You recall the Article 88 restrictions our Legal Section is always in an uproar about, the ones that could rise trouble for the independent contractors who do not work here. This morning has a bumper crop. Historic times can get a little frantic, you know?

So, we reiterate the standing footnote that “we respect and support all the officials who are specifically referenced in those DoD documents, our Constitution and all the mountains of laws, regulations and customs attributed to it, and hope for good times for everyone.”

We hope that will at least keep the internal conflicts down until publication, but we are attempting to observe, not comment on the bias contained in any of the major messaging streams. We do want to observe them daily, and attempt to understand who has created them, what their targets might be, and what they are intended to achieve. To understand where they want us to go.

We keep expecting things to cool down a bit to something we once recognized as “normal,” since there has always been a little hysteria in public affairs and in the old print and broadcast media coverage about them. But things have changed. The messaging is now so pervasive and the means of conveyance so complete that it now seems there are literally alternate realities colliding.

We wish it were “so-so,” but alas it seems in earnest.

Check the intro graphic that starts this morning’s chapter of our adventure. Forgotten issues that blip through like satellites? Take the two astronauts on a one-week visit to the International Space Station. They have now been up there 51 days, their news and emergency so old that it is a half-century of news cycles in the past and still continuing. The Olympics? Goodness!

Two stories on flash-dial, the grand open-air opening of the Paris Olympics conducted under pouring rain, while Drag Queens were employed to celebrate in a cross-dressed parody of one of Christianity’s holy symbols, the Last Supper. The idea that the major faith of The West- or what had been generally the major faith- could be so utilized is a bit remarkable. There was conjecture about the prospective reaction had any of the other faiths been mocked. Oh, wait, one of them was at Union Station yesterday across the River. One out of three ain’t bad, you know?

So, like the campaign kick-off for the “most powerful office on earth” here at home that featured an appearance on RuPaul’s entertaining Drag Race, we are a bit befuddled at the messaging.

That had an aspect of the outré, but there was more, to include disappearing acts. Some of them were described as resembling the old picture of Josef Stalin, carefully doctored by his photographic specialists to remove a suddenly disfavored former supporter from view, replaced by placid river. That sort of magic happened twice in visible messaging yesterday. FBI Director Wray made a bullet disappear in his testimony on the Hill, magically transforming the projectile into something he called “shrapnel.”

We didn’t notice it much, since to the Salts, a whizzing white hot piece of steel shorn wildly from something else at breakneck speed is as fatal as any other object.

Instead, it was apparently a deliberate attempt to use a word not commonly used for normal citizens to imply that someone had not been shot and it was all a much smaller deal that it had appeared at the time. In almost the same news clip we were informed that the individual who had been proclaimed as the Czar of something or other by the House of Representatives in 2021 actually wasn’t and had nothing to do with the days of triumphant announcements three years ago.

There has been some commentary about misses- directional and informational- and the outright contradiction contained in the reporting about our chaotic carnival of events. It occurs to us that one of the explanations is that we are now capable of living in completely different realities. Not by delusion or misunderstanding, but rather by the complete separation of information streams in word, pictures and sound. When we live like that, it seems possible to believe that opponents on domestic political issues might actually be agents of the antichrist and thus suitable for some sort of direct righteous action.

Maybe with shrapnel, since using simpler words would be scarier, you know?

Anyway, this morning we were going to run a marvelous piece about our last national crisis, the one back in 2009. That one was after the collapse of another strange Government policy that affected us all, like the multiple ones in progress today. That one resulted from the significant loosening of credit standards to enable lower-middle class borrowers to qualify for five or six mortgages simultaneously. That led, quite naturally, to a bubble that popped spectacularly and the collapse in the real estate market and danger to the national financial system.

It is interesting reading about the process then to have a comparison with the messaging about our current and much graver state of affairs.

It is the weekend now, so maybe things will settle down a bit before the message winds roar again on Monday. But these are new times, and this is more historic than just a poor government financial policy gone awry.

This one is global, and it is much more complete, you know? Progress!

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com