CommentsCORRUPTION WATCH--As 2018 closes and we step into 2019, let’s review the history of the media in not only world history but also in Los Angeles.
As explained in the prior CityWatch article, December 27, 2018, CityWatch, The Invention of Writing and the Evolution of Fake News, from the dawn of the written word the powerful have enlisted the writing to deceive.
The line of egregious media lies can be traced from 1276BCE with Ramasses II’s Fake News about his winning the battle of Kadesh to the LA’s Times and the TV outlets constant lies to support Garcetti’s Manhattanization Mania which has turned the city of Los Angeles from the nation’s #1 destination city to the least desirable large urban area with the worst traffic congestion in the entire world and worse GINI Coefficient of any US urban area. LA city hall is perhaps the most crimogenic of any large city government including Chicago.
Fake News is Not Unique to Los Angeles.
Fake News was old when Ramasses II used it; so, we cannot credit the LA Times with inventing Fake News. One infamous American example is Prohibition which gave us organized crime. Prohibition was built on mass hysteria about the Demon Rum to satisfy the political and financial aspirations of a handful of people. By making alcohol illegal, the 18th Amendment provided the foundation for organized crime. Prior to Prohibition, there was crime and there were gangs, but the huge profits from bootlegging required the professionalization of criminal activity.
Upon the heels of disaster of Prohibition, the nation was treated to Reefer Madness in 1936. Most the nation still believes the Fake News of Reefer Madness. Organized crime learned that Prohibition was great for business and district attorneys likewise learned that prosecuting vice enhanced their power. The harm done to society and the destruction of individual lives be damned. Today, Fentanyl is the current Reefer Madness and when that is debunked, the media will find another lethal threat to the public well-being requiring mass incarcerations.
Why People Deny Climate Change
Gees whiz, why don’t people believe in Climate Change? Let’s see, the world ran out of oil in about 1992 and everyone is wearing their Jimmy Carter sweaters. "At any rate, U.S. oil supplies will last only 20 years.” May 1972 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
"As a nation, Americans have been reluctant to accept the prospect of physical shortages. We must recognize that world oil production will likely peak in the early 1990's, and from that point on will be on a declining curve. By the early part of the 21st century, we must face the prospect of running out of oil and natural gas." 1977 US Department of Energy Organization Act.
Apparently, the authorities do not know the story of the Little Boy Who Cried Wolf. The United States is now self-sufficient in oil, but the Men in Black will show up to erase your memory about the great truth of the end of oil, or maybe, you will just numb your mind with more Fake News from the Ministry of Truth so that you are certain oil has always threatened the extinction of the human species along with alcohol, marijuana and Fentanyl.
Human Gullibility Is Limitless
Whether or not oil reserves are de facto limitless or whether rising tides of Climate Change will eat away the US shoreline right up to Denver, one thing is infinite: human gullibility. We prefer idiotic emotional memes to facts.
Jesus died for your sins and if you do not believe that, then a loving god has damned you to Hell for all eternity. This mythology is the prototype of what is most likely to end human civilization: Human beings’ proclivity to believe absurd myths over objective facts.
Group Rights – the Worse Result of Human Gullibility
Humans might survive their gullibility but for their invention of the myth of exclusive truth – my religion is infallible and yours is evil. In the days of the ancient Greeks, people believed a lot of dumb things, but for the most part, they did not believe that their god or goddess embodied absolute truth. The Israelites developed a legalistic culture with no theology and The Shema was binding on no one other than Jews.
Christianity and later Islam, however, had the deadly idea that they alone embodied god’s truth and everyone else in the world was an infidel damned to Hell. The doctrine of exclusivity provided the foundation of Group Rights – all of western civilization was subjected to the perverse notion of the In Group vs The Out Group, Good vs Evil, or Right vs Wrong, Aryans vs Everyone else, and now Identity Politics where the Minorities are the anointed holy ones and whites are the blue-eyed devils. June 21, 2018, CityWatch, The Dangers of Dichotomy: The Saved vs. The Damned,
George Orwell Was not Prescient
All Orwell had to do was look about him and he could see the prevalence of Fakes News – theology is the manifestation of Fake News. Writing in 1949, Orwell had seen the Nazis transform Christianity into a secular evil where the state replaced god and Hitler replaced Jesus and the Jews were still the pariahs which churches had proclaimed.
The Ministry of Truth is Alive in California
Los Angeles should be crowned the capital of Homo Gullibilus. For over a decade LA’s Mandarins and their propagandists at the LA Times have been making war on the single-family home and demanding we switch to all renewable energy, e.g. primarily solar. Instead, we should crowd together in tiny apartments high rise, mixed-us heat islands. The single-family home with lawns and gardens, however, is the most ecologically sound life style. When homes and small office complex can generate all their electrical needs from their own solar panels, something terrible happens. Wall Street loses money. Let’s be clear. For Garcettites, there is no greater evil than Wall Street’s losing money. Wall Street is wedded to the myth that excessive density is the highest and best use of land and that we all should give up individual cars in favor of mass transit, which Wall Street will finance.
In the 1970's Wall Street was pushing the need for excessive urban density and mass transit because we were running out of oil, and today it is pushing its same goals on the basis that we have too much oil. Like a religion, Wall Street’s promise is the same – give us your money and we will save you.
How Do Americans Distinguish Between True and False
It’s easy to know what to believe. What does your fuhrer tell you to believe? If you belong to the Group Right clan on the right, there is no climate change, and if you take your marching orders from the Group Rights Equality claque on the left, the New Urbanism is the new salvation. We believe what our group believes. Thus, Trumpists believe that immigrants are bunch of criminal misfits. If you’re a Garcettite, your current scapegoats are the criminal misfits known as the homeless. Just as Enron had Ken Lay to promote its ceaseless prosperity, Los Angeles has Christopher Thornberg of Beacon Economics, this year’s winner of Pretentious Purveyor of Pernicious Prevarications award, explaining why LA’s housing market will never nose-dive.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams’ views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.)
-cw
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