The People v. "The Man"

Who is pulling your strings..?

Is there any question but that each of us, as individuals, feels just a little less important over time in the eyes of both our government and the people we do business with?

Let's eschew the labels of "right" and "left" for a moment.

Let's just accept each other's differences for the time being, and consider that maybe, just maybe, there is a common foe who is gaining great traction from the polarization of political viewpoints.

Let's just call this foe, "The Man" for want of a better description.  "The Man" is the collective of those who profit greatly from being able to control public opinion and motivate broad public action.

The Man is the broad power of a growing faceless government and a broad, faceless, corporate world where the individuals they do business with and the individuals they do business for (shareholders) are more or less pawns to do their bidding.

The Man is the entrenched power structure in our Universities, which exist not to serve the students attending them, nor the society who supports them - but supports the administration and the continued interest of the faculties to acquire and retain tenure.

We exist, as individuals, in the midst of large power structures who have very different interests from our own, yet, they have become quite adept in manipulating us to support them or argue with each other - resulting often in the same net result.

Yesterday, I read an article from former University of Ottawa physics professor, Denis Rancourt, which is worth a read, a link to his essay and his site is here.

To borrow a quote from Harold Pinter used in Rancourt's essay:

“[T]he majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.”

No friend of the political right - Rancourt's writing is still worthy of consideration - not necessarily because you should accept it as true,  but that you should at least consider the possibility that there are forces around us that take great care to manipulate our emotions and our thoughts to serve their own interests.

That we should take great care in not believing everything that we are told.

Oddly enough, this morning,we see another glaring example of exactly the type of thing that Rancourt talks about - learning that the U.N. Climate Change reports have, yet again, been shown to have been exaggerated to serve their interests and the interests of the new robber barons, the climate change brokers.

From the Toronto Sun today:

The scientific accuracy of the United Nations' climate change reports are coming under fire again.


In a scandal that dates back to January and was dubbed Amazongate at the time, it has been confirmed that claims of the Amazon burning up due to climate change were sexed-up and pulled from activist literature.

The 2007 UN report on climate change, the one that has helped guide government efforts to spend billions of dollars to combat global warming, claimed that “Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation.” The real report, drawn from a website and paid for by pressure group the World Wildlife Fund, says something quite different.

While the UN reports are often described as scientific and peer-reviewed, this claim of the Amazon being at high risk originated on a website of a Brazilian advocacy group. The original claim read that “Probably 30 to 40% of the forests of the Brazilian Amazon are sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall."

Now - before those of us on the "right" get too smug about this, consider also the reality of how broad power and influence granted to large corporations also allows them to manipulate and influence public perception.

Consider the reality that the financial industry purchased as much influence with Barack Obama as they did from George Bush.  Consider that the Democrats during the last election received more money from the defence industry than did the Republicans.

The point isn't that you should read this and conclude that climate change isn't real, or that big business is bad.. it's that you should consider that you should welcome any significant change in public policy with great caution - because the so-called "knowledge" behind the policy may be serving interests that have nothing to do with your own - as much as they may say different.