Some people might get the wrong idea immediately if they just happen to glance at the title and flutter away like a moth without bothering to read. It’s not an essay about some sort of mistake. No. It’s something much different. Look! I’ve made an acronym! People love acronyms, I’ve noticed, so much that it goes way beyond names of organizations or government agencies or whatever. It gets so silly that people online discussing some shared favorite musical artist will even do silly stupid things like refer to pieces of music not by the title, but by an acronym formed from the words in the title, because they assume that everyone reading will just know at a glance by instant recognition what the title is that they’re referring to.
My little acronym (soon to be universally known and used!… er… maybe not) popped into my head in the course of thinking about something that finds itself in my thoughts far too often, because it’s an increasingly serious problem. What is it, then?
The “OOPs” is pluralizing OOP, or Opposite Other People. I’ve actually been referring lately to another little shorthand term I coined a while back, that’s directly related, what I’ve been calling Bipolar Political Disorder. I’m hoping that the meaning of that is obvious without explanation. If not, I’ve explained it before, and if you had not read any of that, it’s about the American epidemic of political irrationality and even frequent delusion involving pairing everything into Left vs. Right, Liberal vs. Conservative, D vs. R sports contests of chattering nonsense. It’s just one form of OOP. Hooray for My Team! Down with The Other Team! Never mind examining actual reality and thinking. Just define your group membership, and then refer to your team membership instructions on what to think.
The result of all that is not good. It’s actually a whole massive array of not good results, really. It’s almost unavoidable that sometimes, here, in writing my little notes launched into the void of the web, the topics can jump around a bit, while any one of them is quite a large and involved subject of its own.
I recently read a really good essay by Richard Heinberg that I’ve linked to before, and will again, that addresses some portion of the epidemic of, shall we say, selective consciousness creating problems.
Heinberg describes a really serious problem, one that, in essence, really comes down to real live honest to god profound questions about sanity versus delusional lunacy. No joke. He talks about the problem of conflict between “political reality” and “physical reality”, or, simply put, reality, what actually is, and how the universe works.
I’ve been writing regularly over the past few years about the problems surrounding energy resources and use and how this problem of contrived “political reality” superseding and dominating physical reality has been complicating and compounding things. I keep thinking there’s a hellishly complex feedback loop effect of some sort, where people’s notions of “political reality” warps and obscures understanding of the physical reality of energy matters, and then misunderstandings and confusion and pretense and delusions about that then affect people’s political notions.
I think I mentioned in a previous note coming across Senator (and neocon elder) John McCain appearing on Fox News a few days ago, making declarations about the Ukrainian situation involving completely delusional notions about natural gas, saying that the United States could and should assert control related to Europe and the supply of natural gas coming from Russia, seen by much of the Washington crowd as a point of coercion and problems imposed by Russia. According to McCain, there’s this supposed new endless bounty of American natural gas that could be sold to Europe to make Europe independent of Russian supplies, with him saying something about this coming from North Dakota, which makes me think that McCain is even more confused about the subject than I already thought.
Interestingly enough, I’ve noticed that McCain’s choice to be his vice president if he was elected in 2008, Sarah Palin, who still pushes herself into public attention as much as possible, has also voiced opinions repeatedly that share the same ideas as McCain and many others. Essentially, that position asserts the idea of “energy” as being a matter of national security, and then proclaiming that the way to go in this is to deal with the finite resources of underground hydrocarbons (particularly oil and natural gas) by using up what remains of these finite resources in American territory even faster than we already are, and this, in their minds, is the road to “energy security” and “energy independence”.
At some point, this kind of bizarre thinking calls into question a person’s basic sanity and mental competence to function as an adult without some sort of supervision, never mind holding high level government office.
New Russia Sanctions: Washington, Delusional About US Energy Capacity, Lashes Out
Heinberg mentions the part of another new set of “sanctions against Russia” from Washington (with heavy coercion applied to European governments to step in line, regardless of their best interests) includes sanctions against Russian oil extraction operations. Presumably, obviously, this is more of Washington’s harebrained “thinking” about applying economic punishment against that Russia and that nasty evil villain Putin, for this claimed “aggression”, and not really thinking anything through at all. But, then, there seems to be a lot of that going in Washington.
Right now, the circus continues with so many acts going that nobody can keep track of any of them, which kind of has a stench of its own of some people wanting it to be that way, so that most of the citizenry stop even trying to know what’s happening.
The reek of bullshit gets more and more intense as the neocon crowd, with Kerry and Obama dancing on the strings, continues to spin tales of nonsense to cover up their machinations of trying to take control of yet another part of the world, and having it backfire in their faces, again. This time around, they’re pulling old tricks off the shelf using the old Soviet bogeyman, regardless of the Soviet Union disintegrating a human generation ago.
President Obama stood up and gave another performance for the TV cameras and offered up even more completely ridiculous and staggeringly dishonest righteous pronouncements. It was too obvious, almost comical in some dark way, that “more sanctions” would be an item. It’s just as obvious, and twisted, that the Fox News and Republican party politician crowd will continuously go apeshit about how qweak they think he is for not just starting up World War 3 and launching attacks right now. Observe John McCain now and then and ponder the alternate course of history of a McCain/Palin presidential administration. God only knows what hellish nightmare might have already taken place by now.
Right there is where the problems of bipolar political disorder and OOP come in too often, if you toss any observations about anything going on, as people start squabbling furiously with “the other side”. Behold the insane spectacle of the battles between the crowd still harping on their idiotic themes about Barack Obama that they’ve been on since 2007-2008, the cartoon villain Obama that is a fixture in the Republican party, Fox News, and AM radio barking idiocy, and on the opposite other side lots of people still hanging on to illusions of what they thought and hoped Obama would be, and still want too believe he is, the whole squabbling skirmish avoiding the reality of what he turns out to be as president.
Part of what that turns out to be, tragically, is being what slightly old archaic slang would describe in words like patsy or dupe, a puppet of the neocon lunatic cult, or, maybe, even a willing player putting on a façade for years.
The last I checked the news, part of the Ukraine saga was the complaint of people trying to get to the airplane crash site and saying that they could not get there because of renewed andintensified attacks by the Ukrainian coup/junta/putsch US puppet government on the Russian-Ukrainian separatist rebels in the area, while Obama and the American neocons babble staggering blatantly dishonest complete nonsense telling us (and the rest of the world) that somehow we’re supposed to believe that Vladimir Putin is the one man who can stop this, and that he doesn’t is more evidence of his evil misbehavior.
Still another layer of absurdity was piled on when I saw, in text crawl form, an item on CNN offering up “news” about the Ukrainian coup government in Kiev claiming that the rebel bunch in the crash area were planting land mines in the area to keep out crash investigators. I don’t believ that bullshit for one second. Seriously? I mean, just stop and consider that for a moment. They’re claiming that the separatists faction there are setting land mines in the place where they live, their own home territory; never mind what that would do right now, or what everyone in the world knows by now about what kind of lethal hell that creates in places long after any armed hostilities have ended. I have no way of knowing if that’s true or not, but, all things considered, I think not.
As it stands now, we still have the ongoing situation where here in the US, we have the spectacle of our own government having painted itself into another corner, letting the neocons play still another game of attempted manipulation of another part of the world in their lunatic quest for world domination, and having it go, again, completely predictable, very badly. But instead of facing the truth, the game just keeps getting ratcheted up, playing this ridiculous farce of shouting “look at what Russia did!”, just lying, and lying, and lying…
Polls Show Mutual Hostility Soars Between Russians and Americans
The Media Ignores the CIA in Ukraine
Escalation of Sanctions a Step Toward War
Resource Insights: Ukraine, Russia and the nonexistent U.S. oil and natural gas “weapon”
Posted by John Eagan 
Noise 