Don’t think I was overly wigged out about the TV. Like I said, it hasn’t been on since early spring when I last heated the house by woodstove. Another week or month or year without large format YouTube videos won’t kill me. But it did remind me how little true news I’m getting.
As a counterpoint to the TV, I’ve been upgrading my HAM setup. The internet is great but when (if?) it goes full totalitarian (or more totalitarian) then what? Will your fancy VPN do Jack-shit if your ISP shuts you down because you have an unpopular opinion or vote for the wrong party? Are you going to use TOR and Linux to find actual news and even then will it be true? If you’re using this marvelous communication technology to read Wikipedia and Twitter you’re ill informed anyway. HAM is one alternative in our decreasing toolbox. It’s not perfect but it’s (partly) analog and it reaches actual living breathing humans. (Unlike the human-ish bot people of Twitter.) Soon (in theory) I’ll be able to use radio waves to peek over the horizon and sniff about for minor but relevant information.
All modern news sources are filtered through media systems that are flat out propaganda machines. Most of the time it’s a complete lie. The rest of the time most of the potential truth is missing some key piece of context. Other times it just plain doesn’t mention things you’re not supposed to see. (Are there still riots in Iran? In France? Is Venezuela still the remarkable socialist success story it was when NPR was abuzz about it? (Have they finally run out of zoo animals to eat?) Heck, modern media can’t even report the weather without somehow tying storm damage to global warming or mean Republican politicians. When they say “this incoming storm is the worst thing to happen since chlamydia” does that mean it’s a legitimately bad storm or that someone wants disaster funding added to the next omnibus bill?
This is the case for me and it’s the case for you too. You might not like to think of it, but your knowledge about real events happening right now is surprisingly limited. It’s likely that an American with broadband, cable, and cell services in 2022 is less well informed than an American reading a three day old newspaper they found lying on the counter at Dennys in 1980. (Remember when you could read two newspapers from two different locations and compare TWO points of view? Seems quaint doesn’t it?)
Here’s one example among many, Russia, in it’s war with Ukraine, has supposedly been losing incredibly hard. They’ve been reported to be on the brink of total collapse (according to damn near everyone who draws a salary to say such things) since day one. How long before we acknowledge that at least the early reports were incorrect? If Russia has been inches from total defeat for three quarters of a year; how long can one be inches from a defeat without actually being defeated? Meanwhile, every talking head that says so has a pristine record of accountability. They assured us that Hillary was robbed in 2016 but to question 2020’s election is treason. They told us the vax would protect us from COVID. (They still try to say it.) They said that the two consecutive quarters of declining GDP is not a “recession” because it’s 2022 and the president is from one of two parties so the word “recession” has a new definition.
Given they all spout the exact same geopolitical evaluation, I can conclude from it… what exactly? That Russia is losing so hard that they’ll be a smoking crater by noon tomorrow? Or that two months hence they’ll still be reporting that Russia is still losing and still on the verge of implosion? I have no clear way of knowing the situation. (Note: I’m not inviting you to post your opinion on the event, only reflecting that the media has an incredibly bad track record for accurate reporting.)
Suppose you really want to know the true nature of things and you live in our modern hive mind clusterfuck of “narratives”. How can you check what you’ve heard against reality? Often we’re forced to parse bits of propaganda. Back in the cold war, there was a word for this: Kremlinology. People used to listen to what Soviet Russia announced, knowing full well it was a total lie. From the lies they’d try to piece together the truth. Reading the tea leaves of Soviet pronouncements was a genuine profession. Serious and otherwise sane people worked diligently using that method in an attempt to discern the truth.
Yet, when the USSR caved like a house of cards, the US was taken completely by surprise. Parsing propaganda to discern the underlying truth had been a complete failure. Why were doing it now… and in our own nation, is beyond me.
So anyway improved HAM radio capacity is coming into being and I picture it being useful at least within the US. Suppose the press announces that everyone in Baltimore has died of COVID and I have no way of knowing if that really happened. Theoretically I can use the radio. I’ll either bounce across several repeaters in the VHF (2 meter) band or use something more technical to get a message through directly to the area. “This is <Callsign> from Curmudgeon Compound calling Baltimore. Are you guys all dead?” “Baltimore responding, nope we’re fine. CNN said everyone north of the 45th parallel froze to death because of global warming. Are you frozen solid?” “Nope, when we get cold we go ice fishing. We’re fine. Have a nice day Baltimore.”
See? When all is lies, a way to go straight to the source may save your ass. I wish I’d planned ahead to detect areas that were the most “masky” during the Nuremberg nightmare of COVID.
Alas, my new (NOS) HAM radio is still in its box. It’s sitting on a couple of expensive cables. It’s adjacent to a boxed up antenna that annoyed my UPS driver and which I haven’t yet mounted. So, the election would have to happen without me having the slightest idea what’s truly going on. I neither could watch the song and dance on TV, nor could I radio for on the ground reference. I’m in the dark. (How is that different from what everyone else is experiencing?)
Consider this, I’m writing this post week after the event and Arizona is going through a full week of discovering new votes that lean a certain way. (They always lean a certain way.) I’d dearly love to radio Arizona. “This is <Callsign> calling Arizona.” “Arizona here. Go ahead <Callsign>.” “I have just one question. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?” “Arizona here, we’re as mystified as you. Maybe the ability to count was lost when we went to common core?” “Are you guys OK? Blink once for ‘yes’ and twice for ‘rescue me’.” “We’re fine, by the way, didn’t you freeze to death due to global warming?” Etc…
So yeah, I was more off grid than even my average. For “normie” events like elections I was about to go under a rock.
Despite tinkering with the radio I was oddly OK being in the dark. I felt drawn to the idea of isolation. After my camping trip I was noticeably relaxed. Whatever happens will be what happens. I care. And I do what I can. But it’s not my job to carry a collapsing society, kicking and screaming, into each new day.
I shrugged my shoulders, packed my shit, and went off to slay Bambi.
More in part 3.
The thing that truly amazes me about people and the media is the Gell-Mann amnesia. Ostensibly intelligent, informed people read a story about ‘what they know’ and can see it is obvious BS, then they turn the page and read about another subject and accept it verbatim. WTF?
I’m not a HAM as ‘having worked, in a peripheral manner, on the other team’ I know just how easy it is to triangulate. Broadcast something/anything ‘they’ don’t want known and you aren’t just on the X, you are the X (with, should they so choose, the life-expectancy of a mayfly). Certain people are monitoring every HAM transmission now, imagine what it’ll be like when/if there isn’t anything else to distract them. Just sayin’. I do have a multi-band radio to monitor/hear though, and listening to foreign ‘interpretations’ of news events through their (unfiltered, unlike the selected excerpts the media here air) eyes is often ‘enlightening’ (Oh, it’ll be just as biased, but biased in another way and you can usually figure out what nobody is saying from that alone).
No politics, or even side choosing, but about media coverage of Russia (from someone who spent way too much time there). So we have a bunch of plainly, blatantly pro-Russian, marxist sycophants spouting anti-western diatribes for decades, then … suddenly, we are expected to believe they did a complete 180 and are now anti-Russian? Seriously? Or is it just possible that this supposed anti-Russian coverage (all of which, purely coincidentally, paints any and all associated with the west as incompetent, war-mongering, corrupt imbeciles whilst supposedly supporting them) is them doing exactly what they’ve always done, just in a different way?
Is the Ukraine corrupt, yep (been there more times than I can remember, love the people, hate, as here, the government) but … it was just as corrupt (and arguably much more so) when run directly, or by proxy, by Russia. This isn’t Russia fighting corruption, it’s them annoyed they aren’t getting their usual cut (and you’ll find more ‘Aryan types’ in Moscow and St. Petersburg, many in official positions of power, than in the entire rest of the world combined, so that excuse is … ‘amusing’).
As someone whose role was to potter unnoticed about parts of the USSR and to “facilitate industrial and infrastructure failures as and when instructed should it all go TU” I find it ‘pertinent’ that whilst Ukraine has had every aspect of its infrastructure attacked, Russia nothing (barring a couple of minor cross-border incidents. This is the first war where nobody on one side even considers actually attacking ‘the enemies’ ability to hurt them). Now tell me how a country so attacked, whose troops can blend seamlessly into an enemy population, who know just what and where the vulnerable war-fighting infrastructure being used to destroy their country is located and … they haven’t attacked any of it?!?. It ‘should’ make you think (look at the brouhaha over Nordstream, now imagine if one of Russia’s very vulnerable few pumping nexus’ was ‘disabled’ – Europe wouldn’t just freeze, Russia would collapse, so the question is why ‘someone’, supposedly ‘on our side’, doesn’t want that to happen?).
You know the conspiracy theory that all those movies show what ‘they’ intend to do? I’m not (quite) at the point of thinking that (or that we’re in a simulation al la Matrix, although it ‘would’ explain so much lol) but I do think everything we see in the media, all of it, is part of a script. What the intent or aim is beyond me though, which is why I went Galt and will stick with my extensive book, music and film archive instead of watching whatever soap-opera they are playing now.
“The question isn’t whether you are paranoid or not, it’s whether you are paranoid enough”.
Watch the news and assume that the truth is the exact opposite of what the lying head says. You won’t be far wrong.