NewsOp-Ed

Knowledge Is Knowledge

Ya just never know.

It was too late by the time Franklin ran a key up a kite string. Heck, might have been too late when we opened the gift that scamp Prometheus brought. The earliest known practical example, of the real trouble, the Baghdad battery, a clay pot, lemon juice and some colloidal silver is the actual inception but we have been playing around with electricity, and fire, well before that. The problem today really boils down to electricity, and fire, and we, and playing.
At this point they know almost everything about almost all of us and they are just beginning to learn how to use it. They are playing with it, and us. When it’s all firmed up, figured out, they will work it, work it like every fiendish little dervish, light a fire under it and use it just the same as a plow beaten into a sword, or the reverse, but less likely. They of course is them and not us because we would never do such a thing. We are decent people.
Psychology is not a true science, not as is, but coupled with a comprehensive database, a company, and some study groups, can make you buy a tasty Big Mac or a bottle of Prell, it’s done daily. The shiny sesame seed bun, the warm greasy hamburger and that thousand island dressing with crisp lettuce and fresh tomato with a side order of fries, hot, tasty and salty just as the bag comes out the little window and fragrantly into the car while the radio sells us something more, perhaps even fear, an ideology, electric car, breakfast lunch or dinner. Maybe Prell, no one wants dandruff if green stuff will fix it.
Snowden closed the barn door after the horses were out. He saw it soon enough but those horses were fast. Assange tried to shove some things into the daylight too, hard honest facts, but he’s unlikeable to begin with. Nobody likes a squealer, think Karen Silkwood, they suffer for their efforts.
Everything is now known, it’s in a big black building in Utah, under the loose supervision of a fat, self idolized, cheating golf player with a bad combover and there are backups he can use under Cheyenne mountain, in area 51, the new World Trade Center, Seattle, Minot and at Disneyworld in Orlando. There are truthfully facsimiles all over the world, in Moscow, along the banks of the Yang Tse, in North Korea under the direct supervision of another fat man with a three stooges haircut who will also brook no dissent and reportedly a couple in outer space, and in them is everything about everything and everyone all the time everywhere back as far as they can figure and as far into the future as they can postulate.
It is good to know all this, knowledge is power. It is bad to weaponize it. In some nations knowledge is withheld, fabricated, falsified, gussied up. Keep the people dumd. (We can spell, it may be for effect, or the interweb is messin wit us.) The powers that be want to be the powers to be. Ruskies lie. Why not here, duh. Probably everywhere, all the time, about everything and everyone, duh. And a fact is a fact, true or not. If it can be coroborated. It says so on the wires. The wires never lie.
So knowing that that cat is well out of the bag and slinking around at midnight, and all the other hours of the day, cold eyed, sharp of fang, muscular, proud and dangerous, what is to be done? It’s laudable that there are those fighting for our privacy, but almost laughable. After all, those horses Snowden and his ilk couldn’t keep corralled are now being ridden, bareback by us all and if one knows anything of psychiatry, or human nature one knows the horses aren’t the only ones bareback and we are at full gallop, twirling our garments above our heads and yodeling like drunken mongrel hoardes of frat kids, trampling our brothers and sisters under hoof, hacking at them and lifting their wallets while they fall.
With everything being known, who wouldn’t parse out and target the senior citizens most likely to fall for an IRS phone scam and target them exclusively to make a buck on their gullibility. They would. With everyone being known who wouldn’t design a social ranking system that targets its nations most disgruntled and effective citizens and hamstring them by limiting their mobility, career advancement and ability to eat, drink and breathe? Who wouldn’t create and enforce a social credit system based upon their own values? They would. Who wouldn’t sell some Prell? Who wouldn’t, given the knowledge that someone was expecting, even though they were underage and their parents didn’t know yet, try to sell them diapers, or counseling? They would. Who wouldn’t tout a salubrious Big Mac? We sometimes be they and everyone knows they are dispicable, vile, unscrupulous, deplorable and will resort to anything to get their way. Once the money has been made it’s its own defense.
Resistance is not futile. Again, laud those fighting the battles in the trenches, they may not win but they shape the nature of the conflict. They may be us. It is in some martial arts that one is taught not to resist, but to redirect. Everything may be known, and it may be too late but we still don’t know everything and never will from microscope through telescope and with time being relative we still have some to straighten things out.
Given an unlimited number of monkeys and an unlimited number of typewriters and an unconstrained amount of time, one of them is bound to churn out a hateful ‘Mein Kampf’ or a ditty as kind and pertinant as John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. They can chant their slogans but we may worship the power of song.