NOTE: The following is not aimed at anyone at Caucus99percent. I'd say the audience here is considerably more immune to bullshit than most – not that any of us are entirely immune. Some bullshit is obvious and some is sneaky – but it's every-fucking-where. This is just a riff on the subject. I'm publishing it here in the spirit of a Public Service Announcement...or for some other reason I can't remember.

We live in a time of explosive growth in the rate at which new knowledge is acquired and applied. It's changing our world profoundly, sometimes in ways we don't understand and at speeds that often defy expectations. It could end up being our salvation or our doom. It's still too early to say...let's say.

How bizarre is it that an explosion of knowledge would be accompanied by, rivaled by, an explosion in expensively produced and prettily packaged bullshit?

“Bullshit is the glue that binds this nation together.” ~ George Carlin

Today, for every ounce of hard earned knowledge, there is a virtual metric ton of bullshit. For every individual or organization trying to tell us the truth, there is an army of others trying to deceive, mislead, confuse and cram their bullshit down our throats. Truth telling is a dying art. Bullshit is a trillion dollar industry.

With the constant shitstorm of lies, propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, ignorance, confusion and general lunacy, who's to say what's real anymore?

Russians!
Terrorists!
WMDs!
China!
Iran!
The Axis of Evil!

What better way to hide blatant crimes than to bury it under a mountain of bullshit? The entire American political class has been propagandizing, gas-lighting and shamelessly conning the all-but-defenseless public for decades. The average citizen with no influence, no power and no recourse is the perfect victim for their crimes. Ah, but citizens have the power of the vote, you might say, but in an easily hackable system that offers nothing honest or genuine to vote for and no way to accurately verify the vote count, a vote is meaningless.

If everybody would just vote, people say. For what? For whom? If everybody votes but we have nothing but corrupt and dishonest scoundrels to vote for, how does that help? With gerrymandering, easily hackable electronic voting machines, Citizens United, Super Delegates, the electoral college, etc. our electoral system is FUBAR.

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

Elect a black liberal and see if anything changes. We did and it didn't. Between the rogue outlaw Bush administration and the Obama administration, virtually nothing changed. What changes did take place were mostly around the edges. Bushco got a pass for lying the country into a phony war and for torturing countless helpless souls, some of them to death, the wars still raged, the looting of the nation by Wall Street and the 1% never missed a beat. When Occupy Wall Street tried to stand up to the 1% for the rest of us, they were crushed by a coordinated campaign of police violence that came straight from the Obama White House. Even the ACA (Obamacare) left our hideous for-profit health care nightmare fully intact with Big Insurance, Big Pharma and Medicine, Inc. firmly in charge. American citizens are still being screwed every day by our heartless and predatory medical system.

We are at war around the world, they keep passing tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and taking it out of the hides of the suffering masses. The criminal 1% keep getting away with their blatant crimes against humanity, the Wall Street bankers continue to gorge on the nation's carcass while the fossil fuel monsters drill everywhere while plotting against renewable energy, climate action, reason and sanity.

My simple point is that we all need to raise our game when it comes to bullshit detection. Without sufficient effort there, any one of us could easily end up falling for somebody's bullshit. It's everywhere. The mass media are rife with it. Our political system is eaten up with it. Our culture oozes it. And it's poisonous.

Everywhere you look: distraction, denial and outright lies. As though lying to the people is the birthright of politicians, political parties, Generals, bankers, media empires and corporations.

Some liars are slicker and more convincing than others, some lies are more egregious and/or harmful than others, but liars are liars. Lying is the new normal and that's horrifying. Our politicians now have public and private views: one for the Goldman Sachs crowd and one for the rubes, one for the Military Industrial Complex and one for the people being cheated out of health care, safety, education, infrastructure, pensions, living wages, peace, equity, justice and a reasonable existence.

Many people don't want to face reality (hard to blame them, it's ugly) and many others don't want us to know what reality is (since clarity could bring their gravy train to a jarring halt).

“If the American people ever find out what we have done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us.” -George HW Bush

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.” ~ George W. Bush

"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." -- William Colby

Hillary Clinton told top banking executives that she has “both a public and a private position” on Wall Street reform and is reliant on wealthy donors to fund her campaign, leaked excerpts of the former first lady’s speeches seem to show, fueling claims of hypocrisy on the part of Mrs. Clinton...

In the realm of the hideously rich, a thick protective layer of bullshit is necessary to continue the myth that it's okay for the few to have obscenely more than the many. That the suffering masses must bear the cost of the over-indulgence of the hyper-privileged few. That we absolutely MUST cut Medicare, Social Security, food stamps, etc. because we MUST now pay for the tax-cuts for millionaires and billionaires that congress had no choice but to pass.

Papa needs a brand new gold-plated yacht, so let the suffering suffer. What could be uglier than selfishness in the face of suffering?

The pathology of the hideously rich is so blatantly unjust that it must be protected by lies and confusion, and since they own the media, the lies come fast and furious. And they come from everywhere. This period in history may someday be referred to as the Golden Age of Bullshit (either that or the Age of Forever War). Someone actually trying to tell us the truth is what is shocking these days. Just ask Julian Assange, Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning.

So when you hear talk of wars, nukes, military rivals, terrorism, immigrants, machine guns for teachers or any other insane rightwing or neoliberal talking point, tune up your bullshit detectors because assholes are hard at work trying to lull us into believing their cynical, cruel-hearted, self-serving bullshit. And it's killing us. Literally killing us. Not to mention so many others around the world.

These greedy assholes are trashing a perfectly good planet and slaughtering innocents by the millions. And they will keep doing it until we make them stop.

My advice is don't choose teams. Don't get sucked into the bullshit trap of groupthink. Do not accept untruths because it's easy or comfortable or buys you membership in a group. Question everything and think for yourself always.

And always push for peace. Every human being on the planet deserves to live in peace.

What we need right now is more people thinking harder and clearer than ever before so that we might stand some small hope of meeting our most pressing existential challenges, which will involve overcoming a shit ton of ignorance and bullshit. Let's fight for science, education, truth and knowledge.

So tune up your bullshit detectors and put on your bullshit stomping boots, because only the clear-eyed truth can set us free.

Down with bullshit. For ever and ever. Amen.

Fight the bullshit!