Petrified Forest

It's just an old school style of writing. We've moved on from the elitist styles to a more democratic one. The cool thing to do now is to use simple sentence structures with excellent word choices, rather than trying to weave something very complex for the sake of poetry.

The first passage is a weird mixed metaphor. I think the part before the semicolon is relatively straightforward. The force of mind is a plant (though, who ever heard of a plant thriving in adverse soil but not in a prosperous flower bed?). The part after the semicolon refers to the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet, and now the mind is a person whose natural red-cheeked bravery and decisiveness have become pale because of the illness of money.

It is bad writing.

It goes a lot further than that. People that are afraid are not rational, it is a lot easier to get them to agree to things that are not exactly in their interests if you can spook them first and then promise that these little changes to society will make them feel safer again.

I think he fact that things have become a lot safer also plays a role. If you live in a society where many kids die before they are ten years old, mothers dying at child birth is 'normal', survivors of diseases such as polio and smallpox are common in the streets, and quite a few factory workers get seriously injured in the work place somewhere in their career, a disaster maiming, say, 10 people, barely sticks out from the background noise, so isn't really worth worrying about (in even more extreme circumstances just a century ago, some soldiers who lost a foot or leg in the trenches in World War One were happy because it meant they would be sent home)

I'm gonna go with, yeah, it's planned. Here's why...

We all know by now we can't "win" a war in Afghanistan. President Washington spelled out why in his Farewell Address (and proved it prior to that as a General) and warned us against partaking in this kind of stupidity.

Being there in Afghanistan for 16 years now is pretty rock solid proof that for us citizens paying for weapons of war was, and is now, a longterm plan that's already been hugely successful for those who sell them.

The excuse "We must fight the terrorists over there" sounds great on TV but makes no sense to anyone that has any. Especially when the nation your warring on is landlocked half way around the planet, has no air force or navy, and is one of the poorest nations in the world.

But people all around me are scared of them and I live way out in the boonies in the middle of the strongest nation on earth. Don't matter, they're still scared.

So, yeah, I have to say it's planned and it's working good.

It really doesn't need to be a conspiracy to be effective. "Manufacturing Consent" is worth a read.

I always liked this Gore Vidal quote:

> The political-science professors, perfectly sane men, look at me with wonder when I talk about the ruling class in America. They say, “You are one of those conspiracy theorists. You think there’s a headquarters and they get together at the Bohemian Grove and run the United States.” Well, they do get together at the Bohemian Grove and do a lot of picking of Secretaries of State, anyway. But they don’t have to conspire. They all think alike. It goes back to the way we’re raised, the schools we went to–after all, I’m a reluctant member of this group. You don’t have to give orders to the editor of The New York Times. He is in place because he will respond to a crisis the way you want him to, as will the President, as will the head of the Chase Manhattan Bank. http://davidsheff.com/article/gore-vidal/

The interview it comes from, in Playboy, is pretty great. They're talking about how that now that the commie threat is spent, they'll need a new threat to keep people scared (they, as in the, the conspiratorial they). He jokes about Nicaraguan imperialism. We now know what we got instead.

I don't think it's necessarily planned, but used (by those it suits) and encouraged via second-order effects. Normally someone would step in, but terror can be used by politicians and suits media profits. Who else has a significant voice? I'd say celebrities, but how many of those play things carefully so as not to frighten sponsors?

It also makes me wonder, is the conversion rate on these god awful popups really that good? I've ever entered an email address into one of these boxes, and why would I? More often than not they shove them into your face before you even see the page content, then again when you try to leave. It's terrible.