With apologies to the joke told through the ages in various forms. The joke, which is really just a reaction to an ancient belief that the world rested on the back of seven elephants, goes something like this:
An astronomer who lived in an era long ago was giving a lecture about how the earth traveled around the sun when someone in the audience asked what the earth was resting on.
— It’s not resting on anything.
— Of course it is. Everyone knows the world sits on the back of a giant turtle.
— If that’s the case, then what is the turtle standing on?
— It’s turtles all the way down.
I think it’s called the problem of infinite regress. It’s an issue with existence, I suppose, because even now, with unbelievable calculating powers of computers, it is still impossible to describe anything before the big bang. So we’re stuck in the same (useless) problem. What came before the big bang. Turtles. What came before that. Turtles all the way back. And of course religious lunatics say now that that’s where God exists. Who knows. The bible may be right in a way: the universe more or less expanded into existence in less than a second. It was so hot that light could not escape for the first 100,000 years. The expansion was so large and fast it’s really impossible to even conceptualize, except in math. Basically the current “expansion theory” is that the universe began as a “sphere” of energy that was about the size of 4 x 10 to the negative 29th power meters, which means: 0.000000000000000000000000000004 meters large and expanded in 0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds to something that was about 9/10ths of a meter in size — let’s 3 feet. From that point, it went “much more slowly,” to quote Wikipedia. I don’t know much about the expansion after that but it was faster than light but it was also dark and it was not an explosion. The “let there be light” phase of the universe didn’t begin until about 100,000 years had passed. But time being relative and affected by gravity, who knows what this really means. All we know — and it’s still a theory but with some pretty good evidence to help the proof along — is that it began, somehow. And that’s the problem of infinite regress.
So in our world right now, it’s lies all the way down, instead of turtles. And I just will never understand, I think, how it is a pathological liar like Trump is able to so totally infect the world with his lies that everyone — literally everyone including the media, newspapers, and so on — loses sight of what started this whole thing in the first place: a lie — or several lies.
The very superficial top of this stack of lies is the horrible case of a named Pretty. Pretti is the proper spelling, but I’m using adjective here because it feels so appropriate and its the way he pronounced it. The government killed Pretty. A few weeks earlier they killed a woman named Good. Pretty and Good. It would only be more appropriate if they killed a person named Justice. Or Honesty. Or Integrity.
And while the media focuses on this vicious act of killing, and forgets the horrible things Trump said last week about almost all of Europe and the rest of the world, and forgets the killing two weeks ago of Good, no one covers or even asks the question is it necessary to control immigration, because the accepted answer is yes. EVEN THOUGH, our growth rate has now slowed to a trickle and that will have severe consequences as was shown in the tome “Capital” by the French economist, Thomas Piketty.
But I want to work our way down to the base of these topics.
- Top is the murder of Pretti and Good.
- Below that is the untrained thugs who enjoy killing people that are currently acting as agents of ICE and CAB or whatever that acronym is. The government uses two agencies to conduct these attacks because legally, customs and immigration is only allowed to work up to 100 miles from a border. Most people live in 100 mile zone. But in a place like Iowa, they need another agency, so they use the second. Anyway they are thugs and untrained. Many of them are probably the same people that Trump pardoned from January 6.
- Below that lie is the 3,000 “agents” they sent into Minneapolis to control “rioting” and assaults — all of which they claim are being waged against the first agents they sent in. But that doesn’t matter because they lie about the assaults. There aren’t any. Most people back away from assault rifles and have to leave places where they’ve deployed tear gas.
- Below that lie is the initial group of “agents” sent in to look for “illegals,” which they have identified as Syrians (Or Ethiopians — check this, but I’m pretty sure it’s Syrians).
- Below the Syrian lie is the lie that Syrians are committing a 2 billion dollar fraud against the government.
- Below that lie is Pandemic Era relief funds from late in the Trump administration and early Biden administration that provided money for companies to keep their employees paid and keep the economy from collapsing. There were flaws in this system that made it possible to defraud the government.
- Below that lie is the notion that people in the rest of the world are not even allowed to ask for asylum. (This is getting into basic human rights of travel, starvation, the search for help.)
Below that lie is the idea that the United States controls the world. (This is where Trump’s mind is at.)
There is one truth to this whole bizarre matter. There was a 250 million dollar Fraud committed by a Syrian American woman in Minneapolis during the Covid pandemic. It was dealt with. They were prosecuted. 50 people in this scam pleaded guilty. They’ve recovered approximately 75 million of the 250 stolen, probably by seizing bank accounts of the actual criminals. I believe the ringleader might be in jail but it’s hard to find information about this group. This is the “2 Billion dollar Syrian fraud,” the lie that sits at the base of Trump’s attack on Minneapolis. This is the lie that caused Alex Pretti and Nicole Good’s deaths. And this is how we end up talking and screaming about the surface of things, and don’t dig down into the very base of it and start looking at some of the more egregious things he has done.
Asylum seekers are often lying. They are often looking for economic gain and are not actually threatened back in their homes. Just because someone asks for asylum should not mean that they are thrown into a concentration camp/jail. Common morality, whether you’re religious or not, says you should not jail someone who asks for help. And until Trump, they weren’t. They were allowed to live in the United States until their case came up to be judged.
Unfortunately, Trump and his ilk decided to slash the number of judges, so that their cases never come up due to a lack of judges. This doesn’t even address the matter of incompetent judges. They COULD have dealt with the asylum seekers. But they would rather cause death and destruction because it’s better for their side.
His disdain for all people is bottomless. This is where he starts to violate human rights by indicating that anyone who even asks for asylum should be criminalized. And especially if they’re from south of the Rio Grande. [NB: There are no human rights. No one has a “right” to live, or to reproduce, or to health care, or to drive a car, or own a phone, go to church, or eat or sleep. But in a proper civilization, we recognize that there should be some sense of rights, thus the framers called them “inalienable rights,” even though they are basically made up.]
America is the richest country in the world and has a reputation, which it is happy to spread and boast about, that you can achieve anything you want. This myth is still being perpetuated by both liberals and conservatives, by progressives and Maga-nuts. When an Oscar or Tony winner gets up and says to the camera, “Never let go of your dreams,” instead of just thanking people, or any other one of those platitudes that Americans are so good at spouting, it sends the message that this is the country of dreams come true — and we’ve been selling it for decades, if not centuries. There is a certain truism to the notion; and that goes back to the initial reason we decided, mainly with the help of Thomas Jefferson, not to have kings or to allow religion any governmental power. Before coming to America, people could not own land. If they were lucky, they could lease it from their local “Downton Abbey.” If they were unlucky, they simply had to go from one farm to another and offer their labor for sale. But America, since 1630 when my first ancestor came over as an indentured servant, was always a dreamy place where you didn’t have striations like England, or France before the revolution, or Germany with all its fiefdoms.
(Never mind that almost immediately, people were divided into “Newcomers,” and “Oldcomers.” My own ancestor, only ten years late to the foundation of Plymouth, was considered a “newcomer” and therefore was not allowed to own land unless he could “buy” it from an American Indian, or was granted tracts of land from the Plymouth colony Oldcomers. Almost every town founded in New Enland and the Virginia colonies were founded because “newcomers” could not own land in the new world. This went on and on and included the great land rushes depicted in Tom Cruise’s movie “Far and Away,” as well as others. People actually had to race on foot to grab pieces of land and plant their own flags. Cheaters were shot on site — all of this took place on what we would call Indian land, of course.)
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that it’s a long way down this ladder of lies, and when you get to the bottom of it, it’s usually history that we’re talking about. Or lies about history. And sometimes, little posters or memes can dig right through all of this. The latest I saw was, “Every refugee boat is a Mayflower.”
True, in its way.