The Undiscovered Lie (another one)

The Principle of Imminent Collapse includes the ramifications of the Undiscovered Lie when it is ultimately discovered. Great men and women have fallen from positions of power and influence because of the dishonesty of their actions. They may have righteously gained that position of power and influence only to lose it. Others would never have amounted to anything unless they employed the Lie in the first place. The men and women of this nation's police departments are no less likely to fall to their Undiscovered Lies.

Nazi Germany employed the Lie to dramatic and tragic affect by convincing the world, or at least enough of it, that they were being beneficial to the greater good by persecuting the Jewish population, Roma, Hungarians, persons with disabilities and all sorts of other classifications of people. They were mechanical and efficient in their exterminations of large numbers of people so much so that many people in the world could not grasp the reality of it. Even today there are those people who refuse to believe the magnitude of the killing.

The Catholic Church has been reeling from the Undiscovered Lie since the first revelations of child abuse, pedophilia, and homosexuality hit the headlines revealing the size and scope of the transgressions of present priests and the men who later became bishops and cardinals. The church hierarchy actively engaged to cover up and dismiss the allegations while transferring the offenders from one location to another in a pious shell game. Men who were looked up to with high admiration for their godliness and piety were exposed for the sins they committed with worldly impunity for decades.

If you look at the reports that police officers file relating to their shift work and the people they arrest, one would see that every beaten suspect was resisting a righteous arrest, every suspect who was gunned down by one or more officers were responding to "threatening gestures", the appearance that the person had a weapon, he lunged at the officer, the suspect actually did have a weapon that mysteriously disappeared or was produced even though the dead suspect had no previous history of crime, carrying a weapon, etc.

Every bruised or bashed face was the suspects' own doing to try to gain sympathy or cast the Police in a bad light. This is what the reports all say.

Witnesses who contradict the official version of events are suspected of siding with the suspect for racial reasons, or mere hatred of the police. Prosecutors and juries like to side with the police just to be sure that a violent criminal doesn't escape justice.

With the advent of the ubiquitous cell phone video cameras tangible evidence is surfacing that demonstrates what previously would have been an Undiscovered Lie. Police officers arrest people, take them in for processing and write an arrest report that fits all the facts that they need in order to justify the arrest. In the past there would not be any way to contest the veracity of the accuser. Now, however, after the report is filed and in the computerized system, it is less vulnerable to being adulterated. Then the video evidence shows up and proves the officer lied.

With the Lie now discovered, it becomes the officers' and co-conspirators task to spin a plausible timeline and story out of that is now presented before them. Each frame of the video is perused for any indications that the interpretation made by the accused is somehow wrong. The Police Department seeks to obfuscate on the basis that "we don't see what lead up to this altercation or what happens after the recording stops. A case in point is a recent arrest by two DC Transit officers who yank a black man out of his powered wheelchair and throw him on the sidewalk ventilation grating of one of the subway lines. They handcuff him and leave him laying on the pavement with profusely bleeding facial lacerations. All the while a bystander videos the events until he is forced to retreat. Amazingly a district judge refused to indict the officers for any sort of mistreatment of this man.

The #Occupy protests all over the nation and indeed the world has relied heavily on these video recordings to expose the Undiscovered Lies that police are using to justify their mistreatment of citizens. Video clips first show up on the Internet. After that they become of interest to prosecution and defense attorneys alike in the courtroom.

The actions of prosecutors and judges seem incongruous in light of the tangible persistent imagery that proved that a police officer lied. He may also have perjured himself if he spoke his lies in the court. The courts are not interested in maligning the "other good works" of officers who have gotten caught lying.

If a prosecutor pursues a case against officers, he will not be later able to rely on them or their fellow officers when they are needed. Just keep in mind that the job of a prosecutor is to convict the accused whether he is guilty or not. He or she only has the evidence provided by the police to go by. If officers fabricate a case, the prosecutor doesn't want to know about that.

The Undiscovered Lie has farther reaching ramifications too. If an officer lies to get a conviction in one case, he might have done it before. He might do it again. This is just the same as the justification of overturning a guilty verdict when there is a preponderance of evidence that the convicted party is innocent of the crimes convicted of. After all, he must have been guilty of "Something." Maintaining the conviction does two things. It keeps the allegedly guilty person out of circulation and it keeps the prosecutors from having to review every case than might be tainted by an Undiscovered Lie. Nonetheless, the police officers are liars and impugn the integrity of every man and woman who wears the badge. When officers act by and for the powerful elite, they lose their honor as protectors of the citizens they are sworn to Protect and Serve.

It is possible that they always only served the powerful elite and service to the people may always have been a myth. The discovery of the Undiscovered Lies will alter the perceptions of even the most skeptical people among us.

Standard And Poor

The outrage that has been expressed at the very idea that S&P lowered the financial rating of the United States down a notch to AA+ is completely understandable.  We have never been so insulted by a private business like that before.  And they did this dastardly deed to us at a time we were vulnerable.  S&P kicked us while we were down.

What were they trying to prove?  We didn't default on our debt.  We have the resources to pay all our investors.  No body who even bought a T-Bill lost even a cent by buying those bonds.  So how does S&P figure that the US of A should be downgraded and removed from the coveted AAA club of the world?  Look at what they did by doing it.  The DOW dropped over 630 points the next trading session.  The NASDAQ dropped 174 points and the S&P 500 by 79 points.  Stocks and mutual funds lost billions in value on the very word that the downgrade meant something.

Was this action one that caused the selloff in the markets or merely preceded it?  Did they make the conditions or just report them?  Were they accurate in the assessment or did they lie or just get it wrong?  The Principle of Imminent Collapse has a connection via the Undiscovered Lie wherein a seemingly upstanding person or company is suddenly shown to be a fraud or not the pillar of society that he, she or it was supposed to be.  Our politics are filled with men who were great men one day and lying cheating misogynists the next.  The history of the financial sector is filled with companies who were riding high and making wealth for its investors until the CEO and/or a cadre of managers were shown to have been cooking the books.  The one day difference is the discovery of the Undiscovered Lie.  Jim Bakker fell from grace, as did Jimmy Swaggart.  Enron died an early death and likes of Michael Milkin saw the world from the inside of a Federal prison cell.  John Kerry became a bum over night over marital infidelity.  Bernie Maddoff made off with billions of dollars in his fraud scheme.  He was a great fund manager one day and an arch criminal the next.  The only way for him to operate was because of the Undiscovered Lie.

A variation of the Undiscovered Lie is the intentional misrepresentation.  Some portion of the mortgage meltdown that destroyed trillions of dollars of wealth came from intentional misrepresentations.  Real estate appraisers reverse engineered house appraised values by starting with the loan amount and backing into saying the value was high enough to cover the loan.  Mortgage loan agents started with what the old mortgage was and added all the cash out and fees to arrive at the new loan figure.  Everybody was making money with mortgages at inflated balances.  S&P rated the USA as AAA rating and left it there without much re-evaluation for decades.  Nobody wanted it to be anything else.  Nobody was arguing about massive budget cuts, no revenue increases, debt ceilings of any of the deadlocked issues now plaguing the American political scene.

Either S&P is now misrepresenting the health of US finances or it was misrepresenting it before.  The rating of AA+ as opposed to AAA is more a indicator of our financial health from this day forward not this day backward.  The rating we have is an indicator of our ability to manage the debt we have, the revenue streams and the expenses of our company.  Any company with a CEO who is being defied openly by the Board of Directors would not have a AAA rating.  Any company with a Board of Directors who is ideologically divided as is the US Congress would not get a AAA rating.  Any company that is failing to manufacture goods and provide services to generate wealth and value would not have a S&P AAA rating.  The United States of American cannot claim to be on the good side of any of those rating factors.  I am surprised that S&P still rates us AA+ and not far lower.

Loose Lips and The Principle of Imminent Collapse

Nature doesn't support the conditions that result in a domino effect because individual events over a long period of time serve to eliminate the interior dominoes that propagate the big collapse. 

Man creates domino sets and waits for one to be knocked over then proclaims surprise and outrage when they fall. He may also deny that he ever knew that the dominoes were all setup to fall and that his words or actions were complicit in initiating the collapse.

When there is a multitude of people making statements against a subject, it is very difficult to isolate which one or ones were instrumental in initiating actions against that subject.  Now if the subject is an idea or a law, it is appropriate to speak enthusiastically for and against the inanimate entity. But when the subject is the people who support and defend the law or idea, or those people who resist it, care must be taken to not incite action against the persons.  Indeed, it may only be the combination of causation that leads to the emergence of negative outcomes.

When a person has the ear of millions of people, that person has the responsibility to be judicious in their use of words.  The speaker of antagonistic and resentful rhetoric may not be able to be held responsible (in a legal sense) for the actions of their listeners, they are nonetheless responsible.

One can claim that it was not the intent to incite murder with such rhetoric as "reload" and "take aim" at the opposition, but those words were explicitly aimed at human beings who were running for public office.  They were not aimed at legislation that was being proposed for passage or repeal.  The national map that was published with reticules (gun sight symbols) pointed to the legislative districts where opposition candidates were running for office.  One can similarly deny that calling for the removal of opposition legislators and pointing them out on a map leads an unstable person to murder 6 people at a public legislative meeting.  The idea that a political candidate would invite constituents to come and shoot an M16 assault weapon as part of a highly contentious campaign, is appalling. However, the perpetrator of such virulent motivations cannot deny that she/he knows that somewhere out there in this nation of 307 million people that there is a significant number of loose cannons who will act upon that accumulation of rhetoric and commit violence as the result.

People who originate and propagate such language may not be convict-able of inciting murder, but they are nonetheless culpable in part for creating the conditions under which the murders were committed.  Very specific persons words are picked up and carelessly spread across the nation's airwaves.  Other less literate bloggers pick up on the words and construct a landscape of distrust, resentment and anger against individuals, some of whom now lay murdered or critically wounded.  U.S. District Judge John Roll is dead and U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is critically wounded by the man who put his and her thoughts into action.

Prominent people have acted to incite actions by members of the American public.  Whether or not one can draw a direct line between them and the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, but as nothing happens in isolation, the seeds they have sown grew out into the mayhem at that Arizona Safeway market.