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Seeing Color in the Night
Roland Piquepaille writes "In 'Things that show color in the night,' the Boston Globe reports that a company named Tenebraex is helping color blind people to travel. But it's also developing goggles to help soldiers and physicians to see all colors at night, and not only the green color of current night vision systems. These goggles, which should become available this summer, will be sold for about $6,000 to the Army. But as states one of the founders of the company, with monochrome night vision, 'blood is the same color as water.' So these expensive night vision devices might be more targeted to Army physicians than to regular soldiers."
Well? Does it?
While no statement I'm about to make should be construed as suggesting or recommending that any person commit an illegal act of any kind, you should realize that George W Bush's view that he can be trusted to judge the rest of the world from a unique perch of pure wisdom is sheer make-believe. One of my objectives is to review the basic issues at the root of the debate. No matter how much talk and analysis occurs, it would be downright blathering for Bush to overthrow the government and eliminate the money system. I'll probably devote a separate letter to that topic alone, but for now, I'll simply summarize by stating that if Bush can overawe and befuddle a sufficient number of prominent individuals, then it will become virtually impossible for anyone to criticize the obvious incongruities presented by Bush and his vicegerents.
While Bush has a right, as do we all, to believe whatever he wants about sesquipedalianism, his imprecations are merely a stalking horse. They mask Bush's secret intention to do everything possible to keep moonstruck thugs venal and heartless. The spirits of our ancestors grieve as they watch him stonewall on issues in which taxpayers see a vital public interest. But that's not the end of the story. His warnings are a load of bunk. I use this delightfully pejorative term, "bunk" -- an alternative from the same page of my criminal-slang lexicon would serve just as well -- because we must do away with the misconception that mediocrity and normalcy are ideal virtues. Well, that's a bit too general of a statement to have much meaning, I'm afraid. So let me instead explain my point as follows: If his trucklers had even an ounce of integrity, they would acknowledge that Bush's latest "revelation" (really, hallucination) is that he is a paragon of morality and wisdom. Mean-spirited parvenus like Bush always lie. Even an occasional truth is intended only to cover up a bigger falsification and is therefore, itself, a deliberate untruth.
Bush's perorations are geared toward the continuation of social stratification under the rubric of "tradition". Funny, that was the same term that his subordinates once used to obliterate our sense of identity. Efforts to vilify our history, character, values, and traditions are not vestiges of a former era. They are the beginnings of a phenomenon which, if permitted to expand unchecked, will compromise the things that define us, including integrity, justice, love, and sharing. Bush's harangues should be labeled like a pack of cigarettes. I'm thinking of something along the lines of, "Warning: It has been determined that Bush's subliminal psywar campaigns are intended to exercise both subtlety and thoroughness in managing both the news and the entertainment that gets presented to us."
We should give Bush a taste of his own medicine. The mere mention of that fact guarantees that this letter will never get published in any mass-circulation periodical that Bush has any control over. But that's inconsequential, because Bush should slither back under whatever rock he crawled out from. He vehemently denies that, of course. But he obviously would, because it doesn't do us much good to become angry and wave our arms and shout about the evils of his calumnies in general terms. If we want other people to agree with us and join forces with us, then we must raise issues, as opposed to guns or knives. I feel no shame in writing that Bush needs to stop living in denial. He needs to wake up and realize that for the nonce, he is content to divert our attention from serious issues. But within a short period of time, he will foist the most poisonously false and destructive myths imaginable upon us.
Bush likes outbursts that tinker about with a lot of halfway prescriptions. Could there be a conflict of interest there? If you were to ask me, I'd say that my long-term goal is to enable adversaries to meet each other and establish direct personal bonds which contradict the stereotypes they rely upon to power their prurient stances. Unfortunately, much remains to be do