Tetherd Cow Ahead

This man is Michael Cohen. Mr Cohen, it seems, has come by an amazing piece of video that ‘might be amongst the best proof we have that we are indeed being visited by aliens coming to us with a message of hope.’ The footage was taken in the Brazilian jungle by British tourists and ‘handed over to US secret agents’, the Brazilian government apparently having some kind of agreement with American spooks to obligingly do that kind of thing. It is unclear who then handed it on to Mr Cohen. We know for certain that the footage is Top Secret because it has a title card that says ‘Top Secret’ on it.

I mean, how much more persuasive could it be?

‘Stop stalling Reverend!’ I hear you cry. ‘Make with the video that shows us the alien Message of Hope! Well, you need to visit the site of that esteemed Australian news voice The Telegraph to see it, because I can’t embed it. Come back here when you’re done (if you don’t need a bit of a lie down first, that is).

Was that a Message of Hope or what?! Thank Xenu that we now know we are not alo… What’s that you say? You missed the alien? Seriously? Maybe you’d better watch it again. I’ve made you a little diagram so that you know where to look:

Was it better that time? Did you see the ‘mesmerising flashing light’ as well?

Mr Cohen proclaims that ‘This is highly compelling footage that will be hard to discredit’. Or it could be plain old pareidolia. I know that sounds far fetched, but hey. Should the footage turn out to be bona fide, however, what I want to know is what the little alien is actually doing here. He doesn’t seem to be delivering any Message of Hope to me. In fact, he seems… a little preoccupied.

Here’s a better resolution closeup. That’s the ‘mesmerising light’ over on the right – it’s gotta be his spaceship, right? So he’s parked it and has wandered a little way away behind a tree, and… well… it’s a bloody LONG WAY from Zeta Reticuli!

Acowlytes! Tell me I’m wrong!

If you intend to take up a stance in the #occupy stakes over the coming weeks, why not parade your casual disdain for entrenched capitalism and religion in front of the news cameras by spending mere sheckels on one of these fabulous new t-shirts from the Cow Shoppe?

For your sartorial elegance we present a new Acowlyte T (for those who are Cow and want to flaunt it), a Duck’s Quack T (For your next visit to St Paul’s whispering gallery) ((Marvel at my GENIUS at tying in all these things!)) and the mysterious Shhh! T (Yes, it’s true, the FBI are on to us…)

Christmas is nearly here Cowpokes, and I know none of you want to see the Reverend go without whisky over the festive season. So spend up big! Who could possibly not want a Cow T-shirt in their stocking this year?

Still (briefly) on the topic of the disintegration of the world’s political and financial structures, I note that the media is carrying a story this morning about the Vatican’s concern about global financial markets. One such report here, from the Guardian.

Synopsizing: the Holy See released a document yesterday that called for a ‘world authority’ that could monitor and intervene in global financial affairs to help restore ‘the primacy of the spiritual and of ethics’. ((Yeah. The ‘spiritual’ in financial markets. I can really see how that fits like a foot in a glove.)) The Pope, apparently, is showing his solidarity with the #occupy movement.

Right. So would this be the same Vatican that is the richest religious institution on the planet that pays zero taxes, and has investments in banking, insurance, chemicals, steel, construction and real estate? ((This relates to a 1965 estimate, and is based on accumulated wealth, not operating profits. You may see people claiming throughout the interwebs that the Vatican barely scrapes by, pointing to various balance sheets, like this one that shows a (relatively) modest profit. Don’t be fooled. That’s like someone showing you what they earned at work – someone who never pays taxes, that is – while neglecting to disclose that they have their substantial life savings hidden under the mattress…)) Would it be the same Vatican that continually uses its influence in politics?

Or could it be some other principled Vatican that I’ve not heard about?

OK, I gotta confess. I have a real problem with the #occupywherever thing. Hang on – put down the stones. It’s not that I don’t agree that it’s undesirable – evil, even – that 1% of the world has most of the wealth in its pockets, or that corporate greed is a huge problem and needs to have a chainsaw taken taken to it. Indeed, you won’t find many people who are as critical of Big Business practices (and even Little Business practices for that matter) as I am. Gee, I’m even up for a protest march every once in a while, if the situation benefits from it.

The thing is, as I see it the #occupy process is just not really a productive way to address what’s wrong in this particular case. More than that – I think it may even be a bad way to do it. ((I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but it seems to me that every nutjob and his dog is attempting to use these protests to further their on agenda. If it’s something that pisses off The Man, there’s someone at #occupywoop-woop on a megaphone about it. This is really counterproductive, as any protest organizer knows. What you need with a protest is a clear, easily graspable focus. Protests are not about doing anything per se, but about getting lots of coverage in the mainstream media. If you get that coverage and no-one in television land can tell what the fuck you’re on about, your protest is a waste of time and energy.))

Think about it for a moment. What does the #occupy movement hope to get done? For the most part it doesn’t appear to have any goals as such, other than a fairly general ‘It’s broken and we demand someone fixes it!’ manifesto. Evidently the reasoning is that if you get enough people to get together and shout that loud enough, then something will happen. Well, duh, it IS broken, and it SHOULD be fixed, but stamping your foot on the ground, chanting slogans and incurring the wrath of the conservative authorities is unlikely to achieve much. Sure you get footage of the police being brutish and stupid, but for what? A sum total of howling righteous indignation for being treated badly? The only message to be taken away from that is that the police, when instructed to move obdurate people on, will likely hit them with a stick if they resist. Again (sadly), duh.

If you do a Search™ on “goals of the occupy movement” you’ll see exactly what I mean. You get a whole bunch of links essentially discussing what such goals might be, but nothing much that defines those goals in any concrete terms. There’s stuff like this blog, ranking high on the search, that opines: ‘…the Occupy movement does not need to release a list of demands. Their demands are the demands of the majority of the American people.’ Sheesh.

According to abovementioned blog’s writer (who appears to be fairly representative on a quick scout), among these demands would be:

…raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans , universal health care, corporations are NOT people, money should not equal free speech, and we need to get the big money interests out of our politics. [sic]

In short, we could easily simplify this to be a call for the rectification of imbalances that favour the rights of the few over the rights of the many. In effect, then, the #occupy movement is objecting to a general level of injustice that has existed in human civilizations from the beginning of recorded history.

A protest highlighting such disharmony could be an extremely useful thing in the right circumstances, but the #occupy phenomenon in the democratic Western world is quite unlike the uprisings of the Arab Spring (with which it aligns itself) because many of the governing bodies of the Middle Eastern countries where that particular movement arose don’t allow their populations to have a say in the handling of inequalities. In America (like Australia), though, there is already a way for ‘the majority’ of people to address these kinds of issues: vote anyone who is in favour of a particular inequality out of power. In fact, we’ve nearly ALWAYS had that option, yet the fact is that we don’t exercise it! It is a simple idea and it works like this: if Obama doesn’t agree that there’s an inequality, vote him out! If George W doesn’t agree, vote him out! But – and here’s the crux – DON’T THEN GO AND VOTE FOR SOME OTHER IDIOT WHO ACTS THE SAME WAY! If you do that, you’re not voting to fix the problems of inequality, you’re voting for something else.

What, then, is wrong here? If, as the #occupy bunch contend, the majority of Americans agree with them, why isn’t that majority using their democratic power to change things, as they surely could? This problem is not new. It didn’t suddenly happen last week.

As I understand it, the #occupy movement seems to invoke conspiracy to answer this question: the governments are in on it; they want to keep the people poor; it’s Big Business itself that runs things. ((I’m basing this observation on my readings of the Twitter streams of various #occupy campaigns, which I’ve been tapping into over the last week or so, and on blogs I’ve read. It may be a misrepresentation, and if so, I’ll gladly take on any thoughtful commentary.)) As is usually the case when anyone resorts to conspiracy theories, I think the actual answer is much simpler. I think the answer in this case is that the ‘majority’ of people are stupid. Well, I guess that’s harsh. Let’s say the majority of people are not properly educated, and don’t know how to wield the power they have. They also don’t understand (or don’t want to know) that to get the things they say they want, they’ll have to lose some of the things that they take for granted as ‘entitlements’ and some of the things that make them comfortable. The ‘majority’ of Americans (and Australians) are pretty damned skittish around that prospect. To give you some examples: an inequality of universal healthcare is not fixed by voting for a politician who offers you a reduction in your taxes. An inequality of rich people paying less tax than anyone else is not fixed by not-being-bothered-to-get-off-your-fat-ass-and-vote-in-the-first-place. Inequalities arising from having to deal with the planet heating up are not fixed by racking up your air conditioner to 11, driving a 6 cylinder 4WD and voting for a government that buys that vote with cheaper fuel prices. You get the drift.

What we have here is a situation where 1% of the population may have all the money, but the #occupy movement just represents a different 1% of people who want to get up on soapboxes and shout about how unfair that is. Yes, it sure is unfair, but to observe that is nothing more than a schoolyard no-brainer. The real problem is the 98% of people in the middle and their enormous apathy combined with selfishness and a frightening lack of acumen. It is partially because of them that the wealthy 1% are there in the first place, because they could, if they really wanted to, change that.

I suggest that this is the goal that the #occupy movement should be seeking (in democratic countries, at least): to teach people how to use their democratic power in an effective manner, and to educate them to understand that the change that ‘the majority’ wants, will come at a cost to more than just the wealthy 1% (who SHOULD be taxed more, don’t get me wrong. That is certainly something that needs to be addressed, but they are not the biggest part of the problem – they’re mostly a symptom and an easy target). Unlike much of the Middle East, we have system in place that could effect the kinds of changes we want if we only had the will.

As I write this, police have been called in to disperse #occupymelbourne, the demonstration in my own city. There is a sense of outrage and disbelief, which I share, that this kind of heavy-handed tactic should be implemented here. But I find myself kind of agreeing with the Lord Mayor of Melbourne when he said of the eviction:

Well, we’ve given them a fair go. We’ve allowed them to make their point.

Because, realistically speaking, what were the protesters hoping to achieve, if not this kind of outcome? Were they intending to stay there until the problem of societal inequality was fixed? If not, then what? That they got some kind of guarantee, perhaps, (by… whom?…) that things would be made better? Or were they intending to hang around so long that people got bored with them being there and ceased to notice their presence? You see my point, I trust.

It seems to me that if you can’t clearly outline what you hope to gain by your presence in such a demonstration and there is no definite outcome to be had, you can hardly be snitty about being told to move along after a reasonable show of solidarity (I want to emphasise here, in case it isn’t plain, that I don’t think sending in the police was a particularly sensible thing to do, and I certainly do not hold for one minute with any heavy-handedness or violence from them. ((And that goes for all the #occupy protests.)) I think the whole thing could have been handled with a lot more diplomacy, but that it unraveled the way it did just adds further weight to my assessment of the protest as an ultimately unproductive mess. Take note governing bodies: using police force is possibly the worst thing you can do in this instance. It’s just pouring fuel on a fire.)

The #occupy movement is painting itself as a revolution, but a revolution to achieve what, in the end? A fair system of government? We already have one of those – it’s called democracy and it is, to date, the fairest kind of governing system we’ve ever been able to devise. If the complaint is that the democracy we have isn’t working so good, then, sure, maybe that’s right. And it’s completely true that we only have the government to blame. But in a democracy, the government is… us. All of us. In a democracy, if the system is broken, then we are all to blame.

Since I last wrote about shoo!TAG here on TCA, I’ve been having some rather interesting correspondence with people at Texas State University regarding a letter that was recently featured on the ShooTag site which was a synopsis of a supposed ShooTag experiment that had been carried out in June under the aegis of the University. The letter, including a precis of the seemingly persuasive results from that experiment, was signed by TSU assistant professor Ken Mix PhD. The document in question appeared to be on a Texas State University letterhead.

Well, it seems that ShooTag’s claims of Texas State University involvement in this affair were (as I speculated might be the case), not entirely to the liking of the University administration, and Dr Mix wrote to me this morning to inform me that he’d requested that ShooTag take the letter down. ((Which they have – kind of. The link to it is now gone but the pdf itself is still there)) Rather surprisingly Dr Mix inferred that I must have gone out of my way to find the letter, claiming that it was not immediately apparent through the site menus and that he had to perform a search to find it. Au contraire I told Dr Mix. I found it simply by looking under Our Technology -> Testing ShooTag and clicking on the link there, as I expect anyone who was curious about ShooTag’s proposed mechanism of action might have done. ((It’s gone now of course, but it was up and active until a day or so ago.)) I also pointed out to Dr Mix that a quote from him appearing to be an endorsement is, as of this writing, still active on the Australian ShooTag site.

Also in my inbox this morning was an email from Melissa Rogers (ShooTag CEO), who had evidently acquired my private address from Ken Mix or TSU. No matter. As I have said before, I don’t go to particular trouble to protect my real identity and it’s pretty easy to find out who I am even if you’re merely casually inquisitive (jeepers – as it says in the FAQ: just email me and I’ll tell you!) I’m not entirely sure, though, that Ms Rogers had connected the dots when she wrote to me, so she may be surprised to read my reply to her, which I’ve reproduced in full below. In her email she wanted to know why I ‘felt the need to defame’ her product, what my concerns with it are, and why I believe that there is no scientific data or evidence that it works. Well, we’ve been through it all before, but here, set out clearly to Melissa Rogers in person, are my grievances against ShooTag. Happy reading (and stay tuned)!

Dear Ms Rogers,

Sincerely
Peter Miller

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The Complete Tetherd Cow Shoo!TAG link archive is here.

As you know, Faithful Acowlytes, I am quite fond of Halloween, and I like to do something a little… ‘spooky’, for you all each year as the holiday approaches. This year I have spooked even myself. Before you click on the following link, a warning: this is NOT FOR THE FAINT HEARTED. Are you ready?

OK, do it.

See, I told you. Please compose yourself and we’ll reconvene in the comments for discussion.