Tag Archives ⇒ psychic

Psychic Terror Network

July 29, 2003
· Martin Kelley

For those of you pronos­ti­ca­tors who want to get in on the ground floor of the Psy­chic Ter­ror Net­work (a.k.a. the Pol­i­cy Analy­sis Mar­ket), here’s the home of dot-com Home­land Secu­ri­ty. Its home­page is appro­pri­ate­ly rem­i­nis­cent of the Heav­en’s Gate Cult web­site, anoth­er mod­ern pseudo-religion (their sto­ry here).
The Pol­i­cy Analy­sis Mar­ket is cosponored by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects, and a spin-off of The econ­o­mist mag­a­zine, con­firm­ing my sus­pi­cion that this is the cult of the cap­i­tal­ists at work. It’s Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations here: there’s a “guid­ing hand” to com­plete­ly unfet­tered mar­kets that allows them to meet peo­ple’s needs bet­ter than indi­vid­ual intel­li­gence ever could. For­get the CIA, we’ll use inter­net surfers! They’ll want to make mon­ey and they can do our intel­li­gence gath­er­ing for us bet­ter than those desk jock­eys in Lan­g­ley! This Psy­chic Ter­ror Stock exchange is the per­fect mar­riage of Nineties dot-com can-do, eight­ies market-uber-alles and Seventeen-Seventies God-guides-the-rich Calvinism.
Trad­er accounts open in two days so get ready to join the Pyschic Ter­ror Net­work yourself!
UPDATe: We’re too late. Pen­ta­gon can­cel­ing Pyschic Ter­ror Net­work under the weight of ridicule they’ve received to the idea. Maybe the Pen­ta­gon should hire Nan­cy Rea­gan’s astrologer for their ter­ror alerts instead (actu­al­ly they should hire her great web­mas­ter, whose great design sure beats that of the Heav­en’s Gate dropout they used).

Lots of Blame-Shifting on the Niger/Iraq Forgery

July 11, 2003
· Martin Kelley

The CIA asked Britain to drop it’s Iraq claim while Pres­i­dent Bush said that the CIA “I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intel­li­gence ser­vices.”
    Remem­ber that Bush’s State of the Union address did­n’t claim that the US believed that Iraq was buy­ing nuclear mate­r­i­al from Niger or oth­er African coun­tries. It said that British intel­li­gence thought Iraq was. Shift­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for the claim gave the Bush team the wig­gle room to include an alle­ga­tion they knew was prob­a­bly not true. It’s the tri­umph of pol­i­tics over truth.
    As I’ve writ­ten before, there is a polit­i­cal bril­lance to the Bush Pres­i­den­cy. The Admin­is­tra­tion knows that it can sway large por­tions of the Amer­i­can pub­lic just by mak­ing claims. It does­n’t mat­ter if the claims are wrong –even obvi­ous­ly wrong– as long as they feed into some deep psy­chic nar­ra­tive. It’s been awhile since we saw a Pres­i­dent that could bul­ly through real­i­ty as long as the sto­ry sound­ed good. Ronald Rea­gan, the ex-actor, was good at it but I’m sus­pect­ing our cur­rent Pres­i­dent is even bet­ter. The ques­tion is whether enough peo­ple will start insist­ing on the truth and demand inves­ti­ga­tions into the lies. There were no weapons of mass destruc­tion in Iraq and Pres­i­dent Bush knew it. The Amer­i­can peo­ple would not have gone to war if we had known that Iraq was­n’t a threat and this too Pres­i­dent Bush knew.