If by any chance the herd-thinning I'm talking about somehow turns out to be a grand plan by secret societies, I'm perfectly willing to review the evidence, reconsider, and say I was wrong about the secret society and conspiracy part.  That's going to take a lot of convincing, however.

That's because what is going on is not secret.  There it is, in front of the Whole World.  Why it's going on is much better explained by very obvious non-secrets.  One big non-secret is the history of how we have treated each other over the eons, stemming from our earliest instincts and history: kill, or be killed.  We're still struggling with that part, some more than others, but there's no need to posit a secret conspiracy.  Can't even make a halfway decent conspiracy `theory' out of it, unless human instinct and behavior is a conspiracy.  It's just age-old conditioned response.  Do what we must to ensure our own survival, then sort out the rest.  Being alive to sort it out is the ticket.  That was learned eons ago, and flares up and down from time to time as has been the case throughout history.  Offing each other has been just as normal as food and sex, or so history indicates.  Old instincts die hard, along with the conflicts that go with them.

But, what happens if and when we manage to stop killing each other one way or another and then there's too many of us?  Or, what happens when we're still offing each other or letting it happen, and there's still too many of us?  Who's going down?  I can see ways to help almost everyone in the world to survive.  So can other people.  Ask Jeff Sachs.  Or Bill Gates, after his conversion to Reformed Capitalist.  Or Dalai Lama.  Is there a conspiracy in there somewhere?  Nothing I can see, at least.  Just an awakening, a recognition about how we really can do things much better to help each other survive, that being compassionate is okay and safe.  What happens if we all survive, make babies, and then we end up with twelve billion people instead of six billion?  At some point, there has to be too many of us such that we really can't grow enough food.  And in trying, powered by hydrocarbons, we can even make the global environment less able to support human life beyond a certain limit in numbers of people.  That's the elephant in the room, our modern, enlightened, and terrible dilemma. In the midst of human compassion - the high-water mark of civilization, and where we are arriving - we also come to recognize that compassion and helping each other to survive can lead to demise of many of us from the very processes we have to use for survival to start with.  

It's a horrible dilemma, but that's what we have.  It's actually solvable, however, on condition that we first stop killing each other out of fear and habit - or for any other reason.  We don't necessarily need to hurt each other, first, batting first to try and prevent getting batted ourselves.  Once there, if we ever get there, we can be very reasonable and honest, face the dilemma directly in the interest of at least not hurting each other. I've lived in the US, Russia, Ukraine, rode trains from France to Siberia.  Most people are quite reasonable, it seems to me.  Some are maniacs, however.   Sometimes they get their hands on the levers of power (BushCo) and generally screw up everything they touch except their own wallets and the wallets of enough of the people who support them to drive them forward.  It's the oldest game in the world, destroy or be destroyed, kill or be killed.  That is BushCo's basic thinking.  It's nothing new.  We learned about it in the Adam and Eve metaphor.  Presumably there were four people in the world, and one them got whacked.  It's that part that still screws up everything else for us.  It's the assumption that, well, if somebody's going to be whacked, it's not going to be "me" no matter what.  Whereas "me" was supposed to extend to "we", US citizens under our famous Constitution, it didn't.  We're surprised, for some reason.  No need to be surprised.  Just need to be aware, and make some conscious decisions about what to do.  I conclude that peacefully shutting off the cash flow to US government will terminate that problem forthwith, and is a necessary start.  It's something that requires no marches on Washington, and can be done from the remaining privacy of our homes stateside.

US government is, at this time, a criminal enterprise.  It does not reflect what most Americans want, certainly is not producing what the world-at-large needs, and cannot be expected to do more than harm people - US citizens and the rest of the world.  To begin to fix things, US government must be brought into check and cleaned out, first, by entirely peaceful means to which we have every right in order to defend ourselves and the world at large.  Remember the very common depiction of Washington, DC as a cesspool?  It is, and it really isn't funny anymore if it ever was.  The only conspiracy I can see is the common consent to let government continue practically unfettered, and there's no more conspiracy there than we choose ourselves, individually and then collectively.  Conspiracy comes down to going and looking in the mirror.  Yes or no is up to each person looking in that mirror, according to what each chooses at that point, and whether that choice includes allowing a broken, renegade government to continue, or not.  If there is any conspiracy, it's a conspiracy of our own making by being passive and feckless in the face of baseball bats and similar blunt instruments that have been around forever.  Blame it on a secret society?  Yeh, that's the ticket!  Then it's not our fault.  We can blame things equally on Russell's China Teapot, orbiting between the earth and Venus.


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The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.
W. Churchill