PREVIOUSLY, I POINTED OUT THAT a clever and amusing email about hard-working teachers was really designed to promulgate a lie about prayer in public schools.
BP, like the anonymous author of that email about teachers, is intentionally using public misinformation to serve the purposes of a smaller group.
So what has that got to do with the worship of Marduk, or BP?
The answer is that it's part of a larger pattern of lies.
It's a pattern that has been with us a very, very, long time—stretching back to the dawn of civilization.
But let's start with BP.
- BP lied about their ability to respond to an accident like this in order to get permission to drill in the first place.
They weren't alone.
Almost all the big oil corporations have admitted that they are incapable of dealing with a disaster like the current one, yet they all claimed that capability when they were applying to drill. -
BP lied about the seriousness of the leak from the first.
They claimed that it was between 1000 and 5000 barrels a day, when they knew full well it could be as much as 100,000 barrels a day.
That's the equivalent of telling me a purchase is going to cost me somewhere between one and five dollars when it's really going to cost me a hundred.
A pretty big fib. -
But the real similarity between BP the email above lies in their more subtle forms of dishonesty—the efforts to keep information from the public or to spin it once it was out.
They tried to keep the live feed of the leak from public view.
They tried to keep scientists from measuring the flow, and from getting samples of the oil coming from the flow.
They tried to change definitions to convince us that a plume was not a plume.
BP, like the anonymous author of that email about teachers, is intentionally using public misinformation to serve the purposes of a smaller group.
This isn't just a matter of lying.
As I've pointed out before, here and here, lying is not always either serious or wrong.
The kid who says "I didn't do it" when he did do it, and knows that he's been caught red-handed can be excused for a moment of panic.
The wife who lies to her husband so he won't suspect the surprise party, is not doing anything wrong.
The man who lies to the soldiers at the door because he is hiding their innocent victim is doing something positively brave and right.
But BP, and the author of that email, are playing a completely different game.
They are intentionally distorting the world-view of the entire public, in order to fulfill their private agendas.
BP is not a little kid caught taking a cookie.
They're an enormous corporation, continuing an ongoing policy of distortion.
They distorted the truth when they applied for the permits, they distorted the truth when said the spill was one to five percent of what it really was, they distorted the truth when they tried to keep scientists and the public from information about the reality, and they continue to distort the truth with their spin on the facts.
All of these are ways of getting us to believe that the facts are different from what they are, like the email above—of creating a false public worldview—a practice which goes back to at least the invention of the gods and organized religion as a propaganda arm of ancient kingdoms.
Like ancient Babylon.
Next: The Worship of Marduk...
