Clink Clink

I love Penn and Teller. I’ve been  facinated with magic all of my life. I saw them in Vegas and met Penn afterwards. Brilliant man! He’s an atheist, but no matter, his sense of humor is impecable.  There are two types of magicians. There are the TV ones, and then there are the ones who can conjure in person with no photographic assist and only skill, learned over years of practice. For the record there is no such thing as magic. What we perceive as “magic” is our mental understanding of the natural world. When you confuse that understanding you get “magic.” It’s called “misdirection.” Misdirection makes you concentrate on what the magician wants you to see, ignoring something else, quite often right there in plain view. Teller has a trick that always amazes me. He has a tin cup and begins to drop quarters into it. You see them drop, hear the “clink,” and all is right with the world. Then, he begins to move around the room, plucking coins from various places and dropping them into the cup. Your eyes will follow the coins, hear them drop, and you will think nothing of it, except for some small details. When he takes someone’s glasses off, and dumps two quarters from them into the cup you are mystified. In a word, this is impossible! Obviously the person was looking through the glasses a moment before. Very clearly, Teller did NOT replace the lens with quarters and then dump them into the cup, yet you hear it and you see it. How is this so? It happens because he has created a form of tunnel vision for you and while you concentrate on his hands you EXPECT to see and hear the event, therefore you do! I have seen him do it, both on TV and in person and I have SEEN the quarters drop. 

Misdirection works in other ways, also. When a population is told by what they understand to be an authority that something is so they will begin to see that something as a fact. If a policeman enters a crowded theater and shouts, “Everybody DOWN,” people will instinctfully hit the floor if they see danger or not. The policeman has directed their attention to the danger and that means it must be real. In spite of all the events that have demonstrated the fact that our government will construct scenerios to achieve their own ends, most Americans still believe that the powers that be are basically good, and have our best interests at heart. So, it only goes to follow, when the government tell us that something is bad, or dangerous, we will mostly believe it. We might debate it, but we will usually follow the party line by and large. This is why we stand by like sheep while the TSA searches a seven year old girl for a pipe bomb. We know it’s stupid, but, courtesy of 9/11 we believe there IS a possibility that the little girl is a very cleverly disguised Arab midget!    

It’s bad enough when the misdirection concerns things we CAN see, but when it starts working with things we CAN’T see it gets sweet! Remember the AIDS virus? Oh yeah. I remember when I heard about it back in ‘81. We all thought is was a homosexual problem, and to be quite frank most everyone was cool with that. You do an unnatural act you get an unnatural disease. Bada Bing, Bada BOOM! Then the misdirection set in. Suddenly AIDS was everywhere, and it was pointed out that it was not just a gay problem, but concerned us all. And it was ALWAYS fatal. You get it, you’re DEAD. Let’s get into the field of probability here. If I walk out in front of my house right now, it is POSSIBLE that an elephant can walk up and pee on my foot. It CAN happen. Happens in India all the time. But is it PROBABLE? If I have twenty sexual partners in my lifetime, who are heterosexual, go to the doctor regularly, and take showers every morning, it is POSSIBLE they may get AIDS, but is it likely? And beyond that, seeing that we do know that the HIV virus transfers with bodily fluids, if I have normal sex with a lady where is most of the fluid going? Please don’t tell me I have to explain that to you. 99.99999% of the American population will not get AIDS. Do the math. You take a greater risk driving to the grocery store. 

Now for a little background. America is in the oil business. That comes as no great surprise to most of you, but let me expand that a bit. America is in the OIL business. Oil is EVERYTHING to America. If one drop of oil comes up missing Wall Street will crash, we will find out that Shirley Temple was a whore and Jesus will NEVER come back. That’s how crucial oil is to America. When the price of oil changes five cents great minds take hours trying to figure out why. It only goes to follow that if a substance is so central to our very existence the government’s entire efforts should be directed toward acquiring and keeping the flow of the sticky substance going at all costs. We will sign contracts with the Devil to achieve this end, and indeed we HAVE. We will also lie, cheat and steal in order to position ourselves as close a possible to the source of it. 

The Middle East has oil. Now, as a Texan I take exception to the worship of Arab oil. I think that Texas oil is just as sticky and a whole lot closer. And, I would rather deal with Bubba than Ali Babba any day of the week, but that’s not how the government thinks. They want ALL the oil, up to and including ignoring sources of it closer to home. The MEXICANS have oil! The CANADIANS have oil. The freaking CALIFORNIANS have oil, but what do we do? We charge off in the most God forsaken part of the world that has been at war since man invented the ROCK and try to work deals with illiterate, greedy, stupid people who hate women, and eat no ham!

Remember misdirection? Save your fork, folks! Well here’s a new twist. DOUBLE misdirection. Let me ask you. How dangerous is ISIS? “Oh, Wilbur, them boys is so bad they killed two or three reporters for no reason and they’s a gonna take over the WORLD.” Why is that? It’s because Obama TOLD you that. And the lame stream media confirmed it on the nightly news. You saw it, didn’t you? I mean them coins dropped right in that cup, I mean them heads come right off. . . it was all right there. ISIS was suddenly everywhere. They weren’t just in Syria, they were in Iraq. They were at the borders. They were at the PTA meeting! Little virgin school girls were running away from home to join ISIS. Send in the troops and pray to God we can win the war! Wait a minute. Didn’t we just pull troops OUT of Iraq? Didn’t Obama wave that around as one of his crowning achievements? Well, he’s only sending about three hundred of fifty or so, right. . . RIGHT? 

The ISIS crisis was number one story on the news. JESUS could have returned the week of 9/11 and He would have been the SECOND story on the news. A few rag heads in the desert dominated the world. Has anyone of you every met anyone in ISIS? I haven’t. Now, I’m just a simple ol’ boy from Austin but them boys all look alike to me so I really can’t tell you if I have or not, but since my car hasn’t blown up yet I’m fairly sure I haven’t. But Obama want’s us to believe that there is a terrorist under every bed. Why? OIL! We have to get next to that oil. He has a logistical problem, however. To get next to that oil he’s got to get MORE troops over there to run them ISIS fellers off, and to do that he needs. . . what did I say in the first of this article, MISDIRECTION! He wants to send more troops to the Middle East, but he doesn’t want you to see it. How do we do that? If you want to get perfect tunnel vision you put someones BUTT on the line. That’ll do it every time. What’s worse than a threat you think you can see? A threat you CAN”T see, but you perceive it to be there. HEEELLLLOOOOO Mr. Duncan! 

An illegal immigrant, sick as can be, flies from a country soaked with a killer virus, and strolls into a hospital right smack dab in the middle of beautiful downtown Dallas! And all the Nortes hate Dallas anyway. Why they killed Kennedy, don’t you know? And lo and behold TWO nurses got sick! One was really cute and that was the bonus factor. If she’d been a fat chick it would have been bad enough, but she was a pretty little Asian girl and why, that’s just UNAmerican, now isn’t it. The two got spirited off to very important hospitals, where they began to improve. It actually took two passes of this trick before it works. Two care givers were bought into the country legally for treatment, but they went out to California where they just got well. That wouldn’t do. Heck no! That’s too normal. Duncan had a mystic about him. He couldn’t be tracked well. He pops into the hospital and got treated for a sinus infection and sent home. Whoops! Gotta send him BACK. The next pass was the coup de gras! He DIED! Not before he French kissed the nurses and they broke out in hives and we had the perfect storm. Oh, my bad, where’s ISIS? Clink, clink, hear them quarters a dropping?

My God, how do we fight this foe? Why send in the troops. And to heck with restraint, we are going to need a LOT of troops to fight a virus. Combine this with all the reports now cropping up all over the country as people check into clinics and ERs with “flu like symptoms.” Hey, folks, it’s FLU season. I, myself just got over it, ok? I sat out here on the porch writing articles sweating like a field hand. I didn’t go to the store because I didn’t want to cause a riot. A fifth of Jim Beam and a bucket of KFC cured me. Swat them bees, swat them bees. So here goes the needed troops to Africa to fight Ebola. How does a soldier fight Ebola? Jus sayin’. But, since they’re already THERE, the oil is so close. . . Clink, clink. And for his next trick, the Amazing Barack is going to saw the country in half!