Wombat Diet

Former colleagues who’ve been there tell me that the Harvard Business School is well run. They were mid-career executives who got the nod to go for some executive refresher courses. They were not doing MBAs but they did get to spend some time on HBS case studies and they commented on how good the logistics were. I was a little jealous.

This evening I learned, or rather I re-registered the fact, that George Bush has a Harvard MBA. I knew he was a Yale and a Skull and Crossbones man, and maybe I knew he had an MBA, but HARVARD? I had forgotten. George Bush? According to this account he deserved to graduate and is smarter than is generally assumed. Really??

I listened to a podcast of a show on a New Mexico local radio station yesterday in which people were calling in to vent their anger about wire-tapping legislation, during which they spoke of the current Bush administration as evil incarnate. For some people George Bush is the most evil man alive (or Nr.2 after Cheney).

A few hours later I watched a British farmer on television, speaking about the latest outbreak of bovine tuberculosis. He concluded his remarks with

“…if anyone can believe anything the government says any more.”

I might have disregarded that a while ago but it struck me forcibly at the time. I had just viewed some 9/11 Was An Inside Job conspiracy videos on the Internet and, in reflecting on how people can come to believe complete twaddle, it was clear to me that in Western democracies many people now simply do not trust their governments any more. People have been lied to so often that many now assume everything is a lie.

It’s one thing to be cynical and to discount spin, but many have gone way beyond that. Quite how far, I really had no idea. Here’s a quick summary of a YouTube thesis called Zeitgeist the movie which has allegedly been seen by 50m people. Fasten your seatbelt.

Christianity and, indeed, all religions are fronts. There is a global elite (the Illuminati, the Bilderberg group, and the Council on Foreign Relations among others) that constitutes the people behind the curtain. They have been there forever. They own all the media and they actively suppress information they don’t like. The Rothschilds and the Rockefellers are prominent members. There are others. Rupert Murdoch is one. They meet regularly, in secret, and they choose who will be the next President or Prime Minister. Elections are a sham. All economic activity is organized to enrich the global elite. The US Federal Reserve System is a privately owned bank created by the elite to enrich themselves. Americans pay income tax, which has no legal or constitutional basis, to service the debt owed to international bankers behind the Fed. 9/11 was a conspiracy by the global elite. It was a “false flag” operation designed to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the “War on Terror,” which will never end. The elite’s next agenda items include having radio frequency ID (RFID) chips implanted in everybody and “one world government” (as predicted in the Bible). The American Union and the Amero are just around the corner.

Allegedly millions of Americans now believe that the World Trade Center buildings were brought down in a controlled demolition, that the Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile and that Flight 93 was shot down. It seems that there are dozens if not hundreds of conspiracy sites that are peddling this. This should be enough of a rebuttal.

Recalling the known lies and spin by political leaders some cynicism is understandable, but this level of credulity is truly hard to fathom. Whatever about the arguments on technical issues, this ought to facilitate doubt, but… hello? It doesn’t seem to. It may even be counterproductive. Has the US simply taken leave of its senses? Or is this just a bunch of kooks running their own version of daytime television on the Internet, narrowcasting to each other?

The BBC screened a program on the conspiracy case a few months ago which I didn’t see at the time but caught up with since. The reflections on the pathology were good but some on the dangers to democracy of spin wouldn’t have been amiss.

If the Republicans are sent packing in 2008 a lot of people, including conspiracy theorists, will sleep better at night. But will isolationism and trade barriers follow?

Could George Bush’s MBA have been an inside job? Quite a few HBS alumni have ended up in jail, including Enron’s CEO. (Do business school rankings take account of jail sentences?! –I must find out.) What are the chances that they were models of probity while still at Harvard? Or that all who should have gone to jail did so? Would Bush have been elected if Harvard had flunked him? It probably wouldn’t have mattered to the voters of Florida but maybe those people behind the curtain might not have been so happy, unless of course they were arranging things even back then.

Tags: Politics, Video