Taking it Public

There's a great scene in the movie, "A Few Good Men" where Navy lawyer Tom Cruise ver-bally battles Marine Colonel Jack Nicholson. Trapped and finally broken by the relentless inter-rogation, Nicholson snarls (as only he can snarl),

"You can't handle the truth."

The disgraced Colonel, of course, doesn't mean Tom Cruise--he means us. We the People. We're the ones who can't take it. We, the unwashed masses, are too lazy, too stupid, too irrational. In his twisted world, only the anointed few, the chosen leaders, deserve access to the truth.

The Federal Government is withholding the truth about Y2K for the same reason-they don't think we can take it. They think we'll panic and,

Take all our money out of the banks. Cash in all our mutual funds and burst the stock market balloon. Break the economic system by hoarding everything in sight. Incite turmoil, chaos and riots.

There are many reasons why their strategy is wrong but only two need to be mentioned. 1) This country belongs to us. 2) These people work for us. If something's wrong, we have a right to know and they have a responsibility to tell us. Will the truth result in riots, shortages and disruptions to the financial system? Possibly so but if our frac-tional reserve banking system and our Just-in-Time manufacturing and retail processes are so dangerously fragile, don't we need to know now rather than in the middle of the Y2K Crisis?

I'm fed up with being told that institutions must be protected even if it means we have to be sacrificed. We are more important than the banks. We have a higher priority than the stock market. We're grown-ups and we have a right to the truth. We the People of this great nation have faced every challenge thrown at us in the past. It's time to take this one on.

We can handle it.

[Jim Lord]

-- dw (y2k@outhere.com), August 20, 1999

Answers

This is especially the case if the people hiding the problem are incapable of actually dealing with, or even significantly mitigating, the problem from behind their veil of secrecy.

Sallust

-- Sallust (sallust@conspiracy.rom), August 20, 1999.

The reason Lord Jim brought this "document" into "public view" is that he has been fading from the scene lately, and his book sales, i.e. ill-gotten gain from pumping Y2k panic, have fallen.

Lord's thesis regarding what was meant by this Navy document has been completely blown out of the water by John Koskinen (a person who has better connections than any Doomer on this planet will ever have).

Get current with current events.

-- Chicken Little (panic@forthebirds.net), August 20, 1999.

Chicken, can you now explain to us how he is making a million by providing a self produced one hour video on Y2K on a VHS tape for $4 INCLUDING shipping?

You can't? I didn't think so. See ya.

-- a (a@a.a), August 20, 1999.

Really Chicken?

Why don't you show me where I can locate Mr. Lord's financial statements on the internet. Based upon your posting, it seems that you have proof that sales of his goods were slowing. How? Do you have an income statement? A form 10-Q? Or were you just talking about something you know nothing about?

-- haha (haha@haha.com), August 20, 1999.

I posted this elsewhere, but it's even more appropriate in this thread. This is from a review of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's new book, "Secrecy":

...Moynihan bases the book on what he learned as chairman of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, which sounds rather Big brotherish, but came out of his growing doubts about secrecy in government. These doubts deepened after his service on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Beginning with the Espionage Act of 1917 and working up to the present, Moynihan concludes -- with the innocent alarm of which only a person who has spent his adulthood in government is capable -- that our government has been routinely, if not systematically, keeping the truth from the nation.

The government has lied to us. And to itself. When the Army cracked the Russian spy code, for example, Gen. Omar Bradley kept it from President Harry Truman.

Instead of a report, the commission on secrecy might have reissued the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller...

-- Mac (sneak@lurk.hid), August 20, 1999.

Chicken Little got so bored over at the satire site, he had to come peck around over here!

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a.tcl?topic=Y2K%20Satire

-- (what@goof.ball), August 20, 1999.

[Chicken Little said]: "Lord's thesis regarding what was meant by this Navy document has been completely blown out of the water by John Koskinen..."

Sorry, but I don't see it that way at all. The Navy's document speaks for itself and is probably -- given the military outlook -- a simple, straightforward, dispassionate, and practical "threat" assessment. For those reasons, it also stands a greater likelihood of being an accurate one... especially compared to the "wishful thinking" assessments put out by others who assume (excuse me, HOPE) that computer systems will continue to work, unaffected by Y2K, unless they've already been proven fatally flawed.

From a personal contingency planning P.O.V., sensible people will take the Navy's comments to heart... and prepare... regardless of Kosky's damage control "spin du jour."

-- M.C. Hicks (mhicks@greenwich.com), August 20, 1999.

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geez ... what an ass this guy is. or .. maybe he's a wanna be comedian?

where in the world DO these people come from???

-- lou (lanny1@ix.netcom.com), August 20, 1999.

I partly agree with Chicken Little. Why the heck isnt Lord publishing the originals so we can see them for ourselves. Why do we have to do this with nothing but his opinion of the report.

Why is everyone so happy to accept whatever view JL has of the report and not demanding JL to show us what he saw.

-- FatTony (FatTony@youmammashouse.com), August 20, 1999.

>Where do these guys come from

Chicken little types are everywhere and from all walks of life. How about this anecdote:

A friend of mine was having lunch yesterday with some of his friends who work at the local branch of the Small Business Administration. (This is the Federal Agency, that, among other things, loans money to small businesses to help them fix their Y2K problems.)

So my friend brings to lunch a copy of the Navy Y2K report and shows it to them, explaining that our metro area is on the deep doo doo list for water and sewage.

They are shocked and very very angry. Among their bizarre statements: "Computers have absolutely nothing to do with water flow and cleaning of sewage."

(After lunch I showed my friend the utility site, http://themdc.com which explains that computers are very important, that Y2K is a significant issue for them, and "they are working on it" with "funding that began in 1999".)

He passed it on. It is frightening to think though, that these government bureaucrats did not even understand the importance of computer hardware and software in water distribution and treatment.

We are all in very deep doo doo.

-- cgbg jr (cgbgjr@webtv.net), August 20, 1999.

Indeed, CL's come from all walks of life. More specifically, they come from technical fields such as IT; enigineering; and the like. They come from fields of endeavor where the vast majority of people "in the know" are not....repeat NOT....worried about Y2k any more.

Why? Because they KNOW better. This forum is filled with worry-warts who wouldn't know their fanny from a hole in the ground. Engineer Cook and Sysman included. And yet you talk as though you have "authority". All of your leaders have been exposed as shameless profiteers and panic-mongers, again and again; but you folks are just too damn blind/dumb to see things for what they are.

And now this Lord/Navy thing. The deadline's approaching; all of the "Doom-Dates" that you idiots have predicted have come and gone without incident. You're getting more desperate to prove your non-existent point, as is the case with all extremists who set Doom-dates. History is replete with such examples.

I really pity you folks. You're going to have a lot to answer come next year. And you can bet your tookuses I'll be laughing as hard as I'm able.

-- Chicken Little (panic@forthebirds.net), August 20, 1999.

Rage all you want against Chicken Little, this attitude actually is typical for what passes as "thinking" today. An official government report is publicized by a private citizen that completely contradicts Koskinen AND his flunkies. The idiotic response from Koskinen & Co. is: It was, until recently, available on some web site somewhere to everyone; it was pulled from that web site somewhere for unknown reasons; the fact that so many of the report's assessment categories are marked the equivalent of "dead meat" is because that was sort of the "default" that was in effect when the report was produced, even though: 1) nowhere does this "default" appear as part of the report's instructions; 2) the report's instructions clearly indicate that the equivalent of "Unknown" should be assessed if in fact there is not enough known; 3) there are in fact many "Unknown" responses, apparently going against the "default = dead meat" convention; and 4) it just plain flies in the face of common sense to mark something as being known (whether positive or negative) when you don't know -- thats what "unknown" is all about!

But, like our stupid little bird brain Chicken Little, the overwhelming response from the press is: "Uhhh, well OK, I guess, I mean, if you SAY so...."

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.com), August 20, 1999.