As I detailed over the weekend, the Obama administration -- in the case brought by two American lawyers and their charity-client claiming that their conversations were illegally intercepted by the Bush administration -- has announced that it intends to try to appeal, yet again, in order to prevent the court from hearing the lawsuit. On Friday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Obama's request to stay the District Judge's Order, which had held that it will review a classified document that the plaintiffs claim proves they were subjected to the illegal eavesdropping (thus conferring standing on the plaintiffs to challenge the legality of Bush's NSA program), and also ordered the Obama administration to provide security clearances to the plaintiffs' lawyers so that they could review the document as well. The Obama DOJ immediately announced they intend to try to appeal again -- the third time, since Obama's Inauguration, that the Obama DOJ will try to argue before a court that the case should not heard at all.
In the meantime, though, the Obama DOJ is now refusing to comply with the Judge's order, actually arguing to the court that only the President can decide whether classified information can be used in a court proceeding, and that courts have no power to make such decisions.
...As Marcy Wheeler documents in detail, the Obama DOJ is now spouting the Cheney/Addington view of government in its purest and most radical expression. Citing lengthy excepts from the Obama DOJ's brief filed on Friday following its loss in the appeals court -- a brief that could easily have been written by John Yoo or David Addington in its distinctly un-American and anti-constitutional theories purporting to vest unchallengeable, unreviewable power in the President -- Wheeler writes:
This whole passage, read in the context of the wholesale rollback on Executive claims to have exclusive control over classified information just reeks of desperation. Not to mention an acceptance of Cheney's contention that we have fewer than one--or even two--branches of government.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/02/executive_power/index.html
Conceptual Model vs. Data.
A conceptual model is a framework into which we plug data in order for them to make sense. For example, if I were to speak the following words to you, unless you possessed the proper conceptual model, you would not know what I was saying:
"Four-eight. Four-five. Four-charlie. Four-charlie. Four-foxtrot. Two echo."
The data appear meaningless to you unless you possess the proper conceptual model, which is that I am speaking in the computer code known as ASCII, and in hexadecimal in particular. I just said "Hello."
The term "conceptual model" could almost be considered to be synonymous with "assumption." If I operate from the assumption that you are in the habit of speaking in hexadecimal ASCII, I will interpret everything you say as an ASCII utterance. But maybe you don't speak in ASCII all the time and you neglect to inform me of this. So I might hear you say some things and then I would interpret it as:
"Pancake chainsaw peepee happytime." If it made no sense to me, I would figure that it was beyond my comprehension, that it was just pure brilliance.
So when people see Barack Obama installing Republicans into key administration positions, they may not understand it. "Well, Mister Fellow Democrat, I don't understand why he's doing it either. It's bi-partisanship, or maybe he's keeping his friends close and his enemies closer. Whatever it is, it's pure brilliance."
It's not that it's pure brilliance that is beyond your comprehension. It's that you are interpreting the data without the correct conceptual model. Nothing in this world is beyond your understanding. If something does not make sense to you, it is because you are attempting to plug the data into the wrong conceptual model.
Now. Remember how I said that a conceptual model is almost synonymous with an assumption? People usually don't think logically. They usually discard non-fitting data rather than switching conceptual models. Never discard data. Do not forget that.Consider the following data:
- Pyroclastic flows of molten steel drip from Tower 1.
- Blast squibs jet from Tower 1.
- Maintenance guy hears a massive explosion and sees fire in the basement of Tower 1.
- Terriss later turn up alive and well, surprised to hear that they are dead.
- Seismographs record events with the signature of demolitions charges just prior to building collapse.
Which conceptual model do these data fit?
- The Astro-Genital Brigade flew planes into the WTC and then the buildings defied the laws of physics and blowed up and fell right down. Why did AGB do this? They hate us so much that they gave us the finger and everything so that we would attack them and poison their land with depleted uranium.
- Bankers needed that pig of an office complex gone like yesterday and they also wanted to launch a war in the Middle East, so they wired that abortion up with demolitions charges and got their hirelings in Mossad and CIA to fly airplanes into it.
But most people don't do this. They pick and choose among data until they find the data that support their conceptual model.
So here is how you solve a mystery:
- Assemble all known data. Discard none of it.
- Spread all your data out on the floor until it makes sense. The resulting pattern is your conceptual model. It is the "code."
- Plug new data into this conceptual model.
Always be willing to update your conceptual model if data begin to not fit, because the people who are generating the data may have changed conceptual models. Be very dynamic in evaluating and updating your conceptual model.
So if we take all the data from the Obama adminstration, we can either remain content that we simply do not understand it --that it's pure brilliance-- or we can develop a conceptual model that makes sense of the data: He doesn't work for you. He works for the same bankers who employed George Bush.
The president doesn't run anything, no personal offense intended. He was installed by the same people who directed him to install Bob Gates and Hillary Clinton and who all else.
The reason why he has made no significant breaks with Bush administration policy is because Bush administration policy was banker policy. You are seeing the same policy now because Barack Obama works for the very same bankers.
It's a show, folks. Dancing girls and everything.
Never discard data. Find a conceptual model within which those data make sense.
The conceptual model within which I interpret all information --and the conceptual model I will continue to use until the data make no sense-- is that everything occurs according to the wishes of bankers. Those with the gold make the rules, after all. (This would seem to be basic information.)
Here's your homework, using a topic of the day: Take all available data regarding the Shoah, including Rabbi Schneerson's declaration that the Holocaust was a good thing and that the diseased limb of apostates needed to be lopped off for the sins of rejecting the Talmud, and how we've got rabbis saying that one Jew in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Poland, and try to develop a conceptual model of the event. Which one makes more sense:
- Everyone stays up nights dreaming up new recipes for Jews and that's why Schmuley got killed. Everyone has nothing better to do than to get up off the couch and persecute Jews.
- Orthodox rabbis and Illuminati Jewish bankers got rid of those animals so that they could form Israel and strengthen their egregore god Moloch with a human sacrifice.
In politics, the dominant narrative is rarely correct. That is because conceptual models get sold just like soap powder. Much of what you believe about the world is incorrect, not because you are stupid, but because you are employing conceptual models that got some heavy advertising, that's all.
When I see people stamping their feet, demanding that I not use a certain conceptual model in interpreting data, I know something's up.
Bingo.
