{"id":67,"date":"2010-04-05T08:42:33","date_gmt":"2010-04-05T14:42:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markniwot.com\/?p=67"},"modified":"2014-05-21T08:36:04","modified_gmt":"2014-05-21T14:36:04","slug":"24-lowers-the-bar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markniwot.com\/?p=67","title":{"rendered":"24 Lowers the bar"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>YHVH declares (Amos 3:7) that He does nothing without declaring His plans through His &#8220;servants the prophets&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>The Adversary seems to do similarly &#8212; although not with the same level of integrity, or for the same reasons &#8212; and it could well be argued that he uses television and the movies for that purpose.\u00a0 There may be no better example of the concept than the\u00a0 TV show <strong><em>24<\/em><\/strong>, particularly when it comes to propaganda for the burgeoning police state.<\/p>\n<p>I originally started watching back when the threat that Jack Bauer faced was a terrorist nuclear weapon in LA, in large part to check out the message being sold to Amerika.\u00a0 While the show is without question well-acted, fast-paced, and finely crafted &#8212; making it not only entertaining but a great vehicle for the purpose of &#8220;molding hearts and minds&#8221; &#8212; it is certainly not subtle:<\/p>\n<p>If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.<\/p>\n<p>When the Constitution, and concepts like the &#8220;rule of law&#8221;, stand in the way of the &#8220;good guys&#8221; like Jack, we are evidently to be comforted by the fact that torture, break-ins, collateral damage, and a total surveillance state are all &#8220;necessary evils&#8221; in the Fight Against Terrorism.\u00a0 While there may be a few bad guys in Government Itself (even in the Oval Office from time to time) the message is that ultimately the ends justify the means, even if there is a bit of ambiguity about getting there.\u00a0 It is the subtlety of how good is mixed with evil, in other words (see Genesis 3) which makes the message so effective.<\/p>\n<p>But when I watched the two episodes last night that I had missed during the recent trip, something new hit me:\u00a0 <em><strong>24<\/strong><\/em> is now lowering the bar.\u00a0\u00a0 The noble TV President\u00a0 made that clear when she declared that the &#8220;total resources&#8221; of the United States would be brought to bear against the terrorists this season when they threatened about a 20 block square area of Manhattan with a &#8220;dirty bomb&#8221; made of nuclear fuel rods &#8212; a bomb smuggled into the city in spite of all the traffic cameras, spy drone UAVs, satellites, and even the NYPD&#8217;s Finest.<\/p>\n<p>We were lured into Terror Fear Syndrome over worries about suitcase nukes and bio-terror pandemics.\u00a0 We were conditioned to accept wiretaps and the torture of suspects because the &#8220;needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few &#8211; or the one&#8221;\u00a0 (OK, that&#8217;s a bit of <strong><em>Star Trek<\/em><\/strong> &#8220;new-agery&#8221;; after all, this concept has been around since the Garden).\u00a0 We strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel, in other words.<\/p>\n<p><em>But look at how far the bar has now been lowered!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>What constitutes a terror event justifying acts that were once utterly prohibited by Law have morphed from pandemic and national destruction to a few city blocks.\u00a0 &#8220;Weapons of Mass Destruction&#8221; once meant a Manhattan Project effort, which required the resources of a nation-state to construct.\u00a0 Now a Maxwell Smart wannabe shoe-bomber and an idiot who couldn&#8217;t even properly light his own underwear have managed to sell post-Constitutional Amerika on a series of airport intrusions and naked body scanners that would get ordinary peons arrested for child pornography if the <em>very same images<\/em> were found on a laptop that one of them tried to carry <strong>THROUGH <\/strong>the very same <em>portal<\/em>!<\/p>\n<p>Even rifles that were once (prior to the bootlegger-era <em>US v Miller<\/em> travesty) called &#8220;weapons of military utility&#8221; and obviously protected by the Second Amendment are now being labeled &#8220;WMDs&#8221; by media sycophants.<\/p>\n<p>Once the Police State &#8220;ball&#8221; starts rolling downhill, it obviously picks up speed.\u00a0 The next steps are becoming increasingly apparent, particularly to those who study what our Creator Wrote for us.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;prince of this world&#8221; and his servants, the prophets of Hollywood, have indeed managed to lower the bar once again.\u00a0 It should make us prayerfully consider what those who &#8220;have eyes but do not see&#8221; are being set up for next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The TV show 24 is great entertainment, and even better propaganda.  After years of conditioning Amerika to accept torture, police state tactics, and unlimited surveillance in the &#8220;war against terror&#8221;, the bar is being lowered once again. <a href=\"https:\/\/markniwot.com\/?p=67\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[210],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markniwot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markniwot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markniwot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markniwot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markniwot.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/markniwot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69,"href":"https:\/\/markniwot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions\/69"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markniwot.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markniwot.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markniwot.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}