Not A Blog™

I suppose it’s time for a confession. This is not a normal, almost inconsequential sort of confession that you might get if were admitting to misrepresenting a piece of data, or talking about my personal dislike for some facet of my life. This is a truly dangerous confession because it may mean the end of this Not A Blog™, but I think this transcends the importance of my individual self.

I’m one of them.

You know what who I’m talking about, though you know them by different names. None of the “popular” names are what we call ourselves, of course. They’re thrown out there to give conspiracy theorists something to latch on to: a definite term among of a sea of shifting concepts and half-truths.

Those behind the government prefer to stay out of the limelight, of course. It’s in our nature. It’s far more interesting to conceive a plan and watch it play out than try to brown-nose people you hate all day long. And while we do a certain amount of behind the scenes work, we’re encouraged to lead otherwise perfectly normal lives and blend in with the community. Not always easy, but I think we manage most of the time.

Let me point out that I’m by no means in the division which coordinates world events. That’s a fairly respectable area and I’ve only been involved for a short amount of time, now; obviously not long enough to have reached such a point of responsibility. I’m actually in the futurist’s division, which might make sense to you seeing as how I spend so much of this Not A Blog™ speculating on future events. I’m on a team which develops scenarios based on certain criteria (as a basic, rather overused example: what would happen if one country used nuclear weapons on another), and then extrapolate from that what world events may play out.

It might seem contradictory that we would need a division on speculating about world events when I’ve already hinted at the fact that we have a division which coordinates world events. This is true; and, indeed, it makes up the majority of what we do (specifically the field units). What we don’t understand—and what the conspiracy theorists miss—is the why. If there’s one thing I can say for our little group, it’s that we’re all concerned about the why.

What we can’t predict is the human behavior and reactions to certain, overly stressful, situations. Mostly, they’re gruesome happenings, which is extremely unfortunate, but it comes with the territory. I guess part of the reason I’m writing this in the first place is because I really can’t justify killing innocent people as part of this experiment, and it’s therepudic to tell someone, even if the someone is the no one who reads this Not A Blog™. But the point is: by subjecting a population to a stressor and measuring the cumulative effect of the shifts to everything with which that population feeds back, we gain insight into the way the mind functions.

So you’re all part of a big experiment. Got that? Yes, cliched I suppose, but at least aliens aren’t directly involved. They’re involved by proxy, I guess you would say, but they mostly stay out of it. And it wasn’t their idea. But I digress.

What most people don’t realize is the amount of give and take involved. In the biz, we call it push-pull. What it comes down to is this: if we need to manipulate a certain event or organization, we make it happen. Otherwise—and this is very important—it is still controlled by the reactions of the population.

The populations supplies push from its end, as a natural reaction based on group psychodynamics, while we pull what we need to in order to accomplish the scenario we’re currently running. (If you’re wondering, yes, pull is a thinly disguised reference to “pulling the strings”, a jokey term if ever there was one. Someone else came up with that, not us.) For example, the population pushes the stock market based on their trades through general retirement funds, hobby day trading, etc. If we wanted to study the effects of inflated prices of technology stocks in mutual funds on the trading volume of low risk securities, such as T-bills (in both cases, a non-public trade and therefore somewhat isolated in the market), we would pull the appropriate stocks into a mid-risk recommendation along with the low risks across multiple companies, and force the “tech bubble” to pop by overinflating it with capital. You may remember this scenario happening recently.

The thing to understand in all this is that we did not make anybody buy any stocks or bonds, yet people scrambled to do so based on the fact that unnamed venture capitalists were pouring millions into companies with scarcely more than a logo. Not everyone does this, of course. Warren Buffet doesn’t play our game and you can see what it got him. But it goes to show many things about the way a population makes decisions, and they generally don’t involve logic.

Here’s a tip: if anything is big, avoid it. We’re probably trying to make it do something bad in order to study the resulting debris. This is why I haven’t bought a house yet.

But these are relatively tame examples compared to some things that happen. Many people accuse the American government of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks. This is absurd, and we did not use our agents in that event. However—and this is what does not sit right with me—we manipulated certain middle eastern political processes in order to provoke a reaction from recently formed (in the past 30 years) alliances within the Muslim community. It was a study as to how well a non-technical society can integrate and communicate under stress.

Pretty dang well, apparently. We found that out by pushing too hard. What about the retaliation? That was President Bush’s decision, and though we lobbied for him to make it the way he did, there wouldn’t have been any penalties if he had done it differently. We’ve been trying to do a country-wide cultural study for some time, and that was a convenient avenue we decided to take.

At this point, I hope you realize the complexity of the situation. Do conspiracy theories have merit? Absolutely. Is it as simple as the government controlling everyone? No, not really. We didn’t assassinate president Kennedy, the lunar landing did happen just as everyone saw it, we didn’t orchestrate 9/11. What we did do is much more sinister and difficult to uncover: manipulation of free trade markets, interference with political processes outside of the United States, and the introduction of technologies designed to force populations to change the way they view the world—all in the name of understanding the human mind.

But it gets worse: the organization itself is broken into divisions, as I mentioned. We routinely hide secrets from each other, so that while I’ve spoken with some of the field units, I don’t really know much about what they do. Assassinate people? Probably, although none of them would admit to this. Influence people? Undoubtedly. So even though I could be considered to be “one of them”, I still don’t know much about how we get things done behind the scenes. Does this mean we really could have staged the Kennedy assassination and I’m not privileged enough to know about it? Possibly, sure. But knowing our prefered methods of operation, that’s really not what we do. We prefer subtlety. And as for the really big stuff, it’s not a secret within the org.

For example: extraterrestrial life. It exists. I suppose we’re the “official” liaisons with them, as much as our group can be official in any particular capacity. I guess when we say we are, we are. We don’t have anyone doing Men-In-Black type stuff, though, because there’s simply no need. Anytime someone gets buzzed, nobody believes them, anyway. Works for us. Besides, the aliens take a very hands-off approach to our world seeing as how we’re not sufficiently developed to deal with them. It makes sense.

So why risk my bright young career with this information? Two reasons. One, although they know I have a blog and they even occasionally read it, I’m betting on the fact that this’ll slip through. And Two, I think it’s important to understand what’s really happening, here. Not to mention, if you ever wondered why I acted odd in a particular situation, it might be because of something I knew but couldn’t say. In the past, some of my acquaintences have speculated that this may be the case; if you’re reading this, kudos on your powers of observation. You were right.

I still can’t say too much, obviously. In the chance they do find this, I’d prefer to only get a slap on the wrist. I can justify it very easily, since we do go out of our way to spread a certain amount of disinformation. Naturally, that’s all this post is: disinformation to mask exactly what we are doing in the first place.