Rand Paul's Plagarism Problem

++Rachel Maddow has always had fun with Rand Paul's tendency to quote verbatim from Wikipedia's film reviews. She did so last night again.

++Ron Paul's Presidential roll-out was also marred by copyright infringement and his web page had to be shut down. 

++Then there is the awkward button "Jew for Rand Paul" which got tweeted around.

++Then the various apps on his policy positions.

++Oh, and Rand said he was keeping an open mind on the Iran deal because it's better than war. Buzzer! You fail the Base test!

++But there is a larger point to the Rachel Maddow story. A man named Roger Thierem is a lecturer on national security matters. He argues that this appropriation of movies and fictional characters actually informs our policy makers rather than vice versa.

++ He points to Anthony Scalia's defense of torture when he talked at the Supreme Court about how Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles from a nuclear bomb by torturing a Muslim terrorist. "What jury would ever convict Jack Bauer?" Scalia said. But no one on the court argued back that Los Angeles was not going to be bombed and Jack Bauer was a TV character. 

++So Ron Paul's Gallactica is a reality that would inform his judgments. It's not simply a gimmick to get younger voters. It is part of his mindset. 

++Thierem goes on about how the entire SERE program in the military to test military personnel how to endure torture is fake. We believed the stories about brainwashing made popular in the book and film Manchurian Candidate. But North Korea did not brainwash people just brutalized them the old-fashioned way. But the CIA was a so convinced the Soviet Union and North Korea engaged in "brainwashing" that we embarked on creating programs to do the same.

++Fast Forward to our American psychologists who devised our torture program. They were asked to reverse engineer the SERE program to produced a state of helplessness. Even they admitted the torture program they created could not produce any actionable intelligence. So they re-engineer a program originally built on a false premise to produce another false reality.


++So Gallactica would be accepted as reality in Rand Paul's presidency and he would devise programs to counter a false reality. The Mobius loops in this stuff are unbelievable.

++On a mundane level, this works with other conservative candidates. Food stamps gets you to Hawaii, ergo pass a law where food stamp recipients can't use them on cruise ships. 

++Rand Paul's plagiarism problem seems goofy but it gives you a window on how his world is constructed.