Monday, November 16, 2009

Week of 11/16/2009

The Armageddon Gambit
– by David Matthews 2

(Writer’s warning: the following article is done completely in jest, and it is best approached as such. Do not presume that any of the suggestions being made should be seriously considered.)

For years liberals have tried to come up with various ways to get rich and powerful people to give up their monies. Often they use a combination of arrogance and the platitude of some “communal equilibrium” to justify it. Sometimes it’s a misguided sense of charity that wins the day, but despite millions upon millions donated, the problems the charity groups CLAIM to deal with somehow aren’t resolved, so the rich and powerful sort of figure that out.

Unfortunately rich and powerful people are greedy and self-centered people. They wouldn’t be rich and powerful if they weren’t greedy and self-centered to begin with. This is why liberals have a hard time convincing rich and powerful people to part with their wealth, because they appeal to a sense of community that the rich and powerful have no real appreciation of.

However I think that I may have come up with the BEST way to convince the rich and powerful to give up their wealth…

Convince them that the world is about to end.

Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking… this has been brought up over and over again, and usually it’s by some nutcases who read scrolls and invisible numbers and codes in religious documents, or maybe take a little too much LSD and start tripping out, and they supposedly see end days and they go hide in bunkers with dim-witted followers who consider bunkers a step up from their meager trailer park existence.

Guess what? That’s strictly amateur hour material.

Where the bush-league doomsayers fail is that they only have THEIR words and THEIR interpretations. There’s no definitive corroboration that what they are saying will come true. It’s just THEIR word, and if you’re talking about some nutcase who took a lot of drugs when they were younger and was a fourth-grade dropout, then they don’t have too much credibility to begin with.

For this to work liberals need to bring in as many experts as possible. You need to coordinate with as many scientists and seismologists and climatologists as you can to convince the rich and powerful that the world as we know it is going to come to an end. They need proof, and they need proof that even their own people will find hard to refute. In fact you may have to bring their experts into the con for this to work.

Oh, and don’t forget they need to believe that this information is a “secret”. The public will never know about this. If anyone suggests it in the open, then these same experts will immediately refute and reject it outright. This is just for those who “need to know”. Because let’s get brutally honest here... in order for them to believe that the literal “End of the World” is nigh, they need to believe that ONLY THEY will know about it in time to do something to save themselves.

The next thing you need to do is to convince them that you have a way to SAVE them from destruction, because the first instinct these rich and powerful people will have is to find a way to ride out whatever cataclysm is about to happen. And we’re not talking ethereal “salvation” either. No “Rapture”, no biblical calling home of the faithful. We’re talking physical survival. They want to be able to walk into the “new” post-cataclysm world on their own two feet, confident that they survived when the rest of the world didn’t.

For that you need a shelter. You need a special bunker, or a vault, or some sort of ark, or maybe even a combination of these things. Something HUGE… or seemingly huge. Fortunately we have a LOT of abandoned mine shafts and closed-up nuclear silos from those Cold War days. You need to give the impression that these haven’t really been filled up and cemented over.

Once you have them convinced that the end-of-the-world is REALLY about to happen and that you DO have a way for the rich and powerful to survive, that’s when you deliver the hook. And the hook is that you’ll save a “place” for them, but only if they’re willing to give up a sizable portion of their money. Don’t be greedy and ask for ALL of it. They have to believe that, while they won’t be able to take it ALL with them, that they WILL be able to take some of their largesse, so that when they to re-emerge in that “new” post-cataclysm world they will STILL be in positions of power and respect.

Then have them wait. And be sure to update them repeatedly to verify that the “end of the world” is STILL coming and that the masses won’t know what will “hit” them. Be sure to tie in any kind of natural disaster that occurs as being a harbinger for future events.

Presto! Countless billions of dollars eagerly handed to you for whatever government project you want enacted. And if they ask about the spending you can always say that it’s just “cover” to keep the masses ignorant to what’s yet to come.

Now if you’re smart, you’ve convinced the rich and powerful that they have a couple of years to prepare for the end of everything. At least two or three years will suffice. That will impress upon them the urgency to act now instead of waiting. After all, preparations need to be “made”. You give them too much time and they’ll delay giving up their money. You give them too little time and they’ll suspect getting scammed.

The really hard part will come when the so-called “deadline” comes near. If you’re lucky then you’ve convinced your fleeced elites to head to that “safe place” before any sign of bad things reportedly start to happen. You can always come up with reports of certain cataclysms while they’re on their way there.

Unfortunately there will come that point when the fleeced elites will realize that they’ve been taken for a ride. If you’re lucky they’ll be holed up in the “safe place”, being fed a continual supply of doom and gloom, and thinking that the world is in fact coming to an end around them. But at some point they WILL opt to come out of their hiding place and they will be ANGRY if the world is the same as it was when they went in.

However…by this time they will not have the money and power and influence that they once had. They will, at that point, have given up most of their wealth, and the rest of the world will have learned to go on without their influence. They would, essentially, be neutered.

It’s a really great scheme if someone were to orchestrate and organize it. It would deliver countless billions to where it would be needed the most, and it would get those annoying rich people out of the way.

Oh, by the way, there is one last thing that you need to do… you need to make sure that NONE of this EVER goes out to the general public. I know it’s tempting to develop this into some Made-For-Cable feature, or even perhaps a major blockbuster motion picture, but the con won’t work if people suddenly realize that this was all just a farce.

Wait… you mean to tell me they’ve ALREADY turned it into a movie?

Oh nuts. Guess it’s back to using political arrogance and wealth envy.

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