Month: June 2015

Plato’s TV

We are headed to Montana for an impromptu class reunion (made possible by the existence of Facebook), plus some time away from electronic signals thereafter. Things will be slow around here.

I have long struggled with Plato’s Cave Allegory, and so tried to update it a bit here, hopefully having a grasp of its significance in our age. Television supplies reality for most Americans, and is the medium by which most of our lies are facilitated. Most people don’t read, but then, I don’t really understand why printed lies are not as effective as televised ones. I have been able to sort my way through the lies of our times [even though books lie], but it has taken many years and I have swallowed whole on many lies in the process. It is a game of musical chairs, new lies taking the place of old ones, until such time that truth settles in. Possibly.

With TV, a lie like 9/11 or Boston, told but once, sticks forever. TV has such persuasive power that people cannot fathom actors staging events for our benefit. It’s a confidence game. The underlying belief of Americans, no matter how much skepticism they profess, is that if something is on TV and labeled “news” it is true.

Given the power of such a medium, there is no way the state would let it operate unfettered. So naturally the American television media is state-controlled. Americans might believe such a thing about Cuba or North Korea, but never their own country. That’s part of the lie.

 TV owns reality. Since government controls TV content, government owns reality.

Below I have plagiarized the Wikipedia entry on the Cave Allegory, making changes as needed.
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The Allegory of the Television (also titled Plato’s TV)

Plato in his work The Republic (514a–520a) sought to compare “…the effect of education and the lack of it on our nature”. It is written as a dialogue between Plato’s brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates, narrated by the latter.

Plato has Socrates describe a gathering of people who have lived chained to a couch all of their lives, facing a television. The people watch images on the TV screen and begin to designate names to these images. The images are as close as the couch prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the dissident is like a prisoner who is freed from the couch and comes to understand that the images on the screen do not make up reality at all. Away from the television, the prisoner can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere images seen by the couch prisoners.

Our perception of the world around is habitation on a couch with the screen’s light reflecting throughout the home. Our view of the real world only comes into focus once we abandon our televisions.

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For reasons unknown the following video seems apropos. Tim Russert, considered one of the best of show in his time, is either acting out a script or swallowing whole on a Rumsfeld routine (performed during the time after 9/11 when people were still in shock).  Seen with a proper dose of skepticism, it is hilarious.

A brief trip in the hall of mirrors

OBL FrightOsama bin Laden is one of those characters that appears to be, like Lee Harvey Oswald, in part real human and in part a creation of the American intelligence system. The image on the right was shown Americans during the staged 9/11 events, and was designed to frighten us, to be part of our nightmares. It is heavily doctored to look menacing, almost a religious icon. OBL fattyBut like “Oswald,” there are apparently more than one Osama, and after his death (reported to be December 13, 2001), new images appeared. To the left is “Fatty” bin Laden alongside the real guy. fake-bin-laden1The man immediately below is an impostor as well. Most Americans are not attune to photographic fakery, and the power of suggestion makes images shown to them to be what  authority figures say they are. This is true of both bin Laden and Oswald. Harvey and lee The image below a comparison of two Lee Harvey Oswalds. The one on the left a man born by that name in New Orleans in 1939, the one on the right a Russian-speaking Eastern European immigrant whose real name is not known to this date. It is the one on the right who was murdered by Jack Ruby on December 24th, 1963, and who miraculously survived for almost two days in custody of the Dallas Police. Two people, to my knowledge, have reported having contact with the New Orleans-born LHO on the left after the assassination – Robert Vinson, as reported in James Douglass’ book JFK and the Unspeakable (see link), and Mae Brussell, who reported on her radio show in the early 1970s that she had been contacted by the man on the left. In the world of spooks, we can never be sure what is true. Both “Osama” and “Oswald” were operatives, spooks, and patsies at once. Both had body doubles running around impersonating them. Both were “sheepdipped,” or made to look guilty prior to a crime and without their knowledge. All are now dead for sure, and I can only guess that the New Orleans-born Oswald was either dispatched or re-branded after 11/22/63. Osama was murdered in 2001, shortly after 9/11, and with reason given his comments below:

“I was not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States nor did I have knowledge of the attacks. There exists a government within a government within the United States. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; to the people who want to make the present century a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity.

That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks. … The American system is totally in control of the Jews, whose first priority is Israel, not the United States … I have already said that we are not hostile to the United States. We are against the system, which makes other nations slaves of the United States, or forces them to mortgage their political and economic freedom.

(Those were his replies to questions submitted by Pakistani newspaper Ummat, published on 9/22/2001.) (I know, he went all Mel Gibson on us.) OBL November tape

Fake Osama later appeared on al-Jazeera in November of 2001, and approved of the 9/11 events, implying foreknowledge. But one year later, in November of 2002, the Swiss Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence in Lausanne, commissioned by a French TV station, concluded that the voice heard in the November tape was not the real bin Laden.

In mid-September of 2001 the Taliban offered to turn bin Laden over to the United States if some evidence of his complicity in 9/11 events could be produced. The United States opted instead to bomb Afghanistan.

I don’t know what is real or fake, of course. I’ve been fooled many times. It is no more wise to trust self-described “9/11 Truth” leaders than the CIA, as I’ve found that they are often in league with one another. The former operates as a second tier of the cover-up. I can only report to you that this is a complicated world with many liars, and that the last place to look for truth is in the United States Government or its state-controlled news media.

Secrecy in a Military/Industrial complex

Most Americans are caught up in the idea that we have an elected government and that our opinions and votes influence public policy. We are encouraged to think that way. Many among us spend their days advancing political candidates and engaging in meaningful debate about public policy. These are our greatest fools.

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) said that the American public is but a “bewildered herd.”

A herd has power (think of a buffalo stampede) but no intelligence or direction. Inside our leadership class it is intuitively understood that the herd should suffer the illusion of democracy.

“Democracy” allows us to spend our time and effort in debates that outside the bewildered herd are of no consequence. Elections are a distraction. Leadership will engage in the ritual, even publicly submitting themselves to the humiliation of interrogation by elected officials (as when leaders of oil companies were lined up in submissive posture to testify before congress). It is absurd, but considered necessary to foster the illusion of democracy.

I have spent many years trying to understand our political economy. I once thought Lippmann to be an elitist. But he was a realist. I do, however, see a fatal flaw in his reasoning, and that is the notion that the leadership classes possesses better vision than the herd.

There may be safety in secrecy, and all of our military and science and corporate affairs are shrouded in secrecy. Every matter of public importance has two facets, the real one, and the one told to the public. Hence we have things like 9/11 and Apollo, events of real significance, but completely shrouded in secrecy. Leadership regards this as an essential part of public governance.

But looking out over the unspeakable horrors that the U.S. and British aristocracies have inflicted on the planet, it is hard to imagine them to be more than an elite body immune to the consequences of its own mistakes – consequences that the rest of us must suffer. They seem no more than common criminals.

Life … “is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It’s all quite absurd, don’t you think?

Technological advances in a military/industrial complex

Most of what are seen as breakthroughs in our civilian sector have existed long before in the military sphere. Examples are GPS and, of course, the Internet. The latter was an ARPA project from the late 1960’s that was gifted (without public process) to American corporations for exploitation in the 90’s. This is Noam Chomsky, speaking in early 2000:

An even bigger giveaway — this one is incalculable, you don’t know how to measure it in dollars — is the giveaway of the internet. That’s very recent. Four years ago, in fact, it was commercialized, handed over to private power. A year before that, in 1994, Bill Gates, for example, was so — saw so little potential in the internet that he refused even to go to conferences about it. In 1995, he figured what he could do with it. This has been developed for thirty years within the public sector, at public expense, and it was handed over to private power, and it’s now considered, you know, kind of like the leading edge of the economy. (Interview, Democracy Now!, 2/3/2000)

The Bill Gates example has long intrigued me. One, I don’t believe he is any kind of genius of visionary. The success of Microsoft has been mostly due to its ability to scout the horizon for technological advances and gobble them up. In this regard, Gates, if he is anything more than lucky, is simply adept at predatory capitalism.

Beyond one man, however, the notion that scientific breakthroughs take place and are then immediately turned into commercial ventures – is simply beyond the pale. The technology is first quarantined and explored in a cloaked environment. It is used to gain advantage over global competition. If it can be made into a weapon, that becomes its primary use.

When finally a technology no longer presents a military advantage, the public gets to use it. Thus have we our cell phones.

In 1989 two scientists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, announced to the world that they had hit on a form of nuclear reaction that would occur at near room temperature. The official story now is that they were premature and that the results could never be duplicated.

However, a fellow scientist doing similar work had received a tip-off from the Department of Energy, and effectively submarined their work. He was BYU Professor Dr. Steven E. Jones. The “cold fusion” controversy of that time is muddled and discredited in the public eye. The technology, if it existed, was kept under wraps.

Dr. Judy Wood noticed that on 9/11/2001 that the Twin Towers and Building Seven, rather than exploding or collapsing or melting or being pulverized, were turning to dust in midair. She called the process “dustifcation,” and revealed her findings in an important 2006 book, Where Did the Towers Go?

The destructive process left behind a telltale tritium signature, a hydrogen isotope that indicates a nuclear process. The 9/11 event was not thermal event, nor is there evidence of introduction of outside kinetic forces (“bombs in the buildings”). It was not a hot process, as the massive dust cloud in the aftermath was cold, and people survived it.

Whatever force was used that day, its destructive power was immense. Absent in the debris were any of the thousands of filing cabinets, sinks, toilets, desks, computers, adding machines and safes.  1,200 people opted to jump to their deaths rather than endure whatever process was taking place in the buildings.

Dr. Wood came under attack, found her work subverted and labeled “space beams” by the same man who a decade earlier had subverted the world of Pons and Fleischmann. Dr. Steven E. Jones was put on leave by BYU after joining the so-called “9/11 Truth” movement to advance the absurd theory that the Twin Towers had been brought down by nano-thermites.

Dr. Wood is still attacked and marginalized by the “Truth Movement” a name as misleading as “cold fusion” and “space beams.” The technology used, directed energy, is a breakthrough. It has obviously been developed to immense capability. We know very little of it other than its observable effects from that day. Due to the efforts of Jones and “9/11 Truth”, is still being kept under wraps. But it is there, and thanks to Dr. Wood, we know about it now.

The larger point is that we suffer from the mythology that in a military state like ours innovation and invention are allowed to go on unimpeded by overlords. My advice for anyone who stumbles on something new, say, for instance, a way to make toast without nichrome wire, do not patent it. In so doing, you alert the authorities. If they see potential for a weapon, you’ll be kindly advised to give up your technology.

If you don’t … think about this.

Apollo and PID – same song, different verses

By fearing whom I trust I find my way
To truth; by trusting wholly I betray
The trust of wisdom; better far is doubt
Which brings the false into the light of day.
(Abdallah al-Ma’arri) (973-1057)*

“We leave you much that is undone. There are great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of the truth’s protective layers. There are places to go beyond belief…” (Neil Armstrong, 1994)

In yesterday’s piece on the moon landings, I was flippant, as the matter is so fraudulent as to invite humor. And yet … Neil Armstrong, quoted above, is obviously a man of high character and intense honesty, so much so that he remained silent and out of the spotlight for the bulk of his life after the supposed lunar landing. In his quoted words, he is doing above what so many others do when under intense pressure to keep secrets – he is communicating by means of inference, leaving it to us to read between the lines.

Oddly, Apollo and P(aul) I(s) D(ead), the serious and the trivial, are alike in this regard. The Beatles, in dropping so many clues on albums and in songs, asked us to think on our own about things they could not tell us openly and plainly. They too were under intense pressure, “McCartney” himself wanting to come clean. So both Macca and Armstrong are in the same boat: Living a lie under threat of death. In their shoes I would do the same. Their personal integrity, in my mind, is fully intact.

I am not going to chronicle all of the evidence uncovered by others. It’s a waste of time. People of curious mind are perfectly capable of seeing it and forming their own conclusions. I have some other thoughts about the the lies of our times in general, and the Apollo Program in specific:

  • The role of evidence: I have noticed in my travels on this planet that “conspiracy theorists” are nothing more than people who look at evidence. There is a direct correlation: Much looking, much doubt. Little looking, little doubt.
  • Fear of the implications. Add to that another factor: Fear of implications when exposed to but a little evidence, which leads to ridicule, a deflection tactic.
  • “Debunking”: NASA knows, along with those who have perpetrated every other hoax in our times, that curiosity leads to doubt, and so has loaded the Internet with “debunking” sites. Phil Plait for example, performs this task for NASA, for what motive I cannot know. The role of the debunker is to derail the curious mind before before curiosity creates suspicion and doubt. “Debunking” is one of “truth’s protective layers.”

The moon landings were faked, but probably for good reason. The people who did it were serving a higher purpose, one that they needed to keep secret.

NASA, it must be remembered, is not a civilian agency, but rather a disguised military one. It is described as such in the US code. While its mission often appears to be scientific, and while it often allows itself to be used to advance science (as with the Voyager probes), we should never lose sight of military objectives. Werner von Braun was a Nazi man first, NASA man second. He needed facilitators to achieve advances in rocketry, using whatever funding source available.

So what was Armstrong referring to above? I don’t know, of course, but to me he appears to be saying everything he can say without blowing his cover: he was witness to some marvelous doings, and wants others to carry on in his footsteps, which are not on the moon.

There are other things to talk about – the nature of technological advance in a military state, the need for secrecy, and the danger of going public when so much is at stake. I want to get into that stuff, but will stop here with but one more thought:

Apollo involved the work of thousands of smart and serious people, most of whom knew only small parts of a much larger whole. Their abilities and accomplishments are impressive. I wish we lived in a world where we could speak plainly with one another, but we don’t. So to get at truth, we need to learn to navigate lies, and for that, we need better equipment than given us by our news, information, entertainment and education systems.

I read that perhaps 20% of Americans do not believe we landed on the moon. I suggest that this 20% is not at all the dumbest quintile of the population. Quite the opposite.
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*Cited in Doubt: A History, by Jennifer Michael Hecht, p231

LOOT

Theology is “a rhapsody of feigned and ill-invented nonsense.” Scriptures are “so stuffed with madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that you admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them.” Jesus must have “picked up a few ignorant blockish fisher fellows, whom he knew by his skill in physiognomy, had strong imaginations.” Moses, “if ever there was such a man,” had, like Jesus, “learned magic in Egypt, but that he was both the better artist and better politician than Jesus.” (Thomas Aikenhead, executed January 8, 1697, at age 20.*)

Many years ago I briefly subscribed to a short-lived publication called “Lies of Our Times.” It was an ongoing critique of just that, the daily lies that stream out of Langley, Wall Street, the Pentagon, and every other set of moving lips in our nation’s power centers. Those lies are repeated uncritically by our journalists, apparently their job.

The words “of our times” are important.

John Lennon was supposedly intrigued by the notion that Jesus faked his death. That’s funny to me, because there was no Jesus, or many. Galileo was housebound by power for merely saying something true. Poor Aikenhead, above, must have wondered why he was given a brain if it was a crime to use it. Abraham Lincoln, who appears to have had some honest qualities about him, spent his brief tenure in the House of Representatives trying to expose the lie that allowed the United States to steal the Southwest from Mexico. The United States was witness to a massive purge in the 1950’s called “McCarthyism,” though historians are only allowed to use that word (“purge”) when referencing Stalin and Mao.

The United States itself is based on a gigantic lie, that we are a democracy. Or a republic. Since we are neither, let’s not struggle with terminology. This particular lie carries with it the notions that the American public is well-informed; that our leaders do not lie to us, and that we are somehow exceptional.

I hope you are catching the humor here, as the lie contained within the lie is that there are no lies. I love that kind of layered humor. But wait … there’s more!

“Una Ronald” lived in Australia, and was watching the moon landing on her telly in 1969 when something odd happened. As the astronauts walked about, a Coke bottle rolled across the screen. At the time, perhaps 30% of a smarter American public did not believe the landings to be real. I have to guess that percentage was even higher in Australia.

It is not that the bottle appeared on-screen. It’s deeper than that (cue spooky music): We all know that the astronauts in their garb could not possibly have been able to remove a coin from their pocket and place it in the lunar vending machine (the LVM**).

I am not going to go through the maze of evidence here to prove to you what is so easily understood – the moon landings were a hoax. Just a bit of a journey and some perusal of photos will tell you that on your own. I marvel at how everything Americans need to know can stay hidden in plain sight.

It is a question of why. That’s a little more complicated. I’ll stumble into that ground tomorrow, and I do mean stumble, as I can only speculate on why $35 billion was diverted from the general fund and funneled into the disguise called “Apollo.” For now, I only want to deal briefly with the usual objection when this subject comes up, that such secrets cannot be kept for long.

  • 1. Government can and does keep secrets. Galileo learned this. It has power over people, and can punish them by means of ridicule, loss of benefits, or death.
  • 2. But secrets do get out. Those who have studied the moon landing photographs have walked away suspecting that people back in 1969 were deliberately putting clues in there of fakery for later generations. The Coke bottle incident might not have been an accident.
  • 3. Think Manhattan Project, or compartmentalization. Most of the people involved in the moon landings thought it was a real venture. They were fooled, just like us.
  • 4. Cold and frightful silence ensues. Even as so many NASA and industry people might have realized the game was a game after the fact, they know to shut up. The people who did this are serious and powerful and had another game in mind.

Tomorrow I’ll try to carry forward. For today, I want to introduce the notion of “Lies of our Times.” There’s nothing new under the sun. In our more technologically advanced age, the tools of mass persuasion, mostly the television set, are able to create bigger myths and make them stick with more people.
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*The Aikenhead passage is taken from the book Doubt: A History, by Jennifer Michael Hecht, p 338
** I believe that Lockheed Martin partnered with Coca Cola Company on this venture, which cost $2.7 billion in development, and never really worked correctly, in fact, was never tested on earth. When placed on the lunar surface all of the Coke inside immediately vaporized in the intense radiation. Coins that the astronauts carried with them to purchase Cokes were later given to other nations as souvenirs. The Netherlands coin, on display in Amsterdam, was seen to have the date 1979 on it instead of 1969, and so was thought to be counterfeit.

Dead man walking

“I think it’s people on the outside who perceive Paul (McCartney) as thinking he’s the only one left. Actually, it’s me. I am the last remaining Beatle.” (Ringo Starr, DailyMail, 5/26/2011)

paul13A rumor popped up in Great Britain in 1966, and took wings in the United States in 1969, that the original Paul McCartney had died and was replaced by an impostor, William Shears Campbell. [Unknown to me on writing this, as I have not really followed this stuff, there are a number of candidates who might ahve filled the bill, “Billy Shears” merely the name of the new Beatle.] I wrote about it back in 2013 after Macca graced yet another Rolling Stone cover. I actually like what I wrote. I said it was a marketing ploy. A very good one.

The idea was this: The greatest rock band in history was breaking up, and the large organization built around them would be set adrift. To keep revenue flowing, they needed album sales. What better way to do that than to plant “clues” in the album covers, beginning with St. Pepper in 1967.

I recommend, especially if you are of a curious mind, to take a look at all those clues. It is a macabre trip, but there are scores of them, and they all point at Paul, and they all hint that he died. The most potent is the Pepper album cover, a funeral scene. It’s crawling with stuff, just crawling. I do suggest that you avoid the audio clues, playing songs backward and all of that, as it strikes me as a bit like looking for encoded messages in the Bible. Who really knows what we would get if we played Pat Boone songs backward? (The words of April Love, played backwards, say “I hate Jesus”?)

By the way, the current guy who plays Paul in real life is an immensely talented performer. He was an unwitting beneficiary. He’s not guilty, in my mind, of anything but living a lie, knowing that if he spoke up, that we would come together over his grave, as we did with John, George, Brian Epstein, Mel Evans … . Further, since so much time has passed, the current Paul is the Paul we know, and has effectively body snatched the original.

That November 16, 2013 piece would have been my last thought on the matter but for three new pieces of information, new to me anyway:

  • An article from The Pessimist, November 7, 2013 that Warren Commission critic Mark Lane was sought out by Paul McCartney in early 1966:

    While living in London during that time I attended a small party of about a dozen people. One of them was Paul McCartney. He walked up to me, offered his hand, and told me his name. The introduction was hardly necessary as he was one of the most famous people in the world…

    He said, “I understand you have written a book about Kennedy’s assassination. I would like to read it.”

    Lane gave McCartney an early draft of Rush to Judgment, and McCartney wanted to write music to a documentary being made to advance the case made in the book.

    Only a person who is as well versed in the JFK assassination as me would know this, but Mark Lane is an intelligence agent, part of the JFK cover-up. Hard as this is to grasp, his role was to become the public voice of skepticism in the late 60’s about JFK’s death, since the case against Oswald was so clearly fraudulent. In that role, others of prominence would seek him out – in effect, would self-identify. Lane’s bosses could then evaluate the risk posed, and act accordingly. McCartney, perhaps one of the most famous people in the world at that time, obviously posed a considerable threat, and so was murdered.

    When I read of Mark Lane’s involvement in the PID affair, my blood ran cold. If you’ve seen the movie Sixth Sense, the big reveal at the end, that the Bruce Willis character is dead and has been dead all along … was a shock. I experienced that feeling again. Oh shit, I realized. He really is dead.

  • The strange behavior of Heather Mills:

    Nuff said.

  • Italians Gabriella Carlesi, forensic pathologist and Francesco Gavazzeni, computer scientist, set out to dispel the PID rumor in 2009. They do this sort of thing in real life for forensic purposes, court cases and all of that. They compared high-quality photos of Paul before 11/66 with those after to determine if it was the same man. To their surprise, it was not. Their article appeared in the magazine Wired Italia on July 15, 2009. The article can be found here and there in rough form – that is, someone photographed the pages and put them online. (Coincidentally with release of that article, McCartney appeared on the Letterman show and gave a rooftop concert. It was a nice distraction.)

How could something that sophisticated happen before our eyes? Who possesses such skill and power of deceit? My question exactly. Until I bumped into the Mark Lane story, I had no clue.

Remember, after the Beatles stopped touring, they radically altered their appearances, growing, beards  mustaches and much longer hair. Seen from a curious angle, all of that served to hide the surgical scars that were healing on Sir Paul. Many months would pass before public performances, and before that, we don’t know if Paul as actually playing the instruments. We don’t know that he wrote the music credited to him since 11/66, so much of which is crap.

Anyway, I add young and naive Mr. Paul McCartney to the long list of deaths surrounding the JFK assassination. That is the only reason I care. It is also weird to think that of the four original Beatles, three were murdered.

Notes in passing

This caused pain …

Dave McGowan, author of Weird Scenes in the Canyon, an inconclusive expose’ of the music scene in Los Angeles in the mid-sixties, along with other works, has inoperable cancer. I think he smokes.

I’ll be spending time soon PDFing all of his website writing, most not published.

Couple this with the an aggressive form of breast cancer hitting DM Murdock (Acharya S), author of The Christ Conspiracy and Did Moses Exist?, among many other works, and it is a double whammy. I don’t know them personally, but feel like I do, and have great fondness for them.

It makes me wonder why George H.W. Bush has lived so long and well. Why do the good die young, while old creepy cynical psychopaths linger on and on and on …?

Needed: A change of direction (It’s getting kind of dull around here)

Here’s a rundown of future topics as I try to take a new direction with my blog.
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I have an unfinished post set aside about the Paul is Dead phenomenon. I’ll get back to it. As far as I can discern on available evidence, Paul McCartney indeed died in 1966, probably murdered. On hand was a body double who had been used in service already, as famous people often use doubles to preserve their privacy. He was groomed, trained and went under the knife, and was used as a replacement. I don’t think anyone planned that, but once it was seen as a necessary to kill McCartney, the idea of replacing him with the double probably took wings, so to speak.

If it were only some silly entertainer and a huge cash machine in jeopardy, it would not matter. But it does matter, for other reasons. I’ll go into that.

On the matter of Yoko Ono, I still do not understand that.
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Another subject I’ll explore: I had the same experience as Dave McGowan (see footnote*) did when he decided to look into the moon landings to see if they were faked. It’s not that they were faked, but how really, really easy it is to see that they were faked.

The fake moon landings were part of a larger project, Manhattan in scope and deadly in intent. This was not trickery for sake of public relations. Apollo was the cover story for work going all the way back to Wiemar: Conquest of space. Therein lay more power than ever before possessed by humans, the most ambitious military prize ever imagined.

Some other day on that one too. I have fewer answers on that than on Macco, but the pretending to walk on the moon part, that was real.
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For right now, we were sitting on our deck overlooking Denver the other evening, and I said to my wife that I had come so far along in understanding this crazy fucking place (I don’t use that word around her), but that I hope before I die to understand everything! That is the reason I exist. I am mostly retired, we have a wonderful life with friends and kids and grand kids. We have no money worries. I am thankful for all of that, for sure. I did absolutely nothing to deserve it.

I should just be satisfied.  But I also have an undying urge to understand things.

So I am going to cover one more subject, DD, or dissociative disorders, which affects me and which I have explored. But first let me state clearly: No whining allowed. I am a happy man. Or men.

I was beaten up as a child, sniff sniff. I don’t remember any pain, and it wasn’t by my parents. They were lovely people. But I do remember as a four-year-old waking up on the floor after being cold-cocked, and then again later on. Did it happen at other times? Don’t know, and have no desire to know. Looking back I realize there was a demonic pathology in our household embodied in my siblings that made the place a living hell. In that situation, children retreat, lose memories, and become dissociative.

I am thankful for it now, but in my younger years, it caused problems. I avoid hard liquor and Ambien, as they cause amnesia. My inner children take over. When I heard of Patrick, and then Kerry Kennedy driving in blacked out states after having taken Ambien, I immediately understood. Their childhoods had more trauma than any of us can imagine.

Once you know it is there, it is kind of fun. Self knowledge is the best kind. When my fingers hit the keyboard, I do not know what will emerge. I have a little devil residing in me, and he’s a clever one. For me, writing is easy and fun, and necessary. I have to do this.

I know, you’re going all Seven Faces of Eve on me, thinking it’s all weird. I think it is common phenomenon. There is a whole lot of abuse in this world, a whole lot of suffering that children endure or witness and repress. These children become adults who are, in my view, more interesting, observant, and empathetic than regular people with regular childhoods.

We who have endured such trauma – again, no whining allowed, as mine is minor by comparison to so many others (think of the children of Vietnam or Iraq, for instance) – we instantly recognize each other on meeting, sometimes even just passing in the street. No words need pass. We know. We exist on a higher level of intuition, probably an element of survival.
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Enough of that. What on earth I have been doing with the blog … is driving me to distraction! It’s boring! It is like I own a race car, and use it to go to the grocery store.

I feel as though I have only tapped the surface of the potential to use this blog as an exploration tool and heck, even make it interesting. As I said, I want to understand everything. Hardly anything is what it appears on the surface, politics always, but people too. Everyone has a story, everyone is living a lie on some level.

So stay tuned. It is going to get better here. It has to, otherwise I’ll be bored and I’ll quit.

Sorry about the ads in the piece below, one of my favorites from a man I deeply admire, Mel Brooks.

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*Mr. McGowan, I just learned, has been diagnosed with incurable small-cell lung cancer that has already spread to his liver and bones. Travel well sir, and thank you for doing some very interesting work.

Oops!

I let go with a blog post before I had finished it. On the iPad the “save draft” and “publish” buttons are side-be side and I had to pee and ….

So what. Blogging has gotten really, really boring, and it is time for a quantum leap. I am going to attempt something never done by either bloggers or journalists. I am going to tread new ground.

I am going to try to be interesting.

Stay tuned.