I am just passing time here, trying to offer up new material for daily readers. The Columbine piece has absorbed me. The details are engrossing – they meant for that piece of professional mind-f***** to be deeply embedded in every kid’s head in the country. Today I have a rather pleasant task, watching Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, this time with eyes wide open. Moore is filthy – that is – Moore is controlled opposition, which is why we even see his movies. True subversives don’t make it to mainstream theaters. When I first watched that movie, I thought it interesting, I thought he was unfair to Charlton Heston, and for sure did not know he was ‘in’ on the Columbine hoax.
In the meantime, I want to re-post a comment from the Hampton’s piece below that grabbed my interest. I will leave off the name, but the comment is public, so re-posting it is OK, in my mind. If the writer objects, I will take this piece down. Here it is:
“Rising the name of the Hamptons remotely asks if the current view on twentieth century art is upside down? Could the 1950’s Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock have afforded “$17 ice cream” (sic), inflation adjusted, when according to urban myth he moved to the Hamptons in the 1950’s because his paintings weren’t selling and that’s what struggling creative people do, move to the poorer parts of town like the potato farms of the Hamptons when your article otherwise illustrates it’s already established well to do past. Perhaps if Pollack were any poorer he would have had to move further east living in a shack on Cape Cod doing “drip art” paint jobs on Jaguars to make ends meet.
So if the Hamptons were already secluded that may imply he was not poor to live there. Taking a leap expand that to the rest of the Abstract Expressionists on how they made a living as avant-garde artists and taking it further out why New York City supposedly inherited the Paris art style. (1913 was a pivotal year in art history after John Quinn helped repeal the tariff on imported art making it possible to market overstocked European art on American buyers and with the help of the Ashcan painter William Glackens along with Quinn, letting his fellow artists shoot themselves in the foot organizing the “Woodstock” of that era, the 1913 Amory Show. European ‘Modern Art’ becomes fashionable and American art’s appeal declines all the way past Abstract Expressionism.)
The above is my opinion and question whether Pollack could have afforded to live in the Hampton’s then on a painter’s commission (not the service house painter alluded to in the article). I never had lunch with Pollack nor could I even afford the ice cream.”
Many of us at this blog have read Frances Stonor Saunders’ work The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. If not, do get a copy. I am not letting mine go, as it is packed with startling information, like CIA getting much of its early funding by taking a rake off the top of Marshall Program money.
But CIA’s push was to debase art. Why? I guess that is food for commenters. I have my notions, as do others.
PS: I am yet to understand why “$17 ice cream” earned a (sic).
Piece of Mindful 
hey Mark,
“(sic)” can mean two things,
1. Me ranting & raving about an ice cone.
2. The imagery thought of Jackson Pollack alongside Willem de Kooning at “Jungle Pete’s” Bar, leaning back on the counter eating an ice cream cone, (melted ice cream dripping on his shirt, Willem telling Pollack “Nice painting.” And so Abstract Expressionism was born.)
Not exactly the persona portrayed in movies and books of the two fisted bar fighting angst ridden crative artist. Which one is true? Dunno, never had lunch with any Expressionist, not that I wouldn’t. It’s dem unicorn painting Magic Realists I’m a little wary about.
POM’s persona non grata Miles Mathis has an article “Mr. Turner” that is worth reading.
Btw, yous guys must have been really bored to re-post a R&R about an ice cream cone. (sic)
Best to you all
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I am sure I have read the Mathis piece, as have so many others here. Best to you as well.
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I do not get the impression MM is personna non grata here at POM… I would say he is well regarded for the most part. Disagreements in the facial analysis, that is OK. A writer (or 2) could nom stand MM’s criticism on 2/17 and left. He’s been akin to Morpheus for some of us ’round here.
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I think MM is held in high regard by all here, even if only somewhat restrained by a few. He is in the links.
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“For some of us” meaning readers and writers of POM.
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Let me also state that MM’s latest published paper by guest writer, though interesting is poorly written. I’m led to think Miles did not have the time to edit it. I applaud the effort at least he made the time to actually write something. Some of us have a hard time for writing… bills and mortgages you know
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I saw that at 43 pages and just don’t have time for it, though I am going to print it and read it at my leisure. Josh is a good writer and smart researcher.
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Yes, I agree the research is très bien.
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POM,
Ok then, obliviousily Mathis is NOT persona non grata at POM. Ironically it was Miles’ clarification of where he stood that I found this site and after there was talk of gloves coming off, etc., and Vexman leaving. The waters were muddy.
Again another plug for Miles’ article(s) on painting since they are from an accomplished Artist who has and is experiencing what it is to make a living in that field.
Hope my flippant writings does not reflect on the above, there is no disrespect intended, not even for the Magic Realists although sometimes it seems like some rogue MK-Ultra hybrid research gone awry, clowns are scary enough but unicorns ….
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The Vexman affair was me, and me alone, deciding that his inclusion was a major course diversion, taking us into hatred and that part of history that was possibly manufactured to advance the Cold War, Stalin’s famines, outright murder of 700,000 citizens by means of a pistol to the back of the head, as if people did not know how to run and hide. It is, as I see it, a propaganda campaign orchestrated from the British/American side and Vexman, whether a dupe or agent, was taking this blog over a cliff. He was free to do what he wanted, and is still linked below, but at his own blog. He doesn’t write anymore, as far as I can tell. I was done with him, permanently, but others were free to read and criticize his work on their own.
The MM attack was not hostile or manevolent, just unpleasant. He was, sadly, right in some of his assertions, and I spent considerable time taking down or de-linking work that was of poor quality. What is left in the lists in the right is work I stand by, along with that of the other writers that was never in question. Some of mine is still in need of re-work, but is work I believe in, such as Freddie Mercury/Dr. Phil, shocking but, in my view, credible. The lingering effect of the MM attack was loss of Josh, Straight*, and a shadow on our work due to low quality work put up before. It is what it is.
I still hold MM in high regard, and in those areas where I might want to criticize him, don’t, as it looks like retribution and is therefore suspect by readers. It is lose-lose. I just had to take my lumps, learn my lessons, and move forward. We are permanently distanced, but readers, writers, commenters will find no nitpicking or sniping going on.
*Straight, to be clear, left because he found the work here to be negative and depressing. His personal makeup is one of seeking out the positives of life. I like that outlook, even share it, and don’t wring my hands in anguish over what we uncover here. It is just a joy ride for me.
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It was unfortunate, but understandable how people like MM can overreact. It’s certainly a hazard of doing this kind of research which will alienate one from “ordinary” folks already.
The twin and zombie work you’ve done is disturbing and confounding, but there’s obviously something going on. Same for the EGI transgender stuff at Fakeologist. It’s freaky, but “where there’s smoke…” It has to be part of what you’ve uncovered, at a minimum they are finding outliers to present as the norm. MM bashed that research as well, but didn’t take a serious look at it either.
But MM has been a key part of my journey into seeing this stuff, and finding POM, so I’m thankful for that.
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Mark, after reading what you posted above sort of explanation to another reader, I dare to ask why someone who found searching for Truth negative and depressing and is about seeking the positives of life chose a nick like “StraightFromTheDevilsMouth”? Don’t want to raise any controversy here. Just curious for your thoughtful answer, please.
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I like the name and call him “Straight” for that reason. He’s a good person, smart, insightful. Miss him. Think of it as ironic.
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NP. Thanks for the reply. Hope he reconsiders. Nowadays, perhaps, it’s kind of like Michael Jordan in a White Sox uniform. MJ went back to BKB. So there’s hope for a comeback… A year ago he seemed to enjoy the work you guys were doing… I am not sure if it was him but the John-Mark facial analysis was hilarious.
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Apparently the Michael Jordan baseball gig was another thing than we were told. He was so deep into gambling the NBA needed him to leave for a while to keep it under wraps. Of course that may be just a diversion within the diversion….
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Straight said he was tired of the negativity, and had some metaphysical (my word) issues to pursue … that doesn’t really grab it, but is the best I can do. He is an interesting man with a higher than average ethical core. Delving as we do in deceit and disinformation was wearing him down. We are still in touch. He solved Columbine, though he does not take credit, said he just heard about it and passed it in to me.
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For goodness sake, a dupe? An agent? Don’t you know when to stop, Mark? Did it ever occur to you, that history as you’ve managed to learn from your Montana-based sofa does not match the truth? But you do not seem to stop there, do you? Instead of taking a tour to any such sites as I was listing in my posts at your blog, you are taking your libel to the next level calling me a dupe or an agent and at the same time trying to wash your dirty hands over me?
How dare you claim that nobody died with the bullet in their back when you never left your Montana couch to verify any of your statements?
How dare you call me a dupe when I have explicitly asked you in advance for your agreement about what I was going to publish at your blog back in February? You should feel ashamed of yourself, not because of this libel against me, but for being so disrespectful to thousands of victims who gave their lives and are now lying in nameless graves all over the Europe.
Do you even dare to leave your cozy sofa and fly over here, but not for some beach cocktail sipping on such occasion? I will personally take you on a tour, where you will be able to a) see at least 600 marked mass graves from the Red terror era and b) inspect some skulls with the bullet hole at the back to verify my statements about it. Did you ever consider that the purpose of same Wikipedia’s entries on that subject is exactly of the kind you fell for (again)? To doubt about the whole truth just because it was written by some shitty MSM outlet? I guess you have never even thought about it for a second, otherwise you would be at least using the word “allegedly” when calling me an agent of misdirection. Shame on you once again, mostly for misleading majority of your readers here, who are not in position to verify it for themselves. I sincerely hope they will start to question much else written here by you personally.
While I’m at it – you should go and check my blog if you’ve decided to make any statements about it, I’m still quite active with my posts but not as nearly as I was before this incident with you at PoM. The reason? I’ve decided to be active locally and fight against people’s blindness in the most efficient way for which I’m deeply grateful to you personally. I’ve learned to focus on things I can actually improve and I wish you would be able to do the same before leaving this crazy world.
I don’t expect to see this comment published, but if you decide to do it anyway, do not forget to mention that you have deleted my “duping” posts before I had the chance to save them elsewhere. Luckily for all but you, I had them saved in Word as they were being written.
By the way, for somebody calling me a dupe or an agent – do you really think you should still have a link to my blog? Don’t you think that would be seen as pure hypocrisy?
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We know that communism was not real in any practical sense, so that what was installed in Russia could easily be called mere miliatary dictatorship. We know there was close cooperation between New York, London and the Bolsheviks. We know that New York and London centers of power needed an enemy to justify what was to come, the second great conflagration, and that in the aftermath, given the horror and destruction that occurred, there had to be an answer for the question “Why?” We were given the Holocaust,the Stalin purges, famines rewritten as deliberate policy, so that western participants could take comfort knowing that the evil they destroyed was far greater than the evil they represented. That’s my take.
That also justified the fake Cold War.
You seem to rebel at the notion of even some of the evil attributed to communism being fiction for propaganda purposes. It is all or none with you. Of course there were atrocities, but the human mind cannot grasp numbers as you present … 700,000 shot in the back of the head? Let’s examine that number. It just happens to equal the population of my home, Denver (not Montana). It is a small city by world stadards, yet so vast we cannot see the the end of it from our mountain perch. Suppose that the military decided to shoot everyone in Denver in the back of the head … just finding soldiers up to the task would be impossible, as humans are not killers. Getting the citizens, even in our deeply propagandize country, to cooperate would be impossible. 95% of the time would be chasing, and resulting bullet holes would not be in the back if the head, but all over the body.
In other words, it is nonsense. Military men have long known that humans are not killers, and will only do so if convinced they are up against pure evil. Even then, as General Marshall learned, most bullets are fired over heads, deliberately. Even after bootcamp indoctrination, soldiers could not pull the trigger on a real human. What the military learned is distance … if you can put distance between killer and killed, it can be done more efficiently. Ergo high powered artillery, where shooters are not looking in victims faces, and our best weapon, aircraft that drop bombs and are gone before they hit the ground.
Are there mass graves? Of course. People died en masse of many causes, typhus one, necessitating getting bodies underground to prevent spread. What you are seeing is the result of many horrors given us by many sources of evil. Your fixation on Stalin and the pure evil of the Jews who backed him reads like a John Wick movie, pure fantasy. Further, you were coming at readers hard, fast and furious with daily and very long pieces, no time to digest one before you hit us with another. I did what I did to save this blog. I am sorry if you lost anything in the process, but made sure that readers knew they could still access the material, leaving your link below.
I do believe, sincerely, that you are either an agent or a dupe. You would know one, but would be the last to know the other.
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8/11/1956, at 10:15pm- The time and date of Jackson Pollack’s “death”. He followed “modernist” actor, James Dean, in the sexy/ugly mangled meat-steel-bone sculpture genre, a genre Pollack was alluding to in his final months as a mixed media sculptor. Predictable.
All purpose actor Ed Harris made a film about Pollack in 2000, the melodrama including all the clichés of “mad genius” artists: Pissing in a fireplace, cracking wise to sympathetic millionaires, dumping tables full of food on the floor (this was allegedly a starving artist) always having just enough scratch to get drunk (That part is very plausible, ahem-)
The cover story of Modernism of this sort was that Amurica needed to display the untethered “freedom” of a society of equals, expressing themselves in any fashion that suited these free spirits in the face of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the red stained east.
Max Ernst, who lived in America later in his life in the fashion of a witness protected asset, once implied he gave Pollack the idea to drip paint from a punctured can. That I can almost believe. Something a handler might instruct his charge to do on orders from above.
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I make picture frames out of barn wood, and put colored borders around the edges. Often times in applying the paint to the borders, I have dripped.
I must be a fricking genius. No one told me to do this!
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Anyone can drip. Just ask my female roommate about the bathroom floor. The genius is in having Guggenheim money backing the drippage.
I must quote Picasso: When asked to authenticate an unsigned piece he did not recognize, he asked the owner how much he paid for it. The price was substantial prompting the maestro to remark: “At that price it’s a Picasso.”
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Some random opinions on Pollack:
His earlier paintings display “Jungian Archetype” symbols/images (Pollack, Wikipedia). These would be instructive to study. (Jimi Hendrix”s artwork also contained symbols.) Pablo Picasso was an influence on the Abstract Expressionists as his imagery seems to appear frequently in their work.
Representational images form the basis of his paintings, even his later “drip” paintings start with an image say a portrait of his wife and him, then layer upon layer of paint is applied derived from it. Before “fractal” analysis a grad student measured each paint layer depth and subtracted, reversed engineered, each layer until there was an image as the basic compositional element. (Sorry no reference).
What this implies is there is no such thing as a pure abstract painting as there is no pure representational painting. They’re interpretations of reality, not reality.
Pollack started to drift back towards the representational part of the sprectum until his Yoko Ono, Lee Krasner brought him back to what the Market wanted, Abstraction. Why did the Market want abstract painting?
Most Abstract Expressionists couldn’t draw, even Pollack admitted he had ten thumbs, but Abstraction is good as the Emperor’s Clothes if you have no skill or talent since if anyone questions your work you can fall back on the Expressionistic part. I’ve seen A&E paintings and they’re boring.
Why would A&E painting be exported to Europe when Abstraction (ie., Piet Modrian, Kandinsky) and Expressionism (ie., German Expressionism) came to the U.S. though the Trojan Horse, the 1913 Armory Show? Even the French Impressionist’s Claude Monet work was declining in price around the turn of the twentieth century that the American patrons were holding a bag of bad investments. So what to do? Hire someone like Alred Barr to head a museum of modern/contemporary art to give lectures telling the public what art is to increase their value. Or make a movie perhaps like ‘Andy Warhol’ when after his death the value of his work declined rapidly, to promote them. It’s marketing. Or as some would say, treating art as a commodity. But then we are all commodities, “human capital”.
The A&E painters were perhaps the last to realize the above when their prices declined and Pop Art superseded their work that they signed a petition to someone or something to counter that trend. I guess that how it works or not.
If Pollack did eat ice cream it probably was covered in Hors d’age cognac.
Thanks Mark for posting
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$70.5 million, US- Cy Twombly chalk scribbles on a blackboard- What kind of detergent do you launder a load of cash that large with?
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What an entire crock of s**t. Disgusting.
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Good lord. That’s crap.
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I’ve got no talent for drawing, but at least would give the guy credit for painting accurate looking chalk lines which must have taken a bit of time and effort. Like Picasso, who has some work that shows he could draw and paint with some skill if he wanted to, this guy may have some talent, but nothing worth millions, much less hundreds.
Looks like a full on spook from this article https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/07/art-cy-twombly
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After a quick reading of the Cy Twombly article linked above by ‘Inside Baseball’ the last line reads “… he is a painter towards the end of painting’s history”. Ha, I didn’ know painting had an end, especially as implied during our current history. Nice to know he had a hand in it.
The article is a blackwash. It spents time linking Twombly to historical classical artists like Poussin and Hokusau as if Abstract Expressionism goes back that far only then to claim Art, at least painting is dead.
There are other gems like his works are ” … not representations of reality.” followed by “There is an unexpected realism ….”. It’s unexpected since they’re not real … try to get your mind around that for a while.
Then read his Wikipedia page. In the “Life and Career” section “In 1954, he served in the U.S. Army …” followed by “From 1955 through 1956 , he taught at” a college and during summer vacations painted in his apartment. I could be wrong but an Army service was at least two years. Then again perhaps he never left the service.
In 1957 he moved to Rome while working in a New York studio with Robert Rauschberg and his partner from 1955 to 1959. From 1950 to 1951 Twombly had a relationship with Rauschberg. It gets more involved when he marries Giorgio Franchetti in 1959 and they have a son the same year.
That’s only page two. I’m no MM, far far from it, so I’ll stop here.
.
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Hello Mark,
I don’t mean to appear ungrateful for allowing me to post on your blog (thank you) or disrespectful, especially after the brouhaha over MM being PNG on POM and your graceful reply but …
after reading Vexman’s post July 20, 2017 at 5:25 am above (somehow I missed it previously) and rereading Miles Mathis post on his blog a while back concerning his stand on non-entangling alliances due to concerns over potential blackwashing ….
Why not delete their links from your blog?
It would clear the waters for new people coming to POM and honor their request to do so.
Gonna say your comment July 18, 2017 at 5:30 am this post, “… as if
people did not how to run and hide.” is callous to the people both alive and dead.
Best
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Hello Mark,
I don’t mean to appear ungrateful for allowing me to post on your blog (thank you) or disrespectful, especially after the brouhaha over MM being PNG on POM and your graceful reply but …
after reading Vexman’s post July 20, 2017 at 5:25 am above (somehow I missed it previously) and rereading Miles Mathis post on his blog a while back concerning his stand on non-entangling alliances due to concerns over potential blackwashing ….
Why not delete their links from your blog?
It would clear the waters for new people coming to POM and honor their request to do so.
Gonna say your comment July 18, 2017 at 5:30 am this post, “… as if
people did not how to run and hide.” is callous to the people both alive and dead.
Best
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That is indeed a callous remark if indeed I am talking about people who died as Vexman described, and I do not think they did. It is too fantastic, and convenient to Western propaganda. The sheer mechanics of killing that many people, when people are not killers, makes it impossible. I know that soldiers are indoctrinated and basically turned into psychopaths in basic training, but it usually does not stick. Those who actually kill in battle, or even witness killing, are deeply affected. PTSD they call it.
Regarding links, I see no harm in offering them to interesting people, even those like MM and Vexman who have distanced themselves. I am not the last word, and am not a controlling person. I believe in free will. What I did with Vexman left me in an agitated and upset state for several days, so hard was it. MM especially left his mark and did some damage, but when I embraced the criticism without emotion found that he made valid points. That was the important finding. The links stand.
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In my opinion they probably did some strategic killings. I also believe that they knew that bad policies will lead to starvation, like Holodomor. But I believe that many things were exaggerated. Despite this exaggeration, I don’t believe this people are less psychopathic. I believe that they don’t have the necessary physical power and they can achieve results in a more strategic manner. Just because they killed 100 times less people, doesn’t make them less dangerous. In a way they seem to be more vampiristic, so they need slaves that are alive not dead. I don’t know their inner doctrines, but from my point of view they want to centralize almost everything. This desire to centralize can lead to many evils. I believe that people can prosper much better with much less centralization.
I also want to add that people over 40 years of age that lived in Communist countries probably dealt with some ridiculous bullshit. Vexman lives in a country from former Yugoslavia, and that republic was/is the target of many psyops. I am from an Eastern European country but I was born after Communism, so I don’t have direct experience. I know that they took land from some of my great grandparents, but nothing violent happened to my family members. I can point out to the lack of economic prosperity. But in a way some of my great grandparents or grandparents were more secure in an economic collapse scenario because they had at least a garden, and various animals like chickens, cow, goat or a horse. But even in my county, some regions were better than other regions. It was probably better to be in an European communist country than in an Asian communist country.
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Hello Mark,
After listening to personal stories from regular people who survived though that Hell on Earth during and after World War II, I empathize with Vexman on the number of casualties both of you discussed above. And these numbers may be only the beginning as investigative field work is allowed. Remember from 1945 to around 1990 Eastern Europe was an Occupied Territory, no information was permitted out and the news media would have not reported it most likely anyway. And if any news did make it to the U.S. the average person could not comprehend it since they had nothing to compare it with. Perhaps the number of battle casualties from the 1861-1865 Civil War would be a start.
Twentieth century history has more than enough recorded massacres, Armenia, Congo, Nanking/China and the list goes on and on from all over the world. The story of North and South American indigneous populations would bring the realization closer to home.
So are Vexman’s estimates “fanastic”? No.
Can one person kill another? Yes.
Read the book “The Rape of Nanking” by Iris Chang. It will make you ill especially when you consider that Japan was and is a civilized nation. People can turn on a dime or as the phase goes, “Civilization is a thin veneer”. If you don’t believe the book read your local newspaper for the day’s homicide count.
Boot camp does NOT turn people into ‘killers’. Sorry Mark but I find that comment fanastic. At the worst you’re acclimatized to folding your underwear and marching in formation, not necessarily at the same time. Not that the military hasn’t learned some techniques from various cults.
What the military does know is one in twenty people will kill and it takes about nine people to logistically support that person.
PTSD started to be recognized from the trauma of an IED shockwave severing neural connections and has expanded to the fatigue of back to back deployments, unfortunately.
Also people can get used to killing. They may throw up for a day or two the first time but from what I understand that gets less frequent as time goes on. Video game playing is good for deadening any moral connection between people as the other person is just an object. Repeating the mantra “I am you and you are me” makes a person receptive to any suggestion, say to attack someone, as they percieve it to be their idea. No bountries, no restrain.
The ” mechanics” can be learned from the old NKVD of first pacifying the population, taking anything that they could use for self-defense, corralling them into groups and smaller groups so as not to create any panic, until finally ‘tapping’ a few with a .22.
“… as if people did not know how to run and hide.”. Sounds easy enough. The reality is one hundred and eighty degrees different. Even if you’re prepared, how long can you last with a family and just the clothes on your back. Hide where? To a safe haven that doesn’t exist?
Study the “Blieburg Massacre” where mostly civilians, men, women and children retreating from the “Socialist” partisans at the end of WWII made it across the border to safe Austria only to be turned back by a British general to be killed by the same partisans the people were running from. Estimates run from tens of thousand to one hundred thousand over a week or so. Fanastic, right?
There was no excuse no one didn’t know what was happening. The American military had displaced person camps waiting in Italy to take these people in which was known and ignored.
So Mark there is the ‘collusion’ you talk about.
There is a saying “When Germany and Russia agree, Poland gets smaller”.
Regardless of the politics, or whatever pie in the sky conspiracy theory subscribed to, it’s the little people on the ground that get killed. It may not be real to you now but then it’ll be very real when it’s happening to you later.
Deny history and it will come around to you.
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I must ask you why people in “occupied territories” are different than those of us in the “free world.” They are easy to kill, have no taste for freedom, and their leaders are monsters. Reads like propaganda.
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Is your reply a question and then an answer to your question?
If so, then the terms “occupied territories” and “free world” can be easily interchanged as people are people throughout the world regardless of politics.
Is that not what Piece of Mindful attempts to show with “doubles”, things are not what we assume they are?
Your “read” sounds like an old SNL skit on the New York City attitude of trying to negate reality by blaming the victim, ie., “It’s their fault for being mugged (robbed). They should have not being there in the first place.”.
Or worst still, as I cannot read minds, taking a quick litmus test of your wording the tone is somewhat in the area of condensing Elitism. Who vacations in the Hamptons if they are not of “The Hamptons”? I’m sure it’s a fine place with decent people except I would not fit in nor would I be even remotely expected to stay the night. Ah, well.
And so with POM.
Thank you kindly Mark for allowing me to randomly post on your site.
Best
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I assure you I am not of the Hamptons, and my presence there is that of an outsider, not in any alienated sense, but not connected in any way to the people who provided the house other than by relations of other family members, not blood relatives. That’s all I can say in respect of their privacy. I was born dirt poor and have been very fortunate in life, and am well off now, though I cannot speak to tomorrow.
When I said it “reads like propaganda,” I was getting to the heart of the matter, us versus them. In real life we are all one, but propaganda seeks to create in us a sense that others (usually too far away to see and know) embody evil. This is why Mark Twain or someone said that travel is the solution to prejudice. I have traveled quite a bit, and I find that people are the same wherever I go. Consequently, when I read of the horrors of Stalin and Mao, I take it with a mountain-sized grain of salt. If such things do not happen here, neither do they happen there.
Example: Tiananmen Square, done right in our lifetime before our very eyes. What happened? Actors dressed as Chinese military officers entered CNN broadcasting studio and pretended to order them shut down. Coverage ceased, and then by power of suggestion we learned that 10,000 people were killed. Chinese do that sort of thing, as they are “them” and embody evil, while we’re are “us” and thank God we don’t live there! How many people died in Tiananmen Square that night? Zero.
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I get the strong impression that Mark is in denial about a lot of things, especially anything having to do with Jews. He has admitted that he has Jewish ancestry, his child has married a Jew, and his grandchild is being raised Jewish. Am I correct, Mark?
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I have denied none of these things. But you would need to have have lived my childhood to understand the depth of ignorance and deep and oppressive Christianity in which I grew up, Catholic schools, a great aunt that was Mother Superior of some order of nuns, nuns for teacher through twelve years of schooling, a brother as a priest, another brother who at one time wanted to enter a monastery. So to learn that my last name is Jewish was a shock. But it is my Dad’s side, and so doesn’t count, and anyway, at this point in time I am not seeing blood in Jewish bloodlines, just selection.
[I should add, I’ve not been selected for anything, but as long as you are suspicious, here’s another clue for you: My birthday is 4/20.]
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As for deleting the links as to avoid any confusion.
It’s your site, you do what you want.
Thanks for allowing me post,
Best
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P.S.
Yes I can no spell ‘fantastic’. I went to Public School. Spellcheck?
Yea, there are grades of Boot Camp, from the Air Force which has the best food to Marine Boot Camp where I wouldn’t last more than … fifteen minutes, tops. (Plug: William S. Lind, “Traditional Right” website, is very good at explaining military history simply.)
By “… avoiding confusion” in the links, to the person new to POM it appears as a double bind not knowing the previous events. To get up to speed on POM I’m reading the older posts. “Fun with Photoshop” May 9, 2017 is hilarious. Just started the Vermeer series, “Of Art and Freedom” will take multiple readings.
Could Liam Neesom play Fidel Castro?
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Oliver Pollock, one of the financiers of the American Revolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Pollock
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