I deliberately left behind on our current trip anything looking like serious reading. Experience tells me that such books will have many unopened miles on them on return. I did bring some light detective fiction, The Daughter of Time, a 1952 book by Josephine Tey. It has been a joy, surprising sections that remind me that I need to read more fiction. I think it was Norman Mailer who said that journalists use the truth to tell lies, while novelists use lies to tell the truth.
Here is one quote that jumped out at me, only incidentally. Grant is a police detective.
“It was Grant’s belief that if you could not find out about a man, the next best way to arrive at an estimate of him was to find out about his mother.”
My wife and I each had excellent mothers. We rented a car while here, and put a very small parking lot scratch on it. There was no question between us that when we returned the car, we would fess up. The end result, €488 euros and clean consciences. It was my mother who told me that if when walking down a sidewalk I spotted a quarter lying there, that I was to leave it. It was not mine.
I would pick it up, of course. That is kind if extreme, but that was Mom. I am far from perfect, and only desire to be more like my mother. She rubbed off on me far more than my Dad, and author Tey is saying that this is true of most of us. Our mothers influence our character more than our fathers. Maybe so.
Here is another character from the book, Carradine, an American, speaking to Grant as they try to solve the mystery around the murder of two young boys, allegedly by or at the command of Richard III:
“Well, I discovered quite by accident, when I was looking up something at college, that the Boston Massacre consisted of a mob throwing stones at a sentry. The total casualties were four. I was brought up on the Boston massacre, Mr. Grant. My twenty- eight inch chest used to swell at the very memory of it. My good red spinach-laden blood used to seethe at the thought of helpless civilians mowed down by the fire of British troops. You can’t imagine what a shock it was to find that all of that it added up to in actual fact was a brawl that wouldn’t get more than local reporting in a clash between police and strikers in any American lock-out.”
“That’s partly why I like to research so much.”
The four casualties of the Boston Massacre were most likely bloodied noses, by the way. [Now that I think of it more, a scared young kid with a musket might have shot some of the rock throwers, maybe a death or two.]
That was written in 1952. I wonder if anywhere at any time that American school children are ever taught to question history. I doubt it.
Yesterday we travelled by train from Bolzano to Salerno, Italy. We changed trains in Bologna, and that reminded me of what is now known as the Bologna Massacre. I remember reading about it long ago, when I still thought even “alternative” or “revisionist” history to be believable. I looked around at the train station, which is a massive complex, for any signs of what had happened. Apparently I missed it, as there is, according to Wikipedia, a memorial in place. I did see modest police presence, something otherwise absent in our travels in Italy.
According to historical references and to Wikipedia, on October 2, 1980, a bomb was set off in the Bologna train station, killing 85 people and wounding over 200. I read the Wiki account this morning and reviewed photographs, and it all has about it what author Tey says, through Grant, a “Tonypandy” quality about it.
Tonypandy is a place in South Wales where in, according to historical sources, British government troops (in Ludlow fashion) fired on striking miners, killing an unstated number (in Tey’s account). What really happened was that Winston Churchill, Home Secretary, wanted to avoid a bloody confrontation, and so sent in unarmed Metropolitan Police to quell the disturbance. There were some bloodied noses on both sides. That was it.
(For American readers, the concept of “unarmed police” is probably incomprehensible. Just think of the motorcycle cop who pulls you over for speeding not having a holstered revolver at his side. They do that elsewhere.)
Concludes Tey:
“The point is that every single man who was there knows that the story is nonsense, and yet it will never be contradicted. It will never be overtaken now.”
When I get back stateside, I intend to have a look at the nonsense of the Bologna Massacre. It smells like large pile of steaming baloney.
Piece of Mindful 
Speaking of mysteries, MM has finally posted some new material at his sites. Not sure when the stories there posted as they are all dated by when they were completed or written. If they posted yesterday, that would be 77 days since his last post.
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Interesting that a guy who rewrote nuclear physics and understands cesium in use in the 1940s forward and who also does genealogy in his spare time, is a world class portrait artist and scratch golfer, and now the Sherlock Holmes of the Internet, can’t make his Internet work. He made it sound like he was being taken down by Centurylink but is backing off that now, perhaps in reaction to ridicule. After all, if people in power wanted him gone from the Internet … poof! He’d be reduced to a paper newsletter.
If I were Sherlock I would say something is up here, some reformulation, as with Butterfinger bars now being owned by Ferrara and being tweaked … same product, just new owners. Still interesting stuff though, and if you remove the monstrous ego (he says Bill Gates is just a front … why not MM too?) it appears as though we are being given lots of Inside Baseball for free admission.
Something about the initials MM … they mean something. It’s a signal, I swear.
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Many of Miles Mathis’ conspiracy and science writings are almost word-for-word predicted in Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day”, published in 2006, 2 years before Miles appeared online. For those familiar with Miles: Charge/Charge Field, Theosophy, Aristocracy vs. Industrialists, Jews or crypto-jews running projects including a “Grand Cohen”, Titanic/Olympia switch, a main character named Miles are some of the notable coincidences I found in the book. The moment it dawned upon me that I was reading Miles before Miles, Miles’ site went dark. I thought he’d never show his face again. I thought it was me. But he’s back again. Miles also wrote a paper on Pynchon. Why expose Pynchon when he’s probably the least read famous author in history? I’ve read more than half of Pynchon’s published words and I wouldn’t recommend him to anyone.
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Your name reminds me of Confederacy of Dunces. MM took that author down too.
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Miles didn’t “take down” Pynchon. The opposite happened. Pynchon predicted Miles. Miles hasn’t read Pynchon because if he did, he would realize “Gravity’s Rainbow” denies the Holocaust by specifically saying that nobody died at a concentration camp that in real life has a memorial to those who died there. Not a single Holocaust denier quotes Pynchon, sometimes called our greatest living author, etc… Pynchon has a lot more details in “Against the Day” including the inside scoop on 9/11’s real purpose (spoiler alert: he says it wasn’t a terrorist attack). But perhaps the most interesting takeaway is that Miles might actually be working for The Powers That Be without even knowing it. Miles doesn’t “take down” anybody. At best he’s a signpost pointing in the right direction for those who might see. As a person he’s also a signpost, unmoving, stuck in place, alway looking, never moving.
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I was talking about the author of Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole. This Pynchon person sounds interesting. I will look into their work ASAP. Thanks
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MM’s current nonsense reminds me of the nonsense Dave McGowan foisted on his readers (of which, I confess, I was one) before faking his death. First, he posted pics on his site that showed mysterious trucks outside his house or something. Like MM, McGowan initially pretended he didn’t think it was the government/intelligence/whatever spying on his house or doing nefarious things, then began to concede that hmm, maybe it was. Shortly after that bit of drama, he dropped out for a while and came back to tell us he had cancer. He was a smoker. He posted an alarming pic of his puffed-up face… I don’t remember, the cancer messed it up somehow. And then, not content to let cigarettes be the only culprit, he said that somebody had posted a comment somewhere saying something to the effect of “I see Dave McGowan is a smoker…He better watch what he says or he may find himself with Stage 4 cancer.” Or something. Suggesting that maybe, just maybe, “they” slipped something into his cigarettes to create the sudden advanced illness he “died” of. But before he “died” he gave in to pressure from his readers and allowed them to send him donations. I wonder how much he raked in. I wonder how much MM plans to rake in. I predict he/they will soon send MM on “his” way, and will do it in a way designed to make us feel vaguely uncertain and fearful of knowing the “truth.” Seems likely that’s what all this “they’re out to get me/maybe they’re not/maybe they are” bullshit is. Yawwwnnnn
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I doubt McGowan was a smoker. That is like predictive programming, laying the evidence trail down in advance, as with Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and others having drug problems. Then when they “die” we say “Oh yeah, saw that coming.” McGowan made it a point to chain smoke in one interview I saw, probably Hollywood cigarettes, the harmless kind. Good comment, by the way.
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To go even further off topic…I am fascinated by the aggressive campaign to get everybody to stop smoking. (Maybe the McGowan character was a part of it.) Do we really think our leaders are financing this campaign out of concern for our health, even as they poison us in countless other ways? My theory is that nicotine may counteract the numbing effects of wi-fi, cell phones and all our other thought-control technology. Then again, maybe I’m just making excuses for not quitting smoking myself. (These days, any attempt the media makes to scare me into doing or thinking or believing anything brings out the contrarian in me.)
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The “STOP SMOKING” campaign began in 1982, right after Zbigniew Brzezinski received his copy of “POLITICAL PONEROLOGY”. In that book it was revealed that Carbon Monoxide poisoning makes a human being “much harder to brainwash” and that was also when THEY started jacking the prices of cigarettes and adding even more poisons to them than had been added before. You can get mild Carbon Monoxide poisoning through smoking Cannabis as well, without all the Cancer-Causing Chemicals!
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Don’r believe a word of that … “Political Ponerology” rings a bell from the distant past, a book I read? My world view gradually changed from evil monsters running the show to accepting that God must love stupid people, as he made so many of them. It would be an easier life if we were part of the herd. I once thought that human development held promise, and I still think that aspect is unexplored. But by and large, with many exceptions, the human being in his normal state needs to be herded, fed, and given enough education to perform routine jobs, read street signs and not to get run over by buses.
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Thank you, WDA! I looked up Political Ponerology and now have a new rabbit hole to dive into. This is the first validation I’ve had about my anti-smoking campaign theory (not that I’ve really discussed it with anyone.) The elaborate coordination behind the anti-smoking campaign has always bewildered me, even before I started to “wake up,” and I’ve been equally bewildered that no one I have ever known–smoker or non-smoker–has questioned the motives behind it. Nice to know I’m not the only one seeing this.
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Once upon a time, HIGH SCHOOLS had “smoking areas”. Until 1982 that is. Some years ago, the WISCONSIN STATE HIGHWAY PATROL was on a campaign to stop anyone not wearing a seat belt and write the $10 TICKET (small tick) and at the exact same time, the SOUTH DAKOTA HIGHWAY PATROL was doing the exact SAMe thing, (as if/BECAUSE) there was only ONE BOSS (THE ONE, NEO, MR. ANDER-SON, THE HERO, SAVIOUR, the UNDERDOG?). Yeah anything printed using the ALPHA-BET is the “ONE BET” or “SURE BET” if you OWN the COPYRIGHT TRADEMARKS on the ENGLISH ALPHABET you cannot ever lose, EVER! That is what the suicidal SUPERIOR OFFICER was tall-KING about to LT. JOHN J. DUNBAR in Dances with Wolves, as he wrote him a note just before blowing his brains out. He said “The KING is DEAD, long live the KING”, a reference to “written language”.
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1313=8
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Good point.
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It might be noted that nicotine binds to the Ace2 recepters and blocks the spike protein, so can help protect against the virus, and possibly the injection. Suggestion is to use nicotine gum . . . smokers were far less likely to come down with covid, despite the story that it was a respiratory virus.
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