Good tidings and farewell to BMSeattle

You might be wondering why I put up a video from a 1969 movie from a 1951 Broadway musical, Paint Your Wagon. Me too. I woke up this morning with Lee Marvin’s crusty voice on my brain. Tyrone, our Hollywood connection, brought this song to my attention. Marvin (named Lee after his ancestor, General Robert E. – there is something to this genealogy in Hollywood stuff) can’t sing for shit, but with help of real Hollywood talent, creates a memorable moment.

I was not born under a wandering star. I am grounded in my life with a perfect partner, and any wandering we do, we do hand in hand. But Marvin above reminds me of a friend of mine who was not so fortunate as me. His name was Steve, and he and I wandered the mountains of Montana, Wyoming, and the Minnesota Boundary Waters during the 1980s and 90s. I have his photo here on my wall, and on the matte I have written down all of our adventures, maybe 30 trips we took together.

Steve liked my company because I was one of the few friends in his group who did not drink to excess. Steve was a heavy drinker, and used our mountain trips as sober interludes. I rarely saw him in the city, as another hiking buddy said that he was a wonderful mountain companion, and a “city shit.” All of his other friends were only into outdoor trips that included boats and coolers full of beer. On ours, he not only gave up beer, but also left his cigarettes behind. Of course, when we got back down to trailhead, he had a cooler of warm beer waiting, and insisted that I drive.

One night in 1998 Steve, thoroughly wasted, got his third DUI. He went home, got out the title to his truck and signed it, and then went into his garage and started the engine, and waited to die. When another friend, Jim, found him the next morning, his body was half in and half out of the garage and wedged under the door. He was in agony and had decided to live, but it was too late.

I gave the eulogy at his memorial service, and it was a good one. I did him up proud. One guy, a longtime friend of Steve’s, came up to me after and said that it was the best he had ever heard. The manager of the funeral home said that professionals don’t do that well. After I was done I asked all of those gathered to stand up and speak, but none could do so. They were verclempt, unable to stand up and speak before a group. One handed me a sheet of paper with words on it and asked me to read it. What a sorry group of friends Steve had, unable to stand and pay tribute.

Steve reminds me of Lee Marvin above. The detached life without soulmate is nothing to long for. It is empty and meaningless. We can sit under the stars at night in the wilderness and have wispy thoughts, but having someone to come home to matters far more than any romantic wandering notions.

Anyway, some here might have been a little piqued that I shut off comments in the thread below that became a MM debate. It would still be going on had I not done that, and I don’t know if anyone saw, but I mentioned in a comment the night before that was going to do so. Also, a man I met and whose company I enjoyed at the MM conference in 2016, BMSeattle, was taking a beating. He’s a nice man. He’s no agent of MM. He just gives honest memories and reflections. He set me straight that Jeff, the scientist at that meeting, had no agenda and was only frustrated that we were doing conspiracy talk instead of science.

Some people have no stomach for blog commenting when it gets personal. I don’t mind it much, as I have often said that the only way to hurt my feelings is to say something about me that is true. That stings. But I do appreciate BMS, who has now left the blog in perpetuity, citing too much negativity. I wish he and his wife good tidings and a happy life together.

Is anything in this post connected to anything else in this post? Only possibly.

jupa

PS: I just realized I can show the photo on my wall of Steve, as his face is not shown. The photo was taken on the Blacktail Deer trail in Yellowstone National Park, and I remember thinking at the time that him beside a lone tree in the wilderness seemed … appropriate.

90 thoughts on “Good tidings and farewell to BMSeattle”

    1. Here’s another question (not a statement that proves anything, TimR) to add to Fauxlex’s questions.
      For a very long time, the PayPal email MM used for donations to his site carried the handle of a woman’s name–melisasmithus. He instructed potential donors not to find the female name peculiar–it was simply one of his many online nom de plumes. I use PayPal myself and know that once you’ve chosen your PP email, you’re pretty much locked into it. The fact that MM’s Paypal handle suggested he was–or had been–making money using a female name struck me as something a normal person would be embarrassed about admitting. I assumed Miles’s desire to make money from his big high-traffic website outweighed any potential embarrassment. I also assumed that, if PayPal allowed him to use a different email address for donations, he would. I know I would.

      Somehow, after all these ISP’s and cable companies started blocking him and making it difficult for him to post to his site, PayPal became accommodating in ways that it has never been for him before, and allowed him to change his PayPal email so that it matches his actual male name.

      Am I the only one who thinks that’s kind of remarkable?

      (Also, the fact that he has apparently fancied himself a master of Internet disguise makes me wonder if some of the Mathisites who come out of the woodwork to defend him here could be the man from Taos himself.)

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      1. I’ll have to share my experience on this one. I recently had eBay troubles and found that you can connect numerous email accounts to one PayPal. Not sure if this is a new feature, but don’t think this is a clue for the Mathis site.

        Second thing, do we really assume he’s pulling in a lot of donations? I can’t imagine that he is. Am I wrong there? I do find the aliases weird. On the Wayback Machine to the geocities site there is another female name email address. I did always find this very odd, and the bio written supposedly by the Cirque du Soleil dancer. Also, at the end of his bio, it switches tense to someone saying “we” decided to add things because of questions that were being asked. Extremely unusual. It’s all extremely unusual.

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        1. It’s probably been nearly a decade since I looked into linking my PayPal to a different email. It was and occasionally still is a slight inconvenience since I don’t use my PayPal email for actual email anymore. I’m quite certain it was impossible to link to a different email when I tried all those years ago. Good to know you can do it now.

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    2. Now that I’ve thought about it a little, I’m going to make a prediction. (TimR: Predictions, like questions and hypothetical statements, are not intended to be taken as proof of anything.)

      The MMG site will be closing down in the next year, two years at the most. Before it does, MMG will do a cash grab, attempting to whip readers into an emotional frenzy that will prompt them to feed that web kitty as fat as it can get. Then Mathis will die or go into hiding or climb to the top of some mountain and sit cross-legged for the rest of his life or something.

      McGowan did this with his sudden advanced-stage cancer thing. Before the cancer, he treated his donation button like an embarrassment his adoring readers had talked him into. After the cancer thing, he took every opportunity he could to solicit donations and then he disappeared in a cloud of dollar bills.

      After MMG’s weird ordeal with the ISP’s, the first “guest” writer on the site began the article by encouraging readers to donate to the great man, using that shiny new PayPal address of his. I thought that was interesting.

      If he’s gearing up for a cash grab, it would be important to have a PayPal email that doesn’t make him sound like a common catfishing Internet scammer. After all these years, he has finally accomplished that. Let’s just see if he doesn’t take advantage of it.

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      1. Is Mathis really pulling in that much money in donations? Has anyone here ever donated?

        I’ll make a simpler prediction…I think one of the inconsistencies raised here on this blog will be addressed either directly or indirectly by Mathis at some point. Like, randomly in a new paper, Mathis is going to offer some kind of reasonable sounding explanation about his sources of income, or why the artwork on his site almost never changes. This has happened before when doubts were raised. I think they will do it again. That’s my prediction.

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        1. I at one time had a rolling $35 per month donation going on, to my flavor of the week, once Democracy Now!, others I don’t remember, and for a year or so, to Mathis. Never a word said at the conference or via email, nothing. I think I ditched him around the time of his attack piece. (I never expected gratitude. It makes me uncomfortable, so I was not at all upset at no acknowledgement. I just felt weird donating to a guy who attacked me.)

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        2. There’s no way of knowing. I don’t imagine it’s a cash cow or enough to live on. However, I think he has enough readers and ranks high enough in search engines that if he comes up with some drama that gets people emotionally worked up-like McGowan’s cancer story-he could rake in a decent haul. Not a fortune, but more than chump change. There are a few authors and artists I check in with regularly and enjoy what they do so much that I feel guilty about not paying…especially if the content creators let it be known they are struggling. McGowan’s cancer story set off enough alarm bells that I didn’t donate anything, but I thought about it. I occasionally thought about it with Mathis, but that catfish email addy was actually the first thing that made me seriously question his integrity.

          So yeah, I think we’re in the foreshadowing or predictive programming stage here. We’ll see.

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        3. In any case, it’s pretty ballsy to set yourself up as a source of Truth and then say, “Oh by the way, please send your donations through my fake-woman account.” I wonder if his donations have gone up now that he doesn’t have to do that anymore?

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  2. Even with a wandering spirit and without a wife, I find that I too am only hurt by people when they tell the truth about me. And in the rare event that the truth-tellers happen to be total strangers on the Internet, it doesn’t even hurt that much. Farewell, BMS.

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  3. For the record, I really did not intend to hurt this individual’s feelings. I feel as though if I were coming off in a way that gave others the impression my intentions were questionable, I would want to hear that. I really do not think there was any moment at which any of us would not been game for an interesting back and forth about the intricacies of the Mathis site, and specifically why he disagreed with our position. It just never felt like that was in the cards. Mostly, it just felt like we would get reductive statements that put all questioning or criticism into the box of “confirmation bias” without any real debate on the merits. Believe it or not, my mind is still wide open on the Mathis site. Beyond a gut level feeling that something is off with a mountain of circumstantial evidence, I am still swayable in my position of what exactly is going on and what to think of it. No effort was made on this individual’s behalf to actually engage on the specifics. It ultimately seemed like if we had questions, that was not okay for this person.

    Another storm-off, it seems then. I apologize for contributing to that. At the end of the day, I really did hope for a balanced discussion of the matter, and I don’t really think I ever shut the door on that. If this person would rather leave than be party to a real discussion of the Mathis site, warts and all, then what can you do? They have made their decision, I suppose. If I was skeptical, I still am, and as confused and uncertain as ever. That’s life in this world I guess.

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    1. People are people. For some, comments set off cyberdisinhibition, where we are dealing with unseen people, and so not picking up on facial expression or voice tone. That’s why sarcasm doesn’t work in print. For the record, BMS is a really nice guy. At the conference, his partner (who I did not meet) was his girlfriend. They since got married. I wish them the best. And I have seen before many times where people simply shy away from any kind of confrontation. Others seek it out.

      Beyond a gut level feeling that something is off with a mountain of circumstantial evidence, I am still swayable in my position of what exactly is going on and what to think of it.

      Agree in total.

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      1. Well said.

        My biggest fundamental gripe on Mathis is that I think it is beyond any shadow of a doubt that he does not make his income the way we are told. The art pages do not see nearly enough change over the…what… 15 years, to actually support someone. It’s incredibly hard to make a living as an artist, and it requires constant output. The vast majority of his “Available Works” page should not be identical to how it was 10 years ago, but it is. If someone makes their living via a secret income that they are not honest about, I’m going to assume that something is not on the level. He may very well be an incredibly bright guy who really was born Miles Mathis, but then why is he lying about making his living via art?

        All we know for sure that there is a guy in Taos claiming to be Miles Mathis, who has lived his entire life traveling the world many times over without ever holding down a job, and claims to have done so by simply making art. However, his availble artwork page sits nearly unmodified for a decade. Works have apparently been available for 15 years. Yet somehow he gets by. Impossible. I’m willing to stretch the credulity pretty far, but that’s a Grand Canyon sized crevasse in the whole idea.

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        1. This brings about a “Duh” moment in that the paintings seen on the MM page, to a large degree, were on display in the house, ergo, unsold. I seated myself for the long discussions having a view of some of the more delightful ones. Ever heard of Vargas Girls?

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          1. Google is telling me Vargas girls appear to be a 50s style pinup? Clue me in.

            As for the art, I wish it were possible to reference which particular paintings you witnessed on the walls so that they could be cross-referenced against the sold page. That would be a pretty juicy oversight. Personally, the fact that about 75% of the available works have been available for going on 20 years is a decent oversight in and of itself. There is an implication there that it can’t be his true source of income. Is he being paid just sit there and run a website? If so, by who? This is why it feels off to me.

            Among the other art oddities is the fact that a portrait dated 1990 in the artist signature is given on the resume page as being entered into a contest in the year 2001. Making your living as an artist is all about constant output, and it’s an absurd notion that these works dated 1989 and 1990 we’re being entered into art contests 5 or 10 years later. A real artist would have been submitting their most recent works. A real artist who was so open about their being an artist would be uploading a huge amount of new works if they had a website with the audience this guy does.

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          3. Fauxlex … I just looked over the art collection, and I can be of no help to you. I cannot say definitively which of any of the works were on display in his home. I do remember that I positioned myself on the couch for an afternoon session so that I was looking, in the next room, at a woman with a fabulous rack. But my memory beyond that ain’t that good.

            I must say, having viewed everything, that some of those models look very young, uncomfortably so. For instance,

            http://mileswmathis.com/mary.html

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          4. It’s funny you brought up the work titled “Mary.html”. This work made my “oddities” list because I feel the dimensions given cannot be right. You can roughly tell a works’ dimensions by the size of the frame, the general look of it, and this work looks like a smaller item but its dimensions put it as a huge item.

            Assuming I’m right for the sake of argument (God help me saying that), it’s just one more piece of weirdness that proves nothing, but is so weird all the same.

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          5. Take back what I say about the size of the work Mary.html, I think it’s just the fact that it is matted very heavily. See? I’m not unwilling to admit when I’m wrong!

            I do agree that the nudes are…awkward in a way. In another comment I pointed out that I found an instance of two different, unrelated models wearing the same article of clothing. That’s odd, eh?

            http://mileswmathis.com/tessold2.html

            Same dress. Costumes? Weird.

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  4. Most “successful” artists sell through galleries. Santa Fe is full of galleries — listing 240 art galleries, Santa Fe is the third-largest art market in the U.S. Check their websites, call them, whatever. If they’ve never heard of a certain artist good chance that artist either isn’t selling much work, or selling to friends and family only, hasn’t sold any recently or isn’t selling work.

    The universe of known “art buyers” is very, very small. Artists and galleries know most of the real buyers, fight incessantly over who’s client is who’s, which puts the artist in awkward positions sometimes.

    Clarice and I owned/operated an art gallery in Bozeman for over 10 years, mostly “contemporary” work. Here the market favors landscape, wildlife and “cowboys and Indians.” In Santa Fe the market is much broader, but I seriously doubt that portraits and “classic” nudes are all that popular. Without a gallery representing your work, it can be a very lonely occupation.

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  5. A third DUI is the end of the road for many. The expense and hardship may be more than enough to handle. Looking over the statistics in my state in the last decade the # of DUI convictions is shocking. There’s a bar or store that sells booze on almost every street in my town and obvious now that it’s not just so people can unwind and have a good time, it’s a sugar cube, a piece of cheese on the mousetrap. I’ll bet that tree Steve is standing next too in the photo is still there.

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    1. At the Yellowstone Forever! visitors’ center in Gardiner, Montana, they have photographs from an early expedition into Yellowstone. They got the bright idea of going to those spots and taking the same picture from the same angle. There was remarkably little change in over 100 years. So yes, that lone tree is still there I imagine, and has grown very little in the interim.

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  6. Fauxlex- you’re making a lot of assumptions. Maybe Mathis can get by on 2 or 3 big portrait commissions a year (or one for that matter, or savings from past years) if he lives cheaply. Maybe he doesn’t care to update the page with such mostly impersonal work. And at his age it’s no surprise if his passion for his own art making has been displaced by new interests. Especially if it’s out of vogue, as he claims, and he doesn’t get along well with the gallery world. He has also mentioned repairing bikes for sale and similar. Again, with low expenses, that type of thing could cover a lot of the basics. I’m open to entertain possibilities about MM but those seem like you want them to be meaningful, i.e. confirmation bias.

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    1. @TimR
      I see Fauxlex raising legitimate questions, not making a lot of assumptions. I’m sorry, but your speculation about an artist getting by on 2 or 3 portrait commissions a year is a howler. Even if it were plausible, it begs the question of why not post a photo of your most recent commissions like every other working artist with a website does? I mean, we could go further into fantasyland and suppose that every single one of his 2 or 3 commission clients over the past decade has asked him not to display the finished product on his website. Or, as you say, maybe he doesn’t want to display “impersonal” work. I would submit that any artist who has not produced work meaningful enough to display on his highly trafficked website for the past decade is no longer an artist. He’s a retired artist. But, as Fauxlex points out, that’s not how he characterizes himself. I don’t think pointing this out equates to making unfair assumptions.

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      1. “Oil portraits start at $3,000 and can go as high as $100,000, she says. “It’s based on artist and size.””
        —Quote from a Bloomberg News article that comes up on a quick search.

        Sell a few of those even at the low end and yes you could live cheaply for a year. Sell a couple in the mid range and have savings for a few years. The very nice one he has on his front page (that never gets updated!) would certainly fetch more than 3,000.

        I didn’t mean to discourage asking questions, just that I don’t think his circumstantial case is as strong as he suggests. They’re legitimate questions, but assuming they prove anything is the faulty assumption.

        Mathis may have word of mouth clients, or promote in places like listings of portrait artists. His website may just be a portfolio he can link to, rather than a first line sales tool. It does seem idle not to update it. But — there are thousands and thousands of artists who are poorly motivated when it comes to the chores of marketing and promotion. It’s not hard for me to imagine he’s much more interested in the conspiracy and science research, biking and bike repair, legions of cats, trivia night, etc etc

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        1. “They’re legitimate questions, but assuming they prove anything is the faulty assumption.”

          Your assumption that Fauxlex thinks his questions prove anything is a faulty assumption. I see nothing in his comment to suggest that he thinks he is proving anything by asking questions. Perhaps you don’t mean to discourage asking questions, but treating questions as if they are attempts at proving what the person raising the questions freely and frequently admits he can’t prove and doesn’t know certainly comes off like an attempt at discouragement.

          What’s also discouraging is wading through your strained hypothetical scenarios in response to the question. The thrust of the question is: If Miles Mathis says he’s an artist, why hasn’t he updated the art displayed on his website over the past decade? You posit that maybe he does a few commissions a year but is so caught up in writing his sloppy, careless articles that for the past ten or fifteen years he simply couldn’t be bothered to set aside the fifteen or twenty minutes it would take to snap a picture of those paintings and throw them up on his website. For fuck’s sake. Are you defending him or trying to make him sound even more ridiculous?

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          1. Correct. Even at the ridiculous rates charged for an oil painting we would still be talking about AT LEAST a dozen per year, for 15 years. Hundreds of works? Where are they all? Mathis is an enormous braggart and there is no way we wouldn’t be seeing these works.

            This is where the imposter conclusion comes into play, because it FEELS like the art is just a backstory to set up the science and conspiracy stuff. Even if the art background is real, this is where the hidden income idea comes into play.

            I really am just asking questions and I feel like almost each time, the more ridiculous explanations are the ones trying to say it could all be legitimate. Those are the ones showing confirmation bias. I’m just piling up mounds of inconsistencies. I have said repeatedly that any kind of firm conclusion eludes me.

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        2. Wait, I have a hypothetical that answers Fauxlex’s question and may put the whole mystery to rest. Maybe all of MM’s paintings for the past ten or fifteen years have been of sex-trafficked children forced to pose naked in pornographic scenarios and all of his patrons are wealthy pedophiles. That would explain everything, wouldn’t it? Do you have any problems with that hypothetical? (In case I need to remind you… I don’t claim that I’ve proved anything.)

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          1. Well, the model Tess is findable online. I have had many theories on the art, and it’s a good question. I have noticed older Tess is wearing an identical article of clothing to a different model in a different work. So the clothing must actually be costumes. Again, this PROVES nothing. It is just another weird thing to add to big pile of weird things.

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          2. But ultimately, it’s not a faulty idea on the merits. I have always felt like the random nude drawing of young Tess on was a “clue”. She is clearly clothed in the matching photo shoot images. If you were a twisted person, would you see that as a signal? Trafficking? This is where I say…we only see the part of the iceberg that is above the water. We really have no way of verifying. Or at least no way I’m willing to try. It remains an interesting idea.

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    2. So, this is the new definition of confirmation bias? … “Pointing out further inconsistencies in my guy’s already unlikely story.”

      Someone else already dragged that red herring across the data trail last week. It is at bottom a plea for people to ignore the mounting pile of proof that the man in Taos is not what he purports to be. It is a plea for people not to ask the questions about him that the papers on his website teach them to ask about everyone else.

      It is a truly tricksy strategy: turning reasonable questioning into the basis of an ad hominem attack. “You keep finding more and more holes in the story, so you have a confirmation bias.”

      In the meantime, the response to the reasonable questions is simply abuse and threats. We should be dissuaded by these from following our noses?

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    3. Agree to completely disagree. This is where the Mathisites expect you to stretch your disbelief into the absurd. Ah yes, maybe this man with an ego the size of the known universe has been getting by on a few large portrait commissions per year for 15 years but never uploading them. A) I’ve considered this and B) It’s a completely absurd notion and not really how artists operate.

      Thats the thing with Mathis though and any good cover backstory. It’s JUST believable enough that you could jump through mental hoops to excuse it. Why are some “commissioned portraits” on the available works page for 10 years? Again, I could do some mental gymnastics to come up with an excuse for that too. But at a certain point you have to realize, this isn’t confirmation bias here. These are real inconsistencies. If there is any confirmation bias at play, it is the people trying to find any story to explain it away. Maybe one thing, but not ALL the weirdness.

      And again, I reserve on the Mathis conclusions. I’m not saying he’s WRONG, I am saying that he is almost certainly hiding his true income. It is the most reasonable conclusion to come to.

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  7. Still talking about MM? That is so 2017… It may be just the simplest of answers: recent commenters intrigued by the genius from Taos are/were late to the party… the MM project was destroyed 2 years ago in this very same blog. Too bad some comments/posts are gone from that time and even earlier.

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    1. It was destroyed? Wait, so our impression that the site is still running and continues to be updated with new papers is a mass hallucination? Damn, TPTB have taken mind control to a whole new level. Thanks for the info, Lawrence.

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      1. Told ya, late to the party…. “Destroyed”… credibility-wise, cover-blown… I was speaking/writing using a poetic device you might know: a metaphor. That’s all, kiddo.

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        1. Oh, I see what you did there, yeah, that was a little over my head. So his cover has been blown… for whom? You? Some other people? Okay, got it. Thanks again.

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          1. Wait… that thing about us being at a party was a metaphor too, wasn’t it? Shit. Guess I’ll just have to eat all these finger sandwiches myself.

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        2. @Lawrence Rothman

          I recall when you did a storm-out here at POM in March of 2018. You left us with these instructions …

          My Farewell Message. Follow steps below and you will be able to decode it:
          1. Select whole text
          2. Copy text (Ctrl+C)
          3. Create a new document in Notepad
          4. Paste text (Ctrl+V)
          5. Save as HTML (.html extension)
          6. Open file in Browser (Chrome, Firefox)
          7. Gracias Totales!!

          If one followed these by using the text you supplied (omitted here), the letters MM appeared. It looked to be your “tribute video” to Miles.

          I am surprised, therefore, to see you back at POM, first of all, after that effusive farewell; and secondly, to see you distancing yourself from the MM you so laboriously left us with.

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          1. Hi Maarten,
            I am surprised too… Your replying to one of my comments, wonder why? The HTML message? Just had a good laugh at it. No tributes to anyone. My storm out? Well, don’t have to give any explanations other than I left on my terms, I come back idem. What about it?

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          2. @Lawrence
            Oh, man, I hate it when people set the terms by which I stop visiting websites and writing things in their comments sections. The fact that you pulled it off on your own terms with POM is quite an accomplishment.

            Or… wait… were you being literary again? …

            @ Ssccoott

            Love the handle!

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    2. I’ve followed Mathis for years. It continuing to operate makes it fair game. Don’t think that’s really even a question.

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  8. I am willing to accept that MM is a real man, maybe an artist, and I like the output from his blog and hope he keeps on keeping on, no matter how the sausage is made behind the scenes.

    What puts me off are his proclamations about having corrected the errors Galileo, Einstein, Newton, to having sat down one night and figuring out who really wrote Shakespeare, to having rewritten the laws of cosmology single-handedly, to being a scratch golfer and chess player, and more. All of that is impossible for one man. That part does not fly. Is he doing that to taunt us, to ridicule our intelligence? (Notice how, today, writing about Olaf Palme, that he closes by claiming to be entitled to Nobel Prizes in science. Maybe that is tongue-in-cheek, and I don’t care who gets a Nobel, but I do know they have one standing rule: You cannot nominate yourself.

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    1. That’s like saying “I like Picasso, but what puts me off is all that cubism business” or “I like Pollock, if he would just learn to use a paintbrush and stop spilling paint everywhere” or “Hef is my guy, but why all the naked ladies?” or, or… : )

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      1. Good points all around. A healthy dose of skepticism is where I’m at. I like the NFL, but I’m pretty sure it’s all rigged.

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    2. So you’re implying that MM thinks he’s full of it…..I noticed that arrogance vibe that is too much for one person to have. BTW any chance on another conference so all the new people can confront MM and present all the questions everyone now has?

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  10. Associative, a thread, perhaps? Instinctive.

    1828 Webster’s
    PALM, verb transitive p’am. To conceal in the palm of the hand.
    They palmed the trick that lost the game.
    1. To impose by fraud. For you may palm upon us new for old.
    2. To handle.
    3. To stroke with the hand.

    Probably nothing at all. Is POM a “problem?” If so, for whom?

    AI algorithms — step by step (searching and sorting) method of solving a
    problem(s) — learn cumulatively as new data is added and analyzed. What if MM was not a person at all, but a machine? Far fetched, I know, but what fun is life without a little speculation and imagination? Until there is more data/evidence, this will be my working theory on the mysterious “artist” and the fascinating stories that captivate even the sleuthiest of sleuths.

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      1. “Malicious users could outsource writing any misinformation under the sun to GPT-2. All they’d need is a sample line of text to get started to generate a plausible-sounding article, complete with sources and quotations that sound legit. And it’s easy to make any website “look” official online, given the democratization of web design.” – Betsy Mikel https://www.inc.com/betsy-mikel/elon-musks-ai-nonprofit-just-made-a-truly-alarming-announcement-it-raises-serious-flags-about-future-of-fake-news.html

        Perhaps consider the possibility that what is released for public consumption is years behind the technology and many of its applications. I’m thinking of a hybrid AI/malicious human collaboration. I trust my gut. No facts, just a lifetime of instinct when something smells rotten.

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        1. I recall seeing a presention, maybe a TED talk panel, demonstrating technology that can supposedly take a recording of a human voice and make that voice sound like it is saying any text you feed it. Of course, the Japanese developer assured the audience it would only be used for good. The tone of the presentation was similar to that of the article you linked to: Be afraid, but not too afraid, because we all know that deep down, corporations are basically good.

          My gut is telling me that both of these technologies may not be as convincing as advertised. I could be wrong, but I just don’t think the quirks of individual thought and emotion as expressed through voice and writing can be faked by machines this way. I realize there is secret technology and that I am not even very knowledgable of publicized tech, but this still smells fishy to me. It occurs to me that making the public THINK anybody’s voice and writing style can be easily replicated gives TPTB virtually as much power as actually having that ability. Just a thought.

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  11. Hey everyone! I have just turned up a new thread in the Mathis saga. Details to follow. It’s really interesting. I’m kind of giddy at having found something so big that I missed before…

    Hang tight.

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      1. I literally am still diving into the rabbit hole and I don’t want to speak until I have gotten deep enough to get a fair idea of what I am seeing. Was just too excited by what I found to let word of it wait until tomorrow.

        And now, a word from our sponsors…

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      2. I have now tried twice. Could the links to the Mathis site be causing it to fail? Why is it not posting? I’m creeped out like I am being prevented from posting this.

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  13. Alright, here goes. I found a Miles Mathis pseudonym with a web presence dating back to Oct 2002 under which there is a 350 page two-part JRR Tolkien fan-fiction book “discovered and translated from Elvish” called “The Farbanks Folios”.

    Pseudonym: Liam Tesshim
    Anagram: MILES MATHIS

    (Unrelated, this made me also anagram the PayPal pseudonym and that comes out to “Miles Mathis US”.)

    The book is staggering in breadth and the dates are when his scientific theories were supposedly developed. It’s just a staggering piece of the puzzle. The book has numerous detailed maps in Elvish. Also very strange is that the entire book is still also hosted by the main mileswmathis.com site, but is not linked to in any way! It is an entire book just hiding beneath the surface. I am speechless.

    (Links removed in an attempt to post)

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    2. I hate to burst your bubble (I really do), but MM actually announced that book on his Updates page a while back and said he was making it freely available to anyone who wanted to read it. I think he also said he’d posted it online before. I didn’t check it out because I’m not into Tolkien. Anyway, this isn’t something that’s really been buried.

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        1. I don’t remember when… a few years ago I guess… might still be buried on the Updates page if you scroll down on it. You may have seen the papers where he republishes his own poems and then explains why they’re so wonderful.

          You know what might be interesting, though? Boethius has talked about software that analyzes the quirks of individual manuscripts and allows you to figure out if things were written by the same person. I have had doubts about whether someone motivated to write an entire Tolkienesque tome and loves language so much that he practically masturbates over his own poetry could really crank out the slop he cranks out now. I don’t have that software or know how it works though.

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          1. Yep, this is a GREAT idea and I have had the same thought about analyzing the guest papers against a Mathis paper for proof it’s just the same hand.

            Reason I was so excited is that I found the 2002 Geocities site completely independently. Found the anagram on a hunch. The language of this book is DENSE. It is, essentially, a life’s work. That now makes Mathis responsible for about five lifetimes worth of stuff. All completely unrelated. And the pile of weirdness grows.

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          2. The software might be helpful with the guest papers (though in some cases the MMG voice is so obvious it seems unnecessary), but I really don’t know how useful it would be to compare the novel and the poetry with the papers. Would the software detect the same authorship of a nonfiction article, a poem, and a fantasy novel? Especially if the poem and fantasy novel were written decades before the papers? Not sure how reliable the comparison could possibly be. A comparison of a current Mathis paper with one of his Greatest Hits–Manson, JFK, etc.–could be interesting though.

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      2. Also, what’s with the “US” in that PayPal anagram? That can’t be a coincidence. Either way, the Geocities site dating to 2002 is new, right? I just find it one more thing to file under the absurdity of it all.

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  14. “Even at the ridiculous rates charged for an oil painting we would still be talking about AT LEAST a dozen per year, for 15 years.”

    Fauxlex, how so? Even assuming he sells on the low end of the scale, he would not have to sell that many works! And if he sells in the mid range, he would quickly have a cushion of savings that could carry him for several years. I’m sorry, I just don’t see your math.

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    1. We have already said that it is absurd that he has gotten by ONLY on high end portraits living alone in Taos, given that we have not seen any such high end portrait for many years. It’s being extremely generous to assume that he could pull in that average of $3,000 per work. You want to argue me on that, I would say that you are being far too gullible. Heck, let’s even say $5,000. Assuming the man needs money to cover bare essentials, let’s say $30,000 per year, then even at an unbelievably generous set of estimates we have 6-8 works per year times 15 years of web presence. That’s 120 works, and again, I am being very generous. If you think he’s got a standing wait list of people who want to pay him $10,000 for a portrait, then I think you would probably believe anything the Mathis site told you anyway.

      That’s 120 works. Works that should exist, but don’t. And the vast majority of art on the site is dated 1989-1991 and has been posted for a decade or more. If you do not see something wrong there, your eyes are wide shut.

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    2. Without evidence of these works, anyone can say anything. I could put up a website saying that I charge $500/hr to consult for businesses and that I do this work full time. Simply defining some high rates does not mean anything. If this man were really that level of a portrait painter, he would live nearer to his market of ultra wealthy people. We would see the works. Your logic could be stretched to basically believing anything. What wouldn’t you believe? So Mathis, being a scientific genius and author or 4-5 known books and traveler of the world and known artist has somehow built up a war chest from the works that have been on his sold page for 12 years?

      This is where I’m saying, I don’t refute that you could do mental gymnastics to try to believe this. You could. The income being what we are told is within a very strained realm of possibility. I just think it’s clear that the MORE REASONABLE conclusion is that the man in Taos has a hidden income. Not claiming to have proven anything, just saying that the likelier explanation is a hidden income.

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  15. Gee, you boys just can’t quit bashing Miles. What a joyful blog, really.

    Oh, I almost forgot – time to check up your links, Mark. Your beloved co-author of face-chopping-section-now-mostly-retracted, Straight, pulled down his blog ages ago, just like Terran.

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      1. I wanted to help ya, but ya just can’t see it. Or won’t see it. Now I need to decide which one of these two is true.

        How could ya possibly know? Since when did you change y’r opinion from MMG back to MM? If I follow y’r logic, there’s a bunch of unknown authors of everything stemming from Miles’ site. Ya even doubt that the man from Taos you’ve personally met, isn’t necessarily the man who ya were introduced to – Miles Mathis himself. But now y’r suddenly having a feeling….about what exactly? Did the group cease to exist? Or ya suddenly realized ya were wrong all along? Gee, what a logical mess ya made so far.

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        1. The writing style is stifled, use of “ya” to make yourself less able. I don’t pretend to have complete grasp of the man or group, whichever it is, its purpose or substance. So I waver. So what? Incomplete knowledge is a state of existence. Ya seem to know more than me, why don’t ya just give it up?

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          1. So what? How about you quit bashing Miles since ya admit you’re merely speculating? Wouldn’t ya be satisfied with a simple “told ya” if he’s ever shown as compromised? He criticized your work for serious flaw which makes yr work of dubious nature, while ya criticize him for…what exactly? Ya never proved or presented any case where he’s been dishonest on purpose. Ya took a very bad angle angle while attacking him, based mostly on subjective opinion, which is worth zero. That’s why yr punches didn’t land. They were empty claims. He may have tripped over some details, but there’s no deliberate misdirection coming from him. Thousands of his readers would’ve found something by now, don’t you think? But it didn’t happen. Yet. So pull yr self together and stop further damaging yr image. Be a wise man, not an angry one.

            Oh, and my moniker is spelled MIN-I-ME, like Mini me.

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            2. The only one who sounds angry here is you, MM. And this concept that nothing is of value if it is not outright proven is a ludicrous dodge.

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            3. In fact, this is the same ludicrous dodge that the Mathis paper writer themself uses in their last response to POM. Isn’t that a strange coincidence? Hmmm. And for someone who is supposed to be as sharp as Mathis, I find it pretty ridiculous that their argument in reply is that if people are unable to say what exactly is being misdirected from, then any skepticism is inherently invalid. This is simply poor logic and it is deliberately misleading.

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          2. Fauxlex, you need to cut on your dosage. And re-read what I wrote about yr arguments in another thread. They’re empty. Yr running on assumptions. Which makes your criticism sound stupid and hysteric. Btw, change yr moniker. It says “wrong law” in latin. That could be extrapolated as wrong logic, and it almost sounds identical. Which then actually resembles your conclusions. Nomen est omen – is true in your case.

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            1. Hey Miles, glad you cut the pretense. Fauxlex also can mean fake Rolex if you’re not a twat. Also, assumptions aren’t useless when they are made along the path of discovery. They are a means of testing whether you are on a right path. I can ASSUME that a magician is not actually cutting a person in half by the observation of mirrors and smoke. I might not know exactly how the sausage is made, per se, but I can make a fair ASSUMPTION that what I am witnessing is not the magical thing being claimed. But you know that. You’re just trying to muddy the waters, throw the weak-minded down false paths, and try to insult those who don’t believe in the Mathis page as being mentally ill. It’s the same old stuff. Yawn.

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  16. Mine-me? Went for a look in Tall Tales Taos & there is a Clinton piece posted. My, my those folk get a LOT of attention (distraction) yet the pedo & Epsteen (deliberate miss spell) subject does not.

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