How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
I have been reading, only slowly and without much absorption, about the electric universe. I don’t plunge into such projects expecting immediate comprehension. The subject matter is complex, and only slowly does any of it begin to penetrate the thick hide of the accountant.
Still, it is a joy to read very difficult material, even if most of it is bouncing off that hard outer surface. (As the late Tom Magliozzi of Car Talk fame said, he was a member of Densa, not Mensa.)
We have just concluded a two-week trip to Baja, California, watching whales and kayaking. It’s different and beautiful down there except for the litter all about, the run down buildings and impoverished population.
Our guides were educated men and women – this is common. One is a marine biologist. What the hell is he doing helping privileged Americans and Canadians push kayaks cross the Sea of Cortez? It is a but choice he made. Why? Because all the other choices were worse. That makes me sad. He wants to apply his learning but cannot break through. So he lives in Lareto and in winter makes his living erecting tents and paddling his kayak at a far slower rate than he is capable of …
I did not watch the Saints/Rams game and so had not seen this play before today. It certainly adds fuel to the fire for those who think NFL games are fixed. This was blatant pass interference that the whole viewing audience saw. (Click on the “Watch on YouTube”link to see it.)
I am currently working on an AIDS piece, and it is proving extremely difficult for me. It will be done in a few days I think, but in the meantime I am violating one of the core concepts of blogging, not putting up enough fresh material.
This piece is the result of a discussion I had a while back stemming from Facebook and politics. It goes off in an unplanned direction.
What I see going on, with Facebook as the prime mover, is an ongoing and fake investigation into Donald Trump and Russian influence in our elections in 2016. It portends to be another Watergate, that is, the landscape is seeded with new clues on a regular basis. This is done to keep the issue alive and front and center. The purpose is to keep people who do pay attention to politics fixated on the wrong subject and asking the wrong questions. That keeps them out of the hair of real power, which operates behind a veil of media indifference and silence.
It is helpful in marketing, or in being victimized by marketing, to understand that anything that is “free” is essentially worthless. The word has no intrinsic meaning. We just concluded a trip to Belize and used Southwest Airlines for the journey. More about that later.
Two years ago we went to Long Island for a family get-together, and we had accumulated over the years a pile of airline miles, something given us for “free” for using certain credit cards and flying on certain airlines. By use of a Capital One credit card, we had over (a long period of) time accumulated over 100,000 miles, so I thought it a good time to cash them in and save a few bucks.
Continue reading “My Southwest Airlines experience … the joke is on us!”
“…I think the Catholic Church was too much blamed in the case of Galileo – he was just a victim of peer review.” (Eric J. Lerner, The Big Bang Never Happened, 1991)
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” (Upton Sinclair)
I stumbled on the Lerner quote this morning, and thought it would be a nice way to introduce a subject in need of examination, PSA, or the prostate specific antigen, discovered by Richard Ablin in 1970. It has been his life’s work to inform the public on the true nature of the PSA test. Peer review, or enforced mediocrity, plays a large part in preventing the truth about various forms of quackery from seeing light of day. Ablin’s work against PSA does not stand the withering criticism of his peers, who are in it for the money. PSA testing, followed by unnecessary biopsies and prostatectomies, is big business. Ablin doesn’t get it.
Albin co-wrote the book, The Great Prostate Hoax: How Big Medicine Hijacked the PSA Test and Caused a Public Health Disaster. Since it was he who discovered PSA, he has a right to speak up. (I fear, however, that in the U.S. the best place to hide something is in a book. )
The above video, a little over two minutes, is making the rounds on Facebook, our major source of propaganda these days. Pay close attention, as it reveals far more than intended.
I often discover, and I know this is common, that problems and riddles are revealed to me as I write as if my fingers on the keyboard operate as independent minds. The very fact that I tackle a problem and try to understand it is in itself a revealing exercise.
I am hoping to hell that happens with this effort. Dave McGowan, in my view a spook doing limited hangouts (fake death 11/22/2015), wrote (or merely published) a fourteen-part series called Wagging the Moondoggie about the moon landing hoax. Just as with the Miles Mathis Group, though shady and having concealed motives (“Center for an Informed America” – CIA … really?), though we cannot know the underlying intent, it is worth reading. It is well written, and entertaining too.
“We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever masquerades as science.” (Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan)
Via the Internet and a blog, now called the Montana Post (formerly called Intelligent Discontent), I got to know a man named Don (who goes by the nickname Pogie.) Don frequently assailed critics by quizzing them on their use of sources. If something came from the New York Times, OK. If not, if from something less ‘reputable,’ Don would smugly dismiss both the person and the opinion.
Don’s blog posts repeat one theme only, that Democrats are splendid public servants and Republicans scoundrels. It is unnerving to see this as a “thoughtful” outlook on our landscape. I have traveled only sparingly to his site in these past few years, and only bring it up now to make this point: Don doesn’t think for himself. He relies on authority figures and sources.
Continue reading “Intelligent discontent, or rigid orthodoxy?”
It is time now to release the prisoners. If you were banned here recently, and your name is not Skink, you are welcomed back. I know on your end it feels like an injustice. It is. I had a private email exchange with B Muller, and told her that I was not comfortable banning her, so I just asked her to deal with the injustice, as we adults often must do, and she would soon be back in business. I saved her quarantined comments, and will release them now. What harm?
Piece of Mindful 