I have a three-part writing mission, and get sidetracked. Part one is to merely establish that the American people are not capable of self-governance* – not now, anyway. Time might heal us, make us sane again, but agitation propaganda destroys intellectual abilities, permanently, so that it takes new people with fresh brains to lead us out of our current mess.

But each new generation is put through the same grinder of mass media, thought control and education that produces these empty-headed robots who pass for responsible citizens.

I suppose out of that attitude comes the haughty notion that some of us are smarter than most of us, creating resentment. “Are you calling me stupid?” Even stupid people resent that. However, we are talking about a particular kind of insight, the understanding of politics and psychological manipulation that only a few people possess.

This country, since the end of World War II, has been deeply brainwashed, boiled in agitprop all the way from having kids duck and cover and do air raid drills in the 1950s to the current military flyovers at sporting events and the onslaught of fake shootings. These events are designed to keep us in a high state of tension. In that state of mind, we cannot reason properly, and are susceptible to suggestion and manipulation.

Those of us who can see through this nonsense simply have the ability to relax. There ain’t no boogeymen out there, ain’t no terrorists knocking on our doors, ain’t no reason to walk around in fear. If you know that, you can sit quietly and read a book or contemplate a sunrise.

Events like 9/11, Boston, Paris and now San Bernardino (which, until proven otherwise I assume to be just another planned tragedy) are “agitation propaganda.” (A quick tour of Wikipedia and other sources will tell you that Lenin, Hitler and Mao practiced it, but will offer no suggestion that it is going on here this very moment.)

But classical study in propaganda teaches that people cannot live in such a high-wire state for long, and need intervals of relaxation in between agitations. In the United States these days we are not getting any time off. The agitation is unrelenting.

The results of unabated agitprop are resignation of the intellect (the stupidity we see about us now) and insanity. The underlying goal, support for more wars, is what drives the masters of deceit, but in the end they are left with a population that cannot think and only knows how to hate on command.

They seem to want that. So it is that otherwise capable people have been reduced to snarling wolves wanting revenge against the latest target for the United States military. Right now it is Syria. Next week it could be Tonga.

If we stop and think about it, we have no more reason to attack Syria than we did Vietnam, Iraq, Serbia, Libya or Afghanistan. But who has time to “stop and think?” The current ongoing mass shootings are serving the purpose of Orwell’s Two-Minute Hate, to remove thinking from our daily lives and replace it with a cause for action.

I wish they would let up. I wish they would let us relax. I am tired of the stupidity, tension, hatred, and insanity that is the United States today. But all of this reinforces the idea that causes me to write these words: We are not a people capable of self-governance. Not now, anyway.

Maybe for a brief interval after World War II, before the decision was made that we would be a National Security State in search of enemies, that we would be propagandized, we were a sane people. But that ship sailed in 1947.

Until we are given a decent interval of relaxation, a time to recover our senses and learn to reason again, we will not have the intellectual capacity needed to make wise choices or form sane popular movements for peace and human decency.

Oh, wait – what’s that I see? Another mass shooting? Where this time? Let’s go check it out! Gotta go! New reason for hatred! See ya!
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*Part two is to analyze our political class and voting system, part three, the hardest part, is to describe what is behind the curtain, how our system of governance really functions, in concrete terms. I hope to get to that point someday.

I had occasion this morning to visit both the Billings Gazette and Missoulian websites. Both are owned by Lee, both are busy-busy, full of links, and annoying. If you think newspapers exist to deliver news, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Newspapers are in the business of collecting audiences to sell to advertisers, their true customers. News is a secondary pursuit.

Their latest endeavor in the annals of annoyance is to block access to a story* until we answer some advertising questions.

I have said for years the best way to fight intrusive advertising is to lie. If you have qualms about that, remember that they don’t have a right to your information, and you have no obligation to give it to them. Lying in that situation is a venial sin, three Hail Mary’s at most, if even that.

The Gazette asked me if I had been to Sam’s Club (no, but said yes) and if I had a small child (ditto). I fed them useless data. If enough people do that, we will screw up their database. (They asked me what my favorite grocer is and I said Pain & Diaz. That they will probably spot.)

It astounds me to know that most people treat advertisers with respect. The job of the advertiser is to get your attention by any means possible; to market to you in a subliminal and underhanded manner; and to make you unhappy. Happy people, after all, don’t need to buy stuff.

*Some will say that we should not get a news story for free, so that answering their stupid questions is a small price of admission. After all, they have bills to pay. I’ve been in business for myself for decades, and not once has anyone ever expressed concern that I might not make it. My answer to this concern is “I don’t care.”

We are swimming in fake events – the US campaign over who gets to be our next fake president is in full swing. Except for Bernie Sanders, these people are all serious about wanting the job. Bernie is fake, however, working for Hillary. This is quite obvious now.

The attacks in Paris were fake as well, false flag all the way. Anyone with a brain and paying close attention can figure that out. They had their intended effect, I suppose, as most Americans (and apparently French) are not terribly sophisticated about these things.

Meanwhile, there was an incident that is apparently real – Turkey’s military shot down a Russian fighter jet. According to Russian sources, the pilot safely ejected, but other sources say they are dead, possibly murdered on the ground.

Like the Paris attacks, this is a provocation, and a serious one. While Russia and the U.S. were once secretly allied behind the façade of the Cold War, they are now seriously at odds. (Or so it appears. We never can know for sure.)

But Turkish aggression fits – if indeed you know how to read news. The terrorist forces in Syria are a Western creation*, financed by CIA, trained in Saudi Arabia, and supplied by the Americans and French. The Turks maintain the corridor that keeps their supply lines open.

The Russians have launched a military campaign to do something that others only claimed to want to do – put the terrorist forces in the ground. They have succeeded, and in so doing are infuriating the West. Worse yet, Russians have demonstrated military sophistication and might that Langley did not know it possessed.

It only takes a short leap, and not an illogical one, to suggest that Turkey was not acting on its own, but rather on orders from terror central, either NATO headquarters or Langley (perhaps a redundancy). The ultimate objective? Possibly a game of chicken to get the Russians to back down.

There is good reporting going on here and possibly here.
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*This does not mean that the individual fighters for the various false-front groups are aware of the level of deceit. Just as American soldiers imagine they know why they are in Afghanistan, but don’t really, so too would I expect low levels of awareness among fighter for ISIS, al Nusra, al Qaeda, etc.

I received some criticism down below of being too far down the “rabbit hole.” That’s fair – all criticism is fair if offered without an agenda. For instance, when I wrote about bison in another piece, I was set straight and brought up to speed by a couple of men of good will who simply know the issue better than I do. All I need do in that situation is get up to speed.

So understand, I do not mind criticism. It’s a healthy thing. But I do want to answer the rabbit hole remark, and in such a manner as to respect the integrity of my critic. He’s good and fair minded, the latter a rare quality among bloggers.

I wanted out of blogging a while back. I was tired of having the same conversation every day. Worse than that, I had seen too much of this world, this country, and had lost all respect for our institutions and leaders. I was tired of visiting the same issues and always arriving at the same conclusion – we are being lied to. I was tired of the extreme gullibility around me, how every lie is believed with utter credulity. That is still the case.

Knowing what I know, having spent 27 years of my life looking for answers, I can spot a lie fairly easily. For instance, every public word uttered by every politician is some form of a lie. They have to lie, as by definition they are serving two masters and cannot tell the truth to both. To survive in office, they have to be loyal to one and lie to the other. They always end up serving the one with the most power, and it is not the uniformed and gullible voter.

So I long ago lost interest in politics and politicians. It’s wasted energy, as election outcomes have no bearing on public policy. Representative government long ago took leave of this land. I can’t pin the date, but for my purposes, I will guess it was 4/12/45, the day FDR was murdered [or died naturally or faked his death], and his successor, Harry Truman, a corrupt and crooked man of little talent, took office. I like that date because it frames the events of my lifetime. I came along five years later. Before that time is probably just as corrupt, but I wasn’t around for it. Since our history is a lie too, there’s little point in going back too far.

We’ve not had real presidents in my life then. Just actors and aristocrats and intelligence operatives, as we have now. The news media was a joke even in the 1930’s, when General Smedley Butler was told not to worry about them in the 1933 coup attempt. It has not reformed itself, so that virtually nothing we see on TV or read in newspapers is true save perhaps the weather forecast. These days, with six companies owning just about everything, it’s a sad joke.

Some say the military runs the show behind the scenes, but I take it a step higher. The military serves at the behest of an even higher power, the oligarchy. And that force, our wealthiest families, our .1%, knows no end to its avarice and greed. The whole planet is on a platter before it, and the enormous wealth generated by this vast country is at its disposal. Our taxes are used primarily to fund wars, and when they run short of cash, they attack Social Security and Medicare, the only two government programs still functioning well.

It’s an endless quest. The American public is regarded as the domestic enemy, and so we are under constant attack, lied to, dumbed down by entertainment and sports, and kept barely literate by education (just enough to easily accept advertising and propaganda into our pretty little heads). We are now fed a steady stream of lies – easily unraveled by anyone with a functioning brain. And when there is need for a war, an attack on some still-unconquered and independent place, we are fed a false flag event to stir our silly little heads into a frenzy of support.

Thus did I know the Paris attacks to be fake. Where once they might shed real blood and do some real murdering (as with Operation Gladio), these days they don’t have to work that hard. They just set off some noisy firecrackers and call in the dogs of the media to spread lies. Soon enough we see Facebook filled with photographs covered with French flags, comedians offering solemn tributes to fake dead before they go back on script, and singers paying lofty tributes stirring our hearts to mourn for the fake dead. Your country is about to go on a another killing spree, real murders – not fake ones – and needs your support. Patriots, do not let them down!

Does that sound world weary? Probably, but I am not. I’ve never felt so alive as I do now. Truth is an energizer. It always thrills me.

I came to realize that the reality around me is fake, and that I would never get that point across to anyone, and so I decided to quit blogging and just tune it out. But that did not last long. I need to write. So I decided to stick closer to home and heart, and write about my home state, Montana. And to keep my wits about me, I decided to ban three men who bring me down into the depths of silliness and stupidity.

I may waver, but still intend to stick by my plan. As I saw Paris go down, and then saw all of the automatic Pavlonian credulity, I could not help but say “Folks, if everything before now was a lie, it is highly unlikely they decided to start telling the truth this time.” So I went off track and wrote about some obvious fakery there, an easily understood false flag event designed to lure the American and European public into support of yet another massacre. Can’t help myself.

But if you, dear reader, cannot help yourself but to fall for every fresh lie they put on your plate, who am I to stop you? Enjoy. It’s your brain. You can either use it or not.

Truth is not a “rabbit hole.” It is a source of solace, a calm port in a sea of turbulence. I will always find comfort there. I am my own man. Can you say as much?