Morning in Cortina, Italy. A waiter last night asked me what a sophisticated urbanite like myself was doing in a rustic setting like this. I told him we’d be trekking in the nearby mountains. Also, I asked, where are your women?

The Geneva portion of our trip has two purposes, to reacquaint with our daughter, and get accustomed to the time change. We have done both, and have a good feeling about it. I now wake up as the sun rises, just like back home, my head full of surprises and ambition.

Yesterday we took a good long time to achieve the day’s goal, a swim in the Rhone. We managed to do other things, like a farmers’ market and long lunch eating food I’ve never eaten before. The menu was a wide variety of different things, like fish and shell food and weird things that grow here and there thrown them together with a spice or two. There was nothing familiar to fall back on so I ordered smoked salmon, uncooked, along with a mixture of salad, shrimp, tomatoes, avocado and other things I do not understand. It tasted good, took a long time to eat, and of course the wine complemented the meal to such a degree that I now better understand the popularity of wine. Club soda works as well, but wine is a complement to all the other favors and a relaxant. Only a small few drink it for its intoxicating powers.

The night before we sat with a view of Jet D’eau, Lake Geneva and Mount Blanc, with a full moon of course, and ate tapas – eight different dishes before us including figs, mangos, tuna, lamb, tofu … the meal was not to satisfy the appetite so much as the palate. American restaurants load you up with one or two things, pizza or beef and french fries, far more calories than we need. The French are more about dining than eating.

We did finally make it to the Rhone yesterday for a swim. I’ll add a photo or two later. It was an affair for the younger crowd, with hot young bodies displayed, swimsuits barely covering torsos, grabbing on to tight young asses and saying “naked” to the legal limit. The girls were pretty too.

I like to say things like that for my son’s benefit, getting all salacious only to disappoint him with latent homosexuality. Then he can cover his eyes and say “Dad! in the manner of Sylvester the cat’s son prior to putting a bag over his head and saying “Oh the shame if it.”

So we got to the place where the Rhone flows out of Lake Geneva, hit the water, icy cold, and quickly adapted and simply floated downstream to a dock where we climbed out, walked back and did it again. It was delightful. The water was clear and clean, the current fast enough to move us along without scaring us.

The average age was probably 22, hundreds of youth, so that our aging bodies were invisible to all but our own kind. There was one woman who was topless. She was everyone’s grandma, so used to being invisible that being topless in public seemed the natural thing to do. “Look away!” I thought.

We met a couple our age, Aussies, and much like us as possible. They are retired and traveling, fit and off to do the complete Mt. Blanc circuit, 100 miles over twelve days. They will be with a group. Both he and I eschew the group travel setting, as the slowest members always rule, but he was given no choice in the matter, and like me, will probably find the experience to be great fun. They are then off to Malta for “a change of pace” before returning to their home, a thirty hour journey by plane, including changes.

One more day here, and then we are off to Zermatt, the Matterhorn (for viewing, not climbing), and points beyond. The photos of yesterday’s event are on my wife’s iPhone. I’ll see if anything is worth reproducing later. I tried to avoid those tight young asses, and the young girls too, and capture the whole scene. We’ll see how it turned out.

We are off tomorrow on yet another journey of a lifetime. We have to do it while we can. This time we are off to Geneva, Zermatt, the Dolomites, Ljubljana, Florence, Cinque Terre, and finally Milan. It’s a return visit to Florence for us. That place, with its history and culture, is a magnet.

Once one the ground we’ll be using our favorite forms of transportation – our feet, and the amazing European train system.

I’ll probably be writing throughout. I don’t sleep a whole lot compared to other mortals and have time in the early morning for this purpose.
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This blog, more than anything, is my personal journal. I’ve been asked why I do not simply write and keep it under wraps, like a diary. I don’t get that at all. I have had to change my name to a nom de plume recently, as there are some nasty people out there. But understand, that has nothing to do with other bloggers or commenters, all of whom have good manners mostly, or just somewhat, like me.

Paul Marshall is my “porn name,” our middle name coupled with the street we were born on. If you were born on a numbered street, it’s a little more difficult, but do try it on your own … it usually sounds porny. I don’t know why.

My writings here go back to 2006, and the changes in my outlook during that time are a trip on a vine over a chasm – hoping like hell for a safe landing. Just asking a question leads to a whole new outlook. I know all about security in moderate views, how hiding from exposure to ugly truths leads to a more stable existence. However, once the question was asked, I was on the vine. The destination is no safer than a return journey.

I now have the ability to go back and review my own thoughts from 2006 to now, not knowing then where I was headed. I cringe at times, but am forgiving. It’s a journey.

Perhaps the greatest movie I have seen in my time was the Godfather, Part 2. But the best was Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks’ masterpiece. Below is a scene encapsulating American politics. (Important back story for the viewer: the town is Rock Ridge, somewhere in the west. The townspeople are frightened by evildoers. Everyone in town shares the last name “Johnson,” and all of the Johnson’s support and agree all the other Johnson’s. There’s an ice cream store in the middle of the town with a large sign that says “Howard Johnson’s – One Flavor”.)

[Sorry about the ad, but this is The United States America, where advertisers are free to interrupt any gathering at any time for any purpose. Hell, they even get to target kids!]

In the post below regarding the 2000 election I wrote

The 2000 election: Al Gore won, so that the ascension of George W. Bush was yet another coup. I have no regard for Al Gore, and so don’t imagine the policy differences that resulted from Bush holding office over him mattered much, but I stand to be educated.

In other words, there were no history-changing differences between the two aristocrats that were involved in the 2000 coup. Had President Al Gore been aboard Air Force One that day has it flew at low altitude around the country without fighter jet protection, having been given an ultimatum complete with nuclear launch codes to demonstrate the power behind it, he too would have capitulated.

But the coup plotters had apparently been planning 9/11 since at least 1997, so getting their team into office was probably seen as essential to get the right people in position to pull it off. There had to be moles in place throughout the military and in various civilian agencies for the plot to succeed as it did.

Would they have been able to pull it off without having captured the presidency in 2000? I do not know, of course. But I suspect, given that they went so far as to threaten the Supreme Court into making one of the most embarrassing and baseless rulings in American history to get Bush in power, they thought it mattered.

I do not for a second think that George W. Bush was trusted with any information surrounding 9/11. He was a deer in the headlights. Cheney? Perhaps. But this is the United States of America. We do not investigate these crimes, and so will not know for many years to come the manipulations behind that event.

If ever.

Below is a satellite photo of the seas and coastline of New York and Canada on 9/11/2001. The inset shows Manhattan. See the smoke dust trail from the World Trade Center.

Below is the pathway of a hurricane Erin, shown above, in the days up to and after 9/11/2001. It remained stationary during the events of that day.

Below is an NBC weather forecast on 9/11/2001, as shown on TV screens even as the hurricane was present.

Finally, below are graphs from various reading stations in Alaska of fluctuations in the earth’s magnetic fields on 9/11/2001. Note the small blip at about 12:45 UT (8:45 EDT), and then a large and ongoing disruption at 14:00 UT (10:00 AM EDT) on that day. These blips coincide with the “planes” hitting the first tower, and then WTC2 turning to dust, and continue until WTC7 disappears that afternoon. Apparently, in addition to “planes” hitting the buildings, we also witnessed a magnetic event.

A fella can’t make this stuff up.

Here’s a conundrum: The National Assessment of Adult Literacy is a complex document with a large body of information from which one can draw inferences and conclusions. It concludes that only 13% of American college graduates (in 2003) “can perform complex and challenging literacy activities.”

Among those activities would be the ability to understand the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. In other words, only 13% of the public is capable of understanding that only 13% of the public is capable of understanding the assessment.

I am going to draw some inferences about that in the post that appears below this one. I wanted to keep this post short, as I know full well that if an entire post does not appear on the screen when someone clicks on this site, readership falls off dramatically. Longer posts are like homework assignments.

I don’t fancy that people should read what I write. That’s a narcissistic notion. Rather, I simply know that if I write beyond a few short paragraphs, people don’t read. That’s all.

These attitudes you have adopted – I know they comfort you. You are indifferent and incurious about the important events of our times. You are smug about it, thinking yourself wise to be so. But I must advise you that from a distance your attitude is indistinguishable from stupidity.

Such is the nature of our society that people actually capable of critical thought are stigmatized as being the dumber ones, perhaps even suffering mental illness.

The phrase “conspiracy theorist” originated in the bowels of the CIA in the late 1960’s in response to a large part of the population not believing the official story of the murder of John F. Kennedy. The phrase itself is a PSYOP, or …

“[a] planned operation to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”

We are governed by PSYOPS. If you, the reader, automatically assume that “conspiracy theorists” are wrong and dumb and mentally deficient, you’ve been successfully gamed. You are the victim of a PSYOP.

We are all tested from birth. The school systems is designed to survey the herd and pick out the ones capable of certain tasks – soldiers, workers, bureaucrats. The culling process does not seek “intelligence*” so much as useful abilities. Based on testing we are routed to various occupations even as we imagine we self-select our careers.

The idea that our schooling system teaches us critical thinking skills is absurd. That is not why it is there. If tasked to do so, it could perform that service. In fact, exclusive schools used to train our privileged youth do indeed teach these skills. But the leadership class does not want a general public capable of critical thought. Quite the opposite. Those of us who survive schooling and who do indeed learn to use our minds in a critical fashion are set aside for derision and abuse.

It may appear that I am engaged in contradiction, at once saying that the public is not capable of drawing correct inferences from information, and at the same time that the majority of the public does indeed disbelieve the official story regards the JFK hit.

It is true that a majority of the public does not buy the official story. It is also true that majority of the public, even knowing the official story to be false, does not grasp the staggering implications that naturally follow.

As a result, while knowledge of a lie is widespread, the implications of that lie are bottled up, and we go on with business as usual. We suffer the same fools in our political class, unaware of the real power that stands behind them pulling their strings. We endure criminal activities on a massive scale pulled off in broad daylight by our military class. We suffer from advertising and psychological manipulation from the business world. And we allow the news media to keep it all bottled up by means of distraction.

To those of us who grasped the significance of the murder of JFK, it appears that the task of the overlords has gotten easier. Events like 9/11, Boston and most recently Charlotte are pulled off with frightening ease. Cover stories around 9/11, for instance, don’t withstand five seconds critical examination and yet stand unchallenged by the majority of the public.

Reading is key, of course, not to be told what to think, but to gather raw data and make critical connections. There’s never enough, and we never know all we should know, perhaps jumping to conclusions based on inadequate data.

With the Boston false flag operation, for example, it is easy to see from photographs that the injuries were fake and the participants mere actors, but wait a minute! WHY do we have access to such high quality photography? Why was it not bottled up at the source? Surely those who pulled of this operation were able to keep control of the images. That was the whole point!

There is a famous photograph of three ‘tramps” being led from Dealey Plaza by a fake cop on 11/22/63. Two are suspected to be E. Howard Hunt and Charles Harrington, Woody’s dad, a professional hit man. But wait a minute … agents of various stripes monitored everyone in the Plaza that day, and every available photograph was confiscated. Most never saw light of day. Yet we have that set of photos, clear and concise, taken by a professional photographer, and released to the public. Why?

It has to do with intelligence – private researchers have uncovered a tremendous body of data, enough to draw conclusion about the who and why of that day. But there exist smarter people, drawn from our best schools and trained in deceit on a high level. So the class of curious citizens, those capable of dealing with the complexities of the major events of our times, are systematically diddled by people of even higher intelligence. The photographs are real enough, but the inferences deliberately misleading.

No way out, you say? Hall of mirrors? Puzzle palace? Perhaps. What else to do with our lives – stop thinking? That is not an option.
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*I have seen a list which appears to be to be comprehensive detailing nine types of intelligence. Our testing regime focuses only on three, logical-mathematical, linguistic, and spatial.

I had quite a bit of driving to do yesterday, and so wandered the dial on local radio. There seem but a couple of venues left in Denver beyond Christian and music – right-wing talk, and financial talk.

Right-wing talk radio is merely a “look here not there” distraction vehicle. Hosts I listened to are chanting in unison that Obama made a huge blunder in negotiation an arms deal with Iran.  We don’t even know the specifics of that deal, but so what. The radio hosts are merely chumming the waters for sake of political agitation. It keeps listeners married to the two-party system.

If there is a left-wing talk radio circuit around (not in Denver), it serves the same purpose, keeping people focused on bad old Republicans, ignoring really bad old Democrats. Radio is the ideal agitprop forum, and beyond advertising, serves no other purpose.

Please don’t misunderstand – not everyone is wrong about everything on those outlets – it just doesn’t matter. Limbaugh, for instance, talks about how too-easy-to-get student loans are driving up tuition costs. He’s right about that, as I see it, and probably about a lot of stuff. All of these hosts have good points here and there, whether I think they are right or wrong. (I don’t understand everything either.) But their purpose is not to inform, but rather to agitate the audience, to keep them focused on message. Nothing more.

Financial talk is about people with money problems receiving good advice from the various hosts, Clark Howard probably the best. What is most interesting is the low level of financial savvy among callers, how easily they are picked off by hucksters of all stripes. Then, because they don’t read what they sign, they find themselves trapped by a contract.

One caller, for instance, had racked up $45,000 in credit card debt, and wants to get a better deal from the credit card companies. The host rightly informed her that since the companies have her right where they want her, they are not about to negotiate a better deal for her. She walked into her situation with eyes wide shut.

There are several schools of thought on why the American public is both politically and financially illiterate. One is that the schools don’t teach critical thinking skills or basic financial math (as in “annuities,” the beating heart of all finance).

I don’t know about that. I assume that if they do teach it, the kids ain’t learning it. The purpose of Prussian-style mandatory public education is to produce soldiers for the military, workers for the factories, and bureaucrats for the government. Thinking skills are not required for any of that.

Another school of thought was expressed by Alexis de Tocqueville as he toured America in the early 1800s:

When a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with singular dexterity; but at the same time he loses the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work. He every day becomes more adroit and less industrious; so that it may be said of him, that in proportion as the workman improves the man is degraded. (Democracy in America, 1835)

In other words, we work too hard at our jobs, and not enough on our minds.
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PS: Obviously, if kid were taught about annuities in high school, the student loan program would dry up.

I was reading a Linkedin profile this morning, and discovered yet another amazing person. I wondered as I read it if there exists in this land an ordinary human.

I worked jobs. I filled slots, became proficient at the things I did. When I left those slots, other people stepped in, and they too became proficient.

During the time I worked, I had bosses who were also ordinary people. Often times the boss would fear a subordinate who showed talent greater than his own. There is a lot of politics and intrigue in business environments because ordinary people have a need to stand head and shoulders above other ordinary people.

The world is full of ordinary people doing ordinary work and imagining they are amazing and fearing that other ordinary people are going to displace them. Insecurity is the great driver in our society. It makes us write long essays about our accomplishments on Linkedin.

I remember once sitting in a classroom in college as the teacher talked about the need to make even modest jobs sound impressive. She said that even if you sold popcorn in a movie theater, on your resume you should make it sound important. I raised my hand and suggested that person should be “Manager, corn products division.” It got quite a laugh. If only it were not true to life.

I went on to become a CPA, and over the years I’ve done a lot of CPA-type work. It’s a niche, a little grinding, requiring some obsessive characteristics. Filling numbers in little boxes is by its nature obsessive. Understanding just a small part of the tax code is dull and dry and has little bearing on real life and living. It pays well.

I have not set the world on fire. I just worked, got paid, and did other things too. I really enjoyed playing softball, and did that a lot.

I knew a wonderful man who deeply influenced the lives of others, and yet who made less money than any of the horn-tooters on Linkedin. There sits now a monument with his picture on it, erected after his death. As it should be. He left a mark.

The world of jobs and business advancement is one of hard core self-selling, so undignified and yet so essential to success. Might I suggest we all celebrate our ordinariness, and chill?

There are extraordinary people out there. They are usually the quiet ones.

There are few genuine people in politics. Someone once suggested that politicians wear insignias on their suits for their sponsors, like race care drivers. That’s a clever thought, but pointless, as in real politics the insignias would be lies too. Real sponsors would remain hidden.

Politics is not just duplicity, but double and triple duplicity. Thus if a mystery is uncovered, it was probably planted and meant to be uncovered to further the mystery. Politics a most fascinating avenue of inquiry. What is real?

Take Bernie Sanders, for instance. He is one of a dozen or so Jewish senators. He is a self-proclaimed socialist. That’s all fine, and he could as easily be a Mormon and self-proclaimed Randian. That is all window dressing. There are no ideologies in politics. There are only interests.

Who is Bernie, really? We should always hold out for the possibility that he is really what he says he is. But in addition, we should always hold out for the possibility that he is not. It is, after all, politics.

“Socialists” are not allowed to survive in real politics. While socialism is widely practiced here and abroad, we do not like to describe ourselves as such. So normally a self-described animal of that stripe would not attain the necessary stature and name recognition to survive even in the House of Representatives, much less the U.S. Senate.  For Bernie to make the jump from obscurity to the senate required some juice.

That probably means he is something far more common in politics than a genuine person, “controlled opposition.” In real politics, where power comes only from money backers, the players are stationed like pawns in a chess board.

Bernie decided to run for president. It’s quixotic. What possible good comes of it? When genuine people run, say a Dennis Kucinich, they are marginalized. They are not mentioned by name in the polls (“others”). They are never, ever, allowed to “surge.” If they do gain momentum, they are taken down.

It might help the reader to follow the candidacies of two people who might indeed have been genuine, Gary Hart and Howard Dean. Each was gaining favor, running well. Each was taken down, Hart by scandal, Dean by power of suggestion, an organized medial blitz where a common exhortation speech to followers became his undoing.

So in following the Bernie campaign, keep this in mind: If he is genuine, he will be taken down. If he is not, he’ll be promoted. But his purpose is something other than what is apparent. He is not running for president. He is serving another purpose.

Then we have a mystery to solve: For whom doth Bernie toil? It will became apparent with time. Presidential selection always precedes presidential election in our fake republic. In my view, and of course I do not see all or know all, Jeb Bush has been selected as our next president.

But I can be fooled, think too much, make reaches. I could be wrong. It could be that the selection is waiting in the wings, another savior awaits coronation.

This much I know: Bernie receives high notoriety, mention in the polls and news coverage. That does not happen to genuine people.
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PS: The reader might infer from this that I am claiming we have not only bought politicians, but also a controlled news media.

Well, duh.
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PPS: A commenter makes the point that Bernie could be running merely to bring progressives back into the system after having dropped off the voting roles in the eight years of Obama’s brand of right winging his way. Bernie gets them to register, and then they will be available to vote for Hillary after he drops out. Could be. What do I know?