Along with his terrorist war [on Cuba], Kennedy imposed a trade embargo of unprecedented severity, barring any transaction involving merchandise “of Cuban origin” or that “has been located or transported from or through Cuba [or] is made or derived in whole or in part of any article which is the growth, produce, or manufacture of Cuba.” In the years that followed, huge resources have been devoted to monitor international commerce to ensure that the strictures are upheld …

On illustration has been provided by the treasury Department, reporting to Congress in April 2004 on the activities of its Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), responsible for investigating suspicious financial transfers, a central component of the “war on terror.” OFAC informed Congress that of its 120 employees, four were assigned to tracking the finances of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, while almost two dozen were occupied with enforcing the embargo against Cuba. From 1990 to 2003, OFAC reported 93 terrorism-related investigations with $9,000 in fines; and 11,000 Cuba-related investigations with $8 million in fines. (Chomsky, introduction to Voices From the Other Side, by Keith Bolender)

In fairness to OFAC, they might well have known what the rest of us came to understand later, that by 2004 both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were dead.

Even so, it is interesting to note the vigor with which our government fights to withhold basic freedoms from little Cuba while virtually ignoring its own self-proclaimed War on Terror.

I was raised to believe in a man named “Jesus” who lived in my mind and monitored my thoughts and behaviors. Most importantly, he loved me. I was special to him.

Such thought control devices are common. When implanted in the mind of young children, they often last a lifetime. My mother, deeply lost in Alzheimer’s, still bowed her head in deep devotion as my brother invoked the name before slipping her a wafer.

DM Murdock, author of The Christ Conspiracy and a bunch of other stuff, relieved me of much of the mystery. I had long been set free from Jesus before reading her, but she explained the origin of the symbols of Christianity – sun worship.

As with so much of mythology, the explanation is hidden in plain sight. Even so, transcending generations and language development, to this day most Americans believe in and worship the “Son.” Cue the Twilight Zone theme!

Murdock now suffers from a very aggressive cancer. She’ll soon be gone, but her body of work will long outlive her. Because this is the United States, aggressive health care to treat her aggressive cancer is unaffordable, and her friends and supporters are crowd-sourcing to finance her treatment. Good luck with that, and thanks Acharya S for living a good and useful life.
________________________

Solomon Asch was a social psychologist who dreamed up an experiment in thought control, usually done in a classroom. Students, most in on the trick, are shown a set of lines and asked which one is longest. When those not in on the game identify the obvious choice, the group responds negatively, and later still, by group consensus, a shorter line is “voted” to be the longest.

The question is whether the subjects rebel, go along, or really get their minds right. Judging from my experience with 9/11 and other mass illusion phenomena, I am guessing that most students truly believe their perceptions are wrong and the crowd is right. We are but children, after all, and I was 38 years old before I disabused myself of that Jesus guy.
________________________

Which brings me to the last “thought” I had this morning as reading Brian Anse Patrick’s book The Ten Commandments of Propaganda.

People react to the word “propaganda” just as they do to “shit” or “thought control.” The word causes a blockage of cognitive thought processes. Propagandists know this, and so have changed their names to “public relations” and “information” agents. That’s too bad, because the field is rich with explanatory power about all that goes on around us, just as Murdock’s revelations so easily exposed the Jesus scam.

I won’t go into detail on Patrick’s work, as people who saw the fright words in the above paragraph have already quit reading. He invoked Jacques Ellul, and offers a much more refined reading of the man than I could muster.

Ellul reminded us that propaganda gives meaning to an otherwise meaningless existence. It is not something done to us as much as something we deeply need. It validates us, makes us morally and intellectually superior to our peers and to people in other lands. It is our raison d’être.

I have come recently to understand that voting is a scam – that is, public opinion is herd management and nothing more. Actually counting votes would be an absurd practice. We have thousands of people who think they are part of the process every election day. With patriotic music in the background, public officials pretend that voting matters and that votes are actually counted.

Voting gives us meaning. It is the government telling each of us, individually, in a cubicle with a curtain drawn, that we matter, that our opinion counts.
________________________
Anyway, thank you D.M. Murdock, Solomon Asch, Brian Patrick Anse, Jacques Ellul, my mother and most of all, Jesus, for helping me through this crazy fucking life. It just keeps getting more interesting.

Maybe I am at a crossroads or in a lull. All these years of reading have left me empty. This country, full of good but very dumbed down people, is run by a fascist shadow government. My questions now are merely how and when it came about.  Bigger yet,  is it the normal state of affairs throughout history? I suspect so.

Not to go all Godwin on the matter, but the Nazis came to power by deft criminal maneuvering. The primary tool at their disposal was murder. Once an important person is killed, and the crime goes down uninvestigated and unpunished, a cloud of intimidation sets in. All throughout the legitimate power centers there evolves unvoiced but well-understood fear. Smart and brave people who confront the hidden power source are murdered, threatened, scandalized … eventually smart and brave people exit the system, and we are left with thugs, cowards, sociopaths, and cynical manipulators. (Which reminds me, the 2016 election will be a “choice” … Clinton v Bush.) Continue reading “In search of meaninglessness” →

A certain commenter who makes the rounds is product of the age. No depth, no reading, a diet of Google and talk radio. He feigns, as most do, a deep knowledge of “current events,” whatever that means. Terms like “confirmation bias” and “anecdotal evidence” yield a revealing silence.

I’m frustrated today. I’m going to my garage. Thought control is deep and pervasive in this country. Our public dialogue is sometimes fresh and witty, and certainly strident. That it makes no difference, that we are just blowing in the wind … is lost on all.

Liberals (and “progressives”) push for their R-Democrats. Hillary Clinton, for example, is just another Neocon, but these insulated morons will support her over some other Neocon as a better “choice.” The worst part is the arrogance, the presumption of moral superiority. After all, these bastions of deep thought elected a mixed race president. Now they are going to give s a woman!

Right wingers (“conservatives”) push their openly stupid (or incredibly devious) macaroons. Who cannot look at former Texas governor Rick Perry, for instance, or former Texas governor George W. Bush or Ted Cruz (what’s wrong with Texas anyway?), and not see deeply stupid men? If it’s an act, I tip my hat. An interesting phenomenon: Saying they are stupid jacks up their vote tally. Stupid likes stupid, and defends it with vigor.

Some years back a certain very dumb but very pretty actress, I’ll not name her, decided to use her fame to serve public good, and went on a “vote” campaign … “vote, vote vote, exercise your freedom” she told us all on every forum available to her. Vote for what? That was above her pay grade. It was somewhat a relief that certain people who interviewed her, like Letterman, were only mildly amused rather than enthralled.

I am often told that since I don’t vote, I have no role to play in our fake democracy. The idea that we given no choices and cannot rely on the counting system anyway … doesn’t fly. Vote, dammit.

Just another day at the office. I’ll get better.

We are now in the midst of yet another election season. And as November 6 approaches, only one thing is certain: American voters will have no ability to know with certainty who wins any given race, from dogcatcher to president. Nor will we know the true results of ballot initiatives and referenda affecting some of the most vital issues of our day, including fracking, abortion, gay marriage, GMO-food labeling, and electoral reform itself. Our faith-based elections are the result of a new Dark Age in American democracy, brought on, paradoxically, by technological progress. (Victoria Collier, How to Rig an Election, Harpers, November, 2012)

We were seated around a campfire last summer when for some reason, the stunning upset of Seth Cantor in the Virginia primary came up. I mentioned that the vote outcome was probably fraudulent – such upsets can easily be engineered with our modern voting “technology.”

One of the men by the campfire became hostile, insisting that American elections are squeaky clean. Always. I said that when they open the machines at the end of the evening, we have no more way of knowing that the count is accurate than if there are Martians living on the dark side of the moon.

It only happens rarely, but I got some support that night, from another CPA. Indeed, he said, results that cannot be independently verified cannot be trusted.

I catch a lot of flack because, for the most part, I don’t vote. It’s a rite of passage, like peeing on a gravestone to join a fraternity. I see people wearing buttons on election day saying “I voted,” and think, well, I petted a puppy today. Same difference.

I was last concerned about our voting system in 2004, when George W. Bush stole the presidential election. His dad, George H.W. Bush stole the New Hampshire primary in 1988, probably the general too. It’s a family tradition. (Has a Bush ever won a clean election?) Later, however, as I realized that a clean election would have given us … John Kerry!!!  … I stopped worrying about election fraud. If we don’t have decent candidates, the vote tally is the least of our problems. (According to Mark Crispen Miller, Kerry knew the vote count was fraudulent. But aristocrats don’t pee on other aristocrats.)

But I still get upset, and cannot help it. Our system of counting votes is so in-your-face corrupt that it is insulting to our national intelligence. I realize the implications of that statement.

Speaking of implications, here are some opening words of the book Votescam: The Stealing of America:

This book also contends that the theft of your vote, or Votescam, is part of a supposedly patriotic “collaboration” between federal officials and the news media that began shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, when “responsible” American press was persuaded by American intelligence services to hide from the American people the actual implications of the Kennedy murder.”

“…implications of the Kennedy murder.” Those who read this blog regularly know that 11/22/63 was a military coup d’état, and here is yet more fallout. The “intelligence services” (CIA), when they murdered the president,  also stepped into the election system … there must have been a decision that since the executive was overthrown, that the election system had to be compromised* too, to prevent any undoing of the coup. That would make sense.

Folks, please come to your senses. If you cannot independently verify the vote on election night, you cannot trust the result. If the result cannot be trusted, then voting will not solve our problems. Faith will get you to heaven, but will not give a clean election outcome.

Other means are needed. Suggestions are welcome.
_______________
*Election theft is an American tradition. I am well aware that JFK himself was probably elected due to the power and influence of his mafia-don-like father. It is not easy to be self-righteous in this country.

There’s a presumption in many American circles that Israel holds undue influence over American foreign policy. It is true that there are Israeli apologists throughout our media, so that anyone who criticizes that country is immediately branded anti-Semitic and slapped down. But in terms of who runs who, it is the direction of military aid that governs. Israel is a servant. Thierry Meyssan’s most recent piece on the US/Iran negotiations has a lot of material to absorb, much of it unfathomable to Americans who get their news from American sources. He says that an agreement will be signed in late June, and that it will effectively thwart Netanyahu’s ambitions of a Nile-to-Euphrates Israeli state. That in mind, the Israelis have but a couple of months to disrupt the agreement.

It would therefore not be surprising if we were to see further unclaimed terrorist actions or political assassinations, the responsibility of which could be attributed to Washington or Teheran, in order to stop the signature intended for the 30th June 2015.

I regard Israel as danger to human survival, a state born in and sustained by terrorism, but one always one subordinated to U.S. ambitions, a “cop on the beat” that could affect attacks that the U.S. wanted to be distanced from. Meyssan claims that the U.S. currently is engaged in a major troop shift, Middle East to Far East, and so is leaving behind a ten-year agreement that puts Iran and Saudi Arabia in charge of the region. Israel is effectively dealt out. That is a dangerous situation.

The power of literature is to reduce complexity to characters. Judas, for instance, was a mere literary device. Tolkien’s fantasy, Lord of the Rings, has been debased by those movies so that there is not much appreciation for its real meaning, stated by Lord Acton to be this:

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The ring is power. If affects all of touch it. In the end, it destroyed Frodo, as he sadly acknowledged.

I was reading an interview this morning with Madeleine Duncan Brown (1925-2002), the woman who claimed to be at a gathering on 11/21/63 with her then-lover and father of her son, Lyndon Johnson. LBJ retired to a back room with other attendees, including John J. McCloy, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Clint Murchison (host). When he came out, he leaned over to Madeliene, she thought for a kiss on the cheek, and said “Those [Kennedy’s] will never embarrass me again.”

True story? Who knows – it has this working against it – one, she lived to tell it. Two, she was able to tell it in People Magazine in 1987. Our media is so heavily censored that a story like that getting through in  national publication cannot be an accident. And three, researchers cannot place Nixon there – he’d have to be in two places at once.

That is not my subject. In the 1996 interview with Noel Twyman, Brown described the Dallas scene at that time, and the corruption was palpable. She said that these men were on a carousel and could not get off. Once they learned that they could steal, murder, and not only get away with it, but prosper, they could not stop themselves. Their appetites were insatiable. Murder was a twice-before-breakfast occurrence in Dallas, then just a very corrupt small city, now a large one. Murder of a president was a crowning achievement, in part a blow to the Eastern Establishment by cowboy upstarts.

I started 25 years ago on this path, and I was just like everyone else I knew – so naive. I believed in America, its institutions, its history and promise. I have watched the façade crumble around me. At first I was hurt, shocked, ill. I could not fathom that public figures I knew and trusted – Ronald Reagan, for instance – were so corrupt and shallow.

But I soon internalized it and kept moving forward. And now and then I get this reaction from people – “How can you live like that?  It’s as if mere belief is all that matters.

Before I read about real life crime, I was absorbed by Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes, by the Robert Ludlum novels – well-written fiction. I love solving mysteries. After I shed my naivete about my country, I merely got on with mystery solving. It has been fun.

This may surprise people, but my favorite move genre is romantic comedy. I love movies like Forget Paris and Heart and Souls. They are life as I want life to be. As John Denver put it in one of his songs, “True love is still the only dream I know.”

How’s that for contrast? I am a guy who sees the seamy underbelly of perhaps the most corrupt and depraved country ever to exist, and I believe in romantic love.

People don’t want to know how they make the sausage. So it goes. That’s why this is a low-traffic blog. If I were to headline this “Hillary is so wonderful, and Jeb sucks,” my numbers would shoot up. The truth, that both are slimeballs fronting for criminal enterprises reaching deep into the military-industrial-intelligence complex … well, that does not fly.

We have a choice of crooks next year, each representing powerful hidden factions. Here’s another discouragement for you: We will have no idea who really won, as votes are never counted accurately. They don’t even try. That part is all for show.

I’ll close with a little-known fact: According to Meg Azzoni, John F. Kennedy Jr.’s high school sweetheart, he owned a cat. Care to guess the cat’s name? Continue reading “Power and the true nature of my country” →

I took the book Tragedy and Hope, by Carroll Quigley, around the world with me in 2013. Literally. I even carried it in my pack as we hiked the Himalayas. At 1,348 pages it qualifies as tome, and most people don’t have the time. I am fortunate.

As with all good non-fiction, the book creates more questions than it answers. It came to mind this morning as I read a link supplied by SK regarding Timothy Leary. Was he what he appeared to be, something else? Judge for yourself. (Another source, Sherman Skolnick*, claims that most of our prominent sixties “counterculture” radicals were government agents – he includes Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis. So Leary being an insider would not surprise me.)

The link reminded me of Quigley because of his words about The New Republic, a magazine founded in 1914 by an agent of JP Morgan. Mike Straight became correspondent, then editor and the publisher by 1946. During his tenure he removed all known liberals from the magazine, but kept the outer appearance of a progressive outlet. Real control of the magazine existed with the William C. Whitney Foundation, and Straight was its president. Editors of TNR were always aware of ownership – said one, Herbert Croly,

Of course, [the Straights] could always withdraw their financial support if they ceased to approve of the policy of the paper, and in that event, it would go out of existence as a consequence of their disapproval.

The real mission of TNR, according to Quigley, was to advance “certain designs,” to blunt isolationism and anti-British sentiments (very prominent in the U.S. after World War One), and to provide progressives “…with a vehicle for expression of their progressive views in literature, art, music, social reform, and even domestic politics.”

In other words, the favored outlet for the left from the 1914 forward was owned by right wingers.

Contrast this with another magazine, Ramparts, which had some true leftist principles, and how it was attacked and then destroyed by the CIA. (If I learn later that Ramparts was a CIA front, I quit.)

In other words, if credibility of a source is an issue in our reading, the first principle we should apply to judging a source is this: Is it even allowed to exist? If it is vilified, ridiculed, marginalized … it might be worthy. If it went out of business, suffered lawsuits, scandals, or barely exists on a slim thread, it might be OK.

There are two sources of left-wing journalism that are alive and well and prospering today – The Nation Magazine, and Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! is funded by the Ford Foundation, hardly a left-wing outfit. This reminds me of TNR and its funding by Whitney.

Such outlets can be useful. They do provide some left-wing perspective on current affairs. But they also serve as gatekeepers, performing a “this far, no further” role in limiting examination of certain events and policies.

This country is owned by right wingers, who control our corporations and military, campuses and media. But we of the left exist, and cannot be killed, at least not all of us. In fact, it is even good to have a back-and-forth going on, as it gives the impression of an open society. So don’t be surprised to learn that in our past the right-wing furnished us with our left-wing press.  This could well be the case now.
______________
*Skolnick (1930-2006) is labeled a “conspiracy theorist” by Wikipedia. Such pro forma ridicule indicates he’s worth a closer look.

I am ready now to move on from JFK, both blogging and personally. I realize that most readers were not alive when he was murdered, and even those with an interest in solving the crime do not realize its importance today. That crime was a seminal event in U.S. history, in my view:

• It was coup d’état, a military takeover. It could be that the original coup was the death of FDR and importation of surviving remnants of the Third Reich by the Dulles brothers immediately post-war. Thus begat our CIA. But killing JFK insulated those in power.
• It spawned a near-revolution. The “sixties” (1964-1975) are a mixed up era, but immediately post-JFK there was a squeaky clean anti-war movement on the larger campuses, and it was growing in strength. Later it would be infiltrated and hijacked,  and covert operators brought hippies and drugs and Tex Watson (aka “Manson”) into the forefront to successfully derail the movement. (This is where Dave McGowan’s Laurel Canyon scene picks up, and I wonder if he has figured out the bigger picture. I suspect he has.) Jane Fonda, daughter of a military intelligence officer, did not just happen on the seat of a gun turret in Hanoi one day. She was, knowingly or not, part of a PSYOP. She alone set the anti-war movement back ten years.
• Out of his death came a flourishing of movements, from anti-poverty to civil rights, environmentalism, anti-war and feminism. Medicare passed at this time. He did not create or foster them, but the angst of his murder unleashed a torrent of pent-up emotions. Pandora had to be put back in her box.
• The murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King effectively killed hope. There were hundreds of other murders during that time, Black Panther leaders and important witnesses, but those two public executions sent a message:  “Give it up, folks. You cannot defeat us.” The origins of totalitarianism are always highlighted with a trail of murders. A dark cloud fell over the nation in 1968, and has never lifted. Indeed, it seems the good they die young. And not by accident.

I will try to write less about this event in the future, but urge readers to explore on their own for this reason: It is a portal. As inexperienced military doctors performed a sloppy autopsy of JFK’s body that night, they were being supervised by military brass in the balcony above.

That scene is a nice metaphor for our country, with that nameless power structure looking down at the corpse of a republic.

But it is time to move on. I realize that. My “obsession” is not with JFK or the string of murders that followed, including his son, but with what has become a totalitarian system. Such systems have come and gone throughout history, Germany and the U.S.S.R recent examples. This particular system seems much more oppressive because most people are not aware of it.

I interact quite a bit on the blogs and know, as do those who follow this blog, that it is an intellectual desert out there. Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the early 1800’s that this place was mostly drunk every evening. The American public in general has never been exceptional.  Our intellectual class, our academics, our journalists and teachers these days are a smug and deeply ignorant group.

I feel the oppression, but it appears most people have internalized it, and so don’t know about it. There was a turning point. I think it started with a very important murder, and the elevation of an extremely corrupt and stupid man to the presidency. His name: Truman.

Any time there is an event in which a large number of people die, we build a memorial. It’s a nice thing to do. I think there should be a memorial built somewhere to all of the people who have been murdered in the wake of the JFK assassination. Penn Jones kept track of them up until his own death. This story is about a man who saw too much, and lived. For that reason, I have to hold out some doubt, but repeat here the events in the life of Sergeant Robert Vinson. It appears we are witness to a miracle. Continue reading “A miracle” →