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.
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*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” →

Rather than trying to explain this, I want to demonstrate it. The idea is that voting records of office holders do not matter.

Let’s take two Senators, say Tester and Daines from my former home state of Montana, one a Democrat and one a Republican. Lets assume that there are ten pieces of important legislation, and that Tester and Daines voted as indicated:

• 1. A bill to designate certain areas of Montana wilderness. (DEFEATED 27-73) Tester votes Yeah, Daines Nay.
• 2. A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code to index the floor over which Social Security benefits are taxed. (DEFEATED 46-54) Tester votes Y, Daines N
• 3. A bill to release highway funds for portions of the Montana Interstate badly in need of repair. (PASSES 95-5) Tester votes Y, Daines votes N
• 4. A bill to remove marijuana from the banned substances list. (DEFEATED 96-4) Tester voted N, Daines voted N.
• 5. A bill to protect endangered species by re-listing wolves as a protected species. (DEFEATED 60-40) Tester voted Y, Daines voted N
• 6. A vote to approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. (Approved 67-33) Tester voted Y, Daines voted Y)
• 7. A bill to authorize funding for forest fire fighters for the coming fiscal year (PASSED 61-39) Tester voted Y, Daines voted N)
• 8. A bill to overturn portions of the Affordable Health Care Act regarding mandatory payment of premiums to private corporations. (DEFEATED 57-43) Tester voted N, Daines voted Y
• 9. A bill to override presidential veto of approval of the Keystone Pipeline (PASSED 67-33) Tester voted Y, Daines voted Y
• 10. A bill to approve the weapons budget for the coming year. (PASSED 98-0) Tester voted Y, Daines voted Y

Looking over the voting record, the Conservation Voters, based on votes 1, 5 and 7, gave Jon tester a 100% approval record, and Steve Daines a 0% approval rating.

Based on 8,9 and 10, the American Conservative Union gave Jon Tester a 67% approval rating, and Steve Daines a 100% rating.

AARP issues a favorable scorecard to Tester based on 2 and 8, and Daines a negative.
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Now, go back to the list above, and reverse the votes. Change every Tester Y to a N, and the same for Daines. Note that in doing this, nothing changes except two very critical bills – TPP and Keystone. On those votes, their votes would have made a difference, and they both voted with the Republican majority.

However, each will have a completely different voting record to present to voters and to the groups that tally votes.

Voting records do not matter. They can be and are tailored to suit the needs of the office holder.

• Most votes are lopsided, so a senator can vote either way without affecting the outcome.
• Senators agree in advance on who is allowed to be for or against certain bills, often based on election cycles.
• Some bills, like TPP and Keystone, are supported by powerful interest groups, and so transcend parties and always receive just enough support to pass.

Tester could easily present himself as a Republican, Daines as a Democrat, without affecting the outcome of legislation, and voters would support them based on party affiliation.

Voting records are completely meaningless.

“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.” (Orwell, Introduction to Animal Farm)

I could write about partisan politics, as such writing is encouraged and has no impact on power. It also generates readership. Partisan blogs run up all kinds of numbers. People love to squabble back and forth about our false issues, fake division, wedge issues, false ideologies. The whole notion of “left” and “right” fades to black time and again when some issue, important to power, comes to the fore. Whether it is the Trans-Pacific Partnerships, the Keystone Pipeline, wars or selling off of the commons or refusal to regulate or punish wrongdoers, criminals and corrupt officials, the parties are one.

But on trivia, they are at each others’ throats. Thus do we enjoy the illusion of freedom from censorship.

I was just reading Orwell’s introduction to Animal Farm, which was not published with the original book. In it he’s upset that he is not allowed to criticize Russia, and that the implication that the book is about Russia has prevented its being published. His biggest complaint is what is that he found censorship in England to be largely voluntary, but still able to silence people with “surprising effectiveness.”

So too in the U.S. in 2015 – all of that prattling about partisan politics goes on because it is allowed to go on. Electing a Democrat or a Republican is a harmless activity, as each is beholden to the same powers once elected.

On the other hand, discussions of unpopular issues is not allowed in mainstream publications and media outlets. We are as effectively censored as the U.S.S.R. was ever, and it is done without overt government pressure. The only noise that is allowed to escape the cage is the pointless chatter.

Orwell closes his Introduction with a chilling thought:

“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

How much of our civic dialogue is about who should or should not be allowed access onto public forums, as if people cannot use their brains and judge ideas on their own merit? If a group of dedicated citizens question official truth about public assassinations or 9/11 or any other important event, so what? Why make them shut up? Why turn them away at the door? What scares power so that it cannot allow some honest dissent? Why do people go along with it, as if censorship makes them smarter?

Censorship in this country is pervasive and oppressive. I feel it. If you don’t, it can only be because you are thinking thoughts that do not trouble anyone in power.

Anyway, tomorrow I carry on as I have been. I am aware of two things: People are curious, and afraid to be known to be curious. For that, you should be ashamed.

In the coming days and weeks I am going to write about the important events of my times (I turn 65 this month) with an eye on details. I will write short pieces, as long pieces do not get read. (This piece is 626 words, and too long. I don’t imagine that longer equals better. Quite the opposite.)

I will try to walk and chew gum, including not only our important historical coups d’état, but current events in Ukraine, Yemen, Venezuela, France and Germany. We appear to be on the verge of something big. My focus will be on details, as most of what we are intended to see is a lie, and only details can help us punch through to get at truth.

Americans are encouraged to be incurious about major events. People of a more inquisitive nature have been successfully marginalized, so that we have, in effect, a tyranny of the dull. It’s an effective thought control regime, and is extremely difficult to overcome. Normal exposure to American news and entertainment media offers no incentives towards intelligence or curiosity.

Here are some elements of the herding effect of our news outlets:

• FOX News has an older audience who have mostly lost their cognitive skills. Note in the breakdown by age to the left, that 2-3% of senior citizens were proficient in cognitive skills, a serious decline from the 12-13% of younger people. Natural aging might explain this, but it might also reflect years of exposure to a dumbing-down media. There is no avenue in mainstream media for maintaining higher levels of intellectual ability.
• People who do have higher cognitive levels are more likely to get their news from NPR, PBS, or perhaps the New York Times and Wall Street Journal (which is charged with containing a smart and investment-savvy following). These audiences imagine themselves better informed than their FOX counterparts. They all absorb the same information in different formats, and are only segmented for marketing purposes.

News consumers above are effectively walled off from each other. There’s little travel between the segments.

There is more segmentation:

• There is an Agitprop media, right-wing talk radio (and a small “left” counterpart). Audiences for these outlets, functionally illiterate and kept in a state of perpetual anger, are used as a bludgeoning force against members of the media and public officials. It’s an enormous echo chamber where people absorb only selected talking points of selected “news” events*
• On the “left,” among more intellectually curious people, there is a court jester system in place. These are outlets like Daily Show, Bill Maher, John Oliver and the whole of the MSNBC crowd. (Oliver appears to be almost poised to say something important. He won’t, of course. Bill Maher learned that lesson in 2002.) These outlets encourage their self-imagined smart-set followers to focus on the failings of their opposites in the two-party system. (Jon Stewart made a career of ridiculing FOX, whose viewers are barely sentient.) The effect is to mute any energetic organizing by keeping people focused on the wrong targets.
• The vast majority of Americans are turned off and indifferent, only passively absorbing information in a haphazard manner from primary and secondary education and the entertainment systems. Passive exposure yields a muddled mainstream, but they are strongly encouraged to vote and imagine themselves vigilant citizens.

It is important to break free of this system. I was as much a part of it as any when a few details that did not make sense caused me to look a little deeper.
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*Thus do we see leaders of the Republican Party, who need this sector in their voting base, behaving as if they were stupid. That is only an act to satisfy the Limbaugh set. Some, like Ted Cruz, might be genuinely stupid. Most are not.

On these early spring days I’ve been working in our garage while listening to Mae Brussel radio shows from the early 1970’s. She was on the air for one hour weekly for years in northern California in a time when radio stations had “public affairs” departments. That’s an oxymoron, I realize.

Brussel was an unusual woman, inquisitive and thorough. She harvested information from newspapers, magazines and news reports, maintaining cross-referenced files on people and subjects in the manner of J. Edgar Hoover, but for a better purpose. She read every book that time allowed her. In so doing, a different world unfolded before her. She was not mystical, just observant.

Today we would label such behavior an aberration, and she would be called a “conspiracy theorist.” That is part of our thought control regime, designed to keep normally curious people from straying out of bounds. These are oppressive times – we have so much information at our fingertips, and are so afraid to access it. Worse than that, people are mostly boring, smug and credulous at once, self-infused with the idea that they are somehow clever and wise for all of the things they do not know and refuse to investigate. Eeesh!

Incuriosity and indifference, even if studied, are indistinguishable from stupidity. But I digress.

I am not nostalgic. I do not believe in the ‘good old days. I listen to Brussel with an ear attuned to similarities between those times and now. There are many. Then as now, public officials were usually in some manner compromised if not overtly corrupt, and TV was a drug.

But there was a difference. Brussel’s audience was people attuned and aware of incongruities between news and reality. She was constantly fielding letters and calls from sharp listeners. It was a minority of people of course, but enough that her radio show had a large following.

Mae was speaking to college students too. She was warning them that the government was tired of the activism of the sixties, the protests, teach-ins – a climate of vigilance that made the ordinary criminal activity of public officials more difficult. They wanted to dumb it all down again. She saw on the horizon a problem with drugs, and told college kids that they would be easy to come by and to avoid them. She urged her listeners to keep their minds clean and sharp.

That was prescient, I would say. Drug use has always been with us. We all know the image of the stoner and the attitude that accompanies habitual marijuana use – a mildly delirious indifference.

Pot is legal where I live, and the movement is spreading. This is not a sea change – as my son reminded me, pot has always been legal for white folks. Legalization will allow it to penetrate deeper into society. It was a huge tool in the law enforcement arsenal for harassing and imprisoning minorities, and police will have to reload their quivers with other tools. They’ll figure that out.

Legalization of marijuana is a step forward for civil liberties, for minorities anyway. But habitual use ought to be discouraged as well. A government that can stigmatize intelligence and curiosity ought to be able to attach a touch of shame to pot use. But they won’t.

Pot and stupidity go hand-in-hand. But a dumbed down public is a good doggy. Here’s a bone. Or a bong.

It is a good time to pause here and reflect on what has transpired these past days on this blog. I have introduced hard evidence and reviewed a few methods of critical thinking. I have been greeted with derision. I quite expected this.
Continue reading “Why even care about truth?” →

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” (Voltaire)

I am enjoying the news media as they wrestle with Hillary Clinton’s handling of official U.S. business on a private email server. It’s not complicated. She is hiding things we should know about. There is no other plausible reason.

She will be forgiven and the matter will pass, as the U.S. media does not investigate powerful people. We’ll get coverage, but no insight. [Along those lines, Daily Beast does its doody here]

In a recent post I pointed to (painfully obvious) planted evidence, a “hijacker’s” passport found several blocks from the World Trade Center after 9/11. No bodies survived, none of the millions of parts used to make a jet aircraft were found in the rubble. But the passport turned up.

I asked readers, including two commenters directly, to consider the implications.

The predictable response was no response. Such a glaring anomaly pushes subconscious fear closer to the surface. I fully understand the silence of the readers.

Such oppressive silence is a manifestation of hidden power, and is common in every age. Andersen published The Emperor’s New Clothes in 1837, but the story can be traced back centuries before that. Galileo was not arrested for spreading lies, but exposing hidden truth. Julian Assange lives the Ecuadorian Embassy in London now, Bradley Manning is in prison, Edward Snowden in Russia … for saying things that happen to be true.

Even recently with the Charlie Hebdo affair in France there has to be discomfort among thoughtful people that the supposed murderers were hooded men – they could be anyone. Shades of 9/11, the supposed perpetrators left behind an easily discovered driver’s license.

I know the sense of betrayal that one feels when a cherished illusion is destroyed. But we all have to grow up some time, and now would be an excellent time to start.

Robert Siegel is a news reader for NPR, and widely considered one of the better ones in the country. He is the host of a show called “All Things Considered” which airs each evening.

Siegel once commented that he would not be interested in “… airing the views of such media and political critics as Noam Chomsky” on All Things Considered. (Yes, I too marvel at the inappropriateness of the program’s name.)

Siegel routinely allows all manner of right-wing and right-center commentary on its programming, but insists that Chomsky is not welcome. He has said that Chomsky

“…evidently enjoys a small, avid, and largely academic audience who seem to be persuaded that the tangible world of politics is all the result of delusion, false consciousness and media manipulation.”

The word “evidently” is a tell, indicating the Siegel is not familiar with Chomsky’s writing or his world-wide reputation. If Siegel had real chops, he would be eager to discuss Chomsky’s ideas among critics and supporters and with Noam himself. Listeners could draw their own conclusions rather than having Siegel act as gatekeeper.

Not so. Chomsky is simply dismissed. He has been interviewed widely all over the world on media outlets large and small. He routinely fills concert halls and other venues when he lectures both in the US and abroad. But only rarely, perhaps three times in fifty years, has he been allowed on the American mainstream media.

Ours is a heavily censored media that allows discussion of issues only within a very narrow framework, that of our two corporate financed parties. It is true that there is passion involved as they debate horse races and candidate speeches or wedge politics. They do give the appearance of diversity of views. This is important, as it reinforces the illusion of self-government.

The natural effect of the censorship is an out-of-sight-out-of-mind environment where media distracts more than informs, and points our attention at minutiae while ignoring the vital issues of our time, the ongoing investigation of major events part of it. Siegel (or Brian Williams or Jon Stewart) would be quickly out of a job if he dared discuss the glaring contradictions in the official 9/11 story, but is on safe ground talking about legalized pot or a mosque or abortion.

If you really want to be challenged to consider ideas of thinkers of high caliber, go back in time and watch the following, from an era when there was a freer marketplace for ideas, though even then heavily censored. (Buckley, after all, was given free access to public television for his whole right-wing agenda, while no such access has ever been allowed dissidents of Chomsky’s ilk.) The two clips in total are about nineteen minutes.