There are things we are told which are plainly obviously lies, such as magic bullets and aircraft slicing through steel buildings like a knife through butter, all utterly impossible, defying logic and physics. Yet dogged doctrinaire supporters of power demand that we pretend to believe these things to be real and undeniably true. This is the source of our cognitive dissonance, power over our perceptions, to tell us that we see one thing that is actually something else. Those of us who do not see what power tells us to see are indeed the odd ones.

I wrote that, and it is bad form to quote myself. But it does, more or less, add yellow highlighter to the center of my existence. And I’ve been kicking it around for a couple of days here as I avoid writing on the blog. If I cannot get one true thing across, what is the point?

There are degrees of acceptance of the above. For me it is easy. I simply say that if something cannot be true, then it is not true. On the far side, the other end, people like James Conner, for instance, ridicule what is obviously true as a belief in impossible conspiracy, as if saying things that are obviously true is stupid! Most people fall somewhere in between, troubled, wanting to belong to the mainstream and so filing away their doubts in a dark place. That is the definition of cognitive dissonance.

What Conner does is a manifestation of denial, of aggressive stupidity, and yet I know he is not stupid. If the dissonance resides so uncomfortably in him that he feels a need to lash out, then he is perhaps on the verge of internal harmony. Perhaps he will come around. Perhaps his isolation right now is a time during which he is confronting his own internal contradictions.

Perhaps not. His writing lately offers no hint of any forward movement.

In the meantime, there is politics. We always have politics. It does us no good; it solves no problems. It merely keeps us busy. The political system is too corrupt for mere intermittent unfocused anxiety expressed as well-intended votes to have any impact on the power behind the candidates. Perhaps, if one can admit that certain physical feats are impossible, then a clean accounting of the soul will yield yet another hard and undeniable truth: We do not live in a democracy, a republic, a democratic republic, or anything even remotely representing that kind of place. There is only one way that public opinion matters in this country, and that is when it is unified against power.

Unless some entertainer suggests on TV that we should do that, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

One of the most incomprehensible features of the Citizens United ruling by our Mullahs, our Supreme Court, was the secrecy provisions. That made no sense – even if they decreed that money should rule, even a modicum of democratic governance would indicate that we should at least know where the money comes from.

As always, it came as a revelation from someone else that made me slap my head … Of course! The secrecy provisions are in place because CU allows unfettered manipulation of political campaigns by organized crime.

We then need to understand what “organized crime” means. There’s an old meme at work that Castro kicked the mob off the island of Cuba in the early 1960’s, along with United Fruit, oil and gas and mining interests, etc. The assumption there is that there are legitimate imperialists, and there are mobsters. But take it one step further: The Mob, and not the CIA, killed JFK, say Hartmann and Waldron. That makes it more palatable.

But what if they are all one and the same? What if the mob operates under the same rules, and with the same exemptions from civil society as do Exxon, Citibank, and Chiquita Banana (once known as United Fruit).

Isn’t it then all an academic exercise? The Mob killed JFK! The CIA did! The military-industrial complex did. But I repeat myself. And the Mob/CIA/MIC obviously own some of our Mullahs, perhaps all of them. That would make them mere tools, or toys of tyrants.

This is just something I heard last week, wrote down and forgot. It’s from Gordon Duff:

Americans have been over a decade in Afghanistan, and no one has ever seen anything leave a poppy field and move out of the country to a heroin processing plant. In ten years.

The comment is sardonic, of course. The Taliban had the poppy crop under control before the Americans arrived, and since that invasion in 2001, new records are set on a regular basis. The US claims to be trying to stem the flow, but this is a lie. The US is there to protect the fields, as the drug money is an important part of covert operations for intelligence agencies. It ends up in Wall Street banks, London, you know, with the cocaine snorting set, as opposed to crack users, who often land in jail. War on drugs, you see.

Don’t kid yourself – the US is not involved in a war on drugs. Afghanistan, probably Mexico and Colombia too, are wars for drugs.

That’s your country, folks. That’s what the boys are fighting for.

The phenomenon we are seeing here is not new. The degree of self-delusion (if that is what it is) is impressive, saying “sometimes a year has passed without a single comment.” It’s deliberate isolation, the result of polarization. It’s also arrogance, but I’ve learned in my years of treading this planet that arrogance is a product of insecurity.

I have never wanted to hang out with people who only “discuss” things with people who agree with them. I have always wanted to take the fight to the enemy. In so doing, I’ve learned a lot, and have had changes of heart and mind on many topics:

• I used to believe in a thing called “peak oil,” and was wrong. I read scholarly books on the subject too, reaffirming my rightness on the topic before learning how wrong it is.
• I once bought into the notion that the Mob, acting alone, killed JFK. I was wrong. The books I read on that subject, attempting to make that case, combined were over 1200 pages. All they did was assemble selected evidence, ignoring inconvenient stuff.
• I used to think that the underclass is a victim of the upper classes. Yeah, that’s wrong too. Victimhood is overrated, and should not be enabled. (There are victims on this planet who need our help. Instead, we are bombing them, as we speak!)
• I used to have a whole lot more respect for feminists than I do now. Speaking of professional victims.
• I am looking cross-eyed at Chomsky these days, thinking perhaps I’ve stumbled on a fatal flaw. Long story, I’ll have to face that one of these mornings and write a long dreary essay on it. But my view of him is evolving.
• I find myself wondering if global warming, climate change and all of that is just another hoax. That’s why I never write about it. One, the science is beyond me, and two, it could be mere power of suggestion. I am susceptible to that, just like everyone.

These kind of attitudinal changes can only come about when people who disagree with each other stand toe-to-toe and have it out. We are all equipped with an automatic avoidance mechanism (seen above). We instead need to bore into those topics about which we have firm beliefs and not enough evidence to support them. Often enough the people with whom I disagree are right, and I am wrong.

But so what?!! Who among us gets to go through life being right all the time?

Oh yeah – Rob Natelson. He was always right, every word he wrote, and then he went into hiding. Big Swede – when the going gets tough, when you attempt to press him on a topic, Swede gets going. Out the door. And James Conner. He’s hiding. He’s afraid. He’s wrong about stuff. A lot of stuff. Like all of us. And he cannot face it. That is sad.
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PS: I do not know what kind of comments Conner has been getting that so upset him, but for the record, none have been from me. I have made no attempts to penetrate his fortress.

(I see this mentioned here and there, but wonder if it has gained any currency in mainstream US media. Cuba and Russia have agreed to reopen a sensitive electronic eavesdropping base on the island, a response to the US poking its nose into every telephone conversation on earth. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.)
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The TV series Mad Men is such a beautiful metaphor for American life. On the surface it is about advertising, the seediest of professions, the one where people try to mislead us with emotional symbols into making poor decisions. Second, it is about Don Draper, and I cannot imagine this is not intentional: He is running from himself. He grew up in a whore house.

There comes a time in our growing up process where we confront reality, if we grow up at all. I think Don Draper is going to do that in the final half-season, and hope that he becomes a complete human, full of faults and favors, but more aware of himself and his surroundings.
Continue reading “Madmen” →

See Footnotes
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To: NPR Ombudsman
From: Mark Tokarski
Regarding: Weekend Edition, Sunday, July 20, 2014

On your Weekend Edition this morning … the host was interviewing someone at the crash site of the airliner in Eastern Ukraine, and made two inferences: 1) Rebels are stealing bodies, and 2) (and this was so clever), he repeated an accusation by Kiev that rebels were altering the crash site. The on-site person said yes, indeed, people had said that wreckage seen the day before was not present the following day.

Got that? Here’s what we know: A reporter gave second-hand knowledge of missing debris. The host allowed the Kiev accusation through without a rebel response to the accusation. The inference of the news report: Rebels have altered the crash site.

What do we know for certain? Nothing. Agents of CIA, MI6, or Kiev could have as easily removed debris, stolen bodies, altered the crash sites. But NPR only infers rebel activity in the matter.

NPR is subtly inferring the the rebels shot down the airliner.
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(This is not part of the message to the ombudsman): It was apparent, reading between the lines, that the crash site is not secure, so that the investigation is already compromised. Further, NPR reported that official investigative work has not yet started, that the investigators are in Kiev. I think it safe to say that the anti-Kiev rebels are going to get the Lockerbie treatment.
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Score one for the rebels: They have control of the black boxes.

“Aircraft parts looking like black boxes were found at the site of the plane crash. They are currently in Donetsk, in the People’s Republic’s (DPR) government headquarters, under my personal control,” Aleksandr Boroday, the republic’s prime minister, told reporters.

The self-defense forces are ready to hand the data recorders over to international monitors “in case they arrive,” he said.

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JC has some links in the comments below that are quite informative, one of a video put out by the Ukrainian government that asserts evidence that the rebel forces shot down the airliner. The problem with it is that it was, ahem, made before the plane crashed – it is time-stamped, and has been pulled down, but just like Dr. Laura’s nude pictures, gentlemen, once they go out, you cannot get them back.

The other is some mathematical/calculus analysis of the crash, which is above my pay grade.

Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. (JFK, Yale graduation, 1962)

If newscaster ‘facts’ land in your lap and you uncritically accept them as true; if you find yourself siding with one or another pundit in a televised debate; if you repeat talking points; if you’ve never looked at the hard evidence of the major events of our times, accepting official explanations as true; if you have ever ridiculed someone who does not accept official truth….

You’re an American. A thought-controlled, behavior controlled, no-threat-to-anyone-in-power American.

American public opinion is under complete control of the state. You, as a Democrat, might vociferously disagree with Republicans. That’s allowed, even encouraged, and the state will even furnish the issues you are allowed to vociferously disagree about. (Abortion, gun control, etc.) Once elected, they are the same people. But if you stray beyond the bounds of party politics, you’ll be ostracized, marginalized.

Think of what they do now at political conventions: They erect fenced areas, force demonstrators inside them, and then ignore them. They are called “free speech zones.” I am not kidding about that. This is what they are called.

That’s a nice metaphor for party politics. But there are real jails too. Eugene Debs campaigned from a prison cell in 1920, and Ralph Nader was arrested when he appeared at the two-party “debate” in 2000. We are only allowed freedom within the fences. Stray outside, the gloves come off.

Once every two or four years you get to throw the bums out. It does not change anything, but validates you. That is why we have elections. Otherwise, we might have real change, real progress, which is not allowed.

If the man or woman you support enjoys wide media coverage and is welcomed at newspapers editorial board meetings for serious scrutiny by serious journalists, and gets to ride on floats and is touted as a “front-runner” … move on. You’re supporting an apparatchik. Your candidate has already been vetted and found acceptable to insiders.

American party politics is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

We are in Aspen, Colorado today. Our trip here started two days ago when we drove, late in the day, to Crested Butte, a gateway to the Maroon Bell Snowmass Wilderness. Its claim to fame is flowers. On the Crested Butte side, the glacial till provides high moisture retention and flowers grow in amazing abundance. There is an eleven-mile trail through there, over a mountain pass, to where we are now. We decided last year to book a room here and make that hike, and spend a couple of days here during their music festival.

Since we are here without a vehicle, we had to pack our street clothing and stuff in, meaning I loaded a regular backpack instead of a day pack. I haven’t done that since 2011, carried such a heavy load. The hike was long, and included a 2000 foot ascent over a pass and then a 3000 food drop into Aspen. There were a couple of stream crossings, but all told, it was not a difficult affair. Yet we were very tired. Must be that aging thing I keep hearing about.

The focal point of the area on this side are the Maroon Bells, two fourteeners that sit at the head of the valley we came down. One young man we talked to while waiting for the bus yesterday is going to climb them, both of them, later this week. It looks like a technical affair to me, as these are not walk-ups. It makes me feel old and silly for being so tired after having merely walked through the area.

Other folks we met on the trail were doing the “four pass” trek, a 20+ mile trip that, as the name says, takes them up and over four high mountain passes on a circular route starting and ending in Aspen. (I say “in Aspen,” but it is a shuttle bus trip of about ten miles to the trail heads.) That’s an overnight affair, at least a two-day trip.

As we got closer to the trail head, where the bulk of the hikers are found, we found a cacophony of languages, much like hiking in the Alps. This is always a delight.

The photos shown here are pulled off the Internet, explaining their high quality.

And then … we were so tired we just turned on the tube and vegetated last night, and were reminded once again what is being done to the American people. The programming is stupid, and the ads incessant. I don’t, can’t make myself watch “news,” as that is the source of my countrymen’s colossal ignorance. It has two effects, one to dumb them down, and two to insulate them so that they do not know its true impact. They do not know what they do not know. It’s diabolical. Merely having that thing on has got to be harmful to people, and god almighty … what about the children?

Do you ever wonder why, after the success do the movie Rocky, that there was Rocky II, III, IV, V, VI …. people eat it up, that’s why. A successful movie formula is gold, money in the bank.

Even so, I do wish that the American public were a tad less gullible. Just once. Just a tad.

Read this. And this. And get your beer. We will cry together.
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*I was looking for a dead, moribund movie franchise to name this post, and remember the Police Academy movies, and then discovered that Police Academy 8 is scheduled for release in 2014! This post just writes itself! The American public will eat it up!