When my older brother, Steve, spoke at my oldest brother Tom’s funeral, he said that Tom (9 years older than me) had introduced him to the work of Thomas Merton as an eighth grader. Tom was a poet and quiet intellectual, and he and I, even without the age difference, did not have much in common. Merton was just a name to me. I knew such a person existed, but had no interest in him. Religious thinkers have never had any appeal for me. It wasn’t until I read James Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, that I caught a better glimpse of Merton and wondered about my older brother, wishing perhaps that I had known him better.

Here’s the Merton money quote from the introduction to Unspeakable:

“I have little confidence in [John F.] Kennedy, I think he cannot fully measure up to the magnitude of his task, and lacks creative imagination and the deeper kind of sensitivity that is needed. Too much from the Time and Life mentality, than which I can imagine nothing further, in reality, from, say, Lincoln. What is needed is really not shrewdness or craft, but what politicians don’t have: depth, humanity and a certain totality of self-forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals but for man as a whole: a deeper kind of dedication. Maybe Kennedy will break through into that someday by miracle. But such people are before long marked out for assassination.”

This was written in January of 1962.

I recently took a test which is supposed to give me a reasonable approximation of my “true IQ.” It only takes a few minutes. The result is my own business, and I invite the reader to find out an approximation with the understanding that the very fact that you are reading this blog, Piece of Mind, means that you are above average. The test is here.

Why do such tests exist? As a freshman in high school I was placed in a small section of the class at Billings Central Catholic High School, Billings, Montana, knows as the “honors” section. I did not last long. My family’s home life was not conducive to studying, and overwhelmed by distractions, the school officials decided I belonged with the regular kids. Once nice thing about that was the addition of two new class periods to my schedule, study hall and PE. Apparently the brightest kids needed neither.

Continue reading “Get your free IQ score here!” →

The following passage originally appeared in a 1969 book of essays and such, under the heading American Labor and United States Foreign Policy, and cites Thomas Braden. More about Braden in a second, but if you are like me, when you saw that book title you thought “Wow! There’s a book I’ll never read.” Indeed, I never did. I picked up this passage from The Politics of Heroin, by Alfred McCoy.

In the cited book, Ronald Radosh cites Braden, a CIA agent, as follows:

On the desk in front of me as I write these lines is a creased and faded yellow paper, It bears the following inscription in pencil:

“Received from Warren G. Haskins, $15,000 (signed) Norris A. Grambo.”

I went in search of this paper on the day the newspapers disclosed the “scandal” of the Central Intelligence Agency’s connection with America students and labor leaders. It was a wistful search, and when it ended I found myself feeling sad.

For I was Warren G. Haskins, Norris A. Grambo was Irving Brown, of the American Federation of Labor. The $15,000 was from the vaults of the CIA, and the yellow paper is the last memento I possess of a vast and secret operation…

It was my idea to give $15,000 to Irving Brown. He needed it to pay off his strong-arm squads in the Mediterranean Ports, so that American supplies could be uploaded against the opposition of Communist dock workers.

Historians who rely on declassified documents will be hard-pressed to understand what Braden is talking about, but it has to do with breaking a dock workers’ strike in Marseille, France in the post-war years. Quite a few things were going on. The Corsican mob, with CIA assistance, was strong-arming communist workers* out of the unions, while Lucky Luciano, then living in Italy, was using laboratories in Marseilles to process heroin for shipment to the United States (the “French Connection”). The CIA assisted the Corsicans and Luciano in moving product stateside. The U.S. was also running arms shipments through Marseilles to assist the French in their battle to retain their colony in Vietnam.

In the meantime, CIA was busy infiltrating American labor unions and student organizations, trying to separate them from leftist influence. And, in a separate operation aptly known as “Mockingbird,” CIA was busy infiltrating its people into American media. CIA Director William Colby would later say that the idea was to “Own everyone of any significance in the major media.” No doubt they succeeded, as our American news media is a tame rabbit even as it is portrayed in movie and TV fare as a stalking tiger.

CIA were busy boys in those days! The reason this passage struck me was that anyone who was sentient in 1982 might remember a TV show on CNN called “Crossfire,” and the opening words uttered five nights a week:

From the left, I’m Tom Braden.”

Yeah, that Thomas Braden, speaking from the left no less!. Braden was obviously Mockingbirded into his seat on that show. (He was also a newspaper columnist, and the inspiration for the TV show “Eight is Enough.”)

I call it full spectrum dominance. No matter your point of view in this country, if you get your news from the American media, you’re a right winger. If you’re “on the left,” like Braden, you’re just a righty of another color.
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*Due to McCarthy era propaganda, which went on through 1990, the reader’s assumption might be that the communist workers were part of the Internationale, and took orders from Moscow. Not true. It was merely an organizing force for labor.

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.