• Very suspicious! Edward Snowdon is a low-clearance guy with access to very highly secret documents.

• Hiding in plain sight? I sort of get this, that by telling everyone where he is at, he can’t be secretly killed.
• Good timing! In the wake of the Boston hoax, people are in a high state of tension, angry and scared. This spying system will not be dismantled.

It smells like a PSYOP to me, the National Security State telling is that we are being watched. They have emerged from the shadows, the velvet gloves taken off. It’s a little bit warmer now in our pot of water.

There are no “terrorists” of any note outside of FBI, Langley, Military Intelligence, Mossad and MI5 and 6. If they were worried about terrorism, they’d bomb Washington, Tel Aviv and London, do Hari Kari, make honorable exits, leave us alone, stop scaring the shit out of us.

It’s about us. We are the enemy. It is the people who smell a rat that the rat is watching.
___________
Russia is “ready to consider” offering Snowdon asylum, according to Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary. That’s one notch on the “this could be real” side.

Glenn Greenwald tweets “We are going to have a lot more significant revelations that have not yet been heard over the next several weeks and months.”
___________
If anyone is wondering why NSA is doing this, it is simple: They can. No one stopped them after 9/11, and now no one can. Even if we have some mass organizing movement to put a halt to this, how can we ever be sure. Everyone one is vulnerable now. No one has looked specifically at your or my information, but it is accessible. That’s the whole point, a gun that can be loaded at any time.

Imagine if they can store and access information on millions of us, how easy it is for them to corner a few hundred members of congress their staffs, media personalities like Anderson Cooper or even your local talking head. Information is power. Then perhaps you can understand why William Colby can say that “the Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” Owning did not necessarily come about by purchase.

Take it a step further – how did we Learn that Anthony Weiner was sexting? How did we learn about John Edwards’ affair? Every one of them are being watched, and most have something – an extramarital affair, drug habit, “secret” bank account. Even if they are clean, they can be framed easily enough.

There’s nothing that can be done. It happened right under our noses because of 9/11, a false flag attack done specifically for this purpose. We did not investigate it, we believed the lies, we allowed them to pass and keep USAPATRIOT. The republic was already stressed, not having had a worthwhile president since JFK, so it’s hard to point at 9/11 as a red line. If there was a time that brought about the repression we now live under, it would be the ‘1960’s’, or that period from 1965-75 when we had information, organization, freedom of expression, movement politics. That scared the shit out of the overlords, and it has been downhill since. We’ve been dumbed down, kids are saddled with inescapable debt, jobs are now prisons and even essential to get access to health care.

The word gets bandied about, but people do not know what it means: “Freedom.” We cannot have it without fighting for it, and Americans long ago forgot what it was and how to fight. There will be no uproar over this, certainly no uprising. We’re too scared.

If anyone knows a way out of this problem, keep it to yourself or write it down on a piece of paper. Otherwise, your information is being shared with the National Security State.

It goes back to the Powell Memo. Worth a read.

“The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.”
– William Colby, former CIA director

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
– William Casey, CIA Director (in his first staff meeting, 1981)

Years ago, before I met my wife, I was in a relationship that I knew could not last. A painful breakup was on the horizon, and it would fall on me to end it. I occasionally hummed words from a song by Willie Nelson, “if I were the man that you wanted, I would not be that man that I am.” The beauty of those words, I later realized, is their two edges.

4&20 now takes on the whole idea of conspiracy , referring to an essay by Jarrod Shanahan called I want to believe. I want to deal here with just snippets of the essay and comments that follow, but in the following framework: People conspire when they don’t want their activities to be discovered. The best word to describe this behavior is “conspiracy.” No small part of our criminal code deals specifically with conspiracy. The Mafia is a conspiracy, RICO laws were written to punish people at the top of conspiracies who order crimes but do not get their hands dirty. Popular lore has it that 19 Arabs controlled by a man in a cave pulled off 9/11. All of the nonsense surrounding Watergate was supposedly to uncover a conspiracy. JFK and RFK were killed as the result of … oh, wait … lone nuts.
Continue reading “The stigmata” →

Among the criticisms I receive at this blog is that the only way people can debate with me is to agree with me. I regard that notion as classic projection, as they only way I can make headway with any of the noted skeptics of my thinking is to draw back into the crowd, start talking D v R, and get with the program.

D v R is the framework for all debates. The R side is one of honesty and openness, that is, R leaders are allowed to be openly goofy, extreme in their thinking, and even stupid. The D side is a bit more nuanced, as D’s imagine themselves more intelligent, so that their leaders have to play to that vanity. D’s are no less ill-informed and deluded as the R’s. Consequently, an Obama or Clinton, two people who are indeed smart and well-educated, truck well as D’s, but would be regarded with suspicion on the other side.
Continue reading “Political parties as a social control device” →

A bomb was detonated Reyhanli in the Turkish province of Hatay near the Syrian border. From all appearances the bomb and victims are real. There are 62 dead. (RT link.)

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has blamed the Assad regime of Syria for the blast even as that regime would have to be utterly stupid to do such a thing. Having successfully resisted the well-coordinated and funded terrorist attack for two years now, it is apparent that regime is not stupid.

More likely candidates are the intelligence services and black operatives of NATO, Great Britian, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United States, distinguishable in name only, and known by everyone in the world except the American news media to be aiding and abetting the Syrian rebels terrorists.

I write about “thought control” here now and then, but the concept has no penetrating power. Humans are self-contained self-validation machines, so that any suggestion that the mind is thinking thoughts supplied by others is immediately rejected. That’s actually why it works.

So it might be useful now to witness an real-time example. The supposed Boston Marathon bombers have been mauled, one is dead and the other fired on without being given opportunity to surrender. Since he survived, the executive promptly announced that he has no rights, so would never be heard from again unless via the executive.*
Continue reading “Hang ’em high; Obama’s “red line”” →

We had excellent exchanges here over the weekend, and I am left with the realization that the best writers use the fewest words. But I’ve always known that. Blogging is easy. Mark Twain, I think, apologized for writing someone a long letter, but said he did not have the time to write a short one.

I wanted to address the idea of stupidity in a few words, and realized that others had done it already. Keep in mind that stupidity has in it, by definition, the lack of awareness of one’s own stupidity, so that even as I arrogantly recite the lines below, I could be up to my eyebrows in it too. But who would ever convince me of that?

• Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped. (Elbert Hubbard)
• Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. (Euripides)
• To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost. (Gustave Flaubert)
• There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity. (Goethe)
• Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. (Martin Luther King)
• Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it. (Stephen Vizinczey)
• The bookful blockhead ignorantly read
  With loads of lumber in his head. (Alexander Pope)

Now, I’m going to put down my own pithy thoughts on this subject …

During the last baseball game we attended in Arizona, at Chase Field, the stadium announcer asked all people who had served in the military to stand so that we could applaud and honor them. Though I sympathize with their plight I don’t “honor” these people. But there is no way of expressing sympathy without joining the general applause for nonexistent accomplishments fighting manufactured enemies as unwitting agents of Wall Street (or the military-industrial complex, if that makes more sense.)

All of these people had to go through basic training. It’s a terrible experience that none should endure. My brother, a gentle man who had no business carrying a gun, was force-marched, made to stand guard in the rain until exhausted, sleep deprived and hypothermic. He was drilled to exhaustion, kicked in the stomach by a drill instructor, called every imaginable demeaning name. This, we are told, made him a man. But he was already well on his way to manhood before this interruption. The experience merely separated him from humanity, which is necessary to create killing machines.
Continue reading “Professional victims” →

One of the themes that Chomsky returns to habitually is that of the power of repressive systems. The Soviet Union, during its heyday, had legions of spies and informers, but the undercurrent of humor was always present. People living there knew they were in a totalitarian system, and never really bought in. They were told what to believe, and most pretended to believe. (The intellectual classes, true believers, glommed on to power just as they do here.) The threat to the power system there was extant throughout – not that people would learn of their condition, but rather that they would organize. Consequently, the repression of the Soviet state was most effective in spying on its own people.

What brought them down? It was not Ronald Reagan, for sure. I have no special insight, but have heard others say that mere knowledge of life outside the USSR had a large role. Kids knew about music, cars and consumer products, and were restive. The Soviet Union collapsed with hardly a whimper. The people, wise to their leaders, were also unified. No government can survive long without popular support. In other places like Prague and Budapest, similar uprisings made it clear that unless they were willing to engage in massacres of historic proportions, the game was up. (Similarly, in Iraq, the US was forced to withdraw its troops and close down its bases, as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were in the streets telling them to go away.)
Continue reading “The key that could unlock our cells” →

Yes, he is that Michael Brown.

Michael Brown here. It’s FRIDAY! Another Caption This Contest. Considering that Hugo Chavez is still dead, and his funeral is being held today, here’s today’s photo. May the best – or worst – caption win. The winner gets…a pair of passes to Ski Loveland! Have fun!

Contest entries follow by the dozen, a few examples:

Michael J. Titera Book Title: “How To Fake Your Own Death”
Continue reading “Stay out of my Facebook exchange” →

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.” (John Derbyshire)

Swede brought the above quote to me in a comment in another post. I’m a little concerned about that man, as his intellect is locked away in a steel trap, sealed off by hatred and inaccessible to him. He reads some, has exposure to a wide array of YouTube videos. That speaks of long obsessive hours online. The way the Internet is constructed now, post-Google, allows each of us to follow our own passion without exposure to the uncomfortable, even sane, reasoning of others. Google suits our fancies.

I did a quick Wiki-hit on Derbyshire, hardly fair to the man. There’s obviously been some furious back-and-forth editing going on there, and as Bryan Schweitzer reminds us, we should never judge a man when he is at his worst. Derbyshire did work for National Review, after all.
Continue reading “A challenging puzzle” →