A concept that is very useful in understanding politics is this: Individuals behave in one way, but groups of individuals in another. A group has characteristics quite apart from the individuals that make up that group. The key understanding that came out of group dynamics in the early twentieth century was that group behavior could be manipulated even as the individuals within the group were not aware of it.

That’s a large part of what advertising does – to identify groups and manipulate them. Political advertising is no different – group manipulation. When you hear a phrase like “soccer mom” or “NASCAR dad,” you are hearing the results of intense study of our society so that the advertising agencies that work for candidates know how to fine-tune their work. Advertising works, and the most discouraging part for me is that there is no connection between behavior of office holders once elected and the advertising that got them elected. Once the campaign is over, the office holders go back to work for their employers, the people who financed their campaigns. The public goes back to sleep.

Group dynamics is so advanced now that anything can be sold to us under the right conditions. 9/11 was an orchestrated event, a self-inflicted wound. It induced a mass psychosis, and thereafter any poison could be sold to us to salve our wound. Without knowing the inside wisdom, it is easy to see that never-ending war was a big part of the objective, as was passage of the USAPATRIOT ACT, which essentially repealed the Bill of Rights.
Continue reading “Why are we having this discussion?” →

But it seems the good they die young. (Dick Holler, Abraham, Martin and John)

It’s the quality and not the length of a man’s life that counts. If a man is assassinated while he is fighting to save the soul of a nation, his death contributes more than anything else to its redemption. (Martin Luther King)

I’m not going to look this up, as I understand the sentiment well enough that it stands without citation. Fidel Castro warned Hugo Chavez early in his career to be careful, that the United States would use democracy to bring him down. If you stop reading there, the message will be lost. Castro was not saying that our shadow leadership lurking behind our symbols of democracy actually believes in any of that stuff. Get real. He was saying that Chavez would have to play by the rules, while the US would not. He would have to fight fire with fire, and in so doing would be at a disadvantage. His every move would be publicized while those of the US would be kept secret.
Continue reading “Hugo Chavez, a job well done. Rest in peace” →

It just keeps getting weirder! Now they are saying that men in a profession that does not allow marriage or women and features flowery effeminate costumes and hats that oddly resemble a phallus … might also be gay!

There is a mystique around 9/11. We have magnified it out of proportion because it happened to us. We imagine that it is some unique cataclysmic event of epic importance. It is indeed an important event, and the number of real and fake people killed that day is impressive. It was traumatizing, but even in my lifetime it is trivial. A brief list of places that have endured tragedies exponentially larger includes Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Korea, Vietnam, The Congo, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and recently Libya. Of relatively similar proportion are events in Panama, Chile, Serbia, Lebanon, Palestine, Argentina and currently, though it is shrouded in a cloud, Syria. That country may soon join the exponential list. I only include episodes in barbarism that directly or peripherally involve the United States.

In other words, 9/11 was not that big a deal by itself. But what followed – a clash of civilizations, is epic in scale. Millions have been killed, regimes have toppled. 9/11 changed the world. That seemed the objective.

Domestically, Americans are insular and uninformed, geographic grade-schoolers. It’s all about us. The event, well-planned and carried out, also involved an extensive and ongoing cover-up.

This is 2013, and in November we will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the public slaying of John F. Kennedy. That event too is shrouded in mystery, but so much has been uncovered that a majority of the public does not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald “acted alone,” an odd phrase considering the large body of evidence that indicates that he didn’t even “act.” Later this year a movie, Legacy of Secrecy, will attempt to jujitsu this public disbelief in the official story onto a new official perpetrator, the “Mafia,” a loosely affiliated and barely organized group of low-level thugs. Like the similarly mythical “Al Qaeda,” these people could not possibly have pulled it off.

So, fifty years later, the U.S. Government is still conducting an active cover-up of the JFK assassination. Somewhere within the bowels of government there must be a Department of Public Mythology.
Continue reading “The dawn of a new era” →

I am going to continue in the same vein today, and keep it short. First, my thanks to Steve W, who pointed out an apparent CGI scam even in the midst of discussions about CGI scams. That will be part two.

Part one: Since, as expected, those who believe the official story cannot, will not visit the accumulated evidence from the last eleven years, I’ll bring a small part of it to them. The following are photographs from 9/11. The one below is a parking lot a couple of blocks from the Twin Towers. Our boys have to explain how a pancake collapse toasted them. (The gas tanks were intact and unexploded.)

Here’s another, this time of a police car burning up, but only in part, the rest undamaged, and no gasoline explosion. However, paper underneath the car and near the tires is not burning. This was common throughout ground zero – fires that burned but were not hot. Notice also that the fire stops exactly at the door gasket. Also very common. Nothing hit this car – it spontaneously combusted. Firefighters trying to find their way out were aided by cars that combusted. Pancake collapse does not explain this phenomenon.

Now, reader can question the validity of the photos, look for CGI, and come up with explanations that do not call into question the official government story about the 19 hijackers and a laptop in a cave (apparently an amazing one). That’s what skeptics do. And when you have an explanation, contact Dr. Judy Wood, as she wants to know. She collects evidence, but if she cannot explain it, she says so. She speculates, and so labels her thoughts as just that.

The second part is the Pumpkin Video. Briefly, I have had many head-slapping moments in this long exercise when some other person explains or exposes something, and I think “Ay carumba! Why did I not see that!” I am not a “researcher,” only a skeptic. My only original thought, from maybe 2002 and which led me down this path, was incredulity at the idea that people were making cell phone calls from airliners. The official story later changed about that – they do have that power to alter the “truth” as it moves about.

So I watched this video, and it never occurred to me that I was not looking at a pumpkin. That’s all they talked about throughout in the comments, so that my susceptibility to suggestion was triggered. Steve W said “Is that a pumpkin?” and I thought he was being sarcastic, but he wasn’t. Another head-slapping moment. Just as when it was pointed out to me that airliners cannot cut through steel like butter, I instantly realized, due to someone else’s sharp perceptions, that I’d been had.

It wasn’t hard, once the initial illusion was pierced, to see a telltale black outline around the van, and realize that it has been superimposed via CGI.

Something hit something. That’s all we know.
______
I’ll embed the pumpkin video properly later when I am at my desk.

Tomato Guy and I had it out yesterday and last night. Read at your own peril.

• Tomato Guy: Shrill, man. You’re getting shrill.
• MT: I hear ya. It gets frustrating. Lincoln talked about only being able to fool some of the people all of the time, but these Americans are walking wounded. They are barely aware of anything.
• Tomato Guy: That’s really harsh. Just because they don’t agree with you doesn’t mean they are wrong.
• MT: There are things that we can disagree on – it’s a very complicated world. I don’t have any answers on running an economy or a massive organization like the government. We try our best and accept failure and success and try to learn as we go. I’m talking about matters of water bring wet – we cannot disagree on hard evidence. Continue reading “Tomato Guy and the Meaning of Life” →

Zero Dark Thirty is a fiction entertainment piece, part of a larger effort to “kill” Osama bin Laden in our consciousness. I’d be lying if I said I understood why. At the time of the operation, I speculated that the military was leaving Afghanistan and needed to dispense with the cover story. Others I’ve heard discuss the matter think that because it is so widely known outside this country that 9/11 was an inside job that the Pentagon merely wanted to move forward and invent new realities. Most amazing is that the movie makers surely know that the Navy Seals who supposedly pulled off the mission are all dead, and their comrades too. There is an oppressive sense about this movie in that people who made it have to have some inkling of what is true.

Someday some bright light will offer more insight. But I am in awe at the total uniformity of thought among TV news readers, journalists, intelligentsia, public officials, comedians – it’s hard not to believe in this scam! True, the greatest achievement of American propaganda is that most Americans don’t know there is American propaganda. And movies are a large part of our background thought control system. Here’s a paragraph that I wrote to a couple of film reviewers who loved, just loved, ZDT:
Continue reading “Who framed Osama bin Laden?” →

• TG: You are persistent. I’ll give you that.
• Me: That’s one word for it. A nicer one.
• TG: All right then. Let’s talk conspiracy.
• Me: Must we?
• TG: We must.
• Me: Well, people conspire.
• TG: No, not little stuff. Big stuff. You imagine that there are thousands of people who are acting in concert and not talking about it in public. That’s bizarre.
• Me: Kind of hard to grasp. For all of us.
• TG: Like, you know, impossible, dude. Impossible.
• Me: Well, let’s break it down. Let’s say that I wanted to shoot the mayor of Anywhere, USA. How would I do it?
• TG: Well, you get a gun, and then you shoot him.

Continue reading “Annoying guy stops by again” →

There is a long list of things I would change about Americans if I could – turn off the TV, be more aggressive in criticism of public figures other than coaches and general managers, stop trusting politicians, don’t be taken in by advertising, listen, listen listen to me – that’s a a short list, but at the top would be to simply grow up. Countries are sausage factories, and the people who rise to power are the most ruthless and cunning. They manipulate themselves into positions of power, control of resources and other people. They steal, lie, and cheat. They murder people who threaten them. Most “accidental” deaths of prominent people are actually murders.

They do all of this with impunity, as the law is at their disposal too. I laugh at people who think we need a “new investigation” of 9/11. By whom? The ones that did it? An “international body”? That investigation is ongoing, and the people who are calling for a new one are the ones doing it. We may someday know most of the details, but no one of prominence will ever be punished. People who get too close to the truth will be killed. (I do wish that while they are at it they also investigate the anthrax attack – that is part of it as well, but has slipped down the memory hole.)

The United States, like Monty Python’s Camelot, is a very silly place. If it is like that here, it is like that everywhere. We are, however, a large country with several features that make us exceptional:

• We have natural resources on our continent that have always assured our ability to take care of our own needs;
• We have oceans on either side so that it is very difficult to attack us;
• We have neighbors north and south who are not as aggressive and cunning as us, or are just cowed by our hegemonic power.*

All of that makes us a world power.
Continue reading “Light sources” →

Tomato Guy would be a good blogger but doesn’t think it is worth his time.

• TG: It’s all so pointless. You measure success by “hits” and “reads.” So what if someone hits your blog?
• Me: Book successes are measured by number of copies sold. Who actually reads books but a very few?
• TG: So you’re like an author? That’s a little presumptuous – authors do careful research, make arguments over many pages, reach conclusions …
• Me: Blah blah blah.
• TG: Authors have impact. You don’t.
• Me: There are been a few authors who have influenced the flow of events by the strength of their work. Most are addressing selected small audiences and stroking them – Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, for instance.
• TG: Chomsky.
• Me: I suppose. That hurt.
  Continue reading “TG takes aim” →