How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
I have now encountered two people, Gary Taubes and Richard Milton, and by my own judgment found them to be insightful. Their observations go against the grain of embedded ( and pompous) professionals.
Continue reading “Merry Christmas, my fellow intellectual miscreants”
This began as a response to BMSeattle about ‘Wings of Hope’(1998)*, another, IMO, faux TV documentary from Werner Herzog. It got a little long so I’ll post it here and hopefully give some relief to the comments section for Mark’s post, Grizzly Man.
*The film is about a 17 year old German girl, Juliane Koepcke, being the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Peruvian jungle in 1971. 92 (11) others on the plane died. The plane was hit by lightening and disintegrated. Given that planes are routinely hit by lightening and don’t do that, there is your first howler to judge this “real life” drama by. Continue reading “Little Werner Needs to Lie”
The above video is offered just for enjoyment. It is blurry but the sound quality is good. It is Michael Landon’s final appearance on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson on 5-9-1991. Prior to this appearance he had announced to the public that he had inoperable cancer of the pancreas and liver, and was a short-timer. He died on July 1, 1991. I cannot make anything of those numbers. It is a delightful interview.*
A few years back I was alive with the excitement of a discovery that changed my outlook, that “Paul McCartney” was actually two men, a set of twins. Once I got a thorough immersion in their faces, they became easily to tell apart, so that I can easily see that today’s Paul McCartney is actually “Mike,” though we do not have the luxury of knowing their real names.
That information in tow, I put together a (in retrospect, sloppy) blog post on the matter, and submitted it to Miles Mathis. He rejected it as not up to standards, which I easily accepted, as I was indeed a newbie. At a certain point in the succeeding conversation he suggested one flaw in my writing: “You make too many assumptions.”
I was not prepared to accept this comment from XE on first reading. It sat uncomfortably even as I know I can be fooled, and have been time and again.
I watched the movie Grizzly Man in 2005, and we met Timothy Treadwell at a lecture in either Bozeman or Billings, Montana. That created personal interest. What I wrote before was the result of twelve-year-old memories.
Back then I did not watch movies with a discerning eye. I still thought jets flew through buildings like a knife through butter. I thought that elections were real, that news was essentially a (distorted) reflection of reality, and that a movie labeled “documentary” by its makers would be an honest enterprise.
I had to watch the movie again, and did yesterday afternoon.
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Albert Einstein
Is there an environmental “rape culture” in the United States? Yes, of course, there is. Most contemporary ecological problems, or “rape the land” mentality, is deeply rooted in Western patriarchal culture.
Rape (transitive verb) definition for this piece: 1a: (archaic) to seize and take away by force b:despoil 2: to commit rape on Continue reading “21st Century Rape Culture”
[Note to readers: This post should be two, as it covers both the movie Grizzly Man (the life and death of Timothy Treadwell), and Woody Harrelson and his dad, Chuck, and the discovery that Harrelson’s mother is an Oswald. Grizzly Man will be covered in more and better depth in a separate post very shortly. The part about Harrelson in this post starts about 2/3 of the way down. ]
Coming fresh off the realization that the death of Mathew Shepard was probably a hoax, and thinking back on other events in my life that were both gruesome and captivating, I decided to take a look at Grizzly Man, AKA Timothy Treadwell, AKA Timothy William Dexter.
For those not familiar, Treadwell was an advocate for Alaskan brown bears, and during the 1990s he lived with them, filmed them, anthropomorphized them, and was finally eaten by them in October of 2003. His then girlfriend, Amie Huguenard was also killed on that same day.
We saw Treadwell give a talk when we lived in Bozeman. He gave a slide show and was passing the hat, and seemed genuine. He named all the bears – doll-like names indicating that he thought of them as fuzzy friends. One thing I clearly remember from the talk was his view of the bear mating ritual. The male gets a whiff and stalks the female until she is in a receiving mood. He then has a one minute tryst with her, if that. Treadwell called it “making love.” I did think he was a little ’round the bend.’
Steve is a man in his mid-thirties, married with a young child. He expresses himself well. He is a bit of an idealist, that is, he uses words like “authentic” in describing people and looks for meaning behind things like mini-malls. (Idealism is always about “What does it mean? What does it really mean?”) He’s aware of reputation, how far words travel, how meaningless Facebook friendship can be.
He is apparently feeling some stress, as we all do, at having to produce a constant flow of income into his household to keep it afloat. He realizes this will never end.
Continue reading “And now for something completely different”
Note to readers: I am re-running this 2017 post along with original comments intact. The Shepard incident was close to my (former) home in Montana, and I was deeply familiar with the towns in which it was staged. The Shepard incident (along with Columbine) served as the means by which the public mind was prepared for Hate Crimes legislation signed by Barack Obama in 2009. I regard such legislation as a perversion of justice, as it requires that we grasp not only the crime and the evidence but also the state of mind of the accused. Such a thing cannot be done in an impartial and fair world.
Yeah, I know, we don’t have a fair and impartial justice system. Still, Hate Crimes are an aberration.
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This photo appeared on Facebook recently, someone commemorating the 19th year of Matt Shepard’s passing. Since his death was inspiration for major legislation regarding “hate crimes,” I reluctantly thought I should take a look at it.
“Please be real! Please be real!” I thought. I don’t want another project.
It is fishy. Very fishy. Just eighteen months after the Shepard event we would be asked to believe that two psychopathic murderers just happened to be classmates at Columbine. Here are we asked to believe that two kids in Laramie, Wyoming also just happened to be natural-born killers. Such people are [extremely] rare [or non-existent]. That they would hook up in a small town like Laramie, Wyoming … is there something in the water? Continue reading “The Mathew Shepard killing looks like another hoax”
Could not resist sharing this. 
Piece of Mindful 