Creepy art for kids and bottle openers

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This demonstrates that creepy art is not confined to Denver International Airport. This particular piece is near apartments and condos in Sion, Switzerland. Children walk by it every day on their way to school.

Take note, if you are an adult, of the genetalia. This creature obviously just arrived on a space craft. Have a nice school day, kiddies! Try to get that image out of your mind!

Has anyone else noticed how much bad art is around us? It is not just creepy statements like this piece, but landscapes that have no depth or definition, cityscapes that are nothing more than vague impressions, and sculptures that seem to be yelling out at us “Look at me! I am confused!” I understand that some art is impressionist, and even admire much of that work – it imparts warmth. But so much of what I see is a step beyond, the artist full baloney notions that he does not have to communicate anything, that it is up to the viewer to impart meaning. That is nonsense.

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I used to go to art exhibits when we lived in Bozeman, where bored and over-moneyed men and women had their own studios and painted the many expressions of the fruit bowl or cabin in the woods. That is just practice, I realize, and they might well be on their way to doing quality work. The stuff I am talking about, like this piece above from Union Station in Denver, is finished art. Our RTD people probably paid dearly for it, and all who walk in that building pay dearly too.

I think of it as “A Study in Bottle Openers.”

An American Ambassador abroad

I was asked point-blank by a fellow hiker yesterday, a Dane, about our upcoming American elections. I make it a point to avoid such topics, and in saying that I don’t much pay attention, that it is all theater, raised the hackles on another hiker, this one a fellow American.

Half an hour later our American friend had completed his explanation of the American political system, the best democracy in the world, he said. He was a complete reflection of our media, our education system, a font of received wisdom. Even though a nice guy (a CPA even!), he was as clueless as one can be about the real workings of countries and power systems. He is merely as Americans are raised to be, I suppose. He could be a school teacher, even a good one! Our ignorance, after all, is not endemic, but rather has to be learned, taught and re-taught down through the ages. That’s why we have clueless teachers. They pay it forward.

The day before our hike leader, a Frenchman, was explaining how by some mysterious means the melting ice from French glaciers was going to release trapped radiation from Chernobyl. I asked, quite innocently, where our feet currently stood in relation to Chernobyl, and while he wasn’t sure of direction (nor was I), did say with some sarcasm that the cloud from that reactor had stopped at the French border.

So said the French government at the time. Our hike leader did not believe that, of course, and said that he did not trust the French government, as it is corrupt.

“Yours too?” I chimed in.

Last evening over dinner we delved a little bit into politics, and I mentioned that three presidents in my lifetime had changed their names as young men. No one was aware of this. (They are, in case you are curious, Lesley King, who became Gerald Ford, William Blythe III, who became Bill Clinton, and Barry Soetero (Barack Whatshisname). And. Yes, I know few people know that, but you could look it up in one of your trusted sources. I think even Wikipedia, the Intelligence bible, is forthright about that matter.

I was asked then what I thought about Obama’s citizenship, and laughed, saying none of us know where that character came from or what he was up to before holding office, or his parents, for that matter. But I said I didn’t care, as citizenship is the least of issues we should be concerned about in an office holder, that a true leader should have have character rather than merely be one.

And while Obama is a character, he has none, as far as I can see. It is the first requisite for holding office, to have sold your soul.

Thus did yours truly, American ambassador abroad, stand up for the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

Champex, Switzerland

 

We are in Champex, Switzterland. We have been hiking two days, covered around 20 miles, climbed and descended maybe 6,300 feet. The climbing, while hard, is something we can stay on top of, merely resting and recharging muscles. Descent is a little more challenging, as the pain is often unrelenting. Young people do much better at it.

The photo above with a dam in the background – I remember in economics class back in the 1970s they talked about how the French would build dams, pump water up to them at night when rates were low, and run the water down during the day when rates were high. This is one of those kinds of dams. They are building another one, a sister dam, out of sight and using underground tunnels. These are the Swiss, and not the French, I just remembered.

The ground markers, atop a hill and the end of our climb yesterday, mark the boundary of the Sardinain Empire from the 1700s, so I am told.

The village in the valley was hit by a an avalanche in 1997, 20 people killed. So we are told. We walked by many mountainside fortifications to prevent a recurrence.

Parting shots, Chamonix

We leave tomorrow morning for the Haute Route hike. We took a tram cable car (Telepherique de L’Aiguille du Midi (phew!)) up the mountain today to get a look at the very high Alps surrounding amount Mt. Blanc, at over 15,000 feet. It is a remarkable engineering feat! As I understand it, this technology was developed and perfected in the late 1800s. The views are just stunning! Cable cars run every ten minutes all day long, each one holding 30 or more people. Trams and elevators took us up to about 13,000 feet and no kidding, way way up high like that, we exited through the gift shop before coming down off the mountain.

That is a tried and true marketing strategy. (We bought nothing … it was already a spendy day to get up there.)

The “Occult”

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This damned IPad is a most annoying tool, jumping around, making up words … I was ready to publish this and then pow! The image above disappeared along with the first paragraph.

Anyway, I put up a post on “The Occult” which was just too many words and so I took it down, and here I go again. All we need to know about this is as follows:

“Occult = “Intelligence,” capital “I.”

“News,” “entertainment” and “music” are all run by Intelligence. We live in an age of mass deception, so that every level of our “reality” is a manufactured illusion. It has perhaps been so since the advent of electronic media. They are all fake, these media personalities, from your local “meteorologist” all the way up to the Dude, currently Obama.  Everything on TV is fake. TV is used to publicize hoaxes, Orlando the most recent.

Kill your TV.

It is fun to unravel, especially knowing that all of the gruesome death scenes we are being fed are hoaxes. They want us frightened, and the “occult” is just another fear factory with nothing real behind it. Absent that fear, it is just a mystery spun out before us. Mysteries are fun.

There is a reality. It is our feet on the ground, our loved ones and friends, our brains and emotions, all before us via our five senses without mass media, TV, Internet. Our best weapon for exploring the world around us is our brain. It has the ability to sift, sort and analyze and connect dots. Critical thinking skills, no longer taught, are the best tool we have. The best way to short-circuit our brains is by means of visual fakery, which usually bypasses critical thinking edits.  TV is used for that purpose. It creates our fake reality.

Again, too many words.

Some dude, by the way, is re-blogging every word I put up here, even my travelogue. It is creeping me out, so stop that.

Chamonix, France

Chamonix is where we ended our trek six years ago, and where we start this one on Monday. We didn’t have time to see much of the place then. It is a ski town, of course, but today we saw hang gliders, kayaks, bikes, climbers and hikers of all shapes and sizes, a lively place. We sat down to dinner in a small upstairs loft of a burger joint, and were joined by a couple from Israel, a group of four from Czech Republic, and a family from Great Britain.

The photos are of Mount Blanc and its massive glacier. It looms over the town.

Thankfully I can transfer photos from my Nikon CoolPix to the iPad, and so won’t have to rely on this toy to take photos. It does a reasonably good job, but loses quality quickly if you try to zoom. It gets very grainy.

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But I did use the IPad to grab a shot of contrails. We get them occasionally in Denver, but just a few minutes ago we had seven or eight in view. This photo is the remnants of a whole sky that was striped every direction. The best explanation I have heard is that they are using passenger aircraft to get rid of chemicals that they cannot legally dump in land or in the oceans and seas. There are no laws against such activity, as I understand, but it is not something I think about much, so do not quote me.

If you read far enough, you’ll find some people who think that contrails are used for mind control. I doubt it. I think that would be redundant. TV has that ground well covered.

Geneva, day one …

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My wife woke me at 6AM asking if I wanted to attend a piano concert by the river. She must have known the answer as she and daughter were on their way out the door. And, it turned out to be a SITAR concert, so staying in bed was the correct choice. Got up to make coffee, exploded the espresso maker (apparently you have to hold the handle in place), spent the next half hour cleaning up the damage. One broken glass was the only casualty. Will spend the rest of today in coffee-splotched shorts as we travel to Chamonix, France, where the forced march begins on Monday.

Sitar … Some British group, 1967, some band member trying to distinguish himself, long piece taking up the third of the back of an album, me trying to lift the needle and get it on the next song without damaging the vinyl. Ah yes, fond sitar memories.

Anyay, she grabbed this shot with her IPhone, Lake Geneva, slight ripple effect caused by strained rasping sound of sitar strings.

The blog becomes a travelogue

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At the John Lennon Wall, Prague, Czech Republic, 2011. (That is me with the man purse.)

We are leaving today on a trip for Europe, and has been my custom in the past, when I have time I will write and publish photos of our adventures. We are two extremely fortunate people, my wife and I, and so these past years since 2007 have been to …

  • Spain (Barcelona, my carried memory the Salvador Dali museum in Figueras);
  • Europe (Rome, Florence, Venice, and then hiking the Swiss Alps, then sight seeing Switzerland, Hungary, Czech Republic);
  • Nepal, where we hiked a portion of the Annapurna Circuit (it was on this trip that I gathered strong evidence that the earth is indeed round, as we circumnavigated it), and Thailand, including an island in the Gulf of Thailand where the water is bathtub warm;
  • Peru, where we hiked the Inca Trail and visited Machu Picchu;
  • Ecuador and the Galapagos, where I marveled at the intricate survival skills and wacky humor of land tortoises – such cut-ups!;
  • New Zealand, in part where we endured five inches of rain over two days on the Milford Trek, completely worth it;
  • Europe again, where we hiked to the base of the Matterhorn and then a trek through the Dolomites, then driving to Slovenia and through northern Italy to our favorite hangout (and everyone’s), Florence; and finally,
  • Costa Rica, beautiful country and lovely people and with great friends, but where I discovered I can live without bus tours.

This trip we will start out in Geneva, where our daughter currently lives, and from there to Switzerland/France and a portion of the Haute Route, hiking fifty miles or so over five days, with 14,000 feet of elevation gain, 16,000 of descent. There is a debate about which is harder – hiking uphill, or down. The answer is “yes.”

After the hike we are off to Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and then fly home from Bergen, Norway directly to Denver. We return on 9/11.

My wife has done all of the details on this trip (and all the others), everything a travel agent would do from airline and train tickets to advance museum passes to avoid long lines, as at the Louvre. She has gotten very skilled at trip planning.

Money? Of course, always an issue. Our question is where we want it to be when we go – scattered about the world, or sitting in a bank. You can guess the answer. Travel is not only fun, it is gives us a broader, deeper perspective. The United States is just a place to hail from. People everywhere know about our country, but they manage to live their lives 24/7 without thinking of us, unless we are bombing them. As one AAA gal told us before our first trip to Europe, “just lay low. Don’t be Americans.”

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While away, please play! Use the comment sections here to explore the topics we have discussed in the past months, including putting up your own photography and research. This is more and more a communal effort. I’ll be able to check in and delete any spook attacks, but otherwise will be busy with walking, riding trains and buses, drinking fine wines (my preference: white and cheap), photography and sleeping.

My colleague MH does his research, as I see it, in spurts, and by the time I get back will have a tote bag of new projects. I can’t wait!

Bill Hicks became Alex Jones: Case Closed

My colleague Straight wants me to move forward, to get better at using PhotoShop. It offers a far wider array of possibilities than my current tools. I have been using them because I have so much work ahead, and don’t want to take time to learn such a big and complex program. But I must. Fortunately, MH is already well-versed.

We were attacked over the weekend with what appears to be honest but misguided criticism, that the Bill Hicks/Alex Jones comparison is bogus – a golden apple laid out by Intelligence just waiting to be found. I was aware of that possibility, which is why I went to videos, and not Internet images, to pull two together that showed his features to align.

The comparison is difficult, as Hicks has had plastic surgery to become Jones. But I am convinced they are the same man not just by photo comparisons, but also by profession (both fake “conspiracy nuts”), demeanor (both actors who can project intense venom), having the same cameraman and producer, Kevin Booth, and the simple fact that any damned fool can see that Alex Jones is not 42 years old, but rather a man in his fifties, as Hicks would be. Add all of that to alignment of facial features that cannot be changed by plastic surgery, and we have our man.

The person who attacked us lined up several photos side by side looking for differences, as skeptics do. Straight was able to set them to the right proportions, but we noticed something in all of them. See what you think:

Same teeth

The critic is saying that Jones obviously has a smaller mouth than Hicks, but he shot himself in the foot, as Straight and I noticed that Hicks and Jones have exactly the same teeth.

But this calls for PhotoShop, and MH can do this sort of thing. Here are his four overlay progressions after aligning the photos based on the teeth:

In the end, the teeth in the largest photo there are overlaid over the Hicks teeth in upper left. Note how they align with precision.There is only a slight ghosting effect, but no teeth in different positions.

MH then went one step further and created a gif of the progressionhicks-jones-morph

Focus, if you will, on the teeth as you watch that. After all, what are the odds of perfect alignment of one tooth in one photo, much less the whole rack, on two supposedly different men? Statistically speaking, MH has proven beyond reasonable doubt that Bill Hicks became Alex Jones.

Amen to the Bill Hicks/Alex Jones saga. Case closed.

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PS: On the last Jones photo in the gif, or the one on the bottom where all four faces are displayed above, notice the lines extending outward from his eyes. Those are crow’s feet, and not the result of natural aging. Instead, they are a result of extensive plastic surgery, the only reason there is any question about his identity. I expect he may go off the air here soon, maybe a hiatus, as more surgery is necessary to cover those scars.  Or they may just can his ass. We saw this too with both the McCartney boys.

One last parting shot

Before moving forward here, as will be seen in the post that will come right after this, I wanted to stop and take a look at one of the most maligned characters in the history of terrorism, Mohamed Atta.

I was going to do Osama bin Laden, as many photos of body doubles have been used over the years, especially during the time of the Bush presidency when the agitprop was in high gear. Having body doubles is an indication that the real Osama was an Intelligence agent. He most likely shaved off his beard and put on western apparel and lived peacefully after 9/11, his work done. Perhaps he did a photo-op or two, as CIA and company always knew his exact whereabouts. He was an employee, after all.

Osama 1But photos of Osama have been cleaned up, so that most of them left are of the original spook, the 9/11 guy to the left here. He looks normal there, and this is, as far as I know, the original guy, son of a wealthy Saudi family recruited by Intelligence during the original Afghanistan war in the 1980s to drive the Russians out of that country.

So Osama is gone now. Long live Osama bin Laden! Job well done. He may have died in 2001, but that was most likely misdirection. He may have had bad kidneys too, but in retrospect, that too sounds like misdirection. They needed to him alive in our minds until they were done scaring us with his image ten years later in 2011 with his fake killing.

Atta 1Atta is another story. His face was shown all over the country, on TV news and in newspapers, in all the schools, used to frighten everyone. It is to the right here.

The photo has been heavily doctored, and professionally, a top-notch job! It was meant to enter our subconscious while we were in a traumatized state immediately after 9/11.  It was used to ‘sell’ 9/11 by inserting an evil Krueger-like archetype into our dreams, creating nightmares. (I cannot guarantee I have proportions right in comparisons below, as those evil eyes have probably been monkeyed with, made darker all around to make him that much more sinister.)

atta 2Atta too is Intelligence, so I don’t want to make him out to be a victim. He is still around, most likely. There is no need for witness protection for him, as no one is going to confuse him with the guy on the left here, who is the same man. The original photo from which this is cropped has another man with his around him in warm embrace, all in a good mood as if at a party. The red-eye indicates a casual photo. But notice how the eyes, non-threatening in this photo, are turned to something so sinister in the one above! They are the same eyes. The photo above was made, in part, from this one. However, notice how they shortened and widened the face, so that the ears on the one above almost look like they could be on his cheeks. I have never known anyone with ears that low. It is circus freak stuff!

Atta AttaAnyway, I could not resist putting the two together, even as I don’t know what it means. I guess it only tells me that the photo above, the sinister one, has been seriously monkeyed with, so that the two side by side expose all the distortions that were done to create one of the great fake boogeymen of all time.

Looking back now, knowing everything I did not know on 9/11/2001, but having pushed and pushed forward, it is easy to see how all of the characters of that event were inventions, and how the whole thing was a TV show. Street interviews were filmed in advance, the TV networks all given the same feed, and footage we have of the buildings collapsing probably dummied up. They went down, for sure, but we don’t know how. There were no planes, no hijackers, and researchers are busy now trying to prove up how many of the supposed victims were even real.

All too little too late. The psy-op, one of the biggest of all time, worked.