Conrad Burns, Jon Tester … Round and round we go

I was walking down First Avenue North in Billings, Montana on election night, 1988. At that time I was a loyal Republican. I met a smiling man on the sidewalk. He was smoking a cigarette. I had voted for him that day. His teeth were nicotine yellow.  Even then, six feet under in delusional thinking, I thought “This is a cat who swallowed a canary.

Conrad Burns was nothing special. His managers spent many restless nights maneuvering to overcome his latest gaffes. He introduced bills he had not even read, voted sight unseen as instructed by staff. He held native Americans in contempt. He allowed a large building in Bozeman to be named after him for no good reason, a legacy to our corruption.

He wore both a business suit and cowboy hat at once. Neither became him. He was a complete phony.

But to my great surprise, in 2006 he lost out to an ever bigger phony, Jon Tester. Beef  on the hoof, Tester squeezed Burns out down at the end of the trough.

Now that Burns has died, it is time to saying something nice about him: He did get his teeth fixed. If Tester sheds a few pounds, I’ll say something nice about him too when he drops.

Oi veh

I was reading a nice little piece on our health care system, what a joke it is, siphoning cash out of us even as half of us cannot come up with $400 on a bet.  The system has already worked its magic, purged us of our wealth, so that health care is just another cruel joke. It doesn’t work anyway and is unaffordable anyway and ACA did not fix it anyway. ACA was just a scam to prevent reform, to further enslave us.

And then I got to the end of the piece and read the following:

“But convince Bernie to run as a Green Party candidate, and maybe there’s a chance to send a message to the rentier parasites that they won’t achieve total control of our lives without a fight.”

Oi veh. Those messages we send really pack a wallop. 

Even assuming that Bernie Sanders is even for real and that our votes are even counted and that people are politically savvy enough to think beyond controlled media and that the office of president has real power … yeah, that will work.

The house is sinking in mud, foundations are cracked, beams are rotted, cold wind blows through broken windows, there are holes in the walls, electricity and water have been shut off …

Time for new shingles.

I solve the problems of homelessness and addiction

[Note: This post was written in Portland,  and we have seen homelessness here all about, people sleeping in streets and doorways. In one instance we were walking down the sidewalk within a few feet of a bearded and poorly dressed man, and I was approached by a woman hawking some snake oil having to do with travel. I kindly refused her invitation to listen to her presentation. The man a few feet away said “Well, she didn’t want to talk to me.” He knew what what up, his perceptions are keen enough.]

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There are nagging problems in this world that seem never to be solved … addiction and homelessness, for instance. I think the underlying presumption in the minds of those we call “right-wingers” and “progressives” is that the person suffering the problem is helpless.

I have already alienated the pwoggies by suggesting that mental illness is wildly overstated, so I might as well go one step further and suggest that helplessness and victimhood are as well.

I don’t truck with right wingers in these matters … I don’t care about bootstraps or economic betterment because that usually involves some form of wage slavery, or what was referred to in the sixties as “selling out.” In right-wing authoritarian type of mind, these problems are solved by getting a job, working 40,60,80 underpaid hours a week in submission to some over-important cracker. That is just another manner of destruction of the human spirit … and not “empowerment.” (But keep at it, son, and some day you too can be a cracker!)

But the pwoggies are no closer to answers with their shelters and shrinks and drugs. These people are down, seemingly defeated, and possibly on the way out. If there is to be redemption, it has to come from inside. If it does not come from there, it will not happen.

It will not be found in drugs, twelve-stepping, religious faith or getting a job. For each person the answer, if one exists, is buried under a life of defeat that results in resignation of the spirit. For each person redemption comes from that same source. To step in that person’s life and “do for” him or her is to further rob the spirit. Just as giving a person money robs that person of ambition, so too does stepping in to solve  spiritual problems result in robbing the spirit.

But a bed is nice, and so is food. If we can provide that and dispense with all the other bullshit, maybe these people can find some dignity in knowing that there is a tomorrow. Each one has unique qualities, though perhaps drugs and booze have done so much physical destruction that only a skeleton remains. Even so, the recovery journey has to come from self-leadership and self-discovery. Otherwise, it will not happen.

Keep the shrinks away, however. They ain’t got a clue. Keep the preachers away. They are false leaders. Keep the right wingers and pwoggies away … each has a roadmap to a dead-end.

So I tend to agree that food and shelter are necessary to help the homeless people among us. But that is about all I can offer as a solution, and imagine that I am no closer to the answer than anyone else. These are, after all, complex humans, each one a riddle.

Postcard from edgy Portland

It is very good to be removed from party politics, TV news, newspapers and radio and Huffington Post, but reality takes a while to sink in. We have to avoid fake reality and then realize that it is fake before we can begin to see things as they really are. Time offers perspective. Reading helps.

These days when I am driving Denver traffic and turn on my radio, I enjoy listening to Rush Limbaugh – I don’t care about his content, which is designed to manipulate a broad class of potentially thoughtful but utterly clueless men (yes, men). (Yes, clueless.) His tone is appealing – he is older, and has been publicly savaged and ridiculed by “the left,” but seems mellowed and even occasionally insightful. I recommend him to any who are disenchanted and searching for answers. He doesn’t have any, but he does serve as pleasant elevator music while you move on to your next destination.

I have been wondering about the post below about “Paul/Mike” McCartney turning up now and then as “custodian” at his childhood home. What is striking is how pedestrian he is in appearance and attitude, joking, winking, sharing a secret with us. He’s not wealthy or surrounded by adoring fans nor is he sporting an MBE medal. He’s just a Liverpool bloke. He’s been retired for decades. He cannot help himself in appearing on camera, just as John Lennon returned from death to film Let Him Be. And it is comforting to know that they are just men who were hired to play parts, and who, hopefully got a nice pension out of the deal. Judging by their appearances and circumstances, these are not wealthy men at all.

They are winking at us, and in a friendly non-sinister manner, telling us that it was all for shits and giggles. And I am deeply grateful to both of them. I would love now for Sir Paul to come down off his perch, acknowledge his twin, and maybe they could even sit down and play “The Two of Us” together, one right and the other left-handed. I just realized this morning what that song was about. I wonder who wrote it.

One gratifying aspect of blogging is to meet some nice and really insightful people, who know their own names and stop by here on occasion. Without permission I am going to reproduce two comments from “Tyrone McCloskey,” perhaps a real name, but who really cares? Content matters most.

Implications? Perhaps “Paul” said something and this is his punishment (for those who think like television writers)- Or, the Beatles drew crowds that they didn’t deserve, the hype drawing the kids in live (nobody could hear them play and so they wouldn’t know if they were any good), but the TV and film stuff was understood by the actors to be just a role for which they mimed recordings made by others- They never felt the power because the forces that we thought were swirling around them never reached this troupe- The audiences on film and video could have just as easily been paid extras- (Sinatra a decade and a half earlier went through the same paces with paid bobbysoxers screaming and crying on cue) They never expected royalties, just a pension, and the gig finally ended- This may explain their casual reaction to the mania and their ability to crack wise so easily- None of them took any of it seriously because they knew it wasn’t real- Court historians have been paid since the dawn of writing to fabricate, fabricate, fabricate… so whatever their backstory, front-story, it all came through corporate owned media so all narrative tropes are fair game- Resting…

And later in response to another man who has been all over attacking the notion Beatles were not as they were portrayed to us:

GvdH- I was born in 1958- I marinated in the Featles and the goddamned 60’s- You couldn’t escape every detail of the 4 mop top’s lives if you tried- It was rammed down our throats-Certainly no one wants their heroes outed as frauds, but why are some people chosen over others to succeed? It is never just talent- It’s talent that fits a favored agenda of the culture creators, even as that talent, if it exists at all, needs a firm guiding hand- And that agenda always serves their best interests, not ours- Great music that midwifed the mind destroying drug culture is what the Beatles handlers were after and they succeeded –

Another thing the Beatles were designed for was to create a consensus market for pop music- Thousands upon thousands of musicians followed their lead in pursuit of similar wealth and fame- The market pushed out variance and guided a relatively small number of acts to the charts and the playlists of the corporate owned radio and television networks- 50 years on, look what we have rammed down our throats today: lip synching CGI tramps like Taylor Swift and those other synthetic creations that teach pre-adolescent girls that stripper culture is the highest aspiration- For boys, it’s crossdressing and/or ghetto warriors- There won’t be any chance for stable families to grow out of that muck- The population will continue to shrink in the west- But then, population replacement (hello Syria, welcome to Germany) goes back to the Old Testament, and likely well before that-

Enjoy yourselves … I am in Portland for a few days. It is a strange place, saturated in faux-pwoggy causes, hairstyles, and Boulder, Colorado-like smug self-satisfaction. Again, so nice to be removed from it all.

On “mental illness” – avoid Denver

See updated link at bottom

I was angrily criticized this week for daring to suggest that “mental illness does not exist.” In fact, I never said such a thing, but did say that it is wildly overstated. Perhaps the largest group of liars, poseurs, fakes and quacks, outside of our political class, are those who go by the name psychiatrist and psychologist. The harm they do is incalculable, and man, the money that they charge for doing that harm is criminal!

Continue reading “On “mental illness” – avoid Denver”

Some of the rest of the story unfolds

A reader of the Mathis paper on the McCartney twins supplied the video above answering the question of what happened to the twin who stopped performing. He is*, possibly, hidden in plain sight. (The people who do do these scams do not have a lot of respect for our intelligence.) Mathis has added six pages to the paper discussing this matter. While at first it appears to thicken the plot considerably, it answers nagging questions.

The man in this video is said to be John Halliday, custodian of the McCartney childhood home. He looks an awful lot like the original Paul, who Mathis refers to as Mike (if we did not know one from the other as children, either could be right.)

If so, stop and think: This man owned the world back then, entertained the queen, starred in movies, and supposedly wrote Yesterday, a song so famous that royalties would support him for life. Here he is reduced to a man seemingly less than serious, drinking beer and leading a quite ordinary and mundane life.

Implications, please. Implications.
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*The man in the video looks to be 55-60. Don’t be fooled by the eye lines, as there was probably plastic surgery done early on. And he is not missing a tooth – original Paul had a narrow palate, causing some misalignment issues, apparent in this man. Paul and Mike are 73 as of this writing, so this video would probably be taken in the time from possibly 1998-2003?
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PS: I understand the problem that people have with this – first, most people choose beliefs over evidence. Beliefs are comforting. Also with the Beatles, they assume the group formed naturally, so that monkeying with twins is not natural. If you alter that perception, and think of the Beatles as a group that was scripted, scouted, recruited, trained, just like the Monkees, then this might make more sense to you.

The dullness factories

I have a son who is a very bright young man. He was bored in school, as all bright people are, and so was restless and acted up. His teacher wanted him to be tested for ADD. I refused to allow that, and instead did an end run, taking him to a private physician for a battery of tests. The result, said the wonderful pediatrician: “The kid is bored.” Thereafter the teacher was instructed to introduce more rigor into his lessons,  the dumbest thing I had ever heard. The answer, to get him out of school, was not practical. I could not home school, and  we are structured to deny basic opportunities to people who have not endured formal schooling. But at least I was able to stop them from drugging him.

We all have family or friends who are treated for ADD, ADHD, aka boredom in school. The kids are not the problem, but rather the schools. The “diseases” are a trap, as there are no defineable physical symptoms, but rather a set of “behaviors” that indicate presence. It is quackery.

The reason it is quackery is because all of us throughout our lives manifest those symptoms at various times. As a CPA I have to sit through tedious seminars, frightfully boring. I deliberately choose large seminars so I can sit in the back and mess with my IPad or daydream. Those are symptoms of ADD. But I not not have ADD. No one has it. It does not exist.

This all comes to mind because I was looking last night for a test given to students in 1910. I had heard of this before and did not take it seriously, as there is so much fakery and distortion in the Internet. But the test is real. I reproduce it at the bottom.

Schooling in the 19th and early 20th century was not a lifetime occupation. People entered trades and professions, even law and medicine, without spending 16-20 years in the classroom. They could do this because education was rigorous and designed to train the mind to think. A person who knows how to think has all the armor needed for life, and can enter any field and figure things out by means and of focus,  exploration and collaboration.

But that all changed with the need for factory workers, bureaucrats (me – that’s all a CPA is) and soldiers. Schools were worked over, truancy laws passed, and we were all introduced to the tedium of lines, bells, and dumbed-down memorization. Further, we were sold the idea that more years of tedium produces better learning, so that a college graduate is a learned person. When I think back now on my intellectual state on graduation from college, I see a man with a very limited mind.

That was bad enough, and was our state of affairs when I was in school in the fifties and sixties. Since then it has only gotten worse, as nothing waits outside for the average person besides a boring job (if lucky), mortgage, student loan, and medical bills. Oh yeah, and elections and the Super Bowl. So the dumbing down process has gotten more intense. The people who designed our education system, with its drugs and testing, know that it produces non-thinking automatons.

They want that outcome. They do not want thinking people who experience the wide range of excitement, challenge, disappointment, pain and ecstasy that we call life. They want that experience narrowed down, and our receptors inhibited.

I experience this daily now as I write here and view comments here and elsewhere, and realize that perhaps half a dozen people who read this blog are capable of dealing with its content. I wrote yesterday about the excitement of solving the McCartney riddle, and got this comment:

You’re still being fooled, and are a fool.

If that sort of comment were not typical, if that person were an exception … but he is not. His range of intellectual motion is stifled, so he cannot experience anything beyond the tedious little world of he-said-she-said politics and pretty faces reading scripted news. He is a product of schooling. He cannot think properly. He cannot imagine things.

Life is an exciting journey that gets even more exciting as we age and learn more. They start us there on mood altering drugs in school to narrow or range of reception. They keep it up with all of these mood medicines, and now legal pot. They want us, they need us dumbed down and uncomplicated, compliant.

And it is sad to watch. It is working.

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The Google illusion

Just out of curiosity I “Googled” “Paul and Mike McCartney twins” to see if anyone else had tripped on this information. I went ten pages in, and found not a hint. Even as it was hidden in plain sight, meaning many thousands of people out there must know about them, the Google just doesn’t seem to know.

The Google is just another illusion, designed to make it appear that you have free access to ideas. It is perhaps one level deeper in thought control, as you think you are accessing the world, but … not. Google, a campus in Silicon Valley, is not into freedom of speech or exploration of new ideas. Quite the opposite. They merely exist to give us that impression.

They are Intel. I quit using them several years ago when they announced that they keep track of any searches I do for “advertising” purposes. I use Bing. But I am no fool. I have never thought for a second that Bing and Google are separate operations. They are merely Democrat-Republican, Microsoft-Apple,  Coke-Pepsi. Bing is tracking me too, and if ever I refuse to pay my taxes or decide to run for office, they can mine my data and find out all about me.

Fortunately, I do not matter. As with all of those thousands of others who easily figured out the McCartney twins, we remain anonymous.

Alien education practices

The young son of a friend, age 10 or so, is currently enthralled by space aliens and UFO’s. His mother mentioned this in an “it’s just so cute” frame of mind. I hope she does not ‘set him straight’, but rather allows him to continue to explore. What he is doing is really important, and anyway, maybe he’s on to something important. Perhaps she can guide him by helping him ask good questions, like “Is that photo real?”, or “Do they really know that for a fact?” Also, she can suggest as he sits staring at the wall, puzzled, “Maybe you can dig a little deeper. There’s an answer if you keep looking.”

But the worst thing she can do is worry that he does not have correct information about our world. Let him believe as he will as he explores as he can. I fear that some teacher, some thought control guru, will set him straight, make sure that he believes what he should believe, using proper authority figures as a guide. That will destroy his creative impulse, and discourage critical thinking. He is, after all, learning by doing. That is the only way, as I see it, to learn to think critically – trial and error. Studying text books on logical fallacies or syllogisms (not done anyway) is not nearly as valuable as totally screwing up and getting something totally wrong, and realizing it.

Telling kids what to think is a grievous sin. Another friend spent many tedious days during his teaching career “proctoring” ACT tests for his high school. That’s what we do – fill our kids’ heads with facts and demand that they read them back correctly to get into a “good” school. It’s how education came to be what it is today – they slowly replaced curiosity with memorization.

Is the children learning? Nope.

Allow them to explore, gently guiding them as they go their own direction, giving them the basic tools to work things out on their own … that has a name – I’ve forgotten it … what was it … we used to do this sort of thing in past centuries … hmmm .. oh yeah! I remember! It is called “education.”

 

Keeping track of the Zika hoax: More hocus pocus

Swede put up a link in the post below to a Daily Mail article on Zika claiming that as many as two billion people are at risk from the virus.

It’s hoax, a big one, and information about the nature of the hoax is in circulation everywhere. It almost appears as though those behind it doubling down.

“What? You’re not scared? Did I say a million? No … I meant billion. Yeah. That’s right. No. I meant TWO billion. Yeah. That’s right. Are you scared now? Are ya, punk?”

Please understand this is an accessible topic, and that we can get down to the specifics of making a hoax.

The hoaxers are relying on public ignorance and indifference to science and the methods of identifying a virus and any threat it might present.  They have not established in any manner the means by which the Zika virus, common and harmless, actually invades body cells and causes infirmities like microcephaly.

They have not done this because they don’t have to. They are instead relying on authoritative pronouncements by various liars and con artists, each having impressive credentials and titles and positions. It’s nothing more than appeal to authority. (Those with those titles and positions have their reasons for going along, usually financial incentives.)

What they are doing is hocus pocus: Virus present, presto! damage caused.

In order for a virus to damage a normal healthy human, it is to be present in our body in the millions, if not billions. One or two here and there mean nothing. Yet the hoaxers maintain the fiction that mere presence of a virus in a healthy human is evidence of cause and effect – that is, finding Zika and finding microcephaly (they keep adding to the list of maladies, but that is the primary one) means that Zika causes microcephaly.

If A, then B. The exact means by which Zika causes microcephaly … oops. They sort of forgot that intermediate step.

Most likely, there is no connection. But they are hiding something. Microcephaly in various areas of the world has been linked to presence of various pesticides, not to mention malnutrition. Zika serves as a diversion, misdirection, and protects the makers of these pesticides from massive lawsuits, possibly even bankruptcy. The stakes are high.

Read this, for instance:

“Brazil is far and away the most important country in Latin America, firmly under US control since 1945, when it became a ‘testing area for modern scientific methods of industrial development’ applied by US experts…It is a country with enormous resources that should be the ‘Colossus of the South,’ ranking alongside the ‘Colossus of the North,’ as predicted early in the century. It has had no foreign enemies, and benefited not only from careful US tutelage but also from substantial investment. It therefore shows with great clarity just what the US can achieve in ‘enlarging the free community of market democracies’ under conditions that are near ideal.”

“The successes are real enough. Brazil has enjoyed a very high growth rate, which conferred enormous wealth on everyone except its population – apart from the top few percent, who live at the standards of the wealthiest Westerners. It is a sharply two-tiered society. Much of the population live at a level reminiscent of Central Africa…the UN Report on Human Development ranked this rich and privileged country in 80th place, alongside of Albania and Paraguay. In the northeast, Brazilian medical researchers describe a new subspecies: ‘pygmies,’ with 40% [actually 60%] the brain capacity of humans, thanks to severe malnutrition in a region with fertile lands, owned by large plantations that produce export crops in accord with the doctrines preached by their expert advisers. Hundreds of thousands of children die of starvation every year in this success story, which also wins world prizes for child slavery and murder of street children – in some cases for export of organs for transplant, according to respected Brazilian sources.”*

Read use of the word “pygmies” to mean “microcephaly.” That was written by Noam Chomsky, in 1993.

Normal human immune systems easily isolate and destroy invaders, and have throughout our history. We live in harmony with millions of viruses, none of which present any threat to a healthy human, Zika among them. In fact, Zika is not proven to cause any human ailment, not even a head cold.

The subject is accessible, but takes some effort on our part to read about the science, the methodology for identification of a virus. I recommend that you start here, with an interview by journalist Christine Johnson with biophysicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos regarding the isolation and identification of the HIV virus. It is hard reading, and your own judgment will be needed, but if you read this blog, you’re probably used to it.

And if you do that bit of homework, you are in a good position to judge the credibility of the Zika threat all on your own without reliance on the impressive and fake authority figures they keep throwing at us to back up their hoax.
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*h/t  Jon Rappoport for forwarding this link to his readers.