How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
I am going through now the flags that I placed in various passages of the Frances Stonor Saunders book The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters: The Cultural Cold War. I catch a lot of grief about having a conspiratorial outlook … from people who just don’t know anything. They don’t begin to grasp how their attitudes and ideas, which they think are their unique brand, are really put before them to be found and copied by people who think much further ahead and in broader terms than they do.
I read the book late last year, and is my habit flagged various passages to revisit. The book looks like a cheerleaders pom pom, it has so many flags. Right away, on page 4, I had highlighted the following
A vital constituent of this effort was ‘psychological warfare’, which was defined as ‘The planned use by a nation of propaganda and activities other than combat which communicate ideas and information intended to influence the opinions, attitudes, emotions and behavior of foreign groups in ways that will support the achievement of national aims.’ Further, the ‘most effective kind of propaganda’ was defined as the kind where ‘the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own’.
That is a passage from a National Security Council Directive from July 10, 1950 regarding the decision that was made, that the U.S. was going to be in the propaganda business, and big time. At that time CIA was prohibited from doing direct propaganda on Americans (a prohibition since discarded, and never much honored anyway). Saunders discusses how CIA invaded the world of arts and letters in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, and redefined our culture. It was a huge psy-op costing as much as $200 (?) million in 1950 dollars. CIA stole the money from the Marshall Plan – not sure of the amount. Will run across it later.
I’ll post more as I go along, but understand something very important, just one aspect of the overall CIA effort: What we call “modern art” was a product of this propaganda effort, the purpose to remove from art the ability to offer clear and crisp criticism of power. It is Orwellian in concept, to take away our ability to communicate by substituting garbage for real art. Jackson Pollock, for example, painted shit, as seen here, but received high praise and honor from those who knew to push the cultural agenda forward by acting as opinion leaders. He was backed by CIA money. Did you know that? Hollywood, also under CIA control, made a movie to honor him. The world of modern art is like the world of wine, full of pretense and phonies. None of it is meaningful, uplifting, or informative. Thank you, CIA.
Something very similar happened in music, the tribal drum we beat. Look around you now for cultural significance or confrontation of authority in the music world, and good luck. There was a time … but most artists that succeed today have an imprimatur from the cultural police … if you think that your love of Taylor Swift came from your own imagination, think again, and read the cited passage above again. She has lots of help.
Of course, people will not look this way or even begin to fathom that we move in directions that others desire for reasons we believe to be our own.
The world that I inhabit is simply a more interesting place with more understanding of power and the means by which the few rule the many. The criticism that I get, that I am somehow delusional, is wrong. People who say that never say why, never want to talk nuts and bolts. Odd, wouldn’t you say?
If you cannot fathom that things could be just a little different than you think, that your perceptions might just possibility be managed by others, I am simply miles ahead in understanding. I did not set out to be that way, it just happened over the decades as I read and read and read, but more importantly, allowed myself to be wrong. As it happens, I have lost ability to communicate with people running around laughing and shouting about elections or obviously managed news and staged events. I cannot help that, and I will not go back to that world. It is boring and, I am afraid, quite stupid.
Evidence of what I wrote above about art and music are to be found in passages of this very important book. Your beliefs may be at odds with that evidence. I suggest you introduce your beliefs to that evidence, and see which survives. My guess, based on experience, is that your beliefs will not be affected by any evidence.
I have learned that climate change is a hoax, but a useful one. Anything that keeps people in a constant state of fear is useful to the ruling class. I grew up during the (fake) Cold War and in a state of fear, the bomb and communism being so evil. That is how they controlled us in those days. (Running out of oil was a useful scam too. I lived through two Arab boycotts, both fake. I thought they were real.)
These days it is climate change, ISIS, terrorism in general, but I noticed something else yesterday – fear of financial collapse.
Here’s something to think about: Don’t invest in the stock market. Avoid consumer debt, student loan debt, anything that puts you in a position of having to produce a sum certain every month that has to be given over to people who did not earn it.
If that means owning a smaller house than you’d like, that is reality. Drive a heap – old cars that run well are treasures. (Ours are 11 and 10 years old, Japanese, and so well-built, and paid for.)
Are you afraid of what your life will be if you don’t get that college degree? You’re better off without the degree and the debt. You’re left to your own devices. Who ever said that learning only comes from college?
This sounds like heresy, even unrealistic, but what it means is you need to do everything possible to avoid the financial grid. It is a trap. It is meant to be a trap. It is no accident that student loans are handed out like candy with no expectation of performance or even a job on the other end. They are meant to be hung around your neck to keep you in debt and under control throughout your life. Avoid them. (In a sane world college would be based on ability and performance, the tab picked up by all of us via taxes. There are remedies aplenty for slouches.)
Is there another financial collapse on the way? Of course! They are planned. A change of administration often signals the timing, though I don’t know why. With each one the most powerful people go around behind sweeping up the wreckage. The big eat the small.
But truth be told, we have an economy of people making, growing and selling things that are not nail salons or massage parlors. We are all in some form talented enough to survive. We are taught not to develop our real talents, but rather to learn to be good employees, take on massive debt, and lead lives of quiet desperation.
The answer, don’t do that, sounds trite and unworkable. But it is not if you start today. If you are already in the student loan trap, your impetus, your first step should be to shed that burden. If it were me, I would look first to convert it to a form of debt that I can walk away from if I am trapped.
Think about it. Nobody on the other end “earned” that annuity that has you strapped down. It’s all in your head.
This is a fable I ran across from a man calling himself Richard Bell. He does not claim to have invented it.
It’s a fable about 10 monkeys in a cage with a door. They can get out if they want to. Somebody hangs a banana outside the cage. One monkey goes out and reaches for the banana. Suddenly, all the monkeys in the cage are sprayed with a lot of very cold water. When the monkey gets back inside the cage, another one goes out for the banana or a new banana. And the monkeys are doused again. Now, when the third monkey tries to go outside and get the banana, the other monkeys beat him up, because they don’t want to get doused with the ice water. And little by little, all the monkeys in the cage learn not to go out for the banana. And then, one by one, each monkey in the cage is replaced with a new monkey, and each new monkey tries to get a banana and is beaten up by his fellows instead. Only now, there is no ice water. It’s just a reflex. And finally the cage is entirely populated by monkeys who have no experience with the ice water. They just know that, if a monkey tries to go out and get the banana, they have to beat him up.
I apply it to the field of journalism, where so many thousands of reporters at all levels all over the country intuitively know not to go near certain stories, or types of stories, and who will crush anyone in their profession who does.
Gary Webb, for instance, whose piece called “Dark Alliance,” about how CIA was behind the influx of crack cocaine into the Los Angeles area, was viciously attacked by other journalists.Webb died in 2004 at age 49, allegedly a suicide.
Envision a small room full of children and toys. The toys are of the boring kind, plastic bats and wiffle balls, those spongy basketballs that don’t bounce very well, and plastic tables and chairs with tea sets where most of the pieces have long been lost. It’s a boring time for the kids, but they are young and so don’t know what they are missing. They can use their imaginations and somehow make fun of it all.
In a few years their imaginations will be gone. The room will wear them down, make them forget how to pretend and have fun. Then they’ll be ready to be regular people.
The kids have a room monitor to watch them all day long. They are never left alone unless they are asleep, and even then the room monitor listens in through a microphone and can peep in through a spy hole.
Outside the small room is a town full of people, a forest full of danger and excitement. But the kids never get to see that, at least on their own. They are kids. They get in the way. We hired people to keep them in that room so we can go on about our business. They can be a nuisance, after all, so many questions, so much energy.
And the forest – don’t even think about it! Maybe the monitor will take them there on a field trip, but they will be watched closely. Grown-ups are scared in the forest too, and usually don’t go there without a gun. But the kids are curious. There is genuine excitement and danger out there. Creative impulses are set free. The games they could play in the forest are so much more intense than swinging a plastic bat or sipping fake tea from a tiny cup. They invigorate the kids, make them hard to manage.
I know, if you’ve read this far, that you think I have constructed an allegory about our school system. It does work that way. School, as we do it, destroys youth and kills imagination. As designed.
But that is not my thrust. The allegory is about our political system.
Voters are kept in a small room and only allowed to play with bad toys, these awful candidates who are insincere and won’t have any power after the election anyway. Voters are kept far away from the real action.
Voters are discouraged from exploring on their own. Even if they want to leave the system, they are always brought back to the room and told “Vote. It’s your duty. But only for one of these two. That’s your choice.” Voters are not allowed real games and candidates, or to have a real say in how their country is run.
That is all that elections are, folks – a way of keeping us out of everyone’s hair. The more we believe, the harder we debate and fight about our candidates, the better for the real leaders.
After all, we are the children. We have to stay busy doing something, and elections are the best way yet devised to soak up our energy, kill our imaginations, and keep us out of their hair.
Piece of Mindful 