And now for something completely different …

Clifsnickers-fun-size-candy-bars-127643-wWe usually keep a Clif bar on our kitchen counter, and I grab a nibble several times during the day. I do not like them, but we don’t keep other candies around, so that’s what it has to be. I live by house rules.

If you put a Clif Bar on a shelf and let it just sit there, it might eventually go good on you.

So I was asked yesterday to pick up some Clif Bars at the grocery store. I could not find them in the candy section. A clerk pointed me to another aisle where Clif Bars are sold under a sign that reads “Health and Nutrition.” Yikes!

Clif Bars are just a not-very-good candy. My favorite candy is Snickers. Let’s do a side-by-side comparison:

CandyFat and sodium are non-issues. Dietary fat, no matter the source (animal or vegetable) is good for us. Sodium, for some people who are at risk, can be a bad thing, but salt has largely been decriminalized. Protein, like fat, is harmless, essential to our bodies. It is abundant, found in all meats, some vegetables, and fricking tofu.

The key here is “carbs,” or carbohydrates. Carbs from sugar, which are “simple,” are the main culprits in the American diet. Candy, soda pop and fruit juices are the main delivery vehicles.  But “complex” carbs, found in bread and pasta, pizza and french fries, are equally bad for us. Our bodies take longer to digest complex carbs, but in the end they are just another form of sugar.

Overloading on carbs, as Americans tend to do,  causes our bodies to produce a hormone called insulin. It is insulin that is makes Americans gain weight. It signals the body to store body fat rather than letting it (stated delicately) pass through.

The Clif Bar, an inedible hunk of complex and simple carbs, has more protein than a Snickers Bar, which is what makes it so disgusting. It also has non-digestible fiber, in current vogue thought to be good, but not. These two ingredients allow the makers of Clif Bars to pretend that their product is not just a bad form of candy.

The Snickers bar is an honest treat, tasty, satisfying the craving for sweets, and loading our system with sugar. It does not pretend to be good for us. We need to be moderate about eating Snickers Bars. (They are especially tempting in bit-size pieces, as we tend to eat more that way. Marketers know that too.)

The Clif Bar loads our system with sugar, but by moving it from the candy aisle to a different part of the store, the advertisers changed our perceptions. It is just a tasteless disgusting candy bar, but one found in the backpack of every hiker.

Ah, marketers, you fooled us yet again.

Rethinking the 2000 coup d’état

In the post below regarding the 2000 election I wrote

The 2000 election: Al Gore won, so that the ascension of George W. Bush was yet another coup. I have no regard for Al Gore, and so don’t imagine the policy differences that resulted from Bush holding office over him mattered much, but I stand to be educated.

In other words, there were no history-changing differences between the two aristocrats that were involved in the 2000 coup. Had President Al Gore been aboard Air Force One that day has it flew at low altitude around the country without fighter jet protection, having been given an ultimatum complete with nuclear launch codes to demonstrate the power behind it, he too would have capitulated.

But the coup plotters had apparently been planning 9/11 since at least 1997, so getting their team into office was probably seen as essential to get the right people in position to pull it off. There had to be moles in place throughout the military and in various civilian agencies for the plot to succeed as it did.

Would they have been able to pull it off without having captured the presidency in 2000? I do not know, of course. But I suspect, given that they went so far as to threaten the Supreme Court into making one of the most embarrassing and baseless rulings in American history to get Bush in power, they thought it mattered.

I do not for a second think that George W. Bush was trusted with any information surrounding 9/11. He was a deer in the headlights. Cheney? Perhaps. But this is the United States of America. We do not investigate these crimes, and so will not know for many years to come the manipulations behind that event.

If ever.

It’s merely evidence

Below is a satellite photo of the seas and coastline of New York and Canada on 9/11/2001. The inset shows Manhattan. See the smoke dust trail from the World Trade Center.
image

Below is the pathway of a hurricane Erin, shown above, in the days up to and after 9/11/2001. It remained stationary during the events of that day.
image

Below is an NBC weather forecast on 9/11/2001, as shown on TV screens even as the hurricane was present. image

Finally, below are graphs from various reading stations in Alaska of fluctuations in the earth’s magnetic fields on 9/11/2001. Note the small blip at about 12:45 UT (8:45 EDT), and then a large and ongoing disruption at 14:00 UT (10:00 AM EDT) on that day. These blips coincide with the “planes” hitting the first tower, and then WTC2 turning to dust, and continue until WTC7 disappears that afternoon. Apparently, in addition to “planes” hitting the buildings, we also witnessed a magnetic event.

magchart2_ss

A fella can’t make this stuff up.

Adult literacy in the United States

Here’s a conundrum: The National Assessment of Adult Literacy is a complex document with a large body of information from which one can draw inferences and conclusions. It concludes that only 13% of American college graduates (in 2003) “can perform complex and challenging literacy activities.”

Among those activities would be the ability to understand the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. In other words, only 13% of the public is capable of understanding that only 13% of the public is capable of understanding the assessment.

I am going to draw some inferences about that in the post that appears below this one. I wanted to keep this post short, as I know full well that if an entire post does not appear on the screen when someone clicks on this site, readership falls off dramatically. Longer posts are like homework assignments.

I don’t fancy that people should read what I write. That’s a narcissistic notion. Rather, I simply know that if I write beyond a few short paragraphs, people don’t read. That’s all.

Literacy inferences regarding “conspiracy theories”

These attitudes you have adopted – I know they comfort you. You are indifferent and incurious about the important events of our times. You are smug about it, thinking yourself wise to be so. But I must advise you that from a distance your attitude is indistinguishable from stupidity.

Such is the nature of our society that people actually capable of critical thought are stigmatized as being the dumber ones, perhaps even suffering mental illness.

The phrase “conspiracy theorist” originated in the bowels of the CIA in the late 1960’s in response to a large part of the population not believing the official story of the murder of John F. Kennedy. The phrase itself is a PSYOP, or …

“[a] planned operation to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”

We are governed by PSYOPS. If you, the reader, automatically assume that “conspiracy theorists” are wrong and dumb and mentally deficient, you’ve been successfully gamed. You are the victim of a PSYOP.

We are all tested from birth. The school systems is designed to survey the herd and pick out the ones capable of certain tasks – soldiers, workers, bureaucrats. The culling process does not seek “intelligence*” so much as useful abilities. Based on testing we are routed to various occupations even as we imagine we self-select our careers.

The idea that our schooling system teaches us critical thinking skills is absurd. That is not why it is there. If tasked to do so, it could perform that service. In fact, exclusive schools used to train our privileged youth do indeed teach these skills. But the leadership class does not want a general public capable of critical thought. Quite the opposite. Those of us who survive schooling and who do indeed learn to use our minds in a critical fashion are set aside for derision and abuse.

It may appear that I am engaged in contradiction, at once saying that the public is not capable of drawing correct inferences from information, and at the same time that the majority of the public does indeed disbelieve the official story regards the JFK hit.

It is true that a majority of the public does not buy the official story. It is also true that majority of the public, even knowing the official story to be false, does not grasp the staggering implications that naturally follow.

As a result, while knowledge of a lie is widespread, the implications of that lie are bottled up, and we go on with business as usual. We suffer the same fools in our political class, unaware of the real power that stands behind them pulling their strings. We endure criminal activities on a massive scale pulled off in broad daylight by our military class. We suffer from advertising and psychological manipulation from the business world. And we allow the news media to keep it all bottled up by means of distraction.

To those of us who grasped the significance of the murder of JFK, it appears that the task of the overlords has gotten easier. Events like 9/11, Boston and most recently Charlotte are pulled off with frightening ease. Cover stories around 9/11, for instance, don’t withstand five seconds critical examination and yet stand unchallenged by the majority of the public.

The red stuff is called “Tempera”

Reading is key, of course, not to be told what to think, but to gather raw data and make critical connections. There’s never enough, and we never know all we should know, perhaps jumping to conclusions based on inadequate data.

With the Boston false flag operation, for example, it is easy to see from photographs that the injuries were fake and the participants mere actors, but wait a minute! WHY do we have access to such high quality photography? Why was it not bottled up at the source? Surely those who pulled of this operation were able to keep control of the images. That was the whole point!

tramps2There is a famous photograph of three ‘tramps” being led from Dealey Plaza by a fake cop on 11/22/63. Two are suspected to be E. Howard Hunt and Charles Harrington, Woody’s dad, a professional hit man. But wait a minute … agents of various stripes monitored everyone in the Plaza that day, and every available photograph was confiscated. Most never saw light of day. Yet we have that set of photos, clear and concise, taken by a professional photographer, and released to the public. Why?

It has to do with intelligence – private researchers have uncovered a tremendous body of data, enough to draw conclusion about the who and why of that day. But there exist smarter people, drawn from our best schools and trained in deceit on a high level. So the class of curious citizens, those capable of dealing with the complexities of the major events of our times, are systematically diddled by people of even higher intelligence. The photographs are real enough, but the inferences deliberately misleading.

No way out, you say? Hall of mirrors? Puzzle palace? Perhaps. What else to do with our lives – stop thinking? That is not an option.
______________
*I have seen a list which appears to be to be comprehensive detailing nine types of intelligence. Our testing regime focuses only on three, logical-mathematical, linguistic, and spatial.

A day with talk radio

I had quite a bit of driving to do yesterday, and so wandered the dial on local radio. There seem but a couple of venues left in Denver beyond Christian and music – right-wing talk, and financial talk.

Right-wing talk radio is merely a “look here not there” distraction vehicle. Hosts I listened to are chanting in unison that Obama made a huge blunder in negotiation an arms deal with Iran.  We don’t even know the specifics of that deal, but so what. The radio hosts are merely chumming the waters for sake of political agitation. It keeps listeners married to the two-party system.

If there is a left-wing talk radio circuit around (not in Denver), it serves the same purpose, keeping people focused on bad old Republicans, ignoring really bad old Democrats. Radio is the ideal agitprop forum, and beyond advertising, serves no other purpose.

Please don’t misunderstand – not everyone is wrong about everything on those outlets – it just doesn’t matter. Limbaugh, for instance, talks about how too-easy-to-get student loans are driving up tuition costs. He’s right about that, as I see it, and probably about a lot of stuff. All of these hosts have good points here and there, whether I think they are right or wrong. (I don’t understand everything either.) But their purpose is not to inform, but rather to agitate the audience, to keep them focused on message. Nothing more.

Financial talk is about people with money problems receiving good advice from the various hosts, Clark Howard probably the best. What is most interesting is the low level of financial savvy among callers, how easily they are picked off by hucksters of all stripes. Then, because they don’t read what they sign, they find themselves trapped by a contract.

One caller, for instance, had racked up $45,000 in credit card debt, and wants to get a better deal from the credit card companies. The host rightly informed her that since the companies have her right where they want her, they are not about to negotiate a better deal for her. She walked into her situation with eyes wide shut.

There are several schools of thought on why the American public is both politically and financially illiterate. One is that the schools don’t teach critical thinking skills or basic financial math (as in “annuities,” the beating heart of all finance).

I don’t know about that. I assume that if they do teach it, the kids ain’t learning it. The purpose of Prussian-style mandatory public education is to produce soldiers for the military, workers for the factories, and bureaucrats for the government. Thinking skills are not required for any of that.

Another school of thought was expressed by Alexis de Tocqueville as he toured America in the early 1800s:

When a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with singular dexterity; but at the same time he loses the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work. He every day becomes more adroit and less industrious; so that it may be said of him, that in proportion as the workman improves the man is degraded. (Democracy in America, 1835)

In other words, we work too hard at our jobs, and not enough on our minds.
__________
PS: Obviously, if kid were taught about annuities in high school, the student loan program would dry up.

The Bernie riddle, another angle

A commenter makes the point that Bernie could be running merely to bring progressives back into the system after having dropped off the voting roles during the eight years of Obama’s right winging it. Bernie gets them to register, and then they will be available to vote for Hillary after he drops out.

Could be. What do I know?

Manager, corn products division

I was reading a Linkedin profile this morning, and discovered yet another amazing person. I wondered as I read it if there exists in this land an ordinary human.

I worked jobs. I filled slots, became proficient at the things I did. When I left those slots, other people stepped in, and they too became proficient.

During the time I worked, I had bosses who were also ordinary people. Often times the boss would fear a subordinate who showed talent greater than his own. There is a lot of politics and intrigue in business environments because ordinary people have a need to stand head and shoulders above other ordinary people.

The world is full of ordinary people doing ordinary work and imagining they are amazing and fearing that other ordinary people are going to displace them. Insecurity is the great driver in our society. It makes us write long essays about our accomplishments on Linkedin.

I remember once sitting in a classroom in college as the teacher talked about the need to make even modest jobs sound impressive. She said that even if you sold popcorn in a movie theater, on your resume you should make it sound important. I raised my hand and suggested that person should be “Manager, corn products division.” It got quite a laugh. If only it were not true to life.

I went on to become a CPA, and over the years I’ve done a lot of CPA-type work. It’s a niche, a little grinding, requiring some obsessive characteristics. Filling numbers in little boxes is by its nature obsessive. Understanding just a small part of the tax code is dull and dry and has little bearing on real life and living. It pays well.

I have not set the world on fire. I just worked, got paid, and did other things too. I really enjoyed playing softball, and did that a lot.

I knew a wonderful man who deeply influenced the lives of others, and yet who made less money than any of the horn-tooters on Linkedin. There sits now a monument with his picture on it, erected after his death. As it should be. He left a mark.

The world of jobs and business advancement is one of hard core self-selling, so undignified and yet so essential to success. Might I suggest we all celebrate our ordinariness, and chill?

There are extraordinary people out there. They are usually the quiet ones.

The Bernie riddle

imageThere are few genuine people in politics. Someone once suggested that politicians wear insignias on their suits for their sponsors, like race care drivers. That’s a clever thought, but pointless, as in real politics the insignias would be lies too. Real sponsors would remain hidden.

Politics is not just duplicity, but double and triple duplicity. Thus if a mystery is uncovered, it was probably planted and meant to be uncovered to further the mystery. Politics a most fascinating avenue of inquiry. What is real?

Take Bernie Sanders, for instance. He is one of a dozen or so Jewish senators. He is a self-proclaimed socialist. That’s all fine, and he could as easily be a Mormon and self-proclaimed Randian. That is all window dressing. There are no ideologies in politics. There are only interests.

Who is Bernie, really? We should always hold out for the possibility that he is really what he says he is. But in addition, we should always hold out for the possibility that he is not. It is, after all, politics.

“Socialists” are not allowed to survive in real politics. While socialism is widely practiced here and abroad, we do not like to describe ourselves as such. So normally a self-described animal of that stripe would not attain the necessary stature and name recognition to survive even in the House of Representatives, much less the U.S. Senate.  For Bernie to make the jump from obscurity to the senate required some juice.

That probably means he is something far more common in politics than a genuine person, “controlled opposition.” In real politics, where power comes only from money backers, the players are stationed like pawns in a chess board.

Bernie decided to run for president. It’s quixotic. What possible good comes of it? When genuine people run, say a Dennis Kucinich, they are marginalized. They are not mentioned by name in the polls (“others”). They are never, ever, allowed to “surge.” If they do gain momentum, they are taken down.

It might help the reader to follow the candidacies of two people who might indeed have been genuine, Gary Hart and Howard Dean. Each was gaining favor, running well. Each was taken down, Hart by scandal, Dean by power of suggestion, an organized medial blitz where a common exhortation speech to followers became his undoing.

So in following the Bernie campaign, keep this in mind: If he is genuine, he will be taken down. If he is not, he’ll be promoted. But his purpose is something other than what is apparent. He is not running for president. He is serving another purpose.

Then we have a mystery to solve: For whom doth Bernie toil? It will became apparent with time. Presidential selection always precedes presidential election in our fake republic. In my view, and of course I do not see all or know all, Jeb Bush has been selected as our next president.

But I can be fooled, think too much, make reaches. I could be wrong. It could be that the selection is waiting in the wings, another savior awaits coronation.

This much I know: Bernie receives high notoriety, mention in the polls and news coverage. That does not happen to genuine people.
__________
PS: The reader might infer from this that I am claiming we have not only bought politicians, but also a controlled news media.

Well, duh.
__________
PPS: A commenter makes the point that Bernie could be running merely to bring progressives back into the system after having dropped off the voting roles in the eight years of Obama’s brand of right winging his way. Bernie gets them to register, and then they will be available to vote for Hillary after he drops out. Could be. What do I know?

The significance of U2, hiding from ugly truth

Q: Do you think these people who were behind all this [JFK assassination] are still very powerful and very deadly?

Gerald Patrick Hemming (U.S. Intelligence Agent): They never stopped doing their work. It’s a continuous event. You see, people don’t understand. The coup didn’t occur in November [of 1963]. The coup had already occurred before the inauguration. Kennedy never took power as president. He never functioned as a real president. This is what Eisenhower was warning* about. They’d done the same thing to him. They’d caused him to cease functioning as the president himself.

Reading over the blog this morning, entries going back a few weeks, I thought it a pity that people don’t read it. I need to spice this place up! I need to write about football and elections! I should not expect people to come here, but rather go to where they live.

Except that I can’t do that.

People advise not to go down rat holes. They say that our country is like sausage – if you like it, don’t ask how they make it.

People get discouraged when they find out that we’ve been lied to most of our lives about everything of importance. It is more important to believe than to live in the real world. Belief sustains people, where truth debilitates them. So it appears, anyway.

Religion, for example, a completely irrational belief system, makes people happy.

Odd. I become exhilarated when I learn truths. Hemming’s statement above was a light switch clicking on. I have long marveled that when Kennedy was murdered, all of the apparatuses to carry out the murder and then cover it up were in place.  The Justice Department, FBI, Dallas Police, Secret Service, intelligence agencies and their mobsters were all either part of the event, or the cover-up.

That’s not a new understanding. What is interesting is that these people and agencies behaved as if it were a practiced drill. They knew instinctively what to do.

And so did the news media. To this day, people of power in the news media know to continue with the cover-up. How do they know to do this?

The answer will not please you. I cannot speak of the time before World War II other than that I know we did not have a powerful military, so that our power to do evil was limited.  But by process of war and formation of organizations to fight it, and by assimilation of elements of the Third Reich into our intelligence establishment, some time after 1945 we experienced a bloodless coup d’etat. The National Security Act of 1947 was the frontispiece.

Eisenhower experienced it. The McCarthy hearings, the public face of a purge, happened on his watch. He sought détente with the Soviet Union, and was undermined by the intelligence agencies, who managed to pull off the Gary Powers U2 affair** to sabotage his meetings with Khrushchev.

Already we were being governed from behind the scenes by acts of treason. Ike knew it, tried to warn us. But as Hemmings tells us above, the country was already lost by that point, our form of government severely weakened. It has never recovered. We are a fake republic, and have been for decades.

I only sort of understand the mechanism that makes people hide from truth. I don’t suffer from that defect. I have never been harmed by knowing things. If as a child I grew up in a whorehouse, I would not know it. When later I put two and two together, I would be hurt, for a brief spell. Then I would want to know more. I would not hide from ugly truth.
________________________
*He’s referring to Eisenhower’s farewell address wherein he warned of the dangers of the “Military Industrial Complex.”
**Sitting on stage right in the middle of the courtroom gathering witnessing the Powers’ trial in the Soviet Union was a young man put there to send a message to the American intelligence community, a “defector,” Lee Harvey Oswald. Gary Powers was sure that Oswald had given the Soviets the information needed to bring him down. But it was a failed operation in part, in that Powers was not supposed to survive when his aircraft was brought down.
_________________________

PS: It occurred to me after writing this that the coup might have occurred on April 12, 1945, or before that time when Henry Wallace was replaced by Harry Truman in backrooms at the Democratic convention. Josef Stalin told Elliot Roosevelt, Franklin’s son, that FDR had been murdered, poisoned by “that Churchill gang.”