We are on Thunder Bay Beach on Georgian Bay, the southern part of Lake Huron. I have been here a week now with my wife’s family. I realized yesterday and last night that this is my family too. I love them all, even with all their faults and foibles (which are not as pronounced as mine). They are lively and energetic, even if they don’t delve into the mysteries of life as I do. I am the weird one, but they accept me without question. As long as I can play cards and whip up some breakfast, I fit in.
I remembered back when my son’s teacher wanted him tested for ADD, a disease invented to help teachers deal with the problem of bright kids. I fought them. He was in a Catholic school but they were going to send him to the big school district in Billings for testing. I did an end run and paid $300 for a doctor at the Children’s Clinic to test him. I did not have $300. The doctor was kind enough to let me pay him $50 a month for six months.
The verdict? “The kid is bored!” The school’s answer was to set him aside to do some more challenging reading when other kids were … I don’t know … doing easy reading? The real answer, which I did not see at the time, was to get him out of his desk, out into the world, to let him explore. Sitting in a desk is the problem. Sitting, under control, bored, thinking it important to internalize boredom and be a good factory worker … that is the point of industrialized schooling.
Standardized testing (and our overlords surely must know this) is about answering questions. Learning, on the other hand, is about asking questions. It does not matter if the answers are found. Searching is far more important. To ask a question is the key.
The most important answers are never found. Is there an Atlantis? A God? A God particle? What happened to the Pueblo tribe? Why do dogs know when we are angry, even when we try to hide it? Who killed JFK? How exactly does money control politicians? Why are journalists not curious about important matters? Why is there not one identifiable part from four supposed plane crashes? Why do people hide and pretend that there are no conspiracies? How can they be that blind? How does television control our perceptions?
Over the years I have taken countless tests, studied, done my homework, but haven’t learned much. That part of “education” is rote and pointless. Asking questions just about the JFK murder, for example, has led me to question everything I see and hear. My sense of wonder and curiosity never leaves me. Life is a beautiful mystery.
My advice to youth: Quit school. It’ll ruin you. You’ll end up like your teacher, thinking you are educated, not realizing you’re just another brick in the wall.
There is a swirling controversy about Ed Abbey. Was he an alcoholic? He died of a condition related to cirrhosis of the liver, a bleeding esophagus. His friends are highly defensive of him, almost making him out to be a teetotaler.
But wait! Who was Ed Abbey? I spent quite a few years in Montana Wilderness Association, before it was body snatched, and during that time everyone I knew had read Abbey, or claimed to have read him. During and since that time I have read most of his work.
Abbey died in 1989, at age 62. By literary standards, he left behind only a modest body of work, fiction and essays. His most famous was The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975). It’s forgettable, in my view. The Brave Cowboy (1956) is better, as the characters are more real and less caricature. The Cowboy in that work reappears in later works, but is never named as such. Fools Progress, I am told, is modeled on Don Quixote, so that if you have read the latter you’ll see it in the former. I have not read the latter.
Sometime in the early 90s a friend of mine in California just up and surprised me with a book in the mail, one called Desert Solitaire. It’s a collection of essays by Abbey published in 1968. I had never heard of it or him. It is riveting. In part of it crews are staking out roads for Arches National Monument. Abbey, working the booth at the entrance, would go around behind them, and pull their stakes out. Whatever Arches was, when the roads came, he knew it would be no more.
Desert Solitaire is a lamentation of the disappearance of the American West. It’s one of those books that can be read again and again, never losing flavor. Maybe like Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, maybe … Abbey had no idea he was writing a classic. He was just writing.
I learned to love Abbey. I found his essays, especially his river trips, far more enjoyable than his fiction. I found him brutally frank. Honest is the word I am looking for. He pursued truth. His motto was to do that, to follow truth, no matter where it takes you. I think that is my motto too, though I do not know that I have one. I do pursue truth. I do not care where it takes me. Maybe I am like Edward Abbey. That would please me immensely, even to be somewhat like him.
Ed Abbey went to Missoula to speak one time. He spoke out against welfare ranchers, the men in big hats and egos with big fat subsidies. Like every town, the power structure in Missoula is built around land and private wealth. People are allowed to imagine their town to be characterized by the people that live there. Missoula is perceived to be liberal, as are many of its residents.
But Missoula is right wing and redneck. Abbey learned that. No. Abbey already knew that. He just did not care to be polite to the power structure while there. He left a mark.
Abbey always managed to have an existing wife and prospective one at once. He complained of population as he fathered five children. He confessed to being “manic depressive” in his private journal. He is sometimes credited with founding Earth First!, though he did not. I have long suspected that EF! served government interests more than environmental, serving to brand the movement as violent, behaving as agents provocateur. But what do I know?
I have a computer file full of Abbeyisms … “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell'” “It is true that wolves eat sheep. They question is, do they eat enough sheep?” Or coyotes. He once observed that losing a few Boy Scouts each year in the wilderness was a necessity … if it was not dangerous, it was not truly wilderness.
I was told one time that Aldo Leopold did the best justification for having wilderness in his Sand County Almanac. I read it, found it syrupy, even wimpy. Abbey, I suppose, has specific words on the subject, but testimony to wilderness is his life in and near it. He never compromised. It challenged him, he never backed away from the challenge. He said earth had nurtured his body for six decades, and he owed earth a meal. His own body.
When he died his friends and family put his body in a pickup truck and took him to an undisclosed location in his beloved desert and buried him under a pile of rocks. His hand-carved headstone reads “Edward Abbey 1927-1989. No Comment.” It’s location is still unknown to any but friends and family.
I am reading “Finding Abbey,” by Sean Prentiss, a Montana State University graduate with Colorado roots. It is a search for self, Abbey’s grave as the metaphorical destiny. Abbey affected Prentiss just as he affected me and so many others, knocking our city comforts aside, making us long for the rugged life outside of the confines of civility and law. I suppose you could call it anarchism – in fact, Abbey’s friend and editor claims his greatest achievement to be the marrying wilderness and anarchy.
Oh – I almost forgot – was Ed Abbey an alcoholic? I don’t know. Who cares.
“All of us, at some level, know that we are being lied to. Some people internalize it and go on with their daily lives. Some ignore it completely. And still others latch onto fatuous opinion-makers whose daily bread depends on the very system they purport to uncover.
Obviously none of this is satisfactory. What we need is to understand how the world works, how systems of power operate, what motivates its operation, and where it all originated.” (Joseph E. Green, Dissenting Views)
I am conferring today, that is, spending a whole day with accountants. I’d rather eat worms. I like the above quote because is synopsizes the American condition, the internalization of lies. My blog runs hot and cold, but one thing I can be sure of is that when I write about the big lies of our times, the comment section dries up.
People shy away, but they know on some level that they are living in lies. Breaking free is near impossible, I think, as so few of us manage to make that break.
Still, if ever you see one thing that does not make sense, no matter how small or insignificant, and follow it through, you might experience a breakthrough. It is usually just that, a small thing.
You will experience denial, pain, disappointment, anger, disillusionment, and finally freedom.
The “con” in “con game” stands for “confidence.” The artist behind a con game can pull off any stunt if the “mark” believes him to be sincere and honest. I’ve often been a victim, less often as I get older. Even so, any time I turn on the TV or enter a retail store, I am exposed to confidence games. (“Loyalty cards, “coupons” and “mattress sales” on Presidents’ Day are all con games, for example. It’s a way of life for Americans.)
One such con game is American “news.” It is only effective to the degree that people trust it. It is comprised of outright lies and half-truths (along with many other fractions). It serves more as distraction, keeping our attention on some events and off others, just as a pickpocket hires a shill to distract the victim while he is removing the wallet.
Con man
Brian Williams, a very talented actor/comedian, was removed from the lead spot at NBC news because he was caught in a lie. That he lied did not matter. Getting caught did. If Americans sense that he is lying, which he does as a matter of routine, then we might lose confidence in him. The game is up. That’s why he is on hiatus.
________________ Wikipedia is an important information source. It too is a con game. It is supposed to be the encyclopedia of the Internet, a place to go to look up anything. I use Wikipedia when I need to know things like celebrity birth and death dates, the history of rock groups, or other non-political matters. It’s fairly reliable.
But we live in a National Security State (NSS), and all our information is controlled. Unless we are aware of that fact and take steps to leave the mainstream to search for information, we are blissfully uninformed. Do you imagine that in our NSS that a powerful tool like Wikipedia is allowed to work free of control?
I have read Wiki’s version of the events of 9/11 and the Boston Marathon false flag event. Wiki is under harness, and parrots the official state line. I don’t bother with it. The lesson is this: If you choose the path of least resistance for news, you’ll be kept in a state of ignorance. The NSS, knowing that we use least-effort procedures to obtain our “news,” will give us the business.
If you rely on Brian Williams for news, you’re uninformed. If you rely on Wikipedia … you’ll have stars and dates and even some astrophysics and math, but for the important events of our time, forget it. It’s a confidence game.
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Abraham Hafiz Rodriguez is a man after my own heart, bouncing from rock to rock, and not so inured to official truth as to be completely brainwashed. He once trusted Obama, and doubting the official story of 9/11 immersed himself in the “9/11 Truth” movement. He joined Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth,” not knowing it was but a front group.
But he did not stop there, and like me, came across the works of Dr. Judy Wood. He bought and read her book, a 500-page compilation of evidence covering everything from the impossibility of a pancake collapse to the barely-reported existence of a major hurricane off the shores of Manhattan and Long Island that day. She found hundreds of cars that had been “toasted” by some cold process, and examined seismic evidence. She found odd behavior in the earth’s magnetic fields that day that coincided with the Twin Towers being “hit by planes,” or as she puts it, “getting their holes.” She found “fire” (plasma) that toasted metal but did not affect paper, as with the cars shown below. She found that 1,200 people had jumped to their deaths that day to escape whatever process was underway inside the buildings. And more. Much more.
Cars parked blocks away from the World Trade Center on 9/11 – notice all the unburned paper.
Curious as to A&E’s take on Dr. Wood, he emailed its founder, Richard Gage, who is (as I see him) a government agent. (A&E’s function is to catch skeptics and misroute them.) He asked about the group’s position on Dr. Wood’s work.
What happened next surprised him – he was removed from the mailing list, and his membership was canceled. A&E later offered to refund his membership dues if he would shut up about the matter, but he was a bit too proud to be bought for $80.
Oddly at peace
Rodriguez then moved on to Wikipedia, and put up a page on Dr. Judy Wood’s work. In very short order, the page was taken down by the overseers. He asked what was up about that, and got no answer, and so appealed the decision to remove her page. That process, which is supposed to be open for five or six days, was shut down after twelve hours.
After that, he found that his own Wikipedia account was closed. He could no longer access it. Not only was Dr. Wood banned, so was he. (Note: I searched Wiki for her name prior to writing this. It appears one time, mentioned in a Qui Tam* court case against NIST brought by Dr. Morgan Reynolds. Dr. Wood’s own Qui Tam case against NIST is not mentioned there.)
The note below is a screen grab of an email sent to Rodriquez by “Hooperbloob, an anonymous Wiki overseer.
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Interesting that the NYTimes and Bloomberg are considered “really good references.”
Dr. Judy Wood is not part of the “9/11 Truth” movement. The official “truth” movement has marginalized her, attacked her. If you are interested in her work, you’ll have to take steps to see it for yourself, as you won’t find it mentioned in all the right and wrong places. It is removed from view, as our NSS does not want you stumbling on it.
This links to her web page, her book. This is a link to a YouTube about how the BBC censored her work. Please understand, you cannot be harmed by exposure to information that you don’t like or agree with. Your brain will still function afterwards. So if you’re bored, have a look at it!
I warn you, however, that you might walk away troubled by what you see and read. That state of mind, also known as cognitive dissonance, will open some doors otherwise hidden from view.
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* “Qui Tam” is a whistle blower’s tool used to sue people who use government resources to tell lies. Dr. Wood and others found that “NIST”, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, lied in its offical reports on the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers One, Two and Seven. Because the private corporations who wrote those reports profited thereby, she sued them. Her case was dismissed (the judge asking her if she had a “death wish”), but we can gauge her honesty by the fact that she is willing to put her work on court record under oath. Other leaders of the “Truth Movement,” like Richard Gage of A&E, refuse to do that.
Our little town up here above Denver is just like every other little town in the country. Every summer they put on festivals, concerts, celebrations and fairs, and people come out in droves. We did so over the weekend. It was a small affair with booths, and the corporations co-opt these opportunities to hawk their own crap. Direct TV had a booth. I walked by it several times and watched the lonely man there gathering spider webs on his body. Nobody cared.
The reason I write this is because I am so often critical of humans of the American variety. It is true that we live in a thought control regime, cluelessly. It is true that we are poorly educated, diddled by what we call “news,” and made to feel important by a PR device known as “elections.”
But these gatherings are so much fun, even just to sit in a chair and watch the people and the stuff they can do. Musical and artistic, athletic, culinary and mechanical talent is out there in abundance. Antique automobiles are crafted, preserved and spit polished by men who understand internal combustion, a mystery to me. People know how to make jelly out of wine, engraving and wood carving. They do some really nice photography (along with the usual photoshopped stuff).
Above is a photo [of a photo] I purchased … I’m no judge, but think she did a good job. It’s taken out in the Colorado flatlands.
My point is that people are amazing and wonderful, even if politically inept. As a country, we have limitless talent. I watched the ponytailed and tattooed guys on motorcycles and the ladies at the cookie stand and have nothing but affection for them.
We we suffer from bad leadership, and have for decades. We have a lousy educational and political system. But we are a wonderful people. Please don’t get me wrong about that.
I spend a lot of effort trying to get people to look at evidence. It speaks, but usually says things we are not supposed to know. Consequently, just as a mother might ignore all the signs that her husband is abusing her children, most Americans studiously ignore evidence that their government has committed grisly crimes against them. Some things are too difficult to ponder.
It is irrational to believe the official story of the JFK assassination, 9/11 or the Boston Marathon bombing. Evidence does not support those stories. But it is entirely rational to believe in Apollo and the moon landings. Evidence is both convincing and abundant.
And false. It had to be manufactured and it had to be convincing because it was not only the American public that was being fooled, but most of the excellent people who participated in Apollo. If you choose to believe in Apollo, I won’t argue with you. Have a nice day.
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The usual reasons given for diverting $40 billion to fake the moon landings are not believable – to instill patriotism and belief in the wonders of our technology? To honor the legacy of a dead hero who boldly stated we should boldly go? Those are nice side effects. (I wonder if JFK was involved in the hoax, or if he was merely deceived by people around him. He spoke of going to the moon in 1961 even as the Van Allen radiation belts were discovered in the late 1950s.)
Among the reasons for belief, the most prominent is that if it were a lie, people would talk. The government cannot keep secrets. Consider this:
Gus Grissom, astronaut, was an open critic of NASA, and went so far as to hang a lemon on one of the space capsules that was supposedly going to take him to the moon. He and two others died in a fire that Grissom’s family believes was deliberate murder.
Tom Baron was a quality control and safety inspector for North American Aviation, the primary contractor for the lunar module. He testified before congress as what we would now call a “whistleblower” about the mischievous goings-on at Kennedy Space Center. Six days later he, his wife and stepdaughter were killed at a railroad crossing. It was ruled suicide.
That’s not how the government keeps secrets. People are right when they say that governments cannot keep secrets. That is how the military keeps secrets. It’s effective. It’s why not even Truman knew about the Manhattan Project. Three things are going on:
Contractual obligations to secrecy. If you violate them, just the financial consequences are enough.
Compartmentalization. Most people involved don’t know the big picture.
FEAR. Grissom and Baron and others who were murdered served as a dog whistle to insiders.
The silent whistle says that if you talk, you die. And not just you – your family too. (Ergo, the absence of deathbed testimony.)
Some time down the road I’ll offer up some opinions on what NASA was really doing in those days when it was not going to the moon. It is still a closely guarded secret, so the best we can do is informed speculation. NASA is a military organization disguised as civilian. It was not playing around with rocketry for fun. The business was dead serious and the need for secrecy was paramount. But knowing that the moon landings were faked does answer a few questions:
Why did we never go back to the moon? We didn’t go there to begin with.
Why, if we had the technology in 1969, are we still searching for technology in 2015? Self-explanatory.
Why the quirky behavior of the Apollo moon walkers? They are and were good and decent men who must lie in public. It is not in their nature. We should just leave them alone. If they speak, they die.
If you are of a curious bent, take a walk on the wild side. The photos taken on the moon are very good fakes. That fact alone does not prove anything, but seeing how they were faked tells a much larger story.
As always, your own thoughts and abilities come into play. And again, given the abundance of evidence …
If you believed they put a man on the moon
Man on the moon
If you believe there’s nothing up his sleeve
Then nothing is cool…
… you have an abundance of good hard evidence to support you. I won’t argue the point.
“My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.” (Christopher Hitchens)
I admired Hitchens, defiant to his last days, possessed of his own mind, flipping us off even as he departed this world.
At the other end of dignity, I was struck by the words in the post below of (Saint) Ignatius Loyola, a man who had obviously lost his mind. But it is a sad fact of our existence that a small percentage of the population is highly susceptible not so much to “thought control” (most Americans), but a more sinister practice, “mind control.”
In fact, anyone who reads the literature of the 1950’s and 60’s will run across a mind control program run by the CIA called “MKULTRA,” the object of which was to find people who could work under control of others without their knowledge. James McGowan trifled with this notion in his book “Programmed to Kill,” in which he speculates that the serial killers of the 60’s and 70’s might well have been subjects of that program.
CIA is a large organization, thousands of talented people, but at its beating heart center are psychotic monsters. They ran a program in Vietnam called “Phoenix.” It was assassination on a large scale, as many as 40,000 dead. What happened to these trained killers when they returned stateside? Did they become plumbers and accountants? (One man whose murderous behaviors in Vietnam are on record, Bob Kerrey, went on to become a governor and senator.)
MKULTRA is a fascinating subject. A trip through its history will take the inquiring mind through hypnosis, child abuse, sexual perversion, dissociative disorder, LSD and other drugs, and of course, the torture regime. What we saw at Abu Ghraib was not some out-of-control underlings getting off by scaring people with dogs … it was a scientific program of torture designed to induce psychosis. Out of such settings come assassins, suicide bombers, and men who proudly pose for photographs while beheading other men. That’s our CIA. Did the MK program ever stop?
MKULTRA was (is?) run by men in business attire sitting behind desks and claiming to be protecting us. But who protects us from them?
And though we will never be able to know for sure, people like Sirhan Sirhan, Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley, Jr., Charles Manson, Squeaky Fromme, James Holmes and others all fit the bill, victims of mind control. CIA claims that MKULTRA was a bust, and was discontinued. I doubt it.
Look at the photo to the right. James Holmes is obviously drugged. What kind of drugs? What kind of treatment has he undergone? His mind is gone.* Sirhan Sirhan to this day cannot remember his activities on the night of June 5, 1968 (the only reason he is still alive). A professional hypnotist from Harvard has studied him and finds that he was deeply hypno-programmed.
We have a cancer within our body politic, an agency that runs programs like MK, and that determines the fate of our country by means of murder and skullduggery. And we have among us people who are susceptible to mind control. If the bulk of the population were not in such a trance as to not be able to see what is before their every eyes, perhaps we could put a stop to it.
I have not linked to anything here. It’s all out there for people of curious bent, and for the others, linking does not prod curiosity.
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*Will he soon be founding a religious order?
The comment below printed but the photos did not at Reptile Dysfunction. So I print it here. People who would not look at the photos anyway can now avoid coming here to see them.
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Steve, you can slap them in the face with evidence, which I will do one time here, and they won’t (can’t) look at it. They take solace in ridicule. Our crime, the thing that makes us “conspiracy theorists” is thinking. if this were the 1600’s we’d be labeled witches, in the `1700’s jailed as Quakers, in the 1950’s and 60’s we’d be labeled “communists.” Americans historically hate people who think.
The photo below is a thermal image of Ground Zero with some overlay showing the actual size of the buildings compared to what was left that day. Normally a demolition leaves about 13% of the original size in debris, so that the rubble should have stood perhaps thirty stories high. There is perhaps two stories of debris. There has been no time for the steel to have been “shipped to China,” a false lead and part of the cover-up. It is not buried underground, as photos from that day clearly show the basements of the buildings mostly free of debris and intact. Firemen were wandering around down there after the buildings disappeared.
These photos below, a section of tower of perhaps 70 stories in height that turns to dust before our eyes.
The evidence is there, easy to find, and people avoid it. Why? What power of mind do the people who did this crime have over the population that they can make them stare at their shoes? It is thought control, that’s all, really interesting to watch but painful to endure.
I recently stumbled on some words that are so pregnant with obvious truth that I slapped my forehead with a “Duh!” *
During the Civil War Lincoln virtually emasculated the Constitution. Historians forgave him, since we were at war. 9/11 was seen as justification for a pre-formed Reichstag-like enabling act that set aside most constitutional guarantees.
Other examples abound, as Eugene Debs might attest.
The point is that our supposed form of government, a democratic republic, is quickly set aside whenever there is trouble.
If when we have trouble we set aside our form of government, isn’t that an admission that our form of government does not work? After all, if it isn’t there when we need it, it might as well not be there at all.
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*The words are by Dr. Walt Brown: “…if that diagnosis is accurate, democracy as a system is a pathetic failure. And when it shuts itself down in a crisis – that validates failure.” He was referring to the unending need of our two parties to tear each other down whether those in power are doing a good or bad job.
The line “Mongo only pawn…” was written by Richard Pryor, who was originally cast to be the black sheriff in Mel Brooks’ classic, Blazing Saddles. I watch the movie when I need a lift. Good hard laughter is a sleep aid.
The studio overrode Brooks in casting, and the part of Bart, the sheriff, went to Cleavon Little, who did a creditable job.
But we’ll never know what we missed had Pryor gotten the part.
Piece of Mindful 