What little news I pay attention to, I get wrong!

I had a long drive into and back from greater Denver today, and listened sporadically to NPR when other stations were doing commercials. (Colorado Public Radio runs commercials all day long, as much as any other station … they just don’t call them that.)

I gathered that some kind of deal had been struck to remove the threat of nuclear weapons from the Middle East. The radio journalists were gaga about Kerry and Obama.

I thought great! Israel has agreed to disarm!

Later I learned that they were talking about Iran, a country that doesn’t have nuclear weapons but could use a few.

As it turns out, the real crazies, the Israelis, are still armed with nukes. It is still a danger zone, madmen at the wheel.

As you were folks, no news here.

The nature of the beast

I think about writing this post now and then and back off, as it is much like lecturing the tides. Nonetheless, it does no harm to discuss things as they really are. The way things “ought to be” is a life on a different planet. We have to live on this one.

People are herd animals, or more politely, tribal beings. We value belonging far more than any other psychic reward. Consequently, there is very little interest in knowing anything that does not settle well with mainstream views. For most people, not belonging is too painful to endure. So they only know what the group knows. (How else do you explain religions?)

People have layers. The outer shell claims to think, read, explore. That’s a false front. Most people do none of those things. There are layers beneath the public self, and there is the “self” that our leaders speak to. They know we don’t read. They know when we enter the voting booth, for example, that we haven’t done anything more than view a few TV commercials and don’t even know the names on the down-ballot. They also know to flatter our phony selves while dealing seriously with the one hidden from view.

This is the essence of advertising, public relations, politics, and propaganda – the knowledge that people do not think, evaluate evidence, explore, or use  critical thought. For example, even as your brain might tell you that what is happening to the left here is physically impossible, the leaders and the group tell you it really happened. The group rules. Reality is cast aside. It does not matter.

Some of us are different. In a comment in a prior post, I recalled an event wherein I participated in group ridicule of some kids that were exhibiting nonconformist behavior.* I remember feeling revulsion at my behavior even at that time, in high school, when peer pressure was very high. (Why else would I remember it now?) I also was a very bad Boy Scout, to the point where the group leader finally took me aside to tell me “We don’t talk like that here.” (We were asked to come up with a game to play during a meeting. I had suggested “Ring around the Rosie.”) I lasted all of six months in that group. What a waste of my parents’ money to buy a uniform!

Am I different from most people? Yes. Am I better? Please consult the opening paragraph above. I am merely describing reality.

That does not matter. The larger point, the one I wrestle with is this: Is there any point to knowing what I know, of being different?

The answer is not satisfying, but must suffice: Individuals can make a difference. But it is hard, and along the way, we have to somehow work the herd to our own advantage. This skill is called “politics.” I do not know how to do that. I refuse to pretend to be something I am not merely to win the favor of a group. That is demeaning.
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*John Bragg, if you ever by chance read this, even though you don’t know I was part of that group, please accept my sincere apologies.

A clinker

Every now and then we stumble on a piece of information that is so out of tune that we automatically disregard it. So too did John Armstrong when he was doing the body of research for his book “Harvey and Lee.”

I like Mr. Armstrong, that is, I think I get a sense of the man. He’s not married to a theory, but rather to pursuit of truth. Evidence leads him to places he’d not otherwise have gone. He claims, based on twelve years of research, that there were two Oswalds: Lee, an American born in New Orleans, and Harvey, a Russian-speaking Eastern European immigrant whose real name he never learned. The identity of the European was merged with the American during the 1950’s.

In 1953 William Henry Timmer lived in Stanley, North Dakota, a town west of Minot in the northwestern part of the state. During that time he met a boy from New York City who called himself “Harvey,” or “Harv” Oswald. He was a curiosity in that small town, and other boys knew him as well. Harv talked about communism and once told Timmer that “Some day I am going to kill the president and that will show them.”

At the time of the assassination, Timmer had a “funny feeling” that Harv was the guy arrested in Dallas. His mother wrote a letter to President Johnson advising him of the incident. (The letter is shown beneath the fold.) The FBI followed up on the lead, but the Warren Commission ignored it, as “Lee” Oswald was officially in 1953 in New York City. His presence in Stanley was an anomaly.

“Harvey” Oswald, the man shot by Jack Ruby, was as he said, “just a patsy.” He did not shoot President Kennedy. There were perhaps four teams of shooters in Dallas that day, and rather than three “shots” perhaps three volleys of shots. But to have this same Harvey, the patsy, claim in 1953 that he had already been set up on a mission is confounding.

Harvey the spy was set up like this: He spoke fluent Russian, but kept that fact hidden while there. As “Lee,” the Russians would think him a real American, as they would dig into his background.

His secret ability to speak Russian allowed “Harvey” to hear and read things around him during his famous “defection” to the USSR. It’s brilliant.

How both “Harvey” and “Lee” were spotted and recruited is a mystery. Mr. Armstrong does not claim to know those details, only the outcome. I accept all of that as standard operating procedure, probably as old as Julius Caesar.  Deep cover spies are known throughout recorded history.

The “clinker” is the statement in the early fifties that he intended to kill “the president.” What possible explanations are there for this?

  • Mr. Trimmer is lying, and is merely a publicity hound. Armstrong has interviewed him at length (he lives near either Great Falls or Helena, Montana), and thinks he is honest. That’s an open question, but if he is a hound, he’s not good at it. He’s not gotten publicity, nor has he made money on his knowledge.
  • That boy in Stanley was someone else. Timmer remembers him introduced as “Harvey Oswald,” however, and thinks he is the man Jack Ruby shot. The coincidence of names and looks is, at the very least, an oddity.
  • “Harvey” was just talking tough for the boys. He was, after all, a big city kid in a small rural town. (That, to me, has some plausibility, but does not fully explain the happenstance of a New York kid in North Dakota threatening to shoot the president.)

There’s another explanation, and it is my own concoction, possibly a reach: In the postwar era, the United States government (and news media) was slowly infiltrated with moles, a continuation of the Third Reich, a mass importation of spies and military men under Operation Paperclip and by other means. CIA was the vehicle. They and others of that persuasion, who are nothing if not devoted to their cause, made their way into pivotal positions in the military and civilian government, and their ultimate aim was coup d’etat.

The coup would be an American coup, that is, uniquely designed for an American public long immersed delusions of self-governance and exceptionalism. We would be allowed to keep outer appearances of self-governance, our three branches of government and supposedly independent media, intact. But form would be devoid of substance, as it appears to be at this time.

To do this, at some point it would be necessary to murder the president and neutralize the executive branch. Any president would do. The murder would be a “coming out”, a show crime used to demonstrate to those in regular government who was really in charge. The people who did the crime were in effect saying “Look at us. Look what we can do. You’d be wise to stand down now.”

Only fools believe the official story of the JFK assassination. It’s ludicrous. Yet it stands as an icon. All who want a piece of the action must bow before it. No one of a “serious” bent in government, media or academia questions that painfully obvious lie.

Could it be that in 1953 a young man had been selected as patsy for the murder of the president, not even knowing who that president might be?

I do not know, of course. But the story of William Henry Timmer must either fit or be discarded. If it fits, then historians (now called “conspiracy theorists”) must discard all of this nonsense of JFK the hero, and merely regard him as JFK, the poor schmuck.

It fits, for me, in one regard: It would have been relatively easy to remove JFK from office without murdering him in public. What we saw that day was not a murder so much as an execution. Its purpose might actually be contained in its clumsiness.
Continue reading “A clinker” →

Plato’s TV

We are headed to Montana for an impromptu class reunion (made possible by the existence of Facebook), plus some time away from electronic signals thereafter. Things will be slow around here.

I have long struggled with Plato’s Cave Allegory, and so tried to update it a bit here, hopefully having a grasp of its significance in our age. Television supplies reality for most Americans, and is the medium by which most of our lies are facilitated. Most people don’t read, but then, I don’t really understand why printed lies are not as effective as televised ones. I have been able to sort my way through the lies of our times [even though books lie], but it has taken many years and I have swallowed whole on many lies in the process. It is a game of musical chairs, new lies taking the place of old ones, until such time that truth settles in. Possibly.

With TV, a lie like 9/11 or Boston, told but once, sticks forever. TV has such persuasive power that people cannot fathom actors staging events for our benefit. It’s a confidence game. The underlying belief of Americans, no matter how much skepticism they profess, is that if something is on TV and labeled “news” it is true.

Given the power of such a medium, there is no way the state would let it operate unfettered. So naturally the American television media is state-controlled. Americans might believe such a thing about Cuba or North Korea, but never their own country. That’s part of the lie.

 TV owns reality. Since government controls TV content, government owns reality.

Below I have plagiarized the Wikipedia entry on the Cave Allegory, making changes as needed.
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The Allegory of the Television (also titled Plato’s TV)

Plato in his work The Republic (514a–520a) sought to compare “…the effect of education and the lack of it on our nature”. It is written as a dialogue between Plato’s brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates, narrated by the latter.

Plato has Socrates describe a gathering of people who have lived chained to a couch all of their lives, facing a television. The people watch images on the TV screen and begin to designate names to these images. The images are as close as the couch prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the dissident is like a prisoner who is freed from the couch and comes to understand that the images on the screen do not make up reality at all. Away from the television, the prisoner can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere images seen by the couch prisoners.

Our perception of the world around is habitation on a couch with the screen’s light reflecting throughout the home. Our view of the real world only comes into focus once we abandon our televisions.

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For reasons unknown the following video seems apropos. Tim Russert, considered one of the best of show in his time, is either acting out a script or swallowing whole on a Rumsfeld routine (performed during the time after 9/11 when people were still in shock).  Seen with a proper dose of skepticism, it is hilarious.

A brief trip in the hall of mirrors

OBL FrightOsama bin Laden is one of those characters that appears to be, like Lee Harvey Oswald, in part real human and in part a creation of the American intelligence system. The image on the right was shown Americans during the staged 9/11 events, and was designed to frighten us, to be part of our nightmares. It is heavily doctored to look menacing, almost a religious icon. OBL fattyBut like “Oswald,” there are apparently more than one Osama, and after his death (reported to be December 13, 2001), new images appeared. To the left is “Fatty” bin Laden alongside the real guy. fake-bin-laden1The man immediately below is an impostor as well. Most Americans are not attune to photographic fakery, and the power of suggestion makes images shown to them to be what  authority figures say they are. This is true of both bin Laden and Oswald. Harvey and lee The image below a comparison of two Lee Harvey Oswalds. The one on the left a man born by that name in New Orleans in 1939, the one on the right a Russian-speaking Eastern European immigrant whose real name is not known to this date. It is the one on the right who was murdered by Jack Ruby on December 24th, 1963, and who miraculously survived for almost two days in custody of the Dallas Police. Two people, to my knowledge, have reported having contact with the New Orleans-born LHO on the left after the assassination – Robert Vinson, as reported in James Douglass’ book JFK and the Unspeakable (see link), and Mae Brussell, who reported on her radio show in the early 1970s that she had been contacted by the man on the left. In the world of spooks, we can never be sure what is true. Both “Osama” and “Oswald” were operatives, spooks, and patsies at once. Both had body doubles running around impersonating them. Both were “sheepdipped,” or made to look guilty prior to a crime and without their knowledge. All are now dead for sure, and I can only guess that the New Orleans-born Oswald was either dispatched or re-branded after 11/22/63. Osama was murdered in 2001, shortly after 9/11, and with reason given his comments below:

“I was not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States nor did I have knowledge of the attacks. There exists a government within a government within the United States. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; to the people who want to make the present century a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity.

That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks. … The American system is totally in control of the Jews, whose first priority is Israel, not the United States … I have already said that we are not hostile to the United States. We are against the system, which makes other nations slaves of the United States, or forces them to mortgage their political and economic freedom.

(Those were his replies to questions submitted by Pakistani newspaper Ummat, published on 9/22/2001.) (I know, he went all Mel Gibson on us.) OBL November tape

Fake Osama later appeared on al-Jazeera in November of 2001, and approved of the 9/11 events, implying foreknowledge. But one year later, in November of 2002, the Swiss Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence in Lausanne, commissioned by a French TV station, concluded that the voice heard in the November tape was not the real bin Laden.

In mid-September of 2001 the Taliban offered to turn bin Laden over to the United States if some evidence of his complicity in 9/11 events could be produced. The United States opted instead to bomb Afghanistan.

I don’t know what is real or fake, of course. I’ve been fooled many times. It is no more wise to trust self-described “9/11 Truth” leaders than the CIA, as I’ve found that they are often in league with one another. The former operates as a second tier of the cover-up. I can only report to you that this is a complicated world with many liars, and that the last place to look for truth is in the United States Government or its state-controlled news media.

Secrecy in a Military/Industrial complex

Most Americans are caught up in the idea that we have an elected government and that our opinions and votes influence public policy. We are encouraged to think that way. Many among us spend their days advancing political candidates and engaging in meaningful debate about public policy. These are our greatest fools.

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) said that the American public is but a “bewildered herd.”

A herd has power (think of a buffalo stampede) but no intelligence or direction. Inside our leadership class it is intuitively understood that the herd should suffer the illusion of democracy.

“Democracy” allows us to spend our time and effort in debates that outside the bewildered herd are of no consequence. Elections are a distraction. Leadership will engage in the ritual, even publicly submitting themselves to the humiliation of interrogation by elected officials (as when leaders of oil companies were lined up in submissive posture to testify before congress). It is absurd, but considered necessary to foster the illusion of democracy.

I have spent many years trying to understand our political economy. I once thought Lippmann to be an elitist. But he was a realist. I do, however, see a fatal flaw in his reasoning, and that is the notion that the leadership classes possesses better vision than the herd.

There may be safety in secrecy, and all of our military and science and corporate affairs are shrouded in secrecy. Every matter of public importance has two facets, the real one, and the one told to the public. Hence we have things like 9/11 and Apollo, events of real significance, but completely shrouded in secrecy. Leadership regards this as an essential part of public governance.

But looking out over the unspeakable horrors that the U.S. and British aristocracies have inflicted on the planet, it is hard to imagine them to be more than an elite body immune to the consequences of its own mistakes – consequences that the rest of us must suffer. They seem no more than common criminals.

Life … “is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It’s all quite absurd, don’t you think?

Technological advances in a military/industrial complex

Most of what are seen as breakthroughs in our civilian sector have existed long before in the military sphere. Examples are GPS and, of course, the Internet. The latter was an ARPA project from the late 1960’s that was gifted (without public process) to American corporations for exploitation in the 90’s. This is Noam Chomsky, speaking in early 2000:

An even bigger giveaway — this one is incalculable, you don’t know how to measure it in dollars — is the giveaway of the internet. That’s very recent. Four years ago, in fact, it was commercialized, handed over to private power. A year before that, in 1994, Bill Gates, for example, was so — saw so little potential in the internet that he refused even to go to conferences about it. In 1995, he figured what he could do with it. This has been developed for thirty years within the public sector, at public expense, and it was handed over to private power, and it’s now considered, you know, kind of like the leading edge of the economy. (Interview, Democracy Now!, 2/3/2000)

The Bill Gates example has long intrigued me. One, I don’t believe he is any kind of genius of visionary. The success of Microsoft has been mostly due to its ability to scout the horizon for technological advances and gobble them up. In this regard, Gates, if he is anything more than lucky, is simply adept at predatory capitalism.

Beyond one man, however, the notion that scientific breakthroughs take place and are then immediately turned into commercial ventures – is simply beyond the pale. The technology is first quarantined and explored in a cloaked environment. It is used to gain advantage over global competition. If it can be made into a weapon, that becomes its primary use.

When finally a technology no longer presents a military advantage, the public gets to use it. Thus have we our cell phones.

In 1989 two scientists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, announced to the world that they had hit on a form of nuclear reaction that would occur at near room temperature. The official story now is that they were premature and that the results could never be duplicated.

However, a fellow scientist doing similar work had received a tip-off from the Department of Energy, and effectively submarined their work. He was BYU Professor Dr. Steven E. Jones. The “cold fusion” controversy of that time is muddled and discredited in the public eye. The technology, if it existed, was kept under wraps.

Dr. Judy Wood noticed that on 9/11/2001 that the Twin Towers and Building Seven, rather than exploding or collapsing or melting or being pulverized, were turning to dust in midair. She called the process “dustifcation,” and revealed her findings in an important 2006 book, Where Did the Towers Go?

The destructive process left behind a telltale tritium signature, a hydrogen isotope that indicates a nuclear process. The 9/11 event was not thermal event, nor is there evidence of introduction of outside kinetic forces (“bombs in the buildings”). It was not a hot process, as the massive dust cloud in the aftermath was cold, and people survived it.

Whatever force was used that day, its destructive power was immense. Absent in the debris were any of the thousands of filing cabinets, sinks, toilets, desks, computers, adding machines and safes.  1,200 people opted to jump to their deaths rather than endure whatever process was taking place in the buildings.

Dr. Wood came under attack, found her work subverted and labeled “space beams” by the same man who a decade earlier had subverted the world of Pons and Fleischmann. Dr. Steven E. Jones was put on leave by BYU after joining the so-called “9/11 Truth” movement to advance the absurd theory that the Twin Towers had been brought down by nano-thermites.

Dr. Wood is still attacked and marginalized by the “Truth Movement” a name as misleading as “cold fusion” and “space beams.” The technology used, directed energy, is a breakthrough. It has obviously been developed to immense capability. We know very little of it other than its observable effects from that day. Due to the efforts of Jones and “9/11 Truth”, is still being kept under wraps. But it is there, and thanks to Dr. Wood, we know about it now.

The larger point is that we suffer from the mythology that in a military state like ours innovation and invention are allowed to go on unimpeded by overlords. My advice for anyone who stumbles on something new, say, for instance, a way to make toast without nichrome wire, do not patent it. In so doing, you alert the authorities. If they see potential for a weapon, you’ll be kindly advised to give up your technology.

If you don’t … think about this.

Apollo and PID – same song, different verses

By fearing whom I trust I find my way
To truth; by trusting wholly I betray
The trust of wisdom; better far is doubt
Which brings the false into the light of day.
(Abdallah al-Ma’arri) (973-1057)*

“We leave you much that is undone. There are great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of the truth’s protective layers. There are places to go beyond belief…” (Neil Armstrong, 1994)

In yesterday’s piece on the moon landings, I was flippant, as the matter is so fraudulent as to invite humor. And yet … Neil Armstrong, quoted above, is obviously a man of high character and intense honesty, so much so that he remained silent and out of the spotlight for the bulk of his life after the supposed lunar landing. In his quoted words, he is doing above what so many others do when under intense pressure to keep secrets – he is communicating by means of inference, leaving it to us to read between the lines.

Oddly, Apollo and P(aul) I(s) D(ead), the serious and the trivial, are alike in this regard. The Beatles, in dropping so many clues on albums and in songs, asked us to think on our own about things they could not tell us openly and plainly. They too were under intense pressure, “McCartney” himself wanting to come clean. So both Macca and Armstrong are in the same boat: Living a lie under threat of death. In their shoes I would do the same. Their personal integrity, in my mind, is fully intact.

I am not going to chronicle all of the evidence uncovered by others. It’s a waste of time. People of curious mind are perfectly capable of seeing it and forming their own conclusions. I have some other thoughts about the the lies of our times in general, and the Apollo Program in specific:

  • The role of evidence: I have noticed in my travels on this planet that “conspiracy theorists” are nothing more than people who look at evidence. There is a direct correlation: Much looking, much doubt. Little looking, little doubt.
  • Fear of the implications. Add to that another factor: Fear of implications when exposed to but a little evidence, which leads to ridicule, a deflection tactic.
  • “Debunking”: NASA knows, along with those who have perpetrated every other hoax in our times, that curiosity leads to doubt, and so has loaded the Internet with “debunking” sites. Phil Plait for example, performs this task for NASA, for what motive I cannot know. The role of the debunker is to derail the curious mind before before curiosity creates suspicion and doubt. “Debunking” is one of “truth’s protective layers.”

The moon landings were faked, but probably for good reason. The people who did it were serving a higher purpose, one that they needed to keep secret.

NASA, it must be remembered, is not a civilian agency, but rather a disguised military one. It is described as such in the US code. While its mission often appears to be scientific, and while it often allows itself to be used to advance science (as with the Voyager probes), we should never lose sight of military objectives. Werner von Braun was a Nazi man first, NASA man second. He needed facilitators to achieve advances in rocketry, using whatever funding source available.

So what was Armstrong referring to above? I don’t know, of course, but to me he appears to be saying everything he can say without blowing his cover: he was witness to some marvelous doings, and wants others to carry on in his footsteps, which are not on the moon.

There are other things to talk about – the nature of technological advance in a military state, the need for secrecy, and the danger of going public when so much is at stake. I want to get into that stuff, but will stop here with but one more thought:

Apollo involved the work of thousands of smart and serious people, most of whom knew only small parts of a much larger whole. Their abilities and accomplishments are impressive. I wish we lived in a world where we could speak plainly with one another, but we don’t. So to get at truth, we need to learn to navigate lies, and for that, we need better equipment than given us by our news, information, entertainment and education systems.

I read that perhaps 20% of Americans do not believe we landed on the moon. I suggest that this 20% is not at all the dumbest quintile of the population. Quite the opposite.
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*Cited in Doubt: A History, by Jennifer Michael Hecht, p231

LOOT

Theology is “a rhapsody of feigned and ill-invented nonsense.” Scriptures are “so stuffed with madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that you admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them.” Jesus must have “picked up a few ignorant blockish fisher fellows, whom he knew by his skill in physiognomy, had strong imaginations.” Moses, “if ever there was such a man,” had, like Jesus, “learned magic in Egypt, but that he was both the better artist and better politician than Jesus.” (Thomas Aikenhead, executed January 8, 1697, at age 20.*)

Many years ago I briefly subscribed to a short-lived publication called “Lies of Our Times.” It was an ongoing critique of just that, the daily lies that stream out of Langley, Wall Street, the Pentagon, and every other set of moving lips in our nation’s power centers. Those lies are repeated uncritically by our journalists, apparently their job.

The words “of our times” are important.

John Lennon was supposedly intrigued by the notion that Jesus faked his death. That’s funny to me, because there was no Jesus, or many. Galileo was housebound by power for merely saying something true. Poor Aikenhead, above, must have wondered why he was given a brain if it was a crime to use it. Abraham Lincoln, who appears to have had some honest qualities about him, spent his brief tenure in the House of Representatives trying to expose the lie that allowed the United States to steal the Southwest from Mexico. The United States was witness to a massive purge in the 1950’s called “McCarthyism,” though historians are only allowed to use that word (“purge”) when referencing Stalin and Mao.

The United States itself is based on a gigantic lie, that we are a democracy. Or a republic. Since we are neither, let’s not struggle with terminology. This particular lie carries with it the notions that the American public is well-informed; that our leaders do not lie to us, and that we are somehow exceptional.

I hope you are catching the humor here, as the lie contained within the lie is that there are no lies. I love that kind of layered humor. But wait … there’s more!

“Una Ronald” lived in Australia, and was watching the moon landing on her telly in 1969 when something odd happened. As the astronauts walked about, a Coke bottle rolled across the screen. At the time, perhaps 30% of a smarter American public did not believe the landings to be real. I have to guess that percentage was even higher in Australia.

It is not that the bottle appeared on-screen. It’s deeper than that (cue spooky music): We all know that the astronauts in their garb could not possibly have been able to remove a coin from their pocket and place it in the lunar vending machine (the LVM**).

I am not going to go through the maze of evidence here to prove to you what is so easily understood – the moon landings were a hoax. Just a bit of a journey and some perusal of photos will tell you that on your own. I marvel at how everything Americans need to know can stay hidden in plain sight.

It is a question of why. That’s a little more complicated. I’ll stumble into that ground tomorrow, and I do mean stumble, as I can only speculate on why $35 billion was diverted from the general fund and funneled into the disguise called “Apollo.” For now, I only want to deal briefly with the usual objection when this subject comes up, that such secrets cannot be kept for long.

  • 1. Government can and does keep secrets. Galileo learned this. It has power over people, and can punish them by means of ridicule, loss of benefits, or death.
  • 2. But secrets do get out. Those who have studied the moon landing photographs have walked away suspecting that people back in 1969 were deliberately putting clues in there of fakery for later generations. The Coke bottle incident might not have been an accident.
  • 3. Think Manhattan Project, or compartmentalization. Most of the people involved in the moon landings thought it was a real venture. They were fooled, just like us.
  • 4. Cold and frightful silence ensues. Even as so many NASA and industry people might have realized the game was a game after the fact, they know to shut up. The people who did this are serious and powerful and had another game in mind.

Tomorrow I’ll try to carry forward. For today, I want to introduce the notion of “Lies of our Times.” There’s nothing new under the sun. In our more technologically advanced age, the tools of mass persuasion, mostly the television set, are able to create bigger myths and make them stick with more people.
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*The Aikenhead passage is taken from the book Doubt: A History, by Jennifer Michael Hecht, p 338
** I believe that Lockheed Martin partnered with Coca Cola Company on this venture, which cost $2.7 billion in development, and never really worked correctly, in fact, was never tested on earth. When placed on the lunar surface all of the Coke inside immediately vaporized in the intense radiation. Coins that the astronauts carried with them to purchase Cokes were later given to other nations as souvenirs. The Netherlands coin, on display in Amsterdam, was seen to have the date 1979 on it instead of 1969, and so was thought to be counterfeit.

Dead man walking

“I think it’s people on the outside who perceive Paul (McCartney) as thinking he’s the only one left. Actually, it’s me. I am the last remaining Beatle.” (Ringo Starr, DailyMail, 5/26/2011)

paul13A rumor popped up in Great Britain in 1966, and took wings in the United States in 1969, that the original Paul McCartney had died and was replaced by an impostor, William Shears Campbell. [Unknown to me on writing this, as I have not really followed this stuff, there are a number of candidates who might ahve filled the bill, “Billy Shears” merely the name of the new Beatle.] I wrote about it back in 2013 after Macca graced yet another Rolling Stone cover. I actually like what I wrote. I said it was a marketing ploy. A very good one.

The idea was this: The greatest rock band in history was breaking up, and the large organization built around them would be set adrift. To keep revenue flowing, they needed album sales. What better way to do that than to plant “clues” in the album covers, beginning with St. Pepper in 1967.

I recommend, especially if you are of a curious mind, to take a look at all those clues. It is a macabre trip, but there are scores of them, and they all point at Paul, and they all hint that he died. The most potent is the Pepper album cover, a funeral scene. It’s crawling with stuff, just crawling. I do suggest that you avoid the audio clues, playing songs backward and all of that, as it strikes me as a bit like looking for encoded messages in the Bible. Who really knows what we would get if we played Pat Boone songs backward? (The words of April Love, played backwards, say “I hate Jesus”?)

By the way, the current guy who plays Paul in real life is an immensely talented performer. He was an unwitting beneficiary. He’s not guilty, in my mind, of anything but living a lie, knowing that if he spoke up, that we would come together over his grave, as we did with John, George, Brian Epstein, Mel Evans … . Further, since so much time has passed, the current Paul is the Paul we know, and has effectively body snatched the original.

That November 16, 2013 piece would have been my last thought on the matter but for three new pieces of information, new to me anyway:

  • An article from The Pessimist, November 7, 2013 that Warren Commission critic Mark Lane was sought out by Paul McCartney in early 1966:

    While living in London during that time I attended a small party of about a dozen people. One of them was Paul McCartney. He walked up to me, offered his hand, and told me his name. The introduction was hardly necessary as he was one of the most famous people in the world…

    He said, “I understand you have written a book about Kennedy’s assassination. I would like to read it.”

    Lane gave McCartney an early draft of Rush to Judgment, and McCartney wanted to write music to a documentary being made to advance the case made in the book.

    Only a person who is as well versed in the JFK assassination as me would know this, but Mark Lane is an intelligence agent, part of the JFK cover-up. Hard as this is to grasp, his role was to become the public voice of skepticism in the late 60’s about JFK’s death, since the case against Oswald was so clearly fraudulent. In that role, others of prominence would seek him out – in effect, would self-identify. Lane’s bosses could then evaluate the risk posed, and act accordingly. McCartney, perhaps one of the most famous people in the world at that time, obviously posed a considerable threat, and so was murdered.

    When I read of Mark Lane’s involvement in the PID affair, my blood ran cold. If you’ve seen the movie Sixth Sense, the big reveal at the end, that the Bruce Willis character is dead and has been dead all along … was a shock. I experienced that feeling again. Oh shit, I realized. He really is dead.

  • The strange behavior of Heather Mills:

    Nuff said.

  • Italians Gabriella Carlesi, forensic pathologist and Francesco Gavazzeni, computer scientist, set out to dispel the PID rumor in 2009. They do this sort of thing in real life for forensic purposes, court cases and all of that. They compared high-quality photos of Paul before 11/66 with those after to determine if it was the same man. To their surprise, it was not. Their article appeared in the magazine Wired Italia on July 15, 2009. The article can be found here and there in rough form – that is, someone photographed the pages and put them online. (Coincidentally with release of that article, McCartney appeared on the Letterman show and gave a rooftop concert. It was a nice distraction.)

How could something that sophisticated happen before our eyes? Who possesses such skill and power of deceit? My question exactly. Until I bumped into the Mark Lane story, I had no clue.

Remember, after the Beatles stopped touring, they radically altered their appearances, growing, beards  mustaches and much longer hair. Seen from a curious angle, all of that served to hide the surgical scars that were healing on Sir Paul. Many months would pass before public performances, and before that, we don’t know if Paul as actually playing the instruments. We don’t know that he wrote the music credited to him since 11/66, so much of which is crap.

Anyway, I add young and naive Mr. Paul McCartney to the long list of deaths surrounding the JFK assassination. That is the only reason I care. It is also weird to think that of the four original Beatles, three were murdered.