How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
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?
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.
There 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.
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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.
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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?
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.
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*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.
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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.”
…I do recall … David telling us story after story about how he worked with the Bolivians to track down Che Guevera and that he was there when they made the arrest; and that he ordered him to chop his head off and then he kicked it as far as he could so there would be no stories that he’d been caught and captured but had escaped. (Robert Walton, attorney, speaking of David Sanchez Morales (1925-1978), CIA agent)
(My note: Morales “ordered” the Bolivians to chop the head off. So much for plausible deniability.)
Robert Altemeyer, retired professor of psychology up north, developed the concept of the “right-wing authoritarian,” calling that particular psychological makeup the enemy of human freedom. (My link is to Wikipedia. It is brief and useful.)
But Altemeyer’s work is misleading if one approaches our world from a “right vs left” framework. In fact, he encountered the same personality profile in supposed “right” and “left” circles and so invented the term “wild card authoritarian” to describe non-right wingers.
I think his use of “right-wing” is misleading. Altermeyer performed similar work in the old Soviet Union and found that the exact same personality profile that fit our “Right Wing Authoritarians” existed in the leaders of the Soviet regime.
Similarly, I have found that the leaders of the Democratic and Republican Parties in the United States are the exact same type of people, authoritarians, conniving, disingenuous, and manipulative. Dr. Judy Wood, as is her talent, coined a pithy phrase to describe the phenomenon: Same team, home and away uniforms.
I bring this up in a much larger framework, however. David Morales hated communists with such intensity that in his own mind he was justified in performing any act of violence against them, no matter how atrocious. As a result, KGB-style communists and American anti-communists were essentially the same people, two sides of the coin called “evil.” They were deeply brainwashed and could live in any era. They might feel at home in Communist, Nazi, Khmer Rouge settings, for example. In our modern-day they could be “al Qaeda,” “ISIL,” Navy Seals or Blackwater ops.
My larger question has to do with anticommunism. At the end of World War II, Americans and Russians were allies, the latter having done the lion’s share of the work in defeating Nazi Germany. Not too long after the war, we learned that the Russians, who became the “Soviet Menace,” were our deadly enemy set on destroying us.
The Soviet Union was never a credible threat to the United States. How, in the minds of Americans, did they become the face of evil? How were characters like Morales created?
I can explain only a small part of it, McCarthyism, a Mao-like purge of career service diplomats from government service, teachers from academia, and writers from television and movies. The 1954 hearings were televised, perhaps the first use of that medium as a PSYOP. McCarthy’s reach extended to campuses, Hollywood, and the news media. While he ended his life in disgrace, he left a mark, a dark seed of suspicion was planted in the United States that the enemy slept in our camp.
That might explain the paranoia that gripped the country during the so-called “Cold War,” now supplanted by “terrorism” as the evil enemy (complete with 9/11, a made-for TV PSYOP). It does not, however, explain characters like David Sanchez Morales, men so convinced of their own rightness that any act of violence is justified in the name of patriotism. There is only one explanation for that: Evil resides in human beings, whether in home or away uniforms.
A “skeptic” is a person who uncritically believes in authority figures and trashes those who do not. (Revised definition used in United States of America, circa 1947 forward.)
I listen infrequently to a podcast from a source called the “School Sucks Project,” hosted by Bruce Veinotte. The affairs are usually long and so do not lend themselves to passive bedtime listening. Yesterday I was pulling raspberries and so put the latest one on for background noise. It was about conspiracy theories and theorists.
I came away a bit disgusted. Veinotte is a good man, in my view, having opted out of the American education system in disgust. He sees that our schools are nothing more than indoctrination and behavior modification factories. Yet given such solid fuel to fire his engines, he does not seem able to achieve liftoff. He’s lost in libertarian theory and government-as-evil idealism. That’s all well and good but it is a rest stop, and not a destination.
After listening, covered in sweat, I offered a comment on the podcast, yet to be approved by the moderator. It is either below their sight line or has offended them. I offered words to the effect that
My bad. I once again violated the wise advice of the sage, Voltaire:
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.
I write about certain matters as if I am on common ground with readers. Perhaps not. Perhaps we need to define the nature of the “sociopath.”
Such a person is not “mentally ill.” Being in such a state of existence merely allows them to view life from a different pedestal. But they are interesting to observe. Sociopaths are a minority among us, perhaps 2% of the population. I’ve heard more, and that the U.S. has a larger percentage due to our being a seeded colony, the mother country dumping its problems. (Australia should then exhibit the same tendency, no?)
They do not experience the same emotions as we do. They do not “fall in love” as we do, though they certainly experience sexual needs. From a young age, as they try to find their place in the world, they learn the art of imitation. As they are a small minority in our population, they need to fit in, and to do this, they must pretend that they are like us.
The common thought is that such people become killers, soldiers, criminals. But they enjoy running free, as we all do, and penalties are severe. Just like everyone, they hate jail.
They need to find a place where they can pursue their own joys in life, which are not like ours, and avoid punishment. Even better, they need a world where their unique traits are rewarded. The natural path for them is the business world. Their specialty is the game, the deal, constructing elaborate traps, and springing them. The springing of the trap is their ultimate pleasure. Business + sociopath = nirvana.
The latest incarnation of Sherlock Holmes, the excellent portrayal by Benedict Cumberbatch, describes himself as a “high-functioning” sociopath. We are seeing more and more acknowledgement of sociopaths in entertainment. But it is important to know that most are not “high functioning.” Like all of us, they come in gradations, most of them average. Most probably lack self-awareness, and merely survive.
The two most likely places to encounter them are in the market for love, and on the job.
In love, a sociopath will often engage in heavy courting, the object of which is a conquest perhaps, maybe access to money and property. They have families, but their relationship with their children is above my pay grade. The Bush and Kennedy families are case studies for advanced degrees, in my view.
On the job, the sociopath will build a nest, and protect it. S/he will see potential enemies, and engage in preventive war. Traps will be set. Sex might occur, later to be used as weapons to force compromise or allow advancement. Such people often work their way into positions of authority over others, and it is hard to fathom as there is no distinguishable talent there. But that is the nature of the game. It is part of the reason why there are so many incompetent bosses out there.
The further up one progresses in the business world, the more financial success encountered, and the more sociopaths. It truly is a world for predators.
I tend to think of them as adaptations. In our tribal past, I can see a need for the heartless killer who has command of others, who orders the village next door to be wiped out, a surprise attack at dawn, carnage. The reward: preservation of the gene pool.
I’ve read a few works on the subject, but not enough to be anything more than a sponge. I wonder about that faction within the Meyers-Briggs pop psychological grouping called the “ISTJ,” introverted, sensing without the ability for abstract thought, [tough minded], and able to command respect and organize the activities of others. Stalin was, I read, ISTJ. That is, however, highly oversimplified. (The popular book outlining all of this is “Please Understand Me.”)
Martha Stout of Harvard wrote “The Sociopath Next Door.“There is also Robert D. Hare, “Without Conscience.” Jon Ronson has “The Psychopath Test.” Those are just the ones I have read. There are many others.
Popular works of fiction like “No Country for Old Men” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley” are about sociopaths. Oddly, Hannibal Lecter does not really fit the bill, nor does Charles Manson, a deer in the headlights. TV’s Dexter is a weak portrayal, as the man is devoted to his family and even falls in love, albeit with other killers.
In real life, Bernie Madoff is obviously one, and George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump certainly exhibit symptoms. George W. Bush tortured animals as a child. People like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs exhibit emotional shallowness coupled with highly developed business skills.
The only useful outcome of this knowledge is self-protection. Here’s are a few clues to watch out for:
Other and better lists exist. Those are drawn from my own experiences.
Do have fun! Use protection.
I first asked the question about the murder of John F. Kennedy as a junior in high school in 1967, reading Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment. 21 years later, in 1988, I asked it again.
For those of you who were not around, those were different times. People coming out of World War II were optimistic. The future looked good. Kennedy was an unusual man, a natural for the leadership slot. I lived in a Republican household, but cried when he died. He was so natural, so good on his feet. He made us do things like exercise our bodies, the fifty-mile walk a goal he inspired in youth. He sent legions of young men to do good abroad in the Peace Corps. We just felt good. Especially us kids. He was so cool.
The murder, and on some level most of us knew it wasn’t as we were told, disenchanted us. It made kids rebellious. Campuses were alive not only with protest, but curiosity. They were holding “teach-ins.” These were not long-haired beaded hippies, but rather young men and women who dressed nice. The anti-war movement was a peaceful movement of serious people. They talked about Indochina, colonialism, the roots of Vietnam, Cuba, Lamumba, Guatemala … They were not spouting slogans. They were spouting real history. It had to be stopped. (In the ensuing years, it has been stopped.)
Hippies, drugs, rock music – all of that came later, and was CIA-inspired. That is the message that Dave McGowan was working on in Weird Scenes in the Canyon. The guy is great, but somehow never nails it. CIA morphed the anti war movement in to sex, drugs and rock and roll. Laurel Canyon was at the center of it. And the war went on until 1975.
There is very little history available today, certainly none taught in the schools. But it is a rich vein for the curious mind.
I was 27 years ago that I decided I wanted to know who killed JFK. What a journey! Have you any idea what it is like to be curious? To go down avenues you never thought you would or could? Lose faith, find faith, lose faith, transcend the need for faith? Each step in solving the murder is an opening into a higher level of reality. When something like 9/11 or Boston happens, you don’t wonder. You know. It’s them again … that dark force operating behind the scenes, ruling us by fear and symbols. It is the ones who killed JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, JFK Jr., Marilyn, so many many others. They drip blood. They are sinister and evil, and in charge.
J. Edgar Hoover was a closet homosexual who was being blackmailed by the Mafia. Lyndon Johnson, had not JFK been killed, would likely have ended up in the penitentiary. Because those two extremely corrupt men had access to power, other people realized that they could kill the president and get away with it. Edgar and Lyndon had to cover it up. They had no choice. Their own lives were threatened. That was the straw that stirred the drink.
1963, Ma and Pa Kettle days, bobby socks and Beach Blanket Bingo and Doris Day, when everything was so clean, yet we were so corrupt.
Anyway, I am just saying, if you haven’t asked a question for which the search for an answer turned your life on its head, you have not thought enough yet. Nothing is as it appears. Nothing.
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.
