Wisdom after-the-fact

imageI’ve been puttering in my garage lately while listening to radio programs from the early 70s by Mae Brussell. I am getting a sense of her intelligence, and perhaps some brashness and youthful enthusiasm. She has figured most things out.

In the current programs the Watergate breakin has occurred. She is trying to understand motive and ramifications. She knows the parties involved, and that “burglar” James McCord never truly “resigned” from the CIA. Her co-host has easily figured out that the burglars wanted to be caught. Mae is not up to speed on this.

She is convinced that Richard Nixon will be murdered. Indeed there were attempts on his life during this time, but his security was always top notch. Richard Nixon will be removed from power via the Watergate affair. She’s got motive right, but not means. There were so many public murders during that time that she assumed he’d be done in that way. It makes sense.

Nixon was a right-winger, but as his record indicated, not right wing enough.

Reinhard Gehlen
Reinhard Gehlen

Mae is sure that the United States is heading into fascism. Her interest was triggered by the JFK murder and cover-up, and the other public murders that ensued. She knows about Operation Paperclip, and the importation of Nazi scientists and generals by the Dulles brothers, including the infamous General Reinhard Gehlen, who was integral in the newly formed CIA.  She draws a parallel to 1930’s Germany as Nazis murdered their way to power, throwing a wet blanket on opposition and rendering opponents and critics silent by fear and intimidation.

She came from an era when there was still limited access to public airwaves. People then and now are mostly clueless, fed shit and kept in the dark. They imagine fascism to be movie-style blunt intimidation. It is far more subtle than that. While ordinary citizens walk around imagining free speech to matter,  votes counted, choices real, those in power know better.

There is a blanket of fear over government. People are afraid to speak up. Those who do are murdered, imprisoned, or hounded out of office by fake scandals. Everyone is under surveillance. The public is distracted by dumbed-down schooling, entertainment and sports, wedge politics and phony elections.

We attended a town meeting last week here in Conifer/Aspen Park. The subjects discussed were a local highway intersection where accidents are too frequent, fire danger in the forest interface. Such issues are important and our opinions and actions matter. The problem is that people imagine such control exists beyond our townships. That part is a grand illusion.

Mae Brussell died in 1988. I’ve hours of listening to go, years in fact. I’ll be full of wisdom after the fact, but will never lose sight of her foresight, insight, courage and persistence. I hope she someday has her face on a postage stamp along with other patriotic people like Bradley Manning, Ralph Nader, Rachel Corrie, Paul Wellstone, Anthony Weiner, Gary Webb, Dr. Judy Wood.

Never lose faith. That day will come.

Hope for an Apple

“Trotter and LeBon concluded that the group mind does not think in the strict sense of the word. In place of thought it has impulses, habits and emotions. In making up its mind, its first impulse is usually to follow the example of a trusted leader. This is one of the most firmly established principles of mass psychology.” (Edward Bernays, Propaganda* (1928)

Wilfred Trotter (1872-1939) was a British surgeon who dabbled in social psychology and studied the herd instinct of crowds. Gustave LeBon (1841-1931) was a French psychologist who did the same. Trotter fed on LeBon, and Bernays fed on both. Together, they pioneered the field of modern advertising and propaganda.

Advertising is merely getting people to change their behavior. But honesty does not work in advertising. People do not change their minds based on reason – in fact, are more often reinforced in their beliefs when confronted with evidence they are wrong.

Realizing this, Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, spent his career looking for ways to manipulate and undermine public opinion. He was an extremely clever and dishonest man.

Bernays realized that people are one thing on the surface, and something quite different underneath. Advertising, and all effective mass persuasion, deals with the our subconscious being.

So ads approach us with surface phenomena, usually sex and humor. But the real ad message is first developed by behavioral psychologists. Every ad campaign has artists and copywriters doing overlays on the central theme.

Im a macTake Apple: The theme: Apple is a cool product to own. Apple users are more sophisticated than PC people. In what was one of the most effective ad campaigns of all time, Apple computer owners became annoying preachers for the company’s product. PC’s and Macs are virtually identical, differing only in muscle memory for keystrokes. Advertising works.**

Or Obama: The “Hope and Change” campaign won the coveted prize for best marketing campaign in 2008. Barack_Obama_Hope_posterIt was a subtle undermining of the will, allowing viewers to participate by filling in their own aspirations and ideals. I fell for it, reading into Obama what I wanted from politics. He delivered the Neocon Republican agenda, yet still has strong support from Democrats.

Which is Bernays’ most important finding. People don’t think. They follow trusted leaders. They cannot be persuaded on reason. Advertisers and politicians merely supply leaders, undermine our identities, supply their desires for our own.

It does not always work, of course. But it works often enough.
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*Bernays book, Propaganda, is short and accessible, easily read and understood.

** Please note placement of Cool Guy’s thumbs.

Cuba: Watch yer back

Item: U.S. Removes Cuba from list of states that sponsor terrorism.

Operation Mongoose was a terrorist offensive by the U.S. against Cuba begun in the 1960s. Operation Northwoods, nixed by President Kennedy, was to be a false flag attack on the U.S. which included the shooting down of civilian airliners. Cuba would have been blamed and the island bombed, invaded, and restored to control.

In 1976 a Cuban airliner was blown up in midair, and all 73 aboard, including a young Cuban fencing team, died. The man responsible for the bombing, Orlando Bosch, was later pardoned by George H.W. Bush, and he was harbored in the U.S.

Most Americans don’t know about any of this, of course, because our information system is designed to keep Americans in the dark.

Cubans, far better informed that Americans, know all about Mongoose and American terrorism throughout the 60s and 70s.

It’s odd. The United States is the largest source and sponsor of state terrorism in the world. Books have been written on the subject. In this country, that’s a good way to hide it.

The State-Sponsored Terrorism List is a weapon used to bludgeon states that are charting courses independent of large banks and corporations. These powerful imperialist forces want to control the world’s resources. They try to isolate countries not under corporate control, like Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and to bring in terror regimes, as happened to Chile under Pinochet.

The hypocrisy is simply stunning.

Take one country, just one of scores: Iraq. It was brutally attacked, invaded, bombed in 1991. Sanctions in the 90s killed a half million of its precious youth. An attack in 2003 followed by a brutal occupation, complete with torture facilities like Abu Ghraib, killed hundreds of thousands and caused millions to flee the country. The U.S. lied about its reason for the attack, and by power of suggestion used its own 911 false flag operation as justification.

Americans ate it up. Has there ever been a more deeply clueless people? Perhaps the Germans in the post-World War One era, so angry at their mangling by Britain and company and about Versailles … perhaps they were done in by their own anger and so were easily manipulated as the Nazis rose to power.

But the people of the U.S. have no reason to be angry at any other country or force on the planet, so the attitude of the American public can only be attributed to deep manipulation by agitation propaganda.

The U.S. is removing Cuba from its naughty list. Watch yer back, Cuba. World wide, American embassies operate as CIA stations and portals though which our terrorists enter and operate in  other countries. By allowing an American embassy, Cuba is inviting terrorists in its front door. (The illegal Cuban embargo, which is the reason why Cubans drive old cars, has been carried on since the Eisenhower regime, and is an important incentive for Cuba to take this chance.)

Watch yer back, Cuba. This can only be the old Mongoose wine in new bottles.

The strangers

“What you have to understand … Is that sometimes there are forces and events too big, too powerful, with so much at stake for other people or institutions that you cannot do anything about them, no matter how evil or wrong they are and no matter how dedicated or sincere you are or how much evidence you have. This is simply one of the hard facts of life you have to face.”

These words above were addressed to author John DeCamp by William Colby, Director of the CIA from 1973 to 1976. During his tenure the famous “Phoenix” program was going on, and cold-blooded murderers were running about in Vietnam killing thousands of people Obama-style (pre-drone) without judge or jury. (One has to wonder what such highly skilled murderers do when they return stateside after our wars – become accountants? Stock brokers?)

Colby himself met a violent end, face down in the Wicimoco River after an impromptu canoe ride which he decided to take without a life jacket and in the middle of a meal. While I do not wish harm to any person, a man who presided over so much suffering certainly had an appropriate exit. (I have to wonder – did his comrades at CIA decide he had gone soft? The quote above almost seems to be that of a reflective man of conscience.)

I write this because to understand the world we have to understand the minds of others. Power is a magnet, and those who gravitate towards it are often imitation humans looking to participate in the great game. They walk among us, devoid of emotion, killing and destroying lives, thinking nothing of it.

Cord Meyer, for instance, was one of the big guns in the CIA when that agency murdered his ex-wife, Mary Pinchot Meyer, in 1964. As Mr. Colby said above, no matter the evidence, there will be no justice in that matter, but what did Mr. Meyer do? Quit in disgust? Or did he help plan the grisly affair? It would be interesting to occupy that mind for just one day.

We live on a planet inhabited by two species, humans and humanoids. The latter look like us, dress like us, spend their lives learning how to imitate us. But among themselves they are free to be themselves, and they are at work daily making our world more to their liking. Their private gatherings, freed of social constraints, are debauched affairs replete with drunkenness and perversions, pedophilia and occult rituals, as in Bohemian Grove. And man do they have fun!

Theirs is a world just barely hidden in the shadows. We catch a glimpse now and then. Most who come to view it cannot imagine it to really exist, and turn their heads,

In my world and in all my travels and inquiries, the veil has lifted. I see them saunter in and out of positions of power, including the presidency and head broker at the local brokerage firm. In terms of money and power, they win, win, win. It is rare to see any one of them, Bernie Madoff*, for instance, pay a price.

That is simply a hard fact of life, and I have learned to live with it. I do not suffer from the notion that justice exists.
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*Madoff, I should add, sits in jail not because of what he did, but who he did it to. He chose powerful victims, a fatal mistake. Had he spent his time scamming regular people, he’d now be sitting in a mansion overlooking the Pacific and sipping wine instead of sitting in a prison cell. What was he thinking?

I petted a puppy today

We are now in the midst of yet another election season. And as November 6 approaches, only one thing is certain: American voters will have no ability to know with certainty who wins any given race, from dogcatcher to president. Nor will we know the true results of ballot initiatives and referenda affecting some of the most vital issues of our day, including fracking, abortion, gay marriage, GMO-food labeling, and electoral reform itself. Our faith-based elections are the result of a new Dark Age in American democracy, brought on, paradoxically, by technological progress. (Victoria Collier, How to Rig an Election, Harpers, November, 2012)

dont-voteWe were seated around a campfire last summer when for some reason, the stunning upset of Seth Cantor in the Virginia primary came up. I mentioned that the vote outcome was probably fraudulent – such upsets can easily be engineered with our modern voting “technology.”

One of the men by the campfire became hostile, insisting that American elections are squeaky clean. Always. I said that when they open the machines at the end of the evening, we have no more way of knowing that the count is accurate than if there are Martians living on the dark side of the moon.

It only happens rarely, but I got some support that night, from another CPA. Indeed, he said, results that cannot be independently verified cannot be trusted.

I catch a lot of flack because, for the most part, I don’t vote. It’s a rite of passage, like peeing on a gravestone to join a fraternity. I see people wearing buttons on election day saying “I voted,” and think, well, I petted a puppy today. Same difference.

I was last concerned about our voting system in 2004, when George W. Bush stole the presidential election. His dad, George H.W. Bush stole the New Hampshire primary in 1988, probably the general too. It’s a family tradition. (Has a Bush ever won a clean election?) Later, however, as I realized that a clean election would have given us … John Kerry!!!  … I stopped worrying about election fraud. If we don’t have decent candidates, the vote tally is the least of our problems. (According to Mark Crispen Miller, Kerry knew the vote count was fraudulent. But aristocrats don’t pee on other aristocrats.)

But I still get upset, and cannot help it. Our system of counting votes is so in-your-face corrupt that it is insulting to our national intelligence. I realize the implications of that statement.

Speaking of implications, here are some opening words of the book Votescam: The Stealing of America:

This book also contends that the theft of your vote, or Votescam, is part of a supposedly patriotic “collaboration” between federal officials and the news media that began shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, when “responsible” American press was persuaded by American intelligence services to hide from the American people the actual implications of the Kennedy murder.”

“…implications of the Kennedy murder.” Those who read this blog regularly know that 11/22/63 was a military coup d’état, and here is yet more fallout. The “intelligence services” (CIA), when they murdered the president,  also stepped into the election system … there must have been a decision that since the executive was overthrown, that the election system had to be compromised* too, to prevent any undoing of the coup. That would make sense.

Folks, please come to your senses. If you cannot independently verify the vote on election night, you cannot trust the result. If the result cannot be trusted, then voting will not solve our problems. Faith will get you to heaven, but will not give a clean election outcome.

Other means are needed. Suggestions are welcome.
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*Election theft is an American tradition. I am well aware that JFK himself was probably elected due to the power and influence of his mafia-don-like father. It is not easy to be self-righteous in this country.

U.S./Iran negotiations and a forthcoming agreement

Mayssan There’s a presumption in many American circles that Israel holds undue influence over American foreign policy. It is true that there are Israeli apologists throughout our media, so that anyone who criticizes that country is immediately branded anti-Semitic and slapped down. But in terms of who runs who, it is the direction of military aid that governs. Israel is a servant. Thierry Meyssan’s most recent piece on the US/Iran negotiations has a lot of material to absorb, much of it unfathomable to Americans who get their news from American sources. He says that an agreement will be signed in late June, and that it will effectively thwart Netanyahu’s ambitions of a Nile-to-Euphrates Israeli state. That in mind, the Israelis have but a couple of months to disrupt the agreement.

It would therefore not be surprising if we were to see further unclaimed terrorist actions or political assassinations, the responsibility of which could be attributed to Washington or Teheran, in order to stop the signature intended for the 30th June 2015.

I regard Israel as danger to human survival, a state born in and sustained by terrorism, but one always one subordinated to U.S. ambitions, a “cop on the beat” that could affect attacks that the U.S. wanted to be distanced from. Meyssan claims that the U.S. currently is engaged in a major troop shift, Middle East to Far East, and so is leaving behind a ten-year agreement that puts Iran and Saudi Arabia in charge of the region. Israel is effectively dealt out. That is a dangerous situation.

Power and the true nature of my country

The power of literature is to reduce complexity to characters. Judas, for instance, was a mere literary device. Tolkien’s fantasy, Lord of the Rings, has been debased by those movies so that there is not much appreciation for its real meaning, stated by Lord Acton to be this:

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The ring is power. If affects all of touch it. In the end, it destroyed Frodo, as he sadly acknowledged. 220px-Madeleine_Duncan_Brown

I was reading an interview this morning with Madeleine Duncan Brown (1925-2002), the woman who claimed to be at a gathering on 11/21/63 with her then-lover and father of her son, Lyndon Johnson. LBJ retired to a back room with other attendees, including John J. McCloy, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Clint Murchison (host). When he came out, he leaned over to Madeliene, she thought for a kiss on the cheek, and said “Those [Kennedy’s] will never embarrass me again.”

True story? Who knows – it has this working against it – one, she lived to tell it. Two, she was able to tell it in People Magazine in 1987. Our media is so heavily censored that a story like that getting through in  national publication cannot be an accident. And three, researchers cannot place Nixon there – he’d have to be in two places at once.

That is not my subject. In the 1996 interview with Noel Twyman, Brown described the Dallas scene at that time, and the corruption was palpable. She said that these men were on a carousel and could not get off. Once they learned that they could steal, murder, and not only get away with it, but prosper, they could not stop themselves. Their appetites were insatiable. Murder was a twice-before-breakfast occurrence in Dallas, then just a very corrupt small city, now a large one. Murder of a president was a crowning achievement, in part a blow to the Eastern Establishment by cowboy upstarts.

I started 25 years ago on this path, and I was just like everyone else I knew – so naive. I believed in America, its institutions, its history and promise. I have watched the façade crumble around me. At first I was hurt, shocked, ill. I could not fathom that public figures I knew and trusted – Ronald Reagan, for instance – were so corrupt and shallow.

But I soon internalized it and kept moving forward. And now and then I get this reaction from people – “How can you live like that?  It’s as if mere belief is all that matters.

Before I read about real life crime, I was absorbed by Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes, by the Robert Ludlum novels – well-written fiction. I love solving mysteries. After I shed my naivete about my country, I merely got on with mystery solving. It has been fun.

This may surprise people, but my favorite move genre is romantic comedy. I love movies like Forget Paris and Heart and Souls. They are life as I want life to be. As John Denver put it in one of his songs, “True love is still the only dream I know.”

How’s that for contrast? I am a guy who sees the seamy underbelly of perhaps the most corrupt and depraved country ever to exist, and I believe in romantic love.

People don’t want to know how they make the sausage. So it goes. That’s why this is a low-traffic blog. If I were to headline this “Hillary is so wonderful, and Jeb sucks,” my numbers would shoot up. The truth, that both are slimeballs fronting for criminal enterprises reaching deep into the military-industrial-intelligence complex … well, that does not fly.

We have a choice of crooks next year, each representing powerful hidden factions. Here’s another discouragement for you: We will have no idea who really won, as votes are never counted accurately. They don’t even try. That part is all for show.

I’ll close with a little-known fact: According to Meg Azzoni, John F. Kennedy Jr.’s high school sweetheart, he owned a cat. Care to guess the cat’s name? Continue reading “Power and the true nature of my country” →

Who do you trust?

I took the book Tragedy and Hope, by Carroll Quigley, around the world with me in 2013. Literally. I even carried it in my pack as we hiked the Himalayas. At 1,348 pages it qualifies as tome, and most people don’t have the time. I am fortunate.

As with all good non-fiction, the book creates more questions than it answers. It came to mind this morning as I read a link supplied by SK regarding Timothy Leary. Was he what he appeared to be, something else? Judge for yourself. (Another source, Sherman Skolnick*, claims that most of our prominent sixties “counterculture” radicals were government agents – he includes Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis. So Leary being an insider would not surprise me.)

The link reminded me of Quigley because of his words about The New Republic, a magazine founded in 1914 by an agent of JP Morgan. Mike Straight became correspondent, then editor and the publisher by 1946. During his tenure he removed all known liberals from the magazine, but kept the outer appearance of a progressive outlet. Real control of the magazine existed with the William C. Whitney Foundation, and Straight was its president. Editors of TNR were always aware of ownership – said one, Herbert Croly,

Of course, [the Straights] could always withdraw their financial support if they ceased to approve of the policy of the paper, and in that event, it would go out of existence as a consequence of their disapproval.

The real mission of TNR, according to Quigley, was to advance “certain designs,” to blunt isolationism and anti-British sentiments (very prominent in the U.S. after World War One), and to provide progressives “…with a vehicle for expression of their progressive views in literature, art, music, social reform, and even domestic politics.”

In other words, the favored outlet for the left from the 1914 forward was owned by right wingers.

Contrast this with another magazine, Ramparts, which had some true leftist principles, and how it was attacked and then destroyed by the CIA. (If I learn later that Ramparts was a CIA front, I quit.)

In other words, if credibility of a source is an issue in our reading, the first principle we should apply to judging a source is this: Is it even allowed to exist? If it is vilified, ridiculed, marginalized … it might be worthy. If it went out of business, suffered lawsuits, scandals, or barely exists on a slim thread, it might be OK.

There are two sources of left-wing journalism that are alive and well and prospering today – The Nation Magazine, and Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! is funded by the Ford Foundation, hardly a left-wing outfit. This reminds me of TNR and its funding by Whitney.

Such outlets can be useful. They do provide some left-wing perspective on current affairs. But they also serve as gatekeepers, performing a “this far, no further” role in limiting examination of certain events and policies.

This country is owned by right wingers, who control our corporations and military, campuses and media. But we of the left exist, and cannot be killed, at least not all of us. In fact, it is even good to have a back-and-forth going on, as it gives the impression of an open society. So don’t be surprised to learn that in our past the right-wing furnished us with our left-wing press.  This could well be the case now.
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*Skolnick (1930-2006) is labeled a “conspiracy theorist” by Wikipedia. Such pro forma ridicule indicates he’s worth a closer look.

The turning point

I am ready now to move on from JFK, both blogging and personally. I realize that most readers were not alive when he was murdered, and even those with an interest in solving the crime do not realize its importance today. That crime was a seminal event in U.S. history, in my view:

  • It was coup d’état, a military takeover. It could be that the original coup was the death of FDR and importation of surviving remnants of the Third Reich by the Dulles brothers immediately post-war. Thus begat our CIA. But killing JFK insulated those in power.
  • It spawned a near-revolution. The “sixties” (1964-1975) are a mixed up era, but immediately post-JFK there was a squeaky clean anti-war movement on the larger campuses, and it was growing in strength. Later it would be infiltrated and hijacked,  and covert operators brought hippies and drugs and Tex Watson (aka “Manson”) into the forefront to successfully derail the movement. (This is where Dave McGowan’s Laurel Canyon scene picks up, and I wonder if he has figured out the bigger picture. I suspect he has.) imageJane Fonda, daughter of a military intelligence officer, did not just happen on the seat of a gun turret in Hanoi one day. She was, knowingly or not, part of a PSYOP. She alone set the anti-war movement back ten years.
  • Out of his death came a flourishing of movements, from anti-poverty to civil rights, environmentalism, anti-war and feminism. Medicare passed at this time. He did not create or foster them, but the angst of his murder unleashed a torrent of pent-up emotions. Pandora had to be put back in her box.
  • The murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King effectively killed hope. There were hundreds of other murders during that time, Black Panther leaders and important witnesses, but those two public executions sent a message:  “Give it up, folks. You cannot defeat us.” The origins of totalitarianism are always highlighted with a trail of murders. A dark cloud fell over the nation in 1968, and has never lifted. Indeed, it seems the good they die young. And not by accident.

I will try to write less about this event in the future, but urge readers to explore on their own for this reason: It is a portal. As inexperienced military doctors performed a sloppy autopsy of JFK’s body that night, they were being supervised by military brass in the balcony above.

That scene is a nice metaphor for our country, with that nameless power structure looking down at the corpse of a republic.

But it is time to move on. I realize that. My “obsession” is not with JFK or the string of murders that followed, including his son, but with what has become a totalitarian system. Such systems have come and gone throughout history, Germany and the U.S.S.R recent examples. This particular system seems much more oppressive because most people are not aware of it.

I interact quite a bit on the blogs and know, as do those who follow this blog, that it is an intellectual desert out there. Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the early 1800’s that this place was mostly drunk every evening. The American public in general has never been exceptional.  Our intellectual class, our academics, our journalists and teachers these days are a smug and deeply ignorant group.

I feel the oppression, but it appears most people have internalized it, and so don’t know about it. There was a turning point. I think it started with a very important murder, and the elevation of an extremely corrupt and stupid man to the presidency. His name: Truman.

A miracle

Any time there is an event in which a large number of people die, we build a memorial. It’s a nice thing to do. I think there should be a memorial built somewhere to all of the people who have been murdered in the wake of the JFK assassination. Penn Jones kept track of them up until his own death. This story is about a man who saw too much, and lived. For that reason, I have to hold out some doubt, but repeat here the events in the life of Sergeant Robert Vinson. It appears we are witness to a miracle. Continue reading “A miracle” →