We stayed at a very plush hotel in Quito for our last night, with exquisite grounds, fountains, pools, and an altar for mass during weddings, which are frequent here. Our group travel service, Road Scholar, booked the place due to its proximity to the airport, which is quite distant from Quito proper. While we were there a fashion photo shoot was going on, and I took two photos standing on the balcony above, inadvertently catching the bare tush above. Our only exit was to walk through their work area, and It was very hard not to gawk at the stunningly beautiful Ecuadorian model.

I have hours to kill here, waiting in our hotel for a ride to the airport later this evening. Ergo, the blog is afire today.
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Right after the initial assault in Iraq in 2003, when the Bush Administration was in Mission Accomplished mode, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld very pointedly threatened Syria with a “you’re next” warning, telling them not to mess with the Iraq. Rumsfeld was full swagger and ripe with imperial hubris due to what was only perceived success in Iraq.

I don’t have clarity of vision into the future. So far I only know that the attack eventually launched on Syria by Western imperialists had to be done under cover of an outside-supported fake internal uprising. It was a bloody, costly war, killing hundreds of thousands, but Syrian nationalist forces prevailed and the terrorist forces had to fall back and regroup. US intended to bomb Syria into oblivion following the false flag chemical attack of 2013, blamed on the Assad government, but Russian intervention stopped them. The terrorists were rearmed with American weapons, trained by Saudi Arabia and, supported by Turkey as well, and are now labeled by the imperialists as “ISIS.”

That part is complicated, as most of those fighters, just like most Americans, think ISIS is real and perhaps that they are fighting a just cause. Soldiers generally ain’t none too bright, ours or “theirs.” CIA by this time has formed a world force of embedded terrorists and is very good at instigating color revolutions and jihadist movements. Al Qaeda itself was a CIA creation. (Real power is on display here as CIA, amidst the conflicts it has spawned in Ukraine and the Middle East, even while playing a God in Brazil and Venezuela, is now going after China via the Hong Kong instigations. Good grief!)

So the modus operandi in the Middle East has now shifted from overt attack to covert warfare using local terrorists to achieve Western objectives. There is heavy use of US military equipment to support ISIS, and US air attacks appear intended to prevent Syrian forces from reaching and rescuing the Syrian Kurds, thereby enabling a massacre of perhaps 300,000 people. This is either going on now or soon hereafter, and will not be reported in American news, just as the true dimensions of the Iraq massacre escaped notice here.

It’s difficult to sit here and describe just how evil their country has become. It happened gradually over 66 years. I know that people cannot accept it and prefer instead to be given the mushroom treatment (kept in the dark and fed shit).

It wasn’t always like this, but in 1948, with formation of the CIA, a virus was injected into government. Never intended by law to be involved in covert operations, CIA has by deceit and treachery embedded itself in every branch of government. Most Special Forces (Seals, Green Berets) actually work for CIA, so it has its own military units. It has its own source of finance, runs hundreds of proprietary companies and has full transportation at its disposal, from cargo jets down to PT boats. It employs undercover agents in all branches of government. George H.W. Bush was inadvertently exposed as a CIA agent by J Edgar Hoover after the JFK assassination.

People in government are intimidated, never knowing who to trust, and understandably don’t try to fight this force within. Meanwhile, CIA runs mercenary forces operating as private companies. NGO’s such as Agency for International Development and National Endowment for Democracy are CIA fronts. CIA knocked off presidents in 1963, 1974 and 1981, and threatened one with impeachment in 1998/99 to get its way. It wrote its own history … cleansing itself of instigating Vietnam and Laos and of drug running and killing JFK … via the Pentagon Papers gambit. It staged the events of 9/11/01 to mobilize US public support behind its wars. Perhaps its most important milestone was installation of George H.W. Bush as president in 1988, giving him the key to the vault, opening every door of every department to CIA infestation via presidential appointment. That was a coup de grâce.

Its preferred mode is to operate behind the scenes, allowing us the fiction of elected government so as to keep us occupied with meaningless politics, imagined self-government. Politics matters in that sense. It is important that we believe in our elections. The best kind of coup is the one where the military steps in, takes over, defines policy, and the allows civilians back in place to carry it out. But civilians sometimes get out of line, so memory-jogging minor coups are necessary from time to time, which is why we had them in 1974, 1981, 1999, 2000, and the big one, 2001.

And yet, it is no more than an “Agency.” CIA does not initiate policy, but neither do our elected officials or their appointees. That is coming from higher up, the government inside the government, the offices in skyscrapers on Wall Street and elsewhere where true power resides. It is not the servants, but rather the owners of the banks, the media, and the government who direct policy.

We have not had a real president or true representative government since 1963. Lyndon Johnson understood what was in play when he cowered out of office in 1968. He knew that if he used presidential power to stop the Vietnam War, he’s be ceremonially placed in the ground alongside JFK. The only hope at forestalling the full force of the coup d’état of 1963 was the election of Bobby Kennedy, murdered in 1968. Our country is nothing like people think it is.

This is what Andrzej Łobaczewski was writing about in his book Political Ponerology, how evil injects itself and spreads in government until such a time that the whole enterprise is so corrupt that it can only die of its own evil, as did the Nazis. We cannot kill it. It is too big, too powerful. I see now how it works.

Lobaczewski drew on his experiences in Poland and the USSR to explain the origins of aggressive war, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and despotism as we are seeing on full display now in the Middle East.

So it appears, given this background and knowledge of the kind of people now in power in our country, that the switch from US military forces to ISIS presaged something truly evil in store for the poor and long-suffering schmucks who live in Iraq and Syria, possibly Lebanon too, eventually Iran. They are redrawing the map, removing pesky local populations that interfere with objectives. Mass murder, genocide and ethnic cleansing of historic proportions are underway, and the US agents behind it want it kept as distant as possible from US forces so that Americans are not held directly responsible. It’s them crazy, evil Muslims doing it. Not us.

Hence the fiction of “ISIS.” It is truly bestial Enterprise, but is no more than the trained attack dogs that are on a Washington leash. The source of this amazing and historic evil force is here, in the US, in Langley, Virginia, and those who pull its chains.

This is World War IV, as much as I want to deny that it is happening before my eyes. Empires in contraction are dangerous enterprises.

One issue that I daily confront is the naïveté by which most consumers of what we call “news” assume that the pasty-faced reporters who give it to us are themselves well-versed enough to understand what they report. They are, by and large, even less studied in world events than their readers. Their craft is a dull one, and they intuitively know their limits. They have accordingly set their minds in passive mode.

Much works to reinforce them in their smugness, including selection bias. Those reporters who survive in the job do so because they lack curiosity and are easily satisfied with mediocre work. But to advance in the profession requires more, an innate sense of where power lies and the intelligence not to mess with it.

My shining example is Tom Brokaw, essentially a stupid man, but one with an outer demeanor that inspired trust. It is that feature that made him famous and allowed him to drive expensive luxury vehicles to his ranch on the West Boulder River of Montana, where he awaited the call to “report” those stories that power wanted reported. His only real talent – he seemed trustworthy. Beyond that, he was a stenographer.

Real journalists are dying now in the current wars, many killed by the Kiev regime, a couple by ISIS, and now this:

Journalist Serena Chehim had announced she was working on a report including videos showing the involvement of the World Food Programme in transporting jihadists of the Islamic Emirate (Daesh) between Turkey and Syria.

However, this story will never be released. The journalist died after her car was hit by a heavy vehicle on the Syrian border; her cameraman was seriously injured and the video tapes have vanished.

Serena Chehim was a dual Lebanese-US national. She worked for the Iranian news channel Press TV.

Those dullards who presume to be skeptical news consumers know not to trust Press TV because it is an Iranian source. I’ve said many times now, because it is screamingly obvious, that ISIS is a western creation. I too am surprised that Western powers have enlisted the UN to support them as well, but then realize that power at this advanced stage can coerce and infiltrate any body of its choosing.

There are many ways for powerful forces inside and outside government to exert pressure on public officials to have their way. Media ownership and control is but one, but a potent one as seen in the focusing of US public attention on Bill Clinton’s Oval Office affair with Monica Lewinski. At a time when he was resisting pressure to attack Serbia, he was suddenly faced with impeachment. He yielded, murdered a few thousand Serbs, and survived in office.

I linked to an interesting site by means of Vineyard of the Slacker, or the right here, and ended up at this article at Strategic Culture Foundation. It, like me, questioned the sudden rash of security breaches around Obama. I know security to be a science, so that we never hear of a corporate executive or leader of a US-friendly client state murdered. But twice within a short period of time Obama was threatened, once by an Iraq veteran who scaled the wall and gained entry to the White House, and another time when he got on an elevator with an armed convicted felon.

Once, maybe. Twice, nah, security around the president is thorough and professional. The only way to get to him is to compromise his security, as accidents are not possible – that is, there are so many redundancies built in that a glitch here and there will not endanger the executive. It takes multiple failures at once, and that takes a compromise.

In other words, these two close calls were not accidents. They were warnings. As I read the article, I was floored to read the following:

Ever since the CIA-backed assassination of John F Kennedy in November 1963, all US presidents must surely be aware that they are at the mercy of their own «deep government» – the dark forces operating in Washington that are beholden to the military-industrial complex and its closely aligned foreign policy hawks.

Who talks like that? I know this to be true. I understand the implications of 11/22/63 more than most. I know that JFK was killed by order of people higher than the executive. I know that since that day when quiet power could murder a president in broad daylight and get away with it, that every president knows he has a gun at his head. I also know that Americans in the public eye are afraid to mention such delicacies. So I sought to find out exactly what is Strategic Culture Foundation. Here is some info from its Facebook Page:

About
Strategic Culture Foundation provides a platform for exclusive analysis, research and policy comment on Eurasian and global affairs.
Description
We are covering political, economic, social and security issues worldwide. Since 2005 our journal has published thousands of analytical briefs and commentaries with the unique perspective of independent contributors from the US, Canada, India, Russia and Europe. SCF works to broaden and diversify expert discussion by focusing on hidden aspects of international politics and unconventional thinking. Benefiting from the expanding power of the Internet, we work to spread reliable information, critical thought and progressive ideas.

Their writers appear at a glance to be a mixture of Russians and Anglos, and their focus currently is on the European Union. It is a site worth following.

I have long passed the point where I tremble in fear on command. I have long passed the point where I grant credibility to the pretty talking heads of the American media. News in the US is state-controlled, heavily censored and filtered. Its purpose is to direct our attention away from things that we need to know.

When there is a big and important event that cannot be suppressed or ignored, there is perhaps a 24-hour window in which real news will slip through. This was true in 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald was allowed to tell a national audience that he was “just a patsy,” and when a Dallas sheriff deputy held up a German Mauser found in the book depository. After that the state news managers clamp down, stories disappear, official truth takes over.

That was 1963. I am tempted to say that it is so bad now that it must have been better then, that we must have had better news then, but we did not. We now have more and better resources, and individual initiative can take a person further quicker than then. But most Americans passively absorb rather than actively seek, so things have not changed an iota.

We are now at a point where news coming out of the Mideast can be set aside as useless. None of it is true. It is all misdirection. There are various diligent astute observers who are part of reporting networks who are trying to smuggle truth to us. But of course it is a minefield. So it is left to us to assemble information and try to fit together a puzzle with many missing pieces. It’s the best we can do. It is frustrating, unsatisfying, and so often leads to wrong conclusions that the temptation is to give it up.

But that is not an option. Meanwhile, we have our distractions and contrived fear campaigns, and Ebola is one. It is not a big deal, that is, getting it is probably fatal, but like so many other deadly bacteria out there, a healthy immune system usually thwarts them before they can gain a foothold. In those places where it thrives we usually see poor infrastructure, bad water and living conditions, and a generally distressing situation. There but for the grace of God …

Right now they are trying to scare us. It will work. Always does. It will dominate news for a while. If they are pointing us to it, they are pointing us away from other things, and that is where we should focus our concentrations.

We are going to be in Quito, Ecuador for a short stay before heading out to the Galapagos for twelve days. I guess you’d have to call it a bucket list, but I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as de-stereotyping. I have images of places in my mind, and then when I experience the places (and people) for real, have to re-adjust. I am re-learning the world.

We just spent four days with 17 delightful people from various places: Colombia, Toronto, San Francisco, Australia, Singapore, Detroit … we got to know them all. There were no whiners as we walked 27 miles, climbed perhaps 9,000 feet and descended 11,000 over four days. Along with us were three Peruvian guides, and unseen during the day maybe 18 porters running ahead with the tents and setting up and cooking. Six of us in the group were over sixty years of age. We were no slackers. On the second day we climbed 4,500 feet to Dead Woman Pass, and my wife was the second one to the top. I was not first, and no, we were not competing. She was in that zone where breathing and energy consumption are in harmony.

My stereotype of Machu Picchu was that it was relatively small, and in a high place that required walking through desolate country to get there. It is none of that. It is massive. It is in a tropical jungle, and though much of the walk is in treeless areas, enough of it is in areas varying from cloud forest to alpine tundra-like landscape. The long valleys are farmed, most often corn is growing along with potatoes. Orchids abound. In the earlier stretches there are some small villages, llamas, alpaca, dogs, cats, and plenty of Gatorade for sale along the way. The last two days cover mostly uninhabited national park, and Inca ruins abound.

So we did the hike, slept in a tent three nights, got up at 3:30 on day four and walked three miles through jungle and mist, and up a staircase so steep that we had to climb on all fours, and we finally reached the Sun Gate. We are perhaps 1,100 feet above Machu Picchu, and cannot see it as the valley is covered in clouds. After four days we are a tight group, and are waiting to see if it was worth it. We laugh and joke and take pictures of one another and decide how long we want to wait.

My contribution: Freddy, our guide had told us the previous day of Inca law and custom. Stealing was frowned upon, and if a child was caught, the mother was required to take the child to a mountain top and push him off an watch him fall to death. During a lull I said “I wish my Mom could be here. She would so enjoy pushing me off a mountain.”

The clouds lifted. There it is. It is lush green, and Machu Picchu mountain itself is lush green too. (“Machu Picchu”, or “Old Mountain,” is the name given it by Hiram Bingham in 1911. No one knows what the Incas called it.) It is laid out to form a condor, with two wings and a head. It is not small. It is massive. I am so full of awe that I, like the others, simply stare in silence. It is a moment of a lifetime, damned few like that. Damned few. It is indescribable. It is magnificent. It is a wonder of our world.

Of course the camera is not working that morning. Too much humidity the night before, as I left it sitting out inside the tent. The telephoto lens had a mind of its own. I had to use the iPad for the pictures below. But the image that morning, being in that group, as the fog lifted and we ended our vision quest … that is permanently etched.

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I’ve been kind of bored and boring here in Cusco, Peru. We’ve been mostly sedentary, building up some red blood cells for the Inca Trail, which starts tomorrow. We’ve walked and toured, but come 5:30 tomorrow morning it begins, a four-day 27-mile hike to Machu Picchu. I’m frankly not worried about it, as we’ve done harder and worse these past few years, but there is some serious up and down in the days ahead and that last day, the descent into Machu Picchu, is rigorous.

Here’s some photos of Cusco and its beautiful people.

There are two Catholic Churches in the town square. Only one stood until the late 1500’s when the Jesuits decided to build a new one, bigger and better than the existing one. As construction proceeded, the pope stepped in and ordered that the new church could not be bigger than the old one. Consequntly, Cuscoans have a Coke/Pepsi Democrat/Republican choice for Sunday worship.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and most of the people most of the time. That’s enough to run a country.

People who see through events like JFK 9/11 or the MH17 shoot down are simply more perceptive, have better problem solving skills, and are not scared to think the worst about our country, having survived the propaganda system with minds intact. There are a lot of us, as a percentage of the population, I am tempted to say five. The government is fully aware that you cannot fool all the people all the time, and so has a special ways of dealing with us. They kdon’t try to hide what they have done, but use two methods of quarantining us: ridicule, and false leads.

Ridicule is the “conspiracy theory” meme, which is absurd on its surface. Of course powerful people conspire! They do this because they don’t want the general public to know what they are up to. The five percent of us who easily see through it are a problem, and classifying us as somehow mentally unstable has been effective. By the virtue of the conspiracy nut meme, people who are incurious, easily fooled, challenged in the problem-solving department, and trusting of government and its media are set up to be our leaders, our thoughtful people. Yikes!

False leads are another way … The garden path. Yes, prominent people have stepped forward and said that 9/11 was a false flag attack, etc., and they are quick to provide us with new insight. Often the new insight leads to such theories as controlled demolition, mini-nukes, mini-neutron nukes, Zionism, Illuminati, Bilderbergers being in control of the planet. Often enough (and I am seeing a lot of this lately), there are attempts to rebrand and redeem the Third Reich. And often enough they just want to sow division, divide us, and mislead us. One prominent false leader is Richard Gage, who founded Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. He did this within months of Dr. Judy Wood suing NIST for science fraud. Gage will slam the door on anyone who mentions the name Dr. Wood. This indicates 1) Gage is an op, and 2) Dr. Wood is on to something.

My favorite government op is John Lear of the jet aircraft family, a seemingly nice and sensible man. I listened to him for a couple of hours last year some time, and he made a lot of good points, seemed to have inside knowledge, and at the very end said there are aliens living on the moon and that we are all transported twice in our lives to space craft for probing. Anyone care to be tin-hatted? That’s his shtick, his game, to poison the well.

There was a rumor floating around that I fell for maybe three or four years ago, that Rudy Giuliani supervised shipment of steel girders from the towers to China after 9/11 and before they could be examined. False lead. there were not enough steel girders left to ship, and that was the purpose of the rumor, to obscure that fact. Then there was the story put up by Norman Minetta, Transportation Secretary that day, that a young soldier kept approaching Dick Cheney asking him of orders still stood as the plane approached DC. Cheney said “have you heard me say different?” Again, false lead, deliberately planted, as there were no planes approaching DC. That was the purpose of the Minetta lie, to plant the idea that a plane was on the way, the one that laughably got “Let’s rolled!” in Pennsylvania.

It’s hard to be a skeptic, to be ridiculed. I don’t like it, of course. But it is even harder, once inside the palace, to know what is a mirror and what is a doorway. Scattered about this post are photos of some of the more prominent government ops, in all their glory. They are a traitorous lot, dishonest and paid to deceive.