One has to be very careful with information such as this … a former Ukrainian soldier has taken refuge in Russia and claims that a Ukrainian fighter jet shot down the Malaysian Airlines aircraft on July 17, killing all 298 on board. While Voltaire reporters are doing their best to vet the soldier and cross-reference and verify his statements, it should be noted that Western intelligence agencies are experts in the disinformation game, and he could be a plant who will later be discredited by Western sources. That’s an old intelligence/propaganda game.
There were actually two Malaysian jets lost last year, and the first, Flight 370, disappeared over the Pacific on March 8th of this year. News media reports that it simply vanished, that technology did not exist to track it to its final destination did not exist, are simply not believable. A French former airline director, Marc Dugain, has claimed that the US military may have shot down that airliner and covered it up. The aircraft was last seen in the vicinity of Diego Garcia, a US/British base in the Indian Ocean that is equipped with very sophisticated weaponry and tracking equipment.
Veracity: “Not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.” (Locke)
U.S. variation: If something is on TV and called “news” it is true. No proof need be offered.
Bertrand Russell:
“[Locke’s] definition is admirable in regard to all those matters as to which proof may reasonably be demanded. But since proofs need premise, it is impossible to prove anything unless some things are accepted without proof. We must therefore ask ourselves: What sort of thing is it reasonable to believe without proof?
I should reply: The facts of sense experience and the principles of mathematics and logic – including the inductive logic employed in science. These are things which we can hardly bring ourselves to doubt, and as to which there is a large measure of agreement among mankind.
But in matters as to which men disagree, or as to which our own convictions are wavering, we should look for proofs, or, if proofs cannot be found, we should be content to confess ignorance.” (The Listener, 1947)
The major event of our time for most Americans, 9/11, is surrounded by so-called evidence with little or no science behind it.
Jet aircraft cannot behave in that manner, cannot fly at 500+ mph in dense atmosphere;
The odds of 19 supposed hijackers all having success with minimal tools at their disposal are phenomenal …
… and then to fly the aircraft (which cannot fly at that speed anyway) unerringly to their targets … unlikely.
Large jet aircraft cannot fly through small holes without meeting resistance and leaving debris.
Light posts would not have been severed by aircraft wings – quite the opposite, the wings would have been severed by a denser metal.
Cell phone calls from aircraft were impossible then, as now.
The notion that an aircraft sunk in an abandoned mine and that no effort was made to recover it is … indescribably ludicrous.
That a group of people ascertained the plans of supposed hijackers and then voluntarily committed suicide to save others … Disneyesque, vain, patronizing and stupid.
That national defense responders all at once screwed up is so … highly unlikely …
… that fighter aircraft needed for national defense conveniently were out of position – highly coincidental.
The large number of military drills going on, easily ‘flipped live” to avail plotters of vast government resources, was too coincidental to be taken without serious skepticism.
The presence of an unreported large hurricane off the shore of Long Island that day … hmmmm.
These are the facts of sense experience, but also principles of mathematics and logic. Those of us who look at the events of that day with high skepticism are the ones who employ the skills of reason and logic, and are also the ones not so susceptible to TV truth. We are the sane ones. The rest of you … you seem to have some screws loose.
I do not understand the power in place that causes ordinarily sensible people to believe such monstrous lies. It’s really weird that all of the above, easily seen to be false, even ludicrous, are accepted without proof.
“I have come to realize that men are not born to be free. Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men.” (Napoleon Bonaparte)
As a young man of 36 in 1986 (April 1st) I had broken free of the business world, and was self-employed. I was worried about making a living, of course, but slowly over time began to notice that I had time to do things I wanted to do rather than dancing like a monkey for some organ grinder. I did not know it, but that freedom made me unemployable, that is, no boss would ever again subdue my thoughts or demand all my time save those two precious weeks a year I was allowed before.
The question is, then: What is our natural state? In bondage? Or as free human beings? If Napoleon above is right, it is both – that most of us are born to be soldiers and waitresses, while a few rise above it all.
If that is the case, I must then sound like an arrogant jerk. Maybe I am.
Lately I’ve been listening to podcasts while I do other stuff, as always, but the topic has been education. Driving to and from Montana last week we passed countless truck drivers, and I tried to look at them, to see the eyes, to see what a man’s face looks like as he is engaged in the most boring possible activity. Of course, the face tells me nothing. But I had to think that our eduction system, with our countless hours of boredom am mindless repetition and regurgitation, prepares them well for that occupation – or to be soldiers, clerks, drivers, insurance agents, sales people, teachers … but not free human beings.
And I wonder about the chicken and the egg – does our education system produce zombies, or merely nurture them?
There is a new book out, Keeping the Wild, a compilation of essays and articles edited by George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist, and Tom Butler. I have not read it but will, and wanted to promote it here as it was recommended to me by a rock thrower over the weekend.
I used to be a volunteer for Montana Wilderness Association. This was the period from perhaps 1992 to 2000 or so – I am not clear. I sat through endless meetings, but it was a learning process more than a time when I was doing effective work. It was like being dropped in the middle of the Keebler Elf cookie factory, a buzz of activity and left to me to figure out who’s doing what and who is in charge. I joined because I like the product.
I do remember a trip to Great Falls in the early 1990’s with the Eastern Montana organizer, Tammy, to meet with people from the Pew Charitable Trusts and try to get some financial support. I was determined at that time to try to understand Max Baucus, and so took with me a yellow legal pad so that I could jot down thoughts as we traveled. I remember that. That was just a beginning, of course, and a long period of self-education followed, still going on. But I did ask a question.
In the aftermath, and memories are not clear, I do know that we were turned down by Pew, and that Tammy was disappointed. A young fellow from back east, John Adams, the successor organizer for the Eastern office, would later tell me that he was of the impression Pew was trying to take over the program for MWA, and offered grants only if the organization conformed to its objectives, abandoning its own.
At that time, I recall MWA having three paid staff in Helena, Bob Decker, Executive Director, John Gatchell, Conservation Director, and Susan, the administrative assistant. There were also paid field offices in Great Falls, Billings, and a couple of other places. It had a host of volunteers*, the old guard, the men and women who formed the organization and fought and won many of the wilderness areas that Montana still enjoys. These men, like Joe Gutkowski, Don Mazola, and two I never met, the Baldwins, and a host of others whose faces I know but names I’ve lost, formed a backbone of directed energy that accomplished goals over a long-term. I do hope that in writing this people come along and refresh my memory, as too much time has passed since my involvement. I would like that list of names, as I could not find it at the MWA website.
An important feature of MWA was poverty. Bob Decker, an engineer by trade, along with Gatchell and Susan, made very little money despite having good skills and talents. That’s a hard way to live, but is part of the deal in the environmental movement ethos – there isn’t a lot of money to be had. Poverty draws out the dedicated souls who are more concerned about mission than comfort. But that’s easy to say of other people. I always wanted to make enough money to be comfortable. So did they. So do we all.
Decker left. Susan probably retired. Gatchell is still there. Pew moved in. Pew won. Here’s a list of current staff of MWA:
Bryan Sybert, Executive Director
Carl Deitchman, Finance Director
Laura Parr, Business Manager
Amanda Hagertym, Administrative Assistant
Sarah Shepard, CFRE, Development Director
Kassia Randzio, Development Coordinator
Molly Severtson, Donor Relations Manager
Denny Lester, Communications Coordinator
Gabriel Furshong, State Program Director
Mark Good, Central Montana Field Director;
Casey Perkins, Rocky Mountain Front Field Director
Zack Porter, NEXGen Program Director
Amy Robinson, Northwest Montana Wilderness Field Director
Cameron Sapp, Eastern Montana Field Representative
John Todd, Southwest Montana Field Director
John Gatchell, Conservation Director
Shannon Freix, CDT Montana Program Director
Meg Killen, CDT Montana Field Crew Leader
Sonny Mazzulo, CDT Montana Field Coordinator
Cedron Jones, GIS Mapping Specialist
Good heavens! That’s not a dedicated group of volunteers – these are mostly degrees and salaries and the hubris that goes with that. Quite a few are dedicated to “development,” or keeping the engine going that pays the salaries. It’s become a self-feeding machine that needs a continual source of new food to keep going.
Wilderness has always been a tough fight, but the fighters left MWA as the Pew children moved in. The culture changed. These folks, one in particular, refer to the old guard as “rock throwers.” The new guard are well paid I assume, and comfortable with development of donors instead of wilderness. These are our “collaborators.” They throw rocks at outfits like Alliance for a Wild Rockies, the men and women who fight the fights that MWA used to help out with.
I once referred in a blog comment to a similar experience that Trout Unlimited experienced, an influx of foundation money, as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” These people talk like wilderness advocates, and they all attach their canoeing and hiking affectations to their resumes. Perhaps they’ve noticed, then, as I have, that the back country is virtually empty these days, as are parking lots at trail heads. That was our constituency, wilderness users. Without them, it will soon be rolled over by ATV’s and snowmobiles and loggers, the people whom MWA collaborates with.
MWA website is littered with pictures of cherished areas. Gone are any references to the founders, any history. If anyone criticizes them for selling out, as they surely have, they are likely to get that piercing and deeply disturbing scream that Donald Sutherland did so well in the 1978 movie about moving automatons into the bodies of real people.
These people, the current staff of MWA, and there are two that were there when I was there, will never know the thrill of a victory. They don’t try to win anything. But they also don’t know the other part of being alive, as essential as an occasional victory, the pain of defeat. Since they don’t try to win, by definition, they don’t know what it is to lose. So life is good for them.
It’s always been easy to call losing something else. But that’s what they do for living.
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*Do not confuse “volunteers” with “membership.” There were perhaps thirty hard-core volunteers even as MWA listed thousands of members. The requirement for members was a $35 annual contribution, and it had a four-fold effect, that is, if you sent them that, they would assume you had a spouse and two children, and add four people to their rolls. I assume that chicanery goes on throughout the not-for-profit world, as there’s very little active volunteer activity in this country outside churches.
This is a most revealing conversation from two days ago at 4&20:
Commenter: Count me among the many who can’t process the thought that elites were behind 9/11.
Me: Totally understandable thought. I do hope, however, that it represents the beginning, rather than the end, of your search for truth.
Commenter: Actually, I’m not much of a seeker. Most of the time I’m willing to settle for appearances. They’re damning enough.
Me: Until scrutinized.
Imagine laying in bed at night and hearing noises in the house. Perhaps the hardest thing we all have to do in growing up is to summon the courage to go find out what is going on. It requires every ounce of steel we have accumulated to that point. (We could just grab a gun, a substitute for courage.)
Here’s another exchange, from this blog:
Commenter: I’m looking for a cause to which I can become a lackey and sycophant. I’m considering the conspiracy theory world. The problems I have with it are:
)there are multiple threads to follow. It would seem things would begin to converge after a while.
)there are as many holes in the proposed alternatives than in the official line.
)the personnel in the genre often have quirks that overshadow the scholarship
Me: As to your first point, it is true, you do have to use your brain.
As to your second point, utterly false. You’ve obviously never looked at any evidence.
As to your third point, such observations are generally made by people who have not used their brains or looked at the evidence.
You can solve this crime … millions of other have. It was essentially solved back in the 60’s. What scares you?
Commenter: Comes the hour, comes the man. Why don’t the millions rise up, empower some leaders, and prosecute the wrongdoers? Probably because there is less there than you think.
Me: Darting, dodging, weaving, ducking, refusing to look at the evidence. You’re scared of what you might find, I suppose. That’s why they got away with it. People are just like you. People don’t want to believe our country is just like every other country, run by thugs. America is exceptional, we are told. Look into this crime … and your eyes will be opened. That’s rare. Few have the balls to do that. Few transcend the barrier of fear.
That’s really all that is going on. People are afraid of facing their darkest fears. I am like everyone else except that, by chance, perhaps being blind and naive, I got up and stumbled around the house and came face to face with reality.
It made a difference. It changed me.
The intruder is American exceptionalism … that is, we need to come to grips with what is not there. We are just like every other country on earth, not different or better. Just suffering deeper delusion.
During our travels I am reading Joseph McBride’s self-published Into the Nightmare, an account of his lifetime pursuit of truth surrounding the murder of John F. Kennedy. We have some things in common – Catholic education, youthful naïveté, and yet an inability to accept the contradictions in our face even back in the 1960’s. But at this point I am merely looking to see if anything new has been uncovered. McBride has interviewed people heretofore not located or ignored, and has some surprising findings.
In addition, McBride has made me aware of yet another miracle.
Miracles are not unusual during important events. On 9/11 laws of physics were suspended, allowing aluminum aircraft to disappear unhindered into steel buildings. And of course we know that on 11/22/63 laws of motion regarding behavior of bullets were put on hold. Also on that day a German Mauser 7.65 rifle magically transformed into a 6.5 Mannlicher Carcano, a water-into-wine event often overlooked in our worship of official truth.
McBride has made me aware of yet another miracle back in 1963. His research focuses on the murder of officer JD Tippit. It is evident that event is a Rosetta Stone of sorts. Tippit, by indications and appearances, was involved in a manhunt, but not the official one. Rather, he was part of a team that was to hunt down and kill Lee Harvey Oswald. This was in motion even before the police knew to look for him, as Oswald (officially) did not come to police attention until he was (wrongly) suspected to be the man who murdered the “poor dumb cop*,” Tippit.
The plan was to murder the president, have a manhunt, murder Oswald, have closure. But Oswald escaped the manhunt and made his way to a hastily arranged meeting at a movie theater, only then to be swarmed by police (who apparently were tipped off about the meeting). For reasons I do not understand, he was not murdered at the theater. (A minor miracle, I suppose, Oswald appears in transformed state, perhaps an apparition: Two Oswald’s were seen leaving the theater that day, one through the front door, one out the alley exit. Maybe that has something to do with it. Was Oswald meeting with his doppelgänger?)
But another miracle was in the works, and we would all witness it. It is this: Lee Harvey Oswald managed to survive for two more days while in custody of the Dallas Police (!) before being murdered in an obviously prearranged encounter with Jack Ruby.
Praised be Allah. Hal’lúkah. The Lord be with us, watch over all of us, forgive us our sins. Our God operates in mysterious ways.
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*According to one eyewitness to the shooting, those words were uttered by the shooter as he left the scene.
___________________ PS: Joseph McBride is far more thorough than me, and meticulous too. My own impressions recorded above are not subject to such scrutiny as his by his peers, and so have a ring of certainty about them that is unwarranted. In truth, I am only certain that the official version of the incident is utterly without merit. Here’s McBride, page 457:
The best that we can come up with at this point late point is eliminating certain suspects and theories, and evaluating various other theories about how the murder might have taken place. Though that will stop short of certainty, it allows us a somewhat clearer picture of the Tippit murder, a key event that has remained obscure for too long. The list of problems preventing a solution is lengthy: failure to collect sufficient evidence at the scene; lost evidence; planted evidence and perhaps planted “witnesses”; failure to interview actual witnesses; intimidation and even murder of witnesses; systematic suppression of information by the police and the U.S. government; and perhaps the most offensive, a seeming official indifference to the importance of this aspect of the [JFK] case and the slain officer himself.
I spent three hours last Saturday at a meeting run by local labor to promote a single payer health system in Colorado. The speaker, brought in from Detroit, was smart, interesting and on top of his game. He understood concepts like “rent seeking'” quite rare. There were about thirty people in the audience. In this brain-dead country, that’s a lot.
In Q&A I mentioned how in Montana we were at the mercy of the Public Relations industry, always behind the eight ball, as they killed us with short and pithy slogans like “death panels” and “government run” and “tax increases,” all false but so damned effective. I suggested that we study this, that we needed some slogans of our own. The speaker agreed, said they knew this.
Here’s one they came up with, a poster on the wall:
Medicare Yes.
Insurance companies No.”
That’s about as bland as they could have made it*. Even substituting the word “cartel” for companies would help, but these people don’t seem to have much in the way of creative juices. They are bound to lose.
Here’s the kicker. The meeting lasted three hours, I met some folks, 29 to be precise. For all of our sitting and listening, they did not ask anything of us. No outreach, community contact, even little things like letters and phone calls. We just listened and went home.
Yeah. That’ll work. Way to go, labor.
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*The speaker said that there is a poster in the labor temple in Detroit that says “The bosses get two parties. Why can’t we have one?” That might be more effective if not kept in the basement. I suspect they are fearful of offending Democrats.
All U.S. citizens, vigilant and regular, need to take some time now with the release of the 6,000 page Torture Report to ignore that report and review the following:
Limited hangout: A limited hangout, or partial hangout, is a public relations or propaganda technique that involves the release of previously hidden information in order to prevent a greater exposure of more important details.
If I understand the report correctly, and I am not going to waste my time reviewing the details (which are well-known around the world), the abuses of the Bush era are exposed in this report, and an executive order by Obama ended the practice.
Bullshit. The purpose of the report then would not be to expose wrongdoing (or punish anyone), but rather to provide a sense of closure. In effect they are saying that the era of torture is ended.
There’s enough there for all of us, so I won’t offer that these techniques work on some of us better than others. #4, for example, translates into “I read only sources I trust.” #5 is about the power of suggestion, or implanting ideas in our minds via back door channels.
We’re all manipulated by media in one form or another. It is when we reach a point of hubris (the state of being of the typical American journalist) that we are most vulnerable.
The author of the piece, David Wong, likely feels that he’s above the battle because he is able to spot these manipulations. He’s not. He’s been taken down via #5, though he’d be the last to know that. He should have listed the following:
As I write there is a massive fire near downtown Los Angeles slowly being contained by fire fighters.
Looking at images, it appears that the laws of physics regarding structural steel, temporarily suspended on September 10, 2001, have been reinstated. The beams that supported the structure, despite intense heat, have not melted, twisted, contorted or collapsed. Other laws that were suspended back then, such as behavior of aircraft at low altitude and Newton’s Third Law (“for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”), might still be suspended by action of the state. I do not know. That’s above our pay grade.
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Today, December 8, is the 34th anniversary of the death of John Lennon. That hit me hard. I’ll never forget sitting in our family room that night with my then-wife and mother-in-law as Howard Cosell said those words that cut like a knife … “dead … on … arrival.” I broke down in tears. My mother-in-law, ever observant of pop culture, was unsure why death of a mere musician would move me so.
Many questions still linger about the direction and source of the bullets that killed him, and also why that creepy kid Chapman was sitting there reading that book while it went down. As with the laws of physics, basic laws of investigatory diligence are suspended by fiat in certain instances, this but one of many.
