Golden apples

A wonderful gal, married to my cousin, sent me the above YouTube. She’s a reader and ponderer and has traveled the waters of doubt and deceit, as have I, so I took time to watch it. (There’s a lot of disinformation and deliberate deceit in the YouTube world, just like every other nook of American media. Nothing is untended in our garden of lies.)

The first words to come to my mind after watching it were “golden apple.” Let me explain. Dan Rather was a mostly useless apparatchik in American news, but in 2004, late in his career and perhaps believing his own press clippings, he got brave. Presented with the ” “Killian documents”, he went forward with a report detailing George. W. Bush’s AWOL status during his military service in the National Guard.

Not too long after airing, the Killian documents were revealed by a blogger to have been typed on an instrument that was not available in 1972. They were forgeries.

The entire Rather/Killian episode was an intelligence covert op, and it ended Rather’s career. More importantly, the Killian documents were a golden apple, or planted evidence. The exposure was well-planned, the blogger* either manipulated or actually in on it. The overall effect: All reporters knew from that day forward never to mess with Bush’s service records.

There’s a lot of that in our news, reports from supposedly “independent” sources that make stories seem credible. The key to its effectiveness is that we have to stumble on such evidence by our own efforts. It cannot be handed to us. This makes skepticism about regular news a minefield. Even as we know the mainstream is lying to us, intelligence agencies also go to great lengths to give us false leads and evidence, just to keep us confused.

The “Pentagon Papers” are, in my view, a golden apple. That’s another story. To a far higher level of deceit, Edward Snowden is performing the golden apple function. He appears to be rogue and speaking out of school. He is telling secrets and yet … not telling us anything new, and telling us exactly nothing about the most important events of our times. What is his function? As with the Pentagon Papers, it is the “limited hangout,” telling small truths as a way to conceal large ones. He keeps our eyes off the ball.

I first encountered the term “golden apple” via Jim Garrison, the district attorney in New Orleans who investigated the JFK assassination. As I look back on his work, I realize what a smart man he was.** His image should be on our postage stamps and dollar bills. He was an honest man! He took on the entire intelligence establishment and the U.S. media to boot. He wondered toward the end of his life if it had all been worth it. Would be not have been better off just letting that dog sleep? He was so abused during his life, and yet he did get one small reward – in the movie of 23 years ago, JFK, Oliver Stone cast him in the role of Earl Warren.

Anyway, back to the video: I know that subliminal suggestion is part of advertising. We’ve all heard that they used to splice movie pre-rolls with the words “Drink Coke.” How effective was (or is) it? I don’t know. That’s proprietary information, buried deep in the bowels of ad agencies. I do know this: Advertisers spend billions of dollars making their products. They do it because advertising works. Really well. The beating heart of every ad agency is the behavioral psychology team. They craft the message, and the rest of the agency is on board to embed that message in those three things they have found effective in selling products: Humor, sex, and fear.

So was our government sending us a subliminal message all those years when TV stations used to sign off playing the national anthem off every night? Here it is as revealed by this YouTube:

TRUST THE US GOVERNMENT
GOD IS REAL GOD IS WATCHING
BELIEVE IN GOVERNMENT GOD
REBELLION WILL NOT BE TOLERATED
OBEY CONSUME OBEY CONSUME

I suppose so. It’s possible. It could also be planted evidence designed to make people who fall for it look stupid when we find out it was a hoax. That would make it a Killian scam.

It wasn’t but a few hours after the CIA was created, put together of remnants of the American OSS and Nazi SS, that the agency went rogue. By the time Bill Casey came on board in 1981, they had managed to infiltrate American media, placing moles and disinformation agents at every critical junction. At his first staff meeting after he took over, Casey was quoted as saying

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”

Mission accomplished, I suppose. But is the video above real, or a golden apple? I don’t know. If real, it is clumsy. They are better at persuasion than that. Way better.
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*Having a lowly blogger do the big reveal was classic CIA sting. It adds credibility.
** RFK, as I understand, sent a private courier to Garrison during the investigation saying that he was watching closely but could not speak publicly, and would reopen the JFK investigation after he became president. Garrison thought that was foolish, that Bobby needed to go loud, as keeping secrets endangered his life. He said that once you are public with information, they can no longer kill you to silence you. (They might kill you anyway just as a STFU example, but what are you gonna do?) Bobby did not listen. However, and this is what I call the Kennedy Curse, that whole family has to shut up about everything, as they all know that if they say anything in public they might run into a large pond or a tree or their small aircraft might disappear into the ocean. So I look at RFK’s 11 children all doing good work and staying silent, and admire them deeply.

Stupid pretty faces

I was half-heartedly watching a TV drama called Ray Donovan the other night. It is one of those productions for pay channels that draws rave reviews, most likely because it has swearing and nudity and is not interspersed with mind-numbing and psychologically subversive advertising. Consequently it seems more coherent than regular TV fare. The acting and casting are more skilled. One of the main characters is Mickey Donovan, played by Jon Voight, otherwise known as Angelina Jolie’s dad. I’ve not been able to locate him in the casting available on websites, but Mickey has a certifiably crazy friend, with erratic mannerisms and a goofy unshaven appearance. (I am guessing here that this is “Bunchy Donovan”, a family member who suffers from depression and addiction. I have not paid enough attention to be sure.)

As I was watching the other night, I noticed that Bunchy was talking about 9/11, and realized that I was witnessing some of the only permitted discussion of that event on television. And of course, the show’s writers and producers had it come from the mouth of a crazy person. But why?

This naturally leads to discussion of how much of our thought control regime is intentional, how much accidental, how much self-induced, and how much merely instinctive. In this particular episode, there was no reason to discuss the 9/11 event in terms of plot. The character was merely riffing. The writers could have been trying to demonstrate the character’s instability, and so chose skepticism about 9/11 as evidence. Or, in a more sinister manner, the show’s writers could have been trying to warn us that only crazy people doubt the official truth of 9/11.

If the latter, the show’s writers certainly have no skin in the game. They were hired because of their skill at their craft, and it’s highly unlikely that natural selection would yield people who are botkih skilled writers and who want to warn the U.S. public not to doubt its government. So I suspect that the lines were interjected in the drama from outside sources.

Who? From where? I have no clue. This I know, however: There are only a half-dozen companies that own all of our media, and there is no variety among them. They all spout the same lies as news, they all use stupid pretty faces on the screen to seriously tell us what serious events are happening in the world. Right now, for instance, all American media outlets, news and entertainment, are telling us that the Russians have invaded Ukraine and the Vladimir Putin is an evil man. That appears to be a lie. Sources closer to the action over there say otherwise, that there’s no evidence of any such troop presence of invasion, and Putin is highly regarded all over the planet outside our bubble.

Whether true or false, in a free media environment, there would be perhaps one skeptical voice saying “Wait, where’s the evidence?” There is not. All speak with one voice.

That speaks of heavy-handed control. I am not in the least surprised. Television is a powerful tool in the hands of the state, as it lulls viewers into a state of somnambulism and high suggestibility. No way does that tool escape control, no way are Americans allowed to see anything but approved opinions via that medium.

Those of us who have seen the evidence around 9/11, and I am boldly speaking for all of us skeptical ones, are deeply troubled by the nature of the event. Yes, there were real deaths and real explosions, and buildings really did evaporate before our eyes. But most of it was made-for-TV. There were no planes, but by the time we were told that one such phantom plane had hit the Pentagon, the idea was so firmly planted in our minds that we did not even have to see it. We never have seen it. We are also told that the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania (the “Let’s Roll” fable) went into an abandoned coal mine, and sunk into the ground leaving behind no airplane parts. That’s utterly absurd, and yet that is the power of suggestion coupled with the hypnotic effect of TV. People don’t doubt it.

They would doubt it, easily so, if one credible doubting voice were ever allowed to speak on TV. But there are gates and walls around it. Any who say anything contrary to official truth are disciplined, or, as Charley Sheen learned, out of work.

Andrea Mitchell knew right on that day that Osama was the perp. She's really good.
Andrea Mitchell knew right on that day that Osama was the perp. She’s really good.
What is so troubling is threefold, one that it speaks of immense power of mind control to get away with such ludicrous fables as the official 9/11 one; and two, that there were many people involved in planning the event beforehand. Three is most upsetting – that they know our minds so well. They know how to do mass suggestion, and make it stick. I am not speaking of the pretty stupid people who read their scripts before TV cameras, as they are most likely clueless. I am talking about corporate executives, well-connected reporters like Andrea Mitchell (wife of Alan Greenspan), and government, military and intelligence officials at all levels.

After an event of that magnitude follows a cover-up, and fear is endemic among those who know the event was a lie. These are quite a different group than those who had foreknowledge. These are frightened people who know to shut up. They are guilty of nothing more than accessory after-the-fact, and with good reason. They need jobs, and also like being alive.

The cover-up of the murder of JFK has been going on now for fifty years. There are still no media voices who doubt official truth. There’s never been a credible official investigation. Fear is so inculcated in our media that even if there were smart people incidentally having pretty faces giving us our news, they would know to shut up. This is a powerful regime of thought control, and escape is virtually impossible. Occasionally we see a movie like Wag the Dog or Invasion do the Body Snatchers that attempt to smuggle some truth our way, but on television, there is none of that. Ever. Occasionally, and this may never be seen again, a bold effort is made to give us the truth directly, as did Oliver Stone with his movie JFK. That was 23 years ago, and there’s been nothing like it since. Hollywood is completely submerged now, and is even an official outlet for lies and fables, as the award-winning and god-awful movie Argo demonstrates. (You get no links from me on that piece of crap.)

So when I see a minor and certifiably crazy character on a made-for-TV drama with high production values and budget doubting official truth, I know it is no accident. We are being sent a subliminal message: Only crazy people doubt our government. It’s just reinforcement. If the character were a normal person of intelligence and possessing some pattern recognition and problem solving skills, he would not be given those lines.

Uselessly overadvantaged

We have also noted how power structures successively dominate over human affairs had for aeons successfully imposed a “specialization” upon the intellectually bright and physically talented members of society as a reliable means of keeping them academically and professionally divided – ergo, “conquered,” powerless. The separate individuals’ special, expert glimpses of the separate, invisible reality increments became so infinitesimally fractionated and narrow that they gave no hint of the significant part their work played in the omni-integrating evolutionary front of total knowledge and it’s power-structure exploitability in contradistinction to its omni-advantaging potentials. Thus the few between become uselessly overadvantaged instead of the many becoming regeneratively ever more universally advantaged.
(Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, p162)

My first reaction on reading the above was that Fuller did not need to write like that. The wording is dense and arcane, difficult to parse. The whole of the book Critical Path is difficult reading, and much of it goes right by me in a comfortable way – I am happy not to need to know what he is writing about.

But this passage stuck with me because it answers a question I have long wondered about – how our society manages to marginalize its best and brightest, leading them to useless careers doing specialized work that has no real purpose other than to cordon them off and render them into eunuchs.

I just completed a very complicated tax return for a client. I am one of those “gifted” souls who can do that sort of thing (I pause here: I am in a profession littered with people of remarkable talent in this field. I have sat in rooms with them and died a slow death of tedium and boredom. There seems to be no personality in these rooms, no humor or self-deprecation, no awareness that most of what we do just doesn’t matter.) As a young man with children I needed to make a living, and so became an accountant and then studied for the CPA exam, passing it on my first attempt. In a class of perhaps 100 or so candidates, I was the only one to do so.

Special, eh? At one point when I had an office in Billings, MT, I looked at a bank of six files and realized that three of them were devoted to history, current events, my real passion. I was not advancing in the professions as I was supposed to. I was distracted by real life.

Those rooms full of accountants, those seminars I sit through, are a waste of human energy. We do nothing more important than to protect wealthy people from overpaying their taxes. Slowly over time the IRS as roped us in and brought us around to work for it and against our client, by law. But even so, one step above all of that is pointlessness. So what? If my client for whom I just gave birth to the tax return ends up paying a thousand more than he should have, I have failed, he’ll never know it, and life goes on unaffected in total by my laborious pursuit.

As professions go, there are more demanding ones than accounting and taxation. Astrophysics is demanding, as is music, metallurgy, civil engineering, medicine. Each if these have yielded tremendous benefits to is, made our lives better and easier. I have no illusions about that.

Here’s another example of specialization: Dow, back in the sixties, bragged about “better living through chemistry.” Dow manufactured napalm, a mixture of gasoline and gels that burns human flesh. In its early versions, people exposed to napalm could jump in water and escape some of its effects, even survive. The Dow Boys fixed that however, and napalm advanced in its usefulness because it still burned humans up even when immersed in water.

Not too far from us here in Morrison is a Lockheed plant. They are an important part of Denver’s economy, with many high-paid specialists busy making weapons. That’s common throughout our country. The whole of Southern California and Silicon Valley, MIT, major Texas communities are nothing more than Pentagon dependencies. These are our best and brightest. We live in a rich country that has a crappy public education system, useless news and information, rotting infrastructure, highly inefficient transportation, a crappy medical delivery system, a crappy diet, mindless entertainment and a deeply indoctrinated citizenship.

And our best people, smartest and most useful, are specialized and know nothing of any useful pursuit to solve these, our most vexing problems. They are busy devising new ways to murder people.

That’s specialization. Fuller said it very well – he must have, as his passage caught my eye, made me think. Well done.

So deep in the stupid

I’ll be blunt here. The video above, which went viral over the 9/11 pornography festival, makes me wanna puke. In it American soldiers, who in reality knock off democratic governments and bomb, murder and maim innocent civilians, are portrayed as heroes. Ronald Reagan, a good actor and very stupid man, narrates.

Sit through it if you can. The German propaganda ministry used to put out films like this, and they too were very, very good at it. They knew how to rally the troops.

Then there was this, a comment from a friend’s Facebook post under this video, since taken down:

Incredibly Powerful. 911 is tomorrow. I have heard from a report from American intelligence that an imminent attack is coming. Pray to be rescued. Pray to be saved. Please pray that they can’t and won’t succeed.”

It is just one frightened and stupid person. But it gave me pause to know that so many millions of Americans, deep in the stupid, are under psychological control by use of such devices as this Nazi-like patriotic film and that goddamned intellectually debilitating fear this poor gal is expressing.

It makes me want to lose hope, but then I remember that it only takes a few. We certainly don’t have critical mass at this time, but there are many incredulous, skeptical and thoughtful people out there. Many read this blog. Not you Swede. Sit back down. I wasn’t talking about you.

Anyway, whew! Fricking 9/11 is over for another year, we’re done bemoaning our victimhood and pretending our soldiers are brave and smart. As you were folks. Back on your heads. Break’s over.

It’s a very big war going on now …

The US military operation in Fallujah, largely justified on the claim that Zarqawi’s militant forces had occupied the city, used white phosphorous, cluster bombs, and indiscriminate air strikes to pulverise 36,000 of Fallujah’s 50,000 homes, killing nearly a thousand civilians, terrorising 300,000 inhabitants to flee, and culminating in a disproportionate increase in birth defects, cancer and infant mortality due to the devastating environmental consequences of the war.

To this day, Fallujah has suffered from being largely cut-off from wider Iraq, its infrastructure largely unworkable with water and sewage systems still in disrepair, and its citizens subject to sectarian discrimination and persecution by Iraqi government backed Shi’a militia and police. “Thousands of bereaved and homeless Falluja families have a new reason to hate the US and its allies,” observed The Guardian in 2005. Thus, did the US occupation plant the seeds from which Zarqawi’s legacy would coalesce into the Frankenstein monster that calls itself “the Islamic State.”
(Nafeez Ahmed, How the West Created the Islamic State … With a Little Help From our Friends)

Missing from photo: Candy for the children
Missing from photo: Candy for the children
The link above (thanks to sk) is a good reference and will be quite shocking to neophytes to think that Obama speeches contain anything resembling truth, or even a scintilla of useful information.

Here’s a shorter article from Thierry Meyssan, Extension of the Gas War to the Levant, where the author performs useful shorthand to aid our understand of the dynamics of the region. Rather than refer to the fictional country of “Qatar,” he uses its brand name, “Exxon.” Similarly, Saudi Arabia is called “Aramco.”

I have been wanting to write about Fallujah for months, but have not gotten around to it. That city endured some of the worst war crimes of the new century. The sin: Contempt of the US military. When attacked in early 2004, they successfully resisted. Thereafter the U.S. pulled out all the stops, breaking out illegal weaponry, shutting down hospitals, cordoning off the city so that all the young men therein could be isolated and slaughtered. If you take time to read American sources on this battle, here’s a reader’s key: When they refer to “extremists,” they are talking about Iraqi citizens. Not Americans. Apparently the US military/intelligence complex does not have any of its own in its employe, least of all those officers who ordered use of illegal weapons and tactics. Under those quaint Geneva conventions, those are war crimes.

Anyway, this post is a ramble. I’ve got better things to do today than to lay out bait so Swede can glance at the title and jump down to the comments. Make of it what you will. One objective, which will not be achieved unless the reader follows links, is to grasp the size of the Western assault on the Middle East, spanning wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and now back to Iraq. The conflict in Ukraine merely serves to sideline the Russians, who managed to thwart a U.S. bombing assault on Syria after last year’s false flag chemical attack. The policy is large, and barbaric: To destroy the region as it is and restructure it as a tribal region dominated by American and European bases. All of the elements of deceit are there, including the arming and backing of the region’s terrorists to give Western forces cause to attack those terrorists, classic agents provocateur, controlled opposition.

It’s complicated. But do not be deterred by that. Read, research, keep at it, and a better understanding will take hold not just of current activities in that part of the world, but of the history of the world, 1914 forward. I do not sit here with my corduroy jacket with arm patches – I struggle with all of this too. Our biggest disadvantage is lack of good information and honest reporting, followed closely with lack of understanding of long-term plans for the region by the imperialist powers.

Enjoy!

September 11: A day to remember

September 11 should not pass without remembrance of honorable people who died in an act of disgraceful cowardice. A building symbolic of democratic government had its dome blown to bits. A respected president died of (an apparent) suicide in the face of execution by thugs. Then followed concentration camps and inquisitions, and a fascist government installed – one of the minor criminals of the 20th century, Augusto Pinochet, came to power.

There have been many others, much more important criminals, such as Churchill, Stalin, el-BJ!, Henry Kissinger and Nixon, George H.W. Bush, his son, and of course, Cheney. Poroshenko is getting rave reviews but is a minor player, like Pinochet a mere puppet on the CIA string. Barack Obama: I don’t know if he has a criminal mind or just reads his lines and enjoys all the perks of being president. He has stood idly by, however, and so has a place reserved in the annals of war criminals, men who should face civilized justice followed by “up the long ladder and down the short rope*”

September 11, 1973 was the day the democratically elected government of Chile was overthrown in an US backed coup d’etat. It is a dark day in history. May we never forget Pinochet or the thousands of victims left in his wake. May we 41 years later vow that it never happens again.

Oh wait. The current puppet just announced he’s going to topple the democratically elected government of Syria. It’s 9/11! It’s on! Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, is a brave man, I hope. Our thugs, given a chance, will murder him in cold blood as they did Allende, as they did Qaddafi (to Hillary’s delight). It is sad and distressing that men of low caliber such as Obama are held in high esteem while men of real value go down.

But for every American crime, every aggressive war, new leaders rise up. One man sat by as the US attacked Serbia without just cause, his country too weak to stop the attack. Vladimir Putin has become the most important statesman on the world stage today. May Russia rise to become what the United States always said it was, but wasn’t, really.
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“Up the long ladder and down the short rope,
To hell with King Billy and God bless the Pope!
If that doesn’t do we’ll tear them in two
And send them to hell in their red, white and blue.”
Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem, closing down the bar.

Worth watching …

imageYou all probably know about this, since I am usually several years behind on TV viewing.

Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s widow, and Seth McFarlane, who gave us Ted, have produced a new Cosmos series with Neil deGrasse Tyson in the place of Sagan. It is a wonderful production, with graphics so intense that our recent houseguests, who are our age, were enthralled, could not look away. I imagine that it would have the same effect on kids. There will never be another Sagan, but Tyson is very warm and has that ability to make complex matters understandable to us, a sign of true intelligence.

imageThe first thirteen episodes are available on Netflix without ads, and current episodes are to be aired on Fox and National Geographic Channel.

When they say what they really think … it gets interesting!

Zbigniew Brzezinski is one of those characters that operates openly in the shadows, a powerful man with easy access to other powerful people. Among his protegé are Madelyn Albright and Barack Obama. He speaks with a heavy accent, and because he never worries about electoral politics, sometimes publicly says what he thinks privately. It’s not a bad thing – I thoroughly enjoyed him on Morning Joe that morning when he told Scarborough that he was “stunningly superficial.” Joe thought not, saying he reads the New York Times.

It’s that classic situation where a person cannot fathom his own stupidity because he does not possess the intellectual resources to see that he does not have intellectual resources he needs. Better said, stupid people do not know they are stupid. If they knew it, they would not be stupid. That’s the great conundrum of life.

I just mention this because Zbig gave an interview to Le Nouvel Observateur*, Paris, 15-21 January 1998, the meat of which follows:

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

Translated from the French by Bill Blum

Let’s not be superficial here. Brzezinski words about Muslims are as true now as then. They are not a unified force any more than “Christians” or “Jews” or “Hindus” are, and present no threat to civilization. For foreign policy purposes, to control the domestic audience, the U.S. has incited hatred of Muslims as the center plank to justify its military aggression, 2001 forward.

In Afghanistan in the 1980’s, somewhere between 850,000 to 1.5 million people died, millions more left the place – those who could got the hell out. Left behind was a US-trained fighting force, the Mujahadeen, that would continue to be useful to this day operating under various names such as “Al Qaeda”, and perhaps now “ISIS” (though I do not reduce that Western-backed force to that one element).

Brzezinski has the typical veneer of the psychopath, glibly unaware of the suffering that he’s caused, indifferent to the tragedy of Afghanistan, seeing it only in geopolitical terms. He qualifies, as does Albright**, as a monster.

Even so, I delighted in his manhandling of Morning Joe. (By the way, sitting next to Morning Joe was Zbig’s daughter, Mika.)
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*Keep in mind that this interview, published in France, has never been republished or mentioned in U.S. state-controlled media.

**Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq, 60 Minutes, 5/12/1996, a famous interview where Albright is unable to grasp the concept of human suffering:

Stahl: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.

Our culture of fear

“When an honest man, honestly mistaken, comes face-to-face with undeniable and irrefutable truth, he is faced with one of two choices, he must either cease being mistaken or cease being honest.” – Amicus Solo

I suffer from the illusion that people will actually look at the evidence in matters of criminal behavior, especially the major events of our time. But they don’t. That’s my bailiwick. Most people get their opinions via absorption of mass media. Consequently, evidence can scream at them but they will not hear it.

For example, take just one small matter, that of the murder of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. The coroner’s report by Thomas Naguchi said that RFK died from a gunshot wound fired at close range directly behind his right ear and leaving powder burns. Sirhan was in front of him and too far away to have fired that shot.

There you have it.

But here’s a critical point: Hardly anyone knows about what I just wrote there. It passes into a void of fear and silence, and anyone with a public reputation who brings it up will come under severe attack. That’s why I conclude that there is considerably more power exerted in covering up these crimes than their actual commission. The culture of fear we live under is as oppressive as any Stalinist state, and don’t get me wrong here: I know Stalin had people murdered who knew too much. I am not being hyperbolic.

imageHere’s but one small example, an unimportant person, comedic actor, legendary dissipator, Charlie Sheen. He’s not even terribly bright, but he did have some swagger and had the balls to appear on Alex Jones’ Prison Planet (did I mention that Charlie is not that bright? Jones is nothing but a gatekeeper, in my opinion.) He said he did not believe the official story of 9/11.

We’re conditioned never to connect dots, but what happened to Charlie after that indeed was a direct result of his speaking up. He lost his job on Two and One-Half Men, Where I enjoyed his work, and later found himself locked in a closet in Manhattan covered in cocaine and surrounded by hookers. I assumed at the time that Charlie was supposed to be killed that night, but have since reconsidered. Our spooks are so goddamned good at the art of killing, if they meant to kill him he’d be dead. Charlie merely received a message:

STFU.

Celebrities have more impact on public opinion than politicians, and certainly more than academics and intellectuals. That’s why Charlie was singled out. His Jones appearance got the attention of a lot of people. He had to be silenced.

More importantly, any other celebrity who did not have his mind right got that message. That’s our culture of fear.

We had a lengthy discussion below, and I am pasting a redacted and long comment I made for the simple reason that it is the evidence contained in Dr. Judy Wood’s book Where Did the Towers Go? Like the bullet that got Bobby, people will shy away from knowing about this. Many will stop reading right here. But I am putting it up here anyway because just like a dog barking in the night, it may recede into the background of your consciousness, but will not go away. If you read this, it will trouble you.

Good bye, then.
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Continue reading “Our culture of fear” →

Somnambulists

watching-tvI got no takers below on the question of who is behind ISIS. I kind of expected that result. The minute I suggest that people are being diddled by mainstream media, there’s a rush for the exits. Why, the very idea!

We could be self-reliant, never trusting, always verifying, and dredge through information trying to piece together complicated scenarios to explain the behavior of power. We could use deductive reasoning, insight and experimentation, and try and fail until we form a coherent picture.

Or, we could just watch TV and, in a semi-hypnotic state, and passively absorb our views. We could just be somnambulist sponges.

Here’s Eric over at 4&20:

Well JC, it’s sure nice to know that Russia did not take back Crimea, and that their troops and tanks aren’t anywhere near Ukraine – LOL.

It’s the “LOL” that got me. The guy is not only stupid, but smug to boot! I’m not worried about hurting his feelings, as my take on Eric over these many years is that he’s impenetrable, and also, that he never comes near this blog. So feel free to talk about him, even insult him, as this is an Eric-free zone.

I’ve got a bigger mission here … why these constant wars? There’s no moral justification for them. We are in no way threatened by the countries we attack. But we are constantly attacking people. Why?

The character O’Brien in Orwell’s 1984 says to Winston Smith,

The primary aim of modern warfare … is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living … if it became general wealth it would confer no distinction. … The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must also not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.

O’Brien also says

“You could grasp the mechanics of the society you lived in, but not its underlying motives … [that] the party seeks power entirely for its own sake.”

But there’s something more going on with our empire than that. These guys appear to be running scared.

We’re bankrupt, have been for decades. That’s a given. The only reason the rest of the planet pays us any heed is because of our military. Fletcher Prouty, whom I’ve just begun to appreciate, wrote that after World War II the US had a massive cache of weaponry stored in Okinawa, and that half was shipped to Korea, the other half to Vietnam.

The bomb, said Prouty, was a game changer. It was well-understood that we could not afford a nuclear war, and yet needed these constant wars. So rather than global conflict, US planners decided that future conflicts would be localized. Apparently they knew shortly after the war ended where the ensuing conflicts would take place.

But it’s hard to keep people in a constant state of fear and anger necessary for public support of wars. It requires constant agitprop. Planners settled on the Soviet Union as the source of all evil, and launched a massive agitprop campaign that went on for decades. No matter who the U.S. attacked, it was because of the Soviets. When that threat vanished, terrorism was used as the new motivational force, and our planners gave us 9/11.

But agitprop is a destructive force in itself. Have you ever tried to unlock your car, get in it, start it up and drive off when you are in a state of fear? That’s because our primitive brain, the amygdala, has overridden our cerebral cortex, or modern brain. This constant state of fear that agitprop keeps us in – of terrorists, immigrants, communists, terrorists, criminals, blacks, terrorists … it takes its toll on our thinking abilities. It reduces normally intelligent people to what we see around us, frightened fools.

So if I read Orwell right, we are kept at constant war to prevent ordinary people from benefiting from our massive material output. That is done because powerful people always crave more power and fear losing it. And I add to that the state of the Empire, in protracted collapse, and suggest that our leaders are running scared.

What, after all, did Iraq ever do to justify its destruction? They had switched from dollars to euros to trade their oil. If a little matter like that can cause such a huge panic response, how vulnerable are we?

It does not bode well for the immediate future of the species. There is pain and suffering in store for millions of people, and we will be the cause.