Today’s comment of note

Big Swede, the doomed Sisyphus and Randian who appears eternally tasked to fight Marxism if it ever reappears, gives us all a what-for at 4&20, quoting another source, of course.

Marxist revolutionaries from Frank Marshall Davis to Billy Ayers to Saul Alinsky to David Axelrod have all known that it will never be possible to establish a one-party Socialist/Marxist State in the U.S. as long as there is a strong Middle Class. It is the Middle Class—not the extremely wealthy, or the poor—that represent the big stumbling block to Socialism. It is the Middle Class that keeps Democracy (as we used to know it) alive via the “Civil Society.” It is the Middle Class that participates most actively in all of the horizontal organizations and relationships that form the back-bone of Civil Society: The PTAs, the Lions Clubs, the Shriners, the small and independent Churches, the Charity groups, the Business Organizations, a Free and Open Press, and even Labor Unions when they are small and locally based, and Political Parties when they have a strong local grass-roots organization (as opposed to the large nationally based, top-down Unions and Political Parties we have today). The “Tea Party” is a classic example of a grass-roots, bottom up loose collection of horizontally organized individual citizens. In short, the “Civil Society” is the entire collection of myriad voluntary associations that exist in a Democracy, but are totally absent in Socialist States.-AMERICADEATHWATCH

Why do people get trapped in time warps? When did David Axelrod become a leftist? Obama too, I suppose, has had an epiphany. Why are “Business Organizations” good while labor unions must be small and local? Why the Lions and Shriners but not Sierrans and feminists? And how can socialism promote “one-party” states even as all openly socialist countries have at least three, while crony-capitalist corporate-socialist US has only one oligarchical party masquerading as two?

Your own words only Swede, if you dare enter these shark-infested waters. You are hopelessly lost in the silly dialogue of the Cold War, it appears.

Thanksgiving postcard from the edge

In my younger years I did not understand why people believe lies, and thought that mere presentation of the truthful alternative would be enough to open eyes. There was so much ground to cover, so much to learn, and so little reward ahead for me that given the opportunity again, I might simply slip into slumber with the rest of the American public. It is so much easier.

I’ve spent decades now trying to gain a better understanding of the world, and to what end? Only to be laughed at and ridiculed by people who have not read beyond Glenn Beck or Ayn Rand? It has to be a reward unto itself, or there is no point to it.

Anyway, today we celebrate wondrous leader bringing Iran to the table, forcing that rogue nation to abandon its nuclear program and allowing us to give thanks for a safer world. Good for him! I celebrate along side all of you with the following caveats:

  • He’s not even in charge, nothing more than a ribbon cutter. The US has not had a real president since around this time of year in 1963.
  • Iran had no nuclear program. They gave up the idea in 1988.

So I raise my glass with the rest of us in honor of a nobody doing nothing. That’s how we roll. Happy Thanksgiving!
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PS: Lizard 19, about all those writers that went before you over there, we must be polite, I realize. But you’re waaaaaay better then them. Without you it was just another Democratic blog, kind of trivial and boring and predictable. You’ve become perhaps the best writer on the Montana blog scene. You’d share that space with Budge had he not given it up.

Two lonely truckers from Billings, Montana…

We are traveling again today, this time by car. We’re going to Billings, Montana. I grew up there. Towns are like minds – they can be narrow confines or exciting adventures.

Boulder, Colorado is an exciting adventure. Billings, for me, was a narrow confine. (Also, all of the interstate accesses to Billings are ugly. The town itself so not bad, but it strikes travelers as refineries and truck stops.)

Billings is a hot and dusty prairie town, close to mountains but part of that semi-desert region called Eastern Montana, about 12 inches of rainfall yearly. Like all home towns, we don’t appreciate what they really are until they are in our rear view mirrors.

The times I have visited there since leaving I’ve been surprised at how little activity there is after hours, and how scattered it is. The downtown area is lifeless, and its center of gravity has moved west, but no one seems to know where.

Billings is not an aesthetically pleasing place to the outside eye. New neighborhoods sprouted up, and all of old Billings is not much more than old houses spliced with long straight roads to get to new Billings. Out there on the west end is brand new infrastructure with roundabouts at most intersections, new shopping malls and planned housing, parks and commercial islands.

It’s all predictable, even boring. I used to drive out in the corn fields west of town looking for birds or passing the time. Out there you will find lots of … corn. East of town is more corn, but more varied geography – some hills, cliffs, viewpoints, streams. East of town are farms and cows, west of town are feedlots and gravel pits.

Overlooking Billings are the Rimrocks – a long cliff-like feature that extends perhaps forty miles west or more. A local geologist told me that the theory was that it was the remnants of a Fire Island-type sand reef where retreating waves built it up in the ancient sea beds. I’ll take his word for it. On top of the rims is riverbed gravel, so it was once a streambed for the Yellowstone River. The importance of the rims in community life is a long stretch overlooking the city where kids can park and drink beer and grope each other while adults pretend they are at the sock hop. That is the city’s Blueball Lane.

Before someone chimes in and tells me of the city’s rich culture, music, and intellectual life, I ‘ll concede the point. There are two colleges there, large medical facilities, three refineries in the region, and all of that requires smart and well-educated people to run it. There’s an NPR outlet that is NPRish to the hilt, playing classical music all day and Car Talk and Wait Wait on weekends just to keep people aware it even exists. Yellowstone Public Radio offers all of the news that the other news outlets offer, identical news in fact, but somehow they think they are better at it. Never did get that.

In 2000, my last general election there before moving up the road to Bozeman, Billings turned out 2,144 votes, 3.73% of those who bothered, for Ralph Nader. That turned a few heads. WTF? Billings?

I did that. I went door-to-door for weeks collecting signatures to get him on the ballot. …[redacted by my editor]… I walked house-to-house evenings with the petitions. It was relaxing, satisfying, better than watching TV. I collected maybe 2,000 signatures during that time.

Here’s what I think happened, at least with the ones who didn’t think the petition was for Rob Natelson* (it is Billings, after all): people were vaguely aware of a Ralph Nader, a consumer protection guy, the Corvair and Pinto and all of that, and maybe even heard he was running for president. There was scant news coverage, but after signing the petition they were alerted to his existence. Once keyed in, they began to pay attention. He wasn’t radical, and the things he said sounded more like New Deal or New Frontier than The Internationale.

Bush and Gore were doing their best to drive people into staying home. Nader was something new, perhaps something old. Those who signed the petitions were probably the bulk of those who voted for him, including the Natelson faction.

I did that. We, the local Greens, also staged a publicity stunt: We got together one Saturday and went along a highway atop the rims and cleaned up all of the litter. We had a big sign that said “Clean Up Politics – Vote Nader!” That got a little TV time, which is the primary way people know politics. We did that.

Anyway, ten-hour drive, and evenings in a place where you can drop a quarter on the pavement at night and then hear it bounce. I’m not saying that you can’t go home again. You can. But why?
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*Natelson was a statewide phenomenon, the regional Randian and well-known throughout the area. Last I heard he had moved to Golden, Colorado.

Oblivionville

I watched Real Time with Bill Maher last night, always good for a laugh. But it was the 50th for JFK and I hoped there’d be some discussion. Understand that on American TV it is not possible to have a full discussion complete with evidence and skeptics. Only official truth is allowed, but Maher occasionally pushes the line, since HBO is less susceptible to advertiser pressure.

It was all predictable except:

  • Maher said the Magic Bullet theory was a little suspicious!* He then stopped in his tracks, having hit the wall.
  • Paul Begala said that he sat around a table with John F. Kennedy, Jr. And others at the time that he was launching George Magazine. Begala smuggled some truth into the show: He said he asked him if he was going to use the magazine as a platform to find out what really happened to his father.

(JFK Jr. Told him that he viewed it as pointless, that no matter what happened that day, he grew up without a dad.)

The art of assassination has gotten so much better over time. No one questions whether JFK Jr.’s death was murder. Most likely it was. Even the smart ones don’t know to wonder about that. We’re deep, deep into thought-controlled environs, much more so than in 1963.

Paul Begala offers all we can hope for on mainstream TV, a little bit of smuggling. Katty Kay, a fearless BBC news journalist, also a guest, was oblivious. She offered wisdom about the nature of conspiracy theorists and was clueless about the assassination. She obviously has never exposed herself to any evidence. But what can we expect? If she did so, and if she internalized the implications, she’d soon be out of work, either voluntarily or by force.

This is key to journalists who work in the US: They are not disingenuous. They are not dishonest. They are simply incurious by nature, and deep into group-think. Those who do not exhibit those traits don’t advance. There are no ticking time bombs in these folks. The right questions never occur to them.
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*The Magic Bullet Theory is not suspicious. It is merely ludicrous.

Of mice and men

imageRFKimageThis is something for people who are well seasoned and still cooking. Every one of us knows exactly where we were on November 22, 1963 when we heard the news. I was in eighth grade and had been misbehaving. I was sent across the hall to sit with the seventh graders to eat my lunch. Others were going room to room spreading the horrible news, and Susan Hennessy brought it to us. There was stunned silence, then tears and sobbing.

Everyone, that is, except George H.W. Bush, who says he does not remember where he was when he heard. (He was in Dallas. Later that day he would phone the FBI from Tyler, Texas to implicate a young student named James Parrot in the crime. But hell, who remembers picayune stuff like that!)
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Bush was a member of the CIA at that time, this fact confirmed by a memo from J Edgar Hoover. His odd behavior, the phone call to the FBI, is unexplained. Speculation is that he did it to place himself somewhere else on that day other than Dallas. But documentation also exists of his presence in Dallas. Did he have a role in the assassination? Possibly, though he was quite young. He did run Zapata Corporation, a shell company and front for the CIA that was using oil drilling platforms in the Gulf to stage terrorist attacks inside Cuba.

So there’s that.

Should a member of the CIA, a highly secret organization engaged in intelligence gathering and covert warfare, be allowed to be POTUS? It appears to me that because they are by definition engaged in illegal activity, that a member cannot uphold the oath of office.

Capsule history of the Syrian conflict

Two voices that I have come to depend on regarding Syria (and Libya and every war of aggression since Obama took office) are Thierry Meyssan, French intellectual and proprietor of Voltaire.net, and Moon of Alabama, one of those sites that just seems wired somewhere and which has a way of staying on top of things and offering counter-media insight. The latest article I read on Syria by Meyssan gives a nice capsuled history of the conflict as follows:

  • The United States planned the destruction of Syria at a meeting on September 15, 2001, at Camp David. They began to prepare this by adopting the Syria Accountability Act on December 12, 2003. They tried to plunge Syria into war first by causing the adoption of Resolution 1559 by the Security Council, then killing the former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri and accusing President al-Assad of ordering the assassination. Continue reading “Capsule history of the Syrian conflict” →

Exchanging bodily fluids

It gets more invasive all the time, and more disturbing because these random driver pullovers were run by a private contractor. Fort Worth, Texas police were apparently not involved even as it was done in its jurisdiction. Instead, a test that randomly pulled drivers over and then got them to “voluntarily” submit blood, saliva and breath tests was run. Intimidated drivers cooperated. Unknown to the drivers, their breath was being tested anyway.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration authorized the tests, done by Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, a private government contractor.

Conspiracy theorists tend to be smarter than the average bear

Stay with me on this, as it leads to a point a little closer to home. Back when the Iraq War was on everyone’s mind, studies done indicated that civilian casualties were extremely high – perhaps as many as 1.2 million overall. At that time – it’s still going on.

Here’s what happened: The sources of the studies were viciously attacked, and reasonable people concluded that such numbers could not possibly be true.

No other studies were done, of course. No counter-evidence was offered. Mere denial became the reasonable intellectual position regarding casualties inflicted on another country by the emperor. End of story.
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Lizard put up a link at 4&20 Blackbirds that cited a study done by psychologists Michael J. Wood and Karen M. Douglas of the University of Kent (UK) that concluded that people who hold “conspiracy theories” tend to be more reasonable and thoughtful than those who believe official stories about some events.

The negative stereotype of the conspiracy theorist – a hostile fanatic wedded to the truth of his own fringe theory – accurately describes the people who defend the official account of 9/11, not those who dispute it,

according to an article that Lizard linked at Before It’s News.”

I’ve known this from the beginning just based on my own encounters. But who believes a conspiracy theorist? Think about it – refusal to look at evidence, anger and hostility and ridicule against those who do, is not a thoughtful way to go through life. That is not the typical skeptic of 9/11, one not wedded to official truth, not claiming to know the whole story, and having a better overall historical perspective.

Anyway, follow the link. Draw your own conclusions.

Here’s what prompted me to write this. Polish Wolf quickly chimed in,

Those sound like truly atrocious social scientists/psychologists. First, to a take online comments as a representative sample of anything whatsoever, and second, to posit that the beliefs of a majority of people have any bearing on the plausibility of those beliefs.

That’s what triggered my memories of the Iraq casualty deniers – in essence he’s saying “I’ve got nothing of my own to counter this, but what you’ve got is not good enough. After all, I don’t like what they concluded. And oh, yeah, I’m not going to think about it any more.”

I’ve encountered this again and again … there is so little credible evidence to support such theories as Oswald or 19 Arabs that a thoughtful person should be embarrassed to hold such beliefs. But in a thought-controlled environment all of the social pressure favors mindless following. Skeptics are subject to abuse and ridicule. In public life, mere mention of doubt about official truth will end a career.
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Paul Is Dead redux

MccartneyWhile trying to get my clock turned around here, I was lazily listening to podcasts and YouTubes, and came across the old “Paul is Dead” controversy surrounding the Beatles in the early 1970’s. I’ve never really understood it well, but am not surprised that there are people still spouting the myth. After all, “evidence” is abundant.

And then came the Rolling Stone magazine cover in the piles of mail – I love it! Rolling Stone is having an inside joke. Paul is lying in state! And smirking.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I believe 9/11 was an inside job, largely fabricated for TV audience, and that Osama died in ’01 and the Boston Bombing was staged and so much of our life is governed by TV illusions. That is all evidence-based, but with that in mind, I want the reader to understand that Paul McCartney is alive and well.

And also that there is lots of evidence, clues strewn about on album covers and song lyrics that hint that he died in a car crash (and lost his hair) on Wednesday morning at five AM on November 9, 1966 driving his gray Aston Martin, a car nicknamed the “Silver Hammer.” What was up with that?

I think it helps to remember that the Beatles were a phenomenon that will never be seen again, a mixture of marketing and charming young men with real talent. But the marketing was important. The screaming crowds that greeted them in New York on first arrival had to be brought in, along with the kids who were in the audience of the Ed Sullivan show. The illusion had to be fostered by suggestion so that other kids would pick it up and start screaming on their own. There were real brains behind that operation, and a cash cow of gigantic proportions.

Sgt-PepperThe question was what to do when inevitably the bubble burst and they came down to earth. The answer, and a real act of marketing genius, was to kill Paul. They did it well in advance of dropping hints when Abbey Road was released. The cover of Sgt. Pepper was literally strewn with clues, from the grave made of flowers forming a bass guitar to a doll holding a car and bloody driver’s glove. Magical Mystery Tour had inside a picture of the band performing, Ringo’s drum saying “We love the 3 Beatles” alongside a pair of bloody shoes as the new Paul is singing barefoot.

Some time in 1969 or 1970 there was a radio phone call to a music station in Michigan, surely planted, that mentioned the clues on Abbey Road. The result was a nationwide frenzy. People went out in droves and bought the albums looking for clues … and are you getting this? The Beatles were breaking up, unknown at that time. It was going to happen right after one more album required under contract. They needed to keep sales going.

I love it! Thanks, Rolling Stone, for the funniest magazine cover ever.
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PS: Rolling Stone cover caption: “Scenes from a nonstop life.” Funnier still!
PPS: Changed name of post from “PID redux” to “Paul is Dead redux” to get more Google hits. It’s a marketing ploy.

Thursday morning at 3AM … jet lag

DSCN4221[1]Ah the beauty of jet lag, up at 3AM, asleep at 5pm in the chair, hoping to make it at least until 9PM to get on track again. We are very fortunate to be able to travel, and seeing other countries, far from making us experts on anything, merely reinforces the reality that everyone on this planet is concerned first with family, friends, making a living, and only secondly with more ethereal matters like impressions of other countries they have never visited.
Continue reading “Thursday morning at 3AM … jet lag” →