Crazy times, a follow-up

I have on the wall a few feet away from me here the above photo taken in the 1980s, the subject of the encircled part a man I will call Clem. The main photo was taken in Yellowstone National Park on the Blacktail Deer “trail”. He and I spent the whole day breaking trail, and as I worked to keep up with him I saw this: A lone man by a lone tree. I thought it apropos of Clem, as he lived alone, had no girl friend, but many men in his life, his city buddies. (Clem was not gay, by the way.) The lower left photo I keep there to remind me of Clem at his best, the two of us in the mountains. He would leave his smokes and liquor behind. As one mutual friend described him, Clem was a “mountain gem and a city slut.” He drank too much. Way too much.

I gave this enlarged photo to Clem, and he hung it on his wall. People went through his belongings after he committed suicide in 1998, and the photo was returned to me. The reason I bring this up is that while grieving over his loss, I took the photo apart and wrote on it every trip we made, every hike and incident I could remember. In so doing I realized that I had been many places and done many things in the wild. Three years before Clem’s suicide, I had met my future wife, and the journeys would continue. She and I hiked and backpacked the mountains of Montana and Wyoming. Eventually, beginning in 2010, we would add Alaska, the Alps of France, Switzerland, Italy, Patagonia, the Galápagos, New Zealand, the Andes and Himalayas. Though our backpacking days are over, we ain’t done yet.

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Crazy court ruling threatens all public lands

[East side, Crazy Mountains of Montana]

Change is coming to what I think is Montana’s most alluring “island” mountain range, the Crazy Mountains.  It’s about to become the latest in a long, tortured history of celebrity destinations dotting the American West.  As the success of Big Sky ski resort, the Yellowstone Club, and Moonlight Basin (northwest of Yellowstone National Park) have demonstrated, there is plenty more opportunity here in Southwest Montana if you’ve got deep pockets and high-level political connections in Washington, D.C.

Hikers and hunters have been battling the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to maintain access to public lands for decades.  Local ranchers have been illegally posting “no trespassing” signs to keep hunters and hikers out of their backyard, and off their private land.  But the ownership pattern is complicated in a “checkerboard” of private and public sections (640 acres, or 1 square mile, per section) that originated when the railroad was given title to every other section.  Under the Union Pacific Act of 1862, Congress granted every other section along the railroad – in one square mile blocks — to Union Pacific and retained the alternate sections as federal government lands.

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Shallow Hal takes on Ben Franklin

I have never watched anything by Ken Burns, the famous documentary film maker. Now that he has tackled Benjamin Franklin, I am even less interested. In 2017 MM wrote a paper called Benjamin Franklin: Premier British Spook, which fit in nicely with my own thinking on the American Revolution. It is a British template, one that the Americans would later use on Cuba. The idea is to take a people infected with revolutionary fervor, and let them have their silly revolution,

In the end, however, it will still be British or American agents in charge, masquerading as patriots and heroes. Thus did we have our Founding Fathers, perhaps all of them compromised, or those not, those who were true believers, marginalized or cashiered.

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Rocks, Rubble, and Roubles . . . and Boulé PsyActs?

“The military . . . establishes contact with a TA [target audience] using face-to-face communication (F2C) and psychological actions (PsyActs) . . . Both are audiovisual products consisting of agents of action who deliver messages to a TA . . . Both require that the people involved follow a set of guidelines while play acting to deliver the messages. Both are used to modify the behavior of the A [audience] . . . to help create audiovisual products, the military can enlist the services of theater actor guilds . . . The people who convey these messages are known as agents of action (also called actors) . . . Some agents of action can be key communicators . . . These individuals are usually seen as trustworthy to the TA . . . PsyActs are conveyed by these actors in the presence of the TA . . . The agents of action follow a general script to convey these messages. These scripts are basic guidelines which allow the actors to adjust their message as the conversation progresses so that it doesn’t sound fake . . . This is a type of live theater performance that can be carried out in a variety of settings . . .”

~ Mark M. Rich, New World War: Revolutionary Methods for Political Control

Several researchers in the truth community (see here, here, and here) have determined that the main reason for the seemingly choreographed stunt performed collaboratively by Will Smith and Chris Rock during the 94th Academy Awards ceremony was to surreptitiously promote the new Pfizer alopecia drug treatment (AKA a covert alopecia awareness campaign). Accordingly, Pfizer was a primary sponsor of the 2022 Oscars, and recently announced their new drug under development to treat alopecia.

I submit this March 30, 2022 article, “Ridiculous: Viral Oscars Theory Says Pfizer Staged Slap to Promote Alopecia Drug” and this March 31, 2022 article, “Evidence does not support the claim that Pfizer staged Oscars confrontation to promote new drug,” as evidence that the alopecia promotion narrative may have been an intentional bread crumb to lure conspiracy theorists down a scripted rabbit hole. 

I surmise that the reason why numerous truthers immediately recognized and described this stunt as being “transparent” fakery is because it may have been designed to be relatively obvious — and then subsequently (and almost instantly) mocked by the MSM. My suspicion is that the Pfizer sponsorship (and its future alopecia treatment) — as related to the Oscars and Jada Pinkett Smith — may have been inserted to induce this conspiracy theory. 

It seems nearly everyone in the fakery analysis community took the bait. 

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A little more care is needed …

[See below for a newer comparison]

The above image is taken from Elle Magazine, and is a composite of Emma Mackey and Margo Robbie, with the blend so thorough that you cannot tell where one face begins and the other ends. I know there is software out there that performs this magic. In fact, a former writer used to use it, claiming it was superior to my face splitting. Anyway, you can see by the sunglasses atop the head and the vertical line in the neck that it is a composite.

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Identity Fraud, Part 2

In April of 2017 I published a post I called “Identity Fraud.” In it I made the claim that Buddy Holly, whose 1959 death was faked, later re-emerged as “Gram Parsons”, who also faked his death. For reasons I do not remember, I was struck by the resemblance of two men, one a music mogul and the other movies, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg. These two men are the “G” and the “K” in Dreamworks SKG, a former film distribution company. The “S” of course is Spielberg.

I have many, many hours of labor behind the Identity Fraud post. Unfortunately, at that time I was using GIFs rather than face splits, and the results were very hard to follow or agree with. I thought that rather than reinventing the wheel, I would merely convert the GIF’s to face splits. However, in so doing I decided that it would be better to start over. I still stand by the original work, regret the poor presentation, and hope to come out the other end here with a clarified and evidence-based piece. In the original I started with Geffen and Katzenberg and worked my way backward. I think it better now to better understand the Holly work we did.

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The choice: To know but to be silent

Last evening I was tired and watching a movie that I just could not get into, a best picture-nominated movie called The Power of the Dog. That’s all on me, I am sure, as my attention span was wavering. The movie received 12 Oscar nominations, so who am I to say that it is not excellent?* I will attempt to watch it again while it is still available on HBOMAX, oops! Netflix. As an alternative, I put on some music for background, and ended up listening to Simon and Garfunkel.

My brother Steve was a composed and quiet man, and when traveling would listen to S&G more than anything else. In 2011 he lay on his deathbed, we around him waiting for the inevitable. They were playing religious music over the speaker for his benefit, and my son went down to the nursing station and asked that they play S&G instead, and they obliged. Steve went out listening to two of the finest musicians of my era, and certainly the best songwriter.

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The trivium, quadrivium, and blah blah blah

I’ve been reading Jordan Peterson, and finished his book Twelve Rules for Life. It was enough of JP for me, as at my age, there was not much new for me in it. As we age, we become wiser, learn from mistakes, even become more sympathetic to others and to different ideas. For instance, at age 38, having abandoned the Catholic faith, I was angry at the Church for having brainwashed me as it did, and thought people who were devoted to the faith to be of a lesser mind than me. Later I would read The Varieties of Religious Experience by the American intellectual/psychologist William James, and took on a new outlook. While religion would never appeal to me, those who experience religious enlightenment are experiencing real phenomena, and are made better and happier people in the process. (Oddly, I no longer have this book. It was a keeper, and I do not know what happened to it.)

I now look at my Catholic upbringing as a means of 1) brainwashing me, to ensure I stayed Catholic all my life, but also 2) as a means of protecting me, since teachers viewed most of us kids as having little enlightenment and intellectual ability. Life was going to be hard for us. Having a rudder, even if one based on superstition and falsehood, would not hurt. It would prevent thinking, but also prevent despair. Stupidity is a great insulator. Continue reading “The trivium, quadrivium, and blah blah blah” →

Blank slate

This post is just an experiment. If you are reading it, the experiment produced encouraging results. The idea is that I am sitting down with nothing on my mind, nothing to pore over, nothing important to share. The Ukraine thread is ongoing under “Wag the Dog,” and they are keeping it lively.

Chainsaw Bob

We have been inundated with snow lately, which gives me lots of time to fill. We have a 330 (is that a 33 I see?) foot driveway, and I have a 26 inch snow thrower (Is that an 8?). It’s a very good machine. However, whenever I need expert advice, I know of only one expert I can trust. His name is Chainsaw Bob. He is off-putting to many people, but I like him. As I told one of our neighbors the other day, Bob looks like an aging hippie and a drunk. But he does not drink. He may be the former, as he does have shoulder-length hair and a beard. However, I like to think of him as merely counter-cultural. I like that in a person.

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