Note to readers about what follows below the fold: This blog has been around for a long time, since 2006. There are thousands of posts, most mine. At one time I fantasized that I could create a stable of writers for new content, but none could hold on for long before burnout or boredom. It is just me. But there has been some very good writing here over the years, and so I have here a rich archive. I don’t need to put up something new every day, and that solves the problem I have of repetitiveness. All I need do is comb what is already here, and rerun it. Below is a 2017 piece by Tyrone McCloskey. He wrote it in response of a piece I had written about my admiration for the Jews I have known in my life.
Continue reading “Three Jews Three”
Two Books: “Unreliable” by Csaba Szabo, and “Unreadable” by Dr. Mark Bailey
The following is taken from Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation, the one in which he warned us of the “military-industrial complex” that has long since engulfed us. These words are about science.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Continue reading “Two Books: “Unreliable” by Csaba Szabo, and “Unreadable” by Dr. Mark Bailey”
On Boys Don’t Cry, and a royal Miles Mathis f-bomb rant
Back in March I received an email from a person asking to be kept anonymous. In it he was inquisitive of a piece written by Fauxlex called Framing John Lotter: The Fake Murder of Brandon Teena. It was based on the 1999 movie Boys Don’t Cry starring Hillary Swank (pictured above with her doppelgänger, Matt Damon), Chloë Sevigny and Peter Sarsgaard and others. Swank played Teena Brandon, who in the movie is Brandon Teena, a transvestite, or woman passing as a man. In 1993 Brandon is murdered by John Lotter (Sarsgaard) and Tom Nissen (played by Brandon Sexton III). Lotter was accused of the murder of Brandon and two others, Lisa Lambert, and Phillip DeVine, and is sentenced to death, in large part based on the testimony of Nissen, who would later confess that he, and not Lotter, had killed the three victims.
At the time I suggested to Fauxlex that even as we agreed that the murders were fake, and that Brandon (played in the movie by Swank) was played in real life by a woman, Barbra Kramer, still living in a town in Nebraska, that Lotter and Nissen could not possibly be in jail. I was able to match the real-life Brandon Teena photo to a to the living woman who in real life was supposed to be Brandon Teena. (Fauxlex made this connection before I did.) So much time has passed, and I do not have the private emails, but I never said publicly to Fauxlex that I doubted that Lotter and Nissen were in jail. He went after me in public for disagreeing with him, as is his wont.
Continue reading “On Boys Don’t Cry, and a royal Miles Mathis f-bomb rant”
33 reasons to be happy, the climate movement is dying
I meant to include this with the last post, but forgot. It is a list of 33 reasons to rejoice that the Climate Change movement is on the ropes. Some of them strike me as significant, such as 1,6,9,11,16,19 and 32. The rest are marginal. The Mann v. Steyn outcome is cause for celebration, even schadenfreude, but is not over yet. Greta Thunberg is really just growing up some, moving on to new targets for her angst. Maybe someday she’ll be a conservative. The rest could be said to be retrenching, I fear. This ain’t over, not with all the money and power behind it, and we all know, here at least, that Trump is just a sock puppet. I like what I see coming from him on climate and energy, don’t understand tariffs or why he is moving on them, and deportations seemed designed to enrage the left. I know in my heart of hearts that he is as phony as Al Gore’s climate angst.
Each of the 33 is linked, so have fun if you have time.
Over 30 items here: Evidence that the climate scam is collapsing
Skip the sunscreen. Wear blinders.
Below the fold you will find what was said to be Kurt Vonnegut’s 1997 commencement address to undergrads at MIT. It begins, after an opening quote, with the words “Wear sunscreen.” It closes with “But trust me on the sunscreen.” It is clever and even contains good advice, like “Do one thing every day that scares you” and “Keep your old love letters, throw away your bank statements.”
The original piece, published in June of 1997 in the Chicago Tribune, was unsigned. Mary Schmich of the Tribune later claimed authorship. The whole thing was weird, as the piece went viral as a real Vonnegut commencement address. It seemed unprofessional to allow it to go unsigned and to print it without Vonnegut’s approval. The Tribune is a high profile outlet, so that practical jokes are beneath it. But only later did we learn that Vonnegut had never spoken at MIT. Schmich then tried to contact him to explain the situation, and when they finally spoke he said it was “spooky.”
“Two questions: Why use Vonnegut? And why sunscreen?
“I tried to pray, nothing happened.”
I am reading a book, The Recovering, Intoxication and its Aftermath, by Leslie Jamison. When it came I did not remember that I had ordered it. I thought had ordered a book about how scientific papers had all become corrupt, and when this one came, I thought that was it. It was not. The one I ordered, Unreliable, by Csaba Szabo, is frightfully boring, so I am stuck now with two bad books … I’ll hang on with the Recovering, if only because I know the ending of Unreliable.
Books by recovering alcoholics can be tedious, self-involved, and boring. But I read a few pages in, and liked that she was talking about famous writers like Faulkner, Hemingway, and others who were also famous drunks. My own take is that these men, along with my own favorite, Edward Abbey, were crooked to begin with, so that both drinking and writing suited them fine. I seek no meaning in the fact that they drank, only the fact that they wrote. The same internal force that made them write might also have driven them to drink, but so what? That does not begin to explain all of the great writers who were not drunks.
Sidenote: This morning as I read she recounted reading the Stephen King book that became the Apollo 11 movie, The Shining. She’s not aware that with “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, Stanley Kubrick, and not Stephen King, is using the word “All” to take the place of “Apollo 11”, where Kubrick was deeply immersed.
Collateral Gammage
Former Pittsburgh Steelers defensive end Ray Seals has reportedly passed away at age 59. Quietly. Too quietly.
There is, oddly, no specific date of death, no cause of death, no obituary with details. According to Sports Illustrated, “his friend” Nini Marie confirmed the news on social media.” That’s it. Just… confirmed.
One anagram of “Nini Marie” is:
“I Am In Rein”
A strange little phrase—perhaps meaningless. Or perhaps a coded signature. Especially when we remember the story of Ray’s cousin:
Continue reading “Collateral Gammage”Slippin’ out the back, Jack
At last count, Manhattan Contrarian’s five (and counting) posts on the JFK assassination have drawn 559 comments, though it the 80/20 rue applies, most have come from two or three sources.
My older brother told me, with awe, that Theodore Roosevelt had been shot while standing on a podium speaking, and still stood tall and finished his speech. With all due respect, Steve, that’s a crock. 1) If shot, or shot at, he would have hid behind the podium and there would have been a pile of bodies to shield him from further harm, and 2) he wasn’t shot (or shot at) anyway. That’s just presidential mythology, like San Juan Hill.
There’s a bit of popular mythology that says that in olden days presidents did not have tight security. They did, just like now. It’s not just presidents, but kings and queens, princes, dukes and archdukes. Security has been around longer than our country or colonies, and they know how to do it.
JFK autopsy photos – the final mile
Note to readers: I was focused as I wrote this on my own Pauline conversion, having read Miles Mathis’s Camelot piece on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In so doing, I ignored another man of equal or more importance who allowed me to publish his piece, JFKTV, here. I offer apologies for the slight to Tyrone Mccloskey, author and long time friend of the blog.
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Everything interesting will happen beneath the fold. I will not put those gruesome photos right in front of faces of people who don’ t know they are fake, some of the best fakes I have ever seen.
But first, a few stories about me. I’ve learned over the course of my life that there are things about me that are not like other people, but also that most things about me are just like other people. For instance, I always knew that I was a very bright kid. In those days we would take tests, be they ACT or just pure IQ tests where we reassemble cardboard boxes. I always scored very high, in the 99th percentile.
How did I know this? Teachers told me. That was a huge mistake on their part, as I began to think, even in grade school, that things would be easy for me. I did not apply myself to things, did not work hard enough, and as a consequence did not grade out well in school, much to the frustration of teachers who looked at my files and knew my scores. I knew some classmates back then who were smart, maybe also in the 90s on those tests, and who also applied themselves, and became engineers, Microsoft employees, well, that’s only two of the 130 or so in my high school class. The rest became ordinary people, workers, teachers, craftsmen and women, and one, my girlfriend at one time, a Vegas showgirl. I loved her, but never saw her as such a stunning beauty as she later became. Continue reading “JFK autopsy photos – the final mile”
JFK Morgue photos, revisited
I’ve been following the posts of the Manhattan Contrarian (here, here, and here) with a feeling of need for forbearance. MC might knowingly be advancing the hoax, but I am keeping the faith that he is the real deal. He could be playing to the galleries, as people love a good mystery, and the JFK assassination is one of the best of all time. It’s got all the elements of skullduggery and hidden villains, and so much misdirection strewn about that an average person of curiosity can’t help but apply intelligence to the matter, coming to rest on one or another of the bogus “theories” involved.
I’ve dropped a few comments there, among the hundreds now, and offer the following as an introduction to misdirection, how it is done:
It will always stand as outright contradiction that the powerful Kennedy family could not stop 1980 publication of the Davis S. Lifton book Best Evidence, which contained in it gruesome morgue photographs of JFK’s corpse. Could they have stopped at least the photos? Of course they could have. Why did they not?
The photos were fake, masterful darkroom creations with JFK’s face superimposed on someone else’s head, some of the most important and sophisticated photo fakery ever done since invention of the camera. Why would the Kennedy’s allow them to be published? Because it drove home the idea of a brutal assassination that did not happen for real.
How do I know this? You can’t possibly just trust me. I have preserved my work, but I ask something better of you: Reproduce the work, prove me wrong. That’s how science is done.
I’d like to go back to the beginning here. I read the Lifton book more than a decade after it was published, and thought it the best exposition to that time of the mysteries, not solutions, surrounding the assassination. Keep in mind that I believed that JFK was gunned down, and was in a state a perpetual grief, as he was so dynamic, so energizing to the American population. Just the idea that kids my age were walking fifty miles (I never did) was testimony to the good he was doing.
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Note: Below the fold here are gruesome morgue photos from the Lifton book. Proceed with that knowledge, or stay away. _____________________________________________________________
Piece of Mindful 