Month: August 2015

I have been going back and forth with some silly people, but the way I work is that these sorts of things always energize and engage me, and my understanding grows and develops, even when dealing with idiots, or–as appears to be the case here–volunteer or paid propagandists.

Anyway, I became aware that there are many 9/11 Truth groups out there.  The one that caught my attention was Military Officers for 9/11 Truth: http://www.mo911truth.org/

The guy who started it was a trained, professional airplane crash investigator, and he doesn’t think planes crashed in Pennsylvania or the Pentagon.

• “In my first position paper, titled The Precautionary Principle, [see below] written shortly after the attacks on NYC and the Pentagon, I cautioned readers against a rush to judgment, although the immediate evidence suggested the crime had been an inside job. As the years went by, a virtual mountain of physical evidence was collected by hundreds of highly qualified investigators — evidence  sufficient to convince any dedicated Grand Jury that the horrendous events of 9/11 were clearly an inside job. The Precautionary Principle no longer applies. It is time to positively conclude that a well-orchestrated and obviously pre-planned cover-up of the worst mass murder in our country’s history began immediately following the deaths of 3,000 innocent people on September 11, 2001.  Nearly nine years later the criminal cover-up continues. Fortunately for our country, our judicial system provides no statute of limitations for treason, first degree murder, and terrorism.”

 I am Major General Albert Stubblebine. I am retired Army Major-General. In my last assignment — my last command — I was responsible for all of the Army’s strategic intelligence forces around the world. I had responsibility for the Signals Intelligence, Photo Intelligence, Counter Intelligence, Human Intelligence. They all belonged to me, in my last assignment. …  

I was supposed to find out what the enemy was doing, before the enemy did it so that we could take action against the enemy. That’s Intelligence, OK, before the fact. So, we always — always — rely not on a single piece of data, before we make a statement, but on multiple and the more pieces of data that you have that correlate, the better you know exactly what is going on. …  

So I have had a lot of experience looking at photographs. I have looked at many, many different kinds of photographs, from many, many different platforms on many, many different countries, around the world.  

Interviewer: OK. So on September the 11th, in 2001, what hit the Pentagon? 
General Stubblebine:  I don’t know exactly what hit it, but I do know, from the photographs that I have analyzed and looked at very, very carefully, it was not an airplane.  

Interviewer:  What made you believe that? 
General Stubblebine:  Well, for one thing, if you look at the hole that was made in the Pentagon, the nose penetrated far enough so that there should have been wing marks on the walls of the Pentagon. I have been unable to find those wing marks. So where were they? Did this vessel — vehicle, or whatever it was — have wings? Apparently not, because if it had had wings, they would have made marks on the side of the Pentagon.  

One person counteracted my theory, and said, “Oh, you’ve got it all wrong. And the reason that it’s wrong is that as the airplane came across, one wing tipped down and hit the ground and broke off.” I said, “Fine, that’s possible, one wing could have broken off.” But if I understand airplanes correctly, most airplanes have two wings. I haven’t met an airplane with only one wing. So where was the mark for the second wing? OK, one broke off — there should have been a mark for the second wing. I could not find that in any of the photographs that I’ve analyzed. Now I’ve been very careful to not say what went in there. Why? Because you don’t have that evidence. … 
I did — I’ve never believed that it was an airplane since I’ve looked at the photographs. Up until the time I looked at the photographs, I accepted what was being said. After I looked at it — NO WAY! …  

We pride ourselves with the “free press.” I do not believe the “free press” is free any more. It’s very expensive. It’s very expensive. And the press is saying what they have been told to say about this.  

Now, do I have proof of that? No. But I believe that what is being — what certainly the — the stories that were told — all about 9/11 were false. I mean, you take a look at the buildings falling down. They didn’t fall down because airplanes hit them. They fell down because of explosives went off inside. Demolition. Look at Building 7, for God’s sake. It didn’t fall down to its side. It didn’t fall to this direction or that direction; just like the two Towers.

 
When you look at the temperatures that you can create with fuel in a gas tank or a fuel tank of an airplane, and then you investigate the amount of heat that would be required to melt — to melt — the superstructure of the buildings that came tumbling down, when you put all of that together, the one thing that shows; It does not match the facts. What is it they do not want the public to know?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daNr_TrBw6E

They you got Physicists for 9/11 Truth, who produced many detailed technical analyses, as here:

http://physics911.net/missingwings/

It is inescapable that a MASSIVE, astonishing conspiracy happened on 9/11, one which HAD to have involved elements of our government, certainly including the FBI.  There is no other credible hypothesis.

Donald Trump is a “birther”–which means he has not renounced his reality testing in favor of compliance with a manufactured “reality”–so I wonder if he might be willing to become a “truther”, and put this mountain of lies on the map of ordinary, deluded Americans.

I am feeling less inclined to post.  This really is in some respects an alternative to living, even if I like to believe I sometimes say useful things.  But I’m having a bit of champagne (my $7 a bottle stuff still makes me happy, and consists in the only agreement I have ever had with Keynes, who, when asked if he had any regrets, said “I wish I had had more champagne”;  actually, early Keynes was honest, as in “The Economic Consequences of the Peace”; he just had an AHA moment when he realized that his people were Lenin’s people) and thought I’d opine a bit more today.

Damn, I have a shitload of opinions.  It’s tiring, and even if I am smart enough to be able to say reasonable things most of the time, the process underlying it has been compulsive and not healthy, not free.

Be that as it may, hundreds, perhaps thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Africans–I assume this disease will not only affect Zimbabwe–will lose their sources of income because of the bans on hunting, the bans on transport of animal “trophies” by most major airlines, and the increased costs in bribes that increased government control of the hunting industry will necessitate.  And enable.

Lions kill some 250 Africans annually.  Some 30 Americans die from lightning every year (this number has been decreasing for a century.  Here is what to me is an interesting article on it.)

How many Africans FEAR lions, though?  Are you afraid of sharks?  The US averages one shark attack fatality every two years.  What would it be like worrying about a shark every time you are standing at the bus stop or walking to the market?

My point–and I am making it poorly, in part because I am not entirely disinclined to empathize and even support those who found Cecil’s murder quite troubling and even traumatic–is that many humans–men, women, and children–will suffer because of the outrage over the killing of a 13 year old carnivorous beast.

I think those Africans who believe that Americans care more about their wildlife than them are on quite solid ground.  That is self evidently and obviously the case.  But I think they fail to remember that Americans only think about what comes on the magic box they put on a shrine in every room of most of their homes. If it’s not on the magic box, it doesn’t exist.  They don’t exist.

I have named this blog “Moderates United”.  I really do retain a “passion for the middle”, and that is what I am pursuing here.  I am not going to call the wailers wrong, nor deny the Africans the right to say their lives matter too.

I read this morning about the latest kick in the balls to the law and the principles of transparency and accountability: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/5/obama-stonewalls-seal-team-6-extortion-17-helicopt/

It seems like a week does not go by without some new news of Obama saying some form of FUCK YOU to the American people, our system, and the very idea that there should be any restrictions on his freedom of action.

In the case of SEAL Team 6, my strong suspicion is that they were set up, and that one of the Afghan commandos with them was Taliban, and that he shot off an RPG within the chopper.

We KNOW that the cleric at the funeral for our fallen sailors and airmen CURSED them: http://therightscoop.com/military-leaders-allowed-muslim-cleric-to-pray-at-funeral-for-seal-team-6-members-but-he-cursed-them-instead/

Imagine the mileage the complicit media could have got out of this if this had happened under Bush.  If ANY of Obama’s dozens of atrocities against sane and honest governance had happened under Bush.  They ran Alberto Gonzalez out of office–and I will remind people Hillary was one of the leaders of that charge–who had done NOTHING.  Eric Holder is complicit in MURDER, hundreds of them.

And the fucking idiots in America, the some 40% of people who still support him, fail to know ANY of this.  It isn’t reported to them, and they don’t seek it out.  They have some vague ideas about him being black, telegenic, and promising all sorts of shiny magical things to the faithful, and that all his failures are the result of nefarious villains who just want the rich to get richer.   Comic book stuff.  That is where we are at.

And I think our Founders were on solid ground when they only granted the right to vote to men of property.  After this requirement was ratified, our economy grew steadily, from 1789 until Jackson in the 1830’s, and we enjoyed, largely, political stability.  As far as I read, there were no predations upon the populace as a whole as a result of this system.  It was not abused.  The rich did not get richer by passing themselves one-sided laws.  Not that I have read.

Certainly, with the passage of years, one can see how this could happen, though.  That was a quite extraordinary generation, and decay is in the nature of time and being human.

But the principle first stipulated by the Greeks, that democracy can only survive until people figure out they can vote themselves other people’s money, remains quite true.  It has crashed Argentina and Greece (or will soon, there: they are incapable of learning; else, they would recall their own maxim), and put massive stress on most of the governments of Latin America, and much of the developing world.

They did not call it Socialism then: it was simply the greed mediocre people have for other people’s stuff.  What the Socialists did was put a pseudo-scientific patina on it, and philosophical underpinning based on godlessness.

The thing about demanding other people’s money is there is no end to it.  The logical end is an economic collapse, which hurts everyone, and mediocre people are simply not capable of foreseeing these things.  Alternatively, they DON’T CARE because even if they poison themselves too, at least they got the bastard on the hill.  Socialists rarely speak about making everyone wealthy.  They speak about “tax the rich, feed the poor, until there are no RICH no more.”  They forget that when there are no rich no more, there are ONLY poor.  Not for nothing  is Socialism called the creed of resentment.  There is literally NOTHING life-affirming or positive in it.  Charity is necessary as a palliative, but economic health is necessary to raise all boats.  Socialism serves neither.

A massive crash is obviously coming to the United States–because as a people we have been extraordinarily remiss in demanding our government act responsibly–but very few see it.  It may be 5-10 years, but the longer it takes, the worse it will be.  And all the news networks will track every cause but the actual one: the short-sighted stupidity of the American people, and of course their complicity in helping to hide from them the fact of their stupidity.

I continue to believe that only people who pay income taxes should be allowed to vote.  You should only get a seat at the table if you have money in the game.  This is fair.  This is common sense.  

How could one ever take credit for something one DIDN’T do?

Leads among Hispanic Republicans: http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2015/08/05/boom-univision-reluctantly-reports-donald-trump-leading-with-latino-republicans/

See, here is the thing: Leftists deal exclusively in cartoons and cartoonish caricatures.  They think of “hispanics” and “Mexicans”, and “illegal aliens” as blocs.  They themselves submit to the leadership of thought creators and directors, and assume that everyone must be like them, that all it takes to turn an entire group, like a school of fish, on a dime, once the new Talking Point, or meme is released and propagated, is direction.  You hate the people we tell you to hate.  You love the people we tell you to love.

But Hispanic-Americans are AMERICANS.  They are like everyone else, and they see the rot caused by people sneaking over here and taking jobs from people born here, and/or pushing down wages.  Leftists assume their primary allegiance must be to the group that is used to push identity politics.  Why?  I think it safe to say that most Hispanic-Americans–especially Cuban-Americans–love the Star Spangled Banner, too, and love and respect the freedoms we enjoy, and are more conscious than most of the responsibilities that go with that freedom.

The true racism/prejudice is that expressed by people who naively and arrogantly assume that all of any given “THEM” must be monolithic, and united around shared grievances and petty avarices.  This sloppy thinking is made inevitable by the Socialist rejection of Individualism.  Individuals exist.  Society does not.  Thus, they begin with an unanchored abstraction, and begin their infliction of violence on the truth from there.

I would like to stipulate as a general moral principle to which I can think of no exception that you never help anyone by making excuses for them.  All of us have within us compasses which tell us how to begin to move in the direction of wholeness, wellness, health, and thriving.  But we ignore this compass because the way is hard.  It doesn’t look hard, it IS hard.  This doesn’t matter.  Growth is why we are here.

I myself have had an enormous amount of painful growth I have endured, and continue to endure.  I get pain better than most.  But I dream of a day when no matter what somebody comes to me with, I can say I FEEL THAT.  I have been there.  And there is another side.  You can get through it.  I did.

I can’t imagine any rape or incest survivor, any soldier with PTSD, any refugee, has suffered more than me.  As an infant I feared daily that my mother was going to kill me, and I never really bonded with any adult growing up.  I never felt a sense of love and safety.  I entered life with severe PTSD, depression, pervasive anxiety, hopelessness, and a piss poor social support network.

And I think this is fucking great, because it makes me USEFUL.  I crawled on my hands and knees a thousand miles, and I got to the other side.

Returning to the thought, I would stipulate as a general principle that if you are not thriving, if you are not living as close to the life of your dreams as is possible for you, and if you are not working daily towards it, you have made excuses.

I have a tattoo on my left arm based on one of the Sets of Three John Wooden was raised with, modified slightly: “Don’t Whine, Don’t Complain, Don’t Make Excuses”, to which I added “Never Quit”.

This is indelible ink–or at least I choose to treat it as such.  It is a burden at times.  These are hard principles to live by, and I haven’t even come close.  But it is an absolute code, and a good one, and I think most of the problems in the world would be solved in short order if everyone lived by this code, and simply added curiosity.  That is the entirety of my moral system in a nutshell.

I write too much.  I actually need to be somewhere.  But it comforts me, and it helps me build the visions I need in order to learn how to hope.  And it is not unreasonable for me to suppose they do others good.  My struggles are not so very different from yours.  All of us, if we are lucky, have some serious shit to get through and learn from.

Edit: you know, it is pointless to compare miseries, and it occurs to me I perhaps being grandiose comparing myself to others.  Suffice it to say my difficulties have led to more understanding, but that every situation and every person offer the opportunity for MORE understanding.  Comparing joys to joys or miseries to miseries is like comparing the breeze on a mild Tuesday to the breeze on a mild Wednesday.  Why?

A man in  KKK outfit on one side, and a caption reading: Murders of black men since 1981: 0. (Michael Donald appears to be the last recorded lynching).

And a picture of a group of black youth and men.  Murders of black men since 1981: 170,000 (or whatever: I multiplied 34 by 5,000.  I suspect the number is higher).

We live in a world where the truth is Verboten.

I will add to this a video everyone should watch: https://video-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hvideo-xap1/v/t43.1792-2/10939799_820070614707179_399756170_n.mp4?efg=eyJybHIiOjE1MDAsInJsYSI6MjgwMiwidmVuY29kZV90YWciOiJsZWdhY3lfaGQifQ%3D%3D&rl=1500&vabr=510&oh=e6dfd7deaaa8730e341a103a7e2b7eef&oe=55BF88B1

That’s the best I can for a link, for which I apologize.

“Can’t is not a part of your vocabulary”.  Compare and contrast this basic mindset with the notion that black people somehow suffer from this abstract lack of “white privilege”.  What the fuck is this, other than a mindset, on one side, that the world owes you something, and on the other that you have an absolute right, and responsibility, and privilege to make your own way?

Can we really speak about a “lack of opportunity” when 40% of black kids fail to finish their free educations by dropping out of high school?  Access to learning was a key goal of both black activists like Stephen Douglass and of socialists of all sorts.  They won.  They succeeded.

Imagine if her parents had made excuses for this girl.  She would be a failure, depressed, and bitter, much like the people you can see huddled outside the corner liquor store in just about any ghetto in this country.

That says nothing about being BLACK per se.  Actual Africans don’t act like that.  It says everything about culture, and mindset, and no serious person can claim that the goal of the Left is not, and has not long been, to reduce all of us to dependent children, and that they merely succeeded more, and sooner, in the black communities, because of the  propaganda past actual racism made possible.

The answer is not to put propagandistic shows about “stupid white people” on TV, but to DEMAND MORE.  Graduate school.  Don’t knock anybody up or get knocked up.  Dump the baggie pants and stop dropping your G’s.

In my personal opinion the reason Cosby got taken out is he was saying this stuff.  If you keep in mind Cecil the Lion overwhelming coverage of the Planned Parenthood atrocities, then you recall that the media can direct people’s attention in any direction they want.  What happened with Cosby is not that the charges escalated, but that they GOT COVERAGE.  Why?  He was fucking with the narrative of black failure.

Healing dissociation is an odd thing.  You kind of merge into and out of “reality”, which is to say a sense of connection with, of participation with, the present, the past, and the future.  You really have none of those when you are gone.

I pendulate back and forth, taking small sips.  Progress seems to be happening.  And it occurs to me that I at least–but I suspect most of us–are deeply fixed in the middles of our being, and not open to qualitative growth for most of our lives, which is why the metaphor of the child is so apt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn2z19QnEfQ

I was drinking when I posted this.  My intent was not so much to communicate the idea, as the song, which I had not heard and really enjoyed.  Freddie Mercury (real name Farrokh Bulsara) had an amazing voice.  Did you know he was a Parsi by birth, and raised in the Sultanate of Zanzibar (now Tanzania)?


I think most people now know Brian May became an astrophysicist.  I found this funny:

 May appeared on the 700th episode of The Sky at Night hosted by Sir Patrick Moore, along with Chris Lintott, Jon Culshaw, Prof. Brian Cox, and the Astronomer Royal Martin Rees who on departing the panel, told Brian May, who was joining it, “I don’t know a scientist who looks as much like Isaac Newton as you do”.

Here’s another good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PItMuGp39Q 

Turns out blogging is part of my life.

Gibbon’s snark with respect to Christianity would, I suspect, amuse those congenitally opposed to it.  I am not one of those people, but he does make the excellent point that the two new things Christianity brought were fear and radical intolerance.

Fear, of eternal damnation, which was assumed to be the lot of most of humanity.

Intolerance, of anyone unwilling to accept this idea, because of the FEAR that their ideas would lead to apostasy and then Hell.

Now, the Romans and Jews really didn’t think too much about an after-life.  Nor did either group feel any need to proselytize.  As polytheists, the Romans were always happy to add another altar; and as de facto xenophobes, the Jews simply wanted to be left alone.  They did not want to convert anyone, or add new people.  No need.

Only Christianity adds this fear of eternal damnation, which itself makes intolerance a virtue, since no one who fails to become a Christian has any hope of salvation.

All this is quite easy to miss if you simply read the scriptures in red, talking about turning the other cheek, and the Sermon on the Mount.

And if you REALLY think about it, Christianity and Islam are morphologically very similar, with the difference that Islam is less hypocritical.  Both are imbued with the notion that no one who fails to adopt their creed can expect anything but literally unending misery in the next and most important life.  Both are driven by fear more than love, even if Christianity nominally talks more about love.

And both religions have burst out into the world through aggressive violence.  Islam is perhaps more obvious, in the wars it fought, the Jizya, the Dhimmis, the Sword.

But why do they speak Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America?  Was Christianity not an important part of the cultural imperialism of Europe?  Why are there Christians in Nigeria?  Kenya?  China? Vietnam?  Australia?

As I say from time to time–and I seem to recall saying it relatively recently–I cannot partake of a religion based on a human sacrifice demanded by an allegedly merciful and benevolent God.  I am quite willing to accept a high spiritual status for Jesus, but not for those who listened to Him, who garbled His words, and who misunderstood nearly everything he taught.

I say again as well that contextualizing all this is a quite interesting exercise.  Within the presumed lifetime of the disciples, the Temple was destroyed again, and with it the ability to perform the sacrifices commanded in what I will call the Pentateuch (Talmud, Torah?  I’m not literate enough).   A new revelation was needed.

And as Gibbon notes, the entire idea of an after-life, of heaven, was quite new to the Jews.  Do you pick the religion that promises nothing in that regard, or the one which grants eternal bliss?  They were used to an avenging and protective God, but only in this life.

Gibbon even recites a version of Pascal’s Wager, which he assumes–likely correctly–exercised among the Romans of antiquity an authoritative force, at least among those of a more thoughtful persuasion.

Science, I say, can be our means for testing metaphysical claims, and science can be our means for developing rituals and behaviors which further our growth as animals on the way to being angels via the dangerous path of being human.