Spirituality and Troubles

There are many troubles involved with whatever you want to call "spiritual development" which I will briefly describe as follows: to become more authentically who we are beyond culture, habit, conditioning and so on. Spirituality fully pursued demands shattering our illusions and our stories (about ourselves and life in general)--not by rejecting them but seeing them as not who we are. My biography or resume is not who I am and does not capture my being or my consciousness. We mainly live fragmented lives and create a fragmented self that reacts to conditions--and certainly that self, known as the ego, is necessary for our survival and orienting ourselves over time and space in this world but it is not who we are. Through socialization we "forget" that this is a veneer and does not reflect the deeper self which, since our culture (for a variety of reasons) is deeply hostile to. We tend to not be aware of our deeper self and we also tend to reject, usually unconsciously depth itself.

I remember reading Plato in my youth and being struck by one of his dialogues where he asserts that beauty actually is the stirring or a memory of when we were at one with God. Every bit of beauty whether it is seeing it in nature, a person, a situation, or in ourselves is, essentially, a connection with God or with absolute and pure consciousness. So Plato showed us that beauty itself is our link to the transcendent and divine.

Now here is the surprise. The good thing about trouble in our lives is that they fuel our awakening. They are the raw material in our lives that can move us off our narrow view of life. My most "spiritual" moments were during times of tribulation. So trouble and our experience of beauty both lead us to the divine or connection with a force that is very deep and essential.

I advise people spiritually and the greatest problem I see is that we can't seem to see the good inside of us due to all the negative judgments we have about ourselves. We get stuck on how fucked-up our lives are because we have failed ourselves and our loved ones. Yet, in many ways, it is the flaws within people that display some deeper more authentic self that may be the coolest thing about them.

To put it another way that freaks people out: maybe we are good just the way we are! Obviously this idea is very revolutionary and most people seem to have a hard time even entertaining the idea. The reason for this is that they would have to unpack all the socialization and conditioning of an entire lifetime. It appears essential that we are "damned" unless we are "saved" either through a religious conversion or working out more, or achieving more. This means something important. We are "schooled", in our culture, to judge ourselves and others. We don't have a "right" to be here--we have to "earn" our right. We have to fit into the highly chaotic and confusing social mores that ultimately seem to come down to status and money but are interwoven with old fragments of traditional virtues often obsolete or irrelevant as fragments whereas when taken as part of the entire set of cultural assumption of a long-past age they make sense. Strict patriarchal values made sense in the age of my youth but today work at cross-purposes with our strange transitional blend of feminism and patriarchy. What used to be sometimes obnoxious way we were taught to deal with attractive women in the past is now seen as "sexual harassment." If I make a comment on a woman on how nice her dress looks or her beautiful eyes, often the result of an artistic way or applying makeup, I risk being rude. So fragments of the old fashioned virtues of opening doors for a woman could be taken as rudeness, or not opening doors may also be taken as rudeness. Our social mores are replete with this sort of confusion so the best policy is just to avoid socialization.

Suppressing our pain, anger, anxiety can be a major problem when we decide, in whatever fashion, to begin a deeper spiritual life. Many will go around being "spiritual" and getting upset with themselves when they stray into negative emotions because most of the "feel good" New Age spiritual paths ignore negativity and want us to transcend this so we think "positive" thoughts all the time to overwhelm our negativity. Actually, we need to embrace our negativity and allow it to transform through the alchemy of love. Affirmations are good only if we are willing to face the internal resistance of negative attitudes and thoughts our egos are reluctant to acknowledge. I'm spiritual and have gone through decades of spiritual practises so after I become furious at something I feel embarrassed and feel I've failed. No, I have not failed--I have allowed anger to emerge and had the golden opportunity to carefully feel and accept my anger and, because I'm not suppressing it I can now more clearly see its origin and transform straw into gold. Feeling I have some image to uphold with not only other people but myself is precisely to be ruled by Satan (the enemy of wholeness). If we suppress that emotion it will come back to us again and again often in very different forms--one day it could be anger over some trivial thing, another day it could be an event or a person in our lives that pushes our buttons. This energy can manifest in any internal or external event until we accept it and delve deeper.

The overall "new-age" idea of spirituality as something you "achieve" is not necessarily a bad thing. Effort is better than no effort when it comes to this sort of work. Creation is saying "yes" to what is--I think the "yes" is actually an act of creation. You create a structure for yourself where there is safety, acceptance--the whole world becomes yours. I say yes to my twisted parts and they slowly relax--shouldn't that be obvious? When a healthy person does something they think they've done wrong and you hug them and accept them--what happens? The person gets heart energy and courage emerges naturally. When we embrace each other unconditionally, when we listen to each other unconditionally that's a little bit of Heaven for both people involved in that moment. That doesn't preclude conflict and hard words but all this is done within the House of Yes which is actually the Kingdom of Heaven--it is Heaven because eternal life is the ultimate "Yes"! 

The Tyranny of Algorithms

It's hard to be a human in this culture. Nearly every truly powerful force is nudging us or shoving us in the direction of being mechanical beings who only seem able to deal directly with the surface of life. Data and algorithms rule. Data is the breakdown of reality into flatness--it takes the multiverse we live in and crushes it into an unrecognizable pancake--even if you don't believe in a multiverse you will agree that data and software cannot create the full-spectrum experience of life human beings are heirs to.

Through the use of algorithms a low-bandwidth reality out of multiple bits of data is being built. To put it another way, reality is recreated in a simpler more controllable way that enables the authorities to monitor and control every aspect of life and do its best to discourage high-bandwidth and more funky lives. Soon, as robots take over more of life we will have artificial programmable sex robots. The idea is that technology has become the medium that creates life out of ideas about life. Life itself is thus defeated.

We are now living in a society that has a highly detailed dossier on each individual in the USA and probably many more societies where none of us has anywhere to escape the bureaucracy--and, indeed, that's where we are headed--doesn't matter whether it's a government or corporate bureaucracy--it is now in the process of becoming all one. Google, Facebook, NSA, and all the security services all will soon have the same information and the same dossiers with some minor changes in meta-data and algorithms depending on the purpose of that bureau. I have no "solution" to this problem. If something is in a database, and this includes our medical files, it can be hacked or accessed by the security services because they are increasingly uninterested in the rule of law and appear, like their corporate comrades in arms, to worship power and have the muscle to enforce that power.

Creating a machine-oriented culture has as its main agenda to de-humanize culture by making machine virtues more important than human ones. Practicality, efficiency, materialism, predictability, conformity, and control, control, control are the final goal of all this. This certainly helps the ruling class but I'm guessing the machines will eat them in the end.

I'm not going to criticize the scientific revolution, the growth of a technological society and all the rest of it. It is what it is and it has gotten us to where we are and who we are. Indeed, this world we live in was pre-figured by, most famously, by Francis Bacon and later by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust. It was "in the cards" so to speak that we would arrive to this point in our history. Many of us and maybe, though it may be a stretch, most of us know that "something" is wrong with our current arrangements. Why? We are experiencing an epidemic of anxiety, depression, drug addiction and, in fact, addictions of all kinds whether gambling, sex, or binge-watching or binge-eating or just playing out some repeating family or personal drama. People of the past ritics on the left and right have, over the past few decades, warned us of the results of our tendency to be seduced by technology and consumerism which go hand-in-hand.

When we move our affections from people to consumer items a serious shift occurs inside of us. We give, in our minds and in the culture, a status to mechanical devices and objects that goes beyond the things in themselves. We move beyond using objects, tools, technology to solve particular problems and, instead, use the objects to simply to use them. I stay on my phone simply because its there, it's easy, it's there and I can accumulate images and information just to do it. I do sometimes use the internet for research but mostly I use it simply to try and justify, back-up my own beliefs or I use it to cover wars and political events much as I would watch a sporting event. Am I learning anything new? Not really--just passing the time. Technology is perfect for just passing the time without solidly engaging into something coherent--my involvement is almost necessarily incoherent, confused, and an escape from my own frustrating life. I also know, very well, that this tool COULD be used to accomplish quite a lot yet my will is so weak in the face of it that I lose sight of my purpose or purposes in life. We are floundering in an ocean of confusion and paradox and we don't care anymore because I can play a game, watch a video about almost anything I can imagine. I can find something that would meet any possible sexual fantasy and many that I didn't know even existed. I can find pictures and information on even minor celebrities and their dysfunctional lives. I can go find out trivia in almost any area of life. I can find magic spells, mantras to cast out demons, I can find out anything I want about religion, war, gaming cheats and so on fairly quickly. I am, in many ways,  a kind of magician with great powers yet, I feel powerless and adrift.

This is what the decline of humanity looks like until we learn to use machines, technology, algorithms and data for making human beings more aware and happier rather than control, control, control. 

Beauty in the Breakdown.

As I look around at our culture I see that we are in the middle of a collective nervous breakdown and many of us feel this but few of us will ever actually say so. Still, it is a good thing,
as the lyric goes "there's beauty in the breakdown." What do I mean? I see our collective issues, our desperate attempt to return to "normal" to reverse the 2016 election as mindless attempts to resist the inevitable. Donald Trump IS America! His qualities, his massive break with the values of Western Civilization our obvious. The human beings he's chosen to run our government are completely at odds with Western values of reason, science, and dialogue. Trump is a crude gangster who thumbs his nose at everyone because he has money and, now, theoretically, has at his disposal the power to throw a monkey wrench in the entire established world-system carefully crafted by fair means and foul to act as a collective structure for the emergent world culture. It appears we are going back to the mentality of the 1930s in Europe. And we Americans seem to like this. We want things to breakdown--we sense there's beauty in it but, at the same time, we have no idea what follows and we still resist change.

However, this is all completely unsustainable for our own country. The rest of the world can no more indulge the USA in its absurd fantasies that are at the heart of our national religion of "American Exceptionalism." The USA was once seen as the bastion of order and sobriety. While certain events were kind of scary things changed after the 2000 election. Brick after brick was dismantled by three Presidents until today we have a caricature of an Empire we don't even admit we have despite the fact we have troops in maybe 150+ countries and military bases in 79. In Germany, which is basically still under US occupation we have 179 bases currently an 109 in Japan. We are described in the media Narrative as a country with "interests" that span the globe but we have no pretension, they tell us, of ruling the globe. This despite the fact that ruling the globe is actually considered a "defense" of the "homeland." Without aggressive domination of the entire planet, they say in so many words, we are vulnerable to "threats" these threats are what exactly? Seldom are threats spelled out other than in vague language. But since I'm familiar with how people in the National Security State think (out of their own mouths) they say that either the US dominates the world or the Chinese do and the world is better off if we dominate. It never enters into the mind of people in the National Security State that we could live in a world where power is balanced and ruled by international law. The USA, of all the countries in the world, is the greatest scofflaw of international law. This is reality and I can point to treaties and laws that the USA has broken without apology over many decades. The US accepts the notion of international law but only if it applies to other countries who are not vassals states.

What does this have to do with a national breakdown? Our behavior towards the outside world is critical to understanding our culture. We can also look at the application of law within the USA. For many years the most obvious bit of "scofflawing" is our absurd immigration system. For decades the US has allowed "illegal" immigrants into the country in order to supply cheap labor for capitalists and oligarchs and undermine native born working class people. Both parties have been complicit in this and have been amply rewarded by the rich. The Republicans, at the end of the day, continued to not enforce immigration laws or enforce them only to the degree that immigrants would live in fear and therefore not complain when they are sexually harassed, not complain when employers short-changed them or stole their labor. At the same time, Republicans pretended to be outraged about illegal immigrants and wildly swung their arms about and did nothing. The Democrats used the issue to solidify their support among Hispanic Americans by showing they were "sensitive" and "caring" of immigrants in general including illegals. It was a lie and is a lie--Democrats didn't care and don't care now--they're only interested in the solid Hispanic vote just as Republicans are interested in the white working class vote and once they get in power they do little or nothing to change anything.

I've talked about the corruption of the System in education, the "justice system" (money=justice), the military industrial complex, health-care an so on. Each major sector is an example of rampant corruption and lies. None of these major systems has much interest (as systems) in the well-being of citizens only in the well-being of the rich. While this  has been the tendency in the USA there has been a balance between the needs of the rich and powerful and the needs of the rest of us. Well, that's no longer the case. The system exists only to make sure the most powerful get the most loot and the rest of us only get enough to keep us from rebelling. This began to change in 2016 when Trump was elected instead of Bernie Sanders who would have been elected had the Democratic Party not stolen the primaries from him through, frankly, fraud, deceit and manipulating ballots and counts. To put it simply, what the state says is real, is not real. What the media Narrative is today is almost completely false and intended to be false to mislead each of us so we don't trust our lying eyes.

All this filters down to our personal lives. This is something very few people seem to understand. There is "politics" and it has no connection to culture, our own personal lives, it is just a chaotic bunch of stuff most citizens flat out refuse to think clearly about because they feel unconnected with it all. And it is for this reason we are no longer a republic but an empire. That means we have stopped being citizens and are now subjects to the state and the major corporations who are, for all intents and purposes, part of the State apparatus. We don't even recognize that our lives spent at "work" is when we are "subject" to the direct rule of oligarchs. We have few freedoms at work. If they tell us to shut up, we have to shut up. They order us to do stuff and we  have no choice other than drag our feet or, as many of us do, actively sabotage the corporation we work for. Most people do not feel engaged in their job and actually believe that this is ok and "normal." It maybe normal but it is decidedly unhealthy and contributes to the epidemic of depression, anxiety and addiction which we now seem to accept as a matter of course--that too is "normal" now.

Now myth generates values and if our myths are confused and distorted and directly contradictory confusion and destructive behavior both personal and collective results. I believe the first toxic aspect of our framework is actually also our most positive. Americans tend to believe that we should always put a smile on our face and think positively no matter how dark appearances are. Yet when this is a clear value and combined with a lack of training in critical thinking, this results in a culture of denial. We pass over and don't think about matters that seem negative or out of our control. While this may have positive results in our daily life it also slowly dumbs us down. We stop catching the contradictions in what powerful people say and only hear what sounds positive. We stop looking at the consequences of our actions and expect other to do the same. We don't want to remedy injustice we just want people who suffer to shut up and are considered "cry-babies" for complaining about racism, sexual assault and so on. Yet, the data is clear--millions of women have been raped and millions of dark-skinned people have been assaulted and harmed by physically, emotionally and systematically (we only have to look at racial discrimination in loans).

The second toxic aspect of our lives is that we are focused on "success" and so anything about us that does not appear "successful" (whether it does or not)--being a "loser" is the worst possible insult in the USA. Lack of material success is considered a sign of immorality. People who have endured horrendous conditions are expected to "win" despite their horror. When one out of thousand seems to do well that is pointed to as proof that those who did not "make it" just didn't work "hard" enough. If a person who was born a millionaire makes a few million more by receiving the best food, education, and access to capital they are still praised for being "successful." There is almost no sense of collective success. You see this in sports. While team sports like basketball are clearly dependent on good teamwork the media lauds, mainly, individual success, lionizing "stars" in any league while underplaying their weaknesses. We have a star-system in movies, music, and all the arts. It's the same star system in corporations. While many professionals receive good salaries for being good at following orders and solving problems it is the CEO who makes the big bucks--on average about 350 times the salary of the average employee and that does not include perks and stock options so the number is much higher. This multiple times more than what other countries have as a normal practice. Success of an enterprise is seen as a collective effort.

The third toxic aspect is the aversion for community and refusal to consider actually reforming our system of government. The reaction to our increasingly corrupt government is not to try and fix it but to not only increase the corruption but limit its scope in favor of allowing private corporations to take over regulating themselves. The reasoning is always that the motivation of making money is the only valid motivation. Though social science and even neuro-science shows that we are deeply cooperative beings and money is only a prime motivator in periods of great scarcity the American cultural elite and, therefore, the average person refuses to believe it.

Finally, the fourth and perhaps most important toxic aspect of our culture is what has now become a militant anti-reason, anti-science, anti-intellectual and, even more dramatically, an anti-compassionate culture that has become tribal. This includes people on the left, right and center--in fact those classifications don't even make any sense as currently constructed yet they endure because we are confused and refuse to use the tools at our disposal to clarify our confusion. Even the sophisticated tools we have developed based, fundamentally, on advances made 50-80 years ago are not being used to solve our collective problems and, instead, are mainly used to increase the wealth of a couple of million people. In social situations bringing up ideas about life, meaning, philosophy the implications of events and discoveries and, above all, politics and religion, is considered rude. At times, men are tempted to start these conversations and you see women, who still see themselves as guardians of social mores, start darting their eyes about and try to signal to the guys to shut the fuck up. Women tend to do this, not because they are any more anti-intellectual (in fact the opposite if often the case) but because they know feelings will be hurt and they are right. Why? Because our social ability to engage in civilized (non-hostile) discussions has rapidly degenerated over the years whether people are college educated or not.

How do we remedy our situation? By waking up in every way that you know how to do and watch carefully what is actually going on that you fear looking at--and by following the song lyrics partially presented (by Frou-Frou):

"Let Go"

drink up baby doll
Are you in or are you out?
Leave your things behind
'Cause it's all going off without you
Excuse me too busy you're writing your tragedy
These mishaps
You bubble-wrap
When you've no idea what you're like

[Chorus:]
So, let go, let go
Jump in
Oh well, what you waiting for?
It's all right
'Cause there's beauty in the breakdown
So, let go, let go
Just get in
Oh, it's so amazing here
It's all right
'cause there's beauty in the breakdown

It gains the more it gives
And then it rises with the fall
So hand me that remote
Can't you see that all that stuff's a sideshow?
Such boundless pleasure
We've no time for later
Now you can't await
your own arrival
you've twenty seconds to comply

Is This What You Want?

I often expect people to pay attention to things that might affect them--like climate change. If the scientific consensus is that climate change is real shouldn't we at least consider the possibilities involved and accept that maybe, beings scientists and all, they might be on the right track? If they are then what about our children and grandchildren--what kind of world are we leaving them? Do we even care? I will actually attempt to answer that question.

The answer is that we don't care about the collective "we" very much if at all--but we do care about our own individual progeny but only as separate beings unconnected from the collective. To be precise, we care about their schooling, their relationships, their meals, their future jobs, their general happiness but I know very, very few people that worry about their children as possible victims of  climate change or nuclear war or even financial collapse as a result of, say, and overwhelmingly large national debt. Any of these public or larger scale problems are almost completely ignored by parents and act as if those problems don't exist. Of course, people know these problems exist but they feel they are powerless to do anything about these things but even more importantly, they don't feel they have the ability to understand what is going on because it all seems so complex.

I believe the following: most parents don't care enough to make efforts to deal with or understand what is going on around them. As much danger as war or climate change may be the lack of confidence in being able to deal with these "big" issues is a deeper tragedy. We seem to lack the education and culture that would help us understand the world around us. To put it another way, our culture from childhood to old age is based on promoting fantasies rather than knowledge, science, reason, and information about how our bodies and psyches actually function. We are largely ignorant of almost everything truly important unless we are professionals in the field of medicine or psychology--and all this despite the fact we are living in a time of maximum information where incredible amounts of information and data are available yet seem distant because so few people are interested in presenting the information and their implications of that information to the masses and without that close connection to this material people feel adrift in paradoxes and puzzles.

At some point a culture needs to define itself and start asking questions like what do we want? The answer is usually money but is that enough. Or the answer is "freedom" which, as we are moving solidly into a police state, is a joke. We have freedom, if we have money, to buy goods and services but why? Is life about just having a few beers and watching sports? Is life about just "hanging out"? Is that as deep as we want to go? Of course, so far, the answer seems to be yes but the result of all this is that we are rapidly becoming a highly belligerent and dysfunctional country with a rising death rate, an explosion of drug addictions (legal and illegal) and increases in poverty despite an expanding job market and money flowing only to the top earners. We have to realize that this leads to a new sort of feudalism. If the trends continue as they have since the late 1970s we will have a few oligarchs with retinues and servants a "middle class" of professionals like doctors, lawyers, mind-control experts (used to be called Madison Avenue), fashionistas, celebrities and Hollywood riff-raff, bought politicians, accountants and so on and the rest will be drug dealers, prostitutes, bartenders, wait staff, nurses, retail staff, all who are surviving day to day by whatever hustle they can find servicing the privileged with ever increasing desperation. Do we really want a future like that? We need to decide. In fact, even that arrangements sounds good compared to the climate going into a positive feedback loop or world-politics becoming even more dominated by war and even nuclear war.

So--do we really care about our children? Or are they merely markers on a board for our egos? I say, as a culture, we are acting both publicly and privately as if nothing else matters than our ego, our status, our ability to live as hedonistic a lifestyle as possible and indulging in endless fantasies the further remove us from our families, our society, and our Mother Earth. Each of us has to decide the direction they want to go in--and not deciding is a decision to go along to get along. Once we were called the land of the free and home of the brave and we have been heading, for decades, in precisely the opposite direction. We have become decadent and corrupt in almost every sphere and that's why we hungrily yearn for whatever addiction will numb that awareness including the love of militant ignorance that allows the authorities to load us up with more bullshit than Herr Goebbels ever dreamt of. 

The Revolving Coup d'Etat

The movie Seven Days in May was published in 1962 and made into a film in 1963. The story was about a military-led coup d'état carried out by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The issue was fairly simple, the Chairman was highly critical publically of a treaty between the Russians and ourselves to end the Cold War. The military were vehemently opposed fearing the Russians would cheat because, well, they were Russians--the same mentality we see today in the power-elite.

All this followed, in my view, one of the most critically important speeches ever made by any sitting President, President Dwight Eisenhower's Farewell Address in it he accurately sees the pattern emerging of not just the Military-Industrial-Complex but the entire complex of government activities related to war. Ike wanted peace while recognizing the need for a strong military. But the U.S. military and its associated endeavors gradually eclipsed and went beyond civilian control and became an independent force. I believe that Eisenhower struggled with his Generals because it is clear to anyone who looks at the history of the next Administration that they had every intention to launch a holocaust beyond the imagining of anyone. Eisenhower was directly responsible for balancing the right-wing generals and fascist anti-communists against reality. There is always a strong element of fantasy within American society that wants to see the world in terms of "good guys" (us) and "bad guys" (them--usually Russians). Eisenhower dealt with reality in balancing generals, countries, national leaders against the need to defeat Germany in a war. He was what we call today that rare breed--a "realist." In his Address, he often used "balance" and that is what a realist does. He or she takes all matters into consideration and tries to balance the many forces at work none of which are "good" or "bad" in the eyes of a true realist. All of us are capable of evil and good it depends on our circumstances as science in recent years has shown conclusively--it is not our genes it is our circumstances that can trigger genes if that person is seriously stressed. A realist knows this intuitively because he or she has made a close study of human beings.

For Ike, Russia was a threat and a rival--but it was also a ruling elite that had factions that could be used, as he did, to make a stable peace which he and Khrushchev were able to fabricate. President Kennedy came into office pretending to be the more hawkish candidate because he understood that the propaganda in the media would work in favor of belligerence as it almost always does. But once in office he turned around quite a lot. He became, like Ike a realist. Two things opened his eyes. First, was the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba which featured Cuban refugees who were either part of the highly corrupt (run by U.S. organized crime) government in Cuba that Castro overthrew or among the middle classes who profited from the dollars that came in from the gambling and prostitution rings that dominated the Cuban economy at the time. These people were willing to form an invasion force to "invade" Cuba and were told by the CIA that they would, if they established a beachhead in Cuba, aided by U.S. bombing and other help. The attack itself, the CIA told them, would force President Kennedy into acting--he would not dare leave "freedom fighters" languishing on a beach or what they viewed as an evil regime who cut a serious hole in the pockets of Meyer Lansky and others (remember the CIA and organized crime had a close working relationship starting with the precurson OSS during WWII). 

Kennedy realized what was happening and refused to use the U.S. military to help the stranded Cubans and they were arrested or killed. Eisenhower, for whatever reason may have not blocked prior CIA overthrow attempts most notably Iran in 1953 and Gautemala in the following year. This deeply shocked not just the CIA but the Pentagon. Later, in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis came and the U.S. Joint Chiefs recommended that a first strike against the Soviet Union be launched in which the calculus was that 150 million people would be slaughtered and on 40 million Americans would die--these monsters actually thought that was a "victory" and why not--they would be deep inside bunkers. The writer of Seven Days in May knew this as did Stanley Kubrick when he made Dr. Strangelove around the same time. Kennedy, rather than launch a strike, sought to negotiate and of all his  around him only his brother Robert supported negotiation. The negotiation with Khrushchev worked and the two leaders became pen-pals writing each other heartfelt and beautiful letters concerning ending the Cold War, obviously this scared both of them. 

The failure to kill of the Soviet Union and firmly establish the USA as the sole superpower, i.e., ruler of the world, was unacceptable to the Pentagon and the CIA and there followed a campaign of right-wing hatred for Kennedy in the press. He was seen, by the ignorant public, propagandized through years of anti-Russian propaganda (now revived by "the left") to do "something" about Kennedy. I believe in November of 1963 a conspiracy led by the CIA and the Pentagon probably using assets and assistance from some organized crime leaders , the Secret Service and the Dallas mayor and Police Department and, also, in coordination with then Vice-President Johnson pulled off the first American Coup d'état in US history. There was a failed attempt against President Roosevelt but it was foiled at the last moment by General Smedly Butler. 

Thus the Cold War continued and Johnson, I believe, against his better judgement agreed to give the military a smaller war against the Vietnamese people and continued Kennedy's program for détente just in a much slower way and felt emboldened to do something about Civil Rights. I think the plotters agreed to "allow" Johnson to pursue those policies in exchange for their war which proved to be a big money-maker for the Military-Industrial-Complex and a source of rapid promotion for the officer corps in the Pentagon. They may not have had the Russian Empire is ruins but money talks and bullshit walks and they were happy.

The plotters, most of which we can now call "the Deep State" (DS) because no President from JFK onward could rule without the approval of the DS, realized that the Vietnam War was growing increasingly unpopular and public order was being disrupted by hippies, left-radicals, and chaos in the ghettos began to fret because Senator Eugene McCarthy had forced Johnson out of re-election, and, later, emboldened Senator Robert Kennedy to make his bid for power which was highly successful and it became clear than another Kennedy would probably beat Nixon in the 1968 election putting their rule in jeopardy and opening up a can of worms, not just when he was elected, but because Kennedy looked like he was going to revive populism and democratic-socialism and ally himself with Martin Luther King who was a Marxist and critic of capitalism and the permanent war state that the U.S. had become and still is. In 67-8 King had decided to put together an alliance of non-whites, poor whites, and the anti-war movement to create a solid political force. If you'd been around in those days you would know that this was a real possibility and that it would upend U.S. political culture even more than the hated Roosevelt did. Kennedy would have destroyed the CIA and their allies and reformed the Pentagon. This could not stand so both Kennedy and King had to die and they did within a month or so thus beginning the destruction of the authentic left in the USA after the FBI's Cointelpro program of "dirty tricks" finished off the left and divided it from their roots--the rest the peculiarities of identity-politics did the rest as we can see today.

The second coup d'état occurred during the Watergate period as a result of Nixon's interest in the Kennedy assassination(s). Watergate was in view of several writers, most notably Russ Baker in his book Family of Secrets and Roger Stone, a close friend of Nixon who I knew and had some deep discussions with in the 80s. The "burglars" were mainly senior operatives of the CIA who put take across the door to the DNC headquarters in the Watergate complex so that the tape could be seen by the security guard could see it--many more details too numerous to go into but you can read Baker's book for more info. It wasn't just Nixon's efforts to uncover secrets on JFK or UFOs, it was also the fact Nixon was determined to end Vietnam and make peace with China, accelerate the movement to end the Cold War with Russia and his tacit support for socialist-leaning policies like a guaranteed annual income and wage and price controls and, above all, his wanting the Presidency to make the decisions, not the Deep State. I believe Nixon was stupid and did not see what was going on until too late.

I watched, while on vacation in Provincetown, Nixon's speech through a shop-window and realized while watching this that I had just seen a coup d'état. Now, I was convinced, along with everyone else, that Nixon deserved impeachment yet, my intuition (which is pretty good) told me this was a coup. I forgot about that until I began to be more interested in the subject after reading Baker's book and saw clearly why my intuition was correct. 

A small coup occurred during the Iranian hostage crisis due to two events. The first was the Deep State's sabotage of the attempted rescue of the hostages thus discrediting President Carter who everyone in Washington which was now aligned completely with the Deep State hated. In addition, the Reagan campaign through the work of William Casey, later Reagans CIA director, to make a deal with the Iranian government that in exchange of not releasing the hostages until after the election, the Reagan administration would agree to re-arm Iran these things were later revealed during the Iran-Contra investigation which stalled badly but that's another story. This guaranteed Reagan's win.

The third coup d'état was, as most people suspect, the events of 9/11. This event followed the publication of the Project for a New American Century's famous manifesto in which stated that, to paraphrase, that U.S. society had few things to unify it and was in danger of splitting apart along cultural, tribal, racial and regional lines and/or descend into rampant hedonism. The only thing that could make the country continue in a healthy way was a common purpose. So far so good--but that common purpose was, they believed, a global war to dominate the world. They believed, as many did in Washington since WWII, that "someone" would dominate the world since these people believed that life was about dominance/submission, and it would be better for the world if it were us and not the Chinese. This idea was not only the central point of the neoconservative movement that authored the document but of liberals as well--the difference was only in method. The neocons believed we should dominate the world through aggressive military action around the world and the liberals thought it should be more gradual mainly through economic and cultural (soft-power) means with military activity only when "easy" to do. 

Within the first day the culprit for the 9/11 attacks was named, Osama Bin Laden, without investigation, without evidence--it was just announced by an unknown person, presumably an intel officer, who stated that's who did it and, after that, all the networks and media state it as fact very much in the same way that John Kennedy's murderer was quickly established as Lee Harvey Oswald without evidence (there is still no evidence that he did it or was even in the place they said he was). It is enough, during the rule of the Deep State for the media to announce something from the operatives that run the State that something is true and then it's true. Any doubt, any contrary evidence is excluded. Any journalist or academic or official is killed or destroyed should he or she actively dissent from the dictats coming out of Washington. There is absolutely no evidence for the government's story on those events whether it is who was in the airplanes, or how the buildings fell--only conjecture usually based on clearly fabricated evidence which the books I recommend will clearly show and have never been contradicted seriously since there was NO forensic-based investigation of the events--the actual "investigation" was a whitewash like the Iran-contra scandal with Lee Hamilton presiding over both "investigations" -- you can read the report yourself and the evidence for the story is simply not there--most of the testimony was about covering asses as I saw very quickly during the hearings and turned them off knowing Washington body language and symbolic language since my life has centered around Washington. Read for yourself the sources I will site below. 

9/11 was not really a coup d'état exactly. It was a direct assault on culture. It create now a wall-to-wall from left-to-right and around the block story that is clearly and obviously false that is not written very deep into the cultural fabric just at a time when external threats were fading and there was pressure to reduce military expenditures aimed, primarily, at an enemy that ceased to exist. Even though both political parties were firmly and inexorably allied with the Deep State, the people would eventually question why we needed such large expenditures for "security" for an enemy that was gone. The general idea about a terrorist "threat" was floated in the 80's by a variety of right-wing sources close to the intelligence community (part of the Deep State, obviously). In that same period the US supported radical Islamic terror groups to fight the USSR's foolish entry into the Afghan morass through using Saudi money and radical activists to train and man these forces with CIA and Pentagon help to bleed the Soviets. In addition, this began the close association between the U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. There had always been a close association between Islamic radicals and the CIA since the 50s to counter nationalism and secularism which the U.S. rightly feared would lead to socialism which is the perennial enemy of the U.S. power-elite at all levels. Thus it was no big deal to turn Afghanistan into rubble by supporting a war in Afghanistan and leaving in place various elements including the U.S./Saudi creation of Al-Qaeda. Like Oswald, who had been associated with U.S. intelligence including the CIA and FBI, Al-Qaeda proved to be the perfect patsy in the 9/11 case. Any close look at the actual evidence, the actual lives of the alleged hijackers would alert you to that fact--a close look also at Mueller's FBI as testified by a number of whistleblowers would also show some real evidence to completely sink the official story. But I'm not interested in examining evidence in this post--the major line of all these "conspiracies" which are actually only one conspiracy have been drawn in innumerable books all of which the New York Times and other Deep State propaganda organs will not and cannot review other than use the CIA invented term "conspiracy theorists" to describe critics of any official story.

Unless you investigate these events and work the information that has been systematically withheld from the American public, you have NO IDEA at all what is actually going on in the halls of power in the global Empire that is centered in Washington. Without clarity about the nature of the actual government that actually governs how can you understand the bizarre twists and turns we've seen in recent years in particular as a result of the Deep States expansion into much of the world and more deeply within the cultural as well as political economy of our own country. The news-media that is thought of as the guardian of our freedom is actually the guardian of our psychological jail cell. There is no need to be the obnoxious police state that Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Mao's China, Mussolini's Italy all instituted to control the public--we have a full spectrum media that creates a mythological framework mainly through entertainment that  has created a fictional world of good guys and bad guys when anyone who has had even a whiff of social science and psychology knows that that's not the way the world works or has ever worked. The news-media backs up the bullshit.

The world that created Sever Days in May no longer exists. The ideals expressed in that movie no longer exist in Washington but have over the decades ceased to exist. That world of responsible civil servants is gone. There are a few still in the vicinity of power, mainly in the military, who still feel an allegiance to the Constitution but they can only drag their feet on stopping the worse excesses of power. Senior officers stopped the widening of the war in the Middle East and continue to do so. Unlike the Kennedy years the maniacs are in the civilian leadership not the military.

Also, what give me hope is that since the Iraq invasion the Deep State has split among several factions not just on policy making but some of this is personal among the powerful players. They all agree that the Empire must continue to expand but sharply disagree on tactics. Most of the factions are completely opposed to the U.S. Constitution and democracy. They are all in favor of an oligarchy dominated by the rich and tempered by those who have the legal right and skills to enforce order through the force of arms--no so much in the military but the growing community of contractors and gangsters that operate outside the law and are not vulnerable to the law.

There is no such thing as the USA anymore as it once was before 1963. There are no Constitutional guarantees to anything. You can be arrested for any reason and held indefinitely or killed at the pleasure of the Deep State and, increasingly, even the police. Who can also legally take your money and property without an actual way of you getting it back. They can legally stop your car, and finding a tiny bit of marijuana or even large amounts of case seize your car and the cash with long-drawn out legal requirement for you to get it back. Most cops won't do that because they are decent human beings. Most people are, in fact, decent human beings. But if they want to and if their careers depend on them violating your rights they will do so in the same way as the press will falsely report that Iraq had WMDs even though nearly all of them knew that was not the case.

JFK-case: 

The best and most complete writer who uses great scholarship from hundreds of excellent researchers is Jim DiEugenio who wrote the following books in order of dates (latest first):

• The JFK Assassination (with Oliver Stone)
• Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case
• Reclaiming Parkland: Tom Hanks, Vincent Bugliosi, and the JFK Assassination

by James Douglass: JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters--perhaps the most emotionally moving book on the case which puts the JFK murder into a larger political and cultural perspective. 

RFK

by Lisa Pease (will be published in Nov. 2018--I know here work so I'm putting it here): A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy

by William Turner and Jonn Christian The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy

From the Guardian from 2008 "New evidence challenges official picture of Kennedy shooting"

from the Mary Ferrell foundation a compendium of info including the "smoking gun" i.e., RFK was killed by a bullet to the back of his head according to the Coroner in the case, Thomas Noguchi. In fact, you don't need to read anything else for the entire edifice of the whole official story about this and all other cases to fall throught--because if this was a conspiracy than the entire state apparatus was involved: The Robert Kennedy Assassination

MLK

by William Pepper: The Plot to Kill King: The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.


9/11:

by David Ray Griffin: The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé

by James Corbett--the ever amusing 5 minute version: 911: A Conspiracy

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth: best website presenting the basic facts and still active--most other sites have either faded away and given up or may contain misinformation.

Thoughts on Militant Ignorance

Most people close to me and people not so close do not want me to talk about “political” issues. It is considered impolite and rude to express yourself in that area. I can talk about cars, lawns, kids, and so on but politics even more than religion is not something you can discuss. Why? Because most Americans of all social classes and almost all political viewpoints do not know how to conduct a discussion or have a rational argument. But even more to the point the information on which political arguments are based are based on an increasingly false Narrative out of the mainstream news outlets who are now fully transformed as official State propaganda outlets. The media is, collectively, the virtual Ministry of Truth. Their “reporting” comes straight out of the permanent war state. Reporters today never check any statement made by the U.S. government for truth—if the CIA says Assad used chemical weapons then he did—no reason to check. If the CIA says Russians hacked the U.S. elections then they did it—no reason to check facts—it is enough that the government said it.

The only real discussion we should have is that the information we receive from the media does not follow the very standards the media gives us. When you check facts you cannot go to the Washington Post who evaluate the truth claims—because their criteria for truth claims because they are part of the political wrangling within the Washington swamp. Their senior editors are and have been since the 1950s political operatives for various interests—certainly the CIA, certainly the arms industry. You cannot go to Snopes for “the truth” because they to are an organ for the permanent government aka “The Deep State”, “The National Security State” and so on. I’m not saying these organs are always wrong just not reliable.

The only possible way to arrive at the truth of any situation is to observe various news outlets, commentators, and reporters over time. Who reports accurately and who has been proven wrong? Seems logical, yet the vast majority of liberals actually take what the read in the NY Times as Gospels Truth when the evidence, over the years, is that they are almost always wrong in their reporting of facts when it comes to national security policy and war. The NY Times as an organization has backed every single military action the U.S. has ever undertaken as have most of the media. NPR, the other sacred liberal outlet has a similar record and has earned its nickname of “National Pentagon Radio.”

Still, checking sources of information may seem obvious but most people don’t operate that way. The reason why liberals trust the NY Times, NPR, and MSNBC is the same as why conservatives trust Fox News and The National Review. Human beings are mainly social beings no individuals. They tend to need to identify with a group of some kind. To belong to a group there has to be a common narrative for that group an intellectual framework that give meaning to the group and the individual within that group. This is not an option for people—it is real. That intellectual framework I call a “mythological framework” because people identify not with some scientifically arrived at truth but with stories that provide a structure for thinking about life and meaning which is myth. This is why the media, during the early part of the Iraq War, if you recall, glorified the story Jessica Lynch which was, in fact, a complete fabrication (one of many around that war). Bottom line you are fool and a chump if you believe anything the mainstream delivers to you without carefully checking it out.

The other part of the problem of not wanting to talk about politics or really anything of importance in social setting lest we “upset” anyone is the “Xanification” of American culture that has been steadily progressing. It marries three tendencies that have always been present in American culture.

First, is that the U.S. as a culture tends to dislike intellectuals and intellectual inquiry because it believes that intellectuals use knowledge to “put down” ordinary people. Knowledge is seen as a way to achieve status as a kind of cheat—that is, the only valid status determinant is and ought to be wealth. In many popular movies villains are often presented as hyper intelligent while heroes are seen as ordinary guys of incredible courage and “common sense” who always mindlessly and irrationally function on sheer intuition and shoot first and ask questions later. Personally, I have been continually and consistently condemned socially by people for being “arrogant” or a “know-it-all” and “talking down” to others. The assumption here is that if I know more about, say, sociology or biology that by attempting to share my knowledge with others I am insulting them. The idea is that the only reason I am doing that is to enhance my social status at the expense of others. The only exceptions to this rule is if you are talking about children (if you are a woman) or cars and sports if (if you are a guy) that’s OK to show off knowledge in those areas as long as you don’t, if you’re a woman, go off into social science or if you’re a man go off on the physics as it relates to high performance cars. One must always pitch conversation to the lowest common denominator.

Second, Americans are increasingly becoming obsessed with “escape” whether it is TV or gaming or cruising the internet on the one hand, or drug or sex addiction on the other hand. The desire to escape is a key element of most people’s lives. First, of course, escapism relieves the tension of living in a multi-cultural society where social tension rides high since you have to be so aware than spontaneous speech can be offensive to others even close friends are easily insulted. In addition, there are all the unresolved psychic ills that stem from past abuse suffered as children, the confusing and contradictory moral messages, the insanity in the news, the constant manipulation by the media through fake-news and endless advertising to buy usually useless products and just the sheer mass of information you should probably look into but are too psychically exhausted to evaluate. So you batten down the hatchets focus on work and family and try to not think too much.

Third, we Americans are usually focused on the surface of life and try to put a smiley face on everything. This can be a good thing—after all, “positive thinking” is a unique cultural contribution of America. The problem comes when we ignore reality and live only on the surface of life. To go deep may mean looking into the mirror and looking closely at our tendencies to avoid any possibility of cognitive dissonance. A positive demeanor is a survival tool to maintain confidence despite appearances. This is the theme of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Another part of this tendency that brings us problem is that it also makes us very easy marks for swindlers and swindles. Living on the surface makes it hard to see deeply into others.

So those who wish to take advantage of the public have a fairly easy job convincing that public of the most absurd and clearly false ideas imaginable. Whether it is a fraudulent product, service, or government propaganda Americans tend to believe in it blindly if it hits the right “notes” in terms of American mythology. For example, American will tend to favor war only if the government can either make them believe the country was attacked (often through fraud) or, like the lead up to the first Iraq War making up a story about Iraqi soldiers bayoneting babies in incubators. The fraud stretches back to the Spanish American War through to WWI and false stories of German atrocities to Pearl Harbor, the Vietnam War and the Gulf of Tonkin incident and, of course, 9/11.

The incredibly simple idea of following the money and finding out who benefits from this or that government policy is rarely even thought about so that obviously ridiculous stories like Assad’s gas attacks are believed without any evidence and, most strikingly, the fact Assad having already won his battle and just about won the whole civil war in Syria suddenly would use gas to invite foreign intervention. As I write this this absurd idea is taken as clear establish fact by the mainstream media again with no evidence supporting that notion and much evidence pointing in other directions. But this story is possible because 1) anti-intellectualism and contempt for logic, reason and science; 2) escapism, not wanting to face the unpleasant truths of American policies; and 3) accepting surface explanation without delving into motivations, finding out who benefits just accepting, on faith, that the American media provide us with the truth because we are the “good guys” and everyone who disagrees with us are the “bad guys” not for any reason but just because America is a America.