* More pedophile arrests! (Here, here, and maybe here). The scourge is being purged.
* Lord Mountbatten, mentor to Prince Charles, and 'decorated war hero', has just fallen from grace due to recent revelations from the FBI's decades-long surveillance of him, newly uncovered by Freedom of Information disclosures in conjunction with an upcoming book from historian, Andrew Lownie: The Mountbattens: Their Lives & Loves. His was apparently for young boys, which might expain his wife's frequent and flagrant affairs.
* This has some now wondering aloud what other secrets remain to be exposed in that family, and which ones Diana knew.
* Ghislaine (pronounced gis LANE) Maxwell, Epstein's 'procurer' reportedly has so much baggage of her own, that we're beginning to suspect that all the drama surrounding Epstein was meant to distract everyone from her. And she is supposedly cooperating with authorities.
* What kind of baggage?
* Her father was almost certainly a Mossad triple agent.
* Her brother-in-law, optical illusion TED talker and bigamist, Al Seckel, fell to his death on her property in 2015, after having been exposed as a swindler in LA who passed himself off, via his (and his wife's) charm, as an Ivy League grad, and Caltech double doctoral candidate. (Which he wasn't.)
* His daughter, Elizabeth Seckel, built on her father's work, developing something called 'mirror box therapy', which the Clinton Foundation paid her to take to Haiti with them after the 2012 earthquake. (And we all know by now all about the Clintons in Haiti, right?)
* Elizabeth also hosted a conference on Epstein's Island of Horrors in 2010, hosting Gell-Mann, Leonard Mlodinow (Stephen Hawking's co-author) (and, some suspect, puppet master), and MIT's Gerald Sussman.
* Another brother-in-law, physicist, Roger Malina, is the son of rocket scientist, Frank Malina, formerly of JPL (pre-NASA days), who fled to France one step ahead of the FBI who took a dim view of a socialist and political activist working in our defense industry.
* She has some sort of relationship with Elon Musk that has us all wondering whether she's where he's getting the money to keep Tesla on life-support.
* She has a helicopter pilot's license. (Who doesn't?)
* Her American in-laws covorted with the JPL rocketry pioneers known as the 'Suicide Squad' for their risky work.
* That group included such 'luminaries' as L. Ron Hubbard, Richard Feynman, and Robert Heinlein.
* And Frank Malina's best friend was Jack Parsons, who inspired the book and CBS TV series, Strange Angel.
* So? They knew a lot of famous and/or interesting people ... people who were all members of Aleister Crowley's Satanic cult.
* Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard, as part of Crowley's cult, were trying to resurrect Babylon by impregnating women.
* Google's meddling in the 2016 election has been exposed by multiple internal sources, AND ...
* A certain Dr. Epstein (no relation to Jeffrey), Democrat and Hillary supporter, published a study he completed (and then testified before Congress about) which concluded that Google's meddling swayed at least 2.6 million votes toward HRC, and possibly as many as 15 million. (More and more, it's looking like Trump actually did win the popular vote as well as the electoral colleg vote, and that by a landslide.)
* Five Democrat Senators (I don't know which five) have written to the Supreme Court ... yes THE Supreme Court ... threatening them with packing, reorganization, and/or a new nomination process, if they decide to hear a 2nd amendment case that's come before them. Can you believe the gall? They're threatening the Supreme Court, AND they're assuming they're going to regain control of both houses of Congress in order to carry out that threat.
* Planned Parenthood (that sadly misnamed organization) has just finally lost their Title X funding. (And may they never get it back.)
* President Trump is, of course, just teasing the media with talk of buying Greenland. (Or is he? It's an idea that has been considered before, and even promoted by the Pentagon. After all, the only thing that's allowed Denmark to hold on to that money-pit is the rent we've been paying them for our 'secret' operations there.)
* The IG (Inspector General) Report may be released before September, and, according to all reports (that I'm hearing), it won't be good news for a lot of people, mostly Democrats and phony Republicans. Why are things taking so long? Well, it hasn't taken nearly as long as the Mueller Report, but there's also the issue of certain redactions having to be made in order to prevent certain parties from learning just how advanced our technology is, technology that allowed us to hear conversations, and see surroundings (this is my 'educated' guess here) EVEN WHEN CELL PHONES WERE MILES OUT OF RANGE OF ANY TOWER, AND EVEN HAD THEIR BATTERIES AND SIM-CARDS REMOVED! (In other words, we already have satellites in orbit which can turn any cell-phone into a satellite phone, even without you knowing it. Even with you trying to prevent it.)
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Speaking of Media-Promoted Pedophilia...
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John Stossel on Trump's deregulation
This is the most honest thing I've heard about it so far.
I'm very much against regulations, you know. I know that irritates lots of people, mostly on the left, but many on the right, too. But, remember what experiences I've had.
Once again, hearkening back to my brief time at Daimler, I learned that almost everything we think of today as the wonderful and beneficial result of government regulation really wasn't. Take seatbelts, for example. They were available as an option on Nash (remember them?) all the way back in 1949, and on Fords as of 1955.
"But", you may say, "people aren't going to pay for such 'options' unless they have no choice via regulation." But you'd be surprised, because that turns out to be completely untrue. Those same seatbelts were already becoming such a popular option, that they had become standard equipment on SAAB cars in 1958, and other manufacturers were about to follow suite.
No, far from cost-sensitivity issues slowing their acceptance, the real problem was that some idiot patent judge granted a couple of crooks patents for something that had already been in use in various forms and ways for about AN ENTIRE CENTURY! That's called Prior Art, and it should have rendered any patent application irrelevant. But, granting these guys a patent suddenly changed the cost to automakers and their customers, because those guys planned to milk those patents for all they could get. And THAT created a cost-sensitivity that wasn't there before. And people stopped bying them. And manufacturers stopped offering them.
So, what's a crooked patent owner (and the judge who wants his kickback) to do about the automakers' sudden recalcitrance? PASS A LAW MANDATING THEY LICENSE YOUR PRODUCT! You know, just like the insurance companies got a law passed forcing you to buy suddenly much more expensive health insurance. Just like laws forced us all to buy suddenly much more expensive liability insurance for our cars (as opposed to, say, making the cars more resilient).
You'd be surprised just how cheap Congressmen can be.
No, I am not kidding.
Yes, I know you've never heard anything like this before, which is why I first referenced my curious history of experience. I've been on the inside. I've seen what's really going on there. And what's going on are things you'll never hear on the news. (Just wait till I tell you what was really going on in the 1982 war in Lebanon!)
So now you're wondering why you won't hear these things on the news.
Well, there are two main reasons.
The first reason is that big money (like Congress has) can pay off enough editors to write enough articles, or produce enough news, or make enough movies, to bury your efforts to get your word out.
The second is a bit more nefarious, and it involves character assassination. And you've seen this one everywhere. It's very simple. You simply say things like, "Well, of course they're going to say that; they want to make more money."
And no one ever even stops to say, "Oh, yeah, right, because making money is a bad thing, right? Except that if they don't make money, they have to let me go, so, yeah, I want to make money, too. So why are we villifying profit?"
And that goes back to a complete distortion of things Christ said, that I'll have to put in one of my epistles, but, suffice it to say here that Christ never once discouraged prosperity. The 'love' of 'money' is something else altogether, which has more to do with what the Federal Reserve has been doing to us all than with what Elon Musk has been up to.
Ok, fine. That's seatbelts. There are a lot more regulations than that. What about emmissions standards?
Indeed! What about them? Did you know that all the major cities in the world embraced the automobile all the way back in the 1920s because they were so very much cleaner than horses?
Cities were literally drowning in horse dung before the automobile came along, and automakers were always working on being even cleaner, cementing their lead over horses.
Why? What would those greedy people care about being clean?
Popularity!
Huh?
Even cigarette makers were trying to make their products safer, and not because any law forced them to, but because they wanted more customers than their competition had, and if your competition has a cigarette that doesn't burn your throat, or, worse, kill you, then you're going to lose customers to them. That's how market forces work. (The addiction issue is another matter I'll have to handle separately.) And car makers didn't want people associating their products with bad smells.
So, why did government have to mandate pollution controls?
They didn't.
And, just as with the seatbelts, auto-makers were already improving their product to the point that it was becoming a highly desirable, luxury feature. Fancy people don't want to arrive smelling like gasoline, you know. But, this time, it was the auto-makers themselves who decided to by some Congressmen.
Why?
Because they were in competition with one another.
GM wanted to push the envelope, making their cars better smelling, and even better performing, than Ford's and Chryslers, but that would cost more money up front than they really wanted to spend, having already made all the cheapest improvements they could. So, having learned the lesson of the seatbelt, they got laws passed (by investing in environmental crusaders) (betcha didn't know that) mandating very low levels of various chemicals (as opposed to mandating specific equipment, like sealed-beam headlights or hydraulic brakes), but only to a level they already knew they could achieve, but which they also knew that Ford and Chrysler couldn't.
Ford was wise to what was going on, and successfully bought some time to get their own engineering up to speed while pushing the envelope beyond what GM was hoping for, putting them both in the same situation, and Chrysler scrambling to catch up, ... BUT also eliminating a number of other competitors.
This is when we saw Studebaker have to sell itself, and Checker had to start buying engines from GM, and a number of other sea-changes in the auto-manufacturing industry.
And now, you can bet, the ever lower 'pollutant' levels are being driven by big money trying to con our governors into creating standards so impossible to achieve, that their competitors simply collapse.
And they do this because they know they can't win any other way.
Tesla cars has never made a profit. They'll go out of business unless the government sets emmissions standards so low that no one else can keep up. But GM and Ford are readying their products while simultaneously fighting any further reductions. Volvo already folded, and was sold to a Chinese company that also already threw in the towel, turning Volvo into an electric car company.
Never mind the fact that electric cars pollute even more than gasoline cars, have stunningly expensive batteries, weigh even more than their gasoline-powered counterparts, and are severely limited by recharge times.
Did you know that China is trying to become the world's supplier of coal-powered electricity? Naturally, they would love to see the whole world use that electricity. And, yes, they can deliver it all the way from China.
Did you also know that China is one of the main sources of the Lithium in those batteries?
Did you know that Tesla is moving to China?
Getting the picture now?
Do Trump's tariffs and deregulation make more sense now?
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George Washington
I know far too little about George Washington, so, when I stumbled over this letter that he wrote 219 years ago tomorrow, I wasn't so much surprised as pleased, and felt obliged to share it with you.
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From my playlist
Classical music is really just prior generations' popular music, and, for me, much more inspiring than most opera, and even many more modern works. And that's due in some part to the fact that the composers of a hundred and more years ago were true artists, not just trying to crank out tunes that might sell, but actually struggling to make complex chords and harmonies that conveyed more than words could say. And for comparison, just consider what the four chords repeated in most modern music (Language alert!) sound like compared to the pieces listed here:
(You're going to want to listen to these when you have the time to devote to it.)
Let's start with the prelude to Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen:
Do you hear what he's doing there? This is order being created out of chaos by the hand of God. And you don't really even need lyrics to know that.
Now could there be any better (or more self-aggrandizing) metaphor for what the composer himself is doing?
By the way, that old saying about the end being signified by the fat lady singing comes from this, Wagner's magnum opus.
And, in that same vein, another order-out-of-chaos piece that everyone knows, Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus spake Zoroaster):
And that should tell you why that piece was chosen for the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
(By the way, that iconic poster is from one of my all-time favorite artists/futurists, Syd Mead an artist whose work you've seen in many places including the early 1990s Cadillac DeVilles.)
At Halloween, I love to play Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor. It's not strictly appropriate, but all those minor chords seem to evoke images of hauntings and such, so it's become a Halloween staple.
But my all-time favorite still has to be the storied ...
Finlandia
Imagine my delight when, upon arriving at a conference priesthood session with my boys in ... what? 2011? 2012? ..., we were met with the BYU men's choir singing this tune.
Who knew that hymn 124, Be Still My Soul, was set to this masterpiece? I'm telling you, having never heard that in church for the 30+ plus years leading up to that moment is proof enough for me that the local choir directors really need to ante up, and stop messing around with all the weird arrangements and non-hymnal pieces they all seem to be so curiously fond of.
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