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* Puerto Rico has clearly benefitted little from more relief money than most of the SE states combined. And now we may know why. * It's topsy-turvey day today as the CIA rebukes CNN for spreading fake news. (Wait, what?) * That's it! We're done for the day. How can I top that? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Q >>1925226 If you continue to proceed down this dangerous path only know that we are prepared. You should know this based on earlier drops re: S[audi ]A[rabia] / Nat[ional] Guard / MIL[itary] Assets activate[ed on] US soil. The game is over when the public knows. The fight to keep the LIGHTS OFF is all that matters to you. You will FAIL. The AMERICAN PEOPLE are AWAKE. You lost CONTROL. SHEEP NO MORE. You underestimated their resolve and their ability to free-think away from the pipeline narrative. We will DECLAS[sify everything]. We will shine LIGHT. THERE IS NOWHERE TO HIDE. No amount of money, influence, or power can stop this. Our rights to secure and protect at all costs then become justified. We stand at the ready. RED WAVE. WHITE SQUALL. IN GOD WE TRUST. Q >>1925332 If you are smart (stupid) you know what just occurred at the meeting in Russia. Attempts to frame Russia / POTUS (optics) are failing and will soon be exposed. [Objective] to keep POTUS away from PUTIN failed. Bolton + PUTIN should scare you. Enemies are allies. EVIL has no place here. America is no longer for sale. The age of taxing our citizens across the World while entry to our markets is FREE is OVER. The WORLD will UNITE in this cause (G[ood] v E[vil]/R[ight] v W[rong]). Forced immigration pushers will be exposed (the 'why' ). Read the BIBLE. GOD WINS. Q ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Stonecutting Have I mentioned the huge mystery surrounding the shaping of stones by the ancients? It's a real problem, but this guy may be on to something. I'll have to look into this a lot more. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Tim Pool Here's even more about the CIA/CNN thing. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Mythos I got some interesting reactions to yesterday's post about Bill Gates. Some already knew what a demon he is, others think I'm buying into internet rumor mongering. But remember, unlike many others who would feign claim intimate knowledge, I actually was there. I ran into Alan Ashton many times. I dodged Bruce (for reasons we won't go into) every time I saw him coming. (I actually did almost run into Marie once. She had a habit of driving her behemoth SUV out the in driveway at McDonald's right across the street from us.) (Yes, my wife scolded me for making a bug-eyed face at her.) (But she never did it again.) (There.) I experienced it all, maybe not exactly first hand, but close enough. Besides, it's far from the only example. We've been getting lied to about just absolutely everything, especially where computers and software is concerned. Just consider facebook. A decade ago, I had liberal friends (as in a Jewish female/feminist lawyer) (among others) sending me information tracing facebook's CIA genesis. And I read it all with mild amusement. Curiously, having watched recent developments, and comparing them with my own experiences, I now fully accept that the C_A (CIA minus the intelligence) simply picked Mark Zuckerberg out of a lineup to use as a figurehead for their latest venture into mass brain-washing. That's part-n-parcel of the operation. That's how it works. Strangely, it's my liberal friends who now reject any such notions as just so much more Trump hysteria. So, you're wasting your breath on me if you mean to pursuade me that TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) is just a conservative media pejorative. Again, I've witnessed it myself. It's no illusion. These people are insane. So, as I was saying, this whole brain-washing thing is real, and quite old. I didn't even really know just how old until recently. I mean, I knew all about Edward Bernays, but I never really connected any of that to the industry I (in a very, very, small way) helped nurture into what it is today, until now. Take, for example, Lotus 123. Remember that? It was the 'killer application' (a term which came into existence because of this product) of its day (1983). In retrospect, a number of other technologies failed to gain broad acceptance, it was said, because that 'killer application' failed to appear. Or, rather, already existed elsewhere. All of its obvious advantages notwithstanding, Apple's beloved Mac faced an uphill struggle precisely because Lotus 123 was already available on the IBM PC. But that wasn't the entire story. IBM or Lotus or somebody understood something about their audience, and about people in general. It's almost impossible to find now, but, back in the day, hobbyists and hackers alike spoke in reverent, hushed tones of the mad coder who supposedly cranked out Lotus 123 in a single, caffeine-fueled week of uninterrupted bit-twiddling frenzy. Ohhh! Ahhh! We were all mezmerised. We all saw ourselves eventually attaining such wizardry status. Few of us ever did, of course. Some of us even learned, eventually, what a charade the whole thing had been. I recall having read an article many years ago about how the marketing firm Lotus had hired deliberately floated that caffeine-fueled rumor as an integral part of the marketing campaign. No up-n-coming programmer wanted to hear anything about a team of a dozen programmers having worked on it for six months, or that they didn't even develop it on an IBM PC, but rather on a DEC VAX, and cross-compiled it to the PC. And no one wanted to be told that it was actually all fairly standard technology which, yes, had been improved for Lotus, but which had already been in use on mainframes and even earlier Apple IIs for years. You don't tell a bunch of erstwhile entrepreneurs that they're just furthering the reach of the entrenched empires that rejected them. No. What you tell them is that another goofball guru, much like them, but just a bit more advanced, left this amazing breadcrumb trail for them to follow. THAT sold software in 1983. Having learned about the true origins of Lotus 123, I soon began to question the naming of all other software. In programming, you see (just ask any programmer), the hardest part is naming things. And, so, it's not really suspicious to any programmer if you tell him that the guys who invented the whole windowing user-interface initially named it W. Duh! What else would you name it? (Really? Just about anything else!) (I've named programs 'stuff' until something more creative came to mind.) So, when you tell them that the final release version got bumped by one letter from W to X, giving us what is today universally known as the X-windows system (for all you Unix and Apple types anyway), no one really questions it at all. That is, until you notice WHERE this all happened: PARC Place. No? How about the Palo Alto Research Center? Still don't recognize it? Try this: XEROX! Get it? XEROX isn't about to release anything this big and important (and it was) with the name W on it, if, in fact, it ever actually had that name at all, which is exactly what I'm questioning here. But they will release it under the name X. And, in fact, back in the day, the X in X-windows was identical with that familiar old XEROX logo. How could anyone have failed to see through the mythos? But none of us did. I even still get people 'who were there' arguing with me over this. It's like Joseph once quipped about those denying the sun right over their heads. But that's because XEROX spread the rumor that it was named X, not because it came from XEROX ... oh, no, we're not like that. We're far too humble. Naming it after ourselves would be so tacky. No, it was just a natural, organic thing. It used to be called W, after all, because ... Windows, you know. And that last final leap pushing it over the edge into a marketable product, well that simply warranted incrementing the version number, which didn't exist, so we incremented the name. And X was born! Really?! So, you're going to tell me that during its entire development it was called W? And it only ever got incremented once? Programmers just don't do that. There had to have been a V, U, T, etc. I mean, according to legend, anyway, the C programming language had at least two predecessors: A and B. (I kid you not! Look it up.) (And, YES, just to maintain that whole charade, there is in fact a D programming language, and you can install it and use it on Linux.) And it doesn't stop there. There are many, many such examples. And software firms, manufacturing firms, soap firms, governments, churches, even just tribes of people have long engaged in this practice of creating a mythos to explain a product, aspect, or even themselves. This is, in fact, what many accuse religious people of having done with such things as the Bible, so, you know it's a real thing. Whether the faithful, or their predecessors are guilty of falsifying anything is another matter. The fact is that human institutions do it regularly, and they do it wish such skill and frequency that each of us really needs to find some touchstone of reality to help us wake up from the unreal world they aim to wrap us up in. We really are in the Matrix, and we need to come back to reality. We need to wake up. Time to take the red pill! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Ok, admit it. Right about now, you're thinking, "What?! Who is this guy?!" I keep telling you; I'm that guy. My whole life has been one long sitcom where I was the butt of all the jokes. Or so I thought. While I always felt like I had to measure up, it turns out that it was only because so many around me were expending so much energy to outshine me, to intimidate me, often even to just insult me. And, because of all that, I tried harder. I've always believed that Rudolph should have fallen to his knees to thank God for that schnozz. It's the boy named Sue syndrom. And I wouldn't even know it myself had a few of them not approached me at various times over years to ask me to please tone it down. I was really taken aback by this. What on earth were they talking about? Well, a native American girl I was tutoring through electronics class at BYU clued me in. I eventually asked her out, showed up on time, found the house dark and quiet. There was no answer to my knock. I'd been there many times. We called it the Utah stand-up. (That's how the girls there brush you off. They accept the date, then 'forget' about it.) (And you're supposed to 'get the message', and never ask again.) (You dolt! What were you thinking?) So I knocked the obligatory 2 times, waited the obligatory 10 seconds, and turned to leave. Then I heard the door creak open. But just a crack. I turned around just as someone pushed her out through the cracked door, and shut it again. And there she stood, looking very sheepish. I led her to my car, opened the door, handed her the belt, closed the door, all while she looked at her feet. Gee. She'd never been like this in class. I tried to make small-talk all the way to the restaurant, but she just wasn't giving me anything to work with. Finally, I just said, "Look, I appreciate you showing up, but I'm not the sort to make you go through with something you clearly don't want to do. I'll just drop you off at your place, and you can order a pizza or something." And then it came! "NO!", she said. "I really want to go out with you. It's just that I don't think you want to go out with me." "But ... I asked YOU out. I wouldn't have done that if I didn't want to." "That's what my roommate said." "Good roommate. I like her already." "You're just this guy who's not like other guys. You didn't just go on a mission; you lived abroad for years. You were in the Air Force. You went to a foreign college. You were married and have a child. You drive two cars. You know about computers. You've just done all these things that people just see in movies." And right about that time I found myself in a wormhole, dizzyingly whirling through the spacetime continuum, trying to get a handle on her perspective, trying to remember what it was I had said or done to give her the impression that I was James Bond when I saw myself as Johnny English, when she continued. "We all talk about you, hoping you'll ask us out, and you asked me, and I panicked." WHOA! Ok, we're definitely NOT in Kansas anymore! And that's not all. Oh, no. Far from it. Roll the clock back a few years. Ok, several years. That was, what, 1988? 1989? Back in 1982, at Barksdale Air Force Base (a nuclear bomber base) (that I had to get a top secret security clearance to work on) (See? There I go again!) one of the sergeants, MY sergeant, Willie Patterson, actually had the gall to call me a liar to my face, in front of everyone. The guy was no genius, so I really debated how to handle that. Wrap a chair over his head and get court-martialled? Or challenge him to see if he really meant what he said, and really understood what he meant. And then it came! "You go around telling people you speak German and all this @#$%. You don't speak German. And you don't know anything about airplanes. And you can't lift any weights. You're a liar. You don't impress anyone." I just looked at him. I didn't know what to say. Lift weights?! When had I ever said anything about that? I requested to be moved to a different shift, and it was granted. A few months later, my fiance came to the states to marry me, and even visited the station because we were going to photograph the wedding of one of my colleagues ... Oh. Right. I probably never mentioned that I was a professional photographer on the side. Yep. I had a custom-built Olympus OM2 rig with motor-winder, lenses galore, and a huge, double-headed flash rig. I studied under a rather well-known Swiss photogropher whose work had been published in a few European magazines, Al Niederegger. Yeah, so, there's that. Beginning to get the idea? Anyway, so my fiance is visiting the station, and she's as tall as the tallest guy there, looks just like princess Caroline of Monaco did back then, speaks six languages (they were sure to ask her) (of course), and she told them all right out there together that the thing that caught her eye ... well actually caught her ear was when she heard me speaking German (on the phone), and she thought I was a German, until she met me in person. Then someone had to go and ask about me picking up a car. "Why, yes! How did you know?" (I was rather curious myself.) "His roommate told us that he told him that he once picked up your mother's car to move it because the emergency brake was on. No one uses the emergency brake!" (Ok, now, in my defense, my roommate, Michael Jackson (and we both worked with a James Taylor), and I were at the gym working out to get ready for our annual test. I was on the leg machine, and he kept raising the weight. We'd gotten it up to 850 pounds with the add-on weights, and I was still able to lift it with my toes, so he climbed on with his 170 pounds to make it a nice 1020 pounds, which I could still lift repeatedly, and bounce on my toes. So, Michael Jackson then asks, "Gee! How much CAN you lift?" To which I replied, "I don't know. How much does the back of a VW Rabbit weigh." "Why?" "Because I've lifted one of those before, and carried it across the parking lot." And THAT is how all THAT got started, and I had no idea. I swear!) "Oh, yes, Germans do, and he does, too. And that's why he had to pick up the car to move it. But it was just a little car." I just started looking for an excuse to end the conversation. Ok, so, now, all this gets back to Willie Patterson, and he does nothing now but glare at me every time he sees me leaving as his shift starts. Eventually, he started avoiding me altogether, leaving by the back door. It was uncomfortable. Oh, no. That's far from all. Just one more, though. Ok? So, I'm still pretty new at WordPerfect back in 1991, and I'm working up in THE building, building A, where the big animals roam. I'm working on all the Germanic versions of all WordPerfect's (many) programs on DOS, Windows, and Unix, and I'm sharing an office with this kid whose dad is the top guy at the local hospital chain. One of the Spanish guys is visiting because my office-mate does the Spanish products, and they're just idly chatting, when the Spanish guy says something about having to get back home for Juan Caramera day. I heard this, and turned around, which was pretty rare because I did my best to tune Eric out while I worked. And this caused them both to stop and stare at me. And the Spanish guy asked me if I knew Juan Caramera. I said that I knew of him because I know the song, but I had no idea that he had his own day. "Song?", he said? "Sure! You know." And I sang a couple of bars. (It's sung to the tune of Guantanamera.) (He was a union organizer.) OOOh! This was more than he (the Spanish guy) could stand. He told us all about Juan and his struggles and how the song is actually Cuban, and on and on. Apparently, this didn't sit well with Eric. Soon after, one of the girls from the German office was flown over to 'tour' our building, meet the team, and all that. There was literally a group of about eight escorting her by the time they brought her around to our (mine and Eric's) office. The boss poked his head in, and said they wanted to introduce me to someone from the German office, so I stood, stepped out, saw her, and addressed her as a proper German of my generation should, heel click and all. She stumbled backward, stammering (in German) "It's real. It's really real." Everyone else was looking around, asking, "What? What's she saying?" So I was translating as she kept speaking, asking where I was from, where I acquired my southern German accent, how long I lived there, etc. I was confused. I couldn't understand her surprise, or their dismay. So they said their goodbyes and we all went back to work. And then it came! Eric asked me, "So, you really are the real deal, huh?" "What deal?" "You're not putting us on. You've really been all those places and done all those things." "Well, uh, you thought I was lying? It's not like I offered any of that. You guys kept asking me questions." "Yeah, we were trying to find holes in it. But you're the real deal. Sorry, but you have to admit, it's pretty unbelievable." Uunbelievable? Is that what I am? So, there's this movie that my wife says is 'my' movie. Keith Carradine is a former Air Force guy who's done a lot, and everyone thinks he's some kind of pathological liar. Choose Me But me ... I think THIS is my movie. Big Fish Apparently, my kids do, too. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |