Doug Morton Music
Computers
Writings & Other Stuff
before and after
Tim and I have been best friends since the Boston days at NEC. He is everything the blurb below says (and a bag of chips), along with being a stand-up guy with his feet on the ground. He asked ChatGPT about himself and this is what it came up with.
Tim Morrison is an internationally recognized trumpeter whose career has spanned classical performance, chamber music, and film scoring at the highest levels. As a longtime member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops, Tim established himself as a principal voice in the American orchestral tradition, known for his lyrical phrasing, technical brilliance, and deep musical sensitivity.
A former member of the Empire Brass, Tim helped revolutionize the perception of brass chamber music, performing to acclaim across the globe and recording landmark albums that remain reference points in the genre. His artistry has influenced generations of brass players and brought new audiences to the power and nuance of brass performance.
Tim’s expressive sound caught the ear of legendary film composer John Williams, leading to a series of solo trumpet features in major film scores — perhaps most notably in Born on the Fourth of July, where his haunting solo work earned widespread praise. His studio work in Los Angeles further expanded his reach, contributing to the emotional core of numerous motion pictures in collaboration with Williams and other leading composers.
Whether on the concert stage, in chamber settings, or behind the scenes of a Hollywood recording session, Tim Morrison’s trumpet playing has left an indelible mark on the musical landscape — a voice at once soaring, human, and timeless.
I need to post this wonderful review of my playing by Tim. "Better than Bud"? (the legendary Adolph Herseth of the CSO). I don't think so, but wow!
Dude, I just listened the opening of the Reiner recording of Domestica and you sounded better than Bud, easily😄
I think if anyone were to listen to multiple recordings of the "big boys" playing that call, you'd likely win the challenge. Honestly, I don't think anyone could play it any better than you did. You simply went for it and gobbled it up. When I was listening to it for the first time, it was kind of an omg moment for me, Dougie. Played with such confidence and authority. I was expecting a pretty good moment, but not quite THAT good🤨
QAnon is the worst fast food conspiracy junk imaginable. A good conspiracy must be actually plausible, has to have a basis in reality, has to be doable by humans with all their faults and foibles. Nothing supernatural. And, there's always money and/or power involved.
My favorite theory as to the origin of the Santa Claus myth is the magic mushroom. The Amanita muscaria is a bright red mushroom with white spots, which resembles Santa's iconic red suit with white trim. Various cultures used this mushroom in their spiritual rituals. The shamans in Siberia, for example, would dress in red and white and go from house to house in a reindeer-pulled sled distributing the mushrooms which were strung to pine tree branches. Doors would often be blocked by snow so they would make their deliveries through the smoke-hole or chimney. The hallucinogenic qualities of the mushrooms would provide a magical, transformative "trip" which were considered gifts and blessings. Sound familiar?
To think that the most wholesome, kid-friendly, "cookies and milk" holiday was based on people tripping out on mushrooms is a mind-expander. For whatever reasons, we Westerners have been very suppressive when it comes to mind-altering experiences. Perhaps it undermines the dominant paradigm!
The Holy Grail of conspiracies. This one has intrigued me my entire life. It's a gift that never stops giving. The greatest murder mystery in history.
I was 8 years old when this happened. My memory is of playing a game of kickball on the playground of my elementary school. I had just whacked a good one when a distraught teacher called us back in to class. She sat us down and in tears, announced that the President was dead. I could only think it was Eisenhower, an old man. It couldn't be that young and handsome Kennedy. But sure enough it was. We were sent home and we spent the rest of the weekend with the black & white television set to CBS News and Walter Cronkite. The entire nation and world were in a state of shock, even more so when we witnessed a live murder on television - Ruby shooting Oswald. What is happening? America was at the peak of its "goodness". There was Disney and Father Knows Best and Leave It To Beaver. We played in our neighborhood without fear. Dad had a nice, secure job with General Motors and mom stayed at home with the kids. There was some looming threat of commies, I guess, but America was so clearly good, clean, pure, rich, powerful, technically adept (we were sending men to the moon!). What could go wrong? Now we knew.
This was a turning point for me. I suddenly caught a glimpse of the dark side of life. It had been there all along but in the lovely, gentle 50's and early 60's it had been papered over and avoided, at least to a child growing up in the Midwest of America in that time period with my morally-upright Episcopalian parents. This world had a dark, noirish feeling - furtive and cramped. Nothing like the shiny world of the future we lived in.
We were told that our eloquent, elegant, handsome, charming, stylish, witty President with the classy, ethereal wife and lovely young family, was murdered by a lone nut wanna-be commie shooting from the Texas School Book Depository. Our fearless vice-president, the avuncular Texan, LBJ, had taken up the mantle and all was safe and sound and stable. Not to worry - back to your lives. (Fortunately for our national mood, the Beatles came along a few months later and a whole new happiness enveloped us). There was still the world of the future to build. All would be well and prosperous and abundant.
But, something just didn't sit right. I was too young to grasp it, but the first chink in the armor was Ruby killing Oswald. We all saw a fedora'd gangster plug a stoolie. And for the weirdest of reasons - to save Jackie from a trial. WTF? Wait a minute. Something's fishy here.
But, no - don't worry about it - we have some of the most respected men in a America looking into it and they tell us that, yes, it was one loner loser and nobody else. End of story. Move on, nothing to see here.
However, it didn't take long for people to start questioning the official narrative. The great Oliver Stone movie, JFK, portrays it well - as a patriotic lawyer in New Orleans, Jim Garrison - reading through the volumes of the Warren Commission and seeing so many loose ends and deliberate obfuscations and squelched lines of investigation. It troubles him so much that he risks his career and life to investigate this on his own - a path many since have followed when confronted with the startling evidence visible to all but seen by few.
The first thing for me was that televised mob hit. Next was the multiple Oswalds. I mean, who does that kind of thing? It's elaborate and involves a team and it pretty clearly was done without Oswald's knowledge and for the express purpose of painting him as a lunatic. That was an early clue to me that something big was afoot. Then, of course, the Zapruder film (which was probably more damaging than we even know given all the evidence of it being tampered with and the herculean effort it took to get it released). Who can deny the evidence of their own eyes, seeing a man's head snap back and to the left with the force of a bullet that could only have come his right front side (where 50+ witnesses placed a shooter). Plus, the timing. The gap between the 2nd and 3rd shots (from the official count, I believe there were 11 to 12 shots from three teams) was way too short for a bolt-action rifle. Plus, the clear time gap between the impact on Kennedy of the 2nd shot (the magic bullet) and Connally's reaction to his shooting. Then of course the magic bullet itself, discovered impossibly intact on a stretcher after causing major wounds. The closer you look the more gaps you see. It's a story held together with great force and manipulation. They must have suffered many sleepless nights with the dread of an actual investigation. Fortunately for them, some of the main conspirators (in my opinion) were at the very top of the power structures and had the ability to move heaven & earth to suppress the truth.
When you put it together, it's almost ridiculous that they would expect us to believe the official narrative. But such were the times, when government was implicitly trusted, when the FBI and CIA were unimpeachable, where our leaders were paragons of virtue.
We're now in a place and time (2026) in America where the corruption of government is almost expected. Trump and his gang have taken it to a whole other level of pure shamelessness and greed. Nothing said officially can be trusted. Perhaps it's true that it was ever thus but for a period of time in America, people strived to show their best sides and at least only lie when deemed absolutely necessary. The JFK Assassination broke the bond of trust and it's only gotten worse and worse over time (with some upswings in the Obama years).
A side benefit of studying the JFK event is the amazing cast of characters and their tangential stories. Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra (even Sammy Davis Jr), Sam Giancana, Carlos Marcello, Castro, Jesus "The Ghost" Angleton, Mary Meyers, Jack Ruby, the whole Kennedy clan, LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover, David Ferrie, even someone named David Morales.
And especially Oswald.
How I know Oswald didn't do it:
How I think it went down:
Motive
RFK was another casualty of the Vietnam war. I believe that the devil's bargain in the JFK killing was where LBJ promised the military that he would
go fully into Vietnam if they helped to get rid of JFK. (Of course, words so obvious as these are rarely spoken out loud and never documented)
The CIA was in first position for all of the clandestine activity around that war. JFK had promised to splinter it into 1,000 pieces.
RFK was his brother, of course, and was of the same mind. He was JFK's point man for covert operations and rode rough-shod on the CIA at the time.
By the time RFK ran for President in 1968, the CIA viewed him as an existential threat. He had made it clear that he intended to
significantly dismantle or restructure the agency's power.
In addition, RFK had aggresively persecuted the Mob as soon as he become Attorney-General.
The CIA and Mob were in bed together since 1959 and the Castro takeover of Cuba.
He came out strongly against the war on March 2, 1967 and for the next year his position only strengthened.
It became one of the bases for running for president. Of course, the dark forces that came together for JFK's killing, feared the Kennedy dynasty,
and reassembled to handle the next major threat.
The Involved Parties
This introduces the concept of LIHOP versus MIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose versus Made It Happen On Purpose). Most conspiracies involve a MIHOP - where the central players of the conspiracy contrive to make it happen. 9/11 is a perfect example of MIHOP. Pearl Harbor, in my opinion, is a LIHOP. FDR and his administration needed a motivating incident to prod a reluctant US public into World War II. Resistance to involvement in the world's troubles was very stiff in America, and support for the fascists was surprisingly strong (see Charles Lindberg). FDR was painfully aware that England might not be able to resist Hitler much longer and in the East, the Japanese were taking over one colonial stronghold after another. Something needed to happen to wake up the American public to the world-wide dangers and to get their support for a massive shift in resources and commitments. During this period, Japan wanted to establish the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" which would establish them as the dominant power in Asia and break the hold of Western colonialism. To counter this aggression and to put the Japanese "in their place", an oil embargo was instituted in 1941. This provoked the rise of ultra-national and militaristic forces in Japan who felt they had no choice but to try to "break the back" of the US forces in the Pacific. The best place for this was a suprise attack on the big US base in Hawaii. Plans and preparations followed. In the meantime, the US has cracked the Japanese diplomatic codes and likely knew about the planned attack. A reinforcement to this theory is that all three US Pacific aircraft carriers were not in Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack I believe, considering the urgency to bring the US into the war in time to stop the complete collapse of Europe into Nazism and to halt the ambitions of the Japanese, the US government dampened the alarm and attention of the US forces in Hawaii and possibly moved out their carriers (which proved crucial to the war) in order to provide an "inciting incident". 9/11 was another, in my opinion, but done with far more calculation. Verdict: unclear but I believe they knew enough about the Japanese intentions and did little enough about it to qualify this as a LIHOP.
The US military had cracked the Japanese communication codes and intercepted a lot of traffic pointing to the Pearl Harbor attack as imminent. In fact, all of the big aircraft carriers normally docked in Pearl Harbor were ordered out to sea, leaving just some destroyers and smaller ships for the Japanese. Of course, the US aircraft carriers were completely decisive in the battles to come. If they had not been told to leave Pearl Harbor, the war might have had a different outcome.
So, I come down on the side of LIHOP. FDR and the military needed an inciting incident which could be fully blamed on Japan. They had been trying to pressure Japan into some kind of action with their oil embargos and other provocative actions. A surprise attack on the US fleet would be the perfect trigger - they likely were quite aware of the possibility and decided to suppress any warnings or obvious defensive preparation. They LIHOP'd it. FDR was more interested in the European front but they couldn't predict Hitler's reaction. He could have held back from declaring war on the US but thoughtlessy and over-confidently, he did just that. The terrible power of hubris. This allowed FDR to completely shift the country into a war footing and the game was on.
Definitely MIHOP.
This is a biggie. In 1982, a book came out called "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail". It contradicts the very core of the dominant religion (at least politically) of the last 2000 years. The story that all Christians grew up with was that the Son of God was miraculousy born to a virgin, was spirited away to Egypt and came back to settle in Nazareth. The only other story we have of his early years was that he was found at age 12 in the Temple, asking questions of the teachers, apparently aware at that time of his divine mission. Otherwise, there is no mention of him in the Bible for 18 years until he was 30. Then he had a three-year ministry ending in his capture and crucifixion, followed by his rise from the dead and ascension into Heaven. There are no contemporaneous records from his lifetime, he is mentioned much later by a few historians. He may never have existed and his life and death could have been entirely myth and legend.
My personal belief is that there was a man with a similar name whose life followed a similar pattern but was much more "real" and complicated than the myth allows. I believe he was the illegitimate son of the young Mary and Joseph (their first legitimate son was James) who were of the line of David and were well-connected to the Jewish aristocracy, primarily through Joseph of Arimathea. The family was important politically and they were expected to produce at least some candidates for the position of Messiah. (interestingly, this term means "Annointed One", which was more of a secular than a sacred designation). The Messiah was essentially going to be the temporal ruler (King) of Judea, who also was a priest and a prophet. They were expected to bring upon the Messianic Age in which the Jews reclaimed Jerusalem and were rulers of that land. To get the "job" he had to fulfill .
Jesus was in the line of David, and said to have had a miracle birth (although it feels to me that that might have been a convenient claim for a couple that might have had sex before marriage. "An Angel did it!".)
In Jesus' time, there was a strong revolutionary spirit, the Jews were feeling terribly oppressed by Rome and Rome's factotums such as Herod. The new leader had to be a fighter. Jesus was said to be a member of or at least had close associations with the Zealots or Warrior Kings espousing a revolution against Rome. He was also associated with the Essenes who expected both a Royal Messiah (king) and a Priestly Messiah. The Essenes lived in caves near the Dead Sea and were a purist cult and wore white. They chronicled their life and beliefs in what became called the Dead Sea Scrolls. They believed they were the "Sons of Light" fighting the "Sons of Darkness", the Romans. They actively wanted and expected an apocalyptic war against their oppressors and sought and supported a Messianic figure. Jesus actually said "I did not come to bring peace, but a sword". In other words, he was not strictly the gentle, radiant image of self-sacrifice and Universal love, but had a more pressing charge - to be the leader and ultimately king of the Jews after an uprising and battle with Rome, led by the Zealots. To achieve the top position, Jesus had to fully fulfill the prophecies - including dying and being reborn, a most tricky feat.
He also had to be a Rabbi. All rabbis were expected to marry and have children. In fact, it seems to be disqualifying if he were not a married father. This is the basis of the Holy Grail alternate theory. This book suggests that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and fathered several children. And this bloodline was the Holy Blood aspect of the theory.
The full arc of his life might have been something like - born to a prominent family in the line of David, spirited away for safety, educated in both the sacred and the secular in all the centers of knowledge at that time - Alexandria, Greece, Babylon, Persia, India (where there are descriptions of a "Saint Issa" who studied the Vedas and Buddhist sutras). He essentially brought Eastern philosophies back to his homeland. Upon his return, he was taken in by the Essenes, baptized by the Essene John, and cultivated, due to his bloodline and experience, to be the next Messiah. He embarked on his three-year mission and "performed" all the miracles required by the prophesies. The final prophesy required some engineering. The story goes that he rode into Jerusalem and deliberately performed and inspired provocative acts (riding a donkey mocking Roman power, overturning the money changers' tables in the temple, the people waved palm branches, a specific nationalist symbol, they also shouted "Hosanna" which actually means "Save us now!" to the man they called "King of Isreal"). He was effectively declaring war - not with swords but with symbols - on the corruption of the Temple and the oppression of Rome. He forced their hand to arrest and try him.
At the trial he admitted that he considered himself the King/Messiah. He was charged with treason and sedition and did not defend himself. The trial was held in a private residence and at night - suggesting a kind of "back-room deal".
I believe it all came down to timing. Working backwards - it was important that his execution take place on a Friday as the Sabbath begins at sunset and if the crucifixion drama and the necessary rituals were not concluded by then, they would have to leave him on the cross. This whole process had to be expedited to be finished by 3PM on Sabbath Friday. After his provocations on Palm Sunday (and Monday) directly in the face of the Romans and the High Priests of the Temple, he returned to Jerusalem for the "Last Supper" on Thursday, and after midnight was arrested. The next morning he went through the trials with Pilate and Herod, which concluded with a death sentence. He was force-marched to Calvary (which was actually on Joseph of Arimathea's land, as was the tomb) and was up on the cross by 9AM. He was declared dead at 3PM.
The important fact to keep in mind is that death by crucifixion is a long, painful process - it could take up to 3 to 4 days for someone to essentially strangle themselves by their own body weight or die of exposure. This is the purpose behind crucifixion, a long form of torture held for all to witness.
According to reports, Jesus was only on the cross from 9AM to 3PM, 6 hours - so short that Pontius Pilate did not believe it and had a nearby soldier pierce his side with a lance. Jesus did not respond. With the Sabbath fast approaching, he was taken off the cross and entombed. It was reported that "angels" were seen near his tomb. Two days later, the tomb was discovered to be empty. Later he was said to have visited with Mary Magdalene and some of his disciples and showed them his wounds. 40 days later he disappeared by supposedly ascending to heaven.
Here's my theory - to fulfill the final Messianic prophesy of death-and-rebirth, it had to seem that Jesus had actually died and been resurrected. As I've stated, 6 hours is an incredibly (in the literal sense of the word) short time to die by crucifixion. To convince the skeptical Romans, his death had to be "proved". This was done, apparently, with a Roman lance in his side to which he did not respond. This may have been because earlier, he had asked for water and it's possible that he was given a dose of laudunam which would have rendered him unconcious. At any rate, close to 6 hours into the crucifixion he was offered "sour wine" delivered with a sponge. The theory goes that this was laced with laudanum or opium and caused him to black out. Shortly after, his handlers declared him dead, this was "verified" by the lance and around 3PM he was taken off the cross and eventually entombed before the Sabbath at sundown. On Saturday, a group of Essenes (all dressed in white like angels) came to the tomb, rolled away the stone, revived him and took him away - likely to a safe spot in the Dead Sea cave network. When he was well enough, he visited with his wife and disciples and showed them his wounds. Since he was supposed to be dead, he couldn't expose himself to the Romans. Various theories have him going to live with the Essenes. Others have him escaping to southern France with his family, still others have him travelling to Kashmir, India where there is an alleged burial site for a saint named "Issa". It's odd that after a lifetime spent proving himself a qualified Messiah, including the death-rebirth sequence - he didn't seem to try to claim the title and lead the Jews to a victory against Rome.
According to some theories, Mary was with child at the time of the crucifixion and was said to have escaped Judea on a boat which took her to an area near Marseille, where she found refuge within a Jewish community at Narbonne. This is the Holy Blood aspect, where "chalice" containing Jesus' blood was a human female carrying his genetic line. This of course went against church doctrine which had Jesus as a roaming bachelor, Mary as a reformed whore and his line died with him on the cross. The Holy Blood theory ties in so many of the secret societies deepest secrets - the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, the Masons, and most directly, the Priory of Sion (whose Grand Masters included Botticelli, da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Debussy and even Jean Cocteau). At the heart of each of these societies was hidden the shocking antithetical beliefs that Jesus was a married father, and that his (virtouus) wife and children escaped to and made a life in southern France and his bloodline still survives, that he did not actually die on the cross but lived until his 70s and this explosive "blasphemy" was one of the reasons behind the 3rd Crusade, which actually took place in southern France against the so-called heretical cult, the Cathars (a purist Christian sect who seemed to spring from the Grail line who believed in reincarnation, allowed women to be priests (or Perfecti) and often held services out-of-doors. They worshipped Amor, or love, in contraposition to those who worshipped Roma, or power), who were hunted down and killed, often by burning. Their last stand was at Montsegur on a nearly unassailable mountain top. All the remaining members were killed or had committed suicide (similar to Masada by the Dead Sea in c. 70AD. Incidentally, a tall man was allegedly found by the Romans at the center of a circle of suicided Essenes with holes in both his hands and feet). However, before the Crusaders surmounted Montsegur, a daring escape was made in the middle of the night and the evidence of the Grail and Blood were spirited off for safe-keeping. The Knights Templar, participants in the First Crusade, had apparently uncovered genealogical documents proving that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had a bloodline, and used this knowledge to blackmail the Church, giving them enormous wealth and influence until Friday, October 13, 1307 (the origin of the Friday the 13th superstition) when King Philip IV of France (who apparently was deeply in debt to them) arrested, tortured and killed every Templar they could find and dissolved the Order. Some Templars are said to have escaped and found refuge in Scotland and the Iberian Pennisula. It is also said that the Spanish Inquisition was partly about rooting out and destroying anyone who knew about this secret - with torture and fire - a continuation of the original persecution of those who held to a heretical and contrary dogma than that propagated by the official church. This of course is why it had to be kept a secret. However, it appear that most of the intelligentia throughout history have learned of this. It's only in the late 20th century when the truth was revealed and indeed popularized by the "Da Vinci Code" books and movies. It's amazing who little reaction there was to these relevations. I suppose that people inclined to adhere to doctrine stick with it and by now, those who are less inclined to accept dogma have already left the church for their own reasons. It's part of the dissolving of the Age of Pisces into the Age of Aquarius. Long-held myths defended passionately by blood and fire in the past are now shrugged off and become part of the mainstream.
This one is fascinating in its atmospherics. The dark, smoky, gaslit Victorian age Whitechapel district, the gruesome but oddly staged murders themselves, the on-going mystery about the perpetrator. There are many theories and suspects - two Polish barbers, a barrister, a con man, an American "quack doctor", a cotton merchant, a doctor/serial poisonist. None of these suspects fully fit with all the facts.
A very important observation is that the killings were executed with precision - with apparent anatomical knowledge and with singularly clean cuts and surgical skill. Also, there was almost no evidence of a struggle at any of the murder scenes. Another significant observation was that the victims were posed in a ritualistic or degrading manner and had very specific "V" shaped cuts, various missing organs. There often was far less blood at the scene than would be expected by such gory wounds. These facts would suggest planning and organization and a very specific motive. They don't appear to be the work of a madman acting on impulse.
The narrative that best fits the facts is also my favorite - it just clicks! The story goes that Prince Albert Victor (Queen Victoria's grandson) was a bit unmanageable and had a taste for the lowlife. He apparently fathered a child after secretly marrying a Catholic shop girl named Annie Crook. This was of course completely unacceptable for many reasons, not the least was that she was a Catholic. The Protestant ruling class could not tolerate this and it could have seriously shaken their hold on power for such a scandal to see the light. After they were forced to break off their relationship, Annie started to make noise threatening blackmail after telling her friends (Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly) about it and working with them on a blackmail scheme. Can you guess the names of the Ripper's victims? This cluster of associates who all get murdered within the same period is not random and therefore begs a reason.
To me, the logical candidate as the prime mover behind the Ripper murders would have to be Queen Victoria's Royal Surgeon, Sir William Gull - with the active cooperation of other high officials in Victoria's court. They could have outfitted a mobile medical wagon, moved it close to the victims, lured them inside to perform the surgically precise murders after the administration of a sedative and then moved them to a nearby alley or back into their rooms. This method explains the relatively "clean" crime scenes with no witnesses, the relative absence of gore and the odd mutilations performed with surgical skill. The ruling class at that time were largely affiliated with the Freemasons and a lot of the symbologies in the murders can be traced to Masonic penalties and apparently were needed to satisfy the Masonic code of silence among the elites (the Prime Minister, the Police Commissioner and the Royal Surgeon) who were managing the crisis.
Characterizing all the women as prostitues and random victims, while keeping the focus on a mysterious dark-caped evil man who steals away in the shadows certainly helps to divert attention from what I believe to be a well-planned and executed official cover-up of a dangerous and salacious scandal involving the person second in line of succession to the British throne. Makes sense to me.
Another wonderful alternate theory of English history is the Shakespeare controversy. Famous characters such as Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, Walt Whitman, even Malcolm X came to seriously doubt the mainstream facts about Shakespeare - that he was the son of a glove-maker and lived in Straford-on-Avon and worked at the Globe Theater as both an actor and writer, someone who had no formal education or travel experience, left no paper trail, left only his "second-best bed" but no books, plays or manuscripts to anyone in his will. Even typing these facts convinces me yet again that there's no way the Bard of Avon could have been who they say he was.
Over the years, many other authors have been proposed (Sir Francis Bacon, Christoper Marlowe, William Stanley - 6th Earl of Derby, even a committee). However, my clear favorite and the leading candidate is Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. He was one of the highest-ranking nobles in Elizabethan England, born into a lineage that stretched back centuries. After his father's death, he became a royal ward in the household of Sir William Cecil (later Lord Burghley), Queen Elizabeth’s most powerful advisor. Many believe Cecil served as the model for the meddling character Polonius in Hamlet. Between 1575 and 1576, De Vere was highly-educated and traveled extensively through Italy and France - his time in Venice, Verona, and Milan could be the source for the vivid, accurate details of Italian life found in plays like The Merchant of Venice and Othello. His family crest includes a lion often depicted as holding or "shaking" a broken spear.
He was known as an important courtier poet and was a patron of the literary and theatrical arts. There are extensive parallels between his life and that of Hamlet - an eccentric aristocratic poet, a drama and sporting enthusiast with a classical education who had travelled extensively to Italy. Surviving examples of his writing and Shakespeare's works show many parallels, including the use of rare idioms, legal jargon and certain grammar choices. De Vere's Geneva Bible had over 1000 passages marked and many of those show up in the works. Both show an obsession with "fame," "the loss of a good name," and "the mirror of nature."
It was considered improper for a nobleman to be directly involved in the theater and other entertainments and the common practice at the time was to write under a pseudonym. He was notoriously volatile. At age 17, he accidentally killed a servant during a fencing practice. Later, he was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London after fathering an illegitimate child with one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, which sparked a long-running and violent feud between rival noble families. There is a suggestion that he and Queen Elizabeth had a had a secret love affair that resulted in a son - Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton — the very man to whom Shakespeare dedicated his long poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
He also had a scandalous affair with the "Dark Lady", Anne Vavasour, one of the Queen's Ladies-in-Waiting, which resulted in the birth of an illegitimate son. This was considered a grave insult to the Queen’s court and also resulted in a violent, years-long street war. He also owed massive sums to the Crown, eventually having to sell off his estates. He wound up being supported by a modest pension from the Queen. The theory goes that along with a brief imprisonment in the Tower of London he would never be allowed to reveal himself as the true writer of the Shakespeare material - that credit going to the modest but apparently embarassment-free part-time actor with the name of William Shakespeare. What an cruel fate for a life of a supreme genius. I suppose we reap what we sow.
The official story is that Lincoln was killed by John Wilkes Booth who acted with a small band of unimpressive co-conspirators, who were all captured and hung. Booth was a racist and white supremacist who felt that Lincoln would destroy the Southern way of life. The "final straw" for him was Lincoln's speech on April 11, 1865 (4 days before his killing) which advocated for voting rights for Blacks.
While all of the above is likely true, I believe that Lincoln’s own Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, orchestrated the death. I find several parallels between the killing of Lincoln and JFK. The primary one is that they were both considered "soft" to the current enemy. Also, they both had embarassing and ambitious Vice Presidents named Johnson. Check out some of the other parallels - it's a bit spooky:Stanton allegedly wanted to remove Lincoln to implement a more radical, punitive Reconstruction policy toward the South. Stanton detested Lincoln, thought him uncouth and underqualified and called him a giraffe and gorilla (although he later came to regard him as a great man). There are several suspicious actions taken by Stanton, including a refusal to provide Lincoln with a specific bodyguard (Major Thomas Eckert) on the night of the play and the fact that several pages were missing from Booth's diary when it was recovered by Stanton. On the day of the assassination Ulysses S. Grant was expected to attend Our American Cousin with the Lincolns. Eisenschiml argued that had Grant attended, the military guards who protected him would never have allowed Booth to enter the State Box at Ford's Theatre. Eisenschiml further argued that Grant's refusal of the Lincolns' theater invitation was due to an order by Stanton to change his plans for the evening. Eisenschiml's theory was that Grant's absence left Lincoln vulnerable. Stanton was also alleged to have known that conspirators were meeting at the Surratt boardinghouse, and that he refused to release from duty the powerful Major Thomas T. Eckert after Lincoln asked for him as a bodyguard (falsely stating that Eckert had vital work to do at the War Department's Telegraph Office).
After the assassination, Vice President Andrew Johnson came under immediate suspicion because of a note Booth left for him at his hotel just seven hours before the shooting. It read, "Don't wish to disturb you. Are you at home? J. Wilkes Booth." The First Lady, Mary Todd, was a firm believer in this theory
There are books that purport to prove that not Booth, but a double was killed in that barn and survived for many years longer. I'm not so sure of that. Ultimately, I do come down on the side of a larger conspiracy involving more than just Booth and his party - one based on a punitive view of race and white supremacy and a desire to control the aftermath of the war.
This one was a surprise to me. World War I was not a series of diplomatic "accidents" but instead was the result of a deliberate strategy by a secretive British elite. 1. The "Milner Group" (or "The Round Table") TheoryThe core theory is that Milner led a secret society, originally funded by the wealth of Cecil Rhodes, with the goal of expanding the British Empire into a global federal system.The Goal: To preserve British global hegemony by destroying the rising power of Germany, which was seen as the primary threat to the British Empire's maritime and economic dominance.The Method: Proponents argue that Milner’s circle (including figures like Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, and Lord Esher) manipulated British foreign policy for over a decade to encircle Germany. This included the formation of the Triple Entente with France and Russia, which effectively "boxed in" the German Empire.2. Specific Allegations of Milner’s RoleTheories regarding Milner's direct influence on the start of the war focus on several key areas:Engineering the Boer War as a Prelude: Milner is widely accepted by historians to have precipitated the Second Boer War (1899–1902) to secure South Africa’s gold and strategic position. Revisionists argue this was a "test run" for the global conflict he planned for Europe.Manipulation of the July Crisis: Some theorists argue that Milner’s associates in the Foreign Office deliberately gave Russia and France "blank cheques" of support during the July Crisis of 1914, ensuring that a local Balkan conflict would escalate into a world war that Britain would be forced to join.Control of the Press: Through his "Kindergarten" (a group of young, talented protégés) and close ties to press magnates like Lord Northcliffe (owner of The Times), Milner is said to have controlled the British narrative, stoking anti-German sentiment among the public to make war politically viable.3. The Counter-Argument (Mainstream View)Most mainstream historians view these theories as an overestimation of Milner's power before 1914:Lack of Official Power: Milner was largely in the political "wilderness" from 1906 until 1916. He was a conservative peer during a period of Liberal government dominance and had little direct hand in the day-to-day diplomacy that led to the war.Reactionary, Not Proactive: In this view, Milner was a "firefighter" who was brought into Lloyd George's War Cabinet in 1916 specifically because of his administrative brilliance and ability to organize a nation for "Total War," rather than being the man who started it.
I only recently came across this alternate theory and it shook my world a bit. The theory goes that Hitler escaped at the end of the war to South America and lived there until his death in 1962. What happened to karma, I thought! How could someone so clearly evil be granted a pass and be allowed to live a more-or-less normal life with a wife and possibly a family?
The facts supporting this theory are somewhat speculative but there is no certain evidence that Hitler killed himself. There were no eye-witnesses and a verifiable body or any physical evidence has ever been recovered. The jaw bone the Russians said was Hitler's turned out to be that of a young lady. [ However, more testing has been done on dental fragments and there is now some contradictory evidence to this theory and that Hitler did indeed kill himself. Remains to be seen, as they say.]
A compelling fact is that ALL the intelligence services, including the FBI, at the time had open cases trying to trace Hitler's whereabouts - they apparently didn't themselves believe that Hitler was dead. There are hundreds of files and a lot of the theories stated below came from these files.
As many as 9,000 Nazis and collaborators had settled in South America around the end of the was under the protection of Juan Peron, the fascist dictator of Argentina. In fact, many S.A. countries were fascist-friendly at the time, esp. Argentina, Brazil and Chile. Paraguay and Bolivia both had dictators sympathetic to the fascists. There are still many thriving German "colonies", esp. in Bariloche, which resembles a Bavarian town, along with Blumenau and Pomerode in Brazil. The famous "Ratlines" had allowed hundreds of high-level Nazis to escape to South America around the end of the war. This route involved the Vatican and the Red Cross and would typically get Nazis out through Italy and Spain, often in U-Boats, through the Canary Islands to a known U-Boat base near Mar del Plata, Argentina. As the Nazis watched their war implode in Europe, many arranged to take this "Ratline" to S.A. and establish a new life and possibly even a Fourth Reich. In fact, a large number of top Nazis left Germany via Templehof Airport after Hitler's birthday party in the bunker on Apr 20, 1945. There is testimony from a pilot that he flew Hitler, Eva Braun and several others out of Berlin on April 28 and that the party was able to reach a usable airport via the over 90 miles of underground tunnels under Berlin - and a entrance to these tunnels has been found right next to the Bunker. They were eventually flown to Vigo, Spain (another fascist country) which was a known hub for German U-boats, and from there transported to S.A.
Several witnesses have attested to sightings of the surfaced u-boats with what seemed to be specially-treated guests who disembarked.
The theory goes that they were secretly transported by train to Bariloche, Argentina in the Patagonian region, where he settled in Bavarian-style
with its own amphibious landing and multiple guard stations, at a place the locals refer to as "Hitler's Island" (!).
Not too far from this are the ruins of a secret "atomic factory",
leading some to the conclusion that this was a center of the Fourth Reich and the power would come from a nuclear threat and the re-emergence of
Hitler on the world stage.
There are scores of witnesses in S.A. who say they saw or met Hitler. There are others in Argentina (Peron's bodyguard), a maid for the Eichhorn
family who served him meals and many Bariloche locals.
There's even this picture provided by an S.S. collaborator who said he met with Hitler once a month for a period of time in Columbia.
What may have kept the Fourth Reich from any success were the facts that Hitler was too old and infirm, the nuclear research never panned out and finally, Peron was removed from office and the support for the Nazi resurgence was terminated. According to this theory, Hitler died in Bariloche in 1962 and the Fourth Reich with him. However, in my opinion, the Nazi spirit infected various governments in S.A. and a lot of that evil and deliberate cruelty was reflected in the horrible and deadly fascist-style dictatorships that flourished for a time.
My conclusion is that it's inconclusive. It's undeniable that there were thousands of escaped Nazis in S.A., that there were many fascist-friendly governments, that there are a number of unusual buildings and complexes that were built by Germans and may have been intended to house important leaders and that there are a number of witnesses who claimed to have seen Hitler and Eva Braun. However, there are a lot of fuzzy and swampy aspects to this story and the case can be made against this theory. I remain open to further discovery.
The Nazis were evil but not stupid. They needed slaves to build their war machines. I believe their strategy was mainly to work them to death. Reading Himmler's biography - he was tasked with setting up a multi-ring system. The area around Berlin was to be entirely free of Jews, and this ring system continued outward with declining goals of "purity" until they reached the Urals. Jews could be resettled there - "beyond the Pale". This was an enormous bureaucratic task, as it required detailed genealogical research and careful judgment. It nearly drove him and his offices crazy. In the meantime, they created concentration and work camps, gathered up and shipped all the Jews and other "undesirables" (gypsies, so-called defectives, communists, etc.) to these camps and separated out those who were deemed to be productive from those who couldn't contribute to the war effort. The productive types were smashed into barracks, fed miserably and generally set on the path of working themselves to death. The non-productive - lots of women, children, old folks, the ill - were "disposed of" with horrible Germanic efficiency. My belief is not that the Nazis embarked on a course of complete and immediate genocide, but were pragmatic enough to suck their victims dry first. The big problem began when the war fronts began collapsing in on themselves. Camps were folded into one another as the Allies advanced, leading to severe over-crowding. Many of the horrific images of stacks of bodies and emaciated walking skeletons are the result of outbreaks of cholera and other diseases, as well as severe neglect. The figure of 6 million Jews has stuck in the world myth system. No one really knows exactly where it came from (it might have been Eichmann) but it started to be used around the time of the Nuremberg trials. The worldwide Jewish population before was approximately 16.6 million. After the war, it was 11 million. That's at most 4.6 million but this figure also includes the rest of the world outside of Europe. The round number of 6 million is convenient and impactful. The idea that the Nazis were pure evil and were only engaged in genocide is also convenient. As always, the truth is more complex, nuanced and harder to digest (but more nourishing and better for the body politic). It also de-isolates the Nazis as somehow being separate and unique in history. This is a dangerous mis-conception and it blinds us to the fact that there is a deep strain of racism and fear (and resentment) of the others which has led to and will lead to terrible actions and tragic results. We're now seeing this in America with the unleashing of the attack dogs of ICE against the non-white population and the building or acquisition of gigantic warehouses throughout the country. ICE operations are still continuing but it's worth observing that the free rein given ICE has only pulled back after they were filmed killing white people. That was "beyond the pale". And, a shout-out to the most effective anti-facist weapon we've seen - the ubiquitous camera phone. Regimes through history have committed atrocities on individuals and groups but were not held accountable because it was their word against the victims. Now, the objective eye of the camera can record what really happened and it is impossible for them to get away with denial and obfuscation and mis-characterization. They can be brought to account at the other great weapons against facism, a strong legal system and an energetic and curious media system. None of these facts or arguments I've laid out above in any way take away from the judgment of history that the Nazis committed unspeakable acts of evil and that the Jews were their main target or that many millions of innocent people had their lives ripped from them in a callous and industrial-scale manner.
Now - a moment to ponder the seemingly forever problem of the Jews. What is it about this specific ethno-religious group that has excited so much persecution throughout most of history and most of the world? My own interest in this topic came early as my first junior-high school band director (and, eventually, my first trumpet teacher) was a colorful character named Irving Sarin. I was a young 11 years-old (soon to be 12) and had been brought up in the Midwest, by middle-class parents with middle-of-the-road politics and WASP (not wasp-ish) values. We were church-goers (Episcopalian) and good, upstanding citizens and I was an innocent, happy young fellow with barely a clue as to the wider world. It was an all-white environment and I guess I thought the entire world was like my little happy land. I walked into the band room (in 1967) at the newly built West Hills Junior High School, trumpet in hand, and met the person who would change my life. I had never met a person like Mr. Sarin. He was a firebrand and incredibly passionate about music and history and politics. I remember him holding up our standard history book and announcing that it was full of lies. What? He inspired us way beyond our abilities and it was a remarkable introduction into a red-blooded, gutsy, provocative - but dedicated, insightful, meaningful - approach to life and music. He clashed repeatedly with our somewhat fundamentalist principal and only lasted a year, but in that year saw and heard something in me and brought me from the last chair to the first chair trumpet in one fell swoop. He also offered to teach me privately (I also studied piano with his wife) and would regale me with inspiring stories of music, surrounded in his studio by pictures of famous musicians he had played with (Reiner, Steinberg, Bernstein, Stravinsky no less) and would play his recordings with the Pittsburg Symphony with dramatic gestures and thrilling tales of trumpet heroism. I was blown away. He was also very Jewish. His last professional engagement was with the newly-formed Israel Symphony which he left rather suddenly around the June 1967 war. The only job he could find was at my little junior high school. Can you imagine? I feel that the fickle finger of fate reached out and tapped me on the shoulder. I'm not sure what I would have been without the relationship with Sarin, but it would likely have been half as interesting.
One thing he revealed to me in a big way was the "Jewish experience". This started a lifelong fascination with that issue. Throughout my life, I've had important relationships with Jews - business partners, musical friends, boyhood friends, female friends and lovers, and so on. They've always been among my most interesting and challenging relationships. There's depth and twisty mazes and emotional land mines and inspiring fire in them. Their history and accomplishments are incomparable. Their ambitions are powerful, as are their emotions and their curiousity about life. But, what is it about them that triggered such horrible persecution and hatred - and continues to in apparently ever-increasing measure? There is not an easy answer to this question - but I've basically come to the conclusion that it's a combination of envy, resentment, fear, otherness and usefullness. One of the high points for Jews was pre-Nazi Germany. They were successful and prominent in nearly every field. Their appreciation of and support of high culture, their fine tastes, their intelligence elevated them and they probably thought they had finally made it. And, of course, this is right before the worst possible thing was about to happen. Reading about their experience in the Middle Ages - I learned that, since it was considered sinful to loan money by the Christian establishment, the ruling class had to deal with the Jews for loans and other financial services. When they had rung up enough debt, I read that they started a fear campaign among the lower classes to inspire them to attack the Jewish ghetto and burn and loot, thereby conveniently erasing their debts. This story is very illustrative to me. We are fine with using them to get what we want and to enjoy the benefits of their culture, until we start to resent their superiority and success and then our lower, base instincts are aroused to destroy what we both fear and desire. They haven't helped themselves all the time with their separateness and "Chosen People" attitudes. Insisting on dressing different and maintaining different cultures is somewhat provocative, but there's nothing a dumb loser hates more than being reminded he's a dumb loser, which they can tend to do by their very presence. Other cultures, specifically the other middle eastern cultures, also separate themselves from the general culture and cause resentment, but the fundamental difference is that they do not generally become richer, smarter and more successful than their host culture and can therefore be pitied or looked-down-on. The Jews are different in that they generally succeed, which is (apparently) intolerable to many. This happened in Palestine in the first period of Jewish settlement. They came in and offered fair prices for land. No problem. Then they turned that land into successful enterprises. Big problem. That made the original inhabitants look like losers.
A non-Jewish example of this is the 1994 genocide perpertrated (Ed: - that's a weird word) by the Hutus against the Tutsis in Rwanda. The Hutus were the common folk, mainly farmers, and the Tutsis were the cattle owners and the ruling elite. The Tutsis were typically taller and thinner and had better jobs and education. One day it apparently just became too much for the Hutus and they launched a 100-day campaign against the Tutsis of systematic murder, often their neighbors and with machetes. It's one of the clearest examples of how the darker forces can be unleashed through cultivated resentment. I believe that's what happened in Germany. This undercurrent of conspiracy theories and racial theories and libel and slander (the "Blood Libel") was always there - just as the fear of immigrants and "the other" has always been simmering in America - and it took a populist demagogue working with a background of national shame and economic uncertainty, with the skillful use of propaganda, to tip the scales against the Jews (and other despised minorities). Suddenly, this enlightened and cultured nation showed its other face of rage and hatred and violence. The concept of the scapegoat who must be sacrificed to cleanse the society of its own sins.
I have an interesting metaphysical angle on this (of course). It goes back to the distant past and involves the Anunnaki (cynics should stop reading here).
The story goes that we were scraping out a life as primitive hunter-gathers and farmers. Suddenly, around 5400BC appears the city of Eridu,
apparently a highly-advanced civic design with sophisticated buildings and designs.
The Sumerian cuneiform tablets need AI and super-computers to translate.
And not just in Sumeria, but for the next several thousand years, amazing structures were erected - the famous pyramds in Egypt and Meso-America that beggar
explanations as to how those massive stones could have been cut and laid so precisely. The corners of the pyramids are square to within one part in 10,000 and
aligned to True North more accurately than the Greenwich Observatory.
This is a quantum leap. What explanation could there be for this?
To me, the most logical explanation is that we were colonized by a non-Earth origined race. Why would this be too wild to believe?
They're discovering all sorts of engravings across the world from cultures in this period that suggest space travel. What is this if not an astronaut?
There's so much in the public domain about this, but one of the more convincing points to me is the similarities in that little handbag being carried
by "gods" as engraved by some people impressed enough to go through the trouble. The first three engravings come from Egypt, Mexico and Sumeria:
Imagine a primitive culture in South America encountering the Age of Exploration ships, guns, elaborate clothing and strange customs arriving in a Spanish galleon.
These are gods! (Actually, they're just other humans but with advanced technology). We can't deny the fact that our little planet floats in an enormous sea.
With our new telescopes and space explorations we can observe a countless number of other suns and galaxies. We have only been around a relatively short period
of time on this Earth and look how far we've come. Homo Sapiens have been around for 300,000 years - a blink of an eye to the timeless universe.
We started to farm only 12,000 years ago. We started to harness electricity 200 years ago. We're really just children starting to grasp a bigger world.
However, now we can fly in the sky and communicate across the world in an instant (and destroy all life if we fall off the edge of reason).
What will our life be like in another 100 years at this rate, another 1000? Why couldn't / wouldn't we develop ways to conquer time and distance? We're
constantly working on that now. It's really a matter of time. How about other cultures on other planets who have been around for even longer - say 500,000 years.
How advanced would you imagine they could be? They could have perfected space travel, gene-manipulation, weaponry, possibly forms of mind control - won't we?
Our Western cultures went through a long period of colonization and exploitation of less-advanced cultures - we just had to figure out how to get there, overpower and
over-awe them and then employ them in extracting their own resources for our use. Doesn't it stand to reason that other non-Earth based cultures would
follow the same pattern? The legend of the Anunnaki is that "gods descended from the heavens" and established a network of complex bases (pyramids, anyone?) that
served primarily as trading ports for the transport of resources extracted and processed by us humans in the service of our "gods and masters". This is
exactly what we did in South America and Asia and Africa and India. One of the most impactful things the Anunnaki is alleged to have done involved
genetic manipulation. They selected a tribe of humans and genetically engineered them to be more useful. They were more controllable but at the same time
stronger and smarter. They apparently were quite interested in gold and programmed the lust for gold into the early humans.
This tribe could be called "The Chosen People". A minor genetic tweak thousands of years ago separated out a subset of human beings who then
went through generation after generation being suppressed, persecuted and slaughtered - while at the same time achieving remarkable feats in science
and culture. Or so this theory goes.
Why did they leave? One speculation is that the Great Flood happened around 2300BC. Also, perhaps by this time, humans had started to resist the complete
control of the non-earth cultures, similar to how colonies around the world started throwing out the exploiting colonists. We may have become too hard to handle,
the distances were too great to compensate for the trouble, there may have been more important uses for their resources - such as a conflict with another
colonizing culture - the main reasons Britain finally abandoned our country.
Continuing from the above theory of colonization by non-earth cultures, I'd like to discourse on "aliens" in general. First let me state that I believe that anyone who does not accept that there may non-earth civilizations is now the conspiracy theorist. There are countless galaxies visible to our moderately powered telescopes - and each galaxy may have 100 billion stars and each star represents a "sun" and each sun likely has planets orbiting it. In our (relatively) little Milky Way, there a 11 billion potentially habitable planets. It's inconceivable to me that we are the only planet with intelligent life - and look how spotty and precarious that intelligence is. Could there be plenty of inhabitated planets out there that have been around much longer and have evolved their technology at similar rates as we have. We were riding horses and buggies until fairly recently, now we're cruising the moon in sophisticated spacecraft. At this rate, in another 100 years we might have tackled the problem of long-distance space travel. It's very comfortable to me to assume that older cultures than ours have passed that milestone and have been out cruising for opportunities for colonization and exploitation. There are a few general categories of aliens. They basically fall into the logical groups of genetic source. In other words, mammals managed to survive the collision with a giant comet 66 million years ago. They became the dominant species and were the ones that evolved technically. What about a planet that hadn't had that cataclysmic event? Reptiles would be the dominant species and would have evolved technically. Perhaps it was insects, or fish or birds that became dominant (birds were originally reptiles). Each species could conceivably followed the path we mammals did. The current categories of aliens include mammalian/humanoid variations (the Plaedians, the Nordics), reptilian/reptoid variations (the Reptoids, mainly from the star system Draco, possibly the Anunnaki) and the Greys. A simple way of thinking of this is - mammals are warm-blooded and reptiles are cold-blooded. (Insects have no blood - they're bloodless) There engravings of both reptilian and mammalian alien "astronauts" found across the world. My belief is that the two types are natural enemies, and possibly have been engaged in combat and competition throughout time and space. The reptoids from Draco (think Draconian) are focused on dominance since that's what works for them. Mammals survived and thrived through cooperation. My belief (stated above) is that we were colonized by both types of aliens. They used us to do their manual labor and to extract precious resources. This probably went on for thousands of years. Then came the Great Flood and for that and other reasons they withdrew. They likely left some observers and observation mechanisms for them to keep an eye on us, but we were largely left alone for another thousand years although there are plenty of eye-witness accounts of encounters. The number of encounters grew exponentially after humans exploded the first atom bomb. The theory is that this is such a profound event that it resonates throughout the sub-atomic level which alerted other-world cultures to our progress. This meant that we were on the threshold of a new level of technology and it was time for them to observe us more closely. Would we destroy ourselves as likely happened many times before, or would we break through to a more universal conciousness and be on the way to joining our former colonists in the universal "market". I believe that the crash in Roswell in 1947 was a result of an observation vehicle experiencing a catastrophic failure (maybe hit by lightning?) and the entities and the craft were recovered and analyzed. This focused the attention of at least the US government. Remember, we were moving from a hot war to a cold war that needed high-tech weaponry and surveilliance - not the old brutal smash and grab tech of WWII but secret and slick - jets, advanced communication, miniaturized devices. Apparently, the bodies of the aliens recovered were those we now call the "Greys". The theory behind the "Greys" is that they are an over-cloned race and they desperately needed to refill their genetic gas tank. They approached Earth's government and offered to trade technology for access to mammals to harvest genetic material. There are so many eye-witnesses stories of abduction with foggy but poignant memories of being examined by Greys (and even insect-like aliens) and having their body fluids extracted. There are also the so called "cattle mutiliations" where with surgical precision (and no tracks or excess blood around) the cows were drained of blood and stripped of many of their organs. This sounds to me like genetic harvesting. In exchange, we got tech. Look at the quantum leaps for technology we've experienced since WWII. That's kind of the theory behind Area 51 - where so many experimental and boundary-breaking advances occured and also where it is alleged we store and examine alien vehicles and entities. We have stopped hearing so many reports of this occuring and that may be because the deal was concluded as both parties got what they needed. Now what we are experiencing are encounters with both very small and agile spheres (testified to with both actual video evidence and the testimony of hardened and highly-trained military personnel) and sitings of enormous scales (the 1997 "Phoenix Lights" event witnessed by thousands, the 1991 Mexico City Eclipse mass siting are just two of many). My theory here is that we are being observed and possibly having our defenses probed and our strengths measured - much as we do with potential earth-bound adversaries. However, there is also the possibility that we are being introduced into a much larger "community" and gradually getting acclimatized to the idea of living among more powerful forces. I believe there is an on-going and forever "Star War" between the reptilian and the mammalian-based aliens with occasional truces and compromises, but two cultures this far apart in the concept of how to manage their societies is not ultimately compatible. Obviously, we would be much more comfortable with the mammalian-based aliens, but we have dark tendencies towards "reptilian brain" activities. We've recently experienced a migration towards more authoritian leaders - as always, a backlash against too much "feeling" and "compassion". But Draconian solutions are very attractive to too many people. Ultimately, the story of aliens has a lot to do with our own evolution. Will we rise above our base instincts and become more like the humanoids or more like the reptoids. My money's on the warm and fuzzy mammals. I just hope and pray that we dont't allow the madmen of the world (I'm looking at you, Donald Trump) to tip us over into an unrecoverable crisis.
"Like nothing we've ever seen", as he would say. (And, as usual, not true or accurate). The mind reels at the current state of affairs. I was born in the Eisenhower era - was 8 years old for the Kennedy assassination, 12 for RFK and MLK, in high school for Watergate. Thought I'd seen the worse with Nixon, revised my opinion during the George W Bush era (really, the Cheney era) because we'd experienced a major shift in America (and the world). With 9/11 as the trigger (see My Favorite Conspiracies), we transformed from an open, even fun society with a sax-playing, foolin'-around President who was erudite, compassionate, broad-minded, and successful (balanced budget, prosperity, peace) into a paranoid security state.
Sometimes I think that paranoid period was more impactful than the Trump era in that it turned us inside out. Air travel changed forever and the world became an uptight and inconvenient place. Security is now the major impediment to everything - from travel to doing any kind of business on the web, with banks, with the government. Mistrust is the norm. Did that make us safer? Not that I can tell, although one of the problems with security is that you don't see the bomb that didn't blow up or the terrorist plot that was foiled in the nick of time. But, are we really safer? With the proliferation of insanely powerful guns and the propagation of hate and bitterness via the internet, we are far less safe in our daily lives then ever before, and thanks to Fox News and others, we're at each others' throats. There was also the ugliness of our unneccessary and unsuccessful foreign wars with the consequent damages to our morale, reputation and treasure. Oh, and then the 2008 economic collapse brought up by our regulators being asleep at the wheel.
But then came Obama - and my faith in humanity was rewarded - for a minute. The most powerful country in the world exhibited enough confidence in itself that a white majority elected a "person of color". He proved to be of superior ethics, general competence and even grace and nobility. However, the racism that always lurks in the dark started bubbling up and I think the conservatives and reactionaries and latent racists were deeply alarmed by his ascension and maybe more by his success. This proved to them that they weren't a "superior race", even though they couldn't admit it. Ugliness and aggressiveness started to well up from the pits below. A bellicose, mendacious, posturing, egomaniac fabricator and fantasist saw his opportunity and began to tap into the dark side of suspicion, denialism, resentment, shame and racism and started his rise to power with his birther conspiracy. Being soundly slapped down with the facts and humor only strengthened his resolve to get into power and get even.
When he first started his campaign, most of our reactions were - "yeah, right, that guy? What a joke." I know mine was. He's such an obvious phony - from top (his super-weird hair) to bottom (lifts?). His history was checkered to say the least.
Lots and lots - as it turned out. Enough to put him over the top in 2016 against a vastly more competent, experienced, connected, rational, thoughtful, compassionate but somehow deeply hated woman. The long and scurilous campaign against the Clintons finally paid off. I also think that there was some resistance to the attitude of inevitability of a Hillary victory. Americans like a surprise. Plus, Trump's salemanship managed to put lipstick on a pig and con enough people to make the difference.
OMG! WTF! (Choke) - were my basic reactions on election night. Impossible! This can't have happened! What is going on with the US? What didn't I get?
I, and probably most responsible liberal types, dove deeply into the topic. We read everything we could find about the Red States and their people. In fact, Paula and I went on a several weeks car tour called "The Red States Trip". What we discovered was that things were normal and in fact much improved since I last visited.
We had a great time and met so many lovely people. America is a beautiful and bountiful country (in most places). It has a fascinating history with contrasting archaeological layers of horror and redemption, but we somehow land sunny-side up and continue to evolve socially while institutionalizing liberal progress - in civil rights, workers' rights, the rights of women, etc. However, change takes time to filter down and is often met with organized resistance and backlash. One thing the conservatives have is patience. They work tirelessly for power and are aided by a seeming immunity to shame and charges of hypocrisy.
So, what happened? And what continues to happen in increasingly alarming ways?
There's lots of interesting theories. One of my favorites is the "shame to blame" hypothesis. The idea here is that his supporters carry around shame at themselves and their failures in life. Greed and bad governance has made life harder and harder to afford. Life itself is a challenge and some people aren't well-equipped for it. They don't adapt and become miserable. They know it's their fault, but accepting the blame and responsibility for that is too much to bear. They welcome someone who can shift the blame on to someone else. This is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany where a majority felt demoralized and defeated by World War I. (It didn't help that the Allies were extremely punitive and judgy, either). They couldn't take it and when someone came along with a ready scapegoat and easy explanation, they bought it. It must be the immigrants!
Another aspect of this is the "rebel". Rebels are cool. "Resist the dominant paradigm!" In my day, the rebels were the hippies and college intellectuals who were fighting the good fight against overt racism and a terrible war. They were scorned and marginalized and attacked until the moral tide shifted. They started to inherit the positions of the establishment they had fought against and America continued to institutionalize their liberal values. I believe the full bloom of that was the Obama era. The dream became the reality.
Well - what goes up must come down. The yin-yang of it all. This period is inevitable. Life MUST balance.
The assassinated right-wing activist, Charlie Kirk, really embodied the new rebellion. He's reactionary and illiberal and in my opinion, holds some nasty views and has said some nasty things. "MLK was a bad person", "gun deaths are justified to keep the 2nd Amendment", "wives should submit to your husband" and so on and so forth. In other words, a reactionary and someone almost worse than the establishment our generation fought against.
However, turns out he was considered "cool" by lots of people. He was the new rebel fighting against the dominant paradigm.
Trump is an opportunistic, always has been. He's not a strategist and is no theorist or social engineer. He has a predator's sensitivity to weakness and fear. You can watch his methodology develop in real time. He'd throw stuff at the wall and see what stuck. Build the Wall! Yay! "Woke" Bad! Yay! Transgenders! Boo! He's like a stand-up comic refining his routine based on audience reaction. He doesn't really seem to have a strong belief system - if something works for him, he's all for it. If it doesn't, he wants to destroy it. He's a walking Id, a bruise, a bundle of needs, an empty soul that needs the vacuum to be filled with adoration and praise - oh, and money+sex+power. BTW, a little numerological aside - the letters FOX translate to 666. Just sayin'.
Leading up to the 2024 election, it was looking very bad for Biden, who presented like a walking corpse, even though he wound up accomplishing more than most Presidents against a wall of furious Republican opposition and had kept the peace. In the face of predictable economic after-effects of a world-wide shutdown, limited supplies, slowed deliveries - leading to higher prices (world-wide). Biden was calming and tempering and productive and skilled in the art of compromise - and objectively things were doing quite well. Of course, the Republicans were absolutely fired up and Trump was promising to end wars and inflation on day one (this made me laugh - who could possibly believe him? Turns out 49%). There was a momentary bump in optimism when Biden dropped out and the energetic and likeable Kamala Harris took the mantle, but it was too little, too late and too female for the current mood. For the second time, the pretend Alpha Male roared over his far more qualified female opponent and enough people bought into the ancient instinct of "man strong, woman weak". Oh, not to mention the (apparently diabolically engineered fake) assassination attempt which made him a invulnerable hero and martyr blessed by God himself. (There are some very suspicious aspects to this event, primarily the blood streaks. If he had actually been hit by a bullet the streaks would have shown up going backwards from his ear. Instead, they are forward into his face, as would happen if a blood squib were squeezed. Second, there is no evidence of an ear wound in the thousands of pictures taken since then. There are other questions - like how could a gunman gain access to a rooftop with a direct line of sight just 150 yards from the stage? No security force in the world would allow that - and he was there for quite a while without being "discovered". If this really was an engineered event, the horrific thing is that the planners expected some innocent bystanders to die - and that was OK with them, I guess the end always justifies the mean for them). I had some dark moments that year as it started to dawn on me that a convicted felon, failed President, insurrectionist, fraudster, sexual abuser and serial liar was likely going to win the most powerful office in the world. Project 2025 had been published where all the Right's plans were laid out for all to see. It was clear that they were planning an anti-democratic takeover of my beloved country. This could be it for the whole grand experiment.
And after the election we found out that it was going to be even worse. It was upside-down time. He pardoned thousands of insurrectionists, he fired hundreds of watchdogs, he escaped all his legal entanglements - including his obvious encouragement of insurrection, of fake electors, of pressure campaigns to "find him votes", of the wholesale theft of thousands of secure documents - he continues to pardon every crook and con man that asks, he hands out money to his friends and viciously prosecutes his enemies after taking full control of what has always been an independent DOJ. He installed fools, goofballs, knuckleheads, drunks, lick-spittles and low-wattage characters in his cabinet to the point of it being almost funny. (He has a knack for finding the worst of the worst.) He and his sons are grabbing everything they can lay their hands on - no matter if it compromises the security of the country or exposes him to blackmail or economic pressure. He's unleashed his strange, rage-filled attack dog - Stephen Miller - who has helped to create a US Gestapo, which has been funded beyond any other agency here or in the world and yet has the least oversight (ICE) and sicced them on everybody who isn't white (or right or straight) enough. He's funded the establish of huge human warehouses all through the US. He enthusiastly supported the mad billionare Elon Musk as he recklessly took a chain saw to the Federal government - DOGE was manned by children, who, it's been reported, would cancel programs because they didn't like their name. So many good things were killed or crippled by DOGE or others such as Russell Vought, Brendan Carr and other like-minded scrooges - USAID, PBS, the Stephen Colbert show, Federal Mediation and Conciliation, US Digital Service, Consumer Financial Protection Board, AmericCorps, EPA. It seems that the rule was - if it pleases the liberals, it's gotta go. The administration went after law firms, the media, it hollowed out the top brass at the Pentagon, it fired any FBI person who even had a slight bit of participation in any investigation of Trump (never mind that these poor souls had merely accepted an assignment), it's working to undermine and take down the Departments of Education, Labor, Transportation, HHS, FDA, CDC, NIH, etc. and is basically going after any group that might provide "uncomfortable" facts, such as science, medical, research, labor statistics, museums, national parks, general statistics, you name it. And there's a total kook in charge of the medical posture of the United States. Measles, anyone? (Of course, the horrible irony of it being RJK's son. That apple fell a long way from the tree). Oh, and not to forget - gold leaf on everything and a ballroom that dwarfs the White House and a triumphal arch and triumphal marches and UFC fighting for the 250th. What's next? Monster Truck rallies? Watch the movie "Idiocracy" for hints.
I could go on.
When discussing the 2024 election with my liberal friends (and wife) I tried to remind them of the cyclical nature of things, of the fact that so many of the Trumpsters are incompetent and pretty dumb, that Trump himself has the attention span of a ferret, that he won a broad but very shallow victory (despite his exaggerated claims to the contrary) that America is a really big country filled with Cranky Yankees who kicked free of a tyrannical system 250 years ago, that we still have a democracy and a pretty well-designed constitution and stubborn courts and energetic media and that it would take more than four years to dismantle all that and dissolve us into a full autocracy or dictatorship or monarchy or whatever muddled "vision" they might have.
Many of my rose-colored assumptions have been severely tested, however. I really had no idea of how cowardly, complicit and chicken-shit the Republican Party could be. I also didn't anticipate the utter greed and self-interest of the moneyed-class (how could I have missed that? Maybe because I was raised in a time where the concept of noblesse oblige was active (the Kennedys, the Carnegies, some of the Rockefellers and Fords). If it weren't for the guilty conscience of the Robber Barons, I wouldn't have had symphony orchestras to play with and libraries to visit). I also hadn't taken the measure of my fellow man (and, sadly, woman) - the 49% of voters - who have shocked me in their hatred and ignorance and shallowness and gullibility, who missed the dangerous elephant in the room while he was pointing out the bad, evil mice (by that I mean the relatively tiny issues of "woke" and "DEI" and "transgender bathrooms" and all the other idiotic non-issues that were set on fire and waved in the air by the propaganda machines on the Right.)
Basically, though, I truly felt that the only thing that would demonstrate exactly how wrong the Trump approach to governance would be - would be actually experiencing it. No volume of warning, no mode of communication seemed to penetrate the asses of the masses. They wanted cheaper eggs, dammit! They hated trans people and uppity feminists and being scolded by "woke" liberals, and being made to feel less than. They also desperately needed some scapegoat to blame for their shitty lives - so that they didn't have to take responsibility or even focus on them. [BTW, I love the origin story of the scape goat, from Mesopotamia - they would take a goat and make it King, parade it through the city and honor it and give it anything it wanted, then would either send it out to the wilderness or slaughter it. The difference between the ancient and the modern scapegoat, is that we currently do the same thing without realizing it. We should bring back that ritual as it's a cleansing metaphor for what ails us.] There have been times when I've kind of cheered on the demolition derby - the quicker and more obvious it is, the quicker and shallower the actual impact. Of course, I don't want people to suffer but I'm a bit less concerned about that if they, say, voted for Trump three times. Most of his actions so far, other than the obvious attempted takeovers of cultural institutions like the Kennedy Center, have really impacted the working class and his rural voters. They're going to wake up someday with much higher prices, no Medicare, no rural health care, greatly reduced social services and probably a lot of bankrupt local governments - while their hero-god is skipping away with their money.
As I write this in April 2026, Trump has threatened the total annihilation of a civilization! On Easter (!?!?) he told Iran to "open the fucking Strait, you crazy bastards" and is acting out as the demented, senile, narcissistic, decaying soul he is. Because of his impulsive decision to start a war with Iran - which virtually no pre-planning or warning to any of the millions of people not to mention dozens of allies, with no consultation with the hundreds of experts in the Middle East or thousands of military experts - but after consultation with his son-in-law, his real-estate buddy and his crazy monkey of a Defense Secretary, and very strong persuasion by Bibi Netanyahu and the Mossad (and probably with some reminder of the hold they have over him thanks to Jeffrey Epstein (more on that later)) - he just went ahead with it - boom! Adding to all the economic chaos he already brought on with his insane and erratic (and ultimately judged illegal) tariffing, and the complete under-cutting of his own supporters in taking away Medicare and SNAP support - now they have to deal with rocketing fuel costs, global chaos and uncertainty, and, of course, by kicking this hornet's nest, the hornets are dispersed and out to get us. We haven't even begun to see the consequences of this impulsive act, although Iran's tight grip on the world's petroleum balls is starting to hurt.
How do I think this might end? It appears that a huge blue wave is building in the country. All the "let's give him a try" folks gave him a try and don't like it. He's lost major support of independents, the young, Latinos, even the manosphere. Many of his die-hards are mea-culping. This is what I meant by them not believing it until they see it. Now they see it. Only the blindly partisan and the Fox-hypnotized can miss it. Mainly because everybody has to fill their gas tank. You can't lie your way out of that.
He still poses a major threat. This next period will not be easy. First off, his super-powers are shamelessness and the ability to shrug off bad news. Also, he really doesn't seem to care much about anything but the current moment - oh, and building monuments to himself. He's the "f-it" President. That's a power. Word is that he and his minions are preparing for a major assault on democracy if it looks like they'll be done in by it. If the Republicans lose the House and esp. the Senate in the mid-terms, this is Trump's death-knell. Full Epstein release, investigation after investigation, the stymieing (this is really a word) of their initiatives and, hopefully, the restoration and healing of the damage done. Impeachment attempts are sure to follow. He'll dig in behind his veto power and every battle will be hard-fought. But at least there'll be checks and balances again. It's "party over" for the Project 2025 folks and for the Trump family's epic greed. And, likely also for the gigantic money transfers from the American public to the upper-class, the military-industrial complex and all the scamsters and fraudsters running rampant right now. So, they're not going to give this up without an anything-goes fight. What I've heard is their current plan is to declare a national emergency around the election, where they would try to nationalize election rules, restrict mail-in balloting and force people to re-register, among many other strategies including refusing to seat Democratic senators and reps by reason of "fraud" - and this would paralyze the country until all the legal challenges have been resolved. With our current hard-core conservative Supreme Court majority there's no counting on them to do the right thing. The effort will probably not succeed in the long run but I will not put it past them. We'll see in a few months.
The Trump era is not over, but it's starting to smell funny.
A Psychic Reading of Donald TrumpWhat, if anything, does this list say about me? I guess I'd say that I like taut action and broad but well-built comedies. I feel that these movies are gems - refined and polished with lots of aspects. I love craft with a dash of artistry. I love films with minimal chaff and maximal wheat. I love movies that have great "tone" - the music has a lot to do with this. Most of these have great scores. I like origin stories versus the more baroque and padded sequels. The first movies in series tend to be those that the creators poured everything into - they're often done under duress with lower budgets so little is wasted. Plus the motivations and the original behavior patterns are established. These are movies for grown-ups. I don't need or seek out "feel-good" stuff - I like to be moved and/or impacted. I love reflecting on a movie for days afterwards. I love epiphanies. I also love the Coen brothers - their movies meet all my criteria, tight writing, serious humor, polish, depth, multiple aspects and facets, well-drawn characters, propelling narratives.
In the era of Trump and Stephen Miller and ICE, I've been pondering the concept of evil, defined by the Oxford as "profoundly immoral and wicked, and the deliberate intention to cause pain, suffering, or destruction".
First, I'm pretty sure no one rubs their hands together in glee - happy to admit they're evil. They typically have all sorts of rationalizations for their actions - many times it's for the "greater good" or at least for the good of their tribe. There are lots of people who do evil things. Does that make them evil people? I'm not sure.
I would say something like - those who know something is morally wrong but does it anyway - repeatedly. I would classify sadism as evil. But, a sadist could be sick or damaged and unable to help themselves. However, they could and should seek help overcoming their impulses. If they don't seek help, it could be that they are profoundly deluded or damaged beyond repair.
Was Charlie Manson evil? Ted Bundy? Hitler? How about Trump? He's a repetive, compulsive liar who is constantly on the attack. But, does this make him evil or just of the "offense is the best defense" mindset. Stephen Miller probably thinks he's doing a good thing removing the "other" from what he considers a white man's country. The hard-ass men of ICE can be said to be doing evil things, but they probably justify their actions in their own mind as good for the country or at least good for their race.
Unfortunately, a lot of evil can come out of cults. The primary attribute of a cult is its insularity. They isolate themselves into their own bubble, centered around a charismatic leader. I've been in a couple cult-adjacent groups and have personal experience in how that world collapses into itself - paranoia starts to grow and the need for an us-versus-them paradigm creates a tendency to dehumanize the perceived enemy, which greases the slippery slope down into actual violence against them.
A lot can (and will) be said about my wife, the lovely and wise Paula Jackson. Here's her list of what she likes about me:
Note - I'm also "exasperating at times, but that's minor in the grand scheme of things".