What is a conspiracy theory?

Grant Morrison: Doing Magick and Getting Results

Nixon's war on drugs was a war against blacks and the antiwar left

In Dan Baum's excellent article in Harper's about the devastating consequences of the US government's war on drugs, there's a revealing quote from John Ehrlichman, Nixon's Watergate co-conspirator:

I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. I barely recognized him. He was much heavier than he’d been at the time of the Watergate scandal two decades earlier, and he wore a mountain-man beard that extended to the middle of his chest.

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door.

Harpers.org is offline right now. Here's Archive.org's snapshot.

Donald Rumsfeld Tells Journalist He Never Knew that Tower 7 Fell on 9/11 — VIDEO

via FreeThoughtProject:

In 2011, Donald Rumsfeld went on a radio and television tour to promote sales of his revisionist memoir. Of course, most hosts refused to ask him any questions of substance. However, one radio host hailing out of Chicago, Mancow Muller, was unafraid of asking hard-hitting questions.

On the show, Mancow asked Donald Rumsfeld what his thoughts were on World Trade Center Tower 7. His answer was ridiculous.

    “What is building 7? …I’ve never heard that before.” said Donald Rumsfeld

Amazingly, some folks still believe that only two towers fell that fateful day back in September 2011. The fact that Tower 7, a 47-story building, collapsed, was but a small blip in the media. Since 9/11, World Trade Center Tower 7 is rarely, if at all mentioned in the mainstream media.

While people who rely solely on the mainstream media for their information may have an excuse for not knowing about Tower 7, the two-time Secretary of Defense, three-term Congressman, and director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, has no excuse.

Any attempt to deny the reality of Tower 7 when you have the political past of this man is insanity — which makes the fact that he just did it a second time seem like a scene from the Twilight Zone.

In the video below, Luke Rudkowski with We Are Change, and friend of the Free Thought Project, confronts the former secretary of defense who was on duty on 9/11. Once again, he disgustingly denies that it happened.

Regardless of your views on what caused tower 7 to fall — the fact remains that it did. Anyone who keeps denying it is either a fool or has something to hide.

Creepy twins truly mirror each other

This has to be seen to be believed.

The Charter of Free Inquiry: The Buddha’s Timeless Toolkit for Critical Thinking and Combating Dogmatism

via Brainpickings

Two millennia before Carl Sagan penned his famous Baloney Detection Kit for critical thinking, another sage of the ages laid out a similar set of criteria for sound logical reasoning to help navigate the ideological maze of truth, falsehood, and dogma-driven manipulation. Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha, formulated his tenets of critical thinking in response to a question by a tribal clan called the Kalama — the inhabitants of the small village of Kesaputta, which he passed while traveling across Eastern India.

The Kalamas, the story goes, asked the Buddha how they could discern whom to trust among the countless wandering holy men passing through their land and seeking to convert them to various, often conflicting preachings. His answer, delivered as a sermon known today as the Kalama Sutta or the Buddha’s “charter of free inquiry,” discourages blind faith, encourages a continual critical assessment of all claims, and outlines a cognitive toolkit for defying dogmatism.

"Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another’s seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, “The monk is our teacher.” But when you yourselves know: “These things are good; these things are not blamable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,” enter on and abide in them."

But the most heartening part of the Buddha’s sutta is that implicit to it is a timeless measure of integrity — it is the mark of the noble and secure intellect to encourage questioning even of his own convictions. The Buddha was, after all, just one of the holy men passing through the Kalamas’ land and he was urging them to apply these very principles in assessing his own teachings.

The Wisdom of Erich Fromm

"The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic."

“Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.”

“Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinion as the result of their own thinking - and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as this of the majority."

My Summer Job at the Bohemian Grove, Serving Milkshakes to the Shitfaced Global Elite

 via Gawker

“Anyone can aspire to be President of the United States, but few have any hope of becoming President of the Bohemian Club,” Richard Nixon reportedly once said. But for a kid growing up in Sonoma County, California near the Bohemian Grove, the club’s ultra-exclusive campground, getting a service job there was easy.

The elite need a lot of help to unwind in the wilderness. So every year, hundreds of young people shuffle through the Grove’s assembly-line hiring process to spend several weeks bussing their picnic tables and parking their Porsches.

The Bohemian Club, founded in 1872, was originally composed of journalists and musicians (“bohemians”). Over the years, though, the artists’ patrons assumed a larger percentage of the membership. For most of the last century, the Club has been known for its ties to politicians and powerful executives. Members and their guests included Dick Cheney, Walter Cronkite, Donald Rumsfeld, Clint Eastwood and nearly every former GOP president dating back to Eisenhower. In Sonoma County, the Grove, a 2,700-acre expanse of forest owned by the Club, is known for its willingness to hire local kids to work at the three-week-long Encampment each summer, when members come to sleep under the picturesque redwoods, participate in performing arts, and get wasted with their friends.

Most of us were 19, 20, or 21. We had graduated from high school, and were either still living in Sonoma County with our parents, attending the local community college, or on break from school. The majority of those interviewed in this article took entry level positions as servers, bussers or valets. Sonoma has a high cost of living, the third highest rate of youth homelessness for a rural county in the U.S., and lower wages than most other counties in the prosperous Bay Area. These gigs were a welcome source of employment and one of the few jobs in the area that are easy to get without job experience.

“If you don’t get hired at the Grove, you probably have a felony on your record or showed up at the interview looking terrible,” said Olivia, who worked one year as a server and for several years as a valet. “For valet parking there was no training whatsoever, like, none,” she remembered. “They just throw you to the wolves. You’re parking like, $300,000 Bentleys, and they’re just like, ‘Go, fast as you can, fast, fast, fast!”

A boy’s club since the beginning, the Club barred women from even working for the organization until a lawsuit in 1978 went to the California Supreme Court, where the organization’s employment practices were judged discriminatory. By the time I made my way to the Grove in 2009, the summer after my freshman year in college, this was ancient history, but my employment options were still limited to valet parking and the Dining Circle, a charming clearing surrounded by old growth redwood trees and filled with enough picnic tables for several hundred members. A literal red line on the ground defined the area past which females were not allowed. More lucrative jobs, such as maintenance and employee driving, were beyond that line.

“The Grove is the middle of nowhere in the middle of nowhere,” said Devon, who worked there as a server for two summers. The camp was situated outside the tiny, isolated town of Monte Rio (known for its campy vintage sign reading “Monte Rio: Vacation Wonderland”), miles from even a gas station.

Because of the limitations on women’s movement in the camp, employees who worked in the Dining Circle were shuttled through the camp to our workplaces. After making it down a twisty driveway, past the security gates into a huge dusty parking lot, we’d line up to be carted in packed vans, 15 at a time, up an internal dirt road. If you got there late, a line would form and you could look forward to an unpaid forty minutes or so of waiting time.
Working at the Grove was largely like any other boring, shitty service industry job.

The sprawling grounds contain dozens of individual camps, which range from incredibly rustic, with canvas tents on wooden platforms that barely have electricity, to straight up stand-alone structures with personal chefs and full bars. (Camp Mandalay had a funicular.) Members wander between these camps, getting progressively drunker as they go, peeing on trees as they please, even in the designated no-pee zone where the employee shuttles would bring us down to our cars. “Once, as I was driven the quarter mile distance between the dining hall and the parking lot I witnessed a dozen drunk men stumbling around,” said Stephen, who worked as a dishwasher in the kitchen. “They were peeing on trees which were only feet from the road. Others would not yield to our employee truck. We had to drive behind them at a snail’s pace.”

My friends and I were aware of the Grove’s lingering mystique. We knew that powerful conservative figures like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were known to make appearances (though not all of us could recognize them). We’d heard of the Cremation of Care ceremony that kicks off each encampment, where members are decked out in cult-like robes and an effigy is burned on the property’s lake. Many of us had heard the legendary tale of an early meeting for the Manhattan Project which took place at the Grove in 1942. Despite these quirks, working at the Grove was largely like any other boring, shitty service industry job, something to slog through for some spending money.

What truly separated the Grove from most normal jobs was not its prestige, but the long hours and short overall duration. “While working there, it pretty much consumed my life,” Cameron said. “I’d wake up around noon, get ready and go to the Grove, clock in around 2 p.m. I usually wouldn’t get home until midnight or later, and I’d just pass out. Then I’d wake up and start again.”

For Bohemian Club members and their guests, the Grove is a place where they can be themselves, fraternize drunkenly, pee on trees and otherwise engage in behavior that doesn’t usually fly for people of their stature in the regular world.

For the staff, the opposite was true. We were instructed to refer to all members as “gentlemen” and our appearances were highly policed. The night before my first day at the Encampment, I got a dress code reminder email. It excluded any men with hair past their ears or even a little stubble. (“If you show up with a 5 o’clock shadow you will be instructed to use the $0.50 razor to take care of it.”) “The ladies” were forbidden from dangling earrings, long bangs and glitter. This was attached:

“Once I wore a clear piercing in my eyebrow, just to test the waters. I was immediately sent home,” said Megan, who worked as a server for two summers. “I had to take it out for each shift. My face was usually low-key infected.” Bandages were seen as preferable to visible tattoos. “There was this girl who always had this giant bandage on her neck. I was like ‘Oh man, that girl’s neck is fucked up!’ But no, it was just a really shitty tattoo,” Megan said.

There were a few things that made the job special. The asshole customer yelling at you about something out of your control could be our next president. Or it could be Jeb Bush.

Devon remembered a night when she had to break it to the ex-Republican presidential candidate that she couldn’t get him a milkshake. “The pastry chefs are busy making dessert for everyone, so there are rules about when you can order milkshakes,” she said. “One night, Jeb Bush is there, and he flags me down and asks for a milkshake. I give him my spiel about why you can’t get a milkshake before 8 pm. He’s like, ‘No, I really want a milkshake.’ I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, sir, I can’t get you one.’ So he asks to speak to my manager.” Like his presidential campaign, Bush’s milkshake confrontation would end in defeat. “So I find a manager and tell him what’s going on. He goes back over to the table and tells him basically the same thing I did. Jeb Bush gets kind of angry. He says something like, ‘Do you know who I am?!’ My manager bends down and says, ‘Yes, sir, I know who you are. But the milkshake rule still applies to you.’”
“It was some of the worst theater I’ve ever seen.”

For male employees with access to the camp itself, more of the Grove’s idiosyncrasies were on display. All entertainment is provided by members or members’ guests, and since they were all men, there was plenty of cross-dressing on stage. A few were professional actors or musicians, but the majority were not.

“It was some of the worst theater I’ve ever seen,” said Will, who worked with the productions. (In 1989, Spy Magazine’s Phillip Weiss wrote that the productions cost as much as $75,000 for a one-night show.) “Sometimes it’s a stage designer that’s able to make an entire set from pieces of garbage, then some guy shows up who’s never done lights before so he just makes everything pink. Then there’s a guy who is on his fifth glass of wine and reading off a script,” said Will, still in disbelief. “And they’re all on the same stage together!”

Kevin, who worked on the maintenance crew for two summers, remembered Henry Kissinger making a cameo in a play that featured a stoner character literally named Toker. “At one point, Kissinger, wearing a big, long-haired wig and a tie-dye shirt, comes stumbling out of Toker’s trailer followed by a huge billow of smoke. He says in a deadpan voice, ‘I never inhaled’. The audience laughed quite a bit.”

The members, though amateurs themselves, weren’t shy about demanding professional-level stage production from the staff. “I’ve seen grown men throw hissy fits about whether they can have a person on stage fall through a trap door. I’m like, there’s no trap door built. So we’d have to find the money to build the trap door,” said Will. “Also, the person you want to drop through the trapdoor is a 78-year-old arthritic man. That’s not safe.”

Chatting with the members wasn’t encouraged (outside of polite customer service stock phrases like “How are you gentlemen doing this evening?”), but staff were told to respond politely if it did occur.

Many of the Grove’s young employees were graduates of the nearby El Molino High School, like me. Only about 10 percent of my class went on to a four-year university. It was even less likely that we’d ever make it out of the state. Devon was an exception—she attended Harvard on a full scholarship.

One evening at the Dining Circle, the members at her table asked Devon what she was doing outside of serving them dinner. She told them she went to Harvard and they cheered with excitement—they belonged to the Harvard camp, one of the many camps within the Grove traditionally associated with a specific university, family or company. “Most of them were really excited. They started asking me, ‘What house are you in? What’s your concentration?’” she said. “Then one of the men who was directly on my left kind of thoughtfully shook his head and said ‘I didn’t think people like you went to Harvard.’”

Over the years, the Grove has been infiltrated countless times by activists, journalists like Philip Weiss, and conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones. None of them have found anything much of interest, other than a lot of powerful old men partying and urinating on trees.

Even former employees I talked to who had access to the entire campground were disappointed by the lack of intrigue. “After working at the Grove, I really do believe that Area 51 is a boring Nevada test site full of nothing,” Kevin said.

The Bohemian Club’s motto, “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here,” implies that the Club (and the Grove even more so) is not a place for business or networking. This is taken seriously, so much so that sources reported seeing members yelled at for something as minor as passing a business card. This is what the Cremation of Care ceremony is all about—leaving the worries of the real lives behind as members prepare themselves for three weeks of letting loose in the woods. The tradition of abandoning of business concerns is one reason the conspiracy theories about the camp seem overblown to many employees. “If members back in the Manhattan Project days were anything like they are now and someone said, ‘Are you really building a bomb?’ they’d probably say, ‘Let’s not talk about that, I want to play dominos,’” said Will.

“You were there, it happened here” was another catchphrase heard around the camp. No cell phones, cameras or any kind of recording devices are allowed inside the Grove. (Kevin remembered seeing a member’s cell phone smashed in front of him.) In part, the slogan could be seen a celebration of “living in the moment,” free from the obligations and stressors of the outside world that many of these men help rule. But it was also a wink-wink-nudge-nudge reminder of the private moments that these men shared over their time at the Encampment, the moments that mean everything when you see a familiar face in the Senate or a corporate boardroom.

The longevity of the Grove is a testament to unchanged power. It’s a place where progress and change in society don’t really matter. The same redwoods tower over the camp as did when it was founded nearly 150 years ago. The same systems that kept the rich on top and the poor struggling to survive in the Gilded Age are going strong today.

My high school friends, with our pimply faces and food service frustrations, didn’t even register on the power scale at work in this space, and likely never will. Ultimately, the reason there’s no real vetting process for Grove employees is that nothing happening there is all that damning—if you accept that the world is a capitalist hegemony controlled by old white men who can piss wherever they want.

Singer in Paris attacks suggests inside job

 via Yahoo News:

New York (AFP) - The frontman of the band whose concert turned into a terrorist bloodbath in Paris has suggested the attack was an inside job, saying he was suspicious of the club's security guards.

The historic Bataclan angrily rejected the "senseless" claim and said that Jesse Hughes' allegations were because he was traumatized.

Hughes, the singer and guitarist of Eagles of Death Metal, said he immediately felt uneasy when setting up for the November 13 show as a guard in charge of the backstage area at the Bataclan club did not make eye contact.

"I didn't like him at all. And so I immediately went to the promoter and said, 'Who's that guy? I want to put another dude on,'" Hughes said in an interview broadcast late Wednesday with Fox Business.

"He goes, 'Well, some of the other guards aren't here yet.' And eventually I found out that six or so wouldn't show up at all," Hughes said.

"Out of respect for the police still investigating, I won't make a definite statement, but I'll say it seems rather obvious that they had a reason not to show up."

As the California rockers were playing, assailants opened fire and threw grenades to kill 90 people, the deadliest in a series of coordinated attacks around Paris claimed by the Islamic State group that left a total of 130 dead and 350 injured, many seriously.

Hughes said that one of the assailants allowed three fans to leave the venue, in what he saw as further proof that the culprits had previous knowledge of the Bataclan, a famed Paris venue for mid-sized rock shows.

"The senseless statements of Mr. Jesse Hughes are the result of the enormous trauma," the Bataclan said in a statement.

"All witness accounts from the day show the professionalism and courage of the security personnel," it said, adding "their intervention likely saved hundreds of people."

"A judicial process is under way," it said. "We would like justice to complete its work calmly."

Hughes previously made similar allegations in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine, saying he wished he had "followed my instinct" as the soundman had spotted two people inside the club before the show whose attire and behavior were at striking odds with the typical rock audience.

Hughes, in contrast to many rockers, was known even before the attacks for his right-leaning views and support for the right to own guns in the United States.

In the interview with Fox Business, Hughes said he was not necessarily advocating gun ownership but wished that fans had ways to defend themselves.

"I don't want to shoot anybody -- I would hate to do that," he said, breaking down with emotion.

"But I, more than that, do not want to let the bad guys take any of my people, and I don't want to go out like a punk."

Peer into the infinite mirror cube

via Minds

Have you ever wanted to get a glimpse of what infinite looks like?  A mesmerizing device created by Numen/For Use can do just that.  The cube takes light waves and makes them appear as if they are bending or warping like liquid.

The cube-shaped device was designed using one-way mirrors and bright fluorescent lighting. Three of the cubes six surfaces consist of a  flexible membrane that bends as a high-powered compressor pumps air in.  The three remaining surfaces onsist of semi-transparent mirrors that allow you to look into the cube's infinite dimensions without leaving a reflection.

“By inflating or deflating the air tank, the membrane turns convex or concave, deforming the reflections,' says one of the creators. “These objects, when lit, produce images that function as ideograms for non-Cartesian definition of space, in which the vanishing points are multiple and elusive, with the primary form of each solid projected ad nauseam, creating fractal light graphics.”

This is one of those things that needs to seen in action to be fully appreciated.  Luckily, Numen has released an entrancing video of the device in all its wonder:

Archetypal Synchronistic Resonance

"A New Theory of Paranormal Experience"

download the paper here: http://www.williamjames.com/ASR.pdf

I have mixxed feelings about this. The terminology and concepts are interesting to me... some of the specifics put me off a bit. I recommend taking it with a grain or two of salt.

Have some 9/11

This link here: http://www.911ca.org/

Scientific Research Questioning the Official Conspiracy Theory of Nine Eleven (OCTONE)
Collected articles and repeatable experiment based studies done by qualified scientists,
including PhD graduates from Harvard, Cambridge, and Cal Tech,
22 papers published in Peer Reviewed Independent Scientific Journals (PRISJs)
including 10 engineering related journals - over 500 pages weighing over 5 pounds.

Also check out: http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-mysterious-collapse-of-wtc-seven/15201

9/11 Truth: The Mysterious Collapse of WTC Seven

Why NIST’s Final 9/11 Report is Unscientific and False

by the eminent David Ray Griffin.

Are you convinced yet?

Brian Eno - Textures

Textures is a 1989 album by the British musician Brian Eno consisting of edited and unedited ambient music, produced exclusively for licensed use in television programs and films. The album was not commercially released to the public.