“There’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.”
             – Buffalo Springfield 1967

It’s not supposed to be clear, now or then.  If you’re confused by the news you’re hearing, you should be.  They want you to be.  They try to make you be.  But you don’t have to be.

Who are “they”?  They are the corporate mainstream media (MSM) that serve as mouthpieces for the power elites, who are connected through an intricate system of institutions and associations, both obvious and shadowy.  They run the show that the media produce for the masses.  To paraphrase the illustrious American propagandist, Edward Bernays: This is the engineering of the consent of the ignorant herd by the intelligent few.

CBS disinformers Norah O'Donnell, and Charlie Rose. The former an ignorant, glorified cheerleader, the latter a veteran sycophant to the powers that be in capitalist society. Regrettably, they embody the DNA of US media and much of the Western press.

That this has been going on for a long time should be obvious.  That such propaganda is surround-sound today is a fact.  It is total and non-stop.  Even its critics are often seduced as they are horrified.

But I utter the obvious to explore the obscure.  In particular, the ways the elites try to manage the public mind by confusing contradictions, half-truths, multiple and conflicting narratives, and revelations proffered to conceal more fundamental facts.

The basic way people’s thinking is controlled today is by confusing them and creating a perpetual state of mental vertigo.  Muddled and disordered by double-speak, illogical reporting, and a kaleidoscopic merry-go-round of conflicting reports, the average person is reduced to a mental mess.  “To the average man who tries to keep informed,” writes Jacques Ellul in Propaganda, “a world emerges that is astonishingly incoherent, absurd, and irrational, which changes rapidly and constantly for reasons he can’t understand.”

Take Donald Trump.  He is regularly castigated by the media for his endless stream of tweets and contradictory statements.  He is called a moron, mentally imbalanced, and a clown.  But what these critics fail to grasp is that he is beating them at their own game of sowing confusion.  He is our modern mythic Johnny Appleseed, wildly spewing seeds of bedlam to incite and confound.  He is no anomaly.  He has stepped out of our celebrity reality-TV screened world to carry on the media’s task of what Orwell said was a necessary task for the rulers in a totalitarian society: “to dislocate the sense of reality.”

The mainstream media do this daily.  Think of their reporting of some recent news and ask yourself what exactly have they said – Russia-gate, the Iran agreement, the Las Vegas massacre, Catalonia, health insurance, etc. Gibberish piled upon gibberish, that’s what they’ve said.  A salmagundi of contradictory verbiage that leaves a half-way sentient person shaking one’s head in astonishment.  Or leaves one baffled, devoid of any sense of the truth.

While the gross Harvey Weinstein, buddy to Democrat politicians who took large sums from his deep pockets, dominates the MSM’s spotlight, as if his exploits suddenly appeared out of nowhere, the U.S. war against Syria and so many other countries “isn’t happening,” as Harold Pinter put it in his Nobel acceptance speech when he said the systematic crimes of the United States have been disappeared behind “a highly successful act of hypnosis.” The nuclear threats to Russia and China aren’t happening.  It doesn’t matter right now anyway.  We might get back to that next week or next month, if we are finished with Weinstein by then or if Stephen Paddock’s autopsy report isn’t back from Stanford where they are studying his brain tissue to find the cause and manner of his death – you know what deep secrets brain tissue can reveal.  And yes, we will be exploring a question a brilliant reporter asked the Las Vegas authorities: “Do you think Paddock did it because he could?”   

In 2003 the Bush administration blatantly lied about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction in order to wage a barbaric and criminal war against Iraq.  Then Obama glided in on the giddy fantasies of liberals, the same people who supported Clinton’s savaging of Serbia in 1999.  He smiled and smiled and spoke articulately about the need for war, drone assassinations, the bailing out of Wall Street and the big banks, the need to confront Russia over his own administration’s engineered Ukrainian coup, and a crackdown on whistleblowers. For decades the media echoed the blatant deceptions of these men.  From slick to obvious to slick went the propaganda.  And then the shock and awe of Mr. Trump’s election.  How to deal with one of their own, one spawned from the entertainment-media-news complex? Trump accused them of creating fake news.  He relentlessly attacked them, as if to say: you hypocrites; you accuse me of what you do.  Then he continued to tweet out his messages meant to confuse and inflame.  He continued to make statements that were then contradicted.  What were the poor media to do except one-up him.  This they have done.

We have now entered a new phase of propaganda where sowing mass confusion on every issue 24/7 is the method of choice. 

But therein lies hope if we can grasp the meaning of Oscar Wilde’s paradoxical statement: “When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound.” 

“To lead you to an overwhelming question…/Oh do not ask, “What is it?”/Let us go and make our visit.” – T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

If you find yourself lost and confused in a dark wood, then perhaps following this network of knots strung on a long string of dates listed below will help you find your way back home, where the bread of truth awaits you on the kitchen table.  

As we  know, children love to trace, to connect the dots, to make connections, but often the connections they make frighten adults who try to ignore their points or offer some ridiculous circumlocutions.  Maybe we adults are much like children in our desires to make connections, but the thought of it frightens us, even when we are already frightened by being lost amidst a forest of propaganda.   Suppose we could for a while calm those fears and concentrate long enough to trace through the dim glimmerings of a faded pattern a clarifying story that would jolt us into an awareness that could change our lives and society.  I offer here an arc of history that you may consider tedious.  Try patience.  I could yell, I could scream, I could try all the classical argumentation and logic that comes “naturally” to me.  I could be a wise guy, amuse you, try to provoke you, curse, sing a song, stomp my feet – even write post-modern gibberish.  As Andre Vltchek says, it’s hard - I’m putting it nicely – to get through, to have an impact that counts. We desperately want to believe in a world where we really are children and BIG Daddy (apologies to Burl Ives) has told the truth. And yet we know that is an illusion.  Obviously I have reached some stern conclusions, but I think the conclusions follow from the facts.  See what you think.  Follow these knots.  They are a sampling. There are many more.

• 1957 - Massachusetts Senator John Kennedy delivers a Senate speech in support of the Algerian liberation movement, in support of African liberation generally, and against colonial imperialism.  The speech causes an international uproar, and Kennedy is harshly attacked by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even liberals such as Adlai Stevenson.  He is praised in the third world.
• 1959 - George H. W. Bush moves his oil company - Zapata Offshore – to Houston, Texas.  One of Zapata’s drilling rigs, Scorpion, having been moved from the Gulf of Mexico the previous year, is now operating 54 miles north of Cuba

• 1960 - On March 17 President Eisenhower approves the Bay of Pigs project.

• 1961 - On January 17, in anticipation of Kennedy’s inauguration in three days, the Belgian government in complicity with the CIA assassinates Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba.  On February 13^th a devastated Kennedy receives a belated phone call informing him of Lumumba’s murder.

• 1961 - April. More than a week before the CIA led Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba – code-named the Zapata Operation – the CIA discovers that the Soviets have learned the date of the invasion and informed Castro.  Knowing the invasion is doomed in advance, the CIA Director Allen Dulles doesn’t tell Kennedy.  When the invasion fails, the CIA blames JFK who angrily says he wants “to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”  Kennedy fires Dulles.

• 1962 - On June 13 Lee Harvey Oswald, ex-Marine and alleged traitor, returns from the Soviet Union with a loan from the State Department that also arranges for him, together with his Russian wife, to be met at the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey by Spas T. Raikin, an official of an anti-communist organization with extensive intelligence connections.  Oswald soon moves to Dallas, Texas where, at the behest of the CIA, he is chaperoned around by CIA asset and George H. W. Bush’s old friend, George de Mohrenschildt.

• 1963 - June 10.  JFK delivers his famous American University address calling for an end to “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.”

• 1963 - On October 11 Kennedy issues National Security Action Memorandum 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 American troops from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and all of them by the end of 1965.

• 1963 - November 2.  At the last minute JFK cancels his trip to Chicago to attend the Army-Air Force football game when it is learned that a four-man rifle team has plotted to assassinate him.  The four are never charged or named, but an alienated ex-Marine scapegoat with CIA connections, Thomas Arthur Vallee, is arrested on a pretext. Vallee works in a building overlooking a dog-leg turn where JFK’s car was to pass.

• 1963 - November 22.  JFK is shot in Dallas on a dog-leg turn at 12:30 P.M. and dies at 1 P.M.  At 1:38 P.M. Walter Cronkite makes the first public announcement of the president’s death.  At 1:45 P.M. George H. W. Bush, who is in Tyler, Texas an hour and a half southeast of Dallas, telephones Houston FBI agent Graham W. Kitchel to inform him that he’s heard gossip that a Houston man, James Parrot, has been talking about killing Kennedy when he comes to Houston (JFK had been in Houston the day before).  Parrot is questioned and deemed harmless.  Bush tells the FBI agent that he’ll be going to Dallas in the evening, though he fails to mention that he was there the night before.  At 1:50 PM the Dallas police arrest Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas Theatre and charge him with the murder of Dallas police Officer J.D. Tippett.  A few minutes after Oswald’s arrest and his exit out the front door to waiting police cars, a second Oswald is arrested in the theatre and surreptitiously taken out the back door. Later in the day Oswald is charged with also killing President Kennedy from behind from the 6^th floor of the Texas School Book Depository.  But the fatal shot to Kennedy’s head comes from his right front.

• 1963 - Two days later Jack Ruby kills Oswald, who claimed he was a patsy, in the Dallas police building.  That same afternoon LBJ tells Henry Cabot Lodge that “I am not going to lose Vietnam.”

• 1963 - November 29.  LBJ announces the formation of the Warren Commission whose key member is Allen Dulles, the former CIA Director fired by Kennedy.

• 1963 - On December 24^th Johnson tells the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “Just get me elected, and then you can have your war.”

• 1964 - August.  The fraudulent Tonkin Gulf Incidents and Tonkin Gulf Resolution. The Admiral in charge of the U.S. fleet is George Stephen Morrison, the father of the singer Jim Morrison, who the following year will settle into Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles together with, among others, Frank Zappa, “Papa” John Philips, Davis Crosby, and Stephen Stills, all children of parents of the military/intelligence complex.  Johnson orders the bombing of North Vietnam.  The Vietnam War starts in earnest.

• 1964 - September. The Warren Commission findings are made public.  Oswald is declared the lone assassin with the magic bullet explanation being the key.

• 1966 - The CIA’s Phoenix Program, an intelligence gathering, assassination, “pacification,” and drug running program, is organized in Vietnam. It conducts countless assassinations and tortures throughout Vietnam. Its organizational structure later becomes the structure for Homeland Security and the “war on terror,” while its drug-dealing modus operandi, joined to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), floods the United States with illegal drugs up to the present day.

• 1967 - On June 8 Israel attacks the USS Liberty in international waters, killing 34 U.S. sailors and Marines and wounding 171 others.

• 1968 - April 4.  Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis.  The authorities blame it on James Earl Ray, a petty criminal loner.  It is later proven that King was killed by U.S. government forces in coordination with Memphis police and local Mafia.

• 1968 - On June 6 in Los Angeles, Senator Robert Kennedy, on the cusp of becoming the Democratic nominee for president, is assassinated.  The accused lone assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was standing in front and to the right of RFK. None of the bullets from his gun struck the Senator. The autopsy shows Kennedy was killed by a bullet from behind and below that entered his head behind his right ear.  Sirhan is subsequently convicted as the lone crazed gunman, despite many witnesses seeing a girl in a polka dot dress with a male companion, running down the back stairs of the hotel, shouting. “We shot him!  We shot him!  We shot Senator Kennedy.”

• 1968 - November.  Richard Nixon, vowing to end the Vietnam War, is elected President after secretly sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks.  He subsequently continues the war and secretly expands it to Cambodia and Laos.

• 1972 - June 17.  Five CIA employees and veterans of the Bay of Pigs operation are arrested inside the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee.  Together with H. Howard Hunt (CIA) and G. Gordon Liddy, they are later indicted.  The burglars are caught by a security guard who notices that these skilled undercover operatives have taped locks open from the outside so that the tape is showing.

• The Watergate story is primarily reported by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who work at the Washington Post under Editor Ben Bradlee.  Woodward had earlier served in Naval Intelligence, as had Bradlee, while Bradlee and the Washington Post have deep ties to the CIA and intelligence communities.

• 1973 - September 11. A CIA  organized coup overthrows the socialist government of Chilean President Salvador Allende, killing thousands.

• 1974 - August 9.  Nixon is forced to resign.  He is the second president in eleven years to be removed from office.  Gerald Ford, a former member of the Warren Commission assumes the presidency.  Dick Cheney is named White House Chief of staff and Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense.

• 1976 - January30.  Having been nominated by Ford, George H. W. Bush assumes the Directorship of the CIA, despite critics arguing that he has no intelligence experience.  He serves in that capacity for 365 days.

• 1976 - George de Mohrenschildt, Oswald’s CIA handler and George H. W. Bush’s old friend, writes a letter to CIA Director Bush begging for help “we are being followed everywhere….”

• 1977 - March 27.  George de Mohrenschildt, about to be questioned by investigator Gaeton Fonzi of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, allegedly commits suicide in Florida.

• 1979 - November 4.  Fifty-two Americans are taken hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

• 1980 - Ronald Reagan is elected president and George H. W. Bush, vice-president.  It is later alleged that Bush, CIA officer Robert Gates, and CIA Director William Casey met secretly with Iranian officials in Paris before the election and made a secret deal to insure Reagan/Bush an election victory by not releasing the hostages before the vote.  The hostages were subsequently released a few minutes after Reagan and Bush were sworn in on January 20, 1981.

• 1985-88 - The Iran-Contra scandal plays out as it is discovered that the Reagan administration was secretly selling arms to Iran in exchange for hostages and using the proceeds to illegally arm the anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua in violation of the Boland amendment.  Oliver North becomes the public face of the secret machinations while Reagan and Bush plead ignorance.  Many are indicted, while Bush, when running for president in 1988, claims he was “out of the loop.”

• 1988 - July 16.  In the midst of the presidential campaign pitting Bush against Dukakis, the Nation magazine publishes an article by Joseph McBride, “The Man Who Wasn’t There, ‘George Bush,’ CIA Operative.”  The article centers around a newly discovered memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, dated November 29, 1963, concerning the JFK assassination and an oral briefing the bureau had given on November 23^rd regarding the assassination to “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency.”  A Bush spokesman denies it was candidate Bush.

• 1988 - July 3. The USS Vincennes shoots down in Iranian airspace civilian Iran Flight 655 killing 299, including 66 children.  Vice President Bush says, “ I will never apologize for the U.S.  I don’t care what the facts are … I’m not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.”

• 1988 - George H. W. Bush is elected president.

• 1990-91 - President Bush attacks Iraq, called the Gulf War, public and congressional support for which is given a huge boost on the testimony of a nurse who claims she witnessed Iraqi soldiers In Kuwait City hospital grabbing babies out of incubators and throwing them on the floor to die.  It is later discovered that the “nurse” in question was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and that she hadn’t lived in Kuwait at the time.  Her story had been hatched by the Hill and Knowlton public relations firm and was a lie – a successful lie.

• 1991 - May 19.  A few weeks after filming had begun on Oliver Stone’s movie, JFK, the Washington Post’s national security reporter George Lardner, Jr. writes a scathing review of the film based on a stolen copy of the first draft of the screenplay.

• 1991 - December 20.  Stone’s film, JFK, is released.

• 1991 - On December 24 President Bush grants pardons to six former members of the Reagan/Bush administration facing prosecution in the Iran-Contra scandal.

• 1993-2000 - President Bill Clinton bombs Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Sudan … killing untold numbers of people, while maintaining economic sanctions on Iraq.

• 1995 - April 19. The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, blamed exclusively on Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.  Evidence pointing to others involved was dismissed, even the report of Air Force General Benton K. Partin, the U.S. Air Force’s top explosive expert, showing in detail that explosives were planted inside the building at critical structural points on the third floor.

• 1996 -  May 12.  On CBS’s Sixty Minutes Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albrecht says that the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions are worth it.

• 1997 - The Project for the New American Century, a neo-conservative enterprise, three of whose signees are Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Jeb Bush, is launched. Among other things, they call for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.  Ten signees of the statement of principles go on to serve in the George W. Bush administration.

• 1999 - On April 26 CIA headquarters was named the George Bush Center for Intelligence in honor of former president George H.W. Bush who served as CIA Director for 357 days.

• 1999 - A jury in Memphis, Tennessee returns a verdict in a civil trial brought by Martin Luther King’s family concluding that King was killed, not by James Earl Ray, but by a conspiracy involving agencies of the U. S. government and the Memphis police.

• 2000 - September.  The Project for the New American Century releases a position paper, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” stating that the United States will not be able to enforce its will on Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Afghanistan and maintain a Pax Americana “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”  The paper introduces a new word to refer to the United States of America – “the homeland.”

• 2000 - November.  George W. Bush is elected president after a disputed ballot count and the intervention of the Supreme Court.  Dick Cheney becomes vice-president and Donald Rumsfeld is named Secretary of Defense.

• 2001 - May 1. George W. Bush gives a major foreign policy speech at the National Defense University and says that the U.S.A. must be willing to “rethink the unthinkable,” giving public notice that the U. S. planned to withdraw from the ABM treaty.  He warns against “weapons of mass destruction” and “weapons of terror” in the hands of rogue actors.  The speech closely follows the reasoning of the PNAC paper of the previous year in urging an aggressive foreign policy.  Cheney and Rumsfeld are in the audience.

• 2001 - June 22-23 Exercise Dark Winter takes place at Andrews Air Force base.  The scenario involves anonymous threatening letters sent to mainstream media.  The letters threaten more letters to come with anthrax.  Judith Miller, author of Germs, and a notoriously deceptive Iraq war hawk for The New York Times, participates, playing Judith Miller of the New York Times.

• 2001 - September 11.  The terrorist attacks in NYC and Washington, D.C. occur.  The media immediately starts referring to them as another Pearl Harbor, a new Pearl Harbor.  CBS News reports that before going to bed at night George W. Bush wrote in his diary, “The Pearl Harbor of the 21^st century took place today.”  The site of the Twin Towers is first referred to as “ground zero,” a nuclear war term, by Mark Walsh, identified as a freelancer for Fox News by the Fox News interviewer on the street of lower Manhattan.  Presciently anticipating the official explanation for the buildings collapse, Walsh adds that the towers obviously collapsed “mostly due to structural failure since the fires were too intense.”

• 2001 - September 12.  The New York Times headlines a story: “Personal Accounts of a Morning Rush that Became the Unthinkable.”  Another headline under the byline of future editor Bill Keller, Iraq war hawk, reads, “America’s Emergency Line: 9/11.”  The endless emergency and war on terror begin.  Henceforth, for the first time in American history, a very important day is referred to by numbers, not by name – an emergency phone number.

• 2001 - September 22.  Tom Ridge is named Director of the newly created Homeland Security and becomes in charge of politically motivated terror alerts.

• 2001 - September-October.  Real and fake anthrax attacks occur.  A sham investigation follows with the FBI eventually accusing government scientist Bruce Ivins on little to no evidence, resulting in Ivins’ alleged suicide.

• 2001 - Throughout the first three weeks of October the major media use the word “unthinkable” repetitively, echoing its association with nuclear war, just as the World Trade Center site is similarly referred to as “ground zero,” another nuclear term. A phony “anthrax” letter containing a harmless white powder, postmarked in St. Petersburg, Florida on September 20, is sent to Tom Brokaw of NBC.  The letter, not made public until October 22 after the media’s repeated use of the word “unthinkable,” begins: “The Unthinkabel” Sample Of How It Will Look.  Judith Miller of the New York Times receives an anthrax threat letter also sent from St. Petersburg.

• 2001 - October 7. The U.S.A attacks Afghanistan.

• 2001 - October 27. The Patriot Act is passed.

• 2001 - December 4.  George W. Bush says when he was outside the classroom in Florida on September 11^th he “had seen this plane fly into the first building.  There was a TV set on….”  Problem: No one saw the first plane hit the North Tower since it wasn’t televised live.  Much later a tape someone had made was shown on television.

• 2002 - October 2.  At the Cincinnati Museum Center President Bush gives a speech linking Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks and says that “we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”  He urges the disarming of Iraq.

• 2002-10 - Regular color-coded terrorist alerts

• 2003 - February.  Secretary of State Colin Powell gives false testimony at the U.N., asserting that Iraq possesses chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction and must be confronted.

• 2003 - March.  The U. S. attacks Iraq based on lies.

• 2003-8 - Bush wages war on Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.  Homeland “security” leads to indefinite detention, black sites, torture, spying on Americans, the loss of Constitutional rights, etc.

• 2007 - February 10.  Barack Obama, having been a U.S. Senator for 2 years 1 month announces he is running for president.

• 2008 - September.  An international financial meltdown occurs.  The government claims it was unforeseen.  The Bush administration bails out the big banks and financial institutions.

• 2008 - November.  A seriously inexperienced Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, comes out of nowhere to be elected president on a populist platform of “hope” and “change.”  He receives more backing from Wall Street than his Republican rival.  Liberals and progressives go wild for joy.  Hope and change is proclaimed.

• 2009 - Lawrence Summers, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, takes up his position as head of Obama’s economic team.  Timothy Geithner, former head of the New York Federal Reserve, whose father, Peter Geithner, oversaw the Ford Foundation’s programs in Indonesia developed by Obama’s mother (who also worked for another notorious CIA front, USAID) becomes Secretary of the Treasury.  And Robert Gates, former CIA Director and George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense continues in that position for Obama.

• 2009 - March. Obama meets with the CEOs of fifteen big banks and tells them that “my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks …. I’m not out there to go after you.  I’m protecting you.”

• 2009 - Obama intensifies the war on Afghanistan.

• 2009 - October 9.  Obama is given the Nobel Peace Prize.

• 2009 - December.  Obama sends 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan, saying this “will bring this war to a successful conclusion.”

• 2010 - Obama vows to carry forward the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans.

• 2011 - Obama and partners attack Libya and brutally kill Muammar Gaddafi. Libya descends into chaos.  Hilary Clinton exults.

• 2009 - and ongoing.  Obama attacks Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, etc. Does nothing to stop the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians.  Supports and arms terrorists in Syria and other countries.  Engineers a coup d’etat in Ukraine and supports neo-Nazi forces attacking eastern Ukraine.  Encircles Russia with NATO troops and military exercises.  Starts a new Cold War.  Maintains military commissions and indefinite detention.  Prosecutes more whistleblowers than all previous American presidents combined, but does not prosecute any banksters or torturers.  Charges Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, Jeffrey Sterling, Chelsea Manning, John Kiriakou, et al of violating the 1917 Espionage Act.  Acquiesces in the military coup against the democratically elected leader of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi and his subsequent imprisonment.  Spies on Americans and other countries. Maintains a national state of emergency and the Patriot Act with minor adjustments.  Prosecutes “the war on terror” initiated by George W. Bush.  Rules over a technological, computerized war of killing all over the globe and a technological, computerized spying apparatus here at home.  Spreads USAFRICOM throughout Africa, killing black Africans and undermining governments with Special Forces.  And does all this and more with a smile.  Then, before leaving office he creates the fraudulent Russia gate story to continue the new Cold War and to undermine any possible cooling of US/Russians tensions under a possible Trump presidency.
• 2016 - Trump is elected President to the shock and awe of the Democrats and their supporters.  Immediately, the undermining of Trump begins to make sure he doesn’t follow through on his promise to reduce nuclear tensions with Russia.
• 2017 - Donald Trump, the new reality-TV president, takes office and comes under incessant attack from the Democrats and the main stream media. He reneges on most of his campaign promises, including reconciliation with Russia, and tweets so many moronic messages that he plays into the Democrats’ hands.  Propaganda expands exponentially as the game of personality politics plays on.  Meanwhile, the structures of oligarchic rule continue un-abated, both at home and abroad.  Trump continues Obama’s war policies, killing people around the world.

It should be clear from this small portion of events over the years that there is a connecting link, that there is a bloody thread running through them connecting key players and the obvious ongoing presence of a secret structure that recruits its team to maintain this oppressive system. To see it should be gutsy child’s play.   It is not an issue of either/or; we can’t explain how we have come to this terrifying situation of rule by a murderous, militarized national security apparatus serving the wealthy elites by concentrating on either individuals or structures.  People such as Barack Obama, the Bushes, Trump et al. don’t emerge from thin air (though in Obama’s case it seems that way, and some have speculated on his CIA links).  These people grow out of a system that has cultivated and nurtured them.  They become spokesmen for the secretive and powerful moneyed forces some call the Deep State, the shadow government, the power elite, etc.  (The scholar Peter Dale Scott sees a hidden link between the JFK assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11.)   Spokesmen, yes, they are that, but executive spokesmen; they are not innocent victims; they are free executive executioners, ordering death and destruction around the world and threatening a nuclear holocaust.  People and ongoing structures are intertwined.  Individuals count, but so do structures.

We are now living within a structure of non-stop and almost total propaganda that individuals, with the help of alternative structures of communication such as alternative media, can penetrate and understand, but only if they are willing to trudge through the forest of history that will allow for context and the connecting of dots.  In the end, it takes desire and work.  There are no excuses when, at least for now, the World Wide Web makes available so many voices for truth.  Many individuals concluding alike can lead to change.  Connect and be outraged.  This is the path to true patriotism, a love of one’s home country and the world that is our home.  We are not lost children without a way out of the forest of deception and fear.  Follow the knotted string to freedom.  Add to it.

The psychiatrist Allen Wheelis once wrote a brilliant little book called, How People Change.  His “childish” conclusion was that they change because they want to.  Simple but true. 

“Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information.  Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.”
—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 1951

“It is not only information that they need - in the age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it….What they need , and what they feel they need , is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves.”

                                                      — C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959

The mainstream media’s (MSM) ongoing narrative of the massacre in Las Vegas is clearly deceptive.  This is nothing new.  That is their modus operandi.  Overwhelm people with a glut of information about a terrible tragedy and all becomes clear to people sick-at-heart over the deaths and injuries to innocent people. But it’s a false clarity engendered to confuse. Tell the story big and loud, and tell it repetitively from different angles, and It becomes hard to think straight, especially with the addition of all the sad stories of the innocent victims’ deaths and injuries.  Who can forget the false official narrative that was spun amid the grief for all the innocent victims of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Few could think straight at the time.

The MSM tells us in detail about Stephen Paddock’s gambling life, his houses and real estate dealings, how much he paid for them, his gun collection numbering 47, including all those in his hotel room (23), the alleged exact number of rounds he had in his car (1,600), how he shot from his hotel room windows, etc.  We are told what his brother and girlfriend say about him: they are shocked; he was just a regular guy; they can’t explain it.  We are told how he got the room gratis, how long he stayed there, and that he was planning to escape (they say this with a straight face). Told how many people died (59) and how many were injured (527), we remember these numbers vaguely, especially the latter.  A regular person just feels overwhelmed by all the information, the numbers; saddened and depressed for all the victims, and more afraid.

A mystery is created, an endless mystery that can be pondered and pseudo-debated ad infinitum: why would a seemingly normal, if slightly eccentric, man do such an horrendous thing?   Why did he “snap”?  Was there something wrong with his brain?  But if he “snapped,” why did he buy so many guns over a long period of time?   Is snapping consistent with long-term planning?  Was he mentally ill?  The national “conversation,” as they like to call it, will revolve around guns and mental health, and the MSM will keep the story going with endless experts offering their opinions.  And that endless conversation will divert the public’s attention from the essence of this case and other matters we are not supposed to be focused on at the moment.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat the media do not say is that there is video and witness evidence that there were at least two more shooters, maybe more, one from a lower floor and another at the Bellagio Hotel that was locked down.   This means that there was a conspiracy involved.  They don’t mention this so that someone like me can do so and be branded a “conspiracy theorist,” the term created by the CIA to besmirch anyone questioning the  official narrative of the JFK assassination.  You will notice that I am not – purposefully – linking to this evidence that I assert exists, nor am I raising more of the many questions surrounding this case. I am hoping that readers will research these matters themselves, and if they discover that there is evidence proving that there was more than one shooter, then, just as with the magic bullet absurdity in the JFK case, they will conclude, ipso facto, that the MSM are involved in a cover-up of a conspiracy, which is itself a conspiracy – a  factual conspiracy, not a conspiracy theory.  And if that is so, they will ask why, and who is being protected.  Cui bono?  Why would the MSM push this narrative of the lonely crazed gunman? 

People need to realize that they must be immediately skeptical of such official narratives and do their own research, and they will learn that there are excellent alternative websites that are doing real journalism and are seeking truth for truth’s sake. 

While this brief article is not a “lucid summation,” as Mills suggested we need, I offer it as a concise provocation to anyone reading this to develop their own sociological imaginations to achieve such lucidity at a time when propaganda is king and the pawns are being swept off the devil’s chessboard.

One might end up asking: Who’s the devil?  And answering their own question? 

So I wish you well, Sarge, give 'em Hell!
Kill me a thousand or so
And if you ever get a war without blood and gore
I'll be the first to go                                                               Phil Ochs, The Draft Dodger’s Rag

“Guess that makes me a proud bitch.”                              Teresa Kaepernick, Colin Kaepernick’s mother’s                                                             response to Trump’s comment about her son.                       

In the true spirit of patriotic opposition, Colin Kaepernick took a courageous knee when he protested the current and historical treatment of black Americans and people of color during the playing of the National Anthem.  For his patriotism, the NFL has made sure he remains unemployed, and now, when our reality-television president urges NFL teams to fire any “son-of-a-bitch” who dares follow Kaepernick’s example, the NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell releases a sanctimonious statement calling Trump’s demented words “divisive comments,” revealing an “unfortunate lack of respect” for NFL players.  NFL owners and others chimed in with the word of the day – “divisive.”  Exactly who is being divided from whom is left to speculation?    

The hypocrisies of this lurid spectacle continue to mount daily.

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick on August 8, 2013. His gesture of conscience and defiance is now almost 3 years old.

Kaepernick knelt on principle during the Obama presidency. His was a lonely act.  Now that the buffoonish Trump tweets and speaks his grotesqueries, it has become easy to emerge from the woodwork and join the crowd in supporting the man who made his solitary witness.  Cheap grace, the German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer termed the desire for “salvation” without paying a price.  He said this before being executed by Hitler for his opposition to Nazism. 

Who among those kneeling today in solidarity with Kaepernick are willing to pay a price? What’s the NFL’s price?  The Tycoons who own the teams?  Who among them agrees with a man who gave his life for black liberation, Dr. Martin Luther King, who made it emphatically clear that the fight against racism involved opposing a trinity of devils when he said:

Bonhoeffer: If he were alive today, he would see in America a population bathed in cheap grace, the coin spread by centrist liberals, the most affective accomplices of the status quo.

We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.

Colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, racism – this is U.S. history, not the myths proffered by mythmakers, politicians, and schools.  The system of exploitation is old and enduring, and the point of its spear is war.  It is great that many players join in solidarity with Kaepernick. Racism must be opposed and freedom of speech exercised and defended. But it would be better indeed if more of those who rightly oppose Trump’s disgusting comments and support Kaepernick speak out about the triple devils King warned about.  The system of racial exploitation does not stand alone; never has. Nor will it fall alone.

The Star Spangled Banner is a celebration of war, meant to stir martial emotions. It also contains racist lyrics.   And football is the war sport par excellence, extremely violent, and deeply tied to the spectacle of cruelty that dominates American society today and that has caused so much suffering for black people and other people of color for centuries. In the 1960s, Brazilian television, in an effort to distinguish football (soccer) from American football, aptly termed it “military football.”  And while it, like other sports, has been an avenue to wealth and “success” for some black Americans (a tiny minority), its war-like structure and violent nature is noted with a nod and a wink.  Heck, it’s fun to play and exciting to watch, and is just a colorful spectacle that we can’t do without, despite all the concussions, pain killers, and crippling life-long injuries.  Lasting effects similar to those suffered by veterans returned from war zones.  The gridiron is a war zone.

That the NFL is a conditioning agent for the love of war and violent aggression is usually passed over.  Its language, like all good linguistic mind control, becomes powerfully invisible. 

Colin Kaepernick, like all quarterbacks, is the field general who throws bombs to flankers as he tries to avoid the blitz.  Each team defends and conquers the enemy’s territory, pushing its opponent back through frontal assaults and pounding the enemy’s line.  This is mixed with deceptive formations and aerial assaults behind the opponent’s line.  When none of this works and the enemy goes on the offensive, a different platoon is brought in to defend one’s territory. One’s front line must then defend against a frontal assault and hit back hard.

The analogies are everywhere, and as with many aspects of “everywhere,” what’s everywhere is nowhere – its familiarity making it invisible and therefore all the more powerful.

In a society of the spectacle, NFL football is the most spectacular and entertaining mass hypnotic induction into the love of war and violence that we have.  Goodell says that “the NFL and our players are at our best when we help create a sense of unity in our country and our culture.”  These are swell sounding words that were essentially forced out of his mouth by Trump’s mad rantings.  Words involving a double-entendre as well: The good of being united against racism on one hand, if that is what Goodell meant; the bad of being united to promote patriotic militarism, violence, and war on the other.  Hypocritical contradictions, at best.

And where in all this is Colin Kaepernick, the forgotten man?  Has he decided to study war no more, but to study Dr. King’s true legacy and his naming of the three demons that must be confronted and exorcised if MLK’s “Beloved Community” is to be established?

Great ironies abound here.  Who among Kaepernick’s current supporters said one word when the mixed-race, neo-liberal Democrat, Barack Obama, suavely mass murdered his way around the world with seven wars, while showing his “cool” skills on the basketball court?  Coolness works. Obama was given a free ride.  More than that; he was treated like a rock star by the entertainment/sports complex.  And now that he is cashing in with speeches to Wall Street, who calls him out on that?  Obama, while always standing front stage, was all about operating back stage, very CIA-like.  “One may smile, and smile, and be a villain,” wrote Shakespeare, who was quite an expert on acting. 

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Martin Luther King: “America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order,” he told us. His greatness endures. At the moment he reached the natural evolution of his political thinking, he was murdered. Ironically, like Bonhoeffer, he was just 39.

Trump is the obverse.  His back stage is his front stage.  He is an easy target.  He makes himself one; thinks coolness is to generate heat and draw audience attention to it.  It is an aspect of his celebrity reality-TV mindset: create buzz around your “brand,” make it hot, whether good or bad, it doesn’t matter. Titillate, provoke, tweet garbage sure to arouse passions. Agitate the audience.   He is an expert at feeding the beast that is America’s entertainment circus, the spectacle of con-men and prestidigitators extraordinaire.  Flip Trump and you have Obama.  Flip Obama and you have George W. Bush.  Flip George and you have Bill Clinton.  Flip Bill and you have the tail that wags the dog – Hillary.  Or the reverse.  Rotating little people going round and round, in and out, disappearing and appearing on a cuckoo clock with terrible music and mockingbird sounds.

There’s only one coin in these United States, and it’s counterfeit.

Trump goes to the United Nations and says he is “ready, willing, and able to totally destroy North Korea” and its 25 million people.  Who will take a knee for the North Korean people threatened by the public ranting of a man willing to commit genocide? 

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Obama tears up speechifying about his family. Such thoughts never entered his mind when assassinating thousands of people around the world and destroying the lives of millions. His departure from the center stage was prolonged and almost embarrassing in its self-indulgence, the spectacle encouraged by the adoring liberal propaganda machine. That this man is a cynical war criminal is irrefutable. And a disgrace to his race, too.

Who took a knee for the world when Obama announced a 1 trillion dollar nuclear weapons upgrade?  When he savagely attacked Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan; sent drones worldwide in search of victims?  Did the NFL issue a statement of condemnation on the deaths of innocent children at the receiving end of American bombs? 

Who is linking arms for all the innocent victims killed by Trump in eight months?  What communities are the NFL Commissioner and team owners referring to when they say the league and the players are forces for good in our communities?  Does “ours” mean a small circle of friends, outside of which the enemies lurk who should be annihilated?  Over there, over there, send the bombs, send the bombs, over there.  Far from our “communities.”  Is that the theme song?  Is that the distinction?

What about Dr. King’s “Beloved Community”?

Our goal is to create a beloved community and
this will require a qualitative change in our souls
as well as a quantitative change in our lives. 

Who will take a knee for a radical redistribution of economic and political power?  Who will link arms for the end to capitalist exploitation and the amassing of obscene wealth by a few at the expense of the many?  Who will refuse to support war and war-making?  Who will tell it like it is and say that the demon of racism can only be eliminated if the others are?  Liberals won’t.  Conservatives won’t. Who will?  Who will pay a price? 

MLK paid the ultimate price for confronting these demons.  When U.S. government forces killed him in Memphis, he had taken a knee for all the exploited and oppressed people of the world community, the beloved community.

“America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order,” he told us. Hypocritical comes from the Greek hypokrites, a stage actor; pretender, dissembler.  There are too many actors on this stage of moral outrage – far too many hypocrites.  For years many NFL teams accepted Pentagon money to pimp for the war makers, but their pimping days started long before and continue to the present day, even if they say they no longer accept their client’s payoff. What do the owners stand for?  Capital accumulation? Exploitation?  War?  And all the liberals jumping on the moral outrage train of racism?  Obama was okay as he killed, maimed, and exploited – wasn’t that their silent mantra?  So Trump is a conservative?  What kind of true conservative would threaten foreign wars and tweet absurdities?

Welcome to the phony circus, where the man on the hire wire, the daring one, Colin Kaepernick, is home studying American history and learning about all the confidence men.

So I hope and pray.