Year-End Thoughts 2023, Part 1

2023 has been a year of confluence. All manner of Big Lies are being promulgated by the mass media, and a rapid-fire series of events is making it possible to determine that lies on a huge scale are not recent occurrences but deeply embedded in the underpinning of many public assumptions. What’s interesting is the ironic poetry of the intertwining revelations of old and new lies, secrets, and crimes in the context of what is supposed to be government of, by, and for the people. Even the mechanisms that are used to perpetuate lies on this very day and in years long past are being disclosed for all to see if they wanted to. The sad news is that as a people being governed into serfdom, we don’t want to see, maybe can’t see, the elegant way so many different pieces are falling together with very little attempt to hide them.   

Elegant? This is the year in which a name from history has suddenly re-emerged into news. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is running for the Democrat presidential nomination, and the party that has replaced the one he was born into is so transformed that he is regarded as a pesky nonentity, prey to the same disdain and smear campaigns as their other enemies. They have so little regard for him and his family legacy that they aren’t even ashamed of the low expedient of denying him Secret Service protection during his campaign. Because in their eyes there is no campaign, and Kennedy is not a force they need reckon with at all when they can simply ignore him. Don’t see the elegance yet? There’s a parallel development underway that underscores the importance of Kennedy’s sudden reappearance from crank oblivion.

 

We just experienced, with little remark btw, the 60^th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Robert’s uncle, which for most of my life has been one of the great mysteries of American history. As with 9/11, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I got the news. On November 22, 1963, at 2:15 pm, I walked out of my elementary school to board the bus that would be waiting at the end of the drive. But before I could get more than a few steps across the lawn I saw my mother’s car, a 1962 Studebaker Hawk, parked on the grass just off the driveway. She never picked us up from school without some previous arrangement. But she was here now. I got into the car and she told me with a shaky voice, “The President has been shot.” We learned on the way home that he had died of his wounds in Dallas. That weekend I saw Lee Harvey Oswald murdered on live television and the controversies began, never to be ended, only tabled a decade or two back by those in charge of the files. Was the President killed by a lone lunatic? Or was he the victim of a conspiracy by the mob or the Russians or the CIA? Within weeks of Robert Kennedy’s entry into the presidential race, there were suddenly new developments in the mystery of the Kennedy assassination. More recently, new witnesses to the autopsy in Dallas have come forward to claim that the forensic evidence they witnessed 60 years ago ruled out the possibility that the President of the United States had been killed by one shooter.

 

To date, though, there’s been little follow-up on this disclosure. Kennnedy had already gone on record himself on the assassination, saying he had knowledge of proofs that there was CIA involvement in the killing of JFK. He promised he would reveal what he knew at an appropriate time in future. But there’s been no flurry of eager-beaver reporters scurrying into the weeds in search of spectacular headlines. Who could believe that the CIA and other federal agencies would participate in such a dastardly conspiracy?

 

Oh, wait. Has there ever been a time when people would be more likely to believe criminal wrongdoing by feds with guns and political motives? After seven years in which the full force of the federal establishment has made every conceivable attempt to destroy Donald Trump, who just happens to be a charismatic celebrity-type politician resembling JFK in more than a few ways. Worse, the three years of the Biden administration have been used to conduct blatantly political lawfare against a former President of the United States who represents the only rival for the current charisma-challenged occupant of the White House. And it seems that multiple scary federal agencies have been working together to make weak cases stick against their target: the Department of Justice and its FBI; the national intelligence establishment including the CIA, the NSA, the DHS, and the FISA court; even the Pentagon, the IRS, the Air Marshals, and a dizzying array of federal and state judges and prosecutors. It doesn’t take a paranoid to see conspiracy in all this, and it doesn’t calm the nerves when the media establishment (staid Business Insider magazine, for heaven’s sake) is starting to talk about available alternatives if  “something happens” that results in the death of Donald Trump.

 

Why wouldn’t it be more believable than ever before that a high-level federal conspiracy could plan and implement an assassination of the President of the United States with the brazen expectation that they could get away with it? What if there’s inside information that feds of the past have already pulled off such a crime and effectively gotten away with it? Do things start to fit together in some broader context yet? What if not one but two Presidents have already been ‘removed’ by the unelected who believe they should be in charge despite the electoral whims of the American people? How far back must we go to see the darkest workings of our own faceless government potentates?

 

There’s another almost certainly earth-shattering story that has gotten very little media attention. In a huge change from decades of communication policy, the federal government is specifically acknowledging that UFOs are a real phenomenon that cannot be explained away. Not only that, government voices were also admitting the untruth of constant assurances to the public over the years that the government saw no threat in UFO reports and ceased studying them after the famous Blue Book project was closed in the 1960s. In fact, they never stopped studying them. And now they are candid about telling us that, yes, there’s something out there we don’t understand after all.

 

Let’s see. The JFK story goes back at least to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, and the UFO coverup goes back at least to the Truman Administration with the infamous Roswell Incident in 1947. If we’ve been substantially lied to about these matters, what does it mean about our government, about our media, about the context of our own lives as citizens?

 

It means everything. It affects almost everything, including the history of all our lives and the conduct of our private lives right now. It’s way bigger than most of us can begin to wrap our heads around. Yet the sadly broken mass media which surround and permeate our lives show no interest in finding the truth.

 

I have personal memories and time invested on both these stories, as well as the present disgraceful persecutions of Donald Trump. As a ravenous reader with insatiable curiosity, I have read dozens of books and watched innumerable documentaries about JFK and Ufology. I have also paid attention to the rumors and gossip about both, even on the fringes. My Dad was always convinced that LBJ was behind the Kennedy assassination. We had a book in our home library called “MacBird,” a satirical fiction depicting Johnson in the role of MacBeth murdering the King. The crime occurred in Johnson’s home state of Texas. It was no secret that the Kennedys and Johnson despised one another and ran on the same ticket as a political compromise. It was also evident that Johnson played hardball with his foes and was not above cutting corners for both political and financial gain. He doubled his net worth during his years as President. What if?

 

My readings pushed me toward the forensic approach. The Magic Bullet. Well, maybe not so magic. Not as pristine as popular descriptions had it. The one-two sequence of Kennedy’s and Connally’s reactions to being shot by the same bullet, suggesting a shooter location behind the Presdent’s Lincoln. The magnum opus of Vincent Bugliosi, whose thousand-page book meant to close the case had found in a thousand viewings of the Zapruder film, he said, an almost imperceptible forward movement of Kennedy’s head before the snapback following the explosion of the fatal bullet, consistent with a shot from behind. So, yes, the death of Oswald at the hands of a crooked strip club owner, and the CIA’s ambiguous past interactions/observations/uses of Oswald were still suspect. But all the mythology about the grassy knoll never materialized into a witness or a photo of a second shooter. Oliver Stone’s movie was ridiculous. By accident or design it just made people laugh. Besides, I thought, it’s too complicated a crime. You can’t really keep that many people silent for so long. Although I did twig a bit when I heard about a guy in my dorm at college, an assassination buff, who got a late night visit from men in suits who informed him that his days as an amateur investigator were done. They were right. I filed that under youthful paranoia and forgot about it.

 

But that was before I had done all the reading ahead of me about Roswell, and Area 51, and a military dude named Corso, and Rendlesham Forest, and Morris Jessup, and… on and on and on. Until I realized that there were two great ways to keep a big lie secret. The first, of course, goes back to the great British comic writer P. G. Wodehouse, whose errant, rotten-liar schoolboys had great success with the resort called stout denial. “I (We) didn’t do it.” Repeated as many times as necessary in spite of all the evidence and testimony to the contrary. There’s also the even more famous Sergeant Schultz defense, “I know nothink.” Same basic approach. Don’t give the accusers anything to work with or pick apart. Make it a he said/he said stalemate. Where the men in black suits come in handy if you have them. If there’s any temptation to let go of the Wodehouse/Schultz defense, ambiguously stated (or unstated) threats can work wonders, particularly with nobodies and underlings, if there’s any difference between those two.

 

The other way of keeping a secret is through disinformation, a word we’ve all become a lot more familiar with since 2016. The brilliant advantages provided by too much published information. Use deliberate, deceptive leaks imaginatively to attract naïfs who will discredit their own investigations by making errors of fact, logic, technology, and interviewing technique. Better yet, any media attention drawn by the amateur sleuths can also inspire con artists hoping to hoax their way to 15 minutes of fame and its income opportunities. Then, if questioned, the ones in the know can employ stout denial with an air of cold dismissal, or even laughter. Make the whole topic a joke, and all those taken in by it fools, dupes, drunks, attention seekers, and liars.

 

This is how the United States Government kept the reality of UFOs secret for three quarters of a century. Every UFO incident that made it to a local television newscast did so as a light feature story, played for laughs, which began coming as soon as the anchor uttered the word “aliens” with a raised eyebrow and a knowing smirk.

 

And all those Hollywood movies made UFOs into belovèd fiction, a genre of mere entertainment that made millions and accomplished no real education while ensuring that the hoaxsters and liars would keep coming. 

 

I observed these machinations as I continued my reading and reached the conviction that UFOs were quite real, notwithstanding the laughter and the media incompetence in ignoring the biggest single news story in history. As I was embarking on my thirties I also experienced a real life big lie that survived for five years until it collapsed under a problem government agencies rarely have, financial losses.

 

At the time I was working for a (being disingenuously hypothetical here) Big 8 computer company, in a startup division that was reselling a product made by an outside company. Quicker route to revenue and all that. They were earning their future by adding their own ‘improvements’ to the software that ran on the OEM hardware. Their mission was to sell into major accounts that would provide a point of entry for the company’s vertical market products in retail and banking. Early on, a golden opportunity presented itself from a Scandinavian company that wanted a custom software set running on the hardware our division was offering. They were willing to pay big money up front for the required software development, which included high-tech items like advanced, secure network management and other hot-button capabilities our parent company lacked.

 

The problem was that the product the client wanted was a proprietary system that could not be used for anything else by anyone else. That’s why they wanted it. But in the earliest days cash flow considerations led our division managers to misrepresent the software they were developing as easily transportable to a general major account market prospect. A way of scoring against the runaway edge IBM enjoyed with its grand slam hit Personal Computer product. The various pieces of software being developed were not, and would never be, easily transportable to a general market opportunity in the burgeoning open network environment. And so the big lie began.

 

The ‘Five Year Mission’ of our divison became the release of the various components of the proprietary system in a build-it-yourself product offering called, in-house, “The Big Bang.” All the real computer jocks knew this monster release would never work, never be a viable product for the company. But they went along with it because our divison VP was being groomed as the next CEO, and this struggling young division was his necessary apprenticeship in having profit-loss responsibility after years of brilliance as overhead staff. He needed to make good on his promise about the Big Bang or succeed sufficiently with the OEM product we were aleady selling to make some future screw-up into a trivial setback. Except that all the software development engineers were working on the Big Bang and the improvements we were supposed to be adding to each new release of the OEM manufacturer’s software kept falling farther behind, until what we were selling was considerably less functional than what we (and their direct customers) were buying from our vendor.

 

It all came to a head with the impending release of the Big Bang, which had become an obsession with management and the engineers, in the development facility they had even hung up a huge bedsheet with painted-on brickwork and “The Wall” spelled out on it in big red letters. Their deadline reminder, literally. My closest ally in marketing and I flew down to the development facility for the final pre-release meeting after having put in a 24-hr day at headquarters preparing our presentation opposing the release. A roomful of managers and engineers stood up and lied their heads off about how wrong we were and how good the product was. Afterwards, the VP graciously took both of us aside, thanked us for our dedication, admitted we were probably right, and told us he had no alternative. The release went forward as scheduled, and the division was closed for business inside of a few months. The VP never became CEO. Of 500 employees, most lost their jobs and a lucky few got transfers to other divisions.

 

I could tell you the company as a whole went on as before, but it didn’t. Ironically, the largest economic unit of the enterprise was making the same kind of mistake we had made, though on a much larger scale. They had been taking public credit for development of a next generation product much more competitive than anything in their current product set and when it began to become clear the new development was phantomware, the executive office responded with massive stock buybacks to push up the share price and then sold the company to a giant conglomerate that flunked the due diligence part of the acquisition. The story gets less pretty from there…

 

How could our own little divisonal insanity come to pass? They were company men, all but my colleague and me (aliens from New Jersey). The company culture was very much ‘do-as-you’re-told’ if you want a career (or a job) here. And they weren’t participating in the lie knowingly. They contrived to convince themselves it was true. Even the ones who detected real problems had as a fallback, “Well, they’ve been in business for a long long time, and they are pretty smart guys when all is said and done.” Which is a vaguer way of saying “Who am I to say? They have reasons I’ll probably never know about.” And they didn’t want to know.

 

No doubt, that’s also a part of what’s going on in the U.S. Government. What’s been going on for a long time now. We’re the ones who have to deal with the consequences though. It may be that as a people we are also behaving like company men. We don’t really want to know.

 

What does it mean if our Constitution has been subverted by a Praetorian Guard that believes itself entitled to remove elected officials that threaten their own plans and prospects? What if they continue extending their reach as they have done thus far with Trump and the hapless American citizens who went anywhere near the District of Columbia on January 6, 2021?

 

What does it mean if this same kind of arrogance has persuaded them to disseminate an even larger lie about the nature of the universe we live in, one in which intelligences from other planets or dimensions are observing us with technologies far beyond our own? What would that mean in terms of religious affiliations, life aspirations, and the educational requirements necessary to survival? What would it mean to your own relationships with all the accomplice institutions we were brought up to trust, government officials, the watchdog media (watching who?), scientists, academicians, military leaders, and organizational responses to a planet-level threat?

One sterling example of what we must consider the ramifications of is this: President George H. W. Bush, the genial father of the screwup W, became Vice President and then President after serving as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Which means he was in a position to know 1) that the CIA was involved in the JFK assassination and 2) the scope and specifics of the government disinformation programs about the very real and serious research being conducted into UFOs. Both of these are dirty dealings involving monstrous lies that have ruined many American lives and concealed important information the people government supposedly serves have a right to know. With regard to UFOs in particular, it’s absolutely the case that many governments around the world, including the U.K., France, Russia, and Mexico have been much more aboveboard with their citizens about the scale and reality and unknowns regarding this phenomenon. 

How many observers and independent researchers have been laughed or smeared into oblivion for their efforts to disclose the likelihood that there is a second secret government inside the government we believe works for us? A government unto itself that is beholden to no one at all, in many instances not even the President? This is no trivial matter. It smacks more of Ancient Rome or the Soviet Union than what we like to believe is a Republic that is continuously accountable to the nation’s citizens. 

 

Speaking of which, if the establishment authorities have conceived and gotten away with such huge lies, what else are they lying about? The mysterious climate change-driven march toward universal poverty? The imposition of controls on human persons with regard to medication and freedom of movement in response to health crises whose origins they don’t seem anxious to investigate as long as we take our mandated meds? The sudden promotion of the outright fiction called Artificial Intelligence as a means of controlling and supplanting human agency in government, technology, and communications? 

 

How much of everything we’re supposed to re-orient our lives around in the new Progressive Coming of Global Age is founded on an array of gigantic lies?

 

Things we should be thinking about. Unless we don’t want to. Or unless we’re getting too dumb to. Which is it, do you think?

A final observation about the elegance cited above. To my eyes, that elegance of coincidental phenomenal revelations and their interrelatedness is possibly its own hopeful message. Perhaps we are meant to see, finally, how big and important all this is in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps we are actually being dared to see, here at an enormous tipping point of civilization, that it’s our mission and duty to see what we have been deliberately blind to for so long. The greatest danger? The dire possibility that we have collectively lost the ability to see anything big and meaningful outside of our own personal siloes.