Category Archives: belief

ABOUT YOU FACEBOOK PEOPLE

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ABOUT YOU FACEBOOK PEOPLE

Much as I hate FACEBOOK, I have learned much about people from it. There is a very wide variety among you, which should be obvious because there is such a wide variety of individual types within our common species: homo sapiens.

But also, I took the policy of being fairly liberal in who I accepted as “friends” (and FACEBOOK labeling has so desecrated that noble word) with the result that my FACEBOOK contacts are quite varied even though I, like everyone else, have definite preferences as to the kinds of people I want as (“to”) “friend.” So from all of you and your associated contacts who post comments, I get to see a wide swathe of human types: good, mediocre, innocuous and irrelevant.

Who is who I never say because I have a policy of not making personal characterizations, which either are or could be taken as insults. Everybody takes themselves to be the measure of “reasonableness” and their opinions, especially political opinions, to be the measure of “correctness” and “accuracy.” I am no different in that regard, though I do try to be conscious of my own “settings” to try to avoid fooling myself when evaluating new information, since it could possibly teach me something new and worthwhile.

I attribute this last cautionary attitude to both a natural inclination and to my long years of rigorous training in the sciences (the real sciences), the scientific method (European Enlightenment thinking), and many years of actual scientific investigation (and with mathematics and physics). As a result, I find most of what you’all post to vary from logical, well-documented and erudite, to pathetically self-centered and idiotic.

I remind myself that many people are afflicted, lonely, poorly educated, and have unfilled emotional and psychological needs, and their FACEBOOK posts may mask cries for help and solicitations for acceptance and compassion, and just be outbursts of sorrowful anger and frustration. I avoid poking into all postings that initially strike me as stupid and pathetic, because they may be harboring deeper layers of emotional murkiness that their breezy superficiality does not hint at.

All of this informs my policy on “unfriending.” Basically, I only do that when I have finally decided that an individual is irredeemably tiresome, or insulting, or obdurately stupid beyond what their innate intellectual capabilities should allow for. It is so much easier to just ignore such people until (and if) they become insufferable, and in that way I can avoid being unnecessarily hurtful. As to me being “friended” and/or “unfriended,” you’all can do as you like.

Long ago I learned that people believe what they want to believe because those chosen beliefs let them feel good about themselves. Belief is emotional because the chosen beliefs are taken to be ego-defining, and hence people become very defensive, even quite hostile, when you challenge their “ideas” because they take such criticisms as attacks on their egos — on their actual being. This can be avoided between interlocutors disciplined in the scientific method, because they know that their ideas are not “them,” they are separate abstract constructs. Such constructs are retained as long as they are practically and morally useful — that is, validated by objective reality — and discarded when found to be erroneous, and improved constructs can be adopted. But most dialogs on FACEBOOK are of the intellectually undisciplined emotive-reactive type. So the best responses are most often none.

The postings I find most interesting deal with societal and political issues, with art, music, literature and photography, with Nature and our grand geophysical context, and with deep insights into human psychology and the human experience. A small sprinkling of trivial amusements is also enjoyable. I don’t expect others to share my interests, but I find others more interesting if they do.

From my perspective, the most important political struggle in the world today is that between “Democracy” and “Fascism.” By “democracy” I mean secular societies of wide inclusiveness and with a high degree of personal freedom/liberty, and which are organized under government regimes that are democratic/parliamentarian, and have a significant portion of their domestic policy being that of a social-welfare state (the more the better) and with as little corruption as possible. By “fascism” I mean the exact opposite of “democracy.”

The next most important political struggle in the world today is that between “Socialism” and “Capitalism.” By “socialism” I mean that the entirety of the state apparatus and the economic paradigm of its society are organized for the benefit of ALL its people, without regard to the desires of economic special interests for preferential treatment and exclusionary protections to give them a “leg up” in their self-aggrandizing contentiousness. By “capitalism” I mean governments owned by an agglomeration of corporate and financial institutions, and managed by the collective political arms of those organized capital interests, primarily for the benefit of the self-aggrandizing activities of those capitalist institutions and the careerists manning (and ‘womanning’) them.

Most of the nation-states in the world today are capitalist (I can’t think of a purely socialist one, except perhaps Cuba), and some of the capitalist nation-states are more “democratic” and some are more “fascist.” From my perspective, and broadly speaking because all nation-states are flawed to some degree, The United States, Latin America and Western Europe are primarily democratic, while Russia under Vladimir Putin is fascist, Syria under the al-Assad family dictatorship is fascist, and China is authoritarian, which for me is equivalent to fascism. Authoritarian regimes are also common elsewhere in the world, and they always include oppressed populations, sometimes even of majority numbers, but segregated by ethnicity, or religion, or physiological attributes (a.k.a., “race”), or language, or relative and enforced poverty. The ultimate logic of fascism is genocide (“The ultimate logic of racism is genocide” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.).

So, I see struggle #1 as Democracy versus Fascism, and struggle #2 as Socialism versus Capitalism.

The singular existential threat of planetary scale and of alarming immediacy that we face today is human-caused Global Warming Climate Change. I have written volumes about this since 2003, but that is no longer necessary. In the last two or three years, the last shreds of climate change ‘denialism’ have all fallen away. Everybody now accepts the fact that global warming is reality, but humanity has yet to do anything real in response to it. So both fossil fuel use and the average global temperature keep rising at accelerating rates.

The only effective response to tamp down global warming, and in the ideal to permanently stop emitting carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases, would necessarily have to be a cooperative and coordinated worldwide effort. In order for such an effort to be mounted and sustained indefinitely, it would be necessary to equalize the standard of living around the world, so as to offer all people everywhere an equivalent degree of protection from economic hardship and natural disasters, and to equitably tax all people around the world for the resources needed to maintain our linked programs of environmental preservation. In essence, we need World Socialism in order to be able to effectively counteract Global Warming Climate Change (GWCC).

The immediate reaction by “the rich” on hearing this is: “you want to take wealth, luxury and comfort away from us to pay for poor people,” and the immediate reaction by those “poor people” is: “we are suffering the brunt of this deadly climate change, which you are causing, so you owe us!” But ‘we are not all in it together,’ so the rich will continue to claw fossil fuels out of the Earth and burn them up because that is the source of their physical, and thus military, and thus financial power, and therefore of their overall political power domestically and internationally; and the poor will continue to seek to acquire fossil fuels and burn them up because that is the quickest way to move themselves out of grinding poverty, brute labor, and lives of precarious survival. Because the idea of worldwide human solidarity is too challenging and too frightening for most, we are relegated to a fractious “law of the jungle” (and actually the animals of the jungles are not as unnecessarily bestial as narcissistic humans can be).

Therefore, in order to have any chance of slowing and ultimately stopping Global Warming Climate Change we first need to have World Socialism, or a high degree of it; and before we can develop that we need a predominantly democratic world, because socialism will never emerge from a world strangled by fascism’s grip.

That is why the support for the Ukrainians’s defensive war against Russian aggression driven by Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy is so important. Defense of Ukraine is of course essential to protect the lives, culture, and liberty of individual Ukrainians and of their nation-state, but it is also important in the defense of democracy generally against the attacks on it by fascism. There are many places around the globe besides Ukraine where that struggle is taking place, Palestine, Syria, Myanmar easily come to mind, but at the moment Ukraine is a particularly intense flashpoint in that struggle that has galvanized much world public attention (including mine).

My contention is that the global “we” — especially in its most privileged nation-states — should do our best to support and arm the Ukrainians, and other oppressed people facing similar existential threats from fascist aggression, to help liberate them, and then expand those initially bilateral bonds of human solidarity into a broader international bond of human solidarity that is democratic and then socialist (as I have characterized those terms). In that way we erode the extent of fascism while expanding the domain of social justice and moral humanism, and simultaneously increase the extent and effectiveness of humanity’s Global Warming Climate Change counteractions.

To say that this is idealistic and impractical in our realpolitik civilization is simply to make excuses for preferring to sink into ignominious defeatism and dishonorable opportunism. There is no shame in ultimately failing to reach our desired goal in this tiered and multi-faceted global struggle, there is only shame and dishonor in failing to give that struggle our best collective efforts and to continue them.

Novalis paraphrased Herakleitos’s observation on the karmic drift of the unexamined life, as “Character is fate,” but it is important to realize that the nature of that personal moral character can be defined by the kind of fate one seeks to aim at by intentional actions. The world that humans inhabit never passively nor spontaneously improves (or not for long at least), but the worst possibilities can be prevented, and the sporadic catastrophes can be helpfully responded to after the fact, when the global we is more integrated through bonds of human solidarity: democratic socialism.

So all that goes into my thinking as to the value of my posts, and of yours, on FACEBOOK, not that I have any illusions that any of our posts actually “change people’s minds” (you can only do that for yourself, in reaction to your experiences in life), let alone influence the potentates and “change our world.” But we can stimulate each other’s thinking by what we choose to share on “social media,” and some of that might lead us each to reexamine prior assumptions, and even possibly decide to replace some of them with new and improved idea-constructs. In that way we improve ourselves.

So that is how I go about using FACEBOOK, and why, and how I view you’all in general.

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One Life, Many Lives

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One Life, Many Lives

Democracy is how human dignity is preserved institutionally. Socialism can only be brought about by individual commitment and effort, not by top-down political mandate. Capitalism is the economic face of fascism, and the sociological face of settler-colonialism and its imposition of slavery — and of genocide.

The most important struggle in the world today is that between Democracy and Fascism. This is more important than the struggle between Socialism and Capitalism because until the world is democratic it cannot achieve socialism, and without World Socialism no effective counteraction and adaptation to Climate Change can be implemented. A human civilization that would perish by Climate Change would necessarily have to be fascist, and a human civilization that would prevail against the existential threats of Climate Change would necessarily have to be democratic and socialist.

Fascism has many varieties but all are easy to recognize: wherever human dignity and democracy are suppressed, that is where fascism rules. While it is easy to see that potentates and the wealthy are fascist because that is the ideology that sustains their privileged positions and schemes of self-aggrandizing and exploitative inequality, it can seem paradoxical that working-class people would willingly choose to act as functionaries in the enforcement and bureaucratic mechanisms of fascism’s machinery, until you realize that human weakness and lack of moral character and a lack of a sense of honor are common.

Patriotism is a hoax, the only values worth fighting and dying for are: family and honor. And World Socialism means including all peoples and their communities within your allegiances to “family” and “honor” — just as those people would, in that ideal, include your family and your right to dignified living, within their allegiances to “family” and “honor.”

We humans are only as good as our willingness to take care of each other. It is very easy to see our deficiencies in this regard, but it is better to try overcoming them. That effort will be as eternal as the continuation of our species, and the mark of its success will not be the eventual achievement of some perfected societal advancement, but that at any moment a serious effort continues in that direction.

It is not possible to achieve that success for the world if the preservation of your uninterrupted comfort is paramount. There is no blame in being annoyed if such interruptions must happen, but there is no honor, and there is great shame, in seeking to avoid such annoying inconveniences by making excuses justifying the sacrifices of the lives and liberties, cultures and independence of other peoples, just to preserve your material comforts and ego.

So: am I an idealist and a romantic?
Yes.

Have I judged people harshly based on their responses, or lack of them, to the Russian-Ukrainian War?
Yes.

Do I worry this might reduce the number of my friendships, and perhaps significantly?
No.

Most friendships are quite superficial, and I have learned not to expect too much from “friends,” because most people just want you to play a supporting role in their own dramas of receiving attention, and for that they often want you to compromise your ideas and principles so as to harmonize with theirs.

For everybody, the first step toward World Socialism is the development of a well-integrated and principled moral character. The chasm, between the sordid reality of “now” and the projected idealization of the desired “then,” is never a justification for surrendering to defeatism. We are only as good as we do.

I seek to be truthful, not popular. I aspire to be worthy, not acclaimed nor egotistical, even knowing how socially challenging and personally difficult achieving that can be. I cannot think of a better way to make an anonymous life significant, and fulfilling.

The Ukrainians are fighting for their lives, families, culture, personal honor and national independence, and we support them because their struggle is one of the sharpest points of conflict in the world today that is also for the defense of democracy, and of our own morally humane honor.

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FROM INDIVIDUAL BELIEF TO UNIVERSAL MORALITY

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FROM INDIVIDUAL BELIEF TO UNIVERSAL MORALITY

People believe what they want to believe so they can feel how they want to feel. Emotional reactivity is quick, and judging is easy. Rational deliberation is slow, and thinking is hard. So, the former is the instinctive and popular choice for seeking a favorable outcome in response to a present difficulty. The use of rational analysis by logical thinking based on objective data to understand reality is not the popular choice. Using the rational method to seek universally equitable moral outcomes, in terms of individually experienced benefits and individually assumed responsibilities, is the least popular use of the rational method of engagement with reality. The elimination of existential threats of global scope, or the most effective responses to attenuate them, can only be realized by the universal acceptance of the rational method guided by an equalizing morality. The quality of an individual’s moral character, and of a collective’s politics, can be determined by which of these factors dominate its composition. — And, from all of this we generate our futures.

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I’m Done with “Anti-imperialists”

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I’m Done with “Anti-imperialists”

I never thought that such a large proportion of people who call themselves “leftists,” and “socialists,” and “anti-imperialists” could be so inhumanly ideological, where their good opinions of themselves as morally superior beings could be automatically justified by the wars and mass murders inflicted on civilian populations by neo-fascist dictators and other imperialist regimes designated as opponents of “US hegemony” also “NATO expansionism,” by the ignorant magical thinking of these self-satisfied ideologues. I admit to being totally flabbergasted by this realization, made vivid in all the blathering broadcast about the war in Ukraine. What an incredibly inhuman bottom line: those civilians being oppressed, tortured, disappeared, gassed and bombarded, “deserve it,” because they stand in the way of the retention and expansion of power by those “opponents of US hegemony,” who are “defending themselves” (from US hegemony and NATO, of course) by doing all that oppressing, torturing, disappearing of “enemy” prisoners, gas bombing, artillery and aerial bombing, and military invasions of victimized civilian populations, and that “US hegemony” is THE ONLY and FUNDAMENTAL problem deserving of any opprobrium in the world. WOW!, talk about being brainwashed! Such ideologues are really “mental imperialists,” recreational leftists heartlessly consuming inconvenient foreign civilian populations so as to maintain the “exceptionalism” of their overweening self-regard: it is the self-righteousness of utter fools, and craven cowards. My pal and Vietnam War veteran, Stan, had told me: “There are some people you would want in your foxhole, and some you don’t.” If survival ever got that desperate for me, I would be sure not to have any of these ideological pseudo-“anti-imperialist” fools in my foxhole. But at least now I know much better where I stand with regard to everyone.

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An Anti-imperialist and an Atlanticist Argue about Ukraine

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TWO PEOPLE ARGUE: PRO-PUTIN vs. PRO-UKRAINE
or
CONSISTENT ANTI-IMPERIALIST vs. INCONSISTENT ATLANTICIST

After numerous previous escalating exchanges (with faint echoes of Jean-Paul Sartre versus Albert Camus), we came to this:

ADR:
What you said a while ago was that bombings/war/invasion are bad and therefore you take this as an evidence that Putin/Russia is the primary responsible for this. While you cite Chomsky as a probable author to read when it comes to politics, you carefully ignore what he said during Maidan in 2014 because you claim without any ambiguity that NATO has nothing to do with this. While bombing is bad, you seem to agree that it is legitimate to bomb Irak and Lybia. There is only one logical conclusion for this: bombing is legitimate under certain circumstances. Circumstances which you accept for Lybia, but you don’t accept for Ukraine if Zelensky/Poroschenko/Yatsenuk are viewed by Russia as their Gaddafi/Saddam. You also claim that Russia has more neo-nazis then Ukraine and said that Putin himself is a neo-nazi (+dictator+…). How does that fit with the fact that the communist party of the Russian Federation comes 2nd in parliamentary elections and that communist organisations are banned in Ukraine? That’s the inconsistence from your side!

MG,Jr.:
You are absolutely right, I am inconsistent on all the points you raised. “Inconsistent” means that I do not hew to an inflexible ideological standard — the making of equivalences between the situations you point out, and which you clearly think should be treated as equivalent (Ukraine=Libya: revolutions, interventions, bombings; Zelensky=tyrant and Nazi coddler; Russia=communist not fascist, but parliamentary).

I make judgments on the basis of what I see as “right” and “wrong” in each situation, and that means that at times I think “bombing is legitimate under certain circumstances.” I make those judgements on the basis of what I think will most help the people being brutally victimized at the moment (Libya in 2011, Syria 2011-now, Ukraine 2022). I don’t care about ideological (political) consistency, or which ideological “side” is “winning.” I care about the actual people those ideological “sides” are playing with — and oppressing, torturing, disappearing, gassing, and bombing.

In all your arguments you never reference those people nor give them a voice: what is it they want? You don’t really care, do you?, they don’t matter; what is important for you is that “your” ideological “side” not be disadvantaged as compared to the Great Satan’s (=US/NATO/EU) side: if the “US” can do it then “the other side” should be allowed to do it. Hence Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Putin are all “anti-imperialists” and the populations they eradicate deserve it by the principle of the consistency of equivalence between ideological justifications for the application of power.

I am definitely politically-ideologically inconsistent. I see you as continuing to argue with me because deep down you know I am right both politically and morally, and that you don’t want to face that fact because all your arguments about “consistency” are about you trying to hide that you accept being inhuman by being willing to sacrifice populations being victimized by tyrants, in order to argue “consistently” against an ideological abstraction, “anti- US/NATO/EU imperialism” that you have absorbed into your self-image, as a supremely ennobling characteristic. Your arguments boil down to a defense of how you wish to think of yourself regardless of how many foreign civilians have to be murdered (by “your side”) to preserve that self-image.

Here is a little abstraction of the argument (by Zubêr Hatia) with regard to Ukraine:

Ukrainians: Putin has amassed a huge army on our borders.
Fools: He won’t invade – he’s just securing his own country!

Ukrainians: Putin has started the invasion from the East, from the South and from the North.
Fools: Its not an invasion – more of a temporary incursion; and he’s kindly left the West of the country open to allow those who want to leave!

Ukrainians: Putin is realising heavy losses – of soldiers lives and military equipment.
Fools: Lies! A few casualties at most… and he’s posthumously awarded medals to dead peacekeepers!

Ukrainians: Putin is shelling hospitals and clinics!
Fools: No! A popular vlogger who is pregnant and is spreading lies. Anyway, it wasn’t a hospital!

Ukrainians: Putin is committing war crimes against civilians.
Fools: They’re not civilians – they are neo Nazis!

Ukrainians: Please protect our skies (NFZ).
Fools: Warmongers!!

Syrians: We told you so about Putin.
Fools: Long live anti-imperialism! Long live whataboutery!!!

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People who read any of this will take from it what they prefer to believe.

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Answering Job Today

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Answering Job Today

Evil is a refutation of God. The existence of the former indicates the nonexistence of the latter. That is, of a caring, good, loving, all-powerful God. This fact has been recognized since the days of Job, if not earlier. Real God either is not caring, or is not good, or is not loving, or is not all-powerful, or any combination of these, or does not exist at all.

The tortured replies to Job since Biblical days, which try to reconcile the contradiction of the existence of evil in the world and the undeserved sufferings inflicted on innocents, with the simultaneous existence of a caring, good, loving, all-powerful God, are simply not credible. What is credible is an atheism that accepts the statistical workings of chance to sprinkle the world of human experience with good and evil, bad breaks and lucky breaks, which often are completely independent of a person’s supposed merits — if lucky — and supposed just deserts — if a victim, or a convict in the eyes of others.

The fact that those statistical workings are not perfectly random has been recognized as the concept of karma, and with Biblical epigrams like: “those who live by the sword, die by the sword,” and with real world statistics showing that your likelihood of being killed or injured by a gun are much higher if you live in close proximity to a gun, regardless of who owns it.

But neither the idea of karma, nor the idea of retribution for sin, which is espoused by Biblical apologists and other religious fundamentalists, can justify an inflexible assignment of guilt worthy of earthly punishment allowed by a Supreme Divinity onto clearly innocent people who are visited by undeserved evil. Victims of genocides, mass bombings as terrorist attacks or in campaigns of war, victims of epidemics or who contract fatal diseases like cancers in young children, are not guilty and do not deserve a punishing evil.

There is no “good” or divinely guided “lesson” that comes out of the experience of suffering the visitations of evil into your life, there is only relief if you survive. The people who walked out of the Nazi concentration camps, and lived on, did not deserve the punishing evil they went through; and their subsequent freedom and new resolutions about how they would conduct themselves thereafter, if they had any such new resolutions, were not “a good” or “silver lining” or surprising and compensating benefit that came out of their punishing experiences, that renewed freedom was just simply the relief of surviving. So, the idea of “a good” coming out of “an evil” is pure bullshit.

In this world we have people who do evil, and people who do good, and for each category not all of those in them may do whichever all the time. A fair generalization is that most “normal” people have times in their lives of doing evil — of varying degrees — and times of doing good — also of varying degrees. A dramatic example easily visualized is that of the military veteran who was a killing machine during a war and became a devoted humanitarian after. Billions of simple examples are all of us “normal” people who have at times hurt others with intentional cruelties, and at other times been caring, nurturing helpers selflessly relieving the pain and suffering of others.

There are really only three kinds of people: those who are suffering, those who inflict suffering, and those who relieve suffering. The nature of human society is determined by the relative proportions of these three populations, and we must recognize that any particular individual can be in two of those categories simultaneously at any given time, and maybe even all three. If I were tasked to state just one rule that each person was supposed to follow, as the purpose of individual life, it would be: spend as little time as possible causing suffering. What I would wish is for human society and its governments to be designed entirely for the relief of human suffering. As we know, today human society is designed for the few to profit from the sufferings of the many. And the workings of that design are increasingly killing off the species of the designers. The aspects of those sufferings that are projected into Nature have produced a blunt counterattack by Nature, a fever called global warming climate change, to disinfect Planet Earth from the human pathogen causing the planetary illness, a broad-spectrum disinfection that includes the sacrifice of many harmless organisms.

Even in the hypothetical ultimate world-society designed entirely for the relief of human suffering, we would still have the occurrence of natural disasters and eruptions of diseases, to visit evil — bad luck and cruel fates — upon undeserving victims, but we would also have minimized the reach of what can be termed “evil” into the continuation of human existence. That would be so much better than any orthodoxy about God, and any organized fantasy with restrictions and prejudices, called “religion.”

I am a great believer in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, proclaiming a freedom of expression, which also means a freedom of religion. Every individual should have the freedom to fashion their own belief-system for mediating their personal relationship with eternity, basically the story they tell themselves to console them for having a finite lifespan with a certainty of death. No one else should be allowed to compel you to live under the restrictions — called religion — that they proclaim as preeminent and under which they say they live (for there is so much hypocrisy here) and to which they want everyone else to submit.

So, I don’t care what you believe in order to assuage yourself to the inescapable eventuality of death, I only care about how you act as a member of our joint civil society. We can craft purely secular just laws to specify the limits of acceptability on human actions in civil society, and we can do our duty as members of human society to obey those laws for each other’s benefit. Ancient traditions have recognized this obvious principle as ahimsa with karuņá, and the moralistic Golden Rule: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It was also recognized in the early 20th century by the anti-capitalist Spanish Anarchists of the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) as: “no property, no god, no bosses.”

It is by having communities of people committed to their mutual relief of unavoidable and haphazard suffering, as the design purpose of human societies, that we most effectively confront evil and limit its extent in the world. And that is Paradise in reality.

God and Country
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/02/15/god-and-country/

Darwin’s Living Legacy
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/02/13/darwins-living-legacy/

Asian Philosophies, Oppenheimer, & the New Age
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/03/28/asian-philosophies-oppenheimer-the-new-age/

An October Sunday Reflection
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2021/10/18/an-october-sunday-reflection/

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Belief, Truth, Science, Religion and 9-11

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On 2 September 2021, Counterpunch published my article ‘Confessions of a Secret Controlled Demolitions Special Operative for 911’ (https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/09/02/confessions-of-a-secret-controlled-demolitions-special-operative-for-911/).

Some readers believe this story is entirely true, and confirms suspicions they “have always known to be true” about 9-11 being “an inside job.” Other readers believe this story is a hoax, something like the Piltdown Man fake fossil of 1912 that was only definitively refuted in 1953. And a third group of readers vacillate maddeningly with their uncertainties between these poles of true belief and complete non-belief. The present article is my reflection on all of this.

FIRST, about me

I gained a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 (Magna Cum Laude). I was awarded a Ph.D. in Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences by Princeton University in 1978. My graduate studies were centered on the classical and quantum physics of molecular and ion gas mixtures that in macroscopic quantities are fluid masses, and quantified by the branches of physics known as: fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, chemical thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, electrodynamics and magnetohydrodynamics and plasma physics. My thesis work focused on supersonic flow electric discharge molecular infra-red lasers, specifically with gas mixtures containing CO (carbon monoxide) or CO2 (carbon dioxide), and non-lasing inert species like diatomic nitrogen (N2) or helium (He, atoms). The following are images of my experimental apparatus: a supersonic windtunnel (flow is right to left), with a variety of electrodes for creating and spreading out ionization. The first image shows the unit in a static condition, the second shows it in operation, with blurred photo-images of vertical arcs being swept horizontally at Mach 2.2 (740 meters/second).

Image of Discharge Channel, static (#1)
Image of Discharge Channel, ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ (#2)

Because of my scientific knowledge about the molecular physics of the interaction (absorption and emission) of infrared radiation (IR) with heteropolar molecules like CO2 and CO, and its loss by them through molecule-molecule and molecule-atom inelastic collisions, and in this way mechanically transferring internally stored IR energy (held in excited rotational-vibration quantum levels) to other particles (like N2, O2, He, Ar, and unexcited heteropolar molecular species) as enhancements to the energy of motion (heat) of those other species — I have long been aware of the detailed physics of global warming through CO2.

Between 1978 and 2007, I had a physics experimentalist job that was dominated by nuclear radiation physics, as well as including aspects of plasma physics, magnetohydrodynamics, classical hydrodynamics, physical chemistry, and electronics. Also, throughout my entire scientific life, up to the present, I have done a great deal of mathematical physics modeling, mainly analytical but also computational, and based on the solution of systems of differential equations (both linear and nonlinear).

From 2003 to the present, I have written articles for the general public explaining physical phenomena in Nature (like global warming) and human society (like 9-11, and chemical warfare), and articles advocating antiwar, anti-racist, leftist-progressive political, and logical-rationalist orientations. Between 2006 and 2008, I wrote detailed reports — for the public — on my independent analysis of the many mechanical and thermodynamic phenomena that occurred during the building collapses of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2 and 7. My original copies of those four reports are now collected at, and viewable from, the following webpage. https://manuelgarciajr.com/2019/09/05/mgjr-9-11-physics-reports-originals/.

Since 2006, I have received many many e-mails expressing the full spectrum of ‘belief’ to ‘non-belief’ about my descriptions of the 9-11 phenomenology. I have also received the full spectrum of praise to condemnation that accompanies the entire ‘belief spectrum’ attached to the 9-11 events.

So all of this is the background from which I wrote ‘Confessions of a Secret Controlled Demolitions Special Operative for 911.’

SECOND, what I have learned about you all

Most Americans (and many others) in these modern times live out their lives by employing 20th-21st century technology with minds mired in medieval conceptions and fearful superstitions. This closely-held ignorant conservatism more than anything else kills the promise of possible enlightened societal advancement. We are witch-burning gods-fearing emotionally reactive apes with nuclear weapons.

I have learned that people believe what they want to believe, because that is how they construct their images of themselves. Any outsider who tries to change that runs into furious defensive opposition. Any outsider who supports that is warmly received.

Also, it is impossible for me to “change your mind” about anything. Only you can decide if and when you wish to reevaluate a currently held belief, perhaps prompted by a dramatic or traumatic life experience that shifts your consciousness into doubting previously held certainties. Such life shocks are usually what prompt people to reorient their thinking about life and about themselves: we only ever learn from ourselves.

At most, the only influence an outsider like me can have on your “change of mind” is if in your personal ruminations you choose to include some of the facts or arguments I advance in my publications, to formulate the final synthesis of the new orientation you will now operate from.

So it is pointless for me to argue with people about their belief systems, and I will never be a missionary, but I will always be a scientist: rational, logical, empirical. (I will also always be a poet: lyrical, romantic, philosophical; but that is another discussion.)

Clear thinking — also known as critical thinking — is performed with a rational mind that employs logic and wields Occam’s Razor.

My advice to all younger people on how to live fulfilling lives is: have fun, think clearly, and be kind.

THIRD, belief spectrum on my “confessions” article

The tripartite split of responses within one day after publication was: 60% True Believers (TB), 20% Vacillators (V), 20% Great Joke (GJ).

Vacillators mainly wanted to be reassured that it was all true, so a bipolar characterization of the first day responses could be: 80% TB (with 3 out of 4 fully confident, 1 out of 4 apprehensive), and 20% GJ.

FOURTH, what my “confessions” article really is

‘Confessions of a Secret Controlled Demolitions Special Operative for 911’ is a satire sprinkled with truthful incidental details to provide it with verisimilitude. You could think of it as Part II of Orson Welles’s radio broadcast on Halloween 1938 of the Mercury Theater’s play based on H. G. Wells’s novel ‘The War of the Worlds’.

Nearly every assertion in my article can be checked out against factual reality, with some internet searches performed with a rational mind that employs logic and wields Occam’s Razor, to slice away the elaborately improbable from the much simpler most likely.

A scientist allows preferred belief to fall before the superior force of verifiable facts, even if undesirable. A religious believer — for that is what all faith-dominant beliefs are: religions — will be undeterred by facts and hew to the faith, condemning all contradictions to it even if factual, and welcoming all agreements with it even if fabulous.

My “confessions” is a mirror to the reader’s chosen belief values on the reality or unreality of the 9-11 events, and on the believability or unbelievability of my elaborate “inside job” story about them.

Did I have fun writing “confessions”? You bet!

What parts are real and what parts are fake? That’s for you to decide.

FIFTH, what are my answers to your belief choices and “more details” questions?

In truth, at this point in my life I really don’t care what you believe about 9-11, or about what I’ve written on it.

To ‘truthers’ miffed at my tweaking of their noses: touché, for all your many troll e-mails to me over the years.

To people laughing at the satire: I’m glad you enjoyed it.

To vacillators anxious that I quell their doubts: stop being lazy, use your brains and work it out for yourselves; gaining knowledge takes work, and then it rewards you with confidence.

To most everyone (and especially those not scientifically minded) you doubtless take your set of beliefs as core elements that define your personality — not just to others but to yourself: your self-image. Thus it is very likely that anything anyone might say or write that contradicts one of your self-image defining beliefs will be met with hostility because you would experience it as a personal attack.

When a person takes a scientific approach to holding a set of observations and empirical and theoretical findings, synthesized into a unified hypothesis or body of knowledge (whether general or topical), as separate from themselves, then like all scientific knowledge such belief systems will be considered tentative-in-waiting until new information comes to light requiring you to gladly correct those beliefs.

This scientific process of evolving your belief systems insulates you from the emotional turmoil of feeling personally attacked when reality finds your ideas in error and dumps bad karma on you if you persist in failing to correct them. Remember, our goal as rationalists, realists and scientists (like Sherlock Holmes) is to maintain the most accurate description of reality available to us. That is what makes us happy to hold the belief systems we keep, and to change them as needed by the dictates of reality.

SIXTH, Science versus Religion, Rationality versus Irrationality

In his book ‘The Rebel’ (L’Homme révolté) Albert Camus made a very apt distinction between two orientations toward reality and meta-reality, those being a “rational” or “irrational” perspective. The conflict between faith-based people and “scientists” (characterized as agnostic or atheist: like Darwin, Einstein, Steven Weinberg, and many others, BUT NOT ALL) is of the type that Camus was describing in his book (which is superb). In my experience that conflict is entirely a result of believer insecurity.

Science is a method of logical and empirical inquiry. Results that have been shown to be reproducible by others are then taken as “scientifically proven facts” (e.g., enabling excellent engineering, invention and technological developments) until such time as new data calls them into question, as with supremely accurate Newtonian physics and Maxwell’s electromagnetics, which were refined with Einstein’s new revelations of 1905. Einstein’s corrections to 17th century mechanics and 19th century electrodynamics are essential for making late 20th century GPS satellite technology work.

So all science is always tentative in that scientists accept the possibility that new data and knowledge may require updating, correcting and refining old results; as for example with the refinement of Darwin’s formulation of the fact of evolution, with modern genetic science, which is essential for producing items like changeable flu and COVID-19 vaccines.

Scientific “laws” are not legalistic restrictions, but simply facts that no one has yet found contradictions too (like: heat always flows from a hotter point to a colder one). Scientists are also aware (or should be) of the wider implications of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem: that no axiomatic-logical system can contain within itself all the elements (definitions, rules of transformation) needed to prove every fact or hypothesis that can be constructed from those elements contained within the system. Loosely: no one theory can prove everything imaginable.

So, items like arguments over “proofs” or “disproofs” that God (or gods) exists or doesn’t exist, are beyond the purview of science. Metaphysics (“beyond physics”) is a matter of belief, that is to say irrationality: faith, intuition, hunch, but not rational, logical, scientific analysis.

And on belief, people believe what they want to believe, especially about how they wish to mediate their personal connection to the infinite. What science does do is provide us with the most accurate description of reality that is currently available to us (which window of availability has steady expanded — with a few hiccups — throughout human history), knowing that the totality of reality is always beyond the limits of human knowledge.

It has been my experience that people uncertain in their irrational beliefs (“faiths”) are more likely to attack science and scientists (impugning their honesty, for example as “all” being paid-off shills) as a defensive-by-attacking acting out, rather than scientists being more likely to go out of their way to attack faith-beliefs/”believers” — unless they are doing public harm, such as with creationist pollution of public education, vaccine avoidance, promoting poisons as alternative medicines, and climate change denial.

Fantastical “inside job” conspiracy theories about 9-11 are minor obstructions to the public good, in comparison to the four public harms I just mentioned. But their damage to both the public good and the wellbeing of the individuals holding them is still real, like the damaging effects on our politics and society by the entire complex of biases and delusions and hucksterism that I would term the Trumpian Neurosis, or the Cult of Rage. This kind of stuff stymies a better running of our public affairs, and bogs down the potential for advancing enlightened societal progress.

It’s bad enough that malicious power-seeking politicians and special interests will work to divide the citizenry by appealing to their competing bigotries, fears, superstitions, mental laziness and ignorance — all for the sake of their careerist self-aggrandizing agendas — without us making that easier for them by deluding ourselves with irrational beliefs and conspiratorial fantasies. Thinking is freedom: when it is done right.

Again: how you formulate your personal relationship with the infinite and eternal is for you alone to decide. This is outside the bounds of science.

However, the damaging social consequences, or “collateral damage,” that your irrational beliefs may have on other individuals and on the public at large are rightly matters of public concern and enlightened containment by society. Obvious examples of this today, in dire need of correction, are the imposition of White Supremacy biases through violent policing on Black, Latino, Amerindian and refugee people, and the imposition of sexist domination of women by men intrinsically fearful of female sexuality and psychology, through legalisms (or worse yet ‘honor killings’) aimed at usurping women’s control of their own bodies, their reproductive functioning, and to whom they choose to direct their affections.

9-11 ‘trutherism’ is a minor secular cult, or self-willed mental weakness, and springs primarily, I believe, from a deep-seated desire for personal attention, and deep-seated insecurity. It is a symptom that it would be well for those who have it to recognize as such, so they can then choose to improve their experience of life by developing and strengthening their ability at critical thinking. Teaching oneself how to think clearly is how one gains reality-based self-confidence, and the equanimity that emerges from that.

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Confessions of a Secret Controlled Demolitions Special Operative for 911

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Confessions of a Secret Controlled Demolitions Special Operative for 911

An insane person knows they are sane and the rest of the world is crazy, and that is why it should be feared. A truly sane person knows they are crazy and the rest of the world is sane, and that is why it should be feared. I have learned from experience that the best way for me to speak with other people is: not at all. I have learned from experience that everything that people tell me is correct, and I should never let on that I rarely if ever believe them. As far as everybody is concerned: you are right, I am crazy.

But now I’ve had a chilling life-and-death health scare, and it made me realize that before I die I should finally confess to the American People about being a secret controlled demolitions special operative for 911. Everything you have secretly believed, and could never let on about, is true. Here is my story.

In the 1980s I was working on the secret Orbiting Space Laser Weapons Platform (OSLWP) project for the US Government. Believe me, they’re up there now; they’re just not telling you, it is TOP SECRET. The HARP Project was just a low level test run experiment during the development of the OSLWP.

I had gotten a Physics Ph.D. from an Ivy League University, and was recruited into the Nuclear Weapons Program a few years earlier. I designed an electronic sensor that was able to measure the rate of fusion burn in the golfball-sized spark plug at the core of fissioning uranium and plutonium atom bombs. Only the U.S. has this, and I did it. Because of this, I was then double secretly posted into the OSLWP project, and my identity in the outside world was completely erased, until now.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, we were building OSLWP modules in the vast underground MX Missile Railway Complex, the expansion and completion of which with weapons manufacturing and assembly capabilities is another TOP SECRET. Those modules would be loaded into the cargo bays of the USAF robotic mini Space Shuttles (whose existence is no longer a secret) at AREA 51, which is linked by the MX Underground Railroad (MXUR). By the way, the steak restaurant in the MX Underground Weapons Manufacturing Complex (MXUWMC) is top notch, as is the bar (one dollar for top shelf doubles of martinis and 18-year scotch!, and yes I often got hammered on the US taxpayers’s nickel).

The OSLWP fleet was assembled piece by piece robotically in space, the engineers doing the work remotely from MXUWMC, by video link and joysticks. The huge underground supercomputer banks doing all the calculations and command and control generate so much heat that they have to be cooled by an underground river diverted from the Colorado River by a deep rock-cut tunnel.

By 2000, the OSLWP fleet had been up and running for a few years, and work down in the MXUWMC had dropped off very significantly, mainly just legacy maintenance and guarding classified data banks. Layoff after layoff happened, and I thought my high-paying high-tech career would suddenly come to a close, and I’d have to live off my savings from there on out. I would always be a designated security risk under surveillance by the CIA’s secret Homeland Monitoring Department in the FBI (yes, it exist, another secret they’re not telling you about), because of the Government’s fear that I might inadvertently “spill the beans” to coworkers if I was to get an outside job, which they did not want me to do.

So after I got my notice on July 4th, 2000, I just stayed home and drank my own martinis. I wasn’t much fun for the wife and kids, but then I had never been able to tell them anything anyway, while now at least I was home regularly at nights and available to take out the garbage cans once a week for the pickup. Dullsville 24/7, and staying off the telephone.

Then one day I got a visit from an old buddy of mine who was an Army Ranger and had been a guard at MXUWMC. Guards at MXUWMC had to have proven search-and-destroy capabilities, and my drinking buddy ‘Keith’ had lots of secret missions under his belt. He’d parachuted into Vietnam in late 1975 (after the US withdrawal and the official end of the war) to find and lead out a group of 86 people hiding in the jungle from the Communists: rich bankers and their families who were also hauling crates of gold bars. He and his squad (not all surviving) guided this group to an isolated spot on the Vietnamese coast and loaded them onto a waiting US submarine, for evacuation. In 1980 ‘Keith’ was secreted into Poland at night from a German S-100 Class Schnellboot (a WWII war trophy now used by the CIA’s Naval Branch), where he was to reconnoiter the Solidarity Movement and try to recruit in-country anticommunist spy assets, particularly for monitoring Soviet military movements. ‘Keith’ was the “muscle” of the small team which included a CIA political officer who was also a Polish language expert. ‘Keith’s’ souvenir from that trip was the beret of the Soviet Special Forces sentry he killed during the team’s extraction (I’ve seen this beret, it has a beautiful emblem in Cyrillic sown in). ‘Keith’s’ proven performance as a special op gave him lots of credibility with MXUWMC Security, so they recruited him for a Guard job in 1982, and that’s where we met and traded stories many nights at the MXUWMC bar: “Thor’s Cave.”

‘Keith’s’ kind of an ADHD sort of guy and he left MXUWMC after three years, but he didn’t leave the secret world we were both part of (okay, let’s call it the ‘Deep State’). He went out and made tons of money as a CIA approved and vetted assassin in the employ of the apartheid South African Government, from 1985 to 1990. While John Perkins made his splash with his book Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man, dishing about his times as a national foreign economy disruptor secretly employed by the US Government, ‘Keith’ was the ultimate type of person-as-weapon employed by the US Deep State: a jackal, a man with a gun, a Swiss bank account, and any passport of his choosing anytime he wanted it. So I lost contact with ‘Keith’ during the years that he was dispatching African nationalist activists and union organizers in several African countries south of the Equator, for the South African Defence Forces (SADF), and burying his bounties in gold in the cellars of his various foreign retreats, and in Switzerland.

So I was really surprised to see ‘Keith’ on my doorstep in the autumn of 2000, when everybody was all hopped up about the election tussle between George W. Bush’s people and Al Gore’s. That was obviously going to be a no-brainer as the Supreme Court made blindingly clear. Deep State rules. ‘Keith’ had been tasked to bring me a very tasty offer for getting back into the Deep State fast action high tech world I had been so enthralled by. The project was being run by Dick Cheney, and its purpose was to reshape the World Order to secure another century of US control. How could I say no?, plus, the pay was astronomical (and thanks to the US taxpayers!).

And that is how I was recruited into the most complex US false flag operation in history: the secret controlled demolition of the World Trade Center: a cover for launching the Global War On Terror, which is really the War For Complete National Control and World Domination, though of course they never call it that or let any of that phraseology appear in any written memo or in any electronic file. Those of us who already had long histories of working deeply in dark government programs all knew the drill about “security.”

By the way, being drunk really messes up the readings of their polygraph tests on you, which is fun. But then they just keep you in the tank until you sober up, and you have to take it over and over again until they’re satisfied. Dreary. They respect your technical skill and prize that, but not your humanity. You’re just a tool.

Once I again had access to supercomputers, engineers and laboratory technicians, I set about calculating what arrays and minimum doses of charges could collapse tall buildings instantly. My experience as a young physicist working on nuclear bomb detonation tests, years before, came in very handy here. Now at MXUWMC, I had laboratory scale models built and tested in blast-wall confined cells. It was good to be back in MXUWMC, now refurbished for Cheney’s GWOT false flag kick-off project.

None of us had any moral qualms about this work because we all knew GWOT911 (yeah, another of our ’spoken only’ acronyms) was a necessary operation to insure the best for the continuation of the American Way Of Life. That phrase meant a lot to us, and we would refer to it affectionately amongst ourselves as AWOL — really, I’m not kidding. I guess we all believed the operation would be carried out at night on a long holiday weekend when the WTC buildings would be empty. But, hey, you know how it is, people always believe the best about themselves and about what they are doing. We were no different, at least for those of us below the level of the Inner Council of the Directorate, basically Cheney’s roundtable (which George W. Bush was escorted into a few times, or so I heard from ‘Keith’, as Security Guard scuttlebutt).

Anyway, my calculations and experiments worked out really great, and jibbed with the best results of the other controlled demolitions designers in the GWOT911 Physics Department. So from our pooled results, the technological component packages were blueprinted and built in the MXUWMC factory. When it came time to select Emplacement Teams (ETs), I was selected as the “physics lead” for Team 6, and I got Keith’ as the “muscle” leader for my team. My small platoon comprised of 20 people; the other 18 were a mix of demolition emplacement techs, electronics and circuitry interruption specialists, and security troopers like ‘Keith’. This was exciting adrenaline-pumping work.

In less than two weeks, staged as HVAC, plumbing, elevator, and electrical conduit repairmen working through the Labor Day weekend of 2001, all our teams got the WTC Twin Towers and Building 7 wired for demolition. Then we were sent home and scattered, without knowing the date of execution or even if the operation would actually be carried out.

It didn’t take long to find out. On 11 September 2001, the WTC buildings were blown, and those collapses were caught on many cameras for the world to see and be humbled into submission by the awesome yet cloaked power of the Deep State that controls us. I was as surprised as all of you to see this. I call it the American Fatima, because so many people watching the televised visions of 911 got a miraculously instant engineering and physics education that day.

That night, ‘Keith’ came and picked me up for a ride in an unmarked government limo. By then I had come to realize that he was my personal security monitor for GWOT911. Frankly, I thought I might be living out the last scene in The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, because of what ‘Keith’ was capable of. But it turned out to be much sweeter than that. The GWOT911 Directorate realized that they needed to ramp up and maintain a long-term undercover disinformation program to confuse the public and keep a lid on the real purpose of the 911 ‘Spectacle’ (that’s what we GWOT911 insiders call the events known to the public as “September 11”: “the Spectacle”), and ‘Keith’ had been sent to retrieve me for induction into that effort. I got a really nice seafood dinner in San Francisco that night — and of course martinis before dinner, and 18-year scotch after — for listening to that spiel and getting read into the program. Hey, more big chunks of change electronically dumped into my bank account for the next seven years of easy work. My cover was “retired physicist” (for the nuclear bomb work) who wrote amateur essays supporting the “official story” of the 911 events as being solely the work of Osama Bin Laden and his 19 Saudi henchmen (who were all expendables supplied to GWOT911, through Cheney, as part of the ‘Washington-Allied Oil Industry’s’ compliance with the plan).

The problem for the GWOT911 Directorate was that 300 million Americans, and billions of people worldwide, had seen the Twin Towers and Building 7 fall on TV, and they all just knew that these had to be controlled demolitions (I mean, you can see it, right? Who believes you need an engineering degree to think differently?). And besides, no one in America was believing that “Arabs in caves” could conceive of and then execute such a daring and devastating operation on American soil. So I was recruited to become one of many “internet influencers” tasked with thwarting the messaging that had started coming out of what soon became known as the ‘truther community.’ For me this was easy work at first, but it soon became boring. Like gravity, the truthers just never quit. It became clear to me that truther belief would live forever, and it was ultimately a waste of my time to continue opposing it. But the income from doing it was good, so I slogged on without any enthusiasm.

Between 2002 and 2008 many big engineering reports were issued detailing the technicalities of the official story, and a huge number of photographs were published of scattered airliner debris in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon. I know how much of all that was real, but I’ll leave you to your own guesses about that (this story is already too long, and I’ve got to wrap it up).

However, I will give you one more little tidbit about Spectacle Day. Wiring up the Twin Towers took up 22 of the 24 ETs, so Building 7 was shortchanged on getting more than 2 Emplacement Teams, which then had to rush their work because they each had over twice as many floors to wire up. As a result, they slipped up a bit. Some of WTC7’s charges dudded, others misfired out of synch, and so the building stayed standing while highly damaged internally, and burning from fires ignited by burning WTC1 debris falling into it. The fires in WTC7 could not be extinguished because the water mains under the street had been cut by the collapse of WTC1, and all the fire suppression systems were rendered inoperative. Many hours later on that day, WTC7 finally collapsed.

By 2007, I had grown disillusioned that GWOT911 would really lead to a beneficial transformation of appropriately guided American democracy, and assured prosperity for the American people. You know how it is, we technical propeller-heads are not real good at political insight. And smart as I’d always thought I was, I finally came to fully realize this was so true of me, too. By then truther consciousness had become very subdued in American public discourse, thanks in no small part to people like me, so despite the fact that it would never really disappear altogether the Directorate now considered it innocuous, like the common cold, and deemed it ignorable.

So on 9 October 2008, Keith’ came to pay me one last visit. His message from the Directorate was simple and clear. We were both cut loose to live quietly on our savings from there on out, and never to break the security regulations of our lifetime Official Secrets contracts — we’d be watched. ‘Keith’ and I then went out and had a fabulous filet mignon plus shrimp scampi dinner at Scott’s Seafood at Jack London Square, with lots of Maker’s Mark and Woodford’s bourbon and sodas. ‘Keith’ is a straight bourbon man, I’m bi with either bourbon or vodkatinis, and ‘Keith’ was buying, spending from his saved up lavish SADF per diems. Soon after, ‘Keith’ flew off — I don’t know where — to one of his personal gold-bottomed dark sites situated in a beautiful resort setting where bevies of nubile and compliant pleasure angels were certain to be available for his company. ‘Keith’ is a simple straightforward guy when it comes to “the meaning of life.”

The coup de grâce of the Financial Crash of 2008 hit the next day — “another controlled demolition,” I thought to myself. The ensuing frenzy in the US government over that economic chaos made them forget about outcasts like me, and I never got any messages from the Deep State again. So I just puttered along in my life of birdwatching, and writing my little ‘political word doodles’ that I post occasionally on the internet. This was just a way for me to ward off boredom, by continuing with a writing habit I’d been habituated to from my days as a covert anti-truther influencer.

We physics people, especially in MXUWMC and GWOT911, all knew about global warming from way back, of course. But that was unmentionable on the outside, and the expendables the Oil Industry was tasked with supplying for Spectacle Day were part of the price the Deep State demanded as payment from the Oil Industry to keep global warming off the public radar screen (I’m sure you can guess who the Dark Lord was who mediated that arrangement). Believe me, all those high-end people are pure business, they don’t have friends, they only have “interests.”

I’m a conventional guy, I have kids, I want the best for them and I know where our future is headed, and I now had the freedom to write openly about climate change. Naïvely — and we propeller-heads are always naïve — I thought my warnings on climate change could arouse the public, and that it in turn would influence our government, and all governments, to really take action changing national infrastructure to transform our energy and food systems for a sustainable society and sustainable human civilization. And so I spent more than the last decade happily writing for that. But that revolution never came. I guess I’m just a dreamer, tech-savvy and socio-politically dumb.

Then this year I got a medical diagnosis, and my long view into the future collapsed (another controlled demolition) into a much shorter timeline. I’m not a praying kind of guy, I like to think of myself as a realist who is logical — and moral. So I came to the conviction to “spill the beans.” Why not, what can they do to me now? And who cares anyway? Nobody pays attention, nobody notices anything, nobody listens to anybody, and everyone is their own expert who does their own research: usually on the toilet with a smartphone.

So that’s my story. You can believe it or not as you like, I don’t care. I’m at peace for having told it, in fact I rather enjoyed myself doing so. I’ll just be birdwatching and word doodling all my happy days from here on out. All I can tell you beyond that is this: it’s your world now, folks, take care of it if you want it to last (but I don’t think you will).

Cheerio.

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Why Does the Physical Universe Exist?

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Why Does the Physical Universe Exist?

Why do we even imagine we can ask such a question and find an answer?

The total energy of the universe exploded out of an infinitesimal pinpoint of reality erupting into the void of nonexistence, to cool and diffuse as the wake behind the expanding bow wave of the Event Horizon, precipitating into the swelling space-time of intergalactic, interstellar and interplanetary emptiness, and granulating into matter-energy that expresses gravitational potential by its mass distribution; that itself slowly contracts into accumulative material bodies, and ultimately into light-void centers of matter extinction that in their turn evaporate their confined energy by quantum flickering between existence and nonexistence, until those singularities of space-time pop back into nonexistence once voided of any reality.

Will that cycling between existence and nonexistence also be enacted by the Event Horizon? Will it just diffuse away into the void of nonexistence?, or will it rebound into a new universal contraction?, or will it oscillate in some as yet unknown Limit Cycle alternating existences and nonexistences? Could we guess that such a coiling and uncoiling was inherent in the Totality, as reflected in the eddies of reality shed behind the Event Horizon and which we see as the cycles of birth, life, death and rebirth?, down to the coiling and uncoiling of the very molecules that convey the persistent genetic patterns of which we each are momentary expressions and disposable links of Life’s transmission?

Why do we imagine there could be a Supreme Consciousness creating and controlling this dynamic? Why would such a Supreme Metaphysical Constant, beyond any limitations of space, time, materiality, personality, emotion, ego, boredom and need, bother with the triviality of creating a toy universe of existence to occupy and confine its unlimited awareness? Is this not simply a yearning on our part for magical extensions of our brief flashes of confused awareness of eternity: for a heaven, or even a hell? Isn’t our existential philosophizing just another vortex coiling and uncoiling in the human psyche tumbling us distractedly along our brief stretches of time?

For us the answers may all lie in our acceptance of tumbling along with grace and kindness, and without fearful clinging to the questioning. In doing that we may experience the constancy of the eternal during a few moments within our brief spans of conscious awareness. Of course we will never know, but miraculously we do have the choice to live as though that were true.

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On Gloating Over The Death Of A War Criminal

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By Stan Goff on 2 July 2021 (on the death of Donald Rumsfeld):

No one cracked on Donald Rumsfeld harder than I did for a few years there.

Just finished DB Hart’s book on universal salvation, which contends that even Rumsfeld falls within the ambit of Christ’s salvation. I found it utterly convincing.

Some know I don’t do ritual corpse kicking, which I see as virtue-signaling in far too many cases (and which I’ve done!); and posting this right now may seem a little masochistic . . . like I’m inviting people to protest this claim (don’t worry, plenty of Christians also still cling to the idea of some eternal torture for those of us who went waaay off the rails in this life).

We think Donald Rumsfeld made himself the way he is, because we cherish the belief that we make ourselves the way we are, and moreover (unstated) that those of us who didn’t turn out like Rumsfeld (or ‘choose your villain’) never even contained the potential to become like him. That we are ourselves not superior beings, and not substantially determined by a complex chain of “nurture,” by luck or lack thereof, by history, and by accidents.

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I thought Stan Goff’s comments important enough to comment rather fulsomely on, as follows:

I found C. G. Jung’s comments on this question illuminating. His were given post WWII, about Nazism and Nazis, and “collective guilt” of the German population (and others).

Jung advocated people learning about their “unconscious” (which he wrote so much about) because most of us (our personalities) are contained in (or is) the unconscious.

Among the elements of our entire psyche, Jung included a “shadow”, a part of us which we (our conscious ego) denied about ourselves. This deep “negative” part is where we have the dirty, nasty, perverse and violent thoughts THAT WE ALL HAVE, but block from affecting our actions by the workings of the more conscious, logical and moral (and educated) part of our consciousness.

Jung’s point was that the many self-styled “moral” people who claimed ‘I would never have been a Nazi nor acted like one, because of my morality’ were precisely those most in danger of becoming so, because they were blind to their intrinsic potential to become so — as everyone is — and thus unprepared (a deficiency of consciousness) to recognize the external psychological influences pulling one into that direction (basically: brainwashing you).

For Jung, the successful operation of “morality” to keep an individual free (safe) from the worst potentialities of evil erupting from their unconscious into action, was knowing that: ‘anything the worse villain — like a Nazi — can do, I am equally capable of doing, so I must consciously keep myself from falling into that, I cannot rely on remaining safe from it unconsciously.’

In more modern times we might say that, genetically, we all sprout from the same root, and all the potentialities of human form and expression are coded within us, and those that are actualized have emerged by a combination of our personal genetic spectrum (our alleles) and our learned conscious (logical and moral) behavior.

So, yes, “corpse kicking” is embedded in the Id (“virtue signaling”), and can be recognized as such, and re-channelled, by the Super-Ego (the non-asshole top layer of the Ego). We all want Rumsfeld to “burn in hell,” but what’s the point? (It’s too late for prosecuting him in a war crimes trial. The U.S. must have the world’s best “social security” and legal immunity programs for retired war criminals: as, why no Nuremberg II for the Vietnam War?)

The best we can do about people like that (successful war criminals who have moved on) is to — as best as we can — clean up their messes, care for the surviving victims, and try embedding that tragic past into our society’s historical memory as a lesson (accepted and learned) for eliciting safer and better behavior in the collective future.

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