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CELIA FARBER – The Truth Barrier

JOURNALIST, AUTHOR, AND EDITOR BASED IN NEW YORK CITY, WHO GREW UP IN SWEDEN AND NEW YORK.

To Caravaners

Posted on June 2, 2019

I have been honored to be on John B. Wells’ two programs in the last week–Caravan to Midnight and Ark Midnight.

Both shows were life-changing for me, and I promised to post links to some of the materials I discussed about the AIDS Wars, in those shows.

Here, first is the Harper’s article I discussed: “Out of Control: AIDS And The Corruption of Medical Science.”

I’ll post more as we go. Caravan to Midnight and Ark Midnight are my two favorite shows. John B. Wells is truly amazing–a national treasure.

 

Welcome (Back) To The Truth Barrier

Posted on June 1, 2019

Today is Saturday, June 1, 2019.

 

This website has been dormant for many months, but will now be revving up again.

 

In a few minutes I will be a guest on ARK MIDNIGHT with the legendary John B. Wells, 10:30 pm to 12:00 am, EST.

Tune in at www.arkmidnight.com.

Yours truly,

Celia Farber

Drawing By Hans Christian Andersen

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This Is Extremely Dangerous To Our Democracy

Posted on May 25, 2019

 

Julian Assange Is Not A Rapist: Details Of Police Report Lays Bare The Madness Of Sweden’s Crusade

Posted on May 20, 2019

.

“Based on Anna’s story, when she called me, she said “we had sex” and that’s what happened, and she made no reference to any kind of assault… She did not want to go to the police. My sense is that she [Ardin] did not experience this as serious, but got pissed off.”
Donald Bostrom, witness
.
“It is simply amazing how much work this case is generating. It sometimes seems like an industry. It is certainly non stop. Please do not think that the case is being dealt with as just another extradition request.”

Paul Close, Crown Prosecution Service

Full article here:

https://theindicter.com/new-analysis-of-swedish-police-report-confirms-julian-assanges-version-in-swedens-case/

The Truth Barrier Is Back Online

Posted on November 13, 2018

 

 

The Truth Barrier has not been publishing for many months, due to technical complications that seemed insurmountable to me but weren’t at all. All I had to do was focus on it and fix it.

 

I am glad to be publishing again and I hope to gradually restore the site to the way it was before it crashed and all the design and formatting was lost.

A very important note, going forward:

If my fierce opposition to “the left,” “globalism,” “identity politics,” and/or my growing embracement of Christianity bothers you then this website will bother you. I will no longer, this time, allow tantrums in the comments section. I will always allow discussion, debate, etc but not tantrums seeking to convert me to a leftist or an atheist.

Thank you for respecting the new rules.

–Celia Farber

 

 

“Funeral Music,” Geoffrey Hill

Posted on June 9, 2018

 

from “Funeral Music” by Geoffrey Hill:

8

Not as we are but as we must appear,
Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we
Desire life but as they would have us live,
Set apart in timeless colloquy.
So it is required; so we bear witness,
Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us,
Each distant sphere of harmony forever
Poised, unanswerable. If it is without
Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or
If it is not, all echoes are the same
In such eternity. Then tell me, love,
How that should comfort us—or anyone
Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place,
Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.

 

(Sent to Truth Barrier editor Celia Farber by Mark Harris–thank you Mark.)

 

Schneiderman, Trump, And Cohen: A Fascinating History Lesson

Posted on May 9, 2018

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Before The End Of Feelings

Posted on May 5, 2018

 

 

A Moment

 

 

The field where my brother died–

I’ve walked there since.

Weeds and grasses, some chicory

stalks; no trace of the scene

I can still see: a father

and his sons bent above a deer they’d shot,

then screams and shouts.

 

Always I arrive too late

to take the rifle

from the boy I was,

too late to warn him

of what he can’t imagine:

how quickly people vanish;

how one moment you’re standing

shoulder to shoulder,

the next you’re alone in a field.

–Gregory Orr

 

You Go To Burning Man; I’ll Stay Home

Posted on April 30, 2018

Everything in  my being and soul rejects this supposedly “liberating” event, which I’ve been told for years I “must” attend.

It has always repelled and frightened me. In addition, like all things Luciferian, it strikes me as dull, tedious, and pointless.

What narcissism. What a load of bollocks.

 

The 7 Word Kanye West Tweet That Is Bringing About A Berlin Wall Moment In The US Around Freedom Of Thought

Posted on April 23, 2018

If Candace Owen is not “evil,” or “right wing,” then what hope is there for the coherence of the media’s hate symphony? Will Kanye now be retro-fitted as evil or right wing? Will “crazy” work? Probably not. Seems like Game Over, to me. Bear in mind, for propaganda to succeed, there must be NO interruptions of message. No hiccups. No deviations. Kanye is  doing what a real artist does, which is disrupt established patterns of conformist, consensus “reality.” Nobody should be surprised. There were indications long ago, that he was not hammered into place, had not surrendered his voice. Was in control of his own mind, though it was clearly an epic battle.

His Twitter feed is suddenly America’s Berlin Wall. And we are all heading over, or are there already. Birds too, are flocking there. And some people thought to bring champagne. What is being celebrated?

The survival of independent thought.

pic.twitter.com/0u9NnvAQ17

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 23, 2018

 

Solly Mahlangu: LUMINOUS

Posted on April 20, 2018

Watch while you listen. You will feel joy, possibly even against your will.

 

What They Said: Kanye West

Posted on April 19, 2018

just stop lying about shit. Just stop lying.

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 18, 2018

 

You Were Always Waiting For This Moment To Arise

Posted on April 17, 2018

The sound of a bird I had never heard before. I didn’t even know for sure if it was a bird. It was calling–Ceeaw! Ceeaw! Ceeaw! and I stopped short. I looked out at the fire escape. The window was open on the bottom. I stood on high alert, felt this was a meeting, and an important one.

“I hear you, but I don’t see you,” I said.

Then he showed himself, flew up on the the railing, as I gasped. He looked at me, then flew off. A magnificent Bluejay. It felt personal, that he had come booming out of the cold milky Manhattan sky to my fire escape, just as I stood there, to tell me something, just at the last moment of bearability. And I got it.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

A radiating warmth filled my consciousness, and for the first time in so very long, the fear was gone.

“Please come back,” I said.

The next day, today, I heard him again, calling to me. I raced to the kitchen window and he did the same thing. Looked at me, then flew off in such a perfect curved arc, his blue-black wings so perfect and striking. In all our years of feeding the birds on the fire escape, I’d never seen any other bird but pigeons and brown doves. (Whom I love.)

I told Dean, who is teaching me how to pray: I got two signs.

“Don’t secularize them,” he wrote.

I never doubted this bird for a moment. He came to give me a message. Twice. I was so moved. I began waiting for him, by the window. Why did I know he would return. I was out of seeds and there as no food in it for him.

“Live!” he cried. “You must live!”

He knew I was choking to death on ugly modernity, and that I had committed the sin of despair in recent days.

“Look at me,” he said. “I’m the truth.”

(It would have been funny if he said, “Forget Twitter,” but he didn’t. I don’t think my majestic friend would ever say “Twitter.”)

It was only when I thought of him that I felt a spark of hope.

Then I heard him again, late this afternoon. I dashed to the window and saw him yet again. Three visits, in two days. Tears came into my eyes.

I held onto the bars of the window gate and looked at the sky where he had flown off.

Three visits. I wondered why he seemed so familiar. The way he needed to get ahold of me. Just like Guy used to sound on the phone.

“Guy?” I said. “Is that you?”

Guy Alexis Obolensky.

He always said I had to make it. I had to do my work again. I had to write, and that we both had to survive this cruel age. At the very least, survive the winter, so he could re-build the machine in the spring.

The last time he called me I was on another call.

His death broke me. I lay on my back sobbing and unable to move when I got the text from John.

All winter–fossilized by grief. Nothing mattered, not The Truth Barrier–nothing.

When I publish a piece called “The Machine Whisperer,” you will know who he was.

I told him over and over that he could not leave me here alone.

Also, in life, he came flying in like that, in blue, in his famous blue smock. He shook my hand so warmly. It was the beginning of the most important friendship of my life.  A gift I did not deserve.

If the bird does not come back, I will remember him, and his message, to be brave, and good. As he is.

 

Mark Zuckerberg’s Banality Of Evil: Evasion And Passive Aggression

Posted on April 10, 2018

How then, do you know “evil?”

Thank you for asking.

One of the characteristics of a person who has become overtaken by mass demonic persuasion of some sort, is that they can’t answer a question. This is the penultimate passive aggressive weapon.

What does it mean, then to answer a question?

That you answer the question, not the shell of the question, or some insignificant fragment of the question. That you answer the soul of the question, with your soul of an answer.

This is the strongest evidence I have seen for the “Zuckerberg Is A Robot,” conspiracy theory.

Listen to Senator Durbin’s question, then Mark Zuckerberg’s “answer.”

I suppose if Mr. Zuckerberg were speaking to a wall of machine, wires, computer code, that might pass for an answer. It’s not a dialogue between two human beings though. Only one–

Watch as Sen. Durbin makes a point about the right to privacy when Zuckerberg declines to reveal his Washington D.C. hotel and who he messaged last night. https://t.co/9rPFRyvzPn pic.twitter.com/198cwwiXjj

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) April 10, 2018

 

And The Parting On The Left Is Now The Parting On The Right

Posted on April 10, 2018

And the bids have all grown longer overnight.

.@tuckercarlson's Most Important Monologue Ever.#Syria pic.twitter.com/GcRC3J0S7m

— The Columbia Bugle ?? (@ColumbiaBugle) April 10, 2018

 

Next Trans Movement: Synthetic Humans, Holograms, And Chimeras: The Marketing Of Eternal Death As Eternal Life

Posted on April 7, 2018

“It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.”

― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,

Frankenstein

 

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

1 John 4:7-8

 

Coordinated Warning Of Fake News Campaign At Sinclair Shocks The Public

Posted on April 3, 2018

It gets creepier every time I watch it. Below the video is a link to Sinclair’s self description, which is itself Orwellian. They call themselves “…the most diversified television broadcasting company In America today.”

You couldn’t make this up.

May this viral video wake Americans up once and for all, the the fact that we have been–for decades– under the heavy spell and attack of a “media” that is a fully loaded propaganda weapon aimed at all times at your sense of reality and morality.

 

http://sbgi.net

What They Said: Malachi Martin

Posted on April 2, 2018

 

“Nothing has changed in the process by which an individual is Possessed by personal and intelligent evil. Nothing has changed, either, in the requirements for successful Exorcism of a Possessed individual. All of that remains as described and summarized in the chapters and cases that follow. What have changed are the conditions of the society in which we all now live. To a far greater degree than most of us could have imagined fifteen or so years ago, a favorable climate for the occurrence of demonic Possession has developed as the normal condition of our lives. In 1976 Satanism was presented, and was probably regarded by most Americans, as a box office and a bookstore draw. In fact, Hostage to the Devil was intended as a clear warning that Possession is not—nor was it ever—some tale of dark fancy featuring ogres and happy endings. Possession is real; and real prices are paid. Now,”

― Malachi Martin, Hostage to the Devil: The Possession and Exorcism of Five Contemporary Americans

 

 

Focus On The Crucifixion: A Fascinating Discussion Between Mel Gibson And Diane Sawyer

Posted on April 1, 2018

“Let’s get this out on the table and talk about it. This is what the Talmud says, this is what the Gospel says. Let’s talk, let’s talk.”

–Mel Gibson

 

 

From The Nazis To The Silicon Valley Billionaires: Exposing The Totalitarian Origins Of Today’s Climate Industrial Complex

Posted on March 30, 2018

“When we’re talking about the climate industrial complex…first of all you’re talking about multi-billion [dollar] American foundations. We’re talking about the various Rockefeller funds, you’re talking about Pew, MacArthur. These huge, huge foundations who’ve been funding some of this stuff really since, well, the Rockefeller Foundation’s been funding [since] the [influx of the] Frankfurt School.

When the Frankfurt School, these far-leftist, post-Marxist academics from Germany fled Nazi Germany, they came to America. Part of their time here was financed by these foundations. Their return was financed by one of the Rockefeller Foundations. They’ve been in this game for a very long time, and in addition to which, you then have all the climate scientists and the billions of dollars of climate funding research. They depend on that stream. They’ve got to keep this going to keep the grants coming. And then you’ve got the wind and solar [movements]. And that’s not billions, that’s hundreds of billions [of dollars supporting the relevant organizations]. It’s enormous.

And then out in front of those, you’ve got what I call the “shock troops” of the climate industrial complex: The NGOs. [These include] [n]ot just the people at the World Resources Institute, if you like — they’re the more respectable kind of intellectual end of it — but you’ve got the people who go out there, like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, the Bill McKibbens of this world. And again, when you look where they get their money, it comes a lot from these large foundations, West Coast foundations. And it comes from Silicon Valley billionaires. So we are talking about something that is very large, very powerful and extremely well financed.”

 

“But the second thing is to do with the way the climate industrial complex behaves, and how they seek to win the argument, and that is to close down debate; it is to delegitimize dissent; it is to cull people into silence. And the penultimate chapter in the book is called, “The Spiral of Silence,” which is this notion that when people don’t hear arguments in the public square, they cease making those arguments themselves. They stop even knowing what they believe…So you can suppress debate, you can suppress the arguments, not by having an argument but just making sure you don’t have an argument. And I think that…ultimately the United States Constitution depends on the First Amendment, the right to free speech, but that’s a formality. The real thing is the essence of being able to speak freely, and that is what is at risk.”

Rupert Darwall, Interview here.

Note:

The astonishing interview, posted below, with Rupert Darwall resonated with everything I have first hand experience of, in the field of weaponized, fabricated “science,” that “good people” believe in. (HIV/AIDS–)

I always thought I was surely an “environmentalist” and that does not change.
I’m not an expert in that subject. But I detest all totalitarian methods, especially against scientists.

CF

Green Tyranny: Exposing The Totalitarian Roots Of The Climate Industrial Complex

More information: Top Russian Scientist Says Fear A Temperature Drop, Not Global Warming

What They Said: Devin Nunes

Posted on March 18, 2018

A very eye-opening interview. Direct and informative.

 

8 Steps To Transcending Scapegoating, Undermining, Bullying Within Families

Posted on March 15, 2018

“The assumption of love within a family is as dangerous as the assumption of human decency in The State.”

Glenda McGee
(From comments section following video)

 

Sweden: Man Tries To Rob Store With Knife, Storeowner Attacks With Crowbar: Which One Is Going To Prison?

Posted on February 27, 2018

The storeowner is being brought up on charges of excess aggression with a possible prison sentence. Both Denmark and Sweden have laws that say, yes, you have the right to defend your property and life against an intruder, but you must use just the right amount of aggression, not more than the situation calls for.

?‼?? #Sweden: robbery in a shop. The shopkeeper is threatened with a knife, he picks up a crowbar, and makes the robbers harmless. Now Lars Alring, 59, is suspected of gross assault and is in danger of imprisonment! The world of idiots! https://t.co/9D01pgsGhT pic.twitter.com/Mv4hDjjmd1

— Onlinemagazin (@OnlineMagazin) February 26, 2018

 

Antifa Cries For Guns: “The Revolution Has Come, It’s Time To Pick Up A Gun!”

Posted on February 26, 2018

How can this far left position square the other progressive positions against guns? Will gun control advocates now condemn Antifa? CNN? Anybody?

WATCH: Antifa outside @cernovich 's #ANightForFreedom .. Listen to the chants promoting violence against Conservatives.. @TheDemocrats still won't condemn them. pic.twitter.com/ZzcxUoKmrF

— ALX ?? ✘ (@TheALX) February 26, 2018

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March On Nowhere: Who’s Next?

Posted on February 20, 2018

In the US, Fentanyl caused 20,100 deaths in 2016, a rise of 540% over the past 3 years.

It is about 75 times stronger than morphine for a given amount. Some fentanyl analogues may be as much as 10,000 times stronger than morphine.

–Wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a product manufactured by a vile “pharmaceutical,” oh sorry…”Biotech” company called Insys Therapeutics, based in Arizona.

In 2016 Insys Therapeutics donated $500,000 to an “activist” group called Arizonans For Responsible Drug Policy, which opposes legalization of marijuana and peddles stories to bought media that we must “raise awareness of the harms of marijuana,” and “protect our children.”

This is literally mass death for mass profit, with full media complicity and societal apathy/silence.

No Psy-Op.

No “brave” kids who get to speak out on camera about what it felt like to see their friends die.

Why no outrage over our failure to ban Fentanyl? You’re barely allowed to say it killed Prince and Tom Petty, but it did. Among countless others.
Here’s a nice little story about the company’s stock value, as it seeks to launch something probably even deadlier. Why stop at 75-10,000 times more potent than morphine?

Behold this insane passage of stock market reportage, from Jan 4, 2018:

“Fortunately, the low point was when pessimism over allegations of off-label marketing for its fentanyl opioid spray, Subsys, were at their maximum. Investors seem to be hoping a $150 million reserve Insys has set aside to settle lawsuits will be enough to squelch the Subsys problem.

Insys’ long-term value will be tied to Syndros, which hit the market last year and its buprenorphine sublingual spray for moderate-to-severe acute pain, which is currently under review by the Food and Drug Administration. If Insys can make the Subsys lawsuits go away and produce decent sales from the two new drugs, its current $800 million market cap is certainly a reasonable valuation.”

–Brian Orelli

#No Lives Matter To Pharma

Why Insys Therapeutics Inc. Crashed Today
What goes up must come down.
FOOL.COM

Article By Celia Farber

My Definition Of A Psy-Op, Picked Up On Twitter

Posted on February 19, 2018

I posted this last night on FB. Peter Barry Chowka, to my delight, made a tweet out of it. And now I am making a Truth Barrier post of Peter Chowka’s Tweet of my comment.  And since I usually tweet posts, this will re-appear as a Twitter post, of my comment, tweeted, posted, then tweeted.

“To turn, turn, will be our delight till by turning, turning we come round right.”

We're in the midst of a massive new Psy-Op. Atop the ongoing Psy-Op that is modern life. Psy-Op definition by journalist & author @CeliaFarber → below is as good as any I've read. https://t.co/wTkfxbmHaq #MAGA #DrainTheSwamp #FakeNews #DeepState #Propaganda #Conservative pic.twitter.com/0RZt60R4GC

— Peter Chowka (@PChowka) February 19, 2018

 

 

 

 

Peter Chowka’s Article About My Father: A New Dawn For Old Journalistic Values

Posted on February 18, 2018

It was also tweeted by Sean Hannity, who once told me he grew up listening to my father under the covers late at night. My father would say: “Get up and get a map, because you are going to learn something.” Sean told me: “We didn’t have a map, so I brought a globe to bed.”
He added: “Every time I am a jerk on the show, it’s because of me. Every time I am a gentleman, it’s because of him.”

Thank you @PChowka for this wonderful piece about my father. A conservative who wears clogs–who sings West African folk songs at the grocery. I have always wished somebody could describe his hilarious soul, and you have. His motto for journalism: "Penetrate The Ostensible" https://t.co/8IL5VbujT8

— Celia Farber (@CeliaFarber) February 18, 2018

 

I Was Right (And So Were You:) Anti-Trumpism Was And Is A Deep State Media Psy-Op To Manufacture Consent And Abolish Freedoms One By One

Posted on February 16, 2018

Do you all see what's happening here? Anti-Trumpism is being used to manufacture consent for increasingly dangerous cold war escalations. There will never, ever be any proof of collusion. That has never been what this is about. It's about crippling an obstacle to US dominance. https://t.co/XO2Gf1UWlf

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) February 16, 2018

 

Hating Brexit, Hating Democracy,And Losing Blair’s Phony Pretext For War In Iraq: Brendan O’Neill

Posted on February 16, 2018

Brendan O’Neill on “Britain’s Kissingers” pic.twitter.com/5Ctu5MwqXw

— spiked (@spikedonline) February 16, 2018

 

Glenn Greenwald’s Crystalizing Light On Mueller Indictments: What Exactly Was In The Secret Box?

Posted on February 16, 2018

Some interesting aspects of the allegations in the Mueller indictments as described by Bloomberg https://t.co/SdZZtVuyMC pic.twitter.com/scnds678zE

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 16, 2018

 

Mueller Indictment: Is That All There Is?

Posted on February 16, 2018

 

 

Mueller "troll farm" indictment today
– explicitly states no collusion
– does not mention WikiLeaks
– states trolls intent to support Trump & Sanders, oppose Clinton, Cruz
– states trolls intent on anti-Trump AND pro-Trump rallies post electionhttps://t.co/uMxBAwOeOY

— Julian Assange ⌛ (@JulianAssange) February 16, 2018

 

Hiding In Plain Sight: Kinsey, Hefner, Penthouse, Hustler, And The Not So Veiled Pedophilia Agenda Of Postwar USA

Posted on February 14, 2018

According to a DOJ investigation conducted by Dr. Judith Reisman, between 1953 and 1982, at least 9,000 images featuring sexual scenarios of children under age age of 18 were published in magazines like Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler.

“Your average guy thinks he’s buying a girlie magazine…and he has no idea that the messages that are being pumped into him, near-physiologically…include images of sexual assault of children.”

Dr. Judith Reisman, author: Images of Children, Crime and Violence in Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler

 

I Lived Through This (If You Can Call This Living)

Posted on February 14, 2018

“When a hit piece is done on you or your friends and suddenly everyone is talking about the hit piece, you have the feeling that your life is over…” —- @EricRWeinstein cc: @BretWeinstein @jordanbpeterson https://t.co/HjDVOwX08r pic.twitter.com/QGJ8s1oFR2

— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) 13 februari 2018

 

A Colleague, Peter Barry Chowka, Found And Tweeted Something I Wrote Long Ago

Posted on February 12, 2018

Peter Barry Chowka found (in the archives) and tweeted, an article I wrote about the future of radio, for Media Post, in 2008. I don’t often post published articles of mine here, but some of them hold up well. I don’t even own a copy of my own book. I’ve never read my Wikipedia page. I react neither to praise, nor attacks. I just think about one thing: How to return from disembodiment. Once I have cracked it, I will have a real book too write.

I used to love the process of writing, how it felt to get an idea, when the material started to buzz and hum. Seeing it on the page. Now I mostly write inside my mind, just listening to all the voices, lines, twigs of words. I don’t aim to organize it anymore. I seem to be waiting, like a fossil under the ice bed, until some giant biblical thaw makes it once again a free and safer world, for expression. When the storms of hatred subside, the hammer-blows over the heads of the different-minded.

“Radio used to be strange, free, intimate, mossy – like an enchanted forest, dominated by a few heavy trees that seemed to have sprung from a soil of eccentricity and showmanship. Anything could happen there. It was a medium for the ever wandering minds, the insomniacs, the history buffs, the truth-seekers. Talking meant talking – which entailed listening, combing the ocean’s floor for that which might surprise or delight. It was not, or did not seem, all that connected to money, power or politics – until the mid 1990s. It was around that time I started to truly lose sight of the medium that honors my father as one of its shapers.

When talk is free, when nobody has harnessed it, it is closer to music than speech. Not what is said, but the way it is said.”

Talk radio fans: important & prophetic article by @CeliaFarber on early history, pioneers & future of radio https://t.co/c4mgrGWPoZ & https://t.co/UGBavYGvlP is Celia's home base for probing independent journalism & reporting. Bookmark it. #MAGA #DrainTheSwamp #TalkRadio #PJNET pic.twitter.com/miAMkSxvh6

— Peter Chowka (@PChowka) February 11, 2018

 

Emotional Freedom Technique In Traumatic, Abusive Times

Posted on February 6, 2018

 

A Voice From Russia: Andrey Afanasyev Explains How Globalist Bankers Are Parasitic To Russia And US And Reveals Oligarch Agenda At Heart Of American Progressive Anti-Trump-Ism

Posted on February 5, 2018
Andrey Afanasyev – Private photo from Twitter

So where does this leave the average American “card-carrying leftist?” Can you despise Trump without carrying water for the Rothschild Oligarchs? Same ones who funded the “Bolshevik Revolution,” one hundred years ago.

I’ll post the full interview in a later post. We have had absolutely NO dialogue about “Russia,” and generally, Americans do not interview people from OTHER countries. We only keep track of what we are emotionally hysterical about inside our bizarre bubble of shame, guilt and wanna-be “Socialism.”

 

CNN Deep State Contractor Identified By Assange

Posted on February 4, 2018

This bizarre and disturbing interview was mentioned in this post. Then I saw this on Twitter. It figures. (It always, figures.)

Former CIA official, now paid CNN contractor (who libeled me as a 'pedophile' on live TV) has some thoughts on U.S. electoral democracy: https://t.co/mM0qYbJhnJ

— Julian Assange ⌛ (@JulianAssange) February 4, 2018

 

Trying To Make Gerald Riley Aware That I Have Replied To Him In Comments Section And Loved His Word “Excellent”

Posted on February 4, 2018

Part one, from “Not Satan.”

“Okay , but you do know that Trump in January signed surveillance extension into law ,
the sweeping warrant-less programs that intercept digital traffic of foreign targets while hoovering up the personal information of an unknown number of Americans. YES , that law..
Then to defend your case you use RT (?)
Do you at all see the hypocrisy in this??”

Reply, from Celia Farber, which also contains a reply to Gerald Riley in second half of comment:

“I do.

Trump is not my issue. I have bigger fish to fry.

Trump is actually largely incidental, to the Story Of Our Time, which is: The overreach, exposure (by whistleblowers) and final unraveling of the US Deep State which is complicit as we know in crimes from JFK to 9/11.

If you DON’T know that, you are are very good (or subtle) hallucinogens.

Only easily fooled goldfish are falling for EITHER the anti-Trump or the pro-Trump spy-ops. Trump is one man. One President. 4 or 8 years. Me, I am interested in systems.

Not personality, nor gossip, nor gladiatorial class wars and distractions from what TRULY matters to human life.

Government tyranny. Vs. Government accountability.

Smart people read Wikileaks. Listen to William Binney. Read and listen to Diane Roark. Research the history of Trailblazer, SARC, Thin Thread…smart people know who the criminals are at the heart of all of this.

Oh, Gerald? You brought up the word “excellent,” in trying to persuade me Rachel Maddow is “excellent.” She sure is rich. But is she “excellent?”

I offer to you, two names I consider “excellent:”

William Binney and

Diane Roark

(among many, way way way superior, to Maddow, who has cashed in to the system, supports it every step of the way, and simply does not get the story of the century. Her century. Doesn’t mean she’s not “super smart.”)

Why Did FBI Fail To Probe “…Coverup Of The Worst Child Molester, Perhaps In American History?”

Posted on February 4, 2018

It’s a very, very bad week for the FBI. Perhaps somebody can explain who among the “rank and file,” failed even to catch this guy?

“THEY’VE ENGAGED IN A COVERUP OF THE WORST CHILD MOLESTER, PERHAPS IN AMERICAN HISTORY.”

–John Manly, attorney for Nassar Victims

“The email was labeled highly confidential and USA Gymnastics had told the US Olympic Committee the FBI was handling things.”

 

–Yahoo/HuffPo News, linked below

https://www.yahoo.com/news/apos-may-ugly-apos-aly-165645931.html

CNN Attacks FBI Reform Post Memo: Disgruntled Deep State Ex-CIA Instead Of Lamenting Corruption And Overreach, Whines That FBI Agents Are “Ticked Off;” Warns Trump: “We’ve Been Around Since 1908”

Posted on February 4, 2018

Yeah, we know, and we’re getting kind of sick of you, with your dirty, Godforsaken boot on our American necks. You’re counting on your Trump Is Literally Hitler Psy-Op to keep you in power, but the Deep State’s days are numbered. Thank you Diane Roark, William Binney, Ed Loomis, Kirk Wiebe, Ed  Snowden, Julian Assange, and many, many deep state whistleblowers whose names have yet to be illuminated. The war is not between Pro and anti-Trump factions, but between those who support a surveillance state with unchecked powers to violate every American citizen, including Donald Trump, vs those who would oppose this passionately and vehemently.

https://www.rt.com/usa/417814-us-president-fbi-power/

Clip above.

 

Do you feel, as I do, (when you hear this agent of the Deep State spittling forth on CNN) that the agent, Mr. Mudd, is speaking a dangerous language and cares nothing for the will of the American people? It feels like violence, to me. I watch it once, and that will have to be enough.

 

‘All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.’

Comments from RT, reflecting part of the international conversation about the Nunes Memo [LINKED in this NYT article) and its implications:

 

“Why do nearly all American politicians sound like they’re standard government villains from Marvel movies? Is it just arrogance? Are they drama queens?

This guy seriously sounds so proud that he “knows how the game goes” and “you’ve only been here 13 months.. we’ve been here since 1908″. Sounds like dudes measuring eachothers’ members’. FBI/DOJ get caught red handed in a corruption scandal, and this guy is treating it like a football game. He’s proud that a corrupt system is capable of outwitting an elected official… how is this not causing protests?”

 

“Pelosi also knew how it would go. “Trump won’t win, you can take it to the bank”. The whole American political system is full of false prophets. They don’t know how it will go.”

“The fact remains that if the FBI are not worried, then why did they the Dems, the MSM and twitterati try so hard to block its release?”

“That “guy” isn’t a politician. He is CIA as are many of the broadcasters for CNN and MSNBC.
all NWO operatives.”

“I don’t really know how the different departments in US work. But it’s pretty obvious that nobody, not even the president has enough control to real in the FBI, CIA etc no matter what they do or how they act.
It may have been established that way to fight corruption etc. within, but no safeguards were put in place to control those departments when they themselves become corrupt.”
“FBI out of control since J Edgar Hoover, and CIA since Truman.”

“The FBI, Hoover and his Einstein and the Communism phobia…
FBI, CIA, NSA….mankind have about none of them a good meaning. They are under control of Oligarchs and the deepstate and their leaders are acting like Kindergarden cops…”
“Actually, since 1909.”

“Yeah, “we are going to win”, just ask Comey and McCabe. ; )”

“The agencies forgot they are nothing without peoples and govmnt. Support.
And now EVERYONE knows that CIA and FBI and KGB have designed whole sy stem of the world for past 50 years……This WILL stop. In next 15 years all memories of current leaders will be erased.

Mark my words.

Humans dont praise Murderers….or do they?”

“Wrong! they have never worked for the people nor have they been elected by the people.
the Soros of the world, the Rothys, all control the world and have never been elected.”

“The MEMO is the kick start, followed by a tsunami that will wash the swamp like never before.”

“One would hope… nobody appears to care about this. People genuinely don’t realize how serious a precedent this sets – there is corruption in the top organizations of government.

Americans will suffer for their apathy because of this. They may not understand how dangerous this situation is, letting FBI/DOJ off the hook for illegal actions. This is going to snowball in the next 10-20 years.”

“This isn’t only about US citizens, this is global and the root cause as to how presidents have been bought to create global terrorism ,and not held accountable I’m sure Africans especially in Libya and Middle East especially Palestinian’s ,Iranians; Syrians, Iraqis South America especially Venezuelans Cuba Asia North Korea 9/11, JFK MLK etc this is global and huge.”

“I hope and pray you are right, comrade.”

 

 

A Daily Morning Prayer: Declare Victory

Posted on February 4, 2018

 

Mike Cernovich Stricken By Implications Of Memo:”How Can Anybody Have Read That Nunes Memo Today And Not…Fear For The Lives Of People In Independent Media?”

Posted on February 2, 2018

“I don’t know man. Are they gonna frame us all?”

 

–Mike Cernovich

 

I’ve never seen Mike Cernovich look like this. He looks ashen. I think his words take the story to another level. He’s so right. This is so grave, and so frightening. I want to quite literally get far away from any person who does not recognize the gravity of this, and who instead merrily goes on Trump bashing.

Trump is merely incidental to this way deeper horror story, about the Black Ice Deep State, and every last one of us. Trump was raped, as we all have been, will be, or could be, by the politicized and corrupt intelligence apparatus. If that does not scare you then you are, I feel, completely hypnotized.

To all those friends with whom I have parted over the past year, I see now that there was no way we could have remained “friends.” Anybody who can’t oppose this is helping evil on earth.

 

 

The FBI is run by criminals, General Flynn was framed. #MemoDay https://t.co/IbvUnHai1r

— Mike Cernovich ?? (@Cernovich) February 2, 2018

 

Clark Baker, 20 Years LAPD, On Nunes Memo: “They Knew They Were Breaking The Law,” …Deserve “Harshest Prosecution Available”

Posted on February 2, 2018

 

I’ve conducted several thousand criminal, civil, and military investigations with the LAPD (1980-2000) and as a private investigator (1997-present). I’ve observed FBI and DOJ corruption since 1991 and am relieved that the criminals at the DNC, DOJ, and FBI have been exposed.
This unprecedented and treasonous behavior deserves the harshest prosecution available so that Americans can be confident that no one will ever attempt to repeat these crimes. If ANY municipal detective was caught conspiring with political candidates and prosecutors to file false affidavits to secure warrants to spy on a local mayoral candidate, he (and his co-conspirators) would face fines and many years in prison. Hillary and her co-conspirators deserve no less.
The fact that the FBI, DOJ, and DNC officials fought so hard to prevent us from knowing shows what prosecutors call “consciousness of guilt”. They KNEW they were breaking the law and violating President Trump’s constitutional rights at every step of the way and did it anyway for political reasons. Russia didn’t try to steal the election – the FBI, DOJ, and DNC tried to steal the election. Russian is a dangerous player, but not nearly as dangerous as the enemy within. #DTS

 

–Clark Baker, via Facebook, link below

(Former Marine, Former LAPD Officer, Private Investigator)

https://www.hannity.com/media-room/fisa-bombshell-read-the-full-text-of-the-explosive-fisa-memo-here/

Nunes Memo Declassified: Black Friday For Deep State Collusionists In Media And FBI

Posted on February 2, 2018

“The House Intelligence Committee has released its controversial memo outlining alleged abuses of secret surveillance by the FBI and Justice Department in the Trump-Russia investigation. Here are some key points:

* The Steele dossier formed an essential part of the initial and all three renewal FISA applications against Carter Page.

* Andrew McCabe confirmed that no FISA warrant would have been sought from the FISA Court without the Steele dossier information.

* The political origins of the Steele dossier were known to senior DOJ and FBI officials, but excluded from the FISA applications.

* DOJ official Bruce Ohr met with Steele beginning in the summer of 2016 and relayed to DOJ information about Steele’s bias. Steele told Ohr that he, Steele, was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected president and was passionate about him not becoming president.”

–Washington Examiner

 

FULL STORY HERE:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/house-intel-memo-released-what-it-says/article/2647937?platform=hootsuite

Black Friday For Deep State Collusionists In Media And FBI: NUNES MEMO RELEASED

Posted on February 2, 2018

“The House Intelligence Committee has released its controversial memo outlining alleged abuses of secret surveillance by the FBI and Justice Department in the Trump-Russia investigation. Here are some key points:

* The Steele dossier formed an essential part of the initial and all three renewal FISA applications against Carter Page.

* Andrew McCabe confirmed that no FISA warrant would have been sought from the FISA Court without the Steele dossier information.

* The political origins of the Steele dossier were known to senior DOJ and FBI officials, but excluded from the FISA applications.

* DOJ official Bruce Ohr met with Steele beginning in the summer of 2016 and relayed to DOJ information about Steele’s bias. Steele told Ohr that he, Steele, was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected president and was passionate about him not becoming president.”

–Washington Examiner

 

FULL STORY HERE:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/house-intel-memo-released-what-it-says/article/2647937?platform=hootsuite

House Rules

Posted on January 22, 2018

This website is a “labor of love” (that gratefully receives some micro-donations, but not enough to maintain editorial overhead and Celia’s life/income.) This website has for a long time been trying to become more a) consistent b) up to date with new media, meaning transition to video podcasts, c) relatively harmonious, not plagued by fights in the comment sections. When those conditions are met, it will earn its salt and attract more supporters on Patreon–OR–it will die because things that can’t sustain themselves die. (Wrongly referred to as “Darwinism.”*)

(*Why wrong? Because apparently Chuck Darwin never wrote the words “survival of the fittest, but I must double back and find out the details of this via my friend James Macallister, who worked closely with Lynn Margulis.)

I don’t want it to die, and I don’t want the financing of it to depend upon me harassing my readers to become patrons. I believe somehow things can float with or without “money,” and I am kind of a magician at this. This post is not about money. It is however, about survival. Energy and frequency.

I can not keep the site going, and allow those participants who consistently appear to tell me everything I post is wrong, stupid, crazy, right wing, paranoid, etc. I erred on the side of NOT blocking for so long that I created actual trauma to myself and my readers in some cases. It’s depressing to always be countered and tomato-pelted, but NO, I am not censorious and thin-skinned.  Anybody can correct anything at any time. But this is no longer the playground of anybody who objects vociferously and regularly to EVERYTHING I post, or even “just about” everything. It’s too draining and demoralizing. The site will die if I give up. And the constant, relentless objections are very wearying.

I understand that I have offended some people and there are people who are upset with me and hate this website and everything I come up with.

I understand that I made mistakes in the past and I insulted certain people when I myself felt insulted. I want it all to stop. I apologize that I partook in anybody being injured. I want never to hurt anybody. I want us to figure out, together, what the big truths are. I am honored to host this website, to that end, and grateful to all who come here and contribute their thoughts, knowledge, and time.

Anybody who finds they are blocked, please know that I WANTED your participation here as member of this online “family” but it became untenable because the frequency was destructive and combative.

I remain open to non-abusive criticisms of all kinds.

If you’re blocked, you were also warned, many times. BE RESPECTFUL.

I have challenges behind closed doors that are not visible here, but I ask that you take my word for it–the struggles are formidable. I need to captain this ship. Anybody who is not with me, (not “agreeing” or “conforming” but also not constantly disagreeing) is now off the ship. It is always a possibility that things will change and people can return with new better intentions.

Thank you. The next step is going to be to transition from print to audio/video, and interviews. When I can find time, and what the Swedes call “ork” which means vital energy.

Did Q Reveal The Contents Of The Memo?

Posted on January 22, 2018

 

The Simple Way To Stay Alive: Shatter Your Conditioning And Set Yourself Free

Posted on January 19, 2018

More from the remarkable Dr. Jennifer Daniels (and if you listen at the 30 minute mark, you’ll hear some familiar corrections about HIV, AIDS. the nature of “retrivirusus,” AZT and more.

 

Reuters: U.S. Unemployment Drops To 45 Year Low

Posted on January 18, 2018

 

 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-unemployment/u-s-housing-starts-fall-jobless-claims-hit-45-year-low-idUSKBN1F71S2?utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_content=5a60ad1504d30155a44837c9&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter

Breaking Through Fantasies And Myths About Candida, “Inflammation,” And Cancer: And How Slaves Cured Their Dying Masters With Gum Spirits

Posted on January 18, 2018

“Ok so this is another, I believe, fantasy. Whenever medicine talks about inflammation you can just substitute the word ‘inflammation’ for parasites.”

–Dr. Jennifer Daniels

This is one of the most eye-opening interviews I have ever heard.

Before I posted this, I watched many YouTube testimonials from people who have used turpentine in either sugar or castor oil, to rid themselves of parasites and re-balance candida. If you ingest no more than one teaspoon of 100% pure gum spirits of turpentine daily, distributed on either (white) sugar cubes or in castor oil, according to those who have tried it, you will immediately start to purge parasites and effectively curb candida.

A most fascinating part of this interview traces this cure–all to the era of slavery:  When slave-owners were near death, they would go to their slaves’ cabins and ingest the tonic the slaves used (actually, how reprehensible it is to even have to refer to human beings as slaves but that it the word we are left with) to remain healthier than their “owners.” It was also once known as “Apache chewing gum.”

I have ordered a reputable brand and will try this remedy myself as soon as it arrives. I have been unwell (fatigue, brain fog, etc) for about 10 years, and found no real relief despite following various gut-healing, anti-inflammation protocols. I now believe that, yes, parasites are the problem for most of us. The blind spot, and the source of our “demons.”  Here is Dr. Daniel’s PDF, detailing her research on the healing power of gum spirits. I hope you listen to the entire interview, before making up your mind one way or the other. The African-American patients Dr. Daniels questioned had, in many cases, grandmothers who were still alive, well, and taking care of themselves well into their 90s, using this old folk remedy.

 

Lyme Disease: What Really Works?

Posted on January 17, 2018

 

Signs Point To Q Anon Being Real: Deep State Financial Crimes Tied To 9/11 Means Charges Of Treason For The Guilty

Posted on January 15, 2018

“The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not to sure it is right.”

–Justice Learned Hand

I trust this narrator. I find new Q narrators now and then, replacing older ones, who perhaps get a little too famous.

I go on voices, and just the way a person makes me feel. Frequency.

This is apparently going to be a shocking, “planet changing” week. So let’s–yes–be kind to one another as we brace for what is coming.

I respect that many people believe Q-Anon is a Psy-Op, but I don’t think so. The culture of Q-Anon, [Reddit, 4-Chan, 8-Chan] in any case, is not a “top-down” geometry (pyramid) which presumes that un-annointed priests of information get to bless and hand down what is good, right, true, and or worthy of shock. It is the in fact nothing less than inversion of the CIA’s “Mockingbird” media. A “revolution.” (A thing turning all the way around.) It’s driven from “below,” (the many, the anybody, the everybody) not the anointed overpaid PsypOp few. It is an eco-system, and a symbiosis in action.

This is such a long held dream of mine, that I would live to see the media exposed and known, seen for what it is, no longer blindly believed. It is such a longheld dream that I can barely “see” it as one squints toward the sun. I had given up. It was so many years ago, I began to discover how violent and truth-destructive “the media” is. (are.)

I think I should pipe down and let you watch this video. And remember: If you try to show up and berate people (starting with me) because PRRRROOOOOOFFF is not yet “in,” the guns will shoot blanks. It doesn’t work anymore. No more shooting down people for “getting it wrong.” Rather, truth is a massive collective archaeology and excavation mission–in real time, together.  The renaissance of Citizen Journalism. It is by definition “not too sure it is right,” hence, protected, transcended and transcending.

 

Trump Derangement Syndrome (Unchecked Chronic Indignant Narcissistic Fury Never Tempered By Humor Or Self-Awareness) Wrecks Wall St. Man’s Life In One Tweet (Wishing A Woman A “MeToo Moment”)

Posted on January 15, 2018

“Because it really is a mental condition, he couldn’t just apologize.”

–Mike Cernovich

Note: Mike Cernovich correctly assigns Trump Derangement as a “mental condition.” If it is, it is a form of “traumatizing narcissism,” a phrase described in this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Traumatic-Narcissism-Relational-Subjugation-Perspectives/dp/0415510252/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1516043854&sr=8-1&keywords=Daniel+Shaw

The Truth Barrier‘s position (i.e. my position) on “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is that it is an actual demonic infection. Why do I say that? Because it afflicts millions, at once, with an identical “thought form” as in a Psy-Op. You could call it “code.” It eclipses instinctual humanity, nuance,  terminates mercy, encourages sadistic fury, hates accuracy, obliterates context, and begins and ends with an infinite accusation from which the accused cannot, by design, transcend. It’s not enough to call it a mental condition. People who have it appear to be possessed and should be avoided at all costs. But I admire Cernovich for imploring these people to “get help.”

The demonic infection stands apart from Trump’s flaws or criticisms of them. Trump’s character flaws can be addressed by non insane people in ways that are not governed by this destructive syndrome, which seeks the total annihilation of varying perspectives from their own. ie. extreme narcissism. Secularists call demonic possession “narcissism.” The terms are interchangeable.

Trump Derangement Syndrome blows up a man's life – GET HELP!: https://t.co/4t5Tobd6TU via @YouTube

— Mike Cernovich ?? (@Cernovich) January 15, 2018

 

Media Without Borders: Project Veritas Breaks Horror Of Twitter, An Organ Of Invasive Electronic Tyranny

Posted on January 15, 2018

Welcome my son
Welcome to the machine
Where have you been?
It’s alright we know where you’ve been
You’ve been in the pipeline
Filling in time
Provided with toys and scouting for boys
You bought a guitar to punish your ma
And you didn’t like school
And you know you’re nobody’s fool
So welcome to the machine
Welcome to the machine
Welcome my son
Welcome to the machine
What did you dream?
It’s alright…

Welcome To The Machine,
Roger Waters

MAJOR PRIVACY BREACH: @Twitter has a "virtual profile" on all users – even those without accounts – which is sold to advertisers. "You're paying for the right to use our website with your data basically." pic.twitter.com/m3win7S39M

— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) January 15, 2018

 

The Frozen Iguanas Who Triumphed

Posted on January 15, 2018

A guy in Florida loaded his car up with frozen iguanas and then they came back to life while he was driving. https://t.co/FBFtpR5SyI pic.twitter.com/wxQobX33Un

— Chris Ostertag (@videograndpa) January 6, 2018

 

I’m Losing You

Posted on January 14, 2018

 

 

What does it mean to hear somebody?

It means you hear what they say and what they do not say. Not necessarily in that order.

 

Shungite Science 101 From Cosmic Reality: America’s Most Trusted Shungite Source

Posted on January 14, 2018

Let’s not forget about Shungite. I notice when I remove my Shungite pendant, I am prone to an immediate allergy attack. When I put it back on, it begins to resolve. That is only one effect. When I see people who need Shungite more than I do, I often give them my pendant or whatever shungite I have on me. Shungite is a potent mineral/crystal–it can push people out of your life who should not be in your life, rather dramatically. It can precipitate a “crisis” in your life that is actually a healing crisis, an awakening.  It always wants the best for you. I can attest to that the Shungite that comes from Cosmic Reality (CosmicReality.net) is real, which is all that matters. (No commercial affiliation.) I recommend the stickers, the nuggets, and the pendants. I am astounded by the effects of the fridge magnet. Food stays good much longer, and the fridge is much colder. It’s quite astonishing.

Happy 2018, with Shungite’s power around you.

 

How To Heal Your Body: Edgar Cayce’s Everlasting Insights For Us All

Posted on January 13, 2018

I listened to this yesterday and I highly recommend it. (Not sure why we use that phrase, “highly recommend it…”)  I trust Edgar Cayce. And I generally trust those who spread the word of his works. They are straightforward and not trying to dominate and hypnotize us. Edgar Cayce is often referred to as the “father of alternative medicine.” God bless him. Had he lived today, the demons of “rational medicine” which could also be called “militant atheist medicine,” or even Luciferian medicine, would have hounded him to death. But he made it. And his wisdom lives on and is available to us all.

Please let me (us) know how, if you watched this, it resonated with you.

 

100 Most Damaging Wikileaks Regarding The Clinton Apparatus

Posted on January 5, 2018

“Jen you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news… we need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov”

“How is that not classified?” Huma Abedin to FBI when shown email between Clinton & Obama using his pseudonym. Abedin then expressed her amazement at the president’s use of a pseudonym and asked if she could have a copy of the email.”

I can’t state how huge this is, it’s a cover up involving the President of the United States. There are a lot of emails implying this, but this email states it very clearly so anyone can understand. The email proves obstruction of justice and shows how they lied to the FBI, and likely perjury of Congress. This at the very least proves intent by her Chief of Staff.”

 

https://www.conservativeoutfitters.com/blogs/news/hillary-clintons-top-100-most-damaging-wikileaks-full-list

[Special thanks to a source and friend in Sweden.]

What Was Found On Weiner’s Laptop, According To Judicial Watch?

Posted on January 5, 2018

.@JudicialWatch: At Least 18 Classified Emails Found on Weiner’s Laptop. @RealDonaldTrump DOJ should act! https://t.co/AalMFbsRLJ pic.twitter.com/jQ7kgdvSBQ

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) January 4, 2018

 

Let It Snow; And Donate If You Can To TTB So We Can Grow

Posted on January 4, 2018

The PayPal button is off to the right side, and my patreon account is here:

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3597112

Thank you!!!

 

Sweden’s Apathetic Children: Traumatized By Deportation, Fallen From Life

Posted on January 4, 2018

“Georgi was given a diagnosis of uppgivenhetssyndrom, or resignation syndrome, an illness that is said to exist only in Sweden, and only among refugees. The patients have no underlying physical or neurological disease, but they seem to have lost the will to live. The Swedish refer to them as de apatiska, the apathetic. “I think it is a form of protection, this coma they are in,” Hultcrantz said. “They are like Snow White. They just fall away from the world.”

The apathetic children began showing up in Swedish emergency rooms in the early two-thousands. Their parents were convinced that they were dying. Of what, they didn’t know; they worried about cholera or some unknown plague. Soon patients with the condition filled all the beds in Stockholm’s only psychiatric inpatient unit for children, at Karolinska University Hospital. Göran Bodegård, the director of the unit, told me that he felt claustrophobic when he entered the rooms. “An atmosphere of Michelangelo’s ‘Pietà’ lingered around the child,” he said. The blinds were drawn, and the lights were off. The mothers whispered, rarely spoke to their sick children, and stared into the darkness.

By 2005, more than four hundred children, most between the ages of eight and fifteen, had fallen into the condition. In the medical journal Acta Pædiatrica, Bodegård described the typical patient as “totally passive, immobile, lacks tonus, withdrawn, mute, unable to eat and drink, incontinent and not reacting to physical stimuli or pain.” Nearly all the children had emigrated from former Soviet and Yugoslav states, and a disproportionate number were Roma or Uyghur. Sweden has been a haven for refugees since the seventies, accepting more asylum seekers per capita than any other European nation, but the country’s definition of political refugees had recently narrowed. Families fleeing countries that were not at war were often denied asylum.
In an open letter to the Swedish minister of migration, forty-two psychiatrists asserted that the new restrictions on asylum seekers and the time it took the Migration Board to process their applications—children could be in limbo for years—were causing the disease. They accused the government of “systematic public child abuse.” Opinion within the medical community converged on the theory that the illness was a reaction to two traumas: harassment in the children’s home country, and the dread, after acclimating to Swedish society, of returning. Sweden’s leading medical journal, Läkartidningen, devoted dozens of articles, and several poems, to the syndrome. “Your eyes had seen it all / aged with an old man’s weariness without any hope of life in the future,” Mildred Oudin, the chief of child psychiatry in Skövde, in central Sweden, wrote. Magnus Kihlbom, the director of an institute for child psychiatry in Stockholm, proposed in the journal that the disorder represented a kind of willed dying. Kihlbom cited the psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim, a Holocaust survivor, who wrote that some prisoners in the concentration camps were “so totally exhausted, both physically and emotionally, that they had given the environment total power over them.” They “stopped eating, sat mute and motionless in corners, and expired.”
Swedish news programs broadcast footage of children on stretchers being loaded into airplanes and expelled from the country. Sweden prides itself on its commitment to helping the most vulnerable, and the illness was seen as an affront to the country’s national character. Even the King was alarmed.”

Rachel Aviv’s New Yorker article here.

 

*I recall this topic being discussed at dinner parties during my most recent (and final) attempt to return to this country I once thought might be “my” country, though I was 11 when we suddenly moved there. It was discussed as a controversial assertion–something that one camp claimed existed for real and another, (one was to assume more valid,) was dismissive of. Heads tilted in the glow of the candle light. Oh oh oh, how hard it is to know if anything is really actually true. I remember a prickly rage rising up my throat and a strong effort to keep my mouth shut. Because I knew it was true. And I knew that if I said that I would be the loser, the emotional one, the immigrant, the dirty goat.

I experienced “intellectual” life in Sweden as torture. One knew only one thing: Sweden must simultaneously emerge seeming to have been dipped in self-recrimination, but in actual fact, emerge un-touched and gleaming, like silver.

 

 

Happy New Year, To All Friends Of The Truth Barrier, And Thank You

Posted on December 31, 2017

 

WISHING TRUTH BARRIER FAMILY CONGRATULATIONS FOR SURVIVING 2017!

Thank you for all you do to keep the determined flame here. I am always amazed and grateful that YOU are still there.  May we all find more of what we seek, in 2018. Happy New Year! And here’s a little bit of Pushkin to kick us off, from my Russian friend Marina Himanen. <3

–Celia Farber

 

 

 

 

It’s time, my friend, it’s time! (Rhyming)

Versions: #1#2
It’s time, my friend, it’s time — the heart demands repose —
The days are flying by, and with each moment goes
A tiny slice of life, and vainly, you and I
Endeavor thus to live, but in a wink we die.

There is no bliss on Earth, but there is scope and solace;
For many years I’ve dreamed of this elusive promise:
A place that will give me, a tired slave, new strength
Through able-bodied work and simple, pleasant things.

 

–Alexander Pushkin

Protests In Iran: 2018 Will Be The Year Fascism In All Forms Is Obliterated By “People”

Posted on December 31, 2017

Today in #Rasht, chanting “Death to the Dictator!” For those asking if movement is dying down, appears it’s gaining momentum in numbers and in cities. There has been, however, a slowdown in sending videos as Telegram & Instagram are blocked in certain areas. #iranprotests pic.twitter.com/zNVbnOLBcQ

— Lisa Daftari (@LisaDaftari) December 31, 2017

 

Have Senior Regime Officials Fled Iran?

Posted on December 31, 2017

WATCH: New video shows #IranProtest heading towards the residence of Supreme Leader Ali Khameini. Other intel shows that senior regime officials have already fled #Iran on unmarked jets pic.twitter.com/ftIsnmX4ij

— Jacob Wohl (@JacobAWohl) December 31, 2017

 

Photo From Iran Protests

Posted on December 31, 2017

#IranProtests

An Iranian woman raises her fist amid the smoke of tear gas during a protest against the Islamic regime. #IranProtests #تظاهرات_سراسرى #يحدث_الان_في_ايران #متحد_شویم #IranProtest pic.twitter.com/0agU2lAzrn

— Armin Navabi (@ArminNavabi) December 31, 2017

 

Cry Freedom, Iran

Posted on December 31, 2017

There are many ways to essentially differentiate people. Some people love freedom. Other people say loving freedom is just a cover for nefarious impulses.

Me, I tend to think people who are willing to get shot on the streets fighting for freedom are worth loving, and I do.

I love them.

I have never seen so many Islamophobes in my life. Iran is full of Islamophobes who want democracy over Islamist theocracy. pic.twitter.com/axdhle3Nfx

— Imam of Peace (@Imamofpeace) December 30, 2017

 

CIA Operative Reveals He Was Offered Half A Million Cash To Blow Up Murrah Building In Oklahoma City: Shortly Thereafter, Is In A Car Wreck

Posted on December 31, 2017

I listened to this entire interview 3 days ago in The Trauma Bath (I feel most calm when I am in a hot bath with 2 cups of bentonite clay.) I have discovered that I only listen properly when I am in The Trauma Bath. (I could call it the Anti-Trauma bath.) I then sent an urgent email to Stephen Ericson asking if I was crazy or if he also thought this was not only shocking but probably real. The trouble with everything these days is you simply can’t tell if it’s real or if it’s part of the great infinite Psy-Op on the collective human brain.

I think this is “real” and true. I can’t say for sure but for what my battered ears are now worth, I think so. I would like to know what you all think.

This is an infuriating and devastating two hours of human testimony. It sickens me to think that I know people who voted for Hillary Clinton. Thank God she did not win.

 

This Hagman show was published Dec. 22. Former CIA Operative, Cody Snogres, was in a car accident apparently due to outing the information in this show about the CIA offering him half a million USD to blow up the Murrah Bldg. in OKC. About 2 hrs. https://t.co/c3wP8sAyJx

— Tiffany Fontenot (@Tifvision) December 24, 2017

 

Huma Abedin Emails Found On Weiner Laptop To Be Published Today At 3 Pm EST

Posted on December 29, 2017

We expect that State Department will post the Abedin gov docs found on Anthony Weiner's laptop around 3:00 pm (eastern) today. https://t.co/IDyjCKBs7H

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) December 29, 2017

 

What Could FBI Agent Peter Strzok Possibly Have Meant When He Said We Can’t Risk Letting The American People Elect A President?

Posted on December 29, 2017

This is what @Jim_Jordan was alluding to earlier this month during the Rosenstein hearing pic.twitter.com/A6T8UV3Hal

— Nick Short ?? (@PoliticalShort) December 29, 2017

 

Simple Gifts

Posted on December 29, 2017

(Special dedication to Berenice–)

 

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come ’round right.’

 

—Simple Gifts,

Joseph Brackett, 1848

 

 

 

 

Lionel Nation: Q-Anon, “The Deep Throat Of The Deep State Of Our Generation”

Posted on December 28, 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1820&v=_CHjrbE18h8

The Trinity Of Opposition: Guilt, Shame And Rejection (And How To Overcome It)

Posted on December 28, 2017

“The primary object of crucifixion…was to impose shame on people. Jesus endured it all. But he despised the shame.”

–Derek Prince

“Not being loved is the worst sickness.”

–Mother Theresa

I have realized (I think) that the Catholic Church, as we loosely call it, has been engulfed by an error, and it is no minor error: The trafficking of shame. How many Catholics do you know, i.e. people raised as Catholics, who neither harbor shame nor seek to impose it on others?

That said, I believe that true Christianity is rooted in the opposite of shame.

“What is the opposite of shame? How many of you can tell me? I think the best opposite of shame, is glory.”

–Derek Prince

 

 

What Ailments Can You Heal, Both Physical And Emotional, With A Teaspoon Of Clay A Day?

Posted on December 27, 2017

This conversation is worth paying very close attention to. It has many astonishing reveals, about common mineral deficiencies and things like irritability and quarrelsomeness, all the way to arthritis, osteoporosis, depression, insomnia, bone spurs, ADHD, and more.

I am considering writing, in 2018, strictly on health and healing matters as I continue to attempt resurrection of my own collapsed health, and find a strong urge to share what is working and what clues I find along the way.  I find all things pertaining to minerals fascinating. I am always drawn to them. Just a warning–I am also, of late, completely obsessed with activated charcoal. The color, first of all. It is so black you actually can’t see it. Like the black in the horse’s pupil in that poem by…aaargh. Who do I mean? Russian. I’ll find it. I have a sinus infection and am even more forgetful than usual. I have had today: One glass of charcoal, one glass of Bentonite Clay, one clay bath, and some vegetable broth. Sea Salt and tea tree oil Netti pot for 3 days has not resolved sinus infection. It’s bacterial, right? Last night I also ate 2 blurbs of chopped garlic in honey.
These are the kinds of situations I think are actually important. How can you help a person, yourself, say, who has a sinus infection, with what they have at home?

How can people on low income get their mineral levels up to par?

Things like that.

Above all: How does “nutrition” affect the soul? Why did they find elevated manganese in the hair of 100% of serial killers tested?

Why did the rats Dr. Olson mentions in this video like each other again–enough to once again sleep in a single pile– when they got calcium?

 

Speculation That Elite Mass Arrests May Be Underway: Details, Anomalies, Broken Patterns

Posted on December 27, 2017

Thank you to Sal Gagliano, for this find.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJt8Q_5Nif0&app=desktop

A Beautiful Sight In Barcelona

Posted on November 11, 2017

Amazing https://t.co/nPNMirHCSn

— Julian Assange ⌛ (@JulianAssange) November 11, 2017

 

Sexual Liberation & Political Control: Libido Dominandi

Posted on November 11, 2017

 

New Q

Posted on November 10, 2017

New "Q" Video Update: #FollowTheWhiteRabbit https://t.co/GI8ZnEkiNp

— Tracybeanz (@tracybeanz) November 10, 2017

 

Cooler Minds Prevail: The Trump Kool-Aid That Doesn’t Work On Everybody

Posted on November 10, 2017

Best part of awesome summary essay. pic.twitter.com/HoNMAgDutm

— BP (@BadgerPundit) November 10, 2017

 

DC Metropolitan Police Dept. Sudden Reversal: “…No Investigation Involving Comet Ping Pong” (And No Explanation)

Posted on November 10, 2017

https://twitter.com/ImperatorTruth/status/929018593592922112

Citizen journalists persist.

[link above, to exchange between Titis Frost and DC Metropolitan Police]

Also, here below is a link to the images that started the quest for truth.

Who do you think the babies and children belong to?

What feeling do you get when you look at those images and read the hashtags and comments?

The feeling I get is the need to pray to Jesus Christ, and that’s what I do.

That’s the war, the only war: The Christ and The Anti-Christ.

The Christ is an idea (of good.) The Anti-Christ is a conviction, of domination, degradation, and evil.

Evil people believe they have the right to feast upon the innocent. USE everything.

Usury. [Source code of destruction.]

Leave everybody alone.

http://themillenniumreport.com/2016/12/pizzagate-comet-pizza-owner-james-alefantis-posted-hundreds-of-suspicious-instagram-pictures-like-these/

[Trigger warning]

If you wish, and feel prepared–look at them again. I am struck cold, dumfounded, when I review these images. Even my mind, to the last moment, struggles to find the outlet–why and how this is not evidence of Hell.

Understatement: I have been unable to work out how this could be “ok.” Babies and children, in the normal world, (if it exists anymore) are rarely photographed without their parents or family. Think about it.

Babies are rarely held by anybody outside of immediate family. I suddenly had a flashback. “That man in Riverside Park who wanted to take pictures of us, and Mom was so upset and we didn’t understand quite why she was so upset…”

I can see his face in front of me. Heavyset, dark, frightening eyes. A yellow checkered shirt, pulled right (this part, not sure it is a real memory.) But Mom took a picture of him.

Was that what happened? There was always so much going on that Mom was upset about that I did not understand at the time. Mom was always talking about things I was too young to understand, but I understood that my mother was deeply alarmed.

I am not sure I can even handle reporting on this. It fragments the psyche. It’s trauma.

If Kevin Spacey is being cut out of movies, why is Comet Pong Pong cleared of wrong doing?

 

Stephen Ericson wrote me, in an email:

“who is Werkinonmanightcheese?

who is mens_society who gives it the 666 sign?

Why is werkinonmanightcheese making baby sized coffins…’coffee tables’…who would want one?”

Indeed.

The image of the coffin. It’s frightening geometry. What does it all mean? What is the adoration of “death?” Their secret lover? What?

 

 

No response yet so I re forwarded it to their Media Relations office: pic.twitter.com/APKIR6haZV

— Titus Frost (@ImperatorTruth) November 10, 2017

 

Emails Purporting To Show “Pizzagate” Investigation Launched By DC Police Based On A Video

Posted on November 9, 2017

COMET PING PONG UNDER INVESTIGATION thank you @trebillion @ImperatorTruth @Cunningham623 @defango AND EVERYONE else who won't stop exposing the darkness! pic.twitter.com/85ekRl7w0u

— Bee ‍⚖️ (@TheHoneybee_) November 9, 2017

 

Comet Ping Pong Officially Under Investigation

Posted on November 9, 2017

“Pizza gate is officially under investigation by the DC police because Comet Ping Pong was stupid enough to put child porn and sell it on their own server.

–Titus Frost

Amazing clip. One of my favorite YouTube broadcasts ever.

His words are direct, and his passion is real and believable. I love his anger, also. It’s “appropriate,” to use a pod word.

He’s  doing the job 2,000 others refuse to do, including in “alternative” media. Bravo Titus Frost!

I’ve been asking my Shungite stones to clear out apologists for pedophilia from the energetic soul of this website.

With this, so be it.

The argument has been resolved–in favor of those who said Pizzagate was real.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=483&v=hjItGTMYArM

Interview With Hacker Who Brought Evidence Of Child Porn To DC Police: Explains What “Fake News” Shooter Incident Was Really All About

Posted on November 9, 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OgdK1Oa35A

Targeted Individuals, A Whistleblower Reveals All: The Struggle To Remain Human Is The Only Struggle, And It Must Be Won

Posted on November 9, 2017

“The program is going to be rolled out nationwide, and it will become the norm. Every man, woman and child in America will be under the influence of this technology…Hive mind, voice install, emotion manipulation, behavior modification. This is horrible stuff that’s being done to people. It’s specifically to make sure that people will pull the trigger when they need to and stuff like human decency and love and compassion and empathy and sympathy and caring for a fellow human being does not enter into the decision making process.”

“…specifically to take away their conscience…The most horrific technology ever conceived of by the mind of man.

“They were going to torture me, they were going to destroy all my relationships with friends and family. I was never going to be able to make a living again.”

“It came down to the victims. It came down to the targeted individuals all over the country who were crying out for help, curled up in a ball in a corner in their bedroom, in horrible physical pain and horrible emotional pain. Nobody will help them, everybody calls them crazy, there’s something wrong with them, friends and family have abandoned

them, their relationships with their significant others are ruined.

Some of the most brilliant men and women I have ever known in my life, as I got to know them, are now homeless, and they have no way to get out because the DESC is specifically making sure, going out of their way to make sure they can’t get jobs and they can’t find homes.”

“Up to 70-75% of targeted individuals are in fact women.”

 

 

PEDOGATE: Enquirer Probe Unearths Detailed Evidence Of Charlie Sheen And Pedophilia: Reports That He Sodomized Corey Haim At 13; LAPD Opens Investigation Into Hollywood Pedophilia Decades After Initial Reports

Posted on November 8, 2017

https://www.nationalenquirer.com/true-crime/charlie-sheen-corey-haim-rape-claims/

https://lawnewz.com/high-profile/lapd-investigating-corey-feldmans-claim-of-hollywood-pedophile-ring/

AN OPEN LETTER 2 MY FRIENDS IN HOLLYWOOD & BEYOND…

Read: https://t.co/PiQJtBvF6M

— Corey Feldman (@Corey_Feldman) November 8, 2017

 

Activating Our Dormant Minds By Way Of Questions: New Q, New Tracy Beanz

Posted on November 8, 2017

NEW VIDEO by Tracy Beanz, interpreting “Q.”

As my only commentary, I will say that your pilot over here is on the map, (as opposed to not) I know true north–many of the salient points light up in my mind as “yes, right. Yes right. Exactly.” Sometimes: “I’ve been saying that and people said I was crazy…” “Oh yes, there’s that piece…I remember wondering about that…”

I’m re-posting this Saudi/Obama post here because it fits and prepares the mind for questions posed in this video. These are not manipulative, lesser magic questions like mass media likes to pose, but actual questions with precise answers that are democratic in nature. (The asking and the answering.)

Tell me what questions I am permitted to ask and I will tell you if this is Love or Psy-Op.

Quickly: Examples of “lesser magic” questions in mass media that drive me up the wall, they sound like this:

“Should Parents Let Children Choose Their Own Clothes Even Earlier?”

“Will Anti-Vaxxers Destroy Mankind?”

“Is Anal Sex Being Taught Right In Public Schools?”

“Will Trump Be Impeached Before Thanksgiving?”

“Is Donald Trump Mentally Ill?”

“Is Incest Always Bad?”

 

Crude imitations; I could do better, but…you get the idea. Mind-control mass media “questions” have been bothering me for a long time. Honest, real media should answer specific questions–not pose them as vague guilt trips. Our job should be, pose questions/answer question/look for source who knows/rinse, wash repeat.

Who was Deep Throat?

That kind of thing.

These questions “love” us, because they are designed not to wash your mind with alien concepts, but rather, to liberate you from darkness by the lighting up of the relevant and right questions.

A real question wakes you up. A false question pushes you down.

Hansel and Gretel: Didn’t they follow breadcrumbs to get away from the witch’s house? I’ll never forget the trauma of that fairytale. It should be told very starkly: “Children, watch out for people who are very very “nice” to you. Consult your inner voice. Are you seen as food? Are you free or are you held in by some force you can feel but is denied? Don’t be polite anymore when you see an oven! Trust your instincts. Avoid all forms of seduction. Trust very few. No, even fewer. If it felt weird, it was weird. Get out, fast.”

(If I were re-issuing that fairy tale, as a publisher, I would make this the foreword.)

 

Snail Week At The Truth Barrier: A Poem

Posted on November 8, 2017

Snails = teachers of ballet, and silent buddhas of professorial, contented devotion to self-exile from life’s jungles of adversarial competition.

Snails = celebrity worthy of celebrity. stardom worthy of stardom. prestige worthy of prestige.

Queens and kings of peace…

beings in a world not worthy of them.

 

–John Powell

A Book By Its Cover: “Hacks” By Donna Brazile

Posted on November 7, 2017

It’s called Hacks.

How dare anybody guilt trip anybody for not voting for Hillary Clinton?

Donna Brazile was there.

Be the first to read "Hacks." You can "preorder now": https://t.co/zFQRottoGd. pic.twitter.com/mgJIY0jZyy

— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) July 12, 2017

 

It’s Snail Week At The Truth Barrier

Posted on November 7, 2017

A photographer interrupted a snail while he was chowing down on a blade of grass. His face is priceless pic.twitter.com/boJwELncNQ

— Land of cuteness (@landpsychology) November 7, 2017

 

Elites Shocked As Islamic Terror Sponsors In Saudi Arabia Placed Under House Arrest

Posted on November 7, 2017

 

“And I’ve got to tell you, for all the elites out in the world, the Party of Davos guys are sitting there today gobsmacked, absolutely shocked,” he said. “The largest financier in the Arab world, the Muslim world, is Prince Alwaleed. He’s got stakes in just about every high-tech company. He’s a huge partner of Rupert Murdoch. When he came to the United States back in the early nineties, he was actually a client of my firm as he got into Hollywood; he got into media. He owns a huge stake in Citicorp, he saved Citicorp from going bankrupt.”

“People are stunned today that he was put under house arrest, put under arrest yesterday in Saudi Arabia, in this situation of what they called corruption, money laundering, et cetera. People are thinking this is directly tied to the financing of the Muslim Brotherhood, this whole thing about cleaning up Saudi Arabia to take care of this. You’re going to see a lot of changes. This thing is far, far from over. You’re at the top of the first inning. You’re probably at the first batter,” Bannon said.

http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2017/11/06/bannon-middle-east-knife-edge-last-48-72-hours/

 

 

Who Is Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal And Why The Saudi Blindspot? Percy Sutton Revealed In 2008 That Recently Purged Saudi Prince Asked Him To Pull Strings To Get Obama Into Harvard: Who Got The Story Killed, And How?

Posted on November 6, 2017

Ben Smith, Editor Of Buzzfeed, that’s who.

“According to Sutton, al-Mansour had asked him to “please write a letter in support of [Obama] … a young man that has applied to Harvard.” Sutton had friends at Harvard and gladly did so.

Three months before the election it should have mattered that a respected black political figure had publicly announced that an outspoken anti-Semite like al-Mansour, backed by a Saudi billionaire, had been guiding Obama’s career, perhaps for the last twenty years, but the story died a quick and unnatural death.

The principle assassin was Ben Smith. On September 4, 2008 — a week after I reported this story in WND — Smith fired back in Politico. Sutton’s story, Smith reported, “seems off in at least one key detail.” The “detail” was that Obama, through spokesman Ben LaBolt, claimed not to know al-Mansour.

What Smith failed to report is that, unless forced to, no presidential candidate in his right mind would acknowledge the sponsorship of a man Smith described as a “Black Panther turned Muslim businessman.”

–Jack Cashill

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/01/time_for_a_look_back_at_buzzfeed_ben_smiths_biggest_fail.html#ixzz4xgVW31Qu

“The octogenarian Sutton calmly and lucidly explained that he had been “introduced to [Obama] by a friend.” The friend’s name was Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, and the introduction had taken place about 20 years prior.

Sutton described al-Mansour as “the principal adviser to one of the world’s richest men.” The billionaire in question was Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.

Given the game-changing nature of this revelation when it surfaced in late August 2008, the Obama camp and its allies in the media, particularly Politico and Media Matters, shifted into overdrive to kill the story. Through a series of denials, lies and slanders about Sutton’s mental health, they succeeded.”

–Jack Cashill

 

The Washington Post reports (failing to reference Jack Cashill’s reporting about the Obama/Harvard connection and the Percy Sutton interview in 2008:)

“Holdings in Twitter, Lyft, Euro Disney and Twentieth Century Fox; luxury hotels across the world; a tower under construction in Saudi Arabia that will soon be the world’s tallest building. Or his opulent palace, where Business Insider once reported the prince kept “a group of dancing, laughing, joking dwarfs” in his entourage, occasionally tossing them around as sport like human shot puts.

That last part isn’t in the official biography. And it would be a shame if all you knew about Alwaleed was his wealth, because the personality behind those billions of dollars sounds no less extraordinary.”

Avi Selk, Washington Post, article here.

Bad news for us: This guy owns us. We live at the mercy of the fake news brothel he funds. He is a major shareholder not only in Twitter, but in Apple, News Corp, and many other culture-controlling corporations. I guess this explains what I have naively called “the Saudi blindspot.”

He has done business with Stephen K. Bannon, even, and Trump has purchased a yacht from him. (Which, by itself, is not that worrying.)

The only person I can locate at press time who did not take his money was former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

And: Why did Rudy Giuliani reject bin Talal’s gift offer of $10 million to New York, after 9/11?

All answers here:

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/01/time_for_a_look_back_at_buzzfeed_ben_smiths_biggest_fail.html

 

http://www.wnd.com/2012/09/saudi-billionaire-did-help-obama-into-harvard/

So…he’s a progressive? A good guy? WaPo tells us, confusingly, that the “prince without borders,” Bin Talal’s politics are “hard to pin down,” and that he is both a “medieval monarch” and a modernist/feminist reformer, whose heart bleeds for the poor, and an unrepentant abuser of midgets.

“Not only did the prince hold occasional “midget-tossing” contests with these people, Business Insider wrote, but once invited his “jesters” to a business meeting, where he taught them the words “Boeing” and “Airbus” and had them decide which type of plane he should add to his personal fleet.

In the face of such bizarre accusations, Alwaleed has made great demonstrations of his concern for human rights — especially among the poor and women.”

Jack Cashill’s articles contain all the important undetonated landmines, and the history of how Ben Smith got the story killed–all  linked above, with video of Sutton, no longer viewable on YouTube, but easy to watch in the WND article. Lastly, his Twitter stakes and the complete list of names of the Saudi Royals “purged.” Prince Al_Waleed bin Talal, Obama’s lucky charm, is number one on the list.

Take it from here, all citizen reporters. Don’t let any reporter get isolated, cornered, and beaten up. (As happened to me.)

All truth is carried by all truth-seekers and finders. This story was “broken” by Jack Cashill, years ago, killed by Politico, Media Matters, Ben Smith, et al, who are mass murderers of truth and reality, and paid handsomely to “discredit” reporters who do honest work. Make it stop. Support small, independent journalists, and above all, protect the drive-by shootings that appear to kill “reputations,” for political propaganda gain. It’s gone far enough. Why weren’t we allowed to know who  bin Talal was, and what it meant to our entire political landscape and consciousness, after 9/11?

Answers linked above.

To become a Patreon for The Truth Barrier:

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3597112

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/saudi-prince-invests-300m-for-3-stake-in-twitter-2011-12-19

Who Were The Saudi Royals Purged This Weekend, And Why The Media Blackout?

 

Is This True? Versions Of Texas Church Massacre

Posted on November 6, 2017

An atheist attacked Christians in a gun free zone with illegally obtained weapons & was stopped by an armed NRA member #TexasChurchMassacre

— Mike Simpson, M.D. (@DrMikeSimpson) November 6, 2017

 

The Long Overdue Takedown Of Monster Predator Sigmund Freud “…A Man Whose ‘Treatment’ You Wouldn’t Wish On Your Worst Enemy’ “

Posted on November 6, 2017

“Over 650 pages, he builds up a portrait of Freud as the most vile, medically useless, misogynistic, snobbish, petulant, jealous, crazy, sex-obsessed creep you could ever hope not to look up at from a couch — and a man whose ‘treatment’ you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.”

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-5044817/Was-Freud-really-just-sex-mad-old-fraud.html#ixzz4xfOtjqRf

[Note, The Truth Barrier is on the record as detesting the predatory Freud and admiring his counterpoint, and intellectual superior: Alice Miller. May she rest in even more peace, now.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To become a Patreon for The Truth Barrier

click here:

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3597112

 

 

 

Who Were The Saudi Royals Purged This Weekend, And Why The Media Blackout?

Posted on November 6, 2017

Complete list of Saudi royals purged yesterday by House of Saud in charge. pic.twitter.com/7ubx2KKBmY

— M. Zuhdi Jasser (@DrZuhdiJasser) November 6, 2017

 

Tracy Beanz: A Thoughtful, Careful Analyst Of 9/11, Trump, Saudi Arabia And The Real Story

Posted on November 6, 2017

NEW VIDEO- https://t.co/wC8NXXAtwZ

— Tracybeanz (@tracybeanz) November 5, 2017

 

Trump, 28 Pages, Saudi Arabia, Connecting Dots With Tracy Beanz, Who Has Studied 9/11 Since 2001

Posted on November 6, 2017

 

 

TIME Magazine Religious Innovator Of The 21st Century Accused Of Numerous Sexual Assaults, Including Minors: Denies Charges

Posted on November 5, 2017

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/05/oxford-professor-accused-sexual-misconduct-swiss-minors/

 

https://pamelageller.com/2017/11/french-gvmt-knew-ramadan-rape-jihad.html/

https://pamelageller.com/2017/11/tariq-ramadan-pedophlia.html/

The Rise Of Christianophobia–The Last “Acceptable” Form Of Hate

Posted on November 5, 2017

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/01/29/they-should-be-eradicated-sociologists-reveal-shocking-results-of-christianophobia-research-and-a-cautionary-warning-for-conservative-bible-believers/

I remember when I “got it.” It was a scene in that movie about Harvey Milk, starring Sean Penn: “Milk.”

A straight Christian politician, and colleague of Milk comes into his campaign office and all the gay staff fall dead silent. He is nervous. He has come to invite Milk to his wedding. Milk–who is a class act– casts a glance at his horrified staffers, stands up, and says: “I’d love to come. I’ll be there.” (We are of course to understand that this man is actually in the closet, etc.)

In any case, the marrying Christian hetero man nods, relieved, (he is entirely the “loser,” the bad guy, the ugh, who- would-want-to- be that guy, in the film, whereas Milk is a perfect shining hero and martyr. And has all the charisma and love.)

When he has left the office, the staff unfreeze. They roll their eyes, hiss, cackle, and exhort Milk to explain his bizarre decision. “You’re going?”

As if he was entering a very filthy tank full of terrible untouchable creatures nobody would want to be associated with.

I always wondered if the film maker, Gus Van Zandt, who intended his film to display gay heroica, realized what he had done in that scene.

Did he understand that Harvey Milk’s staff were showing exactly the kind of “PHOBIA” that this whole predictable exercise in virtue signaling was meant to deride?

I was very eager to ask him but of course I don’t know the guy.

Let me tell you another story that defies Hollywood’s strict ideological narratives and moral codes. My father ran for Mayor of New York City, in 1977, on the Republican ticket, and actually did very well, due to his capacity to turn up in any neighborhood and speak any foreign language. I love him but he would have made a terrible Mayor, I think. He is not interested in anything administrative or dull. He likes to do things like place colored flags on all his cheeses and know their names in foreign languages. A hoot, a total character–but Mayor of New York? No.

(I was in Sweden, with my mother and sister, and literally was barely aware of this Mayor Of New York business. Before the internet…)

He ran against Ed Koch, who of course won, and who was deeply in the closet as a gay man. Nobody knew, nobody cared.

BUT: I met and interviewed Koch, many years later, for a story about post 9/11 New York, in Newsmax. He was very warm and nice, until I mentioned my father, at which point he turned to cold steel. Perfunctory quotes–done.

Usually people across the political spectrum, all the way over to and including Victor Navasky, all but hug my legs when they learn who my father is. People just love him. But not Ed Koch.

So I asked my father about it and here is what he told me. His campaign manager wanted to leak to the press about Koch’s homosexuality. (Bear in mind, this is in 1977.)

My father said no way. NO WAY. I’d rather lose than win like that. (I have no doubt whatsoever this is true.)

Koch nevertheless believed to the end of his life that when the story eventually did leak, my father was behind it. He would not believe the truth.

“But hang on a  minute,” I said to my father. “He won.”

“Yeah I know,” my father said. “He was a sore winner.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/01/29/they-should-be-eradicated-sociologists-reveal-shocking-results-of-christianophobia-research-and-a-cautionary-warning-for-conservative-bible-believers/

Watching Ourselves, Loving Being Small In A Big World Of Monsters Who Can’t See Us

Posted on November 5, 2017

I have mixed feelings about my addiction to the illusion that I can make heads, tails, or demon horns out of the endlessly traumatizing news cycle. I try, and I am heartened by the feedback that many of you feel kind of safe and comfortable here, even if we are not equipped to BREAK BIG STORIES IN REAL TIME. thump thump.

Associate Editor Jack Mackerel

I want to go home, go back, go somewhere.

I want to not be hooked into all this terrifying narrative, with which I also traumatize others, (you guys) in the sacred name of getting-to-the-bottom of-the-bottomless-abyss. Funnily enough, this never seems to happen.

I have a proper book-book to complete right now. I have to “un-hook.” I ask, warmly encourage, you all to keep looking, posting, even fighting, if need be. Tell me (us) what you know, suspect, find. My trolls love you too, they just don’t know it yet.

Women make good journalists in the sense that nobody takes us seriously anyway so what do we have to lose when we get beaten like gongs. It just has a kind of clarifying effect, in the end.

I just saw a headline that the latest shooter, in Texas, was an Antifa member. He looks quite indistinguishable from a KKK type. All these creeps start to look the same–just post-human. Those clammy, dead eyes. Jesus, what has been done to these people? Have they never picked blueberries in the woods? (In Sweden, my mother actually steered us toward a very rejected–by the Swedes I mean–cousin berry to the blueberry, an oblong, not perfectly round berry called an “odon.” She had us all–cats included–in the woods, filling buckets, certain we had struck gold. Nobody else was interested in them. They actually tasted kind of weird. But we made jam, juice…)

These are the things I prefer to think about, when my nerves start to shake–unravel. I do not (not anymore) have the nerves necessary to do “investigative journalism.”

I unhook the hooks, and admit a kind of defeat. I do not know. I can never know. I don’t know if that photo that person, that name, that narrative is entirely real, entirely fake, or some composite of the two.

So to heck with it all. What am I saying? I want my “life” back. I am only really on solid ground when I tell little stories that I know are true, because I saw and heard them with my own eyes and ears. Subjective perception.

True success, to me, is when you say you can tell what I am asserting vs. what I am thinking out loud about. Transparency. Thank you. (In this instance, thank you Scott Gordon. But thank you to each person who has ever expressed “getting” the elusive concept of this website that doesn’t behave much like a news site or like a conspiracy site.)

It is a trauma portal. Edited by somebody who has survived many rounds of trauma based mind control, since I was shorter than my desk. Because it happens in families, as it happens in society at large: Rage based reality shaping.

This is all I know: Those who hold forth narratives based on what they observe, as H.C. Andersen’s child did, are met with abuse, rage, and identity collapse. So: Any time you see that–anger, rage, attempts to make somebody feel like dirt–truth is trying to cross over.

Little furry duckling. Stand back and let him cross.

 

 

 

 

 

Strange Events At The Truth Barrier

Posted on November 5, 2017

I was composing a post about “Your News Wire” having posted an article claiming it knew about the contents of the sealed indictments that are being posted on Twitter. I suddenly (as I was composing it) got an email saying I had published it. I was not aware of having published it–this usually requires a few steps which I don’t recall taking.

Now I have pulled it, to try to figure out how that happened. Meanwhile,  I put out questions to two people, including James Brower, on Twitter, asking if they could confirm or deny it. Awaiting replies.

If there is a “bot” that is running the control panels here, I have every plan to fight back and give them a hard time.

For now, everybody can go read it for themselves.

Are you noticing that your phone is blinking? That your screen is jumping around? It’s always possible that we are “imagining” these things. One likes to think nobody would bother with a website this small.

Who knows?

 

How My Father Knew It Was True

Posted on November 5, 2017
Barry and Ulla Farber, circa 1963

Sometimes to calm my nerves, I tell little stories. I tell myself stories. Or rather, I remind myself of stories. Many of the stories in my head are from my father, who is a master story teller. He makes you have a feel for the story by painting a picture of the emotions of it, and the people in it. One such story just came into my head.

It was Friday, November 22, 1963. My mother had somehow reached my father at work, and told him she’d heard President Kennedy had been shot. He took the elevator from his office up to the main news floor, at  “the station.” The radio station where he was employed at the time. (Though he is my father, I actually don’t know which radio station he worked for in 1963, and I was not yet born.)

On last year’s anniversary of the JFK assassination, I said to my father: “For some reason, this year, I am focusing on it, as it must have been for all of you. Trying to imagine and picture it. It must have been so traumatic for you. I don’t know why I never thought of it the way but everything is always about the bullets and the theories…”

He said:  “Have I ever told you how I learned it was true?”

“No, I don’t think so.” (I say that even when he has told me, so I can hear a story one more time.)

“I took the elevator up to the main news floor. ” (As he was telling me this, I was transported to that elevator car, and can see my father frantically trapped in there, like a giraffe in a cage, waiting for the slow elevator to get to the right floor. When I “imagine” things, it’s always these kinds of details that get me. Was it silent? Was it packed? Were there elevator buttons that lit up? White light? Were there men in damp overcoats and fedora hats? Had they all stopped wearing fedora hats, by then, because JFK stopped wearing one? Were you in shock? Disbelief? There was no “fake news” then. No Twitter rumors. Just sober newscasts one would have a hard time disbelieving.

“The elevator doors opened,” he said. “There were two men carrying a woman, horizontal, who had fainted. As soon as I saw that, I knew it was true.”

My parents left shortly thereafter, took a train to Washington D.C., and got in a very ling line, to view the casket. They stood in that line all through the night, and in the morning, reached the casket, and paid their respects.

That is one of a small handful of stories I have and hold, from my parents, as a couple. Children of divorce collect these stories like sea-shells. The photo of my parents is its own kind of “fake news,” but I like to look at it, because it represents “before.” They look so happy.

We all have a JFK assassination in our memory bank, when something dark came in, and wrecked our innocence–our lives.

Why did it all have to be taken away? Who was the gunman? Can’t he be stopped?

 

 

 

 

 

Follow The Questions: Q’s Breadcrumbs Ask All Citizens To Pay Close Attention To Vast Web

Posted on November 5, 2017

It just occurred to me that alot of “alternative” media, including InfoWars, (to a lesser extend) Cernovich and all the other biggies, rely on a domination model rather than an inclusion model. They rely on “fame” journalism and swelling audiences.  They do great work, but narration has taken over cautious bread-crumb fact finding and dot-connecting. So it begins to wash over your consciousness, like a “show.”

This, below, on the other hand, feels like a new tradition to me: It lays down a question grid–and an inclusive one, at that. Most media lays down an “answer” grid, and asks you to surrender some part of yourself, essentially, to “believe.”

So: Here are the questions “Q” asks that we keep in mind as this week’s news events unfold.

 

Twitter Rumor Spreads That John Podesta Is Missing, Tony Podesta In Custody

Posted on November 5, 2017

First: Interesting video I reviewed, from 3 days ago. Second, update from yesterday. All help is needed from all people with an Internet connection to discern what might be “truth” at this moment. This video is mostly questions, but they amount to a perspective that I had not heard before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwFsTowoGFI

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwFsTowoGFII am reporting this AS a Twitter rumor, from yesterday. Not confirmed.

level.)https://twitter.com/LizCrokin/status/926885520281542656jj

https://twitter.com/SourcesClaimed/status/926907198239801344

All Eyes On Saudi Arabia/Child Trafficking In Wake Of “Corruption” Sweep Bust Of Saudi Princes

Posted on November 5, 2017

Note: How do I report on developing news, and how do I weigh information?  I am a one-person, unstaffed news portal relying on micro-donations, nowhere near capacity to do the kind of heavy first hand reporting that enables you to be plugged in to sources. The next best thing I can do is spend hours each day trying to at least figure out which portals and threads are asking the right questions, doing the digging. Hence, I am reporting second-hand, basically ushering TTB readers to certain places where I hope you will continue the research yourselves. We are all “the media.”

Shock developments awaiting confirmation include:

Saudi prince ousted earlier owns Mandalay Bay alongside Bill Gates. The Vegas shooting was part of this.

Saudi Prince ousted is the second largest share holder of twitter and owns a larger share than @Jack

The Saudi Princes have been protecting the cabal. They can’t any longer. The princes had to go first.

 

From VOAT Thread here:

“Everything PG, Vegas, 911, Cabal is connected to SA.

The Saudi Princes are huge donors to the CF et al and the CF has been using them for money laundering.

Trumps SA tweet was confirming that he’d trade Amaco on the NYSE, his part of the bargain for these Princes being ousted. He’s essentially saying he’ll protect the Saudi economy.

Trumps first visit overseas was to Saudi. He made a deal that these Princes would be outed, so he can bring down the Cabal in exchange for him protecting the Saudi economy.

The missile which hit Riyadh last night was a US one. Targeted EMP is being used to cut power to the princes compounds.

Saudi prince ousted earlier owns Mandalay Bay alongside Bill Gates. The Vegas shooting was part of this.

Saudi Prince ousted is the second largest share holder of twitter and owns a larger share than @Jack

The Saudi Princes have been protecting the cabal. They can’t any longer. The princes had to go first.

IMPORTANT – See my comments in the thread below for essential reading on the Saudi tweet from Trump earlier.

Q signed a post with a puzzle leading to the initials DJT (will find the link)

It appears that MegaAnon is Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Follow from this post, and into the next thread where the ‘feet ‘ photo shows feet on the WH Press Room carpet — http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/147998236#p148001412 — Appears that she’s posting as Sarah and Megs at the same time.

We have been chosen to support DJT and this historical time. WE ARE THE MEDIA NOW.

Princes First — Podesta and Clinton Cabal Next

Whatever you’ve got, please post it over there too, all the dots are being connected JUST NOW and they are calling for us PG Voaters to help as we know our subject.”

 

So What Happened Yesterday?

Posted on November 5, 2017

The great #Antifa uprising. #lol pic.twitter.com/qmBb8s6Xk9

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) November 5, 2017

 

Big Picture Snapshot, By Scott Gordon (Via Comments)

Posted on November 4, 2017

It got me thinking about the vested interests that the Rothschild-Soros-Clinton-Bush cartel are working on:

*Positioning anti-government (mainly peaceful anarchists and libertarians) as “violent” – effectively shunting actual righteous anger into a dead-end – a perfect recipe for preventing any real revolution (as if that is what we needed anyway) – and an excuse to annihilate citizen opposition to their hegemony over the common people

*Bigger government with more and more control measures implemented unopposed

*Fueling both extremes (racist alt-right vs. “alienated” fake alt-left) with fake events and a new army of “brownshirts” (Nazi-era paid agents, violents and actors for those rallies) – a perfect recipe for increased gun control and other police state measures

*Increased sales:
-gun sales (yes, these Rothschild-Soros-connected families manufacture and sell arms)
-sale of news and fake news (the mainstream media cartel)
-selling arms to city police forces
-it has been brilliantly pointed out that people under stress go shopping – they buy more things they don’t really need – distorting the economy – directly benefiting merchants in league with the Rothschild-Soros axis (MilesWMathis.com)

But probably chief among all reasons for their current panic operations:

*Distracting from the global pedophilia and child sex trafficking that has had them controlling politicians, governments and militaries across the globe – this is starting to unravel and has been the basis for their control and their long-running march into one-world-government globalism

The Surreal Vanishing Of Hollywood Whistleblowers On Twitter

Posted on November 4, 2017

All they’re doing is confirming the worst and making the truth more glaring.

The Gruesome Truth About Hollywood Elite Revealed pic.twitter.com/vZ8ahvO2qH

— infowars (@infowars) November 4, 2017

 

Comment Rules, Repeated

Posted on November 4, 2017

If you post a comment that is strictly mockery, with no “point” other than contempt, you may get your comment deleted. If you are calling yourself “Satan’s Tool” while you do it, your chances of getting deleted shoot up to 100%

I am doubling down on abuse, not disagreement.

Now: There were two people who suggested, caustically, that the NYT Antifa ad was an Alex Jones hoax. I proved it wasn’t and asked that those who partook in this distortion return and say: “Roger that.”

This is about correcting the record as we go.

One was David Crowe. I can’t recall the second. I trust you will eventually let us hear from you.

 

Nov. 4: It Begins

Posted on November 4, 2017

 

A Warning From Former BLM Member About Nov 4 And The Mind Control Neo-Bolshiviks: “This Is All A Big Set Up”

Posted on November 4, 2017

“For the people who still are believing that this movement, this black movement, even some of these white movements, are legit….man you have a lot of growing to do.”

“Alot of the black leaders are leading us straight to our demise…They’re playing us emotionally because they need all the help that they can get. They’re getting gays, they’re getting black people…anybody who doesn’t like Donald Trump. They’re basically trying to get you to fight for a war that is being started on American turf very very soon.”

“This is all a big set up.”

“The various black movements have been compromised and infiltrated. The BLM is not a black organization, it is being used to help those who want to start a civil war. Many black people are being set up to be slaughtered. We must put the race thing to the side, for now. The Democratic Party is using black people to fight whites for Antifa. Antifa is being paid for by Clinton, Soros, and Rothschilds. Black allegiance is the target. The whole plan is to take the guns away from people on the conservative side. November 4th is the day that Antifa has pledged to start the war. It is already here with the Las Vegas thing. That was a direct hit from the left. I want black people to understand that you are being used.

What is going on now is so much bigger than the issue of racial equality, it is about revolution against America. I am damn sure not going with Hillary and Soros. The people on the left are trying to get you to do their dirty work and start the civil war. White, Blacks and Mexicans, they are coming after you. You are going to get slaughtered if you listen to them. Hidden powers are controlling the narrative. Trying to get you to hate white people.”

–Chaziel Sunz

Note: As I have reported here in recent days, I attended the Oct 30 Antifa protest against journalist Mike Cernovich, at Colombia University.  There’s still a lot I have not had time to report. One thing that struck me to the point of shock was this: As they stood crowded into that lobby, chanting, then pausing, to allow speakers to come to the center, and take the mike, the white leaders (thin, shifty, menacing hooded types) they said, over and over: “Are there any brown or black people that would like to say anything? Are there any brown or black people that would like to say anything?” They made sure every speaker was “black or brown” but the leaders were white, and oozing violence.

Who talks like that? “Black or brown people?” It struck me as racist and condescending. And exactly in line with what Chaziel Sunz is saying here.

Well, whatever comes, it starts today. It’s November 4th.

What are the two sides? Rothschild Hate Based Revolutionary vs. Anti-violence Humanist. Trump is a trigger, a huge trigger. And what we are being subject to is mass trauma based mind control. Try to hold in to your thoughts. Don’t let your mind be hacked, to abandon your values, because you feel abused enough to go along with anything the Globalist Narcissist ghouls say.  As he says, “Do your own research.”

There are ways to oppose racism that do not play directly into the hands of a destructive, deadly NWO Bolshevik revolution that benefits the 1 % here on US soil, just because you may not like Donald Trump. He is not nearly as relevant, or as central, as he is made out to be.
You are under no obligation to become hateful, to assist banking elites in their final destruction of human liberty.

 

 

Trauma Alert: Soros Funded Hedge Fund Manager Was Human Trafficker, Beat, Electrocuted Women

Posted on November 3, 2017

Is hatred of women the new place where hate goes, when it can no longer go where it used to go before some forms of hate were rendered “unacceptable?”  What caused this? What is the devil’s border abyss between lust and abuse? For the record, I was never one to take the cultural mushrooming popularity of S&M lightly. Sadism is very dangerous and so is masochism. These are symptoms of desensitization, which breeds violence, which breeds destruction. Every day I am more and more pleased to be old fashioned and a prig. Look what can happen if you are too open to people’s expansive “sexuality:”

From New York Post:

‘Rubin gagged, tied up and viciously abused the women — even punching one in the head, the suit filed by civil lawyer John Balestriere said.

“I’m going to rape you like I rape my daughter,” Rubin barked during one of the alleged assaults.

In one session, he beat one of the women’s “breasts so badly that her right implant flipped,” the papers state.

The former Bear Stearns trader paid her $20,000 to repair the damage.

One plaintiff was tied up, gagged and shocked with a cattle prod in her groin before Rubin allegedly raped her, according to the filing.

Rubin — who collaborated with two female fixers and a lawyer — had the women sign non-disclosure agreements, the papers state.

The trio sought to “cover up Rubin’s sexual misconduct and criminal abuse of women and to serve as a cover for his wide-ranging human trafficking scheme,” wrote Balestriere.

A lawyer for one of the women blasted Rubin’s alleged conduct.

“While arrogance and self-import may convince certain men otherwise, neither money nor power gives any person the right to victimize a woman,” said Jeremy Saland.’

 

David Corn Of Mother Jones Accused Of Making Rape Jokes

Posted on November 3, 2017

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/02/david-corn-mother-jones-workplace-behavior-probe-244482

 

 

Why Do You Suddenly Think You Are A Closet Islamophobe? Because Saudi Money Has Been Soaking Western Universities For A Long Time And This Is What They Paid For

Posted on November 2, 2017

Follow the money behind all mass media guilt trips. Always:

 

http://www.meforum.org/6205/foreign-muslim-funding-western-universities

 

No, Pizzagate Was Not Debunked: Here Again In The Shocking Evidence Of What Came To Be Known As Pizzagate

Posted on November 2, 2017

DC PizzaGate: A Primer UPDATED 07/07/17

Race War In Full Throttle: You Are Being Brainwashed By Saudi Interests To Suddenly Feel Like A Racist No Matter What You Do

Posted on November 2, 2017

Follow the money.

Where is all this coming from? If you have accused friends you’ve known your whole life of being “racist” in the past year, you have been successfully conditioned by violent mind control to do the bidding of the post 9/11 Saudi-Globalist-Zionist puppet masters.

Apologize to your friends, take a shower, and take back your mind.

This is mass mind control and mass abuse. A Psy-op, just like “HIV-AIDS.”

 

Republican Donor Robert Mercer Divorces Milo And Breitbart: Quotes Dangers Of Groupthink And References “Pain And Divisiveness”

Posted on November 2, 2017

[Anybody whose work or ideas has ever been connected with a larger identifying “group,” has had the experience of mistaking said group for some kind of “family.” Only to discover, the hard way, that that is exactly what it is like. Here is Robert Mercer’s pained and somewhat mysterious quote:]

“A society founded on the basis of the individual freedom that flourishes under a limited federal government has no place for discrimination. Of the many mischaracterizations made of me by the press, the most repugnant to me have been the intimations that I am a white supremacist or a member of some other noxious group.

“Discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, creed, or anything of that sort is abhorrent to me. But more than that, it is ignorant.

“The press has also intimated that my politics marches in lockstep with Steve Bannon’s. I have great respect for Mr. Bannon, and from time to time I do discuss politics with him. However, I make my own decisions with respect to whom I support politically. Those decisions do not always align with Mr. Bannon’s.

“Without individuals thinking for themselves, society as a whole will struggle to distinguish the signal of truth from the correlated noise of conformity. I supported Milo Yiannopoulos in the hope and expectation that his expression of views contrary to the social mainstream and his spotlighting of the hypocrisy of those who would close down free speech in the name of political correctness would promote the type of open debate and freedom of thought that is being throttled on many American college campuses today. But in my opinion, actions of and statements by Mr. Yiannopoulos have caused pain and divisiveness undermining the open and productive discourse that I had hoped to facilitate. I was mistaken to have supported him, and for several weeks have been in the process of severing all ties with him.”

http://www.businessinsider.com/robert-mercer-leaving-rentech-breitbart-news-2017-11

 

 

Video Documentation Verifying Antifa Ad In New York Times

Posted on November 2, 2017

I have just seen the comments asking if this is an Alex Jones ruse, a rabbit hole, or “another Pizzagate.”

At a time when pedophiles in Hollywood and all through society are being exposed and (in the cases of the less powerful, wealthy ones) arrested, I am astounded to see “Pizzagate” still referred to as a fake distraction. I am astounded also, that anybody thinks Alex Jones would risk losing all credibility, by doctoring an Antifa ad that did not appear in the New York Times.

Here below, InfoWars reporter Kit Daniels walks into a supermarket, walks over to the newspaper section, and opens the New York Times to reveal the ad.

I would ask each person who has questioned whether this is real, to please check back, and say “Roger that. It’s real. It is proven. Sometimes my politics affects my capacity to have a good feel for what is credible, believable, provable, and what is likely fake.”

No harm done, but it would be reassuring to me if those messages came in, so we are all “on the same page” about when we have proven a thing and when we have not. Please watch the entire video. Thank you!

Salon.com Debunked: Pedo Defenders Caught Lying About Antifa NYT Ad

 

Should People Counter-Protest The Ultra-Violent Antifa On Nov 4 In Major US Cities?

Posted on November 2, 2017

 

The Ungraspable-Ness Of Antifa: When Righteousness Obliterates Logic And Language

Posted on November 2, 2017

 

Mike Cernovich Talk At Columbia University: “Why Is Alternative Media Rising? Because We Tell Stories That Nobody Wants To Tell”

Posted on November 2, 2017

https://youtu.be/-oE0N4Ln5Lc

Warning: What Might Happen Nov 4? Will The Power Grid Go Down? Saudi Private Military Companies Involved

Posted on November 2, 2017

Breaking Intel: Saudi Arabia Connection To Vegas, More Attacks Could Be Coming

 

WARNING: What Might Happen On Nov 4? Will The Power Grid Go Down? Part 1

Posted on November 2, 2017

http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2017/10/25/strong-evidence-trail-points-to-a-massive-grid-down-event-on-november-4th/

The New York Times Antifa Ad Was Against The Law: Is This To Prepare Us For The Overthrow Of The United States Government On Nov 4?

Posted on November 1, 2017

 

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2385

 

“Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or

Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or

Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof—

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.

If two or more persons conspire to commit any offense named in this section, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.

As used in this section, the terms “organizes” and “organize”, with respect to any society, group, or assembly of persons, include the recruiting of new members, the forming of new units, and the regrouping or expansion of existing clubs, classes, and other units of such society, group, or assembly of persons.”

(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 808; July 24, 1956, ch. 678, § 2, 70 Stat. 623; Pub. L. 87–486, June 19, 1962, 76 Stat. 103; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(N), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2148.)

 

The New Guardians Of The Old Order: Antifa Protests New Journalism At Columbia University

Posted on November 1, 2017

By “new journalism” I mean the non-deep state affiliated, working class, non Ivy League, non-pod Mike Cernovich, who was showing slides about facts vs propaganda inside and taking questions. That’s the new “literally Hitler!”

[I was not able to hear the talk at the time, but watched it later online, and will post it.]

You know…I have never done many disgusting, popular things. One such thing is chant. I have never chanted. Not once in my life. It seems to me like an exercise in degradation– the collapse and reversal of sovereign mind space. I would not even chant along to something I heartily agree with.

Once I submit to a chant, I give up my voice, by lending it to the injected command–the content of the chant.

“It is clear that the importunity of these devils was as monstrous as their numbers. Whenever Richly, a Cisterian abbot, closed his eyes he saw them around him as thick as dust. There were more precise estimates of their numbers, two of which are known to me, but they differ widely: one is 44,635,569; the other is 11 billion.”

Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti

 

Scene From Antifa Protest Of Cernovich Talk At CU, Oct 30

Posted on November 1, 2017

I have many more videos. I often struggle with whether to narrate, or let material speak for itself. I can give you a bit of context: The mob was weary of its chants inside the lobby, scoping the exits, looking to attack (if possible physically) the speaker inside (Mike Cernovich) and/or anybody who had come to hear his talk on the rise of the new alternative media. Suddenly, with tremendous speed and velocity, they all took off running for a “kill–” somebody they were calling a “troll.” There was a lot of commotion, and as I walked toward there the commotion was coming from, the man in question was on the other side of a locked gate, and the squalid little deep state “radicals” were bullying him from the safety of their numbers, their “many” to his “one.” I wanted to ask: “Do you guys make any distinction between an American flag and “fascism?” But this aren’t “people,” who will answer questions of fellow humans, so I thought better of it, and just went back to observing.

 

Antifa Buys Full Page Ad In NYT Announcing Intent For Nov. 4 Revolution

Posted on November 1, 2017

I was wondering how much such an ad costs in 2017, so looked it up. According to Quora, about $150,000 for a pull page ad in the NYT.

The Soros sponsored Anitfa is by no means “ragtag.” I attended one of their protests the other night, against Mike Cernovich, who gave a talk at Columbia University about the rise if new media. I stayed and observed–watched and listened, for about 4 hours, until I was frozen and hungry and my phone had powered down and they were still baying for Cernovich’s blood outside the building, with the cops standing politely by as they screamed that they are the same as the KKK.

It was so depressing and dispiriting, I have no words. These people are pure hate. Their nature is perfectly cold. For this reason, it is almost impossible even to write about them or describe them. But I will try, if you want me to.

I have never been quite so happy to be reunited with my cats, Jack and Lewis, as I was that night, when I came home, horrified and cold. I saw straight up fascism: Violence against any and all who do not conform to the ideological doctrine they have set out. I mean physical violence. And verbal. And spiritual.

This mentality is the “nightmare.”

ANTIFA Buys Full Page AD In NYT Calling For Overthrow Of Trump November 4th pic.twitter.com/c5HHABRGls

— infowars (@infowars) November 1, 2017

 

Who’s Crazy Now? JFK Files Shatter America’s Delusions About “Conspiracy Theorists” (But Will They Ever Be Healed?)

Posted on November 1, 2017

Imagine how many people were called crazy. Imagine how entire industries of making people seem crazy flourished.Rethink everything, America. pic.twitter.com/GHBsONUEXi

— Celia Farber (@CeliaFarber) November 1, 2017

 

New Report From AHRP Reveals Truth About The Wakefield Affair: “The Case Was Crafted As A Relentless Assault.”

Posted on November 1, 2017
Carmel and Andrew Wakefield, GMC Hearings, London

“The case against Dr. Wakefield and his two co-defendants, was contrived and filed by Brian Deer, on assignment for Murdoch’s Sunday Times. Deer had been explicitly commissioned to get “something big [on] MMR”.6 As a Murdoch-commissioned reporter, Deer gained access to numerous influential sources. Doors to confidential information that Deer would not otherwise have obtained – including confidential medical records – were opened. Deer was essentially providing the ammunition, while garnering material for his “story”. The case was crafted as a relentless assault, aimed at destroying Dr. Wakefield’s professional career and reputation, for which Deer won kudos, and advanced his own career.

An MLI newsletter (2004) confirmed that Deer was assisted by MLI “in strictest confidence”.
[45]

Among MLI’s services to its pharma clients was crafting complaints to initiate GMC investigations.
The GMC hearings were calculated to: (1) end the line of research into the relationship between the MMR and autism; (2) prevent parents from filing legal action; and (3) to destroy the professional standing of the senior doctors in order to achieve 1 and 2. [GMC proceedings are noted for being high pressured, prejudicial, & extremely stressful. Defendants in GMC proceedings are presumed “guilty unless proven innocent.” Reports have documented a startling number of doctors who have committed suicide during GMC proceedings. [See Appendix 6]”

 

Read the in depth report by the outstanding Vera Sharav here.

Please consider making a donation to AHRP, and remember that these brave, small boats have been shelled by Pharma affiliates for decades. Money is protection, and the capacity to keep researching, keep the flame going.

 

CF

 

Little Detail

Posted on October 30, 2017

#NewsWars – Breaking Live: President Kennedy Assassinated From The Front According To Surgeon General & FBI https://t.co/6gasWgyyMd

— NewsWars (@TheNewsWars) October 29, 2017

 

“Nexus Of Science Bullying” “Science Blogs” To Suddenly Shut Down, Catone Baby Cause Of Death Revealed

Posted on October 30, 2017

[Harvey Bialy, this one is for you. Leave word.]

 

“It was a source of terrible lies, and viciousness, and meanness, and cruelty to struggling families. It laid the trap for new families to be brought in…and for their children to be hurt, and even killed.”

–Ginger Taylor

[HIV dissidents, at the inception of “ScienceBlogs” fought many brutal, bloody battles, we too lost people at the hands of this truly sociopathic organ of deep state lies and murder. Here they are for example,  celebrating the death of a grieving mother,

More links here and here.]

What are they afraid of? Why are they going off-line? What should be preserved before it’s erased?  These murderous toads do not readily retreat. There is a reason. They know they are defeated and they are covering their tracks. I can’t personally “go to” the site because when they killed my friend, and almost killed me, I was energetically unable to ever look at it again. A friend coined the term “Luciferian misogyny.” They represent hatred of women, mothers, children–above all.

I agree with Ginger Taylor’s Christian influence, and while I am in one sense rejoicing because, as this also demonstrates, the deep state is everywhere in thrashing-wounded-animal-death-rattle-free-fall, I feel no hate. I do feel relief. Sorrow, for the countless victims of this murderous “blog” that really, genuinely, killed so many people, most tragically, children.

As I write this, it is 4:10 pm EST. I am yet in my robe, have not had breakfast, have been transfixed and agog over the shock contents of the Mueller indictment and the clear, imminent path to the Podesta indictments.

I believe the Deep State is dying before our very eyes. But strap yourselves in, this is going to be extremely turbulent.

I also believe there is a God, there is good, there is evil, and evil is losing, miserably, right now. At last.

 

ScienceBlogs is shutting down on Monday

ScienceBlogs is shutting down on MondayProverbs 24:17-20Do not rejoice when your enemy falls,And do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles;Lest the Lord see it, and it displease Him,And He turn away His wrath from him.Do not fret because of evildoers,Nor be envious of the wicked;For there will be no prospect for the evil man;The lamp of the wicked will be put out.Chris Mooney, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Lori Kozlowski, Rosie Mestel, Thomas Maugh, David Gorski, Virginia Hughes, Science Journalists, The Dying of the LA Times and an Angry Autism Momhttp://adventuresinautism.blogspot.com/2009/09/chris-mooney-sheril-kirshenbaum-lori.html

Posted by Ginger Taylor on Sunday, October 29, 2017

America Wakes To Confusion And Shock As Manafort, Gates Indicted By Mueller On 12 Criminal Counts Including: “Unregistered Agents Of Government Of Ukraine,” Lobbying, Laundering, Tax Fraud And FARA Scandal Reaches To Podesta Group

Posted on October 30, 2017

I may be wrong but this is my best assessment after reading the documents all morning: This is way bigger deeper, more obscene and deadly than mere “money laundering,” and I am astonished that anybody with a brain would try to spin the crux point as the nexus between Trump and Manafort. READ IT.

2006-2014, Manafort and Gates ran a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign “directed by the government of Ukraine.”

The European Centre for A Modern Ukraine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine what enough money can buy you. This group not only “lobbied multiple members of Congress and their staffs about Ukraine sanctions” but meddled in something cryptically called “the propriety of Yanukovych’s imprisoning his presidential rival, Yulia Tymoshenko…” [Italics mine.]  Now we know why. The MSM is spinning this, rather insanely, as a Trump debacle, though it seems to be a bullet that barely grazes him, but is aimed at the heart of the criminal Podesta gang.

Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign in August of 2016.

 

Here are the burning questions: Which companies are company A and company B in the indictment? And why is nobody interested in Podesta Inc’s ties to The European Centre For A Modern Ukraine?

 

Company A or B?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FARA documentation here:

 

https://www.fara.gov/docs/5926-Amendment-20170412-80.pdf

And what about all this (JPG below) strangeness between The European Centre For A Modern Ukraine and the US deep state media? Is it incorrect to say there was collusion, it was with the Government of Ukraine, it was (among other things) about THEIR election, while these guys profited, took tens of millions from Ukraine, lobbied members of congress, media, put Yanukovych’s rival in prison, laundered all the profits, and Podesta Inc. was at the center of it WITH Manafort, Gates, and God knows who else?

That’s just for starters.

Tell me if I am wrong, and if so, how I am wrong. Left media is spinning this (meekly) as a Trump scandal, right wing media as a Nothing Burger–I see it as neither, but am getting disoriented, because I don’t see my interpretations reflected elsewhere.

Seems these are big crimes and Podesta is next to be indicted. I welcome corrections in my thinking, but only with documentation and proof. Speculation is only serving to further cloud the already impossibly clouded mess right now. We should take time and not jump to conclusions that fit our political stripes.

 

 

 

Mystery Illness, “Resignation Syndrome,” Reported By BBC

Posted on October 30, 2017

I heard about this when I was in Sweden, last year. It’s not a new story: “Apatiska barn,” or “Apathetic children,” now called “Resignation Syndrome.” I believe personally that the extremely powerful WiFi networks in Sweden play a role, as do all the cultural rules and prohibitions that in so many ways turn immigrants into inert parcels, treated as something not quite human. There is actually one camp in Sweden, in this debate, that argues that the kids are faking it. I doubt that.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-41748485

Things Fall Down Together: Kevin Spacey Reported To Have Attempted Sex With 14 Year Old Boy

Posted on October 30, 2017

And you will be instructed, conscious modern person, on social media. that this “does not give you permission to be homophobic.

To I would hope you would say: F@^k right off. They don’t get to control this demolition, and this moment is about chasing the PC prison guards back under the rocks they slithered from. “Homophobia” has had its reign and rule for decades, and anybody who would interrupt an investigation into the breaking, lurid, horrid truth about Hollywood pedophilia to whip and spank you into an obedient response is, as they say, “part of the problem.” This is going to be messy, is going to break and shatter across all political, social, and cultural lines. It comes down to the predator class and the preyed upon class. Those who assaulted and those who were assaulted. Those who were protected and those who had to repress their stories for decades because they were an inconvenience to the predator class and its sycophantic media enablers.

Never thought I would admire journalism at Buzzfeed.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/anthony-rapp-kevin-spacey-made-sexual-advance-when-i-was-14?utm_term=.vb49XjMz0#.qsPdQwRZr

Last week I was saying: Listen to women. Now I’m saying: Listen to victims of sexual assault. Men have an even harder time find their voice than women do.

We all have to support one another, and become part of the human chain of opposition.

God this makes me angry.

DEEP STATE IN PANIC: Trump Releases All JFK Files

Posted on October 29, 2017

Trump Confirms “All JFK Files Are Released” After Latest Clash With Spy Agencies

 

Get Unstuck And Release Misery Instantly: BioDynamic Gamma Breathing

Posted on October 29, 2017

I consider the most important work I do to be this: A) Agreeing by karmic soul contract to experience deep spectrum trauma, B) to “confess” it (live in and with it, openly) C) Fail, fail, and fail again, D) continue to search for answers, try everything on myself until E) something works so well it stuns me, and F) I spread the word!

Stephanie Dietz and Nancy Hopkins host a show that has become a favorite of mine, called “Shungite Radio Show.”  [If you type “Shungite” into the search bar, three previous article will come up. I have no financial connection to any form of Shungite or sellers of it, but if you buy it, I want you to get the real thing, so consider going to: www.cosmicreality.net.] These two women, I consider pilots of the highest caliber. I’m no longer as keen on “healers” as I am on pilots.

Women perceive cloud formations that have not even happened yet, in a 360 degree way that takes into account past, present, future, body, mind, soul and above all: Energetic literacy.  Women understand the invisible, impactful. Because you can’t see it or prove it, it’s a hard road. It’s better to be a man, in many ways. People believe you.

But women are very important pilots at this moment.

I think its safe to say: We are going through a wild storm right now  connected to long repressed, dark secrets emerging–from dark to light, via pain and fear. Maybe many of us are also going through that on the “individual” level, (though there is no such thing as an “individual.”)

Three people in my life gave me two tools, and today they became “aha” breakthroughs. One was the importance of supplementing properly with magnesium (which I will return to) and the other was breathing.

Not just “deep breathing,” but rather, a remarkable way to breathe in a certain sequence that activates all parts of the brain.

If you are suffering from free-floating anxiety, spinning mind, unable to focus, I strongly recommend you listen to this entire podcast. At around the one hour mark, Jodi Neering takes us through the exercise, breath by breath. Many of us will be resistant to breathing properly, and that is a sign we are among those who needs this the most.

Shungite (by far the most powerful mineral/stone I have ever encountered) opened up pathways to healing that, as I knew going in, are not always easy, but are always necessary.

Let me know if you tried it, and what the effect was, on the comments section. I want this website to contribute to “truth” but not to contribute to “trauma.” As I unlock the mysteries of trauma and the brain, I will become better able to integrate the healing secrets, and share what I find.

 

 

JFK Autopsy Photo Forgery

Posted on October 27, 2017

 

America Begins To Wake Very Long Up A Bad Dream We Were Never Allowed To Know About: JFK Files

Posted on October 27, 2017

The One Paragraph You Need to Read From The JFK Assassination Files Changes Everything https://t.co/lZ0HJsrUo6#JFKFiles pic.twitter.com/w4Ed9ruJx8

— Ian56 (@Ian56789) October 27, 2017

 

DOJ Shocker: YES IT’S TRUE–IRS Targeted Tea Party Groups, Now Admits It Was “Wrong.”

Posted on October 27, 2017

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/357298-doj-settles-tea-party-groups-lawsuits-over-irs-scrutiny

 

 

Pence Accounces U.S. Decision To Bypass Genocide Enabling United Nations And Support Locals Fighting The Extinction Of Christians In Iraq

Posted on October 27, 2017

http://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2017/october/pence-us-persecuted-christians-usaid-un.html

 

 

Breaking News: Catalan Has Declared Independence From Spain

Posted on October 27, 2017

 

 

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/catalonia-independence-latest-spain-direct-rule-catalan-parliament-president-a8023221.html

 

Homage To Catalonia

Posted on October 27, 2017

Barring a storming of the Parliament, Catalan independence will be declared in a few minutes.

— Julian Assange ⌛ (@JulianAssange) October 27, 2017

 


 

Newsweek: Obama Clinton At Center Of 2010 Nuclear Deal For Which FBI Held “Substantial Evidence Of Racketeering”

Posted on October 26, 2017

“The Obama administration and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have risen to the center of controversy over a 2010 nuclear deal that handed Russia control of 20 percent of the U.S.’s uranium supply. The Uranium One deal has been referred to as a Russian nuclear bribery scheme and similar names since government documents surfaced last week showing the FBI had substantial evidence of racketeering by Russian officials before the Obama administration approved the deal.”

–Newsweek

 

Article here.

 

Any and all who continue past this point in history to mock or attempt to degrade people who have resisted media driven Russia-Trump hysteria are 100% discredited, face down in the mud. The best of them will admit defeat. The second best will keep silent. The worst will persist in their distortions, thus declaring themselves mentally unfit for public discourse.

 

CF

 

Mark Steyn Compares Exploding Uranium One And Fusion GPS Scandal To Agatha Christie Thriller: “Everybody Was Colluding With Russian Except Trump!”

Posted on October 26, 2017

 

Every American Must Know The Facts In The First 20 Minutes Of This Broadcast Or You Forfeit All Rights To Political Commentary

Posted on October 26, 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73YgfazZmCA

Swedish Star Journalist Who Called Assange “Criminal” Accused Of Drugging And Sexually Assaulting At Least 12 Young Women

Posted on October 25, 2017

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-24/swedish-journalist-who-called-assange-criminal-accused-sexually-assaulting-girls-you

#Virtanengate

 

 

Harassed And Isolated, Corey Feldman Pleads For Help To Impart His Dark Knowledge Of Hollywood Pedophilia Safely

Posted on October 25, 2017

“I’ve been insulted and degraded in ways that were unimaginable to me. All because they feared what I know as the truth.”

“I am using this to draw a line in the sand.”

–Corey Feldman*

Note: Mr. Feldman famously said: “The biggest problem in Hollywood was, is, and always will be pedophilia.”

 

An American Commuter Moment, 2017

Posted on October 25, 2017

Literally, an #Antifa Clown on the Chicago train. (LISTEN) What a sad #Soros pawn. #Nov4ItBegins will fail. #MAGA will continue!! #infowars pic.twitter.com/E0eKImZupT

— Tiller Wills (@TillerWills1111) October 22, 2017

 

Turning Tide: MD Declares Colluding Pediatricians Have Blood On Their Hands For Every Child Killed By Vaccines

Posted on October 23, 2017

“The blood of every vaccine injured or killed child is on the hands of every pediatrician that parroted lies like “vaccines do not cause autism” and “the science is settled.”

The science isn’t settled, it’s corrupt.

The vaccine industry will soon face the backlash as doctors, scientists, and parents across America become aware of your crimes, rise up to oppose your lies, and hold you accountable for the vaccine injury holocaust you’ve caused.

The fraudulent deceit is coming to and end.”

–James C. Meehan, Jr. MD

 

http://vaccineimpact.com/2017/medical-doctor-blood-of-every-vaccine-injured-or-killed-child-on-hands-of-murder-by-vaccine-pediatricians/

 

Director Of “An Open Secret” Details Hollywood And Media Campaign To Block Doc About Pedophilia–Releases Film For Free, Tells Pedophiles To Expect War

Posted on October 22, 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=Rop23aBiBjQ

America’s Buried Wound: Trump Orders JFK Files Opened

Posted on October 21, 2017

Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 21, 2017

 

Interview With The Parents Of Nicholas Catone

Posted on October 20, 2017

This is the first video I have ever posted without watching it in its entirety. I have followed the raw, heartbreaking posts of the Catone family on Facebook, since the sudden death of their son, Nicholas, almost two. When they describe the shattering moment, (“Nicholas is sleeping a bit late..?”)  the details so vivid and frozen in amber, I traveled there and felt it too, so many thousands of layers of intensity less, of course, but even that hurt so much that I turned from it. It’s not enough to say: “I can’t imagine.” We can all imagine. This is a catastrophe. A catastrophe. It’s happening every day. They are over-injecting EVERY American child and risking their lives from sudden death, sometimes up to two weeks or more after the chemical attack. The body fights so hard, harder than we can ever know, to compensate, balance, find a way, stay alive. In the case of this strong little boy, his body fought for 17 days before the fight was lost.

Nicholas’ parents have asked–in reply to the question, “what can we do?”–that everybody spread the word, spread the links, to Nicholas’ story, his parents courageous account of what killed him. They don’t want this to happen to anybody else.

Ask yourself: Why has no mainstream media outlet covered the story of the death of Nicholas Catone? Not one.
It is spreading like wildfire across social media and alternative media.

 

May God bless and protect the Catone family, as they move forward, shattered, and unwavering.

 

Jon Rappoport: The All A Or All B Propaganda Trick

Posted on October 20, 2017

The mind game designed to produce losers

Sacrificial Virgins: Part II–Pain And Suffering

Posted on October 20, 2017

 

Hate Culture At The New York Times

Posted on October 19, 2017

DON'T MISS: #AmericanPravda NYT Part IV: @nytimes IT contractor reveals that nobody at the "paper of record" likes @realdonaldtrump pic.twitter.com/j5kOPTrpof

— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) October 19, 2017

 

About Comments: Guidelines

Posted on October 19, 2017
Our invisible frog mascot

Many people have written to me saying that they are unable compost comments. I have no web master or other kind of assistance, so I do my best with the software. There must be some bug in the system–nobody should have any problem posting a comment; The problems people are experiencing are not consistent with the settings. I finally (now) have removed even the one requirement that commenters identify themselves with an email address.

I welcome all comments. People have written asking me to please censor those commenters who are consistently negative, and/or insulting, bringing down the mood and spirit of the site. I have been reminded that it is my site and I should not hesitate to maintain order. Any time I have tried to in any way keep the negative/harassive comments under control, the harassers leap forth and accuse me of censorship. Even when they are in the middle of attacking me and/or others, they still claim they are being censored. Now I have changed the settings to no restrictions, so we can expect more attacks.

If you are consistently angry/offended/affronted/incredulous over what I post here, I would ask that you ask yourself why you come here and read material that only upsets you, since you have a fundamental problems with the site and the editor. (me.) And anybody who does not hate the site and the editor.

You are here because I created this site as a place for ideas and interpretations of what may or may not be happening in our world. A post is not an end point, but a starting point, for thought and dialogue.

If you were invited to a dinner parry at my home, and started attacking me and my guests, presumably you would experience regret, and expect to be shown the door.

This site is a voluntary event, in both directions. Therefore, I ask that all comments that are critical, avoid insults, sweeping character assassinations, and energetic attacks on people’s soul or character. If you wish to resolve an old conflict with me, I make myself available privately, through an email exchange. I have said before: I don’t pick fights, but if somebody else starts them, I am human and I sometimes get defensive and angry. I am not a robot.

Any comments that strike me as carrying a bullying energy, will be deleted. Any comments that are factually corrective, no matter how strongly worded, but contain no bullying energy or character assassination, or laments about how stupid I or other are, will remain.

 

If you have tried recently to comment and not succeeded, please try again, with the new settings. And thank you for letting me know about glitches in the system that I did not design.

As soon as I am able to afford it, I hope to do a comprehensive overhaul of the site, and clear up and and all annoying glitches, especially with the comments software.

 

Thank you.

 

CF

BLACK MIRROR BOMBSHELL: Confused About Uranium One Scandal? Charles Grassley’s Oct 12 Letter Is A Good Place To Start

Posted on October 19, 2017


“Notably, in the same month as the Clinton speech, Uranium One and Rosatom notified CFIUS of the Russian government’s intent to acquire twenty percent of the United States’ uranium assets. The next month, in July 2010, Renaissance Bank reportedly assigned Uranium One a “buy” rating, a move that would principally benefit its Russian investors.19

The donations raise concerns about potential conflicts of interest for Secretary Clinton and the Obama administration. The fact that Rosatom subsidiaries in the United States were under criminal investigation as a result of a U.S. intelligence operation apparently around the time CFIUS approved the Uranium One/Rosatom transaction raises questions about whether that information factored into CFIUS’ decision to approve the transaction.”

 

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2017-10-12%20CEG%20to%20OSTP%20(Uranium%20One%20Follow%20up).pdf

THE ABNORMAL FIRES IN SONOMA: Trees Burning From Within, Structures Disappearing, And More: Theory Of Military Grade EMF Accelerants Presented

Posted on October 14, 2017

 

Clip Emerges Of Barbara Walters Scolding Corey Feldman For Damaging Hollywood’s Brand By Exposing Active Pedophiles

Posted on October 12, 2017

[Note: Feldman has always been clear that Michael Jackson was not a pedophile, never did anything to him.]

 

 

http://www.dailywire.com/news/22222/flashback-video-barbara-walters-scolds-corey-chase-stephens

 

Shungite Transformations: What They Said

Posted on October 12, 2017

“Have been using these stones for only a few days and all I can tell you is that Something Good is Happening. I have been feeling down lately with a disease that has been difficult to deal with. I am actually feeling much better and I wanted to give you a ‘testimonial’ that they work! I wear this around my neck 24/7 and I put them in my water and my cat’s water as well. Yesterday, they were dancing all around my lawn like it was the best day of their lives and today I have been feeling the same way. From my heart to yours, Nancy!”

***
“wow is right Mr Benton! I should also mention I have been able to cancel FIVE (that’s right 5 !!!) unique doctors appointments and am now going to slowly try to eliminate some of my meds on my own. I really think the Shungite has saved me so much money already in medical bills….. I will continue to post here and keep you updated to my progress. this is yet another day I am feeling like a spring chicken again.. nothing is hurting or aching and am mentally clear……………this is amazing!”

***

“Shungite had been linked to a multitude of healings. Old dog Josie had been doing so bad we thought she had only days left. I took a shungite pendant and put it on her collar. By the next day she had improved so significantly I actually forgot to give her medication. In the following three weeks she continued to get stronger. Instead of a dog who mainly slept and did not want to eat, I now have a dog who eats three times a day and spends most of the day dozing between being awake and taking short walks. The only change in what I was doing was the shungite. That was on March 5, 2014.

***

I admit this is very limited examples of what I have seen shungite do. Mostly it is a feeling that this mineral is just magical. I believe shungite takes negative energy and changes it into a positive energy while enhancing positive energy. It works to balance the human or animal energy fields that results in healing. Illness and aging are simply energy fields out of balance. Shungite works to bring back balance.

And since writing the above all I have seen is Gaia’s Gift of Shungite continually demonstrating rather mystical powers. Please, give yourself a change to experience Shungite. It is now May 13 and old dog Josie is better than she was six months before having the Shungite experience. And the friend diagnosed with lung cancer had the diagnose changed after wearing a Shungite pendant for a couple of weeks. Because they could not explain what had happened and did not want to admit to a misdiagnosis, the doctors claimed it was a 1-100,000 chance that the thing they thought was cancer was not. Was it chance or Shungite?”

N.L. Hopkins

***

“CAUTIONARY NOTE: One of the things brought on by Shungite is getting distance between people who are not good for you. The tell tale sign is someone is attacking you and you do not react emotionally. It is more of WTF moment. It is just a temporary distance. You need the space to grow. Once you get to a point of complete empowerment, those who were negative influences will be drawn back to you for healing.”

N.L. Hopkins

“I received my Shungite a couple of months ago….. and I have to say I was a total skeptic that it would do me any good what so ever.
My mind was mush, from all the drugs I was taking to keep my body working.
I have Rheumatoid Arthritis, Fibromyalgia, Crohns Disease, Thyroid Disease, COPD and a host of several other health problems…..that were all keeping me from living life…….
.. after about a month… I (and my hubby) noticed I was thinking clearer … I was not so spaced out, and could actually hold a nice long conversation. The true test was when hubby let me balance our checkbook for the first time in several years .. and it was a success! ….. as time passed I continued to drink my shungite water and wear my pendants daily….
Not kidding you ~ one day I just woke up feeling so good, I decided I would tried to take a walk, … just a short one, didnt want to over do and hurt like hell the following day. The next day, the same thing, walked a wee bit farther than the day before.. and over the last few weeks I have finally walked myself back up to an entire mile. You dont know how good this feels to move like this again! I have alot of weight to drop from sitting so much and so many steroids and walking will help me do it quickly!!! Before I broke down and got “sick” I walked 3 miles daily without fail.
I FIRMLY in my heart believe if not for the Shungite, my brain would still be in a fog .. and I would not be having the clarity or energy I have …. I HAVE DONE NOTHING different than purchasing the Shungite and using it !! please please believe me when I say to TAKE THE CHANCE and make that purchase! I was at the end of my ropes and so desperate,
~ seriously ready to even off myself even ~
I will never be without my pendants … and I will continue to keep moving and walking… and never give up trying to get back to my normal life !!! THANK YOU NANCY, THANK YOU for the quick & courteous delivery and providing me with a stone that is so magical, so unbelievably unique… that I can hardly believe it myself !!!!!!”

***

http://www.cosmicreality.net/shungite-customer-comments/customer-experiences#comments

 

My quiet awe about the energy transforming effects of shungite only grows, with each passing day. I’m way more stable, less distracted, less armored, less exhausted.  In fact, I’m downright energized, to the point of feeling like I was returned to my body, after about 10 years of being in energetic exile.

We are under Ahrimanic energy field attack like never before; Shungite is the secret weapon, to restore harmony, repel bad energy, cut EMF fields, resolve countless ailments, dispel hatred, and repair broken love.

Within 24 hours of wearing my shungite pendant, my persistent, annoying eye allergies vanished, (about 2 weeks ago) and have not returned, except for the one time I took the pendant off, overnight.

The allergies were only getting worse, no matter what I ate, or didn’t, and despite countless supplements, which I have now (on the gentle advice of two very wise friends) stopped taking altogether–for now.

My energy is shifting noticeably. I can fulfill tasks, without “splitting.” I have kept my desk clean, and am sometimes waking up in the early morning to re-organize drawers. (This qualifies almost as para-normal.)

The plants are growing beautifully, and the whole apartment feels peaceful.

My father actually came into the room where I was talking to my son on the phone, within 15 minutes of having his shungite in his pocket, and he said: “I feel noticeably better! Is that possible?” His wife Sara cleared a chronic stomach problem by the next morning, and called me, amazed.

It seems to make tap water taste like spring water, no chlorine smell. (The cats have shungite in their water bowl as well.)

Lewis and shungite

I notice also, that I am less defensive, less armored. I can think about my flaws, sins, shortcomings, and accept myself without feeling such a sense of metallic dread as I used to. I can also think about all the very painful things that have happened, and feel the embedded shards loosening, dissolving. Forgiveness (of self and others) is no longer just language, but something I can finally experience in my own energetic field.

 

I don’t think the word miracle is too big a word.

This is a trusted source of shungite in the US (originally I ordered it straight from Karelia) and I think you will be interested to read the many testimonials, and treasure trove of shungite information, here:
http://www.cosmicreality.net/shungite-customer-comments/customer-experiences#comments

 

P.S: Brother Strawberry and John Powell, email me your mailing addresses and I will send you shungite. I’d like to see what might happen.

Previous posts about Shungite:

 

Karelia (and I) Get The Last Laugh, As Earth’s Only Reserve Of An Extra-Terrestial Carbon Mineral That Restores Life And Blocks EMFs

 

The Black Lion: What Is Shungite, And How Can It Help Humanity?

 

Is Hollywood Imploding? Video Surfaces Of Ben Affleck Mocking A Disabled Person While Groping TV Host

Posted on October 11, 2017

At 4:06, Affleck mocks people with cerebral palsy, and uses the word “retarded.”

 

Project Veritas Launches Expose Series On New York Times: Audience Strategy Editor Claims To Be Comey’s Godson, Appears Unstable

Posted on October 10, 2017

 

Eugenics: The Vanished Violence We Still Deny

Posted on October 9, 2017

Nobelpristagare George Bernard Shaw: "there are an extraordinary number of people who I want to kill" https://t.co/blmAvT4U3g #svpol

— Pål Bergström (@palbergstrom) October 9, 2017

 

The Black Lion: What Is Shungite, And How Can It Help Humanity?

Posted on October 7, 2017

Some of you may have noticed a long, breathless and (even by my standards) tangential article that appeared here about a week ago, about a carbon mineral called “Shungite” that had made me hysterical with excitement. I woke up in the middle of the night and my voice that always talks told me it was “clinically insane” and I had better take it down.

So I took it down. I am going to ask a friend to edit it for me (he is an editor) until it sounds sane.

If I am right, and if the other Shungite enthusiasts are right, then this mystery mineral can heal broken, perturbed energy fields, and reverse all forms of degradation to life. I would not advocate something that I have not tested myself. I took my Shungite pendant off once in the last week, and it resulted immediately in chaos to my body in the form of a profound allergy attack. Once I put it back on, the allergy cleared again, along with my energy, mood, and concentration.

I listened to this broadcast tonight–and decided to start Shungite Week at The Truth Barrier with this fascinating interview with Walt Silva, who calls himself an “energy explorer.”

The article I took down contains a story about how I have been obsessed with the region of Karelia–the only place real Shungite exists–for about 16 years. But that can all wait.

Why and how Shungite has these properties that seem “magical” will be explained more in future posts.

Enjoy.

 

 

 

EU’s Silence On Spain Violence: Assange Tweets Crushing Video That Ought To Make EU Apologists Cringe

Posted on October 6, 2017

How Spanish police treat women: Suffocate them — and 'grab them by the p**sy'. #Catalonia pic.twitter.com/8OMZRqf3gG

— Julian Assange ⌛ (@JulianAssange) October 6, 2017

 

America Holds Its Breath In The Calm Before The Storm

Posted on October 6, 2017

 

“What storm, Mr. President?”

“You’ll find out.”

http://www.thedailysheeple.com/is-a-serious-event-about-to-take-place-president-trump-warns-its-the-calm-before-the-storm_102017

 

Women Come Forward To Expose VICE/Broadly “Feminism” Journalist Of Rape And Battery

Posted on October 6, 2017

Is it arrogant to say “I told you so.”

[I’m almost ready to re-name this whole website I Told You So.]

I am on record warning women about “feminist” men, in media especially.

I hope I am also on record saying VICE is like First Class Rail for demonic entities and sociopathy.

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/10/male-feminist-writer-broadly-facing-multiple-rape-allegations-potential-jail-time/

Heart Of Darkness: Glee Actor Pleads Guilty To Possession Of Child Porn

Posted on October 6, 2017

You who claimed we did not HAVE a pedophilia pandemic, or that because it was wrongly named “Pizzagate” instead of “Pedo-gate,” you could dismiss the problem and mock the alarmists–I do hope you were sincerely misguided, as opposed to possessed.

I politely ask anybody possessed by Satan to stop reading The Truth Barrier.

Zero tolerance here for apologists for pedophilia cults.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/glee-actor-mark-salling-pleads-guilty-to-child-pornography-charges_us_59d53a71e4b0cde45872a7da

 

Reddit: Paddock Was Undercover FBI Agent In Gun Running Entrapment Scheme Gone Bad

Posted on October 4, 2017

Discussion and synopsis below. Thank you to Kristen Marie for bringing this to my attention. It has more “ring of truth” certainly than the idea that Paddock “snapped.”

If this is true, Paddock did not kill anybody. ISIS did, and are at large.

 

https://i.redd.it/z7ma82sfxopz.png

Receipts Show Media And Las Vegas Cops Lying: Paddock Checked In Days Earlier Than Reported And Had Another Guest In The Room

Posted on October 4, 2017

Laura Loomer is on the ground, doing (almost extinct, but making a comeback) shoe-leather reporting in Las Vegas. Government and media lies unraveling.

This is definitely a cover up, of epic proportions.

If you want to follow the story, developing by the minutes, I suggest you tune in to InfoWars.com, and Laura Loomer on Twitter.

ANOTHER GUEST IN ROOM? https://t.co/9XhfhGhSds

— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) October 4, 2017

 

What Is Terror? Beauty? Silence? Art?

Posted on October 3, 2017

On the importance of being exposed…

That’s the whole bloody thing, isn’t it? Everything that really matters, everything that really works out there—as a writer, as an artist, as an interlocutor—everything you do is about whether or not you actually are going to be exposed. If you choose not to be, if you choose to be defended, if you choose not to go there, if you choose not to risk it, then that’s your choice and that’s fine.

 

–-Edmund de Waal

Psychotronic Weapons Science: Are We Ourselves?

Posted on October 3, 2017

“Certain kinds of weak electromagnetic signals work exactly like drugs.”

“…You can induce heart attacks, at a distance.”

Antony C. Sutton

 

Las Vegas Massacre: Hidden Facts, Some Of The Lies Slowed Down

Posted on October 2, 2017

I think Paul Joseph Watson is a gifted fact-finder, but his degree of loathing, for the liars on the Globalist, PC left, undermines his impact a bit.

I always wish he was about 70% less livid, so these videos could be 90% more impactful. Because they are always incredibly eye-opening.

He’s an excellent Angry-Young-Man journalist and I say that with respect for the lost role of anger, in journalism.

Pretending to not have emotions about what is going on is reprehensible J-school posture.

He’s really good. But I want to give him some L-Theanine.

 

 

The Many Shimmering Colors Of Hunter S. Thompson

Posted on October 2, 2017

I look at HST’s writings and marvel at many of it qualities, but above all, how his motifs and counter motifs moved symphonically, at high speed, and totally against expectation. As far as I can tell he wasn’t even using the metrics of Anglican languages. The embedded rhythms and simultaneous varying time signatures remind me, if anything, of West African music.

I got a chance to tell Mr. Thompson, via letter correspondence and telephone, that I thought he was the most original American writer of the past century.

Here’s something he wrote about gun control. Except notice how far afield from mere “gun control” it moves, and how fast. The man was never boring–always hilarious, always the voice of the writer alone in his  mind–unable to replicate the mass feelings, phrases, conclusions, or platitudes of anybody around him. Hunter was clearly on the “left,” but among his many contradictions: He was an open gun enthusiast and frequently dressed in the American Flag and not much else.

“…the membership hears nothing but bells when the NRA is “attacked.”

I love him for his refusal to trod out easy, chewed, pious positions. Healthy incivism against government, media and “counterculture,” alike.  A writer should never become a billboard for contemporary political fashions.

His word for himself was “freak.” What might he write, today, were he alive? Would have loathed Trump. But would have helped us see under many surfaces, penetrate many “ostensibles.”

In my interactions with him he was a perfect  gentleman.

pic.twitter.com/e1BWLBxBAN

— Hunter S. Thompson (@GonzoVice) October 2, 2017

 

According To Numerous News Sources, ISIS Has Claimed Responsibility For Las Vegas Mass Shooting

Posted on October 2, 2017

ISIS Claims Responsibility For Mass Shooting/Suspect Converted Months Before!

 

8 Month Old Baby Died 13 Hours After Nurses Bullied Mother To Comply With Multiple Vaccines At Once: An Open Letter To Rachel Maddow

Posted on October 1, 2017

30 September 2017

From: Mark Harris
To: Rachel Maddow

Comment by Mark Harris:

Someone should go undercover with a recording device and hidden camera to catch this sort of abominable behavior by medical personnel on tape; no one believed cops were beating up suspects or shooting them in cold blood with such frequency either until such behavior was recorded on video for all to see.

Heartbreaking Accounts of Vaccine Injury

 

Christina Moore took her happy, healthy 8 month old son Trent to his well baby visit at Seymour Medical Center in Seymour, TN. He passed away in the night, less than 13 hours after his mother was bullied at the doctors office to give him 5 vaccines, even though she only felt comfortable with one at a time.
Trent dead after vaccines
Christina wrote “I argued with the nurse practitioner for 30-45 minutes. They would not split the shots up! They bullied me, told me I was retarded, told me he needed all the shots that day, told me they could not split the shots up, told me it absolutely would not hurt him! He was injected with 4 needles and given the Rotavirus oral vaccine. He died less than 13 hours later. I’m upset that I argued with them and they bullied me into something that I did not want in the first place and the same thing that I told them might happen, did happen!”

She was not even given an apology when she went to pick up his medical records and saw the person who did this. A claim was filed with the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program but since the parents couldn’t find an expert witness to prove Trent died from the vaccines, they settled their case for $20,000 before it went to trial. They had one of the best lawyers and still almost lost any chance at receiving any compensation.

More than 2 out of 3 claims are denied and parents have to prove the vaccines harmed their child. That’s what his life was worth to those responsible. Most never see a penny. Trent’s younger sister he never got to meet is vaccine free. Trent is greatly loved and missed. They said he died of unknown reasons. Trent Michael Blackburn 4/29/12-12/21/12

— Mark Harris

Shock Videos Emerge From Fascist Crackdown In Spain Against Peaceful Voters On Catalan Referendum

Posted on October 1, 2017

Straight up fascism. Whose quiet? Who’s not?

Who followed it since the beginning and Tweeted until we opened our eyes.

Julian Assange.

Thank you Mr. Assange, for keeping us aware of  the real wars on freedom, not the fake ones.

#CatalanReferendum

https://twitter.com/KalvinChapman/status/914523191644745730

What They Said: Laura Riding

Posted on October 1, 2017

 

 

“There are many people who are not entirely themselves because as children they were not given time to think about themselves. And because they don’t know everything about themselves they can’t know everything about everything. But no one likes to admit that she doesn’t know everything about everything. And so these people try to make up for not knowing everything about everything by doing things.

[…]

People who for some reason find it impossible to think about themselves, and so really be themselves, try to make up for not thinking with doing. They try to pretend that doing is thinking.”

 

Laura Riding

 

Four Unposted Letters To Catherine

 

Three Articles On Hugh Hefner, One For, Two Against: “He Said He’d Like To See Her Copulate With A Dog”

Posted on October 1, 2017

Bob Guccione Jr. just sent me his essay on his father’s rival, High Hefner, tonight. Wonderfully written, starting with the perfect opening lines:

“My father hated Hugh Hefner. Which I always thought was irrational and, by the end of his life, just force of habit, something he no longer felt with any real emotion, a default position for which the source code had long been lost.”

Read the full essay here:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/my-father-and-hugh-hefner-the-greatest-rivalry-in-porn

These two pieces on Hefner are darker, angrier–As much as I love Bob’s writing, humor, and sense of the absurd, I lean toward agreeing with these perspectives:

“And his appreciation of male-female difference was rotten, too — the leering predatory sort of appreciation, the Cosby-Clinton-Trump sort, the sort that nicknames quaaludes “thigh openers” and expects the girls to laugh, the sort that prefers breast implants to female intellect and rents the charms of youth to escape the realities of age.

No doubt what Hefner offered America somebody else would have offered in his place, and the changes he helped hasten would have come rushing in without him.

But in every way that mattered he made those changes worse, our culture coarser and crueler and more sterile than liberalism or feminism or freedom of speech required. And in every way that mattered his life story proved that we were wrong to listen to him, because at the end of the long slide lay only a degraded, priapic senility, or the desperate gaiety of Prince Prospero’s court with the Red Death at the door.
Now that death has taken him, we should examine our own sins. Liberals should ask why their crusade for freedom and equality found itself with such a captain, and what his legacy says about their cause. Conservatives should ask how their crusade for faith and family and community ended up so Hefnerian itself — with a conservative news network that seems to have been run on Playboy Mansion principles and a conservative party that just elected a playboy as our president.”

–Ross Douthat

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/30/opinion/hugh-hefner.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

Susan Brownmiller’s essay is also biting, incisive, and elemental:

“Women aren’t bunnies, they’re not rabbits, they’re human beings,” I added. Then, addressing Hugh Hefner directly, I said, “The day you come out here with a cottontail attached to your rear end …”

Mr. Hefner called Sally and me “girls.” I told him that, as a 35 year old, I believed I qualified as a woman.”

–Susan Brownmiller

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/opinion/sunday/hugh-hefner.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article

 

These two essays harmonize with some of the issues Stephen Ericson tackled, from the male perspective.

–Celia Farber

Karelia (And I) Get The Last Laugh, As Earth’s Only Reserve Of An Extra-Terrestial Carbon Mineral That Restores Life And Blocks EMFs

Posted on September 30, 2017

We fall in love with places we’ve never been to, and we don’t know why.

My father, for example, loves Albania.

He has even been “adopted” by a large Albanian clan in New York, who over the years, have invited him to to their festivities, and delighted in his mastery of their language, their culture, and especially, their famous ironclad, unbreakable tribal vow called the “besa.”

Due to the “besa” that went down from the Albanian warlords during WW2, the “backward” country became the only country in Europe that had more Jews after WW2 than before–despite being a Nazi ally. Ten times more, in fact.

“Hitler got nothing out of the Albanians,” my father remarked. Once when we talked about why he loves this place so much, he said: “Maybe I was Skanderbeg’s horse in a past life, I don’t know.”

 

Besa during World War II

Besa also means taking care of those in need and being hospitable. During World War II, Albanians saved over 2000 Jews from Nazi persecution.[2] Rather than hiding the Jews in attics or the woods, Albanians gave them clothes, gave them Albanian names, and treated them as part of the family. The concept of besa is incorporated into their culture. Before World War II only about 200 Albanians were Jewish. At the end of the war about 2000 Jews were living in Albania. An award-winning feature film documentary BESA: The Promise (2012) is about American photographer Norman H. Gershman’s quest to tell the story of Besa and the Albanians who saved Jews during World War II. This story was featured on CBS News Sunday Morning on November 8, 2009 for the 71st anniversary of Kristallnacht, which occurred on November 9, 1938.”

–Wikipedia

Everybody who knows me, knows I have harbored an irrational obsession with Karelia–the embattled, and finally ambiguously deserted “mellanland” between Finland and Russia.  Since I first happened upon a CD by The Karelian Folk Music Ensemble, some 17 years ago–I played it until my son begged me to turn it off. “Mom! No more Karelians!”

To this day I listen to this Best Of Kantele, when I need to transport myself to a higher ground. I always used “Karelia” as part of any chosen screen name, thinking it would protect me. Yes, seriously. I always knew there was some lost magic in that land.

 

Over the years, as my life conditions deteriorated, my Karelian Dream only grew. I kept saying I needed to get myself to Karelia–somehow. I immersed myself in their music, their tragic history, and always pestered my father about what status Karelia had after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. My understanding was the Finland didn’t want it back and Russia didn’t want it, period. My old Swedish-Finnish friend Urban Sarback flat out said to me, one of our nights on the island of Runmaro: “Celia stop talking about Karelia. You don’t want to go there.”

“What’s the matter with you, of course I want go there?”

“It’s nothing but old wooden churches. Potatoes. There’s nothing to see.”

This was at the beginning of my old friend’s loss of innocence; Now we don’t speak anymore, but that story is too sad to tell.

I still talk to him in my mind sometimes.

“You were wrong about HIV. And you were wrong about Karelia, Urban,” I said to him today, in my mind. “There was a reason my internal energetic systems were insisting I focus on this place. There was a reason.”

Today the reason came clear. Let me back into it.

My father and stepmother called me, in the early evening, to find out how I was feeling. In recent days, for the first time in my 10 year battle with Mystery Fatigue, I was unable to dress, and had to cancel a commitment to moderate a panel discussion of Miranda Bailey’s documentary film about Andrew Wakefield–yesterday.  I got a report on a hair mineral test that my adrenal exhaustion is so bad, my worst enemies have cause to celebrate. My adrenal and mineral energy, the report said, (and I don’t want my enemies to get too excited here–there’s a point, coming)…is at an an “end of life” all time low. I got “sick” at the exact moment in time, about 10 years ago, that my building installed a cell tower on our roof, right above my head, as I write this. I live right under it.
(I have committed to a program of Nutritional Balancing, which I will chronicle as my energy permits, here, but let me get back to the winding story.)

 

I suddenly saw, in a new light, my shundite pendant, on a bathroom shelf, and put it on. I started looking up videos about it, and as my excitement grew, the pendant became warm to the touch. I got more and more excited. Even enthralled. I watched about 10 videos, read various reports, and one scientific paper. I ordered some additional pieces, from a seller called Karelian Heritage, where my pendant came from.

“You won’t believe this,” I said to my father, and stepmother,” but I have experienced an energetic healing in a matter of hours, from wearing a pendant made from a rare kind of carbon that originated in outer space, only found in Karelia. It’s called shungite.”

“I believe it,” my father said.  I kept talking. They listened.

“It’s got some kind of molecular structure called Fullerenes. Some kind of vacuum bubble that reverses decay, radiation, and takes poisons out of water. They awarded a Nobel prize for this discovery, and they tried to invalidate the findings but I read a paper that proved it’s true. It came from some kind of ancient meteor collision two billion years ago. It’s not a material that can be found on earth. And the only ones who have it are the Karelians. On the Russian side.”

Soon we were worrying out loud that somebody would stage a fake war, invade Karelia, and take over the shungite mine. (Don’t get any ideas, bad people.)

“Let’s try to stay positive,” my stepmother, Sara, said.

“Celia, has somebody yet… made a fortune on this?” my father asked, as though we were on his radio show.

“I don’t think so, not yet,” I said. “But it is referred to as “the medicine of the 20th century,” and I would expect it to be worth more than gold, silver, and diamonds, as poisoning in all forms becomes our biggest problem.”

“Wait–I’m getting exhausted again. I have to calm down.”

We’re the kind of people who would call up other people until we found somebody who might want to make a fortune on this. We would just hope they remembered who idea it was. I don’t want anybody to do anything to Karelia! They deserve peace and prosperity after all they have gone through.

“This is not New Age nonsense,” I said. “It’s backed by chemistry, and science.”

 

“Fullerenes are powerful anti-oxidants, and their presence in this stone seems to be quite unique.

It has been noted that this stone has strong healing qualities, and that Shungite will help to neutralize any organism within your body that is harmful to you.

This is an amazing claim, but this black stone has been in use for a very long time in Russia where they have been documenting these qualities.

Since this stone was discovered in Russia in the 1700’s, they have been recording amazing results from its use. They use shungite chips of various sizes to purify water.

Shungite is a powerful stone to shield you from the electromagnetic radiation given off by electrical equipment, including computers, mobile phones, microwaves and televisions.”

http://www.healing-crystals-for-you.com/shungite.html

It makes people’s chakras stop spinning backwards, like mine no doubt are, and reverses them.

“What is the unique property that distinguishes shungite from other protection stones?” wrote Regina Martino. “I have carried out detailed studies using bioenergetic tests and have personally tested more than 200 stones and crystals that have an influenceon the chakras. Among those tested, I made comparative studies of about 20 stones, including shungite, that were able to resonate withthe first chakra.In comparing tests on shungite with tests carried out on other stones of this group, we noticed right away that for stones of the sameweight, shungite is the stone that achieves the largest expansion of the vital field, the greatest concentration, and, in a striking way, a significantexpansion of the first chakra. It is quite possible that the presence of fullerenes would explain all of shungite qualities:

1. Helping the energetic body correct the influence of left-torsion fields
2. Neutralizing the impact of electromagnetic radiation
3. Opening access to life energy (first chakra)
4. Concentrating the vital field5. Not taking on negative charges”

We should all order some pieces of “elite” shungite from reputable (Karelian) sellers, and place it in pitchers of water, and around our electronic devices.

I have been asking for years what the New Age people mean when they say you can’t change your life until you “heal your frequency.”

How do you do that?” I asked. And asked. No answers ever came.

I believe this is the answer. And maybe just maybe my old friend and mentor/editor Bob Guccione Jr. will send me to Karelia on a shungite safari, for his newly launched travel magazine, Wonderlust. I would just go lie down in the shungite mine and go to sleep.

Skeptic Troll: You will be tempted to say I don’t know what I am talking about and they didn’t find fullerenes ha ha ha, what a fraud, but guess, what, they did so.

 

 

Baxter Dmitry Reports That Hugh Hefner Was A Pedophile, And Was Murdered

Posted on September 30, 2017

This article (that you are reading) is strictly reporting that this article has appeared.

I am well aware that there have been times when YourNewsWire.com has published less that rock solid reportage. My sense of that landscape is that as their reporters go, Baxter Dmitri is the high end.

 

“Hugh Hefner was found dead in suspicious circumstances on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles, just days before he was set to be arrested on child sex charges, according to a Los Angeles police source.

Hefner had been dealing with police on a daily basis for the past three weeks, trying to work out a plea deal, after an investigation, launched in 2009 after a lawsuit was filed against Hefner, suddenly “went hot.”

What Is Wrong With The Burns/Novick PBS Documentary “The Vietnam War?”

Posted on September 30, 2017

[An email sent from Cat McGuire, to a friend of hers on the Left, re-printed via the Facebook page of Mark Crispin Miller:]

 

 

Hi, F.
I know you are familiar with the criticisms of Burns’ Vietnam documentary film. I am not sure which ones you read, but I think this review by FAIR in particular does a very good job of explaining why Burns’ series is flawed. (You know who FAIR is, right?)
On the one hand, I agree with you that just seeing the images alone is a stark wake-up call for clueless young people who have no idea about Vietnam. On the other hand, as the FAIR review astutely deconstructs, Burns’ narrative neuters accountability, thereby shielding the psychopaths who willingly, calculatingly perpetrated the massive Southeast Asian horror.
Without full-disclosure analysis accompanying all that imagery, by and large the public — unlike you — does not have a context for interpreting the historical truths underlying those images. History thereby becomes co-opted by the dominant culture’s version of reality. One might say how bad is that?, at least they’re getting a clue as to what happened — as opposed to zero idea.
What’s so bad about it is that the exact same dumbing-down lies and fake news is what is being peddled to us once again with the current 9/11 Wars. History is repeating itself, and documentaries like Burns’ are a continual programming of the public to accept the official narratives being drilled into us, subliminally or otherwise.
Add to that, it’s not necessarily what is said that’s so bad, it’s almost always what is not said. The omissions is where truth lies. Through glib gloss-overs of the role of the power elites (yep, his funders), popular-culture filmmakers like Burns, under the guise of an inclusive “lets hear all sides” (as if all the sides have equally weighted power), serve to lull people from doing the deeper critical analysis of teasing out the depths and nuances of history — which is the exact lack of perception the powers that be require for today’s 9/11 Wars.
Or as Orwell so aptly wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
On a somewhat tangential note, it frustrates, angers, and pains me how FAIR can deliver such an astute analysis of a past war, yet perpetuate so thoroughly the same myopia for current wars. To wit, the mainstream-left’s inability to acknowledge the historical roots of today’s wars — the Deep State’s responsibility for committing 9/11 — keeps America in as thorough a state of denial of the truth as Burns’ propaganda film does.
FAIR is ultimately mirroring the same failures of omission as the dominant power structure it exposes and excoriates. Pot calling the kettle black.
As long as the Left – just like Ken Burns – continues to eat from similar Big Funder troughs that demand deflection of the uber criminals, they will never truly grasp why they are no less enabling the 9/11 Wars as the liberal establishment enabled Vietnam back in the 60s.
Or as Upton Sinclair wrote: “It is difficult to make a man understand something when his job depends upon not understanding it.”

–Cat McGuire

 

*Note from Truth Barrier editor: Despite the  tone of moral purity and clarity here, Ms. McGuire continually erases the female half of the documentary team, proving that male supremacy on the left is intact and unquestioned.

I count six mentions of the name “Burns” not one, “Novick.” I understand Lynn Novice traveled to Vietnam, where as Ken Burns did not. Unconfirmed.

 

InfoWars Brings Back RFK Jr. Thimerosal Expose Disappeared By Salon Editors After Talbot: Devastating Simpsonwood Transcripts Come Back To Haunt Houses Of Fake News

Posted on September 29, 2017

“I was actually stunned by what I saw,” Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants — in one case, within hours of birth — the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.
Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life and death, the findings were frightening. “You can play with this all you want,” Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the group. The results “are statistically significant.” Dr. Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting’s first day, was even more alarmed. “My gut feeling?” he said. “Forgive this personal comment — I do not want my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know better what is going on.”
But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry’s bottom line. “We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits,” said Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Delaware. “This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country.” Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the CDC, expressed relief that “given the sensitivity of the information, we have been able to keep it out of the hands of, let’s say, less responsible hands.” Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, declared that “perhaps this study should not have been done at all.”

https://www.infowars.com/government-cover-up-of-a-mercuryautism-scandal/

True, shocking history of Salon’s sabotage of RFK’s Article here:
https://worldmercuryproject.org/news/salons-retraction-deadly-immunity-article-real-reason-behind/

If you are on Twitter please Tweet out both articles. Salon founder David Talbot is to be commended for his pro-journalism stance and ethic. The story here is very familiar to the editor of this website. It’s a formula, that was perfected over time, and reached its apex around 2006-2008. Journalism was actually assassinated, by the Pharmaceutical industry, and the fake “press” it installed to do its black ops, reversing truth, crushing reputations overnight, vanishing articles by vicious intimidation, and then claiming the authors were discredited because the article was “retracted.” Or had “errors.”

Details are very critical, as are names.
Don’t let this slide.

CF

From An Online Conversation About Hugh Hefner: A Man’s Lament At The Insidious Damage

Posted on September 29, 2017

 

“When I was young, it seemed that the prevailing wisdom was that women were the victims of this pornographic society that he labored to usher in. To think that not all that long ago, only real creeps would have a subscription to Penthouse, or Hustler. That was rough stuff back then.
The real victims of porn are of course men and women. Equally. Women have to live in this world where men are frequently damaged by this thing, and men have to have been damaged, even if that damage has been normalized, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
It messes with your neurology, your survival skills that were hard wired, long long before we were even human.

To me his life seemed like a garish cartoon. Weezer wrote a song about his mansion. It was a rock bottom low point for the music of my generation, that being X. Especially being that they were capable of much better; it seemed to represent this…bottom, this inevitable attraction to something that almost can’t be avoided due to its ubiquitousness, and it’s one of the handful of songs that have a built in, spoken word apology to their fans for ever having been so honest about their most base assessment of ‘success’. Beverly Hills is where you want to be? Really? Why?

I remember watching his reality show while alone in front of the TV, and there was this woman who should have been living a life somewhere, but instead she was forcing a smile out onto the stage her face had become, obviously repulsed to have sit there, listening, not watching but listening to episodes of Flash Gordon on a radio with the Hef. That was the meaning, the essence of a life well lived, to enjoy the same banalities that thrilled your pre pubescent self, with an endless round of compliant human love dolls.”

“Success, success, success…what does it matter? I’ve been shattered. ”
-Mick Jagger.

 

–Stephen Ericson

 

 

 

[This comment came from a Facebook Thread that began when I wrote this, in a state of extreme aggravation.]

[I will post it in the comments section. Maybe.]

 

CF

 

 

Fred Warmbier Details Son’s Torture At Hands Of North Koreans

Posted on September 26, 2017

“International organizations have assessed that human rights violations in North Korea have no parallel in the contemporary world.”

 

North Korea

 

“Now we see North Korea claiming to be a victim and that the world is picking on them,” Fred Warmbier said. “And we’re here to tell you North Korea is not a victim. They’re terrorists. They kidnapped Otto. They tortured him.”

The Warmbiers also opened up about seeing their son for the first time after his release from North Korean custody, offering new ― and, at times, disturbing ― details about his condition.

Fred Warmbier described a “howling, involuntary, inhuman sound” as he and his family walked up the steps of the plane that transported their son back to the U.S. from North Korea.

“Otto was on the stretcher … and he was jerking violently, making these inhuman sounds,” Warmbier said. “Otto had a shaved head. He had a feeding tube coming out of his nose. He was starting blankly into space … He was blind. He was deaf. … It looked like someone had taken a pair of pliers and rearranged his bottom teeth.”

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/otto-warmbier-apos-parents-describe-144338446.html

 

 

Is Judy Wood “Pure Disinformation?” Another Perspective On Her Directed Energy Weapon Model Of 9/11

Posted on September 18, 2017

My Facebook friend Andrea Gambioli wrote:

“Judy Wood’s theories are pure disinformation, to confuse and divide the truther’s movement (which is in fact what happened).”

He posted this retort to her work.

In any case, this opens up the discussion to Directed Energy Weapons, which is probably important, in a horrifying way.

9/11 Mystery Raised By PhD Scientist: “Where Did The Buildings Go?”

Posted on September 17, 2017

“A quick summary is that the buildings didn’t burn up, nor did they slam to the ground, but they turned into dust in mid air. How do I know that? Because if they collapsed to the ground, you would have a pile of debris that would correspond to two hundred and ten story buildings. That didn’t happen. “

–Dr. Judy Wood

 

Jeffrey St. Clair On “What Happened”– Amazon Can’t Delete This One

Posted on September 16, 2017

It has been pointed out that Silicon Valley and the Tech-Topus, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon et al, are the helm of the new American Totalitarianism–its de-facto “deep state–” and that the actual, lumbering “government,” uses said Tech-Topus to enact its agendas, polish its mirrors, send its critics “to the cornfield.”

No longer trying to be covert or subtle, it has instead begun to perform its bloodbaths on free speech in plain view, followed by paternalistic justifications as to why the world is a better place this way, and it was only acting in the best interest of the Nation, Truth, and The Right And The Good. (Political Correctness fulfilled.)

Hillary Clinton’s latest book What Happened (is the title a nod to the “diabolical Joseph Heller?) (that word, by the way, comes from his daughter) came out last Wednesday. The day after its release, there were 1,600 predictably polarized reviews: About half had given it 5 stars, slightly less than half, one star.

Along comes Mr. Clean, arms folded, ready to fight and kill germs of wrong opinion. The very next day, over 1100 negative reviews had been purged by Big Brother, leaving 460 positive ones. The following day, a dash of free expression was added back to the bland soup, leaving us with 626 positive reviews, of which 607 were glowing, but also (hey, you’re still free, Americans) 22 negative ones. Those token 22 are meant to be the way these megalomaniacs at Amazon disabuse you of your deplorable “free speech” baby rattles.

Obedient Bland Soup Media wrote Obliging articles explaining in maternalistic tones why Daddy Amazon had to do what it did to take care of us all. You see, some reviewers are suspect, and what makes them suspect is they never reviewed any previous books. Fair enough. They also couldn’t possibly have had time to read the 400 page tome and review it so fast, hence they deserve to be eliminated as troll-roaches. Follow the logic and the magic: Positive reviewers can read and review a book in the exact time frame!

[The stats I relied upon are documented here.]

This trifecta (that is the first and I hope only time I will use that pompous word) of traumatizing corporate PC narcissism, was sealed by the one quality all reviewers had to prove: They had purchased the book on Amazon, and could prove “verified purchase.” 100% of reviewers were “verified.”

Who loves freedom, raise your hand!

The somewhat good news: Things are getting so obscene and out of hand, that plain old fashioned websites are becoming popular again, as information life rafts. The Truth Barrier is one of them, and if you will subscribe, and have faith, (and consider making a tiny regular monthly donation of $5,) I will stop putting most of my writings on Zuckerberg’s surveillance site Facebook, and focus them here instead. I am well aware of the gravity of the situation, and it calls for all people who value non-state sanctioned corporate news to help these tiny rafts star afloat as the war intensifies.

We still have ham radios. We still have a few well-positioned lunatics who love reality more than money, and are prepared to die 1000 ways to smuggle the contraband to the West.

Julian Assange, Ham Radio King, is a very good curator of non-corporate media–things written by people using their own minds, on their own platforms–and he tweeted this remarkable review of What Happened by Jeffrey St. Clair, editor of the journal CounterPunch, founded by the late Alexander Cockburn.

I feel bad for the 1100 and counting who bought the book on Amazon and saw their (admittedly rushed) reviews expunged–something I doubt Amazon has ever told its customers is something that can and may happen. After all, reviews are core and critical to Amazon’s business model. Reviews drive our purchases.

But this review by St. Clair can be read in lieu of those perished ones, and reality (a word I prefer to “truth”) survives its infinite, squalid hunting packs. Nobody “hates” Hillary Clinton for “being a woman.” Rather, it is being a traumatizing narcissist who can’t open her mouth without polishing her 12 refracting mirrors, splayed as on a 1960s Mod Vespa.

As St. Clair points out, even every admission of guilt, error, or responsibility, morphs quickly into a boast laced with victimhood. Narcissists love to say: “I’m sorry the cruel, insulting thing I did or said was misunderstood by rubes, when in fact I was perfectly justified and you know what, come to think of it I’m not sorry.”

“The closest Hillary comes to any admission of personal liability is when she discloses that she may have blundered when she smeared Trump’s supporters as “deplorables.” Then she suddenly pulls back, recalibrates and defends her denunciation of white working class voters as an act of courage, speaking truth to the powerless, even though it may have harmed her. “I regret handing Trump a political gift with my ‘deplorables’ comment,” she writes. “[But] too many of Trump’s core supporters do hold views that I find — there’s no other word for it — deplorable.” What started as a confession ended in a boast.

Of course, Hillary Clinton has never been able to conceal her contempt for her enemies, real and imagined. It’s one reason she’s never been a successful politician. Where others are supple, she is taut. Unlike Bill, Hillary is a prolific, but graceless and transparent liar. She is also probably the nastiest political figure in America since Nixon. Yet she lacked Nixon’s Machiavellian genius for political manipulation. Hillary wears her menace on her face. She could never hide her aspiration for power; her desire to become a war criminal in the ranks of her mentor Henry Kissinger (symbolized by the laurels of a Nobel Peace Prize, naturally). Americans don’t mind politicians with a lust to spill blood, but they prefer them not to advertise it.”

 

Hillary Happened

 

Truth Barrier Bug/Ransomware–Going Offline For Repair

Posted on September 12, 2017

The post from yesterday about Joan Shenton and Andi Reiss’ HPV YouTube series “Sacrificial Virgins” was spread across many vaccination-aware groups on FB. A FB friend central to the movement emailed me today:

“Hi Celia, I’ve shared your latest Truth Barrier post in several groups. Someone just commented that your site is trying to install ransomware on their phone, and suggested viewing the embedded video directly on YouTube.”

I am not sure why this is happening but am going to park The Truth Barrier off-line, to be safe, while I solve it. Please go to YouTube and type in “Sacrificial Virgins” to get a safe video upload. Many apologies if anybody has had trouble with ransomeware via TTB. I hope to solve the problem soon.

 

 

Here is a comment that came in, following last night’s post:

 

GARDASIL gave my daughter CERVICAL CANCER at 17.
She died on Christmas Eve 2013, just 8 days after her 20th birthday.
RIP Jessica D. 12/16/1993-12/24/2013

Ps… One day very soon, I will hunt down and “vaccinate” the ENTIRE Board of Directors of MERCK Pharma.

E-7 Ret.

CIA Fake News Roots: Funding And Influence On Literary Culture And Magazines After WW2

Posted on July 25, 2017

“So magazines like Encounter, they were created in Paris, they were created in Italy, they were created all over Europe; and then they spread to the Nordic countries, they spread to the Third World. What they did was they involved people at different levels. So the people in the know would be people who were editors and regular contributors, and it would even for them be kind of an open secret. So one person I interviewed was a guy named Nelson Aldrich, and he collaborated first—well, he worked for, I should say, first with the Paris Review. The Paris Review was not one of those magazines created by the CIA, or if it was, it was sort of indirectly used. It was used as Peter Matthiessen, the writer who was one of its founders, as his cover in Paris in the early fifties. But then he says he resigned from the CIA and there was no connection. Well, later on, George Plimpton, the famous writer and man about New York, was the public face of the Paris Review through its formative years and for many decades; he found a way to get CIA money through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, its cultural propaganda front. So that’s a second tie. Later on in my research, I found a third tie through a founding managing editor. So you have such a vast network of money for culture that in one organization, one magazine that’s sort of only a tangential CIA asset or friend, you can find three big separate ties.”

Truth Dig Interview with Joel Whitney here:

 

 

What Did A 2000 United Nations Document Reveal About The Plan To Flood Certain Countries With Migrants, Socially Engineered For Decades?

Posted on July 23, 2017

“In other words, this is the way they’re implementing it. The EU is there as a sub-unit of global governance. It’s there to consolidate the European countries, so they can then be subsumed into the world governance. That was what the Trans Atlantic and the Trans Pacific partnerships were about.”

–David Knight

Note: I think defenders of the EU at this point ought to be ashamed of themselves. But they never are. They keep invoking the “peace in Europe,” fairytale.

 

This Place Could Use Some Communism

Posted on July 23, 2017

Socialists be like pic.twitter.com/kEDhOgirr8

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) July 23, 2017

 

Assange: “The Transparent Do Not Fear Leaks”

Posted on July 22, 2017

 

How to solve the "leak problem"? Be the first to tell the truth. The transparent do not fear leaks. No more secrets.

— Julian Assange ⌛ (@JulianAssange) July 22, 2017

 

Extraordinary: The Healing Power Of Colostrum

Posted on July 22, 2017

 

 

 

Stage 4 Cancer Reversal Protocol: No Shortcuts, No Failure

Posted on July 22, 2017

“It’s never too late to turn things around. Never, never.”

 

CORRECTION: Black PR Psy-Up Behind “Assange” Tweet About Podesta

Posted on July 21, 2017

I checked it with the person I trust most about all things Wikileaks, Bella Magnani, on Twitter. She explained it was false and I immediately took it down. I apologize to Truth Barrier readers, but there is a more valuable lesson here. Big money is being spent to discredit Julian Assange by creating imposter accounts on Twitter.

Thus is why I miss the days of interviewing people on creaky old tape recorders. You always knew that the person was real, and said what they said.

I feel sorry for people who only have “fake news” as their life-blood.

Julian Assange Impostor Accounts: Report to Twitter for impersonation and block

Esquire O.J. Simpson American Underbelly

Posted on July 21, 2017

O.J. Simpson was freed on parole today as you probably know. I was commissioned to write about O.J. Simpson on two occasions. One article (linked below) was published in Esquire in 1998. It was at the time the second largest selling issue of Esquire, second to this in 1970, 28 years earlier. [“The Confessions of Lieutenant Calley.”]

 

 

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a46086/celia-farber-oj-simpson-interview/

The second article, “O.J. Incorporated,” was in Rolling Stone, 2000, issue #853, and  is absurdly relevant to today’s news, where the name Bruce Fromong is trending at #1 on social media. Would you believe I was in a room with Fromong, O.J. Mike Gilbert–before they all wound up in Nevada Court together as the Las Vegas “armed robbery,” put a bit of a strain on their old bonds. It’s not available online. I have exhausted myself trying to get hold of it. I finally ordered it in the mail.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Rolling-Stone-11-9-00-Al-Gore-John-Lennon-O-J-Simpson-Barenaked-Ladies-U2-Nelly-/320927385038?rmvSB=true

I have many things to say about all this but it can become engulfing, so I prefer to put the articles out to do the work.

I’d like to mention the editor that commissioned both articles–he migrated from Esquire to Rolling Stone–the legendary Bill Tonelli. Wish I could find him, and thank him.

Those were the days. We were sent out for weeks or months, and if you didn’t get the story, you didn’t come home.

Still looking for the RS link. The above is just a link to the magazine on eBay. My thought was RS would draw traffic by re-posting it.

 

The Elites Have Minted A Palatable Hillbilly To Translate Trump’s Voter’s Despair, Or “Concerns”

Posted on July 19, 2017

“The 2016 election was in part the revenge of a white working class long ignored and neglected by the establishments of both political parties. This America turned out in large numbers for Trump.

Vance knows these people. He’s one of them. So he became the Trump whisperer, the voice of a forgotten tribe that rather impolitely had the gall to reassert itself on the national stage. When Trump won, Vance became a permanent fixture on CNN’s pundit couch, explaining to puzzled liberals “what these people think”.

When I first sit down for coffee with Vance, he nervously checks his watch every five minutes. He’s worried about being late for the US celebrity news anchor Megyn Kelly, who later arrives in a fleet of sleek black executive cars to record a special programme on his recent move from California back to Ohio, where he was born and spent much of his childhood.”

Article In The Times of London here.

 

[Is it arrogant to say: “I told you so?”]

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This way the site can a) survive and b) grow.

Thank you, from the editor, who has never revealed–but will– her strange life journey through privileged beginnings and a childhood crash into working class misery, in Sweden, in the 1970s. This may partly explain her incapacity to express total hostility toward Trump, or at least her visceral defense of his voter base.

The Last Gentleman: How George Trow Went Mad, And What The New Yorker Used To Be Like, Or Vice Versa

Posted on July 19, 2017

 

 

“And in fact Trow did wear a fedora for a while—to the great amusement of his colleagues—when he was a young writer at William Shawn’s New Yorker. “This is the sixties, so to wear a fedora is some kind of a big statement,” says Jonathan Schell, who, like Trow, graduated from Harvard in 1965 and was swiftly hired by Shawn. “Since Kennedy didn’t wear one, it was like a high wind blew through the country and took off all the hats. For George, the hat had something to do with being an adult, but some kind of mockery of being an adult. The fedora was like a flag of our fathers: No one else wore a fedora except William Shawn.”

 

 

“It was such fun, I can’t tell you,” says Jamaica Kincaid of her early days in New York City, when Trow was her mentor and social guide. Trow would take her to the parties and events he covered in “Talk of the Town,” and he found Kincaid so amusing he decided that she too should write for The New Yorker. “George took me to lunch with Mr. Shawn at the Algonquin. I was always hungry, I had no job, and I didn’t know when I would eat again, so I ordered the most wonderful, expensive thing on the menu. Mr. Shawn ordered a slice of toasted pound cake and I thought, Oh, gosh, I’ve spent all his money; I’ve reduced him to toasted pound cake,” she says. “I went to the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn and I made some notes and gave them to George, and I thought he would rewrite them and make them into something proper. George gave them to Mr. Shawn and he printed it just as it was written.”

 

 

Trow told us that we had “a third parent—television.” And that the function of television is “to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts.” Television is neutral, it is the referee, not distinguishing between the war against wrinkles and the war in Iraq. Over time, Trow suggested, this would scramble people’s brains and lead us to our current situation: “Of all Americans, only they”—celebrities—“are complete.”

 

“Trow spent the last years of his life living the radical rootlessness he’d prophesied in “Within the Context of No Context”: “at home in many strange places.” He sold the house he had designed and built in Germantown, New York, and cut off almost everyone he knew. He drove his pickup truck to Alaska, Texas, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia, where some friends of his came to get him after neighbors complained that he’d taken to going outside without any clothes on. They found him very thin, living on Scotch and sardines, and checked him into McLean Hospital, the famous psychiatric institution outside Boston. After Trow got out, he moved to Naples, Italy, popping up once in a while as a voice on the answering machine of an old friend, never leaving a number. Twice, he was visited by DeCourcy McIntosh, his best friend from Exeter, and told him that he was never coming back.

Trow’s body was discovered by the Italian police in his apartment in late November last year, days after his death.

In 1999, Trow wrote (again) about what he saw as the protective function culture had once served in people’s lives. “Well, we don’t have that,” said Trow. “People fall off the high wire invisibly. There is no net; they crash.”

 

From this remarkable profile by Ariel Levy in New York magazine.

Previous post about Trow (for context,) here.

 

Waking Up About Alcohol And The Protection Of Your Spirit

Posted on July 19, 2017

Al kol: Genie or spirit that takes on varied shapes or a supernatural creature in Arabic mythology.

Al kol: Any drug or substance that takes away the mind or covers it.”
The word alcohol is also linked to the fixed star in astronomy known as

Algol- also known as “the Demon’s head.”

The current Arabic name for alcohol (ethanol) is الغول al-ġawl – properly meaning “spirit” or “demon”.

It is not a coincidence that alcohol has often been referred to as spirits. There is a deep history behind this intoxicating substance. There are layers of information throughout our culture, sometimes we have to look below the surface of things to find the fullness of truth. I encourage you to deeply consider the information shared here, look at the effects of alcohol in your life, in the lives of the people you know, and in society at large. Make conscious, informed, and health enhancing decisions. The more people who awaken to truth and seek health and liberation from mind control agendas, the more likely we are to make positive changes and co-create the world we feel good about living in.

 

The Spiritual Consequences of Alcohol Consumption

 

The Growing Power OF “Within The Context Of No Context” By George W.S. Trow

Posted on July 19, 2017

 

 

THE DECLINE OF ADULTHOOD

In the New History, nothing was judged—only counted. The power of judging was then subtracted from what it was necessary for a man to learn to do. In the New History, the preferences of a child carried as much weight as the preferences of an adult, so the refining of preferences was subtracted from what it was necessary for a man to learn to do. In the New History, the ideal became agreement rather than well-judged action, so men learned to be competent only in those modes which embraced the possibility of agreement. The world of power changed. What was powerful grew more powerful in ways that could be easily measured, grew less powerful in every way that could not be measured.
POWERFUL MEN

The most powerful men were those who most effectively used the power of adult competence to enforce childish agreements.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1980/11/17/within-the-context-of-no-context

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/323366.Within_the_Context_of_No_Context

 

I Have No Headline For This But Somehow It’s Bringing Us All Closer, Might Be Sublime

Posted on July 18, 2017

 

Haitian Government Official Set To Testify Against Clinton Foundation Found Dead

Posted on July 17, 2017

According to Eberwein, a paltry 0.6 percent of donations granted by international donors to the Clinton Foundation with the express purpose of directly assisting Haitians actually ended up in the hands of Haitian organizations. A further 9.6 percent ended up with the Haitian government. The remaining 89.8 percent – or $5.4 billion – was funneled to non-Haitian organizations. –WND

 

Haiti Official Who Exposed The Clinton Foundation Is Found Dead

 

 

“This Is The Way It Is Now.” (Raw Audio From Germany, As Girls Are Made Impossible– Canceled)

Posted on July 12, 2017

SICKENING!!!

Terrified German parents ask Mayor what they should do in the wake of Muslim "Refugee" Sex Attacks & Rapes upon School Girls.. pic.twitter.com/HZ5f7kRKa1

— Amy Mek (@AmyMek) July 10, 2017

 

Bonfire Of The Vanities 2017 [When Satire Is Almost Identical To Earnestness]

Posted on July 10, 2017

She is hilarious. Great satire sketch. pic.twitter.com/YKUtSsJPc0

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) July 10, 2017

 

Eye Witness Accounts And Footage From Hamburg G20: “Hellhole Beyond Imagination.”

Posted on July 9, 2017

Gary Ogden and others–I share your confusion and shock. Who and what is “Antifa?”

Who and what is backing them, and to what end?

Please let’s NOT ARGUE right now and instead put our heads together about what is going on, as it is obviously very dire. Very. And by the way, the word “Kristallnacht” is irrelevant.

Anybody who can find words for this,  or first hand knowledge, please let us hear from you.

 

[comments from YouTube.]

German here. Do not come to Germany. Save your country instead and don’t become the next victim nation. Within two years our country has become a hellhole beyond imagination. Do not let this happen to you.

*

So basically going back to Hitler’s playbook. Christ, this is leading up to World War 3.

*
Stefan!!

The ANTIFA in Germany are the storm troops of the Government!! ANTIFA members are being payed by the hour with tax money by governing political parties!! Believe me! I am in Germany! I know !! GERMAN ANTIFA IS CONTROLLED BY THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT!!!

 

Look no further than #HamburgG20 summi #Antifa terrorism.
pic.twitter.com/RwQz10Gbbf

— Kevin W (@kwilli1046) July 9, 2017

 

A Father And Son Story, By R.A. Davis

Posted on July 9, 2017

“You want to be a writer? Here.” He found a pen and an unlined memo tablet. Wrote: LIFE DEATH. “Now, write me a third word as big as the first two!” And walked away.

I instantly knew the third word but was afraid to write it. The word came by intuition, and Dad was a man of logic. If he demolished my word I’d never have forgiven him.

http://www.splicetoday.com/writing/remembering-my-dad-a-little-late

What Is A Metaphor?

Posted on July 9, 2017

(For Caroline)

 

An event so impactful that most people in a given time knows its name and roughly what happened is a “historical event.”

These events spawn avatars, even centuries later, turning up in people’s sayings, writings and creative works. The Swedish pop group ABBA for example, won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974 with a song called Waterloo.

 

The opening words are:

“My my, at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender. Oh yeah! And I have met my destiny in quite a similar way.”

In quite a similar way? Well how DARE they? Here is the historical death and carnage toll (some 25,000 men killed) from the actual Battle of Waterloo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Waterloo

It’s used in the ABBA song to convey final defeat in a love affair.

What is the metaphorical resonance of the very real, very horrific historical event then, that was the cruelly named “Kristallnacht–” the Nazi pogrom that swept through Germany and Austria Nov 9, 1938?

I was referring to an outbreak of state sanctioned hatred against a detested and (perceived as threatening) minority group, in this case independent reporters– in the battle between populism and globalism. The sense of the attacks now being done in the open, and almost welcomed by the state, media, and authorities–this was how I arrived at the metaphor of “Kristallnacht.”

Interesting that Caroline, who is proudly Jewish, with Middle Eastern, American, and Canadian heritage is NOT offended, whole others (not Jewish) seem hysterical almost.

I am not an authority of when use of these metaphors is kosher and when it isn’t–I am open to the charge that I chose the wrong word. A writer is supposed to choose the right word. If at all possible, the inevitable word.

I hope this opens the door for further discussion.

 

 

Kristallnacht Of Media Wars: Independent Journalists Stalked, Beaten, Lives Threatened By Antifa Thugs At G20 In Hamburg

Posted on July 8, 2017

German police to journalists: “You’re on your own.”

 

 

The Simple Cure To Almost Every So Called Disease

Posted on July 8, 2017

 

Milo Yiannopoulos Files $10 Million Breach Of Contract Lawsuit Against Simon & Schuster

Posted on July 8, 2017

 

What Was Happening In That Dawn’s Early Light? The True History Of The Star Spangled Banner

Posted on July 4, 2017

What stirs in me on the eve of the birthday of this nation, that feels like a terrible secret, like when you’re not supposed to love somebody or something but you do. Walking home from the park last night, I wondered what this feeling is and why it has nothing to do with what evil has been committed by the malignant rogue state people THINK of now when they think of the United States.

What would I try to say to my European friends (actually I’m not sure I have any “European friends” anymore)–about why I love this place?

Everything about us is insane.

Precisely!

It’s not the government! It’s not any President. We surely ache for our collective sins. It’s not fraud.
It’s a collectively held mirage. People who love this country (immigrants, all) don’t love it as a thing, but as a reverie–a prayer, that never ceases. You may think we should want it answered, but that isn’t how Americans think. I tell you: We’re crazy.
We want to stay in our reverie, just a little longer, because you NEVER KNOW what tomorrow may bring.

 

 

How Laura Loomer Re-Invented Living Theater And Shocked The Petit Bourgeoisie

Posted on June 17, 2017

“A thing with a brave spirit is not mean.”

St. Mawr, D.H. Lawrence

 

 

I just realized something. All my so-called life in so-called journalism, all I was ever doing was looking for genuine expression of emotions, through the human voice. I love the human voice, when it is being honest. It’s an instrument like no other. Like a Stradivarius. For this reason, I oppose the email interview, as well as the notion of “trimming” transcripts after the fact, cleaning up the voice. (This was a fierce argument I had with both Liam Scheff, and Christine Maggiore, who both believed that cleaning up dissenting scientists voices would hasten the collapse of the HIV empire.) (It didn’t.)

A real scientist sounds like nobody else. A fake scientist sounds like hundreds of others.

Anna Akhmatova famously said: “We must never forget about despair.” This is not an American idea–we are afraid of despair. We like successfully repressed people in this culture.

Last night as I listened to this voice, of Laura Loomer, screaming helplessly: “Shame!! Shame on all of you! Shame!” (Video below) I was riveted, because I was hearing a genuine human cry. Until I listened to it, motionless from start too finish, I did not realize how long I’d been waiting for it. She sounded like somebody screaming into the Atlantic iceberg before the collision. She sounded like I feel. (Yet I rarely make a sound.)

Inside the theater she had been dragged out of by security, the actors had been doing what actors do: Simulating the emotions of the famous play. We’re always told that great theater and great actors provide, as the ancient Greeks defined it, “catharsis.” I have rarely, if ever, experienced that in a theater, and rarely go see plays as a result. This rendition of Julius Caesar is now a juggernaut of palatable emotions that are not classical or eternal, rather, a “period piece,” delivering fascistic mass sentiment —Trump hatred. I would argue that mass (political) emotions can never be real emotions, they can only ever be positions. You can’t have a political emotion, only a political persuasion. In addition, you can’t have an emotion that millions of other people are also having at the same time.

I was very moved by Laura Loomer. It was not until today that I stopped to think about it more carefully. Was she the real play, lasting a few seconds, bursting forth like the shackled ID of a brainwashed society?

You can argue whether plays should be disrupted–I would always argue in favor. I would expect most playwrights to agree. A play is alive, or should be.

Loomer, intentionally or accidentally, transformed (in moments) a very petit bourgeois night-at-the-theater moment into a wild avant grade living theater moment. She interrupted a fake play with a real one, a one woman tragedy in one act. (“Tragedy” is an internal measure of despair–should not be used to describe events.)  She interrupted safe emotionalism with the very dangerous emotion that was not permitted to enter the theater, or for that matter, the culture. It must remain on the deplorable, dirty fringes. I would sooner hurl myself into the jaws of Siberian tigers who hadn’t seen food in 2 weeks than do what Loomer did. You can say many things about it, (echoing Bill Maher)  but you can’t say it was not brave. Loomer went in without a single trapping–no platform, hub, alt-right, boy’s club, back-lit American flags, website, gang, badge–nothing but her own voice.

Americans of all ethnicities and backgrounds who oppose Trump hatred, and the escalating normalization of the “Kill Trump” meme, people who may or may not “support” Donald trump, yet despair at the ugliness that has arisen in the name of crushing him–these people feel voiceless.

I am one of them. Laura Loomer screamed bloody murder, on behalf of that missing voice, that voice that can’t find a home, can’t find a culture that understands or hears it.

In her wild screams, I heard my own muffled, muted, defeated emotions. The cry for it to stop–for the bullying, cruelty, savagery, the attacks on the politically incorrect “other,” to stop. If not “stop,” to at least acknowledge, in a brief moment of respite, its own brutality–its palatable disavowed sadist. Being a liberal lefty in the Trump era means being safe, and having the power of the bully majority always on your side.

Laura Loomer opened an audio track, so all those smug, air-conditioned theater loving, Trump despising liberals, got to, or had to, hear a shard of the pain they cause, support, and proliferate. Unless, as Tennessee Williams once put it, “you devote yourself to its opposition.”

 

Julia Caesar meets Laura Loomer https://t.co/THlerwmODp

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) June 17, 2017

 

The Truth Barrier Supports Anti-Tryanny Activists Laura Loomer And Jack Posobiec Whose Protest Shut Down Grotesque Trump Assassination Play In New York City

Posted on June 17, 2017

Two anti-tyranny, anti-violence activists Laura Loomer and and Jack Posobiec disrupted the Public Theater’s production of Julius Caesar.depicting Donald Trump stabbed to death by a mob with knives.

Loomer, of Rebel Media, shouted: “STOP THE NORMALIZATION OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE AGAINST DONALD TRUMP. YOU ARE POLITICAL TERRORISTS ALL OF YOU!” She was arrested and later released from police custody. Posobiec shouted: GOEBBELS WOULD BE PROUD! YOU ARE NAZIS, ALL OF YOU!”

Civil War has now broken out in America. May as well face it.

The Truth Barrier fully supports this courageous protest against the normalization  of political violence on the reprehensible bourgeoisie left.

Clips below:

BREAKING: Julius Ceasar Gets SHUTDOWN pic.twitter.com/ITgfMR0tHE

— Jack Posobiec ?? (@JackPosobiec) June 17, 2017

 

Julia Caesar meets Laura Loomer https://t.co/THlerwmODp

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) June 17, 2017

 

Alex Jones, 2013: “I Clearly Believe, From The Evidence, Children Were Really Killed In Sandy Hook, And It’s A Real Tragedy.”

Posted on June 16, 2017

NBC and Megan Kelly are in foaming hot water over Kelly’s upcoming interview with anti-globalist, populist talk show host Alex Jones. Jones pre-empted Kelly’s piece by publishing his own recording of the interview, here. A close friend of mine knows the father of one of the children killed at Sandy Hook, and told me he met the boy once. Another friend of mine has posted on FB that he knows another family who lost a child, but didn’t respond to a request I sent that he put me in touch with the family. It is understandable that grieving parents are simply unable to summon the strength to “prove” that their children have been killed, so the situation persists: People on the internet persist in spreading “conspiracy” theories that run the gamut, all the way out to saying no children were killed, and that the entire event was staged as a false flag to condition to public to surrender the right to bear arms.

Story on Sandy Hook families outrage over Megan Kelly’s Alex Jones interview here.

Mainstream media outlets continue to report that Alex Jones thinks Sandy Hook “was a hoax,” and that no children were killed. This, a simple internet search reveals, is not true.

Jones, apparently, interviewed people on all sides of the conspiracy spectrum. In 2013, in the video posted below, he said:

“I clearly believe from the evidence, children were really killed in Sandy Hook, and it’s a real tragedy. But the fact that they’re having people script things and that answers are being scripted is incontrovertible. We’ll get to some of that evidence right now..”

The issues raised by Jones in the video below broach the way bigger, messier issue of primarily CNN having been caught staging, faking, and manipulating news, including pretending to be places they were not. That’s the conversation America is getting ready to have now, thanks to Alex Jones/Megyn Kelly hysteria.

My heart aches for the families, and my primary intention with this post is to prove:

A: Alex Jones believes children were killed at Sandy Hook and B: Alex Jones believes CNN is a deep state organ that literally fakes news. These questions should not be conflated to the point where the entire discussion is rendered “toxic,” “hateful,” and taboo. Instead, let’s get everything up to the surface, out in the open.

 

UPDATE: In 2014, Alex Jones seemed to contradict or expand on the 2013 quote above (which is normal, to alternate position, as new information comes in.) Were no homicides registered in Sandy Hook in 2012? Really?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1RlzXvGy2s

Camille Paglia, In Searing Interview, Eviscerates Elite Democrats, Praises Trump As A “Builder,” Says Sex Change Is ‘Impossible’ And Calls Global Warming “A Sentimental Myth Unsupported By Evidence.”

Posted on June 16, 2017

And–she is a lifelong registered Democrat. I interviewed Paglia in 1990, in a two part interview in SPIN Magazine, and remain an admirer of her wild, caustic mind, passion for history, and serious sense of humor.

To wit:

“Of course this rousing speech (with its can-do World War Two spirit) got scant coverage in the mainstream media. Drunk with words, spin, and snark, middle-class journalists can’t be bothered to notice the complex physical constructions that make modern civilization possible. The laborers who build and maintain these marvels are recognized only if they can be shoehorned into victim status. But if they dare to think for themselves and vote differently from their liberal overlords, they are branded as rubes and pariahs.

In summary: to have any hope of retaking the White House, Democrats must get off their high horse, lose the rabid rhetoric, and reorient themselves toward practical reality and the free country they are damned lucky to live in.”

 

“There seems to be a huge conceptual gap between Trump and his most implacable critics on the left. Many highly educated, upper-middle-class Democrats regard themselves as exemplars of “compassion” (which they have elevated into a supreme political principle) and yet they routinely assail Trump voters as ignorant, callous hate-mongers. These elite Democrats occupy an amorphous meta-realm of subjective emotion, theoretical abstractions, and refined language. But Trump is by trade a builder who deals in the tangible, obdurate, objective world of physical materials, geometry, and construction projects, where communication often reverts to the brusque, coarse, high-impact level of pre-modern working-class life, whose daily locus was the barnyard. It’s no accident that bourgeois Victorians of the industrial era tried to purge “barnyard language” out of English.”

 

–Camille Paglia, full interview here.

 

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Simple Mental Techniques To Rewire Traumatic Memories

Posted on June 16, 2017

 

Forbidden Knowledge: Proof Of U.S. Military Having Infiltrated CNN And Other Media “Since At Least 2001.”

Posted on June 15, 2017

“Truth Stream Media’s Melissa Dykes revisits a story I posted about 5 years ago regarding hard evidence that has emerged over the years of US military psychological operations involvement in the production of this country’s news media. US Government propaganda against US Persons was illegal until Barack Obama officially legitimized it in the 2012 NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act), the annual budget for the US Department of Defense. This story was first reported by the late Michael Hastings on BuzzFeed, before that independent news service was co-opted in 2015 by the propaganda behemoth, NBC Universal with a $200 million investment.

Dykes’ piece includes a cringeworthy 1996 clip of Anderson Cooper, who interned at the CIA for two summers prior to joining CNN, reporting that TWA Flight 800 had been “Shot down” and then after the commercial break, correcting himself with the CIA’s official line that the 747 had been brought down by a “center fuel tank explosion”.

There are more excellent cringeworthy moments here. It goes into things that are no longer reported on in the Mainstream Media in our post-9/11 world. CNN is hardly the only culprit in the dissemination of US Government propaganda. Moreover the US military/intelligence concerted penetration of the media goes back to at least 1951 with President Harry Truman’s creation of Psychological Strategy Board, under the premise that “Wars could not be won through bloodshed but by winning the hearts and minds of people.”

–Forbidden Knowledge TV, full story here.

 

[Note, I was unable to locate the Hastings article cited here but did find this one, about the CIA and Hollywood. If anybody is aware of additional links to Hastings’ article on this subject, I do hope you will share them here.]

Please consider supporting The Truth Barrier with a $5 a month subscription fee, here, so we can grow. Or, consider supporting another website–like Forbidden Knowledge. Lacking corporate sponsors or paid subscriptions, we all rely on donations. Thank you.

 

 

What They Said: Alan Dershowitz

Posted on June 15, 2017

“The fact that Mueller is opening an investigation on obstruction doesn’t answer the two basic questions. One — can a president be indicted while sitting? And two — can a president be indicted for obstruction — which is simply doing his job, being the head of the executive branch?”
“I think the answer to both of these questions is still going to be no and no.”

 

[In an interview with Newsmax]

Otto Warmbier’s Father’s Statement

Posted on June 15, 2017

Fred Warmbier on dealing with Obama admin: "They did nothing for us. No letters, no communication. Nothing.'pic.twitter.com/gFrznuC6bp

— Journalism Is Dead (@TheDailyBail) June 15, 2017

 

What They Said: Alfieri

Posted on June 15, 2017

He dies in her arms, and Beatrice covers him with her body.

Alfieri, who is in the crowd, turns out to the audience. The lights have gone down, leaving him in a glow, while behind him the dull prayers of the people and the keening of the women continue.

 

Alfieri: Most of the time now we settle for half and I like it better. But the truth is holy, and even as I know how wrong he was, and his death useless, I tremble, for I confess that something perversely pure calls to me from his memory – not purely good, but himself purely, for he allowed himself to be wholly known and for that I think I will love him more than all my sensible clients. And yet, it is better to settle for half, it must be! And so I mourn him – I admit it – with a certain . . . alarm.

 

Curtain.

[A View From The Bridge: Arthur Miller]

What They Said: Gary Ogden

Posted on June 15, 2017

“I find myself largely in agreement with these sentiments. Truly frightening that Democrats, at least in California, but Obama is one of these, too, wish total control of every aspect of our lives by government, beginning with the fetus in the womb. The Democrat politicians have become totalitarians, meanwhile our children are very unhealthy, IQ’s are dropping, and not only from fluoride, but from the 72 doses of vaccines they receive, and the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, a real cesspool of pharma corruption, has just confirmed that vaccines cause autism (they don’t admit it, but what causes fever in pregnancy? DTaP and Flu vaccines). What is most disconcerting about public political life today is the vitriol directed by the acolytes of these totalitarians at anyone who questions what they are preaching. They are incapable of civility. They seem to know nothing of science, nothing factual, nothing of history. They appear to be incapable of actual thinking, know not how to use logic and debate, nor seem aware of the rules of basic decency we learned at our mother’s knee. I sometimes wonder if the behavior we see in the young on college campuses and elsewhere is a manifestation of sub-clinical vaccine injury (and acetaminophen and antibiotics and all the other crap they have been shoving into children especially for the past three decades). Things gonna get uglier, as these spoiled, damaged children enter a world without opportunity led by the craven and cowardly.”

–Gary Ogden, in response to this.

Requiem: The End Of Normal

Posted on June 14, 2017

These were the last days of our lives.

These were the days when we discovered that we had no friends, as soon as we developed observations or concerns that did not mirror theirs. Friendships that had held for decades crumbled into dust based on a Facebook post or a single text message.

You could hate Him properly, or expect to lose Them.

Fire, everywhere. Everything was catching fire.

You could not expect to have a proper conversation with anybody. No thoughts could have been fought for, they had to be as instantaneous as they were apparently deep, tethered to something primordial in us all.

Once death began, it became easy.

And soon you were the same way. Old friendships worth no more than a rice paper, or a discarded match, after the  fire was lit, after the arson, the discharge that never sated anybody.

Was it worth it?

Let them, then, kill Him, kill your children, kill you.

Praise them as they finish the job. Tell them they were right all along.

Keep your eyes open to the end, and don’t blame God.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” my friend wrote me.

(We were still friends because we saw the same thing in the fire.)

“There’s no way I can buy that those shootings and that fire happened on the same day. I’ve never seen a building burn like that. Never. This is chaos.’

I called him but he did not pick up.

 

 

Reflections On The Misogynist Impulse, By Fred Slater

Posted on June 14, 2017

[From a correspondence, June 10, 2017, published with the author’s permission.]

“You know Celia I never had really noticed that type of misogny before, the kind you have mentioned before how men want to correct you, contain your voice, isolate it, a demeaning tone and sometimes outright vicious.
I was only familiar with classic misogny,
Anyway,  mentioning I’m Irish and gay makes sense i suppose, a European liberal homo

They dont believe it’s “hate” though, do they? They think they are correcting you, putting you in your place and scolding you for being an IRRATIONAL woman, you’re an irritance to them, and must be contained.

Your voice is deeply important to me, you are a lone voice in many ways, you understand tone and the individual meaning of words in a way I’ve never come across before.  i was just thinking earlier how journalism has become an art of condemnation, and the tones of condemnation or if not that then an art of smug superiority to anthing that challenges the status quo, peace loving muslims and peace loving liberals who im pretty sure are the majority in both camps are very much in the same situation, they are afriad to speak up, to break the social boundaries that can cause them to be isolated and condemned.”

What They Said: Fred Slater

Posted on June 14, 2017

[Ed: Fred Slater–a friend living in Ireland– has written some things that I feel need highlighting. He wrote this comment (below) some months ago., in response to this post, which was where the civil war at The Truth Barrier broke out, between those who see pure evil in communism, and those who slap down those who see pure evil in communism–refer to us as failed, unwashed “right wingers,”  or  even spitting on my perspectives as “Vichy journalism.” I am horrified that communist apologia exists here, as horrified as I would be if some of you declared yourselves to be Nazis. We are close to the end–brought about by this conflict, which is not trivial, but fatal.]

Fred Wrote:

 

“I don’t feel so alone in this world when brave souls like you speak so clearly. You are morally cognizant in drawing this to our attention in a time of such horrifying cognitive dissonance blaring from the liberal left.

Oh and by the way Celia thank you for not patronising or mollycuddling me by telling me right wing dictators are bad too. I would have been pissed at you for being that facetious. Unfortunately the weak minded desire such comforts.

What kind of mindset values free education and healthcare over ‘free speech/free expression’ what kind of life is that? Im shocked to what level stealth Marxism, shadow Marxism has infected the liberal left.
How ready they are to beg for state tyranny as long as we live under a toxic big pharma rainbow for all fucking eternity.

Their humanity is in crisis.

What has happened to the will to be free, to will ‘power’ ‘greatness’
How has culture/arts become so average, mediocre or depraved/muddled.
Have these fools not understood George Orwells 1984, how an infinite
prison/cloud of grey mediocrity/tyranny will fall upon the human race
if we beg blindly for pseudo comforts within the heartless machinations of a
monolith state.

If any fool supports a state that destroys freedom of expression than they
support the stealing of souls and ultimately the POSSESSION of souls.

And in all mythologies around this globe there is a name for entities
who wish to steal and possess your soul.

DEMONS.

So worship demons if you desire so, but it will wreck havoc with your
soul, invite chaos, destruction and horror till there is nothingness.

NO ONE WILL STEAL MY SOUL.”

The Missing Disavowal Of Antifa

Posted on June 14, 2017

After today's press briefing was compete, a journalist asked about political violence by the left. Real journalism, finally! pic.twitter.com/EjLuBk3dZR

— Mike Cernovich ?? (@Cernovich) May 1, 2017

 

Emotional Freedom Technique: Tapping For An Amazing Day

Posted on June 14, 2017

EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) tapping has been extremely popular over the last decade, and countless people testify that it has transformed their lives. If you’re not familiar with it, you can read about it here:

https://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-8311/what-you-need-to-know-about-tapping-a-free-easy-stress-buster.html

Here is a short, easy way to try it, if you want to. I like Brad Yates. He is reassuring the way Mr. Rogers was.

 

 

The Post Vietnam Rainbow Tribe

Posted on June 14, 2017

 

The World Today According To Terrence Williams

Posted on June 13, 2017

This guys makes me laugh. I don’t think he’s cruel, like most comedians. Sean Hannity aired one of his clips and he blew up on Twitter.

Sometimes we have to puncture some of our balloons. Concepts like “government” and “journalism.”

Jeff Sessions Ate the Democrats up lol @jeffsessions @realDonaldTrump @FoxNews @CNN #MAGA lol sing with me Jeff pic.twitter.com/v8EJ8ZsVzo

— Terrence K. Williams (@w_terrence) June 14, 2017

 

Graham Hancock: “I Traced The Human Story”

Posted on June 13, 2017

For Jeremy.

 

“The lie told by archeologists is that the great pyramid was the tomb of some megalomaniac Pharaoh.

It’s been clear to me for a very long time that the great pyramid was never a tomb. The great pyramid was a giant instrument for amplifying human consciousness. And it functions as a beacon. It still functions as a beacon. It draws people towards it, from all over the world, they don’t even know why they’re drawn towards it. It selects its own initiates. For some people it’s just a heap of stone.”

–Graham Hancock

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXmT7oTQeII

Pink Light

Posted on June 13, 2017

PINK LIGHT

Q: What happens when you send pink light and love to someone else?

Abraham: You activate a vibration of connection within yourself which causes the object of your attention to have the same vibration activated within them. In other words, whatever you hold as your object of attention IS vibrating but EVERYTHING is that two ended stick we were talking about. So every person that you look at has things in them that you would LIKE as you see them and things within them that you would NOT LIKE as you see them. And the way you feel about them is NOT so much about what they’ve got activated, it’s about what YOU’VE got active, which is causing you to rendezvous with THAT aspect of them. So as these people got together and agreed about their criticism, they got it active pretty good and we imagine got more and more of it for a while. And then they reached a point of sort of critical mass where they were clearly getting further and further away from WHO THEY ARE and KNEW it. It’s a wonderful thing they had that kind of awareness going on, and then they visualised, now clearly their idea of the pink light was love and appreciation and so as they deliberately focused there, because of their power of their desire and their willinginess to do it and even their COLLECTIVE willingness to do it, they managed to active within themselves something very different than had been activated before and we imagine the feeling of relief was palpable. And as they activated the different vibration within them, they rendezvoused with a different characteristics in THAT person. We would like you to understand that EVERY person on the planet has the potential of THRILLING you beyond description and causing you DESPAIR beyond description, it just depends on what part of them is active in YOU.”

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2lJUML0n9o by Vera Mrsa

Pink light is to be sent to those who need healing, someone you have difficulty with, a difficult situation, your loved ones who are having a difficult time, and your family. Start seeing the person in your mind, in your imagination. Surround them quickly with a lot of pink light, or pink smoke, which symbolizes love. Send them love from your body to theirs, strongly, from your chest/heart/solarplexus area. Keep talking to yourself and to them about how much you love them, and feel yourself sending them love. Stop after two minutes. Do morning and evening.

This sending of love raises your vibration, and in return the other person must either raise their vibration to match yours, or vibrate out. You should see results 3-7 days. What is the difference in pink light sending, and prayer? Very little. Prayer sometimes includes asking (with or without thanksgiving). Pink light symbolizes Love, which is sending God INTO the situation (God is Love).

– Patti Blankenship

 

 

 

What They Said: Trump Protesters And Trump Supporters

Posted on June 12, 2017

 

Chemical Holocaust: Studies Find Cause Of Ocean Death Not Warming Water But Glyphosate

Posted on June 12, 2017

[Brought to us via Alexandra Gatsis, who finds exceptional material all the time.]

“Coral reefs are largely plant life. Glyphosate is a plant-killer, designed to annihilate any life it comes in contact with that isn’t protected by genetic modification. Run-off from agricultural spraying of this weed killer goes into our rivers and is dumped into the ocean in less than 40 days. It maintains roughly 80% of its killing capacity.

The researchers found the most notable phytoplankton declines in waters near both poles, in the tropics, as well as in the open ocean. So basically, everywhere. Conventional science tells us that phytoplankton die-off is due to warmer waters from climate change. Then one has to ask oneself: Why is the die-off also occurring in the colder waters at the Arctic poles? Apparently temperature is not the determining factor, so there goes the global warming explanation.”

 

Studies Link Monsanto’s Glyphosate to Ocean Death

 

Incredibly Adam

Posted on June 12, 2017

Intrepid reporter Gordon Ramsey explores Adam-ness.

 

Delta, Bank Of America Pull Sponsorship Of New York’s Public Theater After Depiction Of Trump Look-Alike Murdered

Posted on June 12, 2017

 

NEW YORK (AP) — Delta Air Lines and Bank of America have announced that they are pulling their sponsorship of a Manhattan-based theater company’s portrayal of Julius Caesar as a Donald Trump look-alike in a business suit who gets knifed to death on stage.

Atlanta-based Delta released a statement on Sunday saying it was pulling its sponsorship from The Public Theater “effective immediately.”

“No matter what your political stance may be, the graphic staging of Julius Caesar at this summer’s Free Shakespeare in the Park does not reflect Delta Air Lines’ values,” the statement said. “Their artistic and creative direction crossed the line on the standards of good taste.”

Later Sunday night, Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America said it was withdrawing its funding for the production.

“The Public Theater chose to present Julius Caesar in such a way that was intended to provoke and offend,” the bank said in a tweet. “Had this intention been made known to us, we would have decided not to sponsor it.”

Performances at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater began in late May, just days before comedian Kathy Griffin was widely condemned for posing for a photograph in which she gripped a bloodied rendering of Trump’s head.

Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director who also directed the play, said earlier in a statement that “anyone seeing our production of ‘Julius Caesar’ will realize it in no way advocates violence towards anyone.”

Messages seeking comment from The Public Theater weren’t immediately returned.

Earlier Sunday, Donald Trump Jr. retweeted a Fox News story about the play and wrote, “I wonder how much of this ‘art’ is funded by taxpayers? Serious question, when does ‘art’ become political speech & does that change things?”

[From Yahoo News: Full Story here:]

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/delta-ends-sponsorship-over-trump-002912904.html

 

[NOTE TO BOA AND DELTA: THANK YOU! CONSIDER RE-ROUTING FUNDING TO INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM SITES THAT NEVER DO ANYTHING LIKE THIS AND REALLY NEED SPONSORSHIP!]

 

The Auric And Spiritual Effects Of Hatred

Posted on June 12, 2017

 

Priestess Of Hate: Who Is Linda Sarsour?

Posted on June 11, 2017

Here’s a little background on Linda Sarsour, who now has an unexpected new opponent–rock musician Courtney Love.

This clip zooms past the most infamous Sarsour tweet, which I find more breathtaking every time I read it. Pause and dwell on the words:

“I wish I could take their vaginas away–they don’t deserve to be women.”

That is such a deeply disturbing sentiment–nobody alive could call it anything but pure psychopathy.

(I said “alive.”)

The present day “women’s movement,” and “women’s marches,” have been hijacked by a totalitarian, intolerant, pro-Sharia, woman hating cult leader: Linda Sarsour.

But that is not my only reason for avoiding those marches like the black plague. Seeing liberal men in those absurd knitted pink cat-ear hats, knowing all that I know about them, from direct experience–that would be the end of me. I could not continue.

Has there ever been a more grotesque perversion of a liberty movement that this? Contemporary mass-feminism…punishes and attacks as “Islamophobic” any and all who would seek to address the murder of women in the name of Sharia law, all over the world.

I suppose it is on par with a proletarian worker’s revolution that mass murdered farmers and peasants.

I would live my life over as a brain scientist if I could have access to Radical Leftists Brains, and see what they contain. Is there a little blocked brain passage where perception and emotion make a U-turn and go the wrong way all of a sudden, in this brain? Is there a way to quantify empathy? A way to diminish psychopathic narcissism, or block the dopamine rushes of attacking people declared as morally unfit? Racist, Islamophobic, etc?

Everybody is getting high on this garbage. We should approach hate as an addiction. A cheap crack pipe. These frauds are drug dealers and cult leaders, offering nothing but a dead end life of Godforsaken hatred of our fellow man, while the real killers are aided and abetted.

 

 

Why Don’t Feminists Fight For Muslim Women?

Posted on June 11, 2017

 

If This Is The COMMERCIAL, Imagine The Reality

Posted on June 10, 2017

We live in a society that has gone utterly psychotic. The pharmaceutical industry was the driving force beneath the inversion of “life” and “death.” Listen to the words, starting around 0:19. Even by the standards of shocking pharmaceutical death cult propaganda, this one is arresting.

 

Bombshells: Most Critical Clips From Comey Senate Hearing

Posted on June 8, 2017

Comey Chronicles: Bombshell Clips From Senate Hearing

 

Gavin McInnes In Hilarious Conversation With Alex Jones Post Comey Testimony

Posted on June 8, 2017

“That’s what all of journalism is today. It’s bitter, angry nerds who should be hanging from a basketball hoop from the waistband of their underwear.”

 

Proof In The Patent: Hijacking Nervous System, Manipulating Human Emotions, By Remote

Posted on June 8, 2017

“Electric field pulses capable of exciting a sensory resonance can be generated by small insulated electrodes packed flat in the space of a credit card.”

 

Loretta Lynch Bombshell: Comey Pressured To Mislead Public

Posted on June 8, 2017

Lynch Successfully Pressured Comey To Mislead Public Using Clinton Campaign’s ‘Inaccurate’ Talking Points

 

 

Here is a website that brings many simultaneous breaking stories up to date:

 

https://www.citizenfreepress.com

 

 

I’ll post a few Tweets along the way:

1. Comey confirmed my view that under the constitution the Pres w/d have the authority to order FBI Director to stop investigating Flynn

— Alan Dershowitz (@AlanDersh) June 8, 2017

 

 

#ComeyDay
– called NY Times fake news
– admitted he had friends leak memos to press
– confessed that AG Lynch obstructed justice

???

— Mike Cernovich ?? (@Cernovich) June 8, 2017

 

 

Carter And Solomon: Comey Sued By Former Intelligence Contractor For Breach Bigger Than Snowden, Charges FBI Knew Americans Were Being Spied On

Posted on June 7, 2017

“A former U.S. intelligence contractor tells Circa he walked away with more than 600 million classified documents on 47 hard drives from the National Security Agency and the CIA, a haul potentially larger than Edward Snowden’s now infamous breach.

And now he is suing former FBI Director James Comey and other government figures, alleging the bureau has covered up evidence he provided them showing widespread spying on Americans that violated civil liberties.”
***

“They’re doing this domestic surveillance on Americans, running a project on U.S. soil,” Montgomery alleged. He did not disclose the classified name of the project but said he revealed all aspects of the project during his interview with the FBI.

“Can you imagine what someone can do with the information they were collecting on Americans, can you imagine that kind of power?”

Officials with the FBI and CIA declined to comment due to current and pending litigation.

 

http://circa.com/politics/accountability/james-comey-sued-by-intelligence-contractor-dennis-montgomery-over-spying-on-americans

Critics Lambast The Intercept For “Burning” Source, As Russia Interference Theories Revive And Die At Same Time: New NSA Leaker 25 Year Old Reality Leigh Winner Who Faces Prison Supported Sanders, Despised Trump

Posted on June 6, 2017

Tweets reveal warring factions inside wild world of whistleblowers, leakers, radical journalists, and the US Government.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/wikileaks-declares-war-on-the-intercept?via=newsletter&source=DDAfternoon

Russia election disruption theories revived.

“The NSA analysis does not draw conclusions about whether the interference had any effect on the election’s outcome and concedes that much remains unknown about the extent of the hackers’ accomplishments. However, the report raises the possibility that Russian hacking may have breached at least some elements of the voting system, with disconcertingly uncertain results.”

The Intercept’s article here.

Basic background story of Winner’s arrest here:

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-feds-found-reality-winner-nsa-leak-intercept-2017-6

Former CIA officer @JohnKiriakou, imprisoned for exposing CIA torture, states Intercept reporter burned him too https://t.co/0gEkeKT8r9

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 6, 2017

 

.@theintercept should be ashamed of itself. Matthew Cole burns yet another source. It makes your entire organization untrustworthy.

— John Kiriakou (@JohnKiriakou) June 6, 2017

 

Winner case is 2nd time Matt Cole was involved in a story where the source ended up prosecuted for Espionage
1st was my client @JohnKiriakou

— unR̶A̶D̶A̶C̶K̶ted (@JesselynRadack) June 6, 2017

 

 

“Winner faces 10 years in a federal prison if convicted. The charge, “gathering, transmitting or losing defense information” is contained under Chapter 37 of federal law: espionage and censorship. The law went into effect as of February 1, 2010.

The prosecution of Winner is being handled by Julie A. Edelstein of the Department of Justice’s National Security Divisions Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, a news release by the agency said.

However, what is most perplexing is that her anti-Trump tirades and her anti-government, liberal leanings were all part of the public record at the time she was hired as a NSA contractor for Pluribus in February. How she succeeded in receiving top secret level clearance with such a highly politicized public record remains a mystery.”

–Zero Hedge

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-05/nsa-leaker-called-trump-piece-shit-fan-bernie-sanders

This part of our Russia hacking story is very important for people to understand as they analyze the document: https://t.co/78Cdwb1jsP pic.twitter.com/wX5ACzGg6C

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) June 5, 2017

 

Note: I don’t care much for The Intercept. I can’t say why, other than that it feels mirthless and tediously accusatory.

A Morning Prayer Declaring Favor Over Your Life

Posted on June 6, 2017

I really like this Bill Winston prayer, and send it out not as Christian propaganda but to share the power of the spoken word to bless our day.

 

(What if I said, Brother S., that the “faith” that “faith” can awaken, is in the healing of past wounds, by speaking favor over our lives, the way we wished it had been done by our parents? Like what George Jacobs was talking about.)

The Lord’s prayer is so good because each time you say it your soul is reminded to be forgiven our trespasses as we “forgive those who trespass upon us.”

That said, I think 99.99% of “forgiveness” lies instead in clarification, deeper mutual hearing. I am afraid of people who talk more than they listen, because not having heard (perceived) lies at the root of most distortion/evil that later develops. Ahriman (according to Rudolf Steiner’s prediction) came through electromagnetism, with his “perfectly cold nature,” in 1998. Certainly the battle of good and evil is played out through emerging technologies.

We heard one another lucidly when we had landline telephones, like this beauty, the Model 500, designed by Henry Dreyfuss, based on the measurement of 2,000 human faces.

“Smart phones,” are not shaped in any kind of communion with the human head. They aren’t “telephones,” and they aren’t designed to serve the ear. Jackie Mason had the great riff on the cell phone misery: “Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? Hello? I just called to say I can’t hear you.”

You can call it “opposition,” if “evil,” seems too old fashioned.

Opposition loves interference, making sure people can’t really reach one another, even when they are supposedly talking. I don’t like “multi-tasking,” and I don’t like when people call me when they are walking their dog. Why? Because I’d rather they commune with and pay attention to the dog during that time.

Cell phones, like CDs before them, mitigate resonance. Vinyl records have made an enormous comeback–maybe next, Dreyfuss dial phones. I even like the idea of how long it would take to dial a number, and indeed, I remember it. This vanquished act would speak to our patience, rather than, as all things now do, our impatience.

In Sweden in the late 70s, we had a red Cobra phone. I don’t like Cobra phones, they’re clumsy and almost infuriating. In Sweden you answered your home phone by stating your phone number. I still remember by best friend Anneli’s number: 139732. “Tretton-nittio-sju-tretti-två?”

“You’ve got a wandering mind, don’t you?” Hunter S. Thompson once said, on my answering machine.

I wish I could have one or two thoughts at a time instead of 25.

Marshall Rosenberg said all bad behavior is really unmet needs on a “suicidal” crossing. Nobody “trespasses,” other than when they are in pain. And pain, in turn, is caused by unmet needs refusing to declare themselves.

Marshall always said it, over and over, the simple punctuation of all his great teachings in non-violent communication:

“Say the need.”

 

Grassley Bombshell: Evidence Shows Hillary Clinton Blocked Investigation Into CGI Donor, Threatened Bangladesh Prime Minister’s Son With IRS Audit

Posted on June 5, 2017

VIA ELECTRONIC TRANSMISSION

The Honorable Rex W. Tillerson Secretary
U.S. Department of State Washington, D.C. 20520

Dear Secretary Tillerson:

June 1, 2017

Recent news reports detail that Secretary Clinton and her staff allegedly pressured the government of Bangladesh, including its Prime Minister, Sheik Hasina, to terminate a corruption investigation into a Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) donor, Dr. Muhammad Yunus.1 Reports also indicate that State Department officials threatened the Prime Minister’s son, Sajeeb Wazed, with an IRS audit if he did not attempt to get his mother to terminate the investigation.2 On May 11, 2017, Prime Minister Hasina confirmed that Mrs. Clinton called her office in March of 2011 and demanded that Yunus be restored to his position of chairman of the Grameen Bank.3 This new evidence of pay-to-play and special treatment reinforces the appearance that donations to the Clinton Foundation resulted in favorable treatment by Secretary Clinton’s State Department.4

As I wrote in my August 2016 letter to Department of Justice, federal law requires that executive branch employees be disqualified from matters that have a direct and predictable effect on the employee’s own financial interests or the financial interests of those persons or organizations with which the employee is affiliated, such as those of a spouse, unless the employee first obtains an individual waiver or a regulatory exemption applies.5 Once again, Secretary Clinton’s actions have raised reasonable suspicions that she violated these rules and undermined the public’s confidence in the integrity of the State Department.

Full letter here:

https://www.grassley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/constituents/2017-06-01%20CEG%20to%20State%20%28HRC%20Muhammad%20Yunus%29.pdf

Does Sadiq Khan Have Ties To Extremist Groups, And Is That Why He Says Such Atonal Things In Wake Of U.K. Carnage?

Posted on June 5, 2017

“Dear London, fire your current mayor before he starts giving everyone crap about Islamophobia. Hire someone who won’t ever do that again.”

–Stephen Ericson,
(FB)
“In 2016, Prime Minister David Cameron was widely criticized in the UK when he claimed that London mayor Sadiq Khan had ties to the terror group ISIS. An investigation by Disobedient Media has determined that Khan has ties not just to organizations associated with ISIS, but also groups such as Hamas, Al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. During his time as mayor, London has seen an increase in terror incidents with concerning indications that terror groups wish to stage a major attack on the City of London. Rather than focusing on combatting terror, Khan has used his forum to tell Londoners as well as citizens in other parts of Europe and the United States that the West must learn to live with terrorism as a part of daily life. Khan’s extreme flirtation with radical Islamic extremism raises serious questions about his commitment to fighting a wave of extremist fueled terrorism that only continues to spread after a number of attacks and police operations in London and other areas of the UK.”

I. Khan Has Been Affiliated With Organizations Tied To Hamas, Al-Qaeda, Al Nusra, ISIS And The Muslim Brotherhood
A. Khan’s Relationship To Figures Tied To Hamas And The Muslim Brotherhood

Full Article:

London Mayor’s Ties To Extremism Call Commitment To Fighting Terror Into Question

 

Start Your Day With Lynn Margulis, Ponder Translucent Clams, Symbiogenesis, Bacterial Origins, And [UH OH,] Might We Be Mammalian Weeds?

Posted on June 3, 2017

“Most clams live in deep, fairly dark waters. Among one group of clams is a species whose ancestors ingested algae—a typical food—but failed to digest them and kept the algae under their shells. The shell, with time, became translucent, allowing sunlight in. The clams fed off their captive algae and their habitat expanded into sunlit waters. So there’s a discontinuity between the dark-dwelling, food-gathering ancestor and the descendants that feed themselves photosynthetically. ”

–Lynn Margulis

 

“Viewing life as one giant network of social connections has set Margulis against the mainstream in other high-profile ways as well. She disputes the current medical understanding of AIDS and considers every kind of life to be “conscious” in a sense.” *

–Dick Teresi

Lynn Margulis, Puffers Pond, 2010
Photo by Celia Farber

“The way I think about the whole world is that it’s like a pointillist painting. You get far away and it looks like Seurat’s famous painting of people in the park (jpg). Look closely: The points are living bodies—different distributions of bacteria. The living world thrived long before the origin of nucleated organisms [the eukaryotic cells, which have genetic material enclosed in well-defined membranes]. There were no animals, no plants, no fungi. It was an all-bacterial world—bacteria that have become very good at finding specialized niches. Symbiogenesis recognizes that every visible life-form is a combination or community of bacteria.”

–Lynn Margulis

Lynn Margulis with “jellyball,” Puffers Pond, Amherst, June 2011

Crescendo finale of iconic interview here:

 

Your perspective is rather humbling.

The species of some of the protoctists are 542 million years old. Mammal species have a mean lifetime in the fossil record of about 3 million years. And humans? You know what the index fossil of Homo sapiens in the recent fossil record is going to be? 
The squashed remains of the automobile. There will be a layer in the fossil record where you’re going to know people were here because of the automobiles. It will be a very thin layer.

Do we overrate ourselves as a species?
Yes, but we can’t help it. Look, there are nearly 7,000 million people on earth today and there are 10,000 chimps, and the numbers are getting fewer every day because we’re destroying their habitat. Reg Morrison, who wrote a wonderful book called The Spirit in the Gene, says that although we’re 99 percent genetically in common with chimps, that 1 percent makes a huge difference. Why? Because it makes us believe that we’re the best on earth. But there is lots of evidence that we are “mammalian weeds.” Like many mammals, we overgrow our habitats and that leads to poverty, misery, and wars.

Why do you have a reputation as a heretic?
Anyone who is overtly critical of the foundations of his science is persona non grata. I am critical of evolutionary biology that is based on population genetics. I call it zoocentrism. Zoologists are taught that life starts with animals, and they block out four-fifths of the information in biology [by ignoring the other four major groups of life] and all of the information in geology.

You have attacked population genetics—the foundation of much current evolutionary research—as “numerology.” What do you mean by that term?
When evolutionary biologists use computer modeling to find out how many mutations you need to get from one species to another, it’s not mathematics—it’s numerology. They are limiting the field of study to something that’s manageable and ignoring what’s most important. They tend to know nothing about atmospheric chemistry and the influence it has on the organisms or the influence that the organisms have on the chemistry. They know nothing about biological systems like physiology, ecology, and biochemistry. Darwin was saying that changes accumulate through time, but population geneticists are describing mixtures that are temporary. Whatever is brought together by sex is broken up in the next generation by the same process. Evolutionary biology has been taken over by population geneticists. They are reductionists ad absurdum. 
Population geneticist Richard Lewontin gave a talk here at UMass Amherst about six years ago, and he mathematized all of it—changes in the population, random mutation, sexual selection, cost and benefit. At the end of his talk he said, “You know, we’ve tried to test these ideas in the field and the lab, and there are really no measurements that match the quantities I’ve told you about.” This just appalled me. So I said, “Richard Lewontin, you are a great lecturer to have the courage to say it’s gotten you nowhere. But then why do you continue to do this work?” And he looked around and said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do, and if I don’t do it I won’t get my grant money.” So he’s an honest man, and that’s an honest answer.

Do you ever get tired of being called controversial?

I don’t consider my ideas controversial. I consider them right.

Lynn Margulis, Discover Magazine

Read Dick Teresi’s terrific interview here.

 

[*Ed: Look closely at the word conscious. This one word obviates the HIV/AIDS theory.]

 

What We Don’t Understand About The Paris Climate Accord

Posted on June 3, 2017

A Very Weird Sentence In The New York Times, in a strangely euphemistic “Q&A” about the Paris Climate Accord, which I turned to to get the basic facts straight:

“China vowed that its emissions would peak around 2030 and that it would get about 20 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources by then. India would continue to reduce its carbon intensity, or CO2 output per unit of economic activity, in line with historical levels.”

Also this bizarre graph:

“Unlike its predecessor treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris deal was intended to be nonbinding, so that countries could tailor their climate plans to their domestic situations and alter them as circumstances changed. There are no penalties for falling short of declared targets. The hope was that, through peer pressure and diplomacy, these policies would be strengthened over time.”

“…tailor their climate plans to their domestic situations and alter them as circumstances changed?”

Why does US media treat the world’s biggest polluters, or “emitters,” China and India, with such deference, and why does this deal allow them to increase emissions until…2030?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/climate/qa-the-paris-climate-accord.html?_r=0
Two unmissable discussions about the Paris Climate Accord, last night and tonight, on Tucker Carlson’s show. Tucker’s show is more sharply observed, written, and produced than anything I know of on television. His face may be God’s way of luring his prey into that studio, as he looks so harmless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppQoekqSLiM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHC4K8Iak_A

Full Kathy Griffin Press Conference: Accuses Trump’s Whole Family Of Bullying Her When They React Negatively To Decapitation Video

Posted on June 2, 2017

Or…”How To Virtue Signal While Expressing Homicidal Decapitation Fantasies: By Kathy Griffin.”

I got through 14 minutes of this, which means I beat my friend Sal by 13 minutes. If you need a refresher course on the baroque multi-directional flying carpet narcissism of the PC trash crowd, you have it here. The Truth Barrier takes the position that to should not come as a shock when Americans recoil over a broadcast image of their President’s blood-soaked head, especially in the age of ISIS, and the very real beheadings taking place. I GET that she was creating a response to Trump’s bizarre comment about blood pouring out of Megan Kelly’s eyes and “wherever,”  (which I had forgotten, and which was probably among the strangest things Trump ever said.) Re-wrapping your own atrocious conduct in justifications, eye rolling, whining, as this lawyer is doing so inelegantly, is in addition to be foul, also an enormous PR mistake.

Griffin is unintelligent enough to partake in “The AIDS Walk,” so why would I hope she had heard of ISIS, or could anticipate that this decapitation video would traumatize the nation. And “allegedly” (bitch, lawyer) Barron Trump.

I think how back-fiery this is, how tone deaf to this American moment, is what is hardest to take about it. The fact that they think this was the way to go, rather than a mea culpa, and partaking in healing the nation of hate, which would have saved Griffin’s career.

Why must American women be so grotesque, in order to be in the popular imagination? Unconsciously, what the sadomasochistic  male dominated media does is to compel women to self-immolate. Women being moronic and self destructive is good for business.

One last thing: Lisa Bloom’s comment suggesting all President Trump does is tweet foolishness, destroys her fleet on the tarmac. It’s absurd. As it is absurd, as much as I detest hunting, to suggest Trump’s son had to “take time away from killing animals” to attack Griffin.

God how I hate distortion and exaggeration. These, forgive me, feminine qualities of manipulating everything until you have no moral code or responsibility, rather, you are the victim.

In a PC inverted world, you can even be astonished anybody would be upset by a bloodied head of the President raised slowly, executioner style–I don’t know, not my forte.

Why can’t women, much less PC progressives, just say “I’m sorry, I was wrong, ” and leave it at that?

Narcissists always make the victim pay, for the crack in the self adoring mirror.

Still, Griffin’s attorney is so awful and humorless that it endears me to her, by comparison.

Something is wrong with her jaw and mouth. She does need to drink water, as she says. More water. God this is sad.

I would worry about her, if I were her mother or close friend. Right now, she is not in control of her own mind, but is casting about for “love” inside a system of codified hate, in which she took a wrong turn and tripped a wire she believed was OK. She reminds me of a love-starved dog. All this weepy flinging oneself onto LGBT, minorities, people with “AIDS,” etc–all part of the pathology of love famine in the PC world. They can’t have love, or give it, so they instead are forced to use all these bankrupt pieties as tiny straws with which to suck in self worth.

 

Ohio Attorney General Sues 5 Pharmaceutical Companies With Lawsuit Over Opiate Catastrophe, Charging They Lied About Safety, To Get Millions Addicted

Posted on June 2, 2017

Attorney General DeWine Files Lawsuit Against Opioid Manufacturers for Fraudulent Marketing; Fueling Opioid Epidemic

5/31/2017
(COLUMBUS, Ohio)—Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine today filed a lawsuit against five leading prescription opioid manufacturers and their related companies in Ross County Court of Common Pleas. The lawsuit alleges that the drug companies engaged in fraudulent marketing regarding the risks and benefits of prescription opioids which fueled Ohio’s opioid epidemic.

“We believe the evidence will also show that these companies got thousands and thousands of Ohioans — our friends, our family members, our co-workers, our kids — addicted to opioid pain medications, which has all too often led to use of the cheaper alternatives of heroin and synthetic opioids. These drug manufacturers led prescribers to believe that opioids were not addictive, that addiction was an easy thing to overcome, or that addiction could actually be treated by taking even more opioids” said Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine.

“They knew they were wrong, but they did it anyway — and they continue to do it. Despite all evidence to the contrary about the addictive nature of these pain medications, they are doing precious little to take responsibility for their actions and to tell the public the truth.”

The five manufacturers which are listed as defendants include:
Purdue Pharma, which sold OxyContin, MS Contin, Dilaudid, Butrans, Hyslingla, and Targiniq
Endo Health Solutions, which sold Percocet, Percodan, Opana, and Zydone
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and its subsidiary Cephalon, which sold Actiq and Fentora
Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals, which sold Duragesic and Nucynta
Allergan, which sold Kadian, Norco, and several generic opioids.”

Read more here.

This is a huge story.

I urge everybody to read the PDF of this historic lawsuit, and spread this news far and wide.

Ohio’s lawsuit marks a potentially revolutionary change in America’s willingness to be openly mass murdered by psychopathic, greedy pharmaceutical companies.

Mike DeWine is the real Bernie Sanders, in action, not rhetoric.

Let’s see if Sanders even mentions this suit in the coming days, when weather conditions are so perfect for anti-Trump grandstanding about the Paris Climate Accord (handled brilliantly by Tucker Carlson, here.)

From the lawsuit:

“It is hardly necessary to say – in this County or this State – that Ohio is now awash in opioids and engulfed in a public health crisis the likes of which have been seen before. In 2012, the total number of opioid doses prescribed to Ohio patients soared to 793 million – enough to supply every man, woman and child in the state with 68 pills each.3 In 2016 alone, 2.3 million Ohio patients – roughly 20% of the state’s population – were prescribed an opioid drug.4 The Ohio Automated RxReporting System (“OARRS”), the computer system that tracks how drugs are prescribed and dispensed, shows that in 2015, 1,663,614 opioid pills, or 182.2 per patient or 21.3 per capita, were dispensed in Ross County alone.

10. The result of Ohio’s opioid crisis has been catastrophic. Opioids have become the main source of unintentional drug overdose in the state and, due to the vast supply of opioids, the number of annual deaths attributable to unintentional drug overdoses has rapidly increased in recent years.

2016 saw a thirty-six (36%) increase in unintentional fatal overdoses in the State of Ohio from the previous year, when Ohio led the nation in the total number of fatal overdoses.”

Nicky Gumbel: Christian Faith By Way Of A Secular Jewish Intellectual Upbringing

Posted on May 31, 2017

What kind of Christian lecturer quotes Freddie Mercury, C.S. Lewis, The Gospels, and…Alice Cooper?

I am very grateful to my Facebook friend Safaa Hakim for sending me to Nicky Gumbel today. Stunned, I have had a hard time doing anything except listening to his videos, one after the other. I neglected to even eat anything until it was early evening and I got dizzy from from hunger. He’s honest, real, funny, “modern,” and …Jewish! And now: Christian. This progression makes perfect sense (finally) to me. I know I am excitable and impressionable; I know I have alienated some Truth Barrier readers with my Christian searchings, mostly just confused mutterings, so far. But I have come to think of confusion as a great medium. A train.

Gumbel also seems to have been raised, like so  many of us, on the churches of rock and roll, pop culture, and barren secular sophistication.   I personally relate to him very much. Through his resistances, you’re able to feel spoken to, as yourself–and you recognize the spiritual stalled-out train you have been on.  You want to get off, but you don’t know what to do. Finally, you begin to really listen. No longer does Christianity feel like an inside job, a club that would never have you, or something too esoteric for you to grasp.

I don’t want to sit around for the rest of my life trying to figure out how awful Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump may be. Or prove it. That’s my life? I’m a slave? I swallow nothing but ugly gossip and then I die.

No.

I have come to wonder if Donald Trump is not quasi-Luciferian, in the sense that cultural hatred of him has forced our hand.

Yesterday: Comedian Kathy Griffin held up a decapitated Trump head. Last night she apologized, after considerable public disgust, and today CNN fired her from an upcoming TV event. Before it was over, Chelsea Clinton The Church of Satan (!) had denounced what she did, on Twitter, the modern electronic anti-humanity Church, loaded with millions of “bots” who attack people like swarms of hornets.

All she was doing was trying to impress her masters, who are the ones who got the froth going in the first place–they run it 24/7, and they do it for ratings.

I think Griffin will, at the end of it all, have served light, not darkness, by being willing to, as she said, “go too far,” and “cross a line.” I think this sent many Americans into a new kind of reflection and prayer today.

 

This one goes out to my son, Jeremy, on his 23rd birthday, today.

I thanked God for him today, in front of a Mary statue I sometimes pray at. But it was the first time in 23 years I even thought to give thanks to God, for the miracle of my own son. Something was clouding my soul: Modernity and an impoverished imagination. Before anything else is said: For me, being a beginner Christian is being a beginner at saying thank you.

 

 

 

 

The Destruction Of Individuality And Rise Of Institutional Hate On American College Campuses: Who Is Controlling Their Minds And With Which Tools?

Posted on May 31, 2017

A bracing, important discussion between Tucker Carlson and Bret Hume. Hume says this era is more stifling than the (supposedly repressive) 1950s in America.

 

http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/05/30/tucker-carlson-democrat-diversity-agenda-everywhere-against-donald-trump-violence

Looking Up The Church Of Satan’s 11 Rules And Being Surprised

Posted on May 31, 2017
“The person who takes every opportunity to “pick on” others is often mistakenly called “sadistic”. In reality, this person is a misdirected masochist who is working towards his own destruction. The reason a person viciously strikes out against you is because they are afraid of you or what you represent, or are resentful of your happiness. They are weak, insecure, and on extremely shaky ground when you throw your curse, and they make ideal human sacrifices.”

–Anton LaVey

 

So I got to reading up a bit, after discussing neo-Satanism with my father, who interviewed Anton LaVey back in the day, and found him to be a mere showman, certainly was not rattled by him. My father has always had a simple policy that NO guest is off limits. So about LaVey… Barry recalled one sequence, decades later. “I asked him to tell me what an act of Satanism is,” he said. (Great question!) LaVey replied that an initiation would be: To enter a NYC subway at a complex station with many tunnels, naked under a coat, and open the coat, facing an empty passage.

“Flash to no people?” I said.

“Yes.”

Good Lord, bring back the Satanists of the good old days!

No but seriously, I looked it up, read some of his quotes. It was not as I expected.

http://www.churchofsatan.com/eleven-rules-of-earth.php

 

This is Satanism? A bit unsettling that one would agree with most of this. Especially the mating signal law and the lousy houseguest law.

LaVey railed against stupidity and declared it a Satanists’s number one sin. So that would cancel out mainstream media as Satanists. I found him difficult to take seriously as ‘evil’ and was astonished (and pleased) that he insisted children and animals should never be hurt, but that if houseguests are rude they should be “destroyed.” I actually agree with that, as a lifelong victim of terrible houseguests. But I always, as recently as a few weeks ago, remain polite about horrible houseguests, and simply unable to reveal what they have done, because you would never believe me, nor would you believe where the worst were from.

 

If I had discovered The Eleven Rules of Satanism before they ever plagued me with their total lack of western hospitality consciousness, I would have been better able to protect myself.

I try to forgive and have compassion. It works for up to 11 seconds when I really focus.

You know what–I would like to start a Church too and declare my own list of sins. LaVey said “stupidity” was top of the list of Church of Satan sins. I would say stinginess. But I agree with him that it’s a pity stupidity is not painful.

I think I had better quit figuring out points of agreement between myself and The Church of Satan, and go to bed.

 

 

A Very Naomi Klein Moment: Pepsi Commercial Exposes The Bankruptcy Of Soros Funded SJW Mass Mind Control Movement

Posted on May 30, 2017

I missed this when it happened.

Wow this family is breathtakingly awful. Beautiful and immeasurably stupid. But in some ways, their awfulness lights up the darkened world by being too clueless to conceal its true nature, or even try.

We all express what we are, whether we wish to or not, at all times. So too: “Social Justice Warriors.”

 

Why Leftists Submit To Terror: Gad Saad In Conversation With Paul Joseph Watson

Posted on May 30, 2017

 

The Truth About Popular Culture

Posted on May 30, 2017

Is anybody else, as I am, thinking: This can’t be happening?

How does Paul Joseph Watson stay in one piece? This is now new, but was brought to my attention for a second time and I watched it all the way through. There are no longer any words, really, that so justice to the Satanic storm we are in. What’s the answer? Is there one?

Say The Lord’s Prayer? Ignore? What?

 

What They Said: Derek Prince

Posted on May 28, 2017


“Let me give you another example of how rejection can occur at a very young age and of the spiritual impact it can have on a child. Many years ago I was conducting services at a church in Miami. While visiting one of the parishioners at home a few
nights earlier, I had done something I rarely do. I said to her, “Sister, if I’m correct, you have the spirit of death in you.”
She had every reason to be happy, but she never was. She had a good husband and children, yet she hardly ever smiled or looked happy. She was like a person in continual mourning. Although I very rarely make that kind of statement to anybody,
I felt I had to say something to her that night.
I said, “I’m preaching on Friday night in Miami. If you come, I’ll pray for you.”
At the beginning of the meeting I noticed her sitting on the front row. Once again, I did something I do not usually do. At a certain point in the service, I walked over to her and said, “You spirit of death, in the name of Jesus, I command you to answer me now. When did you enter this woman?”
And the spirit, not the woman, answered very clearly, “When she was two years old.”
I said, “How did you get in?”
Again it was the spirit that answered, “Oh, she felt rejected; she felt unwanted; she felt lonely.”
Later that evening, the woman was delivered from the spirit of death, but for several days that incident kept coming back to my mind. It gave me a new understanding of the effect that rejection can have on a person’s life. It is not merely evil in itself, but it also opens the door for various other negative, destructive forces to move in and gradually take over a person’s life. Rejection truly is a root from which much that is harmful can grow.”

 

From: God’s Remedy for Rejection,

Derek Prince

Mass Media Fits Description Of Delusional Narcissists

Posted on May 27, 2017

Many of us feel that the mass media in the present day manifestation is not unlike a psychopathic narcissist that sees all of us as extensions of its enraged vision, with which me must comply, or be destroyed. When you encounter this is a person, you can leave.

How do we protect ourselves from the destruction this malignant “being” intends for us all? I say: Expression and more expression, is the only answer. Keep expressing what YOU think. What YOU think is found in your own thought and voices, and every time I encounter them here, I know we are succeeding, just in being our own collection of sea-glass on a beach.

[As for so called trolls– I make exceptions to comments that feel malignant and abusive. Those don’t count as freedom to express.]

 

From Quora.com

 

Are narcissists delusional and mentally unstable?

Lisa Rochwarg
Answered May 20
“I would say that a person whose rage is barely under control, whose original personality has been obliterated, who regards the slightest autonomy in others as a dire threat to his control, who treats his intimates like dogs, who literally gets high off another’s pain, who becomes depressed and down by the happiness of another, who makes a point of betrayal, who entraps and isolates, who falsely accuses, who plays for a sympathy that he knows really belongs to another, who wants leadership but cannot responsibly handle it, and who manipulates every one around him to gang up on his victim is indeed unstable and much, much more.

As for delusional—narcissists only thrive when surrounded by an entourage of flying monkeys, sycophants, dupes and suck-up wannabes. They’re the buffer between him and reality—the narcissist’s bubble—to keep reality at bay and the flimsy ego intact.

Narcissists are utterly impossible, and sometimes, they’re much worse. Ira Einhorn is one famous example of “much worse.”

John Pilger: Today, False Symbolism Is All. “Identity” Is All

Posted on May 27, 2017

“One of the persistent strands in U.S. political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. This was given expression and reinforced during the two terms of Barack Obama. “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” said Obama, who expanded the United States’ favorite military pastime: bombing and death squads (“special operations”) as no other president has done since the Cold War.
According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 alone Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people on earth, in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.

Every Tuesday — reported the New York Times — he personally selected those who would be murdered by mostly hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the “terrorist target.” A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones killed 4,700 people. “Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that,” he said, “but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.”

Like the fascism of the 1930s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome, thanks to an omnipresent media whose description now fits that of the Nuremberg prosecutor: “Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically … In the propaganda system … it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”

Take the catastrophe in Libya. In 2011, Obama said Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew … that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

This was the known lie of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. It became the media story and NATO — led by Obama and Hillary Clinton — launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and UNICEF reported that “most (of the children killed) were under the age of ten.”

 

“Today, false symbolism is all. “Identity” is all. In 2016, Hillary Clinton stigmatized millions of voters as “a basket of deplorables, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.” Her abuse was handed out at an LGBTQ rally as part of her cynical campaign to win over people of color by abusing a white mostly working-class majority. Divide and rule, this is called; or identity politics in which race and gender conceal class, and allow the waging of class war. Trump understood this.

“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident poet Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”

 

This is the Call of Obama. It is not unlike a dog whistle: inaudible to most, irresistible to the besotted and boneheaded, especially “liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics,” as Luciana Bohne put it. “When Obama walks into a room,” gushed George Clooney, “you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere.”

William I. Robinson, professor at the University of California, and one of an uncontaminated group of U.S. strategic thinkers who have retained their independence during the years of intellectual dog-whistling since 9/11 wrote this last week, “President Barack Obama … may have done more than anyone to assure Trump’s victory.

–John Pilger, The Issue Is Not Trump, It’s us

Make No Allowances For A Cold Disposition

Posted on May 26, 2017

 

 

Ill will is ill will.

We should oppose ill will.

Not targeted persons, but rather–the spiritual impulse that produces the ill will.

The media is the source of the “emotional plague” that sets humans into psychosis and division.

This is the invasion of Ahriman that R. Steiner predicted accurately: That his (Ahriman’s) nature would invade and take hold, around the year 1998, through electromagnetism.

Steiner called his nature “perfectly cold.”

I am terrified of cold people. Not wrong people–cold people.

EU Countries Impose Strict Vaccination Compliance Ordinances: Freedoms Vanishing Fast

Posted on May 26, 2017

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40056680

 

A question: I know one person in the US is said to have died of measles in the last 20 years, according to the CDC. Does anybody have information about this mother of three who allegedly died of measles in Essen, Germany?

 

 

Who Exactly Are The Individuals Protecting The Rich Family, I Mean Protecting…Oh Dear This Gets Confusing…

Posted on May 26, 2017

(For John Powell. How could you not understand, from this previous post, that the “them” being driven “straight up the wall,” were the DNC and its media? How weird.)

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-22/dnc-affiliates-increase-involvement-seth-rich-case-after-wheeler-claims

To the comment that suggests Seth Rich never existed and is part of a new Psyop–all theories are valid, but that one needs some evidence on its scaffolding before it can, never mind must be considered seriously.

Meanwhile, Twitter has banned some accounts for posting on the story.

 

 

 

The Latest In The Seth Rich Train Wreck: Kim DotCom’s Letter To Seth Rich’s Family

Posted on May 25, 2017

When you can’t add to a story, take it anywhere in your own hands, you can at least sit abstain from noting it’s major developments. Here’s the last major development I have seen, not trying very hard, just taking things off the windshield.

I don’t have a good feeling about this.

Mommie Dearest media is saying anybody who covers this deserves a “place in hell.” I’ve also heard worse things that I can’t repeat.

 

 

This story really drives them straight up the wall.

I wonder why.

Media Matters: The New McCarthism Seeking Total Domination Of US Media

Posted on May 24, 2017

“He had more security than a Third World dictator,” one employee said, explaining that Brock’s bodyguards would rarely leave his side, even accompanying him to his home in an affluent Washington neighborhood each night where they “stood post” to protect him. “What movement leader has a detail?” asked someone who saw it.

Extensive interviews with a number of Brock’s current and former colleagues at Media Matters, as well as with leaders from across the spectrum of Democratic politics, reveal an organization roiled by its leader’s volatile and erratic behavior and struggles with mental illness, and an office where Brock’s executive assistant carried a handgun to public events in order to defend his boss from unseen threats.

Yet those same interviews, as well as a detailed organizational planning memo obtained by The Daily Caller, also suggest that Media Matters has to a great extent achieved its central goal of influencing the national media.

Founded by Brock in 2004 as a liberal counterweight to “conservative misinformation” in the press, Media Matters has in less than a decade become a powerful player in Democratic politics. The group operates in regular coordination with the highest levels of the Obama White House, as well as with members of Congress and progressive groups around the country. Brock, who collected over $250,000 in salary from Media Matters in 2010, has himself become a major fundraiser on the left. According to an internal memo obtained by TheDC, Media Matters intends to spend nearly $20 million in 2012 to influence news coverage.

Donors have every reason to expect success, as the group’s effect on many news organizations has already been profound. “We were pretty much writing their prime time,” a former Media Matters employee said of the cable channel MSNBC. “But then virtually all the mainstream media was using our stuff.”

–Tucker Carlson, Vince Coglianese

The Daily Caller


“I would say without any hesitation that he is incapable of recognizing the truth, let alone of telling it,” Christopher Hitchens wrote after reading Brock’s memoir. “The whole book is an exercise in self-love, disguised as an exercise in self-abnegation. How could he, asks the author of himself, have possibly gone on so long in telling lies, smearing reputations and inventing facts? The obvious answer — that he adored the easy money and the cheap fame that this brought him — was more than enough to still his doubts for several years. However, his publisher seems to have required a more high-toned explanation before furnishing him with a fresh tranche of money and renown. And Brock’s new story — that he was taken in by a vast right-wing conspiracy — is just as much of a lie as his earlier ones.”

Quoted in: David Brock, Invasion 4Chan, The Alt-Right & Pizzagate,” by Jasun Horsley

 

Media Matters, a power hungry, fascist and dangerous organization, circles in on its latest kill, boasting today that they have harassed 5 advertisers to abandon Sean Hannity’s show Hannity, due to Hannity’s coverage of Seth Rich’s murder, and Kim Dotcom’s efforts to tell the FBI what he knows.

 

Why can’t an American journalist in a free America investigate a murder, without being hounded out of a job? Does that make you suspicious?

Do you believe that a McCarthist organization that uses sheer bullying and intimidation against all stories they don’t approve of should determine what Americans get to see, read, and listen to?

If you don’t, then stand up in any way you can, against Media Matters–even if it means that, yes, you support Sean Hannity. It’s not “about” Sean Hannity, or Seth Rich. It’s about a free press vs a bully-controlled press. This is the bully. This is the problem.

 

 

Spell Breaking–Daily Beast Article Quotes ISIS Magazine Vowing To Step Up Killing, Including Women, Children, Elderly

Posted on May 24, 2017

This article seems to me to represent a sea change in media: Finally, we are talking about ISIS as they represent themselves, not as PC culture dictates. I had no idea this ISIS  magazine existed–and was apprehensive to even click through to it.

I salute the work of Rita Katz and wonder if I am alone feeling that we have not been “allowed” to look at this kind of reality, to discuss it, to learn its terms–without going through countless filters. NOBODY thinks “all Muslims” are ISIS radicals. So how did that guilt trip ever get started?

 

From Katz’ Daily Beast article:
“The first issue of Rumiyah, released on Sept. 5, 2016, contained an article headlined “The Kafir’s [Unbelievers’] Blood is Halal [Legitimate] for You, so Shed It.”

The article told readers that killing any non-Muslim not protected by covenant “is not sinful, but is rather rewarded with Jannah [Paradise].” After providing what was presented as various religious justifications, the article concluded in part:
Muslims currently living in Dar al-Kufr must be reminded that the blood of the disbelievers is halal, and killing them is a form of worship to Allah, the Lord, King, and God of mankind. This includes the businessman riding to work in a taxicab, the young adults (post-pubescent “children”) engaged in sports activities in the park, and the old man waiting in line to buy a sandwich.”

 

 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/23/isis-isnt-done-targeting-kids-after-manchester-attack

ISIS Captures Marawi, Philippines: Churches On Fire, Non-Muslims Beheaded, As Duterte Declares Martial Law

Posted on May 24, 2017


“I was told my school is being burned to the ground. I was informed the city jail is on fire. I was messaged the local hospital is taken over by these men in black hoods.
Roads were blocked, fire trucks were seized, and everyone is questioned of religion. If you can’t prove you are a Muslim, you are “taken care” of.
I have received a message that my high school principal is taken as hostage. Along with her are many non-Muslims who strive to give education to young minds of Marawi. My sisters’ classmates and their families are on their way to our house; they are running away from the threat of fire and bullets.
Black flags are raised to claim dominion of the city.
Hope is frail as of the moment.”

 

–Reddit

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Western media very muted. BBC avoids the word: “ISIS.”

Here is a Reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Philippines/comments/6ctoij/terrorist_attack_right_now_in_marawi/

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/pictures-isis-takes-control-first-city-philippines/

 

Hashtags:

#PrayForMarawi

#ActionForMarawi

Kim Dot Com Has Made His Statement On Seth Rich: “Panda Advised Me That He Was Working On Voter Analytics Tools…”

Posted on May 23, 2017

“I KNOW THAT SETH RICH WAS INVOLVED IN THE DNC LEAK.

I know this because in late 2014 a person contacted me about helping me to start a branch of the Internet Party in the United States. He called himself Panda. I now know that Panda was Seth Rich.

Panda advised me that he was working on voter analytics tools and other technologies that the Internet Party may find helpful.

I communicated with Panda on a number of topics including corruption and the influence of corporate money in politics….”

 

Full statement here: http://kim.com

In other developments: Conservative periodical World Net Daily has published an article claiming Rod Wheeler has identified who from the DNC tried to stop his investigation into Seth Rich’s murder.

Who Is Kim Dotcom?

Posted on May 22, 2017

What on earth does he plan to tell the world, tomorrow, about his involvement with Seth Rich?

Well, so far, it’s still possible to fish up YouTube videos, wonder out loud, and post them.

Maybe tomorrow the world as we know it will end, who knows?

I did not know who this guy was two days ago. I still don’t, but I at least know what I don’t know, and at least I am not one of these scumbags who thinks most things are “way too crazy” to believe.

So, for what it’s worth, here’s “Kim Dotcom” in his own words.

I am glad to be part of the back row spectator gallery, on this developing story.

 

 

Stefan Molyneux Talks To Charles Ortel

Posted on May 22, 2017

..About the true depth of the cancer in government, what Ortel calls the “uni party cabal.”

“There isn’t a sense in this country…that we’ve actually been making progress for 17 years.

“The mainstream media was gutted by, I would argue, 1999-2002, that time frame–the traditional approach of letting editors sit on top of journalists and, you know, have a long lede time between when a story is conceived and the time it reaches an audience, the notion that the imprimatur of The Washington Post or The New York Times would be enough to know that it’s truth or fiction…that’s all dead.”

 

–Charles Ortel

 

 

Bio: Charles Ortel is a former Wall Street banker, having been a Managing Director at Dillon Read and Newport Value Partners, and private financial investor. In 2007 he became a whistleblower and was instrumental in bringing down General Electric after revealing GE’s fraudulently overvaluing its stock by many billions of dollars to mislead its investors. For the past fifteen months, Charles has been undertaking a thorough review of the financial records and collaborations and networks of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. His analysis investigated the Foundation’s fundraising practices, its allies and associates, its so-called charitable interests, and its political and corporate connections both in Washington and overseas. He received his BA from Yale and an MBA from Harvard Business School. His weekly blog exposing the Clinton Foundation can be found at CharlesOrtel.com.

 

His many interviews on the subject are widely available online. I highly recommend this one, on Progressive Radio Network, PRN:
http://prn.fm/progressive-commentary-hour-05-31-16/

 

 

VAXXED Screenings In Europe And At Cannes Kept Secret To Circumvent Paid Pharmaceutical Saboteurs

Posted on May 22, 2017

“We’ve done secret screenings throughout Europe where we don’t announce the location until the day before because there are organized groups of pro-vaccine folks who will mobilize 10-20 people to call the venue that will threaten the venue or get it to change its mind about screening the film,” says Beth Portello, Cinema Libre CFO and vp marketing and publicity.

Cinema Libre will screen the film at Arcade 1 at 3:30 p.m.

 

Hollywood Reporter story here.

 

 

Julian Assange: “She Decided To Destroy The Libyan State. As A Result She Fueled The European Refugee Crisis. We Published A Lot Of Her Emails On How This Unfolded.”

Posted on May 20, 2017

SPIEGEL: Recently, you have been the focus of fierce criticism from a growing number of politicians and journalists who are linking WikiLeaks to Russian propaganda and disinformation.

Assange: That is all spin. After Hillary Clinton lost the election, she and her campaign manager John Podesta decided to blame it on FBI director James Comey, on Russia and on WikiLeaks.

SPIEGEL: The credibility of Wikileaks depends on it being non-partisan, on not having a hidden political agenda.

Assange: WikiLeaks’ credibility with the public depends on our proven record of accuracy. In 10 years, we have published over 10 million documents. Not a single one of them had been proven to be forged. But of course, every source has its own interest. That’s a basic law of journalism.

SPIEGEL: Do you know your sources?

Assange: We usually have very good insight into our material to authenticate it. In some cases, that means that we also develop insight into a source.

SPIEGEL: If the U.S. government were able to prove that the CIA documents WikiLeaks has published were submitted by Russian sources, that would damage the credibility of WikiLeaks severely, don’t you think?

Assange: That is a media fantasy. The official position of the U.S. government, as expressed by Barack Obama in his last press conference as president, is that the it has no evidence whatsoever of collusion between WikiLeaks and Russia. U.S. officials have said they believe that the CIA documents don’t come from a state party, but from an American private contractor.

SPIEGEL: But you can’t deny that WikiLeaks lost a lot of its popularity since it published documents about Hillary Clinton and her campaign.

Assange: What are you saying? If we hadn’t published Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches, she would have won? Or should we have censured information to favor one candidate? WikiLeaks will never do that.

SPIEGEL: Increasingly, though, secret services seem to be trying to influence the outcome of elections in foreign countries.

Assange: That may well be.

SPIEGEL: If these secret services are using WikiLeaks as a useful weapon, you can’t just lean back and say: “That may well be.”

Assange: Secret services are planting things in the media every day. And if WikiLeaks is logistically able to publish documents before an election, we will do that – and that’s also exactly what the public expects.

SPIEGEL: You don’t care if WikiLeaks influences the outcome of elections?

Assange: WikiLeaks is made up of human beings who have different political views. But we cannot undermine our publicly given commitments, our publicly stated principles.

SPIEGEL: And these principles require that you publish authentic documents as quickly as possible, regardless of who benefits or is damaged?

Assange: That’s our current policy, which might be changed under extreme circumstances.

SPIEGEL: What sort of circumstances?

Assange: If we were on the brink of a nuclear war and a WikiLeaks publication could be misinterpreted, then it would make sense to delay the publication.

SPIEGEL: You didn’t delay the publication of the material which harmed Clinton.

Assange: We are not in this business for likes. WikiLeaks publishes documents about powerful organizations. WikiLeaks always will always be the bad boy.

SPIEGEL: What do you have to say to people who accuse WikiLeaks, among others, of being responsible for Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president?

Assange: WikiLeaks revealed the dirty tactics of the Clinton campaign. Some voters took it in. It was their free choice to do so. That’s their right. That’s democracy.

SPIEGEL: As secretary of state, Clinton sought to take action against WikiLeaks. Was the publication of Democratic Party documents a kind of vendetta?

Assange: That is U.S. East Coast psychobabble. The reason that WikiLeaks follows its principles is because one man has a problem? No! But here is some historic irony behind it. Clinton was involved in putting our alleged source Chelsea Manning in prison. There seems to be some natural justice.

SPIEGEL: You derived satisfaction from her loss?

Assange: . . .

SPIEGEL: You are smiling.

Assange: On a personal level I would probably get along with her quite well. She is a charismatic person. She is a bit of wonk – like me. A little bit awkward – like me. However, there has to be a line drawn. She decided to destroy the Libyan state. As a result, she fueled the European refugee crisis. We published a lot of her emails on how this unfolded. It seems an inescapable conclusion that she is a war criminal.

 

May 19 Der Spiegel Interview here.

Assange’s Swedish Lawyer: “They Spoiled And Wasted 5-6 Years Of His Life”

Posted on May 19, 2017

“Of course if they had had evidence against him they would never drop the case.”

–Per E. Samuelson

Very lucid and painful to watch interview with Julian Assange’s Swedish lawyer, today, upon news breaking internationally that Sweden “dropped the rape case,” against Assange. They did not even “drop” the case–rather, they finally deigned to interview him properly after 6 years and discovered they had no case.

Assange was accused, tried, and found guilty in Swedish media, which then spread internationally.

How will they spin the story now? Will anybody be held accountable?

Virtually every Swedish friend I discussed the case with since it happened put me “on the carpet” as the Swedish saying goes, for trying to get at the facts. It was just not done. I can see their concerned faces in front of me now.

They knew.

This is what is appalling about people. The banality of evil.

They “know” but they don’t investigate, or keep open minds. Or wait.

http://tu.tv/videos/statement-ecuadorian-embassy-in-london-where-assange-has-stayed-for-over-4-years-may-19-2017-assange?utm_source=tw

 

Assange said, from the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London: ‘The proper war is just commencing.”

This is a victory and an inspiration for victims of media-driven media-witch hunts everywhere.

One wonders, also, why the Swedish media made such an exceptional exception to its strict laws about never showing the face of an accused rapist in the press. This is supposedly in order to keep the peace. Why didn’t the laws apply to Julian Assange?

Many questions for Sweden–and prosecutor Marianne Ny, famous for her mirthless, self righteous  demeanor– to answer.

 

 

Sweden Drops All Rape Charges Against Julian Assange After Long Overdue Review Of Forensic And Electronic Evidence

Posted on May 19, 2017

Swedish prosecutors have dropped all charges against Julian Assange, after review of the evidence that could have been (and in part, was) obtained years ago.

In setting out to destroy the reputation of Julian Assange, it seems to me Sweden succeeded on destroying its own reputation, cultivated for so many decades, and with so much success.

Many jumped on the “Assange is a rapist” bandwagon; The Truth Barrier was not among them.

The person who should be investigated is Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny.

“After the incidents for which he is wanted for questioning took place, in mid-August 2010, Mr. Assange remained in Sweden for five weeks, until September 27, during which time Swedish prosecutors once dropped the case altogether, only to re-open it days later. Prosecutor Marianne Ny was quoted in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter as having said: “Even if I’m wrong, I won’t give up.”

–Celia Farber, The Indicter

New Analysis of Swedish Police Report Confirms Julian Assange’s Version in Sweden’s case

 

 

Peter And The Wolf: Can You Remember Feeling Your Feelings?

Posted on May 18, 2017

 

About an hour ago, I walked to my phone, which was ringing, in the bedroom. All of a sudden, I was humming Peter and the Wolf, out loud. I think it was Peter’s theme.

I am only able to get to the oboe, the duck, before I feel unable to bear the feelings that come up.

I will push through again later. Tell me how you feel, listening to it.

Such a mysterious masterpiece by Prokofiev–it’s like the Room of Rooms, where you can’t escape anything you don’t want to feel. The music makes you feel all stories, of all people, all at once, in a few notes, with instruments speaking in ways words never can.

It made me go to pieces, even as a child.

 

 

Rod Wheeler Details Obstruction Of Rich Investigation: Cites DNC Mystery Person

Posted on May 16, 2017

 

A note:
The “point” here is actually NOT even that one believes or does not believe Rich was killed by DNC operatives. That is highly speculative and speaking for myself, I am NOT saying that.
How would I know?
How would any of us?
The point is: A DNC insider leaked the emails to Wikileaks that tipped the election, if anything did. There is to date no evidence of a Russian ‘hack,” but there is evidence of an inside DNC leak.
So–Russia-gate is complicated by this, and what we should be very concerned about is that US media won’t touch this story. UK media have behaved, by contrast, as normal journalists, by reporting it.

The US deep-state complicit power drunk media is the greatest threat to our so called democracy.

You can dislike propaganda more than you dislike Trump. And I leaver disliking Trump to others, because it’s hard work and others have it well covered. Maybe he is even half the things they say he is, but at this point, they want him to fall more than they want America to rise. And that’s evil.

Are We Possibly Stuck In A Gigantic Murder Cover-Up, Leading To The Ultimate Heart Of American Darkness?

Posted on May 16, 2017

Comment submitted to The Truth Barrier by Peter R. Mare:

“Fabrication of news by fake news, yellow journalism, as it used to be called, can be done by anyone. I would like to post my true yellow journalism. In which, I believe is the chain of events:
Clinton insider sees what an evil is being unleashed on America, sends to Wikileaks, gets murdered, Wikileaks posts reward, Hillary invents Russia involvement & collusion to cover up murder, Police cover up investigation. Sessions must get his hands on the murdered “Patriot” computer & the computer of Carlos Danger. Obama sent emails to Hillary, He Knew. They all knew. Including Comey. They will all go to jail. All that is fake news, or is it? Think about, on how Cheney fabricated with Hillary’s assistance, evidence of “Weapons of Mass Destruction” , shunted war to Iraq instead of Afghanistan & Cheney’s ex company benefited. Evidence?? WMD?? Where is evidence of collusion? Everything I wrote above is fake. Except that America Must Honor The Patriot That Crushed The Witch.”

[Ed: I would have asked the writer to change the word “witch,” on grounds that I find the word very troubling, having read “Witch Craze: A New History Of The European Witch Hunts by Anne L. Barstow. There is no such thing as a “witch.” The greatest holocaust that ever occurred was on women in Europe, for centuries, and we stand here today because it was finally overcome. It peaked in Salem, Mass.  I hope you understand the difference between being careful with choosing words and being censorious about words, Peter. I’m not into thought/word policing. I appreciate your comment very much and hope it spurs a big discussion. Long overdue.]

Comey Sends Nation Into New Tailspin Over Memo, Deflects Attention From Seth Rich Murder

Posted on May 16, 2017

“I hope you can let this go.”

Is that so terrible?

Here’s the NYT story that broke within the hour.

Now, I don’t think he was a kind, soft fuzzy man, but…you know what?  .

Nixon would have a tape.

I would prefer, as an American, not to hang the Republic on the word and memory of Mr. Comey.

I want to wager a bet: Trump has a tape. I mean a recording.

Let’s see if the tape remembers the conversation the same way he does. Until then, let’s do our best to keep calm, open minds, which can receive incoming information, without filtering for our own preconceived beliefs.

Meanwhile: Watch Comey morph in front of your eyes from somebody they despised and distrusted, thought to be crazy, to somebody they revere.

At this rate, he could be TIME Magazine’s Man Of The Year.

 

(Sorry– Person of The Year.)

 

“The only story that matters is what the MSM has created this cover up for in the first place. SETH RICH. The murdered DNC staffer, as of today a federal prosecutor confirmed he sent over 44,000 emails to Wikileaks. But that would destroy the whole fake Russia story so ofcourse no one will talk about it. Look it up! Do your own research. He was a Bernie supporter, and didn’t like the way the party was openly against him. Regardless of how you feel about Trump, this is wrong, and he lost his life.”

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4512806/Comey-claimed-Trump-asked-SHUT-Flynn-probe.html#ixzz4hI03GWZx
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

 

 

Did Seth Rich Have Contact With Wikileaks? Who Killed Him?

Posted on May 16, 2017

This is the best article I have found after hours of “scouring” the internet. It opens about 14 cans of worms and closes none. But at least it sounds like reporters put it together, unlike American journalism which has all its conclusions already baked in; sounds and feels like propaganda.

If you already know what the truth needs to be, i.e. you went to Globalism School, then don’t be a reporter. Reporters are crazy, and driven by an unconscious death wish, which is a necessary attribute. They know how to get people to talk. The best ones know how to also make those same people not to regret it. If you are too good, as a reporter, like Michael Hastings, or Gary Webb, you will have lost your life, right after you lost all your friends, and your editor’s support.

The British still dominate when it comes to journalism. We have no journalism culture, in the US. We have propaganda wars.

I have no doubt journalists would like to be real shoe-leather reporters here, but there are no politically neutral places to report anymore so they are left to either report propagandistically or not at all.

Everything is rotten fish, indignant hysteria, Trump revulsion,  and conspiracy-soaked conspiracy snobbery now.

Except: Wikileaks, which uses raw data only and has a 100% record of no “fake” news, i.e. false documents. For this reason, I believe that Wikileaks has already rendered all of western journalism obsolete. It’s all just a huge dysfunctional bar brawl, compared to Wikileaks, which offers at least the chance, if we have the stamina, to locate what actually has transpired in our time.

Sara Carter at Circa is doing good work. Why will only Sean Hannity talk to her?

Want to play Shoot The Messenger? You can make a good living in U.S. media if you just master the dark art of pure contempt for what a fact may or may not be. Usually you can save yourself 25 phone calls or a trip out the front door merely by saying “FOX news…” with the right timbre of Globalist contempt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VAXXED PLAYS ON POLISH NATIONAL TV

Posted on May 15, 2017

I received this news from Andrew Wakefield just now.

The Truth Barrier published this story from Poland on May 14.

The Poland news came via Sheila Lewis Ealey, (whose story, of twin children, one vaccinated with MMR, one not, one who got autism, one who did not) is in the film.

If our friends in Poland can tell us more, we would love to know. Has there been a national debate in Polish media? How is it all playing out?

What country might air Vaxxed on national TV next?

 

 

 

 

My Mother

Posted on May 15, 2017

Ulla, my mother. Sept 13, 1931-Aug 19, 1999.

 

 

 

For so many hours I have tried to find words that aren’t false, for she hated falsity. Inconsolable, is a word that comes to mind. Also: Pure joy, like a child.
I offered consolations that were not backed by turns of events in this life.

I think of her standards: That you bring gifts, help, uplift, gold-sprinkle the atmosphere. Die sooner than be an ungracious house-guest.
Thank people with gusto, greet people warmly, POUR, she used to tell me, BEFORE your guests have reached empty glasses. NEVER ask a guest: “So, are you hungry…?”

No, you anticipate needs, and meet them.

Oh she would have lost her mind in this PC sourpuss era.

Traveled the world as a Pan Am stewardess–managed to cause an airport to shut down by chickening out of a plot to export rotten explosive herring from Sweden, via Karachi. Was it?
Her favorite country was Haiti, hands down.

My whole life was following her way of thinking and now I am stuck without her and nobody thinks this way and it’s awful. Everybody wants to do things the rational way. I can see her eyes sparking with contempt.

She got my sister and I to the Sahara desert twice on a nurse’s salary as a single mother because we “had to” see the stars. Once there, we “had to” go to a deserted island virtually off the map (almost ended very badly) and we “had to” purchase several large birdcages and send them to various people in the US, including her estranged husband’s parents in Fort Lauderdale–and bring a few home. When we went to visit her dance teacher (yes, dance teacher) Willie, from Barbados, she thought for a long time about a suitably spectacular gift to bring and settled on a full size fir tree, Christmas tree, which traveled from Sweden in a burlap sack to Barbados, and when it emerged on the conveyor belt…I just can’t tell you. Everybody was like in stitches. The customs official, I can see him before me: “A CHRISTMAS tree?” Her sense of humor and adventure were limitless.

 

Me and Mom

She and her mother Ingrid, on a trip to Haiti, rented a motorcycle to speed up a mountain to a voodoo ceremony, which I wish I’d questioned her more about. She made my father demand of the radio station WINS that they release the gift monkey a sponsor had sent as it was animal cruelty, Max. He became my parents monkey, but turned against my mother when he fell for my father and lived on his shoulder.
Max tore up a friend’s daughter’s bedroom and Mom had to yield. Max went to a zoo.
All I know of their short lived marriage, in terms of domestic detail, just about, was that they played “Rule Brittania!” on the record player to time my father’s eggs to perfection.
Sublime sense of humor.
Temper? Oh yes.
But you know—I get it, now. Roy Cohn was my father’s divorce lawyer, which means now we all speak Swedish. No concept such as warn us we are moving to Sweden.
It’s ok, Mom. Trauma is trauma. She set only one small fire, to my father’s second wife’s experimental noir downtown…um..ah never mind. Nobody was hurt. It was this ex wife of my father’s who told me the story, with a smile, kind of. (Yes, I know, it’s not funny. But nobody was hurt, thank God.)

She rescued at least two drowning men, once from shark infested waters. She was asked to carry a leg down a corridor when in Red Cross nurse’s training, to test her nerves.
She made my father confront a man beating his mule at a train station in Yugoslavia, “Are you going to let him treat that animal like that Barry?”

My father recalled, shaking his head:

“There we are in communist Yugoslavia., and Ulla wanted me to pick a fight with a farmer!”

In the Soviet Union, so they did not have to ask, as they could not, she wrapped gifts for the girls in US fashion magazines.

And when she walked in on my father interviewing an important member of some royal family, realizing his secretary had made a mistake, she invented a crisis in New York, to explain the intrusion, and spare the secretary a major scolding. When my sister, her first child, was on her way, she decorated the house, put on her best dress, and made my father guess for two hours WHAT relative was coming to dinner. “Uncle Ellis?” “No” “Aunt Hick?” “No.” He had to exhaust every possibility on all sides of both families before she gave him the critical clue:

“I didn’t say when they were coming.”

That’s how she told him she was pregnant. Elevate, always, was her motto. She had not one snobby bone own her body and you always knew what she was feeling. She did not believe some people are more important than others.

I’m not saying she was some kind of mother angel person. But she was real, as real as real gets. I wished she could be fake sometimes but no.
When we were on a flight that began to plummet from the sky, my son was one year old, she turned to me when everybody else was screaming for saints, (we were flying back from Puerto Rico) and she told me to “SAY THANK YOU” to God. And I did. That was what she said you do in these situations, and it was not her first. She broke her back, and suffered a concussion, in an airplane incident.
How did she live all these lives?
The line I recall, the thing she said, that kills me the most, was about 6 months before she died. She was setting her hair in rollers, and tossing pins into a pan, and she said, “The only things I regret in my life are the times when I did not show enough love.”

This is me often, now, but I am exhausted and I can’t “show love” anymore. I’m trying to, but everybody is psychotic at the moment.

Mom, this is ridiculous, what were you thinking? Living without her is a bleak slow hell. Living with her was a wild hilarious traumatic ride.
There was a Tunisian man–a Muslim in Sweden named Mohammed, who was paraplegic; He came over sometimes, including, on Christmas eve.
In Sweden!
“He’s a man,” she said.

She said that also, about Peter Olsen.
When my son was due, and I was packing for the hospital, she raised the issue of the importance of a NEW nightgown and robe.
That was another one of those things that just did not end well.
I learned nothing about how to keep the peace, everything about how to keep the….something. What was it? SPIRT.
Now I am a spiritless furless squirrel, gasping for solace in a destroyed, cold world.
“Drink!” she said once, admonishing me for drinking with bird like sips. Go ahead. Say it’s not healthy. I haven’t the strength to argue.
God made my mother, as an antidote to political correctness.
No, that’s not true.
She was Ulla. She was my mom. And I loved her beyond measure, no matter how many times I object to how I was traumatized by it all.
Just told my father I can’t come cook dinner. Can’t move.
Mom, I wish we could spend the night yelling at each other. We could smash some plates. We could clean up. We could laugh again. She would have been SO proud of her grandson, Jeremy, now 22.
And when I am an overbearing tyrant telling him he has to TAKE the gesture, and make it big, it’s her I am channeling.
The only sin in her book, was coldness.

On the last night I would see her alive, I bought her a dozen red roses and Beluga caviar–we partied, and also argued. And then she packed for her trip back to Sweden the next day.

Those roses outlived her. I never tortured a telephone like those two long days when she just did not answer the phone. With each ring, I begged. “Answer Mom. Answer.” Finally smashed it into the floor.

On day 3 we managed to get the lady who watered her flowers into the apartment. I made my father make that last call. His face fell, and in Swedish, he just said the word “no,” over and over. I ran out of the room screaming, and threw up.

She was always, since I was born, my world, my light, my teacher and my greatest ally. We have fallen apart since she died. This is what happens, when you lose a mother. Nobody is there, telling me we have to go to Tunisia…and “DON’T THROW OUT,” the plastic monkeys from the margaritas at Banditos.

Never. I have them right here.

What They Said: Adam Kolaczek

Posted on May 15, 2017

“Thanks for the great article. 1939 -1945 we fight with nazism , since 1945 to 1989 -we fight with comunism Now we fight for future of Poland with crazy and extremly dangerous people, who decided to destroy the youngest Poles by more and more and more mandatory vaccinations.”

 

Adam Kolaczek from Poland, in response this this post.

 

 

Ed: I am seeing more and more Polish flags on StatCounter. For the first time in I don’t know how long, I feel hopeful. I hope to hear from more Polish friends, about that is going on right now, in preparation for this massive protest, which will get no coverage in US media. (Not counting us.)

 

MASS PROTEST IN POLAND AGAINST MANDATORY VACCINATIONS, AS DEATHS SKYROCKET

Posted on May 14, 2017

Thanks to Sheila Lewis Ealey for alerting me to this.

 

 

 

To write about opposition to communism in the 1980s, one must begin with Poland. The Poles were the only ones ever to stage repeated challenges to communist rule, with major uprisings in 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976 and 1980. Solidarity, the last of these, was a more credible alternative to communism than anything else produced in Central Europe. Its influence throughout the region was incalculable…’

(Padraic Kenney – A Carnival of Revolution: 15)

 

http://stopnop.com.pl/poland-calls-the-whole-world-to-protest-against-the-compulsion-of-vaccinations-june-3rd-2017/

 

Welcome to Poland

A country where a newborn is given high-risk vaccine against tuberculosis – the very one that Germany withdrew 18 years ago! (1)

Country where even premature babies are vaccinated against hepatitis B due to the fact that hygiene standards in medical facilities are notoriously neglected. Newborns are offered a cheap, Korean vaccine used nowhere else in Europe! (2)

Country that continues to use a high risk, whole cell vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis already withdrawn in other European countries. (3)

Country where the tender for the pneumococcal vaccine is won by a pharmaceutical company that previously employed the Deputy Minister of Health. (4)

Country where children are injected with vaccines never legally approved for the given market – only by applying the regulations on … pandemic. (5)

Country where parents are charged a huge penalty fine if refusing to inject their child with the above `goodness`. (6)

The country, that didn’t ratify the bioethics Committee and lets testing the biggest amount of vaccines in whole Europe, on it’s citizens. (7)

A country where the government and corporations censor public television shows where families of vaccine-injured children were allowed to tell their story. (8)

Country where doctors are punished for informing patients on side effects of pharmaceutical products. (9)

Country where doctors are unable to recognize vaccine adverse reaction and its consequences. (10)

Country that has the highest child-immunization rate in the world and yet the lowest number of doctors vaccinated against flu. (11) (12)

Country where the only excuse allowing not to vaccinate a child is their death. (13)

Country where the only vaccine exemption is death. Country where pharmaceutical companies sponsor media campaigns aiming to turn the society against the real advocates of patients’ rights and do so by introducing fake epidemics! (14)

Country where the Sanitary Chief Officer performs a rap song mocking the victims of system’s negligence. (15) (16)

Country where the dangerous oral polio vaccine is forced to be used up till the end of stocks AFTER it was given the status “for immediate withdrawal.” (17) (18)

Country where there is no compensation program for the victims and doctors and officials are above the law. (19)

POLAND – a country where you can go to jail if you issue a petition which calls for a change of the abovementioned irregulaties. (20)

JOIN THE PROTEST! (email us: stopnop@gmail.com)

 

 

 

DEAR POLAND,

 

Allow an American friend to remind you that you are also the country of countless great minds, intrepid souls. amazing people–SOLIDARITY.  Do you have Hungary also with you? Between the two nations you have gotten us out of chains before and you can do it again.

Send us a word so we know you got this. Send us INFO and update about the protest please. Thank you!

 

CF

Swedish Parliament Strikes Down Mandatory Vaccination: National Health Federation Cites Constitutional Protection From Pre-Meditated Murder

Posted on May 13, 2017

 

The Vaccine Reich is hoping nobody notices what just happened in Sweden: The Parliament considered, and struck down, mandatory vaccination laws presented by politician named Sofia Arkelsten, of Sweden’s right of center party Moderaterna, (M.)

 

Other motions, including for additional vaccines added to the schedule and HPV vaccines for boys, were also rejected.

Age of Autism published this report. Being half Swedish and fluent in the language, all my journalistic instincts started firing with the notion that I had stumbled upon a very big angle that even the vaccine reform movement seemed unexcited by. This happened when I opened a PDF from National Health Federation (NHF) Sweden, with its objections submitted the the Swedish Parliament. NHF is the world’s oldest non-profit for alternative medicine, I believe. They and many others, submitted objections to 16 of 89 proposals made to the Parliament about Swedish public health, (“folk halsa”) which included matters about everything from vaccines, drugs and alcohol, to suicide prevention, to trying to urge Sweden to officially recognize the fact that horses have a therapeutic effect on humans. [This is in the parliamentary debate–and I am impressed!]

Here’s what I found significant–a passage from NHF detailing why exactly it would be a violation of the Swedish Constitution to mandate vaccines: (My translation)

 

 

National Health Federation, Sweden

Delegates in The Social Commission

Parliament

 

Stockholm

 

 

Statement about Sofia Arkelsten’s Mandatory Vaccination Bill 2015/16 :430

 

Sofia Arkelsten’s motion may not lie as a foundation for any proposition since:

 

–It violates parliamentary foundation 2 chap 6.

 

–It violates the fact that all Swedish medical care, according to existing laws, is based on free will with regard to medication and other treatment (with the exception of forced hospitalization.)

 

–It violates article 8 in ECHR, about human rights

 

–It violates the Nuremberg Code (vaccines lack satisfactory scientific foundation, since there have never been any adequate risk-benefit analysis comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated. Thus all vaccination must be seen as experimental mass research.)

 

–It violates the Helsinki Declaration (vaccines lack satisfactory scientific foundation, because there has never been risk/benefit research comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated. Thus all vaccination must be seen as experimental mass research.


Every Citizen Is Societally Protected From Enforced Physical Bodily Intervention

 

Society is for all people. Citizens may not be discriminated against. It is equality by law that is essential. Neither the state, politicians, nor society owns citizens bodies and also does not have the right to decide what to do with them. In the parliamentary code it says: “Every citizen is against public [civic] protected against bodily intervention.” This covers all forms of forced interventions and makes forced vaccination impossible. Sweden has foundational laws that protect against enforced intervention, which mandatory vaccination involves. Thus Sofia Arkelsten’s motion can not be considered in such a way that it leads to a proposition of a law.

ECHR—Human Rights

Political initiatives such as mandating vaccinations against people’s will is an act that legally could be considered premeditated murder, as well as attempt to cause bodily harm. The reason for this is that through grounded research and published studies, it is indisputable that vaccines can lead to serious adverse effects, bodily damage, conditions of sickness and even death for some of the vaccinated individuals.

 

This came at the same time as The Boston Herald published an editorial essentially calling for the “hanging” of vaccine critics, by calling vaccine skepticism a “hanging offense.” The storm of protest about this period piece of an article is formidable; It is literally “hate speech” but as I have stressed in the past, there is a gaping hole in hate speech laws, so long as minority “ideas” are not incorporated into protections.  Only race, sexual orientation–etc.

My colleague Pal Bergstrom told me in an online exchange today that there was “no coverage” in Sweden about the Parliament’s rejection of mandatory vaccination, and that he believes this was only part of a bugger push to come. He also told me that Italy is pushing for mandatory vaccines right now. This article details how media led messes scares in Germany, Sweden, Finland, and other countries are invariably followed by these attempts to make vaccine mandatory, as happened so disastrously here in the US, with the Disney World scare and the implementation of SB 277 in California.

I will translate it in a future post–it is very eye-opening.

I was unable to locate any direct quotes from the Parliamentary debate, but Swedish analyst and blogger Mr. Bergstrom has agreed to shed additional light on it all tomorrow, by replying to my questions.

In conclusion, I can say this: Sweden stayed neutral in yet another war. That’s the good news. One only wishes they were less quiet about it.

 

(With special thanks to Andrew Wakefield and Shiela Lewis Ealey for talking to me about this, as I sought clarity, and with apologies to both for some of yesterday’s over-reaching interpretations.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Inoculated Girls: Denmark’s Gardasil Expose On TV2

Posted on May 13, 2017

“We can see that it’s serious. There’s a systemic dysfunction. I can tell that they’re seriously ill.”

–Niels Gregersen,

Arhus University Hospital

 

“You have no idea how bad this is.”

–Dr. Louise Brinth

 

 

Note: This program ran on Danish state TV’s channel TV2. Denmark is an outpost of first amendment freedom, and known for strong laws guaranteeing freedom of the press.

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO2i-r39hok&feature=youtu.be

Via palbergstrom.com.

 

Is Vitamin D Deprivation Part Of The Great Attack?

Posted on May 13, 2017

 

American Ugly, Cont.

Posted on May 12, 2017

Submitted as comment by R.A. Davis, to “American Ugly.” Let me say something here: Those who read The Truth Barrier and comment, are themselves! They are not me. I enjoy seeing “different opinions” by which I really mean perspectives that can cause mine–or yours– to evolve, stretch, grow, or even faint in the road. I don’t care. It used to be known as “publishing.” This was before the Golden Age of Propaganda.

Uniformity is fascism. Incidentally, the comment section has been freed up from experimental settings.

Here’s R.A. Davis:

 

 

 

Donald Trump is, yes, ugly. An egocentric narcissist who was born to privilege and considers his beautiful wives as accoutrements to his persona.

May I quite rationally suggest that this makes him the most honest presidential candidate in recent history, and maybe going all the way back to George Washington & his wooden teeth.

Because all his obvious flaws are out there for all to see; he is saying to us, “This is what I am, folks>”
G.W. bush bore the mantle of Christian Conservative, but spawned more global death than any recent US leader, all under the pretext of a War On Terror. Obama was a CIA trained snake oil salesman with ties to radical Islam. Candidate Romney was and is a drug money launderer.
Sanders is an ideologue who cannot answer the basic challenge to socialism: who pays for all this?

Now this uncouth booming orangeheaded TV star is our president, like it or not. He wears his bullshit on his sleeve. I suspect most of this is by design. It distracts his enemies’ who poke at his flaws. He’s fine with that. It draws attention away from his shrewd brilliant mind,and the sincerity of his mission. Draining the Swamp isn’t a matter of installing enough sump pumps; it’s a matter of disarming those who wallow in it, until it’s too late.

 

–R.A. Davis

American Ugly

Posted on May 11, 2017

The thing Churchill said to that woman about how he would not be drunk in the morning but she would still be ugly.
Trump detesters will still have contributed to American Ugly, when this is all over, and Trump, the detested object, will be removed…they will say ‘WE didn’t destroy the country. HE did.”
I want nothing to do with those who partook and became part of this ugliness, in the future, if there is one. Moreover, they want nothing to do with me. But even if they did I would not want anything to do with them. Except for that….I wish they would own their ugly nature and address it. And I am prepared foe the life of total isolation. I will not back down on this. I feel as strongly about this as I do about Americans who partook in any lynching esprit.

What They Said: Doris Lessing

Posted on May 11, 2017

The character keeps four notebooks which she weaves into one golden notebook. One quote that could apply to many of us is, “What’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better.”

Doris Lessing wrote this book in 1962, and was confronted by a horde or reporters in 2007, outside her home in London, telling the 88 year old writer that she had won the Nobel Prize.

Her response was, “Oh, Christ, I couldn’t care less.”

The intellectual, natural writer died in 2013 at 94. Her novels, short stories, operas, poetry, nonfiction and autobiography are treasures.

 

[Via Amazon, and thanks to Alexandra Gatsis.]

What They Said: Richard Nixon

Posted on May 10, 2017

 

 

You Do Not Exist

Posted on May 10, 2017

“What have you done with Julia?” said Winston.

O’Brien smiled again. “She betrayed you, Winston. Immediately–unreservedly. I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly. She is the perfect penitent. There is not a trace of rebellion or illusion left in her. She is washed absolutely–everything has been burned out of her. She is clean all through. She loves Big Brother.

“You tortured her.”

O’Brien left this unanswered. “Next question,” he said.

“Does Big Brother exist?”

“Of course he exists. The party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.”

“Does he exist in the same way as I exist?” said Winston.

“You do not exist,” said O’Brien.

A sense of helplessness assailed Winston. He was no good at philosophy, at metaphysics. He knew, or he could imagine, the arguments which proved his non-existence; but they were nonsense, they were only a play on words.

Did not the statement,” You do not exist,” contain a logical absurdity? But what use was it to say so?  His mind quailed as he thought of the unanswerable, mad arguments, with which O’Brien would demolish him.

“I think I exist,” he said wearily.

 

1984,

George Orwell

[From Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Facsimile*]

 

 

 

 

Is Trump A Sadist? Were The Foamers Correct?

Posted on May 9, 2017

I called my father,* moments ago, (30 minutes before he goes on air with his nightly radio show) and said: “I need your take on Trump firing Comey,” he said, “My head is still spinning, I’m glad you called it gives me a chance to organize my thoughts. ”
(I opened laptop…)
He continued:
“He had the choice to do it brutally or elegantly. He chose brutally.”
Silence.
“Yeah.”
“This really does not make Trump look good. It’s redolent of Nixon. He didn’t even have a chance to gather his workers and let them know first. This is sadistic.”
“Yeah. Good word. I keep thinking about sadism.”
“Nobody is “good” on this subject– there is no good opinion. They’re blaming it on his handling of Hillary’s emails, Trump is firing Coney for the crime of making Hillary lose the election? What? Why didn’t he do this right after the inauguration? It would have been a hiccup and not a headline. ”
“Well,” I said, ‘I think it’s time to admit that even though they have desecrated so many values we hold dear, Trump foamers may have been right about this. Maybe he’s nuts.”
“Darling, I said that to Sara**five minutes ago.”
Then he told me an agnostic, insomniac, dyslectic joke. It goes like this:

“Insomniac, agnostic, dyslectic lies awake at night wondering if there is a dog.”


* Barry Farber. Originally Southern Democrat, Civil Rights Activist/….Voted Republican first time for Nixon. Voted for Trump but when I asked, referred to him as a “Horse’s ass.”

** My father’s wife of 9 years,. and broadcast host, pioneer of local NYC TV reportage, Sara Pentz.

Assange In Conversation With Pilger: The Most Important Email In The Entire Collection

Posted on May 8, 2017

 

Was Alice Miller “Correct?” A Critique Of Her Limits And Strengths

Posted on May 2, 2017

 

How Is Emotional Blindness Created? Alice Miller

Posted on May 2, 2017

 

EFT Tapping: You Deserve To Be Treated With Love And Respect

Posted on May 2, 2017

 

What Do I Mean By “Pod?”

Posted on April 30, 2017

The term which came via Charles Ortleb, into my consciousness, some time in the late 1990s, refers to a politically armored person who wears political correctness as a kind of sheath. In this way, they protect themselves from injury, and yet they can injure others, whose “pod-d0m” is less intact or well constructed. Pods are “right on,” in every way, but there are questions about their level of humanity. They tend to judge others from a place of moral superiority, and believe that some people have dirty beliefs that needs to be sanitized. By them.

Mainstream media is the game reserve for pods, where they primarily live and breed. Universities. Student organizations, political organizations–basically anywhere there is a dearth of creativity, there will be high levels of “pod-think.”

When you feel in the presence of an aggressive political person who wants to cut you, and all of humanity, down to size, and basically frighten you all the time about who you “are,” then you know you are in a pod zone.

Always get out as fast as you can, scope the exits, never share any of your true feelings, always tell them what they want to hear. They’re quite dangerous.

“Snowflake,” is a very poor substitute for “pod,” and I regret that the term “snowflake” entered the lexicon where Ortleb’s word “pod” would have served so much better. A “snowflake” is a UNIQUE thing that never recurs in nature, is ephemeral, beautiful, delicate and of course harmless. “Social justice warriors” don’t seek social justice but social terror leading to a certain kind of conformity. Pods have an insatiable need for all human minds to conform to a mean, sanitized, hostile, xenophobic and racist world view. Only then are they happy. But the thing about pods is, actually, they are never happy, so don’t waste time trying. Just tell them you’re awful and you know you’re awful, and can’t be fixed. At least this is my new strategy, to cease fighting for the approval of pods anywhere.

They are ‘traumatizing narcissists,’ on a mass scale. They don’t care about beauty or truth, and in fact, truth does not strike them as beautiful.

They are avenging something.

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/white-house-correspondents-dinner-host-072100930.html

 

Seeing In The Dark: Segmental Armoring

Posted on April 30, 2017

It takes most of a life time to discover how the word and concept “love” is weaponized to block natural responses to the objectionable and/or repressive conduct of others.

Not saying: “I love you,” no longer, to my ear, means: I lack love for you, or, I lack a desire for your well being. It does mean, more and more: I wish to give myself a pass, a compliment of sorts, or to disarm myself or you, or both. I wish to advertise my own “lovingness,” by asserting those iconic words.

Really, it should work in reverse or no at all. You (one) say(s) to me (other:) “You love me–” or else, nobody says it.

Why should we always declare something so self serving, usually right at the moment when we are most uncomfortable with ourselves?

“I love you.” The most common raindrop of self-serving sound.

Is it violent? It’s muddling, and for animals that is not love. You love me? Great–but is it safe to cross this river? Is there ‘love” outside of habitual, protective, rightfully vigilant responses?

There are two ways of being: Free and unfree.

The more you “love” somebody, the less you let them be themselves, say what they want to say, when they want to, how they want to.

I’m as lousy at this as everybody else but I can’t STAND it, so I…compensate.

Every day I intend, and fail, to understand more about things like Reich’s segmental armoring theories, which sound so majestic. My old friend Tom DiFerdinando knows about this in detail and depth.

Families become body casts, iron lungs–we freeze, go rigid, so anything at all, daily, rather than admit to the “failed” emotions: Hurt, anger, fear–

I don’t think Reich, for all his brilliance, ever set foot on or near the moon. In other words: How to take off our suits of armor.

 

Reich’s Segmental Armouring Theory

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heart Of Darkness: Fox News Accused Of Malevolent Spying And Harassment On Andrea Tantaros

Posted on April 24, 2017

I can’t cover but a fraction of what passes across my screen or consciousness at The Truth Barrier, but I want to publicly support the women who are exposing the dark underbelly of Fox News. Is it “biased” to state that you “believe every word of it?” No. I don’t think so. I’m well seasoned in lawsuits. Nobody, but nobody, in addition to “nobody’s” very costly attorneys, would make false allegations against a killing machine like Fox. Nobody in their right mind, and nobody in their wrong mind.

Here’s the latest in the war between Fox News and Women.

I find it astounding that “people” are out there saying none of this is true, none of it happened, this is a “well orchestrated” leftist hit job against Bill O’Reilly, and so forth.

I don’t think that kind of rubbish deserves any closer attention that Holocaust denial. That’s a sign of mental fatigue, I guess,  such an invocation–but I simply can’t fathom what universe you live in if you think O’Reilly walked the Fox plank for no good reason other than martyrdom.
If you live in New York, like I do, you know people who know people.

O’Reilly is very lucky this is all that is presently in the news about him.

I never “hated” FOX news, and still don’t, per se. But its harshest critics are in fact enjoying vindication right now.

Many people’s stories have been told. It looks to be women’s turn.

Macron And Le Pen: At Least Know This

Posted on April 24, 2017

“At Least Know This,” was a concept my father and I hatched together about 20 years ago, but never “developed.”  I would (and still do) often ask my father–who I did not grow up with– sweeping questions, mostly about World War 2, which he began following closely by short wave radio as a boy in North Carolina, too young to serve. As I recall it, as soon as she said it: “At Least Know This,” we both knew it was a way to capture basic knowledge, and we thought to do a book with one page written by an expert on a variety of subjects: “World War 2: At Least Know This.” Or, “The Bolshevik Revolution: At Least Know This.”

I remember we agreed Peter Duesberg could write the chapter on virology. Neither of us can understand why the publishing industry has not beaten a path to our door.

In any case, last few days, I have brushed up my “at least know this” knowledge about the French election, and offer one article and one video, about Le Pen and Macron, respectively. One shocker, I suppose everybody but I already knew:

Did you know that Emmanuel Macron’s wife is 24 years his senior, and fell for him when he was her student, at the age of 15? Because they are globalists bankers, you are to view this as a “unique love story.”

I can hear my father say what he loves most to say about the French, in French:

“Ce n’est pas la fin des haricots”

(It’s not the end of string beans.)

But maybe it is. I may call my father tomorrow and say, “You know how you always say is not the end of string beans? Well, I just read something that might be.”

Meanwhile, I like this little video about Marine Le Pen’s voters, for the simple reason that it interviews actual LePen voters in the French countryside, who are part of the “forgotten France.” It’s basic man on the street journalism, which we see almost never in US media.
I have a feeling Macron will win. But Marine is very charismatic and powerful. She’s a populist, not “far-right,” though her father, who she kicked out of the party was.

 

Young, White, And Dead In America: When Will It End?

Posted on April 18, 2017

[Text by Celia Farber]

 

They aren’t trendy, purple haired, tattooed and pierced, gay or transgender, officially oppressed,  or getting triggered on a college campus somewhere; They have no functioning anger to deploy, and if they did, nobody would fake-love them for it. They don’t have that kind of middle or upper middle class political energy.

Even if they did, they would not have the money to take the bus to the anti-Trump rally in the nearest big city.

It”s never been safe to be a young black male in the United States, but it is no longer safe to be a young white male either. And if you even say “white,” you sound a little suspect in today’s America. It’s a trigger word.

These are the kids who couldn’t go to college because student loan debt loomed like a crushing mushroom cloud, from which it may never have been possible to emerge. They don’t even try to form families, or come anywhere near what was once called The American Dream, now referenced mostly sarcastically.  Instead it’s temporary odd jobs, opioids, and a relatively painless (compared to some) way to suicide by accident, from an opiate overdose. These kids didn’t die because they “were addicts.” They died because a decades long conspiracy at the heart of American financial culture abandoned them, crushed their “American Dream,” like a cheap soda can.

In 2015, there were 78.2 million Americans over 16 working at the minimum wage.

Where are the charts for those who were not even doing that? Could not even get those jobs?

From 2000 to 2014 nearly half a million Americans died from drug overdoses. Opioid overdose deaths, including both opioid pain relievers and heroin, hit record levels in 2014, with an alarming 14 percent increase in just one year, according to new data published today in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The most commonly prescribed opioid pain relievers, those classified as natural or semi-synthetic opioids such as oxycodone and hydrocodone, continue to be involved in more overdose deaths than any other opioid type. These deaths increased by 9 percent (813 more deaths in 2014 than 2013).

Increases in prescription opioid pain reliever and heroin deaths are the biggest driver of the drug overdose epidemic. Deaths from heroin increased in 2014, continuing a sharp rise that has seen heroin overdoses triple since 2010. Deaths involving illicitly made fentanyl, a potent opioid often added to or sold as heroin, also are on the upswing.

“The increasing number of deaths from opioid overdose is alarming,” said CDC Director Tom Frieden, M.D., M.P.H. “The opioid epidemic is devastating American families and communities. To curb these trends and save lives, we must help prevent addiction and provide support and treatment to those who suffer from opioid use disorders. This report also shows how important it is that law enforcement intensify efforts to reduce the availability of heroin, illegal fentanyl, and other illegal opioids.”

[CDC Press Release, Dec 18, 2015]

I disagree with Frieden’s emphasis on preventing “addiction.” Prevent, rather, financial hopelessness, and cultural segregation. Stop killing our kids by obliterating both their sovereignty and future. Stop, allowing the pharmaceutical mega-beast to finish them off with easy access to pills they are “addicted” to. If they survive, there’s another  money mill: Addiction recovery centers. Rehab. Revolving door re-hab, since “re-hab,” doesn’t work, since this is not “addiction.” That’s a very convenient and lucrative way to blame the victims.

I meet and talk to young kids like this, sometimes. They drop out of college or never start because of student loan debt anxiety. Then they try to “get work,” and find that there simply isn’t a functioning world out there that wants them, no energy of “young man, you can do anything you set your mind to.” It’s not there anymore. Norman Vincent Peale, I know you believe me, wherever you are. It’s a different “America.”

You know what happens to the females in this social class by the way? They’re sold into sex trafficking.

Predatory college loans should be the first thing to go in this supposedly new America. How long does that take?

Also, how can you have “loved” Mr. Obama, when he said and did apparently nothing or next to nothing about this, and instead fostered trendy national dialogues about race, gender, bathrooms, and what have you. Not a way more difficult and way less trendy conversation about hopeless white kids dying in dirty gas station bathrooms in Eerie P.A. with no right-on sign on the bathroom door, just another life snuffed out, in the cold heartless shadows of Politically Correct America.

Here is the article that started me writing this text:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-18/young-white-america-is-haunted-by-a-crisis-of-despair

 

 

Easter, Not A Huge Success

Posted on April 17, 2017
Taken Outside Emily Dickinson’s House in Amherst

 

Because it struck me on Easter morning, on what would have been my fourth day as a proper Catholic, I was sure it was an attack from Satan personally. I’m self-important that way, in my imagination.

I was extremely weak, nauseated, eyes were hard to open or see with,  and I felt like a poisoned rodent. Still, I put on my red dress, stockings, coat, sunglasses–and made my way to Church. Never felt more grateful for big Jackie-O sunglasses on a sunny day. Got to Church, took one step at a time, up the stairs.

Standing room only. I left only after whispering a soundless apology to God that I had to leave because I thought I might throw up. I got home and did just that, oddly enough, in the sink. That’s an indication of how sudden it was. Rounded the corner into the bedroom, drew the curtains, collapsed into bed, gave thanks for the cool sheets, and begged Lewis to come. Lewis is my younger cat, who always comes when I am ill or extremely sad and stays with me, does not leave my side. Pretty soon, the room was spinning. I wanted water but absolutely lacked the energy to move. It’s not that interesting to die, and also, I didn’t, so I’ll abbreviate the next 12 hours thusly: I had less energy than the dead, my head was pounding in pain, I took to crawling to the kitchen to get water, and vomiting all over the floor, in the hall, in the kitchen, or in the bathroom, totally unable to even direct my vomit. My sister Bibi called and sounded very worried, said I had to see a doctor. I was thinking it was just food poisoning, and did not want to be on a stretcher in the ER alone, shivering and feeling tragic. My sister lives two hours north of New York and my son lives on the West coast. At around 1 am I actually got worse, and our very own John Powell was demanding I go to hospital, after I posted here that I am acutely ill, rather than ignoring our conversation that I was appreciating so much.

I lay there just feeling lighter and lighter, like I was floating, I fell asleep finally, for a few hours, woke up feeling suddenly at peace, suspended over my life, like when a horse is harnessed and lifted across a body of water. There was nothing I could do. Finally I made my way to the bathroom again, vomited on the way, crawled to the bedroom, got the phone and dialed 911. “I’m extremely ill,” I croaked. I gave them my address, then I curled up on the hall floor with a blanket and my handbag and keys. A few minutes later they arrived, and took me in a wheelchair down to the ambulance. In the ambulance nothing interesting happened. Except that the guy with messiah hair from the Dive Bar texted me, one in the morning mind you, and wondered how I was. “are you well?”

“I’m in an ambulance actually,” I texted back.

“What happened??” he wrote.

I told him I would let him know tomorrow. And I did talk to the ambulance workers a little. Never stop asking questions. “You guys must see a lot.”

“Yep.”

“Get used to it, don’t even notice. Blood all over. Then we just go eat lunch.”

At the hospital they gave me IV fluids, and diagnosed a severe migraine with vomiting–not food poisoning. I got migraine medications and some anti-histamines. I am now certain it was all brought on by sitting on a duvet made of feathers for about 5 hours the previous day on a visit. The chair was handed down from several generations, and I am deathly allergic to feathers. I lay shivering for a while, a couple of hours, fell asleep some, then they pulled the needles out, I signed the papers, and I was out on 9th avenue at dawn. Took a taxi home. Jack and Lewis were pretty happy to see me.

Today, I feel fine. But I had an awful lot of laundry to do.

I also had a comprehensive epiphany, while doing the dishes: I don’t need any more fixing. Nothing is wrong with me. All that seeking and asking and traveling to healing clinics and out-sourcing my own intuition, that was all just serving my need to be Under.

I’m finished with all that now.

 

 

What Is “Non Violent Communication?” Is It Soft And Infuriating?

Posted on April 15, 2017

I’ve posted about Marshall Rosenberg before, the creator of NVC (Non-Violent Communication) who divided all language into “Jackal” language (dominant, accusatory, carrying deeply concealed needs) and “Giraffe” (deeply hearing, translucent, expressive of needs and feelings, but not to be mistaken for “gentle,” which can also be Jackal in disguise.) Rosenberg used to joke that he grew up in Chicago, and so spoke “many dialects of Jackal.”

Pete Townshend called him a “tough Jew,” which he also was. I loved that choice of words, because it let us know right away that this is not New Age faux kindness. All that does is make the issuer appear to have gold when really he has rocks. False kindness is worse than real cruelty.

Nor does Rosenberg espouse the kind of “tough love,” that is actually sadism in drag, claiming spiritual  legitimacy. Marshall Rosenberg was not a man of psychological or spiritual fashions.

Nothing frightens me more, personally, that people who can’t, or won’t, say how they feel. My own mother definitely, always, could, and did. It was often–to choose the correct word–terrifying, but not, I think, as terrifying as it would have been to climb the walks trying to interpret an icy silence in the house, like so many people I know grew up. My mother did not “do” silence and I am eternally grateful for that, because I believe that nothing hurts more. When my very loved mother was entering a rage, you knew because her fist actually came down on the table and the plates and glasses shook. There are four known responses to trauma, all beginning with the letter F: Flight, fight, freeze, and fawn.

In our house, I resorted to fight and fawn, and my sister Bibi: Flight and freeze.

But Marshall Rosenberg tried to tell us we can actually express our needs, if we can reach them, and transcend all these armored reactions. This is the language of the Giraffes.

We have a conflict here at The Truth Barrier. I think about how I might resolve it but I put it off and put it off. It’s very hard to enter into peace talks when you are under attack from another person whose needs have not been met but who is no longer trying to get them met, rather, the anger is just always coming at you, on a continuous loop. My own anger “stimulated” it, I have to accept. I don’t like to be told my ideas and thoughts are wrong or crazy because somebody else has other ones. The need then, is sovereignty. Let me be me. You be you. Let us be different, and just say, “Oh, that’s what you think! OK then.”

It’s not just I who am the target of rage, but others too. The fighting makes me think, sometimes, of closing down The Truth Barrier. That’s not a manipulation. Who wants to stay at a party where the guests have left the spirit of a breaking bread and everything is shaping up for a brawl and broken glass?

But then, we seem to get better, for the time being. I did block overt trolls. I did not block any real people, who just happen to ‘hate’ me right now, because I hurt their feelings. What people need to do is say: How did I hurt the other person’s feelings? This is “translucency.” Giraffe.

But all parties must first be willing.

I believe that anger is the deadliest of sins. I also believe it can be transformative.

“I’m saying,” says Rosenberg, “that all judgements are tragic expressions of unmet needs.”

 

 

 

Catholicism, Communism, And Back

Posted on April 14, 2017

I walked into my (Jewish) father’s bedroom, where he and his wife were sitting up in bed, watching the news, last night. I had just come from Thursday Night mass, and felt overcome with emotion. I don’t write any of this to alienate or “trigger” any of my atheist readers. I told them I have plans to convert to Catholicism.

“Oh you’ve been saying that for two years,” said my stepmother sharply. “I know,” I said, producing a smile to indicate that the arrow was well deserved.

“There were people there older than me, who were baptized tonight,” I said. “I’m what’s called a catechumen. Don’t you love the language, at least?”

Well, I do. “catechumen” sounds to me like a little caterpillar type creature, curled up safe and warm.

My father’s wife of 9 years is a staunch atheist, who knew Ayn Rand. My father, on the other hand, prays for two hours every morning, before rising. Then he “closes” his prayers with a curious backwards walk in the large foyer. I think for him, it’s simply important to give thanks.

My mother, who was Swedish, was of course born Lutheran, but her mother, Ingrid, rather inexplicably, took her two children to Stockholm in the late 1930s and converted them to Catholicism. Then my mother converted to Judaism, in order to marry my father, who descended from Russian Jews–not particularly devout.

The Rabbi, right after my mother was converted, said: “That’s funny, you don’t look Jewish.”

Then everything blew to pieces and there was no longer a family, just war, which I’ve written about here. When I was 9, my mother took me out of public school and placed me in an all girl’s Catholic private school here in New York–The Convent Of The Sacred Heart. I was in heaven. Ironed my white blouse each night, put on my grey uniform dress, pleated skirt, took the bus across the park, changed out of pants or wool stockings in the vestibule in the winter months. I loved all the rules and the Nuns, contrary to many other people’s experiences, were my liberators. They taught me I had a mind, and could use it. They has us performing Shakespeare in Elizabethan English, and for the first time in my life I excelled in school–skipped grades, even did well in math. My brain trauma seemed to disappear, and I no longer froze during tests. I fell into a spiritual reverie and began my conversion process. I loved this figure: Jesus. I felt he would always be on my side.

Then, in the winter of 1976, we went to Sweden, and in a small hotel in the town of Orebro, my mother told us we were not returning to New York. Not for at least 8 years–to avert a custody battle that was very real in my mother’s mind.

Sweden is almost perfectly secular. Atheist, materialist, “socialist,” (then) and there was no way of continuing my Catholic exploration. We moved into a housing complex that had incredibly serious class implications. “Working class,” we were told. But we were also told in no uncertain terms that people with dark hair, immigrants, at the time called “svartskallar,” (black heads) lived where we lived. We were from New York so didn’t really understand the Big Deal. They said it had low status, We said whatever. The apartment was bleak, with cement walls, vinyl floors–built to crush the human spirit, But perfectly modern. The kind of apartment complex that now has “no go zones,” where the police won’t even go.

Soon we began to be indoctrinated by the Communist Party–its youth program, which preyed on our very young minds, and began gender-leveling by sending us girls to work in car parts factories, the boys to learn nursing and other female oriented professions. This communist eruption happened to me, but not my older sister. I was always way more gullible and emotionally impressionable. They taught us The Internationale in Swedish, had us raking leaves, painting red stars on the walls of the Youth Center, reciting the outrages of the proletariat. We learned about Joe Hill and Victor Jara. One word I do still feel a certain nostalgia about from those days is “Solidarity.” Like when I sometimes have to lock Jack in the bathroom for a few moments because he is pushing things off counters, even though I have fed him, Lewis goes and sits outside the bathroom door and won’t budge. It only takes minutes until I feel like such a tyrant, I let him out. “Solidarity” is a wonderful concept and yes, they drummed it into us. But when we were 14, the bearded Socialist Youth leaders we had given our souls to, had us raking enough leaves, picking enough apples, to go on a canoe hike. It was very important that nobody who “could afford it” had an advantage–so we all worked for a set amount of time, until the money was raised, and then we took off. I actually, looking back, don’t understand how we raised money this way but in any case, they made their point.

I think I was 12 or 13 when I once came home having attended a Communist Youth rally, and was late. My sister  Bibi had to tell my mother where I was and my mother went rather ballistic. I was in very serious trouble when I came home. My mother called my father in New York, furious, and if I recall, hollering. But this time she was not hollering at him, but rather, about me. “Her life will be ruined Barry! She won’t be able to return to the States!” My mother wanted them to agree to ship me off the live with my very strict grandparents in Fort Lauderdale. I don’t know how I even “heard” this, considering the cobra phone technology of the day, but my father, a Conservative, since Nixon, who ran for the office of Mayor of New York in 1977 (the year before) started laughing uproariously.

This infuriated my mother. “It’s not funny Barry!” she roared. And my father roared back: “You’re calling to tell me Celia is a communist. You can’t say that’s not funny.”

That’s become one of our standard phrases to this day: “You can’t say that’s not funny.”

Let me add: I respect my mother’s concern.

In any case, that canoe hike put a decisive end to my communist dreams. Our leaders forgot the maps in the bus. So we winged it–the part about where to carry the canoes and where to paddle. That was all marked up in the maps, left behind. Somewhere around day two, we were paddling along happily when all of a sudden, we were engulfed in rapids. Then we were holding on to the bottom of the canoes, trying not to drown. No life vests. A man called down to us: “You can’t paddle down there!” This we knew. But how to get out? We eventually made our way to the edges, and started climbing up the muddy incline. It was raining. We all got out, but our provisions had floated off, and all our clothes were soaked. I don’t know how many days it was, but we wandered in the wilderness, without food, and with wet clothes, long enough that we began to hallucinate from hunger. Our leaders, unlike us, had packed their clothes properly, and my distinct memory is that “solidarity” went out the window. Not to demonize them, but my best friend for her first period in the middle of all this, and they were not helpful. I don’t know if this contributed to her being worse off than I was but she got very ill. When we were finally rescued–having found our way out of the wilderness, to a small village, she was grey. She was taken to the hospital, with acute meningitis, and her heart stopped–she died. But they started her heart again, with a shot of adrenaline into her heart, which kills you if you are not technically dead. She was so angry at the doctors who brought her back that she cursed them out. She said it was so wonderful on the other side, that there are no words to describe it. None of the youth leaders visited her in the hospital, or called. The same day as her heart stopped, my mother’s fiance fell down dead with a stroke. He was cooking breakfast–boiling an egg– and we were all, the four of us, supposed to go on a vacation trip that day.

My mother and I went anyway–how we got it together I will never understand. She cried, of course, for weeks, like I never heard anybody cry.

I became an anti-communist, but my friend retained her faith. If I’ve told these stories before, forgive me. I am rarely able to remember what I wrote or said or did. “Classic PTSD,” Dr. Brooks always says. I only know the present moment and can’t connect back very well. Eventually, I traveled to the following countries to study communism for myself: The Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia (as it was then called,) Romania, Bulgaria, and Cuba. Right now I am too depleted and exhausted to say any more. I don’t even know why I am trying to explain all this, right now. I don’t think my views “matter,” but I have a compulsion to write things like this, unprompted, maybe to calm my nerves. I can’t bring myself to write about the situation with North Korea, China, and the US. A friend from Japan wrote: “Japan is freaking.”

Well finally somebody is having a reaction that makes sense.

I feel like everything I write is getting more and more stupid, like I am still 14. I can’t explain why I never can remain consistent. Feels I am inside a small cell, and barely speak English anymore, but have to keep talking. I can’t form fancy sentences, or “write.” I am trauma with eyeballs. Everybody is angry. Everybody has always been angry. How can I make people less angry, at least here?

I started this post actually wanting to address my kindergarten sense of Catholicism–went to Mass yesterday, and today, and will go tomorrow, and Sunday. This could become a blog that is simply a diary of a middle aged half Jewish woman trying to become a Catholic, but everybody and their uncle will try to get me to drop it. My friend S. wrote me long texts today saying if I was going to do this I should join a non-denominational Church. Why would I want to do that? That’s the last thing I need–a non-denominational Church. I can’t even stand the words “non-denominational.” Cold and watery. Like everything else. And no, I am not a “Buddhist.” I’m also not from a Buddhist continent.

I want Catholicism. I don’t want to be let off easy either. I wrote a letter to the only editor I ever chained my soul to, at the age of 20, and told him I have quit journalism and am becoming a Catholic. (He’s Catholic.) Here is part of the letter, maybe the most important part:

“I am, at the same time, discovering that my distance from God has caused everything. I need to tell you this, since you are one of the only practicing Catholics I know: I went to mass last night and all of a sudden I was able to feel the sorrow of The Betrayal, and I cried. When they turned the lights off and walked around (I lack all the right terminally but can’t wait to learn) …the Stations, I knew it was real, in a way that is more real than the “truth” I have been caught up in all my life.

I was so affected. I walked to my father’s feeling like a different person, like I was no longer alone, cold and in pain. I know Christ would not mock me or sexually degrade me or feel the need to cut down my mind. (Journalism)

He didn’t hate women! He would never allow a woman to be disrespected.

I have always loved him but didn’t think I was “allowed” to because of the false Jewish/Christian divide. It’s all the same, it’s all one. I don’t have to leave my father or my fragmented judaism to embrace the Cross. Judaism, in fact, does not offer redemption from sin and pain. Not really.

Morals, yes, but healing? My father used to quip, when we could still hold a Seder in his home: “All Jewish holidays are the same story: They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat!”

But I am out for stars. My whole life has been being hunted. I believe that Christ can cause us to love ourselves and never be hunted, no matter what. ”

That is my “faith.” I can either continue to bleed to death from political, social wounds, wounds of knowledge seeking, or I can embrace the offering of redemption. Today I learned that Christ was mocked on the cross, by the other two crucified.

Did you know that? It made me think of Andrew Wakefield, Peter Duesberg, Ignaz Semmelweis, Galileo Galilei; It made me think of scientists:

 

29 Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, “So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, 30 come down from the cross and save yourself !” 31 In the same way the chief priests and the teachers of the law mocked him among themselves. “He saved others,” they said, “but he can’t save himself! 32 Let this Messiah, this king of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe.” Those crucified with him also heaped insults on him.

 

Mark 15:29-32

Walking to my father’s, after mass last night, I took a photo of another Church–New York is a very Catholic city, and also, a city of sin and pain. All of America, paralyzed by pain, sin, rage. I’m sick of it.

I don’t want to be around people who don’t think they should atone for a thing. Who have no beauty about them, which is to say, no remorse. When we ask to be forgiven for our sins, we don’t endorse a blood-soaked Patriarchy. We just open up the possibility of reversing the plague of selfishness. Of zombie-dom. We thaw our frozen hearts.

The war never ends, never changes. I believe that Satan is real, and that he works through us, through our wounds, causes us to inflict suffering, in a vain quest to escape the pain.

I did not like who I had become.

So I went to Church.

The Trump war was Satan’s triumph. Like the episode of The Twilight Zone “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street,” where longtime neighbors, from fear, start accusing one another and the whole community breaks down.

https://vimeo.com/168014736

 

 

In Loving Memory: Bently Stratton: Oct 17, 2011-April 10, 2012

Posted on April 10, 2017

“Totally unbeknownst to his mother, Bently received a staggering 13 vaccinations that day, including two triple doses of DTap, Hepatitis B, a polio shot, three oral rotavirus doses, and a pneumococcal pneumonia vaccine. It was all compressed into three shots and one oral dose. It took the nurses half an hour to prepare all the shots Bently received. The pediatrician told Alisa that her boy perfectly healthy—that he showed above average strength in his stomach and legs.

Five days later, he was dead.
Bently died while sleeping on Alisa’s chest in the middle of the day, five days after receiving those 13 innoculations.
Holding up the photograph, Alisa says, trying to steady her voice, “This is Bently, or… was Bently.”

Then she holds up the silver object:

“And this is Bently now,” she says quietly.

Bently died while sleeping on Alisa’s chest in the middle of the day, five days after receiving those 13 innoculations.

 

http://www.naturalnews.com/A-Family-Destroyed-Vaccines-Without-Consent.html#

 

Today marks five years since Bently died from the chemical assault he got on a “routine” doctor’s visit.

The family released balloons for him, along with one for the family cat Pumpkin. The two balloons were died together, and got stuck in a tree. Alisa wrote on Facebook:

“You wanna know what’s ironic.
When we released the balloons we tied them together.
When Pumpkin was little he got stuck in a tree.
The balloon that’s making all the balloons stuck…..is pumpkins balloon <3
I see signs everywhere <3 ”

My heart aches for this little family, this grieving mother, big sister fighting to be cheerful as a child has every right to be.

Please pray for them all, especially this week. Please don’t be part of the “looking away,” crowd.

You know why these mothers do not sue? Because it takes everything they have just to survive, just to keep going.

There is a donation page linked to the article.

Donald Trump–the walking wounded and the walking aware, many, voted for you because of a faith that you would DO something. You sure did something when your daughter showed you images of 67 children who were victims of a chemical attack in Syria. [I hold the position that the real perpetrators are not revealed.]

Please do something.

America will never be “great again,” until we cherish our children enough to not sacrifice them in the name of profit and dogma.

 

 

 

A Searing, Brilliant Summation Of America’s Chemical Vaccine Warfare By Liam Scheff, R.I.P

Posted on April 10, 2017

I had not listened to this before. I am extremely grateful he left behind so many spoken word pieces, like this one, through which he lives on.

The way Liam channelled the whole “story,” and everybody in it, and all the angles of the trap, all the countless attacks, and all the ways in which they have blocked all the exits–was powerful and original.

What is evil?

I like what Andre Tarkovsky wrote, in “The Sacrifice:”

“Evil is everything that is not necessary.”

It may at first sound laconic but it is actually a perfect definition of evil.

 

Fifth Victim Of Stockholm Terror Attack Was A Dog Named Iggy

Posted on April 10, 2017

An Irish animal rescue organization called Dogs Aid posted this statement on FB:

“We are deeply saddened to learn that one of our dogs was killed in the terrorist attack in Stockholm. Iggy found his beautiful home in Sweden in 2012. R.I.P. beautiful, special boy.”

 

I saw his photo and these words, written by a Swedish man, in a Facebook group, and I broke down crying.

“Rest in peace Iggy! You had not done anything wrong. You were going on on a walk like usual. And you were probably as happy as you ever were when the leash was lifted down. But this walk would be your last. At least in this world! Hope you are running over the green fields over there in dog heaven right now, and that everything is completely awesome!”

 

“Vila i frid Iggy! Du hade inte gjort något ont. Du skulle ut på promenad som vanligt. Och du blev säkert lika glad som alltid när kopplet lyftes ner. Men den här promenaden skulle bli din sista. I alla fall i den här världen! Hoppas du springer över de gröna fälten där i hundhimlen just nu och har det helt awesome!”

People are flooding Iggy’s memorial site with dog biscuits, cards, flowers, and candles.

Four people died in the truck bomb attack last week in Stockholm, among them an 11 year old girl who I believe was deaf and probably did not hear the truck approaching. The apprehended suspect’s name is Rakhmat Akilov, and I am having trouble keeping up with the details of the developing story. I believe one of the people killed was a Belgian mother of small children, another a U.K. man, and father, and a third, a beggar, an elderly woman, possibly from Romania.

Sergel’s Torg, a square in Stockholm, was filled with thousands of people honoring the victims, and trying to represent the urge to heal Sweden, without incurring the sin they most dread, and are most often accused of, when they protest terrorism’s encroachment in Sweden, namely racism.

Iggy has become a place where the grief can pour forth. I myself did not cry before, but was able to, somehow, when I saw his photo. There is a photo of the 11 year old girl (after the blast) circulating that people are understandably fighting very hard to banish from the web, and discussion groups.

I was not able to find information about Iggy’s owners, but they have asked for privacy.

Praying for Sweden to find her way back to peace, and become a standard bearer once again, for the rest of the world.

 

Home Alone

Posted on April 9, 2017

Staying overnight at my father’s tonight, I imagined Jack reassuring Lewis, as he is five years older.

Lewis: She’s not home yet.

Jack: She’s fine. She’s probably at Grandpa’s. Remember the snow this morning?

Lewis: I’m scared.

Jack: Oh for Pete’s sake!

Lewis: What is we have no food!?

Jack: Have you looked in the kitchen? We have food for 5 cats!

Lewis: Don’t yell!!

Jack: I’m not yelling!!

Lewis: I’m telling Mom!!

Jack: You’re such a dummy sometimes.

Lewis: You called me dummy when I’m scared? Mom will hear of this.

Jack: Sshhh! I am trying to sleep.

Lewis: How can you sleep at a time like this?!

Jack: Sshh!!! Be quiet!

Silence.

Lewis: I’m allowed to make any sound I want.

 

Liam Scheff’s Exceptional Journalism: The Story That Almost Brought Down The HIV Murderers

Posted on April 9, 2017

 

 

 

Liam Scheff has passed away, after a long battle with extreme nerve damage (tinnitus)–described here, leaving his many fans, readers, followers, and friends bereft. He’d been mourning the loss of the love of his life, Helen, for many years, who died suddenly in 2010.

I had, like many, recent exchanges with Liam, in which death was openly discussed, and I was fairly good about refraining from imposing useless or banal advice on my suffering friend. Nothing makes people feel more lonely than the feeling that the person they are addressing can’t quite hear what they are saying. Including when they are saying they are ready to die, because living is too excruciatingly painful. (Not psychically–physically, in this case.)

Liam addressed that in his farewell letter, linked above, so I don’t have to run the risk of a ham-fisted or cloying effort to represent it.

If I were to be dead, I would want somebody to bring up my best work.

Liam was both one of the most penetrating, fearless, investigative reporters of our time and one of the funniest YouTube satirists of fake science (I’ll post some of these later.)

He broke a story that was bigger, darker, more devastating, I think, than anything any of us ever broke (proved) before or since, on HIV/AIDS. It came to be known as “Guinea Pig Kids.”

I am a little unclear on whether it was 2002 or 2003 that Christine Maggiore first connected me with Liam Scheff, but when she did, it was because she had found out about a story that Liam then went after like a Tomahawk Missile–emerging with smoking gun evidence that got parlayed into several articles, got picked up by other reporters, and even became a BBC documentary.

Christine deserves the credit for making initial contact with the story, and Liam did the absolutely unparalleled penetrative, undercover investigative reporting that blew it wide open, locally, (here in New York City, nationally, and internationally.

In memory of Liam Scheff, I invite you to tread his original story, “Orphans On Trial,” published in NY Press, here.

And “The House That AIDS Built,” here: http://www.altheal.org/toxicity/house.htm

[Note: This was NY Press under Jeff Koyen, a very brave editor.]

You can read about how all hell broke loose here, and read the letter that temporarily caused the BBC to expunge the film from its archives, after industry bullies threatened and threw tantrums.

The film below is painful to watch. I worked on it as a researcher when Liam fell out with the producer, Jamie Doran, and I know everything in the film is true, sourced, and accurate.

If you have time for nothing else, watch this 25 minute BBC documentary, based on the original reporting by Liam Scheff.

You will find hard to believe, but it’s all true. And it all happened because of two remarkable people: Christine Maggiore, and Liam Scheff. May they both rest in peace, and hey guys–don’t squabble.

Send word. We miss you.

 

 

 

Staging The News, Selling The Wars

Posted on April 8, 2017

 

Note: I have problems with this video. The production, especially the music is heavy-handed. Rather like…propaganda music. But it opens some very important cans of worms.

Who pays for RT? To what end? See what I mean?

There is no such thing as non-propaganda anymore, unless you saw it with your own eyes. And even then, if you don’t shoot video, you will get the facts all wrong when you re-tell what you saw 8 minutes later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blg9XVBUEZg

A Subtly Heartbreaking Headline About The Trump Family

Posted on April 8, 2017

It is a known phenomenon that fathers will choose one daughter for excessive admiration, leaving the other, or others,  to grow up in a cold, cold shadow.

It is one of my pet peeves, fathers who do this. It’s horrid.

Trump has done this, to Ivanka and Tiffany. Both are, in very different ways, victims.

I don’t like him, at all. For my own reasons, developing faster now, day by day.

https://www.yahoo.com/style/tiffany-trump-makes-her-first-164805661.html

Read The Indicter Magazine On Syria: Who Are The White Helmets?

Posted on April 7, 2017

 

 

 

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2017/04/06/swedish-medical-associations-says-white-helmets-murdered-kids-for-fake-gas-attack-videos/

 

[Editor’s Note: I am a contributor to The Indicter, wrote this article for the periodical, know, and trust–utterly– Professor Marcello de Noli who I met while living in Sweden recently. Such trust is intuitive, and rare. I will tell you more about this very interesting man, and this group, Swedish Doctors For Human Rights, in future posts. CF]

 

Thanks to Sharon Warner for alerting me to the Veterans Today article.

Games Without Frontiers: Perspectives On World War Lll, By John Powell

Posted on April 7, 2017

[Note: I will be publishing select comments and submissions from Truth Barrier friends, not as reflections of myself but as reflections of you all, along with other voices on the Internet etc. This first one, by John Powell, was submitted as a comment. CF]

 

Exactly as I predicted, in an analysis posted on Facebook a few weeks ago.

It’s exactly what Putin and the Chinese leadership wanted, for initiating the consummation of their collaborative project of achieving global dominance by baiting “the West” into World War III (a war which, as all reputable military analysts concur, will be easily won by “the East”).

Russia is the only military force on the planet, which has manuveurable orbiting weapons in space, closely trailing America’s satellites which are vital for U.S. offensive targeting and for defensive detection of incoming weaponry.

Those Russian orbiting drones are ready at any moment, to fire satellite-killing shots at those space-based U.S. assets, thereby rendering American defensive targeting and mission-critical communications completely useless.

The American military itself has admitted its helplessness in the face of that vulnerability.

The convergence of “Eastern” interests and “Eastern” imperial imperatives has arrived at its apex of existential imminence. Its post-Nixon/post-Yeltsin strategy of seduction has successfully provided it with the time to prepare for the grand betrayal of the trust granted to it by those in “the West” who were seduced.

Trump is the man whom that “Eastern” convergence wanted in charge of the attempt to “deal” with its trap.

Exactly as that convergence planned, Trump has grabbed the bait.

If not now, that trap will eventually be SUCCESSFULLY sprung, because “the East” IS superior in weaponry, superior in the will to deceive, and superior in sophistication of the will to conquer human destiny’s bumbling, arrogant, vainglorious western overlords of Eden.

“What a piece of work is Man.” Bullshit. To hell with them all.

I pledge allegiance only to the children, and to the republic for which they stand.


–John Powell

RT–Strike On Syria: Did Trump Drink Kool-Aid? Does It Makes Sense?

Posted on April 7, 2017

 

I Don’t Trust Trump, But I Know Who My Friends Were Not [A Facebook Post, To Be Elaborated On]

Posted on April 6, 2017

I don’t trust Donald Trump one iota, but instead of being engineered to “hate” him from the outset, I took my time. During this suspended space, many people I wrongly thought were friends went nuts, became abusive, caustic, morally superior and even abandoned me altogether.
I am NOW opposed to Donald Trump, due the Syria threats AND his vile statement that Bill O’Reilly “did nothing wrong.”
Screw him. AND good riddance to all the people I used to think were friends in the sense they would allow me time to weigh situations and draw my own conclusions.
Thank you Donald Trump, for that, at least. You make it easy to detect fanatics in one’s life.

Anybody who was not your friend when you were undergoing some understandable political disorientation is what is known in clinical terms as a “traumatizing narcissist.” These are people who need you to be just like them.

This whole Trump thing really lit that up and made it easy to answer Pete Townshend’s question, how many friends have I really got?

Farage Decries EU “Mafia” Tactics, Is Booed, Changes Word To “Gangsters.”

Posted on April 5, 2017

 

Who Is “He?”

Posted on April 3, 2017

Misery has gotten into everything, like a dust bowl.

My neighbor Jim gets into the elevator and says, with a stricken face:

“Did you hear what he tweeted this morning?”

I said I didn’t.

[Except I did.]

I smile a little, trying to deflect.

I should have asked who he was talking about.

I don’t think he would have laughed.

 

 

A Feeling For The Organism

Posted on April 3, 2017

In reply to Tom DiFerdinando:
“Tom, I resonate powerfully with your statement, “It is next to impossible to overcome the emotional plague alone, because the emotional plague is a social sickness, not an individual one.” Just last night my adult son and I were exploring the source of our deep perpetual sadness, and after listening to a painfully shocking expose of the extent of pedophilia in high places of power, we realized that we cannot be whole while living in such an atmosphere, even when not knowing about it, or not knowing the particulars. The field of human consciousness is ill, infected with the despair, pain and fear of those who are suffering.
This in turn impacts our own emotional experience. We are part of a whole, and the whole is under assault.”

–Carolyn,

 

Truth Barrier comment section

 

 

Untitled

Posted on April 3, 2017

TIME magazine asks on its cover: Is Truth Dead?

I wonder: Is Mercy Dead?

A small white plastic bag is stuck on a tree branch outside my window, near the projects. Every day I think it will have blown away but it never has. Will somebody climb up there and remove it eventually?

The trouble is: Everything turns out to be false, including the way we promised we felt about each other.

I keep thinking I need to tell the world that the media is made up of ghastly megalomaniacs but nobody would believe me.

Fragments

Posted on April 3, 2017

6:19 am. Lying awake I began hallucinating something about wolves and tried to remember, so I could describe it. My mind has spun out of orbit from trying to hold out hope.

Media is a disease and it can’t be cured. If men go in there as men, they become monsters. If women go in there, they live to regret it.

Unless you are Rachel Maddow–don’t go in there and try to turn the big wheel of rage and conviction. Not as a woman.

Knowing I can’t know anything, or generate knowledge, I listen to the Oracles, the men in media, explaining to the other men in media, what is going on now in terms of catastrophe and perpetual emergency.

Who mints the Oracles? Who designates their power over our perspectives? There are some women on TV but they are without sleeves, always. I wonder if they aren’t cold, and why they have to show their arms. It keeps bothering me. Like it’s some kind of skin-tax, before they are allowed to talk.

Wilhelm Reich: Alone

Posted on April 2, 2017

“This reaction of my closest friends and co-workers to the situation here is exactly the same that has harassed the human race for as much as we can say, 8.000 or 10.000 years, since patriarchy has ruled its destinies and since natural love was extinguished in the newborn infants. I shall not go into that. It is all written up in my publications. Whoever knows these publications also knows what that means. The discovery of the life energy would have been accomplished long ago, had this “I don’t want it, I fear it, I loathe it, I’ll kill it, I’ll flatten it out, I won’t let it exist- live, or exist”. If that had not been in their structures, not in their desires, not in their positive conscious wishes. They’re all descent and good people. No, it is in the structure. It is somehow in their tissues, in their blood. They cannot tolerate anything that has to do with orgone energy, or life energy, or what they call God, or what is their deepest longing for love fulfillment. They cannot tolerate it and they fear it. They fear it by way of structure. Their tissues, their blood cannot stretch out, cannot take it, evades it – avoids it and loathes it.

I do not say all this to depreciate their efforts, their honor, their loves, their lives. I say it because it is true, because it turns up in every single move, in every single word, in every single opinion, in every single paper, in every single thing they did to a- to whatever ever had to do with discovery – the discovery of genitality, life, love, such people as Laurence/Lawrence, or such philosophies as Giordano Bruno’s or such great lives as Jesus Christ, and so forth, and so forth. It is a sad, lonely chapter of the human race.

I don’t feel that I am obligated to solve this riddle, to do anything about it. I happened to discover the life energy. I happened to induce the ORANUR experiment. I know what it means for the future development of medicine and biology, philosophy and natural science and in this awareness I am completely alone.

There is no soul far and wide to talk to, to give one’s feelings – to let one’s feelings go freely, to speak like – as friends speak to each other.
This is all.”

–Wilhelm Reich,

1952

*Special Thanks to Tom DiFerdinando for discussions and knowledge.

 

What They Said: John Powell

Posted on April 2, 2017

Editor’s Note: I re-post here an outtake from a comment by John Powell, who has been with us for many years at The Truth Barrier,  and certainly knows my “armor” and rough sides, which we always manage to overcome. The angry comments (names un-named)  have affected my energy and will, to continue the website, and on one occasion earlier this winter, I pulled it, thinking that was the only option I had, against daily attacks. This is a “labor of love,” and not a for profit website. I don’t think arguments are “attacks,” or factual corrections. Attacks makes themselves felt as attacks; They sting and hurt, as they are intended to.

In my life going forward, all I know is, I no longer want to “sign up” for being abused and I never want to be in such a defensive position that I strike out at another person disrespectfully either. Therefore I have said to all haters of myself and my writings: I accept your feelings, but not round after round after round. If I “block” such persons, I stand accused of a terrible censoriousness, as if I am trying to create or project perfect appreciation for all I state. Not so. Anybody who is made miserable here, should consider not reading this site anymore. Surely that’s reasonable.

I am a PERSON. I have tried to repair the damage done by whatever it was I contributed to this angry knot, but at a certain point I can’t continue to explain and apologize, and yes, it is strictly against the rule to publish private correspondences without both parties’ permission.

Here’s part of what John Powell wrote. I appreciate it and I publish it in hopes we can re-boot, start over, and stop all the fighting, before the website is brought down by ill-will.

CF

 

***
I encourage you to embark on the quest for understanding THE FACT that peaceful, calm, well-reasoned philosophical dialectic between two or more people who have differing beliefs and perspectives IS NOT the same as throwing grossly-insensitive, taunting, condescending, malicious hand grenades of personalized ridicule and mockery.

6.) Your persistent and unsuccessful prodding of Ms. Farber, with sometimes snide and snotty pomposity, to get her to publish here the contents of private correspondence, brings to mind something she stated during one of her recent more-than-gracious attempts at accommodating what characterize as a case for receiving justice.

During that recent attempt at accommodation, she stated as her sworn and sacred duty to her conscience, that she would never violate her personal standard of maintaining the confidentiality of her private correspondence.

You continue prodding her, with sometimes snide and snotty pomposity, to compel and/or coerce her into submitting to something to which she has clearly answered “No”.

I encourage you to embark on the quest for understanding THE FACT that “No” means “No”.

 

–John Powell

Apathy

Posted on March 28, 2017

I have stopped eating, or feeling hunger. I have a brain signal saying: “Go get some food,” but I don’t feel hunger. 3 days now. Yesterday I made some rice and added frozen peas and butter. I ate about 4 fork fulls. “Add some salt,” I said to myself. I did. But it didn’t feel like eating, and it didn’t seem like food.

The last time this happened I was 6.

Something very traumatic happened yesterday. Another, today.

Oddly: The previous few months, especially the last few weeks, were characterized by a strange wolf-like hunger. I ate and ate and still felt I was starving. My weight, since I returned from Sweden–10 lbs higher than my “normal” since age 21.

I have not been somebody who ever had to think about losing weight, but sometimes I had to think about gaining some. People hate skinny people and people hate overweight people. I think people also hate average weight people, as well as slightly pudgy people.

I am also not breathing properly.

I catch myself and I think:

“Breathe, for Christ’s sake.”

Then I draw one or two deep breaths.

People are always telling me to breathe.

Not wanting to eat, or breathe, is connected to rage about what has been taken away.

The last time I stopped eating, they had taken my mother.

This time, they’ve taken history. And history includes that is happening now, and is about to happen. In other words, everything that “happens–”

they have taken.

 

 

 

 

Herzog: “Let Them Fact Check To Their Death”

Posted on March 26, 2017

 

NUNES: Trump Transition Team WAS Under Surveillance; Did Comey Lie?

Posted on March 22, 2017

“I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions, the intelligence community collected information on U.S. individuals involved in the Trump transition,” Nunes said.

 

Quoted at InfoWars.com

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veYcFEZcPpo

 

https://twitter.com/Pamela_Moore13/status/844645879248273408

Swedish Singing Duo With Aspergers, ADHD, Threatened By State For Filming Riot: Told To Call Themselves Mentally Impaired, As Instruments Seized And They Face Firing

Posted on March 22, 2017

[BREAKING DEVELOPMENT: 10:22 AM: THEY HAVE NOW BEEN FIRED.They will not get their equipment back.]

 

A Swedish singing duo– Claes Mård and Nayana Gulstad–filmed a battle between drug gangs [of unknown origin] on March 3, 2017, in the Swedish town of Hallsberg. The gangs were throwing rocks, brandishing weapons, and attacking police cars. Mård’s 17 year old son was barricaded inside his high school at the time, along with other students,  and the two musicians were circling in a car to see if they could evacuate him. They live-streamed the film on Facebook to warn others who may be in the area. Because they said a few mildly negative words about the criminals, their lives have been turned upside down.

They were called up, and told they could expect to be fired from their job, singing favorite tunes at retirement homes in central Sweden. Their instruments and PA were seized, and they were told to write a letter of denial/denunciation, apologizing for shooting this film, and using the negative words. [I have watched the film, speak Swedish, and heard only mildly critical language. see transcript.]

They were–most shockingly–told to recuse themselves on grounds of being “mentally incapacitated,” because one of them, Mård, has ADHD and mild autism, and the other, Gulstad, has has Aspergers. Swedish authorities demanded they put in writing that their mental “handicaps” caused them to not know what was happening, and to act badly, and allow themselves to be manipulated by “far right” media. They have refused to do so. Truth Barrier editor Celia Farber interviewed the besieged duo on March 21, by phone, from the US.

On March 22, (today) they will be called to a meeting and told to sign a new letter, and possibly lose their jobs. The Truth Barrier will follow up with them to find out what happened at the meeting.

Here is a translated transcript of the interview.

CM stands for Claes Mård, NG stands for Nayana Gulstad, and CF for Celia Farber.

 

 

CF: Tell me about yourselves.

NG: We work at a [state affiliated organization] called ABF where we go out and play music, favorite songs, which older people want to hear. We play music from the 11th century to the present. Every week we go around to different retirement homes in Örebro lan. [Note: By sheer coincidence, this is where CF grew up. It is also where whistleblower cop Peter Springare is from.]

CF: What is ABF?

NG: ABF is “arbetarna’s bildings forbund” [“Workers Educational Association”] an old…organization with access to education, teaching people their union rights, that kind of thing.

CF: Is this run by the Social Democrats?

NG: According to some bosses there, you can’t be part of it unless you are a social democrat, but last Monday the top boss said they are politically neutral.

CF: What is the name of your musical duo?

NG: We are called “Sound of Scandinavia.” We play music that our elderly and frail, or people with health struggles, appreciate.

CF: When did your troubles begin?

NG: March 3, a few weeks ago, we happened to record an event where  criminal individuals threw rocks and caused a riot at our local high school here in Hallsberg. We filmed this event. I filmed and Claes drove the car. We were talking while we were filming and we wound up saying things that were a slight bit…well put downs, but we didn’t mean it that way. Both of us stand by the film 100% and we are truly sorry if we have hurt anybody’s feelings…anybody of foreign origins. We didn’t mean to do that.

CM: It’s like this. I have lived in the Dominican Republic for almost 20 years. There it’s like, of you say something like “Blatte” to somebody, it’s not degrading. I have a child from the Dominical Republic and my wife is Arabic. So I have been a “Blatte pappa” and still am.

CF: I don’t know the word “Blatte…”

NG: It’s a word…you have some words you may use…words like…well it’s a downer word

Claes: But it’s not a strong word.

CF: B l a f f e? [Did not hear due to poor connection.]

NG: No, B L AT T E. We all say it, like we’re joking around. But publically and official media you haver to sayare not to use this word in Sweden.  You can’t say “foreigner” in Sweden you can only say “immigrant.”

CF: This is a law?

NG: It’s not a law but you’re supposed to be socially aware enough to not say that. For example you say “chocolate ball,” not “negro ball.” [This is a reference to an iconic Swedish confection that was disastrously named in the 60s and re-named in the 90s.]

CF:  Can we talk about the event you filmed? Are you able to discuss it?

NG: Yes, we can.

NG: We filmed this event and put it put on Facetime. It was live so people reacted very powerfully. In Sweden it’s not the immigrants per se but integration problems that we have in Sweden. It’s easy to blame the immigrants but it’s not their fault. It’s pur politicans who don’t take responsibility.

CF: What kind of event was it you filmed? [Film clip below.]

NG: It was riots with big rocks, weapons. It’s like the kind of stuff you see in the movies. You hear like…about Stockholm, Goteborg, Malmo, this was totally surreal, that it would happen in our little town, in Hallsberg.

 

CM: They were throwing rocks at the police and they even hit one of the police cars with something. The police managed to get hold of them after a while. My son was locked in at the school because they locked the doors. We were circling the school to evacuate him.

NG:  Then we went round and filmed what happened.

 

 

CG: And this went out on FB live stream?

NG: Yes.

CF: How many people saw that?

NG: About half a million. It went out on Peter Springare’s FB page and other social media.

CF: Had you been alerted to come to the school?

NG: No, we just happened to be driving past…

CF: How did you know there was trouble?

NG: We simply drove past and saw as it was happening.

CF: How old is your son?

CM: He’s 17.

CF: Were you worried for his safety?

CM: I was accustomed to riots from the years we lived in Santo Domingo, there were often riots. I did think something could happen…

NG: With a mass school shootoing or something…

CF: What happened next?

NG: People had a huge reaction, became “skogs tokiga” (forest crazy)  and then they called from ABF and said this film could cost us our jobs.

CF: This was on the phone?

NG: Yes, they said politicans had contacted ABF and asked how we could be working for  them.

CM: 99% of those who have contacted us have been supportive of us. This has become like an opening shot in Sweden, the start of something…Now people are finally daring to speak the truth about what is happening here. The lid has been pressed down tight previously. We have used our names openly and we have therefore been threatened and my car has been totally smashed up,

CF: Your car has been vandalized?

CM: Yes.

NG: They told us we had to write our own denunciation, a letter denouncing ourselves. We were told we had to apologize for this bad behavior, which we had already done long ago, for this film, and we also had to come out in public and declare our political “colors.” And we were also to state that we were mentally handicapped and that we don’t understand things very well. That we had been tricked by mass media.

CF: What do you mean, mentally handicapped?

NG: I have Asbergers and Claes have ADHD and [inaudible] autism.

NG: We have never had a complaint about our work,. Everybody says we are the best they have ever had. It’s just the police who think this film is so….they don’t like the film but there have never been complaints about our work.

CF: How long was it between the time you filmed the incident and you got this phone call?

NG: About two hours.

CM: The news spread fast all over Sweden.

CF: This is so shocking. It sounds like GDR.

NG: Tomorrow we have meeting number two.

CF: I hope you will record it.

NG: They have already recorded us but they didn’t tell us.

CF: Insist on recording it. Seriously.

NG: They don’t want us to, they have already told us what to write in the letter and tomorrow they will demand it, they will be very strict.

CF: But you are free people in a democracy.

NG: We aren’t, in Sweden, not really.

CM: Not in Sweden. I can say this, I lived 20 years in the Dominican Republic, in Miami, in Colombia, I have worked professionally with music and so has Nayana. We’re not idiots. We have degrees, we have all kinds of things. But they want us to come out and say we are mentally handicapped and because of that we have been bad, shot this film…

NG: I am actually the first female winner of “Big Brother,” in the whole world.

CF: This is very shocking to me as an American, that they have the nerve to say you are mentally handicapped…

NG: I have Asbergers but I am not ashamed of it. We felt very degraded. You know what they did last week? We have worked extra gigs to raise money for our musical equipment. Last week  they came to get our gear so we can’t work. We had other equipment so we used that instead..

CF: So they have stolen your instruments.

NG: Yes.

CF: Do you have a lawyer?

NG: To be honest, we can’t afford that right now.

CF: You need a lawyer. They have confiscated your gear and they’re trying to eliminate your livelihood. I speak as somebody who that happened to. Don’t let that happen. This is a modern version of  communist tyranny.

CM: That’s exactly what it is. I might be exaggerating here but I think we are now getting to the point where some Swedes will have to leave this country. The same way Swedes emigrated to the US to get away from the Church’s persecutions.

 

NG: Now it’s the politicians who are persecuting us. And we are culture workers, we are not supposed to be quiet. We are supposed to critique society. We are supposed to be a bridge between normal people and those who make the decisions. If culture workers can’t express themselves here…then what happens?

CF: Has Nerikes Allehanda [regional newspaper] written about this?

NG: The only thing they wrote about was about protests against us in the Church, they’re very angry, they wouldn’t look at us in Church, I sat up front…it was so degrading, they wouldn’t even look at me. It felt like a witch burning, like they were going to set fire to me.  I believe in God. I want to say though, that our local police did a fantastic job. They locked the schools, they protected the children.

CF: This outbreak of violence was it to do with drug dealers and rival gangs, selling drugs?

NG: Yes. Narcotics, weapons, different gang affiliations.

CF: Why do you two think it is SO important for the Swedish state and media to repress this story? What is this really all about?

CM: I think it’s like this: In Sweden, our main industry is weapons which we sell to other countries. When people who are fleeing somewhere come here, we earn money. Not we ordinary Swedes, but our politicians.

CF: How do they earn money on the migrants, if that is the right word? Immigrants. How does Sweden earn money on them?

CM: Sweden gets money from EU and other countries to receive refugees. I call this the “humans trade.” You earn money, but in a very short sighted way.

CF: EU want the refugees to come to Sweden. But why does EU want them to come to Sweden?

NG:  At the bottom of it all, these people really do need help. When the war broke out in Syria…there are so many people in crisis who want to come to Sweden. We are a good country. We are also a social experiment, since the 1970s. We want to be able to say that we are better than others, that we have high morals and we help people.  But we don’t have the possibility to do that, really.

CF: Lets’ go back to the incident. Tell me more about what happened.

NG: They threw rocks at the police, these youth, they had weapons, it was a real panic, chaos.

CF: Nayana when you say weapons what do you mean?

NG: They had steel pipes, they had [inaudible.] We didn’t film anybody’s faces. We were careful not to film their faces.

CF: What was the worst thing you said? This word “Blatte?” That word you are not supposed to say…

NG: In Sweden we say “fy fy fy,” (shame, shame, shame) to those words. If you are a good Swede you don’t use words like that.

CM: But it’s not a very harsh word. It really isn’t.

NG: It’s a word you don’t say. Not publicly. You can say it in your kitchen, but you don’t say it in public.

CF: They have not told you to take the film down?

NG: It has been clicked on so many times it’s too late.

NG:We have a perfectly ghastly media here in Sweden. Demanding that every last person think a certain way…They are awful. Just awful.

The media here are constantly attacking Trump. Constantly. I don’t know. I think he seems like he is pretty tough and plain spoken. Media in Sweden is like the Church was in the 1600s.

CF: Fascinating. And I noticed when I lived there recently, briefly, that you hardly have any alternative media. Except News Voice and a few others. I would suggest you read Torbjorn Sassersson’s Newsvoice, if you don’t already.

OK so, about this meeting…you wrote a letter, tell me about that.

NG:  I wrote a denial/ denunciation letter but they did not accept it. I wrote that I apologized for speaking in a derogatory way, that we do not believe that the problems we have here in Sweden are the immigrants’ fault, that it is a problem of integration, a political problem. I explained that we are socially liberal. That we believe in democracy, equality…that absolutely nobody should ever be put down but that you must say something when something is wrong.

CF: Could I possibly get a copy of that letter?

NG: Yes, you can. I’ll send it to you.

CF: Thank you. Why didn’t they accept that letter?

NG: They want us to be more exacting what we mean by socially liberal, what that is. I believe in freedom, I believe everybody should be free to be who they are. But that was not enough for them. And then like I said they want us to invoke our mental functioning, apologize, say that we did not understand what we were doing, and that we were exploited by right wing extremist media, who were using the situation politically. We are having an election soon in Sweden.

I am a liberal. By that I mean I believe in laying out the facts and the truth about things.

CF: Claes, did you also have to write a letter or was it one letter for the two of you?

NG: I wrote it for both of us.

CM: My position is, we shot some video, because we happened to be there at the time these events were happening. We have not mismanaged our jobs, at all. We don’t really have anything to apologize for, in fact. Apart from my use of this word. “Immigrants.”

NG: You’re not allowed to say that in Sweden, you have to say “immigrants.”

 

CF: You can say “immigrants,” but not “foreigners?” To my Swedish-American ear, I don’t hear a big difference, but OK…Did you write a second letter when they rejected the first one?

 

NG: No, we have this meeting instead, tomorrow at 2 pm. They are formulating a letter that they will demand we sign but we don’t plan to approve it.

 

CF: The event was the third of March? When did they take your gear?

NG: This past Thursday, at 9 am. They took all our instruments.

 

CM: Our boss has a whole garage at home with a PA system…but he came and collected ours.

 

CF: Incredible. Do you feel fear over the possibility of not being able to support yourselves?

 

CM: There is a great risk that we will be fired tomorrow.

NG: Yes.

CF: Please record it. Please.

NG: I plan to use the fact that as they have said we have mental incapacity. So we need to know what we have said.

CF: This is important. Otherwise they will do what they will, with your reputations, livelihoods, they can turn it into anything they want. You can even record them saying you can’t record it. In such case, it’s an outright fascist society.

CM: That’s true. I have lived in South America. In countries with fascism. This is worse.

CF: In what way is it worse, in your estimate? I agree.

CM: When I lived in The Dominican Republic, for instance, I was never checked by the authorities. My opinions…nobody was checking that kind of thing. Here they demand to know everything!

CF: Have you been in contact with Peter Springare?

NG: He has contacted us and said he thinks this is ghastly. He has information about these criminals.

CF: It seems to me the missing piece is drugs, gangs. Rival gangs. A friend told me this when I was home in Orebro. She said it kind of quietly. “It’s all about drugs. That’s why they riot and set fires and all the rest. So the cops don’t come in and interrupt their drug trade.”

CM: That’s true. It’s worse than anything I saw in the Carribean.

 

CF: I noticed when I lived in Sweden recently that people have truly changed. Nobody can talk, nobody wants you to bring anything up, it’s very strange. My friends have been attacking me on FB like I am a criminal for bringing these things up. I am an American. At the end of the day, I don’t care, I can leave. But it must feel very crushing to Swedes to be betrayed like this, that Swedes’ feelings mean nothing, immigrants feelings mean everything.

NG: We are a social experiment. We are to be brought up, shaped, engineered, it’s in our whole education, media.

 

CM: We don’t need so many jails and things like that because here you can control people anyway [inaudible.] Like me, they can fire me, tomorrow. They can eliminate some social allowance or other. The whole society is built on this system that those citizens who don’t do what the politicians want, they will be punished in some way.

CF: What has the response been among your friends?

NG: Many think it’s a good thing but they would never dare say it themselves. They think we’re brave. They call us whistleblowers. Like Peter Springare. We’re really just simple culture workers, going around trying to play good music for our elderly. We are not trying to be political.

 

CF: Be prepared that your story can become big internationally. Sweden does not get how bad this publicity is for Sweden, it’s like black PR. In the international community. People are appalled. “What is going ON over there?”

 

NG: I love my country. I do. But we have to change things. The educational system, the health care system.

 

[Break]

 

In Turkey, all their surveillance is bought from Sweden.

CF: You are spied on, then, just like us?

NG: Yes we are. Same as in America, NSA and everything.

CF: Right. Do they check you on FB and everything.

 

NG: Every Swede on Facebook knows they are being surveilled by Swedish Secret Service. I have nothing to hide. I hope they go after these terror groups…

 

CF: But they are wasting a lot of time and resources on hunting down Swedes who say the wrong words. When they have grave problems to deal with. It’s like a psychosis.

 

NG: I think it’s like this—we are close to an election, and Swedish politicians are worried because SD [“Far right” party, pushing immigration reform] has 20% now. And they are entering an alliance with the Moderate party. Next year we don’t know what Sweden will look like.

 

CF: What is the truth about women, girls, sexual molestation, rape…? How bad is it?

 

NG:  We have always had public bathhouses in Sweden. Now they want to segregate women and men, so these men can’t make sexual attacks on women.

 

CM: What they have done here in Sweden is, they have caved in to these extremist groups who want to change society.

 

NG: The worst part is…for 100 years women have fought for equal rights here.  Same salary, same everything, It’s all wiped out, not important anymore.

 

CF: Nobody cares about women’s rights…?

NG: When a Swedish man commits a sexual crime against a woman the newspapers say: “Swedish man” did this or that. When it is an immigrant they just say, “ a man…”

 

CM: The statistics on rape have gone sky high. Women don’t dare go out alone.

 

NG: We can’t even let our girls go to concerts anymore, they get raped and molested. Guys come in packs and molest and rape the girls.

 

CF: Continue as you are doing, don’t cave in to the shame. You have the world behind you, the civilized world.

 

CM: Maybe we can play for Donald Trump some day, you never know.

 

CF: You never know.

 

Are you aware Sweden is deporting 80,000 people in the next 3 years?

 

CM: I don’t think they will get hold of them.

 

CF: Why isn’t that racist?

 

NG: It’s authorities who aren’t synchronized. They have no integration politics. Sweden needs families with children. I don’t understand why we have to receive  all these men. We should go to the war zones like we did in WW2 with the “pink buses” from the Red Cross and pick up women and children. Why all these men? During WW2 the king went to collect Jewish children, why can’t they go to Syria and collect these poor children, and their mothers. Why can’t they do that?

 

CF: We are missing a piece. Something we don’t know. They’re up to something, the globalists.

 

Last question, for now: I was wondering, how does it feel? How did this attack make you feel inside? Claes, I’ll start with you.

 

CM: I’m devastated over these developments. My son is born in the Dominican Republic and he went there to visit family over Christmas. He came home and he was shocked. He said, “Dad, we had it better in The Dominican Republic.” This country has gone backwards. I’m deeply worried about the future here. We have to have the freedom to say what we think. You don’t have to agree with everybody. But we have to allow each person the right to express themselves.

 

CF: Sweden is almost no longer a democracy at all. It’s like a soft totalitarian system.

 

CM: I might be unemployed tomorrow, because I shot video of this event. I have not even expressed a political position, I just happened to be there when this riot happened.

 

CF: Classic totalitarian. Punish all witnesses.

 

CF: How about you Nayana?

NG: I love Sweden, period. We have to develop our democracy BY inviting everybody into the conversation. It’s when you silence people that things become dangerous.

 

CF: They count on shame—that you will be ashamed, be emotionally brainwashed.

NG: We won’t be.

 

CF: Everything they are doing is backfiring.

 

CM: My thinking is this: If I lose my job tomorrow due to this, I want the whole world to know.

 

CF: We will see to it. You have allies. You’re dissidents now. Like in any totalitarian regime—you are dissidents.

 

NG: I may be brave but I am also worried. That doesn’t mean I will stop.  They can kill me if they want. I believe every person’s voice should be heard.

 

CF: Keep people who don’t get what you are about at a distance. I say this from experience. And keep a record of everything. Everything.

 

CM: We will.

 

The End

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All Of Society Is A Giant Asch Conformity Experiment: Saker

Posted on March 19, 2017

 

 

“What society had done to me – made me completely powerless – it has also done to you. And just the way it had made me feel like a single lonely nutcase, it made you feel like you were the only one. I most sincerely believe that the real reason for the success of this blog, its global community, its vibrant discussions and the amazing outpouring of kindness towards me is in the following simple fact: I inadvertently made it possible for many thousands of people to realize they they were not alone, not crazy, not wrong but that quite literally “we are everywhere”!”

 

 

I just discovered this magnificent, writer who feels like a Submarine in a Desert brother I never met.

I find his words to reflect my inexpressible experience, in an organized way I can’t achieve. I have too much grief dust, sheer discomfort, and I enter dream states all day long. How do you escape the cruelty and your own rage, which sometimes starts to create cruelty? What is the prayer of words, what is the idea? Is it time to let go of all these truth battles, when it only makes people leave you?

 

 

 

Pharmaceutical Culture Bullies Ban And Harass Film About HIV Positive Healthy 30 Years No Treatment

Posted on March 18, 2017

This is the short history of what happened to the film “Positive Hell” which Truth Barrier readers will have heard about before, in 2016. The film was successfully screened in Queens last weekend and will be screened again today in Harlem, where I will join film maker Joan Shenton in a Q&A afterwards.

Free speech has at last triumphed.

 

 

Racist SNL Skit Backfires: Alex Jones Reveals How “Entertainment” Is Weaponized

Posted on March 14, 2017

 

Marshall Rosenberg On Non-Violent Communication: Words Are Windows Or They’re Walls

Posted on March 9, 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D-_QVz4LHs

Why Don’t I Hate Trump?

Posted on March 8, 2017

“The surest, and often the only, way by which a crowd can preserve itself lies in the existence of a second crowd to which it is related. Whether the two crowds confront each other as rivals in a game, or as a serious threat to each other, the sight, or simply the powerful image of the second crowd, prevents the disintegration of the first.”

Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti

 

I just got off the phone with somebody I have known most of my life, who I love and admire, who actually, unlike the rest of us, knows Mr. Trump and has had fairly close dealings with him.

Because I am compulsively honest*–not in a Girl Scout sense but in a keeping-things-unresolved-makes-me-feel-grimy sense–I wanted to jump right on here and share it. Not the details–just the fact that my heart is registering something uncomfortable. I am taking stock, checking myself for denial.

This person said (not en original thought but nevertheless) that Mr. Trump is a megalomaniac. That was one thing. What bothered me more were some things he said about how he treated women, in this person’s presence. (And the speaker is not known for his lack of enthusiasm for the opposite sex.) Insensitivity, grandstanding, social climbing, boorishness, usury, only caring about himself. Being disrespectful to his wife. Boasting about sexual conquests.  Those kinds of things.

The thing about this person is we respect each other deeply and have worked together in intellectual warfare trenches that forged a trust that is impossible to describe.

So I listened. Then I listened some more. I picked up my bruised self and sat it into a chair. What am I missing?

(These days I’m frankly thrilled if somebody at least is not a pedophile.)

I have always tried, since this hell-storm began, to maintain a middle position: That I oppose Trump hatred, that it is destructive and irrational and downright terrifying. I have not loved a President since Jimmy Carter, who I was spiritually in love with, as a child. I was Jimmy Carter for Halloween when I was 8.

But my confession is this: I resist hating Trump, because I hate what Trump hatred has done to us all. And there’s something else. It reminds me of my childhood, which was not at all a happy place.

In childhood, I was forced to hate a man. I was given no peace until my squeaky little hatred came out sounding convincing. He was bad, bad, bad. He had no redemptive qualities. In fact, he was trying to kill me! If I didn’t see how bad he was, I was bad. And I was punished, by the removal of love, safety, and self-regard.

That man was my father.

And my father, you see, was not bad. He was, and is, a very loving person, who was unable to play the role of either husband or father in such a way that we could avoid the cancer of hate overtaking our small family. I understand as well–trust me I do–my poor mother. And my love for her was paramount and visceral. I learned to say and do anything at all, to stop her from being angry.

And my most dreadful secret was that I loved my father

This was unacceptable, and I was a treacherous sinner.

And now I can’t even keep typing because my eyes are filled with tears. I am thoroughly emotionally exhausted by all of this warfare. Aren’t you? I have no idea which way to turn. I am so tired of being flogged, I’m almost ready to say anything, write anything, to make it stop. [No, I do not think Donald Trump is my father, but I did find it hilarious, and rich, when conservative, gay, Jewish, Greek, British enfant-terrible Milo Yiannopoulos coined him “Daddy.”]

I can hate alright. I hate systems: I hate communism, fascism, globalism, political correctness. I hate everything that dehumanizes us and weaponizes our interactions, poisons our language, mocks our hopes.

And yes, I “hate” institutionalized Trump hatred. The self-entitled, reflexive violence of it.

Last night I was verbally assaulted on the street outside my father’s apartment, by a Hillary supporter I used to know. In fact, knew since birth. Upon seeing me emerge from a taxi carrying a chicken I had baked for my father, she screamed at the top of her lungs: “YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF!!!”

I didn’t drop the chicken. I kept my bearings. I screamed right back at her, and on shaking legs, went into the building. Because I am still trying to show my love for my father, who I was never allowed to love as a child–and this is a very primordial need.

There it is again: Shame.

There it is again.

It follows me. It follows us all. Shame for being insufficiently on board with hatred, in the name of “liberalism” this time. Political correctness. I’m not even allowed to hate the surveillance and entrapment that permits us all to know what he said on that bus 12 years ago.

We live in a time of acid hatred, as the primary medium of thinking ourselves “good.”

Last night I got a poignant email from a friend who is one of the most intelligent, ethical, brilliant people I know. He’s a composer. He’s not on the left, no. Neither am I. We share secrets and unburden our souls, sometimes. He wrote this:

“There are a bunch of really, really smart people out there who voted for Trump—in the belief they were cutting the 100% odds we would go down the tubes (with Hillary) in half. Unfortunately, the unalloyed joy of watching the HRC pods (as you call them) weeping on television is offset in real life by the daily reality of presumption that you are one of them! Complaining about Trump seems to be the only way people can communicate with one another anymore, and it makes perfect sense because so much of social transaction is foreplay—before the main event of bitter complaining and protestations of victimhood—anyway. Now everybody has an excuse to complain 24/7/52/365.

When people start in on Trump, I just look at them and say “I’ve come to a different conclusion than you” and enjoy the astonishment. ”

I was particularly struck by the simple line: “Complaining about Trump seems to be the only way people can communicate with one another anymore.”

And I still stand by what I posted here some months ago, as my formal position:

“I do not accept Donald Trump as my anti-Christ.”

And my other point, which I have written about many times: “My issue, my war–is with the deep state and its media. On that, Trump is a co-beliggerent.”

On this, with yesterday’s Pearl Harbor sized event: Wikileaks publishing “Vault 7,”–the entire hacking capacity of the CIA, I have been vindicated.  So have all if us who dared say we believed there was such a thing as a “deep state,” which causes elite types to scoff.

So ok.

I will “admit” that Donald Trump may be a megalomaniac, a “pig,” and a bad person. If you will admit that yes, there was a “deep state,” only deeper than we dreamed, and it’s spying on you and me right this very moment. Through computer, TV, phone–the works. It’s disgusting. I actually feel nauseous after yesterday’s revelations from Wikileaks, only 1% of which have been published thus far.

Kind of the way you may feel nauseous when Trump Tweets, when Trump blows his horn, when he does all the things he does.

I hope we can agree it is a good thing there are–allegedly–upward of half a million new jobs already, and the stock market is at an all time high. 1500 child traffickers and/or pedophiles have been arrested.

Yes yes, I know–pedophilia is paranoia, and the soaring stock market only means it is about to crash.

Thanks.

What is it like to be an Oracle, I wonder?

When do we begin to recognize that to deprive people of hope, and to socially and economically induce them to hate another–this is abuse.

So what do I stand for, as one leftist friend demanded to know on FB?

I went to the Trump support rally this weekend (calm down) to watch, listen, take pictures, shoot video, and understand. People were alive and passionate, all races, all social classes, ages. Chinese Americans for Trump wore orange T-shirts, and were the most vocal. They had megaphones. They wanted us to know where they had been, what they had come out of: China. This is the thing about America–it is only loved by those who came here with nothing but their lives, fleeing a tyranny.

The Trump supporters weren’t fancy people, but they were open and talkative. You could go right up to them and ask what they were thinking and feeling. I interviewed the man who runs the concession stand in Trump Tower, where the crowd retreated from the cold when the gathering was over, in their red caps, beneath the cascading wall fountain in the lobby cafe. The man was from India, and had known Trump 10 years. He told me he always came in–before he was President–and bought Rolo chocolates. And he always insisted on paying. “You’re  a businessman,” he would say. He proudly showed me a letter Trump had written him, and signed.

I wanted to post some of the footage, here, which would be a way of saying: “Look at the American story. The American street.”

But you don’t care, if you hate Trump. You’re so weaponized and armored that you are rarely called out for another hatred: Ordinary people. Fellow Americans. You hate them too.

Why do I say that?

Because you make no effort to ask what it on their heart. You don’t care what they think, or why. That’s the number one manifestation of both disrespect, abuse, and narcissism–to abject everything that is not “myself.”

Well, at the very least, can journalists still talk to people? It used to be a well respected interview tradition called “man on the street.”

No more.

Now we just broadcast what we know, our propaganda. Our hate.

I can see, with one eye, that Trump may be a very troubled man, and with the other eye, that people who support him are good, sound, decent people with a dream.  And their own anger–very well earned.

They’re the new Jews, the new negroes, the new hated and hounded. You can spit on them and throw bricks through the window of their business and nobody will accuse you of being a hater, because your hate is popular and blessed by the media.

Here are two clips, two American voices: Gary from the Bronx and Gary from Staten Island. The former wanted to be allowed to say :”Merry Christmas.” The latter, until recently, was still a Trotskyite.

It was so cold, my iPhone froze every few minutes and shut down, so forgive the truncated clips. I went in to various art galleries–not a soul inside–to unfreeze my phone. There were sculptures in there of headless bodies in white plaster. I fled as soon as the phone was re-charged. I think people–what they say and how they say it–are works of art.

Journalism stopped being journalism when it stopped hearing them–and as we all know, that is why Trump, like it or not–is President. Not yours, necessarily.

Theirs.

 

 

 

 

*except when I lie.

VAULT 7: Wikileaks Publishes The Entire Hacking Capacity Of The CIA

Posted on March 7, 2017

 

“Still working through the publication, but what @Wikileaks has here is genuinely a big deal. Looks authentic. ”

Edward Snowden, Twitter, 8:53 am, March 7., 2017

 

I’ve been following the mountainous story since it broke this morning–and I went to sleep last night knowing I would wake up to a changed world. We all went to sleep last night mumbling silently: “Vault 7. I wonder what it is.”

I’d seen shady looking “clue” images on Twitter, suggestive of some ghastly secret society or other. Turned out, it was the CIA, no less:

Gutted like a fish.

 

Read about it here, if you haven’t:

https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/

 

I don’t know why, but as the day has worn on, 12 hours into this breaking story, I have become too depressed to compose words about it.

I simply feel sick, like a bird alone in a dirty fountain in Caucescu’s Bucharest in 1972.

De-vitalized, I offer but a few links, no significant commentary, no insights.

What did I tell you? Attacking Trump is fine, but it’s kindergarten, politically. Sesame Street.

But I know those of you who linger here looking for dead bones of arguments you have long since lost, will never rest yours.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikileaks-cia-documents-released-cyber-intelligence/

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/wikileaks-cia-what-are-they-explained-vault-7-year-zero-julian-assange-secrets-a7616826.html

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/world/europe/wikileaks-cia-hacking.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

 

Vault 7: CIA Can Stage Fake Russian Hacking to Undermine Trump

 

Somali Journalist Exposes Al-Shabaab Recruiting In Sweden: Betrayed By Swedish Ultra PC Media, Returns To Somalia

Posted on March 4, 2017

“We don’t judge anybody.”

–Randi Mossige-Norrheim

 

“This place is more dangerous than Mogadishu.”
“What do you mean?”
“Here you cannot tell the truth. The truth is kept secret and the people are silenced.”

–Amun Abdullahi

 

 

Swedish Psychologist Too Afraid To Reveal Identity Exposes Depths Of Sweden’s Intellectual Tyranny

Posted on March 4, 2017

“Do you realize the absurdity of having to… protect the identity of a psychologist in a Western nation?”

“Yeah, it’s embarrassing.”

 

 

Holy War On Human Trafficking And Pedophilia Networks: The Staggering Number Of Arrests In Recent Weeks

Posted on February 17, 2017

“Since the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20th, 2017, the number of trafficking arrests for human trafficking in 2017 have doubled the total numbers provided for the entire year of 2014 by the Department of Justice. Each individual law enforcement operation has been listed below for reader convenience.”

 

All the current data is here.

BREAKING VACCINE SAFETY PRESS CONFERENCE: LIVE IN 10 MINUTES: Robert DeNiro, RFK Jr.

Posted on February 15, 2017

TODAY, 9:30 am EST–

 

“Activist Robert F. Kennedy and actor Robert De Niro are set to hold a major press conference at the National Press Club Wednesday to discuss the correlation between mercury-containing vaccines and childhood autism.
“The event will focus on the announcement of a unique challenge with substantial cash award to the American people and media,” a press release from Kennedy’s World Mercury Project states.
The conference will also address President Donald Trump’s potential “Vaccine Safety Commission,” which Kennedy claimed he’d been offered an opportunity to chair last month.”

–Adan Salazar, InfoWars

Watch the historic press conference live on InfoWars here.

9:30 EST

LIVE FEED HERE

Could The NSA Have Prevented 9/11? The Movie That Will Finally Give Us Answers

Posted on February 13, 2017

 

 

And here is a fascinating article featuring Bill Binney, by Stefania Maurizi, whose 2016 Julian Assange interview was famously distorted by The Guardian.

 

 

Fear In The Age Of Trump: Undoing Hypnotic Media-Induced Hysteria, With Byron Katie

Posted on February 12, 2017

 

What They Said: Rachel Carson

Posted on February 12, 2017

“It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within.”

 

 

What They Said: Jacques Ellul

Posted on February 12, 2017

“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

 

 

Women’s March Toward Islam?

Posted on January 24, 2017

Two stunning pieces everybody should read, as we come to terms with the women’s march, its roots, funding, architects, and extremist bedfellows:

[Note: Yes, I do realize most women marched spontaneously. That doesn’t change the funding, or ideological fuel, documented in the New York Times piece linked below.]

This:

“THE ENTIRE COFFEE SHOP GASPED IN DISBELIEF AT THE IMAGE OF AMERICAN WOMEN DONNING THE HEADSCARF.”

 

And this:

“WOMEN’S MARCH” PARTNERS INCLUDE THE COUNCIL ON AMERICAN-ISLAMIC RELATIONS, WHICH HAS NOT ONLY DEFLECTED ON ISSUES OF ISLAMIC EXTREMISM POST-9/11, BUT OPPOSES MUSLIM REFORMS THAT WOULD ALLOW WOMEN TO BE PRAYER LEADERS AND PRAY IN THE FRONT OF MOSQUES, WITHOUT WEARING HEADSCARVES AS SYMBOLS OF CHASTITY. PARTNERS ALSO INCLUDE THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER (SPLC), WHICH WRONGLY DESIGNATED MAAJID NAWAZ, A MUSLIM REFORMER, AN “ANTI-MUSLIM EXTREMIST” IN A BIASED REPORT RELEASED BEFORE THE ELECTION. THE SPLC CONFIRMED TO ME THAT SOROS FUNDED ITS “ANTI-MUSLIM EXTREMISTS” REPORT TARGETING NAWAZ.”

 

 

Comic Relief With Steven Crowder

Posted on January 24, 2017

Some Calvinist, I guarantee it, is going to scold me on grounds this is not funny. But I know it’s funny, because I laughed.

 

This. All. Really. Happened. Undercover tranny at #WomensMarch. @wendydavis, run some background checks, woman! https://t.co/1Yy58wqQZF

— Steven Crowder (@scrowder) January 24, 2017

 

How Would MLK Jr. Have Felt About Anti-Trump, BLM, And Disrupt J20?

Posted on January 23, 2017

“After all, some smug, pretentious, solipsistic, raging pseudo-intellectual might castigate and excommunicate you for having jumped aboard the anti-Trump bandwagon (how gauche! how plebian!).
And then where would that leave you?”

–Mark Harris

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqqUDAWPhiA

 

 

“I’M sick and TIRED of violence…I’m TIRED of hate, I’m TIRED of selfishness, I’m TIRED of EVIL. I’m not gonna use violence no matter WHO SAYS SO.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

 

YES. WE GOT IT. WE GOT IT. TRUMP SAID TERRIBLE TERRIBLE THINGS.

But slow down. We have a civil war in the United States, more or less,  about whose violence is worse, and whose hate is more hateful. It’s a COMPLEX situation.

Watch this video, below, in its entirety. If you do not oppose the violence you see, then this website is not for you. I can’t say whether I am ‘solipsistic’ (don’t even know what that means,) ‘smug, pretentious’, or a ‘raging pseudo-intellectual,’ but this I know: I oppose tyranny. I oppose bullying. Above all, I oppose fake reality–mass media distortion, brain washing, mind control, and propaganda. Those are my issues.

I am not “ex-communicating” anybody, but rather seeking a community with a shared ethos of opposition to violence, as trendy as it is right now to endorse violence, since Trump is the worst person we’ve ever had to deal with on our planet. He hasn’t killed anybody but you know, words are the new mass murder.

 

It is widely, and wrongly assumed, that those who have not worked up a frothing hatred of Donald Trump, are racist, evil, stupid, blind, deaf, and political descendants of the Third Reich–or worse. Nobody ever stops to think they may be concerned with another body of hate and distortion. We can’t all be looking at the same thing all the time. One worries you more, one worries me more.

The platform that opposes Trump is soaked with hate. They have a long and unapologetic record of criminal abuse and vandalism: The elderly, children, teenage girls, even a disabled boy, beaten, in some cases almost to death, (on video) for their support of Trump. I saw one today which shows a Trump hater setting a trump supporter’s hair on fire with a bic lighter. This is all part of the new “normal,” and even the new “right on.”

The first such video I saw was a homeless woman viciously attacked by Trump haters, as she tried to protect his star on Hollywood Boulevard. I’ll post it, if you don’t believe me. In fact, I did post it. And as I posted these things, I assumed people who know my essential way of approaching things would understand that my dissent and opposition was to this new mass hate that so quickly became culturally romanticized and endorsed. This disgust on my part was conflated with a support of Trump.

I have consistently despised tyranny, violence, abuse and degradation.

So what about when Trump commits it?

Please listen: I am going to address Pussy Gate. I am going to address his supposed attack on a disabled reporter. I am going to address his quote about Mexicans. Some things were very strange, some inexplicable, some unforgivable, and some not bad at all, but wildly distorted. But Trump has been President since Friday, and today is Monday, so there is no way he is the reason our lives are impossible. If you refuse to give him a chance, then you are declaring war on the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of hundreds of millions of Americans–all of them immigrants. You’re not attacking Donald Trump–you are attacking hard working people who presently have the first ray of hope for their lives they have had in many years. Hope that was snuffed out by 9/11, and the Globalist PC Warring Reich that used it to justify its destruction of civil, economic, medical, discourse, press and countless other liberties in this country.  50 Million Americans on food stamps. 55,403 deaths from opiates in 2015–roughly the same number of dead from then entire Vietnam war. 20-22 veterans commit suicide every day. Rates of autism and infant deaths from vaccines higher than any industrialized country.

Trump has been President for 3 days. If things are WORSE in 6 months, I will swiftly admit it. But right now I find it malevolent to deprive all Americans of their dignity just because they are choosing hope, for a better America, for their children and grandchildren.

Racism is a luxury only those who can already keep roof overhead can afford. Most Americans are wondering quote simply if they can hope to get a job, pay a mortgage, put food on the table, and keep their kids safe.

I suggest you talk to Trump supporters. They’re everywhere. Ask them why they voted for him, and tell us what they said.

 

“What If Our America Is Not Dead, But A Country Waiting To Be Born?”

Posted on January 23, 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCenwgheIBs

He Will Not Divide Us

Posted on January 23, 2017

Shia Labeouf maniacally screams "he will not divide us!" in a Trump supporter's face…thereby becoming the physical embodiment of division. pic.twitter.com/vwCUn6acNL

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) January 22, 2017

 

Cease Fire

Posted on January 22, 2017

I have never endorsed, whitewashed, nor even addressed what I think of Donald Trump as a human being, given the evidence presented. A common mistake people make is to fill in your blanks when you are still thinking about a thing. I think for a long time and when I have something authentic and original to say, I say it.

I have concerned myself primarily with the “systems” of totalitarian government/media/corporate powers–not the cults of the individual. I have not openly condemned Mr. Trump, or, for that matter, any of major Democrats. One of the reasons I couldn’t get to it was that I was consistently being bludgeoned on site and off by a few tenacious critics, for denouncing Marxism, which apparently came as a great shock and betrayal.

My own thoughts about “Pussy gate” were opaque until they found their way to a colony of thoughts that had been lying in wait for about 15 years, that seemed not to be connected–until I realized they were.

So I ask for a cessation of quarreling about my failure to address Trump and Pussygate, with the assurance that I am working on it now. I needed time to think it through.

It’s not what you’re expecting.

 

Robert Crumb, On The Myth Of The Counterculture Feminist Man

Posted on January 21, 2017

“The hippie culture of Haight-Ashbury, where it all started for me, was full of men doing nothing all day and expecting women to bring them food. The ‘chick’ had to provide a home for them, cook meals for them, even pay the rent. It was still very much ingrained from the earlier patriarchal mentality of our fathers, except that our fathers, generally, were providers. Free love meant free sex and food for men. Sure, women enjoyed it, too, and had a lot of sex, but then they served men. Even among left-wing political groups, women were always relegated to secretarial, menial jobs. We were all on LSD, so it took a few years for the smoke to dissipate and for women to realize what a raw deal they were getting with the ne’er-do-well hippie male. Men who acquired preeminence at the time were all frauds, fake gurus who were paying lip service to peace and love, charismatic cons who just wanted to fuck all their adoring disciples. Timothy Leary was like that. A big phony.”

–Robert Crumb

 

[NY Observer, 2016]

What They Said: Donald Trump

Posted on January 20, 2017

“For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.

Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth.

Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed.

The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.

Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s Capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.

That all changes – starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you.
It belongs to everyone gathered here today and everyone watching all across America.

This is your day. This is your celebration.

And this, the United States of America, is your country.”

 

I reviewed quite a few videos and settled on this one from CBS News. They describe all kinds of details that fans of pageantry may find interesting. President Trump’s speech begins around the one hour mark.

love Melania Trump’s outfit and am dying to know who the designer is. I could look at it for hours. I also think her hair is perfection, and inspires me to hold out hope, perhaps not for my own hair, (per se) but for the hair of all American women going forward into 2017.  She set the bar high, which is good. Hillary Clinton’s hair is also sensational, as is her outfit. I love all the white. Bill Clinton looks like spite in a suit. He needs to curb his rage, and stop ogling (apparently Ivanka Trump.) I’m tired of Bill Clinton. Michelle looks great as always but I was puzzled by her somewhat sloppy hair. Michelle usually never has sloppy hair. What happened?

Baron Trump is such a lovely boy, and Melania has dressed him like royalty. Look at his coat. Have you ever seen a 10 year old look better in a coat? He’s just got that quality. But back to Melania, do NOT get on here and start telling me you don’t like her dress or her hair because I will block you. No first lady’s hair has ever looked that good. I was not sure about the gloves at first but I think I am changing my mind.

Congratulations America on your new President, and if we are decent, we will all pray that he does a great job.

Anything else is destructive, at this point.

 

Saints March In: The Talladega Tornados Are In D.C.

Posted on January 19, 2017

And I am in Sweden, trying to get somebody–anybody–to understand that this is America. This too, is America. The choreography of contradictions, overseen by Our Better Angels, careening screamingly toward a happy ending. Though always, always, some people are so outraged they are calling for The End Of The Nation.

But can anybody no matter how hate filled, truly resist the love that overtakes you when you watch the Talladega Tornados?

 

 

What They Said: Julian Assange

Posted on January 19, 2017

Like a move on a chessboard that ends the game, and at the same time encompasses all moves that have been made up to that point, this statement from Julian Assange is everything.

I am heartbroken that so many people here have fallen for the ostensible political positions, or outmoded stigmata like the “alt-right,” when in fact, there is one war: The People Vs. The Deep State. If you have not discovered what lies beneath and around us, if you STILL have not discovered it even over these past 6 months, then I think we are wasting one another’s time. But I am grateful for the time you spent here.

There is not one brain cell of mine that still thinks within the Left/Right binary trap, nor can I write or report from that mind set. NOR can I continue to explain that I don’t think like that.  I think like

THIS: [like an anarchist]

Assange Agrees To US Extradition And Prison Time

Posted on January 18, 2017

True to his word, Julian Assange has agreed to be extradited to the US, and serve prison time, in exchange, if need be, for Chelsea Manning’s release.

Story here.

 

 

John Pilger’s Brightening, Frightening, Dissenting Voice “The Issue Is Not Trump, It’s Us”

Posted on January 18, 2017

I have lost almost all my friends, but I agree with every word of this brilliant essay by John Pilger.

 

“The seedbed is Obama’s Weimar Republic, a landscape of endemic poverty, militarized police and barbaric prisons, the consequence of a “market” extremism which, under his presidency, prompted the transfer of US$14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street.

Perhaps his greatest “legacy” is the co-option and disorientation of any real opposition. Bernie Sanders’ specious “revolution” does not apply. Propaganda is his triumph.

The lies about Russia — in whose elections the U.S. has openly intervened — have made the world’s most self-important journalists laughing stocks. In the country with constitutionally the freest press in the world, free journalism now exists only in its honorable exceptions.

The obsession with Trump is a cover for many of those calling themselves “left/liberal,” as if to claim political decency. They are not “left,” neither are they especially “liberal.” Much of the United States’ aggression towards the rest of humanity has come from so-called liberal democratic administrations such as Obama’s. The U.S.’ political spectrum extends from the mythical center to the lunar right. The “left” are homeless renegades Martha Gellhorn described as “a rare and wholly admirable fraternity.” She excluded those who confuse politics with a fixation on their navels.”

 

He even quotes Yevtushenko.

Quoting Yevtushenko is always a sign of a healthy mind.

 

“We even paid her an occasional small fee,
but we wouldn’t accept her as a writer,
because our moral guardians
had decided
she wasn’t normal.
You,
who are so revoltingly normal,
you–”

Y.Y. 1959

Obama Commutes Chelsea Manning

Posted on January 17, 2017

 

Dr. Brian Hooker On RFK Jr, Trump’s Vaccine Safety Commission, And How To Stay Polite When Fighting Evil

Posted on January 17, 2017

Brian Hooker, PhD, became a household name in 2014 when it came to light that his 12 years of efforts to obtain vaccine safety data from the CDC had resulted in the phone call that changed history. [See Vaxxed trailer below] when CDC Epidemiologist Dr. William Thompson, also known as the CDC Whistleblower, called him and offered to guide him to the very shattering evidence he had been  searching for. Hooker understood, as few do, that there are actually ways to obtain data sets from the CDC, (so-called “public data sets,”) if you have the patience of Sisyphus and know not only what you are looking for but how to navigate the red tape.

 

Hooker is a bio-engineer, researcher,  Associate Professor of Biology at Simpson University, and father of a vaccine injured son, whose suffering set him on the quest for the truth.

He works closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on issues of vaccine safety and so Truth Barrier reached out to him following the media bombshell that President Elect Trump had chosen R.F.K. Jr. to head a commission on vaccine safety.

This interview took place on Jan 14th and 15th, 2017.

CF: yesterday when we signed off you were about to speak with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Did you speak with him?

BH: Yeah, it was a very quick conversation. He is debating a very pro-pharma scientist by the name of Peter Hotez, who is the head of Infectious and Tropical Diseases at Baylor University, and also receives large amounts of money from large pharmaceutical companies. Peter Hotez is like Offit Jr. and he holds about six patents around the hookworm vaccine that’s being tested in Brazil primarily. Bobby really is going on the offense now and showing our science. But our science is so voluminous. He’s quoted in his book at least 500 papers on thimerosal alone. So that was the primary reason for the phone call. It’s still up in the air whether the commission for vaccine safety will go forward. I think it’s very tentative right now considering how President Elect Trump’s team has walked things back, primarily through the statement that Hope Hicks made after the meeting between Bobby and President Trump, so that’s all very tentative. But Bobby is so good. He is looking for opportunities anywhere to be able to gain traction with the press, or, like with Peter Hotez, engaging the other side. And still with the President Elect, I don’t think he’s abandoned that by any stretch of the imagination, especially with the appointment of the CDC director which has not been made yet.

CF: But will be made soon?

BH: It’s going to have to be made soon because Frieden is basically leaving the CDC at the end of the month.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdCU2DfMBpU

CF: When you say the future of the commission is tentative, are you basing that on your interpretation of the quotes that came from the Trump spokesperson, or do you know something about the status of it from the inside..that it actually might not happen at all?

BH: Yeah, based on that Bobby is saying, that’s where I’m a little more cautious. I don’t want to quote him directly. I just think that based on that and…I mean Bobby’s been through a lot. I’ve tried to stay off his back for the last week or so, just because of this whole set of events.

[Deleted passage.]

CF: You’re saying the Kennedy clan is not all in support of a vaccine safety investigation?

BH: I don’t think they’re all in support of that, I think.. that would be true. And they’re all high profile. So there’s a lot of pressure on them…and when they see their brother or their cousin being eviscerated in the media, it just…it doesn’t bode well for.. you know, they’re going to have a response to that.

CF: Can you tell me anything about how you think Bobby Kennedy as a human being has felt about these eviscerations in the press? How has that affected him?

BH: He’s a trooper. And when I’ve been around him personally, he just shakes it off. ..

CF: But we all know it hurts.

BH: Yeah, it really really hurts. I’ve spoken to his wife and she is just so so supportive. Cheryl Hines. She is so supportive of what he’s doing, so supportive of our community, that’s concerned about vaccine safety, so my hat goes off to them. And he works tirelessly. You get really really tired being around him because he’s such a bundle of energy. (laughs) I’m like, I don’t move that fast Bobby, stop. I just have nothing but admiration for him. Loss of reputation, so much thankless work, and then occasionally he gets attacked from within our community because he says he’s pro-vaccine. And that’s really fine. I mean it’s fine that he says he is pro- vaccine. He’s still fighting for safe vaccines. I wouldn’t say I’m anti-vaccine, you know any level of protection or cover that I can give him as a scientist by giving him good science, I’m always going to put my best foot forward.

CF: When you two put your heads together and compare your best present notions about the causation of autism, do you and see more or less eye to eye?

BH: I think that he and I see eye to eye, that it’s a multiplicity of factors, that it’s difficult to nail it down to one factor, regardless of whether he is advocating mostly on thimerosal, that’s where he..he’s been advocating about mercury toxicity for over thirty years. But that doesn’t mean that he thinks the only problem regarding vaccines is thimerisol. It doesn’t necessarily mean that. He sees issues with the vaccination schedule. He sees issues with fraud and corruption at the CDC, which basically throws everything up in the air, if you can’t trust an agency to monitor vaccine safety then how can you say anything is safe regarding vaccines? I think he has come to that conclusion as well. Getting thimerosal out of the flu shot would be a huge victory. But he doesn’t retire at that particular point in time. And so, in terms of causation, to get back to your initial question, I think that we’re both on the same page.

CF: What did he think of Vaxxed?

BH: He liked Vaxxed. He felt it was well done. I don’t know if he agreed 100% with everything that was in Vaxxed, I don’t know if I do. I can say definitively that there are things that I would have done differently than Andy, Del, and Polly in making the movie. But he liked Vaxxed. He appreciated the effort that they went to to expose the whistleblower story. He speaks on a regular basis to Del and Polly. And even did a Periscope interview with Polly Tommey, between Thanksgiving and Christmas. To me that’s huge. Because you know we have these different factions and groups that are coming together, you would consider Bobby the Trace Amounts camp, then Andy, Del, and Polly, the Vaxxed camp, but we can’t have camps, we have to have some kind of unity. I really appreciate that he’s done that and I appreciate that the Vaxxed team has reached out to him. There was a scuttle that happened over emails..
CF: I remember.

BH: That’s right, we commiserated.

CF: Yes.

BH: Well I’m really glad that that’s come full circle. We have to be circumspect about what we do.

CF: This is very rough terrain. Very rough.What has been the most difficult, for you, doing this work, and being up against such a powerful and mendacious apparatus?

BH: When my family is featured in the pro-pharma media, that’s really hard. My son’s vaccine injury case was just thrown out of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and there were several bloggers that blogged about it, and went through the court document and tried to discern the medical history of my son, which is really none of their business. And they were trying to say I was making fraudulent statements about my son’s vaccine injury in the movie Vaxxed. It was really frustrating. My son didn’t ask for that. My wife didn’t ask for that. I’m really really glad that the vaccine injury case is over with because then the level of exposure is done. In terms of documents floating around. It’s really horrible. If he would have been awarded damages then it would have been sealed, nobody could see it, but since he wasn’t awarded damages, the decision was made public.

[Note: The case was thrown out due to an issue revolving around the time of the vaccine injury and the statute of limitations. The court never ruled about whether Hooker’s son had been vaccine injured.]

 

CF: Have you ever been afraid?

BH: I have employment issues. I’ve been attacked at the workplace by coworkers who didn’t appreciate my viewpoint. Although my University right now is extremely supportive at the highest levels. I’ve had meetings with the President of the University about this and they’ve been so supportive and wonderful. But there were lower levels of management that were vicious, to the point of, you know, trying to get me fired.

CF: Did they write things, did they tell you to your face…?

BH: It was actually both. I had a supervisor who was writing memos to the administration in terms of my lack of fitness, and that I was besmirching the reputation of the university. I approached them because they were my supervisors and I needed to let them know that I was working on Vaxxed. That I was working on Trace Amounts. The response that I got was really, really chilling. I wasn’t even allowed to take notes during the meeting. I just wanted to write down notes, because I take notes during every meeting that I have ever attended, that’s what I do. My supervisor at that particular point in time told me to put away my notepad. It was very disheartening.

CF: You can’t tell me what they said to you at that meeting where you weren’t allowed to take notes…

BH: Exactly.

CF: OK. We will infer.

BH: It was basically that I was bringing down the careers of my colleagues.

CF: Wow.

BH: That I was responsible for the demise of enrollment at the University. It gave me a lot of power. They ascribed a lot of power to me that I didn’t know I ever really had. (laughs.)

CF: Can you go on the record about how you felt about RFK Jr revealing that he had been chosen by Trump to head the vaccine safety commission?

BH: I was excited and disappointed both. I was excited to hear the news. But I was disappointed because I knew that mainstream media’s response would be vicious and callous and.. I want to bring it around to the desensitization of these people who are basically attacking the families of disabled children. So that’s exactly what happened. It was a very predictable thing. I wouldn’t have handled it the way Trump’s team handled it. I don’t think I would necessarily have handled it the way Bobby handled it. I can’t really address that because I wasn’t there and I don’t know all the details. But the level of backlash is always so horrifying. When you’re a parent in the trenches, it’s very very unsettling to see that it would rise to that level of hatred.

CF: But that’s where the whole thing is trapped—these pogroms and these waves of hate and abuse. How do we ever get past that? It’s just pure abuse.

BH: I think that pushback has to happen. I look at the whole pushback regarding the AIDS epidemic and the response of groups like Act Up and Queer Nation…you know, I think it’s time to take to the streets, and respond to these evil people, these Mengeles of our society in very blatant ways. It’s one of the things I grapple with every day, because I’m pretty mild mannered. But I’d like to have a die in in front of Senator Pan’s office. So we can disrupt his business for multiple months, I would love to do that. And it was effective. When you look at the amount of money that is given to AIDS research right now. So I grapple with that. Is that the next step? We have a society that is asleep, and they need to be shaken awake.

CF: And you are a Christian.

BH: Yes.

CF: I’ve noticed that there is a higher representation of Christian faith among vaccine fighters than the average.

BH: It comes through desperation. You have no other place to turn, so that’s where you go. You cry out to God. Which is the best place to turn anyway, so…

CF: I agree.

 

 

Breaking Project Veritas Expose: Radical Groups Plotting To Release Butyric Acid Into Ventilation System At Trump Inaugural Ball

Posted on January 16, 2017

 

A Far Left Critique Of Obama: The President Who Wasn’t There

Posted on January 15, 2017

“Obama is a master of gesture politics, but he tends to flinch in nearly every pitched battle, even when the odds and the public are behind him. His political instincts drive him to seek cover in the middle ground. He is a reflexive compromiser, more Rodney “Can’t We All Just Get Along” King than Reverend King. Even when confronted by bumbling hacks like John Boehner and Eric Cantor, Obama tends to wilt.

Perhaps Obama had never before been confronted with quite this level of toxic hostility. After all, he’d lived something of a charmed life, the life of a star-child, coddled and pampered, encouraged and adulated, from Indonesia to Harvard. Obama was the physical and psychic embodiment of the new multiculturalism: lean, affable, assured, non-threatening. His vaguely liberal political ideology remained opaque at the core. Instead of an over-arching agenda, Obama delivered facile jingoisms proclaiming a post-racial and post-partisan America. Instead of radical change, Obama offered simply managerial competence. This, naturally, the Berserkers of the Right interpreted as hubris and arrogance and such hollow homilies served only to exacerbate their rage. The virulent right had profiled Obama and found him to be the perfect target for their accreted animus. And, even better, they had zeroed-in on an enemy so innately conflict-averse that even when pummeled with racist slurs he wouldn’t punch back.

Of course, Obama’s most grievous political wounds were self-inflicted, starting even before his election when he rushed back to Washington to help rescue Bush’s Wall Street bailout. This was perhaps the first real indication that the luminous campaign speeches about generational and systemic change masked the servile psyche of a man who was desperately yearning to be embraced by the nation’s political and financial elites. Instead of meeting with the victims of Wall Street predators or their advocates, like Elizabeth Warren and Ralph Nader, Obama fist-bumped with the brain trust of Goldman Sachs and schmoozed with the creme de la creme of K Street corporate lobbyists. In the end, Obama helped salvage some of the most venal and corrupt enterprises on Wall Street, agreed to shield their executives from prosecution for their financial crimes and, predictably, later got repaid with their scorn.”

Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch

 

Read the article The President Who Wasn’t There: Barack Obama’s Legacy of Impotence.

What They Said–Paul Murray: “Even With A Boorish Loudmouthed Orange Sexist At The Helm..”

Posted on January 15, 2017

My good friend Paul Murray, Scottish, South African, cat-whisperer, humanist, vegan, now based in Australia, with his wife Karen and 7 cats, has a way with words, uniquely his.  My own writing often resembles meandering schools of fish by comparison. I’m always negotiating. Whereas Paul can just slam a thing into the wall, when needed. I love that. The fleeting sense of freedom I get vicariously when somebody ceases to sound like an upholstered chair at The United Nations–when the dirt, horror, absurdity, and sublime humor enters the parlor. This is when I personally feel able to breathe. All my life as a writer I have kept my thoughts in chains–carefully tended. So terrified of overstatement. And yet still, of late, I m scolded and flogged (off site, mostly) for my “intemperate” and treasonous posts. I have been mistaken for somebody who “likes Trump.” It will take about 3,000 lightyears to clean this up, and at the moment, I’d too tired. And pissed off.  So you see my friends, you can’t win. [I want that on my tombstone: “You Can’t Win.”]

On a FB thread I will post below, about the 4,000 US troops Obama has moved through Germany into Poland to the Russian border, Paul slammed it thusly:

 

 

“John Pilger’s been talking about Obama’s bellicose behaviour for his entire tenure especially in the South China Sea.
This dude has spent more on weaponising America than any other president in history and between him and Killary Clinton who has helped teeter the world on the brink of nuclear war, he’ll be handing over this shitshow to Trump who’s achieved pariah status before even taking office.
If Trump turns any of this around (assuming he’s safe from attempts on his life, which wouldn’t surprise me) he’ll be dealing in minor miracles and then when he and RFK Jr take on the infanticide brigade with their toxic vaccines at the CDC, the world will be a much better place even with a boorish, loudmouthed orange sexist at the helm.
Bring it on, I say.”

Here’s the thread. I marveled, by the way, at every person who commented, (Stephen Ericson teaches me something every time he comments) and how lucky I am to know people who are  awake and lucid, not overtaken by the new big trendy bubble machine that blows only one bubble of revulsion, over and over and over, the bubble being the weaponized word, one word, “TRUMP.”

And what he said about wimmmmmin.

 

[Apologies for unclean text but that’s what happens when you import FB.]
Celia Ingrid Farber
14 hrs ·
The BBC website
·
Why aren’t we talking about this? I’m not in the US–did Obama explain this to the American people? “I’m sending tanks and troops through Germany into Poland.” Anybody hear him say that?

US tanks and troops in Poland a threat, Russia says – BBC News
Thousands of troops, and hundreds of armoured vehicles, are being sent to Poland.
BBC.COM|BY BBC NEWS
LikeShow more reactionsCommentShare
11 Michael Elliott, Elizabeth Ely and 9 others
5 shares
Comments
Brian Bowman
Brian Bowman Hm, Reading the article now.
Like · Reply · 14 hrs
Bob Snee
Bob Snee not being covered by the corporate media propagandists
Like · Reply · 13 hrs · Edited
Lisa Andersson
Lisa Andersson http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/…/the-establishment-is…/

The Establishment Is Trying To Steal The Presidency From Trump — Paul Craig…
PAULCRAIGROBERTS.ORG
Like · Reply · Remove Preview · 1 · 13 hrs
Stephen Ericson
Stephen Ericson You don’t just invade Russia, you invade the Russian winter. It’s amazing to me that Russia had such a hard time fighting Finland prior to barbarossa. Fighting a war in a deadly winter just has to suck.
So that said, why are we moving ANY troops toward…See More
Like · Reply · 5 hrs
Lisa Andersson
Lisa Andersson Could be to destroy Polands relations to Russia even more.
Unlike · Reply · 1 · 3 hrs
Celia Ingrid Farber
Write a reply…

Rachel Chevallier
Rachel Chevallier https://youtu.be/1CI8pIkq2rw

Exclusive: Inside The Plan To Stop Trump Inauguration
YOUTUBE.COM
Like · Reply · Remove Preview · 12 hrs
Jan Stark
Jan Stark Nope. Zip. Nada.
Unlike · Reply · 1 · 11 hrs
Jan Stark
Jan Stark http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com/…/american-force-of…

American Force of 4,000 Arrives in Poland at Taxpayer Expense
RONPAULLIBERTYREPORT.COM
Like · Reply · Remove Preview · 11 hrs
Deborah Bos
Deborah Bos Alicja Tandecka do you know about this?
Like · Reply · 11 hrs
Alicja Tandecka
Alicja Tandecka · Friends with Deborah Bos
Someone mentioned it to me the other day. But nothing in media as far as I recall…
Like · Reply · 1 · 10 hrs
Celia Ingrid Farber
Write a reply…

Theresa Chieng
Theresa Chieng · 2 mutual friends
Not a peep. I tried to pointed out to some people, they don’t believe me because it’s not on CNN
I didn’t know why NOBODY address this.
Unlike · Reply · 2 · 8 hrs
Theresa Chieng
Theresa Chieng · 2 mutual friends
In the meantime, football season is in playoff and it’s the main thing you see on TV this weekend
Like · Reply · 8 hrs
Paul Murray
Paul Murray John Pilger’s been talking about Obama’s bellicose behaviour for his entire tenure especially in the South China Sea.
This dude has spent more on weaponising America than any other president in history and between him and Killary Clinton who has helpe…See More
Like · Reply · 5 · 6 hrs · Edited
Alexandra Gatsis
Alexandra Gatsis Slam dunk.
Like · Reply · 2 · 6 hrs
Celia Ingrid Farber
Write a reply…

Stephen Ericson
Stephen Ericson So now, Obama, the Nobel Peace prize winner, is suddenly a saber rattling war monger. And…the MSM in the United States is absolutely uninterested. This is the same guy who mocked Mitt Romney for being out of touch and stuck in the cold war, and who denied defensive missiles to Poland that they were promised.
I’m starting to think that they had this up their sleeve all along. At the very least this troop build up should be seen as at least a tacit admission of failure in regards to Democratic foreign policy.
Of course you’d probably be branded a racist for seeing it that way by at least half the country, but whatever.

Edit (from the BBC article that started this thread) “The US Armoured Brigade will also carry out military exercises in the Baltics, all part of President Obama’s response to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and to reassure nervous Nato allies.”

Really? Now he wants to comfort them. How nice of him.

https://www.theguardian.com/…/missile-defence-shield…
Like · Reply · 4 · 5 hrs · Edited
Stephen Ericson
Stephen Ericson To be fair, this story is on CNN right now, but it’s buried under a lot of other complete crap.
Like · Reply · 3 · 5 hrs
Marilyn Mandy Cooke
Marilyn Mandy Cooke · Friends with Lisa Andersson
USA is so bloody dominant/ provocative. Some one some day is going to give them a spoon of their own medicin….how many other countrys are they going to be allowed to distroy before the world wakes up?
Unlike · Reply · 2 · 4 hrs
Curtis Cost
Curtis Cost I fear that Obama may be planning something that could halt Trump taking office. This is unprecedented for an outgoing President.
Unlike · Reply · 1 · 2 hrs

Glenn Greenwald V BBC On Trump Memo, CIA, Russia And Wikileaks

Posted on January 14, 2017

“You know of course, don’t you, that the Iraq war was started because that agency said that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was in alliance with Al Qaeda, something that turned out to be tragically untrue, so of course people would treat those claims skeptically.”

 

“The problem that people have is that  they [CIA] caused the publication of this material by calling the source credible and then somebody went to CNN in a very coordinated way, multiple officials, to tell CNN that this was briefed to the President and the President elect, knowing that they would report it, and that the document would then surface.”

 

Glenn Greenwald

 

 

 

Network President Admits To RFK Jr. Pharma Rules TV Content

Posted on January 13, 2017

 

 

“I ate breakfast last week with the president of a network news division and he told me that during non-election years, 70% of the advertising revenues for his news division come from pharmaceutical ads. And if you go on TV any night and watch the network news, you’ll see they become just a vehicle for selling pharmaceuticals. He also told me that he would fire a host who brought onto his station a guest who lost him a pharmaceutical account.”

 

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr

 

Interviewed on “Off The Grid”

Science Magazine Interviews RFK About Vaccine Safety Commission

Posted on January 12, 2017

Q: When you say “science people,” do you mean experts from the scientific establishment?

A: Prominent scientists.

Q: Do you mean prominent vaccinologists who believe in the safety and efficacy of today’s vaccines?

A: We are going to look for people who have expertise in toxicology, epidemiology, and in public health.

Q: When does the president-elect want you to have the commission in place?

A: We didn’t talk about the details but he expressed urgency about it. That he wanted it done—we talked about a 1-year commitment.

Q: It’s an unpaid panel?

A: Yes.

 

Science Magazine Q&A with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. here.

 

RFK Jr. Appointed By Trump To Chair Commission On Vaccine Safety

Posted on January 10, 2017

“Shit, meet fan. Best day for autism activists, perhaps ever.”

JB Handley

“He’s full of surprises, Donald, isn’t he?”

Andrew Wakefield

Story here:

Crowds And Power

Posted on December 20, 2016

“Can I ask you something?” he snapped. “What do you think of Donald Trump?”
I could say many negative things, but others have that covered. I could say many positive things, but others have that covered. What I question is the question. The presumption that I OWE it anybody to address ONE man instead of what I have been addressing, namely entire systems of deep corruption. Hating One Very Bad Man The Only State Sanctioned Bad Man is central to the narrative in Orwell’s 1984. His name was Emanuel Goldstein. Remember? The enslaved people of Oceania were ushered into halls to scream, roar, and throw tomatoes at the screen featuring his image, during “Two Minutes Hate.”

That is what many of us have been reduced to. It’s a national sport. Hating Trump so much that many of our media pollinate openly statements about killing him, assassinating him.

Absolutely extraordinary in our lifetimes, that this would happen.

You must go inside and ask yourself: Is this what I want to be?
One day we will re-examine everything he SAID, next to everything Hillary and Obama DID. And then we will have a new discussion.
For now, here is my official statement on Donald Trump:

I do not accept Donald Trump as my anti-Christ.

 

[Originally published as FB post]

New Bombshell From Wikileaks: Nobody In US Government Has Tried To Find Out Who Leaked The DNC Emails

Posted on December 19, 2016

Note: Sometimes  a ‘bombshell’ in journalism is a void–a thing that did not happen.

As Obama threatens Russia, Dems and Celebs lead the charge to overturn the election  results due to “Russian hacking,” implore the besieged, bombarded electors, today,  to “do the right thing,”  “be a hero,” and “speak for us all…” we now learn this:

 

Via Wikileaks on Twitter, today:
WikiLeaks ‏@wikileaks 19 minutes ago

The Obama administration (including CIA, FBI) has yet to contact WikiLeaks in relation to our DNC/Podesta publications. #PodestaEmails

71 replies 702 retweets 769 likes

The CIA And The Media: By Carl Bernstein

Posted on December 18, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The CIA even ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were “taught to make noises like reporters,” explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. “These were the guys who went through the ranks and were told ‘You’re going to he a journalist,’” the CIA official said. Relatively few of the 400‑some relationships described in Agency files followed that pattern, however; most involved persons who were already bona fide journalists when they began undertaking tasks for the Agency.”

 

Carl Bernstein, Rolling Stone, 1977

 

Read Carl Bernstein’s full 1977 report on the CIA and The Media, here.

 

What They Said: Barack Obama

Posted on December 17, 2016

https://twitter.com/comermd/status/810095318377398272

Why Liberals Vote For Fascists, By Paul Glover

Posted on December 17, 2016

“Every society, including ours, contains the seed of fascism, ready to sprout from fear and anger. We were taught after World War 2 that “just following orders” made us “good Germans” but bad Americans. We were taught pride in America’s revolutionary history and our obligation to speak against tyranny. We were taught that obedience to evil makes one evil.

So I do not vote for war criminals. And I say so though many friends disagree. Trump would harm us unpredictably. Hillary would harm us systematically. Neither is inclined to push back. They are both creatures of this machine.”

 

–Paul Glover

 

 

I haven’t spoken to him in way too long, but I am privileged to know America’s most incorruptible politician, Paul Glover, and am fascinated by his version of “leftism,” [for now, I’m calling it that.] He manages to do what nobody else I know on the “left” pulls off: Love the earth, hate tyranny, and avoid self-serving hagiography. [Paul Glover might object that I have even placed him on the so-called “left” but for now, it’s a useful word to signal certain values, which don’t include allowing the nation’s rape by corporate banks, war, blowing up mountains, locking up dissidents and whistleblowers, espionage, funding terrorists, or colluding with brutal regimes–for starters. It also does not include overlooking the mass murder of up to 100 million people for the sake of “revolution.”

This is one of the reasons Paul and I get along so well. He never “left-splains” or tries in any way to guilt trip me when I raise these little details, outside of the super-weaponized Very Bad Man Who Is Worse Than Anything Ever.

You can read about Paul at his site, linked above, or at gpofpa.org:

He is founder of the Los Angeles Greens (1984) and the Ithaca, NY Green Party (1989). He was an environmentalist candidate for Ithaca’s city council (1973), Ithaca’s campaign manager for Ralph Nader (2000), Green Party candidate for mayor of Ithaca (2003), and was invited by GPUSA to participate in the presidential primaries of 2004.

I met Paul in 2008 at an extraordinary “concordium” [conference]  that took place a few years in a row in Concord, Mass. It was based around the idea of “re-seeding,” the American Transcendentalist movement, and it actually took place in structures that were in some case  built by the famous transcendentalists’ own hands, primarily the Alcott family. Drafty wooden wonderful old church like rooms where we sat with wool blankets and spoke without hate, accusation, or interruption for three days–about the lost American dream of freedom and how to bring it back. (The tradition at this concordium was based loosely on the medieval practice of discourse: In order earn the right to speak, you had to first sum up what the previous speaker had said, to that speaker’s satisfaction. Then you could speak.)

Paul Glover’s life of activism is such a blizzard of achievements I can’t do it justice, but for one thing, he introduced the first para-economic system local currency, in Ithaca New York (“Time Dollars,”) and it worked. He has been in Philadelphia for many years now, after leaving Ithaca, and if you see what you could have sworn was a parking lot there, now curiously a blooming community garden–it’s because of Paul Glover.

Another thing that deserves its own interview (I’ll get to it some day) is that Paul walked across the entire United States, in the 1970s. He did this not for any publicity purposes, but just so he could see, feel, and know the landscape, for his emerging vision about how cities can be worked out to harmonize with the land.  Unlike many environmentalist activists, he loves cities, and he believes deeply in their potential for transformation. See the video below, to hear Paul’s vision for the greening transformation of Philadelphia. (Philadelphia.]

 

Here is the best piece I have read in ages, for those of us who feel trapped in the Titanic of this political discourse with nowhere to go.

It’s called:  Why Liberals Vote For Fascists.

 

An Elector Recalls Bribes And Death Threats In 2000 Election

Posted on December 15, 2016

Editor’s Note: This piece is about what few of us know, namely how common it is for electors to be harassed, and what forms that harassment takes. It’s also about the concept of “faith” among electors. This two time Republican elector says no electors he has ever encountered have voted against their party. Please limit comments to factual observations about the U.S. Electoral College. When I find a source who knows and is willing to speak of something from direct experience, I try to clear space for that person to say their piece, without embedding it. I don’t know about you, but this testimony stunned me.

–CF

 

 

You needn’t be too cynical about the prospect of bribing electors… at
least not among Republican electors. I have served two terms in the
Electoral College… in 2000, when Bush-Cheney won with only a two vote margin in the Electoral College, 271 to 266, and again in 2004 when the margin was a bit more comfortable.

The problems occurred in 2000 when the final decision rested on certifying the Florida count. That put Bush-Cheney over the top by just two electoral votes. Unfortunately, someone from the Democrat side obtained a list of names, addresses, and telephone numbers of all 271 Republican electors and published it all on the Internet.

My first bribe offer came by telephone from London. I can’t recall how many bribery offers I received but any one of us could have had $5 million in a Swiss bank account by merely saying, “Yes, I’ll agree to be a faithless elector. Show me the cash.” There were also many death threats. In fact, the danger was such that many of the governors brought the Republican electors to their respective state capitals a day early and put us up in undisclosed locations. We were also advised to travel to the state capital with a handgun within easy reach.

What I remember most about that experience is sitting at a large conference table in the governor’s office and writing in the names of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney on the ballot that was placed before me. As I did so, I was so proud to know that, of the 271 Republican electors across the country who had pledged to vote for the Republican candidates for president and vice president, every single one of us, all 271, ignored all the money that was available to us and did exactly as we had sworn to do.

 

–Outtake of a longer piece by Paul Hollrah, two time member of the U.S. Electoral College, re-published with his permission

A Letter From A Two Time Member Of The US Electoral College: “…It Would Be The Biggest Political Crime In History…”

Posted on December 15, 2016

[Note, this is from an email correspondence, Dec. 3, 2016, between Celia Farber and Paul Hollrah, following an inquiry about the possibility of an electoral insurrection in the U.S.]

 

 

 

Celia:

I find it hard to believe that the Left could ever convince 38 people to become faithless electors… which is what it would take to reverse the outcome of the election and put Hillary Clinton in the White House.

Electors are not just people who walked in off the street and decided they wanted to be electors. One cannot become an elector without having given many years of faithful service to the political party of their choice. As you probably know, when I served the first of two terms in the Electoral College in 2000, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had only 271 electoral votes to Al Gore and Joe Lieberman’s 266. And in spite of numerous death threats and bribery offers, every single one of the 271 electors did exactly what they had sworn to do. I just don’t think that it would ever be possible to corrupt 38 (12.4%) of all the Republican electors. If they did, it would be the biggest political crime in history and a full scale civil war would be sure to follow.

 

–Paul H.

 

*Paul R. Hollrah is a retired corporate government relations executive and a two time member of the U.S. Electoral College

In an upcoming commentary for The Truth Barrier, he will tell us more about what few of us can imagine, regarding the real life experiences of U.S. Electors.

 

 

 

Voices: “AIDS Wasn’t The First Big Lie But It Was The First Of Its Kind”

Posted on December 9, 2016

“AIDS wasn’t the first ‘big lie’, but it was the first of it’s kind. It became a template which they, the PR people, the drug companies, the propagandists, etc. have used over and over again.

AIDS, as far as I’ve known in my lifetime, was the first subject that came along where the mere act of stopping for a moment to think was somehow considered dangerous. It was the moment that it became ok to be expected to not think and to be called crazy for having done so.

We, the human population in general, were so willing to hear about it. We were so poised to suddenly accept that the end was nigh. Sometimes to me that was the worst part of the whole thing: that at this very innocent age ( I was just graduating high school in 87) I was forced to accept that the most simple and natural expressions of being human was somehow akin to committing suicide. Worse, we had to be ok with it.

And then they gave everybody Prozac.”

 

–Stephen Ericson,

Posted as comment on this post.

Fake News Flashback: AIDS Could Kill More People Than There Are People [US Gov-US Media, 1987–]

Posted on December 8, 2016

“If the spread of AIDS continues at this rate, in 1996 there could be one billion people infected; five years later, hypothetically ten billion people; however the population of the world is only five billion. Could we be facing the threat of extinction during our lifetime? Even before our children are grown?

 

Theresa Crenshaw, President’s AIDS Commission, 1987,

 

Quoted in Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History Of AIDS,

Celia Farber

Melville House Press/Random House 2006

 

 

2000:

CDC Figures

As of December 31, 2000, 774,467 persons had been reported with AIDS in the United States; 448,060 of these had died; 3542 persons had unknown viral status. [Ed: CDC had “vital” but I assume they meant “viral.] The number of persons living with AIDS (322,865) is the highest ever reported. Of these, 79% were men, 61% were black or Hispanic, and 41% were infected through male-to-male sex. Of the AIDS cases, approximately one third were reported during 1981–1992, 1993–1995, and 1996–2000 (Table 1).

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5021a2.htm

2010: The US Government (tried to quietly) remove “HIV infection’ from the list of “communicable diseases,” that were considered…communicable. Enough to be of “public health significance.” These included, in descending order from the top: Chancroid, Gonnorrhea, Granuloma inguale, and leprosy.

http://truthbarrier.com/2012/03/14/wikileaks-cable-us-gov-ceases-hiv-testing-visa-applicants-and-calls-hiv-infection-not-a-communicable-disease-that-is-of-significant-public-health-risk/

These kinds of apocalyptic quotes  based on sheer hallucination were peddled all across the media, including such platforms as the Oprah Winfrey Show, TIME Magazine, and every single media outlet save for a few, that were destroyed for being “irresponsible,” which was the original weaponized  word for  today’s “fake news.”

The horror is that those who peddled this mushroom cloud, soul crushing terrorism aimed at causing all people to fear touching each other were never penalized, or corrected, or disciplined–only rewarded, while those who tried to correct the record were professionally ruined.

It was the new way to be “right.” (To be indescribably wrong.)

There’s fake news and there’s fake news.

I hope this answers any lingering questions why certain “trolls” would prefer not to say their names.

Would you want your name attached to this holocaust?

 

“The horror of it is every goddamn thing you look at, if you look at it through the glasses that you’ve developed through looking at this thing, seems pretty scary to me. Look at the oncogene people and I go, oh yeah, I know what they are doing. Same stuff. Oncogenes don’t have anything to do with cancer. Radiation probably doesn’t have anything to do with stopping cancer. The drugs that we use on people – all those goddamn horrible poisons – they’re no less toxic than AZT. And we are doing it to everybody. Everybody’s aunt is being radiated once a goddamn month and given drugs that are going to kill her. We’re dealing with a bunch of witch doctors. The whole medical profession – except for the people that patch you up when you get a broken leg or you have a pumbling problem – is really fucked. It’s just a bunch of people that have become socially important and very rich by thinking about the fact that they might be able to cure the diseases that actually cause people in our society to die. And they can’t do shit about it. It’s scary, that’s what it is.”

He takes a deep breath, and I realize that on the other end of the phone, Kary Mullis, Nobel laureate, pioneer of the DNA revolution, has started to cry.”

 

–Celia Farber, SPIN, Words From The Front

July, 1994*

[*This was the same year that Associate Editor Staci Bonner launched a Title VII lawsuit against SPIN Magazine alleging sexual favoritism, holding us up in Federal Court until 1997, when SPIN prevailed. Bob Guccione Jr. sold SPIN, and the AIDS column (in 1994) was immediately terminated, being replaced (in the same pages where the column used to hold space) by a three page advertisement for Combivir, a combination anti-HIV drum that includes AZT, which our reporting successfully exposed as lethal, following that of John Lautitsen in the New York Native, which in turn, was put out of business by an ACT UP boycott led by activist Peter Staley.]

 

 

 

 

 

United Nations Backed Assange Details Swedish Rape Falsity To Prosecutors: “I Am Entirely Innocent”

Posted on December 7, 2016

“I am Australian. I am not Swedish. I do not speak Swedish. I have never resided in Sweden.
I am entirely innocent. I was already cleared of exactly this allegation in 2010 by the Chief Prosecutor of Stockholm, Eva Finne, who closed the case.
During the height of the Pentagon’s conflict with me the following month, the allegation was resurrected by the current prosecutor, Marianne Ny. It was immediately seized on to extinguish my freedom of movement and harm my reputation.
Without even bothering to take my statement, the Swedish Prosecution Authority broke its own rules and released my name to a tabloid newspaper. Prosecutor Ny went on to produce more than 40 press releases and press conferences about me. As a result, to this day more than half a million webpages falsely conflate my name with the word “rape”.
For six years I called for my statement to be taken so that the ‘preliminary investigation’ might again be swiftly closed.
In February this year the United Nations found that Prosecutor Ny has caused Sweden and the UK to breach their international human rights obligations. The UN found that her actions are subjecting me to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” and an unlawful deprivation of liberty which must immediately cease.”

 

–Julian Assange

 

Julian Assange has broken his silence on the manipulated and almost paranormal “rape” charges against him involving two Swedish women who  has consensual sex with him in 2010 and never said he raped them. The women themselves never filed rape charges and no formal charges have to date been filed, despite international mass media driven belief that Assange stands accused of rape.

All signs point to that he will be exonerated and walk free. His letter and testimony are here. More details here.

I read the 98 page police report in Swedish years ago and The New York Observer published this piece which I originally named, somewhat too flippantly, “Julian Assange’s Penetration Agenda.”

It shows that Julian Assange had consensual, if lousy, sex with two women in Sweden, one of whom had  morbid phobia of seminal fluid and had never had sex without a condom. The whole thing was set off by HIV hysteria, which is explained if you read the piece linked above.

What will Sweden do next?

By the way, last week a source informed me that all notions that Assange was dead were the byproduct of “black PR,” and showed me who, what, where, when and why.

That was accurate.

 

 

A Prayer For The Inquisitive In Times Of Violent Certainty

Posted on December 7, 2016

“I have a right to be confused about the current state of politics. I have a right to pursue all threads. That doesn’t make me anything but an intellectually curious and open minded person. I refuse to hate myself for having a seeking spirit. I didn’t realize how alienating curiosity is.”

 

 

–Alexandra Gatsis

 

I asked my Facebook friend Alexandra if I could post this prayer she posted on FB, at The Truth Barrier. She said yes.  I call it a “prayer,” because it seeks an interior safety as violence approaches. I’ve never known a time when intellectual terror was as unleashed as it is now, including here. That’s why Alexandra’s prayer is so vital.

Sometimes I see words, things people have written, and they just appear luminous, right, simple and expressive of the interior voice that resists all “usage” by forces that wish to paint over it with the red angry paint of the propagandists.

This is what the American Transcendentalists–Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Alcott, et al–wrote about so passionately, as well as our “founding fathers.”  Justice Learned Hand stated: “The spirit if liberty is the spirit that is never too sure that it is right.”

And this interior space is what Tomas Tranströmer so brilliantly called “The Truth Barrier,” hence the name of this website. Many poets “know” the truth, whereas Tranströmer wrote about the stormy voyage (which never ends) on which we are given a chance to watch ourselves trying to find truths. Are they subjective, objective, both? Do they “exist?”

The late, legendary Yale mathematician Serge Lang also devoted his life to this–the discipline to discern “..a fact from a hole in the ground.” To each freshman class he gave a test called “The Huntington Test,” which was a reading of an article about social unrest (or lack thereof) in apartheid era South Africa, which he famously fought with Samuel P. Huntington about. (Huntington measured lack of street protest as a sign of a “satisfied society” without taking into account that black South Africans had restrictions on when they could even be on the streets. Serge, a member of The National Academy Of Sciences, successfully had Huntington blocked from membership, which the left never forgave Lang for.)

It’s an eternal struggle that never ends. Am I seeing? Have I stopped seeing? Have I developed blind spots?

Here’s my own translation of a famous and utterly stunning passage in Tranströmer’s  1970 collection “Seeing In The Dark,” from the poem Preludes:

“Two truths approach one another. One comes from inside,

one comes from the outside

and where they meet one has a chance to see oneself.

He who notices what is happening hollers

in despair: “Stop!

anything, so long as I don’t have to know myself.”

 

Note: “The Swedish word “känna” means both “know” and “feel.”

Here is an article I wrote about Tranströmer in Lapham’s Quarterly, in 2012.

 

L-R: Urban Sarbäck, Celia Farber, Erik Bergqvist, Tomas Tranströmer, Runmarö, 2011 [Looking at translations, I got a chance to tell Mr. Tranströmer why Robin Fulton’s are to my ear the best in English.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Most Ambitious Attempt At Deconstructing “Pizzagate” And The “Brocktopus” Yet To Surface

Posted on December 5, 2016

 

 

“I would say without any hesitation that he is incapable of recognizing the truth, let alone of telling it,” Christopher Hitchens wrote after reading Brock’s memoir. “The whole book is an exercise in self-love, disguised as an exercise in self-abnegation. How could he, asks the author of himself, have possibly gone on so long in telling lies, smearing reputations and inventing facts? The obvious answer — that he adored the easy money and the cheap fame that this brought him — was more than enough to still his doubts for several years. However, his publisher seems to have required a more high-toned explanation before furnishing him with a fresh tranche of money and renown. And Brock’s new story — that he was taken in by a vast right-wing conspiracy — is just as much of a lie as his earlier ones.”

[From “David Brock, Invasion 4Chan, The Alt-Right & Pizzagate,” by Jasun Horsley]

The writer* of this piece is new to me, and has dazzled and overwhelmed me. His name is Jasun Horsley and he is clearly some kind of genius. The trouble with geniuses is their work can feel claustrophobic, though that is not meant as a criticism. The work is (at last) a genuine reflection of a human mind grappling with a sandstorm of “information” and trying to render it coherent. In this piece, drawing out the “Brocktopus” and ultimately, “Pizzagate,” Horsley has owned the confusion in a way I find admirable, but “admirable” is too meek a word. I think we would all do well to look at this, whistle, and admit we are all in the baby pool. Amidst sound and fury, and the pressure to keep up with the autobahn speed of the story, (which moves as fast as it does propelled by induced propaganda rage,) we know almost nothing.

I found Horsley’s article when I went on voat.com to see if there was any real information about the Comet Ping Pong gunman.

[It has a fascinating seaweed bed of links on Welch at bottom, that defy belief. He spent time in Haiti?]

It seems to be the stage has been set for Comet Ping Pong to close its doors, because it is no longer a “safe” restaurant by any stretch.

Sunday brunch in DC with the kids? “I have a great idea sweetie, let’s go to Comet Ping Pong! I can’t see why not. Can you?”

What American writer could ever aspire to “describe” this America, or make “sense” if it?

[You may be familiar with Anna Akhmatova’s famous poem “Requiem,” in which a faceless woman in a breadline during the Yezhov terror turns to the poet in line behind her and says, “And can you describe this?”]

Horsley is entirely correct that in point of fact, none of us know which “news” and which attack balls of abusive “persuasion” on media/sicla media have been “fake” and which or which parts of which may have been organic. This means “Pizzagate” could be a fabrication from the start. Except there is no “start.” It’s all Escher stairs that lead to no “before,” no moment of innocence, before paradise is lost.

It becomes evident as you read, and rub your temples, that you are gulping like a goldfish as flakes of information without having even a prayer of understanding either the context, the no context, or the meta-context of no context of what you think you are revealing.

That said–organized pedophilia and the complicity of the global mainstream media, the sullying of those who press against it morally–this is definitely “real.”

As an aside–I also just reviewed The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) website. They linked to a very dubious “toolbox” about “the [debunked]  Zika virus,” that suggested they have dropped their standards, like most of these outfits do, on matter of mega-funded scare viruses lacking causation models for the syndromes they are accused of causing. Talk about witch hunts.

Still,  I like the fact that SPJ has been around since 1909, I (kind of, but not really) want to know more about them, and I wholeheartedly approve of  this ethics code for journalism.

 

*I don’t call writers “bloggers,” ever. I call them writers.

And now I’m going to make a donation to his Mr. Horsley’s website, the devil being, as we know, in the detail.

 

Edgar Maddison Welch: No Proof Of False Flag, Some Details Of His Troubled Life

Posted on December 5, 2016
Edgar Maddison Welch surrendering to DC police Dec 4

 

It has been widely reported that a 28  year old man from North Carolina named Edgar Maddison Welch entered [controversial DC restaurant] Comet Ping Pong in Washington DC yesterday, Dec 4, at “around” 3 pm with either a gun or a rifle. According to reports and eye witness accounts, he was not concerned with the guests and did not try to block anybody’s passage, nor did he make eye contact or speak with any staff. Rather, he went to the kitchen area and seemed to be looking for something.

At some point he allegedly fired his gun into the floor. I am not aware of anything he said to anybody.

Guests fled, panic broke out, he left with his arms in the air and was arrested.

The story broke at 16:10:18 pm, i.e. an hour later, in The Washingtonian. I don’t know if any news outlet broke it earlier.

On Twitter, early this afternoon, I saw Tweets claiming Welch was an “actor,” and that he was hired to act out a false flag operation to justify a crackdown on citizen and online journalism now branded by the left as “fake news.”

I asked all Twitterers who said such things if they had proof. As I write this, none have replied. It appears Welch has appeared as an actor in some minor film roles.

I have spent the day studying this as best I can, in my at home fact distillery–me, my phone, my laptop, my contacts, my experience and my mind.

I called a source with access to police records and data bases and asked if he could locate yesterday’s police report for this incident. This he was not able to do, yet, but–he was able to locate Welch’s records, which I was not able to download on my laptop but only on my phone. It’s harder therefore to assess–and I will add more later if there is anything important to add, from it–but this much I have gleaned:

Welch has a criminal record–DUIs, traffic violations, and an incident in which he hit a child with his car. The child survived.

He registered as a Republican in 2006, when he turned 18.

He has held 17 addresses–all either NC, GA, and one in Ohio. His record shows 4 evictions, no professional affiliations, no professional licenses, no bankruptcy records, no liens, and 2 judgements. Both judgements involve: “Forcible entry.”

I could find no social media account of his, but have read in alarmist news reports that he “liked” Alex Jones’ Infowars.

I also have found no evidence he was hired to stage a false flag. I vehemently oppose speculation of this kind. Follow facts all the way to the root or shut up, is my belief.

There are two photos of him circulating–in one he is carrying an assault rifle across his chest and looks like a white supremacist, or what we call “redneck,”–menacing facial expression. The other is a man who looks nothing like him (in the menacing photo) whose clothes and even sneakers are in American flag motif. This image is more goofy, less menacing.

I can’t find any online evidence that Welch was upset about, or researching, “Pizzagate.”

Perhaps he was. Many people are.

As I write this, I am not clear how “Pizzagate” came to focus on Comet Ping Pong, nor do I think it’s the right focus. I also have never said I know what is going on with the Podesta brothers. I do report on what is being ASKED by the American public.

Wikileaks leaked the emails and called them: “The Podesta Files.”

We can all read them. I do believe that all people are innocent until proven guilty. I personally wish there was a very strict ban on art that depicts adults having sex with children.

Meanwhile, if Alefantis wants to prove he has no basement, he needs to address the interview bloggers have found where he cites Comet Ping Pong’s basement. All of these “rumors” could easily have been laid to rest of Alefantis wanted to. He wants to play the victim. If none of the suspicions are true then he IS a victim. But why can’t he address them then, in detail? Why can’t he explain any of the things “ordinary” Americans are horrified by?

I’m very mindful of the fine line between the spirit of mindful investigation and the spirit of a witch hunt.

Those of us still deeply concerned with the blatant pedopholia themes (and words) of captured Alefantis Instagram shots are being bullied to stop speculating, and accused of many things, including now vigilante attacks on totally innocent small restaurants that have done nothing to deserve this hate.

I resist all attempts to vilify my continued attempts to glean important facts about all this.

That’s the story so far.

 

 

Sections Of Dakota Access Pipeline Denied Permit: Tribal Chairman Thanks All Protesters And Obama

Posted on December 4, 2016

This appears to be straight up fantastic news.

NPR Coverage here.

The American Transcendentalist in me, and Romantic, wants to say this: Henry David Thoreau’s spirit is hovering all over this and smiling, (if he ever smiled.)

The pickled observer in me wants to say: What’s this about re-routing? That worries me. Also, did Obama have the executive power to stop this…the whole time?

I really hope it’s not true that Donald Trump is in favor of this despised pipeline.

But it might be. I don’t have time to know all these things at once.  I am the only staff I have. In my dreams I have a staff of 50 incorruptible and  reporters with no life to go home to, of all ages, races, political persuasions and all in competition to bring ME the truth gold at the end of the day. My office would be a place where they would fear to come knocking if they came home not have overturned every stone. Or failed to call enough sources on all sides to bring me the real story. Which, being the Tribal Chief, I would know as soon as I looked at the text, and if it was true gold, I’d nod almost imperceptibly.

“Run it.”

 

 

In a any case: These words have been issued, and are real:

 

The following statement was released by Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault II.

 

“Today, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced that it will not be granting the easement to cross Lake Oahe for the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline. Instead, the Corps will be undertaking an environmental impact statement to look at possible alternative routes. We wholeheartedly support the decision of the administration and commend with the utmost gratitude the courage it took on the part of President Obama, the Army Corps, the Department of Justice and the Department of the Interior to take steps to correct the course of history and to do the right thing.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and all of Indian Country will be forever grateful to the Obama Administration for this historic decision.

We want to thank everyone who played a role in advocating for this cause. We thank the tribal youth who initiated this movement. We thank the millions of people around the globe who expressed support for our cause. We thank the thousands of people who came to the camps to support us, and the tens of thousands who donated time, talent, and money to our efforts to stand against this pipeline in the name of protecting our water. We especially thank all of the other tribal nations and jurisdictions who stood in solidarity with us, and we stand ready to stand with you if and when your people are in need.

Throughout this effort I have stressed the importance of acting at all times in a peaceful and prayerful manner – and that is how we will respond to this decision. With this decision we look forward to being able to return home and spend the winter with our families and loved ones, many of whom have sacrificed as well. We look forward to celebrating in wopila, in thanks, in the coming days.

We hope that Kelcey Warren, Governor Dalrymple, and the incoming Trump administration respect this decision and understand the complex process that led us to this point. When it comes to infrastructure development in Indian Country and with respect to treaty lands, we must strive to work together to reach decisions that reflect the multifaceted considerations of tribes.

Treaties are paramount law and must be respected, and we welcome dialogue on how to continue to honor that moving forward. We are not opposed to energy independence, economic development, or national security concerns but we must ensure that these decisions are made with the considerations of our Indigenous peoples.

To our local law enforcement, I hope that we can work together to heal our relationship as we all work to protect the lives and safety of our people. I recognize the extreme stress that the situation caused and look forward to a future that reflects more mutual understanding and respect.

Again, we are deeply appreciative that the Obama Administration took the time and effort to genuinely consider the broad spectrum of tribal concerns. In a system that has continuously been stacked against us from every angle, it took tremendous courage to take a new approach to our nation-to-nation relationship, and we will be forever grateful.”

Dave Weldon Is NOT The New CDC Director

Posted on December 4, 2016

I told you late last night that a source close to the vaccine battle posted on FB that Dave Weldon was appointed the new director of the CDC.

It’s not accurate.

The source who told my source said something that the source misinterpreted and it took off from there.

I apologize for jumping the gun, but I clarified in the post what I had heard, from whom, that it was on FB, and that I was not 100% sure.

 

I wrote: “I hope this is still true tomorrow.”

 

Well, it isn’t.

 

Not as bad as Newsweek or Time (forget which) printing millions of copies of Hillary on the cover with the headline: “Madam President,” before the election, and certainly not as costly. But still, I owe you an apology for not waiting for more confirmation.

Telegram To The Left: Karl Marx Hated Mexicans, Blacks, Jews And Was A White Supremacist, Like For Real

Posted on December 3, 2016

[Ed: I regret being forced to publish such racist swill but people need to know this. There is a lot more where this came from. ]

 

“What most people don’t know is that Marx was an out and out racist and anti-Semite. He didn’t think much of Mexicans. Concerning the annexation of California after the Mexican-American War, Marx wrote: “Without violence, nothing is ever accomplished in history.” Then he asks, “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?” Friedrich Engels, Marx’s co-author of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” added, “In America, we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States.” Much of Marx’s ideas can be found in a book written by former communist Nathaniel Weyl, titled “Karl Marx, Racist” (1979).

In a July 1862 letter to Engels, in reference to his socialist political competitor, Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx wrote, “… it is now completely clear to me that he, as is proved by his cranial formation and his hair, descends from the Negroes from Egypt, assuming that his mother or grandmother had not interbred with a nigger. Now this union of Judaism and Germanism with a basic Negro substance must produce a peculiar product. The obtrusiveness of the fellow is also nigger-like.”

–Walter Williams,

 

And here’s more.

 

 

 

How We Did It [Colluded With Russia To Create Pedophilia Network Delusion]

Posted on December 3, 2016

“Well, Celia, it seems we’ve been exposed as charlatans. It was a great hoax–thanks in large part to the behind-the-scenes efforts of our Russian handlers. I asked Boris Badenov how they planted similar stories in Norway and Canada about busting pedophile rings; he said: “Better you should not be asking.”
What’s even more astounding is how our Russkie friends went back in time to alter the urban dictionaries to fake a sinister meaning for the terms “cheese pizza” and “in poor health, not expected to survive.”
And yes, they did all that while stealing the US election for Donald!

Well, now that the Bear’s outof the bag, so to speak, I’m gonna ask for extraction so I can drink my remaining days away in my Crimean Dachau.

It was all a great big joke, folks. We faked the Podesta emails. Our children are safe.

So you can all go back to sleep.”

 

Comment submitted Dec 3, 2016 by Truth Barrier friend R.A. Davis, who wrote this piece.

 

 

 

[By the way, this is sarcasm, not mockery. I stand by what I wrote about mockery. But I like sarcasm, when it’s sharp like this, and you need to cut the onion.  CF]

A December Morning

Posted on December 3, 2016

 

Man, what a week. Unpredictable energy popping out of people like popcorn. Rage. Frailty. “Where’s my place in things?” I feel like I’m falling through colors and icebergs and danger and funerals and toys and hidden romances, and there’s a little bit of blood on everything. I hear the sound of breathing and the ghost of old songs half heard. It’s the holidays, and Saturday, and there’s a wind blowing all the words away. The newspaper goes blank in my hands, and my hands look foreign to me. I feel like we’re all spirits revisiting the days of our earthly lives, leaving little messages for the truly living. A December morning.

 

–John P. Shanley

Curated via Facebook, Dec 3, 2016

 

Great Writing–And Why

Posted on December 3, 2016

As of this morning, my new favorite news website both for trustworthiness and transparent (aka “great”) writing, is www.sofrep.com, billed as “…trusted news and intelligence from special ops veterans.” Some of their ads are for big fat guns that scare me, but I am going to tell you why I like them.

I downloaded the EU’s brand new “European Defense Action Plan” [PDF]  and started to read it. It made me uncomfortable. I sought interpretations in the media that told me straight up what it was all about, as I have become intolerant of all things occluded in the age of Political Correctness, where everybody uses that unctuous elitist tone that now has morphed into a virtual smoke machine. You never hear a human voice, and you never escape the narcissistic imposition of moral superiority.

The EU was beefing up its military, dramatically, and it seemed to have something to do with Donald Trump, and I needed to know how exactly NATO is considered evil now.

I found this site, and the writings of one Alex Hollings, a U.S. Marine.

Here is one graph from his report on the European Defense Action Plan:

“The European Defense Action Plan calls for a dramatic increase in funding for joint military assets among member nations. The proposal includes increasing immediate expenditures from twenty-five million euros per year to ninety million by 2020, when it will be replaced by a new defense spending program that allocates five hundred million euros annually. An additional fund created in this plan could potentially be worth five billion euros per year, and could be used to help member states acquire expensive military assets like drones in joint purchases with other nations to reduce costs.

The plan is intended to help bolster defense spending throughout the European Union, while also creating a “single market for defense” within the organization. This financial strategy would be modeled after existing “single markets” in Europe designed to aid international trade within the Union like telecoms and energy.

Some believe this influx in military spending within the EU is due to concerns over President Elect Donald Trump’s stance on NATO, who made headlines during his presidential campaign when he suggested that the United States may not come to the aid of its NATO allies in their time of need. Trump’s stance is based on his concerns over many of the organization’s member nations failing to meet their required defense expenditures, opting to rely instead on the military might of the United States.

John Bolton, rumored to be a contender for Secretary of State under President Trump, said he believed any effort to establish a joint European military body must be considered a sign of withering confidence in NATO in the face of Trump’s hard line stance on the organization.

“If they actually got to the point of achieving [a true EU military capability] – that would be a dagger pointed at the heart of NATO,” Bolton said during an appearance on Breitbart News Daily radio on Wednesday. “If the EU says, ‘Actually, we can defend ourselves,’ I tell you, there are a lot of Americans who would say, ‘Fine, and by the way, the next time an authoritarian militaristic society threatens you, let us know how it turns out.’”

Excellent.

Very clear, and I did not feel bullied.

My curiosity piqued, I stayed on the site, and found this piece, where  Hollings is trying to make heads or tails of Cairo, and manages to crystalize a whole world for me in one paragraph:

“As I strolled down the street in Cairo wearing the most foolishly American-looking polo shirt I could have possibly chosen, I realized quickly that the area I was in wasn’t commonly traversed by tourists. Unfinished but occupied apartment buildings towered above me on all sides, with extension cords spanning across them from windowless openings in the upper floors. The moist mud clumped on either side of the street, I quickly realized, was a mix of gasoline, oil, and human waste. I bought some bottled water from a man on the street, who explained that the owners of these apartment buildings didn’t need to pay taxes until they were complete, so they had opted to never actually complete them. The downside to their scheme was that utilities like running water and electricity would only be activated when the owners started paying taxes. As a result, some people simply throw their waste out the window to avoid the long hike required to dispose of it responsibly.”

It’s a marvel of a passage. Every words dances into every other, showing– not concealing– meaning, context, subtext, history, corruption, and humanity.

Were Jann Wenner not fighting off multi-million dollar lawsuits for fake PC journalism he tragically fell for–in a dream world– he’d hire Alex Hollings, who faintly echoes Hunter S. Thompson, my favorite American writer.

Speaking of which, the late Michael Hastings was an outstanding journalist and writer, and until his bizarre death, Rolling Stone was still publishing sizzling stuff. I do suspect Hastings was killed, by remote controlled car crash. I interviewed car mechanics back when it happened, just for my own internal records, and they all confirmed the crash and subsequent dismemberment of the vehicle was impossible. Hastings should have perhaps backed down. But really good journalists don’t do that, when they get onto the scent of a very big story and are young enough not to have gotten the Big Memo.

Is a story worth dying for?

I would put it this way: At the root of real investigative journalism lies a death wish. It’s unconscious. For this reason, you’ll find that the best journalists are ruined souls who had horrendous childhoods. Case in point: Julian Assange. Julian Assange told Michael Hastings in a Rolling Stone interview I read several times, that what he is revealing is more important than his own life, and furthermore, that all core Wikileaks staff accepted this.

I almost cried when I read that.

I used to have that deranged big story lust, and should be thankful to be here, still. I like writing here, in total freedom.

I wrote for Rolling Stone once, (in 2000) about O.J. Simpson, and will always be grateful because when Wenner heard I was to be paid $2 a word, he randomly raised it to $3 a word, because I had such good access to O.J. and his inner circle. This I needed, to report the story “O.J. Inc,” about the underground market of O.J.’s signature, which also funded his criminal defense.

I should add that I feel immensely sorry for the journalist who produced the story about campus rape that turned out to be based on a false witness. This is the waking and sleeping nightmare of every journalist on earth. And it happened after decades of Wenner publishing almost only men. Awful.

Self-servingly, I point to it as exhibit A of what happens when a journalist is “discredited,” for real. It happens from the text, not from special interest, funded to the gills, interest groups, or “activists.” And the outlet–in this case Rolling Stone— has to capitulate when the falsity is brought to light.

 

 

 

 

Guest Column: Taking Down The Pedophiles

Posted on December 3, 2016

 

By R.A. Davis

 

The very fact that we’re learning about Pizzagate indicates they’re being exposed. Given the nature and extent of this curse, it will be a slow process. Central is the fact that taking these people down is synonymous with destroying the entire corrupt Western political, corporate and financial power structure. But it will succeed.

It began to unravel for these sick networks, starting in Norway, where it’s hinted that the network is global and involves people in high places.

Understatement of the decade. Another major ring was busted in Canada around the same time.

Years ago when I first got online I started reading about it. I mentioned my findings to a friend–a local cop. He told me that in police academy a guest came to speak about pedophilia. The man told the trainees to be very careful and meticulous when prosecuting these cases, because the presiding judge might be another pedophile himself.

Former PA Attorney General Kathleen Kane just began a 23-month sentence on bizarre charges. Kane had poked her nose into Penn State’s Sandusky pedophile case.

They protect their own, you see.

I know why JonBenet Ramsey was killed. And no, it was nobody in her family.
I know why Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died, with a pillow over his head, and no subsequent autopsy was performed.

I merely collect data. The information is out there, for anybody who has the stomach for it. Run a search for “The Franklin Coverup,” a documentary the Discovery Channel chose, at the last minute, not to air. It’s on the WWW, if you know where to look.

More often than not, the FBI, the courts, are useless. Because when you join the Club, and participate, you’re videotaped. They have something on you. And that’s your ticket to the House, the Senate, the Governor’s Mansion, the White House, an Anchor slot on the Nightly News, and, of course, the Federal Bench. You rarely rise to these heights unless they have something on you.

How do we live with all this? That’s a problem. Some pedophilia is hereditary, in the genes, and so, many of us express outrage a tad too stridently.

We as a society are going to have to come to terms with all of this. And that will require a hard honest look at ourselves. Much as we might wish, we dare not turn our backs on it.

The toughest part for me is knowing that 300,000 American children disappear every year and are never found.again. It is one thing to know this in one’s mind; it is a whole other thing to contemplate all that pure innocence taken from those unable to defendthemselves.
Gonna pour me a drink now.

 

–R.A. Davis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please donate if you can to independent journalism at The Truth Barrier.

 

Thank you.

Australian Embryologist Arrested Trying To Buy 6 Year Old For Sex In Los Angeles: “Wanted To Meet Other Pervs” In The US

Posted on December 2, 2016

Quinn allegedly told agents he was travelling to Los Angeles and wanted to ‘meet up with a dad who shares his young ones’.

He explained to the undercover agent he was hoping to meet ‘other pervs’ in the US and agreed to pay a human trafficker to provide him with a child with whom he could engage in illicit sex, authorities alleged.

Quinn allegedly went to the LA hotel on Saturday expecting to meet with three fellow child predators for a party, during which the men would engage in sex with boys provided by the sex trafficker.”

May, 2016.

His name is Michael John Quinn, and as Pizzagate fury and as online citizen investigative journalism escalates, (in a mainstream media vacuum) he has apparently been wrongly pegged as “the shirtless guy” next to James Alefantis in some photo or other.

Here are some articles:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3614616/Accused-paedophile-Michael-John-Quinn-active-dating-sites-left-

http://www.kidspot.com.au/baby/real-life/in-the-news/australian-ivf-worker-charged-with-hideous-child-sex-crimes

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-21/melbourne-man-on-child-sex-charges-in-the-us-pleads-guilty/7647470

Fine. No connection between this one convicted pedophile and Alefantis. I don’t care about Alefantis per se, and certainly not about the DNC/Democrat angle,  but child trafficking per se. What this article tells us is:

1. There are websites where pedophiles can arrange to buy a child as young as 6 for sex in hotel rooms in L.A, it’s connected to well organized networks, and even involves parents offering their own children. Here’s the line that jumped out at me:

“Quinn allegedly told agents he was travelling to Los Angeles and wanted to ‘meet up with a dad who shares his young ones’.

This is apparently a…thing? They arrange parties around this? In Los Angeles? And where else? What about Washington DC? Unheard of? Impossible? Wild internet bullying? Moral panic?

2. Federal agents have infiltrated. The mystery is, why isn’t every single person who ever signed on already arrested?

3. This story was reported in the UK and Australian press, not at all in the US media. I’m not sure if that is significant but it strikes me as odd.

4. Pedophilia and child trafficking have nothing to do with politics or Trump or Hillary. Please let’s drop all that. It got us to look at this, is all. So let’s all assist in the uncovering. Imagine children being offered up like this and thinking, as all children do, no  matter what their fate, “…grownups are going to save  me. Grownups are going to save me…”

Nancy Schaefer fingered CPS, and then, according to MSM, her husband decided to kill them both with untraceable guns.

For the record, I’ve been looking for a good time to say this: I would never under any circumstances take my own life. Just saying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWngNsOShx4

 

Donations

Posted on December 2, 2016

Raising funds to grow The Truth Barrier, give if you are able, thank you for what you have already given, and small monthly donations are very appreciated.

[Have not asked since March!]

We’re growing!

The PayPal button is in the RIGHT hand side of the site. And below I have pasted the infuriating story from 2013 when GoFundMe DELETED our account after money came in because we were deemed unfit in some way.

 

 

[Just for general interest how they mess with us…]

 

Post: March 12, 2013

 

Darkness At Noon: GOFUNDME DELETES TRUTH BARRIER ACCOUNT AFTER DONATIONS MADE

By Celia Farber

As I posted here, (old post at bottom) last week, I created a donation page for The Truth Barrier at GoFundMe, one of the major crowd funding sites. In the first day I raised $450. I was quite surprised to find, last night, that I was getting emails from GoFundMe telling me donors funds had been returned to them. Why? I hadn’t asked them to do this. I had also gotten no warning of any kind. First I thought, when it was just one refund, in the beginning, that this donor was upset with me and wrote to him to ask why. Then all the donors were refunded and my “amount raised” went to $0.00. I thought maybe there was a snag with my bank account. I called the help number, and sent emails to tech support. “Why did you send all my donations back to donors with no explanation??”
I was stunned to get this chilling reply:

Hi Celia,
I apologize, but we are unable to process payments for your account. Our banks and processors hold us to a strict guideline on what we can and cannot process through our site. Unfortunately, we will not be able to provide you or your business with our services. I do apologize again, and wish you the best going forward.
Thanks,
Susan
WePay | Customer Support
Phone: 855-GO-WEPAY (855-469-3729)
support@wepay.com | wepay.com

It got worse. Today I found that GoFundMe had deleted my page altogether, again without alerting me.
If you believe in diversity of expression, citizen reporting, and the first amendment, I suggest you BOYCOTT GoFundMe. They are so censorious and cowardly they are making PayPal look like The Freedom Riders. (PayPal accepts donations here at the site, and has never given me a problem.)
When have we had enough of these underhanded Stasi tactics? They offered a service, I became a customer, I broke not one of their stated violations, and yet I was deleted without a word.
Who is behind GoFundMe? Which banks? What tactics do they use to screen people? On what do they base there “DELETE” decisions? What right do they have to send money BACK to donors once the donors have sent it to the recipient? This means I have to write to each donor and explain.
Let’s expose and name those complicit in the destruction of free speech on the Internet.

Thank you.

(Original post, minus GoFundMe page, below.)

 

I started a page today to support developing The Truth Barrier into a real investigative contender–combining old school shoe-leather traditions with web-based citizen journalism. This is the first building block. Another way you can help us is to take interest in our ads, even if they seem annoying at first. Thank you for supporting The Truth Barrier in every single way, mainly with your attentiveness. We hope to grow like a beanstalk in 2013! (Make that 2017, as well)

Celia Farber,

Editor

 

[Comments were especially revealing]

Comments

TANYA says:
November 28, 2016 at 10:30 am • Edit
I HAD MY GOFUNDME ACCOUNT OPEN AND I HAD DONORS DONATING ON THERE I HAD ABOUT 12 AND SOMETHING HUNDRED DOLLARS AND THEN I WENT BACK ON THERE THE NEXT MORNING AND THE GOFUND ME IS SAYING MY LINK IS NOT FOUND. REALLY…. I DIDN’T GET NO EMAILS ABOUT MY ACCOUNT OR NOTHING I’VE BEEN EMAILING GOFUND ME SUPPORT TEAM AND NO ONE NO ONE RESPOND BACK I DIDN’T HEAR NOTHING FROM THEM SO I’M TELLING MY LAWYER TO LOOK INTO. I TRIED AND TRIED TO CONTACT THEM AND NO RESPOND I DON’T THINK SO WE NEED THAT MONEY A SUV CRASHED INTO OUR WHOLE APARTMENT WE HAVE NOTHING BUT THE CLOTHES ON OUR BACKS. I WANT TO KNOW WHO DID IT AND WHY?

REPLY
Alexandra says:
November 6, 2015 at 1:20 pm • Edit
Hello Celia,

I am going through a similar experience right this moment. They do not communicate, replay to messages when I ask for information. I raised over 12K for few fire survivors who are heavily injured with burns over 80% of their bodies. It is a horrible situation! GoFundMe would not cooperate whatsoever! We made a complaint with BBB and I might need to take them to court as our campaign is legal and the cause we are raising the money for is a good cause. Was allover the news the case of Colectiv Club -Bucharest Romania. I am American citizen so I have all the right to create this campaign and help these people. GoFundMe denies me this right!
I am outraged by their lack of communication, respect and discrimination.

REPLY
Joe Beck says:
July 8, 2013 at 2:28 pm • Edit
What they did to you Celia is a crime.
I found your site by searching “gofundme.com”. I see many funds on gofundme.com that had received donations above the “goal” dollar amount but were still accepting donations. That might be a crime, if it isn’t then it should be. State the goal, reach it, then stop all donations. Why? Because the donations are being made to help a person meet a dollar amount. I noticed other problems with their site and the way they do things.

An example is this fund, – http://www.gofundme.com/Home4Barbara -, for Barbara Garcia, a victim of a tornado in Oklahoma. The fund is in the name Erin DeRuggiero who states “I am in contact with Barbara and her daughter Jackie”, which is obviously suspicious for very logical reasons. The “goal” was $60,000, it was reached on June 19, 2013 with a $100 donation by Mary Ulman. Erin DeRuggiero is still accepting donations. This is gofundme.com’s response:

Carissa (GoFundMe Support)
Jul 08 09:41 am (PDT)

Hi Joe,

Thanks for reaching out to us.

I do see that this page was set up as a Personal page. Personal donation pages can be set up for as long as the page creator would like them to be. They do not have an expiration date, and people are free to donate more to the page creator if they would like. The page will remain live unless the page creator takes the page down.

Hope this helps to clarify, let me know if you have any further questions.

Thanks,

Carissa

Notice how gofundme.com deflects responsibility by claiming it is a “Personal” page. Yet they are collecting 5% of all donations on this “Personal” page. I have many other problems with gofundme.com’s way of doing business, and yes it is a BUSINESS for them, 5% of all donations is extremely high. It is just a website, built with free software, and no buildings to lease or own, and no employees to pay wages to. They also hide their website ownership, which is unethical and stupid if you are accepting donations.

If you want any help with looking into this website Celia, I am available to help. I am always conducting research, it’s like a hobby. I am disabled currently and have plenty of time.

REPLY
jerryholmes says:
April 21, 2016 at 5:17 pm • Edit
today date is ,. 04-20-2016.,., im a single father with 5- kids how need help after loseing all most everthing in our home stil today I have being trying to withdral my go fund ms account money payment stil I got know money help today this family lights are cut out in now I have a 5- month old grandougther in a 5- year old grandson n tothis family have bills over 9865 dollars in soon ned money to pay rent if I have to use all the money we have to get the lights trun back on., please hel I been trying to withdral my go fund me money account payments out to m-t bank at ., jerryholmes., 9868959843, . ro- number,. 052000113., this family lost it all but need your help to start over please added money to m-t bank account.,.,., thank you

REPLY
Allison Quinn says:
March 14, 2013 at 1:31 pm • Edit
What I really dislike is that they say:
“We will not be able to provide YOU or your business…..” So, not only do the disagree with TheTruthBarrier for some reason (I see nothing in the Prohibited Activities that would match up. what, promoting hatred and racial intolerance?); but they say YOU. How much more personal can it get?

REPLY
David Crowe says:
March 13, 2013 at 6:32 pm • Edit
Did they give any explanation? Is it because of your views on HIV/AIDS or something else? They owe you an explanation. None of this “violated terms of service” crap. If they’re going to censor they should at least be brave enough to explain why.

REPLY
Flahute says:
March 13, 2013 at 8:20 am • Edit
Thx for getting us involved, engaged, & up to speed with things regarding this issue. A temporary setback at best.

This is just the equivalent of ‘Moneyball’ where the game is, partly IMHO, societal and scientific integrity. It’s taken these forces which you & varied others have documented, quite awhile to assemble their ‘team’ & put their game pieces in place. Suspect that it may take a somewhat long while to deconstruct the apparatus or reach some series of critical tipping points. It is how we weather & respond to these temporary crises that allow us to achieve the next series of victories.

I imagine there remain a number of equally engaged elements, operating on a worldwide basis for the long haul with far less resources, dedicated to the dismantling of this apparatus or at least what it represents. It shouldn’t be difficult to retool your current situation.

Sometimes, we get to the truth in strange non linear ways…. you & your integrity have illustrated some very creative ways to do this.

REPLY
Sepp says:
March 13, 2013 at 5:34 am • Edit
The GoFundMe terms of service

http://www.gofundme.com/blog/user-forum/terms-conditions/

(look at “Prohibited Activities”)

make it rather easy for someone to complain about your page to them and convince them that you are advocating something that is contrary to all good medical practice and therefore fraudulent, or whatever. Just imagine one of the nasties in the Aids world doing such a complaint…

Probably that is what happened. Getting interference from the pro-aids-drugs crowd.

You might be able to tease the complaint out of the GoFundMe people, but it seems futile. There will be other means to gather support.

REPLY
Cheryl Nagel says:
March 12, 2013 at 11:01 pm • Edit
This is lunacy – why should they give a darn who uses their service, and BTW, what have you done now? Nothing different than usual, I’m sure. I liked Noreen’s response. Try something else!

REPLY
R. A. Davis says:
March 12, 2013 at 10:18 pm • Edit
Somebody’s playing with your head, Celia. Please don’t let it drag you down.

REPLY
Noreen Martin says:
March 12, 2013 at 6:01 pm • Edit
Don’t understand what their problem is but try fundy or other types of fund-raising organizations. This is so unfair for them to do this. Maybe an account could be opened by-passing all of these who all want a piece of the pie. Post it on your site, Facebook , etc. I wanted to send money but no longer use Pay Pal.

REPLY
sheri thomas says:
May 14, 2013 at 6:27 pm • Edit
My GOFUNDME account is exposing COURT CORRUPTION and CPS kidnapping.

I was just REJECTED as well with no explanation and all funds held then refunded.
JusticeOpensDoors http://www.gofundme.com/justiceopensdoors

This is CLEARLY A TRUTH BARRIER organization and front for BANKSTERS

Celia, I would like to form a alliance …Please call me…phone number at website

REPLY

My 2006 Article In Harper’s “Out Of Control: AIDS And The Corruption Of Medical Science”

Posted on December 1, 2016

What happened to my life after this article came out has been unavailable to me, by way of a sonic trauma boom that separated me from it. It eventually came to involve such macabre manifestations of the the whacko kingdom that although it was all happening to and through me, I became utterly disassociated. It seemed like “bored,” but really it was my brain protecting itself while it healed.

People have said over and over: “Tell the story. Write the book.”

Here is part of the story–I hope you will read it as a cautionary tale.

In the meantime, it’s Dec 1, which the propagandists have marred forever as “World AIDS Day,” and I thought I should find it, and post the article, as a counter-measure.

One thing though: I did not refer to Yoweri Museveni as a benevolent dictator, but rather, as a “benevolent dictator,” but Harper’s lost the quotes on that, so I am forever contrite to the people of Uganda. (It’s obvious why they branded him as such, due to his corrupt collusion in “HIV/AIDS,” which was the kind of crisis that could soften the heart of any brutal dictator when the right people came knocking.)

 

 

Ted Gunderson’s Last Video, And The MacDonald Case In Light Of PizzaGate

Posted on December 1, 2016

Many years ago, I was invited by a fellow journalist to consider the byzantine and seemingly incomprehensibly unjust case of Jeffrey MacDonald, as a comparison study to the rabbit holes of HIV/AIDS.

I believe if memory serves I may have interviewed Gunderson. That’s not significant one way or the other, and traumatic events in my own life and career caused me to forget things along unusual patterns. I know nothing more than you do, but I’m revisiting deserted trains of thought.  The blur in my mind at the time was that I believed the MacDonald case to be a horrific case of murder, plain and simple, and either he was guilty or he was telling the truth and there were assailants who came and attacked his family that night. I thought it was a murder case, only. Maybe some kind of “hippie” story.( And if you know me, you know my deep dread of hippies.)

Now I realize that the MacDonald case is way more “central” to understanding whom what, where, when, and why all these seemingly new revelations are upon us, about child trafficking, and other things that even I can’t put into words because it sounds so frankly insane and paranoid.

I invite us all to listen to the late, very clear, very intrepid and courageous for mer FBI agent Mr. Gunderson.

“PizzaGate” is not where the story begins.

A fantastic piece of journalism on all this here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57GVIbVkHQY&sns=tw

On Mockery

Posted on December 1, 2016

 

And now I realize, evil’s favorite blocker is mockery. Mockery is the thing people most fear. It is what will afflict you with a thousand wounds when you begin to expose anything significant. If you can endure it, you will be so strong and so free, there’s nothing like it.

Cross over–

The river is treacherous, but on the other side of mockery is a place where we can admit everything we don’t yet know, but are trying to understand. We can be human beings. There’s freedom in that.

 

“Deep in the forest there is a clearing that can be reached only by someone who has lost his way.”

Tomas Tranströmer

 

 

 

 

 

Behind The Curtain At The Normal Factory

Posted on December 1, 2016

“This is all to say that popular discussions of the pathologies of “Trump supporters” have become trite and boring. “Those people” are always depicted through the same phony anthropological prism, as if pundits are examining some inexplicable phenomenon that just suddenly became evident in the material universe. Trump supporters exist in all walks of life and in every region of the country, but they’ve somehow become these exotic creatures to be analyzed in a pseudo-journalistic lab. On the other hand, supporting Hillary is seen as the height of normalcy, requiring no further interrogation.
It would be equally possible to scrutinize the prototypical Hillary voter as some kind of baffling curiosity—plenty of loopy people support her for a variety of weird and off-putting reasons. I recall attending a Hillary rally during the Democratic primaries several months back where a number of her fans were propagating preposterous conspiracy theories about Bernie Sanders, on topics ranging from his alleged ties to communist radicals to his “illegitimately” begotten son. I could have weaved these anecdotes into a larger narrative about how Hillary voters were motivated to back her out of “anger,” “resentment,” and “anxiety.” But I didn’t, because my sense of fairness militated against the impulse.”

–-Michael Tracey

Genius.

How did I ever miss this article? All I know is I have happily let go of “friends” who have tried to assert their own cleanliness over the alleged dirtiness of hundred of millions of hard working Americans they have never spoken to and whose lives they know nothing about.

It’s not about Trump. That’s the irony. We get so obsessed about the purity or lack there of of One Man, the so called charismatic leader cult phenomenon, that we lose all interest in the reality that is so grotesquely obscured by these puritanical lenses.

It’s a veiled version and manifestation of what all the screaming middle class college kids are calling “racism.”

Racism is really all forms of trying to ugly-ify and “other” groups of people who are forced to be a proxy for the abjected in ourselves.

This is detailed in “Life Unworthy of Life,” by Daniel Glass, the best book on the Holocaust I have ever read, brought to my attention by Charles Ortleb, whose name will return here soon.

 

Dear PizzaGate Denialists: What Is A Pizza In “Poor Health,” And “Not Expected To Survive?”

Posted on December 1, 2016

“We’ve already found a secret memo coming out of the justice department, and they’re now going to go after 12 new perversions. Things like bestiality, polygamy, having sex with little boys, and making that legal…”

Tom De Lay

(3:42)

Update here.

Call me crazy, call PizzaGate “a fake,”  but then you have to prove that none of these pieces of evidence from Come Ping Pong and other strange occult pizza joints is all part of a very big not funny joke played on us rubes.

 

 

Comet Pizza Instagram Captures

Posted on November 29, 2016

I watched many “Pizzagate”  videos in recent weeks, with a sensation like a vise closing in on my temples. An otherworldly headache, blurred vision, an inter-cellular sense that all hope of normalcy is forever lost.

Nobody knows WTF is going on, but I have to tell you there are millions of dots in my memory bank that are in strange ways floating back to me, though I can’t describe yet, what I mean. For so many years, I was exposed to so many things I was not “allowed” to be alarmed about, because of deep seated cultural taboos that restricted healthy alarm. One was always conditioned to consider the highly abnormal normal.

I am exhausted from decades of having to always, always, always reassure the outside world that “we don’t know what it means.”

So I’ll say it again: We don’t know what it means.

One repeats this tea-parlor prayer, as though it will confer protection against the most dreaded accusation of being overly alarmed (about incredibly alarming things)  while no shame was ever attached to being insufficiently alarmed.

I chose this video because it seemed most succinct.

I am aware of the risk of “mass hysteria.”

But for the love of Christ, what is this?

 

 

NYPD Cop Says Anti Trump Protesters Paid By Soros, Cites “Intel”

Posted on November 28, 2016

THE MORNING AFTER: FEAR, LOATHING AND THE INVISIBLE ECONOMY THAT PRODUCES IT

 

 

“History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.”

 

Hunter S. Thompson,

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

 

 

 

Last night, around 10 pm, I heard there was another “Not My President” anti-Trump protest at Trump Tower, and headed down. I arrived at 57th and 5th, where the street was blocked off—guarded by cops in varying degrees of protective garb, some of them so swaddled and helmeted they could barely walk. An NYPD cop was manning the barricade, checking ID, and allowing through people who could prove they lived in the building, from the corner. What remained of the protesters—about 200—were across the avenue, behind yet another barricade— with signs and chants, staying in one place, mostly interested in cars coming down 5th Avenue seeing their signs, and either honking or cursing.

The barricaded streets looked just like they do the night before Thanksgiving. The windows of Cartier, Saks, and Harry Winston sparkled all around us, like we were inside a jewel box. It was very cold. I looked at the barricade, and asked the officer, who was Latino, and exuded calm, what I would have to do to get to that corner. He explained I would have to walk to 6th Ave, and cut back across 56th street, which might be partially blocked, in which case I could try 55th.

 

Trump won the election early Wednesday morning, and today was Friday. I seem to be the only person who thinks something almost incomprehensible has happened in this country since that queasy moment around 2:30 am when all the TV people on the various networks stopped their endless swiping on those red and blue electoral maps and just sat agape, trying to wrap their actual mouths around the “shocking” result. It was as though they were vying for a few more moments, or even seconds, inside of which they could hide, stall, hold back the tidal wave of strangeness implicit in Donald Trump winning an election that the entire mass media had insisted he could not win and would not win.  Then they finally gave in to it and sort of dumped us all into post-election shock-times, which is what we’re in now.  To say that things got very dark and strange very fast would be an understatement.

Berkeley, of course, is where it began. Half the student body—about 1500 students– walked out of class by 8 am the next morning, and the faculty went with them. Partaking in class suddenly deemed unthinkable since everybody was experiencing such trauma. Then the narcissistic rage began—the screaming, chanting, raging, and “peaceful” protesting, which included smashing windows, storefronts, and people. “Not My President,” was the battle cry, along with the charmless, “Fuck Trump,” “Pussy Grabs Back,” and, for some reason, “Bitch.” American flags were burned, Mexican flags were flown and waved, along with vast red banners bearing the hammer and sickle—something called The Revolutionary Student Front. The elderly, the homeless, teenagers and even children were physically attacked in various parts of the country, caught on video—including a young boy whose mother expels him, sobbing, from his own home, because he said he liked Donald Trump.

 

I understood immediately that something truly malignant was afoot, whereas most of my “liberal” friends seemed to think there was nothing that alarming about the nature of these protests. It was said that they were all expressing “understandable” frustration. To me, they were the PC crowd, one minute—supposedly representing a kinder, more sensitive American dialogue about various issues. And then in a fingersnap…they went all ISIS on us.

In one video, there are hundreds of angry young people marching, the males swathed in “shemagh” scarves in red or black, their lithe bodies bristling with violence seeking an outlet. They looked truly menacing and scary, like terrorists. “Fucking piece of shit racist,” one of them spits at the person shooting the video. Why he was a racist for shooting the video is not clear. But suddenly everything in America was a “piece of shit racist,” probably including a Starbucks cup. Donald Trump puppets were burned in effigy. America had officially cracked. This was it.

 

“I’m doing a story,” I said, to the officer, “on the protests. My feeling is there is something off about it all.”

“Well, they’re paid to do this,” he said calmly, lifting the barricade to allow two people who showed him ID, into Trump Towers.

“Soros?” I said.

He nodded. “Yep.”

“I have read that, and I don’t doubt you. But do you know for a fact or do you just suspect?”

“I know for a fact,” he said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Intel,” he said.

“Ah. So you guys are briefed in the department?”

“Oh sure. It’s been going on for a long time. I’ve known it for 12 years. Soros pays for all the protests. These people, many of them, don’t even live here. They come in from other states.”

“So where do they sleep at night?”

“They put them in apartments that they rent for these purposes.”

“And you have to close off streets to accommodate them?”

He shrugged.

“Soros has this plan to overtake the police force, and replace it with his own. Some kind of one world police force that they would control, after they have dismantled the police.”

My jaw dropped, literally. “I beg your pardon?”

“Yeah, it’s deep. Nobody understands what is behind all this.”

I clasped the rare butterfly of revelation he had just given me and placed it in an imaginary safe box, to take home and examine later.

“So they want to run their own police state, and yet they are calling Trump a fascist?”

“That’s about it, yeah.”

“Wow.”

“It was the same with Occupy Wall Street. All those people were paid to be there.”

“What about Black Lives Matter?”

“That was a mixture of genuine street rage, which Soros took advantage of and put a lot of money into, to expand it. All the protests are funded by Soros. These people are professional protestors.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood.”

“To put it bluntly, I fancied myself as some kind of god, or economic reformer like Keynes, or even better, a scientist, like Einstein.”

 

George Soros, Underwriting Democracy

 

 

“Can I ask you a question?” I said to the officer. “Isn’t it illegal to fund street protests that force American taxpayers to pay for extra police forces, block off streets, and all this?”

“You’d think so,” he said, turning to let somebody through the barricade.

“My friends on Facebook, my liberal friends, have been mocking me for thinking Soros funds these protests,” I said. “Is there any earthly chance you could go on the record, at a future time, if we set careful ground rules?”

“Sorry, I can’t.”

I deliberately did not look at his name. I apologize for not being able to give you an ID but I can swear on my life this conversation happened, just like this.

“Is Mr. Trump in the building?” I asked.

“Yes.”

An elderly couple passed by, heading east. The woman wore a fur jacket and pearls. “How long will this go on?” She asked the officer.

“Until Soros’s money runs out,” I said. “Could be a while.” They laughed.

A gay couple approached, arm in arm, and waited to cross west. “Why is the street closed off?” one of them asked. “Protests,” said the officer. They looked toward the crowd, and one of them turned back and said, to the officer, “Can you even believe this is our President elect?”

Why would you say that to a New York cop? I wondered? It’s a loaded question. Rigged, if you will. Perfect for like, a wine bar at Moma.  I bet there are many other things that bother an NYPD officer a lot more. People never pay attention to who they’re talking to. Have you noticed that? They think every human shares their ideology, and they speak from that assumption. No individuation. You have to master little facial movements that convince people you are part of Uni-Thought, so they go away, satisfied that umbrage has been properly exchanged.

“That thing the man just said,” I said to the officer, “that was all based on him thinking he was witnessing one thing, but in fact, he was witnessing something else. They thought they were seeing the raw emotions of the nation’s youth, and Trump was the sole cause. But it’s staged, paid protest. Theater. Still, Donald Trump has to be seen as somebody who rouses this much disgust, when in reality, if there was no money going around, it would be a fraction of this size.”

He nodded, and rolled his eyes. He was seasoned.

I made a mental note: “Potemkin Village.”

“Nothing is what it seems, is it? I said.

“No it isn’t,” he said.

 

Suddenly sirens started wailing and the corner of 57th and 5th filled with cars moving so fast they seemed to be flying, red and blue lights flooding the intersection, as a megaphone voice boomed forth menacingly: “Get out of the street! Get out of the street!”

“There’s some kind of escort coming through,” the officer said.  I retreated a few steps, and watched. Several police vans flew past, along with a large black van, with men putting their heads out the windows, checking all directions.

“Who could this be?” I wondered.

You will never believe “who” it was.

A massive flatbed truck reached the intersection and turned down 5th.

“Oh it’s the tree,” the officer said.

The tree?” I said.

“Yep.”

Sure enough. On the flatbed was a gigantic fir tree, covered in a white cloth, that said in huge black letters: “Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree.”

I felt star struck. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I reached for my iphone but it had died in the cold, so I couldn’t take a picture.

The officer took a few pictures.

Suddenly, I felt sad. In fact, grief stricken. The mighty tree looked like a hostage, captured and felled. It was so big, so powerful, yet it looked so tragic lying on its side like that. I was glad I didn’t have a photo.

I’d been thinking on the subway coming down that in these queasy days since the election, something has tangibly changed in American life. I returned, November 7, from a tiny island off the east coast of Sweden, where I had decided to relocate (not because of Trump.)  As election day approached, with no non-Orwellian reporting in the Swedish press, I rather lunged back here, realizing this was history in the making, one way or the other—the ultimate clash of values.  The classical world vs. the new world order.

What do I mean by “classical?” Well, remember the world before the unseen hand of George Soros, before the angry, never sated progressive PC dragon armies, were everywhere?  When protesters carried home made signs and didn’t looked like  MK-ultra mind controlled zombies? Remember laughter? Christmas parties? Jesus, even the Rockefeller Christmas Tree looked to me now like a hostage of some angry army or other. Everything now, I thought, is shame and anger. This is the end stage of the plague that is Political Correctness: People can do nothing, except one thing, the Uni-Activity, which is traffic in shame, blame, identity rage, affront. Social media is the great shame forest—the opposite of the enchanted forest. There can be no joy, no love, no fidelity. Only political hygiene, and the never ending shame games. We all are expected to walk around simultaneously accusatory and ashamed, shoveling this shrapnel of disdain back and forth, in a state of political hysteria that once was the modus operandi of extremists and fanatics. Indeed, mental patients. If you try to temper anything, you get a strong sense they’re coming for you next. But their world, even if they do finally conquer us all, is all misery. Misery is the language, the pollen, the cause and the effect.

They’ve killed all life, was my cheerful thought, standing on the platform at 103rd st waiting for the 1 train, looking at people in porridge colored winter coats, shuffling onto the train.

We know one thing: We must now (if we intend to be taken as “people,”) be miserable about Donald Trump—not only here but around the world.

When I left Sweden, there was a terror scare in the tunnels, so I got delayed to the airport and missed my flight. The woman at the re-booking desk at Arlanda airport, tapping away to see if they could re-book me the same day, shook her head, like they always do, to discourage hope.

I leaned into the counter and said: “I need to get home in time to vote,” and she looked up.

“Oh! Yes! Heavens! Yes you do! We are all depending on it!” She tapped away with renewed zeal, never acknowledging that she did not know who I would vote for. It was way deeper than a given. As she tapped, she commented: “We all, here in Sweden, you know, we thought Trump was a joke. We thought it was a joke.”

 

 

After finding no flight, and charging me $250 to fly to London that night and home the next day, she said: “Well, do hurry home and vote. Fingers crossed.”

Now another woman next to her chimed in. How dangerous Trump would be. I had three hours to kill so I put my bag down and said. “Here’s the thing. The NYPD seized computers from Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Hillary’s closest aide, last week. Then the head of the FBI re-opened the investigation into the potential criminal conduct of Hillary Clinton. There are concerns about national security, as well as some things we simply are not privy to. So it’s complicated, for Americans. They found something on those computers, we don’t know what. That’s all I’m saying.”

They looked confused, and quoted a Facebook meme, listing Trump’s sins and on the Hillary side of the equation, only one thing: “Emails.”

When there was still some faint hope of getting on a flight that night, I let them assume, hoping it would work in my favor. But now they had pissed me off with their Swedish condescension about uncouth Americans. I felt kind of violated. Why should I have swept into this, when all I was doing was missing my flight and minding my business? When my mother flew for Pan American in the 1960s they respected passenger’s boundaries. They weren’t even permitted to acknowledge previous cocktails by using the word “another” when coming through with the drinks cart.

Remember when people were nice? Charming?

Now we’ve been plunged into some kind of Blade Runner world, Or A Clockwork Orange, where everything is broken, cold, dripping, and everybody is angry all the time. Violence and identity rage bristling in all things.

At Heathrow, the man who stamped my passport also encouraged me to hurry home and vote for Hillary. But he was at least a personality. “Look, I doubt they’ll find evidence she shoved a cricket bat up somebody’s arse,” he said. “And Trump is terrible. He’s a misogynist, racist, xenophobe…” People in the line were glowering, so I thanked him for the conversation, and moved on. He said he also voted against Brexit, which he called a “disaster.” Well, British people will always be funny, no matter what. At any rate, how am I expected to know? I don’t know. Neither do you. Neither do any of us!

[line]

Before I said goodnight to the police officer, my Deep Throat, I asked him one last thing: “Do you know what the NYPD found on Weiner’s computers?”

“No,” he said.

And I thought, “Good. I have enough problems.”

I thanked him.

[line]

 

I made my way around the block, and encountered some protesters—young girls, with signs. I asked if I could ask them some questions and they said yes but then they refused to speak to me, and I wound up standing there talking to myself. “Can I just ask you what brought you out here? Such a cold night. What is your goal?”

No reply.

They turned away from me and brandished their signs toward traffic, with a kind of militant posture, like statues.

“Ok well, nice to meet you, and good luck,” I said. I was approached by a young Brazilian reporter in a trench coat, extremely friendly. She said in Brazil they are “…kind of rooting for Hillary.”

 

She also said they have mandatory voting in Brazil. If you don’t vote you pay a fine.

I asked what she thought about the protests and she said, “Well, in Brazil we all like very much to protest.”

I didn’t feel in the mood to tell her about the paid angle.

I bet Brazilians would find that to be a serious hoot.

Get paid to be angry in the street? Is it like sex? Like once money enters into it, everything changes? Do protesters who get paid tell people they are paid? Do they hide it?

I would not find much material in this crowd, and besides, I was freezing. Word is there would be 10,000 protesters, the next night. Another officer told me that. How many are paid? Are the unpaid, organic ones going to cotton on and expect Soros to pay them too?

 

Fascinating.

 

I walked toward the subway, depressed. I tried to remember that I had a scoop, even if it was still a totalitarian truth-hating society, where they’ve convinced everybody that investigating stuff is like being a terrorist who hates women. I did have a scoop. I had an NYPD police officer confirm (“intel”) that protesters are paid by Soros, and have been for at least the last 12 years, in his experience. What I couldn’t figure out is why New York tolerates this. Then, I went home and Googled Soros. I found a comprehensive list of his donations. It’s called “A Guide To The Political Left,” and can be found at www.DiscoverTheNetworks.org. [link] Soros funded, of course, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but also, Bill de Blasio’s. [See sidebar “Soros Funding, Some Details.”]

 

As I waited for the subway, an MTA worker with false eyelashes dipped a big brush in a bucket and scrubbed the walls. The ammonia vapors cleared my mind.  We have to make peace with our new Soros funded, thought-controlled fish tank, I thought, because we all live in it, and we can’t get out. He has more money than God and he has no love whatsoever for a non-engineered, natural world, where the chips fall as they may. Imagine being able to use your money to “influence” everything the players say, think, do. Like a megalomaniac progressive-left playwright, with no talent. The play never ends. Nobody ever learns anything. Nobody ever cries. Love is of no interest. Everything is offensive. Nobody is ever understood, or forgiven. All quotes are always taken way out of context. Crime is not crime. Everything is flattened, numb, post-human.

 

And even the Rockefeller Christmas tree needs a police escort.

 

 

—Celia Farber

 

(Note: The first half of this article has been published in a Swedish periodical, www.Newsvoice.se, in Swedish. It was previously “killed” by a NY periodical after repeated attempts on my part to get NYPD to offer a single officer to go on record by name regarding Soros funding protesters came up dry.

I am not asserting here that “all” or even “most” protesters are paid by Soros and/or anybody else. I am only asserting what is in the text.

Celia Farber)

Human Rights Report: Castro Regime Sold Victims’ Blood To Vietcong Prior To Executions

Posted on November 27, 2016

“On May 27, [1966,] 166 Cubans — civilians and members of the military — were executed and submitted to medical procedures of blood extraction of an average of seven pints per person. This blood is sold to Communist Vietnam at a rate of $50 per pint with the dual purpose of obtaining hard currency and contributing to the Vietcong Communist aggression.

“A pint of blood is equivalent to half a liter. Extracting this amount of blood from a person sentenced to death produces cerebral anemia and a state of unconsciousness and paralysis. Once the blood is extracted, the person is taken by two militiamen on a stretcher to the location where the execution takes place.”

— InterAmerican Human Rights Commission, April 7, 1967

 

Article in WSJ, 2005, by Mary Anastasia O’Grady

[Ed: I guess they were better capitalists than we ever gave them credit for.]

Listening To You: Reinaldo Arenas

Posted on November 26, 2016
“But regardless, if someone is a true writer—not an opportunist who wants to be in favor with the government of the day—that person is always going to be for freedom. Because the simple truth is that without freedom, the writer cannot exist. And the writer who is for freedom is, by definition, not for any totalitarian system. So the duty of the writer is to write well and champion freedom.”
“I do not want to convey to you a message of defeat but of continued struggle and of hope. Cuba will be free. I already am.”

—Reinaldo Arenas

July 16, 1943 – December 7, 1990

 

Is there such a thing as a Cuban novel?

I wouldn’t go so far as to categorically state that a Cuban novel exists. If we compare the Cuban novelistic tradition with the French or English or North American ones, there hasn’t been an accumulation of really impressive works. But Cuba is a surprising and mysterious case, because such a small island that’s rather unfortunate in every way has, in each generation, produced very good poets, novelists, and short-story writers. There’s been an important Cuban literary tradition that, in spite of—or maybe because of—so many hardships, has shown an unusual continuity. This has been demonstrated over two hundred years, in a country where almost nobody reads. With the exception of the police, who read your manuscripts.

 

Since you’ve been here, have you noticed a difference in perspective? What’s the perception of life compared with in Cuba?

 

It’s completely different in that here, you don’t feel the weight of a flagrant and inescapable evil. I’m much more relaxed in this sense; I can work more peacefully and my imagination can roam more freely. On the other hand, the experience of having lived in Cuba is also very important, because it’s given me an understanding of history that people who haven’t suffered like that lack. You can no longer see anything with innocent eyes. You know that behind every political system there’s a series of political interests that are what shape you, and people more or less work in agreement with these interests or against them. Knowing this has given me a critical ability that I’ll always be able to use.

 

What do you think about poetry?

Poetry is part of everything. You can’t have a really good work if it’s not touched by poetry. Poetry manifests itself in millions of ways: as rhythm, metaphor, mood. Sometimes it’s a type of emotional outpouring or necessity that’s not expressed through characters but through feelings. To me, poetry is the tragic sense of man. It’s a way of seeing things in the most complete way, the most absolute, and, to a certain extent, the most perfect. Where there’s no poetry, there’s no beauty, and without beauty no kind of artistic work can exist.

 

When you think about what you love or what you hate, what would that be?

In what, literature?

No, in general, in life.

What I love most is life itself. I’m very afraid of death. Nevertheless, it seems to me that it’s a solution. It’s the only thing that gives meaning to life! (Laughter.) I really like people in general. People, the mystery of the human being, and the sea above all. The sea is a mystery.

What I don’t like is … well, just imagine. There are so many things not to like. Stupidity, which is something terrible, and the militarization of the world. Dogma. When someone talks to me about some dogma, I can no longer talk with that person. Dogma can be religious as well as political; it’s the same. You can’t engage in any dialogue because the person is already wielding an absolute truth. It’s like pounding on a rock—there’s no way in. I think that, in the end, what I hate most in the world is fanaticism.

Does a writer have a duty to himself and to society?

The writer has a fundamental responsibility to write well or to write the best he can, because if he doesn’t he’s not a writer. And when a writer writes, he’s always referring to a social and historical context. It’s impossible for Argentinian writers not to write as Argentinians, because to be Argentinian is a circumstance of fate, like it is to be Cuban. When you analyze the bourgeois writer’s novel, you see the shortcomings of bourgeois society. Even when you try to write a fantasy story, in some way that fantasy is going to be connected to a reality. But regardless, if someone is a true writer—not an opportunist who wants to be in favor with the government of the day—that person is always going to be for freedom. Because the simple truth is that without freedom, the writer cannot exist. And the writer who is for freedom is, by definition, not for any totalitarian system. So the duty of the writer is to write well and champion freedom. And he champions freedom because he has an obligation—what better obligation than this?

Complete interview In The New Yorker here.

 

 

What They Said: Hillary Clinton

Posted on November 26, 2016

 

 

“Anyone not willing to accept the results of an election is a danger to democracy.”

 

–Hillary Clinton

How To Make A Miracle When You Think You Have Given Up

Posted on November 24, 2016

 

[Note: This is a Facebook post by renowned activist and author  Lisa Joyce Goes, who co-founded Thinking Mom’s Revolution.]

 

I will be off FB for the holiday weekend. Before I go I have a hard uncomfortable message to deliver.
I know it is hard watching me talk about recovery and restoration when you are in the thick of it and your kid is abusing you and herself or himself and life seems dire and miserable. I hear from many of you. Probably more now, than I did back when we identified the source of Noah’s brain damage back in 2008.

I also know what I have been saying as of late does not mesh with many of you. I know that when you tell me you need help and you run down the litany of verifiable proven medical issues your child suffers and I respond with “tell a different story, stop identifying with this one, give it over to God and start healing your own heart first” you want to throat punch me with a jackhammer.

There is so much unsettled, so much injustice and pain and financial anguish and suffering and it is in the present. NOW. And you flip me the imaginary bird in your mind.

I could have a recovered kid if I had “XYZ” but I don’t have “XYZ” and that is life and I am a realist and this is how it is.
It’s not.

Stop being afraid to be crazy. You already crossed over into that camp the day you read the science that proved your child was vaccine injured and began to pursue healing.

We are all part of a much greater political, societal, financial, spiritual awakening. Our children’s suffering is not in vain. There is so very much more to it, and my friends and I can barely keep up with all the folks wanting information and help.

But we are not the magic bullet either. Oils are not the magic bullet. Clean food is not the magic bullet.
YOUR choosing what is and committing to it with your whole heart and pursuing it in unshakeable faith IS.

I remember lying on the floor in Noah’s room with a bloody nose that came from a spat about food. That food was thrown all over my clothes, the wrist of my sopping wet hoodie was congealing to the shag of his carpeting. I began uttering sounds beyond human sobs–while he laughed hysterically dancing around me, biting himself. I remember thinking it would just be the very very best thing if I had a heart attack on the spot–a really really good one–none of that revivable pansy ass heart attack sh*t–I mean a good solid dead on the spot heart attack.

And, God completely abandoned me then. Just would not let me die. Just left my puffy, bloodied, miserable body there on the ground with my dancing abusive child. My husband in another country. My neurotypical kids hiding under the kitchen table doing their homework.

And then the still small whisper.

It always comes in that moment of absolute despair.

No, there were no angels and trumpets and Noah did not glow with healing light.

“Get up and call Jane.”
“Go read that email Helen sent you. There is something to that.”
“Rest now, there will be time for this in the morning.”
“Eat the arugula and the kale and leave the spinach this time.”
“Give him two doses of the ferments instead of three.”
“Rub frankincense on his big toe.”
“Go play classical music.”
“Get a dog.”

Miracles are sometimes gentle soft promptings. Miracles are most often soft gentle promptings. Miracles…9 times out of 10 are soft gentle promptings.

Miracles are available to EVERYONE. Do not second guess yourself.
One miracle builds upon another. And another and another. And all of a sudden the miracle you have before you is described as “great luck” or “a coincidence.”
Do you want a miracle? IF you do–DEFINE IT CLEARLY. Allow yourself to go there.
OR…do you want to be heard and acknowledged more than you want to be healed because you have been doing this so damn long?
If it is the latter, I am begging you to stop telling the story that is bringing you more of your story. Because it can get so big it will consume you. Trust me.
While I am not a fan of pop-psychology, there is something to Dr. Phil’s “fake it til you make it”.
A year ago, still in the thick of it, Noah was losing his mind on our commute to his school. Traffic was bad, I turned the wrong way, and he was screaming for me to stop the car and turn it around so he could go look at ceiling fans in a restaurant we passed.
I looked him in the eye, and smiled and said, “buddy. You don’t do this anymore. Now hold my hand and let’s say a prayer.”
He looked at me like I was out of my f*(king mind.
And extended his hand…
and I took it. And we prayed. Yes, I have heard the talk.
“You know, I saw them out the other day. He’s better…but…he’s not you know…like normal.”
This is the reasoning of man. Not GOD.
He is not normal. He is exceptional. Do we look at babies fresh out of the womb and say, “Well…I mean…he can’t…you know–walk yet. I don’t think he’s going to make it.” Do we look at people who’ve just had a trauma had have stitches and say, “oh that skin will never come back together.” Growth and recovery take time.
Get quiet in the midst of the pain. Listen to the promptings. Follow your heart. Reason and science are immensely compatible and familiar with the Divine. All connected. All one <3
Happy Gratitude Day
Much love and respect, lj

 

[Lisa Joyce Goes, via Facebook]

Radical Love Poem

Posted on November 24, 2016

 

Love

 

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills—
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn’t always understand.

 

–Czeslaw Milosz

Why People Don’t ‘Get’ Czeslaw Milosz

Posted on November 24, 2016

 

 

‘It took place at an evening poetry discussion at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. It was a meeting devoted to [Miłosz’s] Second Space, which had recently appeared in English. All, and I mean all, of the Americans there were convinced that Miłosz was most likely a postmodern spiritual seeker, probably much like them, possibly fascinated by archetypes, certainly spiritual, and definitely not religious. Had Miłosz been there he might have recycled the words he hurled at Kisiel in A Year of the Hunter, “[They don’t] take into account a particular, quite fundamental fact: all my intellectual impulses are religious and in that sense my poetry is religious.” No such luck. Yet, unbeknownst to me, I had an ally who was in on the joke Miłosz was playing, in absentia, upon this poor but sincere American audience. This stranger/ally clearly had an Eastern European accent and he kept taking up my cause. He kept waving the flag of Miłosz as a homo religiosus and, anathema sit, a practicing Catholic! We quoted poems from Second Space, made reference to his other work, and cited countless details of his biography. All to no avail. I’m convinced the Americans thought we were trying to play an inverse Polack joke on them.’

 

Artur Sebastian Rosman,

 

Quoted in The Book Haven: Cynthia Haven’s Blog For The Written Word

Another Stormy, Intemperate Post On Trump, Homophobia, And Racism

Posted on November 22, 2016

 

What They Said: James Baldwin

Posted on November 20, 2016

 

 

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

 

 

 

― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Come In

Posted on November 19, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I came to the edge of the woods,

Thrush music — hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush’s breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went —
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn’t been.

 

–Robert Frost

What They Said: Lynn Margulis

Posted on November 18, 2016


“The Gaia [theory] is not, as many claim, that ‘the Earth is a single organism.’ Yet the Earth, in the biological sense, has a body sustained by complex physiological processes. Life is a planetary-level phenomenon and Earth’s surface has been alive for at least 3,000 million years. To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable – the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self-inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth or heal our sick planet is evidence of our immense capacity for self-delusion. Rather, we need to protect us from ourselves …. We need honesty. We need to be freed from our species-specific arrogance. No evidence exists that we are “chosen”, the unique species for which all the others were made. Nor are we the most important one because we are so numerous, powerful, and dangerous. Our tenacious illusion of special dispensation belies our true status as upright mammalian weeds…. Less a single live entity than a huge set of interacting ecosystems, the Earth as Gaian regulatory physiology transcends all individual organisms. Humans are not the center of life, nor is any other single species. Humans are not even central to life. We are a recent, rapidly growing part of a single huge ecosystem at Earth’s surface.”
— Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (1998)

 

Posted on Facebook by Lynn’s eldest son, Dorion Sagan, who wrote this piece for The Truth Barrier this year.

What They Said: C. G. Jung

Posted on November 18, 2016

 

 

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”

What They Said: Jon Stewart

Posted on November 17, 2016

 

“I thought Donald Trump disqualified himself at numerous points. But there is now this idea that anyone who voted for him has to be defined by the worst of his rhetoric. There are guys in my neighborhood who I love, I respect, that I think have incredible qualities – that are not afraid of Mexicans and not afraid of Muslims and not afraid of blacks. They’re afraid of their insurance premiums.”

“In the liberal community, you hate this idea of creating people as a monolith,” Stewart continued. “Don’t look at Muslims as a monolith. They are individuals and it would be ignorance. But everybody who voted for Trump is a monolith – is a racist. That hypocrisy is also real in our country. And so that is the fight that we wage against ourselves and against each other because America is not natural. Natural is tribal. We’re fighting against thousands of years of human behavior and history to create something that no one ever [has]. That is what is exceptional about America. This ain’t easy and that’s an incredible thing.”

Jon Stewart

 

The Charlie Rose Show

Origins Of Left Wing Political Correctness Explained By Ex KGB Agent

Posted on November 11, 2016

Please watch this and tell us what you see. It’s not necessary to discuss what you think of InfoWars, but rather, this footage, of American “normal,” today.

I am literally hoarse from typing forth my horror on Facebook, and my brain hurts from all the “friends” who think it is I who have gone off the deep end.

I, in turn, welcome their repudiation of me, because I no longer want any communist apologia touching me or breathing on me.

America has been hijacked by armies, armies, upon armies, of brainwashed, militant PC youth, looking for heads to bash, like skinheads used to do in my youth, when punk was the language and violence bristled at the edges.

PC was never benign, never “understandable.” It was always part of a decades old plot from the former KGB to sow the seeds of communist destruction in the US, where it would flower and bloom, long after the Soviet Union fell.

Do I really believe that?

Yes.

More or less, I do.

 

 

 

 

This Is War: Psychotic Fascist Pods Vs. Americans Who Respect Democracy

Posted on November 11, 2016

 

This Is One Of The Saddest Videos I Have Ever Seen

Posted on November 10, 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoZ_utS0LuA

Oh Thank God, Gay Humor Survived The Rainbow Tyranny

Posted on November 5, 2016

 

Anonymous: Documents Emerging In Coming Days Demonstrating “…The Largest Coverup In American History.”

Posted on November 5, 2016

I can’t verify or properly weigh the content of this message–but I also don’t consider myself like a parent that has to pre-chew her child’s food.

We’re all in this crazy stew together, and nobody should take on airs of being too proud about what they just can’t bring themselves to “believe.”  Many things “on the internet” are crap, but many are real. Even “crap,” is in some kind of symbiotic relationship to the always emerging vortex of all that has ever been.

 

 

It’s safe to say things have never been more flat-out psychedelic in the days leading up to a US election. If I don’t miss the boat to the mainland which leaves punishingly early tomorrow, I will be back in the States in time to cover the coming days that may just be wild enough that MSM will cover something other than their own feelings about “conspiracy theories on the internet.” But that remains to be seen.

All help is needed by all good people, to stay awake, read, decipher, try to  exercise judgement, try to lift out new clues, weed out disinformation, and continue this most urgent battle against apocalyptic darkness in the United States.

The governing cliche has always been “follow the money.” Now, sadly, it’s “follow the pedophilia clues.”

At least we have clarity: Evil is in a free-fall. Light will kill it, and as luck would have it, it’s almost dawn.

 

–Celia Farber,

Nov. 4, 2016

Runmarö

 

 

NYPD Police Chief: “What’s In The Emails Is Staggering, And As A Father, It Turned My Stomach.”

Posted on November 5, 2016

 

“What’s in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach,” the NYPD Chief said. “There is not going to be any Houdini-like escape from what we found. We have copies of everything. We will ship them to Wikileaks or I will personally hold my own press conference if it comes to that.”

 

My take on this is that it is very real. If it were not, it would be “very real libel,” and the NYPD would be sued to powder.

I can’t fathom why the Clinton camp is not screaming bloody murder, if this is not true.

What do you think?

Julian Assange: “This Is The Most Significant Email In The Whole Collection”

Posted on November 5, 2016

 

 

“There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves.

But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and Qatar that have been funding ISIS.”

Links to interview here.

Link to quoted email here.

Exclusive Interview With Julian Assange By John Pilger

Posted on November 5, 2016

 

 

John Pilger:

Do you take yourself a view of the US election? Do you have a preference for Clinton or Trump?

Julian Assange:

Donald Trump – what does he represent in the American mind and in the European mind? He represents American “white trash,” deplorable and irredeemable. Basically, the same thing. It means, from a… establishment or educated, cosmopolitan, urbane perspective, these people are, you know, like the rednecks, and you can’t… like, they are just… you can never deal with them. And because he so clearly – through his words and actions and the type of people that turns up at his rallies – represents the people who are not the upper-middle-class-educated, there is a fear of seeming to be associated in any way with that, a social fear that lowers the class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting in any way Trump, including criticizing Clinton. And if you look at how the middle class gains its economic and social power, it makes absolute sense.

 

See the interview here, courtesy if Dartmouth Films, syndicated by (among others) RT.

Full transcript here.

What They Said: Alex Jones

Posted on November 4, 2016

“The hashtag #SpiritCooking trended for hours on Twitter Friday following the email chain’s discovery. Clinton-supporters in the media attempted to outright deny or downplay Podesta’s extracurricular activities, claiming such behavior is mundane.

The fact that those close to Clinton are engaged in such disturbing rituals should cause concern to any American who doesn’t view carving Pentagram’s into their flesh as “normal.”

What They Said: Kurt Vonnegut

Posted on November 3, 2016
Drawing By Hans Christian Andersen
“There is a tragic flaw in our Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.”

A Middle Of The Night Facebook Post About Offense Taken Or Not Taken

Posted on November 2, 2016

 

5:20 am

My feeling is, Political Correctness is a seemingly never ending assault of dirty glass shards thrown at people, and the whole thing is rigged from the get go, so that you can never get them all out. But you do try.

Well, I do.

I try to be less UN PC.  The prayer is, more or less: “God, help me be indignant the way I would be if I were good, instead of bad.”

Indignation is the building material to identity–it is how and what with, you put yourself together. “Take offense, citizen!”

Donald Trump is like Lego For The People Building Themselves As Good. By hating him.  All he has to do is speak.

PC is such a clarifying medium.

TWO types of people exist. Those who do not detest PC, think it’s “important,” and those who do, think it’s Satan’s work; I am firmly the latter.

What I hate most about PC is the willful destruction of reality. The craze for hygiene of the mind and word. The destruction of the scientific method, of course. Of journalism, of course. And the destruction of the intuitive, erotic order between men and women.

Still, in recent years, I fond myself always trying to become a bit more PC so I could recover from all the brain injuries caused by not being PC in the golden age of PC tyranny.  They really beat you up, especially if you are correct. (Not politically, but actually.) I think those days are over, and the playing field is becoming more leveled.

Last night a mesmerizing interview with “dangerous faggot” as he calls himself, Milo Yiannopoulos, made me laugh so much while making dinner that by the time Ake came home I was in agreement that men have higher IQs, not when measured en masse but in the “Mozart” sense.
Yiannopoulos calls Trump “Daddy.”

I think he’s hilarious. He was born in Greece and dyes his hair platinum because he knows he looks better with dark hair. He said God made him a homosexual so he could attack feminism. He took polls of people asking of they preferred feminism or cancer, and cancer won. Even by survivors.

 

 

So, I live with a man.

You should see the way he just BUILDS things around here. He sees an empty space and next thing you know it’s an outdoor deck, or a closet. I could never do what he does. I want to know what it is that makes me not that, but something else. See how I can’t even type the W word?

Is it that I light welcome home candles in the window when I know he is walking home from the ferry, around 6:40 pm?

Listening to the interview (between two conservative gay comedians, one of then Canadian!) I became aware of all these built in defenses about what I “am,” and felt free as a dolphin suddenly embracing the idea of how my brain is not male, let’s just say. I keep wanting to call myself “stupid,” because that would be the true liberation from the whole nightmare. The PC feminist nightmare in which I am expected to demand being validated by society yet can’t ever be.

(The whole deal is off, of course, if you provoke Pharma-Dragon.)

If I said I just want to be WHATEVER God made me to be, you’d say I’d lost my mind out here in the archipelago. Ah! what a great phrase. Can you imagine women wanting to “lose” their minds rather than partake in this grisly never ending battle about intelligence? I would say, instead: “I’m in a reverie. You’d never interrupt a woman in a reverie would you?”

I love to cook. Been cooking since I was 11. I have even begun to love to clean, once I get started.

Milo said it was not at all difficult to be a homosexual, (“I don’t think I’ve ever met a homophobe…”) He said it was WAY harder to come out as a conservative, but coming out as a Trekkie….THAT took guts.

Over candlelit dinner last night, I explained to Ake about the rise of the uber-mensch cult, in the US, around the time of Steve Jobs. Guys like him.  How it all used to horrify me, and I felt they were trying to build a woman free world, like they speak of a disease free world, all these glassy eyed young philanthropic billionaires.

“A world without women?” Ake said.

Though it was dark I could see he had true pain on his face.

“That would be no world at all.”

–Celia Farber,

Runmaro, Nov 2, 2016

What They Said: Michael Moore

Posted on October 27, 2016

Michael Moore is not a Donald Trump supporter, but he is a story teller  and journalist, with powerful talent for hitting heart strings. I just watched this this morning, here in Sweden, and found it breathtaking.

Whoever you may vote for on November 8th, at least try not to partake in the classist deformation of what why Trump’s supporters love him.  Please don’t do the cheap thing so many are doing, hold your nose and run away screaming, calling Trump voters racist, bigots and rubes. That is a disgrace to your fellow Americans and THEIR story, which may or may not be yours.

I think a Clinton supporter and film maker who made an anti-trump film., explaining WHY those who love Trump love him, is a fascinating media gem.

You must know by now how I detest “consistency.”

 

 

Thank You Hungary, Köszönöm

Posted on October 23, 2016

It was 60 years ago today that the Hungarian Revolution broke out on the streets of Budapest, ending in a massacre 12 days later when Soviet tanks came in and crushed it, killing some 2,500 Hungarians.

We should all say Thank You Hungary, for the courage you showed, for striking the first blow for freedom against Soviet repression. No freedom fight is ever really lost, wasted, or futile.

We must remember that.

Forty minutes ago I rode an escalator down a glittering shopping mall in Tallin Estonia, and laid eyes on the sign inviting us shoppers into the well lit, well stocked grocery store. It said: “Tere Tulemast!” (Welcome!)

All of a sudden my eyes filled with tears.

I’m in Estonia and that’s the supermarket.

I saw it as one of the beads on the Freedom Rosary, begun by the Hungarians, Oct 23, 1956.

Köszönöm

 

Below:

 

My father’s address to the Hungarian people, requested by the Hungarian Consulate, as he was involved at the time with rescue operations on the Austrian border, and has done countless radio interviews with Bela Kigali and other figures. They invited him to be in Budapest this weekend to partake in the celebrations, and I can’t find him, but I’m trying not to worry.

 

 

“Everyone Has To Watch This”– Undercover Video Exposes DNC Trains And Hires Professional “Grassroots” Agitators

Posted on October 18, 2016

Text: Ginger Taylor

“Ok… Everyone has to wach this. Undercover video out today.
This is just so horrifing.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC hire groups to cause trouble outside Trump rallies in front of the media, and be “consultants” to run between the Super PACs and the campaign because they are not legally allowed to talk to each other. One of the guys that does this calls himself and his peers a “Pony Express” between the entities.
They actually have “agitator training” in NYC, DC, LV, Colorado, Minneapolis, etc with a script that they use to try to get people to punch them at Trump and Pence appearances. They are running the “grassroots protests” and brag about the Chicago Trump event that they turned violent and got shut down. They pay the medical bills and legal bills of any “kid” who gets hurt or arrested.
They also brag that they planted many people in the front and back of the Iowa Walker event where he grabbed a sign after having it shoved in his face. That was their guy. There were several there to instigate problems.
When they need someone to do something dramatic, they call the AFL-CIO who will get someone to do what they want.
They paid an elderly woman wearing an oxygen mask to go to an event, try to pick a fight with another elderly man, and then fall to the ground and charge him with assault.
THEY PAY MENTALLY ILL PEOPLE TO DO “CRAZY STUFF.”
Remember that the DNC and Hillary Campaigns are their clients.
Undercover video of the consultants admitting to all of it and admitting that they don’t care what the law or the ethics of their acions are.
Apparently this is the first in a series of videos. So it is going to get worse.”

Ginger Taylor

Via Facebook

 

 

What They Said: Joan Baez

Posted on October 14, 2016

 

“The Nobel Prize for Literature is yet another step towards immortality for Bob Dylan. The rebellious, reclusive, unpredictable artist/composer is exactly where the Nobel Prize for Literature needs to be.
His gift with words is unsurpassable. Out of my repertoire spanning 60 years, no songs have been more moving and worthy in their depth, darkness, fury, mystery, beauty, and humor than Bob’s. None has been more of a pleasure to sing. None will come again.”

 

–Joan Baez

 

 

The Brain That Changes Itself

Posted on October 12, 2016

 

Julian Assange Video Talk, Via Berlin, Live

Posted on October 4, 2016

In honor of Wikileaks 10th Anniversary. Watch live now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7OwzD5yxUU

‘Watered-Down’ AIDS Drugs Story Hides The Clinton Foundation’s Worse Crimes Against Humanity

Posted on September 29, 2016

By Elizabeth Ely

The day the report appeared on the “watered-down drugs” that the Clinton Foundation arranged, September 20, to be exact, the meme had already been established. The soundbite, the spin, the propaganda, already lived in that space, “The Daily Caller” having leaked certain findings the night before.

 

U.S. Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn’s staff has found that the Foundation had arranged for the generic drugs to be bought from crooked foreign drug firms to distribute to poor rural populations in the Third World. These were not literally diluted drugs, mind you, but possibly contaminated, and certainly fraudulently tested ones.

To avoid grasping the full reality of the generic AIDS drugs story the report tells – the horrific damage on the ground, so carefully avoided there – we are encouraged not to speak, nor even to think, in full sentences. A soundbite will suffice to protect us from the distasteful details. “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it much.” So wrote Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness.

We begin with another soundbite, the “racket.”

The “racket” is the little neighborhood candy store with a backroom where the real, uglier business goes down. The candy store here is a front operation to “fight AIDS.” In that dark backroom, the Clinton entities were supposed to have been buying drugs for AIDS patients. Instead, they were engaging in influence peddling, pilfering funds, and filing fraudulent, unaudited tax forms. Somewhere in there is the bare fact that neither the Clinton Foundation nor any purported affiliate has a charter to fight AIDS or anything else. (Also reported HERE and HERE.)

 

These stories were already public, and investigators would of course have known about them. What they never asked was whether the candy store itself – the AIDS mission – was legit. In other words, nobody imagined that dumping drugs of any kind, clean or dirty, on poor, rural populations, with scarcely any medical follow-up in evidence, might be a bad idea and certainly employing (Conrad again) “unsound method.”

 

The emotional blackmail of AIDS propaganda creates this blind spot. According to a story that’s been around so long that no one can refute it, AIDS missions are always and everywhere a good thing. Cheap drugs? Even better.

 

Blackburn herself grasped some of the implications. “You think about the emotional state of health care workers as they are dealing with these individuals and the emotional state of the patients,” she wrote. “To me it’s disturbing and very sad.”

 

Imagine how these workers, if they existed, would feel if they suspected their patients might not need AIDS drugs in the first place. The Clinton Foundation and its allies depend on nobody connecting the dots between the Bangui definition, used in “resource-poor settings” to diagnose AIDS without an “HIV test,” with these media-hyped explosions of supposed HIV cases.

 

Nobody envisions that the Foundation has been inventing fake AIDS epidemics around the world. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton implied it himself when The Atlantic in October 2007 found him creating a “supply” if foreign governments created a “demand.” Without reaching that sordid conclusion, the report did, however, quote Elton John in his 2012 book Love Is the Cure: “If we can get you cheap AIDS drugs, will you commit to buying a lot of them? Then they went to drug companies and made the reverse pitch. . . .”

 

Clinton may have eyed these future business opportunities many years ago. To Blackburn and her investigators, the problem isn’t merely the fact that he excepted generic AIDS drugs from the strict patent protections that he created for all drugs. The report notes that he exempted intellectual property rights for AIDS drugs in Sub-Saharan Africa. His administration also designated foreign AIDS epidemics as a danger to U.S. national security.

The report doesn’t say that both actions came shortly after then-South African President Thabo Mbeki announced he was including scientific dissenters on his Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel for the 2000 International AIDS Conference in Durban. Clinton’s designation in effect made criminals of those who accepted Mbeki’s invitation, as well as South Africans in support, for questioning the usefulness of the drugs for which he would later try to broker sales.

But the real problem, to the Blackburn staff, is those damned “watered-down” generics. Let’s get real that there is nothing “watered down” about these drugs. The generics companies put garbage in those capsules, and you should see how toxic the real drugs are. You would definitely want a generic version of something as toxic as nevirapine, which literally burns the skin off bodies, to be diluted.

 

The authors also acknowledge that it wasn’t only the dirty generics per se but the fact that they were bought from fly-by-night drug companies friendly to Clinton. The drugs are the consumer offering, and, as is quoted, “At a time when Indian products did not have much credibility in the market, the Foundation gave buyers the required confidence about the products.” The secondary play was to sell part of the company itself in a pump-and-dump on the mergers and acquisitions market.

 

For instance, Indian company Ranbaxy Laboratories “partnered” with the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) to sell its worthless AIDS drugs to USAID, the “primary administrator” of President George W. Bush’s initiative, fattening up the investment value for a selloff. Even as it was under FDA investigation for falsifying test data, Ranbaxy offloaded, according to the Congressional report, 63.4% of its assets to a somewhat clueless Japanese firm, Daiichi Sankyo.

 

Fortune had already reported this in May 2015. (Fortune cited the FDA’s approval of “Ranbaxy’s application for the first pediatric-AIDS drug for the U.S. market, Zidovudine,” even as it was investigating the company’s procedures. More commonly known as AZT, this drug had already caused ghastly side effects in adults in the late 1980s and was being replaced in the West with newer drugs, although some of these are still taken in combination with AZT. They were going after children. In the U.S.)

 

I am indebted to Australian Michael Smith for this excerpt from a speech the former prime minister of Papua New Guinea made to celebrate entering into a fraudulent “memorandum of understanding” with Clinton:

 

“Papua New Guinea is a nation of many tribes whose cultures in the past have provided a safety net for those who are orphaned, sick or aging. With the arrival of this ‘new’ virus, fear has turned families and relatives away from supporting their loved one. Children, who traditionally brought great joy to families, often find themselves being abandoned and desperately needing care and treatment.”

 

Inducing traditional societies to stigmatize and abandon their sick, children and elderly is apparently a modus operandi.

 

Not so coincidentally, Clinton friend George Soros’ exploitation of Papua New Guinea’s mineral resources has proceeded. Soros is a new major investor in Barrick Gold Corporation, a Canadian firm with a concession to mine in Papua New Guinea and a history of labor and environmental abuse there.

 

Behold “the conquest of the earth.”

 

–Elizabeth Ely

The Great Bell Chant (The End Of Suffering)

Posted on September 27, 2016

(Thank you John Carville.)

 

Do They Advocate Mandatory Vaccination In Sweden?

Posted on September 25, 2016

 

American progressives have long fetishized everything Swedish as the ideal way of the civilized world. Sweden is also probably the most safety obsessed nation in the world. Since I am half Swedish and have moved back here, I thought to look up Swedish vaccination laws. I was just curious: Do Swedes have any political movements toward eliminating parental choice and making school attendance dependent upon vaccination adherence?

Turns out: No.

Here below are two relevant passages that I pulled out and translated.

“I Sverige finns inga krav på obligatorisk vaccination, utan det är du som förälder som avgör om ditt barn ska vaccineras. Inför ditt beslut har
du säkert många frågor. Varför ska man vaccineras? Finns det risker? Är det vanligt med biverkningar? Hur går vaccineringen till? Här hittar du svaren på de vanligaste frågorna.”

Translation:

“In Sweden there is no mandatory vaccination, rather, you as a parent decide if your child should be vaccinated. Facing this decision, you undoubtedly have many questions. Why get vaccinated? Are there risks? Are side effects common? How does the process of vaccination work? Here are the answers to the most common questions.”

“När ska man inte vaccinera sitt barn?

Om barnet har en infektionssjukdom med feber och påtaglig trötthet ska man inte vaccinera. En lättare förkylning är däremot inget hinder. Om ditt barn har en långvarig sjukdom eller ett starkt nedsatt immunför- svar ska du först prata med den läkare som behandlar barnet. Det gäller också om barnet tidigare har visat sig överkänsligt för något ämne som ingår i vaccinet.”

Translation: When should you not vaccinate your child?

If the child has an infection with a fever and observable fatigue you should not vaccinate. A very light cold is not a problem on the other hand. If your child has a chronic illness or a diminished immune system, you should talk to your pediatrician. The same thing applies if your child has shown to be overly sensitive to any chemical that may be in the vaccine.”

Source: Folkhälsomyndigheten

 

 

What They Said: Clark Baker

Posted on September 22, 2016
Clark Baker, hero of HIV/AIDS wars, whose OMSJ freed 57 men and women from prosecutions and incarcerations due to HIV crimes they did not and could not commit. Details here.

“If the new documentary “Vaxxed” was made by flat-earthers, no one would imagine that NASA would pressure VFF to pan the documentary. What makes this documentary dangerous is that it deals with facts that – when widely understood – erodes confidence in a pathological industry and threatens the credibility of thousands of incompetent doctors, universities, dangerous bureaucracies, and the United States as well. The CDC wouldn’t care if Dr. Wakefield was wrong – what makes them nervous is that he’s right.”

 

–Clark Baker

CEO and Principal Investigator Office of Medical and Scientific Justice, OMSJ

 

[Please click on the link above to learn what became of OMSJ and why.]

Australian Film Festival Organizers “Personally And Professionally Threatened,” Pull Vaxxed For Fear Of Personal Safety

Posted on September 22, 2016
Text exchange between Dr. Andrew Wakefield and Dr. William Thompson,
Aug 27, 2014
“A controversial anti-vaccination documentary has been withdrawn from the Castlemaine Local and International Film Festival.
The festival committee says it faced a firestorm of abuse after announcing Vaxxed would be included in the October event, and last night issued a statement because some members felt “personally and professionally threatened’’.
“This is unacceptable,’’ the statement read. “It is with the utmost regret therefore that CLIFF is compelled, for clear reasons of personal and public safety, to withdraw the screening from the CLIFF 2016 programme,” the statement said.
Vaxxed explores allegations of a cover-up by the US Centre for Disease Control and a link between the Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine and autism.”

 

–Chris Pedler

Pedler’s article describes the by now familiar dynamics of intimidation, threats, and festival organizers having to choose between their safety and the safety of their families, and showing a sought after “controversial” documentary, which to date has not had its contents refuted by the film’s central subject: CDC Whistleblower Dr. William Thompson.

You can read Dr. Thompson’s revealing text exchange with Dr. Wakefield and his wife Carmel, published in 2014 at The Truth Barrier, here.

What They Said: Joan Shenton

Posted on September 22, 2016

“What has happened is that the gay community is suppressing anything that could make the wider community question whether or not it isn’t the gay community that is endangering its own people.”

 

–Joan Shenton

[On “London Live” addressing the second forced removal of short documentary about long term HIV positive survivors, “Positive Hell,” from a UK film festival. We reported on it here. ]

 

 

 

The Astonishing Healing Power Of The Earth

Posted on September 19, 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezsZInhnfxE

Dorion Sagan: My Mother’s Love Letters

Posted on September 13, 2016

Finding the Orange Bag:

Ghosts, Reality, and the Escape into Life

By Dorion Sagan

 

 

“It was strange because almost every letter that she had stuffed in the bag—seemingly with a frenetic need simultaneously to preserve and dispose of, to bracket to some impossible future time—was a kind of love letter.”

 

 

Lynn Margulis, Carl Sagan, 1957

In 2011, a couple of weeks before she died, Inocencio Higuera, her host in Mérida in the Yucatan noted that my mother was complaining of headaches. She waved off offers to take her to the hospital but continued to act somewhat strangely. This wasn’t just her usual workaholic focus and wide-ranging mind. It was also, I’m tempted to say in the aftermath, something ethereal. Inocencio told me that before her lecture she held everyone up looking for an adapter for her computer. All morning they helped her and waited while she looked for it. At one point she stood, Inocencio said, on a chair and looked up, straight at the ceiling.

Meanwhile I, having traveled from Toronto to Montreal, had what I am tempted in retrospect to call a premonition. I had traveled to give a talk on her work at the biggest annual international meeting of anthropologists, the American Anthropology Association, in a sub-session called Culture at Large, run by the Society for Cultural Anthropology. The name of my talk was The Human is More than Human. When I found out, after a laconic email from my brother—“Mom collapsed”—I still went on, as I know she would have wanted me to, dedicating the talk to her.

In the morning before I received the email I had what I wanted afterward to call my premonition. It was simple enough. I had brought my bathing suit and swum first thing in the morning in the sunlit pool at the top of the hotel. This was a thing she often did, swimming first thing in the morning, including at otherwise empty hotel pools. So naturally enough I thought of her.

Later on the way to the colorfully windowed Palais des congrès in Montréal I looked up from the taxi stand of the Westin on St. Antoine Ouest and saw what seemed a most surreal sight: the colorful bellies of what looked like some strange species or species of large mammals swimming. Why, pray tell, would the strange sea mammals with colorful undersides that could be seen swimming high above, be visible only from the taxi stand? It didn’t make any sense. But of course, as Freud talks about in his meditation on the ‘unheimlich,’ the “uncanny,” what seems strangest is often not what is most distant from us but rather that which is closest: those colorful undersides belonged to humans. But for my not-so-big belly, I might have been seeing myself earlier the same day.

After being apprised of my rather ridiculous yet enlightening mistake by my anthropologist girlfriend, Natasha Myers, I was reminded of the theory put forth by Sir Alistair Hardy, and popularized by Elaine Morgan in the book The Descent of Woman: that our ancestors underwent a phase of life in the water. This would explain our finlike hands, our love of beaches, our relative hairlessness among primates, our need for essential fatty acids found almost exclusively from fish, and our subcutaneous fat; my mistaking of the humans for sea creatures seemed to be an additional datum for this aquatic ape hypothesis.

“One never knows, do one?” sang Fats Waller.

 

During the Q/A period of my talk, and afterwards at lunch, I was asked about ghosts. I poo-poohed the questions; my point was to show the nonhuman world that was real, a needed counterfoil to the too narrow focus of academia in general, and anthropology in particular, on human beings.

My mother, having told many that she was likely to die like her mother of a stroke, had written a do-not-resuscitate order. Nonetheless she was rushed to the hospital and kept on a respirator. Through an arduous intervention my sister had her brought home to her bedroom. By the time I was there she was in a coma but you could hardly tell; she moved and occasionally groaned in her sleep. The women massaged and bathed her. Before the advice of her trusted doctor, to stop the saline drip and allow her to die of kidney failure was taken, people came in and out of the room, sitting vigil. My son sat despondent by her body. He and a philosopher friend both suggested that she might be conscious at some level, working snippets of conversation into a kind of dream; the philosopher friend, an ethical vegetarian, suggested we should ask her if she indeed wanted to terminate her life, and perhaps blink or give another sign if she did.

She lived across from Emily Dickinson and was a great fan of the poet, knowing many of her poems by heart, and even saying occasionally that Emily talked to her. I am in the room with her and ask Natasha to flip through the big book of Emily’s complete poems, using her finger to stop at any time. The poem she stops at is #1263, with the line “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” – this was the poem that Lynn and I had used for an essay anthology, “Slanted Truths.” Then we asked her to flip again, and the poem landed on was # 565, “One Anguish—in a Crowd,” containing the line, “The Bung out—of an Artery—… Harms”—strangely mirroring her hemorrhagic stroke.

 

 

My mother was a fearless, no-holds-barred scientist, who was very open-minded but had no time for either New Age thinking or group-think. This meant that she had not time for people who equated Gaia—scientific shorthand for the scientific hypothesis that Earth’s surface has regulated its atmospheric chemistry, global mean temperature, ocean acidity and other environmental variables for hundreds of millions of years—with a goddess, or even an organism. At the same time she had a good nose for government propaganda, and wasn’t afraid to question the meretricious deceptions of increasingly conformist and corporately and academically beholden Big Science. Science, she liked to quote quantum physicist David Bohm, is about finding the truth whether we like it or not.

Does that mean I am saying that my mother would be open to some belief in ghosts, or that she herself was making an effort at contact from what in Mexico is sometimes known as El Mundo de Más Allá—the afterworld?

No, not really. In fact, as my aunt, her younger sister told me, she was very proud of me and my collaboration with Eric Schneider. In Into the Cool Eric and I had written about the energetics of life. The tendency of energy differentials, or gradients, to naturally come to equilibrium, to even out, leads to complex forms. Life may itself, in its origin and its ecology, be one of these forms. We give the example of a heated cabin on a snowy mountain. Wherever there is a draft, the heat will try to get out; however mindless, it will seem to seek escape, crawling under a door jamb or sneaking out through a crack in the window to reach equilibrium. The science of this, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, was the topic of our book, Into the Cool, on life and energy. In Burlington after a play, when my mom was alive I was drinking with Roger Payne, the man who discovered whale songs, and Dennett Worthington, who had been a house insulator. Worthington told of how they add powder to the air to visualize air currents in insulation; in one case he said he witnessed a streamer of warm air seep through an electric outlet, creep up a wall and half way across the ceiling before turning around, heading down, and going back whence it came. It was as if, although lacking a body let alone a brain, it had “changed its mind” on the way to equilibrium. This, it occurred to me, was a nice rational explanation for some reports of ghosts. It is winter, you are alone, in a large Victorian house as night falls. Suddenly you feel a presence brush by you, then the curtains flutter, and perhaps even glimpse a ghostly form on a mission to escape.

After my mom died one of her closest confidants, James McAllister, directed me to the closet in her office. He told me to reach back. It was a surprisingly deep closet and vaguely I recalled that my mother had once told me there was something important back there. Your will? I asked. She’d shaken her head and I’d smiled, perhaps relieved to not think more of it for the time being. With my full arm extended I finally found the nylon surface of a grungy object that had been stowed back there. Sure enough, I emerged from the dry fishing expedition with a strange booty. It was an orange backpack stuffed with mostly handwritten papers from multiple parties. Later, over a waterfall, I would peruse these papers. Fascinated, I read, including about myself, of past times. The spirit which had been my mother and, if we want to shy away from this rather superstitious term, the energetic ensembles of others, some still living, had left their traces on a variety of different kinds of stationary. Smoothing out the papers I began to read, feeling again as if I were in the presence of my living breathing mother.

Sort of. When first I opened it, sneaking after being told through the grapevine that it was in the back of the linen closet—way in the back, it was an old crawl space almost, your whole arm with fingers extended had to go through bedding and not-quite-clean sheets and pillowcases to get to that nylon strap, that textured orange sheen—the first thing I pulled out was a ratty, familiar address book. Messy handwriting, completely pedestrian. It’s heft was impressive, thirteen maybe sixteen pounds—a couple of babies worth. I was surprised at the dirt, the strange foldings, the messages written on napkins in multiple hands and languages and, as I slowly discerned while methodically smoothing the papers best I could at the Montague Book Mill (“Books you don’t need in a place you can find”—the rather ridiculous Tiny Tim had fainted here decades ago)—most of the missives were from men. This, combined with some lust-love-science letters in my possession from my father to my mother, began to shed some dark light on her mysterious personal life. One of the first and most intriguing—almost damning—things I noticed was a dot matrix manuscript, a good chunk of the computer printout that was the result of our professional collaboration, me trying to popularize her views of symbiotic life, that began immediately after I ended college: a dot matrix print out of most of our Microcosmos, the first book for a popular audience to show the sweeping effect of microbes on Earth’s surface and life’s evolution. What was “I” doing with her in this strange orange capsule, among so many cryptic declarations of forbidden desire?

It was strange because almost every letter that she had stuffed in the bag—seemingly with a frenetic need simultaneously to preserve and dispose of, to bracket to some impossible future time—was a kind of love letter. I ascertained this to the best of my ability even in the cases where the cursive was near-indecipherable, and the language was Spanish, French, or German. One letter upon first glance seemed an exception. This was from the late Ed Tripp, erstwhile editor at Yale University Press. He had seemingly with a debonair gentility, the same as he displayed while alive, complemented my mother with the formal politesse that underscored him not only as fastidious and endearing, but also as a kind of throwback to an earlier time in the history of civility, publishing, and generosity. I breathed an audible sigh of relief: here at last was a letter with no hint of pressure cooking secret lust, no sign of a recent untoward secret assignation. Neither scientific minutiae nor references to the genital stature or marital status of third parties were in evidence. The letter was clear, and Tripp’s intentions gentlemanly in the extreme. He even mentioned how nice it was to see my card tricks. (I was her coauthor on Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination, our earliest published English collaboration, Yale University Press, 1986). Then, almost as an afterthought, I looked at the date above Tripp’s fine editorial hand: February 14, 1982—Valentine’s Day.

 

There was no getting around it: my mother’s secret love life, or lives, as recorded sporadically, messily, and even a bit obsessively—in some cases she had kept not only the handwritten, pen-touched, grimy finger- or airport beer-stained notes of her admirers, but also carbon copies of her own correspondence to them—partook of the same sort of promiscuity as the more-than-human that she in her work famously describes. Just as bacteria have sex, trading their genes across what would be species boundaries, so her missives preserved strange intimacies, unexpected connections, secret assignations and disseminations of desire and gossip—some involving me—no less than scientific information. The epistles were not only often (albeit in a cultured way) literally as well as literarily dirty, the grime of forgotten hours clinging to the pages I pored over years after the fact—they also testified to a kind of symbiotic mélange without end, a vast backstage showing the redolent workings behind what in science studies today might more likely be called, with an antiseptic air, “the production of knowledge.”

It was thrilling to discover above the rush of falling water these fragments of a past that contained me. As I sat there, touching her effects, a living testimony that felt as much like something being unearthed as a fossilized stromatolite, or termite trapped and preserved in a yellowing piece of Miocene amber*, time seemed to stop, even reverse—as in that optical illusion where you gaze continuously at a waterfall. Then, when you look away, the landscape rushes upwards.  I came across letters not only from my mother’s lovers to her, and hers to them, but also secret jibes between her and graduate students about parties I knew, family members, stepparents, divorces and jealousies. What scientists may as a class lack in emotions and humor was made up for by their mania for cataloging and analyzing. I might supply my own emotions, my own humor. Here, as I in bewilderment unfolded and smoothed out, were revelations from my mother to my college girlfriend, the both of them attuned to the problems of my superficiality, my foppishness, my insouciant inability to take life—and in due time, the necessity of a career—seriously. Time is supposed to go in one direction but, on Earth, water travels like the perpetual stream, flowing uphill to power the waterwheel, in M C Escher’s “Escape into Life”—around and around. The sun, evaporating water, and plants, using the energy of sunlight to bring water from roots, through the stomata of their leaves, to form clouds, provides a scientific explanation for this real magic.

Science sits astride a need to know and the humility of its ignorance; the climb to highest peaks is powered by base desire; the voyage infinitely out is the journey indefinitely in. There is skepticism, and there is skepticism of skepticism; this latter is not belief, but a higher immersion. Among my admitted wastrel ways and foppish tendencies, is the dandy idea that wonder and critique should have their own secret alliance. As a practiced sleight-of-hand magician of the second or third rank—the societies actually do not give such ranks, but I digress—I watch in wonder as the human intellect scrambles atop the growing sphere of its increasing knowledge, which brings it face to face with ever greater domains of the unknown.

Those, like my mother, who had a capacity for wonder, intuition, the courage both of and to go against their convictions, combined with a natural and scientifically trained skepticism, are valuable guides. The great, plain-speaking American physicist, Richard Feynman, taught my scientist, and son-of-a-scientist friend, Tobi Delbrück (who also does a mean one-handed shuffle) how to pick locks. Feynman also persuaded another old friend, Tarleton Reynolds, the ex-wife of my ex-magic agent, to pose for him. He liked to draw women like Tarleton whom, with scientific directness if not playboy acumen, he tried (apparently without much success) to seduce.  With happy-go-lucky whimsy, he played bongos, traveled to the lost land of Tanna Tuva in central Asia, and, always fond of trying to figure out things for himself, attempted to translate Mayan hieroglyphs from scratch. He loved puzzles and deduced the cause of the crash of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger to be from an O-ring (he tested the material himself) that did not seal in cold weather. A commission later agreed. As a kid, his father encouraged him to try to find natural explanations for him. He stopped doing physics, Berlin-born physicist Otto Rössler told me at a bar near the Cuartel del Conde Duque in Madrid in 2002, when he began having dreams of New York City in nuclear ruins.

 

 

A scientist who was his student told me Feynman saw no reason why the past could not in principle be recaptured, despite the second law of thermodynamics which suggests an end in absolute chaos. He was open-minded, creative, and a rationalist.  Told she had only hours to live, he scrambled to New Mexico to come to the side of his dying wife. He hitchhikes from Los Alamos, where he has been working on the Manhattan Project—the top secret project to make an atomic bomb that stayed top secret despite the fact that thousands were working on it.

It is 1945, the US is at war, she breathes with difficulty, he bends to kiss her. Six weeks before the August 6th and 9th bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Feynman, 27,  stands watch, sits by, kisses her. Soon she dies of the Hodgkin’s disease that was destroying her. He is only married for two years. And here is the spooky part: after gathering her sparse effects in preparation for her cremation, he comes back to her room and sees the clock above her bed is frozen at 9:21—the exact time, according to her nurse’s records, of her death.

Here was a puzzle that many of us would be tempted to attribute to otherworldliness, a secret passage to the ordinary from the spirit realm. Feynman first tries to solve the puzzle himself. Recalling that the clock is delicate—he was asked to look at and indeed fixed it himself on more than one occasion himself previously—he ponders. According to his memoirs, he theorizes the nurse must have lifted the clock to check the time of death; this would have disrupted the internal mechanism, stopping the clock’s hands from jerking off beyond the numerals on which they’d stopped, 9:21. As the philosopher Spinoza emphasized, perhaps the greatest miracle of all is that there is no need for miracles.

Reading my mother’s letters brought her to life again. I had found, in my readings of the Victorian author Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, an epigrammatic comment to the effect that too-mechanical modern descriptions of Darwinian biology took the “life out of biology.” It was a poignant phrase my mother loved. As a renegade biologist, she appropriated it for her own purposes. She used it as shorthand to redress this regrettable tendency in biology toward an oversimplification of the richnesses of life, to remark the gap between quantitative biology and genetic determinism on the one hand and the metabolic and ecological details of biochemically complex, pulsing life on the other. “My own suspicion,” claimed the geneticist, socialist, and jump-starter of selfish gene theory J.B.S. Haldane, “is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

Science approximates. We must watch for unwarranted capitulations to disembodied abstractions, especially when they forego careful observation and are subverted to short-sighted human ends (like gaining money and status). Real life is messier, it has more in it than dreamed of by biologists emulating the physicists, the Newtonians, the mathematicians who seemed to, and sometimes claimed to have, intuited the mind of God. Not so, her life’s work blares from the green, photosynthetic bacteria-created hilltops. Such a god is a petty phantom who belongs in bas-relief, seen in correct proportion as a cultural shadow of the real life which created not just “Him” but the women who gave birth to the babies that grew into the men who’d constructed such narcissistic fantasies.

 

My mother looks up toward the ceiling for an adaptor shortly before her death; I dream of seeing her high up in an amphitheater that reminds itself to me when I walked into the lobby of the Fiesta Americana in Mérida, looking up at the open terraces visible also from the glass elevator; looking up again but earlier, I see sea creatures high above my head, which turn out to be the humans of a glass-bottom pool; above a waterfall I read the by turns worried and superior judgments as to my frivolity in epistolary confidences between my mother and girlfriend, both of them significantly younger than I; not just the waterfall flowing over rocks below but the petrified streams of ink on the wood of tables speaks to me, a living archive, as I gaze at the past in the form of un-petrified, living prose.

As the metaphysical poet John Donne wrote to Sir Henry Wotton: “SIR, more than kisses, letters mingle souls,/For thus, friends absent speak. This ease controls/The tediousness of my life; but for these/I could ideate nothing which could please;/But I should wither in one day, and pass/To a bottle of hay, that am a lock of grass.”

“A lock of grass”: The ghostliness of the word is real. It preserves a past time in the pulsing wetware of the mind. It is open to our senses. If beauty be in the eye of the beholder, so death must be included in life which—as my mother turned to me poignantly in the funeral parlor where the coffin holding her own father was—is for the living.

 

 

—Dorion Sagan

 

First or second author on twenty-five books translated into thirteen languages Dorion Sagan has written for Natural History, Smithsonian, BioScience, The Sciences, The Ecologist, Co-Evolution Quarterly, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Skeptical Inquirer, Wired, Pabular, Times Higher Education Supplement, Whole Earth Review, and Cabinet. Sagan’s What is Life? was called “A masterpiece of science writing,” and he received an EdPress Association of America Excellence in Educational Journalism Award for his article “The Riddle of Sex.” His works include (as editor) Lynn Margulis: The Life and Legacy of a Scientific Rebel, Cosmic Apprentice (University of Minnesota Press) and (with J. J. Mitteldorf) Cracking the Aging Code: The New Science of Growing Old and What it Means for Staying Young. Dorion’s interests continue to include philosophy, science, poetry, and fiction.

 

 

 

 

 

Endnotes:

* such as the one I, haplessly attempting to do a magic trick in her lab, broke. Cut with a diamond knife, and examined in thin section, the fragmented amber from the Dominican Republic revealed a fossil community of symbiotic microbes living in Mastotermes electrodominicus, a termite that today is found only in northern Australia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What They Said: Karl Ove Knausgård

Posted on September 12, 2016

 

 

“When I started out on Min Kamp, I was so extremely frustrated over my life and my writing. I wanted to write something majestic and grand, something like Hamlet or Moby-Dick, but found myself with this small life—looking after kids, changing diapers, quarreling with my wife, unable to write anything, really. So I started to write about that. During that process, I realized that this was material, I didn’t like it, but still, it was something, not nothing. If you read Hölderlin or Celan, and admire their writing, it’s very shameful, writing about diapers, it’s completely without dignity. But then, that became the point. That was the whole point. Not to try to go somewhere else than this.”

 

Karl Ove Knausgård,

 

From The Paris Review, 2013

9/11 American National Anthem Buckingham Palace

Posted on September 11, 2016

 

A Song To Mama

Posted on September 11, 2016

And if your mother, like mine, is already on the other side of the dream, I should warn you this may make you cry.

 

Film About Survival Without HIV Drugs Removed From Portobello Film Festival After Threats From Buzzfeed

Posted on September 10, 2016

 

By Elizabeth Ely

 

In Film Festivals, Who Gets to Tell Their Story?

 

Joan Shenton and Andi Reiss’ film Positive Hell has again been removed from a film festival–this time the Portobello Film Festival in London. It chronicles five people’s experience following an HIV “diagnosis,” and their choice to exit the HIV/AIDS Pharmceutical State in the presence of a diagnostic omen.

[The Truth Barrier covered it, here and here.]

At 28 minutes, it packs a rare punch–having twice been banned from film festivals that previously selected it.

First, the London International Film Festival in April caved under pressure from letters sent by parties said to be LGBT student groups. And now the Portobello Film Festival, also in London, has as of September 7 pulled the film from its screening lineup on Saturday night, similarly citing two phone calls, the source of which it won’t disclose.

At the time of the LIFF’s action, we learned that censorship wasn’t exactly the word for it. These days, they call it “no-platforming.”

[Editor’s Note:  According to an article in the UK Journalism magazine The Tab, a top UK Barrister has found that “no-platforming” may be illegal. From an article on www.thetab.com:

“Christopher McCall QC was commissioned to write a 37-page legal opinion by the National Union of Students. It found that no-platform policies are only legal when applied to members of a proscribed group such as terrorists. Otherwise, the policies breach Section 43 of the 1986 Education Act.” ]

When a festival decides one day to accept and screen a film, then suddenly decides not to, based on “feedback” from an unnamed “public” that has never shown its face and never rioted dangerously in the streets or shot up any cinema multiplexes over this film or any other of its kind, you have to kind of wonder, don’t you?

The evidence in the latest case shows that Patrick Strudwick, LGBT editor of BuzzFeed News, found out about the “no-platforming” even before the filmmakers did. He triumphantly reported on Wednesday that the decision came “following a request by BuzzFeed News to comment on their decision to show the film.” Producer and narrator Joan Shenton reported that she only spoke with festival spokesperson Jonathan Barnett the next morning.

Apparently, a film festival can back down before threats and still claim it stands for something. Joan reports that Barnett claimed to run “an anti-establishment and counter-cultural festival” while folding under threat and not disclosing where threats came from. There was a hint of funding being at stake. And he’d appreciate her being “slightly indulgent” and not causing a fuss in the media.

The thing is, censorship is about who doesn’t get to tell their story. The five subjects of Positive Hell, who were then alive in Spain 26 years after being informed they had months to live, told Shenton and director Andi Reiss what happened. One of them died after the filming, and Strudwick decided that was the only story worth telling.  Four are still alive, and AIDS stories are almost always about death.

Is the film balanced and unbiased? Not exactly. Shenton editorialized a little by framing the issues, and Reiss sequenced the film footage in the editing room—but only to contextualize with what the storytellers said.

Fortunately, you can listen to the stories and judge for yourself. The movie has been posted at www.positivehell.com all this time. You can decide if it’s worth protesting in front of The KPH at the Kensington Park Hotel, 139 Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill, London, at 8:30 p.m. Saturday.

I talked to Dr. Manolo Garrido Sotelo, one of the four, in 2015 and posted English and Spanish versions.

There are these LBGT groups around, and they want you to know, as always, that they’re pissed off. Not actual LGBT people, mind you, because after the LIFF no-platforming incident, the film screened at London Soho to no protests whatsoever.

These are not the people you and I know, whom we sometimes like and sometimes find as annoying as anyone else, who just happen to be gay or what-have-you.

These are, instead, the ones we never meet as people, only as a bloc of opinions-on-legs we’re not allowed to dislike, and they sometimes show up for parades with their shirts off and their hair dyed in unnatural colors. They have spokespersons, to keep the actual people they claim to represent from speaking for themselves—often implying their constituency is childlike and likely to get “confused” if presented with too much information.

This LGBT—excuse me, “LGBTQ”—class professes itself satisfied with the soundbites about “HIV” and “AIDS” that have been blasted at them for 35 years.  That’s cool.  They shouldn’t go see a movie that puts different facts in front of them.  They might let others see it and tell them how bad it is.

What’s downright hilarious is that the LGBTQ-thing is naughty and rebellious. Which is what making documentaries that some people find shocking is all about, too. You mean to tell me, they’re coloring their hair pink and marching in a parade to support pharmaceutical companies?

If the four people in Spain don’t get to tell their stories, then who does? Certainly, LGBTs and Qs will be the first to be shut up in this sensitive climate of ideas.  It’s a strange time we live in, when we all get to tell our stories so endlessly on social media that they drown each other out, yet the big, date-night movie screen is still reserved for the grownups-in-charge and their propaganda.

They get to tell their stories, as the only thing.

–Elizabeth Ely

 

Additional Links:

 

You can see the film free of charge here:

www.positivehell.com

And here is Dr Garrido’s website

http://superandoelsida.ning.com

 

Articles:

 

https://www.buzzfeed.com/patrickstrudwick/a-british-film-festival-has-withdrawn-a-documentary-that-den?utm_term=.qbr7ARGNL#.wmPbv2X6O

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/positive-hell-silencing-the-hiv-heretics/18243#.V9QsHVeMBPM

Runmarö Diaries

Posted on September 8, 2016

“People try to put us down.”

 

–Pete Townshend

 

 

 

September 8, 2016

 

There is one grocery store here on the island, (pictured.) For some reason, it brings out my shame, this store. Not always, but often. It’s a small, well curated, local grocery, and I try to act local. Without fail, I show up here with catastrophically low blood sugar, which never helps.

Today something noteworthy and rather funny happened. I had bicycled (25-30 mins) to the store, and part way there I realized I still had three bags of our garbage in the plastic crate on the back of the bike. These are the things you don’t think about, when you transition from, say, Manhattan, island of 10 million, to Runmaro, population 270. (Or maybe 271, now that I’m here.)

In New York you’re always holding your garbage before you toss it, down the hall. It’s never on the back of a bike. So of course I found myself traversing the island with our garbage, 3 bags, and one of them was the cat litter. I shopped without incident, but made the mistake of asking if I could leave the garbage in their dumpster. “We can’t receive it,” the shop owner, a fastidious, and by all accounts good man, told me. “But you can leave it at the garbage dump up the hill.”

So far so good.

Oh wait. I did not shop “without incident.” I always give my Chase card and my NY Driver’s license, and they write down my whole ID, and it holds up the line, but it’s not too bad. This time, they had a new cash register, and my American Bank card crashed the system, somehow. Everybody was good natured about it.

I went back in the store after I left to ask a very low blood sugar question about the garbage thing again, but thought better of it, when a white-haired man on the line said, with a smile and a twinkle: “This was all your fault.”

Back outside, an elderly woman spotted my red bowling bag as I attached the garbage, the groceries, my two sweaters, etc, to the bicycle. “Is that your bag?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t forget it.”

“Thank you, I’ve got it.”

She walked over, and I was thinking, are we going to break protocol and talk to each other?

She said something about how hard it is to bike with a lot of heavy stuff. A favorite Swedish expression is:

“Det är inte lätt.” (It’s not easy.)

So I said that.

I sound Swedish more or less, which is exactly what gets me into trouble. Åke and I made an executive decision last night that even though I am fluent in Swedish I should speak English when I leave this house, so they don’t expect me to know the exact way everything works, and instead treat me with kindness, like a tourist.

Anyway, this woman, she and I got to chatting. She told me she and her husband had bought a golf cart, though they don’t golf. Out here, there are extremely few cars. People bicycle, or use various motorized forms of bikes and tractor like vehicles. I told her about Åke, and that I had moved her from New York City which I come from, and was about to spend my first winter here on the island.

“I hope he’s worth it,” she said.

“He is,” I said, and smiled. (It’s September 8, but mark my words he will still be worth it on Dec 8.)

She said she and her husband sometimes had American friends visit. I braced myself, unconsciously. “They are so impressed when they come. And my God do they talk. They really are a talkative people. They never stop talking.”

I was thinking about my plummeting blood sugar, but me, I never leave a conversation with a stranger unless there’s good cause.

“And another thing about Americans, they cut their food and put the knife down and then eat with the fork.”

I suddenly felt like an ape. Oh no. Another thing I never even thought of that I don’t do as nicely as everybody here does. Shit. You’re supposed to hold onto your knife?

“They were so impressed with us, the way we eat, those Americans, they couldn’t get over how we ate with knife and fork,”she continued. I’d gotten her name, by the way. Birgitta.

“Like the saint,” she told me.

I leapt at the chance to demonstrate my inferiority and willingness to improve.

“I am not sure, but I think I might do that,” I said, eyes widened, tiny beads of sweat forming. We were standing in the sun, and it’s actually hot here these past few days.

“Well,” she said, “it’s not very European., that way of eating,” she said.

“If you want to impress Åke, sue knife and fork. Eat properly.”

(“Ordentligt,” in Swedish.)

I said I sure would.

Her husband came out of the store and I tried to come up with somebody good about my people, Americans.

“We’re more about communication in a public sense,” I said. “We’re like an entertainment based people.”

I stopped short of saying, “Like clowns!”

We bid one another goodbye and she said, “Good luck!”

As I biked home I located the correct garbage cans.

I wish I had said to the woman: “One thing about Americans, we don’t spend all that much time figuring out what’s wrong with everybody else.”

But you know what?

I also thought: I really appreciate that tip. I plan to eat like a European from now on.

Knife and fork, all the way through.

What They Said: J.B. Handley

Posted on September 6, 2016

 

 

“We have a pediatrician up here in Portland, Dr. Paul Thomas, who has made a very interesting and compelling claim. Dr. Thomas claims that by making two simple amendments to the vaccine schedule (not giving Hepatitis B at all and delaying MMR until a child is over the age of 3) he has seen no cases of Autism in more than 2,000 patients.”

 

J.B. Handley,

Age of Autism

Pray Away The Ugly

Posted on September 6, 2016

“Father forgive them for they know not–”

Luke 23:24 (my edit)

 

My mother used to say, “Pray.”

I didn’t know what she meant. We were not a religious family, though we had the following progression: She was born, like most Swedes, Lutheran, her mother converted her to Catholicism at age 8, then she converted to Judaism to marry my father, in the States. I’m thinking she must have been taught to pray by the nuns in Stockholm.

Right after the Rabbi converted her, he said, “That’s funny, you don’t look Jewish.”

After the family shattered, she raised us alone, in NYC and Sweden, with too many problems to incorporate formal religious structures. Also, Sweden was almost militantly atheist when we moved here, winter of 1976. I was at the time attending the Catholic School, Convent Of The Sacred Heart in New York City, and working toward a conversion to Catholicism. The move to Sweden ended all that–cut it off like a severed electrical cable. There was just no way.

Instead, the Swedish Communists got hold of my 12 year old soul. I have never written about this. My mother always said it would destroy my life in the US, and maybe that’s why I avoid it. I ran out of the communist faith screaming by the age of 14, after some bearded communist youth leaders nearly killed us all on a People’s Canoe Hike Without Maps. I can’t do that story justice now, but suffice to say: We got hideously and irreparably lost, nearly drowned, were covered in mud trying to scramble up ravines, wandered in the woods for days and days, became clinically famished, hallucinated–

Most devastatingly, I saw my socialist heroes–our moral leaders–protect their own food stashes, and warm dry clothes, after so many hours of preaching “solidarity,” to us. Believe it or not, that was actually crushing, in a very personal way. I can still taste the sulfur of betrayal.

My best friend Anneli actually did “die,” and went straight to heaven. Then she got an adrenaline shot in the heart, (which would have killed her if she had not been “dead,”) and came back.

She was openly furious at the doctors who brought her back.

We were 14.

Only once did my mother call my father for parental consultation, and it was around this time.

In 1978, prior to my leaving the Red Star Faith, I confessed to having attended a Communist rally, after I came home late and probably smelling of wet wool and moral switchblades.

My mother called my father in New York, wildly upset and furious. (My mother could really, I mean really, do RAGE.)

She wanted me shipped to Florida to live with my paternal grandparents until I was 18, immediate departure. My father (an anti-communist, Vierick-Buckley conservative) failed to respond with appropriate alarm and instead began laughing his head off. (That, I would call the Jewish side, but my mother had it too, usually.) On this occasion, not so much. She was screaming: “It’s NOT funny Barry! It’s NOT funny!”

I remember very little from my childhood, but I remember, (and it has since become a family slogan) what my father said, between gasps of laughter. “Ulla, you’re calling me to tell me Celia is a communist? I understand you are upset, but you can’t say that’s not funny.

[Family Slogan: “You Can’t Say That’s Not Funny.”]

*

My mom also used to say, “Talk to God.”

Again, I didn’t know what she meant.

She also sometimes said, “Drink, pie pie!”

(She said I drank alcohol “like a bird.”)

I want to talk to my mother, but I can’t. And for some reason I always forget I can “talk to God,” and I remember it only in the deepest, darkest ditches, when my brain is an agony of black bears eating garbage.

So I talked to God today, by the water, with Patrick’s rosary beads. I had allowed ugly Godless ideas to get the better of me.  Out here, there are asphyxiating cultural forces I am not accustomed to–people wishing away “other–” assaulting and trying to minimize “other.” The “other” elements I represent have to do both with ethnicity, but more troublingly, journalistic imperatives. The only thing that really hurts is when that weaponry is used among close friends.  This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever dealt with, spiritually.

I plan to succeed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love sitting by the water, my new Church. Sometimes I see swan families, and am filled with questions about them.

First of all, do the children have to leave their parents in the same moment they turn from teenage brown to adult swan white?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack and Lewis are still in the house, but making daily advances toward me letting go (—) and trusting them to be outdoor cats. (There are no cars here on Runmaro, and few predators.)

Today I let Lewis outside and he got a one hour long taste of the wilderness, with me hiding behind trees, spying on him. It all wound up with him ducking under the big tent where they keep all the tractors and old bikes. Every time I crawled toward him, he crawled away, until I finally begged him to stop doing that. Then he let me catch him. I realized I was calling him “pie pie.”

I reminded him that he is way smaller than me, that it’s hard for me to dash under old bicycles like he can, and he should have some mercy. And also, that he is too precious to me for me to just let him go into the wilderness just like that, even though Ake keeps insisting he is a cat and will know exactly what to do.

 

 

As soon as the spy-collars arrive, Jack and Lewis will be “ute-katter,” outdoor cats (here on the island of Runmarö.)

But right now I appreciate their company, because I am alone in this house all day and I have to face a mountain of un-written material. 97% of it I have forgotten, and/or, nobody would believe it.

I will start again, today. Even if it’s three lines.

Frying two eggs, I listened to Joel Osteen, and I thought up my own motivational mantra:

“Pray away the ugly.”

“The ugly” can easily get into the house that is my soul, and now I intend to be less tolerant, to pray it away, rather than let it grow like killer weeds.

Pray away the hurt.

Pray away the weakness.

I’m not in America anymore so it’s not that easy to find anybody who will say the kinds of things Americans so readily say to one another, lit with faith, or even secular positivism. It’s just not done here.

That’s ok.

Just means I have to pray more.

It’s very hard to pray for those who hurt you very badly. You want to just armor yourself from head to toe, ideally inside a body cast. You want to not think about it. You want to place them outside memory, and your heart–outside the house, like Dino in The Flintstones.

But more than I want to achieve that kind of numb nothingness, I want to know what happens if you work with God. I want to know if I can do it.

I also want to know if I am supposed to.

—Celia Farber

Runmarö, Sweden,

Sept 6, 2016

 

 

 

 

The Last Lines Of A Letter

Posted on September 4, 2016

 

 


Perhaps there are some wounds we don’t want to heal.
The memory of what we thought was real.
That we never found again.

 

–Kevin Skolnik,

[From a letter to Celia Farber, August, 2016]

Happy Birthday Andrew Wakefield (And One Thing You Don’t Know About Him.)

Posted on September 3, 2016

As a much younger, much less war-damaged journalist, I would have been able to live up to en encounter with Andrew Wakefield–would have had all the right questions, and all the wrong ones. This would have been some time between 1989 and 2006. As I always did in those days, I’d be wearing something OAT colored. I would still be in the sway of The Big Mirage and still be certain it was so close one could virtually touch it.

The machine to absorb the conversation would have been a Marantz tabletop with 4 fresh C batteries.  I’d have cared so much about this interview I would perhaps freeze and be unable to speak, or shatter a thick  glass door with my fingertip, as I did when assigned too interview my idol Pete Townshend, for SPIN, in 1993.

I would have wanted to be the one who brought Wakefield’s detangled and now by me clarified story to the imaginary frontline of medical journalism, full of conviction and subconscious suicidal ideation. This was before everything finally dawned on me, and before everything went into static.  In 2016, Vaxxed: From Coverup To Catastrophe exploded.

Now the truth is out.

 

 

 

 

 

Interviewing Andy Wakefield, NYC, 2012, Uncomfortable In Journalist Costume

In 2012, I  met, and interviewed Andrew Wakefield on assignment for a Swedish documentary team.

I mainly wanted to watch him from a distance–see what I could pick up. My beloved friend, now passed away, the raving lunatic and genius known in earth form as Fiona Eberts, had met Andy Wakefield at The Sundance Film Festival that year, and shortly thereafter she and I had lunch near Lincoln Center.

I was a cloud of bewilderment, obsessed with the gory details. How could such a person exist? Was he like…Zeus or something? I did not understand it at the time. Where did all the knives and bullets go? Rather like those magicians who saw themselves or others in half but never explain why they are ok at the end.

I stared at Fiona, over soup, and finally said something: ” Jesus Fiona. You met him. What is he like? I mean…Jesus. Is he alright?”

Fiona (also British) tilted her head and said with a throaty laugh: “Well. He’s British.”

Good answer.

“YOOOUUU HAVE BEEN ATTACKED BY A MONSTROUS ENAMEEEE BUT YOU NEVAH FLINCHED OR WAVAARED…” (Churchill.)

However he is or isn’t, it would be another year before I understood that he had utterly rejected this whole train of thought. “I don’t have a problem. The children with autism have a problem.” *

Fiona connected us via email, and lo and behold, he was gracious, responsive, and in a much friendlier mood than most people who have not been crushed under the “million pound shithammer”** of the  pharmaceutical Reich.

The interview we did, some weeks later, in a NYC Hotel room, on camera, was excellent, on his part, OK on my part. Competent. But I had failed.

A journalist wants to get something nobody else got from a subject. Wants there to be something exchanged that was unique to the encounter. And like I said, my fangier days were behind me. And the Marantz had been stolen. And I couldn’t wrap my head around Brian Deer’s malicious red ant tight little accusations–just could not get a feel for how to ask anything about a ball of wax so obviously constructed in the wax ball factory where they make precisely these balls of Nothing to look HUGE.

Dr. Wakefield, meanwhile, was a walking library of his own case, his own story, and the various stories his fate was origami-ed inside; He was Olympian, lucid, detailed, and comprehensive. But I could have been anybody.

Much later, some time in 2014 or so, I finally got what I wanted.

Wakefield and the Autism Media Channel Team were in NYC to screen their latest film, Who Killed Alex Spourdalakis, and they invited me to attend.

That evening, I was in a loud, fairly dreary midtown bar, with Andy Wakefield and Polly Tommey, and Polly went to the restroom. Andy and I got to chatting, and when I mentioned Bob Guccione Jr., he said that in the 1970s, one of the Gucciones (he could not recall which) had stolen his girlfriend. He laughed at the memory. (I later asked Mr. Guccione if he remembered stealing Andy Wakefield’s girlfriend, but as usual, he said it must have been his father.)

Then all of a sudden when I least expected it–the jewel.

The subject turned, incredibly, and inexplicably, to (wait for it) Deep Purple.

The 70s rock group.

Dr. Wakefield said he felt they had been terribly under-rated, and I wholeheartedly agreed. I DO think that. I always did.

He laughed heartily. “They were a great band.”

In the dark, my elation was not palpable. Polly Tommey returned and wondered, “What are you two talking about?”

It was so loud and miserable in there I evacuated us to another, (slightly less miserable) place without further ado.

But I held in my mind’s ear the butterfly, the hilarious thing that I had been given, the scoop I always wanted.

Oh my God, I thought silently. Andy Wakefield just told me he thinks Deep Purple were under rated.

Nobody will ever believe me but I don’t care.

He said it.

And now that I have revealed Wakefield’s deepest darkest secret, Brian Deer can get behind me, cause I got him beat.

Wishing Andrew Wakefield the happiest of birthdays, as September 4th dawns over the Baltic Sea.

 

 

 

 

 

Footnotes:

* [Quote from our 2012 interview. Made me think of Pete’s line from Quadrophenia:‘I see a man without a problem.’]

**From Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thompson

 

 

Letter From My Father,* 4 Days After I Moved To Sweden

Posted on September 3, 2016

 

 

*I don’t mean to be cryptic, I just haven’t had time to explain anything, in a long time. Or post anything.  I’ve left NYC and gone “home,” to Sweden, where I grew up–a tiny island in the Stockholm archipelago called Runmaro, to be exact. Jack and Lewis (my trusted cats) ALSO moved, and the back story is a love story that stayed in the shadows for over three decades as a friendship story. That too, I will explain. Because I want to, I mean. The same way I want to share this private letter from my father, because time is running out, and words should bring hope and spark with love or not be at all. We’ve been here 4 days. The Baltic Sea is whistling in the background. This is the only place in my whole life where I ever felt truly safe. Oh! And Åke lets me pilot the motorboat now, between the islands. (After 32 years, during which, we never considered it.)

I could easily become boastful as all get out after even the slightest sea-or boat related triumph, but thank you in advance for bearing with all the strange dots of this website and its frayed editor.

And let me know how you feel about amateur boating stories?

 

–CF

 


Dearest Celia,

It makes me proud and happy that someone of your high caliber can be lifted
by messages from me! I’ve long been lifted by the rainbows of postcards and
telegrams and the like from you and never moreso than right now that you’re
off onto what I regard as a brilliant and courageous adventure. Did you
ever watch goldfish sucking oxygen from the side of a tank? That’s what I
do with all your communications. My mind has already confected and
catalogued at least fifty different “pictures” and impressions of you
carrying lumber across that magic little island of yours!

Be well and let me hear from you when it’s opportune! Meanwhile, continued
good things to all of you and may the mighty Atlantic Ocean fail in its
perverse effort to keep us apart!
Much Love,

Daddy

The Silver Linings Candidate: Jill Stein

Posted on August 11, 2016

[Republished from Facebook today]

Note: Cherished friend Paul Murray is South African, and lives in Australia. A keen observer of global events and even American politics,  he was deeply affected by an article I shared, about falling in political love with Jill Stein.

So he wrote this:

 

 

The best thing to have come out of the Clinton/Trump presidential candidacy endorsements is that sane Americans are indeed starting to cast around for alternatives, knowing full well that there’s a really big rock or a hard place facing them.
And the more one digs into what Jill Stein is about, the more one listens to her and sees her in action, the more one realises there are still politicians with the integrity and intelligence of Bernie Sanders, a parallel which perhaps does Stein a disservice.
She’s a cut above Bernie in my book and she’s a rational, cogent, fearless person who knows how to take care of business. The fact that she’s a woman is just a bonus.
In a just world, this would be the Silver Linings Presidential Candidate.
The voters still have the power. I wonder how far the fear and rot has progressed.
America, you want to see a historic first female president?
Then bin the sociopathic Clinton drone and look no further. Jill Stein is your woman.
Great article.

Thanks, Celia Ingrid Farber

 

—By Paul  Murray

 

More Writings by Paul Murray at his website, linked here.

A Facebook Post I Just Wrote (Is The United States Over?)

Posted on August 10, 2016

I’m scared!
Aren’t you scared?
The political situation in the US is so surreal, unthinkable, and violent. We’ve never been more drunk on hate and phobia, disgust and certainty.
Who could make any of this up? NOBODY.
For starters:
An Australian hacker and radical freedom of information activist is working from inside an Ecuadorian safe zone in an embassy in London, accused but not charged, by Sweden, and cutting open the American political system like a corpse on the autopsy table, while we scream or turn away in denial.
Yelping liberal slogans that seemed to work just weeks ago, like “first woman President,” or “dump Trump.”
A friend on FB said he would “vote for anybody” who doesn’t “need to be locked up.”
All kinds of people turning up dead, which we have also become overnight experts at shrugging off.
Now Assange all but says Seth Rich was the DNC emails leaker, and is offering $20,000 for information about his murder, in the “botched robbery” on a DC street.
We retreat further and further into the safe corners of our minds where we try to think about anything, anything at all, except reality.
1.9 billion requested to combat “Zika.” No causation model. No correlation. No nothing. (Google “Zika Causation Model,” just for fun.)
Our country appears to be disintegrating.
And the founding wizard of FOX News was, for something like 30 years, debasing and extorting women to be his sex slaves, which kind of has the effect of making Donald Trump seem like Mr. Rogers. The darkness at the heart of our entire culture and system is now exposed but the corpse is still driving the bus and we still feel the need to make it appear our parents love us, so we try to strike deals left and right.
The American writer who put this ALL down in the form of a prophecy in many books and columns was Hunter S. Thompson.
Open to any page of any book and you’ll see the footprints which at the time seemed hilariously hyperbolic:
“Dear Jim… Are you ready for the death of print, books, and magazines? The whole future was laid on me tonight by a professor from UCLA Journalism School.”
[From, Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, pp 165, letter to Jim Silberman, Random House, dated–March 25, 1969.]
1969 he wrote that!

How To Replenish Dopamine Naturally

Posted on August 8, 2016

During the many years I was lost in the black forest (trauma, aka “depression”) I avidly, obsessively researched ways to increase bio-available dopamine. I watched hundreds of videos, read hundreds of thousands of words, and experimented on myself ceaselessly. I was seeking even a minute of a pain free psyche, or spark of joy.

I consider myself healed now, which is another story for another time. (There are many elements involved in the healing.)

I recommend this particular video highly, for anybody who struggles with depleted dopamine, (which is inherent in the design of the modern, progressive, mineral depleted, traumatized world.)
Raw chocolate. Blue Green Algae. Mucuna Pruriens.  Magnesium. B-Complex. And may I add: Pine pollen.

If you are not vegetarian, raw grasped beef and especially organ meats are immensely helpful.

 

 

 

How Marilyn Monroe Really Died: The Missing Evidence

Posted on August 8, 2016

 

What They Said: Etienne De Harven

Posted on August 7, 2016

“HIV is a monstrous hoax.”

 

—Etienne De Harven

Truth Barrier Belatedly Registers Shock Over Wikileaks DNC Expose

Posted on July 28, 2016

 

I’m not in the United States right now, and the last few weeks have been marked by many changes. One of them is that I can’t easily access the Internet, and have not kept regular work hours. (I am in the Stockholm archipelago.) I am also not in the company of Americans, so nobody around me is talking about this. I am alone with my shock measurement wand, (which works even out here in the Baltic sea.)

At a cafe now with white haired tots toddling back and forth, and the clean fragrant woods right outside the open door, I am trying to keep my eyes from widening too much as I finally telescope into the news from the US. I have listened to two Julian Assange interviews, carefully narrating the new now, the new “normal” following Wikileaks publication of the DNC emails, and I notice my heart is pounding.

“I really encourage people to research the more than 8,000 attachments that we have put out, separate files, including more than 175 spreadsheets, that has the real core, the financial core of the power structure and the exercise of monetary influence over the DNC.”

–Julian Assange

I have made a donation to Wikileaks today and hope you will too.

 

 

Homesickness

Posted on July 16, 2016

Standing in the Larsson kitchen on Runmarö, thinking about the word “home,” and wondering what 30 years is, or is not. Why did it seem the other night like I never left, or like we were once again in the beginning?

I fend off homesickness for my other home, America, which Åke’s father Bengt pronounces Ameerka, and YouTube throws me this lovely song by Elizabeth Cotten, Shake Sugaree.

North Carolina, where she was born, is in turn, is my father’s home. No, his second home. New York is his third.

New York is where people come when they have left their hometown, one way or another, even if you’re born there, as I was. You can’t make it “home,” quite. But it’s a fascinating department store of everything under the sun.

Åke is down in the woods fixing bicycle tires.

Something in me tries to build a case against simple happiness, like a terrorist. But something new makes no concessions.  Makes tea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjCmp1gt5o8

Mercury-Autism Link Called “Not So Crackpot” By The New York Times In 2002

Posted on July 7, 2016

In a 2002 NYT article by journalist, author and vaccine historian Arthur Allen, Dr. Neal Halsey, Director For The Institute of Vaccine Safety, lost confidence in his previous position that ingredients in vaccines did not cause brain damage (autism.)

This article was published 14 years ago. (I am only addressing this moment in time, here.)

Here’s my question: How did the thought leaders, the propagandists, eliminate all this sober middle ground, in subsequent years, and collapse all objection to any and all vaccines, into a stigmatized, totally illegitimate position, when as recently as 2002 the NYT was running article like this?

How did they make the search for truth so detestable in the zeitgeist?

The extreme bullying by trolls, “science” bloggers, attack journalists, and some celebrities, is a recent phenomenon. Post Brian Deer, would be one way to put it.

It’s illuminating to see what professionals were thinking and saying before the violence was formalized:

“Halsey, 57, has green eyes, a white beard that makes him look like a ship’s captain and an air of careful authority. As chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on infectious diseases from 1995 through June 1999, he often appeared in the media administering calm reassurance. ”Many of the allegations against vaccines,” Halsey said in one interview, ”are based on unproven hypotheses and causal associations with little evidence.”

And then suddenly in June 1999, during a visit to the Food and Drug Administration, a squall appeared on the horizon of Halsey’s confidence. Halsey attended a meeting to discuss thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative that at the time was being used in several vaccines — including the hepatitis B shot that Halsey had fought so hard to have administered to American babies. By the time the dust kicked up in that meeting had settled, Halsey would be forced to reckon with the hypothesis that thimerosal had damaged the brains of immunized infants and may have contributed to the unexplained explosion in the number of cases of autism being diagnosed in children.

That Halsey was willing even to entertain this possibility enraged some of his fellow vaccinologists, who couldn’t fathom how a doctor who had spent so much energy dismantling the arguments of people who attacked vaccines could now be changing sides. But to Halsey’s mind, his actions were perfectly consistent: he was simply working from the data. And the numbers deeply troubled him. ”From the beginning, I saw thimerosal as something different,” he says. ”It was the first strong evidence of a causal association with neurological impairment. I was very concerned.” ”

 

Allen, Arthur, “The Not So Crackpot Autism Theory.” NYT Magazine, Nov. 2002

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/magazine/the-not-so-crackpot-autism-theory.html?pagewanted=1

A Divine Drum Track You Need To Re-Appreciate Tonight

Posted on July 6, 2016

If we were forced to give up every other drum track since the dawn of rock and roll to a terrible new dictator, my thinking is, we would each be allowed to keep two.

I would keep this one, [Keith Moon, on Going Mobile] and the drum track to Rock Around The Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets.

Somebody on YouTube in the comments uses the words “simply unbelievable” to describe what Keith Moon is doing. I’ve been listening to it since I was maybe 8 or 9, but tonight it felt brand new, and I needed to get un-freeaked out, like I presume you do too if you’re hanging around this place.

 

 

Before The Ice Age, There Was A Keith Moon

Posted on July 6, 2016

It’s Keith Moon week at The Truth Barrier. So is next week.

I figured we need a little break from my relentless bludgeoning. So I searched for a clip I longed to watch, of Keith doing such a cute little dance, to this song from Tommy.

He was a warm, desperate, brilliant soul, and the more I watch his comedy, the more I realize he could easily have been a Robin Williams, a comedic juggernaut, but he was assigned by the gods to be the drummer of the Who, and to blow out Pete’s left ear with actual explosives on live television.

I do think Keith was genuinely insane, and if you listen to his drumming and try to understand what is going on between Keith Moon and what we call “time,” you may discover that he played outside of “time,” and outside of possibility.  Like some people can actually fly. My mother told me that about Nureyev. She said he hung in the air.

I interviewed Pete Townshend in 1993, at great great length, mostly about Tommy. A lot about Tommy anyway. SPIN magazine published a feature, two years later (when I finally finished transcribing it) and I have been meaning ever since to publish outtakes.

But like I said, it’s Keith Moon Week!

 

Brexit, A Week And A Half Later: Did The Sky Fall?

Posted on July 6, 2016

 

Editor’s Note: I have spent countless hours since early yesterday trying to de-spook the spooked text formatting of this new article by Stephen Ericson. I even braved the purchase, downloading, and teeth-gnashing enrollment protocols of Microsoft Office 2016, but it was all for naught. The line breaks refuse to behave in the published version. So,

just pretend

it’s a

 

T.S. Eliot…poem

and…forgive us this time.

CF.

***

 

As anyone who follows the news would have to, by now, know, back on June 23rd, the U.K. decided to leave the E.U.

Reaction here in the United States was, unlike the outcome of the vote, easily predictable.

That being because President Obama had gone to Britain for the sake of admonishing them for even having considered the notion of casting off the yoke of their continental overlords, (it will put Britain in the “back

of the queue”) everyone in the United States seemed to assume that the matter was a simple left/right

issue, such as is pretty much all politics in the United States.

A closer examination of the issue shows that it is, like all matters of European politics, much more

complicated than that. There were politicians and thinkers of deep thoughts on both sides of the British

political spectrum who advocated for either ‘stay’ or ‘leave’, yet the situation here in the states was treated

in the press largely, and again predictably, as a monolithic act of unbound, moronic racism. There was a

cartoon that made the rounds on Facebook of a map of the island anthropomorphized into a cantankerous

old man shooting himself in the foot. The foot in this case being somewhere near Wales.

Tisk tisk… stupid old British people.

The morning of the 24th saw CNN affix a camera to the Dow Jones Industrial Average as it “plummeted”,

an act that upon reflection almost reeks of sabotage. The responsible thing to do would be to let the

business channels handle it, the same way they almost always do in the event of a stock market situation,

but clearly CNN had taken sides on Brexit.

The Washington Post chimed in with an air of condescension; “The British are frantically Googling what

the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it”, typifying the British voter as a doddering old lady “Even though I

voted to leave, this morning I woke up and I just — the reality did actually hit me,” one woman told the

news channel ITV News. “If I’d had the opportunity to vote again, it would be to stay.”

By the following Sunday, CBS’s Sunday morning was running with the angle the whole thing had been a

remarkable mistake, issuing the new catch phrase “Regrexit”.

Flash forward the following Sunday, and…crickets. Brexit had vanished from the Sunday morning political

talk show circuit. There was simply nothing to say. Sure there was a good deal of other things to talk about;

Hillary and the FBI, the seemingly endless series of ISIS related terror attacks…

But surely Brexit had ruined the world economy, right? Well, not exactly. The DJI which post Brexit had

‘plummeted’ to 17,140 was back up to 17,949 by July 1st. The low it turns out was still 1480 points higher

than the last crash back in February due to low, not high, oil prices.

Ok, well that’s no big deal I’m sure the UK is suffering right?

The pound has in fact taken a hit vs. the Euro, but it seems to have stabilized. It may be a bit of an ongoing

process, but it’s nothing that sound fiscal policy shouldn’t take care of.
 Banking has also taken a hit; shares

of the Royal Bank of Scotland went from 7.49 on the 23rd to 4.69 on the 27th. But that 4.69 low is still

higher than the 1.03 it fell to in October of 08’, from which it rebounded to 19.46 in the following

December.

But what about trade? Surely the British are suffering due to rank xenophobia of their stogy pensioners,

right? Well, not exactly:

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/686038/New-trade-deals-lined-up-for-Britain-after-brexit

“Australia, Canada, South Korea, India and Mexico are all understood to be keen to get around the

negotiating table as soon as possible and American politicians are also eager to strike a deal.”

Not exactly ‘the back of the que’.

All of this leaves me a bit flabbergasted. When did seemingly the entirety of the left in the United States fall

so in love with the European Union? For that matter why would President Obama even bother to get

involved? Why would he threaten to punish them, mind you this would be in a time past his term as President,

with economic punishment for simply removing themselves from an economic partnership that

the majority of them feel is no longer working?

Why would the press in the United States offer up such a shallow take on the reasons for Brexit? Could the

entire moment have only been about nationalism and hence racism? Even if that were the case, and clearly

it isn’t, are countries simply not allowed to monitor their own immigration policies without being likened

to fascism?

As it turns out, the more one examines the E.U. the more a disconcerting picture emerges. Brussels dreams

up some arbitrary new and complicated regulation and suddenly it becomes law. British law. French law,

Polish and Italian law. The man on the street who thinks he lives in a democracy where the House of

Commons and the House of Lords hash out the day to day decisions that govern his life finds that his rights

are slowly being eroded, and that there’s nobody available to petition for change. The corridors of power

are across the channel and frankly they’re just not interested what you have to say.

Had the vote been presented in this way, would there be such a hub bub at all? If the question were put to

the public as “Do you want to be governed by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats from Brussels, or do

you want to be a part of a democracy centered in Westminster?” would it even have been a question at all?

So, it’s curious then that there’s been all of this hand wringing and finger pointing. People who love and

value democracy should be overjoyed that the will of the people has been done on this complicated issue.

Instead we get this wall of recrimination and then when that turns out to have been mostly false, stoney

silence.

I’m guessing that this is what we can expect for anyone who dares to stand up to the globalist agenda. It’s

going to be a bumpy ride.

 

–Stephen Ericson

Wakefield: 48 NIH, EPA Scientists Migrate To Non-Disastrous Side Of History, Admit Mercury On List Of Chemicals That Cause Brain Damage

Posted on July 6, 2016

An alliance of 48 “top scientists” have finally signed their names to the long known reality that “toxic chemicals” cause brain damage in children, including mercury as “prime example” # 6 on the list.

In his powerful July 1st talk at the 2nd Annual Health Freedom Rally, Andrew Wakefield identifies the political shapeshifting of the press release that was released the very same day as the health rally in Santa Monica, opposing the draconian and widely detested California Senate Bill No. 277, signed into law on July 1. On the same day, a federal lawsuit was filed against the new law.

“In this article,” Wakefield says with characteristic precision, “they talk about mercury, they talk about pharmaceuticals–they come within a hair’s breadth of saying what you have known all along…the people who wrote this paper wrote it in large part because they do not want to wind up on the wrong side of history, ” adding, “…I will not let them forget where they stood…They do not absolve their consciences that easily.”

The July 1 press release, which you can read in full here, reads:

“An unprecedented alliance of leading scientists, health professionals, and children’s health advocates agree for the first time that today’s scientific evidence supports a link between exposures to toxic chemicals in food, air and everyday products and children’s risks for neurodevelopmental disorders. The alliance, known as Project TENDR, is calling for immediate action to significantly reduce exposures to toxic chemicals to protect brain development for today’s and tomorrow’s children.

Neurodevelopmental disorders include intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorder, attention deficits, hyperactivity, and other maladaptive behaviors, and learning disabilities. Project TENDR’s consensus statement can be found here.

Prime examples of the chemicals and pollutants that are contributing to children’s learning, intellectual and behavioral impairment include:

Organophosphate (OP) pesticides
Polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) flame retardants
Combustion-related air pollutants, which generally include polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter
Lead
Mercury
Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs)

“This is truly an historic agreement. It’s the first time so many leaders in public health, science, and medicine agree on the message from the scientific evidence: that toxic chemicals are harming our children’s brain development,” said Irva Hertz-Picciotto, environmental epidemiologist at UC Davis and TENDR Co-Director. “Ten years ago, this consensus wouldn’t have been possible, but the research is now abundantly clear.”

This is a wild pack of self-congratulatory lies, of course. “Ten years ago,” the “science” was already abundantly clear. But cowards like to hide behind concepts like “consensus” and act as though it is a magician’s hat that makes their 20 years of denial and complicity disappear.

Adding insult to unimaginable injury, their next move will be to shroud themselves in glory, and of course, funding. One thing they will never have is what Wakefield has: A flawless track record of staying true to his mandate as a scientist, rather than waiting for “consensus,” on the stolen and betrayed lives of children.

That’s why his name is known, and theirs aren’t.

If you Google “Andrew Wakefield,” you will find over 9.5 million hits.

9,690,000 and counting.

 

Exchanges: Andrew Wakefield, Polly Tommey, And Sunday Times Reporter

Posted on July 5, 2016

 

 

On July 1, 2016, 6:38:24 AM PDT, Andrew Wakefield received an email. It read:

 

“Dear Mr. Wakefield, (italics mine)

I’m a reporter from the Sunday Times. We intend to publish a story this weekend about supposed treatments for autism, in which you will be named. I wanted to give you an opportunity to respond and hoped you could answer a couple of questions for me.

You continue to assert in videos posted online, interviews and publications, as well as in your new film Vaxxed, that vaccines cause autism.

However your studies claiming to show this link have been discredited and retracted, and other studies have shown there is no link between autism and MMR vaccine. You were struck off the GMC for your claims.

Critics say promoting the idea that vaccines cause autism is dangerous, as it encourages families not to vaccinate their children, which has led to outbreaks of measles.

Could you please tell me why you continue to promote the idea that vaccines cause autism?

Our story will also cover GcMAF and MMS, two unlicensed, unproven treatments for autism. You continue to promote both of these drugs, despite advice from both US and UK medical authorities that they are potentially harmful.

Could you please tell me why you continue to promote these products as effective treatments for autism?

Kind regards,

Josh Boswell

News Reporter

The Sunday Times

[Contact info]

 

Upon receiving this email, Andrew Wakefield left a phone message for Josh Boswell. At 12:58 pm, he let a publicist for Vaxxed know that he had done so.

“Have called and left a message. Waiting for reply.”

Three minutes later, the publicist replied:

“Noted. Thank you.”

The next day, July 2, at 16:21, Wakefield emailed Boswell, marking the email “URGENT!”

“For the record I have made contact and recorded the message for broadcast on social media. It is Saturday morning. You have not got back to me. Your allegations are false.

Andy Wakefield.”

Boswell replied the same day, at 10:50:30 am:

“Dear Mr. Wakefield,

 

Thank you for getting in touch. I’ve just emailed your PR–what with Brexit and various political stories we’re holding this for next week, so how about we set up a time for a call next week? Would Wednesday afternoon, say, 3/4 UK time be alright?”

At some point, Polly Tommey sent this to Josh Boswell (source: Facebook c/o Sheila Lewis Ealey’s page, July 4, 2016:)

Dear Josh,

I have just seen your email and think I have 10 mins to reply before your deadline.

1. I have never promoted or posted a link to GcMAF or MMS – in fact I have literally no clue what they are.
2. Autism Mother was set up years ago to create a forum for parents to openly discuss helping their children and themselves navigate autism and answer questions between themselves, it is a support group. I am one of many admins on this site.
3. Andy Wakefield and I have NEVER promoted any of these treatments.
4. Yes, I believe the MMR is unsafe and I would like to see vaccines tested safely. My son was damaged by the MMR. My personal advice to parents is to do their research before vaccinating, something I didn’t do.
5. The Autism Trust is dedicated to providing safe, secure and happy futures for adults with ASD. The Autism Trust does not promote treatments or discuss vaccinations.
6. Again, I have NEVER promoted such treatments.
7. I am proud to have Dr Andy Wakefield as my business partner at the Autism Media Channel.

Sincerely,

Polly Tommey

In the comments following this letter, some of the mothers of vaccine damaged children, way more motivated as fact-finders than newspaper journalists, checked the root source and confirmed what Tommey had stated in her letter.

Lucille Smith posted:

“There are 8 Posts with words of “GcMAF” on the Autism Mothers FB group, and one of the links to look to buy “GcMAF” is an invalid link, and none of these posts are posted by Polly, and as Polly said there are multiple admins on this page, and she didn’t post any of those posts. Here is post 1/8 from most recent posted in 2015 to the oldest post in 2011.”
Lucille Smith then posted screen shots of all 8 posts, between 2011 and 2015.

So, we now have a mystery.

Why does Sunday Times reporter Josh Boswell believe that Wakefield and/or Tommey promoted GcMAF or MMS?

And why didn’t he take Andrew Wakefield’s call? I am also baffled by the fact that he does not respond at all to Wakefield’s clear statement: “Your allegations are false.”

He just starts telling Wakefield what else the paper has been covering, like “Brexit.”

What does that have to do with anything?

It will be interesting to hear what the two parties say to one another on Wednesday, somewhere between 3 and 4 UK time.

Then, when all the facts and fact-struggles have been laid bare for the world to read, and hear, we’ll have the ambush itself.

 

 

 

 

 

What They Said: Lewis Morris

Posted on July 4, 2016

 

 

 

“Stand upright, speak thy thoughts, declare the truth thou hast, that all may share; Be bold, proclaim it everywhere: They only live who dare.”

What They Said: Dr. Rachael Ross, M.D.

Posted on July 1, 2016

 


“I’ve ordered thousands of vaccines in my career as a physician. Until recently I had never considered vaccine injury as more than folklore. And weeks ago I never would’ve believed a story about vaccine injured triplets. The past few weeks have been difficult. I have struggled to make sense of all I have seen and learned. I met a mother of triplets the other weekend, a very attractive white woman with years added onto her face and her smile. She recalled to me the day her triplets were born. She and her then husband were ecstatic that she was able to carry them for 36 weeks.
“At the time, mom was so happy that they were inside of her long enough to mature, they were born perfectly healthy. I can totally relate since I am now twelve weeks postpartum. I had very similar worries while carrying my princess. Her eyes dropped though as I gave her a hearty smile of excitement. On the same day that her triplets were given their six-month check-up and vaccines, was the same day that all three of her kids checked out. She said it was as if someone replaced her children with new ones. They unlearned all they knew and regressed and screamed for days. I stood there motionless and speechless. She didn’t want my pity, nor my tears, she just wanted me to know…
“…We all took an oath to first and foremost “Do No Harm.” It’s been difficult. Throughout my tenure as a physician, I have watched while our academy has pushed certain medication that we find years later has been causing more harm than good…that hurts.
“I have witnessed the vaccine schedule grow from 16 doses of 4 vaccines from birth to six years old when I was a child, to the current recommendation of 49 doses of 14 vaccines between birth and age six, and 69 doses of 16 vaccines between birth and the age of eighteen….and we’ve been giving them on-time, sometimes five shots a day to help kids ‘catch-up’, and all without question. Medical school and residency taught us to do so…”

Dr. Rachael Ross

The Mountain

Posted on July 1, 2016

I dedicate this one to Michael Specter, of The New Yorker, and Dr. David Gorski.

I wouldn’t want to be either of them, as history turns against everything they propagandized, and were paid so well to construct. It simply was not true. They must know that, by now, and it must feel like living a nightmare, to know you partook in this carnage.

If you want truth, you turn to human voices. Journalism (now a profane word we all flee from) is (originally) nothing except listening empathically.

Vaxxed: From Coverup To Catastrophe is not one “thing,” that can be denounced, de-listed from a film festival, or brought down, even by 1 million “scientists” signing their names to how irresponsible it is. That racket is over. For 30 years they’ve been telling that telling human stories is “irresponsible.”

The film is the catalyst for a domino effect of millions of voices, repressed memories, tears, details, building a mountain.  I see the mountain as limestone, a warm white color. If you bring your story to the mountain it will receive and hold it, and everything that went into it will withstand, for all eternity.

No matter what happens today with SB 277, and the truth rally in Santa Monica, it’s done. It can’t be undone.

“Flee as a bird to your mountain.”

Psalm 11:1

 

 

 

 

“Before they even gave him to me they gave him a Hep B shot, and uh, he screamed his head off, and then they finally gave him to me and he wouldn’t latch, for nursing.  I don’t know why they didn’t let me nurse first, before doing that, but he wouldn’t latch, and he never did, after that.”

–Nicole

 

 

Herzog On Ecstatic Truth: “And Facts Do Not Create Truth…They Do Not Create An Illumination”

Posted on June 29, 2016

“This was not a serious bullet.”

“It’s something very exhilarating for a man to be shot at, with little success.”

—Werner Herzog

 

What They Said: Andrew Wakefield

Posted on June 29, 2016

 

“If you interfere with nature. If you interfere with natural processes that have been established over tens of thousands of years, if you make assumptions about things as collectively sophisticated as viruses, then nature will exact a very very big price. And it won’t necessarily do so immediately. But that’s the way it works. So if you change the ecosystem, then just by, for example, raising the temperature of the earth by one degree, then there are massive knock-on effects.

So, if you interfere in the natural process of infection… let’s just take measles, for example… by changing the strain of the virus that people are exposed to, changing the age of which people are exposed […], if you change the route by which we’re exposed to a virus, if you change the dose of the virus that people are getting, you change the way in which they’re exposed to the viruses at the same time […]. If you change all of those things in a heartbeat, effectively, then that is a massive change in the dynamic between that infection and its host, the human being.
So, you must expect a huge consequence to come down the line. Why? Because these viruses are geared up to adapt, they’re geared up to survive. And they will do so at any cost. And they have an infinite capacity to mutate very rapidly to produce new variants of the virus that are capable of surviving in the new circumstances, and they’ll produce new diseases or new manifestations of the same old diseases. So, that’s what’s happened with vaccination.”

 

— Andrew Wakefield, MD

www.vaxxedthemovie.com

What They Said: James Baldwin

Posted on June 28, 2016

 

 

“It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else—housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers—would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities. Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough. There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”

 

–James Baldwin,

Letter From A Region In My Mind,

Published in The New Yorker, 1962

Psalms

Posted on June 28, 2016

 

 

Depart from me, ye evil doers, for I will keep the commandment of my God.

Uphold me according unto thy word, that I may live and let me not be ashamed of my hope.

 

Samech 115: 116

Fuel And Gratitude

Posted on June 28, 2016

 

The best way to support The Truth Barrier is to make a small recurring donation each month, if you are able to.

 

Thank you!

 

CF

 

 

What Is Left? Remain Campaign Funded By Big Banks: Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley

Posted on June 27, 2016

 

Hate As Virtue Among The Politically Correct: Essay By Brendan O’Neill

Posted on June 27, 2016

 

 

A superb essay but Brendan O’Neill, on neo-PC acceptable hatred of certain groups of people, such as older generations, Christians, labour (in the UK,) southerners in the U.S. and so forth.

O’Neill’s essay: “Who You’re Allowed To Hate,” is a contemporary companion piece to Havel’s An Anatomy Of Hate, but Havel was able to remain more lofty while O’Neill writes from the street, where rocks and bottles are flying.

Brendan O’Neill’s Wikipedia page has all the hate graffiti of somebody who dared speak out against Uni-Thought from the PC-Elite. (“Uni-thought” is my term for the big grey cloud that seeks to absorb any and all dissent from PC Global Elite Basics and convert it to virtual filth.)

Footnote: I was suspicious myself (and still am) of the ideological (see Wikipedia) progression from the British Revolutionary Communist Party to Living Marxism, to Spiked Online, to the anti-environmentalist movement and “Sense About Science” (which attacked countless factions of alternative medicine voices and dissenting scientists) but I have to admit the book title, Can I Recycle My Granny? by “Ethan Greenhart” is funny.

When Simple Clarity Seems Like A Diamond In The Sun (This Is Funny)

Posted on June 27, 2016

 

Snatched Sanity: A Reasonably Accurate Starting Definition Of The EU

Posted on June 25, 2016

It’s summer time so there’s a trend here toward journalism by sea gulling. Like seagulls will grab half a french fry our of your hand at Brighton Beach, I grab comments I like and pin them here. They are not intended to be exhaustive, only impressionistic beginnings.

(Actually there is no such thing as a “seagull.“)

 

So, I asked on FB: “What IS the EU?”

Always ask, first: WHAT is it? Inside that lies WHO is it? It follows naturally that whoever and whatever it is, it eats something. What does it eat?

We have to start somewhere.

Andrea Gambioli, mathematician, replied lucidly:

Comment #1:

“Here is a bit of history. Sorry, it’s just Garbagepedia, but I think it’s reasonably accurate. They want to wipe out European individual nationals and fuse them into an unreasonable and incompatible coalescence of cultures and economies as an intermediate step to the total globalization of NWO. An aberration that has impoverished most countries (those on the Mediterranean area for sure) .”


Comment #2:

“In Italy, when the Euro was introduced in 2001, the purchase power of salaries was basically HALVED overnight. What you could buy on one day with 100.000 Liras (the old currency) ended up being worth about 100 Euros, with an exchange rate of almost 2000:1. People with a decent salary found themselves at the brink of poverty overnight. It was the beginning of the end. Then there were all the new regulations imposed by the EU, for which for example, Italian milk producers could not exceed a certain “quota” of production, otherwise they would incur in huge fines (hundreds of thousands of Euros), leaving the Italian market to other producers. Result: the milk we drink in Italy is a mixture of German milk, mixed with reconstituted New-Zeland powder milk. But it’s sold as Italian. And our own producers are forced to throw in the garbage millions of liters of milk that exceed the maximum allowed by the EU. This is the fucked up economy EU has produced. Entire companies brought to bankruptcy, small entrepreneur pushed to suicide, average salaries brought down under the poverty level. Now, blame the Brits for wanting an exit. I don’t.”

–Andrea Gambioli, via FB

June 25, 2016

 

Manufactured Consent And Brexit Hysteria: Is The Dow Really “Plummeting?”

Posted on June 25, 2016

This comment on my Facebook page today by TTB contributor Stephen Ericson, felt like a tiny powerful essay in its own right so I mag-pied it.

 

“I’ve been at my job for 12 years and for 12 years they’ve had CNN on the TV screen when I sit down for breakfast. Not once in that time have I ever seen them fix a clock on the DJI because it was ‘plummeting’ for any reason save for a country declaring its independence from the NWO globalist agenda.

The DJI is still higher today than it was after the drop last August.

CNN et al. are actively trying to amplify the panic as hard as they can. They’ll tank our economy for ratings and more importantly their agenda.

IN ANY OTHER SITUATION THEY’D BE URGING CALM.

That doc is amazing BTW.”

–Stephen Ericson

What We Said: British Exit From EU Proves Media Impotent As Propaganda Organ

Posted on June 24, 2016

 

 

My sister Bibi called me earlier today and mentioned how “shocking” it was to hear the wall to wall propaganda of NPR about the importance of Britain’s “Remain” vote, and preserving the EU. Now they’ve moved over to Sky Is Falling rhetoric.  Bibi told me about a documentary about Brexit showing British fishermen who had to stop fishing because of an EU quota, and how the British government paid them to destroy their fishing boats. “Kind of like a Swedish thing,” she said, “as if they were helping them.” (We grew up in “socialist” Sweden.)

The globalist media “mainstream” (radical, really) media is defeated, shocked, and swollen with faux dread.

We see it again and again.  Mass “mainstream” media exposed as a propaganda organ for global elites using soft liberal PC jargon to guilt trip, deflect and paralyze factual discourse.

If you still believe the fairy tale that the EU exists so there could “never be another Hitler,” think again. According to recent in depth reports on AHC–Germany began economic and strategic restructuring for Germany and Europe’s future well before the end of the war, anticipating defeat, and laid the plans for the EU of today. Of course it helps that it has a nice ribbon around it, telling us it’s a big giant Nazi-citronella diffuser to protect the free world.

I spoke with my father, Barry, a journalist who has been broadcasting on American radio since 1960.

“Are you thrilled?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” he said, “but for reasons nobody has talked about yet. The BBC has been like an unending propaganda reel to remain. Remain. Remain.  It had no impact. I conclude that the major media has lost its Scorpionic power to sting.”

(This is mainly what we do. Call each other and come up with dramatic new ways of saying things are going in the right direction.)

 

 

Chronicles Of Tyranny Dressed As Liberalism: “The EU Is Turning Into A Dictatorship.”

Posted on June 24, 2016

“IT WAS DEVISED TO MAKE SURE THAT THE GREAT MASS OF THE PEOPLE COULD NOT CONTROL THE GOVERNMENT EVER AGAIN.”

 

[Thank you to Bibi Farber for sending me this.]

 

 

What They Said: David Cameron’s Resignation Speech After British Vote To Leave EU

Posted on June 24, 2016

 

 

1998 ESQUIRE O.J. Simpson Article “Whistling In The Dark,” By Celia Farber

Posted on June 21, 2016

This article about O.J. Simpson’s post trial life was originally published in 1998. Ezra Edelman’s “O.J. Made in America,” 7 1/2 docs-series and  movie on ESPN has stirred up new interest.

To read, scroll via the arrows beneath the image.

[Thank you Paul Bradicich.]

 

[pdf-embedder url=”http://truthbarrier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/CeliaFarber.Esquire.pdf”]

What They Said: Arthur Miller

Posted on June 20, 2016

 

 

 

“All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.”

What They Said: Amos Oz

Posted on June 10, 2016

 

“There are lots of women who are attracted to tyrannical men. Like moths to a flame. And there are some women who do not need a hero or even a stormy lover but a friend. Just remember that when you grow up. Steer clear of the tryant lovers, and try to locate the ones who are looking for a man as a friend, not because they are feeling empty themselves but because they enjoy making you full too. And remember that friendship between a woman and a man is something much more precious and rare than love: love is actually something quite gross and even clumsy compared to friendship. Friendship includes a measure of sensitivity, attentiveness, generosity, and a finely tuned sense of moderation.”


― Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness

Havel’s Masterpiece: The Anatomy Of Hate

Posted on June 2, 2016

Editor’s note: I think this may be the single greatest essay ever written. Nothing else I am aware of is a more comprehensive confession of why and how we succumb to hatred. In today’s climate, we readily make excuses for hate. The media is monetized, organized hate. Politics too. “Science” has become a game of hate. Very few question hate itself. Political Correctness is the cultural religion that promises its devotees that hatred will deliver them to a promised land, where the guilty have at last been bludgeoned into silence. Hatred of Donald Trump has brought hatred to new vistas; If you question how far the hatred has gone, you will be hated for not hating. His haters say they hate him because he represents hate.

Havel’s essay does not ask “what?” but “how?” and “why?”

–CF

 

THE ANATOMY OF HATE


Dear friends,

 

As I look over this assembly, I don’t imagine there are many of us who could contemplate our theme hate from the inside, almost as a kind of autopsy, as a state of the soul that we have personally experienced. We are, rather, uneasy observers of this phenomenon, and thus we try to reflect on it only from the outside. This applies to me as well. Among my bad qualities and there are certainly enough of them there is not, oddly enough, the capacity to hate. So I too look at hatred only as an observer, whose understanding of it is not profound, but whose concern about it is.

When I think about the people who have hated me personally, or still do, I realize that they share several characteristics which when you put them together and analyze them suggest a certain general interpretation of the origin of their hatred.

They are never hollow, empty, passive, indifferent, apathetic people. Their hatred always seems to me the expression of a large and unquenchable longing, a permanently unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire, a kind of desperate ambition. In other words, it is an active inner capacity that always leads the person to fixate on something, always pushes him in a certain direction, and is in a sense stronger than he is. I certainly don’t think hatred is the mere absence of love or humanity, a mere vacuum in the human spirit. On the contrary, it has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the dependence on them, and in fact, the delegation of a piece of one’s own identity to them. Just as a lover longs for the loved one and cannot get along without him, the hater longs for the object of his hatred. And like love, hatred is ultimately an expression of longing for the absolute, albeit an expression that has become tragically inverted.

People who hate, at least those I have known, harbour a permanent, irradicable feeling of injury, a feeling that is, of course, out of all proportion to reality. It is as though these people wanted to be endlessly honoured, loved and respected, as though they suffered from the chronic and painful awareness that others are ungrateful and unforgivably unjust towards them, not only because they don’t honour and love them boundlessly, as they ought, but because they even or so it seems ignore them.

In the subconsciousness of haters there slumbers a perverse feeling that they alone possess the truth, that they are some kind of superhumans or even gods, and thus deserve the world’s complete recognition, even its complete submissiveness and loyalty, if not its blind obedience. They want to be the centre of the world and are constantly frustrated and irritated because the world does not accept and recognize them as such; indeed, it may not even pay any attention to them, and perhaps it even ridicules them.

They are like spoiled or badly brought up children who think their mother exists only to worship them, and who think ill of her because she occasionally does something else, like spending time with her other children, her husband, a book or her work. They feel all this as an injustice, an injury, a personal attack, a questioning of their own sense of self-worth. The inner charge of energy, which might have been love, is perverted into hatred toward the imputed source of injury.

In hatred just as in unhappy love there is a desperate kind of transcendentalism. People who hate wish to attain the unattainable and are consumed by the impossibility of attaining it. They see the cause of this in the shameful world that prevents them from attaining their object. Hatred is a diabolical attribute of the fallen angel. It is a state of the spirit that aspires to be God, that may even think it is God, and is tormented by evidence that it is not and cannot be. It is the attribute of a creature who is jealous of God and eats his heart out because the road to the throne of God, where he thinks he should be sitting, is blocked by an unjust world that is conspiring against him.

The person who hates is never able to see the cause of his metaphysical failure in himself and the way he so completely overestimates his own worth. In his eyes, it is the surrounding world that is to blame. The trouble is that this is too abstract, vague and incomprehensible. It has to be personified because hatred as a very particular kind of tumescence of the soul requires a particular object. And so the person who hates seeks out a particular offender. Of course this offender is merely a stand-in, arbitrarily chosen and therefore easily interchangeable. I have observed that for the hater, hatred is more important than its object; he can rapidly change objects without changing anything essential in the relationship. This is understandable. He does not harbour hatred toward a particular person, but to what that person represents: a complex of obstacles to the absolute, to absolute recognition, absolute power, total identification with God, truth and the order of the world. Hatred for one’s neighbour, therefore, would seem to be only a physiological embodiment of hatred for the universe that is perceived to be the cause of one’s own universal failure.

It is said that those who hate suffer from an inferiority complex. This may not be the most precise way to put it. I would rather say that they are people with a complex based on the fatal perception that the world does not appreciate their true worth.

Another observation seems worth making here. The man who hates does not smile, he merely smirks; he is incapable of making a joke, only of bitter ridicule; he can’t be genuinely ironic because he can’t be ironic about himself. Only those who can laugh at themselves can laugh authentically. A serious face, quickness to take offence, strong language, shouting, the inability to step outside himself and see his own foolishness these are typical of one who hates.

Such qualities reveal something very significant. The hater utterly lacks a sense of belonging, of taste, of shame, of objectivity. He lacks the capacity to doubt and ask questions, the awareness of his own transience and transcience of all things, he lacks the experience of genuine absurdity, that is the absurdity of his own existence, the feeling of his own alienation, his awkwardness, his failure, his limitations or his guilt. The common denominator of all this is clearly a tragic, almost metaphysical lack of a sense of proportion. The hateful person has not grasped the measure of things, the measure of his own possibilities, the measure of his rights, the measure of his own existence and the measure of recognition and love that he can expect. He wants the world to belong to him with no strings attached; that is, he wants the world’s recognition to be limitless. He does not understand that the right to the miracle of his own existence and the recognition of that miracle are things he must earn through his actions. He sees them, on the contrary, as a right granted to him once and for all, unlimited and never called into question. In short, he believes that he has something like an unconditional free pass anywhere, even to heaven. Anyone who dares to scrutinize his pass is an enemy who does him wrong. If this is how he understands his right to existence and recognition, then he must be constantly angry at someone for not drawing the proper conclusions.

I have noticed that all haters accuse their neighbours and through them the whole world of being evil. The motive force behind this wrath is the feeling that these evil people and the evil world are denying them what is naturally theirs. In other words, haters project their own anger onto others. Here too they are like spoiled children. They don’t see that they must sometimes show themselves worthy of something and if they don’t automatically have everything they think they should, this is not because someone is being nasty to them.

In hatred there is great egocentrism and great self-love. Because they long for absolute self-confirmation and do not encounter it, hating people feel that they are the victims of an insidious evil, an omnipresent injustice that has to be eliminated to give justice its due. But in their minds, justice is turned on its head. They see it as a duty to grant them something that cannot be granted: the whole world.

The person who hates is unhappy, because whatever he does to achieve full recognition and to destroy those he thinks are responsible for his lack of recognition, he can never attain the success he longs for, that is, the success of the absolute. The full horror of his powerlessness, or rather his incapacity to be God, always will burst through from somewhere perhaps from the happy, conciliatory and forgiving smile of his victim.

There is only one hatred; there is no difference between individual hatred and group hatred. Anyone who hates an individual is almost always capable of succumbing to group hatred or even of spreading it. I would even say that group hatred be it religious, ideological or doctrinal, social, national or any other kind is a kind of funnel that ultimately draws into itself everyone disposed toward hatred. In other words, the most proper background and human potential of all group hatred is a collection of people who are capable of hating individuals.

But more than that, collective hatred shared, spread and deepened by people capable of hatred has a special magnetic attraction and therefore has the power to draw countless other people into its vortex, people who initially did not seem endowed with the ability to hate. They are merely morally small and weak, selfish people with lazy intellects, incapable of thinking for themselves and therefore susceptible to the suggestive influence of those who hate.

The attraction of collective hatred infinitely more dangerous than the hatred of individuals for other individuals derives from several apparent advantages.

1) Collective hatred eliminates loneliness, weakness, powerlessness, a sense of being ignored or abandoned. This, of course, helps people deal with lack of recognition, lack of success, because it offers them a sense of togetherness. It creates a strange brotherhood, founded on a simple form of mutual understanding that makes no demands whatsoever. The conditions of membership are easily met, and no one need fear that he will not pass muster. What could be simpler than sharing a common object of aversion and accepting a common “ideology of injury” that justifies the aversion expressed to that object? To say, for instance, that Germans, Arabs, Blacks, Vietnamese, Hungarians, Czechs, Gypsies or Jews are responsible for all the misery of the world, and above all for the despair in every wronged soul, is so easy and so understandable! You can always find enough Vietnamese, Hungarians, Czechs, Gypsies or Jews whose behaviour can be made to illustrate the notion that they are responsible for everything.

2) The community of those who hate offers another great advantage to its members. They can endlessly reassure one another of their own worth, either through exaggerated expressions of hatred for the chosen group of offenders, or through a cult of symbols and rituals that affirm the worth of the hating community. Uniforms, common dress, insignia, flags and favourite songs bring the participants closer together, confirm their identity, increase, strengthen, and multiply their own value in their eyes.

3) Whereas individual aggressiveness is always risky because it raises the spectre of individual responsibility, a society of hating individuals in a sense legitimizes aggressiveness. Expressing it as a group creates the illusion of legitimacy or at least the sense of a “common cover.” Hidden within a group, a pack or a mob, every potentially violent person can dare to do more; each one eggs the other on, and all of them precisely because there are more of them justify one another.

4) Ultimately, the principle of group hatred considerably simplifies the lives of all those who hate and all those who are incapable of independent thinking, because it offers them a very simple and, immediately recognizable object of hatred. The process of manifesting the general injustice of the world in a particular person who therefore must be hated is made wonderfully easier if the “offender” is identifiable by the colour of his skin, his name, his language, his religion or where he lives.

Collective hatred has another insidious advantage: the modest circumstances of its birth. There are many apparently innocent and common states of mind that create the almost unnoticeable antecedents to potential hatred, a wide and fertile field on which the seeds of hatred will quickly germinate and take root.

Let me at least give you three examples.

Where can this particularizing feeling of universal injustice flourish better than where genuine injustice has been done? Feelings of not being appreciated, logically enough, grow best in a situation where someone has been humiliated, insulted or cheated. The best environment for a chronic feeling of injury is one of genuine injury. In short, collective hatred gains its veracity and allure most easily wherever a group of people lives in a genuine want, that is, in an environment of human misery.

A second example. The miracle of human thought and human reason is bound up with the capacity to generalize. It is hard to imagine the history of the human spirit without this great power. In a sense, anyone who thinks generalizes. On the other hand, the ability to generalize is a fragile gift that has to be handled with great care. A less perceptive soul can easily overlook the hidden seeds of injustice that may lie in the act of generalization. We have all made observations or expressed opinions of one kind or another about various peoples. We may say that the French, the English, or Russians are like this or that; we don’t mean ill by it, we are only trying, through our generalizations, to see reality better. But there is a grave danger hidden in this kind of generalization. A group of people defined in a certain way in this case ethnically is, in a sense, subtly deprived of individual spirits and individual responsibilities, and we endow it with an abstract, collective sense of responsibility. Clearly, this is a wonderful starting point for collective hatred. Individuals become a priori bad or evil simply because of their origin. The evil of racism, one of the worst evils in the world today, depends among other things directly on this type of careless generalization.

Finally, the third antecedent of collective hatred I want to mention here is something I would call collective “otherness.” One aspect of the immense and wonderful colour and mystery of life is not only that each person is different and that no one can perfectly understand anyone else, but also that groups of people differ from one another as groups: in their customs, their traditions, their temperament, their way of life and thinking, their hierarchy of values, and of course in their faith, the colour of their skin, their way of dressing and so on. This “otherness” is truly collective. And it is quite understandable that the “otherness” of one group can make it seem, to the group we belong to, surprising, alien, and even ridiculous. And just as we are surprised at how different others are, so others are surprised by how different we are from them.

This “otherness” of different communities can of course be accepted with understanding and tolerance as something that enriches life; it can be honoured and respected, it can even be enjoyed. But by the same token, it can also be a source of misunderstanding and aversion toward others. And therefore once again it is a fertile ground for future hatred.

Few of those who move on the thin, ambiguous and dangerous terrain created by the awareness of a genuine wrong, the ability to generalize and that awareness of “otherness”, can from the outset detect the presence of the cuckoo’s eggs of collective hatred that can be laid in this terrain or that already have been laid there.

Some observers have described Central and Eastern Europe today as a powder keg, an area of growing nationalism, ethnic intolerance and expressions of collective hatred. This area is even often described as a possible source of future European instability and of a serious threat to peace. In the subtext of such pessimistic reflections, one can sense, here and there, a kind of nostalgia for the good old days of the Cold War, when the two halves of Europe kept each other in check and produced a kind of peace.

I don’t share the pessimism of such observers. Even so, I admit that the corner of the world which I come from could become if we do not maintain vigilance and common sense fertile soil in which collective hatred could grow. This is so for many more or less understandable reasons.

In the first place, you have to realize that living in Central and Eastern Europe are many nations and ethnic groups that have blended together in various ways. It is almost impossible to imagine an ideal border that would separate these nations and ethnic groups into territories of their own. Thus, there are many minorities, and minorities within minorities, and the existing borders are sometimes rather artificial, so that in fact it is a kind of international melting pot. At the same time, these nations have had very few historic opportunities to seek their own political identity and their own statehood. For centuries, they lived under the shelter of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and after a brief pause between the wars they were, in one way or another, subjugated by Hitler and then immediately, or shortly thereafter, by Stalin. The nations of Western Europe had decades and centuries to develop to where they are; the nations of Central Europe had only a few years between the two world wars.

Understandably, then, they carry within their collective subconsciousness a feeling that history has done them wrong. An exaggerated feeling of injustice a condition for hatred could quite logically find fertile ground for its birth and growth here.

The totalitarian system that held sway for so long in most of these countries was outstanding, among other things, for its tendency to make everything the same, to control and coordinate things, to make them uniform. For decades, it harshly suppressed whatever authenticity or if you like “otherness” the subject nations had. From the structure of the state administrations to the red stars on the rooftops, everything was the same that is, imported from the Soviet Union. Is it any wonder then, that the moment these countries rid themselves of the totalitarian system, they suddenly perceived, with unusual clarity, their mutual and suddenly liberated “otherness”? And would it be any wonder if this long-invisible, and therefore necessarily untested and intellectually undigested “otherness” did not cause surprise? Rid of the uniforms and the masks that were imposed on us, we are looking for the first time into one another’s real faces. Something has come about that might be called the “shock of otherness.” And this has given rise to another favourable condition for collective aversion, which in the right circumstances could grow into collective hatred.

The simple fact is that not only have the nations of this area not had enough time to mature as states, they have not had enough time to get used to one another’s politically defined otherness.

Here we may once more invoke a comparison with children: In many regards, these nations have simply not had enough time to become political adults.

After all they have gone through, they feel a natural need to make their existence quickly visible and to achieve recognition and acknowledgement. They simply wish to be known, to be consulted along with the rest of the world. They want their special “otherness” to be acknowledged. And at the same time, still full of inner uncertainty about themselves and the degree of recognition they enjoy, they look at one another somewhat nervously and ask whether those other nations which moreover have suddenly become as different as themselves are not stealing some of the attention that is rightfully theirs.

For years the totalitarian system in this part of Europe suppressed civic autonomy and the rights of individuals, whom they tried to turn into pliant cogs in its machine. The lack of civic culture, which the system destroyed, and the general demoralizing pressure ultimately can make possible the careless generalizing that always goes along with national intolerance. Respect for human rights, which rejects the principle of collective responsibility, is always the result of a minimum level of civic culture.

It may be clear, from this rather brief and thus necessarily simplified account, that in our part of Europe, conditions are relatively favourable for the rise of national intolerance or even hatred.

There is one more important factor here. After the initial joy about our own liberation comes the inevitable phase of disillusion and depression. It is only now, when we can describe and name everything truthfully, that we see the full extent of the awful legacy left to us by the totalitarian system, and realize how long and difficult will be the task of repairing all the damage.

This state of general frustration may provoke some to vent their anger on substitute victims, who will stand as proxies for the main and now liquidated offender, the totalitarian system. Helpless rage seeks its lightning rod.

I repeat that if I speak of the nationalistic hatred in Central and Eastern Europe, I’m not talking about it as our certain future but as a potential threat.

We must understand this threat in order to confront it effectively. It is a task that faces all of us who live in the former Soviet Bloc.

We must struggle energetically against all the incipient forms of collective hatred, not only on principle, because evil must always be confronted, but in our own interests.

The Hindus have a legend concerning a mythical bird called Bherunda. The bird had a single body, but two necks, two heads and two separate consciousnesses. After an eternity together, these two heads began to hate each other and decided to harm each other. Both of them swallowed pebbles and poison, and the result was predictable: The whole Bherunda bird went into spasms and died with loud cries of pain. It was brought back to life by the infinite mercy of Krishna, to remind people forever how all hatred ends up.

We who live in the newly created democracies of Europe should remind ourselves of this legend each day. As soon as one of us succumbs to the temptation to hate another, we will all end up like the Bherunda bird.

With this difference. There will be no earthly Krishna around to liberate us from our new misfortune.

 

–Vaclav Havel,

 

Oslo Conference,

Oslo, August 28, 1990

 

The Truth Barrier: A Short, Devastating Film

Posted on May 31, 2016

 

Will Hogan Victory Have A Chilling Effect On Sadistic Websites?

Posted on May 26, 2016

Latest stunning developments in the Gawker v Hogan lawsuit, the same day as a Florida judge upheld the verdict and denied Gawker a new trial.

From the NYT article:

“Mr. Thiel has donated money to the Committee to Protect Journalists and has often talked about protecting freedom of speech. He said he did not believe his actions were contradictory. “I refuse to believe that journalism means massive privacy violations,” he said. “I think much more highly of journalists than that. It’s precisely because I respect journalists that I do not believe they are endangered by fighting back against Gawker.”

He continued, “It’s not like it is some sort of speaking truth to power or something going on here. The way I’ve thought about this is that Gawker has been a singularly terrible bully. In a way, if I didn’t think Gawker was unique, I wouldn’t have done any of this. If the entire media was more or less like this, this would be like trying to boil the ocean.”

Comment from Breitbart.com:

“I applaud Peter Thiel for his generous help taking down Gawker. Gawker is only the visible open sore on a malignant internet culture that hides in anonymity while torturing other people to reputational death and sometimes even real death. We shudder at the stories of the old Roman coliseum where people died in gruesome ways for the entertainment of others. Welcome to the 21st century version of the old Roman circus.”

DeNiro And Weinstein Making Vaccine Movie

Posted on May 22, 2016

Finally, somebody is making sense. The Kool-Aid is not working anymore:

 

“And they were saying it’s because of the filmmaker and he was discredited, but how was he discredited? By the medical establishment? There’s a lot going on that I still don’t understand, but it makes me question the whole thing, and the whole vaccine issue is a real one. It’s big money. So it did get attention. I was happy about that.”

 

Robert DeNiro

 

Read the article here.

Love Song To The Smallest Bit Of Paradise

Posted on May 21, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was easier to love at that time,
It was the smallest bit of paradise, no more than a
drop of rain that fell as we fished.
The ant with her straw did not give up,
she is always the same.
She gleamed in the sun, she was on her way somewhere
with a secret she is still full of
and on the jetty where we lay on our stomachs we saw
the sea’s fluted bottom: the one who
slept down there with skin shining
did not forget us,
we were in love with the world then: there is

the beach where I poured sand over you,
the fear too is there, that glittering sense
of not really understanding, of being outside,
a part of it remains, a part
one shares with others
when one loses what one loves,
when one recreates it

when the smallest bit of paradise goes on glittering
among the days that we live.

 

 

Inga-Britt Wik

From A Way To Measure Time (Contemporary Finnish Literature)

 

Was Pan Ambushed By Vaxxed? More Info Emerges About Pan’s Despotic Conduct

Posted on May 18, 2016

 

Errors are under-rated in journalism. Minor errors are not journalism’s cancer–willful distortions are. Minor errors are more interesting and more complex. For when minor errors are corrected, they are often so fruitfully corrected that it winds up being a good thing you made the error to begin with.

My father, a journalist, has many Southern influenced truisms, including: “Too many good stories are ruined by over-verification.”

True. But not this time!

In my May 15 post titled Sheila Lewis Ealey: Voice of the Broken, Voice of the Unbroken, I referred to a journalistic tradition called an “ambush” which is when reporters, usually with cameras, surprise an antagonistic source and film them running, or ducking into a car, or putting a hand over the camera lens, etc. And we take pleasure from seeing the guilty person flee. (It also greatly enhances the sense that they are guilty.)

A reader named Jen wrote this extremely interesting (and gracious) correction to our comments page, detailing just how much Senator Richard Pan despises the democratic process, and just how much activists, and even constituents did, over a period of fourteen months, prior to Vaxxed’s visit/ambush, to try to communicate with him.

Thank you Jen! (I don’t know your last name, at “press” time.)

Pan is not in his right mind. About that we all agree. But actually, technically, any non scheduled interview, no matter the pre-history, is still an “ambush.”

But I think the ambush has its place, and this was definitely it.

–CF

 

 

Jen’s letter:

 

Bravo! Well said. We are near a tipping point, The truth is set to cascade.
I’d like to offer one tiny correction: Del, Andy, and Polly didn’t ambush Senator Pan. There were a group of Sacramento activists accompanying them in the Capitol that day, including four of Pan’s constituents. Pan and his staff knew we’d be coming. For two weeks we had been communicating with his office in attempt to get an appointment. We were using the online appointment setting system (which I assume is broken as I’ve been using it in attempts at getting an appointment for 14 months now, have yet to have an appointment request honored). There was a letter written requesting an appointment that was signed by almost 50 of his district constituents (I know, I wrote the letter), which was emailed AND hand delivered the week before (this in conjunction to phone call requests for an appointment as well). Pan knew we were coming, it wasn’t an ambush, yet he still ran. We were granted appointments with several other legislators; some appointments made in advance, some granted on the spot. A Sacramento activist team visited EVERY SINGLE Senate and Assembleypersons office, gave them a Vaxxed postcard and invited them to the movie (they were in session the week Vaxxed was playing in Sacramento). We also told every office that Del, Andy, and Polly would be in the building and might stop by. Some gracious representatives welcomed the entire team with open arms, Senators Anderson and Moorlach for example. Some representatives granted on the spot meetings without prior notice; Assemblymen Gomez for instance. Some, who were very PRO SB277 granted us an audience; Ben Allen’s COS for instance. In case you’re not familiar, Ben Allen is the co-author of SB277. We were told over and over that day at the Capitol that the implementation of the bill is a nightmare and that constituents and schools are drowning the staffers with phone callsand emails; office after office told us that Pan has been unwilling to respond to their requests for guidance. So you see, it’s not just Wakefield and Co. Pan’s running from, it’s not just his constituents he’s running from, it’s also his colleagues.

He is a man without integrity. He doesn’t answer to the people, he answers to special interests. And he is the perfect example of all that’s wrong in our political system.

FYI- in 14 months not one of us from this activism movement has been granted an appointment. NOT ONE! Last August I went to his office with a Nun and a Pastor, whom are both very upset about this law. As a thank you for our desperate attempt to speak with Pan we were escorted to the Capitol Police office. This is how Pan and his staff operate. Truth and integrity are not currencies this man operates with.

 

Here is a different “Pan Ran” video from the last one published here:

 

Sheila Lewis Ealey: Voice Of The Broken, Voice Of The Unbroken

Posted on May 15, 2016

“We’ll be fighting in the streets, with our children at our feet.”

–Pete Townshend

 

“Revolutions are times of reversal; those who have been defenseless for so long suddenly find teeth. Their numbers have to make up for the experience in viciousness which they lack.”

Elias Canetti, Crowds  and Power,

“Reversal Crowds” pp.58

 

 

 

 

As I write this, Vaxxed, the film, the movement, the awakening, is sweeping the country, arriving in hungry city after hungry city. Today Atlanta. Next Chicago. Compton LA on Thursday.
Nations around the world are begging for Vaxxed to come to them too. Film stars, rap stars, politicians, even doctors are getting on board, after they see, and are transformed by the film.

There is now more demand than Vaxxed can even meet. Perhaps they are hiring more staff.

As one veteran vaccine warrior mother put it on FB: “The tide is not turning. It has turned.”

(By the way, my desk’s paperweight is a medium sized chunk of the Berlin Wall, which I picked up myself, in November 1989. Technically it is the property of GDR, but that does not exist anymore. This is my wish for the CDC.)

Last week, the Vaxxed team– now a touring three piece rock band, or maybe The Avengers–Del Bigtree, (representing, science journalism, and major league baseball)  Andrew Wakefield (representing persecuted science, and big picture) and Polly Tommy (representing the awakened mother, media, and the Mod*) (*will explain later) did what is known as an “ambush” at SB 277 architect Senator Richard Pan’s (D-Sacramento) office, in an effort to talk to him. Pan bolted down a corridor, and two flights of stairs, igniting the obvious hashtag #PanRan, which exploded on social media.

(It is funny, when Del Bigtree says, “I have to hand it to Pan. He is fast.”)

I remember learning that Robespierre feared laughter more than anything, and that when he heard it, he knew he was finished. I think, also, when the powerful begin to run from their own power bases, offices, behaving as prey, not predator, you don’t have to be Elias Canetti to understand it’s getting real.

“Thank you!” they shout, in the dark, as they stand and applaud, by the hundreds, in city after city, as the credits roll. The people, the parents, witnesses, now participatory audience.

The film does’t just tell them; They tell the film.

Vaxxed keeps showing us all that it is now its own organism some good  dragon from another world, composed of the repressed truths of millions.

Dr. Wakefield’s reputation assassins never dreamed a “disgraced” (by whom? Brian Deer?) and brutalized gastroenterologist  could re-emerge as a documentary film producer with a huge hit. It is like the stuff my friend Roland Kelts speaks and writes of, in “JapanAmerica” where Tezuka’s “Mighty Atom,” later “Astro Boy,” a cartoon hero in postwar Japan, has a heart powered by nuclear energy.

Transformation is the moral key to every hero, in every fairy tale, no? They had their turn. Now it’s Dr. Wakefield’s turn. The pharma-lords presume to own all media, all art forms–to own sound.

The one part I will never understand is why they pay such fortunes for “PR” yet they are so incredibly dumb.

“Can everybody please stand up who has a vaccine injured child?” says Del Bigtree, as the camera turns to the audience and more than half of them stand up.

“It’s real,” whispered a man in the row behind me, at one screening as the lights went up. He was a pediatrician.

People. Crowds. Lines, stretching around blocks, packed movie theaters, colliding and exploding, crying and cheering. The words “Thank you!” being spontaneously shouted out as people stand up and applaud until their hands are sore.

And a mainstream press that sounds more and more meek and confused, seeming not to be getting clear commands from Moscow–but losing its fangs, its abuses and derisions that were such a given, just weeks ago. Suddenly words like “discredited” and “elaborate fraud,” fall away, clearing the path for what everybody intuitively knows is coming next.

 

 

Every moment of this film is a fragment of a whole truth re-assembling itself after a shattering, so many years ago. I call Vaxxed: “A tour de force of investigative journalism.”

To those “going-down-with-the-shippers” who, in captured pro-pharma media, are whining that the CDC Whistleblower is only heard on tape, and that he did not know he was being taped, and that (naturally) he never appears on camera, let me say this:

Let’s bear in mind that the foundations of (quasi-mythical) investigative journalism after Watergate were laid by a never named source our culture came to call “Deep Throat.”

Woodward and Bernstein could not have dreamed of audio, being part of their “proof,” space. And though Brian Hooker acknowledges what we all feel–it’s uncomfortable to record a person without their knowledge–it does not lower the truth quota, it raises it.

There is somebody whose energy on screen makes Vaxxed seem to suddenly lift off. Takes it to the “next level.”

Her name is Sheila Lewis Ealey, she lives in New Orleans, and has three children. She tells the story of how she brought her two twins in, a boy, and a girl, in for their shots, around one year old. Her boy got one of the shots intended for his sister–an extra MMR shot. He screamed bloody murder, went limp, lost his joy, and all the other classic symptoms of vaccine induced brain damage.   Temple and Lucinda are now 16.  Temple has severe autism. His twin sister speaks three languages, is a straight A student, and plays classical piano.

When Sheila speaks of the dreams she had for her son, that he would grow up, have a family, be a father–her face soaked in tears–something happens. I think we are a very, very repressed society.

We need the Sheilas of this world to allow us to feel what we feel. It’s hard to describe the quality. Heart, soul, warmth, and no hesitation about reaching all the way in to the place where when she tells it, she is re-living it.

I stole a fragment of Sheila from my iPhone when I saw Vaxxed for the fifth time, with my son. He stopped me. “Mom, that’s illegal,” he whispered. Sorry. But it’s only a snippet:

 

 

And here is a video Sheila made for specially for The Truth Barrier, when news broke that CDC Whistleblower Dr. William Thompson planned, this month,  to reconfigure the data of the central paper at the heart of the Vaxxed scandal:

 

 

Sheila told me that her boy Temple, when he saw himself on film, stood up and clapped. He doesn’t know he is vaccine damaged. He thinks children in wheelchairs are, and he wants to help fight, for them.”No vaccines for Temple, Mommy!” he told her.

Rosie O’Donnell saw Vaxxed and sent a private tweet to Sheila. If we obtain permission, I can report it to you another time. But let’s try to get away from all the celebrity obsession.

Vaxxed has real stars.

–CF

Sheila Lewis Ealey will be on the panel following Thursday’s screening of Vaxxed in Compton, Los Angeles: 301 North Tamarind Avenue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is a video describing the Pan Ran incident:

 

Abandonment, According To Your Brain

Posted on May 14, 2016

 

 

I woke to feed the cats. I wandered to my desk and punched in a search on “PTSD, Abandonment Rage, Brain Chemistry.”

I found a fascinating article on the subject.

An outtake:

“The emotional volcano of abandonment unleashes a torrent of primal emotions that overwhelm us. Molten lava spews from the rock bottom of our emotional core ripping up through our freshly opened abandonment wound. No wonder the event is traumatizing! Technically speaking, being rejected by one’s love object triggers primal abandonment fear – the fear of being left by one’s source of vital sustenance. Abandonment, our first fear, is in response to being expelled from our mother’s womb. This sensation is stored in the amygdala – the site of emotional memory responsible for conditioning the brain’s fight/freeze/flight response. The emotional memory is intact enough at or before birth to lay down traces of the feelings and sensations of birth trauma as well as some prenatal antecedents. These primitive feelings can be reawakened by later events, especially those reminiscent of unwanted or abrupt separations from our attachments.

In adult abandonment, these primitive sensations become activated, creating terror and panic. As the old infantile urgencies emerge into the current crisis, it precipitates a symbiotic regression in which we feel unable to survive without our loved one. We become suffused with the intense stress of helplessness, especially as we try to compel our loved one to return but remain unsuccessful in doing so. This failure to compel can cause us to judge ourselves as having what Michael Balint calls a “limited capacity to perform the work of conquest – the work necessary to transform an indifferent object into a participating partner.” Balint suggests that experiencing this ‘limited capacity’ is sufficiently traumatic to produce a fault line in the psyche which renders us more vulnerable to break down emotionally when faced with problems in our relationships.”

What He Said: Conversation With Grandpa

Posted on May 13, 2016

“His Unmistakeable Goodness Dealt Anti-Semitism A Painful Blow.”

—Barry Farber

 

Is the world redeemable? Is there any hope at all?

Once a friend, acting teacher and trauma coach David Tawil, emailed me a photograph of a sunflower that grew straight up through a concrete sidewalk in Coney Island, and I laughed through tears.

Majestic and undaunted, it said: “Take that modern world. Take that….electronic disconnect, despair, faithlessness. I am SUNFLOWER.”

I feel the same way about my father’s email today, pasted below. Just as I was myself becoming “the sidewalk”– it arrived. The now digitized recording of my father’s 1964 interview with his grandfather, my great grandfather, Alexander Marcus, who came from Tsarist Russia. The broadcast was so loved, it went viral, even though “viral” at the time meant WOR, and my father, had to make recorded discs and mail them to people. (I absolutely see my father doing this, night after night, with stacks of envelopes…)

Barry’s email, (re-published without permission of the author but soon as he gets off the air tonight I’ll get permission.)

 

Dearest Cousins:

A lucky break now brightens our path. (The Persian proverb tells us “Good fortune favors the industrious!”)

In September of 1963 when my elder daughter Bibi was three months old and Celia wasn’t yet born, I recorded an interview with Grandpa Marcus. He told of life in his “Fiddler on the Roof” shtetl in Russia, the big Trip to America, going to live with his brother in Savannah, watching Colonel Theodore Roosevelt marshal his troops for the Spanish-American War on horseback on Oglethorp Avenue, raising a family in the New World and so on.

When Grandpa died in January, 1964 I played that “Conversation with Grandpa” on WOR and it went viral. We had to have copies printed on records (that’s “discs”. Do you remember?) and we sold them for our cost, 90 cents per copy. The Boston Police Department asked if they might use the interview in their Community Outreach Program. We were all proud and happy that Grandpa’s love for America came blistering through. His unmistakable goodness dealt anti-semitism a painful blow.

A few months ago Cousin Judy importuned me to make copies for the children who never had a chance to know Grandpa and I resolved to have copies made for everybody. But we all know what happens to resolutions among the likes of me!

A dear friend who works for Newsmax.com, a center-right website, constantly peppers me with teasers, newspaper articles from the time of my father’s winning a major bridge tournament in 1941 coverage of my bar mitzvah in 1943, etc.

A few days ago my friend scored a knockout. He e-mailed me an invitation to go to “the Brookfield Pharmacy for a lemon snowball”. How could he know about the Brookfield Pharmacy? I called him. Turns out our “Conversation With Grandpa” somehow got purchased from E-Bay by someone who digitized it and put it on YouTube! And that’s where the good fortune kicks in. I was hours away from the agonizing task of remastering the interview and making MP3s for everybody and then sitting back and hoping everybody in the extended family had the technical means to listen in.

No problem now! There it is, for us family insiders and the world at large, on YouTube!

All you do it click on this link and you’re in touch with a relative we can all be so proud of!

I no longer need the ninety-cents per copy, but I’d love it if you’d take the time to let me know the reaction of your young ones who get aboard and listen.

Much Love,

Barry Farber

 

 

 

 

If I may draw your attention to my favorite passage, which I have etched in audio memory (yes, I have the tape, and no, I never digitized it, because I am hopeless) it is 7:05 to 7:13.

I swear I have  listened to it a hundred times over the years, wondering what became of this…quality, that causes his voice to slow and drop, right there, in those six seconds. He’s talking about the moment he saw her.

“She woz beeeeutiiful. She woz actually beeeautiiiiful. I told her: “I like you very much, Now let’s get married.”

It’s my favorite six seconds of recorded sound in the world, those words, in that warm Yiddish accent.

“She woz beeeautiful.” And then the “actually,”line–a poetic repetition that makes me want to hug his legs and sob.

Hilarious.  Love you grandpa, though we never met.

(Rabbi Harizy, this is also for you.)

 

—CF

 

The Girl In The Poem

Posted on May 13, 2016

 

 

I found this girl on the street a couple of weeks ago, right outside my building.

My initial instinct was to  walk past her, because I had no idea what she was.

Then I thought I should slow down, and at least look at her.

The next thought was: “I’ll never be able to lift her anyway. I bet she weighs a ton.”

Then I picked  her up, and carried her upstairs. A man in the elevator said, “What is that?” and I said, “I don’t know.”

I don’t understand “art” that well but because she is right next to my desk, I look at her more and more.

Tonight I thought:

I’ll never know her history.

And I’ll never know mine.

 

But then I thought, wait– Maybe I do know who she is.

She might be Yevtushenko’s Ksiusha.

 

 

Modernity, Political Correctness, And Satanism In Our Midst

Posted on May 6, 2016

“Naturally, I prefer someone who feels but does not write, to someone who writes but does not feel.”

 

–Marina Tsvetaeva, Art in The Light Of Conscience

 

“Narcissist,” “sociopath,” “psychopath,” etc are all contemporary words that compensate linguistically for the removal of the old world definition “the devil,” which bothers modern people, and of course, atheists.

But can we talk about “the devil” even if we can’t agree on “God?”

There are other terms. Rudolf Steiner foresaw the rise of a demonic force known as”Ahriman” who (or which) he predicted would be unleashed in or around the year 1998 AD. “He,” or “it,” would come to us through “electromagnetism,” Steiner said, as it would allow passage for his “perfectly cold” nature.

How can you know what is good and what is evil? Or what is, “Ahrimanic,” as Steiner put it.

I started making a list, feeling exasperated with the latest notion of “evil” among a certain subset, namely: Donald Trump.

(There is always a latest notion.)

 

Cloudy is Evil,

Clear is Good,

Silent is Evil,

Noisy-Good.

Sarcastic–Evil

Funny-Good

Concealed is Evil,

Open–Good

Self-Pity–Evil

Self-protective–Good

Flattery–Evil

Respect–Good

Sexual incoherence–Evil

Sexual reverence–Good

Rigidity–Evil

Flexibility–Good

And above all:

Cold is Evil

Warm is Good.

Jack–Good.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For many years, in my identity as “investigative journalist” and “writer,” I went after the light of “truth” without knowledge of the consequences from the unseen (“occult”) world.

I fell under a series of “attacks” that were indistinguishable from catastrophic depression–something very familiar to people who embark on serious fact-finding missions, without adequate spiritual preparation.

I have never known how, or whether, to make an account of my journey, or the many close encounters with death I did not, at the time, understand. Like being a child on a storm tossed ship, but being in the bowels of the ship, unable to see the furious seas, or even be aware of being inside a boat.

“Mother, why do I feel so nauseous? Is this thing moving? Can I get off? What did I do? Why can’t I…ever… feel normal?”

You search for your sin, your error. Eventually, over many many years, you begin to see the structure of the whole thing, and how it was designed this way.

“Political correctness obviously dominates its core territory of politics, public administration (the civil service), law, education and (especially!) the mass media. But PC also substantially shapes everything else: foreign policy, the military, policing, the economy, health services, and personal life: the mating game, friendships and even family life.

Therefore political correctness is objectively totalitarian.

Just as with the cruder totalitarianism of the mid-twentieth century, PC has created a population that lives in fear: fear of being denounced and losing everything – fear of committing (or indeed merely being accused-of) a thought crime or uttering a hate fact for which there is no defence; fear of the sanctions which range from social ostracism, through loss of job, financial penalties, up to directed mob violence and imprisonment.

Consequently the mass of people, especially those of status – with power and influence – have learned and internalized the constraints of political correctness, so that it is now something inside us, as well as pressing upon us. The lies, shabbiness and wickedness of PC now permeate our very thought processes.”

Thought Prison: The Fundamental Nature Of Political Correctness,

Bruce Charlton

Political correctness is, as Charlton so brilliantly lays bare, by design, a system of demonizing all truths, inverting all morality, and causing all who seek “reality” to experience being guilty of something the classical moral universe can never identify as “wrong.” He characterizes PC as, “…something new under the sun, never before seen in history,” and “…a vastly more robust and malignant thing than I had ever imagined.”

It’s not a “left-right” thing. Not at all. The battle here is over the actual essence of all life, all truth, all beauty, and all hope.

“PC,” Charlton writes, “does not discover truth–it makes truth.”

Now how do you fight something like that?

The Satanic element in Political Correctness has taken the entire classical moral system and smashed it– all the way through state sanctioned chemical warfare and murder of children. But that’s not all.

It brings it back (even Hitler, even Stalin, could not have dreamed of this) as not only “good” but so good, only the truly wicked need to have it beaten into them why it is good.

As Charlton writes:

For the PC it is vitally necessary to control discourse, to exclude all hostile communications if possible, immediately to stop them if they break through. There can be no delay – effective dissent must be shouted-down, mocked, vilified, shut-up; the politically correct must switch-off, turn-away, gabble and gossip to drown or silence the hostile discourse; instruct, direct and unleash the mob – then begin again to rebuild the thought prison of PC discourse by their own words, in their own image.”

Right now there are two armies, approaching one another: The politically correct vs. the humanistic.

Bruce Charlton has captured the crisis comprehensively in his INCREDIBLE book, quoted above: Thought Prison: The Fundamental Nature Of Political Correctness.

I pass the link to new allies, new friends. What we share is an absolute agreement that Charlton has got it by the tail. He has got the devil by the tail. And we wonder why we “never heard of him.” (I heard of him only after he was sacked by Elsevier, for published an HIV “denialist” paper some years ago.)

BUT.

I always want to re-name things, and here is now I would to re-christen Charlton’s masterpiece:

Heart Prison: The Fundamental Nature of Political Correctness.

 

Learn To Pray

 

Never realizing what on earth I was actually in battle with, over the years, I became afflicted–with internalized terror, paralyzing self-doubt–all by design. I went down every rabbit hole marked for somebody descending into “depression.” I tried every remedy, swallowed and mostly spat out every medication, tried every form of New Age healing, attended clinics, collapsed into hospitals, and–not often enough–prayed.

Now–finally— I get it.

I am now on the ship’s deck. I learn the signs, the symptoms. At any moment I could become a beast of my own dark “knowledge.” Other people’s “wrongs” identified do not make us good.

Accusation is a tricky business.

Sometimes I wish I could open a Journalism School with the singular motto:

“Don’t Become An As–ole.”

THAT’S the hardest part.

We are traveling through a storm that must be traveled through, not around. The demon world is awakened. Also in our own selves.

Now I can see the storm.  I can find words for this.

It was always an “occult” battle–the “debate” (war,) for example, about “HIV” (the most perfectly malicious code against human life ever written) was nothing if not a war of goodwill vs. ill-will.

The pushing forth of the truth about vaccines, which has taken form in the explosive documentary “Vaxxed: From Coverup To Catastrophe,” is an uprising of mothers. (And fathers, but mostly mothers.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is no stronger bond or love than between mother and child, father and child,  so it follows that the “devil” would strike there, that this would become the final battleground for this civilization. If we lose, we have no world. We have no children, we have no families, we have no world.

We finally have our war. So let’s go.

It’s ok to laugh, even uproariously, even in the face of catastrophe. The demons hate laughter, because laughter is born from incongruity, whereas they are possessed by death and sterility–the attainment of the perfectly terrible.

 

 

—Celia Farber

Skip Tribeca, Go Directly To Hollywood: Wakefield’s Life And Book Optioned By Second Most Successful Hollywood Screenwriter Of All Time

Posted on April 28, 2016

One of Andrew Wakefield’s articles of faith, often stated by him when the matter of his troubles, the tar ball that journalist Brian Deer set upon his life,  is raised, is

“It isn’t about me. This isn’t about me.”

When asked how he has managed to bear the brunt of the two decade long vilification campaign against him, Wakefield says: “I don’t have a problem. The children with autism have a problem.”

Olympian.

I hope they paid him a lot of money for this. And I hope the screenwriter makes it a franchise, like he did with Pirates Of The Caribbean. Because as the article says: “The details, and drama surrounding his life are even more remarkable than generally known.”

Yes indeed. His name is even a verb. Many doctors and scientists told Vaxxed producer Del Bigtree that they knew the truth but “didn’t want to get Wakefielded.”

Well, maybe they will be more encouraged now that the next stop on the Madness Train after being “Wakefielded,” is to be “Hollywood-ed.”

 

—Celia Farber

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BREAKING NEWS: Brian Hooker’s Statement On Thompson’s Rumored About Face

Posted on April 26, 2016

 

 

 

Text exchange between Dr. Andrew Wakefield and Dr. William Thompson,
Aug 27, 2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Editor’s Note: This statement was published today, here, at Focus For Health.

Dr. Brian Hooker’s official statement regarding William Thompson
April 26, 2016

Brian S. Hooker, Ph.D., P.E. | Science Adviser, Focus For Health

 

 

Dr. William Thompson, senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) contacted me during 2013 and 2014 and shared many issues regarding fraud and malfeasance in the CDC, specifically regarding the link between neurodevelopmental disorders and childhood vaccines. Dr. Thompson and I spoke on the phone more than 40 times over a 10 month period and he shared thousands of pages of CDC documents with me. Eventually, Dr. Thompson turned this information over to Congress via Rep. Bill Posey of Florida. Among the issues discussed in the phone conversations were lies told to the public by the CDC regarding the link between thimerosal-containing vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders (including autism) as well as the links between the MMR vaccine and autism in African American males and the MMR vaccine and “isolated” autism. Isolated autism is the term coined by CDC researchers referring to all children who received an autism diagnosis without additional diagnoses of mental retardation, cerebral palsy, visual impairment or hearing impairment.

Very recently, Mr. Richard Morgan, Esq., Dr. Thompson’s whistle blower attorney, stated that Dr. Thompson will be publishing a paper in May, 2016, where he will assert that the MMR vaccine is not linked to autism in African American males. Instead Dr. Thompson will state that socioeconomic factors alone in the African American community account for the original MMR-African American male “effect” (the effect that he is on record as stating the CDC purposefully hid). I have not been given access to Dr. Thompson’s reanalysis and therefore cannot comment regarding the forthcoming paper at this time. However, I am suspect of any analysis coming from the CDC due to the historic nature of the agency’s scientific misconduct and conflicts of interest specifically around any link between vaccines and autism.

Regardless of the content of Dr. Thompson’s reanalysis paper, these facts remain:

Continue reading here.

CDC MMR Coverup Is To “Watergate” As Lightning Is To The Lightning Bug

Posted on April 24, 2016

(Phrase on loan from Barry Farber)

Editor’s note: “Watergate” is just a liberal incantation that means “Daddy and Mommy Washington Post gave me permission to find something in government scandalous and to be appalled.” (But that was the 70s, that was Nixon, and since then, I deem everything a “conspiracy theory.”)

 

What I Mean By “Vaxxed Fever”

Posted on April 24, 2016

 

April 24, 2016, Manhattan Film Festival,

Video by Celia Farber

 

An Elaborate Fraud: How Could One Journalist Create A Monster And Terrorize Open Discussion For 15 Years?

Posted on April 23, 2016

This is the third of a three part series in Age Of Autism, that takes apart the propaganda cloud around Wakefield, Deer, the GMC hearings, and more.

This is what fellow editor at AOA Mark Blaxill wrote introducing this (old, now seen through new eyes) series by Dan Olmsted, on FB:

“The attack on Andrew Wakefield by Brian Deer, the Sunday Times, and the British Medical Journal (BMJ) was really an attack on the parents of autistic children. These parents have overwhelmingly stood by Wakefield. What’s more Deer obtained private medical information without parental consent. The BMJ published his findings anyway. That’s a clear violation of medical ethics. Fraud, privacy violations, ethics violations–all par for the course for the medical industry’s Elaborate Fraud. Here’s part 3.”

 

UK Press Turns Fair With Tide As Vaccine Injury Denialism Continues To Crumble

Posted on April 23, 2016

This article was called “best article yet,” on Facebook by JB Handley of Generation Rescue, who also pointed out that the chances he would have a brain damaged child today if he had been able to watch the FOX News interview with Wakefield and Tommy in 2002, are 0%

I think the days of believing the press of any country perform anything except random political theater are over.

Anything you write, I write–it’s all the same degree of “media,” as any other. That’s what makes these times we live in so strange and interesting.

“Alternative” or “Social” or “Citizen” media serve as spurs trying to force Big Whale Media to report something accurate now and then. Then, although the latter has been a destructive propaganda organ for decades, while the former keeps the story accurately updated for no pay, the Whale still “validates” the smaller fish.

Illegitimate authority crumbling on all fronts.

Widespread terror among the propagandists.

No mercy, not from me anyway.

 

–Celia Farber

 

 

 

Principles Of Non Violent Communication: “How Come Some People Enjoy Other People’s Suffering?”

Posted on April 23, 2016

 

Breaking The Sound Barrier

Posted on April 21, 2016

“Chances I’d have a child w/autism if I’d watched this interview in 2002: 0% ”

–JB Handley,

Generation Rescue

‪#‎autismtimemachine‬

 

Diaz In Moviemaker Magazine: The Tribeca Precedent Is The End Of Festivals As We Know Them And The End Of Free Speech

Posted on April 20, 2016

Cinema Libre’s Philippe Diaz has thrown down the gauntlet to the film industry, on life support now after Tribeca’s Jane Rosenthal breached the firewall between filmmakers and industry, by sending VAXXED to members of the medical profession, and setting in motion a wave of manufactured hysteria that caused Robert DeNiro to be forced to drop it from the lineup against his wishes.

The “vaccination” issue has birthed, like Russian dolls, new uprisings that have nothing to do with vaccines, and everything to do with freedom of speech and the values of a democratic society.

My father, radio broadcaster Barry Farber, coined the following phrase, the night I took him to see Vaxxed, when it premiered April 1, in New York City:

“The correct prayer is not “we shall overcome. No. We shall never overcome. Rather, the correct prayer is: “They shall overreach.”

Diaz’ article in Moviemaker Magazine (we could all have lived without the disclaimer, but greatly appreciate the act of publishing the piece) is linked below:

Fascinating.

 

Barry Farber, on the air, 1960s

 

 

 

Arianna Huffington Reinstates Simmens Account Following VAXXED Censorship

Posted on April 19, 2016

This does not solve the “mystery” as to how Simmens’ review violated HuffPo’s guidelines. ARE there “ideological” guidelines for HuffPo? This raises more questions than it answers. But I am intrigued about this development. Perhaps I was too harsh on Huffington Post. Stay tuned.

–Celia Farber

 

 

Via Facebook, Lance Simmens

“To All Following @lancesimmens or @vaxxedthemovie: I received an email from Arianna Huffington earlier today and my HuffPo account has been reinstated. Small victory. In reply I asked that she personally reconsider republishing my article Why Our Kids Will Hate Us as it merely asks for public escalation of the allegations of corruption in CDC in the documentary Vaxxed. The piece does not represent conspiracy theory, does not contain inaccurate medical information, and is not part of a widely known hoax as purported to be the guiding principles that determined the fate of my previous post. To not allow this freedom of expression to look into an issue does not represent the best of investigative journalism and should not be tolerated. People should be encouraged to see the documentary and judge for themselves just as they ought to be able to read my article and judge for themselves. There ought to be a national discussion of the issue.”

Below is the article as published in the LA Progressive Magazine:

Watch “Positive Hell,” The Film Banned By The London Not So Independent Film Festival

Posted on April 18, 2016

“Imagine the sudden announcement of a plague and a death sentence with no real science to support it. It doesn’t seem possible, does it?”

The Truth Barrier presents here the short award winning documentary film by Andi Reiss and Joan Shenton pulled from the lineup by the London Independent Film Festival, after pharmaceutically supported “AIDS Charities” complained the film was “dangerous.” The details of this absurd protest, and how the film makers turned it around, are chronicled here.

Positive Hell is about people who live their lives, in a coastal town in Northern Spain. Doesn’t sound very “dangerous” does it?

I happen to love this film.

—Celia Farber

 

 

 

 

 

HuffPo Pulls VAXXED Review From Veteran Columnist, Blocks His Account, As Vaxxed-Fever Spreads

Posted on April 17, 2016

“This is seriously troubling.”

 

 

 

Lance Simmens, author, whistleblower, political veteran,  fracking activist,  and more, went to see Vaxxed: From Coverup To Catastrophe at one of the California screenings, and was moved, enraged, awakened. He wrote a column for The Huffington Post about it, and it went up, as per the usual protocol–he has been a contributor for 8 years and written almost 200 articles without incident.

Shortly thereafter, without warning or explanation, the piece was taken down, and his account was blocked.

 

The Truth Barrier reached out to Simmens via an email interview:

TTB:  Give us if you would, a brief history of your writing for Huff Po. How many years, how many pieces, what topics…

 

LS: I have been writing on Huffington Post for nearly eight years and during that time they have published something close to 180 articles. I am a political writer and have written articles over the years about events as they unfold, which is the nice feature of blogging. I have a decidedly liberal bent to my politics but have striven to write thoughtful, provocative pieces that try to define a rationale and logic to the policy prescriptions being offered.

TTB:  What happened exactly when you posted your review of VAXXED to HuffPo?

LS:  I saw a premier of VAXXED the other evening and was so moved by the presentation and discussion that followed that I felt compelled to write a piece asking that we at least begin a serious national dialogue on the allegations contained in the documentary. I also drew attention to the spate of events that have unfolded over the past several years, where there has been a massive governmental failure to do its essential job which is to protect the health, safety and welfare of the citizens. I sent it to Huffington Post as I normally do–I have an account there–and they published the article. About a half hour later as I was sending it out to my network I was alerted by some folks that when they went to access it it was not coming up. It turns out that they pulled down the original piece and when I tried to rewrite it I was alerted that permission was denied to my account. I have made at least a half dozen attempts to reach someone at HuffPo to alert them that there was a malfunction and over the course of the last two days have not received one response. I even went so far as to email Arianna herself.

It never crossed my mind that this might be some sort of censorship because it has never happened to me and the article, while provocative, is not beyond any bounds of journalistic or political propriety.

TTB: Does Huffpo have editorial guidelines that writers are clear about? What are they?

LS: Yes, HuffPo outlines editorial guidelines and I follow them. I respect that they can determine whether or not to publish articles but what is so frightening here is that they originally published the article and then evidently pulled it back, unless it truly is a technical issue but I suspect they would have been right on fixing it if it had. This is seriously troubling.

TTB: Have you ever been paid for your work by The Huffington Post?

LS: No I have never been paid by HuffPo and I have always felt that that gave me the liberty to explore areas that might not be acceptable to the mainstream media. This is just shocking.

TTB: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

LS: I devoted nearly forty years to politics, public policy, and public service. I worked for two Presidential administrations, two U.S. Senators, two Governors, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and briefly for the Screen Actors Guild. I was a whistleblower in the documentary Gasland, Part 2 and am the author of two books: The Evolution of a Revolution: An Attack upon Reason, Compromise and the Constitution (which ironically is a collection of 86 articles I wrote in HuffPo over a 4 and a half year period) and Fracktured, just recently released, which is the definitive anti-fracking novel.

TTB: Would you still write for HuffPo in the future?

LS: Of course it depends upon what the actual story and fallout is from this sorry episode but yes I would still consider writing for HuffPo. I need to see how it plays out. I will coordinate with the VAXXED team. I will be speaking at the premier in Santa Monica later today, after the 4:40 show.

 

You can find Lance Simmens’ books on Amazon, here.

–Interview by Celia Farber

 

Coda: I passed a Barnes and Noble on the UWS yesterday and noticed a new book by Arianna Huffington that seems to be about why sleep is great. Being asleep. She is sitting on a bed, on the cover. I have never contributed to The Huffington Post because I oppose “Refrigerator journalism” and what I call “Czarist media,” which Arianna Huffington personifies. These are both my terms and I will define them: “Refrigerator journalism” is where writers are editor-less, and without attention, hosting, or brain contact of any kind. This is not publishing, editing, or journalism. Arianna Huffington is not an editor.

 

“Czarist media” refers to the new terrain writers and journalists found themselves in when, over the past 10-15 years, HuffPo introduced the idea of replacing payment for journalism, with an imaginary currency known as “access to the hive.”

You could set up your “ideas” there and have people notice them, if you chose. HuffPo argued that it “could not pay” its writers, but thousands of writers started tilling the new land, in hopes of one day growing money some other way.

HuffPo itself certainly did. In 2011 it was sold to AOL for $315 million.

Huffington and AOL’s Tim Armstrong business partner were quoted in The Guardian:

“This is the most exciting thing I have ever done,” Huffington said after the deal was first announced.

“Together, our companies will embrace the digital future and become a digital destination that delivers unmatched experiences for both consumers and advertisers,” said Armstrong. [Itals mine.]

 

—Celia Farber

 

 

 

 

 

Half Time

Posted on April 16, 2016

 

 

 

 

“There is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”

Hunter S. Thompson

 

What a beauty that quote is. I went through a phase around 2004, of being almost incapacitated by my sudden awareness of the genius of Hunter S. Thompson, who an ex boyfriend, a tycoon (just so you picture me pool-side with tycoons, big pharma!) scoldingly made me aware of.

Chuck was always scolding me. It was long after our short and disastrous non-relationship had ended, but sometimes we had dinner so he could scold me about wasting my talent, at restaurants I could barely dress for, unless he gave me serious notice, and he never did. I learned the hard way that it would be preferable to arrive still carrying your ironing board than to arrive 40 seconds late to dinner with Chuck.

We were Opposite, reversed versions of human beings. As far as I could tell he mostly shouted through the phone and then made space in his bank accounts for all the money raining down. When I shout at people I never wind up with more money. In my next life I want to be born a man with sand-colored hair and a Pennsylvania blue-blood name. I’ll make an enormous big deal out of my need to play golf.

Writers are spies, you realize. We just want to get access to worlds that might reveal Real Info.

3 minutes after death we are still accepting flakes of Story.

 

 

Chuck did have the most beautiful smoke busted voice you ever heard—three packs a day probably since he was 12 years old. And he wore a white shirt like no man I’ve ever known.

The Russian poet Anna Ahkmatova recorded in her memoir an anecdote about a white shirt that I finally located and emailed to Chuck.

Speaking of genius writers:

“I received a letter from a Swedish professor who is writing a book about me. He wrote that he was coming to see me. And he did come, but I was in the hospital, so he went there to see me. A fine fellow and he knows a lot, but the most amazing thing was the blinding whiteness of his shirt. It was a white as the wing of an angel. While we had two bloody wars and a lot of other blood, the Swedes were washing and ironing that shirt.”

I live for moments of finding writing crystals like that.

The best writing, like Thompson’s, like Akhmatova’s, manages to be covertly, subtly hilarious, as well as subversive and finally, hopeful. The quote at the top is actually a very straightforward sentence to be one of HST’s, but the thing that makes it an HST line is the surprise of the word “pompous.” 999 writers out of 1,000 would call Objective Journalism a “…contradiction in terms,” but only HST would spin the whole thing on its head like a breakdancer with the word “pompous.” HST was a devotee of what the referred to as the precisely right word, or the exactly right word.

I have been both praised and accused in recent days, of posting about Vaxxed as though a revolution is breaking out, or perhaps I think I am Paul Revere on the Midnight Ride.

Well, at this moment, it’s pretty quiet here. The birds are happy I finally remembered to buy bird seed for the All-You-Can-Eat-Buffet on the fire escape, and the cats, Jack and Lewis, are happy to watch them get fatter and fatter. I think they still think some fine day I will lift the screen and let them pounce.

We dream, all of us.

I have no idea how to appear Important and Wired, and truth is, I no longer have any insider’s account what it going on with Vaxxed. I follow developments on FB like everybody else. I don’t call any of the players, you know why? Because one thing I’ve learned is this: When people are fighting a War with only their ethics, brains, and bare hands, you leave them alone.

If you are walking behind them and somebody drops their car keys, you can shout: “You dropped your keys!”

But what you never do, if you know the first thing about what it feels like to be enveloped in the white hot flame of the devil’s $400 billion rage, is bother people.

And when I don’t have any new information, I take a break, collapse, think about taking a different turn 26 years ago.

Or write something ponderous and wholly beside the point, like this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DeNiro Sets Media Tumbling, Unrepentant About Vaxxed: “Everybody Should See This Film”

Posted on April 13, 2016

 

 

 

I am writing this in haste. Something enormous happened today: Robert DeNiro went on The Today Show and spoke openly, clearly, and at length about his true feelings about the vaccine catastrophe.

“Everybody should see this film,” he said. He even admonished the media for failing to investigate.

This is the new media though–it’s so sick. NOT investigating and saying terrible things are NOT happening has become the better part of the job description, last 10 years. The job of the “medical reporter” is now: “Well paid pharma-apologist with a flair for condescension, bordering at times on sadism. Refuse at all times to investigate fraud or listen to real people and you will go far.”

The mass media had been aggressively promoting the wishful thinking trope that Robert Deniro did not know what film he had accepted, when he chose “Vaxxed” for the Tribeca Film Festival Lineup.

He knew very well.  At the Q&A following the NYC premiere of Vaxxed, producer Del Bigtree commented that DeNiro had been in contact with, and gathering careful information from the Vaxxed team’s sources, for “a couple of months.”

DeNiro also said this, in the stunning interview, which formerly wildly hostile Indiewire, now refers to as “compelling.”

“Nobody seems to want to address [the issue of whether vaccines cause autism] or they say they’ve addressed it and it’s a closed issue. But it doesn’t seem to be because there are many people who will come out and say, ‘No. I saw my kid change like overnight. I saw what happened and I should have done something and I didn’t.’ So there’s more to this than meets the eye, believe me. The thing is to shut it down—there’s no reason to. If you’re scientists, let’s see, let’s hear. Everybody doesn’t want to hear much about it, it’s shut down.”
This development spreading like fire across the mainstream media, and as it spreads, the anti-anti-vaxxer fangs seem to fall off, pretty rapidly. Journalists are now concerned, it seems, with not being on the wrong side of history.

Again, to quote my father, whose column on Vaxxed just came out:

“We will overcome is the wrong prayer. No. We shall never overcome. The correct prayer is “They shall over reach.” ”

You can thank Mr. DeNiro here.

(And thank you Truth Kings.)

Village Voice–Profiteers Of Child Sex Trafficking– Rejects “Vaxxed” Ads

Posted on April 12, 2016

By Stephen Ericson

 

 

 

Anyone following the drama surrounding the film Vaxxed: From Coverup to Catastrophe who was expecting things to finally be settling down, will just have to get used to being disappointed.

As anyone following the story has to know, the film was pulled from the Tribeca Film Festival only to find success in its opening weekend at the Angelica Film Center in NYC. Later the film was supposed to also be shown at Worldfest Houston International Film Festival, only to be pulled by none other than the Mayor of Houston himself. That a government official would partake in an unbridled act of censorship doesn’t seem to bother too many of the film’s critics in the media, and that in of itself should tell one a great deal about their “journalistic ethics.”

For a film that’s been attacked by a wide swath of media outlets as being based on mostly lies, one truism found on the films poster remains unquestionably intact; it’s “…the film they don’t want you to see.”

To wit: On April 5, The Village Voice sent out a promotional email “Vaxxed Gains 2nd Week at Angelika NYC‏” celebrating the underdog film’s success. Keep in mind that the Voice made no bones about the fact that the promotional email was just that– a paid advertisment. The ad contained a statement about the film: “In 2013, biologist Dr. Brian Hooker received a call from a Senior Scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who led the agency’s 2004 study on the MMR vaccine and its link to autism.”

You can read that for yourself over and over again, and it won’t change; it clearly says “the MMR vaccine,” not “vaccines.” There is nothing vague in the wording, nothing that says “all vaccines” or anything like that.

Later the same day, the Village Voice was so concerned with the veracity of the claims of the movie that they were compelled to send out a follow up email explaining their official position in regard to the controversial film:

Our Editor’s Note on the film VAXXED

We want to be very clear that the Voice vehemently disagrees with that position, and believes it to be contrary to the vast majority of scientific information on the subject. We believe vaccinations are an essential safeguard of the public health for New York City and the world in general.

Please forgive the interruption of your day and thanks for reading the Village Voice.

Will Bourne
Editor-in-Chief
The Village Voice

One wonders if Will Bourne has bothered to not only watch the movie but to peruse the ad copy that appeared under his paper’s banner in the first place? If he had, one would think he would clearly have seen Dr. Wakefield stating sans reservation that he’s not against vaccinations and that he openly encourages parents to continue to vaccinate their children, and only advises that the MMR shot be returned to three separate shots. In the case of the ad copy that his paper promoted, it should have been perfectly clear that Dr. Thompson was reporting on the MMR vaccine and not vaccines in general. Of course that would have required some diligence on his behalf in the first place.

Well, readers of the Village Voice can relax in their fears that their news outlet of choice has been over run with “anti-vaxx” crackpots: They’ve pulled all ads related to the movie. It seems that accepting advertisement dollars from a film reporting the claims of a CDC whistleblower (we at The Truth Barrier patiently, perhaps naively, along with the rest of the civilized world, await congress to subpoena Dr. Thompson so that his testimony be properly recorded) is just one step over the ethical line for the paper who has been accused of profiting from child sex trafficking.

The controversy surrounding those accusations brewed up most noticeably circa 2012, when a Change.org petition was circulated by an Ohio minister named Justin Wassel, pleading with the Village Voice to stop the practice of child sex trafficking on their subsidiary Backpage.com. Even Norman Mailer’s son, (Mailer founded The Voice) joined the protest movement. Attorneys-General from 48 states wrote a joint letter to Backpage, warning that it had become “a hub” for sex trafficking and calling on it to stop running adult services ads. The Attorneys-General said they had identified cases in 22 different states of pimps peddling underage girls through Backpage. While both Backpage and Craigslist.org were accused of being complicit in criminal activity, only Craigslist decided to shutter their adult services section. When that happened, the US Backpage’s revenues jumped 15% the next month. Backpage, rather than responding to the accusations in any remotely humane way, decided to dig in their heels, leading to repeated protests outside their offices, and even celebrities joining the fight.

 

 

At one point the Village Voice not only attacked the statistics in the study that was cited in the petition (and actor Ashton Kutcher, noted feminist Gloria Steinem, the New York Times, SalonMedia Bistro, and  USA Today among others in the process) they even went so far as to sue the State of Washington when it passed a bill that allows for the criminal prosecution of classified advertising company representatives who publish or cause publication of sex-related ads peddling children, despite the fact that Proof of a Good-Faith Attempt to verify the age of the advertised person is considered a defense under the law.

So, when it comes to their bottom line, the Village Voice will put forth the notion that the world is simply out to get them, and worse, is willing to stand by misleading statistics to do so! Yes, the poor Village Voice, raking in millions a year as a megaphone for pimps on Backpage.com (which is still a great place to find these sorts of services.) 48 states worth of Attorneys-General citing cases in 22 states involving child prostitution didn’t have enough clout to make them take the accusation seriously.
And yet when it came time to review Vaxxed, they said of Brian Hooker: “… attempting to use the CDC’s data “the way it should have been,” “…something it’s hard to imagine a person with no experience in pathology managing to accomplish.”

(It should be noted that Brian Hooker has a doctorate in biochemical engineering.)

If all of this seems duplicitous and self serving to you, consider that the Village Voice is now marching in lock step with the rest of the media that it claimed hadn’t done their homework when it was under attack, only a few short years ago. Such is the tragic condition of our 4th estate. It seems they are the last ones to “get the story.” The story about how done people are, with them.

 

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/real-men-get-their-facts-straight-6431644

http://www.businessinsider.com/companies-pull-ads-from-village-voice-over-child-sex-trafficking-2012-5

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/backpagecom-sues-over-wash-sex-trafficking-law

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/07/village-voice-sex-trafficking_n_1495225.html

http://www.hollywoodrepublican.net/2011/07/the-village-voice-vs-ashton-kutcher-the-debate-over-child-trafficking-statistics-in-america/

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL PULLS FILM ABOUT LONG TERM SURVIVORS AFTER PHARMA-AIDS CHARITIES THREATEN PROTEST

Posted on April 11, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please find below our latest release. For further information, please contact: Joan Shenton – Tel: 07957 585 515, Email: joanshenton@clara.co.uk

Published online with high quality images at http://bit.ly/LIFFaxe

April 11, 2016

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
LONDON FILM FESTIVAL PULLS FILM SCREENING IN LATEST NO-PLATFORMING

* London Independent Film Festival pulls HIV/AIDS documentary after protest threats
* Film makers hit back, describing act as ‘censorship’ and ‘no platforming’
* Film maker questions independence of festival in ignoring rights to free speech and debate
London, UK. LIFF, the London Independent Film Festival (http://www.liff.org/), has controversially axed its screening of the film Positive Hell, scheduled for April 17, in a move described by the film’s writer and narrator, Joan Shenton, as “blatant censorship” and “the latest case of ‘no platforming'”.

This morning, Ms Shenton announced that she had been contacted by LIFF director, Erich Schultz, to say that he had “pulled” the film after four HIV/AIDS charities had threatened protests at the screening venue and at festival sponsors’ premises “if we [LIFF] don’t comply”. Schultz also said he had received “over twenty protest letters”.

The axing has some echoes of Robert De Niro’s decision to remove the anti-vaccinaton documentary Vaxxed from the Tribeca film festival in New York at the end of March (http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/mar/27/robert-de-niro-pulls-vaccination-film-tribeca-vaxxed), though there is no suggestion that the two films are in any way similar.

Positive Hell – already nominated for best documentary at the Marbella International Film Festival, and selected for LA Cinefest, Digital Griffix online festival, and the Indie Festival 01 – was successfully screened at the Frontline Club in Paddington, London, last year after similar threats, though no protest actually materialised at that screening.

Joan Shenton said: “Positive Hell, the right to free speech and the HIV-positive people honestly depicted in the film are the victims of barefaced censorship. The film presents a view of HIV and AIDS which is not shared by the giant pharmaceutical companies, their lobby groups and some activists, but it is an evidence-based view nonetheless and has just as much right to be aired and debated as any other.

“I am flabbergasted by LIFF’s censorship in response to a handful of emails that were clearly designed to shut down this debate by intimidating the festival and its sponsors. It questions just how ‘independent’ the London Independent Film Festival really is.”

The email from Eric Shultz also stated that the selection committee was “unanimous in wanting to step away from screening Positive Hell.”

Joan Shenton responded: “This is the selection committee that originally voted in favour of the film, so it has obviously been ‘got at’. And in deciding to withdraw the film like this, the committee members – all students – are creating the latest case of ‘no platforming’. They’ve been lobbied and have chosen censorship over free speech, solid evidence and constructive debate.”

“I’m concerned about the lack of freedom of speech on student campuses. Some student unions are displaying fascist attitudes. We have been penalised with no redress and no chance to air our views, let alone the science that underlies the debate.”

– ends –
NOTES FOR EDITORS

Joan Shenton is available for interviews.

Positive Hell is a 30 minute documentary written and narrated by journalist Joan Shenton and co-produced in 2015 with director Andi Reiss.
* Nominated for best documentary at Marbella International Film Festival
* Selected for
– Los Angeles CineFest
– Digital Griffix online festival
– Indie Festival 01
* Selected for – then banned from – 2016 London Independent Film Festival

Positive Hell tells the stories of five individuals in the north of Spain who had been intravenous drug users or alcoholics in their teens. They were treated in rehab units and overcame their addictions but tested “HIV” antibody positive. Thirty years on, they were fit and well, despite no regime of antiviral medication. One of them, physician Dr Ramon Garrido, had never taken any antiviral medication, consciously swimming against the tide of HIV orthodoxy for three decades. Another, Manoel Penin, took antivirals for short periods of time but gave them up. Raquel Sanz stopped taking antivirals because they made her feel so ill. She married and had two daughters. Both daughters inherited their mother’s HIV antibodies but (as is common) lost them after eighteen months. Raquel’s eldest daughter went on to have six children and her younger daughter followed a successful career. Both daughters were immensely grateful to have been kept out of the “AIDS zone”.

Positive Hell may be viewed at http://www.positivehell.com .

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Joan Shenton
Tel: 07957 585 515
Email: joanshenton@clara.co.uk
Site: www.positivehell.com

You Tell Me (On The Vanished Post About Vaxxed/Tribeca)

Posted on April 11, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I know you place your faith in something here, at The Truth Barrier, because you have expressed it.

We are in symbiosis–trying to crack this whole unfathomable thing.

I get most of my information by way of being willing to not be in control, and not “know” what I am doing, (exactly.)

Yes, you DID see a story here that seemed to shed light on the DeNiro Vaxxed got axed mystery. Then it vanished.

What the hell?

The best I can do is to tell you that I can’t tell you, right now, what happened exactly.

I can tell you this: It’s nothing to do with threats. Nor was there any mistake. Please be patient. All will be revealed.

I woke up this morning thinking it mattered who subverted “Vaxxed” at Tribeca Film Festival, and how.

(I can confirm that the person who allowed the film to be viewed by outside forces in the medical field, was Jane Rosenthal, if anybody cares.)

 

Now that the anti-Monsanto movement has gotten behind “Vaxxed” I sense a tidal wave. There will be enormous upheaval.

Tribeca Film Festival–which seemed so big and powerful only days ago–will be reduced to a matchbox. Nothing. Empty vanity. A few honest people who tried, who happen to know the truth, happen to be famous, rich,powerful.

Not powerful.

I appreciate, so much, your patience and goodwill.

I’ll tell you as much as I can as soon as I can but in the meantime, let’s make sure we all remember that I don’t “tell” you, any more than you tell me. We are one similarly minded “thing” that forms a cooperative of eyes, ears, and souls.

So, you tell me.

There is no such thing as a “journalist.”

Not anymore.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What They Said: Del Bigtree–“Journalism Is On Its Last Breath”

Posted on April 10, 2016

Here’s what Del Bigtree said when I asked him a question about journalism at the NYC premiere of Vaxxed, April 1.

What a third chakra this man has. Absolutely extraordinary.

 

 

March Against Monsanto Joins Forces With VAXXED: “The Most Powerful Documentary Of Our Lifetimes”

Posted on April 10, 2016

I was just informed that March Against Monsanto has one million followers on Facebook.

VAXXED: The Documentary That Destroys The CDC’s Lies About Autism and Vaccines

 

VAXXED LA–FIVE SHOWS ALREADY SOLD OUT

Posted on April 9, 2016

aWill Forbes’ Emily Willingham correct her chosen word “fizzled” to describe how Vaxxed: From Coverup to Catastrophe is doing?

What will happen next?

Will people turn on Pharma-media, demand accuracy? Or will Forbes allow this propaganda travesty to stand uncorrected?

How many filmmakers have already boycotted The Tribeca Film Festival?

Will they ever recover from this huge mistake?

Is this the beginning of a rebirth of investigative journalism, transcending corporate power and bully-media aggression and manipulation?

Stay tuned

 

 

Houston Mayor Under Attack By Free Speech Defenders For Censoring VAXXED

Posted on April 8, 2016

The tables are turning on the forces seeking totalitarian control of the vaccine narrative in the culture.

 

What They Said: Andrew And Carmel Wakefield, On Houston-Gate

Posted on April 7, 2016

“I’m searching life for observations, nuances, details. Because my interest in life is not the event as such, not war as such, not Chernobyl as such, not suicide as such. What I am interested in is what happens to the human being. How does man behave and react? How much of the biological man is in him, how much of the man of his time, how much man of the man.”

–Svetlana Alexaevich

 

Carmel and Andrew Wakefield, GMC Hearings, London

 

I reached the Wakefields at their home in Austin, Texas tonight. Andrew Wakefield answered the phone. April 6, 2016 was a historic day. We all got to read the unbelievable words of an accidental hero named Hunter Todd–the letter that “changed everything.”

“How does it feel?” I asked Andrew Wakefield. “What is going through your mind?”

“I am having a glass of gin,” he said, with a laugh. “I came home from yoga and had a gin, instead of a beer.”

After a brief pause, and being British, not one to yarn on about his feelings, he said this:

“I think you should title this piece, The Tribeca Syndrome.”

“The Tribeca Syndrome…”

He elaborated:

“The Tribeca withdrawal had lacked any transparency. It was unknown people from unknown affiliations saying unspecified things…”

He has gotten to a point in his unfathomable life where a more brutal rejection, a “kosher throat slit,” would come as a relief. I could hear the relief in his voice. It was as though he’d happened upon–after twenty years of fiddling with a lock–the right combination. Now he was inside the vault.

“With the Houston rejection it was quite clear where the pressure had come from and what the nature of the threats had been, and that is why it was so important. It was particularly poignant that it was in the state of Texas where freedom from government interference in our lives is sacrosanct. Perhaps more so than any other state in the nation.”

“So what did it mean to you personally?” I asked.

He paused. His words came out with a certain slow gravity I had not heard before.

“It means …it was true all along. What the parents said from the very outset, was absolutely true.

I heard his wife Carmel’s voice across the room.

“Carmel says “The parents truth is now manifest,” he said. “Hang on…”

[CDC Whistleblower William Thompson’s texts to Carmel Wakefield, 2014.]

Carmel took the phone.

“Hello darling!”

We had a real good laugh about the pillow.

The pillow?

Well, that’s a story for another time.

“So what are your feelings tonight?” I asked.

“Well. I’m just about to become an American citizen,” she said. “I am genuinely excited and proud. One of the massive tenets for me of this country has been the freedom of speech which is the essence of America. The founding fathers would be horrified at these attempts to censor truth.”

“Free speech will prevail. Everybody must see this film. Like it or loathe it, it must be seen. This is a statement of fact to which we all have to face up, and make our decisions going forward.”

[See article in The Autism File, by Carmel Wakefield.]

“The Houston revelation,” she continued, “while massively disappointing, was a relief because the whispered, shadowed nameless, faceless thing now had a name and the name was suppression of freedom of speech. That name was cash dollars in the bank. That name was deceit and defilement of the American constitution.”

I thanked her, and wished the Wakefields a nice evening.

Afterwards, I wished I had shared my father’s quote, when I sent him the Houston-gate article, and he called me, beside himself, like everybody has been, all over the world, today.

“The correct prayer,” my father said, “is not, “We shall overcome. It’s they shall over reach.”

It Boggles The Mind

Posted on April 6, 2016

[Sometimes a comment will impress me so much that I publish it as a stand alone essay. ]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reader’s Gold: It Boggles The Mind

 

“It boggles the mind that the CDC threw out the definitive proof the MMR caused autism (which was retrieved from the trash and can now be seen) . It boggles the mind that the head of the CDC that authorized this fraud, Julie Gerberding, was hired as the President of Merck’s Vaccine Division shortly after the cover up. It boggles the mind that while she cashed $24 million in stock last Fall, the Autism rate shot up to 1 out of every 18 two year olds. It boggles the mind that the controlled corporate media can still brainwash parents into harming their own children and bullying others into incapacitating their children as well. It boggles the mind that because of this cover up 1.8 MILLION American children will never be able to speak, never be able to stop wearing diapers, never feed themselves, never have a very clear idea of where they live (1/4 of them run away and a high percentage of them drown during their “escape”) and never be able to take care of themselves once their parents are gone. These kids were born AFTER a safer vaccine could have been made. They COULD have been normal if it weren’t for the lies, the cover-up, and the refusal to spent .50 more a dose (at a 3500% mark up) to make it safer. One would almost think it was done on purpose!

If your child has ADHD, Eczema, Nuerological Disorders, Seizures, Deadly Allergies, Asthma serious Brain Injury, or died of SIDS, or did not dodge the Autism bullet, you should be mad as H3!! right now!!!!

The CDC is pulling out all the stops on VAXXED because the stakes are high for their corrupt, incompetent and lying behinds and those of their masters. You see, 15 years ago the CDC, knowing there was a link between vaccines and autism (the government’s worst kept secret), set out to bury the truth by having published six vaccine safety studies that would proclaim vaccines don’t cause autism. You can listen to mainstream media people today repeat the lie, “study after study has shown there is no link.” The whole story is in a new book coming out later this month (April 2016) title Master Manipulator: The Explosive True Story of Fraud, Embezzlement, and Government Betrayal at the CDC (Skyhorse Publishing, April 2016).

These fraudulent studies are those very same “study after study” the media keeps talking about, and those that wrote the studies had ties to Merck, and the Vaccine Act does allow lawsuits if there is a case of fraud. So, while you can’t sue the CDC for fraud unless you use the Data Quality Act, which no one seems to want to do, Merck can be sued for fraud, and those lawsuits are already in process with more coming.”

 

–MrsDorisRice, April 6, 2016,

Comments: The Truth Barrier

BREAKING NEWS: HOUSTON FILM FEST HIT WITH “VERY THREATENING CALLS” FROM GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS FORCING “VAXXED” PULLED

Posted on April 6, 2016

The following letter was sent to Philippe Diaz, Chairman of  Cinema Libre, Distributor of Vaxxed: From Coverup To Catastrophe, on April 5, at 8:56 am. The situation has now apparently escalated to criminal conduct and extortion. We urge all media to investigate immediately.

–Celia Farber, Editor

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Philippe~ Good Morning…

I wanted you to know that just like DeNiro and Tribeca, we must withdraw our invitation to screen VAXXED! It has been cancelled, and there was no press release about the film… that was scheduled for today, but after very threatening calls late yesterday (Monday) from high Houston Government officials (the first and only time they have ever called in 49 years) – we had no choice but to drop the film. Heavy handed censorship, to say the least… they both threatened severe action against the festival if we showed it, so it is out. Their actions would have cost us more than $100,000 in grants.

I do hope that they did not call or threaten you. It is done, it is out and we have been censored… There are some very powerful forces against this project. It does seem a bit of overkill, as I am confident that it will be released Online soon and millions of people can see it.

My Thanks and Best regards,
Hunter
Hunter Todd
Chairman & Founding Director
TEAM WORLDFEST
The 49th Annual WorldFest-Houston

What They Said: Werner Herzog

Posted on April 6, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“If you’re purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn’t illuminate.”

 

 

–Werner Herzog

DeNiro Speaks About Vaxxed: It’s Not Over

Posted on April 6, 2016

In a somewhat candid interview with Fox 5 NY, Robert DeNiro at last addresses the hysteria about the documentary “Vaxxed: From Coverup To Catastrophe” that was pulled from the Tribeca Film Festival in late March.

 

 

Fox: Do you have hope to bring it back?

DeNiro: I might. I’m thinking about working that out right now–not in the festival.

Rosenthal: We’re not releasing it.

DeNiro: No, we’re not releasing it.

[Right there you can see a whole lot of “politics” in the body language and tone–a tense Rosenthal seeming to be trying to control  and constrict DeNiro from her chair, while DeNiro continues to speak rather freely. You can see quite clearly that Rosenthal wants to disassociate from the film, whereas DeNiro wants to go deeper into the mystery, and redeem what seemed to be a “mess,” but as he is well aware, is something much more grave.]

I found this quote particularly telling:

DeNiro:  “It wasn’t an anti-vaccine movie. My position is not anti-vaccine. It was what was put into the vaccine and how it was dealt with…it’s very complicated and I still am getting information from people who are much more into it, all the time.”

 

 

 

 

 

What They Said: Philip Nelson

Posted on April 5, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Manhattan Film Festival strongly feels that part of the role of an independent film festival is to spark debate and give filmmakers a platform. It is not to limit their first amendment right of free speech, nor is it supposed to be the main stream media. Over the weekend I was able to view the much talked about film “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe.”

After following this story closely, I wonder if many of the writers covering the story actually watched the film. The rate of Autism is a serious topic and needs to be addressed. There is nothing more important in this world than our children. I never understood this until becoming a father. We should be open to transparent discussion when it comes to their health. I am thankful the Vaxxed team accepted our invitation to screen closing day of the 10th annual Manhattan Film Festival.”

–Philip Nelson, Festival Director, Manhattan Film Festival

“Vaxxed” Foes In NYT, Forbes And More, Grossly Distorted The Story Of Ticket Sales

Posted on April 5, 2016

By Stephen Ericson and Celia Farber

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is already a Wikipedia page set up attacking the film Vaxxed:  From Coverup To Catastrophe, from all angles– citing lies and distortions, from the usual cast of illegitimate hostile bloggers.

It states, for example, under “Premiere” that the film was attended, as the first review, in the New York Times, stated, by “several dozen people.”

The review (more like a premeditated attack) by Melena Ryzik, sniffed that Vaxxed, “…premiered to an audience of a few dozen, days after it was dropped by the Tribeca Film Festival.”

This should–we feel– have been anticipated by the PR agents for Vaxxed: Most people work. The film opened on a Friday. How many people can leave work and attend a film during the day?

A fair and honest reporter would have waited to see how many people attended the real “premiere” which was at 8 pm, April 1st, and which was followed by a Q&A with the film’s creators and lede characters. That viewing was packed to the last seat. As were the majority of the screenings throughout the weekend. When the film makers came out after the screening, (see video below) they were met with a standing ovations.

But propagandists never let facts get in the way of a good beating. A trope took hold, in all the hostile captured media reviews for Vaxxed, insisting that the film has been “sparsely attended.”

Emily Willingham, blogging for Forbes, is to vaccine damage what Walter Duranty was to the Holomodor: A shameless apologist. Unable to contain herself, she titled her gleeful hit piece: “Andrew Wakefield’s Film Fizzles.” To prove this, she drew upon fellow bullies who in turn, drew upon Ryzik and the mid day screening April 1st.

Willingham trumpeted: “As the New York Times reported, “several dozen people” turned up for the premiere in Manhattan. Rebecca Robbins from Stat tweeted from the premiere: “Not a huge crowd here.’”

Now let’s look at some hard facts:

Boxofficemojo.com said that the movie did $22,000 in 3 the three days of its opening weekend.

The tickets ran $14 each so let’s do some basic math.

$22,000/$14= 1,571 people who saw the movie. The theater holds 236 people. 1,571 / 236 = 6.7 sold out shows in total.

By late evening Monday, April 4 an article appeared, that did not fit at all with the fantasies of Ryzik, Willingham, et al. It turns out Vaxxed was even more successful than our search earlier today at BoxofficeMojo revealed:

 

“Controversial Vaxxed Doc Grosses $28 k in US Debut.”

http://www.screendaily.com/news/distribution/controversial-vaxxed-doc-grosses-28k-in-us-debut/5102244.article

 

The film grossed $28,399 its first 3 days.

Let’s compare that to an opening weekend for some other controversial documentary: Fahrenheit 9/11.
Fahrenheit 9/11 reaped $23,920,637 its first weekend but it opened in 868 theaters, which brings us to an average of $27,558 per theater.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=fahrenheit911.htm
But that film that had infinitely more PR, hype and television advertising. Many people “disagreed strongly” with its message, but the world did not come to a halt.  Citizens United tried–unsuccessfully– to get the ad blocked, on grounds it counted as a political ad during a campaign season.

As for Willingham’s general diagnosis of a”fizzle”–wrong again.  It was reported today in Variety that distributor Cinema Libre has had many requests for its popular but officially unpopular film:

Variety reported:

“In two weeks, the controversial documentary will open at the Laemmle in Santa Monica, and possibly one or two other Los Angeles locations. Distributor Cinema Libre Studio hopes to expand the film’s national footprint in the coming months, eventually screening “Vaxxed” in between 250 and 300 theaters before it debuts on home entertainment platforms in July….”

 

“…The film will also be shown at the Houston Film Festival and the Manhattan Film Festival, and there are discussions to include the picture in other festival lineups, Diaz said.”

Now, let’s see if we can get any of the liars to admit the reality of box office numbers, and festival screening requests, and retro-fit their attack-articles to resemble reality outside their heated emotions.

Please tweet them, and if you manage to get anything corrected, we’d be most interested–and even more surprised.

 

 

 

— Stephen Ericson & Celia Farber

 

 

Video by Celia Farber, April 1, 2016, Angelika Film Center

 

 

 

Media Propagandists Willfully Ignore Core Content Of “Vaxxed: From Coverup To Catastrophe”

Posted on April 2, 2016

By Stephen Ericson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last night I was able to attend a screening of  Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, the now famous documentary that was wrongfully kicked out of the Tribeca film festival for reasons not yet completely understood. The writers, producers, stars if you will, of the movie did a quick Q&A following the screening and I have to say that when the four of them walked out after the screening,

(Andrew Wakefield, writer, Del Bigtree, producer, Polly Tommy, star, and Brian Hooker, star), I got a real sense that I was witnessing history in the making.

I think the primary reason that I felt this, is that for anyone following the Andrew Wakefield saga who has anything resembling an objective, if not sympathetic ear for information, its been rough going. The fog of war. Finding a detailed and yet digestible account of his trials and tribulations has been chaotic, hit or miss, partially due to the fact that as the story continued to unfold, actual information and misinformation seemed to intermingle to the point of incoherence.

The story takes a lot of twists and turns, and for every accusation there’s an answer, for every crime there’s a dodge, for every false label handed down from without, there’s clarity from within. For me, and I suspect for others like me who have remained interested in the details but who also have other interests and responsibilities to take care of (for many, I’m assuming, an autistic child) staying abreast of the minutia involved is tantamount to a full time job in of itself.

We live in an age of an age of misinformation; the internet is rife with conspiracy theories that are as alarming as they are difficult to believe. That said, the opposition to Andrew Wakefield has been simply titanic– as dense as the singularity that’s said to exist at the center of a black hole. A poignant example of that extreme density: The New York Times ran a review of the movie with the headline “Anti-Vaccine Film, Pulled From Tribeca Film Festival, Draws Crowd at Showing.”

Andrew Wakefield, the films writer and partial subject matter says explicitly in the film, make absolutely NO MISTAKE, HEAR THIS WELL, to use a borrowed phrase…he’s “not anti vaccine.” He’s a doctor. He believes in vaccines. He clearly says, and his reporting has always maintained that he believes that the MMR vaccine is dangerous and rather than combining those three vaccines into one one dose, they should be given as single shots.

For the reading impaired, for those who suffer some sort of cognitive dissonance, please, before you utter the phrase ‘anti vaxx’ one more time, re- read that last line. ANDREW WAKEFIELD IS NOT ANTI VACCINES. No he isn’t. Please…stop saying that. So, that said, therein lies the historical moment I referred to earlier. From here on out, anyone who calls him or the film ‘anti vaccine’ is admitting that they lack sufficient mental acumen to have digested the film. If you can’t get it, if it’s too much for you, and I’m talking to a good deal of the press here, have someone who’s…smarter than you explain it, or admit that you’re a hack ‘writer’, and hang your head in shame. Forever. The jig is up. You can’t say that and continue to be taken seriously any longer.

The film begins with Brian Williams’ face large upon the screen, going on about the measles outbreak that supposedly began at Disneyland in 2014. I had the pleasure of saying to Del Bigtree that I thought he was an apt choice, due to Williams’ noted difficulties with the truth. I don’t blame the talking heads though, smarter people than they quickly form a montage following Williams reading from the prompter, flowing through Sanjay Gupta, and culminating with President Obama advising people to continue vaccinating their children. I thought that starting with the media complex and it’s “dealing” with the issue was powerful. The subject matter is multifaceted to be sure, but one thing that’s perfectly clear: The media has failed to accurately portray the  issue. They issue bland propaganda, telling us only what is “not” happening, namely, vaccines are not causing braun damage. (“autism.”)

It’s difficult for me to review this movie objectively, I’ll admit that. My reasoning however isn’t merely due to my proximity to the subject matter; who doesn’t harbor animosity toward someone who’s one sided relationship to a sticky subject ends up dominating public opinion?

Simply reading the review that I mentioned earlier, that appeared in the New York Times, will show all of the usual twist and turns, the weaves and dodges that they employ to avoid the subject matter as much as they can.

From the opening salvo …“A roiling controversy over the truthfulness and intent of a documentary about the widely debunked link between vaccines and autism did not keep theatergoers away from its premiere on Friday”, immediately they establish a tone of dismissiveness. The phrase ’widely debunked” is unmistakable. However, the title of the film includes the word “Cover-up”. So, one would think that they’d address that cover-up, being that it’s simply and unmistakably the subject of the movie. But for the rest of the review they hardly touch upon the idea of there being a cover up, let alone a cover up that makes Watergate look like a stolen cookie. In fact, it dwarfs even all the Clinton scandals bundled together. It eclipses any and all American “coverup” you have ever heard of. And that may be the film’s greatest challenge. Who can believe it?

The film presents what seems to be solid evidence of that cover up. The film implores the audience to address that and to take action to sort the whole mess out through the only means available to us: by contacting our representatives in government. That facet of the movie then, is really quite simple. There’s not much more to it than that, and to ignore that is a tacit acknowledgement of the media’s being complicit in that cover up.

There’s more to the story though: Polly Tommy, the mother of an autistic child, has her story presented in all of it’s heart wrenching and heroic detail. She and her husband’s decision to start a magazine and organize a community, and the reaction to her endeavors are a heartening reminder of the strength of the human spirit. A vast number of other families are shown, and only the truly heartless will remain unmoved.

But, that’s not the point of the movie. Wakefield and Bigtree don’t rely on emotion for the sake of making their point. They show those emotional stories because they’re really what’s at the heart of the controversy. When Abby Haglage writing for the Daily Beast says, for example “Leaving a room at the near-empty Angelika Theater in SoHo… It was a sad opening for any film, much less one that—just four days earlier—was slated to premiere at The Tribeca Film Festival”, she’s clearly not being objective, (the screening that I went to was completely sold out, and as shown above, the New York Times seems to agree with me in that regard) she’s being dismissive for the sake of being dismissive.

 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/01/i-watched-the-anti-vaxx-doc-booted-from-tribeca-film-festival-and-it-was-insane.html

 

She goes on to slam the film in predictable ways, and writes the whole review, omitting mention of the film’s core subject, namely Dr. Whistleblower, Dr. William Thompson. We are walked though every single step of how Dr. Thomson, somewhat willingly and somewhat not, came to confess to partaking and being complicit in the crime of the century. The film’s hero–PhD scientist Brian Hooker, father of an autistic son, follows the breadcrumb path laid out by Thompson, leading to his discovery of the extremely damning revelations. The CDC concealed, cooked, and finally destroyed, the data that would have forced them to concede that MMR vaccine given at too young an age, does increase the risk of autism by an enormous margin. This is a white-knuckle ride–a tour de force of investigative journalism. And it ends in a brick wall fizzle. You know what the brick wall is?

 

The media.

 

Like I said earlier, perhaps Abby Haglage is just not smart enough to understand what the movie is actually trying to say, so I’ll spell it out for her one more time:

The makers of the film want us, the viewing audience, to write to our congressmen and representatives so that we can get them to subpoena Dr. William Thompson to testify before congress about his role in a cover up the he partook in at the Centers for Disease Control, regarding the safety of the MMR vaccine. Ok Abby? I’m sorry that you missed that, I hope it’s clear to you now. Here, if you’re interested in simply putting the subject to rest, like you claim to be, I’ve included a Change.org petition urging just that.

https://www.change.org/p/barack-obama-united-states-congress-u-s-senate-president-of-the-united-states-congress-subpoena-william-thompson-cdc-vaccine-whistleblower

To Abby and the rest of the media who are busy slamming this film for being misleading while at the same time not even mentioning the name Dr. William Thompson, CDC whistle blower: HE is what this movie is about. If you fail to mention that, you are a propagandist.

For everyone else, not sipping Statist Kool-Aid– go see it.  Whatever you have to do to see it, make sure you see this documentary film, which is a feat of investigative reporting that demolishes the myth of a safe and ordered government “health” complex.

Why Did Salon De-Publish This Article On Arthur Caplan?

Posted on April 1, 2016

 

 

 

Thank you to Erik Leon for retrieving this for us from the Way Back Machine.*

 

It is the Sept 2000 article describing the lawsuit against Arthur Caplan, which came up in an earlier Truth Barrier article.

The back story can be read here:

 

From the disappeared Salon article, by Arthur Allen:

 

“Last week, Caplan, 50, earned the dubious distinction of being the first prominent bioethicist to get sued for his advice. The father of Jesse Gelsinger, an 18-year-old from Arizona who died a year ago during experimental therapy for his inborn metabolic disorder, named Caplan in a lawsuit against several Penn doctors and two hospitals.”

 

“Paul Gelsinger charges in his complaint that Caplan’s advice led to the recruitment of his son for the gene therapy trial — and thus indirectly killed him.”

“Caplan, the Gelsinger complaint points out, had a somewhat unusual relationship with Penn’s Institute for Human Gene Therapy. Penn had hired Caplan away from the University of Minnesota in 1993 as part of then-medical school dean William Kelly’s attempt to build the nation’s leading gene therapy program.

Kelly was also responsible for hiring Jim Wilson, the gene therapy researcher whose experiment with Gelsinger went awry. (Kelly and Wilson were both major stockholders in the company that funded the research, a relationship that has been central to the controversy over Gelsinger’s death).

Although Caplan heads the bioethics center, he was technically a member of the Molecular and Cellular Engineering Department, which Wilson chaired.

“That’s why he was brought to Penn — to provide Wilson’s group with ethical cover, well, that’s too harsh, with ethical background…”

We now plan to ask Salon: Why, on whose orders, and under what circumstances the article was removed?

What has Salon become?

Why are they, of late, so fanatic and vicious against critics of vaccines and other controversies of “modern medicine?”

 

Stay tuned.

 

←→

[*As Stephen Ericson (newly agreed to help me co-pilot The Truth Barrier) says: “We LOVE the way back machine.” He also pointed out that we all should make donations to that wonderful counter-Orwellian website, even if it’s just a few bucks. ]

[If you can spare $5, send $4 to the Way Back Machine and $1 to us! :)]

 

 

 

Paging Dr. Wakefield: One Of Your Critics Quoted By CBS And FOX Was Named As A Defendant In A Wrongful Death, Fraud Case With $33 Million Conflict Of Interest

Posted on April 1, 2016

I was going to call it a day, when a piece of particularly distressing Associated Press anti-“Vaxxed” (the movie) propaganda caught my eye–on Fox (Health) News Online  and CBS News online.

 

The headline was: Medical Community Is Fighting A New Germ: Celebrities.

 

It managed to be all at once offensive, (actually in a WW2 Holocaust* sense,) self-victimizing, and the kind of yuk-yuk “clever” only the truly humorless could ever embrace.  (*Historian Daniel Glass, in Life Unworthy of Life, delineates how the Nazis saw Jews as infectious matter, first, which began the dehumanization.)

The Fox News article featured a photo of Jenny McCarthy, while CBS News used a photo of Robert De Niro.

Propaganda has countless depressant features; One is that all hope of novelty or ingenuity is lost before you even read it. It’s always a sucker punch. Take that. In this case, we the aggrieved nerds at the CDC who resent that anybody in the Western World should begrudge us a fatally corrupted study MMR/Autism that supplied the bedrock of “vaccines-don’t-cause-autism” are here to flog famous people who have “disappointed” us. We all know how Jenny McCarthy was crucified for speaking out on behalf of her vaccine damaged (by her own telling) son, despite the fact that she managed to improve his condition tremendously by way of multiple healing modalities, chiefly gut restoration and diet change.

Despite the fact that the gaspers here are politically correct down to their last atom, they see no reason to hold back on mocking and flogging McCarthy for her beauty. You get the sense they would like to literally stone her if they could. The condescending and wholly unoriginal insult they trot out again and again asks with heavy eye roll who parents would “rather” get pediatric advice from–a medical doctor, or a Playboy Bunny. As if any parent alive ever stood before these two choices. The worst thing is, nobody ever tells these people how banal they are.

My eye caught the other sucker punch quote that has been, insanely, pollinating in the raft of articles hysterically denouncing the explosive documentary nobody has seen yet: Vaxxed: From Coverup to Catastrophe, produced by Andrew Wakefield, Del Bigtree, and Polly Tommey. Robert DeNiro, who has seen it, backed it passionately, until suddenly, he pulled the plug, this past Saturday, removing it from Tribeca Film Festival’s schedule.

De Niro therefore is getting mostly praised, but inside the praise, psychosis bristles. This brings me to the second sucker-punch, opening with that favorite pod phrasing about what “no one would question:”

[This is an author-less article, written by The Associated Press, and syndicated.]

From CBS News:

 

“No one would question that the issue is personal to De Niro. But the Tribeca Film Festival, which opens its 15th edition on April 13, is an extremely public event. When news of the documentary’s scheduled screening spread, disease experts were distressed that the festival would lend its megaphone to a film by a disgraced doctor. Michael Specter, the New Yorker staff writer and medical expert, called it “a disgrace” for the festival, and compared Wakefield’s film to “Leni Riefenstahl making a movie about the Third Reich.” ”

Hell’s Bells. “Disease experts,” distressed? We can’t have that. Let’s instead make sure that millions of parents of brain damaged children are tortured to no end, by the mass media, who bludgeon any and all who think its “journalism” to allow their voices to be heard. Then let’s make a clumsy Nazi/Reich/Propaganda/Riefenstahl metaphor, for good measure, even though the analogy does not even make sense. Vaxxed is an expose documentary about the CDC whistleblower–not a propaganda film for the CDC. Maybe The New Yorker and Salon, and Forbes, should make that one.

[In an interview with The Truth Barrier, not yet published, distributor Philippe Diaz, of Cinema Libre, called Specter’s quotes, “insane,” and wondered, “what is he smoking?”]

I knew what was coming next–one always does with these “period pieces.” The lament. The lament that despite the CDC’s best efforts at totalitarian control of the press, and the film industry–a few rogue celebrities still manage to go off script.

This despite their creepy foundations like “Hollywood, Health, and Society–” which is run by a former CDC employee, funded by the CDC, The Gates Foundation, and countless more corporate giants, which “consults” on scripts for hundreds of TV shows, movies, and even documentaries, spreading “important messages about public health.”

They are so narcissistically deranged they actually believe and expect that all celebrities should do their ideological bidding every time they open their mouths. And many do.

So here came the self-victimizing lament, quoted as gospel:

“Celebrities have had an out-of-proportion impact on the public’s understanding of vaccine risk,” says Arthur L. Caplan, head of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University. “I don’t want to overplay it; most people vaccinate. It’s not like hordes of people are listening to Jenny McCarthy and saying, ‘Forget the American Association of Pediatrics, I’m going with the former Playboy Bunny.'”

The name Arthur L. Caplan came back to me, from an assignment I had from TALK magazine in 2000, to write about “gene therapy.” I wondered why they would want to lend their megaphone to such a controversial, to say the least, doctor of ethics.

Gene Therapy was a field that ground to a screeching halt after an 18 year old boy named Jesse Gelsinger died in an extremely dangerous “gene therapy” trial at Penn. That was where I remembered Caplan’s name from. I interviewed Jesse Gelsinger’s  grief-stricken father, at the time. TALK, for its part, killed the article, because it wasn’t enthusiastic enough about “gene therapy.” (Actually no, they asked me to revise it to become more positive–and I killed it.)

I remember vividly what the PR man at Penn said to me when I entered his office for an interview. He slumped down in his chair, and sighed.

“We killed an 18 year old kid.”

The interview was pretty much over, after that. This was before the days when everything was reversed–back then, a child’s death was called a death, and heads rolled, and ill-conceived, greedy “research” programs using human guinea pigs were halted. End of story. Turned out they had failed to inform Jesse or his family that two other people had nearly died in similar experiments, and that research monkeys had died. In addition, Jesse’s levels of ammonia were way too high for this to be remotely safe for him. I remember his father telling me that before his organs shut down, Jesse’s blood had turned to the consistency of jello.

Jesse Gelsinger

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I typed into Google: “Jesse Gelsinger and Arthur Caplan.”

 

Well what do you know?

 

First item, worth quoting in its entirety:

 

Gelsinger wrongful death lawsuit names bioethicist Caplan

Genetic Crossroads
October 16th, 2000

 

The family of Jesse Gelsinger, the 18-year-old who died last September
in a gene therapy experiment at the University of Pennsylvania, has
filed suit against the researchers and institutions involved in running
the experiment: the university, two medical facilities, and Genovo Inc.,
the biotech company founded by lead scientist James Wilson that had a
stake in the successful outcome of the experiment. The lawsuit accuses
the defendants of negligent, reckless, or fraudulent acts.

Gelsinger’s death was followed by revelations of serious regulatory
violations and financial conflicts of interest in the Penn trial,
as well as in hundreds of gene therapy experiments nationwide. (See
Issues 7 and 10 of this newsletter.)

Media coverage of the lawsuit focused on its inclusion of well-known
bioethicist Arthur Caplan, who advised the researchers on the design
of the experiment. Caplan argued that the parents of sick infants are
too desperate to provide true informed consent, and that the experiment
should therefore be conducted on relatively healthy adults. For more
on Caplan’s role, and on bioethicists’ growing influence and financial
conflicts, see Arthur Allen, “Bioethics comes of age,”
.

In venues unrelated to the Gelsinger case, Caplan has often argued
that human germline engineering is “inevitable.” In December 1999 he
wrote, “Before the next century is out, fetuses will no longer need
their mother’s womb for nourishment and growth. We will see many
children made by the artificial creation of embryos. . .This prediction
is 100 percent certain. . ..There will be strong social pressure to use
eugenics to improve children in order to minimize the social cost of
disease and chronic disability. The rush to use eugenics will be
amazing, with parents competing to give their kids the `best’ start
in life.” See

 

[By the way, Salon has removed its 2000 article on Caplan.]

Here’s more, on the legal case.

 

It opens with this:

Ten years ago, Jesse Gelsinger died while participating in a human gene- therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania (“Penn”). His death came to signify the corrosive influence of financial interests in human subjects research. After Jesse’s death, the media reported that one researcher, Dr. James Wilson, held shares in a biotech company, Genovo, which stood to gain from the research’s outcome-shares that The Wall Street Journal later valued at $13.5 million, although Wilson maintains he did not make nearly this much.’ At the time Penn authorized Wilson’s deal, internal Penn documents implicitly valued Wilson’s stake in Genovo at approximately $28.5 to $33 million.

Jesse’s death sparked two separate lawsuits: one by the family, who sued in tort, and one by the federal government, which framed alleged errors in the research trial as a civil False Claims Act violation. Both suits settled, with no public apologies or acknowledgement of wrongdoing in either case.’ The government refused to make public the documents it collected, despite requests from the family.’ Thus, in what is arguably the most famous conflict- of-interest case in medicine, we have known for a decade almost nothing about the nature of the financial stakes that Wilson, and Penn, had in the research’s outcome, or why Penn authorized a researcher to hold such a substantial stake in that research’s outcome. How this web of financial ties came to enmesh Jesse’s trial is a subject worthy of exploration because it provides an important lens for evaluating two divergent visions about the role of money in research.

Another illuminating outtake:

B. A CASE OF FIRSTS

Jesse’s death was a case of firsts. Jesse was the first person to die in a human gene-therapy trial.3 ‘ His family’s lawsuit was also the first high-profile suit in which a family of a participant sued in tort to recover under a variety of new and creative claims.3 2 That suit was also the first to name a bioethicist, the world famous Arthur Caplan, director of Penn’s Center for Bioethics, as a defendant based on the advice he gave the researchers regarding study design-which essentially urged testing the protocol on relatively healthy adults rather than dying infants.

3. The family’s lawsuit was also the first to spotlight a financial conflict of interest by a researcher, Wilson.3 4

Jesse’s trial was also the first to trigger a lawsuit by the government in which it framed errors in a human subjects research trial as a civil False Claims Act violation, bringing to bear the crushing power of the penalties under that act.35

Now let’s go back to the CBS News article, and a phrase you will have read in countless articles these past few days, as well as over the past decade, since Murdoch, Brian Deer, GlaxoSmithKline, the BMJ, and all their attack dogs in the press dropped what Hunter S. Thompson once dubbed “the million pound shithammer” on Andrew Wakefield. The phrase is: “…an elaborate fraud.

To wit:

“The film, “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe,” is directed by Andrew Wakefield, a former British gastroenterologist who was stripped of his medical license in 2010. The British medical journal BMJ called Wakefield’s study connecting autism and vaccines — which was retracted by the medical journal The Lancet — an “elaborate fraud.” ”

Having supposedly been involved in a legal case and having various potential vested financial interests in MMR lawsuits is the better part of why Wakefield is repeatedly drubbed as “an elaborate fraud.”

Here’s how the sane and uncontroversial men of medicine speak, by contrast to Wakefield who speaks mostly of ways to improve bowel diseases that exacerbate autism.

Whereas look what excites Dr. Caplan–let’s have that quote again:

 

“Before the next century is out, fetuses will no longer need
their mother’s womb for nourishment and growth. We will see many
children made by the artificial creation of embryos. . .This prediction
is 100 percent certain. . ..There will be strong social pressure to use
eugenics to improve children in order to minimize the social cost of
disease and chronic disability. The rush to use eugenics will be
amazing, with parents competing to give their kids the `best’ start
in life.”

I could stop here, but you know what? It gets worse. There’s more.

Here is a comprehensive timeline of events from an online journal called Guinea Pig Zero, It contains this passage, about Caplan:

 

“Now, let’s explore the reasons why this young fellow, in relatively good health, was ever strapped into a table, fitted through the groin with arterial catheters, and infused with an experimental gene-vector, in spite of the blood-ammonia reading that should have disqualified him from the procedure. Before we can do that, we must ask, who are these people at the University of Pennsylvania?

Arthur L. Caplan is the director of the university’s Center for Bioethics, and has become the most quoted person in his field in recent years. He is peculiar in that he is far more visible and Media-friendly than any of his peers. Some say he’s right in popularizing important discussions, while others say he’s just another media whore. In either case, Caplan is a team player, and he does not publicly criticize any researcher who practices under the same roof as he does himself. In Guinea Pig Zero #6, I pointed out his odd silence on the subject of the dermatologist Albert Kligman, who used prisoners at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg prison as human guinea pigs from the 1950’s through the early ’70’s. In exchange for small cash payments, Kligman tested LSD, dioxin, radioactive isotopes, Agent Orange, and poison ivy on the inmates. He became very rich (he invented Retin-A), and the prisoners became scarred, insane, chronically ill for unknown reasons, and underwent excruciating pain. When prisoner-experiments came under public scrutiny and Kligman was investigated, he destroyed all his original patient records. This is why I do not say that he killed any prisoners. There were questions about dead inmates, but Kligman destroyed the answers. For all that, Art Caplan has no opinion as to whether the surviving inmate guinea pigs should be compensated or otherwise relieved by the university that tortured them. Since the release of Acres of Skin in 1998, a book documenting Kligman’s research, most everyone else in the city does.

I saw Caplan at a conference on science and religion last spring. The distinguished professor remarked in passing about how those gentlemen outside on the sidewalk (Holmesburg veterans, chanting with picket signs) had reached their conclusions by some logical method as opposed to another. No one would understand what he meant, unless they’d had special training, but he saved face by giving them a nod. But what he said did not in any way reflect upon Kligman’s past behavior and the university’s refusal to take responsibility for the harm suffered by his living victims.

In the case of Jesse Gelsinger, the bioethics poster-boy was the one who made the experiment possible by persuading the researchers and government overseers that asymptomatic adult patients, as opposed to infants with fatal cases, should serve as the human subjects. The reasoning was that the parents would be coerced by the sickness of their babies. Caplan’s letter of Feb. 4th fiercely defended why adult OTC deficient persons like Jesse should be put at risk when they were not the intended beneficiaries of the treatment. He ridiculed a reporter who had taken this up as an issue. The letter’s effect was to draw the reader’s attention away from the more disturbing facts of the case.

Caplan’s name occurs also back in September, when he argued for an immediate announcement about the nature of Jesse’s death. After that, there’s been not a word on the glaring conflict of interest on the part of Dr. James M. Wilson, both co-author of the experiment’s protocol and one who stood to make many millions if the vector proved marketable. It is obvious that Caplan knows which side his ethical bread is buttered on.

When Arthur Caplan, an ethics expert, remains silent on alarming ethical crises, in cases where the players are his own colleagues and when his salary and professional future are controlled by the institution that’s directly vested in the matter, he services as the university’s spin doctor. To be sure, he did not directly praise them. But, of all people, Caplan is the one whose position should be the clearest and loudest when there is an ethical conflict. We should keep in mind, above all, that he participated in planning the clinical trial that took Gelsinger’s life, almost as directly as the researchers themselves.”

And CBS News, which dubbed Wakefield “…an elaborate fraud,” described Caplan, who was named as a defendant in a lawsuit over the death of a child in a very unethical experiment, how?

By his title, of course. And what is his title?

He, unlike Wakefield, was never “stripped” of it. It is, astonishingly:

 

Head of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University.

 

–Celia Farber

 

 

The documentary dropped by Tribeca Film Festival, Vaxxeed: From Coverup to Catastrophe, debuts tonight at Angelika Film Center.

 

The Mind Cage: An Uncensored History Of The War Against Andrew Wakefield And The Disappeared UK Victims

Posted on March 31, 2016

A New Column: By Martin J. Walker

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1995 a lawyer in Norfolk England, began work on a civil claims case against three pharmaceutical companies. Over one and a half thousand parents were claiming for the damage the MMR vaccination had done to their children. The claims varied for different forms of damage, from conditions on the autism spectrum, which left children without speech or rational thought, to children who had hearing impairments.

In 2003 the government-run Legal Aid Department withdrew funding from the case, leaving parents of damaged children without representation and without ‘a day in court’. In 2007, two of the doctors who had agreed to act as ‘expert’ witnesses for the parents, Drs Wakefield and Walker-Smith were themselves charged, with another doctor, Simon Murch, by the General Medical Council (GMC) with around eighty main and subsiduary charges. After a 33 month trial, Professor Simon Murch was admonished by the GMC, Professor Walker-Smith was found guilty on the majority of charges and Dr Andrew Wakefield was found guilty on every charge, stripped of his right to practice medicine in Britain and had a number of already published papers withdrawn from Journals.

Professor Simon Murch returned to work, Professor Walker-Smith appealed against the findings of guilt against him and was found not guilty on every charge by a High Court judge. Judge Mittings at his hearing made it clear that in his opinion the ‘jury’ at the GMC hearing had badly misunderstood the evidence. Dr Andrew Wakefield, enmeshed in a now long running and massive campaign of character assassination, was denied an Appeal on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence opposing the decision of the GMC jury.

Outside the circles of the original MMR claimants and autism groups set up by parents, the one and a half thousand children damaged by MMR, were forgotten, they and their parents faced a new and difficult life denied special treatment because none had been researched and denied financial support and funding because many of their parents refused to discuss their childrens health without also claiming that they had been damaged by vaccine.

These children and their parents became Britains ‘Disappeared’[1] Everyone who spoke on their behalf was targeted and character assassinated by mercenary propagandists paid by the pharmaceuitical cartels.

[1] A term used by Argentians who knew those who had disappeared during the first reign of terror and thos Spanish people still campaigning for those who dissapeared during Franco’s reign.

 

[To Be Continued…]

 

* Martin Walker, Dirty Medicine: The Handbook on Facebook, and/or www.slingshotpublications.com

 

 

The Mind Cage: A New Column By Martin J. Walker

Posted on March 31, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IT WAS ON THE MORNING OF MARCH 31, 2016, THAT I READ BRITISH INVESTIGATIVE AUTHOR MARTIN J. WALKER’S COMMENTARY ON AN ARTICLE THAT WAS UPDATED AND RE-POSTED, IN THE FIRST DAYS OF THE CRUMBLING OF THE GREAT MEDIA BLACKOUT ON THE VACCINATION WAR AND THE CDC WHISTLEBLOWER.

THIS HAS BEEN A DECADES LONG A WAR ON CHILDREN, PARENTS, (ESPECIALLY MOTHERS,) DOCTORS, JOURNALISTS, FREE SPEECH, FILM FESTIVALS, ACTORS–A WAR OF ANNIHILATION AGAINST INFORMATION, DATA, HUMANITY, AND HISTORY.

In the last week of March, events occurred with hairpin, white-knuckle turns, and a persistent sense of what Hunter S. Thompson called fear and loathing, in the atmosphere. After the vaccine lobby, and media propagandists bore down on Robert DeNiro and Tribeca Film Festival for endorsing and including the film Vaxxed: From Coverup To Catastrophe in its 2016 lineup, the film was pulled, on Saturday, March 26. Haters of truth seeking processes, defenders of “public health concerns” overriding even stories of profligate corruption at federal institutions like the CDC (better to say, “deniers” of said realities) were luridly pleased, while millions of parents of environmentally brain damaged children were crushed.

Overnight, the film went from being a film, as some pointed out, to being a movement. Maybe even a revolution.

Vaxxed Producer Del Bigtree spoke out loud and clear in many interviews. “We started out making a film. Instead we wound up making history,” he said.

The momentum was simply too big to be crushed the the usual Big Boot. We all knew something was going to “happen.”

Sure enough.

On March 29, news broke that the film had been defiantly picked up for distribution by Cinema Libre Studio, and that the trendy Angelika Film Center just south of Tribeca, would run it for two weeks, starting April 1.

“If everything goes well we will be in 500 theaters,” said Philippe Diaz, Chairman of Cinema Libre Studio. “We will screen this movie (Vaxxed) for free if we have to.”

Addressing the staggering, absurdist atmosphere of censorship around the film, Diaz also said:

“We have just seen almost every single major news outlet in the entire country tell the public to not see a movie (Vaxxed) that they have not seen themselves.”

Within hours, the film’s debut screening at Angelika Film Center in downtown New York, was sold out. It would appear the totalitarian press had lost its lend-no-credence-to-vaccination-trouble stranglehold, and a brand new team of freedom fighters had suddenly gotten the ball: Cinema Libre Studio.

Two outspoken heroes: Philippe Diaz and Richard Castro. All I know about them is that I love everything they say, and their names sound Latin. I suspect they know a thing or two about vested interest forces trying to tell people what’s newsworthy and what is not.

Now we had film distributors behaving like film distributors, and (knock on wood) at least one movie theater acting like a movie theater and not like a sub-contractor for the CDC’s Ministry Of Information.

The Perestroika-Glasnost surprises kept on coming. Yesterday, I blinked a few times at my screen upon seeing this article, seeming to validate “discredited” Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s widely condemned and hysteria-swept early concerns about MMR vaccines, bowel disease, and autism. I soon learned via Martin Walker that, mysteriously, it was an old article, updated as though written this week.

Martin–being probably the most well informed investigative writer on the subject of MMR and the Wakefield affair–having written several books about it, and attended every day of the GMC hearings. [See “Dirty Medicine: The Handbook on FB, to order these historically critical books]–put it in context for me on his FB page.  I read the comment and asked if I could make it “Part 2” of a Martin Walker series at The Truth Barrier, which began spontaneously with this, also originally a FB post.

This was his FB post:

 

“I’m not going to hold my breath while this article changes the world, many people have interviewed and quoted Peter Fletcher over the years, as a previous civil servant with a sense of moral social responsibility, he is eminently quotable. He was also slated as an expert witness in some of the claims for damages made by the 1,500 parents whose children had been adversely affected by MMR. These parents and their damaged children were swept under the carpet when the UK government shut down their legal case.
The problem is now, and his applies equally to Dr Wakefield and Dr Peter Fletcher, the intelligent, responsible good men and women, have been plunged into war with the mercenary, psychopathic, profiteers of the pharmafia. No one is going to win in this war, this side of a revolution, or at least this side of thousands on the street, and the changing of direction of developed societies.
However, it would be good to see a start to this revolution with the charging by the police of those in Britain and those in the CDC in the states, who have buried the cases of damage and got away scott free.”

 

After I threatened (I say this jokingly) to make this FB commentary “part 2,” Martin sent me new text; The new text delighted me greatly–as a publisher of unpopular, granular, ring-of-truth, carefully sourced, non-propaganda material in the age of the anti-media.

Martin and I came to an agreement that he will submit materials that will bring today’s vast, information hungry audience closer and closer to history’s ringside, to understand at last, where the “Wakefield” mushroom cloud came from. How did it all begin? Who were the players? What exactly, happened?

The installments will be sometimes short, sometimes long. Martin himself will decide what to tell us, and in what order.

The new column:

 

The Mind Cage: An Uncensored History Of the War Against Andrew Wakefield And The Disappeared Victims

 

… begins in the next post.

BREAKING NEWS: Cinema Libre To Distribute Vaxxed: “We Chose To Distribute This Film To Correct A Major Issue, Which Is The Suppression Of Medical Data By A Governmental Agency That May Very Well Be Contributing To A Significant Health Crisis.”

Posted on March 30, 2016

VAXXED: FROM COVER-UP TO CATASTROPHE

DISTRIBUTOR CINEMA LIBRE STUDIO RESPONDS

BY PREMIERING THE FILM FRIDAY 4/1 ANGELIKA FILM CENTER IN NYC

 

 

LOS ANGELES, CA (March 29, 2016) Cinema Libre Studio will be distributing Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, the explosive documentary directed by Andrew Wakefield which was “de-selected” from the Tribeca Film Festival this past weekend. The film investigates the claims of a Senior Scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. William Thompson, who revealed that the CDC had manipulated and destroyed data on an important study about autism and the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine. Cinema Libre Studio has been working with the Vaxxed team since fall of 2015, and has acquired worldwide rights from Autism Media Channel. The documentary will premiere Friday, April 1 in an Exclusive Engagement at the Angelika FiIm Center in New York City before being widely released in other cities with future distribution plans to be unveiled.

The film was an Official Selection at the Tribeca Film Festival with the world premiere scheduled for April 24th. However, after the film was announced in the lineup last Monday, online protests erupted. Then festival co-founder Robert De Niro had a one-hour conversation with Representative Bill Posey, who appears in the film and who has vetted all communication related to the CDC whistleblower and asked that he be brought before Congress to testify. After the call, a statement was posted on the Tribeca Facebook page from De Niro:

“This is very personal to me and my family and I want there to be a discussion, which is why we will be screening VAXXED. I am not personally endorsing the film, nor am I anti-vaccination; I am only providing the opportunity for a conversation around the issue.”

The pressure mounted when the story went viral and the festival made an about-face, when TFF executives called Cinema Libre Studio executives over the holiday weekend to tell them the film was being pulled from the line-up. De Niro then posted a second statement saying:

“My intent in screening this film was to provide an opportunity for conversation around an issue that is deeply personal to me and my family. But after reviewing it over the past few days with the Tribeca Film Festival team and others from the scientific community, we do not believe it contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for.”

The media frenzy continued including a Change.org petition to bring back the film to the festival which now has over 28,000 signatures.

Cinema Libre Chairman Philippe Diaz says, “We chose to distribute this film to correct a major issue, which is the suppression of medical data by a governmental agency that may very well be contributing to a significant health crisis. The media storm of last week also revealed another issue; the hyper mediatization by some members of the media and the documentary community who had not even seen the film, as well as Tribeca executives, which condemned it as anti-vaccine. This film is not anti-vaccine and neither is Dr. Wakefield. Wakefield’s concern for the last twenty years has been about making sure that vaccines are safe for children. This is why we decided to release the film now rather than as originally planned later in the year.”

Richard Castro, Head of Distribution, explains, “It’s disturbing that an American film festival can succumb so easily to pressure to censor a film that it has already selected an announced. On Friday I received a call from Tribeca executives expressing concerns about showing the film, but no opportunity was afforded our filmmakers to even address those concerns. When I questioned the rationale, it was indicated that sponsors interest was a factor. By Saturday night, the film was simply pulled off the festival’s programming schedule.”

Produced by Del Bigtree, who left his job as producer on the Emmy© award-winning television show The Doctors to make the film, the documentary features Dr. Brian Hooker, to whom Thompson leaked documents as well as autism experts (Dr. Doreen Granpeesheh, Mark Blaxill, Polly Tommey), practicing family physicians (Dr. James M. Sears, Dr. Rachel Ross), former Pharmaceutical drug representative Brandy Vaughn, research scientists (Dr. Luc Montagnier, Stephanie Seneff) and Congressman Bill Posey. Says Bigtree, “While making the film, we spoken to so many medical professionals who are afraid to speak out publicly against the pharmaceutical companies, and their influence on the medical industry. When the CDC Whistleblower story broke last year, not one mainstream news outlet ran the story. Either they were asleep at the wheel or were in a coma induced by their pharmaceutical advertisers. “

Wakefield says, “Our aim with this movie was to take this complex, high-level fraud and to give it context, and weave through it the tragic street-level narratives of ordinary families affected by autism. We hope that the film will help, at a minimum, push Congress to subpoena Dr. William Thompson and investigate this fraud at the CDC. ”

The film was produced by Del Bigtree, edited by Brian Burrowes with original music by Franceso Lupica (Knights of Cups, Tree of Life) who has contributed his “Visual Music Design” to several Terrance Malick films. The film was financed through donations of individual families and philanthropists, and was acquired from Autism Media Channel in a deal negotiated by Wakefield for Autism Media Channel and Bigtree with Richard Castro.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdCU2DfMBpU

 

 

Website: www.vaxxedthemovie.com |Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vaxxedthemovie
Twitter: @vaxxedthemovie # vaxxed #cdcwhistleblower

ABOUT CINEMA LIBRE: Cinema Libre Studio is a full-service mini-studio known for producing and distributing high concept feature films and social impact documentaries. Headquartered in the Los Angeles area, the team has released over 200 films.

www.cinemalibrestudio.com

| www.facebook.com/cinemalibrestudio.com | twitter.com/cinemalibre

LINKS:
1) Direct link to De Niro’s Tribeca Facebook posts: https://www.facebook.com/Tribeca/posts/10154153954489758

2) Change.org petition: https://www.change.org/p/tribeca-bring-vaxxed-back-to-tribe…

FOR MEDIA REQUESTS:

· There will be a press conference on Wednesday, March 30th at 1:00pm PST at the Sportsman Lodge in Studio City. Contact Dawna Shuman at dslighthousepr@aol.com, ph: 818-632-3296

· PLEASE NOTE: due to the short lead time to release the film, we are unable to distribute advance screeners and instead encourage the media to attend one of the screenings at the Angelika Film Center

Angelika Film Center (18 W. Houston St., New York, NY 10012)
Tickets: http://www.fandango.com/angelikafilmcenter_aaeci/theaterpage

Show times: Friday (4/1) thru Thursday (4/7): 11:00a, 1:15p, 3:30p, 5:45p, 8:00p, 10:30p

There will be Q&As following the 8:00pm shows on Friday (4/1) and Saturday (4/2)

For other requests, please contact press (at) vaxxedthemovie (dot) com and ph: 818-588-3033

LINK TO RELEASE: http://cinemalibrestudio.com/…/vaxxed-premieres-april-1-at…/
Vaxxed Official Documentary Film Website
Directed by Andrew Wakefield, Vaxxed investigates the CDC whistleblower, Dr. William Thompson and how the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), the government agency charged with protecting the health of American citizens, destroyed data on their 2004 study that showed a link between the…
vaxxedthemovie.com

Live To Tell, Part 1: How Dirty Exactly Are Big Pharma’s Tactics? Britain’s Toughest Investigative Writer Brings Back Lost History

Posted on March 28, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Martin J. Walker

 

 

The row over Vaxxed: From Coverup To Corruption, has led me to consider my experiences of censorship, apart from attempts to wipe out my book, and I thought I would write a little about the subject as a whole this morning.

Hands up all those who know that between 1929 and 1952, the UK Anti Vaccination League unsuccessfully lobbied the BBC, to have their voice heard. The BBC stuck doggedly to its medically directed policy of not allowing “crackpots” to have a voice on the British Broadcasting. I’m not saying that anything has changed since 1952, but there is a definite reference for this period.

I started my involvement in campaigning against pharmaceutically directed medical orthodoxy, in 1988 when I began researching the Campaign Against Health Fraud, a stooge pharma group set up by the Wellcome Foundation. This group’s first campaigns were built around – amongst other things– denying that people could be susceptible to food allergy and chemical sensitivity. This group vehemently attacked anyone who suggested that manufactured food stuffs or chemicals could cause sensitivities. They did everything they could to stop anyone speaking or writing on the subject. The group, still in existence, is now headed by Dick Taverne, the founder of the bogus charity Sense About Science. The group’s campaign is obviously responsible for the fact that the UK now has the highest rates of allergy and anaphylactic shock in the developed world.

The first mother campaigner I worked with, whose child suffered from serious allergies and who set up a group to defend her alternative doctor found:

-Two family dogs dead in their garden, one had been poisoned while the other having trapped its two front paws in a garden gate had died of a heart attack. The vet who attended said it was “very odd.”

-Inches away from death when a car drove at her outside her house.

-Evidence that her phone had been tapped over a period of months.

One incident occurred in relation to the alternative doctor that the mother defended, I know that I’m moving away slightly from censorship, but this took me back to my ‘political’ days in the 1970s’ when activists used to pick up the phone and found their last conversation playing back to them – ah those were the days!

When the doctor opened an envelope full of papers from another doctor who had been attacked, she found inside an official post office printed note, instructing the post office worker to make notes on the documents and take photo copies. I always found it difficult to understand whether when this happened the worker had put the instructions in with the papers, to warn the doctor, or by accident.

Although I was privy to all kinds of dirty tricks and censorious dance movements by the Pharmafia, I wasn’t really concerned until I began working on Wakefield’s case.

Over the years, I had worked with Gordon Newman, one of the UK’s best and most politically acerbic dramatists. I did research for his series of Judge John Deed. One episode, Heart of Darkness, based on Wakefield and MMR, having been shown once by the BBC, was banned throughout the world from any more showings. The BBC said it was banned because of one complaint, but it was clearly a put-up job. I wasn’t surprised that the BBC banned this episode, but what did amaze me was the dexterity with which the BBC and the pharmafia unrecorded history with respect to this episode–its banning caused hardly a ripple.

Around this time– 2003–Channel 5 showed the brave and brilliant ‘Hear the Silence,’ a drama documentary written by Timothy Prager. The forces of darkness were unable to ban this production, but after immense pressure, Channel 5 agreed to a panel ‘discussion’ following the showing. The panelists should have been provided with buns to throw. I remember, distinctly the appearance of the ‘scientist’ Vince Marks, a leading figure in HealthWatch, who appeared quite deranged, his face distorted screaming his ‘scientific’ opinions at the camera. It was like feeding time at the zoo.

This piece on Wikipedia gives some idea of the lack of balance with which the film was reviewed.

“Many doctors invited to participate in a discussion about the MMR-autism link after the programme, boycotted it instead, claiming it was misleading. One of these doctors (David Salisbury, director of the British National Immunization Program) justified his decision to do so by saying that if he and his public health colleagues had appeared as the filmmakers had requested, “We felt we’d be giving respectability to a program that was not respectable.” British doctors also wrote an open letter condemning the film, in which they called it “distorted” and “entirely unbalanced.” One of the letter’s signatories, Great Ormond Street Hospital pediatrician David Elliman, also called the film “overly sentimental” and “potentially dangerous.” ”

In response to such criticisms, Stevenson said, “Perhaps it was naive of me to think you could put out a film like that,” and, “I thought it was generating an interesting debate and that it gave a voice to those who needed a voice – parents who were told they didn’t know anything.”

Finally, if we are going to talk seriously about censorship, we have to think always of the one and a half thousand parents of vaccine damaged children, who having worked with their lawyers for a decade, only to have their case pulled from beneath them by the British government. These parents, who have a life time battle are the true ‘disappeared’ of UK. Those who caused these babies, children and now young people to be swept away and never referred to again, should face criminal charges.

 

 

–Martin J. Walker

 

[Note from Editor: No writer alive has amassed more information about the Wakefield story than Martin Walker, who attended every single day of the GMC hearings, for starters. As we, citizens, move through this shocking morass, now an international news story due to DeNiro and Tribeca Film Festival–we must appreciate the best source material there is, and read it closely. There is so much propaganda and pulp out there. I strongly urge all Truth Barrier readers to order Martin Walker’s outstanding works of investigative writing, on all aspects of Pharmaceutical Tyranny. Find him on Facebook at “Dirty Medicine The Handbook. CF]

Producer Of Vaxxed: We Must Forgive Robert DeNiro

Posted on March 27, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert DeNiro Is Not At Fault For This Disaster

 

By Polly Tommey

 

Autism is hard to live with for many families. I know as I am Billy’s mother. Billy is a 19-year-old who had a severe adverse reaction to the MMR vaccine at 13 months of age. He was later diagnosed with autism.

 

Robert De Niro is the father of a child with autism and no amount of money or fame can take away the sheer heartbreak that comes with this diagnosis. Unless you live with it, it’s impossible to imagine. I know that he, like me and so many others, wants to do the right thing. What happened to our children must not happen to other families. We don’t want others to go through the pain and heartache that comes with caring for a child who has chronic health issues as a result of vaccine injury.

On the other hand, we could just walk away from this and get on with our lives the best we can. Why do I need to constantly tell Billy’s story? People who speak out about vaccine injury are subjected to a constant hail of abuse and even threats. My child is already damaged so why should I care what other parents do?

 

 

 

 

Because I was once one of them– extremely pro-vaccine. My eldest child Bella had all her vaccinations and was perfectly fine; I had no reason to question anything when I took Billy to the doctor for his shot. I continue to speak about vaccine injury because I don’t want you to watch your child regress into another world. It’s too painful and I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. Autism doesn’t just affect the child with the diagnosis, but so many others as well. It can be devastating to the entire family.

Robert de Niro lives a life similar to mine. Granted, I don’t have money or fame—which some might argue could ease the burden—but he still lives with the same pain as I do: The deep daily sadness of knowing what our child could have been, the guilt for what we should or could have done differently, and the utter fear for the future of our vulnerable loved ones. For Mr. De Niro to have quashed what I know he thought was an important, well researched documentary can only mean one thing. Someone, somewhere, frightened him. You see we are just parents, we are not scientists. Mr. De Niro is just a father who happens to be an actor. We can tell our stories of what happened to our children and then leave it to the scientists and research world to do the right thing.
Vaxxed: From Coverup To Catastrophe is an Autism Media Channel production. We have spent many years researching collectively so we could bring you accurate information—the truth about the man-made autism epidemic.

 

I have travelled the world interviewing families, seeing the utter devastation autism brings. Producer Del Bigtree, Andrew Wakefield and I travelled across America to get interviews from scientists, researchers and politicians. I am the parent; Andy is the academic gastroenterologist (with as much, if not more knowledge about autism than any psychiatrist or psychologist can claim); Del is a first class medical journalist. And the team is not just us. We’ve been joined along the way by many experts including parents, academics, practitioners, and journalists who have contributed to the documentary. This film has been thoroughly researched and fact-checked.

As most people know by now, Vaxxed is a film centered around recorded conversations between Brian Hooker and top level CDC scientist William Thompson regarding fraudulent autism research. Brian Hooker is a scientist—a scientist who has a child with autism. What might his motive be if all this is a sham? That would make no sense.

And Andy? Just today, BBC news referred to him as being found guilty of fraud by the UK General Medical Council. He wasn’t. Fraud was never alleged by the GMC. They know this. The news report refers to him as “Mr.” Wakefield as though his medical qualifications can be removed. They can’t. Only his license to practice can be removed. He remains Dr. Wakefield, and they know this too. The report refers to him as an anti-vaccination activist. He isn’t. He is pro-vaccine safety. When people eventually view the film (and believe me they will), this will be made very clear.

Andy could have given up on “the cause” years ago. If he really had been responsible for some kind of medical fraud, it would be pretty clear to him by now that he’d lost. If he really had lied, what on earth would be the point in him carrying on?

But he didn’t lie. He simply listened to the parents, looked at the data and investigated what might be happening. He simply suggested that a potential link between vaccines and autism warranted further study. And he was right.

There is more chronic illness amongst children with autism now than ever before (as Andy said there would be), there are escalating levels of gut problems in all children, but particularly those with autism (as Andy said there would be). There are more people with autism than services can even begin to deal with (as Andy said there would be). And so it goes on. A paper published just this week eagerly informed us about how vitamin B12 might help children with autism. Excuse me for not getting too excited about this, but Andy told us that 20 years ago. Andy and his team are proven right day after day. What Andy predicted is regularly reported in the literature and from the families of children with autism around the globe. The reason he carries on is because he was right, and because he has integrity.

Robert De Niro made his initial statement about the film on Friday after Tribeca had been besieged with complaints from those who are desperate for it not to be seen. After the De Niro statement, the response escalated to the point that the film was withdrawn. Even the detractors have suggested how this indicates a level of fear beyond the norm.

But Robert De Niro is not at fault here. At the end of the day, he is an autism parent like me, neither of us is a scientist or medic. But I am more fortunate than him. I have the best team in the world backing up Billy’s story. Some of the most experienced brains and experts continue working together to bring you the truth. And these people can’t be bought. They won’t be silenced by threats. Mr. De Niro says he has taken “scientific” advice.

I feel bad for him because he took it from the wrong people.

 

—Polly Tommey, March 27, 2016

 

 

 

Polly Tommey, Producer, Vaxxed: From Coverup To Catastrophe

Director, Autism Media Channel

Founder, Autism Trust UK/USA

 

 

 

 

[Note from the Editor: Polly Tommey also kicked off the hugely impactful “Hear This Well” campaign with her one minute video, which is linked above on her name, in red, via Epoch Times. Please watch all the videos to get the full impact.]

Easter Greetings: A Passage From Handel’s Messiah

Posted on March 27, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He was despised

Isaiah 53: 3

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Isaiah 50: 6

I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting.

Surely He hath borne our griefs

Isaiah 53: 4,5

Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
And with His stripes we are healed

Isaiah 53: 5

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray
Vocal (mp3)

Isaiah 53: 6

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

All they that see him laugh him to scorn

Psalm 22: 7

All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying,

He trusted in God

Psalm 22: 8

He trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him: let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him.

Thy rebuke has broken His heart

Psalm 69: 20

Reproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of heaviness: and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none.

Behold, and see if there be any sorrow

Lamentations 1: 12

Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger.

He was cut off out of the land of the living

Isaiah 53: 8

He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken.

But Thou didst not leave His soul in hell

Psalm 16: 10

For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.

 

 

Wakefield: De Niro Spoke With Posey For An Hour

Posted on March 27, 2016

 

Andrew Wakefield (Director) and Del Bigtree (Producer) of the recently censored “Vaxxed: From Coverup To Catastrophe” have released this statement.

“Robert De Niro’s original defense of the film happened Friday after a one-hour conversation between De Niro and and Bill Posey, the congressman who has interacted directly and at length with the CDC Whistleblower (William Thompson) and whose team has scrutinized the documents that prove fraud at the CDC.

It is our understanding that persons from an organization affiliated with the festival have made unspecified allegations against the film – claims that we were given no opportunity to challenge or redress. We were denied due process.

We have just witnessed yet another example of the power of corporate interests censoring free speech, art, and truth.”

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdCU2DfMB

 

When powers that be wish to “discredit” a piece of journalism: They claim it is “full of holes.”

Has errors. They don’t have to document what they are.

I’ve lived through this myself.

The Truth Barrier will be following this developing story, closely. It is far from over. In fact, it’s only just begun.

Here’s Andrew Wakefield, in his own words, in a video recorded a few months ago, so you can listener yourself, to his presentation of facts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tribeca Film Festival Caves In To Pressure: “Vaxxed” Pulled From Schedule

Posted on March 26, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Tribeca Film Festival has pulled “Vaxxed: From Coverup To Catastrophe” from its schedule. The Truth Barrier reached Andrew Wakefield, who confirmed the chilling news. Clearly, they succumbed to monumental pressure, from various powerful entities, some of whom have been named, but it is premature to report on the details.

Andrew Wakefield will be making a statement shortly.

 

Update: Here is the statement.

Easter Eggs

Posted on March 26, 2016

 

 

 

 

FRIENDS–

DONATIONS ARE HUGELY  WELCOMED, TO HELP US GROW, THRIVE, AND EVENTUALLY DOMINATE THE MEDIA LANDSCAPE.

SOME OF OUR RECENT POSTS ABOUT THE CDC WHISTLEBLOWER ARE GOING VIRAL AND WE ARE POISED TO MAKE A BIG IMPACT.

ALSO, PLEASE WELCOME NEW SENIOR EDITOR, STEPHEN ERICSON, WHOSE DEBUT ARTICLE I WAS VERY PROUD  TO PUBLISH THIS WEEK.

HAPPY EASTER AND THANK YOU FOR BEING PART OF THE TRUTH BARRIER. ♦

 

[Paypal button is to the right.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

De Niro To Vaccine Lobby: “You Talking To Me?”

Posted on March 25, 2016

“There’s a whistleblower from the CDC who’s going to come out and say that the CDC had committed fraud on the MMR study, and that they knew that vaccines were actually causing autism.”

–Del Bigtree

Investigative Medical Journalist, former Producer, “The Doctors.”

 

Tribeca Film Festival is, as the name suggests, a place where films are screened. Documentary films. Documentary films consist of people who know things, speaking of what they know, on camera.

Period.

In democratic societies, documentary films are very popular.

Over the past decade, a plague has descended upon the eco-system of journalism, in which ideologues presume totalitarian control over all forms of media, and demand that it reflect the position of the state–that it act as an enforcing arm of public health agencies. This bizarre new hybrid post-journalism-hijacked public-health bully train is enforced by legions of know-nothings, operating as media, but with no sense whatsoever what the esprit of journalism actually is. They’ve boiled the formula down to pure, monotonous contempt, and zero reporting.

They pound away at the “sinners” (I even saw that actual word used today) like automaton Maoists, competing to express new shades of hatred for the thought-criminals in our midst.

But Robert De Niro? This, to them, was crushing. For some reason they seemed to assume, until today, that he could be counted on to think like they do–to hate, for example, documentaries that expose fraud at federal agencies entrusted with children’s brain development.

The modus operandi of these professional neo-fascist bullies is the tantrum. When a film, article, panel discussion, or book appears that upsets them, they demand, like the Stalinist boy in the 1961 The Twilight Zone episode “It’s A Good Life,” that the offending material be eliminated, and that the offenders crawl, beg, apologize, if they wish to avoid being vaporized themselves.

“They have to think happy thoughts and say happy things because once displeased, the monster can wish them into a cornfield or change them into a grotesque, walking horror. This particular monster can read minds, you see. He knows every thought, he can feel every emotion. Oh yes, I did forget something, didn’t I? I forgot to introduce you to the monster. This is the monster. His name is Anthony Fremont. He’s six years old, with a cute little-boy face and blue, guileless eyes. But when those eyes look at you, you’d better start thinking happy thoughts, because the mind behind them is absolutely in charge. This is the Twilight Zone.”

 

Opening narration, Rod Serling, It’s A Good Life

 

A team of documentary makers that include public enemy gastroenterologist Dr. Andrew Wakefield, have completed a film that has been selected for the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.

You can see a description here:

https://tribecafilm.com/filmguide/vaxxed-from-coverup-to-catastrophe-2016

 

Here is the trailer:

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdCU2DfMBpU

The “foamers” in the camp which has come to include many formerly legitimate media outlets, went predictably deranged upon discovering that Tribeca Film Festival had not consulted them, and received their blessing, prior to selecting its 2016 films.

The “HOW DARE YOU?” reflex is characteristic of “traumatizing narcissism,” as defined by Dr. Daniel Shaw–when a “being” (individual or collective, and characteristic of cults) fails to recognize where it ends and another sovereign being begins. It actually expects all things to be extensions of itself–just as infants believe the world ends at their own toes.

If you watch the trailer, you will see that contrary to foamers’ foaming–no–this is not “fraudulent” Andrew Wakefield making a documentary about “his fraud.” This is Andy Wakefield (and crew) making a documentary about the Centers For Disease Control’s fraud.

“You have a son with autism, and I have great shame now.”

“Oh my God, I can not believe that we did what we did, but we did.”

–Dr. William Thompson, CDC Epidemiologist

 

The pressure on Tribeca Film Festival was “enormous” if you count a bunch of journalism-hating cranks in the “pod” media and on pharma-funded hate blogs.

But today, Robert DeNiro showed the bullies that yes, he knows what he is doing, and no, he does not owe them a film festival that does not challenge their destructive ignorance.

He made this statement today:

“Grace and I have a child with autism and we believe it is critical that all of the issues surrounding the causes of autism be openly discussed and examined. In the 15 years since the Tribeca Film Festival was founded, I have never asked for a film to be screened or gotten involved in the programming. However this is very personal to me and my family and I want there to be a discussion, which is why we will be screening VAXXED. I am not personally endorsing the film, nor am I anti-vaccination; I am only providing the opportunity for a conversation around the issue.”

A worried pro-vaxxer on a popular bully site wrote an astute one word comment:

“Shit.”

 

Indeed.

 

This is serious.

 

Have you ever heard of good people trying to STOP a documentary from being shown?

I haven’t.

And why do the media refuse to report on the “there there,” of this: The elephant. The CDC Whistleblower, Dr. William Thompson. The insider.

The Truth Barrier published, in 2014, critical text exchanges between Dr. Thompson and Dr. Wakefield, in which the former apologized to the latter for having helped destroy his reputation, with false and fraudulent science, that harmed countless children. Orac and his crew asserted that they were falsified. They were not–as even they subsequently had to grudgingly concede. [See comment section.]

 

http://truthbarrier.com/2014/09/02/breaking-news-cdc-whistleblower-text-messages-to-andy-wakefield-study-would-have-supported-his-scientific-opinion/

 

Below is another  objectively reported news segment about the non news that dogs will continue to bark, rain will continue to fall, and documentary festivals will continue to present documentary films about matters that affect the lives of millions of people, no matter who’s propagandistically confused hearts may be “broken.”

It’s breathtaking to watch the mainstream media go lemming-like to their credibility deaths like this.

They are simply delusional, and at this point, having failed to crush journalism itself– very, very frightened. As well they should be.

The coverup they have partaken in is not human, and not forgivable.

 

Stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

Avoid Cafes

Posted on March 25, 2016

 

 

The propagandists have now achieved their goals, judging by the young man in a bandana from whom I ordered a hot chocolate.

It’s spilling over, the people are like bursting sausages of propaganda.

“Crazy times we live in,” he said,” as he began to mix my cocoa. “Some people just so full of hate, you know?”

He was referring to supporters of Donald Trump.

On this day, in Brussels, at least 31 people had been killed by bombs detonated by ISIS.

But the barista did not mention this. He was focused on Trump and his supporters.

“Scary, how full of hate people are.”

I said nothing.

I was weary and past all words. And in any case, he wasn’t interested in a conversation.

“And Bill Maher, that guy pisses me off big time. He pretends to be this liberal left guy but then out of the blue, just out of nowhere, he starts saying the most ignorant hateful things about Muslims.”

“Does he? Like what?”

“Oh like that the religion is all about violence and…I don’t know exactly.”

I figured I had to say something. So finally I said: “I think it’s fair to say that the media has us all primed to proclaim confidently about vast subjects we know virtually nothing about.”

He looked at me blankly.

“Yeah.”

There was  no getting away from it. People want to spray graffiti onto other people, first chance they get.

I heard his booming voice working the same riffs on every customer. I wondered if I could discreetly ask a manager if baristas could be asked to make the coffee, tea, and cocoa, without broadcasting their propaganda to the customers. I would pay extra for that.

The worst part about it was that they weren’t even his beliefs. They were generic statements.

If he was paying attention to the news of the day, he would have been a better reporter. He would have mentioned the arms, legs, and dead bodies all over the Brussels airport, and the frantic parents calling their children’s non answering cell phones.

For some reason, this didn’t strike the young man as “hate,” or even worth talking about.

I am rarely happy in cafes, but I keep trying.

If you think about it, nobody really wants to eat or drink anything served in cafes anyway.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who’s Really Stealing Your Job?

Posted on March 20, 2016

CONTINUE READING “WHO’S REALLY STEALING YOUR JOB?”→

What They Said: Jacques Ellul

Posted on March 18, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“We are in the process of seeing the fulfillment of Edgar Allan Poe’s prophecy in which the painter, impassioned by his mistress-model and also by his art, “did not want to see that the colors he spread on his canvas were taken from the cheeks of the woman seated beside him. And when several weeks had passed, and very little remained to be done, nothing but a stroke on the mouth and a glaze over the eye, the mistress’s spirit still flickered like the flame at the base of a lamp. Then he put on the final touch, put the glaze in place, and for a moment the painter stood in ecstasy before the work he had finished. But a moment later, he was struck with panic, and shouting with a piercing voice: ‘It is truly Life itself,’ he suddenly turned around to look at his mistress. She was dead.” Nothing ever constrains us to face what is dying when we see it so alive in our images.”

The Humiliation Of The Word,

 

Jacques Ellul, 1981

[J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 208]

Dead Dissidents: How We Were Wrong

Posted on December 13, 2015
Keep away old man, you won’t fool me
You and your history won’t rule me
You might have been a fighter, but admit you failed
I’m not affected by your blackmail
You won’t blackmail me.

–Pete Townshend, Slip Kid

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an elephant in the room and I am not one to ignore elephants.

Nor is this a laughing matter.

But it does, if you stay till the end, have hope and light in it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When you write about a subject long enough, you become what you write about, dissolve into it, finally, and are asked to own and take full responsibility for it, like it or not.

The so-called “dissident movement,” in the US which is not a “movement” so much as a body of objections and critiques, has urged people to leave the ARV (anti-retroviral) based ship of the orthodoxy, but not provided any reliable lifeboats. That is a simplification, but I will elaborate.

The time has come to put a new flag up. One of total surrender to all that can be observed, with no defenses of calcified beliefs. To stick to beliefs that are not open, alive, and evolving, is to betray people who are in a life or death situation.

 

Brief History

I began in late 1987, reporting and writing about dissent to the mushroom cloud of terror that was the Robert Gallo-based “hypothesis” that what he self-servingly named “human immunodeficiency virus” (after naming it HTLV-lll) was the single and sufficient cause of the syndrome the CDC called Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. (A paradox. Did one “acquire” it or did one “catch” it?)

I reported with youthful zeal, with the full backing of my editor, Bob Guccione Jr. on a subject he gave monthly feature length “column” space to, at his magazine, SPIN, namely AIDS. Mr. Guccione considered the subject worthy of a monthly column because it was, as he said, “the Vietnam of our generation.” I interviewed, of course, Dr. Peter Duesberg, Dr. Robert Root Bernstein, Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, Safe Sex inventor and AIDS activist Michael Callen, and many other voices of “dissent,” which was a symphony of voices objecting to various parts of the mushroom cloud.

Duesberg cleanly said retroviruses are not pathogenic. Root-Bernstein and Sonnabend argued a multifactorial model. Dr. Michael Lange at St. Lukes Roosevelt told me AZT was killing patients. (And that his career would be terminated if I revealed his identity.) (That’s mute now.)

Sonnabend and Callen joined the chorus of AZT dissent. Root-Bernstein pointed out things like scientific papers that showed “HIV” (pro-virus) was absent from seminal fluid. They all agreed that the “heterosexual AIDS explosion” was a cynical plot driven by AmFar to raise funds from terrified heterosexual Congressmen, that had no basis in the emerging statistics, or reality. When, in the early 1990s, The Perth Group wrote their first stunning paper in Bio/Technology, demonstrating that the “HIV test” was not proof of infection with “HIV,” things got more complex. The closer you held a magnifying glass to any one truism of the AIDS juggernaut, the more it dissolved in front of your eyes.

 

 

“I think time is my greatest ally.”

—Peter Duesberg

 

 

We were all caught up in trying to unravel a mass of pseudo-scientific assertions that sprang sui generis from…what seemed to be a propaganda factory. Where were these psychologically devastating proclamations about mass death from sex coming from? Everything was post-classical, meaning “proof” was considered somehow filthy, because people “were dying.” And this was the biggest problem: The orthodoxy managed to be “right” even when it proved to be “wrong.” Those who said things were “wrong” were declared murderers, even when they were proven right. It was incredibly difficult to function in this inverted universe.

Over the years, and then decades, camps splintered, hatred grew, careers were crushed, condemnations flew, and people died. On both sides, people died.  I have a lot of love and respect for just about every single person who tried to sort this nightmare out. Let me just say that, first. The purpose here is not to condemn anybody for not having “all the answers.”

It is an act of abuse to demand answers in advance of due process.

 

In the Beginning

 

My first article was a breathless feature article about an egg lipid compound called AL-721 that was being cooked up in basements by gay men trying to save their brothers. I believed it was possibly the “cure for AIDS,” at the time. It wasn’t. It didn’t work.

The dissident movement actually grew out of the gay community in New York: Michael Callen, Richard Berkowitz, and  Dr. Joe Sonnabend. They formulated the multi-factorial model for AIDS and pushed for a ruthless honesty between the gay community and the straight world. Larry Kramer and Act Up were the opposition to this. They prevailed. I don’t have time or space to get into that here and now. But the fact is, AIDS dissent began with gay men, not with a heterosexual cancer virologist in Berkeley. This was swept from the history in order that the Czars of AIDS could make dissent appear to be “homophobic.”

(Sonnabend, in turn, denounced Duesberg and other dissenters, as did Berkowitz. Callen never did. I welcome any persons named here who may read this to comment, or issue any corrections or embellishments.)

Michael Callen was my number one influence. He informed my thinking, and we were great friends. He died of AIDS, in 1994. He told me, and even left words to this effect in his will, that I would have my “head handed to me” by the gay community if I pursued this reporting on AIDS, and he urged me to do it anyway. After his death, his legacy has been scandalously transformed into conventional AIDS kitsch. None of his true “dissent” is honored.

He left me his archives, in his will, but I have never gone to try to retrieve them. His survivors  and “loved ones” have decided to speak for him, by changing his message into something unrecognizable. Without Michael here, I can’t persuade them to take an interest in what he was really trying to say. But I will re-publish some of the old interviews and correspondences, as my energy returns.

AZT–Hiroshima

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AZT killed off a generation of gay men–the figure often quoted is 300,000.

AZT alone killed them–not AZT and HIV. The deaths were swift and gruesome. People were left sometimes with half a face, like survivors of Chernobyl.

Arthur Ashe, Rudolf Nureyev, Elizabeth Glaser–Kimberly Bergalis narrated her own drug-death by three nucleoside analogues, one being AZT, in Time Magazine. The artist Keith Haring died within two weeks of being persuaded by activist friends to take the “fast tracked” new nuke DDi. He died of renal failure, as gay activist and writer Jim Fouratt bravely went on record to admit.

When, after the 1993 Concorde Study‘s results were revealed in Berlin, AZT fell from its bizarre pedestal as “the only drug that can save lives,” the new drugs were about to be launched. Protease Inhibitors. David Ho. The math model for HIV. Andrew Sullivan’s cover story in the New York Times Magazine. The Lazarus Effect.

This was a hairpin turn in the history of AIDS. The despised “dissidents” and “AZT refusniks” saw their objections to the deadly AZT folded into a triumph, and made to disappear. The new drugs “worked.” Dr. David Ho was named Man of The Year by TIME magazine. We learned, the hard way, that orthodoxy types can kill 300,000 people with their “views” and still go after “deniers” with accusations of strongly held views “killing people.”

Breathtakingly dishonest.

Sean Strub, founder of POZ Magazine, is a notable exception. He has always been capable of conceding that AZT dissenters “saved countless lives,” though he remains certain HIV causes AIDS and ARV drugs save lives. We get along just fine–because he is honest.

Here’s what happened next, in broad strokes: AIDS dissenters had nothing to offer, while the establishment had a Lazarus Effect to offer. Answers.

By default, and under the relentless pressures of bullying, abuse, censorship, libel, career destruction, and psychological torture, the dissidents formed a defensive posture: It came down to “don’t take drugs.”

If HIV was only a random collection of proteins, if “it” had never been proven to cause AIDS, if it said in the test inserts of all HIV tests that they can’t demonstrate either the presence or absence of HIV, if nothing could be trusted, the dissenters argued, why not free yourself instead from the “lie” and the “myth” of HIV’s deadliness. Break the chains. Just live your life.

Here, I need to state plainly: It worked for some. It did not work, generally. There was, and is, a blind spot. I titled this post “Dead Dissidents,” to own and deal with the spiteful phrase and the accusation inside it. To say that yes, it’s true, dissidents continued to die, having broken the chains (to some extent) and having gone off toxic drugs. They also died having gone ON toxic drugs, but after becoming inexplicably ill, often after some 20 years of relatively stable health.

A new and baffling pattern emerged: Does HIV cause AIDS after 20 years?

People who did not buy into the orthodox model were not by any means immune from sudden plummets in their health. In many cases, they agreed to take ARV drugs and this is probably what saved them. In other words: The truth was complex. It was still at large. Elusive.

There were others who did succeed in staying healthy with no interventions, 10, 15, 20 years on. But the important thing was those who got sick.

Why? How?

A positive HIV antibody test meant something, but what?

Denunciation

I want to get a real proper lather going here–a true Stalinist denunciation, of myself.

 

This is what I want to do.

 

I denounce myself, and I don’t speak for anybody else. I do this so that I may be considered free of calcified beliefs and open to new solutions. My notion of denouncing myself comes from an urge to metamorphose, to be free of old armor and blinders.

I don’t know how to transition, without this denunciation. It’s very important: I don’t want to be patted on the back. I want to be free.

I want to die (in terms of what I became branded with) and then come back in a new form. A form that allows for the “you people were wrong” rock thrown. Let me receive it, head on. Then we can carry on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s what I see: The dissenters were correct about the important and large critiques, but did not solve the matter of why people got sick, or how to reverse immune collapse. There was a greater interest in collecting “wrong” from the other side than in solving the problem. The other guys being wrong did not adequately help those who needed answers.

If I take a “ruthless moral inventory,” I can acknowledge that I myself was in defensive posture, and somewhere deep inside, I was too exhausted to open my eyes and keep them open, to the emerging patterns. Truth was not pooling obediently on one side. I fell asleep. I tended to my inner wounds. Then I realized that there was something I needed to SAY.

“Let’s talk about what we have been wrong about.”

(Imagine how much joy we could spread to the hearts of our enemies, in time for Christmas.)

It grew in me. I lost friends. Or were they? I was raw and angry. We had worked SO HARD and some of us were still alive after all the pogroms. Why couldn’t it just work out, solve itself like in a movie?

My outlets had been eliminated, following the orchestrated attacks on my journalistic veracity following an article I wrote in 2006 in Harper’s, (which was not denounced by Harper’s, or any of the sources quoted in it, but was attacked by both orthodox forces and dissidents, mostly for things that were not in it.)

I am often told my journalism is “irresponsible,” and here I must object. This is a Maoist concept. It is false. Journalism in a free society can never be “irresponsible.” It can only be correct or incorrect. The sole responsibility is to be accurate and correct. In today’s world, works of journalism can be accurate and “irresponsible.” We’ve severed the ties to observable reality.

I will never allow servant of public health or activist agendas to tell me what “journalism” is. Instead, the Nobel Committee has spoken, by awarding the prize this year to journalism’s savior: Svetlana Alexaevich.

“I’ve been searching for a genre that would be most adequate to my vision of the world to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life.I tried this and that and finally I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves. Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire. Together they record verbally the history of the country, their common history, while each person puts into words the story of his/her own life… The document brings us closer to reality as it captures and preserves the originals…  But I don’t just record a dry history of events and facts, I’m writing a history of human feelings. What people thought, understood and remembered during the event. What they believed in or mistrusted, what illusions, hopes and fears they experienced.”

 

–Svetlana Alexaevich, Nobel Laureate, Literature, 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Human voices can’t be “wrong” and there should never have been a body of “authority” that eclipsed the voices of HIV positive people themselves, speaking for themselves.

If you think HIV science is anti-science, you should see the deranged ideas people have about what “journalism” is. They don’t realize it but they view journalism as a propaganda medium.

You have to fight this every step of the way. Sometimes you have to blow yourself up just to clear the debris and start over, fresh and new.

Nothing in my work–which relied always on voices, quoted at length, verbatim– is in need of retraction. Nothing that I am aware of. However, lacking an outlet, I have not had a chance to report on the failings, if you will, of the so so-called dissidents. Of myself too.

What I saw happening was neglect and abandonment. Not really listening. Not really dealing with the problems that were emerging. There was an entrenched refusal to evolve and keep moving. The discussion grew repetitive and stale. And people were exhausted and demoralized by the total absence of justice, rhyme or reason. No matter what, come or go 300,000 AZT dead or the failure of 90 million dead from heterosexual AIDS to appear, dissidents were still, to use a very accurate term– niggers.* (Carriers of abjected guilt and knowledge of crimes.) (One reader has objected strongly to my use of this word. I decided to keep it. I even plan too use it in the title of a book about women in journalism.

Zero points accorded for huge rights, in the face of an accusation that formed a choking shadow.

But in another country, far away from this one, dissident groups were approaching the problem differently, and arriving at real answers. In Korea, Raymund Ban and labor activist ‘Bara’ founded a website to help Koreans diagnosed HIV positive, 50% of whom committed suicide almost immediately.

In 2010, they published a translation of my book, Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS. Raymund came to New York twice in recent years, and we had two serious discussions. Also in Korea, Raymund and Bara came under fire for failing to keep people alive, once they were disabused of certain orthodox notions–most urgently, that life was already over, and suicide was the only good option.

Raymund told me, to my delight, that people had literally come off the ledge after being handed my book. In one instance, a man who was engaged tested positive after a flu shot (which can cause a “false positive”) and planned to commit suicide. He read my book and changed his mind. Today he and his wife have a beautiful, healthy 2 year old girl, who Raymund sent me photos of. The whole family is healthy and well. THIS is why the “dissident movement” matters. This piece is about where it went wrong, but there is much to say also about where it went right.

Raymund revealed to me that he had found the “eureka” moment in the writings and observations of Tony Lance, (who may since have adjusted his model) who argued that leaky gut syndrome correlated 100% with advancement of symptoms. The answer, then, to AIDS, was to fully heal the gut, and also re-mineralize the body with all 90 of the critical minerals the human body requires. I asked him to put this in writing, and he did. This, he told me, is working, and people are, yes, reversing and truly healing their immune suppression syndromes.

(It should be noted that Dr. Roberto Giraldo tried in vain for many years to assert the importance of chronic, systemic malnutrition in AIDS. He tried to open my eyes many years ago but in some way I was only a half-prepared mind. I had not gotten gravely ill myself yet. (With CFS/Thyroid collapse/Electric radiation, etc.)  I did not respect the gut–yet.

It was Raymund’s frequency I was most interested in. It was a place of kindness, humility, and bereft of accusation. I wanted to be in this frequency, to heal myself, of the deep lash wounds of both sides of this inflamed, hysterical war. I told him, and Bara, that I needed a family, a constructive and trusting one, and we made a pact of sorts. To start over. I asked Raymund if he would share his information with the US and other global dissidents, and he agreed.

When, last week, it was announced that Lindsey Nagel had died, my phone rang with worried people, who wondered if the dissidents were wrong. The Nagels themselves wondered if HIV may have contributed to Lindsey’s failed health. (You can find Cheryl Nagel’s story in a previous post.)

Two gay men I know approached me with their anxiety. They were doing well, ignoring the orthodoxy’s dictates, but they weren’t “perfectly healthy,” and I decided to connect them with Raymund.

Things began to get very interesting, as we looked at ill health–and I include my own–through the prism of two things: Gut health and mineralization.

Raymund wrote a comprehensive text explaining what was working, in their dissident group, in Korea. You will be able to read it in full at the and of this post.

As of this writing, I have no allegiance to any camp or group. Truth be told, the beatings I’ve taken from dissidents has been more severe than even those inflicted by the orthodoxy. I myself want to live, and have been stuck in a kind of purgatory. I couldn’t quite “be here” until the questions I had posed had been resolved. They kept me in exile.

 

 

Love Is The Absence Of Accusation

I have been treated over many years for symptoms of PTSD, and my interpretation is this: Anything that is not love is trauma, vibrating at a level that causes dangerous cortisol release. (I broke the record for high cortisol and measurable body trauma at two different clinics, one in Minneapolis and one in New Mexico.)

I had to heal myself, or I would die. In 2008, with a very severe case of bronchial pneumonia, I came close.

Dr. Christian Fiala probably saved my life. He said, on the phone, “You’re really very sick. You have to take an antibiotic.”

I did, and I recovered. But it was the sense of caring in his voice that I recognized as life calling out to me.

I have learned a lot, since then– a lot– about detoxification, gut repair, re-mineralization, and self-acceptance. I agree with Robert Gallo about one thing: We all have AIDS.

I have seen people cry out on dissident pages on Facebook: “A healthy person doesn’t get pneumonia!” (Often called “PCP pneumonia,” for uncertain reasons, rarely properly diagnosed.) I have seen people say that a mother and child separated, persecuted, and poisoned,  would not be enough to explain it.

Really?

When I was 6 years old, I was traumatically separated from my mother, and developed a pneumonia that took 9 months to clear up. I was also hospitalized with malnutrition, and fed intravenously. I had turned to sugar, to comfort myself.

You might say I had “AIDS” when I was a child. There was no HIV test then.

Fear, separation, trauma, social alienation, sugar, poor diet–YES, these things alone can kill a human being. So, the most important thing is to focus on the frequency: Love is a measurable frequency, (528 hz) shared also, allegedly, by chlorophyl. Grass.

Show me “AIDS” where there has been: Love, protection, nourishment, community, safety, joy.

This is not the “poetic space” of the “dissident movement.” This is the emerging science of quantum physics and the teachings of inspirational healers, who never heard of Peter Duesberg or The Perth Group. Similarly, you won’t hear many “dissidents” quoting Wayne Dyer or Anita Moorjani. (Author of Dying To Be Me.) Everybody, these days, seems to know that microbes don’t “cause” disease and that healing is a matter of being self-accepting, well nourished, and de-toxified. It’s mainstream.

The “dissident movement” as it came to be known, formalized, and attacked– was mostly academic, secular, rational, and fairly cool, emotionally.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it rejected, in its way, the importance of “nutrition,” on the emerging health epiphanies of the alternative health movements. I have lived to see first hand that yes, sugar can kill you. Intestinal health is everything. Make that: Everything.

No, it was not enough to ask what if everything you thought you knew about AIDS was wrong? But it was a great, great start.

I stand here as one voice, one person. No movement, no nothing. If you convey to me any version of accusation, or tell me you now blame Peter Duesberg and the dissidents for all they were “wrong” about, because somebody close to you died, yet you took no steps to research or implement gut repair, or to take personal responsibility for said health–well….

 

Goodbye.

 

 

I don’t receive accusations anymore. I don’t receive shame anymore. I don’t take responsibility for any “movements” or scientists, what they said or didn’t say. I take responsibility only for my own utterances. I can tell you only what I think and have observed.

 

The most painful trauma I uncovered in my own trauma healing journey was how it felt to be “accepted” only when I held certain positions. To be made into a thing, an object. To be mistaken for a propagandist. The notion that there are shards of “belief” that, when modified, or changed, can turn a person into what Orwell called an “un-person,” is the most offensive thing I can think of between humans.

I am not what I reported. My value is not embedded in the answers to questions I posed or forged. There is no shame in an open journey from ignorance to knowledge, and if you try to shame me, because you’ve changed your mind or what have you, I will consider it your problem, and enjoy the time suddenly freed up by not being in a false friendship with you anymore.

Strong words, but shame is not something I allow in my house of healing anymore.

You honor people’s process of discovery, if you honor them at all.

NOBODY IS GUILTY OF ANYTHING.

Here.

A new healing discussion opens in this space, today, here at The Truth Barrier. Come join us if you:

 

–Take full responsibility for your health and healing.

–Do not consider that any outside forces either made you sick or can make you well

–Abstain from verbal and mental violence in all forms

–Are willing to help in an active way, the formation of a model of health in the post AIDS world, for the syndrome called AIDS, and many other related syndromes

–Accept that there is one universal human body, governed by biological laws, and no special “gay” body or “straight” body.

–Speak your mind in the moment something occurs to you. No hoarding resentments quietly and then springing them on people in times of stress.

–Keep an open mind

—Commit to health regimens with a proven track record, or, if you don’t, don’t blame anybody else.

–It’s your ship.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now I share Raymund Ban’s email, as he wrote it:

 

What Is Working In Korea In A Group Who Previously Experienced Failure

 

Dear All,

Below is my personal study of the link between the gut health, gluten intolerance, mineral deficiency and HIV issue based on long time inspection of HIV positive people in Korea.

Why do some of HIV positive people get sick and their health deteriorates day by day? You can get a first clue if you read this. This is from the RA conference 2008, by Tony Lance. I shouted ‘Eureka’ when I heard this. It stroke me like a flash, “Yes, Mr.Kim in our community (Korean dissident group) was suffering the chronic, severe constipation. Ms.Lee was always suffering the diarrhea….with no exception.”

https://hivskeptic.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/gay-related-intestinal-dysbiosis.pdf

Since then, I recommended probiotics and fermented food to our community members. YES, it worked. But had a limit. They could slower the deterioration of health. But they could not perfectly avoid deterioration.

Now I carefully say:I got the final solution.

You have to read this first. (cited from Dr. Peter Glidden’s THE MD EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES)


…The digestive tract in a human is called the alimentary canal. It is basically one long tube that starts in the mouth and ends in the butt. The part of the alimentary tract that is immediately downstream from the stomach is the small intestine. The function of the small intestine is to absorb the food that we have eaten and deliver it into the blood stream.
Approximately 20 feet long and 1.5 inches in diameter (in an adult male), the small intestine is lined with millions of structures called “villi.” They number anywhere from 6,000-25,000 per square inch! The villi look like octopus tentacles, and at their tips they are covered with hundreds of “Micro-villi.” The micro-villi grab onto passing food molecules and transport them into the blood stream. Kind of like an octopus tentacle reaching out and grabbing onto a passing fish. This is how we absorb nutrients into the body. This is also why our belly gets warm after we eat a meal – the friction caused by the action of the villi creates heat.
Individual amino acids are handled by the villi with no problem at all, and are transported into the bloodstream easily. But long chains of undigested amino acids (proteins) are a BIG problem. Imagine a vacuum cleaner trying to suck up 18 strings of pearls that have been twined together and you will get the picture. The villi become damaged from the mechanical action of trying to suck up molecules that are much bigger than they are used to handling. An undigested protein in the intestinal tract is like a “one-two punch”, because, in addition to mechanical damage, it also causes electrical damage, but we have to look at thunderclouds to understand how.
Little puffy white clouds in the sky do not create lightning. BIG thunderclouds do. In the creation of the electrical discharge commonly known as lightning, it is the size of the cloud that matters. Thunderclouds are thousands of times larger than their non-electrical counterparts. The same thing applies with an undigested protein – as above, so below…
An intact, undigested protein is thousands of times bigger than a single amino acid. The relatively large size of the protein gives it an electrical charge. So, as a large undigested protein tumbles through the intestinal tract, it acts like a live wire – zapping every villi and micro-villi that it touches.
If you remember, the function of the villi is to absorb nutrients into the body. So when we destroy villi by the simple act of eating wheat, we impede nutrient absorption.
Then we eat some more wheat. Then we eat some more wheat. Then we have some wheat with dessert. Then we eat some more wheat. Then we get sick and die. It is really that simple. All chronic disease is caused by multiple nutrient deficiencies. Our food DOES NOT CONTAIN all of the 91 essential nutrients that our bodies need in the first place. Now, to add insult to injury, when we eat 100% organic whole wheat bread, like our knuckleheaded nutritionist told us to, our intestinal tracts become damaged, and it becomes harder and harder for us to absorb the limited nutrients that are in the food! If this happens every day, eventually we will end up with multiple nutrient deficiencies – even though we are eating 3 square meals a day! It is only a matter of time until these deficiencies get so big that something breaks. This is how an illness is born. Then we go to our MD, who gives us a symptom suppressive synthetic drug to manage the problem. We feel a little better but we still have multiple nutrient deficiencies, so a little while later, something else breaks.
Back we go to the MD for another prescription drug, or unnecessary surgery. This cycle happens again and again and again…and then we die. Then our MD chalks it all up to a bad gene, and takes a snort of the prescription grade cocaine he has become addicted to. Oh! The humanity!
Inquiring minds want to know – Why is the gluten protein so hard for the stomach to digest?
Other proteins like eggs, meat, chicken, fish and rice are very easy for the stomach to digest. Even a dead person can digest rice! So what is the deal with wheat? I don’t know! Nobody knows!
That’s just the way that it is… It is one of history’s greatest ironies that the “staff of life” is one of the worst foods that humans can eat on a regular basis. There are many theories as to how this has come about. It is a fact that the wheat of today, having been genetically manipulated by agri-business for the last 100 years, is quite a bit different from the wheat of our ancestors.
It is also possible that it is the lack of minerals and nutrients in the diet that contributes to this problem, as these deficiencies have become so epidemic that EVERYONE’s stomach acid is weak as a result. It is also possible that wheat has always been a problem, but the population just never lived long enough for the trouble to come to fruition. Whatever the reason, the sad fact remains that the gluten protein contained in wheat, barley, rye and the protein found in oats, are very dangerous foods to import into the human body, and we would all be better off to avoid them completely. Here is a partial list of the foods that contain gluten and oat protein(this is probably the last time that you will like me…):

· Bread
· Pasta
· Cookies
· Crackers
· Pie Crust
· Bagels
· Oatmeal
· Granola
· Beer!? Beer!

This is more or less EVERYTHING that we eat, most of the time! Then we wash it all down with a Coke. This is why we are all sick, all of the time. Sherlock Holmes was right: “…when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Chronic illness is not caused by a bad gene, or a Gypsy curse, nor is it a function of aging. Chronic disease is caused by chronic nutrient deficiencies. Period! Nutrient deficiencies are accelerated by the destruction of the intestinal villi. Undigested proteins destroy intestinal villi. Therefore the consistent consumption of wheat, barley, rye and oats leads to the generation of chronic disease.

—–
This can be applied to every people. But especially for GLUTEN INTOLERANCE suffering people. My friends who are HIV positive are all suffering from diarrhea after taking ramen, bread, pasta, beer, etc. I got the conclusion that they are all gluten intolerance patients. Then, why does gluten intolerance emerge in such a various symptoms? Nobody knows. You have to read by Stephen Wangen to get the more detailed information about gluten intolerance.

Anyway, you have to get off gluten. ‘Obsessively’ get off gluten with no cheat. It is the first step to recovery of health. After getting off gluten, we need nutrients. As I’ve cited, All chronic disease is caused by multiple nutrient deficiencies. If our body is supplied with enough nutrient, our body fixes itself. I cite my friend Alison Tomlinson’s personal experience. She is not HIV positive, but I saw a miracle in her. I observed similar miraculous improvement in one friend(HIV positive) after taking Youngevity mineral product, and another fascinating improvement in other friend(also HIV positive) after just getting off gluten and taking probiotics.

Here I cite what my friend Alison Tomlinson had said.


HEALTHY HAIR, HEALTHY SKIN, HEALTHY COMPLEXION, HEALTHY HEIGHT, HEALTHY WEIGHT, HEALTHY SHAPE, HEALTHY POSTURE, LEVEL HIPS.
IS THIS ME?
I’ve been in ill-health since the day I was born. I’ve never been able to function at the same level as other people. In 2012 my health completely crashed. I was permanently bent over to the left with my left knee bent in, I could barely walk and I was in pain 24/7. I felt like my life was over. I prayed and prayed. Then I started listening to Dr Joel Wallach:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlrb-XrMOwE (Celia, you have to hear this, this lecture contains more clear information than the Youtube video I cited last time. I recommend you listen to this lecture with Jeremy again.)

He says that chronic disease is caused by nutritional deficiencies and EVERYBODY is nutritionally deficient, because the food we’re eating does not contain the nutrients we need. When we give the body the nutrients it needs, it FIXES itself.

I took him at his word and did his diet and nutrition programme and LOOK AT ME NOW. At 55 I feel better than I have done in my entire life.

If you’re suffering with ANY chronic disease, please listen to him.
If you’re NOT suffering with any chronic disease, please listen to him.
—-

If the gluten intolerance patient’s gut is destroyed by taking the gluten, the various indigested proteins including gluten would infiltrate into the porous gut and will create the antibodies responding to it. And if the antibodies increase to some level which can result in HIV positive test, they can be diagnosed as HIV positive. It is my conclusion from observing many HIV positive people in Korea for a long time. Most of them are not gay, they have no particular reason to be diagnosed as HIV positive. But they show one common thing-no exception since I began to observe them. Their gut status is the worst. They are showing constant diarrhea or constipation. Nearly every one of them suffers diarrhea or typical gluten intolerance symptoms when they eat the ramen, beer, bread. etc. All of this food contain gluten.
If they do not get off gluten, their gut, their health would deteriorate day by day. That explains why some HIV people get sick as time goes by. The solution of it could be to get off gluten and take the nutrients including indispensable minerals and vitamins.

Our body needs 91 nutrients. Below is the list of that nutrients. If it lacks for even 1 nutrient, our body will suffer from adverse effect.

60 Essential Minerals
Calcium Magnesium Phosphorus Potassium Sodium Chloride Sulfur Cobalt Copper Aluminum Arsenic Barium Beryllium Boron Bromine Carbon Iodine Iron Manganese Selenium Zinc Cerium Cesium Chromium Dysprosium Erbium Europium Gadolinium Gallium Germanium Gold Hafnium Holmium Hydrogen Lanthanum Lithium Lutetium Molybdenum Neodymium Nickel Niobium Nitrogen Oxygen Praseodymium Rhenium Rubidium Samarium Scandium Silica Silver Strontium Tantalum Terbium Thulium Tin Titanium Vanadium Ytterbium Yttrium Zirconium

16 Essential Vitamins
Vitamin A, Vitamin B1 (Thiamine), Vitamin B2 (Riboflavin), Vitamin B3 (Niacin), Vitamin B5 (Pantothenic Acid), Vitamin B6 (Pyridoxine), Vitamin B12 (Cobalamin), Vitamin C, Vitamin D, Vitamin E, Vitamin K, Biotin, Choline, Flavonoids and Bioflavonoids, Folic Acid, Inositol

12 Essential Amino Acids
Valine, Lysine, Threonine, Leucine, Isoleucine, Tryptophan, Phenylalanine, Methionine, Histidine, Arginine, Taurine, Tyrosine

3 Essential Fatty Acids
Omega 3 (EPA, DHA, ALA)
Omega 6
Omega 9

But as I’ve cited, it is nearly impossible to absorb this 90 nutrients by eating food, because the food lacks for minerals. Our soil is deficient in minerals. When we cultivate plants in the same soil for 3 years, the soil would lose all of its mineral. Then, how can we get the 90 nutrients? I strongly recommend to take the Youngevity Basic pack(It contains all of the 90 nutrients). It’s the second step for recovery of gut and immune system. Since one HIV positive member in our community began taking this product after getting off gluten, he has experienced great improvement in his health. I believe if the gut-destroyed HIV positive people completely get off gluten and take the Youngevity mineral product for a long time, their gut and immune system will recover day by day.

Besides getting off gluten, I strongly recommend to get off 10 bad foods. Here is the list of 10 bad foods you should never eat. You can refer to the appendix III of attached file ‘THE MD EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES’, and below video to know why we should evade these 10 bad foods.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M21-ztpDtXc

BAD FOODS:
· Wheat
· Barley
· Rye
· Oats, oatmeal – even if it says that it is Gluten Free.
· Fried Food
· Oils—cooking or salad. Yes, this includes Olive Oil! NO canola, NO coconut, etc… If it has OIL in the name don’t use it. This also includes anything made from oil, like salad dressing. Dr. Wallach recommends using salt and lemon juice as a salad dressing. No margarine or combo spreads. No mayonnaise. Nothing made from oils.
· Well done meat (rare or medium-rare is ok)
· Deli Meat, any nitrates added to meat – tell your butcher NO NITRATES
· Soda/Pop/Any carbonated beverage with a meal. OK between meals, but should be used rarely.
· Skin of a baked potato (or yam, or sweet potato). If you boil a potato, yam or sweet potato, you can eat the skin.

And I mention the special immune boosting protocol of Dr Joel Wallach. The bolded words mean the name of individual Youngevity products. This can be additional therapy to Basic pack for the immuno-supressed people,

Dr. Wallach’s Immune Support Protocol

75% of our immunity is located in the gastrointestinal system. As a result, when an immune
problem is present, we need tofocus on both digestive and immune support.

(1) Healthy Digestion Pack 2.0 per 100 lbs. –One pack is a must to get all 90 essential nutrients. If budget is an issue, add extra BTT 2.0 as appropriate for body weight.

(2) 3-5 Selenium per 100 lbs. of body weight and up to 1 bottle of Selenium per 50 lbs. per month stopping at 4 bottles a month regardless of weight. Make sure to listen to the “Selenium” CD by Dr. Gerhard Schrauzer—a world renowned expert on Selenium.

(3) Imortalium–6 per day in most cases. Imortalium has nutrients shown to increase the glutathione activity (the body’s repair mechanism particularly for soft tissue) by over 300%. Visit www.imortalium.comand listen to this recording with Steve Wallach and Richard Renton http://tinyurl.com/nrrkuzlfor more information.

(4) Restart Your Life Beta Glucan–These products help to boost the immune system’s ability to identify invaders and fight them. With our immune system, not every cell responds when there is an invader. One way the researchers explain this is that only 30% of the immune system “sees” the invader. But with the Beta Glucan, now up to 70% of our immune system can “see” and respond to the invaders without increasing the inflammation response. The RVB 300 is used for Daily Immune Support at 1 capsule per 110 lbs. The RYL 500 is for those who want or need additional immune support at 1 capsule per 55 lbs. These products are best takenon an empty stomach–30 minutes before eating or 2 hours after. Visit www.vitawithimmunity.comfor more information.

(5) 50,000-100,000 ORAC points per day-BTT 2.0: 8,000 per 2 scoops, Triple Treat Chocolate: 16,945 per piece, Cell Shield RTQ: 8,000 per capsule, Imortalium: 10,500 per 4 tablets.

(6) 4 bottles of Zradical or Fucoid Z —do as much as budget allows even if only one bottle. Zradical does contain natural fruit sugar, caution is advised with blood sugar challenges—but these fruits are also well known for their immune boosting properties. Listen to this recording to learn more: http://tinyurl.com/ozhp3ql

(7) Oxybody1 oz. 2 or 3 times a day taken on an empty stomach. This product can increase oxygen levels in the blood.

(8) Support the tissue or organ that is affected by the cancer. Examples: If bone is being affected, add in the “secret sauces” of GlucoGel and CM cream for hard tissue support; if the pancreas is affected, add the Sweet-Eze for pancreas support; if the thyroid is affected, add Ocean’s Gold for thyroid support.

(9) Ocean’s Gold -recommendations range from 6 to 12 a day. Research shows that 1 mg of the FrondosideA (found in Sea Cucumbers) reduced cancerous tumors by 40% in only 10 days –without the side effects of radiation.

(10) Extreme Diet Clean-Up to maximize absorption and results. Start by listening to the “Cerial Killers” CD. The basics are gluten free, oat free, and high fiber free, no fried foods, and no vegetable oils or margarines. Do as much organic food and produce as possible, and limit or avoid GMO’s.

Education on Immune Support:

The person affected needs to be a participant in their own healing. The best place to start with somebody new to Dr. Wallach and 90 For Life is with the “Best of Dead Doctors Don’t Lie CD” and then use any of the following tools to learn more (don’t forget the Selenium CD!)
(A.) Go to www.pubmed.govand do a search for Fucoidan and cancer—Fucoidan is the active ingredient in Zradical and Fucoid Z. Also search for Selenium and cancer to see the thousands of published studies on these two amazing substances.
(B.) The Clemson Report –independent research by Clemson University testing for safety, toxicity, and the affect of BTT and Classic on cancer cells: http://tinyurl.com/clemsonreport
(C.) Research on sea cucumber (found in Ocean’s Gold)
http://tinyurl.com/lxg2dyt

(D.) Ask the person who shared this protocol with you for the videos “Understanding the 10 Bad Foods” and “Against the Grain” by Dr. Peter Glidden to learn more about the Good Food Bad Food List and Diet Clean-Up.

Lastly, I’d like to say this.

You can take the probiotics and fermented food to enhance the gut health. Yes, it is desirable. But If you don’t get off gluten completely, just taking the probiotics and fermented food can be a meaningless endeavor. It is like throwing the small pebbles towards the rushing elephant to you.

Dr. Joel Wallach, Dr Peter Glidden are not HIV skeptic doctors, and as far as I know, they have never said that their protocol can be of help to HIV positive people.

But I know they are the best in the world as to the nutrients(mineral) issue. The link between gut health, gluten intolerance, nutrients(especially mineral) deficiency and HIV issue is just from my personal study based on long time observation of HIV positive people in Korea.

I’m not a doctor and I cannot prescribe any specific treatment to any person, but I strongly feel, and carefully say that my findings can be fundamental solution to the HIV positive people, whose health is deteriorating day by day. And I really saw great improvement in some of my friends who are HIV positive.

Best regards,

Raymund

2 Attachments

Immune Support Protocol 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Open Letter From Cheryl Nagel

Posted on December 1, 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dec 1., 2015

I am writing this open letter to let everybody know that our daughter, Lindsey has passed away.

She was 24 years old, and leaves behind her son Rico Martinez Nagel, who will be 3 in December.   The cause of death was a bacterial infection.

 

Lindsey first became ill with PCP pneumonia in the fall of 2013, after a year of almost inconceivable stress. Many of you have followed our story, here. The end result of the heroic measures taken by an army of doctors, social workers, Mower Country Child Protective Services, and even the Sheriff of our small Minnesota town, to “save” Rico’s life, left him motherless, and unable to walk, talk, or even sit up, due to all the drugs they gave him as an infant.

We ask that no war for or against ARV drugs break out over our daughter’s tragic story but rather, a renewed commitment to end the obscene violence that our daughter had to endure in her short life, due to the branding on her forehead of an “H.” Lindsey herself did go on ARV drugs to try to get better. Instead they caused a ferocious diarrhea. The spiral was not reversible, especially when she lost her will to live.

We honestly do not know what it was that caused Lindsey’s health to fail– to disintegrate in front of our eyes.  We may never know.

We have been in silence for a period of time, due to overwhelming grief, but have now found the strength to tell the full story, here, which we feel is vital to share, in  detail:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Beginning

 

Most of you know that in 1990, we adopted Lindsey in Romania. We met her when she was only 2 weeks old, and brought her home to Minnesota, where she was given a battery of tests that were routinely performed on all international adopted babies. It was then, in January of 1991 that our pediatrician told us Lindsey tested positive for HIV, and she was given only a 20% chance of living to be age 2. Our pediatrician referred us to Dr. Kiran Belani, a pediatric infectious disease doctor at Children’s Hospital. She ordered AZT for Lindsey. The day we picked up the prescription intended to “save Lindsey’s life,” we sat on the floor of the pharmacy and eagerly gave her the first dose.

Dr. Belani had a poor bedside manner, and after 7 months of sloppy care, we asked our pediatrician if there was someone else we could go to. He referred us to Dr. Margaret Hostetter, at the U of M, who continued the same type of drug treatment.

On AZT, Lindsey developed severe leg cramps, and would awaken nearly every night, screaming in pain. Over the next few months, as the dosages of AZT increased, so did her pain and the number of times she awoke. We contacted Dr. Hostetter, and she said, “This is what you can expect as the HIV progresses.” The dosages of AZT continued to increase. We were getting upset at the idea of actually losing our precious little girl, a girl everybody loved – she was so special.

By this time I had read the book, In The Absence of Angels, by Elizabeth Glaser, wife of Paul Glaser, who starred in the popular TV show Starsky and Hutch. I realized Lindsey was in fact experiencing the same side effects from the drug that both Elizabeth Glaser and her daughter experienced. Glaser writes about the horrible side effects of AZT, yet continued taking it, and eventually died from it. Before her death, she founded the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which was established to find drugs for HIV+ children. We found out several months later that Dr. Hostetter HAD to know about the deaths of Elizabeth and her daughter, because she was on the board of directors at Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

There was another disturbing coincidence. Lindsey was beginning to flat-line on her weight gain, and we were distressed about her growth chart. Again, Dr. Hostetter made reference to this being a result of “the disease.” At the U of M medical library, however, I found a study about children born in Romanian and eastern European orphanages which concluded that they lagged behind their American counterparts in weight and height. We were startled to find out that Dr. Hostetter was one of the lead investigators of this study.

In August, 1992, prior to the deterioration of Lindsey’s health, my dad gave us an article written by Tom Bethell in The National Review. It was all about Dr. Peter Duesberg, a molecular and cell biologist, with tenure at Berkeley, CA. At age 49, Duesberg had been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. He received an Outstanding Investigator Grant (OIG) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1986, (an award just short of a Nobel prize), and from 1986 to 1987 was a Fogarty Scholar-in-Residence at the NIH laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland. Duesberg claimed that HIV did not cause AIDS, and that AIDS was primarily caused by heavy recreational and prescription drug use, including the drug AZT – the drug we were giving Lindsey! At the time, we dismissed the article as unscientific, and told Dad he was a grandfather with wishful thinking.

In October 1992, when Lindsey started having the leg cramps, we were forced to reconsider everything. Everything was up for grabs at that point. We wrote to Duesberg for advice, and he wrote right back, letting us know that if Lindsey were his daughter, he would take her off the AZT, “or she will die like Kimberly Bergalis.” So, Steve and I, feeling that we could not let Lindsey go on suffering, took her off the AZT. It was scary. We were taking a risk, but we could see she was losing ground. She was dying. We’d read about other Minnesota children in the newspapers, and heard their stories on TV.   They were featured as “brave” and the photos of them were jarring, as they lay in hospital rooms with tubes in their arms, wearing oxygen masks, looking listless, and obviously dying. In a later interview, in 2005, Dr. Belani stated that, “There was nothing you could do years ago. Most children back then did not live past 7 to 12 years old. And it was hard; these were children that you got attached to. It was really hard. All we could do was provide some supportive care and treat their opportunistic infections. We had many deaths, 10 to 12 in 1994. Now people are living longer, even the kids who are seriously ill.” (In the early 90s there were only 20-25 children 0-12 years old, with HIV or AIDS, according to MN Dept of Health)

Our decision was well-founded, it appeared, when the leg cramps and waking up at night stopped after just three nights. It was actually shocking. We called Dr. Duesberg to let him know about the incredible turn of events! We called Tom Bethell to thank him for writing the article. We did NOT tell Dr. Hostetter. Eventually, of course, we had to tell her and as soon as she found out we’d taken Lindsey off the AZT, she threatened to have her removed from our home. On New Year’s Eve, at 6PM, she called and said, “There are families who would love to take care of Lindsey.”

January 2, we called our attorney, and he told us to find Lindsey a different doctor, one who would not make us give Lindsey AZT. He said as long as Lindsey was being cared for by a qualified doctor, we would have a medical umbrella, and she would remain in our care. His actual words were, “If Lindsey were my daughter, I’d take her to the Mayo Clinic, set her on the floor in front of a doctor there, and say, “What would you do? This child is entirely asymptomatic, has normal lab results, and we do not want her on AZT.”

After making at least 10 phone calls to doctors in Minneapolis, we ended up doing exactly what our attorney recommended – we took Lindsey to the Mayo Clinic. Steve talked to Mayo’s Nancy Henry, a pediatric infectious disease doctor, and had a lengthy conversation. Over the phone, she said that if Lindsey had no compromised lab results, she would not make us give her AZT. YAY! It was now 1993, and Lindsey was drug free, and doing very well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As Lindsey grew up she was active, and healthy. She played on the Wings soccer team for 8 years, took ballet for 5 years, took swimming lessons, was on the volleyball team, was a cheerleader for three years, and participated in numerous other activities. She was rarely ill and was never hospitalized. Even when she was exposed to chicken pox by her cousins, she didn’t require any extra care, even though we’d been warned that should she ever be exposed to chicken pox, she’d have to be hospitalized.

When Lindsey turned 20, she met, and fell in love with a man named John Martinez. We soon learned she was expecting. She decided to move back home for the duration of the pregnancy, so she moved from Minneapolis to our residence in Brownsdale, near Austin, MN, just 45 miles from Rochester. She decided to enter the midwife program at the Mayo Clinic, where the baby would be born at Methodist Hospital, one of Mayo Health System’s hospitals in Rochester.

I went with Lindsey to every single midwife visit. We always made the trip to Rochester MORE than just a visit to the doctor. We had fun, went out for lunch, and to the children’s shops to see what was new for babies!

Her first midwife visit, June 13, 2012, became tense immediately, as Lindsey explained that she was HIV positive, and therefore did not need to be tested for HIV. She told the admitting nurse or midwife – we’re not sure what her title was – and subsequent investigating provided no further clues – that the drug AZT had almost killed her when she’d taken it the first two years of her life, and she didn’t want it to kill her baby. The nurse who was filling out the computer form didn’t want to skip that test, but Lindsey insisted. The meeting did end on a positive note, although a doctor, someone with more authority, came in and removed the HIV test from the list.

During the next 6 months, HIV was never brought up. Since I was at every single appointment, I can attest to this. Lindsey was not verbally informed or given a single pamphlet about HIV, and never medically urged to take any medications. December 18 her water broke and we drove to the hospital. Once Lindsey was situated, I left the room for just a few minutes. It was while I was gone that the midwife asked Lindsey if she wanted an HIV test. Lindsey said absolutely not. It wasn’t until after Rico had been born that Lindsey was informed of the fact that if an HIV+ mother takes AZT during pregnancy, and the baby is delivered Caesarean, the baby has only a 2% chance of being born HIV positive. NOBODY told her that! That fact was never mentioned.

An Abusive Birth Experience

 

Lindsey had a very normal full term pregnancy, and the baby was born December 19, 2012. After his birth Rico had an issue with meconium and a pneumothorax, which while not uncommon, meant that he had trouble breathing, and would temporarily need to be in the neonatal intensive care unit. So Lindsey, who had just gone through labor overnight, was deprived of holding her baby except for about 2.5 minutes for a photograph, after which he was whisked away and taken from her arms to the NICU at St. Mary’s, the other hospital in Rochester’s Mayo Medical System. (Rico’s 1- minute Apgar score was 2, and his 5-minute score was 6.)

Lindsey was deprived of every item on her personal list, (Article 4) which was referred to as “The Plan,” a list the midwives encourage each expectant mother to have on hand in the delivery room. Lindsey’s plan  included numerous directives including the following: I do not want an epidural block, I do not want an episiotomy, I want my baby boy circumcised, I do not want the umbilical cord cut until the blood stops flowing on its own. Not one of these things was granted for Lindsey, nor was there any explanation provided. Not one. Even the doula Lindsey had hired was ignored as though she were not even present. John and Lindsey wanted Rico circumcised, and when he was released January 10, the dismissal documents stated that he was, but obviously he wasn’t. Her wishes were totally trampled.

About ten minutes after Rico was born, the birthing room filled with numerous medical staff, including a young pediatrician, Dr. Dufendach, who asked out of the blue, “Aren’t there some HIV issues in here?”

Once I gained composure, I wondered why he had waited 6 months to bring up HIV. Since it hadn’t been an issue the entire pregnancy, why bring it up now?   And just WHO was this guy!? We had never seen him before.

Side Note: During the pregnancy Lindsey had developed a bacteria, molluscum, which causes bumps that grow larger and then break open. It is very common for children to have molluscum, and it usually goes away on its own, sometimes after 6-12 months. The midwives virtually ignored the molluscum, growing in Lindsey’s pelvic area, citing the fact that pregnant women are also common targets of the condition. But suddenly, just minutes after Rico’s birth, the molluscum was of interest to the dermatology department at Mayo – at least 3 young male doctors wanted to see Lindsey’s molluscum and photograph it for publication! She refused, but it seemed to me that every twenty minutes or so, they’d ask if they could “see” it, and finally she gave in. Before I knew it, they’d gotten her permission to snap pictures of it, too.

Later that morning, an ID (infectious disease) doctor, a lawyer, and a social worker came into Lindsey’s post-delivery room, demanding that she be tested for HIV, and that Rico be tested. Without any discussion whatsoever, they threatened that if she refused, Rico would be removed from her custody. Sound familiar?

All her life, Lindsey had heard “her” story, the story of how her pediatric ID doctor threatened to remove her from our home. Without hesitation she stated “No way. I’m not subjecting Rico to that medication,” referring to the AZT that nearly took her own life. The attorney turned about face, and literally began dialing Olmsted County on his cell phone. He was notifying the authorities that they had a court order to fill out – an order of child protection.

The door had not even closed all the way when Steve pointed out what had just occurred. He urged Lindsey that perhaps she should reconsider, at least until we could get our own legal help. Rico might have to be on the drugs – but better that she give them to him than lose him foster parents who would give it to him.

Lindsey calmed down, realized the wisdom of Steve’s logic, and made the decision to comply. Steve had the nurse call the attorney, Josh Murphy, and told him over the phone, that Lindsey had changed her mind, and would comply. I was standing right next to Steve, and I recall, the attorney told Steve “Okay,” and Steve said, “Now, do I have your word on this?” Murphy said, “Yes, you do.”

So, Lindsey had been awake over 24 hours. Rico had been born just a little before 6AM and had been taken to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in a different hospital, 2 miles away. A team of three officials stood at the foot of her bed and threatened to remove Rico from her care. She now had to submit to blood tests, and was subsequently visited by more ID doctors, none of whom she’d met before, who each insisted that Lindsey should go on HIV meds. She should have had a revolving door on her room – every ten minutes someone new came in. It must have been a surreal experience for her, far from the birth experience she had envisioned. Her emotions were being stretched to the point of breaking. It would have been a horrible experience for anyone, let alone a 21 year old woman who had just given birth for the first time.

Rico was in intensive care for 3 weeks. On Day 4 he started breathing on his own. He didn’t drink out of a bottle, so they had to tube feed him through his nose. Lindsey wanted to breast feed him, but the ID doctor, Dr. Huskins, said No, “not until we have you tested for CMV, because we don’t want Rico to be exposed to more viruses than he needs to be.” Supposedly Rico tested positive for HIV, even though most (or even all) babies born of HIV mothers do test positive because they are still carrying their mother’s antibodies until they are 18 months old, when they develop their own antibodies, and the mother’s are sloughed off. At this point, I was wondering if anyone at Mayo knew this fact.

We certainly didn’t know it at the time, but on the second day of Rico’s life, and even possibly, the first day of Rico’s life Dr. Huskins took it upon himself to treat the HIV, and administered an experimental, perhaps controversial, heavy duty drug treatment, presumably intended to shock the HIV out of Rico’s body. The two drugs were Nevirapine and AZT. But at a CARE meeting a few days later, Dr. Huskins shocked us all with this admission: “I made a mistake,” he said. Instead of giving Rico the intended dose of Nevirapine, he accidentally administered a triple dose. John asked, “If that does cause damage, what would it look like?” Dr. Huskins said, “It would be neurological damage.” It was a surreal moment.

It is interesting that this “mistake” was seemingly overlooked, yet we had to wonder why Rico had an MRI while in the NICU. At the time the doctors claimed they were looking for a cause for Rico’s trouble swallowing, and they were wondering why his head circumference was 3% on the growth charts. I was left wondering if they were actually trying to determine if the triple dose of Nevirapine affected Rico’s brain and neurological function. By March 4, his head circumference was at 9% on the growth charts. And the trouble swallowing was diagnosed by an occupational therapist who came in with a tongue depressor and observed that Rico had a split uvula.

I couldn’t help but make a comparison between what happened to Lindsey and Rico and a little girl in Mississippi, whose story was in the headlines March of 2013. Our stories unfolded concurrently and even the prosecutor questioned Dr. Huskins during the trial about the similarities. She had also been diagnosed as HIV+ and treated similarly with large doses of an experimental drug that was supposed to knock the HIV out of her body. At first it appeared to work, but the HIV reappeared months later at which point the story disappeared from the news. It was difficult to miss the similarities. Was Rico being used as a research subject?

Lindsey was given the opportunity to willingly participate in Mayo research. She was paid $25 to fill out the form whether she was going to participate or not. She always filled out her forms, saying, “NO, I do not wish to be part of a study.”

Lindsey tested negative for CMV and started breast feeding Rico before he was released. She was required by Mayo to prove that she could feed him enough so that he would gain weight every day while Rico was in the NICU. A specialist in breast feeding came to the NICU care every morning as Lindsey fed Rico. The breast feeding was working and he was slowly gaining weight. Lindsey and John were allowed to stay overnight in a room just down the hall from the NICU, and part of that week I stayed with Lindsey and Rico in that room. It became tedious and we were hoping to leave Mayo and get home!

A few days before Rico was released, Lindsey was informed by her Mayo social worker, Hannah Mathieson, that a social worker from Mower County, Paul Oelfke, would be stopping by “just to check on things.” We were so surprised that he was coming because the Mayo attorney had promised Steve he would drop all child protective action! We were wrong in assuming Lindsey would never hear from Mower County.

When Paul Oelfke arrived Steve, Lindsey, John and I had a cordial conversation. He was very interested in Lindsey’s past, and seemed impressed that she had not been on any medication since the age of 2. We told him about the 2009 documentary, House of Numbers, which told the story of Lindsey’s experience, and how she was the lone survivor among the pediatric HIV cases in Minnesota in the 90’s. We felt relieved after Oelfke’s visit and it seemed that his questions had been answered. My sister recalls me telling her at the time that it had actually been quite a pleasant visit.

Rico was released from the NICU on January 10, 2013, and on January 18, just 8 days later, Paul Oelfke came to our home, where Lindsey, John, and Rico were living with us. When Oelfke scheduled the appointment he said he wanted to observe Lindsey and John giving Rico his meds, but instead, he showed up at the door with Mower County Deputy Mark May, and served Lindsey and John papers stating that Rico was being taken into the custody of Mower County. There were no specific charges, no statement of HOW they reached that conclusion, and in fact three pages of the 5-page document were missing!

Lindsey’s attorney, Ben Tarshish, was at our home that day, thank God.  He instructed us all to stay calm, and to refrain from doing anything because Lindsey and John would have a day in court, their day to explain things to the judge. Lindsey did, however, insist on demonstrating that she knew how administer Rico’s meds, since that had supposedly been the purpose of the visit. This played a huge part in the events to follow.

The hearing was supposed to occur within 72 hours, but it was Martin Luther King weekend, so for 5 days Lindsey didn’t even know where the sheriff had taken Rico. It was sheer hell. Lindsey continued to pump her breast milk and store it in the freezer for future use. Our shell-shocked family members gathered around, stayed at our home for hours and days. Steve’s mom, sister and family were there, our parents, my sister and my brother-in-law, my niece, John’s family – everybody was upset beyond words.

 

In the 8 days Rico was out of the hospital, Lindsey and John sought a second opinion of Rico’s diagnosis by a doctor in Seattle. Instead of flying with a newborn we chose to drive out to Seattle. But that day, our attorney called and said that because the doctor was not a pediatric specialist, he recommended we turn around and come home, which we did. In order to make the trip, Lindsey and John had cancelled two appointments. The first one was a CARE meeting with a potential new doctor for Rico – a pediatric infectious disease specialist in St. Paul, just in case Lindsey and John decided to relocate to the Twin Cities. The other cancelled appointment was suggested as an option by Dr. Chevalier, at a post-hospital stay appointment. She thought it might be useful for Lindsey to gain some tips on boosting Rico’s caloric intake.

Neither of these appointments was required, and neither one was a physical exam of Rico. But throughout Mayo’s computer records on Rico, it is noted that both appointments were skipped and/or missed. They were not. They were both cancelled, and in fact, the five of us were sitting and waiting at the McDonald House for the doctor to get back to us. We wanted to postpone the appointment just two hours, so Lindsey and John’s attorney could attend. It was to be a meet and greet appointment. The doctor never returned the call. The second appointment was rescheduled for January 21st. Steve called and scheduled it! CPS and Mayo continued to use the “skipped” appointments. Still, this was the pretext for the ambush, and the nightmare that unfolded.

 

After Rico was seized, a plan was in place for him to go to foster care. But the foster parents had no way to feed him, as Lindsey had been breast feeding him. The Mayo doctors told them he couldn’t drink out of a bottle, though we knew that to be erroneous. Paul Oelfke, the social worker, said when the foster mom arrived to pick up Rico, she noticed a rattling in his throat. Unbeknownst to her and Oelfke, Rico was simply reacting to the meds Lindsey had just given to him. Of the three medications, the worst offender was Kaletra, which was so awful that it made Rico gag, and for several hours afterward, he would cough and try to get that sticky stuff out of his nasal area and throat. Hence, the rattle. So between the rattle and the problem of not being able to use a bottle, they (all non-medical people), decided it would be best to send Rico back to St. Mary’s. Only this time, he would not be admitted to the NICU, a place Rico and the rest of Rico’s family would be used to – NO. He had to get a private room, where he would remain, isolated from everybody, for 52 days, 52 LONG days. Lindsey and John would be allowed to see him only a few hours a day at first, and over the next few days, the rest of us would finally be allowed to see him.

 

Rico and his mom, Lindsey Nagel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interestingly John was continually portrayed as an irresponsible absentee father. The emergency room report from the day Rico was removed from our home, states “Biological father has not been actively involved.”   The same statement was repeated in Rico’s records on 1/23/13. Also in the records is the phrase, “challenging social situation.” When I read these statements, I was appalled. John lived with us in Brownsdale every weekend for months, and December 9, ten days before Rico was born, he moved in with us full time until late May of 2013.  He was present when Rico was born and was at the hospital every day Rico was there. Mayo provides a correction form with enough space for about two sentences, but I would need two encyclopedias for all the corrections!

 

The foster parents were expected to visit Rico in the hospital, and they did – every morning. One of these mornings the foster dad asked the doctors making their morning rounds how he and his wife would handle having a person with full blown AIDS visiting their home. He was not referring to Rico – he was referring to Lindsey! The nurse of the day nearly fell off her stool, where she was typing on the chart, taking notes of the doctors’ advice for Rico. Later that day, when John’s parents came for a visit, the nurse told them all about the foster dad’s conversation with the docs. The foster dad had referred to Lindsey as a “prostitute and a drug user.” The nurse was visibly upset and felt Lindsey’s HPPA rights had been trampled on! Why was it the foster dad’s business to know and comment on Lindsey’s health status? And what he thought he knew was WRONG! Lindsey rarely had a cold, and certainly did NOT have full blown AIDS – Where had he received this information?

 

Rico was scheduled to have a feeding tube inserted into his stomach. The first two attempts were botched, and caused the formula to drip into his abdomen, causing a great infection. He looked very skinny, but had a huge stomach. Two of the younger Mayo doctors told us on two separate occasions that the bulging stomach was caused from sucking on a pacifier too much! We could hardly believe our ears. Rico also required 4 transfusions during this stay at the hospital, causing the doctors to realize that Rico was allergic to AZT, the drug Lindsey got in trouble over – the drug she did not want her son to have in the first place.

 

Mower County Child Protective Services had medical custody over Rico. They approved everything, every procedure, continually defying Mother Nature and common sense. During the trial, April 1 and 2, it was disclosed that Lindsey Brekke, head of CPS, begged Mayo Clinic to keep Rico as long as they possibly could, because she was unable to find a foster home for him. (After the incident at the hospital, our attorney said Rico could not stay with the initial foster family– thank goodness.)

 

Lindsey and John went every day to see Rico at St. Mary’s, and most days Steve and I went as well. We tried to make a ghastly situation bearable. We thought, at the time, that Rico was given medication that was unnecessary, as Lindsey had lived her whole life, except for the first two years, with NO medication whatsoever. This also added to the stress she bore, causing high anxiety over Rico. She was not able to hold him like a mother would, a normal mother holding a normal baby. It was difficult for her to be natural with him and she could no longer breast feed him. He wasn’t even eating from a bottle – he had numerous tubes in and out of his body, and many days he was not able to be lifted from his crib.

 

 

Mayo was pushing for Rico to be released on February 20, and wanted him released to Lindsey, not to foster care. I don’t know why, because all through this ordeal, Mayo appeared to be against her. But we were already seeking media coverage, both local and Twin Cities stations, and maybe they got wind of that, and decided they had better start looking “nice.”

 

On March 6 and again on March 11, just after Rico arrived home, Liz Collin from WCCO TV came to our home and interviewed all five of us! Lindsey’s attorney advised that Lindsey and John best not be involved except for a photo and a few sentences. Mark Saxonmeyer from KSTP TV also came to interview us. Eventually Baby Rico’s story was covered on all the local TV outlets, and Mason City. Richard Merryhew from the Star Tribune attended both days of the trial and wrote about the story numerous times. It was also covered here, at The Truth Barrier.

 

 

Steve and Cheryl Nagel on local news

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Though we were very relieved to have Rico home, things were by no means normal. We were all exhausted. What if the surveillance of our house began again? What if we spotted a sheriff’s car coming down our street?   Steve and I were struggling to keep things on an even keel; We had our café in downtown Brownsdale to operate. And how did Lindsey and John feel? They still had court appearances to make. What if the judge decided to remove Rico again? He could if he’d wanted to, as was noted in numerous Mayo medical notes. The trial was scheduled for April 1 and 2.

The Trial

We have transcripts of the trial. We thought the purpose of the trial was to secure custody of Rico. However, the prosecution turned it into a medical issue – in my opinion, they turned it into a “Steve and Cheryl Nagel’s Faulty Opinion” trial. The prosecution’s first witness was Dr. Huskins, who dominated the questioning for most of the first day. He gave a full description of what he believes are scientific facts about HIV and AIDS. He said sometimes doctors have to choose which procedure provides more benefits, knowing there are risks. He repeated numerous times that sometimes benefits outweigh the risks. Was he justifying the use of the accidental triple dose of Nevirapine, saying the risk of giving it to Rico might have given great benefits? He failed to mention that he didn’t get the parents’ consent to do so.

Lindsey & John’s attorneys, Scott Cody and Ben Tarshish, were two young guys, and though they did their best, they were not prepared for a Mayo doctor, who brought along his entire legal staff. Yes, Josh Murphy and a couple other Mayo legal were observing everything from a private office with a window to the courtroom. Our attorneys were not prepared to have a medical discussion – which we were going to address at a later date. Had we known and been better prepared, we could have brought in at least 10 specialists of our own. They would have at least created doubt about the use of all the drugs Rico was given. Some of these specialists did attend the trial, and were upset they could not speak to the court.

 

The prosecutor, Jones, wanted assurance that Lindsey and John would only be advised by Mayo doctors and Mower County – not Steve and Cheryl Nagel. He did a “great” job explaining to the court that Lindsey resisted giving Rico meds, and she was to be watched, because she, “was being advised by her parents not to give Rico his meds.”

Scott Cody, Lindsey’s attorney explained it quite clearly, regarding Lindsey and John:

“Once the parents understood the law, they consented to HIV testing for their child and they consented to all medications that were recommended by Mayo Clinic doctors. At no time after that did they waiver from their consent. They’ve never withdrawn their consent. They believe that they were doing the right thing, which is to give the child his medications, follow up on everything that the doctors told them to do, and in the meantime, seek legal process for a court order that would allow them to withdraw that medication. What they’ll testify to is they have no intention of stopping the medication, no intention of wavering from the doctor’s recommendations unless the Court told them that they could. Their motivation was to follow the law. They did not need a CHIPS Petition in place.”

 

During the trial Steve and I were questioned about our roles in advising Lindsey and John. Lindsey and John were questioned on who makes their decisions for them, and so on.

 

Paul Oelfke gave testimony at the trial. He was the Mower County social worker who’d visited Lindsey while Rico was still in the NICU at St. Mary’s, and the same social worker who removed Rico from our home. Following is part of his testimony. Cody was doing the questioning.

CODY: You had previously stated that the family was not a flight risk, is that correct?

OELFKE: Yes.

CODY: You had previously told us that at this time you had no reason to believe, no evidence, that any medications had been withheld, is that correct?

OELFKE: Correct.

CODY: So in all, what you are telling is that you have no reason to believe medications were withheld, you had no reason to believe that they simply had no showed and not called Mayo Clinic about missing this appointment? Is that fair to say?

OELFKE: Yes.

CODY: Yet, you recommended, as you told us, that a CHIPS be entered?

OELFKE: Yes.

CODY: And before you told us that the reason for that recommendation was the fear of withholding medications, is that right?

OELFKE: Yes.

CODY: Missed appointments, no shows, is that right?

OELFKE: That would be the concern. That would be the risk.

CODY: Yet, what you are telling us is that none of those risks were actually present, is that correct?

OELFKE: Yes.

CODY: Thank you. I have no further questions.

So Oelfke was lying, even in court. The question is WHY? Why would he do that?

Judge Wellman ordered that Mower County CPS was to continue monitoring Rico’s care. The county would remain in charge of Rico’s medical custody, monitoring that would continue for another 16 months.

 

Rico was released from the hospital March 8, about 3 weeks before the trial, but in early May had to return to St. Mary’s because of a major skin rash. His torso was bright red, and any measure taken to comfort him was in vain. He would have to stay at St. Mary’s for a few days until they could figure out what had caused the rash. Early the next morning Lindsey and John headed over to Rochester before us. Lindsey called home, quite disturbed because Rico was totally wrapped up in gauze and was extremely uncomfortable. Lindsey was very distressed over the whole thing. We flew out the door, Steve grabbing the video camera to film our entrance to the hospital room, and what we saw was shocking. Poor little Rico was wrapped up like a mummy, limbs spread out and unable to flex one single joint. Tubes from his head, toes and stomach area. It was very upsetting – I was almost sick to my stomach, but tried to keep it together for the benefit of Lindsey and John. It turned out Rico was allergic to the Abacavir he’d begun at the end of his last hospital stay.

 

During the trial Lindsey and John were not charged with any wrong-doing. Rico was home once again, but was to be monitored by Mower County, which had retained full medical custody. This was not the nice cozy atmosphere conducive to cuddling and snuggling with a new baby.   The CPS social workers were allowed to call and show up at will. Lindsey was required to take Rico to all his doctor appointments, (there were over 100), and was required to take parent training in our home. Besides that, Rico was given therapy in our home.

 

The Mower County CPS social workers were very demanding, and seemed to have mastered the art of making Lindsey feel stupid, and keep her jumping at their every command. They established a system to ensure Lindsey never missed giving Rico his medication. Every 12 hours, 8AM and 8PM, Lindsey was required to Skype herself giving Rico his 3 medications by way of her laptop. This was quite a grueling schedule, and to avoid being late, which she feared would give the county an excuse to confiscate Rico, Lindsey set her alarm clock. She always signed onto the Skype program early and waited in front of her computer holding Rico, who was generally sleeping. The Steps:

1) Dial up the social worker, who was usually not immediately available, so Lindsey would have to redial, sometimes 3-4 times; 2) Show Rico’s stomach, and the tube that went into his stomach to the social worker via the computer camera; 3) Hold up the bottle of medicine so the social worker would lean in to her camera, and view the writing on the bottle, that Lindsey was holding up to the camera on her computer; 4) Fill the syringe with the medicine and hold the syringe up to the camera so the social worker could make sure it was the right amount; 5) Attach the syringe to Rico’s stomach tube, and squeeze it in. All this time, Rico is supposed to be in view of the camera, so the social worker can see it is actually going into Rico’s stomach. Repeat this procedure for the other 2 medications. Then happily, say, “Thank you Jessica, see you in 12 hours! “  If Rico happened to be sleeping – by the end of the Skype process, – Rico was wide awake! Once one of the social workers had the nerve to tell Lindsey that Lindsey Brekke wondered why Lindsey always appeared grumpy! The Skyping thing went on for months, then it finally slowed down to once a day, then once every other day, then once a week.

Rico would cry, arch his back, struggle to get free, sometimes foam at the mouth, and seize, when given his meds. This was excruciating for Lindsey to go through, twice a day, yet she was meticulous about it, and determined to fully comply, to never miss a dose or do a single thing “wrong” that they could jump on. She was terrified they would take him from her again.

 

It was like living in a full blown police state–a tyranny of Big Brother watching and monitoring your every move. Literally!  Once, for example, Lindsey needed to ask for special permission to take Rico to a family wedding in Indiana, which was granted. But we had to drive around looking for WiFi so Lindsey had to slip out of the groom’s dinner Friday night, and the wedding reception on Saturday night, to Skype Mower County. Can you imagine? This had become “normal” life, for us. We sat in a parking lot at Caribou one night and on the floor at a Pizza Hut the other. They simply would NOT trust Lindsey to give Rico his meds unless they were watching. The intimidating tactics from CPS were certainly not conducive to building up Lindsey’s faith in her ability to be a good mother. She felt demoralized and ashamed, even though she had done nothing wrong.

 

Lindsey was an absolutely wonderful mother.

 

Every couple of months a new hearing would come up. Just seconds before stepping into the courtroom for the July 18, 2013 hearing, Lindsey was told by Scott Cody, her attorney, that this would be the last time he would be representing her. What? Why? Because John had retained a court-appointed attorney, and was seeking full custody of Rico. (Cody did finish the appeal work, and the appeal was held September 17, 2013.)

 

So now Lindsey was not only fighting the Mayo Clinic, Mower County and the social workers. She would soon be fighting John Martinez, the man who just a few months earlier, she had planned to marry. She was still wearing the engagement ring. It was yet another shock; someone was trying to take Rico away from her again. One Monday in late July, Steve and I were out having coffee with friends. Lindsey called. By Steve’s face, I could tell it wasn’t good news – Lindsey had just been visited by a detective from the Austin police. He demanded that Lindsey answer questions because they had to find out if Lindsey had told John she was HIV positive before she had sex with him. John was pressing charges. Lindsey refused to answer any questions without her dad present. So the detective, Bruce Hemann, told her that she and her dad better come to the police station later that day to answer the questions. We drove home as fast as we could. Our attorney told us not to take Lindsey to Austin, so we didn’t!

 

The APPEAL

In September, the appeal to Mower County’s ruling occurred. My family and several friends were in attendance. The judge on the left asked Jones, the Mower County prosecutor, how long he intended to keep the CPS order in place. He said, “Until they change the way they think, or 18 years.”

The judge on the right brought up facts that were not part of the trial transcript. How could she do that? Our attorney said he could not bring up anything that was NOT in the original trial. This judge went against the rules of her own court, staring at Lindsey, and said, “They believe HIV doesn’t cause AIDS – EVERYBODY knows HIV causes AIDS.”

 

There’s something Lindsey, Steve and I agreed to way before 2012, and that was that we were not scientists, so the actual HIV/AIDS theory, whether you believe HIV causes AIDS or not, should be left to them to figure out. What WE, the Nagels, know is that the drug AZT kills people. Every other child in our state who was HIV positive and remained on AZT in the 1990s, died, whereas Lindsey, who was taken off the drug, survived. She was the only one. So for this judge to bring this up, was totally out of place, and showed her prejudice toward us, and particularly to Lindsey. Furthermore, our personal opinion about HIV/AIDS shouldn’t have had any bearing on the matters at hand. The prosecution had no business judging Lindsey on the basis of her parents’ views. She was accountable for her own decisions and behavior. She never failed to comply with any of the instructions or protocol given by the doctors or Mower County. There was never a charge or accusation of noncompliance against her or anyone else in our family.

In hindsight, we can see that it was about this time that Lindsey began to give in to the pressure. Sure, we got the best attorney we could afford to represent her, and she gained physical custody of Rico, with John having him every other weekend. Sure, she got to hold Rico, care for him, and play with him. But the normal relationship between a mother and baby was ruined virtually from the start. She was denied the privilege of holding him at birth, then he was in NICU for 3 weeks, home for 8 days, then taken away from her in the most brutal of ways, and put into the hospital for 52 days. She Skyped twice a day for months. She lost John and then had to fight with him for custody of Rico.

 

The state wanted to drive a wedge between Lindsey and John. They succeeded.

 

In October, 2013, 10 months after Rico was born, Lindsey was admitted to Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park, and treated for pneumonia. It was very serious, so Steve brought Rico up to John’s for the duration of her hospital stay. The first 24 hours, Lindsey was on a ventilator. Steve and I stayed with her the entire two weeks.

 

In January of 2014 we took a trip to Florida – Steve, me, Lindsey and Rico. Of course, we had to get permission from John, Rico’s doctor, and Mower County. We had a wonderful time in Key West, Miami and Fort Meyer. Our happiness was soon marred by Lindsey’s pain. It was a pain that began in her lower abdomen, and was discovered to be lymph node swelling, caused by a bacterial infection known as MAC. MAC is akin to tuberculosis, but attacks the intestines. It requires a vigorous treatment with 3 antibiotics.

 

It was at about this time that we noticed Lindsey was growing careless about her eating habits and her health. We had always questioned the risk and reward of the HIV drugs, because taking her off AZT when she was age 2 had saved her life… In general healthy people slough off MAC bacteria, so what was going on now? Was the HIV responsible for her seeming lack of immunity? Was she so stressed that her body succumbed?

 

During 2014, Lindsey sought treatment at the Mayo Clinic, but the decline in her health continued. We closed our café and decided to move to the Twin Cities, where there would be more resources for Lindsey, more support, and more distance between her and Mower County.

 

In October 2014, Lindsey began a year-long series of hospital stays, which included a 2-month stay at Bethesda, a recovery hospital in St. Paul. All the way through 2014, Steve and I had been caring for Rico while Lindsey was in the hospital, in compliance with the terms of the court order. But by early January, we realized Lindsey was likely going to be in the hospital indefinitely, we were getting worn out, physically and emotionally, one of us going to the hospital, the other staying home with Rico, and we decided it was time to talk to John. We brought Rico to John, who lives with his parents, in Brooklyn Park. We had no way of knowing how long he would have to be there.

 

Lindsey was released from Bethesda April 2, and came home, expecting to resume at least some time with Rico, maybe beginning 2-3 days every other week until she got better.

 

Communication between John and Lindsey had ceased months earlier, and John would only speak with Steve. But now even Steve could get nowhere with John – he flatly refused to give Lindsey any time with Rico! Every time Steve called John with a proposal, John would say, “Only if Lindsey comes (drives) to get him.” Or, “She can come to visit him here, at our house.” Lindsey and Steve came up with a plan to just tell John we were going to pick Rico up on Saturday at 11AM. So Steve texted John that information, and John texted back, “You can’t have him this weekend, he has therapy on Monday.”

Before she became critically ill, Lindsey was denied being with her son. She never got to see Rico again.

 

Lindsey’s passing followed 2 years of being under brutal siege from the Mayo clinic and CPS in Mower County. The siege continued with John Martinez, and is not resolved. Lindsey was ambushed right after Rico’s birth, and Rico was forced into taking a cocktail of so many HIV drugs, vaccines, and other toxic medications, including the experimental attempt at trying to “knock” the HIV out of his tiny body, that we believe caused permanent brain damage. To my knowledge, he has never spoken a word, crawled, or walked. The last time we saw him, he did not eat, except a few nibbles of food.

 

Rico’s eyes lit up whenever he was in his mother’s arms, and he had a smile that inspired people following his story, and his mother’s – many on the Internet, from all over the world.

 

Rico and Lindsey

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our family’s unbelievable battle to keep our daughter, and then our grandson alive, has been documented on videos, audio tapes, transcripts, and personal notes. We had a healthy daughter and a healthy grandson 2 ½ years ago. But then the powers that be decided to intervene “heroically” in the delivery room. Today we have neither our daughter nor our grandson who we have not seen since January.

 

–Cheryl Nagel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo of Rico from Lindsey’s cell phone

 

 

[Editor’s note: As Editor of The Truth Barrier, I have requested that the Nagels submit documentation for each claim they made. They have complied. John Martinez was contacted, and given a chance to respond to what has been reported here, but at press time, has not responded.

Having reviewed the legal documents and affidavits, and removed passages that detailed the battle for custody, I can say this with confidence:

As Lindsey’s condition worsened, Rico was cared for more and more by John. During this time, Lindsey and John barely spoke, and finally communication between them stopped. Any messages to John were conveyed by Steve. The Nagels have reportedly spent over $150,000 to fight all the legal battles for Rico at this point. They sold their home and family business and moved to Minneapolis, seeking better care for Lindsey. Their man focus was keeping Lindsey alive, and at the same time, caring for Rico.

A few days ago, John’s sister wrote this on Rico’s Facebook page:

“Ironic how the page is titled Save Rico and yet his maternal grand parents haven’t seen or really asked about Rico in a year. Don’t disguise your mission as one to better the life of a little boy. This has nothing to do with Rico and never has, and it’s disgusting that his image and story are being used by people that don’t care enough to even invite him to his mother’s funeral.

For everyone that asks about Rico’s well being that doesn’t receive answers. He’s doing quite well in his father’s care.”

 

In response, Steve Nagel said, “There has been no funeral for Lindsey. We are still mourning the loss of our daughter.”

 

Further details will come to light in the documentary “Born Free: The Shocking Story of Rico Martinez Nagel,” set to be released in 2016.

 

Tranströmer Fragment

Posted on March 28, 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Listen to society’s mechanical self-reproaches

the voice of the big fan
like the artificial wind in mine tunnels
six hundred metres down.

Our eyes keep wide open under the bandages

If I could at least make them realize
that this trembling beneath us
means we are on a bridge.”

 

 

The Gallery, Tomas Tranströmer

From The Truth Barrier, 1978, translation by Robin Fulton

Tomas Tranströmer, Author Of “The Truth Barrier” Dies

Posted on March 27, 2015

 

 

 

Our beloved poet Tomas Transtromer–from whose work we took our name– has gone on to “the real party,” as he once called it.

Thank you

Tomas,

for insisting on mystery, magic, beauty, stillness, and majesty, while modernity and sterility raged all around us.

You always reached across, with your quiet but warm modesty, and wild imagination.
In your crystalline poems one could see to the bottom of the lake.

You invoked mystery but never used foggy prose to keep us at a distance.

Your clarity felt so very much like love when it was hard to find, hard to trust.

That I got to meet you in “the blue house” is something I will cherish as long as I live.

You looked down on nobody, and signed my book with your only partly functioning hand, in such a tender scrawl, I’ve never been able to look at it without feeling vulnerable.

Thank you for laying down your body as an instrument of transmission–these vital messages–while “truth” was under siege as never before.

“Read between the lines. We’ll meet in 200 years,
when the microphones in the hotel walls are forgotten
and can at last sleep, become trilobites.”


http://www.svd.se/kultur/wastberg-om-transtromer_4443855.svd

 

 

 

America (For John Powell)

Posted on March 16, 2015

 

 

 

 

 

If you encounter the public language of America as an outsider, or somebody whose formative years were elsewhere (mine were in Sweden) you’re struck by a quality that is very difficult to identify.

I think about it almost all the time. Just now I think I got it. I want to write it down, in case I’m right.

It’s not just that feelings don’t permeate the language, it’s that feeling-less language is upheld with a near nationalist determination. We love, and abuse, sterile phrases like, “It is what it is,” “You got to move on,” and so forth.

The things people say when they don’t want to say what it really true, relevant, or reflective, have formed a kind of calcified second language, on top of the true, living language that moves, reveals and connects.

What do I expect, you may ask?

Do I expect American public figures to sound like Liv Ullman?

I don’t know.

All I know is that I just wait, and wait, and wait, to hear something human sounding. On television, on the bus, or in my own conversations.

The language is rational, above all else. Pain-avoidant and joy-avoidant.

Lawns are mowed almost out of what seems to be a fear of what might emerge from the grass if we didn’t show it who’s boss.

When somebody cries, without exception, they say, “I’m sorry.”

And we say, “Are you ok?”

Not, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Bengt, the now 93 year old father of a close friend in Sweden–when I sat on their small boat in the Baltic Sea after we’d scattered my mother’s ashes–he did something lovely.

He said nothing suggestive that I should push my tears back where they came from, that I should bring things back to an emotion-less state as fast as possible.

He just sat there with me. And then he wiped a tear from my cheek.

After

Posted on February 14, 2015

Betrayal

 

 

 

 

 

 

I always thought I would wear that bracelet to my grave.

I thought about it for a moment and then

I heard myself say the words,

“Yeah that’s for sale.”

 

 

 

–Celia Farber

R. Crumb Speaks Out On The Killings At Charlie Hedbo

Posted on January 10, 2015

Today The New York Observer published an interview I did with Robert Crumb, on Jan 9, about the massacre of 12 people in Paris, including two satirical cartoonists.

Special thanks to the late, and greatly missed, Christine Maggiore, who connected me to Mr. Crumb many years ago.

He is one of the most vast, patient, kind and brave souls I have ever met, though he views himself as the opposite.

There is a sense now, a real sense, we all agree, of something shifting.

The collective energy is saying:

Enough.

Whatever it is, bring it, but we’re not going to live like this.

Tyranny and blood only serve to hasten the process of liberty, to wake it up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Wolves Bring Life: An Astonishing Short Film

Posted on January 1, 2015


Special thanks to R.A. Davis

Challenging Orac To Determine Authenticity Of Wakefield/Thompson Exchange: Were The Texts Fake?

Posted on November 4, 2014

To my readers:

This link must be viewed first, to make sense of the text below, which I posted this evening at Respectful Insolence. It offers the context of this journalistic challenge.

 

 

Dr. Gorski,

You and your readers have spent an inordinate amount of time and energy speculating about the veracity of the text message exchange I posted to my website The Truth Barrier, seen here:

http://truthbarrier.com/2014/09/02/breaking-news-cdc-whistleblower-text-messages-to-andy-wakefield-study-would-have-supported-his-scientific-opinion/

On your blog, people even Google mapped my building, published my address, and speculated about my son’s age and computer equipment.

But you never thought to contact me, and ask me.

It’s Nov 4, 2014, and this is a matter of public record:

I am inviting you to engage in a resolution of this, so that the questions raised can be answered. Typically, as a journalist. when you want to find something out, you start by contacting people close to the story. You ask questions. Unless, of course, you don’t really want to know the answer.

Journalists don’t rely on comments from readers of their blogs to find things out, nor merely consult their own thoughts and suspicions. They investigate.

So let’s find out of the texts are fake.

I challenge you to go to the source–to write to Dr. William Thompson at the CDC and ask him if he had these exchanges with Dr. Wakefield and his wife.

Then I’d like you to ask me anything you like, about the texts.

Present me with terms of proof that would satisfy you and your readers that they are real not fake.

You want to know that beneath the name “William” on Dr. Wakefield’s phone, there is a cell phone number belonging to Dr. Thompson, correct? We all understand that we are not at liberty to make this number public.

Let us agree that if the texts are proven real, you will publish the results, and apologize to me for the false and slanderous accusations that I published falsified materials.

My question to you is this: If they ARE proven real, what does that mean?

It means that Dr. William Thompson is a real, as opposed to “fake” CDC Whistleblower. It means that he was not at all “taken out of context” by Dr. Wakefield and Dr. Hooker. It means that he stands by what he said in his press release, namely that the CDC significantly altered (falsified) data, and deliberately sought to eliminate the link between MMR vaccines given at a certain time in neurological development, and autism.

If you do not think this is what Dr. Thompson means to convey, please say so here and now, and we will answer that question next. I am inviting you to pose, investigate, and weigh evidence to three questions, publicly:

1. Are the texts real?
2. Does Dr. Thompson confess to partaking in scientific fraud at the CDC?
3. Does Dr. Thompson feel Dr. Wakefield’s career was unjustly destroyed, and that his own study, done right, would have backed up the paper Dr. Wakefield lost his career over?

Your reputation is at stake. I await your reply.

CDC Whistleblower Thompson Text Exchange With Mrs. Wakefield: “..Your Husband’s Career Was Unjustly Damaged…”

Posted on September 8, 2014

“…and this study would have supported his scientific opinion.”

(This text was cited in a  previous post but now I offer the JPG of the full exchange.)

 

 

 

 

 

BREAKING NEWS: CDC WHISTLEBLOWER TEXT MESSAGES TO ANDY WAKEFIELD: STUDY WOULD HAVE “SUPPORTED HIS SCIENTIFIC OPINION”

Posted on September 2, 2014

“I apologize again for the price you paid for my dishonesty…”

–CDC Whistleblower Dr. William Thompson

 

 

The last desperate effort when the CDC whistleblower story broke last week was for the vaccine establishment and media to drive a wedge between Dr. Thompson and Dr. Andrew Wakefield, whose “fraud” (according to British journalist Brian Deer) has been made to carry the sins of the entire vaccine industry for many years.

Dr. Wakefield shared two text messages with The Truth Barrier that he and his wife received from Dr. Thompson.

 

The first one was to Dr. Wakefield’s wife Carmel, from August 20, 2014, and it read:

 

I do believe your husbands career was unjustly damaged and this study would have supported his scientific opinion. Hopefully I can help repair it. You can see it here.

 

The second one is a JPG, here:

 

 

Text exchange between Dr. Andrew Wakefield and Dr. William Thompson,
Aug 27, 2014

 

 

 

Polly Tommey, Director of Autism Media Channel, told The Truth Barrier there are more whistleblowers trying to find the courage, and or, the legal protection, to speak.

“There are more whistleblowers coming out,” she said. “We know who they are and we’ve spoken to them. They’re petrified. These sources make Thompson pale in comparison, some of them. They know the MMR is a massive problem, data has been corrupted, they’ve been told to hide things…”

“One guy spoke about Gardisil. He said, ‘You can forget about MMR—Gardisil is one of the biggest crimes ever. 144 girls or something have died already. Thompson is only the beginning. “

CDC Whistleblower Statement Confirms Data Manipulation Around MMR

Posted on August 27, 2014

This statement was released by Dr. William Thompson through his attorney just now.

It is being spun by both sides because it is a mixed bag, with some dog bones for the pro-vaccine set, such as a sudden, oddly placed lecture on how much Dr. Thompson believes in vaccines in general.

It seems to me, bottom line, the point of it is this: CDC manipulated data around MMR and autism in a critical study.

To wit:

“I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information  in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased  risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.”

 

 

Why would the CDC omit data?

 

 

 

 

 

International Newspaper Dares Report On CDC Whistleblower

Posted on August 26, 2014

Today’s Epoch Times.

 

Breaking the sound barrier…

CNN Reinstates Two Deleted Stories On CDC Whistleblower After Verifying Veracity

Posted on August 25, 2014

In a remarkable turn of events, after a weekend that included a total of three reports on CDC Whistleblower Dr. William Thompson being deleted from CNN’s iReport page, the first two have been reinstated, presumably following review from CNN.

You can see them here, and here.

This means de facto that the mainstream media magic carpet prayer– suggesting Thompson’s claims could not be verified– is not going to arrive.

CNN emerges as so far the only mainstream media outlet or TV network that is capable of reporting reality when it turns out they had been wrong on a major story. For this they should be commended.

Major media, largely supported by the pharmaceutical industry as main sponsor, has unanimously and consistently backed the “vaccines are perfectly safe” argument and abusively attacked parents of damaged children as “anti-vaxxers.” They have also pummeled the argument that British gastroenterologist Dr. Andrew Wakefield committed “fraud” as per free-lance journalist Brian Deer’s foaming persecutions. The 1998 Lancet paper at the center of the controversy has since been cleared in a British High Court, along with, preposterously, some, but not all, of the paper’s 13 authors.

Now it would appear the roles have been reversed, and it is the pro-vaccine crowd that must deal with allegations of very serious fraud, form inside the CDC itself. (The second major fraud scandal involving criminality to hit the CDC in recent years.)

Except they are not “allegations,” like those made by Brian Deer against Wakefield. These “allegations” are documented, in papers that scientist, and father of a vaccine injured child, Dr. Brian Hooker, obtained by way of FOIA requests, later confirmed by the whistleblower himself–Dr. Thompson.

Many of the parties involved have the documents, and the results have been summarized in a scientific paper published by Dr. Hooker in early August, which you can read here.

 

 

 

 

 

CDC Whistleblower Story Again On CNN’s IReport By New Citizen Reporter

Posted on August 24, 2014

UPDATE: It’s been taken down.

It was apparently up for two hours, and had garnered 20,000 views and 5,000 shares, before it was deleted.

 

‘iReport” at CNN.com is an open, free form page that CNN normally does not vet, or take responsibility for, so this is strange indeed.

 

—-(Text below was posted a few hours ago)

 

Truth Barrier is following the unfolding story of the media paralysis on the CDC MMR/Autism whistleblower, Dr. William W. Thompson, who has gone on record saying the CDC committed major scientific fraud to disguise an MMR/Autism connection–a fraud in which he himself became complicit. He now regrets his complicity very deeply.

We reported that “CNN iReport,” took the story down after it garnered some 45,000 views and 17,000 shares. “iReport,” it turns out, is an unregulated free space, not “vetted” by CNN under normal circumstances. It’s the equivalent of Facebook for CNN, meaning, anybody can publish and CNN is not responsible for the accuracy of the content.

The first story stayed up for 19 hours.

Let’s see how long this one stays up.

 

CNN Complicity In Media Blackout Of CDC MMR Vaccine Whistleblower Deepens

Posted on August 24, 2014

The Truth Barrier received the following message this evening, providing additional details about the CNN iReport story that was taken down on the morning of Aug 23. .

 

“I wrote the CNN iReport.  The producer contacted me and wanted to know how I know what I know.  I gave her contact info for Hooker, and also for Thompson’s attorney.  I took her through the entire Hooker/Thompson timeline of events.  I told her what else is coming soon.  The producer said she was calling Hooker right away and that if they verified the story they’d put it back up.  Hooker said they never called. The story is still down.”

CNN Complicit In Media Coverup Of CDC Whistleblower

Posted on August 23, 2014

CNN is now overtly complicit in the mainstream media blackout of the developing story of CDC whistleblower Dr. William Thompson, who stepped forward and revealed that he had partaken in cooking data attempting to minimize the truth about the toxicity of the MMR vaccine in infants and the increased risk of developing autism.

 

Yesterday, on CNN’s “iReport” page, the story was posted.

As of late last night, the article had 45,232 views, 178 comments,( mostly people literally begging CNN and other media to cover it,) and a staggering 17 thousand shares.

This clearly is what we call “news worthy.”

However,  CNN has now deleted the story, claiming it was “flagged” for being “in violation” of iReport’s policy.

In violation of what?  CNN’s appeasement policies toward the vaccine industry?

CNN won’t allow the story of a whistleblower from a federal health agency who has admitted to falsifying a bedrock of data about vaccine safety, but it offered frothing, extensive coverage to Brian Deer’s claim’s that Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 Lancet paper was “fraudulent.” (The paper’s assertions–of a link between gastrointestinal illnesses, MMR, and autism– have subsequently been repeated in many other studies, and the paper’s lead author, who was funded to do to, went through the proper courts in the UK  and was vindicated.)

 

See the tangled web of interests here.

 

CNN’s frothing pro-vaccine coverage, and systematic bullying of critics, such as Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who was “interviewed” by an unhinged Anderson Cooper here, in one of journalism’s lowest moments, points to a very disturbing development in American journalism.

The $52 billion vaccine industry ship, meanwhile, mighty as it is, is taking on water from escalating leaks.

Who will jump next?

 

 

Breaking News: CDC Whistleblower Escorted Off Grounds, Life Believed In Danger

Posted on August 22, 2014

The Ed Snowden of the Pharmaceutical/Petro-Chemical Industry is here and his name is William W. Thompson.

 

“A Study by Focus Autism Foundation Finds: CDC Whistleblower Reveals Widespread Manipulation of Scientific Data and Top-Down Pressure on CDC Scientists to Support the Fraudulent Application of Government Policies on Vaccine Safety”

—The Liberty Beacon

Read more here.

Thompson helped rig the damning data on MMR vaccine and autism, and over time, felt too grief stricken to carry on, too guilty about the damage he had helped cause to so many countless children. So he blew the whistle, covertly. He has since been outed, escorted off CDC grounds, and now his life is believed to be in danger.

By the way–CDC is part of the same military industrial complex as the “military industrial complex.” HHS and all due-branches are military.

This is an EXTRAORDINARY situation. Mass media will try to ignore it, but let us cooperate to make this very difficult for them to do.

Age of Autism’s site is down apparently because it crashed, due to high volume. BIG story. Great work by The Liberty Beacon, Jon Rapapport, and Autism Media Channel, and others.

I am seeking comments from all involved and will keep reporting on this explosive story.

Read the latest below:

breaking-cdc-whistleblower-thompson-in-grave-danger-now

Support Independent Journalism

Posted on August 22, 2014

The Truth Barrier was down temporarily last month. I fell behind in web hosting costs.

Your donations are hugely appreciated, but not expected.

Small is great, very small is great too–anything keeps the lights on and the energy alive.

Thank you!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hope Is The Thing With Feathers

Posted on August 2, 2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’d just gone in to look for my notepad.  “You can come in,” Rita said, “but this is not a happy time.”

One of the sparrows was being lifted from his small cage.

“His feet are dead,” Rita said, her sky blue eyes the color of the sky she tried to return all her beloved birds to. No bird was turned away here. When I first arrived that day I watched them amputate the toe of a female pigeon whose feet had become tangled in something alien, perhaps hair from hair extensions.

Pigeons have four toes, did you know that? And their eyes are rust colored, or sometimes blue. Three toes form a “peace sign” Helen–an attorney who had captured this pigeon and brought her by taxi from Wall St. to the Upper West Side– explained to me, and the fourth points in the other direction. These women know everything about birds–their feet, feathers, bones, beaks, everything. The feet are very important. Landing gear, for one thing, or, in the case of a sparrow, what they use to grip.

“He’ll never survive,” she said, cradling him in her hand, as she placed him under the glass dome that would put him first to sleep. “Turn the light off, it’s calmer,” she said, and her assistant did. In the darkened room, my heart was pounding.

“I gave him his favorite worms and he ate them all,” she said to Rita, and I watched his tiny head droop under the glass dome.

Rita took him out, turned him upside down, and injected something into what seemed to be the heart area.

I saw that his feet were a mess.

His feathers looked clammy.

“I’m sorry, I’m getting my sweat all over you sweetheart,” Rita said to him.

I thought my heart would break, along with his. But I had decided not to leave, not to run away.

“The sad statistic is 50% don’t make it,” Rita said.  Birds like seagulls, hawks, raptors–they need every bone in their complex wings working right or they can’t fly right, at angles. So if one of those birds breaks a wing bone it can mean death, whereas pigeons rely less on their wings for food. Pigeons can even function without any feet at all.

“There was this male pigeon I will never forget,” Helen said, “you know they dance. They dance for the females, every time they see a female they start dancing. Well this guy, it was a snowstorm, a really bad snowstorm, and he was down by the Chelsea Pier, and he had no feet, but he just started dancing this really wild dance for a female near by him. It was as if he was saying, “Hey baby, come on, we’re all gonna die anyway, let’s dance. It was just amazing. Pigeons are very stoic animals.”

Outside the room, pigeons were flying from one side of the room to the other.  A pigeon teenager was brought in while I was there and everything was off. He couldn’t open his beak for one thing. His lead test came back very elevated. This is curable, but takes a few weeks.

A young volunteer, a boy, said, “Did somebody just get euthanized?’

Rita explained to him who it was.

I wanted to stay in there, because it was good. Goodness. No bird was garbage, each bird was loved. When they suspected a bird could fly they would toss the bird like a baseball into the middle of the room, and up they went.

I kept turning, to conceal my tears, and awe.

 

–Celia Farber

Aug 2, 2014

 

 

Exiting The Trauma Cult: Reflections On The Emergence Of Totalitarian Science

Posted on July 30, 2014

 

 

 

 

“War against the “denialists.” Nothing more.

When you’re in a war, there are no rules.

This IS a war, there ARE no rules, and we WILL crush you, one at a time, completely and utterly (at least the most influential ones; foot soldiers like you aren’t worth bothering with. )”

 

—Weill Cornell HIV researcher John P. Moore,

(in an email to an HIV positive man, Michael Geiger, who wrote to ask him an unorthodox question.)

 

 

Recently, British documentary film maker and colleague Joan Shenton asked me to address this question:

 

“Why do you think the scientific edifice that holds onto the AIDS orthodoxy has not yet been breached in spite of all the evidence of flawed science and terrible injustices that you and others have been exposing for 25 years or more?”

 

This is my answer:

 

I think we dissidents were in fact “denialists.” What do I mean by that? I mean that we denied the true nature of the forces that came together to form this “typhoon of unreason” (a borrowed phrase from Martin Amis, referring to Stalinism).

“The scientific edifice” has not been breached because it was not a scientific edifice. If it were, it would have never birthed itself without evidence, without struggle, without peer review, without meeting Koch’s Postulates, indeed, with no “virus” in evidence. I think the HIV/AIDS edifice is “post-scientific science,” which should not be called “science” at all.

So what is it?

It is ,of course, domination—a domination paradigm. Domination operates on fear.

It’s abuse.

What is this word, “abuse?” I want to be scientific about it.

The hidden psychic spindle (“…the rod on a spinning wheel by which the thread is twisted and on which it is wound”) of the HIV-Causes-AIDS paradigm is, I argue “abuse,” in every sense of the word: From the day it was born, it demanded abject subservience, no sound of protest; It permitted no exit, and set itself up to be above reproach and infallible.  A dictatorship without borders.

Its other bizarre and characteristic feature was elasticity. An elasticity so great it could accommodate any and all circumstances in which its predictions failed, abjectly. It did so by systematically occluding what those predictions had been (for example, the elimination of upward of 90 million Americans by the year 1990), and by assuming a posture of rightness and goodness that never had to be either right or good. A sui generis halo around the whole contraption that took it off the scale of fair play, reality, conventional morality, and certainly off the scale of scientific form, which it abhorred, in favor of its crisis mentality, fueled by the notion that there was no time to demonstrate or prove anything, because people were “dying.” This cast the one who asked for “proof”—of anything—in the role, insanely, of “murderer,” which is what we have all been labeled since we took our positions of skepticism. (In my case, I began chronicling and reporting on the rift between the camps the year it broke out—1987. This was my first assignment in journalism, still not finished.) The entire time was spent in flight from whips and chains aimed at one’s core self-esteem, which you could kiss goodbye.  And I did.

It wasn’t until I read Daniel Shaw’s stunning book Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation that I finally struck the chord of awakening—understood where I had been all these years. Shaw managed to leave a spiritual cult after ten year of strict obedience and silence, when he spoke up against sexual abuse by the cult’s leader and was punished and shunned.

In the chapter “Traumatic Narcissism in Cults,” Shaw renders a description that any surviving dissenter of the HIV/AIDS wars (be they scientists, journalists, or HIV positive individuals seeking answers) will recognize:  “…grandiose, overinflated narcissists who seek hegemony for their subjectivity by weakening and suppressing the subjectivity of others.” He then cites, “…the relentless use of sticks, such as humiliating character assassination and threats of expulsion, meant to persuade the followers that their own subjectivity is inadequate and corrupt compared to the leader’s, and therefore in need of extensive correction that only the group and its leaders can provide.”

Shaw refers to “the hallmarks of abuse” as follows: “…the use of power to intimidate, seduce, coerce, belittle, and humiliate others—not to strengthen, uplift, and enlighten, as advertised, but for the more base purposes of psychological enslavement and parasitic exploitation.” 

The abuse directed at the HIV positive customer/follower, though presented as a form of protection (against death, no less), was sinister in the extreme:

“If I can scare you, I have power over you. Then I can start to charge you for the partial exit strategies, passageways, and tunnels, out of the fear you are now overcome by.”

It is a brilliant, classic, demonic (“Ahrimanic,” more accurately) economic domination model–a domination model with spectacular economic rewards for those willing to do the bullying. What was taken, seized, robbed from people who got snared, at the outset, was nothing less than the individual’s birthright–the promise and hope of life itself.

This was an unprecedented hostage drama:

“I’ve taken all hope from you. I’ve already declared you dead.” The Promethean promise that all humans should be blinded from knowledge of “the day of their deaths …so that they might aspire,” has already been removed. Nothing is more fundamental, as a human “right” — or better to say, a natural condition — than the right not to be sentenced to an imminent death. Worse, a cloudy one, that only expands, but never breaks. Worse still, a death sentence from a “virus” that was never proven to exist, that is spectral.

This is the stuff of Goethe’s Erlkonig, of ancient folklore. It is precisely its bizarre qualities of superstition, fear, sacrificial occultism, and 16th century witch-terror that make it so paralyzing, so seemingly hopeless to confront, to bargain with, to attempt to dissuade or counter.

Any presence of “fog” is the presence of menace, fog being also the prelude to subjugation. Clarity, by contrast, is love itself.

From a translation of Goethe’s Erlkonig, or “Erlking:”

–Father, don’t you see the Erlking? The Erlking with his crown and tail?

–My son that is a streak of mist!

[I skip the middle of the poem and go to the end:]

“In dread, the father gallops fast, he holds the moaning child in his arms—he galloped home with all his might—in his arms the child was dead.”

So–Goethe would understand us. Goethe who brought German culture to its highest peak, before the emergence of the Reich, which, the good listener observes, is the word Peter Duesberg uses for the “it” we have all battled so hopelessly (or has it been?) all these years.

 

What have I learned, in the end? How has my mind changed?

 

I learned that I was fighting something I encountered long ago, as so many of us do. I was fighting for my own right to “live,” in a neutral space, not hunted by abstract clouds of “sin” which is really other people’s abjected self-acceptance. They were, of course, abused too, in early life.

I don’t presume to speak for any other “dissident” when I say, here, now, what it is I believe I was actually confronting: not “flawed” science, but rather, de-sensitization, brutality, and finally, sheer sadism.

Cruelty, not “science;” Abuse, not “science.”

Abuse, as any survivor of abuse knows, is not trying not to be abuse, is not trying to become understanding—not seeking its “aha” moment when it can grasp what the “other” means to express, or why.

“Oh now that I see what you mean, or, (common dissident fantasy) now that I have read your paper attentively, I will call for all beatings to cease, and your wounds will be tended to by our staff. Step over here.”

Yes, there was a crucial difference between the camps, the groups. One was campaigning for a debate, while the other had already pathologized and demonized “debate” and was waging overt, covert, and brutal war against the different-thinkers, in the name of the very “hegemony” Shaw invokes.  We were never able to popularize the idea that scientists who posit something in the midst of great scientific mayhem should be protected from violence.  Few stepped forward, in this terrifying climate, to argue for the preservation of scientific discourse.  It was a battle over science—over the very soul of science in the politically correct era: Should science be free or should it be totalitarian? What should we do with those we deem to be wrong? But “wrong” did not mean incorrect—it meant wrong.

The answer came before the question: Beat them mercilessly. Disappear them. Abject, humiliate, de-fund, and at every turn terrorize and demoralize them. Whoever’s left standing will be “right.”

 

“…The overinflated narcissist,” Shaw writes, “can experience himself as cohesive and alive only at the expense of devitalizing his objects. To achieve this goal of “devitalization,” the traumatizing narcissist virtually colonizes others, using the other as a host, as it were, onto whom to project and control his unwanted and disavowed affects and self states connected to dependency–especially the shameful sense of neediness and inferiority.” In one of the most stirring moments in the book, Shaw writes simply: “One step along the way toward attaining freedom from emotional enslavement to the traumatizer can be the demystification of the traumatizer’s power.” He identified the “punishing grip of the moral defense,” that ties the abused to the traumatizer, and says that breaking this tie, freeing these particular patients, is, “among the most daunting task in any analytic therapy.”

The years following publication of my most penetrating article, Out of Control: AIDS And The Corruption of Medical Science (Harper’s, March 2006) — especially 2008 to the present — have been spent seeking relief from the psychological shattering that was finally (by 2008, 21 years after I embarked on the story) complete. I lost, of course, my “reputation,” my livelihood, my self-esteem, adrenal health, identity, ability to concentrate, and finally, will to write, or even in the full sense of the word, live.

In the winter of 2013 I was finally diagnosed with “Complex PTSD,” which cleared the way for gradual healing, now that I had the concept of “trauma” to work with. I was not “depressed,” I was traumatized. It wasn’t actually the overt death threats, the explicit fantasies published online by detractors of how they dreamed of murdering me, cutting me up, filming my slow death, “selling tickets”—nor the blood-splattered photo of me that till hangs on the main anti-“denialist” website that did me in. It was the asphyxiating presence of perpetual condemnation—the sense of being trapped, hunted, inside a sick domain that reserved the proud right to inflict fear and punishment—and the realization that nobody would or could protect me. Or any of us.

Why do we persist with this childish fantasy that any of us have been involved in a “scientific debate,” when in fact it was a squalid pit-bull dog fight, something out of A Clockwork Orange?

And as for the money—how can one even find the words to describe the monetary aspect of this monstrous, global industry that sells salvation from a deadly entity that does not exist. Or perhaps, as The Perth Group would correct that phrase: “Has never been proven to exist.”

I step away from every intra-dissident esoteric battle about which inaccurate version of the spectral “scientific” paradigm is more wrong than the other. I step away because I believe it to be a fundamental misreading of both what is upon us and what is called for. What is called for is all contained in the works of a living hero of mine, Marshall Rosenberg, who teaches around the world on the principles of “NVC,” which stands for non-violent communication. If there is a human being whose work could dismantle this vast, dense “misunderstanding,” which is at root, what it is, it would be Rosenberg. In his radical peace work, he gets at the essence of violence on our planet, which resides in our language. The very way we address one another, steeped in what he calls “jackal.”

The language of jackal seeks to dominate, conquer, separate, abuse, and accuse. On the other hand, the true language, the one buried in the steel and concrete of this dying age, which Rosenberg calls “giraffe,” is one composed of only two things: Feelings and needs.

“Any evaluation of others that implies wrongness is a tragic, suicidal expression of an unmet need. Say the need,” Rosenberg says.

He quotes Krishnamurti: “To observe without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence.”

I do think “they” were erroneous, destructive, domineering, and dangerous. Yes. And yet, if I had it to do over, instead of focusing my thoughts and intentions on exposing and laying bare the “bad guys,” I would have focused on increasing the peace in myself that would make it possible for me to convey a sense of safety and love to those trapped, as I myself always have been, inside a cloud of co-created victimhood.

I am not here to save anybody.

We are free. But this is very hard to discover.

It may be that our highest purpose in life is actually “joy,” as it accords others their greatest freedom as well, when we transcend the need to dominate, coerce, or conquer. Happy people don’t need to do any of that.

Love, which contains no accusation, is the sustaining force of life. And that too is scientifically demonstrable. “Love,” the sun, and chlorofyll, all vibrate at the same frequency, which is 528 hz. (Unless that isn’t actually true, and how could I ever know?)

The opposite of love (again, the comprehensive word for the life force, the good)—is it really apathy? I think it’s accusation.

Evil is accusation. Can accusation not be evil?

No. Redress can be not evil, but accusation is always evil. Its frequency is pure destruction, disharmonious with nature.

HIV-AIDS is a miserably complex cacophony inside a typhoon powered by upward of $400 billion—but the Alpha and Omega of it, its dominant and inescapable frequency, is accusation. You can’t overcome the spirit of accusation with more accusation, or even blue-ribbon correction.

The way out, then, is to leave the cult of fear—uproot it at all levels, until we are genuinely interested in peace, and disinterested in being right, or validated by sick systems.

The Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky wrote a line in his last film, “The Sacrifice,” which for me is the most accurate summation of evil I have ever heard. One character asks another:

“What is evil?”

There is a pause, then the stunning response comes:

 

“Everything that is not necessary.”

 

 

 

–Celia Farber

New York, March 2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Believe O.J. Committed The Murders And I Also Loved Him (And What A High Dose Of Prozac Had To Do With It)

Posted on June 12, 2014

As FX ends its series “The People Vs. O.J. Simpson,” tonight, The Truth Barrier brings you some narrative that is a bit different.

This is the real story–a more real story– for those who care to know it, and understand it on a level beyond the media’s cartoonish renditions.

 

The teller of the story is Mike Gilbert, O.J.’s marketing agent for many years.

I got to know Mike Gilbert first when he spoke to me on the record for a 1998 story I published in Esquire, Whistling In The Dark, which made international headlines due largely to OJ’s cryptic quote: “Let’s say I killed her. If I killed her, it would have to have been because I loved her very much, right?” In 2000, I wrote another cover story about O.J. for Rolling StoneO.J. Inc. Once again, Mike Gilbert was an invaluable voice and source, In 2008, this material that we collaborated on, telling Mike’s whole story at last, was published.

 

Those who know what it means will be interested to learn that O.J. was on a high dose of Prozac at the time of the murders and had been acting consistent with an SSRI disassociation.

You can buy the book on Amazon, if this stirs your interest.

–Celia Farber

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Mike Gilbert

 

 

(From the book How I Helped OJ Get Away With Murder (Regnery, 2008) written by Celia Farber, story by Mike Gilbert)

 

 

 

Prologue

How I Helped OJ Simpson Get Away With Murder

By Mike Gilbert

 

 

 

“Man must not disclaim his brotherhood with even the guiltiest.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

 

I am not interested in anybody’s forgiveness, but I do want to tell the real story.  I want you to know what happened, why it happened, and how it happened. I want you to see us as real people, no matter how you may judge us by the end of this book.

Before O.J. Simpson killed his ex-wife and her friend on the night of June 12, 1994, we were all people you might have liked. We worked hard, kept our business affairs straight, kept discretions (in personal matters), and watched each other’s backs. There were four of us in the innermost O.J. circle: Me, Skip Taft, Cathy Randa, and Al Cowlings—the agent, the lawyer, the personal assistant, and the best friend. None of us talk anymore. During the trial we were inseparable, but the pain and stress dissolved our bonds and now there’s just a resigned silence. Our relationships wound up snuffed out by everything we could not discuss, thoughts we could not voice.

We’re not evil, stupid, or crazy, any of us. We could see the evidence. We knew O.J., we knew Nicole, we knew their dynamics, we saw the evidence, and in our hearts we knew the truth.

But there are deeper truths we also knew, that none of the rest of you knew. It doesn’t change the bottom line: He did it. Of that I am 100% certain. Maybe if we start there, you can relax a little, and not feel that anybody is trying to tell you two plus two does not equal four, that O.J. is innocent. Then maybe we can wind the film back to the beginning, and get it right this time.

It’s been 14 years since Nicole and Ron were murdered. It’s been like living on the deck of a sinking ship caught in a typhoon. The storm never lets up, it’s never over. You think you can move on but you can’t, because you’re tied to this thing, and you can’t get off. The reason nobody can get off is because the ghost of the story is still stalking us.

O.J. came as close as he will ever come to confessing last year, in his bizarre tell-all If I Did It. But he couldn’t go through with it. I see this book partly as an answer to his book—a way to finish what he started.  I hope to relieve people not only of the cost of this book but of their own unresolved curiosity. Maybe that will assuage the public rage against O.J., which I also think is excessive and fairly sick. Maybe that rage will now, like a flipped searchlight, turn on me instead. But at least I will tell the truth. I can afford to. It won’t destroy me.

Ironically, before the murders, we knew O.J. to be many things; one of the best things about him was that he never lied, not to us. Now we have all been cast out into a world where truth is virtually impossible. How could we ever tell you the truth? We all live in fear of the whole truth being told, because once the story is told, everybody’s ghosts start to come out.

Let me put it this way:  We are all guilty of something. I’ll start with myself—I am guilty of a whole lot.

But you have to take the whole journey with me, not just tune in when the saga began for the rest of the country, on June 13, 1994, on every TV screen in the country. We’re going to go back to the beginning, and I’ll show you exactly where I took my first wrong steps and I’ll try to explain how and why.

 

 

It wasn’t until two years ago that I finally broke ties with O.J altogether and told him never to call me again. I always said, and this shocks people, that I could forgive him the murders—I really could. Why? Because it was the worst night of his life. Because everything that night happened in the blink of an eye, and it’s that blink that nobody can comprehend—not even O.J. How can we judge him, finally, if we don’t know what happened in the fateful, dreadful blink of a moment? I tried not to, all these years. But I do judge him, now, based on everything that happened after that—the choices he has made since that terrible night.

After he got out of jail, I expected him to make amends, to be grateful for his life, to devote himself to his kids and to the people who had loved him so much over the years they even helped him get free, like I did, or just helped him, period. But he never returned the favor to any of us. He was never concerned about any of us. He just expected us to go down with the ship, except somehow he was always the only one with a life preserver.

He’s O.J.

Nothing is ever his fault, ever.

He’s also one of the most charming human beings you’d ever meet in this life. He smiles and makes you think you can fly.  During the golden years, when I first met him and became his marketing agent, in 1989, up until the murders in 1994, he gave me a great life, and a great status I never had before. I have a lot to thank him for. After the murders, it never crossed my mind to abandon him, even though I knew in my heart right away that he had done it. But we all told ourselves we didn’t “know.”

Over the years, I was not unlike a battered wife, who kept vowing to leave him but never could.  As he sank deeper and deeper into depravity, lies, drugs, sex, orgies, and various financial scams, I knew he was reeling from the loss of what mattered to him more than anything. He did love Nicole, very much, but what he was most protective of in this life was his image. His image was the most important thing in the world to him—that was told to me the day I went to work for him. And as the gods would have it, he went from being adored by millions to being possibly the most reviled American in public life.

If you’re too young to remember O.J. before 1994, you probably can’t imagine what a hero he was to millions of  Americans. Even if you were alive back then, you probably find it very hard now to remember just how beloved O.J. was. He was white America’s favorite black man, non-threatening, charming– a black athlete and superstar  who had succeeded the “proper” way, who had made it on his own merits and skills (in sports and entertainment, the two major tracks for black success at the time), who was willing even to goof on himself. At a time when many white Americans felt threatened by black males – threatened with violence, or just with racial guilt – O.J. was a very comforting presence.

Then he became, literally overnight, white America’s most hated and reviled man. Was he reviled as a man or was he reviled as a black man? Both, I think.

Overnight became the completely opposite symbol for white America to what he had been: the rampaging black male who had sex with and murdered a white woman. Even if we’re not conscious of it, this is one of the oldest and most potent symbols in American race relations, and it triggers more terror and rage in white Americans, both male and female, than probably any other. I really think that helps explain the absolutely psychotic tsunami of rage and hatred the O.J. case unleashed. He was everybody’s ideal of the “good” black male, and then he was everybody’s ideal of the evil one. I think white Americans felt massively betrayed by O. J., and that’s a big part of why white America and black America reacted so differently to his acquittal.

I don’t think he can pull himself out of this death spin he’s in. Think about it. Everywhere he goes, everyone he sees, he sees reflected in their eyes, whether they say it or not, the charge:  Murderer. It’s there in every single moment of his life, with every person he meets, even when nobody says it, and even when people assure him they think he is “innocent.” It’s still there, it’s just the flip side of it. It’s still his entire identity, and it has eclipsed everything he ever was before June 12, 1994.

I wouldn’t have thought this was true, but I have come to realize that the worst possible punishment for a man is not to be given a chance to atone for his sins. I was amazed to discover, just recently, that O.J. was acquitted on Yom Kippur, the Jewish high holy day of atonement. There was one country on earth at least, where the verdict was not televised, because all electronics were shut off, and that country was Israel.

Atonement of sin is partly a necessary act—not just a merciful one– because otherwise the guilty are re-tried and re-hanged every single day of their lives. But how could we forgive him for a crime he would not admit he committed? Instead we all became trapped in a Dante-esque limbo, year in and year out, trying, and failing, to find a place on earth that was not tainted by it, where the truth didn’t reach. In the void comprised of O.J.’s denial, an industry sprang up that would give us all a chance to find our right price, to choose how exactly we would compromise ourselves. We all had something to sell, some piece of the story, some piece of the lie, or some piece of the truth.  Even O.J. would become a participant in the end. By the time he had landed at the last station of his slow downfall, in Florida, living a squalid, decadent life of sex, drugs, booze, and nightclubs, he even persuaded his girlfriend, Christy Prody, to stage a threesome with him, and sell the story to a tabloid, so they could split the money.

This entire saga is an extended act of role-playing, masking, posturing, and selling to a voracious media beast that can never get enough. What I hope is different about this book is that it contains first hand experiences, and I have not altered them to make myself appear better than I am.

As the years wore on, I was one of the people who stayed with O.J, and it was not purely emotional or personal—it was business.  We continued doing the business we’d done before the murders– primarily the business of sports memorabilia, of signing items and selling them—all the way up until my final break with him, two years ago. His signature was still valuable on the market, in a whole new and macabre way. I never lied to him, never told him I didn’t think he did it. Over time, I became more and more disgusted with him, and disgusted with myself, for all the lies I told for him, for everything I did to help him hide, move, and lie about his most valuable possessions, to hide his assets, to launder and shelter his money. I found myself, pretty soon, outside of society, living in a twilight world, where truth was always negotiable, where there was honor among thieves. I’m not exactly a Boy Scout myself, but I draw the line at throwing old friends under the bus, and at making your own kids pay the price for your behavior, every day of their lives. I once screamed at him: “You bastard, I hope you committed this crime because if you didn’t then all of our lives have been ruined for nothing.”

But I know he did it. He told me as much.

 

 

You are wondering why I decided to write this book now, and if it is “all about cashing in.”

Nothing is “all about” anything. I wasn’t ready before. I was still working for O.J. and I was still an apologist for him, and for myself, and all the positions we’d taken over the years, and the decisions we’d made. For me, those decisions were rooted in my enslavement to O.J.’s charm and charisma, and in wanting to turn back, mediate, and negotiate with the elephant in the room: The murders. I was in denial and I was hooked in by choices I made from day one, the day of the blast, June 12.

Now I’m not.

I’m free.

The simple reality is that I have a story that I know you will want to hear and I am telling it. You are free to judge me however you wish.

What follows is my story– not as I dream it, or imagine it, or would like it to be– but as it actually was.  The worst part about it is, I remember every detail.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 1

My Hero, Number 32, O.J. Simpson

People always ask me what I miss the most about the golden years, as agent to one of the most iconic American athletes of all time.  The five star hotels? Flying first class? Being treated like a rock star wherever we went? The women?

All of that was intoxicating, and I enjoyed it more than I would like to admit. But what I miss the most dates back much earlier to when I was a kid, in the 8th grade. That was the last time I can remember feeling truly innocent, just before the leap into real life, when my dream world still governed me. Like every other American kid at that age, I had a hero. It happened to be O.J. Simpson.

I watched his every game, I knew his every move. He was one of four people in the world I dreamed of one day meeting.

I can remember the smell of the black magic marker and the thrill I felt as I carefully drew the number “32” on the back of my white T shirt from Sears, stretched against the linoleum kitchen table. Those of you who remember O.J. from before all this know that 32 was his number. I wore that T shirt constantly in our local football games, hollering: “I’m O.J. Simpson!” There was nobody on earth I admired more, or wanted to be more. We played football constantly in my neighborhood of Hollister, California, until long after dark most days,  every weekend, every holiday, every chance we got. We drove our mothers crazy—we just wouldn’t come home.  Actually, I didn’t have my mother around to battle with, but I drove my stepmother crazy enough.

My mother had us way too young, and simply couldn’t cope– left all three of us to our father. She left me first, before she left my two sisters. I was three years old when she put me on the front stoop of my grandmother’s house and drove away, assuming my grandmother was home because the curtains were moving. My grandmother was not home; I was found early the next morning in a nearby cornfield, wailing. My grandfather went out there because he thought he heard an injured animal, thought it was a cat or something. But it was me.

Things stabilized after my mother left us. My father remarried, and I became a fairly normal suburban kid.

My mother came to see me once when I was a track star in the 9th grade and somebody told her where I would be competing. My buddy Ray Sanchez said, “Hey Mike, there’s a lady here who looks just like you who claims to be your mother.” I looked up and she was coming right over to us. I stiffened, but I was glad to see her.  We talked for a while, and she asked if she could drive me home, which I agreed to. I wasn’t very nice to her during the ride. She did look a lot like me.

There is so much pain in this life. One way I learned at a young age to conquer it, or at least escape it momentarily, was through sports. Once I discovered football, I was free. I loved everything about it: the  excitement,  the clarity, the suspense, the heroics, the perpetual chance at instant  redemption. At the center of the stage of my imagination was O.J. Simspon, flying, dancing, defying gravity. He was an amazing athlete. He could turn on a dime. He had everything—speed, strength, grace, agility, and a kind of uncanny genius at acceleration. That was his most exceptional gift I think—acceleration.  He could go from standing still to top speed in two steps. He was just faster than everybody else—they couldn’t catch him. He was like a god or half-god out of a Greek saga, who suddenly sprouted wings when he needed to fly. He could stop, turn, go. He could run over you, he could run around you, he could run past you.  He did things on the field that I thought were physically impossible. O.J. could easily have been an Olympic track star—he was that fast. His coach at USC said he was not only the greatest running back, but the best college football player he had ever seen.

In January of 1969, I took USC against Ohio State in the Rose Bowl for twenty-five cents, in a bet with my aunt. O.J. played brilliantly, but USC lost. I was crushed, and paid up the twenty-five cents. Stung, I promised my aunt: “One day I’m going to meet O.J. Simpson and get my twenty-five cents back.”

Sometimes I wonder if God punished me for being so greedy about that quarter. But of course it wasn’t the money—it was the emotion of losing. Thirty years later, when I was his agent and we were sitting on the patio by his pool, I told O.J. that story. I asked him for the quarter. O.J. did have a great sense of humor.

“No,” he said. “Fuck you, Mike. I’m not giving you the money. Twenty-five cents? Fuck no. What the fuck do you want me to do? It wasn’t my fault we lost. That was one of my best games ever.”

In 1992, Skip Taft, O.J.’s business attorney and longtime friend, sent me a Christmas present. It was a check from O.J’s bank account for twenty-five cents. It was itemized as: “Repayment of gambling loss on 1969 Rose Bowl,” and signed by O.J.

I still have it.

 

I have been a sports marketing agent since the late 1980s. I was never one of those agents who only watched the bottom line—I was always emotionally attached, more than average. My childhood experience made me form fierce attachments, and to fear abandonment above all else.

In my heart I identified with the fans; I was a fan. Even when I was moving among the elite, representing the athletes, I still felt my strongest affinity not with the them but with the fans, who represented innocence—who believed in something.

My career as an agent began accidentally, in my sophomore year in high school, in 1971. A bunch of us took a Suburban to the big coliseum at Cal Berkeley to watch a Raiders-Rams pre-season game. We got there at half time. After the game we went over to the locker rooms, hoping for autographs. We saw one of the players—Ben Davisson– and without thinking, I had an inspired idea.

“Uncle Ben!” I  hollered. The security guards stepped away, and we all followed “Uncle Ben” into the locker room. We got a lot of autographs that day.

Soon after that I started to understand and tap into the immense power that athletes have, to do good–raise a lot of money, fast. A friend of my brother’s had been paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident. I called the Raiders office and made arrangements for a few players to come to a fundraiser. They did. Very quickly and simply, we raised several thousand dollars for the family’s medical costs. One of the players even visited him in the hospital, which made him very happy. In that moment, I saw both the power of celebrity and the power of athletes, to do good, to give back. They are given so much because of a God-given ability—because they can run faster or jump higher. Everything is free and easy for them, as it was for O.J.

By the mid-1980s, I was continuing to do work with the Raiders, and my reputation was growing. Before long, I signed my first superstar client– Marcus Allen.

O.J. and Marcus were almost uncannily similar in their career paths. Both running backs, both alums of USC, both won the Heisman in their senior year of college, both were picked in the first round of the NFL draft. Both were expected to make immediate impacts on their NFL teams. Both were later inducted into pro football’s Hall of Fame.

I was Marcus Allen’s marketing manager for ten years. Marcus and I had a great personal and professional relationship. Before I started representing O.J., Marcus was my most famous and lucrative client.  Marcus gave me instant credibility in the industry. For Marcus I handled public appearances, endorsements, and the merchandising of collegiate and NFL memorabilia. This was where my own life began to change, in the late 1980s. Suddenly, I became a member of the elite. No more flying coach, no more Best Westerns, no more Denny’s. Once I was repping Marcus, everything was five star and first class. I had money, I had influence, I had tickets to every game, backstage passes—whatever I wanted.  Before long, I started to buy into this lifestyle, to believe that I “deserved” it, and to resent whenever anything fell short of my expectations. This was also the time, looking back, when all sense of innocence started to become eroded and lost.

Before long part of my job for Marcus included creating smokescreens that allowed him to more easily cheat on his lovely wife, Kathryn. I would leave false messages on his answering machine at his request—asking him to appear in fictional contexts, to give him an alibi and cover for his trysts with other women.

I did it not only for him but for other athletes.  I created alternate worlds for these guys to live in. The loyalty and honesty was to the athlete—not the wife. I didn’t like that part of the job, but I did it, very well. It started to become depressing—like the part in “The Wizard of Oz” where Dorothy looks behind the curtain. I remember I used to tell people, about the world of professional sports—that from the outside it’s sort of what you see when you go to Disneyland. We created an illusion. I wanted people to think that Marcus was this witty, charming, intelligent, sensitive person, because that was the image that  NIKE or Reebok or American Express wanted to portray.  That’s what we do in sports marketing. We create illusions. I want little Jimmy to go to McDonalds, and on the way I want him to be bouncing a basketball with a NIKE logo on it, while wearing a NIKE jogging suit and sneakers, dreaming that he’s his favorite ball player. In sports marketing, we create that dream, that illusion, and then sell it, sell it, sell it.

Pretty soon, I became an illusion myself. I started cheating on my own wife too, even though I loved her more than anything in the world. I started thinking the only thing that mattered was not what I did but whether I got caught doing it.  I started to think I was a hot shot — but I also started to like myself a little less and a little less every day. The less I liked myself, the more I had to prop up the image, to distract myself and others from who and what I had become. I started thinking I was better than and different from “ordinary” people. I moved among the gods, and although I wasn’t one myself, I was still among the elect, and I still felt I deserved royal treatment.

A few years ago I had a dream in which my grandmother, who raised me, who loved me probably more than anybody in the world, placed her hand on my leg and said: “Michael, why are you crying?” I told her I was crying because I was unhappy. She said, “Michael, you are unhappy because you have gotten so far away from who you really are. I know who you really are. You need to return to being that boy I knew and loved. Then you will be happy again.”

I woke up sobbing, and cried for a very long time. That was the turning point, when I decided never to try to get back to the privileged life, the royal, VIP treatment, or any of it.  I decided to write this book, and not worry about how I might come across. Just to tell the story as honestly as possible.

 

 

There were four people in the world I truly idolized and had wanted all my life to meet: Mohammed Ali, Clint Eastwood, Elvis Presley, and O.J. Simpson. To me they embodied perfection in the American male species. Each, in their way, was a hero, an iconoclast, one who defied all expectations and rose above all the forces that threaten to drag us down in this life, make us ordinary, make us blend into the crowd and live and die without distinction. That frightened me more than anything—ordinariness. I worshipped the extraordinary.

I met Mohammed Ali, and Clint Eastwood. I never did meet Elvis. Meeting O.J., though, transcended my wildest dreams.

Here’s how it all began: Marcus Allen, who had been my star client and friend for several years, had said on a few occasions, “I can hook you up with O.J., you know.” Marcus was good friends with O.J., and had been mentored and guided by him professionally. I told him I would be thrilled if he could make the introduction, but I didn’t press the issue.

One night in 1989, late at night, I got a call. It was about 11 p.m. California time.  I wondered: Who would call me at this hour?  I answered the phone and a deep voice said: “This is O.J. Simpson…”

I thought Marcus was playing a joke. “Fuck you, Marcus,” I said. “What the fuck’s going on?”

“No really,” the voice said. “This is O.J. Simpson. Marcus suggested we might do some work together.”

Then I heard Marcus laughing in the background, and I froze. I put on my best professional voice and said, “Mr. Simpson, sir, I apologize. I am very honored to talk to you, and would be happy to discuss the possibility of a professional arrangement.”

O.J was very friendly and charming, said he’d heard I was the best, and he liked to only hire the best people.

We set a date and time, then O.J. put Marcus back on the phone. The plan was I would meet O.J. and his assistant Cathy Randa at his office near Brentwood in one week.  I was still very star struck, and quite nervous. As the time approached, Cathy Randa called me and said O.J. wanted me to meet him at the house instead, at Rockingham. I got directions.

“One thing, Mike,” she said before we signed off. “He is very, very protective of his image. You have to be extremely careful. He can’t stand letting people down, so you mustn’t ever book him for anything if there is even the slightest chance he won’t be able to make it. Everything has to be checked and double checked. His image is everything to him.”

“Understood,” I said.

Cathy had been with him forever, and was extremely devoted to him. Sometimes it seemed she was even more protective of his image than he was. In Kathy’s eyes, the world revolved around protecting O.J. Back in the early days, that wasn’t very hard. He was a god on earth and America adored him. He was solid gold in the industry. He was the first black American athlete to score a national commercial, with Hertz car rental. That was because of all the things his image carried: He was an icon, a great athlete, and one of the great personalities of all time. He was all-American, almost post-racial– people trusted him. O.J. represented, ironically, an America that had gotten past its shameful racial history, a place where everything was going to be okay, where nothing traumatic was going to happen. He picked up more and more endorsements in the years leading up to the murders—he was very sought-after, as an icon, as a motivational speaker, a  a network NFL commentator, even an actor. [Preceding graph maybe repetition]

We were all riding high on a flying carpet and that carpet was O.J. Everything he touched turned to gold, everybody loved him, everybody wanted him. He was one of those athletes that represented something that was much more than the sum of his achievements. He was the god of flight. That’s what people wanted from him. That’s why all those people lined the 405 as the white Bronco passed with those signs that said, “Go Juice!” O.J. remarked in his book that his thought when he saw those people with the signs was: When did they have time to make those signs?

Being a fan myself, it didn’t surprise me at all.

I saw it wherever we went. People wanted to touch him, shake his hand; they felt he had some kind of magic to impart, and it was all about speed, flight, and hope.

He had, after all, transcended some pretty tough odds. He’d grown up in a rough neighborhood, Portrero Hill in San Francisco, run in street gangs, gone to jail briefly as a teen, and been raised by a single mother—Eunice– after his father left her for a man.

O.J. didn’t talk about his father much, but when he did it was fairly affectionate actually. O.J. was very respectful of his elders, no matter what—especially his beloved mother. His father had done something unusual for that era—he not only came out as gay, he left the family, then stayed in the neighborhood, living an openly gay lifestyle, living with a man, and eventually getting pulled into the San Francisco bathhouse scene. There are theories that O.J.’s notorious rage was rooted in some Freudian reaction to his father’s homosexuality, but if so, you’d never have known. Then again, there were so many things O.J. kept hidden.

The most astonishing fact of O.J.’s childhood is that he had rickets—a disease of malnutrition that his mother always blamed herself for. It left him with skinny, bowlegged legs, which Eunice built homemade braces for, successfully straightening them out. He had to walk around as a child, for hours every day, in shoes that were welded together with an iron bar—if that isn’t symbolic I don’t know what is. He came from an environment of very strong, church-going and disciplinary women—his mother and his aunts. I think he developed into a fusion personality, both depending upon and raging against women’s power. The greatest terror was to be abandoned. I see this in myself as well, in the way I am with women. Sometimes I am not sure if I am talking about him, or me, or all men, or the place where all men have something in common.

Everybody adored Eunice. She was a wonderful woman and I remember her vividly—hr warmth, charisma, humor, and church-going groundedness.

People have pointed out that O.J. was actually something of a mama’s boy—he was very sensitive as a child and Eunice, who had not welcomed her third pregnancy so shortly after her previous two children, compensated for her guilt by lavishing attention on him. It was Eunice who pushed O.J. out of the ghetto and into a life of sports.  She talked the baseball coach at a local high school into giving him a scholarship, but he lost it when he failed to show up for a crucial practice. O.J.’s original dream was actually to be a major league catcher.

Fate steered him onto the path of another sport instead, football.

Here is how Sheila Weller, in Raging Heart, describes O.J.’s discovery of his own talent. He was standing near a vacant lot, watching some other young people shooting off some guns.

 

“I had to get through that lot…I stood there and figured I was gonna run this way, then that way, then the other way—to get my ass through those bullets. I saw the course. I saw myself doing it before it happened. That was it, man: visualization.”

 

When I think back on this whole saga through the prism of race, class—all the things we refuse to talk about in America– I see a pretty astonishing picture. A black sports hero literally came running into white America through a blaze of bullets. That’s how he learned how to run like that—that’s how he became “O.J.” This talent for flight was the premise of his Hertz commercials—O.J. dashing, hurtling, and even flying through an airport, with that cute little old lady—remember her?—yelling “Go O.J. go!”

Nicole once said, “He’ll kill me one day and get away with it. He’ll O.J his way through it.” She very brilliantly used O.J. as a verb.

They even made a commercial in the early 90s—for an 800 collect calling company– featuring Eunice hurtling over her rose bushes to get to a phone when O.J. called. It was very funny—we loved it. I remember the contract too. Eunice got $50,000 to shoot the commercial, and O.J. got $100,000 just to agree not to make a competing commercial that year. That was probably the best contract I ever negotiated for him—he was thrilled. He got paid 100 grand just to not do something he wasn’t going to do anyway, and it put money in his mother’s pocket.

But back to his youth. O.J. was not a thug or even a particularly tough guy. He had a lot of femininity in him, you might say. He was in equal parts disciplined and indulged. He had been relentlessly teased about his father’s homosexuality, as well as about the size of his large head, his crooked legs, and the thing he hated most—his name. Orenthal was a name given to him by one of his aunts who mistook it for the name of a famous French actor. He turned it into “O.J.” (because his middle name is James,) and never looked back.

[More repetition?]

Even beyond his athletic genius, I think O.J. was feeding us fantasies at a deeply subconscious level, like the dream of a post-racial America, where everything is forgiven and redeemed. Or rather, we were conjuring this ourselves, through him. By the time I started watching him play and started idolizing him, like so many millions of white American sports fans, his background had been burnished off and he was simply “O.J.”

Sheila Weller dug up some pretty amazing tidbits, though, that are a powerful reminder of how openly racist the world of sports still was when O.J. came up, in the late 1960s, and became a USC star. She quotes a profile of O.J. in SC’s daily Trojan that kind of takes your breath away when you read it, and shatters the often quoted fallacy that O.J. “wasn’t really black.”

The newspaper wrote of the young athlete: “His environment shows through in his grammatical inconsistencies in his deep rumbling speech, but he absorbs and understands as well as any man.”

Holy cow.

O.J. himself didn’t dwell on racism much, it’s true. Or rather, not before the murders, he didn’t. He was very strict about people never uttering the “n” word around him, but he himself made constant jokes about race, especially with Nicole. One story that came out in one of the books was that O.J. used to walk in to the bathroom when any white (male) houseguest was taking a shower and yell: ‘Hey Nicole, get in here and get a good look at what a white man’s penis looks like!”

Everything in our world was lighthearted, jovial, fast-paced. We were on top of the world. We weren’t standing around trying to be perfect citizens. Now it’s as though everything any of us ever said or did—especially O.J.– is a piece of the mosaic that culminated with and around the murders. But the murders were an alien event, something totally other, shocking, irreconcilable and un-knowable.  We could not then and can not today reconcile that crime with the O.J. Simpson we knew before.

[line]

 

O.J. was a proud American. He flew the flag in his back yard. I’m not sure how he voted, but if I had to guess, I’d guess Republican. He was not a radical of any kind, didn’t like politics, was fearful of the hippie culture in the 60s, and didn’t like what he called “marginal” figures—people who dabbled in drugs or crime, or people who “made excuses.” This was one of the clashing points at the end his marriage to Nicole—he was furious that she allowed people who he felt were dingy, drug-dabbling characters, especially Faye Resnick and her crowd, to be around her, and especially around the kids. [repetition?]

People speculate, probably correctly, that much of this rage stemmed from the fact that his father abandoned the family, lived an openly gay lifestyle, and eventually got roped into the gay bathouse culture and the drugs that came with it, to die of an AIDS-related cancer.

In a 1976 Playboy interview, O.J. described his childhood with characteristic romanticism: “To me, Portrero Hill was America The Beautiful, and I think most people who lived there felt the same way. At World Series time everybody would crowd around a radio and listen to the games, and when the national anthem was played, the whole room would stand up. Everybody—mothers, fathers, kids—would be on their feet.”

To me, one of the tragedies of the whole O. J. saga – I mean besides the central tragedy of the murders – is that America lost this O.J., and O.J. lost that America. A lot of Americans felt he betrayed them, and so they betrayed him back.

 

 

As I said before, you probably can’t imagine today that O.J. was so loved and admired, but it was still true in 1994, in the months before the murders brought it all crashing down. That whole year had been a great one for us—we were on top of the world. I had secured many new and lucrative contracts for both O.J. and Marcus. We were attending World Series games, NBA playoff games, Super Bowls, parties everywhere. O.J. was a broadcaster for NBC sports, was on the board of directors for Swiss Army, was doing countless gigs as a representative of Hertz rental car, and had started filming the Naked Gun movies. He did the coin toss at the 1993 Super Bowl in Pasadena.

Even Presidents wanted his attention, wanted to meet him. Just weeks before the murders, in the spring of 1994, one of President Clinton’s security people came over to O.J. at the Riviera and asked if he wanted to play golf with the President the next day.

O.J., in genuine confusion, replied, “The president of what?”

“The President of the United States.”

“Oh! That President. Sure.”

So the next day, sure enough, they played golf. I was disgusted when O.J. told me this, because I despise the Clintons. O.J. and I argued about it a bit. He said, “Mike, if you met him you’d like him.”

“No I wouldn’t.”

“Mike,” O. J. said, “no matter who is in the White House, it’s always good if they’re your friend.”

I remember him telling me that he’d made a putt that impressed Clinton, and that O.J. had cracked, “That’s why they call me the Juice.” Then Clinton made a putt and said, “That’s why they call me the Prez.”

O.J. told me that Clinton had waxed enthusiastic about Anna Nicole Smith, who had a small part in Naked Gun. He had drawled, “I saw her and I said…there goes the White House.” O.J. was much less enthusiastic about Ms. Smith, but I don’t want to quote what he said about her.

Also around this time, spring of 1994, I had been negotiating to have Ronald Reagan, who was a big sports fan, sign 1000 baseballs. His representatives were interested in this, and also said that President Reagan wanted to meet O.J. We worked very hard on scheduling a lunch, with the three of us, but O.J.’s Naked Gun shooting schedule made it impossible.

I was very disappointed. Ronald Reagan was my favorite President.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

June 13, 1994: The Call

 

 

 

It was shaping up to be a perfect weekend. My two star clients, O.J. and Marcus Allen, were both taking off on trips that weekend, all their contracts were in good shape, and I was finally taking a real vacation.

I am an experienced rock climber, and my favorite place on earth is Yosemite. It’s where I go to find solace and peace, but it’s also something a little more complicated. My sister says I used to climb very deftly, in order not to fall, but that now, after all that happened, I seem to do the opposite. I think she’s right. I’m a coward, I guess. But often I have thought, one single wrongly-placed foot and I could fall into a place where nobody has a name, or a face, or a history—where nobody ever heard of O.J. Simpson, and where all of us are as loved and connected as we were when our souls entered time and space.

It was my weekend with my kids from my first marriage, and my son David said he wanted to come with me to Yosemite, while my daughter Chrissy decided to stay home with my wife, Debbie, her stepmother. The weather was balmy and warm that time of summer, early June. Our lives were pretty great. Money was good, business was good, everybody was healthy.  The only thing that was clouding my mind at all was the problem with O.J.—the thing Skip and I had discussed.

 

The last time I spoke to O.J. was the day before we left for Yosemite, June 10th. His voice and diction were bizarrely altered. He  sounded so strange, so dark, I thought somebody was pretending to be him on the phone. Imagine playing on a record player an album that has melted in the sun and become warped. O.J. had first sounded like that to me on June 3nd, when I called him from the Hyatt Hotel in Kansas City to ask why the hell he hadn’t signed and returned a $100,000 endorsement contract. That, first of all, was totally unlike him. In business, he was stellar and 100% dependable. He always told me never to book him on anything if there was even a remote chance he couldn’t make it. Now all of a sudden he wouldn’t answer his phone and ignored a barrage of pleas from me to sign the thing and fax it back before we lost the deal. When I finally got him on the phone, he sounded like a slowed-down audiotape version of himself. His voice was so dark and deep, his intonation so strange and foreign, I actually didn’t think it was him. Everything about him was different—everything.

I wondered in passing whether he might have had a stroke. Either that or he was on something.

I was very worried, and also like I said, literally unsure if this voice on the phone was really O.J.

I asked him what year he won the Heisman.

He answered groggily,  “1968.”

“And what year did you run 2003 yards?”

“1973.”

I hung up and called Skip Taft, O.J.’s business attorney, mentor, and guiding light since two decades.

“Skip,” I said, “what’s wrong with him?”

Skip sighed, in the sloping, gentle-father manner he had when things got rough, and I remember verbatim what he said: “Mike, Nicole has O.J. so fucked up, he doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going.”

I was silent.

“OK.” I said.

Skip asked me to fax the contract to him, and said he would take it over to O.J.’s house, at Rockingham, have him sign it, and fax it back to me, which he later did.

“Thanks buddy,” I said. “Love ya. I’ll talk to you when I get back from Yosemite.”

I said the same thing to OJ, breezily, the day before we left, when I told him I would not be reachable for a few days, and wished him luck in Chicago, on the Hertz golf outing. “If you need anything, call the house,” I told him. “I’ll be checking in every few days.”

We’d all been witnessing things deteriorate between O.J. and Nicole, for about a year before the murders. It got worse and worse, and reached an all time low point starting on Mother’s Day, 1994. That was when things really spun out.

In the nine months weeks leading up to the murders, O.J. and Nicole were in that very brittle phase couples can get into in which they have broken their bond, but not accepted it. They were trying to have it both ways, both if them—being together and not being together.  In the months leading up to the murders, things got steadily more complicated and freighted. Nicole had rather actively been trying to get back together with OJ  for some time, calling him constantly, and springing surprise visits on him at out of town at events, which was not good because he had other women around, always. It fell upon me and Kathy Randa to make sure we could clear the runways in time for Nicole’s surprise arrivals.

O.J. liked it when  Nicole was chasing him, though he sometimes felt oppressed by it. Sometimes I remember Nicole would call, O.J. would put her on hold, and just leave her there, then not answer when she called back. Nicole, for her part, had not reacted well to being put out of the castle—Rockingham—where she was queen. In her condo, lavish though it was, she lost status,  she was just another rich California divorcee–no longer the wife of an icon. She was pushing hard to move back into Rockingham and really make it work again. O.J. basically shunned her. The simple truth is, he was enjoying all his other women, and he also liked keeping Nicole dangling, so long as the roles remained the way they always had been. Nicole was a spitfire—had a real temper. She was nice after one drink, quiet after two, after three drinks she became very mean and by her fourth drink she was raving lunatic. She was not a good drunk. When the two of them would start to fight, the squirrels and rabbits would dive into the deepest holes in the ground and stay there. It was not fun to be around.

I was with O.J. on October 25, 1993, the day of the now famous 911 call that Nicole made, pleading for cops to come save her from O.J. who had virtually broken down the door. I remember it for several reasons: Number one, it was my wedding anniversary, number two, I have never ever experienced O.J. in a mood that foul, not even when he was in jail. O.J. was filming one of the scenes in the Naked Gun movie in the Shrine auditorium in L.A., and I’d driven down to get some footballs signed and work on some business affairs in between scenes, in his downtime. I had my son Luke with me. Normally O.J. was incredibly charming, charismatic, high energy, but on this occasion he was just in a horrible, very foul mood. I finally said, “O.J. what’s the matter?”

He said: “It’s just more Nicole…bullshit.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Oh it’s just more of her fucking bullshit. I’m just fucking tired of it.

He always said, afterwards, that his mood that day was perfectly normal, but that is a total lie.

I remember looking at my watch and saying, “It’s my anniversary O.J. If I don’t get to the restaurant in time for dinner, I’ll have another ex wife.”

I remember he said, “Well that’s the last mother fucking thing you want is another ex wife.”

He wound up going over to Nicole’s house on Gretna Green that night, and that was the night of the 911 call.  Something obviously set him off, beyond the by then 6 month old news that he’d found Nicole giving oral sex to  bartender named Keith Slowowitz in her living room, with the kids asleep upstairs, when he came over to spy on her. At the time, O.J. told me he had rung the doorbell and left, just to let them know he’d been there.

I don’t know what it was that enraged him that day, or that night, October 25th, 1993.  I talked to him the next day. He told me what had happened—that Nicole had “wound up” calling 911—and immediately started justifying it. He said they were just “talking,” and that he was urging her to be careful how, when and with whom she “fooled around.”  He felt that Keith Slowowitz–  a bartender she had dated on and off– was beneath her, and he didn’t want people like him around the kids.

Nicole had retorted: “O.J., I don’t want you stopping by here uninvited. You have no reason to come here uninvited, ever.”  She was basically telling him he was a stalker. And she was right.

I remember O.J. trying to sell me on a convoluted scenario involving his foot being in the door when she was trying to close it. “I didn’t break the door down. Mike, she was trying to close the door on my foot.” I remember in that moment when he was telling me I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe a word he was saying and he was starting to exhaust me, from the energy it took just to play along. It was starting to become a very simple pattern:  Everybody else is wrong, always. O.J is never wrong. Never.

The  911 story wound up in The National Enquirer, and according to Faye Resnick, O.J. called Nicole when she was on her way to the airport with Faye to go on a trip, and said: ‘Get a copy of the National Enquirer at the airport. In it was an account of not only the 911 call, but also of O.J. and Nicole’s attempted marital reconciliation. It was so detailed, O.J. was certain it must have been leaked by somebody in Nicole’s inner circle.

O.J. did love Nicole very deeply, but he was also very angry at her for the way he felt she treated him.  He felt that without him she would have been just another uneducated girl, a waitress, and that because of him, she lived a millionaire’s life. He felt she was disrespectful, despite the fact that everything she had was because of him.  I never liked her, and I am not going to pretend I did because she was murdered. I wish she were alive.           The avalanche started with a few pebbles: Everything that could go wrong in the weeks and days leading up to the murders, did go wrong.

Everything.

Emotionally, what was going on with O.J. was that Nicole had rejected him in a very final and for him, humiliating way. She had communicated: ‘I don’t need you. Get lost.” This happened as a final result of his rejection of her, when, in the months and weeks before her death, she tried to persuade him to let her move back into Rockingham. He rebuffed her, and finally she said, well the hell with it then. That was when she really started showing O.J. in no uncertain terms that she did not want or need anything from him. She repeatedly told him this. But the simple truth remained that she did need him, if nothing else, for financial support. Everything she had, he had bought—the house, the Ferrari, the breast implants. In fact, I remember O.J. telling me how much Nicole had changed, for the worse, after she got breast implants. He said she was never the same after that.

In the last weeks of her life, she had done a complete about face, and stopped doing the same dance steps that the two of them were somehow accustomed to.  She just pushed him straight away from her, as though she was truly truly finished with him.  Her new friend Faye Resnick encouraged her in this direction. Faye was telling her: “You don’t need him,” and encouraging Nicole to come out and party and develop a new life with new friends, which she did.

O.J. and Nicole had been fighting for seventeen years at that point. They had divorced in 1992, but as various books—including O.J.’s—have described, they still had a stormy, addictive, passionate relationship that kept them bound to one another, through countless brawls, splits, reconciliations, and even serious beatings resulting in the now infamous 911 calls. They knew how to push each other’s buttons and they knew when and how to stop.  O.J. would kick down a door, bash Nicole’s car, “get into a tussle” with her as he put it—that is, hit her.

I am as guilty as we all are of looking the other way when it should have been obvious that O.J. was abusing Nicole. Did we now know or did we not want to know, or both?

In Nicole’s diary, she describes a return from a Disney On Ice event when she was pregnant with Justin in 1988. We see a very different O.J. than the one who “loved Nicole” and was himself a victim of domestic abuse. Nicole wrote:

 

We went to the show and when we got back he was still gone. When he and A.C. [Al Cowlings, O.J.’s friend and driver] got back A.C. seemed strange, like he was waiting for something to happen, that they might have discussed. He kissed Mama, Mini, but not me, which is weird for A.C. O.J. was drunk. Mama and Mini felt something too. They started to leave and O.J. started saying things about not being invited. No room for him. I said that he made excuses all week. Well, he followed Mini and Mama out the door rattling 100 miles per hour about what a liar I am. He never stopped. He followed Sydney and I around the house “Please, don’t yell and scream in front of Sydney.” So A.C. grabbed her. And I tried to get away from her so she wouldn’t have to hear it. He never let up. You’re a fat pig. You’re disgusting. (I’m two months pregnant.) You’re a slob. I want you out of my fucking house. Then I took Sydney to bed, tried to anyway. And he proceeded to cut me down with A.C. in the entry downstairs. I tried to tape the conversation but the recorder didn’t work. He was saying all those things again so that I could hear every word as he was telling A.C. My wife’s a fat ass, a liar. I stopped fucking other girls and now I jack off the fat ass.

 

He locked me out of our room and I buzzed him. Get out of my fucking house you fat ass liar. He opened the door and started off on me again. I want you to have an abortion with the baby. So I packed a few things together. He locked the door again. I buzzed. Do I really have to go tonight. Sydney is sleeping. It’s late.

Let me tell you how serious I am. I have a gun in my hand right now. Get the fuck out of here. I got real scared and grabbed Sydney and the cats and a bag for her and a bottle and a pair of sweats from the laundry room for me and got the heck out of the house.

 

When this was read to A.C. when he was being deposed in O.J.’s 1996/97 civil trial, he claimed to have no memory of the event. It must have been devastating for A.C. to hear Nicole’s words. Her torture and conflict are reflected so clearly in everything she wrote–the combination of submission and strength, of trying to get close and trying to get through to O.J., to make him hear her.

Maybe Al was just suppressing the memory. We all did a lot of suppressing. I myself have much more sympathy for Nicole now, especially now that I myself in some sense have completed the entire path of O.J.’s charisma and managed to break the spell. If you’d asked me if Nicole was a battered wife prior to the murders, I’d have said no. There was the one incident, the 911 call in October of ’93, but O.J. spun that his way, and although we didn’t believe him, the incident was soon forgotten. Just like Nicole’s friends and family, we were blinded by the fact that she herself seemed so in love with O.J. and was always back in his arms no matter what. It was a combination of a traditional marriage and a modern one. O.J. was a domineering authoritarian, a controlling patriarch, a sounding board, friend, and quasi-ex-husband. Nicole both wanted to be free of O.J. and begged him to put her back in her cage. Neither of them could make up their minds.

Each of them had their allies and confidantes, and I was of course strictly on O.J.’s “side.” When he asked me if I thought he should get back together with Nicole, I always said, “No way.” I didn’t think it would ever be different, and I was exhausted myself, seeing O.J. always so strung out, angry, and unpredictable. Every day it was something else. If Nicole pissed him off, he took it out on us—on whoever was working with him that day. But he had two distinct faces—charming, public O.J. and crabby, enraged O.J.

They had other lovers and separate lives, and they continued to weigh down their already frayed bond with transgressions and confessions. I am not going to attempt to de-thread this dynamic, because I think O.J. has given his side of the story and, through friends who spoke over the years on the record, we got Nicole’s side too.

There is no disagreement on any side about the simple, essential facts: They had a very powerful love and bond, and they were obsessed with each other.  They both tried to be by turns married, a family, separated, independent, single, free, diffident, relaxed, jealous, predatory, or whatever. They just shifted in and out of all this in a kind of incoherent dance only they understood. Everybody else they got involved with became a mere accessory, a way for them to hurt the other.

With each new lover, they were just feeding their addiction to the one thing that was the core of their lives—the other. They switched roles on and off—who was most angry, jealous, thwarted, or solicitous. It is true that Nicole worked very hard at persuading O.J. to take her back and let her and the kids move back into Rockingham the year leading up to her death, and it is true that O.J. rebuffed her. He enjoyed being free to date other women, and he also enjoyed, to an extent, watching Nicole crawl, when she did. When she stopped chasing him, he absolutely hated it.

We all had to listen to O.J. bitch about Nicole, ad nauseum. We had to help him dodge her calls and her surprise visits, we had to help him keep his other women away from Nicole’s notice and keep her away from them. It was very stressful for everybody, because they both would go from one set of emotions to the opposite at the flick of a switch. They were both ragers, and they could also both suddenly turn to ice.

Deep down, Nicole always loved and adored O.J. no matter what was going on between them, and he absolutely felt the same about her. But at the very end, he started to become so icy toward her that it slowly generated a new feeling in her: contempt.

I witnessed this personally. He would hang up on her, leave her on hold when she called, not call her back for days on end. Nicole—who was hellbent on reconciling at this point in time– was just made more and more desperate by this rejection, and she started acting “crazy” and “bitchy.” It was during this time that she would show up at Rockingham and start slapping his staff, or making bizarre demands.

She was hanging out with her new gang of friends, with Faye Resnick at the center, and Faye was also O.J.’s confidant. Faye would field calls from the two of them, often at the same time, clicking back and forth, and God only knows what advice that woman gave out. She probably lied to both of them. We know she was more or less in love with Nicole, from her breathless recounting, in her book, of a kiss they once shared on a bed.  My impression was that Faye influenced Nicole to make a real, final, unequivocal break from O.J. When she finally did, just days before her murder, it was because she herself had begun to truly dislike and disdain him.

Why? Because he crossed a new line of cruelty. Nicole was falsely claiming a tax break by telling the IRS she lived at Rockingham and was renting out the Bundy condo. O.J. had one of his lawyers send her a letter threatening to turn her in to the IRS. That was when Nicole truly, once and for all, decided she was “done” with O.J. That was why she didn’t invite him to sit with the family at Sydney’s dance recital, or to join the family for dinner at Mezzaluna later that night. He had already been indifferent to the kids, and to her, on the numerous occasions when she turned up at the house crying and begging to be let in. But this was spite taken to a whole new level, and she simply shut down.

Nicole wrote her in her diary:

 

O.J. came to pick up kids at 8:30 p.m. This is June 3,1994. They wanted to stay home because I let them organize sleepovers at last minute. Thought daddy wasn’t coming. Told O.J. I’d drop them off first thing in the morning. He said okay. Then “you hung up on me last night. You’re gonna pay for this bitch. You’re holding money from the IRS. You’re going to jail you fucking cunt. You think you can do any fricking thing you want. You’ve got it coming. I’ve already talked to my lawyers about this bitch. They’ll get you for tax evasion bitch. I’ll see to it. You’re not gonna have a fucking dime,” et cetera. This was all being said as Sydney’s girlfriend Allegra was being dropped off. They may have already walked into the house. I’m not sure if they had heard all or any of it. I just turned around and walked away.

 

The perfect storm was brewing, and it didn’t take long. It was a rogue tornado that one could even argue took shape on that very day—on June 12.

Nicole, with Faye’s counseling, had planned very carefully how she would shun O.J. at Sydney’s middle school dance recital that afternoon. It was partly in retaliation for his cruelty to her and his increasing disregard for the kids. He had previously failed to show up for Sydney’s confirmation reception. Also, Nicole was furious about the IRS letter.

So Nicole, and by extension her family, cut O.J. off cold, even refusing to let him sit near them at the recital. He had to sit behind them. Then, when the family went out to dinner at the restaurant Mezzaluna afterward, O.J. was explicitly not invited.

If you knew how enmeshed all these people were, you’d understand how extreme that was. Something was clearly marked on June 12: Nicole was finished with O.J. and showing him that she “didn’t need” him. Kato Kaelin later testified that O.J. came home from the recital really angry about it. It had started a fire in his mind. He always ranted about how his money paid for everything Nicole had, so this was a sore spot, and her independence could only ever be a kind of pretend action. She was not independent and couldn’t be. She had never worked a day in her life. O.J. felt like he owned her, and her family.

So there she was treating him with a level of distance and even disdain he’d never seen before – and wearing a very short, tight dress, in his mind provoking him and taunting him. None of his friends were around to talk him down, and he just went into a very bad tailspin. The dance was over.

A little past 9:30, Nicole’s mother Juditha called Mezzaluna because she’d left her glasses there. Ron Goldman, a Mezzaluna employee, arranged to drop them off at Nicole’s. Some time between 10 and 11 p.m., somebody went into Nicole’s house and killed them both. At about 11:15, O.J. climbed into an airport limousine, and at 11:45 his flight left for Chicago. He would never come up with much of an alibi for where he was and what he was doing during the crucial period that the murders occurred.

I believe there was one more fatal element to that night: Nicole had been having an on-again off-again affair with Marcus Allen. Marcus Allen, O.J.’s good friend and protégé. Marcus Allen, my friend and client. I did not know this at the time. I know this because Marcus himself told me so, not long after the murders. So did O.J. I’ll describe those conversations in more detail later.

According to Faye Resnick, despite O.J.’s threat that he would kill Nicole if she started seeing Marcus again, she did. Her friends told her this was like signing her own death warrant. They were horrified to find Marcus’ car in her driveway on some days, right out in the open, when O.J. could drive past. They were very afraid of this affair, of her seeming nonchalance about it, and believed it could get her killed. Marcus, after all, was not only one of O.J.’s best friends, you could say he was a younger version of O.J. He never expressed rage toward Marcus directly—that part is true—but he was definitely enraged about it.

Faye Resnick said that when she spoke to Nicole on June 12, she was on “cloud nine” because of Marcus, whom she was in love with, and who she said was the second love of her life after O.J. Faye concluded that Nicole “…had seen Marcus that day, or she was going to see him. I knew how she got when she was going to be with him.”

Marcus Allen is the one person who has managed to miraculously stay out of this entire mess, and I also think it was he who caused it. I have always thought that, even though Marcus flew to the Cayman Islands late on the night of June 12 with his wife Kathryn, he was with Nicole either that day or earlier that night. At her house. And O.J. saw them together.

I believe that if it weren’t for Marcus Allen, June 12, 1994, would have come and gone like any other summer night, and that Nicole and Ron would still be alive.

 

 

When I spoke to O.J. on June 10th, the day before we left for Yosemite, I told him I would not be reachable for a few days, and wished him luck in Chicago, on the Hertz golf outing.

“If you need anything, call the house,” I told him. “I’ll be checking in every few days.”

[line]

 

On June 11, David and I climbed the Royal Arches—a fairly short climb. The next day, June 12, we woke early and hiked to the top of Yosemite falls, looking out over Lost Arrow Spire. That was my Moby Dick—the one climb I had never done. I had been scheduled to do it 10 years previously, but my then-wife, Gerilyn, told me she had a dream that if I climbed it I would die, so I never did. On this crisp, perfectly still morning, David said, “Dad, let’s do it.”

“Okay, let’s,” I said right away.  I decided to hire a guide, and we set off down to the bottom of Yosemite Falls to use the payphone and call home to tell them what our plans were. I got the answering machine at the house and started leaving a message for my wife Debbie. She picked up the phone, and cut me off.

“Mike,” she said, “Nicole’s been murdered and O.J. is in handcuffs. You need to get to Rockingham.”

After a brief silence, I said, “So he finally did it.”

Debbie shut off the answering machine.

“God. What did you say? How could you say such a thing? Why would you think that?”

Everything was already filmy, nauseating, unreal, like after a car crash.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know why I said that.”

I tried to steady my mind. I remembered that O.J. was scheduled to fly to Chicago the night before, and I clung to that. I immediately started looking for reasons to believe he didn’t do it. David was in shock, pale and quiet.

“David, we got to go.”

We packed up our stuff and hightailed it out of there. I must have been driving 100 mph on the straightaway stretches. We had no radio or phone reception for a good hour, until we got to a town called Oakhurst. I turned on the radio and the story was everywhere. I started making calls on my cellphone. This being 1994, my cellphone was the size of a small suitcase. But it worked.  I called all of O.J.’s numbers, not expecting to reach him but wanting to get a message through to him. I called everybody.

When I finally walked in the front door to my home in Hanford, Debbie was in front of the TV and the story was on every single channel. There was O.J. with his hands cuffed behind his back, leaning under a branch overhanging Sydney’s playhouse at Rockingham. I was totally lost, slightly out of my own body. The phone literally rang off the hook. Friends, business associates, clients—everybody was calling. I finally got to the point where I just answered the phone by saying, “I can’t talk,” click, “I can’t talk,” click, “I can’t talk,” click.

The inner circle, the outer circle, and every possible layer of any O.J. circle that ever existed was calling my house.  People we were doing business with, with whom we had signed various sorts of contracts, were wondering what to expect, whether they would get their money back.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “The guy’s wife’s been murdered and he’s in handcuffs. We have to wait and see. I don’t know any more than you do.”

Then there was the gang—those of us who actually interacted with O.J. on a daily basis. We became like a crisis unit, like a Red Cross tent, trying to act normal in an extremely abnormal situation. All I remember from our conversations back then is that they had that underwater, strange quality, like when you have severe jetlag. Every word you’re hearing and speaking is something foreign to you that you’d never think you’d hear or speak.

One conversation that still stands out in my memory 14 years later was the one I had with Marcus Allen, whom I reached that first day, the 13th. Everything about it was puzzling and peculiar. It didn’t make sense–then.

I called Marcus’ house and got his sister in law on the phone. She said Marcus and his wife Kathryn were in the Cayman Islands, which I knew. They had flown out late the night before.

“Does Marcus know what’s going on?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Tell him I need him to call me.”

Marcus called moments later.

“You know what’s going on?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. He asked me how I was.

“Blown away,” I said. I asked Marcus what I thought was a rhetorical question: “Are you coming back?”

I expected him to say, “Of course, are you crazy?”

Instead he said, “No.”

What? Why?” I asked, absolutely blindsided. “You’re going to the funeral, aren’t you?”

Again he said flatly, “No.”

I couldn’t comprehend anything anymore. Marcus and Kathryn has gotten married in O.J.’s living room. He had been friends with O.J. and Nicole since he was in college.

“Mike, it’s going to be a media zoo,” he explained. “It’s going to be nuts. You shouldn’t go either.”

I remember saying to myself, well, if one of their closest friends isn’t going to the funeral, I certainly don’t have to go. So I let myself off the hook too. To this day, I regret it. I never liked Nicole, and she never liked me, but I should have gone to her funeral.

That the one of my first mistakes. I think the deeper reason I wanted an excuse not to go was that I had started to feel that O.J. did it, and I didn’t know how I would face him or what I would say.

I got off the phone with Marcus and resumed calling O.J.’s house. I finally got an answer—it was Gigi, the housekeeper.

Gigi sounded very nervous. I said to her, “Tell O.J. if there is anything at all that I can do, I’m here. And tell him…I’m sorry.”

The phone kept ringing ceaselessly over the next few days. This was when the whirlwind started to become a typhoon. I was trying to stay under it all, and yet at the same time, on top of it all. I called the house again and told Gigi to tell O.J. that I was going to be at the Hyatt near the airport, standing by with $5,000 cash, or whatever else O.J. might need.

On June 17, the day O.J. was to voluntarily turn himself in to the authorities, I got in my car and started driving toward Los Angeles—a four hour drive. As I got about 100 miles north of L.A., it came on the news that O.J. was wanted by the police and that they were actively searching for him. I thought Jesus, did he kill himself? Is he that spun? I called every number I ever had for him—cell, car, everything. Then suddenly O.J.’s friend and lawyer Bobby Kardashian came on and started reading O.J.’s suicide note. I could not believe anything that was happening was actually happening. I am a staunch atheist but I think I started praying: Please don’t let him throw his life away. We can get through this. What time did his flight leave again? He couldn’t have done this. This will all be straightened out.

I got to the Hyatt, went to my room, and called O.J.’s cell. “O.J. it’s Mike. I’m at the Hyatt hotel and I have $5,000 cash. If you need to reach me call my cell. Whatever you need, I’m here.”

I turned on the TV, and within seconds they broke into the NBA championship game and showed grainy footage of a car chase. The newscaster said: “The vehicle you are seeing contains O.J. Simpson on the 91 Freeway, in flight from police cars who are pursuing him.”

My hotel phone rang. It was the hotel operator. “Mr. Gilbert, there is someone who called for you. They said they don’t know your last name but they have a package for you from UPS.”

That sounded implausible. Nobody knew where I was, and I most definitely wasn’t expecting any package. I told her that if they called back, to put the call through. Seconds later the phone rang again and a voice said: “Mike? You don’t know me. I live near O.J. and I know him from the cellphone store where I work. He and I once had the same cell number by mistake…”

“Yeah, right.  I doubt anybody who lives in Brentwood works in a cellphone store.  How stupid do you think I am? Who are you?”

It was obviously either the cops or the tabloids, picking up every message that went to O.J.’s cell. The guy continued: “Do you expect O.J. to call you back? What did you mean ‘If you need anything?’”

The TV was showing the white Bronco on the 405 now. I hung up, ran out of my room and jumped into my car. I knew O.J. was going home, to Rockingham. As soon as I got onto Sepulveda heading toward the 405 I looked toward the southeast and saw a swarm of helicopters; I knew that was where O.J. was. By the time I merged onto the 405 I was about a mile behind him. I exited on Sunset Boulevard and headed toward Rockingham.

As I got close to the house, the streets were blocked by police barricades. Media everywhere. I parked the car near Cora Fischman’s house and started walking as close as I could get. Another barricade. The cops told me O.J. had not yet surrendered, and that nobody was coming in or out until he had. I showed them every piece of ID I had.

“I’m his manager,” I pleaded. “Let me talk to him. I need to get in there.”

A cop asked how they could be sure I was who they said I was. “Look,” I said, showing them my cellphone. I dialed O.J.’s house, and a police officer answered.

“This is Mike Gilbert ,” I said. “I am O.J.’s manager. I need to talk to him.”

Then all of a sudden I overheard some reporters saying that they had SWAT teams in the trees, because O.J. had a gun. The word was they were going to shoot him.  I wheeled around to the nearest cop and got right up in his face.

“If you fuckers kill him there will be hell to pay. Do you understand? Let me talk to him.” At this point I was panicked. Suddenly O.J. was a black man with a gun surrounded by SWAT teams. I was in a cold sweat, walking in circles, mumbling and praying that he would surrender. That was all I wanted at that point. “Surrender Juicer, goddamit,” I muttered. I used to call him Juicer.

I don’t know if twenty minutes passed, or three hours, but finally, I heard what I wanted to hear– O.J. was in police custody. I felt a radiating wave of relief through my whole body. The police car with O.J. handcuffed in the back seat drove right past us, less than ten feet away. I could see O.J. in there, frozen, looking straight ahead. He looked like a wax figure of himself. The reporters started to walk back toward the main entrance road, like a herd just fed and moving on. I walked back to my car, feeling absolutely physically and emotionally drained. I got into my car and just sat there, relieved that he was in custody — that he was still alive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Three

O.J. In Jail: The Show Must Go On

 

 

O.J. had been in jail for about four days when I received a phone call from Cathy Randa. I was driving back from San Diego, from a meeting with the Ted Williams card company, when I got the call. Cathy said, “Mike, O.J. wants to meet with you. Do you want to go see him?”

“Absolutely.”

Randa explained how to get to the jail, where to park, how to get past the media hordes outside the jail, and who to look for when I got there.

“Nicole will meet you there,” she said.

Nicole?”

“Yes, Nicole Pulvers—from the attorney’s office.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Nicole Pulvers was a paralegal assigned to stay with O.J. at all times and communicate his needs to the rest of the dream team. She was more or less his babysitter.

I drove to the Los Angeles County Jail, walked past the media hordes, into the jailhouse. Nicole found me, and I started going through all the security checks. When they ran my name though the computer, they said I was not approved to go in, as “material witnesses” had not yet been approved. Nicole went in to explain the situation to O.J. and I waited in the lobby.

When she came back a short while later, she had a note for me O.J. had dictated. It said: “Mike, I need you now more than ever. Imagine: O.J. Simpson, L.A. County Jail. My autograph is worth more than anybody alive.”

I looked at Nicole.

“Is this what he wanted you to give me?”

“Yes,” she said. “He dictated it and made sure I wrote it down, word for word.

“Why didn’t he write it himself?” I asked.

“He can’t be given a pencil,” she said.

I stared at the note in shock. For Christ’s sake, I thought, here his wife has been dead less than a week and he’s already thinking about business. I was floored. But I quickly regained my composure and my mind started clicking. O.J.wanted to start signing autographs again, despite the fact that he was in jail—or rather, precisely because he was in jail.

Skip, Cathy and I were divided on it. Cathy  felt very strongly that there should be no business while O.J. was in jail. Skip considered the matter carefully, then told us, “Look, we need to generate money. We are going to do this in good taste.”

Skip Taft, O.J.’s business attorney for over two decades at that time, was and is the most stellar, upright, ethical, and dignified man I have ever known—just a beautiful human being. Whatever Skip said, I trusted. He was like a living incarnation of Atticus Finch—about six foor three, with silver hair.

I remember speaking to Skip two or three days after the murders. We had lunch at our usual place, the Daily Grill. I told Skip that I had been getting a blizzard of calls from all the companies we were doing business with. We discussed how to handle ourselves, businesswise, what to say to people.

Toward the end of the meeting, I finally asked him, “Skip, what do you think is going on? What do you think is happening?”

He looked at me, and said, “Mike, I have known O.J. for 23 years and I have never known him to lie to me. He said he didn’t do it. Until he says otherwise, I will believe him.”

I respected that, then. I still do. But things got a lot more complicated, pretty fast.  Now when I look back on what Skip said that day I feel a nostalgia for that moment in time, when Skip believed in O.J.’s innocence and that meant we could too.

Guilt and innocence always seemed so clear to me before I landed in the middle of this. I am ashamed of much of what I did, but not all of it. The thing I am looking really closely at is loyalty and disloyalty.  I like to think we acted as good friends would. We did for him what you would want a real friend to do for you when you’re down. We didn’t realize how we were losing sight of reality, losing our souls, little by little. Before long we started to lie to ourselves, and believe every word. Each step of the way it was as though we got into deeper, darker parts of a forest we’d gotten lost in, and we did whatever we thought it might take just to get out of there, to get home again. We never really made it. Until that terrible night in June of 1994 we had been living the American Dream. It never occurred to us that it could all be lost in a matter of seconds, in an incomprehensible bloodbath.

A few days later I saw O.J. for the first time. It was ten days after the arrest, the first time the judge allowed him to be seen by anybody other than his defense attorneys. I walked in to see him, and—imagine this—he was shackled. The chains around his waist rattled when he stood up from his chair. That alone just about broke my heart. He was wearing a blue jumpsuit. I remember how defeated he looked. That aura that he always had was gone. He didn’t have the charisma anymore. He was… human.

A glass partition separated him from visitors. We could reach up and pass things over it to him, but we couldn’t touch him, or he us. Couldn’t hug him or shake his hand. Instead we did just like they do in countless prison movies: We’d put our hands up to either side of the glass.

I was afraid to make eye contact with him because I was afraid of what I would see. Because I couldn’t look at him, I looked down at his hands, and I saw the cut on his middle finger, on the knuckle. The finger was swollen and had a very big gash on it. I looked at those hands and I thought, those are the hands that killed two people.

I finally tried to look at his eyes but he couldn’t give eye contact either. I kept searching for words. I couldn’t bring myself to say, “O.J., we know you didn’t do it.” Even then I couldn’t say that. I looked at his hands, his eyes… and you could just see it, that he was guilty. I remember thinking: What happened to you? How could you go so far and not catch yourself? How could you throw it all away? It was so uncomfortable that the twenty minutes’ visiting time seemed like an eternity.

I finally said, “O.J… is there anything at all that I can do?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Get me the fuck out of here.”

A bunch of us saw him that day. Marcus and Kathryn were there, and Cathy Randa of course. And Ron Shipp, a good friend of O.J.’s who wound up testifying for the prosecution. I think he was even the prosecution’s first witness. In our circle, that made him Judas. The first Judas, I should say.

I know what you’re thinking: What about me, now? Am I not also a Judas?

I can’t answer that. Maybe I am. It got to the point where there were no good options, so one by one, we started reaching for the less good options. We were literally damned if we did and damned if we didn’t. We could choose between being damned by the public, by the inner circle, our families, wives, or finally, ourselves. It came down to picking one course–—there was no way not to be damned at all.

Shipp went to the other side because a writer who was working on a book about the Brown family got him to say some things that were not good for O.J. It got back to us and we started to shun him. That was when, I think, the prosecution got him. It was like choosing between freezing water or sharks.

Going to my grave without putting this down on paper has become a less good option than telling it like it was, and risking betrayal. In a catastrophic situation like the one we faced, you start out all huddled together, protecting yourselves as a pack from the onslaught. The pressures are so monumental that people start to crack. The ship starts to take in water, starts to sink. Eventually, your community has been destroyed and it’s every man for himself.

I have a thousand stories of how and when people started “betraying” O.J. I was always very scornful of such people, but now I am one of them. And now I understand why they did it. It is something you are driven to, in an attempt to reconcile horrible things, to return to planet earth from an exile so terrible you can’t imagine it unless you’ve been through it. My now ex-wife Debbie became an alcoholic after our marriage broke apart over all this. Today she has recovered, but I feel that my marriage was one of the casualties of those two murders. Two people were killed that night, but many more people were slowly destroyed. We all died on June 12, 1994. The dream we had been living died. Our hopes died. It was like the sun was snuffed out. We all drifted further and further from society, and from one another. All we experienced was hostility, the perception that we were all a gang of knife-sharpeners. O.J. was the super-pariah, but we were all made into smaller pariahs. The isolation is almost surreal. We felt banished to a hostile planet where everything is lies on the one hand, and on the other hand a rain of arrows from the “enemy” camp.

By protecting O.J., we were protecting ourselves. Or rather, we were trying to protect ourselves—our names, reputations, our standing in the community, and our sense of loyalty. Like I said, in a situation like this, there are no good options, only bad ones. And even worse ones.

 

 

By mid-July, we had decided that we would indeed go back into production and have O.J. sign objects while in jail. We started with cards—the easiest. We went to the Sheriff’s Department and requested permission to sign 5,000 cards for a company called Signature Rookies. The cards featured O.J. in his Buffalo Bills uniform—an action shot.  Skip’s directive that we would only do this in a perfectly tasteful, completely kosher wayrequired a bit of fancy footwork and research. To our knowledge, this hadn’t ever been done before—a prisoner signing autographs in jail. I reminded Skip and Kathy that O.J. had not yet been convicted of any crime. Skip consulted the famous civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz about O.J.’s First Amendment rights. Somehow we secured permission to take the cards to the jail. They prohibited us strictly from letting him add “Los Angeles County Jail” to his signature, but we found a way around that. They gave us permission to have him date the signatures. This increased the cards’ value, because the date showed they were signed by O.J. while he was incarcerated. An O.J. Simpson card signed by O.J. before the murders had a market value of about $25. These went for $250 each. Make of that what you want.

In the beginning, getting the cards signed was a very slow and tortured process. I had to take ten cards at a time, and the pen, and give them to a lieutenant, who would give them to a sergeant, who would give them to the guard, who would give them to O.J. They’d take him out of his cell, hand him the pen, he would sign these ten cards, then give them back the cards and the pen. They would put him back in his cell, and send the signed cards all the way back through the chain of command to the lobby, where I would retrieve them. Then we would start the whole process all over again. We did this for about ten hours every day.

After a few weeks of this, they told us we could send in 100 cards at a time. A funny thing started to happen: I never got 100 cards back. I got 92, or 94–never 100. I counted and re-counted, and it happened each and every time.

I decided I had to talk to O.J. about this. That meant Kathy had to arrange for him to call me collect from the payphone near his cell, to the phone in the lobby.

“O.J.,” I said, “are you by chance keeping any of the cards?”

He got pretty irate. “What the fuck am I going to keep any of these cards for, Mike? Why would you ask me that?”

I explained what was going on. We didn’t know what to do, so as usual, we turned to Dad. Kathy got Skip.

“Skip,” I said, “the guards are lifting some of these cards from us.”

Skip mulled it over. We have a good thing going. It could be that the Sheriff was purposefully having this done so that we’d raise the issue. Then he could say, “I’m not having my guards accused of theft. Bullshit. Shut it down.” They could easily have shut the whole thing down, and in fact, every single day we expected them to.

Skip said, “Mike, let it go. This is just the cost of doing business.”

So we continued. We got back 92, or 94, out of every 100 cards, and we never said a word. O.J. signed a total of about 5,000 cards.

Then we turned to various photographs. Some were photos of O.J. playing at USC, some from his NFL days. We did probably 10,000 of those, maybe more. Then we got more and more ambitious. We had him signing footballs, jersey numbers, posters, lithographs, seragraphs, movie scripts—you name it, he signed it.

We had to be very creative about transporting the goods into the jail. For example, we couldn’t bring in football helmets due to their bulk, and also because the metal facemask would set off the metal detectors. Our solution was to order helmet decals and have him autograph those. Normally a helmet is signed right on the helmet, so these decal-signed helmets are extra-valuable on the memorabilia market, where it is known O. J. signed them in jail.

Footballs are also pretty bulky. We solved that too: Footballs are made of four panels, leather or vinyl. We ordered just the panels from a company called Daden Sports that produced footballs for the Downtown Athletic Club. We brought in briefcases filled with 150 panels at a time.

As for the jerseys, we bought just the numbers, the 3 and the 2, and he signed one or the other. Later we had them sewn onto the jerseys.

We had him sign stuff for the entire duration of his incarceration, clear up to the day of the verdict. We made well over $1 million.

 

 

O.J. remained behind bars from June, 1994, into October, 1995. Eighteen months, while the bizarre spectacle of his trial played out.

O.J. absolutely hated being in jail—hated everything about it. This was somebody who was used to having his food cooked to perfection and staying at the finest hotels in the world, so how would you expect him to feel about it? Once when I was sitting with him in jail I remembered having a meal with him at his house, at Rockingham, and recalled  that he used to refuse to use paper napkins—only cloth, at every meal.

Seeing him in jail tore me apart. I felt very sorry for him. Does it disgust you to hear me express sympathy for him? My sympathy for him doesn’t mean I didn’t also have sympathy for the murder victims, and for the kids, and for the families. The two didn’t cancel each other out. The world isn’t that simple, try as we do to make it be. It’s true that O.J. and I were friends, while Nicole and I were not. But that’s the thing—O.J. was my friend, and long before that he was my idol. I loved him. And I felt sorry for him. Can you understand that?

If I could still feel anything today I would feel even sorrier for him now than I did then. In jail he was at least protected from all the hate. There was an order to our universe. At least we knew what to expect from one minute to the next. Unlike the public, the prison guards treated him very well.  So did his fellow inmates. I actually think O.J. was better off in jail, all things considered. At least in jail he was serving out a small part of the penance, and so the punishment was present as opposed to something that was always at his heels. When he got out of prison, we never knew where or when the next person would hiss “murderer,” or walk out of restaurant, or cancel a contract, or spit at him as he passed by.

In jail, things were predictable and ordered. Because he was in jail, the people around him didn’t feel it necessary to lash out with their own personal punishments. They left him alone.  They accorded him his dignity.

He had a few perks, but was by no means given special treatment. He was allowed to go up and use an exercise bike on the roof, and that was important to him, keeping fit. He lost a lot of weight in jail for the obvious reason that he hated the food.

O.J. was on the same high profile prison ward as Lyle and Erik Menendez,  the brothers who were being tried for the shotgun murders of their parents in their Beverly Hills home. (They would be convicted in 1996.) They sometimes passed us or were in the adjoining visiting room.  On one occasion they got wind of the fact that O.J. was signing stuff and making money, and they had somebody ask me on their behalf whether I could help them do the same.  I said I was sorry but no, I couldn’t.

Once O.J. leaned in and whispered when the Menendez brothers had just walked past.

“Mike, you want to hear a really strange coincidence? A weird story.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, Mr. Menendez, their father, use to work at Hertz when they were kids, and I met them and signed a football for each of them. It was when they were kids, so it was some time in the 1970s. And now here we all are, in prison together, on the same floor. Talk about a small world.”

There was an additional level of macabre coincidence: O.J. told me that one of Nicole’s baby showers, I think it must have been for Sydney, had been held in the house where the Menendez parents were murdered, which at the time was being leased by a friend of O.J.’s.

Sometimes when we were sitting there in jail, with O.J. chained to his chair, under the fluorescent lights, the musty airless smell, the hopeless environment, depressed out of our minds, he would start to tell stories, out of the blue.

Game stories.

He was a phenomenal story teller, and over the years, a few stories had become such classics that it was as if he were a musician and we were asking him to play the same song, over and over. I would look over at Skip and Skip would have tears in his eyes and he would say, “I could hear that story a hundred times, O.J., I still tear up.” When O.J.  would tell the story, we would be transported back, right through those prison walls and back onto the field, with the crowds roaring and the wind on our faces, like we were there. For those minutes, as long as it took O.J. to tell the stories, we were not in jail, we were somewhere else; it sometimes felt like we were inside the huddle.

There was one he liked to tell about a crucial Bills-Jets game at Shea in 1973, the year he became the first running back in history to rush for more than 2000 yards. The Bills had to win tis game or their season was over. The Bills had the ball, the clock was winding down, and the coach was shuttling wide receivers in and out of the huddle, bring the wuarterback plays. This was before they communicated through mics and headsets.

The Bills had this one receiver they called Crackback Jones. There’s a kind of illegal block they call a crackback block. It’s illegal because you can hurt somebody. Anyway, Crackback had a stuttering problem, especially when he was stressed. His only relief for it was to sing what he was trying to say.

The coach sends him into the huddle with a play. The clock is ticking. Crackback is definitely stressed. He’s stuttering, “Buh buh buh buh.” Finally, everybody yells at him, “Just fucking sing it!”

So Crackback starts singing the play, and everyone in the huddle cracks up. They’re still laughing and grinning as they go to the line of scrimmage. The Jets defense is looking at them like, “Are you guys crazy? The clock is winding down, you’ve got to score, and you’re laughing?”

To O.J., the point was that the laughter reminded them that it was a game. They were playing for the fun and the love of the game. And they ended up winning.

Another story was from very early in O.J.’s career, in one of his first USC games. SC Trojans were playing against Notre Dame, at Notre Dame stadium. In the last game of the Trojans vs Fighting Irish, before O.J. had joined the team, the Fighting Irish had left the Trojans out on the field for such a long time, about 15 minutes, in ice cold freezing weather, that were frozen solid by the time the game started. They were demoralized, and just wanted to lose, quickly, and go home to sunny Southern California.

Coach John Mckay said that would never happen again. So now it’s the following year, 1967, O.J.’s rookie year. As the visiting team, USC is expected to hit the field first. That’s how it’s always done.

An official comes to the Trojan locker room and tell Mckay to get his team ready.

“Is Notre Dame out yet?” Mckay says.

The official says, “Home team always comes out last.”

Mckay says, “We’re not coming out until Notre Dame is on the field.”

“Coach, you need to get your team on the field or you forfeit the game,” the official replies.

So Mckay shouts, “Boys, get your uniforms off, we’re going home!”

O.J., the freshman, was dumfounded. He stood there agape. Mckay shouted at him, “Simpson, get your jersey off, we’re going gome!”

The official leaves. O.J. is amazed. The team is actually getting undressed. A moment later, the official comes back in. He says, “Coach, Notre Dame is on the field.”

And Mckay smiles and hollers, “Boys, get your uniforms on. It’s time to go kick some Irish ass!”

They were so beside themselves with excitement by that time, so pumped up, they just went crazy. Mentally, they knew they had already won the game—that they had mentally defeated Notre Dame already, just as Notre Dame had done to them the year before. And sure enough, they won. They just destroyed them. Because they went out of the locker rooms already victorious.

O.J. loved telling that one, and we loved hearing it, even there in jail. Why? Maybe because it was a story about the good old days, the days of youth and glory and victory, before the insanity of 1994.

And maybe because it was about team spirit. Team spirit got harder and harder to maintain in 1994.

For instance, O.J. had mixed feelings about his attorneys—the Dream Team. Headed up by the all-star quartet, the Four Horsemen of the legal profession, Robert Shapiro, Johnnie Cochran, F. Lee Bailey and Alan Dershowitz. His “defensive linemen,” as the Washington Post called them. The finest legal team a wealthy celebrity could buy. The one he was most wary of was Shapiro. He just didn’t trust him. He kept him on the Dream Team after a point because he thought he would leak stuff to the press if he was let go, so he didn’t dare. O.J. did not want Shapiro to be the attorney of record because he knew that black people in Los Angeles harbored a lot of ill will toward Jews. They accused Jews of giving them home loans they couldn’t repay and then seizing their houses. He didn’t want that to be playing in the minds of the black jurors. He simply did not want Shapiro in front of a black jury.

The one lawyer he really wanted to lead the defense team was Johnnie Cochran. To the very end, he loved Johnnie and trusted him. When O.J. was first arrested, Johnnie was busy with Michael Jackson, and O.J. had to wait a bit. “I want Johnnie,” O.J. said, repeatedly. When Cochran finally came on board, O.J. was thrilled. He was careful about making sure Johnnie’s role was secured, and found ways to make sure the others didn’t get resentful or envious. This was a juggling act with some titanic egos, and O.J. understood how the ego and mind of an alpha male worked, being one himself. He made sure they all felt important and took his time navigating Johnnie to the top position, a process he was very apprehensive about.

The two lawyers who wound up truly hating each other by the end of it, ironically, started out as the closest friends: Shapiro and F. Lee Bailey. They had been friends for decades, but tension grew and grew during the trial, and exploded when something was leaked to the press from the defense team and they accused each other. We never did find out who had leaked the information, but the damage was done, the friendship destroyed. They had a big blowup one day, and after that it was total ice and silence. It got very ugly. Shapiro at one point said that he would never work with nor speak with F. Lee Bailey again, and he kept his word.

And then there was Bobby Kardashian. What can I say about Bobby Kardashian that has not been said? He set the original gold standard for O.J. betrayal with his covert, Faustian collaboration with the obese and malodorous  Larry Schiller, author of American Tragedy: The Inside Story Of The Simpson Defense.

Kardashian is perhaps the only person who betrayed O.J. whose conduct was so blatant and unprofessional that he even earned the scorn of the O.J.-haters, even the press, never mind us.  You can see everything in the look on his face when the verdict was read. He wasn’t only shocked, he was miserable. He was counting on a guilty verdict.

And then there were all the rest of us—O.J.’s friends, colleagues, business associates, confidantes, hangers-on, fellow celebrities. It was very complicated, its own cosmology almost, who visited O.J. and how and why and when. Because of the media hordes constantly outside the jail, nobody could visit O.J. without being tarred and feathered as an O.J. apologist, ally, or even accomplice. Visiting him became a political act, virtually.  Some of his old football buddies had their wives threaten divorce if they visited O.J. Being associated with him dealt immediate and serious blows to  people’s reputations, businesses, even marriages. Again I feel compelled to ask: What would you have done?

As the trial progressed and the evidence looked more and more damning against O.J., people started to vanish. One after another they started slowly falling away. Almost everybody from Hollywood disappeared, almost overnight. Marcus Allen only went to visit O.J. one single time, that first day when we all went. Of course, as I said, I believe Marcus’ role in all this was deep and complex. No wonder he stayed away.

Even Al Cowling’s visits were sporadic. A.C. was a long and close friend to O.J., a former Buffalo Bills teammate. He was behind the wheel of the infamous white Bronco on June 17. But neither the prosecution nor the defense wanted A.C. to be a witness in the trial, so it served everybody if he just kept away. The prosecution didn’t want A.C.’s testimony because he’d say that on June 17 he was driving O.J. to Nicole’s grave so O.J. could commit suicide there. They were afraid that this never-told suicide story might make O.J. seem sympathetic to the jury, grief-stricken over Nicole, wanting to shoot himself on her grave. They were determined from day one to depict him as a true monster with no feelings whatsoever.

The reason the Dream Team didn’t want A.C. to testify was obvious and simple: He knew O.J. had committed the murders. How on earth would you chauffer your best friend to his own suicide attempt if not for the fact that yes, he was guilty of the murders?

Let’s review the facts:  A few days after the murders, when O.J. was supposed to turn himself in to the authorities, he had a few people at the house who stayed with him at all times. His sister Shirley and her husband Benny literally did not let him out of their sight the entire time. They took turns leaving the room. Everybody was afraid he would kill himself.

O.J. asked A.C. if they could go for a drive, and they did, in A.C.’s white Ford Bronco. They just wanted to get out of the house, supposedly. The public believes that A.C. was shocked to discover that O.J. had a gun and was suicidal, and that he called the police to get their help in talking O.J. off the ledge. But in fact, AC drove O.J. to Nicole’s grave, explicitly so that he could shoot himself, there, and be reunited with her.

Who told me this?

O.J. did.

During all those endless hours and days when we sat in jail, signing things. He was going to shoot himself in the head, rather than turn himself in. He said he wanted to be with Nicole.

Another thing you have to remember is how important O.J.’s image was to him. He wanted to stop all the sordid details from getting dredged up in a lengthy trial for the world–and above all, for his kids–to see. If he killed himself, he would be a tragic figure, not a hero exactly, but at least the whole matter would have died down.

They’d driven to the cemetery and O.J. had the gun that had been given to him years earlier by an NFL executive named Mike Orenstein. A.C. knew he was guilty. It was a very easy and obvious thing in that circle, and everybody knew it.  Maybe we didn’t say it out loud–we had a kind of internalized taboo mechanism against that–but it was implicit. Would you take your best friend to kill himself if he were innocent?

In his ’96/97 civil trial, O.J. was asked what he was thinking during that ride.

“I felt at peace that I was going to stop feeling the way I was feeling,” he said.

“… And what was the cause of that pain?”

“Losing Nicole.”

What happened was, they got to the cemetery and there were cops everywhere. They couldn’t get in through the front gates. A.C. took O.J. to the back and said goodbye. O.J. went off, leaving A.C. in a fairly excruciating position of having to stand there and wait to hear the gunshot.

Time passed, no gunshot. Finally A.C. went up to him, in agony.

“O.J., Jesus Christ. Are you going to do this or not?”

O.J. retold this story with a hint of black humor.

“Give me a fucking break, man,” he recalled saying. “I’m trying to kill myself over here!”

A.C. just wanted to get it over with. Finally O.J. came back out of the orchard. He had pulled the trigger, he said, and the gun didn’t go off.

“I thought this meant I was not supposed to do it,” he told me.  “I remember what my mother always told me, that suicide is a sin, and if you kill yourself you don’t go to heaven. I’d never see Nicole again.”

So he changed his mind, and told A.C. to take him back to Rockingham, mainly because he thought his mother was there. O.J. adored Eunice, who was a wonderful woman, and she adored him. But Eunice had already left Rockingham and returned to San Francisco, as it turned out.

When A.C. drove O.J. from the cemetery back to Rockingham, he was in contact with the police, and told them he was bringing O.J. home. The famous slow Bronco “chase” on the 405  wasn’t really a chase at all. They were just tailing them, following them, almost like an escort. Shortly after he got home, he was taken into police custody.

That’s the story neither the prosecutors nor O.J.’s team wanted the jury to hear, so A.C. was kept out of the trial.

I have often wondered if O.J. regretted not killing himself that day. Many of us would become suicidal, over time, including myself, from the unrelenting pressures of the trial and the public loathing. If O.J. had killed himself that day, the entire story would have died with him, in the orchard. But that was not his destiny, or ours.

 

 

O.J. suffered losses in jail that nobody knows about. One that really crushed him was what happened to Bobby Chandler. Bobby had played with O.J. at USC and they were very close friends. Bobby was always the pretty boy, the GQ ideal– blond, blue-eyed. He was also a very kind person, and he loved O.J.

Bobby had gotten very severe stomach cramps while watching the Bronco chase on TV, and when we heard that we assumed it was from the stress of seeing O.J. in this situation. But the cramps didn’t stop in the coming days and Bobby went to a doctor. It was stomach cancer. Even after his diagnosis, Bobby kept up his regular visits. They had been golfing buddies, and if you know golfers, for them being on the greens is like being in paradise, or back in your mother’s womb. Bobby would tell O.J. to picture the two of then teeing off at the Riviera.

“One year from now O.J., we’ll be up there having a beer, we’ll watch the sunset over the ocean, and life will be good again.”

But Bobby died in January 1995, just before the trial started. O.J. was crushed by that.

I often wondered what Bobby would have done when the DNA evidence started to come in. You have to understand that people who tried to believe in O.J.’s innocence were not bad people, or stupid people. They were people who knew O.J. before. They were people who knew what he meant when he said, “I couldn’t have done this.”

They did not know what had happened to O.J. the night of June 12, but they knew that whatever it was, it was alien, foreign, something horrific that sprang from hell and seized him, something he couldn’t for once outrun. We all had different beliefs about what the trigger was, what the alien element was. For me, it was the Prozac. Because as soon as he went on it we lost him. He wasn’t O.J. anymore. Everything about him was different—everything. His voice, diction, memory, personality–everything. We knew he was spiraling, we knew he was in trouble, especially in the days right before the murders. I sometimes feel as if the circle of friends understood this, understood that O.J. had been a victim of something outside his control, but that he could never admit it, partially because O.J. doesn’t lose control. He’s O.J., remember? Of all the athletes I have ever worked with or met or known, he would be the last one I would ever imagine committing murder, for many reasons. I already told you his image meant everything to him. He was on top of the world, adored by everybody, and he liked it that way.

I would like somebody, ideally somebody who knows, personally, about the line between killing somebody and not killing somebody, to explain this to me. Why that night was there a bloodbath? Why did he not have any of his normal inhibitions?

As the trial ground on, the friends and well-wishers continued to fall away. The betrayals continued to sting.

We were all pretty good people before June 12. Now we are all damaged goods. Passably decent people who were left with a series of bad choices, and eventually many of us chose all of them. I certainly did. The only person who I can look back and say was stellar, somehow, was Skip Taft. He is the most decent, good, trustworthy person I have ever known in my life. He is like the grandfather we all wish we had. To this day, Skip has not turned his back on O.J., nor has he ever spoken on the record about the trial.

But I remember once when the trial was over, I asked him, “Skip, do you think O.J. would do for us what we just did for him? If the situation were reversed, would he have been there for us?”

“No, Mike,” Skip said. “He loves us but he doesn’t have the ability to love like you and I do. He won’t sacrifice for us.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Four

Smoke and Mirrors

 

 

 

I was by no means a participant in the Dream Team, and I had absolutely no formal legal input, despite the impression created by the title of this book. Did I really help O.J. Simpson “get away with murder?”

Yes and no.

Specifically, what I did was that I became part of the larger organism of support, feedback, financing, and manipulation of public perception that ultimately, in the hands of the best lawyers in the country, resulted in O.J.’s acquittal. But it was the legal team that actually held the ball, naturally. I was a sounding board for O.J. every single day he was in jail, and I started offering ideas and suggestions, some of which he passed along to them.

And over time, by virtue of being around every day, I became inveigled in the defense strategies. I am a very cunning person, and this came in handy throughout the trial. My mind works that way, because all my life I feel I have had to protect myself, and at my core I have deep seated distrust and cynicism. They didn’t call it the “dream team” for nothing. We were masters of illusion and deception. There was nothing we couldn’t spin our way, no witness whose credibility we couldn’t shred.

It’s been said, correctly I think, that this was a matter of necessity. Because, put simply, we didn’t have a case. O.J.’s conviction was the prosecutors’ to lose. They had the motive, the evidence, witnesses, science on their side. We had bupkis. All we could do was poke enough holes in their arguments, sow enough doubt in the jurors’ minds—especially in the minds of the nine black jurors—to weaken their case against us.

Take the blood, for example. Remember the cut I saw on O.J.’s hand? The prosecutors said he cut himself while committing the murders, then left a trail of blood from Nicole’s house to the Bronco to his house. It got on the gate at Nicole’s, on the Bronco, on the infamous glove, on one of his socks that was found in his bedroom. DNA testing—still in its infancy back them–showed both O.J. and Nicole’s blood on that sock, as well as the “blue-black” fibers from the clothes O.J. wore that night. These were also found on Ron’s shirt, and on the glove. This alone should have convicted O.J.

Here is how we manipulated it—shifting the focus of attention, seeding doubt, telling the audience what they were seeing, like any good magician would do.

First of all, we leaked the information about the sock to the press, wanting it to look like the prosecution had leaked it, and we spun it the way we wanted it to fly. The prosecution had video footage from the bedroom, and it does not show a sock on the floor. We stressed that–and omitted the fact that the video was showing a different part of the floor from where the sock actually was. Nonetheless, in the confusion, this seeded the idea that the sock could have been planted by the cops.

Then we kept going: A sock has four sides, like a towel that you fold in half. We made a very big deal out of the fact that three sides of the sock had been soaked through with blood, as opposed to two, which suggested that the cops had poured blood on the socks. We went back to the vial of blood that was collected on O.J. and absolutely assailed the guy who had collected it at Parker Center. We went on and on about how sloppy the evidence processing was, and planted the suggestion that the blood samples were mishandled and contaminated with O.J.’s DNA there. Also, the guy testified that he had taken 8.5 cc’s of O.J.’s blood — but there were only six cc’s. We just took that and ran with it. The defense’s repetition of the question, Where is the missing blood?, created the illusion that there was missing blood. In truth, we knew that somebody drawing blood does not measure it all that exactly. What they thought was 8.5 cc’s could easily be six. What they mean to say is about 8.5 cc’s. Furthermore, the blood could easily have saturated three surfaces of the sock when O.J. took them off.

Now, it should be obvious that if O.J. had nothing to do with the murders, there should never have been any blood at O.J.’s house. And yet it was everywhere—his blood and theirs. How would the cops have known that O.J.’s blood was even at the scene? How could they have planted the sock when he was still in Chicago? It’s absurd.

But then, what made the whole matter fall into such hopeless fog is that there were a few places in the DNA evidence where it did seem possible that blood evidence had been planted. There was no blood on Nicole’s gate, for example, the night of the murders when the first pictures were taken. Three days later there was blood on the gate. It had more of O.J.’s DNA than any other blood they collected, as well as a preservative called EDTA, used in labs. It wasn’t hard for us to suggest that this blood had been brought from the lab and planted there.

When the DNA evidence started coming in, I remember feeling punched in the stomach. It was just so damning. Blood drops near the victims matching O.J.’s. Twelve hairs on the cap found at Nicole’s matching O.J’s. A hair from Nicole, with blood on it, on the Rockingham glove.

And so forth. It just kept coming in, more and more.

It all pointed to O.J.’s guilt.

I decided to go in and sit with O.J, to try to lend him support the day the DNA started to come in. He had a glassy expression on his face, and he spoke to me, suddenly, in what seemed like utter candor, for once.

“You know, Mike,” he said, “it’s weird. I watch this DNA evidence…I believe in this stuff, the science. I believe in this science. I look at all this… and I see it and I think I know I had to have done this.”

He paused, and looked at me with this vacant look. And then he said, “But Mike, if I did it…wouldn’t I remember that I did it?”

He wasn’t saying that for the benefit of the TV cameras or the public. He was saying it to me, in a tone of true confused despair.

I thought to myself: He did it, but he truly doesn’t know he did it.

I thought back to the last time I spoke to O.J. before the murders. His slowed-down, out-of-it, drugged-out voice. I remembered thinking he was “on something.”

Since then, I’d found out what it was: Prozac.

If you’ve ever taken a sleeping pill, like Ambien, you know the feeling: a total blackout, when you truly have no idea where you were or what you did. It’s like a gap in your consciousness, like a piece of a film reel that’s been cut away.

He looked like a kid who had just had a nightmare.

I thought about his description of the Prozac, “some damn drug they put me on that was supposed to make me feel better but only made me worse.” And about what Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, the author of Prozac Backlash, had told me. He’d said that if O.J. committed these murders while on Prozac, he would only remember it like a dream, like something outside of himself, something he saw from above, like an out of body experience.

I looked at him and said, “I don’t know, O.J.”

In his 2007 confessional book If I Did It, O.J., through his ghost writer Pablo Fenvjes, who could not possibly have made this up,said that he found himself that night standing outside Nicole’s house, but “I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there, when I’d arrived, or even why I was there.” Then he realized he was covered in blood, and registered the dead bodies of Nicole and Ron, lying “in giant pools of blood.”

“Where the fuck was I when this shit went down?” he asks himself.

He says it was “like part of my life was missing–like there was some weird gap in my existence.”

I looked into O.J.’s behavior right after the killings, and it is consistent with Prozac withdrawal, which often causes acute suicidality. Another symptom of Prozac withdrawal is profuse sweating. Al Cowlings told a writer that while they were in the Bronco, O.J. was soaked in sweat.

 

His face had turned “golden,” Cowlings recalled. Sweat poured from him. Simpson was so incoherent that [speaking to the cops] he let Cowlings do the talking for him.

 

Now, I know how some people’s eyes roll whenever the “Prozac defense” is raised. But the truth is an incredible number of bizarre and brutal acts of violence in America in recent years seem to connected to the use of or withdrawal from antidepressants. Columbine killer Eric Harris had just been switched from Zoloft to Luvox when he went on his rampage. Steve Kazmierczak was withdrawing from Prozac when he went on his deadly shooting spree at North Illinois University in 2008. Leslie Demeniuk, who shot her four-year-old twin sons in Florida in 2001, was on Zoloft and Paxil. California teenager Jarred Vikto stabbed his grandmother 61 times ten days after being put on Paxil in 1995. Andrea Yates, who drowned all five of her small children in a bathtub in Houston in 2001, had been taking Wellbutrin and Haldol. Julie Rifkin, on Paxil, shot her two sons to death and then herself in Colorado Springs in 2005. The list goes on and on and on.

In 1999, a physician wrote that “virtually all of the gun-related massacres that have made headlines over the past decade have had one thing in common: They were perpetrated by people taking Prozac, Zoloft, Luvox, Paxil or a related antidepressant drug.” The FDA now requires all antidepressants to come with a “black box” label warning about the increased danger of suicide in patients using the drugs. The FDA doesn’t make a move like that without good reason.

I’m not saying that Prozac is an “excuse” for the murders. But I do think it was another piece of the perfect storm. Like I said—everything that could go wrong that night did go wrong.

 

 

And that brings me back to the Marcus Allen factor. To this day I believe Marcus was with Nicole on the day or the evening before the murders. Even if he wasn’t, I believe O.J. thought he was. I know that Marcus was seeing Nicole. And I know O.J. knew it.

I know because they both told me so.

Not long after the murders, Marcus and I went to the Hyatt hotel in Buffalo, NY, where Marcus would be signing autographs. I was in my hotel room when I got a call from a friend.

“Mike, you better turn your radio on,” he said. Faye Resnick’s quicky tell-all book Nicole Brown Simpson had come out that week. “Apparently she says in there that Nicole told her that Marcus’… was like a big piece of driftwood. That size.”

What?

“And this radio station is holding a contest. Whoever brings in the biggest piece of driftwood wins, then they’re going to burn it.”

I was sickened and outraged. I knew the station—it was the one licensed to broadcast the Buffalo Bills’ home games. I called one of the top executives in the Bills organization and told him what “their” station was doing. I said it was disrespectful to Nicole, to Marcus, and to O.J., the greatest player in the Bills’ history.

My friend had also said that the tabloids picked up the story. I went down to the hotel gift shop and sure enough, there on the newsrack were the tabloids with Marcus’ photo and articles about Resnick’s book. I grabbed every copy on the rack.

“You got any more behind the counter?” I asked the clerk.

“No sir,” he said. My anger was obviously making him nervous.

I bought every copy and brought them back up to my room. I didn’t want people coming into the hotel for Marcus’ autograph session to see them.

Marcus came to my room and we held the autograph session. He looked over and saw this big stack of tabloids.

“Mike, what is that?”

He picked one up and skimmed the story.

“You know it wasn’t like that, right, Mike?”

“Wasn’t like what?”
“It wasn’t like what’s in here.”

“You didn’t have an affair with Nicole?”

“No.”

“So you never had sex with Nicole?”

“No, we never made love.”

I stared at him. I didn’t like the evasiveness of his answer.

“So,” I said carefully, “you never had sex with Nicole?”

“Well…” He hesitated. “We had oral sex, but we never made love.”

“Oh, well that’s okay,” I said sarcastically. I was shocked. This was the love of his best friend’s life we were talking about. They didn’t make love. They just had oral sex!

“Mike, I went over, just trying to stay in touch with her, so she knew we were

still her friends even though she was divorced from O.J. One thing led to another…I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

I was just really taken aback. Until that day, I’d had no idea it was true. All I knew was that prior to Resnick’s book, Marcus denied having sex with Nicole. Not long after the murders, prosecutor Christopher Darden had asked him, “Did you ever have a sexual relationship with Nicole?”

Marcus said, “No.”

That was a lie, and he was under oath. He could have been prosecuted. There was no turning back after that. I believe that when Marcus denied the relationship to Darden, he thought it would die right there. And without Resnick’s book, it might have.

We went down to lunch. Now that I knew, Marcus seemed eager to talk about it, to explain it to me.

“It’s just amazing how quickly life can turn on you,” he sighed. “Everything was just great for all of us not long ago. I was at the top of my career, things were going great for O.J. Now look at us. Nicole’s been murdered. O.J.’s in jail. A.C. may be thrown in jail. I’m on the cover of a tabloid. Look at all of us.”

At this time, I had no idea that O.J. knew. As soon as I got back to L.A., I went to the jail to see him.

“O.J., I need to tell you something.” And I told him what Marcus told me.

I expected him to be flabbergasted, but instead he just said, “So he admitted it?”

“He said he said they had oral sex and stuff like that,” I stammered, “but didn’t make love.”

“What do you mean stuff like that?” he growled.

I said, “I don’t know, O.J. I was kind of shocked. I didn’t press him for details.”

“You need to talk to Johnnie,” he said. “We need Marcus to come forward and admit this in court.”

“Why?”

“Because the prosecution will try to make it look like I was so jealous I killed Nicole  over Marcus. He needs to testify that I have been cool about it.”

O.J. said Nicole had tearfully confessed to him that she’d been seeing his best friend. He said she also asked him to ask Marcus to back off her. Marcus was treating her like any girl from the road, and she was very upset about it.

According to O.J., he called Marcus and said, “Marcus, Nicole told me everything. You got to stop calling her. Just be cool.”

“O.J., what are you talking about?”

“Nicole told me everything.”

“Nothing happened,” Marcus insisted.

A few days later, O.J. said, “Marcus comes over and he’s crying. ‘I’m so sorry, man, one thing led to another…I’m sorry…’ I said, ‘Marcus, listen, Nicole and I are separated. What I’m disappointed in is that you never told me any of the things Nicole was saying to you about how she wanted to get back together with me.'”

Now O.J. wanted me to persuade Marcus to come clean.

“Mike, you got to go to Kansas City and talk to your boy. This isn’t about Marcus getting into the fucking hall of fame. I didn’t tell Marcus to fucking fuck my ex-wife. This is about me possibly never getting out of jail or never seeing my kids again.”

I was in a horrible position. Marcus was the guy I always thought would put my kids through college if I suddenly died in a car wreck. He was that kind of person in my life. O.J. wasn’t. O.J. was my idol, but he wasn’t that kind of friend. Now he was pressuring me very hard to do something I didn’t want to do. They were both my clients, but I was closer to Marcus. I loved Marcus. His was the one friendship I lost in all this that I treasured and missed the most.

But I flew to Kansas City to talk to Marcus. We met at the Crown Plaza Hotel.

He said, “I’m not going to testify. You’re going to have to tell O.J. that if I testify I’m going to have to be honest and tell the whole thing. If they ask me if I ever saw O.J. stalk Nicole, I would have to say yes. I would have to tell them that I was with him when he pulled the car over and peered into a restaurant window when we saw her car.”

He looked at me and said, “Mike, just because he didn’t get pissed off at me about this doesn’t mean he didn’t kill her.”

That was true. Marcus was in a hell of a position, as was I. It was like a Gordian knot.

I remember this with 100 per cent clarity saying to Marcus, “If this is the truth, and this is why you don’t want to testify, I accept it. Then don’t testify.”

I went back and told O.J. what Marcus had said.

“He would have to be honest, O.J.”

“That’s what I want, for him to be fucking honest.”

Haltingly, I told him what Marcus said about the stalking.

“When the fuck did Marcus Allen see me stalk fucking Nicole?” O.J. exploded.

“O.J., don’t get pissed at me. I went to Kansas City to talk to Marcus because you asked me to, and this is what he said.”

“Then fucking let him tell about the stalking. I need him to testify.”

I suggested that O.J. talk to Marcus directly. I orchestrated the call to be routed through Kathy Randa in jail.

After they spoke, both of them called me. O.J. was livid.

“I said, ‘Marcus, you got to come clean.’ He starts playing stupid. ‘What do you mean come clean, O.J.?’ I said, ‘About your affair with Nicole, Marcus.’ He said, ‘I can’t do it,  because it never happened.’ I said, ‘Who the fuck is there with you? Is Kathyrn there? Your lawyer? Marcus, we both know it happened.’”

When I spoke to Marcus, he said, “O.J. wants  me to lie for him and say I had an affair.”

“Marcus you told me you had the affair.”

He said nothing.

That was when I lost respect for him. And that was the last time that O.J. and Marcus ever spoke.

I never understood why it blew up like that. My relationship with both of them was very strained after that. I wasn’t happy with Marcus, because I felt the bigger issue was to just be honest about the affair. But I also understand Marcus’ point that it doesn’t mean O.J. didn’t kill Nicole. And I also understand why O.J. was so furious after that phone call. I also absolutely believe Marcus that the stalking incident happened.

So their friendship was destroyed. My friendship with Marcus eroded fast. I still repped him for a few years after that, but it bothered me. I understand that he was locked in by what he told Christopher Darden. He believed that O.J. killed Nicole. He told me once: “O.J. couldn’t look at me in jail. Couldn’t look me in the eyes.”

They finally hauled Marcus in and deposed him, in the civil trial, when all of us finally got deposed. He still denied the affair, under oath. He must have something to hide that is even more serious than the fact of this affair:

 

Q. Did you ever have a romantic relationship with Nicole?

A. No, I did not.

Q. Did Nicole and you, for example, ever kiss one another romantically?

A. No, I did not.

Q. So, no kind of sexual or romantic involvement did you ever have with her?

A. None whatsoever.

Q. Did she ever express to you romantic feelings that she had for you?

A. No, she did not.

Q. And did you ever express such feelings to her?

A. No, I did not.

Q. Your relationship with Nicole was purely one of friendship and nothing more?

A. Yes, it was.

Q. Did you make that clear to Mr. Simpson?

A. Yes. I think he understood that.

 

Marcus described how he and O.J. had been closed friends since 1978. Then:

 

Q: Now, you have indicated to me that your relationship with Mr. Simpson is different now than it was for all these years, true?

A: Yes, it is.

Q: And it changed when?

A: Well, the — I think one phone call I think he wanted me to write a letter in opposition to an article that I think Time magazine had written, and I didn’t do that. And I think secondly he also wanted me to testify to a conversation that we allegedly had — well, excuse me, a conversation that we had in reference to my admitting to him or something of that — you know, the fact about a relationship with his ex-wife, and the conversation, it wasn’t true. The relationship didn’t happen. And, so, I think he got upset with me, and obviously I felt — really — I felt really sort of — I was in a tough position, and I think thereby the conversation never took place again. I am sure he was disappointed, and I was sort of disappointed too, that I couldn’t help him as a friend, but I couldn’t go there and say these things because they didn’t take place.

 

 

The trial dragged on, and the Dream Team spun and spun, dodged and weaved. With no good case of our own we did evertyhing we could to ridicule and punch holes in the prosecution’s. We had to plant as much doubt and mistrust as we could in the jurors’ minds.

Take Mark Fuhrman. Our strategy was, as you know, to go after him at every chance. He was the pinnacle figure, the cop who had been in charge of collecting the evidence. Fortunately for us, we unearthed evidence of racist writings and utterances he’d made (“First thing — anything out of a nigger’s mouth for the first five or six sentences if a fucking lie.”), and we got him to perjure himself. We also made a very big deal out of the fact that Fuhrman jumped the fence at Rockingham, even though we understood perfectly well why he did it. He had two murder victims, and blood leading to O.J’s house, and O.J. was absent, so of course he jumped the fence. What if O.J. himself was in peril? In fact, I think they even tried calling the house but there was no answer.

But the highest point of drama in the entire trial, of course, was the day O.J. tried on the bloody glove that had been found at Rockingham, to see if it fit his hand. Here was where I had my best, and worst, idea of the entire trial. Let me wind back a little bit first, and tell you about these gloves.

O.J. was a professional athlete, and he had very large hands. This was one of the things I remember when I first met him and shook his hand, was how small my hand felt in his, like he was shaking hands with a second grader. When I saw pictures of the gloves during the trial, I am fairly sure I recognized them as a pair of gloves I had actually worn myself, when I was with O.J in Buffalo that preceding football season. We had gone there for a Buffalo Bills game, where O.J. was going to be broadcasting for NBC. It was a cold day, and O.J. was wearing gloves and an overcoat. I remember I was standing under a goalpost, and O.J. handed me his coat and gloves, because he had to put his Buffalo Bills jersey on over his shirt, so he could run out on the field for a re-enactment of the legendary 1973 Shea stadium game when O.J. broke the 2000 yard barrier. As he ran onto the field, I put the gloves on, admiring their quality and how warm they were. I looked at them on my hands—they were way too big—and thought, “Wow, there are really nice.”

Cut to O.J. and me sitting in the jail, a few days before he was going to be asked to try on the gloves in front of the jury. O.J. brought it up, and was perturbed.

“I don’t want to put them on Mike,” he said. That was understandable. They had Nicole’s blood all over them, and had been worn by her killer when she was murdered. I was pretty tough on him that day.

“O.J.,” I said, “the jury is going to be watching you every move, your every flinch, everything about your demeanor when you try on those gloves. They’re going to want to see how you react. If I were a juror, I would be thinking, ‘How would I be feeling if I was innocent of the murders, and had to try on the gloves that killed my beloved ex-wife?'”

There had been wax models made, and all kinds of measurings, and various experts called in about what this glove testimony would mean. Both sides were risking something, and both sides both wanted him to put it on, and didn’t want him to.

O.J. sat quietly, taking this all in. “I don’t want to put it on,” was all he said. Then something just fell into my mind.

I said, “O.J., why don’t you just not take your arthritis medicine the day before?”

“What? Why?” he said.

“What happens when you don’t take your arthritis medicine?”

“My hands hurt like hell.”

“What else happens?”

“They swell up…”

“Exactly.”

I could see the penny dropping when I looked at his face. There had been a few times when we were traveling together when he forgot his arthritis medicine and his hands, especially his knuckles, would just get huge from swelling.

I knew that if he did what I said the glove would not fit. We did not discuss it any further. I  am not even sure he ever told his attorneys about this—I don’t think they knew.

When he tried on the glove in the courtroom, with the whole world watching, he said, “It doesn’t fit,” and made that facial expression of gee-wiz, one of the iconic moments of the trial, the moment everybody remembers. And Cochran, of course, being a genius, came up with “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

And they did.

So yes, in that sense I guess I did help O.J. “get away with murder.”

Of course, the prosecution helped. The prosecution was ridiculously incompetent. The jury did not state that O.J. was either “innocent” or that they felt he was “not guilty” of the murders. What the verdict reflected was that the prosecution did not prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The Dream Team created and maniuplated that doubt, especially in the minds of the black jurors. We manipulated the suggestion that the cops had tampered with the evidence. We played up the fact that Furhman had in fact been recorded on tape expressing disdain—whether for theatrical purposes or not—toward “niggers.” As soon as we found the Fuhrman tapes, we knew it was over. Well, we all but knew. In his closing arguments, Johnnie compared Fuhrman to Hitler and made it sound like the jurors weren’t there to decide a murder trial but to help clean up the racist and corrupt Los Angeles Police Department. And the jurors sat there rivetted. It was like O.J. wasn’t even on trial. The LAPD was.

We—and again, when I say “we” I don’t mean to imply that I was part of the Dream Team, but part of the larger team that helped out—did something I was very familiar with: We created illusions. The glove scene is the perfect example. There was no illusion we could not create for our audience. And maybe like any mesmerized audience, part of them wanted to be fooled. The truth is always harder work, and more painful. We all create illusions in order to survive. We just don’t all do it on this scale.

 

 

Sitting there with O.J. every day in jail as we signed memorabilia, I got to hear a perspective that was, by sheer accident, the rarest one: I got to hear O.J.’s  feedback.

He would come in to the room each day after trial, and I would have either sat through the court proceedings or followed it in the media, and then we’d talk about it as we sat there signing. He would sometimes watch portions of the trial himself, on the TV in one of the prison hallways, but he was not permitted to select the channel. Only the guards could do that.

He constantly narrated his retorts, answers and defenses to the various testimonies. He would rant and rave about how biased the media reports against him were—and he was right, they were. He always said that when anything went his way they downplayed it, but if it was a bad day for him it was banner headline news. By the time the verdict was read, the media had created such a bonfire of sentiment against O.J. that it quite literally was like a rampaging beast that was set loose upon the land. Once it was set loose, nobody could control it. It had a life of its own. O.J. and his crime and the evidence of his guilt were at the center of it, but it was so much more than that. It had picked up the dormant emotions of this nation’s entire racial history. The verdict became a proxy for unresolved racism, a place where it could attach itself and where it could be expressed. The “racism” did not reside in any one person stating the obvious, “O.J. did it.” Rather, the racism was expressed in the depth and intensity of how personally people took that fact, how personally they took the murders, and how personally they took the matter of showing O.J. how much they hated him.

The thing O.J.  thanked me for when it was over was continuing to work as his marketing agent, continuing to sign objects throughout, that we sold to help finance the costly defense. I could have done what many business associated of O.J.’s did—I could have quit, abandoned him, as soon as the evidence convinced me of his guilt.

Why didn’t I?

We were living in a parallel universe. Inside our bubble, it was as if we could torture the evidence until reality itself was altered. If we closed the windows tight enough, if we filled our minds with myopic interpretations of blood drops and possible scenarios of malfeasance, we could keep the truth monster outside the house. For a little while longer, O.J. could still be the hero he was to me when I was in the 8th grade, pretending to be him. If we could create doubt in the minds of the jurors, we could create doubt in our own minds, and in that space where doubt was created, we could breathe, we could survive.

It was only years later, after the trial was long over, that I started to come apart at the seams. I told you I never like Nicole, and she never liked me. But she paid me a visit more than once in my dreams, when her ghost appeared, standing right over me, just looking at me. I started to try to tell her I was sorry but could not form any words or sounds. I woke up in a cold sweat.

I know I created that apparition out of my own guilt-wracked mind. It was as if I was merging into O.J after all, like I dreamed of doing when I was a kid. Except I am much weaker than he is. O.J. was always able to block things out. That’s what made him the athlete he was. The Greek definition of tragedy is not when terrible things happen, but an internal measure of what is felt about those things that happen. O.J. knew how to outrun the pain in life. He’s running still.

 

 

 

Chapter Five

 

Verdict and Homecoming

The trial had wrapped, and it was time for the jury to deliberate. We assumed the jurors would deliberate for at least two to three weeks, and were planning our lives accordingly. The day they began deliberating, October 2nd ,1995, I was sitting in O.J.’s old office down the hall from Skip’s office, making arrangements to meet a contact of mine near the jail and pick up some photographs to be signed by O.J. that day.  All of a sudden Skip’s assistant Judy came running down the hall crying out, “They have a verdict!”

I came out of my office and Skip came out if his, and we were both motionless, staring at Judy. This made no sense.  O.J’s jury had only been deliberating for 3 ½ hours.

Who has a verdict?” I asked.

“O.J.’s jury has reached a verdict,” Judy said.

I looked over at Skip, who was ashen. The blood literally drained from his face. “Mike, this isn’t good,” he said. “This isn’t good.”

Later, I learned that Fred Goldman, Ron’s father, was jubilant when he heard about the quick verdict. He told a reporter, “They’re going to find him guilty, they’ve found him guilty… This is great. I’ve had the feeling all weekend long. They found him guilty.”

Skip walked over to the TV in his office and turned it on. There it was, all over the news: The jury had reached a verdict and they were going to deliver it the next morning. Skip and I could literally not  believe our ears.

Trying to reassure Skip, I said, “Skip, think about it. They’re not going to put a man in jail for the rest of his life after three hours of deliberation. Remember that this is a jury that will have been asked, ‘Do you believe that evidence was planted in this case?’ Skip, if they say yes then they have to let O.J. go. They have to.”

Skip was sitting at his desk, and I was sitting across from his desk. Skip stood up and said, “I need to get to the jail. O.J. is going to be flipped out.”

We turned off the TV and agreed to drive separately to the jail and meet there. On my way there, I stopped at the Denny’s near the jail to meet the guy who had the photographs. I was thinking maybe O.J. wanted something to do to take his mind off the verdict in the morning. But when I got to the jail I just left them in the car. I couldn’t handle it at all. My mind was reeling and everything seemed surreal.

There is no way to describe the size of the media hordes outside that court house that day. It seemed to me that every person in the world who owned a camera or video camera was outside the L.A. County courthouse. (You know who wasn’t there? Israeli media. In Israel, there was no coverage of ther verdict at all, but not for lack of interest. Television and radio stations were off the air because the country was observing the solemn holy day of Yom Kippur. The Day of Atonement, no less.)

I remember walking down the grey concrete walkway to the jail and hearing reporters call out, “Mike! Mike! I need to talk to you!” Many of them were people I’d gotten to know somewhat. We’d seen each other every day for the past year and a half. But I didn’t answer anybody this time. At that moment, I suddenly felt I had entered a dream, my own dream. I can remember walking up the sidewalk, but it seemed like I wasn’t walking. It felt like I was on a conveyor belt and everybody was being whisked past me. It was as if I was standing still, they were moving, and the building was getting closer to me. I could see the glass doors of the jail and I just focused on those. I got there, signed in, and for some reason didn’t even have to go through a metal detector.

Somebody said O.J. was in his usual room.  They closed the metal door behind me before they opened the other one, and in that moment I focused on making my demeanor strong and upbeat. I made my way into the attorney room. O.J. was off to one side. Skip was already there, as was Bobby Kardashian, who unbeknownst to us had sold O.J. out in a lucrative book deal with Larry Schiller. Kathy Randa was there with her attorney. I went up to O.J. and tried to act normal.

“Hey O.J., how’s it going?”

He just looked at me said, “Oh God. This is crazy Mike.” Before I had a chance to tell him that I had left the photos in the car, he said, “I can’t sign anything today Mike…”

“I completely understand,” I said. “You don’t need to explain. I just thought you might want to be distracted.”

Everybody was talking and buzzing about possible scenarios. The one possibility—that the verdict would be “guilty”–didn’t necessitate any planning, nor was it discussed or ever mentioned. That’s not to say it didn’t weigh very heavily, silently, in all of our minds. But we avoided mentioning it, speaking the words.  The other possibility– “not guilty”—that one would require careful planning, so we threw ourselves into that.

The questions were how to get O.J. out of there and where he should go. F. Lee Bailey had offered his private jet to fly O.J. wherever he wanted to go.  A few of us, myself included, were pushing for him to fly to Maui and stay at the Ritz Carlton there until the madness died down a little. He of course wanted to see his kids right away, but they were in the custody of the Brown family, so that too was complicated.

Then O.J. said he wanted to make a statement to the press outside the courthouse if he was acquitted.

At that moment the lieutenant at the jail came over and asked if he could talk to me outside. “Sure,” I said, and we went out into the lobby.

“Listen,” he said. “O.J. is under the impression that if the verdict goes his way he can just walk out of the courthouse and address the media on the steps, like Perry Mason. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Okay,” I said. “Then how does it work?”

“If he is found guilty he will immediately be transported to a holding facility until they figure out which prison to send him to.”

“Okay.”

“If he is found not guilty he will still have to be transported back to the jail and then processed out. His possessions will be boxed up and returned to him, and he will be released like all other inmates. I’ll show you. Follow me.”

He walked me through the maze of the jail to show me the exit from which O.J. would be released.

“I would suggest that you folks get a few different vehicles.”

“Okay. But O.J. still wants to make a statement.”

“That is not a good idea. We don’t want that.”

“Why not?”

“We have received numerous death threats against O.J.  People have said that if he is found not guilty they will shoot and kill him as he leaves this jail. For that reason we will most likely have SWAT teams stationed around these buildings to make sure he is safe. As long as he is on this property, he is still our responsibility. We would like him to get off the property as quickly and quietly as possible.”

I felt punched in the stomach. It is a feeling I would experience countless times in the years to come. This was my very first inkling that O.J. would not be welcomed back into the community with open arms.

I went back in to the visiting room and started listening again to the clamor of plans. Various people were offering limos, vehicles, planes, houses…The only one who didn’t seem interested in any of this was O.J. himself. At one point he hushed us. He raised his arms and said, “Guys, guys, slow down. This could all be moot. This could all be a moot fucking point. We don’t know what the verdict is.

At that, everybody just kind of stopped. Skip broke the silence. “O.J. don’t think like that.”

“But it’s true. We don’t know.”

People have claimed at various times in the media that O.J. knew what the verdict was going to be. That is nonsense —he had no idea.

“Well, the moment is finally here,” I said to him, and he nodded. I asked him what Johnnie had said about the extremely short deliberation time. O.J. said Cochrane thought it was good.

“But he said it could go either way,” he still insisted. “Nobody knows.”

I told O.J. what the lieutenant had said.

“Death threats?” he said. “What the fuck are you talking about? This is crazy. Why are people talking like this?”

“O.J., you can’t make a statement,” I said. “If you get shot, they’ll have the L.A. riots all over again.”

He shook his head in disbelief.

I explained that if he was found not guilty they would have to take him back to the jail and process him out.

He said, “Mike, if I’m not guilty there’s no way I’m going back to that fucking cell.”

“You’re not going back to the cell,” I said. “Your things will all be boxed up and they will quickly get you out, and you will leave the same way any inmate does. And we’ll have several cars.”

“When am I going to see my kids?” he asked. I told him I had no idea but that I understood it was his first priority.

We went back to the group, who were still discussing where O.J. would go if he were to be found not guilty. O.J. had made a decision.

“Listen, folks, I want to go home,” he said. “I don’t want to go to Maui. I don’t want to go to Florida. I want to go home. I have not even been able to grieve for Nicole. I want to go back to the home we shared and grieve and start my life over. I want to see my kids. Just let me go home.”

Everybody was quiet. “Whatever you say O.J.,” I said. “It’s your decision. Just understand, dude, the press will surround your house.”

“I understand that. I still want to go home.”

So that was that.

It was close to 8 pm, the end of visiting hours. Everybody left, and it was only me, Skip and O.J. left in the room.

O.J. put his hand up to the glass partition. He said, “I want you both to know that I love you. I never could have gotten this far without you, both of you. If the verdict is guilty, I never want to see you guys again. I wouldn’t want to burden you with having to come visit me. I wouldn’t have anything to offer, anything to share with you. I’m serious, guys. Don’t come back if the verdict is guilty. Don’t come back ever.”

I looked at him, and wondered if this could be the very last time I ever saw him. The guards said we had to get going.

My last words to him were, “I love you, man. I’ll see you tomorrow at Rockingham.”

They came to take him back to his cell and I remember the sound of the chains rattling against the metal chair, a sound I prayed I would never have to hear again. They led him out of the room and I turned away. I started crying, and so did Skip. We went out to the middle room, and before we exited I said to Skip, “Hang on a second. Let’s not go out yet. We can’t go out there looking like we’ve been crying.” I found a tissue and started drying my eyes, and Skip dabbed his eyes with his sleeve. We took a deep breath and walked out, and as soon as we got out, we were instantly surrounded by the press. I didn’t want to say anything, and definitely didn’t want them to see my face because I had really been crying pretty hard. I dodged right behind them and found a path to get away, a trick I had used before, once I realized that cameramen can’t turn because of the weight and size of their cameras.

I looked back over my right shoulder and saw Skip trapped in a blaze of camera lights. I was thinking about how hard it must have been for him, because Skip truly loved O.J. and had been his friend and attorney for over twenty years, much longer than I had known O.J.

I kept going. I had to let him fend for himself. But I felt bad, like I had left a buddy in battle and allowed him to be surrounded by the enemy.

I got to my car and drove off as fast as I could. I went to the Hyatt, to my room, and my cellphone was ringing absolutely nonstop. CNN got through and asked if they could come and film my reaction as the verdict was read, over at Rockingham. I said, “No way.”

I turned off my cellphone and the hotel phone, and took an Ambien to help me fall asleep. It had no effect. I took another half. Still no effect; I was wide awake. I finally got up and started getting dressed. I decided to drive home then and there. It was about three in the morning and it was a four hour drive. It wasn’t the smartest move I ever made—driving home after taking a dose and a half of Ambien– but I drank a lot of coffee, drove at a steady good speed, and before I knew it, I was home.

I got there about twenty minutes before they read the verdict. The kids were at school. Debbie had the TV on, and a few relatives had come over.

I braced myself and stood stock still in front of the TV. I remember hearing the first part of the verdict, for the first charge, which was “murder,” and when they said “not guilty” I suspended my breathing and said, “Wait, it’s not over yet.” I was thinking that he could still go to jail for life even if one of the lesser charges like “manslaughter” stuck. They continued to repeat “not guilty” all the way through, and the moment I saw O.J. mouth the words “thank you” to the jury and saw Johnnie’s reaction, that was when it hit me.

Every phone in the house started ringing off the hook. It was insane. Everybody from my entire life was calling– people I’d gone to high school with, or worked with at odd jobs I didn’t even recall.  Neighbors were knocking on the door, people were just walking right in to the living room, sharing their reactions and asking me questions about what O.J. had said and felt the day before. They were all very upbeat. I was dazed and stunned.

I sat down and just absorbed the moment, took stock. I remember feeling at that time that I had done the right thing by sticking by him, and that now we could go on with our lives. Debbie gave me a very long hug, not a celebratory hug but more of an it’s over hug.

From the moment I had called home from Yosemite on June 13, 1994, to this, almost a year and a half later, our entire lives and consciousness had been dominated by this ordeal. I was worried about the toll it had taken on my family. But truthfully, back then my first instinct was always to worry about O.J. Later, when the cracks in my marriage started to manifest, it was too late. As with almost everything else in this hideous ordeal, it was too late to save it.

I drove to my kids’ school and took them out of class to tell them the news. They already knew.

“Dad, we watched the verdict on TV in the classroom,” Luke told me. I laughed a little. Luke asked, “Does this mean that uncle O.J. can come home now?”

“Yes, sweetheart,” I said, “it does.”

 

I knew I had to drive back to L.A. and get to Rockingham by nightfall, but first I had some urgent business to attend to. I had had O.J. sign one thousand envelopes in jail, and my brother in law had agreed to help me get them ready for the post office to turn them into what’s called caches, which are envelopes that are stamped and cancelled by the post office to verify their postage date. My brother in law was licking stamps on the entire four- hour drive to L.A., and then we had to wait in line at the post office in downtown Los Angeles to have each of them cancelled. I never wound up selling those, and still have them. I have received so many macabre offers from people for O.J.-related objects they wanted to buy for various ritualistic or commercial purposes. One guy, years later, wanted to affix crime scene photos to those O.J.-signed envelopes and offered me $250,000 for them. They are still in my attic.

By the time I got to Rockingham it was dark, some time after 8 p.m. The media mob had descended there, predictably, and literally engulfed the neighborhood. As far as the eye could see there were news vans, trucks, satellite dishes, and hordes of reporters from every country in the world except possibly North Korea. The house itself had been barraged with deliveries from friends, well-wishers and, we later learned, journalists trying to get inside. Flowers, telegrams, pizzas, ice cream, cakes—everything imaginable was delivered to the house. Before long, it was discovered that the tabloids had made floral deliveries and planted microphones inside the flowers. Other reporters ordered deliveries of various items to be made so they could try to sneak inside when the gates opened, or at least shout questions. Before long, all deliveries had to be left outside the front gate and examined by the security guards.

Those guards opened the gate for me and I went inside. I had only one thing on my mind—to see O.J. The first person I saw inside the house was Larry Schiller, who was dismantling some camera equipment. “Hey, you’re late,” he said, with characteristic lack of subtlety.

“I was working,” I said. I spotted Kathy. She said O.J. was upstairs in his bedroom. The party was winding down by the time I got there, as it had been going on most of the day. I greeted a few people, then quickly went up to the bedroom. The door was ajar. I knocked and walked in.

O.J. was lying on the bed propped up against some pillows. Gretchen Stockdale, whom O.J. had dated, was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking quite stunning. Because Gretchen was jaw-dropping beautiful, prosecutor Marcia Clark assumed she would have the IQ of a raisin. She got on the witness stand and dismantled Clark. Everybody on the defense team was blown away by Gretchen. Marcia kept trying to corner her and make her look stupid, but she just couldn’t do it.

When Gretchen and O.J. broke up, Christy Prody was over, and O.J. told her to pretend she was with a guy named Ed who happened to be at the house. Christy went along, but Gretchen saw through it and confronted O.J. She went off on him the next day, told him to fuck himself.

Gretchen graduated from law school a few years later. I was very happy for her when she broke up with O.J. She and Skip Taft are my two favorite people I met through him. She was very different from a few of the other beauties O.J. dated, who did not strike me as so bright. Like the one who told me, “I knew that I should be with O.J. because my birthmark looks like Africa.” She did have a birthmark that looked like the continent of Africa, but what a thing to say.

Once, she visited O.J. in jail and said, “O.J., do you remember when we went to that big dam in Buffalo?”

Big dam, I thought, in Buffalo?

O.J. and I looked at each other. At the same moment O.J. and I clicked and we both said, “Niagara Falls?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“That’s a waterfall,” I said, “not a dam.”

She said, “Well, I’m not good with geometry.”

“Geography,” O.J. said, “not geometry.”

I later told O.J., “If you get out of here and you marry her, I’ll kill you.”

O.J. lit up when he saw me enter his bedroom.  “Michael Gilbert!” he called out, and pulled me right onto the bed on top of him, hugging and kissing me.

“Hey don’t give me jail sex, dude,” I joked. “You’re the one who’s been in prison for a year and a half, not me.”

He laughed, and I sat down on the bed. “I told you I’d see you here,” I said.

“You did, you certainly did,” he said. “Where the fuck have you been all day anyway?”

“Well, while you all were partying, I was working,” I said. “Making sure we can keep paying all our bills around here.” I showed him one of the envelopes and explained about the post office.

He said, “I should have figured, knowing you.”

Somebody brought me a glass of champagne. We all talked and bantered for probably two hours about the verdict and our reactions when it was read. People always ask me what O.J. said about his own response to the verdict that night, and all I can remember is that he said he was extremely happy. I don’t remember specifically what his words were. I do remember that at one point he looked around his bedroom and said, “This is so good, to be back in my own bedroom, in my own bed.” He was in an extremely euphoric mood.

He was still wearing the suit that he was acquitted in, and had a “lucky ring” on his finger that had been braided by one of the inmates out of multi-colored threads pulled from socks. Around midnight, exhausted, I excused myself and told O.J. I would be back in the morning. He hugged me goodbye and thanked me again. I said goodbye to Gretchen and the others, left the party, got my car, and drove to my hotel, totally exhausted. As I was laying on my hotel bed, I was simply thinking the obvious: “Wow. It’s all over. It’s done. The nightmare is over. We can all get back to real life now. Everything is going to normal again.”

Wrong again.

I flipped on the TV, and every station was covering it, talking about it. They were showing people’s reactions. Every single one was not only negative but shocked, disgusted, and enraged. Every single station, it was the same thing. It was like a futuristic nightmare world where the TV only shows one story, and within that story was only one emotion: Hate.

You may well call me naïve or worse for not having anticipated this, but I didn’t. I remember O.J. in jail, talking very confidently about being on the A list for every party in Hollywood if he was acquitted. We were like an insulated society; we had our own emotions, values, instincts, reactions. After the acquittal, our bubble world was suddenly pressed against the “real” world, and for the first time, I could see the writing on the wall. I had a sick feeling. It’s like running a marathon, and you give every ounce of energy, you’re exhausted and beaten, you think your lungs are going to explode, but you can see the finish line. Then you look down and they’ve moved the finish line, and you’re nowhere near it. I went from pure jubilation, being full of energy and hope, to a feeling of despair. I laid back in my bed and it hit me like a punch in the gut. It’s not over. Not even close. It was like seeing thousands of raised pitchforks coming down over a hill straight toward your street. This was war, and it had only just begun.

 

 

The next morning I turned on the news to see if there was anything I could grasp onto for comfort. There wasn’t. It was the same, on every channel, the same rage-filled responses. They were showing protesters outside of Rockingham with signs that said, “Murderer,” “Butcher,” or, “Get Out Of Our Neighborhood, Killer!”  They showed a barricade near the house that somebody had spray-painted with the word, “Murderer.”

I thought to myself, I hope he’s not seeing this shit. But of course, he was. He was watching TV just like everybody else.

A lot of the anti-O.J. sentiment at that time was being driven by feminist groups, particularly the National Organization of Women. Even I was a target. Tammy Bruce, the head of N.O.W.’s Los Angeles chapter, recorded an outgoing message on N.O.W.’s answering machine not long after O.J.’s acquittal giving my home and cell numbers and urging people to call me and tell me what they thought of me. I fielded hundreds of calls—everybody from furious feminists to white supremacists. I decided to talk to as many of the callers as possible, rather than just hide, and I engaged them in real discussions about what it means to respect the rights of others, and what it means to incite hate like Ms. Bruce had done. I recorded a few of the most hate-spewing messages I got, including some from racist groups, and gave it to CNN, which aired a segment on it.  They confronted Tammy Bruce with the recordings. Her only quote was deeply sarcastic: “Well, welcome to the real world, Mike Gilbert.”

Denise Brown, who had reinvented herself as a staunch feminist and anti-domestic violence spokesperson, was being interviewed everywhere, furiously denouncing O.J. as a wife-beater and killer. To the best of my knowledge, when she was alive, nobody in Nicole’s family had ever urged Nicole to leave O.J.—not even after the 911 call. Her parents, without question, always urged her to stay in the marriage and try to hold it together. O.J. was very well-liked by Nicole’s family as far as I could tell. He was practically Santa Claus.  He had paid for the college tuition of one of Nicole’s younger sisters, Dominique, and had set Lou Brown up with the Hertz car dealership that he ran. He frequently paid for the entire family to vacation in places like Hawaii. This was not lost on the black members of O.J.’s family. His sister Shirley used to comment on the fact that Nicole spent much more of O.J.’s money, at Christmas for example, on what she called “the white folks.”

But all the contradictory, real, complex details of O.J.’s family relations were totally wiped out in the media glare. Nothing was recognizable anymore, nobody was permitted the faintest hint of positive commentary on who O.J. Simpson was, or had been, other than “murderer.” It proved too tempting for many. Everybody became an instant saint in the refracted media light of anti-O.J. sentiment. It quickly got to the point where all you had to do to be a public hero or heroine was denounce O.J. as a killer.

This outpouring of hate reinforced my wish to protect O.J. The attacks were so vicious I felt I had no choice but to fight back. My position was in a sense defined in opposition to theirs. If we could have talked like reasonable people, we would have found points of mutual agreement. I never said—ever—that I thought O.J. was not guilty of the murders. But I still wanted to defend other aspects of the truth about him. Prior to the murders, I’d known him to be a generous person and a good friend. I always used to quote a line of Richard Gere’s from the movie Primal Fear. In that movie, Gere plays a criminal attorney who defends a killer in court. He is in a bar with a journalist who asks him why he does what he does, why he defends the guilty. He replies, “Because I don’t want to judge any man by the worst night in his life. I have always believed that sometimes really good people do really bad things.”

 

 

I got to Rockingham that morning with a knot in my stomach. I took something to eat out of the fridge and then went upstairs to O.J., who was still in bed. He muted the TV when I came in. He was truly off the hook, furious, after watching an interviews with Denise and various hardcore feminists.

“Can you believe this shit? I was found fucking not guilty. This is bullshit. These women would never have defended Nicole when she was alive. These are the same types of women who hated Nicole, and hated what she was. That she didn’t have an education, that she married a rich guy, got by in life on her looks. Now they’re gonna use Nicole for a membership drive? This is fucking crazy.”

I saw the suit he’d been wearing the day before, when the verdict was read, crumpled on the floor, near the closet. We had joked about it being his “lucky suit.” I picked it up and put it on a hanger—the slacks, shirt, jacket, and tie.

“O.J, what are you going to do with this? I asked. “This is a piece of history now.”

He looked over. “You want it? Take it. You can have it if you want it. That’s the least I can do. Take it.”

I thanked him. Went downstairs and got a shopping bag, folded the suit into it, and put it in my car. When I went outside, I was struck by the noise of the media who had simply moved “Camp O.J.” now to surround his house and watch his every move. He couldn’t go out. He had to stay in the house, for now, at all times. It occurred to me then that he had gone from being a prisoner in jail to being a prisoner in his house. The only difference was his cell was bigger now. And now he had something worse than chains. The prison guards had maintained strict order around him, and he had been sheltered from the reality outside, from the rage of the mob. This rage only matured fully when he was acquitted. Now he was on his own, and he found his world getting more and more ominous and claustrophobic. He was hunted, hated, abjected, exiled. Little by little, he lost everything that had ever mattered to him, beginning with his image, his friends, his business partners. Eventually he lost his house, his possessions, even his Heisman trophy.

People ask me where the suit is today.  It’s in the same place where it has been all these years, hanging in my closet in Hanford. It still has a fleck of blood on the collar of the shirt, where he cut himself shaving the morning he was released. I know the world of memorabilia collectors, and how much they are willing to spend to own an iconic piece of American pop culture history. I’ve been offered as much as $50,000 for the suit. At one point, Howard Stern declared he wanted to buy it, in order to set it on fire in a public place. I never participated in, or provided materials for, any of this kind of O.J. voodoo being acted out. In fact, I never sold anything, even when I was dead broke. At least that’s something small to be proud of.

Over the years, O.J. forgot that he had given me that suit, and decided he wanted it back. He had been led to believe it was in that hotel room in Las Vegas, and went bursting in. I can see why it would have emotional and symbolic meaning to him. I have lost a lot of my humanity over these past 14 years, but I am still human enough to find it heart-rending that in the end O.J. trapped himself. And the lucky suit that he believed represented his freedom is now the very suit that may put him in prison for the rest of his life.

 

O.J. and I were alone at Rockingham, with nobody around, a few weeks later. The kids were with their grandparents, the Browns, and the security guard was out in the guard shack. We had finished some business we had to tend to and I was spending the night there and driving home to Hanford the next day. We had been upstairs and OJ had gone out on the balcony to smoke some pot, a habit he acquired after the criminal trial. Marijuana had the same effect on him as it does most people, it made him slow, a little bit melancholy, more relaxed. It was pouring rain outside and that had a calming effect as well. We were both drinking Rolling Rocks, and for once we weren’t trying to get anything done, or struggling to evade some immense impending threat.

It was a long, strangely hazy night. We sat around, we talked, we went outside, sometimes we sat quietly and said nothing. At one point it stopped raining and O.J. took me outside because he wanted to show me something. It was a huge tree in the back yard that I had never given any particular thought to before.

He told me it had been a very special tree to both him and Nicole, but especially to Nicole.  “Nicole loved this tree,” he said. “It was dying and we got on a crusade to save it. Spent thousands, and consulted all these tree specialists. It took a lot of work but finally we turned it around.” He showed me where they had carved their names into the trunk. He liked to go stand under that tree, he said. One thing that struck me was that although he seemed to grieve his own loss, he never once wept for Nicole. He never once said, “I wonder what she went through,” or  “I hope she didn’t suffer.” Never once.

We came downstairs and sat down in the living room. The only sound was the rain against the windows.  It was now or never, I felt. This was my chance. I didn’t know if I really wanted to know the answer, but something about the atmosphere that night gave me the courage to ask him. I remember trying to steady my voice.

“OJ,” I said,  “what happened that night? What happened June 12th?”

He took a breath, and leaned back. He did that familiar sigh. He got a very pensive look on his face. He looked at me. “What do you think?” he said. “What do you think happened that night, Mike?”

I hesitated for a while. I thought: Do I just give him the same pat answer that everybody gives him? I gave very careful consideration to what I was about to say, and how I was going to say it. I finally answered: “O.J., I believe you were there. I have always believed you were there. Whatever happened…happened. I don’t believe it was your intention. I don’t know if you know you did it, if you think you did it, but yes, I believe that …you did it.”

I remember looking at him as I was saying this, and waiting for shock, waiting for him to stop me. But he didn’t. He looked at me with no expression, no emotion, nothing.

Then he said, “Mike, I did go there that night, but I didn’t take a knife.”

It was quiet for a moment and I said gently, “I know that, because you told that to A.C.”

We didn’t say any more.

Nothing more needed to be said.

Shortly after this, we both turned in for the night. It started to hit me what had just happened. I had asked to be burdened with the truth, and now I was. I felt very strange.   It was so quiet in the house and I was all alone. I went down to the kitchen to get some fruit, some apples, and a knife to cut them with. I brought the fruit and the knife up to my room. In the eerie quiet, I started getting more and more apprehensive. I wanted to barricade the bedroom doors, but it was a double door that opened outward and it was impossible. I placed a chair and my suitcase near the door, and placed the knife on the bedside table, just as a neurotic form of imaginary protection. What if O.J. decided he had said too much? I knew my mind was playing tricks on me, and wondered if I was going crazy myself.

His denial was always rooted entirely in his insistence that he was not there that night.   He had always strenuously denied it. A few of us in the inner circle, though, knew that he had admitted to this. Al Cowlings had told a man named Mike Pullers, a former close friend of O.J.’s, and Pullers had told me. I confronted A.C. about this when he and I were at the Hyatt Hotel not long after O.J. was incarcerated, signing black and white NFL photographs of himself and O.J.

A.C. came clean right away, and confirmed what I had heard. We talked about it from many angles. I remember him talking about how impossible it was to imagine Nicole confronting drug lords, which was O.J.’s proposed scenario.

“Nicole was a chicken,” A.C. said. “Remember when she was too scared to drive under the overpasses after the 1992 earthquake?”

I did. For a good year after the earthquake, Nicole had been so afraid that she exited at every overpass. I said, “Mike Pullers told me that you told him that O.J. told you he went there that night but didn’t bring a knife.”

A.C. nodded.

“So then why is it okay?” I asked. “Why do we stay with him? Why do we continue to defend him?”

I remember AC’s words very clearly. He said, pretty forcefully, “What good would it do? Mike, it’s like this. The kids already don’t have a mom. If we help put OJ in jail for the rest of his life, then they don’t have a dad. And now they have it proven to them that their dad murdered their mom. We can’t do that to them.”

I nodded. Part of me accepted this simple inner circle logic. Another part of me felt something else, but I didn’t say it. The something else was the obvious: We would do it because it would be justice. The trouble was, we all knew O.J. and we knew he wasn’t a crazed killer, like a Charles Manson type who would go out and kill again. We knew he was strung out on Prozac. We knew that everything had aligned that night for this catastrophe to occur, and that it would never happen again. Everything that could go wrong that night did go wrong, like I said. Nicole had shunned him, none of his friends were around, Marcus was in the Cayman Islands, I was in Yosemite. All of us were gone. Everybody he could lean on was gone. There was nobody there to reel him back in.

I remember the complex ambiguity of something else A.C. said.

“Mike, if Nicole wouldn’t have opened the door with a knife, none of it would have happened.”

Well, that is one way of looking at it.

This thing has taken on the deep mysticism of an ancient, impossible to obtain secret, like the riddle of the Sphinx, but that that’s all just veils and smoke and posture. The truth has been lying on the ground at our feet right out in the open the entire time.

 

 

 

 

Chapter Six

Selling O.J. Piece by Piece

 

 

 

I can hear his voice to this day. Gruff and menacing. “Gilbert,” he told my answering machine, “you will be in the wrong place at the wrong time and I’ll kill you and your nigger client. We’ll kill your kids too, cut their throats like Ron and Nicole, and leave them on your doorstep.”

Charming. And that was just one of the hundreds of calls I got after N.O.W.’s Tammy Bruce gave my number out to the world. I guess you could say they were wake-up calls. My golden goose of a client, my former idol who’s name had been so adored, was now the most reviled man in the country.

Nothing in contemporary American history has revealed the Grand Canyon still dividing White American from Black America like the reactions to O.J.’s acquittal did. Black America rejoiced, as one writer put it, like they’d just won the Super Bowl. White America was aghast, appalled, enraged.

I had to walk through the hate storm to believe it. Before it was all over, I would go from being pampered like a king, with five-star treatment wherever we went, to having my life threatened on a regular basis just for being O.J. Simpson’s agent.

It was like something out of another century, or out of a bad movie, the levels of hate and terror that were unleashed by the O.J. verdict. Each day, we thought it would die down, and each day it just grew and grew.

I wish I had kept track and counted the number of times I had to hear the word “nigger” (about O.J.) and “white nigger” (about me.) We were primarily targeted by two political groups when O.J. got out of jail: white supremacists and extreme feminists. Talk about your unholy alliances. I think everybody in between, “ordinary Americans,” mostly got swept up in it, but would never have generated so much of an uproar if left to their own devices.

I got threats all the time from what I call feminazis. Tammy Bruce’s obsession with O.J., and the apparent racism that fueled it, have been well documented. During the trial, she denounced O.J. with practically every breath she took on her L.A. talk radio show. When it was announced that a verdict was in, she uncorked a bottle of champagne on air, she was so confident O.J. had been found guilty. When he was acquitted instead, she organized candlelight vigils and protest demonstrations outside Rockingham.

In her crusading zeal, she made some huge and revealing tactical blunders. On ABC’s “Nightline” she basically declared that abuse of women was a more important issue than racism, and actually blurted out that focusing on domestic violence provided “a needed break from all that talk of racism.” Then she turned down an invitation to appear on a Philadelphia radio talk show, saying that she didn’t want to “argue with a bunch of black women” about O.J.

Her superiors at N.O.W. publically censured her and apologized for those remarks. Bruce left N.O.W. a few months later. She went on to become a popular pundit on conservative media. Her web site describes her as “an openly gay, pro-choice, gun owning, pro-death penalty, voted-for-President Bush authentic feminist.” Make of that whatever you want.

I got hate calls from the Klan, and from white supremacists. “You helped a nigger get away with murder. You are no better. You’re a white nigger.” Of course, I think they hated O.J. because he was a black man who had “miscegenated with” a beautiful blonde white woman. I really don’t think it was so much about the fact that he had murdered her as the fact that he had had sex with her, “defiled” her. There was also the fact that the Dream Team that “got him off” for the murder was made up of Jews and blacks. We heard a lot of vile and idiotic ranting from them. Tom Metzger, the founder of the neo-Nazi White Aryan Resistance, wrote that “O.J. had served the international Jew conspiracy in a most powerful way, suggesting by phony example that racially mixed marriage and mongrelization could be a glamorous lifestyle for the elite.” He suggested the Jews had butchered Nicole kosher-style, framed O.J., and then “sent their best shysters in to defend him.”

Then again, there was the counter conspiracy theory that it was the white supremacists themselves who murdered Nicole and Ron and framed O.J. That’s just one small example of the kinds of hysterical lunacy the O.J. verdict provoked.

 

 

Oddly enough, at the same time as this was going on, my phone was ringing off hook with people wanting to book O.J. for the first public appearances after his release. The very first post-jail deal we attempted was a microcosm of what was to come. It was with a Pennsylvania-based company called Signature Rookies, a major sports card memorabilia company. The deal was an appearance and autograph contract for $1 million. O.J. had to make an appearance and sign about 50,000 autographs on selected items and some different type of inscriptions.

O.J. received so many sacks of mail in jail, at least hundreds of thousands of letters, both positive and negative, and we had kept a lot of it. We had agreed to give Signature Rookies the positive letters, so they could market these to O.J.’s fans. The gentlemen from Signature Rookies, Tim Slatt and Paul Golden, and I were to have a press conference in New York to announce the deal within a few days of O.J.’s release.

Meanwhile, O.J. was booked to do an unpaid interview with NBC, in Burbank, CA, four days after verdict, with Bryant Gumbel. He believed this would take care of everything. He would explain everything, and as Nicole had put it, “O.J. his way out.”

The President of NBC West Coast, John Olmeyer, a close friend of O.J., called him and warned him that it was going to be “brutal,” and that there was nothing he could do personally to help or protect O.J., because this was not his department. This was not entertainment, but news.

At that point, O.J. started to get worried, but he still wanted to do it. He wanted his image back, very badly. He was obsessed with doing what he imagined to be the great Everything Is Forgiven TV interview, where he would be believed and heard and understood and redeemed.

But the skies were darkening and the drums were beating. Now NBC was dealing with threats, bomb threats, mass public outrage, threats of boycotts.

O.J.’s  attorneys, meanwhile, cautioned him that everything that came out of his mouth would be used against him in the pending civil suit–everything. They told him to watch every single word he said in private and public. Well, that’s useless advice to a non-stop talker like O.J.

On the day of the scheduled NBC interview, I got a call from Skip saying it was cancelled. O.J. would not do it.

We regrouped and talked about what to do next. Most of us thought this was a minor storm that would pass, and that maybe if we just laid low, the tide would turn by itself in a few days. I was the one most in favor of putting O.J. back out there. I told O.J. and Skip that we needed to do something to turn public opinion, or at least spin public opinion.

“If we don’t, we’re just sitting here taking a beating,” I said. “It’s just going to get worse.”

I met with Signature Rookies and we all agreed to put the press conference on hold, sit back and wait for tide to past. In the coming days and weeks, it just got worse and worse and worse. Anti-O.J. sentiment had metastasized into a cult or crypto- religion within days of his release, and there was nothing whatsoever anybody could day or do to affect it. I don’t think Jesus Christ could have calmed people down.

Soon we realized that anybody who did business with us would themselves be jeopardized, and it came down to whether we could force them to honor their contracts or not. For that first $1 million contract, Signature Rookies wound up asking me if they could form a secondary, front company just so that their name would not be targeted by hate and protest. I feared that a second company, which had no assets, would just be a way for them to get out of the contract legally.

As it worked out, after a few weeks they did start to look for ways to breach the contract. It was becoming more and more evident that it wouldn’t work.

Ultimately, we kept $50,000 of their money, they kept the cards and we both walked away. Signature Rookies went bankrupt a year or two later. I believe that it died of the plague, not natural causes.

 

 

But there would be many, many more opportunities to market O.J. memorabilia, O.J.’s signature—O.J. himself—over the coming years. I know many people find that appalling. I can only say you don’t understand how celebrity and fame work in America.

I’d add that almost everyone involved in the O.J. case, on both sides, marketed their experiences somehow. Everything had a price, and everybody was buying or selling. Those on the side of the victims were, in many cases, the ones who profited most. Prosecutor Marcia Clark got a $4 million advance for her book on the trial and pursued a post-O.J. career as a television expert on criminal justice. Nicole Simpson’s father sold her diaries to the National Enquirer, the same paper to which her sister Dominique sold topless photos of Nicole. Nicole’s parents sold use of O.J. and Nicole’s wedding video to “A Current Affair.”

As one L.A.-based TV correspondent who toiled long hours during the trials said: “I think he’s guilty, but I bought my house because of this guy.”

At the center of this industry stood O.J. himself — a pariah, at least in American public life, but the possessor still of a legendary autograph. Once it was a sports hero’s signature, then it was an infamous one, but maybe also a historic one.

For years after the verdict, I arranged for O.J. to do a private signing for memorabilia dealers about once a month. Month after month, year in and year out. A typical signing would be in a hotel conference room where O.J. signed hundreds of items –maybe 200 footballs, 100 USC jerseys, 100 Buffalo Bills jerseys. Several thousand signed items in a given year.

Of course, O.J.’s financial picture was complicated by the outcome of the ’96/’97 civil trial that found him liable for the killings. During the trial, the survivors of Nicole and Ron Goldman asserted that O.J. was worth at least $15.7 million. His financial advisers argued, to no avail, that he was actually $9 million in debt after paying for his criminal defense, and that his future earning prospects were minimal. (O.J. also got a $25,000-a-month NFL pension that no civil judgment could touch.)

Even before the murders, O.J.’s net worth was estimated at no more than $10 million. Despite that, on March 9th, 1997, a jury awarded the plaintiffs a total of $33.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages. Fred Goldman’s share was worth almost $13.5 million. His ex-wife, Sharon Rufo, Ron’s mother, had not seen her son for fourteen years and was accordingly awarded “only” $7.5 million. The estate of Nicole Brown Simpson, which included Sydney and Justin, was awarded $12.5 million.

The judgment was based on the faulty assumption by an expert witness during the trial, who declared that O.J. Simpson would be able to earn around $3 million a year by telling his story and signing autographs. That was totally absurd. In reality, he could make at the most $50,000 to $75,000 a year doing autographs. I couldn’t guarantee Michael Jordan $3 million a year from signatures. Because at a certain point, the market becomes saturated.

One thing both sides agreed on: The income he earned from his autograph was not going to the Goldman and Brown families. As the years rolled by, O.J. did not pay any of his mammoth debt, which grew by almost $10,000 a day in interest alone. Winning the civil judgment against him was one thing. Collecting it was another matter altogether. In fact, the size of the award made it virtually impossible for the Brown or Goldman families to collect.

You see, to get the money from O.J., they would have to catch him as soon as he made it, before he could spend it. The only money they made was from auctioning off his things, and from me. I turned over up to $8,000 of my own income. But that was it.

The only money they could make was by seizing and auctioning off his possessions. They wanted not only his valuable possessions, they wanted his most sacred totemic objects from his football career, for sacrificial voodoo purposes. Things like his Heisman trophy, his NFL game worn jersey, his original Buffalo Bills game played footballs.

O.J. was of course utterly defiant, and uncooperative. It was a very strange situation, to say the least. He owed $33.5 million dollars that he did not have to the family of a man he insisted he did not kill.

We knew, at a certain point, that we were going to lose everything.  The funny thing is, we started to become adept at that too, at losing. We did it shrewdly.

We knew, for example, that we were going to lose the civil suit in Santa Monica almost as soon as it began, for the obvious reasons that Santa Monica is predominantly white, and the burden of proof is much lower in a civil suit. Our focus was to keep the dollar amount of the judgement as low as possible.

O.J. had blown through astronomical sums of money during the criminal trial. Between lawyer’s fees, expert fees, travel expenses, court fees and so on, it was as much as $25,000 a day some days. Between $10,000 and $25,000 per day I would say. He started losing money from the day he went to jail. He immediately lost all his endorsement deals. It never even had to be formally spoken; I just let those go without a word. What do you say?

“Oh really, you don’t want O.J. to be your spokesperson anymore? Gee, why not?”

O.J. lost most of his $11 million fortune in jail, paying for his defense—about $9 million. He was still paying off various lawyers long after he got out, sometimes with cars or other highly valuable objects, to settle debts.

I was with him in jail when he was served the papers for the first civil suit, filed by Sharon Rufo, Ron Goldman’s mother. He didn’t have much of a reaction, and seemed to know it was coming. That was always hovering on our minds as the next major crisis—but first we had to get O.J. out of jail.

When he did get out of jail, his fortune was down to about $3 million. All he had in front of him at that point were his NFL pension, whatever money we could raise doing signings, and insanely, the monetary value of a true confession of the murders, were he to decide to go that route. Once upon a time his money rolled in because of his football talent. Now his only remaining worth was to confess to two brutal murders. If he did that, the assets would of course be owed to the civil judgment. (What Judith Regan and Rupert Murdoch were thinking when they decided to pay O.J. $1 million to write his confessional book, If I Did It, which he has since called “a fictional account,” is anybody’s guess. I could have told them that it would capsize.)

He also had many valuable possessions—cars, houses, condos, art, expensive carpets, lamps, and all kind of sports memorabilia (mostly his own). Between legal debts for the two trials, the civil judgment, and the destruction of his name, he resigned himself to losing his earthly possessions, and in typical O.J. style, feigning a slight diffidence. He had worked very hard to amass all this wealth, all these things, but once his image and status were destroyed, he no longer had the deep connection to it, or the need for it.

One thing that did infuriate him was when we got a notice from Fred Goldman’s attorneys that they had found out that O.J.’s mother, Eunice, lived in a fairly valuable house that was in O.J.’s name. They went after that house while Eunice was still in it, age 79. It never came to pass that Eunice got booted out of her house, but it was close.

Looking back, it seems like a biblical flood that carried away absolutely everything. I said to him once, when the financial cat and mouse game between O.J. and the Goldman team was well underway: “O.J., you are hurting yourself more than them.  Instead of hiding from the Goldmans, why don’t you make them a deal? Why don’t we just end this thing? Go to Goldman and say, ‘Listen, we’ll give you 30 percent of whatever we generate.’ They won’t protest that. It will stop all the rage, the protests—we can say we are paying off the civil judgement. Our lives can be a little normal maybe.”

“No,” he said, darkly, “fuck that. I am not going to give them a dime. They will get nothing. I didn’t kill them.”

He was resolute on this.

“Okay, O.J., okay,” I would say, with a sigh.

And so he lost and lost. The first condo he lost was the one he had in New York, on East 65th St., in the Bristol Plaza. He lost another condo in Laguna Beach, and all the furniture was put into storage units in California. O.J. didn’t want movers to move his things out of the New York condo, so he asked me if I would do it personally. I agreed, but told him it would cost more than movers would cost—renting a van, driving cross country. He didn’t care about the cost, he just didn’t want movers to come in, mainly because he feared they would tip off the press.

“There’s stuff in that apartment that belongs to my kids and that belonged to Nicole,” he said. “I don’t want people I don’t know going through that stuff.”

So my brother and I flew to New York and rented a moving van. It took us three days to load it. Some of the stuff went to storage in California, some went to Rockingham, some went to Arnelle, O.J.’s oldest daughter. There was a wicker bedroom set in Sydney’s room that O.J. told me Nicole had picked out. He wanted me to give it to my daughter Lindsay. She still has it, to this day.

We moved every last thing out in those three days, and we managed to do it without the press finding out.

The next place we had to clear out was the Laguna beach house he’d shared with Nicole. That was me and a guy named Gary Raza. We cleared that one out much faster—furniture, golf cart, household items, a jet ski. It was incredibly sad to walk around there in that ghostly beach house. You could almost hear the shrieks of happy beach-bound kids, without a care in the world. I could see Nicole walking around barefoot, with a towel around her waist and her sunglasses up on her head, telling O.J. to shut up. Nicole was always barefoot when she could be.

We started selling off all the things that mattered least first, starting with the condo, a few cars—his Bentley and his Ferrari, the Laguna beach house, his shares in restaurant chains—until we got down to the thing we all dreaded most.

 

 

The crowning jewel of O.J.’s earthly possessions was Rockingham, the opulent, sprawling home he’d lived in since 1977.

Rockingham was a huge part of O.J.’s life. He had always loved that house more than just about anything. He’d lived there with both of his wives, and raised two families there. He lived there though the best times of his life, and the worst. We never thought of it as “O.J.’s house.” It was “Rockingham,” just like Elvis’ house was Graceland.

We knew they were going to place liens on O.J’s property and possessions, but we did not know when or how. I arrived at Rockingham one day in 1997, with my son Luke, for what I thought was going to be a normal business day with O.J. Instead when I pulled up I noticed several other cars, which was odd that early in the morning. I rolled into the driveway. People were moving and taping boxes. I walked into the house and it was a madhouse, with all kinds of people walking around with cardboard boxes.

The first person I saw in the kitchen was Kathy. I asked her what the hell was going on.

“We have been informed that the Sheriff is coming in the morning to seize all of O.J.’s valuables,” she said. “It was faxed to us by one of the  guards at the L.A. jail. Anything we don’t want them to seize we have to get out of here now.”

The Goldmans had hired a moving company to come the next day to pick up OJ’s stuff.  O.J. was out playing golf. That way he had deniability. Everyone else was moving out valuable stuff.

I took off my jacket and rolled up my sleeves. We had very little time, and it was just chaos, boxes and people and things going this way and that. People took stuff to their homes, to storage, you name it. The problem was no one kept track of where went what. Most of the stuff O.J. saw again, but not all.

The court order stated that  O.J. was allowed to keep necessary living items, which created a grey area. A lamp is a necessity, but is a $65,000 Tiffany lamp a necessity? We found the Goldmans had gotten a list from O.J.’s insurance company estimating his valuables, stating the value of every Persian carpet or Tiffany lamp in the house. So the game plan was to move as much as we could, hide as much as we could, and replace that which could be replaced.

His good golf clubs, for example. I packed them into one of the cars. Then I went by Salvation Army and bought some cheap old golf clubs and left them in the garage.

One of O.J.’s most prized possessions was his old USC jersey. It hung in a glass case in the living room. We couldn’t let them seize that. We had a bunch of replica jerseys he would sign so we could sell them to the public. In fact, we found some in the house that he had mis-signed somehow. He might have misspelled his name, or the ink ran out, something of that nature. We decided to replace the real one with one of those. But the replica looked too new. So we took it outside and rubbed it around on the lawn, kicked some dirt on it to make it look worn. We took apart the glass case and put the dirty replica in there.

We did the same with his authentic game balls, switched them for replicas. Everything valuable that could be replaced was. It went on all night. At some point in the night O.J. wanted to come home. He’d played golf, he’d had some drinks afterward, he was drunk and sleepy. But we weren’t done and he couldn’t see what we were doing, so he could plausibly deny knowledge of it later. Also, if the sherriff knew he was home, he could serve O.J. the papers as of 12:01 a.m., and we didn’t want that, because we were nowhere near done making all those replacements. So we had someone drive down the street get him, and sneak back with O.J. in the car. He parked in the garage, and O.J. crawled out of the car and went inside the house through the garage. He was drunk, mumbling, stumbling, singing. Whistling the theme song from Wizard of Oz and singing, “If I only had a brain.”

“O.J., shut up,” I said. “Nobody can know that you’re here.”

We packed him off to bed, while the rest of us went on taping boxes, loading cars, and driving off for the rest of the night.

By 7 a.m. the only ones left in the house were me, my son Luke asleep in Kato’s old room, and O.J. asleep up in his room. I was still loading items into my BMW, which looked like a low rider because it was so loaded with stuff. I went up to O.J.’s bedroom to wake him, and saw the Goldmans’ two moving vans pulling up.

“I can’t keep my eyes open,” I told O.J. “We’ve done a lot, but there’s stuff in the garage we couldn’t get to. Take a look real quick look before they come in.”

We went downstairs and did a quick walk-through together. He was impressed by how much we’d replaced. But he did point to a Persian rug and say, “No, no, we’ve got to grab this. You don’t know how much this carpet is worth.”

I rolled it up.

“O.J., I have to get to get out here. My car is on your property and they might want to go through it and see if I’m removing anything.”

We went and woke Luke. O.J. ruffled his hair fondly, which he often did. We told Luke to get ready, and I went upstaurs with O.J. In his bedroom he suddenly said, “Shit. I can’t have this around.”

He reached under his bed and pulled out this wicked-looking machine gun, some sort of fully automatic assault weapon. My eyes bugged.

“Where did that come from?”

“Oh, some guy over at SWAT.”

I was thinking yes, that would be a hell of a sight. The sherriff, the movers and the media knock on the door, and O.J. answers with a machine gun in his hand.

“We’ve got to hide it,” I told him.

So we went back downstairs. O.J. unrolled the Persian rug and rolled the gun up in it, and handed it to me.

O.J. walked me and Luke to the door and gave me a hug.

“Alright, buddy. Thanks for everything. I appreciate it. Luke, I’ll see you later. Go get some breakfast.”

Luke and I walked out at the same time. I put the carpet with the gun in my trunk. As I drove my low-rider BMW out the Rockingham gate, the sherriff and his crew were driving in the Ashford gate. As we drove away, Luke looked around the car sleepily and asked, “What’s all this stuff?”

“It’s just stuff we’re keeping for Uncle O.J.”

I kept expecting to see blinking lights in the mirror. I didn’t relax until we reached the 405. We drove to a Denny’s for breakfast.

That replica USC jersey was later sold for several thousand dollars by the Los Angeles auction house Butterfield and Butterfield in 1999. The buyer took it to the courthouse where O.J.’s murder trial had been to burn it on the steps as a protest. The hilarious thing is, instead of just burning, the way the real jersey would have, it almost exploded in his face—because, being a cheap knock-off, it was polyester. That should have tipped someone off that it was a fake, but it didn’t.

And where is the real jersey? In a very safe and secure place.

 

 

Among the numerous other items auctioned off that day in 1999 was O.J.’s Heisman trophy. It went for $230,000. And it was the real one, not a fake. It would have been awfully hard for us to fake.

I first saw it the very first time I went to Rockingham to meet my idol O.J. Simpson in 1989. It was in a glass case. It felt like I was seeing the Holy Grail. In fact, I think ultimately I was much more attached to that thing emotionally than he was. To me, after all that happened, the Heisman was the symbol of a paradise lost, a sacred object. It was a great achievement, a trophy he had won fair and square, and I fought long and hard to keep it from becoming a token of destruction, a way for people to vent their fury against O.J.

Fred Goldman had told the press that he wanted to get hold of the trophy so he could smash it with a sledge hammer. There was also talk of melting it down and making Nicole Brown Simpson angel pins out of it.

I wanted something—anything—to be kept away from that mob fury, to preserve a small piece of history, of who O.J. had been. It was very personal. Not only was O.J. a hero, and my hero, when he won that trophy, but it also represented a time when I myself was still innocent.

O.J. won that trophy the day his first child, Arnelle, was born, in December of 1968. My feeling was: They can punish him however they like, but they can’t take this away. They can’t take away what he did on the field.

Wrong again.

The battle over the Heisman was like the battle over O.J.’s soul. I wanted it protected at all costs because it held and symbolized O.J.’s achievements as an athlete. The Goldmans wanted it for that very same reason—to be able to achieve revenge on “O.J. Simpson,” by crushing the very place where that identity was formed. Their objective, I believe, was to find a way to hurt O.J.. Which I must say he provoked himself by always taunting the Goldmans. For my part, I was no longer sure if I was defending “O.J. Simpson,” the athlete, O.J. Simpson, the man, myself, a vanquished dream, or my own self-image. All I knew was I had to fight. The battle was on, and I was prepared to fight to the death.

In 1997, O.J. was ordered to turn over the Heisman along with other valuables as part of the civil judgment. Funnily enough, though, it had vanished from its glass case at Rockingham. O.J. testified in his deposition for the civil trial that he came home from golf one day and it was just not there. Like a missing Pepsi from the fridge or something. He was completely nonchalant about it and said he had no idea where it was. He claimed he didn’t “really think much about it.”

Fred Goldman’s attorneys came after me and Skip Taft and accused us of hiding it, which was not true. The Heisman was, at that time, being held by Leo Turrell, a black attorney in L.A. who never worked on any of O.J.’s legal cases, but was a close friend of O.J.’s. Leo also had lots of things that had been collected by O.J.’s sister after we lost the judgment but before they collected on it. Leo kept these things safe in his office, and nobody ever thought to look there.

While the Heisman was “missing,” one of the tabloids offered something like $100,000 to whoever found it. Our lie was that I had seized it and that O.J. had no idea I had done so. I didn’t have it, and O.J. knew exactly where it was, of course. We all just did what needed to get done, quietly, wink wink, often without saying a word to any of the others, because it did not need to be said and one was careful not to rope in others when it could be avoided.

We knew we were going to have to turn it over, or some of us were going to wind up in jail, in contempt of court. I was given a deadline of December 15 1997 to turn it over or go to jail. Finally we worked it out that I got the trophy from Leo and turned it over to

one of O.J.’s attorneys, Ron Slate, who gave it up. Another item, wracked with tragic irony, was a 2ft by 3 ft plaque that Disney had presented to O.J. when they anointed him as their Man Of The Year.

When we got to Ron Slate’s office, before we went in, I stopped. As a final act of defiance, and without even thinking about it too carefully, I unscrewed the name plate from the trophy and put it in my pocket along with the screws. This was crazy of course.   But I was stalling for time. If they didn’t have the nameplate, in my mind, there was still a small piece of him, of O.J. the football hero, that they did not have. They could smash it, burn it, melt it down, but this way, without the name plate, they couldn’t completely humiliate him. Because he won it on the day that Arnelle was born, I had always hoped Arnelle would get to keep it, and I felt that would have been fair. When I removed the nameplate, my thought was that maybe we could have another trophy made, and put O.J.’s nameplate on that one.

I never dreamed it would cause such a hell storm—a new one now. The nameplate was estimated to be worth up to a quarter of a million dollars. Over the next several months, I was subpoenaed, deposed, and ordered by courts six different ways till sundown to turn over the nameplat, or go to jail. I finally took it over to O.J., who had by then moved out of Rockingham to a house on Alta Mura.

I said, “O.J., it’s up to you. You want me to hold it? I’ll hold it, and go to jail.”

O.J. was quiet for a moment, then said, “Turn it over.”

I handed it to O.J. He was holding it, looking at it. Then he got up, walked to a kitchen drawer, and took something out. At first I wasn’t sure what he was doing. I walked over to him. He had a knife, and he was defacing the name plate on the kitchen table.

I said, “O.J., stop.  What are you doing? We can fight this. We’ll get it back in court.”

He said, “No Mike, I’ll never see it again.”

“You can’t be sure.”

“Mike, we’ll never see it again.”

He started gashing the plate. The scratches weren’t going deep enough. He grabbed a screwdriver and started digging with the screwdriver, slashing harder. This was his last act of defiance. But he was defacing himself. It was among the saddest sights of my entire life.

I want to say to whoever the person is who owns the trophy today—if they want to know how all those scratches and gashes got there, it was done by O.J., just like he did to Ron and Nicole. It was that same frustrated anger and rage. There you have it.

By the way, I still have the original screws. I ran up over $20,000 in legal bills over the Heisman and the nameplate. The guy who bought the trophy at the auction called me two or three times asking me for those screws. I’m not giving them over.

When O.J. was questioned about it by Rolling Stone in 2000, he said: “I couldn’t understand why anybody would want to buy somebody else’s trophy. That was kind of perplexing. But losing the trophy really didn’t mean that much to me. I guess I kind of wish I had it now, for my kids. I feel about football the way I feel about high school. It’s part of my past. It’s just something I did.”

As usual, O.J. doesn’t care, right? That’s always his answer and his central lie, that he didn’t care so much. Not about Nicole, not about her affair with Marcus, not about that trophy, not about what people think of him.

Of course he cares. He cares deeply. Why can’t he be honest? This entire nightmare we have all been trapped in for almost 15 years is the result of O.J.’s total inability to be honest. This, in turn, is a by-product of the culture of sports and hero worship and celebrity. I myself fostered and fed it—that was my profession as a sports marketing agent. It’s a tissue of lies and delusions that we all create in order not to have to deal with the pain, humiliation, and difficulty of being real people, real men, who hurt, and cry, and suffer. None of that is tolerated or admitted in the narrow world of sports hero worship. If it were, the dream would all fall apart. It’s lies that make money, not truth.

 

 

Financially, the whole civil judgment thing was so bizarre and complex. Just to give you one of countless examples of financial Gordian knots: Lou Brown had sold the rights to Nicole’s diaries to the tabloids for $1 million, claiming she had left them in her safe deposit box in an envelope addressed “to Dad.” But funnily enough, he could never produce the envelope. O.J. felt that money should go to the kids, not to the Brown family. That was something that came up for discussion a lot.

The three parties had a joint settlement, the Browns, the Goldmans and Sharon Rufo, Ron’s mother. It wasn’t divided equally three ways. It was very convoluted, based on who had spent what on lawyers and all kinds of factors, where human loss is calculated. Human loss, of course, is incalculable. In the end, it degenerated into what I call cannibalism, because instead of it being fair and equitable it became all about who got there first. O.J. was willing to let assets go to the estate of Nicole, i.e. his kids, but not to the Goldmans or Sharon Rufo. The Brown family, in turn, were left in a position where if they helped the Goldmans, they hurt Sydney and Justin. It was so Byzantine, I doubt anybody alive can describe it all accurately.

That 1999 auction reportedly netted the victims’ families just under $400,000. Obviously, that didn’t even make a dent in the interest on the $33.5 million O.J. was ordered to pay. It was an unattainable number that he could never come up with as long as he lived, even before the murders. If it had been a few million dollars, we could have paid it off. Somebody could have paid it for him, possibly one of his wealthy friends. Instead, the enormity of the sum, in keeping with everything about this case, made it crushing, impossible, and even absurd.

At one point there was talk, between the attorneys, of a settlement, but Goldman rejected it. Maybe the Goldmans are telling the truth when they say “it’s not about the money.” What they want is to pursue O.J. to the last breath he draws. And I think they will.

I can’t say I blame them.

I do, sincerely, empathize with the Goldmans. All those years, we all had what we called the “bunker mentality,” and for me, the Goldmans were the bad guys, because of this battle we were in. But the longer I have been away from O.J. the worse I feel for Mr. Goldman. I wish I could take back every cutting thing I ever said about him.

I put my sons’ faces on Ron Goldman, and it breaks my heart. When I reviewed the timeline of June 12, I saw that he had clocked out of work at Mezzaluna at 9:33 pm, and apparently 42 minutes later he was dead. Why? Because he was being a good guy, being thoughtful, being a good friend, just like the kind of thing my kids would do, go return somebody’s glasses.

When I saw that timeline I started thinking about what I was doing at that exact time, and I started crying, for the first time in years. I was with my oldest son, David, in Yosemite. It all hit me, hard, after all these years of such extreme defensiveness. How often does Kim Goldman wish she could call her brother and she can’t? How often does Fred Goldman imagine what Ron’s life would have been like, or how many kids he might have if he’d been allowed to live? And why? Because of O.J.?

The Goldmans are the only people I would really like to be forgiven by.

 

[line]

 

 

It was the last day at Rockingham. O.J. had lived in this house for almost 21 years. It had been his port in the storm and the one thing in his life that held its center, that didn’t, in his mind, let him down or abandon or betray him. The house. You remember how badly he wanted to get to Rockingham both when during the Bronco chase and when he got out of prison? “I want to go home,” he said adamantly in both cases.

Nicole had also developed an acute longing for that house, not necessarily as the house she loved the most–that would have been her condo at Bundy–but as the house where O.J.was, where life with O.J. was. She knew that to get back together with O.J. she had to get back into Rockingham. She pleaded with him to let her move back in. He was rather cold about it, refusing her each time. He was willing to start “dating” her again in that last year to see if it would work out, but he would not let her and the kids back into “his” house. I always found this relationship–between O.J. and his house–a little strange.

 

 

So the day had finally come. The house was virtually empty but for a few stray boxes, some broken lamps, things nobody wanted. All we had to do now was say good bye.

Leave.

O.J. always flew the American flag in the back yard. I went out and looked at it, and felt an immense, complex sadness. We had come so close to living the American dream, actually holding it in our hands and knowing what it was. Now we were ship-wrecked, packing up and leaving, in disgrace, and also in confusion. What was it, really, exactly, that has caused our terrible downfall?

 

Double murder, you might say.

 

Fair enough.

 

But what caused those double murders?

 

O.J. Simspon, in a rage, with a knife.

 

Fair enough, but how did he get there, with that knife in hand, in that dark driveway, and why, when he had climbed so high, transcended so much, only to lose it all, literally, in a few seconds in a slashing fury?

 

This is the mystery.

 

I had a camera and a video camera with me that last day at Rockingham. I documented everything. I filmed him taking down the flag for the last time. Then we walked through the house, room to room. When we got to O.J.’s office, he became very solemn. He was staring at the floor. He pointed to a part of the carpeted floor and said: “Right there…was the first place I ever made love to Nicole. Right there.”

He just stood there staring.

“O.J.,” I said, “why don’t you take part of the carpet? It’s obviously very important to you.”

“I can’t destroy the carpet Mike.”

“Why not?” I said. “This means a lot to you. We don’t have to take it out of the main floor, we can take a piece out of the closet carpet.”

 

I opened the door to a small closet in the office and got down on my knees with a box cutter in hand.

“I’m sure when they auction off the house they won’t notice this.”

 

I cut out two pieces, about 8 X 8 inches each. I gave one to him and kept one for myself, which I still have to this day.

 

Then we went outside. In the concrete outside, near the patio, they had carved their names “O.J. & Nicole,” and their wedding  anniversary date. O.J. said, “I would hate to leave this.”

“Why don’t we take it with you I said, if it means so much to you.”

This time I didn’t have to persuade him. I got a skill saw, put a diamond blade on it, and used a Rotterdam to cut the concrete. It took a couple of hours. O.J. would come and check my progress from time to time. To the very end, I was trying to answer his losses with preservation of memories, as if that would make anything better or different. I am a very sentimental person in many ways, and in fact, so is O.J.

I finally managed to cut loose that piece of concrete–it was about 16 inches long, 6-7 inches wide, and 4 inches deep. “Here,” I said, handing it to O.J.

He took it and placed it in one of his bags. Then we did one last walk through of the house, to see if we’d forgotten anything.

When I went to see O.J. in the house he leased right after he left Rockingham, up on the hill in Alta Mura, he still had that piece of concrete and the piece of carpet. I am pretty sure he brought those two things with him wherever he moved after that.

 

 

 

You Will Hear Thunder

Posted on May 2, 2014

 

 

You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.

 

 

 

[From: You Will Hear Thunder, Anna Ahkmatova]

 

Bounce (A Truer Story)

Posted on April 2, 2014

by Liam Scheff

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m almost human today, having reverted from whatever maudlin and darkly creative state the world usually extrudes me, into a more wide-open pose. Perhaps it was my intersection with a woman accelerating blindly into the intersection yesterday. I’ll restrain myself from a parsed, tight-lipped explanation that might make you think I was hit by a car and bounced off of its hood and tossed onto the road — that would be too dramatic. It is what happened – but I was able to stand and my job became to soothe and calm the woman, who seemed all at once in deep tremorous shock.

People don’t see cyclists, I refuse to pass in front of a car paused at an intersection, as they crane their necks right into traffic; they never see me until they hit the accelerator. This one, though, was 12 to 15 feet away, and I felt sure she’d s…

And then she was accelerating and I was sure she would hit me, it was inextricable, and then I was on top of a hood, and the bike, I noticed was too, and then there was the pavement. And I thank the Holy Lord and Lords and Goddess and Spirits and Angels that no car zoomed quite near me, and that she responded to my yell of ‘Stop!’ But, really, more, “stop.”

“Stop” is such an interesting word. It means so many things. Stop: cease, desist, arretez!  But also, “Please notice the fellow on your hood and release the accelerator and do seize the brake, dear.”

The blacktop was a calm place. I lay there like it was my right to, like we were old friends. I felt myself to be entirely conscious and calm. I wasn’t thinking about other cars; I stood up and brushed myself off. I noticed the mass of swirled pollen and dust on the hood of her car. I wondered where it was on my person. On my shirt, shorts? I notice my forearm was a little scuffed, the most superficial skin abraded, by hardly at all, and I realized how lucky, entirely fortunate I’d been.

I got to bounce off the hood of a car and tell the tale. I was finally in a movie. The kind we see on TV growing up. Oh, I understand the seriousness – but – I did a real, professional stunt. And … that is kind of cool.

The woman was a shaking ghost, I had to stand with her, a hand on her shoulder, for fear she’d have a heart attack. I said, “you’ll have to look both ways, I’m okay. It’s okay. But you’ll have to look both ways.”

I said I did not want to call police – oh, what a wreck they make out of peaceful situations – and examined the bike, which was a little, though not greatly, offended by the bruising.

I said, ‘I’ll have to get this fixed, would you mind, would you be willing to come to the bike shop with me – I know them, and see what it costs – ‘

She shook her head in agreement as though understanding the Gods had let her off easy, too. “Of course, of course.”

Not an educated, but an experienced woman, late fifties, generous bosom, well-built, had enjoyed and suffered in life. A progressed “Nancy” from Oliver who had avoided Bill Sykes. I liked her. I didn’t want her to have a heart attack.

Back on the bike, she followed me in her trans am. Slowly. I rode with the thought of my own slightly skewed perceptions and knew I might be experiencing a touch of shock. But, the CBD I’d taken had left me very, almost ironically calm. The locals who came quickly to the scene of the pavement on the – well – very busy street – so, more God, more luck looking out for me – were kind, asked if I was alright. They were the oft-drunk, worse for wear residents of the park, and a lawn club of dark-toothed, tattooed drinking till death do us part Americans. And all were quite sympathetic. The whole thing restored a bit of faith in the average human to have concern elicited from them.

She followed in her Trans Am; we made it to the bike shop, but not before I was almost backed over by a mini-van. I stood, pausing, shaking my head and cursing a bit because people in cars are tools for Satan’s arse. Absolutely fucking blind with distraction goggles, hopelessly unaware and talking on radiation devices. No one looks around.

We made it, the nice woman, still with some shakes, her bosom still generous and raised for comment in her top – a woman showing the degrading collagen of the mid 50s; showing the face of both the girl and the old woman – reminded me (now I realize) of a type: Valerie Perrine in American cinema. She came into the bike shop with me; I talked to my friends there, briefly described the issue, sparing the woman’s role, and we walked out.

I felt strangely turned on – and some lusty odd part of me wondered if I could extract sex from this? I decided not to try at all, I’d regret it, I was in some state of emotion, not thinking clearly… I said she was free to go – if she’d be willing to pay the fee for the bike realignment, I’d appreciate it. She seemed in no rush to leave, so we sat outside and waited a half block away in front of a cafe. I heard something about her, we talked about CBD oil, and how I’ve had worse bumps by pharmaceutical goons. We talked about gardening – or I did, and suggested it was a good thing to do locally. She talked about bugs, I said I knew people who could help.

We went back in, she paid the 26 dollars and change for the ‘truing’ of the bike and the touch up. I wished her well, said I’d send her information regarding gardening locally. I gave her another hug – I’d given her a couple – to calm her – to reassure her that whatever film was playing in her head was not playing in real life. She’s a nice lady, and I appreciated that she would have sincerely regretted hurting me. (She’s clearly not a doctor.)

She asked me if I wanted some money; I didn’t. I don’t know what the normal fee for hitting someone on a bicycle is. I waived it. She was very appealing, in her way. Maybe I wouldn’t have regretted it. (Not that it was offered – but she seemed a sweet person; how much the world wants for some generosity, it’s so filled with venom, so pointlessly, so needlessly).

I had been on my way to a longer ride, to what I call “the Asiamarket,” but which you know under the name “Wal.” (What monstrosities we’re given to while away our days. A degraded fluorescent-bleached heap of garbage food in a plastic electric retailer), but it’s where I was going. I can’t recall why; would I risk the ride?

I pedaled, I paid close attention; noticed the tinges of slight anxiety around cars; met eyesight, proceeded with extra care. And was, blessedly, fine.

I’d gotten an email earlier that the bad guys were planning to hurt me financially by writing bad reviews on Amazon, particularly Amazon UK. They laughed to themselves about having to waste money on my book to review it.

It is to say, all in all. I think cars hit the wrong people.

So, I’ve been lightly punched by a car; I am lucky. Very. Also to have some good friends, and also, at this point in life, to be a nice  – a kind person. A generous one, too. Foolishly so? I suppose I could have made 20 to 60 dollars, but chose instead to make a deposit into the karmic bank. (Oh, hear me karma, I’m paying ahead.)

 

 

Liam Scheff is, through the glass darkly, author of Official Stories: Counterarguments For A Culture In Need

Quite Simply The Greatest Cat Video Ever Made

Posted on March 24, 2014

My son Jeremy showed me this  sublime video last night.

There are thousands of “funny” or even “hiilarious” animal videos on the Internet but few deserve to be called sublime.

It could prevent suicides, if it were shown on emergency screens affixed to bridges. It could save marriages. It could replace 10 years of therapy.

At the first “pom!” I am laughing so hard I forget I have PTSD. In fact, am cured.

 

Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

The Secret (A Very Short Play)

Posted on November 23, 2013

It’s 2018, late fall. Two friends meet in an enclave of Central Park known to contain a sonic dead spot, where conversation can’t be overheard. It’s dusk.

 

 

CONTINUE READING “THE SECRET (A VERY SHORT PLAY)”→

Poetry: Sandra Cisneros (Via Junot Diaz)

Posted on October 28, 2013

One Last Poem For Richard

December 24th and we’re through again.
This time for good I know because I didn’t
throw you out — and anyway we waved.
No shoes. No angry doors.
We folded clothes and went
our separate ways.
You left behind that flannel shirt
of yours I liked but remembered to take
your toothbrush. Where are you tonight?

Richard, it’s Christmas Eve again
and old ghosts come back home.
I’m sitting by the Christmas tree
wondering where did we go wrong.

Okay, we didn’t work, and all
memories to tell you the truth aren’t good.
But sometimes there were good times.
Love was good. I loved your crooked sleep
beside me and never dreamed afraid.

There should be stars for great wars
like ours. There ought to be awards
and plenty of champagne for the survivors.

After all the years of degradations,
the several holidays of failure,
there should be something
to commemorate the pain.

Someday we’ll forget that great Brazil disaster.
Till then, Richard, I wish you well.
I wish you love affairs and plenty of hot water,
and women kinder than I treated you.
I forget the reason, but I loved you once,
remember?

Maybe in this season, drunk
and sentimental, I’m willing to admit
a part of me, crazed and kamikaze,
ripe for anarchy, loves still.

–Sandra Cisneros, 2013

***

I discovered the poetry of Sandra Cisneros as I opened Junot Diaz’ masterpiece This is How You Lose Her, where he has excerpted, or perhaps offered a dub mix rendition of the poem above, as follows:

Okay, we didn’t work, and all
memories to tell you the truth aren’t good.
But sometimes there were good times.
Love was good. I loved your crooked sleep
beside me and never dreamed afraid.

There should be stars for great wars
like ours.

**

(I love both versions, long and short, probably equally, maybe with a slight preference for the shorter one.)

What They Said: Junot Diaz

Posted on October 28, 2013

“The biggest megaphones want to talk about the person on top. They want to talk about the hero, the winner. But the little megaphones, you’re in a library with your librarian, you’re working at the church in the basement, helping folks out, you’re coming in to a home and reading to elderly. There are all these other little megaphones that are telling you and whispering that “This is beauty, this is humanity, this is America.”

Junot Diaz

Sunday

Posted on October 28, 2013

 

In church, today, an elderly couple sat two pews in front of me, a bit apart. They both had short, grey hair. He reached over and stroked the nape of her neck, tenderly. I quickly decided this was happening because they were Christian, so not overcome with the hatred that has consumed men and women. My mind always writes these stories.

I knelt down to pray and my head was bowed. My neck was exposed because I had put my hair up in a clip. I was praying for comfort.

I asked Jesus to please come, here, as in come here, which I had never thought to ask before. I read this in a book by Teresa of Avila, that you have to picture him in front of you as you pray. Right away, I “saw” the edges of his robe, as he approached, and felt a warm hand radiating kindness over my neck, not touching it. My eyes filled with tears. I could swear he said, “dear child,” but I can never tell what is my own mind and what isn’t.
This has never happened before, in Church. I don’t go very often, at all.

Once I was on an Amtrak train in the deep south and the guy working the cafe car called me “dear child,” when he asked me what I wanted. I never forgot it.

When the Priest, in his rust colored robe, shook my hand on the way out, he seemed to know what had happened.

**

Chambers Street subway platform, hardly anybody there: A man bent over and a small plastic bottle of Beefeater’s gin dropped from his pocket. He knelt down and picked it up. He looked around. The train came.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves

Posted on October 27, 2013

I turned to Lester Bangs today to ponder Lou Reed, the totally encrypted enigma of rock who just died, as you probably know.

I tried to find the text of Bangs’ legendary interview with Lou Reed from CreemLet us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves, , and I found it as a PDF, but WordPress won’t let me link it, so I can’t provide it, at least not right now.

Has there been a single rock critic with a heart, since Bangs?

Not that I am aware of. I worked at SPIN magazine for something like 13 years, but I was “non music,” so not permitted to even dream about having valid opinions on these things. Male business.

In any case, here’s a profoundly prophetic quote from the anti-snob Lester, who tried in vain, single-handedly, to give rock meaning, soul, and heart–redeem it from its sadomasochistic, misogynist impulses, which a rock-worshipping cult refuses to take on:

“The only questions worth asking today are whether humans are going to have any emotions tomorrow, and what the quality of life will be if the answer is no.”

It was not until I saw Lou Reed’s Berlin, the documentary film featuring Reed performing the crushingly depressing Berlin that I understood the depth of emotion and paradoxical beauty of that otherworldly album.

It’s the first Schnabel film I managed to feel anything for. It’s quite stunning and if you haven’t seen it you should.

The Crystal

Posted on August 26, 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don’t know if you can see the crystal yet.

On clear nights when your heart has good reception, when you have managed to push aside your illusions, noise, static, your notions that you were not loved–you can begin to decipher the crystal. It will tell you the one and only story, of all things broken through all time and space, never, in fact, broken at all, never betrayed, never lost. It was always one story, it always will be.

You get glimpses of it, but it blinds you and you look away, or stall for time. Gather shrapnel, your junkyard stories that the crowds like to hear. You swear one day you will tell the story of the crystal. If you can just get it to talk to you some more. You need proof.

You have proof.

It seems to be breaking, all the time. It all seems to be breaking, smashing, burning. But on nights when the crystal whispers to you you understand that it is not so.

Nothing that ever seemed smashed, lost, forsaken or betrayed leaves the crystal. It holds everything and restores it.

It’s all there.

Like when you were a child and you saw the snow coming down and knew the secret, and shouted for joy no matter what was behind you in the living room.

 

 

 

Discovering The Diamonds Of René Char

Posted on August 23, 2013

I am staying in a loft in Bushwick, Brooklyn that has many intriguing books I sometimes pull from the shelves. One that has pierced my heart is “Selected Poems” by renowned French poet René Char, who I never read before.

 

Char is sometimes referred to as a “surrealist” which may be why I was phobic before I read him, but now that I have read him I am as awestruck as I was the first times I read Tomas Tranströmer.

It’s complex but it is not opaque. (post-modern)

It is not false, and perhaps most amazingly, it is not dark. I would call it,  “lamenting ecstatic.” Char’s poems have gravity, are made of something ancient, heavy, real–are anchors that (I at least) want to be weighted by, brought to the bottom, the quiet sea-floor, see his beautiful ruins.

Williams Carlos Williams is quoted, in the dedication page:

 

René Char

 

You are a poet who believes

in the power of beauty

to right all wrongs.

I believe it also.

***

 

Here’s the Char poem I wanted to share with you today:

 

 

To Resume

 

We suddenly got too close to something from which we’d been kept at a mysteriously favorable and measured distance. Since then, corrosion. Our headrest has disappeared.

 

It is unbearable to feel oneself a committed and impotent part of beauty that is dying through the fault of others. Committed in one’s breast and impotent in the movement of ones mind.

 

If what I show you and what I give you seem less to you than what I hide,

my weighing is poor, my reaping ineffectual.

 

You are, poem, a wayside altar of darkness on my too exposed face. My splendor and my suffering have slipped between the two.

 

I must cast off life’s ugly accumulation and find again the gaze that loved it enough in the beginning to display its foundation. What is left for me to live exists in this assault, this tremor.

 

 

—René Char

 

 

 

What They Said: Theodore I. Rubin

Posted on August 12, 2013

 

“I must learn to love the fool in me–the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled, masterful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of my human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my Fool.”

― Theodore I. Rubin, M.D.

Author, Compassion and Self-Hate: An Alternative To Despair

A Child’s Heart In A Woman’s Body

Posted on August 12, 2013

“Do your thing,” he said, when she said she needed to do something.

All of a sudden she did not know what she “needed” to do. She was thinking there was some email she needed to send regarding something she had not done, but she was confused.

She wanted to talk to him and ask if he felt anything unusual had happened. People were disinclined to say that anything unusual had happened.

“Did you buy this broom?” he asked.

“I did” she said. As he swept the debris from the wood floor into the dust pan, she saw for the first time that the broom’s fibers were bright pink. This struck her as hopeful.

A diffuse light was flooding the loft, and it seemed important that nobody say anything impractical.

He went to the sink.

“You’re doing the dishes again,” she said, smiling.

“I am.”

She decided to do a load of laundry, just to be productive. She glanced at a key-chain on the shelf with a frowning Che Guevara, and wanted to start an argument about Che Guevara, but they weren’t even his keys. Nor hers. But somehow because of the Che Guevara key-chain she became convinced that she should be performing some kind of labor.

“I’m going to do some laundry,” she said.

And suddenly she wondered whether she was real. Where was she? Whose loft was this? Why couldn’t she enter her own life? It was like trying to step onto a moving train. Landscapes, people, events passed her by but she could not stop the train, get off, and say: “Here.”

Instead she was always moving. So was everybody else. Sometimes people focused on one another a bit. But everybody understood that they were all in some kind of aquarium.

“I want you to come with me to the laundry room,” she said.

He was looking out the window.

“I love when the birds do that,” he said.

She looked and saw two teams of birds in the sky over the rooftops doing what looked like a square dance in the sky. Flying through one another, just changing sides.

“They’re weaving,” she said.

It was hard work, being so nonchalant. She wanted him to stay but it was better that he had to go, since everything had to make sense.

Truth Barriers [Seed Of Novel]

Posted on August 9, 2013

I can try to put it down more or less but you won’t believe a word of it.

I want to counsel you to close your eyes, look the other way, or whatever you can to counter the filthy truth-seeking habit that landed me where I am.

Forget the truth like you forget nightmares about burning slime chasing you uphill. Forget it. Go the other way. Nothing good will come of it. You will find your gold-tooth truth and you will desperately long for the days before you went hunting for it. The truth will only break your heart, every time.

It will also break your neck, consume you, lick your bones, spit out your soul, and ask, mockingly, if you’re still interested.

Say no.

1971

Posted on August 6, 2013

 

Anyway I had a goldfish, a common Woolworth’s goldfish, who I brought home in a water filled plastic bag, and somebody, a man named Rick I think, who worked for my father, said it would be safe to place him in a concrete planter on the terrace, filled with water. Everybody is always doing their best. I remember his kind and comforting energy and I think he had been a marine.

I named my goldfish Simon. I loved him, but I can’t swear he had any real feelings for me. I turned him into my best friend, confided in him. It was the year my life collapsed. I was six, and my mother had disappeared.

Every morning, having bolted down the spiral staircase carrying my mother’s portrait, asking anybody I could find if she had CALLED, being rebuffed, I would go sit on the edge of that planter, and stroke Simon’s tail through the water.

One morning I came out and found him curled up in the drain hole, the water was gone. I can still see his small orange body curled up in there, defeated.

I don’t think I cried then. But strangely enough I cried today, in a cold cafe in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with waterfalls on the walls, and people working on their laptops. I was already coming apart, from the night before, but now I started to experience what felt like Simon’s emotions from 1971. Could that be?

A searing pain right through my heart that felt dark blue and like a thread, weaving a telegram from childhood from was never delivered at the time. I gripped my own throat, pushed up against my jawbone and tried to block the tears. Simon would not have understood why the water was leaving. He would have been wondering why I had let this happen to him, not protected him. He would feel betrayed, so deeply betrayed, just as I had. And he had no chance.

I always wondered what time it happened.

Touching Hunger–Fiction By Peter S. Kahrmann

Posted on August 1, 2013

 

Two weeks before she died Mary switched to day shift at Mookie’s Diner. She and Mickey Quinn wanted more time together. Mickey was the day chef. He’d taken the job fourteen months earlier after moving back to the neighborhood. He’d tired of life in the big city; thirteen years was enough.

Life had not been easy for Mickey Quinn. He’d be the first to tell you much of the difficulty was his own doing. Mickey was like that. Honest. Straight forward. Said things in straight lines rather than leave you wondering. A rebellious streak got him fired from more than one job. (Six actually.) He’d never been a fan of authority. There’d been a  brief stint of homelessness. (If you think four months is brief.)

In the beginning Mickey liked Mary straight away. Mary had her doubts. He seemed nice enough. She’d never seen any chef love his work as much as Mickey did. He was forever checking on the tables, making sure people were enjoying their meals, refilling coffees – sometimes to the wait staff’s chagrin. On some occasions if people seemed down on their luck, not able to order as much food as maybe they’d like, Mickey’d come out of the kitchen moaning about having made too much lasagna or how had he been so stupid cooking up four more Philly cheese steaks then he needed. He’d give the food to those who looked like they needed it most, assuring them, while doing so, that they were doing him a favor by accepting it. After all, he couldn’t eat it all and if they didn’t accept it he’d have to throw the food out and – here he would dramatically cross himself and look sorrowfully up at the ceiling – his dear late mother would never forgive him. Mary liked how he watched out for their dignity, everybody’s dignity, come to think of it.  Including the wait staff, remarkably enough. Never treated them like servants, like there was nothing more to their lives than the fact they worked as waiters and waitresses. Still, she wasn’t sure. First of all she was beautiful. Formidably so by any measure. Her beauty got her attention from men (and some women) leaving her with the dispiriting task of figuring out if the person in question was talking to her or her looks.

With Mickey Quinn’s straight forward way it didn’t take her long to determine that, yes, he was, in fact, talking to her. But, she wanted to be very careful. She’d made the wrong choice more than once. She’d done exactly that seven months earlier with tall, slender, deceitful Luke. Handsome Luke. A smile that could melt ice. The mouth that wore the smile spun falsehoods so elaborate they’d make any politician proud. Like other men of handsome stock she’d slept with he was a dud in bed. During the act a disconcerting pinched expression appeared on his face making him look as if he was suddenly feeling unwell or holding back a fart as opposed to being in the throes of, if not wonderful sex, pedestrian sex – recognizable, discernible, identifiable sex. Anything, dear mother of God, except looking like you were fighting off the sudden onset of nausea, or flatulence.

Mickey signaled his interest in Mary by sending her flowers, anonymously at first. He paid his friend Rafael, a seventeen-year-old kid from the neighborhood, five bucks to deliver the flowers to Mary at the diner. Rafael made his money doing odd jobs in the neighborhood, sweeping up  sidewalks in front of the stores in the warm weather, washing windows, shoveling snow in the winter, and, in this instance, delivering flowers. Rafael was under strict instructions to keep the identity of the sender secret.

Mickey’d bought the flowers from Herbert Slepoff, an old man with a Santa Claus beard who sold flowers seemingly twenty-four hours a day on the corner of Lilly Street and Box Avenue. The first time Rafael delivered the flowers to Mary she asked who they were from. “Got me, lady. Guess somebody likes you.” Mary thanked him and gave him a five dollar tip which led Rafael to tell Mickey he should keep sending flowers because it looked like it’s working, the lady likes them a lot. Anyway, he thought, but did not say, she was very pretty and when she smiled his knees weakened. That, and who in their right mind gives up a ten-dollar gig if they don’t have to?

Rafael lost his ten-dollar gig the day Mickey decided to deliver the flowers to Mary himself. He didn’t have to say a word, nor did she. But she did. Soft-smiling and wet-eyed: “You.” And then the treasured first hug, where the all of each sighs dreamily, happily, into the others arms, hearts and souls and bodies fully satiated.

Rafael was well liked in the neighborhood, known to be a good hard working kid who gave his weekly earnings to his mother never keeping more than five dollars for himself. His father walked out on them when Rafael was two months old. As far as Rafael was concerned, the sonuvabitch didn’t exist. Yes, his mother drank too much and let too many men like her for that one reason, but mother and son were close. No matter their struggles, they were in it together.

Rafael attended evening GED classes twice a week, he told Mickey once, while the two of them were on the corner eating fresh apples Mr. Greenberg gave them for free because his oldest daughter Sylvia was engaged to be married and it was about time because Sylvia was pushing forty, thank you very much, and Mr. Greenberg wanted to know she was married, happy, and settled before he died. He’d not been feeling so good lately, he told them. But he was smiling when he gave them the apples which was rare anyway because everybody knew what the numbers tattooed on his forearm meant. Morris Greenberg knew horror.

“When you get your GED then what?”

“My mother says you should make your dreams come true because if you don’t they stay in your head and next thing you know they’re nothin’ but memories.”

“Smart woman.”

Rafael nodded, quickly ate the core of the apple flicking the stem into the gutter. “How come you left the city?”

“Didn’t work for me.”

“It’s expensive livin’ there.”

“Costs more’n dollars. You buy into the hype about the city so fast next thing you know you don’t know who you are anymore. The city’s the center of the world, summit of the universe. Most important place on planet earth. It’s if you make it there you can make it anywhere crap, and, if you make it anywhere but there you are crap. That’s how they get your money. Millions of dollars to live in brick fortresses without backyards ‘less it’s on the roof or something. You think if you move out you’re settling for second place, if that. You think you failed. You’ve been defeated by the big city. You weren’t good enough. So you stay. Most do anyway. Ever hear of H.L. Mencken?”

“Nope.”

“Ballsy guy from Baltimore. Died in the fifties some time. Mencken said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” The city’s proof.”

“Give me woods anytime.”

“Me too.”

“How’d you break out?”

“I don’t remember when exactly, but at some point I realized I was putting a whole lot of time and effort into being someone I’m not, and never will be. Almost anything. Didn’t matter – actor, writer, anything’d make my name show up somewhere. You start thinking, fuck thinking, believing if people didn’t know your name you didn’t exist. Like you’re invisible.”

“Like fame’s the answer.”

“Yeah. Fuck fame.”

Rafael thought for a moment, bent down, retied his right sneaker, fingers deftly flashing. “So what made you want to be a cook?”

“I’m walking home from this rehearsal on Grand Street. Winter. I see this old guy. Homeless guy. All balled up in a doorway. Store’s closed, it’s Sunday. He’s wearing a fatigue jacket. Not camouflage like today, but the World War II kind – like my Dad actually.” Mickey pauses, looks down the street, seeing nothing but his father in a World War II fatigue jacket. “Anyway… he’s all balled up in the cold. Poor guy was freezing. He’s got this shopping cart with this one wobbly-ass bent wheel next to him filled up with all kinds of shit he’s been collecting. Bottles, cans, clothing, bags filled with scraps of paper. There’s no way this guy’s not hungry. So I wake him up and ask him if he’s hungry and he says yeah he’s hungry. So I ask him if he wants to get some food with me and he says yeah but he can’t leave his cart by itself and I get that so I get us both some soup and buttered rolls and some coffee from a deli. I don’t want him eating alone. So we have a meal together.”

“What’d you eat?”

“Soup and rolls, same as him.”

“So he knows you’re equals.”

Mickey smiles. “Fuck if he didn’t used to be a high school math teacher. Dude was a mathematician; I’m talking real mathematician too. Turns out all those scraps of paper in those bags are all covered with figures and symbols.”

“How’d he’d wind up homeless?”

“Didn’t ask. Name was Mr. Reynolds. Alan Reynolds. Said all he wanted was to keep his stomach full, do his math problems, watch pretty girls, and think about his hero, this guy named Paul Erdös.”

“Who?”

“Some famous mathematician. Hungarian I think. There’s some book about him called The Man who Loved Numbers.  Mr. Reynolds  loved him.”

“You call him Mr. Reynolds?”

“What, you call your teachers by their first name?”

“Nope.” Rafael smiling, nods.

“So Mr. Reynolds tells me he spends his days doing these math problems and thinkin’ about Paul Erdös.”

“And watchin’ pretty girls.”

“Told me he works on things called infinite series and set theory, shit I couldn’t get on my best day. Looks like a different language. ”

“So you fed him.”

“Yup. That’s when I knew.”

Rafael one eyebrow going up.

“Right then I knew I wanted to be a cook. Feed people. Nothing I can think of has more meaning than feeding someone.”

“You die without it.”

“Without it lots of things. You eat you’re taking care of yourself. You feed someone, you’re helping them. There’s something spiritual about it. Watching faces relax when they begin to chow down. Almost like they can rest for a moment, catch a break. With all the death and suffering in the world, man, no excuse but greed for people goin’ hungry.  I can’t think of anything more honorable than feeding people. Life is good for me now, beyond I ever hoped for. I cook food for people five days a week, Mary every day if she lets me. Take a break, she says, let me cook for you. She does too. Makes the best cheese omelet’s I ever had. Cheddar. Little sprinkling of oregano. Life with her, man, it’s gotta be one of the things makes people say heaven on earth.”

“What happened to Mr. Reynolds?”

“Never saw him again. Walked by the same place next day he was gone.”

“Ever wonder if he was real?”

“You mean did I imagine him?”

“Yeah.”

“…Frequently.”

 

It was three minutes past one in the afternoon when the first pain struck. Mary had just served Joe Montenegro his coffee. A portly pasty man who daily stopped in for breakfast and lunch and regaled all who would (and wouldn’t) listen with stories of the good old days. (His good old days, anyway.) At seventy-three the perpetually wheezing retired bookkeeper was proud of the fact his father, the late Giuseppe Montenegro, had been a milkman. Not milkperson, thank you very much. Joe Montenegro would snap at anyone who dared to correct him and use what they stupidly thought was the politically correct word, milkperson. Bull. As low on the totem pole of success as he might’ve been in the eyes of some, his father’d been the real thing, the real deal. He’d been a milkman.

“A milkman was about a lot more than just milk. (Insert sir, madam or friends.) Poppa would bring full bottles of fresh milk and pick up the empties. This was a certainty. Life needs certainty. He’d bring his customers cream, cheese, eggs, butter, even soda pop! It is a stain on this country that the nurturance of simplicity is no more, a stain as sure as I’m sitting here. And what is life now I ask you? (He never paused for an answer and one was never offered.) People staring into those so-called smart phones and iPads. Can you think of a name that screams self-absorbed louder than that product’s name? I think not.”

Joseph Montenegro was in the midst of presenting his milkman monologue to Pastor James Winston of the local Methodist Church when Mary refilled their coffees, turned to walk away, dropped the metal coffee pot on the floor, and grabbed at her chest. Clenched in pain on the floor Mary inexplicably found herself watching a thin rivulet of coffee leaking from the coffee pot and wondered if it would reach the base of the counter. “Jesus,” she whispered, exhaling.

“You okay kid?”

“My chest.” Again, clutching. “This isn’t right. I’m wrong with me. Mickey!” Her mind shadow swimming in memories, soft patches then sudden arcs of color, pulsing, and need, so much need. Thinking, Mickey? Yes, God, the pain, can I remember, please, that lovely thing he did, his car breaking down, the state trooper giving him a ride home. Mickey baking a cake and bringing it to the trooper’s barracks three days later… Oh, God, Mickey, not now. She was sick with the flu, the knock on the door, then the key. Mickey, thank God. In he came with the best chicken soup she’d ever had in her life. He made her tea with real honey, not the dead honey sold in stores. “You’re magic with food,” she said. He kissed her, flu and all. He kissed her. Pain surging. Mickey, please!

Mary on the floor behind the counter, unconscious now, sweat soaked. Mookie holding her head, weeping, Pastor James Winston’s lips moving in prayer. The ambulance arrives. Fifty-seven minutes later in the emergency room Mary is pronounced dead.

 

Three months later.

He avoids all music. Melody tears holes in his chest. He does not walk down certain streets. Memories everywhere. Every street heartbreak. When he did walk it was in the park, shoulders hunched, head bowed, expecting another blow at any moment. Another would kill him. (A welcome event.) Sometimes sitting on the grass against a tree he wishes he could be a little boy again and start all over. Why would God kill a young woman with a heart attack?

It has been weeks since anyone’s seen him. He’d had his phone disconnected. Didn’t answer the door. After the burial he never went back to the diner. He just vanished, disappeared. Mookie told people he always had a job at the diner but after weeks went by nobody questioned him when he hired another day chef. Rafael stopped in from time to time, made eye contact with Mookie, one of the waitresses, heads wagged no. No one had seen him.

Mickey’s landlady said he’d moved out, no forwarding address. “He was heart broke sad,” she told Rafael. “Sometimes a body just knows when enough is enough.” Now Rafael was scared. Not that he thought Mickey would kill himself, but, then again, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d been wrong about people. Hell, Billy Winston won more than $18,000 in a poker game at Sal’s Chimney Room one night, went home and put a gun in his mouth. Note said he wanted to go out a winner. Fucking people. You just never know.

Early morning bone cold tired on a bench, a pulsing ache, fragmented thoughts, somewhere in the thinking dark the day’s first birds flipped pastel jewels of sound into the air, flickers of life. He tried and failed to grab onto them, sing back in return, call out, but there was too much ache and for some reason he couldn’t move his mouth. Maybe he was still sleeping, or perhaps it was death, now, hopefully. The birds again. Again he struggled. Then a familiar voice in a whisper from far away called his name. The ache now beginning to fade, the flicker of bird songs farther away. Good, quiet, let go. Let it all go. Then, again, the familiar voice in a raised whisper. “Mickey. Yo, Mickey.” He was in motion, rocking now. Someone was rocking him. He opened his eyes, Rafael looking down at him, smiling. “Hey, we miss you.” Rafael helps him to sitting on the bench, takes off his coat, wraps it around Mickey’s shoulders, pulls it closed in front. Mickey nods, still unable to speak. Not yet. Speaking means return. Not yet.

“You hungry?”

Mickey nods.

“Me too. I’ll be right back.”

 

 

 

Nushawn Williams Verdict

Posted on June 29, 2013

This afternoon I received this email from OMSJ’s Clark Baker, about the Nushawn Williams Civil Commitment verdict in Buffalo:

Nushawn just called me – he said that the jury deliberated for 25 minutes before finding him guilty. I told him that there are a lot of constitutional problems with the law and that we will be involved in his appeal. He’s very down – says that his life is over. I told him to keep the faith and that I am confident that the decision will be overturned on one of many grounds.

Baron, David, Nancy, and Rodney worked very hard on this case. Nushawn’s conviction had nothing to do with HIV or your assistance. The public perception was just too much to overcome.

This is a sad but not unexpected decision. It’s easier to put him away than explain to their white neighbors why they released him into their white community. After thirty years, this is the first time I’ve ever blamed racism for a conviction. I hope to never see it again.

–Clark

 

Editor’s Note:  “Civil Commitment” is an Orwellian law outside the law that sets up psychiatrists (“of all people,” as Clark notes) to evaluate whether prisoners who have already completed their sentences in prison, should be released. If said group of psychiatrists gives the nod, then the prisoner (having served his entire sentence, as Nushawn has) must remain incarcerated for life.

Can Electron Microscopy Resolve The HIV Battle? An Exclusive Interview With EM Pioneer Dr. Étienne De Harven

Posted on June 20, 2013

I have known Belgian scientist (pathologist and electron microscopist) Dr.  Étienne de Harven since 1993, when he introduced himself to me at a conference, with characteristic graciousness and enthusiasm, clasped my hands, and said he had translated my 1992 SPIN article Fatal Distraction into French.

I was of course delighted. I was writing about this scientific battle for a rock and roll magazine, and he was a very distinguished scientist– one of the pioneers of Electron Microscopy. His utter lack of snobbery, his warmth and openness,  set the tone for a friendship spanning all the years since– rooted in exchanges that are in no way sterile, not mere transfer of “information.”

I wanted to understand de Harven’s “poetic space–” that something I knew he was seeing when he peered into this abominable mess called HIV science.

Over the years, we’ve sat in bistros in New York, or on the patio of his marvelous house in Saint Cezaire, in the south of France, or in my cramped kitchen in New York City–and we’ve worked on it. “It” being the Mystery.

HIV.

Or rather, “HIV.”

When I didn’t exactly “understand” the science at hand, I understood the expressions on his face, the depth of emotion in his eyes when he spoke of “what Gallo did.” For scientists like Dr. de Harven, “what Gallo did,” and all that followed, represents a kind of holocaust on all they’d known and taken for granted: Empirical, classical science.

 

 

Now retired, Dr. de Harven’s life’s work has revolved around Electron Microscopy, a pioneering technology now at the center of the explosive trial in Buffalo New York, where Nushawn Williams, after serving 12 years in prison, and still being in state custody due to “mental abnormalities,” he is said to possess, has been found to be HIV free on electron microscopy (EM) tests.

Amidst political machinations surrounding the attempted media blackout from the trial– coercion and even possible witness tampering; the internet is ablaze with new disputes as to whether being HIV negative on EM is a “valid” way to be considered HIV free, or negative. As we all know, the church is built entirely upon the now discredited HIV antibody tests and PCR viral load tests, both of which state as disclaimers in package inserts that they are not designed to test for HIV.

The Truth Barrier contacted Dr. de Harven as well as The Perth Group, with questions about the Nushawn Williams case and how it relates to the HIV existential debate, and these materials will be published as the story unfolds. There is disagreement about how EM tests must be performed in order to properly discern whether HIV is present or absent in the blood.

But what does this thing, not word, bit of code–“HIV”–mean?

The “debate” about HIV’s causation has been, I’m devastated to realize, obscured by the sheer fact that we used as concepts, symbols, words that lacked meaning. We began by saying “Does HIV cause AIDS,” when we should have said, “What do we mean when we say “HIV?”

If you have the mental stamina to unravel it, please read the writings collected at The Perth Group’s website. I have certainly failed on this front–trying to unravel this. It was the hardest part of the gigantic knot, but it was the most important, by far. The knot ties all perceptions, illusions, shadows, linguistics, hallucinations, and stunning truths together at its center: HIV’s existence (as exogenous “retrovirus,” in human blood, not as technological artifact,) the “validity” of the “HIV test,” the question of “cause” and pathogenicity, and the question of infectivity.

To accusations that I have not dealt with this adequately, I am guilty as charged.

In other words:  I have mostly (not entirely) wasted the past 27 years of my life as an AIDS unraveler, because I did not start at the epicenter: The existential question–Not does it, but is it?

“Does HIV Cause AIDS?” already contains accumulated detritus, constructed words, and what William Burroughs called, the “set up.”

The Truth Barrier is delighted to bring you this Q&A with a true expert on EM. Dr. de Harven is the former President of the Electron Microscopy Society of America.

[Note to readers: 1. The questions were emailed and responded to in writing, not asked in sequence, so there will be passages where the question asked suggests that the interviewer has not heard or comprehended the answers given.]

INTERVIEW

Q: Tell us about electron microscopy, EM: What is it? What need did it answer when it was pioneered, and what role did you play in it?

A. There are several types of electron microscopes (EMs). One that brought, by far, the most important contributions to bio-medical research is the “transmission” electron microscope (TEM).

I shall, therefore limit my remarks to the birth of TEM. The inventor of TEM is Ernst Ruska, who constructed and successfully operated the first TEM, in collaboration with Knoll, in Berlin at the research laboratories of the Siemens CY, in 1931. The instrument was aimed at developing a microscope offering a “resolution” better than that of the optical microscope. By “resolution”, we mean the shortest distance separating two punctual objects that could still clearly be recognized as two, and not one. The resolution of the optical microscope is limited at the level of 0.2 micrometer (“microns”; one micron = one thousandth of a millimeter). This limitation was recognized as making the optical microscope totally unable to visualize viruses. By contrast, the resolution of the TEM is around one Angström unit. One micrometer equals 10.000 Angström. It follows that the resolution of the TEM is approximately one thousand times better than that of the optical microscope, making the direct visualization of viruses, and even of single atoms possible. Most viruses are definitely smaller than 0.2 micrometer. The size (diameter) of viruses was approximated before they were actually visualized, from the analysis of the average pore size of ultra filters through which these viral particles could go through, testing the infectivity of “ultra-filtrates.”
Ruska definitely demonstrated, in 1931-32, that his electron microscope had, indeed, a resolution better than that of the optical microscope. His microscope (the first TEM) was using a beam of electrons instead of a beam of light, and using electro-magnetic fields, generated by several magnetic “lenses”, to deflect there pathway instead of optical lenses. The technology involved in this instrument has several points of similitude with that of the cathodic TV tube. For this discovery, Ruska received the Nobel Prize in 1986, two years before he died. The hope of Ernst Ruska was that his new microscope could, possibly, visualize viruses, and he actually was thinking about the poliovirus! Still, in the mid 1930s, many biologists thought that this new microscope could never be useful in biological research, fearing that biological specimens would inevitably be destroyed by the electron beam–like burned out by a lightning.
This was demonstrated to be false at the University of Brussels, Belgium, in 1936, by Louis Marton who published the first EM images of cells, taken with an EM of his own making. The first EM made in America was constructed at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, at the Banting Institute, in 1938. Important improvements, aimed at correcting some image defects, were developed within the laboratories of the RCA CY, in Camden, PA, during WWII.
Just after WWII, Albert Claude (Nobel, 1976), using an RCA microscope and working at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, succeeded in imaging the Rous sarcoma virus, observed within infected, cultured cells. This was definitely the first application of EM to the direct visualization of what we now call retroviruses. In 1955, I was fortunate to operate the very first “Elmiskop I” from the Siemens CY in the USA, installed at the Sloan Kettering Institute, in New York City, and with which I made early contributions (1956-1960) to the ultrastructure of murine leukemia viruses, to their “budding” phenomenon, and to their purification from the blood plasma of leukemic mice. That microscope had a resolution far superior that of the US made RCA instruments.

By the early 1960s, all the known viruses had been well characterized under EM, and, unquestionably, TEM has been a major factor in the emergence of modern virology, as well as of modern cell biology.
Nobelist André Lwoff recommended, at a Cold Spring Harbor conference in 1962, that the general classification of all viruses be primarily based on their morphology, as seen by EM.
[Emphasis mine, ed.]

By 1970 however, and in spite of a most extensive, worldwide research effort, not a single virus was ever demonstrated by TEM to be significantly associated with any form of human cancer or leukemia.

Q: What happened exactly vis a vis “HIV” and EM, in 1983/84? Was patient blood serum (HIV Elisa/WB positive) validated against EM? Ever? It seems to me they say that yes, it was, yet we have Montagnier saying, “We did not purify.” Let me elaborate the question a little:

What should have happened, vs. what did happen, with the “new virus” and EM, in this period of time?

A. What happened in 1983 is a direct consequence of what developed since 1970, i.e. the highly predominant reliance on “molecular markers”.

Unacceptably frustrated by the total lack of success in all attempts to demonstrate virus particles in human cancer by EM, the “impresarios” of the cancer/virus “dream” (Gallo, Fauci, and others) totally engaged in the molecular approach.

Consequently, they invented molecular markers to compensate for the missing viral particles… This would have been acceptable if the specificity of these new molecular markers would have been clearly established. Unfortunately, this was not the case. The most misleading molecular marker was probably the first one, i.e. the enzyme reverse transcriptase (RT). Following Temin and Baltimore 1970 papers in “Science”, the RT enzymatic activity has been, most abusively, used as a specific retroviral marker. Both Temin and Baltimore demonstrated RT activity in samples of supposedly “purified” retrovirus.
Embarrassingly, they both omitted to verify the “purity” of their samples by EM. Some of their samples were simply purchased from a commercial company… True, the label on the vials read “pure retrovirus”… However, it was known that these commercial “pure retrovirus” were heavily contaminated by cellular debris!

And since it is also known that all cells contain RT (see Varmus), cellular debris are most likely carrying similar RT enzymes.
Temin and Baltimore did not, therefore, prove that RT is a specific molecular marker for retroviruses. It would have been so simple to check, by EM, the degree of “purity” of the samples they used. This would have, most probably, shown important cell debris contamination, and would have obliged Temin and Baltimore to be much more cautious in the interpretation of their results. In 1975, the members of the Nobel Committee, most regrettably, failed to scrutinize this “purity” problem…

In 1983, at Pasteur Institute in Paris, reliance on the RT marker was a key element in the claimed “isolation” of a new retrovirus. Still, Montagnier himself recognized “We did not purify”… He dangerously omitted to consider the misleading interference of cell debris, just as Temin and Baltimore did in 1970.
But a paper on the discovery of a new retrovirus looks much better if it contains at least… one EM picture! So, members of Montagnier’s team spent hours at the TEM, looking at their mixed cell cultures, and they found the virus!
See Fig. 2 in their “historic” 1983 “Science” paper! It is, by the way, a good quality EM picture. It shows unquestionable retroviral particles, budding at the surface of a cell. But the legend of this Fig. 2 states that this cell is a cord blood lymphocyte. Indeed, cord blood lymphocytes were admixed to these complex cell cultures (why?)
Montagnier and his co-workers should have known that human embryonic tissues, and the placenta in particular, are very rich in endogenous retroviruses (HERVs), and that cord blood lymphocytes should therefore be expected to carry the same endogenous retroviruses (under the TEM, endogenous and exogenous viruses, looking identical, cannot be distinguished.)
The budding of these particles has perhaps been stimulated by some of the growth factors also present in these cell cultures. An essential control would have been to repeat the experiment using lymphocytes from the peripheral blood instead of from cord blood. This control is unfortunately missing.

In short, I would frankly state that the Pasteur 1983 paper (whose 30th anniversary has just been celebrated in a “grand messe” of official HIV retro-virology!) contributed very little in AIDS research because its conclusion (i.e. “the isolation of a new retrovirus”) is based on 1)the use of a non specific RT molecular marker, and 2) is falsely supported by EM pictures of, most probably, endogenous human retroviruses.

More details and appropriate references on this analysis can be found in my 2010 paper published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (www.jpands.org/vol15no3/deharven.pdf).

Q: When antibody and VL tests became widespread as diagnostic tools for “HIV infection” over the ensuing decades, what happened with EM inside of HIV science and literature? It is my understanding that nobody has ever found HIV in human blood, on EM. Is this an accurate way to say it?

A: In my views, Western Blot tests lost all credibility after the publication of Eleni Papadopulos’s et al. (1993) paper, and antibody tests (“Elisa”) after Christine Johnson’s report( 1996). The notion of a “Viral load”(VL), however, brought a new parameter in AIDS diagnosis (Ho,1996). It called attention to the actual number of HIV particles supposedly present in the blood plasma of AIDS patients, PCR technologies being presumed to offer a way to quantify that number.

If such a viremia (i.e. presence of virus particles in the blood) is indeed present in AIDS patients, it reminisces the retroviral viremia well known in leukemic mice. In such case, retroviral particles should be readily demonstrable, by TEM, of appropriately prepared patient plasma samples. Unfortunately, it as never been possible to demonstrate by TEM one single retroviral particle in the blood plasma of any AIDS patient, even if one selects patients presenting with a so-called “high viral load.”
I was apparently the first researcher to make that statement, during the opening session of President T. Mbeki’s major AIDS conference, in Pretoria, SA, in May 2000. My statement to that effect has never been refuted.

How come?

That question must be answered because “something” is measured by PCR technologies in the blood of many AIDS patients. Actually, what is being measured is definitely not the number of retroviral particles (phantom-like, i.e. EM invisible!). In fact, what is being PCR identified, amplified, and supposedly quantified is the number of genomic nucleotide sequences that are extremely similar to sequences known to be part of the retroviral genome. Most regrettably, these sequences were misinterpreted as an indication as a certain number of … HIV particles! This did a lot to consolidate the quasi-religious dogma of HIV as the cause of AIDS, a dogma that as been sharply criticized, a few years ago, by David Rasnick who wrote, authoritatively, about “The AIDS Blunder”…

This interpretation would have been acceptable only if retroviral particles would have been readily demonstrated, by EM, in the blood plasma of these patients; but, since this is not the case, another explanation for the presence of these nucleotide sequences has to be founded.

I presented at the RA conference in Oakland, CA, in 2009, and further developed in my 2010 JAPS paper such a much needed explanation for the presence of these retroviral-like nucleotide sequences. My explanation is based on the well known, variable amounts of circulating DNA in the blood of severely ill patients, and on the fact that we all carry retroviral-like sequences in our DNA, as endogenous, defective retroviruses, i.e. HERVs (HERVs, for “Human endogenous retroviruses”)(See “Virus in all of us”, R. Lower at al., 1996 PNAS paper).

No surprise, therefore, that these nucleotide sequences are recognized by PCR in the blood of many AIDS patients, who are indeed severely ill. As already demonstrated in 2008 in Robin Weiss laboratory, HERVs can interfere as confounding factors in the search for novel retrovirus in chronic human diseases.

In addition, “viral load” clinical data will remain very hard to interpret, as long as the essential control is missing. The essential control would be to search for “viral load” in serologically negative (HIV-), severely ill patients, ill from advanced cancer or from infectious diseases, NOT FROM AIDS. Unfortunately, this essential control has never been done, since the so-called ”Viral load” has, so far, been exclusively searched for in HIV+ patients…

Conclusively, measuring “viral load” does not prove the existence of a hypothetical HIV.

Q: If so, if that is true, then what does it mean? Paint a picture for us. The story of the virus, the “new deadly virus,” what happens first: What steps did they Montagnier, on one hand, Gallo on the other take to “find” the new entity? Then once they ‘found’ it, what shape was it in? It was not an entity, a thing, with a body, right? It was not coherent. Can we say that? So it lived where? It was seen only through the technologies developed to find it, Elisa, WB? Later PCR/VL? But what happened back THEN when they tried to see it on EM? Why didn’t everybody look for it on EM? Too expensive?

A: No, EM is not cheap but not that expensive! And its cost has certainly nothing to do with the fact that it has barely been used for the past 30 years in AIDS research! It has not been used because “They” knew it was not going to show anything of retroviral significance in samples coming directly from AIDS patients. And since AIDS had become big business, the stocks of involved giant pharmaceutical companies could not be jeopardized! It had to be saved at all cost, even at the cost of trusting non specific molecular markers… Fear is good business, and viruses generate fear most efficiently… So, the HIV flag has to be maximally agitated. In worldwide medias, with thousands of computer-generated, colorful caricatures of an idealistic retrovirus… By contrast, the medias have been dominated by the most rigorous censorship when it comes to inform the public about views of rethinking dissidents. This total censorship put a safety lock on any information that could jeopardize the colossal, entirely HIV derived profits of the major pharmaceutical companies.

But I am glad we have Internet!

Daring to say that HIV does not exist amounts to some sort of a capitalistic crime…

Yes, the HIV dogma is probably the darkest page in the history of modern medicine.

Q: What was your reaction when you saw the recent story that Nushawn Williams does not “have HIV,” despite being repeatedly positive on antibody and VL tests over the decades.

A: I am not, unfortunately, familiar enough with phylogenetic analysis methodology to provide a critical view on this case. I was impressed, however, by the recent (June 1st and 2nd, 2013) e-mailings between Georg von Wintzingerode and David Crowe on this topic, and I would suggest to read that correspondence for elaborate questions on the analysis of Nushawn Williams story. Still, one point I wish to make is that, as far as I know (?), DNA/RNA phylogenetic analysis is currently performed exclusively on HIV antibody positive people(?). Where are the essential phylogenetic controls on antibody negative people? If indeed that control is also missing, then the significance of such studies is wide open for questions, just as much as the significance of the alleged HIV “viral load” (see above) that has also never been searched for among HIV antibody negative patients.

Q: Etienne, if you could sum up: Does HIV exist? If so, where and how and as what?
If you could examine 1,000 HIV positive people’s blood under EM, what would you expect to find? If you don’t find HIV on EM in human blood, can any argument be made that the virus is “hiding” and so forth, or that the drugs suppressed the virus to undetectable levels? This is what the defenders of the orthodoxy seem to be saying about the results seen in the Nushawn Williams case.
A: This is the main question! Questioning the very existence of HIV is not something that should be debated only between specialized retro-virologists. It is an essential question that concerns all of us.

Why?

Simply because 100% of AIDS research funding is based on the dogmatically postulated existence of HIV. If HIV does not exist, it would follow that AIDS research is the most appalling case of total misappropriation of public research funds! And it would also follow that the monumental amounts of money, so far exclusively devoted to HIV research, would be much better used in other directions. Could you imagine what world we would live in, today, if the total amount of money wasted over the past 30 years on HIV research had been, instead, used for feeding starving Africans, for clean water supply equipment, for public hygiene infrastructures, and for public health education? This would happen only if HIV research is totally stopped! And for this, the scientific and public health organizations have to face the fact that, indeed, HIV does not exist!

If, to the contrary, one keeps talking about HIV as… possibly hiding, or possibly harmless, or possibly endogenous, then the waste of research funding on HIV research shall endlessly be tolerated.

Instead, we all have to, courageously, face the fact that the very existence of an exogenous HIV has never been scientifically verified.

True: to prove that something does not exist is never an easy task. But it is the responsibility of the scientific, orthodox establishment to bring us the proof of the opposite, i.e. the proof of the existence of HIV as an exogenous retrovirus responsible for the causation of AIDS. And such a proof has to be based on classic virology methods, not on the use of questionable molecular markers. So far, the hypothetical HIV has never been properly isolated, nor properly concentrated, nor even ever purified. As long as this remains the case, the specificity of HIV molecular markers shall not be accepted.

The Perth Group (PG, Eleni Papadopulos and Valendar Turner et al.) had repeatedly, in the early 1990, stressed the notion that in view of the considerable difficulty encountered in all attempts to isolate/purify HIV, the specificity of HIV molecular markers was most uncertain.

In 1994, German virologist Stefan Lanka raised major questions about the very existence of all exogenous retroviruses.

Soon afterwards, the “PG” strongly emphasized that HIV had never been properly isolated. During the international, large debate held at the European Parliament, in 2003, I further stressed the problems encountered in isolating HIV. But stressing the difficulty to isolate a virus remains short of stating that this virus does not exist, and is, consequently, not enough to stop all research on this virus.

As already emphasized, the appalling waste of HIV research funds must stop, and these enormous research funds should, most urgently, be re-affected towards completely different, non-retroviral aims. This will happen only if the worldwide scientific establishment courageously faces the fact that HIV does not exist. The fact that HIV does not exist is actually not be so surprising for all those who realize that, after almost 30 years of research, based most exclusively on a non-scientifically verified HIV hypothesis, 1) not one single AIDS patient has ever been definitely cured by ARVs, 2) apocalyptic epidemiological predictions never materialized, and 3) not one single efficient vaccine has ever been developed…

Obviously, we were, for 30 years on the wrong track!

ERRARE HUMANUM EST, SED DIABOLICUM PERSEVERARE, i.e. Error is human, but it is devilish to persevere!

Conclusively:

-we all carry, in our chromosomes, defective endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) that have interfered, most presumably, as misleading, confounding factors in AIDS research;

-“HIV” is not an endogenous retrovirus;

-“HIV”, as an exogenous, AIDS causing retrovirus simply does not exist, and this fact should be recognized as soon as possible for a complete, radical re-distribution of AIDS research funds, worldwide.

Etienne de Harven, M.D.

Prof. Emeritus (Pathology) from the University of Toronto,

Past President of Rethinking Aids (2005-2008)

 

[References: The relevant materials cited in this interview can be found here, here and here.]

 

Update: Rico Enjoys First Drug Free Days Of His Life: Laughs

Posted on May 15, 2013
(Update is a copy of a Facebook Post)
Rico and Lindsey
I spoke with Cheryl Nagel this evening and she updated me on the situation with her grandson Rico, and said I could share it.
Rico was seen by several different doctors today. They are anxious to get him back on ARVs but not before he is tested by a dermatologist on Thursday, to see if his skin condition suggests he is “allergic” to any of the drugs. If they say no, then Rico has to go back on a 3 drug ARV cocktail–same as before. If he is (please God) allergic then he can’t go back on the drugs. As many of you know, Rico almost died one week ago after suffering an extreme bright red rash that was very painful when touched, and with ARVs this can mean catastrophe in the form of comprehensive skin loss, (Steven Johnson’s Syndrome) and/or renal failure.
Rico’s aunt Pam told me the rash was bright red, “like he was wearing a little red suit.” This earned Rico five days off all meds, and in those five days, I got to see him, and everybody said his color was totally different, pinkish, and that he had developed an appetite and also cried a little. (He never cried while on the drugs.) So now he gets two more days drug free. His hemoglobin level is “really good” Cheryl said. The medical staff apparently asked Lindsey: “So when you are going to start on the meds?” And Lindsey said she has never taken them and feels fine and has no plans to take them now or in the future.

But it was something Cheryl said just before we hung up that really haunted me. She told me Steve was playing with Rico this evening and suddenly, for the first time in his life, he laughed. Cheryl thought: “Is he laughing?”

She said that as Steve was playing with him, Rico laughed and laughed.

This is so crushing.

Rico does not “have HIV.” He was born healthy.  Despite the inventor of PCR, Kary Mullis, stating openly that PCR’s role in HIV diagnostics is miscast and distorted, PCR became the holy grail of HIV “detection”–including for newborn infants still carrying their mother’s antibody shadows. And it was PCR that doomed Rico to this chemical prison. Everybody who is complicit in this Holocaust, media especially, go to hell and stay there. The story of scientific dissent was always right there, a phone call away, but you all refused to even talk to them. Refused to debate. Refused to read. Reconsider. Even the inventor of PCR (Mullis) and the discoverer of onco-genes (Duesberg) not good enough for you. Nor Serge Lang. Nor Harry Rubin. Nor Lynn Margulis. Nor Harvey Bialy. Perth Group. Nor ANY of the close to 3,000 scientific/academic signatories who have been decrying this scientifically bankrupt theory since 1987, calling it madness, calling it wrong, calling it murder. All this suffering because it was THAT important that Larry Kramer/ACT Up screaming brats got their way and buried the true history of late 70s bathhouse culture and the obvious consequences to a human immune system. No, it had to be a “virus.” From Africa no less. Now look where we are. Psychotic medicine. A baby snatched from his mother’s arms and kidnapped, placed on toxic drugs in a tube through his stomach. Why? Because they have to prove Duesberg wrong. That is ALL they care about. A $350 billion industry that by every measure is criminal. And the foremost scientists in the field could not stop it, or even slow it down. And the press rolled over. WHEN WILL IT END?

Rico’s tiny body is the battlefield for a $350 billion scientifically bankrupt theory. And he laughed tonight for the first time. His family given 48 more hours to enjoy the sight of him not poisoned. They’re getting a glimpse of what he would be like if he could be allowed to just be, just live. “The transformation was immediate,” Steve Nagel told me. “It was the same with Lindsey. Overnight.” *

[*Lindsey Nagel was taken off AZT as a baby, and immediately stopped showing symptoms of toxicity from the drug, which had been attributed to HIV. She grew up perfectly healthy–the only survivor in the state of Minnesota of pediatric HIV treatment in the early 90s, (AZT) which killed 11 other children who remained on the drug. There were a total of 12 HIV positive children in the state. 11 were kept on AZT and died and one, Lindsey, was taken off, and is alive today, and the mother of her own child, Rico.]

Thought Crime Trial Against Nagel/Martinez Family Adjourned

Posted on April 3, 2013
Courthouse, Austin, MN
Brownsdale, MN
This is a short dispatch written to convey the essential facts of what happened on April 1 and 2, in the court case against John Martinez and Lindsey Nagel, parents of Rico Martinez Nagel.
It’s early morning in Brownsdale MN, a very small town near the Iowa border, about two hours from Minneapolis.  I am soon to depart for the airport and struggling to compose a coherent narrative of a completely incoherent situation.
I’ll start at the end: No decision was reached by the judge in the two day trial in which Lindsey Nagel and John Martinez were (vaguely) accused of Medical Endangerment; The prosecution (“petitioner”) did many inexplicable things throughout the trial, not least of which was to play 4 videos from YouTube, which has not previously been vetted as evidence. That meant delay: The videos have to be transcribed, the transcripts put before judge and opposing legal teams, and the case reconvened. This is expected to happen at best in 15 days. For now, the parents retain custody and a recommendation was made by a guardian ad litem that they should revisit the situation in 45 days to see if compliance was still consistent. If it were, Skype surveillance may be reduced from twice a day to three times a week.So for now, the situation for John and Lindsey Nagel is the same: They retain physical custody of their 3 month old son Rico, and the state controls his medical decisions, i.e. has medical custody.  Still, each day, twice a day they must hold the baby in front of a Skype camera, with a social worker on the other end, which I witnessed; They first hold up each medicine bottle (Rico is on 3 “anti-HIV” medications,  Bactrim, and a drug to regulate his disrupted red and white blood cell counts,) then they draw the liquids into the tube attached to Rico’s stomach via gastric intubation (a plastic tube surgically implanted into his stomach,) while the social worker watches.
The two day trial was, to use a word I now wish I had never wasted on any previous situation, “Kafkaesque.” Kafka gave us the concept of an accused who can’t locate his crime. I was in the courthouse for ever moment of testimony, which ranged from crushingly tedious to heartbreaking, and not only could I not grasp what these parents were accused of, but both sides actually testified to this effect. To wit:
* 10-15 minutes after giving birth, having been awake for 45 hours, a battalion of about 12 people, lawyers, social workers, doctors, etc, appeared at the foot of Lindsey’s hospital bed, and made clear that if she did not consent to having Rico tested and treated for “HIV infection” she and John would lose custody to the state.
* After being given about 10 minutes to consider the matter, the parents gave full consent to any and all demands that were being made on them, in order not to lose custody of their son.
* Rico was tested and found (according to the hospital) to be HIV “infected” on “pro-viral DNA” PCR tests.  [The chief physician testified that quantitative PCR is the standard to use on infants and “represents” the actual presence of the virus in the infant.] [Which is an admission that HIV antibody tests do not represent the actual virus.] [But neither does PCR, by any means.] [!]
* From that point on [and again, every single witness on both sides supported this] John and Lindsey did not miss a single dose of Rico’s numerous medications, even when one of them was AZT, which almost killed Lindsey when she was a baby.  Rico was finally taken off AZT after he became so anemic he ultimately needed a total of four blood transfusions. There was not even a suspicion or allegation that these parents did not take the threat of losing Rico very seriously. They did. They complied to the letter of the “law.” Yet Rico was taken from them, because one social worker had “concerns” that they might not give them meds in the future. (More details will follow in future reports.)
* The county seized the baby from the family home, from Lindsey’s arms, supposedly because Lindsey and John had “missed” two medical appointments to discuss nutrition. Not so. They never “missed” any appointments. Instead, two appointments were properly canceled, one of them re-scheduled, the second one was optional.
John and Rico

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Apparently to punish the parents for daring to go seek a second medical opinion, in another state, and having in advance (and properly) canceled an appointment about nutrition for Rico, (who throughout the trial was referred to by his initials, “RMN”–witnesses were not allowed to use his name) Mower County Child Protective Services seized him in an ambush to the family home, took him off his mother’s breast, and planted a gastric tube in his stomach, through which he now has to be fed 24/7.

[See photo]

One quote from my notepad: Dr. W. Charles Huskins, the physician who oversaw Rico’s medical care:
“He is not supposed to be fed by mouth. He is supposed  to be fed by gastroscopy tube only.”
* The various witnesses on the petitioner’s side all testified that although they did not have a shred of evidence that Lindsey or John missed a dose, or in any way did not fully comply with “the law” on Rico’s “medical care,” (which almost killed him) they were nonetheless “concerned” that there could be defiance in the future. So the trial was quite literally a Thought Crime trial, in which the parents stood accused of not wanting to give the medications which all sides agreed they nevertheless gave. And continue to give. On Skype, twice a day.
“You have to understand the culture here,” Steve Nagel said yesterday, after the trial. “These people are bullies. they are medium fish in a small pond. they expect it to go their way. The judge is used to always being elected.  There’s nothing here, a car goes by every ten minutes that’s what’s happening here. “
The trial will continue in mid April, we expect. Overall, the courtroom was packed with Rico supporters and the whole town was buzzing about it, not a soul in support of the state, locals sporting “Save Rico” T-shirts all over the place. Our waitress at lunch (in Austin, MN, pop, 24,718) on day one was a supporter, had spent the morning in court, was returning for the afternoon, had seen House of Numbers, knew who Peter Duesberg was and cited him, asked me, “are you Celia?” and insisted on paying our bill.
I will miss my flight if I don’t stop here.
I hope that gives you enough of a sense of the good news, until I return to report more.
The TV cameras in the restaurant where we all convened at the close of the trial, had numerous reports of the trial, and various phones were abuzz with national interest as well.
“We just went national today,” said Steve Nagel. “The trial is done now. Now is time for the tigers to come out and scare. Now is the time for everybody to join together. Now is the fight. “
Steve and Cheryl Nagel on local news

Indomitable Lynn

Posted on March 27, 2013
Lynn Margulis, Puffers Pond, 2010
Photo by Celia Farber

By Dorion Sagan

 

 

 

 

 

Unlike many, perhaps, she continued to grow and learn until the end.

One of the last projects she was involved in was the characterization of the symbiotic bryozoan, Pectinatella magnifica, who, like Lynn, loved to dwell in the possibility of Puffers Pond, the lake across which she swam nearly every day that last blue summer of 2011. There it was she quoted to me the words of Emily Dickinson, “That it will never come again/Is what makes life so sweet.”

Harsh and true and beautiful—like her. But, defying Dickinson, I’ll throw my boat in with Anaïs Nin, who said that we write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.

Thinking of those gentle summer ripples, that blue pond in whose water the matter of my mother’s body now lies, I am reminded of Krug, a fictional character in Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, who as the novelist describes it, “in a sudden moonburst of madness, understands that he is in good hands: nothing on earth really matters, there is nothing to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution.” If she burned out in a sudden burst of hemorrhagic overactivity, like a blazing celestial object vanishing into its own glory, the end-blaze was not so different than the burning life, as she died near the height of her powers, at the peak of her coruscating personality.

Death is a mystery but it is also a sublation, a rising up to another realm, a reckoning, not just a negation but a planting and possible flowering, an archiving, a setting of the seed of the soul as information into the fertile if not eternal field of collective memory. Of course memory, as every novelist and memoir writer knows, cohabits with and is infused with imagination, prey to the twin temptations of revisionism and hagiography.

The dear disappeared, no longer able to speak on her own behalf, to mischievously interrupt, to make her own case and sweet diatribes, is made to mean what we want her to mean, instead of saying what she would have said, perpetuating her own brand of perplexity. In the case of Lynn, my matrix, my secular miracle of a mother and writing partner, that perplexing brand consisted of several scientific strands, woven into a rope of such strength one imagines it suitable for performing the Indian Rope Trick or, with the fibers differently arrayed, into that fabric of lore permitting lucky riders upon a flying carpet. Her science took her, and us with it, along for a once-in-a-lifetime ride not only into previously unrevealed regions within the wild geography of intellectual inquiry, but also back into the time of Earth’s earliest beginnings, when, as she never tired of pointing out, so very much had happened. Growing the grass for us even as we are paving the way—or maybe not—for a future we naïvely imagine is obligated to include us.

When I used to stay at her house in Amherst I slept downstairs in a drawing room with two sets of creaky sliding doors, one wall lined with books. Holding his ground on a shelf in the northeast corner, watching over me in my sleep, was her pre-Columbian man, a beloved piece of statuary that (I found this part out after she died) she picked up for $500 after a tiff with my stepdad about his losing the same amount in a poker game, and which she willed upon her death returned to Mexico, its country of origin. When I awoke I would be treated to five portraits, of my mother and her sisters as little girls.

There were two of her. In one she’s a baby, not yet two. In the other she is maybe six or seven. It awakes in me a curious affection, the same I experienced at seeing them while she was still alive, bustling about with inimitable energy at the age of seventy-two, running to feed and warm, in of all places, and not without an unappetizing odor, the microwave, dog food for her black Irish wolfhound, the rescued and eternally grateful Menina (named after the Velázquez painting), as she prepared to meet Jim MacAllister to swim, before preparing for classes, for lectures, for guests coming or going, for children and grandchildren, papers, books, and projects without end. Food for her was fuel, and her energy such that toddlers had been known to request naps after being drained by the continuousness of her curiosity, the boundlessness of her enterprise. She grew up in the South Side of Chicago during the Depression, and this experience, along with her poverty as a young mother and woman, fostered in her a lifelong appreciation of culinary frugality, of leftovers. She once was caught eating cereal with slices of hot dog in it and explained that the dog (a different one, the scrappy mutt Roosevelt) didn’t want it.

She had many motivators, from the desire to get out of the constant bickering between her parents, which led her into the beautiful act of rebellion that was getting into the University of Chicago at the age of fourteen, to the startling death of her mother, Leone, who dropped dead one day in her late middle age after exiting the shower. Her mother’s stroke imposed upon Lynn a sense of urgency to finish her many and ever-expanding circle of scientific projects centered around the unveiling of early life and characterizing the evolutionary and ecological nature of life on earth. This boundless energy that ran toddlers ragged and could exasperate as well as entice, educate, and enchant those around her—a motley mix of students, children, colleagues, and friends swept up into the whirlwind that was Lynn—made it right to describe her, as Earthwatch founder Brian Rosborough did, as a life force.

In some of her effects in my possession, I have a copy of a letter from my father to an esteemed academic colleague, who is duly informed of my father’s progress and plans in all things scientific and astronomical. If all goes well, Carl concludes, he will receive his PhD in approximately nine months. I was curious, seeing the date of the letter, March 18, 1959, to see if there would be any mention of family in this unstoppable passion for science which also, not uncoincidentally, infected his young wife and former teenage girlfriend, my equally if not more unstoppable mother.

And yes, there it was—almost a footnote in this letter detailing lunar organic syntheses from Yerkes Observatory to Dr. H. J. Muller in Bloomington, Indiana—“Speaking of nine months, Lynn gave birth yesterday to an 8 lb. 2 oz. Boy, Dorion Solomon Sagan. It feels strange adding our fiber to the red thread. I’ve never before had so strong a feeling of being a transitional creature, at some vague intermediary position between the primeval mud and the stars.” That was me, although I’ll have to check my birth certificate because I always thought it was 8.6 pounds, but right or wrong one can glean the passion my parents had at that time, succored by America’s post-Sputnik gravy train, for the life of science, for the exploration of new worlds that my dad, in that same letter, compares to the age of exploration as Europeans began to venture across the seas at the beginning of the fifteenth century.

In Carl’s letters as in Lynn’s life, the scientific and the personal are mixed, as is the private and the public, as the great gulf stream of the discoverer’s quest sweeps up all—family, friends, lovers, and lives—into its world historical quest. This was the life of my father, and my mother caught its fire and sent it in a different direction: instead of imagining icy floaters in the ammonia atmosphere of Jupiter, or underneath the regolith of Mars, she delved into that mud that my father had taken more for granted in his extraterrestrial flights of fancy, and explored the real organisms—the methanogens and archaeans, the symbiotic protists and wriggling corkscrew-shaped spirochetes—beneath her hiking boots. She did so with gusto and love, and once she got started she never stopped. In the volume before you will see her in her journey, her stubborn recalcitrance, her passionate quests, her fearless interactions with nature inclusive of stuffed shirts, old boys’ networks, and patriarchal power structures that would intimidate a lesser mortal. For her, it was the opposite: she often intimidated them. She was too often right, too articulate and passionate, too well versed in the minutiae of chemistry, ecology, evolutionary theory, cell biology, microbiology, geology, and a thorough, encyclopedic familiarity with the ultimate objects (and subjects) of natural history, organisms themselves.

In this book you will sample her indomitable personality as she sampled the multicolored microbial mats, the sulfurous seaside mats and inland muds, the waterlogged logs and forest floors from which she derived her photosynthetic bacteria, her spirochetes, her symbionts, her wood-eating termites, sometimes smuggled into the country with the cellulose-digesting microbial communities in their hindguts fully intact. You will read of her interactions with those fellow life-forms, also deeply if often unknowingly symbiotic, whom she derided as a species but appreciated as individuals. You will hear of how she tweaked, countered, incensed, and ultimately often intellectually triumphed over her contemporary great evolutionary biologists. The Spanish biologist Mónica Solé-Rojo told me, for example, of Stephen Jay Gould, inarguably in the top percentile of articulateness, dumbfounded in the presence of her onslaught of supporting examples to her argument, replete with species names. Much the same, indeed more, can be said and herein will be, of the friction between her and the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, whose popular “selfish gene” concept in her opinion missed so much in terms of subtlety and reality with regard to the real living world, symbiotic and transformative, that she knew so well.

Despite the rancor she elicited as a result of her forthright and fearless manner, and the adamancy with which she insisted on her points of view, the more so when, though supported with crucial facts they were underdogs in the temporarily prevailing but ultimately malleable scientific consensus, Lynn also stood out because she could change her mind. She could learn, and continued to do so, to the end of her days.

It is true that at times she may have been attracted to unorthodox views because they needed an ally in a world of consensus genuflectors and pig-pilers, a world, paradoxically, where her own views on symbiotic interliving were deemed untenable by coteries of coactors teaming up and cooperating against a perceived intruder like an immune system detecting a foreign protein or a quorum of bacteria sensing, as one being, a threat. But her threat was not to people but to the evil done to the spirit by the entrenchment of unsupported views.

Although she could be a bulldog, her heart was soft and her spirit loving beneath the scientific realpolitik of her conversation and the insistent tough-mindedness of her sometimes strident and blunt, withering and refreshingly unadorned opinions. That deep intellectual honesty didn’t always need to be right in details to be right in approach, which it was, and could not else but be for her. In a privileged place to observe her intellectual and personal trajectory, I became more enamored of her as she grew older and I tagged along, always a lucky twenty-one years behind her rushed schedule.

At the end of her life I became more fond of her as a person, an individual wonderful in her own right and separate from the matrix that spawned and coddled me, cuddled and argued with me, gave me simple gifts of clothes and books and peasant food, who always had demands and expectations and, as might be surmised, had trouble simply relaxing. Time was too short, life was too important to squander it on trivial pursuits.

But as she grew older there were more signs of an increasing capacity for being happy. Her laugh was deeper, the twinkle in her green eyes more mischievous. She was less likely to be rankled, quicker to accept the latest instances of perceived incompetence, inaccuracy, and hubris from the benighted race into which, through an amorous accident and hundreds of millions of years of microbial evolution, she had curiously been born.

As I looked at those pictures in the drawing room where I slept on the fold-out futon she had replaced with a new one to add to my comfort at my home away from home which was and always will be my home, I noticed in myself a feeling of fatherly tenderness for that little girl whose endless curiosity stared out in perfect composure from the pictures on the wall. At seven years of age, there she was, an inchoate nestling and intimation of future greatness, a force of nature in seedling form, as yet to be loosed, not least by herself, onto a not-always-appreciative world. I had read Roland Barthes’s essay on photographs of his mother engendering a similar feeling of reversed paternity and was thus predisposed.

When she became seventy-two, and reiterated a refrain from a sparse but multiyear discourse on the bewilderment of change and aging and her reluctance to make an unnecessary to-do about it, I commented to her that I had recently come across a study that said the age of maximum subjectively identified happiness was seventy-three. Since you are seventy-two, I joked, at least you’ll have something to look forward to. As chance or fate or Gaia or some other agglomeration of that ambivalent nexus of causation the Greeks explored in tragic theater would have it, she did in fact die at the age of seventy-three. Pictures of her, for example her beaming visage over the podium in a poster that advertised the last lecture of hers I attended—to a packed house of UMass students as she detailed her views of life on earth and her discovery of a symbiotic representative, the brain-shaped log-clutching bryozoan, Pectinatella magnifica, at hers and their local swimming hole, Puffers Pond—showed that increasing capacity for happiness as she came closer to the end of that trajectory that catapulted her from the land of the living, of flesh and blood, to the murkier, ecological realm whose inhabitants and chemical cycles she herself helped characterize.

My son (for whose care as a boy she provided, giving invaluable love and assistance) Tonio and I kayaked to the center of Puffers Pond at the end of a private family ceremony. There we sprinkled from a pink urn of Himalayan salt my son’s grandmother’s ashes back into the water, inhabited by the bryozoan she discovered, the water across which she swam nearly every day that last summer of her life, the summer of 2011, her dog sniffing and running about on the shore. Tonio dropped a coin of remembrance into the waters (in olden days to pay Charon to ferry one’s soul safely across to the world below) and her ashes spread, after lingering, as with ghostly mischief and microbial mystery, accommodating the subtle ripples and disturbance from the paddles and sinking coin. As I tried to explain to all nine of her grandchildren, including two of her beautiful granddaughters (who bear an uncanny resemblance to the pictures that used to grace the far walls of that room whose futon she’d replaced), Lynn’s body is gone, she has returned to the nature she so loved and studied, but part of her is still here, left behind as they themselves, their hearts and thoughts and smiling, curious faces.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Re-published courtesy of Dorion Sagan and Chelsea Green Publishing; Originally published in Lynn Margulis: The Life & Legacy of a Scientific Rebel, edited by son & collaborator, Dorion Sagan, Amherst Books, 2012]

For Profit HIV Forum Abuses, Threatens, And Bans HIV Positive Man Who Posts Naturopath Protocol

Posted on March 18, 2013

 

CENSORSHIP FROM POZ MAGAZINE – HIV STIGMA WITHIN THE HIV+ COMMUNITY

By John Strangis

After testing positive on an HIV antibody test, and taking medication for more than a year, I became aware of the dissident perspective on the matter. After carefully comparing the orthodox and dissident sides of the issue, I made the personal decision to stop medication.

At the time I thought this decision would be no different from a cancer patient choosing to follow an alternative treatment plan instead of following the classic options prescribed by oncologists. I never dreamed I would be subject to abuse, derision, and finally censorship.

I was naïve. I decided to comment on a thread posted on POZ.com, the website of POZ magazine–a magazine for HIV positive people. Well, what happened next left me in stunned disbelief and only reinforced the idea that the path I chose was the correct one. Something was definitely wrong.

What follows is a description of what happened the first time I tried to connect with others on POZ.com’s forums:

It began when I replied to a comment on POZ.com which described the alleged death of a person with AIDS after this person stopped taking HIV medications. Another member of the forum posted a reply to this comment claiming he had stopped medication because he was convinced that what was being told to everybody was not the complete truth. Considering that I made this same decision, I decided to post a reply of my own describing why I made this decision and the alternative plan I decided to follow.

In my post I included references which would help people understand why I did this, both to back up my claims and to spark a thought in people’s minds. I did however mention that I am not stupid; I was aware of what might happen if my decision was incorrect. This comment was deleted by the moderator and her questionable replies prompted me to document all that followed.

Just to clarify, Schedir81 was my screen name on the POZ forum:

After my first comment, the moderator wrote:

Schedir, I deleted your post. We do not allow denialist crap on this website and that’s exactly what your post was – denialist crap. Do it again and you risk being banned.
Consider yourself warned.

Ann.

I replied:

No problem, I expected my post to be deleted. I did not post denialist crap; I posted my own comment which was only meant to spark a thought in those who would read it. However, I will not mention it again. Like I said, I did not intend to offend anyone with what I wrote and it seems obvious I had a good reason to do so.

Schedir81

Ann wrote back:

I’ve been around long enough to recognize when someone is parroting denialist propaganda when I see it.
If you want to go down that road, that is your choice. Just don’t expect to use this forum as a means to temp others to follow you into a preventable death from eschewing necessary hiv treatment.
Again, consider yourself warned.

Ann

I wrote back:

Yes, I have been warned and just to inform you, I was not spouting propaganda. You read my post and I have been on this forum for a while you can see that clearly. However, I will not post anything like it again, don’t worry.

Schedir81

Incredible! Since when did discussing opposing scientific views become something that angers people so much? This censorship reinforced my belief that the dissident arguments may be correct and it was obvious that what I wrote was something these “moderators” do not want other members to be informed of.

What gets to me the most is that I have been on that forum for a while and the members there know I have been diagnosed HIV positive, so you can see I am not just some person randomly popping up on the website to lure people into following the “denialists.”

The replies to me from Ann made it appear as if I was on a political forum, not one where people are struggling with a medical condition.

I did not post anything offensive, I only described what I am attempting to do for my own health and why. I also emphasized that others who read my posts should not attempt to do the same, that this was just me speaking for myself.

These people always speak of stigma, and here they were stigmatizing and shunning me just for stating that I have stopped taking medication, treating me like a very bad child who had to be punished. I am a grown man for heaven’s sake. So is everybody on that forum–a grownup.

I thought this was the end of it. My ban lasted for several months until one day I noticed it had been lifted. I knew it was the software which lifted the ban automatically after an expiration period, something the forum moderators were happy to point out to me once I decided to post another message on their forums.

I thanked them for restoring my privileges but I did point out how they (moderator Ann) infringed upon my first amendment right by banning me for asking valid questions in regards to an alternative view on a medical condition.

The moderator who replied, arrogantly, explained to me that my first amendment rights “do not apply” on the forum–that I should learn more in regards to the constitution and that I should think twice about coming back to taunt Ann.

Well, I did explain to him that I was well aware that my first amendment right does not apply to private entities, but also that the American people do not take kindly this sort of thing, private entity or not and especially when it has something to do with a medical condition, civil rights etc.
I left it be, we said what we had to say and I promised never to speak of anything controversial again. It seemed as if the story was finally over with, based on his response:

“I’m all for moving on but let this be the last warning to indeed move on.

You broke the rules so your banning was warranted and for the record, no one had second thoughts and lifted your ban, the software was triggered that your ban was up. So sorry bud, no change of heart or even a thought was given about your being allowed to return.

I’m going to take you at your word that you don’t want to spend any more time on this and lock this thread, so let’s move along and talk no more of this.”

I looked up the forum’s rules, and lo and behold, there it was:

“Actions that may result in an immediate and permanent ban include the following:

1) HIV/AIDS denialists. Any member who posts denialists propaganda — including direct links to information produced by denialist entities or language encouraging members to research denialism — will be banned immediately. More benign questions or comments about denialism, especially when raised by a long-term member of the Forums, will be handled on a case-by-case basis.”

My question here is, why? Why are people banned for speaking of alternative views in regards to a medical condition? Are people banned from cancer forums for asking questions about alternative treatments? They might be told that those alternative views are not supported or to speak to their oncologist before considering such an option, but I have never seen anyone being banned.

Why are the people who speak of “HIV denialism” shunned and swept aside almost like a heretic being sentenced to die at the stake during the times of the inquisition? Are the FDA and Big Pharma God? Why do people have to believe everything they say without question?

I proceeded to create a new thread on the forum posting the link to a naturopathic protocol and telling people to consider a few options on it because it might help them while on HAART. WHILE ON HAART. [Highly Active Antiretroviral Medication.]

After posting this message, I was banned again. This time through an Ip address ban which would not allow me to access the forum itself–at all.

As funny or tragic as it may seem, the message displayed on my screen when attempting to access the forum read:

Sorry Schedir, you are banned from using this forum!
Go away you denialist.
This ban is not set to expire

What was the reason this time? What rules did I break? Is telling people “drink this juice” or “eat these vegetables” considered dangerous information, and a reason to ban an HIV positive person from the forum?

It seems to me that these people do not want their followers to hear about the other side of the argument, or even be permitted to enhance their health in any way other than through chemical medication. Is the HIV orthodoxy really this far gone, this out of touch?

People need to be made aware of this because POZ is the largest HIV magazine in existence, and many people who have been diagnosed turn to them for help and support. This is way different than a discussion group banning you for posting opposing religious or political views. This is a medical condition and people should feel free to speak about whatever they feel might be beneficial towards their health.

The time has come for people to wake up, and ask a simple question, one that perhaps a child would ask. It is one word:

WHY?

***

Editor’s Note:

The Truth Barrier obtained some additional information. “Ann” is Ann Smith, one of two listed staff moderators.

Posting at POZ.com is not free. All prices and rules are detailed below, cut and pasted from POZ.com.

Some things really stunned us. For example, this update indicates that members are only allowed to post 3 times for free on the Am I Infected? forum; This restriction only applies to this forum.

[There is no “dissident” or “rethinker”HIV forum that charges members any money for participating in discussions about HIV/AIDS.]

To wit:

IMPORTANT UPDATE
Posted Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Welcome to the “Am I Infected?” AIDSmeds forum.

New members — those who have posted three or fewer messages — are permitted to post questions and responses, free of charge (make them count!). Ongoing participation in the “Am I Infected?” forum — posting more than three questions or responses — requires a paid subscription.

A seven-day subscription is $9.99, a 30-day subscription is $14.99 and a 90-day subscription is $24.99.

Anyone who needs to post more than three messages in the “Am I Infected?” forum — including past, present and future AIDSmeds Forums members — will need to subscribe, with secure payments made via PayPal.

There will be no charge to continue reading threads in the “Am I Infected?” forum, nor will there be a charge for participating in any of the Main Forums; Meds, Mind, Body & Benefits; and Off Topic Forums. Similarly, all AIDSmeds pages, including our “How is HIV Transmitted?” and “Am I Infected? (A Guide to Testing for HIV)” lessons, will remain accessible to all.

NOTE: HIV testing questions will still need to be posted in the “Am I Infected?” forum; attempts to post HIV symptoms or testing questions in any other forums will be considered violations of our rules of membership and subject to time-outs and permanent bans.

To learn how to upgrade your Forums account to participate beyond three posts in the “Am I Infected?” Forum, please click here.

Thank you for your understanding and future support of the best online support service for people living with, affected by and at risk for HIV.

**********************************************************************************************************

Here are the general posting guidelines:

The information shared in these forums, by moderators and members, is designed to complement, not replace, the relationship between an individual and his/her own physician.
All members of these forums are, by default, not considered to be licensed medical providers. If otherwise, users must clearly define themselves as such.
Forums members must behave at all times with respect and honesty. Posting guidelines, including time-out and banning policies, have been established by the moderators of these forums. Click here for “Am I Infected?” posting guidelines. Click here for posting guidelines pertaining to all other POZ/AIDSmeds community forums.
We ask all forums members to provide references for health/medical/scientific information they provide, when it is not a personal experience being discussed. Please provide hyperlinks with full URLs or full citations of published works not available via the Internet. Additionally, all forums members must post information which are true and correct to their knowledge.
Product advertisement—including links; banners; editorial content; and clinical trial, study or survey participation—is strictly prohibited by forums members unless permission has been secured from POZ.

And here are the guidelines for the “Am I Infected” forum:

Here in the Am I Infected? Forum, you will be able to ask questions relating to HIV risk assessment and HIV testing.

Please take time before posting your question(s) and read the HIV Transmission Lesson and the HIV Testing Lesson. You’ll find some basic information about HIV/AIDS which maybe useful to you. And of course, if you still have questions, by all means let us hear from you.

If you are having physical symptoms you are concerned about, you should discuss them with your doctor. Neither the staff of AIDSmeds.com, nor the helpful members of the Forums, can diagnose your physical symptoms over the Internet.

Posting Guidelines

Please do not start a new thread every time you have another question or thought – regardless if you think your questions are related to each other or not. It helps us to help you when you keep all your thoughts or questions in one thread and it helps other readers to follow the discussion. Additional threads will be merged.
If you cannot find your thread, click on the “Show own posts” link in the left-hand column of any forum page, under your name.
Please do not post questions that you have about your own concerns in another person’s thread. This is called thread hijacking and we do not encourage this practice.
Only those Moderators and members who are authorized to answer questions in the Am I Infected? forum are permitted do so. Unauthorized responses may be deleted without permission of the poster. Repeatedly posting replies of this nature may result in a Time Out or permanent ban, at the discretion of the Moderator Team.
Anyone who continues to post excessively, questioning a conclusive negative result or no-risk situation, will be subject to a four week Time Out (a temporary ban from the Forums). If you continue to post excessively after one Time Out, you may be given a second Time Out which will last eight weeks. There is no third Time Out – it is a permanent ban. The purpose of a Time Out is to encourage you to seek the face-to-face help we cannot provide on this forum.
With the exception of the “Am I Infected?” and “Off Topic” Forums, the AIDSmeds.com Forums are intended for people who have been diagnosed with HIV (or their loved ones/caregivers). If you are questioning or unaware of your HIV status, please refrain from posting messages or questions in the Forums intended for HIV-positive people.
When you created an account with the AIDSmeds Forums, you agreed to have only one account. Starting multiple accounts is against the rules of the Forum and will cause you to be banned from our forums.
Do NOT use Private Messages to question other members about any transmission, testing or symptom issues. These issues must be discussed in the public forum. Misuse of the PM function in this manner will result in your PM privileges being removed without warning.
Please be courteous to other posters. We will not tolerate the use of abusive language under any circumstances.
If you have a problem with another poster, including abusive or unwarranted messages received via the private message (PM) function, please use the Report to moderator button. That is what it’s there for!
While these Forums allow for members to post photos, message threads that contain photos can take a long time for dial-up (modem) users to download. If you must include a photograph or another image with your message, please consider using the attachment option.

Adhering to these posting guidelines ensures the smooth running of this forum. Thank you for your cooperation.

We hope that you will learn enough about HIV in your time on this forum to enable you to protect yourself against HIV infection. If you are in serious doubt about your HIV status, you should seek care from a certified healthcare provider and get tested.

The AIDSmeds Forums Moderators Team


Research credit: Mark Harris, Truth Barrier contributor

Now It’s War: Crowd Fury Rises Against TED Elites For Pulling Sheldrake And Hancock Talks

Posted on March 18, 2013

The Discharge

 

The most important occurrence within the crowd is the discharge. Before this the crowd does not actually exist; it is the discharge which creates it. This is the moment when all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal.

 

Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

 

The Dissolution Of The Sting

 

The sting forms during the carrying out of the command. It detaches itself from the command and, as an exact image of this, imprints itself on the performer. It is small, hidden and unrecognized; its most essential characteristic, as we have already seen, is immutability. It remains isolated within the person concerned, a foreign body lodged in his flesh. However deep it may lie hidden, however incapsulated, it always remains a burden.

It is very difficult to get rid of the sting. It must in fact dislodge itself and can only do so if and when it reacquires force equal to that with which it originally penetrated. For this to happen there must be an exact repetition of the original command-situation, but in reverse. This is what the stung waits for through months, year and decades. It is as though each sting had a memory of its own, but of one thing only: the situation in which it was implanted. When this situation recurs, the sting cannot fail to recognize it, for this is its sole content, the only thing it can recognize. Suddenly everything is as it was before; only the roles of the actors are reversed. When this moment comes, the sting seizes its opportunity and hastens to fall on its victims. The reversal has at last taken place. ”

 

Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

 

This brilliant essay brought the point home to me today that we are very much at war now, the mockers and the mocked, the bullies or the “skeptic” or “debunker” movements vs the long suffering carriers of the Science Wild And Free torch. The former have the bully pulpits, the editorships, the positions, the authority, and appear to be envious of the latter, who have the love of the truly curious, or, you might say, the audience.

The battlefield is the elitist oligarch’s playground and institutional conformity church known as the TED talks, which have for many years been enforcing narrow notions of Right Thinking on the rich and impressionable, for an audience (that’s right, audience) fee of $8,000 per person. (Which at a typical TED conference amounts to $16 million, yet they pay participants nothing, make them work 16 hour days for one week, and share hotel bunks, bound by strict cult like rules participants rarely dare protest against.)

To wit:

 

 

 

Now TED has made a very bad mistake, gone too far, as the arrogant always do.

This has caused a revolutionary fervor to seize the comments section at the marginalized Bad Children’s corner they have assigned the Sheldrake and Hancock video clips to on their site, as TED founder Chris Anderson tries to excuse himself to a distant destination  where he can’t respond to Hancock’s clear questions, while holding up a Wikipedia page as an attempted shield.

What is being fought here? Who are the opponents? What do they stand for?

I’ve been immersed in this war for a long time–it spans so many fields of science, from AIDS to Vaccines to Global Warming to Nutrition, Health, to Paranormal studies, parapsychology, Quantum Physics and beyond.  The bullies, calling themselves “skeptics,” have had one singular weapon which has been impossible to counter, as it is designed not to be answerable, namely pure relentless mockery. Reputation destruction. Wikipedia bullying. Charges of “pseudo-science,” and “woo,” to anything at all that doesn’t conform exactly to a fiercely reductionist, materialist, market driven and frankly misogynist approach to “Science.” Anything that slows booming global bio-tech and pharmacological progressivism is “denialism” and “woo,” and any scientist who steps out of line, no matter how esteemed, how decorated or respected, is thrown into the garbage compactor.

Debate is the very thing that was removed, from the outset, to be replaced by crude censorship, proud of itself, always claiming its unquestioned right to protect the public from “bad” science, “wrong” science, “debunked” science and “irresponsible” science. The bullies found successful tactics and used them without shame: Primarily, the Denunciation: Denounce the aberrant scientist from behind closed doors, and delete, expunge, remove, their article, website, good name, presentation, job, or TED talk, under the guise of protecting their audience from erroneous and bad science. The soul of science–innocence and inquiry–were overtaken by contemptuous persecution, abuse, the all-permating Maoist sense that nobody was safe.

Rupert Sheldrake was always one of the names that could trigger the outbreak of war, as his science revolved around that which requires minds to imagine the possibility that there are worlds of meaning, occult you might call them (occult means unseen,) that transcend the known laws of physics. Telepathy, for example.

The bullies despise anything they can’t control. They are quick to label anything mysterious “crazy,” and as such, they are reminiscent of the 15th century Dutch clergymen who lived in perpetual fear of women as witches. Undiagnosed misogyny ripples through the whole drama; Real men don’t believe in woo. Real men crush woo. Real men serve industry, reason, capitalism, markets, and “real science.”

You know them by their uniformly mocking tones, always the same deadly consistency, never letting up, never allowing neutral tones in, which might suggest that the accused, bullied and mocked are human and reasonable. No, they must be demonized, abjected, and punished like children. And the public must be protected.

Their condescension is also their downfall.

Their time has come and gone–they are obsolete as the dodo. No interesting or serious minds think like they do–only businessmen and corporate shills–seeking to rape and possess the soul of “science,” which is a spirit that has never visited them, and never will. They will never invent, never find, never discover–their only roles in the big drama are mockery and disdain, and as we know, this is the sign of weak minds, disintegrating, from the subconscious knowledge that they are being overpowered and stripped of their self-claimed authority, as I write.

Their bullying will intensify. They are hoping to imprint their names on eternity.

 

“Why did people fling mud at them all?” Yevtushenko wrote in a 1957 poem called “A Career.”

“Talent speaks for itself, whatever the charges.

We’ve forgotten the men who abused them,

Remember only the victims of slander.”

No matter what, TED is a ruined brand name, exposed and shabby. Obsolete in the electrifying times ahead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Darkness At Noon: GOFUNDME DELETES TRUTH BARRIER ACCOUNT AFTER DONATIONS MADE

Posted on March 12, 2013

As I posted here, (old post at bottom) last week, I created a donation page for The Truth Barrier at GoFundMe, one of the major crowd funding sites. In the first day I raised $450. I was quite surprised to find, last night, that I was getting emails from GoFundMe telling me donors funds had been returned to them. Why? I hadn’t asked  them to do this. I had also gotten no warning of any kind. First I thought, when it was just one refund, in the beginning, that this donor was upset with me and wrote to him to ask why. Then all the donors were refunded and my “amount raised” went to $0.00. I thought maybe there was a snag with my bank account. I called the help number, and sent emails to tech support. “Why did you send all my donations back to donors with no explanation??”

I was stunned to get this chilling reply:

 

Hi Celia,

I apologize, but we are unable to process payments for your account. Our banks and processors hold us to a strict guideline on what we can and cannot process through our site. Unfortunately, we will not be able to provide you or your business with our services. I do apologize again, and wish you the best going forward.

Thanks,
Susan

WePay | Customer Support
Phone: 855-GO-WEPAY (855-469-3729)
support@wepay.com | wepay.com

 

It got worse. Today I found that GoFundMe had deleted my page altogether, again without alerting me.

If you believe in diversity of expression, citizen reporting, and the first amendment, I suggest you BOYCOTT GoFundMe. They are so censorious and cowardly they are making PayPal look like The Freedom Riders. (PayPal accepts donations here at the site, and has never given me a problem.)

When have we had enough of these underhanded Stasi tactics? They offered a service, I became a customer, I broke not one of their stated violations, and yet I was deleted without a word.

Who is behind GoFundMe? Which banks? What tactics do they use to screen people? On what do they base there “DELETE” decisions? What right do they have to send money BACK to donors once the donors have sent it to the recipient? This means I have to write to each donor and explain.

Let’s expose and name those complicit in the destruction of free speech on the Internet.

 

Thank you.

 

(Original post, minus GoFundMe page, below.)

 

 

Associate Editor Jack Mackerel, after a long night on the Ruggiero story

 

 

 

I started a page today to support developing The Truth Barrier into a real investigative contender–combining old school shoe-leather traditions with web-based citizen journalism. This is the first building block. Another way you can help us is to take interest in our ads, even if they seem annoying at first. Thank you for supporting The Truth Barrier in every single way, mainly with your attentiveness. We hope to grow like a beanstalk in 2013!

 

Celia Farber, Editor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AIDS Industry Defeated As Rico Ends Media Blackout

Posted on March 12, 2013

I want to speak clearly. In the evolution of democracy the first step is this: citizens outside the Party, including writers, should not have to applaud things with which they do not agree. To make anyone do so is unfair and unworthy of man. But to force a writer to do so is to make him sick in spirit, for a writer’s element, his profession, is to tell the truth. (And if he does not tell the truth he is only a slave or a paid scribbler.)

–The Hungarian Revolution, Melvin Lasky

 

CONTINUE READING “AIDS INDUSTRY DEFEATED AS RICO ENDS MEDIA BLACKOUT”→

Rico Home: Mirthless Bolsheviks Who Almost Killed Him Still In Command And Without Remorse

Posted on March 8, 2013

 

 

We are all heartened and  grateful for all the good-hearted people who came here from all over the world this week, and are still coming, to support baby Rico, who as we reported earlier today is HOME.

People have been asking:  Do his parents still have to medicate him? The answer is absolutely.

It will be done by visiting nurses, apparently, twice a day. The young parents, Lindsey and John, are not charged with missing even one dose of HAART medication, rather, with missing a doctor’s appointment. Still, they are now going to be under very heavy surveillance, and it is not even clear as I write this whether Rico is in their custody, or if he remains in the custody of the state, but at home with his parents.  As his grandfather Steve remarked, “I told them in the beginning, ‘If you do anything spooky with his meds, you’ll never see the kid again.’ ”

So.

Be advised, we officially no longer live in a democracy, by any measure. The state can, at any time, abduct your healthy child right from your arms, terminate custodial rights and medical decisions or even medical input, assail the child with debilitating, toxic, unproven drugs, while charging the parents with child endangerment. And this is the next chapter. Here is a statement tonight from Rico’s Facebook page, written by Allison Quinn, who is Cheryl Nagel’s niece.

 

“Yes! Rico is home. However, CPS is still playing a gigantic role in his custody and care, plus his parents are still facing the trial for child endangerment on April 1st and 2nd…not to mention the future legal battles in regards to the medication and everything.
We need to be contacting Minnesota officials! I will post a sample letter as a comment, below. Please, please send an email (can be the same one) to each of these officals:

MN DHS Commissioner: lucinda.jesson@state.mn.us
MN DHS Assistant Commissioner: erin.sullivan-sutton@state.mn.us
MN DHS Director of Child and Family Services: christeen.borsheim@state.mn.us
MN DHS info: dhs.info@state.mn.us
MN Governor: http://mn.gov/governor/contact-us/form/

 

Cheryl Nagel told me yesterday that one dark cloud was the fact that CPS (Child Protective Services) would be at the house when Rico came home. “It’s like being violated all over again,” she said. She also said a news channel would be there.  Just now, moments ago, Allison Quinn emailed me on FB and gave me permission to share her email verbatim:

 

“The meeting with CPS today didn’t happen today – they got word that the news service was going to be there, so CPS didn’t show up. ha! (so it’s okay for CPS to not show up, but of course not vice-versa.) But yes, Lindsey and John have 9 pages of a care plan they must follow for the daily care of Rico, and if any non-compliance happens, they can (and will) take the baby. CPS needs to give them a 15 minute heads up and then can show up…so basically, the baby needs to be within 15 minutes of the house at all times. He may as well just be under house arrest, right??
Not only did the ABC affiliate from Minneapolis film today (and it aired tonight – it was pretty good, minus that they said “according to hospital documents, Lindsey’s condition has progressed to AIDS.” nice.), but the Minneapolis newspaper the Star Tribune called and interviewed them as well.”

 

Today on Facebook, investigative journalist Ricci Davis shared this quote:

 

“In order to establish a perfect socialist state, you have to destroy the family. You have to substitute the government and its authority for parental authority in the rearing of children.”

– Karl Marx

 

 

Breaking News: Rico Has Been Released From Hospital

Posted on March 8, 2013

Text from Cheryl Nagel, 2:00 pm EDT, March 8, reads:

 

“Hey gals, Rico is almost home. ”

 

“I am standing outside the cafe waiting to get them on film when they arrive. They should be here any minute.”

 

 

High Noon: Peter Duesberg On Rico Martinez Nagel And The Madness At Hand

Posted on March 8, 2013

Dear all – dissident and non-dissident Americans,

This is “High Noon” for all of us to save a little baby. We have only time for facts now – the facts of life and biology. The clock is ticking for a little baby on DNA chain-terminators including AZT, just as it was in High Noon. Here are some of those facts:

1) Life is 3 billion years old, and for all this time it depended on mothers to give birth to babies and to raise them – not on government-paid protection agencies. And it worked pretty well so far.

2) The now 3-month-old baby Rico has been taken away from his mother Lindsey Nagel, his father and his family to treat him with the DNA-chain terminator AZT against the “AIDS virus,” HIV. But it’s not even clear, whether Rico is infected by this virus at this time. He is only “positive” for antibodies against HIV – yes AGAINST HIV, nor for HIV – which he inherited from his mother. It takes many months after birth to determine, whether he has indeed infectious HIV, instead of just antibodies against it, and is able to make his own antibody against HIV. Rico is now only suspected to carry HIV, but is treated with AZT as if he were infected.

3) DNA chain-terminators like AZT are inevitably toxic. They were designed in the 1960s by Jerry Horwitz, Gertrude Ellion and others, to kill human cancer cells making DNA, by terminating DNA synthesis. But since normal cells also make DNA, they also die as long as they make DNA. Therefore DNA chain-terminators were never designed for babies with antibodies against HIV or against any other virus for that matter, in whom DNA synthesis, and thus vulnerability, is at a record high for making the cells of their growing bodies.

4) HIV is naturally transmitted from mother to child, like all other retroviruses of its kind, again since millions of years. According to the World Health Organization , HIV is presumably transmitted by a third of all African mothers to their children . The African mothers and their children have, however, increased from 400,000 to 1.2 billion since the 1980s when AIDS presumably started in Africa. So HIV can’t be a reason for taking a baby away from his mother in a free country – but it is.

5) Where is the evidence from the Child Protection Agencies, who take babies away from their mothers, that AZT has ever cured an AIDS patient? Can they name just one such study?

In view of this and the American constitution shouldn’t mothers have the right to decide what’s best for their babies – in particular, if forced treatments with inevitably toxic drugs that have never cured an AIDS patient, are applied to their babies away from home?

Where is Gary Cooper or John Wayne to help a “damsel in distress and her baby” against our very own AIDS-Polizei?

 

 

Peter Duesberg

Radio Free Rico

Posted on March 6, 2013
Rico and his mom, Lindsey Nage
It has been the most astonishing week, experiencing the enormous reaction from around the world to the plight of little Rico Martinez Nagel, in what seems to be the death-throes of the rogue AIDS machine. Here at TTB,  other blogs,on Facebook, on Twitter, on radio, and even local TV, the outrage, sorrow, and commitment have formed a tornado of support for the Nagel family and little Rico. If you wish to make a donation or express your support to the family, go to www.saverico.com.
CONTINUE READING “RADIO FREE RICO”→

Light Of Corinthians

Posted on February 28, 2013

 

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues,they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.  For we know in part and we prophesy in part,  but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.  When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.  For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Corinthians, 13

War On Life: The Kidnapping And Torture Of Rico Martinez Nagel

Posted on February 28, 2013

 

 

 

 

 

“They aren’t gonna quit. It doesn’t end. There can’t be two of them. Can you imagine if Lindsey had a baby after 22 years and the baby lived? Can you imagine? It didn’t happen to Lindsey. It happened to Rico.”

Steve Nagel, grandfather of Rico

 

 

 

 

We’ve kept quiet about the situation since December, 2012. Lindsey Nagel gave birth to a healthy baby boy on December 19. He was supposed to come home a few days later. He is still not home. He remains in the hospital, in state custody, covered in tubes. So battered and destroyed by force fed ARV drugs, the family has begun to wonder if Rico will make it.

“I don’t know if Rico will make it out of the hospital, at this point,” said Rico’s grandfather, Steve Nagel. “He’s basically on life support right now. He’s 7 pounds. He needs his family. He needs love. But they couldn’t let this mother have a baby that lived too. I’m all cried out over this. It’s just unbelievable.”

Rico and Lindsey

 

The same day Rico was born, while Lindsey was resting, three figures appeared at the foot of her bed.  It was an infectious disease doctor, a lawyer and a social worker.  They told her that unless she consented to being tested for HIV, and allowed them to test Rico for HIV, they were going to turn Lindsey in to Mower county Social Services for child endangerment.”

Cheryl Nagel, grandmother of Rico

 

 

 

 

 

 

Background

 

I have covered the HIV wars, in gory detail, and with increasing shock, since Peter Duesberg’s first critique appeared in the literature in 1987, in Cancer Research, arguing against “retroviruses” as causes of cancer and or pathogens capable of causing “AIDS.”

You know, this “war,” it always has a precise location at a given time, a portal–a human being, or family, through whom it beats its message of ultra violence, its domination, its will to prevail. It is blind with rage and fear, and it does not know how to differentiate between killing and “saving lives.” If it has to kill in the name of saving lives, it will.

It–the dark, grey, meaningless, Godforsaken evil– has now gotten a small baby boy in its grip, and his life is hanging in the balance, as I write this.

The boy’s name is Rico Martinez Nagel. His mother is Lindsey Nagel, familiar to many of you. Lindsey was adopted by her parents, Steve and Cheryl Nagel, from Romania, as an infant, in 1990. She was tested for “HIV” in Romania, and tested negative. Upon arriving to the United States, she was re-tested and tested positive. Shortly after arriving to her new home with her new loving family, in Minneapolis, MN, her parents prepared for her imminent death, after doctors gave their grave prophecies that she would probably not live past the age of two. She was put on AZT. She suffered, of course–AZT being “the antithesis of life,” and a chemotherapeutic agent that kills all dividing cells. She screamed day and night, she stopped eating, she stopped growing. Her parents were assured this was all the effects of the deadly virus, HIV.

Cheryl’s father one day happened upon an article in The National Review, by Tom Bethell, about the critique of German cancer virologist Peter Duesberg, asserting the harmless nature of HIV and explaining why HIV can’t cause AIDS. What a “retrovirus” was exactly, was unclear then–the field was very new. Today the matter is even more opaque. But Duesberg pointed to the elephant in the room: Prior to Robert Gallo’s astonishing declaration at a press conference in April of 1984, that his lab had isolated a novel retrovirus and that it was determined to be the “probable cause of AIDS,” (by the next day, “the cause of AIDS”) retrovirology as a field was in agreement that retroviruses were non pathogenic, or “harmless,” i.e. did not kill cells.

The Nagels (in 1992) wrote to him in Berkeley, despairing about their “HIV positive” daughter suffering on AZT.   “Dr. Duesberg, if Lindsey were your daughter, what would you do?” they asked.

Duesberg, speaking now as bio-chemist, wrote back, sending a dossier of scientific papers, and a hand written cover letter that said: “If you don’t take your daughter off AZT right away she will die, like Kimberly Bergalis…” (who perished on AZT and other “nukes,” from the early years of AIDS treatment.)

Lindsey had been on AZT for 22 months. Her growth had flatlined–she was literally not growing, at all, and barely eating, and spending most of her waking hours screaming. Despite dire threats from Lindsey’s doctors, the Nagels took their daughter off the drug.

“We decided we’d rather she have three good months than six bad ones,” her father Steve said.

Lo and behold, the “deadly virus” stopped being deadly, right away–coinciding perfectly with the cessation of the DNA chain terminating chemotherapy going into her system. Lindsey started growing and thriving, normally. She put on weight, fast. All her normal functions returned. The doctors continued to browbeat the Nagels in a protracted battle; They kept insisting Lindsey would die, soon, they knew not when exactly, if she were not put back on the drug. She would not live to age five. She would not live to age seven. She would not see “double digits.” And so forth. The Nagels prevailed. The system (which Duesberg calls “the Reich”) was not organized at that time, to simply seize a child and forcibly medicate. Or else they just got lucky. In any event, they got away with it. They got away with saving their daughter’s life and also keeping custody of her.

Lindsey grew up. She never manifested any sickness.

When she was 19, she met Peter Duesberg for the first time, at a 2009 screening in Nashville for the documentary House of Numbers.  I took this photo of the two of them in the parking lot of the airport.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CONTINUE READING “WAR ON LIFE: THE KIDNAPPING AND TORTURE OF RICO MARTINEZ NAGEL”→

The Recoil: The Anxiety Of Command (Crowds And Power)

Posted on February 7, 2013
CONTINUE READING “THE RECOIL: THE ANXIETY OF COMMAND (CROWDS AND POWER)”→

Small Heart

Posted on February 6, 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

–for Jan Jozef Szczepanski

 

 

 

The bullet that I shot

at the time of the great war

made a circle around the globe

and struck me in the back

 

at the least suitable moment

when I was already sure

I had forgotten everything

his-my faults

 

after all just like others

I wanted to erase from memory

the faces of hatred

 

history consoled me

that I had fought with naked force

and the Book said

–it is he who is Cain

 

 

so many years patiently

so many years in vain

with water of compassion I washed away

soot blood insults

so nobility

the beauty of existence

and perhaps even goodness

could have a home in me

 

after all just like everyone

I longed to return

to the bay of childhood

to the land of innocence

 

the bullet I shot

from a small calibre weapon

circled the globe

against the laws of gravitation

and struck me in the back

as if it wanted to say

—that nothing will be forgiven

to anyone

 

so now I sit alone

on the cut stump of a tree

exactly in the centre

of the forgotten battle

 

and I

gray spider

weave bitter meditations

 

about too great a memory

about too small a heart

 

 

—Zbigniew Herbert

(Translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter)

Pergamon

Posted on January 4, 2013

by Gary Ryan

 

 

CONTINUE READING “PERGAMON”→

The Crucible: Dangerous And Primitive HIV Criminalization Laws Are Claiming More And More Victims: One Group Is Doing Something About It

Posted on December 22, 2012

By Celia Farber

 

“We expect this trend to continue. While the AIDS industry has convinced Americans of the alleged AIDS epidemic, prosecutors have a hard time finding anyone willing to promote their propaganda under penalty of perjury.”

CLARK BAKER, OMSJ

 

 

The 2011 Nobel laureate poet Tomas Tranströmer wrote a poem called “To Friends Behind A Frontier,” to close friends living in (then) GDR:

 

1

I wrote so meagerly to you. But what I couldn’t write swelled and swelled like an old-fashioned airship and drifted away at last through the night sky.

2

The letter is now at the censor’s. He lights his lamp. In the glare my words fly up like monkeys on a grille, rattle it, stop and bare their teeth.

3

Read between the lines. We’ll meet in 200 years
When the microphones in the hotel walls are forgotten
And can at last sleep, become trilobites.

 

The poem reflects the feeling of sadness of witnessing capture, in this case, Western Europeans wishing they could liberate friends in East Germany. “Read between the lines. We’ll meet in 200 years, when the microphones in the hotel walls are forgotten, and can at last sleep, become trilobites,” captures the cycle of mania, hunt, persecution, inside deranged political systems—all from nothing and for nothing. But one day, the poet assures us, the microphones will become fossils; The friends will be free again, and can “meet.”

For some reason, these stories have not gotten told. Not even by those of us who have devoted years to chronicling the horrors wrought by the never proven HIV “theory.” We got mired in the ego-driven correctomania of “the science”—while the sheer human consequences of the paradigm were overlooked, or tuned out. In utter silence, away from sound and sight, forgotten by all the world, hundreds of people in this country and around the world have been serving time for HIV “crimes” which seem culled from the 16th century, at a time before court room justice was invented.

An accusation. That’s all it takes. An angry ex lover, often, turning the tables on a former partner, claiming he or she did not disclose HIV status prior to sex.

Welcome to the world of HIV criminalization—the logical and chilling final station of barbarism in an already upside down world. This is where the psychic prison of a positive HIV test meets actual prison walls, where the brutality, madness and sheer stupidity of the HIV state is fully realized– where the violence upon the marked people is given unbridled reign.

It is a slippery slope, a perpetual Crucible, a place where the accusation seals the deal, and if you are not a witch, well, you would float. We need not have any sympathy. As POZ magazine founder Sean Strub, who is an advocate against HIV criminalization has said, “All HIV positive gay men are one disgruntled lover away from a jail sentence.”

In the United States, 37 of our states have statutes on the books which criminalize HIV transmission, and non-disclosure of HIV status. Sentences for those declared guilty easily run as high as 25 years or more. One of the Pennsylvania statutes designates a minimum sentence of life imprisonment, and in one state, Nebraska, the crime can carry the death penalty.

States which do not criminalize HIV transmission are: Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Texas, and Wyoming.

HIV criminalization laws began in earnest in 1990 when the federal Ryan White CARE act passed. This law mandated that states criminalize intentional transmission of HIV to be eligible for millions of dollars in funding for treatment and prevention programs. Some states took it a step further than federal law required, defining intentional transmission as failing to disclose positive status to a sexual partner.  The second time the act was reauthorized, in 2000, the requirement that states must criminalize intentional transmission was removed. These quietly woven draconian laws gained foothold also around the world at this time, most popular, not surprisingly, in Northern and Western Europe.

The United States leads the world in prosecutions as well as convictions of HIV antibody positive people, accused of non-disclosure. Some 913 have been prosecuted to date. The second most enthusiastic country is Canada, where there have been 146 prosecutions and 79 convictions. Next is Austria, 55 prosecuted, 55 convicted, followed by Sweden: 50 prosecuted, 50 convicted. Germany, Australia, Norway, Denmark are all close behind.

Here is a random sampling of countries that have a “zero” attached to this—no prosecutions, no convictions: Russia, Philippines, Romania, Latvia, Chad, Mali, Armenia (along with dozens more.)

Point being: Criminalization of HIV positive people only took off in the US and Canada, and in the star-posts of European enlightened post-war democracy. Apparently, in some countries, mothers can now be criminally charged if they pass “HIV” to their babies. This Orwellian society is precisely the nightmare, I must stress, that HIV dissidents have been warning against for many years. It must be dismantled, before any human being on this planet is safe again. (Safe from this.)

You hear of HIV criminal cases only rarely in the media, when local health departments have leaked that a “monster” (male, generally, black, generally) “tried to infect,” several hundred women with “AIDS,” such as the case of Ghanaian national Henry Assumang, soon on trial in the UK.

Absorbing and refracting deep wells of racism, xenophobia, and anti-immigration sentiment, the frothy language of a typical newspaper account of an HIV case:

“An illegal immigrant may have infected hundreds of women with HIV in a string of one-night-stands, it has emerged. The infected Jamaican reveler prowled nightclubs to pick up women and then spent almost a year unchecked in hospital where he looked for sex with vulnerable patients.

“Health officials have written to more than 400 women to warn them they might have the deadly virus after having unprotected sex with him. The immigrant, who arrived in the UK on a visitor’s visa in 2002, has admitted he cannot remember how many woman he has slept with.”  —The Daily Mail, UK

Vapors, hysteria, moral panic, nothing concrete—all this contributes to the perfect storm for human rights disasters that both sides of the HIV war agree must end. [This may be the only point both sides agree on, in 27 years.]

Though it would appear that the “HIV establishment” (hundreds of pharmaceutically-funded organizations, foundations, activists and lobbyists) laid the groundwork for this nightmare scenario which has for a quarter century relentlessly been pounding away at inaccurate, distorted and wildly inflated HIV statistics and scare scenarios—they too are now trying to slam the brakes on.

Sean Strub, founder of POZ magazine, has made a deeply moving eight -minute documentary that illuminates the deep injustice and plain horror of the situation.

“HIV is not a crime” says the film in the opening sequence, summing up the core sentiment, and referring to a “viral underclass” that is created by the enactment of HIV criminalization laws.

Now, the dissenting, or “denialist” position is that all persons who have been branded as “having HIV” by the numerous testing technologies, are part of a “viral underclass” that they (the denialists) would wish to liberate. This would be done by way of a stark and, for the first time, objective scientific look at what we mean by “HIV,” which resides inside the hockey net we call the HIV test.

What does “HIV” signify?

A slew of tests that suggest presence, because the slew of tests defined its presence when they were developed. But presence of what, and more importantly, where?

In human blood? Or in the hockey net. (The tests)

If a person is found not to be carrying a lethal weapon, can they have ever been a threat to another, for brandishing said lethal weapon?

Stop for a moment, ponder with me. We speak of crimes of bodies, bodily fluids, humans being retro-fitted with lethal weaponry in their sexual fluids, and thrown in prison because they supposedly tried to kill another person with no weapon other than their body. If that is not science fiction I don’t know what is.

The plot thickens.

In 2009, a newly-minted non-profit investigation agency calling itself OMSJ – The Office of Medical and Scientific Justice – was founded by retired LAPD officer and investigator Clark Baker, who entered the fray by way of the 2008 Semmelweis Society International Whistleblower Conference.

Comprised of detectives, scientists, medical doctors and attorneys, OMSJ has become a kind of Amnesty International of medical abuses, seeking redress to crimes by an industry that has paid $10 billion (since 2009) to settle thousands of claims related to the illegal marketing of products that kill or injure 2-4 million Americans annually. OMSJ founder Clark Baker always refers to the pharmaceutical industry as a “criminal enterprise.” Detested by industry-funded organizations for what it calls its “denialist” leanings, OMSJ is scoring victories in a legal realm that is just about as dark as dark gets: HIV criminalization.

Fighting not for the “rights” of HIV positive criminally accused people but for the liberation of them from the system, OMSJ has developed a simple strategy: Rather than question the softly defined rights of HIV positive people, they go after the alchemy of tests and presumptions that fuels a pandemic of misdiagnoses. In this way, they force prosecutors to prove that the person they wish to put behind bars in indeed infected with HIV.

“We’ve had scores of victories so far,” says OMSJ CEO Clark Baker. “In all, HIV-related charges were withdrawn, dismissed, or plea-bargained in 49 cases.”

More than 100 cases have crossed OMSJ’s windshield since 2009.  “In about 1/3 of those cases,” says Baker, “the attorneys find one reason or another to ignore what we offer. That narrative involves variations of a young black man who dates white girls in a town where the children of defense attorneys, prosecutors and judges attend the same ice cream socials and school proms.”

Says Baker, “Lynch mobs are a tough sell.”

In another 1/3 of cases, the defense expresses interest but, for one reason or another, convinces their clients to plead guilty to ten years or more.

In some states, prosecutors only need to prove that the defendant didn’t disclose – even when prosecutors make no effort to prove that an infection exists.

Says Baker: “Our successes were typically won by attorneys who coordinated their defense strategy with us.”

Asked to put a fine point on how exactly OMSJ sets these condemned people free, or helps to, Baker says: “We review the medical records, which is often nothing more than a health department report that alleges a positive test result. But when we dig deeper, we find that “Doctor A” received a positive HIV test result from an unreliable laboratory that he didn’t understand. ‘A’ refers the patient to “Doctor B,” who assumes that ‘A’ conducted a competent diagnosis. So like outfielders who think someone else will catch the ball, the patient is soon prescribed a deadly psychotropic drug like Atripla that will eventually sicken and kill the patient. But unlike most negligent homicides, the killer signs the death certificate.”

The makers of Atripla, Baker points out, Gilead Sciences and Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), currently face multistate lawsuits that allege $100,000 kickbacks to clinicians who unnecessarily prescribe their drugs to healthy patients. ProPublica has found almost a billion dollars in such kickbacks, which doesn’t include what wasn’t disclosed.

“These are facts that prosecutors, health departments and doctors don’t want aired before a jury,” says Baker:

“As you can imagine, Doctors ‘A’ and ‘B’ are reluctant to admit their incompetence, which is why the prosecution’s case collapses.  Understandably, our work threatens the credibility of the US Government, drug and healthcare industries, which is why state attorneys general are being pressured to end the prosecutions in their states.  Industry-funded activists at LAMBDA, Treatment Action Group and HIV Law & Policy are cynically using the humanitarian pretext to end prosecutions before too many taxpayers learn of the scam that specifically targets black and gay Americans.”

Baker says, “Based upon the cases we have examined since 2009, there is strong evidence that 95% of all criminal HIV convictions in the United States involve individuals who were never infected with HIV. The greater implication is that millions of allegedly HIV+ people around the world were probably never at risk of dying from HIV.”

Baker believes that he has a “unification theory” that would resolve the differences between the Duesberg position (retrovirus exists but is harmless) with the Perth position (no proof exists for existence of a retrovirus.) (Details of this will emerge over time, and not in this article.)

In an editorial for the journal Haematologica Dr. Etienne de Harven, Professor Emeritus of Pathology, and pioneer of electron microscopy at Sloan Kettering in the 1950s, wrote, on the “fundamental failure” of HIV research:

… The specificity of viral markers depends on the success of virus isolation and purification. Without fully demonstrated success in virus isolation and purification, identification of viral markers is extremely hazardous and can lead to severe misinterpretation of clinical data. A dramatic illustration of this is to be found in current HIV research. In this case, the virus (HIV) has never been properly isolated, since sedimentation in sucrose gradient at the density of 1.16 g/mL was erroneously considered to yield pure virus, systematically ignoring that material sedimenting at that density contains large amounts of cell debris and microvesicles. Therefore, proteins and nucleic acids found in such 1.16 bands are very likely to be of cellular origin and cannot be used as viral markers. Such a faulty methodology has had extremely serious consequences, i.e. the world-wide use of HIV-antibody tests, Elisa and Western Blot, which dangerously lack specificity, as demonstrated in 1993 by Papadopulos et al., in Australia.

Etienne de Harven, MD
Professor Emeritus of Pathology,
University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Viral etiology of human cancer: a historical perspective
Haematologica – Journal of Hematology;
1999; 84:385-389

HIV test kits have stunning disclaimers in the package inserts, stating in different ways over and over that HIV tests are not proof of infection with HIV—a case first made by a group of scientists in Perth, Australia, in a 1993 paper in BioTechnology.

Here is but one of countless examples:

Detection of antibodies to HIV-1 does not constitute a diagnosis of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). A NEGATIVE BLOT is not a guarantee that the causative agent for AIDS is not present. Although a blot POSITIVE for antibodies to HIV-1 indicates infection with the virus, a diagnosis of AIDS can only be made clinically if a person meets the case definition of AIDS established by the Center for Disease Control (USA), the World Health Organization or other relevant authorities…

[HIV blot 2:2 Western Blot Assay, MP Diagnostics
source: Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society]

OMSJ’s team includes Dr. Rodney Richards, formerly of Amgen, who developed one of the first HIV test kits before defecting from the company altogether, in anguish over how misleading “HIV tests” really were.

Says Baker:

“Based upon the 100 plus cases we have been involved in since 2009, there is strong evidence that 95% of all criminal HIV convictions in the United States involve individuals who were never infected with HIV.”

In fact, if you press him further, in the highly esoteric but critical discussion of what exactly is wrong with the HIV test and why and how it does not demonstrate “infection,” or, for that matter, what is meant by “infection,” Baker goes further:

“There is now strong evidence that none of our clients were ever infected with HIV.”

Yes, I know.

WHAT?

But let’s leave that Ostrich Egg to gestate a bit, and hatch when it is good and ready. This will take time.

Baker points out that health clinics profit from every positive HIV test they get.

“They call it the Magic Effect,” says Baker:

“When Magic Johnson retired from basketball, clinics reported that phone calls and testing skyrocketed. Health department busybodies routinely grill patients about their sex lives and partners. Then either call the partners or police about the alleged exposure. When police make an arrest, they leak the story to the media, creating the desired fear and hysteria. Sally’s on the evening news and you think, we dated last year – I should get tested. Before you know it, the health department goons are warning you that they will contact the police unless you provide the names and phone numbers of your friends and employers.”

Doctors, meanwhile, also benefit financially in a rather shocking way:

“Doctors are permitted to ignore FDA warning labels about the unreliability of HIV tests,” says Baker. “Many of these doctors accept kickbacks and trips to Tahiti from HIV drug manufacturers for unnecessarily prescribing deadly drugs to their asymptomatic patients.”

It gets worse.

Multi-million dollar AIDS organizations that purport to serve the needs of HIV positive individuals, are now actively seeking to block them from knowing about OMSJ’s legal triumphs on behalf of the HIV accused.

On the website for Positive Justice Project: Guidance for People Living With HIV Who Are Threatened With, or, are Facing Criminal Prosecution for HIV Nondisclosure or Exposure, there are 15 “things you can do as damage control,”
And one of them is an open warning to avoid OMSJ.

Never naming OMSJ directly, the group warns:

AVOID PEOPLE WHO SAY THEY CAN HELP YOU BECAUSE HIV DOES NOT CAUSE AIDS:

You may be approached by people who claim they want to help you because an HIV test does not prove that you have HIV or AIDS, or because HIV is not harmful to others. AIDS “denialists” — people who do not believe that HIV is the cause of AIDS and that all AIDS treatments are toxic — frequently approach defendants in cases that have received press coverage, and may be interested in using your case to advance their cause. These people should be avoided because they likely will hurt rather than help your case.

Baker, for his part, says: “Organizations like HIV Law & Policy, Treatment Action Group and LAMBDA have never attempted to prove that their clients are not infected with HIV. The Obama administration, UNAIDS and the UN are trying to dissuade Western governments from prosecuting these cases using the pretext of human rights. It was in 2009 when we started winning these cases that they suddenly had their Come-to-Jesus moment.  I would work with any of them to free an unjustly convicted human being. But they won’t work with OMSJ. Our door is open any time they change their mind and decide to prioritize their clients freedom over their own personal ideology.”

 

After Yvonne Nicole Andrews left an ex-boyfriend who had repeatedly assaulted her, he turned around and falsely accused her of exposing a total of four men to HIV, none of whom she had ever met. [All four tested negative.] Soon, before she knew what was happening, Ms. Andrews found herself in a Florida prison cell facing a sixty-year sentence. Despite hospital records documenting the injuries, which included a badly sprained neck, severe concussions, and more, and despite overt statements that he planned to kill her, her ex used the laws to become make her the criminal. He was never charged.

The blond, soft-spoken mother of two had languished in county jail for several months when OMSJ contacted her attorney and prepared her defense.

Reached at home just weeks after her release, Andrews told The Truth Barrier:

“OMSJ’s attorney saw me while I was in prison, and explained everything. Then, after my attorney and I understood and we all became a team, they went to work. They were amazingly fast and effective. OMSJ broke down the prosecution in no time at all and educated them about the scientific side. These people wanted to put me away for sixty years. My kids would have had no mom. Instead I was out after nine months.”

“We had a similar case in 2011,” said Baker, “when a rapist accused his victim of HIV exposure. After questioning the victim’s doctor in a pretrial hearing, prosecutors withdrew all charges against our client who, if convicted, could have received a 30-year prison sentence and a deportation order.”

Andrews’ voice breaks when she mentions Clark Baker:

“Mr. Baker to me is heaven sent. He is my angel. I will be in debt to that man for the rest of my life. I can’t even express the feelings I felt when they came and told me. Words cannot express it.”

“I want my story to be told,” she continues,” because I want everybody to know the truth. I had no idea you could destroy somebody’s life just like that, just accusations, no proof, just hearsay. No idea. I was in prison with a girl who was part of a drug deal gone bad… she ran over a man and crushed his skull. She was in for murder. Her maximum was 15 years. My maximum was 60 years.”

She draws a deep sigh.

“Yes, m’aam.”

She continues:

“I sat down to write Mr. Baker a thank you letter, but after a week of mulling it over, I still could not find the words. The team at OMSJ, those people are working for a higher power. For all the people who are innocent and don’t deserve any of this, but nobody hears them. Nobody wants to hear it. One day it will all come out. The truth will come out.”

Ms. Andrews tells me she is delighted and grateful to God to have gotten home for Thanksgiving, and looks forward to spending Christmas with her family. But life is no Hollywood ending for these people. They have uniformly been exposed in local media, both as HIV positive and as criminals. It doesn’t go away when the charges are dropped. Their collapsed lives don’t miraculously reform.  They are classified felons and can’t work. “I can’t even get a job in a local store,” says Andrews. “But I have faith in God. I know he has his hands on me. I want to help others.”

Ms. Andrews has never taken HIV medication, nor had any symptoms of any kind. During her 9 1/2 months in jail, she spent most of her time studying the Bible. “I’ll be honest with you, when I was in jail I felt safe,” she says. Her ex had (and these are just some of the incidents:) thrown her off a porch, body-slammed her, pounded her head to the point of spraining her neck and giving her a severe concussion, threatened to kill her, stalked her, and more. “Now I am out. He knows I’m out. My family and I want to leave this area. I pray morning, noon and night.”

Take off HIV/AIDS goggles and put on domestic abuse and misogyny goggles, in order to keep seeing, and keep hearing. Her ex was found to be taking anti-HIV medications, which was discovered once when he was pulled over, and the medicine was in his car. He used to tell Andrews: “I’m sorry you’ll never be with another man.”

“He was just so insecure and controlling. He beat me physically, abused me mentally and verbally. This man has done everything he could to destroy me. In his mind, it was either death or prison.”

Andrews ex had a special trick: Mid beatings, he would call 911, and accuse her of domestic abuse. He is 6 ft 4 inches, 280 lbs, and works in construction. On one occasion, he had another girlfriend jump on Andrews and assault her, while he made the 911 call, and commented: “Don’t worry about it. She’s going to prison.”

“I will keep going strong,” says Andrews. “I am not going to give up. I want everybody to know the truth. My heart is just filled with joy. I am so ready to do this. When you’re in a situation like this, you feel like you’re the only person this has ever happened to. But there are so many. And they all need help. I was incarcerated, and as of now, I am a convicted felon. But Clark Baker is working with me to find new life after this. I have to start my life over. I have the utmost respect for that man and his organization. I would do anything in the world for him.”

“I thought this was something I would never talk to anybody about. But I am relieved it’s being written and being put out there. Because I am finding out that it’s not just me, there are other people in this situation. And they deserve to be heard. A lot of people don’t know who to turn to, for help. I was shunned by everybody. When they told me I was HIV positive–when they tell you that, a part of you just dies. It’s just gone.”

Andrews was told she was positive in 2008.

She continues:

“But now I have gotten educated and I think they are inaccurate in their testing. I have never had symptoms, and never taken medication. They tried, but I didn’t take it because I wasn’t sick. I’m as healthy as a horse.”

I asked her how it felt when she left prison, and came home, on Nov 15, this year.

“Elation, tears,” she says:

“I can’t even express the feelings that I felt. I got to come home to my family. I made it home for Thanksgiving, and I have so much to be thankful for. Christmas will be even greater. I am just so happy.  We need to let people know that there are people that do care about them, and they’re not alone.”

***

————————————————————————————————————–
Additional research for this article by Mark Harris.

For more information about OMSJ, to inquire about a legal situation, or to make a donation, go to http://www.omsj.org

The Truth Barrier has traveled as far as Stavanger Norway to report on this unfolding story. Stay tuned for Part Two, coming soon.

Keep The Truth Barrier Running With A Small Donation

Posted on November 5, 2012

If we can raise even a small amount of money we can keep the site going and hopefully grow. Thank you for lending us your spirit and attention. We hope to grow big and strong in 2013.

You can donate $1 or $5, and it will help a lot. You can use GoFundMe or the PayPal button below to the right.

Thank you!

Romanesque Arches

Posted on November 2, 2012

 

An Angel with no face embraced me

and whispered through my whole body:

‘Don’t be ashamed of being human, be proud!

Inside you vault open behind vault endlessly. You will never be complete, that’s how it’s meant to be.’

Blind with tears

I was pushed out on the sun-seething piazza

together with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Mr. Tanaka, and Signora Sabatini

and inside them all vault opened behind vault endlessly.

 

–Romanesque Arches, Tomas Tranströmer

Alice Miller’s Powerchord

Posted on October 29, 2012

The opening graph to Alice Miller’s classic, Prisoners of Childhood: The Search For The True Self, (original title) strikes like a bell. I never tire of reading it:

“We live in a culture that encourages us not to take our own suffering seriously, but rather to make light of it or even to laugh about it. What is more, this attitude is regarded as a virtue, and many people–of whom I used to be one–are proud of their lack of sensitivity toward their own fate and particularly their fate as a child. I have tried to demonstrate in my books why the disastrous belief that this attitude is a desirable one has been held so tenaciously and to point out the tragic conditions it helps to conceal.”

—Alice Miller, The Drama of The Gifted Child: The Search For The True Self

My Father’s Dream

Posted on October 7, 2012

My father calls me every night, or almost every night, between 9:30 and 10:30 pm, after the show. He is now 82.

I cherish our talks, and often take notes. This summer we talked many evenings about Normandy, and his theory that it should have happened somewhere else, but I’d have to find my notes to recall where. It seems he still sits with maps, searching for a better past, to WW2.

Then there was the war in our family.

We sometimes talk about that. For many years when I was growing up, we, my sister and I, were not permitted to talk to him, to express love for him, or to treat him as anything other than the Enemy.

“This is a war, you are soldiers,” our mother would say. “You’re not children.”

But we were.

Loving our father was our deepest darkest secret. We wouldn’t have revealed it even to one another, or if we did, one of us could easily have turned the other one in on a bad night, been rewarded.

Never mind. It’s a long time ago.

Sometimes I bring it up, to him.

“You know we weren’t allowed to treat you as though we loved you, as our father. Do you know that?”

I want him to say he understands, the way he would understand somebody in a former communist state having to internalize and “express” a maniacal and irrational love of the State, along with a hatred and disdain for the West.

When I use those metaphors, I sense that I can get through to him, that the things we used to say on the crackling phone line between Örebro, Sweden and New York, were not from our own hearts. They were engineered. It was the 70s, and everything was insane. Everything.

“I don’t want to criticize your mother. She did such a great job raising you two–”

“I don’t want to either and that’s not the purpose. The purpose of me stressing this is that you understand now that we were not permitted to express our true feelings.”

“I knew that.”

To this day when I see daughters expressing basic affection for their fathers, I can’t believe they’re permitted, that they’re not “in trouble,” like East Germans I met on trains used to “not believe” people could buy and eat oranges on any day other than Christmas.

I sometimes find myself near tears when I see them, so natural. And I want to go back and express everything that is now stuck somewhere, for my father, in the time it was supposed to be transferred, in childhood. I feel sorrow for him, not only for myself, or my mother. He steeled himself to receive nothing but cold scolding from these squeaky voices on the phone–his daughters. “Why wasn’t the check signed? Do you know how many jobs Mom has to work? We have nothing. Nothing!”

I recall the dread; The nights we had to call, from the red Cobra phone in our kitchen in Sweden. In the 1970s, this was a very major production: You placed a call with a Swedish operator, who then went forth and negotiated the call to the United States, for a Mr. Barry Farber. You waited–in tremendous tension– long waits, sometimes over half an hour, or 45 minutes. It was not certain he would be reachable. There were many intermediaries–producers, staff, various people. With luck he was on the air–on the radio, or on TV, both safe havens from the War. If he came on the line, it meant we had to “fight.” I made a very unconvincing soldier, but I tried, really hard, to sound angry. My sister was better at it, she was older, and somehow tougher.

I can recall trying to work myself into a righteous lather
when I really just wanted to go to bed or somehow not be drafted for this war, these phone calls. My mother had a case too. Of course she did.

But then again, she had kidnapped us to another country, and he had taken it very well, never even fought back. I used to feel pain about that. Didn’t he want us? But now I have studied his character enough to understand he just did not have the self esteem as a father, to fight for himself. Many fathers in the 70s were totally cut off from any notions that they were human, had needs, had rights–anything. There was such paranoia in the air about them, about how evil they were.

The men were powerful and charismatic and the women were livid, just
furious. That’s how I remember it. I remember my mother teasing her hair and leaving it half way through because she got so angry talking about our father that she left pieces of hair just teased straight up on her head. My mother’s hair was one of the ways I understood where we stood, how bad things were.

I loved my mother, comprehensively, no matter what she was doing. I felt that, raging or laughing or smashing plates or setting a lovely Swedish table with small pink plastic elephants just to un-Swedish it– she was “life.” Everything else was darkness, more or less. Maybe less difficult, but meaningless.

Recently my father told me about a dream he had had the night before.

He said he dreamed that “money” was a system of white rectangular notes, on which nothing had been written. The blank notes were the only ones that had value. The money lost value if you expressed yourself, and we were broke. In the family, I was, apparently, the most worried. The worst thing you could do was sing–that would destroy your currency even worse than writing on it would. In the dream my father found some notes that were blank. Overjoyed, he came running to me with some blank pieces of paper calling out, “Celia, Celia, look! they’re blank. I didn’t sing. I didn’t write anything either.”

He wanted to convince me we would not be evicted from our apartment in The Apthorp.

As he told me the dream I said: “Do you realize what a dream that is? It’s a science fiction novel, already written. Expression is counter-currency, and the people live in dread of expressing anything because it destroys the value of money? Wow.”

“You’re right, it’s pretty interesting,” he said.

It could have been about us. Or it could have been about the world outside, the one we have now. But sooner or later, love will be the only government.

Or better to say, love survives fear.

One of the last things my mother said before she died–she was setting her hair in rollers in her apartment in Karlstad, Sweden, in 1999, and holding pins between her teeth, and tossing them into the metal tray as she spoke: “The only things I really regret in my life are the times when I did not express enough love.”

Outside her window, the train carrying timber rattled by. She always looked away when it came by. “I don’t like it,” she said, “I don’t want to see it.”

When she died, my father said he got a visit from her, shortly after, and she said in her most ebullient voice: “Barry, you can’t imagine how fantastic it is here. You will see, it is just spectacular.” In this dream, they were inside the shopping mall at Columbus Circle, which used to be the Collisseum, where my mother had once worked as a Dutch Cheese Girl, and my father went to meet her every day after work when they were first dating, in 1958. He picked her up outside the Collisseum.

In the 1990s, first then, I came to realize that he had been passing that building every Monday and Thursday since 1958, to seal in a prayer of thanks. He either had to pass it in a cab, or a bus, or walk past it and touch it. Twice a week for half a century. How did I find this out? By chance I went for a walk with him down Broadway when he was on his way. It was raining and I asked if we should turn back, but he kept walking, and said he would explain another time. We got to the Collisseum and he placed the palm of his hand against it and closed his eyes.

Barry and Ulla, in 1960

“Now we can go back,” he said. We walked home in the rain and said almost nothing.

“This is not a measure of my love for your mother,” he said. “It’s different. Something else.”

“I understand,” I said.

I called my mother in Sweden the next day and told her.

She snarled, sounded like she had a hairball in her throat.

“Ach.”

“I’m just telling you,” I said.

I never gave up on them. Never. I know perfectly well that their war was false and their love was real.

But Lord Jesus, did they put us through the ringer, those two.

It turned out to be a ritual, actually a walking prayer of my father’s. Life was really good in that moment, and he wanted to make a twice weekly sacrifice to God, to go out of his way to thank God for it.

Why couldn’t my mother ever accept that my father loved her, at all, in any way?

Well, despite her beauty and charm, she had no self esteem.

She had no father.

That Was All That Happened

Posted on October 4, 2012

 

Judging from her feet, she was no princess. Size 9, with toes that were long, one shaped like a tennis racket, bunions, bones adrift. They hurt, in all shoes except sneakers. She walked fast and hard, up and down the streets of Manhattan. She could clip 20 blocks in 15 minutes, easily. Thinking, thinking, thinking. People remarked on her gait, often, friends who saw her barreling around, from a distance. “Like a boxer,” said one. “Like a bloody gorilla,” said a British boyfriend, years ago. A kind of lunging. Her shoes always got the same quarter-sized hole drilled straight through the middle of the sole, first left, then right. Her mother, sister, father, all had the same big bony troubled feet.

She was in the examining room, with her shoes and socks off. She closed her eyes to escape the florescent light.

Dr. Delmonte came in. “How’ve you been?” he asked brightly, seating himself on a stool at her feet. “How’s the writing going?”

She told him how she’d been. He was handsome and friendly, always had been. Podiatrists are usually very straightforward, and ranked among her all time favorite category of MD.

He took her foot—the foot in question—in his hand, and studied the troubled spot between the toenail and the toe. He explained exactly what the problem was. “There is a radical thing we can do or a less radical thing we can do,” he said. The radical thing, which involved some cutting, would definitely take care of it whereas the milder option might not.

He was holding her foot as they discussed this.

The world had felt so unusually brutal to her, of late. She liked being in here, with him. He treated her kindly. He explained all about her feet, why the bones were going this way and that, see that, he’d say, showing her the X ray. A luminous white V appeared, through which he was able to give her a percentage of bone drift.

But this was their next project—the sides of her feet. Today it was the toe.

“I don’t know which,” she thought. But she did know. “Which would you recommend?”

Still holding her foot he flipped up the shades of his examining glasses and said: “You mean if you were my wife, what would I tell you to do?”

After an ever so slight syncopation of silence, and a little smile, she replied:

“Yes. If I were your wife.”

“I would say go with the radical option right away. ”

“Ok, let’s do that.”

After trundling up her foot, so she couldn’t see it, and numbing it with an orange solution, he began to cut away at her toe.

“Am I hurting you?” he said.

“No,” she said. “Not at all.”

–Celia Farber, 2011

The Whale Is Behind You

Posted on October 2, 2012

The voice in my head said: “So. Would it be possible to document a family?”

[Equally soundlessly I replied:]

This family?”

The voice nodded.

“The only way to do it honestly would be to melt the spoon. Jump in after them. Tell the whole truth. Otherwise you’d get too much power and that would be terrible.”

The voice said nothing.

I left myself in the chair at El Malecon and went for a walk around the block with a new person who was not carrying decades of unwritten accounts, and who was much more pleasant company.

“Ok,” I said to her, “how then would you do it, so that it was a thing of beauty, form, and function, not necessarily in that order, but more or less?”

She took her time answering.

Squinted toward the sun coming right at us on Amsterdam Avenue at high noon.

“Tell the truth.”

I stopped.

“Excuse me? The what?”

“But tell it slant.”

We walked in silence for a few blocks.

“You know that’s my weakness–the slant part.”

Silence.

 

Dorion Sagan On Lynn Margulis: An Evolutionary Eulogy

Posted on August 15, 2012

This morning I received this link from Dorion Sagan, and though I generally avoid publishing non-original material, this is, to my mind and ear, such an exceptional piece of writing and thinking that I wanted to share it. I wonder if any grieving grandchildren anywhere on earth have ever received such exquisite comfort as Dorion offers here, to the question of where grandmama went.

The photograph of Lynn taken days before her death is itself a vision.

Dorion will be writing a piece about his mother for The Truth Barrier, which will mark the development of a new direction here: Back to old fashioned publishing roots, in which writers are matched with subjects, commissioned, paid, and blessed. The last few years of what I call “Czarist” media, in which writing tumbles forth, writers are not compensated, in which there are no editors, no structured intent–this must end.

This spring, The Truth Barrier received a generous donation from the musician Pete Townshend who is, to me, the patron saint of truth seeking, and of staying awake during times of almost incomprehensible occlusion. Thank you Pete. Thank you Dorion. We are tiny but we have a good flashlight on the sails, and with a little faith, and a few good winds, we can continue our sojourn.

The Sleeping Mouse

Posted on August 14, 2012

Åke and I were sitting in the two canvas chairs outside the Larsson house, and it was time to unpack a big box of Swedish history I was beginning to possibly misinterpret. I’d just returned to Runmarö after being away for a couple of weeks. All the guests (over 40) who’d descended on the island for his father Bengt’s 90th birthday party had dispersed and now it was just Bengt, Åke, myself, and the two cats, Sassa and Gisa.
The sun was beginning to set, and I’d brought out some sardine spagetti and chilled rosé wine, before I asked my old friend to explain once and for all what exactly went down in Sweden before the war, in terms of “race biology,“ forced sterilizations, and the troubled, muted business of “ingenjörs konst,“ (the art of social engineering.)

This was all part of a deeper and more personal conversation we kept starting but not finishing about how Åke himself felt, at age 50 something, that there was a distinct part of him that had in some way been socially engineered by the Social Democrats and was possibly not (entirely) organically him. Åke.

Ake Larsson, Runmaro, July 2012

On the night he first spoke of it I saw something on his face that I’d never seen before. It was as though he had understood the outer edges of some kind of betrayal, and was genuinely baffled by it. Nothing in Åke’s character expects or for that matter registers the sinister. Speaking of the vast engineering experiment known as Vällingby, (a housing complex) where he grew up, he described a place that had been masterminded to anticipate and answer every human “need,“ prevent any danger, and answer any question before the mind asked it. Tilting his head slightly he said: “There were air stewardesses standing in the central square directing us, telling us which was to go, to get to the library, or the store, or the movie theater.“
“Stewardesses?“
“Yes, that’s what they looked like. Short skirts. Hot dog hats. Uniforms…“
[Some would say worse things could happen in the housing projects of one’s youth, but that would be missing the point. And I didn’t.]

That night as Åke lay sleeping on the futon under the mosquito net I sat on the edge of the bed and sent empathy to his heart area. All our lives, I had been in pain, but never he. I always “take things seriously.” Maybe “too“ seriously. Maybe not. I sat there for a long time. I wanted him to tell me more about the stewardesses. Maybe he would dream about them. Who were they? What colors were their uniforms? What did they want? Did they pretend to be his mother, or mothers? Now I was getting freaked out too.

We’ve been very close friends since I was 18 and he was about 23. The setting for our friendship has been this island, Runmarö–one of the main islands in Stockholm’s archipelago–where the patriarch of the Larsson family, Bengt, wisely bought land, in 1965. The Larssons had to blow up a small mountain to clear land for the house, which is, hilariously, still under construction. It does have walls and a roof. We all have the best intentions to pick up a hammer and help out a little, each summer. I sometimes wonder if any of us have ever been fully happy anywhere else except here, on the island.

Åke is a professor of music and history among other things, and the dean of a college. I am forever asking him questions and he is endlessly patient in his detailed and balanced explanations of things.

I was tired. We both were. We’d been to the gigantic supermarket in Guvtavsberg and bought food for this impending last round of the summer, which would include my birthday, and crayfish, and unbeknownst to us, the first ever trans-tribal fight that would change everything between us all.

I sat listening to Åke explain all about Ras Biologiska Institutet in Uppsala, the top Nazi who spent 8 years there, the ways that Europe had been seeking answers to its futurist dilemmas through the burgeoning new science of racial biology, and how and where exactly that science had lost its innocence.

“Biologi lånar sig till vad som helst,“ Åke said. [Biology lends itself to almost anything.“]

“You’re not kidding,“ I muttered, scraping at the dirt with my toe.

It was then I saw the mouse, lying there, half a foot from our feet. He or she was fairly small, perfectly intact.

Åke kept talking, and I–half listening–stared at the mouse.

Finally I pointed it out.

“That’s Sassa’s,“ he said with a faint wince, referring to one of the family’s two female cats. “She’s been leaving them all over the place.“

Now the conversation escalated into the 1940’s, 50’s, the construction of “Folk Hemmet,“ and what it was all about–the Utopian dream of the Social Democrats, to build a perfect country that would have everything going for it except the quality, perhaps of being a country, and a people. [Identity, free will, destiny.]

I’d been probing him about how he felt he himself was affected by it, shaped by it. He and I could always talk though everything. But this was the first time I ever knew him to admit anything had affected him, or better to say, afflicted.

Meanwhile, the mouse was fast asleep, not concerned at all about all these uniquely Swedish anxieties. You just sleep little thing, I thought. Don’t worry about all this. It’s nothing to you now.

Åke spoke, so lucidly, laying everything out, as I felt the familiar pain rise up. I wanted the mouse to wake up and go back to his family. Why wouldn’t he move?

The next day we were getting ready to put up scaffolding and paint the roof. Yes, we actually painted the roof that day. The mouse was still there, still sleeping.

 

“I’ll paint the roof on one condition,“ I told Åke. “That you remove the mouse.“

He bent down and picked him up with a cloth and took him down the hill. I all but asked Åke to bring him back after he’d done that, because immediately I missed him. The thing about Åke is that if I had asked him to go bring back the mouse, he would not understand me, but I think he would have done it. Or if he didn’t, he would want me first to agree that it was not rational, did not make sense, just like the people who mucked around with his soul when he was a child would want him to conclude. But without a doubt, he would talk to me about it.

Åke is kind and incredibly balanced. He wants the greatest good, for the most, at all times, for the best reasons. But ’they’ didn’t build him, and must not get credit. One day I will tell him that.

Tell him who he is.

 

Great Photo Of Barbara McClintock

Posted on June 9, 2012
Barbara McClintock, Rutland Road, Brooklyn, early 1920, permission of Marjorie M. Bhavnani

“She had never married, she had not, as an adult or as a child, ever pursued any of the goals that were conventional for women. She had never had any interest in what she called “decorating the torso.”

…Barbara McClintock has lived most of her life alone–physically, emotionally, and intellectually. But no one who has met her could doubt that it has been a full and satisfying life, a life well lived. Perhaps the word that best describes her stance is “autonomy.” Autonomy, with its attendant indifference to conventional expectations, is her trademark. Where had this extraordinary “capacity to be alone” (in the phrase of the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott) come from?”

—A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock,
by Evelyn Fox Keller

Why We Lack Courage

Posted on February 22, 2012

WHY WE LACK COURAGE

*

We lack courage because if we happen sometimes to be brave as individuals we know that we will for sure be undercut by committees (by managers).

Once this has happened, once some individual has done the right thing (what would strike any individual as the right thing – maybe just a normal routine right thing – like telling the truth) only to be deserted, persecuted, harassed, interrogated, left hung-out-to-dry by a faceless, un-responsible, safety-first, avoid-costs-at-all-cost, dodge-risks-at-any-risk, short-termist committee/ bunch of managers (and put through some kind of prolonged time-, emotion- and money-draining procedural torture) … then it is a strong (um…) deterrent against doing the right thing.

Ever.

Again.

Which makes a perfect, and perfectly understandable, excuse to be cowardly thenceforth.

Which is presumably why we lack courage.

 

–Bruce Charlton, 12 October, 2010

www.charltonteaching.blogspot.com

[Re-Published] Real Watergate Story Revealed In New Book

Posted on February 16, 2012

Note: The Truth Barrier first published this in Feb. of  2012. I decided to re-publish it in light of the events in the US, Hillary Clinton, and the re-opening of the FBI’s criminal case against her.

Michael Hastings, mentioned at the end of the article, has since died in an unnatural car crash. I believe he was one of the best print journalists of his generation, if not the best.

 

CF

 

 

A new book by Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI, is a history of the FBI based on “a foundation of over 70,000 recently de-classified documents,” according to the author.  This explosive book excerpt at long last clarifies the chain of events, political and personal dynamics leading to the Watergate crisis, 43 criminal convictions, and resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974. (It is “explosive” because it is clear.) Watergate was of course not the second grade school play drama we have been induced to believe in which two heroic young reporters “take down” a U.S. President.

They did and they didn’t.  The work of two Washington Post two reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein,  in the long lost days of “shoe-leather” reporting, was thorough, dogged, unimpeachable, but it was the FBI in fact, that “took down” a sitting American President. Woodward and Bernstein were dogged reporters, but the entire thing was orchestrated. And they knew it. Does this “matter?”

I think so.

It’s a clear example of how we lack the basic sophistication of any other people living under a dictatorship or quasi-dictatorship in which it is understood and implicit that successful journalists do the bidding of the state, and there are no accidents in the press.

Weiner clarifies what the FBI was, and is, and why: A counter-terrorist and (domestic) political vendetta organization that is “America’s closest counterpart to a secret police.” (Yet failed to anticipate or thwart either the 1993 WTC bombings, or the massacre of 9/11.) Nixon they did successfully take down however.

I have always wanted these details and now they are here. I wonder if I am over-stating if I say that is book shatters the central mythical edifice of American Journalism’s fantasy of itself.  I will read this book for what it reveals about the media, more than for what it reveals about the FBI.

Ostensibly: Woodward and Bernstein got tipped off about a very big scandal–got hold of a thread, pulled and pulled. Discovered just how big, vast, dark and deep the scandal was, and revealed this to the American People, in dispatches in The Washington Post that shook the nation. All correct, but still, a superficial and self-serving interpretation.

It suggests that things like this can happen in America; They can’t and they don’t.

It never made sense. Not to anybody who knows anything  about American Media.

As this book reveals, the back-story, which never really entered the dialectic, was Hoover’s death, the resented appointment of L. Patrick Gray to head the FBI, Nixon’s (valid) concerns about terrorism, homegrown and international, surveillance methods, the Supreme Court’s 1972 decision to prohibit warrantless wiretapping against US citizens, and FBI’s (and Nixon’s) rogue methods of doing and end run around the Supreme Court–brought to a head by attorneys for Pun Plamondon (?)–head of the “White Panthers,” described with the obligatory adjectives applied to all anarchists (a “wild-eyed anarchist.”)

And to make matters even more mind-boggling, look who’s caught in a wire-tapping scandal now, which actually makes one yearn for Nixon; At least he was justifiably “paranoid” about very real terrorist developments, and not hacking into grieving parent’s cell phones to sell newspapers for profit. Some would make moral distinctions between “Murdoch’s empire” and the American media, and those would be valid up to a point, but the Anglo-American press machine is the Anglo-American press machine. And who shall investigate them, all the way through to the core, or send them off in a helicopter, or strip them off their badges, or just make them all go away stop destroying our civilization?

(Tim Weiner’s next book: “Bastards: A History of the Anglo-American Media.”) (If no editor has tried yet to commission this, they’re asleep at the wheel.)

Here is an at-least-know-this outtake of the actual real true back-story of Watergate, from

“Enemies: A History of The FBI” (Random House, 2012) via The Huffington Post:

“The White House and the FBI had another crisis on their hands that summer. Nixon issued orders to escalate the war on terrorists in America. But the Bureau had lost its license to use its most powerful weapon in that battle.

The Supreme Court had banned the warrantless wiretapping of Americans in a unanimous decision on June 19, 1972 — the Monday after the Watergate break-in. A wild-eyed anarchist on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list was at the center of the case. Pun Plamondon — minister of defense for the White Panthers, whose party platform rested largely on sex, drugs, and rock ’n’
roll — stood accused of planting a bomb at the CIA’s recruiting station near the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His lawyers correctly suspected Plamondon had been wiretapped. The federal trial judge had granted a routine defense motion for the disclosure of the government’s evidence. Nixon’s Justice Department refused to comply. The president’s lawyers claimed that the commander in chief had an inherent and unassailable right to wiretap at will.

The government lost. A federal appeals court ruled that even the president had to obey the Fourth Amendment — the passage in the Bill of Rights protecting Americans from warrantless searches and seizures. The Supreme Court had never upheld warrantless wiretapping within the United States. Most of the FBI’s secret surveillance had been carried out in defiance of the Court — at the command of presidents and attorneys general, but sometimes on orders from Hoover and his subordinates — since 1939. The technology of electronic eavesdropping had expanded exponentially since then. Thousands of Americans were targets of government spying under Nixon.

Robert Mardian, as Nixon’s internal security chief, represented the government in oral arguments before the Supreme Court. Justice Byron White had asked him bluntly: if “the President decides it’s necessary to bug John Doe’s phone,” was there “nothing under the sun John Doe can do about it?”

Mardian had said: “The President of the United States may authorize electronic surveillance; and, in those cases, it is legal.” Justice Lewis Powell, newly appointed by President Nixon, wrote the unanimous decision rejecting that argument. “The issue before us is an important one for the people of our country and their Government,” he wrote. “It involves the delicate question of the President’s power, acting through the Attorney General, to authorize electronic surveillance in internal security matters without prior judicial approval. Successive Presidents for more than one-quarter of a century have authorized such surveillance
in varying degrees, without guidance from the Congress or a definitive decision of this Court.”

That authority was now empty.

“Although some added burden will be imposed upon the Attorney General, this inconvenience is justified in a free society to protect constitutional values,” the Court ruled. “By no means of least importance will be the reassurance of the public generally that indiscriminate wiretapping and bugging of law-abiding citizens cannot occur.”

The Court said the government was free to wiretap “foreign powers or their agents” — for instance, Soviet spies — but not American citizens. Not without a warrant.

The FBI had at least six warrantless taps running on the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers on the morning of the Supreme Court’s ruling. They had to come out at once. The Bureau responded by reviving black-bag jobs. Gray called in top agents from around the country in mid-September 1972. President Nixon had ordered the FBI — along with the Pentagon, the
State Department, the CIA, and the National Security Agency — to come up with a national counterterrorism plan.

The world had been transfixed ten days before by the Black September killings at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Eleven Israeli athletes (and eight Palestinian attackers) had died, most of them after a bungled rescue by the West German police. President Nixon had conferred on the counterterrorism problem with his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, and his United Nations ambassador, George H. W. Bush. His personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, told the president about the prophecies of a popular psychic named Jeane Dixon; the syndicated clairvoyant predicted a Palestinian attack against a Jewish target, such as Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s ambassador to the United States.

“They will kidnap somebody. They may shoot somebody,” Nixon told Kissinger on September 21, citing “this soothsayer, Jeane Dixon” as a source of his fears. “We have got to have a plan. Suppose they kidnap Rabin, Henry, and demand that we release all blacks who are prisoners around the United States, and we didn’t and they shoot him… What the Christ do we do?” Nixon wondered. “We have got to have contingency plans for hijacking, for kidnapping, for all sorts of things.”

On September 25, Nixon issued a secret presidential directive commanding an all-out counterterrorism campaign. The result was the President’s Cabinet Committee on Terrorism — the first full-scale effort by the American government to address the threat. The full committee met once, and only once.

“Everybody at that meeting washed their hands like Pontius Pilate and said, ‘You do it, FBI,’” Gray recounted. Nobody else wanted to take the responsibility. Gray told Mark Felt and Ed Miller, his intelligence chief, that “he had decided to reauthorize surreptitious entries,” Miller said. “Well, I thought that was really good.”

The first targets of the break-ins were hit in October 1972. The Bureau raided Palestinian American groups across the United States. FBI agents burglarized the files of an organization called the Arab Education League in Dallas, stole a membership list from the league’s office safe, identified the group’s leaders, knocked on their doors, and ran them out of the country. Gray wrote years later that the break-ins and burglaries were “clearly illegal.” But he believed that he was following the president’s orders.

FBI black-bag jobs against friends and families of twenty-six Weather Underground fugitives started later that month. Gray was appalled to learn that not one of the fugitives had been caught, despite a nationwide search that had gone on for nearly three years. He ordered them “hunted to exhaustion,” a submariner’s command.

“No holds barred,” he wrote to Felt. At least seven of the burglaries were carried out by Squad 47, the secret unit based in the FBI’s New York office. Under the command of John Kearney, the squad had conducted at least eight hundred black-bag jobs since the 1950s. None of the break-ins ever produced any evidence leading to the arrest of a Weather Underground fugitive. But in time they led to federal grand jury investigations against the commanders of the FBI.”

*** [end of outtake]

Coda: Discussion

Tail Wags Dog: Am I “over-reaching?” Not a Journalist? No. Yes. A journalist must understand power. And care.

It has taken me so many years to fail fully and properly, to get out.

It was so exhausting—it’s such a subtle system in its way.  It asks so much more of those it blesses. They have to keep lying and lying and lying. Never lying, exactly. Seeing reality a certain way. A way that behooves all. Like a very good family.

Ruminations: Let’s Review

Somebody very well read in political literature told me many years ago that the Watergate story was not “broken” by Woodward and Bernstein, but rather, that the decision to take down Nixon came first, followed by the careful seeding of the story using selected press. The Washington Post essentially permitted two of its reporters to run and catch bones that were thrown to them in the form of classified, sourced, evidence from what we were told was a top secret source who became known as ‘Deep Throat.’

Nothing wrong with that, prima facie–sources seek journalists through whom to seed their evidence and stories all the time.  But here is why the Watergate mythology was a pain in the ass forever after, for journalism, for all of us: Because it created the myth that two punk reporters can knock on a bunch of doors and ‘take down’ a sitting President, without the complete cooperation of the government itself.

No, this is done only with the complete cooperation of the government itself, in this case, the FBI’s number two, Mark Felt, revealed after thirty years as Deep Throat. Hence, the identity of Deep Throat was extremely important, and the cagey and coy secrecy surrounding the story occluded the truth for decades, and served the powers that be. The media was forever re-branded as heroic and fearless, lulling us to think if there was a big rat somewhere, they would sniff it out for us. As you may have noticed, they aint-never caught-a-rabbit since Watergate. So the irony is the press required the full cooperation of the FBI to get on top of a real story and stay there.

Do you know how many legions of young people entered the profession of journalism thinking this is what it does? That it hunts down important stories of corruption in government, races back to the office, loosens its tie knots and starts banging out the heart-shocking truth?

Imagine the real story, which they should have told us:

Draft copy:

“Dear American People: Guess what?  There is a rogue element of the FBI embittered against Nixon, partly to do with who got the top job after Hoover, and they have been meeting us in parking lots every night with these incredible envelopes. My God it’s like Christmas every day. They think the American Press can be used like their own personal  wind up doll but boy did they read us wrong. What follows is the documented story of how the FBI tried to use us to do its dirty work, and how we double-crossed them by exposing the whole thing.”

I know: None of the people involved in such a story would ever work again, nor their descendants, but it would be worth it, because we would at last understand how things actually work.

Stories of corrupt and depraved entire infrastructures do not sell; Stories of Very Bad Man do sell. It has to be one man–a Phobic Object, through whom, with the help of a very obedient press, The American Public can ritually cleanse itself of all evil and reclaim its innocence as a nation.

Woodward and Bernstein did very intrepid reporting; The point is not to take anything away from those two, per se, or the sanctified Washington Post, but rather, to observe how real truth emerges slowly over decades, like a very slowly developing photo.

Did the Washington Post act honorably in protecting its source (the FBI) or did it conceal a huge facet of the story that would have been more relevant to the American People than the hyper-focus on the break-in itself, and Nixon?

Here’s how I feel:

If you, as reporter, bite on a story fed to you by a “source” from inside the government, who or which is 100% utterly invested in using you and ‘your’ story to take out an adversary, you are a passive pawn in the game of journalism, while what you really want to be is the hunter.  You represent the public, not the power block. Do not play ball with the power block, ever, but if you find ways to expose them in ways they do not themselves dictate and will, then you are doing journalism.

You will know you are because when the circling stars clear from your vision after your numerous concussions, you will not find yourself on Television, being interviewed about your journalistic feats.

One who did precisely this (exposed the Shadow State) is Julian Assange, so naturally, they can’t decide if he is “really a journalist at all.” (But they never tell us what a “real journalist” is, only that they decide, and they’ll tell us when they find one.)

They weren’t sure about Assange’s methods or tactics, he may have placed troops in danger, (did he or didn’t he?) he is  “arrogant” “hard to work with,” and unkempt. But Woodward and Bernstein they were sure about.

Diametrically opposing figures, with diametrically opposing outcomes.

The year now is 2012.  The next big story to come is this one: What is the media?

Many questions are answered at last, the media and its relations to the Shadow State, in this stunning interview with Julian Assange in Rolling Stone. I have never read a more comprehensive or revealing assessment of media, government, the first amendment, the fourth amendment, or human nature, than this.

I read it with rapt attention and fascination, start to finish, but there was one passage, one quote, that affected me more than I can express. I wonder if this quote was lost on most people. It shouldn’t have been; It’s central and critical.

Here is the passage:

Michael Hastings: What has the low point been for you in all this? Were there any mornings you woke up saying, “What have I got myself into?”

Julian Assange: I understood that the significance of what we were doing was greater than WikiLeaks as an institution and greater than our personal lives. In November, I told our people, perhaps to their surprise, that what we were doing was more significant than the life of any one of us. To that degree, the battles that we’ve had, the severity of the battles that we’ve had, is not something I have found to be difficult to deal with. Their severity is a reflection of the quality and importance of our work.

[In other words, journalism is and must be the one thing nobody can bear to say, except this guy: It is and must be sacrificial, on some scale, if not on this scale.]

Then, in the next line, Assange says something more, a very short but very freighted punctuation: “That said, the betrayals are hard to take.”

–Celia Farber

What They Said: Pete Townshend

Posted on December 6, 2011

“The artistic process, perhaps apart from ballet and Victorian theater, it doesn’t engage the physical form the way that rock does. And particularly not the kind of fighting cock, peacock male thing. It’s a kind of courtship. All that undermines what is really going on in rock, which is a deep, deep , awful and absolute alienation that goes on.  When you and your family split, and you look at your contemporaries and peers and hope for some kind of family to take the place of the family that brought you up and you find that there is no family. And you find that friends are complicated and difficult and love affairs are impossible and marriage is a disaster and having children…you’re just the same as your mother and father and you’re going to have exactly the same problems that your family had with you. You’re on your fucking own. And that’s the thing that rock and roll constantly shrugs off and that’s what I refuse to shrug off. Cause that’s what our fans brought to us–for fuck’s sake, give us a fucking family.

 

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