MORE NOTES ON THE MADHOUSE

 

OCTOBER 27, 2011

 

NOTE 1: What’s the point of teaching a 17-year-old kid about bestiality in school? Was he thinking about having sex with a possum? Maybe he is now, I don’t know. It’s amusing to imagine what my father would have done if I’d been clued in on sex-with- sheep-and-goats in school and told him about it. The principal would have ended up in the hospital, for starters. And there wouldn’t have been a trial. Not in those days. I guess, in the 1950s, there was still a form of frontier justice, even in the suburbs.

 

NOTE 2: For the past 30 years, I’ve been documenting the crimes of corporations. So I’m not a worshiper of mega-companies. But I do recognize that, in many cases, the consumer can choose not to buy what these people are selling. That’s still possible. When kids with all sorts of i-devices (which they adore), built in China by two-year-olds, use the gizmos to rail against corporate corruption, do they have any idea what the hell they’re doing? Apparently not. That doesn’t instill confidence in me. Why are middle-class kids on a crusade impressive? Remind me again. I’ve lost the thread. In the NYC Occupy crowd, they now have a FINANCE COMMITTEE and a GENERAL ASSEMBLY. The assembly votes on purchases that will be rubber-stamped by the finance committee. Learning the lessons of their parents, I guess. The other night, the Interminable Drum Circle incurred a setback when someone punched holes in their drums while they were asleep, so the drummers went to the finance committee for $$ to buy new ones. They were told to fill out paperwork and wait for a decision. I’m really looking forward to these people running the country after the revolution.

 

NOTE 3: If you create a job for an education bureaucrat in a state system, and that job pays an annual 200 grand, and upon retirement the office holder will make 10 million dollars over the course of his golden years…

 

And then on top of that, you’re creating a lot more bureaucratic jobs in state and federal systems that the taxpayer doesn’t even know exist, and those jobs are paying hefty salaries as well.

 

What do these bureaucrats do? Play pinochle with each other? That’s the point. They have nothing to do, so they have to figure out ways to fuck with you.

 

Looking at a chart of education administrators in the state of Illinois, I see that the top hundred people who have held their jobs for at least 30 years will rake in 887 million dollars, once you figure in their retirement pensions. Yeah, just the top hundred bureaucrats.

 

I’ll bet you a nickel I could ax every one of those jobs and no one would feel a thing.

 

I’d start with the 20 or so committees who meet to review the work turned in, by technical writers, for school manuals on condom lubrication, mutual masturbation, anal sex, and the effects of swimming-pool chlorine on various birth-control devices.

 

NOTE 4: For the years 2006-2007, all elementary and secondary schools in the US spent 599 billion dollars. Colleges and grad schools spent 373 billion dollars. (Source: The National Center for Educational Statistics) Taken together, $972 billion, 7.4% of the national GDP.

 

Most of the the money came from local, state, and federal government. Which came from taxes, plus invented computer-entry money.

 

Student performance over that time period didn’t make much headway.

 

From K to12, a student in the US costs about $110,000. One estimate has it that a home-schooled child, from K-12, costs $7200.

 

In your next meditation, Snowflake, your job is to contemplate how much $ waste is undoubtedly involved, for what sort of result, in US schools Remember, this sketch doesn’t begin to assess the actual quality of education delivered. When I use the word “performance,” I merely indicate general factors like graduation rates, reading scores, the ability to squash an aluminum can and put it in the purple garbage can, etc.

 

NOTE 5: Bloomberg News reports that, Fong Lai, a prison doctor in the California penal system, cashed out with $590,000 in unused vacation time when he retired. Wow. Pretty good haul. Let’s see. He didn’t take the vacation time, so he was paid (or not paid?) for working instead, but if he had taken the vacations they would have been paid vacations, but when he retired he got 590 K (anyway?)? I’m lost.

 

With cutbacks in the California state budget, public employees have been laid off, so current employees have had to work overtime (extra pay for that) to cover holes in the pinochle game. And how much overtime pay have they accumulated? Enough to nullify the cutbacks?

 

When I work past 4 PM writing, I keep track of the hours and pay myself triple-time. That’s how I’ve been able to buy three islands in the South Pacific and import snow for cross-country skiing and staff gun emplacements to pick off impulsive monitor lizards. I hadn’t thought about the unused vacation-pay trick, but it sounds like a good hustle.

 

NOTE 6: Today, in the wake of the decision to recommend the Merck HPV vaccine for young boys, Vice President Joe Biden stated that the federal government should pay off vaccine manufacturers.

 

Speaking at a fundraiser for Eskimo victims of Elephantiasis, Biden said: “These vaccine companies are trying to market their products to the whole nation. Men, women, boys, girls, babies. Three-hundred-thirty-million people.

 

“Most of us don’t realize the logistics involved. Stop and think about the man-hours, the infrastructure, the PR. Instead of going through all this, let’s just sit down with these vaccine CEOs and figure out how much money they need and give it to them.

 

“Stop vaccinating people. Just pay the companies.”

 

Biden’s solution was criticized by CDC spokesperson Ann Fibbergoo as shortsighted. “Mr. Biden doesn’t realize how important these vaccines are to the nation’s health,” she said.

 

But Ralph York, chairman of the Pharmaceutical Association of Greater New York, was enthusiastic about Biden’s proposal.

 

“Look,” York said, “let’s face it. This is about money. So let’s cut to the chase. Give us the money and we’ll stop bullshitting the public about the benefits of vaccines. Everyone will be relieved.”

 

In other medical news, researchers at Southeast Florida University claim they have found the gene that regulates boredom.

 

“This could break through into a previously unknown area of human emotion,” said Dr. Francis Plethora, lead author in the study, to be published next month in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.

 

“Of course, if boredom is eventually wiped out, we could see the complete collapse of the American economy,” Plethora added. “People would stop buying crap. But not my crap.”

 

In a related story, The New England Journal of Medicine has just issued a new report on the state of medical research in America. The report concludes, “What we witnessing, across the spectrum, is a battle among researchers to impose their fabrications. It’s a question of which lies will gain the upper hand.”

 

In a Delaware meeting of the state chiropractic association, a panel concluded that, within 30 years, all chiropractors licensed under the national health insurance program will be relegated to sweeping floors in hospitals and nursing homes. “But,” said Dr. Mark Torque, panel leader, “look at the upside. Even though we’re sure to be downgraded, as pharmaceutical companies, working hand in glove with the federal government, monopolize the entire medical landscape, floor sweepers and janitors and medical-waste haulers will be unionized. We can expect steady pay, vacation time, and health benefits. It’s better than running a dying practice.”

 

Dr. Henry Kissinger, speaking from his home in Georgetown with Brian Williams of NBC News, told Williams, “The future of the US, in terms of economic development, rests entirely on the concept of imminent threat.”

 

Kissinger declined to elaborate, but he did indicate that phony viral epidemics provide a good model for sales campaigns.

 

Wait, that was all just a dream I had last night, after I saw Jay Leno interview Obama.

 

Jay knows how to toss softball questions.

 

Reminds me of the night he interviewed Arnold, after global attention was focused on whether the actor was going to announce his candidacy for governor of California. Remember?

 

They actually set up a separate press room in the NBC studio just for the event.

 

With applause signs blinking and the audience screaming, Arnold said: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

 

Which was a reference to the 1976 movie, Network, in which the news department of a national TV network is turned over to the entertainment division…exactly the thing NBC was doing at the moment Arnold launched his campaign, at the moment Jay won the election for him.

 

NOTE 7: California is the sixth largest economy in the world. I’m not talking about city economies. National. And it’s still far too large to be a single nation. It should be at least 10 separate Republics. Call me crazy. But I know a little something about California. In 1994, I ran for a Congressional seat from the 29^th District (LA) against Henry Waxman. He did zero campaigning in the District. If that’s political reality, that’s a problem. When your opponent refuses to make a single comment about your accusations and he’s sitting 3000 miles away, the system needs a plunger.

 

NOTE 8: In and among the Occupy movement, there are some things happening that should be noted—like the guy who closed his bookstore in Brooklyn and moved his inventory, lock, stock, and barrel to a tent near Wall Street, to create a makeshift library. Maybe this guy had reached the end of the line back in Brooklyn. He’d been reading too many books himself. The kind of books that diagnose the human condition accurately.

 

Perhaps something like this, from Black Spring: “Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines—these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous becomes the norm.”

 

Or this, from Wisdom of the Heart: “No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.”

 

Sooner or later—and later might be a million lifetimes—every one of us is going to take the leap. We’re going to do something so absurd it is sublime. We’re going to embrace an idea beyond the Beyond and jump on its back and ride it out into the clouds.

 

That everyone around us will be horrified goes without saying. But they won’t deter us, because we’ve reached the end of the line. Every human is moving inexorably toward that breaking point.

 

Every theme, every system devised to squeeze things together more and more rigidly will give way. It is at that moment we need to remember what is coming to life, no matter how much we want to deny it.

 

Imagination. Wings and flight. Making invisible things visible.

 

This is where we will live, and we will be willing to pay the price, because what we have learned and practiced, over and over, has become an intolerable burden.

 

I have been asked why I am optimistic about the future. That is why.

 

I know what is coming.

 

It doesn’t matter how long it takes. It doesn’t matter how devastating the intermediate period is. The build-up to the launch is simply our refusal to admit what we are.

 

Fret all you want to, wring your hands, drop into an inconsolable depression, the day is on the horizon. The day when you know you have the power.

 

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTES FROM THE MADHOUSE

 

OCTOBER 25, 2011

 

NOTE 1: Take a deep breath and let it out. Take two Thorazine and call me in the morning…

 

NOTE 2: http://gulagbound.com/22535/warningprogressives-npv-plan-for-white-house-control-happening-now-2012-permanently/

 

See an article describing how state legislatures are passing laws that could eliminate the electoral college system in presidential elections, substituting instead the total national vote, the popular vote, as the only deciding factor. This would hasten the collapse of the states as independent entities. It would also tilt elections. E.g., we’d now be talking about ex-president Gore.

 

NOTE 3: The Vatican has stated that the world needs a central banking authority to manage money for the entire planet. That’s just what I was thinking the other day. The Federal Reserve and the IMF and the City of London just aren’t big enough, you know? That’s the problem. And the other problem is we need moralists to run this Earth Bank. People who will decide which countries get how much money to throw around, based on need, based on the weather, based on whatever. I’m sure it’ll work out well. And God can take his 2% off the top. And you can collect a paycheck based on an algorithm dreamed up by a bureaucrat in Brussels that gives you a tiny, tiny fraction of the world’s allotted money supply.

 

NOTE 4: “But He [God] loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, but somehow he just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more.”

George Carlin

 

NOTE 5: A quote from Jack True: “People don’t understand ‘the individual.’ It isn’t something that’s handed down like a silver platter from your grandmother. It isn’t bought at a store. It isn’t copied from a previous document. And I guess that’s the problem. People want replicas. They want the comfort of knowing they have something that’s exactly like what everybody else has. But if they have that, they don’t have ‘the individual’ then, do they?”

 

NOTE 6: The New York City Health Department is seeking to hire a condom coordinator, who will make sure all public high schools have enough free condoms to hand out. Salary for the gig? $88,000. What are the requirements? Can sleep 20 hours a day? Used to inflate balloons with a helium tank for kids in Central Park? “I have always been devoted to condoms, sir.” (Source: NY Post)

 

NOTE 7: Free condoms? High schools? This computes how? Oh, that’s right. Schools are social agencies. And their employees belong to public unions. Sure. No problem. And parents go along with this. Like programmed robots.

 

NOTE 8: The US Attorney General has directed its NY office to require, under penalty of prosecution, all new taxis in NYC to be built to allow access for non-folding wheelchairs. (Source: NY Post)

 

NOTE 9: The US Attorney General? Regulating production by private companies? This computes how? Oh, that’s right. The federal government now owns businesses.

 

NOTE 10: What about people with non-folding wheelchairs who weigh more than 350 pounds and have a dog and a refrigerator? Where are the taxis that will accommodate them?

 

NOTE 11: Again, from the NY Post. The Dept. of Education is mandating that all public schools (middle and high school) begin teaching sex-ed in the upcoming spring semester. Well, sure. Where else are these kids going to learn about sex?

 

NYC schools are opting to set up their own program, which will take high school kids to stores where condoms are sold, so the kids can write down the brand names and note the features, like “lubricated.”

 

These kids will also be assigned to figure out a route from school (not home) to a clinic which offers birth control and STD tests. The teen kiddies will study the clinic’s policy on confidential treatment (parents don’t need to know).

 

NYC schools will have 11 and 12 year-old kids assess the relative safety of: sex with condoms and lubrication; mutual masturbation: French kissing; oral sex; anal sex.

 

Teens will be referred to the Columbia University (bastion of higher learning) site, Go Ask Alice, where the following subjects are discussed: doggie-style sex; phone sex; oral sex WITH BRACES; fetishes; vibrators; bestiality.

 

Certainly no programming going on here. No interference in home life by the State. No control by the State. Quite possibly, since I moved away from NYC 50 years ago, all parents have disappeared or have been outlawed. Kids are now living in tents on school property. I mean, I don’t know. But I would assume if somebody is talking to a kid about bestiality, it must be a surrogate parent, right?

 

And what about a kid who is in a non-folding wheelchair and weighs 350 pounds and has a dog and a refrigerator? Can he get a taxi to school so he can learn about lubrication, mutual masturbation, and vibrators?

 

And if he can’t, is that grounds for a million-dollar lawsuit against the city?

 

“My client has a Constitutional right to be taught about anal sex, ladies and gentlemen. That right has been denied. Therefore, standing on the shoulders of our Founders, we are suing the City. That noise you hear outside on the street is a thousand demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street encampment, who have joined our cause. I call our first witness, the Condom Coordinator for the City, who will testify about the extremely deleterious effects of not being able to obtain a dozen Trojans on demand…”

 

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“DAYS OF RAGE” AND OTHER THINGS

 

SCATTERSHOT FRIDAY, IN WHICH I PULL TOGETHER NOTES AND MEMOS TO SELF AND LET FLY

 

OCTOBER 21, 2011. NOTE 1: Let’s see. Am I supposed to be enraged that a federal loan in the “creating jobs program” (not Steve, he’s dead, and as far as I know they’re not planning to replicate him) and the “creating green energy program” has gone to Finland?

 

Finland? Making electric cars? On a 500-million-dollar US federal loan? The company claims they couldn’t find a US facility where the cars could be built. They had to go to the frozen tundra of Finland, where they really know how to put together cars.

 

Is this supposed to make me full of rage, or should I focus on the Occupy Oakland festivities, where we may soon see epidemics of 19th-century disease rippling out from the decaying encampments?

 

Or how about the delightful innocence of those who believe these protests and riots and killings in the Middle East are the prelude to democratic governments springing up like Jeffersonian bubbles in swamps?

 

Should I be angry that the whole Middle East madness (plus Libya) is an op designed to foster the perception that oil transport is becoming a more dicey proposition and therefore the price of oil will rise and therefore the cost of solar and wind power will be reasonable when compared with, say, six-dollar gas at the pump?

 

For all you MBAs who learned squat at school, there are two ways to innovate in the marketplace. You either bring in a product that people will pay for at reasonable price, or you force the the price of your competitors’ product to escalate, so your product, which was entirely unreasonable, becomes sane. The latter is the Real Green Economic Program. And the slithering champ of making a killing in this op is the light-burning, jet-fuel-spewing AlGore.

 

Should I be angry at the fact that teachers’ unions and government-employee unions are winning the battle to reward chronic incompetence?

 

Or that toxic Big Pharma “healthcare,” which kills 225,000 Americans every year, is 17.3% of the federal budget? $2.3 trillion in 2008. $7,681 per resident of the US. How about the US military budget? 54% of all federal spending. Of course, you can find hundreds of different pie charts that break these factors down in different ways. Pick your pie.

 

Maybe I should focus on the fact that the Occupy movement doesn’t seem to care that Obama was bankrolled by Wall Street in 2008, or that his economic wizards are Wall Street creatures. Where are the OBAMA=WALL STREET signs in NYC?

 

(You want to know how to make millions of young socialists? Student loans. That’s it. If only Lenin knew.)

 

Oh, by the way, the whole Occupy movement, as we speak, is being folded into the World Democracy campaign, which is guess what? Globalism. World Democracy sounds nicer. It can hook together the Arab Spring and the electric car and the universal health (big Pharma) and the student loans and the freebie-everything and the NAFTA-CAFTA-WTO nightmare and the Occupy Anywhere and the V is for Vendetta and the Power to the People and the public unions and the liberation of Libya and the bankrupt governments and the financial meltdown and the Clinton-Gore-Bush-Rumsfeld-Wall Street-Obama axis into one big Occupy.

 

The planet.

 

I thought I knew bullshit during the Vietnam war and the Nixon years and the Watergate infestation, but that was nothing, absolutely nothing compared with this clusterfuck.

 

So when people ask me why I keep talking about THE INDIVIDUAL, maybe it’s a little clearer now. When The Group knocks on your door, tell them you’re his cousin and he went fishing.

 

World Democracy, you’d better believe it, is about the funeral ceremony for the individual. If you don’t want to attend, you’d better think about POWER, as in YOUR OWN.

 

In one way or another, that’s what I’m writing about all the time.

 

When I say MAGIC or IMAGINATION or CREATIVE FORCE, I’m talking about a world that has no name or label or fancy superstructure or university or theology or messiah. It’s born out of the few who can see beyond this op, who can spit the ashes of the old world out of their mouths and climb to the top of the mountain.

 

Where they see that The Reality Game itself is a con of enormous proportions, and where they know they have the life force to crack the egg of a planet put together by mass hypnosis.

 

You first, somebody else next, somebody else next.

 

Waking up to Self.

 

Because if that doesn’t happen, you can sign up to become a Zero or a One in some idiot’s formula for What Should Happen to Everybody for the Sake of a Better World.

 

Occupy Wall Street?

 

No.

 

ZAP THE TRANCE.

 

On the other side of that is Imagination Unlimited.

 

 

NOTE 2: [received as an email] MEDIA ADVISORY.

MOTHERS TO HOLD DEMONSTRATION OUTSIDE THE FDA

“Don’t Turn Us Into Criminals over Milk!” Demand Moms

 

What: —A group of mothers from across the country who feed their children raw milk plan to hold a demonstration to protest the FDA’s crackdown on raw milk production and distribution, arguing that the government campaign not only criminalizes raw milk, but criminalizes the American citizens who buy and consume it.

 

Prior to their peaceful demonstration, a caravan of mothers will cross state lines with raw milk and invite the FDA to witness what the agency wrongly considers to be a criminal act. Media are invited to ride along as embedded reporters to report on how the FDA responds to what it wrongly terms a violation of the law.

 

Where: Across from FDA HQ 10903 New Hampshire Ave., Silver Spring, MD

When: November 1, 2011, 12pm – 3pm EST

Who: Liz Reitzig and Karine Bouis-Towe of the Farm Food Freedom Coalition

 

Visuals: Cars decorated with pro-raw milk slogans, protest signs, moms and children drinking raw milk, moms handcuffed to gallons of milk, Federal law enforcers will be meeting the protesters.

 

Background:FDA has engaged in several long undercover sting operations and raids against peaceful farmers and buying clubs. FDA is also pressuring states to restrict raw dairy access.

 

Under FDA regulations [21 CFR § 1240.61] implemented in 1987, it is illegal for anyone to transport raw milk intended for human consumption across state lines. That includes individuals purchasing it legally in one state and crossing into their home state.

 

Info about farm raids: www.FarmFoodFreedomCoalition.com

For additional information on raw milk www.westonaprice.org Contact: Liz Reitzig, Founder, Farm Food Freedom Coalition

301-807-5063, lizreitzig@gmail.com

www.RawMilkFreedomRiders.com

 

 

NOTE 3: LANGUAGE THAT CREATES THE FUTURE

 

“Language is the part of man which is evolving. Culture carries [follows] along. At the present moment we are able to speak twenty-first century ideas to each other, but our culture is carrying along at about the 1950s level.”

Terence McKenna

 

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There

 

“What do you do, when you are looking at an event that appears unique, has no precedent, and can’t be folded into a previous theory?

What do you do when science insists you need a superstructure of theory in order to swallow up a singular event, in order to understand it, in order to claim it even exists?”

Jon Rappoport, The Magician Awakes

 

When we approach the subject of language itself, we are quite sure we’re on solid ground.

 

The rules may differ, from culture to culture, in some respects, but the basic tenets of words and how they are put together are “the same,” because we are all striving to attain clarity and specificity.

 

Nouns are people, places, or objects. Verbs denote action or state of being. Adjectives modify and illuminate nouns. Adverbs modify verbs, and so on.

 

When archaeologists find a manuscript no one can decipher—and can’t even figure out what culture it came from—there is the assumption that it presents the same kind of language every society has always had, and it was developed for the same purpose: unequivocal communication. Nothing else would make sense. Only a fool would think otherwise.

 

And if poetry and music and painting, God forbid, are ambiguous and yet make a more direct approach to feeling—although in what mysterious fashion no one can quite elaborate—the easy answer is to rule them out as languages. They are different. They’re “art.”

 

Let us suppose that, in the mid-22^nd century, a little space ship, evading all detections systems, lands on a lonely plain in an uninhabited region of China, and the crew walks into a cave and finds a few pages of ancient Chinese text—whereupon they immediately begin to work it over. However, these aliens speak and write an entirely different kind of language. They have an approach to language itself which is “light years apart” from ours.

 

They do, in fact, decipher this manuscript—but their interpretation has absolutely nothing to do with Chinese or the way Chinese is/was put together. They find what they can use, so to speak, and then, over the course of many years, after returning to their home planet, they build upon that interpretation. They expand it into many dimensions.

 

Several decades later, Chinese Confucianauts, traveling through space, encounter these aliens and eventually discover what they have done with their language. The conclusion? The aliens developed a sophisticated (and incomprehensible) system based on a fundamental flaw of inference.

 

Well, consider the possibility that our own languages on Earth, through cross-fertilization with each other, developed, in part, through the same “errors.” The same misunderstandings. The same leaps. The same twists.

 

And at every step of metaphoric borrowing and re-shaping, there was always the chance that people wouldn’t understand the new expression, the new phrase, the new jump into the unknown—until they did.

 

And now, take this further. Suppose we, at this point in time, not erasing all that has gone before, but taking our own leap, develop languages that are based on a wholly different approach and attitude. We’re not trying to be specific and singular and definitive. We’re being subjective and imaginative and open. We’re inventing languages that call for and stimulate new and unprecedented feelings and sensations and aesthetic motilities that move us into unique realms.

 

These realms do not exist as shared, hardened, objective entities.

 

These realms are fluid and shifting and very powerful.

 

Just suppose.

 

As an example, and I have proposed this before, we invent “action nouns.” Words that radiate streams of action while still retaining their object-ness. Old Chinese pictographs appear to have served those functions.

 

These action-nouns would also have the property of chameleons. From minute to minute, depending on the view and imagination of the reader, they would appear as different entities engaging in ever-new actions. But each “snapshot” would be alive, would have impact, would stimulate possibilities.

 

It is as if there are echelons of feeling, sensation, aesthetics, and spirit that remain untapped and totally unknown only because we use language that can’t access them.

 

And if aliens really did land on Earth en masse and in the open, and they inhabited such regions of feeling, how would we communicate with them? How would the gap be bridged?

 

The Earth government would gather “the best scientists” to research the problem, and of course they would get nowhere. The aliens would study us and eventually step down their echelon of consciousness—and both sides would meet in the middle. This solution would be disappointing, but it would be characterized as a momentous breakthrough.

 

Well, that is the state of our world already. People talk and write to one another and meet in the middle. Meanwhile, true artists see this is a huge joke.

 

 

NOTE 4: First of all, I’ll be using a word here: CONVICTION. No, I’m not talking about a jail sentence. I’m talking about a coalesced determination. I’m talking about a YES that you hold firmly and powerfully. I’m talking about having made up your mind about something.

 

I’m actually talking about a supernatural level of HIGHLY ENERGIZED DEFINITE KNOWLEDGE CONCERNING WHAT YOU TRULY AND PROFOUNDLY WANT THAT CAN’T BE SHAKEN, PLUS A VERY POWERFUL DETERMINATION TO GET IT.

 

All right? I’ll come back to conviction in a few seconds.

 

All my audio seminars up to this point provide a ground and a foundation and a preparation for actually DOING MAGIC—because that is the goal here. The exercises in those seminars and the essential background I give are really all about energy work that allows people to build up sufficient power to step into what people like to call The Paranormal.

 

Because The Paranormal is about energy, having it, using it, tapping into it, creating it.

 

And when you have enough energy, you then begin to see deeper into the sheer power of conviction.

 

In particular, you begin to see and know and use the power of your conviction to get what you want. To work for what you want, yes, to go after it, yes, but also to bring it into existence out of nothing. All at the same time.

 

So all those audio seminars I’ve been doing for some years are in this category. Groundwork, foundation, energy, preparation.

 

From this point forward, we need a decent working definition of magic.

 

In practical terms, magic revolves COMPLETELY around the question of how deep and strong your conviction is. Your conviction about what you want.

 

How deep is your conviction that, yes, THIS IS what I want.

 

There are lots of people who fool around with their own conviction like a toy or a pet cat or a Sunday hobby. They will say, “Well, of course I want X,” but their conviction is mild and weak and spotty, and perhaps they are looking for external permission or something equally misguided.

 

In other words—nonsense.

 

Magic comes from you. It doesn’t come from wondering whether tomorrow’s rainbow will somehow give you a map to a pot of gold.

 

Magic is conviction that translates into bringing about the substance of your deep desire in the world, out of nothing. Out of your creation of it.

 

And it is paranormal, because with sufficient energy and conviction, you can shape the future. You can invent the fulfillment of what you want.

 

There is a catch here. There are many people who go around talking about “manifestation,” and what they really mean is: they do nothing, they basically remain passive, they refuse to work—and then on top of that, they wish for something and poof, it comes true.

 

Sure.

 

This is hilarious and it is also hysterical.

 

Magic is basically the transformation of Passive to Active, through conviction—and most people have no idea how far-reaching that change can go.

 

When it goes far enough, you get magic.

 

You get telepathy, seeing into the future, psychokinesis. You get all sorts of phenomena.

 

More than those, you get what you want.

 

But don’t for a minute believe this means you get a better shade of nail polish or a more durable hiking boot or a softer pair of gloves or a more effective toothbrush or a prettier doily for the night table or a longer vacation or a taller Christmas tree.

 

There are layers of want and desire, and if you’re fooling around thinking what you profoundly want is a better car mat, you’re in the wrong pew. Go to eBay.

 

Magic is creating what you want in the world. That’s what it is.

 

Conviction—and the depth of conviction—can be looked like a geological formation of many strata, many layers. You think you’re very deep, but you’re only on the third layer down from the top, and there are a hundred layers further below.

 

With enough energy in tow, your conviction about what you want deepens—if a) you know what you truly want and b) you tap into your conviction about wanting it.

 

You can go so deep that the conviction alone is enough to bring about external changes that will present what you want on a silver platter…but you’ll never reach that level if you don’t also really work for what you want.

 

Most people have lost the whole notion of conviction.

 

So in the December 10-11 Magic Theater workshop, aside from everything else we do, I’ll show you exercises you can do to strengthen conviction.

 

Energy and conviction work hand in hand. As one builds, the other builds.

 

Magic isn’t for the timid or shy or passive. It isn’t for people who think ultimate “harmony” will some day enfold them in a gloss of fulfillment if they wait long enough and are Nice long enough.

 

Conviction is an ordinary word…but when you take the meaning far enough and expand it far enough, you are into the territory of The Paranormal. You are encompassing and projecting and immersing yourself so fully in what you want that it comes about.

 

 

NOTE 5: http://healthfreedoms.org/2011/10/14/big-study-vaccinated-kids-2-5-more-diseases-than-unvaccinated/

 

Survey Study suggests vaccinated kids get more diseases than unvaccinated kids.

 

 

NOTE 6: Fragment of an interview with Jack True, my late friend and colleague, who was the most innovative hypnotherapist this side of Orion.

 

Q (Jon): I look at dreams as adventures. Cultures have always been fixated on analyzing them and finding the hidden meanings.

 

A (Jack): Well, when you think about it, trying to dissect things for hidden meanings happens all over the place. The point is, when you arrive at the meaning, what do you have? The whole business falls apart. You’re sitting there with a few sentences of translated meaning, and it really doesn’t help much. I admit it can be an intriguing exercise, and I’m not knocking it, but it makes me yawn.

 

Q: The most interesting thing about dreams is that people have them. They’re lying in bed, and they’re entering into all sorts of dimensions, and it feels very real. Adventure.

 

A: Well, you would say that, because you’re an artist.

 

Q: What would you say?

 

A: I agree. Many dreams follow the sequence of desire and then manifestation. You want to experience something, and then, bang, it’s there. You’re in a full-blown setting, and there are other people, and you’re feeling what you want to feel. Or you could reverse it. You’re in a setting, you size it up, you see what you desire, and then it happens.

 

Q: In other words, it’s natural. It’s what people want.

 

A: They would like their waking lives to be like that. And in the service of that goal, in dreams, all the rules of physical reality go out the window. Dreams are a glimpse into another kind of reality, where the rules aren’t the rigid context. The rules about what can happen with space and time and what can’t happen don’t apply. In that sense, dreams are like art. In art, you can create what you want to.

 

Q: So there is a general universality in dreams.

 

A: The universality is, the rules of physical reality don’t take precedence. They don’t determine the outcome. They don’t inhibit the action. You can be in a room talking to someone one second, and the next second you can be up in the clouds flying over a city. This isn’t “a symbol” of something. It’s not about hidden meaning. It’s what it is.

 

Q: That’s too stark for a lot of people.

 

A: Well, sure. But so what?

 

Q: In a lot of cultures, if you have a dream, you’re bound to interpret it by the doctrine of the current mythology or religion.

 

A: Yeah. One story used to explain another story. If you wrote a novel, would you feel compelled to write another novel explaining the first one? It’s ridiculous. Dreams have inherent magic in them. Whereas, in your waking life, if you want to go from one city to another, you drive, or you book a flight. You go through all sorts of preparation. Those are the rules. That’s the way it works. In a dream, you can just move from one city to another in no time at all.

 

Q: That’s what I’m saying. That instant travel—it’s part of the adventure. If you want to think about a dream after you wake up, think about that.

 

A: Let’s say you actually had a person who could do that. He’s standing on the corner of 42^nd Street and Broadway, and then he’s standing on the beach in San Francisco. No time elapses. All sorts of explanations would be given, in addition to all the denials that it ever happened. He’s an alien from outer space. He’s a god. He’s the devil. He’s able to hypnotize everybody and make them think he has this extraordinary power. He was using some fabulous machine to make the space shift happen. It was technology, because otherwise it couldn’t have happened. You see, this is the analysis. The interpretation of the event.

 

 

NOTE 7: A brief fragment of a very long poem I’m writing, as yet untitled. Could be The Magician.

 

“The mirror was cracked in a dozen places, like the windshield of a car on a slippery highway at night, just after the police and the emergency workers and the victims had been dispatched to their proper and assigned locations, and he wondered what it was doing on the wall of a doctor’s office, when he realized the doctor was holding the cards of a played out universe in his hands. End of the line. Can’t make this machine keep on turning over. Not enough science left in the drawer. Three arrow ships came out of a diagonal cloud and dove into a Himalaya of crystal and shattered light and shattered more light and finally burned out eyes that were already blind and then we began to see something. Thirty years ago, I discovered that tragedy was a vast illusion perpetrated by three men playing cards in a hotel room and I shot them after breakfast. The royalties from this were enormous. I am in the maple trees. I am waking up in the green light. I am holding on to the mane of a cloudy leopard I have known for a thousand years and we never speak. ( the secret of everything ) sounds immaterial therefore you don’t mention it. (ten thousand incarnations as earth, then ten thousand as air, ten thousand as fire, ten thousand as water, then you jump off.)”

 

 

NOTE 8: McClatchy newspapers, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the online New Yorker blog, and the Washington Post are reporting on connections between the Libyan rebels and the CIA, particularly in the person of Colonel Kalifa Hafter. Revolution, spooks, deals, oil. Blowback?

 

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

 

MYTH AND THE FORCE

 

OCTOBER 14, 2011. I keep saying this over and over, because I have to. So here we go again.

 

A myth, any myth, holds a fascination for people because it is a work of art—and art is the compelling force.

 

Most of the human race want to enter a grand museum, where myths are displayed on the walls. They want to choose one and then WALK INTO IT AND TAKE UP PERMANENT RESIDENCE THERE.

 

Of course, any painter worth his salt would watch this and fall down laughing.

 

The painter knows something that escapes the attention of the throngs in the museum.

 

A MYTH IS THE PRODUCT OF IMAGINATION.

 

The product.

 

The outcome.

 

Of course, when you obscure this fact, all you are left with is products of imagination. That’s all you’ve got. So you choose one. You say, “This is the best one.”

 

You say, “This feels like the key to the universe.” Or, “This is the way the human race will survive, by believing in this one.” Or, “Let’s get everyone to accept this one.”

 

But behind it all is imagination, which can generate, among other things, an infinity of myths.

 

I explore these issues in great depth in my book, The Secret Behind Secret Societies.

 

Once you recognize the existence and power of imagination, YOUR imagination, then in some very real sense, you are on the cusp of becoming an artist. What you need to do then is USE your imagination.

 

You want an exercise? Here it is. Spend the next year inventing myths. Write them down. At the end of the year, you’ll have a whole different perspective about myths. You’ll know in your bones the difference between living inside a myth and creating one.

 

And you’ll have a power that was always yours to begin with.

 

I write this piece because myths are deployed as ruling entities. They shape what people believe and what they do. They are used to coalesce societies and civilizations and run them—and we have reached the moment in history where this is no longer necessary. Where we can all become artists. AKA magicians.

 

But…the fascination with myths lives on. People want to believe (and so they do) that finding one particular myth might unlock the secret of life.

 

The secret of life is unlimited and unbounded imagination and creation—BY THE INDIVIDUAL.

 

Lately, I’ve started the Magic Theater as a way, a vehicle for expanding the imagination and allowing people to use it and use it powerfully, by improvising many, many, many roles in dialogue.

 

And when I say imagination, I mean infinite imagination.

 

And when I say roles, I mean any role that can be imagined.

 

History can be viewed as the struggle, battle, and conflict between opposing myths. And as we all know, this isn’t merely an intellectual war. It is also a blood-and-guts war.

 

It’s a shell game. “Where is the one myth I can point to and choose that will open the door to all the fulfilled promise I seek?”

 

This can be restated: “Which product of imagination will lead to triumph?”

 

When you see it that way, you know the game is exposed, and you can go, instead, DIRECTLY to the force behind all myths: imagination.

 

You can create—without limit.

 

NO PRODUCT OF IMAGINATION IS THE ANSWER.

 

IMAGINATION IS THE ANSWER.

 

IMAGINATION IS MAGIC.

 

MAGIC IS IMAGINATION.

 

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

The first workshop of the Magic Theater will be held in San Diego on December 10 and 11. To inquire: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

THE CRIMES OF M. VAFAMEHR

 

OCTOBER 13, 2011. Marzieh Vafamehr, the Iranian actress who is now in jail for making a movie about suppression of artists—no irony there, nothing to see, move along—has broken two key rules, according to Iranian authorities.

 

One, the movie was made without a permit, and two, she didn’t wear a head scarf to conceal her hair—but wait, in the film, her head was shaved.

 

And for these grave offenses, she faces a year in lock-up and 90 lashes with a whip.

 

What is this, the Stone Age? The medieval Roman Church? Or are we supposed to say, “Well, they have their religion and we have to tolerate these traditions and honor them because, after all…”

 

Don’t worry, though. Women’s organizations all over the planet and groups of powerful actors and directors and major movie studios are mounting a joint effort to turn the tide in Marzieh’s favor and obtain her release.

 

What? They’re NOT? Absolutely nothing is happening? Are you sure? Not a peep?

 

Perhaps failing to obtain a permit to shoot a film (the director asserts they DID get necessary permits) and showing one’s bald head are major crimes. For all I know, there are scores of bald actors and filmmakers who didn’t get permits languishing in American jails as we speak. That must be it.

 

Bald head? 90 lashes. Of course.

 

The president of Iran knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s a genius. The system under which Marzieh Vafamehr is being persecuted is just and right and proper.

 

For all you video devotees out there, I have a suggestion that will set this whole thing straight. Take your cameras out into the street and start interviewing bald people. Ask them if they’re aware that baldness is punishable by a year in prison and 90 lashes. Then mention Marzieh Vafamehr’s name and her case. Put the videos up on You Tube.

 

If you can do photoshop, make Scorcese and Lucas and George Clooney and Tom Selleck and Meryl Streep and Angelina Jolie and Hillary Clinton BALD. “THIS GETS YOU A YEAR IN JAIL AND 90 LASHES IN IRAN.” Use a little imagination.

 

If you need any motivation, think about what 90 hard lashes can do.

 

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

UNTITLED IMAGINATION

 

–a short work of semi-fiction–

 

By Jon Rappoport

 

In the year, 2094, a document was uncovered in a copper mine in Southern California. It was sent to the Non-Federal Bureau of Non-Control, headquartered in the old buildings of the former and forgotten National Security Agency.

 

The document, dated at 2011, written by an unidentified painter, was read by the Chief of Unsystematic Uncoordinated Records.

 

The document:

 

“If you hand a person a fig and tell him it’s a plum, there is a chance he’ll see a plum.

 

“If you give a person a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita and explain its ‘themes,’ there is a chance that, as he reads it, he will find those themes and consider them the most important result of his reading.

 

“Instead of relying on his own imagination and perception, a person imagines that what he is told is what he is looking at.

 

“So you point to a tree and say to a friend, ‘See that car?’

 

“Of course, if you are passionate about deceiving, you dress it up. You start with something complicated—rock formations in a canyon, on which wind and water have inscribed many lines—and you build the notion that these lines add up to faces and legs and feet and eyes and tools.

 

“And then the person with you may see what you’re describing.

 

“He may see a whole civilization no one has ever discovered before.

 

“Whereas, if you just pointed to the rocks and lines, he would see and/or imagine whatever he sees or imagines.

 

“Education tends to define what is there before a person can experience it on his own.

 

“I’m a painter. My education in art, before I ever laid a brush on canvas, was conducted by a few world-class liars who made up convincing theories about this and that. Somewhere along the line, I took over the process and ignored what they were saying.

 

“This eventually led me, on a long path, to the conclusion that imagination has no limits.

 

“A few minutes after that, I realized such an idea was not acceptable to most people. They preferred to be told what to see and what to know. They wanted confirmation of what they already assumed.

 

“Nevertheless, to the extent that I rely on anything beyond my work, I rely on other people’s imagination, in the sense that I’m painting what can only be accessed by imagination.

 

“Given what I believe, it would be foolish to tell people what to see in my paintings. I myself see many things, and what I see changes. I want it to be that way.

 

“I’m not trying to nail down a particular bounded reality. If that were my goal, I would manufacture shoes.

 

“From a rough societal perspective, I see imagination as an infinite series of platforms. The first burst of imagination somehow places people on platform number 1, which is beyond current consensus reality. They walk around on that platform for a while, and then it’s time for burst number 2, which creates a further platform, on which people stroll for a period of time. And then, burst 3. And so on and so forth. Forever.

 

“At no point does anyone lay down laws of perception. Nevertheless, there is a loose and congenial sharing of platforms.

 

“Of course, this is an ideal. Things don’t happen so smoothly.

 

“I have some peculiar ideas about language. In a way, I believe you can reach an endpoint with it. You obviously haven’t exhausted all the possibilities for, say, writing a poem. You can invent lines no one has ever come close to before. But you begin to experience the sensation of rearranging deck chairs, and then you know you need something more.

 

“You need a new kind of language, in which the letters or words or characters or pictographs are open. They carry no fixed meanings.

 

“Confronted with such a language, the reader employs imagination and imagination only.

 

“In terms of what we ordinarily expect from language, this seems quite absurd. It seems absurd until we try it out.

 

“At which point, imagination begins talking to imagination. Leaving systems behind, we are in new territory. The place is new, and how we will deal with being there is new.

 

“Suppose you walked into your garage and found a car you had never seen before. You get in, you turn the key in the ignition and nothing happens. You get out and raise the hood and inspect the guts. You find no battery. In fact, all the pieces and parts are foreign to you. You spend the next month taking the works apart, looking at them, putting them back together, and still, of course, the car doesn’t turn on.

 

“After six months, you come to the decision that this isn’t a car in the usual sense. It may not be a car at all. It may be something else.

 

“Two years later, you’re sure it’s something else, but you can’t fathom what.

 

Finally, driven to desperation, you make a leap. You say, ‘It’s up to me what this is. It can be anything. But for that I need more than perception. I need imagination. And if I need that, then this thing can be anything I want it to be.’

 

“And if this is the case, you can either fall into despair, because you don’t want the challenge, or you can go with imagination.

 

“If you opt for the second choice, you’re launched.

 

“Then one day, a friend drops by, and he looks at the car, he crawls under it, he fusses with a tire, he sticks his hand up the exhaust pipe, he taps on a bolt, and the car roars to life.

 

“You now have two cars. The first one is what you’ve already begun to build in your imagination. The second one you can take out on the road.

 

“If you can accommodate yourself to both cars, you are all right. You are doing fine. You are in good shape. You are dealing with the systems we call reality AND the unbounded X you create with imagination.

 

“Of course, you can simply go back to the car on the road and forget about X. You can drive it, you can study it with your mechanical friend, you can master its workings down to a T, you can understand every single piece of it and settle for that.

 

“Until, some time later, you’re bored out of your mind.”

 

The Chief of Unsystematic Uncoordinated Records finished reading the document and laid it down on his desk.

 

He thought, “If only that painter knew millions of people now speak and write in those open languages. His assessment seems so obvious in hindsight. Of course we would follow this approach. What else could we do? Deteriorate? Give up? Imitate a consensus? Only a lunatic would opt for that.”

 

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

The first workshop of the Magic Theater takes place in San Diego on December 10 and 11. To inquire or sign up: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

OCCUPY THE WHITE HOUSE

 

OR THE MEN’S ROOM

 

OCTOBER 12, 2011. So far the Occupy events have managed to obscure and delay—or remain ignorant of—their precise agenda(s). This is taken as a sign of rank stupidity, but it may hold promise because, let’s face it, as soon as you state your political objectives these days, you’re pretty much finished. You trigger the opposition forces and you attract supporters, and then the whole thing eventually winds up in a muddy ditch, a car without traction…

 

But if you obfuscate and hint and suggest and garble, while others interpret what you mean, you can play the media like a drum and short-circuit many brains and cause smoke to exit many ears.

 

Yesterday, in New York, two guys in suits showed up at the rally with a sign that announced: WE ARE THE 1%. They intimated they were investment bankers. Police decided to keep them separate from the 99%, for fear of a clash.

 

Were these two guys actors? Were they really part of the protesters?

 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6YDA52gkpg&w=480&h=274]

 

Now, I know these “occupations” could descend into violence, and if they do, there is a chance it will be provoked from the outside, to serve somebody’s political plot…but if that can be avoided, we have a chance to see something interesting develop.

 

Wall St., big government, thieving venal corporations, recent college grads with heavy debts from student loans and no job prospects, unions, Obama operatives, the poor on welfare, small businesses wound up in bureaucratic red tape imposed by the government—none of them or their supporters are going to get what they want from showing up in the streets in various cities with signs. It’s not going to happen. This is not an A to B revolution. It isn’t a new political party. It isn’t a pressure group leaning on Congress.

 

It’s a glob.

 

That can be a good thing if the glob expands asymmetrically.

 

Media will see what they want to see and report on it, and the reporting will change from day to day. Against this backdrop of serious high-IQ idiots trying to analyze what is going on, we could get some real theater.

 

We need it. Politics has become so predictable, on all sides, so automatic, that you really need to be an android to hope to move up the food chain.

 

Government has become such a fungal organism its main ambition is to expand. It doesn’t really care what it does, as long as the doing of it creates more jobs for its own employees. If it could get away with the invention of a new cabinet post called Toilet Maintenance, it would bring it into existence and appoint 10,000 inspectors in the blink of an eye.

 

Against this kind of absurdity, we need a counter. Apparently, appealing to rational instincts doesn’t work anymore. The fungus needs to ooze up to something it doesn’t understand, something that doesn’t add up.

 

The fungus perceives people as ciphers that can be encircled and swallowed. But if the ciphers starting acting like a previously unknown species, the fungus, in its small brain, will try to re-set and re-categorize the situation and assess the novelty. This it cannot do.

 

I would hope that, after Occupy Wall Street, we would get an Occupy the White House, or Occupy CBS. I myself favor Occupy the Sun…but I tend to take things too far too soon.

 

Perhaps Occupy Tesla would work. The idea being it’s time to unseal and recapture his notes on new energy devices the FBI seized upon his death.

 

Or, less ambitiously, how about 5000 people in the Wall Street area emitting a low droning sound for an hour at lunchtime?

 

“I don’t know, Dan. I’m standing here watching something very weird. One of the leaders told me a few minutes ago, before the chanting started, that the group was about to employ a non-violent strategy Mahatma Gandhi used in India to ‘just say no to the British occupiers.’ Those were his words. So far, no one we’ve checked with can recall Gandhi doing this. Back to you in the studio.”

 

The government fungus pauses. The media fungus pauses.

 

Outside the offices of Goldman Sachs, at midnight, 20 fat guys wearing suits and holding large dogs on leashes show up and take turns reading aloud from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.

 

Within a half hour, three media vans arrive and bathe the street with thick blue light, workers set up their equipment and start making coffee.

 

At a nearby hospital, an exhausted intern on extended duty, sitting in a little alcove off a corridor, is watching the fat guys read on a small portable TV. He hears approaching footsteps. He stands up, walks into the corridor. A dozen people wearing white coats march up to him. The woman in the lead says, “We understand the pharmacy refuses to stock calcium and magnesium. The President is on his way. He just suffered another episode. He needs supplementation. We’re occupying the hospital. Where’s the Director?”

 

Without waiting for an answer, the group moves away.

 

The intern goes back to the alcove, rubbing his eyes, trying to shake the sleep out of his head. He glances at the TV. Now the scene is Battery Park. Three men in bathing trunks are reciting the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities:

 

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…”

 

The news broadcast cuts away to a rooftop in Brooklyn, where a young man draped in a blanket reads from Tropic of Cancer: “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”

 

The intern looks down at his hands to see whether he’s dreaming.

 

“I don’t know, Dan. Across the city tonight, people are doing strange things. Are they one group? Are smaller factions springing up? It’s hard to say. A colleague of mine who was just here said she spoke to a Congressional source who said this whole Occupy phenomenon is really a move by Chinese allies of Belgian bankers seeking to devalue the dollar. That’s a rumor, of course, but right now all we seem to have are rumors. An intern from University Hospital stopped by—he’s a Yale graduate—and he said he believes what we’re witnessing is the cumulative effect of several decades of widespread use of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. A contagion of antidepressants, if you will…”

 

Soon, across the East River, the first glimmer of dawn appears. What will the new day bring?

 

A hologram of an ox goring a building? A few unemployed software designers posing as reporters interviewing rallying students? A lookalike Michael Bloomberg throwing counterfeit stock certificates out of a slow-moving limo? A man wearing a judge’s robe lounging in a deck chair on the sidewalk, feeding drinks to a bikini-clad blond?

 

Possible cops lead possible stock brokers out of the Goldman Sachs building in handcuffs, as the brokers exclaim, “Our company donated one-point-three million to Obama!”

 

Oh…there is one little thing I forgot to mention. All this engrossing theater, all these stimulating possibilities rest on the prior assumption that people can understand their own freedom, can understand that, in the long run, government will not save them from themselves.

 

Or to put it another way, just because Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would, in today’s world, be camping out in the Wall Street area, it doesn’t mean the people camping out there now are Jeffersons and Madisons.

 

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

UPDATE: MARZIEH VAFAMEHR/90 LASHES

 

OCTOBER 12, 2011. Iranian actress sentenced to a year in prison and 90 lashes by the government of Iran—for acting in a film portraying the plight of free-thinking artists in her country.

 

Many brief press reports, no major media campaign on her behalf, fellow actors in America fail to organize, remain silent.

 

Well, I spoke with spokesperson Megan Mattson at the US State Department a few minutes ago, and she released the following statement:

 

“We are deeply disturbed by today’s news that independent filmmaker and actress Marzieh Vafamehr was sentenced to 90 lashes and one year for her work in the independent film ‘My Tehran for Sale.’

 

“Her sentence is a clear example of Iran’s increasing crackdown on its media and cultural figures. Bloggers, students, religious figures, artists, journalists and civil society activists are all suffering at the hands of a regime that hypocritically champions freedom in neighboring countries but fails to grant such liberties at home.

 

“These actions only intensify Iran’s isolation in the international community. We continue to stand with those Iranians who want nothing more than to make their voices heard and hold their government accountable for its actions.”

 

What to make of this? First of all, the US government has no diplomatic relations (along ordinary channels) with the government of Iran, so whatever US authorities may be doing to secure Marzieh’s release (and I’m not holding my breath) is passing through the hands of the Swiss, as a third party.

 

But why am I not reading this State Department statement anywhere, except on this page? Why aren’t the NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and the TV networks carrying it and exerting pressure?

 

They don’t think it’s an important story? They don’t think their readers would be interested? I have news for their numb editors—it could become a major story if they gave it enough space and exposure.

 

For example: WHAT DO 90 LASHES FEEL LIKE? 90.

 

WHAT KIND OF GOVERNMENT DOLES OUT THAT SENTENCE FOR ACTING IN A FILM?

 

How disconnected and circumspect do you have to be to not see at least the storyline possibilities? And suppose, God forbid, you also saw the human side of it.

 

There was a time when what is happening to Marzieh Vafamehr would have been front-page news. But that was when people in media still thought about individual freedom—now a defunct concept. Reporters have been educated and trained out of it. Editors shrug at it.

 

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com