Monday, February 20, 2012

THE MIRACULOUS: FACT AND FAKERY

I want to talk about The Miraculous.

We know that Creation is a miracle. Don't we?  It's an ongoing miracle, it's still happening, it embraces us, it permeates us, we waltz through it daily, we take it for granted because, ultimately, it is granted to us.

No, we don't appreciate The Miracle because we're obsessed with our collection of what we think are the priorities in Life, and the luxuries that we manufacture for ourselves, and the scandals that we manufacture for ourselves, and the global crises that we manufacture for ourselves.

See, we're so shamelessly narcissistic that we imagine everything mighty and magnificent and glorious only exists for our amusement.  We imagine that we can take it or leave it.

That's what distinguishes us from the other creatures of this world.  This is what got us kicked out of Eden, right?  We were banished from living in harmony with Nature because we aspired to perceiving it as God perceives it.  God knows how Nature works, he knows how it's put together — and when we acquired the awareness of God, we acquired an unnatural curiosity to take Nature apart.  We have the same base impulses as animals, but we have the curiosity of God.

Which makes us unique.  It makes us the ultimate misfits.

See, animals know that God exists, and animals are fully aware of the hierarchy of spirit.  Animals are so tuned-in to the tremulous vibes that events in other dimensions affect them profoundly.  We know that animals anticipate natural disasters, that's just a fact.  But animal sensitivity extends beyond the physical world.  Hundreds of birds of one species drop dead in flight, and they fall to earth.  A shoal of fish of one species go belly up, dying simultaneously for no apparent reason.  Happens all the time.

It's as if the Life force was just sucked out of them.  But it's the precise selection of species that is the marvel — it's not as if some natural force is just blindly sucking the Life out of everything in the area.  There's a surgical precision in these mini-extinction-events.

What is that?  Science has no answer.

All Science can do is attempt to give us perspective.  That's all.

When we think we've discovered something new and we think we know something new, what we've actually done is built a little model of that thing in our minds, and there it becomes an object of admiration and pride, because we think we understand that model.  We have now drawn that model within our perspective of reality.

When we present our discovery to others for their approval, they hold it at arm's length and turn it over and scrutinize it from every angle, and they KNOW that model exists, because their minds comprehend the same details we comprehend.

So, we agree on Reality.  Therefore, the model is "real" and it becomes a working bit of our knowledge base.

The Miraculous, however, cannot be reduced to a model that we can understand or manipulate or place in a museum display case.  The Miraculous defies Nature, just as WE defy Nature.  That's why we suspect that The Miraculous is the result of intelligent interference.  That's why The Miraculous implies God.

That's why Science detests The Miraculous.  The Miraculous refuses to be measured, it refuses to cooperate with our four-dimensional models of Reality.

You know, one of the greatest men I knew many years ago was a magician.  Not a sorcerer or anything like that, but a stage magician, a sleight of hand artist, a practitioner of theatrical magic, which certainly can be explained in four-dimensional terms.  He not only performed magic, he collected all sorts of magic tricks — thousands of tricks, some very ancient and some very modern, but all predicated on the fact that human attention can be reliably misled.

One night after enjoying dinner in his home, this magician offered to reveal to me the secret of any one magic trick I chose.  This was a marvelous gift, but I was at a loss to choose one magic trick from among the many I had seen him perform in the past.  Finally, I said, "How do you pierce a balloon with a knitting needle without popping the balloon?"

This one trick had always baffled me from a physics standpoint.  The magician produces a latex balloon, inflates it, ties it off, and then drives a foot-long knitting needle right through the balloon as easily as inserting it through a melon. The balloon remains intact. The trick is so simple and so in-your-face, your brain immediately goes into high gear trying to solve it.

How do you stick ANYTHING through a balloon without popping it?

He chuckled at my simple inquiry, because I could have asked him about ANY trick.  I mean, I could have asked about Houdini's Metamorphosis and it would have been revealed to me that night.  But I wasn't interested in the Metamorphosis, which is more a feat of timing than anything else.  I was interested in the straight-up physical impossibility of a knitting needle stabbed through a balloon.

The magician stepped to his cabinet, withdrew the necessary props, and rejoined me at the table.  He laid out the objects for me to see and said, "the secret is right in front of you."  There was a balloon and a glinting knitting needle upon a red silk kerchief.  I picked up each of the items and inspected them carefully.  They were unremarkable, except that the silk kerchief felt a little greasy.

"That's the secret," the magician smiled.  A red silk kerchief, which already has a pleasing sheen to the naked eye, is the vehicle for a small quantity of machine grease worked into the fabric.  The knitting needle is dramatically unwrapped from the greased kerchief, and with very graceful handling, the needle is coated all the way to the tip with a film of grease.

The knitting needle is then plunged right through the balloon, in one side and out the other, and the grease serves to seal the puncture, so no air escapes, explosively or otherwise.

Simple physics.  It was a middle-school physics experiment.  I felt incredibly stupid, but also enlightened.

See, Magic is REAL in its performance, the EFFECT it has on the audience is REAL.  How very wonderful to be able to impart that feeling of awe and wonder to hundreds and thousands and millions of people simply by making a few simple physical preparations and presenting the EFFECT as Magic.

This is one reason I've always preferred to work in the background, participating in elaborate preparations that culminate in simple and straightforward presentations.  It's like the magic of the theatre, right?  Behind the various curtains and backdrops, there's a veritable mob of people hurrying to and fro, moving property here and there, adjusting lighting and sound and effects, all to create an illusion of a moment in time out there on the stage.

I've always enjoyed being the man behind the curtain.

But in the cases of select species of animals just dropping dead en masse, or of fish and crabs and frogs and all sorts of unlikely things miraculously falling out of the sky (and in absence of convenient meteorological explanations), I think there are elaborate preparations going on in other dimensions, a lot of covert stagecraft behind the miraculous events we see in the world around us.

Am I saying that miraculous events are faked?  Oh, no, they may surely answer every criteria of our most stringent inquiry.  I'm saying that what we perceive as miracles in our Universe are actually fairly mundane interdimensional events; but, when they intrude into our Universe, and we see only, perhaps, three or four facets of an extraordinarily multifaceted event, we simply have no faculty to grasp or comprehend the true nature of what has transpired.

Look at the Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, in Portugal, 1917.

It was foretold, and some 100,000 people were on hand to witness the Miraculous events, among them scientists and journalists and photographers.  Yes, it happened.  That it happened isn't in question.  But WHAT happened, truly?

How could the SUN apparently move closer to the Earth, such that witnesses saw the disc grow larger and felt the temperature increase accordingly?

Pardon, but if the Sun was jostled around like that, even for a few seconds, it would produce gravity waves that would still be reverberating around this arm of the galaxy.  The known planets would leave their orbits, go sailing off into the void like ghost ships, or assume new, strange, elliptical orbits.  The Asteroid and Kuiper Belts would be affected, and great slabs of rock and ice would come tumbling into the inner Solar System.   Who knows what else would result from the Sun playing hopscotch around the solar system?

Well, then, it was the EARTH that moved closer to the Sun, right?

Again, impossible.  We're talking about taking a binary planet system (Earth/Moon is a binary planet system) off of its orbit and plunging it toward the Sun at the center of the Solar System.  Obviously, that didn't happen.  The velocities involved would strip away Earth's atmosphere in seconds, the tidal forces would launch the oceans out of their basins and into space, where they would turn into an icy, comet-like tail swirling away for millions of miles.

Ever heard of Occam's Razor?

Using Occam's Razor, we can very quickly eliminate the possibility that the Earth or Sun deviated in their exquisitely-balanced cosmic gyrations, and we arrive at the much more simple and energy-efficient explanation that 100,000 witnesses (scientists and journalists inclusive) had their PERCEPTION influenced by an external source.

A cosmic magic trick.  Sleight of hand on a titanic scale.  A Miracle.

Something punched through from another dimension and 100,000 four-dimensional brains tried to make sense of it.  Oh, there was definitely a physical effect, no question.   They captured images of the Miracle of the Sun.

But what really transpired there?

Naysayers will tell you that these throngs of people assembled over an area of 18 miles in Portugal's countryside and stared at the sun until their brains were fried and they started hallucinating.

O my Lord, thou hast set the Sun spinning in the heavens, casting every colour upon the land, and the zig and the zag thing, as thou wouldst, as we cower, yes, the mighty Sun doest make the wet bits dry, in thy mercy! Lo!

Occam's Razor works on naysayers, too.

No, something happened.  It was captured on film and in thousands of witness accounts.   Wet clothing was instantly dried.  Wet, muddy earth was made dry in ten minutes.  Moisture, it seems, was drawn away at the event horizon.

No trees burst into flame, thankfully.  But you can imagine the frenzy of the crowds as SOMETHING increased the outdoor temperature sufficiently to dehydrate rain-drenched clothing and muddy earth?

In ten minutes?

Well... If I may observe.  What do we know that would split sunlight into its spectra, sending flashes of every color?  A prism?  I've played with glass lenses that were crafted to filter light into myriad colors.  The disc of the Sun was also seen to move about erratically in the sky, and seemed to come closer to the Earth than normal.

Somebody playing with a cosmic magnifying lens, maybe?

Why not?  If someone wanted to make an impression on 100,000 people in the Portuguese countryside, I think a display of focusing the Sun's rays on the Earth through a tremendous lens (positioned in Space, of course) would scare the living shit out of anyone.  Even hardened skeptics and atheists.

As Arthur C. Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic.

I think that something extraordinary transpired on that day in Portugal, and I think its explanation is as incredible as its effect.  Some agency unknown to Man positioned a lens of some sort near the Earth so as to create a solar spectacle, complete with prismatic displays of color, as well as an increase in temperature sufficient to evaporate a great quantity of rainwater in a matter of minutes.

Like a boy playing with a magnifying glass, roasting the frantic population of an anthill.

Like that, but not precisely so.  The Miracle of the Sun was foretold, not in exact terms, but the Virgin advised that something was going to happen.  So it was a controlled event.  No one was roasted alive, and no trees burst into flame, but wet clothing and soggy earth were dried, which indicates very precise control of the effect.

The Magician was quite careful not to injure his audience.  The Miracle of Fatima was a demonstration of power, yes?  Power and Control on a scale that dwarfs Mankind's best efforts to insignificance.  I mean, we couldn't replicate the Miracle of the Sun if we wanted to.

The best magicians in the world can deceive an audience at close range, but when it comes to creating a spectacle with intense radiant heat over an area of 18 miles, and visible to an audience of a hundred thousand spread out across the countryside, I defy the best magicians in the world to replicate the effect.

I defy them.

The engineering and orchestration of such an event is Miraculous; even in its explanation it's Miraculous.  It would require the technology of an extremely advanced civilization, far beyond our current capability to harness and focus energies in that way.  For all practical purposes, it would require a God.

But... What if there was an advanced civilization capable of pulling off this magic trick?  From where?  From the Pleiades?  Oh, please.

I'm not going to leap immediately to extraterrestrial explanations, okay, because I don't think that's necessary.  There's plenty of terrain to support a number of civilizations on this planet.  We just happen to occupy the outermost layer of its rocky crust.

Yeah, I do seriously think that there's another civilization that coexists with us on this planet.  A civilization several million years more technically advanced than us, and it is located about 20 miles straight down.

No, the Earth isn't hollow.  But there is a sweet spot about 20 miles below the surface where a sufficiently sophisticated species could carve out a place for itself.  Indeed, an intelligent species would know that you can survive virtually unscathed for billions of years deep below the surface of a rocky planet covered with water.

Survive asteroid strikes, survive gamma bursts, survive super solar flares, survive ANYTHING.

That would be a species that flies in and out of the oceans and atmosphere as easily as stepping out the front door and onto the porch.

They own the planet, of course.  They've always owned it.  And, yes, they're entirely capable of engineering and orchestrating a Miracle of Fatima to keep our species moving in a desired direction.  Whatever direction that is.  A direction that pleases them, perhaps, or that serves them.

Certainly, if there is one subterranean civilization there can be two subterranean civilizations.  In fact, if you have one extremely advanced civilization, it IS going to SPLIT after a few million or billion years.  There is going to be schism in any intelligent community.  Fact of life (and another story).  Intelligent communities split, they divide, and divide again.

So, I think there's TWO subterranean civilizations on Earth.  At least.

But THAT is the fodder for another blog altogether.

Monday, February 13, 2012

ROBOT ATTACK FROM THE YEAR SIXTY-EIGHT!

I don't want to make this a regular thing, but I'd like to lay down a few more impressions of how my childhood shaped my life.  I say impressions rather than memories, because, while I remember all the details of my childhood with excruciating clarity, I'm going to focus only upon those incidents that turned me into what I am today.  These impressions are still influencing me.

Let's take a jog back to 1968, to my grade school years, spent marveling at the possibilities of those things yet to come, spent reading science-oriented books and magazines and fiction of the day, spent reading about 10 books a week, actually.  And, yes, I could give an impromptu and comprehensive report on the contents of any book stuffed into my bulging satchel.  I was 8 years old.

One of my grade school teachers was a Mrs. Spears, a great big-boned woman with a broad, smiling face and ruddy cheeks and a spreading bough of hair like copper wire on top of her head and sparkling green eyes — I always thought she was one of us, I thought she was a kid at heart.  Rumor held that she was a Morman, which was something highly unusual in southeast Texas in the 60s.  But, then, Mormans are highly unusual people to begin with.

Mrs. Spears' class was a pleasure to me because every Wednesday she would close the door and draw the blinds — thus eliminating any external distractions — and pull up a sturdy wooden chair before the class and sit down and open a book and read to us from it.  Her choice of literature was eclectic, to put it mildly, and very much unpredictable, but definitely the sort of stuff to stimulate a young mind.

I recall one book in particular, A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle, which had won a number of awards and was a fairly sophisticated book for eight-year-old kids to digest back in 1968.  It was about a young girl's quest to rescue her father who was trapped in another dimension.  It seems the girl and her father shared an inherited trait that allowed them to cross over physical dimensions, to travel in time by sheer willpower, right.

That's a pretty complex concept, even by the standards of modern physicists.

Mrs. Spears read a few chapters to us each Wednesday from that story, then opened the class for discussion.  I remember she asked us to imagine the year 2000, what it would be like, and she wanted us to write about it and then talk about what we wrote.

Well... I already had my own notions about Time Travel back then.   In fact, I'd been pondering an unconventional means of communicating across Time.  As I sat in Mrs. Spears class, listening to the other kids babbling about flying cars and laser guns and all that nonsense, I thought that there must be a way to discern the true nature of the future, if only I had a telephone that would allow me to call myself in the future and ask a few questions.

I figured, in order to see into the future, all I had to do was mentally link up with myself at a future date.  Establish a mind link across time, right?

While all the other kids were bumbling around in their Star Trek-induced fantasies, I was musing upon interdimensional communications.  I remember becoming completely detached from the noisy scene in the school cafeteria, gazing out the window on an exceptionally clear and sunny day, TRYING to contact myself in the future.

Did I tell anyone about it?  Oh, no, you must be kidding.  They would've thought I "needed treatment," and I was smart enough to avoid treatment all throughout my life.  Yeah, I saw a few counselors who determined that I had "anger issues," but they were utterly wrong in their diagnoses.

See, when a psychiatric counselor observes a child drawing pictures of monsters all the time, as I did, they tend to think it's an anger issue.  No, I wasn't angry, the fact was that I LIKED monsters, I loved the misfits, I loved asymmetry, and I enjoyed the horrified expressions upon the faces of those who encountered monsters.  In my mind, every monster is just a kid who stepped on an anthill, right?  An outsider in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Anybody can be a monster.

Monsters shatter the illusion that everything is normal and pleasant and comfortable.  It's a matter of perspective, who's a monster and who's not.

Anyway, I remember trying to send these mental "gifts" to myself in the future.  And it worked.

In the year 2000, after 32 years of decidedly carnal living, after drinking my ass off for 23 years following my father's death in 1977, after living like a goddamned heathen berserker, wrecking property and maliciously injuring those closest to me, after surviving that den of iniquity in Florida and returning like the prodigal son, something hit me.

I mean, it really hit me like a wallop — suddenly, out of nowhere, I had this resurgence of passion for toy robots.



As a little kid, I loved toy robots, and dinosaurs, and all the usual stuff that 8-year-old boys love.  My passion for robots went a bit deeper than most in that I disassembled and modified and reassembled robots, trying to make them do things they weren't designed to do.

I lived for robots, I dreamed about robots, my first job mowing lawns was one of many labors in an Arthurian quest to obtain a ROBOT on lay-away at Goggin and Gorman's Toy Store.

In my 8-year-old mind, I had constructed a virtual reality populated by anthropomorphic robots, pursuing their various missions across space and time, okay?  I cogitated upon robotic scenarios.  Robots meant a lot to me back then.

But that childhood obsession, like so many others, fell away as adolescence descended and The System's mandatory education drones attempted to breach my intellectual perimeter.  In short, I forgot all about robots for 32 long years.

Then, wham, in 2000 comes this all-consuming passion to collect robots.  Out of nowhere.  Except, boom, look back to 1968 and that little kid in the school cafeteria peering out the window on a sunny day, trying to send a message with his mind into the future.

It worked.  It works.  And it works both ways, I think, but more on that later.







Tuesday, February 7, 2012

DEATH OF THE MIRACULOUS?

If I may wax prosaic for one blog, I'd like to address the demise of something very dear and special to all of Humankind.  I don't know when or even if it died, precisely, but I'll know why when it does.

I'm talking about our Human enchantment with The Miraculous.  Our sense of wonder, of outright awe —and even terror — in the face of the unknown.  The sheer thrill of mystery is what makes Life worth living, yes?

Love doesn't make Life worth living.  Love drives people insane, they go too far and literally kill each other in the name of Love.  Hope doesn't make Life worth living.  Hope fills us with regret and dulls our senses with dreams dreamt in vain.

But Mystery is what keeps us moving, it's what keeps us alive and vital and sharp.

I remember my childhood in very exquisite detail, which I'm told is something of a gift — most people can't remember their childhood, which has always puzzled me tremendously.  How can you forget the most amazing time in your life, when every experience is new, every sensation fresh and unfiltered, when it was just you and mystery all day long?

Those days, for boys, were made for projects and planning and clanning, like junior war games.  God, I remember all they boys on our street gathering together in groups to build forts out of cardboard and wood paneling in the abandoned properties, the "old lots."  Those lots were perfectly terraformed for us boys and our bicycles, with mounds of earth and piles of undergrowth left from a half-hearted clear-cutting project years earlier.

When I think back on the recreation we boys pursued in the 1960s, I'm astounded that we survived.

The old lots were our proving grounds for all manner of bicycle torture tests, gasoline-powered bonfires, slingshot skirmishes, and the inevitable dirt-clod wars.  If anyone tells you that war is not ingrained into the very essence of our Human DNA, you may tell him to go eat a fig.

Little boys know all about war, make no mistake, without any help from political analysts or radical activists or military strategists, okay?  Little boys INVENTED war.  We instinctively knew things about war that were only written by the Spartans and Greeks and Romans in ancient times.  Yeah, we knew how to build forts, we knew how to make concrete using only gravel and mud and straw, we built moats filled by somebody's garden hose.

We knew how to cut cane grass into pikes, we built catapults, and we used furniture boxes for armored personnel vehicles.

For godsake, we didn't need a television program to tell us how to wage war on each other.  War is what Humans DO naturally as we DEFY Nature.  We drive our enemies before us using mysteries otherwise known as "top secret weapons," right?

The one who brings the greatest Mystery to the field is the victor.

Whatever those mysteries are — be they slings or stone bows or ballistas or trebuchets or Howitzers or tactical two-stage thermonuclear devices — their intended purpose is not merely to kill the enemy.  The ultimate purpose of any weapon is to instill FEAR in the enemy, because FEAR is the greatest weapon, it's the weapon that actually changes the course of history.

Fear of the Unknown.  We intimidate the enemy into submission by confronting him with Mystery.

When everyone samples the technology, when the corrupt little despots in corrupt little regimes all over the world fill their arsenals with cruise missiles and remote assault drones, then the mystery is dispelled, and a new mystery must be created.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and so WAR is the engine of civilization.  Aggression drives our Magic.

But I think that the Miraculous is being deliberately targeted for extinction by our increasingly theatrical and arrogant edutainment media.

Edutainment is the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel and the History Channel and the Military Channel and the Biography Channel and the Travel Channel and on and on, and it's the essence of Reality Television, too, right.  Like, if we stick a camera crew and a sound crew and a lighting crew and a couple of assistant producers with a "popping" script in the MOST MUNDANE little niches of everyday Life, this is somehow REALITY?  Is it educational, learning how pawnshops consistently screw people on loans, learning how tattoo artists are narcissistic sadomasochists, learning how a bunch of no-talent, spoiled-brat housewives spend their husbands' fortunes?

It's hardly uplifting.

Some call this "transparency" a unifying campaign that's eventually gonna reveal everybody on Earth to each other, and then we can all hold hands and sing Kumbaya and We Are The World.

I call it a destruction of our sense of wonder.  We NEED a sense of wonder, as Humans.

I mean, I remember when I was four years old, on a warm, humid October night in southeast Texas.  It was a big, broad, quiet night, one of those nights in the dim past when you knew people were out there, but they were isolated in little pockets of family or friendship wherever they were, without an Internet or even 24-hour television to keep them company, so they had to rely on each other and maybe a faint yellow bug light on a back porch and a little transistor radio playing Buddy Holly in the darkness.

We didn't have air conditioning back then because we couldn't afford it.  What we had, rather, was a great 4-foot attic fan that pulled such a vacuum on the house, you could feel a dynamic air pressure change when Daddy flipped the switch in the hall.  Kind of a thunderous pomp that shook the whole house.

It was a mysterious pleasure for a 4-year-old back then to lay across the foot of the bed with my face peering out the open bedroom window in the warm darkness, and feel the air drawn into the house in a rushing breeze over my face, that air scented so deliciously by the pale gardenias in the garden outside.

There were people walking the dark streets, and I could see them out there, but they couldn't see me.  I was a silent observer on those silent figures in the night, trudging their mysterious ways with unclear intentions to unknown destinations.

I take comfort in the thought of that sort of isolation.  That's why I love thunderstorms, too.  Because they're mysterious phenomena that descend on us with power and fury, isolating the humans into little huddling clutches.

We used such gatherings to share information in prehistoric times, when the natural forces and climate change steered us into confrontation with other remote clans.  We'd duck into our shelters and share stories with strangers until the weather cleared.

In my 4-year-old mind on a clear October night in Texas, I was contemplating miraculous things such as Halloween, just a few weeks away, and the little plastic skull with the spring-loaded snapping jaw that I had "won" from a gumball machine earlier that day.  I was thinking about spooky ghosts and the macabre illustrations inside the the cover of Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery (a fairly new book, at the time, that I had just read with great delight).

Yeah, I was thinking about spirituality even at that age, even before I was able to comprehend mortality.  Well... I was pondering spirituality at the moment of my conception, come to think of it, and undoubtedly prior to it.  I don't think I've ever really completely crossed over into this corporeal world, frankly.

I always kept that door open.

How can people not remember their childhoods, unless it's a deliberate decision NOT to perceive the world from an innocent perspective?  We NEED the miraculous.  We NEED magic and mystery and, yes, good old superstitions in our lives.

We're not emotionless insects, okay?  As a species, Humanity shouldn't be striving to organize ourselves into a HIVE of uniformity.  We function BETTER when we huddle together in tribes and clans and families, okay?  That's how we evolved.

Everything that we perceive as "wrong" with our human world is all in our heads, right?  We hold all of this extraordinarily frail infrastructure together by consensus, by agreement; but the Natural world — indeed, the Universe — doesn't give a flying fuck about our most pressing Human concerns.

The Natural world doesn't wonder at itself, the Natural world is not a mystery to itself.  See, we have this extraordinary opportunity as Humans with a uniquely Human perspective to experience the Miraculous, and it's the most valuable thing in the Universe, I'm telling you.

That sense of wonder is the RESPONSE God was expecting when he CREATED the Universe.


TRUTH IN THE INFORMATION AGE

You know, I think my blogs are...well, they aren't boring, but they may come across as pretentious, lecturing, know-it-all bap.  Bap, incidentally, means nonsense, babbling crap. Bap.

I'm not a purveyor of bap, okay?

The philosophical views I hold were gained through experience; I'm not a philologist or a philosopher, and I don't just glom onto trendy subjects and spew soundbites thereof.

For example, one time a guy on a message board accused me of being a parrot for the conservative rhetoric of FOX News.  I told him that I didn't even watch TV, much less favor a particular channel for its rhetorical content.

He insisted that I was a shill for FOX News; but, to be fair, he accuses anyone who speaks from a position of common sense of being a shill for FOX News.

I don't watch FOX News because I don't watch television.  I don't listen to FOX News on the radio, either.  But since when did it become a traitorous activity to listen or watch anything you want, anyway?

I have a pretty broad perspective on what is happening in America, and by that  I mean I look at the USA within the context of what happens to civilizations over centuries.

We need to remember why the USA was founded; or, more specifically, we should remember what threat the Founders were trying to escape.

The grave threat to the early Americans was an oppressive, money-grubbing central government.  It controlled everything in their lives.  It controlled the lucrative trade of luxuries such as tea, and rum, and tobacco, as well as the staples of life for the American colonists.

The Founders — who were wealthy men, make no mistake — wanted to get out from under the pall of a nanny state that controlled virtually every aspect of their lives.  Essentially, the Founders just wanted their own playing field.

This is the story of every revolution that has ever transpired in the history of Humankind.  Same feeling, same passions, same progression of muzzled anger into violent confrontation.  Same thing that's happening in the world and in the USA today.

Don't be deceived by media outlets that proclaim themselves "fair and balanced," as FOX does.  Every media outlet has an agenda, a sponsor, a benefactor.  There's no such thing as an unbiased media outlet, okay?

Truth is Pure Information, right?  It's information you can use, information that is practical, information that is uplifting to the spirit.  But there is no news outlet in America — or in the world, for that matter — that provides Pure Information.  Yeah.  Not one news outlet in America tells the Truth.

It's ALL tainted in some way.