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"I cleave the heavens, and soar to the infinite.
What others see from afar, I leave far behind me."
Giordano Bruno, scourged by the well-meaning TORR.
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Why We Drain The Broccoli...
by Alfred Lehmberg
Or... why are the ostensibly "rational" and "reasonable" singled out for a vituperative thrashing I might more earnestly engender and prosecute elsewhere, on the more deserving? Could it be a result of that "more deserving" being entirely unapproachable, even consensus poisoning in the manner of your friendly neighborhood MAGA Republican? You can't discuss UFOs with Bill Nye or abortion rights with a fundy right-wing authoritarian, but I repeat myself.
...And, they're not getting a thrashing, so much. Not really. Oh, I know... unquestionably it could be argued, and abundantly too, that some nameable individuals seem the ready focus for same, but it's not the wool-dyed skeptibunky bugging me, so much, those reflexive UFO denialists adhering to the isolationist's party line, it's the ostensibly "rational" and "reasonable," sincerely, performing same!
How could that be? Apart from their individual expressions? I don't know those we'll chide from bunny pants, and in most cases, over the long haul? These have perpetrated or have indicated no substantive mendacity themselves. I'd offer that they act, now, as a "communicative foil," but that's the too-easy explanation, the parsimonious one. The one misusing Occam.
No, their inadequate hypothesis predictably requires more complication? I'm just making a bald statement of fact as I see it with no supporting documentation, no citations the furtive bibliophile lusts to covet and crave (then dismiss)... no demonstrable support... ...whatever that might mean (which won't be a whole lot?). Just honesty aspired to... We shall see.
I've no proof...[what was that, again?] only an internal logic aspiring to consistency ...in as much as closure in all things, strict adherence to *immutable* laws, and that much-touted-as-real-in-an-existential-sense white-male-creator-of-all-things... (?) is only ever a *comforting* illusion most maintain among other *comforting* illusions. It's rather like we produce our own individually maintained "Matrix" to keep our big lie "personal fable" well inflated if barely afloat. I digress...
Suffice it to say: All this is merely reported as true by an onsite witness and participant. Me.
Consider... As these things are traditionally measured? Those ostensibly "rational" and "reasonable" (TORR), forgetting they're inexorably turning into their grandparents, are one hell of a bunch of good guys and gals ...even as they are betrayers of the efficacious aggregate trust! In that aggregate, though, some remain to have me long for the broccoli water alluded to in a moment...
They're smart, articulate, engaging, educated, accomplished, and (...measured loosely from scientist to barrister?) even experienced. They're "well read", "well written", "well connected", and seemingly "well-liked" by the people who are close to them or who agree with key aspects of an ethereal if aggregate progressive philosophy.
They're grounded and steadfast and committed to a point of view with WIDE acceptance by the mainstream (the problem!). Their aforementioned networking gives them a golden ticket to the centers of that which is most interesting and rewarding for many of us. They're persons to be knighted, surely, not besmirched, apparently...
What's my problem, then?
Could it be professional, academic, or personal envy? Is it mere jealousy, gravid and green, illustrating and illuminating a personal character flaw nurtured for seven decades and change, and springing forth, finally, like some kind of irrationality of late-term-despairing-male-menopause...?
Perhaps...
...Though, I've explored my feelings, personal accomplishments, and motivations a great deal and I don't think so... Something else is at issue. I've got a pretty good handle on what it is, I believe.
No... the TORRs, and God bless them every one... are not the "problem," but the complacent enabler of same, the looming dystopia, that I allude to. They're fine persons if you want and as it's measured, so I'd like to think we could even have dinner sometime and I wouldn't drown them in the broccoli water hoping they hated broccoli...
What they remain to be, though, is just the most visible, most effective, and most unswerving stand-ins for the "aggregate problem," as I have come to perceive it to be. They are symbol for that which I find troublesome, incongruous, worrisome, and wrong. I criticize them... ...and I have a living breathing foil for an exploration of how far, in my considered opinion, we go wrong as a society, a culture, and a potentially sentient species. Hey. I'm on to 80 at this point. It's what we do.
Besides, let's just blow right passed my qualifications to pronounce on such. 'K? ... 'K.
I have the means, method, and opportunity in the first place... ...the only qualification required for same, anymore, eh? The second is to be on site and paying freight! Such is so. Forgetting that?
Why, I'm uniquely qualified... as anyone is, really, who can put two sincere words together on a page with regard to something they care about? ...on Even our revered TORRs. Oh, especially our TORRs. It's why I swing at their pinatas...
...But apart from the TORRs? I've lived on *both* sides of the ideological fence and presently find all sides of the western ideological fence wanting... (there are more than two, one discovers, not so astonishingly), as might believe our more oblivious TORRs, most of all, ironically.
What's wrong? Oh, I don't know... ...their gleefully uneven road-trip on the highway to hell in a shopping cart with shrieking wheels? This precipitates in the form of "society pathology" and "cultural constipation" brought on by the indolent worship of a sectarian "science" complacently dehumanizing us... ...honestly bringing the whole planet to the tenuous edge of survivability while facilitating the ignorance of our birthright to the stars of inner and outer space? ...Insisting on the unreasonable hubris that a *~man~kind* is uniquely and singularly alive (alone!), essentially, in the unknown multi-verse, a randomly staggering accident of evolution, or the jewel in a crown of a Godhood's creation??
...That's just to start.
See... a retired military flyer with experience in combat, staffing, and for a time, commanding Officer Candidate Schools? I once believed the mainstream, that there even was a "competent and even-handed" arbiter *mainstream* extant... ...saw my function as an aspiring champion of what was good and true on the planet. I left the service in late in 1992 with an intent to continue to serve that aggregate good... anything done creatively, with honor (or what's the point?)
... I was going to be a public school teacher.
I went back to school to secure a credential for same and graduated summa (I've confirmed that) cum laude...
Let's digress a little more... Have you ever wondered why the riot or insurrection or revolution usually starts at the university?
Blame it, as the scurrilous will, on some dodgy leftist teacher's tree hugging sensibility. The real reason is that... ...it is at this university where you can learn about the mechanisms employed to cloud men's minds (and an input on who's employing them), the contents of primary references (who wrote them and why), and the ability to think outside of the *approved* box ...as continuing to think inside the *approved* box is not an appropriate activity for individuals who would aspire to efficacious sentience or the ability to breathe freely! ...Read: aspire to empathic sensibilities. Read: Evolve! Grow!
Which is to say... to the degree that it remains efficacious, ethical, and does no harm? No limitations, social, psychological, or otherwise. No. Limits...
It was in this college (the college of my own insurrection) I began to perceive, with jaw-dropping irony, the craggy cliff that the current faux-conservative sensibilities seemed gleefully prepared to hurtle us off of like we were all in an out-of-control SUV! TЯUMP is a contending pilot of our National airplane... hit a lot of trees on his first flight, actually killing a lot of people and then campaigning on another turn at the stick!
A small study of religion, for example, seemed to prove only how horrible we could make a current life in preparation for an indistinct *next* one, one required to be taken entirely on untested faith... and on the word of those truly picking your pockets!
An examination of the exampling fruit produced by our conflicted Western civilization, by my measure, for my focus, and through my filters...?...only demonstrated a need to review, reassess, reconstitute, revamp, and revise... same! Prideful ignorance, easy authoritarianism, unjustified arrogance, and unwarranted hubris corrupt the mainstream and Status quo, provoking them to psychotic extremes. This all has ample illustration right in the reader's wheelhouse and experience, presuming honesty of self.
We'd been bull-shitting ourselves! Everybody knew it, too, admitted or not. Everybody! Those most rewarded... most of all!
...This is conscience, folks... not convenience. I've always done the hard jobs; there's more satisfaction in them... I digress within digression... [Woooot]!
We take a deep breath...
A revaluation of the so-called *mainstream* showed that it was anything but an inclusive view of things, "balanced" and "grounded". No, it was, and always has been I suppose, a mechanism corrupted by elitists to homogenize and pasteurize distracted human beings without regard to their rights and individualities, their sensibilities, their growth... or any sense of justice or fair play on a level playing field... ...in the service of "good employee" production. The mainstream was anything but a reflection of informed citizenry; it was the manipulator of that citizenry... and it gets progressively worse as the years accelerate. I suspect this is not the way it has to be.
The complacent TORR, et sig al, in my view, fronts this *mainstream*. This is the basis, but reiterated, of my irritation with them.
Further encouraged around 1994, in this college environment, and as a result of a chance presentation between classes about UFOs (given by Robert Hastings), I began to get even more of a sense of just how far down the primrose path we had been taken with regard to our society, culture, and civilization.
Exclusive Society had not been a proper teacher/mentor. Exclusive Culture has not been an apposite friend. ...And, in as much as the cliff edge of "society suicide" and "cultural immolation" seemingly approaches with alarming and accelerating propensity? ...Civilization, western or otherwise seemed to have taken a bad turn... ...somewhere... that was abundantly clear.
Crystal.
I began, reader, not to... "believe in the fringe"... ...but to disbelieve what was official... an oblique endorsement of the fringe! Confronted by betrayal, one must be able to look elsewhere! Moreover, I was subsequently driven there by the unethical and unjust status quo... ...then summarily put off the societal bus! That's a stunning irony for me, verily, as painful as it was!
Credited now as a credulous believer (and quasi-dangerous troublemaker?) and stridently discounted for same? The reality is that I've been rendered bereft of "belief in the mainstream," by that self-same mainstream!
I can't believe the prime-time news, the pronouncements of institutions, the exhortations of the church, the explications of my government, the decrees of law enforcement, the verdicts of the courts, the announcements of a plethora of agencies, or the earnest assertions of hoary academia! These entities have, quite literally, placed themselves beyond the limits of my credulity, as with others as they betrayed the presumed trust... and I can no longer credit them with my complete confidence! Trust has been betrayed.
I won't be a sap!
Predictably, perhaps? I have trouble seeing where this is my fault.
Betrayed by the aggregate system... ...for doing exactly what it had taught me that it respected? ...I'm twenty times burned and now *forever* shy!
My fault, reader? Uh-uh... I won't validate gravy when it's not the same for goose and gander. I won't credit it. I won't shine it on. I won't abide it. I cannot.
If cops aren't color-blind? If you can't afford self-improvement? If you have to decide between medicine and heat and food? If the hypocritical and autocratic abide and prevail against the rule of law? If people rot in the streets in front of their washed-out homes and are eaten by abandoned pets, rats and alligators as the responsible for reassigning blame like errant children? Affluenza, for example, is the disease of a sick society.
If separation of power is inexorably consolidated and at the whim of a dry drunk double deserter with delusions of grandeur enabled by a cohort of corrupt faux-conservatives as it was at one time... or an orange scourge burning the country down in a futile attempt at saving his ass... as it could be again?
...When justice is dispensed to the highest bidder? When efficacious drugs cause cognitive pathologies in people who do not even take them? When science becomes the lap-dog of the sociopathic elite... ...When the truth, as William Blake said, cannot be told to be understood without being believed?
Woof! We need to hoe a different row, brothers and sisters!
UFOs are real, forgetting, as Jacques Vallee and Terence McKenna have intimated, that they likely only pretend to be an "other" to keep from freaking us out, unnecessarily, with regard to what they really are on the one hand... and on the other? ...Just how limited a hundred years of science really is! Our hubris portends embarrassment.
...Science has failed us miserably in coming to grips with the reality of this UFO thing... indeed won't even pretend (although it's done that too) to begin an investigation of it. Outrageous!
Indeed our mainstream agencies discredit and invalidate themselves to the extreme by ridiculing UFOs rather than coming to grips with the obvious reality of them! This is a reality reflected all through recorded history, remember, so includes a physical reality in vetted films, photos, and verified radar returns. Be reminded that it is a stark reality to tens of thousands of credible and quality men and women who have interacted with the concept of them night after night in popular media, radio, and film... ...if you've forgotten!
The mainstream does not respect what the public doesn't know, and won't endeavor to tell them when they don't! The mainstream's conflicted mind is made up and won't be bothered with the facts as plain as the craven beak on a klasskurtxian pelicanist!
The mainstream cannot attack the aforementioned data and so destroys the individual persons bravely trying to ferret that data out. The mainstream facilitates cowardly ends with the most unethical and criminal means. The mainstream is satisfied to do its research by proclamation rather than investigation.
The preceding is WELL documented, reader! Read Feschino, Dolan, Hastings, and Friedman for numerous examples...
This is no *mainstream*, doing the greatest good for the greatest number, folks! The mainstream as it stands is, instead, an egregious tool used against you by sociopaths... ...reptiles who are incapable of the remotest respect for you! Does the reader expect to be directed to respect this *mainstream* even as the mainstream has not been respectable and has shown no respect! Now that's crazy!
"Mainstream"! Who are you to judge the efficacy of yourself?
...On-site, paying freight... Sir and Madam! What's gravy for the goose is gravy for the gander! Your participation is key! The judged judge in turn!
Actually? In the microcosm, yours is the ONLY opinion that matters, reader! Try to have one that matters in the macrocosm!
Something else college does for you if you weren't smart enough to pick it up in high-school (...I wasn't...) and are paying attention? It's the demonstration that the bigger you make your *fire* the more the shadows are highlighted... ...and the deeper they become. But, this is a good thing, right? Knowing you know not is still a pretty good chunk of knowing, at all, eh?
Besides, everything you *know*... ...might be wrong... I'd put money on "likely."
The TORR, I suspect, believes in entropy, the death of heat, things running down, that which was "together" must come "apart" and become... ...at some far, far point in a time as immutable as it was irregular... as cold as a speck of dust in a lightless and airless void... resistance is futile... prepare to have your ass laminated...
The TORR, I suspect, believes in intellectual parsimony, the simplest explanation, the one requiring the fewest moving parts and the least amount of entities added... ...as the preferred explanation in all cases, at the start... ...less is more manageable... ...after all...
The TORR, I suspect, reserves special respect for mainstream mores, *approved* movers and *vetted* shakers... ...one of the nuts and bolts adherents of a bowdlerized Descartes and stridently opposed to the "agreed upon" infirm... those who want to explore a fringe beyond the light provided by the huge fire he so respectfully tends... ...God made the light and the light was good and "we shall be grateful."
...But the TORR handily forgets the aggregate accelerations we all perceive. The TORR neatly forgets that Occam includes the word "ordinarily" in his razor. The TORR too conveniently forgets the duplicities, inconsistencies, obfuscations, betrayals, and, in too many cases? ...The abject cowardice, intellectual and otherwise, of the supporters and players of that *mainstream*, eh?
The TORR forgets that God, as we know him, is largely invented (re-invented!) by the too few to do the bidding of those few.
I can't abide it. No apologies... and no offense meant...
Injury on top of insult, it doesn't really matter that *The TORR* forget these things... ...when it is discovered that these things are purposefully forgotten, forgotten by design and craft and rationalization ...forgotten because what's "real" and "true" doesn't square with being alone (even if only *essentially*)... in an infinite vastness of cornucopic and open-ended potentiality... A jewel in creation's crown—THE jewel in creation's crown?
...Pause, sincerely, for Hoots and squirty Guffaws...
You might begin to see how the TOR, a proud product of their extensive training and study in the arts (and they are) of:
- History (the official story composed by sociopaths to facilitate same?)
- Political science (the study of the methods used in justifying that sociopathy?)
- Law (the codifications of trying to have cake and eat it too?)
...has twisted these aforementioned *arts* around into the self-serving, short-sheeting, pedestrian, and banal celebration of cognitive mediocrity that the TORR precipitates... Gleefully, gladly, and gaily. Indolently. Complacently. Insentiently.
...No—on second thought, if a TORR rep and I ever share that dinner? It would be prudent to drain the broccoli exceptionally well.
...But that's more than was desired on why I fight, eh? No apologies.
Hey ...Closing, real quick and dirty? I know that the most third-rate functionary and perfunctory lackey I criticize in this piece could stomp an official mud-hole in my ass... indeed has! Why bump my gums and imperil myself further regarding this dreaded "portents of social doom" I've iterated... risk an escalation of society's pique already meted out to me?
...Because it is what I've done in the service of this nation and an aggregate humanity, I suspect. Plus? I know that when I am bold, mighty forces come to my aid. That works for you too, reader.
Read on.
ÆL
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*On the subject of "personal fables," these are understandably created to keep an even strain day to day. They're used as barricades to keep the adherent as far into the "warm and fuzzies" as can be allowed and justified or afforded. Some point to everything... some reason to go on... individual faith as peak experience in imagined self-actualization... fine until it's used as justification to impose arbitrary will on another... but it's a fable... pointless beyond the snuffing of life's every candle. How is that good news? Well, forgetting that the answer is stranger than can be imagined, a truth remains that your still self-aware consciousness exists to experience the corporeal (...howsoever that plays out for good or ill...) at the center of the universe and all creation as far as you (that's you, reader!) are concerned. Dare to wonder that that is the point and that that is the good news. It may be an aggregate humanity suffers needlessly and there be real utility in the acknowledgment of that. One has the choice, nay the responsibility, to bear witness, true witness, and responsibility to same. Remains a kingdom at hand, eh? It's within grasp if one just closes fingers on it!
I hear existence is chaos and we've naught but one another. We might as well be kind.
