On Dumbledore...

As there is a clear and present danger to same looming upon Trump, its cruel harbinger (you know, what with gay people being concentrated in camps for sexual reorientation [read torture] in Nations otherwise thought remotely civilized), it may be a time to offer this again:

On Dumbledore
by Alfred Lehmberg

Love. Our dearest tragedy. It is cherished or abused. One makes it; it is all we have! Love is hard to disabuse. But, we betray biology, it seems it's "sequenced" out... ...at long, long last, we've come to find... it's Love we do without!
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Love... it's carved in stone with bleeding knives; Love's dancing on the wind. Love makes a burden easier, or it adds to it, my friend. Though portrayed in tastes and flavors that may dance upon the tongue, Love fills a mouth with ashes where the heart is torn and flung.
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Love gleams in different colors that we break up into grades. Love's crimson, white, or golden; Love endures, or dulls and fades.
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They call the crimson "carnal." It's the marrow in your bones; if white, it's known as "philos"—it's a cleaner octane, Holmes; If golden, it's "agape"—the highest form of Love.  It's selfless and it's perfect—and the rarest (push to shove).
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It takes all three to make us whole—to make us more complete... ...but we would judge Love's value, and would qualify Love's reach! Oh, this is where we HUGELY err! We dictate and pronounce. We ridicule, demean, and shame. We disqualify—denounce!
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We'd prohibit and we'd cancel, we would legislate our drives! We'd complicate the issues. We'd produce our sad despised!
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We *append* to sex and preference "connotation" gone awry—and contrive a lesser value like we *knew* the reason why! Well, we don't know, though we'd presume the "wisdoms of convention," and cause a person's torment based on cant or crass invention.
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Now I don't write with scented inks. I'm just not wired that way. I'm making no apology, but showing distance, Dave! See, I had listed those I've met in decade's factor-five... perceive they're not the problem; they're a blessing, that's no jive.
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They're not all gay—our movie stars, our poets and our clowns, our musicians and our artists, and our dancers of renown. They're not ALL gay—philanthropists, philosophers, or mimes—our nurses tending selflessly, some sports folk of our times. They're not all gay—our stylists... who decorate the day, or work out all the detail in a layout they have made.
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But where's the twin admission that would keep us most contented? That here they are the lion's share, and so OVER represented!  ...And yes they're there in numbers that provide the art we share, compelling our salvation and the triumphs we could dare!
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I think of all the people with an impact on my life, and find so many "gay blades" who have qualified my pride. These are teachers, artists, leaders, and some friends I, too late, made. They are pilots, soldiers, warriors—it's to them my pride is paid!
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Near the end of my existence, when the dues are finally in, I owe a little gratitude—a little loyalty, my friend. I wished I'd spoke up sooner, so that you'd have had more VOICE. I regret that I belittled you when I'd thought you had some "choice."
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If a few of these professionals are, in fact (heh!), proudly gay, then a better class of person swells the ranks of them, I'd say! It's there—seems more intelligence. It's there—seems greater style—seems more imagination, more artistry sans guile...
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It's there, there seems more gracefulness, and (Yes!) that rarest kind of Love. It's there, there are more butterflies, more humming birds—more doves? It's THERE a valued world turns, the one that should be made... as hearts are opened up to find their bills have been put paid!
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If true, no condemnation—no indictment is returned. If true there is no reason to assign some blame or spurn. If true (?), yes, CELEBRATION there's your tendency to share! You have eclectic talents I appreciate, mon frère.
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I see your contribution. I acknowledge right to *be*. I make no value judgment; just prefer you free as me.
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lehmberg2002@gmail.com
http://www.alienview.net/

It's not the gay to be forgiven with nothing to forgive. Ironically, it's those persecuting proud looks in mal-informed judgment requiring all of that...     

My credulity still stunned, I've endured ominous silence.  Friends lost over this were never really friends.

Still, friendless I'd rather embrace choice, tolerance (diversity as an intellectual force multiplier), and love, in all its shades and grades—forgetting for a moment that its PROHIBITION—biblical or otherwise—and foundationless persecution... are so much specious nonsense.  Gay fellow consciousness mote, I don't just tolerate your existence, I celebrate it. Full stop!

No. Your contribution seems to far, far outweigh your "errant" so-called "detriment," and has always done so. Sincerely, live, do, and be.

Bigotry—and gladly—force-multiplies ignorance; ignorance fosters its own lack of consequence; a silence on same must provoke an irrelevance; consequently, I'm compelled to a significant defense of gay sensibilities, to act responsibly.

Get used to it.  There will be no apologies from me. Contrary thinking can just step off with no second thoughts.

Restore John Ford.

It Matters Not?

Extraordinary Denial

It Matters Not?

by Alfred Lehmberg

With regard to UFOs, and at the risk of being "entirely incomprehensible" to the much too easily dismissive... or the most conveniently "baffled"... or ...the "inordinately and so tediously prosaic," or the too reflexively and so very predictably nonplussed, and so ready, "reductionist"...  I protest again that we are—all of us—betrayed by a "hijacked mainstream" and a "base criminal culture" to a tragic and destructive if facile ignorance in their regard.  ...Never plainer than now, eh?

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T'was that, ever, indeed not so. Verily! As idiots propound, superstition confounds, and avarice abounds!  Must the psychopath so often hold sway.  Rhetorical... I digress.

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There is a seeming obviousness remaining inexplicably, beside the contrived—if "official"—point.  Are we really that intellectually unbrave? This individual's head is down in shame for aggregate humanity... a humanity with keys to the kingdom in hand and blithely choosing uninformed squalors, instead!!!
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Could our so curiously prosecuted and convenient cultural cowardice provide for that controversion and obfuscation of a reality necessary where, maybe, one doesn't need to look for answers to the preceding but face the answers which have always been there? Hard Work and ignored as non-existent!

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Some, like the former of the aforementioned types of persons, seem oblivious to this philosophical betrayal, and some, like many of the latter, seem decidedly ok with it, but virtually all of these persons function—whether they know it or not—to give a duplicitous faux-mainstream power, authority, and an unprincipled and punitive pecuniary punch, a punch wholly undeserved, decidedly unjustified, and I'm betting largely unlawful when the period's got to.  
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See, the "mainstream" handily abdicates its responsibility to be centrist—to become instead a foot on the neck of the individual remotely critical of the cruel excesses of it... to the tune of stiff Nazi salutes. How is this not so? Regard a President-elect in December of 2016; gaze upon his works and despair.

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As a failed public school teacher, I, among others of my ilk, endure remaining years beset by lost wages as a result of—pretty directly—refusing to reflexively validate a corrupt and duplicitous and wholly religulous "mainstream" in operation around me, already. A parochially unethical and patently unlawful one, this peripheral experiencer opines. One criminal on multiple levels of sensibility would be my suspicion. 
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Red State Alabama, prayer meetings in public schools, religious cronyism, and piqued retaliations for academic questions regarding the matter. That sort of thing. Wrong's wrong.  Wrapped in a flag and brandishing a Cross like a sword, wrong is wrong.

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A freaking "war hero," even if a third-rate one, and retired military officer graduating Summa with a teaching credential from a respected University—not Yale or Harvard—I was found to be rather inexplicably unacceptable for any position in Alabama's education "system."  I digress, again, but still, this ufological cannon-fodder seems willing, if reluctant, to step forward into the breach of the establishment buzz-saw to pursue... this thing about UFOs, still.  Why is that?

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The row to hoe is ultimately unrewarding in the aggregate. At least not rewarding in the sense appreciated by crass materialists as yet unaware that money actually can't buy happiness... even as it is not even likely to encourage same, am I right?  Search your feelings, young Padawan. The best things in life are supposed to be free! Satisfactions remain to be taken. I say true.

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With regard to the pursuit of this individual's experience, it matters not the collected array of impressive witnesses and (intelligently) volunteered official documentation of that experience... even physical evidence, reader!  It matters not regarding police reports of anomalous sightings recorded in specific areas... many times by professional persons with spotless reputations. It matters not the reported abductions, voluminous reports with regard to those abductions, or samples of the kinds of evidence it has been seriously alleged can be produced to support these, albeit, startling claims.  It. Matters. Not. 
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Curious. A whale in a bathtub, even a highly strange and ephemeral one, might raise the perspicacious eyebrow.
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The hurdle shoved before a serious study is high, of needs. Remains that that hurdle is arbitrarily adjusted, ever up, vis a vis a perhaps threatened peerage. It matters not... Remains that all this evidentiary flotsam does seem to be extraordinary apart from a reflexive refusal or denial of it...  
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Wait. Did evidence ever need to be "extraordinary," at the start? Perhaps this is only an artful dodge denying the existentiality which is there... rendering itself irrelevant for that real existentiality denied! 

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We must embrace this thing still, for all our reluctance, fear, dread, or appalling trepidation. It is our responsibility, our fate, even our destiny to embrace the future with openness and acceptance where we CAN embrace it... and I gladly admit I suspect any of the preceding only as a result of an enduring decades-long intuition, I remind the reader. That matters not! I believe it is an imperative of our individual consciousness: admit this "other" and search it out. Search it out! Find it, to find... ourselves! Wow, eh?

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Who's a good candidate for learned inquiry of a type conjectured? Well, consider for a moment that quality "big city" medical groups could show interest in this contested "other," peripherally evidenced by these very peculiar abduction affairs, for example. This is an "interest" suggested by Pulitzer-winning Harvard Psychiatric Chairs, among others, like the late John Mack.  
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It seems these aforementioned medical groups (Scientists all), psychologically and with regard to physicality, should be intrigued by the evidence that this conjectured UFO and its accessory "abduction affair," given that these are a seeming typical, if anomalous, occurrence precipitated regionally in anomalous medical existentiality even if in a secret college.   The medical groups alluded to should be justifiably piqued? Serious people should begin to take serious subjects seriously? Yet they do not. They "can't." They won't!
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Why is that?

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This "interest" alluded to is generated by weird physical manifestations—also documented to a degree—which, in expert opinion, cannot reasonably be self-inflicted, hoaxed, or contrived, moreover. A curious set of affairs at the very least, reader: implants, wounds, blemishes, rashes, and other, witheringly weird, whatnot...
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Stop.  Full stop.

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Forget the truth or falsehood of these claims a moment!  The claimant might be willing to stand on some peer validated precipice or plank with their claims, regardless, whatever the reader's assessment! The claimant might be willing to provide assurances (given assurances), that those claims could be backed... remembering also that evidence of veracity is demanded of this ufological cannon-fodder in a manner not remotely asked of church, institution, agency, organization, or state, only that which contravenes or invalidates, not so puzzlingly, even suspiciously, the aforementioned claimant: the betrayed and abused individual! Victim, actually.
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This is a glaring point for the rank and file of "interested individuals," decent persons on both sides of the bell curve but outside the loop of the aforementioned, essentially closed institutions, I think it fair to add... maybe not. Much of the time, less is not more.

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"No good deed will go unpunished," apparently, by way of illustration, and "...the evil that men do lives on and on. The good that they do interred with their bones..." 
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These particular ufological bones are too reflexively interred (with seeming prejudice) given the, to date, acceptable history of many of the bones in question. ...Always another shot; however, at trying to derail the "cannon" UFO case. I find myself evaluating the "judging" more than the judged. How about the reader?  We're not alone.

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An extraordinary claim? "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"? Flying Monkey Scat. How so?

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That speciously unbrave and irreverently fatuous argument above regarding "extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence" has been righteously (and I think reasonably) exploded long ago by one Jean Van Gemert as a "think cloak," assumed to provide a retreat for the garden variety skeptibunky, only. It is a clever feint into the obvious fallacy for an always "receding evidentiary horizon."

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See, this argument assumes that the "evidence" can always be made subordinate to an evaluation of the claim's *extraordinariness,* an extraordinariness which remains defined only by the skeptibunky. See? This is an inflated rubric having no defined upper limit! The evidence, it can be arbitrarily decided moreover, is cast as never being extraordinary enough!

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That's a sword cutting only one way, reader. It has no place in science forgetting that it's not the skeptibunkies, good reader, who are going to solve this little ufological conundrum for the genuinely interested, anyway! 
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No, it is the intrepid members of a conscientiously courageous team, individually (and bravely) stepping up to the hard-ball plate, and expecting a clean pitch from a respected colleague who in turn puts Louisville wood directly on that ufological ball!

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In the way is the posit that "we really don't want to know the truth." It's messy, people lose their cat-bird seats, and have to pay for it. That's hard cheese for the cat-birds. I know.  I'm currently having the hard cheese.

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If an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence, reader, then a mundane claim requires evidence which is correspondingly mundane! That's not ridiculous, eh? A mundane claim requires the same quality of evidence establishing its truth or falsehood, no more. No less! I submit this holds true for the extraordinary claim, as well! Non-wavy Gravy for Gander and Goose! Momentous decisions hinge on the smallest evidentiary bit where that bit can be conclusively leading to the conclusion sought!

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Another little mainstream chestnut used to prosecute its continuing betrayal of the individuals trusting to it by appealing to their conveniently misunderstood Occam. See, it remains acceptable to complicate the hypothesis... of NEEDS!

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There are more of these "chestnuts." They matter.

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Restore John Ford! Read on.

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ÆL