Insentient Voting Blocks: Their Care And Feeding

A friend writes me from the field a harrowing tale. If ever the reasonable Democrat (or those not wholly insensate) needed to get out the vote, now is a prime consideration. See, if it's only idiots who are voting then those not voting are the greater idiot... I say true.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I went back to Wisconsin over the holiday to see my brother and sister. My older brother had arranged tickets for a hockey game. Milwaukee plays in the AHL, which is one step down from the pros.

All the players are either on their way up, or have been told they’re too small or too slow, or simply not good enough—so they play their asses off. I remember Wisconsin sports crowds as a bunch of drunks, certainly, but a bunch of sloppy, friendly drunks. They'd buy beer for fans of other teams—that sort of thing...

So, the siren sounds, the teams line up, and the loudspeaker announcement is made... but it’s made more or less as an order. “Everyone stand. Remove your hats. Put your hand over your heart. Sing the national anthem.” 

I look around and people are standing at what looks like attention—like they’re soldiers. When we get to the line about “rockets red glare” they actually cut the white lights and show just red spotlights. I looked at my brother and he’s got the same expression on his face.

The game then begins. The crowd is unusually quiet for what I remember of hockey fans. It’s a little off—something not quite right. I look around the crowd and there are about 10k people, maybe two or three who are black—one on the ice, the others in the stands.

After ten minutes there’s a break in the action and they announce that they are honoring a veteran. The Jumbotron shows a white former marine waving at the crowd, and a deafening cheer goes up. Ten minutes later, the same thing happens. In another ten, it happens again. The first period ends, and they introduce a whole series of white, former servicemen and women.

The whole thing was just creeping me out. My brother leans over and says, “I guess we’re here on white supremacy night.” Yeah. It dawns on me that we’re sitting in a crowd in the third most segregated city of the US, and it’s not really a hockey game. Rather, it’s so obviously a knee-jerk reaction to the NFL and black athletes taking a knee for equality.

With very little exaggeration, it’s got the feeling of an alt-right rally, rather than a game. It was absolutely disconcerting and uncomfortable—a cold, slap in the face—with all the charm and trappings of a German newsreel prior to WWII.

We left halfway through the second period. I realized it’s as bad in my once proudly progressive State (now redder than red) as it is here in SC...and maybe worse. So much for the combined myth of the White Savior and Master Race celebrations. If it is going to get better, it’s going to take a long, long time. It’s a lot worse out there than I thought.

I'm betting it's a lot worse than most are thinking. 2018 Looms! Register... then VOTE. 

Don't be an idiot. Not voting "because it doesn't matter" became an empty and irrelevant concept with the installation of Donald J. Trump. I say true.

...The list is pretty endless...

Me, Too...

Me, Too...

by Alfred Lehmberg

With regard to "me, too," ...me, too. I say true.

Oh, I won't begin to put myself in the same league with regard to the abuse your garden variety woman is privy to, and enduringly. That dread just brushed me, but it scarred me in a substantive way lasting my whole life. I reflect on a maltreated womanhood enduring much worse as a matter of course.

Knowing what I now know about a wholly toxic distortion regarding "the purported sins of Eve," and having an appreciation for a maligned womanhood born, not of supposition, but in fact, I'm able to come to the realization that that womanhood, as she is referred to, cannot be casually dismissed for having "at least half the money and all the pussy," as it has been caricatured. That's never been true.

No, they never had anywhere near the money and their "pussies" have never been their own. Shoes summarily switched, "manhood" would find their oppressive de rigueur intolerable. The current pile-on, then, on the practitioners of "the old androcratic ways," I conclude, is justified. I say true.

In 1970, or thereabouts, and just north of 21 years old, I was a Warrant Officer Candidate going through the second phase of flight training at Fort Rucker, Alabama, where the entire planet goes to learn to fly helicopters. The subject was instrument flight or flight of a helicopter without reference to outside visual cues. Scary!

This activity was aided by a turn rate indicator, an impact airspeed shown in knots, a gyroscopic horizon bar, an altimeter, and a radio compass. Add a bobbing magnetic compass and this was the full package. You learned to trust them all unfailingly, no matter what your lying ass was telling you, or you got washed out. A lot of guys washed out. 

This was a very tense time for me. Everything was hanging in the proverbial balance. Outside of this new military aviation thing, I had nothing.

Basic Instruments, preparatory to the more withering advanced variety, was flying under the hood, as it was called, responding to directions from a check pilot or instructor. "Turn right to heading three-one-five, standard rate, descend to one thousand five hundred, now climb to 3000, right turn, half-standard rate, to heading 185..." The reader gets the idea... Then, we'd do it without the horizon bar. Plus or minus 10 knots of commanded airspeed and 50 feet in assigned altitude. 

These were the standard. Many couldn't forget the seat of their pants for swirling semi-circular canals in confused ears provoking freeze-ups, through full panic, to projectile vomiting. These washed out.

Conversely, I took to it! I loved it! Non-cocky because that bit you on the ass, every time, I reveled privately in my ability to nail it, every time! I was pretty good. Later on, as an instrument flight examiner, I would be at the absolute top of the craft. Near every day was an "A" flight right up to check ride! My confidence was high!

Check flight day arrived at Shell Army Airfield, Enterprise Alabama, and I drew my check pilot. It was like he was drawn from central casting. A West Point Captain replete with a class ring, wide at the shoulders and narrow at the hips, chin as chiseled as his cold blue glare. Wearing a combat patch and a shiny silver Aviation Badge, he was everything I wanted to be when I grew up, you know?

Well, I aced the writ, sailed through the oral exam, and knocked the check-ride out of the proverbial park, I thought. The Captain was somewhat congratulatory and suggested we have a smoke after refueling for the debrief. He hovered the TH-13 BI trainer off the refueling pad and into a clearing way off the beaten track behind a copse of trees in a secluded clearing out of sight of the tower. I remember thinking he must be really serious about fire safety.

We shut the aircraft down and started the debrief, talking about this and that. I was correctly answering his questions and began to get a little unsettled when every question he asked seemed to be getting him angrier and angrier. After about 20 minutes he said, "Well?!" I shrugged my shoulders and said, "Well, what, Sir," looking at him, wholly puzzled.

Clearly pissed off, he threw down his smoke and coldly said, "You're done." An icy front had moved in. All conviviality was gone. We fired up and hovered back to the pad in silence. Shutting the aircraft down, he informed me that I was to complete the post-flight and logbook entry alone. He'd go inside and complete the paperwork. I wondered what had gone wrong. A real Twilight Zone feeling crept over me.

I finished up and hustled inside, wondering if I'd passed or failed. Informing me at the table that I'd "better get my shit together before Advanced Instruments," and citing various flight discrepancy issues I thought were wholly bogus (officer candidates do not argue with a military check pilot) he handed me the lowest possible grade I could get and still pass. Relieved but hugely crestfallen I wondered what the hell had happened. I would always wonder... forever on.

Cut to around 40 years later. I'd been retired from active service for a couple of years and going to school to get a teaching credential. I was going teach in Alabama Public Schools. I'd bought a new home in Enterprise Alabama with its western border on that very same Shell Army Airfield of our story's lore.

In the early-early morning, I'd get up to "sky watch." The adjacent Shell Army Airfield trained 24 hours a day. The military aircraft, about a half mile distant, would be launching or recovering to the helidrome, three times a day, with the usual dull roar of jet engines and air chopping main rotor blades. I would sit on my deck listening and remembering.

Abruptly one morning, as I'd not thought of it for a decade (every checkride!), it occurred to me that the copse of trees and aforementioned clearing, alluded to above, was a very short distance... within walking distance from where I was sitting at that moment. I was remembering my BI Flight Check, again puzzled as ever... wondering again what the hell had happened... ...and then it struck me!

The West Point Captain may have had a whole other interpretation of the concept for an "oral examination," regarding my debrief in the unnecessarily secluded clearing. The reader can follow the drift, eh? He'd wanted me to service him in that regard... is the supposition. In retrospect, nothing else makes sense!

I hadn't had a clue. Was he disappointed I wasn't copping to the requirement that it be my idea? He rewarded me with my barely passing grade for my unwillingness to go along? I'd had no idea what was going on. I thought the screw-up was, somehow, entirely my own.

How did that scar me? Well, I spent the next 23 years getting twisted up and ulcer-anxious when check-ride times came around every year. I can't recall one that didn't cause serious anxiety, and sometimes that anxiety provoked issues with self-respect and self-worth... like a Master Aviator with a thousand hours of combat time in a war zone, full boat Standardization Instructor Pilot (SIP) and Instrument Flight Examiner (IFE) ratings... and even earning a Bronze Star... should be the cause of questioned self-worth. 

No... I was "raped," in a manner of speaking... by a likely serial rapist, eh? I didn't even know I'd been raped for decades and even wholly un-penetrated and oblivious, I was scarred for life. My mind had an unjust hole put in it on the subject of flight checks.

The point is, is that this is not just "shaken off" like it's just "one of those things," and your aggregate female deals with worse on a daily basis... most making it work better than myself... I have to say. No... women have only ever taken a bad deal, rife with ignorance and glad misogyny, and made things better than menfolk deserve, in the aggregate, in spite of their grievous treatment.

Given my own and very minimal, almost tangential, experience with an abuser of the ilk threatening them as a matter of course, I'm provoked to wonder about the avoidable damage to their feelings of worth and self-respect, betrayed. What "might have been" for them... 

See, to a degree... I see how the injustice works. I'm compelled, subsequently, not to reflect, so much, on how different the whole rest of my life would have been... but how constructively different the lives of countless women, in times past or as yet unborn, might have been.

Currently, celebrating abusers of women the likes of Donald Trump and Roy Moore at the top of leadership and governance is a horrifying retrograde from the gylanic ideal we'd rather be striving for, eh? Indeed, one wonders how true the "Handmaid's Tale" is yet to be.

Read on.

Mushrooms In The Dark

We are power we don't use. I've said it many times. Our reach is exponential and our grasp the gold we find.

...And it won't matter, not at all, those distractions we endure... ...we're mushrooms, to the dark, consigned, and fed a thin manure. Yet, we have minds with eyes that see complete with ears to hear. Our voices swell in righteous song! We can vanquish *any* fear!

Our feelings have sincerity, we're alive, in touch, aware... and we would have some answers to the questions we must, bravely, dare!

Yes! We, by right, will think *those* thoughts and question our *beliefs*! Shared misery's diminished. Shared joy, of needs, increased!

Why, if folks are just a little brave? Then no one's scared or suffers. The "slings and arrows" now endured? ...They fold as culture stutters!

No, it's not to *God* we owe success. "Success" was made despite! *Religion* has done all it can... to filter out our light.

See, don't thank "Gods" who are contrived to do the will of men, who use that cloak of godhood to promote their pestilence? Thank instead your force of will that makes a life more real! It's a quantum leap! Enlightened step! You live a better deal!

We're, perforce, a plucky bunch! We'd -dare- to wrestle truth. ...Though "heaven" was the real "hell," and "hell" a clever ruse!

Though black was something paler, and white a charcoal gray! If dawn were dusk and dusk were dawn, with "night" mistook for "day"! Though beauty was an ugliness making cowards of the bold, and plainness was a loveliness more precious than the purest gold!

If everything we knew was wrong? If profits proved a loss? Would we, still, practice foolishly and value what's, indeed, pure dross?

Most would hate the aliens who'd inhabit outer space. They'd hate for specious reasons always used in such a case. The aliens are... well, alien! We hate what we don't know! We project our fears on that... which threatens "status quo."

Though "no man is an island," I've ever heard it said, and change is a necessity or we're moldy, month-old, bread; we hate ourselves and so hate *them*, assign to *them* our faults; moreover, we're duplicitous, so less than the, complete, adult!

Most think the aliens evil... of a lesser stripe than we. On *them* we hang a minus sign, for *us* pretense we're "free." They're the "spawn of Satan," but do halos light our brow?! What have we wrought down here on Earth? What grace do we show... now?

First: we are, then, that which we hate! It's us apes "crooks" and "thieves"! It's us that's starving children by the millions every week! It's us declaring wars we wage for corporate human greed. It's us that's causing misery, and it's us ignoring, ardent, need!

We vilify the aliens! We paint them worse than us! We *divine* their *motivation* as betrayal of our trust. We do this knowing nothing but the crap on which we're fed, the *news* from "FOX" (insulting us)... denial dipped in well-earned dread...

Agents making war they've caused... support corrupted states, and religious fervor's gas on fire, regenerating hate! The Earth cries out her warning; new diseases cause their blight! And we do less than nothing... ...as we cower in our, hapless, fright!

We're lucky we're *approached* at all! We're lucky if they try! We are damned repellant, folks! We're lucky we don't fry!

We're lucky they don't aim at us some stellar cosmic weapon and wipe us from the cosmos like some bug that they could step on! We're lucky they don't act like us, and roar in guns all blazing! We're lucky they don't slap us down like a freshman at a hazing. We're lucky for a lot of things, as we don't act our part. It's us requires change, not "them" ... (of mind, or hand... but heart)!

• lehmberg2002@gmail.com
• http://www.alienview.net/

Is the Alien a rule-breaking villain, a black agent in the nameless dark? Is it an intellectual rapist, a serial abuser on a massive scale, or a singularly bizarre kidnapper criminally exacting an unknown ransom?

Is the Alien a being with no respect for humanity, only raw disgust for humanity's sensibilities? Has it naught but disconnected indifference for humanity's creative attributes or individual quality of life?

Does the Alien use humanity as its lowly subordinate and reviled minimum wager; does it squander our savings, inflict disease and pestilence upon us; does it put us out, homeless, onto the streets?

Does it shortchange and abuse our women, manufacture non-effective and dangerous drugs, equipment, and consumables; does it pollute the groundwater and needlessly despoil the environment with toxic waste and planned obsolescence?

Does the Alien spin our history (...cook the very books of it!) or corrupt accurate institutional memory for unjust advantage (to the "textbook producing" class)? Does it pasteurize, homogenize, and sterilize the accounting of history into boring, unrealistic, and untrue accounts of unjustified heroification... ...to intimidate, manipulate, and depreciate the inventive minds of trusting school children?
Does it punish the critical thinker and reward the malleable "employee"?

 Read on...

Laika

November 4th, 1957

Laika...

by Alfred Lehmberg

A hapless female puppy dog... 

ablates in icy space... 

Unloved, beneath respected, 

yet a credit to the race. 

She starved to death; 

her air ran out; 

she burned up... 

but she suffered. 

She was the one, 

the first in space—

concern not made, or offered.

.

She's "just a dog," beneath concern 

of shiny *honored* man. 

She was so completely terrified, 

and she couldn't understand. 

Her ass was shaved

—electrodes placed—

this side of vivisection.

Then blasted into inky space, 

bereft of all affection.

.

Laika was the small dog's name 

I commemorate with verse. 

She's the one so chosen, 

and in space? She was the first. 

Of all the flesh that ever was 

from right back to the Cambrian, 

she's the first to breath in space—

our very special champion.

.

Forty years and then they choose 

to honor with a plaque... 

the sacrifice she made unasked; 

though it caused her death, in fact. 

Better late than never, 

but then so much better still... 

to—long ago—

have placed her stone 

on the highest sun-washed hill.

.

For half a year she spun the sky, 

to Earth at last, ablaze. 

I wonder if some saw her 

as she burned up in the flames. 

Perhaps a child, 

chance looking up, 

to see her shooting star, 

made a wish for her own puppy... 

and then ate a candy bar.

.

Laika

Flatwoods... It's Important

Flatwoods... It's Important

by Alfred Lehmberg

Why is the Flatwoods case important? The Flatwoods case is important because… and let’s take the scenic route OK? ...Flatwoods is important because UFOs continue to intrude or reveal themselves as important, don’t they? In sighting after sighting after unprovoked sighting…

See, apart from the gleeful psychopathic hoaxing, the ignorant journalistic sneering, the angrily dismissive proclamations of reductionist science... ...and the curiously inept presentations of UFOs by corporate media? UFOs continue to reveal themselves–outside official channels–to thousands of individuals simultaneously, periodically, and have done so for thousands of years. Sneer at peril.

Indeed–now think about it–but it seems disclosure is to be facilitated more as a “bottom-up” revelation, and not a top-down activity … “take me to your leader” is decidedly out of fashion and already shown to be as unsuccessful as it is duplicitous.

Too, consider, perhaps it’s this alien approach to rank and file humans and not the corrupt self-empowered leadership which explains the piqued reluctance of those aforementioned hoaxers, journalists, reductionists, and corporate captains … I digress …

These undoubtedly and indisputably seditious mass sightings we just talked about include numerous well-documented references sailing back through recorded history... passed the recent affairs of Phoenix, South Indiana, and Texas, back all the way to the middle ages, biblical times, and beyond, but specifically in 1952 from June to September of that year, during the biggest UFO flap in History: The Summer Of Saucers.

The Summer Of Saucers gives every indication that UFOs, without regard to where they come from or even how they manifest themselves—and stated as simply as it CAN be stated: UFOs are the reality and the truth. At its most simple, UFOs just are.

Now, it’s my considered intuition and long experience regarding even an unsettling truth … is that an aggregate humanity is BEST served by facing that truth and ILL served by looking for excuses to turn away from it. You can’t put the dentist off forever, eh?

To that end, the Flatwoods case and the implication of Feschino’s incisive research into it are of paramount importance because that specific Feschino research, TO WHICH WE REFER, is so detailed, mapped out, tacked down, cited, and exhaustive … it stands revealed as the most documented UFO case ever, without exception, in history. Even Stan Friedman admits it’s the best documented case he’s seen …

Moreover, Feschino’s Flatwoods research supports the avoided, corporate abhorred, and alleged uncomfortable truth about things ufological, provides support for that ufological truth’s ongoing assessment, and, I suspect, provides humanity with its ticket to a future truth about UFOs and a more experiential existential... a more complete corporeal.

This is forgetting that it provides all manner of gravitas to other valid studies, honest researches, and serious investigations.

This is the singular relevance of the so-called Flatwoods Case. See, besides facilitating our ticket to the future, it’s the best placed and most finely crafted nail in the coffin of our ignorance regarding all things, this writer suspects! A lance, even, for the boil of that ignorance.

This post only outlines the importance of the Flatwoods case, of course… a case otherwise highlighted by the needlessly abused sensibilities and even physical health of innocent Americans, it is highlighted by lost and forgotten soldiers and airmen following orders to shoot UFOs down with state of the art jets in a secret and so undeclared war, and it is highlighted by billions of 2016 dollars in lost aircraft and military equipment.

Very messy and paradigm-changing, I make no apologies, and the ETH so far up your nose you feel knees on your top lip—am I right? ...But truth, though these heavens fall, I suspect, or we are all just deluded fools.

That’s the truth of the Flatwoods case… it is too well documented to be disbelieved or discarded out of hand, so belief regarding all UFOs is begged!