One way of approaching a summary

I guess one way of approaching a summary of a period of time is to create a list of the issues covered, in my 3 years before the mast. And yet, that falls short. In order to have any meaning beyond a mere compilation, patterns must be discerned. Trends and trains of thought, perhaps not even contained in the essays themselves. At any rate I collected essays, stories, data in three categories: politics, religion and conspiracy. What did I find? What have I found? Each of those domains demands its own summary. Till now, I have not put many of the notions I have covered in my own words. The experts and pundits say it much more better than I. And yet that little grammatical exercise is necessary. Nothing is ever truly known … well, no… I was going to indulge that canard of mine once again. Instead let me say that articulation finalizes ones knowledge of a given subject.

There are several issues and events in this collection that standout, as revelations of things I had never known or imagined. Of course the issue that was most stunning was the existence of alternative media itself. It’s very existence testifies to the fact that MSM is designed to deceive us by creating an artificial (false) reality. The PTB then uses this artificial reality to control and manipulate the citizenry. The MSM is an instrument of the government. An instrument of mind control. This is the core realization that sent me on a journey through alternate media and a search for truth.

Johnny Cloud, Navajo Ace

I’d forgotten about this character. Back in the ’60s that was about as close as you could get to a black comic book hero. This comic had everything I liked: WW II fighter planes and an enigmatic non-white hero.

Flying “Johnny” Cloud was a member of the Navajo tribe but little is known about his early life. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force at the start of World War II and overcame racial prejudices with his superior skill as a pilot, quickly becoming known as “the Navajo Ace.”

When the commander of his unit died in battle against a squadron of Nazi bombers, Cloud became his successor and the unit was dubbed “The Happy Braves.”

Cloud led the Happy Braves for several years, but during one failed mission his plane was shot down. He was rescued by the Haunted Tank, which picked up several other stray soldiers on the same run, and the strays banded together to form the misfit military unit the Losers.

http://www.comicmix.com/news/2008/06/09/happy-birthday-johnny-cloud/

That part about his life with the “Haunted Tank” I did not know.

Hard to find pix. The thing that gave the artwork its signature image was the plane that ( Lt or Capt) Cloud flew. The P-51s in the Navajo Ace  comic were always one of the later models that hardly saw any action, in real life, except in the final months of the war, if I remember correctly. Instead of the much more typical P-51Ds, all the Mustangs in the Navajo Ace were P-51Hs or Js or something. Hopefully I’ll be able to find pix of Cloud’s plane.

I told you. I was really into this stuff. Messerschmidts and Spitfires had dogfights throughout the pages of my school notebooks.

PS:

This is why it was so difficult to remember this character. He didn’t have his own book. He appeared as one of two or three features in this mag.

http://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/iss/400w/376/183761/984125.jpg

As Uninteresting as I Want to Be

Blogging reminds me of conversations I never had. In everyday conversations I never get a chance to talk about things the people I’m talking to don’t want to talk about. Because, well, they don’t want to talk about it. Sometimes they will even say “I don’t want to talk about that” but most of the time they will just grow silent. And so, you never get to pursue that avenue of discourse. In most cases, I just forget about articulating the subject matter. I likely forget the subject itself, or submit it to internal dialogue. In either case it never gets expressed. Instead it is condemned to oblivion. Worse, it could become a corrupting influence in my  internal dialogue if the assumptions upon which it is based are incorrect. That is the spirit in which this blog shall proceed in the new year. Yes, my search for data will continue, but the nexus of my activities shall be here. Here I talk about what people aren’t interested in. How ironic is that?

There. So now I am free to be as uninteresting as I want. I don’t know why such rituals as title changes are necessary; but they are. It’s the flow of thought that’s important. Certain things can become cataracts to the flow, if I don’t mark them in some way. I’ve found. You cannot begin anew unless you begin anew.

The same thing happens in the blogosphere. It fascinates me how discussions on a particular post will run its course and simply reach a mutually agreed upon ending where people simply decide to move on to other topics. What happens with me sometimes is that others lose interest before I do. I still have more to say on the subject but the lack of response indicates that no one else is interested. Since I don’t want to bore people in their own home I’ll instead bore whoever stumbles into this rabbit hole.

My discussion on one blog got me to thinking back to the time when I was a writer of fiction of sorts. In my youth I used to try to make comic books. I’m not sure if I ever finished any. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. It was that effort that brought me to the library. Creativity did require research, even in junior high school. One of the comic book  characters I created was a black fighter pilot named Sam Morgan. At the time I created him I was into World War II aircraft. So I read a lot about them, made model planes and such. Read about the exploits of fighter pilots. Naturally when I decided to make a comic book about a fighter pilot I was going to make him someone I could identify with. Black like me. But in my readings,  mostly about dogfights and WW II aircraft specifications, I had never heard of black fighter pilots.  So off to the library where I discovered the Tuskegee airmen. And the background story for my black fighter pilot comic book hero.

Yes, indeed. I think I was the original “ghetto nerd”. I find it fascinating that I apparently had this interest in common with George Lucas.

http://www.eurweb.com/2012/01/george-lucas-red-tails-jon-stewart/

When Will the Government Give Its OK?

I’ve a feeling I’ll be writing more frequently on this blog in the coming year. This has been, as I have observed before, a transitional year. From reading to writing. Reading has been my primary focus these past three years. My three years before the mast. Having first come on to the Internet around the beginning of 2009, I had a lot to catch up on. That is what the “reader” blogs have been about: gathering information. I find myself, at the end of 2011 less interested in republishing the articles I find. That is as it should be. A link and an excerpt will now suffice. 2012 will be a new orientation for the Ironymous project. I’ll keep cataloging stuff at Ironymous1, but, as per the original plan, I will be pontificating here. “Blogging” they call it. Call it mental calisthenics. I don’t want to “lose my verbosity”.

You know, what you have written down, the records of events, as well as articles read and reblogged can’t  really tell you a whole lot about overall trends over a given period of time ; particularly long spans. Years. Decades. In the end it is the things you remember, unaided by any written document, that determines the priorities, that is, what is deemed important -issues, events- over a given span of time. The coherent  summation of a period of time, as I shall attempt here, relies upon one’s ability to see patterns in the remembered events. The data gathered or recorded can only supplement this recognition of patterns, by either confirming or negating perceived trends.

Reflection, like blogs, tend to begin at the end. In looking back, I, for one, tend to see the most recent developments first. So why fight it? Chronology only matters when you’re chronicling. I have to deal with my most recent conceptualizing development. To whit, I have become a true believer, as far as UFOs are concerned. Though I have been examining this issue about a year now, I have to this point been agnostic. Not skeptical. Heaven forbid! Skeptics, or rather neoskeptics, as I call them, deny that UFOs are connected with extraterrestrial visitation. An agnostic makes no such presumption.  But after a year of examining the phenomenon,  I have come to the conclusion that not only is the UFO phenomenon real, it also represents extraterrestrial   presence on the earth. The following video series went a long way in leading me to this conclusion. I had never known there was so much evidence available. As the documentary asserts, it’s no longer a matter of whether UFOs and alien interaction are real. The question is when will our government tell us it’s okay to believe it?

Alas, I Was Wrong

I wrote a couple of months ago I thought Obama was beginning to lose his support among blacks. Seems that was quite an overstatement. While his black support is not as strong as it was in 2008, it is still overwhelming. Turns out the statistics I was relying upon were not comparable to those previously used to measure his popularity. They were measuring somewhat different indicators.

 

The Gallup Daily tracking polls … interviews 500 Americans each day, allowing for combined weekly samples of roughly 3,500. Their weekly tracking broken out by race shows that Obama’s approval rating has seen a small decline among blacks, from an average of 92 percent during 2009 to 86 percent so far in 2011.

The Pew Research Center, which conducts national surveys of 2,000 or more adults on a near monthly basis, shows even less change in Obama’s overall approval rating among blacks since 2009. In fact, Obama’s approval rating among blacks on the Pew Research surveys averaged 89 percent in both 2009 and 2011.

…Obama’s share of the black vote may be less of a concern to his campaign than the level of black voter enthusiasm. Whether black voters will turn out in 2012 at the same levels as 2008 is more difficult to resolve with survey questions. But a good place to start is questions that track intensity of feeling about Obama. How many stronglyapprove of his performance as president? How many report a strongly favorable impression?

Unfortunately, pollsters do not track and report intensity of feeling as often as overall job rating, but the Pew Research Center has tracked strong approval for Obama frequently since 2009. Their data show a significant drop in Obama’s strong approval rating among blacks from 89 percent in April 2009 to 73 percent in January 2010, but since then it has remained in the mid-70s (although it dropped to 64 percent in August and jumped back up to 74 percent in late September).

The Washington Post reported a different trend for Obama’s favorability rating, which asks respondents for their general impressions of Obama rather than focus on the job he is doing as president. The Post‘s September survey, conducted with ABC News, found a 25-point drop since April (from 83 to 58 percent) in Obama’s strongly favorable rating among African Americans.

Still, the apparent drop measured by the Post/ABC poll depends on the difference in that rating as measured by two individual surveys, which may be exaggerated by the usual gyrations of random sampling error. The more general, long-term pattern among black voters evident in the various tracking surveys is mostly stable.

Black voters may be “disappointed” about Obama’s ability to change the political system, but they continue to express the same nearly monolithic support for him as they did in 2008. And more important, while cracks may be forming in expressions of enthusiasm, strong approval among blacks of Obama’s performance has remained roughly constant over the last two years.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/10/obama-black-voters-jobs-approval-ratings_n_1003973.html

Oh well. The spell, apparently remains unbroken, despite the criticisms of people like Cornell West, Black Agenda Reports and even Minister Farrakhan. The untruth is marching on.

The Quiet Man

HA! A lot of things I’ve searched for online a couple years ago with no success are showing up. This is my favorite cartoon drawing of all time. It only had 315 views on Youtube when I grabbed it. Got its own song and everything…

It took longer than I thought

In the summer of 2009 I still wasn’t sure what to blog about. I was still learning the technical part of the process. Besides, my issue of urgency at the time was religion. That was the subject of my initial forays into the blogosphere. It comprised so much of what I chose to blog or reblog about, I decided to give it its own blog; keeping Ironymous1 as a place for my other interests. Strictly speaking, I wasn’t blogging; not much; not writing my own posts. I was mainly collecting articles from around the web that I found informative. Hence my blog subtitle: Journey through the Internet. Ironymous was news  from the perspective of the alternative media I had so recently discovered.

Current events. Art. But I soon found myself paying closer and closer attention to  Obama. It was initially because of the discrimination that he was experiencing as the first black POTUS. He was receiving many death threats; much more than his predecessors. He was the subject of racist depictions in images produced by his opponents. I was beginning to feel indignant about the racist attacks, both  subtle and blatant. But then something happened (or failed to happened) that eclipsed my ethnic empathy with Obama. There had been some disturbing  signs.When he bailed out the banks, I at that time deemed it a grievous mistake. It was obvious to me that the best way to stimulate the economy would be from the bottom up; not the trickle-down bailout-the-banks approach. But I was still willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt; since I have no particular economic expertise, myself. The economists, the Bernanke’s and so forth, obviously know more about the problem than I do. I was willing to wait and see.  Even before that, when Obama filled his cabinet with the same old oligarchy that had crashed the economy, I was alarmed.  But still, I was willing to ‘wait and see’. The probation ended, however, with his handling of the healthcare reform, capitulating to the insurance cartel. At that point, I was convinced. Obama, or rather his image as a liberal or even moderate Democrat, was a fraud.

And yet, the healthcare debacle was not a wake-up call to most of Obama’s constituents. They continued supporting him, to my surprise. Insisting that this is the best he could do, given Republican  intransigence. This was, understandably, the perspective of his black constituency, virtually all of whom have at one point or another suffered the abuses of racism. Racial attacks against any prominent black person, especially of an icon like the president, is taken as an attack on blacks as a social group. The reaction to it from the black populace is visceral. They -we- more than anyone else, more than any other people on earth, understand what it is to be discriminated against.

Okay. I resolved to give it some time. Not everyone is as judgmental/insightful as I am. They don’t see  Obama as a conservative corporatist yet. But after a few more of these rightward leaning political decisions, people will begin to come around. I was right, obviously judging by his recent decline in popularity, but it took a lot longer, and a lot more demolishing of the gains of the New Deal and the Great Society than I had anticipated. It took prominent figures like Cornel West and Tavis Smiley taking a public stand. It took a lot longer than I thought it would for people, especially black people, to awaken from the Obama deception.

***

Here is my prognostication from January 2010:black-folks-not-neglected-obama-says

I do predict a precipitous drop [in his approval rating among black voters] as black people begin to realize Obama’s ruse.

Outrageous Conspiracy Theories

There is a certain advantage in being newly arrived on the web.  Relatively speaking. Almost three years now. I was, as far as all the “memes” and things going on on the web, completely out of touch. Coincidentally my arrival on the internet was simultaneous with the election of Obama. Though I had no idea what I was going to blog about, it was almost inevitable that Barack Obama become the focus of my attention. First of all, the most groundbreaking social event in American history had just taken place. Few could help but notice. And as a social historian, of sorts, I could not help but relate the story of the first black president to my own observations about the history of blackness in America. He was in many ways the marginal man that I had studied in my research into the history of black American art; a shadowy figure who dwelt between two worlds (two separate societies, one black, one white). Obama, having ascended to the office of the presidency, was in fact the epitome of the marginal man. Bi-racial. Multicultural. Cosmopolitan. It was inevitable, given my nexus of interests, that his presidency would capture my attention.

But I didn’t start out to write about him. I was just minding my own business. I had just acquired this computer, you see, in January of 2009 and I was trying to learn how to use it. In the process I discovered the internet, and blogging in particular. Essentially I discovered alternative media. It’s a lot to absorb. I imagine that people who have been in the ether during this period have been slowly acclimated to the alternate media culture that was developing online. The changes they’ve seen over that time have been great. But they’ve gotten used to them and probably barely notice them; in particular the great increase in the accessibility of information. For me, coming back to the internet after such a long time has been something of a shock. There is so much to absorb. A new way of doing things. A new way of communicating. A new set of mores. (I’m still struck by the degree of accessibility to porn.) Much of what I have read and screened these past three years has been news to me. All the things about false flags, weather weaponization, secret societies, etc. A world that heretofore had been hidden (ignored) by mainstream media. But, to the denizens of the blogosphere this is all very familiar stuff. “Conspiracy theories”, it is called, derisively. But it was new to me. And somehow, probably because I hadn’t been on the internet, the pejoration of the term never registered with me. There is nothing intrinsically delusional about articulating conspiracy theories. The theory stands or falls on its own merits. Some theories are not credible. Others are more credible than the official explanation, or “theory”, proffered by the authorities. “Conspiracy theory” should be a neutral term. It isn’t. But it should be. The very fact that the term has been pejorated  over the past decade points to a pervasive manipulation of public opinion. The public has apparently been steered toward preemptively rejecting conspiracy theories through the denigration of the term by “the powers that be”. What better way to shield certain issues from investigation than by ridiculing and thus marginalizing   alternative perspectives?  In fact the public was specifically told by the federal government not to tolerate conspiracy theories. Can the attempt to control public opinion be more blatant?

Planned by Society

Not Ruling Anything Out

I think I’m beginning to understand the nature of this brave new world into which I have awaken. A world underneath the world as it is represented through our corporate media. A world governed by secret organizations and clandestine societies. This nation is being controlled by the manipulation and withholding of information. Who the controllers are is not clear to me at this point. Powerful men. But let us not rule out all possibilities. There is a technology in this world that cannot be accounted for by human standards. Unless our government is many hundreds of times more advanced in their scientific development than the public is led to believe. No. Man, at least the man that we know, is simply not clever enough to devise the crafts that have been seen around the world. The proverbial UFO. Either they are the product of ET or a heretofore unknown branch of homo sapiens. And if such beings frequent our world what is the likelihood that our all-seeing government doesn’t know about them? None. Would they tell the public if they had contact with such beings? Would they tell the public if they were in fact collaborating with the “ET” in some way? Obviously not. They have routinely covered up major issues. Like 911 and the ’60s assassinations. No. Secrecy is the government’s modus operandi. Either they are aware of the UFOs and unable to do anything about them, or they are interacting in some way, perhaps working in conjunction with the “ET”. It could well be that the insane genocidal protocol of this nation and other world governments is ultimately directed by the “ET”. The secret organizations reportedly make plans that take generations to unfold. Organizations that have existed for thousands of years. What accounts for such farseeing cohesiveness and longevity of institutional convictions and dedication? Perhaps a nonhuman perspective. A consciousness confident that plans made will materialize hundreds of years in the future. Perhaps they chronicle humans over spans of generations, much as scientists might study generations of lab rats. The fact of the existence of UFOs make these things definite possibilities.