What This Blog Is All About

The following is taken from an editorial written by David MacGregor of Sovereign Life:

(quote) Galt's Gulch is a high-tech retreat in Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged" - a place where all the "disappearing" productive people can meet, relax and recharge. John Galt, the hero of "Atlas", is a brilliant engineer who has decided he will not support a corrupt system. He will not allow his mind, his talent, or his efforts to prop it up. He plans a strike like no other - a strike of all those who are the engine of civilization, the creative producers in every field. His mission is to persuade each and every one to disappear, to simply remove their support, and thereby bring about a collapse of the existing society.

Galt's Gulch is their private hideaway spot - an anarchic, free community hidden in the mountains. It's protected by a high-tech invisibility screen, which is designed to prevent the place from being found.

It's a "retreat for the rational", a place to re-energize and spend time with like-minded people. (end quote)

So, welcome to Galt's Gulch South blog.

Whistle Blower vs Leaker

The question is: what is the difference between “whistleblowing” and “leaking”?

The answer, not too surprisingly, depends on one’s political party affiliation. Those on the left, the Democrats, will most often be less prone to fault a leaker than a whistleblower, while those on the right, Republicans, will most often find both to be almost equally unacceptable – particularly if the case can be made that National Security has been seriously compromised.

The distinction is important, since the latter (leaking) is a violation of the law while the latter (whistleblowing) is regarded as a cornerstone of serious investigative journalism.

To date, whistleblowers have been charged under the Espionage Act—a 1917 law put on the books to prevent insubordination during World War I. According to ProPublica, as of 2013, the Espionage Act had been used to prosecute government workers who released classified documents to journalists ten times since 1971—and the Obama administration was behind seven of those prosecutions.

The answer to these two questions was written in a recent article on the Internet: “The government should just stop doing bad stuff. Stop torturing people, stop violating FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act], stop holding people indefinitely without trial, stop gathering every single email in the country somewhere in Washington. I mean stop doing all the things that are contrary to our nation's values. If they won't stop doing it, then others have to work to get them to stop.”

Now, you might not agree with this, but that is precisely what the whistleblower Edward Snowden, who is presently living overseas in exile, has done.

The "War On Terror"

NOTE: This is an opinion rant written on my 88th birthday.

The Security Entreprenuers. These are the folks who have been bombarding us with increasingly heavy gobs of terror since 9/11. Those who make up the security apparatus of our government have colluded in making us afraid of “those who are different from us”.

These continual references to a “War On Terror” has stimulated a culture of fear. And fear intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to steer the public on behalf of policies they want to pursue. The wars of choice in Iraq would have never gotten congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the falsely reported existence of “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction”.

And it got worse! The Obama administration plunged us into a continuing series of conflicts spanning Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and potentially Iran. Now nearly the entire Mid-East is engulfed in the flames of warfare.

This is the result of some 15 years of almost continuous national brainwashing on this subject of terror, this fear-mongering reinforced by the security entrepreneurs and the mass media. The latest result, this time from the Trump administration, was revealed in the social discrimination toward Muslims seeking access to the U.S. through immigration (which is still unresolved in the courts).

The question is: where is there a U.S. opinion leader who will say, “Enough of this hysteria, we must cease this national paranoia and curtail the self-serving efforts of the Security Entreprenuers.”

Our Tweeter-In-Chief

It would appear that none of President Trump's handlers can effectively curtail his addictive habit of tweeting at the drop of a hat. He simply doesn't seem to be able to keep from mistakingly inserting his foot into an always open mouth.

The fact of the matter is that Mr. Trump feels that his political base looks forward avidly to seeing them, and so they have become important quivers in his arsenal of interaction with his voters. As for the rest of us, well we simply must endure the antics and try not to wince.

Egregious travesty of legislation

Once again, the Deep State seems bent upon disregarding our cherished Bill Of Rights. The congressional legislation called the "Patriot Act" has effectively over-ruled entire portions of our rights as citizens.

Forty-five days after 2001's 9/11 attacks, president George W. Bush signed the USA Patriot Act, but Americans only learned of the anti-terrorism law's full consequences 12 years later through Edward Snowden's surveillance revelations.

Congressional debate was hurried, and many lawmakers acknowledged they did not read the text. The House of Representatives voted 357 for and 66 against the law, while the Senate approved it 98-1.

In June 2013, Snowden revealed the extent of the metadata program to the world. Several US lawmakers had been briefed on the secret operations of the bill, but many expressed outrage. That "expressed outrage" has done little to amend this egregious travesty of North American legislation thus far.

A Repost From Back In December 2011

(I thought that this little gem ought to be reposted. Back then it was titled "Wandering Down Woo-Woo Avenue"):

Any damned fool knows that pyramid power and such belongs in the province of Tinfoil-Hat-wearing weirdoes, right? ... Right? Well, let me share a little journey down Woo-Woo Street I recently took.

For almost a year there has been a quite beautiful little piece of "art sculpture" sitting on my coffee table. It has the look of something that Terrance McKenna's "self-replicating Elves from DMT-space" might have crafted. And yes, it was in a pyramid shape, made out of a clear resin and about six inches high.

Through the resin could be seen a coil of copper around a large crystal sitting on a bed of what appeared to be tiny metal shavings. There was a "machine" look to it, but certainly no outer controls to turn it on … or whatever. And so it sat there.

Then a couple of days ago I was sent a link to a video presentation. Imagine my surprise (if that's not too tame a word) when I saw what appeared to be a duplicate of my "art sculpture" that the speaker was holding and discussing. It was, he said, "an Orgone Generator" created to attract and then amplify the orgone energy first described by Wilhelm Reich back in the 1930s. AH-HA! The proverbial palm slapped my forehead in startled recollection. Yes, THAT Wilhelm Reich!

I had read all about Reich back in high school …. about the fact that he was the only scientist to ever have his books and research papers burned by minions of the U.S. government. The poor fellow, who was either a genius or a medical madman, was also tossed into prison where he died shortly thereafter in curious circumstances. I remembered thinking at the time that the government spent a lot of effort to shut this supposed nut-case up, and wondered if there wasn't something to the good doctor's claims after all. And here was one of his inventions …. sitting right on my own coffee table.

So with the wriggle of my fingers and a pushing around movement of my hand, my computer keyboard and mouse led me to a consultation with the Great Oracle Google. My little "objet 'd art" was, I discovered, a powerful devise for transmuting the negative energy of electrical impulses into the positive polarity of Orgone energy. Hm-mmm. OK, that supposedly meant that the little "machine" zapped the low frequencies emitted from my computer, the neighborhood cellular towers, CIA Scalar waves, HAARP signals and all the other conspiracy theory electronic "smog" in my immediate environment. WOW! Not only that, but it was reported THE best delta-level deep sleep inducer ever invented!

Now that was something that non-scientist Patrick could check out for himself, and I did. Guess what? For the last three nights in a row my little Apple iPod application that captures sleep habits indicated that I enjoyed almost seven straight hours of deep, deep delta-level sleep each of those nights. What I personally experienced was three nights worth of the most incredible technicolor dreaming that I can ever remember having …. after I moved the little pyramid out of the living room and onto the bedside table right next to my head. It was without doubt the best night's sleep I'd had in years.

The end result of my impromptu experiment is that I'm trying to find a king-sized version of the Orgone Generator and see if I can't sweep all of the errant electronic dust out of Vilcabamba itself. But now I find out that there are many such devises "chugging away" here in Vilcabamba, supposedly helping to maintain our pristine environment. And maybe it's why the Old People of Vilcabamba have so much energy and live so long. Little did I know!

A hold-your-breath report will follow from a newly minted member of the Woo-Woo Club. .

What If ........

What if all the knowledge of the world was to be found at your fingertips? What could you do with this information; for the betterment of the world?

Well, such information does indeed already exists. And yet little of it is used for the benefit of mankind. As our Elders continually point out, we seem doomed to repeat our past mistakes and not learn from them. We are told that there is nothing new under the sun, only a repurposing of the old. But is this true?

Would anyone from the 1900's agree that little has changed in the way of technology in the past one hundred and seventeen years? Not likely. But all too little of what has emerged in all those years has served to make life substantially better for us here on Earth, including our health and well-being. Today, despite the plethora of bells and whistles of our healthcare system and a fairly large increase in longevity from improved sanitation and child care, we are sicker, fatter and more un-healthy than our ancestors were. Something is obviously wrong, but what exactly is it?

This past hundred years plus has seen the decrease in small family farms from seventy percent down to less than one percent, the deprecation of topsoil and the introduction of Frankenfoods into our food stock ... all of which has caused our food supply to change drastically. What is seldom considered is that for almost 100,000 years, people ate no more than about 40 things in their annual diet around the world. Today we have 7 plus billion people who have access to over 100,000 kinds of foods, mostly denatured examples of the food technologists-derived unnatural offerings. And that, dear readers, is but one of the reasons for our nutritional problems today which is NOT for the betterment of mankind.

(Some of the above was taken from my Amazon.com book "An Operations Manual For Humankind").

What's Being Missed Here

Something that everyone is missing about the most recent Wikileaks download bombshell about the CIA is that this information completely nullifies that portion of the Deep State that has been spying on international corporate entities. Corporations! Think about that for a moment.

At least for those business concerns that take appropriate measures, as discussed in the Wikileaks disclosures, their businesses can more or less protect themselves from the federal snoops. This in itself is a game- changer that has profound implications in helping international corporations guard their proprietary secrets.

And then too there’s long-term business plans that these businesses need to keep secret. All of this has been scooped up in the past by the NSA and other national security agencies, for what reasons nobody knows. Remember, not all business proprietary information is guarded by patents.

I Hate To Admit Being Wrong

I really hate being wrong about something, but fair-is-fair and I must admit that I was mistake. In an earlier post something was written that indicated that the MSNBC commentator/anchor, shown above, was nothing but a highly paid shill for the democatic party. However, I've since discovered that she is actually a holding-feet-to-the-fire critic of the henchmen of Donald Trump's inner circle, along with being someone who holds a decidedly liberal bias. Without any doubt, Rachel Maddow delivers the 'news' in a style and tone unlike any other MSM commentator.

The more I watch her show on cable news, the more I have come to appreciate her unique method of reporting. She has proven to be a well-informed news anchor, part of which is perhaps due to her academic doctorate in politics from the University of Oxford in England as a Rhodes Scholar. Her show made Maddow the first openly lesbian host of a prime-time news program in the United States.

All this despite the over-hyped and vastly under-delivered so called "truth bomb" that Ms. Maddow breathlessly proclaimed about Donald Trump's tax returns for 2005 being a political disaster for the new president. That one set her back a bit from her lofty perch as a major news reporter on television.

So for the moment I take back my original critical review and suggest instead that the readers of this blog give the Rachel Maddow Show a look-see and make up your own minds.

One of The Most Dangerous People In The World

She's dead now, but in her prime she was a polarizing figure in the world of philosophy and economics. Ayn Rand was her name and such luminaries as Alan Greenspan was one of her disciples. I first read her work in my early youth, when still forming my view of the world. The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged quickly became my two favorite explanations for the way in which understanding of capitalism was considered.

The bold, handsome visage of the woman shown above shocked many a lad and lass in my youth with her uncompromising thoughts, and continues to do so even today. Want a taste? Well try this:

"Money is the tool of men who have reached a high level of productivity and a long-range control over their lives. Money of not merely a tool of exchange: much more importantly, it is a tool of saving, which permits delayed consumption and buys time for future production. To fulfill this requirement, money has to be some material commodity which is imperishable, rare, homogenous, easily stored, not subject to wide fluctuations of value, and always in demand amount those you trade with. This leads you to the decision to use gold as money, Gold money is a tangible value in itself and a token of wealth actually produced." (Ayn Rand, "Egalitarianism and Inflation").

Chairman Greenspan, despite his sixteen years of heading the Federal Reserve Bank, still believes what she said today. Shouldn't you?

Broken News

I happened to stumble upon Rachel Maddow’s show a couple of days ago and was greeted by a proclamation of a breaking news story, one that she and MSNBC alone were privy to. The lead in promised that her “scoop” was an amazing bit of journalism, and indeed it appeared to be.

It was, as it turned out, a political poll that showed that a significant number of people disagreed with President Trump about something or other. The problem with this poll was that it failed to show the number of people questioned or their demographics, which to my mind at least nullified this "proprietary-only-we-have-it“ would be scoop.

This kind of thing, much like the unattributed stories so prevalent in the mainstream press these days simply plays on the fears of the public, without providing any source material to backup the assertions. This is the crux of what we call "Fake News" and is a gross disservice to all who consume these purported news stories.

The Dark Clouds Of Conflict

Make no mistake about it, the dark clouds of battle hover over the nation’s capital. Donald Trump’s minions are engaged in an all-out warfare with the U.S. Deep State version of the intelligence services. President Trump appears to be in conflict with the entrenched intelligence community on many levels.

The recent take-down of Lieutenant-General Michael Flynn, Trump’s National Security Advisor, based partly on unsubstantiated intelligence leaks along with reputedly lying about his interaction with Russian government sources appeared to be a soft "coup d’état” by dissident factions of the CIA, NSA and FBI. Aided and abetted by Trump’s brand of unscripted, haphazard and chaotic political tweets that flood the media, the battle rages on. But there’s more to the story than this.

The conventional Democratic and Republican parties have miserably failed their constituents. The pundits and political professionals all failed to properly read the pulse of the public. It is true that Hillary Clinton was clearly an uninspiring and compromised candidate, due to her ties to Wall Street and war mongering, but her loss went deeper than that.

Amidst this ongoing political conflict there is another crises at work, and it is both global and systemic. The Deep State factions world-wide, whether conservative or liberal, are being disrupted by mass protests of the disenfranchised. These storm clouds are bearing down not only in the U.S. but across Europe as well. And yet once again the political elites are tone deaf, failing to understand what is happening, Oh so sad.

The Dissemination Of Truth

Not all that long ago (in geological time) “Truth”, as opposed to false doctrine, was dispensed by monks of the Holy Roman Church in their laboriously written script.

Today, of course, it most often appears in the Mass Media or the jottings of widely dispersed bloggers, some of whom merely “retweet” dubious information that is called by some as “fake” news.

It is the speed of this communication that is different, not necessarily the trusted source (or lack thereof). That and the fact that illiteracy was so pronounced that few outside the Church elite could even read what the monks were scribbling on their parchment.

In view of our broken educational system, I find myself wondering if this isn’t what we are experiencing today in our inner cities and other pockets of the poor, where illiteracy runs rampant.

Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year

Christmas is here again - almost without fanfare this year. Probably due to the raucous noise of the election having dominated our thoughts these past several months.

We are all of us saturated by news events from both mainstream and alternative sources, some “fake” and some not. It seems to require a high degree of discernment or a well-honed bullshit meter these days to tell the difference.

I must admit that I paid a certain amount of attention to the North American political circus through the long-distance lens of a foreign expat presently residing in the Ecuadorian Andes. I didn’t however cast a vote.

To my own surprise, after 100% of the nation’s media and most of the pollsters indicated that Hillary Clinton would be the winner, Donald Trump emerged victorious. And now a nation that is still deeply divided and unsettled is inching ever so slowly towards some kind of equilibrium, even though the Democratic partisans still cannot come to grips with their loss.

Only time will tell whether or not the “deplorables” were correct in their faith in Mr. Trump as their president. It is, however, a proven fact that the professional politicians who have been governing ‘We The People’ have been doing a really lousy job of it, so I’m willing to give the new President Elect and his cabinet appointees some elbow room before passing judgement. As they always say - actions speak louder than words.

And so I wish all my friends, familiars and readers a heartfelt Happy Holidays.

The Lost Interview of Steve Jobs

Here's a little treat for all you 'hippy/computer nerds', a just-found interview of Steve Jobs that was lost in shipment from London back to the U.S. It is one of the most thoughtful and introspective interview of Jobs ever conducted. Click link below.

Steve Jobs Interview