rigorousintuition.ca

Hi all. I’ve been a regular lurker here for over 5 years, but have never posted for various reasons, mostly because of time constraints, but also because of a sense that I am not a good enough thinker or writer to contribute anything meaningful. However, I do have a question that I would like to ask the folks here (forgive me if this has been asked recently): What brought you to RI and more generally, what brought you to the political beliefs that make you sympathetic to a conspiratorial/deep politics view of the world?

When and where and how did you first see the cracks in the facade, the silhouette of the man behind the curtain?

For myself, my father was a huge Kennedy admirer and never believed the Warren Commission findings, and had (and has) a huge collection of Kennedy assassination research books, which I started to read in junior high. Reading those books convinced me that there was a plot and a cover-up similar in it’s general outlines to Oliver Stone’s JFK. (As an aside JFK and The Unspeakable by James Douglass is the finest JFK book I have read in a long, long time.) As I grew older I was able to trace the political lineage of Reagan and Bush directly to the faction that gained the most from having Kennedy killed, and concluded that their faction is still calling the shots today, in terms of general foreign policy objectives and approaches.

The events of 9/11 also made me extremely suspicious from the moment that the towers fell. I don’t want to belabor what is obvious to most of the posters on this board, but in brief the complete absence of air defenses, the war games, the multiple specific warnings that we were given, and the fact the several people in government did not fly on Sep 10 or 11, and then how we had lists of names of supposed highjackers so quickly when we supposedly caught so totally off guard simply did not make sense to me. I was fortunate enough to be working in Monterey CA during that time and read the local newspaper the day it came out that contained the op-ed by the second in command of the Defense Language School wherein he accused Bush of having foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and letting it happen to further his political goals. This questioning of the events of 9/11 led me to Mike Ruppert, whom I still admire for his work and writing, and feel grateful to him for the information he made accessible to me. During this time of questioning I read Into The Buzzsaw, which I highly recommend and can briefly describe if anyone is interested.

During the years following 9/11 I would occasionally see newspaper articles that seemed to be slipping through the cracks of the normal media censorship, such as the AP story about the head of the NYSE flying to Columbia to meet with the head of the FARC. Seeing this in print with nary a hiccup in business as usual or any apparent concern or follow up from TPTB amazed me since this was blatantly a drug money cold call - an attempt to convince the FARC to launder their drug proceeds through the NYSE. I mean we all know it happens, but to have so out in the open with no concern or care really surprised me. Another AP story that really caught my eye during the Katrina disaster was a report of a shootout on or near the 9th district levee right around the time the levees were breached between local law enforcement and (at the time) unidentified heavily armed men, in which there were multiple fatalities. I will try to locate and link the AP story. The only follow up story I ever saw was extremely brief and it stated that the whole thing had been an accident and the armed men were from a Federal agency. There was no mention in the second article of casualties.
This is fairly lengthy already, so I will close by saying that I have really, really enjoyed reading all of the interesting blog posts by Jeff Wells which I use to look forward to with feverish intensity, and now really look forward to reading the posts in the forums. Some of the smartest best informed people discuss very news and current events items with a viewpoint that often closely mirrors my own, but they state their ideas and opinions far more eloquently than I can, and their analyses see farther and more concisely than I am able.

So a big thank you to everyone who makes up this community, and please (if anyone has made it this far) respond by telling us what brought to your current political/conspiratorial beliefs, whatever they may be.

I'm a child of Reagan's Cold War. I've always been this way. It drove my parents nuts.

But specifically I followed SLAD here from DU. I think she got banned or something, for being too much of a badass.

I joined DU after the 2004 elections and got my star so I could use the search to help get news to my family about Katrina. I had a cousin trapped in Xavier U.


PS: Nice to meet you, Gashweir

Thanks for saying hi, Gashweir and welcome. No need at all just to lurk. I used to as well. If you've got something to say, by all means say it!

I got here through the many liberal blogs of the day and was big fans of many of them, however RI was the one I took to as Jeff's writing had so many layers of reality woven into it and he was on quite a few blog rolls back then. I believed the bush theft and the events of 9/11 had a whole lot more going on, shit that wasn't meant to be seen and felt in all of my being there was more to it and many esteemed liberal bloggers weren't going places my mind was taking me. Thus, I began avidly reading Jeff among others with a leftwing and peaceful bent, only were not scared to tread into the conspiratorial and fortean as most modern, metro lefties are inclined to do. Changed my life forever and I believe for the better. Left wing skeptics can still speculate and be fascinated by unconventional thoughts and it also doesn't drive you crazy or hateful either.

Anyhow, welcome, Gashweir. Post some more, by all means.

It started about age 4 with a bit of cognitive dissonance regarding racial equality in the southern US. Mind you, this was during segregation. You see, they sent me to Sunday School where we learned a little song about Jesus loving children of all colors but in my home all colors weren't loved. I believed the song because my heart said it was the truth. I continued to believe my heart and continued to see disparity between my heart truth and what was happening. I came to the forum from Jeff's blog and lurked for at least a year.

Keep on posting! I'm not gifted with the word but everyone seems to understand me and no one has made me feel inferior.

something about a yellow brick road...

*

Having seen whole portions of my life as solid objects, my internal debate about free will vs. predestination is pretty much completely offline now. Did anything truly change me? Lessons and turning points abounded but I was seeking them all out, too. The light reaches out to the cornea reaches out to the light.



Hippies and rednecks, Abenakis and Irish Catholics, I'm mighty grateful for the path I've had so far. It's been one of a kind.

Reading about and coming to terms with the CIA's systematic involvement in the drug trade was what got me to see the wizard behind the curtain. If they're doing *that* then they're evil and they know it. Then the whole 9/11 thing happened, which was a no-brainer to me. It destroyed the energy of the anti-capitalist-globalization movement, of which I was a part. I didn't get into a lot of details until much later. People on here have helped a lot.
Thanks for posting.

Starin' at the boob tube, turnin' on the big knob
Tryin' to find some life in the waste land
Fin'ly found a program, gonna deal with Mary Jane
Ready for a trip into hate land
Obnoxious Joe comes on the screen
Along with his guest self-righteous Sam
And one more guy who doesn't count
His hair and clothes are too far out

While pushin' back his glasses Sam is sayin' casually
"I was elected by the masses"
And with that in mind he starts to unwind
A vicious attack on the finest of grasses

Well it's evil, wicked, mean and nasty
(Don't step on the grass, Sam)
And it will ruin our fair country
(Don't be such an ass, Sam)
Well, it will hook your Sue and Johnny
(You're so full of bull, Sam)
All will pay that disagree with me
(Please give up you already lost the fight, alright)

Misinformation Sam and Joe
Are feeding to the nation
But the one who didn't count counted them out
By exposing all their false quotations
Faced by a very awkward situation
This is all he'd say to save the day

Well it's evil, wicked, mean and nasty
(Don't step on the grass, Sam)
And it will ruin our fair country
(Don't be such an ass, Sam)
Well, it will hook your Sue and Johnny
(You're so full of bull, Sam)
All will pay that disagree with me
(Please give up you already lost the fight alright)

You waste my coin Sam, all you can
To jail my fellow man
For smoking all the noble weed
You need much more than him
You've been telling lies so long
Some believe they're true
So they close their eyes to things
You have no right to do
Just as soon as you are gone
Hope will start to climb
Please don't stay around too long
You're wasting precious time

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2 ... o-911.html

And welcome to the board.

MAD, Rolling Stone, Time, Playboy and Macleans magazine started it all for me back around 1972. If you were a library lizard you could go straight to the card catalogues or stacks to learn about the Kubrick, Kerouac, Burroughs, Roth, Pynchon, Hoffman and McLuhan, Mailer, Vidal those windy grownups kept writing about, all THAT stuff, all the SEX going on, those unbelievable drugs and city people, the weird movies and music, all those assassinations. Romanovs, Hitler, Stalin, Kennedys, MLK, Vietnam, Manson. If it bled, it led.

I realized suddenly that powerful people were not good, that ordinary people were very strange and pleasure-seeking, and that The Poseidon Adventure might not be the greatest movie ever made. I listened to 'Walk on the Wild Side' on AM radio one humid summer night and realized that things were about to get more complicated.

A few decades went by, found RI.

The UFO mythos were facts of life for both sides of my family since long before I was born; my parents were hippies and into all sorts of parapolitics and high weirdness. While they were not necessarily researchers themselves, their library allowed me to start early, and my maternal grandfather certainly was. It was a Kennedian, Asimovian household and my parents watched every episode of Cosmos. As a young teenager I found the local music scene and skateboarding, and with that came subversive actions and thoughts. I discovered democratic socialism through exploration of the history of civil rights and music, and by the time I got to college I was already that annoyingly late-90's, pre-Internet brand of conspiracy theorist. After college, I got back together with a girl I had briefly dated 7 years before. She was a survivor of some pretty severe abuse, which we'll never know about because she has dissociative amnesia and her siblings and mother either don't reveal much or are unreliable. That perfect storm of experiences, and my forays into researching each of them kept leading me to either this blog or this forum. After winding up here for the 20th time, I started coming strictly to read. I think I read every single entry under "high weirdness" on the blog before finally registering. This place has helped me grow a lot and has had a pretty profound effect on my life.
Welcome and I hope you stick around.

Let me add my Good Welcome here, Gashweir!
So NICe to finally 'hear' from you!

My own tale of RI coming-of-age Deep State cognizance was like many others here, featuring a heavy adolescent diet of weighty sci-fi, artistic appetites leavened w/ lots of drugs & R&R, early-20's Vagabonding in the footsteps of the beats, Kerouac, Kesey & the Merry Pranksters, Walt Whitman and Frost (the Road Less Traveled), my perpetual self-induced Outsider status relegating me to ponder the deep imponderables of cultural idiosyncracies and contradictions, reflecting on the charade of the Warren Report cover-up and questioning WHY, coming face-to-face in mid-life college with the devestatingly malicious Gulf War 1 and the grizzly horror of Regan-Bush era duplicity esp. the cynical idiocy of Cold War intrigues and the Guatamalan terror of Made-In-Langley Death Squads and legions of disappeared along with the hidden 'secret' of CIA's long Drug-and-Arms smuggling history, then the SUDDEN realization over 2 agonizing difficult & intense years studying 911, reading dozens of Deep Political blogs aided by the fortuitous stumbling onto the Fortean/Alice-in-Wonderlandia RI rabbithole, to realize SOMETHING of the sinister outlines of the parapolitical landscape of extralegal, extranational unelected corporate/military power with organized criminal/political elites who have a vastly OTHER anti-democratic, non-human-rights, uncivil justice agenda that is ruthlessly opportunistic, multi-generational, flexible and shuns the light ...

Its been almost 10 years since the light went on in a A-HA! Oh-SHIT!!!' moment, both alas and blessed good luck, I can't go back to being so naive and simple again.

But I admit to being constantly dismayed at realizing how resolute the public is against seeing what a monumental betrayal, swindle and fraud has been waged against them.

At times I'm an optimistic fatalist, at others I'm a fatalistic optimist. More the former I fear, as my parapolitical education progresses ...

( ;

Thanks to the RI community of like-minded souls for showing the Heart of Goodness and sharing the Truth of Light!!!

I think I've said this before here in broad outline. Maybe I'll go into a bit more detail this time. This needs editing and proof reading due to too much Newcastle Brown, but it is late already.

Even though my parents are not conspiracy theorists at all, in fact quite the opposite, I was raised in a Riginty home. My father had subscriptions to both Life and Soviet Union Today. In 68, when the Soviets invaded Czekoslovakia, he cancelled Soviet Union Today. In 69, when the Americans escalated in Viet Nam, he cancelled Life, which he called 'the American organ of propaganda' and explicitely saw as the equivalent of Soviet Union Today. I grew up reading back issues of both magazines, with that perspective in mind. My mother once had to drive back to the store because she had inadvertently purchased South African oranges, and my father came in one day, gathered the family around the kitchen table, and solemnly announced to us 5 and 7 year olds and such that there would be no Israeli products in the house until the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza ended. There are still no Israeli products in his house as far as I can determine.

Very early on, maybe around 4 or 5, I became fascinated with UFOs, extra-terrestrials, and cryptids. There was a massive seven storey used bookstore downtown back then, in a dangerously unsound old building, packed with shelves from floor to ceiling, with a multitude of small, hidden corners. My father used to collect us and often some of the neighbouring kids on weekends, and drive us down there. He would give us each a couple of dollars and let us loose. Most of the books in there were between 10 and 50 cents. I constantly scoured that place for any books and old magazines on UFOs and the mysterious. I remember getting an old paperback of Charles Fort's Lo! for 10 cents. On returning home, I would usually proceed to lock myself in my room until I had read through all my new acquisitions while wearing thin my Black Sabbath tapes. The place burned down in the late 80s in great conflagration of knowledge whose smoke rose straight up, accepted by the gods, and dominated the city for an afternoon. End of an era.

The first conspiracy I investigated came to me via a translated paperback of George Leonard's Somebody Else is on the Moon. I came home very excited and showed my father the picture of the alleged lunar mining machinery and buildings in the book's central pages. He looked dubious but amused, and importantly, instead of merely dismissing the idea, he directed me to his complete collection of National Geographic, many of which featured copious sets of lunar imagery. I set to work finding either the pictures Leonard had used, or other pictures of the same regions of the moon. I quickly discovered that the buildings in Leonard's book were quite plainly rocks and other natural features on the higher resolution photos in National Geographic. Downcast, having learned an important lesson in critical thinking and source criticism, magnifying glass in hand, I continued examining moon pictures for a few more months, but never found anything worthy of the name anomaly. I was about 8 at that time.

In seventh grade, in religion class, we were being taught Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. As the teacher was talking, I was reading ahead to some of his epistles, and noticed that unlike the letters we had read so far, these contained names and places. I also thought it odd that whenever Paul was about to be lynched by the locals, the Roman garisson would march in, arrest him for disturbing the peace, keep him in custody for a bit, and then release him. I asked the teacher about this. I don't quite remember the details of his answer, but it contained some handwaving about Paul's Roman citizenship. I remember that it didn't satisfy me. One lunch time, I lectured some of my colleagues on my theory that Paul was in fact a Roman agent, sent to keep tabs on the Christians, and to mold their doctrine into a non-threatening one. I laid out my evidence, chapter and verse, pointed to Paul's suspiciously pliant advice to the early Churches, and to his chillingly precise identification of their members and their meeting places. I made few converts. Only one guy, who went on to dabble in Laveyan Satanism, seemed to show an interest. Although I have since discovered that I was hardly an original thinker, this was the first conspiracy which I both discovered and investigated.

It was shortly afterwards, around the 20th anniversary of the JFK assassination, that I started seriously looking into it. But it took many years before I developed a properly critical view of both the coincidence and the conspiracy theories of the event. My view of the JFK assassination, interestingly, was heavily coloured by my reaction to the attempt on Reagan. On 30 March 1981, I happened to be home sick and watching television when on came the ABC News Special Report screen, followed by much backstage scrambling and audio and video adjusting, and finally, a slightly out of breath newsreader. Back then, those Special Report screens meant something. Breaking News was serious business. I immediately suspected that Bush might be behind it. I remember thinking, something I still think today, that Haig was trying to keep Bush from completing a coup. I was frustrated by my inability to investigate and get relevant information that would either confirm or rule out my hypothesis. So when I discovered the JFK assassination, 20 years after the fact, I displaced all my pent up Reagan frustration and dug into the available information with a vengeance, and with a bias, I must admit.

In the 20 years between the Reagan attempt and 9/11, I mostly bemoaned the passing of interest in nuts and bolts UFOs in favour of beings of light and abductees, and feverishly read on JFK, RFK, and MLK. I discovered Lovecraft, Tolkien, and Jethro Tull. I got degrees, jobs, started a family. There was one very strong moment that tempered my interest for Riginty material.

On 1 August 1990, Iraq invaded Koweit. On hearing the news, I rushed to my parent's place, acquired a few maps from my father's inestimable collection of National Geographics, went home, collected some unit counters from various appropriate issues of Strategy and Tactics and from some other wargames, and set up a war room on our kitchen table, to my wife's great displeasure. Looking up various figures in Janes and L'État du Monde, plotting positions and potential movements on the maps, I quickly determined that the Iraqis would be in control of the Saudi oilfields within about 48 hours. Then, the Americans would have to nuke them out of there, and who would really go ahead and do that? During the evening, it dawned on me that this would be the perfect moment for a reactionary coup in Moscow, and that this might very well be the plan. I didn't get very much sleep. In the morning, I was quite surprised to see that there had been no appreciable movement in the situation, either in Koweit or in Moscow. By the evening of the second, I was reduced to desperately wondering where my analysis had gone wrong. I had no way of knowing about April Glaspie's meeting with Saddam, and no reason to conclude that this had been an American sucker punch. It would be many years before I identified this as a possibility. I knew about the New World Order speech, of course, but didn't connect it with these events.

A year later, when the anticipated coup finally materialized in Moscow, I was even more puzzled at the timing. It seemed momentarily that perhaps incompetence was the best explanation for most significant events and that coincidence theory had the most purchase after all. But I was still bothered by the fact that history is mostly made up of acknowledged conspiracies for control of state power, but that the present is always made of incompetence and coincidence. I returned to UFOs and thought about Vallée's 4D theory, which I still think about quite a bit. This was largely my frame of mind on the eve of 9/11.

On 9/11, I knew that the world had changed. I was actually packing to return after an extended stay abroad. I was on the first plane home on the 15th. It was an eerie experience to say the least. Having learned from the summer of 1990, I was cautious about assuming that 'the enemy' would do what I would: hit hard and hit first. I deplored but supported the invasion of Afghanistan. I was increasingly uneasy in the lead up to the second invasion of Iraq.

I stayed home to watch Powell's WMD speech to the Security Council. That was the turning point. I concluded that the Americans knew that everyone else knew that they were lying about the WMD in Iraq, but that they expected everyone to behave as if they didn't know. I knew the invasion was on, and I started wondering about who might have been interested in a giant Casus Belli, a sort of universal Crowleyian Do What You Will For Free card, and who might have had the means to produce one out of thin air at the opportune moment. I discovered the New Pearl Harbor document and went from there. When Lehman Brothers lost 45% of its value on 9/11/08, I saw it as the natural progression of the 9/11 attacks.

I followed Jeff's Coincidence Theorist's guide to RI and have been here every since.

Hello Gashweir,

Two words... Franklin Scandal.

I haven't been visiting this board for very long, just a few years now, and I was petrified to post my first few entries for the exact reasons you mentioned - very smart people posting here.

I don't remember what link led me to the Franklin Scandal thread a few years ago, probably some headline grabbing horrible child abduction or abuse story, but when I looked up whatever it was online, I was led to the Franklin Credit Union collapse via child prostitution in Omaha via RI. The first couple of posts in the thread were enough to make me hastily exit out of RI... I was at work for one thing, and I was a newly minted mom, and I was feeling a bit...discombobulated about work and motherhood and life in general.

But the damned story stuck with me, and after a few weeks I guiltily found my way back to that thread, and after that I was sucked in to RI on a weekly (and then a daily) occurrence. And yes, RI has changed my worldview, and not just regarding conspiracy or politics. (And welcome, BTW!)

More of a languishing lurker than a posting participant, I’ve been scanning this site since a sympathetic cyberfriend suggested it some years ago as a watering hole for those weird but wise wanderers of the byways and unbeaten paths to intuitive insight and enlightenment.

I was raised with a Spiritualist Medium Minister as a grandfather who, between spirit messaging, séances and dowsing for water, used to investigate while ministering the institutionally insane - only to afterwards declare that many of the inmates were too intelligent, perceptive and sensitive to survive mainstream society. He contended that the crush of social conformity stifled natural psychics.

As a child of the fifties in Montreal I played with Duplessis orphans near St. Mary’s and McGill where MK Ultra experimenter Dr. Ewen Cameron refined Dr. Mengele techniques to reprogram the traumatized minds of little, innocent victims. A uniformed “uncle” led us into extracurricular labs for psychically “gifted” kids. The lasting outcome was a visceral, instinctive distrust and suspicion of all declared authorities. The shorter term result was self-protective paranoia about intruders.

Compensation as a student included exploring the outer envelope of society’s fringes in search of psyches similarly bent and left sidelined and squinting at the mainstream. A quest for comprehension of inhumanity led to looking skyward and inward, and outward examining folklore, legends and modern assertions of alien visitors. Nightmares and hallucinations reinforced altered states of consciousness while opening dimensional doorways to a maddeningly impregnable multiverse.

An adult eventually found the monsters were of our own species, some of them sociopaths who gravitated to power positions with hands-on control of the global puppet strings – politics, military, religion, education, media and entertainment programming. In effect, I returned to my grandfather’s findings and the survival of the human spirit. I remain more comfortable amongst the outcasts, where kindness still flourishes.

That is why, seeking surcease and support, the jungle paths lead the curious here. Welcome.

peartreed