Down Cemetery Road — Apple TV Series

Down Cemetery Road — Official Trailer | Apple TV
Apple TV

This might be a thriller, but it's a bit of a mess, but that is probably why it's so entertaining. We've got a bunch of curious characters, a bunch of villains, and a bunch of incompetence. It's all tied to the Ministry of Defense trying to erase the evidence of a chemical warfare experiment gone horribly wrong, all told in a fairly light-hearted fashion.

Our girl, Sarah, is played by Ruth Wilson, famous (to us, anyway) for playing the psychopath Alice in the series Luther with Idris Elba.

Headliner Emma Thompson plays Zoë Boehm, a private investigator. She and Sarah are the driving forces in this show, i.e. the troublemakers that C wants to shut up.

Adeel Akhtar plays Hamza Malik, or maybe Malik Hamza. In the cast he is listed as Hamza, but in the show he is always referred to as Malik, except for one case when his full name is used, but I can't remember which way it goes. Whatever. We've seen him in other shows, usually as a peripheral character, often as a policeman. In any case, this time he plays a fumbling, fawning toady, totally out of his depth, who has inexplicably been put in charge of the clean up operation. His  spectacular incompetence makes me wonder how he got put in charge of anything. I dunno, maybe only incompetent people are willing to work at such jobs because that is the only kind of job they can get. All you have to do is be willing to do whatever you are told.

The title comes from the poem Toads Revisited by Philip Larkin. Kind of a grim little piece.

Cast:

Actor	Surname	Title	Character	Surname	Role
Emma	Thompson		Zoë	Boehm	Lead, Joe's wife and partner
Ruth	Wilson		Sarah	Trafford	Our girl
Adeel	Akhtar		Hamza	Malik	Tool for C
Darren	Boyd		C.		Villain, head of some MoD outfit
Fehinti	Balogun		Amos	Crane	Killer, brother of Alex aka Rufus
Nathan	Stewart-Jarrett			Downey	Soldier, survivor of chemical weapon attack
Ella	Bruccoleri	Nurse	Steph	Ricci	Babysitter
Ivy	Quoi		Dinah	Singleton	Little girl
Aaron	Neil	DI	Ash	Varma	Police
Lydia	Leonard		Talia	Ross	Defence Secretary
Sara	Kestelman		Janice		Joe's mother
Joshua	James		Wayne		Mortician / Computer hacker
Pip	Torrens	Dr.	Isaac	Wright	Tool for C
Ioanna	Kimbook		Cheski	Galanis	Assistant to Defence Secretary
Gary	Lewis	Captain	Donny		Police
Sinead	Matthews		Denise		aka Wigwam, hippie chick, friend of Sarah's
Ken	Nwosu		Rufus		aka Alex, killer, brother of Amos
Tom	Riley		Mark		Our girl's twat of a husband
Tom	Goodman-Hill		Gerard		Rich douchebag, Paula's husband
Adam	Godley		Joe	Silvermann	Zoë's husband, Private Investigator
Sophia	Brown		Ella	Downey	Downey's sister
Steven	Cree		Bob	Poland	Police
Aiysha	Hart		Paula		Gerard's wife

IMDB has a lists 100 people in the cast, half of them only appeared in one episode.

Soundtrack seems to be all atmospheric, no tunes as such, all by Laura Karpman.

8 episodes 50 minutes each.

Real Talk About Nicotine

Hrayr Karagueuzian on radioactive particles in cigarettes
UCLA

Handwaving Freakoutery has a post up about cigarettes, nicotine and the evil CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), a branch of the evil Federal government. It's great stuff, but he left out my favorite theory about lung cancer: 

It's the radioactive lead in the fertilizer that is used on tobacco plants in the field. Some dude did a study many moons ago and found that lung cancer lungs were full of radioactive lead.

Google found a bunch of links that apparently confirm my theory.

The post had a couple of terms that I had to look up:

• Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) are a class of drugs that inhibit the activity of one or both monoamine oxidase enzymes: monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) and monoamine oxidase B (MAO-B). They are best known as effective antidepressants, especially for treatment-resistant depression and atypical depression.[1] They are also used to treat panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, Parkinson's disease, and several other disorders.
• Nootropics, also known as “smart drugs” are a diverse group of medicinal substances whose action improves human thinking, learning, and memory, especially in cases where these functions are impaired.

Conspiracies Я Us

Sarah Beth Clendaniel was arrested by federal authorities on charges that she plotted to destroy energy facilities in the Baltimore area.

Remember when electrical substations were getting shot up?

Over the last three months, at least nine substations have been attacked in North Carolina, Washington State and Oregon, cutting power to tens of thousands of people. After those attacks, federal regulators ordered a review of security standards for the electrical system. - New York Times, February 4, 2023

Well, RT (formerly Russia Today and undoubtedly Putin's mouthpiece) has a story that links these attacks to neo-Nazis in Ukraine, and we are getting these attacks now because of all the money we have been pouring into Ukraine. Talk about unintended consequences. Just goes to show that the mafia that is running this country, and it is most definitely a mafia, doesn't give a fig about what's happening here as long as they can stomp all over the rest of the world.

Neo-Nazi brotherhood: How American friends of Ukrainian fascists plotted a terror attack in the US and the media ignored the story

I don't know that the media ignored the story because I pretty much ignore the mainstream media. 

 

Dreamlandresort.com

Rumor has it that FBI raided the home of the guy who runs the dreamlandresort.com website in Rachel Nevada. The site is devoted to all things pertaining to Area 51, you know, the place where the gummit hides the UFO's and the aliens. This piqued my interest because I've seen at least a couple of movies where Area 51 played a part and I enjoyed those movies (Independence Day comes to mind). So let's see what we've got. We've got a Twitter thread offering up the internet's opinion. One of the subjects is whether the FBI has taken down his website (they haven't), but then the issue comes up as to whether then can take it down. Do they even know where it is? So sum dood looks it up and comes up with the latitude and longitude. Hmmph. How he'd do that? Well, it can't be too tough, so I thought I'd give it a go. I opened a terminal window on my Linux box and typed "ping " and then pasted the website's name. You didn't expect me to actually type it, did you? Of course, the Linux terminal window is old, so the standard cut and paste keys (Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V) don't work. You need to right click and select. Still, copy and paste is generally more reliable than my typing, especially for experiments where you don't know whether it is going to work or not.

Anyway, ping returns the IP address along with some gobble-de-gook about once a second. It will keep on doing this until you kill it with a Ctrl-C (yes, the same Ctrl-C you used to copy the URL. Different interpretations for standard commands on different planets). Take that IP address and feed it to iplocation.net and dumps a bunch of valuable data on your screen. Highlight that data, copy and paste it into your text editor, remove all the redundant stuff, Ctrl-A to select all, Ctrl-C to copy, open a spreadsheet on Google Drive, type Ctrl-V to paste it, do a little judicious editing and you get this: 

Geolocation data for IP addess 69.168.83.86
Wall, looky there, we gots sum nummers. Wonder what's actually there. Plotted on a map:

Geolocation data for IP addess 69.168.83.86

Most of the locations are right around Salt Lake City, but there is one in Las Vegas and one in the middle of a small lake in Kansas. Rachel Nevada is about 100 miles north of Las Vegas, about a half an inch on this map.

In the middle of nowhere seems to the unifying element here. Makes me wonder where they got these locations from. Did some computer algorithm generate them by timing how long it takes a packet to make the round trip? Or did someone just give a street address when they signed up? Or did someone just throw darts at a map? Or maybe everything to the right of the decimal point is just garbage and the location is only accurate to plus or minus ten miles.

And how is it we have multiple locations for a single IP address? IP addresses are typically assigned dynamically, so the same address can be assigned to different locations at different times. Haven't figured out what's going on here, except that maybe routers remember having the address at one time.

I don't know if I learned anything here. It did keep me occupied for a couple of hours. Better than playing solitaire I suppose.

The Gray Man - Netflix Movie

THE GRAY MAN | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

An action packed thriller. You might think it is reminiscent of James Bond, but the violence is so over the top, so gratuitous that it is ridiculous. Ryan Gosling is Sierra Six, a secret CIA assassin. His last mission was to kill another guy who's dying words are that he is Sierra Four, another one of these secret CIA assassins. Hmm, maybe his boss isn't being entirely truthful. Well, since the CIA is known hot bed of prevaricating slimeballs, that's not much of a stretch. Sierra Four hands Six a memory card containing a bunch of documents that supposedly incriminate the boss. The boss wants that card back in the worst way and since Six is not forthcoming, he calls up Mr. Mayhem himself and gives him an essentially unlimited budget to get that card back. This whole business is basically ridiculous. Since digital media is so easily copied, why would anyone think this is the only copy in existence?

When Mayhem's crew makes an attack it looks pretty ridiculous. I would think one person with a little slight of hand would be a better choice for recovering a trinket, but these guys go full metal jacket, laying waste to people and buildings with heedless abandon. But isn't it the nature of bureaucracies that they promote stupidity? The CIA guy has a practically unlimited black ops budget and if the information on that card finds its way into the hands of his boss, that gravy train might come to a stop, so he's pulling out all stops to get it back and he gives Mayhem $10 million to do the job. $10 million dollars can buy a lot of mayhem. And how do you explain this catastrophe? You blame it on unknown terrorists.

Makes me wonder how many 'terrorist attacks' were actually done by some country's government.

Alex Jones

Alex Jones - Play Nice Productions

Variety has a review of the movie Alex's War by Owen Gleiberman. Just in case you don't know who Alex Jones is, the review opens with this:

At the start of “Alex’s War,” a documentary about Alex Jones, the infamous talk-news conspiracist guru of InfoWars is described by assorted media outlets as “a performance artist,” “paranoia porn,” and — in the words of John Oliver — “the Walter Cronkite of shrieking bat-shit guerrilla clowns.” All of which, of course, is accurate.

It's a well written review and gives a little insight into cults and conspiracy theories. Great stuff.

What's Happening?

I have a whole boatload of problems, just like you, me and everyone else. Some are unpleasant and some are annoying, but hey, that's life, you deal with it. So I got plenty to think about, so why do I keep going back to the debacle in Ukraine? Do I have valid reason to focus on it, or is it just some quirk of my personality? Near as I can tell it's because our support of war in the Ukraine doesn't make any sense. 

We went in there and started poking the bear at least eight years ago. That it's taken this long for Russia to react tells me this is a measured response. Putin knows exactly what he is doing. It may not all go as well as he'd like, but it's starting to look like he going to achieve his objectives. A solution we could probably have achieved years ago through diplomatic channels, if we had wanted to. Obviously we didn't.

Could this be the act of some rogue faction in the Pentagon that wants to wargame a conflict with Russia, but with real people, real weapons and real carnage? People worry about the influence the big drug makers have on Congress, but I suspect the real king of the hill is the Military-Industrial Complex.

The whiz kids keep coming up with new, exciting ways to kill people, and the military, once they've seen these weapons, they want them. Whiz kids are expensive. Being able to destroy your enemy? Priceless.

Weapons have been advancing at a rapid pace. Faster computers, better sensors, better algorithms have made them much more efficient at being deadly. But many of these weapons have never been tried in combat. Are they really worth making more of them? Well, how bout we gin up a little war someplace, someplace where we can't get involved, but against somebody with some power. Hey! I know! Ukraine! We can subvert the government and then proceed to poke the bear. Eventually Vlad will have had enough and he'll wade it, and we'll have our war. And then we get to see if any of these new-fangled weapons are any good.

Wander - Movie

WANDER Trailer (2020) Tommy Lee Jones, Aaron Eckhart, Heather Graham Movie
Movie Coverage

An odd little film. We've got a couple of guys living in travel trailers out in the middle of nowhere, doing a regular conspiracy theory podcast. One of them has suffered a tragedy, add in the pain pills for his physical injuries and he's not the most clear headed thinker, he might even be slightly deranged. He gets a call to investigate a murder in the town of Wander, and so he goes and digs around and discovers some real evil things going on. Or does he? Is this all a delusion? There are all kinds of things that don't make a lot of sense, but there's all kinds of weird stuff too. And just when you think everything has been explained, something else happens that flips your understanding of what's going on. Is he deluded, or did this stuff really happen? That flip happens more than once, and even at the end it still wasn't clear.

The subtitle on Variety's review is:

Director April Mullen and writer Tim Doiron’s latest collaboration is a paranoid thriller too twisty for its own good.

Amazon Prime, I think.

There was some kind blurb about 'land acknowledgement' at the beginning. I don't know who is promoting these things, but they strike me as annoying nonsense, kind of like the Black Lives Matter propaganda that flooded the country recently. They do this before the start of shows at Portland Center Stage, too. Stupid Limousine Bolsheviks.

Ukraine On Fire

Ukraine On Fire 2016 Documentary Oliver Stone
Joachim Schreiber
I'm posting this just so I might notice if it gets taken down from Vimeo. According to Bayou Renaissance Man it's already been taken down from YouTube. I suppose I should back up my blog in case someone decides that I, too, am a purveyor of disinformation. Bayou Renaissance Man provided a link to Vimeo, but it leads to a black screen. There appear to be several other copies of this movie available though.

Summary from IMDB:

Ukraine. Across its eastern border is Russia and to its west-Europe. For centuries, it has been at the center of a tug-of-war between powers seeking to control its rich lands and access to the Black Sea. 2014's Maidan Massacre triggered a bloody uprising that ousted president Viktor Yanukovych and painted Russia as the perpetrator by Western media. But was it? "Ukraine on Fire" by Igor Lopatonok provides a historical perspective for the deep divisions in the region which lead to the 2004 Orange Revolution, 2014 uprisings, and the violent overthrow of democratically elected Yanukovych. Covered by Western media as a people's revolution, it was in fact a coup d'état scripted and staged by nationalist groups and the U.S. State Department. Investigative journalist Robert Parry reveals how U.S.-funded political NGOs and media companies have emerged since the 80s replacing the CIA in promoting America's geopolitical agenda abroad.

I don't know what's going on but it sure looks like Tom Luongo might be on to something.

Lots of people don't like Putin, but it strikes me that that dislike arises from the propaganda being produced by the powers that be, propaganda they produce because they fear him. The USSR collapsed 30 years ago. Putin came to power in 2000 and since then he has got Russia moving again, doing things like exporting grain and natural gas, launching satellites into space and building luxury automobiles.

Update June 2026 The video has indeed disappeared from Vimeo. The are several videos floating around out there on net with the same name, which makes it a little hard to track down. I think I got the right one. Wikipedia has a page about this movie as does IMDB.

Moving 1000s of Factoies

Dominated by heavy industry, Hebei province surrounds Beijing and has been blamed for the serious smog problems in the capital. Photo: Simon Song

There's two ways you can move 1000s of factories. You can do it like Stalin did in WW2 and just pick them up bodily, load them on trains and haul them half way across the country. Or you do like the US did and just change the rules and the factories will pack up and move of their own volition.

Yesterday's video was all about when the Nazis attacked in WW2, the Soviet Union moved a boatload of factories east. The number of factories mentioned was 1,500, which prompted anonymous to comment:

1500 so how many went from U.S.A to china

Well, how many was it Google? I had to scroll down (one whole screen's worth) past all the recent new reports of US companies leaving China but eventually we got to some relevant stuff. The first one was from Politifact, I don't know how good they are, but they agreed with Donald Trump, something I would never expect from them.

Donald Trump stated on March 20, 2017 in remarks at a Kentucky rally:

"Since China joined — that’s another beauty — the WTO in 2001, the U.S. has lost many more than 60,000 factories."

60,000 factories gone to China means, what? 6 million people out of work? No wonder Trump got elected. People talk about the deep state, which sounds kind of ominous, but I think what we have at work is a pack mentality. People connected with the government are enjoying the benefits of that cooperation, they are part of the pack. Everybody else, people not connected with the government except through taxes and voting are not part of the pack. For those in the government camp, all those who are not in their pack don't count. If they get screwed over, it doesn't matter, if they lose their job, their home or even their life, it doesn't matter, they are not part of the government pack. From the viewpoint of the government pack insiders, they don't matter because they are not "one of us".

America Gone Mad

Argosy cover: America At Bay in a World Gone Mad

I wonder if we are victims of  statistics. Not that the numbers are pushing us to do things, but that we even have numbers. If we didn't have numbers about what was going across the country and we just looked at our own sorry / not sorry situation, we might not think whatever it was was such a big deal. Still, I keep skimming the blog-o-sphere. Most of it I disregard (yes, the government is lying, yes inflation is ramping up, yes, everyone's supply chains are constricted, yes, everyone is an idiot except me), but sometimes you just got to wade into the swamp and let the hot slimy water wash over your body.

Intro from Commentary: America Gone Mad by Conrad Black:

After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.”

As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”

He goes on at some length. I might have got as far as Flummoxed by Biden.

Conrad Black (author of this piece) is someone to be reckoned with:

Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world as owner of the British telegraph newspapers, the Fairfax newspapers in Australia, the Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times and scores of smaller newspapers in the U.S., and most of the daily newspapers in Canada. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, one-volume histories of the United States and Canada, and most recently of Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. He is a member of the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour.

Via  Knuckledraggin My Life Away

P.S. I much prefer boldface to quote marks. I want to say it's easier, but is it? Putting quote marks around a phrase (assuming after the fact) means typing a quote mark and then typing Ctrl-< (left arrow) as many times as there are words in the phrase you are trying to quote, and then typing another quote mark. Emboldening a phrase (geesh, that emboldening is a long word for such a short root) just requires Ctrl-Shift-< (left arrow) as many times . . . and then typing Ctrl-B. So you save one keystroke, but your movement requires pressing three keys, not just two, so I guess it's a wash. Unless you are using double quotes. Then you have to use the shift key, twice, so you lose.

Plus bold faced text is easier to identify when you are looking at a whole page. Look at whole page for a phrase and bold faced text will jump out at you.

I don't know that I have any hard and fast rules about using bold face type. Titles of articles from other places get it, as do company names and, shoot, pretty much anything nameable. People don't usually get it, I'm not sure why. So I've been formulating rules about this for a while because I think it makes it easier for the ready to comprehend what I'm talking about. But maybe it doesn't help at all. Maybe no one even notices. That's okay, in that case I am just doing it for me. Huh. Imagine that.

Bird is the Word

Birds Aren't Real

Poe's Law writ large. Via Dennis. The title just popped into my head, which leads to the song. This version takes us back to Viet Nam.

Full Metal Jacket - Bird is the Word
CTU51115
Who's crazy now?

Airplane of the Day - Santa & UFO

Christmas Eve. Roswell, New Mexico. 1949

Okay, technically not airplanes, but they could be considered aircraft. Anyway, Merry Christmas.

Via The Silicon Greybeard

Conspiracies Я Us

Tashkent, Uzbekistan

I follow a bunch of blogs on feedly, some of them I read, some I just look at the pictures, some I skip over when they get too long winded for me. Most of them seem to be written by ordinary folks who happen to have access to a keyboard and the internet. Yesterday I came across one post about the Corona Virus that agrees with my view of the situation, and in this post I came across this passage:

". . . which mysteriously appeared at precisely the time the UK and US governments were desperately trying to get rid of me as Ambassador, just a couple of weeks after I had been finally cleared of all the false charges with which the British government had attempted to fit me up."

and I think 'who is this guy'? This guy is Craig Murray, former Ambassador from England to Uzbekistan. What a job, a diplomatic posting to the back of beyond. How do you manage to stir up so much shit from the middle of nowhere? He must be an energetic guy to get so many people mad at him. Anyway, from what I've read, he seems to have a brain in his head, so we seem to be mostly in agreement.

But then I thought about his call for restraint in media, for them to stop blowing this whole thing out of proportion, and I thought - who are you kidding? Asking social media to exercise restraint is like going outside in a hurricane and telling it to stop blowing.

Now my wife just told me that the NBA has cancelled the rest of the basketball season, and Trump has canceled all travel to Europe, and now my spider sense is tingling. Either somebody knows something they aren't telling, or somebody engineered this. Not the disease, any disease would do, what they engineered was the social response in hopes of shutting down the economy. The Illuminati are no doubt behind this. Who are the Illuminati? Nobody that anybody knows. Bunch of guys in a nondescript office on Wall Street, calculating the odds and placing their bets on the stock market, no doubt shorting most everything except Purell and TP. Probably got their start in social media engineering with one of social justice campaigns of the last few years. Probably lent out their expertise to the Democrats and Republicans for their political campaigns. And now they have created the perfect storm and they are going to make a killing on the stock market.

Conspiracies Я Us

Screen shot from Dealey Plaza EarthCam

In honor of the impending 54th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, we bring you the view from Oswald's perch in the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. I still blame the mob for his death, even though the experts discount that theory, which proves the 'experts' are in on it.

Via Indy Tom, who gives us this little bit of snark:

Reminds me of the old Bill Hicks JFK Assassination routine about the painstaking accuracy of the Texas Schoolbook Depository Museum, “Anyway they have the window set up to look exactly like it did on that day. And it’s really accurate, you know. ’Cause Oswald’s not in it.”

Nancy Bergeson Murder

Nancy Bergeson 1952-2009

I got an email alert this morning, triggered by the Bergeson name. Seems Nancy's mother, Marian, has died. None of this rang a bell so I did a little searching.
    Nancy Bergeson was a Federal Public Defender who was murdered in Portland, Oregon back in 2009. They haven't figured out who killed her so the case is still open. I first came across this story five years ago.
    This time around I came across another story, this one by Bob Hurt, which gives us a little more background, and he has a great conspiracy theory:

Tax Crime Public Defender Bergeson Dead - You may now Scream Bloody Murder!

If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Crazy

Came across an entertaining story on The Atlantic. It's a little long, but there is some good stuff (ideas, phrases, concepts) scattered throughout. Periodically, while I'm reading along, the page jumps, I lose my place and I have to look around until I find it again. This jumping is caused by ads that suddenly appear in the middle of the page. Really obnoxious. So obnoxious that I copied the article (Ctrl-A followed by Ctrl-C) and pasted it into a text editor (Ctrl-V). Now I could finish reading the article in peace. Since I'd gone to the trouble to make plain text copy, I added it to my Pages. You can find it here.

Quote of the Day

Abstract

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

This just made my day. Via Comrade Misfit.

Who Killed JFK?

This photograph was taken in a nightclub in Mexico City on 22nd January, 1963. It is believed that the men in the photograph are all members of Operation 40. Closest to the camera on the left is Felix Rodriguez. Next to him is Porter Goss and Barry Seal. Tosh Plumlee is attempting to hide his face with his coat. Others in the pictureare Alberto 'Loco' Blanco (3rd right) and Jorgo Robreno (4th right).

Once upon a time I came across a theory about the Kennedy assassination that passed the smell test, i.e. it wasn't a complete stinker. Some drug dealing kingpin in New Orleans was unhappy about Attorney General Robert Kennedy's enthusiastic persecution of organized crime, but thinking that killing the Attorney General would simply result in him being replaced by a new, even more enthusiastic guard dog, decided to take out the man calling the shots, i.e. the President. Ruby and Oswald were both connected to the mob, and drugs are big business, so it made a kind of sense. Anyway, I thought I posted something about this once before but I can't find it now, and wading through the avalanche of Kennedy conspiracy theory info now is an endless task, so I can't point you to a really good version of this story. You're just gonna have to take my word for it. Unless you can spend the time to root it out for yourself. Inspired by Roberta X.

P.S. The picture has only a tenuous connection to this post, being as it comes from a story about Barry Seal. It makes some interesting reading in its own right.

Really Big Conspiracy Theory

I've been poking around on Military Photos dot net for about a year now, and the one thing that sticks in my mind is how similar everything the Russians build is to the stuff we (the USA) build. Now it may be that they have just been copying us, or it could be that form is defined by your design parameters and available technology, or perhaps everything I know is wrong (it wouldn't be the first time) and we have been copying them. Witness the latest jet fighters:

Russia

USA

    The next part of this conspiracy theory is that all of our really big advances in technology happened because of the military:

• cell phones
• the internet
• the Hubble space telescope
• rockets into space
• communications satellites
• GPS
• jet engines

The 5th Dimension Age of Aquarius 1969
Franklin Balluff

     So my theory is that left to our own devices, people would just putter along peacefully and we wouldn't have any fighting or conflict or war. It's only because some people want to go to the stars, and they want the rest of us to build a spaceship for them, and in order to build this spaceship, we need to develop all this technology, and what you need there is some motivation, and nothing motivates people more than the threat of someone trying to kill them. And just to make the threat authentic, you occasionally have to actually kill some people, which is why we have wars.

     Is this a great theory or what? Will it pass peer review? Will it pass Tam review?

Update April 2022 replaced missing Age of Aquarius music video.