The Mandela Effect, Part 2

In Part 1, I described an experience that I have shared with a couple of other people, in which we have very distinct memories of B. B. King dying in May of 2005, yet it was reported in May of 2015, that B.B. had died again, at least as far as we were concerned.

Just last week, I learned purely by accident that this phenomenon has been dubbed the Mandela Effect, and apparently a great many people have experienced it.  In particular, folks are convinced that a celebrity has died who is still alive (Kirk Douglas for instance), while others have clear memories of a celebrity dying more than once.  Even stranger is the fact that many people, who are complete strangers, share the same memories in great detail.

Across the internet, much of the discussion seems focused on movie lines or titles.  I dismiss this as either remembering a popular impression of a character's scene or just complete bunk trying to cash in on the interest.

One prime example is the plethora of videos about Interview with a/the Vampire.  A quick trip to Wikipedia shows the title as using "the." But even if later issues have changed to "a," it doesn't matter since the author can confirm the original title and there must be thousands of original copies of both the book and movie in circulation.

I call this discussion the "Play it again, Sam" theory, and it includes the Snow White "mirror mirror" and Empire Strikes Back "I am your father" branches of the Mandela Effect hype.

I wanted the reactions of people I knew were level-headed and tended to research things a bit more deeply than Google and hashtags.

Of the people I wanted a reaction from was Joseph Farrell, the well-known author and researcher whom we've interviewed a couple of times on Radio Far Side.  I sent him a note asking if he had ever heard of the Mandela Effect.  The response was nearly immediate and he wanted to discuss my experiences.

It turns out that it is a topic of great interest to Farrell and his subscribers, who have discussed it at length in member vid-chats.  According to his members, this phenomenon is global and seems to have two common factors - celebrities and a period of roughly 10 years.

I was genuinely stunned.  After learning of the name Mandela Effect, I started looking around the net for references.  It wasn't hard.  There are around 511,000 returns on Google, covering websites, blogs and videos.  From what I see, about 50% of the data centers around people misremembering movie lines.  As I said previously, I find this highly unreliable, since a lot of folks remember the line, "Play it again, Sam," from Casablanca, but that line has never existed, at least in the film itself.

The rest of the data focuses on celebrity deaths.  Farrell has specific memories of Helen Thomas, the veteran political reporter, dying during the Clinton Administration and listening to Bill Clinton deliver a eulogy at that time.  Yet, any reference to her will mention her death in 2013.

Joseph also mentioned Kirk Douglas being alive, and that caught my attention.  I distinctly remember watching an interview with his son Michael talking about his father on the occasion of his death.  Yet, according to Wikipedia, Kirk is still alive.

At this point, we discussed reasons for this phenomenon.   I wouldn't feel comfortable trying to express his thoughts, but suffice it to say that he thinks it may be an experiment in social engineering that involves manipulating quantum forces and correlating the effects with massive databases to see what has changed.  The analogy he used was overlapping multiverses with leaks between them.

I was fascinated with the possibilities, though a bit horrified to think that anyone could be mucking around with timelines and peoples' memories on a mass scale.  However, my own theories more or less have the same thing happening, but in a different way.

The Mandela Effect reminds me a lot of several different stories, both fictional and real.

The first is a book that I was enthralled with as a child.  It was "A Sound of Thunder," which introduced the concept of 'the butterfly effect' into common culture.  In the book, time-travelling hunters from 2055 go back to the Jurassic Age to hunt dinosaurs.  An accident leads to a butterfly getting crushed in the past and causes hundreds of large and small changes back in the current time, as the effects of the butterfly's demise ripple through millions of years.

Another favorite book was Robert Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast."  Here, a mathematics professor invents a "continua" device that allows the main characters to shift through six dimension of time and space (leading to the reference of 666).  The characters are deceived by telepathic overlays on reality during their journey through alternate universes.

Finally, the story of John Titor comes to mind.  This may be a bit of an obscure reference, but John Titor was a supposed time traveler who appeared on the internet in various chat rooms around 2000 and 2001.  He was supposedly from 2036, and was on a mission to the 1970s to obtain an IBM 5100 computer to help in decoding a number of old machine languages to avoid some Y2K-like problem in the future.  He described time as a cone shape extending into the past and future that allowed access to multiple timelines, which could vary greatly or very subtly from our own.

All three stories are worth reading, so do make use of the links, but the salient point is that they all involve time travel and in some way mirror the Mandela Effect.  My operating theory is that our timeline has been changed in some way, either in a single event, or in several, and may be ongoing.  I suspect that easiest way to do that would be to manipulate very small and discrete parts of the past to change something in the future.  The double death/not yet dead phenomenon may be an incidental or intentional result for whatever purpose(s).

And yes, I know this sounds far out.  And I do have a much more mundane, though nefarious means of achieving the same result: Winston Smith.  If you recall in "Nineteen Eighty-Four," the protagonist's job is to literally rewrite history.  He spends his days at MiniTrue making people appear and disappear in history, changing narratives and making sure that the past matches the official party line du jour.

It's not an easy choice, and any of them require a very large departure from what we fondly refer to as "reality."  Whether it's Farrell's multiverse leaks, Bradbury's ancient accidents, Heinlein's continua machine, Titor's military time missions, or Orwell's MiniTrue, something is causing an actual phenomenon in which a large number of people "misremember" historic events, but do so in a way that complete strangers "misremember" with exactly the same details.

There is no natural phenomenon that can explain this, and it has only come into the public consciousness with the past two decades.  Most of the reports that I find credible more or less occur between the mid-1990s and today.  Nor can I find any reference in older texts to similar documented phenomena in the past, so this seems to be something completely new.

If you have experienced it, then you know the very strange and other-worldly feeling you get when it happens.  It can literally leave you vexed and paralyzed for a few moments as you try to process the discontinuity in your clear memories.

Either we are all being manipulated somehow (real or perceived), or accidents are occurring (likely in the past) that are changing our current timeline.  No matter how you slice this, the implications are truly unsettling.

One way to find out is to bring the topic to wide public attention.  By making it a major item of conversation, perhaps we can at least stop it from happening, and perhaps even discover why it's happening.  I suspect we will not like the answers behind the Mandela Effect.

There is no reason in physics that time travel is impossible.  When we peer into the Universe, we are travelling backwards in time, as we see the Universe only as it was anywhere from minutes to billions of years ago.  It is also quite possible that aspects of physics that allow time travel have been hidden from the general public for just the sort of reason we are discussing here.

What is most disturbing, and implied by the Mandela Effect, is that we may be unaware of just how much our lives have been changed.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Part 3

Through The Looking Glass

In one fell swoop, bin Laden is dead, torture and secret prisons are justified, the Pakistanis are villainized, the endless war is renewed, the American masses feel justified, and the Military-Industrial complex goes on raking in the Big Bux.

I don’t watch TeeVee, so I haven’t seen the images, but I can just imagine from the descriptions how asinine it must look to see the young, vacuous sheeple prancing in the pasture, celebrating The Dawn of a New Day.  Why, now when they go anywhere in public, they’ll be so grateful to have TSA shoving their hands down pants and groping little children, like Catholic priests.

You can tell this is a psy-op because there are two basic stories going around.

One, Usama was living in a boarding house, in squalor, subsisting on Doritos, like Saddam Husein in his “spider hole.”  He slipped up and used an open phone to call for pizza, and that’s when the cavalry descended on him, shooting him two times in the head and (conveniently) blowing his face off.

The second story is that Usama was living in a million-dollar mansion built just for him, surrounded by Pakistani military camps.  His location was tracked down from information gleaned years ago by torturing teen-aged shepherds and dirt farmers in secret prisons.  Usama was identified, because his wife yelled his name as he hid behind her when the lead started flying.

Both stories end with sensitive and politically-correct Special Forces conducting Islamic burial rites as they shoved Usama’s body out the helicopter door somewhere over some ocean.

And now…who cares if Obama committed multiple felonies by forging legal documents and bald-face lying to millions of people?  He got Usama!  Oh, and let’s give some credit to that other bastion of international law and order, George W. Shrub.

This is classic psy-op crap where several conflicting details/stories are released, and the elements that people swallow become the ones that are the "true" story, while the rest get brushed aside as noise from opposition elements or 'fog of war' errors.

I’m going to puke.  I won't publish and of the stories or photos, since it's all complete bunk.  Even Madeline Albright, the former US SecState, said bin Laden was dead and on ice for later propaganda use.  That was back in 2002.

Who was Usama bin Laden?  Why, let’s let Paul Craig Roberts tell it:

“How many Americans will have the wits to wonder why the "terror mastermind" ­ who defeated not merely the CIA and the FBI, but all 16 US intelligence agencies along with Israel's Mossad and the intelligence services of NATO, who defeated NORAD, the National Security Council, the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs of Staff, the US Air Force, and Air Traffic Control, who caused security procedures to fail four times in US airports in one hour on the same day, who caused the state-of-the-art Pentagon air defenses to fail, and who managed to fly three airliners into three buildings with pilots who did not know how to fly ­ has not pulled off any other attack in almost ten years? Do Americans really believe that a government's security system that can so totally fail when confronted with a few Saudi Arabians with box cutters can renew itself to perfection overnight?”

Now to my eyes, this is all just too blatantly obvious.  I’m sure others must see through all this garbage.  The question is, “Why?”  What’s behind this ridiculous parody of law and order, and who’s pulling the strings?

The ‘why’ part is pretty obvious.  It’s the ‘who’ that gets a little tricky.  The answer to both questions might surprise you.  It’s a lot simpler, yet far more evil, than it appears on the surface.

What’s going on is that there are two primary groups vying for global domination in the Anglo-American empire.  One group is the ‘bomb the hell out of everything and snatch the goodies.’  Let’s call them the American part of the equasion.  The other group is a little more subtle, preferring to work quietly and make other factions fight each other, thus saving precious resources for cleaning up and taking over after the dust settles.  Let’s call them the Anglos.

The Anglos have been at this empire thing for a long time and have a lot of experience.  They are master manipulators who prefer to stir up two ant piles and make them fight each other, rather than sit with a hammer and smash the little buggers one at a time.

The Anglos think that the Beijing-Moscow axis is getting too big for its own good.  They have too much financial leverage and they refuse to play in the Big Boyz Bully Club.  They won’t invade or bomb or join NATO.  The Anglos think its time to take them down a notch or two.

To do that, the Anglos need to squeeze just enough on the wind-pipe to make B-M pass out, without killing the free flow of cheap goods and labor.  If enough of China’s energy supply is cut off, or at least severely curtailed, they will have to look pretty hard at Russia’s Siberian oil fields sitting right there on the border.  This will poison the well, as it were, between Beijing and Moscow.

The American faction is a little more brash.  They are new to this empire thing and the way they see things, they need to bang into these here sovereign countries and secure those resources for later use.  They’ll just lock everything up in perpetual exploitation contracts with all the boys down at the country club.  They don’t give a damn about subtlty, because gol-durnit, if them uppity chinks and bears don’t play along, we’ll just bomb the hell outta them.

The Anglo faction is represented in US politics by the Obama group.  The American faction is represented by the Bush group.  It’s tempting to go slapping left-right labels all over everything, but that would be both misdirecting and misinterpreting what’s really going on.

You see, the world is divided up, at the upper levels, into regions.  There’s the North American Union, the South American Union, the European Union, the MENAs, the ASEANs, and the BRICS.  Think of them as football teams.  They run around playing matches and scoring wins, losses or draws.  And that’s about as far as most people ever get when they start learning about all this stuff.  But, just like football teams, behind all the glamor and glitz on the field are the owners.

And now we come to the ‘who’ part of the calculus.

The owners are a handful of folks who are so fabulously wealthy, they don’t appear in Forbes, or Lifestyles, or at Warren’s birthday parties.  These people are so wealthy, that money means nothing to them.  They could spend millions a day, and have enough for their grandchildren to continue the tradition.  In fact, they are so amazingly rich that playing football with the world is the only entertainment left for them.  If you saw a list of their names, you probably woyldn't recognize most of them.

To these people, your and my life are worthless.  We are just ants to toy with for kicks.  Everything we are seeing in our news outlets is part of their game.  They lead us around in circles and play with our patriotism and religious beliefs and our families for their amusement.  They are like the sadistic kid that would pull the legs off the daddy long-legs to watch them flail around.

How do you fight people like this?  It's amazingly simple.  They control us through media.  They can whip us into frenzies, terrorize us, play with our emotions, and confuse and confound us with the media.  As an expert on media, I can tell you how effective it is.  The best way to stop these people is turn it all off.

Stop watching TeeVee, listening to the radio and reading the papers.  Don't consume anything from AP, or broadcast or MSM of any kind.  Don't vote in their elections.  Don't buy their products.  Refuse to react to anything they say or do.

Sure, it will cause some hardship at first.  You have to go out and find local folks making things you need.  You'll have to put in your own garden and tend to it daily.  Of course, if you spent all the time in the garden feeding yourself and your family that you spend watching TeeVee, you'd be richer, healthier and happier for it.

It's called shunning.  It's a very old concept.  Catholics call it excommunication.  You cease to acknowledge that someone exists.  If millions of people around the world just stopped buying their crap, they would go into a panic.  They would shrivel and die without us chasing their string like kittens.  It would literally kill them if we stopped reacting to anything they do.

So now a man who committed a felony and presented a fraudulent legal document just last week is a major hero today for killing a man who died 10 years ago.

Through the looking glass.  Black is white.  Good is evil.  Joy is anger.  Truth is a lie.

 Time to dust off the old copy of C. S. Lewis, because that may be the only thing that can explain what we are seeing now.  Even Orwell would be amazed.  To see his nightmare come alive so completely and so vividly would stun him, I think.  But, Lewis would probably nod his head and say, "See?"

It's ALL bullshit.`


(Fun Fact: Usama bin Laden was 6'-4"/218cm tall.  Just something to remember as you see purported photos offered in the media)

"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; If a clod be washed away by the sea, is Europe not the less? So therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." -- John Donne, Meditation 17

UPDATE: They're getting desperate.  Now they're trotting out the 'hero dog' to really tug on the emotional strings.  This is all such bullshit!