Dagger Of The Mind

For the last century or so, we (the entire world) have been part of a massive, callous and tragic experiment that has failed miserably in every sense of the term.

A group of people tried to create the Universe in their own image.  They believed that there was no objective reality and that they could manifest whatever they undertook to project onto it.  They made each and every one of us a party and victim of their grand design.  They told themselves that if they could deceive the entire world, then their chosen reality would come to exist.

Didn't work.  And now we are all left holding the bag for it.

This group of people, call them what you will, but you will frequently hear them called "THEY," figured that if they could get everyone on Earth to believe fervently in something, that it would simply come to be.  The only problem with their experiment was that they themselves knew the truth, and that prevented the final take-over from occurring.

They thought that if they made their intended reality a part of every textbook, every classroom, every test, every recitation, every grant proposal, and every TeeVee documentary on the planet, then their version of reality would simply become...um, reality.

They propped up cultural images like Einstein.  They turned real science into a replacement religion.  They made every degree, diploma and certificate on the planet dependent on being able to regurgitate their Grand Design.

They pounded Black Holes, Dark Matter, light speed, Universal Constants, Higgs Bosons, clockwork galaxies, and empty space into our heads.  They created Global Warming mantras, asteroid threats, terrorism, and many other imminent threats from "out there" and "down here".  They attempted to control all information everywhere to create the Preferred Narrative that we all had to memorize by rote (gods forbid we should ever check the truth for ourselves).

The one fatal flaw was that the Deceivers could not make themselves believe the Deception.

They wanted to remain in power by being the only ones with Truth, while the rest of us struggled along under the Deception.  This was their undoing, since their knowledge of The Deception meant that they could never manifest the alternate reality they so desperately wanted to create.

In other words, they failed out of greed and lust for power.

And it is falling apart before our very eyes for one very simple reason - it is NOT Truth.

In every deception there is some fraction of the participants who know that they are deceiving everyone else.  Because of that one simple fact, all lies ultimately fail.  Truth prevails because at some level it is obvious to anyone who cares to look for it, and because those who are lying are constantly scrambling to keep up the Lie.  This makes holes appear in the Lie that are eventually exploited by those who genuinely seek the Truth, and finally the Lie is exposed and crumbles.

One major problem with the exposure of the Lie is that those who were duped desperately do not want to admit they were duped.  They get defensive, angry, even violent in their attempt to deny that they were dupes.  In fact, the reaction is equal in scale to the size of the Lie.  In our immediate case, the Lie was so massive, so pervasive, and so obviously false that the anger is building to an equal and opposite reaction.  Nearly every major problem on Earth at this moment can be classified as either the liars fighting desperately to maintain The Lie, or the dupes reacting very angrily at having been duped.

People do not take kindly to being awoken from a dream, especially one that felt as if it were real.  It will not end well, but it will end nonetheless.

Some will die from the shock, some because they cannot adjust.  Others will muddle through.  Still others will profit and thrive.  It is the way of humanity.  We have spent much of our history deceiving ourselves, and millions have died because of it.  The challenge is always to adjust.  In all cases, it is fear that kills.

Doctor Livingstone I Assume

Maybe you remember that old Star Trek episode called, I, Mudd?  It's the one where a businessman takes the crew hostage, to be guarded by a bunch of androids.  The crew starts dong a bunch of crazy things that cause the androids to shut down because the antics don't make sense, and the crew escapes once again.

This is what happens to my wife when she asks me something like, "Is sour cream still goot [sic] or no?"  I reply, "If the cream is already sour, exactly what criteria are we using to determine if it is good?  If you mean is it green yet, then I have to say it's still good."  I mean, the cream was sweet and fresh at one time, but it was allowed to go sour.  It smells sour and tastes sour, and by most standards that would not be good.

It's amazing how many assumptions we make in our daily lives that heavily influence our thinking.  What's more, our inner scale for judging the real world slides around, depending on what set of initial assumptions we make about a particular subject.

Take the anti-Ahok rally in Jakarta today.  Most people here could care less about Ahok, but this morning I can hear people running around the neighborhood yelling, "There's free food at the Ahok rally!  Let's go!"  If you have a hidden agenda to bring down the current administration and install your personal allies, this is good.  If you are a typical Indonesian who thinks anything free is better than nothing and you will go to any expense to get it, this is good.  If you are reasonably intelligent and like Ahok, this is bad.  It's all relative.

By the way, we really need heavy rains in central Jakarta today, so send some our way, because normally this would be a bad thing, but today it will break up a mass demonstration before it can get violent, and that's good.

Another good example of this phenomenon is the Trump Wave.  Most of the people who support Trump do so because they are sick and tired of corporate interests running the government against the interests of most everyday folks.  So, they get behind a man who is a walking brand name and quintessential CEO of a marketing empire.  Is this a kind of fire break?  To fight a forest fire, you start another fire?  Again, it's a case of assumptions, not to mention a lot of pretty words, coloring decisions.

Just because an apple is red and succulent-looking on the outside doesn't mean it is not shot through with worms.

We assume that vaccines work because...well, gosh, we've never had polio, right?  We assume a restaurant makes healthy food because they passed health inspection, right?  We assume the Sun will rise tomorrow because it has for the previous 20,158 days we've been alive, and by all accounts it has for a long time before we were here, though we assume that those records are really as old as we think they are.

When it comes right down to it, we actually know very little.  Basically, we know what we have experienced, but that is only valid for time already past.  The current status of what we know is just what we see, feel, smell, hear, and taste right this very moment.  All of that could change in the next minute, everything outside the range of our senses is unknown, and all past experience is based solely on our memories, which are provably dodgy sorts of things.

In fact, we are completely clueless.  What we know right now is not provable unless we have someone else to confirm it at the same time, but then we could both be under the same illusion of assumptions.

As Ram Dass exhorted us back in the day, "Be here now."  However, if you have ever really tried to live in the Eternal Now, you know it is virtually impossible to function in our collective cultures.  We actually need an entire truck-load of assumptions just to turn off the alarm in the morning, not the least of which that we can measure 'time' and that a morning will come for us to turn off the alarm.

Point of fact: assumptions are the foundation of our shared reality.  It cannot and does not exist without the basic assumptions that inform most of what we "know."

Perhaps you are one of us hippie-types who read Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land?  In the book, Heinlein posits a class of legal functionaries called "fair witnesses."  These people are trained to live in the Here-Now.  One of the main characters, Jubal Harshaw, demonstrates how it works when he asks his personal Fair Witness, "What color is that house?"  She responds, "It's white on this side."  In other words, she made no assumptions about the color of the house on the unseen sides, and reported only what she could directly experience.

What Heinlein failed to do, through his character, is point out that she assumed that what she experienced as the color 'white' is the same as everyone else who looked at it.

As I type this, I assume that there is a magic machine called a "computer" in front of me.  I can see the screen make squiggles that I assume mean something to objective observers.  I can feel the keys as I type.  I can smell the ozone coming from the heated components inside.  I assume that when I click "Publish," this machine will send a signal to some far off server that will render my experiences into something others can share.  I will only have some confirmation of these assumptions if the hit counter goes nuts and/or if someone sends a response, which I assume will be from a real human being somewhere else on what I assume is a planet that we co-inhabit.

As you can see, this line of deductive reasoning can get rather detailed and one can easily despair of trying to ascertain the Truth of any matter.  It is, however, a very good exercise in recognizing and coming to grips with the vast number of assumptions that we make moment by moment.

Many of the long-time readers here appreciate that I take a slightly different view of things, and I do that by first checking my assumptions, and those of other commentators, to see what - if anything - has been overlooked by our shared assumptions.  I attempt to point out that which has not been considered in the general discourse because we all made some common assumptions.

I do not claim to be special, or even a leader, in this effort.  I am simply trying to think clearly and to understand what assumptions I make about my daily experience.  With a bit of luck, I can share those observations with a wider audience who may - or may not - also appreciate these observations.

My wife just reported that most of the shops at the local bazaar that are owned by ethnic Chinese are closed.  This is because they have assumed that the Muslim-based mass demonstrations will erupt in violence, and that the violence will likely be directed towards ethnic Chinese.  These assumptions are based on either past experience in 1998 and other occasions, or on reports of those events.  Thus, they assume that it is better to stay home, unless their shop is close to where they live.  This last assumption is based on their perception of how fast they can get home in an emergency.

Yes, life is full of assumptions, and for the most part, we can't function without them.  It is important to analyze and understand what our assumptions are, so that we can avoid mistakes because of them.  We are much less likely to be caught off-guard when we are mindful of our foundational assumptions, and are much less prone to panic and more likely to think clearly.

In fact, I don't know for sure that I will be alive to finish this article.  I only assume, based on past experi...

Blinders Off

At the beginning of the film 2010, Roy Scheider's character is told to have a look at the ship Discovery's orbit.  When Scheider does so, he begins to chuckle with a conspiratorial tone and his eyes widen as he realizes just what it is he is looking at.

Such was the scene when I began reading Zero Hedge's article on German gold and the Federal Reserve.  I've been firmly in the conspiracy camp since the early 80s, when I first began to catch a glimmer of the huge steaming pile of secrets behind the world as it is today.

More and more people are swallowing the red pill and seeing, as Morpheus put it, the world that's been pulled over our eyes.  More and more people are feeling that incredibly profound sense of helplessness that first confronts those of us who have seen the Matrix for what it is.  And more and more people are scrambling around trying to find the silver bullet that will kill the blood suckers on the neck of humanity (can I mix a metaphor, or can't I?).

The aware mind will see in the ZH article exactly what I did...that the silver bullet is actually gold.

All the power, all the security states, all the devastation of culture, all the answers are summed up in one tiny word - gold.  If We The People want to bring down the entire system of evil that is turning our world into a vast pit of moral and ethical morass, then all we have to do is demand, with unceasing voices, the complete and transparent audit of all gold holdings in the sovereign treasuries.

That's it.

So simple, and yet so complex.  That one act would expose the entire system from stem to stern: all the secret alliances, all the covert operations, all the dirty laundry mouldering in the dark corners of history.  It would reveal just who runs things and how.  It would expose the ways and means of control.  It would open the doors on all the secret programs and black budgets that have defined the last 100 years.  We would know precisely who to boycott and target for litigation.  We would have the untarnished proof of when and how our current mess was designed and implemented.  It would, in fact, unravel the Matrix.

As Joseph Farrell aptly put it, gold is Ariadne's Thread, and a consistent tug on it will unravel the whole mess - quickly, if not painlessly.  For to unravel this mess will expose many dark secrets that many people are not ready or willing to know - not because they won't understand them, but because they adamantly and vehemently don't want to know them.  To know the unvarnished truth is a frightening and foundation-shaking thing for a great number of humans.

Most humans spend their lifetimes constructing a world around themselves with which they are comfortable.  They eliminate truths that expose holes in the fabric of their worlds and will fight to keep those truths out.  They are happy in their delusions because they don't have to think.  They follow their suburban routines and willingly automate themselves in order to quiet the naggings of conscience.  To know Truth is to require Action, and for a great majority, that is too much effort.

Now, however, enough people have pulled the thread for enough years using such fantastic tools as the one you are using this very moment, that the stench of reality is infesting even the most ardent denier of fact.  Losing jobs, getting anally probed on roadsides, having our personal dark secrets revealed by and to the security state - it's all too much for an expanding number of people.  Part of what made the magic work was that the PTB didn't intrude too much into the fantasy.  Any more, it's like watching a show where the stagehands have taken over and destroyed the carefully crafted illusion on stage.  We are now confronted with the mechanics of our illusion and the magic no longer works.

Which leads us back to gold.

An increasing number of people want their comfortable illusions returned undamaged.  That won't happen in our lifetime's, sorry to say.  However, we can ensure that our progeny at some point will enjoy a modicum of normalcy without the intrusion of the stagehands.  We can not go back, but we can go forward.  To do this requires lancing the boil and releasing the poison that has bespoilt our lives.  The needle by which we lance is none other than gold.

To be clear, I am not advocating return to a gold standard.  That would be asinine and counter-productive, given that not even the stagehands know how much real gold there is.

Rather, I am advocating a worldwide push to audit centuries of gold dealings and to open the results to everyone via the internet, and to list without blinking the entire apparatus of the command and control structure.

It will be very painful because none of us is innocent.  Either by action or omission, we are all culpable, but we can atone by being the vehicles of remediation.

This will have a profound effect on us.  For those wanting to know the truth about UFOs, here's the means.  For those wishing for economic and social equality, here's the path.  For those longing to right the wrongs of history, here's the lance and shield.  For those desiring to release the choke-hold of corporate fascism, here's the key.  For those who simply hunger for truth, you shall receive it in spades.

Like the HAL 9000 computer in 2010, there is only one logical conclusion when confronted with the imperative to hide the truth - you must kill everyone who can expose it.  Therefore, it stands to reason that to continue to hide the huge sins of centuries of social manipulation, the PTB must in fact slaughter all of humanity, or risk being exposed.  It is simply a matter of self-preservation that we all begin to pull this thread and not give up until the truth is out.  If we don't, then we will all be victims of our own desire for normalcy.

Secrecy = Death
Truth = Life

A simple formula.

Those Who Forget History

On this date, in 1492, Cristobol Columbus, an Italian (Genoan) sailing under the flag of Spain and funded by the Catholic Empire through the pockets of the Spanish king, first caught sight of land at what we generally call Hispanola today.  Hispanola, of course, means Little Spain, and Columbus dubbed the people already living there 'indians,' since his best intel was that he had found the east coast of India.

Columbus did not discover the so-called New World.  His mission was to sail south of the Northern Lands and find a route to Asia that was tradeable.  At that time, North America was well-known in academia.  New Vinland, off the coast of modern Canada, had been a Viking colony for centuries.  An Irish monk had produced a map in 1135, that clearly showed the coast as far south as the current Cape Cod.  Other secret maps showed the east coast of North America and South America, though the central regions were still blank.  Some maps also show parts of Antarctica, while others clearly show the Northern Passage, long before Columbus came along.

But, the well-known northern route was impassable half the year, and dangerous the other half.  Plus, it only came to that annoying thing called the Northern Lands, that stood between Europe and the gold and spices of India and the Spice Islands (Indonesia).  The overland route to get there was treacherous, and the sea route had to cross Cape Hope at the southern tip of Africa, which was famous for ship-wrecking storms.  The Ming emperors of China were laying claim to overland routes and attacking any caravans that didn't pay tribute.

Meanwhile, Admiral Zheng He was doing pretty much what Columbus did, only 50 years earlier.  He was sent by the Ming emperor to map and discover new trade routes, and also to claim everything he found in the name of the emperor.  Though disputed, there is evidence that he landed in modern California and mapped at least part of the west coast of North America.  Zheng describes a plant in his logs that looks and sounds a lot like a prickly pear cactus, which only grows in the Americas.  Rock carvings and glyphs have also been found in California bearing characters that look a lot like old forms of Chinese.

There is even more evidence, completely rejected by the Catholic hierarchy, and thus western civilization, that trade flourished between South America and ancient Egypt.  A great many mummies in Egypt have tested positive of cocaine, which could only come from South America.  There are many other lines of research, as well, that would ties the Old and New Worlds together centuries, if not millennia, before Columbus.  So what, exactly, did Columbus discover, and what was his real mission?

Evidence has come to light in recent years, including the discovery of one of Columbus' wrecked ships, that the hull and keel designs for his ships was radically new.  Supposedly imparting greater speed and maneuverability, these designs were state secrets of Spain until the 1980s.  The king of Spain had given Columbus three of these vessels to test in open ocean as part of the deal.

Zheng He

Columbus had pitched the deal to the king by noting the gap between North and South America on the super secret documents of the time, probably by combining some of the best of the maps.  He proposed that the gap between the continents offered a route through to southeast Asia, thus avoiding the overland routes controlled by the Ming, and sneaking in the backdoor to load up on all those riches.

He also wanted to find tradeable wind currents that would allow travel much father south than the perilous northern Atlantic.  Navigators there were stuck for six months of the year, and ice floes presented major hazards for the other six months.  A more southerly route, both coming and going, would be a major coupe and give the one who possessed that knowledge wealth beyond calculation.

In fact, Columbus believed he had landed in the eastern extent of Indonesia, when in fact, he had hit an island in the Caribbean.  Seeing no other imperial flags around (i.e. the Ming), he stuck Spain's flag in the sand and claimed the land for the Holy Roman Empire.

In the east, Zheng had done much the same thing in southeast Asia, Australia, India, and the Middle East.

Certainly, if Columbus could find the backdoor, it would provide invaluable military advantage.  By this point in history, Europe had been threatened by Attila the Hun and Jengis Khan.  If the Holy Roman Empire had a means to flank an Eastern army, they would have tremendous tactical advantage in the event of another invasion.

In other words, 500 years later, we are replaying the trade wars that first ignited in the 1400s.  East versus West, competing to see who will control which lands and trade routes.  Staking out territory and performing an elaborate dance in order to avoid direct confrontation.

Things never change.

Today, China is staking out its client states and sphere of influence, and the Anglo-American Empire is doing the same.  It involves not only trade and access to mineral wealth, but now has taken to the skies.  The Anglo-Americans have staked out near-Earth orbit with their space station, and the Chinese have launched the first section of their own station, with the second piece to follow next month.  Both sides are still vying for military and economic advantage over the other.  And the brown and black skins are again annoying cannon fodder in the middle, squatting on all that wealth that the empires need to feed their greed.

It serves the interests of the Western Empire to keep these things secret and foster fairy tales like Columbus discovering the New World.  One, it hides the vicious and bloody truth, and two it promotes a benign farce that Westerners have just been casual explorers, wanting to find new things and meet new people.  One has to only read "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee," to know that this fairy tale is all but true.

What all of this highlights is that current events are nothing more than the playing out of centuries-long global conquest.  The battles have flared up and receded, but the same currents that began even before the Crusades are still influencing modern headlines.  There has been a war raging between East and West for far longer than most of us know or admit.  Because most of us stopped reading and learning somewhere around high school, we labor under the illusions cast over our eyes, and are unable to see the currents of time swirling through our lives.

Our educations have left us crippled and blind.  We were taught by rote, memorizing 'facts' and regurgitating them on tests.  Once we left school, we figured all that 'old stuff' didn't have anything to do with our modern lives.  We just needed to remember October 12, 1492, to pass the test.  What did anything else matter?  There were girls to chase and things to do, and then families and mortgages and car payments.  Who cared about Columbus?

Someone cares, because the battle, of which he was a small part, is still raging and still impacting our lives.  At the highest levels in both East and West, someone hasn't forgotten, and they are still pushing their agendas written centuries ago.  It's as real as the feud between the Amish families that led to the beard cuttings just recently.  These things have been going on forever, but from the outside, they look like strange isolated events without context.  And since it wasn't our beard, we go about our business after a brief chuckle, having no clue about why and having no interest in finding out.

In fact, it is this very history that has kept the truth about UFOs and ruins on other planets and evidence of life "out there" hidden from most of us.  The Brookings Report of 1960 recognized what cultures with superior technology do to those without.  They looked at the history of Columbus and Zheng and all the rest, and saw that advanced cultures always decimate the lessers.  Even the concept of 'advanced' based solely on guns and indoor plumbing is a conceit to justify egregious actions against who are perfectly happy not engineering the world.

Colubus' Notes to Marco Polo

At this very moment, there is a tribe here in Indonesia whose society is commonly termed 'Stone Age.'  They are perfectly happy that way and have avoided contact with the world at large.  But, they made a fatal mistake.  Their ancestral lands were set atop one of the richest tin deposits ever found.  Now a French company is in the process of destroying these people and their way of life to get to the dirt under them.  What's the bet they've already stuck a flag in it?

So, along we go on our merry ways, not a care in the world.  No one looks to see what has gone before to understand where we are.  At the bare minimum, we owe it to ourselves to find out why mistakes were made before, and try to avoid them.  More useful would be to understand our compulsion for empire, and the death and destruction it carries.  Then maybe, just maybe, folks could live in peace and pursue their individual enlightenment and happiness.

Or we could just destroy more people for money.

By The Way, The Sky Is Blue

One good reader sent me an email last night saying, 'the truth is on the internet, 9/11 was an inside job.'

Fish need water to live.

I'm one of those weird people. I don't take anyone's word for anything, especially if that word is coming from anything near government. Being the son of a politician, I learned enough from the inside out to know the whole game is completely, totally and unquestionablly rigged. Worse than rigged, it's a complete sham.

Futhermore, a certain family whose name is synonamous with 'shrub' is so deep in it, that 9/11 could have only happened on their watch. And if I hear another one of them claim to be Texan, I'm going to puke.

Anyway, back to being weird. I was in New York a couple of years before 9/11, and I was standing on the plaza between the two towers when I noticed thousands of cracks. One of the people I was with said that those appeared in 1993, when the first attack occured. That piqued my curiosity, and later I went down in the garage to see for myself where the bomb had gone off.

I was in a van at one of the lowest levels of the underground parking, snugged up again one of the central support columns. It was a huge bomb, if desciptions of the damage are anything to go by. In hindsight, it occurs to my suspicious mind that 1993 was a test run to see what it would take to bring down the towers. It was also a convenient excuse to have crews go through every inch of the building without drawing much attention. So it you're wondering how they could have planted the explosives, there's your answer.

It also came out that the FBI gave the bomb recipe to the poor numbnuts that were stirred up to do the job. The FBI also gave them explicit instructions on how to build the bomb, where to park it, when to do it, and gave them money, wine and women to keep 'em going. Don't believe me? Look it up. The docs were obtained by FOIA.

Another reason I'm weird, and maybe it's just my media/news background, but the minute I heard about the first tower, I tuned in CNN and popped in a Beta-D on the direct feed from the bird (I recorded the satellite feed). I later analysed the video and found what I already knew: explosives going off floor-by-floor. I knew it already because, as an editor, I have a trained eye to catch split-second changes in images. Back in the day, I could spot things in one-sixtieth (1/60th) of a second.

I recorded hours of footage and watched most of it frame-by-frame. In addition, having done training videos on things like controlled demolition and documentaries on the contstruction of high-rise buildings, I have learned a few things about architecture and explosives.

Poo, you say. What do I know?

Well, the nature of producing a video means that first, I spend many hours of intense study to learn about the subject. Then, I spend more time with an SME, or subject matter expert, and we work together to develop the script. I have to know what to shoot and what order these things have to go in, in order to do the first-rate job that my clients demanded.

I then spent weeks reviewing the footage, editing the videos and polishing the product. In some ways, I got better training than many folks, short of actualy hands-on. I followed processes with pain-staking detail, shooting multiple angles. I watched the footage over and over, sometimes a single edit could take an hour to perfect. Then the client would spot some little detail which meant I had to choose a lesser take with no mistakes, but I learned every little detail.

In other words, I knew what I was looking at, and how to analyze the footage.

In November of 2002, I was in Long Island and Throg's Neck shooting another video. I had a helicopter (getting permits that soon after the attacks was a story in itself) to do some aerials over Long Island sound and Brooklyn Bridge. We spun over Ground Zero a couple of times, so I shot some tape on it. I also spent a day off at Ground Zero, poking around and shooting some footage.

I put together a little video I thought was pretty open-and-shut on the whole thing. I took multiple angles, before, during and after. I was able to spot and highlight small details that would escape most people's attention. I showed it to a few people.

I was damn near tarred and feathered, then drawn and quartered. At the time, no one wanted to hear anything that made all the flag waving a little less nationalistic. Within minutes of viewing some of the feeds, I knew what was going on, but people weren't ready to hear or see it then.

All of that work is sitting in my film vault 10,000 miles away now. And now it's popular to show how it was all an inside job. I gave up my quest and left the States eventually. Couldn't do it any longer.

There is nothing worse than knowing the truth and no one will believe you, much less look at any evidence you have amassed. Everyone wants to live in Snow White land, where the institutions that they have entrusted their lives to are not evil, conniving death mongers.

We don't want to associate the Sand Creek Massacre or the Dresden Holocaust as products of our own power and complicity. After all, if We the People gave the government power, then We the People are responsible for what it does with that power.

The next time you vote, think about how many people you are killing with your choice. Makes that moment a little more important, doesn't it?

I have only voted two times in my entire life, and both times were straight Libertarian tickets, with the exception of Ross Perot.

I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what my government is capable of, and I want nothing to do with it. Maybe it's time for everyone to start taking a clear-eyed look at what is being done, and HAS been done, in our names. Take off the rose-colored glasses and crack open a non-sanitized history book. You won't like what you see, but that's the point. If the toilet's dirty, you flush it.

Like Victor Frankenstein, it's time for us to take responsibility for what we have created. We gave life to an unequalled evil by doing...NOTHING. The time is come to do SOMETHING.

As an expert in media and TV, the best thing I can tell you to do, at least at first, is TURN OFF THE DAMN TV! Then, stop drinking fluoride. After that, you're on your own.

One reason I got out of the news business is that I was stringing for a Not too Bright Channel in South Africa, in the days of apartieid. I was sent to the scene of a 'race riot.' Turns out, it was two families throwing rocks at each other because one accused the other of stealing a chicken. In orther words, it was black-on-black and had nothing to do with 'The Struggle.' Being on the clock, I shot some footage and dutifully uploaded it, along with my notes on what had occured. The next night, a man with a Broke Jaw introduced my footage as the latest fighting over equal rights.

I quit that night.