I started high school in 1968, a tumultuous year of change, both for the country and myself. For the first time I was exposed to long hair freaky people, mostly from the upper grades. I was also exposed to different alternative political viewpoints and alternative life styles than those from grade school and junior high. It didn't take long, by my sophomore year I had tuned in and turned on.

I can freely admit that my friends and I experimented with drugs, mostly pot and LSD (acid). Acid was hit or miss where I lived, you never really knew what you were getting until you tried it. We very rarely got the good stuff like owsley, what we got was usually in pill form which meant it was cut with substances like speed. That made the trip very unpredictable. It could be very enjoyable or a really bad trip with everything in between. I never had a bad trip but I witnessed them. I saw friends have breaks with reality and one that never came back. I did, though, have a couple of trips where all I could do was sit in a chair and hold onto the arms as firm as I could until I came down. It was that intense.

I see the current political situation much like that. Hold on tight.

Sometimes when you're watching history happen it goes by really fast. Like the last couple of weeks or so. If political years are like dog years, we all just aged rapidly.

I wont try to add anything new to the Trump Assassination^© story lines, just about all has already been said, but I do want to point out how the incident has proven to be a masterclass in marketing, symbolism and narrative creation and control, both before and after the event.

In a timeline of an event there is a past, a present, and a future. The past and the future are predicated on the present. The present being that fleeting fragment of a millisecond in time that we recognize as the here and now, that swiftly renders the future into the past. It's that fleeting moment of the present that the story tellers use to define the past and the future to fit within a narrative. Never mind that you witnessed the event in real time, that's not what you saw, here's what you saw, laid out in a neat package of cognitive bias.

Package it in patriotism, repeat the media message ad nauseam, add in some slick AI imaging and babbling talking heads, and you've got a story line worthy of a TMZ gossip column.

That's how modern histories are written, and truth is dispatched right before our eyes.

Sometimes it feels like I'm witnessing a Greek Tragedy. One that even Sophocles may not have dreamed of.

Surely, the same human dynamics were at play in Sophocles' time as they are today, but if one wanted to pen a modern Greek Tragedy a seminal factor that would be beyond an ancient Greek's understanding would be, digital technology. That technology amplifies the modern stage exponentially, in which the ancient Greeks would have to invent a new vocabulary to explain the plight of the contemporary hoi polloi.

I watched the debate so you wouldn't have to. I was going to do a summary write up about it, but after watching it I don't want to sound biased, so I'm not going to make a judgement call on this one.

Except for this:

Watching this debate was like watching two schoolyard bullies pounding their chests about how great they are and daring the other to knock the proverbial chip off of their shoulders.

If you didn't watch it and I don't blame you if you didn't, surely, in the next few days, you all will see clip after clip of this melee, I'll leave it up to you to make your own judgement.

Whew, boy!

I think it's safe to say that we all here at c99 are political junkies. Have you ever wondered why?

I, like many others, became politically active when I was young because certain policies affected my life. I became politically aware in the late sixties. Ever more so as I approached age 18.

The Vietnam War had that affect on me.

So, my question is twofold:

What was the catalyst that got you involved in politics?

Why do we torture ourselves with politics when blissful ignorance is more soothing.

Man oh man, this whole end-of-empire show is sure getting suspenseful, wouldn't you say? Every day, it seems, another layer of FUD is unveiled. So many things are thrown at us from so many directions, repeatedly, it's mind boggling. Where does one begin to sort it all out?

Is it all by design? Yeah, probably.

What are the odds that so many world changing events could be stacked up at the same time, back to back, from let's say, about 2019 to 2024 or so, in just five short years?

I will concede that many, if not most, of the existential threats before us are man made, but what are the odds that the convergence of these events are organic? Oh, I guess it could happen, but with so much power and wealth at play, my hunch is human intervention is helping to compress a millennium's worth of cataclysm into just a few short years.

For the benefit of whom? The sponsors of these events, of course. It's pretty obvious.

But, just when things seem like they can't get any more fudistic, something like this, from Harvard University, pops up:

Note: I wrote the following essay yesterday before the Trump verdict. Will the verdict affect the campaign? I don't know, but I doubt it. All bets are off though if he goes to jail.

I was going to forgo publishing this piece in lieu of a trial verdict essay, but I'm going to post it anyway as the campaign promises are more than likely still valid.

Please use comments below if you wish to discuss the hush money trial.

It's that time again, folks.

Every four years our brains are subjected to massaged messages of mendacity and misinformation by those that would cast themselves as All Things to All Men.

I wont call them silver tongued devils, for that, they are not. I wont call them paragons of principle either, for that, they are certainly not. They will delude, dissemble, dissimulate, distort and dupe you with perjurious promises and prevarications. They'll twist words, obfuscate meanings and lie their butts off while they promise you the world, until elected anyway.

Like any good traveling salesman, they need to first get a foot in the door to sell their product. That's what campaigns are for.

Let's take a look at what snake oil they're selling this time around. But first, let me ask you, "Would you buy a used car from this man?

Back on 12/30/22 I wrote a piece titled Normalizing the New Normal about Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter and the subsequent revelations about the US government's collusion in censoring content on the platform, especially during the 2020 election. The article's basic premise was this:

Let's suppose that freedom of speech may not be Musk's ultimate goal in buying Twitter. Let's suppose that normalizing the new normal is actually the goal. What do I mean by that?

Musk is bringing front and center the alphabet agencies hand in censoring Twitter users. He is exposing that which many of us have suspected for a long time, that is, the government is colluding with big tech to catapult their narrative and to shut down oppositional view points. Exposing that is a good thing, right? My immediate reaction was, "Sure is". But, wait a minute.

Since I've been going on about normalizing the new normal, let me try to explain. The behind the scenes collusion of big tech and the state is being exposed with the intent to normalize that unholy marriage. To put it out there for all to see. It's shocking, right? But after a while the shock wears off and people begin to accept it. There's nothing that can be done about it, so we have to live with it, right? There's no hope citizen, accept your medicine and let Big Daddy Government handle this. Accept this fact and prepare yourself for CBDCs and digital slavery. Go back to sleep.

People are and will be outraged. "My Constitution" is crying out across the land. Folks will ululate, throw up their hands, shake their heads, call out for reform. But slowly, over time, the short attention span majority will move on to the next big thing and the tech/state collusion will be normalized and we the people have lost another right. Perhaps the most important right of all. And it's out there for all to see.

The new normal has been normalized.

Much of Donald Trumps victory in 2016 presidential election was attributed to the massive free publicity that was conferred upon him by the mainstream media.

Trump is a master of self promotion. He knows how to sell himself. He put on a show and the press ate it up.

He and the press were locked in a symbiotic dance of a vote seeking parasite feeding on a money seeking ratings driven host, and vice versa.

Well folks, they're doing it again.

A few years back I had a bad dream, no, it was a nightmare. The worst I've ever had. I was lying on my back in deep sleep and suddenly there was a very large ominous man-like figure standing next to the bed looming over me. This apparition suddenly jumped up and sat on my chest with its knees on my arms so I was totally pinned down, I couldn't move. I struggled to free myself but couldn't budge an inch. I then let loose with a primal scream, you know, the kind of a nightmarish scream that you can feel vibrating deep in your throat but it just doesn't produce any sound no matter how much your subconscious mind wills it.

That unresolved scream woke me up. I was lying there on my back, eyes still closed as I thought to myself, "Phew, that dream was too realistic, I'm glad the scream shocked me out of it". I was actually sweating and my heart was thumping. I said something out loud to prove to myself that I was awake, I don't remember what I said, but my voice was back. Or so I thought.