When the Titanic sank, it would have been a blot on the record of the ocean voyage industry, except for one thing: the incident never occurred.
There never was one of three Olympic class ocean-going vessels operated by White Star Lines called the Titanic. It was never designed by Thomas Andrews, who was not the chief naval architect of the non-existent Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast where it was not built, and who didn’t himself die in the disaster that didn’t befall the ship. It was not 882 feet 9 inches long, 92-and-a-half feet wide at its widest point. It was never under the command of Captain Edward Smith, who never went down with the ship, which didn’t sink after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic and in any case never manifested in this material realm.
The unsinkable Titanic and its ironic fate of sinking was entirely the invention of filmmaker and noted hoaxster, James Cameron. Cameron himself never existed. He was a hoax perpetrated by Hollywood Jews like me. We can’t believe you all fell for that crap. Cameron did not begin his career running a three-card Monte scam on Astor Place in New York City, which was not named after American millionaire John Jacob Astor IV, who also did not die in the mythical sinking of the ironically unsinkable non-existent Titanic.
None of the movies Cameron is supposed to have made have ever existed, not even the abysmally non-existent The Abyss, nor True Lies, evidence of which has been grossly exaggerated.
But the biggest and least believable hoax to crawl from this tangled nexus of falsehoods was the crisis actor known as The Unsinkable Molly Brown. The idea that the bones of her skeleton were made from French-milled soap has never been disproven, because such a claim has never been made. Margaret “Molly” Brown, of course, never didn’t go down with the Titanic because the Titanic was never a real thing. After her murder by the mythical murderer Michael Myers whose impossible crimes were chronicled in the Halloween films, a slasher-movie franchise that itself only barely existed, Molly Brown herself was discovered to have been a portly, dyspeptic crisis actor named Alex Jones.
Under the pseudonym, “Brown,” Jones has portrayed numerous victims of false-flag catastrophes. In one of them, tentatively titled The OJ Simpson Murders, Jones was paid to portray the luckless Nicole Brown Simpson, no pseudo-relation. Jones won the role thanks to his ability to live for many days without a head.
Among Jones’s other crisis portrayals is the role of up to 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilian non-combatants in the Sơn Tịnh District of South Vietnam, in the village of Mỹ Lai, massacred by US soldiers during the long occupation of the country by the US military and its commercial subsidiaries. The false flag operation known in the US as the Vietnam War was actually an attack by movie-making Jews meant to cover up their attack in 1921 on a town in close proximity to Tulsa, Oklahoma populated by about 1,200 Alex Jones clones and one original Alex Jones, a town known colloquially as Fat Wall Street. The Joneses of Fat Wall Street were recently compensated in secret reparations amounting to somewhere in the millions of dollars.
Many such Jones Towns, as they’re called, have existed throughout history. The first Jones Town was the twin cities of Sodom and Gomora, which was supposedly destroyed by the mythical demolition firm, Fire and Brimstone and Co., as punishment for the unpleasant personalities of the towns’ inhabitants. Jones reportedly reaped an undisclosed amount of shekels from that operation, possibly hundreds of thousands. His uncanny ability to imitate a population of innocent people of anywhere from a few dozen to many millions has since served him as a lucrative source of the common currency of whatever realm he finds it to his advantage to serve.
His talent as a mimic truly came into play when he was hired by giants to play all the creatures of the world not taken aboard Noah’s famous ark. Every cubit of the ark, of course, was mythical. There was no such thing, nor was there any flood, great or small, of the type described in the legends of various cultures throughout the world. The Great Deluge, or Great Flood, was a cover story created by the mixed offspring of angels and humans, the Nephilim, who wished humanity to believe they no longer existed when in fact it is they, or maybe others with a similarly nefarious agenda, who are pulling the strings of those who seek to keep us under their yokey and shacklish domination.
The more curious among you might find yourselves asking, “Are all famous massacres the work of Alex Jones?”
The answer, of course, if you want an answer and want to believe an answer, is yes.
“Even the ones claimed to be hoaxes by Alex Jones himself?”
“Yes, it’s a tactic of misdirection and hiding in plain sight.”
“Really?” you might find yourselves asking, and the response is, “Yes, really.”
“Even the massacre of Jews in Palestine by the invading Greeks as reported by Flavius Joseph in his book, Jewish Antiquities?” Yes, all the victims were Alex Jones wearing Jewface.
“Even the massacre of the first born by Pharoah’s order in ancient Egypt?” Yes, every baby was played by Alex Jones, and subsequently, each baby killed by the hand of the angel of God in retribution was also played by Alex Jones. Jones has habitually played both ends against the middle. Jones played the cavalrymen killed in the battle of The Little Bighorn, as well as the Lakota Sioux people starved by the government of the USA, neither of which ever happened.
The simple SuperTrue® fact of the matter is, much like the single electron zooming everywhere instantaneously, creating the ephemeral dream we perceive as material reality, every victim of everything has been Alex Jones all along. Alex Jones is the eternal cosmic victim of everything victimizing. We wouldn’t say it and by law we couldn’t say it if it wasn’t SuperTrue®! Even the so-called Jews, who run everything from behind the scenes, yet are victims of the calumny and libel that they run everything from behind the scenes, even the genocides they’ve suffered, even the current Palestinians whose erstwhile homes they occupy and whose ghettoized populations the Israeli military seeks to control are in fact simply Alex Jones in quantum superposition in every scenario, real or imagined, agonized or dreamed, perceived or ignored.
It's mind-blowing, but if it weren’t mind-blowing, how could we be certain it was SuperTrue®? It’s so unbelievable we have no choice but to ultra-believe it.
If you believe that a “right to work” law is about supporting workers’ rights, I’ve got some swamp land in Florida you might want to buy. Not a swamp, actually; more of a bog. How much does it cost? If you have to ask, you couldn’t afford it.
It’s a pretty special bog. Windover Pond. Since 1982, Windover Archaeological Site. They found some 8000-year-old brains in that Florida bog. No, none of them belonged to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, but that is a good guess. Like the governor’s brain, these have shrunken down to a quarter of the size of that of a living sentient human. Also like the governor’s brain, one would be hard-pressed to use it for thinking in its current condition. Different from the governor’s brain is that the 8000-year-old brains have the excuse of having been buried under ten feet of peat for 8000 years.
Eighty centuries. Eight millennia. Thereabouts.
Archaeologists had the bog drained so they could retrieve all the dead people. They found about ten thousand pieces of human remains representing some 168 corpses. And this was no mass grave like that mass frog grave we learned about a few weeks ago in the segment entitled, “The Cambridge Holocaust.” This was not the locus of any war or massacre or even black plague body dump. Nor was this a mass sacrificial site.
This, dear listeners, was a community cemetery. The people were mostly buried in the fetal position on their left side with their heads oriented north. They were buried ceremonially with objects and covered in woven fabric, fabric that survived, protected from decay, for eighty centuries by the Ph neutral water and anoxic, antibiotic nature of the bog. The deceased were even anchored with stakes so they wouldn’t float to the surface and be picked over by varmints. These ceremonial burials took place in this bog over generations, and DNA showed that one family had been burying their dead there for over a hundred years.
Tradition, bum ba da dum, tweet deedle deedle deedle deedle deet Tradition!
But they weren’t Jews from the Pale of Settlement, most likely, though genetically they are thought to have originated in what is now Russia, but in the North Asian part. So maybe some of their descendants were neighbors, either in Siberia or down in Boca Raton. People get around.
Were they maybe aliens from outer space? Or were they white Europeans who skated over on top of the frozen Atlantic, making the true claim of First Nationhood actually a white thang? These questions are controversial, undoubtedly, but nonetheless stupid and without relevance.
More important is: how did Arlene Cooper-Dwight in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, know to go to Nordstrom Rack on Monday November 14, 1994 and find the polo shirts her uncle wanted for Christmas on sale, even before that week’s Valu-Pak of coupons arrived in the mail? Looking back on her reason for going to that emporium, Arlene linked the links of her chain of decisions back together and said she believed she was told to go and avail herself of the on-sale items by a figure in a dream. The figure looked like a timeless combination of Danny Trejo and Lou Diamond Phillips.
Two years later, Tad Rostoff felt the uncontrollable desire to go to Office Depot and buy an eight-pack of fluorescent cream-gel pens at 50% off the regular price and a blank book full of black pages especially for use with fluorescent cream-gel pens, also at a 50% discount, for his niece on her fourteenth birthday. It was an entirely impulse buy, yet it was exactly what his niece had wanted, even more than the tickets to the Mariah Carey concert her parents bought for full price.
Asked what, if any, images had passed through his mind during the bargain-achievement experience, Tad Rostoff said that he’d had a vivid vision of a mortar and pestle carved out of rock. Uncannily, a mortar and pestle of just that description had been retrieved from among the burial objects at the Windover Archaeological Site.
For the next twenty-eight years, up to the present moment, several dozen people, throughout the area from Florida to the Continental Divide, have been directed by visions or dreams or, in one case, a talking goose, to go to specific retail outlets. Upon arriving at the establishments, they invariably encountered one or more severely discounted items with special significance to themselves or their friends or family members. From fresh English peas to a fat leather Barcalounger recliner with electric beverage-cooling cupholder, the bargains just keep coming. Bargains, bargains, bargains galore.
And every vision seems to have some link to the ancient community whose cemetery was unearthed at Windover Pond. Was there really a connection, or were the discount recipients being swayed by leading questions or winks, leers, and other suggestive facial spasms of their interlocutors?
There was only one scientific way to know for sure, and that was to bring in a psychic consultant.
Her name has been lost in the shuffle. Likewise, any description of her appearance or mannerisms. Some say she erased all that evidence from the minds of all who might give her up to the angry ancestors of her mysterious people, but that conjecture is so odd, ill-considered, and unlikely that it might be true, or even SuperTrue®.
Following up on this non-sequitur clue, our researchers have pieced together what might have happened during the psychic’s investigation, given the lack of any parameters of reason.
Her name was, let’s say, Flois. Not her real name, nor anyone’s real name, probably. Using a device of her own devising, this Flois, if indeed that was her name, set up her pullies, refracting balloons, intake samovars, sparkling parabola funnel mirrors of pflignite and squartz, cranked it up to 115 glagoherpses, and let ‘er rip. The complantangenent meter went wiggling off the chart. The direction flomblossism mechanically oblated through the roof, describing a refraction arc of no more than three degrees three micro-metric minutes from the burial ground of the mystery civilization, and from there to the remains of their prune-like shrunken brains, bent on a bias as through a glass darkly directly to the purchasing centers of the shoppers’ pineal glands, thereby stimulating their eyes, ears, nose, and throat, preparing them emotionally, physically, and a couple other ways to hunt for, locate, and purchase, at a substantial reduction in the normal price, whatever the ancient persons, viewing our market economy from their portholes in the ship of dead souls, sailing through the grasmotic effluviasma of … what were we talking about again?
Anyway, that proved it to our satisfaction. And when it comes to smart shopping, satisfaction is what it’s all about.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!
It is well known that the 12th Century abbess, theologian, poet, mystic, and musician, Hildegard von Bingen, composed her famous morality musical revue, Ordo Virtutum, known in English as The Virtue Play, based on music she heard in one of the many trances during which her divine visions were revealed.
It is also known that Saint Hildegard, beatified in 2012 by recently-retired Pope Benedict, kept a fifty-five-pound (25 kg) dry-cured Westphalian ham in her sleeping chamber in the abbey at Disibodenberg and then at Rupertsberg under a blanket of coarsely-woven wool.
It should be no trouble, then, to place the two facts, the seeing of visions and the companioning with the ham, one fact next to the other, tie them together with additional facts from little-known sources, bind them with the duct tape of bold supposition, and discern for yourself the SuperTruth® that Hildegard’s inspiration for the Ordo Virtutum emerged from no other source than out of her beloved ham in signals from the ultra-high-wattage broadcasting antennae of Jesus in His faraway fortress of solitude, Heaven.
As a child, Little Hildegard first started having visions, hearing voices, feeling feelings, and smelling smells when she was around five years old. This was in about the year 1103. At that time she was known to be fond of carrying with her everywhere she went a cowhide pouch containing a severed, desiccated rabbit’s foot. As she grew older and entered the monastery as an oblate and assistant to Sister Jutta, she could often be found in the chapel communing with a braided cross woven of strips of venison jerky. Later some cured, dried beef, called “speck,” in a hunk about the size of a full-grown squirrel, occupied her teenage years in the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenberg. By the time she became prioress and moved her nuns to St. Rupertsberg, she had already taken up residence with the enormous meat product.
Sister Jutta, when Hildegard visited her on her deathbed, expressed her disapproval of the relationship. In Hidelgard’s own records of her visions, the Scivias, the Liber vitae meritorum, and the De operatione Dei, she never mentions her communications with the ham, which might seem odd given the big deal we’re making of it here. We can most logically attribute the omission to Jutta’s disapprobation and Hildegard’s wounded feelings. Whatever clairvoyant and prophetic sensory extravaganzas the ham revealed to her, the ecstasy – as with all experiences worthy of being so called – in addition to being ecstatic, weighed upon her with the heavy burden of shame.
Still, as has been the way with many nuns, Hildegard persisted in her queer habit. Every night she slept with the cumbersome recumbent joint of preserved pork by her side. Hildegard would cohabit with the ham, lying beside the dry-cured meat much as a Scottish herdsman might embrace the sheep he’s wooing in his Highland bower, caressing its cold-cut contours, petting its firm pellicle, whispering into the grain of its muscle, sensible to its every sinew, alert to the vibrations of its bone.
The two, the nun and her ham, would at times meet on an unearthly plane, in each other’s dream, and dream together as one. Nun and ham. Ham and nun. One divine being. Being divine one. Where we divine one we divine all.
On a particularly cold Rhineland autumn night, according to a cousin of a friend of a friend’s cousin who’d heard it from another friend, Hildegard experienced a rush of sensation in which the entirety of the Ordo Virtutum washed over her, in full, including plainchant music, lyrics, book, lighting effects, cast, costumes, choreography, and even the program design. “Eureka!” she exclaimed on coming down from her trip, but in Latin instead of Greek.
Well, of course we know in retrospect that the production was a smash hit, running for five hundred consecutive years on the Saxon circuit. Years later, George S. Kaufman famously said: “Satire is what closes on Saturday, but mystery morality musicals are forever matinéed, and that von Bingen’s is beaut!” He also said, “That’s no Teutonic turkey!” But by then no one had been listening to him for at least half an hour.
The flesh of animals –the monkey’s paw – and even humans – witness the Viking or the New Guinean devour the heart or drink the blood of a conquered foe to absorb his bravery, or the Aguaruna who parlays with his shrunken head – once-living portions of flesh have long been esteemed for their ability to conduct consciousness and power across the boundary between life and death. Hildegard von Bingen’s ham radio connection to Heaven is far from the only example of cold cuts, salumi, and deli meats intermediating between our world and the world beyond.
Nostradamus was known to consult a pistachio mortadella.
Gershom Sholem, no stranger himself to the deli counter, describes Rabbi Isaac Luria’s longtime mystical bond with a teawurst.
It’s documented quite well that many spiritualists fell under the spell of Blavatsky’s bologna.
Rasputin fraternized with a pair of kabanosi. Carlos Castaneda kept company with chorizo. William Blake had a weakness for weisswurst.
In Crackow, Aleister Crowley claimed kinship with the cosmic kielbasa of Khartoum.
Rumi made love to a plate of Moroccan merguez.
Rumanian chronicler of shamanic visions, Ioan Culianu, composed his most famous treatise on the gnostic knackwursts.
And of course, who can forget Sri Kriyananda Goswami and his shamanic salami?
The SuperTrue® record is plain: since the distant past, myriad seers have sought second-sight in sausage links to the spirit realm.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!
SuperTruth® has brought low the mighty human race. SuperTruth® has turned reality into insanity. SuperTruth® has turned insanity into anxiety, so at least the insane are motivated to go to work. At least anxiety forces us to find a way to function, to search for that which will relieve our anxiety. Life is a disease, and there’s only one cure. But since most of us fear death, we’ll have to settle for… SuperTruth®.
When skies hang pendulous leaden clouds of unnatural hue; seas skip like rams and leap and bow like fire-worshiping devils; the atmosphere groans fat and snappish with negative ions, the barometer uncoils, fright wigs are on edge, and pancake white refuses to be applied evenly to faces beaded with flop-condensation; and all the world’s stage feels burdened by a furrowed lowbrow glower redolent with the sense that too much time has been borrowed, the usurious interest is overdue and the gas gauge reads that your luck has run out; that is when the Lost Dauphine is sighted, bearing its unhappy driver and four dozen eternal passengers, cursed to ride the storm clouds galloping heavy over the bigtop… forever.
It had been a bad year for clowns. Chuckles, dressed as Peter Peanut, had been fatally shelled by an angry elephant who’d had enough of human shenanigans. Pennywise had his heart pulled out by the Losers Club. Octavio the Clown was killed by Frank Lopez’s hitmen in an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Tony Montana. Violator the Clown’s head was cut off by Spawn. Krusty was eaten by Zombie Sideshow Mel. A posse of Penn State students rampaged with the intent to lynch a thousand clowns, but only got the unfortunate Bippo. But the worst clownaclysm of all was the notorious disaster of the Dauphine.
In September of 1989, tragedy struck the non-clown community: 31-year-old Leslie Pulhar, a waitress from Royal Oak, Michigan, was driving across the Mackinac Bridge to visit her boyfriend in the Upper Peninsula. The bridge runs high above the Straits of Mackinac, connecting the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with the Lower. To this day no one knows why the two are part of the same state. Perhaps the thinking was that, as two peninsulas, they had so much in common they simply belonged together. Whatever the reason, Pulhar died when her Yugo was blown off the bridge by a 48-mile-an-hour gust of wind that sent it plummeting 160 feet into the freshwater straits below.
Not one week later, 48 clown passengers and one hobo clown driver named Bum Steer piled into a classic Renault Dauphine. Despite the shadow of Pulhar’s death hanging over them, they had agreed to confront the gloomy prospect of driving yet another economy car over the very same bridge.
What had led them to make this decision? Well, they were the Ypsilanti Clown College class of ’89, after all. They’d been trained for this. They were determined to attend the “Well Above The 45th Parallel” Midwest clowning convention in Escanaba. Perhaps they felt their combined weight would give them stability and prevent them from suffering the same tragic fate as Pulhar.
But does a clown car impossibly stuffed with an absurd number of clowns actually achieve the total weight of the clowns, or does the absurdity collapse them into a six-dimensional Calabi–Yau manifold, (according to theories they were surely taught by Professor Daisy Floppytopper at Ypsi), sharing out most of their mass into other dimensions?
But clown sub-quantum physics was moot. They never found the opportunity to apply it, because Bum Steer, the sad hobo clown, driver of the Dauphine, was aptly named. Once they passed through Petoskey, a strangely persistent fog enveloped them. Bum Steer lost track of the surface of the highway itself. It was as though they were suspended in a uniformly gray-white limbo. This went on for hours.
How do we know what they experienced? One clown, Little Pip, somehow managed to crawl through the ventilation system, out of the grille, and jumped in panic to freedom and watched as the Dauphine, with the rest of the class of ’89, slipped out of sight, like a carp into a pool of cream.
Little Pip found himself afloat in the lake, at the vertex of an expanding horizon that stretched away into infinity. He treaded water there, his body going numb with cold, his mind falling into a madness in which visions of Hiawatha, Hemmingway, and the ghosts of the Chippewa sang Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” to him on endless loop.
Little Pip was pulled out of Little Traverse Bay off the coast of Harbor Springs on the verge of dying from hypothermia. He fell into a coma that lasted a week and a half. Afterwards he told his tale to a local journalist in a single afternoon. That night Little Pip’s heart mysteriously stopped beating with the abruptness of an alternator seizing up. His face was frozen in a mask of terror, his dead eyes bulged from their sockets. What had he seen?
There are times, at night, when the sky threatening a storm has displayed the unappealing colors of bruises on a battered body, bruised brooding clouds hanging leaden above the bigtop of one circus or another, one never knows which, when clowns and other circus folk testify that they have seen the Lost Dauphine appear. Bum Steer at the wheel, the knuckles of his gloves frayed, his eyes below the brim of his worn-out bowler hat are red and all but molten with tears. His painted frown drips down his jowls. The faces, noses, shoes, knees, and hats of the magically packed passengers press in chaotic discomfort against the window glass. One white-gloved hand reaches out of a partially open window, waving, now and then honking a bicycle horn or flaunting a rubber chicken.
It is said that if you stick out your thumb, hitch-hiker style, and in particular if that thumb is comically oversize, and moreover covered in a white glove, the Lost Dauphine may descend from the clouds. You might find it idling beside you. And the legend is that if you don’t flee from it as fast as your gangly legs and floppy feet will transport you, the gloved hand will pull you in through the window, into the six-dimensional Calabi–Yau manifold, and you will ride with the class of ’89 aboard the Lost Dauphine for eternity.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!
The loudest, most obnoxious mass of Christians had come to the general agreement that, the more Jesus loved you, the wealthier and more powerful He would make you in this world. He did this to balance out all the Muslims, Confucians, and other heathens Satan in His nastiness rendered wealthy and powerful. The only explanation for the majority of wealthy, powerful people in the world not being Christian was that, even though Jesus could easily win against the Devil, sometimes He let the Devil win, by mistake or on purpose, just to keep everyone guessing. If the overall picture were simple to interpret, faith wouldn’t be the test it was known it to be. And so, even under the simplistic, dogmatic doctrines of Dominionist Evangelical Christianity, there was room for confused outcomes.
And thank God for that!
Tom Brokaw was a simple, millionaire news-whisperer and fly-fisherman who called the generation that profited most from the FDR public works program—in other words an entire generation of welfare leeches—the “Greatest Generation.” Once in late September of the year 2022 (by the old TV Guide calendar), he wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times. In it he bragged about his friendship with – no, not post-modern Homer, David Letterman – Yvon Chouinard, son of a Froggy Canook mechanic who reluctantly became an outdoor apparel tycoon.
Brokaw, in an attempt to show how low he was slumming it by hanging out with a fellow millionaire, kept calling the guy a “dirtbag,” which was apparently some slang term rock-climbing skiers liked to call each other, and had not much to do with bags of dirt at all. He also referred to Chouinard’s early life as a leisure sportsman rock climber and skier as “hardscrabble,” a term usually used to describe the lives of poor farmers. Rocks are indeed hard, and Chouinard probably found Scrabble a challenging game as a child, but that did not qualify his life as “hardscrabble.” It’s no surprise that Tom Brokaw, who coined the incorrect moniker “Greatest Generation,” should describe the life of an avid outdoorsman who became an apparel capitalist as “hardscrabble.” Tom Brokaw didn’t really know what words meant. A survey of his coverage of US foreign policy during his years as propaganda parrot confirms this.
Brokaw wrote his piece, entitled braggadociously, “Yvon Chouinard Is the Founder of Patagonia. He’s Also My ‘Dirtbag’ Friend,” shortly after Chouinard made loud news by turning his company, Patagonia Incorporated, over to a non-profit pro-ecological consortium. They would still make Patagonia products, in as sustainable a way as they possibly could, but now 100% of the profits would go to supporting the work of grassroots environmental groups.
Wealth inequality would not be one of the consortium’s targets, because only through capitalist wealth-creation could Chouinard have amassed the money required to pay back the world, or what he considered the world, for the damage he’d reluctantly done by reluctantly becoming a reluctant CEO, able to bring his friend Tom Brokaw on “long hauls to Iceland,” as Brokaw put it, once again painting luxury, i.e. a ride in a jet, as hard work, the way one might refer to a dogsled trek across the wild tundra. But then again Brokaw thought standing in a river in waders smoking cigars with David Letterman was the equivalent of coaxing rice out of the bare Earth.
Also name-checked in the op-ed piece was Yvon and Tom’s close dirtbag friend, Doug Tompkins, another hardscrabble sporty outdoorsman who founded the non-pretentiously French-named apparel company, Esprit. Whereas Yvon believed capitalism could be pursued responsibly, Doug walked away from capitalism, having amassed enough wealth to buy an entire region of South America and establish it as a wild preserve fiefdom, putting the land in trust despite the will of its human inhabitants like an absentee feudal lord.
But that’s how things had to be done back then, under the yoke of capitalism. Human communities had to rely on the good will of individual benevolent custodians of property, distribution, policy, and wealth the likes of FDR, Andrew Carnegie, and the owners of Costco.
And if they weren’t benevolent and possessed no good will, humans and everyone else were merde out of luck.
One area Tompkins’ trust helped preserve was the Chiloé Island-Corcovado Gulf region of Chilean Patagonia. A complex of cold-water coral reefs, inland channels, archipelagos, fjords, fresh watersheds, and intermingling ocean currents, the region attracted increasing tourism, part of Tompkins’ entrepreneurial plan to sustain the inhabitants whose ability to decide he’d usurped, and the trend continued even after Tompkins’ death in 2015 from hypothermia resulting from a hardscrabble kayaking accident.
It’s unclear, however, if the Tompkins trust understood the adverse effects on blue whale reproduction caused by the increased noise from burgeoning ship traffic. The preservation of the zone’s wildness overtook entrepreneurial development though, enough to support the comeback of the blue whale population.
One whale understood the situation very well. That whale’s name, translated from blue-whalesong, was Florbitty Glubblebubber. Florbitty was born in Corcovado National Park, and realized almost immediately that she was the reincarnation of Doug Tompkins himself. Blue whale mind activity exists most expressively in the part of consciousness that in humans is devoted to dreaming. Thus Doug’s widow, Kris, who oversaw much of the trust’s environmental preservation work before and after Doug’s demise, was visited in a dream by Florbitty in the whale’s dream-guise as Doug.
Florbitty Dream-Doug held a series of seminars in the venue of Kris Tompkins’ unconscious. They were like Ted Talks but through the mixed media of dreamscape and whalesong. The immersive discourses finally proved to Kris that the cultural and material logic of capitalism, whether for profit or for one couple’s private idea of environmental preservation, was the problem. She had been trying to put out a fire by spraying it with lighter fluid.
Kris Tompkins awoke one morning after the final night of the multi-night seminar of dreams a changed woman. She immediately booked a tour of major cities of the world as the first convert to Cetaceo-homo-sapianity. She also began to devolve the Tompkins holdings to local community land conservators who in turn granted it to families of all types under conditions of responsible stewardship agreed on by a coalition of sustainable agriculture and ecological maintenance practitioners elected to non-contiguous terms of no more than three years. And that was how the apocalypse came to be limited to about half the disaster it could have been.
SuperTrue®? Yes. So SuperTrue® that you will not find a trace of it in the mainstream media of the time. Now, though, with the advent of Dreamsong Media Immersion techno-ritual practice, we can all enjoy tales told by mushrooms, euphausiids, quarks, cabbages, quasars, and kings from time immemorial to the far distant future. We no longer have to rely on the faulty and biased quackery of the likes of Tom Brokaw. The world is our singing oyster of knowledge and imagination.
And this has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!
As the crow flies, so shall it stop flying and settle down in a tree to watch the Romans dig a mass grave. Only a few miles north, as the crow flies, of Cambridge, England. As the crow flies, so shall it caw, and eventually fall to Earth, its feathers carried off by ants to build their ant-bowers, its flesh fattening the Cambridge worms, its bones turned to tinker-toys for Iron Age toddlers out of which to build tiny bone-henges.
But let us leave the subject of that tragic Iron Age crow that didn’t survive the Roman occupation. Few did, and not just crows. In point of fact, not a single person, crow, worm, nor it matters not what animal species, living or dead, today survives from the Roman occupation of Britain. Yet a certain song survives. A song of frogs. So, that is something.
Let us also leave aside all those dead humans, crows, and other species, and observe the Romans digging. What are they digging, here in Iron Age Cambridge? Why are they not enjoying the sunrise with a bowl of Romantic porridge flavored with borage and sorrel? Because they have their orders. They have gone from hut to hut in hamlet after hamlet, interrogating the occupants. They threatened to rape the women, cut parts off the men, or break the bones of babies to get at the truth.
They needn’t have bothered with threats. The humble Iron Age Britons, most of whom would have admitted to still being in the Stone Age, and proud of it, readily gave up the “guests” they’d been harboring.
In total, about five hundred fugitive frogs were discovered and arrested that day. The frogs were frog marched out to the village square, to where a mass grave was dug in view of the roundhouse, and were, one by one, executed by dagger and thrown into the pit.
Astonishing: there really was a mass grave of frogs in this area dating from the Iron Age. It’s both SuperTrue® and regular true. Really. Look it up!
What’s SuperTrue® about it is, of course, the story behind the remains, the conspiracy behind the tangible evidence, the rumors and innuendo by which an overactive imagination can make sense of the random clues. For example, there’s the possible fact that there were rumors the Romans believed to be true, about a frog prophet, King of the Frogs, whose army of followers – and, yes, the collective noun for frogs is indeed “army” (again, look it up!) – whose army of ranine followers believed the Frog King’s prophecy that a mighty general would arise, unite the Celtic tribes, and throw off the yoke of Roman tyranny. It is rumored today that this Frog King’s name was Pepe, but that’s a somewhat tart and possibly satirical rumor, and has yet to attain the internet currency required for it to be considered a SuperTruth®.
The Brits had been saving the frogs for supper, but they didn’t relish eating frogs. A bumper crop of turnips had just come in, and they were far keener on eating those for dinner than frogs. They had no feelings one way or the other about amphibious loyalty to Rome or the lack of it. They turned their frogs over to the Roman soldiers because they hadn’t really wanted them in the first place. They had been worried about a prophecy made by a charismatic mackerel that the turnip harvest would be washed away by a flood and had cached away the frog rations in case the mackerel’s turnip prophecy came true.
Rumors, prophecies, rumored prophecies, and subsequent adorable horrors swirled in abundance.
One rumor that comes just this close to being SuperTrue® is that it was the Britons themselves who started the rumor about the frog prophet and its loyal following of frog zealots. According to a recently rumored-to-be-recovered text by Tacitus, the despair demonstrated by the Britons at losing their frogs lacked the ring of authenticity, and, while Romans crucified the frog they had decided to designate as Pepe, a lot of the Celtic wailing and hair-pulling felt over-the-top, performative, and unconvincing.
A supposed witness claimed to have heard poorly-stifled laughter while the Romans were interrogating frogs to learn the truth about their treacherous plans, and when they flogged the frogs with tiny whips, few Brits could squelch their guffaws. And who among us could but guffaw at a frog-flogging, if only to keep from weeping? The tiny, frog-size whip, the suffering amphibian, the clownish centurion or whatever, leaning forward and squinting as if preparing to make a difficult billiard shot.
As the crow flies, so does it caw. A murder of crows cawed and guffawed at the flogging and holocausting of the army of frogs. How callous. The Romans, of course, assumed the crows were clamoring for a crack at the corpses, and gargled bitter chuckles in their Roman throats at how the crows would be disappointed when they saw the frog bodies interred out of reach of their plucking beaks.
But the Britons knew why the crows guffew. They knew the crows knew of the ruse, and found the Romans obtuse, too. And off the crows flew, as crows tend to do.
About a century later, the purported prophecy of treacherous Pepe, who may never have existed to make a prophecy in the first place, came about as true as such a probably non-existent prophecy could. Queen Boudica of Iceni united the tribes and led a revolt, not far from the mass grave of the frogs, as the crow flies. And as the crow flies, so were the Britons defeated, and in the end even the Romans died. Indeed, no witnesses, nor participants, nor those living in other parts of the world unaware of the frog holocaust or the Boudican Rebellion, no one, not even a sprouting fern, not even a tiny mushroom, not even a miniature meatball, survives to this day from the time of the aforementioned massacre.
The frog holocaust remains one of the strangest endeavors of the Romans, or indeed of any people, and absolutely no one on Earth discusses it, whispers about it, or even whistles a tune they made up while vaguely reminiscing about or elegizing the event.
No one, that is, except the frogs. The spring peepers peep about it in spring. “Pepe, crucified,” you can hear them peep. “We await his Second Coming.” They peep to the skies, eyes teary with grief, “Our people, rounded up, tortured, flogged, and buried in a mass grave,” they peep. Spring peepers call their fellow frogs, “our people,” and who can blame them? Naught remains of the cursed event but their song, their lonely song, the peeping of the peepers. That is how a thing becomes SuperTrue®: through the commemorative despairing of creatures, human and otherwise.
And this has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!
“If you’re right-brained, you’ll see a fish. If you’re left-brained, you’ll see a mermaid.”
Myrtle Adelweiss looked at the assemblage of gestural lines in the picture. In the image they formed, she saw no fish. Neither did she perceive a mermaid. What she saw was the head of kangaroo.
What did it mean? Was she right-brained or left-brained?
One day, Myrtle was at work, at Nordnik High School, coaching the varsity football team. While demonstrating to her beefy players the correct way for a linebacker to plunge ahead at the snap of the ball, she received a concussion from a slab of gristle named Artie Snigginbotham. Myrtle was rushed to the emergency room at Sleater-Sinai-Sloater-Kinnering, unable to recall her own name.
The attending physician, Dr. Elaine Bryant O’Brain, did an MRI of Myrtle’s skull. Then an ultrasound. Then a spectrograph. Then an encephalo-shmeffalograph. Then a spirograph. Then a titration test. Then a Ph test. Then an EEG. Then a BB King. Then an insufferabullitis portmantobleronagraph.
Every image, regardless of what test was done, showed one miraculous fact: between the two hemispheres of Myrtle’s brain lay a third lobe, nestled between them like a summer sausage between two napping, hairless, Sharpei-wrinkled guinea pigs. Dr. O’Brain called it “The Third Lobe.” It became known in neurological literature as The Adelweiss-O’Brain Lobe. “The Third Lobe” was cooler, though.
But what was the function of this extra loaf, or lobe, in the brain of Myrtle Adelweiss? How had this “third loaf” been acquired? How long had it been in amongst the payload of Myrtle Adelweiss’s cranium? Did it confer any other advantages to her besides the obvious one of allowing a third interpretation of an ambiguous figure meant to elicit one of two specific interpretations? What good was this third loaf, if any?
For the next three years, O’Brain conducted a wide-ranging study of people who saw a kangaroo head instead of either a mermaid or a fish in the picture that had given Myrtle Adelweiss a bit of agito. Various types of brain scans revealed that the majority of these specimens had the summer-sausage-shaped third loaf.
What else did they have in common? There was no single phenotype, genotype, ethnicity, religion, or economic class they shared, although the preponderance of specimens were of what was once known as “the white people” and belonged to an economic class of owners of modest homes and owner-operators of small businesses with three or fewer employees, most of them stakeholders in corporations consisting only of a single employee: themselves.
Most in the sample of some 50,000 individuals identified themselves as:
1. thinking for themselves
2. loving their country
3. being more compassionate than average
4. being more intelligent than average
5. being more health conscious than average
6. being of above average health
7. having a greater sense of fairness than average
Remarkably, a large percentage of the control group, those without loaves, answered the same way. It was the last two questions where the difference was starker.
8. considering themselves members of an oppressed group
The only members of the control group, those without a loaf, who answered this way were actual members of a group self-identifying as other than white, Christian, able-bodied, heterosexual, or men (born men, more specifically).
The last question, question 9, was the key marker for difference:
9. believing the nation needs the guidance and discipline of a strong, stern, authoritarian leader
No member of the control group answered that they believed the statement. Every member of the loaf-bearers, or “loafers,” did.
That was the difference. Focusing closer on this particular question revealed another difference: When asked if they considered compassion a quality of strength in a leader, all the non-loafers answered affirmatively. All the loafers answered that compassion was a weakness, not just in a leader, but in a citizen.
One loafer summarized it this way: “At least Hitler had some backbone. Gandhi was a pussy.”
This might lead one to believe a cognitive dissonance might have been pointed out in their answer to question 3: that they considered themselves more compassionate than average. On closer questioning, however, the loafers’ definition of compassion applied only to such feelings extended to those within their own group, however they might define those limits. Not so with the non-loafers.
In her conclusion to her abstract on the paper she published in The Journal of Psychiatric Conclusions, O’Brain summarized the loafers’ philosophy thus:
Laws and authorities should protect those belonging to our group and control those outside our group.
What exactly was it about this loaf of interposed brain matter that either exploited or caused these beliefs? The hypothesis was that the loaf acted as a kind of selective prism for signals between the hemispheres of the brain. In a normal brain, such signals were transported from hemisphere to hemisphere through a clump of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. At one time, severing the corpus callosum was tried as a treatment for epilepsy. It was abandoned when experimentation revealed side effects, such as the inability of the subject to write and speak the same word when shown a different word to each eye. The communication between brain hemispheres turned out to have many subtle necessities in everyday understandings of perception.
In the loafers, the corpus callosum was wrapped in the flesh of the intervening loaf. The loaf edited the signals between the hemispheres, censoring all but the perceptions that might lead a person to conclude otherwise than that an out-group was a threat to one’s in-group, and that an authoritarian leader was required to restrict the activities of the out-group. Further, danger to the in-group was magnified or amplified, or exaggerated, at the expense of other mitigating information.
The most mysterious part of the mystery came eighteen months after the study, when subsequent examination demonstrated that the loaves had disappeared. None of the loafers showed the presence or even a physical trace of the loaves. Unfortunately, the kind of thinking the loaves had vitalized did not likewise disappear.
Elaine O’Brain now theorized that what remained was a phantom loaf. Like the illusion of a limb that amputees may experience, the loafers retained the heavy-handed editor of perception in the form of an invisible prism. A prism of the mind, as it were.
She therefore suggested changing the nomenclature from “loafers” to “mental prismers.”
Although all of O’Brain’s records of the material existence of the third loaf were destroyed in a group of suspicious thefts and vandalisms everywhere those records were kept, the phenomenon of the mental prism is SuperTrue®, and remains a threat to civil society to this day.
And this has been another Moment of Truth. Good day!
Since the beginning of time, money has been known to evaporate into thin air. There’s a saying: “Time is money.” It was originally said by managers to their subordinate laborers in order to urge them to work faster. What the manager didn’t reveal was that the money he referred to belonged to the owners and shareholders, not to the workers. Their wages remained the same regardless of the speed of their toil. Mathematically speaking, the faster they worked, the lower their real wages, because they accomplished more in the same hour for the same amount of cash.
Denial of remuneration to labor for its increased productivity in the latter-20th and early-21st Centuries was the most widespread case of disappearing money since the advent of paid labor. Like most mysterious disappearances that negatively affected the living standards and buying power of labor, rather than injuring the wealth accumulation of the ruling, owning, and speculating classes, however, it has never been the subject of a paranormal investigation.
This story is not going to change that.
Case in point: The National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC. It was later renamed the Nuanced Rick Scott Committee, which allowed it to retain the same initials. The name-change was counter-intuitive, since being named after Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott had long been considered a public relations negative. Even Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott was known to agree with that assessment.
In 1987, Senator Rick Scott was on his way to becoming a big deal in the movement of private buy-up of healthcare services. Ten years later he’d become the CEO of the Hospital Corporation of America, one of the first private hospital companies in the legendary empire known as the United States of America. However, after only four months he had to resign as CEO of HCA due to a federal investigation into Medicare and Medicaid fraud at the company.
The fraud was so fantastically huge that HCA was eventually forced to pay the government 1.7 billion dollars in criminal fines, penalties, civil damages, and other settlements. Many of the fraudulent actions the DOJ found had had to have been signed off on by CEO Rick Scott himself. A lot to accomplish in only four months as CEO.
Maybe because he was so accomplished at fraud, the GOP made Rick Scott chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and allowed him to name it after himself. Whatever the reason, they may have rued that decision.
In the highly fraught election cycle of 2022 of the Common Era, the NRSC had raised a respectable 173 million dollars to be used for Republican Senate campaigns. By July of the same year, that money had dwindled to less than $28.4 million, a reduction of about 83% of their so-called war chest.
Where had all the vanishing money gone? To quote a story in the Washington Post:
“The NRSC’s chairman, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, has taken heat from fellow Republicans for running ads featuring himself on camera and releasing his own policy agenda.”
The obvious conclusion was that Rick Scott had used the funds for his own purposes. Given his shady background in the healthcare industry, not to mention his unfortunate resemblance to what scholars believed the then-decades-deceased Klaus Barbie would have looked like after a month in one of his own Vichy concentration camps, it’s easy to see why suspicion would fall on the homely Floridian.
But the details painted a more nuanced picture. (This is why investigators of the paranormal always look at the details: in case they help explain things by way of painting pictures possessed of lots and lots and lots of nuance.)
Let us remember that Rick Scott had never been found to have embezzled money from the Hospital Corporation of America. He was not a common thief or even an uncommon thief. The stain on his reputation came from his association with the nuanced crime of fraud. An uncommon amount of fraud. Lots and lots and lots of nuanced fraud. 1.7 billion dollars’-worth. Billion with a “B.” To call him a mere fraudster would have been to oversimplify the matter. 1.7 billion dollars’ worth of nuanced crime is not simple. It’s major-league. It’s top of the heap. It was not just a stain on his reputation. A stain that big was pretty much the entirety of his reputation, and certainly overshadowed anything else he’d done in his life.
It also may have explained why the NRSC changed its name. With 93% of its campaign funds devoted to highlighting Rick Scott and his unpopular policies, changing the name, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, to the Nuanced Rick Scott Committee was simply honest. It was almost certainly done to thwart the media’s linking them with their chairman’s over-shadowing reputation as a titan of nuanced fraud. “There’s no fraud here,” they seemed to be saying, “We are honestly fraudulent. We’re named after our famous chairman! Like if Communist China had changed its name to ‘Mao Country.’”
So the mystery remained a mystery, as so many remaining mysteries do. Can money simply disappear without a trace? This wouldn’t have been the first time. $23 trillion dollars of defense spending went missing in the violent destruction and failed nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 21st Century. And who knows how many trillions had been stolen over the years from the United States’ working public, not to mention the public at large?
But who cares about all that? No one. We’re talking here about money meant to retain wealthy elite incumbent Senatorial seats or turn Republican challengers into wealthy elite United States Senators. As vanishing money went, this was vanishing money that really mattered.
And as a mystery remaining a mystery of vanishing money that mattered, it will remain, until further investigation, a mysterious matter of SuperTruth®.
And this has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!
It was in ancient times when Sapperstein, a teenage pot-smoker, used to cruise up and down Woodward Avenue in the environs of Detroit. He would listen to classic rock on FM radio. His main concern at the moment in question was, “Is Jethro Tull heavy metal or heavy wood?” This was before the various metals became segregated into genres of their own: death metal, krautrock, nerdcore, etc. In a way, Sapperstein was ahead of his time.
He jolted to a stop, coming to full consciousness of the traffic around him just in time to avoid rear-ending a restored classic Pontiac GTO. He almost dropped his pipe. Unknowingly, he’d accidentally hit the “band” button. The radio was now tuned to an AM station. A male voice emerged, speaking in crisp, insistent salvos of rhetoric. “Feminazis,” the voice said. “Reverse discrimination,” it said. “Tree-huggers,” the voice of the man mocked in his flurry of affected disgust.
What was this disembodied spirit? It was infectious. It didn’t infect Sapperstein, but Sapperstein’s father became obsessed with it. Soon the voice was everywhere, and imitators flourished. The landscape of discourse changed for the worse as regulations were dissolved in the service of capitalism’s desires. This history-making voice went by many names, but we now know him as “Lush Rimjob or something, the drug-addict from Missouri.”
Within half a century, the Rimjob ethos had swept the world, and it was a short journey, from the bloviating bag of fecal matter who sprinkled his polemics with lies, to entire networks of so-called news based entirely on lies. That evolution is one of the many reasons, if not the key reason, we find ourselves in the Era of SuperTruth®.
The Sappersteins of the world, and everyone else from his historical context, eventually grew old and ceased to exist. There arose in the West capitalists lauded for turning intellectual property, usually that of others, to their own profit. And from among these so-called thought-leaders, success-gurus, and oracles of progress came one called Elon Kuru III.
Elon was a devotee of Kurtzweil, who predicted the advent of a “singularity,” when synthetic cognition would leave the minds of human beings behind, intellectually and physically. Elon believed he could join that elite mental rapturing. To that end, he had his consciousness encoded and uploaded.
Years thence, utterly elsewhere, far from Elon’s crystal, wars of desperation were storming. The starving, choking, burning, bleeding rabble clawed and trampled each other in vain struggle to prolong their unenviable lives, like the damned souls in the Inferno, or a crowd locked in a theater afire. Civilization was moribund, its long age approaching its terminus. Humans led the way into extinction, but soon would follow the animals. The last of the elephants, giraffes, big cats, great apes, baleen cetaceans and the toothed whales would soon follow – and not long afterward, every mammal a person could claim distant evolutionary class kinship with.
Details. It was inevitable it would all be gone. Down the drain of oblivion. True, the force at fault was the social behavior of Homo sapiens. Ants couldn’t have done it. Worms couldn’t have done it. Beavers couldn’t have done it. Only humanity could have so dominated and subjugated the biosphere as to bring it down completely.
But Elon Kuru III was safe in his private simulacrum. The enriched condensate-crystal giga-processor onto which he’d uploaded his consciousness was indestructible for the entire extent of eternity that a human could imagine. Powered by the multi-spectrum radiation of the sun, the hydrogen demise of which would launch him out of Earth’s orbit and send him on what his physicists had calculated would be at least a four-billion-year journey to come to coast around and around the lip of the gravitational well of the red dwarf star, Proxima Centauri, his existence was assured for another couple-three trillion years, give or take. And by that time he’d have figured out what to do next. Elon was effectively immortal.
Striding down the simulated Rue de J’n’-Sais-Quoi in his smartly-tailored McQueen kurta of silk, his Guccis and silk trousers cocooning his perfect feet and legs, he could feel the entirely reasonable weight of his penis against his inner thigh. Its dimensions were his to decide, and he was proud of the good taste and restraint he’d demonstrated in the matter.
Not that he would have anything to prove to a sexual conquest. All the women in his world were as attracted to him as he was to them. And, in preparation for long-term psychological vicissitudes of an immortal mind, projected by his private psychoanalysts (now most likely dead in that all-too real world Elon had left behind), the male cast of the simulacrum looked, as did the females, all the different ways a young, sexually-attractive person could. And they were no mere automatons, these twinks and bimbos, not at all. They were as close to individual, unpredictable refractions of a luminous, complex personality as any AI could generate.
For example, this heartbreaking beauty he is meeting at the sidewalk restaurant for champagne and oysters, on a corner a few blocks from St. Chapelle. Estelle is her name. Originally from Austria. Mother North African. Strawberry blond hair with olive skin and green eyes, a light pink shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, the hint of a lacy bra peeking up. She sets her hardcover copy of Middlemarch on the table as they take their seats. He has never read it. She goes on at length, quite delightfully, about it.
Already he’s challenged. Literature to read. People who love this but hate that. All the many flavors of lipstick to taste, shapes of lips to explore with his. She has joined him on his side of the table, solely for kissing purposes. How chaste, yet carnal.
They both ache to consummate. Or, he assumes she does, whatever that might mean in the imperceptible shifts in verisimilitude. They decide to take a walk to see the St. Chapelle windows. Patience is now effortless for him. The joy and ease of delicious withholding rises in him like fragrant breath in his lungs. They have all the time in the world and then some.
He wonders if his perceptions and responses are being manipulated by the Artificial Intelligence he inhabits, but he doesn’t wonder long, because he is not a self-reflecting, thoughtful person.
Eternity, he says to himself, is not going to be unpleasant in the least.
This had been the Moment of Truth. Good day!
image by Phillip Random Reay