False Flags For Beginners

False flag terrorism is a pretext for elites to restrict freedom, justify wars and impose ever greater surveillance. It is our moral and civic responsibility to always remain on guard for the next false flag. In the run up to the anniversary of 9/11 we remember the victims of false flag operations with this article originally printed by Infowars

False flag attacks occur when government engages in covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations seem as if they are being carried out by other entities.

False flag terrorism is a favorite political tactic used by governments worldwide. They influence elections, guide national and international policy, and are cynically used to formulate propaganda and shape public opinion as nations go to war.

Nero and the Great Fire of Rome

The Roman consul and historianCassius Dio, his contemporary Suetonius and others say the Emperor Nero was responsible for the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD.

Legend claims Nero had one-third of the city torched as an excuse to build Domus Aurea, a 300 acre palatial complex that included a towering statue of himself, the Colossus of Nero.

Prior to the fire, the Roman Senate had rejected the emperor’s bid to level a third of the city to make way for a “Neropolis,” an urban renewal project.

The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that when the population of Rome held Nero responsible for the fire, he shifted blame on the Christians for “hating the human race” and starting the fire.

The Spanish American War: Remember the Maine

By the late 1800s, the United States was looking for an excuse to kick Spain out of Cuba. U.S. business was heavily invested in sugar, tobacco and iron on the Caribbean island.

The U.S.S. Maine was sent to Havana in January of 1898 to protect these business interests after a local insurrection broke out. Three weeks later, early on the morning of February 15, anexplosion destroyed the forward third of the ship anchored in Havana’s harbor, killing more than 270 American sailors.

President McKinley blamed Spain after the U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry declared that a naval mine caused the explosion.

American newspapers blamed the Spanish despite a lack of evidence. “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst told Frederic Remington after the illustrator reported that the situation in Cuba did not warrant invasion.

A number of historians and researchers later argued that the ship was blown up by the United States to provide a false flag pretext to invade Cuba and expel Spain.

The United States occupied Cuba from 1898 until 1902, although an amendment to a joint resolution of Congress forbid the U.S. to annex the country.

Wilson’s Pretext for War: The Sinking of the Lusitania

Nearly two thousand travelers, including one hundred Americans, were killed on May 7, 1915, when a German U-boat torpedoed the RMS Lusitania, a luxury Cunard Line British ocean liner.

Prior to the sinking, the German embassy in Washington issued a warning. Newspapers in the United States refused to print the warning or acknowledge the German claim that the ship carried munitions.

Wilson’s government issued a flurry of diplomatic protests after the sinking and exploited the tragedy two years later as a pretext for America to enter the First World War.

Nearly a hundred years later, in 2008, divers discovered the Lusitania carried more than four million rounds of rifle ammunition.

“There were literally tons and tons of stuff stored in unrefrigerated cargo holds that were dubiously marked cheese, butter and oysters,” Gregg Bemis, an American businessman who owns the rights to the wreck and is funding its exploration, told The Daily Mail.

Hitler’s Fascist Dictatorship: The Reichstag Fire

In February of 1933, a month after convincing Germany’s president that parliament must be eliminated, Hitler and the Nazis instigated theReichstag fire.

Hitler then urged president Hindenburg to issue an emergency decree restricting personal liberty, including the right to free expression and a free press, limitations on the rights of association and assembly, warrantless searches of homes, property confiscation, and violations of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications “permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.”

The Nazis used the decree and cracked down on their political opponents . They worked behind the scenes to force through the Enabling Act, which legally allowed Hitler to obtain plenary powers and establish a dictatorship.

Gestapo Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring would admit that “the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

Prelude to World War: The Gleiwitz Incident

Six years after the Reichstag Fire, the Nazis staged the Gleiwitz incident. Nazi commandos raided a German radio station in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia, Germany. The raid was part of Operation Himmler, a series of operations undertaken by the SS as Hitler set the stage for the invasion of Poland and the start of the Second World War.

SS operatives dressed in Polish uniforms attacked the radio station, broadcast an anti-German message in Polish, and left behind the body of a German Silesian known for sympathizing with the Poles. The corpse was then offered to the press as evidence that the Poles had attacked the radio station.

Israeli False Flag Terror: The Lavon Affair

In 1954, the Israelis activated a terrorist cell in response to the United States making friends with the Egyptian government and its pan-Arab leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Israelis were worried Nasser would nationalize the Suez Canal and continue Egypt’s blockade of Israeli shipping through the canal.

Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion decided a false flag terrorist attack on American interests in Egypt would sour the new relationship. He recruited and dispatched a terror cell that pretended to be Egyptian terrorists.

The plan, however, contained a fatal flaw. Israel’s top secret cell, Unit 131, was infiltrated by Egyptian intelligence. After a member of the cell was arrested and interrogated, he revealed the plot and this led to more arrests. Israeli agents were subjected to a public trial revealing details of the plan to firebomb the U.S. Information Agency’s libraries, a British-owned Metro-Goldwyn Mayer theatre, a railway terminal, the central post office, and other targets.

In order to deflect blame, the Israeli government tried to frame its own Defense Minister, Pinhas Lavon, but the true nature of the plot was eventually made public.

Operation Northwoods: Targeting American Citizens

In the covert war against the communist regime in Cuba under the CIA’s Operation Mongoose, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously proposed state-sponsored acts of terrorism in side the United States.

The plan included shooting down hijacked American airplanes, the sinking of U.S. ships, and the shooting of Americans on the streets of Washington, D.C. The outrageous plan even included a staged NASA disaster that would claim the life of astronaut John Glenn.

Reeling under the embarrassing failure of the CIA’s botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, president Kennedy rejected the plan in March of 1962. A few months later, Kennedy denied the plan’s author, General Lyman Lemnitzer, a second term as the nation’s highest ranking military officer.

In November of 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

Gulf of Tonkin: Phantom Attack on the U.S, Military

On August 4, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson went on national television and told the nation that North Vietnam had attacked U.S. ships.

“Repeated acts of violence against the armed forces of the United States must be met not only with alert defense, but with a positive reply. That reply is being given as I speak tonight,” Johnson declared.

Congress soon passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which provided Johnson with pre-approved authority to conduct military operations against North Vietnam. By 1969, over 500,000 troops were fighting in Southeast Asia.

Johnson and his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had bamboozled Congress and the American people. In fact, North Vietnam had not attacked the USS Maddox, as the Pentagon claimed, and the “unequivocal proof” of an “unprovoked” second attack against the U.S. warship was a ruse.

Operation Gladio: State Sponsored Terror Blamed on the Left

Following the Second World War, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 collaborated through NATO onOperation Gladio, an effort to create a “stay behind army” to fight communism in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

Gladio quickly transcended its original mission and became a covert terror network consisting of rightwing militias, organized crime elements, agents provocateurs and secret military units. The so-called stay behind armies were active in France, Belgium, Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway, Germany, and Switzerland.

Gladio’s “Strategy of Tension” was designed to portray leftist political groups in Europe as terrorists and frighten the populace into voting for authoritarian governments. In order to carry out this goal, Gladio operatives conducted a number of deadly terrorists attacks that were blamed on leftists and Marxists.

In August of 1980, Gladio operatives bombed a train station in Bologna, killing 85 people. Initially blamed on the Red Brigades, it was later discovered that fascist elements within the Italian secret police and Licio Gelli, the head of the P2 Masonic Lodge, were responsible for the terror attack. Other fascist groups, including Avanguardia Nazionale and Ordine Nuovo, were mobilized and engaged in terror.

Operation Gladio ultimately claimed the lives of hundreds of people across Europe.

According to Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a Gladio terrorist serving a life-sentence for murdering policemen, the reason for Gladio was simple. It was designed “to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the state cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.”

Emile Francisco de Antonio

Emile Francisco de Antonio (May 14, 1919 -- December 16, 1989) was an American director and producer of documentary films, usually detailing political or social events circa 1960s--1980s. He has been referred to by scholars and critics alike, and arguably remains, "...the most important political filmmaker in the United States during the Cold War."

Emile is quite buttoned down but at the end of the interview he wells up a bit and tells the interviewers he feels he's among friends. He died a couple of weeks later.

de Antonio was born in 1919 in in the coal-mining town of Scranton, Pennsylvania. His father, Emilio de Antonio, an Italian immigrant, fostered the lifelong interests of Antonio by passing on his own love for philosophy, classical literature, history and the arts. Although his intelligence allowed him the privilege of attended Harvard University alongside future-president John F. Kennedy, he was also familiar with the working class experience, making his living at various points in his life as a peddler, a book editor, and the captain of a river barge (among other duties).

After serving in the military during World War II as a bomber pilot, de Antonio returned to the United States where he frequented the art crowd, often associating with such Pop artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, in whose film Drink de Antonio appears. Warhol was famously quoted praising de Antonio with the words, "Everything I learned about painting, I learned from De."

The book Necessary Illusions (1989) by Noam Chomsky and the documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992) by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick are dedicated to Emile de Antonio.

Filmography Point of Order (1964) McCarthy: Death of a Witch Hunter (1964) Rush to Judgment (1967) America Is Hard to See (1968) In the Year of the Pig (1968) Charge and Countercharge (1969) Millhouse: A White Comedy (1971) Painters Painting (1972) Underground (1976) In The King of Prussia (1982) Mr. Hoover and I (1989)

June 27 Synchronicity

Disclose.tv - Charles Hall,s alien encounters The Tall Whites Video

The sceptical response to synchronicity is increased sensitivity. For example if I buy a UAV drone to bomb the department of homeland security terrorists then naturally enough I'll be sensitive to seeing UAV drones everywhere. 

Capiche?

OK so for about six weeks now an unusual date has been popping up with such frequency that it's hard to ignore. I say unusual because all my life, even though it's my own birthday, I've never noticed it popping up more than now, and so that's the synchronicity sensitivity issue diminished quite radically. Anyway, I was looking for Charles Hall videos and I noticed it was uploaded on June 27 so I'm posting it here and ringing the synch bell. Maybe 27 June is a date to celebrate, or not.  


It's 1969 if there are any astrologers with spare time on their hands to do a reading Robert Phoenix ;)

1969

Before I left Hong Kong for Siam, I passed by another Omega watch in Causeway Bay (Hong Kong is crazy about watches so the density of high end watch shops is quite striking. I took the opportunity to try the Omega Speedmaster on for the first time - It felt spesh. This  specific watch is pretty much one of the few 'as is' terrestrial brands that was integral to the Apollo Mission moon landings including the first one in 1969.  So I tried it on.

  

I really enjoyed explaining why 1969 was such a special year to the staff, and they appreciated listening to more reasons to talk about the watch for potential customers. I waffled on that there were five momentous and historical events in 1969. The most important was probably the launch by the US military's special projects mafia called DARPA, of DARPANET. This led to the internet which apparently is quite popular in many parts of the world regardless of cultural inclination, or notions of cultural superiority. It pretty much works for everyone.

  

Then there was of course the first Apollo mission Moon landing which is the reason for the limited edition  release of the watch this 40th anniversary. The NASA space missions were largely responsible for propelling the United States now unsurpassed technology culture into perpetual orbit. 

Then there was Woodstock which is where it got interesting because the manager of the Omega shop joined us at that point as he was old enough to remember that ideas like make love, not war became mainstream, as well as say a better understanding that marijuana wasn't an evil drug and so what if people took their clothes off and danced to the Grateful Dead or the irreplacable Janis Joplin. I really enjoyed having someone there who was even more qualified to talk about it than I. He was smartly turned out, respectably dressed with wire frame glasses and yet he seemed to authenticate what may have looked like counter culture in its day but is largely just mainstream culture today.

Then of course the Stonewall riots took place which I wrote about just recently over here. Clearly homosexuality isn't the most effective lifestyle for birth propagation (if that's a good thing given each human's carbon footprint) but it did mark the point when a person's sexuality was of less consequence than the things they believed and did. I think also there's a deeper philosphical question about sex that is answered in the issue of homosexuality acceptance, but I've possibly waded through a theoretical and auto didact 'degree' of understanding in gender dysphoria studies that I picked up in my early 20's while breaking personal land speed records. I've yet to knock that episode into a decently shaped post that I anticipate entails some weaving in (and out) of Baudrillardian simulacra. I began to think about it late last year while occasionally chowing down with the formidable Tim Footman who counts a contributed chapter on Baudrillardian philosophy in one of his books, writes a great blog and has effectively snookered me  for life, on any racial observations with an idiosyncratic style of logic, an example of which he uses here on Kurt Vonnegut of all people. It leaves me with an infantile respost, both insipid and arrogant; along the lines of 'but I believe I'm still right'. Here's the Stonewall Riots.

Lastly to amuse the people at the Omega shop, I threw myself into the topic of great events that happened in 1969. Of course there were too many things that made the year an absolute corker including The Beatles playing their last gig on the roof of Apple Records, Golda Meir became the first female Prime Minister of Israel and arguably was an inspiration for Margaret Thatcher while continuing to validate Israels right to statehood as indeed Gaza and the West Bank have.

 

What else? Well, the maiden flight of the Boeing 747.

                                     

John and Yoko.

 

It feels important to share from the authoritative books I've read on the matter, that the British people were both primitive and unfair in their treatment towards Yoko Ono. Once again they further eroded their dwindling reputation for characteristic fairness by being a bully towards her in the media. They considered John Lennon to be only theirs.

Sharing isn't the greatest British quality, or so it appears when it comes to national treasures. Nevertheless, it's important to  know that had it not been for that unfair treatment from the Great British Public. Well who knows, maybe they wouldn't have felt the need to flee to the United States despite enduring the toughest of immigration battles and maybe John Lennon wouldn't have been shot. Another episode of British reliance on tabloid opinion that killer the golden goose as with Princess Diana. 


When I see the Anglo celebrity obsession in this day and age, I"m convinced that the British are still fucking peasants as far as I can see.

Rupert Sheldrake's Google Talk - The Extended Mind

I find the Google Talks held at Mountain View are more generous than the TED talks in terms of depth as they permitted to go on for longer. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and ten books. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he was a Scholar of Clare College, took a double first class honours degree and was awarded the University Botany Prize. He then studied philosophy and history of science at Harvard University, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow, before returning to Cambridge, where he took a Ph.D. in biochemistry. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology. As the Rosenheim Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he carried out research on the development of plants and the ageing of cells in the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge University.

While at Cambridge, together with Philip Rubery, he discovered the mechanism of polar auxin transport, the process by which the plant hormone auxin is carried from the shoots towards the roots. 

From 1968 to 1969, based in the Botany Department of the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, he studied rain forest plants. From 1974 to 1985 he was Principal Plant Physiologist and Consultant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India, where he helped develop new cropping systems now widely used by farmers. While in India, he also lived for a year and a half at the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.

From 2005-2010 he was the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, funded from Trinity College,Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, near San Francisco, and a Visiting Professor and Academic Director of the Holistic Thinking Program at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut. 

Books by Rupert Sheldrake:

A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (1981). New edition 2009 (in the US published as Morphic Resonance)

The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988)

The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God (1992)

Seven Experiments that Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science (1994) (Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the British Institute for Social Inventions) 

Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (1999) (Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the British Scientific and Medical Network)

The Sense of Being Stared At, And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (2003)

With Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna: 

Trialogues at the Edge of the West (1992), republished as Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness (2001)

The Evolutionary Mind (1998) 

With Matthew Fox: 

Natural Grace: Dialogues on Science and Spirituality (1996)

The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet (1996) 

Jesus Life In India

The story of Jesus' time in Tibet and India first came to me by way of a fascinating and good  hearted young Spanish man I met travelling around Prachuap Khiri Kan a few years ago. He left a handful of very distinct impressions that have remained with me. The first was about being humble. I wasn't ready for his message then but I never forgot what he showed me was a genius lesson in the advantages of humility.

We hung out for a while as we were in the same small beach town, and  he talked about his life working as a dancing and singing stage performer in Spain and he burst into a  bit of song from his last performing role in the musical Hair before he became too ill to work. It was the 5th Dimension's Aquarius/Sunshine come in.

I always got the impression there was a lot more to him than he was letting on. As I write this post I see even more synchronicity unfolding in front of me in ways that could only have worked for me now, and not then. Weird, but good weird.

It takes 26000 years for the cosmic cycle to complete and so the age of Aquarius was indeed coming very close back in 1969 when the song below was recorded. For us, it's about 3 minutes to midnight now on the cosmological clock.

Ayasha and hooked up last night after last meeting in Dubai and San Francisco. It was heartening to hear that we both agreed it's not a  case of if the world is changing because it's changing already. The world is separating into two groups. Those who are awakening and the mind bombed materialists consumers who are blind, drugged, plasma screened and asleep at the wheel of opportunity clinging on to the illusory joy stick of predictability.

Change of this nature doesn't come round every day. Look at the signs around you. The coffin pictured doesn't exist. You're an immortal being. You just don't know it.

Xerox Art

A few years back my good friend Joe Sidek from Penang in Malaysia,  introduced me to an elderly gentleman who apparently was the instigator of Woodstock back in 1969.

The excitement around Elliot was that the director Ang Lee was going to make a film about him which I thought was exciting though my full knowledge of the event was limited to cultural references and dare I say, a good friend of mine talking about a guy on stage at Woodstock alerting the attendees to avoid the 'brown acid'. Chris chose a bad trip to invoke this piece of history and while it seemed of little comfort at the time, in retrospect it was a kind thing to support the notion that maybe our distress wasn't entirely due to repressed psychological emotions that are the challenging hall mark of the psychedelic experience. Put it this way if you're curious about that last statement. It's near impossible to take that particular voyage without being fully confronted with the infinite beauty and/or ugliness of who we are but don't let that scare you off. You've your career to think of.

I like Ang Lee. I'm more into Asian interpretation of this trip than Hollywood. There's a good reason for this....It's called bias. But if you can park my bias next to the Lexus for just a few minutes, I'm obliged to point out that I struggle to fall in love with anyone who isn't moved by the compartmental spotlight of social roles in Chungking Express, the operatic opressive futility of And the Spring Comes or say the longest uncut fight scene in the Korean Palm d'Or winner Old Boy

Looks like me in that fight doesn't it? 

Naaa I thought not. 

The give-away is I didn't get up off the floor. I also didn't have a knife in my back but hey, I was just grateful I hadn't been thrown off the balcony; spinal injuries scare me a lot more than a good kicking.

That's enough about me. Have you ever tried Octopus? It's tasty...... It's just that I hear Octopi have an IQ with the chutzpah to start questioning how smart Dolphins are. 

#justsaying

Old Boy is borderline genius. It's so full of life and joyous, gutsy film making that there are a few trying errors which are either confusing or hard to ignore. Which one you suffer, is largely dependant on how much you trust yourself. A topic, believe it or not which loops back into that trip I mentioned earlier.

I can see I'm shirking my duty in this post. I'd love to fill it up with cheeky Asian film references but that's not going to do is it? OK, one more before I spill the beans.

I wanted to use the example of John Woo's Hardboiled because of his clear influence on Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs but as I can't find the exact clip, I'll leave you with 'In the Mood For Love' by Wong Kar Wai.

The definition of a good movie for me is when I ache to be part of that time and like Taking Woodstock this movie throttles my aorta to the point where I don't believe I know how beautiful life is unless I've witnessed white collar Asian girls in 1950's (ish) Hong Kong for real. Which I haven't but I do know it exists from film like this. It's almost intolerable how stylish Wong Kar Wai splashes his Pollock like proclivity to portray the female form in ....In the Mood for Love.

Getting back on track I should reveal my hand. I don't think the digitally duplicated form of anything is fair game for IP or intellectual property. Anybody with half a brain would challenge me on that but as I've spent a few years thinking, there's no more room for me to wiggle so.

If it's on the net. It's free.

I'll come back and polish off that statement and the usual spelling/grammar later. But my friends who champion the rights of artists to earn the same as CEO's (or more). They're wrong. The artist is uniquely privileged to understand why. Look at what fame and wealth does to the artist.

Apologies for the rough nature of this post. I'll edit when time permits.

Creative Brief - 1969

When toying with the idea of going client side, rather than immediately changing the agency and fixing something that isn't broken (Like Camper Shoes) I've often thought I'd just let the professionals get on with their job. Much like this brief from Mick Jagger to Andy Warhol.

Via Garrick

1969 - Apollo 11 Moon Landing

There's a lot of history that went down in 1969 including this and this not to mention DARPANET, which indirectly led me to have a brand infatuation moment yesterday in Causeway Bay. I used to live in the area there on Haven Street, which is a groovy place because locals in the know, drop by during the wee hours for famous local desserts.

But what really turned me on was the New Omega Shop which looks a little bit like it could be a flagship store. I mentioned that the IWC "Top Gun" Official USAF watch was kind of OK on me back here but I think they're a little too showy even though the sales staff are awesome.

I've also been toying with buying a Chanel number that caught my eye.

The strap is ceramic like the Rado watches of recent decades and it's a thing of beauty, although once again a little ostentatious. But now I've seen the watch I want, because it ticks all the right boxes on lots of levels. Through their renovation display, Omega have sold me a watch that is the Omega Speedmaster. The first and only watch worn on the moon.

 You're probably wondering why I'm waffling on about watches. I should point out that inside the suitcase stolen by the taxi driver, was the only luxury watch I've ever bought. It was the beautiful and robust Montblanc watch that I once had to go head to head with Rob on his blog about. I also coincidentally bought this watch the last time I was in Hong Kong from a delightful sales lady called Van Wong at the Montblanc Store. Here is a very similar model as it's the unique rubber strap and elegant face that sold me this watch.

 I'm pretty much reconciled to losing this fine friend because it's now been three weeks since it was stolen and the application process for determining a license plate is arbitrary as I understand it. But that's OK because this damm Omega is telling me that despite having quite funky tastes in watches....

....I still need a piece of craftsmanship on my wrist. It's not so much about having the correct time. For me it's about reminding me how valuable time is. Life my friends, is beautiful. Even when we lose everything we own. I'm going to write a bit more about that. Time is something you can't save. Only lose.

Below is one more shop picture of the striking shop renovation for Omega that celebrates the first and only watch on the moon. I think they're onto something. The watch, which I cannot afford till I get a new computer and some clothes firts, will be on my wrist one day. You can count on it. Here's the bit of the moon that the Apollo 11 space capsule in which the Omega Speedmaster was worn landed on. Neat huh? I think we're made for each other.

I was born, in a crossfire Hurricane

I have actually seen this movie, though right now it crosses over nicely from something I discovered THIS MORNING. It was my 40th birthday YESTERDAY. Which Means I've inadvertantly and serendipitously skipped the whole event. This pleases me no end as firstly, every day is my birthday (close friends will testify) and also I'm still waiting for 21st century banking to hire faster pidgeons because even though speculators can crush whole economies in minutes like George Soros did (and then went on to sancitimoniously lecture the oil speculators -  greed anyone?), when it comes to normal people like you and I; we have to wait. Which is why I left this comment over at Neils because there has to be a reason why the banks don't want us to have micropayments. It's not rocket science or brain surgery.

In any case it was not only my birthday but also the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots because we both belong to 27 June 1969. Anyway in my opinion it was the cops that night who were rioting again, by busting into the Stonewall Inn and using their violence to break up people who are traditionally portrayed as pretty flimsy at physical aggression - pansies I've heard them called.

It was however in the time when same-sex hand-holding was illegal but you know how those ultra homophobic heterosexuals are......They're invariably homosexuals in denial which is just logical if you think it through and if it's too uncomfortable for you, then here's the research for it.

So now that I've given the Hong Kong police force a verbal ticking off for gay policework as in; "You go first", "No you go first", "No you go first, I need to tuck my uniform shirt in". I'll leave you with a picture of the night in question, because New York is on the map and I'm going to take my time rather than go American Express. Or do we tolerate the deniers?

Nixon & Complexity

Prior to George W Bush the most reviled president by pretty much unanimous opinion in recent American history was Richard Nixon. However, after a few years of listening to my early American baby boomer friends or non octogenarian civil rights supporters trash the name of Richard S Nixon I took the time to read into this complex figure who in my eyes is pretty much inseparable from Kissinger as they both dominated the political stage that extended from a year before my birth in 1969 to 1974 when Nixon was ceremoniously (sic) squeezed out of the Whitehouse while walking across the Rose Garden lawn towards the helicopters with one final wave to the cameras before a life of relative obscurity.

There's something about seminal helicopter shots in U.S. history such as the last line of South Vietnamese people desperate to bail out of Vietnam before the Viet Cong triumphed with the fall of Saigon. Yeah, helicopters and history is something I'll always associate with the Americans in much the same way that the Chinese will forever be associated with Tanks and squares.

 

 Incidentally this famous photograph of the fall of Saigon was taken by Dutch photojournalist Hugh Van Es who died just under a month ago here in Hong Kong. It is all connected you know even if it's largely some illusory Black Swan post rationalised causality.

Traditionally the view of Nixon is one of mendacity, vulgarity and sneaky subterfuge, and yet, it is one I can reconcile with the other side that I want to talk about because let's face it, the problems don't lie with our politicians, they lie with the electorate and our complete inability to handle the truth or even discuss it in an adult manner. That doesn't mean I'm not surprised by the sheer scale of human fallibility over on the other side of the Atlantic with the MP's expense claims which are surely not that far morally from those who claim income support while having an income from work. Benefit cheats sounds so much more dramatic and I'm surprised the press haven't dreamed up a more sticky label for the "right dishonourable members of the Parliament". I digress.

 Clearly the thorniest role that confronted Nixon was Vietnam and there's no denying that in order to extricate the United States from that holy fuck up of ideological warfare in proxy countries that a lot of nasty, ugly and criminal decisions were taken such as the bombing and warfare that took place across the Ho Chi Minh trail which veered into Laos (the most bombed country in the history of the world) and Cambodia thus compromising the lives of millions of their own inhabitants. I'm on record as being hugely fond of the Laotians and the Khmer because of the inexplicable and retarded snobbery they face from other developing world candidates such as Thailand who exercise the rule of marginal superiority acted out from deeply evident insecurity in the manner of the arriviste nouveaux riche against old money while more than aware that side by side with the Benz and it's logocentric Star, is the sticky steamed rice, the stink bean and the ubiquitous calloused hands from pre-school tilling of the paddy fields of Isaan, more often than not controlled by the plutocratic Siamese Chinese families as indeed they do across South East Asia.

 But back to Vietnam because despite the claims of denial by Kissinger  (Nixon is now gone) there can be little ground for conceding that nobody knew what was going on in the Mekong Delta and it's a crime against humanity that only the land of the free are obliged to defend themselves against. However we all know that 95% Americans don't even know the difference between Taiwan and Thailand because as long as the milk and honey is flowing in the lands where territorial transgressions are the sticky issues there's little need to have an empathy for what is known as 'the other'. When it's always about two sides isn't it?

 Which brings me on to the nature of this post because I'm of the opinion that the duality of binary classification is no longer a simplistic luxury we can afford and it's time if you haven't started to look, for the complexity and infinite shades of grey that exist between the polar states of good and bad, black and white, north and south or up and down.

 Life isn't some post war halcyon consumer years of rosy cheeked goodness and evil empire badness, though of course that latter term was Reagan's contribution to political history, yet we now see Obama introducing the nuance of different types of Islam between Cairo and Jakarta and which it would be wise to pay attention to (if taking a look at Islamic country birth demographics for example).

To bring anything to the advertising planning table is the ability to embrace complexity and distance oneself from the relentlessly overly simplistic reductionist role of account planning which is one part science to two parts art and not the other way round.  Particularly now we know that homo economicus is forever dead. And so with that mental perspective in mind I want to reverse back, full speed and with screeching tires (distant sound of police siren in the background) into Nixon's career because it was his role with the Plumbers and the repeated and subsequently scandalous 'break ins' of the Democrat National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate office complex and now forever preserved in political history and it's meme like propensity to term any scandal with the suffix of 'gate' and which first came to light when on June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a security guard at the Watergate Complex, noticed tape covering the locks on several doors in the complex. He took the tape off, and thought nothing of it. An hour later, he discovered that someone had retaped the locks. The scandal revealed the existence of a White House dirty tricks squad but to my mind, the democrats could have played a smarter game with what they left out for the uninvited breaking and entering squad.

More to the point is that the labeling of Nixon as  monolithic-bad doesn't do justice to one of the more contradictory and paradoxically subtle minds of the post-war Whitehouse. Here we have a president as in the above video playing his own Piano Concerto.

Furthermore once we distance ourselves from the morally repugnant Indochina actions and the break ins that subsequently required extensive lying, we have a figure who was easily one of the most intellectually qualified of his era, and a character who was responsible for the detente that was fostered in partnership with the Soviet Union (unthinkable really given the postwar context) and most markedly became the first president to visit Chairman Mao and extend the hand of tentative friendship with the Communist China.

 One only has to think of the McCarthy era to understand the deeply Pavlovian response of the American peoples to anything of a socialist nature despite the recent global socialization of the banking system from the efforts of their last GOP president.

Nixon was also responsible for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) "clean air, clean water, open spaces" and so we have a complex figure with both the vulgarity of a Bronx bare-fist fighter and the intellectual subtle fingered sensitivity of  a concert pianist, the diplomacy skills of the long term thinker and player as well as the DNA of a progressive environmentalist. Arguably the only game in town as we observe the decline of the American empire.

So in summary embrace complexity and only settle on reductionist simplicity once the really hard work of weeding out the immortally terrible and the infinitely unworkable.


A lot more difficult than one might think.

(I'll come back and try get the formatting right but it's still a mess in draft blogger)