Author Archives: Curtiswselby

They say not to write a blog from a tired space, but I suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome, so frankly, everything I do is from a tired space. Likely I'm not doing the greatest job of search engine optimization. But I know there are others like me. Passionate about life.

“They” Are Dividing Us. But Who are “They,” anyway?

Round up the usual suspects. The image is of St. Ignatius Loyola, often credited as the founder of the Jesuits. In the good ol’ days, whenever someone talked about “They,” folks were often referring to the Jesuits.

So I’ve been talking quite a bit about the gun control vs second amendment debate. I’ll post links to all the lovely things I’ve said about it:

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.wordpress.com/1820

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.wordpress.com/1897

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.wordpress.com/1937

I am afraid after one o’clock I wore out. So I finally just posted what I had, feeling like I’d done a terrible job of covering the topic. But if you are still with me, you have seen that from a tired bloggers perspective, the polarity of Left vs Right started way back in the 30s, and has finally culminated in a society with one side saying that half our nation is evil, wicked, and hell bent on the desecration of all we hold dear. Meanwhile, the other half are saying the same about the other side…..

I mean….really….how can you hate this guy? Image from The Times of Israel.

“So well played tired blogger! Yes, you are right….this time! But everybody knows we have become a nation of bipolars….what is so special about what you say?”
I believe some of this division has been crafted by insidious artists, like a psycho-historian from the Foundation Trilogy. Perhaps some of this was random evolution, but I believe the current chaos is orchestrated by composers of destruction.

Let us compose the music of the night! We gave them our music, made our votes take wing! And now….how they’ve repaid us….denied us and betrayed us….they will filibuster….when the stock bell rings!!!!

No, I don’t really think “they” are tormented musicians hiding under the subterranean depths of that undrained swamp, D.C. Nor do I think the actual government is pulling the strings, at least, not the one set up by our Constitution. And as fun as it would be to think that Aramis is somewhere in the Vatican, or in Paris, calculating his centuries long plans to unify the world under the reign of the Last Musketeer….no, I doubt the Jesuits are the culprits.

There are three groups I would like to discuss here. Let’s do an exclusive Tired Blogger investigation into these folks:

  • The Trilateral Commission 
  • The Bilderberg
  • The World Economic Forum

Huh….something else happened in 1968….oh well, I wasn’t born yet, so it can’t really matter to me….Shall we begin…..?

I first heard of the Trilateral Commission when I was a boy. I don’t remember exactly, but I think I was somewhere between eight and twelve when Dad came home with a tape to listen to that was not music. He only did this twice in my memory, so it was kind of an event. This tape was a person going on and on about the dangers of this group. I remember very little, except he was saying the group was either the cause of or a response to WWII, and that every President since had been a member. Let’s dig in.

https://www.trilateral.org/

My first step on this quest for enlightenment is to visit their own website. I mean, after forty years maybe I should let them speak for themselves. They introduce themselves with “Championing a commitment to the rule of law, open economies and societies, and democratic principles.” But that still tells me little about who they are.

According to their site, they are ” a global membership organization that for decades has brought together senior policymakers, business leaders, and representatives of media and academe to discuss and propose solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems. Founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller, the Commission has long been an important venue to incubate ideas and form relationships across sectors and geographies.” I still feel a bit confused. I mean….I’m on the globe, but I don’t have a membership….how do I get one?

These folks know the answer to the question….if the conspiracy theorists are correct, these are the faces of the One World Government. Do you know any of these folks? Because I don’t. Did you vote for any of these people? If so, would you let me know where to turn in my ballet? I have a few ideas of who should be on this board…..

On their website they inform me that David Rockefeller founded the organization in 1973, so either the tape as profoundly wrong, or they are hiding thirty years of history.

The day after typing that sentence, I’m sitting drinking coffee in the kitchen pondering what I just wrote and it dawns on me….if the Commission was founded in 1973….how did they write a publication in 1968 called “Crisis in Democracy.” Is this a group of time travelers? And holy crap, why hasn’t Dan Ackroyd talked about this?

I say this because the AZ Quote of Noam Chomsky that ya’ll read above was in reference to a Trilateral Commission publication in 1968….what’s that? My well paid assistance are saying that I’m misreading the quote, that the book wasn’t published then, it was published in part as a reaction to the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Then why did someone believe in the late seventies and early eighties that the Trilateral Commission, that couldn’t have been around much over a decade, had been around since the forties?

Here are some of the “usual suspects.” The roster seems to change a bit from decade to decade, but there usually is a Rockefeller, some Bushes, and a bunch of Rothschilds claimed to be be in on the scheme to unite the world in a diabolic dictatorship, reminiscent of Marvel Comic’s Hydra. Well….Hail Hydra!

I did some digging on the wikipedia page for David Rockefeller, the touted founder of the Commission. According to it, he formed the Commission because of his displeasure with the Bilderberg group to include Japan. Is this the key to the misinformation I was fed as a child?

Bilderberg meetings were begun in 1954. According to their website (all these conspiracy folks have websites!), the meetings have “been a forum for informal discussions to foster dialogue between Europe and North America. Every year, approx. 130 political leaders and experts from industry, finance, labour, academia and the media are invited to take part in the Meeting. About two thirds of the participants come from Europe and the rest from North America; one third from politics and government and the rest from other fields. The Meeting is a forum for informal discussions about major issues.”

I don’t know if I feel better or worse looking at this photo. I see only two faces I know….Henry Kissinger, And David Petraeus, the disgraced hero of the second Gulf War and former director of the CIA; the rest of these faces I don’t know. I see Goldman Sachs is pretty well represented. I only see two heads of state, Anders Rasmussen, the NATO Sec General is “sort of” a national leader, and Queen Beatrix (alas, not Potter) of the Netherlands. Otherwise I see CEOs, NSA directors, senior advisors to CEOs, the IMF director (International Monetary Fund), and the head of MI6 (that’s right….James Bonds boss…..don’t fuck with these folks or they’ll bring back Sean Connery and put a shank in your ass. Once again….how many of these people do you know? Were you allowed to vote for them? Should they be making major policy decisions for the world?

So, if I am understanding this correctly, David Rockefeller was at one time a member of this ultimate country club, but left and started his own agency of chaos when the Bilderberg folks decided they didn’t want to play nice nice to Japan. I’m curious to see if this explains the discrepancy between the reports that the Trilateral Commission was around at WWII, and the official story that they were founded in the seventies.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Bilderberg-Conference\

The Bilderberg are “annual meetings attended by 120 to 150 political leaders, government officials, and experts from industry, finance, media, and academia in Europe and North America. The meetings, held in a different European or North American country each year, provide a private, informal environment in which those who influence national policies and international affairs in the West can get to know each other and discuss without commitment their common problems. After each conference a private report of the meeting is circulated only to past and present participants” this quoted from the Encyclopedia Britannica. “The meetings were initiated by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and took their name from the hotel at Oosterbeek, Netherlands, where the first conference was held in 1954.” Damned Dutch…..any way they can to save a buck….

A little known Dutch girl at her homework. Possibly writing in her journal, private thoughts that will never be read. Her name? Anne Frank. Yeah, she was persecuted for her Jewish ethnicity. But her citizenship was Dutch.

Just as the Trilateral Commission has their own website that makes everything so plain (not!), the Bilderberg meetings also have their own website.

https://bilderbergmeetings.org/index.html

I need to start my own website. How does http://www.htps\\bitemebitemebiteme.zip sound?

From the site: “The annual Bilderberg Meeting is designed to foster dialogue between Europe and North America. Bilderberg was established in 1954 as a forum for informal discussions, bringing together individuals who share an active interest in affairs relevant to the relationship between Europe and Northern America. The Meeting has one main goal: to foster discussion and dialogue. There is no desired outcome, there is no closing statement, there are no resolutions proposed or votes taken, and the organisation does not support any political party or viewpoint.”

Ok. Sounds harmless enough. So then….why all the sinister mystery surrounding them? I think part of it may be their extreme exclusivity. Membership is via invitation only, according to their website. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. According to the website they have never sought publicity (which is neither really good or bad). “Chatham house rules” are imposed on the meetings….ok….what does that mean?

https://www.chathamhouse.org/about-us/chatham-house-rule

Distinctly different from Robert’s Rules of Order, the Chatham House Rules were devised in 1927 (which would very roughly correspond with the rather inexact discussion I heard on the tape about the Trilateral Commission).

“Q. What are the benefits of using the Rule?
A. It allows people to speak as individuals, and to express views that may not be those of their organizations, and therefore it encourages free discussion. People usually feel more relaxed if they don’t have to worry about their reputation or the implications if they are publicly quoted.”

“Q. Can a list of participants at the meeting be published?
A. No – the list of participants should not be circulated beyond those participating in the meeting.”

I think this alone may explain a lot of the suspicion. We don’t get to know who these people are, and we don’t get to know what they have said. Even if there are no transactions going on, just the fact that powerful people are basically hiding what is going on creeps most of us out.

It takes only a few seconds to find a moderately reputable article vehemently criticizing the Bilderberg folks.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/02/bilderberg-secretive-conference-eric-schmidt

According to thefactual.com, The Guardian, while it is styled as a tabloid, actually scores as higher than average:

“Over a dataset of 1,000 articles, The Guardian scored an average Factual Grade of 64.8%. This is slightly above the average of 61.9% for all 240 news sources that we analyzed. This places the newspaper in the 60th percentile of our dataset. 

“These moderate scores are attributable to “The Guardian’s minimal sensationalism and consistently neutral tone — qualities uncommon to its tabloid format.”

Now that I’ve established I’m not quoting Alex Jones, here is the quote:

“But my favourite joke by far from this year’s agenda is this item: “The war on information”. Bilderberg is concerned about fake news? The world’s most secretive conference, which is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars keeping the press away from its sacred discussions, which has spent decades lying and obfuscating about itself, wants to ensure the spread of truth?

“So when Bilderberg talks about the “The war on information” , you have to wonder what side they’re fighting on. Not here in Chantilly, but many times before I’ve been detained by armed police for trying to report on this conference. I’ve been bundled into police cars and yelled at to hand over my camera. I’ve been escorted out of my bedroom at 1am and made to stand under a police spotlight on an Austrian mountainside. I’ve actually wrestled with a policeman in an Athens metro station. And they want to talk about a war on information?

“If Bilderberg wants an answer to “Why is populism growing?” – another question on the agenda – they might take a look in the mirror. It’s almost as if people aren’t all that comfortable with unaccountable technocratic elites and billionaire globalists lobbying their ministers and party leaders behind closed doors.”

One of these people is part of the Bilderberg group. Care to take a guess? Answer will be given at the end of the post. Saying I’m not assassinated before I can finish it….image from New York Post.

I can’t go back in time and dig up that tape, but I think this may be the clue. The Bilderberg group has been doing things in the shadows, and us small folk below, busy building our ant dens, have not been able to pay much attention. The dude on the tape likely just lumped the Trilateral Commission in with the Bilderberg. Honestly, since they seem so similar, I think the mistake forgivable. But still an error.

Images of folks reported to be on the Bilderberg in 2014. No idea who any of these folks are. And not to beat a dead horse but….I never voted for any of these people. Image from Turkishnews.com, so take it for what it’s worth. Why is it Istanbul, not Constantinople?

I’m going to move on to the last organization I want to discuss. Honestly, you can ridicule me all you want about my fears about the other two groups. But I hope you really pay attention to this one. The last, and I am beginning to think possibly the most dangerous organization is the World Economic Forum.

I’ve already done a small post about these folks, I’ll link it here:

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.wordpress.com/1120

I wonder which of these fellows most needed a shower after this meeting. Klaus Schwab, founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum, shaking hands with Vladimir Putin.

I pulled my punches in that post, I was trying to allow my readers to make up their own minds. Maybe I should do the same thing here, but I made the link between them and two other organizations branded evil, so I suppose now I should make my case.

No group of people can ever be branded as perfectly evil, so please understand, I don’t doubt some good has come from this forum. In the interests of fairness, let’s take a look at their own website:

https://www.weforum.org/

Drew Carry and Melinda Gate’s ex husband….I feel better already! Meanwhile Tina Fey looks on. I may have some of that information wrong. Image from WEF website.

Paradoxically, while the WEF is more open (by leaps and bounds) than the other two organizations, I am puzzled. When I specifically look up them up, all I get on the negative side on the first page is Russel Brand discussing his fears about them. All the rest of the page is full of glowing praise of WEF programs. And…..all this praise comes from WEF articles themselves. Maybe not logical, but I smell a rat. Even when I deliberately google “the world economic forum is evil” the first four suggestions are WEF articles. Surely…..google isn’t in cahoots with these guys?

https://www.weforum.org/organizations/google

Well looky there! They are a “partner.” I wonder who else is a “partner?”

https://www.weforum.org/partners/

In case you were wondering, here is a list. Take a glance. It’s pretty big. Granted, in a list this long statistically speaking you will have some bad eggs. Still….I feel a bit nauseous seeing The Bank of China, China Construction Bank, China Energy Investment, GE, Apple, Goldman Sachs, Nestle, PB, Walmart, Microsoft, China Bohai Bank, Johnson & Johnson, JP Morgan Chase Bank, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola HBC, Dow Chemical, Dow Jones & Company, Bayer, Visa, Pfizer, Lockheed Martin.

On the positive, they did give Sadhguru a forum, and some of the articles do look like good work is being done. But….yeah….I honestly do want a Great Reset….but not one run by the organizations I’ve just listed.

And the Bilderberg member from the above photo? No, not Biden. Linsey Graham.

The apparent Second Amendment/gun control arguments are a red herring of the most despicable order.

Here we have [Party X member] making a good point about their [Second amendment/gun control] ideology. Meanwhile, the Independents hide in a cage saying “Did I saw a putty tat? I DID, I DID saw a putty tat!” Meanwhile, Party X believes we are “Just despicable!”

You are sitting in your easy chair, watching CNN, Fox News, or whatever other news you watch. And there is a politician giving a harangue about guns. Either a Democrat quacking about the evils of guns, or a Republican howling about how we will be enslaved when the Democrats take away all of our guns. You just can’t help yourself. You lift your remote with dramatic flair….point it as if it were a Star Trek phaser or a magic wand (or a gun…..is that too “on the nose?”) and just before you change the channel to Youtube to start searching for the latest Branden Tenold video or Rifftrax, you shout and spit out “You’re despicable. Just despicable!”

More and more of us are seeing through this thin charade. The two parties have been in cahoots for quite some time, but they sure had most of us fooled for a long time.

If you went to the store to buy oranges, and these two were all you could find, you’d turn Karen and get medieval on the poor fool who ran the produce department. Yet we allow two crappy parties to run our lives……image from some place with spiffy scan things to ruin my day….hurray!

In the last two posts the topic has (sort of) been gun violence and the debate between gun control and Major Tom….I mean the Second Amendment. I’ll leave links for those who either haven’t read them and want to, or for those who want a refresher:

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.wordpress.com/1820

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.wordpress.com/1897

Do you know the next line? “She know!” Ah, another song from my wasted youth. But I digress. Photo from….well, look on the picture sheesh….

In this final post on gun control, I’m going to tell you:

  • 1. The modern history (meaning, what happened since the 1968 Democratic convention) of the polarization process
  • 2. I’m going to give some thoughts on who benefits from the polarization process in the hopes of deducing who “they” are.
  • 3. I’m going to give some thoughts on why I feel this is a red herring.

I’ve covered polarization of the parties up to the 1968 Democrat convention. And in case some of you wonder why people are Republicans…..that convention is pretty high on the list of why some of us put the check by the dangerous red “R.” So the Democrats handed Nixon a win, and didn’t get their acts together for several years.

In 1977, the NRA underwent an enormous change. Members were upset, believing that the laws passed in the sixties had gone too far. The NRA, which to that point had never complained about a law, had never written anything about the Second Amendment in any of its literature, underwent a “coup” when the discontented members voted out the old board that were mostly concerned with marksmanship and safety and voted in people who were were more concerned with politics. “The right to bear arms” became the mantra, and they started endorsing and grading politicians. The Republicans, who had started to whittle down the Democrat superiority in the sixties, had lost most of the ground they had won when the Watergate scandal erupted, were all too eager to jump on board. Finally there was a demographic group besides rich white males that they could sell their wares to. The NRA endorsed Reagan, who beat Carter in a landslide, and the two organizations have been happy bed mates ever since.

https://www.npr.org/2017/10/10/556578593/the-nra-wasnt-always-against-gun-restrictions

As a child of the 80s, my predilection was to think the best politics will ever be is a Republican President and a Democrat legislature. I no longer think that, but there were people of conscious on both sides of the aisle back then. And Reagan nailed this one. Someone agrees with me that about taxes, economics, foreign policy, and liberty but happens to disagree with me (for example) about which party to vote for…..that person is still my ally. We’ll fix the things we can, and we can worry about our differences once we have built a better world for our children. What? My overpaid assistants who haven’t showed up for several posts insist I must still hate you because you vote Democrat and have a slightly take on abortion….

Somewhere along the way, we lost trust in our government. And I think that is what got both Carter, and ironically, Reagan, elected. Carter promised us he would never lie to us. And some might argue he didn’t, at least, not to the extent most Presidents (in my lifetime at any rate) have, but Americans felt bitterly let down by the horrible economy, a combination of recession and inflation that Classical Economic theory declared was impossible (and that never happened again to the same degree until…..). And we felt embarrassed and frankly afraid when the Iranian supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini took 52 hostages from our embassy in Tehran. In Carter’s defense he did order a rescue attempt, but it failed dramatically. The once great American military that had defeated Hitler’s War Machine could not even manage to rescue hostages from hungry, untrained collage students turned terrorists.

Reagan did a lot of wonderful things, but he also made enough profound mistakes that in some quarters the trust in the government never recovered. And what ground he did gain in other quarters has long since been lost.

Ok….fine! I need to learn Photoshop! But ya gotta admit….this is a pretty impressive list…..MK Ultra alone is enough to make ya think Alex Jones may have a point….but I digress….

And then along came Rush Limbaugh. I’ve already written a post that discusses his impact on my thinking, I’ll link to that post so you can read my thoughts about him (if you even wish to):

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.wordpress.com/1328

The three things he taught to those who would listen:

  • 1) Taxes are not implemented to pay for government spending. We print money from the Fed for that. Taxes are mainly just social engineering. Punish the behavior we don’t like, then bribe voters with entitlements to ensure we stay in power.
  • 2) We cannot trust the mainstream media. They have their own agenda, and it does not involve our well being.
  • 3) The deck is indeed stacked. Big government, big media, sometimes (I wish he had talked more about this) big business colludes to make sure the lower classes stay in their place. We control the barriers of entry, not to ensure quality and promotion by merit, but to make sure the only people allowed into the club are “our kind of people.”

We learned from him that income taxes existed mainly for social engineering, not for the payment of government spending. We learned that the mainstream media was corrupt and had been lying to us for decades, and that it was becoming more and more corrupt and was full of more and more lies. Last of all, we learned the actual value of capitalism instead of Communism, but we also learned that the way capitalism currently functions is deeply flawed, because big government and big corporatism had bloated to the point where the Powers That Be believed it their divine right to decide who the winners and losers were.

I can hear my readers now….”Get on with it!” This was an early cartoon from Puck magazine published shortly after the assassination of President James A. Garfield. Gotta hand it to our Secret Service dudes…they broke that whole “President dies every two decades” curse. Till I was born a President died in office every twenty years, starting with William Henry Harrison till JFK. Everyone held there breaths during the Reagan years, especially when John Hinkley Jr. made his ill fated efforts to impress Jodie Foster, but my life has seen few Presidents pass, and none during office.

“What about guns, tired blogger….wasn’t this post supposed to be about guns?

Do I even need a caption? While this has little bearing on my article, I just thought it would be fun for Florida Man to randomly show up. Photo from some random Florida Man post.

My life since beginning this post has been so hectic, it has been a week or so since I started writing. I had intended this to be my hundredth post, but I could make no headway, even as in my life, I have struggled so hard, yet made so little way down the road. I wonder if The Pilgrim’s Progress would have been as good a book if Christian had reached the Hill of deliverance, only to find on the other side, not angels who helped him off with his burden, but instead a deeper Slough of Despond.

Ok, Ok tired blogger! We get it, we already knew we were polarized. And we now know a Cliff’s Notes version of how we got here….but why do you say it is a red herring? Elementary dear Watson….image from Pewresearch

I know I was shocked to hear that in Oklahoma there was no longer a waiting period to buy guns. Because I remember in the 90s there was a ginormous bruhaha over the Brady Bill (was there a Brady Bunch parody….? There should have been). The bill required a five day waiting period before you could buy a handgun. Since I haven’t been following the news very well in the last decade, I had no idea that the bill had basically expired (they put expirations on bills these days….how nice!) and it is basically a state by state issue.

James Brady, the heroic press secretary who was shot alongside of President Reagan and Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, celebrating a gun control victory as President Clinton signs the legislation that was named after Secretary Brady. Image from Yahoo News.

The right wing had been largely expunged from most forms of big media, but had become powerful on the radio, perhaps in part because everyone assumed radio was on the way out, and the barriers of entry were not watched as closely. Even when the audience climbed to 20 million they were demonized as hate mongers. This was where the polarization started to really bear down.

I’ve written a bit about this before, the 2000 election was a fiasco. Until this last one, it was the most confused and controversial in living memory, and likely the most controversial since John Quincy Adams was elected. Image from the Busy Beaver Button Museum.

And yes, I wrote about this issue as well: https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.wordpress.com/1412

I remember those days. I was still sort of young, I was following politics and right wing radio as religiously as my life would allow. I sang along to “Algore Paradise,” and believed the rhetoric that liberalism was the epitome of evil. It was a head scratcher that “W” won without the popular vote, and having not yet read The Federalist Papers I also wondered about the election, and what it meant. Polarization was rampant, we thought, and we wondered where it would end.

Albrecht Dürer’s classic woodcut, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I have a feeling this is where things are gonna end up. Image from wikipedia

Polarization continued, with both sides throwing hate and vitriol at the other, refusing to listen to the points the other side made, and in general just not being very nice people. We got more and more angry, more and more we showed each other disrespect, and stopped listening to the views of the opposition. We demonized, and closed our minds.

Well, it is not only well past Midnight, it is well past one. The Midnight Blogger is far past tired, and is struggling with depression. I’m going to bed, I will try to finish my point in one or two more posts, we will discuss who “they” are, and either in the next post, or then post thereafter, I will hopefully explain what I really mean about all this being a “red herring.

She says it better.