How did you get here, to a RI view of the world?

[AhabsOtherLeg]

I was brought here by a mainstream Catholic education. When I was about 13-14 we were all given history projects to do, and were allowed to choose our own subjects. I reckoned the Black Death would be cool, because I was 13-14, and male, and the Black Death was all about death, and blackness, and medieval folk like from Excalibur and Monty Python and Jabberwockie.

By the time I'd finished me basic homework-style research on plagues and scourges, I knew that less than a decade before a chemical plant had exploded at Bhopal in India, and a powerful corporation had demonstrated it's absolute ownership of a whole town, region, Parliament, and nation. A bunch of businessmen had shown their unquestioned control over all those powerless people's lives, their deaths, and their destinies. From that moment on (not really - it had fuck all to do with Bhopal) I became a dedicated and passionate alcoholic.

But it stuck with me, the Bhopal stuff, and the smallpox blankets, and the poisonous pants of the Selous Scouts. And then all this other stuff kept happening all the time for the remainder of my life up till now. So here we all are.

Specifically, though, it was the Franklin Scandal. I was looking for stuff on Dunblane, and ended up here, on the forum rather than Jeff's blog, after jumping through many a disinfo and hate site and some fucking atrocious web design on the way. Even when I was new to the web, all those sites looked like shite. And so did this one. But it was good.

[Nordic]

Seems like we've had this thread before. Am I imagining things?

Oh well it's fine to have it again!

I feel like I've written my answer before, so I'll paraphrase.

Son of a career Army officer who did classified work on top secret weapons development. Ever since I can remember. So I've always known the government had plenty of secrets, and there were only a few people who had access to them.

Grew up in the late 60's and early 70's. Things seemed to be progressing well back then -- protests against the war, women's movement, great music and movies, the beginnings of an environmental movement (that was bipartisan back then!), and I just assumed that everybody knew we were making a lot of progress and that progress would continue.

Then came 1980, and Ronald Reagan's inexplicable election to the Presidency. My first election. I had probably never been so shocked in my life, that this DUMBASS, this DOLT, this FOOL, had actually been elected? C'mon!

And what really got me, leading up to the election, were the debates. I watched the debates, and it was obvious as hell that Reagan was totally out of his element. He was clearly a fool, clearly befuddled, clearly didn't have a clue about anything, struggled in a very embarrassing way (painful to watch!) because he didn't have a script.

Yet the media declared him the clear winner of the debates. Were they watching the same debates I was? This supposedly "liberal" media? C'mon!

I saw a UFO when I was 4 or 5. Pretty sure I saw a ghost when I was 8 or 9. Definitely saw something mighty strange when I was in junior high. Always had an interest in the Fortean, but never really believed it to be true, always trying to explain it away, or was just in plain old denial about it, until I lived in a seriously haunted house when I was about 25. That was a big moment, because I realized that I was experiencing something, right in front of me, that I didn't believe in. Talk about your cognitive dissonance.

Well prior to that I'd had what can only be described (and I still describe it this way) as a "religious experience". Religious ecstasy. Never experienced anything quite like it. It was profound and changed my view of everything. Always belived in a "God" because of that although for a bit in college I was a bonafide agnostic/athiest science snob, but then again I was pre med and they kind of beat any spirituality out of you (which is too bad).

Anyway, 9/11 really woke me up. I fell for it at first, and knew there would be a lot of weird shit happening afterward, and that our government would never tell the truth to us about what it was doing afterward. But the psyop aspect of it worked 100% on me, for a while at least. Until Bush started saying some weird-ass shit about invading Iraq. That's where they lost me.

Colin Powell's speech was so obviously a carefully scripted bunch of bullshit that I just wanted to scream.

In fact, I knew full well they were gonna invade Iraq back in August of 2002. They didn't actually start the invasion until March of 2003. That whole time it almost drove me literally crazy. I felt physically ill the closer it got to happening. Nobody wanted to stop it. It's like the whole country was possessed with a mad desire to watch the train wreck occur.

I really think 9/11 was a bit of a magic trick, and literally hypnotized almost everyone. There are some seriously dark and powerful magicians out there. I think they literally get their power from causing the deaths of others. That's why they can't stop.

But I'm digressing .....

Growing up I always had a way of seeking out alternative things. When I was in 7th grade I wrote a paper on acupuncture. I got interested in yoga at the same time (and these both were in a small town in Wisconsin in the mid 70's). I predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union while I was in high school in 1977 or so. I didn't figure it would happen as soon as 1989, but I knew it would happen.

I was always in the upper 1% on my test scores, and my temperment type is shared by only 4% of the population, so I've always felt like a bit of a freak. Because, well, I am a bit of a freak.

I'm pretty sure I came here because of DU. SLAD was posting there, also someone named Octafish (was that Jeff?) and a couple of other people who just BLEW MY MIND. These people were so incredibly informed, more informed than anyone could possibly be from reading the usual mainstream stuff! WHERE did they learn all of this stuff? I was utterly fascinated, and, frankly, wanted to be as smart as they were!

I almost went into journalism. I've always wanted to know what "the truth" is, no matter what. I got out of premed because one day a Biology Professor and his Assistant got into an argument in front of class about something. And I realized if nobody really KNOWS the truth even in undergrad pre med biology, there wasn't really any truth to be found here, only theory, which always changes as more stuff is learned. Fuck that. There's more truth in art. And music.

I'm rambling now. I like it here although sometimes a lot of the people surprise me with some of their views, like in the recent Peak Oil thread.

Maybe we're all nuts.

But even if we are, we get close to the truth here. We get as close as we can.

[barracuda]

Methamphetamine. I did a bunch of it and it made me extremely paranoid. Turned out to all be true.

Welcome.

[Skunkboy]

2012 said:

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2 ... o-911.html

And welcome to the board.

Ditto that. I too also lurk in the shadows. Family and work take up so much time, but I still go to RI every chance I get. How did I get here? Much like everyone else. Raised in a lower middle class Irish Roman Catholic family that thought Kennedy was God. I was home with the flu the day JFK was killed. My family and I were glued to the TV like so many other Americans, and saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald. Four years later on a field trip with the nuns, we cheered RFK and Ethel, and I got to shake his hand. He was dead a couple of months later. The beatings by the nuns instilled a healthy disrespect for authority figures in my life. When I asked my WWII combat vet father what he thought about Viet Nam, he said, "we should get the fuck out of there." Missed out on that fun by a couple of months. College, carrier and family all came along. Forgot about my working class roots and even started voting Republican. Then 911 came along. Invade Afghanistan? Hell yes! Let's bomb them back to the stone age! But wait a second... aren't they living like they're in the stone age? Invade Iraq? Well wait another second... weren't those hijackers Saudis? What about those millions of people around the world marching and pleading that we don't invade Iraq? Well Bush says they're just special interest groups with political agendas. The invasion came, and I began to smell the turd in the punchbowl of America's empire building. I began reading the anti war sites and found out about something called 911 truth. From there it was a hop, skip and a jump to Jeffs article on all those coincidences surrounding 911. After that, I was hooked and down the rabbit hole I went. So far down in fact that I became depressed. Especially after my family, loved ones and friends all thought I was nuts and should go on Prozac when I tried to tell them about all this: (as Starman Skye said:)

SOMETHING of the sinister outlines of the parapolitical landscape of extralegal, extranational unelected corporate/military power with organized criminal/political elites who have a vastly OTHER anti-democratic, non-human-rights, uncivil justice agenda that is ruthlessly opportunistic, multi-generational, flexible and shuns the light ...

Nowdays I keep my thoughts to myself. I read RI and other blogs to keep an eye on the tsunami of fascist shit that seems to be headed our way. I may not be able to change other peoples minds, but I can change my own. I pray, study Zen and martial arts, and I garden. I hike in the mountains and look at all the wonders that God has made. Like this band used to sing, what a long strange trip it's been.

[Skunkboy]

oops! double post.

[gnosticheresy_2]

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/08/coincidence-theorists-guide-to-911.html

This

And welcome to the board.

And also this

[wintler2]

1. Hard early lessons that most adults in positions of power lie, about everything, to themselves and others.

2. PNAC's 'full spectrum dominance' paper - kicked this malcontent up to a whole new level, this really is a war, fought on many fronts.

3. Experiencing state violence & total media lockdown at S11 blockade of WEF meet in Melb.Au in 2000. Yo wordspeak, i wish we could get pissed together and mourn the antiglob. movement that once was.

4. http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2 ... o-911.html If that was all JW ever wrote, i'd still be in his debt.

And since i got here .. the rabbit hole is a fucking portal, information is the bomb. I think depression is a completely unavoidable sideffect of discovering just how shitty the world can be. But coming out the other side, everything makes a sort of sense, and i've never wanted to go back or give up or change sides, only to fight better.

[Sounder]

I was looking at a 1917 penny that one of my three cents for milk about one hour before JFK was murdered. When the school intercom announced that school was to be canceled for the afternoon because of the killing, I ran home to verify what I already knew, that Kennedy was born in 1917. (I was in second grade at the time.)

After that I came to believe that reality as it appears might be quite different than reality as it is. My fixation in life is to examine this disparity and to help create an epistemological stance that might reduce this gap.

I am proud to be a freak and will never apologize for it.

The analytical abilities of some of the posters here is off the charts and I am very thankful for this continuing education that is RI.

Welcome Gashweir.

Oh yeah, for something beyond even RI type speculation and analysis, check out Bruce Duensing at http://materialintangible.blogspot.com/

His latest series is some fine tasting brain food.

[Joe Hillshoist]

3. Experiencing state violence & total media lockdown at S11 blockade of WEF meet in Melb.Au in 2000. Yo wordspeak, i wish we could get pissed together and mourn the antiglob. movement that once was.

I'll drink to that. I'd already bailed to the hills by s11 but the fuckers put my brother in hospital.

I've always thought thats really what was (a big part of) what sept 11 2001 was all about - killing the antiglobalisation movement, that really was a globalisation movement in its own way. It was just a people's globalisation vs a corporate one. They seem to have won the first round. Its not over yet tho. 9/11 was a monumental KWH of s11 I reckon.

Anyway I saw the movie Hellboy, at a mate's place, and then while I was looking for some images of the cool tentacles and the Ogdru Jahad escaping I came across a ref to Hellboy in one of Jeffs blogs. I read enough from the google thing to think "that looks interesting" and read his blog and thought wow, I didn't think anyone else would think like that.

This was my mate's place:

[Joe Hillshoist]

Its on google earth - how fucked up is that?

[Bruce Dazzling]

I walked up out of the subway at Christopher Street and 7th avenue, looked up and saw a smoking hole in the North tower.

A few minutes later, I saw the South tower explode.

After a few years of shock, the official version of events began to ring false to me, and thankfully, I ran across Jeff's Coincidence Theorist's Guide to 9/11.

I've never looked back.

Welcome aboard.

[2012 Countdown]

I'm pretty sure I came here because of DU. SLAD was posting there, also someone named Octafish (was that Jeff?) and a couple of other people who just BLEW MY MIND. These people were so incredibly informed, more informed than anyone could possibly be from reading the usual mainstream stuff! WHERE did they learn all of this stuff? I was utterly fascinated, and, frankly, wanted to be as smart as they were!

Minstrel Boy (Jeff), and yes...if I were to expand on my first post, that is just my story as well. I posted a link to Jeff's blog article, but to be precise, this is the exact link-

http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... 04x2160541

[Stephen Morgan]

I've always had pretty much the same mindset that I've got now, or at least have had for as long as I can remember. So I don't know. Don't have any tales of awakening, or anything.

[NeonLX]

Always had an a general aversion to the official story, I guess...I'm not particularly bright and I don't post very often because I don't need to put out even more evidence that I'm "slow" (my nickname in high school was "dumb Swede"). But I'm fascinated with the stuff that other people post here.

Can't remember if it was 9/11 or UFOs that drew me in here originally...probably should go look for some of my early posts and find out (not only am I slow, but I also have awful memory, along with old guy ADD).

[stickdog99]

I seem to recall that watching James Baker argue on television that machines can count votes better than people can, and then watching the news actors react as if this were a reasonable statement is what first pushed me over the edge.