Where was Zbigniew Brzezinski on June 8, 1967?

Are we just going to sit there and watch? ... We have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren't just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a 'Liberty' in reverse."
--Zbigniew Brzezinski, referring to rumors that Israeli jets may overfly Iraq on their way to taking out Iranian nuclear reactors.

There are several things interesting about this quote. Number one, who is Zbigniew Brzezinski? He was National Security Adviser under, of all people, Jimmy Carter. Pat Robertson saw him as the tail that wagged the dog. If he is still being taken seriously 30 years after leaving office, obviously that man has some serious clout far and beyond any government position he's ever held.

Secondly, he's referring to the Liberty incident as one that was 'a deliberate accident'. I've thought this all along, but the official position of both the US and Israel is a) Israeli jets and torpedo boats didn't realize that the ship in international waters flying an American Flag was one of ours until after they tried to sink it, and b) Everything regarding the incident remains sealed under the highest levels of secrecy [until now anyway], even after most of the people involved 42 years ago are already dead.

This also raises the question: Where was Zbigniew Brzezinski on June 8, 1967?

It's interesting that only this year--four decades after the action--was a Silver Star medal finally awarded to Terry Halbardier in which Israel was actually mentioned as the nation whose jets were strafing him as he strung a makeshift antenna so that the Liberty could get out the message that it was under attack. It was only due to his actions that the Sixth Fleet was alerted and Israel was forced to stop shooting the survivors. And this came only 3 years after Halbardier finally received the Purple Heart for injuries suffered in the strafing run.

Inasmuch as Halbardier has always been a "Liberty Incident Truther" about the attack, the fact that he has finally received what should have been virtually automatic recognition for his valor implies that official US attitudes on The Liberty Incident are softening.

If I live long enough--about another 40 years--I expect to find a similar softening of the lid of secrecy that has remain clamped over the 9/11 incidents.

Man without a country

We now know that Barack Hussein Obama II was not born to Barack Hussein Obama and Stanley Ann Dunham on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii--this despite many assurances we have received to the affirmative.

How do we know? Because this is the information on the Certificate of Live Birth that his surrogates have posted images of online (he himself has never made any of these claims under oath). Images that have been closely examined and declared without doubt to be fraudulently manipulated. Were this information true, there would be no reason whatsoever to forge it.

There is no reason to doubt that Ann was his mother; and little reason to doubt that Barack was his father. Therefore there is only one line on the forged COLB that can't be true, and that is the date and location of his birth.

The conclusion is inescapable: Barack Obama is America's first African president.

[UPDATE 02 Sept 2011: Subsequent release of another altered birth certificate did not settle the question. But unless information has been stolen from B.H.O. I's INS record, the birth did in fact take place in Hawaii, on or about the date indicated. Something has been altered, however, and we can only guess what it was. Perhaps the baby's last name was not Obama, and it took a retroactive tampering with the certificate to avoid the nasty complexities of a legal name change. Search on "Obama" for the full account on this blog.]

How Africans got black skin

I once heard this story from an authority on West African oral culture, and since it doesn't seem to have made its way online yet, I thought I might as well share it with the world. I hope someone will come along with a better version that I can link to.

In the beginning, God made everybody the same: they all had black skin. But God appointed a time when everyone could come to the watering hole and wash the blackness off their skin. He set the time at ten o'clock in the morning.

Now, the European had a watch, so he made sure to be on time. But the African didn't worry so much about the time, and he got there late. Alas, by the time he arrived, the European had used up almost all the water washing the blackness off his skin. There was only enough water left to wipe the blackness off the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet.

This is why Africans to this day are black everywhere but their hands and feet. And it is also why the Europeans always go by the clock.

EDIT 2026: I also ran across this online, but can't manage to verify it: a legend in South America states that the people who arrived first to get washed turned out white, but the latecomers had to bathe in their dirty water and turned out brown.
What all these folklores have in common is that white people are at an advantage, due to a lack of procrastination on the part of their remote ancestors. This foundational thinking is very hard to overcome in third world cultures. Only when dark-skinned people are taken out of their native environment and allowed to flourish in a white-ruled society can they discover this to only be a myth after all: whiteness of the skin has absolutely nothing to do with one's chances of success in life. Alas,this foundational belief has undergone a major resurgence within my own lifetime, with the idea of "white privilege" taking over American academia.

Cracking the Google Bar Code

It's been more than 20 years since I sat down one day with a pile of envelopes and cracked the Zone Improvement Plan bar code. Excited, I then turned my hand to cracking the Universal Product Code, but soon gave up in frustration. The series of thick and thin bars seemed to carry no information corresponding to the digits beneath them.

Well, today on the 57th anniversary of the official recognition of the bar code, I finally did it. The key turned out to be that the thick and thin spaces between the bars also carry information, and, even more importantly, there are extraneous digits at the beginning, middle, and end of the code. Furthermore, there are always an odd number of digits (in order to begin and end the series with a bar rather than a space), so in the last half of the code the numerals begin with a space rather than a bar.

This all came about because today the GOOGLE logo is a bar code. I haven't been able to crack it yet, but I've gone to all the work of teasing out the digits. I don't know yet whether they are base-2 or base-4 binary, but nothing I've tried so far has worked. I welcome suggestions!

Here are the digits:

2112142113131341111341111221142211141122141221142331112

There are 55 digits, which to me probably signifies that 211 and 112 are the beginning and ending markers (which is more ZIP code than UPC code), and that the central digit, 1, marks the middle. That leaves 12 numerals of 4 digits each. They can't be read as UPC code numerals, which always consist of 4-digit sequences that add up to seven. How that is supposed to spell Google, I don't know. Maybe instead it's a date: 10-07-1952/2009.

Or, the end markers could just be the digit 2 and there are 13 numerals. Please help!

Added on October 8th:
Well, I was on the right track. The end marker '2' is only there to allow the code to end in a bar; barcodes for that reason always have to have an extra digit as long as the characters contain an even number of digits. This particular code is rather consistent, in that all other characters contain six digits. So I was a bit short on the end-markers; the symmetry of their outside digits was only coincidental.

But the extraneous 'g' truly is a mystery. In the science of textual criticism, this would be referred to as dittography, but of a rather unusual kind.

The entire barcode translates as follows:
-begin sequence-Googleg-end sequence-.

I don't see that it would have been all that hard to decode only 49 characters instead of 55, especially given that the key was freely available online. And the notion of a checksum doesn't seem to fit, as it is only used with numeric codes like UPC.

I'll check back in if anyone can solve the mystery. And yes, a malicious website in China (forexbids.cn) has hacked into many of the sites discussing this mystery!

As phony as a three-dollar bill

I have as of late been electronically sitting at the feet of certain historians so called, who have endeavored to enlighten me in the true history of the Americas. This experience has indeed been enlightening, as well as entertaining. But at length I have felt the need to pull back and peer into the history of this movement to re-write the ancient lore of this hemisphere. And behold, along the way I found the history of this movement to include, of all things, a phony three-dollar bill. I even saw with the eyes of my understanding, a facsimile thereof, though I have yet to have hefted it.

It can be found on the plate following page 148 of this book.