Sometimes I'm not even sure why I sit down and write some of these things because it feels like nobody's listening... or they deliberately turn a deaf ear because they don't want to "hear" anything that conflicts with their predetermined sense of "How Things Are."
A long-time friend — whom I thought was reasonably sane — keeps sending me all these links to stuff that's allegedly "going on" with the government, the world, aliens, UFO conspiracies, medical breakthroughs and various other things.
Maybe I'm just taking things too seriously and should be filing this under "well, everyone needs a hobby."
I sincerely don't know.
But here's the thing: In the interest of doing my best to "be a good friend" I take at least a cursory glance at what he sends me.
While I shake my head at the "tinfoil hat" nature of it all, what alarms me isn't so much that such skecthy information is circulating, but that it is circulating in groups with hundreds of thousands and even millions of followers.
Maybe this kind of thinking has always been out there, but the advent of the Internet and online groups has made it much easier to quantify the nutball segment of the population.
Or is there something more?
I was watching an interesting podcast in which the host was making the point that adjunct to a kind of selfishness/self-absorbtion that arose and gained a lot of traction in the 1960s ("You're special and you can be anything you want!") there has been a subtle psychological shift through which more and more people see themselves as "unique," and consequently reach for increasingly fringe associations that also reject most consensus (and common sense) ideas.
A while back, I was having a nice long talk with a college buddy — who worked as a profiler for a three-initial government organization for over 25 years — and we discussed (among other things) some of these strange things people cook up, whether it's cities on the dark side of the Moon or shadow governments run in cooperation with aliens.
While he was subject to NDAs with respect to answering the question "is this stuff real?" he made the very reasonable point that most people suck at keeping secrets, and the sheer number of people who'd have to be paid off or silenced would make most of the propositions utterly impossible... because someone's lips would flap somewhere, where a trustworthy source (not just some fellow quacks in an echo chamber) would hear them and shine a light on them.
Which makes sense. The reason most "eyes only" projects are only known to a few — or a few dozen — people is precisely to limit exposure risk.
For example, putting cities on the dark side of the Moon would involve tens of thousands of people... all of whom would have to keep quiet, not to mention the thousands of amateur and professional astronomers watching the Moon and the skies at all times, not to mention the thousands of pairs of eye tasked with watching accounting, purchasing and money transfers. While the theory sounds cool, the scale of its practical implementation makes no sense.
Paul's point was that we should be keeping our eyes on the very basic stuff right in front of us, not the exotic out on the fringe. The commonplace stuff that's "hiding in plain sight," as it were. And if officialdom mentions something "fringe," it's most likely misdirection to keep people from looking for something much more obvious.
Like our local supermarket just converted to "digital price tags" on the shelves, and the local community is already abuzz with examples of grocery items that show at a lower price on the shelf than at check-out. Maybe it's time to unistall the supermarket loyalty app from my phone and snap a quick photo of the shelf tags of sale items, for comparison's sake.
Point here being that the supermarket is less likely to be "profiling" you than to be looking for ways to simply milk you out of a few more dollars without your noticing.
It's all just a big clown show!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Sunday!
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2026.07.26 00:32 PDT
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