Down the Rabbit Hole

You may be wondering about all the posts on the JFK assassination, the CIA, and 9/11.

I have been focusing a lot of my reading recently on the history of the CIA and our 'invisible government' . I started out with Tim Weiner's A Legacy of Ashes, which is a recent award-winning history of the CIA, and have branched out from there. It has been shocking, to put it mildly. Some liken it to 'going down a rabbit hole,' a la Alice in Wonderland. I think they're right.

Over the last several years, I've come to believe quite strongly that appearances can be very deceiving (have you seen the movie The Matrix?). All the goings-on surrounding 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, and the economic crisis (to speak of just the last 8 years) have sensitized me to how gullible we can be, how the media can be very unbalanced and misleading, and how so much is going on behind the scenes that we know nothing about.

For example, with both the 2003 Iraq invasion and the recent economic crisis, I saw things a whole lot differently from most other people and from the mass media in the run up to both of those events. It turns out that I was largely right, and the mass media and most people were not (i.e. the Iraq invasion was based on a lie and was a disaster, and the economic crisis was just a matter of time, given the level of unsustainable debt and the bubbles). That has given me some confidence in my ability to honestly sort through things and get to a semblance of the truth.

I have also come to believe that there were a number of turning points in the history of the last 50-60 years that reveal a whole lot about who we are as a nation, if you can somehow get to the bottom of them. These include the real activities of the CIA around the world and in our own country, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of the Kennedy brothers, Watergate, 'Iran Contra' in the 80s, the rise of the financial sector in the last 25 years, 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, the economic crash of the last year, and the rise and election of Barack Obama.

What's so incredible to me are the resources that you can access online these days. It's a new day for research, in that regard. Obviously you have to be careful about their credibility, but you can kind of get a sense of their reliability, once you've been working on a subject for awhile. Wikipedia, for example, with their up-to-date information and links can lead you down paths of research you could never imagine doing a few years ago, at least not as quickly.

Anyway, I don't quite know where all of this will lead. But I enjoy following the trail, even if it's unfamiliar and somewhat threatening to my sense of reality. Consider it the equivalent for me of going on a long hike in unfamiliar territory (though not quite as good exercise as that!). And I'll share some of it with you via The Great Awakening, as long as you care to read it.