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How to navigate this site

There is a lot here to digest.  A list of categories can be found at the bottom of the sidebar (right). Choosing a category is the easiest way to navigate to areas of interest.

I also have included two links in the sidebar. The first leads to my Substack site containing updates on some stories posted here. The second leads to my the gift shop for the Peace Trail Project. All profits go to build peace sites.

Some of the more important stories I’ve broken over the last three decades include:

The origins of hip hop in the Bronx, origins of the 1980s East Village art scene, the CIA assassination of JFK, the true story of Soma (it’s not a mushroom), John Wilkes Booth was a Confederate intelligence officer, Jesus never lived because he was the Judaic interpretation of Greco-Buddhism, Manna is matzo made from hempseed flour, the story of the holy grail began in ancient Scythia where Heracles was born, and, perhaps the most important of all: the domestic terrorists known as the Weather Underground were actually created and controlled by the CIA. The secret leader was a Jesuit-raised lawyer who stole High Times from the employees and ran it into the ground while climbing the social ladder in New York City.

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Roots of Merlin’s Magic

Crown for an Enaree.

The roots of Merlin’s magic can be found in the Enarei, the Scythian shamans, a name is derived from “Anarya,” which translates as “not men.”

Born male, the Enarei underwent a transformation, adopting female attire, speech, and societal roles. They wielded immense respect and political power as chief advisors to the king. They used divination to determine causes of royal illnesses and national crises and were in charge of fumigation rituals  that burned cannabis in braziers in tents. Red hot stones were placed in a brazier followed by stalks of flowering buds. While the tent filled with smoke, the not-men led prayers, chants and songs.

The Gundestrup cauldron is a richly decorated silver vessel, thought to date from between 200 BC and 300 AD. While found in Denmark, it was not made there as it includes elements of Gaulish and Thracian workmanship, metallurgy, and imagery. The primary figure is believed to be Cernunnos (The Horned God) who is depicted wearing stag antlers. He sits cross-legged in a yogic lotus position, holding a sacred Celtic torc in one hand and a ram-horned serpent in the other, surrounded by wild beasts.

The Scythians worshipped a sacred deer, an ancient stone-age myth that circulated through numerous cultures over the world that depended on deer to survive famines. In Scythian mythology, the Golden Deer acted as a celestial guide and mediator between realms, transporting the dead to the afterlife. Deer antlers were mounted on the heads of Scythian war horses and headdresses of the Enarei.

Everything we know about the Enarei comes from two sources: Herodotus and Hippocrates, and neither visited a Scythian encampment, but relied on testimony of travelers, so it’s all unreliable, secondhand info. Herodotus got as far as the primary Greek port on the north coast of the Black Sea, a port that traded extensively with the Scythians.

Since Scythians descended from the Yamnaya, the first horse riders, they ruled the roads connecting Europe with China and India, and established a huge oasis at Bactra, where the trail split, leading either to China or the Khyber Pass. Controlling trade along this route produced vast wealth and Scythians dominated trade in slaves, spices, grain, fur, wool, lapus lazul, and livestock.

For centuries, the sight of marauding Scythians on horseback was the equivalent of gangsters today driving race cars while brandishing automatic weapons . At an early age, male and females mastered the composite and recumbent bow, the AK-47 of the ancient steppes.

When attacked or engaged, Scythians avoided hand-to-hand combat, but rode away to a distance where they could continue to pummel the attacker with poison arrows while remaining immune from any incoming projectiles.

The Scythians wore leather pants, a garment unique to their culture, and something necessitated by daily horseback riding. They had no permanent villages because they traveled in covered carts pulled by oxen and horses. Their lifestyle was preserved after a large migration moved from Bactra to Romania, where they became known as the Gypsies.

The Scythians rode bareback and had no saddles nor stirrups.

The Scythians were especially adept at firing arrows while fleeing, as evidenced by numerous Scythian artifacts depicting what became known as the Parthian shot. It is assumed the most elaborate Scythian-style artifacts were created by Greek artists.

When a Scythian king died, his slaves and horses would be ritualistically killed and buried in a circle around his tomb, which was buried under a mound of earth. The king would be buried with all the essential objects and supplies to carry him to the afterlife.

The coming-of-age ceremony was celebrating someone’s first kill. This ceremony could happen on the battlefield, or back at the camp. If held at the battlefield, the skullcap would be chopped off and the assembled warriors would use it as a cup to drink blood. Only a fully made member of the tribe was permitted the honor of chopping off a skull cap, but anyone who killed an enemy was immediately awarded the privilege.

These skull caps became treasured possessions and often encased in gold, bronze or leather. They were undoubtedly used eventually to drink bhang after a wave of fire temples appeared along the Silk Road serving Soma, also known as  Haoma in Persia. This ritual was the foundation for the Christian Eucharist, and the myth of the holy grail goes all the way back to the Scythians.

The myth was never about an actual cup as every warrior was buried with theirs. It was about the medicine that went into the cup, something that healed the sick and brought peace to the kingdom. Although this connection has been obscured and hidden, it seems likely Merlin’s magic was derived from cannabis intoxication, which allowed him to visualize the future and communicate with animals, all traits of the original Enarei., and Merlin shares structural and functional traits with the archetype: The original Merlin was likely gay or at least multi-sexual. 

While Greek culture detested effeminate males, the Scythians viewed them as closer to god. The Greeks believed horse riding caused impotence and led to gender transformation.

The Gender-Fluid & Transgressive Shaman: In early Welsh poetry (such as the tales of Myrddin Wyllt), the proto-Merlin is a “wild man” of the woods who loses his mind in battle, sheds civilized taboos, and speaks with animals. Like the Enarei, who stepped completely outside traditional male warrior roles to gain spiritual authority, Merlin operates entirely outside the standard patriarchal and military hierarchy of Camelot.

Decorated tapestry depicting the seated goddess Artimpasa and a Scythian rider from circa 241 BC.

Androgyny and Shape-Shifting: Merlin is a consummate shape-shifter, frequently shifting between male and female forms, or old and young personas. The Enarei embodied a similar ritual androgyny, which the Greeks viewed as an “effeminate disease” but the Scythians revered as a divine gift from the goddess Artimpasa.

Royal Kingmaker and Prophet: Just as the Enarei were the ultimate spiritual authorities behind the Scythian throne, Merlin exists primarily to guide, protect, and legitimize the king (Uther and later Arthur) through absolute prophetic foresight.

The Batraz and Nart Saga Connection

In the Nart Sagas—the epic folklore of the Ossetians (the last remaining descendants of the Alans)—Batraz is a central superhuman warrior associated with a magical sword and lightning.

While Batraz himself is a direct prototype for King Arthur or Lancelot rather than Merlin (most famously mirrored when Batraz, on his deathbed, demands his unstoppable sword be thrown into the Black Sea, causing the water to turn blood-red and seethe), the magic and structural world surrounding Batraz mirrors Merlin’s acts:

The Smith-Sorcerer Kurdalægon: In the Batraz cycle, the hero is tempered and forged in a celestial furnace by the heavenly blacksmith Kurdalægon. This figure acts as a divine mentor, physician, and engineer of destiny. This directly parallels Merlin’s role as the supernatural architect who engineers Arthur’s birth, protects him with magical defenses, and guides the retrieval of Excalibur.

Early version of Artimpasa.
They were distinct from other Scythian diviners. Traditional diviners used bundles of willow rods, but the Enarei predicted the future using split pieces of inner linden bark.
 
The Enarei adopted feminine personas, wore women’s clothing, and engaged exclusively in “women’s work” rather than the martial duties of the warrior elite. Instead of fighting, they served the fertility goddess Artimpasa and the Snake-Legged Goddess. Their duties were strictly ritualistic, focusing on political divination, using dowsing rods to predict the future, and performing religious ceremonies.
 
The Ritual of the Skull Cup
 
According to Herodotus’ Histories, a Scythian could only drink from the communal victory cup—or fashion an enemy’s skull cap into a personal, leather-clad or gold-lined drinking vessel—if they had personally slain an enemy in battle and brought the head to the king.
 
Male and Female Warriors: Archaeology confirms that a significant portion of Scythian women were active warriors (the historical inspiration for the Amazons) and were buried with weapons. These fighting women, along with male warriors, participated in the skull-cup tradition.
 
Enarei Exclusion: Because the Enarei did not fight or kill in battle, they did not meet the cultural prerequisite to claim a human skull trophy. Their position and authority came from divine transformation and spiritual power, not military prowess.
 

The Mysteries of the Enaree: The Androgynous Shamans of the Scythians

By Aleksa Vučković

Lavish burials were important for the Scythians, whose tumuli still stand today after many centuries. And in those burials, the Enaree played a crucial role, conducting their shamanistic practices to help the deceased depart to the afterworld.

After the burial, the Enaree would ritually clean themselves with the vapors of the cannabis plant, which has been attested archaeologically in Saka Scythian tumuli. In these were discovered various receptacles containing remnants of cannabis, including tripods, braziers and incense burners. One of the famous Pazyryk Scythian burials contained a pot inside which were fruits and cannabis, and a copper censer in which the latter was burned.

The Enaree played numerous roles in Scythian society, one of which was the role of divination. They acted as seers, and performed special forms of divination that utilized the inner bark of the linden tree. They would cut the inner bark of the linden into three pieces, and then plaiting and unplaiting them around their fingers in order to obtain the answers they wanted. For example, whenever a Scythian King would fall ill, the Enaree were called in to divine and discover which enemy had “bewitched” the King.

“The Anarya were especially consulted when the king of the Scythians was ill, which was itself believed by the Scythians to be caused by a false oath being sworn upon the king’s hearth. Once the Anarya had identified the suspect who had sworn the false oath, the said suspect would claim to be innocent. If the Anarya maintained the accusation, six more soothsayers were consulted, and if they upheld the original accusation, the suspect was executed by being beheaded. If the additional soothsayers declared the suspect was innocent, the process of consulting more soothsayers was repeated. If the soothsayers all found the accused to be guilty, the culprit was executed through beheading, and his property was divided among the Anarya who had found him guilty. If the larger number of soothsayers still declared the suspect to be innocent, the initial accusers were executed by being put into an oxen-pulled wagon filled with brushwood which was set on fire was made to be pulled by the oxen, who eventually also burned along with the wagon and the disgraced soothsayers; the sons of these Anarya were also all killed, but their daughters were spared.”

—Hippocrates, On Airs, Waters, And Places

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Why is Spinoza so ignored?

On August 20, 1672, a mob led by royalist thugs grabbed the deWitt brothers and beat them with sledgehammers, stabbed them with knives and swords, and repeatedly shot them at close range. They were stripped naked and hung by their feet. Body parts and internal organs were removed. An eye was eaten by someone, others ate raw flesh, and the liver was roasted on a fire and eaten by many. Fingers, ears and body parts began trading for cash. A finger went for 20 cents. The Hague Historical Museum has a tongue and finger on display.

Baruch Spinoza had been 23 when he was excommunicated by the Jewish community in Amsterdam decades earlier. When the Inquisition expelled Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal, many fled to the Netherlands because of its religious tolerance.

After the deWitt’s organized a successful and completely bloodless revolution in the Netherlands that toppled the ruling royal family (103 years before the American revolution), surrounding nations began mobilizing with the intent of invading and restoring the Dutch monarchy. Spinoza, like the deWitt’s, belonged to a successful merchant family. However, their ships had been destroyed in the first Anglo-Dutch War. Spinoza went to the city council to release himself from his father’s debts, a violation of Jewish law that infuriated the Jewish council. All Jews were commanded to cut off communication with Spinoza, including his own family. He had been living in isolation for decades when the deWitts were murdered.

Most likely, Spinoza’s views on the Torah were involved. He had recently anonymously published Theological-Political Treatise (1670), which claimed nations needed to secularize and reign in religions, and freedom of thought and speech were essential to spreading democracy. Spinoza knew Moses could not have written the Torah because the Torah contains a description of the death and burial of Moses. It was not the divine word of god, but assembled by men over many generations.

Although known for his stoic behavior, the 39-year-old Spinoza lost it when he heard the news about the deWitts, and immediately painted a sign with words “Ultimi barbarorum” and wanted to bring it to the site while the mob was still assembled, but was prevented by his landlord. Had he done so, Spinoza would also have been hung by his feet and eaten.

Spinoza’s views on democracy changed that day and he no longer trusted the masses. In fact, the murders had been carefully orchestrated by the deposed royals who were pumping out leaflets blaming the massing French army on the border as being the fault of the deWitts. Remove them, and the invasion threat would go away.

Spinoza continued to write extensively but nothing much was published until after his death at age 44, five years after the murder of the deWitts.

Ethics (Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata) argues that God and nature are the same substance and everything in the universe is a part of God. Freedom and happiness do not come from free will, which is an illusion, but from deploying reason to understand emotions and laws of nature. He is recognized as the earliest fundamental figure in the European Enlightenment, preceded by Descartes and followed by Locke, Newton and Voltaire.

A film director in Israel recently wanted to make a documentary on Spinoza with the help of Yitzhak Melamed in Amsterdam. Far from reconsidering the cherem, or ex-communication, that the rabbinical authorities in Amsterdam pronounced against Spinoza in 1656, when he was just 23, rabbis in the Netherlands extended that cherem to Melamed and to the filmmakers.

Hollywood has never gotten anyone near this amazing story. Wonder why.

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Hip Hop History 101

Three of the biggest controversies involving Hip Hop history solved.

1) Is graffiti writing part of hip hop?

Cornbread claims he was the first but he took more from NYC graffiti than he gave.

Not initially. The first writer may have been Cornbread, who wrote “Cornbread loves Cynthia” in Philadelphia. At first he claimed this was 1967, then later backdated it to 1965 (likely after he discovered Julio 204 had started in 67). By his own account, he had just been released from juvenile detention and was either 12- or 14-years-old depending on which date you accept.

Julio 204’s birthdate has never been released and he stopped tagging in 1970 after being arrested. Julio inspired Greg 69, and Phil T. Greek, who inspired his childhood friend Demetrius to start writing Taki 182 in 1969, when they were both 16-years-old.

But graffiti blasted into the white hot core of hip hop in 1972, when Phase 2 started a chapter of the Ex Vandals at Stevenson High in the South Bronx. A student at Alfred E. Smith Technical also began tagging. He named himself Kook Herc. Both Phase and Herc were 17-years-old.

Phase 2 brought graffiti into the white hot center of hip hop when he started a chapter of the Ex Vandals at Stevenson High along with Stay High 149 and Super Kool 223.

In 1971, Super Kool 223 had discovered he could replace the nozzle on a spray can with the nozzle from a shaving cream can. This allowed him to create the first masterpiece. Many writers balked because it “took damn near an entire can of paint,” according to Phase. Very quickly, however, the best writers began crafting masterpieces. Phase turned Super Kool’s stick letters into bubbles in 1972, and that led into Wild Style.

The original writers in Washington Heights did not aspire to create masterpieces, replace nozzles, or enter into the art world. There is a profound difference between them and artists like Phase, who easily entered the art world, even though they were marginalized until Keith Haring came along and opened a door for commercializing graffiti.

2) Who was the first rapper?

Coke La Rock, the first hip hop emcee.

Coke La Rock began rapping in 1973 at Cindy’s birthday party in the West Bronx when he was 18 years-old. Hollywood began deejaying earlier in 1972, but Hollywood did not rap until two years later, when he was 20-years-old.

3) Who invented breakdancing?

Before it was called “breaking” it was called “going off” and it erupted spontaneously so no one person gets credit. However, Kool Herc immediately recognized having the best dancers was essential to having the best parties, and he cultivated the Twins, Clark Kent, Sasa, Trixie, Eldorado Mike, James Bond, while Coke La Rock made sure to call them out whenever they went off, which made them stars in the emerging culture before the rap crews appeared and took center stage. Herc would reward these displays by extending the break, which was the part reserved for their best moves.

In 1975, in a moment of spontaneous improvisation, Cholly Rock extended the floor spin and finished with a freeze. Sasa had a famous drop, and the Twins did splits like James Brown, and both Kent and the Twins had a spin move, but Cholly laid a foundation for transforming breaking into something entirely new. He was 15 years-old.

Cholly Rock was a huge influence on the crews that emerged after his generation aged out, which included the Crazy Commandos, Bronx Crew, Mexican Crew, and the Rockwell Association, who were inspired by the Zulu floor spin, something Spy and Willie Will expanded that to include the head spin. Phase 2 and Sisco Kid played a role in the evolution of spinning. The crews most people know from the movies (Rocksteady, NYC Breakers) came later.

Cholly was recruited into the emerging Zulu Kings. After Kool Herc was stabbed and lost his club, Bambaataa captured the center of gravity on hip hop culture, which flourished at Bronx River Projects in the East Bronx. In 1979, the best battles were between the Funky 4 against the Furious Four. In 1983 the best battles were between the Furious Five and the Cold Crush Brothers.

Grandmaster Caz could out-rap and out-deejay most everybody in the Bronx. He had started as a breakdancer, became a deejay named Casanova Fly, and then changed to Grandmaster Caz shortly before joining the Cold Crush Brothers (founded by Tony Tone and Charlie Chase), which happened in 1979, when Caz was 19-years-old.

Hip hop began with blacks in the Bronx, but they were often going off to Puerto-Rican-influenced beats. Many hip hop classics were influenced by those beats, especially “Just Begun” by Jimmy Castor, and “Apache” by the Incredible Bongo Band, which became the ultimate b-boy battle anthem early on when street gang culture was fading and hip hop emerging. Latin teens soon flooded in and re-energized the dance style kicked off by Cholly and the Zulus.

Breakdancing was the portal most teens used to enter the culture. First known as a breakdancer turned deejay/rapper named Casanova Fly, Grandmaster Caz joined the Cold Crush Brothers started by Tony Tone and they soon challenged the Furious Five for supremacy.

The Beastie Boys switched from hard core to hip hop in 1983, the same year Run/DMC came out of Hollis Queens with a style that brought back an uncompromising style of rap that had been pioneered by Caz and Melle Mel.

Although Cindy’s birthday party marks the official start of hip hop culture, the essential b-boys arrived a bit earlier (although they wouldn’t get named yet). Disco started in NYC at the Loft in downtown Manhattan in 1970. The following year saw the opening of the Plaza Tunnel in the basement of the Concourse Plaza Hotel in the West Bronx near Yankee Stadium.
 
Herc, Phase, Stay High and Super Kool all came, and sometimes snuck in without paying. They were all into tagging and crafted unique tags, and likely carried markers and/or spray cans and tagged on their way to a party at the Tunnel, where DJ John Brown spun records.
 
The entrance to the Tunnel was obviously a prime spot to hit, and the picture shows Phase2, Herc, Lee 163 and others. The Plaza Tunnel was the only place to be if you were an aspiring b-boy because that is the crucible where b-boy culture was forged.
 
Downtown, disco was a gay invention, but not uptown. Discos were classy places where adults could dance in pairs and show off moves. Teens in jumpsuits and sneakers were not welcome. Disco Mario and Pete Jones were two of the deejays who would shut off the music if b-boys started going off. They weren’t dancing in pairs like they were supposed to, and they were taking up way too much space. When the b-boys appeared with their strange fashions and ghetto blasters, they provoked immense disdain from adults of all cultures. They reveled in being hated by all because they knew they carried the true soul of their generation.
 
Early on the b-boys had a few songs for which they reserved their best moves. Apache, Just Begun and Giveituporturnitaloose were three, but every b-boy had his favorite break.
 
I assume Herc started as a b-boy along with Phase, Caz, Sasa, Flash, Melle Mel, Trixie, Clark Kent, the Twins, James Bond, Eldorado Mike and all the other first generation pioneers. Whoever started the style we don’t know, but it erupted when Phase and Herc were juniors in high school, and every cool kid in the Bronx suddenly wanted to be part of a crew of dancers.
 
Most early discos uptown did not allow sneakers.
 
There was a moment when Herc stood in the Plaza Tunnel disco watching Brown when he said to himself, “I can do that.” And from the moment he organized his first jam, he knew the b-boys had to be there because they were the real stars of the show. Until the rappers appeared.
 
Cholly Rock had just entered high school and saw it going down and became a b-boy at 15, but he could still sometimes put on slippery shoes and do the hustle because Fred Astaire was one of his biggest influences.
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The Deficiencies of Theocracies

Herman Wouk had been completely secularized by the time he entered Columbia University at age 15. He’d been raised by an Orthodox family in the Bronx, but was so secularized that his first novel contained no Jews. In his most famous novel, The Caine Mutiny, the sole Jew is the lawyer who defends the mutinous crew and delivers an impassioned defense of the paranoid captain after winning the case.

Wouk was a comedy writer who had been editor of Columbia’s Jester and author of two Varsity Shows before becoming a joke writer, mostly for Fred Allen. But following the attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the Navy and served in the Pacific Theater aboard two minesweepers, participating in six invasions and winning numerous battle stars.

Once the war was over, Wouk traveled to Europe and began researching what happened because he was disturbed by the systemic racism inside the US State Department that had allowed the extermination of Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals from Europe in cold-blooded massacres. The impact on German troops carrying out the atrocities was so emotionally harmful that they stopped shooting and began building gas chambers. The ovens came later, after the buried bodies began leaking into the ground water.

Racism against Jews had been stoked for millennia by Christians and especially by the Vatican. The discovery of ancient Greek and Roman literature and philosophy suddenly spread across Europe like a wildfire, and there was a tremendous shift in zeitgeist that shook the Vatican to its core, which is why the Jesuits emerged as a military force designed to roll back the Renaissance. The Inquisition concentrated on Spain and Portugal where Conversos had attained immense power and authority. They attended Catholic mass on Sundays but held Hebrew ceremonies in secret on Saturdays.

When the leading Conversos heard a Jesuit inquisitor was coming to investigate them, they tragically decided to hire a hit man, and the Jesuits sought revenge for that crime, so all the Conversos were banished, many fleeing to the New World, although the Netherlands was a popular destination as the Dutch merchant class had fomented a successful and largely non-violent revolution that had democratized the new republic.

When the Jews were originally banished from their homeland it was only men who were forced to leave. The women were useful as slaves, midwives, prostitutes and wives. So single men spread out across Europe, looking for wives.

If you know anything about genetics, you know that when you marry two vastly different DNAs, you get hybrid vigor. Racism is an affront to spirituality because the great spirit welcomes the melting pot, which always produces great talents, while inbreeding produces only problems.

In Germany a new language emerged, a mishmash of Hebrew and German called Yiddish. The German Christians pushed the Jews into the Ukraine, Poland and other Eastern European countries, but the Russians began pushing from the other direction.

Even though hybrid vigor and universal education had sparked immense cultural contributions from the relatively tiny Jewish population, the pogroms never ended, nor did the dream that one day the Jews would reunite in their ancestral homeland, a place now occupied by the descendants of the Mycenae Greeks who attacked Egypt and were bribed and resettled in Gaza, first becoming known as the Philistines.

The decade Wouk spent studying the Holocaust shook him to his core, and led him back to the Talmud. His first work of non fiction was “This is My God: the Jewish Way of Life,” written seven years before the Six Day War, when the existence of the fragile state of Israel was in great peril. This existential threat cemented the religious rightwing into permanent power.

In the 1990s a peace messiah emerged, Yitzhak Rabin, and he orchestrated a two-state solution that might have begun the process of healing and mutual respect necessary for ending the never-ending terror show. Like all peace messiahs, Rabin was assassinated to erase his influence, and there was no more talk of two-state solutions.

Were Wouk alive today, I believe he would be horrified at what Israel has become and especially horrified by the destruction of Gaza in what seems to have been an orchestrated black flag event designed to keep the rightwing in power.

Populations have always been directed and influenced by propaganda and the science of propaganda has grown immensely since Goebbels. The kraken has been unleashed and now we are raining bombs on Iran. This insures that for generations, suicide bombers will be plotting revenge against America.

Embracing orthodox religion may provide emotional comfort, but it is the wrong direction and will not lead out of this morass. Wouk leaned on the Talmud for his morality and empathy, but it blinded him to the deficiencies of theocracies.

When Wouk published Winds of War and War of Remembrance, it was the first time the Nazi horror show was revealed. In the early 80s, the two books became one of the greatest television events ever, although the 50-hour series was never streamed and has largely disappeared.

So I put the entire 50-hours up for free on Youtube. Two families are explored, one deep inside the WASP oligarchy and one deep inside an educated and secularized Jewish family, and Wouk covers both with amazing insight. It is some of the best dialogue since Shakespeare, Chekov and George Eliot.

The end of war and the beginning of peace starts in remembrance.

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The Winds of War & War and Remembrance

I recently discovered a forgotten masterpiece: Herman Wouk’s 40-hour epic retelling of World War II. It only made me realize how lame WWII movies being made today really are, and how most of them only wish to show the brutality and violence, but never reveal the emotional costs faced by all sides.

I was vexed to discover that most of the series is impossible to find online except for dubs taken from VHS tapes. So I ordered a used copy of all the DVDs and began transferring them with the help of my iPhone. Making these transfers has become my 2026 420 ceremony. The final episode will be posted on April 19, 2026.

Perhaps you weren’t alive in 1983 when the entire series was shown on prime time television. Or maybe you just missed all the hoopla. If so you are in for a real treat, as well as perhaps the longest binge-watch of your life.

Before you dive in, however, here’s a message from the creator:

“War and Remembrance, both as a novel and as a long film serial, is intended in the first instance as entertainment on the grand scale. In this my models have been classics like Les Miserables and the historical romances of Dumas and Stendhal.

It may grieve the judicious that the great public learns much of its history from entertainment. But such is the case. A writer like myself, living in the present moment an uncanonized by generations of readers, is well advised to make the history unimpeachable by the highest scholarly standards. Although only one reader in a hundred, and one viewer in a thousand, may know or care, that is what I have done to the best of my powers, in the sixteen years of arduous research for War and Remembrance and its predecessor, The Winds of War.

World War II was actually the first global war, and — failing world suicide — almost certainly the last. It had the dramatic structure of a manhunt. The worst monster in human history, Adolf Hitler, sprang out on the international stage and led the German nation to commit unprecedented crimes. For a while, with his formidable ally, militaristic Japan, he threatened to achieve a world empire.

The black night of barbarism that would have descended on a Hitlerite world is beyond imagining, as the barbarism he actually executed in destroying the Jews of Europe is to this day beyond fathoming. Barely in time, the rest of the world laid aside its differences, and united long enough to smash Hilter’s Germany and do the monster to death. America and Russia, with their allies, accomplished this together; one cannot say either could have done it alone, so powerful was Hitler’s vast engine of war.

Today it is an easy thing for thinkers to assert that Nazism was a fraud, a forged check on human nature, doomed to fail. We who lived through the global manhunt, and fought in it, know what a close-run thing it was.

I have done my best to make these great and terrible days live again, graphically and truthfully, in War and Remembrance. To do so, I have portrayed not only the famous battles — Midway, Stalingrad, Normandy, Kursk, Leyte Gulf — but what we now call the Holocaust. For that insane and tragically successful assault on an entire people was at the white-hot core of Hitler’s feral attack on world civilization. If I were not Jewish I would still have to tell the same story, if with less grief and passion than I have done, in order to delineate the world manhunt as it truly happened.

The motto of the film is the same as that of my book.

The beginning of the end of war lies in remembrance.”

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Bombs only create blowback

In 2021, former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed the top official responsible for countering Israeli spies in Iran’s intelligence ministry was actually a Mossad agent.

Over and over, Mossad has been able to plant or turn operatives deep inside any opposition. Unlike other intelligence agencies, Mossad works in teams, more Mission Impossible than spy in the cold. They are masters of technology and psychology. The team can include two super hotties, one male, one female, to be deployed as bait to compromise targets.

The Arab-Israeli conflict has been stuffed with double agents, but only from one side. It’s like men fighting children.

The cavalier attitude of dropping bombs to solve problems never worked as it only instills ardor in the opposition. There is no enlightened option for Arab resistance, no Arab Gandhi, and Mossad would not allow that to happen.

The reason Mossad is so effective, so ruthless, is because of the violence done to their culture through the Nazi death camps. This is known as “blowback.” They are blowing back the violence done to them at anyone who attacks Israel.

It has always been insane for the Arabs to conduct violence on Israelis. But this is what keeps the right wing in power in Israel.

Even if the war stopped today, there is a lot of blowback coming. A lot of suicide bombings, a lot of terror on civilians. It will come soon, and keep coming for a long time.

We had a chance for a two-state solution that might have led to a just peace. And then Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by the right wing, and the chance for a two-state solution disappeared like a snow devil in a winter wind.

I believe 9/11 was orchestrated by shadowy forces inside our intelligence apparatus, and that Oct. 7 was orchestrated by double agents and that’s the reason why the IDF took seven hours to respond. This could only have happened if normal conditions were intentionally compromised. The right wing was about to fall, elections were going to remove them, but that all changed after the mass slaughter, which instantly evoked the trauma of the Holocaust.

The hard right in Israel was never going to accept a two-state solution which is why they flooded the West Bank with settlements. They insist on occupying the original territory held by the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah. One problem, however, is that Gaza was never part of those original kingdoms, so they have zero claim to it. What Oct. 6 did was provide an excuse for bombing Gaza back to the Stone Age. Gaza’s completely undeveloped coast is a gold mine for people like Trump and Kushner, and they plan to build 180 hi-rise towers for $100 billion, which will earn $400 billion over the next decade or so.

We must find a way out of this morass of unending violence and make the Middle East a center for world peace by flooding resources and education and uplifting all the poor people into a better standard of living and better understanding of the benefits of respecting non-violence as the only way out.

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Western literature started with Homer

The myths created in the wake of the Bronze Age collapse celebrating the lost civilization of Mycenean culture circulated for centuries before Homer crafted songs of such artistic value that they laid a foundation for western literature.

Both the Torah and the Illiad were improvised with performers taking turns. In Athens, a singer might be expected to go for many hours before needing a substitution who would pick up the story from that point. The Torah is the second pillar of western literature next to Homer. By 560 BC, copies of Homer were all over the ancient world. Thirty years later, Cyrus freed the Jews and the Torah was codified. 

Homer’s Illiad was sung in pentatonic dactylic hexameter (six metrical feet per line) with nearly 16,000 lines divided into 24 chapters. Modern day performances last 24 hours, but the original performances covered three days for the Illiad and three weeks for the festival. Pericles was the one who codified the music festival, creating the first Greek Woodstock, but an annual competition for poets had been well established for centuries and was even referenced in the Illiad. Around 600 BC is when a standard text for Homer was being established that ended all improvisation. The oldest examples of ancient Greek date to 750 BC, which is around the same time Homer was writing his poems. Some historians think the alphabet was created to preserve Homer’s work for future generations.

The same thing happened after Cyrus freed the Jews and told them to write down the Torah to prevent further alterations, although Zoroastrian elements likely entered Judaism even earlier, while the Jews had to disguise their hatred for their Babylonian masters by making them Egyptians. . Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and Hebrew derive from the Phoenician alphabet, and all three cultures lived under pantheons in ancient times. The Zoroastrian element is what drove cultures toward monotheism and a rejection of paganism. Cyrus, Moses and Paris were all abandoned and ordered killed at birth and survived through miraculous happenstance. Paris may be the original template the others imitated.

It is doubtful Homer was blind from birth because the descriptions are so visually vivid. The gods and goddesses who drive the story and play crucial and devious roles are easily interpreted as emanations from the Greek collective unconscious involving people grappling with inner demons and compulsions.

The psychological complexity of the Illiad has never been successfully captured on film (not even close) because the directors want to make a battle film when Homer was writing an elegy for the second greatest Greek hero (after Heracles).

Particularly disappointing in Brad’s version is Achilles inside the horse, dying during the massacre of Troy. In fact, his death so demoralized the Greeks that it prompted Odysseus to come up with the idea of feigning a mass retreat to fool the Trojans into thinking they’d won the war. You can’t scramble the basic chronology and keep the psychological complexities intact.

Many have the misperception the Illiad and the Torah were memorized as they existed as oral traditions for centuries before being written down. Not so. They were improvisational performances involving teams. In Greece, the singers always accompanied themselves on a four-string lyre. What was memorized was the outline of the stories, openings to the chapters, and certain phrases, some of which were repeated allowing performers time to catch a break. Not unlike, “yes, yes, y’all, to the beat y’all” used in early rap.

Playing a minor pentatonic on a four-string lyre with psychologically descriptive poetry is very close to what Robert Johnson was doing at the crossroads of Highway 61.

Homer was incredibly prolific while he lived, but only two works survived. Alexander the Great had established a great library in Egypt to house the entire history of culture and science, but it caught fire in 48 BC after Julius Ceasar burned his fleet to prevent his troops from fleeing. The library fell into gradual ruin and decay, and countless works of Homer disappeared like snow devils in a winter blizzard. Alexander was obsessed with Homer, and traveled with his copy of the Illiad. When he arrived at the Temple of Athena near Troy, he seized the armor of Achilles on display and wore it during his quest to takeover the world. He seized Egypt without a fight and declared a god upon arrival.

It was a strange twist of fate considering Alexander’s father had been murdered during a ceremony designed to anoint himself as the 13th god of the Greek pantheon. And later that week, a whole lot of Alexander’s relatives got stabbed to death as well.

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Recipe For a Winter’s Day

An epic once-in-a-decade snow storm inspired me to create something new: blackened chicken in mushroom Chardonnay cream sauce, a dish that pairs spicy chicken with a savory sauce.

It turned out so good, I decided to memorialize it here. There is no added salt beyond what was already in the soup.

You will need two thin-sliced organic chicken breasts pounded thinner, and dipped in a melted butter sauce.

Butter sauce: Three tablespoons of butter with tablespoon each of paprika, onion powder, basil, thyme; and teaspoon each of oregano, garlic powder, cayenne pepper, black pepper.

Mushroom sauce: Pacific Foods Organic Cream of Mushroom Condensed Soup, 10.5 oz mixed with 1/4 cup Siggi’s Icelandic Yogurt and 1/4 cup heavy cream; a splash of Chardonnay, finished with the spicy oil remains from pan.

Sugarcane oil, an all-purpose cooking oil with more good fats than olive oil, a higher smoke point, and a neutral taste that works in any recipe.

Dip chicken in butter sauce, coat both sides, and place in scorching-hot cast iron pan greased with sugarcane oil. As soon as a blackened crust forms, flip over and crust the other side.

Return chicken to butter sauce baking dish, cover with mushroom sauce that has been blended with remains from cast iron pan, and sprinkle with crispy onions.

Bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees.

Serve on top of creamy mashed potatoes and streamed haricots verts.

Next time I make this dish, and it likely won’t be long now, I will add fresh mushrooms. Any mushrooms, fresh, frozen, dried or canned will greatly enhance the dish.

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Joseph Campbell was a fraud

The study of Western mythology was greatly impeded by the myopic Joseph Campbell, who never once wrote (nor spoke) about Scythian, Persian, Bactrian, Chinese, Middle Eastern nor Greek use of cannabis for divination. Although he spent immense time on the most obscure cultures on earth, he ignored the most influential. The foundational myths of Western Culture were born in Scythia, home to Heracles (Hercules in Rome), Prometheus, and the Holy Grail. 

According to Campbell, there was no real chalice as the story was intended as a metaphor for spiritual transformation. This is absurd. The golden cup landed in what is now the Ukraine and was too hot for anyone to touch. But one boy could pick it up, and he became the first great king of the Yamnaya, and eventually morphed into Heracles. A band of seafaring Yamnaya moved south to Arcadia in Greece, received the idea of an alphabet from the Purple People (Phoenicians) and created a magnificent culture documented by Homer.

Meanwhile, back in the Ukraine, every Scythian warrior (male and female) received a ceremonial chalice. It might be bronze or silver or gold, and built around a skull cap taken from their first victim. After a battle, the tribe would return to the field and those celebrating their first kill would ceremoniously chop off a skull cap and drink blood from it. But only once, for after it was brought back home and encased and decorated, it was used to drink bhang, which became known as Soma.

This was the Scythian coming-of-age ceremony, and the tribe would have attended with great merriment. The Scythians were also great musicians, so the tribal band was likely jamming, and the priestly Ennare (men dressed as women who sang in falsetto), might have been making up songs calling out the newly minted adults in the tribe.

It was pretty easy for Scythians to run rampant over Greeks and Persians because they rode horses and fired poison arrows with composite recumbent bows that were smaller but more powerful than the Greek and Persian bows. They were trained to fire arrows with deadly accuracy practically from birth and while riding away, so they could dispatch the enemy without ever being in the line-of-fire.

I can’t stomach Campbell’s books or his videos because his analysis is complete garbage. He does backflips away from the origins of our most dominant myths, which traveled around the world quickly after the Bronze Age Collapse, replacing the local hero-gods.

Hermes was central to the Mycenaean Greeks, as he was born in Arcadia, where three temples were consecrated in his honor. He would later be welded to Egyptian mysticism and become a dominant player in the occult societies that emerged during the Middle Ages.