“Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man.” – Albert Einstein
Perhaps you’ve heard that Ariana N. Pekary, an MSNBC producer, left her job without first lining up another one.
I’ve done this twice in my career as a pathologist, so I know just how insufferable a job needs to become before a person goes out on this limb and saws it off.
You may not watch MSNBC but just know that this problem still affects you, too. All the commercial networks function the same – and no doubt that content seeps into your social media feed, one way or the other.
How does this cancer affect all commercial networks?
It forces skilled journalists to make bad decisions on a daily basis.
More specifically…
It’s possible that I’m more sensitive to the editorial process due to my background in public radio, where no decision I ever witnessed was predicated on how a topic or guest would “rate.” The longer I was at MSNBC, the more I saw such choices — it’s practically baked in to the editorial process – and those decisions affect news content every day. Likewise, it’s taboo to discuss how the ratings scheme distorts content, or it’s simply taken for granted, because everyone in the commercial broadcast news industry is doing the exact same thing.
Is this just the opinion of one disgruntled producer?
…behind closed doors, industry leaders will admit the damage that’s being done.
“We are a cancer and there is no cure,” a successful and insightful TV veteran said to me. “But if you could find a cure, it would change the world.”
In what way?
As it is, this cancer stokes national division, even in the middle of a civil rights crisis. The model blocks diversity of thought and content because the networks have incentive to amplify fringe voices and events, at the expense of others… all because it pumps up the ratings.
Here’s a heuristic worth remembering: The more you yearn to silence your opponents, the more subjective your opinions.
Unfortunately, Ariana’s resignation has been misused as evidence that a conservative bias is superior to a liberal bias.
This misses the point entirely!
Diversity of opinion sustains life.
Monopoly is life’s enemy, whether it’s an invasive species wiping out native life forms or a monopoly of opinion wiping out voices of dissent.
When google’s artificial intelligence locks you into an echo chamber of bias, it doesn’t matter which chamber you’re in. They’ve got you. You will make bad decisions because you have been rendered unable to apply rational thought to the opinions of the other side, the opinions that would normally offer you some diversity.
Diversity is the lifeblood of free will. Without it, we become puppets of google’s AIs or other totalitarian forces.
When TV news industry leaders privately admit that “we are a cancer,” and a cure would “change the world,” where can we turn?
In my humble and yet infallible opinion, (ha, ha) the cure is educating ourselves on the UFO phenomenon and the intelligent mind(s) behind it, possibly aliens of both physical and ethereal substance. Possibly “breakaway” Earthlings of some variety.
Whether or not this idea sounds completely nuts to you now, it’s nearly certain that after you’ve spent a year or two acquainting yourself with the world’s most credible UFO data, you’ll find your devotion to conservative and/or liberal politics fading into a broader perspective.
Humanity is one. Philosophical and political diversity are as essential to our survival as genetic and spiritual diversity.
This morning I was way unmotivated, as if I’d sabotaged my day with carbohydrates in the morning. Rookie mistake, but that wasn’t it.
So I took my side-kick, Halo, down to the man cave, sat in the dark on my couch and did a YouTube search for Jay at Project Unity.
Glad I did.
Remember Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, the two reporters who (with the Washington correspondent Helene Cooper) broke the major UFO stories in the NY Times back in 2017, and recently brought us the NY Times news that Eric Davis, PhD…
gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
I thought the whole interview was full of fascinating details and cautious perspectives, but the following quote was the highlight for me (41:35 on the video)…
Leslie Keen: “I just want to comment further because you brought up the whole concept of aliens, Jay, right? I have a bit of a problem because people do tend to extrapolate. You know, like, people will pick up the story and have something in the headlines that says, you know, “The New York Times Says Aliens Have Crashed on Earth.” If that’s what you’re asking by your question, I just think, you know, it’s very important not to take this beyond what we are actually reporting and what we actually know. And even if there are crashes that have been, that are being reverse-engineered, our sense is that they haven’t made a lot of progress with that reverse engineering. And I don’t think anybody knows much about where these craft are from, or all the questions that everybody has a desire to understand.”
Later, Jay follows up:
Jay: “…reverse-engineering. And you thought it was probably a long process without much success. And I was just wondering if that’s an opinion brought on by your research into the Admiral Wilson—Eric Davis notes.”
Leslee Kean: “You know, I probably shouldn’t have, you know, I don’t think I can expand on that anymore. It’s a sense that I have from sources I’ve spoken to. But I really don’t think I can say anything more about it, Jay. Sorry about that.”
I get the impression Leslie Kean almost said, “I probably shouldn’t have said that.”
Later Leslie had this to say about Dr. Eric W. Davis:
Leslie Kean: “I have tremendous – and so does Ralph – we have tremendous respect for Eric Davis. He’s a fantastic source. He’s been very cooperative with us and very, very helpful and forthcoming. And so we take our hat off to him.”
The following statement by Ralph Blumenthal also seemed significant to me (because Richard Dolan is my favorite UFO historian):
Ralph Blumenthal: “There are people who are very rigorous in their approach, like Rich Dolan… and you, Jay, who are very rigorous in their approach, and careful, and understand what the issues are….”
Three cheers for Dolan!
He did an interview with Jay here. Jay describes one (and a half?) of his UFO experiences for which he meditated, hoping to initiate contact with the phenomenon.
At the end of the interview, Dolan talks about something dear to my heart, the Christian concept of loving your enemies. As interested as I am in UFOs and Alien beings, I’m far more interested in learning how to love our enemies without being devoured by them.
I’m a little jittery about all this. With my lengthy and abandoned background of fundamentalist Christianity, I can’t help being worried about “opening the door” to ethereal forces that the Church said were evil. But that’s my baggage. I’ll deal with it.
If UFOlogy is leading us all to love our enemies, you can count me in.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, I spent many early mornings struggling to learn how to day-trade the financial futures markets under the benevolent wing of a quadriplegic friend who had earned a good living day-trading for decades. He is no longer with us, God rest his soul.
I gave up the learning process in 2005, realizing I couldn’t develop the requisite nerves of steel.
In retrospect, the thing that still baffles me is how well the public “retail” traders were managed through the dissemination of bad group-think information. The non-trading public “knew” that day trading was gambling. No one could win in the long run. The retail day-trading public saw through this lie, but their “experts” made a living teaching, not trading. These experts had the retail traders brainwashed into following a variety of well-known chart setup patterns and retail trading systems.
The professional traders inside huge financial corporations took advantage of this brainwashing and also contributed to it.
A pro could look at a futures chart and know exactly where the retail traders with their simple chart setup patterns would have placed their automatic stop-loss triggers. This allowed the pros with liquid billions at their fingertips to micro-influence the market at strategic moments, causing it to “run” the retail trader’s stops.
This was how they collected the retail day-trader’s money as a matter of routine. I bet they’re still doing it today.
The only way I ever beat the pros at all was to wait (and wait and wait for months) until there was a huge intraday crash that was too great to be manipulated by the pros. On these rare occasions, I would short a “skirt pattern” (also known as a “leg pattern”) which consisted of a brief, roughly 2-point pullback on the 3-minute es chart during a rapid, steep downward intraday trend.
Too much information, I know. It bores me, too.
But I mention it because I see something similar going on now in the scriptwriting community.
Years ago, when I discovered Save the Cat by the late Blake Snyder, I could see the advantages of plot planning (or outlining a fictional story before writing it). I later learned that Snyder was not the first to offer a one-size-fits-all story outlining plan. No big deal.
But gradually I watched as an endless parade of writing gurus presented similar strategies, most of them resembling The Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell. It began to smell like “group think” rather than teen spirit.
So when I came across a YouTube video by Film Courage featuring Corey Mandell’s bubble-bursting message, I listened carefully.
He was saying that any script or screenplay that follows a one-size-fits-all story structure will be tossed out by the current gatekeepers in Hollywood. I mentioned this here.
Not having any interest in Hollywood screenplays, I wondered if Mr. Mandell’s advice might apply to my rock-n-roll dream, novel writing.
I joined his mailing list and soon heard about “creative integration,” the concept of separating a writer’s conceptual mind from her/his intuitive mind, building each aspect up separately, and then integrating the two so they can work together rather than always being at odds.
This convinced me to take the first of his three classes in scriptwriting. I just finished the first class and will begin the second one in September.
So far, his approach to story creation seems unique and ingenious. I’ve been at this fiction writing thing since the mid-90s. I’ve spent thousands on writing education, and I’ve read over 80 how-to books on the subject, so it really surprised me to find an entire world of new writing advice that I hadn’t heard a peep about before.
In the first eight-week class, Corey spent a bit over half the time teaching his principles of left-hemisphere, “conceptual” story creation. This was pleasantly and totally free of the typical story structure advice where a particular category of events must happen at about the 10% mark, and then some other category of story event should happen at the 25% mark, and so on.
Instead, Corey’s “conceptual” training focused on the emotional experience of the reader and how to influence it deliberately and logically.
This was spellbinding stuff. But the other half, his “intuitive” training, is the big deal for me. So far it’s improving my process profoundly. Here’s how and why…
Although I’m an intuitive writer (a.k.a. a seat-of-the pants writer and not a natural plotter), I have a genetic SNP that’s associated with a curious trait: the tendency to respond actively and permanently to negative feedback by avoiding the criticized behavior. Weird, yeah?
So all the “never do this” writing advice I’ve read in books and received in schools has transformed me into a writer who edits obsessively while I’m writing. When writing fiction, I always feel that the words I’ve written are awkward and need to be rearranged to sound better and avoid embarrassment.
This makes me a ridiculously slow writer. It also leads me to edit out all life, personality and voice from my fiction prose for the sake of efficient wording.
It’s not the end of the world, but it’s an interesting setback. The kind of problem I enjoy fixing.
And the thing is, the part of Corey Mandell’s method that excels at teaching “conceptual” writers how to write “intuitively” seems to be teaching me, an “intuitive” writer, how to write without obsessive editing.
He does this by creating a judgement-free writing zone. The details are probably proprietary, otherwise I’d spell them out for you now.
But for me, fixing my writing programming will require practice over a significant time.
It’s like anything where new neuronal pathways must be established and then widened through precise repetitive practice over an extended length of time, (“neurons that fire together wire together” with myeline) while old inefficient pathways must be allowed to atrophy naturally with disuse.
So for me, learning about Corey Mandell’s method is one remarkable thing, but developing any ability at all to use the intuitive half of it for my unique writing problem is an entirely different thing: a long process. An enjoyable one, fortunately.
I’m still not sure if I’ll ever write a screenplay, let alone send one to a Hollywood gatekeeper who through some miracle of divine intervention might read the first page before throwing it away. But as a novelist in perpetual training, I wholeheartedly give Corey Mandell’s class my highest recommendation. (I’ve completed only the first class of the trio, remember.)
Of course, the other point of this article is to cast light on this fact: Western culture is subject to intense information control and “opinion moulding.”
If information is power and power is money and money is food for your children, then it makes sense that anyone with secret info would hoard and protect it. The UFO community claims that the “deep state” or “national security apparatus” spends at least twice as much money on secrecy as they do on R&D or science. If true, it would fit the pattern of secret info hoarding and opinion moulding that pervades society.
The ubiquitous dogma of micro-managed story structure (Save the Cat et al.) arising from within the writing community, especially prevalent in the “retail” scriptwriting community, 99% of whom can’t sell a script, is a glimpse into something both strange and routine.
It probably results from natural market forces that mislead a majority so a minority can continue to make money and keep their trade secrets away from retail scriptwriters. Thus they avoid turning their customers into competitors. It’s the same as the old day-trading divide: professionals versus retail day-traders. Similar to the UFO secrecy divide and motivated, I think, by the same feelings that recently possessed Facebook to censor Ben Davidson, one of the most fascinating young minds on Earth right now. He talks about his censorship by Facebook in a brief video that’s well worth watching right now…
The so-called Davis-Wilson document is said to be the most important UFO document of all time.
I spent several weeks gradually listening to an entire 5-hour discussion of the document here. It’s a fifteen-page document written by Eric Davis, PhD, about a meeting he had with Vice Admiral Thomas Willson. You can read it here. I think Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, God rest his soul, and UFO Guru Steven Greer, MD were also at the meeting, but maybe they were at a preliminary meeting, I’m not clear on this. The meeting took place decades ago and covered a wide range of UFO topics, including Wilson’s failed attempt to get info about a covert project going on at a defense contractor’s hideout, reportedly involving a recovered UFO.
Yesterday I saw an article in the NY Times (here) in which Eric Davis PhD himself, states that he’s aware of retrievals of alien spacecrafts. Here’s the quote from the NY Times article:
Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the Pentagon U.F.O. program since 2007, said that, in some cases, examination of the materials had so far failed to determine their source and led him to conclude, “We couldn’t make it ourselves.”
The constraints on discussing classified programs — and the ambiguity of information cited in unclassified slides from the briefings — have put officials who have studied U.F.O.s in the position of stating their views without presenting any hard evidence.
Mr. [sic] Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corporation, a defense contractor, said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
Mr. Davis said he also gave classified briefings on retrievals of unexplained objects to staff members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Oct. 21, 2019, and to staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee two days later.
Committee staff members did not respond to requests for comment on the issue.
So far, I’m hearing crickets from the media. Once again, one of the most paradigm-shattering pieces of information that our Western culture has stumbled upon in modern times will become yesterday’s ignored news.
For what it’s worth, here’s that 5-hour Dolan interview of an anonymous UFO enthusiast who, to me, sounds like a church school principal scolding a freshman skeptic. (Mellow out, dude, whoever you are.)
The lack of media response to the Times article probably stems from the way the editors tucked in Davis’ earth-shaking admission at the end of an otherwise yawn-worthy rehash of yesterday’s UFO news.
For me, UFO crash recovery is undeniable now. I’m 100% convinced that humans have been retro-engineering recovered alien craft for several years, possibly since the 1940s.
If anyone listens to Dolan’s whole 5 hour interview, please let me know. You’ll have my sympathy and admiration. I was spellbound pretty much throughout, but I like long lectures.
The NY POST also mentions Dr. Davis and quotes Senator Rubio:
“We have things flying over our military bases and places where we are conducting military exercises and we don’t know what it is — and it isn’t ours,” Rubio said. “Frankly, that if it’s something from outside this planet — that might actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some technological leap on behalf of the Chinese or the Russians or some other adversary that allows them to conduct this activity.”
OK, the man’s English ain’t real good, but I like his enthusiasm for this topic. It’s amazing to realize we live in a time when senators talk openly about UFOs and a certain PhD says he’s already got one at the office.
Storiform.com 