Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

The picture in that ad is from episode #369 of "Insight": And The Walls Came Tumblin' Down, (1974). Episode here. A wonderful fantasy about God (Martin Sheen) who gives an aging tailor (Jack Albertson) the gift of understanding.

INSIGHT was an American Roman Catholic religious-themed weekly anthology series shedding light on the contemporary search for meaning, freedom, and love that aired in syndication from October 1960 to 1984. Produced by Paulist Productions in Los Angeles, the series presented half-hour dramas illuminating the contemporary search for meaning, freedom, and love. Insight was an anthology series, using an eclectic set of story telling forms including comedy, melodrama, and fantasy to explore moral dilemmas.  The series was created by Fr. Ellwood E. "Bud" Kieser, the founder of Paulist Productions. 


The anthology format and the religious nature of the program attracted a wide variety of actors, including Ed Asner, Jack Albertson, Beau Bridges, Carol Burnett, Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Patty Duke, Ann Jillian, Cicely Tyson, James Doohan, Jack Klugman, Walter Matthau, Bob Newhart, William Shatner, Bill Bixby, John Ritter, Mark Hamill, Laura Dern, Barbara Hersey, Flip Wilson, and Martin Sheen, and dozens more.

Episode #388 aired July 17, 1976, the host of a sadistic daytime game show called "All Out" asks contestants to make horrifying choices such as playing a version of Russian Roulette with their loved ones. This chilling episode (at the time) would later be realized as a prophecy of what Reality TV was to become decades later.




Jan 18, 1957: "Operation Power Flite" - Three US Air Force B-52 Stratofortresses (Lucky Lady I, Lucky Lady II, Lucky Lady III) completed the first around-the-world nonstop flight by a jet aircraft to prove it could drop a thermoNuclear Bomb Anywhere. General Curtis LeMay was among the 1,000 on hand to greet the three planes, and he awarded all 27 crew members the Distinguished Flying Cross.

The flight took 45 hours and 19 minutes, writes Bethel, and in the words of a Life magazine article from later that month, “shrank the world.”

With nukes in the air 24/7 for decades there is bound to be a few Broken Arrow incidents and at least one mega disaster...

January 17, 1966: A US Air Force B-52 bomber and a KC-135 tanker aircraft collided over Palomares, Spain, while attempting inflight refueling at 31,000 feet. The collision caused four B28FI Mod 2 Y1 thermonuclear bombs to be released. The Y1 nomenclature indicates a W28 warhead with a yield of 1.1 megatonnes of TNT! Two of the weapons were damaged when they hit the ground, releasing plutonium, but there was no nuclear detonation. The fourth, fell into the Mediterranean Sea, and was recovered intact after a search lasting two and a half months. The KC-135 was destroyed when its fuel load ignited, killing all four crew members. The B-52G broke apart, killing three of the seven crew members aboard.

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs: "If you took part in cleanup of the Air Force B-52 bomber carrying nuclear weapons off the coast of Palomares, Spain, from January 17, 1966, through March 31, 1967, VA presumes that you had exposure to radiation."


Top photo: The recovered thermonuclear bomb displayed on the fantail of the submarine rescue ship USS Petrel.

Bottom photo: this B28FI nuclear bomb was recovered from 2,850 feet (869 meters) of water and lifted aboard the USS Petrel (note the missing tail fins and badly dented "false nose"). This photograph was among the first ever published of a U.S. hydrogen bomb. Left to right are Sr. Don Antonio Velilla Manteca, chief of the Spanish Nuclear Energy Board in Palomares; Brigadier General Arturo Montel Touzet, Spanish coordinator for the search and recovery operation; Rear Admiral William S. Guest, commander of U.S. Navy Task Force 65; and Major General Delmar E. Wilson, commander of the Sixteenth Air Force. The B28 had a maximum yield of 1.45 megatons!!

Once the bomb was located, Simó Orts appeared at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York with his lawyer, Herbert Brownell, formerly Attorney General of the United States under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, claiming salvage rights on the recovered thermonuclear bomb. According to Craven:

    It is customary maritime law that the person who identifies the location of a ship to be salved has the right to a salvage award if that identification leads to a successful recovery. The amount is nominal, usually 1 or 2 percent, sometimes a bit more, of the intrinsic value to the owner of the thing salved. But the thing salved off Palomares was a thermonuclear bomb, the same bomb valued by no less an authority than the Secretary of Defense at $2 billion—each percent of which is, of course, $20 million.

The Air Force settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. In later years, Simó Orts was heard to complain that the Americans had promised him financial compensation but had not kept their promise.

1966 Palomares B-52 crash

Ha, that sounds about right given what we know today about denial of gov't (VA) compensation!

Over 55 years later and the nuclear clean-up debacle still goes on...

On 19 October 2015, Spain and the United States signed an agreement to further discuss the cleanup and removal of contaminated land. Under a statement of intent signed by Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel García-Margallo and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the two countries were to negotiate a binding agreement to further restore and clear up the Palomares site and arrange for the disposal of the contaminated soil at an appropriate site in the U.S.
U.S. and Spain Agree to Nuclear Deal

No doubt Spain got screwed over and silenced by Skull & Bones Kerry.

Barbara Moran wrote the definitive book on the Palomares incident.


The Day We Lost the H-Bomb

AFAIK, this docu has never had a USA distribution...

Madrid-based Onza Distribution, producer of “The Department of Time,” has acquired international distribution rights to four-part doc series “Palomares: The Atomic Bomb Fiasco,” a stranger than fiction doc thriller about how in 1966 the U.S. Air Force accidentally dropped four hydrogen bombs on Spain.

“The story of ‘Palomares’ is too incredible to be true and perhaps the best way to tell it was through a documentary series. If we had done a scripted series, people would think we were making it up,” Ron said.

He added: “This is a piece of U.S. and Spanish history that had never been told in all its complexity and this ‘golden age’ of documentary series has given us the opportunity to finally do so.”

For Onza, which recently opened a Miami office, the Movistar Plus deal is another strategic step-up, here via its alliance with Movistar Plus, as the pay-TV/SVOD arm of giant European telco Telefonica drives energetically into non-fiction.

Last July, Onza Distribution signed a strategic alliance with Movistar,  Telefonica’s label in Latin America, to represent worldwide sales on Movistar’s first four original series.

Palomares: The Atomic Bomb Fiasco

Decades later I was sitting on the grassy knoll watching my elder cousin take-off in Strategic Air Command's annual Global Shield exercise summer of '85. The noise level was so loud the ground literally shakes, your heart starts beating faster & faster and it's beyond accurately describing unless you've experienced such a sight. He's piloting the 3rd B-52 in this vid:




Never missed an episode, LOL... years later I got plenty of tickets from the CHiP boy's.

TV Guide - Jan 12 - Jan 18, 1980



Introducing the Apple Sleep Paralysis Demon. Sleek, modern, captivating and hauntingly beautiful.




It's almost like an article from the 50s. They even threw in Jaques Vallée in the sidebar just for good measure...

Daily Fallen Angels Mail

That part about the "Pentagon faction" I believe is true. Been reading about that since the 80s. Modern Ufology is a mystery school. These days the rites are performed over social media and YouTube. The end result is the spiritualisation of a society that generally lacks any spiritual depth. I'm trying to figure out if this is a positive thing or not in the long run.



Somewere over the cybernetic rainbow, Memetic psychologist (PhD in parapsychology) Dr. Susan J. Blackmore is smiling. Author of "The Meme Machine and Seeing Myself".
Who Am I?



"Each individual experiences life in two worlds. There is the outer world and there is the inner world. One is the realm of the effect while the other is the realm of the cause. When we surrender to the sensory impressions of the outer world, then life is in the realm of effect, and we continually find ourselves in situations and predicaments that feel beyond our control. However, if we live from the inside out, we then live as masters. The interior, inner world, is the essence and the cause of the outer.”
— Rav DovBer Pinson (world-renowned Rabbi, scholar, author, teacher)