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‘Wind of Change’ Is Must Listening

I’ve been enjoying a new rabbit hole of late: the growing pile of free podcasts on Spotify. Like its music collection, the array of podcast topics are vast. There’s history, news analysis, true crime — the sky’s the limit.

My favorite so far is a series called “Wind of Change.” I’m not a big believer in conspiracy theories, but I enjoy learning about them and this is a big one.

The episodes follow New York writer Patrick Radden Keefe as he explores rumors that “Wind of Change,” a huge hit for German rock band The Scorpions, was actually written by the CIA to stir pro-democracy feelings in the Soviet Union.

Mood Music:

As you go through each episode, the question of whether this happened doesn’t seem to matter much. What makes this great are the people he talks to along the way.

There are musical acts touring the Communist Block, not always realizing their gigs had been engineered behind the scenes by the CIA, hoping to spread pro-West propaganda.

There’s the CIA operative who suggests some musicians knowingly conspired with the agency and the GI Joe collector who made a display of The Scorpions for an exhibit about groups and individuals who actively promoted freedom. The guy hadn’t even heard the “Wind of Change” theory when he created it. He just assumed the band was taking up the mantle.

My favorite episodes focus on the Moscow Music Peace Festival, a 1989 event I remember watching on pay-per-view. The festival — featuring The Scorpions, Ozzy, Mötley Crüe, Skid Row and Bon Jovi — was put together by Doc McGee, manager of all the bands at the time, to promote an anti-drug message.

The story goes that Doc McGhee, a prolific drug runner on the side, put on the festival to get out of jail time on drug charges. The catch was that it would be held in Moscow, where it would spread pro-West sentiment, per the wishes of the CIA.

It was during that event, the official story goes, that Scorpions singer Klaus Meine was inspired to write “Wind of Change.”

Keefe interviews McGhee, one of his former drug-smuggling associates, other musicians that played the peace festival and finally Meine himself.

With everything happening in the world right now, it’s a welcome distraction.

Do yourself a favor and check it out.

Podcast logo for Wind of Change
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Conspiracy Theories Aren’t About Good vs. Evil

I recently wrote about how COVID-19 has sparked a deluge of conspiracy theories, most notably those at the center of the “Plandemic” documentary making the rounds. But as I think of my own OCD-driven behaviors over the years, I find that it’s not entirely fair to dismiss these people as cranks and villains.

Mood Music:

I came across a Vox article that drives home the point. In “I Was a Conspiracy Theorist, Too,” Dannagal G. Young, associate professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware, describes the crazed internet rabbit hole she traveled down as she desperately sought answers for why her husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor. As she jumped from one potential answer to the next, she wrote:

Each time I landed on a possible culprit, my anger reenergized me. Instead of making me feel hopeless, it gave me a target and suggested there might be some action I could take. If it were from his work or from an old factory site, maybe I could file a lawsuit. Maybe I could launch an investigation or trigger some media exposé. If I could just find the right person or thing to blame, I could get some justice. Or vengeance. Or … maybe just a sense of control.

Take something like the COVID-19 pandemic and its lockdowns, with multitudes stuck at home looking for answers on how we got here and where it all might end, and you get radioactive yet fertile ground for conspiracy theorists. Lots of depressed, increasingly paranoid people with the internet at their fingertips. Lots of rabbit holes to explore.

There’s plenty of gasoline to stoke the flames. The government response has been full of contradictory advice. At the beginning of the pandemic you had the surgeon general tweeting about how masks won’t help. Then states started mandating that people wear them in public. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tells Congress one week that it would be a huge mistake to end lockdowns now, only to be quoted a week later saying continued lockdowns would cause “irreparable damage.”

Then there’s the fact that the virus began in China. Given the Chinese government’s sinister actions over the years, it’s easy to wonder if it either created Coronavirus in a lab or accidentally let it leak from a lab where it was being studied.

Isolate people, knock their normal lives off their axis, and this is what happens.

The resulting emotions remind me of what it was like when I was first diagnosed with OCD but hadn’t yet brought it under control. I was paranoid all the time, seeing conspiracy everywhere. In those cases, the paranoia usually manifested itself as the perpetual belief that people at work were conspiring against me, or, at the very least, were constantly talking about me behind my back.

In the pandemic, with my OCD under better control, I’m not given to conspiracy theories. Not that my management of the disorder has been perfect. The compulsive actions that go with it have continuously surfaced, and I’ve had to play whack-a-mole with them. Compulsiveness makes you do a lot of stupid things, and I’ve certainly questioned my sanity and self-control in these last months.

The world is full of fear and uncertainty right now. People want answers and have gotten mixed messages. Economic uncertainty, health concerns, lack of contact with friends and loved ones — all ingredients for conspiracy theories. It’s not a matter of good versus evil or even smart versus stupid. It’s simply what happens in a global environment like this.

We’re all in varying degrees of pain and our collective sanity is fragile. We need to do better looking out for one another.

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If You Say Things Like This, You May Be a Right-Wing Elitist

I have a friend who has shared a lot of wisdom in the 12 years I’ve known him. We’ve disagreed plenty along the way, but it’s been constructive. In personal matters like family and well-being, we’ve been in lockstep.

I even value the disagreements, because I know my views are only as solid as the pressure testing they receive. But on Facebook recently, he shared a view that crossed the line.

Mood Music:

His post was built around an article about how Americans were made of sturdier stuff during past pandemics, most notably the 1968–69 Hong Kong Flu, when citizens didn’t let the contagion stifle their freedoms. Hell, the article says, we had Woodstock during that period.

After moaning about how weak we Americans have become, he suggested those who agree with the current COVID-19 lockdowns should move to Europe and stop calling themselves American:

Let’s unpack this:

  • CDC records estimate that the Hong Kong flu killed 1 million worldwide, including 100,000 in the United States. That was for the entire two-year run of the pandemic.
  • The earliest COVID-19 cases are believed to have surfaced in November and in barely six months has killed nearly 300,000 people globally, including close to 83,500 in the U.S. alone. That’s all in the early months of this pandemic.
  • Basing what we now know about COVID-19 — which isn’t much — and the 20/20 hindsight we have on the Hong Kong Flu, that flu wasn’t as lethal. It had a slower infection rate, people got sick right away and a vaccine came along much sooner.

Comparing that pandemic to this one, especially with the piss-poor data we currently have, is both comical and unfortunate. Suggesting those who “made America great” are long gone and that those still here are “wimps” — that’s more than a little insulting to people who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

My friend has said much that I’ve agreed with in recent months. I don’t believe open-ended lockdowns are sustainable. I saw the lockdowns as necessary to keep the healthcare system from getting overrun — to give it time to build the resources and processes needed to handle the caseload. From my limited knowledge of the medical profession, I believe a couple months of this should have been enough.

It appears that hasn’t been the case.

But the suggestion that the current situation is simply a tyrannical power grab by local, state and federal authorities? Laughable. No official in their right mind wants a frozen economy. How they might benefit from this is the stuff of impossible-to-prove conspiracy theories. Calling people wimps for wanting to protect lives? I don’t know the right word for that, but it’s nothing good.

The suggestion I find most objectionable is that people who disagree — who believe the lockdowns are the right thing — should stop calling themselves Americans and leave.

One of the best things about America is our right to disagree without being thrown in the gulag.

My friend, when you talk like that, I conclude that you love America — indeed, you fought for it on the battlefield and I respect you for that — but have contempt for Americans who don’t share your worldview.

You like to complain about so-called liberal elitists who look down their noses at the ordinary working folk, telling them how stupid they are.

But that particular brand of elitism goes both ways, and you’ve displayed plenty of it from your right-wing perch.

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When Conspiracy Theorists Become Bullies

Conspiracy theorists usually don’t bother me. Hell, I even subscribe to the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald had help assassinating JFK. But a new breed of conspiracy theorist has emerged in recent years. They make threats and act like the schoolyard bully, and they make my skin crawl.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:0JhAglbb3Ca9Cp2OflPKPi]

The clowns who argued that 9/11 was an inside job are one example, though to my knowledge they never actually threatened anyone. Now there’s the Sandy Hook truther movement, a band of conspiracy theorists who believe the government secretly orchestrated the murder of 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, so the public would support efforts to gut the Second Amendment. They take things in a dangerous, cruel direction.

They are the bullies in the schoolyard, the thugs hiding in the alley waiting to pounce.

One of their victims is Gene Rosen, a man who took in six little survivors of Sandy Hook the morning of the massacre. Rosen lives close enough to the school that he heard the gunshots. He found the children at the end of his driveway, and they told him they couldn’t go back to school because their teacher was dead.

He took the children into his home, gave them food, juice and toys, and called their parents. He sat with them as they described the horrible events.

He became a target of the Sandy Hook truther gang because he had been interviewed by the media. The truther thugs believe the government is paying actors to pose as eyewitnesses.

The Salon website describes how Rosen has suffered at the hands of this group:

“I don’t know what to do,” sighed Gene Rosen. “I’m getting hang-up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting emails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ‘how much am I being paid?’” Someone posted a photo of his house online. There have been phony Google+ and YouTube accounts created in his name, messages on white supremacist message boards ridiculing the “emotional Jewish guy,” and dozens of blog posts and videos “exposing” him as a fraud. One email purporting to be a business inquiry taunted: “How are all those little students doing? You know, the ones that showed up at your house after the ‘shooting’. What is the going rate for getting involved in a gov’t sponsored hoax anyway?”

As I said, I generally have no problem with conspiracy theorists. Most share their beliefs without hurting anyone. And there’s no question that the US government has engaged in conspiracies and illegal activity. Did the government orchestrate this massacre? Although you never know, I think there are people out there who hate Obama so much that they’ll believe just about any theory where the president is cast as a brutal dictator.

If we ever see evidence that the truther gang is right, Americans will show the same outpouring of anger that has led to the downfall of many a government official.

But whether they’re right or wrong, conspiracy theorists have no right to threaten or harass anyone. If you think the government is behind something terrible, speak out and search for evidence. That’s your right as an American citizen.

But when you limit others’ rights in favor of your own, you become just as evil as the empire you’re fighting against.

Below: Gene Rosen (Credit: AP/Mary Altaffer)

gene_rosen

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Obama Killed Andrew Breitbart? You People Are Stupid

Many of us are shocked this morning to hear that Internet publishing giant Andrew Breitbart is dead. He’s had plenty of haters over the years because of his conservative zeal.

But when folks start suggesting he was murdered by the “liberal,” “socialist” President Obama, I find myself contemplating the idea that the human race may not be smart enough to survive. Also revolting is that some people are celebrating his death because they simply don’t share his ideology.

Mood music:

Personally, I’ve always been indifferent about Breitbart. He passionately expressed his opinions and that was his right. When passion oozes from a person’s pores, someone will inevitably get uptight about the smell. I have my own haters, and I know that’s just the way it is.

But the suggestion in this article that Obama had him offed is human idiocy at its worst. The post displays 25 tweets from people convinced that this death was a White House job. Some examples, taken from the post:

“Does anyone else think this is foul play? Did Obama send his Chicago goons to murder Breitbart?”

“Andrew Breitbart must have been getting too close to the truth about Barack Obama so he was offed! Typical Obama move!”

“Andrew Breitbart threatens Obama at CPAC with a video then suddenly dies? This must be investigated as an assasination Obama. WTF?”

I won’t speculate on how he died. I’ll just wish him a peaceful rest and extend my condolences to his family. As for the conspiracy theorists, I’ll just end with this:

Being stupid on Twitter is your right. You enjoy freedom of speech like the rest of us.

But don’t think for a second that your mindless drivel makes you look like the thoughtful intellect you think you are.

That goes for those of you who think the death of a human being is worth cheering.