Out of Pod Experience

Nope, never happened

I've heard that FDR conspiracy theory from right-wing old guys in Japan. "They knew about it, but they left the BSs there to get sunk so the American public would let the U.S. get in the war." Check out At Dawn We Slept by Gordon Prange. Seems more like the inept U.S. military bureaucracy was to blame. Wireless listeners pick up a Japanese transmission. Intelligence officer says it sounds like a fleet with carriers is headed toward the U.S., scribbles a note marked "Urgent." Corporal types up a memo, misreads the abbreviation for "carriers", types in "cruisers." Memo sits on lieutenant's desk. Captain gets it and stamps it 'Priority', sends to colonel. Colonel's secretary puts it in the wrong pile. Colonel eventually sees it, misunderstands the memo's terse wording, thinks it's not important. Sends it to general's office. General is golfing with a visiting Senator. Sees the memo on Sunday morning, calls his Executive Officer, says, "Bob, maybe we should move all those aircraft sitting out on the runways...." BANG! BOOM! KABLOOIE!
Over and over like that. Lower ranked guys picked up clues, but the bureaucracy didn't have a system for collating them, analyzing them, and acting on them.

Also a great book for the description of the Japanese carrier-fighter-bomber operation. Very cool, and executed nicely. But they had SNAFUs of their own too. Didn't hit the oil tank farm at Pearl, and the submarine link-up op was a complete disaster due to overly-complicated and optimistic planning.

People are too conditioned by movies and fantasies to really see that life is ultimately mundane and has less than interesting explanations for large scale events.

Sorry Herzog, but you're not some anti-hero caught up in some geopolitical master plan for world domination.

Here's the cut: People are weak and make mistakes at times, humans are prone to error, misunderstanding information, and other such things that make us incredibly fallible. I doubt a human cabal could possess the ability to mastermind a complete control over the world since WW2 without any real credible evidence.

Furthermore, why do I see ads posted up and down these websites with this news that should be freely distributed to every man, woman, and child? Sounds like someone's making a buck off of people's need to feel that life is much more than it is.

And...what is life, in your opinion?

Interesting question.

I have traveled abroad, from the US to Central America and South America, Europe and as far for me as Croatia and some other Eastern European Countries with main European countries in the list.


I have met, during my younger years as a ... "student of the university of life" , a latin phrase for people that do nothing during their early years, a lot of people from several paths of life.

Medical Doctors, Engineers, Psychologists, Artists, Drug Addicts, Suicidal Patients, Schizophrenics, Hinduism believers, Buddhists, Christians of all denominations, Muslims and Jewish practitioners, Con Men, People "possessed", was part by happenstance of a local church delegation into demonic infestation (which is taken quite seriously btw) , met Drug Dealer Capos and Sex Addicts and Orgy organizers, talked to Military men that tried to shoot me with a FAL after failing to notice their stop motions and seen and heard gunshots aimed at me or stuff pretty close to me and or my relatives.

I dabbled into practically any kind of secret club or society pretending to have a key or several of them to understanding and life, people with all kinds of sexual tendencies and hardcore criminals masquerading as the law, talked to priests, rabbis and an aspiring Imam once.

I worked in Jails, Psychiatric Hospitals and several childrens institutions dedicated to disabilities, like Down's and Autism. I have met all kinds of strange people and been friends or companions to pretty odd ones.

I have a friend that ended working for VALVE and another that ended up working for the NOBEL Foundation in Spain, have met Amazonian Shamans and Wayoo Ethnic MOJANS, witch doctors in Venezuela, plus Colombia. I have talked to self declared satanists and talked to people that tried to kidnap me once after I narrowly escaped in the mountains in Merida, Venezuela during an age where people dissapeared there a lot. I have seen people killed in front of me and seen death to the eye, I still find myself squirming a bit. I have met killers, that killed with their hands and killers that just ordered hits, part of working in latinamerica in jail I guess.

I have met a lot of them and to most of them I always ask the same question you asking. After any kind of event where my life has been threatened and I have managed to get my bearings I usually try to talk to people, just to understand, and I end up asking that same question friend.

And not a single one of them has given me a definitive answer.

The solder that was about to unload a magazine on my car and family once in the Colombia Venezuela border I kindly asked him after being detained a lot of questions. Same with a lot of other people and have had grown men cry at me if I knew the meaning of life, ready to kill themselves or after trying to kill their spouses/girlfriends.

And after all this I honestly know about that as much as when I started.

For some, the meaning of life is money, plain and simple, others power, others family and some only one person in particular, and they were pretty much willing to kill for it or kill themselves since without them, life had no meaning.

Others I have found to be a bit more complex, and life was perhaps a standby point to be enjoyed with women and alcohol, others decided it was best to dedicate their lives to a single person or ideal, not out of love but for having something to stand upon.

Simpler minds usually had a clearer idea, since for them life was ... simpler. Marry, have kids and work. Others decided all they wanted from life was just love, from family or prostitutes, real or paid for, it was the same for them, they just wanted to be reassured they were loved.

I once met a man whose purpose was to attain knowledge, of an esoteric nature that to this day I consider one of my mentors, and he confided me , a couple months before death, that after all his years and wonderful trove of mystic books (having seen an original Manly P. Hall signed by him was one of the FEW treasures he decided to just show me and I managed to touch the ink for a small symbolic gesture) that despite everything he had done , he had never seen enough of everything that he wanted so his purpose for life was perhaps incomplete, or perhaps just a need to keep understanding.

Some of my friends in high end institutions all over the world have confided me their purpose in life was social climbing and academic respect and another , that went away poor and entered Spain illegally and lived doing drugs, confided me all that mattered to him was sexual pleasure.

Some elderly people I have met told me the only good thing that ever happened to them was having sex with X or Y person, and that they would have happily traded their whole lives for one with said human being.

I have met obsessed men, and still treat from afar, that simply cannot let go of their former partners and need my help from time to time to avoid doing something crazy, their whole meaning is beyond a person, but an ideal state of things that never will be.

I met women whose only purpose in life was romantic love and despite being torn apart by life itself, keep looking for it, innocently, burdened by children and absentee husbands.

I don't know, anyone that says they know the meaning of life in an universal way is deluded.

If you ask me, though, I can pretty clearly say that knowing, like my mentor once did, is mine. My meaning lies on the eternal looking for it. I don't look for God nor Satan, nor pleasure nor poverty, But I severely enjoy watching and understanding.

And to be honest, I have never remained cloistered, since ironically, life itself has pushed me to a lot of bad experiences, which I assume are part of life.

To know who I am.

Without that knowledge, all else fails.

My understanding of the meaning of life is based on the simple fact that any cut to even one major artery and you bleed to death in roughly 2 minutes.

Yeah I'm no fun at parties.

Life has no meaning. And if it had, it would be a practical joke.

I found that out after living on a remote island a couple of years with drunken machete people. Kind of cured me of being a pseudo-philosopher/hipster/music connoisseur snob. But I don't think it's the whole meaning of life. How about the fact that we're put into a material body in what seems to be a material world... but we have the ability to inquire beyond it?

Interesting, can you elaborate on the island with drunk machete people?, I find the concept and basis of the possible story ... entertaining.