Quote:The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes

A century ago, Thomas Midgley Jr. was responsible for two phenomenally destructive innovations. What can we learn from them today?

It was said that Thomas Midgley Jr. had the finest lawn in America. Golf-club chairmen from across the Midwest would visit his estate on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, purely to admire the grounds; the Scott Seed Company eventually put an image of Midgley’s lawn on its letterhead. Midgley cultivated his acres of grass with the same compulsive innovation that characterized his entire career. He installed a wind gauge on the roof that would sound an alarm in his bedroom, alerting him whenever the lawn risked being desiccated by a breeze. Fifty years before the arrival of smart-home devices, Midgley wired up the rotary telephone in his bedroom so that a few spins of the dial would operate the sprinklers.

In the fall of 1940, at age 51, Midgley contracted polio, and the dashing, charismatic inventor soon found himself in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. At first he took on his disability with the same ingenuity that he applied to maintaining his legendary lawn, analyzing the problem and devising a novel solution to it — in this case, a mechanized harness with pulleys attached to his bed, allowing him to clamber into his wheelchair each morning without assistance. At the time, the contraption seemed emblematic of everything Midgley had stood for in his career as an inventor: determined, innovative thinking that took on a seemingly intractable challenge and somehow found a way around it.

Or at least it seemed like that until the morning of Nov. 2, 1944, when Midgley was found dead in his bedroom. The public was told he had been accidentally strangled to death by his own invention. Privately, his death was ruled a suicide. Either way, the machine he designed had become the instrument of his death.

Midgley was laid to rest as a brilliant American maverick of the first order. Newspapers ran eulogies recounting the heroic inventions he brought into the world, breakthroughs that advanced two of the most important technological revolutions of the age: automobiles and refrigeration. “The world has lost a truly great citizen in Mr. Midgley’s death,” Orville Wright declared. “I have been proud to call him friend.” But the dark story line of Midgley’s demise — the inventor killed by his own invention! — would take an even darker turn in the decades that followed. While The Times praised him as “one of the nation’s outstanding chemists” in its obituary, today Midgley is best known for the terrible consequences of that chemistry, thanks to the stretch of his career from 1922 to 1928, during which he managed to invent leaded gasoline and also develop the first commercial use of the chlorofluorocarbons that would create a hole in the ozone layer.

Midgley did in fact recover from his bout with lead poisoning, but other early participants in the Ethyl business were not so lucky. Days after the first mass-production site for tetraethyl lead opened at DuPont’s Deepwater facility in New Jersey, Midgley and Kettering found themselves responsible for one of the most horrifying chapters in the history of industrial-age atrocities. On the eastern banks of the Delaware River, not far from DuPont’s headquarters in Wilmington, the Deepwater facility already had a long history of industrial accidents, including a series of deadly explosions in its original operational role of manufacturing gunpowder. But as soon as it began producing Ethyl at scale, the factory turned into a madhouse. “Eight workers in the DuPont tetraethyl gas plant at Deep Water, near Penns Grove, N.J., have died in delirium from tetraethyl lead poisoning in 18 months and 300 others have been stricken,” The Times would later write in an investigative report. “One of the early symptoms is a hallucination of winged insects. The victim pauses, perhaps while at work or in a rational conversation, gazes intently at space and snatches at something not there.” Eventually, the victims would descend into violent, self-destructive insanity. One worker threw himself off a ferry in a suicide attempt; another jumped from a hospital window. Many had to be placed in straitjackets or strapped to their beds as they convulsed in abject terror. Before work was halted at the plant, the hallucinations of swarming insects became so widespread that the five-story building where Ethyl was produced was called the “house of butterflies.”

The question of leaded gasoline’s health risks to the general public was a known unknown. The health risk posed by Freon was a more mercurial beast: an unknown unknown.

In his 2015 book, “A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology From Slipping Beyond Our Control,” Wendell Wallach talks about the class of unsettling near-term technologies that generally fit under the umbrella of “playing God”: cloning, gene editing, “curing” death, creating synthetic life-forms. There is something unnervingly godlike in the sheer scale of the impact that Thomas Midgley Jr. had on our environment, but the truth is that his innovations required immense infrastructure, all those Ethyl and Freon factories and gas stations and aerosol cans, to actually bring about that long-term destruction. But today, in an age of artificial replicators, it is much easier to imagine a next-generation Midgley playing God in the lab — with good or evil intent — and dispatching his creations with that most ancient of commands: Go forth, and multiply.

NOTE: I have reposted this thread at ATS from one I posted in Hernando's Hideaway back in 2016 and wanted it here as well.

Although you aren't legally allowed to create a private currency, script and voucher systems can be used as an alternative to out right bartering. Coupons, tokens, vouchers and scripts are legal if they don't look like the official currency or are minted coin from metals. They have been and still are being used like cash in certain communities and there are problems with getting people to use them, but if the government eliminates physical currency, you could go this route on a local or regional basis.

I can see a Bartertown scenario (open air or flea market) where this could work. Exchange goods with intrinsic value for scripts, like say metals, then use the scripts for purchases within the open air market. Any scripts not used could be exchanged for the goods that back the scripts in circulation. Items that have a limited shelf life are normally not used as an exchange commodity. I could see using minted coins, like pre-1981 copper pennies or current nickles, as an exchange commodity. esp. if the government decides to eliminate the penny like they want to eliminate the larger denominations ($100 and $50 bills).

Script


Voucher

Scripts are often used for fundraising activities and many companies offer company scripts, like Disney Dollars and the old timey Green Stamps. There is plenty of historical examples of script and vouchers being used.

There are other private "currencies" like bitcoin, of course that is a cashless deal.

It would be somewhat complex to fix a value to whatever you call your script or vouchers. I suppose that would depend on what was accepted in trade for said vouchers. Services can be exchanged in this way as well, but I imagine that services or commodities that are in the highest demand will be equal to higher value vouchers. If there is a worldwide economic collapse, then runaway inflation would make comparisons to legal tender currencies and metals difficult.

Then there is counterfeiting scripts and vouchers. Perhaps a method of keeping track of serial numbers in addition to watermarks on specially produced paper could do the trick.

It would be complex to do, but it would be like having cash in hand in a local economy. No worrying about runaway inflation, government tracking purchases, getting the Cyprus haircut, or negative interest rates.


Overall, I believe this would be a hard one to pull off with other markets doing business with other forms of exchange. Also, it is always a possibility that if scripts and vouchers become popular, then they will be made illegal even though it's legal at the moment.

Quote:https://lists.youmaker.com/links/Akbx8qw...D7f80wn4yK

Young Pilot Fights Post-Jab Heart Issues, Speaks Out on COVID Shot Fears

Sierra Lund, a recreational pilot, is pictured with a small airplane in 2022. (Courtesy of Sierra Lund.)

By Janice Hisle
March 14, 2023Updated: March 16, 2023
biggersmaller
Print

0:0013:11


Sierra Lund, a recreational pilot, shudders to think what could have happened if she had been in the cockpit when she started experiencing heart attack-like symptoms.
Just 18 hours after being injected with a COVID-19 shot, Lund felt intense pain in her chest. She was having trouble breathing. “Walking was a struggle,” she said.
None of this made sense.
Lund was a well-conditioned, competitive athlete. Neither she nor her relatives had any history of heart issues. And she was just 23. So Lund tried to shrug off her symptoms. They didn’t abate, so she sought emergency medical care.
Now, a year and a half later, her symptoms persist.
Lund was diagnosed with two heart conditions: myocarditis (cardiac muscle inflammation) and pericarditis (inflammation of the sac encasing the heart). Studies have linked both conditions to COVID vaccinations, and Lund says she’s sure the jab is to blame for her new health issues.
As a result, Lund can no longer fly a plane solo. Flying has been her passion since she first got her pilot’s license at age 17.
Lund and Josh Yoder, co-founder of aviation advocacy group “US Freedom Flyers,” say many other pilots—including commercial captains—have also suffered health issues that they strongly suspect could have been caused by taking a COVID jab. Yoder’s group has encouraged pilots to get screened specifically for myocarditis, which can remain undetected during routine medical exams.
“A lot of people are afraid to talk about it, afraid to lose their job,” Lund told The Epoch Times. “And since I’m not in that situation, I have a responsibility to speak out.”
Lund is sharing her story, she said, in the hopes of increasing public awareness about the health issue. She is also urging the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other government officials to look into vaccine-related health risks that could affect pilots more seriously.
Failure to do so is “extremely dangerous for the pilots and for the general public,” Lund said.
‘Zero Doubt’ Vaccine Caused Problems
A large percentage of commercial pilots received the COVID shots after being threatened with losing their jobs if they failed to comply with federal mandates.
Yoder, a commercial pilot, said he has heard from dozens of vaccinated pilots who worry that the shots hurt their health, may be threatening their livelihoods and affecting their ability to fly safely.
“Unfortunately, many of them have been suffering with these issues for quite some time … they were hoping the symptoms would go away,” Yoder told The Epoch Times of conversations he’s had with those in the industry.
He said word had spread that his organization was connecting pilots with medical professionals who could help diagnose and treat their health conditions; US Freedom Flyers connected Lund with doctors who are trying alternative therapies after conventional treatment methods yielded little improvement in her heart conditions.
While proving a link between vaccines and medical conditions can prove elusive, Lund says cases such as hers, which document near-immediate effects after vaccination, are hard to dispute reasonably.
After consulting with four cardiologists and learning about many reports similar to hers, Lund says she has “zero doubt” that the COVID shot caused her heart problems.
After receiving a COVID vaccine in September 2021, Lund felt terrible chest pain and shortness of breath as she headed for a flight as a passenger on a commercial aircraft. She called her father, who had just dropped her off. He headed back to pick her up and took her to an urgent care clinic, where an X-ray showed inflammation in her chest.
Her chest has hurt ever since.
[/url] Vials of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine on a table in a vaccination clinic in San Rafael, Calif., on April 6, 2022. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Lund took the shot voluntarily, mostly because she wanted to take a trip to a foreign destination where the shot was required. She also felt societal pressure to get the vaccine.
She now regrets the decision, which has changed her life dramatically.
As a daughter of a commercial airline pilot who also flies recreationally, aviation has been a constant in her life. Since her diagnosis, Lund still pilots small planes to keep her skills sharp. But she must always have a second pilot accompanying her; she is no longer medically cleared to fly alone.
Lund’s past schedule of daily gym workouts are also in her rear-view mirror—at least for now.
She tries not to think about all that she is missing.
“If I did, I’d probably be depressed,” Lund said. “I’m trying to figure out how to get better and figuring out how to come up with some sort of normal life in the meantime.”
She now runs her own business as an aircraft broker, keeping her in touch with the aviation community that she loves so much.
In between, Lund heads to medical appointments, including some that require travel from her home state, Georgia. She has spent about $15,000 out-of-pocket trying to get well so far.
FAA Decision Puzzling
U.S. government agencies insist that cases such as Lund’s are rare and that the COVID shots are safe and effective for the general public. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has stood by its decision to OK them for pilots’ use.
Lund and others, however, fault the FAA for approving the vaccines for pilots.
“Allowing pilots to put any substance in their body that has not had the appropriate clinical trials and abundant data to back its safety goes directly against what the FAA has always stood for,” Lund wrote in a Jan. 25 email to Federal Air Surgeon Susan Northrup.
The FAA forbids pilots from using numerous substances, including over-the-counter medications, within a certain number of hours before flying.
That’s why the FAA’s willingness to approve the emergency use COVID-19 vaccines for pilots is mystifying, Lund said.
“Instead of advocating for pilots, you allowed mandates to roll out,” Lund told Northrup.
Now, many pilots are vaccinated with the same shot that Lund blames for her predicament.
As of March 13, Lund said she had yet to receive a reply from Northrup.
When the Epoch Times sought comment from Northrup, an FAA spokesman responded on her behalf: “The FAA has seen no credible evidence of aircraft accidents or incapacitations caused by pilots suffering medical complications associated with COVID-19 vaccines.”
U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has been investigating COVID vaccine concerns in aviation.
In a Feb. 10 letter to Johnson, Northrup said that the FAA knew of only four “potentially vaccine-related adverse events in active pilots.”
She also said that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) “is the responsible agency for tracking and follow up of suspected vaccine adverse events”—not the FAA.
Johnson accused the agency of ignoring problems that the COVID shots might be causing among pilots that pose serious risks specific to the airline industry.
Pilots Not ‘Your Average Person’
“I think one thing that the public needs to know is, if they hear of a pilot having a condition, or a heart attack in the cockpit, they aren’t just your average person … I mean, these people go in for extensive medical screenings to keep their jobs,” Lund said. “So these should be the healthiest people out there.”
Yet, at least anecdotally, people seem to be hearing more reports of pilots suffering from heart ailments similar to Lund’s, or worse, Yoder said. This suggests that effects from the COVID shots or the illness itself could be the culprit.
“This is not something that we’ve seen happening on this scale before,” Yoder said. “You never heard about it; it was very rare … Now it’s something we hear about now almost every week.”
Josh Yoder, president of US Freedom Flyers. (Josh Yoder)
Through aviation networks, Yoder has heard numerous reports of flight attendants collapsing at work. Periodically, he has also seen reports of pilots being incapacitated or dying suddenly. Few of the reports in the mainstream press raise the possibility that the COVID vaccine may have been a factor.
Lund said people tend to shy away from talking about anything related to COVID vaccines because it can cause controversy. But she said more open discussion and investigation are needed to protect people’s safety.
Yoder concurs. He worries about undetected cases of cardiac inflammation. With the disclaimer, “I can’t speak as a doctor,” he said that cardiologists were telling him, “The longer you go with severe chronic inflammation, it’s not something that gets better over time. It gets worse.”
“So, left untreated, we’re gonna continue to see these deaths and incapacitations increase, most likely,” Yoder said.
Her Condition ‘Rare,’ Officials Say
In April 2021, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) acknowledged an uptick in cases of myocarditis and pericarditis, especially among adolescents and young males. But the CDC insists these incidents are “rare” and that the benefits of the shots outweigh the risks.
“COVID-19 vaccines have undergone—and will continue to undergo—the most intensive safety monitoring in U.S. history,” the agency says on its website. “Evidence from the hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccines already administered in the United States, and the billions of vaccines administered globally, demonstrates that they are safe and effective.”
Data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) show 26,584 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis after COVID vaccinations, according to an analysis on OpenVAERS.com.
Nurse Kimberly Overton, VAERS Whistleblower Deborah Conrad, Dr. Jeffrey Howard, Dr. Reni Moon, and Dr. James Thorp discuss COVID-19 vaccine adverse events in the Mississippi capitol building in 2023. (Courtesy of Charlotte Stringer Photography)
Prior to the availability of the COVID vaccines in the United States, those conditions barely registered on VAERS. But the number of myocarditis and pericarditis reports in VAERS soared to almost 16,000 in 2021—the first full year that the COVID shots were in use.
Lund said her case was submitted to VAERS; it is listed among 3,819 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis for COVID-inoculated people in her age group 12-25. But COVID vaccine recipients in the age group above hers, ages 25-51, recorded the highest number of those heart conditions in VAERS: 5,456.
As of March 3, more than 1.5 million “adverse events” have been reported to VAERS. That’s a fraction of the [url=https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-total-admin-rate-total]270 million people in the United States who have had at least one COVID vaccine, the CDC argues.
But as OpenVAERS, a group that questions vaccine safety, points out: “VAERS is widely acknowledged, even by the CDC, to be vastly underreported.” If that is true, the number of adverse effects of the COVID vaccines could be many times higher than the VAERS data show.
‘Real Solution’ Needed
Lund said she hopes that people on both sides of the political spectrum—and on both sides of the COVID vaccine mandate debate—can look for answers more open-mindedly.
She has heard the vitriol surrounding the issue and finds it unproductive.
“If you are extremely pro-vaccine, don’t blow people off when they say they have had an adverse side effect to the vaccine,” she said. “You need to be more understanding and listen to other people’s experience and listen to the studies that are coming out and maybe try to do some critical thinking as far as what you put into your body.”
It’s wrong for people to label vaccine skeptics “grandma killers” and “conspiracy theorists,” Lund said.
On the other hand, people who are anti-vaccine “need to be more understanding of the pressure that people are under and how scared they were of the pandemic,” and about their willingness to trust the government-appointed experts, Lund said.
“People on both sides of the aisle really need to come together, especially on this front, and just look at it logically based on the facts that we have now,” Lund said.
“It’s a real big issue … But as far as the FAA, I think that they need to start investigating these cases of pilots and people in the aviation world that are getting adverse side effects and come up with a real solution.”

We have all heard the benefit of eating certain types of food products..

In the 1960s the FBI created a fake faction in the Communist Party called the Ad-Hoc committee for a Scientific Socialist Line. It was small and did nothing but publish highly divisive polemics, but was extremely successful in sewing political divisions and causing wide spread disruption.

Quote:“Comrades: The time has come to throw off the shackles of revisionism and return to the Revolutionary principles of Lenin, Stalin and Mao.” — Ad Hoc Committee, 1962.

“A specific example of the ability of [Special Agent] Stallings is the fictitious counterintelligence ‘Ad Hoc Bulletin,’ ostensibly published by the also fictitious Ad Hoc Committee.” — Personnel file of FBI Special Agent Carl N. Freyman, 1964.

Quote:Among the Maoist organizations to arise out of the political tumult of the 1960s was a group known as the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party (initially called the Ad Hoc Committee for a Scientific Socialist Line). The entity, begun in 1962, was said to be a secret faction within the US Communist Party working against the “revisionism” of Nikita Khrushchev and US party leader Gus Hall. That the entire operation was an FBI construct was a mystery to all but a handful of FBI agents and informants.
...

The Ad Hoc program, part of the Bureau’s infamous Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), aimed to reach those who had stayed in the CPUSA throughout the turmoil of the 1950s who still had revolutionary aspirations. In that respect, the impact, from the Bureau’s perspective, could not have been better:

Party members have resigned or stopped attending meetings or have joined left wing caucuses. The number in this category is unknown; however, there are six in a caucus headed by [REDACTED] out of the Railroad Club [Party Unit or Cell] alone.... We feel that the total loss to the CP in expulsions, resignations, and those boycotting meetings could number approximately 25. (Freyman file 1/22/1964)

The FBI’s Maoist Faction

Quote:FBI Bookstore Spying in Chicago Eyes Abortion Rights, Cop City, Anti-Development Activists

Chicago, IL – The owner-workers of Pilsen Community Books acknowledge that their store is “very cute.” A vintage typewriter holds a signboard featuring a quote that’s both intellectually stimulating and heart-warming. A repurposed mid-century card catalog cabinet holds a collection of vintage mass market paperbacks. Tarot decks with charming wood-cut illustrations and a caterpillar tote bag featuring an anti-police slogan greet the socially conscious shoppers.

But don’t be deceived. At least according to the FBI, there’s more to this bookstore than good vibes and book release events with the latest left-wing author. Beneath the cute exterior, feds insist, a group of “violent extremists” are “planning and networking.”

“That’s news to us!” said Mandy Medley, one of the owner-workers of the store, when told that the FBI believes her store to be a hotbed for terror plots and “pro-abortion extremists.”

Nearly 30 pages of FBI documents obtained by Unicorn Riot reveal a pattern of monitoring of Pilsen Community Books, a worker-owned and collectively managed bookstore in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago.

In language reminiscent of the Red Scare, cubicle-lurking FBI intelligence analysts wrote in their reports that the store is used by “anarchist violent extremists,” or “AVEs,” “environmental violent extremists,” or “EVEs” and “pro-abortion extremists.” (While the reports talk about a “source,” importantly, there is no evidence included of physical surveillance.)

...which sadly sounds all too human with tales of lust, envy, greed and vain pride.

If you have the time I highly recommend this history series:




The Trust Game (Series playlist)

This 10-part series unwinds four centuries of intrigue between banking and revolutions in government and society. Now a new phase of revolution is underway- with ramifications and possibilities we are only just beginning to understand.

Inflation Repeating: 'The Trust Game' studies how inflation pressures under Fed Chair Volcker in 1980 is history repeating in 2022 under Fed Chair Powell. See episode 7.

1 min clip of the last episode of The Trust Game, “The One Ring”:



^^^Been stuck in my mind since late 2020.

Jimmy talks to Kennedy about the 2024 race and why he believes he can break through despite the party’s rank corruption and win the nomination as an outsider like a 2024 Democratic version of 2016 Donald Trump.



Partial transcript:

Quote:Robert Kennedy Jr tells Jimmy Dore: Trump got in there and said I'm going to get rid of the swamp. He asked me to be on a vaccine safety commission. When that news got out, Pfizer gave him $1 million for his inaugural party, and he appointed two of Pfizer's lobbyists, Scott Gottlieb and Alex Azar, to run HHS. They killed the vaccine safety commission, and Gottlieb went on to serve on Pfizer's board.

The thing that I feel like I have, Jimmy, is that I sued those agencies for forty years; I know how they work, I've written books about them, I've studied them, I know the people in them who are causing the problems, I know how to fix them.

That Dr. Anthony Fauci has been in charge of developing bioweapons for the Pentagon since 2002, and in 2014, three viruses escaped from US labs, so he moved his bioweapons research to the Wuhan lab:

They took the money that Cheney gave them [from the Patriot Act], $2.2 billion, and they funneled it through NIH, and it all went through Anthony Fauci. So beginning in 2002, Anthony Fauci got a 68% raise from the Pentagon for doing bioweapons development, and he got a raise of billions of dollars a year, and then he started doing all of this gain-of-function.

In 2014, three of those bugs escaped in high-profile escapes from different labs in the US. Congress held hearings on it. Everybody was angry, and 300 top scientists sent letters to Obama saying you got to shut down Fauci because he is going to create a pandemic.

So, Obama ordered a moratorium, and at that time, Fauci had eighteen different gain-of-function experiments he was doing around the US. He instead moved his stuff offshore to Wuhan, where he could do it out of sight of these 300 scientists and nosy White House officials who were trying to shut him down.

And he continued to do it with the same people he was funding here, Ralph Baric and Peter Dazak, and they moved their operation to the Wuhan lab."

the CIA, DOD, and Tony Fauci taught Chinese military scientists how to build weapons of mass destruction. Then Bill Gates, a former CIA director, and China's CDC director collaborated on how to censor a lab leak at Event 201 in Oct. 2019:

Fauci funded the study that taught the Chinese military scientists, everything in China is dual-use, that lab is a military lab, and he taught them cutting-edge technology for building weapons of mass destruction. In other words, the study for how to create the clones and how to create a spike protein that could attach to a human lung and transplant it onto a coronavirus.

He also funded through Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina a technique called seamless ligation which is a technique for hiding human tampering on that virus after you've done it. Fauci gave Baric $212 million, and Baric developed a technique for hiding the human tampering; Baric taught that to Shi Zhengli, the Chinese bat lady.

Fauci says we were doing this for vaccine development and countermeasures, but there is no justification in the world for funding somebody to create seamless ligation; in fact, it is the inverse of what you would do if your interest was public health. If your interest was bioweapons creation, and he was the czar of bioweapons since 2002, that's what you would do.

USAID gave ten times what Fauci gave. The DOD was there. Why were they in there teaching Chinese scientists how to build weapons of mass destruction? USAID is a CIA front group. Eco-health Alliance is a CIA front group. The CIA modeled this outbreak in 2019 twice, the second time at Event 201.

Who was at Event 201? Avril Haines co-hosted it with Bill Gates, and the head of the Chinese CDC, George Gao, was there. The virus was already circulating in Wuhan, nobody knew it, but George Gao had to know it; he was the head of the Chinese CDC and their number one expert on coronaviruses.

He comes to New York in October of 2019 and sits downs with Avril Haines, the former director of the CIA, today the Director of National Intelligence, the top spy in the country, and they do a four-part simulation, and the fourth part is George Gao and Avril Haines talking about how do we get social media to censor people if they say this is from a lab leak.

So, I never had, until this fall.  I went on a road trip with a friend for a day, and she asked if I had ever heard of him.

She was surprised when I said no.
Because she says I am a conspiracy theorist.  LOL. (she's known this forever)

So anyway, she starts playing his songs.
They are almost all about conspiracy theories.
And he caught a lot of BS from the media for it.

And while I am not a huge fan of rap, I liked it, reminded me of Eminem.

But it turns out, this fellow, is doing it all on his own. With a lot of help from his girlfriend.
He will not sign with a Record Label.
He doesn't seem to be afraid to talk about anything, including his troubles.

He recently gain some mainstream popularity with his song "Ghost" which was written for his girlfriend. It reached number 1 on the billboard pop chart.  It's ok.  Not really my cup of tea.
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=tom...Fq%3Dtom%2


But I like a lot of his other stuff, like this one:  A lot of truth in it.  "System"
Tom MacDonald - "The System" - YouTube Music - Bing video

I just think it is nice, that he is doing so well, on his own.  I hope more artists follow in his footsteps.

When the residents of Willowsgate finally superseded Father Martin's advice and agreed that when the next Midnight Mail
Rider came to their little piece of heaven, any message for a particular type of assistance must hold the caveat that funding
would only be provided after positive results.

The gaunt balding man in the dog-collar had dramatically raised his arms in the act of exacerbated capitulation and warned
his twenty-or-so flock that answers to their current woes will draw all sorts of charlatans to their snowed-in quiet village of
wealthy citizens. Although, the reverend hadn't quite worded that way.

But to inspirit the despondent preacher, the small group of men, women and children did allow that benediction would still
be warranted, but added whatever had killed young Joshua Cutler, Miles Brandreth's milkmaid and two of Percy Pumice's
best oxen needed something a little more trenchant than mere praying.

In his candle-lit nave smelling of freshly-sawn wood, Father Martin finally renounced his remonstrations, blessed his sated
parishioners and watched them file out into the dark graveyard. It seemed to the priest that even though he'd hadn't given
it utterance during their after-prayers discussion -to the adherents of the new religion, the old ways still contained the more
appropriate ordnance of solving matters they believed were supernatural.

On that chilly snowy winter's night of their shared decision, the tiny affluent hamlet of twelve families collectively sighed
with relief as they left the newly-built church and made their way to their respective homes. A smiling Arthur Thurgood
wished his fellow pious followers a safe evening and went about herding his wife and boy towards their recently renovated
cottage.

With a vigilant gaze and a hope that things would get better around here, the grey-haired retired businessman returned to
the introspections that had fluttered quietly in the back of his mind whilst the preacher and his gathering had talked. It had
taken Arthur a long time before fully buying into Elsa's idea of a tranquil lifestyle in such hedonistic a place to see out their
days, but he'd accepted her wisdom and quickly learned that his wife's wants for her man would require him to step up in
the area of social etiquette.

Willowsgate was certainly different from the unpolished thorps where he'd made his money and those he'd just wished an
easy sleep to would never positively appreciate the blue-collar demeanour of the men who'd worked under him. They were
his sort, they spoke his language and he always felt comfortable in their presence. But he'd found that here in the village,
such people of the labouring classes were articulated to in a certain aspect that always rankled Arthur and if it hadn't been
for his better-half's dream of bettering their family, he'd have used a particular dialect that his fellow-proletarians would've
appreciated.

The old Lamplighter appeared from the gloomy alleyway between Martha's Fabric Emporium and one of the two Dry-Goods
Store in Willowsgate and with all of his might, Arthur steeled his heart and only afforded a nod to acknowledge the fellow's
tug of his cap. Apparently, there were borders now and he needed to learn them.

Under the swaying flickering oil-lanterns adorning the stone-surfaced road leading towards the far-end of the village's square,
the once-owner of four large saw-mill companies -and a major contributor to their new chapel, continued his ponderance of
his family's choice to live here among the well-to-do. It was Elsa who had steered the Good Ship Thurgood to where he and
his loved ones currently compressed the drifting results of this morning's blizzard and if it hadn't been for the slayings, Arthur
would have to concede it was his wife's fortitude that had brought them to this would-be safe harbour.

Peering into the silent darkness as they walked, the narrow-shouldered man wondered if the maritime metaphor would stretch
to the term 'Here There Be Monsters'. Fondly patting his son on the shoulder, Arthur decided to change his stream of thought
to a less unnerving theme and wander in the subject that had bothered him since moving here from Bootle Mills.

Thurgood had sworn to himself that if asked, he'd admit he had come from a working-class background -although he'd never
dare to openly confess this to his neighbours without the correct provocation. He'd worked hard to better himself in the purse
and in his deportment with a verve he'd acquired from his late-father.

He'd become -what he guessed his peers would deem successful and if it hadn't been for the woman swishing snow from the
hem of her long dress ahead of him, Arthur knew he would only be rich instead of rich and happy. He also knew now which
eating-irons to use and with assistance from Elsa, his cussing had been curbed to nothing more than a gasp of exasperation.

The snow-covered lane to their restored abode held no such illumination afforded to the main boulevard in Willowsgate and
as the Thurgood family blemished the white surface between the borders of bough-heavy rhododendrons, Arthur continued his
leery watchfulness of the silent shadows. Something was out there picking off the rich people of the fairly-remote community
and hurrying on home, Arthur wondered who these well-heeled notables would acquire to fix their dilemma.