James Tracy interviews author, filmmaker, and lifetime surfing enthusiast Allan Weisbecker on the weekly interview program, Checkin’ It Out. The two discuss a variety of topics, including intellectual freedom, the doublethink phenomenon especially peculiar to America’s professional elite, and the curious impact events like the JFK assassination and 9/11 continue to have on public discourse and political life.
Weisbecker is the author of the classic titles, Cosmic Banditos (NAL Trade 1986), In Search of Captain Zero: A Surfer’s Road Trip Beyond the End of the Road (Tarcher 2001), and Can’t You Get Along with Anyone? A Writer’s Memoir (Bandito Books 2007). He has also recently released a fascinating new film that he has been working on since 2007, Water Time: Surf Travel Diary of a MadMan. The film may be viewed free online by contacting Weisbecker via his website at banditobooks.com.
Part I
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Download
Part II is posted at the program’s website and available by clicking here.
“Allan Weisbecker pulls off something in his movie I couldn’t even imagine before I saw it,” writes journalist Jon Rappoport.
With his beloved dog, Honey, and his surfboard, he goes on the road across America, moves south of the border, his laptop loaded with evidence that the US government has been lying to the people for the past 50 years about every pivotal event in our history, and he confronts lawyers and ex-pats and dropouts and people on the side of the road with this evidence and he records their reactions extensively, and we finally see what the resistance is all about. (Rappoport’s Review of Water Time.)
“This film is an odyssey of truth, which operates at several levels, using music, cascading imagery, and recorded interviews,” Professor David Ray Griffin notes. “The scenery is beautiful, the music eclectic, and the message compelling – a message reflecting anguish at the bogus pretexts for war.” (Griffin’s Review of Water Time.)
Allan has one of the best perspectives as to what happened on September 11th, 2001. John O’Neill was a key member of the psy-op.
Hi James! Just an audio-related comment about the Weisbecker interview:
I’m sure you noticed that the audio is very unbalanced between your audio and Allan’s audio his being at a good strong level, but yours sounding very weak in comparison.
Just FYI so that you can correct it in future shows thanks for your work!
Michael Ivey Asheville, NC
Reblogged this on Today,s Thought.
Does anyone think the Santa Barbara stabbing/shooting spree bears all the earmarks of phoniness. I’m not there, so I cannot tell too much about it, but I do remember that Gore Vidal was always dubious when some assassin proved to be a diarist, something he felt was anachronistic for the sorts of punks which are charged with this stuff. Here we have an “autistic” kid keeping a diary, and his father just happens to be a Hollywood director (when you consider that someone like Clint Eastwood has about eight kids from seven different women, it might not be too hard to smuggle a fake egg into the nest now and then).
I’m not going to pursue this here, and frankly I’m kind of weary of the whole thing, but this time, the father of the “great kid” who did this is pursuing the anti-NRA angle right out of the starting gate, which sounds like reel grief to me.
Musings… The father who spoke (and never shed a tear) was the father of one of the “victims”….just to make a point clear.
As for this “Elliot” fellow, I was so revulsed at his speech and actions in his posted videos that I could not bring myself to finish watching… AND NOT BECAUSE he seemed at all deranged or evil in any way, at all. I felt that I was being spoon fed horse manure. Call it discernment, at this point…or it could just be the scales falling…
yes: musings MARTHA Kathy poppylavender
newest rampage seems to be following a script
Yes, that is exactly what I would do, after loosing my child, give a 45 minute rant about how the NRA and guns are bad.
They messed up the script once again, or perhaps the patsy was unwilling to go along with it, most of the carnage was caused by brutal stabbings and assault by a deadly BMW.
Yes please, declare it a crime, there is no way it should be legal, an unappreciative, spoiled child should be given the weapon of a BMW!
Musings I watched this morning a clip on the news. in santa Barbara, the boy talking in a car pre the event…, and a bystander ( English accent) who saw what happened.. The father being upset. and wanting guns to be revoked… the newsreading reading out the events and sounding as if it was a shopping list – something just didn’t sound right..My feelings like you are a bit weary, I was wondering if I was overlooking something..but my instinct was telling me, that something was wrong.
Commenting on the interview, Weisbecker provides some insight into a situation today where conformity in media is regimented. I think we’ve all heard about the way in which our statements and images posting into the blogosphere or on YouTube, develop a life of their own, following us, potentially, for life (or at least for the short-term future). This to me resembles the so-called McCarthy era in which one’s affiliation with certain organizations, not necessarily banned but put on lists by the government as communist fronts or perhaps other types of fronts (Japanese theatre for instance treated as a fifth column of Japanese imperialism), would lead to black-listing of creative people because they might somehow insinuate their “propaganda” into their creative works and thus lead the public in a direction the government does not want it to go (away from “Americanism”). That this style of blacklisting has re-asserted itself seems to be lost for the moment among those supposedly in favor of a robust public forum.
One waits for someone’s other shoe to drop quite audibly – will it be the latest Greenwald revelation of Snowden’s downloads? Somehow I feel like I am waiting for the last secret of the Fatima apparition which will shock and astonish the public and change everything more dramatically than 9/11 – perhaps reversing its baleful effect.
But I know that waiting passively to receive truth is never how it really comes. Fingernails must get dirty. Maybe that makes one less of an employment prospect, less in line for that big script purchase. But it cannot help but make one more of a human being. If you are not shown the way, you must make the way.
Professor Tracy… This is a FANTASTIC interview! Thanks so much. I simply want to say that I hope you can get your sound balance in order… Alan is WAY too loud when I turn the sound up in order to hear YOU….
I’m sure this will get worked out, but thought you needed to know…
Great interview. I recently watched Water Time and absolutely loved it. Can’t wait for Part 2 of the film.
agree mangrove
watched it last night
will be spreading the word
Several of you have commented here or elsewhere on the poor sound quality of the interview. I have attempted to address this and have *reposted* a new file. This is my oversight in learning some new equipment and software.
Thanks for listening. Part II to post later this week.
Thanks to those who’ve written me about the interview and about my film and many thanks to Jim for his intelligence and due diligence — which, given his excellent work – notable for meticulous sourcing – should not have surprised me. Not that I’m all over the radio, but in my experience Jim is as good as they get. Appreciate him.
Thank you gentlemen for your bravery, may you go forth and multiply!
Here’s an interesting article on how the unions have taken over our media.
Of course we already know you cannot fire a government worker no matter how corrupt or criminal them become because of unions. The thugs worked out really well in Detroit!
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/63330
Just finished hearing Part two…Fantastic conversation!! (sound levels fine this time..thanks)
PLEASE, be certain to check in with Allan occasionally during his ‘Road Trip”! We need updates.
I have now listened to part 2.
What’s great about this, at least one of the many things, is that Allan is in a way interviewing James, as well as being interviewed. James is not uncomfortable with this role reversal, and his responses give us some insight into the mind of our host, which is welcome.
Additionally, Allan, who I have to say in his movie struck me as a man pretty much depressed and at his wits’ end with the crimes that pervade our time and place, and the sheer stupidity of the people in these benighted times, turns out not to be that way at all in normal life. He’s on top of pretty much the entire catalogue of researchers and topics, he knows James’ work here as well as the rest of us do, and he does not sound at all depressed.
Certainly, presenting evidence of pervasive conspiracies to moronic men on the street is bound to produce depression when it becomes clear no one wants to know the truth. But Allan did not do that: he chose surfer-folk, beach bums, people who want nothing to do with the structure of modern rat-race society and thus have fled to the comfort of total escape. So I wasn’t surprised when most of them responded to his proof-texts with a shrug of the shoulders; it strikes me that most of these people have no interest in the affairs of the state, any more than the Elves in the book The Lord of the Rings concern themselves with the affairs of Men.
So, this chat between him and James was very instructive. Allan knows his stuff, he has not lost his marbles and rushed off on some forlorn last-hope search for a single honest man in the world. It was a kind of scientific experiment, that movie, seeking to know if people can be reached on their own level–and the group he targeted happened to be the beach bums and surfers he already knows the culture of. The answer is, they can’t.
I was particularly struck by the bit concerning Neo’s passport. I had never heard of it before, so I looked it up: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKZg9n6eosA). I have written much about The Matrix, since the movie came out–and it infects my thoughts almost as much as does 1984 (and you all know how much THAT is). I know The Matrix really well, but I did not know this. As Allan says, we tend to think of that movie as a bit of whistle-blowing, because so much of it is true from OUR side of the struggle. That’s true, but this is a very valuable clue that we have being played on this one, too. “Something’s happening here/What it is ain’t exactly clear….”
So here we have the ultimate quandary. We know we’re always being played. This is a VERY subtle hint about who these guys really are. I am constantly amazed at the growing list of 911 adumbrations now revealed to have been presented in plain sight in the popular culture in the years leading up to the event. The question always is, did each of these artists and producers and directors and so forth know what was going to happen (think of that rap album cover, with the twin towers smoking, for instance)? Certainly not. The deep politics, and the power to infect entertainment products with these messages is awesome–and terrifying. I wonder who at Family Guy knew about the Boston hoax when they put it into the show those many months before.
We can read Dave McGowan, and know how much strangeness suffuses the media that we swim in, but we can’t know how exactly it’s done.
Anyway, thanks, guys. Great chat.
Very insightful comment, especially re the implications of the ‘the Matrix’ bit. You see the ambivalence of the implications and put it very well. Gracias.
The best thing about coming to this site everyday is meeting people like Allan…. He is a gem!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKZg9n6eosA