Pulling a Swede here.

Accordingly, the [JFK murder] case has been deliberately and systematically marginalized by the “media industrial complex” and turned over to the province of kooks, crackpots, and “assassination buffs” and “conspiracy theorists,” coded expressions craftily designed to disparage anyone who simply keeps an open mind and wants to look further into the circumstances of the president’s death. Independent thinking about this critical event has been stigmatized as taboo, a stigma enforced through belittlement, mockery, and obfuscation. Many people as a result are too intimidated to express the dissenting opinions about the case.

The effect is a pervasive atmosphere of unreality surrounding postwar American history, a willed decision by most citizens (even some who know better) to live in a fantasy America rather than the far messier place we actually inhabit. The fact that none of the official explanations for all of the major events in modern American history – the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Vietnam War; Watergate; Iran/contra; the Gulf War; 9/11; and the Iraq War – makes sense when the evidence is examined with care should be enough to make even the most trusting American realize he or she is being duped by our own government. (Joseph McBride)

It usually takes a great tragedy, losing a war or perhaps internal rebellion, to force those in power to come clean. In South Africa after years of apartheid the new government deliberately forsook opportunity to hold an inquisition, and instead went the “truth and reconciliation” route. This promotes healing even as I know that the very worst people in society walk free after committing heinous crimes. “Reconciliation” is not possible with such monsters. No doubt the South Africans knew that too, and yet, what was the alternative? To hire a new set of monsters to make revenge?

Nonetheless, if our country is ever to heal, even 51 years after the fact, we need to officially solve JFK’s murder so that we can have some closure. The private kooks, crackpots, assassination buffs and conspiracy theorists can then join all of the regular people of society, no longer grasping on to a slim read of truth under the yoke of a fascist state hidden behind a fake democracy. We could all be equals. We could all know some truth.

The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology. There have been many kinds of writing, pictographic and syllabic, but there is only one phonetic alphabet in which semantically meaningless letters are used to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds. This stark division and parallelism between a visual and an auditory world was but crude and ruthless, culturally speaking. The phonetically written word sacrifices worlds of meaning and perception that were secured by forms like the hieroglyph and Chinese ideogram. These cultrually richer forms of writing, however, offered men no means of sudden transfer from the magically discontinuous and traditional world of the tribal word into the hot and uniform visual medium. (Marshall McLuhan, The Written Word: An Eye for an Ear)

Marshall McLuhan is a man whose words I cherish, as he was so able to communicate complex ideas in an understandable manner. A tribute to his genius is that while reading his words it is as if the sun pokes between the clouds, yet shortly after I lose that light. I have to continually revisit him.

Consequentially, his major essays, collected in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, sits atop my shelves here among pictures of my mother and grandmother and others – I didn’t realize as I placed that and two other books there that I was reserving a place of honor for him. I just wanted his book to be handy.

Love of the written word takes many forms. Some prefer fiction writers, and I tend to agree that fiction in the proper hands conveys important truths in a manner that non-fiction cannot. (See, for example, “The New Testament” by various anonymous authors.) Others prefer poetry, but I’ve never been able to sit and look at a it long enough for it to penetrate this thick cranium. Hearing poetry is another experience entirely.

I read mostly non-fiction. But my most recent experience with fiction, The Stranger by Camus, left me wanting more. It was so deeply moving. In the same manner, On the Road by Kerouac moved me … “That’s not writing. That’s typing!” scorned Truman Capote, but Kerouac had managed to convey to me the emptiness felt by the Beat Generation in the post-war years in a manner that no historian could touch.

So as a reader of non-fiction, I doff my cap tho those who prefer fiction. Their pathway to truth is less littered with lies than my own.

As we head into a new year, I take a moment now to offer tribute to those who read this blog and bring their own ideas and experiences here. There is nothing new or original under the sun, of course, but there is the human mind. We are capable exchanging complex notions of great value.

It is always obvious to me in blog exchanges whether or not I am dealing with someone who reads, and even more, the type of reading done. It takes a lot of reading over time before things can settle in and begin to paint a picture of the world that has some consistency around the edges.

As a young man raising kids and working full time, I managed to read maybe three books a year, and consequently each had disproportionate impact on me. So it was that I read, for example Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, and Dare to Discipline by James Dobson. Without broader experience, the effect of these men was disproportionate.

So too is it with so many of recent generations who have read Atlas Shrugged, and then stopped. It’s good to read Ayn Rand, and then even better to throw her aside with great force later on. It’s a liberating feeling.

Before we settled in the house we now occupy, we looked at maybe thirty others in this area and up around Boulder. I was always curious about the people who lived in those houses, so as we went room-to-room I looked for the book shelves or stacks. What I generally found was no shelves or stacks, maybe a few travel guides or a beach book or two. Dan Brown probably accounted for 60% of book sales in this land a few years back. It’s a desert out there, I realize.

But then I recall that Allen Dulles, who sat on the Warren Commission, reminded the other Commission members that even though the final Report would contain gaping holes and contradictions, that they should not worry about it because Americans do not read.

That was 1964 and true then as now.

As McLuhan reminds us, what is more meaningful on a wall? An American flag, or the words “American flag”? While phonetic symbols store a great wealth of information, symbols impart far more and with immediate impact. Consequently, the power of television and movies, and now the images on the screen of our computers, own the American mind.

There is a vast treasure trove of truth and lies out there waiting to be assembled and easily accessible to all of us. But it is hidden away in books, and so will never be found.

@the OliverStone: A dirty story & in the aftermath the West maintains the dominant narrative of “Russia in Crimea” – the true narrative is “USA in Ukraine.”

@shaymultimedia: @TheOliverStone Shame on you Stone! How much is the Kremlim paying you? You are what Lenin used to refer to as a “useful idiot.”

@AlexandrNevskij: @The OliverStone I know my history, and Putin is a thieving murderous war-mongering thug, pure KGB filth!

@mpthct: @shaymultimedia @AlexandreNevskij @TheOliverStone Odd that people who claim to know their history are the ones that don’t know their history.

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I listened to NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me podcast over the weekend. It is called the “NPR News Quiz” and I listen because they have some really funny people on their panels. But it can be annoying too. It is, after all, NPR, and so the “news” it quizzes panelists about is mostly lies. Host Peter Sagal made jokes and references to our official and given truth in this last show, that Vladimir Putin is an evil man, that the Russians invaded Crimea, and that the Ukrainian coup d’état earlier this year was a triumph for democracy in which the US played only a small part, if any. That is the official and dominant narrative, and Sagal, of course, is too … NPRish … to know any better.

Oliver Stone is now making a documentary about the Ukrainian coup d’état and Maidan massacre, and it will be out soon enough and opening at a theater anywhere but near you. Here’s a part of his description:

“Details to follow in the documentary, but it seems clear that the so-called ‘shooters’ who killed 14 police men, wounded some 85, and killed 45 protesting civilians, were outside third party agitators,” he said. “Many witnesses, including Yanukovych and police officials, believe these foreign elements were introduced by pro-Western factions – with CIA fingerprints on it.”

My only question, and why I reprinted the Tweets above, is … how can anyone not know this? How?

The massacre during demonstrations is a CIA specialty repeated elsewhere, for instance in Venezuela in 2002, and of course in countless coups d’état wherein any government that demonstrates any left-leaning sympathy or, more importantly, charts a course independent of US dominance, is targeted for regime change. Of course, the @AlexandrNevskij’s of this world who know their history so well don’t know this, and neither do most Americans.
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This may seem a disjointed post, but all of this came full circle this morning for me as I reviewed a murder in Washington DC in 1964, that of Mary Pinchot Meyer, one of JFK’s lovers, but oddly, one with whom he was truly in love and with whom he shared deep secrets. Her ex-husband, Cord Meyer, was high up in the CIA and so had to sit in silence as CIA murdered her. The murder took 6-8 people to carry out, not counting those who planned it. It included

• surveillance for weeks to choose the murder spot;
• a planted broken-down car so that a tow truck was called, to make sure witnesses were on hand;
• a patsy selected that very morning, a young black man who was sleeping off a drunk after having had a tryst;
• a wardrobe department at CIA that supplied the clothing for a a man looking like the patsy to be seen near the body by witnesses;
• two people, a man and woman strolling through the park – actually doing surveillance;
• a “witness,” a young army officer who appeared and offered incriminating testimony against the patsy and then disappeared into the shadows;
• and of course, the shooter himself, a mere mechanic, a paid killer, who performed his job with cold calculated efficiency, even eliciting a scream from his victim before dispatching her. (He could have killed her silently but wanted attention drawn to the event so that the man imitating the patsy could be seen walking away from the scene.)

It’s just one more murder. CIA has done thousands of them. But look at the attention to detail in the staging, the thoughtful setup for the sake of investigators. They are professional murderers, and their art is to make murders look like something else – accidents, random acts of inexplicable violence, car accidents, plane crashes large and small, suicides, drownings, lone nuts in windows overlooking motorcades … there is always the act itself, but then something else too, some distraction to draw our attention away from the real murderers and motives.

James Jesus Angleton was one of the early henchmen in the organization as it found its wings in the post-war era. Like most psychopaths, he found little joy in life beyond the game, and spent his closing days drinking himself into oblivion, perhaps even demonstrating elements of a conscience in these words spoken close to the end of his life.

Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. Intelligence were liars. The better you lied, the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. These people attracted and promoted each other. Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and I loved being in it. … Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offie, and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.

I guess I will see them there soon.

I bring this up because Oliver Stone, in being openly hostile to CIA and having power in his filming skills and reputation, is putting his life in danger. Discussions are likely going on as we speak about the wisdom and possible means of dispatching him. If he knows this, and I assume he does, then he is a man of honor and rare courage. We all gotta go sometime, and his body of work, especially the movie JFK, is an enormous and important contribution to the preservation of truth, that thing that American historians* are so very bad at.
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* As Senator Frank Church discovered during his investigation into CIA activities in the late 1970’s, CIA has paid writers on staff whose job it is to rewrite history in the making so that researchers looking for source material in college libraries and other archives will find only official history, and not the real stuff. Thus are the bookshelves of Barnes and Nobel, history and current events section, littered with bullshit.

I am busy today transcribing a one-hour interview by Len Osamic of William Pepper, currently serving as defense attorney for Sirhan Sirhan, but before that the attorney for James Earl Ray. And I have to chuckle a little bit because commenter Fred has said to me on occasion that the government cannot keep secrets and that secrets get out, and that’s why he doesn’t believe these fantastic stories of conspiracies and cover-ups, Martin Luther King being a big one.

Well, information did get out there. In 1999 the family of Martin Luther King sued Lloyd Jowers and “other unknown conspirators” in the death of Dr. King, forcing a public trial in Memphis. It was the trial of the century, and no one showed up. To this day if you ask any newspaper reporter or journalist in this country about that trial, you’ll get a blank stare. But for a week Three weeks in 1999 seventy witnesses were called and testified about the events surrounding King’s death. The verdict was that Lloyd Jowers, a minor player, was found guilty, as were the FBI, Memphis Police, and U.S. Army.

The trial is public record, and I intend somehow to get hold of the transcript. William Pepper and company have done a remarkable job of uncovering witnesses and evidence. It seems they know everything now except the name of the actual shooter. Lloyd Jowers, who had ulterior motives for approaching the King family to confess his guilt, was not a shooter, but took care of the rifle after King was gunned down from the bushes below the rooming house where the shot “officially” was fired. He knows who fired the killing shot, but refused to give up a name because, as Pepper says, he feared for his life. The actual murderer of King, a hired gun, a mechanic, was a very dangerous man, and was still alive in 1999.

It gets even more interesting. There were levels of organization in the shooting, with the U.S. Army providing backup snipers in case King survived. (Andrew Young was also to be killed that day but was not.) The Army also provided a photographic team, two still photographers who were atop the fire station nearby taking pictures of everything. From them we heard testimony that James Earl Ray was not present at the time of the shooting. But is that not weird, that the Army took the trouble to photograph the event? Would we not want to see those photos now? Were they produced at trial? Subpoenaed?

Here’s part of the Pepper interview, as it relates to Colonel John Downie, who was in charge of the military side of the shooting:

That entire Army unit, those soldiers, the ones from Psychological Operations and the other Special Ops came out of Camp Shelby, Mississippi early that morning, was designated, authorized under the control of Colonel John Downie. John Downie was the head of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group that was based in the Pentagon reporting directly to the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence of the United States Army. And that’s the only MIG, Military Intelligence Group, that is based in the Pentagon. John Downie controlled it, he was brought back to take it over and run it in June of 1967, and he was given his marching orders to begin to organize the military side of that operation as opposed to the civilian side, which was handled separately.

Downie was organizing the military side in ’67. He’s an interesting character, and was a man, strangely enough, that one had to have some respect for as a patriot who believed what he was doing was right. Because, he was Lyndon Johnson’s briefer. He was also CIA. He was Lyndon Johnson’s briefer on the Vietnam War. And he would come back into Washington on a regular basis and meet with the President to give him a briefing on the war and continually question the president as to what we were doing there, saying this was a ridiculous waste of blood and treasure, and that we had no business being there. And why are we there? And he kept pounding out this fact to Johnson and finally one day Johnson pounded the table and said to him “John, I can’t get out of this war. My friends are making too much money.”

Now that is one of the most outrageous and revealing statements about war and the waging of war that any head of state in the history of this republic has ever made. And he made it to John Downie, and I learned about that subsequently with an interview of John Downie’s daughter, who remembers him coming home that day very upset and saying to his wife “Pack your bags. We’re going to Canada.” And he had himself transferred up to the embassy in Canada and wanted nothing more to do with being a facilitator for the war in Vietnam.

So that taught me something about the character of this man who originally was from Pennsylvania, and in terms of his perceived actions in terms of patriotism. And I believe – this is the quandary one gets into – I believe that he had no doubt that Martin King was an enemy of the state and that what he was doing was correct. Of course, however, it was wrong and illegal and criminal and immoral. With that assessment, one has to put the whole story out there so that it’s clear where this guy was coming from. He ran the military side of things. He ran the military side.

I find that intriguing, that the assassination of Martin Luther King can be traced to within shouting distance of Lyndon Johnson. Of course, we have no evidence that Johnson ordered it or even knew about it. But his military briefer sure did.

Pepper will put out a book that summarizes all of this, to be coordinated with a movie, in the near future. He has written two previous books on this subject, Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King (1995), and An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King (2003, revised 2008). These will be folded into the final book, which also includes “devastating information that I have been able to acquire in the fifteen years following the civil trial.”

So there ya go, Fred. Information got out, it’s hidden in plain sight, and still no one knows about it! That’s thought control in our democratic society, at its finest.

Veracity: “Not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.” (Locke)

U.S. variation: If something is on TV and called “news” it is true. No proof need be offered.

Bertrand Russell:

“[Locke’s] definition is admirable in regard to all those matters as to which proof may reasonably be demanded. But since proofs need premise, it is impossible to prove anything unless some things are accepted without proof. We must therefore ask ourselves: What sort of thing is it reasonable to believe without proof?

I should reply: The facts of sense experience and the principles of mathematics and logic – including the inductive logic employed in science. These are things which we can hardly bring ourselves to doubt, and as to which there is a large measure of agreement among mankind.

But in matters as to which men disagree, or as to which our own convictions are wavering, we should look for proofs, or, if proofs cannot be found, we should be content to confess ignorance.” (The Listener, 1947)

The major event of our time for most Americans, 9/11, is surrounded by so-called evidence with little or no science behind it.

• Jet aircraft cannot behave in that manner, cannot fly at 500+ mph in dense atmosphere;
• The odds of 19 supposed hijackers all having success with minimal tools at their disposal are phenomenal …
• … and then to fly the aircraft (which cannot fly at that speed anyway) unerringly to their targets … unlikely.
• Large jet aircraft cannot fly through small holes without meeting resistance and leaving debris.
• Light posts would not have been severed by aircraft wings – quite the opposite, the wings would have been severed by a denser metal.
• Cell phone calls from aircraft were impossible then, as now.
• The notion that an aircraft sunk in an abandoned mine and that no effort was made to recover it is … indescribably ludicrous.
• That a group of people ascertained the plans of supposed hijackers and then voluntarily committed suicide to save others … Disneyesque, vain, patronizing and stupid.
• That national defense responders all at once screwed up is so … highly unlikely …
• … that fighter aircraft needed for national defense conveniently were out of position – highly coincidental.
• The large number of military drills going on, easily ‘flipped live” to avail plotters of vast government resources, was too coincidental to be taken without serious skepticism.
• The presence of an unreported large hurricane off the shore of Long Island that day … hmmmm.

These are the facts of sense experience, but also principles of mathematics and logic. Those of us who look at the events of that day with high skepticism are the ones who employ the skills of reason and logic, and are also the ones not so susceptible to TV truth. We are the sane ones. The rest of you … you seem to have some screws loose.

I do not understand the power in place that causes ordinarily sensible people to believe such monstrous lies. It’s really weird that all of the above, easily seen to be false, even ludicrous, are accepted without proof.

What the hell is wrong with you people?