I first asked the question about the murder of John F. Kennedy as a junior in high school in 1967, reading Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment. 21 years later, in 1988, I asked it again.

For those of you who were not around, those were different times. People coming out of World War II were optimistic. The future looked good. Kennedy was an unusual man, a natural for the leadership slot. I lived in a Republican household, but cried when he died. He was so natural, so good on his feet. He made us do things like exercise our bodies, the fifty-mile walk a goal he inspired in youth. He sent legions of young men to do good abroad in the Peace Corps. We just felt good. Especially us kids. He was so cool.

The murder, and on some level most of us knew it wasn’t as we were told, disenchanted us. It made kids rebellious. Campuses were alive not only with protest, but curiosity. They were holding “teach-ins.” These were not long-haired beaded hippies, but rather young men and women who dressed nice. The anti-war movement was a peaceful movement of serious people. They talked about Indochina, colonialism, the roots of Vietnam, Cuba, Lamumba, Guatemala … They were not spouting slogans. They were spouting real history. It had to be stopped. (In the ensuing years, it has been stopped.)

Hippies, drugs, rock music – all of that came later, and was CIA-inspired. That is the message that Dave McGowan was working on in Weird Scenes in the Canyon. The guy is great, but somehow never nails it. CIA morphed the anti war movement in to sex, drugs and rock and roll. Laurel Canyon was at the center of it. And the war went on until 1975.

There is very little history available today, certainly none taught in the schools. But it is a rich vein for the curious mind.

I was 27 years ago that I decided I wanted to know who killed JFK. What a journey! Have you any idea what it is like to be curious? To go down avenues you never thought you would or could? Lose faith, find faith, lose faith, transcend the need for faith? Each step in solving the murder is an opening into a higher level of reality. When something like 9/11 or Boston happens, you don’t wonder. You know. It’s them again … that dark force operating behind the scenes, ruling us by fear and symbols. It is the ones who killed JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, JFK Jr., Marilyn, so many many others. They drip blood. They are sinister and evil, and in charge.

J. Edgar Hoover was a closet homosexual who was being blackmailed by the Mafia. Lyndon Johnson, had not JFK been killed, would likely have ended up in the penitentiary. Because those two extremely corrupt men had access to power, other people realized that they could kill the president and get away with it. Edgar and Lyndon had to cover it up. They had no choice. Their own lives were threatened. That was the straw that stirred the drink.

1963, Ma and Pa Kettle days, bobby socks and Beach Blanket Bingo and Doris Day, when everything was so clean, yet we were so corrupt.

Anyway, I am just saying, if you haven’t asked a question for which the search for an answer turned your life on its head, you have not thought enough yet. Nothing is as it appears. Nothing.

“All of us, at some level, know that we are being lied to. Some people internalize it and go on with their daily lives. Some ignore it completely. And still others latch onto fatuous opinion-makers whose daily bread depends on the very system they purport to uncover.

Obviously none of this is satisfactory. What we need is to understand how the world works, how systems of power operate, what motivates its operation, and where it all originated.” (Joseph E. Green, Dissenting Views)

I am conferring today, that is, spending a whole day with accountants. I’d rather eat worms. I like the above quote because is synopsizes the American condition, the internalization of lies. My blog runs hot and cold, but one thing I can be sure of is that when I write about the big lies of our times, the comment section dries up.

People shy away, but they know on some level that they are living in lies. Breaking free is near impossible, I think, as so few of us manage to make that break.

Still, if ever you see one thing that does not make sense, no matter how small or insignificant, and follow it through, you might experience a breakthrough. It is usually just that, a small thing.

You will experience denial, pain, disappointment, anger, disillusionment, and finally freedom.

I spend a lot of effort trying to get people to look at evidence. It speaks, but usually says things we are not supposed to know. Consequently, just as a mother might ignore all the signs that her husband is abusing her children, most Americans studiously ignore evidence that their government has committed grisly crimes against them. Some things are too difficult to ponder.

It is irrational to believe the official story of the JFK assassination, 9/11 or the Boston Marathon bombing. Evidence does not support those stories. But it is entirely rational to believe in Apollo and the moon landings. Evidence is both convincing and abundant.

And false. It had to be manufactured and it had to be convincing because it was not only the American public that was being fooled, but most of the excellent people who participated in Apollo. If you choose to believe in Apollo, I won’t argue with you. Have a nice day.
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The usual reasons given for diverting $40 billion to fake the moon landings are not believable – to instill patriotism and belief in the wonders of our technology? To honor the legacy of a dead hero who boldly stated we should boldly go? Those are nice side effects. (I wonder if JFK was involved in the hoax, or if he was merely deceived by people around him. He spoke of going to the moon in 1961 even as the Van Allen radiation belts were discovered in the late 1950s.)

Among the reasons for belief, the most prominent is that if it were a lie, people would talk. The government cannot keep secrets. Consider this:

• Gus Grissom, astronaut, was an open critic of NASA, and went so far as to hang a lemon on one of the space capsules that was supposedly going to take him to the moon. He and two others died in a fire that Grissom’s family believes was deliberate murder.
• Tom Baron was a quality control and safety inspector for North American Aviation, the primary contractor for the lunar module. He testified before congress as what we would now call a “whistleblower” about the mischievous goings-on at Kennedy Space Center. Six days later he, his wife and stepdaughter were killed at a railroad crossing. It was ruled suicide.

That’s not how the government keeps secrets. People are right when they say that governments cannot keep secrets. That is how the military keeps secrets. It’s effective. It’s why not even Truman knew about the Manhattan Project. Three things are going on:

• Contractual obligations to secrecy. If you violate them, just the financial consequences are enough.
• Compartmentalization. Most people involved don’t know the big picture.
• FEAR. Grissom and Baron and others who were murdered served as a dog whistle to insiders.

The silent whistle says that if you talk, you die. And not just you – your family too. (Ergo, the absence of deathbed testimony.)

Some time down the road I’ll offer up some opinions on what NASA was really doing in those days when it was not going to the moon. It is still a closely guarded secret, so the best we can do is informed speculation. NASA is a military organization disguised as civilian. It was not playing around with rocketry for fun. The business was dead serious and the need for secrecy was paramount. But knowing that the moon landings were faked does answer a few questions:

• Why did we never go back to the moon? We didn’t go there to begin with.
• Why, if we had the technology in 1969, are we still searching for technology in 2015? Self-explanatory.
• Why the quirky behavior of the Apollo moon walkers? They are and were good and decent men who must lie in public. It is not in their nature. We should just leave them alone. If they speak, they die.

If you are of a curious bent, take a walk on the wild side. The photos taken on the moon are very good fakes. That fact alone does not prove anything, but seeing how they were faked tells a much larger story.

As always, your own thoughts and abilities come into play. And again, given the abundance of evidence …

If you believed they put a man on the moon
Man on the moon
If you believe there’s nothing up his sleeve
Then nothing is cool…

… you have an abundance of good hard evidence to support you. I won’t argue the point.

“My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.” (Christopher Hitchens)

I admired Hitchens, defiant to his last days, possessed of his own mind, flipping us off even as he departed this world.

At the other end of dignity, I was struck by the words in the post below of (Saint) Ignatius Loyola, a man who had obviously lost his mind. But it is a sad fact of our existence that a small percentage of the population is highly susceptible not so much to “thought control” (most Americans), but a more sinister practice, “mind control.”

In fact, anyone who reads the literature of the 1950’s and 60’s will run across a mind control program run by the CIA called “MKULTRA,” the object of which was to find people who could work under control of others without their knowledge. James McGowan trifled with this notion in his book “Programmed to Kill,” in which he speculates that the serial killers of the 60’s and 70’s might well have been subjects of that program.

CIA is a large organization, thousands of talented people, but at its beating heart center are psychotic monsters. They ran a program in Vietnam called “Phoenix.” It was assassination on a large scale, as many as 40,000 dead. What happened to these trained killers when they returned stateside? Did they become plumbers and accountants? (One man whose murderous behaviors in Vietnam are on record, Bob Kerrey, went on to become a governor and senator.)

MKULTRA is a fascinating subject. A trip through its history will take the inquiring mind through hypnosis, child abuse, sexual perversion, dissociative disorder, LSD and other drugs, and of course, the torture regime. What we saw at Abu Ghraib was not some out-of-control underlings getting off by scaring people with dogs … it was a scientific program of torture designed to induce psychosis. Out of such settings come assassins, suicide bombers, and men who proudly pose for photographs while beheading other men. That’s our CIA. Did the MK program ever stop?

MKULTRA was (is?) run by men in business attire sitting behind desks and claiming to be protecting us. But who protects us from them?

And though we will never be able to know for sure, people like Sirhan Sirhan, Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley, Jr., Charles Manson, Squeaky Fromme, James Holmes and others all fit the bill, victims of mind control. CIA claims that MKULTRA was a bust, and was discontinued. I doubt it.

Look at the photo to the right. James Holmes is obviously drugged. What kind of drugs? What kind of treatment has he undergone? His mind is gone.*  Sirhan Sirhan to this day cannot remember his activities on the night of June 5, 1968 (the only reason he is still alive). A professional hypnotist from Harvard has studied him and finds that he was deeply hypno-programmed.

We have a cancer within our body politic, an agency that runs programs like MK, and that determines the fate of our country by means of murder and skullduggery. And we have among us people who are susceptible to mind control. If the bulk of the population were not in such a trance as to not be able to see what is before their every eyes, perhaps we could put a stop to it.

I have not linked to anything here. It’s all out there for people of curious bent, and for the others, linking does not prod curiosity.
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*Will he soon be founding a religious order?

Every now and then we stumble on a piece of information that is so out of tune that we automatically disregard it. So too did John Armstrong when he was doing the body of research for his book “Harvey and Lee.”

I like Mr. Armstrong, that is, I think I get a sense of the man. He’s not married to a theory, but rather to pursuit of truth. Evidence leads him to places he’d not otherwise have gone. He claims, based on twelve years of research, that there were two Oswalds: Lee, an American born in New Orleans, and Harvey, a Russian-speaking Eastern European immigrant whose real name he never learned. The identity of the European was merged with the American during the 1950’s.

In 1953 William Henry Timmer lived in Stanley, North Dakota, a town west of Minot in the northwestern part of the state. During that time he met a boy from New York City who called himself “Harvey,” or “Harv” Oswald. He was a curiosity in that small town, and other boys knew him as well. Harv talked about communism and once told Timmer that “Some day I am going to kill the president and that will show them.”

At the time of the assassination, Timmer had a “funny feeling” that Harv was the guy arrested in Dallas. His mother wrote a letter to President Johnson advising him of the incident. (The letter is shown beneath the fold.) The FBI followed up on the lead, but the Warren Commission ignored it, as “Lee” Oswald was officially in 1953 in New York City. His presence in Stanley was an anomaly.

“Harvey” Oswald, the man shot by Jack Ruby, was as he said, “just a patsy.” He did not shoot President Kennedy. There were perhaps four teams of shooters in Dallas that day, and rather than three “shots” perhaps three volleys of shots. But to have this same Harvey, the patsy, claim in 1953 that he had already been set up on a mission is confounding.

Harvey the spy was set up like this: He spoke fluent Russian, but kept that fact hidden while there. As “Lee,” the Russians would think him a real American, as they would dig into his background.

His secret ability to speak Russian allowed “Harvey” to hear and read things around him during his famous “defection” to the USSR. It’s brilliant.

How both “Harvey” and “Lee” were spotted and recruited is a mystery. Mr. Armstrong does not claim to know those details, only the outcome. I accept all of that as standard operating procedure, probably as old as Julius Caesar.  Deep cover spies are known throughout recorded history.

The “clinker” is the statement in the early fifties that he intended to kill “the president.” What possible explanations are there for this?

• Mr. Trimmer is lying, and is merely a publicity hound. Armstrong has interviewed him at length (he lives near either Great Falls or Helena, Montana), and thinks he is honest. That’s an open question, but if he is a hound, he’s not good at it. He’s not gotten publicity, nor has he made money on his knowledge.
• That boy in Stanley was someone else. Timmer remembers him introduced as “Harvey Oswald,” however, and thinks he is the man Jack Ruby shot. The coincidence of names and looks is, at the very least, an oddity.
• “Harvey” was just talking tough for the boys. He was, after all, a big city kid in a small rural town. (That, to me, has some plausibility, but does not fully explain the happenstance of a New York kid in North Dakota threatening to shoot the president.)

There’s another explanation, and it is my own concoction, possibly a reach: In the postwar era, the United States government (and news media) was slowly infiltrated with moles, a continuation of the Third Reich, a mass importation of spies and military men under Operation Paperclip and by other means. CIA was the vehicle. They and others of that persuasion, who are nothing if not devoted to their cause, made their way into pivotal positions in the military and civilian government, and their ultimate aim was coup d’etat.

The coup would be an American coup, that is, uniquely designed for an American public long immersed delusions of self-governance and exceptionalism. We would be allowed to keep outer appearances of self-governance, our three branches of government and supposedly independent media, intact. But form would be devoid of substance, as it appears to be at this time.

To do this, at some point it would be necessary to murder the president and neutralize the executive branch. Any president would do. The murder would be a “coming out”, a show crime used to demonstrate to those in regular government who was really in charge. The people who did the crime were in effect saying “Look at us. Look what we can do. You’d be wise to stand down now.”

Only fools believe the official story of the JFK assassination. It’s ludicrous. Yet it stands as an icon. All who want a piece of the action must bow before it. No one of a “serious” bent in government, media or academia questions that painfully obvious lie.

Could it be that in 1953 a young man had been selected as patsy for the murder of the president, not even knowing who that president might be?

I do not know, of course. But the story of William Henry Timmer must either fit or be discarded. If it fits, then historians (now called “conspiracy theorists”) must discard all of this nonsense of JFK the hero, and merely regard him as JFK, the poor schmuck.

It fits, for me, in one regard: It would have been relatively easy to remove JFK from office without murdering him in public. What we saw that day was not a murder so much as an execution. Its purpose might actually be contained in its clumsiness.
Continue reading “A clinker” →

We are headed to Montana for an impromptu class reunion (made possible by the existence of Facebook), plus some time away from electronic signals thereafter. Things will be slow around here.

I have long struggled with Plato’s Cave Allegory, and so tried to update it a bit here, hopefully having a grasp of its significance in our age. Television supplies reality for most Americans, and is the medium by which most of our lies are facilitated. Most people don’t read, but then, I don’t really understand why printed lies are not as effective as televised ones. I have been able to sort my way through the lies of our times [even though books lie], but it has taken many years and I have swallowed whole on many lies in the process. It is a game of musical chairs, new lies taking the place of old ones, until such time that truth settles in. Possibly.

With TV, a lie like 9/11 or Boston, told but once, sticks forever. TV has such persuasive power that people cannot fathom actors staging events for our benefit. It’s a confidence game. The underlying belief of Americans, no matter how much skepticism they profess, is that if something is on TV and labeled “news” it is true.

Given the power of such a medium, there is no way the state would let it operate unfettered. So naturally the American television media is state-controlled. Americans might believe such a thing about Cuba or North Korea, but never their own country. That’s part of the lie.

 TV owns reality. Since government controls TV content, government owns reality.

Below I have plagiarized the Wikipedia entry on the Cave Allegory, making changes as needed.
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The Allegory of the Television (also titled Plato’s TV)

Plato in his work The Republic (514a–520a) sought to compare “…the effect of education and the lack of it on our nature”. It is written as a dialogue between Plato’s brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates, narrated by the latter.

Plato has Socrates describe a gathering of people who have lived chained to a couch all of their lives, facing a television. The people watch images on the TV screen and begin to designate names to these images. The images are as close as the couch prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the dissident is like a prisoner who is freed from the couch and comes to understand that the images on the screen do not make up reality at all. Away from the television, the prisoner can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere images seen by the couch prisoners.

Our perception of the world around is habitation on a couch with the screen’s light reflecting throughout the home. Our view of the real world only comes into focus once we abandon our televisions.

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For reasons unknown the following video seems apropos. Tim Russert, considered one of the best of show in his time, is either acting out a script or swallowing whole on a Rumsfeld routine (performed during the time after 9/11 when people were still in shock).  Seen with a proper dose of skepticism, it is hilarious.

Here’s a rundown of future topics as I try to take a new direction with my blog.
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I have an unfinished post set aside about the Paul is Dead phenomenon. I’ll get back to it. As far as I can discern on available evidence, Paul McCartney indeed died in 1966, probably murdered. On hand was a body double who had been used in service already, as famous people often use doubles to preserve their privacy. He was groomed, trained and went under the knife, and was used as a replacement. I don’t think anyone planned that, but once it was seen as a necessary to kill McCartney, the idea of replacing him with the double probably took wings, so to speak.

If it were only some silly entertainer and a huge cash machine in jeopardy, it would not matter. But it does matter, for other reasons. I’ll go into that.

On the matter of Yoko Ono, I still do not understand that.
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Another subject I’ll explore: I had the same experience as Dave McGowan (see footnote*) did when he decided to look into the moon landings to see if they were faked. It’s not that they were faked, but how really, really easy it is to see that they were faked.

The fake moon landings were part of a larger project, Manhattan in scope and deadly in intent. This was not trickery for sake of public relations. Apollo was the cover story for work going all the way back to Wiemar: Conquest of space. Therein lay more power than ever before possessed by humans, the most ambitious military prize ever imagined.

Some other day on that one too. I have fewer answers on that than on Macco, but the pretending to walk on the moon part, that was real.
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For right now, we were sitting on our deck overlooking Denver the other evening, and I said to my wife that I had come so far along in understanding this crazy fucking place (I don’t use that word around her), but that I hope before I die to understand everything! That is the reason I exist. I am mostly retired, we have a wonderful life with friends and kids and grand kids. We have no money worries. I am thankful for all of that, for sure. I did absolutely nothing to deserve it.

I should just be satisfied.  But I also have an undying urge to understand things.

So I am going to cover one more subject, DD, or dissociative disorders, which affects me and which I have explored. But first let me state clearly: No whining allowed. I am a happy man. Or men.

I was beaten up as a child, sniff sniff. I don’t remember any pain, and it wasn’t by my parents. They were lovely people. But I do remember as a four-year-old waking up on the floor after being cold-cocked, and then again later on. Did it happen at other times? Don’t know, and have no desire to know. Looking back I realize there was a demonic pathology in our household embodied in my siblings that made the place a living hell. In that situation, children retreat, lose memories, and become dissociative.

I am thankful for it now, but in my younger years, it caused problems. I avoid hard liquor and Ambien, as they cause amnesia. My inner children take over. When I heard of Patrick, and then Kerry Kennedy driving in blacked out states after having taken Ambien, I immediately understood. Their childhoods had more trauma than any of us can imagine.

Once you know it is there, it is kind of fun. Self knowledge is the best kind. When my fingers hit the keyboard, I do not know what will emerge. I have a little devil residing in me, and he’s a clever one. For me, writing is easy and fun, and necessary. I have to do this.

I know, you’re going all Seven Faces of Eve on me, thinking it’s all weird. I think it is common phenomenon. There is a whole lot of abuse in this world, a whole lot of suffering that children endure or witness and repress. These children become adults who are, in my view, more interesting, observant, and empathetic than regular people with regular childhoods.

We who have endured such trauma – again, no whining allowed, as mine is minor by comparison to so many others (think of the children of Vietnam or Iraq, for instance) – we instantly recognize each other on meeting, sometimes even just passing in the street. No words need pass. We know. We exist on a higher level of intuition, probably an element of survival.
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Enough of that. What on earth I have been doing with the blog … is driving me to distraction! It’s boring! It is like I own a race car, and use it to go to the grocery store.

I feel as though I have only tapped the surface of the potential to use this blog as an exploration tool and heck, even make it interesting. As I said, I want to understand everything. Hardly anything is what it appears on the surface, politics always, but people too. Everyone has a story, everyone is living a lie on some level.

So stay tuned. It is going to get better here. It has to, otherwise I’ll be bored and I’ll quit.

Sorry about the ads in the piece below, one of my favorites from a man I deeply admire, Mel Brooks.

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*Mr. McGowan, I just learned, has been diagnosed with incurable small-cell lung cancer that has already spread to his liver and bones. Travel well sir, and thank you for doing some very interesting work.