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Wednesday, November 29th, 2006
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It's been a long time since I've updated this thing and figure it's time.Like the days of old i'll do it bullit style.
1> Things with Kristen are great, I ,ve come to realize that she was my next great girl (remember you only get three),My last girl friend was actually a rebound, a rebound that lasted too long, probably because of the distance. She (the ex) drained me I tried to put on way to many masks to please her and in the end it all bit me in the ass..........."but of course I bit you I'm a snake" that old story comes to mind, O well alls well that ends well.
2> Work s'ok it mindless and I love it
3> SCA is getting really great again
4> Going to tony christmas party, fight with his boys , share some tales, and maybe just maybe join his house............after all there is some captain in all of us.
5>Um did I mention Kristen she is the bomb
6> Fighting in crown again in Jan. the off to estrella and then BOOYAA GULFWARS
7> fEAR THE HOFF
that is all toodles
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Wednesday, September 20th, 2006
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I've found a spot in a world where I have been living and never realized it, I fell for a girl a long time ago and let the world swirl about and keep me blind, I lied to people and to places, I am completly happy and never even saw how big life was until now, 3 years have past and me and kristen have fallen for each other again, my life was small until now I feel like a person again, something i've been missing for a long LONG time.When we wear the most convincing of masks the mask often resent us for making them so real.I realize now you were a mask.I never knew love and comfort could go hand in hand.With the smallest of motions kristen has seemed to wash away all the lies of my past and helped me to tear apart what was built for me, and is allowing me to build it for myself.
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Tuesday, September 19th, 2006
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I am loathe to think of myself as a simple person, I feel and need to feel like I have depth. My parsimonious belief in life is fickle. Once the hero then the villain. I would never give people keys to my glass house and invite them to throw stones, that is a chore I do myself. I throw my own stones.I raze myself to keep myself safe." He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man".I am done with being a man I am tired of the pain, I've wore a dark mask and know your only fear is the rivalry of contradistinction between you and what really lives in the dark.I can live with that fear I know I will lose. James you are a good person, who lives in a great big world full of lolipops, rainbows and sweet dreams with love dripping from the wells of joy that spring like fountains out of every blade of grass, and all you need to do to be happy is lay your head on this dream, close your eyes and never see the real world again.All you need is to close your doors and we will fill you with the grandiose, and to make sure you stay happy just give us the key to your heart so no one can open it and try to steal away what we've given you.I throw stones at what I build and call it hope,I throw stones by being smart.I throw stones by being diverse.I throw stones by letting my heart lead me.I throw stones by letting emotion drive me.I throw stones by giving into my artistic vision to make things larger than this world can hold.And I throw stones because behind it all I have a huge sense of betrayal for letting myself believe that any of it was real.I am a product of what a greedy villainous child can become.My spurious world has been caught and devoured by the real,and now I'm left without stones...............................
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Monday, September 18th, 2006
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I have a huge way of making the world bigger than it is, I dream big, talk big and tell fantasic stories through the eyes of a big child. My emotions carry a huge onus, because I dream big I hurt just a big, when the hurt need be there. Today I hurt I am crushed the ponderousness of my situations is crushing me and all I can do is let it. I made no empty promises. I have gave what was my greatest effort and am a failure. I wore no mask for once in my life and the darkness sneered at my bravery and tore down what was left, I stood skinless maskless and whole for once.I am tore down today, beat, I am covetous in being where I've been and somehow lost my way out of where I was. My rational snarl and irrational tears do nothing to ease or compliment, and I'll hide them again behind my mask. The old familiars I find all to easy to fit again,and still believe that hope is the most wicked of things God gave man.
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Wednesday, September 13th, 2006
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I'ma causeway whore
destrict number 9 kinda whore
loaded and provacative by speech
killed for the new ways kinda whore
different indeed lipstck on the edges
crazy howlin at the tall kinda whore
wired, tapped by God kinda whore
Feelin groovy on my back kinda whore
touched by the grace that is her image
copulated greedy needy no father type of whore
weird beyond
affectionate...sometimes type of whore
amoral far off distinct type of whore
burned flesh kinda whore
touch me but only if you dare kinda whore
runabout the mill kinda whore
early to rise late to start
blooming
grizzly yet soft hard yet tender kinda whore
why me God? kinda whore
leperous by voice kinda whore
sincere
easy to just not feel ya kinda whore
irish drinking and fighten kinda whore
loved kinda whore
fraternal kinda whore
way to go kid looking good, but not feeling that way kinda whore
twisted serial slaughtering kinda whore
momma told me to bring the wicked shit the best way I know how kinda whore
watch out thy're gonna stick ya in the back kinda whore
so'k
underestimated and artsy yet not realized of his talents kinda whore
always hungry for more
complacient cause I have to be kinda whore
5150 kinda whore
cast from a different mold
Body of a God...buddha kinda whore
able to love kinda whore
digging the bright red lipstick kinda whore
masterbating kinda whore
paid full price when I coulda got it on sell kinda whore
being her friend cause i love her like a sister kinda whore
Not knowing I'm beautiful but suffering cause I think I'm a beast kinda whore
I'm a man.....................nothing more kinda whore
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Sunday, September 10th, 2006
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Thanks for the e-mails! I must send my thanks to everyone who has sent me the wonderful info e-mails. Thanks to whoever sent me the one about rat crap in the glue on envelopes because I now have to use a wet towel with every envelope that needs sealing. Also, now I have to scrub the top of every can I open for the same reason. I no longer have any savings because I gave it to a sick girl (Penny Brown) who is about to die in the hospital for the 1,387,258th time. I no longer have any money at all, but that will change once I receive the $15,000 that Bill Gates/Microsoft and AOL are sending me for participating in their special e-mail program. I no longer worry about my soul because I have 363,214 angels looking out for me, and St. Theresa's novena has granted my every wish. I no longer eat KFC because their chickens are actually horrible mutant freaks with no eyes or feathers. I can't enjoy a good Latte from Starbucks anymore because they WOULD NOT send any coffee to that poor Army Sgt who requested it. I no longer use cancer-causing deodorants even though I smell like a water buffalo on a hot day. Thanks to you, I have learned that my prayers only get answered if I forward an email to seven of my friends and make a wish within five minutes. Or if I'm not ashamed of the Lord I must forward this e-mail within five means to countless people. Like God cares if you forward an e-mail. Because of your concern I no longer drink Coca Cola because it can remove toilet stains. I no longer can buy gasoline without taking a man along to watch the car so a serial killer won't crawl in my back seat when I'm pumping gas. I no longer drink Pepsi or Dr. Pepper since the people who make these products are atheists who refuse to put "Under God" on their cans. I no longer use Saran wrap in the microwave because it causes cancer. And thanks for letting me know I can't boil a cup water in the microwave anymore because it will blow up in my face...disfiguring me for life. I no longer go to shopping malls because someone will drug me with a perfume sample and rob me. I no longer shop at Target since they are French and don't support our American troops or the Salvation Army. I no longer answer the phone because someone will ask me to dial a number for which I will get a phone bill with calls to Jamaica, Uganda, Singapore, and Uzbekistan. I no longer worry about sudden cardiac arrest, since I can now cough myself back to life instead of wasting time calling 911. I no longer have any sneakers -- but that will change once I receive my free replacement pair from Nike. I no longer buy expensive cookies from Neiman Marcus since I now have their recipe. Thanks to you, I can't use anyone's toilet but mine because a big brown African spider is lurking under the seat to cause me instant death when it bites my butt. Thank you too for all the endless advice Andy Rooney has given us. I can live a better life now because he's told us how to fix everything. And thanks to your great advice, I can't ever pick up $5.00 I dropped in the parking lot because it probably was placed there by a sex molester waiting underneath my car to grab my leg. If you don't send this e-mail to at least 144,000 people in the next 70 minutes, a large dove with diarrhea will land on your head at 5:00 PM this afternoon and the fleas from 12 camels will infest your back, causing you to grow a hairy hump. I know this will occur because it actually happened to a friend of my next door neighbor's ex-mother-in-law's second husband's cousin's beautician, who is a lawyer.
Have a wonderful day, and you are welcome !!
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So I'm telling you how things are because people/person might be curious of the going on.
1. I'm in florida writing this, visiting with one of the most fasinating people I know, her name is tiff and she is a minor threat.(and my girlfriend)
2. I now know I do not like m&m's they are minions of the false prophet, they are color coded yet all taste the same, and for this theyu are evil.
3. I hate everyday people and it's getting worse, i can't go to a wal-mart or kroger without getting this vile pukey feeling in my tummie tum, and when they reach out and touch me for some reason.............I will and am going to start punching them in the face......with a chainsaw.
4. On the most I'm good life is not unwell and things seem good,much love to all my peeps worldwide........I'm outtie.
P.S. toga party on
the 8th of july, much love.
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SO I don't really have much to talk about, my job is rad I'm pretty low on the totem pole but have lil responsibility and there virtually no system to buck against so I can't really complain about that. I'm hoping in the next week or so to have transportation, so that is also a plus. My girl is the raddest ever and things are going strong I can't wait to go see her again. i'm looking into getting more tattoo work done to help further my sleeve (all old school all the time).I'm thinking maybe about getting a lil doggie a pug to be sure. And well that really kinds of sums things up I guess, I miss alot of you guys and hopefully maybe we can throw an oldschool snoop dog type barb-b-que to get er' one back together. love you all.
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Wednesday, April 5th, 2006
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Wednesday, February 1st, 2006
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Life seems ok right now, some really really good stuff going on and some really not so good stuff in the air. I can handle this balance and seem to be doing alot better than I was a fews years back with things.I think I am in a weird way mutating, either that or just growing up more, cause after all adults are mutants. I'm madly and deeply in love with the raddest girl in the world, I'm so pleased that we found each other and that her raddness makes me radder by osmosis or some shit, and vice versa as in my oddness has an amplifing effect on hers. Tiff you are the tops. And on other sides of things I'm having really REALLY oh my god REALLLLLYY bad nightmares, so if you would be so kind leave me a comment on your thoughts of what causes these nightmares.
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Monday, January 16th, 2006
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Man Tiff (my fantastic effing rad hot smart girl) told me she had some odd dreams, and so have I for that, nothing like hers until tonight. I woke up sweating in a panic and imediatly went and started dry heaving in the bathroom nightmares suck.
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Sunday, January 15th, 2006
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I woke up in the shittiest mood ever, got over it real quick sorta, not sure whats going on, or why i'm in a bad mood. Maybe it's my guy time of the month or just little things piling in not sure but i'm trying to figure it out so I can kick it. I think i might be homeless soon Not sure but it's no biggie I have tons of places to go if so. Damnit sometimes being a weird-o really sucks, i feel silly on days like this, I feel ugly and put apart it's stupid really but.........oh well I'll deal
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Wednesday, December 14th, 2005
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It's rare I post serious topic but with the death of Richard Pryor I think another great mans death was overlooked, Eugene McCarthy a democratic senator who had a major impact on ending the war in vietnam.
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.
Eugene McCarthy, Time magazine, Feb. 12, 1979
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Wednesday, December 7th, 2005
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 Dear Santa...
Dear Santa,
This year I've been busy!
In November I had a shoot-out with rival gang lords on the 5 near LA (-76 points). Last Thursday I pulled ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sonicshadow's hair (-5 points). In August I pulled over and changed tiffiku's flat tire (15 points). Last Monday I committed genocide... Sorry about that, enderwiggin1978 (-5000 points). In September I caught a purse-snatcher who stole wyldkyss's purse (30 points).
Overall, I've been naughty (-5036 points). For Christmas I deserve a moldy sandwich!
Sincerely,
just_fn_james |
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Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
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I'm giving in to a request I'm updating.
I know for a fact that when I die I want to be buried and know of 2 songs I want played sweet baby james by James taylor and surfing bird by the the trashmen
the first song is cause I think my mom might enjoy it the second is for my daddy even though he is gone I will always remember him calling me "bird" and would really like to think that he would appreciate it the other songs can be choosen randomly I like by my wife and if thats not possible then I want someone to wake up to a perfectly wierd stranger and ask them through a description of me what they think would be approprite.
All this aside I'm loving life right now due mostly to my rad as fuck fiance
thank you
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Saturday, November 5th, 2005
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Howard Hughes
As fantastically wealthy manipulators go, Howard R. Hughes was king. The billionaire's Midas touch had less to do with his fabled technical and financial genius than with endless secret deals and covert political bribes. "I can buy any man in the world," Hughes liked to boast. Indeed, Hughes's conspiratorial authority stemmed from his ability - and eager inclination - to purchase loyalty from anyone, including the president of the United States, in a position to advance his, well, idiosyncratic designs.
Everything about Hughes was larger than life, including his paradoxical legend. Heir to a Houston fortune based on a drill bit patent that revolutionized oil mining, the dashing young Hughes captured the American imagination during the Great Depression years. Cowboy aviator, Hollywood playboy, patriotic military contractor, maverick financier, Hughes was like a comic book hero whose can-do exploits knew no limits. Later in life, as his eccentricities metastasized into madness, the darker portrait emerged: the stringy-haired old man, a ranting lunatic with a mortal fear of germs holed up in a penthouse hermitage.
Throughout his life, Hughes's obsession with control expressed itself in a mania for espionage and spookery, especially as it applied to nurturing his substantial neuroses. However, despite his seeming omnipresence in the eye of many a stormy conspiracy, Hughes was just as manipulated by others. Known to spooks as the "Stockholder," Hughes fronted for CIA covert operations, sometimes unknowingly; Hughes, the demented shut-in, saw his empire manipulated by remote control.
We join the Hughes saga during the late 1950s, with the arrival of the shadowy and somewhat sleazy Robert Maheu, fountainhead of many real and imagined Hughes conspiracies. In the late fifties, Hughes hired Maheu to intimidate would-be blackmailers and spy on dozens of Hollywood starlets toward whom Hughes felt possessive. Maheu was a former FBI man whose private security firm fronted for the CIA on ultra-sensitive (read: illegal) missions.
By the time he became Hughes's private spook, Maheu already had impressive credentials, supervising contract kidnappings for the CIA and acting as the Agency's literal pimp, hiring prostitutes to service foreign dignitaries and their peculiar sexual appetites. Maheu's most notorious CIA job was a go-between in a failed 1960 plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, which recruited the Mafia to do the "hit." Friendly with the darndest folks, Maheu enlisted the aide of Vegas mobster John Roselli ("Uncle Johnny" to Maheu's children), Chicago godfather Sam "Momo" Giancana, and powerful Florida mob boss Santos Trafficante.
Apparently, Hughes had no involvement in Maheu's freelance CIA work but delighted in the spook's exploits and connections, which only enhanced the billionaire's reputation and influence. (According to journalist Jim Hougan, Maheu informed Hughes of his efforts on behalf of the CIA to off Castro.) By some accounts, however, the Stockholder was the Agency's single largest contractor. In dedicating his resources to the CIA, though, Hughes wasn't guided entirely by selfless motives. During the late sixties, he asked Maheu to offer his empire to the Agency as a CIA front. At the time the Hughes fortune was threatened by major legal troubles; the beleaguered billionaire hoped to deflect the nettlesome litigation with a "national security" shield.
One of Maheu's extracurricular assignments that Hughes did support was a successful effort to foil a "Dump Nixon" movement threatening the unlikable vice president's place on the 1956 Eisenhower ticket. As Maheu fell into Nixon's orbit, Nixon in turn felt the pull of Hughes's considerable gravitational field.
Hughes thought of the Red-baiting Nixon as his man, and the billionaire's audacious patronage suited Nixon's political ambitions. Unfortunately for Nixon, Hughes cash would always be something of a liability. During the 1960 presidential race, the press reported that the Hughes Tool Company had loaned $205,000 to Nixon's hapless brother, Donald (who was attempting to revive his failing Nixonburger restaurants). Disclosure of the Hughes loan, which was never repaid, damaged Nixon in the final days of the campaign, giving Jack Kennedy a much-needed boost. Typically, Hughes fared better on his end of the apparent quid pro quo. Less than a month after his loan to the vice president's brother, the IRS reversed a previous decision and granted tax-exempt status to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and obvious tax shelter of dubious charitable merit.
Or course, the archconservative Hughes could be bipartisan when it came to greasing presidential wheels. He ordered Maheu to offer both Presidents Johnson and Nixon a million-dollar bribe to stop nuclear bomb tests in Nevada. In the mid-sixties, Hughes had holed up in a Las Vegas penthouse, and he considered the nuclear testing to be a personal threat to his health. Maheu claims to have disregarded both orders.
The next bomb to explode in the Nixon-Hughes orbit was a metaphorical one that would prove politically fatal to Nixon. Because the shadow of Howard Hughes hung over Watergate, staff investigators of the Senate Watergate Committee were convinced that the phantom billionaire was the key to understanding the scandal. But under pressure from senators, investigators deleted from their final report forty-six pages that concluded Hughes had indirectly triggered the break-in. Some have suggested that committee chairman Sam Ervin and his Senate colleagues, many of whom were recipients of Hughes money, staved off personal embarrassment by burying the Hughes connection.
But what role, if any, did Hughes play in Watergate? Always tangled in power politics, the billionaire seems to have been a motivating, albeit peripheral, presence in the scandal. Hughes's former Washington lobbyist, Lawrence O'Brien, was chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the Watergate era. O'Brien had joined the Hughes payroll in 1968 when "the Old Man," exercising his option to purchase the powerful and well connected, ordered Maheu to hire Bobby Kennedy's key men in the aftermath of the senator's assassination. And as the self-absorbed Hughes saw it, "aftermath" meant before the blood had dried, on the night of the assassination.
O'Brien drove Nixon to paroxysms of rage. Not only was he a former major domo of the Kennedy clan and the Democratic Party's top apparatchik, O'Brien was now plugged in to the Hughes empire, and theoretically privy to the billionaire's many deals with the president. At first, Nixon ordered his staff to delve into the O'Brien-Hughes connection with an eye toward collecting dirt on the DNC chairman. Later, White House aides worried that O'Brien might have damaging information on Nixon-Hughes dealings. One of those affairs involved an unreported $100,000 cash contribution to Nixon from the billionaire. Nixon's banker and bagman, Bebe Rebozo, stashed the cash in Florida. It's possible that this secret and illegal money fix became part of the notorious White House slush fund that subsidized dirty tricks and, later, bought the silence of the Watergate burglars.
There were other quid pro quos. Hughes's generous support of the Nixon regime coincided with exceedingly favorable treatment (some would say exceedingly illegal treatment) on antitrust issues, aiding his efforts to corner the market on Las Vegas hotel-casinos.
According to the traditional view of the scandal, O'Brien's office was the primary target of both break-ins at the Watergate office complex. However, a persuasive revisionist theory suggests that O'Brien wasn't the burglars' primary target. Indeed, this view doesn't necessarily contradict that the Nixon White House was obsessed with the O'Brien-Hughes connection. It seems likely that some of the White House cohorts in crime, including "plumber" G. Gordon Liddy, were misled to believe they were bugging O'Brien's phone "to find out what O'Brien had of a derogatory nature about us," as Liddy put it in his 1980 book, Will.
Nixon, then, possibly fearful of losing another election thanks to Hughes, may have set the Watergate machinery in motion, without specifically knowing what Liddy et al. were doing. As H. R. Halderman, Nixon's chief of staff, later wrote: "On matters pertaining to Hughes, Nixon sometimes seemed to lose touch with reality. His indirect association with this mystery man may have caused him, in his view, to lose two elections."
Of course, it's clear that Hughes, himself was in the dark about Watergate, just as he was literally in the dark in "malodorous" hotel rooms worldwide, shooting up codeine and gobbling down Valium "blue bombers." By the early seventies, Hughes was a withered bundle of neuroses who handled all objects with Kleenex "insulation" as a prophylactic against germs. His decaying teeth; corkscrewing toenails; greasy, shoulder-length hair; and Rip Van Winkle beard seemed to mock his dapper appearance of the thirties and forties. His human contact was limited to his Mormon nursemaids.
Hughes seems to have lost control of his empire a year and a half before the Watergate break-ins. During the so-called Thanksgiving coup of 1970, a struggle within the Hughes organization for control of the Old Man and his assets came to a head. The heavy-handed conspirator was oblivious to the deft conspiracy carried out by his top staff. Hughes executives, led by Bill Gay, the Mormon administrator who had shrewdly handpicked the billionaire's attendants, spirited Hughes on a stretcher from his ninth-floor penthouse in Las Vegas's Desert Inn Hotel, down the fire escape and into an awaiting jet, which whisked him away to the Bahamas.
The cognizant loser was super spook Robert Maheu, whose controversial rise within the Hughes apparat came to abrupt halt. Gay and company resented Maheu's unsubtle power grabs, luxuriant salary and perks, questionable business decisions, and penchant for promoting himself as the Old Man's "alter ego." Maheu, in turn, accused his rivals of kidnapping Hughes against his will.
The Thanksgiving coup spawned other conspiracy theories. One IRS agent reported to his superiors that he believed Hughes died in Las Vegas in 1970 and that "key officials in charge of running his empire concealed this fact at the time in order to prevent a catastrophic dissolution of his holdings." According to the IRS conspiracy theorist, a double "schooled in Hughes's speech, mannerisms, and eccentricities" had been deployed. (In fact, Hughes did employ doubles during the sixties to distract press hordes while the rich and famous invalid made his stretcher-bound escapes.)
But Hughes was still alive - and apparently a willing dinizen of the Bahamas, as he subsequently informed the world in a rare telephonic press conference. In the same interview, Hughes took the opportunity to denounce Maheu as a "no-good, dishonest son of a bitch" who "stole me blind."
With Gay's control over Hughes's nursemaids, it was easy for Maheu's rivals to monopolize the Old Man's ear even before the exodus from Vegas. Spiriting Hughes to the Bahamas enabled Gay and company to cut off Maheu from his power base and to insulate Hughes from having to testify if any of the ongoing legal actions against corruption in his empire; this was crucial, for if Hughes were to appear publicly, it might have become obvious that the emperor wore no clothes and had no sanity - rendering him incapable of managing his affairs.
Considering the testy Old Man's decline and his pathological fear of facing human beings, then it's a bit surprising that he managed to make several personal appearances before small audiences. During a short stay in Managua he met face to face with Nicaraguan dictator Generalissimo Anastasio Somoza and a U.S. ambassador and later, to his custodian's alarm, demanded to pilot airplanes as he had in his prime. Considering this sudden coming out after years in phobic seclusion, perhaps the doppelganger theory isn't so outlandish after all, though accounts of Hughes stripping to the buff at the controls and demanding to fly in a blinding rainstorm sound like the real McCoy. Regardless, Hughes's brief forays outside of his musty hotel cloister would soon come to an end, following a bathroom fall that broke his hip. Thereafter, Hughes would remain bedridden until his death two and a half years later.
It's not clear how much the Stockholder knew about his minders' agreement to act as cover for a CIA project to raise a sunken Soviet submarine northwest of Hawaii. The top secret "Project Jennifer" involved the Glomar Explorer, as massive ship supposedly owned by Hughes's Summa Corporation. Ostensibly Hughes's latest oversize business venture, the Glomar Explorer was to test pioneering techniques of mining the ocean floor. That, anyway, was the CIA's cover story. In reality, the ship was designed to plunge a prehensile steel claw on a three-mile tether to the ocean floor in an effort to retrieve a Soviet submarine that contained valuable code books. When word of the real doings in the Pacific eventually leaked to the press, Hughes was hailed once again as a figure larger than life. In fact, by then the six-foot-three maverick financier was an emaciated 90-pound husk more concerned with enemas than spy craft. Finally, on April 5, 1976, a jet ambulance ferrying Hughes's cadaver from Acapulco touched down in Houston. Such was the reclusive millionaire's enigma that his fingerprints were taken and sent to the FBI for verification. It was Howard R. Hughes, all right. The IRS agent had been right.
His overall condition suggested abject neglect. X rays revealed broken hypodermic needles lodges in his arms. He was malnourished and dehydrated. Why hadn't his doctors checked him into a hospital long ago, regardless of his protests? In Acapulco, Hughes had lain in a coma for three days before his person doctors summoned a Mexican physician, who was "aghast" at the patient's condition. The Mexican police suspected foul play.
Even Maheu has modified his original kidnapping theory - but was Hughes in some sense the willing captive of his staff? Clearly, his own mental and physical decline had rendered him incapable of managing his affairs long before his death. Early on, his withdrawal into seclusion enabled his staff to control his interaction with the outside world. Later he was, for all intents and purposes, preserved in a state of suspended animation, his drug-glazed eyes fixed on a third or fourth showing of ironically titled B-movies like The Brain That Wouldn't Die while his employees conducted the Hughes interests. In a sense it's a tribute to Hughes's conspiring mind that the Stockholder continued to front for the CIA long after he was little more than an extremely wealthy vegetable.
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Friday, November 4th, 2005
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Abraham Lincoln
As conventional history tells it, the conspirators who plotted the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln met justice at gun-point and on the business end of a hangman's noose. John Wilkes Booth, the actor who fired a derringer ball into Lincoln's brain at point-blank range, was shot dead by federal troops near Bowling Green, Virginia, two weeks after his grand exit from the scene of the crime at Ford's Theater. Later, four of Booth's coconsspirators went to the gallows.
Yet from the moment of the president's murder on that drizzly Good Friday, suspicions about the actual nature of the conspiracy began to fester. Did the government have fore-knowledge of Booth's plot? Was Booth a pawn of high-ranking officials? Inevitably, 125 years after the crime of the nineteenth century, fact and lore are more than a little tangled. Still, given the abundance of odd "coincidences" and curious admissions of the players, in many ways America's first presidential assassination remains a genuine mystery.
The Booth plot, which included the attempted butchering of Secretary of State William H. Seward (he lived) and the planned assassination of Vice President Andrew Johnson (never executed, thanks to a coconspirator with cold feet), involved nine ne'er-do-well Northerners (including Booth) who harbored Southern sympathies. But the bitter Civil War had only tentatively concluded, so it fell upon the Northern government to blame the plot on the South, not sparing Confederate president Jefferson Davis from indictment. Of course, the North didn't let a minor obstacle like lack of evidence hinder its case; at the trial of Booth's peon cohorts, the government suborned testimony to implicate "the dirty Rebs."
Trumped-up evidence not withstanding, Booth did in fact have provocative links to Southern brass. A rabid advocate of the Confederacy (yet unwilling to don a uniform and fight), the egocentric actor used his celebrity as a cover for smuggling medicine to the South. Consequently, some historians have claimed that Booth as a Confederate secret agent.
During an October 1864 trip to Montreal, Canada, Booth conferred with Jacob Thompson, chief of the Confederate secret service. At about the same time, Booth had been recruiting for his grand plot to kidnap Lincoln, hoping to trade his eminent hostage for Confederate POWs. "Did Booth propose his kidnap scheme to Jacob Thompson?" asked historian Theodore Roscoe. "Probably. Did he suggest Lincoln's assassination…?" Roscoe thought that possible as well.
Another item often cited as evidence of a Southern role in the Booth plot is a note found in Booth's steamer trunk and signed by a "Sam." The note referred to seeing how Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, would feel about some unspecified affair.
During the nineteenth century, a steady stream of pamphlets linked Booth to the Copperheads - Northern Democrats seen as Southern-symps - and their secret society, the Knights of the Golden Circle. The Jack Ruby of the Lincoln affair, Boston Corbett, the soldier who shot Booth in a burning barn, purportedly was a religious nut who had castrated himself to achieve spiritual purity. Though later locked away in a mental institution, he managed to escape and vanish without a trace. The altar on which the long-haired Corbett supposedly offered his eternal chastity? The Russian Skoptsi sect, a pagan goddess cult whose priests wore women's clothing. A pagan cult? Ah, cue the Illuminati: For conspiratologists who like to posit that all-powerful eighteenth-century Bavarian secret society at the center of history's nastiest moments wonder if the Illumined Ones had a hand in the Lincoln murder. If so, can we be sure that Brother (or is it Sister?) Corbett really killed Booth?
The more enduring - and earthbound - theories assert that Booth was working for traitors among Lincoln's own cabinet, that he escaped with their assistance, and that the rakish actor lived to a ripe old age on a handsome government pension.
"There was one man who profited greatly by Lincoln's assassination," historian Otto Eisenschiml announced in 1937. "This man was his secretary of war, Edward M. Stanton." A member of the Radical Republican faction that bitterly opposed Lincoln's lenient reconstruction plan for the South, Stanton stood to consolidate his own power if the North imposed a hard-line military occupation instead.
As Eisenschiml and other revisionist historians saw it, Stanton's behavior immediately preceding the assassination, and also after, was highly suspicious.
Stanton refused a request by Lincoln to allow the secretary of war's assistant, Major Thomas Eckert, to accompany the president to the fateful performance at Ford's Theater. The implication, according to Eisenschiml, is that Stanton knew something Lincoln didn't.
Despite the profusion of death threats against Lincoln - and an earlier kidnap attempt by Booth in which the actor shot the famous stovepipe hat clean off Abe's head - only one bodyguard accompanied the president to Ford's Theater. And he was hardly a stellar specimen at that, abandoning the president in his hour of need to indulge in a snort at the corner pub. Apparently the bodyguard was never reprimanded for his gross negligence.
The night of the assassination, commercial telegraph lines in Washington - controlled by the government during wartime - apparently went dead, delaying the news of Booth's escape. Some see this mysterious event as evidence that government insiders abetted the assassin in his flight.
There is also the curious matter of Booth's diary, which disappeared into a Stanton safe after the assassination. It wasn't until several years after the conspiracy trial that the journal was made public, a revelation that caused a political tempest. Curiously, there were at least eighteen pages missing. Lafayette C. Baker, the scheming chief of the National Detective Police (NDF), forerunner of the modern Secret Service, testified that when his men turned the diary over to Stanton, all the pages had been intact.
Others have explained Booth's vanishing diary in terms of a less sinister conspiracy. Thomas Reed Turner suggests that the government suppressed the diary, which detailed the failed kidnap plots, to avoid raising embarrassing questions about its own inaction in the wake of Booth's less-than-subtle abduction attempts. According to Turner, "There was more than just a suspicion that the government was aware of Booth's plot….The fact that the government was able so rapidly to get on the track of the main conspirators indicates that this was a group it had under surveillance." Still, if this is true, the question remains: Why didn't the government put Booth and company out of business before all hell broke loose?
In a strange cipher message written by NDF chief baker (himself the object of many a suspicion) three years after the assassination, the corrupt top cop issued what some believe to be a rhyming confession: "In New Rome there walked three men, a Judas, a Brutus, and a spy. Each planned that he should be the kink[sic] when Abraham should die… As the fallen many lay dying, Judas came and paid respects to one he hated, and when at last he saw him die, he said 'Now the ages have him and the nation now have I.'"
"Judas" obviously refers to Stanton, who rushed to the scene of the crime and uttered his famous "Now he belongs to the ages" quote. Brutus may refer to Booth's father, the famous actor Junius Brutus Booth; to Booth himself; or to Lincoln's close friend, Ward H. Lamon, the U.S. marshal for Washington, who had often warned Lincoln about assassination plots, but was out of town on that fatal evening. Et tu¸ Lamon? Whatever its real meaning, Baker's doggerel declaration concludes thus: "But lest one is left to wonder what has happened to the spy, I can safely tell you this, it was I. Lafayette C. Baker 2-5-68." Even anticonspiracist historians like Thomas Reed Turner concede that the text and signature seem to be authentic.
Baker died several months after penning that cryptogram, "at the robust age of forty-four." His wife believe he had been poisoned by government operatives.
Dead men tell no tales, of course.
It fell upon Schick Sunn Classic Productions, producers of searching documentary films on Bigfoot and Noah's Ark, to rejuvenate such arcana. The Lincoln Conspiracy, a 1977 book and feature film, is less the catalog of verities it professes to be and more of an imaginative compendium of assassination possibilities. Drawing on controversial "never before published documents," authors David Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier proposed a superconspiracy in which four separate (and not necessarily congenial) groups sponsored Booth's kidnap and assassination plots: Stanton and his Radical Republican confreres, who planned to seize the government with the aid of Baker; Jacob Thompson, the Confederate spy master, and his Graycoat superiors in Richmond; Northern bankers and cotton speculators, who made a mint on wartime contraband and hated to see the good times end; and Maryland planters whose malevolence toward the Negro-coddling Lincoln knew no bounds.
But Balsiger and Sellier managed to top even that ambitious theory by rallying the enduring legend of Booth's survival and escape from the massive federal dragnet. The Lincoln Conspiracy claimed that the man killed in the Farrett barn was not Booth, but a second Rebel-agent-cum-fugitive who had nothing to do with Booth's plot. His name was Captain James William Boyd, a man who, unfortunately for him, "bore a striking resemblance to Booth."
Lucky for Booth this amazing body double (who stood a full six inches taller than Booth) bore a number of other convenient similarities, including the initials J. W. B., which even more conveniently were tattooed on his arm. According to Balsiger and Sellier, both J. W. B.'s were hobbled by seriously injured legs. (Booth snapped his when he leapt from the president's box to the stage at Rod's Theater; Boyd's old war wound had flared up.) And as luck would have it, both men were accompanied by fugitive sidekicks, who themselves shared an uncanny resemblance. Not only that, but in his flight the hapless Boyd managed to team up with a bona fide Booth coconspirator.
When NDF chief Baker informed Stanton that his men had killed Boyd, and not Booth, the coverup began. This theory, like other tales of Booth's survival, draws on genuinely peculiar details surrounding the identification and disposal of the body, which were conducted in ironclad secrecy. Few saw the body; an official photograph of the corpse was consigned to oblivion; and Booth's own doctor had trouble identifying his former patient, who had never sported reddish hair before. (The folks at Sunn Classic tell us the Boyd had…reddish hair!)
Balsiger and Sellier's claims about body doubles and synchronized limping are a bit hard to swallow, as are their "newly discovered" documents, which include transcripts (yet not the originals) purporting to be the missing pages of Booth's diary.
However improbable, though, the legend of Booth's survival is incontestably deathless. During the 1920s, the mummified remains of a derelict painter, John St. Hellen, billed as the once-worldy Booth, enjoyed a mildly successful postmortem career as a carnival sideshow. Before that, the latter half of the nineteenth century had been rife with accounts of a gracefully aging Booth, lately back from Europe, India, or points more mysterious, dropping in on relatives, or spouting deathbed "confessions" in unglamorous places like Enid, Oklahoma.
To loosely paraphrase Booth's often-alleged overboss, the redoubtable Secretary of War Stanton: Now the Lincoln conspiracies belong to the ages.
Take a look at some Coincidences about the Lincoln Assassination.
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Thursday, November 3rd, 2005
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The CIA and Acid
LSD was invented in Switzerland by Albert Hofmann, a researcher for Sandoz pharmaceuticals. It did not spontaneously appear among the youth of the Western world as a gift from the God of Getting' High. The CIA was on to acid long before the flower children.
So, for that matter, were upstanding citizens like Time-Life magnate Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, who openly sang the praises of their magical mystery tours during the early sixties. Henry, a staunch conservative with close connections to the CIA, once dropped acid on the golf course and then claimed he had enjoyed a little chat with God.
While the cognoscenti had the benefit of tuned-in physicians, other psychedelic pioneers took their first trips as part of CIA-controlled research studies.
At least one person committed suicide after becoming an unwitting subject of a CIA LSD test, crashing through a high-story plate-glass window in a New York hotel as his Agency guardian watched. (Or perhaps the guardian did more than watch. In June 1994 the victim's family had his thirty-year-old corpse exhumed to check for signs that he may have been thrown out that window.) Numerous others lost their grip on reality.
MK-ULTRA was the code name the CIA used for its program directed at gaining control over human behavior through "covert use of chemical and biological materials," as proposed by Richard Helms. The name itself was a variation on ULTRA, the U.S. intelligence program behind Nazi lines in World War II, of which the CIA's veteran spies were justly proud.
Helms later became the CIA director and gained a measure of notoriety for his Watergate "lying to Congress" conviction and a touch of immortality in Thomas Powers's aptly named biography, The Man Who Kept the Secrets. Helms founded the MK-ULTRA program and justified its notable unethical aspects with the rationale, "We are not Boy Scouts."
At the time, the spook scientists suspected that LSD had the potential to reprogram the human personality. In retrospect, they were probably right - Timothy Leary spoke in similar terms, though he saw unlimited potential for self-improvement in this "reprogramming." The CIA and the military simply couldn't figure out how to harness the drug's power. Thank goodness. Their idea was not to open "the doors of perception" but to convert otherwise free human beings into automatons.
"We must remember to thank the CIA and the army for LSD," spoke no less an authority figure on matters psychedelic than John Lennon. "They invented LSD to control people and what it did was give us freedom."
Or did it? The acid-tripping intersection between the CIA and the counterculture is one of the areas where the on-the-record facts about MK-ULTRA meld into the foggy region of conspiracy theory. It has been suggested, even by prominent participants in the counterculture, that with LSD the CIA found the ultimate weapon against the youth movement.
Officially, the MK-ULTRA program ran from 1953 to 1964, at which time it was renamed MK-SEARCH and continued until 1973. However, U.S. intelligence and military operations with that same purpose had been ongoing at least since World War II and likely chugged ahead for many years after MK-ULTRA's publicly stated conclusion. MK-ULTRA encompassed an undetermined number of bizarre and often grotesque experiments. In one, psychiatrist Ewen Cameron received CIA funding to test a procedure he called "depatterning." This technique, Cameron explained when he applied for his CIA grant (through a front group called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology), involved the "breaking down of ongoing patterns of the patient's behavior by means of particularly intensive electroshocks," in addition to LSD. Some of his subjects suffered brain damage and other debilitations. One sued the government and won an out-of-court settlement in 1988.
Then there was operation "Midnight Climax," in which prostitutes lured unsuspecting johns to a CIA bordello in San Francisco. There they slipped their clients an LSD mickey while Agency researchers savored the "scientific" action from behind a two-way mirror, a pitcher of martinis at the ready.
Author John Marks, whose The Search for the Manchurian Candidate is on of the most thoroughgoing volumes yet assembled on U.S. government mind-control research, readily admits that all of his source material comprised but ten boxes of documents - but those took him a year to comprehend despite the aid of a research staff.
Marks writes that he sought access to records of a branch of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology, the Office of Research and Development (ORD), which took over behavioral (i.e., mind control) research after MK-ULTRA's staff dispersed.
Marks was told that ORD's files contained 130 boxed of documents relating to behavioral research. Even if they were all released, their sheer bulk is sufficient to fend off even the most dedicated - or obsessed - investigator. To generate such an intimidating volume of paper must have taken considerable time and effort. Yet curiously, the CIA has always claimed that its attempts to create real-life incarnations of Richard Condon's unfortunate protagonist Raymond Shaw - the hypnotically programmed assassin of The Manchurian Candidate - were a complete bust.
If their demurrals are to be trusted, then this particular program constitutes one of the least cost-effective deployments of taxpayer dollars in the history of the U.S. government, which is rife with non-cost-effective dollar deployments.
The CIA's most effective line of defense against exposure of their mind-control operations (or any of their operations, for that matter) has always been self-effacement. The agency portrays its agents as incompetent stooges, encouraging the public to laugh at their wacky attempts to formulate cancer potions and knock off foreign leaders.
Under this cover story, MK-ULTRA's research team was nothing but a bunch of ineffectual eccentrics. "We are sufficiently ineffective so our findings can be published," quipped one MK-ULTRA consultant.
Despite the findings of a Senate committee headed by Ted Kennedy that U.S. mind-control research was a big silly failure and even though Marks - whose approach is fairly conservative - acknowledges that he found no record to prove it, the project may have indeed succeeded.
"I cannot be positive that they never found a technique to control people," Marks writes," despite my definite bias in favor of the idea that the human spirit defeated the manipulators."
A sunny view of human nature, that. And indeed a consoling one. But the human spirit, history sadly proves, is far from indomitable. The clandestine researchers explored every possible means of manipulating the human mind. The CIA's experiments with LSD are the most famous MK-ULTRA undertakings, but acid was not even the most potent drug investigated by intelligence and military agencies. Nor did they limit their inquiries to drugs. Hypnosis, electronic brain implants, microwave transmissions and parapsychology also received intense scrutiny. Marks, Kennedy, and many others apparently believe that the U.S. government failed where all-too-many far less sophisticated operations - from the Moonies to Scientology to EST - have scored resounding triumphs. Brainwashing is commonplace among "cults," but not with the multimillion-dollar resources of the United States government's military and intelligence operations?
For that matter, the (supposed) impetus for the program was the reported success of communist countries in "brainwashing." The word itself originally applied to several soldiers who'd fought in the Korean War who exhibited strange behavior and had large blank spots in their memories - particularly when it came to their travels through regions of Manchuria. Those incidents were the inspiration for Condon's novel, in which a group of American soldiers are hypnotically brainwashed by the Korean and Chinese communists and one is programmed to kill a presidential candidate.
Interestingly, the belief that one's psyche is being invaded by radio transmissions or electrical implants is considered a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. But there is no doubt that the CIA contemplated using those methods and carried out such experiments on animals, and the way these things go it would require the willful naivete of, say, a Senate subcommittee to maintain that they stopped there. Even Marks ,who exercises the journalistic wisdom to stick only to what he can back up with hard documentation, readily acknowledges that the clandestine researchers "probably" planted electrode experiments "went far beyond giving monkeys orgasms," one of the researchers' early achievements.
The ultimate goal of mind control would have been to produce a Manchurian Candidate assassin, an agent who didn't know he (or she) was an agent - brainwashed and programmed to carry out that most sensitive of missions. Whether the program's accomplishments reached that peak will probably never be public knowledge. So we are left to guess whether certain humans have been "programmed to kill." In 1967, Luis Castillo, a Puerto Rican arrested in the Philippines for planning to bump off Ferdinand Marcos, claimed (while in a hypnotic trance) that he had been implanted with a posthypnotic suggestion to carry out the assassination. Sirhan Sirhan, convicted as the assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, showed unmistakable symptoms of hypnosis. A psychiatrist testifying in Sirhan's defense said that the accused assassin was in a trance when he shot Kennedy, albeit a self-induced one. Author Robert Kaiser echoed that doctor's conclusions in his book RFK Must Die! Others, of course, have offered darker conjectures regarding the origins of Sirhan's symptoms.
James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Martin Luther King, also had a known fascination with hypnosis, and, more recently, British lawyer Fenton Bressler has assembled has assembled circumstantial evidence to support a theory that Mark David Chapman, slayer of John Lennon, was subject to CIA mind control. Way back in 1967, a book titled Were We Controlled?, whose unknown author used the pseudonym Lincoln Lawrence, stated that both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby were under mind control of some kind. The book may have had at least a trace of validity: Something in the book convinced Oswald's mother that the author was personally acquainted with her son.
Did MK-ULTRA spin off a wave of history-altering assassinations - did it whelp a brood of hypnoprogrammed killers? The definitive answer to that question will certainly never reach the public. We are left, with John Marks, to hope on faith alone that it did not, but always with the uneasy knowledge that it could have.
Perhaps not through assassinations, and perhaps not even intentionally, MK-ULTRA definitely altered a generation. John Lennon was far from the only sixties acid-hero to make the connection between the mood of the streets and the secret CIA labs. "A surprising number of counterculture veterans endorsed the notion that the CIA disseminated street acid en masse to deflate the political potency of the youth rebellion," write Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain in Acid Dreams, their chronicle of both the clandestine and countercultural sides of the LSD revolution.
"By magnifying the impulse toward revolutionism out of context, acid sped up the process by which the Movement became unglued," the authors continue. "The use of LSD among young people in the U.S. reached a peak in the late 1960s, shortly after the CIA initiated a series of covert operations designed to disrupt, discredit, and neutralize the New Left. Was this merely a historical coincidence, or did the Agency actually take steps to promote the illicit acid trade?"
The tale of Ronald Stark, told by lee and Shlain, may provide the connection between the CIA and the Left. Stark was a leading distributor of LSD in the late 1960s - the same time acid use was at its heaviest - and apparently a CIA operative. The Agency has never admitted this, but an Italian judge deciding in 1979 whether to try Stark for "armed banditry" in relation to Stark's many contacts with terrorists (among other things, Stark accurately predicted the assassination of Aldo Moro) released the drug dealer after finding "an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs" that Stark had worked for the CIA "from 1960 onward."
"It could have been," mused Tim Scully, the chief of Stark's major LSD-brewing outfit (a group of idealistic radicals called the Brotherhood who grew to feel exploited by Stark), "that he was employed by an American intelligence agency that wanted to see more psychedelic drugs on the street." But Lee and Shlain leave open the possibility that Stark may have been simply one of the world's most ingenious con artists - a possibility acknowledged by most everyone to come in contact with Stark.
The CIA's original "acid dream" was that LSD would open the mind to suggestion, but they found the drug too potent to manage. Sometime around 1971, right before MK-ULTRA founder and, by then, CIA director Richard Helms hung up his trenchcoat and stepped down from the CIA's top post, he ordered the majority of secret MK-ULTRA documents destroyed due to "a burgeoning paper problem." Among the eradicated material, Lee and Shlain report, were "all existing copies of a of a classified CIA manual titled LSD: Some Un-Psychedelic Implications."
There exists today no on-paper evidence (that anyone has yet uncovered) that MK-ULTRA was the progenitor of either a conspiracy to unleash remote-controlled lethal human robots or to emasculate an entire generation by oversaturating it with a mind-frying drug. But MK-ULTRA was very real and the danger of a secret government program to control the thoughts of its citizens, even just a few of them at a time, needs no elaboration.
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