Just fuckin James (baby)

hello walls

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 06:57:21 GMT

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

What is this world.

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 03:48:17 GMT

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.

FOR ME

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 08:41:24 GMT

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...............................

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 17:16:01 GMT

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.

Repost of an old prose I did

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 05:38:19 GMT

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

Thank you's

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 11:44:53 GMT

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 !!

Mandantory update

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 02:58:45 GMT

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.

Mandantory update

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 03:56:11 GMT

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.

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 19:42:23 GMT

High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program

In an Arctic compound 200 miles east of Anchorage, Alaska, the Pentagon has erected a powerful transmitter designed to beam more than a gigawatt of energy into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Known as Project HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program), the $30 million experiment involves the world's largest "ionospheric heater," a prototype device designed to zap the skies hundreds of miles above the earth with high-frequency radio waves. Why irradiate the charged particles of the ionosphere (which when energized by natural processes make up the lovely and famous phenomenon known as the Northern Lights)? According to the U.S. Navy and Air Force, co-sponsors of the project, "to observe the complex natural variations of Alaska's ionosphere." That, says the Pentagon, and also to develop new forms of communications and surveillance technologies that will enable the military to send signals to nuclear submarines and to peer deep underground.

Opponents of HAARP - a coalition of environmentalists, Native Americans, Alaskan citizens, and, of course, conspiracy trackers - believe that the military has even more Strangelovian plans for this unusual hardware, applications ranging from Star Wars missile-defense schemes to weather modification plots and perhaps even mind-control experiments.

The HAARP complex is situated within a 23-acre lot in a relatively isolated region near the town of Gakona. When the final phase of the project was completed in 1997, the military had erected 180 towers, 72 feet in height, forming a "high-power, high-frequency phased array radio transmitter" capable of beaming in the 2.5-to-10-megahertz frequency range, at more than 3 gigawatts of power (3 billion watts). According to the navy and air force, HAARP "will be used to introduce a small, known amount of energy into a specific ionospheric layer" anywhere from several miles to several tens of miles in radius. Not surprisingly, navy and air force PR (posted on the official HAARP World Wide Web Internet site, an effort to combat the bad press the project has generated), downplays both the environmental impacts of the project and purported offensive uses of the technology.

However, a series of patents owned by the defense contractor managing HAARP project suggests that the Pentagon might indeed have more ambitious designs. In fact, one of those patents was classified by the navy for several years during the 1980s. The key document in the bunch is i. Patent number 4,686,605, considered by HAARP critics to be the "smoking raygun," so to speak. Held by ARCO Power Technologies, Inc. (APTI), the ARCO subsidiary contracted to build HAARP, this patent describes an inospheric heater very similar to the HAARP heater. In the APTI patent - subsequently published on the Internet by foes of HAARP - Texas physicist Bernard J. Eastlund describes a fantastic offensive and defensive weapon that would do any megolomaniacal James Bond supervillain proud. According to the patent, Eastlund's invention would heat plumes of charged particles in the ionosphere, making it possible to, for starters, selectively "disrupt microwave transmissions of satellites" and "cause interference with of even total disruption of communications over a large portion of the earth." But like his hopped-up ions, Eastlund was just warming up. Per the patent text, the physicist's "method and apparatus for altering a region in the earth's atmosphere" would also:

"Cause confusion of or interference with or even complete disruption of guidance systems employed by even the most sophisticated of airplanes and missiles";

"Not only . . . interfere with third-party communications, but [also] take advantage
of one or more such beams to carry out a communications network at the same
time. Put another way, what is used to disrupt another's communications can be
employed by one knowledgeable of this invention as a communications network
at the same time";

"Pick up communication signals of others for intelligence purposes";

Facilitate "missile or aircraft destruction, deflection, or confusion" by lifting large
regions of the atmosphere "to an unexpectedly high altitude so that missiles
encounter unexpected and unplanned drag forces with resultant destruction or
deflection of same."

If Eastlund's brainchild sounds like a recipe for that onetime cold war panacea, the Strategic Defense Initiative (AKA Star Wars), it's probably no coincidence. The APTI/Eastlund patent was filed during the final days of the Reagan administration, when plans for high-tech missile defense systems were still all the rage. But Eastlund's blue-sky vision went far beyond the usual Star Wars prescriptions of the day and suggested even more unusual uses for his patented ionospheric heater.

"Weather modification," the patent states, "is possible by . . . altering upper atmospheric wind patterns or altering solar absorption patterns by constructing one of more plumes of particles which will act as a lens or focusing device." As a result, an artificially heated ionosphere could focus a "vast amount of sunlight on selected portions of the earth."

HAARP officials deny any link to Eastlund's patents or plans. But several key details suggest otherwise. For starters, APTI, holder of the Eastlund patents, continued to manage the HAARP project. During the summer of 1994, ARCO sold APTI to E-Systems, a defense contractor known for counter-surveillance projects. E-Systems, in turn, is currently owned by Raytheon, one of the world's largest defense contractors and maker of the SCUD-busting Patriot missile. All of which suggests that more than just simple atmospheric science is going on in the HAARP compound.

What's more, one of the APTI/Eastlund patents singles out Alaska as the ideal site for a high-frequency ionospheric heater because "magnetic field lines. . . which extend to desirable altitudes for the invention, intersect the earth in Alaska." APTI also rates Alaska as an ideal location given its close proximity to an ample source of fuel to power the project: the vast reserves of natural gas in the North Slope region - reserves owned by APTI parent company ARCO.

Eastlund also contradicts the official military line. He told National Public Radio that a secret military project to develop his work was launched during the late 1980s. and in the May/June 1994 issue of Microwave News, Eastlund suggested that "The HAARP project obviously looks a lot like the first step" toward the designs outlined in his patents.

Is HAARP capable of anything on Eastlund's wish list? The military says no, pointing out that the power levels used in the Alaskan transmitter are too low to achieve Eastlund's goals. That may well be true - Eastlund's designs call for more powerful bursts of high-frequency radio waves than the HAARP prototype will be able to muster. However, the project's own environmental impact reports warn that the HAARP transmissions could pose a danger to airplanes up to four miles away. And according to Far Smith, editor of the environmental magazine, Earth Watch Journal, the energy that drives HAARP could be a thousand times more powerful than the military's most powerful PAVE PAWS over-the-horizon radars, which emit "incidental" sidelobe radiation that can disrupt cardiac pacemakers up to seven miles away and cause the "inadvertent detonation" of bombs and flares in passing aircraft. The official HAARP "fact sheet" reassures jittery paranoiacs that the effects of ionospheric heating will always dissipate in a matter of minutes. Yet good soldier Eastlund boasts in his patent that the radiation "can also be prolonged for substantial time periods so that it would not be a mere transient effect that could be waited out by an opposing force.

"Thus," he continues, "this invention provides the ability to put unprecedented amounts of power in the earth's atmosphere at strategic locations and to maintain the power injection level. . . in a manner more precise and better controlled than heretofore accomplished by the prior art. . . the detonation of nuclear devices of various yields at various altitudes."

Eastlund's patent really trips into conspiratorial territory in its References Cited section. Two of the sources documented by Eastlund are New York Times articles from 1915 and 1940 profiling none other than Nikola Tesla, a giant in the annals of conspiratorial history. Tesla, a brilliant inventor and contemporary of Edison, developed hundreds of patents during his lifetime and is often credited with inventing radio before Marconi, among a host of other firsts. Of course, mainstream science has never fully acknowledged Tesla's contributions, and his later pronouncements (he vowed that he had developed a technology that could split the earth asunder) have left him straddling that familiar historical territory where genius meets crackpot. Not surprisingly, fringe science and conspiracy theory have made Tesla something of a patron saint. Whenever talk radio buzz or Internet discussion turns to alleged government experiments to cause earthquakes or modify weather, references to government-suppressed "Tesla Technology" are sure to follow.

Judging from the APTI patent, Tesla was a major inspiration for the Eastlund ionospheric heater. The first New York Times article, dated September 22, 1940, reports that Tesla, then eighty-four years old, "stands ready to divulge to the United States Government the secret of his 'teleforce,' with which, he said, airplane motors would be melted at a distance of 250 miles, so that an invisible Chinese Wall of Defense would be built around the country." Quoting Tesla, the Times story continues: "'This new type of force,'" Mr. Tesla said, "'would operate through a beam one hundred-millionth of a square centimeter in diameter, and could be generated from a special plant that would cost no more than $2,000,000 and would take only about three months to construct.'" The second New York Times story, dated December 8, 1915, describes one of Tesla's ideas to Eastlund's invention are remarkable, and by extension the overlap between Tesla and HAARP technology is downright intriguing.

Apparently, APTI and the Pentagon are taking Eastlund's - and by extension, Tesla's - ideas seriously. As authors Nicholas J. Begich and Jeane Manning point out in the 1996 book, Angels Don't Play This HAARP, another of the Eastlund/APTI patents outlines a technology for transmitting electrical energy a la Tesla's war-and-peace project.

On the conspiracy circuit, any nexus between Tesla and Tesla-like military plans is likely to be as explosive as a warhead passing through one of Eastlund's ion plumes. From here their speculation about HAARP tends to rocket into somewhat thinner air. In Angels Don't Play This HAARP, which is subtitled, "Advances in Tesla Technology," authors Begich and Manning suggest that in addition to modifying the weather, the military's Tesla-HAARP technology might be used as a form of mass mind-control.

"The impact of RF [radio-frequency transmissions] on human physiology," they write, "is well known to the air force and has been described in publications dating back to 1986." If Begich and Manning don't conclusively prove a connection between HAARP and government schemes to "disrupt mental processes" via pulsed radio-frequency transmissions, they do dig up a motherlode of elitist pontification by cold warriors obsessed with controlling the American hoi polloi. Zbigniew Brzezinski - former National Security Advisor to President Carter - puffed in 1970 that a "more controlled and directed society" would evolve, one in which the "elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control." Infuriating and outrageous, yes. But it doesn't actually prove anything about the goals of HAARP.

Even more interesting, but still not the smoking gun that some HAARP critics believe it to be, are the forecasts of geophysicist Gordon J. F. McDonald, a vintage cold war strategist who comes off sounding like Dr. Strangelove on speed. Begich and Manning quote a McDonald precis calling for electronic pulses aimed at broad geographic regions. "In this way," McDonald explains, "one could develop a system that would seriously impair the brain performance of a very large populations in selected regions over an extended period . . . . No matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behavior for national advantages, to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades." (Never a lover of subtlety, McDonald titled a chapter on weather modification in one of his books, "How to Wreck the Environment." Clearly, mind control has been the Holy Grail of anal-retentive national security obsessors since the days of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program. And it certainly wouldn't be surprising to find the Pentagon toying with that notion in Alaska, although the evidence for it hasn't surfaced (yet).

On the farthest fringes of speculation, HAARP has attained that ultimate status of conspiracy theory template, onto which any ideology, philosophy, or pathology can attach its own interpretation and customized "facts." It comes as no shock to find UFOs circling these outer limits of HAARPology: the HAARP frequencies are the radio frequencies associated with UFO appearances and abductions, say some theorists, suggesting either than alien UFOs use a similar technology or that UFOs are a government hoax implemented with HAARP-like hardware, or both. Beyond UFOs, other theorists claim that HAARP is a "death ray" with northern exposure, is responsible for various recent earthquakes and power outages in the Western United States, is a plot to implement a "genetic reprogramming" of the human race, or ultimately represents a battle between earthly villains and New Age "ascended masters" from dimensions beyond.

Back on earth, the fact remains that HAARP certainly isn't the simple science fair project described by its Pentagon handlers. To quote HAARP's godfather, Bernard Eastlund, "HAARP is the perfect first step toward a plan like mine. . . . The government will say it isn't so, but if it quacks like a duck and it looks like a duck, there's a good chance it is a duck."

An update

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 03:05:23 GMT

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.

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 21:58:50 GMT

You're Trash!

Which Return of the Living Dead Character Are You???
brought to you by Quizilla

PHEW

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 07:22:05 GMT

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.

Todays and tommorows and sometimes yesterdays

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 20:05:53 GMT

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

A good man

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 06:06:50 GMT

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

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 05:58:28 GMT

Ed Gein

Ed Gein may be America's most famous murderer, although his name is seldom heard and barely recognized today. Four decades have passed since he first made the headlines, but Gein is will with us, in spirit. His crimes inspired the movie Psycho and its sequels, spinning off in later years to terrify another generation as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and then even more recently, Silence of The Lambs. (The latter film, billed as "a true story," changed literally everything except the grim décor of Gein's peculiar residence.) While other slayers have surpassed Gein's body-count and notoriety, America has never seen his equal in the field of mental aberration.

Gein was born August 8, 1906, in LaCrose, Wisconsin, but his family soon moved to a farm outside Plainfield. His father held jobs as a tanner and carpenter when he wasn't working the farm, and Gein's mother emerged as the dominant parent, settling most family decisions on her own. Devoutly religious, she warned her two sons against premarital sex, but Gein recalled that she was "not as strong" in her opposition to masturbation. Ed's father died in 1940, and his brother Henry was lost four years later, while fighting a marsh fire. His mother suffered a stroke that same year, and a second one killed her in 1945, following an argument with one of her neighbors. Alone at last, Gein nailed her bedroom shut and set about "redecorating" in his own inimitable style.

From childhood, Gein had been ambiguous about his masculinity, considering amputation of his penis on several occasions. With Christine Jorgenson much in the headlines, Gein considered transsexual surgery, but the process was costly and frightening. There must be other ways, he thought, of "turning female" on a part-time basis.

Between 1950 and 1954, Gein haunted three local cemeteries, opening an estimated nine or ten graves in his nocturnal raids. He might remove whole corpses or settle for choice bits and pieces; a few bodies were later returned to their resting place, but Ed recalled that there were "not too many." Aided in the early days by "Gus," a simple-minded neighbor, Gein continued excavations on his own when his assistant died. At home, he used the ghoulish relics as domestic decorations. Skulls were mounted on the bedposts, severed skullcaps serving Gein as bowls. He fashioned hanging mobiles out of noses, lips, and labia, sporting a belt of nipples around the house. Human skin was variously utilized for lamp shades, the construction of waste baskets, and the upholstery of chairs.

The choicer bits were specially preserved for Gein to wear at home. For ceremonial occasions, such as dancing underneath the moon, he wore a human's scalp and face, a skinned-out "vest" complete with breasts, and female genitalia strapped above his own. By "putting on" another sex and personality, Gein seemed to find a measure of contentment, but his resurrection raids eventually failed to satisfy a deeper need.

On December 8, 1954, 51-year-old Mary Hogan disappeared from the tavern she managed in Pine Grove, Wisconsin. Authorities found a pool of blood on the floor, an overturned chair, and one spent cartridge from a .32-caliber pistol. Foul play was the obvious answer, and while deputies recall Ed Gein as a suspect in the case, no charges were filed at the time. (Three years later, the shell casing would be matched to a pistol found in Gein's home.)

On November 16, 1957, 58-year-old Bernice Worden disappeared from her Plainfield hardware store under strikingly similar circumstances. There was blood on the floor, a thin trail of it leading out back, where the victim's truck had last been seen. Worden's son recalled that Gein had asked his mother for a date, and on the day before she disappeared, Ed mentioned that he needed anti-freeze. A sales receipt for anti-freeze was found inside the store, and deputies went looking for their suspect. What they found would haunt them all for the remainder of their lives.

Inside a shed, behind Gein's house, the headless body of Bernice Worden hung from the rafters, gutted like a deer, the genitals carved out along with sundry bits of viscera. A tour of the cluttered house left searchers stunned. Worden's heart was found in a saucepan, on the stove, while her head had been turned into a macabre ornament, with twine attached to nails inserted in both ears. Her other organs occupied a box, shoved off to moulder in a corner. Deputies surveyed Gein's decorations and his "costumes," counting skins from ten skulls in one cardboard drum, taking hasty inventory of implements fashioned from human bones.

In custody, Gein readily confessed the Hogan and Worden murders, along with a series of unreported grave robberies. Confirmation of the latter was obtained by opening three graves: in one, the corpse was mutilated as described by Gein; the second held no corpse at all; a casket in the third showed pry-marks, but the body was intact, as Gein remembered.

On January 16, 1958, a judge found Gein insane and packed him off to Central State Hospital, at Waupun, Wisconsin. A decade later, Ed was ordered up for trial, with the proceedings held in mid-November 1968. Judge Robert Gollmar found Gein innocent by reason of insanity, and he returned to Waupun, where he died in 1984.

Gein willingly confessed the murders and was tried for one, but were there others? And, if so, how many?

Brother Henry was suggested, by Judge Gollmar, as a likely victim, inasmuch as there was no autopsy or investigation of his death. However that may be, there is a stronger case for murder in the disappearance of a man named Travis and his unnamed male companion, last seen at the time they hired Ed Gein to be their hunting guide. One victim's jacket was recovered from the woods near Plainfield, and while Gein professed to know the whereabouts of Travis's body - blaming his death on "a neighbor" - police never followed up on the case. The search of Gein's home turned up two "fresh" vaginas, removed from young women, that could not be matched to existing cemetery record. Judge Gollmar suggests that one likely victim was Evelyn Hartley, abducted from LaCrosse on a night when Gein was visiting relatives, two blocks from her home. A pool of blood was found in the family garage after she vanished, with the trail disappearing at curbside. Mary Weckler was reported missing a short time late, from Jefferson, Wisconsin, with a white Ford seen in the area. When searchers scoured Gein's property, they found a while Ford sedan on the premises, though no one in Plainfield could ever recall Ed driving such a car. No other evidence exists to name Gein's victims, but if he did not dispose of Hartley and Wechler, he must have killed two other women, their names still unknown.

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 15:20:55 GMT

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 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

A Request

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 23:39:15 GMT

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

An update

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 04:53:09 GMT

Marilyn Monroe

The main question that comes out of the case history of Marilyn Monroe's death is not whether she was murdered or even by whom, but how the men who ran this country in 1962 ever found time to do their jobs. They were all too busy with Marilyn Monroe.

The Kennedy brothers, Jack and Bobby, president and attorney general respectively, were either in bed with her for hours at a time or talking dirty to her on the phone for even longer. San "Momo" Giancana - the Chicago/Vegas mob boss who, some say, really ran the country - was preoccupied with the sex icon to end all sex icons, and wiretapped her - as did Teamster leader and Kennedy-hater Jimmy Hoffa. Giancana saw her as a means to gain power over the Kennedys. He bedded her too. At one point Momo boasted to another gangster that he had one up on the Kennedys because he was the last to have sex with Marilyn before her death.

And, unsurprisingly, J. Edgar Hoover spent his time listening to recordings taken from bugs in every room in her house - or anyone else's house or hotel where she stayed.

The Marilyn tapes, according to Hollywood private eye Fred Otash, who recorded and retained many of them, are "probably the most interesting tapes ever made - with the exception of Watergate."

Come on. What's on the Watergate tapes but a bunch of old lawyers cussing, smoking cigarettes, and grumbling about politics? The Marilyn tapes are said to contain lengthy recordings of America's most glamorous movie star doing the nasty with America's most glamorous president. And other intriguing episodes. Private investigator Milo Speriglio, who had spent thirty years on the Monroe case, says that the tape recorders were rolling right through Marilyn's murder.

Among researchers, writers, and sleuths who claim either to have heard some of these tapes or know what's on them - or to have just done a lot of legwork - there is a dazzling spectrum of opinions on how the former Norma Jean Baker met her demise at age thirty-six, on August 4, 1962. And at whose hands. Most of the hypotheses involve the Kennedy brothers and Giancana, with Hoover in the wings, as always, watching.

Speriglio names none other than Jack Kennedy himself, in collusion with his morally bankrupt father Joe (by that time incapacitated by a stroke that diminished his physical and mental faculties but apparently left his capacity for evil unscathed), as ordering the hit. Marilyn had become too pesky. Her constant calls to the White House and the Justice Department had become a hot gossip item for Washington insiders. And there was the omnipresent threat of a press conference at which Marilyn would blow the lid off her relationship with the Kennedy brothers, an option Marilyn was apparently considering. Not only did she jeopardize the Kennedy dynasty, but national security. In some kind of weird attempt to impress his extramarital flame, Bobby blabbed secret info about the CIA-Mafia kill-Castro plots to Marilyn Monroe, of all people. Or so the story goes. The official version is that Marilyn committed suicide by barbiturate overdose.

But even Goddess author Anthony Summers, who believes that Marilyn did not intentionally kill herself and goes no further than to "leave open" the possibility of murder, seems in his book to have been persuaded that Bobby Kennedy was at Marilyn's bungalow the night of her death. The attorney general may have visited her on a humane "mission of mercy," that night, Summers, perhaps wishfully, speculates.

Marilyn was extremely distraught that day, attempting to call everyone she knew in a fit of despair over her broken relationships with the Kennedy brothers. Career minded as always, they rather cruelly led her on then cut her off. In most versions of the story, Bobby initiated his relationship with Marilyn mainly to protect the president. Jack saw Marilyn as a fling. She saw him as marrying material. She harbored delusions of First Ladydom and when Jack grew bored of her, she wouldn't let him go. In stepped Booby, who made the tragic error in falling in love with her.

Some biographers have written that Marilyn Monroe carried a Kennedy child in 1962, though whether it was supposed to be Jack's or Bobby's is not clear.

According to Summers's recreation of events, Bobby Kennedy would have arrived to find Monroe already in the throes of overdose but alive. He, or an aide, called an ambulance, which was to take Marilyn to the hospital, but she died en route. When the younger Kennedy brother saw that his paramour had passed, he switched immediately into coverup mode. No matter how she dies, it would not look good for the aspiring next president to show up at a hospital towing the corpse of America's favorite sex symbol.

The ambulance, according to Summers, turned around and returned to the bungalow. The body that wet dreams were made of was laid out on the bed, the room straightened, and a call placed to Marilyn's confident and psychiatrist Robert Greenson. It was Greenson who, officially, discovered the decease Marilyn Monroe. By this time Bobby was safely out of L.A. maybe. A police officer named Lynn Franklin tells of pulling over a car driven by Peter Lawford sometime after midnight - hours after Marilyn died. Bobby Kennedy was in the backseat.

Unlike some other writers on the topic, Summers admits that his scenario might be "wrong in certain details, but it is a fair construction from the information now available." He also says that, probably, "no serious crime was committed that night." But the death of Marilyn Monroe was, in Summers's view, Bobby Kennedy's Chappaquidick - a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong dead woman. But Bobby got away were his younger brother Ted got caught.

In the updated edition of his book, Summers interviews an unnamed source who claims to have heard tapes of Marilyn's final night. The tapes appear to have been edited. Bobby Kennedy, Peter Lawford, and Marilyn Monroe are on the tapes - the two ex-lovers screaming at each other while Lawford tries to calm them down. At one point, according to Summers's informant, there are sounds of a struggle. Bobby may have pushed Marilyn onto the bed.

The tapes leave the impression, according to Summers, that Marilyn was dead when Bobby left the house after his second visit of the evening and that later there was a phone call placed to Marilyn Monroe's home. on the tapes, someone picks up the phone, but says nothing. When Marilyn's body was found, she clutched a phone in her hand. The implication, according to Summers, is that it was placed there - the call was intended to establish a phone record that Marilyn was alive and answering the phone at a time when she was, in fact, far too dead to chat.

Conspiracy theorists and medical examiners alike have long been bothered by the absence of pill residue in Marilyn's stomach and the lack of any glass of water in her apartment with which she could have swallowed the massive overdoes required to kill her. And medical examiners never found any signs of injected drug either. Summers was the first to publicly postulate the one method of ingestion that would leave no trace, unless checked for. It wasn't.

Peter Lawford, the debauched actor and Kennedy in-law who arranged Jack's West Coast trysts, knew something about Marilyn's death, but took his secrets to his drug-and-booze induced grave. When one of his former wives asked him if he knew how Marilyn died, he made an odd remark.

"Marilyn took her last big enema."

The starlet "complained of chronic constipation," Summers wrote. "Enemas relieve that complaint. Their use was also a common fad, particularly among show business people in those days, as an aid to instant weight loss." Marilyn Monroe had been taking enemas for years.

The rectal ingestion theory is now a common one. Double Cross, written by the late Sam Giancana's godson also named Sam Giancana, and his brother, Chuck, says that Marilyn's killers listened to Giancana's wiretaps as they lurked near her home, waiting for the opportune moment to strike. They overheard Bobby Kennedy and another man in the house irate at Marilyn. Finally, Bobby ordered Marilyn sedated and left. The hit men sneaked in and, as Marilyn lay in a drugged stupor, administered a lethal "suppository."

One of the latest Marilyn books, Speriglio's Crypt 33 (titled for the compartment where Monroe's body was stored at the L.A. County morgue), describes how gangland superstar Johnny Roselli - a Giancana associate who is better known for his involvement in the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro and, by some accounts, JFK - showed up at Marilyn's house to distract her (they knew each other; Roselli traveled in show biz circles) while two hit men sneaked in the back. One knocked her out with a chloroform-soaked cloth, then the other administered the killer enema. It is unclear from the rather choppily written Crypt 33 whether Speriglio bases his scenario on evidence from the actually evidence from the actual Marilyn tapes, though he seems to imply that he does. Crypt 33 includes Speriglio's assertion that Joe and Jack Kennedy beseeched Giancana to rub Marilyn out and that the gangster, always looking for leverage with the Kennedys, happily obliged. The book revises Speriglio's earlier theory, spelled out in The Marilyn Conspiracy. Namely, that Giancana and Hoffa, under pressure from Bobby Kennedy and aware, through wiretaps, of his affair with Monroe, set him up for scandal. Slaying his sex-queen-on-the-side was part of the plot. But the Kennedy coverup worked. Neither Bobby nor Jack suffered destruction. Until later. And then by somewhat different methods.

The coverup continues. On that point all the Marilyn writers concur. Whether she was murdered, committed suicide, or died by accidentally misjudging her capacity to tolerate downers (Summers's preferred hypothesis), there is no question that the Kennedy brothers got involved with her in some way that grew too dangerous. In 1985, possibly for this reason, ABC killed a story on its 20/20 news magazine that independently corroborated the information in Summers's book Goddess. The half-hour segment included information about several of Jack Kennedy's other affairs, including liaisons with mob moll Judith Campbell Exner and suspected Nazi spy Inga Arvad.

ABC's higher-ups were skittish and ordered the segment trimmed. Finally it was down to thirteen minutes when ABC News president Roone Arledge, a close friend of Robert Kennedy's wife Ethel, killed it altogether. He denied that his friendship had any bearing on his decision, condemning his own reporters' story as "sleazy." According to Hugh Downs, one of the network's more staid on-air personalities, the "sleazy piece" was "more carefully documented than anything any network did during Watergate."

One biography recounts that more than a decade after Marilyn Monroe's death, a TV actress named Veronica Hamel, later well-known on the show Hill Street Blues, purchased the house where Marilyn lived and died. During redecorating, she discovered a thicket of aged wires sticking out of the roof. The actress hired a private contractor to destroy the cables that had transmitted the sounds of Marilyn Monroe's anguished life and eerie death to a place in history where they have never been found.

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 04:50:15 GMT

Leave a message and:
1. I'll respond with something random about you.
2. I'll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you.
3. I'll pick a flavor of jello to wrestle with you in.
4. I'll say something that only makes sense to you and me.
5. I'll tell you my first/clearest memory of you.
6. I'll tell you what animal you remind me of.
7. I'll ask you something that I've always wondered about you.
8. If I do this for you, you must post this on your journal. You MUST. It is written.

Can finally log in

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 21:37:18 GMT

Benn having trouble loging in and seems that problem is fixed, not posting much cause I'm not really having a good time today, sometimes you think to much and your feelings get hurt by it, I'm hoping that what this is.

An update

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 02:54:23 GMT

A big thanks to solotoro for pointing out that these should be behind cuts, and now on with the program.

Accquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
Dr. Donald MacArthur, a high-level defense department biological research administrator, showed up at a June 9, 1969, meeting of a House subcommittee on military appropriations begging for cash to carry out an unsavory endeavor.

"Within five to ten years," he prognosticated, "it would provably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which would differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these," he continued - and this is the ominous part, "is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease."

This new germ, the one Dr. MacArthur desired so sincerely to whip up in his lab, would destroy the immune system. The good doc proffered the most hackneyed of Cold War rationales for this odious ambition.

"Should an enemy develop it there is little doubt that this is an important area of potential military technological inferiority in which there is no adequate research program."

He got his coveted taxpayer funding. In 1977 and 1978, at the tail end of Dr. MacArthur's time frame, the first cases of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) emerged in Africa.

As smoking funs, or smoking petri dishes, go, the MacArthur transcript leaves something to be desired. But the coincidence is undeniably provocative. Is AIDS the ultimate in biological warfare? This is a case with so many conundrums that the JFK assassination seems like a District Court Drunk-driving rap by comparison.

U.S. representative Theodore Weiss - a New York congressman with a large gay constituency - speculated in 1983 that "as far fetched as it may seem, given the attitudes toward homosexuals and homosexuality by some segments of society, the possible utilization of biological weapons must be seriously considered."

The demographics of AIDS also encourage the biowarfare notion. Though no one is immune, several groups have been especially hard hit: gays, Africans, drug users. Could those groups have been deliberately targeted in some Pentagon-operated biotech chamber?

Support for this biowarfare thesis is scanty at best. But then the same holds true for the "official" explanation of how AIDS entered the human population - that green monkeys spread it, somehow - which rests on a rather flimsy foundation itself.

The generally accepted cause of AIDS is a virus labeled HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) "discovered" in 1984 by Dr. Robert Gallo and, more or less simultaneously, by a team of French scientists (the French doctors charge, apparently with some justification, that Gallo ripped off their research - but that's a conspiracy for another book). From what corner of the ecosystem the virus arose remains an open question.

Gallo et al. note the similarity between a simian-borne virus (STLV-III) and HIV. They muse that at some point the Cercopithecus aethiops carrying this virus transmitted it to an African human being. Within a few years thousands of people dropped dead from having sex and from blood transfusions.

It is barely worth scrolling down the litany of assumptions required to support this untested bit of fabulism (not the least of which is the massive and presumable instantaneous mutation of the simian virus). 'Nuff said that the green monkey scenario is at best an educated guess.

There are some gaping improbabilities in the AIDS-biowarfare mise-en-scene as well. Perhaps AIDS is indeed a biological bomb aimed to eradicate the world's useless eaters. The military and its politico-industrial cronies have certainly pulled some nasty stunts in their time. But who in their right mind would unleash a highly insidious, unstoppably lethal pathogen into the same population that includes oneself and one's All-American family?

A brief history of the U.S. biological warfare includes on-the-record instances of military assaults on U.S. cities, unleashing various germs and toxins, though none as deadly as HIV (by a long shot). Nonetheless, there are some noteworthy examples of verifiable ruthlessness. Take the fiendish Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The U.S. Public Health Service ran the study on four hundred syphilitic black men, denying them not only treatment for their ailment but any information that they had the disease at all. This proceeded for forty years.

Then there was the 1931 Puerto Rico cancer experiment; self explanatory. A number of Puerto Ricans were deliberately infected with cancer by the Rockefeller Institute and thirteen died. Chief pathologist Cornelius Rhoades's justification?

"The Porto [sic] Ricans are the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and theivish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere…. I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off eight and transplanting cancer into several more…. All physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects."

None too politically correct, the Dr. Rhoades. No one prosecuted him, though. They brushed him off as "mentally ill." The U.S. government must have disagreed. It placed Rhoades in charge of two large chemical warfare projects during the 1940s, granted him a seat on the Atomic Energy Commission, and pinned him with the Legion of Merit.

Though biowarfare research was legislatively banned in 1972, the Pentagon's "Department of Loopholes" took immediate action and research pressed on. One of the germs that intrigues military researchers is the canis strain of brucella. Symptoms of this disease include headaches and fevers, malaise, muscle aches, pharyngitis, and lymphadenopathy - the same roster seen in AIDS-Related Complex, the precursor to full-blown AIDS.

The first published charge of an AIDS-biowarfare connection came in the Patriot, a newspaper in New Delhi. The July 4, 1984, report cited articles from an official U.S. Army research publication about "natural and artificial influences on the human immune system."

The Indian paper reported that scientists from Fort Detrick - home of the National Cancer Institute's Frederick Cancer Research Facility but until 1969 known as the Army Biological Warfare Laboratory - ventured into darkest Africa in search of "a powerful virus that could not be found in Europe of Asia." The data from this excursion "was then analyzed at Fort Detrick and the result was the isolation of a virus that causes AIDS."

The U.S. government immediately labeled the article Soviet disinformation, a case not harmed by the subsequent relentless coverage given the story in Soviet media. A Pravda editorial cartoon showing a doctor standing on a pile of corpses, and handing a general a vial marked AIDS virus did draw a whine of protest from the U.S. embassy. But it wasn't until a major British newspaper splashed the story all over its tabloid pages that American authorities began to react, their objections echoed slavishly by the ever-enterprising U.S. media.

Next came the 1986 pamphlet AIDS: USA Home-Made Evil by two French-born East German scientists, Jakob and Lilli Segal. The pamphlet, with no listed publisher, floated freely throughout the English-speaking regions of Africa. Not an orthodox means of scientific publication, but the Segals' arguments formed the basis for much of the subsequent discussion, such as it was, of the AIDS-biowarfare theory.

HIV, the enigmatic Segals enigmatically claimed, is a genetically genetically engineered hybrid of the visan virus (cause of a sheep-borne brain disease) and a virus called HTLV-I (HIV was originally named HTLV-III), which causes white blood cell cancer.

The Segals, too, fingered Fort Detrick as the lab that invented the virus. There has never been any hard evidence that HIV was synthesized at Fort Detrick - or anywhere else - but it can't hurt to inquire why the National Institutes of Health asked the army researchers at Fort Detrick, not the "civilians" there, to help develop a cure for AIDS.

In February of 1987 army colonel David Huxsoll, taken by a scoffing fit while discussing the AIDS-biowarfare charges, blabbed an intriguing bit of information.

"Studies at army laboratories have shown that the AIDS virus would be an extremely poor biological warfare agent," quoth the colonel.

What studies? Pentagon PR tells us that the military wants to put an end to AIDS in our lifetimes, not an end to our lifetimes. Huxsoll later denied making the statement. The reporter who wrote it down stands by the story.

The first American AIDS outbreaks - then confined almost exclusively to the gay male population --coincided with the onset of Reaganism and its attendant bitter backlash against gays. The biowarfare theory assumes that gays were singled out for destruction, or at the very least, for scapegoating. But how?

In 1978 more than a thousand nonmonogamous homosexual adult males received experimental vaccination against hepatitis B, courtesy of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control. Within six years 64 percent of those men had AIDS.

Coincidence is of course possible, even likely in this case. Under the conventional view of AIDS-transmission, nonmonogamous homosexual adult males are prone to the disease anyway.

There was another vaccination program, for smallpox this time, in Africa. The World Health Organization ran the show. The regions where W.H.O. administered its program later became the most AIDS-wrecked in Africa. Again, however, the notion that this could be a coincidence is quite plausible, though among adherents of the AIDS-conspiracy theory the smallpox program stirs considerable alarm. But it's hard to knock the W.H.O.'s largely successful attempt to eradicate smallpox - a far worse killer than AIDS.

There are variations on the AIDS-biowarfare theme: Some rest on the argument that HIV, on its own, does not cause AIDS. Dioxins (used by the military in Vietnam) and dengue virus (used by the CIA in Cuba) have found mention as possible culprits, as has a mutated form of syphilis. Any of these would be simpler than a synthesized virus to administer as a weapon.

There's only one certainty: The epidemiology of AIDS is one case where neither the official nor the conspiratorial explanations comes off as particularly satisfying.

Another update

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 20:56:00 GMT

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.

An update

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 09:51:39 GMT

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.

Another update

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 15:25:39 GMT

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.

an update

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 02:12:05 GMT

Was the First Moonlanding Fake?

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong planted his left foot in the lunar dust and became the first human to walk on the moon. Unfortunately, that stellar moment in history may have been marred by one not-insignificant detail: If inquiring author Bill Kaysing has it right, Amstrong made his giant leap for mankind not 240,000 miles above the Earth in the barren Sea of Tranquillity, but a mere 90 miles north of lusty Las Vegas on a top-secret movie soundstage. Yes, as Kaysing tells it, the nation was gulled into believe that Armstrong and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr., were gamboling through a bona fide lunar landscape, when in fact the two "actors" were hamming it up in a sinister government production that qualifies as the greatest hoax of all time.

Sheer lunacy, you say? Not according to the millions of skeptics who watched the spectacle of men walking on the moon in disbelief. And not according to Kaysing, who outlined his highly evolved theory in a self-published expose, We Never Went to the Moon. A former technical writer for Rockwell International (which contributed to the alleged "moon missions"), Kaysing claims no direct knowledge of NASA's shenanigans. Rather, his certainty derives from the epistemological alignment of a "hunch," photographic "proof," and a gnawing feeling that "the government is a specialist in hoaxing the public."

If his thesis is, well, somewhat weightless in the hard evidence department, Kaysing more than compensates with copious enthusiasm. "America's 30 Billion Dollar Swindle!" he declares, played itself out over the course of five more sham moon landings and involved "well-faked photographs," phony moon rocks, and "programmed astronauts" - not to mention "the help of father-figure [Walter] Cronkite as the journalistic goat."

First and foremost, Kaysing has questions - questions that NASA and the former astronauts evade like a grifter dodges the "heat";

In photographs of the lunar sky, why are no stars visible, and why are the
astronauts "extremely evasive regarding stars"? With no blocking atmosphere,
the celestial tableau would have been "the most magnificent available to mortal
man," Kaysing writes. The answer, he posits, is that NASA's set decorators knew
they couldn't dupe professional astronomers with an ersatz starry backdrop.

If the moon's surface was powdery enough for deep footprints, why didn't the
lunar lander's rocket thruster dig a gaping crater? And why in photographs is
there no moon dust on the lander's legs?

If the moon was proven to be "sterile" after the first Apollo mission, why were
astronauts in later missions held in quarantine so long? Kaysing submits that they
needed quality time in an airstream trailer to "1) eliminate guilt feelings; 2) study
and memorize moon data; and 3) practice responding to questions."

"Why did so many astronauts end up as executives in very large corporations?"

Kaysing provides answers to most of the questions, including the most obvious - why would NASA go to the trouble of faking the Apollo moon shots? It seems the space agency launched its elaborate ruse when, after years of technological screw-ups and bureaucratic snafus, NASA realized it would never put a man on the moon by the close of the 1960s.

To avoid international embarrassment, NASA and the military's stealth apparatus, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), established a top-secret operation that Kaysing calls the Apollo Simulation Project (ASP). For their secret base of operations, the cold-blooded ASP team chose a site in Nevada adjacent to land used by the Atomic Energy Commission in nuclear bomb testing - the perfect deterrent to the overly curious. Of course, ASP's secret base also had the advantage of being less than an hour's drive from "a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week, anything-goes resort boasting more than thirty large casinos." According to Kaysing, who presents his case in semiomniscient fashion, ASP quite naturally hooked up with the Vegas "Cosa Nostra," which patriotically provided the space program with expert "services," apparently in the lethal splashdown department, so to speak.

In its desert redoubt, ASP excavated an underground cavern and installed "a complete set of the moon." (Some word-of-mouth versions of the moon scam theory place the phony set in Arizona or New Mexico.) In fact - and in the absence of traditional journalistic sourcing, we must take Kaysing at his word on most "facts" - none other than film director Stanley Kubrick assisted in the plot, generously using his 2001: A Space Odyssey to develop the Hollywood special effects required to foist the NASA hoax on an unsuspecting public. (It makes you wonder what The Shining was all about.)

According to Kaysing, ASP's modus operandi went something like this:

An empty Saturn V rocket lifts off in Florida - in full public view, thereby lending
the Apollo con a patina of authenticity. However, once out of sight, the ghost
rocket ditches into the South Polar Sea.

The "astronauts" are jetted to ASP's Nevada complex where the enjoy "every
conceivable luxury, including a few of the shapeliest showgirls from Las Vegas,
cleared for secret, of course." When Armstrong and his fellow playboy thespians
aren't earning membership in the 240,000 Mile High Club, so to speak, they "are
free to wander about and play the slots" and "sample the twenty-four-hour buffet
from the Dunes" hotel. (In this moral vacuum, the well-informed Kaysing
reports, one of the astronauts may have "socked an ASP official in a dispute over
a showgirl named Peachy Keen."

When the curtain finally rises, the special -effects team, TV cameramen, and
"ASP moon walk director" create a near-seamless piece of performance art, as
Armstrong recites his scripted "one-small-step" line. Every aspect of the phony
video feed is "meticulously" choreographed, down to the "boo-boos," jokes, "and
seeming improvisations of the astronauts." Meanwhile, NASA cooks up
counterfeit "moon rocks," the purported hard evidence of the journey, in a high-
tech ceramics kiln.

In time for their triumphal return to Earth, the astronauts are coaxed away from
the Vegas vixens and whisked to a hidden air base south of the Hawaiian Islands
(the "Tauramoto Archipelago," Kaysing obligingly specifies). There they are
sealed inside a dummy space capsule and dropped from a C5-a transport plane
into the roiling seas.

If the plot sounds a lot like the 1979 film Capricorn One, which dramatized a similar cabal involving a bogus mission to Mars, it is because, according to Kaysing, Hollywood borrowed the idea from the first edition of his book.

Like the O.J. Simpson-Telly Savalas film (or any conspiracy hypothesis worth its salt), Kaying's theory has its martyrs, a whole cemetery full. There's Tom Baron, the aerospace technician who complained to Congress about dangerous corner-cutting in the Apollo program - and died in a train accident "just four days after he testified." There are also the three astronauts - including Gus "the Right Stuff" Grissom - who died on the launchpad in a 1967 "mishap" when fire swept through their capsule. Grisson had groused publicly about Apollo's safety troubles, leading Kaysing to postulate that perhaps the DIA arranged a little "accident" to silence the whistle-blower and impress other loud-mouth fly-boys.

And, as in many a postulated conspiracy, this one involves brainwashing. Kaysing suggests that the astronauts might have been subjected to state-of-the-art mind-control techniques and turned into "Manchurian Candidates," thus ensuring their obedient participation in the hoax. This, he postulates, might explain their subsequent reclusiveness and, in some cases, "severe mental problems."

What are they trying to hide, anyway? Kaysing wonders. Neil Armstrong "will not speak on the phone to me," Kaysing complains in his book. Buzz Aldrin apparently won't appear on talk shows alongside Apollo's intractable critic. Despite their seeming aloofness, however, the space jockeys may in fact be very interested in the California researcher's doings: Kaysing intimates darkly that agents of Armstrong keep close tabs on his ongoing quest to defrock Apolloscam.

Alas, NASA's secrets remain as impenetrable as any Vegas vault. Barring unforeseen revelations, hectoring ex-astronauts may be the only way for Kaysing to get to the bottom of the conundrum. Like David flinging tiny Earth rocks at a space-suited Goliath, the intrepid investigator has issued a standing challenge: "I am willing," Kaysing pledges, "to debate any or all of the astronauts at any time on live TV or in person anywhere."

So far the Manchurian Spacemen have declined to take that one small step.