This popped up on my radar just now.

When President Clinton’s book come out on June 22 do you think he will
tell what he knows about the influence of mind control cults like
Scientology and Skull and Bones in American government?

It’s an old message, from 2004 I suppose — the Kerry reference tells all. But it makes no sense. What kind of conspiracy nut thinks Clinton, a figment of the ruling power structure, is going to expose the secrets of the power structure?

On the other hand, this makes sense.

He could renounce Skull and Bones and tell all of their secrets. 

But he never did, did he?  And look where he is now.  Right where Skull and Bones dictated him be, I suppose.

There are a handful of different 9/11 conspiracy websites being chalked onto downtown sidewalks, one chalked all over the place at any given time.

I suspect that the sites all go back to the same server, but nonetheless I cannot help but wonder and amuse myself with the possibility of a sort of raging Turf Battle.

The two sort of conventional “unconventional claims” on the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt are either contradictory, or weirdly compatible.

I am not speaking of the anti-Roosevelt faction meted out in the occasional George Will column — the conservative actions against Big Government — which lines up to “The New Deal didn’t get us out of the Great Depression”.  I tack to a couple of positions that could be described “progressive”, perhaps a progressivism measured out with conspiranoia, but it aligns itself there nonetheless.

The BBC has recently aired a program, I believe because a new book has just been published (as well the old book has recently been republished) — on “The Fascist Plot to Sieze the White House“.   The key name that has been dropped into this fracas, which was not mentioned in any mention of Smedley Butler’s claims between the 1930s and through — probably until today, but certainly through the 1970s — Prescott Bush.

And thus FDR is the bulwark against Mussolini’s mode of Fascism, as represented by the Bushes — who weaved themselves through the Republican Party and through the Government Apparatus — and which shows itself in the current administration.  Who were, at the time, deafly afraid of the courageous reforms and changes he was bringing to bear on the established order.
If you must.  Everything stems from the question “If they attempted it rather crudely with Smedley Butler, who’s to say they didn’t just keep on going with more sophisticated tactics.”

Any number of CIA experiments come to mind.

Or else you may go to, say, Walter Karp and his book Indispensable Enemies.   FDR kept the old order going, serving as a bulwark against the angry masses — handing “Big Business” every single thing they wanted, beyond even what Herbert Hoover dared grant these Special Interests — all the while making sure to let the Republican Party off the hook and back into the Political Game.  Then he started preaching warfare in 1937, and ended whatever goodness emenated from “The New Deal”.

At a more conspiratorial angle than Walter Karp dares offer, this has FDR looking the other way to, well, in the current political climatology we end up focusing in on Prescott Bush.  But the names have to be rather temporal — even if they are part of the same basket from 1933– based on who on that ledger is up or down.

There’s a bit of “I Want to Believe” in these crevices of the mind.  But the secret sometimes stares a bit closer and clearer in one’s face.
So what was Roosevelt?  Both and neither, I suppose.

I’m watching this item from prisonplanet of some group or other of 9/11 conspiratorial windbags assaulting John McCain. The video is tedious.

What I hate about this video is not so much the crux of the content — a press outlet where these conspiratorialists ask John McCain awkward questions McCain considers beneath him — McCain having garnered their wrath for having written a preface to the Popular Mechanics 9/11 conspiracy theory debunking book. To each their own.
I loathe the production. I hate the intro. I hate the outro. I hate the trumpets at the start announcing that something is coming. I hate the stylistic drumbeat of splatting from one still image to another in rapid procession, which intercuts the thing at different points in the proceedings for a naseating effect that in its desire to captivate me into strong emotions leaves me rather detached.

They are stylistic jackasses. I see this mode of video editing for “politically provocative” “guerilla” videos of any number of political stripes, and on to the non-political. I do not like it.  I want my web content from self described grassroots fighters against the Establishment to be stripped down. If you look around there, you can find video of Alex Jones yelling in a bullhorn in the direction of the meeting of the Bilderberg Conference. I liked that one. Just as politically fringey, if a little more palatable in the sense that — indeed, it is a conspiracy of the rich and powerful making decisions on the course of human events — and in its way as confrontational — if only to a brick wall — but much more viewable.

All right, everybody.  Put on your tin foil hats and run with John Perkins for a spell:

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George W. Bush’s cocaine habit and womanizing ways caused the invasion of Panama in 1989. According to the book [   The Secret History of the American Empire   ], Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega installed cameras on Contadora Island, which was a safe haven where American politicians and businessmen could schmooze with, and bribe, Latin American politicos. There were “rumors that George W. was photographed doing coke and having kinky sex during the time his father was president,” Jose, a top adviser to Brazilian president Lula da Silva, tells Perkins. “There was a theory in Latin America that Noriega had used incriminating photos of the younger Bush and his cronies to convince the older Bush, then president, to side with the Panamanian administration on key issues. In retaliation, H.W. invaded Panama and hustled Noriega off to a Miami prison. The building housing Noriega’s confidential files had been incinerated by bombs.”

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There’s a slippery slope with John Perkins which is summed up with the fact that my only retort is “If you say so.”   Confessions of an Economic Hitman preys a little too easily on people’s biases and beliefs — takes what a lot of people believe and goes one step further — I suppose I think of that particular conspiracy as a little bit more unstated that John Perkins has it.  The problem with the Bush – Cocaine – Noriega spriacy is that it personalizes the politics onto George Bush and George Bush, the CIA Head and the rich son.  I guess it may well be a type of spurious tabloid rumor-mongering, though a little bit meatier in terms of things I’d particularly care about than if Bush was having an affair with Condelezza Rice.

In other news of this sort, Angelina Jolie has joined the evil Council of Foreign Relations.  I wish I had more thoughts on that matter than I do, but I do not.

I keep half a thought in reading King’s book on what I could drag out onto this blog.  It seems most of what I’d want to settle from his book onto here, for … oh… Chris?  … I’ve already done and dealt with, independent of goddamned or godblessed Dennis King.  But some things pop out, the mainstream media of which I had relied on was not paying attention to some things, some things that pop out in Larouchian discourse today.  Witness:
Item #1:  an encounter I recently had trying to cross Commonwealth Avenue. Somebody (who looked and sounded like a German exchange student) approached me and said, “What are your plans for the development of the solar system in the next fifty years?”

Hans wanted to know why I didn’t have plans to develop the solar system.
I tried to explain that with the time and distance involved, it wasn’t practical, and that more importantly, I didn’t particularly care about developing the solar system.
Hans wanted to put 200 billion people on Mars. Then he started talking about how modern science was a conspiracy against human progress. Then he asked why I hadn’t read the complete works of Kepler. Then he talked about Bush and the Right-Wing Conspiracy. I think all my professors were in the conspiracy as well.

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Item #2:   One of those fascinating items from our history is Operation Paperclip.  It is something worthy of speculative and uneasy conspiratorial fodder.  The United States and the Soviet Union inarguarted the Cold War by scooping up Nazi scientists, and employing them in our military industrial complexes.  Cheekily, we can credit the advantage the Soviets had over the Americans in the early Space Race with the fact that they happened to have nabbed better Nazis than we did.

The uneasy conspiratorial speculation runs along the lines of — to what degree did they infect their host nations with their nazi ideologies?  If I were thinking a bit more darkly, I would contemplate that the nazis had a sort of alliance across the two spheres of influence, and continued to plot and proceed plotting with their dreams of the 1,000 Year Reich.  This is sort of dashed quickly, because it seems we more easily had two sets of Dr. Strangelove types.  In the American case, advocating SDI not so much for defense, but for offense against the Soviets.
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Item #3: From Dennis King’s book (You know the one), pages 80-81 or thereabouts…

FEF = Fusion Energy Foundation, Larouchian advocacy organization.  old-timers = ex-Nazi scientists, here in the 1980s.  Kraft Ehricke (*)

In 1985 the old-timers held their fortieth reunion at the Alabama Space and Rocket Museum beneath a giant picture of von Braun. Linda Hunt, a former Cable Network News reporter, recalled a darkened auditorium full of aging Naziss eagerly watching a slide show of the latest laser-beam weapons. She said taht when the lights went on, the FEF’s Marsha Freeman went to the front and delivered a tirade against the OSI to ahearty applause.

This event was mild compared with the Krafft Ehricke Memorial Conference held that year in Reston, Virginia. Sponsored by the FEF and the Schiller Institue, it united support for SDI, defense of Nazi war criminals, glorification of Peenemunde, and a messianic vision of the conquest of outer space. Fusion boasted that participants included “military, scientific, and diplomatic representatives from four continents.” Former top Nazi cientist Hermann Oberth sent greetings from West Germany hailing Ehricke’s “vision of Homo Saphiens Extraterrestris,'” the New Man who would leave behind the “flaming harbors of the Earth.” Speakers included Admiral Zenker and Peenemunde rocketeer Konrad Dannenberg. Larouche gave the keynote address, entitled “Krafft Ehricke’s Enduring Contribution to the Future Generations of Global and Interplanetary Civilization.” Resoultions were passed calling on President Reagan to adopt Laourhce’s crash program for SDI and halt the Justice Department’s investigations of the old timers. Since the only timers being probed were those allegedly served at Mittelwerk, the FEF/Schiller Institute’s hoopla about underground factories on the moon and the spirit of Peemunde in space technology was suggestive, at the least.

Over the next two years LaRouche assumed Krafft Ehricke’s mantle. He outlined plans for cities on Mars and in the asteroid belt — an extension of his earlier earthbound citybuilding schemes so reminiscent of the SS plans for Aryan colonies in occupied Russia. His prototype design for a space city was based on the geometry of cosmic spirals. He said his inspiration had come from the work of German scientists who, at the end of the war, while “awaiting reassignments” had amused themselves by drawing up plans for rebuilding the Ruhr.

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Item #4, from an ex-Larouchite posting at FACTNet, a fairly quick clip on how these associations damned legitimate technological goals:  Democracy is not a strongpoint for Lyn, and no matter how valid some of his views may seem they reflect the worst aspects of Plato’s philosopher king ideal. To this day, I still support the idea of fusion research, although again Lyn treated it as a catchall, and I have no idea whether the fusion torch will be around in less than another 50 years.

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(*) Great.  Even Larouche’s kooky ideas are lifted from elsewhere.  Damnedit.

You know, had a Democrat been in the White House, and certainly a Clinton, there would be a bigger proponent of 9/11 conspiracy theorists off of the edge of the right-wing, and by that dent off of the edge of the Republican constituency, as opposed to where we are now with a Bush in the White House (The CIA’s bastard son), and the necessity of The Nation to publish Altermann editorials wagging the smattering of some of the “9/11 Truth”ers in the midst of some meetings with largely liberal groupings.  None of which is to even toss an arrow at the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, but is by way of observation.

I am surprised that I can not find the story of Virgin Atlantic Airlines’ giving Loose Change 2 as an option on Alex Jones’s “prisonplanet.com”.  I have to surf through the web to find an editorial against this decision, and by way of explanation:

On Tuesday Virgin Atlantic revealed it would present among its onboard viewing options Loose Change 2, a revolting conspiracy fantasy – its makers prefer the description “documentary” – which claims to present evidence that September 11 was an inside job pulled off by the wicked government of George W. Bush.

In other words, 9/11 is the greatest con since France tricked everyone into believing it was a nation of intellectuals. Loose Change 2 – the second version contains extra portions of stupidity – makes similar claims, all of them ridiculous, and easily demolished by the non-idiotic.

Your little update:

Virgin Airlines has pulled a controversial internet documentary on 9/11 from its in-flight entertainment system after complaints from bloggers and radio shows.

Fair enough, and I’m not surprised, and have no real opinion on the matter.  Except to say this: why would anyone want to watch a presentation, conspiracy-oriented or not, pretend for a moment that it is issued straight from the government, of airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center (and crashed into a Pennsylvania wheat field) while riding on an airplane?