tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-247038932024-03-07T19:11:38.849-08:00Psychopaths, psyops and COINTELPROAllen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.comBlogger21125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-79464476273825166962008-07-05T16:45:00.000-07:002008-07-06T00:17:56.690-07:00Junk science: How to lie with numbers<p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Epidemiology just sounds like the sort of thing you don't want to criticize in public without sounding like a fool. Who are you, mere mortal, to doubt the findings of someone with a title as impressive and as likely to cause your tongue to twist into knots as an epidemiologist? It's seven syllables long, for crying out loud. Anyone with a title that long must know what they are talking about, right?</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">That, at least, is what epidemiologists would like you to think. So, let's start by demystifying this mystical art. Although it is a branch of medicine, fear not. It ain't brain surgery. Yes, it does involve statistics, but we won't go so far into it that you'll have to do any math.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">According to the American Heritage Dictionary, epidemiology is</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.2in;">The branch of medicine that deals with the study of the causes, distribution, and control of disease in populations</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">To put that in simple terms, they try to figure out why it is that some people get sick with certain diseases and others don't. Cancer is a big one. We don't know, publicly at least, what the causes of cancer are. Of course, medical doctors and cancer researchers have to same <i>something</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> when people ask the question. Shrugging the shoulders and saying, “damned if I know” isn't exactly a recipe for research grants flowing in.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">The answers they struggle to give border on the downright funny, at times. For example, Cancer Research UK has a page on their website with the question, “What causes cancer?” right at the top. Their introduction to the answers reads, “This page tells you about what actually causes cancer,” then goes on to say, “There is no single cause for any one type of cancer.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Hmmm. That's sounds a bit like a dodge. Perhaps further down the page they'll get into the specifics. After all, if I asked a doctor “What causes the common cold?” she'd be able to tell me about rhinoviruses getting into the cells in my nose and my body's immune system reacting to the irritation with inflammation and increased mucus production. Solid information.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Not so with the cancer researchers. All they have, with the possible exception of some viral links to certain types of cancer, are epidemiological studies that say there is a statistically calculated risk of getting certain types of cancer if you engage in certain types of activities. Calculated risk, </span><i>not</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> cause and effect relationship. They aren't even willing to pin the calculated risks down. Hence, the statement, “There is no single cause for any one type of cancer.” Keep that statement in mind, by the way. It was published by serious cancer researchers with some serious funding. It will be important a bit later on.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">In other words, you won't find anyone able to tell you that certain toxins, radiation or what have you cause specific changes in cells that get them growing out of control. The only thing they can tell you is, statistically you </span><i>may be</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> more likely to get these types of cancers if you do these other types of things.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Now, how do you figure out just what these types of cancer causing things might be? You can't do the typical scientific thing, with a double-blind study and control group. That would require you asking people to come in and be exposed to what you believe to be toxins to see if they get sick. The problem there is, unless you happen to work for the Nazi party or the CIA, a positive result in your study will land you in jail for reckless endangerment. Instead, you create an epidemiological study.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The best way to get a handle on exactly what one of these studies is, is to do your own. It's easy and it's fun, so dive right in. Please note, though, that we aren't going to do our instructional study on a disease, so it technically isn't an epidemiological study. That word stems from the word “epidemic” and you probably don't have any epidemics running rampant around your computer at the moment to work with. We are just going to do a simple statistical study so that we can understand the concepts involved. Ready? This won't hurt a bit.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Find a die, by which I mean the singular for dice, not the outcome of an epidemic. You just want a simple six-side die, not one of those bizarre sphere approximations from Dungeons and Dragons. Roll it and it stops with some number face up. Let's say the number is three. Roll it again. Let's say the number five. Roll it one more time. This time it lands on six.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">At this point, do you have enough information to make any predictions about how often those numbers might come up in some arbitrary numbers of rolls? If you answered no, you are doing well so far. See, I told you this would be easy.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Take a closer look at the die. The numbers are represented by little divots carved into the sides of the die. The number one has only one divot taken out, while on the exact opposite side of the die there are six divots taken out. This might get you to wondering, is the one side of the die heavier than the six side of the die since there is more material removed from the six side? How would you find out? If you don't have the equipment available to suspend the die and see if it is balanced no matter how you turn it, you'll just have to do a whole lot of rolling of that die to see if number one shows up more often.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">With this, we have introduced two very important factors in an epidemiological study: is the effect being studied physically plausible (in an actual epidemiological study this would read “biologically plausible”) and are their confounders? In this particular case, the difference we noted between the one side and the six side serves in both capacities, depending on how you look at it.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">In our first series of rolls, which we stopped after three trials, you likely assumed that given enough rolls you would see a pretty even distribution of numbers come up, right? That's the theory behind dice, at least. The rolls are random. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">If that is what you are seeking to show, that the rolls are random, the difference between the various faces of the die is a confounder. Simply put, confounders are the variations that can throw the results of your study off. They confound your study. If, on the other hand, what you are trying to discover is whether the die will land with the six side up more often than the one side and about how much more often, the difference between the sides is a test of plausibility. It seems to make sense that the one side would be a little heavier and so would end up face down (with the six side then face up) a little more often.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">So you start to roll. You roll the die until your arm hurts. You stop and you tally up the number of rolls you've done so far. Is it enough? You don't know how much heavier one side might be than the other, so how do you figure out how many rolls you need to see the expected result? For instance, if the one side were twice as heavy as the six side, you would expect the one side to land face down quite a bit. You may well be convinced of the effect after only 100 rolls of the die or so. But that isn't the case. If the die you are using has a one side that is, indeed, heavier than the six side, it is by a very minuscule amount. So, how many rolls?</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">This introduces another important concept in epidemiological studies: what is your sample size? Or, how much data do you actually have to work with? That amount of data will be one factor in determining the </span><i>confidence interval</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of your study.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Understanding confidence intervals is simple. If you've ever heard the results of a poll given in a news broadcast, you've heard a confidence interval given. Typically, in the political polls, the confidence interval is plus or minus 3%. That simply means that the numbers given are in the middle of a range of probable actual values that extend three percentage points above and below what is being reported. So, if they say that candidate A is leading candidate B by 51% to 49% plus or minus 3% (the confidence interval) what they are actually saying is that it is perfectly possible that candidate B is actually leading since the difference between them is only 2%.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">What they never ever tell you is the </span><i>confidence level</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> used to calculate that range. They leave it to you to assume that they are 100% sure that the actual values are within 3% of what they are reporting, but that confidence level is impossible. The gold standard for confidence level, at least in epidemiology, is 95%. That means that when they give the range of possible values, the confidence interval, they are 95% sure that the real numbers are somewhere in that range. Put another way, they are saying that there is a 5% chance that the actual values could be something else entirely.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none;"> When you think about it, leaving out the confidence level is a pretty big omission. As far as you know, that confidence interval of plus or minus 3% represents a confidence level of 50%, which is to say there is only a 50/50 chance that the actual numbers are within 3% of reported, which is to say that the entire poll is really just a roll of the dice...give or take a few percent.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Now, get one more die. That should be easy to come by since they generally come in pairs. I mean, a lot of people don't even realize there is a singular form of the word dice. But we don't want matching dice. We want dice that have some obvious dissimilarity. We'll go with size. We want to know if size really does matter.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Imagine we have one normal sized die, the kind you'd find in any casino, and a one of those smaller die like you might find in a travel sized game of some sort. What we are going to study is whether size has an effect on how often the number six is rolled. You can already guess how we are going to do it. We are going to roll the dice a whole lot of times and tally our results. Since I'm not about to sit here and roll dice until my arm hurts, I'll make up some numbers.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"> Number of rolls: 100<br />Large die sixes: 15<br />Small die sixes: 18</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Already, given the data we have, it wouldn't take an epidemiologist to figure out that it is looking like you want a small die if you want to roll a six, or a larger die if you don't. To put it in epidemiological terms, we have the data to calculate the </span><i>relative risk</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> or </span><i>risk ratio</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of rolling a six with a particular size of die.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The math is simple. First, we need to determine the risk of rolling a six for each die. Since we rolled each 100 times, the risk for the large die is 15/100 or .15 (15%). Apply the same math to the small die and you get 18%. The </span><i>relative risk</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (how much riskier is a six in a small die over a large die) is .18/.15, which equals 1.2.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">So, in a study that was looking to see if you were at greater risk of rolling a six with a small die rather than a large die, an epidemiologists would state that there is a relative risk (RR) of 1.2, or a 20% greater chance of rolling a six with a small die. Because we were looking at the risk of throwing sixes with the small die, the small die risk was the top number in the division. If we were looking for the large die relative risk, we would have calculated the RR as .15/.18 = .83. That is a relative risk below 1, which means that you have a lower risk of throwing six with a large die. A relative risk of 1.0 would mean there was no difference between the two at all.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Frankly, 20% sounds like pretty good odds, doesn't it? Yet, if you'll remember the part about confidence intervals (how much plus and minus and how sure are we that somewhere in there is the actual risk) you'll realize that we don't have nearly enough information to draw any conclusions. For instance, if we say we want a confidence interval at a 95% confidence level, we might find that our confidence interval tells us that the actual number is somewhere between, say, 0.9 and 1.5. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">That means that, despite the number reported of RR = 1.2 (a 20% greater chance with the small die) the study really shows that we are 95% confident that the small die will throw somewhere between 10% fewer and 20% more sixes than the large die.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Did you catch that? Our study shows absolutely nothing at all, despite reported numbers of a 20% greater chance of throwing a six with a small die. The only conclusion that can be drawn from our study is this: a small die may or may not land with the number six face up more often than a large die. That's all we have.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">But is this relative risk number overblown?</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Relative risk is an interesting beast. Pharmaceutical companies just love to put numbers in terms of relative risk because the numbers are larger than <i>absolute risk</i> (AR). Those of you who feel comfortable with numbers and have been following along closely probably already noticed that the 20% increase we reported seems grossly inflated. The fact is, according to the numbers you can expect to roll only three more sixes with a small die than with a large one. Without resorting to a calculator, I'd estimate that to be somewhere around 3%.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">In other words, there is an increase in sixes of 3% (thee out of one hundred rolls) with the small die. That means that in order to see the effect, statistically speaking that is, we'd need to roll around 33 times. If our game includes fewer rolls than that, we are probably not going to see any sixes benefit from rolling the small die. In epidemiological circles, those 33 rolls are called the <i>number needed to treat</i> or NNT.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">For a quick practical example, let's say a pharmaceutical company has put out a new blood pressure medicine, call Premazine. [Author's note: Premazine is not a real drug. Any resemblance to a real drug is purely coincidental. The numbers quoted are for the purpose of illustration only and are not meant to represent and/or imply actual studies of the effectiveness of any real medication.] They gave this medicine to 500 people and gave a placebo to another 500. Let's say that out of the group that got the medicine, 25 showed significant reduction in blood pressure. In the group that got the placebo, 15 showed a reduction in blood pressure. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">That means that the medication seemed to have a positive effect on 5% of those who took it. Hardly a number that will get bottles of the stuff moving off the shelf, especially when you hear all of the potential side effects!</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">To get a number that will move some product, they will use the relative risk or, in this case it's inverse, the relative risk <i>reduction</i>. Out of the medicated group, 5% (.05) saw a reduction of blood pressure while 3% (.03) saw a reduction while only <i>thinking</i> they took the medication. Just put the medicine number on top of the division and you get .05 / .03, a whopping 1.67 or 67%! Now there is a number a marketing department can sink its teeth into. The sales pitch will probably read something like this:</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"> Clinical trials have shown that taking Premazine resulted in as much as a 67% reduction in high blood pressure over taking no medication at all.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Boy howdy, that sure sounds impressive. If you didn't know anything at all about statistics, you might even be impressed enough to beg your doctor to prescribe Premazine before you keel over and die. But before you go running to your doctor, stop and think about what that 67% really represents. Out of the 1,000 people in the study, there was only a 2% difference in how many got better taking the drug as opposed to how many just got better. That means that the number of people that will have to take that drug before the statistics kick in and one of them gets a reduction in blood pressure is 500, our number needed to treat (NNT).</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">That's right. A 67% reduction in this case really means that out of 500 people taking the drug, only one will see some positive effects (statistically speaking) while 499 will see nothing but side effects, not the least of which is the lightening of their wallets. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Alright, now you know enough about epidemiological studies to look at some numbers and actually make sense of them. I'm sure quite a few people reading this never thought they could say that! Let's try out our new skills.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Oh wait, there is one more thing you should know. Despite some truly horrific studies by epidemiologists over the years, please don't think that all epidemiological studies are junk science--they aren't--or that these people have no standards. They do. They also have rules of thumb that they go by to determine if a study is likely to have any validity at all that will be helpful to us later on.</p> <ol><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">A relative risk below 2 is unlikely to show a valid result, regardless of the confidence interval. A relative risk of at least 3 is preferred, 4 is best. Many peer reviewed journals, like the New England Journal of Medicine, would not typically publish a study without a relative risk of at least 3.</p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Confidence level should be 95%. A lower confidence level is a sign that someone is cooking the numbers to prove something that isn't there.</p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">If the confidence interval includes 1.0, as our dice study did (0.9 – 1.5), there is no statistical significance at all. We've got nothing.</p> </li></ol> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Just to recap before moving on, here are the terms we have learned:</p> <ul><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Biological plausibility</p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Confounders</p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Confidence interval / confidence level</p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Relative risk or risk ratio</p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Absolute risk</p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Number needed to treat</p> </li></ul> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">Next episode: The case against smoking (and mirrors)</p> <div style="border: 1px solid gray; position: absolute; left: 0px; top: 0px; width: 16px; height: 16px; background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,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); 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background-repeat: no-repeat; background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); cursor: pointer; z-index: 65535; display: none;"></div>Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com429tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-15267626532992359992008-06-14T20:52:00.000-07:002008-06-15T19:41:37.632-07:00<p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold;">The assassination of Robert Kennedy, Part 5 -- Sirhan Sirhan</span></span><br /></p><p>The 1966 Simon and Garfunkel album 'Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme', ends with a haunting track titled 7 O'clock News/Silent Night. On that track, the pair sing a pretty, though straight-forward, rendition of Silent Night as a sound clip from a 7 o'clock news broadcast plays in the background. The broadcast includes the following:</p> <blockquote> <p>In Los Angeles today comedian Lenny Bruce died of what was believed to be an overdose of narcotics. Bruce was 42 years old.</p> <p>Dr. Martin Luther King says he does not intend to cancel plans for an open housing march Sunday into the Chicago suburb of Cicero. Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogleby asked King to call off the march and the Police in Cicero said they would ask the national guard to be called out if it is held. King, now in Atlanta, Georgia, plans to return to Chicago Tuesday.</p> <p>In Chicago, Richard Speck, accused murderer of nine student nurses, was brought before a grand jury today for indictment. The nurses were found stabbed and strangled in their Chicago apartment.</p> <p>In Washington the atmosphere was tense today as a special subcommittee of the House committee on un-American activities continued its probe into anti-Vietnam war protests. Demonstrators were forcibly evicted from the hearings when they began chanting anti-war slogans.</p> <p>Former Vice President Richard Nixon says that unless there is a substantial increase in the present war effort in Vietnam, the U.S. should look forward to five more years of war. In a speech before the convention of the veterans of foreign wars in New York, Nixon also said opposition to the war in this country is the greatest single weapon working against the U.S.</p> </blockquote> <p>We know the news broadcast was made August 3rd, 1966 because that is the day Lenny Bruce died. Just two days earlier, Charles Whitman had climbed to the observation deck of the administration building on the University of Texas Austin campus and began a 96 minute reign of terror with a sniper rifle. Two months later, on October 30, 1966, Cheri Jo Bates would be found dead, her neck sliced so deeply that she was nearly decapitated, on the campus of Riverside City College. The murder would later be linked with the Zodiac, though his particular reign of terror would officially begin about three years later. The Riverside Police made the link, noting the similarity between the Bates murder and the Zodiac killing at Lake Berryessa in Napa County September 27, 1969.</p> <p>Earlier that year, on April 30, 1966, Anton LaVey ritualistically shaved his head and formally declared the founding of the Church of Satan and that day as Year One, Anno Satanas - the year of Satan. Given all of the killing that year, he may have had a point.</p> <p>The Zodiac wasn't the only one to find his killing stride in 1969. On August 8 and 9 of that year, the Manson "family" committed the famous Tate/LaBianca murders. The combination of the mind numbing gruesomeness of those murders along with the fact that they involved a very beautiful and popular actress, Sharon Tate, has tended to overshadow the other strangeness that went on around the Los Angeles area at the time. The LAPD would find themselves investigating a total of 29 homicides in just four days!</p> <p>1969 also saw the release of the song The Age of Aquarius, recorded by The Fifth Dimension, stay in the number one position on the Billboard Hot 100 for six weeks. The Age of Aquarius was a proto-New Age sort of hippie idea that was largely promoted by San Francisco based astrologer and Gay Liberation leader Gavin Arthur. His full name was actually Chester Alan Arthur III. The similarity to the name of the 21st President of the United States is no coincidence. Gavin Arthur was his great-grandson. On an interesting note, Gavin Arthur's great-grandfather was the Vice President under James Garfield until an assassin's bullet made him President. On a bizarre coincidence note, Gavin Arthur is said to have predicted the assassination of John Kennedy before he even entered office. Go figure.</p> <p>The Age of Aquarius idea would figure prominently in the Santa Cruz mountains, just south of San Francisco, where the Flower Children, disenchanted with the Haight-Ashbury, district would go to set up communes and grow marijuana. These same Flower Children were closely associated with the goings-on in Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles around the same time, at least in terms of being considered a part of the same cultural movement. What is curious is that while the Los Angeles area was seeing veritable blood baths, the San Francisco area would become the spawning ground for serial killers, not to mention the home of the People's Temple. To quote from Dave McGowan's brilliantly researched book, Programmed to Kill,</p> <blockquote> <p>To briefly recap, no fewer than six serial killers/mass murders--Charles Manson, Stanley Baker, Edmund Kemper, Herbert Mullin, John Lindley Frazier, and the Zodiac--were all spawned from the Santa Cruz/San Francisco metropolitan area in a span of just over four years, at a time when 'serial killers' were a rare enough phenomenon that they hadn't yet acquired a name. And another serial killer was said to be at work not far away during the same time frame. As [Ted] Bundy chronicler Richard Larsen recounts, the bodies of at least fourteen young women and girls were found, nude and with their belongings missing, in Northern California between December 1969 and December 1973. In the immediate vicinity of each of the bodies "was found an elaborate witchcraft symbol of twigs and rocks." Remarkably enough, the crimes collectively attributed to these men did not even account for all the ritualized homicides that occurred in the Bay Area during that time. For example, the murder of Fred Bennett, the captain of the Oakland chapter of the Black Panthers whose mutilated remains were found scattered in the Santa Cruz hills, was never solved. And many of the young students who were reported missing from local campuses were never found, either dead or alive, and were therefore never listed as homicide victims.</p> </blockquote> <p>It is interesting to note that Ronald Reagan held the office of Governor of California between the years of 1966 and 1974. During those years, he would completely dismantle the California Mental Health System and turn mental health patients out into the streets.</p> <p>Notice in the above quote that Fred Bennett's mutilated remains were found scattered in the Santa Cruz hills. I would leave open the possibility that Bennett was killed in a fit of rage. Rumor has it he had an affair with Bobby Seale's wife while Seale was in jail. However, something just doesn't feel right about the killing being an inside job. The Panthers were not known for that kind of behavior. Admittedly, the Panthers were armed and militant. They had a good reason for it, though. They had suffered at the hands of an armed police force that thought nothing of killing black people and walking away with a shrug of the shoulders. One could easily imagine a police officer in Oakland, after killing 16 year-old Bobby Hutton, unarmed and with his hands in the air, brushing the whole thing off with a disgusting remark like, "No big deal, just a dead nigger."</p> <p>As a matter of fact, according to Terry Cotton, a Black Panther member who was there that day, the police did make statements like that. As he wrote on the website It's About Time, the police made statements like, "you niggers just lost Martin Luther King and if you make one move we will not hesitate to blow your heads off." Charming.</p> <p>What the Black Panthers actually stood for was positive action to make life in the black community in the U.S. better, through programs such as the Free Breakfast for Children Program, which started in January, 1969 at St. Augustine's Church in Oakland, California, then spread across the country. It is because of that program, and what the Panthers really stood for, that I point out the killing of Fred Bennett. Following Anton LaVey's declaration of 1966 being Year One Anno Satanas, it seemed as if what could well be described as a satanic rage was let loose in the U.S., much of it focused on those who worked for peace.</p> <p>Before we return to the story of Bobby Kennedy's assassination, I'd like to point out one other very curious case of a serial killer. This one was not in California but, rather, in Texas. His name was Henry Lee Lucas. Lucas claimed that he had been responsible for literally hundreds and murders, that he worshiped Satan and was part of a Florida Everglades cult called The Hand of Death. There is some controversy over whether Lucas was telling the truth or just saying these things for the attention he would receive. Whichever is the case, Lucas was clearly not the sort of guy you'd want your daughter dating.</p> <p>Lucas was sentenced to death in Texas. His sentence was to be carried out under then Governor, now President George Bush. Bush, as is well known, holds the U.S. record for the death penalty, having presided over a grand total of 152 deaths. His unwillingness to commute the death penalty to life imprisonment is the stuff of legends. He refused to commute the sentence of an octogenarian woman who had killed her chronically abusive husband. He refused to commute the sentence of a mental retarded man who was, by Texas law, not eligible for the death penalty. According to Tucker Carlson, conservative journalist and the last person you'd imagine making this stuff up (aside from someone like Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly), Bush even mocked Karla Faye Tucker when he was asked about her interview with Larry King. According to Carlson:</p> <blockquote> <p>In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, a number of protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Karla Faye Tucker. "Did you meet with any of them?" I ask. Bush whips around and stares at me. "No, I didn't meet with any of them", he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. "I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with Tucker, though. He asked her real difficult questions like, 'What would you say to Governor Bush?'" "What was her answer?" I wonder. "'Please,'" Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "'don't kill me.'" I must look shocked - ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel - because he immediately stops smirking.</p> </blockquote> <p>In fact, out of a total of 153 death sentences that crossed Governor Bush's desk, exactly one was commuted to life in prison. That one was, if you hadn't guessed already, Henry Lee Lucas.</p> <p>That, my friends, has got to make you scratch your head and wonder just how wide this web really is.</p> <p>The California death toll continued to climb well into the 1970's with Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, known as the Hillside Stranglers, allegedly killing prostitutes in Los Angeles. I say allegedly because, as is the case with so many of these things, there was quite a bit of contradictory evidence. Neither of these two were exactly stand-up guys, so getting a jury to believe their guilt wouldn't be difficult. They probably were actually closely involved. The problem is, many people gave eye witness accounts of seeing a man who did not fit the description of either of them. And that is a common element in case after case. Someone who's life history and rap sheet make them an easy fall guy takes the blame for everything while others walk away.</p> <p>There were two witnesses that saw Judith Ann Miller, murdered on October 31, 1977, get into a car with a man just before her death. The first witness who, interestingly, had worked as the subject of a stage hypnotist, described the man as black with light skin. The other witness was a bounty hunter named Marcus Camden, whose description of the car definitely did not match Bianchi's car. He described the driver as dark with curly hair.</p> <p>Why we care about conflicting reports of an abduction and murder that happened nine years after the RFK assassination is this: after Camden gave his description of the car and the driver, one of the LAPD investigators on the case had him checked into Cedars-Sinai Hospital for tests. That is a strange enough thing for an investigator to do with a crime witness. Even stranger, though, is that Camden much later altered his testimony by positively identifying Angelo Buono. This happened while Camden was a voluntary resident at a state psychiatric hospital in Indiana.</p> <p>Now, here is the weird and coincidental part of it all. The hospital Camden voluntarily checked himself into was Richmond State Hospital, in Richmond, Indiana. In case you don't remember from Part 3, Richmond just happens to be the home of that most notorious CIA agent Dan Mitrione, and the founder of The People's Temple, Jim Jones.</p> <p>Now, back to our story.</p> <p><span class="BoldGrey">Sirhan Sirhan</span></p> <table align="center"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><a linkindex="255" href="http://www.sott.net/image/image/9964/sirhan.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.sott.net/image/image/9964/medium/sirhan.jpg" alt="Sirhan Sirhan" title="Click to enlarge" border="0" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tiny" align="center">©Unknown</td></tr><tr><td class="caption" align="center">Sirhan Bishara Sirhan</td></tr></tbody></table> <p>Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was born March 19, 1944 in Jerusalem. Three years later, the state of Israel was created, turning Sirhan's childhood, along with many others, into a living hell. According to interviews with Sirhan and his family, Sirhan was only 4 years old when he first witnessed a bomb leave "the street strewn with the bloody, mutilated bodies of Arab victims." His childhood went downhill from there. He remembers seeing an explosion that resulted in "a little girl's leg blown off, and the blood spurting from below the knee as though from a faucet." His mother, Mary, and brother, Adel, remember Sirhan once screaming as he ran into the family apartment carrying a bucket half full of water with a human hand floating in it.</p> <p>On top of this daily horror, Sirhan was regularly beaten and abused by his father. His father had been witnessed many times beating Sirhan with his hand and with sticks, calling Sirhan "too emotional." The family managed to emigrate to the United States in 1956. After seven months, Sirhan's father abandoned the family there and returned to the Middle East.</p> <p>In an interview with documentary filmmaker Shane O'Sullivan for his film RFK Must Die, Sirhan's brother Munir describes Sirhan as being an incredibly gentle soul, the sort who would literally lead a fly out the door of the house rather than kill it. His career goal was to be a United Nations translator until, inexplicably, he suddenly found an interest in horses around 1965 and decided he wanted to be a jockey. That dream ended in September of 1966 when Sirhan fell, causing an injury to his head and the loss of nerve around horses that is required of a jockey.</p> <p>Following his fall from the horse, Sirhan's personality seemed to change. The once sociable Sirhan became something of a recluse. In 1967, Sirhan mysteriously disappeared for three months without telling his family where he had gone. When he returned, he had developed a strong interest in the occult.</p> <p>No one has ever been able to prove or even produce direct evidence of Sirhan being a victim of the CIA's MKULTRA mind control program. What we do know of Sirhan is that he would be an ideal candidate for hypnotic suggestion and the sort of mind control that the CIA claimed they only investigated with MKULTRA but, most assuredly, actually practiced. A childhood filled with shocking violence combined with an abusive father left Sirhan an almost uniquely talented hypnotic subject by virtue of the fact that dissociation had become a well established defense mechanism for him. This was noted by Dr. Bernard Diamond, who was called to hypnotize Sirhan in his jail cell following the assassination in the hope of eliciting a remembrance of the events and a confession from Sirhan. Diamond noted that Sirhan achieved a deep trance almost instantaneously, suggesting that Sirhan had been hypnotized many times before.</p> <p>While under a trance, Sirhan was asked to climb the bars of his cell like a monkey. He dutifully obeyed. He was asked to recreate pages from his journal. Again, he dutifully obeyed, writing over and over, "RFK must die." He could remember every detail of that evening, including talking to the woman in the polka dot dress, but could not be induced to remember actually shooting Bobby Kennedy. Diamond even attempted implanting the memory in Sirhan's mind via a post-hypnotic suggestion. Even that failed with this amazingly adept hypnotic subject.</p> <table align="center"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><a linkindex="256" href="http://www.sott.net/image/image/9963/sirhan_sketch.png" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.sott.net/image/image/9963/medium/sirhan_sketch.png" alt="Sirhan hypnotized" title="Click to enlarge" border="0" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tiny" align="center">©Unknown</td></tr><tr><td class="caption" align="center">Sketch of Sirhan being hypnotized in his jail cell. Even under deep trance, he could not remember details of the shooting</td></tr></tbody></table> <p>The fact that Sirhan had disappeared for three months in 1967, a time in which he was working with horses and was, according to witnesses, likely spending time with Jerry Owen, puts Sirhan in a position to have been intensively worked on by a hypno-programmer. The fact that Jerry Owen and William Bryan, the self-confessed CIA mind control expert, both worked the same fundamentalist preaching circuit, along with the fact that Sirhan seemingly makes reference to Albert DeSalvo, the alleged Boston Strangler and one of Bryan's most famous subjects, in his journal would make the connection between Bryan and Sirhan not unlikely at all.</p> <p>George Plimpton, the journalist famous for, amongst other things, donning a Detroit Lions football jersey and actually taking part in a NFL game, was one of the men who helped subdue Sirhan the night of the assassination. He described Sirhan as having a very peaceful look in his eyes and a sickly smile on his face. Rosey Grier, part of the "fearsome foursome" which was arguably one of the best defensive lines in professional football history, had a difficult time getting the gun out of Sirhan's hand. This peaceful, detached look and the amazing feats of strength Sirhan displayed are classic signs of a deep hypnotic trance.</p> <p>So, it appears quite possible that Sirhan could well have been hypno-programmed by William Bryan, having been brought to Bryan by fellow fundamentalist preacher Jerry Owen. Even if those links in the web were to be proven, the question would still remain as to whether Sirhan actually fired the bullets that killed Bobby Kennedy.</p> <p>As Kennedy entered the pantry area of the Ambassador Hotel he stopped to shake hands with staff members who lined up to meet him. The last person he was to shake hands with was busboy Juan Romero, who's face has been memorialized cradling Kennedy's head after having placed a rosary in his hand following the shooting. According to multiple witnesses, including Romero, Kennedy had finished shaking Romero's hand and was moving on when Sirhan appeared, raised his .22 caliber Iver Johnson eight shot revolver and fired two of those shots toward Bobby Kennedy. The first shot seems to have hit Paul Schrade in the head. In fact, Bobby Kennedy seemed to have been well aware of the fact that Schrade had been hit as multiple witnessed claimed that, while on the floor in a pool of his own blood, Bobby asked, "How is Paul?" If Schrade had not been hit first and Bobby hadn't witnessed that fact, it seems very unlikely that Bobby would have been asking about him particularly. I have spoken with Schrade, personally. He has no memory of seeing Bobby getting shot, giving further credence to the idea that Schrade was shot first.</p> <p>Three bullets entered Bobby Kennedy's body. A fourth passed through his clothing. The bullet that killed him was fired into the right side of his head at point blank range, as evidenced by the power burns on his skull. The bullet that passed through his clothing was also shot at point blank range as evidenced by the powder burns at the entrance point of the bullet. Yet, not a single witness at the time of the shooting would put Sirhan any closer than about 1 ½ feet from Kennedy. Even if, as Dan Moldea has hypothesized, Sirhan was able to fire point blank into Kennedy's head due to Kennedy being pushed by the crowd toward Sirhan following the first shot, we would still be left with the inexplicable point blank shot through his jacket.</p> <p>We are also left to ponder the question of why Sirhan would have been in the pantry, of all places, waiting to murder Bobby Kennedy. Kennedy was not originally scheduled to pass through the pantry. The decision was made at the last minute to go through the pantry, apparently by aide Fred Dutton. There is no way that Sirhan should have known that he would be able to shoot Bobby Kennedy in the pantry, yet that is where he had placed himself. And, according to John Pilger - a man who has been very outspoken in his criticism of Kennedy and, so, would seem to clearly have no vested interest in promoting a conspiracy theory concerning the assassination - stated in an interview with Democracy Now that he and other reporters were told before the decision would have been known that Kennedy would go through the pantry that the kitchen staff had reported Sirhan's presence in the pantry area.</p> <p>As it happened, however, there is one recording of the assassination, an audio recording, that was inadvertently made and has survived to this day.</p> <p>Stanislaw Pruszynski was a freelance reporter covering the Kennedy victory in California that night. His Telefunken Model 4001 tape recorder was on the podium as Kennedy spoke his last words in public, "Now it's on to Chicago and let's win there." As Kennedy was lead into the pantry area, Pruszynski gathered up his recording gear and followed, slightly behind the entourage. Fortunately, for the sake of historical evidence, Pruszynski forgot to turn off his recorder, leaving us with the only record of the actual shooting.</p> <p>Unfortunately, Pruszynski's recording is of very poor quality. His recorder was not professional grade and he was approximately forty feet from the scene when the shooting began. A casual listening of the recording reveals what sounds like eight shots being fired. That would be completely in line with the official account of Sirhan being the lone gunman and firing all eight shots from his Iver Johnson revolver. No doubt, it is because of this apparent confirmation of the official account that the recording was allowed to reach public hands. However, a more careful and scientific examination of the recording reveals something else entirely.</p> <p>Philip Van Praag was given permission from the California State Archives to make duplicate copies of the Pruszynski recording for analysis. The very thorough work he conducted to verify the authenticity of the recording, calibrating his tests using an identical model of recorder and precisely timing the moment of the apparent gun shots recorded by matching Pruszynski's recording to overlapping timestamped network video is covered in his book <em>An Open & Shut Case</em>, coauthored with past President of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Robert Joling. What Van Praag and Joling found shoots holes (pardon the pun) with solid forensic evidence in the official story of the assassination.</p> <p>Van Praag's analysis reveals a total of thirteen shots that can be positively identified on the tape. It is possible that there were more, but the noise of the crowd following the shooting would rule out identification of them. Two pairs of shots, shots 3-4 and 7-8, come only 149 milliseconds and 122 milliseconds apart, respectively. To put this in perspective, the world record for quick shooting is 140 milliseconds between shots. That record was set using a competition grade firearm. The Iver Johnson Sirhan used was a very cheap, heavy triggered revolver. In tests conducted by Van Praag and Joling on a firing range with a world class shooter firing a revolver identical to Sirhan's was 366 milliseconds between shots. That is three times slower than the pacing of shots 7 and 8 in the Pruszynski recording.</p> <p>Already, with the identification of thirteen shots fired, we can see that it is not possible for Sirhan to be the sole shooter that night. From the data gleaned from the recording, it would appear that Sirhan fired eight shots and someone else fired five. The next question would be, does the count of thirteen shots make sense given the other evidence? It does.</p> <p>As mentioned before, the LAPD destroyed critical pieces of evidence before they could be critically examined by experts. Key amongst that evidence were pieces of a door jamb that had clear bullet holes in it and two tiles from the drop ceiling which had also clearly been pierced by bullets. While the destruction of that evidence made any direct analysis impossible, enough information from the evidence collection was left intact to correlate with Van Praag's findings.</p> <p>Remember that three bullets entered Kennedy's body, all from behind, while Sirhan was shooting from in front of the Senator. Another bullet passed through Kennedy's jacket, fired from point blank range. It was clear from analysis at the crime scene that two bullets entered the ceiling space and one ricocheted out. The other was never recovered. At least, not officially.</p> <p>According to the official account, naturally, the two bullets that entered the ceiling space were fired from Sirhan's gun. Even a cursory analysis of that account reveals how ridiculous it is. Sirhan was subdued after firing only two shots, one of which hit Paul Schrade in the head. His remaining eight shots were fired with multiple men holding his hand against the steam table in the pantry. It would have been impossible for him to have twisted his hand upward enough to shoot into the ceiling. A deeper analysis virtually proves the presence of a second gunman.</p> <p>The police records of the crime scene show detailed analysis of exactly where everyone was standing as Sirhan began to fire. Reenactments of the crime, placement of the victims and eye witness testimony were all used to precisely mark the position of Sirhan as he began firing. Of course, his positioning in the LAPD analysis necessarily has him close enough to potentially fire at least one shot at point blank range. And therein lies the rub, because police photographs taken at the crime scene also show the precise location of the bullet ridden ceiling panels in relation to Sirhan.</p> <p><strong><em>The panels were behind Sirhan.</em></strong></p> <p>In other words, it was physically impossible for Sirhan to have both shot Bobby Kennedy from point blank range and, while subdued, fire bullets into the ceiling where bullets had clearly penetrated. <strong>There was another gunman.</strong> Further, the math works out perfectly. Van Praag found thirteen shots recorded on the Pruszynski tape. Eight shots were fired from Sirhan's gun, three bullets entered Kennedy from behind and two bullets entered the ceiling <em>behind Sirhan</em> - a total of thirteen bullets.</p> <p>A frequency analysis of those thirteen shots also shows the grouping of eight from one gun and five from another to be correct. Van Praag developed a specialized forensic technique that he called <em>frequency selected integrated loudness envelope analysis</em>. In essence, what Van Praag did was to look at the sound of the gun shots at discrete frequencies (in this case, you can think of frequency a bit like a note on a piano, each note being a distinct frequency) to get a picture of the loudness of the shot sounds at each frequency. What he found was that in exactly five of the shots, including one each of the doubles, the volume of the sound noticeably jumped up at 1,600 Hz - Hz, or Hertz, being a measure of frequency. So, here we still have a group of eight shots that display one set of frequency characteristics and five that display another.</p> <p>Test firing a weapon identical to Sirhan's and recording that firing with various equipment, including a recorder identical to Pruszynski's did not reveal a spike at 1,600 Hz. However, they did find a .22 handgun that showed exactly that frequency characteristic. They also found something else interesting about that particular firearm: it's rifling characteristics.</p> <table align="center"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><a linkindex="257" href="http://www.sott.net/image/image/9962/rifling.png" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.sott.net/image/image/9962/medium/rifling.png" alt="Gun rifling" title="Click to enlarge" border="0" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tiny" align="center">©Unknown</td></tr><tr><td class="caption" align="center">Rifling in the barrel of a gun and the corresponding marks left on the bullet</td></tr></tbody></table> <p>Rifling refers to helical grooves cut into the inside of the barrel of a gun that will cause a bullet to spin. The spin imparted adds stability to the bullet and improves accuracy, much the way a quarterback will put spin on a football as he throws it. In general, the rifling of each make of firearm is unique. This makes it often possible (assuming the bullet isn't too damaged) to identify the make of gun that fired a particular bullet by comparing the rifling characteristics with the known characteristics of various firearms. Typically, this is most difficult to do with .22 caliber bullets, yielding an accuracy of only 20-30%, which is why the .22 is the preferred weapon of professional killers. It has the least traceability. Still, 20-30% of the time it is.</p> <p>The distance between the grooves in a bullet due to the rifling of an Iver Johnson Cadet Model 55-SA, the gun Sirhan used, is .054". At least until 1975, the Crime Laboratory Information Service, or CLIS, reported that the only handgun with those rifling characteristics was that particular model Iver Johnson. However, by 1987, the CLIS database had been updated and now included a second handgun with precisely the same rifling characteristics. It happened to also be a handgun that produced a frequency anomaly at 1,600 Hz. That gun is a Harrington & Richardson (H&R) Model 922, a nine shot .22 caliber revolver.</p> <p>To save you the time of looking back, allow me to reproduce for you here the text of the sales slip for the gun Thane Eugene Cesar claimed to have sold to Jim Yoder three months prior to the assassination of Bobby Kennedy but actually sold three months after the assassination. "On the day of Sept. 6, 1968 I received $15.00 from Jim Yolder [sic]. The item involved is a H&R pistol 9 shot serial no. Y 13332. Thane E. Cesar."</p> <p>Before we close the matter of the Bobby Kennedy assassination for now, we need to tie up one glaring loose end. In part one, I said that there was evidence pointing to the possibility that Sirhan was firing blanks the night of the shooting. Indeed, that evidence does exist. Yet, that evidence is clearly contradicted by the audio analysis made by Philip Van Praag. For the number of bullets fired that night to correspond to the number of shots he can identify on the Pruszynski tape, Sirhan must have been firing live rounds.</p> <p>In short, the evidence for the blanks is this. It has been shown that Sirhan had spent several hours firing at a shooting range the day Kennedy was shot. The bullets recovered from the scene of the crime were copper coated bullets. Hence, the ballistics expert employed by the LAPD, DeWayne Wolfer, to examine Sirhan's gun and the bullets found also fired copper coated bullets in his test firing.</p> <p>On June 11, 1968, Wolfer noted in his Analyzed Evidence Report a gun with the serial number H18602 as Sirhan's gun and the gun he had test fired. Later evidence documents would assign a different serial number to Sirhan's gun. According to Wolfer, the original H18602 serial number was simply a clerical error.</p> <p>A July 1968, LAPD teletype tells an interesting story of bizarre coincidence and happenstance, however. It reads as follows: BUR FILES REVEAL A .22 CAL IVER JOHNSON SERIAL H18602 REPORTED DESTROYED 7-00-68 BY PD LOS ANGELES. In other words, an Iver Johnson revolver with the precise serial number that Wolfer claimed was Sirhan's gun in a "clerical error" was destroyed the following month, a full nine months prior to Sirhan's trial.</p> <p>When Sirhan's gun was reexamined by a panel of ballistics experts appointed by Superior Court Judge Robert Wenke in 1975, they found the inside of the barrel heavily coated with lead, which would have obfuscated any identifying marks. To clear the lead, they fired two copper coated bullets first. Given that the bullets recovered from the Ambassador were copper coated and Sirhan had definitely spent hours firing at a range that day, it would be logical to conclude that Sirhan had been firing uncoated bullets at the range and only blanks the night of the shooting. If he had fired any of the copper coated bullets, the lead would have been cleared from the inside of the barrel of his gun.</p> <p>There is one answer that matches all of the available evidence. That is simply that the gun provided for test firing by the Wenke experts was simply not Sirhan's gun, that Sirhan's gun had been destroyed, as evidenced by the LAPD teletype above, along with other critical evidence, long ago.</p> <p>And that ends our story about the assassination of Robert Kennedy. There is far more to tell, but the fact is, there are more important things to discover than who, specifically, murdered Bobby Kennedy on June 5, 1968. I would certainly hope that the man who almost assuredly fired the shot that killed Bobby, Thane Eugene Cesar, could one day be extradited from his current home in the Philippines and brought to trial for this horrific crime. But that won't change the fact that the real criminals, the masterminds behind the assassination of Bobby, John, Martin Luther King and many others, are still at large and will likely never be brought to justice.</p> <p>Even if some of them were brought to court and convicted, justice would not be served. There is no justice in either locking up or putting to death a murderer or a conspirator in a murder. More will follow in their footsteps. The carnage, the lies and the manipulation will continue. No new evidence, no new trial and no new elected leader will change the fact that these murders have been given tacit approval by us, through our silence, inaction and acquiescence to continue in their murderous ways in perpetuity.</p> <p>On September 11, 2001 they committed their biggest political assassination to date. Despite a wealth of information that contradicted the official story, we remained silent. We accepted an absurd verdict, turned our heads and told ourselves that everything would just work itself out. Emboldened, they moved on to an even bigger political assassination. They blatantly and demonstrably lied, forging intelligence documents to justify the invasion of a defenseless country, namely Iraq. Again, after a brief whimper of protest, we shut up and continued on with our lives.</p> <p>The lies and the killing continue, and will continue to continue. Soon, the victims will be you and your children if you dare to utter the obvious truth. There will be no one to come to your defense. Any review of the evidence after the fact will mean as much to you as this series of articles has meant to Bobby Kennedy.</p> <p>Barack Obama will not change the course of this country. John McCain will certainly not change the course of this country. No leader, even another Bobby Kennedy, can do a single thing to change the course of this country. There is only one hope, and it is a slim one given the evidence of the past several decades. We, the citizens of the U.S., will have to pull our heads from the sand, or some other place where the sun doesn't shine, and look the truth of what we have become straight in the eye.</p> <p>We must acknowledge certain unassailable facts. First and foremost amongst those is the fact, well established in psychological circles yet virtually ignored in public discourse, that there is a portion of our population that is genetically without conscience. That difference makes them capable of performing acts of unthinkable cruelty, including torture, child abuse and mind control, while maintaining a facade of seemingly complete normalcy.</p> <p>Another key to the puzzle is the realization that their influence spreads far wider than we have imagined or would really like to allow ourselves to believe. This brief overview of Bobby Kennedy's assassination is only emblematic of a situation that is typical, rather than extraordinary. A nearly identical story can be told from a thousand different starting places, from alleged "serial killers" and child abuse/pornography rings, right up through the events of 9/11 and all that this Pathocracy* has been able to achieve in its wake.</p> <p>This web stretches through every part of society. The LAPD is notorious for its cover-ups and abuse, but they are hardly alone. The web includes police departments, judges, politicians, celebrities and corporate executives from all over the country and all over the world. What works in favor of keeping this web, and the unbelievable depravity of the actions of its inhabitants, hidden is the incredulity any normal person feels when faced with even a hint of its size.</p> <p>It is not even remotely possible to see the web for what it is without critical pieces of the puzzle. Yet, if we can't see the web, we <em>will </em>become the spider's next victims. This is the end of the Bobby Kennedy portion of the series, but there is more to come...things you'll have to see for yourself to believe.</p> <p><strong>*</strong> <em>Pathocracy (from Gk. patho "disease" + kratos "rule, strength") According to Andrew M. Lobaczewski in his book Political Ponerology, "Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements as well as the accompanying ideologies... and turned them into caricatures of themselves."</em></p>Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com39tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-69850371826386179812008-06-05T01:05:00.000-07:002008-06-05T01:17:03.516-07:00<span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 102);font-size:130%;" >The assassination of Robert Kennedy, Part 4 -- Deeper down the rabbit hole</span><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">In Part 3 we looked at one way in which people, manipulated by beliefs that have been programmed into them throughout their lives, can become unwitting accomplices in a conspiracy. However, that is the soft side of this thing. There is a hard side, too. Many more people that hold positions of trust are very <i>willing</i> accomplices.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">From the Carl Bernstein article <i>CIA and the Media</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, published in Rolling Stone on October 20, 1977,</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.2in;"> “One of the things we always had going for us in terms of enticing reporters,” observed a CIA official who coordinated some of the arrangements with journalists, “was that we could make them look better with their home offices. A foreign correspondent with ties to the Company [the CIA] stood a much better chance than his competitors of getting the good stories.” </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">This is what embedded reporters was all about. The program was an offshoot of a CIA program of using reporters as agents, a secret project begun in the late 1940's called Operation Mockingbird, but with a twist. This program would be carried out in the open. Rather than secretly recruiting key reporters from mass media outlets, virtually every reporter allowed access—nearly 800 of them, by some reports—to the “inside story” of the war would be carefully controlled by military and intelligence agencies. Not only would these reporters look good by getting the “inside” story, they would be bound to show only what the military and intelligence communities would allow for fear of losing their position.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">The rabbit hole goes deeper and deeper. The infiltration of the CIA, recruiting agents and operatives to work covertly for them, touches virtually every aspect of society. An idea like that might be hard to get your head around, but it is in fact well documented. Some have even been surprisingly frank about their association with the CIA. For example, in an editorial for <i>National Review</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> on November 1, 2005, William F. Buckley wrote:</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">When in 1951 I was inducted into the CIA as a deep cover agent, the procedures for disguising my affiliation and my work were unsmilingly comprehensive. It was three months before I was formally permitted to inform my wife what the real reason was for going to Mexico City to live. If, a year later, I had been apprehended, dosed with </span><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">sodium pentothal</span></span></span></span><span style="font-style: normal;">, and forced to give out the names of everyone I knew in the CIA, I could have come up with exactly one name, that of my immediate boss (</span><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">E. Howard Hunt</span></span></span><span style="font-style: normal;">, as it happened). In the passage of time one can indulge in idle talk on spook life. In 1980 I found myself seated next to the </span><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">former president of Mexico</span></span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"> at a ski-area restaurant. What, he asked amiably, had I done when I lived in Mexico? "I tried to undermine your regime, Mr. President." He thought this amusing, and that is all that it was, under the aspect of the heavens.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">It is easy to dismiss someone like Chuck Barris and his </span><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;">Confessions of a Dangerous Mind</span></i></span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"> as mere delusions of a deranged mind (which is possibly the point of the book/movie), but not so with someone of Buckley's stature.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Buckley's admitted boss, E. Howard Hunt (allegedly the spy for whom Tom Cruise's character in </span><i>Mission: Impossible</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, Ethan Hunt, is named) shortly before his death implicated David Atlee Phillips in the assassination of JFK, chronicled in an April 5, 2007 </span><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/13893143/the_last_confessions_of_e_howard_hunt/1"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">Rolling Stone article</span></span></a><span style="font-style: normal;">. He wrote out the cast of characters for his son, Saint John Hunt, putting Lyndon Johnson at the top of the list. David Atlee Phillips worked closely with another CIA operative by the name of David Sanchez Morales. Bradley Ayers, a retired US army captain who had worked closely with Morales, identified him in film of the event at the Ambassador Hotel along with two other know CIA agents. One has to wonder just what someone like Morales would have been doing there that night.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The rabbit hole goes deeper still. As one explores the depth and breadth of CIA involvement in every aspect of culture, one is left with the unnerving feeling that the CIA almost literally </span><i>defines every aspect of culture</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. That, in fact, seems to be their goal. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The best known CIA mind control operation, which involved the well documented torture of hundreds of adults, most notably the patients at Allan Memorial Institute in Canada by Dr. Ewen Cameron, was called MKULTRA. By the time the program was discovered and investigated by Congress, it had allegedly been terminated without positive results. That, at least, is what was claimed by the CIA. What else were they expected to say? What they did to the unwilling participants in MKULTRA was unconscionable and revolting. They were physically tortured, given psychotropic drugs like LSD, hypnotized and forced to listen to countless hours of the same recorded messages over and over, what Cameron called </span><i>psychic driving</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">While MKULTRA allegedly spanned the 1950's and 60's, George Estabrooks, a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard PhD, wrote the following in an April 1971 article for Science Digest.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">One of the most fascinating but dangerous applications of hypnosis is its use in military intelligence. This is a field with which I am familiar though formulating guide lines for the techniques used by the United States in </span><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>two world wars</b></span><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in;">Communication in war is always a headache. Codes can be broken. A professional spy may or may not stay bought. Your own man may have unquestionable loyalty, but his judgment is always open to question.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in;">The "hypnotic courier," on the other hand, provides a unique solution. I was involved in preparing many subjects for this work <b>during World War II</b>. One successful case involved an Army Service Corps Captain whom we'll call George Smith.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in;">Captain Smith had undergone months of training. He was an excellent subject but did not realize it. I had removed from him, by post-hypnotic suggestion, all recollection of ever having been hypnotized.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in;">First I had the Service Corps call the captain to Washington and tell him they needed a report of the mechanical equipment of Division X headquartered in Tokyo. Smith was ordered to leave by jet next morning, pick up the report and return at once. Consciously, that was all he knew, and it was the story he gave to his wife and friends.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in;">Then I put him under deep hypnosis, and gave him -- orally -- a vital message to be delivered directly on his arrival in Japan to a certain colonel -- let's say his name was Brown -- of military intelligence. Outside of myself, Colonel Brown was the only person who could hypnotize Captain Smith. This is "locking." I performed it by saying to the hypnotized Captain: "Until further orders from me, only Colonel Brown and I can hypnotize you. We will use a signal phrase 'the moon is clear.' Whenever you hear this phrase from Brown or myself you will pass instantly into deep hypnosis." When Captain Smith re-awakened, he had no conscious memory or what happened in trance. All that he was aware of was that he must head for Tokyo to pick up a division report.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in;">On arrival there, Smith reported to Brown, who hypnotized him with the signal phrase. Under hypnosis, Smith delivered my message and received one to bring back. Awakened, he was given the division report and returned home by jet. There I hypnotized him once more with the signal phrase, and he spieled off Brown's answer that had been dutifully tucked away in his unconscious mind.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in;">The system is virtually foolproof. As exemplified by this case, the information was "locked" in Smith's unconscious for retrieval by the only two people who knew the combination. The subject had no conscious memory of what happened, so could not spill the beans. No one else could hypnotize him even if they might know the signal phrase.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Estabrooks is claiming—and keep in mind that this is no “conspiracy theorist” saying this to a bunch of tin foil hat wearers, but a Harvard PhD and Rhodes scholar publishing in Science Digest—that the techniques for hypnotically getting someone to do something with absolutely no recollection of having done it were already perfected during World War One! While the example he gives is from WWII, he says that these are techniques used by the United States in </span><i>two world wars</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">It is easy to see how it could well be the case that the CIA did indeed, as they claimed, end MKULTRA in the 60's. By that time, they likely had all of the data they needed from that experiment. Today, what they are involved with is even worse: children.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">There are claims that more than 200,000 children disappear without a trace in the United States each year. The number is impossible to verify because, bizarrely (or curiously), the FBI does not keep track of this statistic. Despite an concerted effort to discredit such stories, the evidence points inescapably and painfully to the fact that ritual abuse is commonplace, not only in the United States but around the world. In countries across the globe, investigations have uncovered pedophilia rings that involve not merely photographs of children engaged in sexual acts, but the torturing, mutilation and killing of children and infants. In many cases, young children have reported being forced to either watch or participate in the murdering of small babies.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Of course, stories like these are nearly impossible to accept. These kinds of things </span><i>must</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> only happen is horror films. Detective Robert Simandl of the Chicago Police Department answer that natural incredulity with this. “It's difficult for us to believe such crimes are occurring, but they are, all over the United States.” But it is not just in the United States. Each time one of these rings is uncovered, high profile political figures are involved. And each time, the perpetrators are either not brought to trial or are given suspended sentences.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Many of these can be linked to the CIA. Their involvement makes sense. Hypnosis, which they have perfected as a means of controlling the mind of another, is a form of </span><i>dissociation</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. Dissociation occurs with everyone. The process of become so engrossed in a book or a movie that you forget your surroundings is a form of dissociation. Some are more prone to dissociate than other, which makes them better hypnotic subjects. One thing that can lead one to be more prone to dissociation is severe childhood trauma.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">In other words, the CIA appears to be abducting children and subjecting them to unthinkable abuse for the purpose of creating hyper-talented hypnotic subjects that can be programmed to do virtually anything.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;">And that brings us to the next part of our story.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><b>The Walking Bible</b></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><span style="">Jerry Owen was a freelance preacher of the bible thumping variety with a long rap sheet (police list of arrests). Owen seems to be one of those sorts that found his way out of trouble with the law by “finding Jesus.” His claim to fame was that he claimed he had memorized the entire Bible, Old Testament and New. For this he gave himself the moniker The Walking Bible, since taken over by that purveyor of fundamentalist fantasy and fear, Jack Van Impe.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><span style="">The night Bobby Kennedy was shot, Owen made a trip to visit the police. That seems like a strange thing for a man with a long rap sheet to do. The story he had to tell was even stranger. Owen claimed that he had picked up Sirhan, RFK's alleged assassin, as a hitchhiker before the assassination. According to Owen, Sirhan was in the market for a horse and Owen had a horse to sell. They agreed on a price of $300. Owen was to deliver the horse for Sirhan to the back of the Ambassador Hotel at 11:00 on the night that, as it turned out, Kennedy was shot.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><span style="">Already, you are probably thinking that Owen was nothing but a nut case trying to get a little free publicity for his “ministry.” That is exactly how the LAPD passed off his story. Unfortunately, Owen was not so easy to dismiss. For one thing, while the claim that Sirhan had wanted to buy a horse from him seems far-fetched and almost random, it betrays a knowledge of Sirhan that Owen should not have had immediately following the assassination. Sirhan did, in fact, make a living working with horses. And when Sirhan was apprehended that night, they found four $100 bills in his pocket, this despite the fact that Sirhan was unemployed at the time. Yet, when Owen arrived at the police station, nothing was known about Sirhan beyond the fact that he had been subdued in the kitchen area of the Ambassador Hotel with a gun in his hand.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><span style="">Owen seemed to know about what would later be reported about that night at the Ambassador., too He claimed that as he drove Sirhan around, Sirhan directed him to stop so that he could talk to a man and women on the corner of Wilshire and Vermont, only a couple of blocks from the Ambassador. The man and woman suspiciously mirrored the story told by Sandy Serrano of the woman in the polka dot dress. But again, this was not a detail Owen should have known at the time he gave his report to the police.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><span style="">While those aspects of Owen's story rang true, others did not. Why, for example, would Sirhan ask Owen to deliver a horse for him to the Ambassador Hotel at 11:00 on an evening when not just one but three political rallies were taking place, and on a night when Sirhan had apparently intended to shoot Bobby Kennedy? Details like this made it easy for the LAPD to simply dismiss Owen as a nut looking for publicity. The problem is, Owen did not seek publicity with his story. If he had wanted publicity, he would have gone to the press, who were all too willing to take any story at the time. Instead, he contacted the police and asked that his name not be used.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><span style="">Owen claims that the day after he made he police report, he received a threatening phone call. “Are you Shepherd? The man with the horses? Keep your motherfucking mouth shut about this horse deal, or else!” Owen's name, of course, was not Shepherd, but his business card read, “SHEPHERD OF THE HILLS, Free Pony Rides for Boys and Girls Who Go To The Church Of Their Choice, Learn a Bible Verse, and Mind Their Parents.”</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><span style="">While Owen claimed that his only acquaintance with Sirhan was picking him up and attempting to sell him a horse, there were witnesses who knew Sirhan that testified they had seen Owen with Sirhan several times well before the assassination. Chief amongst these was Bill Powers.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><span style="">Bill Powers ran Wild Bill's Stables in Santa Ana, California, boarding horses, hiring them out and giving riding lessons. Owen had a home close to Wild Bill's and often visited the stable. When asked in court if he had ever heard Owen use the name Sirhan, Powers replied that he had. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><span style="">Powers had an employee named Johny Beckley who worked breaking horses that belonged to Owen. As Powers would testify, “Well, he didn't like the way Johnny was handling the horses and cowboying around, and he said he had other people at the track and stuff that could handle in the right manner, and the name Sirhan was mentioned.” When asked how he could be certain, he responded, “Well, because it was an unusual name, and then shortly after the I heard Sirhan's name again. And Mr. Sirhan was a horseman too, and that's why I remember.” Other witness corroborated, making for a very high likelihood that while Owen may have picked up Sirhan, he did not do so as a random hitchhiker but as someone with whom he had an ongoing relationship.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><span style="">Keep in mind as we move on that we are looking at a web. The threads that make up this web can seem tenuous and might even seem invisible until the catch the light just right. In many cases, that light comes in the form or realizing that two people in a story have something in common that was not suspected.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><b>William Bryan</b></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><span style="">The journals found in a search of Sirhan's house read like the ramblings of a lunatic. Sirhan himself claimed this. Though he admitted that the writing in the journals was his own, but had absolutely no memory of having written them. Under hypnosis, however, Sirhan would recreate the writing in the journals, compulsively writing over and over, “RFK must die,” giving credence to the idea that Sirhan actually wrote the journals under a hypnotic trance.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><span style="">While much of the writing in those journals is repetitive, there is a curious line written once that seems to bear no relationship to anything else around it. Seemingly inexplicably, Sirhan wrote, “God help me...please help me. Salvo Di Di Salvo Die S Salvo.” While we can't know for certain what it means, one likely explanation is that it is a reference to Albert DeSalvo, the infamous Boston Strangler.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><span style="">The Boston Strangler case was solved by use of hypnosis. Attorney F. Lee Bailey had hired a Los Angeles hypnotist William Bryan in an effort to extract a confession from Albert DeSalvo. Under hypnosis, DeSalvo gave such a detailed description of the murders, including information that was not known by the public, that his guilt was immediately presumed. At the time, the Boston police were on the tail of a prime suspect, not DeSalvo, who they were convinced was the killer. After DeSalvo's hypnotically induced confession, the case was closed and the other suspect dropped.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><span style="">Bryan billed himself as “probably the leading expert in the world” in the use of hypnosis in criminal cases. Bryan actually claimed many things that are difficult to verify. There is no doubt that he was considered one of the top hypnotists in the country. He also claimed to be a one-time drummer for the Tommy Dorsey Band, a technical consultant for the movie </span><i><span style="">The Manchurian Candidate</span></i><span style="">, the grandson of William Jennings Bryan and, tellingly, a consultant to the CIA for their mind control programs.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><span style="">Bryan was also a sex addict. He reportedly hypno-seduced up to a dozen women a day in his practice and still found a need to hire prostitutes. Two of the girls he hired regularly allegedly did not have sex with Bryan but merely indulged him by listening to the stories of his accomplishments while dressed seductively. So they claim, Bryan came right out and told them during one of these sessions that he had hypno-programmed the infamous assassin of Bobby Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"><span style="">One curious thing about Bryan that does not seem to be in keeping with his work as a world-renowned hypnotists but does potentially shed a little light on a thin sticky thread. Like Jerry Owen, Bryan was also a fundamentalist preacher.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"> It seems preachers and ministers where not uncommon in the field of hypnosis in those days. While William Bryan was the founder of the American Institute of Hypnosis, the head of the International Society of Hypnosis was headed by a man by the name of the Reverend Xavier von Koss, also of Los Angeles. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"> James Earl Ray, the man who was convicted of assassinating Martin Luther King about two months before the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, had lived in Los Angeles before that assassination. As more bizarre and inexplicable coincidence and happenstance would have it, he had been hypnotized by the Reverend Xavier von Koss.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"> Four years after the assassinations of MLK and RFK, an assassination attempt was made on George Wallace. Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, had run for President before, but it was not until 1972 that he became a formidable candidate. Then, at a sparsely attended appearance at the Laurel Shopping Center, Arthur Bremer pushed through the crowd and fired all five shots from a five-shot revolver at Wallace, point blank. While Wallace lived, a bullet that had lodged in his spinal column left him paralyzed for the remainder of his life.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"> Bizarrely, Wallace's fingerprints were not found on the gun, though Wallace was not wearing gloves. Just like Sirhan, Bremer was described as having a sickly smile and very detached demeanor at the time of the assassination attempt. While Bremer's gun only held five rounds, Wallace was wounded in nine places. Three others were also wounded in the shooting, each taking one bullet apiece.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"> According to Bryan's secretary, moments after the shooting of Wallace was announced, a call was made to Bryan's office. He announced that he had to leave on an emergency that involved the shooting of Governor Wallace.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; font-style: normal;"> More to come...</p>Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com53tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-2608019836405656422008-05-24T18:51:00.000-07:002008-05-25T15:01:01.495-07:00<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102); font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >The assassination of Robert Kennedy, Part 3 --<br />The woman in the polka dot dress</span><br /><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><b>The Woman in the Polka Dot Dress</b></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Sandy Serrano, a young campaign worker for Kennedy, was there at the Ambassador Hotel that night. Needing a break from the heat and the crowd, she found a little quiet on the steps that lead from the back of the kitchen area. Somewhere around 11:30pm, she encountered three people, a woman and two men, entering the kitchen from the back, using the stairs she was sitting on. The woman she would described as wearing a white dress with dark polka dots and having a “Bob Hope” type nose. The two men with her were described as,</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.2in;">White male (Latin extraction), 5'5” tall, 21 to 23 years old, olive complexion, black hair, long—straight, hanging over his forehead and needed a haircut. [The other was] white male (Mexican American), about 23 years of age, 5'3” tall, curly, bushy hair and wore light colored clothes. She said after seeing a picture of Sirhan Sirhan in the newspaper she felt certain that this was the same person she saw go up the stairs with this woman. [Turner and Christian; The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, The Conspiracy and Coverup]</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Sometime later, seconds after Serrano heard what she described as sounding like automobile backfires, the woman and one of her male companions came running back down the stairs. According to Serrano, the woman was yelling, “We shot him, we shot him.” When asked who they shot, she replied, “Senator Kennedy.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Serrano was not the only one to describe the woman in the polka dot dress and associate her with Sirhan and/or the assassination. Amongst them was Kennedy campaign worker Darnell Johnson and the son of an Ambassador Hotel <span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;">maître</span> d', Thomas Vincent DiPierro. DiPierro said that the only reason he noticed Sirhan was that there was a very good looking girl next to him. According to DiPierro,</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.2in;">I would never forget what she looked like because she had a very good looking figure—and the dress was kind of lousy...it looked like a white dress and it had either black or dark-purple polka dots on it.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Minutes after the shooting and well before any of the stories of the woman in the white dress had been made public or could have been shared, LAPD Sergeant Paul Sharaga heard news of the shooting on his police radio. Already in the vicinity, he arrived at the scene within a minute. An older couple approached Sharaga and, as he tells it,</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.2in;">They related that they were outside one of the doors of the Embassy Room when a young couple in their early twenties came rushing out. This couple seemed to be in a state of glee, shouting, “We shot him, we shot him, we killed him.” The woman stated that she asked the lady, “Who did you shoot?” or “Who was shot?” and the young lady replied, “Kennedy, we shot him, we killed him.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">The only defining characteristic of the young lady that the witnesses could give was that she was wearing a white dress with polka dots. Sharaga immediately put out an all point bulletin for police to be on the lookout for a woman in a polka dot dress in the company of a man.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">And then something very strange happened that, as far as we know, has never happened before or since in the history of the LAPD. For about 15 to 20 minutes, all police radio communications were lost on all frequencies. This was ample time for the woman in the polka dot dress and her companion to get off the streets and out of reach of the police.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">The elderly couple Sharaga had interviewed were lost and have never come forward. Serrano, being the sole witness to the woman in the polka dot dress claiming, “We shot Kennedy” was brought to the notorious <a linkindex="58" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_Scandal">Rampart Division</a> of the LAPD for extensive questioning. I encourage you to follow the link on the Rampart Division. The story of the ongoing corruption in the LAPD and the Rampart Division in particular is very informative. The Bobby Kennedy assassination is not the only one in which the Rampart Division has taken part. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">In this case, however, the witness was not so much questioned as she was browbeaten and verbally tortured into renouncing her testimony. The “questioning” was performed by Sergeant Enrique “Hank” Hernandez who, according to his resume, played a key role in “Unified Police Command” training for the CIA in Latin America. As is clear from the questioning, Hernandez had one goal in mind—to discredit Sandy Serrano and anything having to do with the story of the woman in the polka dot dress.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Here, for your listening pleasure, are two excerpts from that taped session which, amazingly, survived after the LAPD had attempted to destroy all evidence that would discount the official story of the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Keep in mind as you listen that Sgt. Hernandez is allegedly questioning a material witness who has nothing to gain from lying.<br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Serrano and Hernandez part 1<br /><object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" id="rings" align="middle" height="20" width="400"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain"><param name="movie" value="http://allenbranson.com/include/mediaplayer.swf"><param name="quality" value="high"><param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff"><param name="flashvars" value="file=http://allenbranson.com/audio/serrano1.mp3"><embed src="http://allenbranson.com/include/mediaplayer.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" name="rings" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="file=http://allenbranson.com/audio/serrano1.mp3" align="middle" height="20" width="400"></embed></object><br /><br />Serrano and Hernandez part 2<br /><object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" id="rings" align="middle" height="20" width="400"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain"><param name="movie" value="http://allenbranson.com/include/mediaplayer.swf"><param name="quality" value="high"><param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff"><param name="flashvars" value="file=http://allenbranson.com/audio/serrano2.mp3"><embed src="http://allenbranson.com/include/mediaplayer.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" name="rings" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="file=http://allenbranson.com/audio/serrano2.mp3" align="middle" height="20" width="400"></embed></object><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><b>A piece of the web</b></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Hernandez played a key role in the special LAPD task force created to investigate the Kennedy Assassination, called Special Unit Senator, or SUS. SUS was headed by LAPD Lieutenant Manuel Pena.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Interestingly, Pena had officially retired from the LAPD in November of 1967, less than a year before the Kennedy assassination, to take a position with the Agency for International Development Office of the State Department, or AID. AID, a known cover agency for the CIA for its counter insurgency and torture operations in South America. AID is probably best known for one of its most infamous agents, a man who Pena allegedly had worked with, Dan Mitrione. From 1960 to 1967, Mitrione worked with the Brazilian government under the cover of AID, torturing then killing, without trial, political dissidents.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Though Pena's farewell was a well attended and publicized event, sometime around April 1968 he returned to the LAPD quietly, without fanfare. His explanation was that the job with AID had not turned out to be what he had hoped. Within two months, he would find himself in charge of the most important murder investigation every conducted by the LAPD, the man who would have the final say on virtually everything that would happen in the investigation.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">And here, we have an interesting piece of web to examine. Two of the most important investigator's of the case, Hernandez and Pena, are both ex (or perhaps current at that time) CIA operatives, both involved in CIA operations in South America. Pena, the man running the entire investigation, had just returned from duty with AID, a CIA front organization that specialized in crushing political dissidents and likely worked with Dan Mitrione. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">In 1970, Mitrione was kidnapped by the Tupamaros, a leftist guerrilla organization fighting against the U.S. sponsored dictatorship in Uruguay. Though his name was changed, that event was the <span style="font-style: normal;">basis of the movie </span><i>State of Siege</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. Mitrione's funeral, much like Pena's “retirement” from the LAPD, was a well publicized and attended affair. Following his funeral, a benefit concert was held in his home town of Richmond, Indiana, headlined by none other than Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis (go figure).</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Sinatra, as you may remember, was one of the stars of the John Frankenheimer film </span><i>The Manchurian Candidate</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. The film is a fictional account of a man, played by Lawrence Harvey, who is hypnotically programmed to perform assassinations without conscious knowledge of doing so. Following the Kennedy assassination, Sinatra purchased the rights to </span><i>The Manchurian Candidate</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and removed it from circulation until 1987.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">On June 3</span><sup><span style="font-style: normal;">rd</span></sup><span style="font-style: normal;">, Bobby Kennedy had dinner with his friend John Frankenheimer (who, coincidentally, drove him to the Ambassador Hotel that fateful night) along with a pretty actress named Sharon Tate and her husband, Roman Polanski. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Now, please bear with me as we descend into something of an abyss. When trying to see the web, we run across strange coincidences that may seem on the surface to be tenuous, improbable or even downright laughable. It's the nature of the beast. If you want to know what is really going on, these things must at least be put on the table, even if they are discarded later. Remember, though, webs are tenuous things made from very delicate threads. Often times, the most obvious and easily accepted data turns out to be nothing more than something caught in the web—an artifact, if you will, rather than the web itself. That said, here we go.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">In August 1969, Tate was murdered by members of the Manson Family, who had strong connections to the Laurel Canyon music scene. Curiously, the year Kennedy was shot Sharon Tate was in the process of making a film entitled </span><i>The Wrecking Crew</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, which costarred Dean Martin. That same name was taken by a group of Los Angeles studio musicians associated with Phil Spector, who were also closely connected with the Laurel Canyon music scene. And Dean Martin, her costar in that film, was of course a long time collaborator with Jerry Lewis, who shared billing with Frank Sinatra at the Dan Mitrione benefit concert following his funeral. During the filming of that movie, Tate would be trained to do her own stunts by the martial arts expert Bruce Lee, with whom she would become close friends and who also later died under mysterious circumstances. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Tate, it should be noted for those who don't remember her, was a movie star on a meteoric rise. She was beautiful and talented. As the Hollywood Reporter stated concerning her role in </span><i>The Wrecking Crew</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, "Sharon Tate reveals a pleasant affinity to scatterbrain comedy and comes as close to walking away with this picture as she did in a radically different role in Valley of the Dolls." </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Tate, it should also be noted, had taken a keen interest in Bobby Kennedy's campaign. She was a frequent attendee at Kennedy campaign dinners. It's funny (and not in a humorous way) how often it seems that those in the public eye who take a political stance that is in favor of human rights, human dignity and simply doing the right thing are found in a pool of their own blood.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">As for Dan Mitrione, he was not the only famous former resident of Richmond, Indiana. For a fairly small town (the 2000 census shows a population of only 39,124) it has had more than its fair share of celebrity. Richmond can boast at least four NFL players, one of whom was a rookie of the year, an NFL coach, two NBA coaches, an Olympic gold medalist, Margaret Landon (the author of The King and I), Orville and Wilbur Wright, the legendary and cutting edge R&B singer Baby Huey and actress Polly Bergen along with Mitrione and a street preacher there who Mitrione befriended while he was Chief of Police in Richmond. A man by the name of Jim Jones.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">But that is another story for another time.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">More to come...</span></p>Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-40331802434915108452008-05-19T23:11:00.000-07:002008-05-25T14:34:41.825-07:00<p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 102);font-size:130%;" >The assassination of Robert Kennedy, Part 2 -- Thane Eugene Cesar</span><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Before we get back to our story, a few words on the word <i>conspiracy</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. Given the definition of the word that seems to be in vogue with the conspiracy debunkers these days, I'd have to say that I am no believer in conspiracy theories. As they'd have it, a conspiracy implies managing to get a whole lot of people, from the top to the bottom and sideways in both directions, to knowingly maintain a consistent lie over a long period of time. This would include everyone from the lowest on the totem pole to all of the attorneys, reporters and witnesses involved in an incident.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Ain't gonna happen. As a comedian once quipped about the idea of a vast Jewish conspiracy, anyone who has every sat at the dinner table of a Jewish family knows how ridiculous that idea is. No one agrees about anything. The same goes for the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK, along with the tragedy of 9/11 and countless other politically motivated killings. There was not a vast conspiracy of everyone involved to keep a secret. Plenty of people in all of these cases and others have come forward with bits of information that diverge wildly from the official story.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">So, rather than refer to </span><i>conspirators</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, we will refer to </span><i>perception managers</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. The perception managers are the spiders, the spinners of the web. Like any web, it's usefulness is not dependent on any particular part holding up. Areas of the web can fall away and still the spider will catch it's prey. This is how it works. A central lie is spun and anchored in several locations. Threads connect the various anchors until a web has been woven of lies and misdirection that can remain useful and maintain its overall integrity even when various individual parts have broken down.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">It is the nature of a web that you will never break it down by attacking the individual pieces. As you work to break the web in one spot, the perception managers work to build it back up where it had been damaged before. They run you around in circles until at last, exhausted, you give up and give in. Eventually, even some of the most ardent seekers of the truth either just stop looking or, in some cases, join the spiders and help them spin their webs. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">As we examine the web spun around the Bobby Kennedy assassination, keep in mind that no one element of the web is important in and of itself. If you think that this or that aspect is probably the key to the entire affair, you are probably wrong. See the web as a whole and you can identify the species of spider that made it. Seen as its individual parts, it is just another mass tangle of threads that gets you stuck.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">One more point about perception management. While there aspects of perception management that will be obvious to most anyone, such as managing how the public will think of an event overall. Think of how quickly the PM's moved to tell you that Arab hijackers—names, photos and all—were responsible for the 9/11 attacks, even before it would be humanly possible to know such a thing. There is another important aspect that will become clear as we get to the alleged shooter himself, Sirhan Sirhan. I think you will see that that a commonly held belief that it is not possible to get a man to do something against his will that is contrary to his own moral principles is not only wrong, it is just plain silly. In the hands of a skilled PM, and given the right subject, it is child's play.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And now, on with the story.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><b><span style="font-style: normal;">Thane Eugene Cesar</span></b></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Cesar worked for Lockheed Aircraft in nearby Burbank. According to interviews with fellow employees there, Cesar's job at Lockheed was unspecific, though he had access to the most high security areas. He was also a staunch Kennedy detractor. In an interview, Cesar had this to say about the brothers Kennedy.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.2in;">And I definitely wouldn't have voted for Bobby Kennedy because he had the same ideas as John did and I think John sold the country down the road. He gave it to the commies. He gave it to whoever else you want him to. He gave it, he literally gave it to the minority. He says here, you take over. I'm giving it to you you run the white man. Nobody should be run. I'm not saying that the whites should be the slaves of the black or black the slaves of the white. But he turned the pendulum too far the other way.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">As you will remember, Cesar was the security guard that lead Kennedy through the kitchen area of the Ambassador Hotel and to his death. He was moonlighting, working for Ace Security. He'd only just started with the company and was placed in charge of security for the area of the hotel through which Kennedy would be lead as a short cut to his press conference in the Colonial Room. Cesar stood behind Kennedy and to his right.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Cesar was interviewed by KFWB reporter John Marshall only minutes after the shooting. During that interview, Cesar had this to say about the event. Keep in mind that Cesar was in a uniquely good position view what had happened. He was standing behind and to the right of Kennedy, holding his arm.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.1in;"><b>Marshall:</b> I have just talked to an officer who told me that he was at the Senator's side when the shots occurred. Officer, can you confirm that the Senator was shot?</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.1in;"><b>Cesar:</b> Yes, I was there holding his arm when they shot him.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.1in;"><b>Marshall:</b> What happened?</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.1in;"><b>Cesar:</b> I dunno. Gentleman standing by the lunch counter there and as he walked up the guy pulled a gun and shot him.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.1in;"><b>Marshall:</b> Was it just one man?</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.1in;"><b>Cesar:</b> No. Yeah, one man.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.1in;"><b>Marshall:</b> And what sort of wound did the Senator receive?</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.1in;"><b>Cesar:</b> Well, from where I could see it looked like he was shot in the head and the chest and the shoulder.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.1in;"><b>Marshall:</b> How many shots did you hear?</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.1in;"><b>Cesar:</b> Four.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.1in;"><b>Marshall:</b> You heard four shots. Did you see anyone else hit at the time?</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.1in;"><b>Cesar:</b> Nope.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.1in;"><b>Marshall:</b> What is your name, officer?</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.1in;"><b>Cesar:</b> Gene Cesar.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.1in;">There are several interesting things to note about Cesar's interview with the press in the moments following the assassination. First, look at what Cesar did not get right in his description of the shooting. He claimed that only four shots were fired when, in fact, Sirhan had fired all of the eight bullets that his revolver was capable of holding. Second, while he claimed that he saw no one else hit, five others were wounded in the shooting and most of them were close to Cesar. Then, there are the slips Cesar seems to make when he refers to <i>they</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> shooting him and initially responding to the question of whether there was only one shooter by saying, “No.”</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.1in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Equally interesting is what Cesar got right about the incident. When asked where Kennedy was hit, Cesar says that he thinks Kennedy was shot “in the head and the chest and the shoulder.” Yet, no one knew just where Kennedy had been shot until after a doctor had examined him. You might think that anyone could see where he had been shot simply by looking at him lying on the floor. Yet Cesar was in no position to see the wounds. Kennedy laid on the floor on his back, and all three bullets that entered his body had done so from the back. In other words, the exact nature of the wounds could not be evident until after he had been examined. And yet, some how, Cesar was aware of where Bobby Kennedy had been wounded.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.1in;" align="left"><span style="font-style: normal;">The fact that Kennedy was wounded from the back, while Sirhan approached him from the front, has been a matter of contention. Several witnesses recall that just prior to the shooting, Kennedy had turned to his left to shake hands with busboy Juan Romero, whose face has been immortalized in the famous picture of him cradling Kennedy's head immediately following the shooting. However, even if Kennedy was in the middle of shaking Romero's hand when the shooting began, this only afforded Sirhan a shot from the side, not from the back. Further, as we find in the next installment, the autopsy showed that all of the shots hitting Kennedy came from behind and from a </span><i>low angle.</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> In other words, the appeared to come from some who was behind Kennedy and low to the ground.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">While admitting to owning a .22, the caliber of pistol used by Sirhan, Cesar claimed that he was not carrying it that evening. Instead, he claimed to be carrying a .38 he had purchased for guard duty. In fact, he said that he had sold the .22 three months before the assassination to an ex coworker named Jim Yoder, who had retired and moved to Arkansas.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Curiously, this contradicted testimony Cesar had given to the LAPD. At that time, he stated that he had told a police sergeant about his .22 when interviewed following the assassination. He said, “In fact, I don't remember if I showed it to him but I did mention that I had a gun similar to the one that was used that night.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Now, this is a curious thing for a Cesar to say. How could it even occur to him to show a gun to an officer that he had sold three months earlier?</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">In 1972, William Turner and Jonn Christian, the authors of the book The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, were struck by this discrepancy. They paid a visit to Jim Yoder in Arkansas. As luck would have it, Yoder was still in possession of the receipt for the gun. It read, “On the day of Sept. 6, 1968 I received $15.00 from Jim Yolder [sic]. The item involved is a H&R pistol 9 shot serial no. Y 13332. Thane E. Cesar.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">September 6, 1968. Three months <i>after</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> the assassination of Bobby Kennedy.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">As strange and inexplicable coincidence and happenstance would have it, the gun in question was not available for testing. Shortly before the arrival of Turner and Christian, Yoder received a call from the LAPD about the pistol he had purchased from Cesar. Shortly after that, his house was burglarized and the pistol was stolen.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Every single witness to the shooting that night placed Sirhan at least three feet in front of Senator Kennedy. There has not been one person who has ever come forward claiming that Sirhan ever got closer. Nor has there ever been a witness to Kennedy turning around far enough for Sirhan to shoot him in the back. Further, the fatal shot entered Kennedy's head near his right ear from a distance of not more than an inch or two, as evidenced by the powder burns found there.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">In other words, there was only one man at the Ambassador Hotel that night who was armed, owned a .22 caliber pistol (despite his claims otherwise) and was in a position to fire the fatal shot that ended Bobby Kennedy's life. That man was Thane Eugene Cesar.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">We should note that there is a man who once accepted the idea that Cesar likely was the actual killer of Bobby Kennedy then later recanted. That man is the well-known investigative journalist, Dan Moldea. Moldea apparently decided that Cesar was not the killer based on the evidence of a lie detector test, which Cesar passed. Surprisingly, Moldea seems to not be aware of a glaring problem with lie detector tests. <span style="font-style: italic;">They only work on a certain percentage of the population</span>. Or, more to the point, they are completely worthless on a specific portion of the population.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Psychopathy is a genetically inherited condition that leaves the inheritor of the gene without a conscience. You can read more in Robert Hare's definitive book on the subject, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&keywords=without%20conscience&tag=allenbranson-20&index=books&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325">Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us</a>. It is this specific portion of the population on which lie detectors simply do not work.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">To understand why, you must first understand what it is a lie detector does. The name is a misnomer. The device would be more accurately called an <span style="font-style: italic;">anxiety detector</span>. It measures subtle changes in the body when a person feels anxiety, as a normal person will do when they have told a lie. No matter how capable they are of keeping a straight face while lying, the average person's body will react involuntarily with signs of anxiety when they lie.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">A psychopath, however, will feel no such pangs of anxiety. They feel nothing about the lie they have told because, to them, reality is whatever they say it is. To them, the lie is not a lie simply because they say so. No anxiety means no reaction on the "lie" detector. In short, the fact that Thane Eugene Cesar passed the lie detector test that was set up by Moldea is absolutely meaningless. That test could only possibly have meaning in conjunction with an in-depth psychological analysis of Cesar by someone qualified to diagnose the condition of psychopathy. Without that, a lie detector test given to Cesar is as valuable a piece of evidence as one given to a weasel.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Frankly, Moldea, for all his notoriety as an investigative journalist, should feel ashamed at such an obvious mistake. Moldea has investigated enough of the criminal element of society to be well aware of the facts of psychopathy, leading one to wonder whether this was not a mistake at all, but rather a purposeful misrepresentation of fact.<br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Let me remind you what was said at the beginning. As much as you might be tempted to think Thane Eugene Cesar is the key to the whole affair, remember that this is a web and the web is big. There are a lot more players involved and a lot more threads to examine before we are even close to having something that approximates a whole picture. Cesar may well have pulled the trigger that ended the life of Bobby Kennedy, but Cesar is only a hair on the back of the spider we are looking for.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Who we are looking for are the perception managers, the orchestrators of the tragedy.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">More to come...</p>Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-17281369269788596032008-05-18T22:36:00.000-07:002008-05-19T23:13:11.220-07:00<p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 102);font-size:130%;" >The assassination of Robert Kennedy, Part 1</span><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">June 5<sup>th</sup> marks the 40<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy in the kitchen area of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It was shortly after midnight. An exhausted Kennedy had just finished addressing the crowd gathered to celebrate his victory in the California primary for the Democratic nomination to the presidency. His next stop was Chicago. If he won in Illinois, the nomination was his.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">It's difficult to imagine, today, what Robert Kennedy meant to many in the U.S. in 1968. There is really no parallel that can be drawn with any politician since. Following the death of his brother, John, in Dallas less than 5 years previous, the nation has been brought almost to the brink of civil war under the Johnson administration. Millions were taking to the streets across the country to protest the war in Vietnam, political factions were springing up like wildflowers after a rain, the yippies were engaging in irreverent “political theater,” the hippies were tuning in, turning on and dropping out, the Black Panther's Bobby Hutton, only 17 years old, was killed by the Oakland, California Police. His house was set on fire, forcing Hutton, unarmed, to run into a hail of bullets. He was hit ten times.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Just two days before Hutton's death, Martin Luther King was assassinated. The man charged with and convicted of the crime was James Earl Ray. Four months before the assassination, Ray lived in Los Angeles and had been hypnotized by Reverend Xavier von Koss, head of the International Society of Hypnosis. For some reason, Los Angeles had become connected to a long string of deaths under mysterious circumstances around that time, including a rather long list of bizarre associations and killings centered around the Laural Canyon music crowd. But I'm getting ahead of myself.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">The country Robert Kennedy sought the presidency of was fractured and, so it seemed to many, on the brink of collapse. Or perhaps it would explode. Whites were afraid of the uprising Blacks, Blacks were arming themselves to defend themselves from police who had shown clearly that they thought nothing of murdering them in cold blood, and Hispanics were rising up to demand fair treatment and pay for their hard labor. The Florida Education Association instituted the nations first state-wide teachers strike. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Then there was the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which U.S. soldiers killed as many as 504 unarmed civilians. Many were raped and tortured before being killed. The U.S. Congress repealed the necessity to back the dollar with gold. And, in a grand effort to turn everyone's mind away from the horrors gripping the country, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In (the name a play on a form of non-violent protest being used at the time called a sit-in) debuted on NBC. The year before was the infamous "Summer of Love" and the year following would see a gathering of hundreds of thousands for a music festival at Woodstock.<br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Every political and social card was up in the air and no one knew where they would land.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">And into the middle of this chaos came the younger brother of John Kennedy, affectionately referred to by many as simply Bobby. He had served as Attorney General of the United States in his brother's administration. During that time, he earned a reputation for being highly intelligent, indefatigable, and unbelievably honest. As one contemporary stated,</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0.2in;">The politicians are half people as a rule or 60% people. The other 40% is some putty that's trying to please and beg and plead and whine. You can't even have a drink with them. Their awful. It's a bad breed. [Bobby] was almost a whole person, yes, which is a rarity in politics.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Bobby Kennedy's integrity was tested time and again, always with the same result. He was, as far as anyone could tell, incorruptible. He approved the prosecution of Judge Vincent Keogh on bribery charges. Keogh's brother was a powerful congressman (whose name has been memorialized in the Keogh retirement plan) and staunch supporter of John Kennedy. Even JFK had hoped that Bobby would not follow through with the prosecution and sent a message to his brother to that effect by inviting Congressman Keogh as his guest to the 1962 Army/Navy football game. But Bobby proceeded with the prosecution. The judge was convicted of bribery, along with the mobster, Tony 'Ducks' Corralo.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Bobby had more than just integrity, however. He had the looks, self-assurance and stage presence of a seasoned Hollywood star. He could crack a joke off the cuff and made everyone who he spoke with feel respected and at ease. His popularity crossed all races. In short, Bobby Kennedy was a man who many believed would be able to begin the process of healing the rifts that were tearing the country apart and institute social policies that could put the U.S. on a path to become the nation it had always believed itself to be.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">The were probably right. And the powers-that-be were terrified of what might happen if Bobby Kennedy became president.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Yet even worse for the PTB—for social policies that would have been implemented by Kennedy could have been undone by future administrations—was another crime Bobby sought justice for: the assassination of his brother in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Given his track record as Attorney General, there could be no doubt in the minds of anyone involved about whether he would succeed. But, in order to find the truth behind the events of that day, Bobby needed control over the Justice Department. And the only way he would gain that control was to become President of the United States.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">On June 5<sup>th</sup> 1968, just after midnight, Bobby Kennedy delivered the final words of his California primary victory speech to an adoring crowd in the Embassy Ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel, then left the stage. He was one primary away from securing the Democratic nomination, and only moments away from his death.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Following his speech, Kennedy was to give a press conference in the Colonial Room of the hotel. It was suggested to him that he take a short cut through the kitchen. He was lead through by security guard Thane Eugene Cesar. As Cesar pushed him through the crowd, a young, quiet Palestinian man named Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, with no history of violence, psychological problems or political activity, appeared. He pointed a .22 caliber Iver Johnson pistol at Kennedy and fired two shots before being subdued. As members of Kennedy's entourage attempted to wrest the pistol from his hand, he fired the other six rounds still in his pistol, wounding five others in the crowd.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">And then things really started to get weird.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">What follows only scratches the surface of a vast web of, let's call it coincidence and happenstance, surrounding the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Conspiracy has become such an ugly word these days, and it is a very difficult thing to prove. In this case, everyone saw Sirhan pull a gun and fire at Kennedy. He was wrestled to the ground with the gun still in his hand. He was even pulling the trigger while he was being subdued. An open and shut case if ever there was one.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">And yet, as you will see, things are rarely as they appear on the surface. Yes, Sirhan did point a .22 at Kennedy and pull the trigger. Yes, he was witnessed doing it. Yes, he did still have the gun in his hand when he was subdued. But there is far more to this story, not the least of which is this: it can be shown from evidence presented in court that not only did Sirhan <span style="font-weight: bold;">not </span>fire the fatal shot that killed Bobby Kennedy, he apparently fired <span style="font-weight: bold;">no real shots at him at all</span>. His gun, it would appear, was loaded with blanks!</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">But I'm getting ahead of myself again. We'll start with a round-up of the usual suspects along with a few less-than-usual. Bring your spider repellent folks, because you are about to walk in to one hellacious web.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">More to come...</p>Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-46889340623142155442008-03-08T22:13:00.000-08:002008-03-08T22:38:08.869-08:00<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><span style="font-size:130%;">Is Barack Obama the next JFK?</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">There seems to be a movement afoot to associate Barack Obama, a young and charismatic Democratic candidate, to another young and charismatic Democratic candidate, the late John F. Kennedy. Obama's campaign is making the most of it, naturally, even posting an article on obamadallas.com by Ted Sorensen who worked in the White House with Kennedy as special counsel and advisor, which states:</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Above all, after eight years out of power and two bitter defeats, Democrats in 1960, like today, wanted a winner--and Kennedy, despite his supposed handicaps, was a winner. On civil rights, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the race to the moon, and other issues, President Kennedy succeeded by demonstrating the same courage, imagination, compassion, judgment, and ability to lead and unite a troubled country that he had shown during his presidential campaign. I believe Obama will do the same. </span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">In that article, he makes reference to many supposed similarities between Obama and Kennedy, including the fact that they were both first-term senators while seeking the Democratic Presidential nomination, both lacked experience and both come from a heritage that the country was simply not ready to embrace.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Interesting parallels, sure, but are they meaningful? I don't think so. </span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Now let's be clear, here. Sorensen knew Kennedy well. He was not some tangential player hanging around the White House. According to Pierre Salinger in his book With Kennedy:</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Sorensen wore more than one hat at the White House. He was the coordinator of planning for domestic policy and had a key role in formulating JFK's recommendations to Congress. But he also continued to serve as the principal speech writer. Actually, speeches were not written for the President but with him. He knew what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it. The role of the speech writer was to organize JFK's thoughts into a rough draft, on which he himself would put the final touches. His revisions would often change it dramatically. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">So, far be it from me to dismiss outright what Sorensen has to say on the matter. But keep in mind what Sorensen really seems to be saying. He never makes the statement that Obama is the next Kennedy. Near the top of his article, he properly qualifies all comparisons, writing:</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Different times, issues, and electors make any <i>meaningful comparison unlikely</i>. But the parallels in their candidacies are striking.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">He goes on to say:</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">JFK's establishment opponents-- probably not unlike Obama's--did not understand Kennedy's appeal. "Find out his secret," LBJ instructed one of his aides sent to spy on the Kennedy camp, "his strategy, his weaknesses, his comings and goings." </span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">This is precisely what the Obama camp seems to be doing today. They are attempting to capitalize on each and every point of similarity between Obama and Kennedy in the hope that enough of the voting public will be hypnotized by the repetition of the association to actually believe it. The strategy could well be effective, because most of the voters Obama is courting either have never experienced a President like Kennedy or don't really remember what Kennedy was like.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Sadly, today's voters have become so accustomed to politics that ranges from mediocrity to outright pathocracy, they have no idea what a truly great, or even potentially great man sounds likes. To quote Kennedy on the matter,<br /></span></p><p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today - and in fact we have forgotten.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">So, in an effort to clarify the issue and compare these two men in a meaningful way, here are a few quotes from speeches by Kennedy and Obama. Have we, in fact, forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life? You be the judge.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b>Barack Obama said:</b></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">In an interconnected world, the defeat of international terrorism – and most importantly, the prevention of these terrorist organizations from obtaining weapons of mass destruction -- will require the cooperation of many nations. We must always reserve the right to strike unilaterally at terrorists wherever they may exist. But we should know that our success in doing so is enhanced by engaging our allies so that we receive the crucial diplomatic, military, intelligence, and financial support that can lighten our load and add legitimacy to our actions. This means talking to our friends and, at times, even our enemies. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b>John Kennedy said:</b></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">We can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and acts of courage. Among the many traits that the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union. In the Second World War, at least 20,000,000 lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nations territory, including two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a waste land. A loss equivalent to the destruction of this country, east of Chicago. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Our primary long range interest in Geneva however, is general and complete disarmament. Designed to take place by stages, permitting parallel political developments to build the new institutions of peace. Let both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"> <span style="font-size:100%;">It is therefore our intention to challenge the Soviet Union, not to an arms race, but to a peace race.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Let us call a truce to terror.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b>Barack Obama said:</b></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b>John Kennedy said:</b></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish. Where no public official either requests,nor accepts instructions on public policies from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source. Where no religious body seeks to impose its will, directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials. Where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b>Barack Obama said:</b></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">America is a land of big dreamers and big hopes. It is this hope that has sustained us through revolution and civil war, depression and world war, a struggle for civil and social rights and the brink of nuclear crisis. And it is because our dreamers dreamed that we have emerged from each challenge more united, more prosperous, and more admired than before. </span></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b>John Kennedy said:</b></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. Here at home, the future is equally revolutionary. The New Deal and The Fair Deal were bold measures for their generations. But now, this is a new generation. This administration has failed to recognize, </span><i><span style="">has failed to recognize</span></i><span style="">, that in these changing times, with a revolution of rising expectations sweeping the globe, that the United States has lost its image as a new, strong, vital, revolutionary society. A long view shows us that a revolution of national independence is a fundamental fact of our era.</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">This revolution will not be stopped.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b>Barack Obama said:</b></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">We should be more modest in our belief that we can impose democracy on a country through military force. In the past, it has been movements for freedom from within tyrannical regimes that have led to flourishing democracies; movements that continue today. This doesn’t mean abandoning our values and ideals; wherever we can, it’s in our interest to help foster democracy through the diplomatic and economic resources at our disposal. But even as we provide such help, we should be clear that the institutions of democracy – free markets, a free press, a strong civil society – cannot be built overnight, and they cannot be built at the end of a barrel of a gun. And so we must realize that the freedoms FDR once spoke of – especially freedom from want and freedom from fear – do not just come from deposing a tyrant and handing out ballots; they are only realized once the personal and material security of a people is ensured as well.</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b>John Kenney said:</b></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children-not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b>Barack Obama said:</b></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">I always believe that ultimately, if people are paying attention, then we get good government and good leadership. And when we get lazy, as a democracy and civicly start taking shortcuts, then it results in bad government and politics. </span></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b>John Kennedy said:</b></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Harry Truman once said there are fourteen or fifteen million Americans who have the resources to have representatives in Washington to protect their interests and that the interests of the great mass of the other people--the hundred and fifty or sixty million--is the responsibility of the President of the United States. And I propose to fulfill it!</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">And I believe it is the business of the President of the United States to concern himself with the general welfare and the public interest. And if the people feel that it is not, then they should secure the services of a new President of the United States.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b>Barack Obama said:</b></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">You know, there's a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit - the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes; to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us - the child who's hungry, the steelworker who's been laid-off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town. When you think like this - when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers - it becomes harder not to act; harder not to help. </span></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b>John Kennedy said:</b></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">I realize that there are some business men, who feel only that they want to be left alone. That Government and Politics are none of their affairs. That the balance sheet and profit rate of their own corporation are of more importance than the World-wide balance of power or the nationwide rate of unemployment. </span></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">But I hope it's not rushing the season, to recall to you the passage from Dickens' Christmas Carol; in which Ebenezer Scrooge is terrified by the ghost of his former partner Jacob Marley. And scrooge, appalled by Marley's story of ceaseless wandering, cries out, "but you were always a good man of business, Jacob." </span></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">And the ghost of Marley, his legs bound by a chain of ledger books, and cash boxes replied, "Business? Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business. Charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business."</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Members and guests of the Florida State Chamber of Commerce, whether we work in the White House or the State House, or in a house of Industry or Commerce, mankind</span><i><span style=""> is</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style=""> our</span></span><span style=""> business. And if we work in harmony, if we understand the problems of each other and the responsibilities that each of us bears, then surely the business of mankind will prosper. And your children and mine will move ahead in a secure world, and one in which there is opportunity for them all.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b>Barack Obama said:</b></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe or hiring somebody's son. That we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will be counted -- or at least, most of the time.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b>John F. Kennedy said:</b></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.</span> </span></span> </p>Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-20975372548316671732007-12-09T22:15:00.000-08:002007-12-09T22:30:04.797-08:00<span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 102);font-size:130%;" >The Art of Illusion</span><br /><br />Illusions are fun. The best illusionists pass into history with mythological status. If I write the name Houdini, I don't have to say anything more. Your mind will fill in a rich picture of death defying illusions and escapes that seemed beyond what a human being should be able to accomplish. <br /><br />The greatest illusion of all time, though, is one we never see. It is so good, so pervasive and so believable that it is all but undetectable. It is the illusion that goes on between your own ears. The illusion that you see the world as it is. You don't. You never have.<br /><br />As a very simple example, click on the 'Start' button, below. You will see a uniform gray ring drop into place in the center of the split gray background. The start button will be replaced by three small views of the ring in different positions. Notice, in the opening state, how the ring is clearly one shade of gray. Now, click on the view to the left or the right. What do you see?<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" id="rings" align="middle" height="400" width="550"><br /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain"><br /> <param name="movie" value="http://allenbranson.com/illusions/rings.swf"><br /> <param name="quality" value="high"><br /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff"><br /> <embed src="http://allenbranson.com/illusions/rings.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" name="rings" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" align="middle" height="400" width="550"></embed><br /></object><br />Each split side of the ring appears to become a different shade of gray. They are still the same, but your mind will see them as different. Try all you like, you will not be able to convince your mind that the two rings are still the same shade of gray. And yet, they really are. The vertical split presents the best illusion. The two halves of the ring are almost touching, yet the difference between them seems so great.<br /><br />Interesting, isn't it? Even when you know the truth, you can't convince your mind to present it to you truthfully.<br /><br />Here is another interesting illusion. Click 'Start' and six identical gray diamonds will slide into place, followed by seven identical discs, quartered into four different shades. Despite the fact that the only thing that has been drawn are those six gray diamonds and seven discs, you'll notice that your mind tells you there is something more—a hazy white diamond on the left.<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" id="rings" align="middle" height="400" width="550"><br /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain"><br /> <param name="movie" value="http://allenbranson.com/illusions/haze.swf"><br /> <param name="quality" value="high"><br /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff"><br /> <embed src="http://allenbranson.com/illusions/haze.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" name="rings" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" align="middle" height="400" width="550"></embed><br /></object><br />Now, for a little fun. Click on the 'Spin' button and watch what happens. The moment the discs begin to spin, the hazy white phantom diamond disappears, only to reappear on the right side when the discs have finished their rotation. There is no trickery going on here beyond the trickery between your ears. You see things that aren't there and, try as you might, can't help but see them. You can, with a little practice, observe the process of the hazy diamond appearing, though. Give it a try. <br /><br />What is going on, here? Do these illusions show faults in your visual system? Not at all. If anything, they show it's sophistication and power. Your eyes don't work just like little cameras, recording the amount of light bouncing off of (or being emitted by, in the case of your computer screen) objects. You look out in the world and <em>interpret</em> what you see. You literally create the picture of the world in your mind.<br /><br />When you think about it, this is the only useful way for your mind to deal with visual data. If you did nothing but read color and luminance (brightness) values, you'd become hopelessly confused when the light struck certain objects in certain ways. For example, you depend on differences in luminance to figure out the contour of objects like stairs. If all you did was take a reading of the light without making assumptions and interpreting it as a whole, what would happen when a shadow was cast across the staircase?<br /><br />You mind interprets more than just shades of gray when you look at the world. It makes assumptions and builds a picture based on movement, too. Take the dots, below. You will either see them apparently moving left/right or up/down. Whichever way it is, you'll probably find you have a very difficult time changing the orientation in your mind. Mostly people feel stuck with whichever way their brain initially sees the "movement." It can be done, though. Just click on the button for the direction you want to switch to and watch the moving dot.<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" id="rings" align="middle" height="300" width="300"><br /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain"><br /> <param name="movie" value="http://allenbranson.com/illusions/seesaw.swf"><br /> <param name="quality" value="high"><br /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff"><br /> <embed src="http://allenbranson.com/illusions/seesaw.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" name="rings" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" align="middle" height="300" width="300"></embed><br /></object><br />Now, try a little experiment. See if you can train your mind to alter the apparent movement at will. The trick is this: anticipation. <br /><br />Anticipation plays a key role in all of the illusions your mind creates. This illusion gives you an opportunity to play with it and see how it can be used to drive the illusion in different directions. In order to change the direction of apparent movement of the dots, focus on one of the dots, then shift your attention to the spot that you would like it to move to, either horizontally or vertically. For instance, if you see the dots apparently moving left/right, focus on the upper right corner. When a dot appears there, move your eyes down to the lower left corner. Suddenly, the movement of the dots seems to change orientation.<br /><br />With a little practice, you can continually anticipate the apparent motion so that the illusion seems to be moving 360° clockwise or counterclockwise. Just keep moving your eyes to the next corner around the imaginary box the dots inhabit. As a dot appears in the corner you are looking at, look to the next dot around. Voila! The dots no longer move just up or down, they spin around in a circle!<br /><br />Notice that you have changed nothing about the illusion itself. In the animation, there is nothing but dots turning on and off in a certain order. Everything about the apparent movement of the dots is made up by your brain.<br /><br />Your mind likes to group things together, too. For example, you will see apparent motion in the dots, below. This time, however, there is really only one way to interpret the motion--as left and right. What about the dot next to the square in the middle? That one looks like it is hiding underneath the square as it move in tandem with the other dots, doesn't it?<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" id="rings" align="middle" height="300" width="400"><br /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain"><br /> <param name="movie" value="http://allenbranson.com/illusions/ball_hiding.swf"><br /> <param name="quality" value="high"><br /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff"><br /> <embed src="http://allenbranson.com/illusions/ball_hiding.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" name="rings" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" align="middle" height="300" width="400"></embed><br /></object><br />Now, click the 'Hide' button to hide all the dots but the one in the center. Does it still look like it is moving under the square? Nothing has changed with the center dot. It is doing exactly what it did from the beginning, yet without the other dots for reference, you'd really have to stretch your imagination to see it moving under the square. With the other dots, however, it goes right back to its little game of hide-and-seek.<br /><br />Before we get to my favorite optical illusion of all, let's think for a moment about what all of this might mean. There is a lot going on here beyond tricks of light and apparent movement. This interpretive ability of your brain extends beyond your visual system. The beauty of optical illusions is that they give you the chance to watch your brain in action—the very same action your brain takes, unobserved, every waking moment.<br /><br />It is literally impossible to see the world as it is through casual observation. As you've seen through these illusions, you brain makes assumptions based on the data it has available to it to put together a picture that makes sense given your brain's existing programming. The first illusion shows how your brain makes certain assumptions about the shade of an object based on contrast. When the circle is whole, the brain interprets the ring as one object. Split them and the half circle that is on a darker background looks lighter.<br /><br />The secret of the second illusion is the pattern of dark and light in the quartered discs. Two opposing quarters are the same shade of gray. The other two are dark and light. You brain recognizes this pattern, even if you didn't notice it consciously, and makes the assumption that the dark and light quarters are actually the same shade of gray, just like the other quarters. For that shading scheme to make sense, the lighter quarter must be covered by a translucent diamond that only makes it <em>appear</em> to be lighter in color. Your brain makes up the translucent diamond out of whole cloth. It isn't there, but the picture doesn't quite make sense (given your brain's assumptions) without it.<br /><br />What you are seeing is your brain <em>making up lies</em> in order to maintain its assumptions about the world. It does this all the time. As you read the news or listen to a story, you don't read or listen to the actual facts and judge them on their own merits. Your mind, without your knowledge, is cooking what you hear or read to fit in with a preconceived model of reality.<br /><br />Your mind's model of the world, for instance, probably includes the assumption that everyone is basically the same deep down inside. That assumption has been pounded into your brain from the time you were an infant. When you watch the actions of others, your interpretation of their actions is against the background of this fundamental assumption.<br /><br />Try a little experiment, much like the one you tried with the dots, above. Think of the actions the U.S. is taking in the world right now. The background you've been given to view these actions is one of democracy, justice, freedom and the fight against evil terrorists. That background will lead you to view these actions in a certain way, no matter what you think of the leaders who are taking these actions. If you accept the validity of that background, you might argue that we have misstepped in our efforts to spread democracy, justice, freedom and safety from terror, but that the basic principle behind what we are doing is correct. <br /><br />Now, just for the sake of having fun with illusions, imagine for a moment that everyone isn't really the same inside. Imagine that some people are missing a critical element in their makeup—something that we consider fundamental to being human. Imagine they lack a conscience. They are genetically incapable of feeling anything for other people than a hunger for power over them. Take it a step further. Imagine that the people telling you we are spreading democracy, justice and freedom while fighting a war on terror are afflicted with this lack of conscience.<br /><br />How does you view of U.S. actions change?<br /><br />Right this moment, there is a group of men and women in the most powerful political positions on the planet who are so afflicted. In psychological terms, they are psychopaths. Already, if you take the time to observe your brain working again, you might see that the very word "psychopths" conjured an image in your mind that will set the stage for how you will perceive everything else you read, here. Perhaps that picture was of a Hannibal Lecter type of character, or a Jeffery Dahmer. Whatever it is, take a moment to observe it and realize that this is nothing more than a programmed response. Your thoughts around the word "psychopath" were molded by your training and assumptions before you even realized you were having them, just like your perceptions of the shades of gray were altered before they even bubble up into conscious awareness.<br /><br />A psychopath is a person who is genetically conscienceless. They have no feelings for other people beyond what might be described as hunger. They hunger for power over others. For some, this plays out as wielding the ultimate power of life and death. For most, it means wielding power over perception and the ability to manipulate others to get as much as they can from them.<br /><br />Having no conscience, psychopaths can lie with impunity. The typcial methods for detecting lies will not work with them. All of those methods depend on detecting the unconscious physical "symptoms" of a lie, none of which manifest with a psychopath. Brain scans of the brains of psychopaths have shown that they do not react emotionally to things that normal people cannot help but react to. Different parts of a normal brain are activated when saying the words "death" and "rose," for example. Not so in a psychopathic brain.<br /><br />This lack of emotional reaction doesn't come across as cold, like you might think. One of the skills a psychopath learns early in life is how to mimic the emotions of normal people. Since they don't have emotional triggers of their own, they can pick and choose which faux emotions they will display at any time in order to achieve whatever effect they desire. If they want to illicit pity from someone with a soft heart, they will put on a convincing act of crying. If they want to win the heart of someone fun-loving, they might have a smile on their face and a ready joke no matter what the circumstance.<br /><br />Normal people, though, are largely emotionally driven. When our brains are putting together the picture of the world that makes sense from the data given, they will tend to focus on the parts of the picture that will have to do with affecting us emotionally. If something looks like it would stir an unpleasant emotion, it will be seen as dark and negative. If it looks like it might stir pleasant emotions, it will appear light. Our emotions are, to a large extent, the background against which we judge the various levels of gray in the world.<br /><br />The psychopath's job, then, comes down largely to manipulating the contrast and apparent movement in the picture you are presented of the world. They might say words, like national security, war on terror and mission accomplished. These words have no bearing on reality, but they aren't intended to convey reality. They are intended to lead you to see things they way the psychopath wants you to see them. They are part of a linguistic illusion in which dark appears light and phantoms appear to fill in the gaps in the picture you are presented.<br /><br />One example of such a phantom, not unlike the phantom hazy diamond above, is the so-called suicide bomber. No doubt, some of these have lived in the past, though logically there is not a single suicide bomber alive today. Are there as many as reported, though? Probably not. There are also reports of British agents posing as suicide bombers and people being set up as unwitting suicide bombers, only to discover the explosive planted in the trunk of their car before they went off. These stories do not fit the official story about the state of the Middle East, so they are ignored by the mainstream news media in the U.S. If they do happen to filter through to some Americans, they are dismissed. The illusion is too strong. Contradictory evidence like this seems to fly in the face of common sense. We can <em>see for ourselves</em> what is going on in the world.<br /><br />Except, as we've already seen, we can't.<br /><br />Perhaps you aren't convinced of that yet, though. Maybe you think that you really do see the world as it is and are not subject to the illusions that are born of your programming and assumptions. Here is another illusion that will show you just how dramatically wrong your brain's interpretation of the world can be.. <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" id="chess" align="middle" height="400" width="550"><br /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain"><br /><param name="movie" value="http://allenbranson.com/illusions/chess.swf"><br /><param name="quality" value="high"><br /><param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff"><br /><embed src="http://allenbranson.com/illusions/chess.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" name="chess" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" align="middle" height="400" width="550"></embed><br /></object><br />What's the big deal, you ask? The big deal is that the squares marked A and B are exactly the same shade of gray!<br /><br />The first time I saw this illusion, I just passed it by. Clearly the explanation was wrong. Squares A and B are absolutely <em>not</em> the same shade of gray...except they are. To convince you, I've added a little aid to this copy of the illusion. As you move your mouse over the squares on the grid, you will notice that they highlight as a light yellow. Click and the highlighted square will either disappear or reappear. Eliminate squares of the checkerboard until the squares around A and B are masked. See for yourself, they really are the same shade of gray.<br /><br />Your mind cannot see the A and B squares by themselves as long as there are squares connecting them. It interprets the picture presented as a whole, making assumptions and interpretting the data to create a whole picture that makes sense to it that is in line with those assumptions.<br /><br />The same thing happens with everything you observe. Between the squares of various points of interest in the world, you have been shown connecting squares carefully designed to lead you to interpret what you see in a very specific way. As with the above illusion, that interpretation comes without any effort on your part. It happens before you are even aware of having thoughts. You see a world, as clear as the nose on your face, that looks a certain way...and yet it isn't that way at all.<br /><br />You have been lead to believe that Arab highjackers flew planes into buildings on 9/11. You have been lead to believe that Palestinians are nothing but a crazed bunch of suicide bombers who deserve to be kept locked up in Israeli prisons and behind walls guarded by armed men. You have been lead to believe that the U.S. had a right to invade Iraq and that it will have a right to invade Iran, too.<br /><br />None of this is how it really is.<br /><br />What you see are illusions created by controlled contrast between events, statements, conditioning and allegedly unbiased reporting. To get to the truth, you must dig. Of course, digging for yourself into the truth of matters is a lot of work. You're busy. You don't have time.<br /><br />But, if you don't dig, you don't have a life, either. The world in changing rapidly, in ways you probably can't even comprehend at this moment. You have been lied to, manipulated and programmed to see the world in a specific way. This is not a way that is of benefit to you. The purpose of it all is to keep you quiet and docile until the time comes for the hammer to fall and you to be brushed aside like dust on the floor.<br /><br />The question is this: do you wake up and do the work to see the illusion, or do you blithely work and entertain yourself into oblivion? The choice is yours and will remain yours until the moment the choice can no longer be made. Exactly when that will happen, no one can say.Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-84487948889023371572007-08-11T00:18:00.000-07:002007-08-11T07:25:07.785-07:00<p style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(51, 0, 153);" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:180%;">The Art of the Con</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Not one of the people getting on the I-35W Bridge on August 1<sup>st</sup> had any reason to suspect what was going to happen that night. The day before, and the day before that, the bridge had held just as much traffic as it did on the 1<sup>st</sup>. The bridge had help up just fine since its opening in 1967. It had a history of holding the weight of vehicles traveling across the <st1:place>Mississippi River</st1:place> without any problems.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">If someone with knowledge of the bridge’s lack of structural integrity stood at one end of the bridge trying to warn commuters of their imminent demise, he would’ve been laughed off as a nut case. Political cartoonists would have, if they had the time, probably drawn him as a long-haired, bearded, sandal-wearing lunatic carrying a sign reading “THE END IS NEAR!”</p> <p class="MsoNormal">And yet, at <st1:time minute="5" hour="18">6:05pm</st1:time> on August 1<sup>st</sup>, the I-35W Bridge did collapse. The collapse was so sudden and catastrophic that some thought explosives had gone off. Cars plummeted into the water, below. A school bus full of children just managed to stop before going over the edge. Panic ensued.<o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Everyone on the bridge would’ve sworn it couldn’t happen, yet it did. Even the engineers in charge of inspecting the bridge didn’t see it coming. According to a report from WISN in <st1:place><st1:city>Milwaukee</st1:city>, <st1:state>Wisconsin</st1:state></st1:place>:</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt;">"During all of my time on the I-35W Bridge, I did not notice any unusual or unexpected swaying or rumbling," said Steve Weston, a project manager with Progressive Contractors of St. Michael, Minn. "No one in my crew made any such report to me. Right up to the collapse, I had no reason to believe that my crew and I were in danger."</p> <p class="MsoNormal">That is, of course, exactly the way we like to see the world. We need stability. Without stability, adrenaline pumps into our blood stream and our heart rates stay dangerously high. The stress of prolonged lack of stability has a detrimental effect on our health. So, if we don’t find stability in reality, we make it up in our own heads. Lack of stability is just too much for most of us to handle.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">In order to create this make-believe stability in our minds, we call on our recollection of history as justification of our fantasies. The bridge has never collapsed before. The country has always weathered the storm of hard times in the past. The system will correct itself and everything will soon go back to normal. Everything is under control, just as it has always been.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">We, in the <st1:country-region><st1:place>U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region>, live in an empire, though some refuse to acknowledge it for what really is. Being an empire means having control. Control equals stability, or, at least, it feels that way. Empires provide a special form of history that makes believing in their stability easy for anyone calming themselves with such a fantasy. They can point to the rise of the country from humble, agrarian roots and a bold political experiment in democracy to the economic and military superpower of the world.<o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">How can anyone doubt, with a history like that, that the empire will continue to grow? It has always grown. Anyone who doubts its continued growth and prosperity is a long-haired, bearded, sandal-wearing lunatic carrying a sign that reads, “THE END IS NEAR!” And, no one in their right mind listens to such lunatics, do they?</p> <p class="MsoNormal">It is easy to forget just how many empires have come and gone during the known history of humanity. They all end. That is the history we need to keep in our minds. Every empire that has ever existed has come to an end. But this empire has not ended yet, you might argue. The keyword is “yet.” Every empire, up to its last day, could say the same thing.<o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The desire to believe that a history of success and growth means a future of the same is so strong that nearly every peddler of financial investments covers its legal butt with the disclaimer, “Past performance is not guarantee of future results.” Without that disclaimer, you leave yourself wide open to being charged with running a confidence game.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">We seem to love stories about confidence games, yet seem to learn nothing from them. The Sting won seven Oscars, The Usual Suspects won two and The Grifters was nominated for four. Ocean’s Eleven (the original Rat Pack version) spawned an extremely popular remake which then spawned two popular sequels. The TV show <st1:city><st1:place>Mission</st1:place></st1:city>: Impossible spawned a movie franchise that was successful despite a growing dislike of its star, Tom Cruise. The list goes on and on. We go to the movies to watch them in droves, then rent the DVD's to watch them again, none the wiser two hours later.<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>The essence of a confidence game or, as it is usually called, the con, is exactly what the name implies: confidence. A con artist would convince their “mark” that a tremendous profit was to be made for very little effort. The success of the con is dependent on the ability of the con man to convince the mark that the proposition can’t possibly lose and the desire of the mark to make the profit. Often, the proposition, or setup, is something illegal. For example, in the movie The Sting, the setup used is one called “the wire.”</p> <p class="MsoNormal">In the wire con the mark was made to believe that the con artist had someone on the inside at the telegraph office who was working the “gold wire.” The gold wire was the telegraph wire that delivered the results of horse races. The alleged inside man would delay delivery of the results of one of the late races by a couple of minutes in order to get the con artist the results in time to place a bet at a local pool hall and make a killing.<o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Of course, the con man does not have anyone on the inside at the telegraph office. Instead, he sets up a phony pool hall, complete with actors, to simulate the event. In order to really suck the mark into the proposition, he is not allowed to make any large bets for a few days. Instead, he is cautioned to go easy for a few days and just make a few bucks on races that don’t carry long odds so that suspicions are not raised. In one version of this con, carried out by the infamous con artist Joseph “The Yellow Kid” Wiel, the mark is actually lead to lose money on his first few bets.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">For the first race he bets on, the results are delivered by phone. The “inside man” quickly blurts out twenty one then hangs up. The mark eagerly places his bet on the horse with the number twenty one to win and, lo and behold, horse twenty wins. When the mark later meets the “inside man” he is informed that he is an idiot for not being able to follow simple instructions. He was clearly told that horse twenty won.<o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">A few more similar “miscommunications” and the mark is convinced there is a lot of money to be made and desperate to recoup his loses and make a profit. It is at that point that the sting happens. He places a ridiculously high bet that goes far beyond the house limits—not knowing, of course, that the “house” is phony and has no limits whatsoever. A show is put on for his benefit in which the bookie acts as if he simply cannot accept such a high bet. Finally, the “owner” of the operation steps in and, having seen the man consistently lose, tells the bookie to take the money.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Just as in the movie The Sting, the con might end with a faked raid by the police that sends everyone scrambling, including the mark who is forced to leave his large bet behind in order to escape jail. The con artists are safe from retribution because the mark can’t openly admit that he was willingly taking part in illegal activities.<o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The con does not have to involve illegal activities, of course…at least on the part of the mark. The con artist might claim to be the owner of a sizable chunk of land, even producing convincing documentation to prove it. George C. Parker made a living selling famous <st1:state><st1:place>New York</st1:place></st1:state> landmarks to tourists. His favorite was selling the <st1:place><st1:placename>Brooklyn</st1:placename> <st1:placetype>Bridge</st1:placetype></st1:place>. These types of cons went so far as to open offices that the mark could visit in order to instill confidence in their legitimacy. In the end, the mark engages in what he considers to be a perfectly legal and upfront business transaction that amounts to nothing but loss of their money.</p><p class="MsoNormal">These cons make for great movies because they seem so unbelievable. The wire is so involved, requiring the setup of a fake pool hall, the hiring of lots of actors and several days of manipulation, we can't believe anyone could actually pull it off. Only in the movies, we tell ourselves. However, the wire was a real con, used many times in the earlier part of the twentieth century. Cons could be incredibly elaborate affairs that spanned weeks or months of setup.<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In any type of con, confidence is the key. As every con man knows, confidence is one of the easiest things to instill in another person. They understand that confidence and stability are necessary to the human mind. Rather than look with suspicion on the man who presents a deal that is too good to be true, most people will welcome him with open arms and count their blessings.<o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">So it was with the I-35W Bridge in <st1:city><st1:place>Minneapolis</st1:place></st1:city>. Everyone had confidence in that bridge right up to the moment it collapsed. And, so it is with our little empire. We have confidence. We <i style="">need</i> to have confidence. It has built that confidence in us slowly and surely. Anything less and we might see the sting coming and bolt for the door. It has built that confidence through indoctrination in its history—it’s rise from a lowly rebel nation to a global superpower.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">But, past performance does not guarantee future results.<o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The stock market of the 1920’s was making a lot of people rich. The easy money to be made there drew virtually everyone in. If you had money, you put some of it in stocks. It was just the prudent thing to do. Even if you didn’t have money, you could buy into the game. The “beauty” of that market was that you could buy on margin.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">You borrow some money to buy the stocks then put the stocks up as collateral for the loan. Since stocks were going up and up, it was a great deal. As a matter of fact, it was such a great deal that by 1929 the total debt on margin buying was six billion dollars. Yeah, that really is billion with a “b”.<o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In early September of that year, the market took a bit of a tumble by dropping, then rising, then dropping again. No need to worry. The market fluctuates. It had dropped like that before, but it had a history—a history of rising up stronger after the dip. Investors had <i style="">confidence</i> in the stock market.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">This time, however, the market didn’t rebound as everyone thought it should. On October 24<sup>th</sup>, Black Thursday, investors began to panic. Selling orders overwhelmed the stock exchange’s ability to process the transactions. Financiers attempt to rebuild confidence in the market by buying as much of the stock as they could. It didn’t work. On October 29<sup>th</sup>, Black Tuesday, the floor of the stock exchange went chaotic. Traders on the floor (those guys you think of as staid and sober businessmen handling enormous sums of other people's money) were actually tearing at each other’s throats like crazed animals. In the end, thirty billion dollars—more than twice the national debt—had been lost.<o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">It happens just that fast. One day, you have confidence, the next day…nothing. You’ve been taken for a ride and you have no means of regaining what you have lost. It is simply gone. We don’t want to believe that it happens, but it does happen, it has happened and it will happen again. Perhaps it will happen again very soon.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">The warning signs are there. We are near the end of a very elaborate con game and we are the mark. But, we don’t want to see the signs. We have been promised a payoff at the end and we are too heavily invested in the game to quit now. We’ve lost some in the past, so we are putting it all behind the game, now. We are going to recoup our losses and then some!<o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Except, we aren’t. The mark never does. The only hope the mark has is to wake up to the fact of the con and end the game before it is too late. Letting the game play to its end is all the con artist wants. After that, you can have your regret for what could have been, what you should have done or what a fool you had been. The con artist has your valuables. That’s all that matters.<o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Still, here we are at the end of the game. We’ve seen the movies. We should know the game by now, but our confidence holds firm. We tell ourselves <span style="font-style: italic;">this</span> con is too big and elaborate. No one could carry it off. Only in the movies. Instead, we blindly place our bets, mortgage our future and the future of our children, all for the big payoff we’ve been promised. It will come. It <span style="font-style: italic;">must come,</span> dammit! The stock market will continue to rise, democracy will spread across the face of the planet and we will be welcomed as liberators.<br /><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">And that bridge…the bridge to our future…we have confidence in it. It got us to where we are today, so it will get us to where we have been promised for tomorrow.<o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">If you believe that, I have another bridge I’d like to sell you.<o:p></o:p></p>Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-46117394622908981132007-06-01T07:18:00.000-07:002007-06-01T07:19:54.768-07:00<font style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 102);" size="4">The Art of Deception</font><br /><br />The man sitting across the table from you is known for trickery. He is a stage magician. You know he employs trickery, so he tells you he is going to do a card trick in which he can't possibly manipulate the cards. In this trick, you will do all of the card handling. He won't touch the cards at all.<br /><br />He instructs you to cut the deck into four piles. You do so. He then tells you that you are going to randomize the order of the cards by shuffling them around and moving cards from one pile to another. Pointing to a pile of cards, he instructs you to take the top three cards and place them at the bottom of that pile. Then, take the next three cards and place them, one each, on top of the three piles remaining on the table. You repeat the procedure with all four piles of cards. The cards should now be very well mixed.<br /><br />The man then begins his patter in earnest. He asks you to confirm the fact that he has not touched the cards. You agree. In no way could he have manipulated how you would cut the cards or handle them. Again, you agree. With a smile, he asks you to turn over the top card from each pile. You are amazed. The four aces sit at the top of each of the four piles of cards. For a moment, your mind might actually entertain the possibility that real magic has been performed, though you "know" you've been duped.<br /><br />The fact is, this trick can be taught in a couple of minutes to any child capable of understanding the instructions. It requires no fine motor skills for clever card handling since the performer does not even handle the deck. The only thing required is setting up the deck before the trick is performed and being able to do a little sales patter in which you get the audience to agree to a statement that is blatantly false.<br /><br />Take a moment and see if you can identify the lie that makes the trick believable. Everything the magician says is true with one exception. The trick is based completely on a facet of human psychology that most people--stage magicians, salesmen and politicians aside--don't understand. When a person is given a number of facts that are demonstrably true, they will tend to group all statements in that group together, agreeing to everything said, including an embedded lie.<br /><br />1. The magician asked you to agree that he did not touch the cards during the trick: True<br />2. He asks you to agree that he did not influence you in any way in how the cards were cut: True<br />3. He asks you to agree that in no way did he manipulate you in the handling of the cards: FALSE<br /><br />In fact, the only thing he did was manipulate you while creating the illusion in your mind that you were making free choices. If you don't see the manipulation yet, read through the description of the trick again. The magician did not allow you to choose how the cards would be shuffled once they were cut into four piles. Instead, he guided you through a pre-programmed series of moves--three cards to the bottom then three cards on top of the remaining piles--designed to move the four aces to the top of the four piles from their pre-placed position at the top of the deck! If you want to understand the mechanics of the trick, grab a deck of cards and try it. Just put the four aces at the top of the deck then simply follow the trick as outlined above.<br /><br />Once you understand how the trick is done, you'll realize it is a very cheap bit of manipulation. If you found your mind reeling at the description of the trick, you'll probably feel a bit of a fool at how easily you could be duped. The trick really is a child's game and a very old one, at that. Yet, people are still fooled by it.<br /><br />It works with more than just cards. The phrase, "stacking the deck" means using a variation of this kind of trick to predetermine the outcome of any situation by placing what is to be chosen in a particular position then guiding the chooser through a predefined set of movements that forces that particular choice while giving the illusion of free choice. There are a number of other methods used to force a selection in stage magic. Many card tricks rely on forced selection, but the magician can't use the same force twice in his act. As he changes methods, he informs you that each new method is an assurance that he is not engaging in any sort of trickery. Maybe he fooled you on the last one, so this time he won't even touch the cards. Next time, perhaps he'll use the force called Magician's Choice. He'll give you three choices and ask you to pick one at random. You, of course, have no choice but to pick exactly what you are forced to pick.<br /><br />How can that be? It's easy. Given three choices, A, B and C, suppose I want you to pick B. I ask you to pick one at random. If you happen to pick B, the force is done. If you pick A, I set A aside and ask you to pick from B and C. If you pick C, I declare that you've left your choice, B, on the table. Again, a cheap trick that most people will fall for if done with the requisite theatricality. Forced choice and sleight-of-hand are not only the prevue of stage magicians, though. Take a look at how it is done in real life.<br /><br />The most enduring form of the forced choice in the U.S. and western Europe is the electoral process. This is such an obvious forced choice that it can, rather paradoxically, remain undetected even after it is pointed out. The key is the emotional involvement of the electors, which just happens to be the key to stage magic, too. Once you've convinced someone they are making a free choice, they will provide the evidence of the freedom of their choice for you. If human beings didn't possess this peculiar bit of psychology, stage magic wouldn't work. It wouldn't matter what the magician said. The forced choice would be seen for precisely what it is: forced. Instead, a little salesmanship on the part of the performer convinces the audience of what is to come before the trick is performed. The audience then dutifully sees exactly what they were told to see and the magician is free to manipulate events to his favor.<br /><br />Here is another example of the techniques of stage magic at work. On the morning of September 11, 2001, you awoke to reports that the unthinkable had happened--a massive terrorist attack had occurred on U.S. soil. As the day unfolds, you learn the following facts. Four planes had been hijacked to be used as veritable flying bombs against high profile targets. Two of those planes, in front of thousands of witnesses and several video cameras, fly into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Later that morning, those towers collapse, leaving not even a bit of the structures left standing. In the Pennsylvania countryside, another of the hijacked planes crashes following an apparent heroic effort by the passengers to regain control of the aircraft from its hijackers. Also, something crashes into the Pentagon, causing massive damage, a huge fire ball and loss of life.<br /><br />Eventually, it is announced that the damage at the Pentagon was caused by the fourth hijacked plane. This makes perfect sense to you. Four planes are hijacked, three are clearly accounted for, and something crashed into the Pentagon. The only logical choice is that the fourth plane crashed into the Pentagon. What doesn't occur to you is that you have been duped once again by another variation of the forced choice. Just like with the card trick, you don't think of the obvious, that the deck has been stacked and movements manipulated to force this particular choice.<br /><br />Subsequent revelations about the inconsistencies in the official story of the event only further the illusion. A magician might turn your mind away from thoughts of the cheap manipulation he has performed by giving you a false choice of explanations for what you have witnessed. He only needs to give you one of the possible explanations, letting you provide the other in the privacy of your own mind. He tells you it must have been "magic." While you know it isn't true, his suggestion has clouded your thinking by introducing noise into your thought process. After all, if you were sufficiently impressed by the trick, that very thought likely went through your head. The same thing is done in the official story of the events of the day of 911. A false choice is set up by suggesting that the alternative to the official story is something preposterous, like holograms of planes flying into the twin towers, or rogue elements of the U.S. government committing this atrocity.<br /><br />And here we see that a subtle variation of the trick, also used in stage magic, has been employed to divert your attention. You have been given two possible scenarios that contradict the official story. One of them is blatantly silly, one is not. Yet, as any stage magician, salesman or professional politician knows, your mind will group the statements together and dismiss the second with the first. In other words, the truth about the trick has been told openly, but in such a way that you will reject the truth, sending you down any number of dead-end blind alleys searching for the secret of how it was done.<br /><br />Take a moment again to review what you were told and what you actually saw with your own eyes. If you want to see how the trick is done, do not accept anything the magician tells you at face value. He is a liar. His job is to give you as much truth and openness as possible, for the purpose of proving to you that he is not manipulating events in any way, so that the critical lie that makes the trick work will go undetected by the average observer. In the case of 911, you were flooded with demonstrable facts that were horrifying, engaging your emotions to a high degree. Remember, the key to all trickery is the emotional involvement of the audience in supporting the lie. Each fact presented made the ensuing lies all the more believable.<br />Two planes really did crash into the twin towers. A plane really did crash into the Pennsylvania countryside. Something really did crash into the Pentagon. All of this is a matter of record, so everything that comes after, your mind will tell you, is a matter of record, too.<br /><br />But it isn't.<br /><br />In fact, the evidence strongly suggests that a commercial aircraft could not have crashed into the Pentagon. There was, for example, no wreckage found at the scene that could have come from such a craft. For the craft to have hit the building as low as it did, its engines would have had to scrape the ground, yet the lawn in front of the Pentagon was left unmarked. The hole left in the Pentagon was barely as wide as the fuselage of such a craft. Assuming that the fuselage managed to fully penetrate the building and disintegrate, creating a hole that size, one is still left to account for the wings and engines. The official story would have the folding back and penetrating the building along with the fuselage. But there is simply no room for them to have made it through the hole.<br /><br />In the case of the twin towers, the claim has been made that they collapsed--as did the building 7, later--due to a loss of structural integrity caused by massive fire and a weakening of supports from the shock caused by the impact of the planes. This was accepted as a reasonable explanation, despite the fact that the buildings were designed to withstand such a shock and no steel reinforced building has ever collapsed due to fire, before or since. Also, as any publicly available video of the collapse of the towers will show you, the tops of the towers leaned to one side as they began to fall, yet still managed to right themselves and fall into the footprint of the building. This would be impossible without a controlled demolition of the buildings.<br /><br />You have also been asked to believe that each and every safeguard against such an event put in place by the U.S. military failed simultaneously on that fateful day, despite the fact that those safeguards had been called to action over 60 times in the preceding 12 months and worked perfectly each and every time. In the words of our stage magician, "it was magic!"<br /><br />Of course, in the case of stage magic, the lies are told for our amusement. No harm done, maybe even a lesson learned. In the case of a deception like 911, the stakes are a bit higher. The art of deception is as old as mankind. Strike that. It is far older. It is as old as the universe itself. Deception is a key survival strategy for nearly everything that has ever been alive. How curious, then, that we—the one species we believe capable of rational thought on the planet—remain almost completely ignorant of the various means of deception. What’s even more curious is the fact that many remain steadfast in their belief that such deception is rare when the evidence contradicting that belief can be seen in even the most cursory investigation of nature.<br /><br />Chameleons change color to blend into their surroundings. Some species of moths and butterflies have markings that are so close to the bark of the trees on which they perch that you can look right at them and not notice they are there. Carnivorous plants will mimic the smell of rotting flesh in order to attract the flies they like to eat. The list goes on and on, from one link in the food chain to the next. Why do we insist that this behavior ends with mankind?<br /><br />The key, once again, is emotional involvement in a lie we have been told. Since the time we were children, it has been drummed into our heads. Everyone is the same inside. It’s a lovely democratic sentiment, but it is a sentiment that is contradicted by evidence. Just like in stage magic, we are directed away from seeing the truth through clever means of misdirection. The belief of what we are to see is planted in our heads before we ever see it. If we begin to suspect the truth, noise is injected into our thought process and true statements are mixed with false to use our psychology against us.<br /><br />The simple fact is, all who look human are not human in the way we normally understand humanity. A small but very destructive minority of those who look human lack some of the most basic of human characteristics—empathy and conscience. These creatures use deception and misdirection to prey on human beings. If humans begin to suspect that all is not right with them, they will put a preprogrammed set of movements into play that are designed to steer you away from the truth. And, just like in the trick, everything they do is mechanical. Yet, as long as people remain unaware of their methods, their actions continue to befuddle and even amaze.<br /><br />Another real world example of how this kind of trickery is performed. As you read this, the chances are pretty good that a soldier for the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) is either using a Palestinian mother as a human shield while he terrorizes innocent people in their homes, ostensibly to search for terrorists, or is shooting a small Palestinian child in the back for the egregious crime of throwing rocks at an Israeli checkpoint in anger.<br /><br />If this were any other country, you would be outraged. But this is not any country. This country was set up with immunity from criticism before it even existed. Do you see the correlation to stage magic again? The audience is told what they will see BEFORE they see it, preparing them to look for clues that validate what they were told and ignore what doesn’t fit. In the case of Israel, the audience was told that they are God’s chosen people who have suffered endlessly and now deserve to have this little plot of land to call home and live in peace. <br /><br />What the audience misses is the fact that a large portion of the Jews who have made Israel their home are the descendents of converts to Judaism rather than descendents of the founders of that religion, and that they appear to be lead by some of the aforementioned almost-human predators, a.k.a., psychopaths. Even the slightest hint of criticism of Israel is met with cries of anti-Semitism, another bit of manipulation in which the only choice given is to wholeheartedly support everything Israel does or side with the Nazis. It’s another bit of forced choice that is as cheap as any described here…and it is remarkably effective.<br /><br />The fact is, most Jews are caring, compassionate people who really do want to live their lives in peace. Because nearly everyone has had at least a Jewish friend or two and has observed this for themselves, charges of anti-Semitism can carry weight in their minds. Jews are not monsters, so how could these people claim they are doing anything but defending themselves against a relentless Palestinian terrorist mob that threatens their very existence? Let’s look at the statements in the same way we looked at the card trick.<br /><br />1. Most Jews are caring and compassionate: True<br />2. Jews deserve a home in which they can live in peace like everyone else: True<br />3. Therefore, Israel is only defending itself when it imposes curfews, limits travel and even shoots small Palestinian children: FALSE<br /><br />No one deserves a home at the expense of others. The Palestinians were living peacefully in the region for thousands of years before the U.N. created the state of Israel. Even after that event, Palestinians were gracious to their new neighbors. It was not until the leaders of Israel saw fit to demolish Palestinian homes and drive a people from a land that had been theirs for thousands of years that things turned ugly. Put yourself in their position for a moment and tell me you wouldn’t be just a little pissed off.<br /><br />You may think I’ve given three examples of trickery in the real world—voting, 911 and the assumed irreproachability of Israel. In fact, I’ve only given one. The best tricks have multiple levels. One deception follows another until the audience is completely lost in the tricky with no hope of unraveling the secrets. The same is true, here. There are more levels to this particular trick, far more than we could talk about now. The rabbit hole is deep with a lot of branching tunnels that lead nowhere.<br /><br />It is possible to unravel this trick, however. The key, as always, is to avoid taking any of what the magician says at face value. To see how the trick is done requires a little study and a willingness to accept that you have been tricked at all. Maintain your emotional attachment to supporting the lie and you will only fall further under the spell of the magician. Learn to open your eyes and you will suddenly see what has been going on right under you nose, undetected. One day, the trick will seem cheap and obvious and you will wonder how you didn’t see it all along.<br /><br />If that day comes for you, the day your study has paid off and you can see the trickery of the magician, you will have a future.Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-74966594327537852252007-04-28T11:42:00.000-07:002007-04-28T11:44:05.351-07:00<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102); font-weight: bold;">Here is Your War on Terror<br /><br /></span>A war on terror is raging and the battlefield is all around us. That, at least, is what we are asked to believe. Most of us do believe it. Many of those who claim to believe that our government is nothing but a den of thieves and liars even believe them on this point. They might say that the invasion of Iraq was wrong, that we should pull out ASAP, that we should quit our imperialistic ambitions and...concentrate our efforts on the real terrorists.<br /><br />We all know who the real terrorist are, right? Osama bin Laden, suicide bombers and all fanatical non-Christian and non-Jewish religious adherents. Those are the guys we have to worry about. Of course, you would never be so politically incorrect as to say that all Muslim are terrorists, but you do have to wonder, don't you? Just what is someone who worships a foreign god capable of? The citizens of Israel have a nice familiar god, even if they aren't exactly on speaking terms with his whole family. That's comforting, isn't it? Israel may be in the Middle East, but they don't seem Middle Eastern, if you see what I mean.<br /><br />But Muslims, we are wise to keep a close eye on them. Take, for instance, the case of Sami al-Hussayen. To the public, he presented the face of a peace-loving father and doctoral candidate at the University of Idaho. The watchful, post-911 eyes of a local bank teller saw something more, however, and promptly alerted the FBI to a suspicious transaction by this Arab student.<br /><br />The FBI sprang to action, working diligently to rid us of this terrorist threat living right in the heartland. Getting the "goods" on a sly terrorist agent like al-Hussayen takes time, however. The last thing they wanted was to have to take some of that precious time figuring out where he'd disappeared to. Fortunately, al-Hussayen provided them with the perfect excuse for tossing him in the hoosegow while the investigation proceeded. As it turned out, al-Hussayen had violated the terms of his visa.<br /><br />Living in the U.S. under a student visa, as al-Hussayen was, one is not allowed to work. Yet, al-Hussayen, showing as much disregard for our laws as he did hatred of our freedoms, volunteered his time maintaining a website for a Muslim charity!! Even worse, he allegedly received as much as $300 over the course of five years of such "work," leading an immigration court judge to decree that he should be kept behind bars until the charges could be cleared up. Clink went the cell door for nearly 1 1/2 years.<br /><br />The FBI scoured every nook and cranny of al-Hussayen's life. Virtually everything that could be known about the man was known by the time they brought their case to court. What did they find? As John Ashcroft put it, al-Hussayen was part of "a terrorist threat to Americans that is fanatical, and it is fierce."<br /><br />Did the FBI uncover evidence that al-Hussayen was about to blow up the White House or unleash some other form of violent nightmare on the public? Not exactly. He was charged with having provided material support for terrorist activity, which sound like it could be bad until you realize that the material support was his volunteer work maintaining a website for the Islamic Assembly of North America.<br /><br />Like most Islamic charities after 9/11, this one came under the close scrutiny of the U.S. government. While the website al-Hussayen managed seemed devoted to peaceful religious study, the government found that it did in fact contain articles written by radical sheiks. Some of those articles contained calls to violence against the U.S., including one article that mentioned hijacking planes and flying them into buildings that was written before 9/11. The site also contained a link for making donations to Hamas, considered a terrorist organization by the U.S.<br /><br />Unfortunately, for the prosecution, it turned out that much of the anti-American material posted on the site was also posted on the site of one of their witness, as well as on the website of the BBC. In any case, there was no evidence that al-Hussayen believed any of the rhetoric in those articles and, certainly, he had never written anything like that himself. As for the link for donating to Hamas, it was never on the site during the time al-Hussayen was webmaster.<br /><br />Evidence of al-Hussayen's other suspicious behavior was also presented. The FBI claimed al-Hussayen attempted to delay his graduation, in order to lengthen his time in the U.S. for terrorist fundraising, by changing doctoral advisors mid-year. They also noted that he moved his campus office from the computer science building to the one that housed the universities defunct nuclear reactor. Obviously, so they claimed, he was hoping to get his hands on some radioactive material he could use to make a dirty bomb. And, he was studying computer security systems. I'm sure I don't have to spell out what horrors he was planning to unleash in that arena.<br /><br />The truth of the matter was, al-Hussayen was attempting to hasten his graduation by changing advisors. His former advisor was battling cancer. As for finding radioactive material lying around a decommissioned nuclear reactor--I can't even bring myself to comment. And since when can one be accused of suspicious behavior for engaging in a common field of study already offered by the university one is attending?!<br /><br />That's right, I forgot. Sami al-Hussayen is Muslim.<br /><br />His trial was notable because he was the first tried under the newly expanded definition of "material support" to include "expert advice and assistance." The government claimed that since he used his expertise in website design for a charity they were investigating as a possible supporter of terrorists (no such links were ever found, by the way), he was a terrorist himself.<br /><br />In this case, al-Hussayen was lucky. Being a test case of sorts, the government didn't quite have it's act together and the jury hadn't been softened quite enough by Fox News terror alerts. al-Hussayen walked, free to volunteer again. Countless others after him weren't quite so lucky. They simply disappeared into the the bowels of a prison like the one in Guantanamo Bay, "extraordinarily rendered" to a place far away from the prying eyes of the public.<br /><br />Sami al-Hussayen wasn't quite as lucky as some others, though. Take, for example, the Israelis founding dancing with joy in the shadow of the burning twin towers on 9/11. They even videotaped the event, mocking the burning of the buildings by holding their lighters in front of the camera as if they were lighting the building on fire themselves. I would hazard a guess that their immigration status wasn't exactly to-the-letter kosher, either. But, the lucky stiffs, they were merely shuffled out of the U.S. and onto Israeli TV where they were welcomed as heros. Talk about dodging a bullet!<br /><br />There there is Luis Posada Carriles. He has also been charged with immigration irregularities. In his case, he just entered the country flat-out illegally and was caught. There isn't a lot of wiggle room in those kinds of cases. It is on the immigration issue that any similarity between Posada and al-Husssayen ends, however. You see, Posada is a known and self-confessed terrorist. Yet, the U.S. government refuses to either bring terrorism charges against him or extradite him to his native Venezuela, a demand made by that government, as is required by both Article 7 of the Montreal Convention and Article 8 of the International Convention for the Repression of Terrorist Acts Committed with Bombs.<br /><br />Posada's known terrorist activities include blowing up an airplane (the only recovered human remains were those of a young girl whose brains and internal organs were literally blown away) and several bombings of hotels in Havana. Of course, that one sentence brings the entire thing into sharp focus, doesn't it? Not only is he not Muslim, he is OUR terrorist. In the eyes of the U.S. government, a terrorist is always one of "them." A man who blows the guts out of young girls isn't a terrorist if he is fighting our enemies (though I'm still not clear on how Cuba, of all places, qualifies as the enemy of anyone). No, a man like that is...well, in the case of Posada, he is on the CIA payroll. Go figure.<br /><br />We all know there is no more honor amongst spies than there is amongst thieves. That in mind, one has to wonder just why Posada, a man who has worked for the CIA since the 60's, was trying to enter the U.S. illegally. Also worth pondering is why he was being financed by a man, one Santiago Alvarez, who had been indicted for an illegal cache of weaponry at his Florida home that included machine guns and rocket launchers! You've just got to ask what they were planning to do with all that. Yet, the U.S. has, after years, still refuses to bring terrorism charges against Posada. Rather, they keep him tied up, and away from the Venezuelan government, in immigration court.<br /><br />It kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it? What if--and I know this is a big "what if"--but what if the war on terror isn't quite what we've been lead to believe? What if the stories about Islamic fundamentalists, crazed with devotion to the wrong god and lining up to splatter their guts all over our freedoms, aren't quite accurate?<br /><br />I'd have to ask the same question of the U.S. government I asked of Posada and Aolvarez. Just what could they be up to?<br /><br />Further reading:<br /><a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002097570_sami22m.html">http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002097570_sami22m.html</a><br /><a href="http://answer.pephost.org/site/News2?abbr=ANS_&page=NewsArticle&id=8463">http://answer.pephost.org/site/News2?abbr=ANS_&page=NewsArticle&id=8463</a><a href="http://answer.pephost.org/site/News2?abbr=ANS_&page=NewsArticle&id=8463"><br />http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Posada_Carriles</a>Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-1155786059513758632006-08-16T18:40:00.000-07:002006-08-17T23:05:56.606-07:00<span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153); font-weight: bold;">A Thief in the Night</span></span><br /><br />While it might not be exactly the apocalypse prophesied in the New Testament, there is something coming like "a thief in the night" that is frighteningly similar. I use the phrase not because I want to give this post a religious tone but because it is perfectly appropriate to the times.<br /><br />The phrase, "like a thief in the night" was drilled into the heads of many of us since we were children. Jesus would return like a thief in the night which, we were told, only meant that he would come when we didn't expect it. But think about the words used in the phrase. There is something more being said here that goes beyond our merely being taken by surprise.<br /><br />Thieves come in the night because that is when we are sleeping. As long as we and our neighbors are asleep, they can take their time picking the lock and looking for our valuables. If we wake up, they are faced with the choice of either running or using violence, neither of which is perferable to the original plan of taking your time if you are actually a thief after loot and not a violent psychopath out to hurt people for the fun of it. If you have to use violence you are running a risk of losing the struggle, after all.<br /><br />We, as a culture, are asleep. There are thieves (who are also psychopaths) looting our house at this very moment. They are prepared to use violence if necessary, but they prefer to rob us blind while we sleep. So far, we have been very obliging on that point. Despite the rattlings from the other room that we can't help but notice, we prefer to tell ourselves that it is just the house settling or the wind, then drift back into deep sleep. On the plus side, we get a good night's sleep. On the minus side, we are in for a rude awakening in the morning.<br /><br />The metaphor breaks down after awhile. They are <span style="font-style: italic;">like</span> thieves in the night, but they don't just wait for us to fall asleep then tiptoe gently around the house hoping we don't wake up. They work to keep us asleep. They whisper in our ears to encourage pleasant dreams that make us want to stay under the covers, eyes closed tight. They convince us that what we dream as we sleep is what is real and that all they are taking is illusion.<br /><br />What are they stealing? Your soul. That's right, that thing that isn't nearly as valuable as the car, house, new clothes and great new body they have been promising you in your sleeep.<br /><br />Remember a time in your life when you didn't hold those things in such high regard? When life was not all about a race to get the latest <span style="font-style: italic;">thing</span>? You probably smiled more back then...felt more joy. You were in touch with something called <span style="font-style: italic;">life</span>. Then you began listening to the dream-making theives who convinced you to go to sleep in the fantasy world they helped create for you while they drained you of everything truly valuable.<br /><br />You may think you have a soul, whole and safe from the theives? You can find out right now. Think of everything you heard on the news over the past week. What created the greatest level of excitement in you? Was it something about fashion, celebrity, technology, transportation, entertainment? Or was it the anger you felt at the killing of innocent people in the middle east?Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-1148767793475103712006-05-27T15:05:00.000-07:002006-05-27T15:22:53.656-07:00<span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 153);font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold;">We The People</span></span><br /><br />The new $10 bill in the U.S. has emblazoned across its face in red script letters to the right of the portrait of Hamilton, We The People. Those are, of course, the three words that begin the U.S. Constitution.<br /><blockquote><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.</span> </blockquote>This opening is a long sentence that is focused on political ideals, not identification as “the people.” You might argue that there is nothing wrong with shortening this historic political statement to a three-word rallying cry. I would disagree. The problem with rallying cries (and the modern global communications equivalent, the sound bite) is that they are intended to drive people emotionally, to disengage their minds and convince them that their “belief” will carry the day.<br /><br />In this case, the words “We the people” implies, for one thing, being set apart and special in all the world. We the people who have a democracy. We the people who God has favored. We the people who have achieved a level of civilization that is the envy of the rest of the world.<br /><br />We the people who have taken the lead in arrogance and hubris for the twenty-first century.<br /><br />It is taken as axiomatic by far too many people I talk with that the citizens of the U.S. are more free than the citizens of any other country. I admit, there are places on the Big Blue Marble where speaking your mind can land you in prison or worse, or where the government intrudes on the lives of citizens by opening their mail, tapping their phones, tracking their spending habits and keeping dossiers on them. For example, one of those countries would be...well, the U.S.<br /><br />It could be argued that there is hardly as single human rights violation that this government is not guilty of. It is currently thumbing its collective nose at the Constitution and spying on its own citizens under the pretext of taking anti-terrorism measures. It has arrested hundreds of people and kept them locked up without formal charges being leveled. It has waged an illegal and aggressive war against a country powerless to defend itself, blatantly lying to its own citizens in the process about the reasons for the war.<br /><br />One reason all of this has stood, so far, is the belief in “We the people.” Other empires have come and gone. Even tiny Portugal was an empire, once upon a time. Yet, that won't happen to us, we assure ourselves. We are “the people.” The middle of the 20th century saw a democratically elected president of Germany stoke the fires of nationalism and fascism and turn their democracy into a dictatorship under the pretense of fighting terrorism. But that won't happen here, we are sure, because we are “the people.” How can “We the people” suffer the fate of those others who were “them” not “us?”<br /><br />Talking with a coworker the other day, the conversation managed to turn toward politics for a brief moment (normally a taboo subject in the workplace). His politics tend toward the left, so I felt pretty comfortable espousing my own opinion that this government is attempting a repeat performance of the Nazification of Germany here in the good ol' U.S. of A. His response was typical. He said, “I'm a cynic, but I'm not that cynical.”<br /><br />I could have asked him what was cynical about coming to the conclusion that when a government follows essentially the same steps the Nazi party took to seize absolute control over Germany, they might be working toward the same goal? Rightly or wrongly, I didn't press the matter because I figured I already knew the answer. “We the people” love freedom too much. “We the people” are special and destined to lead the world to democracy and liberty. “We the people” have faced difficulties and always risen above them.<br /><br />Of course, we haven't risen above anything really. We have become progressively less educated, more enslaved and less able to decide our own fates. Rather than rising above, we have learned to justify, rationalize and call each loss of freedom part of the evolving nature of our government. Subjugation to the whims of authority becomes the rule of law, virtual indentured servitude to corporations becomes economic opportunity and unlawful surveillance and detention of citizens becomes nation security.<br /><br />The problem is one of belief, at least at one level. I don't mean to say that this is the whole or our problems, but it is at the root of them, I think. We believe that evoking the magic words, “We the people,” will make everything alright. The system might be going through a difficult time right now, but it will correct itself. It always has.<br /><br />That begs the question, exactly how will the system correct itself? If the system is made up of “We the people” and we are not taking responsibility for the corrections, what form will those corrections take? The answer is, the system will correct itself in accordance with the desires of those who are putting energy into it. An apathetic “We the people” who are satisfied with accepting the direction and decisions of those in positions of authority will get a form of government that consists of those in authority making all the decisions. In other words, our belief in “We the people” means nothing when our actions are more in line with “They the power.”<br /><br />The system will correct itself and it will do so in the way we deserve, based on our actions. If “We the people” choose apathy and self-absorption, allowing all manner of atrocities and human rights violations to be carried out in our name as long as we remain well fed and left relatively alone, we will become the slaves we are already acting like. And, if we think we are going to pull it together at the last minute and save our beloved democracy and freedom in a Hollywood-esque, “save the day” moment, think again. That makes for a nice feel-good ending to a movie, but it is wishful thinking.Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-1146966263138121582006-05-06T17:57:00.000-07:002006-05-06T18:47:41.473-07:00<span style="color: rgb(51, 0, 153);font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold;">Democracy and the Religious Right</span></span><br /><br />Here's an interesting thought that occured to me while reading some analysis of the Old Testament. The religious right is fond of saying that this nation (the U.S.) is a light unto the world, bringing democracy to the opressed. We sing God Bless America with the understanding that God has blessed America, which leads logically to the conclusion that this spreading of democracy is something God has ordained.<br /><br />So here is the question: why didn't this God give democracy to the ancient Hebrews? They, being "God's chosen people," could've been the light unto the world, showing the world how God intended government to be...but no! They had kings. Always kings. This God, an allegedly unchanging God, also allegedly decided who the king would be. And priests...this God seemed really big on priest. There is nothing democratic about a priesthood! The priests proclaim God's word and that is the end of it.<br /><br />So when did God become such a fan of democracy? The answer, of course, is the "He" never did. Or, more precisely, He did when democracy proved itself a good way to control people.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Democracy Illusion</span><br /><br />Get out and vote. That is the rallying cry of those who champion democracy. Determine who will lead us for the next four years. Take control of the destiny of your country. What hogwash. There has not been an election in my lifetime (born in 1960) that has not been described in terms other than these: the lesser of two evils. Alright, maybe there was one. I was born during the Kennedy presidential campaign. Fifty-two days after I was born, JFK was elected President of the United States. Many people, even in retrospect, don't see that election as a choice between the lesser of two evils.<br /><br />Kennedy's words did not make him seem evil. He once said, "mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind." I couldn't agree more. But, Kennedy was no saint. Let's not forget the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. We remember that Kennedy stood firm against the Soviet Union when they installed missiles in Cuba aimed at the United States. What we forget is that the United States already had missiles in Turkey aimed at the Soviet Union. Fair is fair, as I see it.<br /><br />Today we feel like we have a voice and a choice in our own future, because we vote for who will represent us in the senate, the house and in the white house. But do we, really? What choice do we have? Several hundred million people choosing between this guy and that guy. Is that a choice? We cast our ballot, then we turn away, while those we elected proceed to rape and pillage the rest of the world in our name.<br /><br />Is it any wonder that our elections have turned more and more toward the lesser of two evils? We don't care any more. We cast our ballots...that is our definition of democracy. Once we've left our individal chad hanging, we leave it to whomever we decided was the lesser of two evils to do as they please. That isn't democracy. That is choosing the rapist, but getting raped nonetheless.<br /><br />Excuse me for quote a broadway song, but this one pretty much said it the way it is. The musical was Shenandoah. Like most musicals, the lyrics are corny, but they have some truth to them:<br /><br />Freedom ain't a state like Maine of Virginia<br />Freedom ain't across some county line<br />Freedom is a flame that burns within ya<br />Freedom is a state of mind<br /><br />Democracy is not a matter of simply casting a vote then sitting back to see what happens. If you want freedom, you will only find it within your own mind. Freedom is not political. Freedom is individual. Freedom comes from knowledge, not from votes. And, freedom is not to be found in adherance to any religious doctrine. Think...for yourself. Are you free if you blindly follow the repetitious patterns prescribed by some religious leaders? If the God you follow was actually a proponent of freedom and liberty, would He supported kings for so many millinia, then given you mechanistic rules to follow each Sunday of the year?<br /><br />Something fishy is going on here. The religious, whose God is clearly not a fan of freedom are claiming they are the champions of the same. Is it freedom they represent, or subjugation in the clothing of freedom? Think about the story of the wolf in sheep's clothing. Very often, those who proclaim most loudly that they are for us are actually against us.<br /><br />Think...for yourself. Take the time to consider what you have been told. The words sound beautiful, but look at the man behind the curtain. As Jesus said, by their fruits shall you know them.Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-1144298714521633932006-04-05T21:43:00.000-07:002006-04-05T21:45:14.536-07:00<p style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(51, 0, 153);" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;">The Myth of Democracy</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>It is funny how deeply national myths go and how much they can form the thought process of the nation’s citizens. Case in point: an argument I had several years ago with an acquaintance who had just passed the bar. Her specialty in law school was constitutional law. </p>I claimed that we did not have a representational form of government. This pissed her off to no end. She began to spew expletives, claiming I was insane, anti-American, whatever she could come up with on the spur of the moment. I was OK with that, but wasn’t quite prepared for her denying that the U.S. Senate was a proportionally representational body. <p class="MsoNormal">There is no denying the math. There are two senators from <st1:state><st1:place>California</st1:place></st1:State> and there are two senators from <st1:state><st1:place>Rhode Island</st1:place></st1:State>, <st1:state><st1:place>Montana</st1:place></st1:State>, or any other small population state. Each senator’s vote has equal weight in the Senate, so the senators from the small states can out vote the senators for the large state, even though the large state senators represent vastly more people. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>How and why this happened is a matter of history. The less populated southern states had no interest in a federal government that could maneuver them legally into a way of life contrary to what they enjoyed. Half of the states of the about-to-form <st1:country-region><st1:place>United States of America</st1:place></st1:country-region> would not take part if they were so outnumbered. As a matter of practicality, the senior legislative branch of our government was formed around arbitrary state boundaries instead of representing numbers of population.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">I’m not faulting the southern states for looking out for their own interests. The curious thing is how we defend that decision even today. We insist that ours is the greatest democracy on the planet while, in fact, ours is the only democracy with such disproportionate representation.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Consider also the fact that in a two party, winner take all system, fully half of the population has no representation in government at any given time. It really is a bad situation when you stop to think about it. Yet, we hold on for dear life to the claim that ours is the best democracy in the world. Have you noticed that even in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>, we are not setting up a government modeled after our own? We are setting up a parliamentary system. How strange that we would model after the <st1:country-region><st1:place>U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region>, the greatest democracy in the world.</p>This is yet another example of how we think what we are told to think. Even someone who had specialized in constitutional law has a difficult time accepting the <st1:country-region><st1:place>U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> constitution for what it is. Why? Because she was trained to not question the authority of what amounts to a religious text in the U.S. Granted, it was an amazing document in historical context, but that does not excuse our lack of critical thought, today. <p class="MsoNormal">Then again, even if we had a fully representational government, such a government does not work when its people are asleep. Would we be much better off? We are such a people—asleep and not interested in the machinations of <st1:state><st1:place>Washington</st1:place></st1:State> as long as our jobs feel secure and our favorite TV shows can be TiVo’d. We want comfort, and we will support anyone who provides it. Unfortunately, that comfort comes at a price.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">As long as we sell off our ability to think critically, we live as slaves. Slavery isn’t necessarily that bad, I guess, as long as you are at the top of the slavery food chain. The house slaves (there was a more crude term that we won’t use here) enjoyed fairly good lives, and helped keep the field slaves in line, to boot. Now, we as a culture that began with beautifully poetic words about independence have become a culture clamoring for little more than to be the house slaves. We want the position on the inside, forgetting that even there we are still not the home owner. We are still the slave of someone else who can end our life at any moment. We get the comfort as long as we maintain the status quo.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">The question is, as always, are you really satisfied with being a slave? Do you feel a longing for something more? Read the stories of those who fought for emancipation. The fight toward freedom is not an easy one. There are those who’ve given all, not for freedom for themselves, necessarily, but for freedom for all. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Are you just a house slave, or do you really want to breathe free?</p>Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-1144202187732304532006-04-04T18:00:00.000-07:002006-04-04T18:56:27.800-07:00<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold;">It's What We Don't Know That Kills Us</span></span><br /><br />You know the sayings: ignorance is bliss, what I don't know can't hurt me. I'm sure there are others, but the fact that there are any such sayings I find a bit disturbing. In fact, the only things that can hurt us hit us from the blindspots in our knowledge.<br /><br />Knowledge protects, ignorance endangers.<br /><br />One of the classic techniques used by those who have something to hide is to ridicule the truth. Once the truth is generally accepted as silly, it can parade itself all it wants in public, naked even. No one will pay attention. The most common method used today is to assign the words "conspiracy theory" to anything that troubles the Powers That Be (PTB).<br /><br />Anyone who stayed awake for even a few minutes in high school history class knows that the history of government is one of conspiracy. This person conspired to take over this government or kill that advisor to the king. History texts read like veritable international intrigue novels. And yet, somehow, all this conspiring has stopped today. Curious.<br /><br />We don't have to look any further back than the Nixon administration to find proven conspiracies that included late night break-ins and erased tapes, but not <span style="font-style: italic;">today</span>. Nosiree! Today, everything is out on the table and all our problems are due to incompetence or a few bad apples that have weasled their way into the basically good bunch that will soon be uncovered. Once all these Republicans are indicted for their crimes or thrown out for incompetence, America will be back on the right track.<br /><br />To put it bluntly, nonsense. But I digress. Let's get back to the hiding of secrets.<br /><br />I'm going to tell you about a question I asked of two different people, both seasoned ex-military pilots, neither of whom had any reason to give me anything other than a straightforward answer. The question might cause you to roll your eyes. If it does, that's good. It gives you a chance to observe in yourself how you might have been programmed to respond to things you aren't supposed to think about.<br /><br />The question I asked was this: in all your years of flying, have you ever seen anything you would classify as a UFO? The interesting thing is that both of these men gave me almost identical answers. They both said that they'd even been sent in pursuit of what they would simply call "flying saucers" and that when they landed were extensively debriefed, were told that they saw nothing and informed of what nasty things would happen to them if they had seen something.<br /><br />One of these men was a bank president who was hanging around my circle back in my theater days because he'd always had a fantasy of being involved in entertainment. He was a terrible actor, but could regale you for hours on end with his flying stories. He'd taken every survival training the Air Force offered, from arctic to dessert. The other was my mother's late husband, who'd could similarly keep you spellbound with his flying stories. Since his father owned a small, private airport in Texas, he'd been flying since he was big enough to reach all the controls.<br /><br />Anyone who has taken anything approaching a close look at the UFO phenomenon would have to agree that there is <span style="font-style: italic;">something</span> strange going on. Even if all these things are our own technology or a mass delusion, there is clearly something interesting to study. Yet, the scientific community fights tooth and nail to deny that there is anything interesting at all in the skies. One has to wonder what they are hiding.<br /><br />It could be, I suppose, that they fear all our cherished institutions--governments, religions, economies--would all collapse if we knew that not only are we not alone in the universe but we are being visited by someone else. I doubt it, though. More likely, we would run to our governments for protection, vote for a massive build up of our military strength, fall on our knees and pray more fervently than we ever have and spend ourselves silly on UFO books, shelters, aluminum foil to shield our brains from the "alien thought control rays" and all kinds of other things. OK, maybe I'm stretching it a bit on the spending thing, but who knows?<br /><br />An alternate possibility is that someone doesn't want us to know about the technology we have. Admittedly, that is an important secret to keep for these guys. I'm sure they have a lot of technological gadgets they don't tell us about. But, given what has been observed of the capabilities of UFO's, if we are flying those suckers around we would have no problem taking over the whole world. No fighter plane can catch them. They seem to appear and disappear at will.<br /><br />The possible reasons for the secrecy are too numerous to cover here. Going over them is not my point. The thing is to begin to see the methods used to keep us from even looking at the truth. Think about it for a moment. If you are one of those who is now thinking that my little red choo-choo has just gone around the bend for even writing about this subject, why do you think that? How much of the evidence have you looked at for yourself? I'd guess the answer is, little to none. You've taken the word of people you don't know and whose intentions you don't know. They tell you to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain and you obediently do as they command.<br /><br />Honestly, can you say that you think for yourself? If you'd like to do a little research, check out <a href="http://www.keyholepublishing.com/">Richard Dolan's</a> website.Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-1144027622308543892006-04-02T18:02:00.000-07:002006-04-02T18:27:06.490-07:00<p style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(51, 0, 153);"><span style="font-size:130%;">How to Create a Sociopath</span></p> <p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">In her book Unholy Hungers, Hort uses the metaphor of the vampire to explore the ways in which psychopaths drain energy from the rest of us. The metaphor is extremely apt. She hypothesizes that the vampire is a metaphor of a common (though well hidden) archetype in the human psyche. I suggest that it is this archetype that rules the psychopath. Having no emotional connection to the world (because of their lack of conscience) they must feed on the emotional energy of others.</p> <p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">From the book, speaking of the prevalance of the vampire myth around the world:</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.5in; color: rgb(51, 0, 153);">So many, many names, and among them lies a hard truth. The vampire stalks the living in every corner of the human world. Dracula is only a single vampire among a global horde, and what's more, he is a young member of the clan, for he was born in the mind of Bram Stoker only one hundred years ago, and he was based on a warlord who lived less than six hundred years ago<span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;">–</span>a mere breath of time, considering it was more than three thousand years ago that the Assyrians and Babylonians described the monster ekimmu, an undead corpse who preyed upon the blood and flesh of the living in an effort to evade its own death. So it is between the vampire and us. Wherever we have lived, whenever we have lived, the beast has always been with us.</p> <p>A little meditation on the vampire mythos goes a long way toward putting the psychopath question in perspective. One of the key aspects of the myth is that not all who suffer the bite of the vampire die. Many become vampires themselves. Considering how long this myth has haunted the mind of mankind and how it exists in virtually every culture on the planet, it seems curious that this archetype still roams freely amongst us, creating new vampires (aka, sociopaths) at will.</p> <p>How is this done? Maybe another quote from the book will help to make it clear?</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.51in; margin-right: 0.5in; color: rgb(51, 0, 153);">The difference between love and exploitation is often obscured, and it is easy to understand how we might be duped into seeking the power of exploitation when we can’t find the potency of love. Exploitation is only an imitation of love, however, just as some nonnutritive chemicals are imitations of real food. They may look and taste like food, but they provide no sustaining nourishment. Likewise, the power of exploitation may initially feel like the potency of love, but it cannot provide love's nourishing, self renewing energy. What's more, although the life force stolen in the process of exploitation appears to empower the exploiter, it inevitably does so at a cost to both the exploiter and the victim. Because stolen goods decay quickly in matters of personal energy, exploiters must constantly embezzle more energy from others in order to sustain their illusion of empowerment-a crusade that is ever we relate in this way, we are savoring the true sustenance of our souls, which we experience in this plane of existence as love.</p> <p style="margin-left: 0.51in; margin-right: 0.5in; color: rgb(51, 0, 153);">As we journey through life, we seek love passionately, but not invincibly. If we are met with lovelessness too often, we begin to fear that we will perish emotionally. The prospect of emotional annihilation is terrifying to all human beings, and in order to escape it, we grasp at any lifeline that presents itself, no matter how deceitful its redemptive promise may be. As Bolen suggests, when we sense our impending emotional death, the lifeline to which we most often cling is power, or more precisely, exploitation-the pursuit of self-enhancement at another's expense. Sometimes we exploit others by coercing them with our demonstrations of unassailable dominance, sometimes by manipulating them with our displays of submissive vulnerability. Either way, we are engaging in exploitation, a profane relationship to the life force in others and ourselves in which both parties are dehumanized and objectified. In contrast, love is a relationship wherein we cherish the sacred humanity of another person while simultaneously cherishing the sacred humanity in ourselves.</p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">It appears that if we are starved for love consistently enough, we willing run to the arms of the vampire/psychopath. Of course, starving an entire culture of love by means of denial would be impossible. But, notice what she says about the power of exploitation—that it may initially feel like the potency of love. That, I believe is the key.</span> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Increasingly, global communications technology is used to flood our minds and senses with imitations of real love. Even more, media is used to glorify all those who give in to the imitation of love (exploitation and power) by parading them before us with cameras flashing and crowds cheering. We give special awards to people who live lives devoid of real love but whose images are used to feed us the imitation (the Academy Awards, Emmy's, etc.). Over and over again, we are shown the imitation, then throw a parade for those who buy it.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Who can stand up to such an assault, unless they are already aware of the truth and on their guard? No one. The moment we bought into the idea of television without understanding its potential to lead us away from real love and life, we pretty much sealed our fate. I have nothing against television, per se, but any technology that allows a few individuals to bombard everyone else with images of prescripted imitation life, then stage realistic dramas in which everyone is celebrating those who accept the imitation as real is a technology that will absolutely be exploited.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We can begin to see more clearly how this technique leads to a self-perpetuating cycle once begun:<br /></p> <p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-right: 0.5in; color: rgb(51, 0, 153);">Most people resort to exploitation only in situations where they are met with lovelessness. A person who seeks love, only to be rebuffed again and again, eventually slides toward the terrifying pit of emotional starvation. Undergoing an emotional death is like being the swimmer in Jaws-all of existence is reduced to a scream, without echo or answer, into a black, inhuman void. Every unloved person slides to the brink of this awful pit and teeters there, writhing in terror on the precipice of emotional oblivion. The loneliness of this place seems absolute, but then a new entity slithers up alongside. The newcomer whispers to the despairing soul about a way of life in which love will no longer be needed. It swirls the dark cape of exploitation and weaves for the unloved person a tantalizing yarn of triumph over agony and annihilation. The person takes hold of the glittering bait and embarks on the pursuit of exploitive power, rather than elusive love.</p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">As more and more people accept the imitation, more and more people are also left in a state of lovelessness. Those people now begin a descent into the pit of emotional starvation, eventually joining the ranks of the exploiters who once left them loveless. As in any sort of "chain reaction" it doesn't take long before virtually an entire culture has given up on real love and spends all their time feeding off one another parasitically to maintain the imitation.</span><br /><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">And that, boys and girls, seems to be the state we find ourselves in, today. Real love, of the giving without expectation sort, has beencome a quaint notion...even a foolish one. The legalities of marriage have overcome devotion. Everyone cries and declares the bride so beautiful in her dress, despite the fact that they all know she is a stark raving bitch. The groom looks so handsome and is perceived as such a great guy for the day of the wedding, despite the fact that everyone in the audience knows he is a philandering asshole who will be sleeping with other women within a few months, at most.</span><br /></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">It is all a sham, but we keep it up because we are all looking for someone to con, ourselves; someone we can feed off of. That isn't love, that is an empty shell of a person looking to tank up at someone else's expense. Is it any wonder that so many marriages end in divorce these days? It has nothing to do with lack of religious faith or allowing gays to get married (the goofiest argument I've ever heard, I think), it has to do with the fact that once one partner has bled the other dry, they need to find fresh meat to fill up on.</span><br /></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">You might read this as me being cynical about love. I'm not. I'm cynical about the imitation, and that seems to be about all anyone kind find these days.</span><br /></p>Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com53tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-1143779307296236532006-03-30T19:43:00.000-08:002006-03-30T20:28:27.326-08:00<span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 102);font-size:130%;" >What the Future Holds</span><br /><br />How I wish I could say that the future is bright, but I've know since I was a child that it wasn't. As Art Linkletter put it, kids say the darndest things. I used to shock those around me with my dire predictions for the future of the Earth. Listen to kids today. They know where all this is headed, too. Really...take the time to listen.<br /><br />Perhaps this is what must be. Perhaps we must suffer what is (in my mind, no doubt) coming because we have taken the easy road. We have chosen entertainment and comfort over life. That choice always leads to the same end--heartache and destruction. We always get the life we deserve.<br /><br />Flashback: I was on the phone to my mother just before the election that would put, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, W in the White House the first time. I thought I was going to lose my mind. My mother and I have a good relationship. We are no longer mother and son, we are both adults who have known each other for a very long time and, so, can argue without taking it personally.<br /><br />My mother has always voted republican. In the case of W, no exception. She thought the guy would do the country good. She'd lived in Texas during his gubernatorial term and thought he was charming and a good leader. Go figure.<br /><br />I mention how my mother and I can argue without taking it personally as a lead up to the description of this "conversation." I was screaming at her over the phone. I remember well where this conversation took place. I was at a pub in east Sacramento, meeting some friends for a beer or two. Music was blaring on the patio, where my friends where situated, so I took the phone out into the parking lot. Eventually, feeling self conscious about how loud the talk was getting (on my side, at least) I moved further out into the alley. I'm not proud to report that my friends could still hear my ranting over the sound of the music on the patio.<br /><br />This is not a normal state of affairs for me, that I'd get this loud. Sure, I have been known to make impassioned arguments, but this was something else. I knew, in the depths of my soul, that with this election we were turning a corner as a country. Things were about to get bad...bad in the way that I knew they would get even as a child. What I was saying to my mother in an overly loud voice was that her vote for W was a vote for everything she claimed to hate.<br /><br />I told her that if he was elected, we'd be in a war in the Middle East inside a year. I was close in my prediction. I told her that a vote for W was a vote in favor of the completion of all the conspiracy theories we'd discussed and debated over the years. He would bring with him a cadre of people who were connected to all that sought war and manipulation of humanity for their personal gain.<br /><br />Shortly after our argument, I apologized to my mother. No one deserves to be yelled at like that. I've since given up that kind of interaction. It does nothing but breed isolation and hurt feelings. And, I relate it here as a matter of record and as a confession, of sorts. I feel ashamed by my outburst...but I was right. My mother even agrees with me, now.<br /><br />She, like all of us can be, was taken in by appearances and wishful thinking. It happens to the best of us. It happens to me all the time. The key, here, is to realize that these appearances are not happenstance. What appears to be true, what you and I are sold as our own thoughts, are carefully crafted. This is not "conspiracy theory," this is demonstrable fact. We think we look out on the world and make our own judgments about right and wrong, good and bad. We don't, unless we have worked very hard to get to that point. We see exactly what we are told to see.<br /><br />Even worse, those who are programming us are not human beings. Don't worry, I'm not going into the Twilight Zone here with an Enquirer sort of story about alien mind control. Maybe that is the case. I don't know. I'm talking about something more down-to-earth. I'm talking about psychopaths.<br /><br />You and I are being fed thoughts, through the media, by psychopaths on a daily basis. These are people who don't have even a moments hesitation about manipulating you, using you, then discarding you when you have lived out your usefulness to them. These are people who have the appearance of being human beings, but are lacking a critical component of humanness--a conscience. They can't feel compassion for another or remorse for their actions if they tried.<br /><br />We--you and I--are being lead to our deaths by people without conscience. Think about it. We are at a crossroad. Never before, in generally accepted human history, have we been at a point where we have had the weaponry to wipe out all life from the planet. In addition to that, we have the global communications technology available to control those weapons from anywhere, and to put thoughts into the minds of people in every country.<br /><br />Let me put it very bluntly and without losing my cool like I did with my mother. If we do not wake up to what is being done to us, we are screwed. Our leaders are not necessarily what we think they are. I do not accept that they are incompetent, making mistakes in going to war against Iraq and threatening war against Iran. They (or some of them, at least) are cold, calculating psychopaths who feel NOTHING for the lives of human beings. The deaths of thousands (or millions?) are nothing more than statistics.<br /><br />Time to wake up. The snooze button has run out. Personally, being of the conscience filled human sort, I can't stand by and watch my fellow man go down in flames.Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-1143437488614313632006-03-26T20:49:00.000-08:002006-03-26T21:31:28.750-08:00<span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(51, 0, 153);font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-family:arial;">Psychopathy and Consumerism</span></span><br /><br />It is difficult for us, by and large, to see any problem with consumerism. Sure, as a culture we might speak in vaguely disapproving tones about greed and how awful it is that both parents today are forced to work, leaving their children with day care, babysitters or after school programs instead of family. But we don't really see a problem with it. If we did, we wouldn't still be living these lives we lead.<br /><br />The thing is, we tend to see the way things are at any given point as pretty much normal. For instance, most of the population of the planet for most of human history has not used money in the way we use it now. Yet, most of us see money as being something almost organic. We can't imagine human interaction without it.<br /><br />The same goes for our particular uses of technology. Ask nearly any child today to imagine life in the days before television and you'll see that not only can they not imagine it, they have the impression that it must have been horrific. This is to be expected. It's naturally how our brains work. The world we see is modeled within the very fabric of our brains. Of course the way things are is the way they were <span style="font-style: italic;">meant to be</span>.<br /><br />I suppose there is truth in this, that things are the way they are meant to be. Nothing can be anything other than what it is supposed to be. But accepting that fact is a far cry from <span style="font-style: italic;">understanding</span> how things are and that the way they are now is not the way they will <span style="font-style: italic;">always be</span>.<br /><br />And so, because we are immersed in consumerism, we assume that consumerism is the natural order of things. Yet, a brief tour of known human history will show us that this is not the case. The question is, why is consumerism so prevalent today?<br /><br />The need to have, to possess, is a trait of the psychopath. Because they do not <span style="font-style: italic;">feel</span> they seek to <span style="font-style: italic;">own</span>. If you cannot love, you are only left with possession as an interaction with other beings. This will either take the form of possession of another through manipulation of their mind and emotions, or competition with others to see who can posses the most. As a bumper sticker I've seen too many times says, "Whoever dies with the most toys wins." It's not really funny.<br /><br />Consumerism is indicative of a culture embracing psychopathy as the norm. Though the term psychopath and sociopath are used interchangeably in mainstream psychology, for the purpose of our discussion we will use the term sociopath in the way a mainstream psychologist would use the term <span style="font-style: italic;">secondary psychopath</span>. That is, a person who is not genetically psychopathic but has taken on psychopathic traits.<br /><br />I used to teach inner city kids. Sociopathy was common amongst that group. It makes sense that it would be. They have been placed in a situation in which they are always considered second-class citizens, at best. The only successful role models they have, those who have managed to pay rent, buy a car and provide for others, are psychopaths--drug dealers, pimps and hardcore gangsters. Many become sociopaths out of the need to survive.<br /><br />On the other hand, I live in a rather affluent area of Los Angeles, though I am by no means affluent, myself. Curiously, the percentage of sociopaths among the population on this side of town seems even higher than in the inner city. In the ghetto, there are still people who will accept you no matter where you come from or what you have. On this side of the tracks, that's very rare, indeed.<br /><br />Of course, the most affluent area of the city would contain the most sociopaths. In a consumeristic society, who will find the most success? The person driven by conscience, or the psychopath who is able to do <span style="font-style: italic;">anything at all</span> in order to get ahead? The question doesn't need to be answered explicitly. We all know the answer.<br /><br />We could limit the effect of psychopaths on our society by making the society one that is not so psychopath-friendly. If we held service to others in higher esteem than financial "success" the psychopath would obviously appear the odd man out. But that is not the path we have chosen. Rather, we have joined in the psychopathic race to posses. In doing so, we have learned psychopathic tendencies...we have become sociopaths in order to survive in the psychopath's game.<br /><br />And we still hold on to the idea that it is the way things are <span style="font-style: italic;">meant to be</span>. It is the way things are meant to be. When a culture makes the decision to follow psychopaths, this consumeristic culture is exactly how things are meant to be. But it is not how things <span style="font-style: italic;">must be</span>. We need only a small fraction of what we desire. We work ourselves to the bone to enjoy a life during a brief vacation that we can enjoy on a daily basis, if we could only rid ourselves of our sociopathic tendencies.<br /><br />Will we do it? Not to sound pessimistic, but I doubt it. It is not by chance that we have fallen into this pit. We have been lead here by something dark, something that hates life and love, something that we do not want to believe exists. We have never been left to our own devices. We are cattle, and the chief tool the ranchers have to keep us in line is our ignorance of their existence.<br /><br />We are sleeping sheep, having a dream of a beautiful life with our big-screen TV's, SUV's and nice homes. And, if we don't wake up, we will suffer the fate of all sheep in a tended flock. We will be lead to the slaughter.Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-1143410491572026822006-03-26T13:02:00.000-08:002006-03-26T15:45:58.586-08:00<span style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(51, 0, 153); font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >Reality makes fighters of us all.</span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" > </span><br /><br />No matter how passive we are in our day-to-day lives--even if we are wont to allow others to run roughshod over us in order to maintain the peace--we seem willing to fight to the death to maintain our illusions when faced with the grim spectre of reality.<br /><br />A case in point. I was having a conversation with a coworker, recently. This particular fellow was not a passive person by any stretch of the imagination, so this is not a <span style="font-style: italic;">perfect</span> case in point, but you'll get the idea. Somehow, the conversation turned toward 9/11 and terrorism.<br /><br />Now, this fellow is someone whose political views lean <span style="font-weight: bold;">way</span> to the left of center. He is a self-described Bush administration hater. He considers this entire administration as murderous bastards seemingly capable of doing anything to gain and maintain power. I casually mentioned the fact that it is physically impossible that a 757 had crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. Suddenly, the conversation took a sharp turn from our agreements about the Bush administration to his belief that I'd completely lost my mind.<br /><br />This didn't come as a surprise to me. I've been studying the workings of psy-ops and COINTELPRO long enough now to realize that these folks are capable of creating seemingly impenetrable blind spots in the vision of even the most open-minded person. What I found most instructive in our conversation from that point was observing the specific ways in which he'd been programmed to avoiding even considering the facts of the matter.<br /><br />No matter what physical evidence I attempted to bring to his attention, he kept coming back to the fact that something had done serious damage to the Pentagon on that day and a 757 with a bunch of passengers on board had disappeared. If it didn't crash into the Pentagon, what happened to it? Was I suggesting that somehow "they" managed to keep all of these people quiet about the fact that their plane hadn't actually crashed on 9/11?<br /><br />I pointed out that I did not think for a moment that any of those people were still alive. Surely, I reasoned, he was aware that there are other means of killing people and disposing of an airplane than by crashing it into a building. He wouldn't budge. In his mind, I'd lost mine (mind, that is).<br /><br />I tried to turn the conversation toward the physics of the matter. In order to do anything like the damage that was done to the Pentagon, the plane would have had to impact that building <span style="font-style: italic;">completely normal to the face of the building!</span> For those of you not familiar with the term <span style="font-style: italic;">normal</span>, it means perfectly perpendicular. In other words, if this plane was facing slightly nose up or nose down when it hit, its tail section would either have bounced into the ground (leaving a really big divit to replace) or been flung toward the top of the building, leaving a lot of tail wreckage on the roof. Neither of these things happened. Considering the fact that the plane had to make a descent toward the building--it didn't hit the cars of the freeway, after all--it could not have been flying perfectly level as it would have had to have been doing for a normal impact against the building.<br /><br />The conversation became a bit heated at this point, from his side, that is. He argued that they had clearly cut their engines and were descending while maintaining level flight because they were losing speed. He claimed that also accounted for why none of the witnesses reported hearing the eardrum blasting roar of those jet engines as the plane passed overthem on the freeway. He even went so far as to claim that all commercial airliners cut their engines completely when they come in for a landing.<br /><br />Here, he'd descended into utter absurdity in order to defend his illusions. Anyone who has ever flown on a commercial airliner (and I know for a fact he can count himself amongst this group) knows full well that the only jet that lands without power is the one coming in for an emergency landing because it has unexpectedly lost power. How is the jet to taxi down the runway toward the terminal without its engines? It isn't until the last bit of the trip to the gateway that the aircraft is hitched up and dragged by one of those glorified golf carts. And what if the aircraft needs pull up because of an irregularity on the runway at the last minute? Without engines, it is screwed, to put it mildly.<br /><br />He knew he was wrong on this point, so he retreated back to his fallback position. What happened to that flight if it didn't crash into the Pentagon? I agreed that this was a very good question. As a matter of fact, I told him, I'd take it one step further. What happened to that flight if it <span style="font-style: italic;">did</span> crash into the Pentagon? What happened to the wings and the engines? Why wasn't there any wreckage of a 757 found at the site?<br /><br />There is not answer to that question to report. By this time, our break was over and his mind was obviously swirling with thoughts of how I'd suddenly turned into a complete lunatic. He was perfetly willing to not only doubt my sanity but to rewrite the laws of physics on the spot in order to defend his illusions. The very laws that hold our universe together were not going to stand in the way of his personal view of the world.<br /><br />In other words, hew was ready to fight to the death against the encroachment of reality upon his personal illusions. This is something we are all guilty of. Even those of us who consider ourselves open-minded generally maintain that view of ourselves through our clever avoidance of those aspects of reality that will challenge our illusions. In his case for example, like much of the political left in the U.S., he has skirted the reality of the systemic sickness of U.S. politics by demonizing the right and believing that a change of residency at the White House will solve any real problems. He has also hidden in the belief that what has been reported to have happened at the Pentagon <span style="font-style: italic;">must have happened</span>, otherwise it would have been found out by now.<br /><br />He, like so many others, believes in the power of global communications technology to make the truth known. What he forgets is that all power has two poles, like the postive and negative poles of a battery. The power to dissemenated truth via the Internet and communications satellites is match by the power to to spread disinformation and confusion. The problem is, the folks spreading disinformation and propaganda are organized, while those seeking the truth are not. Who wins in that scenario?Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24703893.post-1143311938223272302006-03-25T10:38:00.000-08:002006-03-26T15:46:57.940-08:00<span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(51, 0, 153);font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-family: arial;">The Greater the Beauty the Darker the Cloud</span></span><br /><br />The greater the beauty the darker the cloud that attempts to obscure it. The more the potential for revelation of some truth, the more liars you’ll find crowded around.<br /><br />I experienced this myself in a very tangible way during the summers of 2003 and 2004, when I was taken to England to shoot footage for a proposed documentary on the crop circle phenomenon. I approached the project with excitement. I’d read about crop circles, had seen a lot of pictures and talked to several people who actively investigate the phenomenon. At last I’d get a chance to experience them for myself. I was excited.<br /><br />Because what I’d read was mostly written during the “heyday” of the crop circle phenomenon, when thousands would crowd into Wiltshire, England and environs to meditate, hold various rituals, take measurements and discuss the possible explanations of these mysterious formations in the fields, I had expected something of a carnival atmosphere of metaphysical musings conversation. What I found was something else altogether.<br /><br />I should say right up front that there are many people involved in the crop circle experience that I like and respect very much. I met people who struggle year after year to make sense of something mysterious and ephemeral. And mysterious it is. I have no doubt that something is going on in fields all over the world (the fields of southern England being the most famous for it) that is outside anything we generally accept as normal…and I mean this in two distinct ways.<br /><br />Do I think that at least some crop circles are formed by an unknown, non-human agent? Absolutely, yes. I don’t see how it could be otherwise. There have been too many similar reports from too many individuals across to great a time period of strange goings-on witnessed in the night to discount them all as the ravings of lunatics or wishful thinkers. There have been too many formations that have appeared on rainy nights when any walking across flattened crop leaves tell-tale signs of muddy footprints, yet no muddy footprints are to be found in the pristine formation at the break of dawn. There are far too many crop circles of high precision and great mathematical and artistic beauty to be accounted for by any reasonable number of hoaxers, especially considering the fact that the phenomenon occurs worldwide.<br /><br />All this suggests that the crop circle phenomenon represents something we generally do not accept as normal in one way in the sense that the formations (or some of them) appear to be artifacts of interactions between our planet and an intelligence that is not accounted for in our philosophies and science. It is also outside what we generally consider normal in how infused the phenomenon is with PSYOPS and COINTELPRO.<br /><br />We don’t consider this normal because we’ve been trained to think of this kind of spy stuff as the fanciful notions of the authors of spy novels or something that only goes on between governments in the dark alleys of eastern European communist countries. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is everyday life all over the world. We normally don’t notice it because one goal of the efforts of PSYOPS and COINTELPRO is to keep the populace corralled toward the middle of the road of opinion and knowledge. As long as you are living your “normal” life, going to work, watching your favorite TV programs and arguing politics within the parameters set by the mainstream news outlets, the agents remain quiet. Step just a little bit away from the center and you might feel their gentle hand guiding you in the form of a friend or loved one calling you back to the middle. Step a little further out and you might feel a metaphorical slap. Step out as far as the crop circle phenomenon and things get really weird.<br /><br />My first direct encounter with one of the darker agents of those working to confuse the crop circle issue both put the hair up on the back of my neck and elicited such a strong emotional reaction from me that I hardly knew what hit me. I became almost immediately furious, so much so that I felt shocked by it. I verbally lashed out, loudly.<br /><br />I would liken it to this strange situation that happened to me some years earlier. I was staying in a motel in my own town. Work was being done on my place and I needed to be out of the house for the night. Not wanting to spend a lot of money on it, I took a room in an inexpensive motel, though not in a bad part of town. In the middle of the night, I woke up to the sound of the door to my room being opened. Somehow, someone had a key to the room and was using it at about 3:00am. As I remember it, two men were coming in. It could have been that the hotel mistakenly given them a key to my room, or it could have been that they’d picked the lock and were coming to rob me. I’ll never know, because I instinctively reacted to the potentially dangerous situation by becoming a virtual wild animal.<br /><br />My girlfriend of the time was with me. My reaction shocked her. My voice became very low in pitch and very loud, like the roar of a lion. I roared out, almost loudly enough to shake the windows, “What the fuck are you doing?” Whatever these two men intended, they changed their mind at that moment and ran for it. After we’d settled down from the surprise, my girlfriend and I were both a bit shocked by the force of my voice.<br /><br />That’s the sort of reaction I had when encountering this fellow who claimed to be a crop circle hoaxer. In his presence, I felt something unmistakably dark, foreboding and malevolent. Just like in the motel room, the strength of my voice instinctively trying to drive this presence away shocked me and everyone else who was there. But here is where this situation and the motel situation were radically different. This fellow didn’t run. He wasn’t in the least bothered by my verbal attack. He seemed to like it.<br /><br />Well, I didn’t quite expect that. I was under the assumption before this, as all of us are trained to be, that this sort of fellow was merely misguided or crying out for love and attention. At that point in my life, I didn’t accept the reality of a “dark side.” I optimistically saw all human beings as basically working toward good with varying degrees of success based on how much insight and mental clarity they possessed. I learned that day that this view is not accurate. The dark side—evil, if you will—is very real, and our barking does nothing to scare it away. It enjoys our anger. It feeds off the energy. Our righteous indignation is merely lunch for it.<br /><br />The darkness of this sort of energy is enough to either scare off anyone who turns their mind toward the esoteric or drive them insane. I’ve witnessed both in the crop circle community. Those who don’t leave the fields in disgust usually end up holding tight to any manner of belief that seems to provide refuge from the darkness. In doing so, they become agents for the dark side. They begin fighting with their former friends who now espouse a competing belief, giving up on the search for truth in favor of defense of their new religion.<br /><br />Those who peek in on the outskirts of reality like the crop circle phenomenon see all this fighting and, if they value their own mental wellbeing, stay away. Instead of looking for something extraordinary in this phenomenon, they maintain their interest at a purely aesthetic level by ordering crop circle calendars and logging on to one of the many crop circle websites each spring to see the latest formations as they appear along with the superficial geometrical analysis that always follows.<br /><br />PSYOPS and COINTELPRO agents are all around us. They work this same scenario in every important arena in which someone might become interested. Politics, for example, is only palatable to the general public in the form of brief encapsulations in the newspaper and on TV or radio. Get in close and the average person comes away dazed, confused, angry and sickened.<br /><br />The agents of the dark side have a job to do and they do it well. Their job is to keep us corralled toward the middle of the road. They are, effectively, shepherds of the flock, and we are the sheep. Stay in the middle of the flock and life is easy. Stray a bit and you’ll feel the gentle nudge of the shepherd’s crook. Get anywhere near leaving the flock and you’ll face the dogs and the darkness.<br /><br />So, most of us remain close to the middle of the flock and convince ourselves that it is all that there is. It isn’t, but it is definitely more comfortable.Allen Bransonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00676386875409148294noreply@blogger.com1