Skilluminati Research

A Toast to Clare Petty

2013-01-02T03:55:00Z

"It was not a clear cut case." Clare Edward Petty would emphasize that sentence repeatedly during his interviews with author David Martin; he wanted to establish his doubts for the written record. It was the bloody end of the 1970's and Martin was gathering material for his book, Wilderness of Mirrors, a critical assessment of James Jesus Angleton. Petty's legacy today is basically a single paragraph twist in Angleton's obituary, an ambiguous note too sweet for any author to resist recounting. Yet Petty's story took decades to unfold, and represents the life of a remarkable man who could easily be a patron saint for the parapolitical research caste.

So consider the career arc of Clare Petty, a compulsively thorough counterintelligence analyst held in great regard by Langley's leadership class. He was recruited by Angleton for a mission critical project: a fresh investigation into the entire Central Intelligence Agency, especially the Soviet desk, to locate KGB moles. He was groomed to be a front line vanguard against infiltration and deception.

Instead, he found himself indulging the literary imagination of his boss, at one point trying to crack a Canadian KGB spy ring that relied upon carrier pigeons. After destroying a few lives and wasting many thousands of pre-Nixon dollars, he concluded that no such plot existed. He would continue to harbor that same suspicion about many of the missions he executed at SIG. Petty would spend the last two years of his CIA employment covertly building a case to implicate Angleton himself as the primary KGB mole.

It should not go unremarked that Clare Petty made his case and resigned from the CIA in 1974, the same year that John Le Carre published Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a novel advancing the premise that British intelligence had been similarly compromised on the highest level for much of the cold war. If Petty has ever been asked about this fictional synchronicity, the results remain unpublished. Strange resonance aside, his report was instrumental in giving William Colby the leverage to get Angleton out of power and radically remake the Agency.

Speaking to David Martin several baffling years later, Petty claimed that his brief was based on 25 points of evidence and he spent a week being interviewed on tape about his research. (It could also be remarked that David Blee was in the room for much of this testimony. David should not be confused with his equally ubiquitous son, Richard Blee, who figures prominently in the history of the CIA's later relationship with Bin Laden.)

Despite Petty's doubts, all of his 25 points were discarded almost immediately as a rationale to end Mother's reign. James Angleton has been cleared, at least in terms of history and the CIA's public documentation, of being the most audaciously successful KGB agent known to man. Although Petty's actions are usually described today as a cautionary tale about paranoia, I consider him to be an inspirational character, an admirably pure product of his training.

"To this day, there are people who don't want to hear Ed Petty's name." - Mary Ellen Reese

5GWTF: Calculation and Control

2012-12-16T08:33:00Z

Politics is mostly marketing, and power is mostly pursued by those who would abuse it. After centuries of highly consistent behavior patterns among elected officials, there is little point in getting angry about politicians, lying. This is a basic matter of tradecraft and daily routine, part of the job description, no different than stage makeup or ghostwritten speeches.

So it makes sense for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to claim that the NYPD had stopped 14 terrorist attacks -- it’s just plain good copy, a reliable, strong finisher for an otherwise pointless press conference. It’s also not true. The specifics are mundane and matter very little, because the most remarkable part of the story was Bloomberg’s response when some reporters later questioned the veracity of his sales pitch. Faced with a fact-by-fact rundown, and the unspoken implication that he had been caught lying, he was not concerned in the least.

Bloomberg put it simply: “We’ll never know.”

That’s not a very satisfying answer, but it is a strikingly pure statement of where the American social contract is at in 2012. How can you evaluate the track record of a global ecosystem that consumes billions of dollars in almost total secrecy? Where are the solid data points in a history that’s mostly planted evidence, product placements and calculated lies?

”Security” is a benign and ubiqiutous word these days, elevated to a fundamental social good, taken to be synonymous with safety. Viewed operationally, though, the end goal of most security spending is insulating powerful decision makers from the consequences of their own actions. Total executive privilege is a matter of bipartisan consensus today, with each successive presidency further insulating their office from liability for their legacies. Given the real world track record of the past dozen administrations, this was a prescient move.

Double Binds: If it was not for the all-consuming professional paranoia of Richard Helms, researchers today would know very little about the domestic nightmares he oversaw. His zeal to lock down the coverup yielded a wealth of internal documentation. Then again, if Helms were alive today, he would want me to pause and consider: perhaps that was all part of the plan. John Marks was one of the first authors to tackle the MK material, and any sane reader would question if Marks himself were on the payroll. That's not paranoia, that's just how these things are done. It would all vanish into post-modern smoke, if not for the physical weight of survivor testimony.

Still, even the most thorough critiques of the Central Intelligence Agency are drawn almost entirely from CIA sources. If there is anything solid to take from studying the wilderness of mirrors, its that history is a cheap, plastic thing -- easily fabricated and even more easily replaced. Concerted smear campaigns become the foundation of encyclopedia articles decades later. Men like Patrice Lumumba were assassinated multiple times by multiple teams, having both their lives and their legacies terminated with extreme prejudice. Frank Olsen still jumped out a window as far as most historical sources are concerned. The fingerprints are easy to see. They turn up just about everywhere.

As Michael Bloomberg put it later in the same press conference: “They can study anything they want. I don’t know how you prove it one way or another.”

While the cold war was ostensibly waged in the name of the American citzen, the facts of the matter remain largely unknown to us today. This isn’t about us, though. It’s about them. It's about the extremely high demands that maintaining secrecy places on executive resources and time. It’s about the very real probability that the men and women working behind the firewall of compartmentalized power are every bit as deluded and fundamentally incorrect as the average American citizens they are charged with the management and protection of. This is about decision-making in a completely corrupted economy of information, and this is about inevitable mistakes.

As the tapes of cabinet level meetings in the LBJ White House were released, it turned out the bulk of their conversations were not about strategy or even combat objectives -- their primary concern was domestic politics and media coverage. Worse, the conversation itself was torturously circular, comprehensively pointless. The level of indecision in the transcripts is pathological.

Years before he found himself accepting the job of Secretary of Defense on the back lawn of the White House, a young Robert McNamara was evaluating the performance of Air Force bombing campaigns and tactical missions for a unit called the Office of Statistical Control. He was tasked with constructing and monitoring the feedback loop that would guide the final acts of the second world war, with bombardment followed closely by reconnaissance, and success evaluated in stark terms of square feet and total acreage of firebombed destruction.

The result of this increased efficiency was civilian casualties on a massive scale, something that McNamara was forthcoming about in his old age, stating “we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo. Men, women and children." In 2003, he made the stunning decision to sit down in front of the Interrotron and talk to Errol Morris for hours on end about his entire career. The resulting film, “Fog of War,” is essential viewing for anyone with an interest in power and force. It’s also basically a horror movie.

It’s important to remember that as far as military history is concerned, no matter how badly McNamara miscalculated Vietnam, he was fundamentally correct about World War Two. His careful and thoughtful application of pure Operations Research to the chaos of an Air Force full theater war campaign resulted in huge gains in net efficiency. That translates into millions of innocent human beings, extinguished, whole lives ground into dust and blood. None of these casualties have names, either -- they only exist today as aggregate figures, mere statistics.

At the age of 85, McNamara was talkative and transparent but fervently denied any real culpability for his actions. In retrospect, the brilliant strategist protested, ”it is beyond the human mind to comprehend all the variables.” Encouraging words from a man who made his name running the show. Perhaps former Secretary Rumsfeld is sitting at a bar somewhere in DC right now, voicing similar laments about the fundamental unknowability of it all.

Perhaps McNamara was admitting more than he knew by claiming that mistakes and mass murder were simply part of the job description. It’s not the most inspiring statement a grown man could make, but there is at least something to it. As his chief critic David Halberstam noted in his introduction to The Best and the Brightest:

"The other thing I learned about the Kennedy-Johnson team was that for all their considerable reputations as brilliant, rational managers they were in fact very poor managers. They thought they were very good, and they were always talking about keeping their options open, even as, day by day and week by week, events closed off those options. The truth was that history -- and in Indochina we were on the wrong side of it -- was a hard taskmaster and from the early to middle sixties, when we were making those fateful decisions, we had almost no choices left."

A worthy statement for any tombstone: "We had almost no choices left." That line of thought never ends well -- in fact, it generally never ends at all.

Computational Intractability & Infinite Regression

"I learned at JSOC that any complex task is best approached by flattening hierarchies." - Stanley McChrystal

From RAND to PNAC to Obamacare, the Operations Research mentality lends itself to predictable problems. First and foremost is the institutional bias whereby anything that gets measured is presumed to be important. Close behind is the academic hubris whereby any subsequent “improvement” in the measurements get attributed to the sage decisions of the Operations Research department. Between that single closed loop exists far, far too much of recent US policy & history.

Real world problems are seldom a cause for concern in this vacuum, and are all too often attributed to implementation errors further down the chain of command. While that’s usually just a convenient excuse, it’s worth noting that it’s also sometimes true. Still, this is the filter bubble that degrades a goal-oriented organization into another self-perpetuating mere bureaucracy. Classically known as Anacyclosis, more recently known as the Iron Law of Oligarchy, this institutional entropy has been diagnosed by many over the centuries but it has yet to be effectively dealt with.

Robert McNamara had no idea, either. Faced with the gordian knot of bureaucratic turf warfare, forced to question the quality of the intelligence he was relying upon, McNamara made the first of many Horrible Decisions in 1961, when he created the Defense Intelligence Agency, yet another central agency for intelligence. It was a maneuver he'd learned from more adventurous colleagues at General Motors: you deal with institutional inertia by installing a parallel power structure and making decisive cultural changes. Bold men of action making cold, rational decisions...delusions that never fail to inspire. It's worth noting that this approach also failed for General Motors, but McNamara had moved on before that could become obvious to both Detroit and Wall Street.

The failures of Robert McNamara are probably not an indictment of Robert McNamara, however. He has distinguished company, a pantheon of "whiz kids" and "management gurus" and "warrior scholars" who have undertaken audacious structural reforms to huge media fanfare and failed more or less completely. It raises a question: why do we keep building institutions that are too complex for human beings to manage?

People love to talk about Leadership, to analyze the mostly fictional hagiographies of Great Men, to rhapsodize about Courage, Conviction and Compassion, yet despite all this joyful noise, in the realm of institutions and power the only operational principle in effect is Cover Your Ass At All Costs. The Boy Scouts of America spent decades covering up sexual abuse and child rape in their ranks, not because they have an agenda to enable pedophiles, but because they were desperate to protect their brand, their reputation. Thus does simple cowardice metastasize into actual evil.

Like most any books in the Business section, the Arbinger Institute's Leadership and Self-Deception is a "teaching story" that drives home less than 5 actual concepts at a less than 8th grade reading level. The real crime here, however, is the wasted title, because history has a lot to teach about the self-deception that passes for leadership. Not enough, clearly, because our current civic dilemmas are little different than what Athenians and Spartans grappled with. Norman Dixon, a historian of vast patience and wry humor, does great justice to the title of his 1976 book, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. Dixon speaks volumes on the inherent, structural origin of executive delusions, and slyly acknowledges that managing an army of officers means accepting a certain amount of incompetence in exchange for the obedience it ensures. Soldiers can’t all be Pattons of Destiny; most of them simply need to follow orders efficiently.

Citizens are no different. It's important to remember that much of the secrecy behind what the National Security state does is intended to hide their activities from the American public, not some competing intelligence agencies or rival governments. That is an action movie fairy tale, and in the real world our military industrial power base is infiltrated by dozens of competing conspiracies with conflicting goals. Recent embarrassments like the damage Ahmed Chalabi was able to inflict with a small, well-connected team are proof that documentable 5GW success stories exist IRL. Consider the FBI's ongoing losing battle with Israeli, Saudi and Chinese espionage rings, consider the CIA's transition from covert HUMINT to death squads with embedded journalists, consider the NSA going open source to cope with the fact they've been drowning in the sheer volume of their Full Spectrum success, and consider the Obama State Department and their ongoing orgy of total blowback failure that's still being called the Arab Spring because branding has to be simple in order to stick.

"There was a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak." - Alan Greenspan

Faced with this whole horrible landscape of executive failure, I hope that I have left you in a more optimistic and empowered place. After all, the worst you can do is fail and failure is, historically at least, definitely the status quo outcome for any and all human endeavor. Your leaders are every bit as ignorant and confused as you or me, and I would suggest that's a good thing, at least in terms of your next ten years on this planet. Global problems that appear to be computationally intractable to the Bilderberg set might turn out to have remarkably simple solutions.

The tools of the trade are out in the open. Even the un-classified manuals are excellent reading. Build your own data, run your own numbers, share what you see.

5GWTF: The Post-Everything Future of War

2012-07-22T12:15:00Z

On the auspicious date of August 17th, 2011, Barack Obama was looking ahead. Faced with the recent actions of Anders Brievik and contemplating the immanent 10th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, he stated: “The biggest concern we have right now is not the launching of a major terror operation, although that risk is always there. The risk we are especially worried about right now is the lone wolf terrorist. Somebody with a single weapon being able to carry out wide scale massacres of the sort we saw in Norway.” The fact he was in a television studio speaking those lines to a man named Wolf Blitzer is just one of those coincidences that permeate our associative universe.

"Fifth Generation Warfare" is not catchy. Consumers need something relatable, something visual and visceral. That's why “5GW” has devolved from the critical theory of the warrior class into the crude shock and awe of "Lone Wolf" domestic terrorism. The dumbing down process is irreversible and immune to reason, so this isn’t written as a defense of the concept so much as a post-mortem for the field.

There have been a number of noble but aborted attempts in recent years to establish a center of gravity for this subject, the slickest and most recent being the 5GW Educational Institute, who have been pretty quiet since their initial PR campaign in 2010. They are patterned after the earnest template of the Project for a New American Century, an academic noise machine raising awareness about future threats to national security. Witness "Fifth Generation Warfare: A Growing Concept" by consultant Stephen "Awkward Titles" Bucci. It's mostly the kind of boilerplate copy that any IO intern could hand you before breakfast, but here's where things get downright quotable:

"...the United States is at a moment of transitioning from traditional and separated disciplines in the national security space to the world of highly integrated, multifaceted and sophisticated 5GW. Our enemies have figured this out already. They are agile, innovative and will try whatever works. We tend to still have an industrial-age methodology. We preach agility, net-centric operations and a legion of other buzz words, but then return to our comfortable traditional corners."

I think that "our enemies" are being given far too much credit, as usual. Besides, in the generational warfare model, "agile and innovative" is a 4GW fundamental already. Operationally, it's a euphemism for banal atrocities like "hiding behind Islamic clerics and charities to facilitate IED training networks" or "using drug money to finance the murder of political opponents and honest law enforcement" or "funding arms purchases by forcing women into prostitution." That's just run of mill, Carlos the Jackal, everyday terrorism, dumbass simple and lower case t. Sure, they have special ops training thanks to SOA legacy programs and they build their own parallel IT networks for secure communication, but so did the IRA. Ideally, words and concepts communicate a precise, repeatable meaning. 5GW is more subtle and sophisticated than 4GW, a perpetually embedded insider threat, and Zetas using GPS phone apps to kill a target in Texas doesn't qualify. That's organized crime and it's older than English.

In the real world of informed adults, nobody is touching the United States of America in terms of force projection. However, Full Spectrum Dominance is the most capital intensive activity on Earth and requires continuously escalated funding. So with “Cyberwar” getting a bored response from the body politic, we've got some product testing underway in 2012 and the “Lone Wolf” angle is a promising pitch.

Which is not to say the concept is something new: it predates Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray, tracing back to a mostly forgotten man named Andrew Kehoe. He was a Michigan native and local school board treasurer, a perfectly unremarkable man who killed 44 people on the morning of May 18th, 1927.

There is seldom much value in the details of crimes like these, but what Andrew Kehoe did deserves scrutiny just the same. Like many spree killing incidents, it began with a domestic homicide when Kehoe woke up, killed his wife, and set fire to every building on his failing farm. This was not a psychotic break, but the beginning of a meticulous plan that hinged upon predicting the response of authorities and maximizing damage and fear. When the fire department and police responded to the housefires, Kehoe was detonating over six hundred pounds of explosives somewhere else. He had spent months slowly wiring inside the walls of nearly every room in the Bath Township elementary school, which was just starting their first classes of the day.

Fortunately, Kehoe was not an meticulous enough and the majority of the charges never went off. Despite that, the explosion killed dozens of children and teachers. In the aftermath, Kehoe drove his truck back to the scene and detonated the entire vehicle, which he had built into a massive shrapnel bomb. The next day, investigators pulling unused explosives and dead animals from the wreckage of Kehoe’s farm found a stenciled message on the perimeter fence: “CRIMINALS ARE MADE, NOT BORN.” All this ten years prior to television sets becoming commercially available in the United States.

After the fires of Andrew Kehoe were finally out, the town of Bath demanded a grand jury inquisition to determine who was at fault. They concluded that “Kehoe conducted himself sanely and so concealed his operations that there was no cause to suspect any of his actions.”

The man in the cage is Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated president William McKinley in 1901. He was a self-proclaimed Anarchist, as they often are. It was already the third time that America’s elected leader had been killed with a firearm, and Czolgosz himself was merely a copycat, imitating the world famous crime of Gaetano Bresci. In 1898, New Jersey activist Bresci vowed to kill the king of Italy in retaliation for the Bava-Beccaris Massacre, an Italian strike turned shooting gallery which killed over 100 civlians, mostly activists and union organizers.

Two years later, he looked directly into the mighty moustache of Umberto I and shot him 5 times in the chest, standing in the middle of a beautiful summer day in the Italian city of Monza. One year later, William McKinley was murdered in the Temple of Music by man he never knew. Leon Czolgosz was just another face in the crowd.

Nobody saw him coming. As usual.

As ad copy for enhanced security goes, the "Lone Wolf" argument is compelling and concise. “There’s no way you can prevent it. There’s absolutely no way. It was random. It happened. There was nothing that could have prevented that unless someone saw him loading his car with guns.” That's Peter Ahearn, retired FBI agent (and more), diagnosing the recent incident in Aurora.

Of course, "there's absolutely no way" is not an answer consumers want to hear. That void will be filled, in strange but predictable ways. Civil society is a very thin veneer, and although Bruce Schneier is factually right about the "Security Theater" of DHS checkpoint theory, those systems aren't exactly there because they work or something. It's what the consumers wanted. Impulse purchases can usually be returned, but impulse legislation is far harder to deal with.

"Lone Wolf" is something pundits can really tear into. It's already been through the online content cycle long enough to get critiqued by Stratfor: "Cutting Through the Lone Wolf Hype" takes two approaches, dismissing the perpetrators as "stray mutts" and insisting that truly dangerous individual operators are quite rare, in terms of the larger domesticated population. Both points are mostly true.

Throughout the strange history of single perpetrator mass killings, one pattern that emerges is how often their simple mistakes can save lives at every turn. Nearly a century after the incident at Bath School, potential Lone Wolf types have a new asset: a media driven learning environment. Monsters or not, these murderers are celebrities now and their actions are analyzed in careful infographic detail.

As Peter Drucker teaches: ”What gets measured gets done.”

If an angry young man with an AR-15 and a tactical vest qualifies as a “Super-Empowered Individual,” then the phrase means nothing at all. Mass shootings are horrifying precisely because they are so easy, basically only requiring a functional credit card and an empty soul. The perpetrators themselves are bland emotional cripples, yet their poodle complaints are elevated to the status of breaking news.

The Terrorism Research Initiative did a recent essay on “Preventing Lone Wolf Terrorism” and part of their conclusion is worth quoting here:

”...exactly because lone wolves – although operating alone – draw inspiration from other extremists or ideologues, disseminating counter narratives ought to be an important element of an effective CT strategy. A crucial ingredient of counter narratives is the de-legitimisation of perpetrators and their acts and the falsification of their ideologies...it is important to refrain from handing them the public theatre they strive for. ”

Park Dietz: “We’ve had twenty years of mass murders throughout which I have repeatedly told CNN and our other media: If you don’t want to propagate more mass murders, don’t start the story with sirens blaring. Don’t have photographs of the killer. Don’t make this 24/7 coverage. Do everything you can to not make the body count the lead story, not to make the killer some kind of anti-hero. Do localize the story to the affected community and make it as boring as possible in every other market. Because every time we have intense saturation coverage of a mass murder, we expect to see one or two more within a week.”

What makes 5GW interesting isn’t the democratization of violence and spectacle, because again, that’s just basic terrorism. There’s not much to analyze in terms of a gas-powered automatic weapon in a crowded room full of unarmed people. 5GW is not about the ability of individual actors to kill civilians or even hit hardened targets, it’s about the ability of individual actors to challenge institutions and nations.

The growing asymmetry of power that converging technologies provide is what distinguishes the open horizons of 5GW from the closed abbatoir loops of 4GW. When Liang & Xiangsui wrote about “Unrestricted Warfare,” they didn’t have a bunch of Woo Bum-Kon impersonators in mind, they were outlining a method of leveraging systems and processes against themselves, a means of enacting sabotage invisibly and continuously.

What about the real deal SEIs? They're mostly the subject of internet conspiracy theories, appropriately enough. George Soros, John Rockefeller, Jr. and the Brothers Koch are all boogeymen to someone, but the bigger picture is a global ecosystem of billionaire operatives pursuing both overlapping and contradictory goals. There are thousands and thousands of them. Most of them are completely gone on some terminal ego trip and barely in touch with the world they want to remake in their image.

Focusing on individual perpetrators can only become overwhelming, so take some advice from Barbara Bush and don't trouble your beautiful mind about The 1%. Instead, take the John Nash approach -- the real John Nash, pathologically obsessed with game theory and iterations of the Prisoner's Dilemma. This "Lone Wolf" stuff might be watered down, but it's still bitter and strong. There are no deliverable solutions and no technological fixes.

That bleak conclusion is exactly where 5GW should logically begin.

Neal Koblitz: “Mathematics as Propaganda”

2012-04-27T18:33:00Z

This is an excerpt from Volume III of Mathematics: People, Problems, Results that had to be shared.

One night several years ago while watching TV, I was surprised to see a mathematical equation make an appearance on the "Tonight Show." The occasion was an interview with Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb and popularizer of population control as a solution to the world's problems. At that time the ecology movement had just started to capture the attention of the public, and Mr. Ehrlich was arguing that the solution, as always, was in population control.

Johnny Carson was in top form, but the show could have bogged down if his guest had delved into subtleties or overly serious discussion. However, Ehrlich had the perfect solution. He took a piece of posterboard and wrote in large letters for the TV audience:

D = N * I

"In this equation," he explained, "D stands for damage to the environment, N stands for the number of people, and I stands for the impact of each person on the environment. This equation shows that the more people, the more pollution. We cannot control pollution without controlling the number of people."

Johnny Carson looked at the equation, scratched his head, made a remark about never having been good at math, and commented that it all looked quite impressive.

Who can argue with an equation? An equation is always exact, indisputable. Challenging someone who can support his claims with an equation is as pointless as arguing with your high school math teacher. How many of Johnny Carson's viewers had the sophistication necessary to question Ehrlich's equation? Is Ehrlich saying that the "I" for the president of Hooker Chemicals is the same as the "I" for you and me? Preposterous, isn't it? But what if the viewer is too intimidated by a mathematical equation to apply some common sense? Ehrlich knew how to use his time on the show well.

Political Theory

Of course, it will surprise no one to find low standards of intellectual honesty on the "Tonight Show."

But we find a less trivial example if we enter the hallowed halls of Harvard University, where Professor Samuel Huntington lectures on the problems of developing countries. His definitive book on the subject is Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), in which he suggests various relationships between certain political and sociological concepts: (a) "social mobilization," (b) "economic development," (c) "social frustration," (d) "mobility opportunities," (e) "political participation," (f) "political institutionalization," (g) "political instability." He expresses these relationships in a series of equations (p. 55):

social mobilization / economic development = social frustration (a / b = c);

social frustration / mobility opportunities = political participation (c / d = e);

political participation / political institutionalization = political instability (e / f = g).

When he is called upon to summarize his book (e.g., in Theories of Social Change, Daniel Bell, ed.), he emphasizes these equations.

Huntington never bothers to inform the reader in what sense these are equations. It is doubtful that any of the terms (a) - (g) can be measured and assigned a single numerical value. What are the units of measurement? Will Huntington allow us to operate with these equations using the well-known techniques of ninth grad algebra? If so, we could infer, for instance, that

a = b * c = b * d * e = b * d * f * g

i.e., that "social mobilization is equal to economic development times mobility opportunities times political institutionalization times political instability!"

A woman I know was assigned an article by Huntington for her graduate seminar on historial methodology. The article summarized his work on modernization and cited these equations. When she criticized the use of the equations, pointing out the absurdities that follow if one takes them seriously, both the professors and the other graduate students demurred. For one, they had some difficulty following her application of ninth grade algebra. Moreover, they were not used to questioning an eminent authority figure who could argue using equations.

Huntington's use of equations produced effects - mystification, intimidation, an impression of precision and profundity - which were similar to those produced by Paul Ehrlich's use of an equation on the "Tonight Show." But Huntington operates on a more serious level. He is no mere talk-show social scientist. When he is not teaching at Harvard, he is likely to be advising the National Security Council or writing reports for the Trilateral Commission or the Council on Foreign Relations.

For further reading: running notes on The Paradigm Crisis

Notes on the #Occupy Media Teams

2011-11-12T15:55:00Z

So far, Occupy has thrived as a prototype rather than a program: an open-source laboratory for activism. What follows is a collection of research notes on how #Occupy collectives have evolved media teams, with a special focus on the original group in Zuccotti Park, NYC. Apologies to the authors pilfered here, but no repentance...after all, this is for Science.

Columbia Journalism Review: I sat down with Brian Phillips, a former Marine, who quit his job in Washington and hitchhiked to Manhattan to participate. He was wearing a press pass, saying he was a field journalist for a company out of Washington state called Cast Media. He described himself as the communications director and head of security within the media team, and said security is there to keep watch on the stacks of donated computers and other equipment that’s sitting out in the open October air.

The media team supplies content to post on Occupywallst.org, which Phillips describes as their "frontline for media." This site contains videos, pictures, and short posts, but remains unofficial, as all things here do, to retain its horizontal hierarchy.

Next stop, the internet table, where Drew Hornbein is sitting in front of a sign-up sheet for volunteers. He explains that the internet group is like the media team and press team, a semi-autonomous section of the General Assembly, and their objective "is not the conversation itself, but facilitating it." Horbein says his team runs the New York City general assembly (NYCGA) webpage.

The big project they are working on now is getting Internet to the park as a whole, which Hornbein says will help, "eliminate the information hierarchy." He explains that right now, the media area has the computers and the connection, but because "they have a job to do," it is cut off from everyone else. "We’re trying to create this model society but at the same time we’re recreating some of the bad things," he says. "Our big concern is to get Internet to the rest of the park."

The Internet table is in its first day, but Hornbein has been working as part of this committee since July, when the call to Occupy Wall Street first went out from AdBusters. He says he used to work as a freelance graphic designer, but quit as soon as he heard about this protest, "I was working on this dinky little e-commerce site that gets 500 hits a day," he said. "Now I am working on a site that is getting 50,000 to 100,000."

History News Network: How did the press tables get started/organized?

Mark Bray: Although there was a press working group before I really got involved, it was only shortly after I got involved in the press group that having a specific site started. At first we made a sign to have by a table, but now with the re-organization of the park we have a table next to the legal, info, and outreach tables. At first press didn’t know we existed, but now we are a regular fixture for them and when someone isn’t at the table for a moment they really freak out. They have become so reliant on us that they often don’t put in any effort themselves to walk around and speak with people but instead ask us for two nurses and a teacher or whatever they want.

Turnstyle: In midst of the frenzy at Zuccotti Park, under a giant pink umbrella, a small group of Occupy Wall Street protesters hover over laptops surrounded by mounds of equipment covered in blue tarps. A beaten up cardboard sign rests at their feet, the word “media” written in Magic Marker. This is the Occupy Wall Street media headquarters.

Colin Laws is a 19-year-old here from Connecticut who came to OWS to help the media team. “We got people that monitor social media such as Twitter and Facebook, people that monitor the news, people that Livestream,” he said. “That’s a huge thing, actually, because that’s how get a lot of our news out to our followers.”

A week ago, Laws was one of those Livestream followers, watching the streaming video of Zucotti park over the internet. And then after weeks of just watching the Global Revolution Livestream channel, he sold his TV and all of his video games and bought a bus ticket to New York.

The Observer: Barbara Ross, the eloquent and crunchy-pretty spokeswoman for the environmental organization Time’s Up!, told The Observer that the profusion of citizen journalists among the protesters was a mixed blessing. They provided a lot of raw photo and video, which allowed her to be stationary and keep an eye on the equipment. Even in the calm before and after the arrests, security is dicey.

She had to remove one attendee she believed was covering the protest, she said, when she saw him zooming and focusing his lens on the screen of a team member’s laptop as they entered a password.

Occupy Wall Street’s media output is critical to keeping the demonstration inclusive, accessible, and democratic, but the content of the demonstration is a secondary concern for the live stream, according to Ms. Ross. (How many will tune in for another hour of drum circles and acoustic ballads?) The documentation doesn’t really become important until things go wrong.

Vlad Teichberg, a 38-year-old Russian émigré and self-described “media activist,” staged similar media operations at the Republican National Convention and G8 Summit. With Ms. Ross, he helped document the monthly cyclist demonstration Critical Mass. Video footage of the Friday night group rides was crucial in 2008, when it served as proof that the cyclist Christopher Long, who had been charged with assault, was in fact a victim of police brutality. NYPD later paid a $965,000 settlement to cyclists who were wrongly arrested.

With a viral video and a shamed cop, the obscure social event for environmentalists and DIY kids became front page local news. Now, it’s a launch pad for bigger targets.

“We’ve been using the monthly Critical Mass rides to train media warriors,” Mr. Teichberg said.

Andrew Katz: At two o’clock in the morning on Thursday, Nov. 3, two members of the Occupy Wall Street media team, Justin Wedes and a woman named Victoria, who declines to give her last name, decide it is time to head to what Wedes calls the team’s “super-secret lair.” They hail a taxi. Wedes hands the cabbie a small paper with the address.

So few people, both in and outside the movement, appear to know about the off-site media operations center that when journalists are granted access, they are blindfolded with a maroon scarf and told the precise location is off the record.

Ten minutes later, the cab stops outside a rundown building in NoHo. Up the stairs and down a hallway, three men and a woman, all in their late twenties and thirties, are fixated on the monitors in front of them. They’re using, at turns, a third-party Twitter application or running a live feed from Oakland, Calif., that’s streaming a late-night clash between police and protestors.

The office serves as headquarters for globalrevolution.tv, a live video feed hosted on Livestream that’s become a go-to source for national Occupy Wall Street footage. It is a crowded space that looks as if it were thrown together by a bunch of college kids. There are a few desks littered with wires and food containers. Shelving units hold enough laptops and tech equipment to approximate a small newsroom. The room is long and narrow with paint-cracked walls and floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto the street.

Brooklyn Ink AK: Describe your typical day, from dawn to dusk, with Occupy Wall Street.

Justin Wedes: Well, there’s no typical day. But I think if I had to summarize or kind of approximate what a typical day would be, I would say that around 9 a.m., my alarm goes off. I have some tea. I tweet a little bit. I check my email. I try to eat something. Then I usually meet up with the media team, either here on-site or at our off-site location; check in with people with the Livestream, with social media; check in with the PR team to see if they’ve got any press releases or things that they want me to help push online; and then come through the park; have lunch in the park and talk with people; interview people on Twitter—on the new occupier hashtag so that they get introduced to other occupiers online—and then usually in the afternoon we have working group meetings. For example, the media team will meet, or the Arts & Culture committee, or the Community Relations committee.

Later on, we’ll have General Assembly in the evening at seven and I try to tweet those, too, or at least help coordinate who’s live-tweeting each General Assembly so that people can stay informed. Also helping the media team and tech people put up new forms of interactive technology for the General Assembly, like projection screens and online polling and text responses and all of these things we’re trying to build to make it more interactive. And then in the evening if I’m lucky, I’ll get a chance to relax a little bit with folks here at camp, or maybe go meet up with some folks, or speak at a forum or a workshop in other places to do outreach, like at local colleges or local events and just kind of get the word out about what we’re doing. And then usually in the late-night, I’m back here at Zuccotti and doing like late-night media round-up: looking at the news of the day, doing question-answer sessions on the Livestream—people like to do that—and yeah, one or two or three in the morning, or maybe I just stay the whole night, I usually head back to Brooklyn and try to get some sleep.

AK: How do you build engagement and which platform is producing the best result?

JW: You get engagement in a couple ways. One, by telling compelling stories and narratives. So, like the little short jokes that kind of reveal a small truth about the occupation, or about politics in our country, or about the state of our democracy, or whatever. People tend to retweet those and really dialogue with you on these.

We’ve had some really fun kind of dialogues going, like, for example: Michael Bloomberg won’t tweet about us, but he said multiple times in public that he’s having trouble finding people to negotiate with and talk with. And it’s so ironic because if he just tweeted at us, he’d probably get a lot of engagement. But he refuses to, and so we tweeted that because he refuses to acknowledge us on Twitter, we’re going to start negotiating with @ElBloombito, who is the Spanish parody of Michael Bloomberg. And we’ve had some interesting back-and-forth there.

I think the other point of engagement is when people really feel that rights are being violated. So when like police crack down on encampments—peaceful protestors—that becomes a flash point and a big issue and generates a lot of social media buzz, but also concrete action. People will call mayors’ offices, will call police departments, they’ll call the Real Estate Board of New York when they learn the Real Estate Board of New York is going to put pressure on the city to close privately owned public parks like this one from one to five in the morning because they see that as a direct attack on the openness of these spaces. Twitter has been instrumental. Early on, it was our best tool. Now, in combination with the Livestream and combination with traditional media, blogging, Tumblr, Facebook, it’s a very powerful tool that we have.

National Review: Even as Zuccotti Park has become a sea of troubles, it has been regarded as unsporting to bring up its obnoxious elements, as if to report on the dark side is to tar all associates unfairly with the same brush. But the unpleasant are demonstrably in attendance, and are no longer necessarily in the minority. I asked a “press representative,” named Justin, how many of those in the park he considered to be genuinely part of his movement, and was surprised to hear him say “less than 50 percent.”

Mother Jones: In San Francisco's Justin Herman Plaza on Monday afternoon, a group of young, ragtag tech wizards sat among a tangle of electrical cords and surge protectors. This was the Occupy SF Media Team, which has been live-streaming video from the downtown location as much as possible in recent days. It has its own website and Kickstarter campaign to raise $5,000 in the coming week. While other protesters wandered around barefoot or strummed acoustic guitars waiting for the next general assembly meeting, the media team provides videos of the event and edited a radio story about Sunday night's police raid for the Berkeley station KPFA.

They work with everyone at the protest, but they aren't always in sync with other participants. At a Monday afternoon meeting of the general assembly, members of the media team were shooed away when they brought their recording equipment. "They booted me out of committee when they saw the microphone," said Kyle Lesley, 30, an audio engineer. "They said, 'We didn't vote on that.'"

Some members of the media team express qualms about the amorphous nature of the protest. "Roles are necessary because they create the movement, they are the movement," said Kames Geraghty, 20, a web developer. "Active participation is important. Talking alone is not participation." Beside him, a white Apple laptop boasted a message in black permanent marker, à la Woodie Guthrie: "This machine kills fascists."

Inside the Occupy Boston Media Struggle: Without much infrastructure in place — its primary Web site, occupyboston.org, was still in early stages of development — the media team found itself the focus of national attention. Swooping in to help, veteran Web activists from groups like the Independent Media Center and Global Revolution, both of which had already helped power Occupy Wall Street's message, also put Boston on full blast.

Despite the viral myth that there was a media "blackout" at the beginning of Occupy Wall Street, there were in fact hundreds of stories posted during the first days that protesters took Zuccotti Park — including sympathetic coverage from such mainstream outlets as the Guardian and ABC. So by the time that Occupy hit Boston two weeks later, local, national, and even international media were poised to swarm like paparazzi.

Occupy Wall Street's media ops have come under scrutiny, with a widely syndicated Associated Press story from last week noting a "chaotic and complicated relationship with [outside] media." In their turn, Occupy Boston has tried to learn from New York's PR wins and errors. Gunner Scott, a seasoned activist and executive director of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, has handled the bulk of the press releases. Recently, multiple Twitter jockeys were finally given access to all house accounts, so that they can crowd-source coverage and amplify concurrent happenings.

In the coming weeks, the media team plans to conduct internal demographic surveys in order to help outside outlets get their facts straight. Mazen also says they'll concentrate on disseminating more videos. All this while press inquiries haven't slowed down — they still get dozens of calls every day, and spend time correcting lazy journalists and deflecting slanderous conservative trolls.

...they are aware of their shortcomings, the most significant of which is a glaring digital divide among occupiers. Despite the Limbaugh line that they all pack iPhones, most Dewey Square campers lack Web access. Technological inequities have even caused breakdowns; just last week the media tent was occupied by members of the direct-action committee, who demanded more access to electricity.

"For a long time, we were saying that there weren't enough people of color, or enough LGBTQ people," says Mazen. "But overall we're also working with people who barely text, let alone vote on a Wiki. If we really want to represent the 99 percent, we have to think about how we can disseminate through low-tech means. It's like a lot of other things: we're working on it, but we just haven't gotten there yet."

#Occupy Itself

2011-10-04T20:11:00Z

"Since August, investigators with the Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have monitored the online efforts of activists to bring demonstrations to Wall Street." -- NYT 9-26-2011

It's easy to write some critical theory noise about asymmetrical emergent rhizomes, and it's easy to wish the #Occupy movement was more clearly defined. Jagged edges are good, though: there's no reason it has to be simple. Media training makes soundbites easy to digest, but "easy to digest" only leads to "quickly forgotten" here in the age of Cognitive Overload. Bottom line: as an exercise in non-violent democracy, the #Occupy movement has been a fascinating success so far.

Despite the clear communication, advance planning and the public nature of the event, most people still have no idea what is happening. Spectators who lament the poor organization of the Wall Street protest probably don't know about the test run on September 1st, 2011. Seventeen days later, the operation was officially launched. When Wall Street failed to surrender within 24 hours, most observers declared the whole thing a failure and moved on.

David Karpf eulogized it like so: "Anarchists and radical organizers have a bit of collective amnesia with regards to the “Battle of Seattle.” The kids in black bandanas were only a very small part of the coalition that shut down the city in October, 1999. Their acts of childish violence against a Starbucks may have become the lasting public image of the event, but they were hardly representative. The bulk of that anti-globalization protest was composed of labor unions, environmentalists, and other organized progressives...The culture jammers are practicing activism-as-public-art. The community organizers are practicing activism-as-public-process. Both have their place, but we rarely spell out the differences. And they’ll lead you in very different directions."

#Occupy Itself

Clearly they're doing something right. Wall Street remains occupied, two weeks later, with a steady stream of celebrity guests and spectacle-worthy abuses of power. The protest has also taken on a larger scale as an open source movement around the country. This is more fascinating and more powerful than the Wall Street action itself: the moment when a movement catches fire.

It's important to decentralize quick, because a single location would be too easy to co-opt and control. In NYC, police essentially make arrests at will and are clearly making those decisions based on a strange political logic. Law enforcement attempts at containment have been a SNAFU circus so far, whether that's because of byzantine red tape complications or just internal disagreements remains to be seen. Still, Anthony Bologna provided a whole week of headlines, and for any protest action, the police are a strategic asset. The media, on the other hand, are a strategic threat.

Lawrence O'Donnell and Dylan Ratigan are not allies, they are a predator species. They are also incredibly helpful. Modern reality is fractally packed with double binds like this, and no movement can sustain the analysis paralysis of evaluating every opportunity for hidden traps. The immediate future is going to make a lot of people very uncomfortable, and that's a good thing.

There's a lot being written right now about "selling out" and "getting co-opted" but #Occupy might prove too slippery and too strong for that Nixon-era smear campaigning. Besides: do you say No to Susan Sarandon? What are we to make of change agents like Hazem Sayed showing up to the campfire? He bought a lot of headlines for just $900 bucks, back in the dark ages of March 2011, when he bribed his way to the front of the line for an iPad2 at a media-saturated "Launch Event" -- it worked then, too:

Terrence O'Brien"Intrigued by the man who was willing to pay so much money just to get to the front of the line, reporters began lining up to talk to Sayed, who wasted no time plugging his company, [whatever], and its latest app, [whatever]"

Now he's hyping up Vibe, a "smartphone messaging platform" that posts anonymous messages to localized lists. These messages can be set to disappear minutes or hours later, allowing for real time communication about police actions and logistics problems. Sayed made the tech news again for flying out to the Wall Street occupation with flyers about his free application. It's a beautiful application of stigmergy -- the ordering principle that keeps ant hills running like armies. No matter what you might think of Sayed's marketing intentions, his model is a smart one for protest situations and his technology has proven useful.

There's going to be a lot of odd contributions like that. Expect more assistance from the Grey Zone -- self-promoters, ideological lunatics, shady billionaire types -- as any serious national movement gets off the ground. That's going to be unavoidable. Or at least, just as unavoidable as internet commentators declaring the movement "dead" because someone suspect gets involved. What if Adnan Khashoggi is caught writing checks? I think that the #Occupy movement can and will survive that...and no matter what, it will certainly be a weird year from here.

There's a lot being written right now about what the #Occupy movement must do. What it should be, where it all needs to go. Yet somehow, everything that looked like a mistake at first has unfurled into an advantage. All any single #Occupy cell needs to do is hold their ground for another night, and plan to make tomorrow bigger and better. It's easy to write a sneering caricature of a Tea Party rally, but it's interesting to note how many reporters wrote mocking hit pieces on the Wall Street crowd that all wound up being completely different. It's hard to get a bead on where the consensus is -- but the occupation itself is the whole message. Nobody on Wall Street is confused about what it means, at least.

Anonymous vs. Anonymize

The Anarchists sing beautiful songs, but make no mistake: there is a management team in the mix.

Malcolm Sacks: "I'm hesitant to say that it's non-hierarchical, that there's no leadership, because I do really think that there's a core of people – the media and press team – who are doing a lot of the organising and shaping the public image. We tried to talk to one of the media folks about the problem of there not being people of colour, and the problem of people of colour not necessarily feeling comfortable participating, and there was resistance on their part to acknowledge that. They deflect criticisms by saying, 'if anybody want's to get involved they can get involved. If they want to be represented, they just come and they can do it too.' I think it's denying the real power dynamics that are at play now."

"I Am the 99%" is powerful stuff, and it's also a heavy responsibility. There are a huge amount of voices to be taken into account to justify rhetoric like that. Building consensus is a whole different box of tools than organizing protests, it's true. That doesn't necessarily mean that some folks in Topeka, Kansas need to read up on Saul Alinsky in order to start a local #Occupy chapter. The room for mutation is a big part of what makes this phenomenon so interesting. As Burroughs croaked: "Any number can play."

Still, giving advice on "building successful movements" is dishonest. It all boils down to the same tautologies in a numbers game -- the further your movement spreads, the more leverage you'll have. That's not unlike Wall Street's advice for the unemployed and foreclosed: the key to making more money is just increasing your monthly income. There's a lot of free advice out there, and none of it is much more helpful than that.

#Occupy will become what it will. All that's left is waiting and watching and holding the square.

Finis.

Because we always quote McLuhan here:

PLAYBOY: How does such environmental programing, however enlightened in intent, differ from Pavlovian brainwashing?

McLUHAN: Your question reflects the usual panic of people confronted with unexplored technologies. I’m not saying such panic isn’t justified, or that such environmental programing couldn’t be brainwashing, or far worse — merely that such reactions are useless and distracting. Though I think the programing of societies could actually be conducted quite constructively and humanistically, I don’t want to be in the position of a Hiroshima physicist extolling the potential of nuclear energy in the first days of August 1945. But an understanding of media’s effects constitutes a civil defense against media fallout.

James Angleton | 7 Types of Ambiguity

2011-09-26T02:05:00Z

"Deception is a state of mind--and the mind of the state." - James Jesus Angleton

As the CIA's own website has the cunning arrogance to tell me: "...observers of the intelligence scene find James Angleton endlessly fascinating." Too true. Personally, though, what interests me the most is that with a small mountain of information available, none of it is believable. The man himself simply isn't there.

Vanished in a turn of phrase. Angleton is all fiction, these days. From Hollywood bastardization to the weird channeled communications with Michael Ledeen, ARTIFICE remains an inscrutable wall of impeccable forgeries. Largely, this is thanks to the CIA's enviable position as the primary author of it's own history.

"Counterintelligence is one of the most thankless jobs in spy craft. Its practitioners think the unthinkable, examining each operation, recruit or defector for the possibility that it may be a deception. Counterintelligence agents also try to recruit agents who work for hostile intelligence services, hoping to confuse opponents with cleverly packaged false information." - NYT 5/12/87

It is unknown at this time, for instance, whether James Angleton was really a devoted fan of James Joyce, or just wanted to cultivate that kind of image. It is worth noting that he himself prefered being simply James Angleton. His full name was evoked, over and over, by John Birch vintage right wing researchers to emphasize his suspect roots -- no different from the careful enunciation of Barack Hussein Obama today. It got picked up by less extremist researchers like Mae Brussell and Robert Anton Wilson, perhaps because of how acutely poetic the cadence of his full name sounds on paper...and today it sticks with him.

James Angleton was writing French poetry and hadn't even arrived at Yale yet when 7 Types of Ambiguity was published in 1930. According to the legend of James Angleton, though, his eventual discovery of that book was life-changing. The book is forceful, the work of a young, brash intellectual who wrote the thing at 22 years old and celebrated his first publication by drinking himself into a sex scandal that got him banished from Cambridge. As legends go, that's definitely a good start by William Empson.

I suspect it's also a good start on understanding Angleton's disjointed body of work. I'm betting that his early years were real enough. I'm betting that he did read Finnegans Wake several times over, he did recieve several D's and F's while he was at Yale, and was profoundly influenced by Empson, as taught through the lens of professors Norman Holmes Pearson and Maynard Mack. I believe the story about James Angleton discovering his lifelong insomnia at Yale, too.

James Angleton led a long, strange life, though. There is entirely too much to be said about his legacy and legend, so I'm using Empson's book as a tool for orchestrating all this noise. A story in seven holographic slices, guided by questions of applied strategy, organization design, and unintended consequences.

Who has the time today to pursue the 10,000 networks that Angleton wove himself into? In fact, quite a few authors have devoted decades to exactly that, so I'm in no rush to replicate their work here. This is not about who James Angleton was so much as what James Angleton had to be.

1a. Comparative Metaphor

"Testing is a continuous process." - F M Begoum, Observations on the Double Agent

Counterintelligence work is insane. Let's start there. Critics who approach Angleton's work as merely "paranoid" are missing every available lesson on the buffet table. His job was paranoid. How he pursued it is an education.

"Russian spy schools know all about the CIA’s use of lie detectors in personnel screening and could be presumed to have no trouble at all training infiltrators to outwit the machine. There is some ground to believe that Communist agents still are operating in American intelligence organizations and perhaps there are more of them than ever." - Stefan T. Possony, 1964

Who do you trust? Angleton was tutored by Kim Philby and Kim Philby turned out to be a traitor. As origin stories go, it doesn't get much more cinematic than that.

Kim Philby was an MI6 man, specializing in sabotage and counterintelligence. Philby and Angleton were drinking buddies, having extended martini lunches and cracking fabulously intelligent jokes. Philby would later write of Angleton, "he was one of the thinnest men I have ever met and one of the biggest eaters." Angleton never talked about Philby much.

The circumstances of Kim Philby's downfall would make for either a boring movie or a living nightmare. The man had titanium nerves, despite spending most of his career self-medicating with alcohol. He was part of a Russian spy ring that became known as the Cambridge Five, and it all fell apart in horrifying slow motion. It was 1949 when their covers began to unravel, yet Philby didn't resign from MI6 for another two years. He spent three more years in limbo before finally being cleared in 1955 by Harold Macmillan. It wouldn't be until 1962 that he was finally exposed.

World War II had a lot of strange endings, though. Ezra Pound spent a few weeks living like a farm animal and getting his brain fried in the cages of Pisa. One of his critics -- an MP who supervised and escorted him around Italy -- rendered his verdict thus: "he is an intellectual 'crackpot' who imagined that he could correct all the economic ills of the world and who resented the fact that ordinary mortals were not sufficiently intelligent to understand his aims and motives." So many great intellectuals are like that: constipated and doomed. Rewind about 5 years, though, and you'll find Ezra Pound in New Haven, Connecticutt, being introduced by our protagonist, who arranged for him to come and read. Pound was treated like visiting royalty and maintained a correspondence with Angleton for years afterwards. Angleton learned a great deal about the world from Ezra Pound.

Especially the lesson about staying out of cages.

In the aftermath of V-Day, Angleton was hard at work networking his way through post-war Italy. Pound was en route to an asylum and Mussolini was a swinging corpse, but Angleton had HUMINT raw material to spare in those heavy days. He helped manage two programs to get highly-trained (and connected) Nazis out of Europe, or at least out of Israel's reach. One through the US Military, the infamous Operation Paperclip, and the other through the Vatican itself. He made a lot of introductions on behalf of Israel during those years, too, and built the core relationships that would keep him in charge of the CIA's Israel desk no matter who got nominally appointed in the decades to come.

Staying ahead of the curve -- every curve, really -- was Angleton's ultimate pursuit. The eye of the pyramid is a position that places huge demands on the operator. Between finite time and exponential complexity, Angleton was faced with steep transaction costs for every piece of information he processed. However, he had to weigh that against the equally steep security risks inherent in adding personnel or allowing his data stream to be filtered.

Allen Dulles and James Angleton agreed on a foundational principle: counter-intelligence, properly pursued, has to be proactive -- they inverted the Nazi OODA loop where CI agents were the cleanup crew. Instead Angleton became a ghost in the system, wired into the center of a Panopticon rendered in paperwork. He operated ahead of the conventional intel process, monitored all internal communications, and used a vast network extending far outside the official CIA to keep tabs on the entire Langley establishment. From raw SIGINT to Special Operations, Angleton was an invisible supervisor.

Most importantly, Angleton controlled the flow of NSA intercepts into the CIA and micro-managed the only team that was given access to this valuable raw feed: they were called Staff D.

Everyone is a suspect. Everyone. It's easy for Normal Folks to dismiss the John Nash nightmare of Game Theory betrayal as "paranoid" from a safe, domestic distance, but what Nash outlined was a very real dilemma for counter-intelligence agents of any nation. The pursuit of "intelligence" places an inhuman burden on the secret police.

Despite all his tactical advantages, Angleton was still faced with an essentially impossible mission: Omniscience.

2b. Resolution

"The simple fact is that if Angleton wanted something done, it was done" - Tom Mangold

Angleton is perhaps best understood as the Patron Saint of Homeland Security. Compartmentalized secrecy, zero accountability, and access to everything. Yuri Nosenko spending almost 4 years in solitary confinement, undergoing beta version Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, was most definitely a precursor for the current situation in Guantanamo Bay and hundreds of other secret prisons around the world.

Then again, that's just a cheap literary device. It's unfair to the nuances of the truly Angletonian theory of Counterintelligence to presume that he would approve of a rush job as sloppy as DHS turned out to be. Consider the recent headlines declaring that over four million US citizens have classified clearances, and over a million of those are private contractors.

Angleton liked recursive loops. Within the Countertintelligence desk, Angleton ran an additional secret team named SIG -- Special Investigative Group. This alone is a beautifully pure illustration of Hagbard Celine's First Law: secret police within the secret police within the secret police. This kind of total freedom from scrutiny was essential to the proper practice of Power. "It is inconceivable that a secret arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government," he once remarked, and that simple binary trap was the source for most of Angleton's headaches.

To Angleton, Counterintelligence was clearly an artform, yet today it's practiced more like an ISO 9000 certification. The Black Arts have been templated and Taylorized into something so foolproof that any MBA can make it happen.

Consider Kenneth Senser, ex-CIA, ex-FBI, and currently running the counterintelligence division of Walmart Global Security, a group called the Analytical Research Center. As a matter of corporate rountine, he maintains a network of informants, disinformation agents and agent provocateurs within the ranks of the "Anti walmart Movement." All network and company computer activity is monitored via CoreView, some shit-simple automated surveillance software from Raytheon's Oakley Networks lab. He manages a staff of nearly 400.

Kenneth Senser routinely busts Walmart executives around the world, but actual law enforcement is hardly part of the Angleton Theory. Allen Dulles and James Angleton agreed on another foundational principle: counter-intelligence, properly pursued, was an esoteric pursuit that tolerated petty crimes in pursuit of cardinal sins. Clearly, everything from drug dealing to genocide qualified as petty crime in the face of the Communist threat.

For decades, when people went looking for power, they ran into James Angleton. Which is not to say they ever so much as saw the man -- just that they wound up on his radar screen and probably never knew how exposed they were. He occupied the crossroads between the Vatican, the Mafia, the Mossad, Shin Bet and the CIA. Like all espionage masters, he understood that secrets were best kept, period...best used for leverage, milked for intel, and only exposed as a regrettable last resort.

One of Angleton's greatest assets was his patience. He mastered the discipline that Bonaparte learned from French secret police pioneer Johseph Fouche: "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." Where most agents would have made moves, Angleton was content to let operations unfold for decades, letting infiltrators live out their entire lives in secret service. James Angleton waited. He routinely ran operations so convoluted even insiders would find them too absurd to be real.

Before the convenient epithet of Conspiracy Theorist was in common usage, smug realists in the US, UK and Soviet intelligence community would label such intricate paranoia "Angletonian." The man didn't just become a legend, he became an adjective. Few among us could aspire to reach such heights.

3c. Context

"Literature must in some sense be believable, whereas experiences of human beings in fact develop beyond all powers of conjecture. Thus Social Literature is conventional, while History exceeds all limitations of common sense." - Albert North Whitehead

When US Army Sergeant Robert Lee Johnson got caught spying for the KGB, he'd been doing it for over a decade. Despite all of the hard work of Army Counterintelligence, Johnson only got exposed because his wife decided to turn him in. Years later, Johnson would find himself bleeding to death on the US Penitentiary floor in Lewisburg, PA. In one of those non-believable plot twists, he was stabbed by his own son.

James Angleton had nothing to do with Robert Lee Johnson, yet the Johnson case itself would later become a central detail in Great Mole Hunt. The top minds in the National Security State agonized for years over two Soviet defectors, Yuri Nosenko and Anatoliy Golitsyn. One of the key data points was Robert Lee Johnson, so Angleton collected information on the case. To call it obsessive would be pulp cinema: it was simply his job.

Jay Lovestone was a life-long Communist activist and organizer, who really started to shine in the early 1930's, when he pulled together a fragmented US Communist demographic into a cohesive party platform. He organized almost a dozen national worker's Unions, funded hundreds more on the local level, and became a powerful figure at the AFL/CIO until his retirement. He was reporting directly to James Angleton the entire time, keeping tabs on the movement as he worked his way to the top. History has no way of determining if Lovestone saw himself as an infiltrator or if Angleton had compromised him somehow, but when the "Lovestone Empire" spy ring was revealed, it dealt a serious blow to the organized Left in the United States.

As it turned out, the Lovestone Empire was anything but: just a small team, one of hundreds of covert networks tucked into the counterculture. Once Operation CHAOS got uncovered in the 70's, the American public finally caught a glimpse at how tremendous the scale of activist infiltration really was.

The entire project was overseen by Angleton himself, designed as a small labyrinth of frequently overlapping, strictly compartmentalized projects. Several of them, notably MERRIMAC and Project 2, were tasked with the long-term infiltration of "domestic antiwar and radical organizations." The budget was in the millions, the agents were in the thousands and the network is ongoing.

Most of the agents were never exposed. Which is perfect; the ideal outcome to ensure maxmium FUD. The resulting feedback cycles of accusations and paranoia have been crippling the international social justice movement ever since.

Which is not to declare any victories for James Angleton. The greatest adversary of any progressive movement is simply human nature. Also, most CIA conspiracy narratives paint the agency as far more powerful than operational reality permits. Espionage work is difficult because the raw material is volatile, hard to measure accurately and impossible to predict. Human beings are buggy technology, so Angleton had to keep a fairly massive rolodex and travel in circles far afield from the Ivy League bubble of Langley.

As he slyly said to Seymour Hersh: "A mansion has many rooms." Even a basic tour of Angleton's mansion is absurd, in terms of sheer diversity, and in terms of heavy implications for hidden history. George DeMohrenschildt, Reinhard Gehlen, E. Howard Hunt, Roger Hollis, Frank Wisner, Klaus Barbie, Luigi Gedda, Ted "Blond Ghost" Shackley, Raymond Rocca...at every turn, another great damn book waiting to be written.

Angleton encouraged extremes. This is reflected in his legacy, where authors either pile on praise or denounce him as a criminal, but in either narrative he remains The Mastermind. This strategy of tension, more than 20 years after his death, rages on. Still: out here in the information vaccuum created by CI/SIG, it's altogether too easy to give Angleton more credit than the man deserves. In the absence of evidence, his legacy grows into a fiction the second you start to contemplate it.

One area where Angleton is surely afforded too much credit: his "Theory of Counterintelligence," which was very much WWI era technology and 100% British, too. Angleton's operation was essentially the template laid down by the original Coordinator of Information, Bill Donovan. Even here at the beating heart of Angleton's legacy, there's nothing there.

4d. Complexities

Angleton was not born into a normal life. He grew up in the network that would later become the P2 Lodge, where Italian fascism and Vatican intellectuals overlapped, the piously militant bloodlines traced by the Knights of Malta. He inherited his Italian network, but he surely earned his connections with British and Israeli intelligence. The trajectory of his career makes it clear Angleton was more than fortunate, he was a natural. Still, some authors call it genetic...

Doug Henwood: "Intelligence ran in Angleton's blood; his father, James Hugh Angleton, headed the National Cash Register franchise in Italy; in the course of visiting NCR's European operations, he set up his own amateur spy operation, which was of benefit to the United States when the war broke out. Angleton père was a Mason, and a professed admirer of Italy and Germany in the 1930s."

Angleton is deeply mysterious, but that's a projected image, a studied pose. It's worth considering that Angleton made himself scarce because in person, the puppet master was socially awkward and downright transparent. As Amos Manor would later observe: "...he was fanatic about everything. He had a tendency toward mystification."

Despite that, Angleton made it a point to appear when and where it really mattered. He understood that his longevity within the agency depended on his direct involvement with contacts. Despite the culture of cut-outs, Angleton built his espionage network on personal relationships, and he defended these relationships from scrutiny by rendering them state secrets.

Despite the analytical (and critical) bent of Angleton's approach to uncovering spies within the ranks, later decades would bring a more qualitative touch to the process. In 1990, the CIA wrapped up Project Slammer, a long-term study in the motivational psychology of traitors and moles. Their conclusions were stark: "Heavy drinking, drug dependence, signs of depression or stress, extramarital affairs and divorce could be warning signs of a security problem." In the aftermath of cases like Aldrich Ames and Jonathan Pollard, investigations turned up simple behavioral cues that were ignored by co-workers and supervisors.

Consider Jeffrey Carney, desperate to get caught, stuck in a bad movie: "I was ostensibly trying to further my education and get the big picture," Mr. Carney said. "I was putting my nose in books where I didn't belong...talking to people, gathering information from conversations. It was actually very obvious, I felt. Somebody should have noticed. I took a huge document and another huge document with me, went across the hall into an unsecured room, laid the documents out on the table, secured everything, and had my camera ready, and started photographing..I was walked in on two times while I was photographing. . . . My face went red as a beet because my blood pressure was unbelievable, and the people went, 'Oh, excuse me, I didn't know you were busy.' And they turned around and walked out."

Internal culture is just as dangerous as any external threat. Angleton couldn't help but view the domestic press as an enemy -- he didn't even trust most of the CIA. His job description forbade it. He was engaged in a starkly simple game where most of the world was his adversary.

5e. Fortunate Confusion

"We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces." - Carl Sagan

Word salad. There is no history here, only leftovers. Today's generation knows James Angleton by different names: Matt Damon, Michael Keaton, or The Cigarette Smoking Man. The Narrative is always a study in why men do horrible things in the name of noble goals.

The myth of James Jesus Angleton is only this: that he had to exist. Even agency history concedes his paranoia and ultimate failure. He is justified, legally and historically, by the principle of national security. As his champions with high clearance levels can always claim, it's what we don't know that proves Angleton right. Thanks to his heroism, we will never know how much we should be thanking him for. There's also other interpretations. When it came to Angleton's artistic legacy, most of his fiercest critics were his own colleagues by the end.

William Colby: "I determined a long time ago I had to get rid of him, and the question was how. I found several hundred people in there. I honestly couldn't figure out what the devil they were doing...I couldn't find that we'd identified any penetrations. And I concluded his work had hampered our recruitment of real agents. We weren't recruiting any because of the negative effect of the super-suspicion."

James Angleton has every legacy: take your pick. MKULTRA controller and sad paranoid headcase. The Mafia consigliere, the Vatican agent, the Company man. He is a true believer and a cynical manipulator, the ultimate insider and the stereotypical outsider. Angleton's keywords have all been woven into the UFOlogy mythos that centers around the Majestic 12 documents. It is remarkable how many key players in the JFK Assassination got written into that whole script: David Ferrie, Fred Crisman, Art Lundahl, John Paisley, and the fabulously unreal Gordon Novel, who rode out the 80's doing counterintelligence work for Larry Flynt, of all people.

Further memetic noise comes from Michael Ledeen, a careful student of Gladio and the Strategy of Tension, and one of the Great Architects behind both Team B and The Vulcans. In his column for the American Enterprise Institute and on several other blogs, he will regularly publish conversations with Angleton's ghost, channeled via Ouija board. I am sure there are already conspiracy forums unpacking the intricacies of Angleton's opinions on Osama Bin Laden.

I mention all this only in the interest of applied physics. The event horizon of history is about to close on Angleton's legacy as pop culture continues to digest him into the Spectacle and his last living accomplices, victims and witnesses finally die. It's a new day in America.

6f. Invented Interpretations

"Angletons principal concern was not with "moles" per se, but with the inherent vulnerability of intelligence services to systematic deception. To him, "moles" were a means to this end if, and only if, they were in a position to provide timely feedback to an adversary about what channels his intelligence service were monitoring and how it is was interpreting the data it was intercepting. With such a feedback loop in place, he believed perfect deception was possible." - Edward Jay Epstein

Strangely, effective Counterintelligence operations are totally indistinguishable from normal life. People of all ideological backgrounds are quite industrious at foiling their own plans, exposing their own secrets, derailing their own investigations...it is significant that a useful idiot can be every bit as effective as an actual trained asset. Gallows humor in the control room as the masters of the universe play cards and smoke cigars. And wait.

Consider the case of Oswald Le Winter. The man is apparently real, a professor and poet, but his primary occupation would appear to be running disinformation on orders from the CIA. At least, that's what he says. He has claimed to be a NATO liason officer for the Gladio program and a former agent of the CIA, and troublingly, he has also claimed that he's targeted journalists with deliberate disinformation "leaks" in campaigns that lasted for years and paid $100,000 per gig. His testimony is an integral part of the BBC's Timewatch trilogy on Gladio, yet even by his own admission, he was working to disrupt investigations into both the murder of Olof Palme and October Surprise saga.

Oswald Le Winter is an article unto himself, and only a single asset, one of hundreds feeding mystery meat into the sausage grinder of History. The CIA doesn't write history -- that kind of naked power is crude, too lowbrow for the Yale crowd. Angleton reached out to several authors in order to help sculpt his own legacy through selective leaks. This was years after he'd begun planting conflicting narratives through agents like Le Winter, Ledeen, or assets like William F. Buckley and Dr. Leary. This was years after he'd finished planning his countermeasures for the key vulnerabilities in his record. He never forgot the last lesson of Ezra Pound.

So most of what we know about Angleton was carefully orchestrated and scripted by the man himself. In all probability, this includes most of the "dirt" and apparently incriminating data points.

7g. Contradiction

"Actually, I didn't know whether to believe Angleton at all." - Stephen Jay Epstein

No final word on Angleton's legacy, of course. The final consideration is that Angleton himself was a mole: one of his own disciples concluded as much. As for a final verdict on his technique, history appears to be on the Kingfisher's side. Epstein makes a good case, though it does boil down to the Broken Clock Principle. The existence of any moles in the FBI and CIA would be enough to validate Angleton -- surely that's setting the bar on intellectual achievement a little too low, even by American standards. And let's not forget, despite his pivotal role in US history James Angleton was very much an Italian.

"Persons having the deepest and most legitimate insights into intelligence matters are most scrupulous in their trusteeship of such knowledge and that the penchant for sensational revelations is the near monopoly of the charlatans and pretenders who scavenge along the flanks of the intelligence enterprise." - Frank Wisner

While most accounts end with Angleton leaving the Agency in various stages of defeat on Christmas Eve, 1975, even Langley will cheerfully admit that ARTIFICE was re-activated pretty much as soon as Ronald Reagan got elected back in November 1980. The call came from Willam Casey, who was the next Director of Central Intelligence and getting his team up to speed for the transition. All that Jimmy Carter, Stansfield Turner transparency crap was being liquidated through out the chain of command. Operation Cyclone was kicking back into high gear, and Angleton returned as a consultant. Whether this position was active counterintelligence work, or just a pension gig to keep the old master on campus, I will leave the guesswork to you.

Curiously, Angleton may be his own worst critic. Joseph Trento insists that James Jesus Angleton confessed and Confessed and I haven't seen these quotes disputed yet. If genuine, they're fucking remarkable:

"You know how I got to be in charge of counterintelligence? I agreed not to polygraph or require detailed background checks on Allen Dulles and 60 of his closest friends. They were afraid that their own business dealings with Hitler’s pals would come out. They were too arrogant to believe that the Russians would discover it all. You know, the CIA got tens of thousands of brave people killed. We played with lives as if we owned them. We gave false hope. We - I - so misjudged what happened."

"Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars. The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. These people attracted and promoted each other. Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and I loved being in it... Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offie, and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell. I guess I will see them there soon."

"...the poem is not good in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions, which ought to be clear in our mind when you are feeling its power. I think it horrible and wonderful; I regard it as like Aztec or Benin sculpture, or to come nearer home the novels of Kafka, and am rather suspicious of any critic who claims not to feel anything so obvious." - William Empson, Milton's God

Down Here in the Cave

2011-09-18T02:01:00Z

"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." -- William Colby

That's a hell of a quote, and like most of the classic admissions of guilt in conspiracy literature, it's completely fabricated. Too late: it's in the lexicon now. The Conspiratainment Complex doesn't do "corrections." That's just not now that particular network was wired.

Data points are fragile things. The more you examine your assumptions, the more your assumptions will fall apart under examination. If you research any given subject in depth, you get an appreciation for how much noise human beings introduce into every signal we touch. After awhile, it gets deafening.

Nobody writes about facts these days...least of all journalists. The human species traffics in Narratives. Fox Narrative, MSNBC Narrative, Narrative Gingrich and Narrative Chomsky. Even numbers tell stories, these days. US, 1980: total population 225 million, prison population 500k. US, 2010: total population 305 million, prison population 2.4 million. A movie in every sentence: watch it and weep.

September 11th, 2001 was exactly like every other day in history: it's difficult to really account for. Any measurement of that day's events is a complex timeline of several thousand data points...at least. The sources and accuracy of these data points are secondary to their role as plot devices.

We evaluate each data point in terms of how well it fits in with other pieces to tell us a story that makes sense. It has to make sense, doesn't it?

Although the science of perception management is far more exact than you're willing to think, you're in luck: their success is their own greatest problem. This is the biggest challenge that Pentagon Information Operations Officers face: somehow getting a coherent message out of the global brand known as America. 18 year old Mormons from Indiana are in the streets of Islamic nations being asked about gay marriage and military support for Israel. Also, being shot at. Naturally, ten years after being attacked by a group of mostly Saudi Arabian terrorists we find ourselves spending billions on the military occupation of Agfhanistan and Iraq.

Television media would be a far more potent tool for brainwashing if there were only one channel. Instead, it's an omnidirectional pinball machine of conflicting but equally effective brainwashing. The human brain is a learning machine, and this world-changing asset remains our greatest weakness. Face to face, in social situations, in large crowds, persuasion is ridiculously easy -- crude, even. It's a simple enough game, but the problem is everyone is playing. From local preachers to rock stars to think tanks to bloggers to whatever the hell passes for "Celebrities" here in the dark ages -- everyone is making their Pitch. Simultaneously. After awhile, it gets deafening.

Between Israel, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, you now have five differrent national intelligence agencies with a vested interest in covering up their own ongoing operations, and compromising the operations of their rivals. The links to ISI, to the Mossad, to Saudi Princes, all seem bizarre and sinister when you're trying to fit them into a puzzle they may not even belong to. There is a deafening amount of noise surrounding the hijackers and their financing, and I would wager that most of that noise is from covert programs that had nothing to do with the actual attacks that day. Attempts to take dozens of conflicting stories, multiple layers of conflicting disinformation, and make it all fit into a single story always seem to wind up sounding completely insane.

That's by design. Welcome to the wilderness of mirrors. To those of you still trying to connect those dots, well, this beer is for you. Any major operation, here in the Information Age, inevitably becomes a Susurluk Moment for all the clandestine lifeforms who happened to be under the same rock. These security breaches are nothing new. There are detailed countermeasures in place in preparation for ugly accidents like this. A successful covert operation is actually not about the deed itself, it's about managing and controlling the aftermath. This is what separates Special Operations from a straightforward military attack.

So any formulation of 9/11 Narrative, from the official story to the most holographic UFOlogist strains known to mankind, can only sound like a movie script. A badly plagarized movie script, at that. Given the cast of characters, that's inevitable. How can you stitch Mohammed Atta, Colleen Rowley, Philip Zelikow, Wallace Hilliard, Mayo Shattuck III, Cass Sunstein, Mahmood Ahmed, Lee Hamilton, Steve Butler, Siebel Edmonds, Randy Glass and Francesco Cossiga into something that sounds normal enough to be understandable and convincing? Intelligence operatives are exceptional people leading remarkable lives -- most of us just go to work. As Gary Sick observed:

"Such characters are a researcher's nemesis; they are meant to be. When the CIA or other intelligence agencies need to hire a "contractor," who may be required to carry out taks that are potentially dangerous and of questionable legality, they look for three things: a specific and useful skill (a knowledge of money-laundering, perhaps); a romantic streak that glorifies both the secrecy and the risk; and a propensity for exageration and trouble."

Those of us who do believe in conspiracy theories have one feature in common with those of us who don't -- we're all pretty pleased with ourselves. Despite the odds, we've all managed to figure out the truth, and somehow we all manage to be humble about it, too.

Once you've seen a couple hundred thousand arguments about What Really Happened On September 11, 2001, you'll realize that none of it matters. Which is not to say it's meaningless. Minds change, and that's a beautiful thing. The problem is, there's over seven billion minds, and even a cursory consideration of the scale involved makes it clear how little you and I actually matter. That number is hovering awfully close to zero. We're all actively involved in the computation of reality on behalf of a Superorganism that remains invisible and unkowable to us.

Call me arrogant, but fuck that. That seems like a real waste of our capabilities.

Truly, we live in marvelous times. The view from down here in the cave is nothing short of spectacular and everyone wants to talk about it.

We are spectators. Spectators having arguments.

Of course you have reasons for believing whatever you believe: so do I. So does everyone you disagree with. Every addict has a thriving portfolio of justifications and evasions.

We couch it in terms like "education" and "activism" but really, we're desperate for validation. We just want other people to agree that we're right. It's important that we admit, often, that we are not. And it's highly probable that we can't be. Ever.

Then again...so what, right? We're still here, waking up every day. Pour some liqour out for the fallen soldiers, known and unknown, conscripted and covert. Whatever you believe, take it seriously and make damn sure your dots are actually connected. Think differently, folks. Aim high, be all that you can be. Just do it.

Life in an Occupied Country

2011-09-09T22:54:00Z

"Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be." -- Marshall McLuhan

For the past month, I've been pursuing a new obsession: tracing the historical contours of the single largest and most powerful demographic force in United States politics. Despite all the media hype about Red States and Blue States, our American Democracy is completely defined by something else altogether -- the lobby known as Big Apathy.

Everyone I speak to feels strongly that our political process is broken. On this much, Bill Moyers, Noam Chomsky and the Tea Party are all on the exact same page. Why is voter turnout so low in the United States? There's no need to belabor the question with an essay: a majority of Americans just see no point in voting. They don't believe it matters. Put simply, they don't vote because they know better.

Everyone wants to insert a Narrative here, but this is an ecosystem. Be wary of easy answers. Mike Lofgren wrote an excellent essay last week, "Goodbye to All That," and sure enough, he's got a Narrative to sell you, too. It's instructive:

"The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters."

It's a compelling case, so it's instructive to point out he's probably wrong.

One strange constant you'll find in all the opinion polling data on "non-voters" is they're more likely to be satisfied with government, overall, than actual voters. Weird, right? 25% of non-voters claim to be "basically content with federal government," compared to 16% of 2010 voters. A recent Pew study posed the question "Can you trust the government in Washington to do what is right?" 73% of non-voters answered either "Some of the time" or "Never." By comparison, 76% of voters gave the same answers. So clearly, Big Apathy represents a consensus so huge that it reaches into the ranks of Democratic and Republican alike, fusing into a super-majority force for total stasis and constant, impotent bitching.

However, it's hard to place much faith in demographics as a precise science. Copywriting and marketing deals with broad strokes, so your typical Pew or Rasmussen numbers are at least good enough to guess with. Of course, guessing never won a war, and so serious demographic data becomes a valuable trade secret. Karl Rove doesn't dick around with four-figure sample groups - he goes wide and he goes deep.

Which leads us to another, more insidious factor: the 21st Century Ressurrection of Jim Crow. Karl Rove doesn't just do opinion polls, Karl Rove builds 1:1 maps and engages in data-mining projects so byzantine the NSA sends him interns. He does this because he's engaged in a decades-long plan to permanently increase the ranks of Big Apathy. It's important to stress that Karl Rove is far from alone, and he gets invoked here as a symptom, not a cause.

Since 1965, white folks have been steadily losing their majority status, dropping from 89% of the US population back in 1965 to around 65% of the US population today. Every step of the way, the GOP's permanent establishment has been working overtime to make sure that ethnic minorities and urban poor aren't eligible to vote.

From scrubbed registration lists to "challenging" voters on election day, the perpetual Block the Vote campaign has become more overt in the past decade. (The War on Drugs represents a parallel campaign to disenfranchise voters, even more blatantly targeted at minorities.) Up next is the state-level barrage of Koch-funded "Voter ID" initiatives. There's big money behind reducing the population of eligible voters, and big money gets impressive results.

The United States Elections Project is a superb resource for raw numbers, but this particular paragraph is some unintentional dark poetry:

"Voter turnout rates presented here show that the much-lamented decline in voter participation is an artifact of poor measurement. Previously, turnout rates were calculated by dividing the number of votes by what is called the “voting-age population” which consists of everyone age 18 and older residing in the United States (the yellow line to the right). This includes persons ineligible to vote, mainly non-citizens and ineligible felons, and excludes overseas eligible voters. When turnout rates are calculated for those eligible to vote, a new picture of turnout emerges, which exhibits no decline since 1972 (the green line to the right)."

In other words, once you take into account the fact we're systematically denying millions of people the right to vote, those voter turnout numbers look several percentage points better! Yes, a bright, shining new day for Democracy. Here's how to really read their graph: simply observe that the gap between the yellow and green line has been growing larger every four years.

Money corrupts politics - of course - but I'm not convinced money is the real problem here. Perhaps language is. It's absurd for pundits, professors or PR professionals to talk about "fixing" or "restoring" our dysfunctional "Democracy" when history makes it plainly clear that the United States of America was never intended to be much of a Democracy at all. The most serious problems with the political process here in 2011 are design features that are centuries old now.

Simple: the Electoral College system means that our Presidents are chosen by 538 votes. This is significant because statistically, individual votes truly do not matter. It is difficult to argue with cynics when math itself is on their side. From James Madison to Walter Lippmann, the architects of modern American politics have been openly suspicious and disdainful of direct Democracy since the first Constitutional Convention.

How about you? If you think that America is broken, how do you fix it? If you don't trust politicians and you don't believe you have any other options, where does that leave you? More importantly, where does that leave us? What does is really mean when a clear majority of the United States believe they cannot trust their government?

When it comes to that point -- to "What now?" -- we mostly throw up our hands in despair, or we change the subject.

Let's change the subject. The man you see above is Elmo Burns Roper, Jr and his life story weaves together everything we've discussed so far. Roper was born in 1900 and he networked himself into the financial, political and military power bases of a growing United States. He spent over a decade working with Henry Luce, the mythic architect of the American Century, and then joined the OSS with the blessing of Wild Bill Donovan himself. His real legacy, though, was his public opinion polling company, The Roper Center.

When the torch was passed at The Roper Center, it was given to Everett Ladd. "You will decide for yourself what the record shows," he would often repeat to his readers, but yet his writing offers only fully cooked conclusions. Everett Ladd and Elmo Roper are never in the objectivity business. They made a fuss about scientific polling, for sure, but the data has always been subservient to the Narrative. Really innovative pollsters don't just generate spreadsheets, they tell stories and become a part of the political machine, a media priesthood with colorful charts. Ladd was rewarded for his innovations with a long and distinguished career, a parade of Fellowships from Guggenheim to Ford to Rockefeller.

Everett Ladd, in turn, created an accidental protege when he inspired a young Scott Rasmussen, who was in the process of dropping out of the University of Connecticutt in 1975. It would be a decade before Rasmussen graduated college but his time with Professor Ladd changed his life. Today, Rasmussen is a political celebrity, an outspoken Tea Party cheerleader, and one of the most vocal media pundits on life in an occupied country:

"Just 17% of likely US voters think the federal government today has the consent of the governed. Sixty-nine percent (69%) believe the government does not have that consent. Fourteen percent (14%) are undecided. We are united in the belief that our political system is broken, that politicians are corrupt and that neither major political party has the answers." He can also do subtlety: "The gap between Americans who want to govern themselves and the politicians who want to rule over them may be as big today as the gap between the colonies and England during the 18th century."

Desperate times make for strange alliances. How else are we to rebuild consensus? Where is there a "national conversation" that isn't a screaming match? How much are we willing to let go of our own beliefs in order to make strategic compromises? Can we assemble a meaningful power base when 64% of the US population has less than $1000 saved up? What are the leverage points available to the over-educated and under-employed?

Semantics, Mere Semantics

Then again, forget langauge, of course money is the problem. Wasn't it always? If we're going to think about our United States as an occupied country, aren't we talking about the fact that Class Warfare is long since over and the top 1% won it all?

More importantly, how can we remind people that facing this reality is not a death sentence but a necessary beginning? How can we import Swaraj to America? As Ghandi correctly observed, "Independence begins at the bottom." Well...here we are. My generation is completely defeated. Does that make us a lost cause, or raw material?

What now?

Rick Perry vs. Ron Paul - GOP Body Language

2011-09-09T02:14:00Z

Who behaves like this in public with cameras rolling? Seriously.

Notice's Ron's location relative to the podium here...and in the next picture. Ron steps back about 2-3 feet to the side and is still trying to get Perry's hand off him...

...and then Huntsman arrives to break it up. Insanity. This should have been the focus of today's media coverage. Meltdown status: Reich Perry has mental issues that disqualify him from office.

Then Again...

These overt dominance signals play an important role in Chimpanzee Politics. Here's Lyndon Johnson running a Texas clinic on ectomorph Theodore Green:

Towards a Psychological Operations Reading List

2011-09-07T16:59:00Z

"Psychological Operations are conducted across the operational continuum." -- FM 33-1

Defining Psychological Operations is straightforward enough, but determining where exactly it ends is extremely tricky. The US Department of Defense has infiltrated institutions around the world, they expend billions every year on domestic and foreign propaganda, yet they still only represent a single slice of the spectrum. Intelligence agencies, private think tanks and public corporations are all competing for attentional bandwidth, too. PSYOPS has become ubiquitous, metastasized into Standard Operating Procedure for the entire edifice of Western Culture. Our news and our entertainment, scientific studies, history books, political campaigns and activist movements are all just sponsored messages and paid promotions. From advertisements to astroturfing, everyone's got "desired effects" and everyone's got a "target audience" now.

This is a work in progress, a reading list that attempts to outline how far gone we really are. Suggestions are more than welcome -- they're necessary.

Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann. Propaganda by Edward Bernays. These earlier works are included for the sake of history and history alone. While they clearly outline the mentality and general theory behind Psychological Operations, they're dated antiques and all the really juicy quotes have been strip-mined out by pretty much every subsequent book on the subject.

PR! - A Social History of Spin by Stuart Ewen. Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry and Trust Us We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. For a basic introduction to this entire field, this right here is where to start. Readable, entertaining and packed full of facts, these three are my top pick for general readers and curious mammals looking to get caught up.

The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by HUGH Wilford. This is certainly one of the best books I've read, period. Wilford takes on an insanely ambitious and important subject that's been obscured by secrecy and history. He does it great justice and the writing itself is amazingly good. Once the premise and reality is established, Wilford kicks things into high gear, providing hundreds of pages of eye-opening connections that will change the way you think about the past six decades of US popular culture. It is a source of great amusement to me that so few self-proclaimed "conspiracy theorists" have even heard of this book, because their paranoia pales by comparison to what Wilford is laying out in abundantly documented detail here.

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky. Unfortunately, the 1992 documentary of the same name is far inferior, an over-long and confused muddle of a biopic that focuses far more on Chomsky as media celebrity and public intellectual than the actual subject of the book.

Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential by James Moore and Wayne Slater. While there are certainly better biographies of Rove in circulation, and I've read them all so far, I'm recommending this one because it's got the juiciest quotes and focuses on what Rove was actually doing to make his unique approach to political science work. I've got six books on Rove in the back room right now, but this is the one that's full of bookmarks, notes and annotations because I keep coming back to it while working on Skilluminati material. Rove is, of course, not the "genius" he's made out to be and his motus operandi is really rather crude. What makes Rove exceptional is his behind-the-scenes strategy and dedication to the pursuit of personal power, not to mention his willingness to take the usual dirty tricks further than most operatives would ever dare. Great reading.

Mirage Men by Mark Pilkington. While I do think Greg Bishop's Project Beta is one of the best-written treatments of disinformation in UFOlogy ever written, Pilkington's book is a more valuable read because his focus is so much broader. He begins at the same point: the sad saga of Paul Bennewitz. From there, however, he traces a national (and ultimately global) effort by the military and intelligence communities to control the entire field of UFO investigation through faked documents, hoaxed "events" and good old fashioned intimidation and violence. How you feel about the "field" of UFOlogy is quite beside the point -- the book's focus on operational and practical details makes it an essential pick for our purposes here today.

The Deep End

Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda, Third Edition by Philip M. Taylor. This is essentially The Textbook. That's why it's so expensive. If you care about this subject and take it seriously, you should buy this and then read it, hundreds of times. That is all.

The Gods of Antenna by Bruce Herschensohn. This deceptively short volume is an in-depth treatment of the subject from an insider of both corporate and military PsyOps, and stays relentlessly focused on the actual techniques of framing, priming, leading and outright deception that makes the magic possible. Loaded with examples and operational detail, this is essential stuff and I'm grateful & surprised it's still in print.

Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War by Christopher Simpson. This is a collection of historical essays about the role of military money in guiding public research we well as controlling the content of education itself. There is certainly a sequel waiting to be written - hopefully it's already in print? - about how private corporations have taken up the slack as gov/mil money slowed down. I'm including it here because it's very well written and fleshes out the details of something that usually gets brought up as a general theory or vague accusation. Also - it's back in print and far, far cheaper than it was when I had to track down a used copy.

Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960 by Christopher Simpson. This is a dense book of original history and, much like the Carroll Quigley classic The Anglo-American Establishment, it frequently devolves into pages and pages of names and dates. So while it's far from easy reading, it's also an essential source document and I'm certain there are thousands of connections yet to be drawn from the material here.

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller. This is some heavy going and the fact is, I never would have read it unless it was handed to me by a mentor. Years later, I find myself really wishing that I still had a copy because so much of the material was over my head at the time. This is a dense, slow going, top-level academic approach to the central question of Social Control that informs this entire reading list. It's also one of the more thought-provoking books my young brain ever came in touch with. For those of you interested in The Deep End, this is solid source material if you can find it.

A Century of Media. A Century of War by Robin Andersen. One last recommendation, this time second-hand. I've had a number of folks I really respect tell me I had to get ahold of a copy in recent months, but acute delusions of being a rapper have made that impossible so far. I'm looking forward to picking up a copy, though -- looks ambitious and heavy-duty.

...and? I'm betting there's dozens of hidden gems I have either forgotten or never knew about to begin with. I know the reader base here is a rare and strange breed of autodidact, so I'd like to turn the microphone over to you: what else should have been included here?

An Invocation Against the Inevitable

2011-09-02T05:13:00Z

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” - McLuhan

Skilluminati Research has been a very cynical project...until now. Change of policy: there are no sufficient excuses for inaction. There is no point to all this research if I'm not capable of using it for something real. What interests me now is Synthesis. How can we build a politics that takes all of this horrible shit for granted and still provides a master plan?

In 2011, Hope and Change are hollow brand names and representative Democracy itself is hollowed out, broken for decades. Distrust of government has gone from a fringe position to a bipartisan consensus. If you think all that adds up to a "Now is the Time" pep talk, you're not hearing me at all. We are more fucked than ever. The situation is not "ripe," it is fundamentally out of control and irreversible. ...so what then?

The Machine is bigger than you can think. It snakes through every aspect of your life, it networks an entire planet of political powerbrokers, banking cartels, intelligence agencies, arms dealers, cult leaders, secret societies and royal families. From cynical operatives to true believers, from corporate boardrooms to secret bases, the Machine is too vast an ecosystem to model accurately. Both in human terms and hardware specs, much of the infrastructure is classified -- and that's just the stuff the military is doing. Every serious effort to reform this system to date has gotten nowhere. ...so what now?

Most dangerously, our language is broken. Not only broken, but weaponized against us. Human beings are depressingly easy to manipulate in large numbers. Your brain, not to get too technical, is a buggy piece of shit. Despite being a three pound patty of Universe-making miracle meat, our brains leave us very vulnerable to each other. Our broken cultural dialog is a cascading feedback loop of confirmation bias, narrative framing, visual cues, and paid disinformation -- and that's just the stuff the Democratics are doing. Even starting the conversation about "fixing the system" or "improving quality of life" is difficult now. This is a testament to the power of demographic targeting, segmented messaging and persuasion engineering. Mind control is a very mundane science these days.

And...so what? I can at least say this: there is a way - in fact, thousands of Ways - and we will find them, and we will use them. I'm still sketching out the details, but it's there and I'm far from the only monkey in the Zoo who sees it.

Every 24 hours, the global situation gets more unstable, and we have less time to fix it. The imperative weight of what our generation must accomplish is crushing, and for most of us, paralyzing. What is being asked of you is both unfair and unrealistic. To be clear: I'm not going to tell you that you have to do it, I'm just explaining where I will be located through 2012.

"One man with an idea in his head is in danger of being considered a madman: two men with the same idea in common may be foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act, a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and the cause has victories tangible and real; and why only a hundred thousand? Why not a hundred million and peace upon the earth? You and I who agree together, it is we who have to answer that question." -- William Morris

Everybody wants to change the world...and that makes this a dangerous conversation to have. I can understand why bloggers get touchy about being labeled "Enemy Combatants" by DoD documentation like the Information Operations Roadmap, but I also don't think the Pentagon is exactly wrong, either. We all think our motives are pure, so when we talk about "changing the world" we seldom hear the resemblance to, for instance: Christian Dominionists, al-Qaeda, Jeff Skilling from Enron, and the Council on Foreign Relations. In fact, the langauge is identical, and any serious political reform effort is essentially a non-violent revolutionary act.

Enemies are too easy, though. I would like to play a different game now. I am here to learn from everyone, but please don't mistake that for an invitation. I learn on my own terms -- as Wyndham Lewis never said to Marshall McLuhan, "The secret of success is secrecy."

With that approach in mind, I will be tinkering with changes to the format here at Skilluminati Research. This will still be home to long-form essays, but the back end architecture will be changing into something more useful for other researchers. Certainly, my source documentation is more valuable than my moron opinions. I also intend to make this more of a network hub, with more outbound links and spotlights on worthy endeavors being waged elsewhere.

Suggestions welcome. As always: Thank you for your time.

Ronald Hadley Stark: The Man Behind the LSD Curtain

2010-12-02T21:09:00Z

"...revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science for the few who are competent to practice it. It depends on correct organisation and above all, on communications." -- Robert Heinlen

11/30/11 -- The curse of doing research out here in Weirdoland is that the really fascinating people are nearly impossible to do research on. For instance, when you're covertly running the world's largest LSD manufacturing and smuggling operation for the CIA, you're not going to be doing interviews in Newsweek or publishing an autobiography. That's precisely the problem with Ronald Hadley Stark, who is one of the most insane characters in the history of LSD -- and that's really saying something, don't you think?

This article has been updated considerably since I first published it. Stark's life story is beyond belief, so I think it's important to be meticulous. There are, no doubt, still hundreds of errors here.

For anyone unfamiliar with the tangle of political, scientific, cultural and covert forces behind spread of LSD, this article could get confusing. Ronald Stark is a central figure in David Black's book ACID: A Secret History of LSD, but the best overall introduction to this material would be Acid Dreams, by Lee & Shlain. It's short and very readable, laying out the overall history in clear terms. For more serious seekers, I highly recommend HP Albarelli's masterpiece, A Terrible Mistake, which is meticulously documented and considerably broader than mere LSD history.

The Super-Context

Stark had been working with US intelligence agencies for at least 9 years by the time of his most infamous moment, a legendary meeting with the "hippie mafia" drug syndicate called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. (no joke.) They were looking for a new supplier and Stark kicked off the meeting by showing them a kilogram of liquid LSD -- for US readers, that's 2.2 pounds of acid. Needless to say, his resume was persuasive. He claimed to have a dedicated lab in France, but it's his political philosophy that really makes Stark such an interesting character:

"He had a mission, he explained, to use LSD in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both the capitalist West and communist East by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people. Stark did not hide the fact that he was well connected in the world of covert politics."

The Brotherhood was sufficiently impressed to bring Ronald Stark into the fold, and what followed was the Golden Era of cheap, high-quality LSD. From 1969 through 1973, Stark and the Brotherhood dosed a generation and got away with it, too.

According to a figure quoted by everyone and verified by nobody, Stark made 20 kilograms of LSD in his career. Hippie lore generally gives Owsley Stanley the crown of the Acid King, but by Stanley's own estimates, his total production was a half kilogram. That might not sound like much -- but it adds up to over 5 million hits of acid. You can see why the Army and Navy were so interested in this compound: it is unusually powerful as drug molecules go.

Although the LSD story is closely associated with the Sandoz pharmaceutical corporation in Switzerland, most of the CIA's supply was actually domestic. Since at least 1954, the Eli Lilly Company was working under secret contract to keep the various MKNAOMI and ARTICHOKE research projects stocked up with magic mindfuck juice. The figures on their total LSD output are classified.

David Black: "Before clinching the deal with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Stark had been making some contacts in England among the radical psychiatry movement of R.D. Laing and the Tavistock Institute."

Obviously this was a big money business, and organized crime involvement was inevitable. Since small batches of LSD have a literally exponential commercial profit margin, technical expertise was highly rewarded. Consider the case of Clyde Apperson, a specialist in quickly setting up a fully functional manufacturing lab just about anywhere. More importantly, he could take them down even faster. For set-up, Apperson would charge $100,000 in cash -- take downs were only $50,000. He was finally busted working in the infamous abandoned missile silo with William Leonard Pickard in 2000.

Everyone's always getting busted, though. The history of LSD is full of incredibly intelligent men making highly stupid decisions. Yet through it all, from Operation Julie to the Sand-Scully case, Ronald Stark just kept on trucking. He was a calculating cameo artist: always on the scene, never holding the bag.

Until he suddenly was: "Whatever game Stark was playing took an abrupt turn in February 1975 when Italian police received an anonymous phone call about a man selling drugs in a hotel in Bologna. A few days later at the Grand Hotel Baglioni they arrested a suspect in possession of 4,600 kilos of marijuana, morphine, and cocaine. The suspect carried a British passport bearing the name Mr. Terrence W. Abbott. Italian investigators soon discovered that "Mr. Abbott" was actually Ronald Stark."-- Source: Acid Dreams, pg. 213

Terrence W. Abbott was holding a genuine British passport, number 348489A, which was issued in 1973. The story of how he got it will never be told -- British intelligence refused to release his files. The FBI refused to share their files on him with the DEA's investigation, and the US State Department has actively interfered with many foreign attempts to extradite or prosecute Stark. The man led a charmed life.

"...the picture of Stark's activities began to broaden with the discovery of a vial of liquid and a cache of papers kept in a Rome bank deposit box. The vial was sent for forensic examination. The scientists reported back that they could not precisely identify the drug it contained. At best, they put it close to LSD. Perhaps it was the synthetic THC Stark had dreamt of creating; the papers included formulae for the synthesis. There were also plans for the bulk purchase of hemp seeds and calculations for shipments, investments and plant installation. Some of the papers went back to the Brotherhood days but they gave no details of his LSD operations after the Belgian episode. They did show that his range of interests in the drug world had expanded to include narcotics. There were details of the synthesis of cocaine." Source: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love

Stark's time in Italy is the strangest and bloodiest chapter of his odd history. Although most accounts frame his 1975 arrest as a "bust," one commentator who does not is worth mentioning here: Phillip Willan. His view of Stark is shaped not by LSD folklore, but through earnest journalism and research into the history of political terrorism in Italy. The Ronald Stark that Willan presents is not a drug lord getting taken down, so much as an intelligence asset deliberately changing venues.

Willan: "Stark's arrest in Italy was prompted by a mysterious phone call to the police and he seems quite happy to go to prison, where his time was gainfully employed in winning the confidence of captured Red Brigades leaders, given that he turned down the opportunity of bail in August 1978."

Stark was no mere snitch, though. He was actively setting up infrastructure, teaching the principles of operational security and preaching the virtues of the "cell" structure. "He also provided them with a cryptographic system for coded radio communications," Willan says, although it should be assumed that Stark was also passing that system on to his secret employers. Prison records show that he met with Italian police and intelligence agents many times while he was networking there. It was in Italy that a large part of Ronald Stark's operation collapsed into the visible world. The facts that emerged are an education in covert warfare and intelligence operations.

Some Heavy Dudes

"...his preferred to keep his range of contacts ignorant of each other's activities. Oftentimes he concealed the fact he was an American. His European associates were not privvy to his affairs in Africa, and those in Asia knew little about his work in the states. The brothers, for example, had no idea he was running a separate cocaine ring in the Bay Area." -- Acid Dreams, pg 250

Researching Roland Stark, I was reminded of people like Porter Goss, Henry Karl "Andijra" Puharich, or Barry Seal: it is unreal how much this guy got around. He stayed in close contact with the founders of "The Process Church of the Final Judgement," which is another hub in the Dark Network of occult history.

They began as a splinter group who broke ranks from Scientology, which meant they were waging spiritual war with L. Ron Hubbard from 1965 through 1974, which was a pretty bad year for "The Teacher," Robert DeGrimston. He was booted from his own cult and his wife divorced him on her journey to starting a successful chain of "Best Friends" animal shelters. (No joke.)

All of which sounds way more lurid than it was. Stark was ultimately a drug dealer so beyond being Very Interesting, his link with the Process Church doesn't imply any shared philosophy...and doesn't exclude it, either. The oddball sociologist William Sims Bainbridge studied the group for months, and he didn't exactly make it sound like a blood magick sacrifice: "there was no violence and no indiscriminate sex, but I found a remarkably aesthetic and intelligent alternative to conventional religion." Then again, the Solar Temple was full of wealthy and sophisticated people who held refined parties and had very high-level conversations right up until the mass murder, mass suicide thing.

(For considerably more detail on the Process, refer to the Bainbridge essay Social Construction from Within: Satan's Process.)

Timothy Leary was a perfect avatar for the Age of Horus: playful, brilliantly creative and blissfully unaware of the bad consequences he was unleashing. Although there is little evidence to tie Leary himself to the drug smuggling and merchandising activities of the Brotherhood, there is no question he quickly became the spiritual center of the group. For what it's worth, Leary himself downplayed their significance:

LEARY: "The whole concept of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is like a bogeyman invented by the narcs. The brotherhood was about eight surfer kids from Southern California, Laguna Beach, who took the LSD, and they practiced the religion of the worship of nature, and they'd go into the mountains. But they were not bigshots at all. None of them ever drove anything better than a VW bus. They were just kind of in it for the spiritual thrill."

Maybe so -- but probably not. In September 1970, Leary escaped from prison in a complicated deal exposing just how serious the Brotherhood network had become. Money from Ronald Stark was paid to the Weather Underground, which is the precise point where the "hippie mafia" became connected to actual hippie terrorists. Leary himself wound up in Algeria under the (very) armed watch of Eldridge Cleaver, himself in exile. A year later, Leary and his wife were in Switzerland, living under the protection of the arms dealer Michel Hauchard. For a story about spiritual thrills, there's definitely a lot of guns involved here.

At one point, though, maybe the Brotherhood really was just a group of hippies with a couple trunks full of weed. The Weather Underground were harmless student activists for awhile, too. Once Stark was brought into the Brotherhood, he quickly took change of the entire operation, establishing secure shipments and managing every aspect of their finances. "Stark warned them that buying real estate openly, as they had done, was much too risky -- but his lawyers could remedy the situation by hiding ownership in a maze of shell companies."

This is a repeated pattern in Stark's operations: he is always ready to create an organization where none exists. After Owsley got busted and the Brotherhood went international, many of the original bay area chemists got wise to what Stark was really doing. "We were definitely very gullible in believing the stuff he told us," as poor Tim Scully would later observe.

The Brotherhood got plugged into Stark's global underground very quickly: massive marijuana imports from the Middle East, shadow bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, and he was somehow micro-managing everything. Once he had flooded the West Coast with Afghan weed, Stark turned his attention to New York City, which was completely unprepared for the sheer quantity the Brotherhood supplied. From distribution to organizing street-level dealers, Stark was there, establishing Ordo Ab Chao is his own specific way.

Skilluminati readers may already be familiar with Mr. Nice, the Welsh arms trader and Hashish entrepreneur who paved the pipeline that brought Afghanistan's finest exports into the hands of hippies and other connoisseurs all around the world. His real name is Howard Marks and his pioneering work in cultural exchange was the foundation for everything from the Cannabis Cup to Afghanistan's ongoing civil war, although of course neither was actually Howard's fault. Unlike Stark, he's made a modest living telling colorful and contrite stories of his drug dealing days. Part of the Mr. Nice gig, of course, is that he swears he's never used violence or trafficked in "hard drugs" -- which was probably an even bigger factor in his early retirement than getting busted by the DEA. Afghanistan, of course, got very heavy very quick and Mr. Nice was steamrolled out of the picture in short order.

Howard Marks was very much a hippie. Ronald Stark was something else altogether.

Giorgio Floridia

Most of what's known about Ronald Stark today is through an Italian magistrate named Giorgio Floridia, who released Stark from Italian prison in 1979. After Stark had gotten himself caught in 1975, he busied himself trying to convince anyone and everyone that he was operating with the blessings of the United States government. Four years later, he finally managed to persuade Floridia, who cited "an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs" that Stark had given him.

At his appeals trial Stark changed identities once again, this time passing himself off as "Khouri Ali," a radical Palestinian. In fluent Arabic he spelled out the details of his autobiography, explaining that he was part of an international terrorist organization headquartered in Lebanon, called "Group 14." Stark's appeal failed, and he was sent back to jail.

But Italian police took a renewed interest in his case after they captured Enrique Paghera, another terrorist leader who knew Stark. At the time of his arrest Paghera was holding a hand-drawn map of a PLO camp in Lebanon. The map, Paghera confessed, had come from Stark, who also provided a coded letter of introduction. The objective, according to Paghera, was to forge a link with a terrorist organization that was planning to attack embassies.

Floridia also claims Stark worked for the Defense Department from 1960 on, and recieved paychecks from Fort Lee, in New Jersey. It is worth considering that Stark might have exaggerated his role and connections, and even fabricated evidence, in presenting his case to the magistrate who was in a position to free him. Either way, it worked. Stark was released on parole....and disappeared days later.

In terms of Floridia's motivation, it's worth considering the fate of the guy who came before him:

In June 1978 a Bologna magistrate, Graziano Gori, was assigned to investigate Stark and his astounding web of associates. A few weeks later, Gori was killed in a car wreck.

That, of course, might be the most "impressive proof" of all.

Somehow Not the End

Ronald Stark turned up in Holland in 1982. There's not a lot of published details, but it clearly involves 16 kilos of hasish and a Lebanese cover identity. He was busted en route to New York City. He got deported the next year and apparently died in custody -- because when Italy requested that he be extradited on terrorism charges, the US replied with a copy of Stark's death certificate.

(You guessed it -- "heart attack.")

His paper trail comes to an end here, although the reader can be forgiven for assuming his crusade continued covertly. There was certainly no retirement for a man like Stark. His mission was too important, too huge for a mere career.

...but then again, what was his mission, after all? Is it a mistake to place any stock in what he told the Brotherhood of Eternal Love? Perhaps not. Although Ronald Hadley Stark was many things to many people, the sole constant that emerges is Revolution. From the Weather Underground to the Red Brigades, from the PLO to the IRA, Stark was consistently moving in circles where the overthrow of government and the liberation of the people were central themes...circles that today would be considered "Terrorist." Certainly, Stark manipulated and lied to his contacts every step of the way, and it's safe to assume the speeches he gave to the Palestinians and Italians were much different from the picture he was painting in 1969 for the Brotherhood.

It's worth revisiting, though: "...in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both the capitalist West and communist East by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people." Now, Hadley's chosen network makes it pretty clear that he viewed automatic rifles and firebombs as equally valid tools for "inducing altered states of consciousness," and it's unlikely that a realist like Stark honestly believed that LSD was going amount to much more than a profitable business. Setting that aside, overthrowing both capitalism and communism sounds like an authentic statement of Stark's overall goals, or at least one that fits his sketchy and fast-moving modus operandi.

Stark was an infiltrator, creating back channels for communication between intelligence and police agencies and the underground movements that were trying to fight them. The fact he was so successful and so prolific is what makes him a remarkable character. Throughout his documented life, Stark is relentlessly working with, for and against dozens of competing players. He travels constantly, juggles multiple identities and stays actively involved in multiple conflicts simultaneously.

Looking over his strange, tangled career, it's hard to avoid thinking that LSD was really not the point. The single biggest producer of raw LSD the world has ever known was not a True Believer, he was just passing through on his way to bigger and better things. His work for US intelligence agencies had less to do with blowing minds than establishing connections. Vast quantities of acid was perhaps more of a bona fide, a calling card to establish himself as a legitimate criminal figure.

Which brings us, finally, full circle.

A Harsh Mistress

In 1966, Putnam & Sons published a new novel from Robert Heinlein named The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The plot concerns a worker's revolution on a Lunar colony, organized by a small group of people with considerable assistance from a self-aware supercomputer that controls the colony's infrastructure. Written in a distinctively abbreviated "Moonspeak," the book goes into remarkable detail about secure, secret communication networks. Stark was seldom without a copy and spoke highly of it around the world. Perhaps the closest we can ultimately get to unraveling his motives and beliefs is within the pages of a sci-fi story, rather than the life he left behind.

It's impossible to write about the character of Ronald Stark without discussing the character of Professor Bernardo de la Paz. As the brains behind the Lunar revolution, the Professor has several extensive monologues about the design principles behind covert operations. "Revolution," the Prof says, "is an art I pursue, rather than a goal I expect to achieve."

The end of the novel is pure Chinatown. The revolution gets subverted like revolutions always do, and Heinlein was really writing a love song about The Frontier itself. Revolution is the flame that extinguishes itself, for simple and practical reasons: "Every new member made it that much more likely that you would be betrayed," as the Prof puts it.

"Organization must be no larger than necessary -- never recruit anyone merely because he wants to join. As to basic structure, a revolution starts as a conspiracy; therefore structure is small, secret and organized as to minimize damage by betrayal -- since there are always betrayals. One solution is the cell system and so far nothing better has been invented."

The Professor goes on to propose a mandala of three-member cells, all reporting through a single Leader node back towards the center. This compartmentalized approach allows the founders to both monopolize information flow and insulate themselves against exposure. The concept is simple and effective, and it has been proven here in the real world for decades, from terrorist networks to intelligence agencies to evangelical Christians. It is staggering to think of how much Ronald Stark was connected to, assuming he rigorously pursued the Professor's blueprint, as Art for Art's sake. It is sobering to realize that the long, wide trail of covert history I've outlined here was just a couple of cells that got busted, part of a larger picture that is gone completely here in 2010.

His greatest achievements were the successful conspiracies, the completed operations that will never get traced back to his careful planning and constant hard work. There are too many huge gaps and unanswered questions to leave much doubt that Ronald Hadley Stark had a very impressive batting average. He was in a line of work where invisibility is the goal, and his true legacy is hiding behind headlines we will never understand, out here in the herd.

pg 77 "Correctly organized and properly timed it is a bloodless coup. Done clumsily or prematurely and the result is civil war, mob violence, purges, terror. I hope you will forgive me if I say that, up to now, it has been done clumsily."

The Revelation of the Method

2010-11-28T09:11:00Z

I've been in love with that phrase for years: The Revelation of the Method is not my own invention, but borrowed poetry from the world of conspiracy theory. Although it gets referred to as an actual Masonic concept, it's actually a very recent fabrication from a Catholic "Revisionist Historian" named Michael Hoffman. In his original formulation, the Revelation of the Method is an occult ritual, specifically a "Masonic psychodrama."

Used casually, the implication is always the same: when the Cryptocracy commits major crimes, they will broadcast their intentions in advance, through popular movies and television. Hoffman himself was iffy on the actual order of the process: "it's my contention that these are occult rituals and that like the Rosicrucian Manifestos of the early 17th century they are accompanied by anonymous statements of intent like the original Unabom manifesto, as well as scripts that precede the ritual." Later in the same interview, though, he deviates from his own script: "Look at the movie "The Matrix" in the wake of Columbine. Look at "The Wicker Man" movie in the same time frame as Son of Sam. The themes of the killings are in the movies." Whatever its actual merits, the end result of this theory is pattern recognition in the service of a pre-established conclusion. The Revelation of the Method is how the Illuminati, or the Vatican, or the CIA rub it in our faces.

Of course, Michael A. Hoffman II is also a man who devotes a large portion of his life to questioning the historical veracity of the Nazi Holocaust. He's a religious fundamentalist with weird hobbies, and much like myself, badly in need of an honest editor. I'm not discussing him because he's important or correct on much of anything: he is not. He just happens to be the first source using this particular phrase.

As you might expect, he equates Masonry with Judaism and both with pure pagan Evil, which makes for some eloquent and exquisitely researched nonsense. The evidence boils down to drawing connections between violent crimes and violent media, with no actual chain of causality or conspiratorial links involved. Common themes and overlapping symbols are taken as sufficient proof.

Although this approach is similar to the recent "Synchromysticism" movement, it's important to note that the more grounded minds in that field reject Hoffman outright. When Christopher Knowles from the (outstanding) project The Secret Sun addressed The Revelation of the Method, he was blunt enough to bear repeating:

"First of all, there is no such thing as "Revelation of the Method," it's a speculative concept coined by a extreme-right conspiracy theorist and has no basis in esoteric history or doctrine. Second, I have no interest in talking to people who automatically identify ancient mythological symbols with conspiracy or evil. I'm talking to open-minded people who are looking for a deeper narrative in all of this." -- source link

Christian and Conspiratainment commentators who take on the weighty topic of Hegelian Synthesis usually present it as something invented, an intellectual technology that was unleashed upon the world. Actually, Hegel was diagnosing a pre-existing condition of the human species. The endless iterations of Thesis and Anti-Thesis stretch back throughout the history of human culture. It is a binary trap that has always shaped us: East and West, victors and victims, war and peace. Us and them.

"History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken." It's a great quote, pure poetry, but I can't get with that particular Thesis, when I really think about it. Humans are incredibly adaptable creatures, our brains are robust sense-making machines, and that's how we quickly come to view these nightmares as normal. History is normal days just like this one. "Business as Usual" is exactly what we need to get involved with. You know, just like the Socialists did.

On the Conspiratainment front, as always, we find a new set of answers. In the Infowars archives, the "Revelation of the Method" is a college essay by Hillary Clinton about the work of political realist Saul Alinsky. Alinsky, much like George Soros, has recently achieved Bond Villian Status in the cosmology of popular Mormon/JBS theorist Glenn Beck. Alinsky is the author of "Rules for Radicals," an explicit guide to achieving and exercising power in the tradition of The Prince, The Arthashastra and The Art of War.

Alinsky is worth being afraid of. He is clearly far sharper than any of the conservative propagandists, because in recent years they've simply stolen his material verbatim and re-named it "Rules for Patriots." (Matt Kibbe, you are lazy as fuck.) Besides, no matter what Hillary Clinton thought about Alinsky in College, she got further illuminated during the 1990's orchestrating the push for Health Care reform. Hillary wasn't cynical enough yet, she couldn't process how easily the American electorate could be motivated to become activists against their own interests. Pretty soon, she was talking about "a vast Right wing conspiracy," too. It was documented in a 331 page portfolio of clippings and connections titled "The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce."

It's catching. The most remarkable thing about Conspiracy apophenia, to an amoral free agent like myself, is that it's distinctly contagious. Once infected, we always tend toward greater certainty. This is not lost on Michael Hoffman himself, who proclaims: "Give me two hours with any group of average intelligence and I'll have them reading twilight language and decoding occult rituals for the rest of their lives." I see no reason to doubt him.

Of course, Hoffman himself is a Catholic, a willing subject of the single most successful occult conspiracy in the known history of mankind. The Catholics, it should be noted, are the exact reason why the Freemasons and the Perfectibilists were "secret societies" in the first place: because of vulgarians like Tertullian, Torquemada, or Michael Hoffman. Men who could look at Sacred geometry and basic science, the very language of nature, and see only Satanic evil. Men who would torture and murder for the glory of God's Love. It's pathetic. And it's catching.

Then again...it doesn't exactly help that Saul Alinsky dedicated Rules for Radicals to Satan Himself: "Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history... the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer." You can imagine what the NWO fighters make of a quote like that, but to me, it doesn't read like Sympathy for the Devil...it's more like a sly curse. Perhaps Alinsky was winking at young idealists who are charging headfirst down a road paved with good intentions? Che and Lenin both come to mind, for essentially opposite reasons.

It's not like Socialism has a monopoly on horrifying unintended consequences. In fact, human history teaches something far bleaker: every formalized system of government we've created has been perfectly capable of facilitating mass murder, class warfare and repressive regimes. Conspiracy critics like Michael Hoffman allow themselves the luxury of a solution, an answer, a promised land. An honest study of reality allows for no such sentimentality, and recognizes that the only way out of Hell is through it. This is where we stand in the modern world, and no amount of symbolic connections and "Twilight Language" is going to change these naked facts of our condition. Finger-pointing is a cop out. It is not sufficient to merely expose or destroy the Freemasons: it also falls upon us to replace them.

We don't have to look far for real life examples of power elites committing crimes out in the open, and sneering at the general public every step of the way. It's technically known as the Banking industry and they have been stepping up their game dramatically over the past two decades. More audacious and socially destructive than any "occult ritual crime," the spectacular theft of American wealth by a privileged few has been conducted in plain sight, documented through sober PBS documentaries and bestselling books. These are crimes everybody knows about, yet nobody seems to have the power to stop them.

Why can't the Revelation of the Method be about the actual science of social control? Movies and mass murder is such a tiny, schizoid slice of the entire spectrum of control that shapes our waking lives. Fields like political science and sociology have mostly been philosophy and horseshit, but in recent years they've been able to get ahold of serious data -- sufficient "Big Picture" numbers to start recognizing patterns instead of merely creating theories. The kind of headlines that emerge are grimly predictable but undeniably important: "Low incomes make poor more conservative, study finds" or "UT Professor: Economic Inequality is Self-Reinforcing" or more cheerful material like "The Poverty Trap: Why the Poor Pay More."

"Lee had a great knack to visualize. His whole thing was wedges and magnets. What pulls people apart...and what attracts people? You find ways to bring people to you, and ways to divide the people who are against you. This was his bottom line practical theory." -- Richard McBride

I would like to create a Revelation of the Method that functions as real Political Science, something to replace a field which is currently neither Political nor Scientific. As it stands, it's history, with no science involved, and far too little discussion about actual politics -- the technical details of the ongoing Cold War known as Everybody vs. Everybody Else.

There will always be an eye in the pyramid. The human race is a global superorganism managed by a self-selected Elite, thousands of competing and conflicting conspiracies. The goal of Skilluminati Research is to encourage active engagement instead of opposition and resistance...or as Graham Summer observed: "If you live in a country run by committee, be on the committee." I'm not talking about "Democracy" so much as the whole corrupted and invisible System itself. Money, power, religion and war. We need to be engaging with it, because there is no question of working outside of it -- that's a rhetorical flourish, a concept that exists only on paper. Here in the flesh and blood, bombs and bullets, money and food Real World, the System is everywhere at once and consumes all that it touches.

The most dangerous thing about excuses is that they're technically true. There's not much difference between Democrats and Republicans, there's not many avenues to exercise our power safely, and there's way too many problems to deal with simultaneously, it's all true. There's not much hope for the forces of peace. It's also true that all human innovation happens in that tiny space between "not much" and "nothing" -- because we are powerful, and tiny differences will be enough to enact huge changes. Remember, you only ever need 51% of the vote...and best of all, actual voters are already a minority to begin with.

Mark Meckler, the datamining and direct sales guru who created the Tea Party Patriots, has a 40 year plan. Over the weekend of October 2nd, 2010, he got to give a sales pitch the Council for National Policy, asking for a head start on the $100 million dollars it will cost to save America. His "in" was Gary Aldrich, who now sits on the board of TPP. Meckler claims to have 20 million email addresses and he's clearly stated his goals: "Tea Party Patriots plans to convert sixty percent or more of the population to support our core values of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets."

I know: Braindead horseshit. This frat boy has a 40 year plan, though.

Do we?

The Conspiratainment Complex

2010-11-20T09:11:00Z

Conspiracy Theory lacks credibility because it has no history. Original research doesn't get cited so much as looted, refitted as filler content to feed new revelations to a hungry audience. They know what they like because they like what they know. It is a product that gets updated for new audiences through a self-selected succession of upstart entrepreneurs. Mae Brussel becomes Lyndon LaRouche becomes Alex Jones.

As a published field, though, Conspiracy Theory has a surprisingly strong foundation. Consider Carroll Quigley's "The Anglo-American Establishment," a masterpiece that completely unravels a powerful, and very real, conspiracy. It's written by an internationally respected Georgetown professor, and it's content has never been disputed. Indeed, it is so meticulously and absurdly detailed that nobody has ever read it. There are lists of names and dates over 10 pages long throughout the text and I find myself skipping whole chapters every time I try and dig in. The information here is seldom referenced today, but it has been co-opted and integrated into the marketplace, too. Professor Quigley becomes Cleon Skousen becomes Glenn Beck.

The signal always gets distorted, degraded...and more popular every time. Dumb is accessible, people like dumb. They like aliens, they like Satanist bad guys, and they like to buy products that signify their secret knowledge. It's hard to exaggerate how hollowed out the Conspiratainment Complex has become in 2010. Conspiracy Theory is literally being taught to Americans on a chalkboard now. Remote Viewing has gone from a classified project to a mini-industry of competing DVD training packages. Even Tila Tequila is tracking the Illuminati's every move these days. This is an emerging demographic and it's going to be extremely important in the next decade.

Consider the rise of Evangelical Christianity as a political force, from the fringes to the frontline. It took decades of negotiations to turn dozens of theological disputes into a single policy platform. Once that machine clicked into place, though, things changed very quickly. This is the social movement that brought us Jimmy Carter and Ralph Reed. It's also the story of a conspiracy, involving hundreds of people, to infiltrate powerful organizations and advance a political agenda. How it happened is the real Political Science.

Jeff Sharlet: Key to the growth of evangelicalism during the last twenty years has been a social structure of “cell groups” that allows churches to grow endlessly while maintaining orthodoxy in their ranks. New Life, for instance, has 1,300 cell groups, or “small groups,” as Pastor Ted prefers to call them. Such a structure is not native to Colorado Springs; in fact, most evangelicals attribute it to Pastor Paul Cho, of South Korea, who has built a congregation of 750,000 using the cell-group structure.

Pastor Ted's insight was in adapting this system for the affluence of the United States. “Free-market globalization” has made us so free, he realized, that an American cell-group system could be mature enough to function just like a market.

In devising New Life's small-group system, Pastor Ted says that he asked himself and his staff a simple question: Do you like your neighbors? And, for that matter, do you even know your neighbors? The answers he got—the Golden Rule to the contrary—were “Not really” and “No.” Okay, said Pastor Ted, so why would you want to be in a small group with them? His point was that arbitrary small groups would make less sense than self-selected groups organized around common interests. Hence New Life members can choose among small groups dedicated to motorcycles, or rock climbing, or homeschooling, or protesting outside abortion clinics.

What, are you too good to learn from Ted Haggard? Anyone who can harness millions of supporters is worth studying and taking seriously. His beliefs are probably not your beliefs, but his goals absolutely are.

In any market, the focus is on "Conversion" -- Baptists want more Baptists, Catholics want more Catholics, and the whole point of 9/11 Truth is to "wake up" the sheeple who haven't seen the light yet. Conversion is a numbers game, and it's been studied scientifically for several centuries, here in the Land of the Free. From Charles Grandison Finney's clinically detailed market testing to the strange duo of Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, there's always been a quiet elite studying how minds get changed. Preaching has been a precise science for longer than modern medicine has even existed. Behind the scenes, from the Great Awakening to the Moral Majority, men have been watching closely and taking notes on everything. Measure, Model, Calculate, Control. Dwight L. Moody taught John Wilbur Chapman taught Billy Sunday.

Real power moves through crooked lines like these. The secret lineage of World Government is more important than the public history. It is more than coincidence that Al Gore and Newt Gingrich were both taught about Toynbee by Alvin Toffler, before they memorized their scripts and walked onstage in the 70s. Alvin Toffler had some zingers of his own, especially the concept of "Ad-hocracy," which describes the flexible and informal power structures that get created by default during times of change and crisis. Conspiracy theory tends towards monolithic explanations, attributing far too much power to far too few people. Political Science assumes the existence of hundreds of co-existing and conflicting conspiracies in any group of over thousand people.

Most real, successful conspiracies are mundane and barely covert: consider the Council for National Policy, an invitation-only Evangelical Conservative influence network with a membership list so powerful it defies belief. What happens when you get Pat Robertson and John Ashcroft into the same room? Throw in Oliver North, Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, Jesse "33°" Helms, James Dobson, and big money sponsors like Richard DeVos, Holland Coors, Richard Mellon Scaife and Nelson Baker Hunt. Strangely enough, Lawrence McDonald was also a member -- one of the most vocal and powerful members of the John Birch Society was rubbing shoulders with members of the CFR and Trilateral Commission while publicly demanding those same organizations be investigated for treason. He was assassinated in 1983 and like everyone else in this movie, his lineage becomes sadly degraded, as Ron Paul becomes Rand Paul becomes...well, what do you see coming? Look closely.

In 2010, The Watchmen is a superhero movie. In 1918, Les Veilleurs was a superhuman movement. The roots of conspiracy theory and modern Political Science emerge from Synarchy and Fabian Socialism -- but names like Antoine Fabre d'Olivet are not easy on American audiences. Which is unfortunate, because the original Watchmen centered around René Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz, one of the most amazing non-fictional characters of his age. There will be more like him, though. Things move too fast for history these days, so the saga of super-scientist Camille Flammarion's secret mission for Rudolf Hess amounts to little more than a neat story now that we're almost a century downstream from aftermath of the first World War. Besides, Les Veilleurs fell to pieces, like most conspiracies do.

Maybe the secret lineage doesn't matter so much after all. Perhaps the dead hand of the past has less influence than we think. The details of how Synarchy was established as a concept, then implemented around the world by dozens of competing conspiracies, probably have no relevance to our situation today. The simple fact It Happened will suffice, as a briefing, because there are more important subjects for us to interact with. Synarchy is not a secret commodity, it's a best-selling business book called The Spider and the Starfish that's been embraced by CEO's and Tea Party organizers in the past year. The New World Order of H.G. Wells has grown into the generic and very exoteric New World Order of market globalization. Fabian Socialism was so successful it became ubiquitous, and even institutionalized as the Council on Foriegn Relations, who openly celebrate their infiltration of US government, business and media.

This is not about which conspiracies are "real," though -- this is about the bigger picture, where dozens of different subcultures have converged into a single market. It was a 20 year process of enterprising graphomaniacs, like Jim Marrs, Graham Hancock and David Icke, synthesizing hundred of books into "Unified Field" conspiracy theories that offered readers a secret history of the entire world.

Today, these competing meta-narratives are blending into a Conspiratainment mainstream, where the largest possible audience meets the lowest common denominator. Roswell is an article of faith, JFK is holy scripture, and 9/11 is the wedge issue and the litmus test. The Apollo 11 mission exists in a Schroedinger-style quantum state where it simultaneously did and did not land on the moon, although the priesthood agrees there was a cover-up, either way.

The concept of the Overton Window is essential, especially now that it's being whitewashed into a generic civics lesson. Joeseph Overton created an important blueprint for successful conspiracies, the Window of Political Possibility. The civics lesson whitewash positions Overton's concept as a theory about public participation in government. The reality is that the Window represents a sandbox which is owned and operated by a small, powerful conspiracy. The job of PR and government operatives is move the Overton Window by establishing the limits of "Acceptable Public Discourse." The conversation should be about how we go to war with Iran, not if we go to war with Iran.

This is an explicit statement about media control. Overton never saw this as a natural process, but as a managed project. It wasn't a social theory so much as it was ad copy for his Mackinac think tank. It's a visualization of what Think Tanks do: taking privately-funded business goals, positioning them as important public policy reforms, and then working with the media to push the message until it becomes normalized enough to pass into law without controversy.

The window is a scale that claims to run from "More Freedom" to "Less Freedom," but this is not a system of measurement. You simply position the policy you don't like as "Less Free," and then you designate your current sponsor's goals on the other end of the spectrum...and through the magic of Framing, Americans aren't less safe, they're "More Free."

That much is true. We're more free every year.

So what will the Conspiratainment Complex grow into? Who is doing the polling work to determine where this emerging demographic stands on The Issues? What is the common ground between Alex Jones and Glenn Beck and Rand Paul? Will Stanton Friedman ever pay for his sins?

More importantly, could all this have played out any other way? People are wise to mistrust "Marketing," but naive to think they'll be able to know it when they see it. Marketing has consumed everything in our culture, and there is no way to build a mainstream political movement without some serious merchandising involved.

"From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." That's Andrew Card, talking about the Iraq War. It's too late to mistrust marketing: We won. It's too late to lament about how far we've fallen. Everything is marketing and we have to engage reality. Stickers and shirts, baby. Business cards and style guides and databases, too. The metrics of conversion.

I don't like Ed Dames and Richard Hoagland, but I don't hate them, either. I understand why Richard Dolan made the decisions he's made to get a larger audience for his work. Every single guest on Coast to Coast AM is a true American entrepreneur, trying to find a business model that clicks with the masses. Conspiracy Theory has no history because it's never been about history -- it's about product testing.

These guys are all just doing their jobs. Ultimately, that's the worst I can say about any of them. They're building their email lists and trying to get as much media coverage as possible. They're all doing the same radio shows and conferences. They're all showing up on each other's blogs and podcasts. Thus do you make money in the Conspiratainment Complex. It might be less profitable than mortgage modification, but it's more interesting.

I'm not pointing fingers, I'll sell out eventually, too. Skilluminati becomes MSNBC becomes TMZ. And I'll be selling your email address to the highest bidder, every step of the way. Tell Warren Tompkins I'm coming for him.

Skilluminati Research

A Toast to Clare Petty

5GWTF: Calculation and Control

Computational Intractability & Infinite Regression

5GWTF: The Post-Everything Future of War

Neal Koblitz: “Mathematics as Propaganda”

D = N * I

Political Theory

a = b * c = b * d * e = b * d * f * g

Notes on the #Occupy Media Teams

#Occupy Itself

#Occupy Itself

Anonymous vs. Anonymize

Finis.

James Angleton | 7 Types of Ambiguity

1a. Comparative Metaphor

2b. Resolution

3c. Context

4d. Complexities

5e. Fortunate Confusion

6f. Invented Interpretations

7g. Contradiction

Down Here in the Cave

Life in an Occupied Country

Semantics, Mere Semantics

Rick Perry vs. Ron Paul - GOP Body Language

Then Again...

Towards a Psychological Operations Reading List

The Deep End

An Invocation Against the Inevitable

Ronald Hadley Stark: The Man Behind the LSD Curtain

The Super-Context

Some Heavy Dudes

Giorgio Floridia

Somehow Not the End

A Harsh Mistress

Further Reading

The Revelation of the Method

The Conspiratainment Complex