Sunday Sermon | Philo Drummond, Overman

In the Church of the SubGenius, the dollar is not God. It is merely an avenue to God. The dollar is "St. Peter at the Gates." It's but the eucharistic communal symbol, whereby the the congregation's wealth flows to the Church, and "Bob's" Slack flows back to the flock.

There is no God in any sense we could comprehend -- there is only Economics, a vast cosmic operational system. "Bob" embodies the uber-economic spectrum underlying reality. In THE ECONOMICON he discussed the Paradox of Thrift -- thrift cancels itself out. In an equilibrium, supply is meeting demand. But thrift increases savings and decreases spending until the supply is devalued, and the whole economic reality crashes. This is the Dobbsian Unified Economic Theory.



We must battle the mercantilists, the money changers, who are perverting humanity with their unnatural fiscal policies. The natural order is patriopsychoic anarchomaterialism, with individuals dependent only on themselves, and free. Every sentient organism for itself is the underpinning of patriopsychotic anarchomaterialism.

We are Economic Animists. It is God eat God. That's the operational system on which the application software of our species operates. It's not just a policy, it's a life force itself -- the collective URGE...in fact, a demiurge. It may sound heartless, but it's the only true reality. It's up to us to husband and shepherd, rationally and mercifully, the degree to which this existing system is exploited.

Source: Page 160 of Revelation X, buy now.
Send $30 to Cleveland, Ohio ASAP!

The General Patton Collection Part I

The United States enjoyed an amazing public library system for nearly a century, but that century is very clearly over. These pagan poodles have no respect for civilization, but their iPad hypnosis is my dark victory, because library hardcovers are ubiquitous and cheap. Last month I received a generous donation from someone I respect a great deal, and resolved to really stretch that sum into a library unto itself. Thanks to the slow-motion collapse of the United States of America, I was so successful I'll have to do this in two parts.



Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August" was originally brought to my attention as a compliment to "On the Psychology of Military Incompetence," one of my favorites from 2012. Her book is a study of the first month of World War I, with a focus on the arrogance of the generals and failures of leadership that made WWI such a memorable abattoir clusterfuck.

"The Mighty Wurlitzer" is a book I have read before and recommend to anyone with an interest in the exercise of power, the mechanics of propaganda, or the history of the CIA. My new copy is a mint hardcover from the Guelph Public Library, and I noticed with some sadness it was never checked out prior to being, as the stamp says, "WITHDRAWN." Big thanks to whatever clueless functionary up in Canada passed me this gem.

I was exasperated to find out there are two books named "October Surprise" in existence and both of them come highly recommended by various folks I take seriously. I'm starting with the Barbara Honegger version, which was published first. It's interesting to note that Honegger, decades down the line, found herself working Al Stubblebine's beat as a "government insider" feeding horseshit into the 9/11 Truth disinfostream. Still, any book or article on this subject is primarily written by Oswald LeWinter and/or Michael Ledeen already, I'm approaching this one with an open mind. Sort of.



"Friends in High Places" is a book I've been intending to read for probably a decade now, a dense & un-sexy history of the mega-contractor Betchel that had a hard fight even getting released. Remarkably, it is also the first of two signed copies that I wound up getting courtesy of the fine folks at the Fresno Free Library. The second was David Corn's "Blond Ghost", a very unauthorized but mostly uncontested biography of CIA operative Ted Shackley. The inscription reads "To Neil - a fellow watcher of spooks!" -- so if Neil ever reads this, drop me a line.

"The Powerhouse" is an account of Robert Keith Gray, a man who is of great interest to my study of covert blackmail operations. As the title and cover obviously imply, he was a hot shit power broker in Washington, DC for quite some time, peaking during the Reagan Era. Most readers have probably noticed an abiding preoccupation with the Reagan Era, and it's a subject I won't get over anytime soon.



Life can't all be 80's vintage parapolitics, though. I have also procured a copy of "What Goes Up", a colorful and brutally frank 'oral history' of Wall Street drawing from a truly ridiculous roster of titans. These are the guys who were slitting throats and building skyscrapers, and the author/editor Eric Weiner seems to have a rare gift for getting them talking. Highly recommended.

I have been increasingly impressed with the work of James Grant, the founder and primary author of Grant's Interest Rate Review, probably the best financial publication in existence. (Also, slightly expensive.) Although the Amazon comments for his books are ripe with complaints that these are mostly just collections of his GIRO columns, I'm happy to pay $3 for a hardcover edition of precisely that. I find his writing to be engaging and his clarity of thought to be nearly terrifying.

Speaking of Walter Karp, we've got another one of his books in the pig pile...



I only found out about Mr. Karp recently - but he has passed on some time ago, having been a mentor and friend of Louis Lapham, who I have been reading for many years and respect tremendously. Karp was eloquently outspoken in an era when most folks were not. I was not surprised to find all of his work cheaply available, and decided to start with the two titles that interested me the most.

I finished "Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy" today and it was overall pretty excellent. Bearing in mind this is an airport book all the way, Eamon Javers manages to slip in a lot of sly insights and gets away with some big reveals by making them casual asides. It's a good compliment for Jim Hougans "Spooks: The Private Use of Secret Agents" and the more recent & badass tome "Spies for Hire," by Tim Shorrock. Javers takes a broad view of the subject but his writing style only allows for one idea per chapter, so this is a very sparse history for the first half. The second half, featuring actual journalism, is way more informative & entertaining.

"The Spike" is actually a work of fiction, by Washington Post globe-trotting spook Arnaud De Borchgrave. I picked this up because 1) I'm working on a piece about his role in Craig Spence's death and figure this will be relevant, and 2) I have read NYT archival chatter about Zbigniew Brzezinski being a primary and barely fictionalized character, and going off angry letters to the editor alone, this book seemed to ruffle a lot of feathers in Washington, DC. I will probably pick this one up next.



This is an absurd amount of books. I can see that now. This particular stack brings us to the halfway point of the General Patton Collection, because slow shipping is the only real downside of plundering Alexandria with a debit card.

"Blowback" is a book I have only read a few character-specific chapters of, back when I had beef with Klaus Barbie just for existing. It is by Christopher Simpson, an exiled academic who has written a lot of great books. This one focuses on Operation Paperclip and the "Rat Lines" that brought Nazi personnel to America and set them up with US military jobs.

"Twilight War" is a rare mistake: I had ordered a recent history of US special operations vs. Iran, and instead got a different book, which happens to be about the weaponization of space. Better yet, it's written by a serious scientist with professional experience monitoring and auditing secret defense projects. Therefore I consider this a synchronicity win. "Munitions of the Mind" is a dry but expansive history of propaganda by a British military practitioner who is far too coy about his own accomplishments and capacities once the narrative starts marching towards the cold war. Still, this is a foundational text for the Psychological Operations wing.

"Senseless Secrets" I purchased primarily because of the bad reviews. It is a history of military intelligence failures told by a hilariously bitter front line soldier. I am a few chapters in and it's definitely entertaining -- sure, it's one-sided and pretty superficial, but his survey is rich and well told. Having read quite a bit about this subject in recent months, so far this almost entirely new material to me.

Finally -- for now, but finally -- two books I used to own but had never read: "House of Bush, House of Saud" and the dubiously titled followup, "Fall of the House of Bush." Craig Unger has been a tenacious watchdog team monitoring the money pipeline between the Bush clan and the Saudi Royal Family. Without question, I have far more precious, precious hardcovers than I could conceivably read in the next month, but I have made a Viking Vow to digest both of these. They shall not suffer the same fate.

"Après moi, le déluge."

01-23-2013 | The Yesferatu Collection

January has been a remarkable month for donations and I'm a grateful mammal. I will be thanking several folks this month, but first, someone with the (kinda awesome) handle of Yesferatu has committed to a monthly donation for the purpose of rebuilding a parapolitics library here in Vermont. The first batch arrived shortly before my last business trip to DC, so the photo above represents an attempt at starting an interesting conversation with a TSA employee. Alas, it was not to be...although I did have plenty to read at the bar.

My first five picks might look random, but that's only because they are. William Blum's "Killing Hope" is, of course, a flatly essential piece of work, being a comprehensive history of US military (and intelligence) "interventions" post WWII. The scope is encyclopedic, the sourcing is rigorous, and this book has stood up to many lavishly funded attempts at "debunking" the narrative contained here. I may in fact purchase several more copies. I have strange priorities.

I haven't read "The Iron Triangle" since shortly after 9/11 happened, and it is awe-inspiring to consider how little I resemble that version of myself here in 2013. 10,000 personal observations aside, that also meant that this was a brand-new book and I read it the night it showed up. I had no context for the players and history here until fairly recently, and this is a small but valuable puzzle piece for mapping the National Security State. I have been going back through to connect dots and follow up on notable paragraphs ever since.

Eric J. Weiner wrote my all-time favorite book on Wall Street ("What Goes Up") and does a great job of being "accessible" to shit-stupid popular audiences while still providing clear thinking, meaty facts, and no Friedmanesque metaphors in sight. That said, "The Shadow Market" is a very flawed book. Hard to say which is worse: how perishable the narrative is as the global economy continues to unravel, or the simple fact that "The Shadow Market" is an actual finance economics term with a long-established meaning that has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with the subject of Weiner's actual book. He is writing about how the rest of the world has stepped into the black hole of the "global" credit/solvency crisis that began in 2008, which is a fascinating and important subject, and he gives a fast-paced tour. There is not a single page here, however, regarding derivatives, dark pools, private exchanges, or rehypothecation. Although these are facts with an expiration date, I still give it a thumbs up.

I am partial to the work of Jeff Wells, so I should qualify my recommendations of the very imperfect "Rigorous Intuition." Without question, it is basically a bound collection of blog posts. The fact those blog posts are quite poetic and often cover important material that barely exists in print, well, that might not matter to you. Although I wish this had been fleshed out into more of a book proper, it's far preferable to being on a f'ing computer and the sheer range of material here makes it one hell of a gateway drug or general introduction to...well, The Gaping Maw.

Re-reading Daniel Hopsicker's "Welcome to Terrorland," I am appreciating how much this book influenced me. When I first read this, I found his writing style irritating but the facts were the star of the show. So granted, I wish Hopsicker didn't speak in the third person, wouldn't waste column inches with personal gossip from anonymous sources, and second-guessed himself more often. Still, nobody else wrote a book about Mohammed Atta that comes anywhere close to being honest. Until then, this strange little book remains essential.

Edit: Oh yeah - so how did a book I still don't really like manage to influence me? Hopsicker stays focused on drugs and money, to the limited extent there is a difference. Whatever else can be said about "Terrorland," at no point does he wander away from his story. No geopolitics, no history expositions, no writerly pretension, just a police blotter, gumshoe narrative of his attempt to break a story. That story is one we talk about a lot here: the ongoing and global reality that "illegal" economies in drugs, prostitution, assassination and weapons are a major source of revenue for the same governments who criminalize them.

Another day in paradise, though: no biggie.

01-12-2013 | Late Saturday Evening

Anderson, "Inside the League" page 269:

"With his Reagan administration support, John Singlaub has become less hesitant about revealing the World Anti-Communist League's true mission. According to a September 1985 Common Cause article, "Singlaub spoke proudly about his work with the rebels ... He said that in the last year he had raised 'tens of millions of dollars' for arms and ammunition, and millions more for non-military supplies."

Since the US Neutrality Act bars a private American organization from supplying weapons to foreign groups, Singlaub has established a secret overseas bank account where donors send their money to buy weapons. Many of these donors, according to Singlaub and Congressional aides, are his comrades in the WACL, notably the governments of Taiwan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia.

Singlaub's overt militancy and the Reagan Administration ties to his efforts have raised the serious concern of a number of congressmen in both political parties that the private aid circumvents congressional restrictions. Representative Jim Leach (R-Iowa) called the private groups "international vigilantes" engaged in "privately funded terrorism."

"What we've done," Leach said, "is unleashed a force that's accountable to nobody."

Jefferson Morley, "Our Man In Mexico," page 7:

The agency had taken possession of Winston Scott's personal correspondence, including letters ... appointment books ... and at least one short story, entitled "A Time to Kill." From Win's safe, Horton obtained a stack of eight square-inch reel to reel tape boxes. One tape was marked "Black Panthers." Another was labeled "Lesbians." The biggest batch, a stack of tapes three or four inches thick, was marked "Oswald."

The treasure in the trove was a 221-page manuscript titled "It Came to Little." The story that Win Scott told in those pages displeased and disturbed his longtime friends in CIA headquarters, including Angleton and the director of Central Intelligence himself, Richard Helms. Helms and Angleton were the two most powerful men in the American clandestine service. Both had known Win for more than twenty-five years. By snatching up the only two copies of the manuscript, Horton thought the agency had dodged a proverbial bullet.

"THINK WORST HAS BEEN AVOIDED THROUGH ANGLETON'S PERSUASIVENESS AND MRS SCOTT'S GOOD CHEER," he cabled Washington that day.

01-06-2013 | Late Sunday Evening

From Jim Hougan's Spooks, page nine:

''It seems fitting that in a country where people aspire to two of everything -- cars, kids, and homes -- we should have two histories as well. And we do: a public chronicle, or "Disney version," so widely available as to be unavoidable...and a second one that remains secret, buried and unnamed.

Lately, Americans have come to suspect the existence of this second history; the Watergate affair, with all its resonances, and subsequent snippets of CIA malpractices have disinterred a part of the times. Spooks is an effort at further excavation in an area that has long been identifie as terra incognita: the private use of secret agents by multinational corporations and the rich.''

From Raphael Ezekiel's The Racist Mind, page 78:

''Deep into our final interview, I asked Metzger to talk about the Order, the group that arose in the Northwest, and -- before the leader, Robert Mathews, was killed and the others imprisoned -- assassinated Denver radio commentator Alan Berg and successfully staged several armored car robberies. Metzger's discussion is worth study. "From where you sit," I had asked, "from what you can see, what actually was going on?"

"What was going on?" he responded. "Well, it was, I think, the first stage of many others. Frustrated, racially conscious young white people. Some were religious, some were not religious. The chemistry was just right, they came together and they decided that this was their time. And they declared war on the government and went from there." "I respect every one of them," he continued. "Not because I would say go out and do it they way they did i. But they weren't hypocrites. They decided what they wanted to do and didn't make any excuses, they went out and did it."

...

He seeks tactics that will make the Establishment eat its words. "See, I believe that most of what people say is bullshit. They lie to themselves and they lie to everybody else. And they believe they are telling the truth. They say they believe in free speech. But when you ask them on the street, they say, well, not for these guys. You put it up to a vote, the Bill of Rights would be out the window in a week."

From Arthur Macy Cox's The Myths of National Security, page 181:

''The sickness hat has infected the US governmen in recent decades, and most seriously since the Vietnam War, has some grim symptoms, but nothing that can't be cured by employing the essential strengths of our democratic system. In order to find the remedies we need to understand what went wrong and why.

The most important reason for the breakdown was the grant of extra-ordinary powers to the executive branch for the intended purpose of of protecting the nation's security. The American people, responding in fear of Soviet-led communism and nuclear weapons, willingly acquiesced in the need for secret decisions, secret operations and secret information to protect our national security.

It was generally accepted that the American public would be deprived of certain information in order to prevent our enemies from obtaining our secrets. This broad national security consensus was dependent on the public's trust of its government. When that trust was violated, the consensus crumbled. The trust can be restored again, but only by insisting on the accountability and the constitutional checks and balances essential for the health of our democracy.

...

The way to impede the spread of totalitarianism in the United States is not through "moral outrage," but by limiting the secrecy system through accountability so that those who lie know they are being watched -- so that the public, if so inclined, can throw the rascals out at the ballot box. Secrets are necessary, but as Justice Potter Stewart said in his opinion in the Pentagon Papers case, "Secrecy can best be preserved only when credibility is truly maintained." Anthony Lake, a former member of the National Security Council staff, says: "The essential first step is for the government to realize that it cannot lead the public while misleading it."

January 2013: A Bigass Stack of Goals

Too much to read. As problems go, a good one to have, and I've already started a few of these.

The Swerve and Secret Agenda have both been equally engrossing and the resonances are many & strange. Swerve is about the birth of modern English speaking culture and ten thousand fascinating threads of prior history, while Agenda is focused solely on the characters and background of the "Watergate" break-in and Nixon's subsequent removal from the White House. Both are ultimately reminders that even digging up huge tomes of journalism from the 1980's doesn't cut it for an education, and I need to dig back into far older sources.

Yeah...maybe in February, we'll see. Meanwhile, I have a whole bunch of parapolitics on tap. So far Thy Will Be Done is devastating because it is wicked artfully written, while also being a meticulously researched horror story. Grateful to have a good copy, it gets pretty dang expensive even used.

Katharine the Great is about Katharine Graham and her interesting methods for maintaining control and command of her inherited media empire. The woman has been involved peripherally in so much skullduggery I feel compelled to understand her better. I also implicitly trust Deborah Davis as an author, mostly because she is pretty and smart and I am lonely and dumb.

I'm re-reading the Dobbs book Six Months in 1945. As I've mentioned elsewhere, even if his breezy God's eye view account is a full fifty percent horseshit, it's still one the best books I've read lately. Great storytelling and a compelling Big Picture Theory. I am reviewing it with Wikipedia and Spartacus Educational and, you know, other books.

Spooks is also a Jim Hougan book and, on good advice, "probably his best." I have yet to crack it open because Secret Agenda has me hooked -- which bodes well for this one, right?

The final three are going to be slow reading for me, mostly because I have realized, the more I study up, that my memory is a storyteller at best and even on good days, still a liar. Many years of re-thinking are in order.

The Winston Scott biography was published academically and represents a huge constellation of connected dots I will not be able to fully process for many moons. (Many many type "many.") Subversives is a history of California's "war on student activists," a subject with obvious lessons for #Occupy. I am especially interested in the relationship between the FBI and the nascent Reagan machine.

Finally, I am shamefully late in picking up the McPhilemy book The Committee: Political Assassination in Northern Ireland. He has already lost and won lawsuits over the contents of this book, and it's a story that shapes my own family history so I'm definitely curious to get a journalistic take on it.

As always, thank you for the donations. I'm not kidding when I say it all goes to books.

08-16-2012

From H. Montgomery Hyde's Room 3603: The Incredible True Story of Secret Intelligence Operations During World War II, page 69:

''...the famous 'Black Tom' explosion in Lower New York Harbour in July, 1916, when thirty-seven loads of high explosives, several warehouses, a dozen bargers and chips and a whole railway station and yards were blown up in one terrific detonation. Had the Germans possessed a sabotage operation in America under the efficient direction of a man like Captain Von Rintelen as they did in the First War, the precautions taken by B.S.C.'s Security Division would have been much more hampered and less effective than they were proved to be in the event.

Of upwards of 20,000 cases of suspected sabotage which the F.B.I. investigated during the Second World War, Hoover claimed that not a single case of enemy directed sabotage was established. For the most part, they were industrial accidents caused by fatigue, carelessness, horseplay among the workers, and occasionally spite.

The only attempted at active sabotage which the Germans made after America had entered the war was a complete fiasco. Early in 1942, Canaris received instructions from Hitler to cripple the American production of aluminium. Since no organization for sabotage existed in America at that time, agents had to be recruited and sent from Germany, an operation in whose success it appears neither Canaris nor Lahousen had much faith. Nevertheless the Fuehrer's orders had to be obeyed, and accordingly on May 28, 1942, eight agents were landed by submarine in groups of four at two different points on the eastern American seaboard.

Two of the prospective saboteurs promptly gave their comrades away to the FBI, thereby saving their own skins, while the remainder were rounded up and in due course went to the electric chair. "It was the biggest failure that ever occured in my section," General Lahousen recalled with a sigh after the war was over.

5-31-2012 | Been a Good Run

They don't return my calls. At least, not yet...big plans afoot in 2012. The recent Shameless Fundraising post was a humbling success and I hereby offer an update in gratitude.

I have been in the throes of an immense overhaul, something astro-mystics refer to as Saturn's Return. I have written a background introduction about it here: Been a Long Time Gone. Since then, it has predictably been damn near impossible to hold onto the clarity and calm of that revelation.

I have returned home to Vermont, adopted a very normal disguise, and acquired several day jobs to #occupy my time profitably and build a foundation -- something resembling adulthood, perhaps.

Re-thinking, re-reading, recalibrating the synapses. I keep Andy Clark's Pragmatic Thinking & Learning close by these days, but few pieces I've read this year hit me as hard as the Lewis Lapham essay Ignorance of Things Past, which concludes with a passage that's been haunting my head ever since:

The Roman historian Titus Livy likened history to a collection of “fine things to take as models” and “base things, rotten through and through, to avoid." The contemporary American novelist John Crowley carries the thought another two thousand years along the road to who knows where, suggesting that “the past is the new future . . . its lessons not simple or singular, a big landscape of human possibility, generative, inexhaustible.”

Fortunately so. We have little else with which to build the future except the driftwood of the past, salvaging from the journey across the frontiers of the millennia what mankind has on scraps of papyrus and bronze coins, in confessions voluntary and coerced, in five-act plays and three-part songs.

...

To acknowledge the truth of the old Arab proverb that says we have less reason to fear what might happen tomorrow than to beware what happened yesterday is also to say that we have more reason to look to the past — history as the phoenix in the attic — for the hope of the future.



At the end of the day, Ozymandias was just watching TV. Fucking TV. He was using the high noise levels and emergent patterns as a means of divination -- free-form, left-brain, meditation & ideation exercises are valuable, but he could have just as easily used the I Ching or hired interns to transform a stack of daily newspapers into cut-up experiments.

The insights this process yields are fleeting and frantic, though: these are facts with expiration dates, the urgent revelations of the hedge fund, where anything that matters is time-sensitive on a scale humans cannot even experience.

Me, I like experience. This is a recent development. I've been living online for about a decade, participating in a Constant Global Now -- all this while sitting in a stunned trance for endless, mostly wasted hours. And, well, shucks. Mistakes get made, new mistakes are currently being attempted, and I don't pretend anyone reading this will "learn" much of anything here.

Still, just in case: focus on reading real books and being outside as often as possible. That's been my game plan recently and in terms of mental and physical health, the positive change has been immediate and remarkable.



People do change. In fact, your biologically wired capacity for change is vast enough to be effectively infinite. Know that. Feel that. Get out into the sun ASAP.

And come back tomorrow! That, too.

5-16-2012

we interrupt our regular programming for a message from the elder council

"This supposedly fortunate citizen is therefore left with only two concerns: making money and entertaining himself. He earns money, typically as a specialist, working an eight-hour day at a job for the quality or consequences of which somebody else—or, perhaps more typically, nobody else—will be responsible. And not surprisingly, since he can do so little else for himself, he is even unable to entertain himself, for there exists an enormous industry of exorbitantly expensive specialists whose purpose is to entertain him...

The fact is, however, that this is probably the most unhappy average citizen in the history of the world. He has not the power to provide himself with anything but money, and his money is inflating like a balloon and drifting away, subject to historical circumstance and the power of other people. From morning to night he does not touch anything that he has produced himself, in which he can take pride. For all his leisure and recreation, he feels bad, he looks bad, he is overweight, his health is poor. His air, water, and food are all known to contain poisons. There is a fair chance that he will die of suffocation. He suspects that his love life is not as fulfilling as other people’s. He wishes that he had been born sooner, or later. He does not know why his children are the way they are. He does not understand what they say. He does not care much and does not know why he does not care. He does not know what his wife wants or what he wants. Certain advertisements and pictures in magazines make him suspect that he is basically unattractive. He feels that all his possessions are under threat of pillage. He does not know what he would do if he lost his job, if the economy failed, if the utility companies failed, if the police went on strike, if the truckers went on strike, if his wife left him, if his children ran away, if he should be found to be incurably ill. And for these anxieties, of course, he consults certified experts, who in turn consult certified experts about their anxieties.

It is rarely considered that this average citizen is anxious because he ought to be -- because he still has some gumption that he has not yet given up in deference to the experts. He ought to be anxious, because he is helpless. That he is dependent upon so many specialists, the beneficiary of so much expert help, can only mean that he is a captive, a potential victim."

-- Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, (p. 19-21)