It’s a Thursday in a deep and dark (but surprisingly warm the last couple of days) December. Winter solstice doesn’t arrive for 10 days until Dec. 21 at 5:03 p.m. Central Standard Time (CST) and Christmas comes two weeks from today. Dick Cheney and the CIA are back on top of the news agenda and serious sports analysts are discussing whether the 1989 movie Back to the Future Part II will now be prophetic with the Chicago Cubs winning the 2015 World Series next year (the Cubbies last won back-to-back World Series in 1907 and 1908) in a five-game sweep over Miami in a nine-game series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnmw6K1H-gQ), which, of course, didn’t have a MLB team when the movie was filmed 25 years ago. The Marlins arrived in Miami in 1993.
While the Cubs and Marlins both play in the National League, so won’t be meeting in the real seven-game World Series in any conceivable scenario, unless one of them were to switch to the American League soon, the Cubbies’ World series dream for 2015, aside from Back to the Future Part II, is the result of the team signing Jon Lester, the 31-year-old left-hander free agent starting pitcher, to a six-year contract worth $155 million at the 2014 major league baseball winter meetings.
All in all, what better time to check out some non-mainstream media (MSM) “news?” Might I suggest your tour include Before It’s News (http://beforeitsnews.com/); Alex Jones’ Infowars: There’s a war on for your mind! (http://www.infowars.com/); Trunews: The Real News, Uncensored (http://www.trunews.com/); Rapture Ready News (http://www.raptureready.com/rapnews_db.php); , AboveTopSecret.com – Conspiracy Theories, UFOs, Paranormal, Politics, and other ‘alternative topics’ (http://www.abovetopsecret.com/) and Coast to Coast AM with George Noory (http://www.coasttocoastam.com/)
Just don’t let yourself get worked up into a lather about Code ICD E 978 and legal execution by guillotine coming to the United States via Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington if you stumble onto that meme. For some of the history of where that comes from, check out(http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/08/28/74549_secret-camps-and-guillotines-groups.html?rh=1) and http://urbanlegends.about.com/b/2013/06/21/government-purchased-30000-guillotines.htm
Back in November 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a famous 1964 essay for Harper’s magazine, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which opens with the sentence, “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” Masons, Jesuits, munitions makers, Bavarian Illuminati, the “Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome,” the list of enemies has been long and variable, Hofstadter noted.
“[O]ne of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen,” argued Hofstadter. “It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.
“We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”
At the same time, however, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you,” says Capt. John Yossarian, the 28-year-old fictional character and protagonist assigned to the 256th squadron of the Army Air Forces where he serves as a B-25 bombardier in Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22.
Take your pick for a worldview: Hofstadter or Heller. As for me, in the absence of conclusive proof to the contrary, I counsel that “Occam’s razor,” or the law of parsimony should apply. Namely, a problem should be stated in its basic and simplest terms and the simplest theory that fits the facts is the one that should be selected when there’s two or more competing theories and that an explanation for unknown phenomena should first be attempted in terms of what is already known.
Which means, while I approach conspiracy theories with an abundance of caution, I don’t automatically rule them out as London Times columnist David Aaronovitch, author of the 2009 book, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, does in his de rigueur attempts at debunking same. But ad hominem arguments and smarminess are no substitute for an open mind.
Some conspiracies are … well, conspiracies. Others remain unproven matters of conjecture. And still others exist on the fringes of tinfoil hat conspiracy theory speculation.
While conspiracy theories about Charles Harrelson, actor Woody Harrelson’s father, being one of the “three tramps” on the grassy knoll – a second shooter in Dallas – along with two other shadowy figures, Charles Rogers and Chauncey Holt, continue to have some currency, it appears the boxcar tramps actually were Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle and John Gedney, and that Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Warren Commission concluded, acted alone in assassinating U.S. President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
The assassination of an earlier American president, Abraham Lincoln, however, was part of a larger conspiracy, a fact that’s largely forgotten today. What is remembered is that actor John Wilkes Booth entered Lincoln’s State Box at the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865 undetected and shot him in the back of the head. Lincoln, mortally wounded, was taken to the Petersen House across the street and died at 7:22 a.m. April 15. On April 26, Booth was found hiding in a barn near Port Royal, Virginia and was shot and killed by a Union solider after he refused to surrender and the barn in which he was hiding was set ablaze.
Co-conspirator Lewis Powell attempted to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward, but only managed to injure him. At the same time, another co-conspirator, George Atzerodt was supposed to have killed Vice-President Andrew Johnson, but backed out.
Eight Lincoln co-conspirators were caught over the next few days and tried by a military court. They were found guilty on June 30 and given various sentences depending upon their involvement. Powell, Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Elizabeth Jenkins Surratt were charged with conspiring with Booth, along with various other crimes, and all were hanged in Washington on July 7, 1865 – with Surratt becoming the first woman executed by the United States federal government.
You might also want to check out: “Conspiracy and dissent for the 21st Century” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/08/conspiracy-and-dissent-for-the-21st-century/; “Some conspiracies are … well, conspiracies” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/07/some-conspiracies-are-well-conspiracies/; “Blood Moon rising” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/blood-moon-rising/; “Shemitah: The next sabbath year begins Sept. 25” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/shemitah-the-next-sabbath-year-begins-sept-25/; “The Prophecy of Malachy” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/the-prophecy-of-malachy/; and “Blessed Pope Paul VI’s famous ‘Smoke of Satan’ homily of June 29, 1972: The enigmatic Malachi Martin would later suggest the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurred exactly nine years to the day earlier on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived on June 29, 1963” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/12/05/blessed-pope-paul-vis-famous-smoke-of-satan-homily-of-june-29-1972-the-enigmatic-malachi-martin-would-later-suggest-the-enthronement-of-the-fallen-archangel-lucifer-occurred-exactly-nine-years/; “Winnipeg’s Dr. Omond McKillop Solandt, chairman of the Defence Research Board, and Project Second Story” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/winnipegs-dr-omond-mckillop-solandt-chairman-of-the-defence-research-board-and-project-second-story/; and “Edward Baker:’ Thompson, Manitoba’s microwaved telephone company night watchman 1998 urban legend owes its fame to real-life American scientist and a Denver newsman” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/edward-baker-thompson-manitoba-s-microwaved-telephone-company-night-watchman-1998-urban-legend-owes-its-fame-to-real-life-american-scientist-and-a-denver-newsman/
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