New book about Kerry Thornley published

Author Adam Gorightly, author of the excellent Kerry Thornley bio The Prankster and the Conspiracy, has a new book that's about to come out about Thornley, Caught in the Crossfire: Kerry Thornley, Lee Oswald, and the Garrison Investigation.  (Adam Tweeted that it is "now available," which apparently means you can order it from the publisher right now. Amazon lists an Oct. 7 release date.)

From the publisher's page: (from where you can order the book)

"Kerry Thornley never imagined that after starting a spoof religion in the 1950s that worshipped Eris—the Greek goddess of chaos and discord—that this seeming joke would unleash a torrent of actual chaos into his life in the years to follow.

"During the late 1950s, Thornley became friends with Lee Harvey Oswald when the two served together in the Marines, and was actually writing a novel based on Oswald three years before John F. Kennedy’s assassination. These connections would later cause New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison to suspect that Thornley was one of the notorious Oswald doubles and a part of a JFK assassination plot. Initially, Thornley denied these allegations, but later came to believe that he’d been used as an unwitting pawn in the conspiracy.  This is the story."

When I interviewed Adam, I asked about the new book:

When I read "The Prankster and the Conspiracy," your Kerry Thornley biography, one of the highlights was all the weirdness connecting Thornley to Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK assassination theories. Will you have a lot of new material about that in your upcoming book, "Caught in the Crossfire"?

In the Discordian Archives I discovered a large box of material related to Thornley, Oswald, the JFK assassination and the Garrison investigation, including a lot of Thornley’s writings on the subject that had never been previously published — in addition to letters from the Garrison investigation period, and letters in the years to follow to and from the likes of RAW, Bob Shea, Greg Hill and others. In these letters and articles, Thornley continued to evolve his own theories as to what’d gone down in Dealey Plaza, as well as his alleged role in relation to the assassination. Greg Hill actually compiled a lot of this material into an early manuscript called Thornley/Oswald in 1975 that he helped put together in as cohesive a manner as possible to present Kerry’s JFK assassination related theories and experiences. And so all of this prompted me write this latest book, Caught in the Crossfire, which will be released in October. Had I not come across all this new material, I’d have never gone back down the rabbit hole. But here we are. And RAW was very much a part of this whole roller coaster ride; first as an early defender of Thornley and critic of the Garrison investigation, and then later as someone Thornley grew to believe was a part of some grand conspiracy to mess with his mind.

Burn him! Burn him! He's a witch!!!

Radley Balko may be a respected critic of police abuse, but let's face it -- at bottom, is he a  hardworking journalist, or just a disreputable bald guy? 

On Thursday, Slate, an online publication I often read, published an article by some creature named Ben Mathis-Lilley.  For your convenience, I've boldfaced the part that makes Mr. Mathis-Lilley seem like an ignorant asshole. Here is the first few sentences of the piece:

Yesterday the Washington Post published an epic investigation of the municipal-fine system in outlying St. Louis County cities and towns like Ferguson. If that sounds boring—and I admit, as the person who wrote the preceding sentence, that it sounds boring—try this: In appalling detail, reporter Radley Balko makes a case that St. Louis County is home to a large-scale state-enforced shakedown racket that extorts black residents by using unjust imprisonment as a weapon.

Balko is a civil liberties advocate who's written for the libertarian publication Reason, so if you're inclined you can take his framing of the issues with a grain of salt. But the most stunning parts of his piece aren't anecdotes or rhetoric; they’re facts about a system that raises money for itself by deluging a largely-black population with fines and tickets for minor civic infractions, then punishes them again and again with arrests and imprisonment for not being able to navigate a convoluted judicial system.

If you suspect  you are about to get a rant along the lines of "the map is not a territory," you are correct. And notice that I don't seem that Mathis-Lilley "is" an ignorant asshole; I just write that his article makes him "seem" like one.

What if Mr. Mathis-Lilley had written, "Balko is a civil liberties advocate who's a bald guy, so if you're inclined you can take his framing of the issues with a grain of salt." Or, "Balko is a civil liberties advocate who's an Indianpolis Colts fan, so if you're inclined you can take his framing of the issues with a grain of salt."

In all three cases, I would argue that hanging a label on Balko has little do with the merits of any piece he's written. It's either well-written or it's not. It either follows reasonable standards of evidence, or it does not.

Reason magazine was founded in 1968, so it's probably run quite a few pieces by now, by a variety of writers. I'm not sure what it's supposed to prove that it has published Balko. Mathis-Lilley could have emphasized, by the way, that Balko's piece was published by the Washington Post.

Yesterday, I linked to a writer I admire, and whose death I mourn, Alexander Cockburn. I guess since I self-identify as a classical liberal, by Mathis-Lilley's reasoning, I really should have written, "Cockburn was a Marxist who's written for the Nation, so if you're inclined you can take  his framing of the issues with a grain of salt."

Friday links

The Intercept has launched a new blog by Dan Froomkin. Lots of peace and civil liberties stuff in the initial postings.

Me, on the Ohio Republican war on the Ohio Libertarian Party. 

Huffington Post runs bogus series on the invention of email. 

"There are plenty of real conspiracies in America. Why make up fake ones?"  Alexander Cockburn in 2006, via Charles Davis. 

Discordian historian Adam Gorightly on Week 28

Adam Gorightly, hanging out a few years ago with a prominent American writer.

Crackpot historian Adam Gorightly — his title refers to his esoteric specialties, not his expertise as a scholar — has kindly weighed in on Week 28 of the Illuminatus! online reading group. Please consult his blog post to learn more about Greg Hill, Emperor Norton, the Yin Revolution and other Discordian topics.

Your tax dollars at work: Government harassment

I've been reading a book called Strange Attractor: The Discordian Libertarian Writings of Jake Shannon.

For awhile after he moved to Utah, Shannon ventured into politics. There's an interesting passage about what happened after he ran for Congress as a Libertarian on a platform of (among other things) abolishing the IRS:

Well, not even eight weeks after I announced my candidacy for the third Congressional District, I went to check my private business banking account and found it emptied out! At first, I thought I was the victim of identity theft, so I called up my bank. This is when I first found out that the IRS had levied my account! Without so much as even a letter to warn me, they had simply emptied thousands of dollars from my business account. In addition, I started to be charged non-sufficient funds fees by my bank for services that were on auto-draft. I was dumbfounded.

I called up my accountant, and she began the process of trying to figure out what was going on. I had my own business for years and had never had a single problem with taxes. After much back and forth, the IRS said they made a "mistake" and put the funds back into my account. No apology and no offer to compensate me for the hundreds of dollars of NSF fees from the bank their "error" had caused me to incur. Now, normally, I'd be open to the possibility of chalking the whole experience up to coincidence, but when the exact same "error" happened to my wife's business just a few weeks later, it became clear this was harassment. Our accountant cleared everything AGAIN, and she got her money put into her account, but it was becoming clear that there were consequences for speaking freely. 

That's from Chapter 20, "Project Jake." Of course, it's not embezzlement if the government does it.

Now check out Jesse Walker's posting at Reason's  Hit and Run blog, "That Time the President, the FBI, and a Moonlighting Supreme Court Justice Tried to Dig Up Dirt on a Movie Star." It details how, when LBJ's daughter began dating George Hamilton, the president enlisted a Supreme Court justice (!) and the apparently-compliant FBI to dig up dirt on Hamilton.

This was back in 1966 — nearly half a century ago. So why is it relevant now? Walker writes that while some of the story has been known for years, the full FBI file has yet to be released. A law professor sued two years ago to get the file made public. That hasn't happened yet, but a U.S. district judge has issued an opinion.

I'm hoping that Jake will press his own case to find out who ordered the IRS to harass him. Perhaps in 48 years, some of the truth will come out.

Jeff Rosenbaum has died

Timothy Leary, Robert Shea, Patricia Monaghan, Jeff Rosenbaum, Gillie Smythe

Jeff Rosenbaum has died. An important figure in the pagan movement in the Cleveland Ohio area, where I live, he was closely associated with Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Shea, Tim Leary and other persons of interest. He was an organizer for the Starwood Festival and a founder of the Association for Consciousness Exploration.

Here is an obituary. It's written by Jason Pitzi-Waters. Excerpt: "In addition to his work with ACE and Starwood, he was Robert Anton Wilson’s lecture agent for six years during the 1980s, played guitar & percussion with Ian Corrigan and Victoria Ganger in the bands Chameleon and Starwood Sizzlers, and was published (and interviewed) in a number of Pagan-themed publications."

Here is another obituary. The photo, above, of Rosenbaum with Robert Shea and Patricia Monaghan is taken from it. The obituary is from Ian Corrigan. Excerpt: "With an agenda drawn largely from “Cosmic Trigger” we set about hosting events as simple as showing movies at a Case Western Reserve University venue and as major as bringing Dr. Leary to Cleveland for the first time as he returned to public speaking in the late 70s."

Thanks to Timothy Leary Futique on Twitter (e.g., R. U. Sirius) for spotting the sad news.

Week 28, Iluminatus! online reading group

The Buddha gives his first lecture after enlightenment.

(This week: Page 272, "I. THE FAUST PARSON, SINGULAR" to "not huddled around my shower stall, Page 282)

What could be more Discordian than a Buddhist sutra delivered during an acid trip by Dr. Ignotum Per Ignotius, one of the personas of Discordianism co-founder Greg Hill?

Malik and Simon are let in by a young man with a "Frisco-style" beard and hairstyle, and it would be appropriate indeed if the setting of the scene was California, where Discordianism was founded and where Buddhism and acid played important roles in the counterculture.

The Buddhas lectures to his followers (or, if you like, sermons) were known as "sutras," and Buddha would address his followers as "O, nobly born," so when Dr. Ignotius addresses Malik in this fashion  he self-consciously turns his talk into a sutra by using the same phrase (page 279).

"The name was chosen by my predecessors, Malaclypse the Younger," page 275. Malaclypse the Younger was an earlier name adopted by Greg Hill; later, as Discordianism developed, he adopted the Dr. Iggy persona.

"Of course, the quirkiest, most chaotic things that exist are other people — and that's why they're so obsessed with trying to control us," page 278. I recently finished reading a book, Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick, about North Korea, a dictatorship in which one man at the top attempts to ruthlessly control the behavior and thoughts of an entire nation. I'm pretty sure Illuminatus! is not freely circulated there.

Here's the heart of the sutra:

Feeling paranoid? Good: illumination is one the other side of absolute terror. And the only terror that is truly absolute is the horror of realizing that you can't believe anything you've been told. You have to realize fully that you ARE "a stranger and afraid in a world you never made," like Houseman says. (Page 278).

A.E. Housman

The reference is to Housman, not "Houseman," i.e. A.E. Housman. The quotation is from the Last Poems: 

And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.

The text is available.

And here is another important point: "The life history which most of us carry around in our skulls is more our own creation than it is an accurate recording of realities," page 281.

(Next week: "There are times when dignity is suicide," page 282, to "that sign is absolutely the whole clue to how the show runs, page 292).

What's in the missing pages of the 9-11 report?

One of the reasons why conspiracy theories about the U.S. government have to be taken seriously, at least some of the time, is that much of what the government does and knows is kept secret from ordinary citizens.

There's a movement that's been launched to declassify 28 pages from a Congressional report on the 9/11 attack.

President George W. Bush censored 28 pages of this report—an entire section said to describe the involvement of specific foreign governments in the attacks. After reading it, Congressman Thomas Massie described the experience as “disturbing” and said, “I had to stop every two or three pages and rearrange my perception of history…it’s that fundamental.”

Much more here. 

Hat tip: Justin Raimondo, who wrote an opinion piece about the matter. It is somewhat speculative, but one easy way to prove him wrong would be to release the secret information.

My ten books, and Supergee's

An old friend, Tim Ford, revived a Facebook meme this week by posting 10 books that have stayed with him, and tagged 10 friends, inviting them to participate. I tagged 10 people (inevitably leaving out many readers I should have listed) and posted my 10. Arthur Hlavaty has just posted his 10 on his blog; I don't know if he saw my post or was inspired by something else.

Please consider this as an invitation to post my 10 in the comments.

My 10 books (slightly altered from the Facebook posting):

Illuminatus! trilogy, Wilson and Shea
This Immortal, Roger Zelanzy
Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
The Gold Bug Variations, Richard Powers
Cosmic Trigger 2, Robert Anton Wilson
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, Harlan Ellison
Money, a Suicide Note, Martin Amis
The Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolfe

Can't point to a particular title, as I love almost all of them, but Jack Vance belongs on that list, too.

Supergee's 10:

Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land
Shea & Wilson: Illuminatus
David Cole Gordon: Self-Love / Overcoming the Fear of Death
Joseph Heller: Catch-22
Alan Watts: The Book
Martin Gardner: Fads and Fallacies
Ursula K. Le Guin: The Dispossessed
Philip K. Dick: Eye in the Sky and others
G. Spencer Brown: Laws of Form (though I haven't managed to finish it)
James Joyce: Ulysses

ETA: And of course The Crying of Lot 49. These top 10 things never work.

Friday links

Some of the NSA spying came from Reagan.

Bobby Campbell draws a character in Schroedinger's Cat. 

I find a classical music album, mostly modern, that I like. 

Semifinalists announced for Fuller Challenge. 

Everybody has conspiracy theories.

Painkiller deaths drop in medical marijuana states. 

Maybe the U.S. can't win in the Mideast, but we can't lose, either!

Reality is continuing its bitter feud with satire as the best way to depict U.S. foreign policy.

In an apparent bid to show that reality can overshadow any attempt at satire, the U.S. government has now officially given help to both sides in a bloody civil war that's taking place in Syria and Iraq. Previously, the U.S. sided with Islamists in the attempt to overthrow the evil Assad regime in Syria. We are now cooperating with the Assad junta in an attempt to contain the evil Islamists we previously sided with.

For more information, see Glenn Greenwald's article at the Intercept.

Previously, the president wanted to drop bombs on Assad's soldiers. Now we're dropping bombs on the folks who oppose Assad. I guess as long we can bomb somebody, we're happy. As per usual, only a few Americans — libertarians, pedantic leftists and MYOB conservatives, and other such nut cases — want to simply stay out of the war. These weirdoes are not heavily represented among officials in the Democratic or Republican parties.

Meanwhile, the State Department has scolded Egypt and the United Arab Emirates for "outside interference" in Libya, where "outside interference" by the U.S. and other western nations led to the current civil war the country is embroiled in.

The EFF an Illuminati front?

The Illuminati mythos trundles on; in the latest issue of The Week magazine, Katy Perry explains that she is not, in fact, a member of the Illuminati.

The above graphic is taken from science fiction writer Bruce Sterling's Tumblr, which Bruce accompanies with the comment, "That's pretty cool, for a civil liberties org." John Merritt sent it to me, commenting, "The EFF is an Illuminati front??!!"

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties group, says it's just a cool design for a limited edition T-shirt. Of course, that's what They want you to believe!

Jake Shannon on 'Illuminatus!'

Jake Shannon (with his conditioning invention, the Macebell). 

When I read a nonfiction book on a topic I know something about, I often start by looking at the bibliography or the "Further Reading" list.

So when I began reading Strange Attractor, the new book by Jake Shannon (who runs the "Discordian Libertarian" group on Facebook), I turned to the "Recommended" area in the back. The first book listed in the section is Illuminatus! Here's what he wrote:

The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson – If you consider yourself a “libertarian” of some sort but you haven’t yet read The Illuminatus! Trilogy then might I suggest that such a reading might help you internalize the Cosmic Schmuck Principle. Plus there are plenty of dirty sex scenes and none of the boorish Randian logorrhea that plague many other epic libertarian novels.

Strange Attractor  is interesting so far (Shannon was a teen cancer survivor); I'll post a review when I finish the book.