#1: What can I possibly say?  Am I to infer that the cast of Star Trek: Voyager was a group of sex crazed maniacs?

#2:  It dawns on me to wonder: did the “European Leadership” quit, were they fired, “You can’t fire me — I quit”, “You can’t quit — You’re fired” or…?  Tangled webs.
#3:  Everybody has a story.  The story of the woman photographed here — who did not a’know who the heck Patrick Fitzgerald was, something I assure you anyone at, say, a moveon.org meeting trying to figure out how to impeach Cheney would know.
The person at the card table shrine may be a long time member named Susan Bowen according to people who have viewed the picture. Sue was recuited more than 30 years ago to the LC. This picture looks like it was taken in Chicago. In the briefing it is reoprted that a “flying squad” was sent from Detroit to reopen that city for money and bodies. Chicago used to be a big deal for us and was run by a couple named Cheila and Terry Jones. [few paragraphs all very interesting, and describes the cultural surroundings of Susan Bowen.]

Susan Bowen I would guess is over 50 years of age by now. She went from being a field hand to a phone team fundraiser for many years. Susan’s husband is a big guy named Bob Bowen who now runs the Detroit LYM. Since he too is a boomer, that is only a temporary title in the cult. One of the worst comboa a married couple could have is being a “power couple” where the guy is a local or regionla leader and the wife is a fundraiser. For some strange reason, men in the LC prove how good they are by how much money their wives raise. I should have paid attention in those early Beyond Psych classes to figure that out. If your wife did not make the bucks, then the local NCs would go after the spouse, who in turn would go after their wife when they got home. This is on top of a very late night meeting with the local NC with the female fundraiser about how her blocking in raising money may casue Lyn to get assasinated and humanity wiped out. By the time this all ended, a woman like Susan may be finally getting to sleep at 3 AM and have to get up the next day for another 9 AM to 11 PM fundraising gig.
No none has mentioned anything which Susan did which can be construed as abusive. I have a soft spot for her predicament as I was reminded of a special meeting she may have been at in 1981 or there abouts. This was a special meeting Lyn had with the local field membership in the NYC/NJ region.
It was held at Lyn’s townhouse on Sutton Place, a few rows down from E 58th street. The locals were all being starved and money was all being sent to the National office . The talk was about the upcoming campaign by Lyn and one exchange always sticks out by members who were there. After Lyn came down stairs he rambled on about how important the field work and fundraising is by the regions. All sorts of intitiatives were announced and how we running the globe. At the end of this, one member asked if this means that most people (including the person asking) were ever going to stop being at card table shrines. Lyn responded that of course you will because that is how we change history. A few people looked at each other with a puzzling look while trying to show a good face. Many people who were there eventually left, except for Susan Bowen.
So here we are, a QUARTER CENTURY later, seeing a Susan Bowen at a card table shrine on a Chicago street.  […]
Looking at that picture of Susan Bowen, I wonder if she ever thinks about that one morning on New York’s fashionable Sutton Place where Lyn finally told her the truth about her life?

Many people also wonder if Susan Bowen ever wondered how Lyn could testify under oath in his trial that he has no idea of where the money for the town house, armed guards, food, utilities , transport, clothes and other expenses came from? This truly is a Bizarro moment for Susan Bowen as she and others were patted down and searched before being allowed to enter Lyn’s classy townhouse. Lyn appears in front of her and says that she and others have to raise the money and work those phones and card table shrines even harder. One of the phrases Lyn liked to use was that because of all of the assassination threats against him, he was a prisoner in the townhouse and only left for travel. Each night the NEC came by for a NEC meeting which included the daily income totals . The cult’s expenses and budget was discussed nightly and Lyn has the final word.
Yet, he claims to not know how he got to Sutton Place , the Penthouse, the Riverdale condo, Ashburn or Club Ibykus, or how how the money came about when he was prosecuted for tax fraud. Most people would call those addresses pretty expensive places to live. During the trials we called them safe houses and then later said they were open to the whole LC to merrily wander through and park you butt on the sofa when you felt like it.
A QUARTER CENTURY later, Susan Bowen is parking her butt at a card table shrine, just like Lyn forecasted. Then again, based on the people who tell me that she was a regular at being browbeaten by the leadership, maybe it is more peaceful outside for her.

#3A: From the Harvard Crimson, 1984:

Three members of a radical political group were evicted from a University of Pennsylvania classroom after calling economics professor Lawrence Klein a Nazi and accusing him of promoting genocide.
“This man’s model is Adolf Hitler!” cried one of the three supporters of the Lyndon LaRouche presidential campaign who disrupted the class.
“This is an outrage–a Nazi on campus. He is currently plotting the destruction of Israel. This man is an anti-Semitic genocidal butcher,” he added.
Students in the class were not amused. “How can you come here and call him a Nazi? He’s teaching an introductory economics class,” said one of the students to the demonstrators’ claim.
Klein said, “I insist that you are a bunch of screwballs and will please get out.”
According to LaRouche supporter Susan Bowen, Klein served as an advisor to the Monterrey business-financier group which she claims was responsible for destroying the Mexican economy by forcing the country to cease government industrial projects and social services.
Bowen and another group of LaRouche Campaign members demonstrated outside the building where the class was held, toting signs reading. “Stop Klein’s Racist Nazi Genocide” and “Feed Africa.”
#4: Regarding Dianne Bettag, a quick google search shows sometime after popping up here, she popped up there with, oh-so-importantly “Out in the Streets Organizing” (uh?):

We don’t just expose, we’re out in the streets of the nation organizing to destroy Gore, so that the Democratic party will not be distracted from impeaching or otherwise giving the boot to first Cheney and then Bush… so that the nation can ally itself with Russian, China and India in creating a new monetary system modelled on the old Bretton Woods system, to develop industry, water, energy, agriculture and transportation projects all over the world. […] Gore with his bs on Global Warming, profiling the party to react on that issue instead of taking care of the collapsing economy a la their FDR tradition…

The response I find amusing, but is unrelated…

I visit the LaRouche site though LaRouche should forus more on Huey Long style Democrats than that FDR who sold us out by letting Prescott Bush and the Boys remain at liberty on American soil.

Actually there is an odd contingent of Huey Long supporters out there, I have noticed.  But then again he modeled his corruption after a previous Louisiana governor, and also had a bit more windfall to the poorest.  FDR’s slide from bad to good came with his change from Marxist to erstwhile Democrat, but what I have always found interesting is that at all stages of his game, Harry Truman gets to remain an Enemy.  I think of Harry Truman somehow as akin to Einstein’s old “Cosmological Constant”, at least in terms of Larouche’s jabs at contemporary American politics.  (Later referred to by Einstein as his biggest mistake, wasted years and years working with something that he determined to be an artificial artifact.)  Interesting to note, Einstein is now on Larouche’s “Good list”, which is a very swift whip-lash.
#5:  Because the world is demanding more internal briefings from Larouche?
MESSAGE FOR AM BRIEFING
FROM LYNDON LAROUCHE

As our own experience of the results of such cases has shown us, such forms of hysterical denial of reality can be deadly.

Such types of reactions are almost always associated with certain clinically significant kinds of hysterics in manner of speech, facial expressions, and “body language” generally. These usually
have forms of body-language and related expressions we would associate with efforts to “shout down” anything which frightens the victim of such pathological incidents. Sometimes, literal
shouting occurs; but, as we know from experience, there are other varieties of this, such the kind of bare-faced lying which Hartmut Cramer showed in his broadcast lie in defense of Uwe’s
complicity with Fernando Quijano, in resigning from his post of treasurer. The case of the not-always-candid, money-grabbing Uwe Friesecke’s essentially habitual practice of such bare-faced lying, is also notable as among clinically relevant typical expressions of witting lying as an habituated form of denial of obvious reality.

The important thing is: never capitulate to such forms of denial. Do it compassionately: “I am sorry to learn that you are too frightened to face reality in this matter. We can discuss this
later, when you have thought over the reasons for your denial of this reality.”

I: A comment that just came through to the matter of Star Trek’s Robert Beltran and his rather odd career choice:

I think Beltran almost walked when Lyn began to loudly promote the choral work while denouncing the work on drama. I think he was handled by the Boomers and his ego massaged after some of lyn’s more pointed comments got out. I especially remember a cadre school session where lyn made remarks about people in drama wanting to change sex partners and it was better to focus on the discipline of the choral work. If I can find a transcript of the session, I will include Lyn’s words.

Paging Motherskadi, maybe the one person most interested in the matter of Robert Beltran and his connections with Larouche.

II: Other items of note: the feed shows many splogs linking to one of those Larouchian articles entitled “Larouche Challenges Youth: Make a Revolution in Science”.

Which I take to mean to man the wikipedia sites and attempt changes to entries on various scientists to fit Larouche’s cargo cult, and not much else in the realm of “Revolution”.

Infinitesimal?

Actually, referring to anything as a “Cargo Cult” is a sleight to cargo cults, which after all make sense to someone not understanding the world around them with no way of figuring out what those world powers beyond their reach are doing.

III: Persistence did not pay off for some LaRouche followers who were yap-yapping about how LaRouche can save the universe from the Baby Boomers, and how only he can save us all from imminent economic disaster – oh – and yeah – he will impeach Cheney too by the way.

I stopped to point out the Cheney-doings of Patrick Fitzgerald the United States attorney in Chicago.

This lady answered, “Who’s Pat Fitzgerald?”
You will notice that the Larouche reason for Impeaching Cheney, and if you google “Impeach Cheney” Larouche has a site on page one of google searches, now fits around an obscure scandal in Great Britain — something that manages the feat of getting the British Royal Crown in, as well British mps who call for an investigation into the death of Jeremiah Duggan. (Jeremy Duggan?)
The question of who Patrick Fitzgerald is to a LYM reminds me of how the easiest way to detabilize a yute is to ask either questions about the lunacy of the cult or ask a serious question about an important issue’s technicalities. In so many races we used to run candidates in we had eveyone fired up about somtehing like the SDI or increasing exports. We looked like fools when someone would ask a question in a TV debate about something like “do they support a change in the PBA pension funding as per bill 1669”. Our people would quickly mouth off that “if we adopt Lyn’s IDB proposal we would be able to do what needs to be done”

If you asked about an SSI COLA figure you got “Laruche’s Export-Import Bank proposal vis a vis the world wide developmental forces who are fighting the British Dark Ages proposal of Prince Philip would resolve this issue”.

All I could do was cringe and plan my eventual escape as it became clear to me that this was all a parlor game of Lyn , designed not to work except to make worshippers. Lyn would issue memo after memo stating that there are NO LOCAL ISSUES except the election of him to save the USA and humanity as the world faces ” A Thermonuclear War and a depression”. This has been the case from the first time we ran candidates in the 1970s to now. You never see how crazy this is until you leave and then see it again.

IV. If Factnet implodes, the new forum is here.

V. Jeff Steinberg is always on the lookout for more ex-members to re-recruit to his post-LaRouche Steinbergian thinktank. He used the occasion of Ken Kronberg’s funeral to renew or try to renew a lot of acquaintances…. Rather ghoulish. Mostly he’s interested in former NEC and NC members (National Executive Committee and National Committee).

He claims he will “reform” the organization and it will be what it was supposed to be. Of course, it IS what it was supposed to be…. And Steinberg is one of its biggest enablers.

I visualize Krushev’s speech denouncing Stalin for some reason.

I suppose I should wander into the field of Larouche nuttiness again.

Two articles of note were published. The New Republic had a small and pointless article about Larouche discussing an interview with him, which I see is mentioned a small bit in the blogosphere, generally to the effect of “Lyndon Larouche. Huh. I forgot about that nut!” (Here. Here. Here.)

A few points to be made: maybe Larouche is running for president, maybe he isn’t. I wonder if I were to look through the rules of what point a presidential candidate receives federal matching funds if I would see a bar that a Larouche organization that is not on par with its past version cannot reach — meaning the fantasy world view that he is deeply allied with the Clintons will have to work. On the other hand, his coy rhetoric certainly created the framework for a supposed “reluctant” run — a direction for his cult to take for an election cycle. If it enables him to get those federal matching funds.
The article sits next to an article about Dennis Kucinich — the two articles entitled “The Crazy that is Running” and “The Crazy that is Not Running”. It is unfair to Dennis Kucinich, who I don’t think is a terribly serious politician — and my misgivings about Kucinich goes beyond his politics– who — I will say — does not operate a cult. To deviate from the topic and take a quick gander at this Kucinich article, past the obnoxious title — the phrase that his campaign throws him to a “Pacifica Archipelago” is an apt observation. Actually I do see method to Kucinich’s madness, and it is simply that he is building his national base composed of the average Pacifica listener.

The other article answers that old assertion from a Larouchie that I was taking Nick Benton’s article on Larouche’s internal memos as gospel. (Go over here.) Here, I suppose, is what the Larouchie was jabbing her stick at, the information I was supposed to have learned that would have showed me the truth about Nick Benton and his motives. Larouchies despise ex-Larouchies.
Beyond that, a copy of odds and ends:

Recordings from a “9/11 Truth” conference (conspiracy theorists on 9/11.)

Friday’s keynote speaker was Webster Tarpley (pictured), a historian who used to be involved with the Lyndon LaRouche org, and co-author of The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush [Sr.]. I actually read excerpts of this a few years ago. Tarpley looks and sounds somewhat like Mr. Lebowski, but has a killer vocab and a wicked sense of humor: An exceptional speaker.

Okay. Webster Tarpley. He is a fraudulent ex-member, meaning that he is a member who is more helpful to the cause if he claims not to be connected with Larouche nowadays. I know this because the discussion at factnet shows that he spoke on behalf of Larouche in Russia. I would post the exchange if I could find it right off the bat.
I think this is how Larouche has his hands in the “9/11 Truth Movement”, something the “9/11 Truthers” are weary of, something that I end up shrugging at thinking that they sort of deserve each other.

One last item from factnet of interest:

For those who were born before the Fall of the Berlin wall and were campaigning against the Soviet nuclear Armageddon… just this info I read at the time:
Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB defector, revealed (I quote) that during a November 1983 NATO exercise, to enable the Western alliance to practice its nuclear release procedures, the Soviets responded to the manuever by going into an “ill-founded panic,” since they believed that “belligerent imperialist circles in the U.S.A. are getting ready for war, and are preparing new weapons systems which could render a sudden attack feasible.” (ie the march ’83 Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative”, SDI aka “Star wars”) As a result of this “panic,” Gordievsky claims, on or about Nov. 8-9 (1983), the world “really passed through a war danger.”
I cannot help not to think that these “belligerent imperialist circles in the U.S.A.” associated to the SDI, were also connected to ours. We were all over the place at the time, officially invited to speak about the Reagan/Larouche’s SDI.
But in August that year, irresponsible larouche wrote an Open letter to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov: “YOU HAVE CHOSEN TO PLUNGE THE WORLD INTO WAR”, because of his rejection of Reagan’s sdi proposal. Then, in November these NATO maneuvres took place and were perceived by the Soviet KGB as a possible cover or preparation for a US military offensive…
Later we were attacked in the Soviet press as imperialist nazis connected to Reagan etc
So larouche played a very dangerous and irresponsible game then, as unofficial spokesman for Reagan’s “parallel diplomacy”. A “war of words” similar to Iran’s or North Korea’s today.
Maybe that motivitated the US authorities to get his mouth shut (that is : the 1986 FBI raid in Leesburg)

AND That should do it for this topic for a week. Unless something comes up.

(Additional: I cannot pass this up, from the very prolific xlcrer, after discussing the sales technique for the Pro-life magazine and the Fusion magazine, Larouche hidden until the end– AND:

When we call up subscribers for everything we sold they would ask why they have not recieved a magazine or why it is 6 months late. Wearing a Lyn dunce cap makes it easy for you to beleive the story appearing in the briefing about how Henry Kissinger or some new evil start up has sabatoged the Post Office from mailing out the materials. Instead of noticing that we are raising huge sums of money, 5 bucks a day is going towards labor and money for postage has been diverted, our people believe that some incredible and mysterious force which wants Lyn assasinated to unleash a New Dark Age has blocked us from paying our postage bills. […]

What the yutes should notice is how many of the slugs in the briefing written by Jeff and his friends have this twist where some unamed source tells us “I like the material but I think your boss is crazy”. Jeff is busy running his own end game around Lyn and lining up his pieces for a post Lyn world. Lyn is so delusional that he has not caught on after spending years in prison and giving some crazy figure like 11 million to scam artists that Jeff and Paul are the ones who bring in these grifters. Go through the ranks of security and you find quite a collection of people who are “out” but ‘in” with Jeff.

A decent enough answer for my weird little question of “What happens when Larouche dies?”

I don’t quite know what to make of this myspace user.  The blog entry where he announced that he is now taking off and joining the Larouche Youth Movement is gone, wiped away.  Which is either a positive sign or a negative sign… I do not a’know.
What I still have from the rant, or have with easy accessibility (I could probably dig in and find the rest if I were slightly more motivated):

I have been spending time at the local Lyndon LaRouche P.A.C. (Public Action Committee) with the youth movement. I have gotten a better education since Teusday than I have gotten going to any school. Lyndon LaRouche is an educated. intelectual, political, and concerned individual. He is opposed to the British oligarchy (or as you all might call it the elitist nazis in the world steming out of Great Brittan coming from the Queen and operating even in the United States, inluding the White House) and is trying through all actions sane to bring it to it’s knees.

That’s all I have.  It goes on to say that his previous political and philosophical stance — Anarchism –  was good, but this… THIS… Larouchism… is simply better.  More Purposeful, you see.
… because, as you see in the previous post… he’s fighting those neo-nazis in the White House.  (As well Al Gore and his nazi gardens, but this is a movement that destroys those traditional political spectrum, you understand?)

Which spurs me to wander through his myspace site, past the multitude of PUNK ROCK videos (and he does realize that Punk Rock is a British Oligarchical — slash — Zionist — slash — Synarchist Plot, doesn’t he?) I come to his … discourse?… on Anarchism.

He misspelled Henry David Thoreau.  And something about this rapid discovery of anarchism, and dismissal to something else entirely, is a little haphazard and quick on the draw.
You can also go to www.akpress.com to get books and the like about many important undergound issues concering all movements.  If you are a PUNK or a feminist, or even a hippy, this is the place for you all.
That website is not altogether bad, but it is devoid of the important underground issues concerning the “movement” he aligned himself with…

… where he will have to sooner or later give up his Punk Rock.  (A bit nihilistic, isn’t that?  Which, I guess, is the point of finding something less nihilistic.  The vacuum provided by…?)

……………….

Re-Reading the Washington Post article from 2004, which I read first when it was published (and indeed linked here) after observing that April Witt read through the same news articles I did last December, I chew back over the Jeremiah Duggan story, and I have no clean explanation.  The lesson for aspiring cult leaders is to hold their conferences a bit out-of-the-way, where physical escape routes are difficult and unwieldy, and where the recruits are in out of their element, not entirely sure of where they are.  This is particularly appropriate in Europe, where you can meet them up in different nations.

Stop and laugh at this one:

In early 2003, Jeremiah telephoned to say he’d met a LaRouche activist who wrote for a French-language LaRouche newspaper, Nouvelle Solidarité. The literature he gave Jeremiah to read in French didn’t always make total sense, but Jeremiah chalked it up to his difficulty translating unfamiliar political terms, his mother says.
Why it doesn’t make total sense.

From xlcrer: The REAL understanding of Larouche is from the numerous scam artist outside security people who know how to use Larouche’s delusions and thievery against him. […]  Bunko artists themselves become victims to better bunko artists by playing up the greed and delusions of the mark.  

Some of that story came out in the Fraud trial in 1987, I guess.  The relationship between Larouche and the KKK?  Apparently what was going on was that the Ku Klux Klan was bilking money out of Larouche, providing false intelligence services, in order to get money to attend Star Trek conventions.

No, seriously.  Cue New York Times!  December 9, 1987!:
A neo-Nazi hired for security by Lyndon H LaRouche Jr., the political extremist who frequently runs for President, bilked and ridiculed Mr. LaRouche and his associates, according to testimony and statements in the man’s trial for conspiracy to obstruct justice.

The man, Roy E Frankhouser Jr., was sent by Mr. LaRouche to Boston in November 1984 to check on the progress of a Federal investigation into possible credit card fraud by LaRouche campaign workers.  But Mr. Frankhouser, a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, and two other members of a “security” team apparently went instead to a convention of fans of the television series “Star Trek,” being held in Scranton, Pa.

Well, I broad-swiped my description of… um… The KKK bilked money out of Lyndon Larouche in order to attend Star Trek conventions.  Just individual members.  And just one reported Star Trek convention.  The KKK did not, as an organization, make the organization choice to charge Larouche for fraudulent services, using the funds to attend Star Trek conventions, as my statement to that effect implies.
How did I miss this when I read through media history of Larouche in December and January.  It must have been that I read a few articles, understood the gist — sure: Larouche describes the conspiracy against him; the Prosecution goes to great lengths to say this has nothing to do with his politics — his organization’s just been bilking the elderly out of their credit card savings.  Throw in the ignoble quotation from one of those famous Larouche briefings about how this is for the victims’ own good, and some KKKers taking Larouche’s money and running off to a Star Trek convention gets lost in the mix.

I stumbled upon this looking for a very specific news item… a whimsical piece on life in Washington, as so happens during the great Stock Market Tumble of 1987.  I could not find the piece.  I was going to post the lines about Larouchies marching, singing and chanting to the effect of “We Told You So.” — the economic crisis that dear old Lyndon Larouche has gone about has come, darneditall.  Next to that, I was going to post a passage from Jeff Durstewitz’s part of Younger Than That Now, concerning his wild ride on the stock market at the time where he looked straight in the eye of whether to pay out his margin call or to sell his stocks and cut his losses.  He chose the latter, and noted that had he met the margin call, he would have become rich by the end of that year.

It was to be a simple lesson for the crisis-enfused denziens of the LYM, regarding perspective.  1987 is now 20 years ago, about the age of a LYMer one has to figure.  I remember the stock market calamities of the time merely because my birthday happened on that weekend — my age moving to one more finger on my second hand — otherwise I would not recall that.

Some financial bubbles are going to burst.  It is not an Economic Crisis that is the End of the World.  But Larouche will play it, and any slight occurrences — real or imagined — as such for the benefit of further tightening his control over a LYMers’ being.

Anyway that was going to be the purpose of this blog post.  Along with that last Larouche post I did, it would have pretty well closed the book on my “Purpose #2”.  But I couldn’t find that brief commentary.  But I found that KKK — Star Trek story when looking for it.  KKK Trekkies.  I suppose there’s no reason they shouldn’t exist.

I. — We discussed the idea of putting together binders full of visuals (recent LaRouchePAC.com slugs, quotes, maps, diagrams, old pamphlet covers, EIR articles if we are low on EIR hard copies, etc.) to help us effectively communicate a single laser focused idea to a contact out in the field, and get them to sign up. —-

Binders of slugs, old pamphlet covers, EIR articles if we are low on EIR hard copies? This looks like more corroboration of problems in getting things printed, now that PMR is gone. (comment from Rachel Holmes.)

response: I had similar echoes from Europe: they don’t print their newspaper anymore! I suppose this is what “the best economist in the world”‘s solution was all about after their financial/structural crisis last year when the european leadership slammed the door with kingpin Friesecke… The “best economist in the world” thought the solution was to cut down production costs: so why not not printing anymore and have an allout “internet strategy” (the socalled larpac website strategy)?
I suggest even better, why not joining the online “virtual communities” like www.activeworlds.com The youths would have their avatars and their virtual cardtable shrine, trying to make some other avatars to sign up for their virtual copy of EIR? Whenever they organize well they ll win some “virtual credits” to buy some “virtual sandwiches”. Their mission is to save this “virtual 3d world” from the forces of evil.

II. I have gone through the FACTNet posts, sorting them in a most hap-hazard fashion, wanting to but not willing to prune out redundancies and meandering superficialities. One thing that I have done is to place a bunch of anecdotal explanations of life stories of why some posters entered, and why they exited, the Cult.

My cleanest observation is that Lyndon Larouche is a cynical operator indeed.  I suppose a close look at “Beyond Psychology” tells all, but a rudimentary awareness of psychology, and marketing –which is after all psychology applied to commercial purposes– is sufficient.  Here is a post from a LYMer to an exited LYMer:
Cynicism is difficult to combat. It often devolves into existentialism, or even nihilism. The fault dear Scott, lies not in our stars, but, in ourselves that we are underlings.
I am reminded of the fact that professionals who work with schizophrenic patients generally work for six-month stretches, then they are required to get away for six months. This is a standard procedure simply because the condition of schizophrenic patients has a powerful, detrimental effect on the therapist. I fear that if anyone were to spend too much time with you, Scott, they would suffer the same.

That is the craven meanness of a LaRouche follower.  But you already know that if you ever pass by one of their card-table shrines, particularly during crunch-time as they come close to their deadlines for meeting quota lest they be haranged by their orderlings, and they shout out the projection “FASCIST!”

I’m currently tapping my pen onto the table, trying to assemble some coherent and not yet plodded thoughts on the topic of Lyndon Larouche, and his Cult. Understand, I have covered the essentials for my Purpose #1 — indeed, any further prancing on probably takes away from this unstated purpose. Purpose #2 and #3 are a little harder.

I. Okay. Check this out. It’s cited as excerpts of daily briefings for LYMers, sent to the unofficial liason of such things, by someone getting ready to exit stage right. Feel free to scan right past this — frankly, I think it’s a bigger rhaspberry to Larouche, Inc. just to toss this sort of thing out into the public domain
“The winds of Change”
If you have been away long, or have never been here at all, you might not know about how the winds of change have swirled through the Los Angeles local, how they have carved into the sediments here, revealing symbolic messages upon the underlying bedrock. Our most favored men and women, the council of elders themselves, struggled only in vain to grasp the source or meaning for these mysterious hieroglyphs, but they could not transcribe them. The fabric, the very air in our local seemed shaken into uncertainty. So, in a desperate attempt, we had our best Bel Canto voices line up on the Hollywood hills and sing out into the distant yonder (to the far off place some called WarRoom), for a sign, a hint, some useful feedback from the outside world that might lend us a hand in resolving our enigma, when suddenly, one day, a reply arrived to us from beyond the hills which said, almost in echoes, “Stop blocking and learn to use e-mail. If you want our help, you need to write more ops reports!”

So due to popular demand, I thought it worthwhile to give people a rare sense of what’s up in Los Angeles: Renaissance workshop/recruiting ground extraordinaire. First of all, we are half-staffed with organizers, which is
both bad and good, but which generally means there is more space to grow and a greater necessity for EVERYONE, new and old, to take on new challenges in what THEY can do individually for the good of humanity. When the mass recruitment factory is pumping, wonders are done for the movement as a whole — but that IS the big “Tipper Gore” in the living room here. Youth outreach. It is what Los Angeles was made for; the wide sprawl, the year-round perfect weather for campus organizing, and plus, these kids all KNOW they have no future the way things are going… and so we have a HUGE capability to explode t he numbers of contacts joining
us over this summer break IF we have the will to do so. Do you have this vision in your mind? Are your arms long enough to dig into the “box” of uncalled contacts?…………

we have just reinstituted something which a few months ago was tentatively called the “New Person Reading Day”, which was meant to supply a kind of launching pad for serious contacts and new members, to work with older members on foundational studies in epistemology, geometry and of course, Lyn’s economics. The next eight weeks will be, “So You Wish…” and its periphery. Imagine the experience of contacts spending all day Saturday reading Lyn, Liebniz, Hamilton etc., then sticking around for Phil’s P.M. update, and not leaving until hours after the regular meeting!……………….

another really interesting situation is the new L.A. Tweener deployments, which hasn’t yet slowed their accelerating potential in providing the necessary public credit investment that our youth recruitment demands. Not merely a fundraising breakthrough, they are opening up new territories (for example in Republican Orange County districts), raking in Boomer contacts for the phone team, and have even started taking on youth apprentices. I won’t go into too much detail on this latter point, but I will just say that a number of youth, even some who have had problems with fund raising, have been able to raise over $200 individually when working within the dynamic set by Chris Sayre or others of the Tweeners.

These kind of breakthroughs breathe optimism into numerous areas, whether relating to funds or otherwise. Lastly, the field meeting resolution was to create a tenacious organizing fury. If you are at a table, give every
person the opportunity to get on board, but waste no time catering to their pessimisms and weaknesses. Treat them as they ought to be, calmly and with conviction. If they are wimping around, keeping their distance, say to them, “Look, are you gonna do this?” Better for everyone is to challenge them early. Everyone who joins, only does so when they face certain challenges. To get contacts coming consistently, try settling for ten confirmations instead of two and [two] might show up! We discussed the idea of putting together binders full of visuals (recent LaRouchePAC.com slugs, quotes, maps, diagrams, old pamphlet covers, EIR articles if we are low on EIR hard copies, etc.) to help us effectively communicate a single laser focused idea to a contact out in the field, and get them to sign up.

There are any number of items to digest from this, if you are of a sort to digest these things. Feeding into Purpose #2: — zero in on — Imagine the experience of contacts spending all day Saturday reading Lyn, Liebniz, Hamilton etc., then sticking around for Phil’s P.M. update, and not leaving until hours after the regular meeting! — Imagine rambling discussions late at night in your dorm surroundings with marijuana smoke breezing through freely, where every word you speak about someone mentioned in the course of your 200-level college course seems so BRILLIANT! That is roughly how I imagine the “hours after the regular meeting” come across, and I do not believe that image in my head to be too accidental. The seduction is the illusion that the college aged can cut out some artifacts of Youth Culture — the drugs, whatever it is the music the kids are listening to these days, and discuss Liebniz, Hamilton, etc… and, um… Lyn? How’d that guy get into that list?!? A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
There are other items in this little briefing that I could focus on and explicate, but my gut tells me I will have plenty of opportunities to make those points in the future.

II. There is a minor controversy about Alexandar Cockburn, writing in The Nation — and his own Counterpunch — magazine some contrarian opinions about global warming, entitled “Dissidents Against Dogma“. Read or don’t read the article at your peril. Cockburn often seems to be contrarian for the sake of contrarian’s sake. But one controversy with this article comes with his choice of cited articles. Read through the citations:

Z. Jaworowski, “Ice Core Data Show No Carbon Dioxide Increase”, 21st Century Science & Technology, Spring 1997, available on line at www.21stcenturysciencetech.com

Hotcha! 21st Century Science and Technology! You don’t say? Now, I suppose someone who considers themselves a Scientist with the contrarian of all contrarian viewpoint on Global Warming within the Scientific Community (only a Young Age Creationist would have as much trouble getting into a peer reviewed journal) has to go somewhere to get his or her studies published. Some more words and sentences and paragraphs over here.
The wikipedia entry for Jaworowski includes the factoid of publication in this spurious publication, and the entry for Cockburn now includes the update of his global warming skepticism.

UPDATE: Larouche puts this controversy in historical perspective:

The deeper aspect of the anti-science commitment of the Anglo-Dutch faction goes to questions that can be mentioned here for purposes of identification only. The essence of the matter was the decision by elements of the then newly formed Anglo-Dutch financial oligarchy to promote the fraud of Isaac Newton in an attempt to destroy both Leibniz himself, and the tradition he represented, in the disgusting Commercium Epistolicum affair. To end the threat of the succession of a Leibniz-influenced Princess Sophie, in the event of the early death of Queen Anne, the faction of Winston Churchill’s progenitor Lord Marlborough, also known as the “Venetian Party,” launched a defamation campaign against Gottfried Leibniz that has few equals even in modern times.

However, in thus successfully destroying real science in England, the Venetian Party laid the basis for its own monumental defeat. The German classical renaissance, which built upon the revival of Leibniz by such figures as Gotthold Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn and led to the revolution in German science marked by such high points as Carl Friedrich Gauss and Bernhard Riemann, was their first come-uppance. The American Revolution was the second, and still persisting, fruit of that strategic miscalculation.

British methods of cultural manipulation and intelligence warfare–more properly, Venetian methods–succeed more often than not. When they fail, the failure tends to be catastrophic, as the present unraveling surrounding Britain’s BAE/Prince Bandar scandal portends, to those trained in the ability to read, and act upon, such situations.

Um.  Hrm.

III. The Larouche search on bloglines, which spits out the new releases on EIR and all of that, reads a like the North Korean news service. Kim Jong Il praised and respected in various world parts; Larouche praised and respected in various world parts… underlying message: He’s A Major World Player, Damneditall! So I breezed over the headline LPAC News Hits the Arab World, appears to be one of his main audiences for the moment. But breezing over this title stopped me from reading in full:
June 14, 2007 (LPAC)–An Arabic translation of the May 22 LPAC story, “Is Lebanon Conflict the Fruit of Failed Cheney Scheme” which appeared on the LaRouche Arabic language website (www.nysol.se/arabic) was picked up last week and put on the front page of the Hezbollah website (www.almanar.com.lb) with credit to the LaRouche website. Over 15,000 readers clicked on the article. The average for hot news items on the site is 2,000 to 3,000. It also led to hundreds of new clicks on the LaRouche Arab website.

Praise Hezbollah!

Anyway, in other news… LaRouche in Dialogue with Italian Political Leaders at Forum in Rome, LaRouche in Hemispheric Webcast on Defeating Globalization with South American Trade Union Leaders, and… You can fill in the blanks from there.

The other news item that Larouche is flogging is this not terribly widely reported in the US — British Scandal. Which he conveniently ties into the Synarchists who are out to destroy him with those investigation into Jeremiah Duggan:

Spurious to say the least, but there you go. This is, again, similar to the North Korean news where every news item dovetails into American, and South Korean, plots against Kim Jong Il.
IV. Needless to say…

I.  I am scanning the news articles on James Bevel through google. If I had a smidgen more motivation, I would actually sample them a little closer to poll the percentage of the articles that mention Bevel’s 1992 run as vice president — “received less than one percent of the vote” as the copy states — with Lyndon Larouche. It is less than a quarter. Maybe even less than that. This is partially because it is the last line of the Associated Press story, a high percentage of the news sources aggregated on google news are simply newspapers running that story — and that line is the first to be cut off. So it is that Bevel worked with Martin Luther King, Jr and was instrumental in organizing the Million Man March.

Women from across the country have stepped forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against a prominent civil rights leader and Martin Luther King Jr. confidant who is charged with incest, a prosecutor said Thursday.

The Rev. James L. Bevel, 70, was charged last week with having sexual relations with a teenage relative in the 1990s.

Since his arrest, Loudoun County prosecutors “are getting calls from people all over the country saying the defendant engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct,” prosecutor Gigi Lawless said at a bond hearing Thursday.

So THAT’s what a Larouche vice presidential candidate does.

And there’s this punchline: Bevel was – allegedly – just trying to have his own youth movement.

II. When a company places on its website something that proports to be its “Secret”, you know it can not possibly be that company’s secret. Hence, on the ghostly website for “PMR Printing”, you get a link for “Secret” to this ad copy. (And speaking of ghostly…)
But it is not as though PMR’s real secret was ever a terribly secretive secret. That secret has been in the public domain. In the age of google nobody who would have wanted to contract with PMR would have had any reason to be ignorant of the secret. They could do with that information what they must — I suppose in many ways it is no worse than dealing with, say, China — but the dangers inherent in the setup (Larouche decides that he needs to move funds to a different department of his org; Larouche decides to screw some baby-boomers) could only really dawn on the client a little later in the game.
WorldComp’s website is even more cob-webbed, for a company of graphic design it is just sort of nonsensical.

Now then. Full steam ahead.
What is the deal with Robert Beltran?

Of the half a dozen episodes I think I saw, I remember two episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, that forgettable a series it is for me. One of the episodes I remember basically because it was a rip-off of a Next Generation episode, a premise later used — I think but am not certain on the X-Files and then later on with a wink and a nod on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All of which is just as well, because Groundhog’s Day had a not dissimilar premise.

It does look like the weakest link in the Star Trek franchise. I know nothing about Deep Space Nine, but I do remember that there was a one or two season story arc that my Star Trek fan siblings found fascinating. Even Enterprise looks as though it had more charm, or potential for charm, than Voyager. The Trek franchise is a bit on the rocks right now, and there isn’t any clear idea of how to jump-start it with new material. In the popular imagination of the casual civilian, Trek begins and ends with Kirk’s crew and Picard’s crew. It actually is enough of a feat that they managed to churn out The Next Generation; you can throw the darts twice and come up with something.

So it is that Patrick Stewart, a classically trained Shakespearean actor, can be pretty damned comfortable with his role, known primarily as Jon Luc Picard.  Robert Beltran has a harder time as Commander Chakotay. From a 2001 New York Times:

“Chakotay has not changed enough for my taste,” the outspoken actor said, referring to the character he’s played for seven years on Star Trek: Voyager. […] “Although they come up with a scene here or there that’s tolerable, I think the character has not progressed since season four,” Beltran said. “In fact, he may even have regressed a little.

“I would have explored his past, his spirituality, the inner conflicts he might have,” the actor said, “and most definitely his relationships, not just with the captain, but with everybody else on the ship. I would have liked more revealing scenes with the other cast members, which were sorely lacking with Chakotay.”

Though his frustration is palpable, Beltran insisted that he never let it seep into his performance or his on-set demeanor. The actor gave his all when called upon, and it wasn’t unusual to find him joking with cast and crew on the stage or tossing a football outside, in front of his trailer on the Paramount lot.

“When you’re given these throwaway scenes with not much thought put into who’s saying it and its importance to the whole story – and I’m talking mostly about seasons five and six here – it just makes me feel like the writers don’t care,” Beltran said.

“I just felt let down, ignored and insulted,” he said. “I think they did a grave disservice to what I thought could have been an interesting character.” […]
“I’m just sorry that it has gotten to the point where I’m feeling so unexcited, that I got to be so disillusioned with it,” he said. “I’m sorry that happened. I’m sorry the writers didn’t see the possibilities. I’m sorry for all the missed chances, not only for my character but for the whole Voyager story.

“I just feel like it’s been a disappointment,” he said.

Beltran, however, is looking forward rather than back. Life after Voyager, he said, will resemble life before Voyager.

“I’m an actor,” he said. “I do television. I do films. I do stage. I’ll do whatever feels right.

“I can only do what’s offered to me,” he said, “and from the list of what’s offered to me I’ll just do what I think is the best thing to do. Ideally I want to do my own films – I’d like to have my own production company and tell the stories I like.”

I imagine Larouche and company getting wind of this disaffected actor, with it piquing their interest. I don’t think a Scientology approach per se could work at all with Larouche — a group of Big Name actors hamper the need to be above this silly pop culture world.  But a single well-regarded actor disillusioned shadows their recruitment base, and besides which he is in a position to wander in and out of Hollywood without much fret.
Note the immediate post-Trek stage performance he took part in, which served as his “in” to the orbit of Larouche:

Robert Beltran, perhaps best known for his work on “Star Trek: Voyager,” stars as Charlie Castle, a much-adored movie star who has sold his soul, metaphorically speaking, to satanic, all-powerful studio head Marcus Hoff (chilling Miguel Sandoval). When Charlie killed a child in a hit-and-run accident some months back, Hoff covered up the incident. Now, Hoff is pressuring Charlie to renew his 14-year contract — a Faustian bargain Charlie’s wife, Marion (effective Rita Rehn), will not tolerate.

Ever mindful of the period, beautifully evoked by Scott Siedman’s tacky-lush set, Melendez calibrates the distance between emotional truth and histrionics, seldom tumbling into the gap between. Reminiscent of John Garfield in his prime, Beltran is righteously passionate as a conscientious artist forced into an unholy compromise — Odets’ prescient nod to escalating McCarthyism.

It doesn’t take too much work to read into his motivations to that role.  It also managed the trick of putting some of Larouche’s words into Beltran’s mouth regarding a post – FDR let-down in society, a bridge into Larouche’s faux idealism.
Interesting to note what Larouche’s attitude toward Star Trek and Star Wars has been — largely negative “moronic space opera drivel”, but with the value of “getting kids interested” in his dreams of moon colonies and missile defense “Beam Weapon Technology”.

Robert Beltran later insisted that he basically hates the genre conventions of science fiction, and insisted that one of his projects not be compared with The Twilight Zone.

That explains why Robert Beltran is now teaching Drama at Larouche’s Academies. Actually, he is not too dissimilar from the Youth Recruits in respect to motivation.

lhl scamed beltran with the truman story, and the generation gap story, and now beltran thinks he finally has modern american history – as well as the cause of all the world’s problems today – figured out…thanks to lhl – the world’s one and only non-solution.
lhl is very good at making up simple explanations to help make complicated things line up neatly…the only problem is that every now and then some new explanation will come along – but this doens’t mean that lhl was wrong – it just means that lhl was hypothezing the higher hypotheses,
the org is using beltran to sucker in more youth…the idea of having a well-known actor give you acting classes is too good a pull.
the org has used this trick before…get to know some well-known singer, musician or actor, get some rapport going with them, by having “intellectual” discussions with them about how bad movies or music or broadway is today…then the target will think that they have found someone who understands them, their problems, share their hopes and dreams, etc.
then comes the ego stroking – you get an invitation to perform at a conference or something like that.
finally, comes the “lyn is the only solution” line, with some explanation on how lyn is so clever that everybody just slanders him as a fascist and everyone who has left him – chris and carol white for example – are agents – real estate or otherwise.
then, the org starts asking for money…which is what it was all about to begin with.
it happened to william warfield…and now that warfield is dead…beltran is next in line.

OR… Robert Beltran speaking before an excited conference of Youth:
The final speaker was Mr. Robert Beltran, a Classical actor who has been working with the LaRouche Youth Movement for about five years.  He connected “the long arc of corruption and immorality from Nietzsche, Wagner, Kant, Liszt, Darwin, Freud, and various others like that.”  Beltran read from 19th and 20th Century poets such as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot, which include such demoralizing, banal, and self-hating lines as, “Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.  For I have known them all already, known them all-Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons. I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”-which was written by T.S. Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1919).”
Robert then contrasted that by reading two sonnets by Shakespeare, two poems by John Keats, and the great “Ozymandias” by Percy Shelley, which, if you make it simpler for Bush and Cheney, would be nice for them to hear. “Ozymandias” is a political lesson for those who don’t know the consequences of an empire. He also read “On Peace” by Keats, which is a call for Europe to free itself from the chains of Empire, following the model of the just-created United States. (Hear Robert Beltran read the poems)
The dialogue which ended the meeting rallied the audience to establish its responsibility as a social body, and to find self-inspired passion to change their own identity in order to create a renaissance. “How do you lift society up in a world jaded and bereft of beauty?” Beltran was asked. He replied, “All I can do is hope there is a project out there worth putting your time into. You have to do it yourselves, like what the musicians (Duckles and Levin) said, you do it because it’s in you. You will have to create it, you guys will have to create it, we have to create it. The world needs great poetry, a great chorale.”
Too bad he couldn’t be Captain Picard.

I.  James L. Bevel, a civil rights leader who worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted of charges that had an incestuous affair with a juvenile between October 1992 and 1994 in Leesburg.

[…] Bevel is credited with playing a key role in some of the country’s major civil rights protests, including the 1963 Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, AL. He also was a leader of the Freedom Riders to desegregate public accommodations throughout the southern states in the 1960s and was an architect of the March on Washington in 1963 and the Selma-to-Montgomery march in Alabama in 1965. Bevel also helped organize the Million Man March in Washington in 1995.
And it goes on from there.  Okay.  By now anyone who sees this blog knows what “Leesburg” is, and where this is going:

 In 1992, Bevel was a candidate for Vice President of the United States on the ticket with Lyndon LaRouche, a Loudoun-based political activist and economist, who was convicted for mail and tax fraud as well as illegal fundraising practices. LaRouche and Bevel received less than 1 percent of the popular vote.

Lyndon Larouche’s running mate.  A more pathetic and inconsequential political slot I would be hard-pressed to think of.  Oh well.  At least his name was attached to Larouche’s program of 1992.  That’s worth something… I suppose.  I know there are a few of those civil rights workers drawn into the orbit of Lyndon Larouche – land, which is somewhat bemusing.
II.  A new gutter outlet for Wall Street Fascist John Train.
III.  I was told that Larouche was just about to release a new ground-broken article titled “The Rules of Survival”, looking for all the world like the new “Children of Satan” in terms of at the moment agenda-setting.  And so he has.

The world as a whole is presently caught within the last phases of a general breakdown-crisis, a crisis for which there is no true comparison, until now, within modern European history since the 1618-1648 Thirty Years religious war. In fact, the nearest resemblance to the current threat, is to be found in European history in the so-called “New Dark Age” of Europe’s mid-Fourteenth Century. In that mid-Fourteenth-Century collapse, half of the parishes of Europe were erased from the map, while the level of the population was reduced by about one-third.
There is no reason anyone needs to read anything beyond that first paragraph.

IV.  The panel looking into the Virginia Tech shooting has lost patience with the Larouche- representatives in the attack against video games, politely brushing one of them aside.

V.  And we have this oddity to consider, the current Larouchie pestering the FACTNET boards and breaks down in a fit of psyche-showing paranoia, and seeming guilt related to the death of Ken Kronberg…:

Time for Truth, you just wrote the following:

This forums dialogs would be translated to in the public in the form of:

No one in the LaRouche movement should feel able to say that with impunity–especially after LaRouche’s letter about his death, the EIR package about him–weren’t you paying attention to Lyn? What about Fidelio?

Creepy and telling, methinks.