I do not follow College football — which, to me, has the feeling of following Triple A Baseball. I do not quite remember the last time I watched anything of college football. But, yes, I do remember hearing and reading and buzzing about that Fiesta Bowl victory of the disgruntled mid-major “Nobody gives us any respect” Boise State over Oklahoma — a victory that came off of three miracle plays. Down a touchdown at the end of the game? Go to the play entitled “Circus”, which the coach indicated the team is going to by juggling air. Wackiness ensues as the team successfully completes a touchdown play which is based on confusing the other team by stopping them dead in their tracks because they can’t process why the heck Boise State appears to be running a Benny Hill routine. Or so the hype that surrounded the play would suggest. Actually, the highlights of the game are found here, and with that I don’t really want to go through the rest of the end of the game. Watch it — it’s entertaining, and it is the only minute thirty nine seconds that anyone will ever remember about the game.
In the height of the excitement the ensued, the star running back proposed to his girlfriend, a former cheerleader for the team, seemingly to make the game palatable for a made for tv movie — the backstory that adds depth to the football game.
Some things that were not particularly notable at the time, and thus did not process for me when, say, reading Sports Illustrated and seeing his photograph or watching the highlight reel on television. The running back that won the game with the not terribly ever used Statue of Liberty Play? He’s black. The girlfriend he proposed to? She’s white. This did not process because, you know, I grew up in the 1980s and the 1990s — not the 1940s and 1950s. Nobody commented on this fact because, you know, the Civil Rights Act is now 43 years old, and time marches on — the fairy tale story still holds together.
Until this past week, if you were to ask me if that running back for Boise State were black or white, I would not have had a clue. Until this story came over the news.

Boise State running back Ian Johnson’s wedding Saturday will be guarded by security because he’s received threats regarding his interracial marriage. His fiancee, Chrissy Popadics, is white. Johnson is black.

Johnson said he’s received more than 30 letters, phone calls and personal threats about the marriage. The threats were first reported by the Idaho Statesman.

“You take it for what it is — the less educated, the less willing to change,” Johnson told the Statesman. “But we’re not acting like we’re naive to all the stuff that’s going on. We know what’s been said. We’re going to make sure we’re safe at all times. It’s really sad because a lot of people that are probably doing it are the same people who were cheering me on.”

He didn’t describe the threats — or the heightened security measures the couple have planned — in detail.

Johnson led the nation with 25 touchdowns last season and finished eighth in Heisman voting while leading his team to a Fiesta Bowl victory. He scored the winning two-point conversion in overtime on a trick play to put the underdog Broncos over Oklahoma 43-42 on Jan. 1.

He proposed to Popadics, a former Boise State cheerleader, on the field after the game.

At which point I halt backward and do a quick double take, and give a “WTF?” I would suggest throwing out a “That’s Idaho for you”, but that feels a little too pant.  It has been notable the racial invectives that aggregate onto the comments of any video on youtube with Barack Obama, and they cannot all stem from out of Idaho.

I heard someone suggest that the problem is the lack of racial diversity in that area which stultifies racial attitudes. But that seems to have no particular solution, unless you suggest that we should create a mass migration of black Americans to live next to the old Aryan Nation compound. As it were, more than one black person has told me that when driving or riding across various states, they make it a point to not step foot out of the car when passing through Idaho.

Whatever.  May they have a happy marriage.  Wherever they live.

I was walking behind a schizophrenic-sounding and very ruffled-looking man as he was talking to himself incohrently. As he opened the garbage can lid and rumbled around for food, it occurred to me that his speaking was in the exact same style as a lot of auto – spam messages, which shuffle words around into familiar sentence structures but with disjointed topics.

I do not know where to go with that. I cannot quite make the conceptual leap to comparing the purposes and processes by which your schizophrenic street person and your schizophrenic spam message** are formulated. If I absolutely had to, I am pretty sure I could, though it would probably be a little forced and untrue — an act of fudging to get two unrelated items to relate to each other.

———————–

** Which reminds me: In my spam comment box, checked because occasionally some non-spam finds its way into the section, I had to do a double – take when I came to a message “This is exactly what I was looking for when I saw the headline ’21st Century Science and Technology”. I deleted it, because it was obviously spam, because really — I don’t believe anyone is looking for under the headline “21st Century Science and Technology” the evolution of a Larouche cult periodical to a forum for 20-something year olds to crucify their parents. Call me crazy.

“I was in 6th grade when Titanic came out.”

“God, I feel old.”

“I was a Sophomore in High School.”

“Now I feel really old.”

“Wait.  How is it that you feel old when someone dates themselves to that young age, and ‘really old’ when they date themselves a few years more?”
No answer.  I suppose it’s just one of those… things.

……………………

It strikes me that with each passing year, I move one year further from the bottom baseline of adulthood.

P.S. For those who choose to orbit the Sun, they may get burned.

A Larouchite posted that here once upon a time on this blog. A threat, of sorts, but to dissect that statement is to arrive at a sort of crippling hole in the psyche of the cult follower. The sun is the Cult Leader — and it appears that this commenter was not self-aware enough to realize who it is that is orbiting the sun — and ergo how much he has debased his sense of identity to the point where he feels he deserves to be put under complete control of the Cult Leader — get too close to his greatness, you see, and he may get burned. Better to do as he says, not exhibit any independent thought… Ken Kronberg and Jeremy Duggan orbited the sun, and they could not handle it. They could not handle this, this differential between MAN and ANIMAL. * (By the way: Do you know the difference between man and the animals? The question that appears to have a rather Fascist answer. But I always thought those No Fear shirts with the slogan “If You’re Not Living Life to the Edge, You’re Just Wasting Space” were kind of fascist.)

Another Larouchite posted this: Umm…everybody past and present on this and other anti LaRouche websites tend to be self appointed “experts” on the life and times of Lyndon LaRouche. Especially D. King. But just remember this; the not too old definition of an expert. “an EX is a HAS-BEEN…a SPERT is a DRIP UNDER PRESSURE.”

“Drip under pressure” from what, exactly? He never answered. Which brings me to the latest noteworthy missive from Larouchepac **…

As an aside: You know, for a supposed political action committee, the “Larouche PAC” sure doesn’t do much for the purpose of any legitimate pac: help elect political candidates that fit the pac’s issues, or working as a tool for various political figures in their “I scratch your back, you scratch mine” of our electoral machinery. A statistic I will have to look up — Out of the funds coming into “Larouchepac”, a grand total of $1550 go to his “Democratic” candidates. Where do the rest go, do you presume?

But anyway, back to Larouche’s insanity regarding suicide and the man who has followed him for the past 3 decades: My first impulse on reading this was to see it as an attempted psychological trick dug out from his article’s recollection of his all too human response to the jarring anonymous caller’s “Why haven’t you killed yourself yet?”, which for Dennis King, I can pretty well assume he has the sympathy and empathy which allows him to transfer those feelings to what it would be like for Ken Kronberg to have similar assaults under relations entirely different from his own.

Larouche is giving us some projection on the state of his soul and/or moral campus. The dehumanization is a part of the stripping out process on the part of his followers, projected from the cult leader.

Re-reading it, I come to a more sinister thought — successfully doubling of that square of sinisterism, I suppose. The Manchurian Candidate scenario, which past Larouche incarnations have been obsessed with (as Larouche posits threats supposedly happening from the outside but really happening from the inside of the cult.) He is saying that to continue on Larouche’s scent is an act of suicide. Continue on your suicide run, Dennis King, or don’t — it is up to you. “Nice House. It’s a shame if anything happens to it.” You are dead, either soulless or literally.

His words are disingenuous — clearly Dennis King is front and central in Larouche’s mind right about now, and clearly King hit paydirt with this article. The disingenuousness stems partially from the fact that Larouche gives King a bit too much power in directing unfavorable (and neutral) news about him. When I posted a series of posts going through Larouche’s past 4 decades of history — as presented in mainstream news sources — and let me make clear to you: I had and still have nothing that is not available to a patron of the library system of a middle sized city — the Larouchites finally butted in with an attack on Dennis King. I could only shrug and suggest that I do not need Dennis King to tell me about Operation Mop Up, and coin the phrase “Dennis King, of High Times Magazine single article fame”. (Though, I guess I do need him to tell me about conferences with old Nazis advocating SDI technology for their own strange purposes.)

Actually I think he has Avi Klein’s forthcoming article on his mind, and there is a degree to which Avi Klein is simply transferred to Dennis King. King has been demonized to the point of not being human — What was that he typed at the beginning of the Ken Kronberg fall-out, somehow tying things through John Train?
Lyndon Larouche has repeatedly noted that he’s never had a political enemy who has tried to destroy him, who was not thoroughly evil.
I would not have mentioned Avi Klein’s article [I have taken to referencing it rather vaguely] except I noticed that King updated his essay with an explication for “this might be the end game, folks” — which is, in the end, what is irking LaRouche like crazy. I posited in my last Larouche-related post, which Rachel Holmes backed up, that the spotlight turned on Larouche in 1986 (and again in 1988) did indeed destroy him — and then he rose from the dead… at half strength. Able to exploit the post 9/11 climate and the Bush era for what will prove to be his final go at whatever the hell his project is supposed to have been, he had the right memes at the right time to bring in one last spurt of followers.

I have surmised for quite some time that the post-game — the post-game being after Larouche passes away — has several splintered organizations which will be easily identified as descendants of Larouche’s stupid cult. For all I know, one or two of them might develop into something productive — though not under the leadership of the Jeff Steinbergs*** of the world. The glue that held Larouche together, and not just Larouche but various criminal opportunists who apparently allow its existence, are thrust apart. The goal of Larouche, if he can possibly find his way past the internal chaos of his cult, is to ensure his Cult of Personality fall into the proper hands and someone who will send all glory to Larouche. Considering his crew, and the Machivellian games he has had them operating under, good luck with that. He best have a few highly capable LYMers (the best and the brightest? Ivy League drop outs?) he can somehow harrange straight to Hegla Zepp.

…………………

LaRouche’s approach to death has always been to threaten, as if he had the power of life or death. For many years, even while in the organization, I wondered why, every time an “enemy” of LaRouche died, he gloated, claiming, in one way or another, that the dead enemy had received a “just” punishment. Only the very young could buy into such megalomaniacal
insanity.

And that is the problem, the LYM are, for the most part, very young. The LYM is composed of the same generation that brought the world Columbine, Virginia Tech., Red Lake and other massacres. It is all well and good for LaRouche to blame these massacres on video games and baby-boomer parents, but, since he has claimed to be a powerful, world leader for the entire time these kids have been alive, why isn’t he also to blame?

Further, it is beyond question that some of the LYM are unstable, and are being made more unstable by their intensely coercive living conditions, and LaRouche’s policy of taking away their medications. I have asked before, is it possible that a zealous member of the LaRouche Youth Movement, hyper-stimulated by the rhetoric of Helga et al concerning Jeremiah Duggan’s supposed connections to the British Royalty/Zionist/Tavistock conspiracy to kill LaRouche, took it upon him- or her- self, to protect the LaRouches by killing Jeremiah? If so, how would LaRouche’s statements concerning Dennis King’s “death wish” be interpreted by such an unstable LYM’er?

Two more points:

1. LaRouche has killed people in the past by deploying them 16 hours a day, not paying them enough for proper nourishment, and denying them proper health care. Despite his grandiose claims of having been a leader in industry in the 1950’s, nobody, except a Third World sweat shop owner, would force people to live on $5-7 a day, share a bedroom with four unrelated people, and take away medications without a legitimate doctor’s opinion. Or force pregnant employees to have abortions [I’m not going to let up on this]

2. Do the second generation LYM’ers know that their “caring” guru-LaRouche demanded that their parents abort them, and that he railed mercilessly against the members who dared to defy LaRouche and have babies?

……………..

* A few years ago, a current Larouchie harranged a just exited ex-Larouchie with words to the effect of “Couldn’t Handle the Fight”. I take this to be representative of their attitude, and how they have steeled themselves for their card-table-shrine duty.

** As a matter of course, I will avoid linking to his set of websites. Thus I link to my posting of what he posted on the website. I am told that elsewhere on the website, he links to this missive with an old photograph of Dennis King — which does add a certain credence to the “Manchurian Candidate” concept.

*** sp? Either it ends with an “er” or not. Frankly, I don’t care enough to check to see if I got his name right. I note that the Larouche feed spit out an article from him on Cheney’s “Guns of August” — which seems to use the considerable resources of Larouche’s vaunted Intelligence Service to do little more than cite an article in the Guardian. And I note that the Guardian was just recently trashed by Larouche in connection with the author of that New Republic piece.

The other day I heard a rap album.  I am not a fan of “the rap” or “the hip hop”, though I recognized this as being a cut above in terms of quality.  I can’t eschew things that obviously have strong influences from hip hop or hip hop culture — the effect is that I skirt a few edges on my pandora.com playlist and have to violently throw down a “thumbs down DO NOT PLAY” when the site decides to trip along from genre influence to genre.

There’s a certain narrowness of range in terms of lyrical content that I have always found annoying with hip hop, and a certain narcissism.  The effect is I can’t help but think I’ve stumbled into a wasting of talent on the small and insignificant — a little too much chasing and eating of own tails.
This album was more or less good, though.  In terms of race and gender relations, um… “keeping it real”, um… “in the hood”… who can go wrong with “Dark skin girls are better than light skin, light skin girls ain’t better than dark skin”.  Some Ivy League Grad student can do a Cultural Studies Graduate thesis on the cultural and sociological undercurrents inherent in that song’s premise.

Okay, seriously, that and another song with a narrative on getting annoyed with his brother for overstaying his welcome by crashing on his couch were good.  People can relate to them.  Stories are told.  A google search shows that I was hearing Del The Funky Homosapien — whether I will keep that in a mental file or not, I do not know.
Somewhere along the line, though, I heard two references thrown out to Vanilla Ice.  Disparaging, naturally.  I can’t defend Vanilla Ice as much more than a media creation which flamed out badly, but my thought was that I sure as Heck hope that these references date the songs to no later than maybe, at the latest 1996 (and I realize that Offspring got away with a reference in “You’re Pretty Fly for a White Guy” in 1998, and not jabbing at that makes me a hypocrite of sorts)– it seems pointless to harp on Vanilla Ice as a fraudulent poseur orbiting your musical domain that needs to be mocked away.  The problem is that I do not know that they do — Vanilla Ice is a short-hand and easy out.

Sometime past his televised nervous break-down, Van Winkle has had the last laugh — insofar as he hired great money managers during his 15 minutes of fame that has allowed him to maintain his wealth which makes that whole Punching Bag thing moot.

Well, this is an unpleasant turn of events.

The doctors _ whose names were blacked out _ said that the bullet holes were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.

Ultimately, the Pentagon did conduct a criminal investigation, and asked Tillman’s comrades whether he was disliked by his men and whether they had any reason to believe he was deliberately killed. The Pentagon eventually ruled that Tillman’s death at the hands of his comrades was a friendly-fire accident.

[…]
_ In his last words moments before he was killed, Tillman snapped at a panicky comrade under fire to shut up and stop “sniveling.”

_ Army attorneys sent each other congratulatory e-mails for keeping criminal investigators at bay as the Army conducted an internal friendly-fire investigation that resulted in administrative, or non-criminal, punishments.

_ The three-star general who kept the truth about Tillman’s death from his family and the public told investigators some 70 times that he had a bad memory and couldn’t recall details of his actions.

_ No evidence at all of enemy fire was found at the scene _ no one was hit by enemy fire, nor was any government equipment struck.

What I had supposed was bad enough — a Friendly fire accident blown out to Hero under Fire for a quick Draft Day Propaganda Play — followed by the necessary dismissal as inconvenient information spouted out.  I have a difficult time wrapping my mind around this, but then again I’ve developed a one-dimensional and not terribly sophisticated view of what happens on the battle-field — comradeship trumps all.
I have a faint feeling that some interesting things would be posted on Free Republic right about now.  The gutteral emotional response for Pat Tillman, and on to the political identity ramifications, are nothing if not a roller-coaster ride and schizophrenic — although to be fair, they’ve solved part of the confusion by simply denying the inconvenient.  (And my first thought on seeing this news release was an image of someone in his brigade telling him to shut up his “defeatocrat” rantings — something I brushed out of mind because — really, what do I know?)  The quickest of searches brings me the comments for the posting of the story Pat Tillman’s Mother Accuses Bush of Hiding Facts (Which, perhaps not Bush himself but his administration, is pretty well a given)

Sounds like she’s about to go Cindy Sheehan all over us.

OR to the article on his brother speaking on the Pentagon:

Pat Tillman’s brother Kevin speaks out against war (Kevin Tillman Goes Cindy Sheehan)

“Follow the money….”Isn’t ESPN owned by ABC, which in turn is owned by Disney, which in turn is very leftist?

I did finally find the posting of the story, under a “Warning: Lefty Smear Campaign Alert”.  A number of gunfire re-enactments to counter the story, and there is a certain amount of haggling over whether item #1 and #4 contradict each other.  Also prisonplanet is a “lefty” site, a notion that will be dispelled during the next Democratic presidency, probably (Or right this minute if you want to read its illegal immigration rhetoric).
All in all I probably should not have gone there.

The two sort of conventional “unconventional claims” on the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt are either contradictory, or weirdly compatible.

I am not speaking of the anti-Roosevelt faction meted out in the occasional George Will column — the conservative actions against Big Government — which lines up to “The New Deal didn’t get us out of the Great Depression”.  I tack to a couple of positions that could be described “progressive”, perhaps a progressivism measured out with conspiranoia, but it aligns itself there nonetheless.

The BBC has recently aired a program, I believe because a new book has just been published (as well the old book has recently been republished) — on “The Fascist Plot to Sieze the White House“.   The key name that has been dropped into this fracas, which was not mentioned in any mention of Smedley Butler’s claims between the 1930s and through — probably until today, but certainly through the 1970s — Prescott Bush.

And thus FDR is the bulwark against Mussolini’s mode of Fascism, as represented by the Bushes — who weaved themselves through the Republican Party and through the Government Apparatus — and which shows itself in the current administration.  Who were, at the time, deafly afraid of the courageous reforms and changes he was bringing to bear on the established order.
If you must.  Everything stems from the question “If they attempted it rather crudely with Smedley Butler, who’s to say they didn’t just keep on going with more sophisticated tactics.”

Any number of CIA experiments come to mind.

Or else you may go to, say, Walter Karp and his book Indispensable Enemies.   FDR kept the old order going, serving as a bulwark against the angry masses — handing “Big Business” every single thing they wanted, beyond even what Herbert Hoover dared grant these Special Interests — all the while making sure to let the Republican Party off the hook and back into the Political Game.  Then he started preaching warfare in 1937, and ended whatever goodness emenated from “The New Deal”.

At a more conspiratorial angle than Walter Karp dares offer, this has FDR looking the other way to, well, in the current political climatology we end up focusing in on Prescott Bush.  But the names have to be rather temporal — even if they are part of the same basket from 1933– based on who on that ledger is up or down.

There’s a bit of “I Want to Believe” in these crevices of the mind.  But the secret sometimes stares a bit closer and clearer in one’s face.
So what was Roosevelt?  Both and neither, I suppose.

(At the end of a string defending myself.) I don’t think Larouche is listening.

— LaRouche is not listening, but believe me, some of the folks in the org are listening. Or reading. (Of course, ex-members read this material voraciously too–just as I am convinced that ex-members account for a very high percentage of the hits on the LPAC website that the org is so proud of.)

— But members still locked in the org are also reading and reading and reading–welcome, one and all (pretty much–except for the members who read FactNet as part of the endless “investigative” work that the org does in “monitoring” its “enemies”).

(Shrug). HELLO LEESBURG!
I posted two paragraphs from Dennis King’s latest, and most noteworthy, article, on the power a cult leader holds in suggesting Suicide — over on the sidebar. Then there’s the final few sentences. The ex-members are outraged, the boomers still inside the organization are upset, and the “yutes” (LaRouche Youth Movement members) are confused. LaRouche, it would appear, has finally opened Pandora’s Box. This may be the end game, folks.

Tap tap tap…
I am certainly not in a position to argue, or to agree for that matter. But I am reminded of the number of times an article in the mainstream media reported on Larouche and suggested that, for example when his Illinois followers won those two Democratic nominations in 1986, “but will the spotlight shined on him be the end of him?”

Though, in a sense, these things did destroy him.  Imagine you kill a zombie. He returns from the dead — at half strength. You kill him again.  And he returns again — once again, at half strength. Posit up any metric you want, and Larouche will fail to measure up to his old standard, except perhaps in terms of his Grandiose Vision of himself which is a constant unchangeable. (Once upon a time he had decent CIA contacts; now he just appears to google.) So comments like this are what we have: Somewhat disappointed that LaRouche is still alive….so conventional of me.

The mindset of the Fantasy Shadow Government, and if I may quibble with this found at the “larouchewatch” blog: If Hillary supports the resolution, and then gets elected, wanna bet LHL will be expecting an invite to sleep in Lincoln’s bedroom? — It’s not so much that Larouche will be expecting anything, as he will claim such a thing. He’s a close adviser to Bill Clinton, you see.
Cut his strengths in half enough times, and eventually it will just Larouche in a strait-jacket, directing world affairs in his own mind.
From an ex-Larouchie at FACTNet:

Things have changed in Leesburg. From what I am picking up, members are challenging, complaining, muttering.
The place leaks like a sieve, because members and non-members fraternize like crazy now–something that never happened in the past to this degree.
The insulation and isolation that was preserved so effectively in the past is eroding beyond repair because so many people in Leesburg, including NEC members, now work. (Everyone who isn’t independently wealthy or running some special scam or VERY IMPORTANT to Lyn is either working or married to someone who’s working.) “Outside” contact–whether ex-member friends, non-member friends, outside jobs–is popping the bubble.
That means that there is potential for constant leaks, uncontrollable, and also for unrest in the ranks.

Again, I can’t argue or agree, and if this spitting out at the wind were a serious enough threat to their own Special Oligarchy I’d receive denials of such. BUT… continuing on with this message, to the other side of the ledger, conflicting with the signs of breakage.

This all pertains to Leesburg. In the regions, the NCs suffer from a 30-year addiction to being absolute dictators, which is reinforced by the communalism imposed on the LYM, and the general attitude associated with the LaRouche Jugend Bewegung.
And back a bit:
The problem however may lie in the fact that it appears that new recruits are subjected to a much more brutal and coercive and isolated existence than even we members from the earlier 70s, 80s and 90s were exposed to.

These things are probably now more necessary than ever to maintain an increasingly credulous claim to “World Historic Figure” in this day and age, where one can theoretically be hermetically secluded in an obscure corner of the globe and with an Internet connection still have connections with the outside world. With that in mind, it appears that Larouche has ripped some pages off his websites. Note that the Dennis King website linked page on “Larouche served notice on his Jewish ‘boomers’ in 2005” is no longer there.
I wonder what else has been cut. I always thought one could use any number of examples of Larouche disparaging his boomers — or the equivalent of disparaging boomers in general while praising his Youth. Since this has been the very basis of the past half a dozen years of cult positioning, surely they can’t all be just tossed to the wind. Maybe that particular page wasn’t subtle enough.
So here’s the dirty little secret. “Leaking like a sieve”, internal memos flowing out like an avalanche — and I return to the comment Bettag left on this blog about “those stolen documents”, a misnomer that she didn’t actually believe (but which allowed the acknowledgment of accuracy against an earlier insinuation of “slander”.). Maybe the Leesburg gang cares one iota about that situation, perhaps they don’t. But these things — these Daily Briefings — aren’t really needed to get an overview of the events of Larouche-land. It always manifests itself in the Larouche literature, which — after all — is produced primarily for the consumption of the cult members — and thus reflects what he means to knock into their head. (Secondarily any off-hand random supporter of whatever cause — Damned ye, Al Gore. Damned ye, Dick Cheney).
The Dirty Laundry of Larouche’s organization, and its means of control and its circled wagon, is aired right there in the open, thinly submerged behind lines about Synarchist Plots and a supposed “BAE Scandal” or three — if something is beaten to the ground beyond any comprehension, there is a good bet that the external crisis is hiding an inflamed internal crisis. Just toss in a few old lines about Jeremy Duggan in unrelated treatsies, and I think we can measure that Rorschach Test pretty easily.
But Larouche can get great mileage from blasting away anyone who bothers to read these things and reports back on what they just read.