W. Niederhut

The MAGAts have been endlessly repeating memes and tropes about Biden's alleged senility ever since Mango Mussolini began calling Biden "Sleepy Joe" back in 2019. Yet, Biden has delivered a series of articulate, thoughtful speeches since 2020, (Acceptance, Inaugural, State of the Union, etc.) in addition to trouncing Trump in their 2020 debates. Of course, we all lose brain cells as we age, and Biden is no spring chicken, but these same MAGAts seem to be unaware of Trump's stroke a few years ago -- after which he began to noticeably slur his words and drag his right leg. It was around the time that Trump had obvious difficulty walking down that ramp at West Point. But, as always, Trump aggressively projected his own defects on to his adversary-- in the same way that the MAGAts have repeatedly accused the adversary of Ghislaine Maxwell's Orange Friend of being a pedophile.

Addendum: Hedges initial comments about corporate plutocracy are correct, but he's dead wrong about alleged policy equivalence between the two parties. This is the same false equivalence argument that Ben has re-posted endlessly. Hedges' false equivalence claims are debunked by the facts of U.S. legislative history.

Chris Hedges makes a number of blatantly inaccurate assertions in this article, especially his claims about allegedly similar Republican and Democratic policy positions on healthcare policy. Let's not forget that the Republicons repeatedly sought to sabotage and overturn the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion, and passed major funding cuts for Medicaid in December of 2017. They are also planning to force cuts in funding for Social Security and Medicare in 2023 if they regain control of the House. My response to Chris Hedges is, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

Shocking stuff, really. Jagger and the Stones should have sued the U.S. government, although only a handful of people knew the MK-Ultra details at the time, including Richard Helms. The CIA MK-Ultra guys were awfully cavalier about their use of unwitting civilian guinea pigs-- including mental health patients, hippies, and even non-rockabilly rock stars, etc. Notice that they never gave acid to performers like Elvis and Pat Boone.

John, I don't have any data on the subject, but I'm not aware of any violence in the U.S. toward people who refused to wear masks or get vaccinated during the height of the COVID pandemic. But I am aware of many news stories and firsthand reports of people getting angry and violent about being told to wear masks in public settings. There has also been a strong correlation between anti-mask/anti-vax sentiment, higher COVID death rates, and Trumpism in the U.S. Trump, unfortunately, fostered resistance to basic public health measures during the pandemic, even hosting deadly super spreader campaign rallies in 2020.

Interesting. Kinzer writes about Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, and Grateful Dead song writer Robert Hunter taking LSD at Stanford, as I recall. I once listened to an interview of Jerry Garcia where Garcia talked about trying LSD at Kesey's electric kool-aid acid parties in the Bay Area during the formative days of the Dead. He said LSD gave him a sense of "infinite creative possibilities." Kinzer also described Sidney Gottlieb's frequent, avid use of LSD, and the way that the drug became quite popular in academic and celebrity circles. Cary Grant, reportedly, experienced it as a life-altering antidepressant.

Tusko the Elephant and Jolly West are mentioned at the end of Poisoner-in-Chief. Frank Olson's life and death are also covered in detail. I didn't realize from watching Errol Morris's documentary, Wormwood, that Frank Olson had traveled with Gottlieb to visit some of the sites in Europe where Gottlieb's MK-Ultra experiments (and murders) were conducted.

Kinzer covers some of the same ground as Tom O'Neill, but O'Neill's book has more detail about Jolly West and the Haight Asbury "clinic."

It's worse than that, Kirk. Trump has been "stochastically" promoting right wing violence in the U.S. since 2016-- as the American University professor described in the Vox article I posted above. And Trump has done this in a way that is technically legal-- at least prior to January 6th. But he crossed the Brandenburg v. Ohio line on the morning of January 6th, IMO.

Actually, Paul, it's a thread about Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA and MK-Ultra. But Dylan has, obviously, been interested in the subject, as we learned from his hit song, Murder Most Foul.

A somewhat odd coincidence. This afternoon, I just happened to finish reading Stephen Kinzer's 2019 biography of MK-Ultra mastermind, Sidney Gottlieb, Poisoner-in-Chief. So, looking for some lighter reading material this evening, I resumed Bob Dylan's new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, and eventually arrived at Chapter 27, pausing before each song/chapter to listen to the YouTube recording of the song for the chapter. (One of tonight's chapters was about Marty Robbins' 1959 cowboy ballad, El Paso, which I knew by heart when I was a kid, but hadn't listened to for decades.) Anyway, chapter 27 is about the Fugs 1967 proto-punk song, C.I.A. Man. I had heard this song before somewhere but I can't remember where. Was it part of a movie soundtrack? Punk rock historian Cliff Varnell probably knows. I was a bit surprised to hear in the lyrics that the Fugs, obviously, knew in 1967 about Sidney Gottlieb's MK-Ultra LSD research projects-- more than a decade before John Marks published The Search For the Manchurian Candidate, based on the MK-Ultra financial records. But, as Kinzer pointed out, John Lennon and other rockers also knew about the CIA's role in pushing LSD, because Lennon once said, "We must remember to thank the CIA for giving us LSD." Dylan mentions that the Fugs took their name from Norman Mailer's novel, The Naked and the Dead, where Mailer used "fug" for "f*ck" to circumvent obscenity allegations. He also includes a photo in Chapter 27 of Allen Dulles' CIA photo ID card. The recording is raw and out-of-tune, like something Iggy Pop might have recorded in a garage, but it's funny.

Addendum: I'm not a lawyer, but I think that Trump met the high threshold in the Brandenburg v. Ohio ruling for the direct incitement of imminent violence at the Capitol on January 6th-- especially since he knew that his angry MAGA mob was armed when he directed them to march on the Capitol.

Some key points here about "stochastic terrorism" and the Trump MAGA cult-- as exemplified by MAGA Bomber Cesar Sayoc, the Baltimore newspaper murders, the El Paso Walmart Massacre, the Whitmer kidnap plot, January 6th, the Pelosi hammer attack, etc. Stochastic terror in American politics creates an environment of violence - Vox November 5, 2022 Excerpts 1) Stochastic terror — the idea that even if people in power don’t specifically call their followers to violence, by entertaining it as a legitimate tactic or by demonizing a political enemy on a platform capable of reaching millions of people, one of those millions will be inspired to violent action — provides a framework for understanding the current moment. 2) Stochastic terrorism or stochastic terror is a unique kind of phenomenon that we’ve only really seen emerge in recent years. Stochastic is a term related to statistics that’s meant to define processes that, individually, they’re absolutely impossible to predict when and where something happens. 3) It’s important to note that stochastic terrorism, this indirect incitement, is not illegal. It’s protected by the First Amendment because the legal threshold for incitement to violence is so high. There’s a case, Brandenburg v. Ohio, where the Supreme Court ruled that for something to be incitement, there needs to be direction, and the incident needs to happen immediately after the direction. And stochastic terrorism doesn’t achieve either of those. So although the language does not meet the legal threshold for incitement, it nonetheless motivates people to actually engage in violence. 4) Most of what we call stochastic terrorism has been initiated or has been motivated by deliberately spread disinformation — that demonizes others, that tags other individuals, usually political opponents, as mortal threats. And if you look at most models for violent radicalization or radicalization to terrorism, one of the steps in those processes usually involves perceiving the intended target as being a direct mortal threat to an individual’s survival. So the kinds of disinformation that are being spun about certain targets as being these threats to the United States, to election processes, to political parties, by spinning them as mortal threats, the individual who’s exposed to the message is much more likely to perceive that person as a threat and deserving of violence against them.

Geez, Mathew, speaking of the "normalization of right wing political violence" by the MAGA cult... You remind me of Ben denying the significance of the armaments stash during the J6 coup attempt. The Militiamen Conspiring to Kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer: A Threat to Democracy? (esquire.com) October 17, 2022 Further corroboration, if even required, that these men were just who they seemed to be came when two of the six (Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks) struck plea bargains, agreeing to plead guilty and testify against their accomplices in hopes of receiving a reduced sentence. Need more? Among the property confiscated from those arrested were at least seventy guns, along with sundry magazines, suppressors, scopes, and silencers; abundant ammunition; and various explosives. Even more? Well, perhaps it’s easiest to get a clear flavor of who the remaining four men (Adam Fox, Barry Croft, Daniel Harris, and Brandon Caserta) were, and of how they thought, and of their intentions, by listening to their own words, recorded while under surveillance. Fox: “Snatch and grab, man. Grab the xxxxin’ governor. Just grab the bitch. Because at that point, we do that, dude—it’s over.” Caserta: “When the time comes, there will be no need to try and strike fear through presence. The fear will be manifested through bullets.” Croft: “Wham! A quick, precise grab on that xxxxing governor. And all you’re going to end up having to possibly take out is her armed guard.” Harris: “Have one person go to her house. Knock on the door, and when she answers it just cap her . . . at this point. xxxx it.” Fox: “I want to have the governor hog-tied, laid out on a table, while we all pose around like we just made the world’s biggest goddamn drug bust, bro." Caserta: “And I’m telling you what, right now, man, I’m going to make this dooky 100 percent clear, dude, if this dooky goes down. Okay? If this whole thing starts to happen. I’m telling you what, dude, I’m taking out as many of those motherxxxxers as I can. Every single one, dude. Every single one.” Reading all this, maybe you’re thinking that the only other words you really want to hear are a succinct confirmation that the speakers will all be in prison for a very long time.

"Morrison, Musico and Bellar were among 14 men arrested in October 2020 on state and federal charges related to the plot to kidnap Whitmer at her summer home in Elk Rapids, try her for treason over her coronavirus mandates, and then execute her."

With all of the recent, lengthy nightly updates from the MAGA-verse by Ben and Mathew Koch, I noticed that this big news story was never posted here on the 56 Years thread. Did Fox News cover this story, Mathew? When else, in the course of American history, did an armed partisan militia ever conspire to kidnap and execute a U.S. governor? And let's recall that this kidnap/execution plot was conceived in the context of the Orange Stochastic Terrorist-in-Chief repeatedly denouncing Governor Whitmer for implementing basic public health measures during a deadly pandemic! Three militia members guilty in plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer www.rawstory.com/whitmer-kidnapping-plot/ October 26, 2022

Chad Wolf is the same sleazeball who erased DHS J6 texts. Meanwhile, it looks like Mathew Koch, like most Fox News watching MAGAts, is still unaware of the documented cases of violent right wing agent provocateurs who posed as BLM protesters after George Floyd's murder.

It was a Deep State fake terrorism plot, all right, but not the one Benjamin Cole imagined... 🤥 Homeland Security Admits It Tried to Manufacture Fake Terrorists for Trump (yahoo.com)

So, this isn't about the JFK assassination, but I wanted to report that I got a hardback copy of Dylan's new book today, and read the first few chapters, listening to the song for each chapter on YouTube as I proceeded. There's a lot of interesting Americana from the past 70+ years, with old photographs and brief, often humorous, Dylan commentaries about the songs and artists. "Did Elvis know what he was singing about when he sang Tutti Frutti on the Ed Sullivan Show?" I hadn't heard some of these songs for 30, 40, 50, or 60 years-- Without a Song, (Perry Como) The Ballad of Jesse James, Money Honey, (Elvis) and Pump It Up (Elvis Costello.) Some of these recordings are quite obscure, like parts of the commentary. So far, it's a fun read.

Sure thing, Ben, but let's be clear about the nature of the disagreement. I don't believe that there is any meaningful equivalence between America's wave of right wing MAGA violence in the age of Trump-- including the unprecedented J6 attack on Congress-- and Democratic violence. Nor have Democratic leaders and media figures incited violence against citizens and public officials the way that Trump and the right wing media have done in recent years. Even in the case of the George Floyd protests, numerous instances of violence toward property and the police (e.g., in Minneapolis) were perpetrated by right wing agent provocateurs posing as BLM protesters-- in addition to over 60 instances of vehicles being driven into crowds of BLM protesters. Trump is a stochastic terrorist.

Dylan has always had an uncanny knack for remembering his lyrics, but I would be amazed if even he could remember all of the lyrics of Murder Most Foul on stage, especially at his advanced age. Geez, I can't even remember half of the time if I took my blood pressure pill in the morning. 🤥

Ben, Go back and re-read what I wrote about Max Boot and his recent article about the non-equivalence of right wing MAGA violence in the U.S. today and rare incidents of violence by liberals. It, obviously sailed over your head, along with all of the factual details in the article. But, then again, you have always been quite adept at ignoring facts that contradict your fixed paradigms-- confirmation bias on steroids. As for the CFR, as I said, I have never been a Max Boot fan, but even a blind squirrel finds an acorn on occasion.

Well, this is just bonkers. A "break out," not a "break in," at the Pelosi house? Also, shockingly, Benjamin Cole never read the Max Boot article I recently posted for him which explained, in detail, why there is no meaningful equivalence between right wing Trumplicon violence in the U.S. today and rare reports of alleged liberal violence. Way to go, Ben! Da Nile ain't just a river in Egypt, eh?

From the terrific In Search of the Lost Chord album. I still listen to that album, Ron-- and have for 54 years now. (I have an old vinyl copy and a modern era CD.)