W. Niederhut

Somebody needs to record an updated variation of the old Beatles hit entitled, "I Don't Wanna Hold Your Hand." 🤥

So, it looks like Ratcliffe's ratty presser last night may have been primarily a smoke screen-- a public relations stunt to deflect attention from the story of Russian election interference to help Trump and the GOP.

Mark, Your entire erroneous argument about Prouty allegedly "lying," and "erasing" his testimony about the Antarctica detail hinges upon one word-- "routine." What did Prouty actually mean when he said that the November 1963 Antarctica flight detail was "routine?" You have misinterpreted that statement to mean that there was nothing unusual-- nothing fishy -- about the detail. But Prouty may have been merely referring to the fact that the detail was within the scope of his official duties as a Colonel in the U.S. Air Force. In contrast, he very specifically wondered about the timing of the assignment after JFK was murdered-- especially in light of the fact that he had been directly involved in the intel work culminating in JFK's critically important NSAM263 of October 1963. Little wonder that a "routine" flight detail at that time seemed fishy after 11/22/63. Now, my next question. What "disinformation" do you imagine Prouty was disseminating? Do tell.

Well said, Joe. Frankly, I'm surprised that anyone who has carefully studied his work would impugn L. Fletcher Prouty's integrity. He was a gem, and a rare, perceptive witness of important Deep State events during JFK's presidency who spilled the beans. He mentioned in one of his books, possibly The Secret Team, that he was one person involved in CIA Special Ops who never had to sign one of Allen Dulles's Non-Disclosure Agreements. Two questions that I have for Mark and Rob. 1) Have you read JFK-- The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy? 2) If Prouty was not concerned about being targeted by the CIA, why was he so careful about concealing his contact with Jim Garrison during the Garrison investigation?

Chuck Schumer claims that Ratcliffe's press statement about Iranian election interference differs from what Ratcliffe told the Senate on the subject. In the Senate intel briefing, Ratcliffe did not present any evidence of alleged Iranian targeting of Trump. So, in addition to violating the Hatch Act, Ratcliffe is lying. I smell a rat.

Bingo. This lingo about "routine" is misleading. Was the assignment, technically, within the scope of Prouty's official duties? Yes. But the November 1963 Antarctica assignment by Lansdale was unusual -- as Prouty points out in detail in his 1992 opus -- because, at the time, Prouty had been deeply involved, with General Krulak, in helping to document and frame JFK's NSAM263 Vietnam policy. And the NSAM 263 policy was being discussed and reversed by McGeorge Bundy, et.al., in Honolulu the week JFK was murdered. In fact, as I recall, the draft of NSAM 273 which LBJ signed on 11/25/63 was dated 11/21/63!

Interesting analysis, and a methodology that could also be applied to the morbidity and mortality stats for the victims -- foreign and domestic-- of our "War on Terror" since 9/11.

Yes, and now we're supposed to believe what Trump's political hacks in charge of the FBI and DNI -- Wray and Ratcliffe-- are telling us about alleged Iranian and Russian hackers undermining Trump. This latest GOP October Surprise not only makes no sense, it looks like another violation of the Hatch Act.

Prouty published his major, detailed opus on the subject of the CIA, Vietnam, and the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy, in 1992. 92-63= 29.

Mark, Where did you get the notion that Prouty was "speaking out for 30 years" about his detailed personal knowledge of the secret history of the CIA, Vietnam, and the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy? On the contrary, Prouty waited for almost 30 years to finally tell the world what he knew about the Deep State events of late 1963. Any thoughts about why he waited 30 years?

Rob, You missed my point entirely. American Presidential nominees in our nation's history traditionally refrained entirely from "campaigning" after receiving their party's nominations for the Presidency. They usually sequestered themselves in their homes and assiduously refrained from commenting on the upcoming elections. Of course, we all know that this admirable American tradition eventually went the way of the dodo, long before the current age of multi-billion dollar expenditures on television ads, and staged campaign blathering. This week, during a major COVID surge in many parts of the U.S., Sean Hannity and Trump's goon squad are ridiculing Joe Biden for doing precisely what many of America's greatest Presidents did-- refraining from self-promotion. Meanwhile, Trump is frantically deploying his "Firehose of Falsehoods" approach to gas-lighting his mask-free cult from the stump. No surprise. Conning people is the one thing Trump is good at. But, if you really believe that Trump's latest Firehose of Falsehoods methodology is beneficial for this country, we'll have to agree to disagree. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/trump-lies-disinformation-playbook/

Perhaps Prouty didn't want to end up committing "suicide" with a CIA shotgun. He, obviously, understood full well what the CIA had done to other witnesses during the previous 30 years. Read the book. It also describes a number of details about Prouty's consultations with Oliver Stone on the landmark film, JFK.

Rob, If you study some actual American history, you will learn that, traditionally, American Presidential candidates assiduously avoided "campaigning" after receiving their nominations. It was consider inappropriate and unethical. Naturally, Trump takes to it like a flatulent duck to water.

Mark, I would encourage you and Rob to actually read Prouty's book, JFK-- The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy. It's a gold mine of detailed information about the history of the Vietnam War prior to 1964, and JFK's conflicts with the CIA and the Joint Chiefs-- written by an eyewitness who was responsible for creating the Special Operations Office of the Joint Chiefs to coordinate their liaison with the CIA. (Contrary to on-line disinfo by McAdams, et.al., Prouty was far more than a CIA chauffeur.) From your comments here, I can tell that you don't really understand the context of Prouty's November 1963 Antarctic trip, or the detailed back story of Prouty's involvement in writing the September 1963 McNamara/Taylor Report which led to JFK's October 1963 NSAM263. I had to dig up my old paperback copy of the book to find Prouty's detailed account of the incident. Herewith... (italics mine) "By the fall of 1963, I knew perhaps as much as anyone about the detailed workings of this world of special operations. I had written the formal directives on the subject that were used by the Joint Chiefs for all military services. Therefore it seemed strange when I was approached after I had come back from a week spent reading intelligence papers in Admiral Felt's headquarters in Hawaii, during September 1963, and informed that I had been selected to be the military escort officer for a group of VIP civilian guests that had been invited to visit the naval station in Antarctica... ...Although the trip had absolutely nothing to do with my previous nine years of work, except that I had supported CIA activity in Antarctica over the years..." JFK-- The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (Skyhorse Publishing/ 2011, pg. 283-84)

Rob, What's "routine" about Prouty being sent by Ed Lansdale on a field trip to Antarctica during JFK's assassination? Have you read Prouty's detailed accounts of his experiences during and after JFK's murder, and with Ed Lansdale in Southeast Asia and D.C.? The reason I ask is that, from what I have read on the subject, Prouty was subjected to a significant smear campaign (by McAdams, et.al.) after the publication of The Secret Team, and JFK-- The CIA, Vietnam, and the Assassination of President Kennedy. The on-line disinfo about Prouty's career and writings seems to bear little or no relationship to his own detailed descriptions of events in the Kennedy administration that he witnessed personally. Among other things, Prouty has been labelled by CIA propagandists as a mere "chauffeur," etc., despite having served with General Victor Krulak as a White House briefing officer and Chief Liaison between the Joint Chiefs and the CIA during JFK's presidency. Prouty also had a great deal to say about his co-authorship, with Krulak, of the September 1963 McNamara-Taylor Report that was integral to JFK's issuance of NSAM263 in October of 1963. Quite a talented chauffeur! 🤥

On the contrary. The delusional people are the ones who still believe the Warren Commission Report.

We can add this one to the list of your other delusions.

Rob, Who said that I was joking? There's nothing funny about Trump's sociopathy. On the contrary, it's dangerous and destructive for this country, and for the human race. As for the shock collar, how did Chris Wallace's repeated attempts to remind Trump of the rules in the first debate work out? Wallace kept appealing to Trump's "conscience," to respect the rules of the debate, which Trump's campaign had agreed to beforehand. It accomplished nothing, because Trump has no conscience-- no moral compass. Now, picture Trump wearing a shock collar in a debate. Do you think he would abide by the rules? My hunch is that he would start by yelling about being treated unfairly by the media, but would shut up and follow the rules after a few shocks.

In Trump's case, the electro-shock collar is an excellent idea. One of my favorite psychiatry professors back in the day taught me that sociopaths only respond to the threat of external consequences for their behavior. It's a waste of time to appeal to their conscience, because they have none.

My wife and I just dropped off our ballots today. Then I saw a photo of this yard sign (posted at the Democratic Underground.)

Ron, Half of the WaPo article is personal anecdotal stuff about people who were infected at Sturgis. Here are a few non-anecdotal excerpts... October 17, 2020 Within weeks of the gathering, the Dakotas, along with Wyoming, Minnesota and Montana, were leading the nation in new coronavirus infections per capita. The surge was especially pronounced in North and South Dakota, where cases and hospitalization rates continued their juggernaut rise into October. Experts say they will never be able to determine how many of those cases originated at the 10-day rally, given the failure of state and local health officials to identify and monitor attendees returning home, or to trace chains of transmission after people got sick. Some, however, believe the nearly 500,000-person gathering played a role in the outbreak now consuming the Upper Midwest. More than 330 coronavirus cases and one death were directly linked to the rally as of mid-September, according to a Washington Post survey of health departments in 23 states that provided information. But experts say that tally represents just the tip of the iceberg, since contact tracing often doesn’t capture the source of an infection, and asymptomatic spread goes unnoticed. In many ways, Sturgis is an object lesson in the patchwork U.S. response to a virus that has proved remarkably adept at exploiting such gaps to become resurgent. While some states and localities banned even relatively small groups of people, others, like South Dakota, imposed no restrictions — in this case allowing the largest gathering of people in the United States and perhaps anywhere in the world amid the pandemic and creating huge vulnerabilities as tens of thousands of attendees traveled back home to every state in the nation. Many went unmasked to an event public health officials pleaded with them to skip, putting themselves and others at risk, because they were skeptical about the risks, or felt the entreaties infringed on their personal liberties. Rallygoers jammed bars, restaurants, tattoo parlors and concert venues; South Dakota officials later identified four such businesses as sites of potential exposure after learning that infected people had visited them. Despite the concerns expressed by health experts ahead of the event, efforts to urge returnees to self-quarantine lacked enforcement clout and were largely unsuccessful, and the work by state and local officials to identify chains of transmission and stop them was inconsistent and uncoordinated. Those efforts became further complicated when some suspected of having the virus refused to be tested, said Kris Ehresmann, director of infectious-disease epidemiology at the Minnesota Department of Health. Such challenges made it all but impossible to trace the infections attendees may have spread to others after they got home. Several infections tied to a wedding in Minnesota, for instance, “linked back to someone who had gone to Sturgis,” Ehresmann said. Those were not tallied with the Sturgis outbreak because “the web just gets too complicated,” she said. “When it comes to infectious diseases, it’s often the case that the weakest link in the chain is a risk to everybody,” said Josh Michaud, an epidemiologist and associate director for global health policy for the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. "Holding a half-million-person rally in the midst of a pandemic is emblematic of a nation as a whole that maybe isn’t taking [the novel coronavirus] as seriously as we should.” The Aug. 7-16 gathering has drawn intense interest from scientists and health officials, and will likely be studied for years to come because of its singularity. It’s not just that Sturgis went on after the pandemic sidelined most everything else. It also drew people from across the country, all of them converging on one region, packing the small city’s Main Street and the bars and restaurants along it. And in contrast with participants in the Black Lives Matter protests this summer, many Sturgis attendees spent time clustered indoors at bars, restaurants and tattoo parlors, where experts say the virus is most likely to spread, especially among those without masks. Attendees came from every state, with just under half hailing from the Great Plains and substantial numbers journeying from as far as California, Illinois and Arizona, according to an analysis by the Center for New Data, a nonprofit group that uses cellphone location data to tackle public issues. The analysis, shared with The Washington Post, shows just how intertwined the South Dakota rally was with the rest of the country — and how far the decisions of individual attendees could have ricocheted. ... In the run-up to the rally, officials estimated that 250,000 people would come. The actual number, according to the South Dakota Transportation Department, was over 460,000 — down just 7 percent from 2019. They came in the greatest numbers from South Dakota, source of an estimated 93,000 attendees, or a fifth of the total, according to calculations by the Center for New Data. Minnesota ranked second, with an estimated 31,000 people, followed by Colorado with 29,000. Many traveled hundreds of miles: 21,000 rallygoers are believed to have come from Texas, and 20,800 from California. ... South Dakota, which had the most attendees, saw coronavirus cases surge within weeks of the rally’s Aug. 16 close, with the seven-day rolling average going from 84 on Aug. 6 to 214 on Aug. 27. The numbers remained elevated into October: The first day of the month, the seven-day rolling average was 434. The state is second in the nation in cases per capita behind North Dakota, with numbers high enough for the Harvard Global Health Institute to recommend stay-at-home orders. But precisely how that outbreak unfolded remains shrouded in uncertainty. Because symptoms of the coronavirus can take days to surface, rally attendees were unlikely to know they had been infected until returning home. Without a nationally coordinated contact-tracing strategy, the job of identifying chains of transmission was left to a patchwork of local and state health departments with varying approaches, leadership and staffing. Typically, such efforts focus on determining a person’s contacts after they became infectious — and stopping those people from spreading the virus — rather than on pinpointing the source of an infection. Genomic sequencing, which other countries have harnessed to determine the path of an outbreak, has been underused in the United States. And because it requires culturing and sequencing active virus, the rally is too far in the past for it to be of service now, said Michaud, the Kaiser Family Foundation epidemiologist. So even as the Dakotas and the Upper Midwest began seeing infections climb, it is impossible to say precisely how many of those cases originated at the rally — or how many of those might have ignited additional clusters elsewhere. “This motorcycle rally was and is such a big thing that people come from miles and miles away and they come from right next door. And it’s not reported anywhere who they are, where they live,” said Benjamin Aaker, president of the South Dakota State Medical Association. “Contact tracing on something like that is even harder than it is during normal circumstances,” he added. But other countries offer examples of more robust and coordinated contact-tracing efforts, Michaud said. Japan uses what’s called retrospective contact tracing — working backward to determine where a person was infected and who else may have gotten the virus there, he said. It’s particularly effective in dealing with the coronavirus, which is often transmitted by a small number of people infecting many others in clusters. It was “fairly obvious” that a gathering the size of the motorcycle rally represented a risk, Michaud said — and more rigorous contact tracing could have revealed the actual impact. It might also have prevented some of the secondary and tertiary spread. Hospitals have seen the effects. David Basel, vice president of clinical quality at Avera Medical Group, which has locations on the east side of the state, said on Sept. 30 that facilities had been “busy, and we’re feeling it.” Covid-19 cases make up 10 percent of patients, he said. “The thing that quite honestly scares us most is personnel,” he said. “If we started to lose personnel to them coming down with covid, that would be probably the biggest risk to us.” Three of the four South Dakota counties estimated to have the highest share of Sturgis attendees also saw cases spike post-rally. The increase was most pronounced in Pennington County, which is just outside Sturgis. Its seven-day rolling average of new cases leaped from eight on Aug. 6 to 34 on Aug. 27. State health officials, who linked 125 cases to Sturgis, have not tied the surge to the rally, however. They note it overlapped with school openings and end-of-summer restlessness. “Anytime you’re bringing individuals together, you’re going to have times where you’re having covid-19 transmission,” state epidemiologist Joshua Clayton said last month. “That’s a risk whether you’re in South Dakota, or in other states.” Noem, the governor, attributed the rise in cases to increases in testing, echoing President Trump’s explanation of growing U.S. infections. “That’s normal, that’s natural, that’s expected,” she told the Associated Press. She did not explain how extra testing could have accounted for the rise in hospitalizations in the state, which hit record highs in October. And the increases in coronavirus infections spread beyond South Dakota, post-rally. In Crook County, Wyoming, Corinne Hoard started feeling sick a week afterward but isn’t sure whether she was infected there — or whether health officials counted her case as Sturgis-related. Hoard, who said motorcycle riding is “kind of in my blood,” was mostly avoiding crowds but kept her annual tradition of going to Sturgis and attended a concert there, viewing it as safe because she sat outdoors. She started feeling sick a week afterward and went to the hospital after waking up one morning feeling like “death had crawled in the bed with me.”

Then there's Rob Wheeler's favorite Sinatra hit, "Something Stupid..." "I practice every day to find a better line to say before I take a dump, But then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like, 'I love Trump.'"