the mafia became the government (or the other way around)

I've been reading into a little "mob history". Fascinating, all the stuff those guys did for us during the war. For which a grateful government was not only grateful, but... curious too.

Well, here's a heads-up on something new I found, don't know if y'all have seen this or know this person, but here, this is a pretty interesting piece of research: http://hdblenner.com/woodside.htm

As near as I can tell, the author is trying to give us a pretty broad heads-up here. These activities he's talking about happened in the "late 50's and early 60's", so, after the McCarthy witch hunts but before the DEA (which would put it right around the heyday of the mafia).

Y'know, it's funny, most people I've talked to who are trying to understand how Jack Ruby and the mob might have fit together, they have this entirely unreal conception of a lone wolf trying to furtively evade the cops as he's ducking between trains, y'know....

But that's not the way the mafia was, not at all. There WAS that, for sure, but it was only 1% of what was goin' on.

This thing here, is really interesting. It looks very much like our government is trying to set up a spy network to "keep an eye on the subversives in the public housing projects", and I mean, if you know anything about the way the mafia worked back then, or even the way
most of the street gangs work today, you can easily understand how the approaches are one and the same.

Makes me think whether we're still paying a vig for this kind of stuff - y'know, today it would be "terrorists" instead of "subversives", right?

Kinda makes me want to vomit sometimes....

Brian,

Herbert's work on this is interesting, no? Thanks for giving it a plug.

greg parker wrote:Brian,

Herbert's work on this is interesting, no? Thanks for giving it a plug.

You know him? There's some great stuff on his site! He sounds like a "serious researcher".

nonsqtr wrote:

greg parker wrote:Brian,

Herbert's work on this is interesting, no? Thanks for giving it a plug.

You know him? There's some great stuff on his site! He sounds like a "serious researcher".

Yeah. Herbert lives in NYC. Years ago when I was first starting out on my own research, he very kindly copied reams of old news stories from the 50's on topics and names of interest to me and sent them over. That was all before google started its archived newspapers...

You'll find his name in the acknowledgements of my ebook. 

I don't think his work gets the attention it deserves because it takes a lot of work to follow his line of thought.

Brian,

                 Indeed the Hoover and the FBI repeatedly attempted to infiltrate "subversive groups"  and destroy them. Hoover used COINTELPRO on groups ranging from the KKK to the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition. 

Two cases of a Bureau agent infiltrating the Communist party would be Herbert Phillbrick and Elsie Piper. There similarity to Oswald's attempt are noteworthy in my view. Additionally the Commission was troubled in Executive Session about Oswald's possible employment by the FBI.

greg parker wrote:

nonsqtr wrote:

greg parker wrote:Brian,

Herbert's work on this is interesting, no? Thanks for giving it a plug.

You know him? There's some great stuff on his site! He sounds like a "serious researcher".

Yeah. Herbert lives in NYC. Years ago when I was first starting out on my own research, he very kindly copied reams of old news stories from the 50's on topics and names of interest to me and sent them over. That was all before google started its archived newspapers...

You'll find his name in the acknowledgements of my ebook. 

I don't think his work gets the attention it deserves because it takes a lot of work to follow his line of thought.

Herbert is one of my favourite posters at Duncans forum. Yes he can be way out. He had a thread about Oswalds nostrils once upon a time that he still keeps copping flak for when they can't get one over him. He is good at giving it back too. His work on the Dictabelt recordings is awesome stuff even if a lot of it goes over my head. He has had it out with Steve Barber a few times. He is also big on the wounds side of things and makes a lot of sense in that area.
I've got a lot of time for Herberts research and highly recommend his website.

So much to read, so much to learn...

I did definitely want to check out the acoustics stuff, that's actually one of my areas of expertise (career-wise as well as otherwise). Let's see, I'm responsible for some miniaturized implanted medical equipment (for auditory issues, "bionic ear" kind of stuff), and also I used to be a signals analyst way back when (contract only), looking at sonar they were collecting off the west coast. (In fact I gave 'em a computer method they're still using, to calculate the overlaps between neighboring sonobouys). I'm really big into echos and stuff like that (also being a sometime professional musician and recording engineer - grin  ) Definitely would like to take a look at any "advanced models" in this area ('course first I have to get off this web site stuff and back into real research).

Which is kinda the problem here, from where I sit at the moment - I have enough time to "either" do computer stuff, "or" real research, but not both. So, I have to make a value decision, and so far that decision is something along the lines of:

a. I'm not an expert JFK researcher (yet), and you guys are, so I should let you experts do your expert thing, and focus on other ways I can be helpful to the community.

b. The computer thing is high-value, since the tool we're trying to raise "doesn't exist yet". And, I'm uniquely positioned to bring this to life in a very short time frame, so I should do that - and dedicate whatever time is required to make an intial effort "real" and useful - after which I might be able to pass if over to someone who's interested in maintaining it or something - because "eventually" I'd like to get back into real JFK research!

Y'all can kinda tell that while my nose is buried in computer code, I'm being very "loose" with the way I'm looking at actual research data - how can I say this... "collecting" data is something different from "analyzing" it, in other words, when you're collecting you want as much as possible, so anytime you see a bizarre new piece of data you say, "great! let's get it up into the system" - without really looking at it or checking it in any detail up front, because you figure that part will come "later". So in its intermediate state (right around now), the data looks terrible - it seems like just a mish-mosh of raw events and conspiracy theories and digitized Xerox copies. But in a week or two all that will start to gel, and you'll start seeing some of the high level data organization that was the goal of this project in the first place.

(I figured it would be "impossible and counter-productive, and mostly a waste of time" to try doing any real research before the hierarchical data organization is in place - but what I've discovered is there's a lot of stuff that's "not in the public record", whereas much of the previous research HAS focused on the public record - so like, I can easily scrape the public record, "all at once in volume", but the rest of the stuff is considerably harder to collect and organize).

So far so good - so what I'm saying is, during this intermediate time I'd like to collaborate with you real researchers (since I don't have time to do much real research myself), and "divide and conquer' in terms of allocating time - I'll focus on the computer stuff I'm good at, and you focus on the research stuff you're good at, and then we can put our heads together and get three times as much bang for the buck, compared to the alternatives.

I very much look forward to seeing the first "massive internal data reorganization" in response to a new piece of Evidence. That is a truly beautiful thing to watch. I've only seen it "in action" just a very few times in my life - once I was fortunate enough to witness it in the context of an AI natural language processing system, and that was the first time I ever "grokked" exactly what was happening - but I mean, it's truly beautiful to watch the system reorganizing itself once it's reached an important new conclusion. You can be the biggest expert in the world, but once the system kicks stuff back to you you'll be FORCED to pay attention, there's no way in the world to escape the simple logic the system is showing you. It really is a very powerful research paradigm once it's working robustly, so we'll just keep chipping away at it until it gets a little closer to where it needs to be.

But in the meantime, getting "unusual models" from people like Herb would be a fine thing! Scope is a tricky issue to deal with sometimes, like, all the housing project stuff could result in a few more gigabytes of database if there's a need to put it all in there. But the data record itself is probably sufficiently valuable to begin with, even if it has nothing attached to it (no "actual" supporting documents yet - the intent being to provide a "halfway state" in the meantime, where there's a link to the text but no actual searchable text yet, kind of like we're doing with the Warren Commission Exhibits right now - we're linking over to Rex Bradford's site which already has all those documents, so we don't have to pay 300 bucks a month to re-host all that stuff ourselves - however the price we pay is that we can't search the text internally, so at the point where that capability becomes essential we'll have to think about an upgrade or something).

Dammit, lost another long post. Look here - can we get an auto-save on this forum or something? Shouldn't be too hard, right? Pretty please?

I'd like to float a model, and let's see what you think.

In the mafia days, they had a thing called "vig". You know what that is? It's "protection money", it's kind of like rent, you have to pay it every month. In the case of rent, if you don't pay the bankers come in and foreclose (or equivalently the sheriff comes to evict), but if you don't pay the protection vig, the enforcers come to your place of business and start destroying stuff.

Now, in the case of our government, the "vig" comes in the form of a little thing called TAXES. Here's the question: when a bank makes a loan to Uncle Sam, WHAT IS THE SECURITY, what collateral is Uncle Sam using?

There can be only one answer, right? It's the FUTURE LABOR OF THE CITIZENS, from which Uncle Sam derives 100% of his revenue.

When the economy is doing well, everyone's doing well - and so is Uncle Sam! He's getting tax money from everyone's who's making any disposable income (and when times are good, that would be "almost everyone"). However when times are bad, Uncle Sam experiences a double whammy - because not only does he lose the tax revenue ('cause people aren't making money anymore), but he also has to start paying out food stamps and unemployment insurance.

Our government is not supposed to be a "financial entity". As near as I can tell the one and only job of our federal government is to protect our rights. But our idiot Uncle is off in never-never land at the moment, it seems he's trying to protect everyone ELSE's rights at our expense! And it's even worse than that - Uncle Sam has been making excuses about what those rights are that he's trying to protect - to the point where there are elements inside our government that believe they can "foist" democracy on an unwilling and unprepared population.

Uncle Sam is very near to becoming Uncle Guido and Uncle Luigi. They're taking the financial role much more seriously than their real role, which is to PROTECT OUR RIGHTS. They're somehow trying to justify that spending more money equates with "protecting more of our rights", and it doesn't. All it seems to equate with these days, is idiotic ideas like "free speech zones" and the "free speech rights of corporations".

Uncle Sam, right now, is treating the tax revenue stream like a vig. They have all KINDS of completely un-Constitutional mechanisms to support it, too - like the RICO laws for instance. You know what they do with all the stuff they seize in a RICO case? They auction it off - and their excuse is that they're raising money to help defray the cost of the prosecution.

F'in morons - that's exactly the same as paying for your ambulance twice. We pay once when we okay the bond measure to fund all these wonderful services, but then they charge us AGAIN when we actually use 'em! Imagine paying 400 bucks for an emergency ambulance ride that you've already paid for with 40% of your income over the course of an entire lifetime! Well, that's exactly what's happening.

Seems to me, our government needs to play the tape all the way through, otherwise what happened to the mafia is going to happen to Uncle Sam too.

nonsqtr wrote:b. The computer thing is high-value, since the tool we're trying to raise "doesn't exist yet". And, I'm uniquely positioned to bring this to life in a very short time frame, so I should do that - and dedicate whatever time is required to make an intial effort "real" and useful - after which I might be able to pass if over to someone who's interested in maintaining it or something - because "eventually" I'd like to get back into real JFK research!

Y'all can kinda tell that while my nose is buried in computer code, I'm being very "loose" with the way I'm looking at actual research data - how can I say this... "collecting" data is something different from "analyzing" it, in other words, when you're collecting you want as much as possible, so anytime you see a bizarre new piece of data you say, "great! let's get it up into the system" - without really looking at it or checking it in any detail up front, because you figure that part will come "later". So in its intermediate state (right around now), the data looks terrible - it seems like just a mish-mosh of raw events and conspiracy theories and digitized Xerox copies. But in a week or two all that will start to gel, and you'll start seeing some of the high level data organization that was the goal of this project in the first place.

(I figured it would be "impossible and counter-productive, and mostly a waste of time" to try doing any real research before the hierarchical data organization is in place - but what I've discovered is there's a lot of stuff that's "not in the public record", whereas much of the previous research HAS focused on the public record - so like, I can easily scrape the public record, "all at once in volume", but the rest of the stuff is considerably harder to collect and organize).

So far so good - so what I'm saying is, during this intermediate time I'd like to collaborate with you real researchers (since I don't have time to do much real research myself), and "divide and conquer' in terms of allocating time - I'll focus on the computer stuff I'm good at, and you focus on the research stuff you're good at, and then we can put our heads together and get three times as much bang for the buck, compared to the alternatives.

I very much look forward to seeing the first "massive internal data reorganization" in response to a new piece of Evidence. That is a truly beautiful thing to watch. I've only seen it "in action" just a very few times in my life - once I was fortunate enough to witness it in the context of an AI natural language processing system, and that was the first time I ever "grokked" exactly what was happening - but I mean, it's truly beautiful to watch the system reorganizing itself once it's reached an important new conclusion. You can be the biggest expert in the world, but once the system kicks stuff back to you you'll be FORCED to pay attention, there's no way in the world to escape the simple logic the system is showing you. It really is a very powerful research paradigm once it's working robustly, so we'll just keep chipping away at it until it gets a little closer to where it needs to be.

But in the meantime, getting "unusual models" from people like Herb would be a fine thing! Scope is a tricky issue to deal with sometimes, like, all the housing project stuff could result in a few more gigabytes of database if there's a need to put it all in there. But the data record itself is probably sufficiently valuable to begin with, even if it has nothing attached to it (no "actual" supporting documents yet - the intent being to provide a "halfway state" in the meantime, where there's a link to the text but no actual searchable text yet, kind of like we're doing with the Warren Commission Exhibits right now - we're linking over to Rex Bradford's site which already has all those documents, so we don't have to pay 300 bucks a month to re-host all that stuff ourselves - however the price we pay is that we can't search the text internally, so at the point where that capability becomes essential we'll have to think about an upgrade or something).

With a project this large, how do you ensure that: 1) you have quality data, 2) you have sufficient data (i.e., you are not missing critical pieces of data), and 3) the system will perform as expected?
 
Quality data would be facts and information that are reliable and credible. Not discredited witness statements that would skew system output queries inappropriately—unless the system flags/acknowledges this so the person interpreting the output data can take this into account.
 
Sufficient data means that all important details are included, because if they were omitted, system output results might give false impressions. When I read Walt Brown's Master Chronology of the JFK Assassination, I see tons and tons of data. 
 
And have you prepared test cases, or are you planning to run test cases, on the application to make sure it produces expected results? Take a known situation (perhaps something well understood and not overly complex) and input it into the system and run it. It should produce the expected results. This would inspire confidence in the software. If results are not what is expected, why not? Investigate and find out.
 
I am innately suspicious of "black boxes" unless I know they've been tested exhaustively.

Stan Dane wrote:

nonsqtr wrote:b. The computer thing is high-value, since the tool we're trying to raise "doesn't exist yet". And, I'm uniquely positioned to bring this to life in a very short time frame, so I should do that - and dedicate whatever time is required to make an intial effort "real" and useful - after which I might be able to pass if over to someone who's interested in maintaining it or something - because "eventually" I'd like to get back into real JFK research!

Y'all can kinda tell that while my nose is buried in computer code, I'm being very "loose" with the way I'm looking at actual research data - how can I say this... "collecting" data is something different from "analyzing" it, in other words, when you're collecting you want as much as possible, so anytime you see a bizarre new piece of data you say, "great! let's get it up into the system" - without really looking at it or checking it in any detail up front, because you figure that part will come "later". So in its intermediate state (right around now), the data looks terrible - it seems like just a mish-mosh of raw events and conspiracy theories and digitized Xerox copies. But in a week or two all that will start to gel, and you'll start seeing some of the high level data organization that was the goal of this project in the first place.

(I figured it would be "impossible and counter-productive, and mostly a waste of time" to try doing any real research before the hierarchical data organization is in place - but what I've discovered is there's a lot of stuff that's "not in the public record", whereas much of the previous research HAS focused on the public record - so like, I can easily scrape the public record, "all at once in volume", but the rest of the stuff is considerably harder to collect and organize).

So far so good - so what I'm saying is, during this intermediate time I'd like to collaborate with you real researchers (since I don't have time to do much real research myself), and "divide and conquer' in terms of allocating time - I'll focus on the computer stuff I'm good at, and you focus on the research stuff you're good at, and then we can put our heads together and get three times as much bang for the buck, compared to the alternatives.

I very much look forward to seeing the first "massive internal data reorganization" in response to a new piece of Evidence. That is a truly beautiful thing to watch. I've only seen it "in action" just a very few times in my life - once I was fortunate enough to witness it in the context of an AI natural language processing system, and that was the first time I ever "grokked" exactly what was happening - but I mean, it's truly beautiful to watch the system reorganizing itself once it's reached an important new conclusion. You can be the biggest expert in the world, but once the system kicks stuff back to you you'll be FORCED to pay attention, there's no way in the world to escape the simple logic the system is showing you. It really is a very powerful research paradigm once it's working robustly, so we'll just keep chipping away at it until it gets a little closer to where it needs to be.

But in the meantime, getting "unusual models" from people like Herb would be a fine thing! Scope is a tricky issue to deal with sometimes, like, all the housing project stuff could result in a few more gigabytes of database if there's a need to put it all in there. But the data record itself is probably sufficiently valuable to begin with, even if it has nothing attached to it (no "actual" supporting documents yet - the intent being to provide a "halfway state" in the meantime, where there's a link to the text but no actual searchable text yet, kind of like we're doing with the Warren Commission Exhibits right now - we're linking over to Rex Bradford's site which already has all those documents, so we don't have to pay 300 bucks a month to re-host all that stuff ourselves - however the price we pay is that we can't search the text internally, so at the point where that capability becomes essential we'll have to think about an upgrade or something).

With a project this large, how do you ensure that: 1) you have quality data, 2) you have sufficient data (i.e., you are not missing critical pieces of data), and 3) the system will perform as expected?
 
Quality data would be facts and information that are reliable and credible. Not discredited witness statements that would skew system output queries inappropriately—unless the system flags/acknowledges this so the person interpreting the output data can take this into account.
 
Sufficient data means that all important details are included, because if they were omitted, system output results might give false impressions. When I read Walt Brown's Master Chronology of the JFK Assassination, I see tons and tons of data. 
 
And have you prepared test cases, or are you planning to run test cases) on the application to make sure it produces expected results? Take a known situation (perhaps something well understood and not overly complex) and input it into the system and run it. It should produce the expected results. This would inspire confidence in the software. If results are not what is expected, why not? Investigate and find out.
 
I am innately suspicious of "black boxes" unless I know they've been tested exhaustively.

Hi Stan - answering your questions,

1. You have to have "some" data before it can be "quality" data. Which immediately begs the question: define "quality". How do you measure it? What's it made of? I think, the answer is where the buzz-words like "scope" and "coverage" come in. Once again, I use the terrain-mapping model as the "most useful" approach to these kinds of situations. Terrain mapping is very different from mathematical logic. In terrain mapping, you first put stakes in the ground, then you use those to analyze the lay of the land. You start with scope - "I'm interested in this quarter acre right here, and I don't care what happens on my next-door-neighbor's land over there" - and once you have the scope defined, then you strive for coverage within that scope - which means in a practical terrain-mapping sense, that you're going to drive the surveying down to the "maximal possible level of resolution", or at least to the point where any new information you get by delving deeper would be of diminishing value compared to the effort required to get it. So that means, it's an iterative process - at some point it becomes of supreme importance to represent the position of the trees, and of lesser importance to represent the position of the rocks around those trees. But then, all of a sudden, the analytical situation reverses itself and the position of the rocks themselves becomes interesting - and the beauty of the terrain mapping method is that you can do it iteratively. so you can derive important results "in the meantime" even if the data isn't perfect.

2. "Sufficient" is a concept that relates to coverage. "Coverage" is a very deep mathematical concept, it has its roots in Measure Theory, and it's beautifully covered by Benoit Mandelbrot in his outstanding book "The Fractal Geometry Of Nature". Coverage gets into stuff like space-filling curves and all that - it's "mathematical", and it can be measured. The thing is, to measure it usefully you have to have a clue about the "dimensionality" of what you're looking at, which is what the fractal ("fractional dimension") approach is all about. In real life though, what we find is that the level of coverage is woefully incomplete. (That's why we're on this forum talkin' about this stuff in the first place!) So, instead of taking your question "relative to the reality", we have to take it "relative to the data we actually have". In other words, we don't KNOW the total scope of what we're looking at, and that's why the mathematical approach is so important.

3. "Trust me". Ha ha.    I won't be able to convince you on this one, Stan - at least not with words. I can tell you several things from my experience though - first of all, I used these same methods on Wall Street back in the early 80's when the very first "program trading" was taking place - and you can read about the history of the Black-Scholes Model and what it did to the markets. Secondly, I used these same methods at NASA, and I can't tell you what exactly I was doing but I can tell you that it had to do with the trajectories of a bunch of little fragments ("coverage", right?). Third, the method we're talking about is called "constrained stochastic optimization", and it has all kinds of formal (and informal) analogs in the words of physics, economics, chemistry, raw math, .... neuroscience, applied mechanics, nanotechnology, robotics... I could run off a short list for your research - Ising models in physics, Boltzmann and Hopfield models in neuroscience (you can look those up on Google), the Black-Scholes model in economics... Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize in the mid-70's for some work he did on "nonlinear thermodynamics" which is very closely related to a constrained stochastic optimization method, he was looking at "stable spatial equilibria" in liquid systems, which is a pretty big deal if you think about it from a physical chemistry standpoint.

The whole reason we're interested in "optimization" at all, is because our dataset is sparse. We don't have "coverage", all we have is a few little data points and we have to "guess" what the terrain in between looks like. I mean, simple stuff - "was Jack Ruby related to the mob"? First of all, most people don't even know what the mob is, if you ask 'em that question their heads go straight to gun-running and narcotics, whereas the part we're interested in has a lot more to do with the relationship to government officials. Secondly, everyone wears multiple hats, and everyone lies through their teeth because they all have interests to protect. Our data is tainted with "lies", in other words, we need to be able to measure some level of confidence somehow.

Your last sentence pretty much says it all. The thing is, your brain (and mine) is a "black box". PEOPLE are black boxes. What would you sooner trust, an unpredictable person or a completely predictable digital computer? I just read someone trying to defend the lone-wolf shooter theory, where he's basically saying that other peoples' models are "illogical", and my only response to that is, if you can quantify the logic of an individual I'll go along with it, but if you can't do that then you should stop making idiotic assertions about the "dataset you clearly don't understand". This thing we're looking at here, the JFK thing, is NOT "logical". It's not an "if A then B" world. It's very complex, it's a bunch of interleaved events that may or may not be related to each other. (The thing we learn from Prigogine is there are "fake equilibria", you can look at such a system and it may "look like" it's in a particular state that it's really not in - and the same thing happens in JFK research, for example it may "LOOK" like the CIA planned the whole thing, but maybe that was just a carefully constructed illusion crafted by Marcello and company).

This is precisely why we need "more" than just simple A-B logic. We need something that can show us all the ways the information fits together, not just the "logical" ways but also the "illogical" ways. The classic example is the clandestine operation. Person A suddenly shows up in the middle of Event B doing something without any apparent rhyme or reason, and the only way you can "discover" the rhyme or reason is to increase scope. How can I say this - if you had a bucket full of pebbles (which is what the JFK dataset is - sparse, with lots of air in between), and you wanted to somehow "sort" the pebbles by.... I dunno.... let's pick something simple - SIZE.... how would you do that? Well, if you try the "A-and-B" trick, you're going to be there all night till you're old and gray, trying to figure out which pebble is bigger than the other. The easier thing to do would be to get some chicken wire of a certain mesh size, and "sift" the pebbles through the grid - that way all the little ones fall through and all the big ones stay on the mesh, and when you're done you have pretty robust compartments for your data. That's really all we're doing here, is using a "slightly different method" from the one most people use when they're looking at raw data. It's COMPLEMENTARY, right? It's not an "either-or" thing, we'd like BOTH sets of results available to us, so we can compare and contrast. Right now though, the literature is heavy on the A-B trip, and you can see exactly where it's gotten us thus far. (We're still sitting here debating whether Jack Ruby was "related to the mob", right?)

OK. No further comments.

Brian,

It sound like a fascinating and dynamic system.

Once the mountain of data points are inserted it should be a rockin' awesome tool.

I think there are several people here who would like to try out the Second Floor Encounter to see what the results might be. There seems to be a lot - too much! - data on that small matter.

Brian,

You may be overthinking this. Your approach seems the opposite of KISS and you may have the Vig scenario exactly backwards.
I have been trying to "get to the bottom of this," only since 2008.
I have always been a curious person sceptical of the motives or authority, I have a good memory for arcane detail and some luck using google search and newspaper archives.

This worked for me, but I did not plan it in the beginning, and YMMV. I think what set me off, casting aside some of what I hope are few preconceived notions, were what I discovered after never completely walking away from notice I took of the 2003 California gubenatorial recall campaign and election.

I did not follow politics and did not engage much in political discussion. I recall the aftermath of a weding I had attended in upstate New York in the mid 1980's. Sitting around on the day after the wedding with friends of the groom, as I had not met him  before the wedding weekend, I was almost shocked to observe that almost all who engaged in the conversation were very politically partisan and enthusiastic about the idea of the northern part of the state seceding from the New York metro area. I harbored a POV that these people missed the reality that the rest of the state was financially and economically dependent on the taxes generated in the area they wanted to secede from. Much of upstate New York is dependent on the employment and spending by state and federal prisons and by the State University system. It struck me that the political beliefs of these people were narrow and incomplete, similar to today's republicans, tea partyiers, and libertarians.  I had been influenced by the assassination of JFK, campus protests against the Vietnam war, rapid social transformatoin signaled by the Woodstock festival, etc., Watergate, the pardon of Nixon, the brief flirtation with Carter and demilitarization lite, and then the regression that was Reagan.

I had been interested in Charles Higham's "Trading with the enemy," which helped me notice an obscure book about William Rhodes Davis. Studying his background through the supressed Post WWII US DOJ study of Nazi Germany by then asst. atty general, John Rogge, I was informed that Davis was an American business Abwher agent who met Hitler and was approved by him for Reichsbank financing to build a Hamburg refiney in 1938, supplied by expropriated, recently nationalized Mexican oil. My genealogy background led me to the discovery that this Nazi traitor Davis was the grandfather of the ousted California governor, "Gray" Davis. It was Schwarzenegger who ironically had asked the Weisenthal center to vet his own Nazi family background, During the 2003 recall campaign, Schwarzenegger was painted as the Nazi candidate despite his preemptive and transparent efforts to neutralize that family controversy. Davis sat back silently with his stealthy nickname and the Rove managed republican opposition research and the cadre of professional journalists evidently had other priorities.

So, I mulled over my discovery that the two leading contenders in the 2003 gubenatorial contest in the largest US state both had
Nazi grandfathers, combined with my awareness the the two major party 2004 presidential candidates were members of the secret society Skull & Bones, which "tapped" just fifteen Yale university class members each May.

[url=http://books.google.com/books?q=pryor rhodes marquis childs &hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&as_ldate=1940&as_hdate=1961&sa=N&tab=np]http://books.google.com/...[/url] pryor rhodes marquis childs - Google Book Search[/url]
Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie - Page 171
by Steve Neal - Biography & Autobiography - 1984 - 371 pages
After the election, it was learned that William Rhodes Davis, ... Willkie told Marquis Childs that he had never heard of Davis until Pryor told him about ...
Link to image of 1946 Marquis Childs' column describing verification of William Rhodes Davis's role in 1940 via interrogations of Hermann Goering and two other Nazi leaders:
http://home.comcast.net/...
http://books.google.com/... pryor rhodes scarsdale - Google Book Search
After a week, Pryor took Marshall to the Scarsdale home of fifty-one-year-old William Rhodes Davis, an independent oil operator. ...
http://www.time.com/... Exquisite Befuddlement - TIME[/url]
Exquisite Befuddlement
Monday, Jan. 06, 1941
.....One hundred and seventy prominent U. S. citizens petitioned the President to aid England more. Dog-Fancier Albert Payson Terhune made a prophecy on his 68th birthday: The U. S. will get in the war this year. The Saturday Evening Post grumpily declared the Johnson Act might as well be repealed, since common sense had been. Anne Lindbergh's book* was described by the Nation, as "most reactionary and pernicious."  Her mind was described by Louisville Courier-Journal Editor Herbert Agar as "painfully divided against itself" and as producing "some ugly examples of confused thought." Historian Allan Nevins, writing in the New York Times, implied that "her wave of the future" was "a wave of the past.".......
.... Organized hastily three weeks ago in Iowa was a new isolationist group (No Foreign War Committee) headed by Verne Marshall , editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, a dark, hard-bitten veteran of World War I and of numerous local crusades. (In 1936 Marshall and his Gazette managed to have 31 Iowa State officials indicted, and the Gazette was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for "most meritorious service to the community." Same day the Iowa Supreme Court dismissed the indictments on technical grounds.) Marshall moved to Manhattan, took luxurious headquarters (recently Willkie's) for his committee, at once paid $41,000 for full-page advertisements in 60 papers in 51 cities, asking for money to fight interventionists. Another ad was set for this week in 79 papers in 57 cities.
Marshall, who once described himself as a "rabble-rouser" of the first World War, planned a St. Louis mass meeting soon after Jan. 1, to be addressed by Colonel Lindbergh. ....
http://www.google.com/... pryor gave lindbergh - Google Search
CHARLES A. LINDBERGH AND FAMILY: An Inventory of Their Papers at ...
Samuel F. Pryor, Executive Vice President to Pan Am for 28 years, was the cause of Lindbergh's coming to Maui.  Pryor gave Lindbergh 5 acres to build his ...
http://www.mnhs.org/... CHARLES A. LINDBERGH AND FAMILY: An Inventory of Their Papers at the Minnesota Historical Society  
Gibbon Secret Rests Near Maui Church - International Primate ...
Six diminutive, weathered cement markers lie between the graves of Pryor and Lindbergh in the historic church cemetery located on the edge of Kipahulu town. ...
http://www.ippl.org/... Gibbon Secret Rests Near Maui Church - International Primate Protection League ~ IPPL

After much thought I had a new appreciation for the coordidnation and secrecy of the appearance of opposition by two major political parties, where there is actually little or no opposition. I concluded that it would be best to study the recent outcomes, the "winners" of these political contests and work backwards. I began by investigation succcess as best as I could, the backgrounds of Obama and the Bushes. By late 2008, I arrived at researching segments of the JFK assassination, and I am still here today.

Brian, do not bite off more than you can chew, and thank you for sharing your observation of Nancy Hamilton and the stables at Lewiston Raceway, I had missed that in the Mark Lane video and I hope it will be a useful clue.

And, "the Vig," is not taxes, and government is not there to protect our rights. Government is a result of cumulative political compromise. Taxation, especially what remains of the progressive taxation scheme in the US, is the power of government not fully endorsed by libertarians and tea party republicans. This blind spot makes their politics incomplete and unsustainable. Bullets or ballots. Progressive taxation is the exercise of a compromise of most of us with the top one percent.
The pitchforks do not come out because progressive taxation prevents them from owning it all. The masses extract crumbs and the wealthiest retain life and limb and most of their wealth.
Our riights are supposed to include all authority that we have not specifically invested in government. The Bill of Rights was a result of a compromise between those less concerned about the tendency of government to usurp all authority and those most concerned about that potential. Individuals must petitiont the courts to try to protect rights because elected representatives no longer effect check and balance, and my example above indicates that the press is no check.

The "Vig" is the consequences of enduring center right capitalists an the status quo they maintain. They exploit and use up people similarly to other inputs, energy and other raw materials. They exploited the communuists to do most of the dying in the successful effort to destroy the Axis powers and then exploited the Mafia to neutralize the jubilant and very expectant but no longer usefull communist dominated partisan militias in France and Italy and in Eastern Europe. After the Mafia helped to diminish the expectations of the communists, the Mafia was listed after the Apalachin, NY meeting in 1957 and pursued. Luciano was released but permitted no closer than in Cuba. An entity exploited by the capitalists must be perceived as more useful than troublesome to avoid being further diminished.
The strategy of standing back and letting the Red Army do the dying in the final conquest of Germany was fully vindicated when the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union fell.

The class exacting the Vig on the world is gifted wth genius and chose to apply the gift to concentrating the own wealth and power at the expense and misery of the exploited classes.

Brian, study the dominant forces symbols of success. The dictabelts, Zapruder film, and the grassy knoll are diverting distractions.

Tom Scully wrote:Brian,

You may be overthinking this. Your approach seems the opposite of KISS and you may have the Vig scenario exactly backwards.
I have been trying to "get to the bottom of this," only since 2008.
I have always been a curious person sceptical of the motives or authority, I have a good memory for arcane detail and some luck using google search and newspaper archives.

..................

Brian, study the dominant forces symbols of success. The dictabelts, Zapruder film, and the grassy knoll are diverting distractions.

Tom,

An excellent piece. Thanks for your reminder to KISS.

terlin wrote:Brian,

It sound like a fascinating and dynamic system.

Once the mountain of data points are inserted it should be a rockin' awesome tool.

I think there are several people here who would like to try out the Second Floor Encounter to see what the results might be. There seems to be a lot - too much! - data on that small matter.

Hi terlin - let's talk about that for a minute, can we?

You're talking about Oswald and Truly and Marrion Baker, yes?

What exactly would you like to know about that? What are the open questions? Is it mainly the timing, or is there a lot more to it than that?

And, I'm aware there's this little issue with what's-her-name, that woman who was supposedly running down the back stairs at the time. (Gawd, I got too many names swimmin' around in my head from all this data entry!  )

Please give me some guidance here - what's the scope? Are we interested in the women on the 4th floor or can we narrow it down to just the 2nd floor encounter?

And, I'm also aware that some people have tried to measure "times", like, the time it took Marrion Baker to get there, how long exactly did it take Truly and Baker to run up the stairs from the first floor to the second, etc etc.

And, recently I heard there was a new deathbed eyewitness (or an "old" one I suppose), who places LHO "at" the Coke machine at the exact moment the shots were fired.

I would love to try the Second Floor Encounter with y'all - the first step is we'd have to take a moment to organize the data, and then we just need to be able to translate the questions "we" want to ask into computer-speak. (I'm good with the second part, and I can show y'all how to do that if you wish - if y'all could provide a little guidance on the first part in terms of what we already know... the goal being to get a reasonable coverage of events into the system, and then we can put the computer to work).

Tom Scully wrote:Brian,

The "Vig" is the consequences of enduring center right capitalists an the status quo they maintain. They exploit and use up people similarly to other inputs, energy and other raw materials. They exploited the communuists to do most of the dying in the successful effort to destroy the Axis powers and then exploited the Mafia to neutralize the jubilant and very expectant but no longer usefull communist dominated partisan militias in France and Italy and in Eastern Europe. After the Mafia helped to diminish the expectations of the communists, the Mafia was listed after the Apalachin, NY meeting in 1957 and pursued. Luciano was released but permitted no closer than in Cuba. An entity exploited by the capitalists must be perceived as more useful than troublesome to avoid being further diminished.
The strategy of standing back and letting the Red Army do the dying in the final conquest of Germany was fully vindicated when the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union fell.

The class exacting the Vig on the world is gifted wth genius and chose to apply the gift to concentrating the own wealth and power at the expense and misery of the exploited classes.

Brian, study the dominant forces symbols of success. The dictabelts, Zapruder film, and the grassy knoll are diverting distractions.

Thank you Tom! Your view has a lot of resonance with mine. I'm just starting into the Nazi connection, I came across Gehlen by way of Loran Hall. It's a complex history. I'm guessing the pattern back then is the same as the pattern now - private interests abusing the public system (and its money, to be sure).

In my early view just now, the grassy knoll is more than just a distraction, it's a data point that has to be connected. There was a puff of smoke, and there was an Oswald. Yes, he was at Atsugi, in the Phillipines, and all over the U-2 story at a time when people of his ilk were also being recruited for other purposes.

I've been checking into William Pawley. He is perhaps an individual member of the class you mention. Ultimately though, his actions (and results) were political, weren't they? Same for Carlos Marcello (who was represented at Appalachin by Joseph Civello from Dallas). Pawley and Marcello had many common interests, linked by money.

The other part of what you're suggesting, the part related to military intelligence, seems to have mostly disappeared, is that an accurate perception? The source documents were destroyed, the record is no longer recoverable. (At least the "official" record, like for instance anything that might directly connect Oswald with military intelligence, during the New Orleans phase and afterwards).

greg parker wrote:

nonsqtr wrote:

greg parker wrote:Brian,

Herbert's work on this is interesting, no? Thanks for giving it a plug.

You know him? There's some great stuff on his site! He sounds like a "serious researcher".

Yeah. Herbert lives in NYC. Years ago when I was first starting out on my own research, he very kindly copied reams of old news stories from the 50's on topics and names of interest to me and sent them over. That was all before google started its archived newspapers...

You'll find his name in the acknowledgements of my ebook. 

I don't think his work gets the attention it deserves because it takes a lot of work to follow his line of thought.

Is this part of the attention it deserves?

This is "Isaacs", from the Giesbrecht incident - only, not Charles R, this is Martin Isaacs from NY, the "social worker".

"The New York FBI office sent an airtel to Headquarters on Mar. 4, 1964 with copies sent to Dallas, K.C., Las Vegas and Minneapolis re: Richard Giesbrecht, indicating Mr. Isaacs, age 59 and an employee of the Dept. of Welfare for 30 years, had never been to Texas, and was working in his office on Nov. 22, 1963. He was not familiar with the names "Hoffman," "Hauchtman" or "Romaniuk," and didn't recognize the descriptions of the men overheard and/or seen by Giesbrecht. He did not own a car, and knew nothing about a '58 Dodge or possibly Mercury car. He had never been to either Kansas City or Winnipeg. In regard to his connection to the Oswalds, Isaacs indicated he had been contacted by the U.S. State Dep't and asked to assist in the relocation of the Oswalds to Texas when they arrived in New York from Russia." http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2009/05/winnipeg-airport-incident-3-views.html

Isaacs, public housing projects in NY (which is where most of the NY social workers usually hang out).

And that, is not y'r-average ordinary request for a NY social worker, amirite? (At least, said social worker does not usually get "contacted by the US State Dept").

(sorry, couldn't resist, the connection seemed relevant... carry on...)