Warning: Geeking Out Again

I'm still catching up on Lost. I'm not quite halfway through "The Brig", but already I can see one of my long-held suspicions coming true. "Anthony Cooper" - whatever his real name is - is Sawyer. Not a big shock. Just like most people knew perfectly well Christian Shepherd was also Claire's father. Another certainty I have is that Ben isn't "Him". Ben, as I've said, is strictly middle-management material. Devious, yes, ruthless, yes, but the leader of the pack? Nope. Him is A. someone who's not actually on the island very often (perhaps DeGroot or Alvar Hanso, though I doubt it), B. a Howard Hughes/Colonel Kurtz-type loony, C. a Moses-y, Promised Land, quietly demented messianic dude, or D. Some combination of all these types. We know his name is Jacob. Does he have a literal twin, or a double/nemesis? The twin imagery is popping up like crazy. Naomi the copter pilot basically said each survivor has a body double somewhere in an ocean trench off Bali, for instance.

I know I could be wrong about this stuff. I did have a cool, rather elegant theory about an alien ship being buried on the island, causing all the paranormal phenomena like in Quatermass and the Pit (or The Tommyknockers; same diff). But the creators insist there's nothing alien-related happening.

The UMMO sign (noticed by at least one other blogger) has dredged up some interesting insights, though. From Jacques Vallee's Revelations: [the Ummite philosophy, as laid out in the UMMO documents] "is a version of Kant's view of the world, mixed with a puritanical attitude toward morality..." Does that sound like The Others, or what?! The attitudes of these people just screeeeaammm "categorical imperative".

The "Ummites" claimed to have drugged humans and collected samples from them for some unknown purpose.

Carlos Jerez, founder of an UMMO "medical facility"/intelligence service in South America, claimed to have a cure for cancer. So did Ben. Jerez also claimed to have established an international network of scientists.

Vallee describes Borges's Uqbar, Tlon, Orbus Tertius, suspecting it might have been the inspiration for the UMMO hoax. "On Tlon..there is no concept of time as we know it. The past only exists s a present memory, and the future as a present expectation. Therefore it should be as easy to alter the past is it is to change the future. There is also a theory that all common objects have doubles..."

On Tlon, imagined objects can become real.

One UMMO researcher, physicist Jean-Pierre Petit, was inspired by the UMMO documents to write papers on speculative cosmology, including "Entantiomorphic [Mirror-Image, Twin] Universes with Opposite Proper Times" and "Universes Interacting with Their Image in the Mirror of Time."

Whoa. That is the island, is it not?

Pardon me while I geek out for a minute...

Just when I think I waste my time reading Fortean/ufological stuff, something like this happens.
I was catching up on Lost. In the episode "One of Us", Jack allows Juliet to go alone to a cache of medical supplies that Ben stowed somewhere near the caves (Claire is suffering withdrawal from the serum Ethan was administering to her). Juliet finds the cache by a symbol carved into a tree. I recognized this symbol immediately. It's the UMMO sign. I think it's also an alchemical symbol for something, but if so I can't recall what. Venus, maybe?
Knowing that Vallee discussed the UMMO hoax(es) in his book Revelations, which I haven't read in its entirety yet, I dug out my copy and thumbed through it...only to find that in the section on UMMO, Vallee starts off describing (!!!) Borges's story Tlon, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius. This is the story I referenced when I first wrote about Lost! Rereading the story, I noticed another parallel with the show...

On the fictional-but-real planet of Tlon, anything a group imagines becomes real. Remember when Ben talks to Locke about a "big box" that manifests anything you can imagine inside it? I don't know if Ben was being literal or figurative, but it sounds an awful lot like the stuff on Tlon. It also sounds a bit like the black box in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policemen (mentioned by the writers of Lost and featured briefly in the episode "Orientation"), and/or the blue box in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (both boxes are vectors of unwelcome reality). Also, every object on Tlon has a double. Twin imagery and references (most notably Jacob) abound in Lost.

Then there's the rabbit. Ben once showed Sawyer a white rabbit that had been implanted with a device that would kill it if its heartrate exceeded a certain limit, and when Ben shook its cage and screamed at it, the bunny did indeed keel over and appear dead. Later Ben whipped an identical bunny out of his bag of tricks and assured Sawyer it was all an illusion. Well, now that I have a bunny I realize that you can't really train them to play dead. They'll play possum, sure, but they keep their eyes open. So either Ben was manipulating Sawyer with matching rabbits, or the island is home to Schrodinger's Bunny. Whatever the case, some people can cheat death on the island.

In my first post on Lost, I asked if there could be a "man behind the curtain". An episode I haven't watched yet is titled "The Man Behind the Curtain."

L.L. Has-Been

Been a while since I posted! I must post my 9/11 conference stuff, but I've been distracted by, of all people, Lyndon LaRouche (not to be confused with Lash Larue). He was a name in the '80s and still has his devotees, but his international organization has been accused of cultish recruiting/indoctrinating methods, financial misdeeds (LaRouche is, in fact, a convicted felon), anti-Semitism, harassment of perceived enemies, outlandish conspiracy theorizing (that one is beyond dispute) and a fascistic master plan for restructuring the government. If ex-members and LaRouche-watchers can be believed, he's the poor man's Oswald Mosley.
His name has been popping up everywhere for me lately, and I decided I had to look into him. At least one of the guys in the local 9/11 group is somewhat enamored of LaRouche, and sent Richard a link to one of his lectures. I came across one of his '80s pamphlets, "Is Satanism in Your School-yard?" in my Satanic panic research. But for me it really started with Webster Tarpley at the Vancouver conference; he's a former member of the LaRouche organization, and proud of it. This in itself is rather odd, since it seems people either leave LaRouche's organization on bad terms or they don't leave at all. Then, driving to Minnesota, I reread Jacques Vallee's examination of UFO hoaxes and disinformation, Revelations, and it mentioned that French ufologists uncovered links between the epic UMMO hoax and the LaRouche organization in Europe. I wondered if LaRouchites infiltrate fringe groups like ufology and 9/11 Truth to disseminate their ideas. Could Tarpley be a member who only pretends to be an ex-member? It turned out my question wasn't out of line: A fellow who posted an excerpt from my summary of Tarpley's speech on his blog thinks the same thing. And an expose of the LaRouche organization is soon to appear in Washington Monthly, focusing on the bankruptcy of his in-house publishing operation (PMR) and the April suicide of its director, Ken Kronberg.

Unfortunately, the Kronberg tragedy is only one of several disturbing incidents linked to the LaRouche organization.

In 2003 a 22-year-old British student at Paris's British Institute and the Sorbonne, Jeremiah (Jerry) Duggan, was invited by a LaRouche recruiter to attend an anti-war conference in Weisbaden, Germany. Weisbaden is the HQ of the Schiller Institute, the German arm of the LaRouche organization headed by LaRouche's wife. The Schiller Institute promotes the same political/financial reforms as the other orgs, but also concentrates on LaRouche's concept of a new Renaissance that will essentially be a return to Classical forms of music, painting, poetry, and literature. The Institute takes this mandate so seriously that it has actually picketed composers and musicians who don't use Verdi tuning, the narrow range of Classical tuning that LaRouche feels is the only appropriate form of tuning. They want to see it enforced on orchestras and composers, in fact. Reminds me a bit of the Degenerate Art Show...

Anyway, on 21 March 2003, Jeremiah Duggan attended the anti-war conference in Weisbaden in the belief it was sponsored by the now-defunct LaRouche newspaper Nouvelle Solidarite. Others in attendance say he was disturbed by the organizers' insistence that Jews are responsible for the war in Iraq (Duggan is Jewish), but he agreed to stay on in Weisbaden to go through a youth training course. The recruiter had promised him a job writing for Nouvelle Solidarite once he "learned more about politics". He roomed with another young man taking the course, in a house owned by a Schiller Institute member.

Around 4:30 AM on 27 March, Jeremiah's mother in England and girlfriend in Paris received bizarre phone calls from him. He was in a state of fear and panic. He told his girlfriend "they're manipulating people with computers...they're hurting their arms and legs." Then he hung up. Minutes later, the girl received a call from Jeremiah's flatmate in Weisbaden, informing her that Jeremiah had "run away", as though he was a teenager rather than a grown man.
Erica Duggan received two calls from her son. In the first he told her he was in "big trouble". Then he was cut off. In his second call, he begged her to come and get him. He started to spell out the name of the town he was in, but only got as far as W-E-I before the call was cut off.

Less than two hours later, Jeremiah Duggan was dead on the side of the autobahn. According to a perfunctory investigation by local police, he ran the 5 miles from the flat to the road and threw himself in front of three oncoming cars in an effort to commit suicide. The third collision killed him. A British pathologist later concluded Jeremiah was not hit by a vehicle but died from head trauma consistent with a beating. Weisbaden authorities are adamant: Duggan committed suicide. Period. They didn't even pursue a hit-and-run investigation.
The LaRouche organization dismissed the incident as a "newspaper hoax" engineered by Tony Blair, and declared Jeremiah (referred to as "Jeremy") a "mentally unstable British national" who had indeed thrown himself into oncoming traffic.

Jeremiah Duggan might have been a disturbed young man with well-hidden emotional problems. But some unsettling details emerged from the affair:

- Jeremiah reportedly told other conference-goers that he had attended family counseling at England's Tavistock Institute Clinic in the wake of his parents' divorce, when he was 7. LaRouche believes Tavistock is a mind-control facility where political assassins are trained.
- Jeremiah was a British Jew. LaRouche has been accused of anti-Semitism (and is a Holocaust denier who insists there were no gas chambers in the camps). There are Jewish people in his organization, but ex-members claim Jews are made to feel ashamed of their heritage and are recruited solely to counteract the allegations of anti-Semitism. This may or may not be true. It is beyond dispute that LaRouche loathes the English. He has called Britain "worse than the Nazis", and accused the Queen of "pushing drugs".

The 11 April 2007 suicide of Ken Kronberg is also disturbing. It's unclear why LaRouche's publishing operation went under, but observers suspect he's shuffling funds from one wing of his organization to another to evade taxation and/or hide ill-gotten donations. Ken Kronberg, head of PMR since the '70s, was blamed for its collapse. On the morning of April 11 LaRouche issued a "daily briefing memo" that excoriated the Baby Boomers in his organization, particularly the "print shop" (PMR), for failing him. They didn't raise enough funds, they weren't open to change, they didn't have vision, etc.
That afternoon, 58-year-old Kronberg left the PMR offices in Leesburg, Virginia and jumped from a highway overpass.

So far I don't know much about LaRouche. I don't grasp his ideology yet, though I gather it involves the Platonic ideal and authoritarianism. I know he really hates Cheney, considering him the true President. I know that he is a political chameleon who started his public life as a Trotskyist, took over a faction of the radical Students for a Democratic Society in the late '60s (SDS was behind most of the campus protests of that era, including Kent State), then became a conservative Democrat. Despite his party affiliation, he provided support and intelligence to Republicans in the '80s and sang the praises of Manuel Noriega. He ran for President several times, first in '76 and most recently in '04. He's endorsing Hilary Clinton now. He spent 1988-1994 in prison. He allegedly had links to white supremacists like Willis Carto in the '80s.
He has spun many out-there conspiracy theories:

- The Beatles were designed and sent to the U.S. by British intelligence, to undermine the morals of American teenagers.
- The B'nai B'rith was created by Freemasons as a pro-slavery spy ring during the Civil War.
- A single oligarchic group has controlled mankind from the dawn of history. It was first centered in Babylon, then Rome, then Venice, and now in London. The Queen of England is the "number one danger to humanity."

The nerve center of the LaRouche organization is the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the National Coalition of Labor Committees (NCLC), established in the early '70s and now headquartered in Leesburg, Virginia. Ken Kronberg was an NEC member. The NEC receives daily briefing memos from LaRouche or one of his aides, like former SDS member Tony Papert.
The NCLC quietly administrates a complex network of businesses, publishing ventures (most of them now defunct, replaced by online material like Executive Intelligence Review), fund-raising and recruiting operations such as telephone "boiler rooms", educational organizations like the Schiller Institute, political action committees, and political parties in 8 countries.

Dennis King, author of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, says LaRouche plays himself off as an eccentric sometimes, but is really "a serious ideologue in the classic European fascist mold...[with] a coherent program, subtle tactics, and a long-range plan."

More Information:

Lyndon LaRouche entry at Wikipedia
LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC)
Executive Intelligence Review
The Schiller Institute
Jeremiah Duggan entry at Wikipedia
LaRouche Watch

Other than this, I haven't been doing much of besides gearing up for some fringing and watching TV. We get FOX News now, and man is it creepy nowadays. What's up with Colmes's stand-in, Susan Estrich? Is she a man?!