Spent the whole weekend reading about the impeachment forces gathring around Nixon in 1974, and one thing really stuck out. The House Judiciary committee. Up until the previous election, it had been chaired by Emmanuel Celler, a 25-term incumbent, and a known friend of Nixon's. If Celler had been chair, the hearings would almost certainly have had a different complexion. Could Nixon have escaped? Maybe not, but he might have dragged things out longer, perhaps long enough for another Hail Mary play like China. (Notice how the Dark Umbrella cabal thinks in the long run -- they knew China was a sleeping giant market for their capitalist wares, and that may well have been the reason Nixon was euchred into making that trip.)

But seriously. A 25-term friend of Nixon's suddenly fails at the polls just when he might tip the balance? I'm thinking I see the shadow of the White Umbrella.
 
Here's the rule of thumb I've learned: To find conspiracies, you need to look for outlier events. Things that are plausible, that don't defy the laws of physics or human nature, but are just one extra standard deviation from the mean.

Things like, say,  JFK's secret service detail drinking non-alcoholic "Salty Dicks" at a club the night before Alpdrucken ims Ulmstrasse.  You read that in the Warren Report, and you say, yeah, right. A bunch of Secret Service guys drinking grapefruit juice. (The things you can learn reading the entire 22-volume Warren Report cover to cover.)

Or, things like the entire political system suddenly turning on Richard Nixon in 1974. Within that overall penumbra of events, there will be some moments of totality where something truly unusual happens. Those are the Black Swan moments where the shadow of the Umbrella cabal can be seen.
 
After much soul searching and pouring over notebooks, I've decided to turn to one of my long-suspected connections with the white umbrella: the Nixon resignation and the end of the Vietnam War.
 
For reasons I may expand on in future blogs, I've given up on the line of research of the last couple years focusing on the Weathermen.
 
Played a lot of Resistance and BioShock. My enormous Fabian Bachrach campaign poster of Nixon watches me with smug, airbrushed eyes. Every day I squat here in the basement, I get weaker. Yeah, Maybe I'll just get a pizza and watch Apocalypse Now. That's probably best.

It's really sick to look forward to Mondays.
 
I always know what's up. I mean, that's what it is to be a conspiracy researcher, always looking for "other orders behind the visible," never being satisfied with the "official story" and, despite what the critics say, never holding blindly to a hypothesis under which the facts have begun to erode.

And that's why I'm in such a peculiar place right now. I'm getting home after another brutal week at work, and instead of diving in, certain of where I'm going, I feel like I'm spinning my wheels.

This is what it's like not to be sure.
 
People had been telling me I had to watch the film, and I will admit, there were some suggestive ideas. The notion of Nixon being a larger-than-life force all the way through to 1985 is interesteing, and I can see why some of the folks in the conspiracy community read the film as an allegory of American foreign policy and domestic disinformation. But for me, it was just to morally ambiguous. I'm not a big fan of comic books -- sorry, graphic novels -- but maybe I should trying reading it. People tell me it's better. Meh.
 
I've figured out what's been nagging at me about the Sixites and Seventies. If we assume that the Nixon Administration was aligned with the Dark Umbrella (a given) and that the counterforce was effectively muted (which also appears the only conclusion from the evidence) then how does one account for the Weathermen.

Their goals are too orthogonal to the Adminstration to consider the possibility of a splinter cell of the Dark order. I suppose that a false flag operation cannot be entirely ruled out (with the operatives themselves, perhaps, not even knowing that they were operating in service of the Dark. Could Nixon's people  have infiltrated and run a fifth column of Manchurian insurrectionists?

I have learned not to put anything beyond the pale of the Dark Umbrella cabal, but that seems to strain credulity. Will need to think.
 
I generally don't blog about personal stuff, but every once in a while, I have to admit that walking through downtown Manhattan gets to me. I have to walk down through Battery Park to get to the Staten Island ferry every day, and most of the time, I just turn off that switch in my head. I might just be walking through a Nebraska corn field. But sometimes -- like this week -- I just start to lose it. I see the Sphere, or despite my best efforts, I catch a glimpse of the cranes and construction at Ground Zero, and it all just comes rushing in on me.

It's ironic, I suppose; someone like me, working as a tech support geek at a Wall Street financial services firm. If I thought there were jobs for geeks like me somewhere outside the city, sometimes I think I'd move out of Staten Island. And no, contrary to the snide comments over on on the alt boards, I don't live in my parent's basement.  It's an in-law apartment, ***hole. I put every penny into getting the word out, and I'm proud of that.

I just wish, sometimes, that I worked in midtown.
 
I wonder if Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was a easily readable to his contemporaries. It must have been, or why else would the folks from the SDS have appropriated the name.

But I am struck by the playful clarity of the opening lines of the third verse, which are all clearly ways to avoid the draft. "Get sick, get well, hang around an inkwell,"  that is, receive a deferment for higher education.) "Ring bell" took me a while, until I stumbled across an early 60s PSA for mental illness, whose symbol, in those days, was a hand-rung school bell. Avoiding the draft by faking insanity. "Get barred" i.e., use (or perhaps become) a lawyer. "Write braille," would be a medical deferment for vision. "Get jailed," speaks for itself. Easy to see why this appealed to the "Weathermen."

And their symbol -- well, at least some others have noticed its similarity to Obama's corporate logo.