August 23, 2009

My favorite conspiracy theory

My favorite conspiracy theory for the last few months has been that the young Barack Obama benefited from some CIA favors along the way, perhaps in transferring to Columbia U. or in his getting his copyeditor job at Business International, a firm with, apparently, ties to both CIA and SDS. Here's a website called Cannonfire that pulls together, in a disorganized fashion, various bits of evidence. There's nothing conclusive, but the young Obama probably had many more indirect links with CIA before the age of 25 than you did.

My version of this conspiracy theory is one that's neither terribly implausible nor hugely significant. But, when you are talking about the President of the United States, it's certainly interesting.

If you think of CIA less as the puppet-master of world history and more as merely one well-funded player in an international version of the municipal Favor Bank familiar from Bonfire of the Vanities and The Wire, then the idea that Obama got help from CIA-connected individuals along the way seems less shocking and more plausible. He's not the Manchurian Candidate, he's just a kid whose parents exploited Cold War tensions to get him a favor or two.

The key thing to recognize is that the President's parents were exactly the type of non-Communist leftists whom CIA constantly cultivated.

Barack Obama Sr. was a protege of the dynamic Tom Mboya, who was America's man in Kenya in the three way power struggle with Britain's man Jomo Kenyatta and Russia's man, Oginga Odinga. Mboya was publicly on the payroll of the AFL-CIO's anti-Communist outreach program and may have been on the CIA's payroll as well, according to David Horowitz's Ramparts magazine. Obama Sr. got to Hawaii on the American-funded Tom Mboya Airlift that brought young Kenyan elites to America for college. He later got his master's degree at Harvard, which was probably second only to Yale as a CIA recruiting ground during the New Frontier.

Although Obama Sr. criticized Mboya's non-radical and non-racist economics in his first published paper, he later worked for Mboya, as well as for an American oil company. Indeed, if Obama Sr.'s claims were true, he may have been the last man to speak to Mboya alive, and saw him gunned down in 1969 by a Kikuyu hitman likely affiliated with Kenyatta's cronies. Obama Sr. claimed to have been the only witness to have been able to identify the triggerman and that the Kikuyus tried to kill him for it. (Obama Jr. left all this out of Dreams from My Father, whether because the story was dangerous for his surviving Kenyan relatives 25 years later, because he didn't believe it, or because it violated his No Interesting Anecdotes policy in writing his book is unknown.)

Obama's mother worked at the American embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia in the mid to late 1960s, when it was CIA Central. Obama writes in Dreams from My Father:
She found herself a job right away teaching English to Indonesian businessmen at the American embassy, part of the U.S. foreign aid package to developing countries. ... The Americans were mostly older men, careerists in the State Department, the occasional economist or journalist who would mysteriously disappear for months at a time, their affiliation or function in the embassy never quite clear. [In other words, these International Men of Mystery were CIA] ...

These men knew the country, though, or parts of it anyway, the closets where the skeletons were buried. Over lunch or casual conversation they would share with her things she couldn’t learn in the published news reports. They explained how Sukarno had frayed badly the nerves of a U.S. government already obsessed with the march of communism through Indochina, what with his nationalist rhetoric and his politics of nonalignment-he was as bad as Lumumba or Nasser, only worse, given Indonesia’s strategic importance. Word was that the CIA had played a part in the coup, although nobody knew for sure.

Later, she worked for the Ford Foundation in Asia, which had a long history of ties with the CIA.

My theory is that at some point, the President's father and/or mother got in touch with old CIA contacts and asked them for help with their Hawaiian slacker son's advancement, such as getting him into the International Relations program at Columbia or getting him a decent-paying job at Business International. Obama would have been exactly the kind of second generation, suave, charismatic globalized individual with lots of foreign friends (including sons of Pakistan's political elite -- and this was in the early 1980s when Pakistan was the frontline in CIA's struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan) whom CIA guys would have wanted to do favors for in return for favors down the road.

When I first started thinking about this, I said, "Boy, my parents sure didn't have any two-degrees of separation contacts to CIA!" But, then, I realized, actually they did, being old friends from Lockheed back to the 1940s with legendary engineer Henry Combs and his wife Jimmy. Combs was the "irascible genius" (according to Ben Rich's Skunk Works) who was the chief structural designer of the incredible SR-71 spy plane that went 2500 mph, and, before that, he played a major role in the U2 spy plane. These CIA projects were of world-historical importance in averting WWIII by reducing tensions by letting the U.S. know the Soviets weren't on the verge of attack.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

63 comments:

Anonymous said...

Check out E.D. Hirsch's The Knowledge Deficit

Anonymous said...

This reminded me of MY favorite Barry O conspiracy theory. It has to do with the stock market collapse that happened during the first week of October of 2008. The market was always going to go down, but when? If it crashed in 2009, that would have been bad for Obama. If it crashed in 2007, that would have been good for Obama. October of 2008 - triple jackpot for Obama. Barry O had lots of fans on Wall St., so to me it's not a question of whether the will to do it was there, but rather a question of whether or not there was a way. In other words, would it have been technically possible for one or for a handful of big Wall St. operators to stick their fingers into the already-nauseous market's throat and induce vomiting on schedule?

Call me paranoid, and maybe I really am, but why haven't I seen anyone else wondering about this?

Anonymous said...

Barry O had lots of fans on Wall St

Fanny, Freddie, and Obama
By The Prowler
on 9.8.08 @ 12:08AM
spectator.org

When President George W. Bush nominated Henry Paulson to serve as Treasury Secretary, Republicans raised a red flag that Paulson, who, along with his wife, has strong ties to the Democrat party, would not be an honest broker with Republicans.

That seems to have been borne out, with sources inside of Treasury reporting that Paulson briefed Sen. Barack Obama and his campaign advisers on the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailout plan before offering such a briefing to the McCain campaign...


Paulson and Obama
By The Prowler
on 9.26.08 @ 9:49AM
spectator.org

When Sen. Barack Obama was given the floor to speak during White House negotiations, according to White House aides, he did so raising concerns about a House Republican alternative to the Paulson/Bernanke $700 billion bailout. But those concerns weren't necessarily his, as he was not aware of the GOP plan before reviewing notes provided him by Paulson loyalists in Treasury prior to entering the meeting.

According to an Obama campaign source, the notes were passed to Obama via senior aides traveling with him, who had been emailed the document via a current Goldman Sachs employee and Wall Street fundraiser for the Obama campaign. "It was made clear that the memo was from 'friends' and was reliable," says the campaign source...

Anonymous said...

"The Americans were mostly older men, careerists in the State Department, the occasional economist or journalist who would mysteriously disappear for months at a time, their affiliation or function in the embassy never quite clear. [In other words, these International Men of Mystery were CIA] ..."

Someone once told me that you can discern high-ranking CIA men by the fact that they have reserved parking spaces in the embassy parking lot, even though their job description does not apparently justify that.

Anonymous said...

That's a good one because it's probably true, in exactly the way you described. The bad one is this nonsense about him not being a citizen. It's ridiculous on its face yet will probably inspire some crank to post a 'rebuttal' in the comments here. How are these people any different than the 'Bush caused 911' cadre?

Bill said...

CIA?

They're a bunch of librarians (as far as I know).

Other Obama contacts - like Chicago commodities traders - were probably far more important to his political success.

Charles said...

Speaking of conspiracies, David Goldman who writes as "Spengler" in the Asia Times and First Things, used to write thing like the following during his days as a Lyndon LaRouche lackey:

"Operating under the cover of partnerships in Wall Street Brokerage Firms, executive positions in industrial companies, and hole-in-the-wall "scientific" firms scattered throughout the New York Metropolitan area, members of the Nuclear Club of Wall Street are the core of the atom spy network of Israel's foreign secret intelligence, the Mossad. These men are the most dangerous traitors in circulation now in the United States. Through their efforts, Israel has the means to provoke a third World War and destroy the United States."

http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/larouche-israel.PDF

Anonymous said...

"Other Obama contacts - like Chicago commodities traders - were probably far more important to his political success."

Bill, haven't heard of this angle.

Any more info about this?

Anonymous said...

Who but someone affiliated with the CIA could come up with such a dull, Beltway bureauspeak name like Business International Corporation? It sounds like a joke, or a bad parody from a movie.

Anonymous said...

Steve, what're you doing up past 2 in the morning anyway? Some personal time cruising porn sites cuz the wife's asleep?

Steve Sailer said...

Slaving away on a VDARE.com article.

It will be a good one.

Anonymous said...

"Slaving away on a VDARE.com article."

Ah, I see. I'm sure it'll be good.

Well, I hope Brimelow's paying you at least as much as he's apparently raking in. You deserve it, to say the least.

Anonymous said...

Call me paranoid, and maybe I really am, but why haven't I seen anyone else wondering about this?


i called this on iSteve the day the market broke. it was so obvious. westerners live under the illusion that the "Free Market" is free. it's not. there are "playas" out there who decide what happens, when.

haha said...

Steve, what're you doing up past 2 in the morning anyway? Some personal time cruising porn sites cuz the wife's asleep?


looks like u talk from experience

Anonymous said...

The CIA has proven itself completely incompetent for at least the past 20 years. Those bunglers aren't pulling the strings behind Obama. When was the last time they did anything effective - the early 1950s?

Anonymous said...

"Call me paranoid, and maybe I really am, but why haven't I seen anyone else wondering about this?"

Where do you hang out? Us weirdo goldbugs who post on the Kitco.com forum long since have concluded that Goldman Sachs did in fact crash the market for BO, in October 2008, as you say, so he'd be elected in November. And the current green shoots? Are really toxic-waste slime. The market will crash again this fall/winter, in order to get it over with in time for the 2010 elections.

Anonymous said...

I have a problem with the notion that Obama, Sr. was a “protégé” of Mboya. He’s not portrayed that way in “Dreams,” and he was certainly hostile to Mboya’s policies. It’s more likely that he was a protégé of Odinga. Susan Mboya, who was yet to be born when her father was assassinated, is quoted frequently with regard to the supposed relationship between Mboya and Obama, based on alleged “series of letters the two men exchanged” but “She declined to release the letters.” Uh, huh. The “witness to the assassination” story is also unsourced, based on what Obama supposedly told anonymous “friends.” Uh, huh.

Also, the evidence doesn’t support the fact that Obama was on that historic “first airlift” -- not necessarily significant, but just another indication on how incurious and sloppy the media’s research has been – why bother with anything so mundane as facts when the fourth estate is united in an all-out swoon ‘n drool effort to aid their “historic candidate”?

According to Footnote #25 in this article about the airlifts in the Journal of American History, “…a list of the students who landed in New York on September 9, 1959, does not contain the name of the elder Obama. Tom Shachtman, working in the African-American Students Foundation (AASF) papers for a book on the airlifts, has found that the elder Obama came in 1959 with support from the AASF but appears to have been routed a different way as he made his way to the University of Hawaii.”

That’s supported by this article in The East African written about a British couple, living in Kenya, who were involved through USIS with the airlifts, and for whom Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, worked as a cook: “…the young Obama Sr. left for the University of Hawaii before the first formal student airlift…”

Anonymous said...

"That's a good one because it's probably true, in exactly the way you described. The bad one is this nonsense about him not being a citizen. It's ridiculous on its face yet will probably inspire some crank to post a 'rebuttal' in the comments here. How are these people any different than the 'Bush caused 911' cadre?"
That's okay, Sprout. We understand your mental resistance. We were all where you are, at some point. Our egos are powerful.
Do be aware, though, that conceding that one "conspiracy theory" is true cracks the dam. Then other inconvenient facts begin to force themselves, against your will, into your conscious awareness, even though you may try to fight it for all you're worth.
Let's talk again in a few years.

Meanwhile, read the Kitco forums, for laughs, of course. Such silly nutcases!

Svigor said...

the type of non-Communist leftists whom CIA constantly cultivated.

Wow, that strikes me as a brilliant strategy. No, really. What to call them? National Socialist is already taken...oh, I know, Patriot Socialist? Nationalist Socialist? Jingo-Socialist?

Anonymous said...

Anon. said

"The CIA has proven itself completely incompetent for at least the past 20 years."

That's what they want you to think.

Svigor said...

Oginga Odinga

I knew I'd heard that somewhere before. That's Tibetan for "on your death bed, you will achieve total enlightenment"! So, he's got that going for him...

can't believe my eyes said...

"The CIA has proven itself completely incompetent for at least the past 20 years. Those bunglers aren't pulling the strings behind Obama. When was the last time they did anything effective - the early 1950s?"

Bunglers? Would you care to elaborate? And what makes you think that the official "CIA" is the one really doing all this? The CIA has itself become a "front" since people like the above commenter are convinced of its "bungling." hmmmm. There are other agencies, some of which we are totally unfamiliar with. What the official CIA has going for it, I'm not sure; but I do know that DARPA produces technology decades advanced over what is normally available today--I know people who work there.
The "coincidences" in the Obama background (such as we know of it, considering all those closed files) are too remarkable not to inspire critical thinking -- or at least questions -- in those capable of such activity.

Conspiracy theory? To conspire means literally, to "breath together" and a theory is an explanation yet to be proven. It is entirely in the nature of politics and social movements and goes on constantly. All you need to squelch the questions is a media totally saturated with those beholden to the handful who own them.

To use an old, but exemplary case: That LHO was the lone assassin is the government approved "conspiracy theory" that we were bullied into accepting as gospel, despite the loading of the "fact finding' Warren Commission with JFK's old enemies. They were largely a bunch with no investment at all in finding out the truth. As you read investigations that went beyond it, you realized with a shock that what the Commission ignored was more important than that to which they paid attention. The biggest question was WHY did they ignore what they ignored.

Fortunately a few critical thinkers, including my brother (who knew at the age of 14 that something was fishy) questioned how they wrapped up the whole event, that happened just after lunchtime, by dinner. American president murdered, defector to Russia come back to America (in the early 60!?) certain shooter. Case closed, as Posner entitled his book when the editors insisted on a LHO-lone-Assassin conclusion. Per his later admission, he'd been on the seesaw about how to tie up his magnus opus. Depended on who paid him, really.
Then Jack Ruby, hardened mob gofur, kills Owald so widow Jackie wouldn't have to testify in any trial. Just an old softie. E
Then sudden moving cancer took him away just before his own trial, as such cancer -- especially brain tumors -- has visited so many politicians who stick their heads above the crowd.

While I knew the Vietnam War was engineered and unnecessary, and that a lot more went on with the 60s assassinations, I did think that perhaps they were unusual cases. Now I know better. Questions, questions and more questions. In one prominent religion I know of, "Questions" is considered a divine attribute, "answers" interestingly, is not.
btw Steve, for people who seem to admire critical thinking, mistrust of the the official line, and justified paranoia about what the "elites" are doing to us, an awful lot of the responses to your article appear to mock the very idea of "conspiracy theories," using no discernment whatsoever. hmmm again.

Anonymous said...

> westerners live under the illusion that the "Free Market" is free. it's not. there are "playas" out there who decide what happens, when.<

Exactly; and it never was Free and can't be, given human nature.

Libertarians - may heaven kiss them - are the most naive simpletons on God's green ball. Reading Lew Rockwell's site is like reading exasperated Christian Science ladies with too much time on their hands.

Anonymous said...

Other Obama contacts - like Chicago commodities traders - were probably far more important to his political success.

Do not misunderestimate the baleful influence of one Thomas G Ayers, CEO of Commonwealth Edison; chairman of the Board of Trustees of Northwestern University, the Erikson Institute, the Bank Street College of Education in New York City, the Chicago Symphony, the Chicago Community Trust, the Chicago Urban League, the Community Renewal Society, the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry, Chicago United, the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities, and Dearborn Park Corp.; vice president of the Chicago Board of Education; member of the board of directors of Sears, G.D. Searle, Chicago Pacific Corp., Zenith Corp., Northwest Industries, General Dynamics Corp. of St. Louis, First National Bank of Chicago, the Chicago Cubs, and the Tribune Co.; etc etc etc.

Steve Diamond used to have a wealth of information about the Chicago years on his blog [to include a lot of stuff about Obama Jr & M LaVaughn Robinson's intimate relationship with the Minow family - who, by the way, recently trotted out their (other) daughter, Nell, in an attempt to smear Matt Taibbi - cf The Prowler's work on Goldman Sachs, as above], but for some reason Diamond has chosen to take his blog off-line...

Anonymous said...

Obama stabbing the CIA in the back??



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/
24/us/politics/24detain.html?_r=1&hp

&

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/
story?id=8398902

Anonymous said...

Obama's mother worked at the American embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia in the mid to late 1960s, when it was CIA Central. Obama writes in Dreams from My Father:
She found herself a job right away teaching English
==========


Was that Obama's Mama's cover story..... ???

Steve Johnson said...

The CIA has proven itself completely incompetent for at least the past 20 years. Those bunglers aren't pulling the strings behind Obama. When was the last time they did anything effective - the early 1950s?

The assumption there is that CIA's goal are what you think they are

If you assume that CIA's goals are power, influence and money for people connected with CIA (in other words, as Steve said in the post, a favor bank) you realize that they might be competent and you'd never know it.

-Steve Johnson

Anonymous said...

Speaking of conspiracy theories - no one seems to care that the Wahhabis now have an operative at the very heart of Foggy Bottom.

Of course, we also have a President who bows before the Wahhabi Prince, and who reserves his best & most heart-felt rhetoric for honoring Ramadan, so it's not like Foggy Bottom is the apple of the Wahhabis' eye anymore.

Nor, for that matter, do I imagine that they give a damn about the foreign affairs and imperial ambitions of Kenyan chicken farmers.

Anonymous said...

Good post, fills in a couple blanks

Obie was groomed all the way, mondo manchurian mamaboy for the new woman order (which ain't coming, it is here)

God help you all

Bill said...

Anonymous said...

"Other Obama contacts - like Chicago commodities traders - were probably far more important to his political success."

Bill, haven't heard of this angle.

Any more info about this?


Sure. I suspected about a year ago that something was going on with the big corn (i.e. ethanol) scam and the Obama candidacy, and it turned out I was right:

Sandor Got Obama’s Nod for Chicago-Style Climate Law

The amount of money in this carbon trading scheme is enormous. I really had no idea until I saw the figures myself.

Here's another article:

:
Obama's green energy vision to slash US carbon emissions faces key vote


This stuff worries me, because ethanol will not work as a fossil fuel replacement. Nuclear is our best bet, but I haven't seen any evidence that nuclear power producers will get the kind of subsidies they're throwing at Midwestern farmers.

Hunsdon said...

Apropos of nothing,and massively off topic, but when I read this NRO article (a shameful vice, like the NYT) I experienced strong, strong cognitive dissonance.

http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=MWFhYjhiODFiOGZmNTc1ZTQxMzlkNjNkNjIzNDg2YWU=

Garrett said...

I don't think Rich would be considered the chief designer of the SR-71, or having made a "major" contribution on the U2. It might be more accurate to say he made a small contribution to the U2, and a more significant one to the Blackbird, but that his mentor Kelly Johnson was really the key designer on both of those projects. But Rich could fairly be called the chief designer of the F-117 stealth fighter. Which is, you know, still pretty good.

Anonymous said...

My conspiracy is how it seems that the Dems and Pubbies have a deal to be "in power" for 8 years and then let the other party take over. You could hardly find a more unattractive candidate than McCain. He's about 90 years old, has a huge lump on the side of his face, and was "Bush on Steriods" when the country was sick of Bush. Talk about deliberately throwing the election... it could hardly be more obvious.

Whiskey said...

Obama, according to HotAir, will be prosecuting CIA interrogators and superiors for waterboarding KSM and others.

So, he's basically declared war on the CIA. He played around with charging Cheney, and Cheney fought back with disclosing various memos that showed attacks were averted and lives saved by waterboarding and belly slaps, bugs, etc.

I expect the CIA to leak like a sieve now, they have to destroy Obama (or go to jail) and he has to destroy them (or be ruined by disclosure of whatever it is he's hiding that is generating his war on the CIA).

[Nukes for monolithic nations like Poland and Israel that are small are likely stabilizing, giving smaller nations an "equalizer." Not even Putin will risk Moscow for Warsaw. It's the chaotic, crumbling nations where it's risky. This is why I read "Spengler" for solid data, and dismiss his religious stuff.]

albertosaurus said...

It was all inadvertantly revealed on an "X Files" episode. In a sewer at Dealy Plaza the alien's agent shot Kennedy. That man was of course "The Smoking Man".

Now today Henry Waxman is leading a campaign against smoking. Coincidence? Don't be naive.

Anonymous said...

Coincidence? Don't be naive.

Personally, I didn't think that it was a coincidence that Nell Minow was sent out to lead the accusations of anti-semitism which were leveled at Matt Taibi.

In fact, I found it to be the final nail in the coffin of this idea which holds that all of these various & sundry malfeasances together amount to nothing more than mere coincidence.

Bob said...

The CIA was not happy Obama choose the outsider California liberal Leon Panetta to run it.

Anonymous said...

"but I do know that DARPA produces technology decades advanced over what is normally available today-"

OK, as a geek I gotta ask:

Care to elaborate?

-Vanilla Thunder

Mr. Anon said...

I no longer believe in conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theories are exactly what THEY want you to believe.

Mr. Anon said...

"can't believe my eyes said...

but I do know that DARPA produces technology decades advanced over what is normally available today--I know people who work there."

I find that hard to believe. I'm sure they have glitzy power-point charts describing advanced technologies.......which do not actually exist. A lot of government sponsored research is not very good - a lot of it is just vaporware.

WASP-Harvard-Mafia said...

“There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact”
~ Arthur Conan Doyle

----

How is this one for a conspiracy, Steve-O??


"Obama has repeatedly defended his appointee, saying he will not accept Geithner's resignation if offered."

Maybe this is why:

"Geithner's paternal grandfather, Paul Herman Geithner (1902–1972), emigrated with his parents from the German town of Zeulenroda to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1908.[7] His father, Peter F. Geithner, is the director of the Asia program at the Ford Foundation in New York. During the early 1980s, Peter Geithner oversaw the Ford Foundation's microfinance programs in Indonesia being developed by S. Ann Dunham-Soetoro, President Barack Obama's mother, and they met in person at least once.[8] Timothy Geithner's mother, Deborah Moore Geithner, is a pianist and piano teacher in Larchmont, New York where his parents currently reside. Geithner's maternal grandfather, Charles F. Moore, was an adviser to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and served as a vice president of Ford Motor Company.[9]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_F._Geithner

&

http://tiny.cc/Gv5Sh

WASP-Harvard-Mafia said...

"The Obama Geithner Connection"
« Cinie’s World

[...]
"Did you know that Turbo Tax Timothy Geithner, tax cheat (TTTG, tc) is the son of Peter Geithner, former Ford Foundation head of the Indonesian region’s microfinance program, which formerly employed one S. Ann Sutoro, Program Director, and Mother of the Obamessiah? Betcha didn’t. Well, didja know that when Son of Stanley was going to school in Los Angeles, he went with a Pakistani friend to visit his mother in Indonesia, who was working for TTTG, tc’s father at that time, then spent a couple weeks in Pakistan, before he abruptly transferred to Columbia in New York where TTTG, tc’s dad was headquartered? Now, you do. How’s that Jiffy Pop hat fitting now, huh?" [...]

http://tiny.cc/FXCdp

Richard Hoste said...

"Obama, according to HotAir, will be prosecuting CIA interrogators and superiors for waterboarding KSM and others. "

If only. I'm sure the CIA has been just as incompetent as the rest of government and probably more evil.

Bored with JFK said...

I'm a Gen Xer bored with the Kennedys and I just recently realized something. Why doesn't anyone have a problem accepting Hinckley as a lone nut and Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore as not part of anything larger than the Manson family?

can't believe my eyes said...

"... DARPA produces technology decades advanced over what is normally available today..."

Mr. Anon opined, "I find that hard to believe."
I'm sure you do. That's the point of being stealthy about things.

"but I do know that DARPA produces technology decades advanced over what is normally available today-"
OK, as a geek I gotta ask:
Care to elaborate?
-Vanilla Thunder"

I first heard of it's clandestine aspects from a friend who worked with a film director. I knew nothing about the film industry. However, appparently DARPA releases information about its latest efforts to certain film directors who use them in sci-fi and adventure films. Spielberg screened Close Encounters at the White House with Ronald Reagan in attendance.
Kubrick worked was heavily funded by NASA to film what a moon landing would be like, and damned if some of the same techniques don't show up in the official moon landing film of July, 1969 as were on display in 2001 Space Odyssey. http://www.orwelltoday.com/readermoonkubrick.shtml
and
http://www.cbc.ca/passionateeyesunday/feature_161103.html

American astronauts did go to the moon, IMHO, but there is evidence by those who know how films are made, that photos of the day in 1969, were Kubrick made.

DARPA and NASA - (Never A Atraight Answer)- advised sci-fi films to to acclimate the public and to test out how these inventions would look in real life-- and the closest they can get to that is a film.
My film-connected friend told me of paintings that change color and shading according to the lighing in the environment. Another is total submersion in a liquid and being able to breath. This is known technology now, but DARPA had this for years.

The military keeps futuristic applications top secret for obvoius reasons.
The film industry has been the major, mostly only, venu for displaying the technology of the future.
Concerning War of the Worlds:
http://0xdb.org/0181689

"Three years before production began, Steven Spielberg assembled a team of sixteen future experts in Santa Monica to brainstorm out the year 2054 for him. This team included: Neil Gershenfeld, professor at the Media Lab at MIT; Shaun Jones, director of biomedical research at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency);..." (among others)

Here's one nugget from DARPA DSO (Defense Sciences Organization) "The Future of Ideas":
http://www.darpa.mil/darpatech2005/presentations/dso/giroir-mod.pdf
http://www.darpa.mil/darpatech2005/presentations/dso/giroir-mod.pdf

Anyway, I can't begin to do it all justice. I never used to take it so seriously, but now I know better.

Hamlet:
Swear by my sword
Never to speak of this that you have heard.

Ghost:
[Beneath] Swear by his sword.

Hamlet:
Well said, old mole, canst work i' th' earth so fast?
A worthy pioner! Once more remove, good friends.

Horatio:
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

Hamlet:
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Anonymous said...

"The CIA has proven itself completely incompetent for at least the past 20 years."

That's what they want you to think.


Did they predict the fall of the Berlin Wall? No. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait? No. 9/11? No. Have they caught Osama? No. How'd they do on Iraqi WMD? Terrible. These are just a few examples of why these guys are completely outwitted bunglers.

but I do know that DARPA produces technology decades advanced over what is normally available today,

DARPA doesn't produce anything.

It gives contracts to companies that produce things. But this hardly proves the CIA or the USG writ large is not incompetent.

If you assume that CIA's goals are power, influence and money for people connected with CIA (in other words, as Steve said in the post, a favor bank) you realize that they might be competent and you'd never know it.

Pshaw, more nonsense,

Marc B said...

The linkages and coincidences speak for themselves and do not require much theorizing. It's 80/20 that one or both of his parents were CIA. Notice that his career trajectory and home life mirror another charismatic former state rep, college professor, internationalist, Democratic Convention keynote speaker and suspected CIA plant Bill Clinton. Clinton's unsealed resume shows his connection to power brokers from his later high school years onward. One can only suspect Obama's sealed records would show a similiar web of interconnections.

The Manchurian candidate stuff is going out on a limb, but it is quite apparent that both of these men were groomed at a very early age to hold high office.

Steve, by what measure was Obama's mother NOT a Communist?

Anonymous said...

About this Pakistan business - many of the PUMAs & birthers have wondered whether Obama [and his grandparents] might have gotten a little sloppy about firmly re-establishing his USA citizenship, after he returned to Hawaii, as a teenager, and whether, as 19-year-old adult, he might have made the mistake of travelling to Pakistan on a "Barry Soetoro/Indonesian" passport, rather than on a "Barack Obama/American" passport.

And since Indonesia didn't [and still doesn't, even to this day] recognize dual citizenship, such a foreign journey, as an adult, would prove Obama to be constitutionally ineligible for the presidency.

About a year and a half ago, there was [or was what should have been] a massive scandal when Obama's people [as supervised by John O. Brennan] were caught snooping around in a bunch of sensitive State Department files.

Kenneth Timmerman has since confirmed that Brennan's people were indeed "cauterizing" Obama's State Department file, and, in the meantime, Brennan himself has moved on to become the "Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism", working under Rahm Emanuel, in a position which did not require a Senate confirmation hearing [i.e. essentially he is now the unaccountable "Czar" who gives Janet Napolitano her marching orders].


PS: If you want to see an hilarious little episode involving incoordination within the bowels of the Ministry of Truth, then note that, on the evening of Thursday, March 20, 2008, Obama's people were apoplectic about this unconscionable violation of his privacy:


State Department: Someone snooped in Obama's passport file
CNN's State Department correspondent Zain Verjee contributed to this report.
Thur March 20, 2008
updated 9:10 a.m. EDT, Fri March 21, 2008
cnn.com

..."This is an outrageous breach of security and privacy, even from an administration that has shown little regard for either over the last eight years," said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton in a statement.

"Our government's duty is to protect the private information of the American people, not use it for political purposes"...



But less than two days later, on Saturday, March 22, 2008 [Saturday being an excellent day for dumping these kinds of hate-facts], the entire affair became a non-event and was discarded right down the memory hole when it was discovered that it was in fact Obama's very own people who had been snooping around in his State Department file:


Chief of firm involved in breach is Obama adviser
From Kate Bolduan
CNN's Zain Verjee contributed to this report.
March 22, 2008 -- Updated 0110 GMT (0910 HKT)
cnn.com

The CEO of a company whose employee is accused of improperly looking at the passport files of presidential candidates is a consultant to the Barack Obama campaign, a source said Saturday...

Anonymous said...

More generally, though, I don't understand why Dubya steadfastly refused to publicize and confront and prosecute this stuff.

The decade began with the sale of the New Square & Marc Rich pardons, and it ended with Brennan's people scrubbing passport files & Pritzker turning off the credit-card security checks on the campaign donations & Goldman-Sachs throwing the election to Obama, but all the while - for eight long years - Dubya couldn't be bothered to utter so much as a squeak about any of it.

It's almost as though Dubya had a pathological revulsion to the very idea of dirty-tricks - so much so that maybe he was embarrassed [or felt that it was beneath his dignity?] to acknowledge even the dirty tricks of his own sworn enemies.

Kinda like the prim & proper church-going Garden Club Secretary/PTA President/Ladies Auxiliary Chairwoman former debutante who refuses to allow herself to even contemplate the possibility that her husband might be a serial-philanderer with a large and growing brood of bastard children all over town and throughout the surrounding counties.

Just weird, weird stuff.

It sure would be nice - for a change - to see some GOP types who had the gonads to take the bull by the horns.

I'm just sick to death of watching conservatives allowing themselves to be used as doormats and wash rags and toilet paper by The Left.

Anonymous said...

"I'm a Gen Xer bored with the Kennedys and I just recently realized something. Why doesn't anyone have a problem accepting Hinckley as a lone nut"

Hinckley wasn't a lone nut.

Google "Bushy Knoll Conspiracy".

Anonymous said...

I'm just sick to death of watching conservatives allowing themselves to be used as doormats and wash rags and toilet paper by The Left.

These people (Bush and co.) aren't conservatives. All of them were vetted by the left. Genuine conservatives aren't allowed in the clubhouse.

Mr. Anon said...

"can't believe my eyes said...

Mr. Anon opined, "I find that hard to believe."

I'm sure you do. That's the point of being stealthy about things."

I followed that link you provided - what was shown there is advertising, nothing more. Amusingly, they claim that DSO (Defence Sciences Office) has done this, or DSO has done that.

DSO has done nothing except cut checks to people. DARPA is a funding agency only - they have no facilities of their own. Also in that brochure was this statement:

"...previously unimaginable future,
far side ideas like power from
garbage, tabletop nuclear fusion,..."

So where is that table-top fusion?

Most government managers are full of s**t. Most of them don't even know what the people below them in the organization are really doing. They talk about technologies they may be talking about some avenue of research that they cut years before, or which just never amounted to much.

And the think tank that Steven Spielberg convened was not for "War of the Worlds" - it was for "Minority Report". And I don't expect the world of 2054 to look like "Minority Report". There's nothing more dated than the predictions of a futurist.

can't believe my eyes said...

"And the think tank that Steven Spielberg convened was not for "War of the Worlds" - it was for "Minority Report". And I don't expect the world of 2054 to look like "Minority Report".

Yeah, my bad. War of the Worlds was a classic already written decades ago, so of course he didn't need advice. It was for Minority Report.

"There's nothing more dated than the perdictions of a futurist."

What date of "dated" are you talking about? Time moves quickly and we're used to seeing sci-fi become mundane Christmas presents a couple years later. That doesn't change the fact that these things were in the planning many years earlier.
I'm not talking about "a futurist" as in any old "futurist." I'm talking about specific government sponsored activities, many of which are carried on well below the radar.

"Most government managers are full of s**t. Most of them don't even know what the people below them in the organization are really doing."

Pretty lame "defense" for government insouciance. Govt. employees are easy targets.
The military applies stringent criteria for its Special Forces, compared to, well, the rest of the military. All agencies are capable of this when they need to, as long as they operate below the radar and are not subject to PC/AA criteria for hiring and appointing.

As for DARPA/DSO contracting out. So? They get done what they need done, and don't necessarily have to depend on federal employees.

Where do you think all those trillions that just "disappear" go? http://solari.com/archive/missing_money/
It doesn't ALL go into private pockets to fund holidays in Thailand. IMHO, much of it goes to fund "black ops" and the murky world of conspiracies. I admit that we don't have a complete understanding of this world, but I cannot ignore its existence.
They want you to ignore them so they can just get on with it.
My interests do get into stuff that this blog doesn't "do", but the fact can be equally applied to areas of isteve special concerns. Like the control of the press by illegal immigration promoters. How much sense does that make? You really have to dig deeper for reasons.

Mr. Anon said...

"can't believe my eyes said...
............."

So where is that table top fusion?

can't believe my eyes said...

"can't believe my eyes said...
............."

"So where is that table top fusion?"

Couldn't tell you. If they revealed all, they wouldn't have that clandestine rep, now would they? However, one thing I do know (and you are perfectly justified in your disbelief, since for many, seeing's believing.) If they are claiming it's been done, it has. Probably a long time ago.

Anonymous said...

Bored with JFK said...
I'm a Gen Xer bored with the Kennedys

8/25/2009
----------


Oh, god this is why our country will go doen the tubes. Know your history or be doomed to repeat it, KID.

Anonymous said...

The decade began with the sale of the New Square & Marc Rich pardons, and it ended with Brennan's people scrubbing passport files & Pritzker turning off the credit-card security checks on the campaign donations & Goldman-Sachs throwing the election to Obama, but all the while - for eight long years - Dubya couldn't be bothered to utter so much as a squeak about any of it.
-------------

Obama would never be elected if not for the maufactured crisies.

Maybe They told Bush to STFU or they will charge him with two counts of THEFT.

Mr. Anon said...

"can't believe my eyes said...

"can't believe my eyes said...
............."

"So where is that table top fusion?"

Couldn't tell you. If they revealed all, they wouldn't have that clandestine rep, now would they? However, one thing I do know (and you are perfectly justified in your disbelief, since for many, seeing's believing.) If they are claiming it's been done, it has. Probably a long time ago."

You certainly are gullible.

Anonymous said...

Mr. Anon, "You certainly are gullible."

I choose my gullibility carefully. Unlike most who have it chosen for them.

Anonymous said...

"So where is that table top fusion?"

Couldn't tell you. If they revealed all, they wouldn't have that clandestine rep, now would they? However, one thing I do know (and you are perfectly justified in your disbelief, since for many, seeing's believing.) If they are claiming it's been done, it has. Probably a long time ago."

Eugene Mallove, Ph.D., resigned from MIT in protest of the data falsifying he witnessed from MIT scientists -- all who were working on "hot fusion" -- ostensibly running reproducibility experiments of Pons and Fleischman's cold fusion announcement. Dr. Mallove was later murdered, shortly before he was to give a presentation to the DoD, after years and years of struggle to get the opportunity to present his evidence.

In the intervening years, many researchers, including from Michael McKubre at SRI International, a respected California lab that does extensive work for the government, and the U.S. Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, have refined and expanded upon Pons and Fleischman's groundbreaking discoveries.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Mallove

http://freeenergynews.com/Directory/ColdFusion/

http://www.iscmns.org/
The International Society for Condensed Matter Nuclear Science

http://www.infinite-energy.com/

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

Eugene Mallove, Ph.D., resigned from MIT in protest of the data falsifying he witnessed from MIT scientists -- all who were working on "hot fusion" -- ostensibly running reproducibility experiments of Pons and Fleischman's cold fusion announcement."

Though ostensibly a scientist at one time, Mallove was not employed as a scientist at MIT - he was employed as a science writer. He also falsely used MITs name in organizing a conference on cold fusion - leading people to believe that it was being organized with the sponsorship of MIT, when it had no such approval from the university.

Mallove also has researched "Orgone Energy" - the crackpot theory of psychiatrist William Reich. Do you believe in "Orgone Energy"?

Cold fusion is a crock. No careful experiments ever reproduced Pons and Fleischman's shoddy experiments. Nobody has ever measured the reactants of a D-D reaction emanating from a cold-fusion cell. In fact, the two deuterons in a deuterium molecule are closer together than they are when packed together in a palladium lattice. One should expect to see more fusion from a sample of liquid deuterium than from a "cold-fusion" cell.

Mr. Anon said...

"Mr. Anon said...

Nobody has ever measured the reactants of a D-D reaction emanating from a cold-fusion cell."

Excuse me. That should have been "reaction products" - not "reactants".

Anonymous said...

This Obama/CIA meme appears to be gaining steam [see here, here, and here].