[David Berkowitz] "underscored a reference to Dr. Stephen Ward, who died in an apparent suicide in England in the aftermath of the Keeler-Profumo scandal in the early 1960s.
"For Ward himself was a dabbler in the occult and on his death there was a great deal of scurrying around among certain London practitioners to cover their traces."
(Ward was a close friend of socialite Claus Von Bulow, who was living in England at that time. Von Bulow, who later relocated to Manhattan and Newport, Rhode Island, would be charged with attempting to murder his wife, Sunny, via insulin injections.)
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alright, today I'm gonna talk about James Jesus Angleton, my patented ANGLETON MINDSET, why we're living in a wilderness of mirrors, and why paranoia is the appropriate response to the world we live in.
first, let's cover the contours of his life.
born in Idaho in 1917 to James Hugh Angleton and Carmen Mercedes Moreno. his father worked for National Cash Register, and ultimately bought the NCR franchise in Italy. James Jesus grew up in Milan.
"Hugh Angleton... was ultra-conservative, a sympathizer with Fascist officials. He was certainly not unfriendly with the Fascists."
today I'd like to go down a relatively small rabbit hole about the Salt Lake City Temple in Utah. there's a lot to say, but I'm gonna stay focused on the 1962 temple bombing, or as I call it, my favorite small-scale conspiracy theory of all time
11/14/62, a bomb goes off at Temple Square (a city bloc w/ several LDS church buildings, see first photo). the damage was relatively minor, and it took the watchmen 30 minutes to figure out what got damaged.
11 windows were broken/blown out, damage to doors, fixtures, plaster, and "one of the temple’s famous doorknobs had been sent flying into the building, puncturing a hole in a wall"
it's time to talk about Jimmy Hoffa, which lets me talk about some of my favorite topics: organized crime, unions, parapolitics, corruption, the mafia, the left, reactionaries. I even think you can see him as a proto-Trump, in some ways. let's get into it.
I'm gonna talk about three things in particular: Hoffa's parapolitical significance (he definitely helped kill at least JFK and possibly Bobby, lol), Hoffa the man, and the union's effectiveness. I'm gonna try to stay organized
without being too specific, a union really got my grandparents the chance at a good life, and helped my parents as well. I'm very pro-union, so it's worth remembering this because I'm probably gonna be pretty critical of Hoffa at times, lol
I read this recently, written by the Communist Party of India (Maoist).
afaict it's a pretty good overview of MLM thought, worth reading if you're into that or curious
Mao's innovation of allying the proles with the peasants and seeing them as potential revolutionary actors, and also not immediately alienating the national (as opposed to comprador) bourgeoisie sounds pretty effective
one thing that gave me pause tho, was this passage about 'Soviet imperialism', "A prominent exception was Kampuchea, where genuine communist revolutionaries—the Khmer Rouge—remained independent until invaded in 1978 by Vietnam at the behest of the Soviet imperialists."
today I'm gonna talk about Cleveland organized crime, because I'm going to post more about transnational crime, and it helps to understand the US mafia, and I also wanna post about Hoffa in the future; this topic is a good setup for both.
so, like a lot of people, I'm fascinated by the mafia, and while I'm no expert, I've read a lot about it.
for one thing, I think that a good understanding of the mafia teaches you a lot about how this country really works
also, another thing I feel pretty strongly about (or maybe it's just the mistake I made) is that people rush in and try to understand the five families in NYC, or maybe Chicago, and get a distorted picture of how things work.
the past couple years, I haven't read that much fiction, because reality is strange enough, so I occasionally force myself to read fiction. I also rarely reread novels unless they're really good. I recently reread Jonathan Littell's the Kindly Ones, which is one of my favorites
when I first read this, I didn't know much about the horrors of the Einsatzgruppen and the Eastern Front, so this functioned as an introduction to those topics. the main character meets many real characters, and I didn't know most of them until this rereading
for instance, Paul Blobel, the commanding officer at Babi Yar, who temporarily went insane due to the pressures of the mass killings, which figured prominently in Masters of Death, appears in the Kindly Ones