aleX joneS is the Fred Flintstone of our time

WWW--The fascination--even my own--just continues to boggle my mind. He has no real ideas of his own, but he's burly and loud and shows absolute certainty and credulousness at all times. There's no conspiracy theory he wouldn't love to have thought up. It seems he's the last guy on earth to have heard of Bohemian Grove. Sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote about the gathering place of the elites decision-makers in the California redwoods way back in 1956 in his book The Power Elite, when rock was being born and Eisenhower was president.

America's global power had reached an apex, and it's been downhill ever since. Mills didn't think Bohemian Grove amounted to much and that it was simply a place for the influential to unwind and sometimes talk shop. I don't think he was mistaken, but even reading the implications of what Mills concluded, you can presume that deals are made and consecrated there. And? That's not a conspiracy, it's reasonably out in the open. Were that not so, Jones himself would never have been able to sneak in, but then you begin to realize that this is more about oversimplified explanations and the cult of personality than anything else.

With all of his yammering about government being evil, you'd think Alex Jones was merely an extremist Republican, not that that's saying much these days. Perhaps this is why he's becoming more mainstream. It's beyond my understanding why Slacker director Richard Linklater has placed Jones in two of his computer rotoscope films, Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006), based on the paranoid meditation on informant and surveillance culture by Philip K. Dick., except that he literally sees him as a cartoon character. If that's what he means, I'm with him. Jones is a symptom of a very sick body politic.

While he espouses being against the wars in the Middle East on the one hand as Ron Paul does, he's also spreading misinformation about the current president and his birth certificate on the other. Jones is a clown at best, but I have to wonder if he's around to bad-jacket information that's actually valid and true. But most of all, he really just looks like a shaved ape with a Halloween mask on, yelling at the top of his lungs that there's a fire in the crowded theater of America when there's merely smoke. He is alarmist in his rhetoric. He is a conflater and a spreader of hysteria. He is not the answer, and he is a demagogue. What he constitutes is a great example of delusions of adequacy, and the dark underbelly of Populism. He is a very dangerous man.

Postscript 10.17.2009: And if you don't believe me, look at the one you're with! We'll just say that Ted Nugent is Jones's Barney Rubble.

On my DC Madam account and the human condition

WWW--They say that when you get older, you get wiser. This is true, but how does a lot of this knowledge profit the wise? It just depends. I have descended into the bowels of hell in this story, it has been an eye-opener, even with my own jaundiced view of humanity. When you look at a story like this, one can only marvel at how many countless times it's played-out behind the scenes. But Jeane was a fighter and she wouldn't go quietly, leaving an unparalleled record of the circus going on in D.C. that would make a sociologist drool.

This is what makes the late Ms. Palfrey's saga so unique.

Jeane was hardly a saint, and I would dissuade anyone from looking at her as one. Sometimes, we're both victims and abusers, slaves and exploiters, but the more I learn about her and her life, the more I simply pity her and hate the well-heeled men who used her service and the woman who worked for it. All of these women were used, and used again, until they were no longer of any use. The disgusting prosecution team dragged these women before a court--not their powerful customers, something that's partly Jeane's fault--and made them recount gynecological experiences they had, the coarseness of the sex, and just went about humiliating all of them to protect morons like Sen. David Vitter. Rest assured that I will be getting very loud indeed next year when Davey comes up for reelection, you can bank on it.

Then, you have media turd and crooked lobbyist Jack Burkman Jr. who somehow managed to slip through the wire altogether. How did that happen? A compliant mainstream media, of course. From my own findings and materials, I can tell you without a hint of humor, sarcasm, or exaggeration, that Jack Burkman is making factually incorrect statements very consciously that he's not in the phone records of Pamela Martin & Associates. There's no question of this, and I would have no problem proving it was so in a court of law if seriously challenged. Challengers might recall that while the rules of evidence in Ms. Palfrey's RICO case were more relaxed in favor of the prosecution, there would be an advantage in that area on my end in a civil hearing, and I would win since the truth's on my side. After that, I would countersue whomever was foolish enough to challenge my assertion.

It's sounds strange to say this, but I'm becoming more and more convinced that much of the business going on in Washington D.C. is based around illegal gifting and blackmail. I believe that Jeane was part of this nexus of crime done under the color of authority and that it's all-but-institutionalized. The recent developments (also generally unreported by the mainstream media) in the Sibel Edmonds case and her August 8, 2009 statements under oath before a congressional committee underscore Palfrey's contention that she was being used in some kind of a "honey pot" operation.

At one point I thought I'd introduced the concept to Jeane and her counsel at the time (summer 2007), but after having read Sibley's own account--Why Just Her--and other materials that I've come across over the months, I can see they were already considering this factor in their defense. There had to be a very real reason for this beyond expediency and there are many things still under seal in the case, including ex parte meetings and filings by what I have to assume was the intelligence community, even the White House itself. Jeane and I had an interesting exchange on the phone once: I lamented the eternal quality of corruption. Her response was both profound and almost Buddhist when she stated, "Matt, there will always be corruption. New generations will be born and it will continue." That's true, but it had a tinge of nihilism to it that was confirmed by her suicide. All the more reason for eternal vigilance.

I enjoin all my readers who are interested in this case to buy counselor Sibley's account, do their own research for themselves, and ponder what really makes this system run the way it does. Yes, it's about patriarchy, and much, much worse. You don't even know the half of it. There could be a very good chance that the upcoming inquiries into the CIA, lobbying, the torture and warrantless wiretapping programs, and several other scandals under the Bush II administration, will elicit more information in the Palfrey/Hookergate scandal.

Expect my account spring/summer 2010.