Parole Blocked for Leslie Van Houten

What follows is a brief excerpt from a 3-30-22 GUARDIAN article entitled "California Governor Blocks Parole for Manson Follower Leslie Van Houten":

The California governor, Gavin Newsom, on Tuesday blocked parole for Charles Manson follower Leslie Van Houten, reversing a panel’s recommendation that she be freed after spending a half-century in prison.

Van Houten, 72, “currently poses an unreasonable danger to society if released from prison at this time”, Newsom said in his parole review. It was the fifth time that a California governor has rejected her release.

Her attorney, Rich Pfeiffer, disputed that view and said the decision will be appealed in court. He accused Newsom of rejecting parole because he is worried about “his political future” and noted that Van Houten has a spotless prison disciplinary record.

“We’re not fighting [over] Leslie being a good person. She’s proven that through her actions for half a century,” he said.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

To hear Mae Brussell's analysis of the Manson murders, follow the links below....

MAE BRUSSELL (10-13-1971)

 

 

MAE BRUSSELL (11-17-1971)

Earendel, the Morning Star

From Joel Achenbach's 3-30-22 WASHINGTON POST article entitled "Hubble Telescope Detects Most Distant Star Ever Seen, Near Cosmic Dawn":

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there was a large and magnificently brilliant star that shined across the young, expanding universe. The starlight skewed blue. It was the cosmic morning, when everything in the universe was still new, raw, the galaxies still forming not long after the first stars had ignited and lit up the heavens.

The light from that blue star traveled through space for billions of years, and then one day a few thin beams crashed into a polished mirror — the light bucket of the Hubble Space Telescope.

In a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature, a team of astronomers asserts that this is the most distant individual star ever seen. They describe it as 50 to 100 times more massive than our sun, and roughly 1 million times brighter, with its starlight having traveled 12.9 billion years to reach the telescope.

The lead author on the report, Brian Welch, a 27-year-old doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins University, had the honor of giving the star a name: Earendel. It’s an Old English word, meaning “morning star,” he said. Earendel was found in a young galaxy known as the Sunrise Arc, and “morning star” seemed appropriate, Welch said.

“And it sounds cool,” he added. Moreover, “Earendil” is the name of a character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Silmarillion,” which also inspired the name, Welch said.

“This is one of the major discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope in its 32 years of observation,” said Rogier Windhorst, an Arizona State University astronomer and a co-author of the report.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

BIRTHDAY BOY!

I can no longer deny it. The breaking international news is true. Yes, it's my BIRTHDAY! Instead of mailing me yet another semi-comedic card, a $20,000 automobile, or a plastic bag overflowing with furanyl fentanyl, why not take the easy route this time? Simply vote for me in the 20th Annual Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards! Did you know that ANYONE can vote in the Rondo Awards? Shocking but true! My latest novel, BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD, has been nominated for "Best Classic Horror Fiction." YOU CAN VOTE FOR BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD IN 3 EASY STEPS....

1. Copy-and-paste the ballot below into an e-mail.
 
2. Choose BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD in the BEST CLASSIC HORROR FICTION category.
 
3. Then email to David Colton (taraco@aol.com) by midnight on April 17th, 2022.

Don’t forget to include your name in the e-mail!

--START COPYING--

BEST CLASSIC HORROR FICTION:
— BELA LUGOSI’S DEAD, by Robert Guffey (Macabre Ink, softcover, 264 pages, $17.99). A search for the lost Lugosi test footage from Frankenstein leads to an impossible choice.

--END COPYING--

Thank Ye, Thank Ye! And Happy Birthday... to me!!!

CHAMELEO ON CALIFORNIA HAUNTS RADIO!

Last night, I appeared on Charlotte Sanchez-Kosa's CALIFORNIA HAUNTS RADIO and discussed my book, CHAMELEO, for almost two hours. If you want to check out the complete interview, simply click HERE (I enter the show around the seven-minute mark).

DAILY BEAST: "‘Many’ Spy Agency Staffers Think Capitol Riot Was ‘Justified,’ Ex-NSA Veteran Says"

From Jeff Stein's 3-11-22 DAILY BEAST article entitled "‘Many’ Spy Agency Staffers Think Capitol Riot Was ‘Justified,’ Ex-NSA Veteran Says":

An internal U.S. intelligence messaging system became a “dumpster fire” of hate speech during the Trump administration, a veteran National Security Agency contractor says. And it’s “ongoing,” another Defense Department contractor tells SpyTalk.

Dan Gilmore, who was in charge of overseeing internal chat rooms for the Intelink system for over a decade starting in 2011, says that by late 2020 the system was afire with incendiary hate-filled commentary, especially on “eChirp,” the intelligence community’s clone of Twitter.

“I was the admin of this application and after a couple years, it became a dumpster fire,” Gilmore, a 30-year veteran of Navy and NSA cryptologic systems, wrote Thursday in an extraordinary public post on his own web site. “Professionalism was thrown out the window, and flame wars became routine.”

NSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Hate speech was running rampant on our applications,” wrote Gilmore, whose identity and credentials have been vouched for by another Pentagon contractor. “I’m not being hyperbolic. Racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamaphobic [sic], and misogynistic speech was being posted in many of our applications.”

Even more startling, Gilmore alleges, “there were many employees at CIA, DIA, NSA, and other IC agencies that openly stated that the January 6th terrorist attack on our Capitol was justified.”

Gilmore says that “more than a few government employees at many different IC agencies” grew “concerned about the content that Intelink was allowing to be hosted” [...].

Another NSA contractor told SpyTalk that the hate speech started in 2016 after Trump’s election and is “ongoing.” Trump’s followers in the agency get away with professional indiscretions, some of them serious, while others get dismissed for minor infractions, this person said on condition of anonymity.

“We literally had folks get their clearances burned for time card discrepancies while pro-MAGA types might have multiple DUIs, foreign contacts, and (in one case) vehicular homicide,” the source said. “They were kept working while others were let go.”

Extremist groups have made inroads in U.S. military and police units, experts say. Intelligence sources have told SpyTalk over the past several months that pro-Trump fervor is centered in special operations and hostage rescue units.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

HAPPY ST. PATRICK'S DAY!

 

OCCULT DETECTIVE MAGAZINE HAS ARRIVED!

Earlier today, my contributor's copy of OCCULT DETECTIVE MAGAZINE #8 arrived from the distant shores of England by dropping out of the sky and smacking me square in the face! This was an appropriately Fortean method of delivery, given the arcane contents of the magazine. Contained within this issue's hermetic pages is my latest short story, "Committee of Mystery." Here's the publisher's description...

If you think ‘occult detectives’ are simply a few Victorian amateurs, an out-of-luck noir PI in a trench-coat, or a bit of urban fantasy, you must have missed our earlier issues. In these pages, we range across time and continents, from worrying peculiarities to outright horror.

Authors include Melanie Atherton Allen, Brandon Barrows, Rebecca Buchanan, Robert Guffey, Rhys Hughes, D.G. Laderoute, Paul StJohn Mackintosh, Andrew Neil MacLeod, Jonathon Mast, Uchechukwu Nwaka, C.L. Raven, Carsten Schmitt, I.A. Watson and Cristina L. White. With cover art by Stefan Keller and interior illustrations by Autumn Barlow, Mutartis Boswell and Andy Paciorek.

If you wish to know what it feels like to have a copy of OCCULT DETECTIVE MAGAZINE #8 topple out of the Super-Sargasso Sea and clobber you on the noggin, simply click HERE!

WASHINGTON POST: "'They Are Preparing for War': An Expert on Civil Wars Discusses Where Political Extremists Are Taking This Country"

What follow are a few excerpts from KK Ottesen's 3-8-22 WASHINGTON POST article entitled: "'They Are Preparing for War': An Expert on Civil Wars Discusses Where Political Extremists Are Taking This Country":

Barbara F. Walter, 57, is a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego and the author of “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,” which was released in January. She lives in San Diego with her husband.

Having studied civil wars all over the world, and the conditions that give rise to them, you argue in your book, somewhat chillingly, that the United States is coming dangerously close to those conditions. Can you explain that?

So we actually know a lot about civil wars — how they start, how long they last, why they’re so hard to resolve, how you end them. And we know a lot because since 1946, there have been over 200 major armed conflicts. And for the last 30 years, people have been collecting a lot of data, analyzing the data, looking at patterns. I’ve been one of those people.

We went from thinking, even as late as the 1980s, that every one of these was unique. And the way people studied it is they would be a Somalia expert, a Yugoslavia expert, a Tajikistan expert. And everybody thought their case was unique and that you could draw no parallels. Then methods and computers got better, and people like me came and could collect data and analyze it. And what we saw is that there are lots of patterns at the macro level.

In 1994, the U.S. government put together this Political Instability Task Force. They were interested in trying to predict what countries around the world were going to become unstable, potentially fall apart, experience political violence and civil war.

Was that out of the State Department?

That was done through the CIA. And the task force was a mix of academics, experts on conflict, and data analysts. And basically what they wanted was: In all of your research, tell us what you think seems to be important. What should we be considering when we’re thinking about the lead-up to civil wars?

Originally the model included over 30 different factors, like poverty, income inequality, how diverse religiously or ethnically a country was. But only two factors came out again and again as highly predictive. And it wasn’t what people were expecting, even on the task force. We were surprised. The first was this variable called anocracy. There’s this nonprofit based in Virginia called the Center for Systemic Peace. And every year it measures all sorts of things related to the quality of the governments around the world. How autocratic or how democratic a country is. And it has this scale that goes from negative 10 to positive 10. Negative 10 is the most authoritarian, so think about North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain. Positive 10 are the most democratic. This, of course, is where you want to be. This would be Denmark, Switzerland, Canada. The U.S. was a positive 10 for many, many years. It’s no longer a positive 10. And then it has this middle zone between positive 5 and negative 5, which was you had features of both. If you’re a positive 5, you have more democratic features, but definitely have a few authoritarian elements. And, of course, if you’re negative 5, you have more authoritarian features and a few democratic elements. [The U.S. was briefly downgraded to a 5 and is now an 8.]

And what scholars found was that this anocracy variable was really predictive of a risk for civil war. That full democracies almost never have civil wars. Full autocracies rarely have civil wars. All of the instability and violence is happening in this middle zone. And there’s all sorts of theories why this middle zone is unstable, but one of the big ones is that these governments tend to be weaker. They’re transitioning to either actually becoming more democratic, and so some of the authoritarian features are loosening up. The military is giving up control. And so it’s easier to organize a challenge. Or, these are democracies that are backsliding, and there’s a sense that these governments are not that legitimate, people are unhappy with these governments. There’s infighting. There’s jockeying for power. And so they’re weak in their own ways. Anyway, that turned out to be highly predictive.

And then the second factor was whether populations in these partial democracies began to organize politically, not around ideology — so, not based on whether you’re a communist or not a communist, or you’re a liberal or a conservative — but where the parties themselves were based almost exclusively around identity: ethnic, religious or racial identity [...].

Does it make you at all nervous when you think about the percentage of people who were at, say, January 6th who have some military or law enforcement connection?

Yes. The CIA also has a manual on insurgency. You can Google it and find it online. Most of it is not redacted. And it’s absolutely fascinating to read. It’s not a big manual. And it was written, I’m sure, to help the U.S. government identify very, very early stages of insurgency. So if something’s happening in the Philippines, or something’s happening in Indonesia. You know, what are signs that we should be looking out for?

And the manual talks about three stages. And the first stage is pre-insurgency. And that’s when you start to have groups beginning to mobilize around a particular grievance. And it’s oftentimes just a handful of individuals who are just deeply unhappy about something. And they begin to articulate those grievances. And they begin to try to grow their membership.

The second stage is called the incipient conflict stage. And that’s when these groups begin to build a military arm. Usually a militia. And they’d start to obtain weapons, and they’d start to get training. And they’ll start to recruit from the ex-military or military and from law enforcement. Or they’ll actually — if there’s a volunteer army, they’ll have members of theirs join the military in order to get not just the training, but also to gather intelligence.

And, again, when the CIA put together this manual, it’s about what they have observed in their experience in the field in other countries. And as you’re reading this, it’s just shocking the parallels. And the second stage, you start to have a few isolated attacks. And in the manual, it says, really the danger in this stage is that governments and citizens aren’t aware that this is happening. And so when an attack occurs, it’s usually just dismissed as an isolated incident, and people are not connecting the dots yet. And because they’re not connecting the dots, the movement is allowed to grow until you have open insurgency, when you start to have a series of consistent attacks, and it becomes impossible to ignore [...].

What do you say to people who charge that this is all overblown, that civil war could never happen here in the United States — or that you’re being inflammatory and making things worse by putting corrosive ideas out there?

Oh, there’s so many things to say. One thing is that groups — we’ll call them violence entrepreneurs, the violent extremists who want to tear everything down and want to institute their own radical vision of society — they benefit from the element of surprise, right? They want people to be confused when violence starts happening. They want people to not understand what’s going on, to think that nobody’s in charge. Because then they can send their goons into the streets and convince people that they’re the ones in charge. Which is why when I would talk to people who lived through the start of the violence in Sarajevo or Baghdad or Kyiv, they all say that they were surprised. And they were surprised in part because they didn’t know what the warning signs were.

But also because people had a vested interest in distracting them or denying it so that when an attack happened, or when you had paramilitary troops sleeping in the hills outside of Sarajevo, they would make up stories. You know, “We’re just doing training missions.” Or “We’re just here to protect you. There’s nothing going on here. Don’t worry about this.”

I wish it were the case that by not talking about it we could prevent anything from happening. But the reality is, if we don’t talk about it, [violent extremists] are going to continue to organize, and they’re going to continue to train. There are definitely lots of groups on the far right who want war. They are preparing for war. And not talking about it does not make us safer.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Master Shake's Foreign Policy

From AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE Season 9, Episode 5, "The Granite Family" (original air date: July 22, 2012):

WASHINGTON POST: "The Roger Stone Tapes"

From Dalton Bennett and Jon Swaine's 3-4-22 WASHINGTON POST article entitled "The Roger Stone Tapes":

[Roger] Stone allowed the filmmakers to document his activities during extended periods over more than two years. In addition to interviews and moments when Stone spoke directly to the camera, they also captured fly-on-the-wall footage of his actions, candid off-camera conversations from a microphone he wore and views of his iPhone screen as he messaged associates on an encrypted app. Reporters from The Washington Post reviewed more than 20 hours of video filmed for the documentary, “A Storm Foretold,” which is expected to be released later this year [...].

Stone moved quickly after Trump’s defeat to help mobilize the protest movement that drew thousands to the nation’s capital on Jan. 6, 2021, The Post found. He privately strategized with former national security adviser Michael Flynn and rally organizer Ali Alexander, who visited Stone’s home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in late November 2020 for a dinner where Stone served pasta and martinis.

A few hours before the Jan. 6 attack, the video shows, a member of the far-right Oath Keepers group — who has since pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy — was in Stone’s suite at the Willard. Other rooms in the same hotel were used as a “command center” by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and other advisers involved in the fractious battle to overturn the election. Stone was not part of their effort, the footage indicates, and he said he feared that top organizers were trying to exclude him from the rally.

Stone used an encrypted messaging app later in January to communicate with Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, who is also charged with seditious conspiracy, and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, the footage shows. Prosecutors have said that Rhodes erased some messages from his phone before it was taken by the FBI.

A federal judge considering lawsuits filed against Trump by Democrats and Capitol Police officers over the Jan. 6 riot said in an order in February that Stone’s connection to Trump, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers may prove to be “an important one.”

Stone did not permit the filmmakers to record him for a 90-minute period covering the height of the violence on Jan. 6. A Stone aide blocked a cameraman from entering his hotel suite, claiming that Stone was napping, the cameraman said. When he eventually got inside, Stone was speaking on his phone.

After he left Washington, Stone lobbied for Trump to enact the “Stone Plan” — a blanket presidential pardon to shield himself, Trump’s allies in Congress and “the America First movement” from prosecution for trying to overturn the election, according to the footage and additional documents reviewed by The Post.

But the plan, along with a bid by Stone to win pardons for other Trump backers including convicted mobsters, was ultimately thwarted by White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Stone said in several conversations that were filmed.

“Clearly, Cipollone f---ed everybody,” Stone told Steven Brown, a friend then in federal prison in Oregon for a fraud conviction, during a call on Jan. 19, 2021. Cipollone was aware of Stone’s requests for pardons and opposed them, according to a person familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential matters.

“See you in prison,” Stone wrote that evening in a message to another Trump associate.

To read the entire story, click HERE.

GUARDIAN: "Military 'Invisibility Cloaks' Could Breach Geneva Conventions"

From Owen Bowcott and Alice Ross' 3-14-16 GUARDIAN article entitled "Military 'Invisibility Cloaks' Could Breach Geneva Conventions":

“Invisibility cloaks” and other future advances in military camouflage techniques could violate the Geneva conventions, a top military lawyer has warned.

Refinements of technologies that are already used on stealth bombers could breach compliance with international laws regulating armed conflict if equipment is disguised or soldiers’ weapons are hidden, according to Bill Boothby, a former air commodore and deputy director of RAF legal services.

Scientists and military contractors are spending tens of millions of pounds researching methods for generating effective invisibility through more sophisticated “metamaterials” – substances designed to absorb or bend light and/or radar waves in order to conceal approaching aircraft or troops.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has been one of the major funders of metamaterial science, triggering excitable comparisons with Harry Potter’s fictional invisibility cloak. Last year the US army announced it was planning to test prototype metamaterial uniforms.

Such chameleon-style technology is not entirely new. The first stealth planes went into service with the US air force in the 1980s and took part in air raids on Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Their narrow profile, radar-absorbing paint and deflectors are intended to make them virtually invisible to enemy radar.

In Weapons and the Law of Armed Conflict, a comprehensive survey of emerging defence technologies published this month by Oxford University Press, Boothby highlights difficulties further technological success could pose [...].

[I]f camouflage is used to pretend to be a non-combatant in order to deceive the enemy and thereby to cause death, Boothby says, it could be outlawed under the Geneva convention clause entitled “prohibition of perfidy”.

Similarly, camouflage that involves misuse of enemy, UN, protective, or neutral signs, flags and emblems is banned. Wearing an invisibility uniform might, it is suggested, additionally breach a combatant’s obligation to have a fixed distinctive sign recognisable at a distance and to carry arms openly.

“A combatant whose weapon is rendered invisible by its coating is arguably not complying with the minimal requirements [of carrying a weapon openly],” he states.

To read the entire article, click HERE.