Empire Builders: The Stasi's Influence on American Organized Crime and Politics

Today I have the honor of posting a very important piece written by Medawar at my request. It is my fervent hope readers will give it the close attention and consideration it deserves.

I'd also like to express my gratitude to Medawar both for taking the time and trouble to address this subject so thoroughly and thoughtfully and for saving me from having to do it. I suspect Medawar agreed to do this for me mainly out of fear of what I might post when I threatened to write it myself if Medawar wouldn't. My knowledge of the subject is woefully inferior, but there are things here that need to be said and, even more importantly, understood.

Finally, I'd like to thank Medawar for having the courage to speak out about this, which is no small thing in this world.

ML

The original of this article can be accessed at the following location:

http://medawarsextremistlinkages.blogspot.com/2010/10/empire-builders-stasis-influence-on.html

Note: The location referenced above includes working links, highlighting of terms, etc. that cannot be easily reproduced here.

Saturday, 30 October 2010
Empire Builders: The Stasi's Influence on American Organized Crime and Politics

Medawar has been kindly (and probably quite bravely) invited by ML to contribute an article on this subject.

The Stasi was the secret police and intelligence service, all rolled into one, of the East German Communist regime. Many officers and agents of its Nazi predecessors, the Abwehr, Sicherheitsdienst and the Gestapo, joined, and the secret police methodology was a refinement of inherited Gestapo techniques, with a few learned from the Russian NKVD and later, KGB, thrown in for good measure.

It is highly relevant to the story of the Stasi, that the Gestapo was originally created to reassure the German people that the various political armed militias, and every political party had its own during the twenties, would all be curbed. It only became an explicitly Nazi tool when it was infiltrated by the Sicherhetisdienst (SA), effectively the intelligence arm of a party-political militia. But there was a reason why German people at one stage would have regarded the Gestapo as a source of protection: they did get the militias off the streets in the early days of Nazi rule. Again, when the Stasi first started, there were many gangsters and black marketeers in both East and West Germany and many Germans desperately wanted something to exist that would make the criminals as frightened as they were. Since the Stasi would come to have half a million full and part time agents on its strength, or getting on for one in thirty of the East German population, a measure of public acceptance was needed and indeed existed, throughout what the outside world saw only as the vilest oppression.

To this day, therefore, there are hundreds of thousands who see the Stasi as a good thing, protecting society from deviants -and potential deviants. Those hundreds of thousands were heavily outnumbered by those who hated the political regime the Stasi supported, and in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall falling, they largely kept a low profile or emigrated from Germany altogether. Leading to a diaspora of the Stasi, throughout the world, but mainly in communities formed by earlier waves of German emigration, in the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Namibia, South Africa and even Australia. There were even a handful, including the Stasi-sponsored and trained Baader-Meinhoff terrorist, Astrid Proll, who settled in London. Her brother, Thorwald, having been trained by the Stasi in financial crime, lives in Switzerland.

In recent years, there has been a steady return of the Stasi diaspora to Germany, with many of them using skills gained in other countries to gain influential posts in vital industries, particularly German railways, manufacturers of railway equipment (in Austria as well as Germany) and in German telecoms companies as well as Deutsche Post. This powerful community has been christened the Deutschland Clan by the journalist Jurgen Roth. One of its functions, seems to be to continue the persecution of those who were dissidents before the wall fell, and who had hoped that a united and democratic Germany would be a place of freedom and opportunity for them. It is a bitter thing indeed that it has not.
This link is to a blog with ample material on the continuity of Stasi activity from the communist regime to the criminal enterprise of the Deutschland Clan.


Alongside its secret police functions, though, the Stasi gathered foreign intelligence, and ran agents of influence in Western countries (and quite possibly other communist countries, too.) Again, the established ethnic German communities in the United States, Argentina and Brazil would have been natural starting points for Stasi agents infiltrating Western society, as they had been for agents of Nazi Germany, and Imperial Germany before that. The most open attempt to employ the German-American community against their American fellow citizens was in the first world war rather than the second, this largely stopped when President Wilson pointed out that there were enough lampposts in the United States to hang them all, if they insisted on making it necessary.

During the Second World War, the Abwehr's attempt to land sabotage agents, with the help of German-American gangsters on Long Island and in Florida, came pretty swiftly to naught. But there was a very successful spy ring at the start of the war (when America was still neutral) reporting shipping movements to German Naval Intelligence (separate from the Abwehr and somewhat better led.) This cost many lives, American as well as Canadian and British.

Most important of all, were the more political agents of influence (possibly run by the political SA rather than the military Abwehr or Naval Intelligence) , for whom Henry Ford and Joseph Kennedy were witting or unwitting mouthpieces, who kept America out of the war for as along as possible, and threw every possible obstacle in the path of American companies seeking to supply the British war effort in the meantime. The agents of influence were able to manipulate Congress to place various bizarre restrictions on exports to Britain, which led, for example, to aircraft being hauled from an American airfield near the Canadian border, to one on the Canadian side, by two cart horses, so they could be exported as "aircraft parts" rather than airworthy machines. All of the obstacles could be got around by this kind of dodge, but it all took time and effort, and every one of them was ultimately inimical to America's vital interests, not withstanding the fact that Congress willingly passed them all.

Even in the nineteen thirties, German manipulation of American politics was often being worked through organized crime, notably the very powerful German-American gangs on Long Island.

Between 1945 and 1947, American intelligence services ran something called Operation Paperclip, which sought to apprehend as many recently ex-Nazi scientists, economic and intelligence experts as possible and get them to work in the United States. The Russian NKVD had an identical programme, while Sweden and Switzerland managed to snaffle most of the Nazi's nuclear weapon designers between them. British Intelligence has been criticized for not really competing for Nazi experts, however, they had a different perception of the usefulness of these men, and particularly the risks of employing them in what would, inevitably, be key strategic areas. Perhaps we have Peter Wright and Airey Neave to thank for the UK's fortuitous indifference to this particular gift-horse!

The net effect of Operation Paperclip was to insert potential German agents into key jobs throughout American government and big business -and then endow many of them with bounteous and often secret budgets as a result of the cold war. A golden hello to the Stasi, which had a head start over other Communist intelligence services as far as America was concerned almost from the day it was founded. There were inherent opportunities here for German-American mafia groups as well, who suddenly discovered lost and lonely Germans in important jobs all over the country. They needed only to help them feel at home...

As well as using German-American criminals as ready-made agents in place to assist incoming penetration agents, the Stasi, like its predecessors, also cultivated criminals and terrorists in the West for their own sake. The purpose of this was destabilization, and it is a tactic which intelligence services only use in a country where they want the whole political system to change. Anytime that it appears that America's intelligence or law enforcement agencies are supporting a destabilization campaign on their own soil, it must be presumed that someone in a controlling position wants the system, and not just the party, of government to change.

As well as obvious points of interest for the Stasi, such as Los Alamos and NASA, Operation Paperclip's experts were in the universities and banks, formulating economic policies and, in time political ideologies. Nearly all of the thinkers behind the Neo-Conservative movement have ethnic German roots, although there are some Anglo-Saxon and Irish-American figureheads, some of whom are not noted for thinking particular deeply at all.

The twin trends, of the Deutschland Clan running Germany and the Neo Cons gaining control of American economic and especially foreign and defence policy, caused some French Intelligence officers and high ranking civil servants to coin the phrase "The Holy German-American Empire." However, President Francois Mitterand, who as a junior minister of the Vichy Government had obliged Reinhard Heydrich by signing an order to the French police to deport French Jews to the death camps, appears to have seen The Holy German-American Empire as something that it was his duty to appease and collaborate with, and French Intelligence wasn't allowed to interfere or even continue to monitor, what appeared to be en-train. As in 1942, Mitterand's order seems to have been obeyed, with heavy hearts, no doubt.

Despite the popular impression, that the Nazis were a complete aberration in the peace-loving history of Germany, there's more than just the continuity between the Nazi intelligence services and the Stasi to consider. When the Nazis came to power, many of the policies for which Hitler is credited/blamed, such as covert re-armament, war-planning, and "Lebensraum" had already been put in place by previous governments. "Lebensraum" having been in place since the foundation of "The North German Federation" as a Union of 25 previous independent states and principalities in 1871.

Two important asides:

1/ that foundation was an act of pure subterfuge: the Prussian leader, Bismark, had planted misleading intelligence material on the French, who undertook a pre-emptive war in 1870, which led both to the destruction of French military and economic power in what amounted to a huge ambush, and to all the smaller German states feeling very threatened by the modern world, and suddenly willing to shelter under Prussia's mighty wings.

2/ the very name heavily suggests that the whole of Modern Germany was just the Northern part of something bigger and mightier, which is supposed to include Switzerland and Slovenia, as well as Austria and large parts of the Czech Republic. Hitler and Albert Speer may have worked on this concept, but they didn't actually conceive it.

Lebensraum as a policy was inherent to the hasty formation of a German Empire in Africa from 1870 onwards: earlier ethnic German colonizations in the Americas had no such backing from then-independent German states, and many of them were effectively expulsions by governments, especially Bavaria, which feared the social engineering ideology of certain secret societies and political movements. Bismark's North German Federation was an expression of many of those, and the outcasts were outcasts no longer. However, they were not a party to the sort of thing that happened in the new German colonies, and many of their founders would have been appalled by the way in which their social engineering idealism had evolved in the space of just two generations. What happened, in Namibia, was Genocide. In camps, and by death march and expulsion into uninhabitable areas.


There is continuity, both between successive German intelligence services, as the political system has gone through several huge upheavals, and in the long-term strategic policy which has been followed.

Although German Intelligence, and German-American organized crime, have been present in America since the late 19th century, it has only been since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the resulting Stasi Diaspora, that stalking as flourished as a tool of organized crime and political change-seekers in the United States. Because not even the Gestapo or the SA had evolved and perfected the techniques, not deployed them on such a scale, using such a high proportion of the nation's resources, as the Stasi did. One in the thirty of the population was a full or part time Stasi agent.

This meant that anyone even suspected of being a dissident could be watched, pretty well round the clock, and systematically bullied and harassed, without the need for incarceration, or, indeed, the slightest evidence of any wrong-doing or evil intent. This represented a level of social control beyond anything which the Gestapo and NKVD had ever attempted, or ever thought necessary merely to keep the population as a whole obedient. It served a whole new level of social engineering, another evolution in the theory, which would take East Germany, and via the Deutschland Clan, the new re-Unified Germany, to a point where the mass reactions of the population at large were no longer an issue, and the behaviour of individuals could be effectively controlled.

Although many tyrannies and totalitarian regimes might appreciate and seek this level of control, others would see it as a waste of time and resort to cruder methods. (Ie: China in June 1989.) But the type of regime that needs this level of individual control, is not so much a tyranny, as a kleptocracy.

In a "government of thieves" nothing is so strictly prohibited as stealing, except by those at the top, who see themselves as owning everything and everyone, already anyway. A kleptocracy sees every last thing, and every last person, even officers of the regime itself, as property. It can be tremendously cruel and kill at will, and yet will attempt to control those an ordinary tyrant would be tempted to kill, simply because it sees them as property of the state rather than as enemies of the state. The ultimate despot is not a Communist, nor is he a Nazi. He is a gangster before whom all the judges and all the policemen have bowed. Only a Kleptocrat needs to make one in thirty of the population into secret agents.

In East Germany, every citizen was watched, and any who even appeared to diverge from the accepted norm (and accepting everything was the norm that was accepted!) was followed everywhere. He would be jostled in every queue in every shop, he would rarely be able to buy what he wanted, or earn his living doing his normal trade. People whom Lenin would have shot and buried in a night, would effectively be subjected to living torture for years on end, to make them conform. Some victims of the Stasi might have thought Lenin merciful.

In East Germany, this took enormous manpower, and it didn't happen from the beginning of the communist regime, both for this reason and because the techniques had not been developed. But the system did evolve, and with it great manpower and great expertise. Then the wall fell, and both manpower and expertise were exported, the world over, but especially to America and Canada. Where the temporarily exiled Stasi agents soon discovered that a combination of the drugs trade, some of it already in the hands of ethnic Germans, vigilantism and other forms of meddling do-goodism, could all be harnessed to make the services of the requisite one in thirty of the population available to their cause. Many of whom don't know that they are working with people on the "opposite" side of whatever the relevant social divide happens to be. And America has a lot of social divides. Tying all these threads together to make an unwitting Stasi machine in America and Canada would have taken tens of thousands of expert agents, but they had tens of thousands of expert agents who'd better stay out of Germany for a few years, so it simply wasn't a problem.

The Holy German-American Empire has America all but completely in its clutches and is looking for other victims. The Stasi, having outlived the political system it once served, is now above and beyond the control of any state. It has become the gangster to which all American and German Judges and Policemen will bow. And whilst it might spray the rhetoric of freedom around like machine-gun fire as it consolidates its hold on power, it is a kleptocracy and these cannot co-exist with any measure of personal freedom at all.

Unless America wakes up very smartly indeed, it will find that the Gestapo and the NKVD would have been easy-going compared to their new masters in the rest of the 21st century.

Posted by Medawar2 at 10:17

Dumb City Or Dumb Officials?

This article came out in today's San Antonio paper. It's shocking but not at all surprising. However, it's not the City of San Antonio that's dumb; it's the officials that run it that are.

How can cities expect to turn out well-educated students when so little money is actually provided for this? School and college board members routinely take the precious tax dollars that are supposed to be used to educate our young people and find creative (and some not-so-creative, i.e. blatant) ways to funnel the funds to their friends instead. Texas Governor Rick Perry first used federal funds provided to Texas for education to instead pay down part of the state's debt. Then when the feds. demanded proof of this money's actually being used for education, Gov. Perry turned it down. Now Texas is facing a serious budget shortfall, which doesn't bode well for education here in the future.

The rampant organized crime in our area has many other adverse effects on the education of our young people. Bullying, gang stalking, and gang violence in our schools are so widespread and unchecked that students are afraid to come to school. Just yesterday, another article in the same newspaper told of rumors of impending violence related to Halloween so serious that scared parents are keeping their children home in droves, even in the Hill Country (Kerrville). Students are instructed to tell teachers, counselors, principals, or law enforcement when they are being subjected to these social ills, but when they do so, either nothing is done because officials fear being subjected to the same kinds of things, or the students discover that the people who are supposed to be helping them are actually active participants!

Teachers here face the same problems as students (if they are not participating, as many are) and fear becoming victims of the same kinds of acts students are being subjected to. How can we possibly expect them to teach properly under these conditions? And how can we expect to retain the best ones?--they quickly move on when they realize they have no support. Shockingly high percentages of the teachers that remain have criminal records and substance abuse problems, nothing is done about it (see my earlier post entitled "The Coach", for example), and our students suffer as a result.

In fact, one-third to one-half of our high school students drop out before graduating. Texas already has a shortage of trained workers. With the problem steadily getting worse, not better, it doesn't matter if we attract all the new jobs Gov. Perry is promising; we won't have the workers to fill them.

Our cities and communities here simply MUST start to realize the toll unchecked organized crime is taking on them and insist on its being prosecuted aggressively from the top down. If people don't start seeing the big picture and understanding how much this stuff is hurting them, our rapid downslide into "Third-Worldness" will continue. It's no accident that San Antonio and Las Vegas sit at the bottom of the education list--this can easily be predicted by their crime situations and statistics.

There's one more thing to consider here, and it may actually turn out to be the most important consideration of all: what if the government is deliberately trying to keep our young people as uneducated as possible in order to keep them from seeing, understanding, questioning, and protesting what their government is doing? If you think that sounds far-fetched, I suggest you carefully read the next post after this one, entitled "Empire Builders".

Update, 1/23/11:

Clusters

Deaths and events related to them have a major tendency to occur in clusters in our area, as illustrated here. I'm not saying there's necessarily anything wrong in this particular case (I don't have enough information on it to be able to say either way); I'm just using it as a good example of the kinds of things that happen too often here and need to be investigated seriously by someone from the outside.

The Case Of The Missing Passports

From the time we first got them, my ex-husband insisted on keeping my passport and our children's passports in a file at his office "so they wouldn't get lost". Each time we used them to go somewhere, he would immediately collect them and take them out of the house. Thinking back now in hindsight, I realize I was never given access to our passports on my own; my husband always brought them home himself when we needed them (which wasn't very often).

Then one day when we were planning for a trip (and I can't remember which one right now), I mentioned to my husband that he'd need to remember to bring home our passports so I could check the expiration dates on them and pack them.

A few hours later, my husband called and said he didn't have the passports. He claimed they weren't in the file at his office where he normally kept them and that I had kept them after our last trip and must have stashed them somewhere. I knew this wasn't true, and I reminded him about how he always insisted on taking them; he responded by accusing me of having misplaced them. I knew he was wrong, but I spent the rest of the day searching our house from top to bottom just to make sure. I also went over and looked in our safe deposit box. Of course the passports weren't in either place.

When my husband got home that night, I told him I was now positive the passports were not in our house or at the bank. I also told him I intended to go over to his office and look for them myself because I knew that's where they were.

At that point, my husband insisted on immediately going back over to his office to look again by himself. I can't remember exactly how long he was gone--maybe an hour or so. He came back and said he was absolutely positive all of our passports were not there. He said they must have been stolen out of the file drawer and that we would all have to apply for replacements. I told him I still wanted to go over and look for them myself, but he insisted he was sure they were gone.

The next day, I spoke with his office staff about the matter, and they too said the passports must have been stolen, but they would not let me go back to look for them "because they were busy". Reluctantly, I took the kids to pick up and fill out new applications and have new photographs taken. My husband also went separately and did the same--I saw his application and photo and mailing envelope all ready to be sent, although he said he mailed his application separately from his office.

We all received our new passports in time to take our trip, although my husband's must have been delivered separately to his office. I mentioned to my husband that I'd reported the kids' and my passports as missing or stolen when I applied for new ones for us. I told him I still believed the originals had been misplaced at his office, and I reminded him that if they should ever turn up, we were obligated by law to inform the government and surrender them immediately. He said he knew this.

A year or two later (again, I can't remember exactly when), my husband came home and told me out of the blue that our missing passports had turned up at his office after all. He said they'd been misfiled, and someone had noticed them and realized what they were. I told him we needed to go turn them in the next day. My husband said he'd already done this and the whole matter had been taken care of.

Many years later after he'd left and I'd begun to discover all the strange things that were going on around here, I realized I'd never actually known anything about the missing passports other than what my husband and his office staff had told me. I wrote to the FBI office in San Antonio and explained all this to them because I was afraid other people might have used our passports without our knowledge, but I never received any reply from them.

I will say that every time my children and I used our passports, I don't ever recall noticing any unusual stamps or markings for trips I didn't know about. However, I remain concerned about the fact that, in retrospect, my children and I did not have control of our own passports (meaning they might have been used without our knowledge) much of the time and that we only have my ex-husband's word that he really did return the lost ones when they turned up again. My own passport has now been expired for some time because I haven't used it or renewed it.

U.K. Connections

The situation my children and I find ourselves in has definite ties to the U.K. I know just enough now to realize they are strange to some extent but not enough to understand exactly what they mean (although I do have my suspicious about some of them), so I will simply set down a record of what I know and let wiser heads than mine prevail.

I was originally introduced to the man I later married by his roommates, who were classmates of mine. One of these roommates was from an East Coast military family with far-right political leanings. He was intelligent and hard-working, managing to complete a difficult double major by staying on for only one additional year at college.

This guy was also one of my future husband's closest friends. He and I were both invited to visit the Texas Hill Country home and ranch of my future husband's family often, and we all spent many happy hours here hiking, hunting, fishing, and exploring. The friend had a steady girlfriend who came with us when she could. After they graduated, the two of them got married, and my future husband and I helped with their wedding reception.

My husband's friend got a job with a major Houston company that had business interests around the globe. Almost immediately, his company began sending him to all sorts of exotic foreign locales: Africa, the Middle East, and Russia, to name a few. Often these trips were for extended periods of time and involved living under rather primitive conditions.

Eventually, this man tired of the demands of this job, quit, and went back to school to obtain a master's degree in a third field. Unfortunately, the long periods away from home had taken a toll on his marriage, and he and his wife divorced shortly after my husband and I married.

After graduate school, the friend accepted a job overseas with a major oil company. He was based in London and rented a small house there but continued to travel much of the time all over the world.

Because he and my husband were such good friends, they kept in close contact. The friend loved and missed Texas, so my husband and father-in-law helped him locate and purchase a ranch in South-Central Texas, both as an investment and also as a vacation spot. The friend seemed to be involved in other real estate deals with my father-in-law as well, because he'd often come into our town suddenly and briefly for some sort of meetings that I was told involved the signing of real estate documents.

During his frequent travels, the friend met a stewardess who worked the Dallas-London route for American Airlines. He fell hard for her, and they began a serious relationship that lasted several years. At one point, we all went on a short group vacation to Cozumel together, where I was able to get to know the girlfriend a little. Another time, my husband and I spent several very enjoyable days visiting the friend at his home in London. His girlfriend was working but managed to spend a little time with us. As she packed to leave, she mentioned to me that because she flew back and forth so frequently, she was well-known to all the customs and security agents. She said they always waved her on through without checking her or her bags, and she laughingly bragged that she could take anything she wanted in or out of either country without anyone knowing.

At some point, I found out the friend had begun investing in land in the Czech Republic. He apparently had been buying up large amounts of farmland and spending considerable time visiting there. When I tried to find out more about this, he would only say land was cheap there and he believed it was a good investment.

The friend was later transferred to Scotland, and his relationship with the stewardess ended. He met a Scottish lass whose father and brother were both sailors. Eventually, the two of them married, had children, and bought a house in the country outside Edinburgh. The friend continued to travel much of the time, spending extended periods in Siberia, China, and the Far East.

My husband and I enjoyed a couple of nice visits with the two of them before my husband suddenly left me in 1999. By the last of these visits, the friend said he'd left the big oil company and was now working as a consultant for them and others out of a Scottish office that was owned by a wealthy Houston businessman the friend would never name to me. He also first offered to show me around his office and then abruptly changed his mind for some reason.

One night during that last visit of mine, the friend got a phone call very late at night from two men he worked with who were coming over to talk to him about some sort of business that was never made clear to me. The weather that night was stormy, and the men arrived well after midnight and soaking wet. The three of them went into another room, had a brief meeting, and then they left without even being introduced to me. The whole thing seemed strange.

After we split up, my ex-husband remained in close touch with his friend and at one point took our children over to Scotland to visit him. My kids came back from this visit saying the friend and his wife had been fighting the whole time they were there. Sure enough, the two of them soon ended their marriage as well.

I've now lost track of this friend, but I hear he still shows up briefly and unexpectedly in our town from time to time to visit with my ex-husband and his father. I believe he continues to travel all over the world as well.

Translators Required

The area of Central Texas where I live was settled by German immigrants in the mid-1800s as discussed previously in such posts as "Ancient History" (7/11/10). As documented here, these settlers and their descendants have developed their own language that is a slang combination of German and English. This Texas German dialect is a German equivalent of what has been loosely termed "Border Spanish", the slang mixture of Spanish and English commonly spoken in the region along the U.S. border with Mexico.

As I've mentioned before, locals were forbidden to speak their German dialect during the World War eras, which of course only forced it underground and made its use a focal point of local pride and clannishness. During Prohibition in particular, the local language was used as an "insider code" with regard to the smuggling of alcohol from Mexico, which was rampant here and utilized older local ties to Mexico.

Smuggling ties between the German immigrants of Central Texas and Mexicans have only increased since Prohibition ended because of the rise of illegal drug smuggling. The Texas German dialect is now used extensively in this area over the radio waves, during phone calls, on the Internet, and even while gossiping at the grocery store, feed store, barber shop, etc. to both send "coded" messages and discuss things local "insiders" don't want others to know they're talking about. (It's a common practice to do this while standing very close by someone they're bad-mouthing, for example, even though this practice occasionally gets them in trouble. I'd love to know just what it was that the professor in this article overheard in the restaurant that caught his interest!)

The common use of this language here for important conversations, particularly over scanners, radios, walkie-talkies, and cell phones, makes it imperative that anyone considering mounting a serious investigation of organized crime and stalking here include the use of German translators, particularly ones who have at least some knowledge of the local dialect. Any investigation begun without these translators will completely miss out on what's going on and is doomed to failure. Spanish translators are probably necessary here as well.

As an added note, anyone planning on coming here to carry out any kind of serious investigation must also be aware that local "insiders" routinely act as lookouts or spotters EVERYWHERE. All unknown persons, vehicles, and license plates coming into our area are routinely and thoroughly checked out by local law enforcement using their access to sophisticated federal equipment and data bases. (Please go back to "The Layer Cake", posted 4/13/10, for more information on this.) Anyone planning on coming here who wants locals to open up to them needs to have an airtight cover story and vehicles and license plates that won't attract attention or suspicion. (Even better is if you can show a family relationship to someone here.) Without taking these kind of precautions, you will be run out of town (or worse) the minute you start asking questions, taking photos in the wrong places, etc., and any equipment you bring will be confiscated or stolen.

Conspiracy Theory

My children who were at home and I watched most of the episodes of the first season of Jesse Ventura's new show called "Conspiracy Theory" on TRU-TV. We found it educational, informative, and thought-provoking, although there were times when we wondered about its accuracy.

Last week we watched the first episode of the show's new season on Plum Island and were surprised to discover we already knew a little about it without realizing it. As soon as Gov. Ventura mentioned the possible relocation of the Plum Island facility to a site in Kansas, we suddenly realized it was the same "federal biologic research laboratory" San Antonio had been aggressively competing with Kansas for as reported in the San Antonio Express-News. In fact, when the relocation of this lab was finally awarded to the Kansas site over San Antonio, the people behind San Antonio's failed bid filed a lawsuit alleging that the bidding process hadn't been conducted properly and that the Kansas site was inherently unsafe due to frequent tornadoes.

We never heard any mention on the show about the San Antonio connection or the lawsuit. We also noticed that there was no mention on the show about the fact that Central Texas has been the home of another federal biologic research facility for many years. This facility, which is located just outside of Kerrville near I-10, is an insect study laboratory. Coincidentally, a recent article in the Kerrville Daily Times discussed new plans for a major expansion of this lab that involves potentially moving it to a larger site in the Kerrville area.

Regarding the "Big Brother" episode, I can absolutely believe the FBI is involved in illegal surveillance and stalking. I've personally seen people I knew had FBI connections following me around at times. These are people with ties to active agents, by the way, not the retired ones who defrauded me and still stalk me periodically.

A final note to Gov. Ventura concerning the unusual-looking human body he and his associates said had washed ashore near Plum Island: it's hard to believe this was real (especially so close to Halloween!), but he might want to do some research on Marfan's Syndrome. If legitimate, the extremely long fingers said to be present on this body might possibly be an indication that someone was using genetics to selectively breed for high intelligence. (We are only talking theories here, right?)

Anyway, we're looking forward to seeing the rest of the series. Whether you believe all of it, parts of it, or none of it, it's certain to provoke discussion.

Here's an update on the biolab that just came out.



And this:



Update, 12/10: The sign along Hwy 16 at the entrance to the federal insect study lab mentioned above has now been removed. The site of this lab is just north of I-10, in the valley about half-way between the new 70-foot high skeletal iron cross and the large sculpture of a mechanical deer (a local symbol) crushing a car.