Conspiracy Theories - Part 2
The second and final chapter on general conspiracy theories, motivated by reading on the McGowan claim that the 1960s hippie fad was a CIA project designed to derail anti-war movements
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I decided on this topic while listening to Joe Rogan's interview with Marc Andreessen. Last week I introduced my take on conspiracy theories in general.
Weird Scenes inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon
The title of David McGowan’s book is a send-off to the 1972 Compilation Abum by The Doors, Weird Scenes inside the Gold Mine. There are references to the Doors through the book and a whole chapter is dedicated to them. According to McGowan, the Doors was a US government invention. The band was assembled by intelligence agencies and its headline songs were composed by others. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us start at the beginning.
McGowan is trying to expose a far-reaching conspiracy (what I called a strategic conspiracy last week). His evidence is only circumstantial but extensive. The conspiracy is centred on a specific locality and a specific time period: Laurel Canyon and mid-sixties.
Laurel Canyon is 10 kilometers north-east of Los Angeles city centre as shown in the following map:
The Wikipedia entry on Laurel Canyon says that “the remote, rugged nature of the land and its proximity to many of the movie studios in nearby Hollywood made it an ideal location for many movie stars”.
In 1960s, over a couple of years, this quiet neighborhood became the center for counterculture. McGowan says that this did not happen by itself but was a result of social engineering conducted by CIA and MK-ULTRA1. McGowan's main thesis is that such an event could not happen on its own and it is the result of social engineering by the CIA and MK-ULTRA. He also gives a lot of evidence to support this thesis. There's not a single piece of evidence, i.e. like a 'smoking gun' strong enough to convince an independent jury in a courtroom, but the many odd coincidences and connections seem to support the thesis.
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1960s
If the past is a foreign country, 1960s was a different continent.
Remember that there is only twenty years between 1965 and the end of World War II. In these twenty years, a bipolar world order was established and the Soviet Union, which was an ally during the war, became the number one foe. Convicted for being Soviet spies, Rosenbergs were executed in 1953. This was the same year when US and allies overthrew the duly elected Mosaddeq government in Iran. The McCarthyist purge devastated the intellectual landscape. At the same time, a serious transformation was happening in the US power structure. Companies producing military technology became so big that they started to dominate the national discourse and the government behaviour. The President Eisenhower himself warned against the dangerous influence of military-industrial complex in his farewell speech in 1961.
As in Newton’s third law of mechanical dynamics, in social dynamics too there is a reaction opposing every action. A significant anti-war anti-militarist movement started shaping up across the US at the beginning of the sixties.
The first Vietnam War ‘teach-in’ was held on the campus of the University of Michigan in March of 1965. The first organized walk on Washington occurred just a few weeks later. (McGowan, pp 32-33)
The Antiwar Movement in the 1960s started with the Student Movement, more precisely the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) militating against the Vietnam War. Simply put, this Movement was a resistance to, and non-cooperation with, military interventionist policies imposed by the American government.
At around the same as the anti-war demonstrations were emerging across the nation, a strange subculture started emerging in Laurel Canyon. This subculture came from nowhere but became a national fad in only several years and we now refer to it as the Hippie movement.
Abbie Hoffman said that “There were all these activists, you know, Berkeley radicals, White Panthers… all trying to stop the war and change things for the better. Then we got flooded with all these ‘flower children’ who were into drugs and sex. Where the hell did the hippies come from?!” (McGowan, p 38). Abbie Hoffman was one of the notorious personalities leading the anti-war movement in the Sixties.
It is McGowan’s main claim that Hippies were a government project kick-started in Laurel Canyon to discombobulate the anti-war resistance.
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Laurel Canyon Project
The main theme of McGowan’s book is that Laurel Canyon was a CIA project and the objective of this project was to transform the anti-war movement of early ‘60s to an amorphous counterculture movement that was against everything therefore against nothing specific. The Hippies were not against only the war, but against everything including the war. If confounding the peace movement were the objective, it was successful. Hippies subsumed the anti-militarist movement taking the entire anti-war struggle to the fringes and therefore discrediting them in the eyes of the mainstream America. This is what McGowan claims.
Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. David McGowan cannot offer firm evidence like records of declassified government documents that acknowledge the project. Instead, he gives us a huge repository of weird and interesting factoids about the main personalities of the Laurel Canyon scene. His aim is to highlight the uncanny connections, common family backgrounds, and weird coincidences that suggest the interference of an invisible hand in bringing these people together in Laurel Canyon at that particular time and setting them up in their life journeys.
In fact, the whole book is a collection of weird facts and strange coincidences all occurring in Laurel Canyon in that period of a few years. The implication is that all these things could not possibly have been happening randomly, there must have been a superior force making the arrangements although we do not have direct evidence identifying this hand.
Many of the personalities mentioned in the book would be only vaguely familiar to my generation and probably complete unknowns to younger readers. Therefore, I will restrict my reporting of the book to one example only, who should be known by all. The example is the Doors and Jim Morrison.
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Riders on the Storm: The Doors
I am sure you know the Doors, one of the iconic bands of the sixties, and its lead composer and singer, Jim Morrison. You probably also have watched the 1991 Oliver Stone movie. David McGowan dedicates a chapter to the Doors in his book of 24 chapters.
Jim Morrison’s father was US Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison. US warships under his command were in Vietnam’s Tonkin Gulf in 1964. It can be argued that their mission was to provoke Vietnamese to attack the US ships. Vietnamese did not attack. They probably saw through the ruse but a cable was sent to Washington anyway, falsely claiming that there was an attack. This fake incident was the basis for the U.S. Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution starting the US direct military involvement in Vietnam. Jim Morrison’s dad was such an auspicious person.
One cannot build much on a single example but McGowan’s book is full of such interesting connections. For example, Frank Zappa’s father was allegedly a chemical warfare specialist with a top security clearance at Edgewood Arsenal near Baltimore, Maryland. McGowan reminds us that Edgewood had been exposed as the location of ominous mind control experiments conducted in those years by the CIA under the rubric of MK-ULTRA.
There are also claims on Crosby, Still and Nash; Buffalo Springfield; Mammas and Papas. These are the groups I recognize by name. There are many more in the book. McGowan also mentions a punk gang called Vito and Freaks, who came en masse to the places where music was being played dressed in what would later be called Hippie-style clothes, smoking dope. They entertained the crowd and, in time, some of the crowd starting imitating them.
Let us not digress and return to Jim Morrison and the Doors. As Jim Morrison said once, ‘there are things known, and things unknown, and in between are the Doors’2.
According to McGowan, Morrison emerged out of nowhere as a fully-formed rock star with a band, stage persona, and a repertoire of songs that filled the Doors' early albums. Prior to that, he had never shown interest in music, never studied it, couldn't read or write notes, and didn't even enjoy listening to music. He claimed to have never attended concerts, never sung, nor even thought about doing so. He couldn't play instruments, and he emerged seemingly overnight as an icon of his generation. The narrative was that Morrison wrote all his significant songs in a brief period, supposedly during his time consuming LSD on a Venice apartment rooftop, just before forming the Doors. This immaculate musical emergence feature extended to the entire band. They also lacked conventional band experience. In fact, McGowan claims that the initial records were not played by the band members themselves but by professional musicians.
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True Conspiracy?
Buy McGowan’s book if you want to read about the rest. I do not know whether I believe everything he says but I do not think he is a total lunatic either. I checked some of his ‘weird facts’ and found them to be true. This does not prove that they are all part of a complex CIA conspiracy. But as circumstantial evidence, it is convincing. I also found it assuring that the foreword to the book was written by someone I know of, Nick Bryant, a former BBC journalist who is also writing on the Australian papers.
In any case, this project, if true, would be what I called last week a strategic conspiracy. It is very difficult to prove or disprove and with overarching objectives across time and space and yet it is plausible.
This was the time when the US government was really worried about the Sovier Union. The Sputnik success motivated the Apollo project. The emergence of socialist regimes in China, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and others was a cause for concern. Moreover, the military-industrial complex mentioned by Eisenhower in his farewell speech was agitating for a war to overcome the communist threat before it takes over the world. CIA saw the leftist and communist parties in Europe as agents of the Comintern and could not tolerate the emergence of similar movements in USA. It is easy for me to believe that the groups like the SDS were an anathema to CIA. Consequently, it might have appeared as a very good idea to some people in the CIA to invent a movement involving drug-taking funny-looking youth with loose morals, call them Hippies (or any other silly name), and get them hijack the anti-war movement. This would associate, in the eyes of the mainstream Americans, all peace activists with Hippies and therefore discredit them. They did not know of course that the USSR that frightened them so much at that time had only twenty more years before it collapsed.
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Then and Now
Finally, if it happened then, could it happen now? Who knows? Maybe another McGowan will write in 2070 about a weird 2020s conspiracy .
I know it is dangerous to do crystal ball gazing but I will speculate:
Officers of the government responsible today for the stability of the US system may be thinking of possible threats as the following:
If the inequality increases and/or the mobility between the classes decreases, this would cause serious tensions in the society
The effects of the Climate Change over the next fifty years would exacerbate these tensions.
The system has proven defense mechanisms against external threats like China. In fact, a credible external threat would galvanise national unity and would depreciate the effect of the first two points.
In the absence of a credible external threat, the only challenge to the system would be from within, driven by the internal contradictions.
What could be the equivalent of the Lauren Canyon plot under these circumstances? For example, there could be support for identity policies to mask serious class contradictions. Today, the Woke and cancel-culture movements are tearing away at the fabric of the American society; but, despite all the noise they create, they are not threats to the regime. Could somebody have thought that encouraging such campaigns, which did not and is not likely to harm the regime at all, might help to cover up the real internal social and class conflicts and the legitimate motives for struggle?
I do not know. I am only a retired engineering teacher.
References
McGowan, David. Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart Of The Hippie Dream. Headpress. Kindle Edition.
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Short Takes
Conversation using Brain Waves
Nature Briefing, 24 August 2023
Last week, I talked about a technology that read the brain waves of the person listening to Pink Floyd and produced sounds very close to the music the person was listening to, purely from brain waves. This week's news is similar.
At Stanford University, they were able to connect the implants inserted in the brain of a 67-year-old crippled patient to a recurrent Neural Network (RNN) program on the computer, and they were able to convert the words that the patient was thinking in his head to computer speech. At first, of course, an RNN training was required. With this training, the computer program learns words. For example, the patient says 'refrigerator' in his head. The computer records the brain waves of the patient internally voicing 'refrigerator' and labels those waves as the word 'refrigerator'. The fewer words used during this computer training., fewer mistakes were made in translating thoughts into computer speech later People joked about Elon Musk's Neuralink company that they dreamt a hundred years ahead of their time, but maybe those dreams can come true soon. People can communicate without making a sound purely using brain waves.
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You Tube
Noisy Miners are very territorial and aggressive birds. One noisy miner came and bit Hagi once and Hagi is dead scared of their sound. In the days when Pascal was free in our garden (before the great escape), he also was attacked by a noisy miner but successfully fought it back.
I see noisy miners on campus stealing sugar packs from the canteen and eating the sugar after ripping the paper.
Here is a video from the ABC television showing how they gang up on other birds and protect their territory:
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Diary
I went to the Turkish Grocery last week. I buy things like olives, turnip juice, sausage, coffee, and tulum cheese. When I first came to Brisbane, there was no such thing as Turkish Grocery Store. There have been attempts, but the people who tried, did not have the financial power to import goods directly from Turkey, and the retail profit margins were not enough when they bought the goods from wholesalers in Melbourne. About fifteen years ago, shops were opened that sold both wholesale and retail and brought goods directly from Turkey. It is possible to buy in other places, such as Greek grocery stores, and even in some supermarkets closer home, the goods they bring in wholesale but I prefer to go and buy from them to support the retail operation.
This is it from outside:
The shop is located in a light industrial zone. It takes about 15 minutes from our house to go there. When you enter the shop, you are fronted by a wall of bottles:
They were arranged as a separator. Mostly soda and turnip juice in the bottles. I don't buy soda, but always get some hot turnip juice.
There are glassware shelves on the left:
Next to it are bottles of Turkish cologne. They had sold out during Covid.
More stuff on facing shelves when you walk further in:
Eti, Ülker and other biscuit brands on the right-hand side:
Turkish sausages manufactured in Sydney and Melbourne:
Pumpkin and sunflower seeds. I do not buy them either because they are like an addiction. I feel like I have to finish the pack when I open one.
Baklava imported from Turkey, Sey’to[lu brand. I did not encounter this brans in Istanbul but they may be famous in other cities. I like baklava but I never buy it in Brisbane. I save my appetite for Istanbul.
Tinned vegetables ob the shelf across,
Olive and cheese shelves facing each other:
After that, I pay the bill and leave. I know the owners but there are usually young kids at the checkout. Some of them speak Turkish and some do not. At first, we both start out in English, but those who know Turkish understand that I also know Turkish, and often switch to Turkish..
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Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra) was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken people and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture It began in 1953 and was halted in 1973 (wikipedia)