FROM THE EDITOR FIAT FOOLISHNESS by Kenn Thomas (Feb 23, 2009) It started out as an interesting week for parapolitics: the son of Louis Jolyon West wrote an article on the assisted suicide of the famous CIA-MKULTRA scientist and Francis O’Neill, one of the FBI agents who remarked on “surgery to the head area” in a report of JFK’s wounds that led to David Lifton’s Best Evidence theory of body alteration, died. I circulated these stories on various conspiracy discussion lists and figured it would lead to some provocative feedback. Jolyon West had been well-known for his association with mind control, dating to the time when he headed the psychiatry department at Lackland Air base and the US discovered many of its shot-down fighter pilots brainwashed by the North Koreans. (see: “Bug Bombs,” in the first volume of Cyberculture Counterconspiracy.) West also killed a bull elephant once by mis-administering LSD to it. He developed plans to for human experimentation as part of a Reagan-supported “anti-violence” center. Oddly, even as Francis X. O’Neil’s obituary hit the web, so did a feature on retired Secret Service agent Dale Wunderlich, of the 11/22/63 secret service security detail, from Longmont Times-Call in Colorado. Wunderlich gave a Rotary Club talk trying to make a case for the lone nut theory. “The sight of Kennedy’s body, face down in the hospital, is still engraved on Wunderlich’s mind,” according to the article. Fruitless book and net searches for such an image--JFK’s body face down—added some weight to Wunderlich’s own statement that “I had such tears in my eyes that I couldn’t see anything.” Those not inclined to regard Wunderlich as carrying on a decades-long mythology that few really believe may have taken the kinder view that Wunderlich sees only what he wants to see about this momentous event in his life. That’s about where any thoughtful reflection on these parapolitical footnotes went. The lists instead got clogged with things like another poorly written Ann Coulter rant against the “fiat money” that Barack Obama plans to print up to fund the stimulus program. Coulter doesn’t disguise her role as a narrow minded and barely literate ideologue. Her readers and critics hear no complaints from her when the government starts over-printing fiat money for the sake of the military, which does as much to deplete currency value as anything. So her criticisms remain select and transparent even as her writing style shows her up as—challenged. (Christopher Hitchens has great fun with this.) I had a girlfriend once who labeled Coulter one of the "dumb blondes for Bush." The other was Barbara Olson, who died on one of the 9/11 planes. Olson’s tragic death didn't improve her arguments any which often fell along the lines of Coulter’s aping the hypocritical old "less government" bull. She supports only a shift in big government spending, not a reduction. It’s a fairly obvious false dialogue. I would have greatly preferred a discussion of things of more historical weight, like the stories of people like West and O’Neill. Conspiracy critics do themselves a disservice by ever alluding to any of these mainstream pundits. If you have a point to make, make it yourself. Coulter and Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh and all those others making a similar points—often gleaned from the very online conspiracy sources they say they eschew--are at best like a broken clock, right twice daily, if then. They serve the agenda most students of parapolitics claim they oppose. Their political heroes (Reagan, Bush) have time and again advanced the practice of issuing exorbitant “fiat money” far more than anyone. The TV pundits are about shifting the priorities to which the money is applied. They didn't say a word when Bush's Wall Street buddies, the courtesans of his monarchy, raided the treasury during his last weeks in office. It's only the threat that Obama wants to spend on social programs that's put a bee in their bonnet now. They could give a damn about fiat money, as they always support it for corporate welfare and when the military budget expands. All are welcome to take whatever side they want on the spectrum, of course, but all also, at least when it comes to the endeavor to understand conspiracy, must acknowledge the process of false dialogue and media brainwash. Talking about West, O’Neil and Wunderlich would have been a much more enlightening path to this understanding. Videos by Geert Wilders have made the rounds of late as well and offer a similar lesson. He’s a right wing Dutch politician who fattens his own political fortunes by very publicly opposing the spread of jihadist Islamic culture in Europe. Wilders is at least as right about that as “conservative” “right” or whatever media is about “fiat money”, but does anyone have to support the right in the Netherlands to agree with him? Of course not. They can, in fact, oppose Wilders and the jihadists at the same time. One long-time list manager even circulated material that literally came from a neo-Nazi group in the UK because it has the same anti-jihad message! This is exactly where the false dialogue leads, islamo-fascists on one side; neo-nazis on the other. It’s not an issue of blaming the messenger. These "messengers" are the same people the conspiracy critical world has always opposed. As for JFK and the Federal Reserve: he issued silver certificates in smaller denominations in order to help remove them from circulation. The value of the silver used in making coins had become greater than the value of the coins, so Kennedy facilitated the effort to stop using actual silver in minting coins, fully realized in 1965, under Johnson. This was a move clearly in the direction of fiat money, not toward it. The US has been off the gold standard since 1934, so Kennedy was acting in the grand tradition of FDR by doing the same for the silver standard. It's hard to think that Kennedy was shot for this purpose. Whether it’s gold, silver or the goodwill of a cabal of Jewish conspirators, money is what everyone agrees to call money—American GIs used cigarettes as currency in post WWII Germany. It’s supposed to be a consensus reality. The only place where mainstream pundits and the parapolitical underground agree is on the lack of that consensus. 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