Orlando and the Masque of the Orange Death

It turns out there was another attack on the LBGT community thwarted yesterday in Santa Monica, CA. "20-year-old Wesley Howell reportedly traveled from Indiana to attack the Southern California LGTB event" There is a disturbing resonance with the Orlando attack. In his car were three AR-15 assault rifles with high capacity magazines. Yesterday on my Facebook page, I noted that there seemed to be an emerging pattern in the "lone nut" attacks that indicated inspiration from an ISIS standard operating procedure (SOP) is confirmed by different common threads and in this case far more important and deadly: the AR-15s and the high capacity magazines.

One doesn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to at least suspect that the fact that Howell was carrying three AR-15s may indicate a thwarted meeting with co-conspirators.

My main point is that we are going to hear a lot about what we can do to thwart the ISIS self-motivated terrorists. Frankly we had done something in the wake of the attempted Assassination of Ronald Reagan the Brady Bill. A key feature of the bill was struck by the Supreme Court. Because of the perceived power of the National Rifle Association no progress has been made in protecting the American public from gun violence. Congress even defeated an Obama proposal that gun sales to individuals on the terrorist watch list be banned.

In some states, like New York the sale of high capacity magazines has been banned. But New York is helpless to the importation of AR15s and high capacity  magazines from sister states.

The Orlando massacre will become an issue in the Presidential campaign. Donald Trump has already congratulated himself for his foresight in demanding an end to ANY Muslim entering the United States although the Orlando assassin was a native born American citizen. The problem with ISIS inspired lone wolf attacks is that the supply of disaffected individuals seeking a place in the sun who are native born US citizens while not unlimited is undoubtedly quite large.

It's time to ban high capacity magazines nation wide and adopt reasonable restrictions of assault rifles. Sales to individuals on the terrorist watch list must also be banned although any individual who feels unjustifiable denied a gun ought to have a right to appeal. One candidate for President (and I expect one sitting President) will raise that issue. Another candidate for President having pledged his fealty to the NRA will oppose any remedial gun control legislation. His claim will be that his Mexican wall and barring any Muslim immigration is the answer.

Except that's irrelevant to what happened in Orlando and might have happened in Santa Monica. For a relevant essay on the topic see Edgar Alan Poe and The Masque of the Red Death. Or maybe this time the mask is orange.

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This is not a promo for my book "Quantum Christ" but if you are interested:

http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2015_01_01_archive.html

The Reichstag fire and Lee Harvey Oswald

I have been asked about my take on the Reichstag fire on Facebook  and I thought I had answered it last night but somehow it didn't load. Now a slightly expanded response. It's not something I have studied extensively but I think I know enough to make the following comment. I analogize it to the JFK assassination so hold on to your hats.

The Reichstag, the Germany's capitol building in Berlin was devastated by a fire in 1933 just when the Nazi's had gained control of the Germany Bundestag and Hitler had formed a government. Wikipedia has an entry on it in case you want some details. It corresponds to what I had read some years ago but goes deeper.

The issue is whether the person accused of setting the fire was an agent of the international communist conspiracy through the Comintern, a loan nut, or a false flag patsy planted by the Nazis. The result redounded to the benefit of the Nazi's who used as an argument for justification of giving dictatorial powers to the newly elected Chancellor, Hitler. From the Nazi's viewpoint it was either a total success of a devious plot or gift from heaven (or hell).

We have a rough analogy in our own time in Lee Harvey Oswald. Was he a lone nut assassin? Was he a Fidel Castro operative? Was he a foil or patsy for hidden (barely) US interests who regarded Kennedy as a traitor for his settling the Cuban Missile crisis without war and indicating that he was prepared to withdraw from Vietnam? To the extent the plotters may have wanted war with Castro, it didn't work. To the extent they wanted continued intervention in Vietnam, it did.

The military-industrial complex profited mightily from the Vietnam War. 56,000 Americans and their families paid dearly (not to mention hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.)

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel called "It Can't Happen Here" which was a satire about a hypothetical  rise of fascism in the United States. Well that didn't happen here. Or did it?

When I look at the Trump message of exclusion and bias and cozing-up to the despot Putin and I realize just how much he is echoing the bias and prejudices of a significant number of Americans, I am concerned. Trump is not anti-Semitic. But his dream of a white restoration to power echo's the Nazi's anti-Semitism. He appeals to our worse impulses.

This is not a promo for my book "Quantum Christ" but if you are interested:

http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2015_01_01_archive.html

Yet again, JFK [and the Shroud]

I am working to update and mold the material in Quantum Christ into a new book tentatively entitled "The Pope and the Apocalypse [and the Shroud?] Distractions abound including four matters that are still in litigation at one stage or another. Also, current events of an apocalyptic nature including the refugee crisis are a necessary distraction but a component of what I will be writing about.

However, today on Salon.com is a lengthy excerpt about a newly published book on the JFK Assassination that echoes into my life, my family and my abiding interest in the UNSOLVED mystery of the assassination. Also, my belief that those of the scientific community who used the discredited carbon dating of the Shroud to impeach the authenticity of the Shroud are like those who support the conclusion of the Warren Report the Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nut without co-conspirators. See: Why the Media Want the Inquiries to End, http://www.johnklotz.com/new-jfk.htm

My late brother Herman was a longtime employee of the CIA. I was careful to never plumb Herman for sensitive information that might be classified. Nonetheless we did have a few careful conversations about JFK. Herman initially echoed the CIA back-up story that Castro did it. Indeed, in my opinion one of the aims for the assassination was war with Cuba.  At one point I had a question about something of CIA protocol totally unrelated to the JFK thing: it concerned the protocol for the hiring of an agent (the subject had defected to the Russians). In response, I received a telephone call from David Atlee Phillips who, if you read the citation at the end of this post was a central figure in most "CIA did it" theories. It was brief conversation of no relevance to JFK.

This morning there was published on Salon an excerpt from a new book by David Talbot. David is not only the founder and first editor of Salon; he has spent a lifetime digging deep in the JFK assassination. I thoroughly recommend the Salon posting. And the next time some scientific expert or skeptic derides the authenticity of the Shroud as being disproved by the "evidence," think JFK and the Warren Report.

http://www.salon.com/2015/11/22/inside_the_plot_to_kill_jfk_the_secret_story_of_the_cia_and_what_really_happened_in_dallas/

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This is not a book promo, but if you are interested in: "The Coming of the Quantum Christ: The Shroud of Turin and the Apocalypse of Selfishness.

http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-coming-of-quantum-christ-has-arrived.htm

It includes a 15% discount code on the printed copy which is beautifully illustrated.

Pope Francis shows his grit

Like many in the US, I was disappointed that the Vatican is continuing its efforts to reign in American nuns. Then, I learned today something that to me, is startling, inspiring, edifying and maybe a little stunning. The Vatican is proceeding with the possible beatification of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador who was executed by a right wing death squad while saying Mass in 1980. Previously, the beatification process had been blocked. http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/francis-unblocks-romero-beatification-official-says

To me, there could be no greater indictment of the Vatican than a perceived indifference, if not open hostility, to the Catholic martyrs of Central America in the 1980s. They included six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and the housekeeper’s child. Then there were the four women, three nuns and lay health worker who brutally kidnapped, beaten, raped and then murdered by the El Salvador National Guard.

There was a report that when Benedict XVIth visited Central America and at the edge of the crowd some demonstrators for the martyrs sought his attention, he was told by his local escorts to pay them no mind, they were “communists.”

Although there were some reasons to be optimistic about Pope Francis, there were also some qualms. He had been an outspoken  opponent of “liberation theology” for example. The pronouncement on the American nuns was not a promising sign.

However, whatever his reservations about liberation theology, this development augurs well. It is no small thing and I expect the reactionaries will soon be at open war on his papacy.

If you believe in prayer, pray for him. And if you don’t believe in prayer, at least cross your fingers.

Palm Sunday, March 24, 2013: Christ, Kennedy and Lincoln

For the past two years we have been celebrating day by day the 150th anniversary of events in the Civil War. This year is  huge. There is the horrific Union loss at Chancellorsville followed by the turning point victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in July, followed by the Gettysburg address at which Lincoln  redefined our  Nation, turning us toward the fundamental values of the Declaration of Independence.

This is also the fiftieth anniversary of two events of the JFK presidency. The first was the June speech at American University in DC where he first publicly proposed a ban on the atmospheric testing of Atomic weapons. Both he and Khrushchev had looked into the abyss the previous year during the Cuban Missile Crisis and knew the desperate path the World was trodding toward nuclear annihilation.

Kennedy's speech is best remembered by this phrase about the need for US-Soviet cooperation:

For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

Kennedy lost the White House on November 22, 1963. There is substantial evidence that he did plan to pull of Vietnam after the 1964 election and already had drafted an order to pull back our commitment. All that ended in Dallas, His successor gave the military-industrial complex the war it wanted.

Lincoln finally won his war in 1865. He visited vanquished Richmond but a week later he too was assassinated.

I have come to believe the enduring truth of the Christian faith (or myth, if that suits you) is not the resurrection but its transfiguring of all human experience into the divine. Lincoln and Kennedy both enjoyed great triumphs before their assassins struck. The cheers in Dallas were still ringing in JFK’s ears when all went black.

Today is Palm Sunday when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the back of an donkey. Cheers were ringing also in his ears. Then came the crucifixion and three days of black for his disciples. And then came Easter morning and the witness of Mary Magdalene that some thing  marvelous had happened.

Today is Palm Sunday and we can not forget even as we celebrate that Good Friday lies only five days in the future. But then two days more and it is Easter.

I close with a quotation from Elaine Pagels, author of the Gnostic Gospels:

“In its portrait of Christ’s life and his passion, orthodox teaching offered a means of interpreting fundamental elements of human experience. Rejecting the gnostic view that Jesus was a spiritual being, the orthodox insisted that he, like the rest of humanity, was born, lived in a family, became hungry and tired, ate and drank wine, suffered and died. They even went so far as to insist that he rose bodily from the dead. Here again, as we have seen, orthodox tradition implicitly affirms bodily experience as the central fact of human life. What one does physically—one eats and drinks, engages in sexual life or avoids it, saves one’s life or gives it up—all are vital elements in one’s religious development. But those gnostics who regarded the essential part of every person as the “inner spirit” dismissed such physical experience, pleasurable or painful, as a distraction from spiritual reality—indeed, as an illusion. No wonder, then, that far more people identified with the orthodox portrait than with the “bodiless spirit” of gnostic tradition. Not only the martyrs, but all Christians who have suffered for 2,000 years, who have feared and faced death, have found their experience validated in the story of the human Jesus.”[i]

We in this generation are blessed with a new revelation. His Shroud which not only registers the fact of His crucifixion, but whispers the hope of his Resurrection, and ours.

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[i] Pagels, Elaine (2004-06-29). The Gnostic Gospels (p. 99). Random House. Kindle Edition.

Is Obama channeling JFK?

A dream died on November 22, 1963.

To many Americans, who are old enough to remember, John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas was the principal reason for a long American nightmare of which Bush II is simply the culmination. Ted Sorenson, the other night, stated that the 1961 Inaugural address was only Kennedy's second best speech. The best was, in Sorenson's opinion (and mine, his June 1963 American University speech at which he chartered a course to end the cold war. That he had plans to withdraw from Vietnam after the 1964 election is a matter of public record now. All that ended in Dallas.

I have always felt that second biggest casualty at Dallas was Khrushchev. The Cuban Missile crisis had scared them both and Khrushchev had staked his won career on his new relationship to JFK. His leadership survived for several months but eventually was ousted.

Maybe Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nut gunman. To some, his cloudy intelligence background and the incredible convenience of JFK's death to those who were looking to profit from the Vietnam War is more than a convenience.

If anybody is interested, I wrote an op-ed piece on the media and the environment using Kennedy's speech American University as a starting point. http://www.johnklotz.com/new-jfk.htm

I wrote an op-ed piece for Newsday (which made the WP wire) in November 1993 which discussed the media and the assassination. http://www.johnklotz.com/new-jfk.htm

In any event, you can graph the dissolution of the Americans trust in government has beginning it sharp climb to the time when the public discovered that LBJ’s peace campaign of 1964 was a con job.

I don't know if Obama has Kennedy’s Irish political smarts and I don’t think he has quite obtained JFK's eloquence [maybe he needs a Sorenson], but he's getting there. And beyond political smarts, he has the intellectual capacity to be a truly great President. He will bear the heavy burden of enhanced expectations.

But, after a years of pessimism about the future, and years of second rate intellects occupying the White House, I am suddenly optimistic about the future. I have seen the future and it's Barack.

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