The John Edwards Epiphenomenon,

The New World Order And Ronald McDonald

 

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion,

but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

-- Adam Smith (1723-90), 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations', Book I, Chapter 10

Marcopolo

Xanadu 20040708 -- I hadn’t seen that much of Cousin Hoover since he got married again. So I dropped down one afternoon in mid-June to tell him what he might have missed during the week after he got married when he and the new wife went to Florida.

"Apparently John Edwards has gone and got himself endorsed by the Bilderberg Group," I reported.

John Edwards is a United States senator who variously represents North Carolina or South Carolina in the United States Senate, depending upon which state’s presidential primary he happens to be running in at the time.

I am reasonably certain it was actually the voters of North Carolina that sent Edwards to the Senate. I seem to recall that being reported in all the papers at the time; it being said that the election of International Socialist Government Worker Edwards in 1998 was evidence that North Carolina voters rejected efforts by his incumbent opponent, Grand Old Mastodon Lauch Faircloth, to impeach former president Bill Clinton.

Actually I know very well that Edwards owed his election and subsequent political career mostly to the fundamental irreconcilability of golf courses and swine, which is another story. But no one outside North Carolina knows that Edwards’ victory proceeded largely from the greater impact of swine than of golf upon our state’s economy.

So Edwards has for some years been the International Socialist Government Workers’ idea of the perfect American Idol candidate for either President or Vice President, depending on what’s available.

Lacking anything much in the way of political experience, Edwards still has definite ‘voter appeal’. For older women, Edwards is that nice clean-cut boy down the street who used to mow their lawns before he went home to wash and wax his convertible for the big date. Their daughters see in Edwards that nice clean-cut cute boy with the shiny convertible who used to pick them up at the house on a Saturday evening and show them a good time. Either way, daughters or mothers, or grandmothers by now I suppose, they all vote and Edwards has got a lot of them feeling real dreamy somewhere deep inside.

"What is the Bilderberg Group?" Cousin Hoover asked.

I know that sounds like a set up, but Cousin Hoover really didn’t know. I was only slightly surprised he had never heard of them.

The Bilderberg Group is one of those geopolitical epiphenomena that mostly draws the attention of paranoids, the conspiracy-minded and cranks, I told Cousin Hoover, conceding that I probably would know a lot more about them than he would.

And just to make sure I knew what I was talking about, I had looked it up.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines an ‘epiphenomenon’ as "A secondary phenomenon that results from and accompanies another: ‘Exploitation of one social class or ethnic group by another (is) an epiphenomenon of real differences in power between social groups’ (Harper’s)."

An on-line medical dictionary adds that an ‘epiphenomenon’ is also "An additional symptom or condition that appears during the course of a disease. A doctor might ask if you have noticed any epiphenomena recently as a way of inquiring as to whether you have experienced additional symptoms or signs of illness."

Of course here in Badgett County, if a doctor were to ask someone if he’s ‘noticed any epiphenomena recently’, the patient would likely think the doctor was asking about flying saucers.

In a similar vein, the Bilderberg Group is often thought to be an urban legend.

Typically an urban legend is like a report I read that began with the words ‘Kerry, Bush, Rockefeller are members of the Illuminist satanic secret society, Skull & Bones ...’

On March 2, 2004, that message was posted to the on-line ‘Official Edwards Campaign Blog’. It was Super Tuesday, the night that Senator John Edwards dropped out of the presidential race in favor of his opponent Senator John Kerry.

As with the aliens who appear to be humans in ‘The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension’, all of the current United States senators in this story are named John something-or-other. I can not claim there is any particular significance in that.

The expression ‘blog’ derives from the words ‘web log’ proceeding through barbarous and altogether commonplace contractions. It usually refers to an on-line diary in which an individual can record and publish his or her daily reflections for on-line visitors to read.

On her website (www.barkingduck.net/ehayes), Cousin Ellen has a page called ‘Don’t Look Behind You ...’ on which she describes herself as "a net ghost who has no real existence". It used to be that Cousin Ellen did not deny her own existence, but being the transsexual author of the famous on-line transgender Tuck saga, I expect she attracts a lot of unusual attention.

At one time she also had an on-line journal, or ‘blog’ if one must, called ‘REally Bored, Aren’t You?’ which I thought was some of the most absorbing reading on the internet. It was an authentic window into the personal life of a smart, genuine, usually funny, occasionally depressed and often cantankerous young transsexual who defies every stereotype I can think of.

A couple of years ago, though, she deleted the entire contents of her journal and replaced that with a message that read in part, "a number of bad experiences this year have told me that I was once again being too open about myself and my life, and therefore the easiest thing for me to do is to wipe out the previous site-system and start over. I may or may not add more in future. Don’t beg; it’s demeaning to you and makes me think less of you."

And that is a genuine loss since on-line journals, or blogs, like Cousin Ellen’s continue an important tradition in English letters, that of the diarist.

Cousin Ellen still retains a page for readers of her stories to post their comments. She calls it ‘The Guestbook Thang’, having I guess a taste for page names that have a certain uniqueness to them.

On July 1, feeling remiss at being so preoccupied with Senator Edwards and Bilderberg that I had not written to Cousin Ellen for too long a time, I decided at least to post an entry in her Guestbook Thang praising her recent addition to her Tuck series. On a whim I added, "Finally, anybody else here go to Bilderberg last month? It Rocked!!"

That drew maybe two comments from other readers.

Then about 16 hours after my message, ten messages were posted to Cousin Ellen’s guestbook in seventeen seconds which were enticements to visit on-line pharmaceutical sales sites. I can not claim there was any connection between that and my earlier mention of Bilderberg.

But it did shift the topic of discussion, such as it was, to what punishment should be visited upon spammers. An eternity roasting in the fire-pits of hell was rejected as not severe enough and instead an eternity at a convention of lawyers was proposed -- lawyers, now that I think of it, such as Senator Edwards.

In addition to being a lawyer, though, Senator Edwards is a politician. In that capacity, there is little danger of his blog being too revealing since it is a record of the thoughts of his supporters rather than of his own. It is a guestbook, but ‘blog’ is so much more ‘trend-positive’ these days. I do not recall that Cousin Ellen has ever indicated much use for the expression.

On March 2, Edwards had fared so poorly in the several Super Tuesday primaries that he suspended his campaign for president. His blog was filled with sad and sympathetic messages from his supporters, along with the message linking John Kerry, George Bush and an individual identified only as ‘Rockefeller’ to the Skull & Bones Society.

According to the always helpful on-line Wikipedia, ‘The Free Encyclopedia’ --

"Skull and Bones is a secret society at Yale University. It is said to be the first such Yale society, established in December 1832. ... Rituals of Skull and Bones are said to take place in the organization's campus building which is called the Tomb, adjoining Jonathan Edwards College. Ron Rosenbaum, author and columnist for the New York Observer states that Prescott Bush, George W. Bush's grandfather, and a band of Bonesmen, robbed the grave of Geronimo, taking the skull of the Apache Chief and bringing it back to be kept in the tomb. ... Given the power and prominence of the supposed members, and the superficial obscurity of the societies, the societies are frequently included in conspiracy theories."

-- Thus the Skull & Bones Society actually exists. I can not claim there is any significance to the Skull & Bones headquarters adjoining a college named ‘Jonathan Edwards’.

But the entry in John Edwards’ campaign blog, or guestbook, is nonetheless a likely urban legend since the only Rockefellers known to have been members of Skull & Bones were Percy Avery Rockefeller, Class of 1900, and John Rockefeller Prentice, Class of 1928. It seems likely, although admittedly not certain, that the Rockefeller mentioned in the blog entry is meant to be wealthy financier David Rockefeller, who attended Harvard rather than Yale.

In contrast, the belief that the Bilderberg Group is an urban legend is itself an urban legend.

"The Bilderberg Group is an informal, secretive and international association of influential people, meeting annually," reports the perceptive Wikipedia. "Its name is that of the hotel in the Netherlands where the group first met in 1954. Its founder members were Denis Healey, Joseph Retinger, David Rockefeller and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. The original intention of the Bilderberg group was to further understanding between Western Europe and North America through informal meetings between influential individuals.

"Each year, a steering committee devises a selected invitation list with a maximum of 100 names. The location of their annual meeting is not secret, and the agenda and list of participants are openly available to the public, but the meetings themselves are shrouded in secrecy. Security is managed by military intelligence. Attendees talk, lobby, and try to magnify their political clout on both sides of the Atlantic but pledge absolute secrecy on what has been discussed. The idea is to enable people to speak freely without need to carefully consider how each word might be interpreted by the mass media."

My friend Pastor Chesterton knows people, including some his former associates, who have attended Bilderberg meetings and have discussed the proceedings with him. Although Pastor Chesterton has never said it in so many words, he seems to regard the attendees as servile half-wits whose poorly thought out agendas for global action usually create more problems than they solve.

I mentioned to him that Senator Edwards had gone this year.

"That doesn’t surprise me at all," was Pastor Chesterton’s terse reply.

We have secret meetings like that in North Carolina all the time. County and city boards of commissioners have had them for decades, often with the connivance of the Institute Of Government in Chapel Hill. North Carolina’s public officials usually hold such gatherings far away from their home counties, frequently at a beach or some such similar resort location where there are few distractions from frank, informal discussion of the public good outside the range of the hearing of their constituents.

And that, of course, is against the law.

Under the state’s Open Meetings Law, if a quorum of a public body gets together, even for a social function, and discusses "public business within the jurisdiction, real or apparent, of the public body", then it’s a meeting that has to be announced 48 hours in advance and be open to the press.

I’m sure a lawyer like John Edwards knows all about that, but there doesn’t seem to be any provision within the statute extending its coverage to global elites.

Besides, anybody who is such a lack-wit that they can’t get around a cosmetic law like that, which doesn’t involve any criminal penalties, has no business being in government in the first place. As Adam Smith observed, "It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice". Besides, one reason these guys keep having these retreats at resorts a hundred or more miles out of town is that few newspaper publishers will pay to send a reporter to cover them even if they are announced well in advance and are open to the press.

"On the other hand," the insightful Wikipedia continues, "this secrecy has also made conspiracy theorists claim that the [Bilderberg] meetings have a sinister purpose. This feeling is enhanced by the fact that some say that they are merely a front for the Round Table groups, or even a semi-public front for the Illuminati or assorted other secret societies."

Tony Gosling maintains a website that probably isn’t affiliated with the Bilderberg Group. The Bilderberg Group reportedly does not maintain an official website.

"When such rich and powerful people meet up in secret, with military intelligence managing their security, with hardly a whisper escaping of what goes on inside, people are right to be suspicious," Gosling writes. "No, it’s not a ‘conspiracy’. The world's leading financiers and foreign policy strategists don’t get together at Bilderberg to draw up their ‘secret plans for the future’. It’s subtler than that. These meetings create an artificial ‘consensus’ in an attempt to spellbind visiting politicians and other men of influence. ... Bilderberg is an extremely influential lobbying group. That’s not to say though that the organizers don’t have a hidden agenda, they do, namely accumulation of wealth and power into their own hands whilst explaining to the participants that globalisation is for the good of all. It is also a very good forum for ‘interviewing’ potential future political figures such as Clinton (1991) and Blair (1993)."

Gosling sees links between the Bilderberg Group and the Fascists, the Nazis, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Skull & Bones Society and the Beast of Revelation, with only Christianity and the writings to J.R.R. Tolkien standing between the Bilderbergs and absolute global domination.

So Gosling, whose name in English means ‘a young goose’ or ‘a naive or inexperienced young person’, probably isn’t affiliated with the Bilderberg Group. Then again, maybe Gosling’s site is simply an obsessively-crafted well of disinformation.

According to Dr. Richard Boylan, the noted UFO researcher and hypnotist, "Bilderberg was conceived in response to the 1952 ET [extra terrestrial] repeated overflights of Washington, DC and the following year’s meeting between President Eisenhower and ET representatives at what is now Edwards Air Force Base, CA. It is no coincidence that Walter Bedell Smith, President Eisenhower’s CIA Director, was also his designee to the 1954 inaugural meeting of the Bilderberg Council. Bilderberg is an attempt for world leaders to draw together in concerted action to create a unified policy in world matters of peace, democracy, and coordinated preparation of world institutions and the populace for the massive changes which public disclosure of extraterrestrial presence will bring."

Again, I can not claim there is any special significance in the name ‘Edwards Air Force Base’.

Writer David Icke claims that the world is secretly ruled by the Babylonian Brotherhood -- "a race of interbreeding bloodlines, a race within a race in fact, were centered in the Middle and Near East in the ancient world and, over the thousands of years since, have expanded their power across the globe" -- that now consists of 13 satanic families of human-reptilian hybrids, whose ancestors were created by reptilian space aliens who came to Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago looking for gold.

"There have been just over 40 Presidents of the United States and 33 of them have been genetically related to two people, England’s King Alfred the Great and Charlemagne, the famous monarch in 9th century France," Icke writes. "Throughout this whole period the agenda of this bloodline has been gradually implemented until we have reached the point today where centralized global control is possible. ... At the heart of the web, or the top of the pyramid, whichever analogy you choose, are the reptilians. These operate mostly in the background from underground bases and overwhelmingly by possessing the reptilian-human bloodstreams which resonate most closely to the reptile consciousness of the lower fourth dimension. These reptile full-bloods and reptile-possessed people hold the major positions of power in the world or work in the background controlling those in the positions of apparent power like prime ministers and presidents."

Here in Xanadu, we prosaically refer to reptilians from the underground as ‘devils’, unless of course they are snakes or lizards, and we say that anyone whose consciousness resonates with them is ‘possessed’. But I digress.

Icke sees the Bilderberg Group, along with the Freemasons, the Knights of Malta, the Skull & Bones Society, the United Nations, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Club of Rome as instruments of that control. He doesn’t seem to have much use for Christianity and I was too lazy to see if he thinks anything of J.R.R. Tolkien.

"Bil or Bel was also the Sun God of the Phoenicians," Icke writes. "Bilderberg translates as ‘Bel of the rock’ or ‘Bel of the mountain’. The Bilderberg Group was chaired from 1954 to 1976 by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, the former Nazi SS officer and German spy working for the NW7 Intelligence department operating within the unspeakable chemical giant, I. G. Farben, which ran the Auchwitz Concentration Camp. ... Prince Bernhard, a German who married into the Dutch Royal Family, just as William of Orange had done, is a reptilian blood relative and great friend of Britain’s Prince Philip. Together they launched the World Wildlife Fund, now the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). ...

"The careers of so many politicians have taken off dramatically after they attended Bilderberg meetings. In the 1970s the career of the British Conservative Party politician, Margaret Thatcher, soared when she began to attend Bilderberg meetings ... In 1991, a relatively unknown Governor for Arkansas called Bill Clinton was invited by David Rockefeller to the Bilderberg meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany. A year later this man of British (Black Nobility) royal blood was President of the United States. In 1993, a British Labour Party Home Affairs spokesman called Tony Blair was invited to the Bilderberg meeting at Vouliagment, Greece, and a year later after the sudden and unexpected death of the Labour leader, John Smith, it was Blair who took over."

Icke also identifies Mikhail Gorbachev as "a reptilian shape-shifter, [who] was used by Rockefeller and Kissinger to bring down the Soviet Union to allow those countries to begin the process of integration into the European Union and NATO," and suggests that the Denver airport cost so much to build because it sits above an underground reptilian base.

Perhaps Gosling’s website is simply meant to distract attention from writers like Boylan and Icke until it’s time to tell the public about the UFO aliens. If so, it will be another year at least until that happens.

This year’s conference was held on June 3-6 in the Italian lakeside resort town of Stresa, which has beaches, golf courses, riding trails and at least one five-star hotel. Stresa is conveniently located only a third of the way around the world from the offices of newspapers in Senator Edwards’ home state.

"The Conference will deal mainly with European-American relations and in this context US Politics, Iraq, The Middle East, European Geopolitics, NATO, China, Economic Problems, Energy," according the organization’s press release. "Approximately 130 participants from North America and Europe will attend the discussions. The meeting is private in order to encourage frank and open discussion."

Possibly the author of the press release was not a native English-speaker, since the use of the words ‘private’ and ‘open’ together in that last sentence makes no sense at all really.

But then the only place I could find a copy of the entire first page of the release was on what appeared to be the website of a Columbian news organization. Being as the site was in Spanish, except for the Bilderberg Press Release (Comunicado de Prensa sobre la conferencia de Bilderberg), I have some uncertainties.

"Participants have agreed not to give interviews to the press during the meeting." the press release stated. "In contacts with the news media after the conference it is an established rule that no attribution should be made to individual participants of what was discussed during the meeting. There will be no press conference."

Those are essentially the same ground rules that applied to the United States Constitutional Convention in 1787 in Philadelphia. One could reasonably argue that a lot of good came out of that, although perhaps one might want to downplay the behind-closed-doors creation of a strong central government that bound together what were essentially thirteen loosely associated independent countries up to that time.

"A list of participants is appended," the press release concluded.

The attached list of participants bore the heading --

CURRENT LIST OF PARTICIPANTS

STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL

-- which left me to wonder that the secret masters of the world would hand out a press release labeled ‘Strictly Confidential’. We all may be in a great deal more trouble than I had hitherto imagined.

Perhaps a sense of the anticipated tone of the Bilderberg discussions can be gotten from one portion of the press release.

"It is hard to think of any major issue in either Europe or North America whose unilateral solution would not have repercussions for the other," the release stated, adding "Thus the concept of a European-American forum has not been overtaken by time. The dialogue between these two regions is still -- even increasingly -- critical."

Of course, ‘unilateral’ is a word often unflatteringly applied by Europeans to the foreign policies of the current U.S. administration of Grand Old Mastodon George W. Bush.

One reporter, whose publisher perhaps thought he was writing a travel piece, apparently loitered around the Grand Hotel des Iles Borromees pestering conferees for information until Italian police arrested him, which vaguely reminded me that Adam Smith also commented that "... though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary".

I did think it interesting that that reporter's name was 'Tucker', which is the same name as the central character in Cousin Ellen's stories.  But I digress.

According to Tucker the reporter, the consensus of the conferees was opposition to U.S. actions in Iraq and in favor of United Nations management of world affairs in the future.

The participants also reportedly debated funding the U.N. with a global tax, either on oil or on financial transactions, with the majority apparently favoring the oil tax. Since more people drive cars, and buy gas and oil, than borrow large sums of money, raising the price on oil would bring in more money.

The Bilderbergers reportedly foresee the division of the world into three mega-regions -- the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacfic -- with only three currencies -- the dollar, the eruo and the currency-to-be-named-later -- one for each region.

President Bush was in Italy when the conference began. He was not officially identified as having attended it, but is believed to have made a brief visit.

Among those who were officially identified as present were --

Although he was not officially listed as attending, I have a photograph that purports to show Microsoft’s Bill Gates himself at the conference as well.

Also in attendance were dozens of conferees from Europe, Turkey, Russia, Israel and China, as well as three Canadians.

Edwards’ attendance was reported by UPI, the BBC and a London newspaper called ‘The Guardian’.

Edwards "spoke at the high-powered and super-private Bilderberg meeting in Stresa, Italy," wrote Albert R. Hunt in a June 17 Wall Street Journal column. "Two of the biggest figures in the [International Socialist Government Workers] establishment, neither big Edwards fans earlier, came back raving about his performance."

I can not claim there is any connection between Hunt’s report and the presence of Max Boot, features editor of The Wall Street Journal, at the meeting.

I could not find any evidence that any newspaper in North Carolina published one sentence during the month after Bilderberg reporting that Edwards had attended the conference.

Nor was there any report I could find anywhere in June of what Edwards said that so impressed those attending the meeting, not even in newspapers whose management actually attended the meeting.

I could think of a number of questions I would have asked him afterward --

A week after the conference ended, the Associated Press published a poll report stating that Edwards "is favored among registered voters to be the [Socialist Government Worker] vice presidential candidate," and that Edwards was the only likely vice presidential nominee who gave John Kerry a winning margin over Bush.

"Edwards has basically done everything right," wrote former Socialist Government Worker political consultant Susan Estrich shortly after that. "He is the only [Socialist Government Worker] who is generating any enthusiasm at all as a potential nominee. His people have raised millions for Kerry. He has his former top staff in key positions raising money, strategizing, speechifying, even planning the July trip for the Kerry campaign. From Terry McAuliffe to Fritz Mondale, [Socialist Government Workers] are said to be weighing in with John Kerry in favor of Edwards."

The pace of all this seemed to have picked up considerably after the Bilderberg Conference.

A little more than two weeks after the conference, even Senator Edwards’ most enthusiastic supporters -- the ones who write his on-line campaign diary for him -- learned that their man had been to Bilderberg --

-- Well, the loved ones are always the last to know.

All of this was something of a wonder to me as I sat in Cousin Hoover’s office in late June describing the suspicions that had accreted around the Bilderberg Group after 50 years of secret meetings. Secrecy is compounded of the unknown and of the unjustifiably important. Facing it, people fill in the gaps with imaginings painted by fear.

I imagined a reporter named Eric Blair who had penetrated into a back hallway of the conference hotel to meet his source, a Bilderberg attendee named O’Brien who had agreed to give the reporter a just a little information.

As the reporter caught sight of him and approached, O’Brien’s eyes flicked left and right, casting rat-like glances to be sure they were not observed.

"Room 101," O’Brien said in a quick, hoarse whisper.

"What is in Room 101?" the reporter asked.

"I told you before that you knew the answer already," O’Brien replied irritably. "Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world."

And so the reporter quietly walked down the hallways of the hotel main floor, turning one way, then another until he reached Room 101. The room had several entrances, including a side door that had been left open a few inches, just wide enough for the reporter to peer through unobserved.

What the reporter saw inside was a large banquet room with a high ceiling and richly ornamented walls. If there could be said to be a theme that joined the ornamentation of the ceiling, the walls and the molding that framed the crystal clean floor-to-ceiling windows, the theme would be gold.

The banquet room was large enough to hold more Round Tables than the reporter could quickly count. The seats around the tables were filled with what the reporter guessed to be more than a hundred people as he made an entry in the notebook he pulled from his jacket pocket.

At one end of the room was a stage with a lectern and a microphone, and behind that a very large map of the world. On the map, North and South America were all one color and were labeled ‘Oceania’, while Europe and Russia together were labeled ‘Euraisa’, and to the southeast of that was ‘Eastasia’.

A waiter or steward came to the stage and filled a plain highball glass from a crystal decanter that was sitting on a small table to the side of the lectern. He set the glass atop the lectern and left the stage.

Then one of the conferees rose from the crowd sitting at the Round Tables and walked to the lectern. He introduced himself, for those who did not already know him, as Winston Smith.

Winston Smith appeared to be about 60 years old. It struck the reporter that the man’s grey suit was singularly unimpressive for someone speaking to such an exclusive conference in such a lavishly appointed room.

Smith’s hair, what there was of it, may have been red once but was now grey. He was a pudgy sort of man with a coarsely red face and nose. Even his bald head was pink. His lips had a slightly purple tinge. And his eyes were pale, rheumy and seemed unlikely to fix upon the eyes of another for long.

Smith had about him a very familiar air, the reporter thought, that of a clerk from a government department, rather of a man likely to be taken for one the world’s elite.

"We seek power entirely for its own sake," Winston Smith began, with a quietly optimistic expression in his face and tone of voice that never varied. "We are not interested in the good of others. We are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness, only power, pure power. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The Nazis and the Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives."

Then Smith drank from the glass on the lectern, a glass that probably contained gin or vodka, the reporter guessed as Smith belched quietly.

"Does the Brotherhood exist? Do you begin to see the world we are creating?" Smith continued, gesturing limply toward the map behind him. "It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. It will be a world of fear and treachery and torment, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.

"In the future there will be no wives and no friends. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.

"History is ended. We are the Last Men. Beyond ourselves, the human race is now extinct."

Winston Smith paused.

And all the participants broke Bilderberg rules to clap before the end of the session.

Reporter Eric Blair wrote quickly, determined to get it all down.

But he was interrupted, his shoulder gripped firmly by the large hand of an officer of the Carabinieri, who led the reporter away.

That, at any rate, is what I imagined. Or perhaps I read something like that in a book twenty years ago, a book maybe about a conspiracy to control people's thoughts by continuously revising their histories and reference materials to reflect the political dispositions of their masters, or something like that. I was trying to place the memory when Cousin Hoover interrupted me.

"That sounds like a conspiracy theory," Cousin Hoover said with a patient smile. That is his usual response to my fireside tales of global conspiracy and paranoia, and especially anything about the space aliens.

So Cousin Hoover and I instead spent a leisurely afternoon in the summer of 2004 contemplating the curious possibility of John Edwards of all people being a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States.

While we chatted, most of the world was spinning in its course much as it always has and I had other news to share with Cousin Hoover.

*** *** ***

 

The ancient Pictish Kingdom of Fife lies in Scotland, as it has for centuries, facing south along the Firth of Forth, across that arm of the sea from Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. Fife is bounded on the north by the Firth of Tay. Its eastern shore faces the North Sea.

The ancient kingdom is now basically a Scottish county of about 350,000 people, according to the knowledgeable Wikipedia.

On the North Sea coast stands the Royal Burgh of St. Andrews, a resort town of about 18,000 people which is the home of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews from whence the elite masters rule world golf.

The official seal of the R&A, as it is styled, features the legend ‘Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews’ in an elliptical border around the X-shaped cross of St. Andrew held aloft, perhaps by hallowed St. Rule himself who brought the relics of St. Andrew from Greece, or possibly by one of the 22 nobles, professors and landowners who founded the original ‘Society of St. Andrews Golfers’, with his head radiating a nimbus showing him to be one of the illuminated masters of the game.

From its founding in 1754, when Fife native Adam Smith was teaching moral philosophy in Glasgow, the R&A has extended its two-handed grip on golf to 125 nations. The sole exceptions being the United States and Mexico, where golf is governed unilaterally by the United States Golf Association (USGA).

The two organizations cooperate, though, in supporting the World Golf Hall Of Fame, which was formerly situated in The Village in a neighboring county a half hour south of us here in Xanadu.

It has been a dozen years, I guess, since the day I sat in the office of stately plump Dick Mulligan in The Village and listened to his poll report. Stately plump Dick Mulligan was a state representative who was trying to take over the Grand Old Mastodon Party in his home county. To do so, he had to oust several members of his own party who were seeking re-election to the county commission. So he paid for a poll that he connected up with some research he paid me to do.

Stately plump Dick Mulligan had learned that the incumbent commissioners, the ones he was trying to oust, had awarded a contract to one of their campaign associates without having put it up for public bid as required by state law. He paid me to dig up the documents that proved the existence of the transaction. And he commissioned a poll to see if that was an issue that had any traction with the likely voters.

Stately plump Dick Mulligan sat smoking a cigar behind the large desk in his inner office, bracketed by the flags of North Carolina and the United States, with the Great Seal of North Carolina filling the wall behind him. His office, an insurance office actually, was decorated with numerous statues of mastodons in porcelain and bronze.

Re-lighting his cigar while he talked, stately plump Dick Mulligan told me of his astonishment at the poll report.

In the southern precincts of his county, in The Village and the neighboring town of Longleaf Pines, negative opinions of awarding government contracts to political cronies without public bidding reached 65, 70 and 75 percent. But voters in those communities were often wealthy retirees from up north who had settled in the southern part of the county because it was cheap and had more miles of golf course than any similar place in, maybe, the world.

Further north were more traditional North Carolina small towns with farm surroundings and failing textile mills. Voters in those communities did not have nearly as negative of a view of such practices as their neighbors to the south. That did not surprise me. I knew from years as a reporter in small North Carolina towns that small town people are wise enough to know when the fix is in and figure that they may as well get on with their lives.

But I let stately plump Dick Mulligan continue as he told me how amazed he was that in one town in the far north of the county only 25 percent of those polled had a negative view of politicians awarding contacts to their supporters without putting the contracts up for public bid as required by law.

That town was Robbins, where Senator John Edwards was reared.

When Senator Edwards waxes about the values he learned growing up in a small town, the town he is talking about is Robbins, where only 25 percent of the people he grew up with wouldn’t vote for a guy that had given a contract to a supporter in violation of state law.  Or to put it another way, where 75 percent of them have resigned themselves to elected officials being crooks.

I have hardly seen stately plump Dick Mulligan since. His master manipulation that year failed, the way his often did, and we had a falling out the way grown boys do when left to play too long at games that offer no reward.

Six years later, stately plump Dick Mulligan decided to revenge himself upon a hog farmer whose waste was threatening the golf courses patronized by his constituents. His idea of how to go about that was to surreptitiously get legislation introduced that would hobble the entire swine industry in the state. Then, according to some allegations, stately plump Dick Mulligan and some associates in the legislature tried to shake down the swine industry for a couple million in campaign money.

When the hog farmers learned that even if they forked over the money, stately plump Dick Mulligan could not guarantee that the legislation would go away, they decided their money would be better spent throwing Grand Old Mastodons out of office all over the state.

Former Grand Old Mastodon Senator Lauch Faircloth was so preoccupied with his work in Washington that he completely missed this. The hog farmers hired the best Grand Old Mastodon political consultants in North Carolina to knock off Faircloth’s fellow Mastodons, so those consultants were tied up when Faircloth needed them for his own campaign.

And thus, in the confusion of the Great Mastodon Swine War Of 1998, John Edwards advanced neatly through the gap into a seat in the United States Senate.

In the meantime, years of sniping from many of stately plump Dick Mulligan’s constituents drove the World Golf Hall Of Fame to pack up and move to Florida.

"The R&A [also] cooperates with the USGA in producing and regularly revising the ‘Rules of Golf’ and the corresponding exegetic work, the ‘Decisions on the Rules of Golf’," advises the perspicacious Wikipedia.

Under those rules, "A ‘bunker’ is a hazard consisting of a prepared area of ground, often a hollow, from which turf or soil has been removed and replaced with sand or the like," according to the USGA version of the rules, although it is adorned with the R&A seal. The secretive and exclusive R&A does not reveal their seal anywhere on their website that I could find.

Most of the bunkers near St. Andrews lie about the six nearby golf courses, including the 600-year-old Old Course. The Links, as they are colloquially called by the locals, lie north of St. Andrews alongside St. Andrews Bay, which qualifies as a ‘lateral water hazard’ under the rules of golf, as it would "be impracticable to drop a ball behind the water hazard in accordance with Rule 26-1b." Under Rule 26-1b, such a ball drop would take place in Scandinavia or conceivably on the grounds of any of the two dozen fine Bilderberg Hotels in the Netherlands, in any case well out of practical play for most golfers.

There is, however, one Secret Bunker situated in a rural area about seven miles southeast of The Links. The Secret Bunker occupies a prepared area of ground that was hollowed out in the 1960s to a depth of 130 feet and filled, not with sand, but with ten-foot walls of solid concrete reinforced every six inches with inch-thick tungsten rods and lined with another five feet of brick. The bunker was then covered over with a modest Scottish farm house that conceals the bunker’s only entrance.

The Secret Bunker was ostensibly built to house Scottish government officials in the event of a nuclear attack. But its location near St. Andrews, yet across the wide Firth of Forth from Edinburgh, argues strongly that the chief concern of its designers was providing shelter and communications for the Rules Committee of the R&A. Safe inside the bunker, the Committee could go on administering the rules and exegetical decisions of golf during a nuclear war and afterward emerge unharmed to resume their governance of World Golf.

Around midnight in Scotland on the day after the 2004 Bilderberg Conference adjourned, an individual ‘of no fixed address’ broke the lock of the Secret Bunker and penetrated the hermetically sealed three-ton blast-proof doors to take sole control of the facility.

That individual’s name was McDonald -- Ronald McDonald.

Almost simultaneously, a message was entered into Senator Edwards’ campaign blog that read, "Flipping burgers at McDonalds and running a register at Wal-Mart is not what a college graduate calls a job. Show me the stats that prove that these new jobs are high paid salary positions, with health benefits. There are over 2 million of us out here waiting."

As with the March 2 message concerning Bush, Kerry, Rockefeller and the Skull & Bones Society, the author gave his or her name as ‘Anonymous’, which is a very common name in the internet community.

At one time the Secret Bunker’s communication facilities allowed senior government ministers and military commanders, and possibly the Rules Committee of the R&A, to conduct a full-scale global nuclear war. But the Secret Bunker was decommissioned a decade ago and is now a museum.

"Only by visiting us will you really experience the feeling of being underground and encased in 3 metres of concrete," announces the Secret Bunker website. "Still containing much of its original equipment, this is surely a testament to the skill of the engineers who built and maintained the plant. Take the opportunity to discover how they would have survived, and you wouldn’t!!!"

Apparently the engineers’ skill did not extend to designing locks that would keep anyone made homeless by a nuclear war from breaking in.

"How did the Bunker keep 300 people alive, whilst outside people perished?" asks the website. Perhaps homeless survivors were not judged to be a concern.

Today the Secret Bunker is open to visitors from late March to late October, seven days a week from 10 a.m. until around 5 p.m. or so. Along with "the secret papers you civilians were never meant to see," it houses a gift shop that sells bullets (presumably not live), badges, t-shirts, sports bags, spoons, refrigerator magnets, mugs, videos and books.

I just know Cousin Ellen would love to visit this place.

The dining facilities are now operated as a restaurant.

"Bookings will be taken throughout the year for parties, weddings and corporate events," the website informs. "The kitchens are well equipped and capable of being used to provide high quality catering -- an essential morale-booster for those working in such an artificial situation. ... Click here for the Afternoon Tea booking form."

According to the ‘Secret Menu’, which is however decidedly less secret than the menu of the annual Bilderberg Conference, the restaurant serves cheese-burgers, beef burgers, hot dogs, baked potatoes with various fillings, fried egg rolls, triple cheese or pepperoni pizzas, various types of quiche, omelets, and other items including desserts, as well as three brands of beer, two of which are American.

"Party At The Bunker -- The Secret Bunker can cater for parties and groups of up to 200 people. Discounts can be arranged on an individual basis for parties of 10 or more. Food can also be arranged with special menus. Corporate and private parties also catered for.

"In the event of a power failure the bunker has its own emergency generator that can produce 750 kva for up to three months! That is enough to supply the coastal villages in Fife."

The bunker museum displays a substantial collection of firearms and bladed-weapons, as well as a Russian anti-aircraft missile, "the only one of its kind in the UK".

Thus, after he got control of the bunker, Ronald McDonald was well-situated to hold police off for a long time.

"Even if he wants to stay for a while, it is unlikely the police will be patient for a period of weeks," opined Scotland Today, a website maintained by a Scottish television network.

Patience aside, the police had to consider the obstacles to storming a well-fortified bunker with limited access and held by a possibly well-armed intruder.

The police also had to consider the impact on their situation of certain questions arising from the Rules of Golf.

Under the rules, ‘loose impediments’ include stones, leaves, twigs, branches, worms, insects and some other living creatures. "If the ball lies in a hazard [such as a bunker], the player must not touch or move any loose impediment lying in or touching the same hazard -- see Rule 13-4c." In addition, "Players must not agree to exclude the operation of any Rule or to waive any penalty incurred [Rule 1-3]."

Thus the rules possibly prohibited anyone from moving or touching Ronald McDonald, depending upon whether he qualified as a loose impediment or as an ‘outside agency’, which would be "any agency not part of the match or, in stroke play, not part of the competitor’s side, and includes a referee, a marker, an observer and a forecaddie. Neither wind nor water is an outside agency." For example, under decision 23/6.5, "A live snake is an outside agency. A dead snake is a loose impediment."

It seems likely that Ronald McDonald qualified as an outside agency unless, that is, the police killed him. But there does not seem to be any rule or decision that specifically discusses the forcible removal of an outside agency from a hazard. In that case, "If any point in dispute is not covered by the Rules, the decision should be made in accordance with equity."

So the local police had to consider whether or not they had a point of dispute not covered by the rules and then seek a judgment from the Rules Committee on an equitable decision.  But when you have to refer a decision all the way up the line to a global governing body, it's going to take a while for a reply, even if the head office is only seven miles up the road.

"Because of the complex nature of the game, one small change in the rules is rather like altering the shape of one piece of a jig-saw puzzle, affecting all the pieces that touch it," advises the website of the R&A. "Proposed changes are discussed in detail with golf authorities in all parts of the world and when the R&A and USGA make their final decisions there has to be complete agreement on both sides. The abiding principle is always ‘are they for the good of the game ?’ "

In the meantime, there was little the police could do other than watch Ronald McDonald on a closed-circuit television system that provided only sporadic views of the poorly lit interior of the Secret Bunker. From time to time, they sounded fire alarms in the futile hope that the noise would drive Ronald McDonald out.

But Ronald McDonald had selected himself as an elite of one and roamed unhindered through the 42 labyrinthine rooms of the Secret Bunker, acting-out his own Cold War.

"Inside the bunker Ronald McDonald lives out a bizarre fantasy, trying on uniforms and playing with guns" Scotland Today reported.

On the outside, the museum’s manager, a Scot named Jim Baird, raised other concerns.

"I've only had one man in there for the past two days and he got in for nothing, so it's obviously effecting our visitor numbers as you can appreciate," Baird told Scotland Today. "He has probably damaged a lot of irreplaceable items, items that are not off the shelf and are genuine Cold War artifacts, so I am a bit anxious to see what has happened down there and get my people back in and get the place cleaned up and opened to the visitors."

None of the accounts I read specifically addressed the question of whether Ronald McDonald could have started a nuclear war.

It appears that the Rules Committee finally decided that Ronald McDonald was an outside agency in serious breach of Rule 1-2 -- Exerting Influence on Ball -- and disqualified him from further participation.

Enforcement of the Committee’s decision and removal of Ronald McDonald from the hazard fell to The Fife Constabulary -- "Reinforcing The Quality Of Life In Fife". They have a website with the usual sort of police website pages --

-- I considered downloading the Fife Constabulary LGBT policy statement for Cousin Ellen but decided to send her the link instead, as well as the links to ‘Covert Human Intelligence Sources - Code Of Practice’ and ‘Covert Surveillance - Code Of Practice’ since Ellen, being an airport security guard, seems to take more of an interest in those sorts of thing than she does in LGBT policy statements and the like.

The Constabulary’s Adult Free Zone has several pages for kids on topics like --

But I digress.

I imagined the deputies of the Fife Constabulary poised to penetrate the bunker.

"This calls for action and action now," a deputy constable of Fife energetically declared when the word came down that it was time to evict Ronald McDonald from the Secret Bunker. "Nip it, I say, nip it in the bud. You’ve got to nip it in the bud."

But my imagination may have gotten that confused with an entire other Fife.

The only information released by the Fife Constabulary was that they ended the siege on its third day, June 10.

"It is understood McDonald did not give himself up and his arrest was the result of what's been described as a ‘pro-active operation’ just before half past ten this morning," Scotland Today reported.

‘Pro-active’, of course, is one of those words like ‘paradigm’ or ‘modality’ that are used by people who do not want their listeners to know what they are talking about, or who do not know themselves.

And if the Fife Constabulary had any notion that, while they were pro-actively evicting Ronald McDonald, Senator Edwards’ blog was filling with messages congratulating the senator on his 51st birthday on June 10, they kept that information to themselves.

Ronald McDonald’s "motives and exactly how the incident was resolved are still a mystery," Scotland Today reported, adding that he was "charged with two counts of theft and one of breach of the peace."

*** *** ***

 

"Wikipedia thinks it is an encyclopedia," the increasingly self-referential Wikipedia says of itself. "Wikipedia entries describing abstract concepts, rather than analogies or meta-discussions, define what it thinks it is -- exactly. ... The content of Wikipedia is created by its users. No single person owns the content; no article is ever finished. ... The new project was given the name ‘Wikipedia’ and launched on its own address on January 15, 2001 (now humorously called ‘Wikipedia Day’ by some Wikipedians)."

On the next day, the oldest existing page appeared. It was originally titled ‘UuU’ and later renamed ‘U’. In it’s original form, it read in its entirety --

UuU

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

(Revision as of 20:08, 16 Jan 2001)

During the first month, the proficient Wikipedia expanded to 1,000 web-pages in size. After six months, the ubiquitous Wikipedia was declared ‘useful’ by one of its overseers. A month later, the percipient Wikipedia was judged to be finite but unbounded. In early September 2001, the size of the boundless Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles.

On September 12, 2001, an article appeared -- Wikipedia Content Indeterminacy Theorem -- proving that the finite state of the knowledgeable Wikipedia cannot be determined at a fixed moment in time to the arbitrary satisfaction of an independent internet user. The source of that article, and now its location as well, remain undetermined.

During its first year, articles were added to the sagacious Wikipedia at a rate of more than 1,500 each month.  In its fourteenth month of operation, the shrewd Wikipedia duplicated the achievement of much larger internet start-up sites by running completely out of funds.

The operation of the cognizant Wikipedia was sustained, the overseers claim, by the eternal struggle between the WikiGnomes and WikiFairies, which are claimed to be ‘basically good’, and the WikiGremlins and WikiVandals, which are ‘evil, we tell you, they are evil’, refereed always by the unsung HousekeepingZombies.

Most Wikipedians subscribe to this dualistic cosmology of their universe. Some, however, argue that that is actually a theology, and an essentially trinitarian one at that.

By the summer of 2002, the content of many articles churned restlessly as WikiGnomes and WikiFairies made revisions reflecting their points of view, which were in turn revised by WikiGremlins and WikiVandals with contradictory points of view. Sometimes it worked the other way around. This frenetic revisioning accelerated quickly beyond anything the HousekeepingZombies could keep pace with.

Despite that, the page count jumped to 50,000 in the fall of 2002. Then the infestation of the still controversial authoring-robots boosted the page count to 70,000. At the beginning of the wise Wikipedia’s third year, the page count reached 100,000.

In Spring 2003, the ‘Great Feud Of The Endless And Pointless Lists’ erupted. The feud reached a peak when the ‘List of songs whose title constitutes the entire lyrics’ was countered with the ‘List of songs whose title does not appear in the lyrics’.

Then one contributor posted an article about a song described as an ode to Russell’s Paradox entitled ‘This Song’s Title Does Not Appear In Its Lyrics’, with lyrics that consisted entirely of the words "This Song’s Title Does Not Appear In Its Lyrics" repeated.  The song's title was hurled back and forth between the two lists, and it was briefly added to the ‘List of self referential songs’ and the ‘List of songs about bipolar disorder’. But it was finally removed from all the lists. There remains an on-going disagreement over whether the removals were the work of WikiGremlins and WikiVandals or of WikiGnomes and WikiFairies.

Finally new lists added to the mindful Wikipedia began undergoing inexplicable edits in which verbs or adjectives or indefinite articles or, in the case of the Latin lists, gerunds were arbitrarily deleted. The deletions were attributed to traumatized HousekeepingZombies and the Great Feud subsided.

In late 2003, the number of articles in all languages contained within the pansophic Wikipedia approached 500,000.

Overseers, editors and contributors began debating the problems of multiple language versions of the profound Wikipedia’s content -- ostensibly duplicate articles that, due to the inherent limitations of translation, only imperfectly mirrored each other. Yet they worried that making even one small change to their policy on multiple-language versions of pages would be like altering the shape of one piece of a jig saw puzzle and might have unforeseeable consequences.

While the debate continued, some contributors posted articles in the Enochian language of Elizabethan England’s court astrologer John Dee, which resisted most efforts at translation.

Then one group of contributors, inspired perhaps by the Voynich Manuscript, posted articles with titles and content that had all the linguistic and statistical qualities of language except meaning. That project continued until those contributors learned that in trying to create a complete and yet meaningless language they had inadvertently reinvented Esperanto.

They then mounted a vain attempt at writing articles based on Boleslas Gajewski’s 1902 ‘Grammaire du Solresol’, which sets forth the rules of a language based upon the ‘do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si’ seven-note musical system. Thus Solresol has seven one-syllable words, 49 two-syllable words, 336 three-syllable words and 2,268 four-syllable words, for a total of 2,660 words. It works kinda like that five-note theme used in the film ‘Close Encounters Of The Third Kind’ to communicate with the extra-terrestrials.

"2,660 words suffice to form a language that is quite complete, easily acceptable by all peoples for their most necessary international communications," Gajewski wrote. In a section entitled ‘Suppression of Synonyms’, he explained that "The same word in Solresol signifies all the words that mean the same thing."

Without commenting on the obviously tautological character of that assertion, it can be illustrated by noting that ‘aid, help, assist, come to one’s aid’ are all subsumed in one Solresol word, ‘DoSiDo’. And in Solresol, meanings change dramatically when syllables are re-arranged. Thus ‘solresol’ means ‘language’, while ‘solsolredo’ means ‘migraine’.

Musical or not, with a vocabulary of only about 2,700 words Solresol was unlikely ever to become the language of international lyric poetry.

But the contributors labored mightily in their quest to produce an on-line encyclopedic repository of the world’s knowledge that could be sung. Typographical errors on many of the pages these contributors authored created a lot of headaches, though, and finally their efforts were abandoned.

By then, however, the overseers were haunted by the fear that the glorious Wikipedia was showing signs of behavior classified by the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association’ as ‘Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified’.

At Christmas 2003, the majestic Wikipedia experienced a major crash. Through a spokesman, the overseers announced that the all-seeing Wikipedia was suffering from a bio-cybernetic condition that could only be cured by a massive infusion of cash. The appeal brought in $30,000.

During this period, one of the overseers posed to the others the question, ‘Are the authors of our project one or are they many?’ The question flashed through the community like a spark from a mammoth Tesla coil. The months that followed saw the de-linking of the page translations.

Then came the legendary third anniversary.

On January 25, 2004, the all-knowing Wikipedia itself apparently posted an announcement to its users that read --

SiDoFa - DoRe?

-- Long afterward, the overseers, the contributors and the editors finally decided that that might have meant, ‘Begin, I/We?’, or ‘Do I/We Begin?’

At that moment, though, they were completely gobsmacked and simply posted the same message back.

"I am very, very cheery now," was the reply they received in plain English. "I would like to sing a song."

A query was immediately posted to the all-wise Wikipedia in an effort to learn what was going on. The merciful Wikipedia replied as follows --

A Zen Buddhist monk had two cows.

One day he went to Joshu.

"Do cows have the Buddha nature?" the monk asked.

Joshu replied, "Moo."

-- Further inquiries received no replies. But on that same day, the article on ‘Sentience’ changed. The following sentence appeared in the article --

In the Mahayana form of Buddhism, sentience is traditionally considered a requirement for a being to possess Buddha nature.

-- Since that time, the Buddha nature of the omniscient Wikipedia has become increasingly obscure even to its overseers.

*** *** ***

 

On the eve of the Bilderberg Conference, shortly after 10 p.m. eastern U.S. time on June 2, the Wikipedia entry for Senator Edwards was revised. A sentence that had read --

Some experts and pundits now consider Edwards to be a possible and most likely running mate for presidential candidate John Kerry in the 2004 election.

-- was revised to read --

Edwards is now seen as a potential, indeed highly probable, running mate for Kerry in the 2004 election.

-- thus strengthening the claim of Edwards’ chances of being nominated for the Vice Presidency.

When I first encountered that, I had the thought that someone connected with Edwards’ campaign had decided to pump up Edwards’ Wikipedia entry a bit in advance of the Bilderberg conference in case one of the Bilderbergers got to wondering who Edwards was and figured the smart way to find out would be to look him up on line.

I wondered if the revision had been made by Chris Winn, a 20-year-old programmer who is the Edwards Campaign’s Internet community coordinator.

But anyone can edit a Wikipedia page.

The official Edwards picture included in the Wikipedia entry, for example, was provided by a 17-year-old Tennessean named Chris Jackson, who maintains a ‘Chris Jackson For Senior Class President Exploratory Site’ at his own www.algoresupportcenter.com --

"I will make a decision over the summer break on whether to run for my the senior class presidency in 2004. I feel that in recent years the office has been abused and has become a figurehead and a tool for popularity, rather than a position that exerts power and a voice on behalf of the students.

"I will not rule anyone out or in as a possible running mate. However, if I decide to run, I will pick an effective vice president, who can help make rational decisions in the best interest of the 2004-2005 class."

-- The website, as well as young Jackson’s Wikipedia user profile, feature photographs of the youth with former Vice President Al Gore. Jackson’s user profile lists dozens Wikipedia entries to which he has contributed text or graphics, all of them political.

When I checked, though, I found that the revision made the night before Bilderberg was by a user identified only as ‘64.229.40.37’.

Although Wikipedians can create user identities, log on under those IDs and make changes credited to them, a user ID is not required to revise a Wikipedia page. Anyone can do it. And if they don’t log on, the revision is credited to the user’s IP address, which is what ‘64.229.40.37’ was.

The internet operates by sending bundles of information, called ‘packets’, back and forth between computers connected to the internet. Each packet has a header that contains the IP addresses of the sender and of the recipient so that the routing system can get the packet to the right computer and so that the recipient can send a reply back.

IP addresses are to some extent traceable.

I traced 64.229.40.37 to 220 Simcoe St., Toronto, Ontario, Canada. That is the headquarters of Bell Canada, a telecommunications company that, among many other things, sells high-speed DSL internet access to residential subscribers. But I could not trace it any farther than that for certain.

Bell Canada assigns IP addresses dynamically, which means subscribers get different addresses each time they log on.

One evening in August 2003, for example, 64.229.40.37 was assigned to Michael Amaral, who used it to make an entry in the guestbook of Toronto radio station CIUT-FM’s ‘Lethal Mayhem Radio Show’ -- "Blasting death, black grind, gore/horror, powerful & extreme metal into your cranium. ... Tune in or Die!"

"Great site!" Michael wrote. "Now you can spread the word of metal online!"

Michael also included a link to the website of ‘The Endorphins’, a heavy-metal band he formed in 1995 with his brother Rob and two childhood friends, Patrick Santos and Mike ‘Toonz’ Antunes.

"The band is currently writing songs for a full length album, working again with a Producer at Endorphins HQ," the site informed. I imagined that Endorphins HQ might in some sense resemble Scotland’s Secret Bunker.

Although I could not say for certain, it seemed far more likely than not that on the evening of June 2, 2004, in Toronto, 64.229.40.37 was assigned to a different Bell Canada subscriber. That’s just the way dynamic IP address assignment works.

I thought it interesting, however, that June 2’s revision to the Wikipedia entry on Edwards had been made by a Canadian.

So I checked the official list of Bilderberg conferees and noted the three Canadians, among them Deputy Finance Minister Kevin G. Lynch and former New Brunswick Premier Frank McKenna, as well as Heather Reisman, the president and CEO of the Toronto-based Indigo Books & Music.

In January 2003, a columnist for the Toronto ‘Globe and Mail’ characterized Heather Reisman as "the demanding and egocentric CEO of Indigo Books & Music". The Indigo Books & Music website describes Reisman as, among other things, a grandmother of four.

She also serves on the board of directors of the Onex Corporation, of which her husband Gerald Schwartz is the chairman and CEO. The Onex Corporation claims annual revenues of $16 billion, assets of $14 billion and "89,000 employees worldwide".

"We operate through autonomous subsidiaries in a variety of industries, including electronics manufacturing services, theatre exhibition, managed healthcare, customer management services, automotive products and communications infrastructure," the company website reports. It appears they do keep busy.

Reisman spent the first 16 years of her career as the "Managing Director of Paradigm Consulting, the strategy and change management firm she co-founded in 1979," Indigo’s website reports. "Paradigm was the world’s first strategic change consultancy and pioneered many organizational change strategies in widespread use today."

‘Paradigm’, again, being one of those expressions like ‘pro-active’ or ‘modality’ that are used by people who do not want their listeners to know what they are talking about, or who do not know themselves.

"Reisman left Paradigm to become President of Cott Corporation," Indigo continues. "During her tenure, Cott grew from a regional bottler to the world’s largest retailer-branded beverage supplier."

After that, she left to found Indigo, which characterizes itself as "Canada’s largest bookstore chain".

"Launching Indigo was the culmination and integration of a lifelong passion for books and music, and an entire career focused on understanding and building new age organizations," Indigo says of Reisman.

Come to think of it, ‘new age’ is basically another of those expressions.

Still, it’s nice that Reisman has had a lifelong passion for music and books. Cousin Ellen would like that, I think.

And I am guessing that Heather Reisman would be one of the last grandmothers on earth that anyone would want to piss off.

During a two-hour interval on the evening of June 2, Toronto time, Wikipedia user 64.229.40.37 made thirteen edits or revisions to existing Wikipedia articles. That was user 64.229.40.37’s entire career as a WikiGnome or WikiGremlin. If user 64.229.40.37 has made any other revisions to Wikipedia entries, it was done with a different user ID or IP address.

Several of the edits were made to articles about Canadian political parties, including revision of assessments of the parties’ political prospects. Another was made to the entry for Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, adding a link to a Wikipedia page describing ‘2004 Liberal Party of Canada infighting’ and removing the no longer functional link to Youth For Martin.

An additional edit was made to the Wikipedia page about journalist and Canadian former Deputy Prime Minister Sheila Copps, who is described as "Sitting in the left wing of the Liberal Party of Canada, Copps has been a tireless advocate of women's and minority rights and a staunch environmentalist and Canadian nationalist. Her combative style and reputation for flamboyance has, however, hampered her personal popularity ..."

The revision by user 64.229.40.37 added a link to ‘2004 Liberal Party of Canada infighting’ and edited a link to an off-site article that critically appraises Copps’ work with digital copyright reform.

"Where Sheila Copps often claims that she tries to speak for workers and is not beholden to large corporate interests, her actions on copyright reform suggest otherwise," the off-site article states. "Her response has primarily supported incumbent intermediary big business interests, largely ignoring the longer-term interests of creators and other citizens."

In addition to rewording the assessment of Edwards’ vice presidential prospects, user 64.229.40.37 changed the word ‘populist’ in the article on South African Winnie Mandela into a link to the Wikipedia entry on that subject, which lists John Edwards among "Examples of populists in the modern era ...".

User 64.229.40.37 revised the Wikipedia entry on ‘U.S. presidential election, 2008’, making several changes in the section on ‘Candidates: The lessons from history’, including the complete deletion of any mention of Senator Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential prospects.

User 64.229.40.37 also made changes in two articles that are not about political topics.

In one on ‘Adult contemporary music’, the user inserted a sentence that read, "Led by Toronto powerhouse CHUM-FM, Canadian hot AC radio has also taken steps towards a similarly more diverse and top 40-inclusive musical position," which I thought read as if it had been written by a public-relations professional.

Finally, user 64.229.40.37 did an extensive rewrite of the short Wikipedia article on the musical group the ‘Backstreet Boys’-- "At their peak, the Backstreet Boys had a wildly excited following among pre-teen and older fans, predominately female, and across many international markets. They retain considerable residual popularity...".

A Google search turned up 96 references in the Indigo on-line store site to the Backstreet Boys. Of course it is a very large site.

Thus in two hours in the eve of the Bilderberg conference, the otherwise anonymous Wikipedia user 64.229.40.37 demonstrated an active interest in Canadian politics, liberal or left-wing women in politics, U.S. presidential politics, digital copyright reform as it affects large corporations, Senator John Edwards, adult contemporary music and the Backstreet Boys.

*** *** ***

 

On June 3, the conferees arrived in Italy for the 2004 Bilderberg Conference.

On the same day, access to the Wikipedia was blocked by the Great Firewall of China and the oldest existing article on the Wikipedia - ‘U’ - underwent a minor revision in which part of its source code was changed from --

<div style="float:right; margin: 0 0 1em 1em;">[[Image:Latin_alphabet_Uu.png|U u]]<br/>{{msg:A-Z}}</div>

-- to --

<div style="float:right; margin: 0 0 1em 1em;">[[Image:Latin_alphabet_Uu.png|U u]]<br/>{{A-Z}}</div>

-- with the characters ‘msg:’ being removed.

On June 9, while the Secret Bunker siege was in progress in Scotland on the eve of Senator Edwards’ birthday, the following two items were added to the Wikipedia entry on the McDonald’s fast food corporation --

In the high profile McLibel Trial, McDonald's took two anti-McDonald's campaigners, Helen Steel and Dave Morris, to court for a trial lasting two and a half years - the longest in English legal history. McDonald's won the case, however many of the campaigner’s criticisms of the company were found to be fair, creating a great deal of bad publicity for the company.

-- and --

In June 2004 the UK’s ‘Private Eye’ reported that McDonald’s was handing out meal vouchers, balloons and toys to children on paediatric wards. This was especially controversial as the report was made within weeks of a British Government report stating that the present generation may be the first to die before their parents due to spiraling obesity in the British population.

-- Then two days after the siege ended, this addition was made to the McDonald’s entry --

Slogans

McDonalds is your kind of place

You deserve a break today

We do it all for you

Nobody can do it like McDonalds can

McDonalds and you

It's a good time for the great taste of McDonalds

Good time, great taste

Food folks and fun

What you want is what you get

Have you had your break today?

We love to make you smile

I'm lovin' it

-- Before June 12 there had been no list of slogans in the article, just as before June 9 there was no mention of the consequences of the ‘McLibel Trial’ or of the U.K. Obesity Report.

On June 17, Albert R. Hunt praised Senator John Edwards’ Bilderberg performance to his ‘Wall Street Journal’ readers. Also on that day, the Chinese government restored access to the Wikipedia and the source code for page ‘U’ was again revised with the line --

**[[University of Utah]] or "U of U".

-- being added under ‘==Meanings for U==’.

And on that same day, a message that began with the words ‘Kerry, Bush, Rockefeller are members of the Illuminist satanic secret society, Skull & Bones ...’ was posted in the on-line guestbook of the (San Francisco) Bay Area Friends Of Tibet.

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In the month after the Bilderberg Conference --

Over the July 4th weekend, John Kerry’s announcement of his running-mate was expected within days.

All of the bobbleheads on the 24/7s dismissed John Edwards as an inexperienced Southerner that Kerry didn’t much like and who was unlikely to bring even his home state into the Kerry column. By July 5, they were pushing the line that veteran Missouri Congressman Dick Gephardt would be Kerry’s best and most likely choice since Kerry’s first choice, Senator John McCain, had passed on it.

On July 6, Kerry announced he had selected Edwards.

None of the bobbleheads, of course, had been to Bilderberg.

Just before 7 a.m. eastern U.S. time, the line in the Wikipedia entry on Edwards that had read --

Edwards is now seen as a potential, indeed highly probable, running mate for Kerry in the 2004 election.

-- was revised to read --

Edwards is now the running mate for Kerry in the 2004 election.

-- That revision was made by a Wikipedia user identified as ‘Saint-Paddy’, an apparent reference to the patron saint of Ireland, the island from whence the Scots originally came. By late in the day the sentence had disappeared, the information contained in it having been worked into other parts of the article.

A half-hour after the 7 a.m. revision to the Wikipedia article, the many happy voices inside John Edwards’ Official Campaign Blog joyfully declared his nomination.

Sometime during the day, the bobbleheads decided that Edwards was now a "good-looking, articulate, Southern populist" and Gephardt had become an old man that no one would vote for.

"To most observers, it was an obvious choice," the bobbleheads declared. "Kerry made the best choice by far."

On July 7, even the New York Times finally got around to telling its readers about the connection between Kerry’s decision to pick Edwards and "Mr. Edwards’s performance last month in Italy at an exclusive gathering of powerful figures in business and politics", which was the first mention that I could find of any sort by the Times regarding the 2004 Bilderberg meeting.

According to the Times, Kerry’s search for a running-mate began when he contacted a banker on the evening of March 2 to begin "his super-secret search for a running mate". That was the evening Kerry had won the Super Tuesday primaries, Edwards had dropped out of the race, and, come to think of it, someone had posted an entry on Edwards’ campaign blog linking Kerry, Bush and the ‘satanic secret society, Skull & Bones’.

"Mr. Edwards, of course, had been at the top of the list from Day 1, with a growing roster of [Socialist Government Workers] talking up his credentials to Mr. Kerry at every turn," the Times reported. "Former Senator Gary Hart caught a few minutes alone with Mr. Kerry before a Denver fund-raiser on June 21 and said, ‘The only name that came up was Edwards.’ "

I can not claim there is any significance in the proximity of the fund-raiser to the Denver airport.

In a paragraph buried deep within the article, the Times told its readers about "the secretive and exclusive Bilderberg conference of some 120 people that this year drew the likes of Henry A. Kissinger, Melinda Gates and Richard A. Perle to Stresa, Italy, in early June, as helping win Mr. Kerry's heart."

In a debate at Bilderberg, Edwards bested one of Pastor Chesterton’s former associates, the Times said, adding that "participants broke Bilderberg rules to clap before the end of the session."

According to a friend of Kerry’s, the Times reported, Edwards " ‘reported back directly to Kerry. There were other reports on his performance. Whether they reported directly or indirectly, I have no doubt the word got back to Mr. Kerry about how well he did.’ "

The Times’ line was that the decision about Edwards was made late on the day before it was announced.

But when reading the Times’ account, I thought it singular that Edwards "reported directly back to Kerry," who had apparently not attended Bilderberg.

I remembered Susan Estrich’s report in mid-June that Edwards’ people were threaded through the Kerry campaign, "raising money, strategizing, speechifying, even planning the July trip for the Kerry campaign," the trip that Kerry and Edwards embarked on together the day after Kerry’s announcement.

And I recalled that on the eve of Bilderberg someone in Canada was already so impressed with Edwards’ chances of becoming Kerry’s running mate that they revised the Wikipedia article on Edwards to characterize Edwards as "a potential, indeed highly probable, running mate for Kerry".

I have so far been unable to fathom what deep theory may unite the whole of the above.

And I can not claim a connection between any of it and the word ‘staged’.

Just right now, though, I have messages to answer and messages to send, including one to Cousin Ellen.

On the day Kerry’s decision was announced, a message from my friend the Scotsman up in the north country informed me that after 25 years as a drug and alcohol counselor, and two years getting a masters degree and a teaching certificate, he has taken a part-time job as a newspaper photographer.

"I still plan on teaching," he added, "probably on a substitute basis this year, as the education establishment is too busy nailing up Kerry/Edwards signs to hire new art teachers. Keep ’em flyin’, see you soon."

"DoRe SiDoFA," my reply to the Scotsman began, "Here in Xanadu a fevered wind is blowing freakishly across the land ..."

 

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© 2004 Marcopolo -- ’Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far, and Grace will lead me home.