Lyndon LaRouche is one such man. There is a fairly detailed website tracking his activities which has some insightful articles despite the crude design. One of the things that LaRouche claims is that he is a genius (in effect, he has enough sense not to be too explicit about it). I am skeptical. He loves to make claims about historical figures and about ancient philosophical concepts but does so in ways utterly foreign to experts in the relevant fields and without simplifying the concepts so they can be understood and verified.
Something that is a wonderful example of this phenomenon is an article he wrote in one of his publications in the 1980s. It is a (probably) fictionalized accounts of a security situation that is used to highlight the operations of his organization while serving as a reminder of security concerns.
OK, so that seems to be the typical cult paranoia and grandiosity. So what? It wasn't until the last paragraph on page three that I realized something was horribly wrong.
The organization worked on the implicit assumption that Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin had the correct method, and that Sherlock Holmes's reputation had contributed much to spoiling the quality of security and intelligence organizations worldwide. Poe would have agreed. Poe would have made a valuable addition to the news service's evaluations teams, and he would have found the circumstances agreeable.
Well, there's a literary person most people have heard of but few have read and a fictional character that is supposedly superior to Holmes. Whatever the merits of the "Dupin is better than Holmes" case, these are not either or situations. The process of cultural development is both iterative and additive. Dupin came first and grappled with issues that allowed the more complex work of Holmes to enter the public imagination because elements of the work had been achieved beforehand.
Alright, a degree of name-dropping is par for the course that is claiming to be tracking down terrorists. What's next?
No excess of humility here. Just your typical mad scientist plot but with far less accessible language. At least he didn't name-drop Caesar's referring to himself in the third person.
The relevance of Poe becomes even greater as the assertion is made that he was a member of the Cincinnatus Society and that it was an intelligence organization. Gee, that is not something ordinary people would know and certainly not something historians of the American Revolution would agree with. Likewise, claiming the Marquis de Lafayette was a member of the organization might have been a bit much.
Morse lived 1791-1872. The Marquis de Lafayette lived 1757-1834. While it might have been possible for the two to meet and work together, the only practical time for that to have taken place would be between 1811-1834 when they were both adults and able to travel. The trouble is that actually piecing the possible dates together is much harder because that would involve figuring out when they were in the same country, when they could have met, and if they even knew each other. It is easy to claim that their cooperation was a very well kept secret but traveling across the Atlantic ocean incognito while having somebody claim they worked with you at home during the relevant dates is a bit of a stretch.
Also, as a guy with a bit of interest in military and intelligence history, I have never heard such a thing. Let's get back to the article.
The chairman thought of the thought which had passed through his mind as he had absorbed the briefing. "I can smell something special in this." It wasn't "smell"; he rebuked himself for falling under the influence of popularized argot. It was the cardinalities of the case, even at this early stage. "Intuition", "hunch", "smell": those were qualities to be encouraged in the cop on the beat, the detective. They should not be encouraged expressions of insight among intelligence specialists. A good intelligence officer ought to be trained in Kepler, Leibniz, Monge, Carnot, and the methods of Alexander von Humboldt's proteges at Berlin and Gottigen. A good intelligence officer ought to move in the same direction as Poe, but further and better. Greek classics, music, and physical geometry: everyone, especially the elite of public service, ought to be grounded from childhood in those fundamental disciplines.
Remember folks, this is a guy writing about himself. He also condemns the use of simple terms which indicate a pattern has been recognized and unworthy of of intelligence specialists. This guy was a hipster before it was uncool. Also, what Astronomy, Calculus, and other mathematics have to do with Intelligence work remains unasserted.
Also funny is the claim that FEMA has something to do with security as opposed to just responding to natural disasters. I thought the FBI and state police forces did that. Oh,well, silly me.
Philby's crowd in the KGB had lined up with Khomeini and Beheshti from the beginning, working closely with British intelligence. The Tudeh Party had systematically moved into every vacuum in the administrative apparatus. The game was obvious. When Khomeini finally died, the Tudeh Party would control the apparatus. "Those idiots at State and the National Security Council" had stuck to playing between their delusions about the "Islamic fundamentalism card" and the Socialist International's Bani-Sadr option. The British must be laughing their asses off at the silly American dupes. Now, it appeared, the payoff for years of stupidity was about to come.
Err...Since when was Philby dealing with Iran? Since when did the KGB take the Islamists seriously as a proxy? Maybe, just maybe, the seizure of power by Khomeini was in response to a political opening that the very human planners in the KGB didn't spot as a problem. Whatever, this clearly isn't meant to be serious work, just ego-stroking. Let's move on.
Was there a connection to the Chicago business? On recent years' past performance, there was always some sort of connection between any two unusual atrocities occurring in the world at the same time.Repeat after me: "Correlation is not Causation", "Correlation is not Causation", Correlation is not Causation". Better now?
Let us also assume that it is a bad idea to impute information into a case without actually having data. Assuming a person who made a bomb threat is connected to Iran or that they are highly capable before finding the bomb might be a mistake. Who are these jokers anyways? Oh.
That is the way in which the facts oft he Chicago crisis shaped up. This was the sort of problem in which the chairman had the relatively best skills, developed over decades. This was one of the situations for which he was best suited to be in charge. Instead, he was fishing with the problem from outside the command-structure, reading and tugging at the few shadows of reality accessible to him. The challenge of affecting reality through such shadow-play was delightful-as an intellectual exercise. Unhappily, there was concern in the chairman's mind that the price of failure might be a nasty one. The problem was possibly a nasty one, and included, probably, the exceptional sort of case with which those probably in charge were least equipped to deal.
Gotta love a case of good old-fashioned megalomania.
He then goes on to talk about the bomb assuming it must be some nuclear or biological weapon on the assumption they are dealing with some uniquely intelligent and capable person. Again, they haven't found the bomb, just have a note, and are guessing based on just about zilch in a situation where most bomb threats never materialize and where most bombs are small, poorly constructed, conventional devices. Assuming the guy wants to blow up Chicago might not be a warranted inference.
The most interesting thing about quarks is that they do not exist. No physicist has ever conducted an experiment in which the effect of a quark's existence occurred, and there is no basis in actual experimental physics to infer that such critters might exist.
There is another and annoying tangent on Quarks which the editor claims don't exist. Good grief. Not only are particle physics unrelated, they are beyond the reach of the public, not within the professional experience and purview of intelligence personnel, and not something worth complaining about in the article. Also, they got the physics wrong.
The real, deeper issue reflected by the promotion of the quark dogma is the fight, over approximately four centuries to date, between the physics of Johannes Kepler and that of Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton.
AAARGH! Just stop!
Cauchy was an agent of Venice and Metternich, sent back into France to the purpose of attempting to destroy science under the .patronage of Orleans, the British-Metternich puppet on the throne of France at the time. Under Cauchy's influence, the leading figures of the Ecole Polytechnique were either hounded out, or their work, including the crucial work of Legendre, suppressed.
More name-dropping without context or reason. I just don't have the patience or will to fight through this drivel anymore.
Two of Cauchy's frauds which have done the most to ruin the mental capacities of mathematical physics students in subsquent times are his hoax of "limits doctrine" and the assumption of arbitrarily fine division of a linearized continuum.
Did this guy fail math forever?
There's a bit more but I'm beginning to understand how cult brain-washing works. Trying to pay attention to this garbage is requiring a lot of mental energy. How does anybody take this moron seriously?
