#70: Lose Extra Pounds of Brain & Bone the JFK Way, pt. 2
The Headshot Sports Talk Call-In Show; Group 40, or, The Kill Kastro Klub Becomes The Kill Kennedy Kommittee; the CIA, the Mafia, and a whole lot of heroína; Howard Hughes, the world's most racist vampire (sorry, Peter Thiel); the young John Kennedy, warhawk mediocrity, somehow both stiff-backed and spineless; Patrice Lumumba's head mailed to the Inaugural Ball in a takeout carton.
NOTE, c. 2020: I mention Jimmy Files in this episode and perhaps one or more of the sequels; I no longer regard his story as viable.
Comments (9)
Need a deep dive into Cybersyn
Mike I’m loving being able to get to hear your ideas and feel your presence and humor. I missed it!
new to your show, i absolutely love it. any credence or insight into the grateful dead/owsley being a CIA op? 'acid dreams' gets very suggestive of this but it's all very inferred. i love their music and ethos and this quirk just adds another bizarre angle to it. some fellow wrote a pretty dubious/bullshit seeming book about the laurel canyon scene's ties to intelligence which seemed pretty questionable which is why i approach this with a lot of skepticism. maybe you already have an episode about this. also as a zappa fan.... what do you think of the dead?
Owsley was bankrolled by a CIA-asset member of the Mellon family, and the early Dead shows and Acid Tests were put on by a CIA-front promoter that used them as the variable in LSD tests against an empty room full of acid-dosed victims elsewhere in San Francisco. That book is, broadly speaking, full of shit, and its author Dave McGowan is anything but reliable; what I'm saying above, however, has been documented a number of times. Look into the Mellon section of S. William Snider's STRANGE TALES OF THE PARAPOLITICAL.
James Files? That's like Veciana's stories and Judyth Baker's bullshit. To be avoided-- good move!
You know, I was relistening the part 5 yesterday and I was thinking of asking you whether you thought there were any other scenario that you considered plausible besides the jimmy files one. Anyways, as you said "why" is the more important question rather than the "who".
Why the Jimmy files dismissal?
I spoke at some length with a very well-informed and well-known Kennedy scholar, whom I won't name in case it would be inconvenient for him/her, and (s)he gave me some history on Files tailoring his stories to the particular interviewer and "suddenly remembering" details as they were made public. I wouldn't be surprised if Files were tangentially connected to it, because he WAS, as far as I can tell, a peripheral head-knocker in the Giancana machine, but I think he's mostly bullshitting because he knows how this CIA/mob shit works and can insert himself in a realistic-sounding story. Arguably, he's still worth listening to if you only know the patently false Oswald story, simply because he'll give you a different and much more plausible version of what happened, but he's not the Grail
Even though I know what’s coming, can’t help hoping he makes it out alive this time