Jan Klimkowski Wrote:Gore Vidal has uttered very many insightful and important words over the decades. His comments above are not worthy.

A 13-year-old cannot consent to being drugged and then raped, vaginally and anally. Her mother cannot consent on her behalf.

I'm tempted to put Vidal's comments down to the onset of senility.

However, a less benign interpretation is that Vidal speaks as an aristocratic insider. Whilst he has spent most of his life exposing the sins both of his class and of the powerful, his utterances here seem to share Their complete disdain for the humanity and pain of ordinary people.

Quote:The Washington Daily News, 7 March 1963, p.27

Bobby Kennedy in ‘68

By Richard Starnes

I am obliged to Gore Vidal, a playwright of considerable talent, a politician of some passing competence, and a philosopher of no account at all, for brushing aside the shadows that obscure the political future and, of course, by extension the future of us all.

Writing in this month’s Esquire, Mr. Vidal quickly disposes of 1964. President Kennedy is home free in ’64 and thus the election next year isn’t worth one of Dr. Gallup’s worn-out clip boards.

But 1968 – now there is a magazine-length essay that is another shade of green. What the ordained soothsayer can descry in that year can scarce bear repeating in the presence of nursing mums, particularly nursing mums.

Mr. Vidal (himself a liberal, altho not lactescent at this time) finds that the Democratic nominee will be Bobby Kennedy. He finds further that the candidacy of Bobby seems doomed to succeed. He isn’t happy about the prospect, altho he appears to believe Mr. Kennedy I (the first) is/was/will be counted a good President. I am inclined to agree with him on that score, just as I tend to share his view that Bobby would be a disaster in the job.

What troubles me, however, is Mr. Vidal’s certitude. He concedes that it is always possible a winter-book candidate might have the poor judgment to die between now and 1968, a misfortune that would probably disqualify anyone. He also suggests the possibility there might be no election in 1968 if, say, all of us let Mr. Kennedy – no, no, not THAT one, THIS one – down and lost a war. But otherwise, if I read Mr. Vidal correctly, Bobby is all but fated to succeed his big brother in the White House.

Mr. Vidal writes, as all good essayists write, in a forceful, not to say headlong, style that admits to no uneasy doubts in the reader’s mind. The trick is to write something like, “in six years Hubert Humphrey will be 57” – a sentence which surely proves the author a man of integrity and some ability to foresee the future – and then to follow it with some assumptions too broad for leaping except by the most sure-footed.

The biggest flaw in Mr. Vidal’s argument is his assumption that John Kennedy will exercise his vast power to install Bobby as his successor.

It is at least debatable. Mr. Vidal cites frailties in Bobby Kennedy that might well disqualify him for the job he seeks (come to think of it, there’s another broad jump; Vidal just THINKS Bobby wants to be top banana).

It is only reasonable to assume that John knows a lot more about Bobby than even Gore Vidal knows. Is he going to risk the place in history he will by then have earned (don’t worry, if we’re still alive, he’ll have earned it) by handing the job on to his pushy kid brother?

If he does, he’ll qualify himself in the history books as a man more interested in creating a family dynasty than in keeping alive our frail experiment in self-government. And there is nothing in his record to date that suggests he is such a person.

Jan Klimkowski Wrote:[edit] The Conspiracy Theory - Claims in detail
According to these authors, the Vril Society was founded as "The All German Society for Metaphysics" in 1921 to explore the origins of the Aryan race, to seek contact with the "hidden masters" of Ultima Thule, and to practice meditation and other techniques intended to strengthen individual mastery of the divine Vril force itself. It was formed by a group of female psychic mediums led by the Thule Gesellschaft medium Maria Orsitsch (Orsic) of Zagreb, who claimed to have received communication from Aryan aliens living on Alpha Tauri, in the Aldebaran system. Allegedly, these aliens had visited Earth and settled in Sumeria, and the word Vril was allegedly formed from the ancient Sumerian word Vri-Il, "like god" (In fact, Vri-Il means nothing in Sumerian, and could not even be a Sumerian word, as Sumerian had no /v/ phoneme, nor does Sumerian allow consonant clusters at the beginning of words. While the Akkadian word for "deity" is indeed ilum, the Sumerian word is dingir.). A second medium was known only as Sigrun, a name etymologically related to Sigrune, a Valkyrie and one of Wotan's nine daughters in Norse legend. Other sources[who?] state that the Vril Society was founded by an ill-defined group of Rosicrucians in Berlin before the end of the 19th century, while still others[who?] state that it was founded by Karl Haushofer in Berlin in 1918. Some sources state that the Vril Society was also known as the Luminous Lodge, or the Lodge of Light,[20] though others claim that it was originally called the Brothers of the Light.[21]

The Society allegedly not only taught concentration exercises designed to awaken the forces of Vril, their main goal was to achieve Raumflug (Spaceflight) to reach Aldebaran. To achieve this, the Vril Society joined the Thule Gesellschaft and the alleged DHvSS (Die Herren des schwarzen Steins, The Masters of the Black Stone) to fund an ambitious program involving an inter-dimensional flight machine based on psychic revelations from the Aldebaran aliens.

Charles Drago Wrote:The conflations of literal and spiritual journeys, substances, and objects are both functions of untrained, limited minds and intentional acts of misdirection in service to the maintenance and expansion of power -- material and otherwise.

David Guyatt Wrote:Having said that of course, all the great secrets are writ large and hid in plain sight anyway - but our eyes do not behold what the mind is, as yet, unable to fathom.

Quote:Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Eskimos whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Eskimos knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And as far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.
These data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Eskimos. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Eskimo wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud;

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."