in response ...

in. deed.

"common sense is an oxymoron, don't you know we've got a war on?"

a phrase latched onto during an early evening walk by the stack over achmelvich way, i seem to recall.

Bob Fuscate

in response ...

Eschew… Now there’s a word I haven’t heard in … well, many years. A word as cryptic and obfuscatory as the act the slogan demands we eschew. Which I guess to be the point of the slogan. The statement itself contradicts its content, just like ‘Don’t give orders’ or ‘Hate Hatred’. A sloganistic form of the oxymoron?? As two agents once said, ‘truth is an oxymoron / don’t forget there is a war on’. Or somesuch. So … the slogan may as well read ‘Obfuscate!’ to my eye. In which case it says the very opposite of what it looks like it says. A classic obfuscationist technique…
But a car bumper sticker? This is strange news indeed. They are truly among us.

Car Sticker

Saw a car sticker the other day, which if i recall i've seen before on the same car in York, saying 'Eschew Obfuscation'. The term seems to have a bit of a history...look at wiki entry for 'obfuscation'.

Who is the driver of this car? is the sticker a straight term? can it ever be such...it's loaded, but by who? Are there other examples of this slogan?

hmmm.

Ronald's Early?

"Ronald's Early?"

maybe there is no Searly. maybe the above is what i misheard as "Ronald Searly" three mnoths back.

Though yes, being a pyschiatrist would easily allow someone to remain isolated yet contactable to a group. member dropping by to see him and get operational arrangements made, supplying the main man with updates, the whole time passing themselves off of 'patients'.

naturally, if the whole thing got busted [say by a detective's wire] then he could always claim everything overheard was the product of the maddened minds he is trying to straighten out through professional means, and not somehting he is personally involved in. if if we have recordings suggesting he is involved, he could always claim he is humouring the patient, going along with them in effort to get to the crux of their disorder. first class obfuscatia.

up north but based on the west coast, away from operations in our eastern sphere of investigation, but within reach. classic obfuscatia - when they say look left, you better look right.

False Idol Promotion (aside from Lone Wolf)

Must get myself a copy of this book. [Amused to Death]

Read the last para in the summary section about the presidents - pure false idol stuff.

TV has a lot to answer for - possibly the obfuscationists' greatest weapon. unlimited channels of false idol promotion.

Inspector Gadgetry

medium message

'The medium is the message', as in the phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. The phrase was introduced in his most widely known book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964.[1] McLuhan proposes that media itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study. He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself.

The bee/swarm/hive analogy is fascinating. as is the fact these hives/pig huts were empty in their core. it would seems that whatever it is that lone wolf and nelson came across, donut law would apply. indeed the quality of adroitness would seem to be fairly machiavellian and indeed within the MO of the Obfuscationists.
I am not entirely sure how it all links in, particularly the witches and the wicks, though E H Gombrich once said "Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there". However, we would seem to be dealing with something which applies this theory in the opposite manner - something which is there but we can't see it. Perhaps writing up my findings from east cleveland would help to provide another aspect on the case.

Casebook Retrieval

I recently retrieved my main casebook which had been idly left at Kingsbury PI's place a few days earlier. It contains observations and suppositions relevant to the case hitherto untouched on.

note 1: The redhead girl in the CCTV footage identified by one of the Boston tech crew as Melody Nelson could she be one of the duo known as 'Melinda Packett'? I recall receipts for auburn hair colour being found at their bay area residence? Sounds like one of those coincidences I don't believe in.

Assuming this is the case, it would seem that there is frequent movement of personnel connected to this whole saga from north to south and east to west. The group seem to have connection in all corners of the continent and also south of the border. Vandeloo and De Leon seem to have moved around more than most people we are aware of in the case - Florida, Baton Rouge, Mexico, Wisconsin, probably Maine. I definitely think these guys are researchers/couriers with major connections moving across the landscape on a constant basis, probably running along differenty routes to the cargo cult already identified. I'm still not sure if they were truly soft core group or if they were government plants.

This moving around would facilitate posting correspondance from all over the US, allowing the group to never use the same address twice, appearing ubiquitous and without an operational centre. This is an organisation structured according to donut law. perhaps they themselves extend around the circumference of the planet and Searly could be anywhere. This is a classic obfuscationist technique, favoured by RC Christian as we have already seen.

One more thing: Dan Stairs. His name sounds so similar to 'downstairs'; it makes me think of basements. I think he could be a good lead. I shall investigate his presence in the Ohio region; preliminary enquiries show he has been spotted in the East Cleveland area.

obfuscatia

I think perhaps I have been focusing too heavily on the wool-related aspects of the case and negelecting to join the dots between other case-related activities. In effort to redress this imbalance I'd like to outline my knowledge of the movement known as the Obfuscationsts.

It is believed that the group began in the early fifties US of A with links to the military. Post-war analysis showed that deception tactics were vital to the military success and, once the troops had come home, stories were soon in the air about how some maverick had planned the perfect dupe and gained a critical victory for his batallion. Equally, when a soldier fell, it was always due to the duplicity of the enemy rather than an error on a comrade's part or just sheer bad luck with the odds of a war theatre.

Long story short, in the post-war era there were lots of draftees who had learned to cultivate and depend on deception techniques for their survival who were now looking to integrate back into society. This is how many of the ideas at the root of the Obfuscationist movement came into the public domain. Some of these ex-servicemen went to college and others found steady jobs working for the man, many of them ending up in the growing sales and marketing industry during a boom time for mass production. Their learned instinct to capitalise on weakness and expand territory made them particularly suited to mass-maketing and time has revealed a great overlap between obfuscationist thinking and advertising techniques.

Some of those who drifted into the college scene at this time are likely to have been involved in the devlopment of the op-art experiments noted earlier. By the time the hippie/'Nam north/south split happened in the sixties, ofuscationist ideology was widely permeated throughout the civilian mindset. The movement, or at least its ideology, appears to trascend politics. Photos from Vietnam show grafittied obfuscationst symbology in the jungles of SE Asia as well as on college campuses and on placards and pin badges at peace festivals and protest in the US at a similar time.

John Nash's game theory crystallised many fundamentals of the Obfuscationist modus operandi and was soon latched onto by the marketeers to promote the idea of the anti-Droitwich fix. Worthless items sold for a high price, elevated to must-have status through marketing techniques. Among other things, such groups are known to hold responsibility for pointlessly overdeveloped items of basic functionality such as the five bladed razor and the electric toothbrush, pitching them to the public under a shroud of faux personality. Current projections estimate that products will be named after people within 5-10 years. In 20-25 years is is expected that people will be named after products.

Turbulence

Your last missive gives me the impression that things are beginning to unravel. Are you working from a new base now? A change in situation often allows things to be seen viewpoints hitherto unviewed. Maybe your move will provide you with a different view of the case.Thunder and lightning is filling the sky as I type. Low pressure. Electricity. Turbulence. eight young tomato plants are currently being rained on.

So, the beards are coming to town. It seems our guitar-slinging cowboys are will be active in the UK at a similar time to Costa's Broken Social Scene hitting the Candian road. Is this coincidence? Not if Bob Palindrome's maxim is anything to go by; 'there's no such thing as coincidences; there's only incidences, and they all go in the casefile'. He also used to say 'a casefile is like a good stew; you chuck everything in there, keep a low heat on it and see what rises to the surface'. I always took this as a good metaphor but once I got to know the man I realised that he also meant it literally.

Once I had visted his apartment I soon realised that he would destroy old closed casfiles by boiling them up in a pan of water in his kitchen. This explained the scald marks on his hands I'd previously wondered about. The man, resourceful as ever, used this method of data erasion as it provided him with the raw material for his hobby of making lifesize paper mache sculptures of his favourite birds of prey. The man had these things, hand painted, all over his house. A bald eagle hung above the main doorway, neck craned down and beak out so as to almost peck your left eye out while you waited for the door to open. A pereguin falcon, wings hunched back in a dive pose sat on his bureau acting as a mail holder, envelopes stuffed between the two raised wings. I digress...

Although the dates of BSS and the beard troupe's performance are not the same, they are only a couple of weeks apart. There is the possibility of using winds, possibly the trade winds one of our investigators mentioned earlier, to allow the sound to travel over large distances. This obviously takes time. I am consulting Dr. Epstein on this and am waiting for confirmation, but rough calculations show that it is fairly likely the soundwaves from both touring circuits will collide and interact at some point around the start of august. Perhaps there is some underlying plan for the two soundwaves to mesh in a certain area, interfering with one another in a way similiar to that you tried to achieve with the dual spin sources.

This could be another Black Cat style experiment, done in reverse fashion to the dual particle example. This time, they are starting with two sources, which are intended to meet up in one location. causing some kind of effect or outcome.Due to the butterfly effect, turbulence, it is hard to predict with certainty the when and where or even if of what may happen, but Epstein did say 'it could be possible'. Of course, I may be looking in the wrong direction and this could just be nothing. If, on the other hand, it is the case, then we are dealing with some advanced Obfuscation techniques.

Notes from kojak asa400

At approximately 7am today I was contacted in a dream by the wife of James Long. She was wanting information on his disappearance. I gave no information, as I have none.

Later, on the way to the day job today, I saw a fine example of the Droitwich Fix – sweet lady waiting in the post office with glimmering silver and green purse – I comment on it, and she shows me – it’s made with old drinks can ringpulls, threaded together with green twine. I have a belt made of ringpulls too, she says. Heavy duty stiching technique – utilising second-generational-usage scrap metal to create a chainmail-style ‘fabric’. Very effective. I have become aware through theorising of an opposite principle to the Droitwich Fix. I found its name yesterday but it has slipped from my mind. More information on this when it returns.

Nb. Once on a visit to the outer rim isles (North Uist, from which St Kilda can be seen hazily out in the void, and then on to South Uist), I became aware of the ancient hand symbol supposedly of Jesus. On the catholic southern island, a stone statue of the mother and child shows the infant raising said salute: First and index finger raised, other fingers down – identical to the peace sign but with fingers together rather than apart. Yesterday I discovered the reason for this hand signal. Jesus had given up waiting on a bus, set off on foot, and was waving to passing vehicles while still holding his busfare in his hand…

For myself, the bus caught up with me some time later, and left me at desired beach location, along with two young campers, without charging me the fare.

I now recall part of the name of the anti-Droitwich Fix. It is the [something] itch. I suppose it may include the throwing away of something still of use. It is also the making and pushing of something with no actual use, its intended use being a mere charade. This would be a tactic well used by the Minnesota marketing people. It is a classic technique in the development of money generation and population-regimentation/control through the mid-20th century: must-have products, with a swift decline in any notion of what the product actually does. Often the product will do something, but not what they tell you it does. A classic result of the meeting between the marketers and the early obfuscationists…

Festival Circuitry

This investigator took the weekend off the case to indulge in some much overdue sunshine of impressive intensity and only now has he picked up the impending development in the case, ie. the immediacy with which BSS are 'touring' from Canada to California.

This strikes me as pertinent for the following reasons - we have already established that festivals and musical touring circuits are ideal ways to move people and goods around the continent in a fairly undetected way. We also know Costa is either in BSS or has close links with them. This suggests to me that Costa may use a BSS tour as a means to achieve her own ends, with or without the band's complicity (she is a known Obfuscationist, remember, and as such would have no problem hiding her true intentions while being close to the band).

The band may even be a front to hide less universally accepted operations, such as the promotion of wool-based lifestyles or products of closed-loop synthesis, with promotional methods possibly adapted from those used by the Minnesota thinktank (I recall Costa being quoted in a marketing journal from years ago, which suggests she either worked in marketing or pretended to work in marketing to gain knowledge of their obfuscatory techniques [i strongly suspect the latter]).

It seems to me that the BSS tour is likely a smokescreen to transport a portion of the Michigan operation (people or products) down to California for some purpose, or perhaps to collect something from the southern state to bring back north. The California connection cannot be ignored - Searly's act of philanthropy at the Reno Steak-n-Cake suggests the California route has been active for sometime, and Melinda Packett is registered to a Bay Area address.

The California connection could well be a base or stop-off point for managing the South American connections - this investigator for one is definitely aware that products made from llama wool are readily available in the fields designated for corporate-sponsored rock festivals, though how popular such things prove to be in the california heat, this northerly located investigator cannot confirm.

Long Floats

The reference material sent on Closed Loop fibres revealed a detail which may be of note regarding the fibrous aspects of the case. See mention of a special fabric as follows...

Cinchilla: A cotton, wool, and even synthetic fabric of sateen or twill construction with extra fillings for long floats.

This is a fabric which can be made from natural and synthesised sources and bears a cutely disguising name. Note the talk of 'long floats'. Combining this with the name of the fibre suggests to me a Flotilla, something highly pertinent to this case. Perhaps the Michigan crew were looking at shipping/manufacturing such a fibre for use in their various operations. Perhaps your novel simultaneous spinning experiments are something akin to this manufacturing process, though may need some kind of modification or change of variables to get the desired results.

Are you aware that certain models of turntable favoured by audiophiles and disc jockeys have a pitch adjustment facility which allows, by means of a slider, many (14) speeds of rotation. It enables music to be played between the notes of conventional key structure, similar to the effect of de-tuning an instrument, but on a song-wide scale. I hypothesize that perhaps an unorthodox rotational speed could create some kind of resonance between the two spin sources, allowing for a qualitative change in results. This could operate as some kind of vibrational/resonant cipher - find the right combination of rotational speeds in the two sources and information may be gleaned from the beat notes of the resulting cross-rhythm like some kind of low frequency morse code.

With regard to working out some kind of timeline of 'disappearances', Perhaps Costa's mid-90's 'disappearance' was her dropping out of the state education system to form a band (possibly an early guise of Broken Social Scene), with the interim years spent touring the low-level festival circuit until the band's profile was raised enough to force her to return to the overground. As previously noted, the festival circuit can be a great way to fall of the radar should one wish to do so. Though, as a known Obfuscationist, she could easily disappear and yet be active at the same time, most likely under a pseudonym. Happy said the mixtape couple stopped visiting circa 2005. He doesn't recall when they first began appearing on campus, but says he became aware of them a couple of years into his studies, around summer 1995. I do not know how this fits with your theories.

Fabrics of the Future

Back From Boston. Arriveded home to discover a package from Kingsbury PI amongst my mail. It contains a document entitled Fabrics Of The Future, which is explained in her accompanying letter as relating to a current Phd proposal by a student called Dan Stairs.

Whilst I was away, Kingsbury PI attended a public viewing of a design competition featuring a selection of Phd research proposal posters. It was here, her letter explains, that she found the document I mention, given as a handout to accompany one of the posters on display. Allow me now to relay a few excerpts for your consideration...

Fabrics of the Future
Dan Stairs (Ohio University)

This practice-led project explores ways of using sustainable textile fibres. Through creative experiments with newly developed natural fibres and closed-loop synthetics, to produce solutions to sustainable textile 'products'.

Aims
To examine eco-design theory, exploring emerging ideas about the life-cycle of textile 'products'.
To design and develop innovative textile 'products', using ecologically and environmentally sustainable fibres.
To research closed-loop production methods.
To disseminate findings in academic and manufacturing environments.

Methodology
...Practical experiment to explore the results of findings and test theories in the area of study, which will lead to realising new paradigms in the field of textile design.

Now, let's examine this; note the opening gambit - 'a practice-led project'. This means actually carrying out what is being examined, not just reseraching it. Stairs is planning on acting out whatever it is he is 'studying'. Next sentence speaks of 'creative experiments'. More action for 'research' purposes of dubious nature. Look at the aims and other ambiguous terms jump out; 'eco-design' 'closed-loop production methods' - what are these? eco-design sounds like designing ecological systems to me and 'closed loop production' is a perfect descriptor for the private network of individuals, who seem to exist outside of normal social circles and communication channels, that we are dealing with.

Note the final aim - 'to disseminate findings in academic and manufacturing environments'. Is this not exactly what Project 31 could be described as doing? the talk of a 'new paradigm' sounds ominous. Why would one want ecologically sustainable fibres for any other reason than creating an environment which would be sustainable with the current natural one? One other thing of note is the use of inverted commas with every mention of 'products'. That is sheer ambiguity - a classic Obfuscationist trait.

Unless I am being paranoid and overcompensating for failing to sight Searly in Boston, this would seem to a good insight into the closed loop soft core network. It would seem that Dan Stairs is an Obfuscationist and a part of the Cargo Corps who has secured funding for the operation under the guise of academic research. The alternative view is that he is a government plant and is monitoring academic reserch in the textile field on behalf of the military. As of writing I am unsure but my gut is leaning toward to former. I was hoping for at least a days rest now I am home, but can't shake the imperative to research Stairs.

Walk The Line

Funambulist? Obfuscationist? I don’t see much difference. Your outside-the-box theory of Boston Mass being a gravitational concept is too good not to be true. It may be other things too, but I certainly thing it is an attractive, and possibly also repulsive, force associated with Boston – a focal point already in our investigations. I will examine my flow map of the states later and ponder the significant centre of activity in the Boston area in light of this new insight. My quark work back at MIT in the seventies may be of use here. I might contact some of the old faces in the kipper tie brigade. Time for more coffee machine coffee, I feel.

One further idea I forgot to pass on earlier. I have the theory that a road trip route may have followed as closely as possible the boundaries of states. By travelling along boundaries, one remains ‘nowhere’, constantly able to evade all state troopers and state laws. This would appeal to a group wishing to remain hidden, and fits with the needlework notion of sewing along hems and borders. Perhaps even a static community may have been established on state borders. Don’t just cross the stateline to evade pursuit – stay on the stateline to evade pursuit from all sides… Walk the line like Johnny Cash.

Mister state trooper please don’t stop me… I recall that the crypto-geographers who I spoke to about the nazca lines were researching linear settlement patterns. This would be a prime example… a linear network settlement in no location.

Boston (Gravitational) Mass

Interesting. Perhaps the leads I failed to find in Boston will come to you from your local Joni. It seems fitting that as soon as I leave the town, a possibly significant reference to it shows up elsewhere. It bears hallmarks of the Obfuscationist modus operandi; You look right, there's nothing there; you look left and they tell you to look right again.

I was unaware of the Boston Mass and now wonder if this is some kind of religious (or quasi-religious) festival or a celebration of something large in physical scale or scale of production. Or rather, even, Boston Mass is some kind of condition providing gravity through mass to attract all things. Perhaps due to Boston Mass, all things must gravitate toward [or from] Boston.

Your mention of the album title Songs To A Seagull causes me to recall the French artist and funambulist Philippe Petit who, while crossing an illegally rigged highwire between NYC's World Trade Centre towers in the '70s, paused to lie back on his 3/4" cable hundreds of metres above the Earth's surface and carry out a dialogue with a seagull circling a few tens of feet above him. It strikes me now that perhaps Searly is in a metaphorically similar position and is, as such, untouchable by the man of average means. Perhaps we will have to wait for him to cross the threshold at the time of his choosing and once again become accessible in a more general capacity.

Why I Ran

Some interesting light has been shed on this case in the last 24 hours - the mixtape in particular giving us great insight into the scene we are dealing with. The connections are coming together like a healthy capilliary system, but we are still short of a main artery or two. The Searly connection is still vague, all we know is that it seems to involve automobiles, possibly roadtrips, nutritional strategy and the beefheart associations. To help turn the corner in the investigation, I have been reviewing my notes in an effort to further understand the character of our quarry.

Looking more closely at the man, we know he is a sports fan - the betting slips, bowling tokens and baseball tickets i found in his garbage tell us this. He is also a bookworm, possibly even a writer himself, going by the library fines and Octopiithagoas. His library account was highly active until eight months ago, then all of a sudden he stopped using it. It would have all the hallmarks of a missing persons case, except three weeks ago he apparently returned all borrowed books in his posession to a library in Boston, paying all due fines and renewing one book - 'Why I Ran' by Randy Loboda.

When I first saw the title on the library ticket, I read it as 'Why Iran?' and thought it was some political spook text, then I realised what it was - the autobiography of an eighties hotshot middle-distance college athlete who went off the rails in his early twenties who ended up fleeing police in a highway chase which went all the way from Denver to Los Angeles before he ran out of gas (ironically only 200 yards after passing a gas station). It is the third longest known police chase in America's history and Randy's crime never actually went on the record; his official final charge being that of a faulty brakelight. The book, published after seven years' silence, was intended to explain the motivation for his running both as an athlete and a fugitive. It was a commercial flop, but gained nortoriety as an unofficial manual of evasion techniques, becoming a cult text for those involved in underground movements wanting to avoid the authorities and providing source material for some of the early Obfuscationst manifestos.

It is interesting to know of such recent activities from Searly and his posession of this book provides some insight into his state of mind.

Mid Point

THE IDEA of a marketeer being an expert in elusivity is not such a paradox when viewed in light of modern marketing techniques.

In the nineties, the due to advances in satellite broadcasting, the population of the general western hemisphere became oversaturated with 24/7 advertising pitches and began to see through the mechanisms of sales persuasion. The marketing industry's response: to go covert - obscure the message; advertise without mentioning the product. Sub-conscious persuasion by evasion and mis-direction - car adverts with no mention of the product, except for maybe a manufacturers logo silently displayed ad the end of the commercial, are a classic example. It is a basic trick of the Obfuscationists, so beware. When they say 'look left', you better look right.

Further thoughts on the case so far: It seems I was presumptuous in my proposal that Kozyra was funding Michigan operations. there is no evidence to suggest this - as yet. One thing that struck me though, in light of the Black Cat experiments occuring in two locations at the same time. Following the theory behind the dual particle experiments I mentioned earlier, it seems possible that the real Black Cat experiment was actually taking place at the midway point between Regan and Costa's locations at the time; Regan and Costa's actions being a by-product of a much larger experiment being carried out somewhere equidistant from the two Obfuscationists. This surely merits some further investigation. If we can pinpoint Regan and Costa's exact locations during the Black Cat experiment(s) then we should be able to indentify the location of the midway point where the possible larger experiment would have taken place.

False Idol

The false idol angle is an interesting one. Fabrication woven into reality. This ties in with the core concept behind the suspected enterprises of Project 31. Earl Regan and Ellena Costa are known Obfuscationists, thought to have a hand in the op-art affairs noted earlier. Reports from their rookie days, before they knew how to wear the mask, describe them as chalk and cheese, Earl being brash in style and always happy to tout the press, while Ellena kept a notoriously low profile. All I have so far managed to find on record about her is an article in a marketing journal published in 1976. It doesn't give much away; buried in 2,400 words of the writer's speculation, the only direct quote from Costa was "me - hard to find? only a little".