Continuing from Part One - Facts and Fictions: Why Missing Bullets Matter
….My personal favorite member of the RAND Economics team, and perhaps the most telling about the nature of the work at the time, was Audrey Roger Casselberry. Her obituary from 2009 reads: “Audrey earned her private pilot license and flew Piper Cubs. On the ground, she tore up the asphalt in a succession of sports cars, including a T-Bird, MGB, and several Jaguars. Audrey attended Boston University and had a career as an executive assistant to renowned physicists and economists at the Atomic Energy Commission and the Rand Corporation. “Executive assistant to renowned physicists and economists” is the key phrase here. She was central to the coordination between the physicists at RAND, Los Alamos, Sandia Labs, and the main nuclear facilities and the RAND Economics team. She sounds like a real firecracker.
What a group of people to work with through the greatest crisis in modern history. But, frankly, after getting into a tussle with the SAC and General LeMay, and coming so close to a moment when decisions might have gone another direction and a billion people might have been killed, my father was happy to devote the rest of his life to serving five Presidents (four officially) on trade policy, building the economy of tomorrow and forging relationships between the superpowers. After all, Kennedy had been killed in the most overt and brazen way possible. The story of what happened to JFK was so ridiculous and implausible. Yet anyone who challenged it was silenced.
Fast forward to today. Notice all the events that got swept off the news headlines because of Charlie Kirk’s similarly implausible “missing bullet” and “assembled, disassembled, re-assembled rifle” murder story (see here for a good analysis). The Senate voted against releasing the Epstein files, and 9/11 came and went without too many questions being posed. Notice that Tucker Carlson had announced a docuseries on 9/11 that should have launched that day. There was nothing but silence on this. Strange.
Here’s a photo of my Dad in December 1971 with President Nixon and French President Pompidou, Henry Kissinger, Paul Volcker and other luminaries in the aftermath of the Nixon Shock decision to drop the Gold Standard. That’s another story that has been carefully managed away from the truth of what really happened at the time.
All these stories have their parallels today. We have Presidents being shot at and their close allies being killed. The fictions are implausible but just enough to provide plausible deniability, which is most likely the principal driver of the narrative crafting. Questioners can be dealt with as they pop up. But most people will just turn the page of the newspaper (Boomers) or keep scrolling (everybody else).
Are we dealing with another Jack Ruby-style scapegoat whose story just does not add up? It is hard to watch the footage of poor Charlie’ Kirk’s last moments and fail to see the people behind him using military hand signals, behaving oddly, and seeming to be completely unsurprised by the crack of a bullet(s). You would think that in this era of iPhones, satellites, and AI, it would be hard to lose track of a bullet, bullets, bullet trajectories, bullet acoustics, or a shooter/shooters. Yet, official ballistics analyses are weirdly not forthcoming - not for Butler, Pennsylvania, and not for Orem, Utah. The aftermath of each political assassination attempt involved the destruction of the crime scene evidence and the total loss of the evidence chain of custody. Witnesses giving live on-air testimony are roughed up and dragged away from the cameras, while the security cameras are whisked away within minutes of the events. There was no body tape on the ground outlining his final position. There was no ambulance. Instead, he was trundled away, and the very turf he stood on has already been dug up and concreted over, ensuring that it is now impossible to find the missing bullet. In each case, we see a President, or his close ally, being targeted by a young man, and in the presence of collateral characters, like the Forrest Gump-like George Zinn, whose backstory is stranger than fiction.
Keep in mind that we are on high alert right now, with many nations preparing for the possibility of war with Russia again, which means plans must be afoot for dealing with nuclear threats. Just as in 1962/3, these preparations are now invisible and will remain so. Anyone trying to track back what actually happened might well find themselves stymied. Scrubbing the bios and events is much easier in a digital world. Tracking and, therefore, silencing the witnesses is arguably much easier in a digital world. And today, we find ourselves in a moment that is remarkably similar to the Nixon Gold Standard shock. Notice that there’s now a statue of Trump being placed outside Congress holding a Bitcoin. President Kennedy similarly tried to rein in the Federal Reserve and introduce new methods for funding the deficit. His solution was Executive Order 1110, introduced in 1961, which would have allowed him to issue silver certificates. The parallels are striking.
My point is that we are all flying hopelessly blind. The powers that be can build a fiction over the facts and scrub the facts away before you have figured out which question to ask. Before anybody says conspiracy theory, let me say these two things. First, my own father kept these matters secret until the very end of his life, even from me, and we were incredibly close. The CIA invented the term conspiracy theory in a memo after JFK’s assassination in an effort to stop people from asking questions. Today, it doesn’t get you anywhere to call someone a conspiracy theorist anymore. Too many conspiracy theories have turned out to be true. The powers that be know that the phrase is no longer as useful. Instead, Orwellian restrictions on freedom of speech and movement are being imposed. Therefore, it may be vastly easier to keep a secret today than it was in my dad’s day. But it is also vastly easier to discover facts, inconsistencies, and the truth today thanks to smartphones and AI. So secrets are more entrenched, and truth-seeking is turbocharged. This conflict must lead to greater volatility, less certainty, and more headlines.
Now, let’s return to the facts that require us to figure out how the story ends.
Geopolitical fears are not imaginary. The US just conducted an anti-ship weapon test