The Dark Weird Topology of America

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

The Dark Weird Topology of America

Postby cptmarginal » Tue Jun 23, 2020 1:16 am

In the spirit of The Dark Weird Topology Of Florida thread, here is a peek behind the curtain of my home state. I would invite anyone else to share similar information about other states they have lived in; it's not necessary to provide links or to be exhaustive in your research, just a quick summary or brief outline of whatever comes to mind. Kentucky has The Bluegrass Conspiracy; I imagine there is a Blue Velvet-like underbelly everywhere you look in America.

Obviously the focus of my post is political but Ohio is also home to a lot of weirdness, like ghost stories and UFO experiences. Serpent Mound is located here as well, along with several other important, mysterious sites. Another aspect of Ohio is the rich fraternal history. Besides the obvious Freemason-Astronaut-President nexus, there are derelict Knights of Pythias lodges and such all over the place. Anyway...

Ohio

Prescott Bush's family lived in Columbus:

President George H.W. Bush, Barbara Bush had deep family ties to Ohio

This Stunning Marble Cliff Home Used To Belong To The Bush Family

The original home is now surrounded by Prescott Place luxury condominiums, but don’t worry. It still has all of that early 20th century charm.


Richard Secord is from Columbus. On the Epstein-Wexner-SAT connection:

Why Epstein is Dead - Bob Fitrakis

I investigated local billionaire Les Wexner and Jeff Epstein’s ties to the intelligence community more than 20 years ago. Much of this is captured in two books – The Fitrakis Files: Spooks, Nukes, and Nazis and The Fitrakis Files: Cops, Coverups, and Corruption (CICJ Books, freepress.org).

As the logistics man to Les Wexner, owner of the Limited Brands (now L Brands including Victoria’s Secret), Epstein arranged the arrival of Southern Air Transport to Columbus, Ohio. The airline, formerly Air America, was infamous as an illegal gun- and drug-running operation. Epstein also helped his mentor, Les Wexner, sell the war in Iraq through the Wexner Foundation. Moreover, a memo from Epstein’s sentencing in Miami back in 2007, points out that he was cooperating and providing information to the FBI.


Spook Air - Bob Fitrakis

Originally Published Columbus Alive 4-22-1999

Something’s rotten at Rickenbacker Port Authority. Maybe it’s just the stench of the bankrupt corpse of Southern Air Transport, or the moldering smell of the $3 million the state pumped into the notorious airline before it folded.

Ohio taxpayers are among the more than 800 creditors now lined up to file claims against “Spook Air.” SAT filed for bankruptcy in Columbus on October 1, 1998, the same day the Central Intelligence Agency Inspector General issued a report linking the cargo hauler to allegations of drug-running in connection with U.S.-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

Once lauded as a coup for central Ohio development, landing Southern Air Transport’s business at Rickenbacker eventually turned into a nightmare, as the enterprise became mired in massive debt and was closed under a cloud of suspicion about its true activities. Just how and why one of the world’s most notorious airlines ended up in Columbus in the mid-1990s is a story that hasn’t been fully examined until now.

Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Columbus Alive obtained a massive number of documents from the Rickenbacker Port Authority and additional records from the Ohio Department of Development showing that the Franklin County Commissioners and the Voinovich administration offered hard-to-refuse incentives to get SAT’s business, despite the airline’s shady history.

...

Shadowy ties to Ohio

News accounts show that The Limited owner Leslie Wexner played a role in SAT’s relocation to Rickenbacker. Two other key figures in the SAT story have Columbus connections: Alan D. Fiers Jr., a starting tackle on the 1961 Ohio State University football team and a Buckeye assistant coach in 1962, who later became the chief of the CIA Central American Task Force; and retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord, head of air logistics for the CIA-owned Air America’s covert action in Laos between 1966 and 1968, and air logistics coordinator in the illegal Contra resupply network for Oliver North in the ’80s.


Of course we all know about Paperclip and Wright-Patterson:

Suspected Nazis Work On U.S. Military Projects - October 19, 1984

Rudolph was a close friend and a co-worker of Wernher von Braun, who headed rocket research for the Nazis. They were among 118 German rocket experts secretly brought to this country by the U.S. Army after World War II in what was called Operation Paperclip. After rocket work for the Army, they both became NASA officials.

Sources said yesterday that two other secret operations, code-named Crossbow and Overcast, also brought German scientists and engineers to the United States, totaling 492 by May 18, 1948. According to NASA documents, the Air Force took 205, assigning most to the Wright Patterson Air Force Base outside Dayton, Ohio. The Army took 177, including the 118 who came with von Braun. And the Navy took 72.

NASA has refused to comment on how many of the German scientists other than von Braun and Rudolph worked for the U.S. space program. The agency is maintaining what even one of its spokesmen called a "stony silence" on the matter.


The controversial JFK conspiracy narrative known as "the Torbitt document" claims that there is a Columbus connection to the assassination, and to some extent this can be verified:

NEW ORLEANS, April 8 (UPI) District Attorney Jim Garrison's office began extradition proceedings today against Gordon Novel, now under $10,000 bond in Columbus, Ohio. - 04/09/1967

Nomenclature of an assassination cabal - The Torbitt document

The Security Division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) headed by Werner Von Braun, head of the German Nazis rocket program from 1932 through 1945. Headquarters for this group was the Defense Industrial Security Command at Muscle Shoals Redstone Arsenal in Alabama and on East Broad Street in Columbus, Ohio.

The Defense Industrial Security Command is the police and espionage agency for the U.S. munitions makers. Defense Industrial Security Command was organized by J. Edgar Hoover and William Sullivan, his chief assistant, is in direct command. We shall later examine the involvement of a large number of the Defense Industrial Security Command agents including Clay Shaw, Guy Bannister, David Ferric, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby and others, with Permindex's Louis Mortimer Bloomfield of Montreal, Canada in charge.

As it must be, all of the preceding facts are established and documented by overwhelming evidence beyond a reasonable doubt on the following pages.

Gordon Novel obtained the aid of the Columbus office in 1967, when Jim Garrison was attempting to get him back to Louisiana from Ohio. - Personnel of the Defense Intelligence Agency were subject to assignment with the Defense Industrial Security Command.


Battelle Memorial Institute is based out of Columbus:

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:FB ... x_Frame-up

Elders gives us powerful details of the efforts of the U.S. Army's biodefense center at Dugway Proving Grounds to reverse engineer the anthrax using the Meselson-Adams assumption that no special additives were involved. Quoting Milton Leitenberg, a University of Maryland arms control expert:

Leitenberg says a well-connected former military scientist told him that Dugway was only able to produce preparations containing "one-fifth the number of spores found in the Leahy powder." This same military source also told Leitenberg that Battelle Memorial Institute was also asked to back engineer the Leahy powder.

As Matsumoto wrote in Science:

The Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Columbus, Ohio, is possibly the only corporation in the world known to possess both the Ames strain as well as a "national security division" offering the services of a team of "engineers, chemists, microbiologists, and aerosol scientists supported by state-of-the-art laboratories to conduct research in the fields of bioaerosol science and technology." On its Web site, Battelle calls this research group "one-of-a-kind."


I should add here as an aside that a white supremacist would-be terrorist was arrested in 1998 for attempting an anthrax attack, having previously attempted to obtain bubonic plague bacteria: Anthrax Plot Foiled By FBI - FEBRUARY 19, 1998

Harris, 46, a native of West Virginia who now lives in Lancaster, Ohio, has a microbiology degree from Ohio State University. He has written extensively on the dangers of biological warfare and how people can protect themselves with massive doses of antibiotics.

Harris has described himself as a white separatist. He once held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the far-right white separatist group Aryan Nations, and he has also told reporters that he is a follower of the Christian Identity movement.

During the 1980s, Harris was questioned about his involvement with the Aryan Nations by the Secret Service in advance of a visit to Ohio State by then-President George Bush.

In 1995, he was arrested after purchasing three vials of bubonic plague by mail from a Maryland laboratory.


This next item also relates to Battelle, and a whole lot more besides. Couldn't find text of the article "Is Ohio's toxic time bomb BCCI's baby?" Columbus Free Press, April, 1992. Great title, though

http://www.oilempire.us/wti.html

Waste Technologies Industries (WTI)

East Liverpool, Ohio toxic waste incinerator Clinton Gore's first broken campaign promise

"Jackson Stephens for President: dispense with the middleman"
-- button printed by citizens in East Liverpool, Ohio area angry about WTI toxic waste incinerator financed by Mr. Stephens and supported by the administrations of George H.W. Bush and William J. Clinton

related pages:
Hillary Clinton worked for WTI's funder Jackson Stephens
Gore's Inconvenient Truths

When Hillary Clinton worked for the Rose Law Firm while they represented the WTI company. She also served on the board of LaFarge Cement, which operates a cement kiln in Alpena, Michigan on Lake Huron. LaFarge switched from natural gas to burning hazardous wastes (used motor oil, solvents) in the mid-1980s.

...

According to the Ohio Attorney General's report on WTI in 1993: "It was 'Waste Technologies, Incorporated' in the late seventies, a group of companies owned by Jackson Stephens of Little Rock, Arkansas that became interested in the possibility of developing industrial waste incinerators which could be used to generate power. One of the Stephens companies commissioned Battelle Memorial Institute to do a survey of industrial waste generation patterns in the United States. The Battelle study was finalized in 1978. After the study was complete, the Stephens-owned company (known then as Waste Technologies, Incorporated) hired Don Brown, who had worked on the study during his employment at Battelle. Don Brown helped make the decision that the eastern Ohio area was a feasible site for such an incinerator, based on the nationwide waste generation patterns study. Brown was from East Liverpool and had contacts to local officials there. In late 1979 or early 1980, Don Brown approached the Mayor of East Liverpool, John Payne [his former college room-mate, ed.], about the idea of locating a waste-to-energy incinerator in the area. Mayor Payne referred Brown to the Columbiana County Port Authority ..." upon whose land the incinerator would later be built. So with the financial backing of Jackson Stephens and his company, the WTI incinerator was launched in traditional business fashion: wheeling, dealing and brazen political fixing.


Florida and Ohio were of course the lynch-pins of the stolen elections in 2000 and 2004, respectively. Harris and Blackwell were a tag team.

Ohio 2004 Election case study by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

In March 2004, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman published the article Diebold, Electronic Voting, and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy on freepress.org and on motherjones.com predicting that Ohio would be the new Florida in the 2004 presidential election because of the partisan connections of George W. Bush to the private owners of the electronic voting machines and vote tabulation software. The key source for the article, Athan Gibbs, was an African American entrepreneur who had invented a voting machine that gave each voter a verified voting receipt. Approximately one week after the article ran, Gibbs was killed when his car was hit by a truck on an interstate highway.

[...]


The rest of that article is a list of irregularities & incidences of malfeasance during the 2004 election. While on this topic, can't help but remember this historic moment:

Republican IT Guru Dies In Plane Crash - DECEMBER 23, 2008

Federal investigators are looking into a small plane crash in Ohio which claimed the life of its pilot, a Republican media consultant who was instrumental in the presidential and gubernatorial campaigns of three members of the Bush Family.

Michael Connell,45, of Akron died Friday when his plane crashed near a vacant house in Uniontown while attempting to land at nearby Akron-Canton Airport.

But the fatal accident is also raising questions about Connell and his work for key political figures and lobbyists, which has targeted him in investigations over missing White House e-mails and a lawsuit alleging electronic voting fraud.

Following Last Friday's fatal accident, CBS Affiliate WOIO reported that Connell, who had recently been subpoenaed to testify in relation to a lawsuit alleging vote rigging in the 2004 Ohio election, was warned at least twice about flying his plane because his plane might be sabotaged.

Quoting an anonymous close friend of Connell's, WOIO correspondent Blake Chenault also reported that twice in the past two months Connell, who was an experienced pilot, canceled flights because of suspicious problems with his plane.


There is a long history of organized crime in Ohio, particularly Youngstown, Cleveland, Toledo:

Report Depicts Organized Crime’s Role in Pornography - July 10, 1986

″There ... seems (to be) strong evidence that significant portions of the pornographic magazine industry are either directly operated or closely controlled by La Cosa Nostra members or very close associates,″ the commission says.

The commission’s conclusions are hardly surprising, given the results of law enforcement investigations over the past decade tying in a number of organized crime figures with the production and distribution of pornography.

Thomas Bohling of the Chicago Police Department told the commission that law enforcement officials believe that ″the pornography industry is controlled by organized crime families. If they do not own the business outright, they most certainly extract street tax from independent smut peddlers.″

The pornography commission’s 2,000-page report issued Wednesday points to Reuben Sturman of Cleveland, ″widely believed to be the largest distributor of pornography in the world,″ as an example of the link between the Mafia and the porn industry.

Mafia-figure-turned-informant Aladena Fratianno told the commission that if Sturman ″has a problem he goes to″ Robert DiBernardo. DiBernardo was identified in a federal grand jury indictment last month in New York as a captain in the Gambino Mafia family. Palladino, the adult bookstore operator worried about having a competitor, called DiBernardo his ″compare″ and had gone to him for help before seeing Angiulo, according to the FBI.

Sturman and DiBernardo were ″partners, plus ... if Debe (DiBernardo) wanted (Sturman) to do something, he (Sturman) would do it,″ said Fratianno.

DiBernardo was described to Fratianno as the ″main man in the country″ in the pornography business in the mid-1970s, when Fratianno was seeking ways to expand his own West Coast porn business. When Fratianno eventually met DiBernardo, DeBernardo told him that if Fratianno ″had wanted to get in the business he should have done it four or five years ago. Now it was all locked up,″ Fratianno told the pornography commission.

DiBernardo vanished June 5 and is believed by law enforcement investigators to have been slain. He was last seen driving away from his business office in lower Manhattan, from which he controlled a pornographic film distributorship and other operations. The Gambino family boss, Paul Castellano, to whom DiBernardo was closely allied, according to the commission report, was shot to death last December and a war for control of the family has ensued.

Sturman controls General Video of America, one of the largest distributors of sexually explicit videotape cassettes in the country, according to information supplied to the commission. Other information included in the report says that Los Angeles police found 580 of the 765 adult video arcade machines in the city to be owned by companies controlled by Sturman.

″Law enforcement authorities believe that the Sturman empire has financial control of nearly 200 businesses in 19 states, one Canadian province and six foreign countries,″ including Great Britain, Panama, Liberia, the Netherlands and Lichtenstein, says the commission report.

Swiss bank accounts have been established for several Sturman business associates and some of his foreign corporations, according to a report financed by the Justice Department.


Sturman has been under indictment since 1985 on charges of conspiring to evade millions of dollars in taxes by laundering $7 million through foreign bank accounts.


The Cleveland Mafia: The end of an era and demise of a Don - Nov 23, 2015

Crimetown USA - The city that fell in love with the mob. - July 10, 2000

There was a certain tidiness to the killings in Youngstown. Usually they happened late at night when there were no witnesses or police and only the lights from the steel furnaces still burned. Sometimes neighbors would hear the short, sharp sound of gunfire and then nothing, a silence you can’t describe unless you’ve heard it, which if you’re lucky you haven’t.

Everyone suspected who the killers were—they lived in the neighborhood, sometimes just down the street—but no one could ever prove anything. Sometimes their methods were simple: a bullet to the back of the head or a bomb strapped under the hood of a car. Or sometimes, like when they got Mr. Magda, they allowed for the more dramatic, tranquilizing their victim with a stun gun and wrapping his head in tape until he could no longer breathe.

Yet the most frightening method, the one that captured the city’s imagination, was the most immaculate: the disappearance of people in broad daylight. They were the city’s ghosts. Police found their cars empty on the side of the street, the engines still warm, or their dinner tables still piled with food. They had, in the most classic sense, been “rubbed out.” The only sign of the killers was an artistic flourish: the dozen long-stemmed white roses victims often received just before they vanished.

So, when Lenny Strollo ordered the hit that summer night in 1996, there was no reason to believe it would go down any differently. As the top Mafia don in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley, he presided over the killings and disappearances in and around Youngstown from his farm in nearby Canfield, where he tended his gardens and ate vitamins to quiet his heart. His reach extended over nearly an entire corner of the state, a stretch of land that was home to more than 200,000 people and that had become, by all accounts, the most crooked county in America—a place, in the modern era, where the Mafia still held sway over every element of society, from the police to the judges to the politicians. Only months earlier, Strollo had ordered his main mob rival mowed down as he drove to work. But this time his choice of target was more brazen: the newly elected county prosecutor, Paul Gains.


Speaking of organized crime, Ohio (and Toledo in particular, likely due to proximity to Detroit) is routinely cited by law enforcement agencies as one of the top human trafficking destinations in the nation:

Ohio is hot spot in human trafficking: Hundreds forced into labor, sex; state laws weak

-

Next up: there is one hell of an SRA case that took place in Toledo. Even if it was "just" that a Catholic priest had stabbed an upside-down cross into a nun, and the police covered it up for decades, that would be insane enough. But that is the tip of the iceberg.

Incidentally, I should mention that there is also a 2004 Academy award nominated documentary about abuse and the Toledo Catholic diocese called Twist of Faith.

Gerald Robinson - Court Reinstates Lawsuit Involving Priests’ Satanic Rituals - RI thread

LUCAS COUNTY, OHIO—In a decision which will have far reaching effects in clergy abuse cases and eerily issued just days before Halloween, the Sixth District Court of Appeals in Ohio has reinstated a 2005 lawsuit involving alleged satanic rituals against a Toledo priest who was convicted last year in the 1980 murder of a nun.

Roman Catholic Gerald Robinson, now 69, was convicted in May, 2006, of the murder of a 71-year-old nun and was sentenced to 15 years to life. His request to remain free pending appeal was denied.

Now his attorneys have filed a new motion, asking the appellate court for the convicted murderer to be released on a $250,000 property bond with electronic monitoring while his appeal is pending, saying that the appeal has languished for 19 months.

A Toledo woman had brought the civil litigation against Robinson anonymously, suing as Survivor Doe with her husband, Spouse Doe, claiming that Robinson was part of a group that had repeatedly raped her and tortured her in satanic rituals when she was a child. The woman is now in her 40’s. In addition to Robinson, defendants are Gerald Mazuchowski, a former lay minister; the Toledo Catholic Diocese; St. Adalbert Parish where she alleges the abuse occurred and the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales.

She alleges that Robinson, Mazuchowski and other men dressed in nuns’ habits, used women’s names and engaged in bizarre rituals, victimizing her.

A lower court had dismissed her claim, saying it was barred under the statute of limitations.

The Appellate Court has reversed that decision and reinstated the woman’s claim, saying that her claim isn’t time barred because she couldn’t identify her alleged abusers due to repressed memory “until she saw their faces/names from the television and newspaper reports about them” in 2004 and 2005 at the time Robinson was arrested and charged with the nun’s murder. http://www.co.lucas.oh.us/Appeals/DecisionsPDF/3400.pdf


Robinson, then 43, a Roman Catholic chaplain at Mercy Hospital where Sister Margaret Ann Pahl was the caretaker, was arrested in April 2004 and charged with the nun’s murder.The nun’s body was found on the floor of the sacristy where she had gone to prepare the chapel for Holy Saturday Mass. She had been strangled and stabbed between 27 and 32 times in the chest and neck, wounds which formed what investigators say resembled a cross. She was covered with an altar cloth and her undergarments had been pulled down around her ankles but investigators have said she was not sexually assaulted.

The priest was a suspect early in the case because he was seen near the chapel at the time of her death. Although a sword-shaped letter opener was found in his room that prosecutors believe was the murder weapon, he was not arrested. However, the case remained unsolved for over 23 years.

In December 2003, a woman reported to police that she had been sexually abused by a group of priests who performed Satanic rituals and held sadomasochistic orgies. Following the woman’s allegations in 2003, a cold-case squad began reviewing the nun’s murder case again. Three other women also came forward and claimed they had been sexually abused in cult-like ceremonies involving altars and men dressed in robes between the late 1960s and 1986.

There have been allegations that church officials have tried to cover-up a crime. One of the women who came forward reached a monetary settlement with the church.

The civil case reinstated against Robinson is being brought by the woman who originally made the allegations against him.


There is another notable (awful) pre-FMSF false memory case in the town of Logan, Ohio. I might have to check out some other episodes of this podcast:

The 1982 murders of Annette Johnston and Todd Schultz in Logan, Ohio, had all the markings of messed-upness, so much so that people suspected Satanic cult involvement (hello, the ’80s), but the actual circumstances manage to be even worse, once what really happened is established. Things are seldom the way they initially appear in true crime, and in this case, the amount of time it takes to access the facts is just another example of how nefarious the whole incident really was, and how deeply it took root in the psyches of Logan residents. The State of Perfect Balance, hosted by Amanda Daniels, is about solved and unsolved murders in small towns in Ohio. The fact that more than one episode of the show touches on the Satanic Panic of the 1980s is enough reason to be into it, but listen because each episode is its own gruesome, skillfully told orb of a story.


There is a local connection to MKULTRA et al:

http://cavdef.org/w/index.php?title=Min ... l_programs

According to p.113-114 of Sinister Forces by Peter Levenda, Manson was significantly changed by his prison stay at Chillicothe Correctional Institution in Ohio, perhaps having been subjected to an MKUltra-type program dedicated to making him a "controlled controller":

It is a mystery. What happened to Manson in Chillicothe, that he suddenly became studious (he was still illiterate when he was transferred there), learned to read and write and do simple arithmetic, mellowed out, and became a star “prisoner”? His psychiatric reports were all negative up to that point; even during the first month at Chillicothe the doctors were despairing of him, believing that he needed a closed environment and not the relatively “open” ambience of Chillicothe. Then, suddenly, Manson became a different person and maintained that identity for over a year and a half, until his release. That degree of conscious control—especially in a disturbed, uneducated, illiterate, violent, criminal, sodomitic bastard child of an unmarried, alcoholic mother—is suspicious, if not alarming. Was Charlie “helped” by someone at Chillicothe? According to Manson himself, in his own words, “I stopped thinking in 1954.”13

John Gilmore, in his critically-acclaimed 1971 biography of Manson and the “family”—The Garbage People, retitled Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family—says that Manson met a “boy named Toby” at Chillicothe, from whom he learned hypnosis and mental manipulation. That may be so, but the dates in Gilmore's book seem to be wrong. He has Manson at Chillicothe as early as October 1951, but according to Bugliosi he didn't make it to Chillicothe until September 1952. Perhaps it is only a typographical error in Gilmore's book, because October 1952 is a very likely date for Manson to have met the mysterious “Toby,” a person Manson refers to as “definitely satanic,” and the only person of whom Manson ever speaks in tones both of fear and awe.


The C.I.A. Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists By Colin A. Ross

On June 25, 1937, Hoover acknowledged the receipt of a, "current news clipping depicting experimental use of hypnotism by Dr. A. Herbert Kanter in the Ohio State Penitentiary at Columbus." Drug, interrogation and hypnosis experiments were conducted on Ohio prison inmates under MKULTRA Subproject 39.


Quoting from Albarelli's A Terrible Mistake:

PSYCHOPATHS & MKULTRA SUBPROJECT 39

The files of the VTF reveal that in December 1978 Laubinger and Salmi investigated MKULTRA Subproject 39. This subproject, according to CIA documents, was created in late 1954 and was operated for about 2 years. Its stated objective was “to exploit the research potential that is represented by a group of 142 criminal-sexual psychopaths confined in the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane as well as at the Psychopathic Clinic in Detroit, Michigan. Several materials and techniques will be assessed for their information-eliciting properties ... It is thought that these individuals have the kind of motivation for withholding certain information that is comparable to operational interrogation situations in the field.”


Redacted official CIA documentation on Subproject 39 at theblackvault.com: http://documents.theblackvault.com/docu ... 017436.pdf

-

I'll close this out with a few more politician scandals worth mentioning:

An Ohio lawmaker is seeking to compel powerful Republican Rep. Jim Jordan to testify under oath about whether he was aware that the wrestlers he coached at Ohio State University were being sexually abused by the team doctor. - Sept. 11, 2019

Anti-LGBTQ lawmaker resigns over gay sex scandal - Republican Ohio state Rep. Wesley Goodman may have also previously assaulted an 18-year-old. - Nov 18, 2017

Rep. Donald "Buz" Lukens (R-Ohio)

On Feb. 1, 1989, an Ohio TV station aired a videotape of a confrontation between Lukens, a conservative activist, and the mother of a Columbus teenager. The mother charged that Lukens had been paying to have sex with her daughter since she was 13. On May 26, Lukens was found guilty of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and sentenced to one month in jail. Infuriating his fellow Republicans, Lukens refused to resign. But he finished a distant third in the May 1990 primary. Instead of spending the remaining months of his term in obscurity, Lukens was accused of fondling a Capitol elevator operator and he resigned on October 24, 1990.
cptmarginal
 
Posts: 2741
Joined: Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:32 pm
Location: Gordita Beach
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Dark Weird Topology of America

Postby cptmarginal » Tue Jun 23, 2020 1:16 am

I suppose I could have just pointed to these books on Ohio by Bob Fitrakis:

Image Image Image Image Image
cptmarginal
 
Posts: 2741
Joined: Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:32 pm
Location: Gordita Beach
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Dark Weird Topology of America

Postby norton ash » Tue Jun 23, 2020 4:12 pm

Wow, thanks for the legwork, cap. Look forward to perusing.
Zen horse
User avatar
norton ash
 
Posts: 4067
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 5:46 pm
Location: Canada
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Dark Weird Topology of America

Postby cptmarginal » Tue Jun 23, 2020 9:53 pm

I'd be interested to know some other good books that focus on particular states. Sally Denton's book on Kentucky is the only good example I can come up with off the top of my head.

-

"America: The Dark Continent" from Spy Magazine, June 1988

Image
cptmarginal
 
Posts: 2741
Joined: Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:32 pm
Location: Gordita Beach
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Dark Weird Topology of America

Postby kelley » Wed Jun 24, 2020 10:58 am

Ohio is unique and supremely weird indeed.

Death lore and ceremonial burials were common to the mound-building Adena culture of the Archaic period. The Hopewell populations spread through trade and exchange to surrounding areas of what became Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Kentucky. In some respects this region might be considered one of the cradles of New World civilization in North America.

Ohio might also be understood as the fourteenth colony of Britain. It was heavily contested territory as New French and British American expansion spread westward during the eighteenth century, splitting the confederation of tribes known as The Five Nations. These First Peoples had controlled the Ohio Valley for hundreds of years prior to European conquest. The French and Indian Wars, as they were known, were characterized by extreme violence on each side. Armies deployed proto-guerrilla tactics unheard of in Europe, with battles fought by proxies who reportedly claimed trophies and engaged in ritualistic cannibalism to celebrate victories over white enemies.

It wasn't unusual finding arrowheads or other small artifacts along the shores of Lake Erie, or in the surrounding woodlands still standing undisturbed, well into the Sixties, while growing up there as a boy. These were strange, dark, haunting discoveries which really threw wrenches into an eight-year old's perception of time and place.

Following the rise of the Reagan Democrats in the early '80s, Ohio reemerged as a primary site of national interest. Always misunderstood by outsiders as homogenous and midwestern, Ohio was anything but, and may be seen as division into four geographic quadrants, with distinct populations found in each.

Northeastern Ohio was in many respects the center of an industrial archipelago which stretched from Philly to Boston to Chicago, with Cleveland at the heart of a powerful manufacturing base which included Detroit to the immediate northwest and Pittsburgh to the near southeast. I don't think the relationships these three cities have to their histories in the eighteenth century are coincidental.

Northwestern Ohio is closest to the 'midwestern' cliches held by those from out of state. It's flat farmland which stretches out to the edges of the Great Plains, and appears to resemble what many people likely think of when they hear the word 'Ohio'.

Southeastern Ohio is Appalachian. It's rolling green foothills and lush valleys cut through by the Ohio River. Much of its picturesque beauty was ravaged by strip-mining operations and other industrial despoilation up through the late '70s. Driving southeast from the capital of Columbus, it was possible to see the twenty-storey ruin of the massive Gem of Egypt from the highway. The Hanna Coal Company abandoned this behemoth in place at the Little Egypt Valley in the late '80s, and it was a terrible apparition looming unexpectedly out of nowhere, especially if one was under the influence of the, uh, excellent products of local myco-forestry.

Southwestern Ohio is a fascist confederacy. Cincinnati is the northernmost city in Dixie, and the Wright Patterson airforce base in Dayton was the final destination for many of the Nazi scientists brought into the US through the ratlines of Operation Paperclip. These cities border southeastern Indiana, which during the early twentieth century had become one of the centers of neo-Klan activity opposed to the federal government. The states rights law-and-order vibe is palpable in this region, even as a veneer of postmodern culture in the arts and in architecture coexists with it.

The role Ohio played in the contested electoral 'defeats' of Al Gore and John Kerry shouldn't be underestimated. Ohio has always existed upon a foundation of weirdness and woo. I think in some respects the possibilities of our contemporary political future bled out there, and those new millennial rituals have brought us to where we find ourselves now.
kelley
 
Posts: 613
Joined: Wed Mar 07, 2007 8:49 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

That map from Spy in '92

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Jun 24, 2020 12:40 pm

That map from Spy in '92 is very Eric Kaplan. I knew him in high school, he was a couple of grades back from us so, as these things go, I still think of him as a "10th grader." But he was totally like that. Never met him since. He went on to do 92 seasons of The Big Bang Theory.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Dark Weird Topology of America

Postby cptmarginal » Wed Jun 24, 2020 2:42 pm

Death lore and ceremonial burials were common to the mound-building Adena culture of the Archaic period. The Hopewell populations spread through trade and exchange to surrounding areas of what became Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Kentucky. It some respects this region might be considered one of the cradles of New World civilization in North America.


In this context I am inclined to mention America Before by Graham Hancock, and also the first volume of Levenda's Sinister Forces.

Image

Ohio might also be understood as the fourteenth colony of Britain. It was heavily contested territory as New French and British American expansion spread westward during the eighteenth century, splitting the confederation of tribes known as The Five Nations. These First Peoples had controlled the Ohio Valley for hundreds of years prior to European conquest. The French and Indian Wars, as they were known, were characterized by extreme violence on each side. Armies deployed proto-guerrilla tactics unheard of in Europe, with battles fought by proxies who reportedly claimed trophies and engaged in ritualistic cannibalism to celebrate victories over white enemies.


Robert Anton Wilson's take on this era in his fiction was great: Nature's God: Volume Three of the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles - The Wilderness Diary of Sigismundo Celine, Ohio 1776-78

Southeastern Ohio is Appalachian. It's rolling green foothills and lush valleys cut through by the Ohio River. Much of its picturesque beauty was ravaged by strip-mining operations and other industrial despoilation up through the late '70s. Driving southeast from the capital of Columbus, it was possible to see the twenty-storey ruin of the massive Gem of Egypt from the highway. The Hanna Coal Company abandoned this behemoth in place at the Little Egypt Valley in the late '80s, and it was a terrible apparition looming unexpectedly out of nowhere, especially if one was under the influence of the, uh, excellent products of local myco-forestry.


Speaking of "under the influence," I hasten to add that southeastern Ohio is also home to the legendary Skatopia, and the annual SubGenius X-Day festivities (which start next week)

Image

cptmarginal
 
Posts: 2741
Joined: Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:32 pm
Location: Gordita Beach
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Dark Weird Topology of America

Postby Blue » Wed Jun 24, 2020 7:59 pm

I grew up in Ohio, too. Close enough to WPAFB to hear the B52s taking off and landing at night.
Saw a very scary UFO with a friend who peed her pants and I just said, let's get my dad....ran home...must have been 12.
Saw more in the area as a high school student. Had an employer invite me to his UFO Tuesday night meetings.
Sigh.
User avatar
Blue
 
Posts: 725
Joined: Fri Nov 13, 2009 1:39 am
Blog: View Blog (0)


Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 37 guests