Posted by araucaria
(here)
Although I too came independently to the idea that Mathis was putting out a lot of material for a single individual (an idea that Paul refutes based on his own performance...
), I want to highlight a difference between Weisbecker and myself in this same regard. Weisbecker comes out all guns blazing, and is hard to follow because he is jumping around all the time.
My own approach tends rather towards depth than breadth. Mathis has a tendency to make connections between individuals on the basis that their names appear on the same Wikipedia page. This is worse than treating people as cardboard cutouts: they are reduced to mere labels. My method has simply been to flesh out portraits of the characters involved, notably by extensively quoting things they actually wrote, said or did.
Consider that there are only six degrees of separation between any two individuals on the planet, and that a single degree of separation can cover the mixed bunch of Avalon members. Most of them you would consider your friends, or agreeable acquaintances; others are way out of range, and one or two are maybe on a diametrically opposite course. You don’t want to be linked indiscriminately to all of these people. And this applies to families. Here in France we have a presidential hopeful (Fillon) whose younger brother is a decent jazz pianist. There is not much interesting to be said about either on the basis of that relationship: statesmanship and musicianship have little in common. Similarly, even being married to someone is not enough to validate comments about one or the other being made to include the spouse – which is why we have a high divorce rate: people are different.
If six degrees of separation are sufficient to bring two persons together, however hastily, then I suggest there has to be a law of x degrees of connection to prise any two people apart. Take this quote by Mathis about Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post, stating that his second marriage was to the sister-in-law (very soon to be ex-sister-in-law) of a CIA man:
In 1957, Bradlee married his second wife, Antoinette Pinchot. Do you recognize that name from my Kennedy paper? She was the sister of Mary Pinchot, wife of Cord Meyer. Meyer just happened to be a top CIA agent involved in Project Mockingbird. And what was that about? According to Wikipedia, it was a “program to influence the media”. But Bradlee was never influenced, right? He was just a straight editor later at the Post, right?
By the degrees of separation law, this is very close: close enough to draw conclusions. This is the gray area where, depending on one’s standpoint, conspiracy theory becomes conspiracy fact, or conspiracy fact can be plausibly denied as conspiracy theory. Overall, I would say this is where we get stuck.
By my ‘degrees of connection’ law, on the other hand, this relationship is fairly distant: distant enough to make room for a whole new picture to be drawn by developing these name labels into cardboard cutouts, and the cardboard cutouts into rounded individuals. First, sisters can be very different, including in their tastes regarding men. Antoinette did not necessarily marry a CIA man on the basis that Mary had. Secondly, by 1957 Mary was actually in the process of leaving her CIA man, the divorce proceedings being drawn out owing to the death of their son Michael. Thirdly, Mary was leaving her CIA man precisely because the man she had married was a very different person altogether, a leading campaigner for world peace in fact. And Mary herself was later murdered for knowing too much about the JFK assassination, very likely murdered by CIA husbands and even with Meyer’s consent.
This is not to say that Bradlee was not CIA, applying Project Mockingbird to the Washington Post. On the contrary, I would accept that he was. But what has Mathis done when he stops there? He has placed another label on someone. Big deal. You couldn’t believe everything you read in his newspaper. Now what? Big question. Big question that doesn’t get asked. But one that deserves an answer on the lines of honest consistency within a given individual. For example: Mary Pinchot married a peace activist and divorced a CIA agent, the peace activist husband having done a complete U-turn, while she remained consistent. This consistent woman later fell in love with JFK, who must then have been himself a peace-lover, or more likely a Cold Warrior/CIA sympathizer doing a complete U-turn with her help.
The bottom line is that some people change in relatively superficial ways by being consistent in changing circumstances, while other are profoundly changed one way or the other (revert to type?) by changing circumstances. This is a dynamic picture we don’t get from Miles Mathis. It is symptomatic that he doesn’t allow people to die, although death is an integral part of this dynamic process. In 1963, there were plenty of people wishing Kennedy dead, more than enough to see him off. That sentiment has been gradually reversed over the decades, with more and more people wishing he were still alive, or someone like him. What would be the motive then for claiming that JFK’s death was faked? It would be to immortalize the moment when a maximum of people (albeit a tiny minority) were glad he was dead.
This sums up my difference with Miles Mathis. My goal is to immortalize the moment when a maximum number of people are glad that JFK, Mary Meyer, so many others, up to and including you and I, were/are alive. When a maximum number of people are glad that a maximum number of people are alive.
Re: Miles W. Mathis Theories about Engineered Events in History
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It's a bit of a meandering rant, and thus harder to follow than Part I, but I still think Weisbecker is on to something with respect to Mathis. 
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