And everything seemed to be going "so well"....

The California Inspector General has just released a "blistering" report (.PDF) which faults state parole agents, the department of corrections and law enforcement for gross negligence in supervising--or not, as the case may be--Philip Garrido. Apparently he was only supervised 12 of the 123 months he was supposed to be closely monitored. A list of bungled ooportunities is cited and the conclusion is that "Despite numerous clues and opportunities, the department, as well as federal and local law enforcement, failed to detect Garrido's criminal conduct, resulting in the continued confinement and victimization of Jaycee and her two daughters...." (Summary here).


Meanwhile, over in Cleave-land, people are wondering how ex-Marine Anthony Sowell could have gotten away with murder for so long. Police only got interested in him a month ago after he was accused of rape and assault. Even then, when a naked woman fell from his window on October 20, firefighters came but no police. Another neighbor, the owner a chicken joint across the way, claims that some time ago he reported seeing Sowell naked, standing over a bloodied and naked woman in the bushes outside the infamous "horror house." Nothing came of it. Parole officers apparently last visited Sowell on September 22; despite reports of the overwhelming stench of rotting flesh dating back to 2007, so bad that it caused a local sausage factory to change its sewer line and grease trap--which did not alleviate the stench--no one thought about entering the home!

The bodies were finally discovered by the cops on October 27, and Sowell was arrested on Halloween. Cue theremin!

Incidentally, the police were responding to another attempted rape which occurred hours after Sowell was visited by parole officers on September 22. This attack took place nearly a month before they declined to show up after the naked woman took a tumble from his house....

The link between Sowell and Garrido is that they were both sexual offenders who'd been convicted, served time and upon release were insufficiently monitored. In one case a man got away with imprisoning a woman for at least ten years while he was being "supervised." Another murdered at least 11 women!

We're not the first to make the link. Here and here you can find articles wondering what went wrong.

We would propose that the problem is a mix of indifference and, in the case of Sowell, racism and class prejudice. Who gives a damn about poor, black crackheads? More to the point, however, is that the system is severely overburdened. Who has time to check up on all these convicted rapists when there are potheads to hassle? It is said that America has the highest per capita prison population on the planet after China. That means an awful lot of parolees.

Of course the easy response will be to call for more cops, more laws, tougher sentencing and tougher enforcement. We would replace the word "tougher" with "better." Ditto for the word "more."

Now, this would be loony tunes territory if not for the fact that we are simply making a poetic riff rather than a serious conspiratorial narrative.

Obviously, that Sowell was arrested on Halloween is a resonant fact. It's a time when we dress up as monsters, ghosts, killers, dead people. Tombstones and fake blood abound. The skeleton is ubiquitous.

The most commonly accepted theory of Halloween is that it derives from the Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-an). Samhain marks the point at which the line between our world and the world of the living is blurred, allowing spirits to pass through. It was also a kind of temporal tessellation--regarded as a kind of "New Year as it separated the divide between the "light" and "dark" halves of the year. Black and white, yo.

Hallowe'en, from "All Hallows Even", or "All Saints Eve" is the Christian holiday grafted onto the pre-existing traditions. All Saints Day itself (in Mexico literally the "Day of the Dead"), is celebrated differently in various in Catholic countries including visiting the graves of deceased loved ones and leaving offerings and lighting candles or flowers.

The Sowell "horror house" (shades of Halloween) was located on Imperial Avenue. It's almost a cliché these days that America is like a new Rome: 200 or so years of Republic followed by a slide into Empire. In Sexual Personae writes: "Our cold white Federal architecture is Roman. Banks and government buildings are vast temples of state, tombs and fortresses....Rome rediscovered the hieratic Egyptian funeralism latent in Greek Apollonian style....Egypt and Rome defined themselves by death-rituals of preparation or commemoration." (Italics added)

Terrible and commonplace as the crimes of Sowell and Garrido seem, fact is that most of us will never be touched by these things, even indirectly. The potency of the event however, is enough to give one pause, even fear the world around us. Hence, if America is slipping into something less than a democratic Republic, these are just the kinds of events that will push it in the "right" direction. More cops, more laws, more surveillance. Whatever keeps the kids safe.

Interesting in that the conspiracy theorist thinks this slide into Empire is not a natural phenomenon but one aided and abetted by an unseen had, elite figures such as those to be found as members of Yale's infamous Skull and Bones, perhaps. Figures such as dueling presidential 2004 candidates John Kerry and George Bush. The "Bonesmen" have a headquarters known as the "Tomb," where their basement initiations are said to involve members dressed à la Halloween in garish costumes, including robes, priestly vestments, Don Quixote, the devil, skeletons....Incidentally, Bonesmen assume fanciful names upon initiation and George Bush (Senior) was known as Magog.

The group has also been accused of having the stolen skulls of Geronimo and Sancho Panza hidden in the Tomb. One of the macabre details of the Sowell case is that he kept one his victim's skull in a bucket in his basement. Talk about your New World Odor.

Regarding the Sowell case and what the it evokes, we here at LoS are not proposing any intentional twilight language or conspiracy theory but a case of interesting poetic resonance. Finally, though we hate to "play the race card," we concur with Black Voices in asking: "If this were a white neighborhood, I wonder if more extensive efforts wouldn't have been taken to identify the odor."

Then again, we don't want to contradict ourselves; we've already said the negligence may stem from agencies spread too thin or over-burdened. Garrido's crime went undetected for years, and he was a white dude. But one crime doesn't necessarily negate the other; Garrido's race doesn't necessarily disprove the racial context of the Sowell murders.


Perhaps these cases are a matter of the "class card." Perhaps it's all these things and more. Hundreds of girls in Juarez, Mexico have turned up dead, beaten and raped in the past 13 years and, after a "lull," at least twenty this year have simply disappeared. The American media deigns to cover it every once and a while. The Mexican government hasn't been very effective. Maybe it's indifference. Maybe it's helplessness. All pretty much par for the course.

Just stumbled across this article from Times Online by one Richard Bone!

d.a.levy their city is a fucking mess. Giving it back was the wisest move you could have made....

Foot ho!

For several months the sole "Google alert" LoS has subscribed to is for the keywords "Canadian feet." Every week or so the alert faithfully arrives and we open it with a yawn to scan the news about hockey and Canadian sprinters.

Then a few days ago a familiar story showed up: A seventh detached foot has washed up on the shores around Vancouver. The human remains were in a white size 8 ½ running shoe. There's a joke about Fellini in there somewhere but we can't find it....

This article provides some grisly humor: "....the eighth foot in two years, stumping authorities in both Canada and the...."

UK newspaper the Metro gives us the deets we were looking for: it's a right foot and the shoe was a Nike. (Classical goddess Nike was a daughter of the goddess Styx, or daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, both aquatic deities).

Strange thing is that a quick look at our post Sixth Foot Ashore from Nov. 13, 2008, when the sixth foot was found (a seventh turned out to be a hoax!), we can clearly see the foot doesn't match any of the existing finds. Seeing as two of the feet were a pair from a male the family preferred not to identify, this leaves us with at least six footless bodies out there under the waves. Which isn't so many for such a large area, really.

But it still begs the question, why don't feet bob about in other parts of the world? With the exception of one case in Sweden, we haven't heard of this same phenomenon elsewhere. Which doesn't necessarily mean foul play, but it's certainly weird....

Oh, btw, the human foot has 33 bones. This is obviously a Masonic vengeance affair!

The dog is a domesticated form of the Gray Wolf

Seems like I bungled my post on the Jaycee Dugard kidnapping.... unable to see the forest for the trees, so focused on synchromystic jibba-jabba that I neglected to note the obvious.

When I spent so much time on the name Dugard--"from the garden"--and thinking only of Jesus' night of anguish in the garden of Gethsemane, how could I have missed the Garden of Eden? Probably because I'm currently involved in a dispute with neighbors which has in fact left me sleepless and anguished. Although it is a matter of beams and nails, my crucifixion doesn't seem to be imminent.

If I could see beyond my own nose I might have noticed that Dugard's story can be seen in the terms of the Eden myth. Sexuality and the loss of innocence. It was the Gid who pointed this out to me so I leave it there, as a challenge to the Gid to lay it all out for us. Let the preacher's kid untangle it!

The second (at least!) point of neglect is the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood. I warbled on about St. Thérèse and Anne Frank and forgot to go into this gem of a tale. Worst of all, I'd thought of it and then decided, nah, fuggit. Then this morning I awoke to read a story about Canadian folk singer Taylor Mitchell, a young woman of 19 who was killed by coyotes while walking in the woods and then after thinking "holy shit that's horrible," I remembered the tale.

So, here goes. Apparently the tale was told in the 14th c. by peasants in both France and Italy and may have roots in Eastern or "Oriental" tales with similar themes. There are many versions; sometimes the girl is eaten and sometimes she escapes; sometimes involuntary cannibalism occurs. Sometimes the wolf is a werewolf or an ogre. Sexual overtones abound.

The first written version was published by Frenchman Charles Perrault in 1697. In his version the girl is eaten and there the story ends. A moral tacked onto the end explains that the story is a warning to "good girls" to resist the sexual advances of men.

Since Perrault, many variations have appeared but most know the version as told by the Brothers Grimm.

The Grimm version is almost certainly a re-telling of Perault's except in the end, where a hunter after the wolf's skin saves the girl and her grandmother. In this version the grandmother and the girl are swallowed whole by the wolf, but emerge unharmed after the hunstman cuts the beast open. This ending sees to have been taken from yet another tale. The Grimms also wrote a sequel in which grandmother and the girl trap and kill another wolf with a cunning ruse: they drown him after luring him with a pot of water which had been used to cook sausages.

Many interpretations have been made of the fairy tale, only a few of which I'll mention here. Obviously, wolf attacks were a serious problem in the Middle Ages, so it may have simply began as a cautionary tale to young kids, much like stories of La Llorona are thought to have begun as a way to scare kids away from dangerous waterways.

Alan Dundes has analyzed the tale and interpreted it as the story of a girl who leaves home and in various actions crosses a threshold; she emerges from the belly of the beast as a woman. In another Freudian analysis, Bruno Bettelheim sees it as a rebirth; the child is reborn coming from the wolf, her emotions liberated.

Yet another interpretation sees the story as a warning against falling into the trap of prostitution; supporters of this theory note that the red cloak was a common symbol of hookers in 17th c. France. Less pernicious perhaps is the idea that the story represents sexual awakening. "In this interpretation, the red cloak symbolizes the blood of the menstrual cycle, braving the "dark forest" of womanhood. Or the cloak could symbolize the hymen....In this case, the wolf threatens the girl's virginity. The anthropomorphic wolf symbolizes a man, who could be a lover, seducer or sexual predator...."

We would argue that the pedophile and the kid-snatcher has replaced the Big Bad Wolf as the ultimate danger of our time, lurking in the forest after the sun goes down, ready to pounce; the former is the metaphor for the latter. Indeed the wolf has always had a connotation of sexual aggressiveness. The leering wolf-whistle as the statuesque blond walks past the construction site, Duran Duran's Hungry Like the Wolf (I'm on the hunt I'm after you....) All of these sexual wolf metaphors may derive from this very tale or others like it; the wolf and sexual danger have become intrinsically linked. Wikipedia offers a brief summary of modern adaptations, such as popular songs, cartoons and fiction in which the sexuality of the tale is explored.

Blatant eroticism has been a trope of the vampire tale since Bram Stoker. Less so perhaps for the werewolf but nonetheless, there is clearly a brute sexuality to the lycanthrope. A normal man goes about his everyday business until the full moon appears. In the maiden-mother-crone cycle of pagan moon-lore, the full moon represents the point when the woman is most fertile, full, bountiful. "Mother" may be the appellation but the implication is fertility and thus sexuality. An in the presence of the full woman our mild-mannered lycanthrope turns into an uncontrollable beast with an immense hunger for flesh. While not universally true, the werewolf in European cultures is usually a man.

According to NASA, however, neither June 10, 1991 (Dugard kidnapping) nor November 22, 1976 (Callaway kidnapping) were full moons; though certainly a beast, we can rule out lycanthropy in Garrido's case!

Wikipedia again makes the point that certain modern interpretations of the tale resemble "animal bridegroom" stories such as The Frog Prince and Beauty and the Beast. This latter is perhaps even more telling than the tale of Riding Hood. In the popular Disney film, the Beast first holds young Belle's father as a prisoner but agrees to free him if Belle agrees to take his place. Although coarse and full of anger, the Beast treats Belle kindly, slowly revealing a more sensitive side. Given her freedom, Belle returns of her own volition to save the Beast from his tormentors. She has fallen in love with the Beast, and her tears transforms him back into a handsome young Prince. Cue the dancing candelabra; they live happily ever after.

One might reasonably construe this as a glorification of the Stockholm syndrome. Given the prevalence of the fairy tale in our culture, it shouldn't be so surprising that Dugard never seemed to try and escape her captor. We speak of her as being imprisoned, but it seems she had some degree of freedom, working in Garrido's printshop, interacting with the public. Her children have been described as fairly well-adjusted and clever. Not exactly feral kids locked in a cage for years. Disney's celebrated version of the film was released on November 13, 1991. A week and a day before the Dugard kidnapping!

In both Little Red Riding Hood and the Beauty and the Beast, there is an explicit danger in the forest. Folklorists tell us that this is a trope dating back to the Middle Ages where the forest--place of darkness and danger--is juxtaposed against the village as a place of safety. Put in other words, between the wild and the domesticated, the savage and the tame. In French we can speak of the dusk, or at times the dawn, as "entre chien et loup," literally "between dog and wolf." The night and all its attendant dangers versus the safety of the light of day. These liminal periods put in stark contrast the nature of the wild and the domesticated; they are transitions between states of being. The Wolf in Riding Hood you will recall, dresses itself in Grandma's nightdress and bonnet in order to fool Little Red. And what is the Beast but a lycanthrope stuck in his animal state?

Hunter Thompson brought the following quote by Samuel Johnson to many peoples' attention: "He who makes a beast of himself avoids the pain of being a man." I always thought Thompson was explaining, even advocating, his particular kind of behavior. Now I'm not sure that it isn't merely scorn, or an impersonal observation. Men are dogs, they say. And they are right.

Half past three in the Garden of Good and Evil

We've been grappling with this one for a while and we're not sure if any of this means anything outside the fishbowl of idiosyncratic free-association.

On June 10, 1991 11-year-old Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped and missing for over 18 years. In August 2009 she reappeared and her alleged kidnappers Philip and Nancy Garrido (née Bocanegra) were arrested. The pair are currently awaiting trial and Ms. Dugard seems to be adjusting to her new life--back with her family, including the two daughters she bore while living in a complex of tents and sheds in Garrido's backyard.


Now, the details of this case are indeed remarkable and fascinating. But what is it about this case which drew our attention for LoS?

Let's start with the names. "Dugard" is a French place name meaning "from" or "of the garden." Dugard was born in Garden City, California and the family went to Antioch, where the crime took place, not long after. After her abduction, Jaycee Dugard lived in a backyard, or garden prison.


The name Jaycee is also unusual. According to some baby-name websites Jaycee is merely a name coming from the initials J.C. One even points out that it's an acronym for Jesus Christ. As if necessary. Hardly anyone in the English (or Spanish and French) speaking world could hear those initials and not think of Jesus.


Now, Jaycee is also considered a variant of the name Jayce, itself short for Jason, a name of Greek origin meaning "healer." Jason also appears in the Bible as a possible variation of Joshua.


This brings us back to Jesus. Wikipedia:

The English name Joshua is a rendering of the Hebrew: יהושע‎ "Yehoshua," meaning "YHWH is Salvation," "YHWH delivers," or "YHWH rescues" from the Hebrew root ישע, "salvation," "to deliver/be liberated," or "to be victorious". It often lacks a Hebrew letter vav (ו) after the shin (ש), allowing a reading of the vocalization of the name as Hoshea (הוֹשֵׁעַ) - the name is described in the Torah as having been originally Hoshea before being changed to Yehoshua by Moses (Numbers 13:16).

"Jesus" is the Anglicized transliteration of the Hellenized transliteration of "Yehoshua". In the Septuagint, all instances of "Yehoshua" are rendered as "ιησου" (Iesou/Jesus), the closest Greek pronunciation of the Hebrew.

Jesus, of course, spent his own time of anguish in a garden--the Garden of Gethsemane (lit. "oil-press"), where "being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground." Luke 22:43–44. This was of course on the eve of his crucifixion.

Jaycee (J.C.) in the garden. By process of association we can link one little girl's captivity with one of the cornerstone myths of the Western edifice. In so doing Jaycee Dugard follows in the footsteps of a whole series of suffering little girls, now sanctified.

France, in particular, loves its little-girl martyrs. In the region of Toulouse, for example, every church has a shrine to Saints Jeanne D'Arc, Germaine of Pibrac, Thérèse de Lisieux and Bernadette Soubiros. These count among the most popular Saints in France.

Western literature has pitched in, giving us the sufferings of Alice and Dorothy. Anne Frank may as well be a saint in her own right.

Jesus never went to Antioch, but the city was an important center of early Christianity. Jews there were evangelized by no less figures than Peter and Paul and the converts were the first to be known as Christians. Antioch, California was founded by brothers William and Joseph Smith (not the Mormon prophet!) in 1850. As such it is one of the oldest cities of California.

Not surprisingly, Jaycee's liberation has been hailed as a miracle. Garrido believed he communicated with God, controlled sound with his mind (and vice versa) and kept a blog called Voices Revealed. Posts just before his arrest include: THE U.S. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS NOT THE SOURCE OF MIND CONTROL, A POWER THAT HAS BEEN KEPT HIDDEN, CULTURAL TRANCE....

How all this ties into the Jaycees remains a mystery. I'm sure we could we could somehow tie it all up to a revelation of the method, of mind control with sound, of a cultural trance woven into us via media overload and sympathy for the little children...."suffer the little children"....sympathy for the Jaycees, Proto-Gymnasium for New World Orderism. Etc.

But that would just be crazy....

Bush: "I Did Not Sell My Soul"

While Bush's speech was mostly eloquent and free of the language gaffes he admits he is famous for, he said he regretted appearing in front of a "Mission Impossible" sign during a televised address in 2003. The controversial banner referring to the U.S. mission in Iraq, actually said "Mission Accomplished."

Jornada del Muerto

On Monday October 15, Howard Barton Unruh, the nation's "first single-episode mass murderer," died in a nursing home at the age of 88.

Because synchromystics and conspiracy theorists often claim that mass murderers and other ne'er-do-wells are in fact sleeper agents--victims of government mind control experiments--they are often on the lookout for twilight language, e.g. the names and numbers that to the observant reveal the methods of the cryptocracy.

That's why when we came across this article we felt compelled to comment on some of the names and numbers in the story.

On the morning of September 6, 1949, Unruh left his home and began his so-called "walk of death." He'd been planning the attack for a year and kept notes, so we know some of the victims were intentional, some were people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There is a strange symmetry to his victims: 5 men, 5 women and 3 children. 5 and 3 are already mystically resonant numbers. No need to point out that the total, 13, resonates all over the place; bad luck, witches' covens, American colonies, layers in the pyramid, etc.

Also interesting is the Masonic resonance. He left the house with a Luger and 33 rounds of ammunition. The shooting occurred in the area of 32nd St. and River Rd.

Further advancing the idea that he was some kind of sleeper agent is the fact that he was a WWII vet and an expert marksman in the Army.

The name is also interesting. "Unruh" is a Prussian or Pomeranian place name and is said to mean a quarrelsome or restless person; it comes from Middle German words meaning "unrest" or "disturbance". It can also mean "careless" or "negligent." An unruh in current German is a technical word meaning "balance wheel" in a watch. Our boy was anything but balanced, one supposes.

Howard is an Old English name which means "noble watchman." Haha! Time and observation meet in the pun of "watch."

Anyway, a day after yhis unruly German went on his spree, the Allies gave back to Germany the assets formerly controlled by the Nazi Regime. One day after that, the Federal Republic of Germany was officially founded.

Not that there's a link between one and another. 1949 was an especially transformative year in Geopolitics. Indonesia was recognized. The People's Republic of China was officially proclaimed. The Council of Europe was founded. Basically, a busy year in the ongoing sloughing-off of the old colonial order in the wake of the Second World War.

And the "first"American single-episode mass murder occurred; what was shocking then is now a staple of today's nightly news.

One must imagine that being regarded as the first crime of this sort is a result of the fact that the victims were European-Americans and on American soil.

Incinerating countless thousands of Japanese thousands of miles away apparently doesn't count.

Four years prior the route towards the mass murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki began with the first atomic bomb test at the Trinity site--deep within the Jornada del Muerto, or "single day's journey of the dead man"--a name is said to have originated after a German man died there fleeing the Inquisition in the late 1600's.

Tessellation of the Elementary School

The word "geometry" comes from the Greek γεωμετρία; geo = earth, metria = measure. As such it deals with questions of size and shape and the properties of space. It thus a way not only of defining space but an invented way of seeing.

This way of seeing the world has been with us so long that we've forgotten that we created it ourselves; when we see perfect geometrical forms they often don't register. They are taken for granted; they become like trees and rocks on the plane. The cultivated field seems as natural as the forest glen and people can say without irony that or going to the park or the golf course is a little taste of "nature."

That is why the jungle gym pictured above seems so discrete, hardly noticed in passing. But one day, when the moment is right, it registers.

The way we educate our children, even in play, prepares them for their place in the pyramid of society. There's nothing necessarily conspiratorial in this; it's just so integrated into our way of thinking we don't question it.

But in this particular jungle gym, perhaps with tongue and cheek, slightly bulging, a little cluck of the mother hen, we see an example of how we teach our children to climb the pyramid ladder. They unconsciously know exactly what this represents for them later in life. They will move in artificial stages towards an illusory goal, first reinforced on the playground and thoroughly beaten into them by the drudging "progress" "upwards" in a system of grades. This is called education.


"Reseau Pyramid" is the Réseau régional de formation à distance for the Midi-Pyrénées. (Regional distance-learning network). This is a network of centers which offers training and e-learning components designed to help the under or unemployed get back into the workforce with new training. Anything to help the masses find their proper place in the pyramid.

Just to keep us on our toes we are informed that there are 13 training locations....reminds of the thirteen layers of the Le Temple du Sagesse Supreme or the unfinished pyramid on the dollar bill. There is an implication of progress to an unfinished goal in this latter. Development is assured. Nature can be perfected. The subdivision is a taxonomy of the land; geometry of the mind's eye; one hand washes the other, and with that, the mind. Perfect Thunder dissipated into a fart upon dessicated soil.

In representing a specific form of "natural" social organization, the pyramid implies a certain "natural" division of land. It's worth noting that there are at least three real estate companies in France called Keops (1, 2, 3). We found this out with a quick Google after seeing the following eye-popper on a sign in a vacant lot.

And since we're dealing with questions of real estate, we've finally got a place to put this next photo. Promologis is another real estate company whose signs feature a prominent pyramid. Metering the geosphere indeed....

Which brings us to a final point. Once a French friend told us that Freemasons in France were deeply entrenched in the real estate business in France. This may or may not be true. But it's interesting that in the real estate context, the pyramid shines forth. This is known as development.

Washington: First in War, Peace -- and Accounting

This article by Joel Achenbach in the Oct. 12 edition of The Washington Post is an interesting read and fits nicely with our ongoing look at the rise of capitalism, the tessellation of the plane and Enlightenment revolutionary doctrines. The most pertinent passage is quoted below:

As thoroughly researched as the life of Washington has been, his career as a warrior and statesman has largely overshadowed his entrepreneurial history. He was the CEO, in effect, of a farming, manufacturing and real estate operation that by the end of his life encompassed more than 50,000 acres of field and forest. Farms, fisheries, weavers, smithies, a grist mill, a distillery -- these were just part of the Washington empire.

Washington came of age as a backcountry surveyor of relatively modest means. His business sensibilities, innovative thinking and willingness to take chances are all part and parcel of his evolution as a revolutionary.

By the end of his life, Washington was one of the richest men in the nation he had helped create. But he knew the frustrations of doing business in a land that lacked banks, roads and industry, where there was little capital, and where he had to depend on transatlantic commerce using information moving at the speed of a sailing ship. Washington was so cash-strapped in 1789 that he had to borrow money from a neighbor in order to travel to his presidential inauguration.

The Curious Case of the Barefoot Burglar

Here's an odd little tale about a clever juvenile delinquent with a Facebook fan club.

America--Fuck yeah!!

The saga of the American Police Force story began to unravel last week but the unraveling appears to be on hold for the weekend. We expect things to accelerate tomorrow. Maybe all won't be revealed but certainly more details will emerge, theories will be proven untrue and stupid rumors will be laid to rest.

So far the speculation-o-sphere seems to be divided into a few camps. What we call the knee-jerk conspiracy theorists, or the reactionaries, are convinced that this is a nefarious scheme by Xe (formerly Blackwater). We here at LoS believe that the privatization of the police and penal system are indeed grave threats to civil liberties. That is why the rampant and unfounded linking of this affair to Blackwater is so offensive. Cry wolf enough and sensible people will begin to write you off.

Dig this bit from Prison Planet by Paul Joseph Watson on 1/10: "APF web page admits it runs Blackwater-controlled U.S. Training Center, proving that the two organizations are one and the same."

The article then goes on to "prove" that Blackwater (actually Xe) runs the U.S. Training Center. The problem is, there is nothing to prove. Xe openly admits that the USTC is their operation.

But more importantly, how does claiming to run anything make it true? If you were going to hire a guy to be your security director and on his résumé he listed experience with the CIA as a qualification, you'd probably be inclined to check it out. And if the CIA said there was no record of this guy ever working for them, what would you think?

a) Wow this guy was in so deep the CIA won't acknowledge his employment! or
b) This guy is full of shit

A second camp proposes that the APF may in fact be a real company with links to the private security establishment, but has simply bitten off more than it can chew. We tend to think even this gives the APF too much credit. Their argument has the benefit of restraint and not jumping to conclusions before all the facts are in. Versions of this theory have APF linked to Allied Defense Systems or other less well-known groups, such as Vance Security USA. ADS has in fact admitted meeting with ADF but says their background check persuaded them to avoid working with them.

A third camp thinks that the APF is an elaborate scam. They cite the founder's extensive criminal background and the fact that the APF claims to have years of experience despite being founded in February 2009, just after it became known that the facility they are to take over was up for grabs. They note that the APF website steals images from other private security firms' websites. This You Tube collection of news reports is pretty convincing that this is a boondoggle of large proportions.

To Prison Planet's credit, they've put up an article by Felix Barbour on 02/10 supporting the scam theory. Mr. Barbour has actually done some basic journalism and found that the APF is unlicensed to act in the capacities they advertise. They cannot act as private investigators or security operators.

And then there's the logo. A bit over-the-top, to say the least. Odd too that the APF's website seems to have changed it's name since yesterday from the American Police Force to the American Private Police Force. Perhaps hoping to avoid being charged with impersonating a police officer when the charges are filed....

Last we've heard, APF honcho Michael Hilton, or should we say Miodrag Dokovich, has left town, probably before being run out of it on a rail covered in tar and feathers.

We at LoS think this a scam. Perhaps it will come to light that APF is working in concert with another, more established company but we'll reserve judgment until more facts come out. There has been talk of a parent company but who knows?

We're actually interested in the possibility that the APF is more than just a clever con. Could they be a front for some kind of nationalist Serbian group? Dokovich claims to be from Montenegro, which only a few years ago was linked with Serbia as the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro (2003-2006). In 2006 Montenegro went independent and the bond was dissolved.

Is Dokovish a bitter nationalist who'd like to see that union renewed? Why would a Montegrin use the Serbian coat of arms for his corporate logo?

Anyway, all this is fascinating, no matter which of the theories turns out to be true. We're merely getting our speculations in before more of this tale unfolds....

For more on the situation as it stands as of 03/10, see this good synopsis from The Missoulian.

Also, this guy certainly got on the bus rather early with his site http://www.americanpoliceforce.net which takes the APF story as its centerpiece but also deals with the privatization of the military and the police. And hey, he'll sell you three APF domain names for $100,000!