Federal Bureau of Weird Affairs

WELCOME
You have been duly inducted into the service of your Nation. For the duration of the present semester, you will be an agent of the super-secret FBWA.

HISTORY
The Federal Bureau of Weird Affairs was established by Presidential Decree in 1966, when President Lyndon Baines Johnson lost one of his famous beagles. His wife, Lady Bird Johnson, became convinced that "Woofy" had been stolen by the devil.

 President Johnson had been JFK's Vice President. When Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson immediately expanded the war in Vietnam...which took up so much of his time that he could no longer take proper care of his beagles.

The Johnson White House had a lot of beagles. 

Johnson had gotten in trouble publicly for picking Woofy up by his ears once on national television. Now, with Woofy's sudden and mysterious disappearance, the strong anti-war movement nationwide, and his wife's insane ranting about the devil, Johnson had to find the missing dog fast,  or run the risk of impeachment.

So President Johnson called me. I was a member of  the White House staff at the time, serving in a janitorial capacity. Johnson made me the official head of the newly formed Federal Bureau of Weird Affairs. He promised his wife that I was an expert in  weirdness, so my Agency would definitely know how to deal with the devil, or with ghosts, aliens, time travellers, dog-nappers, or any other occult evil that might be lurking in America.

Lady Bird Johnson liked that.

Since then, the FBWA has worked tirelessly to keep the entire United States safe from weirdness, evil, mysterious and inexplicable hazards, and anything else that falls under our jurisdiction.
We are glad to have you on board. If you live through your term of service, you will receive three hours college credit, disguised as "Comp Two" on your transcripts. If you are killed in the line of duty, you will receive honorable mention at the annual FBWA staff Christmas party.

WARNING
It is important to remember that everything you learn or do during your time with the FBWA is Top Secret. No one, not even your mother, can know of the FBWA's existence.

YOUR JOB
As temporary agents of a super-secret Federal Agency, your tasks will consist of doing the stuff Agent Steed does not want to do himself. We are frequently assigned to do Assessment Reports for Congressional subcommittees, investigate UFO reports, conduct opinion surveys, track the activities of international crime rings, and occasionally we get field work such as cleaning-up evidence of cattle mutilations by aliens. You may also have to make travel arrangements, plan missions or do logistics studies for clandestine insurgencies. If you have any questions, talk to Agent Steed. He is our man in Little Rock.
You will receive your assignments through Steed. Attend class regularly.
 If you fail to show up, you may be listed as suspicious and possibly not from this planet. That is bad. VERY bad.

MORE HISTORY:
Within hours, the FBWA was able to locate LBJ's dog "Woofy" and return it to Lady Bird Johnson. The dog was hiding under the bed in the Lincoln Bedroom. LBJ had a bad habit of picking his beagles up by their ears, and Woofy was sick of it. And so, our glorious tradition of service began. Welcome, Good luck, and watch out: weirdness is everywhere.

You have been issued a Top Secret FBWA membership card. Do not lick or suck on your card: it is coated with an odorless, colorless, vile-tasting poison intended for emergency suicide use only. If you are abducted by aliens, or if you are captured by Hans Gruber's evil Politco Paramilitary organization, you should EAT your FBWA card immediately.

You will, unfortunately, be learning more about Hans Gruber as the semester progresses. Gruber and I are old friends--or I should say, old enemies. His organization--Politco--is closely tied to a sleazy genetic modification company called Econocorn Corporation, with its home office right here in Arkansas. I want you to be aware that as FBWA agents, you will be in constant danger. It is wise to know your enemies....
I do not mean to scare you, but it might be a good idea to write a Last Will and Testament and post it as a page on your website...just in case. The FBWA does tend to lose a few agents every semester.
You should watch the cheerful little WELCOME video below, and then begin work immediately on your first mission, code name Operation Rabbit Hole.

When you write your Last Will and Testament, remember that my name is spelled Steed with two "e"s.
Good luck, and God be with you.  That is all.

Welcome New Recruits!

This is a video message from the bureaucrat currently running things at the Federal Bureau of Weird Affairs. We are a top secret government agency--so secret, in fact, that the government is not even aware of our existence. As you might expect, this level of secrecy makes it difficult to get allocations of tax money for operations, so funding is often thin. Our solution has been to recruit college students. They work cheap. If you are not killed in the line of duty, you can expect to receive college credit for the course you thought you were taking. If you have any questions, talk to your teacher. Steed is on our payroll.
You will receive assignments through this top secret website, disguised as blog posts. You will be expected to submit information and planning documents to Steed.
Welcome to the FBWA. America's safety and prosperity depend on you.
Do not tell anybody that you are working for a top secret government agency.
Not even your mother.
Good luck.
You will need it.

Welcome to Wonderland

Welcome to Operation Rabbit Hole.

Here's the deal: America is in trouble. Our Congress no longer trusts their own Congressional Research Service...and I know why. When I petitioned Congress to take action in Fukushima, I was shown the classified CRS file on Japan's nuclear disaster, and it did not even mention Reactor Four. That information never got to Congress, and now you and I are breathing the effect of this mistake.

I recently received a coded message...
Congress has questions, and they need answers they can depend upon. When things are dark, when America, the world's greatest superpower, is in trouble, who ya gonna call? FBWA.

What follows are more than twenty posts, each on a topic that Congress wants answers to. Each has a certain mystery, a certain depth and darkness about it....sort of like a deep, dark hole....in fact, a rabbit hole. Congress wants answers to these dark mysteries so they will be able to make good decisions.

We will operate under our natural cover, investigative journalists writing for a college magazine--we are just harmless college students. Our instructions are to NEVER contact Congress directly. We will simply publish our findings in our online magazine, the campus REVIEW...and the people in Washington will do the rest.

Think of these as rabbit holes.

We need our best people on this.

Look into each of these topics so that you can match your natural interests and skills to the material. Check them out in any order that  seems interesting. You have only about a month to complete an in-depth evaluation of the issue you choose to cover--an issue that our Congress sees as potentially explosive (though they have not shared with me exactly how, in some cases...)  They have asked us to find answers for a lot of mysteries and we will do our best...so start reading all these rabbit holes,  peek into all of them--the idea is for you to  know them all, see where each one goes, and then decide which is the one you want to explore deeper. In each case, there is a whole world down at the end of the tunnel...and in most cases it is a dark, strange world.

Ultimately, you will be exploring one of these in Great Depth...but for now, just find out where the tunnel leads. Remember: a high school essay tells what you find; a college essay tells what it might mean, but an FBWA Top Secret Investigation saves the world from evil.

As you dig deeper into these topics, look for patterns of meaning, and think about what these patterns indicate, where the evidence seems to point... eventually, you should choose a  topic that will make a fun final project, which might include making a movie, a play, a screenplay, a website, a new nation, an essay...what you ultimately produce is something we will be talking about more as we get into the final project. So start diving into these "rabbit holes," ....but  remember how to find your way back to the surface.

PS: Ummm....I have not exactly told you everything....remember TWA Flight 800, back in 1996? Congress learned a lesson from that. Nobody wants to be eliminated in that way....so they do not want to call attention to their investigations--that is the real reason they are using the FBWA instead of the CRS. As you investigate these issues, Trust NOBODY. Always sit with your back to a solid, bulletproof surface.

Welcome to Operation Rabbit Hole. Have Fun...and Good luck.

Hero or Traitor? Ed Snowden

BERLIN | Sun Nov 3, 2013 7:36am EST
(Reuters) - Fugitive U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden said calls for more oversight of government intelligence agencies showed he was justified in revealing the methods and targets of the U.S. secret service.
Snowden's leaks about the National Security Agency (NSA), from its alleged mass scanning of emails to the tapping of world leaders' phones, have infuriated U.S. allies and placed Washington on the defensive.
In "A Manifesto for the Truth" published in German news magazine Der Spiegel on Sunday, Snowden said current debates about mass surveillance in many countries showed his revelations were helping to bring about change.
"Instead of causing damage, the usefulness of the new public knowledge for society is now clear because reforms to politics, supervision and laws are being suggested," the 30-year-old ex-CIA employee and NSA contractor wrote.
"Citizens have to fight against the suppression of information about affairs of essential importance for the public. Those who speak the truth are not committing a crime."
Snowden is in Russia, where he has been given asylum for at least a year.
In an open letter to Germany last week, Snowden said he was counting on international support to stop Washington's 'persecution' of him.
His revelations about the reach and methods of the NSA, including the monitoring of vast volumes of Internet traffic and phone records, have angered U.S. allies from Germany to Brazil.
Admirers have called Snowden a human rights champion. Others say he is a traitor for stealing information from the NSA after vowing to respect its secrecy policies and then fleeing first to Hong Kong and then to Russia with classified U.S. data.
Snowden declined a job offer from Russia's top social networking site VKontakte (InTouch), local media quoted one of the company's founders, Pavel Durov, as saying over the weekend.
A Russian lawyer with close links to the authorities who is assisting Snowden, Anatoly Kucherena, had said this week the American would start work in November for a "large Russian (web)site" that he refused to name for security reasons.
In the manifesto published on Sunday, Snowden said mass surveillance was a global problem that needed global solutions and added that secret services' "criminal surveillance programs" jeopardized individual privacy, freedom of opinion and open societies.
The existence of spying technology should not determine politics, he said: "We have a moral duty to ensure that our laws and values limit surveillance programs and protect human rights".
Society, said Snowden, could only understand and keep a check on these problems via an open, ruthless and informed debate.
He said some governments that felt exposed by the revelations had at first launched a "persecution campaign" to repress debate by intimidating journalists and threatening them with prosecution.
"At that time the public was not in a position to judge the usefulness of these revelations. People trusted that their governments would make the right decisions," he said.
"Today we know that was a mistake and that such behavior does not serve the public interest," he said.
(Reporting by Michelle Martin; additional reporting by Gabriela Baczynska in Moscow; editing by Tom Pfeiffer)

Rabbit Hole: RFK, R.I.P.

In April, 1968, Senator Robert Kennedy, younger brother of John F. Kennedy, had delivered a moving eulogy at the funeral of his close friend Dr. Martin Luther King. But only a month later, moments after accepting the Democratic Party's nomination for the Presidency, Robert Kennedy was shot and killed. A newsman, without knowing it, recorded the shooting on a sound tape. That tape laid in a box for 40 years before the newsman ever listened to it, and what he found gave him chills. A recording engineer analyzed the tape and proved that the sounds were made by not one gun, as had been claimed, but by three--and two of those guns were in RFK's back--his own security guards?
The police destroyed the gun that was claimed to be the murder weapon. No ballistics tests were ever done. They lost all the photographs taken during the investigation, and the entire room--walls and everything, was removed from the hotel and destroyed. (They found thirteen bullets in the walls, and four in Kennedy's back and head, and yet they said it all came from an 8-shot pistol, fired from in front of the victim.) Welcome to America!
As Kennedy's body was transported by train to be buried in Virginia, over a million people came out to stand beside the tracks and pay their respects as the train passed. On the train, a New York Times photographer caught their faces. It is worth looking at...they are us...

The reporter mentioned above was, coincidentally, our old friend Paul Fusco, who thirty years later would be sent to photograph children defomed by radiation from the Russian nuclear disaster.
Here is Mr. Fusco narrating a series of  photos he took during that long train ride with Robert Kennedy's coffin.
Below is footage taken along the way. Think: Based on these images, what did Kennedy mean to these people? Have we had a leader like that since?

Rabbit Hole: Richard III, the Lost King of England

After he was dethroned and killed, Richard III was said to be the rottenest man ever to sit on a throne. Of course, history is written by the victors...Shakespeare portrayed him as totally rotten, too. It is said that he murdered his own brothers in order to take the throne of England, even murdered his two young nephews  because they had a more valid claim to the throne than he did. But it's been difficult to prove what really happened, since no bodies were ever found. The two young nephews completely vanished without a trace. Even King Richard himself disappeared, which is rare for a king of any era.

A few years ago workers were repairing a stairway in the Tower of London. The old stonework was loose and had to be reset. They peeked through a crack in the stones and found a skull peeking back. It was the first light to shine there in more than 500 years. There were two skeletons, huddled together, arms wrapped around each others shoulders. Forensics identified them as boys about the age of Richard's nephews...

And only last year, in September, 2012, a skeleton was discovered that may be that of Richard III. Scientists have not settled the question yet. So, who was this rotten ruler? Was he the one that was rotten, or was he killed and then blamed for the rotten works of others? If you like ancient mysteries, there is a heck of a story here...and the world needs to know the truth.

The Shock Doctrine

Author Naomi Klein wrote a wonderful book that explains much of modern history with a single concept--the Shock Doctrine. Shocking events are secretly arranged, put in motion, created, and the effect on the public is to weaken them, to disorient them so that laws can be passed which would never have been permitted without that moment of social upheaval. If any of you are still not sure about a really cool research topic...it don't get no cooler than this. I have a copy of her book, and there's plenty on the web, including Ms Klein's website.

"The only book of the last few years in American publishing that I would describe as a mandatory must-read. Literally the only one."   -Rachel Maddow

Around the world in Britain, the United States, Asia and the Middle East, there are people with power who are cashing in on chaos; exploiting bloodshed and catastrophe to brutally remake our world in their image. They are the shock doctors. Thrilling and revelatory, The Shock Doctrine cracks open the secret history of our era. Exposing these global profiteers, Naomi Klein discovered information and connections that shocked even her about how comprehensively the shock doctors' beliefs now dominate our world - and how this domination has been achieved. Raking in billions out of the tsunami, plundering Russia, exploiting Iraq - this is the chilling tale of how a few are making a killing while more are getting killed.

Here's some links
 http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
 http://www.naomiklein.org/main