Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

August 4, 1892: Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered with an axe in Fall River, Massachusetts. Lizzie Borden was arrested and tried for the crime. Though Borden was acquitted, junior prosecutor William Moody gained national prominence and respect. Theodore Roosevelt was so impressed that he later would make Moody Secretary of the Navy. The Borden murders remain officially unsolved.




1943: Battle of Tarawa


The photo is courtesy of L'Abbe, who sent this newspaper clipping in a letter addressed to 2nd Bn., 8th Marines, Nov. 18, 2014.

Our Legacy: John L’Abbe, Battle of Tarawa hero


The Thing, also known as the Great Seal bug, was one of the first covert listening devices (or "bugs") to use passive techniques to transmit an audio signal. It was concealed inside a gift given by the Soviet Union to W. Averell Harriman, the United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, on August 4, 1945. Because it was passive, needing electromagnetic energy from an outside source to become energized and active, it is considered a predecessor of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology.

The existence of the bug was discovered accidentally in 1951 by a British radio operator at the British Embassy who overheard American conversations on an open Soviet Air Force radio channel as the Soviets were beaming radio waves at the ambassador's office.

It hung in the ambassador's Moscow residential study of William Averell Harriman at Spaso House for seven years, until it was finally exposed in 1952 during the tenure of Ambassador George F. Kennan.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, the Naval Research Laboratory and other U.S. agencies analyzed the device, along with assistance from the British government agency MI5 and the British Marconi Company. Marconi technician Peter Wright, a British scientist and later MI5 counterintelligence officer, ran the investigation. He was able to get The Thing working reliably with an illuminating frequency of 800 MHz. The generator which had discovered the device was tuned to 1800 MHz.

Replica of The Thing which contained a Soviet bugging device, on display at the NSA's National Cryptologic Museum (extensive detailed page on "The Thing")


Public disclosure by the Washington Evening Star in 1953
Apparently someone leaked (part of) the story to the Washington Evening Star,  as on March 20, 1953 it published an article with the title Secret Ears in the U.S. Embassy. In the article it was claimed that in the previous year (1952) a listening device had been found inside the Great Seal of the United States in the Ambassador's room, alledgedly actived by a radio beam. The story wasn't picked up widely and the US Government did not reveal further details at the time.

Interestingly, the article in the Washington Star also claims that the US shared the discovery of the device with the British Embassy, where a similar device was subsequently found in the office of the British Ambassador, hidden in the tail of one of the lions aside the British coat of arms.

In his book Spy Catcher, former MI5 scientific officer Peter Wright gives an account of how he was approached by MI5 in 1952 1 to find out how The Thing worked. Apparently the CIA and FBI had no idea of the operating principle behind it and had presented the device, or a replica of it, to MI5. Wright, who was still employed at the Marconi Company in Great Baddow (Essex, UK) at the time, reverse engineered the device after work hours. It took him ten weeks to solve the puzzle.

In this short video, posted on December 1, 2022, Polish radio amateur Jacek Lipkowski (callsign SQ5BPF) demonstrates a working replica of The Thing, using standard parts from a local hardware store.





August 4, 1951: Beardless Colonel Harland Sanders ran for State Senator in Kentucky Republican Primary, before launching Kentucky Fried Chicken at age 62, running on a platform of 11 herbs and spices...


August 10, 1960: A crowd gathers at the grand opening of a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Austin, Texas. Just a "moment in time" photo, with everybody dressed just the way they want to be, including the young boy who showed up in what looks to be a swimsuit and his barefoot, shirtless friend, the young man in the T-shirt and Levis and loafers etc ... Just a classic slice of 1960. It's often argued about which is better: KFC or Church's. I prefer Church's.

Col Harland David Sanders would also sell bobble-head figures of himself in Virginia at the Upperville Colt & Horse show (oldest in America, dates back to 1853) in 1969. Sanders used KFC to start a tech company in Richardson, Texas which revolutionized communications with fiber optics.


August 4, 1952: "Who Says Flying Saucers Are the Bunk? (on the front page Evening Star) "Anybody looking for a real flying saucer has about as much chance as a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat."




August 4, 1960: The X-15 Rocket sets a new speed record AND Fireflies Extra Glow Laid to Nuclear Fallout.




August 4, 1997: Miss Nicest Navel...So the naval gaze started 28 years ago.?




August 4, 1997: Skynet, the world's first Automated Defense Network, was activated.




-REAL ID enforced
-Stablecoins incoming
-mRNA Stargate project
-TSA biometric overhaul
-ICE using facial recognition
-Palantir in 30+ federal agencies
-Google/Amazon health data tracking
-AI surveillance towers scanning highways

Surveillance State: engaged





August 4, 2000: Space Cowboys, a science fiction/adventure film directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Eastwood along with Tommy Lee Jones and Donald Sutherland, along with the feature film debut of a 28-year-old actor named Jon Hamm (Young Pilot #2), is released in theaters. The original script called for the IKON orbital weapons platform to be a top secret NASA project. NASA refused to cooperate with the production, unless the script was changed to depict N.A.S.A. as having no involvement in placing weapons in orbit. LOL, how ironic given NASA's origins. Clint Eastwood nicknamed this movie "Geezer Power".




"We must stop the terror. I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you.... Now, watch this drive."
— President George W. Bush (August 4, 2002)




"What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife."
— Nikola Tesla