In Defense of Miles Mathis

Below is a rebuttal and response to a recent attack on Miles Mathis, titled “Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Clowns.” Note that from the first word there is already an ad hominem attack in the form of childish name-calling. Apparently Miles is a clown, and the picture of him at the top of the post is supposed to prove it, I guess. Also note that the paper was first published on Mark Tokarski’s (now defunct) “Miles Mathis discussion site,” which is apparently just New Speak for a place where discussion is forbidden. The “About” section of the site no longer exists, but it originally stated that: “As always there are ground rules. No personal attacks. I have met him, he is a human being, even as some think he is a front for a committee. Be respectful of one another.” So much for that. I guess the next post he publishes will be a hit piece titled “Miles ‘Pantsload’ Mathis.” Oh wait, they’ve already used that one

[Update May 13, 2018: The link at the top to the commentary on Miles has been deleted from that site, which is now also vacant with a “for rent” sign hanging on the front window. I have re-linked to an archived copy of that page, which I made using the wayback machine before it was erased. That site was a spin-off blog started by Mark Tokarski, who has a regular blog called Piece of Mindful (PoM or POM or now lovingly referred to as POS). I was a contributor there for about 6 months in 2016-2017 before I parted ways and opened up shop here. Mark has now re-published that hit piece on his regular blog under the title ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’ and also added some scurrilous and libelous accusations against Miles. I will not link to the new piece, though you can easily find it yourself. I will have an update in the coming days responding to the new accusations but others have responded to it in comments.]

Two things I want to say before I continue. First: this response is long, and if you think I am trying to Waste Your Time™, then by all means don’t read it. Nobody’s forcing you to. If you think this is part of some manufactured fracas to further split the truther ‘community,’ you will be relieved to hear that the gambit cannot work if you close this browser tab now and ignore it. I sincerely wish I had done both of those things when I first saw the post authored by the pseudonymous “Robert Zherunkel.” But I didn’t and now here I am, unable to ignore it and allowing myself to be hoisted on somebody’s petard—maybe even my own. It is my hamartia. Or one of them, anyway.

Second: I think it’s perfectly legitimate to be skeptical of Miles and question whether or not he his genuine. My intention is not one of “how dare you!” and my response here is not a knee-jerk defense. It comes after having spent a long time wrangling with some of the same questions raised by “Robert.” But unlike him, I did not seek answers to my questions in rhetorical gimmicks. I prefer substance. So in responding to his accusations, I will also be offering some insight into how I came to believe, and still do, that Miles is a genuine person who is genuine in his intentions. That doesn’t mean I think he is perfect or that I agree with everything he writes or every conclusion he reaches. But it does mean that when I think he’s wrong, I don’t think he’s being wrong on purpose. In other words, I don’t think he’s trying to deliberately mislead or act as some kind of limited hangout.

Whoever wrote this pathetic attack piece wants you to dismiss the scientific work of Miles Mathis based on sophistry, since he is unable to show how it is wrong. I don’t think you can reach conclusions about the work (including deciding whether it could be the work of a single person) unless you have read it. And if you haven’t, then it would be best to remain agnostic rather than fall for the sophistry—and sophistry it is, starting from the ad hominem in the title.

Extraordinary Claims…

I think I might know who “Robert Zherunkel” is: the ghost of Carl Sagan. Who else would start out by admonishing that “Extraordinary claims, it is said, require extraordinary evidence.” Yes, that is often said. But remind yourself who says it. You always hear it from the (paid) guardians of the mainstream who try to discredit all evidence that contradicts the status quo. The fact that this writer’s first move is to pull out one of the go-to talking points of paid shills and mainstream gatekeepers is, in my mind, a dead giveaway. In my opinion the whole thing sounds like it was written by a fairly experienced JTRIG operative who has underestimated or utterly failed to understand his target audience. He thinks he can trigger the desired response in Miles’ readers using ad hominems, appeals to authority, and low-level stuff like dragging out this tired mantra. He flatters you as someone who is too sophisticated to believe what you read in newspapers, but treats you like someone who has just begun to question their daily dose of propaganda. His ploy is patently transparent and simply won’t work. Not on us. Can we please speak with your supervisor, “Robert”?

Look, I agree that it is hard to believe that a person like Miles exists. The sheer genius of his insights, the scope of his work, and the scale of his productivity are admittedly hard to believe. They are extraordinary. But that doesn’t mean they’re impossible. In the world our governors have molded, they have tried to marginalize and quash people like Miles, rob them of any incentive to do what they do. They want us to believe that it is no longer possible to achieve so much, especially without the promise of monetary reward and especially if it goes against the matrix of lies they have constructed. “Robert” cannot even fathom that Miles hasn’t copyrighted his work, it is so outside his corrupted vision of conceivable human action. And then he wants you to believe it is a sign that something is amiss. Sorry, but I’m not buying the vision of humanity and human potential that he’s selling.

‘Pataphysicist Extraordinaire?

“Robert” mentions how inconceivable it is that someone who lacks a laboratory, graduate student assistants, a high-powered computer, and an advanced degree could have achieved what Miles has. (I believe he errs in thinking that Miles has never had access to a research library, since much of his earlier work was completed while living near Amherst. And anyway, hasn’t he heard of the internet?) But it actually makes sense when you read his science work, because it is bears the hallmarks of an autodidact who started from square one and questioned everything as he went along. Do you think that most people with advanced degrees in physics these days have actually read the original works accredited to Newton or Einstein? No, they are taught glosses of their work in textbooks. People like that have the tendency to humblebrag that they stand on the shoulders of giants. But the problem is that they are not taught to question the work of those giants. They are taught to accept it as dogma.

Miles also stands on the shoulders of giants, but before trying to look further, he first peered over their shoulders and checked their work. And guess what? Turns out they weren’t as giant as we are taught, since he found a lot of mistakes. He explains these mistakes very clearly. They are not hard to understand and usually involve simple errors of algebra, variable assignment, or logical contradictions. Of course Miles’ work is not just a simple correction to this work: he brings to the table many deep yet straightforward conceptual insights and expands far beyond the work he corrects.

The suggestion that his physics work is a pastiche of different theories is only something that someone who hadn’t read his work could argue without being disingenuous, and it could only resonate with people who haven’t read it. The reason is that it is coherent. It is of a piece. Not only that, you can see how one idea or paper leads another, how later papers build on earlier ones (and plus his physics papers are chock-a-block with interconnecting hyperlinks). For example, his work on Pi follows from the work he did dissecting and correcting Newton’s Lemmae, as well as his work on deriving a calculus that was appropriate for describing the physical world, along with others. He then uses his reworking of Pi to correct many mainstream equations. It’s also worth noting that his argument about kinematic Pi differs from other “tired old math paradoxes” since it is derived from different postulates and is brought to bear only in some circumstances (to describe the path of moving objects). Thus although it may appear superficially to be simply a variant of the diagonal paradox, it is not.

To give you a point of comparison, consider Miles’ conspiracy opus. Imagine someone suggested to you that he had simply cobbled together a bunch of disparate conspiracies and alternative histories from all over the place and claimed intellectual ownership. I don’t think you’d buy it. First you wouldn’t buy it because you won’t find anything anywhere about many of the things he has (un)covered, and the way he approaches the things that have been covered elsewhere are always unique and usually far more decisive and illuminating. Is there anybody else out there, for example, who has ever said that major historical figures like Hitler, Mussolini and JFK were gay Jewish actors who faked their deaths. No, there isn’t. Now imagine someone suggested to you that each of Miles’ papers on those historical figures were all written by different ‘oddballs’ and Miles just revised their work to make it sound like one person wrote them. Would you buy it? Of course not.  So to suggest he cobbled his work together from different sources is an obvious non-starter. And for anyone who has followed the progression of Miles’ work and seen how he built up to these and other conclusions and how intertwined his various papers are, stiff with interconnected hyperlinks, you would have to think that anyone claiming that his work was a pastiche had in fact never read it and/or was deliberately trying to mislead you. For those of us who have read and digested his work in physics, “Robert’s” insinuation is equally absurd. Either “Robert” has not read the work (and is therefore in no position to judge it) or he has read it and is deliberately mischaracterizing it in order to mislead you.

Oddball Comparisons and Appeals to Authority

Here we go with more ad hominems when “Robert” compares Miles to other “oddballs.” But just because the mainstream has discredited these people’s work, how can we be sure they’re wrong? Because the ‘experts’ say so? Whoever this “Robert” is he sure seems to put an awful lot of faith in mainstream knowledge and expertise, wouldn’t you say? There are many implicit and explicit appeals to authority throughout the piece, such as when he says that “any time that Mathis has written on a topic that I have direct, personal knowledge of, he has gotten it wrong. Dead wrong.” Yet he fails to offer any examples, so I guess we’re just supposed to take his word for it.

He makes a lot of claims about what characterizes oddball work (it “bends terminology to make [an] argument”) and charges Miles with the same misdeed without being able to point to a single example. His argument in a nutshell is this: “The mainstream has dismissed others because their work is ‘not even wrong’ and can be trivially falsified. And if that’s true of these others, then it must be true of Miles.” Frankly I’m surprised anybody would think this kind of sophistry would work on this audience, and I’m even more surprised that Mark agreed to publish it. I have defended and made excuses for him until now, but no longer.

Now, if “Robert” will only be satisfied when “experts in the field” are willing to confirm the value or validity of Miles’ physics work, I can point to at least three I know of:

One of them is Tahir Yaqoob, a PhD in Astrophysics who has held positions at many prestigious universities and now works at the University of Maryland and the Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA. Yaqoob was the one who encouraged Miles to publish his first science book and also wrote the forward and a blurb on the back cover. Of course “Robert” might object that the support of a NASA-affiliated scientist is a hug red flag. For that matter, one might argue that the endorsement of any mainstream physicist is a red flag. But in that case he has put Miles in a no-win situation. Also, to immediately dismiss Yaqoob on that affiliation alone would be a symptom of what Emerson called “the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Another supporter introduced himself on Clues Forum in 2015 as Gopi Krishna, who earned his PhD in physics at the University of Houston. In a thread on Miles at CF he wrote:

“I came across Mathis’ work at the end of 2012/beginning of 2013, for a completely different reason: his physics. Now, my background has been in studying physics, both conventional (as a graduate student) and alternative (as a hobby), and due to a reference given by a friend, I checked out the physics theories. Now, I do not know if you guys have checked it out, and that would probably have to be a separate topic to examine it in detail, but the long and short of it is that the theory was intriguing, and very effective in explaining most of the puzzling phenomena in modern physics without enormous amount of tensor theories and so on. Since I already knew from my research that the justification for many mathematical assumptions were on a very shaky foundation, I proceeded to examine his idea of a “charge field” … and it cleared up a lot. I emailed back and forth for about 6 months, trying to hash out my questions regarding the physics, and thereafter, I have visited him two times. Once for nearly 5 days for a Physics conference, at which time everything other than physics was restricted to over-the-table conversations. The second time was around the first week of this year.”

Gopi also says there that he got his degree from the University of Houston, and I have verified his credentials through a web search. So here we have someone with a PhD in physics consulting Miles in person to help improve his understanding of physics. If Miles was a front for a committee whose main task was to mark their work with a consistent style like some kind of ghost writer, would he be able to discuss such issues with Gopi one-on-one like that? Would he be able to host a conference to discuss physics? Would his minders allow him to do that? What if one of the conference participants asked a tough question or if Miles forgot something in the over 6,000 pages written by his committee and published on his science site? Seems risky and implausible. Remember these annual conferences were capped at 8 participants. So there doesn’t seem to be much upside, while the risks run pretty high.

And finally we have Steve Oostdijk who has a degree in electrical engineering, electronics and avionics from Delft University of Technology. Steve has been one of Miles’ most steadfast and vocal supporters. What’s funny is that many have accused Steve of being a Miles Mathis sock puppet. See for example the accusations by Kevin Bos in his review of Miles’ first book on Amazon, where he writes “Steven Oostdijk is a known Mathis alias.” Which is kind of weird since Steve has an extensive LinkedIn page and other presence on social media. Any doubts were put to rest of course after Steve posted a youtube video with an experiment confirming Miles’ work on Pi. Come to think of it, “Robert” also accuses some “Team Mathis” supporters of just being “Mathis himself under an alias.” I guess that’s another line he took straight from the playbook.

(There is also an e-mail exchange that Miles published on his site with a physicist working in private industry who seems very satisfied with the guidance Miles provided and the theories that informed it. And another e-mail with a different scientist who lauds his work. You could argue that those e-mail exchanges are just fabricated. I suppose they could be, but if not that counts as two more “experts in the field” who validate his work. They could all be wrong, I suppose, but it would be lying to say his work is appreciated only by dilettantes.)

Of course it would be hypocritical of me to condemn “Robert’s” appeal to authority and then suggest to you that you should believe in the validity of Miles’ work due to the support of these experts. I only list these examples as a rebuttal to “Robert’s” argument that Miles has no support from experts. It simply isn’t true. But here, as with anything else concerned with matters of truth, you ultimately have to trust your own judgment. (Although I admit that when I was struggling to trust my own judgment about his work, this support from people with training in the field helped me make up my mind. That and the shills coming out of the woodwork to attack and ridicule him in the most dishonest and childish ways.)

In light of “Robert’s” comparison to other “oddball” scientists, we also have to consider the very real possibility that some or much of anti-mainstream science is created by the mainstream in order to be easily debunked. The obvious example is Flat Earth. Another example can be found with some of the worst arguments about 9/11—arguments which seem to have been planted deliberately as low-hanging fruit for the debunkers to pick in order to discredit all skepticism about 9/11. In the case of the planted alternative scientific theories, the conclusion is, “See there is nothing wrong with mainstream science; oh and look what will happen to your career and credibility if you dare to question it. Really now, how could you have listened to someone with such a poorly designed website?” Here I’ll quote from Miles’ recent outing of the Electric Universe project (aka Thunderbolts):

“It now looks to me like the Thunderbolts are just a continuation of the old Velikovsky con. They hook you by admitting what you already know: the upper levels of the mainstream are composed of a bunch of liars and frauds, and textbook physics is little more than an embarrassing edifice of fudged math and bad theory. Using real plasma physics as ballast, they then cobble together an electric universe replacement for the old tinkertoy gravity model, and you feel like you have made some progress. But your progress is illusory, because the Thunderbolts were created to fail. Not only are their theories shallow and extremely limited, but they are purposely created to self-destruct upon any serious reading. Compared to me, these guys are one-trick ponies, who keep publishing the same ten sentences over and over. In 40 years, they haven’t solved a single actual problem. Conversely, in less than half the time, I have solved hundreds of major problems in physics back to the time of Euclid. While these bozos are wasting their time in conferences and chatrooms and Youtube videos, I am solving new problems, doing all the math and theory from the ground up.” [I should point out that Miles also offered a substantive critique of Thunderbolts several years ago.]

Then “Robert” links to a cluesforum thread on the Stephen Hawking hoax along with the accusation that Miles cribbed it – meaning he simply stole their work and passed it off as his own. I encourage you to go to that link. You will see some vague (and also unoriginal) discussion about Stephen Hawking being a hoax, along with almost zero evidence — just a lot of speculation. In fact, the two videos the original poster linked to are completely ridiculed by the forum members. And then on the 3rd page someone links to Miles’s work and the thread suddenly starts to take off with a lot of people presenting additional evidence, etc. Someone even posts the picture with Hawking’s big front bottom teeth sticking out, which appeared in Miles’ paper though they give no credit (if anything, they are the ones cribbing his work). Notice too that Shack tries to spin it to one of his ridiculous over-the-top theories by saying that Stephen Hawking is some kind of animatronic puppet. [By the way, for some reason people find it spooky that Miles Mathis is MM and Simon Shack is SS. But recall that Simon Shack is a pseudonym for Simon Hytten, so his initials aren’t SS.]

In any event, I don’t recall Miles ever saying the idea of Hawking being some kind of a hoax was original to him. But he does claim to have offered a decisive analysis, and in that I agree, especially if you compare his paper to that thread. On top of that, you also get from Miles what you don’t get from anybody at cluesforum: a very penetrating insight into why the hoax was perpetrated – an explanation that follows the conclusions he reached from over a decade of picking apart mainstream scientific bullshit (but then also reconstructs it without simply throwing up his hands and declaring that all science is bullshit).

Go, Team Mathis, Go!

People like “Robert” always try to sell you an inverted version of reality where white is black and up is down. In his telling, “Miles Mathis” is surrounded by a posse of flunkies who place their made-up hero on a pedestal and are always standing at the ready to shout down criticism and close ranks: a “web-brigade of friends [who] can shove [his work] down people’s throats in comment-threads far and wide;” “cyber-friends [who] charge into any forum and defend their guy tooth and nail.”

In “Robert’s” topsy-turvy version of reality, criticism of Miles on comment threads “far and wide” will be quickly shut down. My experience has actually been the opposite. Outside the realm of PoM, whenever I bring up Miles’ work, it almost always brings people out of nowhere immediately who try to discredit or dismiss him and his work. Even on a forum like Reddit’s conspiracy subreddit or fakeologist (just look at the comments on the black frosting post). And this is especially true with his scientific work. In fact, it was this experience I had on several occasions that helped to convince me that he was legit: If random, anonymous people were appearing out of nowhere trying to convince me that he was wrong using pathetic arguments without any substance, then to my mind it was a good indication that he was really on to something.

Here’s a personal example: when I posted my paper that tries to apply his theories to LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions AKA ‘cold fusion’) at a LENR discussion forum, the reaction was most curious. Within minutes, someone replied with “Pi=4?” The paper I posted made no mention of Pi, and Miles’ papers on Pi are way down at the bottom of his website. So how did he so quickly find, read, digest and refer to it? A few minutes later, somebody posted “Does he really believe that Stephen Hawking died in 1985 and has been played by an impostor since then?” While it’s true that his paper about Hawking does appear on his science site, it is also down towards the bottom. How could somebody so quickly have found and read that paper? It was clear that people were almost immediately chiming in with things that seemed purposefully designed to discredit him; and it was clear they were using ammunition they had at the ready. The other thing about that thread is that many of the people commenting were first-time posters, most of whom would never be heard from again. Now go ahead and look at the commenters on the thread about Miles’ genealogy. How many are first-time posters? A lot.

I quickly came to suspect that the site where I had posted that LENR paper was itself carefully monitored and that shills were being sent in to secure the breach. My first clue actually came when I e-mailed the site owner my paper for submission and he didn’t reply. I then wrote to him in a different comment thread, and he said he never got my e-mail. So I sent him again. He looked for it and said he found both e-mails had been diverted to his trash folder. Not his spam folder. His trash folder. When was the last time somebody sent an e-mail to you that found its way mysteriously to your trash folder? I have never had that happen before or since. That was the first time weird e-mail anomalies happened to me in connection with Miles, especially his physics work, but it would not be the last, and our correspondence has been repeatedly stymied. I know I’m not the only one who has had that problem corresponding with him. He didn’t change his e-mail address for nothing, you know.

I had a somewhat similar experience over at cluesforum when someone started a discussion of his work on Pi. It was just me and Vexman explaining and then defending Miles against an onslaught of substance-free and repetitive criticism, much of it from people who said they joined cluesforum just to chime in to that debate. (I’m not imagining things: to become a cluesforum member you have to submit a statement about why you’re joining, and IIRC at least two people stated that was their reason for joining.)

I’ll give you another example. Here is an entry on what appears to be a very obscure blog from July 31, 2013. A scarce 3 hours after the post went up, the “criticism” starts and just keeps rolling in. People appearing out of the woodwork to bash Miles and his work. Some of it really puerile, like: “Miles is out of his mind. He might think that there is a god but he is just a child. If this artist ever sees a 25 feet tall man walking to his house he would think that this 25 feet tall man was a real thing. So do people who take L.S.D. think. So we now know that this Miles Mathis is just a drug taker. Hey Miles. You could just smoke some pot and get high and see what is not real.” Um, okay…

Yes, there are supporters in the comments, but most of them arrived quite late to the party, probably after doing a web search for Miles Mathis, which is how I found that blog (on the 3rd page of google results). But supporters are still heavily outnumbered by denouncers.

This Quora post is another example. To my eyes the question seems to have been posed simply a set-up for them to post a derogatory response. And then there is his entry in Rational Wiki, to which Miles replied, with typically perspicacious logic: “If they are right and I am just a deluded crank … why the obvious and pathetic smear campaign? Do you really need to smear deluded cranks? No, logically and rationally, you can ignore deluded cranks, because they are no threat to any real science. Therefore, logically and rationally, the fact that they feel it necessary to slander me with this prominent transparent project is another sign they are threatened.” Ditto for “Robert.”

And no matter where you go on the web, the criticism sounds the same; it has the same form and tone. It rarely addresses substance, or when it does it frames his arguments in a disingenuous way in order to dismiss them or make them sound totally absurd. I have been told on multiple occasions from different commenters that they are in graduate school in math or physics and that they print out his papers and pass them around the department for a laugh. When I first heard that, it made me pause and question myself. But knowing what I do of graduate school life, I found it far fetched. Grad students usually don’t have time for that, and that doesn’t sound like how they unwind. But when I heard it a second time in another place, I realized it’s one of their scripted talking points designed to make you feel like you yourself are a laughingstock for giving his work any credence.

What’s the Point?

One of the things that is clearly lacking from “Robert’s” hatchet job is what he thinks is the point of this physics psy-op. (The same can be said for Kevin’s piece on Miles’ genealogy.) Is it merely a Waste Our Time™ strategy as “Robert” suggests? If it is, I’d say it’s failing badly. First of all, most people don’t even bother trying to read it because they feel it is ‘above their pay grade.’ So right off the top it wastes exactly zero time for most people. Some people start reading it but find they either don’t understand it or disagree with it, so they stop reading. So it doesn’t waste much of their time. And then there are those of us like myself, Vexman, Jared and many others who feel that the profound and penetrating insights into the physical world we have gained are well worth the time we invested. Do you feel you’ve wasted your time reading Miles’ conspiracy work, or do you, like me, feel you have gained profound and penetrating insights into history and politics and strategies of rule?

You might counter by saying the putative “Miles Mathis project” is the same as the Electric Universe gambit, a way to steer critics of mainstream science down a dead-end alley. Well if that’s the case, then Miles certainly doesn’t act like someone who is trying to build a following. “Robert” finds it inexplicable that Miles never joins the discussion on a physics forum devoted to him in order to have his “huge” ego stroked. But he fails to point out what is really inexplicable: if Miles was the face of some larger project aimed to divert these people into a dead end, wouldn’t he (or someone on the committee pretending to be him) get down in the trenches to rally the troops? I think the answer is obviously yes. And yet, Miles certainly doesn’t seem eager to rally the troops or recruit as many people as possible into his camp. Remember that the Electric Universe folks spend their time in conferences and chatrooms and Youtube videos. If this was a committee running a project, you’d at least think that someone would be assigned to hob nob with the hoi polloi as Miles’ internet persona. But he doesn’t seem to be trying to make friends or enlist allies, as anybody who has e-mailed him is keenly aware. He ran a few physics conferences, capped at 8 guests, but has discontinued those as far as I know. That’s about the extent of it.

And speaking of those conferences, didn’t Mark attend the last one in 2016? That’s actually how I was first drawn to PoM. As somebody whose thinking has been profoundly influence by Miles’ work (both physics and history) I had been feeling ‘alone in the wilderness’ because I could find nowhere to discuss his work in a friendly environment. Everywhere I turned was a shill-fest. Then I stumbled on Mark’s comments in the fakeologist comments on ‘black frosting’ that I linked to above. Aha! Here was someone defending Mathis against charges (which were absurd to my mind) that he was just a fabricated identity fronting a committee. A quick google search on Mark’s name brought me to PoM. (There was someone else on that thread, Brandon, who had also attended and later sent me some pictures from the conference. He also defended Miles against charges of spookhood.)

I won’t rehash my brief history with PoM here. I will say that at first I was delighted to find a group of like-minded people who seemed to admire Miles’ work and take it seriously. So I find it very surprising to see Mark publishing this latest piece. He was there for four days at a conference where people were discussing Miles’ work in physics. Did Miles seem like he was working from prepared notes? Did it seem like the questions he got were planted or that he hemmed and hawed or found it difficult to answer them? Or did it instead seem like he was spontaneously relating knowledge he understood at a deep level, as if he himself had come up with those ideas himself? Was there any hint or indication that the physics work was not of his own creation? And again, if you were fronting this psyop, why would you open your house up to a bunch of strangers to ask you questions about an immense corpus of physics papers unless you felt you could answer them and discuss the work competently and confidently? That doesn’t sound like something a clown would do. Maybe a high-wire trapeze artist, but not a clown.

And speaking of artists, let’s not forget that before Miles started writing on physics, he was writing scathing critiques of modern art and artists and art critics. That the CIA has exclusively promoted modern art during the 20th century (and that their plutocrat masters have profited handsomely from that promotion) is well known. It is not even ‘conspiracy theory’ anymore, since the CIA has admitted their promotion. So are they also behind his critiques of modern art? Why? And if not, why would they choose Miles of all people as a vehicle for their scientific pastiche?

And so again I ask: if Miles’ work on science is the product of an elaborate psyop, what is the point of it? All I hear are crickets.

Coda

I have been corresponding with Miles by e-mail for a little over two years now. Part of my conclusion that he is genuine comes from the texture of those e-mails, which is something that is inherently difficult to relate. One thing that stands out was that when I sent him my paper on Gandhi, he wrote back saying that he had sent it to a friend of his who was from India, and conveyed to me his friend’s reactions. Later when I posted the work on cluesforum, I would learn that the friend he was referring to was none other than Gopi (who commented on my post, identifying himself as Miles’ “Indian friend”). You will remember that Gopi is the guy with the PhD in physics who had sought out Miles’ scientific advice and traveled to Taos on at least two occasions. Does that sounds like the way a big psyop is run? You may say it’s all part of an elaborate charade. Fine. But I don’t think so. There are many other things I could detail from our e-mail conversations, but this rebuttal is already getting long enough, and anyway I do respect Miles’ right to confidentiality when it comes to our e-mail correspondence.

I should add that Miles knows who I am and where I live, and that is part of the reason he does not entirely trust me. In fact, early on in our correspondence he said he thought I was running a project on him and nearly cut off contact. At some point I asked myself, if he himself was running a project, why would he be so suspicious of me? Wouldn’t he try to enlist any and all possible allies to misdirect them down a dead-end limited hangout? Of course you might think that I’m making all this up and that I’m in cahoots with him and a ranking member of the Miles Mathis committee. And I guess writing this defense will only serve as confirmation of that. I don’t know what I can say to change your mind, but I will point out that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have Miles discover a worldwide conspiracy controlled by Jews who promote Zionism, and then assign him a sidekick who is Jewish and lives in Israel. It doesn’t exactly add to his credibility, now does it? And he has told me he has lost supporters for publishing my work. (For the record: I grew up in the US in a non-Zionist reform Jewish household and am decidedly not a Zionist nor do I believe in Judaism. I live in Israel because my wife was born here. And no, I’m not his sidekick). 

Frankly, I cannot say that I begrudge him his mistrust. From his perspective, I can see how the red flags stack around me (though I don’t come from wealth and nobody in my family has been involved in intelligence work or anything like that). But as Miles wrote in his paper on PoM:

“It would be unfair to ditch [Josh] just because he is Jewish. Some people have claimed I jump to conclusions, but I don’t. I require a high level of evidence in everything I look at. Once I get to that level, I can make a fast decision, but I don’t proceed on hunches. Like anyone else, I start with hunches, but I don’t travel on them. I travel on a compilation of facts. Honestly, Josh is the toughest call I have had to make in my short career as a Truther. He admitted from the start he was in Israel, and my gut reaction was to dump him based only on that. Given what I have been discovering, the odds were very high he was trying to run some sort of confidence trick on me. However, odds don’t always pan out. Odds can give you a hunch, but they can’t provide a final decision. In Josh’s favor he has written two long and well researched papers on Gandhi and Dreyfus, in neither of which could I find any spin. They were good enough to publish, and I published them.”

So ask yourself: do you have enough facts at hand to conclude Miles is a limited hangout or the front for some kind of intelligence psyop? I myself have a lot of facts and evidence to suggest the opposite. Just because he has reached a different conclusion than you on the subject of the occult, or elite pedophilia, or transvestites, or chemtrails, or whatever doesn’t mean he is trying to direct people’s attention away from that. It just means he has a different opinion. To quote again from his paper on PoM: “Not everyone I disagree with is perforce an agent.” Plus, it’s not as if there isn’t a ton of other people covering those other topics, right? So why would Intelligence want to (mis)direct people away from those theories, which they appear in fact to be so heavily promoting? I believe he deserves the benefit of the doubt.

And if Miles is misdirecting or is a limited hangout, does that mean we should dismiss his entire corpus of work? That’s the implication we get, where “Robert” tells us it means that we can get some of our heroes back, even transparent propagandists like George Orwell. What? First of all, if Miles is a limited hangout, that means he has offered much good material along with false or misleading stuff. That’s how LH’s work, remember? So it’s quite a leap of logic there. You would want, I think, to go through and state exactly where you think he’s right and where you think he’s misdirecting so you don’t make the mistake of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But “Robert” would have you believe that if Miles is a false guru, then the other gurus he has outed as false are actually real. Again, what? Look, if you want to reclaim a hero, you don’t have to prove to yourself that Miles is misdirecting. Just go back to whatever paper they appear in and figure out if and how Miles was wrong. You’d have to do that even if you think Miles is intentionally leading us astray.

In closing, I want to point out that “Robert” also claims that Kevin Starr’s recent piece on Miles’ genealogy shows us that “Mathis lies.” That’s funny, I don’t remember Kevin showing that in his paper at all. He asserts a couple of times that Miles has been disingenuous in hiding things he “must have known” about his ancestors, but has nothing to substantiate it with. In other words, Kevin doesn’t show that Mathis lies, he claims it. But through “Robert’s” alchemical sophistry, empty claims have somehow turned into convincing demonstrations. I for one, am not falling for it.

 

Update: Miles has a few cutting remarks to add in the latest addendum to his earlier response about his genealogy. And Vexman has now chimed in as well.

Later update: Mark Tokarski promises that more hit pieces are on the way. And I promise not to respond to them. This one took way too much time to compose as it is. I refuse to be baited into losing any more time on this subject. And anyway, judging from what I’ve seen so far I can already tell that whatever they have to say will be “not even wrong.” Just a lot of jealous bluster and disingenuous patter.

One thing I will say: I have never complained about not being able to comment over there. I simply pointed to the absurd hypocrisy of starting a blog whose purpose is “discussion” (it’s in the name of the blog for crying out loud!) and yet to forbid discussion. I believe this is the same point Miles is making, where he has seen on more than one occasion where discussion about his work has been shut down on forums that were created for discussion. But if your site was never created to allow discussion in the first place (see e.g., www.mileswmathis.com), then there is no hypocrisy, is there?

Also note the reason Mark gives for closing down discussion: “Team Mathis sits outside the gate waiting to be let in, and once that happens this blog will become a moonscape littered with debris.” Why is that? First off note the topsy-turvy depiction of reality. He gives you the impression that the site is being circled by Team Mathis jackals who will flood the gates once comments are enabled. But if you look at the comments of the genealogy post at the “discussion” site before they were shut down, it runs very much in favor of Kevin. Roughly 3 to 1 if not more, depending on whether you count posters or posts. No, the reason it would become a moonscape is because “Team Mathis” has the better of it and would continue to tear apart the “arguments” of the other side, littering the comments section with the debris of demolished sophistry, obliterated fallacies and dismembered straw men. Like in every other case where a discussion board has shut down discussion of Miles’ work, it is an act of desperation.

I could care less if Mark doesn’t allow discussion at any of his sites. I certainly won’t be commenting at any of them in the future even if he does open the gates. In fact it would be better if he didn’t allow comments, since he has allowed a once disciplined comment section at PoM to turn into a complete shill fest.

I turned off comments on this particular post since I did not want to be baited into wasting more of my time on it. I know my weaknesses. One of them is the urge to respond to disingenuous, poorly reasoned criticism about things I care deeply about, like, you know, the truth. So the only way to protect myself from that weakness is to close comments. It’s the same reason why I don’t keep any sweets in the house, either, since I know I won’t be able to resist. Will power is not my strong suit, and this second update is a testament to that. However, the comments on all the other entries in this blog are still active. And as always you can contact me directly via the contact page if you wish to pick up the gauntlet.

Further update: I woke up this morning with the realization that it was a mistake to close comments here. I knew that it might give the impression that I, too, am afraid of criticism and counter-arguments, whereas in fact I simply didn’t want to be bothered swatting flies. But the realization I had this morning is that the arguments on the other side are so bad that they defeat themselves. I don’t even need to respond. So I’m taking this as an exercise in self-control. Maybe it will even help me kick-start my diet. So I’ve opened comments — have at it! But keep it civil.

Update May 22: I’ve been meaning to get to this for awhile. Apparently after seeing that their attack on Miles (the one I responded to above) failed to land any punches or be taken seriously be all thinking people, they followed up by doubling down on some even more ridiculous, illogical and libelous accusations. These include the accusation that Miles is either a pedophile or a pederast who agreed to act as a front for TPTB in exchange for an easier sentence, namely house arrest. On top of that Miles is accused of having taken naked pictures of a young girl and put them in a book that he keeps in his house. At the same time they also accuse him of being homosexual, so go figure. The whole thing is beyond ridiculous. It is easy to look up people who have been convicted of sex crimes. I’ve done it. Miles isn’t on the list. Nor does he have a criminal record. That is also easy to confirm. You would have thought the snakes at PoM would have done that before posting such accusations and opening themselves to a libel suit, but as Miles has lamented, “How do you sue Intelligence?” I remember somebody once insinuated to Mark that his brother had probably been a pedophile since he was a Catholic priest. He was fit to be tied. But apparently it’s OK to accuse others of that based on zero evidence. The whole thing is really sickening.

And as for the book, well, of course they don’t let convicted sex offenders keep naked pictures of little girls around, do they? On top of that we have heard from Brandon, who attended the last conference that Miles hosted in 2016. Miles showed the “Tess Book” to Brandon on the last day of the conference, and Brandon says the pictures and paintings in the book are innocent and fully clothed. You can find many of them on Miles’ website and judge for yourself if they look sexualized in any way. How do we know Brandon was really at the conference, you ask? Because he sent a pictures he took of Miles sitting around a table at a restaurant flanked by conference attendees, including none other than Mark Tokarski.

With respect to house arrest, Mark was at the conference and left the house with Miles to go out to lunch on several occasions. If anybody should know that Miles isn’t on house arrest, it’s Mark. If anybody should know that Miles isn’t wearing an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet, it’s Mark. Why he would allow these absurd accusations to appear on his site is something I can’t explain. Maybe he’s still out to lunch.

I won’t bother responding to the rest of the stupidity with which they’ve padded their attack, but I will counter the whole thing with an equally plausible theory: I believe John Candy faked his death, lost some weight, dyed his hair, and re-emerged a few years later as the persona known as “Mark Tokarski.” They’re about the same age. And it would explain the Zamboni parked in front of his house on Google Earth satellite photos. Also note their striking resemblance and the way their ears, teeth, chin and nose match up. It’s a million-to-one shot, doc, million-to-one! Remember folks, face-chops don’t lie, only people do:

[Edit: It has come to my attention that some people aren’t getting the joke. They think I’m actually arguing that John Candy faked his death and was reassigned to the persona of Mark Tokarski. I am not. I am trying to make a point about the absurdity of the attacks against Miles by making an equally absurd argument about Mark. The inside joke here is that Mark used to use this same method where would take two famous people and line up their faces in this way. His hypothesis was that many of the old rockers and famous people from the 60’s or later faked their deaths and then were later re-assigned to a different role. So Janis Joplin became Amy Goodman, Jimmy Hendrix became Cornell West, Freddie Mercury became Dr. Phil, etc. etc. It says something about Mark’s discernment, which in turn tells us something about the merits of his recent decision to turn against Miles. The Candy-Tokarski  “face chop” is a parody. It isn’t even original to me; I took it from here.]

Update May 26: In a separate post, I have collated information on the amount of people who visited and viewed this post in the first two weeks, as well as their countries of origin. I have also collated the supportive comments from this post and put them together here.  

Update June 13: I am reprinting here a slightly edited version of my response to Allan Weispecker’s “open letter,” which he published on his blog in March 2017. I am also including some additional material from comments I have made here and elsewhere. He does not allow comments there, so I posted this originally in the comments at fakeologist (which devoted a post to the open letter), and also e-mailed to Allan, following which we had a brief back-and-forth over e-mail. Allan said he would correct the obvious errors that I pointed out in his original open letter, but since Allan is not a man of his word nor someone to be trusted, he of course never did. I am not going to link to his original letter nor to my response, but they can easily be found with google.

Allan showed up at some point in comments on this post, claiming that nobody had ever responded to his open letter, which of course was a lie. So why am I posting this now? Well the blog was just hit with a tsunami of trollish comments that refer back to some of Weispecker’s arguments. Although I don’t take these trolls seriously, I am adding this as a way of showing that they are full of shit. They claim nobody has ever responded to their points, but that’s false. They are deliberately lying. I am also adding this so that nobody can come to the comments section making the claims that they do. So without further ado, here is my original letter with some minor edits plus additional material:

I find your crusade against Miles to be misguided. And frankly many of your arguments just don’t wash. Now if I wanted to follow your method I’d say that because I find many of your arguments specious, it means you’re trying to use NLP to convince me that Miles is an LH when he’s really not. But I chalk it up to sour grapes. You wanted to come to Miles’s conference and he slammed the door in your face, so to speak. He said you’d ask questions no one would want to hear and be disruptive. So in the first case he doesn’t find what you do very interesting, which has got to sting. And as for being disruptive, well, you did write a book about yourself called “Can’t You Get Along with Anyone?” Is it any wonder he might think you’d be hard to get along with?

So let’s take a look at your arguments against him, starting with the weakest one, which appears in Part 2 of your open letter:

As background, it should be noted that you boasted that you don’t post much but when you do “it’s on the money.” You said that his “Paper Updates” are identical to the previous drafts. “In other words, his boasting on new information is totally bogus.” I literally did a face palm when I read that. The reason they are identical is that both the original links and the updated links point to the same document. You see, he doesn’t put up a new document with a new name for each update. He simply updates the paper, saves it with the same name, and uploads the new document as a replacement for the old one. So when you click on the original document, it links you to the updated one. You do understand how these things work, don’t you? Yes, you should. You seem to be pretty computer savvy. Plus, if you’ve ever read through one of his papers before the update (as I have on many occasions), then after the update, you can very clearly see the new information (which he always puts in [brackets] with the date of the update).

Now, if I were to use your “method” of deduction, I would say something like this: there is no possible way that this Allan character (or whoever the jokers are on the Weisbecker committee) could have made this mistake. He’s (they’re?) always telling us how careful he is and how it takes him forever to post because he waits until he’s absolutely sure and “on the money.” Plus he’s obviously very savvy with computers, having edited many videos on his own computer. He has his own website! This can’t possibly be an honest mistake. There is no way he could be that completely and utterly stupid. He’s clearly using deceit and NLP to make us think that Miles is deceiving us on that. No, it’s obvious to me now (although it took me awhile to suck in my gut and admit it to myself), that he’s LH. But why? Why the bald-faced lies?

Almost all of your other criticism chalks up to: I don’t agree with him or I think his argument is specious, therefore he is using NLP and trying to misdirect. Can you see how the conclusion doesn’t really follow from the premises? What a non sequitur it is? (Miles tried to show you that in his “beautiful logic” response to you [“Because I don’t know everything I am a limited hangout? Beautiful logic.”], but it obviously didn’t sink in.)

See, I just caught you lying to your readers, didn’t I? You seem to think Miles is infallible and therefore any sign of fallibility is clearly a sign of misdirection. That’s a pretty high bar and one that you’ve just hit your head on in an unforced error, ya dingus! Or rather I should say, you lying hypocrite!

You say that he must know why the JFK assassination was hoaxed, and is just misdirecting on the reasons why. Again, it’s a non sequitur. Why should he know? You might disagree with his argument about the motives for it (as I do), but that doesn’t mean he’s trying to misdirect. In all your flailing and finger-pointing, did you offer us a better idea of what the motive is? Instead of just saying: “I disagree, here’s why, and here’s a better hypothesis” all you can do is shout “NLP!” and dance around pointing fingers.

The real irony, though, is that you take his inability to provide a convincing motive for the JFK assassination as evidence of misdirection, while you yourself offer up not a single argument about what Miles’s motives are in his misdirection. You say his genealogy work is bunk and his focus on Jews is unimportant. So if you think he’s pointing us in the wrong direction, can you tell us what he’s misdirecting us away from? Or, as you did with Corbett, what lies he is trying to get us to unthinkingly accept? If you’re so far ahead of us, why don’t you tell us what his motive is? And if you can’t or if I disagree with you, then by your standards that means you must be a LH.

Same thing with your arguments about what you call his “guilt by association” tactics, his “faulty” inferences about genealogy, and most of your other criticisms as well. You’re grasping at straws, which you take as “big clues,” and then have the temerity to say that Miles is a LH because he does the same. It would be far more constructive, and in my view, to engage in a substantive critique. It is actually possible to disagree with someone and tell them “I think you’re wrong about this” without saying “therefore you’re obviously an LH engaged in NLP.” That would actually be far more interesting. And mature.

As for your assetion that Clues Forum is in cahoots with Miles: I agree with you that CF is a limited hangout and part of what I call “operation fantasy land.” Flat Earth is part of operation fantasy land. So is the CF position that rockets don’t work in a vacuum. But your attacks on them are completely irrelevant to Miles. What, because you don’t agree with their criticism of Miles it’s evidence that they are colluding with him? Come on! They have trashed him and his work every which way and left. By the way, your time would be better spent reading Miles’s work on physics than coming up with a hatful of specious and tenuous (and disingenuous?) arguments for why he’s an LH.

Your pinpointing of his British-isms is very tenuous. Yes, it’s true that you wouldn’t expect someone from Texas to use those colloquialisms, but the words “nobody from Texas would” could be used to describe most other things about Miles. He’s very unique, to say the least. And not just for a Texan. If you’ve read his poetry, you will see that he has a very broad vocabulary. So I don’t find it impossible to believe that he peppers his language with British slang. And if he has spent time with British people in the past, he might have picked up on a few expressions. It seems to me to be just as plausible that it is a quirk—even if he is from Texas.

[Here I’m going to add parts of my response to a troll named “Ricky” who brought up the Britishisms in a comment, which is also something the latest wave of trolls are coming back to:

“Alright folks, we’ve got a live one here. His IP address pins him to Arlington or Alexandra, VA, which is of course spitting distance from Langley. And he uses a non-existent e-mail address…. 

Miles later wrote to me about [the Britishisms] in an e-mail, which I will share here:

—-

“I don’t feel like I have to explain everything to trolls, and most times prefer not to answer them, but on the topic of my “Britishisms”, it is really no different than my occasional use of French or Latin. I know this stuff, so I sometimes insert it as color. I do that less than I used to, one because some readers see it as showing off and two because others see it as chaff. They don’t know these things and don’t want to look anything up. The Britishisms are somewhat different, because I use them for a slightly different reason. I usually use them to avoid American obscenities, since–being foreign–they seem slightly less raw. Some of my readers complain any time I use the word shit or fuck, and shite just seems to me to be a one-step tone down, for example. To my ear, it is a little less raw and a little more funny, just because it is British. Maybe that is just me.

“I did live in Europe and hang with Brits, so these words did jump in my bag, so to speak. The other thing is that I have read a lot, as anyone can tell, and that reading has been heavy with British novels, going back centuries. Also, I wrote the Lord of the Rings sequel, putting it as far as possible into British English, down to the spellings, in order to match the feel of Tolkien. Some of that rubbed off, like the way I usually put final quotation marks inside the period, for instance. In some cases, the British usage makes more sense to me, and I have never understood why American final quotes are hanging outside the period. But since I am not anal about this stuff, it can vary depending on my mood. I get emails from people bothered by this, but I just ignore it. If, given all my content, they wish to talk about that, I can’t be bothered.”

—

Well, to his credit he can’t be baited into wasting his time responding to these idiotic “arguments,” but I can unfortunately. What he said rings true to me, because I can relate: I had an advisor in grad school who was Australian, and some of his expressions have rubbed off on me. I still find myself using them some 15 years after graduating. Words like “reckon,” “wombat,” “get stuffed,” and “dingus,” As in: “I reckon you’re a right dingus, ‘Ricky.’ Get stuffed, you wombat.”]

<Back to my original response:>

One more thing: you repeat again and again in the Part II post that nobody on the Clues Forum thread addressed your argument about the microphone shadow. (Frankly I’m still confused about what your argument is as to why he didn’t point that out.) But that’s also a lie. In that thread I responded to your specious argument about his “impossible” word count, and in this comment I specifically responded to your shadow argument:

“And as for the microphone shadow, I’m not convinced you’re right, mainly because it’s a bit difficult to say exactly what position the mic is in. If you look at the shadow cast by Jack Ruby, it goes behind him and to the right. Well the shadow is also behind the mic and to the right. The angle looks a little off, but it’s hard to say for sure given that the location of the mic vis-a-vis the lights is hard to triangulate. But if it’s off, it’s only a little bit off. Maybe MM didn’t answer you because he also didn’t think you were right.

“If you’re right, then it’s hard to say why someone would have added that in there. Your conclusion is that it is a sign that the clues pointing towards a hoax were placed deliberately for us to think the event was hoaxed when in fact it was real. In other words, you’re saying the hoax is a hoax. I suppose it’s possible, but I doubt it. If it was indeed pasted in, I would guess it’s one of those little details they’ve added to troll us. They love trolling us.”

Do you realize how badly you’ve torpedoed your credibility with these demonstrably false accusations? Why should anybody believe any claim you make if you can’t get basic facts straight? Or as you would say: Your claim that nobody ever addressed the microphone shadow is another lie. But why, Allan, why the bald-faced lie?

I could go on and enumerate other problems with your argument and provide you will all the other evidence I have and reasons I believe that he is NOT an LH. (Though of course I cannot rule out the possibility). I could also go on and dissect your arguments to expose the “hidden” workings of your NLP. But I think I’ve made my point, and I’ve got better things to do.

[That’s the end of my response, but I want to add something else. If you look at the video coverage of the Oswald ‘assassination,’ you’ll see that there are bright flood lights in front of the scene from different angles. This means that the camera flash was not the only thing lighting this scene. I just went back to the JFK paper to look again at the picture in question and found this addendum Miles added to the JFK paper in February: More indication of that was found by other researchers after I published this paper. Although I used very little of the research of others in compiling this paper originally, a small amount of good research has come out afterwards, possibly in response to my findings. A YouTube video posted by Amy Joyce in 2017 compares the still photos to the films, tracking the camera flashes. She finds flashes for the photos of Jack Beers and others, but none for the iconic Bob Jackson photo above. I will be told he shot without a flash, but we can see that isn’t true. The shadows we see are from a flash, since they are cast directly backwards. If he had been relying on the lights above, the shadows would cast down. This means the event was run at least twice, which explains the discontinuities I find just below.]

Now nobody can come a callin’ parroting Weispecker and claiming in good faith that his points haven’t been addressed. They may not find it satisfactory, but if so they should say why. Therefore it is with a clean consciences I can say that henceforth, ANY comment that repeats Allan’s specious arguments without substantively addressing my response or Miles’ addendum–and especially any claims that Allan’s points haven’t been addressed–will be deleted. It’s that simple.