Monday's plugs and dottles

Sherlock Holmes’ before-breakfast pipe was always made up of “the plugs and dottles left from his smokes of the day before, all carefully dried and collected on the corner of the mantelpiece.” (Wannabe Sherlockians should see “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb” for reference.) Here are a few of my plugs and dottles from this past weekend:

* The parapolitical research crew at Black Op Radio offer for download an interesting if brief speech the late Col. L. Fletcher Prouty made at Yale in 1975 about the CIA and U.S. clandestine operations. Prouty served early on as the liaison officer for the Pentagon with the CIA and later became a famous critic of American foreign policy. He was an advisor to Oliver Stone during filming of the movie JFK and was the inspiration for the film’s “X,” played by Donald Sutherland. Download or listen to the speech here.

* As the number of Democrats running for the presidency in 2008 swells, Michael Donnelly reveals “The Real Reason I Can’t Stand Barack Obama” at CounterPunch.

* The survivalist dudes over at the darkly humorous Destructomundo podcast conduct an entertaining conversation about how we all might survive if “anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Of course, what they mean by “anarchy” isn’t what we mean by “anarchy.”

* On a much more upbeat note, Warren Bluhm digs into his attic once more and finds a bevy of sounds we just don’t hear much anymore — like electric typewriters and steam engines. Check out this week’s amusing Uncle Warren’s Attic right here.

* And finally, Keith Martin convincingly argues that R2D2 is really the secret leader of the Rebellion in his essay “A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope: Reconsidering Star Wars IV in the Light of I-III.” Listen to this:

“As Star Wars opens, R2 is rushing the Death Star plans to the Rebellion. R2, not Leia. The plans are always in R2. What Leia puts into him in the early scene is only her own holographic message to Kenobi. Leia’s own mission, as she says in the holographic message, is to pick up Obi-Wan and take him to Alderaan — or so she thinks.”