The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture

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By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. The religion/philosophy was quite obscure until publicized by Discordian Playboy editors Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson in their popular The Illuminatus! At which time he looked at me like a betrayed Caesar and screamed, screamed definitely, "Not you too, Thornley. Raised Mormon, in adulthood Kerry shifted his ideological focus frequently, in rivalry with any serious countercultural figure of the 1960s. If there ever was a perennial scapegoat of the 60's counterculture it would have to be Kerry Thornley, one of the founding members of the patently anarchist Discordian Society.

Kerry Thornley in his book, THE PRANKSTER AND THE CONSPIRACY (The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture). Because of these coincidences, he was asked to testify before the Warren Commission, and later got looped into Jim Garrison's late-60's crusade to bring the conspirators to justice (the story depicted in Oliver Stone's 'JFK'). In his book On the Trail of the Assassins (1988) Garrison insists that Thornley was friends with another possible conspirator, Johnny Roselli. There has been some conjecture that both Thornley and Oswald may have been subjected to mind-altering experiments.One of Oswald’s favorite routines was to compare the Marine Corps to the society George Orwell created in 1984. Kerry’s reading habits, though, were not entirely devoted to Mad, and in fact ran the gamut from sci-fi novels, to books on philosophy, religion, politics, and poetry. Needless to say, I was jubilant at the news of Kennedy's death -- something I made no attempt to conceal from anyone, much to the annoyance of most of the Bourbon House regulars. It’s also significant that neither Wilson nor Leary were in a position to benefit financially from the changes that they advocated. More alarmingly, Gorightly recounts allegations that Thornley commited acts of sexual abuse against children.

Turning off the personalized advertising setting won’t stop you from seeing Etsy ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive. In 2015 Gorightly stated that he now believed that the copy in the JFK collection was an earlier draft of the Principia Discordia predating the first edition. While I have several connections to people who live in or originated in Russia, I unfortunately never learned the language. Kerry remembered Oswald as a sad sack type with eternally scuffed boots and cap pushed down over his eyes, which he speculated was Oswald’s way of shutting out the Marine world around him, a world that deeply dissatisfied him.Oddballs though they may have been, Kerry and his cohorts— Newport, Stephens, and Hill—engaged in such normal and expected activities for youth their age, such as cruising Whittier Boulevard, and trying to be cool, which was quite a stretch for these nerdy young lads with ideas as weird and plentiful as their acne.

Things like this had a way of irritating the military establishment usually personified by the Staff NCOs, and there were always people who delighted in baiting superiors with seemingly disrespectful remarks or an indifferent you don’t scare me type attitude. I also believe that you could’ve played up the chaotic effects of “The Jake That Changed The World” and the ensuing Eristic “debate” (more accurately, WAR) surrounding Pluto’s legitimacy as a “planet”. Both men had shared a common interest in society, culture, literature and politics, and whenever duty placed them together, had discussed such topics as George Orwell's famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and the philosophy of Marxism, particularly Oswald's interest in the latter.

Meanwhile, the Discordian/Erisian known as Professor Mu-Chao began a campaign to name the dwarf planet “Eris. The heavenly body was nicknamed Xena after the character appearing in the television series Xena: Warrior Princess. Camp Street and Related Events, House Select Committee on Assassinations – Appendix to Hearings, Volume 10, 13, p. Adam Gorightly has delivered a book that is both funny (some of Kerry's antics were inspired hilarity) and sad (his decline in his later years) and gives you lots of twists and turns in between. Kerry's paranoia grew and he once stated, "It's hard to be an anarchist when your head is talking to you!