Mole Hunt

Making People Better

Oh, Mr. Mason, you may be too clever for your own good.  For years, we’ve assumed your company slogan “Making people better” was referring to curing illnesses.  But in light of the illicit superhuman experiments we now know you’ve been bankrolling, it takes on an entirely different meaning.  That’s right, Constant Readers: Mason International is trying to “improve” us, trying to fix something that isn’t broken.  The only way we can stop them is if we stand up with a unified voice and say “No more!”

Opposition Research

Infernal Designs

I can scarcely believe what happened earlier tonight, Constant Readers.  If you weren’t too busy at Comic-Con yesterday to check your Twitter feed, you know that I was approached by an anonymous source here in San Diego who claims to have been paid by Mason International to design a spandex superhero costume for a petite blonde woman.  Naturally, we at the Flashlight assumed this costume was meant for the long-missing Sara Ward, the frontrunner for Mason International’s alleged superhero bodyguard position.  Our informant, who shall remain nameless, did not cover his tracks very well, and we traced his IP address to a local San Diego company, Myriad Design.  And unfortunately for him, we weren’t the only ones.

Our nameless informant, it seemed, shared our mistrust of Mason International, and was willing to hand off copies of this alleged concept art, but only to me, and only if I came alone.  My stalwart companions RoboVamp2000 and RealJackBower were suspect of this arrangement, but something about my informant’s e-mails rang true.

We arranged a meet, and our informant was true to his word.  The nervous man approached me in dark sunglasses and a black hoodie, and handed me a sealed envelope filled with the original hard copies of the sketches, as well as copies of his invoices to Mason International.  I tried to press him for information, but he promptly took off.  If he hadn’t, they probably would have gotten us both.

All of a sudden, a black SUV screeched to a halt in front of our fleeing informant.  A half dozen goons (who I can only assume work for Mason International) jumped out of the vehicle and pulled him inside.  Then they turned their attentions to me.  I did not stick around long enough to get their license plate.  Through pure dumb luck, I was able to lose myself in the Comic-Con crowds.  Suffice it to say, after that, I got the hell out of San Diego in a hurry.

I suspect that that is the last we’ll see of our ill-fated informant.  But we at the Flashlight will make sure that his sacrifice was not in vain.  For starters, I thought I’d share with our loyal viewers the most majestic of his impressive sketches (see below).  Even more intriguing is the name scrawled in the margin: “Mason Vixen.”

A Call to Arms

Greetings, Constant Readers!  I’ve been getting some questions about the “666” appended to the end of my twitter handle, so I thought it was about time I posted an explanation.  The “666” is not, in fact, a pledge of allegiance to the Biblical Beast, though I can see why so many would make that mistake.  No, the reason I added “666” (aside from the fact that “Uroboros” was already taken) is because that particular numeral is ubiquitous in the world government’s every attempt to see us pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed and numbered.

Kindly observe this excerpt from a piece by our enlightened colleagues at Conspiracy Truths, regarding the Universal Product barcode that appears on virtually every item we spend our hard-earned capital to buy:

Each set of lines in the barcode stands for a number 1-9, so that for instance a skinny line next to a fat line might mean 1, a medium line next to a fat one 2, and so on. The code for 6 is two skinny lines next to one another. Notice every barcode has three sets of thin, parallel lines slightly longer than the others at the beginning, middle and end. These particular lines register as void because they are barriers, but by being two thin lines, they encode the UPC number 6 thrice. Also notice there are always 13 numbers displayed beneath the barcode.

And in his book “The World’s Last Dictator,” Dwight Kinman is just one of many who warns us of a frightening supercomputer affectionately referred to as “the Beast,” which is so big it takes up the first three floors of a 13-story structure in Brussels, Belgium:

Every person in the world has been assigned an 18 digit tracking number, which consists of 3 groups of 6 numbers. The first 3 numbers assigned in the BEAST computer to everyone are 666. The next is one’s national code. The U.S. national code is 110. Then the next 3 numbers are your telephone area code, and then finally your 9 digit Social Security number. The code then is 666 + Nation code + Tel. area code + social security no. = BEAST I.D. no. for an individual.

Now we at the Flashlight have been known to balk at the Judeo-Christian model of the universe, and as far as we’re concerned, the jury’s still out on the existence of Satan as the incarnation of evil itself.  We don’t need the influence of an all-powerful fallen angel to explain the evil that men do, we know that the potential for said evil exists deep down inside of all of us.  But whether or not there is a devil incarnate, and whether or not he/she/it is behind this monstrous supercomputer in Belgium, is not the point.  The point is this: the tagging has already begun.  “666” are the first three numbers in the 18-digit identification code of each and every one of us.  “666” is encoded into every UPC bar code in the country.  And with the government already making Veri-chips mandatory for pets, criminals and alzheimer’s patients, how long do we have before they subject us, the general public, to this same indignity?  How long before the Brotherhood international bankers use these microchips to make good their long-threatened world cashless society and put all of us under Big Brother’s thumb for good?

So before we find ourselves forcibly branded by our fascist, consumer-driven society, I urge those of us who see the writing on the wall to brand ourselves preemptively.  If you agree with the Flashlight’s ends, add the numbers “666” to the end of your Twitter handle.  Let them know that we know what they’re doing, and that we aren’t going to stand for it.

Mason Hack Postmortem

Illuminators: for those of you who missed it, last week we hacked into the @mason_intl Twitter account, in hopes of uncovering evidence that would definitively prove their involvement in illegal activities.  Then, this past Monday, I took what amounts to a disappointing misstep.  I changed their password and hijacked the feed, posting status updates which I hoped would turn the public against Max Mason and his evil corporate agenda.  Everyone assumed Fury of Solace was to blame, and he proceeded to lambast our efforts but good.  And I hate to admit it, but he was right.  If I had laid low, I could have used the account to gain further intel overtime.  Instead, Mason International’s techs regained control, deleted my posts, and shored up their account so it’s all but impenetrable now.  But we did not come away from this completely empty handed.  Through laziness or overconfidence, Mason (or more likely one of his cronies) left a digital trail of Direct Messages connecting them to criminal acts which we at the Flashlight had previously attributed to the criminal kingpin called King.  This has broadened our understanding of Mason International’s misdeeds, and provides us with a new jumping off point for future investigations.  If you loyal readers get any more tips about the machinations of King, Mason International or both, please drop us a line!

Oh, and for those of you who missed it, I grabbed this screen cap of our fake @mason_intl Twitter updates before the pharmaceutical company was able to purge them from the site.  Enjoy!

The King and M.I.

Constant Readers, in a turn of events almost too convenient for even us to believe, it appears that two lines of Flashlight inquiry are beginning to converge.  And the implications are downright terrifying.  In our continuing attempts to undermine the efforts of pharmaceutical giant Mason International, we have most recently hacked their corporate Twitter account.  There, we found Direct Message exchanges between the pharmaceutical company and groups known to be pawns of another thorn in L.A.’s side, the mysterious crimelord called King.  Cryptic exchanges with groups like the Purgers, key figures in the L.A. river poisoning and the subsequent water privitization scandal, while not in and of themselves incriminating, certainly paint a picture making a connection between the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company and the city’s biggest crime lord hard to deny.  And if we’re right about this, it also implicates Mason in the Skid Row Homeless experiments and countless other despicable acts.

Who is King?  What is his relationship with Mason International?  And what is their endgame?  We at the Flashlight won’t rest until all of these truths have finally been brought to light.  And as long as we have access to Mason International’s Twitter account, we may just enlist their aid in spreading our message far and wide…

Otherwise Occupied

Bad news, Illuminators: it appears we are more alone than we thought. I approached members of the Occupy Los Angeles movement about organizing an Occupy Mason International Event. I felt sure that of all people, those seemingly-noble crusaders would recognize what we’re up against and throw their considerable weight behind our cause.

But apparently they only see what they want to see. They think Max Mason’s millions of dollars in charitable donations make him a generous philanthropist instead of a public relations spin doctor. They think it would dishonor the memory of people who lost their lives to picket the remains of Mason Tower. But what they don’t see is, it dishonors their memories to stay silent! If people don’t know what those innocent victims died for, the cycle will simply perpetuate itself!

To their credit, they apparently perused The Flashlight quite extensively, but in the final analysis, they described our theories as “mostly insane.” To that, we say this: we’ve been an active conspiracy site for nearly three years, some of our stories are bound not to pan out. But we have amassed irrefutable evidence of Mason International’s heinous crimes, so as much as I, too, believe in the mantra “consider the source,” I don’t see how any self-respecting civic protestor could so categorically dismiss our claims.

I guess the next time I need people to boldly take a stand against universally maligned enterprises like book burning and ethnic cleansing, I know who to call. But if we at the Flashlight intend to oust corporate villains who don’t literally twirl their metaphorical mustaches, we must look only to ourselves.

Razing Cain

Greetings, Constant Readers.  We at the Flashlight usually find Rachel Maddow’s voice grating and her theories trite, but yesterday she finally started making some sense.  Her latest theory?  That baffling Republican frontrunner Herman Cain is not a politician but a performance artist, whose campaign is marked by a string of supposed gaffs “that is not found in nature.”  I’m sure we all remember that Cain’s mantra, which he used most famously in August’s presidential debate, turned out to be from the theme song to the Pokemon movie.  And the source of Cain’s 999 tax plan?  Why, the popular video game SimCity.  But here’s the problem, Constant Readers: Maddow delivered her theory with a smile wry enough to betray the truth.  This lambasting of Cain is just the latest in her attempts to undermine the political right.  She no more believes Herman Cain is a performance artist than she believes he might sprout wings and fly.  But we at the Flashlight do believe it, Constant Readers.  At least the first part.

Is it really that far-fetched?  You need only read Jerry Mander’s “Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television” to be reminded that the invention of television redefined what it was to be a politician, and changed the face of the modern political campaign forever.  How perfectly ironic would it be if Cain was secretly a liberal plant, injected into the Republican presidential race by the far left to discredit the entire party, only to have his satirical campaign embraced by thousands who, despite all logic and common sense, refuse to see Cain’s slow-motion smile at the end of his absurd campaign ads as a knowing one, begging the viewer to get in on the joke.  Or is it something altogether more meta, with whoever’s pulling Cain’s puppet strings trying to shine a light on the absurdity of the whole process by seeing just how far a political joke like Cain can advance in the race for this nation’s highest elected office.

Has MSNBC’s inveterate liberal political commentator finally stumbled upon a story worth talking about?  Time will tell, Constant Readers.  Time will tell.

State of the Ward

As our own investigation attests, there was no dearth of time or effort put into Mason International’s secret San Diego superhero recruitment earlier this year.  What’s surprising, Constant Readers, is that after all of that to do, nothing seems to have come of it.  The long-anticipated official announcement of Max Mason’s new bodyguard has never come.  Does that mean that Mason has abandoned his plans to put a superhero on his payroll?  Not necessarily.

While I was doing everything in my power to infiltrate Mason International’s recruitment drive, Fury of Solace crashed a dinner date between Max Mason and the mysterious Sara Ward, a woman he believed was a shoo-in to become Mason’s latest corporate stooge.  But since the fabled chase through San Diego’s gaslamp district, Sara Ward has been nowhere to be found.  If any of you loyal CI’s has a line on Ms. Ward, please pass it along.  If she’s still alive, we need to know why she dropped off the map.  And if she’s working for Max Mason under the table, keeping him safe from the likes of Fury of Solace who would do him harm, we want to know about that too.