Conspiracy theories often resemble a kind of misbegotten, debased form of theology — one that begins with a set of suppositions and then reverse engineers a fantastical version of reality that comports with them. History does not dispute, for example, the fact that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s mother’s father was Jewish. But in the auto magnate and arch-conspiracist Henry Ford’s telling, this genealogical detail held the key not only to Lenin’s entire character and political philosophy but to the vicissitudes of the former Russian Empire circa 1920 and to the historical development of Bolshevism worldwide. Lenin’s wife is Jewish, and his children all speak Yiddish, Ford insisted, a little hysterically. Russia’s yeshivas are the recipients of lavish subsidies from the Bolshevik state:

The Bolsheviks immediately took over all the Hebrew schools and continued them as they were and laid down a rule that the ancient Hebrew language should be taught in them. The ancient Hebrew language is the vehicle of the deeper secrets of the World Program.

And for the Gentile Russian children? “Why,” said these gentle Jewish educators, “we will teach them sex knowledge. We will brush out of their minds the cobwebs. They must learn the truth about things!” with consequences that are too pitiable to narrate.

Viewed through Ford’s monistic frame, Lenin’s grandfather’s one-eighth contribution of Jewish “genes” was sufficient to neutralize the very Russianness of the Russian Revolution, to reduce it to just another local skirmish in Judaism’s global war against the Gentiles.

Richard Nixon was forced to resign his presidency because of a small-c conspiracy to cover up the illegal activities carried out by his reelection campaign. But to conspiracists on his right, his whole presidency had been the enactment of a long-standing conspiracy to destroy America’s sovereignty; his breakthrough trip to China was just the latest in a long line of betrayals. “If Mr. Nixon has been only kidding about his devotion to forging the links in the chain of the World Superstate that is to be welded around America’s wrists, then he is a consummate hypocrite,” the John Birch Society’s Gary Allen wrote in 1971, a year before Nixon’s epochal meeting with Mao. “But his commitment to world government goes back nearly a quarter of a century and indeed he would not now be in the White House if he were not committed to this ultimate goal of the Insiders.”

Conspiracism, like racial bigotry, is almost always a murky undercurrent in the mainstream of politics, its propositions only glancingly acknowledged by the establishment and summarily dismissed. But as cartoonish as its heroes and villains might be, as disordered and disreputable and deranged as its proponents and its premises so often are, they are rarely without pertinence to an understanding of the social and political environment that spawned them.

If op-ed columns, position papers, think tank monographs, and State of the Union addresses are politics’ superego, paranoid conspiracy theories and blind, irrational hatreds, as often as not, are its id. Politicians - even some sober, fair-minded, consensus-seeking public servants - know that and take full advantage of it when they have to. Even a dyed-in-the-wool Communist like Richard Nixon engaged in Red-baiting when it suited his purposes.

Before the dust had even settled, the terrible events of September 11, 2001, gave birth to conspiracy theories that were every bit as labyrinthine and obsessive as the body of lore that’s accreted around the Kennedy assassination. When the Web site Boing Boing invited me to be a guest blogger in November 2009, I dedicated one of my first posts to the so-called 9/11 Truth movement. Paraphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous dictum about the test of a first-rate intelligence, I noted that you don’t have to be a genius to simultaneously hold two separate and not necessarily opposing ideas in your mind: (1) that the Bush administration told all kinds of untruths about 9/11 after the fact, and (2) that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had not been an “inside job.”

It opened up a floodgate. Links to YouTube documentaries and interviews and articles by scientists, architects, engineers, physicists, political thinkers, actors, and at least one theologian (David Ray Griffin is an eminent process theologian) came pouring in, along with testimony from disillusioned combat veterans and survivors of the day’s events. Discussion forums on 9/11 Web sites were buzzing for days. Many of the Truthers that I heard from (or 9/11 skeptics, as most of them now prefer to be called) were earnest and idealistic and driven by a missionary zeal; some were openly hostile; others, I suspect, were quite insane.

But what took me by surprise was the outsize role that Jews played in the anecdotes that so many of them related: warmongering Jewish neoconservatives in Washington, D.C.; the World Trade Center’s owner, Larry Silverstein, in New York City; even well-known Jewish leftists like Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and Amy Goodman, who had stubbornly and, to their accusers’ minds, unaccountably refused to endorse the agenda of 9/11 Truth. Binding them all together was the Zionist entity of Israel.

There were stories about the four thousand Jewish office workers who were supposedly told to stay home that day (just for the record, my brother-in-law, whose office was in WTC 7, didn’t get the memo—Snopes.com traced the rumor back to Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television station in Beirut, Lebanon) and about the Israeli moving men with alleged links to Mossad who were arrested in New Jersey after they were seen celebrating the collapse of the twin towers. A disconcerting number of links led to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the forged “smoking gun,” produced in Tsarist Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, that proves that organized Jewry is bent on world domination. Boing Boing’s beleaguered moderator posted a comment himself, about “the moistly glistening comments and links that I have in my refuse bin. I assure you that they are studded with feculent tidbits of loathsome vileness, mostly in the form of links to websites explaining how Obama is exactly the same as Hitler and why it’s important to defend white culture.”

This isn’t to say that all or most or even many 9/11 skeptics are anti-Semites and white supremacists. Surely they’re not. But even after writing Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, I hadn’t realized to what extent even fringes have fringes - and I had failed to appreciate how potent and dependable a driver of conspiracy theory old-fashioned bigotry continues to be.

Adapted from the book THE NEW HATE by Arthur Goldwag

Though I'd heard her tell many official lies when she was G.W. Bush's spokesperson, I confess I was a little taken aback when Dana Perino (click here) joined the conspiratorial chorus ("I'm not trying to introduce a conspiracy theory....but was this deliberate?") -though this is a woman who's also said, for all the world to hear, that America experienced no terrorist attacks during the Bush administration.

Michael Brown, late of FEMA, ascribes the Obama administration's allegedly slow response to the catastrophe to naked political calculation. "We're seeing the Rahm Emanuel rule #1 taking effect, and that is to let no crisis go unused. So this is an opportunity for a President who wants to bankrupt the coal industry, and basically get rid of the oil and gas industry, to shut down offshore drilling." (Click here for more). Obviously, Brown is a man with a chip on his shoulder; I can't really blame him for going off half-cocked.

I would file all of the above under the category of "opportunistic political demagoguery" rather than Conspiracy Theory as such. But then this week, David Emery, About.com's Urban Legends editor, forwarded me a viral e mail that's the real thing. The headline reads "US Orders Blackout Over North Korean Torpedoing Of Gulf Of Mexico Oil Rig"; the article is dated April 30th, and it appears to have originated at the What Does it Mean? website, written by a woman with the Pynchonesque name of Sorcha Faal. Click here to read it for yourself.

The gist of the story is that the oil rig disaster is the work of a North Korean suicide sub, deployed from a "cargo ship" out of Cuba:

The North Korean "cargo vessel" Dai Hong Dan believed to be staffed by 17th Sniper Corps "suicide" troops left Cuba's Empresa Terminales Mambisas de La Habana (Port of Havana) on April 18th whereupon it "severely deviated" from its intended course for Venezuela's Puerto Cabello bringing it to within 209 kilometers (130 miles) of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform which was located 80 kilometers (50 miles) off the coast of the US State of Louisiana where it launched an SSC Sang-o Class Mini Submarine (Yugo class) estimated to have an operational range of 321 kilometers (200 miles).

On the night of April 20th the North Korean Mini Submarine manned by these "suicidal" 17th Sniper Corps soldiers attacked the Deepwater Horizon with what are believed to be 2 incendiary torpedoes causing a massive explosion and resulting in 11 workers on this giant oil rig being killed outright. Barely 48 hours later, on April 22nd , this North Korean Mini Submarine committed its final atrocity by exploding itself directly beneath the Deepwater Horizon causing this $1 Billion oil rig to sink beneath the seas and marking 2010's celebration of Earth Day with one of the largest environmental catastrophes our World has ever seen.

This is too silly to respond to in depth; I'll leave that to Randall Amster at the Huffington Post (click here). But more interestingly, who is Sorcha Faal? The What Does it Mean.com site provides answers here, but they're awfully defensive and hard to follow.

But if you follow a different set of links, you'll learn that Faal is "Sister Maria Theresa, the 73rd Sorcha Faal of the Sorcha Faal Order, Elected as Mother Superior 3 February 2007." She is currently based in Israel.

Born in Dublin, Ireland, the 73rd Sorcha Faal joined the Order in March, 1973 and holds various degrees with both European and United States Universities.

Sorcha Faal has traveled and lectured extensively throughout the World, with her primary focus being the systematic structure of languages serving as a link between thought and sound, and as developed by Ferdinand de Saussure. Sorcha Faal has further expanded her own research on 'Linguistic Ordering' with knowledge gained while a visiting researcher with Russian biophysicist and molecular biologist Pjotr Garjajev on the esoteric structure of DNA and its uses in explaining physic phenomena.

'In accepting this Conclave's nomination as the 73rd Sorcha Faal of our Order, I express the gratitude of all the Sisters in thanking Sister Lyuha for her guidance as our Sorcha Faal these past 7 years, especially her efforts these past 5 years in re-orienting all of us towards the Western World.

Our Order has always striven to provide to this World that Light needed to dispel the myths inherent in Darkness, but which without we could never see the truest balance between the two.'

That's what it says, anyway. If you're interested and have $25.95 to spend, you can order Sorcha Faal's book The True Knowledge of Three Minds, which "From the most ancient of texts, to the latest discoveries in quantum physics, and everything in-between....contains the truest knowledge of human beings available to the Western World today and provides the foundation upon which to live your life more powerfully than you could have ever imagined before."

Literally dozens of equally probable alarmist stories, often of an apocalyptic bent, have been dispatched under Sorcha Faal's name since 2004; they are archived here. For just a few examples, "All Private Guns Will Be Confiscated By September 2009, US Tells Russia" was issued in March of 2009; "Catastrophic Atmospheric Blast in Southern Hemisphere Continues Global Weather Chaos as North American Plate Instability Increases and US President Orders Massive Troop Withdrawal from New Madrid Fault Zone Region" in September 2005.

There has been frantic speculation in the world of conspiratorial websites over the years as to Sorcha Faal's real identity. Most suspect she is the creation of David Booth, a computer programmer, self-proclaimed psychic, and apocalyptic conspiracy theorist who is the author of Code Red: The Coming Destruction of America 2004. You can read the book here here if you like. But be advised that Jeff Rense's far right, anti-Semitic website exposed it as a cut-and-pasted tissue of plagiarisms (click here).

By the way, an update to the original oil spill article is now available: "US Goes To "COCKED PISTOL" Alert Status Over Korean War Fears." We may be on the brink of World War III! You can read it for yourself here.]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/05/06/bp-oil-spill-conspir.html/feed 123 http://boingboing.net/2010/01/18/haiti-haarp-and-cons.html http://boingboing.net/2010/01/18/haiti-haarp-and-cons.html#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2010 05:38:02 +0000 Arthur Goldwag Arthur Goldwag, a former BB guestblogger, is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.


I was almost afraid to do it, because I knew it would get me upset. But with so much conspiracy-mongering already rife in the mainstream -- Pat Robertson and Haiti's deal with the devil (maybe Aricept would help?), Rush Limbaugh's insinuation that Obama is exploiting the catastrophe to burnish his creds with, in Limbaugh's words, "the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country" (lest his listeners forget that light skinned blacks are just as black as their darker-skinned confederates) -- I thought it behooved me to find out what the hard-core conspiracists are saying too. So I typed the words "Haiti" and "Conspiracy" into Google and watched to see what came up.

From the Ahrcanum blog (click here for full post):

Is it amazing that the DR had no damage, or by intention?

What was HAARP up to on January 12, 1010? The official HAARP facility is located in Gakuna, Alaska. The conspiracy theory claims that HAARP could be used as directed-energy weapon, weather control, an earthquake induction device and/or for mind control.

Up here in edmonton, alberta, Canada...the clouds have been quite freakish, (Jan 12-14) and their all looking like waves going in the south east direction today like this> )))))))..... Whether HAARP did earthquake or not I don't know, BUT SOMETHING is going on and they are using the Ionishere as a Weapon....Interesting. If I darw a line froM Alaska HAARP to Haiti It seems to cut though edmonton.

Did you notice how the US media is all over Haiti, as if Haiti is now a part of the USA ? When the big eathquake happened in Italy, the US didn't show this grand interest. Other earthquakes didn't interst the US this much either. And now, even the US army is there, allegedly distributing water, food, end medicine. Since when is that kind of help the army's job ?? Looks like an occupation to me ! Have you noticed that some "Haitians" wear neat, clean, fresh T-shirts with writings like "America", "Samsung", etc, already providing pro-US propaganda ? They may be sort of implants, maybe handed to some locals randomly, to get the propaganda machine going for international corporations. Diana Sawyer, Roberts, and Dr. Besser are there for days now, reporting non-stop, recruiting Americans into thinking that Haiti is "special" to the USA. "Special" it is indeed, as Haiti is going to be the next US colony. Remember, how a US coup ousted their president just some years ago ? The US has very special interests in that region. Economically, politically, and militarily. HAARP is capable of initiating anything, from earthquakes to rain, to draught. Nowadays, some countries will be "taken" by HAARP, not bombs. All a part of the New World Order conspiracy.

While the loss of life and devestation in Haiti is unimaginable there may be a more hidden agenda behind this tragedy. Suppose this "natural disaster" been a weather weopan aimed at Cuba but came up short in it's delivery? The possibility of this being true is not far fetched or out-of-this-world in theory. Weather manipulation and weather warfare are not new concepts and certainly could be the choice of the powers that be to devastate an enemy with a cloak of Mother Nature's disguise to fall back on.

HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program) is a joint scientific research project of the US Air Force and Navy, whose principle facilities are located in Gakona, Alaska (I don't get cable, but I understand that Jesse Ventura visited the site on his TV show). According to its home page (click here), it is:

A scientific endeavor aimed at studying the properties and behavior of the ionosphere, with particular emphasis on being able to understand and use it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes.

The HAARP program is committed to developing a world class ionospheric research facility consisting of:

* The Ionospheric Research Instrument (IRI), a high power transmitter facility operating in the High Frequency (HF) range. The IRI will be used to temporarily excite a limited area of the ionosphere for scientific study.


* A sophisticated suite of scientific (or diagnostic) instruments that will be used to observe the physical processes that occur in the excited region.

Observation of the processes resulting from the use of the IRI in a controlled manner will allow scientists to better understand processes that occur continuously under the natural stimulation of the sun.

Scientific instruments installed at the HAARP Observatory will be useful for a variety of continuing research efforts which do not involve the use of the IRI but are strictly passive. Among these studies include ionospheric characterization using satellite beacons, telescopic observation of the fine structure in the aurora, and documentation of long-term variations in the ozone layer.

Starting with Nicola Tesla's earthquake machine of the 1890s I trace the possibility of "earthquakes on demand" from the development of a "tsunami bomb" during World War II (as revealed by documents recently declassified by the New Zealand government), through Project Faultless which caused a massive earthquake in the Nevada desert after a high yield atom bomb was intentionally detonated on a fault line, to evidences of human initiation of several major quakes and the 2004 Christmas tsunami with "scalar" or other electromagnetic waves.

Also included is an update on recent developments at HAARP..... The US Air Force insists that it has no interest in "controlling the weather" yet HAARP represents the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars and a decade of research and construction in a program whose avowed purpose is to modify the atmosphere. What, if any, is the difference between "modifying the atmosphere" and "controlling the weather"?

It can all get a little bit confusing.]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/01/18/haiti-haarp-and-cons.html/feed 128 http://boingboing.net/2009/11/13/goldwag-the-sarah-pa.html http://boingboing.net/2009/11/13/goldwag-the-sarah-pa.html#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:10:49 +0000 Arthur Goldwag Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

Today's is my last guest post here. I want to take this opportunity to thank Pesco and Boing Boing for inviting me here and giving me the latitude to say whatever I wanted to about whatever crossed my mind. I'm especially grateful to everyone who took the time to comment on my posts, whether you agreed with them or not. You're an amazingly thoughtful, opinionated, funny, articulate, out-of-the-box bunch, and for the most part admirably civil. The reservoir of wit, knowledge and intellectual firepower that Boing Boing has on tap is truly astonishing. As I'm sure I've said before, I don't write because I know so much--I write because it gives me an opportunity to learn. And you've all taught me a great deal. I hope I can come back and contribute to Boing Boing again; in the meantime, you're all welcome to drop by my own blog any time.

I began last Monday with my lucubrations about Orly Taitz and the birther movement. For the sake of symmetry, I will close out with some remarks about another woman of the right, Alaska's ex-governor Sarah Palin.Her block-buster memoir Going Rogue will be published on November 17th; last Friday she market-tested a new speech before some 5,000 right-to-lifers at the state fairgrounds outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Though the press was banned from the event and recording devices forbidden, several reporters, Politico's Jonathan Martin among them, attended as paying customers (tickets went for $30; pledge cards on the chairs offered attendees the opportunity to become one of "Sarah's Rogues" and receive an autographed copy of her book by donating $1000 to Wisconsin Right to Life).

A subject of innumerable conspiracy theories herself--about the state of her marriage, the circumstances surrounding her last pregnancy, the reasons for her abrupt resignation from the governorship--Palin alluded to a conspiracy theory in her speech that got a lot of play last summer: the "death panels" canard. If law-makers don't believe that the lives of the unborn matter, she said ominously, then:

"Perhaps the same mind-set applies to other persons." 

"What may they feel about an elderly person who doesn't have a whole lot of productive years left... In order to save government money, government health care has to be rationed... Do you think our elderly will be first in line for limited health care?  

"And what about the child who perhaps isn't deemed normal or perfect per someone's subjective measure of their use or questionable purpose in the eyes of a panel of bureaucrats making our health care decisions for us," she continued.

Noting that there had been a lot of "change" of late, Palin recalled a recent conversation with a friend about how the phrase "In God We Trust" had been moved to the edge of the new coins.

"Who calls a shot like that?" she demanded. "Who makes a decision like that?"

She added: "It's a disturbing trend."

Unsaid but implied was that the new Democratic White House was behind such a move to secularize the nation's currency.

As for the conspiracy theories about Palin herself.... Andrew Sullivan has blogged obsessively about her eye-brow raising account of the circumstances of her youngest child's birth--he posted a picture of her taken a month before Trig was born in which she barely has a bulge; he noted how her water broke when she was in Texas and, despite her high-risk pregnancy, she flew back to Alaska for the delivery; he's pressed for (and not received) detailed medical records. (Click here and here for just two of his many posts on the subject.) Even Sullivan admits that he's become something of an Ahab on the subject of Palin; not long ago one of his readers tried to calm him down by suggesting that most of the inconsistencies in her stories stem from her characteristically careless attitude with the truth--there's no grand conspiracy, in other words, just self-aggrandizing lies. "Always tell the truth," as the old admonition goes, "It's easier to remember." Sarah Palin would have done well to heed it.

One of Sullivan's posts included a link to the Anchorage Daily News's editor's blog, on which an e-mail exchange between Palin and Executive Editor Patrick Dougherty can be found. It's dated January 12, 2009. In it Palin complained that the ADN had called Levi Johnston a "highschool dropout" (which he was) and implied that she was connected to Levi Johnston's mother's drug dealing activities (the paper had written nothing of the sort). Then she moved onto the issue of Trig. "And is your paper really still pursuing the sensational lie that I am not Trig's mother?" she asked. "Is it true you have a reporter still bothering my state office, my very busy doctor (who's already set the record straight for you), and the school district, in pursuit of your ridiculous conspiracy?"

"Yes, it's true," Dougherty replied. He went on:

You may have been too busy with the campaign to notice, but the Daily News has, from the beginning, dismissed the conspiracy theories about Trig's birth as nonsense. I don't believe we have ever published in the newspaper a story, a letter, a column or anything alleging a coverup about your maternity. In fact, my integrity and the integrity of the newspaper have been repeatedly attacked in national forums for our complicity in the "coverup." I have personally received more than a 100 emails accusing me and the paper of conspiring to hide the truth....I want to be very clear on this: I have from the beginning and do now consider the conspiracy theories about Trig's birth to be nutty nonsense.

If that's true, then why has Lisa Demer been asking questions about Trig's birth?

Because we have been amazed by the widespread and enduring quality of these rumors. I finally decided, after watching this go on unabated for months, to let a reporter try to do a story about the "conspiracy theory that would not die" and, possibly, report the facts of Trig's birth thoroughly enough to kill the nonsense once and for all......

In our age of viral communications, thought contagions spread within seconds. Politicians like Palin try to take advantage of the phenomenon for their own purposes. With one well-timed applause line at the Republican convention she was able to recast herself as an opponent of the bridge to nowhere that she'd in fact supported. Unfortunately her gaffes were propagated just as swiftly. Comedian Tina Fey's "I can see Russia from my house" (a pithier take on Palin's own words to Charlie Gibson that "They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska") became an inescapable meme. Judging from the story in this morning's New York Times about her claims that the McCain campaign is stiffing her for $50,000 in legal charges, some of the untruths in her new book might bite back at her as well.

Karl Popper wrote of "the unwieldiness, the resilience or the brittleness of the social stuff, or its resistance to our attempts to mould it and to work with it." The medium in which thought contagions travel--and in which politicians campaign--is social. "Conspiracies occur, it must be admitted," Popper wrote in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1952).

But the striking fact which, in spite of their occurrence, disproves the conspiracy theory is that few of these conspiracies are ultimately successful. Conspirators rarely consummate their conspiracy.

Why is this so? Why do achievements differ so widely from aspirations? Because this is usually the case in social life, conspiracy or no conspiracy. Social life is not only a trial of strength between opposing groups: it is action within a more or less resilient or brittle framework of institutions and traditions, and creates--apart from any conscious counter-action--many unforeseen reactions in this framework, some of them perhaps unforeseeable.

I hope.]]> http://boingboing.net/2009/11/13/goldwag-the-sarah-pa.html/feed 53 http://boingboing.net/2009/11/12/goldwag-cranks-curio.html http://boingboing.net/2009/11/12/goldwag-cranks-curio.html#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:27:26 +0000 Arthur Goldwag Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

Charles P. Peirce's bestseller IDIOT AMERICA: HOW STUPIDITY BECAME A VIRTUE IN THE LAND OF THE FREE includes a wonderful portrait of Ignatius L. Donnelly (1831-1901), the lawyer, US Congressman, founder of a failed Utopian city, and bestselling author of three influential books: ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD (1882), which sparked the Atlantis mania that continues to this day, RAGNAROK: THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL (1883), which anticipated Immanuel Velikovsky's WORLDS IN COLLISION (1950) by more than half a century by attributing a world-wide deluge that sank Atlantis and wiped out the world's Mammoths to a near-collision with a comet (TRIVIA QUIZ: Can you guess what other pseudo-scientific classic was published in 1950? ANSWER: L. Ron Hubbard's DIANETICS), and then in 1889, THE GREAT CRYPTOGRAM, which argued that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays and scattered clues to his authorship throughout them. Pierce considers the wildly creative, fiercely productive, and swiftly-forgotten Donnelley to be one of America's great cranks. "Cranks are noble," Peirce says, "because cranks are independent. A charlatan is a crank who sells out." It's like the difference between kitsch and dreck--people who make kitsch are sincere. Cynical purveyors of political and cultural dreck like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh know better--they're in it for the money and the power and the fame.

Writing CULTS, CONSPIRACIES, AND SECRET SOCIETIES, I learned about a lot of truly terrible people with really disturbing ideas (Charles Manson, the white supremacist David Lane, Canada's Roch "Moses" Thériault spring to mind); I also encountered some monsters who preached only good things (Jim Jones, Bhagwan Rajneesh). But the people who made the deepest impressions on me and stayed with me the longest were the Cranks. Koreshanity, the religio-political-pseudoscientific cult founded by Dr. Cyrus Read Teed (1839-1908), who believed that we don't live on the exterior of our planet but within it, on its "inner habitable surface of land and water," led me to a whole nineteenth century literature on hollow earth theory. Because Google digitized books in the public domain first, I was able to find some really rare volumes without even leaving my desk, such as William E. Lyon's THE HOLLOW GLOBE, OR, THE WORLD'S AGITATOR AND RECONCILER (1873), a portmanteau of science, mediumship, and Manifest Destiny, which looks forward to our colonization of the planet's inner frontier. I spent some time with Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel VRIL: THE POWER OF THE COMING RACE (1871) too. Theosophists wrote about Vril--a mysterious form of energy--as though it were real, as did members of Thule, a German occult racialist society. In 1960 Louis Pawels and Jacques Bergier wrote a book called LE MATIN DES MAGICIENS that claimed that something called the Vril Society was Thule's inner circle; in the 1970s, a holocaust denier named Ernst Zundel, who sold an English translation of the book through his publishing house, announced an expedition to Antarctica to search for Nazi-built Vril-powered UFO bases (it never got off the ground). Zundel is currently serving a prison sentence in Germany for inciting racial hatred.

The oddest thing I encountered has no wider significance whatsoever. It's just really, really... strange. Not uncanny or eerie, it wouldn't belong in a book like IMPOSSIBLE: YET IT HAPPENED, it's more like running into an old friend in an utterly unexpected place. It happened when I was researching The Processeans.

I first came across the Processeans when I was writing about Charles Manson--they had sued the publisher of Ed Sanders' THE FAMILY, which claimed that their involvement with Manson went deeper than the interview they did with him for the "Death" issue of their magazine The Process. The publisher recalled the book and every reference to the "black-garbed, death-worshipping Processeans," as Sanders had called them, was removed from its pages. In 1987, a book called THE ULTIMATE EVIL accused the Processeans of involvement in the Son of Sam murders. Long after I turned in my manuscript to Vintage, in June, 2009, Feral House published Timothy Wyllie's LOVE SEX FEAR DEATH: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE PROCESS CHURCH OF THE FINAL JUDGMENT. I wish I had had access to it when I was writing my book, but I had to scrounge around for whatever I could find. Someone had scanned whole issues of the Process magazine onto his Web site, along with memoirs by ex members and a whole book by one of Process's founders. An obituary for another founder led me to an article in the Rocky Mountain News, which is now posted on Rick Ross's cult website. But more on that in a moment.

First, who were the Processeans? Some Boing Boing readers might remember them or have even had personal experiences with them; I'm too young and led too sheltered a life. Process began in London in the early 1960s as an Adlerian psychoanalytic practice. It was led by two ex-Scientologists, an ex-cavalry officer named Robert Moor (who changed his name to Robert de Grimston) and a former call girl named Mary Anne MacLean. By 1966, their practice had transmogrified into a religion (Alistair Cooke's daughter and stepdaughter were members). With a follower's inheritance, they purchased a mansion in Mayfair and began to publish their magazine (the press dubbed them "The Mind Benders of Mayfair"). Mick Jagger appeared on one of the magazine's early covers; De Grimston published a chapbook whose first and last lines gave the group its catchphrase: "As it is, so be it." In 1966 they decamped to the Yucatan, where they witnessed the destruction of Hurricane Inez. De Grimston's thinking took on an apocalyptic tinge: "The power of Jehovah, Lucifer, and Satan is the dominant power," he wrote. "Conflicted though they may be for the purpose of the Game, upon one matter They are in total agreement....and that matter is the fact of the End. The End of the world as we know it; the end of humankind as we know it." Processean Churches sprung up around the country; their services featured sitars and invocations of Christ, Lucifer, Jehovah, and Satan.

In the mid-1970s, De Grimston and MacLean (the Omega, they called themselves) divorced and the group collapsed. But it didn't die. Instead it changed. First into another religion, The Foundation Faith of the Millennium. And then into something else altogether. As that article in the February 28, 2004 Rocky Mountain News reported:

One of the world's most admired animal sanctuaries has a skeleton tucked deep in its closet - one with a history worthy of its own miniseries. The Best Friends Animal Society runs the nation's largest "no-kill" shelter in Utah and raised $19.9 million last year alone. But more than three decades ago, its key founders formed a movement that was accused - falsely, they say - of being a satanic cult.

No, not really. But when I was a freshman in college in 1975, the Poli Sci 101 course that I took was Straussian and neo-conservative to its core. Kenyon College's political science department was (and still is--or at least it was three years ago, as this story in the far right wing journal Human Events confirms) an "oasis" of Straussian and conservative theory. The first text we read, as I recall, was Socrates "Apology." Most of us assumed that Socrates' persecutors were the bad guys, that freedom of thought was strictly good and the suppression of free speech categorically bad. But using Socrates' own mode of questioning, our teachers challenged our blandly liberal presuppositions. Precisely what's good about Democracy? Why shouldn't the state protect itself? Are we sure we understand what the Founders of our own country really meant when they wrote about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?"

Writing in David Horowitz's rightwing Front Page magazine in 2002, Robert Locke explains:

The key Straussian concept is the Straussian text, which is a piece of philosophical writing that is deliberately written so that the average reader will understand it as saying one ("exoteric") thing but the special few for whom it is intended will grasp its real ("esoteric") meaning. The reason for this is that philosophy is dangerous. Philosophy calls into question the conventional morality upon which civil order in society depends; it also reveals ugly truths that weaken men's attachment to their societies....Strauss shockingly admits, contrary to generations of liberal professors who have taught him as a martyr to the First Amendment, that the prosecution of Socrates was not entirely without point. This honesty about the dangers of philosophy gives Straussian thought a seriousness lacking in much contemporary philosophy; it is also a sign of the conviction that philosophy, contrary to the mythology of our "practical" (though sodden with ideology and quick to take offense at ideas) age, matters.

Though Strauss was an atheist, he was culturally Jewish to the core. And hermeneutics is a prototypically Jewish practice. Kabbalists acknowledge that every Biblical text has four distinct levels of meaning:

A number of leading conservatives in Washington turn out to be Straussians--Locke's piece identifies some of the most prominent circa 2002: "Justice Clarence Thomas; Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; former Assistant Secretary of State Alan Keyes; former Secretary of Education William Bennett; Weekly Standard editor and former Quayle Chief of Staff William Kristol; Allan Bloom, author of THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND; former New York Post editorials editor John Podhoretz; former National Endowment for the Humanities Deputy Chairman John T. Agresto; and, not meaning to class myself with this august company but in the interests of full disclosure, myself."

Some of the architects and most strident apologists of the Iraq war turned out to be students (or students of students, or protégés of students) of Leo Strauss, among them Wolfowitz, Abram Shulsky, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Douglas Feith, and Robert Kagan. Some of them (not all of them, but enough that it was noticeable) were Jewish. Leftists rightfully attacked these neo-conservatives for the disastrous consequences of their militarism, but at times there was an unsettling undertone to their rhetoric. "The anti-Semitism behind the current wave of Strauss hatred, like the anti-Semitism that drives so much talk about the neoconservative "cabal" in Washington, is barely even veiled," Adam Kirsch complained in the New York Sun. "Tim Robbins, in his recent play "Embedded," portrays characters based on Messrs. Wolfowitz and Perle shouting "Hail Leo Strauss," in an echo of the Nazi salute." Extreme rightists were even less circumspect. But how could they not be? I mean, the whole phenomenon was an antisemite's dream. Here was a real-life, flesh-and-blood cabal of influential Jews, academically trained in the art of dissimulation and coded discourse, enacting what seemed to be a well-thought-out, long-held plan to hijack American foreign policy. It could have been ripped right out of the pages of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

The art of directing masses and individuals by means of cleverly manipulated theory and verbiage, by regulations of life in common and all sorts of other quirks, in all which the GOYIM understand nothing, belongs likewise to the specialists of our administrative brain. Reared on analysis, observation, on delicacies of fine calculation, in this species of skill we have no rivals, any more than we have either in the drawing up of plans of political actions and solidarity. In this respect the Jesuits alone might have compared with us, but we have contrived to discredit them in the eyes of the unthinking mob as an overt organization, while we ourselves all the while have kept our secret organization in the shade.

Strauss thought that the best way for ordinary human beings to raise themselves above the beasts is to be utterly devoted to their nation and willing to sacrifice their lives for it. He recommended a rabid nationalism and a militant society modelled on Sparta. He thought that this was the best hope for a nation to be secure against her external enemies as well as the internal threat of decadence, sloth, and pleasure. A policy of perpetual war against a threatening enemy is the best way to ward off political decay. And if the enemy cannot be found, then it must be invented.

Anything that provides fodder to anti-Semites is unfortunate, but it's hardly surprising that the most politically ambitious exponents of Straussianism would have found each other in Washington and formed a clique-College Republicans, Dartmouth Review editors, born again Christians and students of Robert Bork do the same thing. There's a creepily culty quality to the ism that his name is attached to today, which never quite made it into the mainstream of American academia, suffered a major backlash in the '60s and '70s, and is experiencing another today, during the reaction against George W. Bush. Most of those guys are bad actors and some of them must have real chips on their shoulders. But do they rise to the level of a cult or a conspiracy or a secret society? I suspect not.]]> http://boingboing.net/2009/11/11/goldwag-i-was-a-teen.html/feed 55 http://boingboing.net/2009/11/10/goldwag-books-that-i.html http://boingboing.net/2009/11/10/goldwag-books-that-i.html#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:08:03 +0000 Arthur Goldwag
Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

Pesco requested that I write about some of the books that inspired me as I was writing CULTS, CONSPIRACIES AND SECRET SOCIETIES. I'll need to ask for your indulgence, because I'm going to flash back to my boyhood. When I was in the sixth grade, I came across a mass market paperback called IMPOSSIBLE: YET IT HAPPENED, which, I just learned from the magic of the Internet, was written by R. Dewitt Miller in 1947. It was a prime exemplar of what is sometimes called Forteana, after Charles Fort (1874-1932), a failed novelist, close friend of Theodore Dreiser, and avid collector of news clippings about the eerie and the unexplained--he also gave his name to the magazine The Fortean Times (its cover story this month is about Masonic symbols in Washington, DC). Miller's yarns about spontaneous human combustion, ghosts, premonitory dreams, ESP, apparitions of air-born crucifixes in the smoke-filled skies over World War I battlefields, a fortyeight hour-long midnight that enveloped Colonial New England and I don't know what else, scared the living daylights out of me--but at the same time, I couldn't stop reading it, especially at night, by flashlight. It was an addiction and I eventually had the wisdom to go cold turkey, by giving the book away.

Or maybe I should go back even further, to when I was in the third grade, and we all trooped down to the school gym to look at the slides of ruins that a local character--a magician named James Randi--had snapped on his recent trip to the mountains of Peru. I can't remember exactly what I found so interesting about his lecture, but it made a huge impression on me. Maybe he did some sleight of hand tricks. A couple of decades later, Randi embarked on a second career as a Houdini-caliber debunker of psychic frauds. His take-down of Uri Geller on the Tonight Show is still devastating to watch.

Sometime during my adolescence, when I was an omnivorous consumer of Erich Van Daniken books, Edgar Cayce-inspired accounts of Atlantis and Lemuria, and Robert Heinlein novels about Ascended Masters (LOST LEGACY) and religious cults (STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND), I picked up a paperback about the Bermuda Triangle at a newsstand in the Port Authority bus terminal--LIMBO OF THE LOST by John Wallace Spencer. I stayed up late that night reading it, until I was brought up short by an account of a tragedy that I could actually remember reading about in the newspaper. I hope I'm getting this right--memory is a tricky thing and this happened a long time ago--but I think the story was about a fishing boat that had inexplicably disappeared off the Jersey Shore on a cloudless, windless day (Spencer's "limbo of the lost" was a lot bigger than the original Bermuda triangle). Did it sink? Or was it...transported somewhere? Only like I said, I had read about the incident when it happened--and what Spencer left out was that it occurred during a violent storm. It was a real epiphany for me, this discovery that some of the sensational things you read about in books aren't precisely true. Soon afterwards, I read my first book by Philip Klass--it must have been UFOS EXPLAINED--and discovered that science is more interesting than pseudo-science, that while it can be fun to indulge one's credulity from time to time (we humans seem to have an innate need to scare ourselves and stimulate our sense of wonder), critical thinking is infinitely more satisfying.

It was probably because of all those Frank Edwards books that I read as a kid that I devoted as much of CULTS, CONSPIRACIES, AND SECRET SOCIETIES as I did to UFOs, abductions, cattle mutilations, recovered memory, Satanic ritual abuse, and the like. I'm not comparing myself to the great Martin Gardner, the author of FADS AND FALLACIES IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE, who passed through a Fundamentalist Christian stage as a teenager before he became the dean of Skeptics (Michael Shermer, the editor of The Skeptic and the author of WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS was also raised as a Fundamentalist--he started out as a Christian theology major in college) but my youthful indulgences in books about the paranormal made me more attentive to that side of things than I might otherwise have been.

There's this band of trolls camped out on the Amazon page for CULTS, CONSPIRACIES AND SECRET SOCIETIES who've seized on my "confession" that I used the Internet as one of my resources and made it a headlined feature of their one-star reviews. I scandalized some Masons the other day when I admitted that I'd had the presumption to write about Masonry without being a member. At the risk of providing more fodder to my enemies, I'm now going to reveal that a lot of my thinking about conspiracism has been influenced by works of the imagination. Since I haven't belonged to any secret societies or cults, or personally participated in any global conspiracies (some 9/11 Denialists would argue that my stance on their movement makes me complicit in the biggest conspiracy ever, but I won't go there right now), I turn to literature for insights into what I've called "The Conspiratorial Frame of Mind."

Vladimir Nabokov's PALE FIRE is a tour de force of oblique storytelling and its narrator, Charles Kinbote, is one of literature's most memorable madmen. Grandiose and delusional, his world is a reflection of his own obsessively-imagined conspiracies. Ralph Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN is many things--an epic of race and radical politics in Depression-era America--but it is also the story of a Kafka-esque conspiracy. The hero of Salman Rushdie's MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN believes that the history of post-Independence India was enacted on his own body--and that his mind is a radio transceiver, through which he communicates with a secret underground of misfits and pariahs. Strangely enough, Rushdie became an artifact of world history himself, when Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a Fatwa calling for his execution.

Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's THE ILLUMINATUS! TRILOGY: THE EYE IN THE PYRAMID, THE GOLDEN APPLE, and LEVIATHAN is a wildly erudite, unabashedly trippy immersion in a world that's bound together by occult, philosophical, and political conspiracies--it's as paranoid as Philip K. Dick's VALIS, but much, much funnier. Thomas Pynchon's THE CRYING OF LOT 49 is a classic of conspiratorial thinking, about a private postal service that secretly influences the world. Just before I started writing CULTS, CONSPIRACIES, AND SECRET SOCIETIES, I read Umberto Eco's FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM, which is at once a brilliantly constructed thriller and an astonishingly erudite encyclopedia of esoterica--from Templar mysteries to Theosophy, from Kabbalah and alchemy to shamanism and right-wing synarchism. A Borgesian diversion on a grand scale, Eco's novel is also a cautionary tale about the perils of trying to make too much sense out of the world. I used this line from it as an epigraph for my own book: "Now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."

The afternoon of September 11, 2001, I walked to the Red Cross blood center in downtown Brooklyn to donate a pint of blood. I was listening to the radio on headphones as a news reporter was opining that the fact that the day was the twenty third anniversary of the Camp David accords provided a key clue to the perpetrators' identity (I just fact-checked this and learned that while the agreement was reached on the 11th, the documents weren't formally signed until the 17th). Scraps of charred paper were drifting down from the sky; the passerbys faces were ashen and exhausted. Suddenly it occurred to me that I had walked into the pages of a Don DeLillo novel--into a world that had been upended by an Airborne Toxic Event. (DeLillo did eventually write his 9/11 novel--FALLING MAN).

LIBRA, DeLillo's fictional reconstruction of the conspiracy(ies) to assassinate President Kennedy, is so convincing to me that every time I reread it I have to remind myself that he made it up. Oswald's self-effacing grandiosity, his mother Marguerite's exasperatingly endearing neediness, Jack Ruby's glad-handing insanity, the rogue CIA man's despair--all of them feel so true-to-life. The book also contains a much-quoted passage that explains why conspiracy theories are so irresistible:

"A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act." ]]> http://boingboing.net/2009/11/10/goldwag-books-that-i.html/feed 12 http://boingboing.net/2009/11/09/911-truth-and-the-pa.html http://boingboing.net/2009/11/09/911-truth-and-the-pa.html#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:59:17 +0000 Arthur Goldwag Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

(CC-licensed photo on Flickr by 911conspiracy)

Forty-five years ago, Harpers magazine published Richard Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." The occasion for the piece was the revenant conservatism that had driven Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign (the magazine hit the newsstands the month of the Johnson/Goldwater election), but it remains astonishingly apt. I cannot recommend it enough for anyone who wants to understand the mentalités of fringe political movements in the United States--from the Anti-Masons and Know Nothings in the first half of the 1800s, to McCarthyism, the Nation of Islam, and the Weathermen in the last century, to the Birthers and Truthers today.

I hesitate to bring up 9/11 Truth again after the firestorm of commentary I unleashed last week, but read Hofstadter on the pedantry of paranoid literature and tell me that he doesn't nail some of the most contentious of the posters (most of whom were probably not even born when the piece was written) with a psychoanalyst's precision and a novelist's sympathy:

One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.....Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates "evidence." The difference between this "evidence" and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it....

Of course he's furious! He's educated, articulate, and politically committed. He's not some disreputable, anti-social obsessive--he's a veritable exegete of 9/11 anomalies, as fluent in the jargon of physics as he is in political dialectics. It's bad enough that he has to endure the studied neutrality or outright hostility of the really big guns of the left--Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein--but then an arrant nobody like me comes along with, as one of his fellow posters put it, "a metric tonne of standard issue boilerplate" and presumes that he can conjure away the whole edifice of 9/11 Truth with a couple of wisecracks. Not only am I smug and ignorant and intellectually dishonest --- it's as if I don't even care about the subtle distinctions between one brand of Truthery and another, as if I can't be bothered to acknowledge the museum's-worth of evidence that he and his colleagues have so assiduously curated.

Imagine that you were a Maria Callas fan. You own every recording she ever made -- 78s, LPs, remastered CDs, even reel-to-reel tapes recorded off of radio broadcasts. You've not only read every book and magazine article about her that was ever committed to print, you've written a few yourself. And then some fly-by-night music journalist casually dismisses her in the pages of a mass circulation magazine as a cracked-voiced diva whose sole claim to fame was that she and Jackie O were rivals for Aristotle Onassis's affections.

Reading through all that commentary, I thought of how misguided missionaries sometimes try to evangelize Jews by calling their attention to passages from the New Testament--a scripture that by definition carries no weight with Jews at all. From my outsider's perspective, most of the Truther's exhibits (the iron spherules, the 2.5 seconds of video-taped free fall, the anecdotes about the dancing Israelis, the housing official trapped in the stairwell of WTC7) aren't evidence at all but rather artifacts of confirmation bias--factoids (many of dubious provenance, some long past their sell-by date) that are plucked out of context and marshaled not to build or close a positive case for one thesis or another, but only to cast doubt on the default position. I can't engage the 9/11 issue on the same terms that a Truther does, because I'd have to be a Truther myself.

Religious fanatics, political radicals, obsessive fans -- the worlds they live in are closed systems, governed by dogmas and articles of faith. Discipline is strictly enforced; members are punished or purged for their lapses in ideological or doctrinal purity. Outsiders are regarded with suspicion and hostility -- milquetoast accommodationists who are presumptuous enough to suppose they can make common cause on one issue or another even more so than overt enemies. It's a pressure cooker -- turn up the temperature and you get sectarianism and schisms, higher still and you get witch hunts, show trials, Cultural Revolutions, and Nuremberg laws.

With its congeries of black sheep constituencies (Alex Jones Libertarian populists, movement leftists, anarchists, white supremacists, New World Order reactionaries, Protocols of the Elders of Zion anti-Semites, crusading architects and theologians) and its lack of a dominant leader or organization, the 9/11 Movement will likely never become unified enough to tear itself apart. But it has not been altogether innocuous either. "One of the major consequences of the 9/11 movement," Noam Chomsky said, "Has been to draw enormous amounts of energy and effort away from activism directed to real and ongoing crimes of state...crimes that are far more serious than blowing up the WTC would be, if there were any credibility to that thesis. That is, I suspect, why the 9/11 movement is treated far more tolerantly by centers of power than is the norm for serious critical and activist work."

Just as the missionary can't understand how the Jew can contemplate the prospect of his eternal damnation with such unnatural equanimity, the Truther can't fathom why the rest of us would rather look at the forest than the trees. There's a certain poignancy in their predicament. As Hofstadter wrote, "We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well."]]> http://boingboing.net/2009/11/09/911-truth-and-the-pa.html/feed 168 http://boingboing.net/2009/11/06/freemasonry-dan-brow.html http://boingboing.net/2009/11/06/freemasonry-dan-brow.html#comments Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:00:52 +0000 Arthur Goldwag Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

On September 15, 2009, THE LOST SYMBOL came off press. Fans of THE DA VINCI CODE, with more than 80 million copies in print perhaps the bestselling novel of all time, were thrilled--they had been waiting for Dan Brown to write another book for six years. Random House, B&N, and Amazon were delighted; they moved more than a million copies in twenty four hours and another million copies by the end of the week; two months later, it still sits high atop the bestseller lists.

The Masons breathed a sigh of relief, because, even if Brown had sensationalized their secret rites and made them look a little silly (drinking wine out of skulls and all that--which come to think of it, is a lot less demeaning than donning fezzes and driving miniature cars in parades, which members of the Masonic fraternity called the Ancient Arab Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, better known as the Shriners, do right out in public), he portrayed them as men of reason, and implied that their ranks are still as crowded with the powerful and the wealthy -- Cabinet secretaries, plutocrats, Senators, Museum directors -- as they were two centuries ago, when they could count Goethe, Mozart, George Washington, Lafayette and Paul Revere among their members.

I was guardedly hopeful myself. With all those Masonic symbols on its cover, I figured that CULTS, CONSPIRACIES AND SECRET SOCIETIES stood a small chance of being captured by THE LOST SYMBOL's commercial gravity, much as a tiny planetesimal can get pulled into a gas giant's orbit. But happiest of all was Lynne McTaggart, the real-life author of THE FIELD and THE INTENTION EXPERIMENT, whose books and research in the field of Noetic Science are specifically cited in THE LOST SYMBOL's pages.

No one has ever accused Dan Brown of being a literary stylist; he's too easy to parody. His narrators natter on like chatty tour guides, bludgeoning us with trivia and heavy-handed exposition. His hero Robert Langdon seems to suffer from a testosterone deficiency; his celibate bad guys, with their bulging muscles and self-mortified flesh, are creepily fetishized. But ANGELS AND DEMONS, THE DA VINCI CODE, and now THE LOST SYMBOL do more than merely lead their legions of readers on merry chases; they exhort them to reconsider their world view. Though the answers he provides may be trivial and sometimes historically inaccurate, the questions Brown asks us to consider are worth pondering. Does the church misrepresent Christianity? Is history filled with mysteries and intrigues that mainstream chronicles elide? Are science and religion converging?

Brown earnestly wants us to expand our view of human potential, to open ourselves up to a whole new paradigm--one that is more capacious and filled with possibilities than either secular scientism or the traditional Judeo-Christian world view. In a very broad sense, that was the Masons' philosophical program as well. Stripped of all its pageantry and mumbo jumbo, Freemasonry (which, despite its claims of ancient provenance, can't be dated back any further than the early 18th century) celebrates the rational, non-dogmatic, individualistic values of the Enlightenment. God-the-Architect is a Deist idea. The Masonic openness to Rosicrucian arcana, alchemy, and Kabbalah is an attribute of the same unfettered, non-judgmental curiosity that led to the scientific and technological breakthroughs of the early industrial era--and for that matter to the rise of the bourgeois merchant class and the overthrow of entrenched Aristocracy. Masons did play the outsized role in the French Revolution that their enemies accused them of; Adam Weishaupt's Bavarian Illuminati envisioned an age in which Kings and Catholicism would no longer hold sway. Augustin Barruel and John Robison's 1798 exposes of the Illuminati conspiracies sparked a transient panic in the United States that anticipated 1950s-style McCarthyism; a second wave of anti-Masonic paranoia swept the country in the late 1820s. It's ironic that the prospect of world revolution so frightened the post-colonial Americans, since they were revolutionaries themselves. Not only had they thrown off the shackles of king and church, they had thrived because they did so.

Benjamin Franklin -- a reluctant but eventually an ardent revolutionist -- is the very type of the American Freemason. Inventor, scientist, and entrepreneur, he was a mass of contradictions: a sententious moralizer and codifier of bourgeois virtues, he attended séances at the hedonistic Hellfire Club in England; homespun and self-educated, he was a familiar in the royal courts and academies of Europe. He was our Leonardo Da Vinci, except he couldn't paint or sculpt. And like most of our founding fathers, he had a healthy skepticism of democracy.

Just as we worry about what less advanced nations will do with nuclear technology today, the men of the Enlightenment worried about what the ignorant masses would do with the incredible powers -- philosophic, economic, political, technological and scientific -- that they were unlocking. Their fears were not misplaced... we are living with some of the consequences of their discoveries today. Much of our planet is poisoned; its climate is changing; we live under the shadow of weapons of mass destruction.

Esoteric Masonry acknowledges -- as do all the mystery religions and philosophies, going back to Egyptian Hermeticism and Pythagoreanism--that some things are best kept within a select circle. That doesn't mean the Masons were secret aristocrats or magi; only that they knew how dangerous it could be when complex ideas were trivialized, debased, and distorted by people who didn't understand them. Back in the eighteenth century, the boundaries between science and magic were still porous; chemists were still trying to turn lead into gold; physicians were practicing medicine without the benefit of germ theory; physicists were only just beginning to move away from Aristotle's world view towards one that we would now call Newtonian (Newton himself -- a devout, mystically-inclined Christian and a practicing alchemist -- lived into the 1720s).

The fact that the early Masons were as intrigued by ancient esoterica as they were doesn't mean that they were Gnostics or Zoroastrians or Rosicrucians, any more than their knowledge of Latin and Greek classics made them pagans. One legacy of the Enlightenment is our ability to unravel science and superstition, to draw distinctions between theology and natural science, and between ancient wisdom and ancient ignorance. Those boundaries are so clearly demarcated today that many people have come to believe that science and religion are mutually exclusive.

Dan Brown's THE LOST SYMBOL mixes them up again. In its telling, the Freemasons were the keepers of the embers that cutting edge Noetic scientists are fanning into flame--a philosophic technology that will bring us wonders like ESP and teleportation, and that one day might even conquer death. Noetic science takes some of the spookier discoveries of quantum physics--that particles can remain "entangled," even when they are separated by vast distances--and extends it to the "big, visible" world.

There really is an Institute of Noetic Sciences, in Petaluma, California (Obama's much-reviled ex-Green Jobs czar Van Jones is a member of its board; other famous names are Desmond Tutu, Dean Ornish, and Deepak Chopra). And as I noted, there really is a Lynne McTaggart. "All matter in the universe exists in a web of connection and constant influence," she writes, "Which often overrides many of the laws of the universe that we used to believe held ultimate sovereignty....The significance of these findings extends far beyond a validation of extrasensory power or parapsychology. They threaten to demolish the entire edifice of present-day science." McTaggart's Intention Experiment is a web-based project that recruits volunteers to beam thought energy at objects and people and measure the results. Click here for the protocols of some of the early experiments.

For all of her references to quantum physics and her nods to falsifiability and the scientific method, McTaggart mostly hearkens back to nineteenth century New Thought--Phineas Parkhurst Quimby's "mind cure" movement that inspired Christian Science, the Power of Positive Thinking, and the "Think and Grow Rich" philosophy of Napoleon Hill. In 1888, in a biographical sketch of his father that he published in the New England Magazine, Quimby's son George summarized the essential tenets of New Thought: "That 'mind' was spiritual matter and could be changed'; that we were made up of 'truth and error'; that 'disease was an error, or belief, and that the Truth was the cure.'"

Rhonda Byrne's bestselling THE SECRET is infused with New Thought and Noetic Science; one of its "stars" is James Arthur Ray, whose self-improvement empire is teetering on the brink in the wake of the sweat lodge disaster that took three lives in Sedona, Arizona last month.

The crown jewel of the experiments that the Noetic Scientist heroine of the THE LOST SYMBOL had secretly carried out was one in which she weighed a dying man immediately before and after his death, proving that his departed soul had physical mass. This same experiment was really carried out by a Dr. Duncan MacDougal in 1907 (he determined that it weighed 21 grams). MacDougal also killed a bunch of dogs and concluded, with equal scientific authority, that they didn't have souls. As it happens, I also believe that human beings have souls (dogs too), but I don't think they can be weighed and measured. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the soul is precisely that part of us that can't be dissected or quantified.

Like Brown and his Masons, I agree that we have much to learn from the ancients: from esoterica like Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and the Kabbalah, from canonical authors like Plato and Aristotle, and mainstreatm religious scriptures like THE BOOK OF THE DEAD, the Bible, and THE UPANISHADS. Shamans and herbalists know things that scientists are only now acknowledging; we are only just beginning to appreciate Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine. But I somehow doubt that the materialized spirituality of Noetic Science is the bridge to the future that Brown makes it out to be; one can be open-minded without embracing pseudoscience.

Historically, the Masons have stood for the spirit of free inquiry and, setting aside their heartily reciprocated detestation of Roman Catholicism aside among some American Masons at various periods in American history -- particularly the era of the second Ku Klux Klan, in the teens and '20s -- religious tolerance. It's nice for a change to see them portrayed as idealistic good guys instead of sinister oligarchs presiding over a malign New World Order. But the Masons aren't New Agers. For all of Dan Brown's earnest talk of a new paradigm, I feel like he's urging us -- and them -- to take a giant step backwards.]]> http://boingboing.net/2009/11/06/freemasonry-dan-brow.html/feed 80 http://boingboing.net/2009/11/05/goldwag-hoaxes-celeb.html http://boingboing.net/2009/11/05/goldwag-hoaxes-celeb.html#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:51:47 +0000 Arthur Goldwag
Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

Some of you might remember a story about a little boy and a runaway balloon that erupted in the news a few weeks back. Like Edgar Allan Poe's 1844 scoop about Monck Mason, an English balloonist who was blown off course en route to France and made landfall near Charleston, South Carolina (illustration above), the story turned out to be false in most of its particulars. There really was an aeronautist named Monck Mason, but he hadn't crossed the ocean. There really was a little boy and a UFO-shaped balloon, but... well, you know the rest.

A few days after Balloon Boy's non-event The Yes Men, professional hoaxers with a genuine political agenda, pulled off a coup when they impersonated officials from the US Chamber of Commerce and announced to the press that the Chamber had reversed its policies on global warming. I wrote about the Yes Men in Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies in the context of the bizarre nineteenth century hoaxer Leo Taxil. Taxil was the pen name of Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pages (1854-1907), an ex-free thinker and a highly public convert to Catholicism who, in a series of sensational books, claimed to have discovered Palladism, a devil-worshipping Masonic sect associated with Albert Pike and the Scottish Rite. In 1897, he called a press conference in Paris and admitted that he had made the whole thing up. Not just Palladism, everything-starting with his conversion. For more than a decade, he had been telling the Catholic Church exactly what it wanted to hear, setting it up for a stupendous fall when "the most colossal hoax of modern times" was exposed. Already a prankster as a teenager, Taxil had created a panic about fictitious shark attacks in the waters off Marseilles (shark attacks remain a staple of the sensationalistic media to this day); a few years later he fed Swiss newspapers a bogus story about a sunken city beneath Lake Geneva.

Are there wider lessons to be gleaned from any of this, besides not believing everything you read in the newspaper (or hear on the radio, watch on TV, or read on the Web)?

Frank Rich editorialized about Balloon Boy's father in the New York Times, casting him as a desperate figure out of Nathanael West's Day of the Locust, a victim of our own Great Recession, hungrily grasping after the golden ring of wealth and fame. If West's people worshipped screen gods and goddesses, today's stage struck wannabes aspire to play themselves on TV, living out scripted versions of their own lives.

Mass communications technology and a popular culture that's almost entirely given over to marketing have conspired to devalue the coin of renown. But is that such a terrible thing? Celebrity of the sort that Falcon Heene's father wanted so badly might be vulgar and passing, but who among us hasn't longed to rise above our station, to be noticed and praised and remembered for merely existing; who hasn't longed to cheat death? The Yugoslavian writer Danilo Kiš (who died of cancer in his 50s) wrote a short story called "The Encyclopedia of the Dead," about a Mormon-like religious order that documents the lives of ordinary people. Locked overnight in the library that houses the Encyclopedia's thousands of volumes, its narrator reads about her recently deceased father. Though just a few pages long, his entry recounts in astounding detail not just his vital statistics, but all of his sorrows, disappointments, and joys, rendering him in all his dense and irreducible pathos and particularity. "This," she concludes, "is the central message of the Encyclopedia's authors--nothing ever repeats itself in human history; all things that, at first glance, seem to be the same are barely similar; every man is a single star unto himself; everything happens always and never, everything occurs endlessly and never again."

Sometimes when I'm too agitated to sleep but too sleepy to read or write or do anything useful, I log onto my computer and Google the names of people I used to know. It sounds a little creepy, but it's not as if I wouldn't have been thinking about them anyway. Insomnia is an occasion for revisiting old griefs and regrets. If you want to hear the dead scratching on the walls of their tombs, you have to stay up past your bedtime. I went to high school with a musician who came as close to making it as you can without becoming rich or famous. One night, I don't know why, I typed the name of one of his bands into Google and to my astonishment discovered that fan websites, MP3s, and YouTube videos had popped up like so many mushrooms. I clicked on one of them and there he was, his eyes hidden behind a pair of wrap-around sunglasses, his face achingly young and hopeful. I clicked again and saw some grainy concert footage recorded in Osaka, Japan. He was older this time, and grizzled from the road. The singer he was performing with--a bonafide rock-and-roll legend--would die of a heroin overdose that same month. Jamey would follow him a few years later.

I Googled my late father's father once and found the manifest of the steamship that brought him to this country from Poland at the turn of the last century. I Googled my father's sister--she killed herself in the 1960s--and found her listed as a member of Erasmus high school's graduating class of 1931. Letters that my late mother sent to Harpers magazine and The New York Times are archived and can be accessed for a nominal fee. "In the future," Andy Warhol famously predicted, "everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." Fifteen minutes later the future is here. And thanks to the indelible traces that we leave on the Internet, some of us achieve a notoriety of the kind, if not the degree, that used to be reserved for the notorious alone. Religious faith might offer deeper consolations, but for the rest of us those fifteen minutes might be our last best hope.]]> http://boingboing.net/2009/11/05/goldwag-hoaxes-celeb.html/feed 5 http://boingboing.net/2009/11/04/goldwag-cults-in-the.html http://boingboing.net/2009/11/04/goldwag-cults-in-the.html#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:09:41 +0000 Arthur Goldwag

"Medication" by Andrew Brandou, from his Jonestown paintings

Some people use the word "cult" as a pejorative, a catchall for sects whose beliefs and practices fall out of the mainstream of organized religion. I use the word as a social scientist or psychologist would, to denote a coercive or totalizing relationship between a dominating leader and his or her unhealthily dependent followers. As I wrote in Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, "what makes a cult cultish is not so much what it espouses, but how much authority its leaders grant themselves--and how slavishly devoted to them its followers are."

Robert Lifton, the distinguished psychologist and author of many books, including Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China (1961), defined cults in a 1981 letter in the Harvard Mental Health Letter as an "aspect of a worldwide epidemic of ideological totalism, or fundamentalism." Cults, he continued, can be identified by three characteristics: 1) A charismatic leader who makes him or herself an object of worship; 2) A process of "coercive persuasion or thought reform" ("brainwashing," it is sometimes called); and 3) Economic, sexual, or psychological exploitation of members by the cult's leadership. The chief tool of coercive persuasion, Lifton writes, is "milieu control: the control of all communication within a given environment." When a guru forbids new recruits from communicating with their families; when members are urged to make extravagant donations; and when a guru declares themselves infallible, either God's chosen messenger or God Himself, warning flags should go up.

In the last couple of weeks, I flagged news items about two cults -- one in New Zealand, one in Africa.

Twenty five members of a cult that forbids its members to eat cooked foods were recently arrested in Uganda for trespassing on privately held land, according to this article in the October 25th New Vision ("Uganda's leading website"); a similar group was arrested last summer and sentenced to a year in prison. Uganda's crackdown on cults began in 2000, when 500 members of a cult based in Kanungu commit suicide.

The death count was actually much higher-possibly more than 1000. And they weren't suicides, but murders. The victims were members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, a Mariolatrous doomsday cult led by a former Catholic school administrator named Joseph Kibwetere and Dominic Kataribaabo, an excommunicated priest. In the early 1990s, they merged their group with one run by a seeress and ex-prostitute named Keledonia Mwerinde, who also received visions from Mary and Jesus; in 1997, they claimed to have 4500 followers. Members sold their possessions and donated the proceeds to the church. While they awaited the apocalypse-which was predicted for midnight, December 31, 2000-they lived in compounds, wore uniforms, worked twelve hour days in the sugar fields, and fasted two days a week. Sex was forbidden, as was speech-members communicated with each other in sign language. The cult's scripture, A Timely Message from Heaven: The End of the Present Times, which records the leaders' visions, was studied carefully. When Doomsday didn't arrive on schedule, church members grew restive; some demanded their property back. On March 17, 2000, more than 500 members-men, women, and children-were locked into a church that was set on fire; in the weeks that followed, a number of mass graves were uncovered. Click here to see the story from the April 1, 2000 Newsweek.

Warrants were issued for the top leadership of the church but they were never located. There were rumors that Mwerinde had murdered Kibwetere and Katariabaabo and fled with her family and the church's fortune; Kibwetere's wife later told authorities that he had died well before the fire, in 1999.

A New York Times article from March 19, 2000 provides an essential piece of context that helps explain why the Movement's millenarian message found so many receptive ears: "The church is 25 miles north of Rwanda, where 800,000 people were slaughtered in the 1994 genocide, and 10 miles from Congo, where armies of six African nations have been drawn into a civil war." Some 5.4 million people were killed in that war; Uganda, of course, endured Idi Amin's bloody regime until 1979.

And then there's this, from just last weekend:

Newspapers, TV newscasts, and blogs in New Zealand lit up after 700 new members of The Destiny Church swore an oath of personal loyalty to its founder, Bishop Brian Tamaki, which reads: "To you Bishop we pledge our allegiance, our faithfulness and loyalty. We pledge to serve the cause that is in your heart and to finish that work. Success to you and success to those who help you - for God is with you." According to NZTV, "Mark Vrankovich from Cultwatch, says the covenant contains the type of mechanisms by which cults go askew. 'The pattern is the risk,' says Vrankovich who is upset that Tamaki seems to claim to be the mouthpiece of God. 'Destiny Church is not a Christian church following Jesus Christ. It is a church following a man by the name of Brian Tamaki who claims to be the mouthpiece of God.'" Tamaki's organization also sponsors New Zealand's ultra-conservative Family Party. In 2004, Tamaki said "I predict in the next five years, by the time we hit our 10th anniversary - and I don't say this lightly - that we will be ruling the nation."

It wasn't so much the oath that roused the furor as the document which accompanied it, entitled Protocols and Requirements Between Spiritual Father & His Spiritual Sons, which takes, Garth George of The New Zealand Herald noted, "1300 words to describe in jaw-dropping detail how the 'spiritual sons' shall behave towards their 'spiritual father.'" Sons are instructed to always speak of the Bishop and his wife "in a favourable and positive light" and cautioned to treat them with respect and dignity. "Even though he is very sociable and open--remember who he is!" Followers must rise when the Bishop enters the room and may sit only after he is seated. They must never criticize the Bishop or his family or the church themselves and should not allow anyone else to do so. "You are not only to stop them in their tracks but warn them that they criticize you when they criticize Bishop."

Tamaki, a high-school dropout, grew up on a farm and became deeply involved in a succession of Pentecostal churches in the late 1970s. He launched the Destiny Church in a warehouse in Auckland in 1998 with 20 members; today it claims 9000 members throughout New Zealand (and has opened a branch in Australia). Destiny Church has a close relationship with the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia; Tamaki calls its pastor Eddie Long his spiritual father.

Appropriately enough, Tamaki preaches the Prosperity Gospel, which has by all accounts worked very well for him and his family. Members tithe to the church; they also provide an annual "first fruits" gift to the pastor and his family, amounting to $300,000-$500,000. According to the New Zealand Herald:

Bishop Tamaki's six-figure salary is paid from church revenue, through the Destiny International Trust. He also receives revenue raised by the church's Proton Bookstore - where his messages can be bought on CD or DVD for between $10 and $20 - and Proton Gym.

Bishop Tamaki and Hannah are the sole shareholders in the Proton Trustee Company Ltd. The couple are also shareholders in Tamaki Productions Ltd and Tamaki Investments Ltd.

They own a $1.2 million clifftop home with views of the Hauraki Gulf, which is now for sale, and a $100,000 boat and expensive cars and motorcycles.

9/11 -- the sheer shock of it, the deaths, the sense of violation-still rouses incredible emotions. The seven years of international adventurism, state-sanctioned torture, domestic spying, rampant privatization, and upward redistribution of income that followed, all of it promoted by waving the bloody flag, have left us more polarized as a society than we've been since at least the 1960s.

I recently heard from Daniel Edd III, a passionate and voluble member of the 9/11 Truth Community. "How do you feel about this guy's qualifications?" he asked, posting a link to the Wikipedia entry on Steven E. Jones. "Have you ever watched the documentary 9/11: Press for Truth?" he continued.

I do not understand how anyone could watch this documentary, argue against the victim's families, and still consider themseleves a Patriotic American Citizen. The evidence has been served up on a silver platter, and I promise you that I will see to it that the truth gets exposed.

I joined the US Army in a combat arms MOS just three months after 9/11. I believed that defending my family, friends, and fellow countrymen from those who attacked us was a cause worth dying for. My beliefs have not changed. I raised my right hand and swore to defend this country against all enemies, foreign or DOMESTIC. Now that I know beyond any doubt that Osama bin Laden and 19 cavemen did not bring down the towers, I will continue upholding my oath by pursuing the TRUE perpetrators until I take my last breath.

I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but Yeats's words in "The Second Coming" seem strangely apt when it comes to 9/11 Truth: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." Which isn't to say that 9/11 Truthers are all "bad." Many of them -- Daniel Edd Bland III, for one -- are absolutely sincere and well-intentioned. Part of the reason I try to avoid getting into arguments with them is because I don't want to seem to be impugning their intelligence or their characters. What's "worst" in them is their critical methodology-their emotionally-colored, conspiratorial, often magically deterministic view of the world.Consider David Ray Griffin, whose qualifications as a liberal theologian are sterling, whose political leanings are idealistic and enlightened, but whose writings about 9/11 are tendentious in the extreme.

My own mind may not be first-rate but, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, it's able to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas at the same time. Though I am no Truther, I believe that the Bush/Cheney administration lied to us, repeatedly and brazenly. They cynically exploited the attacks to promote a war that an unholy alliance of interests -- Israel-centric neo-conservatives; profit-hungry oilmen; evangelicals looking to hasten the advent of the End times; expatriate Iraqis seeking their return to power -- were certain would be a cake walk. But I have seen no credible evidence that Bush, Cheney or anyone else in the American government planned or abetted the attacks themselves--and my mind boggles at the sheer nastiness of some of the Truther scenarios that question whether the people on the planes really died.

I was maybe a quarter of a mile away from the North Tower that morning; the jet was over mid-town when it popped into my field of view and I didn't take my eyes off it until it disappeared in the fireball. But an hour and a half later, when I was back in Brooklyn and someone told me that the tower had just collapsed (and indeed, there'd been all kinds of rumblings outside and the sky had darkened noticeably), I insisted that they were mistaken. "It couldn't have fallen," I said. "The damage was all at the top." I was practically there, but I didn't know what I was talking about. No big surprise-as any lawyer can tell you, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. The next afternoon, I met a hard-hat on the Brooklyn Bridge who'd been working on the Pile. "Was it a bomb?" I asked him. "I don't know," he answered, "But I'll tell you this: Yesterday this country was caught sitting on the crapper, with its pants around its ankles." He didn't know anything either, but it's hard to argue with what he said.

As for Steven E. Jones, yes, he is a well-regarded physicist, but he's not a structural engineer. I've read articles by structural engineers that completely demolish his claim that the buildings collapsed at "free fall acceleration." I'm not able to follow their math, but I suspect that most members of the 9/11 Truth Community aren't either. And from what I've read about the trace quantities of chemicals associated with thermites that Jones detected on debris collected from Ground Zero, they don't remotely prove the presence of incendiary bombs--they can also be found in Freon and paint and computer equipment. I could point to websites like debunking911.com or AE911Truth.INFO or 911Myths, but most true believers would simply direct me to advocacy websites of their own.

William of Occam said it best in the 14th century: Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate. "Plurality should not be assumed unnecessarily." Occam's Razor, also known as the Pinciple of Parsimony, suggests that the most credible theory is almost always the most economical--the one that involves the least number of moving parts. This blog post tallies up all the people who would have had to be involved in a conspiracy in which the government deliberately blew up those buildings, manipulated fake hijackers or suicide operatives into crashing jets (or holograms of jets) into them, and corrupted thousands of scientists, law enforcement authorities, insurance inspectors, construction workers, and firefighters to rubberstamp the official story. It's much easier for me to imagine a small, well-funded group of Arabs with box cutters pulling this off (whose leaders may have hid from US bombers in caves, but who are very far from troglodytes) than half a million silent collaborators, almost none of whom have anything to gain by it-and whose number includes almost every structural engineer in the world (Richard Gage, the founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth is NOT a structural engineer).

I didn't watch the movie but I know it was well-reviewed. I salute the Jersey Girls for their courage and assiduousness. I don't believe that all of the political or public safety issues that 9/11 raises have been remotely resolved either (consider NORAD's and the FAA's torpid response to NWA's rogue Flight 188 two weeks ago, if you think that sufficiently-committed hijackers couldn't knock down another American building). I'm completely in favor of airing everything that can be aired in the full glare of the press.

But I don't think it serves truth or justice to misuse science, to pretend that people who died didn't die, that jets didn't crash or that members of the Bush administration-which Lord knows is culpable for so many things-knowingly pulled any triggers.

Hello everybody. I'm excited to be guest-blogging for Boing Boing for the next two weeks and I look forward to meeting some of you--many of you, I hope--through your comments. As you know, I am the author of the book "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies", which Vintage published last summer. Around the time the book came out, I started my own blog, where I have been posting fairly regularly, sometimes about other things, but mostly on the issues of the day as they pertain to cults, conspiracies and secret societies. In this season of birtherism, 9/11 Truth, death panels, sweat lodge homicides, C-Street Christians, The Lost Symbol, rogue balloons and Northwest Airline jets, I've had no lack of fodder.

I make no effort to disguise my predispositions and biases--I am respectfully agnostic on most religious issues, lean leftwards politically, and am resolutely skeptical when it comes to the paranormal or the outlandish. I hope I am not dogmatic or snide or gratuitously ad hominem, but please don't hesitate to call me out if I am. Today's entry features conspiracy theorist Orly Taitz, DDS Esq., the Moldovian-born emigrant (via Israel) to Orange County, California who has become instantly recognizable to Cable TV news viewers as "the wide-eyed queen of the so-called birther movement--that subset of individuals who still, despite all evidence, don't believe Obama was born a citizen of the United States" (Time magazine -- click here for their "2-minute bio").

On Friday, October 30, Federal District Judge David O. Carter issued a devastating 30-page ruling, dismissing Barnet et al vs Obama et al, the case Taitz had been pursuing on behalf of independent party candidates for the presidency, including Alan Keyes, as well as active duty military personnel who don't acknowledge Obama's legitimacy as Commander in Chief. The defendants included Mr. and Mrs. Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Taitz responded to this latest setback to her quest to overturn the election of 2008 with a blast on her website, in which she compared herself to another victim of character assassination, Sarah Palin. As my mother might have said, she should only be so lucky--then she could quit her triple practice of dentistry, law, and realtoring and reap millions too.

Taitz also revisited the issue of Obama's social security number(s):

There is a vicious circle that you see in a regime. There is no unbiased media. So far no one in our media had integrity of character to report on multiple social security numbers of Obama, even though it is a criminal offense, and with 39 social security numbers a person should be criminally prosecuted and should be serving a lengthy prison term. When media reports nothing, the public and the judges are misinformed. The judges are afraid to make decisions, that they think, will upset the public, and in turn, their timid and lopside decisions influence the media.

Though freepers have been buzzing about the Obama family's social security numbers since last spring, there's been nary a word about the matter in the MSM. Here's the story: Taitz hired two private detectives (former Scotland Yard Inspector Neil Sankey and Ohio Private Investigator Susan Daniels) to look into Obama's past.

According to Taitz's miscellaneous filing on October 11:

These two private investigation reports, although slightly duplicative, show beyond reasonable doubt a pattern of manipulation of Barack Hussein Obama's identity, employment, and residence information. The use of a multitude of social security numbers alone is indicative that Mr. Obama appears to have committed a substantial number of felony violations, including but not limited to violations of 42 U.S.C. §408(a) (7)(B). which shows dishonest political advantage during 2008 election. Plaintiffs submit again that "the American People Reserve the Right to know". Furthermore, the examination and decipherment of the trail of deception so casually left by this successful candidate will (1) lead ultimately to discovery of the truth about his origins and citizenship, (2) reveal the nature of the scheme to defraud by which this Mr. Barack Hussein Obama became President, and (3) show the degree and nature of the collusion of other people and parties in the scheme of defraud leading to his election, including but not limited to the other Defendants.

Daniel's affidavit attests that she discovered that Obama's social security number was issued in the state of Connecticut in the 1970s--and appeared to have been previously assigned to someone who was born in 1890 (who was deceased). Earlier Taitz had submitted a lengthy list of social security numbers associated with people named Dunham, Sutoro, and Barack Obama (also Barok, Baraq, Barake, and Barbara Obama) that Sankey had collected by running the names through Intelius, Lexis Nexis, Choice Point and other publicly accessible sites. He also claimed to have discovered that Obama's late mother had used the social security number of a woman who is alive and well and living in Washington State.

Never mind that there are other Obamas--and even other Barack Hussein Obamas--in the world, and that Internet databases are replete with errors (as are some government databases). Conspiracists have seized on these revelations as proof that Obama used the numbers to launder the ill-gotten money, obtained through drug dealing, Rezko, and Ford Foundation grants, that they believe financed his political machine. And where did he obtain them? According to at least one conspiracist web site, you needn't look far: As a volunteer at the Oahu Circuit Court Probate Department, Obama's grandmother Madeline Dunham had access to deceased people's social security numbers.

Or perhaps there was an even more sinister source. I'm thinking that the KGB agents who inserted the Kenyan-born Obama into the US as a sleeper years ago assigned him those bogus numbers precisely so that his imposture would be discovered and exposed--but not until after he was elected, precipitating the constitutional crisis that would topple the American Colossus at last. Of course they'd have to have an agent in place to expose him on schedule. And I think I know just who they used.

If Obama is a creation of the Communists, doesn't it stand to reason that the Soviet-born Taitz is their tool as well?