Reading
Log For 2002
YOU
ARE BEING LIED TO
The Disinformation Guide To Media Distortion, Historical
Whitewashes And
Cultural Myths (2001)
Oversize Paperback
The Disinformation Company Ltd., New York
– 2002.1.30
- For more (dis)info: www.disinfo.com
Reality Is a Shared Hallucination by Howard
Bloom
- 15: “Freedom” comes from Germanic
tribes making
peace by invoking the god
Freda. “Woman” came from the Anglo-Saxon
meaning a “man’s wife”,
originally pronounced “wif-man”.
Journalists Doing Somersaults: Self-Censorship
and the Rise
of the Corporate
Media State by Norman Solomon
- 28: The Media “Big Six” conglomerates:
- CBS merged with Viacom
- NBC and CNBC owned by General Electric
- ABC owned by Disney
- Fox Network and Fox News Channel owned by Rupert
Murdoch’s
News Corp.
- CNN owned by Time Warner
- MSNBC joint venture of General Electric and Microsoft
The Puppets of Pandemonium: Sleaze and Sloth in
the Media
Elite
by Howard Bloom
- 30: Lincoln Steffens, an influential American newspaperman
said:
I have seen the future and it works.
- Bloom accuses the media of being pro-PLO and pro-Viet Cong!
The Covert News Network by Greg Bishop
- 41: Allan Dulles (head of the CIA) occasionally contributed
articles to Reader’s
Digest. In 1942, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph
Goebbels called Reader’s
Digest a “voice in the wilderness” for
its urging to keep the U.S.
out of war. During the war, Hitler’s 805th
Tank Destroyer
battalion shot canisters of Reader’s Digest
reprints at advancing
American troops.
Sometimes Lying Means Only Telling a Small Part
of the Truth
by
R.U. Sirius with Michael Horowitz and the Friends of Timothy Leary
- 65: The Weather Underground helped Timothy Leary escape to
Afghanistan,
which had no extradition treaty with the U.S. He was
kidnapped by
U.S. agents and brought back, where his bail was set at $5 million, the
largest in U.S. history.
School Textbooks: Unpopular History vs.
Cherished Mythology?
by
Earl Lee
- 78: In 1998 the Library of Congress opened an exhibit on
“Religion and
the Founding of the American Revolution” which
mis-characterized Thomas
Jefferson’s views on separation of Church and State.
- 78: Teddy Roosevelt once called Thomas Paine “a
dirty little
atheist”.
- 78: Richard Shenkman wrote I Loved Paul
Revere,
Whether He Rode or
Not
- 79: De Quincey’s Confessions of an
English
Opium-Eater and The
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe are
unlikely
to find their way into textbooks.
The War Secrets Senator John McCain Hides:
Former POW Fights
Public
Access to POW/MIA Files by Sydney Schanberg
All the President’s Men: Nazis, the
Attempted
Assassin, and the Serial
Killer by David McGowan
- 98: A coincidence (or conspiracy, depending on how you look
at it): on
the day that Reagan was shot, March 30, 1981, Scott Hinckley (bother to
attempted assassin John Hinckley Jr.) was to have dined in Denver at
the
home of Neil Bush, son of Vice President George H. W. Bush.
- 99: G. W. Bush helped prevent the execution of confessed
serial killer
Henry Lee Lucas.
God Save the President! How Britain Became the
US’s Lackey by Robin
Ramsay
- 107: During the 1956 Suez Canal crisis, Eisenhower and
Dulles used the
power of the American financial system to protect Nasser’s
Egypt.
- 108: The U.S. invaded Grenada, a member of the British
Commonwealth,
without
consulting the U.K.
You Can’t Win by James
Ridgeway
- 117: The Arkansas Blood Supply Scandal happened under the
term of then
governor Bill Clinton. Arkansas prisons sold tainted blood to
Canadian
hemophiliacs.
- 119: Several witnesses who questioned the infrared film
from the Waco
incident
became sick in suspicious ways.
How the People Seldom Catch Intelligence: Or,
How to Be a
Successful
Drug Dealer by Preston Peet
- 129: Conspiracy theory about the
“suicide” of
19-year CIA veteran John
Millis in a Vienna, VA hotel on 3 June 2000, less than a month after
the
release of the HPSCI (House Permanent Select Committe on
Intelligence)
“Report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s
Alleged Involvement in Crack
Cocaine Trafficking in the Los Angeles Area”.
- 136: In 1989 Costa Rica barred Oliver North, Adm. John
Poindexter and
General
Richard Secord from entering the country for life due to their
connections
to drug trafficking.
Art and the Eroticism of Puberty by
David Steinberg
- 174: The first woman to run for president of the U.S. (in
1872, decades
before women could vote), Victoria Woodhull, was a “Free
Love” advocate,
whose beliefs drove her from the Suffragist movement. She was
the
first person persecuted under the Comstock Act, which prohibits sending
obscene material through the mail.
Apt Pupils by Robert Sterling
- 191: Alvin Toffler points out in The
Third Wave
(1980) that
the purpose of the schooling system was to train children to become
industrial
workers, as argued by Andrew Ure in 1835.
- 191: 26-year New York school teacher John Taylor Gatto was
named the
New
York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. His stunning
acceptance speech
attacked the school system with “I teach how to fit into a
world I don’t
want to live in.” and wrote the book Dumbing
Us Down.
Saving Private Power: The Hidden History of
“The
Good War” excerpts
from a book by Michael Zezima (a.k.a. Mickey Z)
- 224: Truman gradually increases the estimates of the number
of
Americans
and Japanese who were saved by dropping the Atomic Bomb. The
number
of Americans grew from “a quarter of a million” in
December 15, 1945 to
“millions of lives” in April 28, 1959.
What I Didn’t Know About the Communist
Conspiracy
by Jim Martin
- 229: On actual Communists in the U.S. Government:
It almost happened here. Had
President Franklin
Roosevelt died one
year earlier than he did, or had he not chosen Harry Truman as his
running
mat in 1944, the pro-Soviet Vice President Henry A. Wallace would have
become President in 1945. Wallace told reporters at the time that he
would
consider Harry Dexter White and Laurence Duggan for appointment to
Cabinet
positions. Both men spent the war providing Soviet agents with
sensitive
government documents.
Poppycock: Truth and Lies about Poppies, Opium,
and
Painkilling Drugs
by Jim hogshire
- 245: In 1987, DEA agents raided Monticello, home of Thomas
Jefferson, to confiscate poppy seeds and uproot poppy plants.
The Truth About Jesus: Is He a Myth?
by M. M.
Mangasarian
- 276: The writings of Josephus on Jesus were forgeries,
according to De
Quincey and Canon Farrar.
The Bible Code: Scientific, Statistical Proof of
God? Or
Just Another
Lie? by David Thomas
- He thoroughly debunks The Bible Code
(1997) by Michael Drosnin.
Who’s Who in Hell: His Secular
Holiness Reveals
the Hidden Legacy of
Non-Belief: Interview with Warren Allen Smith
- The 1,237-page book is titled Who’s
Who in
Hell: A Handbook and International
Directory for Humanists, Freethinkers, Naturalists, Rationalists, and
Non-Theists
Environmentalism for the Twenty-First Century
by
Patrick Moore
- One of the founders of Greenpeace in the late 1960s, Moore
later became
disappointed with the organization for being too radical, after it had
accomplished the bulk of what it intended to do.
Forbidden Archaeology by Michael A.
Cremo
- Argues that human beings have existed for hundreds of
millions of
years,
perhaps much longer.
There Is So Much That We Don’t Know:
Selections
from the Science Frontiers
Book and Newsletter by William R. Corliss
I Have Met God and He Lives in Brooklyn
by Richard
Metzger
- 347: Metzger breathlessly describes THE
LUCIFER PRINCIPLE (1995) by Howard
Bloom as revolutionary.
- 350: What Is Life?
by Erwin
Schrödinger, who was an
outsider to biology.
BABYLON 5: The Passing Of The Techno-Mages
Book
III: INVOKING DARKNESS
(2001)
Paperback
Del Rey, New York
2002.2.1 – 2002.2.6
- Galen didn’t bother to tell Alwyn that Elric was
dead.
- Anna was removed from her vessel well before the Battle of
Regulae, and
killed some of the alien surgeons working on her.
- Morden walked around openly on B5 (even after talking to
Garibaldi).
- Morden was on TV (talking about his family killed in a
terrorist act)
after
joining the Shadows (and being declared dead).
- Galen immediately recognized the Shadows’
“herding” strategy, and had to
implant the idea into Sheridan (who is one of the best tacticians ever).
- Galen flew around in air vents on B5.
- 225: Galen talks to Morden after trying to kill him.
- On Z’ha’dum, Galen merged with the Eye,
allowing
Sheridan to crash his
White Star into the capital city.
- He meets with Wirden (founder of the technomages) in the
center of the
planet.
- Of course, he also tries to save Morden after the
explosion, and meets
Lorien.
- Is there any accomplishment of Sheridan’s that
Galen
wasn’t secretly behind?
THE
MEME MACHINE (1999)
Oxford University Press, Oxford
2002.2.6 – 2002.2.15
- Forward by Richard
Dawkins
- 17: In a radio debate, Stephen
Jay Gould called memes a “meaningless
metaphor” (which she thinks is
an oxymoron).
- 75: The turning point in hominid evolution was imitation.
- Fads = imitation according to EXTRAORDINARY
POPULAR DELUSIONS AND THE MADNESS OF CROWDS (1841).
- 113: Brent Berlin and Paul Kay discovered that naming
colors comes from
physiology. All languages describe black and white.
If there
is a 3rd term in the language, it will be for
red. Next
come green or yellow; green and yellow; blue; brown; purple, pink,
orange.
. .
- 128: At Oxford (in the 1970s), she was caught with a man in
her room at
8:00 A.M. He was fined 2 shillings and sixpence, but she was
sent
away for the rest of the term.
- 177: Sleep paralysis myths:
- Incubus and succubus of medieval times
- “Old Hag” who sits on one’s
chest
- Kanashibari in Japan
- Kokma in St. Lucia
- Popobawa in Zanzibar
- Alien abductions
- 179: In Near Death Experiences (NDEs), Christians see Jesus
and Hindus
meet Hindu deities. There are no cases where an NDE meets a
deity
of another religion.
- 183: Regarding fortune-telling: The “Barnum
Effect”
= using statements
that almost everyone will judge as true of themselves but not of
others,
such as “You have a need for other people to like and admire
you, and yet
tend to be critical of yourself.”
- 233:
In conclusion, the selfplex is
successful not because
it is true or good or beautiful; nor because it helps our genes; nor
because
it makes us happy. It is successful because the memes that get inside
it
persuade us (those poor overstretched physical systems) to work for
their
propagation. What a clever trick. That is, I suggest, why we all live
our
lives as a lie, and sometimes a desperately unhappy and confused lie.
The
memes have made us to it—because a ‘self’
aids their replication.
Memetics thus brings us to a new vision
of how we might
live our lives. We carry on our lives as most people do, under the
illusion
that there is a persistent conscious self inside who is in charge, who
is responsible for my actions and who make me me. Or we can live as
human
beings, body, brain, and memes, living out our lives as a complex
interplay
of replicators and environment, in the knowledge that this is all there
is. Then we are no longer victims of the selfish selfplex. In this
sense
we can be truly free—not because we can rebel against the
tyranny of the
selfish replicators but because we know that there is no one to rebel.
“SURELY
YOU’RE JOKING, MR. FEYNMAN”
Adventures Of A Curious Character (1985)
Paperback
Bantam Books, New York
2002.2.17 – 2002.2.19
- 48: The title comes from the dean’s tea party at
Princeton.
- 112: While working at Los Alamos, to get to his wife in a
hurry, he
would
borrow the car of Klaus Fuchs (who later turned out to be a spy).
- 117: He was the only person at an a-bomb test to watch
without wearing
glasses. He figured that a truck windshield would stop UV
rays.
- When people don’t know how to apply facts:
how fragile their knowledge is.
- 137: He would practice cracking safes as a hobby.
Finally he
met
someone better at it than himself. Locks come set from the
factory
at 25-0-25 or 50-25-50. These are good about 1/5 of the time.
- 209: In Las Vegas, Nick the Greek bets people who are
superstitious
(“on
a roll”, etc.), not on the table.
- 272: On recommending school textbooks “approved
by 65
engineers”,
It would have been far better to
have the company decide who their
better
engineers were, and have them look at the book. I
couldn’t claim
that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys—but the average
of
sixty-five other guys, certainly!
- He refuses to fill out travel reimbursement vouchers
requiring receipts.
- 310 - 311: “Cargo Cult” people in the
South Seas
set up airfields, light
fires along a runway, and set up bamboo “antennas”,
but no airplanes land.
“WHAT
DO YOU CARE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK?”
Further Adventures Of A Curious Character (1988)
Paperback
Bantam Books, New York
2002.2.21 – 2002.2.23
- Feynman died of cancer on Feb. 15, 1988.
- 41: “Cher-chez la femme”:
look
for a woman (behind a man’s problem)
- 49: How to look up Chinese symbols: start in the back of
the dictionary
with the right category and count the number of strokes. . .
- 219: He offended another member of the Challenger panel by
saying:
How can a man of integrity get along in Washington?
- He was afraid that the panel would whitewash his
conclusions, and
threatened
to take his name off of the final report. His thoughts were
included
as Appendix F:
- 226: Military and civil aviation use bottom-up design and
testing.
NASA testing is top-down (assemble everything and see if it fails).
- 237: Last line:
For a successful technology,
reality must take precedence over
public
relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven;
the same key
opens
the gates of hell.
ROCKS
OF AGES
Science And Religion In The Fullness Of Life (1999)
Hardcover
Ballantine Publishing Group, New York
2002.2.24 – 2002.2.25
- This is all about NOMA: Non-Overlapping Magesteria
- 65 - 66:
The magisterium of science cannot
proceed beyond the anthropology of
morals—the documentation of what people believe, including
such important
information as the relative frequency of particular moral values with
ecological
and economic conditions, and even (potentially) the adaptive values of
certain beliefs in specified Darwinian situation—although my
intense skepticism
about speculative work in this last area has been well aired in other
publications.
But science can say nothing about the morality of morals. This is, the
potential discovery by anthropologists that murder, infanticide,
genocide,
and xenophobia may have characterized many human societies, may have
arisen
preferentially in certain social situations, and may even be adaptively
beneficial in certain contexts, offers no support whatever for the
moral
proposition that we ought to behave in such a manner.
- 106: Pope Pious IX is (was?) the longest reigning Pope.
- 158: Two books inspired William J. Bryan’s ideas
on evolution
and laissez-fair
capitalism:
- Headquarters of Nights
(1917) by Vernon L. Kellogg
- The Science of Power
(1918)
by Benjamin Kidd
- 167: The book that Scopes taught from had some racist
passages.
- 170: From Kellogg:
Some men who call themselves pessimists
because they
cannot read good into the operations of nature forget that they cannot
read evil. In morals the law of competition no more justifies personal,
official, or national selfishness or brutality than the law of
gravitation
justifies the shooting of a bird.
- 173: The other big book of 1859
(besides The
Origin of Species)
was Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat
of Omar
Khayyam, an 11th Century mathematician and
freethinker.
- 183: The example of the “ichneumoid
wasp” (a group
of several species)
keeps coming up. This wasp lays eggs in host caterpillars who
eat
it from the inside, taking care to leave it alive for as long as
possible.
- 212: “syncretic” = uncritical
acceptance of
conflicting or divergent beliefs
or principles.
ISHMAEL
An Adventure Of The Mind And Spirit (1992)
Paperback
A Bantam/Turner Book, New York
2002.3.3 – 2002.3.8
- For more information, www.ishmael.org
- A classified ad: “Teacher Seeks Pupil”
- Ishmael (the gorilla) uses many terms that beg the
question, such as:
- Mother Culture
- 38 - 39: “takers” vs.
“leavers”
- The student has a problem with these terms.
- 45 - 46: Ishmael seems to think that there are never
members of a
culture
who are skeptical of it. For example, an ancient Greek would
not
think of tales about the gods as “mythology”.
- 57: Sets up a straw man argument about Man believing he is
the pinnacle
of evolution.
- 61:
“Even atheists who
swear there is no god know
that the
world was made
for man.”
- 71: Without man, nature is red
in
tooth and claw.
- 85: Leavers don’t have prophets, unless there is
contact with
Takers, such
as Wovoka and the Ghost Dance (see QUESTIONING
THE MILLENNIUM (1997)) or John Frumm and the Cargo
Cults of the
South Pacific (see “SURELY
YOU’RE JOKING, MR. FEYNMAN”
(1985)).
- 88: We know two things: There is something fundamentally
wrong with
people
(Takers) and that they have no certain knowledge about how they ought
to
live.
- 117: The community of this world has worked well for
billions of years.
- 126: Animals never kill just to kill (their competitors).
- 135: Any species that exempts itself from rules ends up
destroying its
community.
- 136: If you feed the starving, they will reproduce more.
- 137: Have you seen ads for sending contraception?
- 139: His point is well taken about the First World
supplying food to
the
Third World.
- 142: Leavers (Native Americans) had to have a reputation
for ferocity,
territoriality, and war.
- 146:
“Among
the Leavers, crime, mental illness,
suicide, and drug addiction are great rarities.”
- 169: The authors of The Fall; Hebrews wanted to be like
their Taker
neighbors
rather than shepherds.
- 173: Origin of Cain and Abel: Cain (farmers) was killing
Abel (herders)
along borders.
- 217: Plains Indians went from agriculture to hunting with
the
introduction
of Spanish horses.
- 220:
hunter-gatherers are among the
best-fed people on earth, and they
manage
this with only two or three hours a day of what you would call work.
- 228: Christ said to have no care for tomorrow.
Don’t sow or reap.
THE
PSALMS OF HEROD (1995)
Paperback
2002.3.10 – 2002.3.21
- In a post-apocalyptic future (which is never explained),
life revolves
around a messed-up religion.
- Becca of Wiserways ’Stead: One of the few women
able to
conceive at any
time. Despite being trained as a fighter, she manages to get
beat
up a lot.
- Adonijah: Challenges and defeats Paul (by cheating) to be
the
’Alph of
Wiserways. While Paul practiced tough love, Adonijah is a
two-dimensional
creep.
- Children born the wrong sex are left to die at Prayerful
Hill.
- 302: The Biblical story of Jacob, Rachel, and Laban seems
to have been
altered.
- 366: Becca meets Sarj, Corp, etc., who are obviously relics
of a
military.
- Gilber Livvy: An observant jew (who are not well thought
of).
THE
SWORD OF
MARY (1996)
Paperback
2002.4.4 – 2002.4.13
- Just as Becca is shooting Adonijah, Gilber Livvy steps
out of the
bushes
to help her.
- Just as Gilber is beat up, the little kids step out of
the bushes to
help
them.
- Outside the Coop, they happen to meet some guys who play
an important
part
later.
- They just happen to be at the right place and time when
Van escapes the
Coop.
- When they bust out, they just happen to go past Wiserways.
AIN’T
IT
COOL?
Hollywood’s Redheaded Stepchild Speaks Out (2002)
Foreword by Quentin Tarantino
Hardcover
Warner Books, New York
2002.4.18 – 2002.4.28
- Harry’s web site: www.aintitcool.com
- The name for the website and book came from John
Travolta’s
line in Broken
Arrow, where they detonate a nuclear device halfway through
the movie.
- 10: The movie Red Sun stars Charles
Bronson as a
gunfighter who
teams up with Toshiro
Mifune.
- 35: Harry’s father was part of Nixon’s
P.R. staff
and did “dirty tricks”
for the Young Republicans.
- 48 & 151: Harlan
Ellison’s
story Demon With A Glass Hand inspired The
Terminator.
- 61: Reference to Cargo Cults.
- 67:
I personally believe
there’s a stronger right to own
collectibles than
to own guns.
- 80: He met Matt Drudge online in 1995 (before Drudge became
a household
name).
- 85: He was at Sundance in 1997 when Clinton announced he
would balance
the budget in 4 years; the same day that Drudge broke the Monica
Lewinsky
story.
- 162: NRG = National Research Group, conducts movie tests,
focus groups,
ads, etc.
- 172: Will Hays was postmaster general under W. G.
Harding.
The Production
Code was a list of in-house censorship rules between 1934 and 1968.
- 178: Sydney Lumet, responsible for Serpico,
Dog
Day Afternoon, Network, Equus,
wrote about the power of NRG in his biography.
- 191: Harry compares NRG to the Strategic Defense Initiative:
It was conceived out of an almost
cosmic hubris; it was begrudgingly
accepted out of fear and desperation; and it will last only as long as
the latest emperor still believes in it. But man, wouldn’t it
be cool if
it really worked?
- 194: Francis Ford Coppola references classic movies and
mythology:
- Quotes Battleship Potemkin in Godfather
- Quotes Aguirre, the Wrath of God in Apocalypse
Now
- Patrol boat Erebus in Apocalypse
Now
named for one of the
guardians of hell in Greek mythology
- 196: Movie audiences are about half of what they were 50
years ago (in
pure numbers).
- 197: Harry has run afoul of the studios by giving flagship
movies bad
revues:
Even if the movie is irredeemably bad, a
certain return
is guaranteed on their investment on opening weekend, on the sheer
strength
of pure hype. That is, unless someone spills the beans. But if a studio
is entitled to income from people who unwittingly go to see a bad film,
that isn’t revenue. It’s taxation. And taxation
without representation
was settled a long time ago.
there’s nothing wrong
with the film business that a
good-sized earthquake
couldn’t fix.
Remember: There’s no
such thing as trickle-down populism.
If the powers
that be stand to gain, it’s either the long con or
crypto-fascism. Probably
both.
- 278: One of his favorite obscure movie quotes:
“You will drink the black sperm of my
vengeance!”
THE
ADVENTURIST
My Life In Dangerous Places (2000)
Hardcover
Doubleday, New York
2002.5.20 – 2002.5.24
- This book mixes short vignettes of his travels with his
autobiography.
- 122: Men Without Women
by Hemingway
- 185: Russell
“World’s-Most-Pissed-Off-Indian” Means
was in The Last
of the Mohicans, Natural Born Killers, Pocahantas,
and Thomas
the Tank Engine. His autobiography is titled Where
White
Men Fear to Tread. He was one of the
Native Americans who
squatted on Mt. Rushmore.
- 202: Pelton coined the phrase:
If you want to make a native poor, give him a T-shirt.
THE
LUCIFER
PRINCIPLE
A Scientific Expedition Into The Forces Of History (1995)
Paperback
The Atlantic Monthly Press, New York
2002.4.28 – 2002.5.28
- In general, Bloom’s thesis is that we
instinctively work for
the good of
our goup/clan/nation at the expense of others.
- 23: Michel de Montaigne invents the “noble
savage”
theory in 1580.
- 24: Lizards, bees, dolphins, fish, and ants are violent.
- 77: Arkansas governor (from 1955 to 1967) Orville Faubus
created the
bogeyman
of black insurrection to get reelected.
- 161: History of Oliver Cromwell.
- 187 - 188: History of the Shiite/Sunni split.
- 192: Homeopathy is more effective in treating yellow fever.
- 203: The Phoenicians set up the trading colony of
Qart-Hadasht
(“new town”)
in 814 B.C. Europeans pronounced it
“Carthage”.
- 228: In the early 1990s, Saudis beat out Christian
fundamentalists in
buying
UPI.
- 231:
But the heavy-handed fertile
crescent
“imperialism” so resented by the
Arabs didn’t begin until the First World War, and it lasted
less than forty
years.
- 234: Simóne Bolívar, who freed many
countries
from colonial
rule, gave up in disgust in 1830, and left for Europe.
- 298: He accuses Chomsky and others of overlooking Pol Pot.
- 329: Yale’s Bruce Russett says democracies are
less likely to
go to war
with each other.
O
JERUSALEM! (1972)
Paperback
A Touchstone Book, New York
2002.5.20 – 2002.6.22
- 17: A U.N. proposal gave 57% of Palestine to Jews despite
the fact that
2/3 of the population was Arab, who owned more than 1/2 the land.
- 21: (In 1897?) Herzl starts the Jewish National Fund and a
Land Bank.
- 26: As Zionists acquired land, absentee Arab landlords
(living in
Beirut)
evicted Arab tenant farmers. Moving into cities, the
displaced farmers
were barred from working by the Histadrut, the Jewish trade-union
organization.
- 51: On Easter Sunday 1920, English Captain Naylor informed
the chief
secretary
at church:
Sir, you may be talking about peace on earth and
goodwill to men in
here,
but down at the Jaffa Gate the Jews and the Arabs are beating bloody
hell
out of each other.
Over two thousand people died in that
vicious intramural
bloodletting. While the Jews of Palestine were developing the young
leaders
and the social institutions that would be their greatest resource, Haj
Amin Husseini methodically deprived the Arabs of theirs. Throttling
progress
and any drift to rational thought with his angry fanaticism, cowing
with
guns of his ignorant villagers the educated elite, he reduced a
generation
of Arab leadership to fear and silence.
- 65 - 67: Haim Slavine invents an ingenious method to
smuggle weapons
manufacturing
equipment (slated for post war destruction) into Palestine.
- 163: Golda Meir came to New York with exactly one $10 bill
and left a
month
later with $50 million in donations to the fledgling Israel.
- 247: The Palmach’s Har-el Brigade (under Yitzhak
Rabin) had a
mission to
raze villages:
not leaving stone on stone and
driving all the people away, there
was
not going to be a village for anybody to come back to.
- 259: As the beleaguered convoy enters Jerusalem, the blue
Ford in the
lead
happened to have written “If I forget thee, O
Jerusalem...” on its front
bumper.
- 262: “One of the Arabs we killed last
night” turned
out to be Abdul Khader
Husseini, a moderate charismatic leader.
- 274: Irgun and Stern Gang perform an atrocity against the
Arab village
of Deir Yassin in “Operation Unity”.
While the international community
was outraged, the terrorism served its purpose by scaring away vast
numbers
of Arab villagers.
- 294: A final peace settlement is avoided because the Arab
side made
unreasonable
demands to try to save face.
- 328: Smuggling ammunition in kerosene barrels.
Out of
kerosene, they
fill barrels with water. One leaks, but the guards
didn’t realize.
A white-bearded Kurdistani rabbi remarks:
Ah, those Englishmen! How many wars did they fight,
how many did they
kill,
how many wars did they fight, how many did they kill, how many of their
kind did they lose, and for what? For an empire of oil. And what is the
difference between oil and water they cannot tell.
- 344 - 346: Golda Meir meets secretly with King Abdullah to
negotiate,
but
nothing is accomplished.
- 356: The vote for Statehood passes by 1 vote. The
announcement was
made at 4 P.M. Friday 14 May 1948, the 5th day
of the month
of Iyar in the Hebrew year 5708.
- 364: The Ridge of Latrun has been the key to Jerusalem for
Joshua,
Judas
Maccabeus, Herod, Vespasian, Richard, Saladin, Prussians, etc.
- 448: Two important rules of British tactics:
- Infantry can’t lag behind armor.
- Move in the morning, consolidate in the afternoon.
- 498: Wasfi Tell escorts residents out of the surrendered
Jewish Quarter
of the Old City.
- 507: His Majesty’s government, fearing
embarrassment,
requires all British
subjects to leave. John Glubb loses 2/3 of Arab Legion
officers.
- 544: Colonel Fouad Mardam, desperate to smuggle in Czech
arms, turns to
the Menara Shipping Agency. Instead of Alexandria, they go to
Tel
Aviv. The owners of the S. S. Argio were
the Israeli Navy.
- 562: Neighboring Arab countries would not accept
refugees. A
generation
would be raised in refugee camps to grow up as fedayeen.
- Lebanon fears upsetting a balanced population.
- Egypt crowded refugees into the Gaza Strip.
- Jordan, the poorest Arab state, tries to welcome them.
- 568: Mardam was condemned to death as a traitor, but Israel
revealed
their
trickery and his life was spared.
THE
WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS PLACES (4th
Edition 2000; 1st
1995)
Paperback
HarperResource, New York
2002.5.26 – 2002.8.22
- For more info: www.comebackalive.com
- The Whores Of War a
book
about mercenaries fighting in Angola
in the 1970s.
- 602: Best Of Enemies
written by
former PFLP terrorist Bassam
Abu-Sharif and a former Israeli intelligence officer.
- 982: The United Nations Development Program (www.undp.org)
analyzes problems in the developing world.
- The American Council for Voluntary International Action
(Interaction)
publishes
a bi-weekly newsletter (www.interaction.org/monday)
SLACKWATER
Oral Folk History Of Southern Maryland
Volume II: Cedar Point 1942 – Spring 1999
Paperback
St. Mary’s College of Maryland
2002.7.20 – 2002.7.25
- “Slackwater” is when the tide is
changing.
- One interviewee remembered how their family would only go
to
Leonardtown
once-in-a-while.
- 46: Anne Lancaster: Before the base, 90% of residents were
Catholic
(now
30%), and the rest were Methodist. Some Jews had to go to
Washington,
D.C. or Baltimore for formal services.
- 47: Masses were segregated; the order was alternated.
- 51: Mary Louise Fleming: On her way to work to/from the
Officer’s Club,
she would always have to sit on the back of the bus.
IRON
CLAW
A Navy Carrier Pilot’s War Experience (1996)
Paperback
2002.9.6 – 2002.9.8
- 4: If the EA-6B Prowler comes off the catapult at less than
130 knots,
they would have to immediately jettison all stores. If less
than
120 knots, ejection would be ordered.
- 11: U.S.S. Midway had 8 squadrons:
- 3 F/A-18 Hornet
- 2 A-6 Intruder
- 1 EA-6B Prowler
- 1 E-2C Hawkeye
- 1 Helo
- Because of its small deck, no F-14s or S-3s could land
there (despite
the
picture in the center plate).
- 13: In order to land at 8,800 lbs of fuel, they routinely
jettison
fuel,
in this case prematurely.
- 69: For an ECMO (Electronic Counter Measures Officer) to
become a pilot
is to receive an “anchorectomy”, a removal of an
anchor from their wings.
- 116: Because of its limited catapult, most Hornet launches
required
afterburners.
- 228: Parking a jet with its nose or tail off the edge makes
it
impossible
to do a pre-flight inspection. In this case, a disaster was
averted
by insisting on checking before the jet was parked.
- 234: 4 Carriers were stationed in the Persian Gulf during
the (first)
Gulf
War:
- America
- Theodore Roosevelt
- Ranger
- Midway
- 250: Constant flights and landings rubbed off the
centerline paint and
surface, resulting in the deck to be dangerously slick. It
took time
to re-surface the deck.
I
HAVE LANDED
The End Of A Beginning In Natural History (2002)
Hardcover
Harmony Books, New York
2002.8.25 – 2002.9.22
- The title refers to what one of Gould’s ancestors
wrote upon
arriving in
America (on September 11).
- 41: Amateur naturalist and famous writer Nabokov notes that
Poe
placed the death’s-head moth outside its geographic range in
a story.
He also noticed that Hieronymus Bosch painted a butterfly incorrectly
in
“Garden of Earthly Delights”.
- 51: Nabokov uses “insect” and
“incest” in the novel Ada.
- 57: The tomb of the Duchess of Newcastle is inscribed:
All the brothers were valiant, and all the sisters
virtuous.
- 61: Jim Bowie’s letter from the Alamo is
“hidden in
plain sight”.
- 66: The “but for this” fallacy
regarding Bill
Buckner’s legs.
- 97: Scientist Alexander von Humboldt wrote in Kosmos:
While we maintain the unity of the human
species, we
at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and
inferior
races of men. There are nations more susceptible of cultivation, more
ennobled
by mental cultivation than others, but none in themselves nobler than
others.
All are in like degree designed for freedom.
- 124: Darwin
wrote in a letter
to Edward Aveling:
It appears to me (whether rightly or
wrongly) that direct
arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on
the public; and freedom of thought is best produced by the gradual
illumination
of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science. It
has, therefore,
been always my object to avoid writing on religion, and I have confined
myself to science.
- 127: “Dutz-freunde” = friends enough to
use the
familiar German “you”.
- 129: Karl Marx begins his study of Napoleon III:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it
just as they
please.
- 147: Teddy Roosevelt on Rudyard Kipling’s White
Man’s Burden:
was very poor poetry but made
good sense from the expansion point of
view.
- 216: A famous Victorian story reports the reaction of an
aristocratic
lady
to the primary heresy of her time:
Let us hope that what Mr. Darwin says is not true;
but if it is true,
let
us hope that it will not become generally known.
- ~280: Most of the days of Biblical Creation are divisional,
“light” from
“dark”, etc.; except for the second day.
- 315: While reading Haeckel’s book Natürliche
Schöpfungsgeshichte,
Agassiz writes a sarcastic note in the margins, “Given in
year one of the
new world order E. Haekel.” in regards to attacking religion
as “the dark
beliefs and secrets of a priestly class.”
- 348: Sir Thomas Browne wrote Pseudodoxia
Epidemica:
or, Enquiries
into Very Many Recieved Tenents, and Commonly Presumed Truths
(1646)
debunking urban legends.
- 357: Origin of the word “Caucasian”
came from
German naturalist J. F. Blumenbach,
who liked the shape of skulls found in the Caucasus Mountains.
- 383: Friedrich Tiedemann wrote in the journal Philosophical
Transactions:
How is it possible, then, to deny
that the Ethiopian race is capable
of civilization? This is just as false as it would have been in the
time
of Julius Caesar to have considered the Germans, Britons, Helvetians,
and
Batavians incapable of civilization.
- 390: The Great Asymmetry:
Ten Thousand acts of kindness
done by thousands of people, and
slowly
building trust and harmony over many years, can be undone by one
destructive
act of a skilled and committed psychopath.
- Gould and his wife were flying from Milan to New York on
9/11/2001, and
ended up in Halifax.
SHADOW
PUPPETS
(2002)
Hardcover
TOR, New York
2002.9.23 – 2002.10.7
PRIVATEERS
(1985)
Paperback
TOR, New York
2002.10.10 – 2002.10.13
- Written at the height of the Cold War, this was a
cautionary tale for
allowing
the Soviet Union supremacy in Star Wars, and Space.
- Tycoon Dan Randolph often spouts right-wing disgust that
would make Ayn
Rand blush.
- Randolph justifies privateering (hijacking Lunar ore
shipments from the
Soviets) due to the vague definition of ownership of space resources.
- 263: CCCP: Soyuz Sovietskiya Socialistik Ryespublik
- Vaily Maximovich Malik: Antagonist.
NONZERØ
The Logic Of Human Destiny (2000)
2002.7.28 – 2002.10.20
- 13: Cultural evolution described by Lewis Henry Morgan in Ancient
Society (1877).
- 14: Margaret Mead was a student of Franz Boas.
- 19: The Mind of Primitive Man
by
Boas, was anti-racist, and
was burned by the Nazis.
- 20: Shoshone (Nevada) Indians had an “irreducible
minimum” or “primitive”
culture.
- 27: Immanuel Kant on the “unsocial
sociability” of
man:
Through the desire for honor, power or property, it
drives him to seek
status among his fellows, whom he cannot bear yet
cannot bear
to leave.
- 42: Listing of technological innovations of indigenous
peoples.
- 64: On war:
waging war, in the end, is
waging peace.
- 66: Richard Lee claims in the 1960s that the !Kung work
only a few
hours
a day.
- 67, 68, 71: Misconceptions:
- Cultural evolutionists believe change is guided by
farsighted
reason.
- The idea of intrinsic equilibrium.
- That human societies are fundamentally unified,
devoted to meeting
their collective needs.
- “Egalitarian” hunter-gatherer band
- 73: The !Kung really do work hard as agriculturists after
all.
- 83: The
“utter-exploitation-of-the-hapless-commoners”
non-zero sum game.
- 84: Why do people turn down the “collective
windfall” game, despite unequal
(even college students offered free money)?
- 84: Mentions John Nash and his Nobel Prize (before the
movie version of A
Beautiful Mind).
- 125+: Misconceptions about Barbarians:
- Barbarians are less “civilized”
than their
neighbors in a moral sense—less
decent, less humane.
- Barbarians lack culture.
- They are beyond true edification.
- They are by nature transient and chaotic.
- They materialized in the age of Rome and recurred
occasionally.
- Barbarian eruptions are ironic punctuation to the
supposedly
progressive
flow of cultural evolution.
- They prey on innocent victims.
- 134: As one barbarian Briton said on the Pax Romans:
To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying
name of empire...
They
make a desert and call it peace.
- 143: “Counts” are the second highest
ranking
nobility, creating “counties”.
- 151 - 152:
The winning of freedom by
medieval
towns, the quelling
of pirates by the Hanseatic League, and the humiliation of Frederick I
by the Lombard League (albeit with papal assistance) were all early
examples
of a process that would continue for centuries and continues today:
capitalism
making the world safe for itself.
- 183: Vuk Karadzic invented the Serb alphabet, published a
grammar book,
translated the New Testament, and compiled oral folklore.
- 199: Herbert Butterfield coined the term “Whig
historian” in 1931 (see TIME’S
ARROW TIME’S CYCLE (1987)).
- 269: Analyzing Gould’s
“drunken
walk” analogy to directed evolution.
- 270: Gould neglected to write about arms races in WONDERFUL
LIFE (1989) and FULL HOUSE (1996).
- 280: Multicellular life was invented more than ten times.
- 297: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin coined
“noosphere”
to be an electronically
mediated web of thought, and believed we were divinely bound for
“Point
Omega”.
- 306: “Dial F For Frankenstein” by Arthur
C. Clark has satellite communication systems becoming alive
and ringing
all phones at once.
- 320 - 321: Imagine a zombie-planet of people with absence
of
consciousness;
and hence lack moral meaning.
- 340: The Evolution of Cooperation
by Robert Axelrod.
- 342: Fights, Games, and Debates
(1960) by Anatol Rapaport.
- Note 6: “Pareto Optimum” is when it is
no longer
possible to make anyone
in society better off without making someone else worse off.
EMPIRE
BUILDERS (1993)
Hardcover
TOR, New York
2002.11.11 – 2002.11.17
- Sequel to EMPIRE
BUILDERS (1993),
written after Soviet collapse, so it hardly mentions the
communist/capitalist
struggle from the first book.
- 10 years later, Randolph is divorced, and his wife went
back to his
nemesis
Malik.
- 280 - 281: The Pacific Ocean is higher than the
Atlantic.
There is
no such thing as “sea-level”.
- The Arctic could get trapped behind the Bering Shelf, which
probably
triggered
an Ice Age.
- The Trade Winds blow the length of the Atlantic and pile up
water in
the
Gulf, generating the Gulf Stream.
SIMULACRA
AND SIMULATION
(1981)
Paperback
University Of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan
2002.11.17 – 2002.11.26
- This was one of the books that the directors of The
Matrix
required
Keanu Reeves to read before reading the movie script (Amazon.com has
them
all linked together).
- Preface:
The simulacrum is never what hides the
truth—it is truth
that hides the fact that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
—Ecclesiastes
- Borges fable: cartographers of the Empire draw a map at 1:1
scale,
covering
the entire landscape.
- 7: In 1971: The Philippine government tries to return the
few dozen
Tasaday
(who has lived for centuries without outside contact) to the jungle.
- 7: Like Orpheus looking back too soon at Eurydice
science never sacrifices itself,
it is always murderous.
- 12: The Urban Legend that Walt Disney is frozen.
- 14: Watergate is the same scenario as Disneyland.
- 20:
For example: it would be interesting to
see whether
the repressive apparatus would not react more violently to a simulated
holdup than a real holdup. Because the latter does nothing but disturb
the order of things, the right to property, whereas the former attacks
the reality principle itself. Transgression and violence are less
serious
because they only contest the distribution of the
real. Simulation
is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to
supposition
that, above and beyond its object, law and order themselves
might be
nothing but simulation.
The simultaneity of two events in the
month of July
1975 illustrated this in a striking manner: the linkup in space of the
two American and Soviet supersatellites, apotheosis of peaceful
coexistence—the
suppression by the Chinese of ideogrammatic writing and conversion to
the
Roman alphabet.
- 45: Hyperreal classic films: Chinatown, Three
Days of the
Condor, Barry
Lyndon, 1900, All the President’s Men, The Last Picture Show
- 59: On Apocalypse Now
The real war is waged by Coppola as it
is by Westmoreland:
without counting the inspired irony of having forests and Phillipine
villages
napalmed to retrace the hell of South Vietnam.
And this translates a more
general fact: that throughout the
“civilized”
world the construction of stockpiles of objects has brought with it the
complementary process of stockpiles of people – the line,
waiting, traffic
jams, concentration, the camp. That is “mass
production,” not in the sense
of a massive production of or for use by the masses, but the production
of the masses. The masses as the final product of
all sociality,
and, at the same time, as putting an end to sociality, because these
masses
that one wants us to believe are the social, are on
the contrary
the site of the implosion of the social. The masses are the
increasingly
dense sphere in which the whole social comes to be imploded, and to be
devoured in an uninterrupted process of simulation.
Whence this concave mirror: it is from
seeing the
masses in the interior that the masses will be tempted to rush in.
We live in a world where there is more
and more information,
and less and less meaning.
But it would be useful to posit
the opposite hypothesis: INFORMATION
= ENTROPY. For example: the information or knowledge that can
be obtained
about a system or an event is already a form of the neutralization and
entropy of this system (to be extended to science in
general, and to
the social sciences and humanities in particular). Information
in which
an event is reflected or broadcast is already a degraded form of this
event.
- 123: The Simulacra
(May 1964) by Philip
K. Dick
- 124: Definition of hyperreal
One does not see an alternative
cosmos, a cosmic folklore or
exoticism,
or a galactic prowess there—one is from the start in a total
simulation,
without origin, immanent, without a past, without a future, a diffusion
of all coordinates (mental, temporal, spatial, signaletic)—it
is not about
a parallel universe, a double universe, or even a possible
universe—neither
possible, impossible, neither real nor unreal: hyperreal—it
is a universe
of simulation, which is something else altogether.
This, only terrorism can do.
It is the trait of reversion that
effaces the remainder,
just as a single ironic smile effaces a whole discourse, just as a
single
flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power and pleasure of the
master.
TIME’S
ARROW TIME’S CYCLE
Myth And Metaphor In The Discovery Of Geological
Time (1987)
Paperback
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts
2002.11.29
- 4: “Whiggish History” coined in Whig
Interpretation of History
(1931) by Herbert Butterfield
- 7:
But science can only be harmed in
the long run by its
self-proclaimed
separation as a priesthood by guarding a sacred rite called the
scientific method. Science is accessible to all thinking people because
it applies universal tools of intellect to its distinctive material.
- 75: Aristotle wrote that the Pythagoreans believed
earthquakes were
caused
by Tartarus, to make its souls fearful.
- 79: James Hutton ends Theory of the
Earth with
Proofs and Illustrations
(1795) that the Earth has “no vestige of a
beginning,—no prospect of an
end”
- 112-113: Catastrophists are often equated with Biblical
literalists,
but
were in fact legitimate scientists in their day. This
caricature
came much later.
- 161: Charles Lyell named epochs based on the percentage of
still-living
mollusks that each strata contained: Eocene = 3%, Miocene=
20%, 1/3-1/2
= older Pliocene, 90% = newer Pliocene
- 168: Lyell finally accepted Evolution in the 1850s.
- 171: Lyell’s Hindu metaphor:
If we take the three attributes of the deity of the
Hindoo Triad, the
Creator,
Brahma, the preserver or sustainer, Vishnu, and the destroyer, Siva,
Natural
Selection will be a combination of the two last but without the first,
or the creative power, we cannot conceive the others having any
function.
- 176: A New York Times editorial on
April 2, 1985
said that extraterrestrial
explanations for the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction have no place in
science.
Terrestrial events, like volcanic activity or change
in climate or sea
level, are the most immediate possible cause of mass extinctions.
Astronomers
should leave to astrologers the task of seeking the causes of earthly
events
in the stars.
- 181: James Hampton (1909-1964), a janitor working the late
shift in
Washington
D.C., created an elaborate throne to be used by Jesus Christ after the
Second Coming.
AMERICAN
GODS (2001)
Hardcover
HarperCollins, New York
2002.12.18 – 2002.12.26
- Shadow is released from prison early when his wife dies.
One of his
cell
mates was Low Key.
- 5:
Call no man happy until he is
dead.—Herodotus
He called his wife collect. Shadow knew
that the phone
companies whacked a three-dollar surcharge on every call made from a
prison
phone. That was why operators are always real polite to people calling
from prisons, Shadow decided: they knew that he paid their wages.
He said the dead had souls, but when I asked
him
How that could be—I thought the dead were souls,
He broke my trance. Don’t that make you
suspicious
That there’s something the dead are keeping back?
Yes, there’s something the dead are keeping back.
—Robert
Frost, “Two Witches”
- 259: The slaves of St. Domingue fought a bloody, 12-year
revolt against
the French plantation owners. Republic of Haiti declared on
January
1, 1804.
- 307: Sam: a University of Wisconsin—Madison co-ed
who Shadow
gives a ride
has a long liturgy of “I believe...”
I believe that California is going
to sink into the sea when the big
one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and
alligators
and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our
resistance
to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by
the common
cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds
MNRay.net
