Email alternatives: A plea for help

Yahoo Mail keeps changing their system -- and to be honest, the results are infuriating. I don't mind the ads (after all, the service is free), but I do mind the lack of functionality. I can no longer open separate emails in separate browser tabs, and I can no longer copy and paste addresses. How do they expect me to put addresses into the "CC" and "BCC" fields? How do they expect me to copy and paste content into several different pieces of mail?

Lots of other people are complaining about Yahoo's revamp. The newspapers have even noticed the many outraged reactions.

It feels a bit silly to snarl over a free service. Then again, commercial teevee has always been free, and people have bellyached about that since the 1940s.

Yahoo has become so unusable that the time has come to seek alternatives. Gmail is out of the question for various personal reasons.

What I would prefer is a web-based mail service which can automatically retrieve my Yahoo mail and then make the messages available in a simple, old-fashioned, user-friendly interface. Going this route would save me the trouble of telling people that I have a new email address.

But if no non-Yahoo company provides that kind of service, then perhaps there is nothing for it but to switch over to another company. Another free service is what I'm looking for.

We return once again to that oft-heard question: Why do computer-related companies insist on changing things which do not need changing? The most obvious example is Windows 8, which absurdly upended the Windows-based computer experience. Unlike many of you, I'm not a Microsoft-basher (and I really do NOT NOT NOT want to hear from the "get a Mac" people or the "get Linux" proselytizers), but let's face it: 8 was the most ludicrous business decision of recent times.

Microsoft now understands that getting rid of the Start button was inane. The Start button at the bottom left-hand corner of your screen has one important characteristic in common with the little white buttons affixed your dress shirt: In both cases, the basic design has reached its apex; no improvement is possible.

(I may have made this comparison in a previous post, but the point bears repeating.)

One of these days, someone might be able to craft a slightly better shirt button, perhaps by attaching the little disc to the material with a stronger thread. Fundamentally, however, the device keeping your shirt together has been unchanged for hundreds of years -- and I predict that, long after your great-grandchildren have died, a shirt's button will still be a button will still be a button. The eternal button.

I guess programmers don't want to admit that many applications in daily use are, in a sense, a collection of shirt buttons.

Net Neutrality

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has sent "smoke signals" indicating that he's amenable to a compromise on the grand principle of net neutrality.

When pressed, he indicated support for a scenario that the FCC’s 2010 Open Internet Rules are specifically designed to prevent, noting, “I think we’re also going to see a two-sided market where Netflix might say, ‘well, I’ll pay in order to make sure that you might receive, my subscriber receives, the best possible transmission of this movie.’ I think we want to let those kinds of things evolve. We want to observe what happens from that, and we want to make decisions accordingly, but I go back to the fact that the marketplace is where these decisions ought to be made, and the functionality of a competitive marketplace dictates the degree of regulation.” In short, he’s suggesting that high-priced express lanes on the Information Superhighway might be okay. For consumers, as well as for companies looking to get content to their customers through new, innovative applications or programs, this means another layer of costs added on top of an already complicated Internet market.

Wheeler sang a somewhat different tune when speaking to a congressional committee on a later occasion. Some people think that his off-the-cuff words represent his truest self.

The two-way payment schemes that Wheeler mentioned in his Q-and-A represent a clear example of where priority and discrimination would occur – precisely what the Open Internet Rules were designed to prevent. And when examined in the context of the concerns about interconnection, that would allow ISPs like Comcast to further leverage their gatekeeper status once again to extract additional fees from Internet content companies.

Basically, two-way payment schemes mean that ISPs aren’t just leveraging fees from CDNs like Level 3 and collecting monthly payments from subscribers. Now, they want to collect a third fee directly from the content providers themselves. Viewed in this light, it may be more accurate to call these arrangements “triple dipping schemes” rather than two-way payment schemes.

So, what’s next? Chairman Wheeler’s clarification of previous remarks at the House hearing and public commitment to the FCC’s Open Internet Rules are reassuring. But, those rules are being challenged in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and an adverse decision by the court would not only invalidate the rules but could also put the FCC’s authority in jeopardy.

The case, in which Verizon challenged the FCC's authority, began in September -- and we may get a decision soon.

Verizon Communications (VZ) challenged the FCC's authority to enforce Net neutrality rules, which bar Internet service providers — mainly cable TV and phone companies — from blocking Internet content or slowing down access to websites in a discriminatory manner.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler could be forced to rewrite the agency's Net neutrality — also called Open Internet — rules if the U.S. appeals court prunes back the FCC's clout. Or Congress might need to step in if the FCC loses the case, analysts have said, as IBD has reported.

Congress won't help as long as the Tea Partiers rule the roost. The 'baggers have long made clear that the oppose net neutrality, which they consider an "affront" to free speech. In their insane construction, the attempt to maintain neutrality is part of a socialistic FCC scheme to "regulate" the internet.

I would go so far as to say that Tea Party opposition to an open internet is part of the ongoing libertarian scheme for complete news management in the United States. As noted in earlier posts, our news outlets are being bought up by libertarian billionaires like the Koch brothers, Bezos and Murdoch. With net neutrality gone, the one-percenters will be able to assure that you can't easily get access to any news except their news.

From the Save the Internet site:

If Verizon gets its way, the rules protecting Net Neutrality will disappear, and just a few powerful phone and cable companies will control the Internet. Without Net Neutrality, ISPs will be able to devise new schemes to charge users more for access and services, making it harder for us to communicate online — and easier for companies to censor our speech. The Internet would come to resemble cable TV, where gatekeepers exert control over where you go and what you see.

Without Net Neutrality, ISPs like AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon would be able to block content and speech they don’t like, reject apps that compete with their own offerings, and prioritize Web traffic (reserving the fastest loading speeds for the highest bidders and sticking everyone else with the slowest).

The tools that ISPs use to block and control our communications aren’t different from the ones the NSA uses to watch us. Whether it’s a government or a corporation wielding these tools or the two working together, this behavior breaks the Internet as we know it and makes it less open and secure.

This issue gives the lie to those who say that more government always equals less freedom. Like it or not, only government regulation assures that we all have equal access to the internet.

Unmanned

Now that Roger Ebert is no longer with us, my favorite film critic is Glenn Erickson, the DVD Savant, an aficionado with interesting things to say about all kinds of movies, from La Notte to Die, Monster, Die!. I feel sympatico with him because we traveled in more or less the same Los Angeles film buff circles back in the '70s. Apparently, he and I even attended some of the same Filmex screenings, although I don't recall meeting him. An editor by trade, Erickson combines a thorough awareness of his medium's history with a professional's technical savvy. Perhaps best of all, he also knows more than a thing or two about the real world -- a refreshing change from those '70s-era movie buffs who could talk about nothing but movies. (At one point, I almost turned into one of those guys.)

Erickson has written a review of Robert Greenberg's new documentary Unmanned: America's Drone Wars, a film I've not yet seen. (But I will soon: It is being streamed gratis for a limited time.) The review brings up quite a few points about Obama's drone program which should interest the political animals who read this blog. I presume that a few long-ish excerpts are permissible...

According to the evidence and testimony presented here, the U.S. military flies constant drone missions over Pakistan, blowing up individuals, vehicles and groups of people based not on reliable intelligence but on tips from questionable sources, and sometimes not even that. Because everything about the program is a classified secret, when information about suspected terrorists turns out to be false, nobody can be held responsible. The docu asserts that, as has been the case with some instances of wrongful detention and torture, civilians are sometimes targeted because a paid informant wants to keep the American $ dollars rolling in. Even worse, a former American drone operator-pilot tells us that he quit because it was not uncommon for his superiors to stretch the definition of 'identified terrorist' to include most anyone found out at night, or congregating in a suspicious manner.

More galling than the innocent loss of life is the attitude of U.S. spokesmen that continue to insist that civilians are never targeted and that the tribal meeting was a terrorist gathering. This goes all the way up the chain of command, to top generals that parrot P.R. talking points about the way the program is conducted and boast about the efficacy of the strikes. Listening to them one would think that the combat was like an episode of TV's N.C.I.S. -- terrorists are on all sides but the vigilant drones are making a real difference. They might as well be paid shills for the drone industry. Drone Wars has more than one clip of President Obama coming forth with what this docu claims are the same evasive untruths -- that all the strikes are done with precise intelligence, and that the few civilian deaths have been tangential accidents. The disc extras state that there have been 340 drone missions since 2004, and 881 civilian kills.

The official story doesn't jibe with convincing testimony that the drone commanders shoot at almost anything that moves. Men carrying rifles aren't hunting, they're terrorists. Kids in a car at night are terrorists. Sealing the deal is the repeated assertion that drone strikes in civilian areas are often followed a few minutes later by a second strike. Assumed to have the purpose of killing the rescuers of the first strike victims, these are commonly called Double Tap Strikes.

The missions are creating thousands of recruits for whatever radical Islamic organizations promise to strike back against the United States. Back home, the drone programs are a win-win choice for politicians and the military. Because no American soldiers are harmed, the President's use of drone strikes has not been given heavy scrutiny -- grievous errors won't even make the front page of the paper.

It occurs to me that the title of Greenberg's documentary may carry a double meaning. Since drones are a cowardly way to fight a war, Unmanned may refer to the process of eunichization. The drone is the weapon of a military without balls.

Libertarianism, conspiracism and fascism

In Salon, a former libertarian named Edwin Lyngar adds to the "Why I left the movement" literature. This bit, about the Rob Paul delegation to the 2008 Republican national Convention, is worth quoting:

And boy, was it a circus. Many members of the group were obsessed with the gold standard, the Kennedy assassination and the Fed. Although Libertarians believe government is incompetent, many of them subscribe to the most fringe conspiracy theories imaginable. Airplanes are poisoning America with chemicals (chemtrails) or the moon landings were faked. Nothing was too far out. A great many of them really think that 9-11 was an inside job. Even while basking in the electoral mainstream, the movement was overflowing with obvious hokum.

During the meeting, a Ron Paul staffer, a smart and charismatic young woman, gave a tip to the group for the upcoming convention.

“Dress normal,” she said. “Wear suits, and don’t bring signs or flags. Don’t talk about conspiracy theories. Just fit in.” Her advice was the kind you might hear given to an insane uncle at Thanksgiving.

The reference to the Kennedy assassination stings. Still, I know all too well that there are libertarian zealots who have latched onto that topic without understanding it or making any kind of scholarly contribution to the literature. These people usually fixate on the notion that JFK was killed because he was going to take action against the Federal Reserve -- a claim that isn't true.

So why do so many libertarians become conspiracy theorists? Because conspiracy theories -- whether worthwhile, worthless, or in the unproven-but-intriguing category -- all tend to alienate the citizen from the government, from the very idea of government.

Libertarians use JFK's death to drive home the idea that government is always malign. Of course, this idea goes against everything the Kennedy brothers stood for. The proposition of universal political corruption, taken to its logical conclusion, undermines all faith in democracy. From there, it is but a short step to Peter Thiel's formulation that freedom and democracy are incompatible.

We can go further. This antipathy for democracy links conspiracism, libertarianism and fascism.

Libertarians insist that they have no kinship to fascism -- that they are, in fact, the truest opponents of fascism. But the linkage between libertarianism and fascism became hard to deny when Milton Friedman went to work for Pinochet.

Even more revealing is the background of the Koch Brothers.

One big time Birch family, the Koch family, has spent (and continues to spend) huge sums to bankroll Birch ideas. David and Charles Koch, the sons of Fred Koch—one of the original founding members of the Birch Society and a friend of my father—have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in their favorite political causes.

The JBS offers a loving biography of Fred Koch on this page. You should also read Wikipedia's page on the Koch paterfamilias:

He claimed that the Democratic and Republican Parties were infiltrated by the Communist Party, and he supported Mussolini's suppression of communists. He wrote that "The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America," and that public welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks and Puerto Ricans to Eastern cities to vote for Communist causes and "getting a vicious race war started."

The Birchers, fueled by Koch cash, were and are notorious for promoting "the paranoid style." Alas, the rewriters of history have largely managed to hide the links between the Society's founders and the American pro-fascist movements of the pre-war era.

One example should prove the point.

In the 1950s, Fred Koch's chief partner in establishing the JBS was J. Howard Pew, a personal friend to Robert Welch, the founder of the Society. A couple of decades earlier, Pew helped to establish a fascist group called the Sentinels of Liberty:

The second most important of the [American Liberty] League's auxiliaries was the Sentinels of the Republic, an anti-Semitic organization which constantly warned the country of "the Jewish-Communist" menace. In 1936 the Senate Lobbying Committee released Sentinels' files revealing fascist sympathies. "The Jewish threat is a real one... I believe our real opportunity lies in accomplishing the defeat of Roosevelt." wrote its president, Boston banker Alexander Lincoln to Cleveland Runyon, who replied that the people were crying for leadership: "The Sentinels should really lead on the outstanding issue. The old line Americans of $1,000 a year want a Hitler."

In public, the Sentinels did not extol the virtues of Hitler; instead, they opposed any attempt to regulate business, with a particular emphasis on repealing laws against child labor.  In other words, the movement was outwardly libertarian and inwardly totalitarian.

Tea Partiers, following the lead of Glenn Beck, have tried to rewrite this history, claiming that liberals were somehow allied with the fascist movement. This assertion makes sense only if you manage to ignore every piece of printed material from the 1930s.

From time to time, I am asked by what criteria do I differentiate the (relatively few) worthwhile conspiracy theories from the many that are rubbish. My quick-n-dirty solution will strike many people as unfair, yet it works for me. I ask: "Did a libertarian come up with this theory?" If the answer is "yes," then the assertions are probably worthless. 

Hell of a footnote...

Okay, we have two conflicting lower-court rulings on the legality of what the NSA does, which means that the Supremes will have to weigh in. I'm not optimistic about any decision rendered by this Supreme Court -- after all, these are the people who gave us the outlandish Citizen's United decision. Then again...who knows? The Republican appointees on the court might want to stick a finger in Obama's eye, while the Democrat appointees might actually give a rat's ass about privacy.

In the meantime, lawyer William Cohn has discovered an interesting footnote in the decision rendered by Judge Leon on December 16. (That, as you may recall, was the ruling that went against the NSA.)

In Klayman v. Obama, federal judge Richard Leon debunks the biggest lie of all – that the NSA spy program effectively combats terror attacks. Buried deep in his ruling is a powerful nugget of truth which exposes that when the government says “trust us” we shouldn’t. Footnote 65, found at the bottom of page 62 of the 68-page ruling has received inadequate attention in the press. It reads:

The Government could have presented additional, potentially classified evidence in camera, but it chose not to do so. Although the Government has publicly asserted that the NSA’s surveillance programs have thwarted fifty-four terrorist attacks, no proof of that has been put before me.

The footnote then provides citations to propublica.org and The Washington Post, and statements by Senators Patrick Leahy and Ron Wyden to support Judge Leon’s skepticism. An in camera review is a secure proceeding whereby the judge reviews allegedly sensitive information in private. If there were evidence of the actual effectiveness of the spy program the government would have no reason not to present it to a judge in camera.

In other words, the Government lies, and we are foolish to accept self-serving claims made by those in power without proof.

Even though Clapper and other leaders of the intelligence community have clearly lied to us, the judge who issued the more recent ruling -- Judge William Pauley -- seems to think that the NSA's tactics have done wonderful things in the war on terrors:

U.S. District Judge William Pauley said in a written opinion that the program lets the government connect fragmented and fleeting communications and "represents the government's counter-punch" to the al Qaeda's terror network's use of technology to operate decentralized and plot international terrorist attacks remotely.

"This blunt tool only works because it collects everything," Pauley said. "The collection is broad, but the scope of counterterrorism investigations is unprecedented."

How do we reconcile Pauley's statement with Judge Leon's Footnote 65?

Why does American journalism suck?

The post below references the horrible cult massacre/suicide that occurred in Uganda back in 2000. After hitting the "publish" button, I decided to search for more information about cult leaders Joseph Kibwetere and Credonia Mwerinde, who may or may not be still alive. First stop, of course, was Wikipedia. The external links at the bottom of the entry mention a "BBC report" and an "ABC report."

Without hesitation, I went for the BBC report.

It was an automatic reaction. Only afterward did I stop to ask myself: Why did I feel no curiosity to see what ABC has to say...?

The answer has nothing to do with any grand conspiracy theories about news management. I simply didn't think ABC would tell me anything that I didn't already know.

Our journalists have forgotten how to dig. Even in the year 2000, most American reporters did not consider the Uganda massacre to be news.

Consider a more recent example: How many Americans have heard that China has landed a rover on the moon -- at a time when the United States no longer possesses the ability to send a human being into space?

For as long as I can remember -- and my memory is longer than most -- everyone has bitched about the ghastly state of American journalism. Yet the field was never truly bad before. Not like this.

Sure, there were major events which left many Americans suspicious of covert government news manipulation. Obvious examples would be the assassinations of the 1960s, the Tonkin Gulf incident, the overestimation of Soviet military prowess in the 1970s, the anti-Sandinista propaganda of the Reagan years, and NBC's outrageous coverage of the shooting of Pope John-Paul II. On Cold War issues, at least half the news reportage filling our teevee screens was dubious or fraudulent.

But in all of those cases, one could discern political motives behind the "massaged" message. Nowadays, the problem goes way beyond the question of political bias. Our journalists can't muster up basic competence on pretty much any topic.

Near as I can tell, the problem comes down to money.

In this country, news is -- or was -- subsidized by advertising, which was always a potential source of corruption. But now that the advertising dollars are drying up, the corruption has become much worse.

The BBC manages the neat trick of receiving taxpayer funding without functioning as an organ of government propaganda. Sure, the spooks have always inserted themselves into various levels of British journalism -- one of these days, I may tell you folks the story of Colin Wallace -- but MI5 does its trickery with a certain degree of subtlety. BBC World Service doesn't feel like Pravda.

Here in America, we have non-stop "news" on various cable stations, but what these outlets do isn't really journalism. Fox and MSNBC exist to make Americans of certain political persuasions feel good about themselves -- and hatred toward everyone else. Those two networks offer nonstop discussion of the talking points issued by the Republican and Democratic national committees; they do not search out truly new news. When was the last time you heard of a reporter for one of those two venues initiating an FOIA search, or seeking out a little-known witness to an event that made history?

As for CNN -- hell, much of the time, CNN is a joke. CNN often serves up celebrity guff, human interest fluff, and endlessly repetitive coverage of this week's trial of the century. In short: Junk journalism.

And then there's the threat posed by the libertarian billionaires. Think of Jeff Bezos taking the Washington Post, the Koch brothers buying up newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, and Peter Thiel (the guy who said that freedom and democracy are not compatible) buying into Facebook and venues that cover Silicon Valley. Of course, Rupert Murdoch got there ahead of everyone else. Since the news business isn't a great way to make money, the libertarian billionaire boy's club must have some other reason for commandeering American journalism.

Some would count Pierre Omidyar as a member of that club. To be frank, I've heard conflicting reports. This article pictures him as a man obsessed with news gathering (and a potential savior of the profession)...

But Pierre Omidyar has a strange obsession: Newsrooms. He reportedly hangs out in them, reportedly likes journalists (that's farther than I'm willing to go on some days). More importantly, he seems to genuinely care about the state of journalism in the 21st Century. He's very concerned about issues like the government's crackdown on whistleblowers and the people who report on whistleblowers, about unwarranted spying on American citizens, and related topics. A few years back, he started a local journalism website in his adopted home of Hawaii, and rather than getting turned off, he was hooked.

Roughly a week ago, Jay Rosen offered a more detailed look at how Omidyar's First Look Media will operate. In theory, the operation will pay for itself through bifurcation. From a First Look press release:

First Look Media is made up of several entities, including a company established to develop new media technology and a separate nonprofit journalism organization. The journalism operation, which will be incorporated as a 501(c)(3), will enjoy editorial independence, and any profits eventually earned by the technology company are committed to support First Look’s mission of independent journalism. The name of First Look Media’s initial digital publication is yet to be announced.

To which Rosen adds:

Today’s news settles one of the questions I have been asked a lot: “Is NewCo going to be a business or a non-profit?” Answer: both. The news and editorial operation will be a non-profit. The technology company will be a business run for profit. If the tech company is successful it can help fund the journalism mission, along with other possible sources of revenue.

Arguably, television network news used to have a similar financial basis. CBS News didn't make money by itself; it was funded by the CBS television network. Walter Cronkite received a subsidy from the Beverly Hillbillies.

Rosen doesn't answer the important questions. Will First Look be yet another libertarian propaganda outlet? Many of my readers will automatically presume the worst. For my part, I'm trying to be hopeful. Whatever Omidyar's up to, it can't possibly be worse than what the Kochs have in mind for the Los Angeles Times...

...can it?

Want to read something really, really weird?

Merry Christmas!

Even if you have an allergic reaction to religion, you will, I hope, find this post diverting and fetchingly odd. As long-time readers know, I'm not a religious person myself.

Nevertheless, a couple of years ago I confessed that, as a boy, I formed an inexplicable, somewhat embarrassing crush on St Bernadette, the pretty peasant girl who allegedly saw the Virgin Mary in 1858. In that earlier post, I did not divulge my desire to write a book -- a book offering not another biography of Bernadette, but an overview of Mary sightings. What I envisioned (so to speak) was the first such work written from a truly objective, "man-from-Mars" stance -- an investigation by someone who is neither friend nor foe to the Church. An outsider's view.

The project fell by the wayside when I realized that few people have any desire to read a book that refuses to take sides. Both atheists and the pious consider themselves objective observers, yet they both use "objectivity" as a synonym for "I want you to agree with my presumptions from the outset." (Of course, both atheists and the pious would indignantly deny adhering to that definition of that word, but I think they're lying to themselves.)

My mantra: "Conclusions come at the end of the investigation, not the beginning." Alas, when it comes to claims involving religious phenomena, most people really do prefer their conclusions at the wrong end. Besides, the Catholics with the deepest interest in this material tend to be tea partiers, a weltanschauung which sure as hell ain't my cup of tea. I can't talk to such people for very long without losing my temper.

Nevertheless, someone ought to write a "neutralist" book about this topic, because these stories are, if nothing else, incredibly strange. Some are scary. Some are sad. Some have political ramifications. All are strange.

The familiar, church-approved visions -- the stories commonly recounted in books intended for a Catholic audience -- are indeed fascinating. But I have an even greater interest in the many bizarre episodes which never have received any kind of official recognition, and which fewer people know about. Most writers ignore these claims -- although Father Rene Laurentin's magisterial Dictionnaire des "apparitions" de la Vierge Marie makes a valiant effort to take in the entire field. (The book weighs in at 1400-plus pages -- small font, double columns, lots of citations.) On the skeptical side of the aisle, Marc Hallet's invaulable Les apparitions de la Vierge et la critique historique is, despite its bias, unafraid of detail and generally well-argued.

You don't have to believe in the supernatural to learn from these narratives. They explore the extremes of human experience. Here are a few examples:

Mass murder. Everyone has heard about Jonestown, and most people know about the "Heaven's Gate" murder/suicide cult. But nearly every one has forgotten about Joseph Kibwetere's Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda, a cult which ended in the second-largest group suicide, or mass-murder, in the history of religious sects. The event took place on March 17, 2000, the date on which the cult's leaders had claimed Doomsday would occur. And so, in a sense, it did: The people who made that prophecy locked more than five hundred of their followers into a church and set off explosions.

Hundreds of additional bodies were later found at other sites associated with the sect. The number of reported victims grew over the course of a week; the official final tally came to 778 bodies.

As with the tragedies of Jonestown and the Order of the Solar Temple, controversy erupted over the question of "Murder or suicide?" Apparently, most of the cult members in the main church died before the building erupted in flame. Some news reports spoke of strangulation, some of poison, some of stabbings. A few writers have even hinted at a conspiratorial scenario in which the government of Uganda used the mass "suicide" as a cover for the murder of political enemies.

Much of the contemporary news coverage neglected to mention that Kibwetere was a Marian visionary. His second-in command, a former prostitute named Credonia Mwerinde (a.k.a. "the Programmer"), also claimed to be in contact with the Virgin:

Some say Mwerinde, who claimed to have met the Virgin Mary, ultimately eclipsed the cult's founder in both real importance and power. Fr. Paul Ikazire, a priest and former cult member said she dominated the group and that "Kibwetere was just a figurehead." He characterized Mwerinde as "a trickster, obsessed with the desire to grab other people's property." The Virgin Mary as channeled through Mwerinde proscribed all the rules of the group.

Credonia Mwerinde preached that personal possessions were evil. She encouraged cult members to sell everything and surrender all their assets to her. Eventually Mwerinde became rich and accumulated farms, houses and cars. Paul Ikazire recalled, "She would come in and say things like: 'The Virgin Mary wants you to bring more money."'

The gender-bending lion-tamer. Between the years 1921-24, a woman calling herself Georges Marasco became famous throughout Belgium, and not just because her name and her appearance were undeniably masculine. (This site says that she openly identified herself as male, a claim I've not seen in older books.) She was a Marian visionary, a stigmatist and a healer who reputedly could reveal secrets of both the past and future.

In 1920, she was stricken by a mysterious paralysis, which was healed during a visit to a Marian shrine in Halle. This experience launched her career as a mystic.

A steady stream of visitors made the pilgrimage to her home in Vorst, where she lived with a much younger "sister" named Irène. The pilgrims came in search of physical healing and spiritual direction. Despite her unconventional appearance, her many disciples viewed her as a genuinely holy person; one observer called her "a sort of priestess."

Naturally, she made many enemies, some of whom spread the rumor that she had spied for the Germans during World War I. She insisted that she had, in fact, worked for the allies, and that she had even been an intimate friend of the famed British Red Cross nurse Edith Cavell, who (in an internationally notorious episode) had been executed by the Kaiser's forces because she had helped allied POWs escape German custody. Although no Cavell biography mentions Marasco, the Belgian government did grudgingly admit that Marasco had acted courageously in the service of the Allies.

In 1924, the police arrested her for obtaining money through fraudulence. Her trial became quite the cause célèbre in Belgium and was followed throughout the Catholic world. Investigators learned that her real name was Bertha Mrazek, and that her parents had tossed her into the streets while she was still a child. She joined a circus and earned a living as a sketch artist, a contortionist, and even a lion-tamer. After the war, she sang at the famed Chat Noir nightclub in Paris, living the life of a classic Bohemian hell-raiser. Irène, born in 1913, was her daughter, not her sister.

Although this “backstory” would shock few people nowadays, in the 1920s, people expected miraculées to have more family-friendly biographies. The public turned against her, and she was confined to a lunatic asylum near Mons. A 1927 news story reported that harsh treatment had nearly driven her mad. After that, she disappears from history.

Another transgender visionary. In 1989, in a town called Agoo in the Philippines, a 12 year-old boy named Judiel Nieva began to see visions of the Blessed Mother, even as his family's statue of the Virgin began to weep tears of blood. Over the next few years, Nieva's visions attracted many pilgrims.

On March 6, 1993, thousands of people converged on a hill where Nieva (then aged 16) fell into a trance. (Some estimates put the crowd at a million people, a number I find hard to credit.) Many witnesses claimed to see bizarre solar phenomena of the kind familiar to anyone who knows the familiar Fatima story. Two distinguished political figures -- the Speaker of the House and the Senate President Pro Tempore -- were in attendance; they claimed that they saw the silhouette of a woman floating above a guava tree near Nieva.

The local Bishop decided to investigate. Bishop Salvador Lazo was an arch-conservative (and somewhat anti-Semitic) cleric who aroused the ire of the Church hierarchy when he accused the Vatican of being infiltrated by a Freemasonic conspiracy. Although initially enthusiastic about the Nieva story, the Bishop was disturbed to learn that young Judiel had surrounded himself with a coterie of handsome young "bodyguards." There were also reports that the Nieva family had helped themselves to funds donated by the faithful to the project of erecting a church on the apparition hill. Eventually, Lazo issued a report condemning the apparitions as fraudulent.

The story does not end there. Judiel Nieva has taken on a new identity as a woman named Angel de la Vega. She -- this is now her pronoun, although I'm not sure if she has actually had sexual reassignment surgery -- has even gained some renown as an actress on Filipino television.

She claims that her sex change was "what the Beloved Virgin Mary willed." Today, she owns a spa and a restaurant in her home town of Agoo. Although she no longer discusses religious matters in public, she insists that her apparitions were genuine and, by some accounts, still hears "locutions" from the Virgin.

Conservative Catholics would concur with the Bishop's assessment of Nieva/De la Vega. But if he/she was a false visionary, what do we make of the strange sights seen by so many people in 1993?

Prophet-eering. An Irish mystical entrepreneur named Christina Gallagher is one visionary about whom I can no longer be objective: In my opinion, she is nothing more than a deceiver out to fleece the public. Although little-known in the United States, she has, in her homeland, been the focus of numerous news stories (see here and here and here) and one book-length expose.

The author of that book, Jim Gallagher (no relation), is her primary journalistic bête noire. Perhaps it would be best to let him tell the story -- and quite a gripping story it is:





If you don't have time to watch the interview, the following excerpts from Jim Gallagher's reportage should give you a taste of what he has uncovered. This comes from a blurb for his book:

THE shocking secret life of millionaire ‘visionary’ Christina Gallagher is laid bare today in a new book, based on a series of Sunday World revelations, which lifts the lid on her scams, greed and lies. Immaculate Deception reveals for the first time how the self-proclaimed holy woman told her most loyal supporters how she was recovering from a heart attack when in fact she had sneaked off to England for two weeks to meet a boyfriend. The book also exposes how the money-grabbing leader of the House of Prayer in Achill Island was furious when a generous American benefactor gave her “only” $800,000 when she expected $2 million.

And here are a couple of excerpts from one of Jim Gallagher's news reports:

FAKE visionary Christina Gallagher’s main American fundraiser is an ex-convict who took part in a $15million fraud, the Sunday World can sensationally reveal. John Rooney, who is the official owner of the self-proclaimed holy woman’s €4-million Malahide mansion, spent time behind bars for his part in a massive interstate scam in the US. The 65-year-old fraudster pleaded guilty in a Texas court to a con-trick which cost his own employers at the time a whopping $10 million.

Many elderly donors in Ireland were brainwashed into handing over tens of thousands of euro but were asked to make out their cheques to John Rooney. Soon after, Gallagher’s magnificent home was bought Rooney’s name. One couple, Michael and Betty Morrissey from Co Waterford, signed a cheque for an incredible €50,000 to Rooney in June 2005 and now assume their money went straight into buying Gallagher’s house.

One of the reasons why this woman particularly annoys me is the fact that she claims to have seen apparitions of not just the Virgin but also my beloved Bernadette Soubirous -- whose behavior never resembled Christina's. Bernadette avoided crowds, disdained fame, considered money unclean and refused even to take fruit handed to her by well-wishers.

Although many alleged visionaries have made dubious claims, Christina Gallagher is...unique. And yet her organization, the House of Prayer, is slowly making inroads in the United States.

A mass sighting. On March 18, 1896, something very odd took place in the French coastal town of Tilly-sur-Seulles, located not too far from the place American soldiers later called Omaha Beach. The Virgin Mary allegedly appeared just outside a school run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart -- not just to one seer, but to the entire school, including three nuns, sixty students, and several visitors from town. They all saw the life-sized figure of a woman wearing a white dress and a white belt, her feet enveloped by a soft, pink cloud as she slowly floated over the school grounds before wafting out of sight.

You don't believe it? Well, I can't say that I do either. Nevertheless, and for what it's worth, we have a couple of photographs. The first was published in the June 20, 1896 edition of a London periodical called The Graphic (and I apologize for the terrible reproduction)...

I have found a somewhat better-quality version of a similar photo which appeared in an 1896 edition of Le Monde Illustre.

Could these pictures be fakes? Of course. Bogus "ghost" photographs abounded in the 1890s. (I have a couple of hilariously obvious "ghost of Bernadette" images from this era.) The figure in the sky could be the superimposed image of a religious statue. Although we can't make any fair judgment about authenticity until we know more about how these images came to be, this much seems certain: The "Virgin" in these photos is much larger than life-sized.

The photos reproduced above were taken not on March 18 but on a subsequent occasion. Over the next four months, the "Virgin" made a number of return appearances at very irregular intervals. For example, there were three public events in May, on May 1, May 2 and May 27. On July 3, the figure appeared for two full hours. The sightings ceased soon thereafter.

As one might expect, crowds flocked to the town throughout this period. Whenever the apparition appeared, most witnesses reported that the figure floated through the air, although some claimed that she rose up out of the ground.

Some of the schoolchildren began to fall into trances (or "ecstasy," to use the term preferred by Catholics) and started to act in an unstable, disturbing fashion.

Around this time, a 24 year-old seamstress named Marie Martel, who lived in the nearby village of Cristot, showed up in Tilly. She soon commandeered the narrative.

On April 25, she began to have intense subjective visions, and claimed to be in regular private communication with the Virgin. Soon thereafter, Mlle Martel's health began to suffer. An affluent local gave Marie a place to stay in town, saving her the trouble of making the journey to and from her home.

Her visionary sequence lasted well into the 20th century, during which time she became the center of a small personality cult. As the years passed, she had visions not just of the Virgin Mary but also of Christ, St. Michael and Joan of Arc (who was not yet a saint). Although nearly all Catholics believe that the "solar miracle" motif originated at Fatima, the first such case occurred in Tilly-sur-Seulles in October of 1901, during one of Marie's visions. Surprisingly, the locals seemed unimpressed, and few outsiders took note of the incident.

Marie offered her followers some spectacularly wrongheaded forecasts of world events -- for example, she said that all of Paris would soon be destroyed by a great fire. Although Marie Martel predicted that a great Basilica would be built on the site of the original Tilly apparitions, no such structure came into being.

In short and in sum, Marie (who died in 1913) made a poor impression on many observers. As her cult diminished, the entire story of Tilly-sur-Seulles faded from public attention. That outcome seems a little unfair, since the unhappy career of Marie Martel does not necessarily have anything to do with the original sightings, which had many witnesses.

What caused that first mass vision? Skeptics will no doubt trot out the concept of pareidolia, the psychological phenomenon which explains why we "see" images in clouds or stucco walls. In my estimation, the multiple-witness events don't fall into that category -- if the descriptions we have are accurate.

And that's a jumbo-sized if.

Tilly-sur-Seulles deserves further study. For now, that's all I can honestly say about the affair.

There's more! When the idea to write this post first popped into my brain, I had planned to include seven or eight additional stories, all very weird. But the sun is rising on this Christmas morning, and I've been typing all night. We can return to this topic in the future, if any readers express interest.

However, I suspect that some of my regular visitors have been irked by this blog's uncharacteristic leap into a luminous, bubbling, boiling vat of strangeness. Blame it on the holiday. 'Tis the season for tales of miracles and magic, n'est-ce pas?

I still do not know what causes people to report these visions. In the case of Christina Gallagher, I have a pretty good idea of what she's up to -- but many other stories are more bewildering. For example, if Credonia Mwerinde was motivated purely by money, why did she engineer the deaths of her donors?

There must be a way to study such things without making folks angry; alas, this topic tends to bring out the worst in both the true believers and the hard-headed materialistic harrumphers. Maybe one day I'll discover the right words which will calm critics on both sides.

At this time, the only words that come to mind are these: Have a weird Christmas.

The terror excuse

An increasing number of mainstream sources are allowing themselves to say what some of us have long suspected: The NSA's expanded powers never protected us from any terror plots. The new Atlantic piece is conclusive:

A Republican-appointed judge and President Obama’s own handpicked Surveillance Review Group both came to the same conclusion last week: The National Security Agency’s controversial phone-records program has been of little real value to American security. Yet its defenders continue to insist that it is necessary, clinging desperately to long-debunked claims about foiled terror plots. Their stubbornness fits a decade-long pattern of fear trumping evidence whenever the word “terrorism” is uttered—a pattern it is time to finally break.

In other words, instead of vacuuming up sensitive information about the call patterns of millions of innocent people, the government could have followed the traditional approach of getting orders for specific suspicious numbers. As for those “dozens” of attacks, the review groups found that the NSA program “generated relevant information in only a small number of cases, and there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different without the section 215 telephony meta-data program.”

Just a couple of years ago, any blogger expressing such an idea (excuse me while I clear my throat: A-hem!) would have faced sighs and eye-rolls and groans. When will it be safe for mainstream writers to drop the other shoe? When will it become permissible for normal, civilized folk to suggest in public that the surveillance state was erected for political control?

File the following item under the heading "Rationalization springs eternal." The story referenced above evinced a memorable pro-NSA remark:

On the other hand, critics of NSA invasions of privacy have produced no evidence that these invasions of privacy have every actually affected the life of anyone, going on ten years now.

In other words, it's all right if I sneak a camera into your bedroom in order to watch you have sex, as long as your life isn't harmed or directly affected. It's all right to violate the Constitution as long as no-one notices any inconvenience.

Conventional metrics may not suffice to measure an injury done to free speech. Consider the case of a person who would like to take part in a protest movement -- and then he or she thinks: "Wait. The NSA has access to all of my emails, to all of my texts, to all of my telephone calls. Is there anything in there that can be used against me? Should I keep a low profile?"

I have no doubt that plenty of people have already asked themselves such questions. In that sense, free speech has already been stifled -- very subtly. If circumstances worsen and the need for protest becomes more urgent, many more Americans will weigh their desire to act against the possible penalties.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration and the major media continue to deceive.

Sunday morning brought out former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell on CBS Face the Nation to say this:

I think that is a perception that’s somehow out there. It is not focused on any single American. It is not reading the content of your phone calls or my phone calls or anybody else’s phone calls. It is focused on this metadata for one purpose only and that is to make sure that foreign terrorists aren’t in contact with anybody in the United States.

Morrell also stated that there was “no abuse” by the NSA and that Ed Snowden was a “criminal” who has shirked his duties as a “patriot” by running. Now Mike Morrell is not just some voice out in the intelligence community, he was one of the supposedly hallowed voices that Barack Obama chose to consider “reform”.

A lot of people were hoping that the President's review board would result in actual change. Morrell's message: Forget it.

Then, Sunday night 60 Minutes showed that fluffing the security state is not just a vice, but an ingrained habit for them. Hot on the heels of their John Miller blowjob on the NSA, last night 60 Minutes opened with a completely hagiographic puff piece on and with National Security Advisor Susan Rice. There was absolutely no news whatsoever in the segment, it was entirely a forum for Rice and her “interviewer”, Lesley Stahl, to spew unsupported allegations about Edward Snowden (He “has 1.5 million documents!”), lie about how the DOJ has interacted with the court system regarding the government surveillance programs (the only false statements have been “inadvertent”)...

Rice went on to proclaim herself a proud "pragmatist" in the tradition of -- get this! -- Henry Kissinger.

Good lord. Has the Democratic party actually become so corrupt that our leaders openly brag about using Henry the K as a model? At one time, Kissinger was despised by pretty much everyone everywhere. Even Nixon didn't really like him.

Sometimes I wish we could send the Obots of 2008 a message from the future. How do you think they would have taken Rice's "Kissinger" remark?

The neocons are calling Obama a sissy

A piece in The Hill decries the waning influence of the United States. To a large degree, articles of this sort should be seen as propaganda exercises by and for the neocons, who are pissed off that they didn't get the wars they wanted in Syria and Iran. These excerpts should prove the point:

In the Middle East, longtime U.S. allies Israel and Saudi Arabia have been rattled by the administration’s nuclear talks with Iran, which led to an interim agreement in November. Under its terms, some sanctions were lifted on the longtime U.S. enemy.

Prince Saudi al-Faisal, a former head of intelligence in Saudi Arabia, told a conference in Monaco on Sunday that several “red lines” put forward by Obama on Syria “became pinkish as time went on, and eventually ended up completely white.”

Get the picture? The neocons are going to call Obama a weak little sissy-boy until he starts tossing bombs around again.

But the Hill piece also talks about China, and China is different: There really is a new arrogance, a new sneer of certainty and contempt. The Hill quote Leslie Gelb, President Emeritus of the CFR:

“Basically, I think the Chinese strategy for some time has been to stake out claims, and hold onto those claims until everyone, including the United States, throws up their hands and accepts its position. At some point we have to demonstrate to the Chinese that this approach doesn’t work.”

How?

We don't make anything. Compared to China's gleaming, science fiction-y new skylines, our cities seem so...20th century. Nowadays, all we have to offer are Wall Street financial "products" that have proven toxic. Our vampire class has displaced our entrepreneurial class.

Here's the key paragraph in which the Hill tries to tie it all together:

China’s rise now looks inexorable while the United States grapples with how to maintain its influence after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and while it still faces economic weakness at home.

The Hill's argument comes to this: Why has America lost prestige and power? Because the neocons drove us into a ditch during the Bush years. How to regain prestige and power? Let the neocons have the keys to the car again!

Does that argument make sense to you? Me neither.

The Chinese achieved their current prominence because they don't waste their time and resources on needless wars. They make things. Obama did not take the steps necessary to lead us back to productivity, and for that reason, I consider his presidency a failure. But thank God he did not fall into the neocon traps in Syria and Iran.

The politics of paint

Never told you folks that I collect paint, did I? Probably figured you wouldn't be interested. But this is the Sunday before Christmas and I am sick of writing about the NSA.

So gather round, my friends, and hear a tale. Pigment and politics are more closely related than you might think...

As a young man, I painted in oils. Not very well. Then the professional gigs started coming, and I switched to other media. The collection of tubed oil paints -- which included some expensive rarities -- went into the closet, nestled within a couple of wooden Mouton Cadet Rothschild caskets. (Yes! Rothschild! A name to make all conspiracy theorists shudder!)

Despite losing all other possessions, I held on to those two boxes. Over the course of the next thirty years, the stash grew whenever the wallet allowed and a bargain presented itself. The collecting bug turns us all into helpless idiots, doesn't it? I rationalized these purchases by telling myself that one day there would be a return to the easel. To tradition.

Needless to say, my knowledge of the history of pigment is characteristically quasi-expert. Or at least not bad. Thus, I took particular interest in an episode of Elementary broadcast late in the first season. (Elementary is the Sherlock-in-modern-New-York television series, which I, just to be perverse, like better than the BBC version.)

The plot turned on the discovery of a jar of gamboge -- raw powdered pigment, not tubed -- in the house where our heroes find an amnesiac kidnap victim. The detectives attempt to track down the kidnapper by consulting the only store in the city where one can buy that ultra-rare pigment.

In real life, that supplier would be Kremer's. They sell only the raw and powdered stuff, which you must mull yourself. You can't find gamboge in paint tubes these days. Even these guys don't make it -- and they offer mummy, fer chrissakes...!

No, I don't have any gamboge. Neither do I possess any orpiment (a similar color), although I'd love to get hold of some: It's marvelously poisonous. (So are many other traditional pigments. Gamboge itself can do hideous things to your intestines. A dangerous business, art is.) I do have a very ancient tube of aureolin -- golden in glazes, but more like Grey Poupon in masstone -- which can, in a pinch, substitute for gamboge. M. Graham makes a gamboge hue which I have not tried, although the brand itself is superb.

What's the political angle? We're coming to it.

The writers of Elementary have tweeted thus:

Gamboge pigment is harvested from The Killing Fields in Cambodia.

To prove the point, they gifted us with a segment of the original script (which was changed before production). The text surprised me. Even though gamboge is yellow, the teleplay identified the pigment as red.

JOAN

It's the kind of red. It comes from a resin that you can only find on the border between Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. They mine it from the sap of trees that are in the Cambodian Killing Fields. The red tint comes from the blood-soaked bullets that lodged in the trunks during the mass executions. The bullets rust, the blood mixes with the sap...

(she holds up the pigment)

Gamboge.

Where the hell (I wondered) did they get that?

Yes, gamboge comes from the resin of a tree found in that region; the very name "gamboge" is a Frenchified corruption of "Cambodia." But that stuff about blood and bullets...? Ridiculous. Gamboge predates the advent of Pol Pot by hundreds of years. Buddhist monks use the stuff to dye their robes yellow.

I wondered: Were the Elementary writers trying to inject a little propaganda into the proceedings? Did someone on the staff take a pay-off from the same folks who brought us the Mitrokhin hoax?

Determined to solve this mystery, I turned to Victoria Finlay's invaluable 2003 work, Color: A Natural History of the Palette. Finlay traveled the world to discover the true origins of various traditional pigments.

The book contains a passage which explains all. Obviously, the television writers misunderstood the following:

This pretty paint can be dangerous in other ways, I learned later. Winsor and Newton have been receiving small parcels of gamboge from their Southeast Asian suppliers since before anyone can remember, and probably since the company started in the mid-nineteenth century. When it arrives at the factory they grind it up carefully and sell it in tubes or pans as one of their more expensive watercolors. But some of the packages that arrived in the 1970s and 1980s from Cambodia and possibly Vietnam were different: the gamboge contained exploded bullets. The company’s technical director, Ian Garrett, has five of them displayed in his office now: a reminder to him and his colleagues of how some of the paint materials they can so easily take for granted come from places where people have lived through unimaginable suffering. One day, during the height of the Vietnam War, or perhaps during the horrors of the murderous Pol Pot regime, a soldier, or a group of soldiers, must have gone into the garcinia grove and sprayed bullets around the area with machine guns. Some of these lodged safely in the bamboo, to be found months or years later by paint-makers in Harrow. What happened to the other bullets can only be imagined.

Ah. So bullets were found. But they did not turn this traditionally yellow product red.

W&N stopped offering gamboge as a watercolor in 2005. Gamboge disappeared as an oil paint long before. Frankly, I've never seen it on sale anywhere.

W&N does, however, offer a fine version of Indian Yellow -- I have a tube of the stuff -- although they no longer make it according to the original recipe. Traditionally, Indian Yellow derives from cow piss. But not just any cows: Cows fed nothing but mango leaves. This practice was cruel -- cows don't do well on mango leaves -- and so the British government forced an end to Indian Yellow production in the late 19th century.

Next time you go to a museum and you see an old painting with lots of yellow in it, remind yourself that you're probably looking at a very expensive arrangement of cow piss.

Victoria Finlay (who traveled to India) reports that she could not confirm the "cow pee" story, but I've seen one old book which reports that the paint's smell offered a strong indication of its bovine origin, and I'm told that W&N still keeps a few samples of "old vintage" Indian Yellow hanging around the offices. Perhaps the only way to prove the story is to buy a cow and a few mango trees.

Have I alienated my usual audience...? If this excursion into the politics of paint has held your interest, then perhaps one day we shall discuss the strange and blood-curdling history of ultramarine blue. Otherwise...

...well, we can always talk about the En-Ess-Fucking-A.

War, peace, nukes, sanctions and Iran

This is a brand-new radio interview, uploaded to YouTube. I have not heard all of it yet, but so far, it seems like the sort of thing I'd like to share with the audience.

Meanwhile, congressional neo-neocons are pushing for new sanctions on Iran in defiance of Obama's grudging peace efforts. The role of Sherrod Brown in the Senate is of great interest -- he seems to be the weathervane.

Who can you trust?

One of the biggest name in computer security is RSA. And wouldn't you know it...they made a deal with the devil -- or at least, with the NSA.

Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a "back door" in encryption products, the New York Times reported in September. Reuters later reported that RSA became the most important distributor of that formula by rolling it into a software tool called Bsafe that is used to enhance security in personal computers and many other products.

Undisclosed until now was that RSA received $10 million in a deal that set the NSA formula as the preferred, or default, method for number generation in the BSafe software, according to two sources familiar with the contract. Although that sum might seem paltry, it represented more than a third of the revenue that the relevant division at RSA had taken in during the entire previous year, securities filings show.

The folks at RSA are now complaining that they didn't really know and they were misled.

What's amazing is that the sums involved were rather piddling. What does it profit a company to sell its soul for $10 million? Who would trust RSA now? Security is the very reason why people go to RSA. Customers don't pay that company to have secret back doors installed on their systems.

But that's a problem with modern capitalism: These days, too many executives just want to sock away large bonuses. Retirement money. They don't care about the long-term health of the firm.

By the way: As you peruse the blogs which deal with this story, be on the lookout for the anti-Snowden, anti-Greenwald trolls. It's all pretty obviously pre-packaged. Who pays for all of that astroturf? Probably the same people who paid ten mill to RSA.

Income inequality

Peggy Noonan loved Ronald Reagan. Loved him. If some unknown party were to dig up and steal Reagan's corpse, any detective's logical first move would be to check Peggy Noonan's bedroom.

That's why I'm a little surprised to learn that she has published a few words bemoaning income inequality. Or rather, she has published someone else's words on that topic, gleaned during air travel:

A billionaire of New York, in conversation: "I hate it when the market goes up. Every time I hear the stock market went up I know the guillotines are coming closer." This was interesting in part because the speaker has a lot of money in the market. But he meant it. He is self-made, broadly accomplished, a thinker on politics, and for a moment he was sharing the innards of his mind. His biggest concern is the great and growing distance between the economically successful and those who have not or cannot begin to climb. The division has become too extreme, too dramatic, and static. He fears it will eventually tear the country apart and give rise to policies that are bitter and punishing, not helpful and broadening.

Ooooh. Which New York billionaire? There are only 442 in this country, and not all of them live in NY -- and most of them use private jets. So the identification game should not be that difficult.

Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg and Si Newhouse Jr. all seem like fair suggestions. Soros? No. Noonan would not have preserved his incognito.

Whoever this billionaire was, he revealed the fears of his class. They all sense, deep down, that if they were to get their fair desserts, their fates would be determined by some future version of citoyen Robespierre. Even the Koch brothers must know that justice demands the striped back, the unlit cell, the jeering crowds, the forced march to the Place de la Concorde...

Incidentally, in the same column, Peggy bemoans the fact that air travel sometimes forces her to share cabin space with scary black people. A decade ago, that statement might have led to media outrage, but not now. We live in a time when nobody cares if you insult black people. But God help you if you injure the precious, onionskin-thin self-esteem of a farmer -- as a certain hirsute hillbilly recently learned.

Dare we call it treason?

I'm never quite sure what to make of former CIA guy Phil Giraldi.

He identified the "yellowcake" documents as forgeries, and later established the fraudulence of Iranian nuclear documents proferred by advocates for war. Admirable work.

But Giraldi has also served as Ron Paul's foreign affairs adviser, which puts him squarely in the Yet Another Fucking Libertarian camp. That's not a way to get on my good side.

Yesterday, Giraldi wrote a startling piece which, in essence, accuses various congressfolk of having greater loyalty to Israel than to the United States.

I am referring to a concerted "betrayal of trust" by a group of American government elected officials in openly advancing policies that serve the interests of a foreign country, specifically the senators and congressmen who are lining up behind Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to oppose the White House’s attempt to negotiate an equitable solution to the thirty-five year confrontation with Iran...

There just might be a congressman or two who actually believes that or who genuinely thinks that Iran poses some kind of threat to the United States, but it does not require any particular insight to realize that the opposition to talks with Iran overwhelmingly comes directly from Israel and its friends and from nobody else. The principal Israeli lobby AIPAC has basically declared war on the White House over the issue and the Senators who are leading the charge are firmly in Israel’s pocket. Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois is even being briefed by Israeli intelligence and Israeli cabinet ministers have been observed pleading their case on Capitol Hill to a very receptive audience. Several congressmen have angrily confronted Secretary of State Kerry when he was trying to explain the tentative agreement with Iran, citing information they received from the Israeli Embassy and even quoting the Israeli media.

Although I'd love to see AIPAC rendered toothless, Giraldi doesn't give us damning evidence of pay-offs.

There's also the distinct possibility that Giraldi himself might have an angle. He directs something called the Council for the National Interest, which advocates for fairer treatment of the Palestinians. Although I like that cause, I don't know who funds the organization. If a foreign government is involved, Giraldi has opened himself up to charges of hypocrisy.

Why do I draw your attention to Giraldi's piece? Because he opens with a very bold and thought-provoking suggestion -- one that takes us well beyond the Israel-Iran controversy.

He believes that congressfolk who toil on behalf of a foreign government should face the gravest legal consequences. The US Constitution is flawed, he says, in that it defines "treason" quite narrowly. From Article III:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

These words do not apply to a political figure who operates on behalf of a country which is not a declared enemy. Giraldi clearly indicates that he would like our definition of "treason" expanded to include loyalty to any foreign interest.

Seems to me that such an expanded definition could get messy. For example, FDR's foes might have used it to squelch the Lend-Lease program. "Loyalty" can easily become one of those eye-of-the-beholder issues.

Nevertheless, I too have argued (in previous posts) that Article III doesn't go far enough. The secessionist movement bugs the hell out of me. I think we should expand our definition of "treason" to include any politician whose loyalty to a proposed breakaway nation trumps loyalty to the present U.S. government. At the very least, secession advocates should be forbidden from holding office.

In 2012, the Republican primaries included two candidates who had flirted with secession. One was Texas Governor Rick Perry, who still seems interested in that dream.

The other, of course, was Ron Paul. The guy Giraldi wanted to become President.

So, Phil...do you really, really, really want to revise our fundamental definition of "treason"? Because I might countenance affixing the "traitor" label to congressfolk more loyal to a foreign flag than to the star-spangled banner -- but only if the same expanded definition also includes "secession friendly" political figures.

Such as Ron Paul. And perhaps Phil Giraldi.

Secret Santa

And here, a great American finds the words I've been searching for over the course of several dozen blog posts...

Let's force our media to ask the right questions

There are times when the mainstream media has no choice but to address what's really going on. To wit:

An independent panel’s call for major changes to the nation’s surveillance programs ups the pressure on President Barack Obama to back serious reforms.

But the big changes the committee is calling for may be less vexing for Obama than one painful, half-buried conclusion: Vacuuming up all that data the National Security Agency collects in its call-tracking database, the panel says, hasn’t actually done much to protect the country from terrorism.

So far, so good. The truth is finally being told: A surveillance state supposedly erected to catch terrorists does not, in fact, catch terrorists.

But look at what comes next. Note how the pundits subtly shift away from the topic we ought to be discussing...

And so the panel’s report raises a pointed question: If collecting huge volumes of metadata on telephone calls from, to and within the United States doesn’t bring much benefit, just how much political capital is Obama willing to spend to keep the program going?

No. That's not the "pointed question" we should ask. Journalists instinctively look for the partisan horserace angle, but right now we have deeper concerns.

The primary question we must ask is this: If the surveillance state was not created to catch terrorists, then what is the true purpose? Secondary question: Why does our media refuse to ask the primary question?

Check out this headline on Marcy Wheeler's site this morning:

President’s Review Group Suggests NSA Currently Acts as a Domestic Security Service

Domestic. That word gives us some clue regarding our primary question.

The President's Review Board is obviously being bamboozled. If ever a real inquiry takes place, I think we'll discover that the truth resembles the following scenario:

1. The NSA collects the content of our domestic communication, not just the metadata. All of it.

2. Although the headers may be stripped for legal reasons, it's a fairly simple matter to re-connect each message with identifying data, in order to determine who said what.

3. Upon request from the FBI and other agencies, the NSA's computers scour this massive take for key words and names.

4. The origin of incriminating data is then laundered in order to build legal cases in which the letters "NSA" do not appear in any court document.

5. Since nearly everyone has something to hide, this system may be used for political control and the harassment of dissidents.

Item 5 is, I suspect, the answer to our primary question.

Dead of Night

Although this blog normally saves non-political reviews for the weekend, I am breaking that rule. Such a slap you should give me!

Last night I re-viewed that classic British ghost story collection from 1945, Dead of Night. Many of you know this film well -- and if you don't, you should. It's a compendium movie in which the framing story forms an infinite loop, although some theorists say that the final loop begins at the very end. Either way, you gotta love the epistemological conundrums.

My favorite episode is the Christmas story, set in an idealized English manor house and starring a 15 year-old Sally Ann Howes. When I first saw this movie, I was of a similar age and (as was my wont at that time) formulated a instant crush on young Sally. She was pretty, charming, well-groomed, cultured, polite yet perky -- and utterly unlike the drugged-out, uncivilized, infuriatingly inarticulate female pseudo-humanoids slouching through California's high schools back in the 1970s. Whatever happened to girls like that? I wondered as I watched Sally. Where did they go? I loved her in that old-style Christmas dress -- and those fingerless fishnet gloves must have launched a thousand fetishists down a mildly pervy path.

I did not know until recently that Sally Ann Howes' ghost story is the only one in the movie based on an actual murder. People still argue about it!

Most viewers prefer the celebrated final episode involving the ventriloquist and his dummy. Even though this yarn has inspired roughly half-a-googol imitations in the years since 1945, the original still conveys a suitable aura of creepiness.

I can't help wondering: Has any stage performer ever worked up an act like this in real life?

What I'm envisioning is kind of a Penn Gillette/Andy Kaufman approach to ventriloquism, in which the voice-tosser does everything he can to convince the audience that he has become genuinely afraid of his own dummy. Although I doubt that even the best actor could convince people that the puppet had become malefic, it might be possible to make members of the audience wonder whether the ventriloquist had become truly unhinged.

Has anyone every tried that approach? It seems like a natural, what with "edginess" being so popular these days.

The BIOS plot

60 Minutes -- yes, it's still on the air -- gave a televisualized blowjob to the NSA the other night. I didn't catch the broadcast, but the gist is here. Swimming in the jizz-stream swallowed by CBS was the allegation that the NSA had foiled "the BIOS plot," a dastardly Chinese scheme to ruin every computer in the world.

That was news to many security experts, who had never before heard of the "BIOS plot," even though "60 Minutes" asserted that "computer manufacturers" had worked with the NSA "to close this vulnerability." Such an undertaking would have been well known in the information-security community.

Plunkett gave only the barest outline of the supposed Communist scheme, not specifying when and how the plot was uncovered and foiled. CBS' confirmation of the plot's existence and provenance relied on unnamed "cybersecurity experts briefed on the operation" who "told us it was China."

Security experts aren't buying it.

Basically, the scheme amounted to a fake BIOS upgrade that bricks your 'puter. But newer machines and Macs are protected, and most people never upgrade their BIOS. Besides, how can the Chinese expect a computer-free West to buy cheap Chinese products via Ebay? Security expert Robert Graham offers this response:

There are no technical details. Yes, they talk about "BIOS", but it's redundant, unrelated to their primary claim. Any virus/malware can destroy the BIOS, making a computer unbootable, "bricking" it. There's no special detail here. All they are doing is repeating what Wikipedia says about BIOS, acting as techie talk layered onto the discussion to make it believable, much like how Star Trek episodes talk about warp cores and Jeffries Tubes.

Stripped of techie talk, this passage simply says "The NSA foiled a major plot, trust us." But of course, there is no reason we should trust them. It's like how the number of terrorist plots foiled by telephone eavesdropping started at 50 then was reduced to 12 then to 2 and then to 0, as the NSA was forced to justify their claims under oath instead of in front of news cameras. The NSA has proven itself an unreliable source for such information -- we can only trust them if they come out with more details -- under oath.

Moreover, they don't even say what they imply. It's all weasel-words. Nowhere in the above passage does a person from the NSA say "we foiled a major cyber terror plot". Instead, it's something you piece together by the name "BIOS plot", cataclysmic attacks on our economy (from the previous segment), and phrases like "would it have worked".

So, in the end, it's just like the existing testimony from Clapper and Alexander that is never precisely a lie, but likewise, intentionally deceptive.

Another security expert, Graham Cluley, considers the report "nonsense." He asks some damned good questions:

How exactly did they [the NSA] foil the plot? The report says that they worked with computer manufacturers to “close the vulnerability”. What did that entail?

Did every PC in America get a firmware update to their BIOS that we simply didn’t notice? Or was it, instead, that the Chinese plot was actually to introduce flaws and vulnerabilities into new BIOS chips used in future computers, and manufacturers were warned to keep their eyes open for meddling?

There's no way the NSA could have offered a warning to Asus and Gigabyte and all of those other mobo-makers without one word leaking out. Besides -- aren't those motherboards actually manufactured in China? Did the NSA warn the Chinese to beware of China?

Some people are surprised that CBS News would swallow government propaganda so readily. Feh. That sort of thing has been going on for decades.

Added note: It just hit me. Above, I ask how the NSA could maintain total secrecy while warning motherboard manufacturers (including those not based in this country) about the Chinese BIOS scheme. But an even better question is why. Why would the NSA keep a Chinese malware plot secret?

Let us suppose that there was some overwhelming need for secrecy. Okay...then why did the NSA get all blabby about the affair when CBS showed up for an interview? What has changed?

The whole thing makes no sense.

God down in the polls

Belief in God is declining in America. Apparently, the only instrument capable of chipping away at the bedrock of blind belief is the wildly swinging blood-ax of smirky hipster atheism. The ill-educated dimwit kids who think Jesus never existed are making headway against the ill-educated dimwit oldsters who think that every word of the New Testament is the Word of Gawd.

The new Harris poll does not ask about a few things I'd like to see measured, such as: How many Americans feel that the "new atheists" are just as arrogant and annoying as the old fundamentalists? How many "new atheists" agree with the demonstrably irrational claim that the majority of scholars consider Jesus mythical?

I know what you're thinking right now: Is Cannon really going to say it again? Yes. The number of New Testament scholars in academia who think that Jesus never existed is zero. If you're a mythicist, you inhabit an intellectual space even lonelier than the place where we store the global warming denialists.

When it comes to driving that point home, count me among the proselytizers. I refuse to live in a society where dolts like Archaya X and the boob who made the Zeitgeist movie are considered beacons of rationalism. Unbelief is fine; misrepresentation of the academic consensus is infuriating.

A couple of other goodies from the poll:

1. Belief in ghosts is at 42 percent. However, that figure is dragged down by old people, who are less likely than any other group to rally for revenants. That result seems counter-intuitive: You'd think that ghosts would be most popular among those likely to join their company soon.

2. Only 52% of Democrats express belief in Darwin's theory of evolution. That's a frighteningly low number. Overall belief in Darwin's theory has risen but still remains below the 50% threshold. (If this post were an MP3, at this point you'd hear the author's head banging in frustration against the wall.)

3. Fewer people believe that the soul survives death than believe that Jesus is the son of God. Can you explain that to me? How can anyone say: "The incarnation and the resurrection -- yeah, I can go for those, but this whole afterlife thing is just silly?" Aren't there a whole lot of non-Christian religious people who believe in an afterlife?

4. Only 58% believe in the Devil. Clearly, we need more articles about Lloyd Blankfein.

5. Thirty-six percent believe in UFOs and 26 percent believe in witches. These numbers are ridiculous. Obviously, both things exist.

There are, in fact, people who call themselves "witches"; I've met them, and you probably have as well. The pollsters did not ask: "Do you believe that self-identified witches have magical powers?" That's a different question altogether. (I vote no, but I won't get upset if you vote otherwise.)

Similarly, no sane person denies that people have seen things in the sky that they could not identify. The pollsters did not ask: "Do you believe that we are being visited by beings from other planets?" That's a different question altogether. (I vote no, but I won't get upset if you vote otherwise.)

Bottom line: Belief in God may be slowly declining, but Americans remain a thoughtless and irrational lot.

Peter Schiff is an asshole

God, I hate libertarians. They are such fucking liars.

Example: Libertarian economist Peter Schiff is leading the propaganda charge against the movement to raise wages for Walmart workers. Here's his shtick:

Protests at Walmart are filling the airwaves as workers demand to be paid $15 per hour. While everyone seems to say they support workers being paid more, I wanted to find out if Walmart shoppers were willing to help out.

Posing as a representative of "15 for 15" -- a make-believe organization advocating Walmart raise prices by 15 percent to enable workers receive at least $15 per hour wages, I first asked shoppers if they supported Walmart workers earning more. Almost all agreed.

Once a shopper signaled his or her support, I asked if they would be willing to donate 15 percent of whatever they spent -- to help support the cause.

How many agreed to do their part to help Walmart workers earn more?

The answer is in his video.

But Schiff's whole premise is a lie. If Walmart workers were given a living wage, prices wouldn't go up 15 percent. Prices would go up ONE percent.

And even that rise would be mitigated if Walmart curbed executive compensation. During this country's most prosperous period -- the three decades following WWII -- the executive class earned a lot less and workers took home a much larger share of the economic pie.

Nobody is asking for complete income equality. But history proves that a stable, lasting prosperity is much more easily secured when inequality isn't so outrageous, because capitalism hums along nicely only when the vast majority of workers have money and leisure time. The "Gilded Age" was actually a rotten time for most Americans: Six-day work weeks, ten-hour work days, company towns, dictatorial bosses and ridiculously unsafe working conditions. Even the Wall Streeters had to deal with terrifying cycles of boom and bust.

Those are the conditions that assholes like Schiff want to bring back.

Terror in Boston: The role of conspiracy theory

The Boston Globe published this mega-piece a couple of days ago, but I could not pay attention to it until today. (A busy boy, I've been.) For those of you following the trail of the Tsarnaevs, this article will probably be the standard reference point for a while to come.

Most will be surprised to learn the alleged lead perpetrator, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, heard voices and believed himself to be a victim of mind control. Naturally, there are plenty of people -- genuine tin foilers, the kind who actually wear the hat -- who will take this claim at face value.

I have a different question: Why we haven't heard any of this before?

Lots of people have dug into the history of the Tsarnaev family. How the hell could such a startling piece of information remain under wraps for so long (except for a brief mention in a Rolling Stone article)?

According to the Globe, the "mind control" claim has two main sources. The first one seems to be a woman named Anna Nikaeva, a Tsarnaev family friend who manages a senior care facility. One day, Tamerlan's mother Zubeidat confided in Anna about the son's condition:

“He had told his mother that he felt there were two people living inside of him,” said Nikaeva. “I told her, ‘You should get that checked out.’ But she just said, ‘No, he’s fine.’ She couldn’t accept the tiniest criticism of him..."

After the bombing, Anna told her husband -- a urologist -- about this conversation. The husband, suspecting schizophrenia, mentioned the issue to Dr. Alexander Niss, a psychiatrist who had been helping Tamerlan's father deal with PTSD resulting from the Chechen war. (Anna Nikaeva was also the source for the Rolling Stone piece mentioned above.)

The problems here should be obvious. Of all the people mentioned above, the only person qualified to make a diagnosis of schizophrenia is Dr. Niss, and he did not examine Tamerlan. The "voices" story comes from Tamerlan's mother -- second-hand. And the phrasing used is troublesome: When Tamerlan spoke of "two people living inside," his intent may have been merely poetic.

The Globe's second source is more substantive: Tamerlan Tsarnaev's friend Don Larking. An odd fellow, Larking is: Substantially older than Tamerlan and somewhat disabled, he attended the same mosque as the Tsarnaevs. (I can't resist noting that most people would consider "Don Larking" kind of an odd name for a greybearded guy in a fez who spends a lot of time sitting in a mosque.)

He and Tamerlan would get together and discuss -- egads! -- conspiracy theory:

Larking and Tamerlan, who met when Tamerlan visited his mother at work, took an immediate liking to one another and shared their views on conspiracy theory and American politics. Larking loaned his young friend copies of a newspaper he reads, “The Sovereign, newspaper of the Resistance!’ ”, which suggests that US military explosives were used in the World Trade Center attack.

As their relationship grew closer, Tamerlan confided in Larking his troubling secret about the voice inside his head. Tamerlan told him that he had been hearing the voice for some time, and that he had a theory of what might be afflicting him.

“He believed in majestic mind control, which is a way of breaking down a person and creating an alternative personality with which they must coexist,” explained Larking. “You can give a signal, a phrase or a gesture, and bring out the alternate personality and make them do things. Tamerlan thought someone might have done that to him.”

The person inside him, as Tamerlan described it to Larking, “was someone who wanted to control him to make him do something.”

This is troubling. I would like to learn just which books or essays made their way onto Tamerlan's reading list.

The phrase "majestic mind control" is unusual. It's not a term one finds in the conspiracy literature or in books about brainwashing. If you google those words (using quotation marks to get exact matches) the hits all lead back to web pages discussing this very Globe story.

So where does the term "majestic mind control" come from?

If memory serves, the word "Majestic" played a key role in the paranoid barkings of the late Milton William "Bill" Cooper, who preceded Alex Jones as the Conspiracy King of the United States. Conceivably, Tsarnaev may have told Larking about something Cooper wrote.

However, I think it more likely that Larking has offered a garbled recollection of the phrase "Monarch mind control," which has received much discussion on kook websites (such as David Icke's). Although many people believe that Monarch is a real project, it's actually a fantasy concocted by a notorious pair of con artists named Mark Phillips and Cathy O'Brien. There is absolutely no documentation on Monarch that does not ultimately trace back to that very shady couple. Phillips charges substantial amounts of money to "cure" troubled individuals who believe themselves to be victims of mind control. In a conversation with writer Walter Bowart, Phillips admitted that he concocted the phrase "Monarch."

Before you decide to write an angry comment: Yes, I know all about the CIA's notorious Project MK-Ultra. Puh-leeze don't think you can take me to school on that topic! If you scour the internet, you can find a few good, older books about that project, along with a surprising number of original CIA documents. I promise you: You won't find any reference to programs or techniques called "Monarch" or "Majestic"; those are latter-day fantasies, invented by the embellishers. Alas, research into what the CIA actually did (or tried to do) has been so thoroughly overrun by cranks, crazies and con artists as to make further study impossible.

In fact, those "cranks, crazies and con artists" are the real topic of this post.

I've long felt that some conspiratorial texts have what may be called a "psychotoxic" effect on readers. Such works can push marginally unstable individuals into total madness.

(Drug abuse -- even marijuana abuse -- can exacerbate this process. The Tsarnaev brothers apparently liked their pot.)

In a post written in April of this year, I listed a number of outrages in which conspiracy theories seem to have driven certain individuals over the edge. At that time, various journalists had reported that Tamerlan was a big fan of the Alex Jones website. Moreover, we were told that Tamerlan had developed an interest in that depressingly ubiquitous anti-Semitic hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Interestingly, the new Globe article mentions nothing about anti-Semitism. Neither do the Globe writers see fit to mention the strange teacher named "Misha" who supposedly exercised a controlling influence on Tamerlan. Am I the only one who remembers Misha? For some reason, he seems to have disappeared from the more recent stories about the Boston bombers.

To be frank, the shifting "Theories of Tamerlan" are rather bewildering. It's almost as if our media infrastructure is telling us: "Okay, you didn't like that picture of the guy? Then let's try it this way..."

Let's return to our main subject: The strange interaction of what we may call "paranoia chic" and acts of public violence.

These days, nearly every act of mass murder gives rise to conspiracy theories. But the theories themselves may be part of the problem. If the reader will forgive a bit of self-quotation, here's a huge chunk of what I wrote back in April...

You surely recall Jared Lee Loughner, the bizarre individual who shot Congresswoman Giffords. Although Loughner was clearly deranged, I have elsewhere suggested that his consumption of "psychotoxic" materials -- such as the film Zeitgeist -- may have aided the derangement process. Zeitgeist (described in this earlier post) is an inane conspiracy documentary which clumsily ties together three separate topics: The alleged non-historicity of Jesus, the controlled demolition theory of 9/11, and financial schemes of the "international bankers."

Some evidence indicates that Seung-Hui Cho, the Virignia Tech shooter, imbibed regularly from the fountains of political paranoia. Was he attracted to that kind of material because he had already gone mad, or did exposure to that stuff help drive him mad?

Nancy Lanza, the mother (and first victim) of Sandy Hook mass murderer Adam Lanza, was a "doomsday prepper," which we may fairly label a conspiracist subculture. (Have you ever met or heard of a prepper who did not believe in conspiracies?)

The mother of Newtown school massacre gunman Adam Lanza was a survivalist who was stockpiling food because she thought the world economy was on the verge of collapse.

Nancy Lanza began hoarding food and water because she feared that the onging financial crisis was going to bring about the end of civilized society.

And, of course, we have the examples of Tim McVeigh and Anders Brevik, two paranoia addicts doing battle with hallucinations of the Illuminati.

Conspiracy theory has become inextricably intertwined with American fundamentalist religion. To prove the point, one need only cite Pat Robertson's infamous The New World Order, which approvingly quotes noted "old school" anti-Semitic writers such as Nesta Webster and Eustace Mullens. When the internet first became popular in the mid-1990s, most "Christian" websites were only one or two links away from The Protocols. Many American clergy preach the politics of fear as routinely as they preach Jesus. This is also true in black churches -- Americans learned all about that when they met Reverend Wright -- and in some conservative Jewish organizations. And needless to say, conspiracism is very popular within certain Muslim sects.

These days, the Republican party's whole act is built around conspiracism. Just turn on Fox News and watch for an hour or so. You're sure to encounter at least one conspiracy theory -- in fact, you'll probably hear about dozens.

Incidentally, it's worth noting that the JFK assassination is one conspiracy theory that the Fox Newsers continually pooh-pooh. In our topsy-turvy culture, those few conspiracy theories backed by decent evidence are the ones least likely to be pushed by the media empire I call Conspiracy Inc.

Conspiracism has become an industry. When the product serves the interests of the powerful, that industry receives funding and thrives. Glenn Beck and Alex Jones do nothing to challenge -- and everything to uphold -- the established order. Being libertarians, they push the message that elected government officials are always evil, and that unelected corporate power must never be tethered. Working class people who look to Jones or Beck for answers will always be told to love their oppressors and to hate anyone who tries to make the average person's life better. The consumers who buy the wares produced by Conspiracy Inc. consider themselves the hippest of the hip, even though they are the most easily manipulated people in the world.

Conspiracy Inc. is itself a conspiracy. That's my theory.

The danger to our nation does not come from any individual conspiracy theory. Some theories have a basis in fact -- and even those which do not are not dangerous in and of themselves. Each argument must be judged individually, on the evidence.

What I have learned to fear is the conspiratorialist mindset. Like Big Tobacco, Conspiracy Inc. must continually create new addicts. If you've ever met anyone ensnared by this addiction, you already know the identifying characteristics:

* The quasi-sexual thrill derived from interpreting all phenomena in the most paranoid possible fashion.

* The instant presupposition of malice and bad faith on the part of anyone offering a counter-argument.

* An alienation from normal society, coupled with an inability to discuss mundane topics or to read non-paranoid books.

* A phobic reaction to the very concept of self-criticism.

* A manic loquaciousness, coupled with a desperate desire to prevent anyone else from completing a thought.

* Either/or thinking, coupled with a distaste for nuance.

* A chronic inability to comprehend the meaning of the word evidence.

* Above all, those addicted to the products of Conspiracy Inc. are characterized by arrogance. They have the unbridled self-confidence of the clueless.

Do these people pose a menace? Yes. Potentially.