Jesse Walker talks about conspiracy theories

Jesse Walker

When Jesse Walker, author of The United States of Paranoia, talks about conspiracies, the result is likely to be interesting. And so it was when Jesse talked to DigBoston. My favorite bit was when Jesse talked about conspiracy theories that likely had something to them:

Tell me a little bit about your paranoia. Have you ever found yourself nodding in agreement with a disreputable, perhaps even absurd, conspiracy story?

Jesse Walker: Not any absurd ones, I’d hope. As far as merely disreputable theories go… Well, I think there’s a lot of unanswered questions about the Malcolm X assassination. Of course that’s one that everyone acknowledges was a conspiracy, since we know there were multiple gunmen. But we don’t know how far it went. I’m in no sense an authority on the topic, so take anything I say here with a grain of salt, but I think Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X [Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention] raises a bunch of significant questions about his murder. Marable was a respected scholar, so I wouldn’t call him disreputable; but his willingness to raise questions about the police’s behavior might stray into disreputable territory.

There are also plausible arguments—not proven, but plausible—that Timothy McVeigh had more than just one accomplice in the Oklahoma City bombing. He was plugged into that whole radical-right network around Elohim City, Oklahoma, and I can’t just dismiss some of the claims people have made about a wider plot there.

Sometimes I accept a non-conspiratorial version of a conspiracy story. It’s obvious, for example, that the people who meet at Bilderberg wield a lot of power, in the same sense that the people who meet at Davos wield a lot of power. But there’s a difference between recognizing that these are powerful people and embracing this strange notion that Bilderberg is the annual Lollapalooza where the big decisions get made. It’s an elite institution; it’s not some sort of secret parliament.

Artwork and memes from New Trajectories

The New Trajectories Tumblr (e.g. Bobby Campbell) has been putting up lots of good RAW artworks and memes. The above is one of my favorites, but go look at the other ones, too.

Wall Street Journal: Rand Paul opposes getting intel on terrorists!

Rand Paul 

Thursday's Wall Street Journal had a perfect example of the kind of cynicism and dishonesty that pervades so much political rhetoric in this country.

The newspaper ran an opinion piece by Daniel Henninger: "Rand Paul Liberates the iPhone." As you can guess from the title, it's another WSJ piece about how unreasonable civil libertarians are for complaining that the NSA should not be allowed to spy on everyone. The whole piece is filled with nonsense, but I want to call attention to a sentence in the first paragraph:

Barack Obama’s miracle race to the White House notwithstanding, it’s always been a long shot that Rand Paul could jump from a single Senate term into the Oval Office. It’s now clear that he knows it, too. After experimenting with various policy thrusts, Kentucky’s freshman senator has fastened his candidacy to restricting the U.S.’s collection of telephone data about terrorist groups, such as Islamic State, which are transforming the Middle East into an apocalyptic, region-wide war. His awkward geopolitical timing makes this a long shot.

Notice how the smear and the lie, which I've boldfaced for your convenience, is casually inserted in what purports to be a factual piece in one of America's major newspapers. Without any citations, Henninger simply states that Paul opposes wiretapping Islamic terrorists. Gosh, Paul must be a crazy libertarian radical!

Of course, Paul has never said he opposes collecting evidence against terrorism, and he never would say such a thing.

Try to imagine, for a moment, that the Congress not only banned mass collection of telephone metadata by the NSA, but also required a warrant for intelligence collection in the U.S. (This is a more radical proposal than anything the Congress is likely to pass, but it would bring domestic U.S. intel into compliance with the Fourth Amendment).

Imagine an FBI agent who has evidence of Islamic terrorist activity asking a U.S. district judge for immediate authorization for a wiretap. Is there a district judge anywhere in the U.S. who wouldn't immediately agree? And are we supposed to believe Rand Paul would object to the FBI  obtaining the warrant?

Possibly related: Piece on Medium on "The Age of Disinformation."  Paragraph from the piece (by meteorologist James Spann) talking about the debate on climate change:

I do encourage you to listen to the opposing point of view in the climate debate, but be sure the person you hear admits they can be wrong, and has no financial interest in the issue. Unfortunately, those kind of qualified people are very hard to find these days. It is also hard to find people that discss climate without using the words “neocon” and “libtard”. I honestly can’t stand politics; it is tearing this nation apart.

Will Neal Stephenson talk to me? Probably not ...

Every few years, my favorite living author, Neal Stephenson, puts out another long novel, and I make it a priority to read it. I bought Seveneves well in advance, and I'm about 100 pages into it so far, which is to say I haven't made it very far.

As I've mentioned earlier, there is an interesting parallel between Stephenson and Robert Anton Wilson. Both published novels set in the present which helped make their names (Cryptonomicon and Illuminatus!, respectively) and then published a series of historical novels, featuring ancestors of the characters in the previous novel (e.g., Stephenson the Baroque Cycle, Wilson the Historical Illuminatus! books such as The Earth Will Shake, the Widow's Son, etc.) Probably just coincidence they both did things this way, but who knows?

I do a books blog for my day job, and I interview authors. I've put in an interview request with Stephenson's  publicist. The answer will likely be "No" (actually, it will be interesting to see if I get a response at all), but if I get the interview, I'll ask Stephenson if he got the idea for the historical novels from RAW.

Neal Stephenson. 

What is the best time to be alive?

Richard Blake

Historical novelist Richard Blake — engaged with the present, very aware of the past — would seem to be a good person to answer the question, "When was the best time to be alive?" And so Blake answers the question, and sombunall RAW fans may well find that it tracks with with RAW's techno-optimism.  In the ancient world, he explains, life wasn't so great even for the 1 percent:

Look now at the cities. Perhaps one in twenty of those living there were in easy circumstances. The rest were effectively beggars. Their life expectancy was lower than in the country. Or look at the higher classes. They had baths and slaves and pretty clothes. But they had no tea or coffee or proper dentistry, nor any effective pain relief. They had no spectacles. When the black rats turned up with their fleas carrying the Pasteurella pestis bacillus, the rich died just as horribly as the poor.

Related: Blake has a new novel out. I've already bought a copy. 

My interview with Blake (aka Sean Gabb) is here. 

It's one of my better interviews and you really should read it. Here's a bit where he talks about the right language for historical novels:

 This brings me to language, which is a problem in all historical fiction. Let me begin by showing how it shouldn’t be done. Take this:

 The King rose up upon his couch. “Thou shalt, before this night is out,” he quoth, “mount upon thy trusty charger and bring me the head of the false Bobindrell.”

 Whether people may once have spoken like this in England is beside the point. What matters is that it sounds ridiculous now, and it distances a reader from the characters in a novel. Whether your novel is set in England c1550, or some other time and place, here is how I suggest it should be done:

Still smiling, the King leaned closer. “I want the fucker dead,” he breathed. “I don’t care how you do it. Just make sure none of the blame ever drifts my way.” He took another swig from his cup and went back to watching the jugglers.

Eric Wagner on Waywords and Meansigns

(Today's blog post is a guest post from Eric Wagner — The Mgt.)

“ The Greeks went from oral to written even as we are moving from written to oral. They ‘ended’ in a desert of classified data even as we could ‘end’ in a new tribal encyclopedia of auditory incantation.”

– Marshall McLuhan, Essential McLuhan, pg. 92

One might see the Waywords and Meansigns musical setting of the entirety of Finnegans Wake as “a new tribal encyclopedia of auditory incantation.” Perhaps cargo cults will emerge around these recordings, with young people focusing all their attention on the sound in an attempt to learn to fly. Joyce encouraged readers to simply listen to the text, and these recordings free the text from the written page and the temptation to read the text in a conventional manner. Many people express disappointment and frustration when trying to find “plot” and “character” in Finnegans Wake, and I hope these recordings will put them more at ease. I suspect that John Cage, a Finnegans Wake enthusiast, would have delighted in these recordings. I would recommend reading Phil Dick while listening to these toetapping recordings, but … beware of the results. (Mind your p’s and q’s!)

— Eric Wagner

(Eric Wagner is the author of An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson)

Week 66, Illuminatus online reading group

A rendering of Leviathan. Source. 

This week: Raise you five," said Waterhouse, throwing down another five-ton note," page 715, to page 729, "Don't you remember any of the last ten minutes?" said Hagbard.)

I feel a bit stuck in this week's episode; much is explained, but I don't really see how to talk about it without putting a bunch of spoilers in a blog post.

But I do think this section has a passage has a pretty clear exposition of one of the book's main themes, a political and spiritual libertarianism of "do not lay your own trip on others." It comes during Ms. Portinari's Tarot reading, when she is talking about the Buddhist concept of the Wheel:

The most important lesson of all, the one that explains all the horrors and miseries of the world, is that you can get off the Wheel at any point and declare the trip is over. That's okay for any given man or woman, if their ambitions are modest. The trouble starts when, out of fear of further movement — out of fear of growth, out of fear of change, out of fear of Death, out of any kind of fear— such a person tries to stop the Wheel literally, by stopping everybody else. That's when the two great bum trips begin: Religion and Government. The only religion consistent with the whole Wheel is private and personal; the only government consistent with it is self- government. Whoever tries to lay his trip on others is acting from terror, and will soon resort to terror as a weapon if the others won't accept the trip through persuasion. Nobody who understands the whole Wheel will do that, however, for such people understand that every man and every woman and every child is the Self-Begotten One—Jesus motherfucking Christ, in Harry's gorgeous brand of English." 

Also, reading this 14-page chunk of the book with its explanations tying together many of the plot strands reminds me that many of my favorite works of fiction are big works: Works that create their own world. I'm thinking of Illuminatus!, of course, but I'm also thinking of works such as Ulysses (which covers the events of one day, but which contains so much, people are still trying to figure it out); The Lord of the Rings (which according to Tom Shippey, Tolkien thought of in a way as a true history of a world), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susannah Clarke, Neal Stephenson's long novels, and the way that modern science fiction is dominated, as Eric Flint writes, by series, entire groups of novels. Readers want to immerse themselves into another universe.

And don't you love Joe's realization of the universe all of the characters are in, and the description of the authors as the Secret Chiefs? (Page 722.)

(Next week: End of Leviathan and beginning of the appendices! "George was thinking. He remembered something," page 729, to page 742, "call Gold and Appel Transfers and leave a message," page 742.)

Sunday links

Orson Welles in 1937 

Eris of the Month, from Manic the Doodler.

Richard Blake has a new one out. 

Unfinished Orson Welles memoir found at the University of Michigan. 

198 things we've learned about the NSA (another update from Ted Gioia).

Support the Emperor's Bridge Campaign (as in Emperor Norton).

Renewable energy costs are continuing to drop and are becoming competitive with fossil fuels. So says Ramez Naam, who guest blogged this week at Marginal Revolution. 

Is a cashless society coming soon?

Richard Stallman

Dan Clemons, a RAW fan in northern Ohio near where I work, calls my attention to a piece in the Telegraph which says that a society that bans cash may not be long in coming. The article, by Jim Leaviss, says it would be easier for the government to take our money away if need be and manipulate the economy under such a system.

It's a really native piece that doesn't so much explore questions such as "manipulate the economy on whose behalf?" as simply ignore them. Then there is this sentence:

Finally, the “black economy” will be hugely diminished, and tax evasion made all but impossible.

What do you want to bet that it won't be "all but impossible" for people who have large amounts of money?

Needless to say, the proposal would also end privacy and allow authorities to track all of our transactions. I notice that Richard Stallman on his website says that he always pays cash when he goes to the store, and urges everyone else to do the same thing. (His official site is quite interesting and worth a look.)

Only 38 more times for me to go!

Eric Wagner

An email in March from Eric Wagner, which I forgot to post until now:

"On pg. 151 of my book during the interview I mention that Pound recommended reading forty books by Henry James to help one’s prose style. Bob replied, “Uh-huh. I’d say, Read Ulysses forty times.”

Eric's book that he mentions is An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson, which I'll probably re-read when I finish the Illuminatus! online reading group entries. The book includes an Illuminatus! timeline, useful in sorting out the complicated plot.  Looks like I need to read Ulysses again, too.

Eric's book is put out by New Falcon, which has a big sale on RAW's books going on.  Eric's book is also on sale; the Kindle is only $5.

A Discordian zine from Britain

From Adam Gorightly's Historia Discordia comes word of a new fanzine, Discordia Britannica. The first issue includes Lewis Shiner's interview of RAW (which I've also published) and a piece by Adam. Adam includes information on how to contact the publishers to obtain a copy.

One more bit from Eric Flint

Eric Flint

This kind of puts "someone said something mean about me on Twitter" in perspective:

 I fought for a just distribution of wealth and—more importantly—a reorganization of the way wealth is produced in the first place. I fought for civil rights and women’s rights, and the first rally I ever attended supporting the nascent movement for gay and lesbian rights was held in a black church in Detroit, Michigan back in 1977. And, throughout, I fought against the imperialist tendencies of the American political establishment in foreign affairs.

Listening to you anti-SJW types whine about your persecution just makes me laugh.

Persecution?

Boy, are you a bunch of pikers. I have had three murder attempts made on me because of my political beliefs and activities. I can’t remember any longer how many times I’ve been threatened with murder. I have been badly beaten by a mob of right-wing thugs in broad daylight on a public street and the man I was with was crippled for life. (That happened just outside of Birmingham, Alabama in June of 1979. Did the police ever investigate? Be serious. Of course not.)

 I have been physically assaulted because of my political beliefs on perhaps a dozen occasions. Being fair about it, while most of those assaults were carried out by right-wingers, some of them—perhaps a third—were carried out by Maoists. I have no idea how many times I’ve been threatened with physical assault. I lost track decades ago.

I have been arrested by the police on several occasions. No charges were ever filed, mind you, since they were so bogus no prosecutor would have taken them up. But this is a typical form of police harassment. They can legally hold you in jail for 24 hours without pressing charges, and if you don’t want to miss a day’s work you have to post bail—and if you don’t just happen to have several thousand dollars handy you have to pay a bail bondsman a percentage which you’ll never get back.

Since I was in my early twenties I’ve known that most careers were closed to me because of my political beliefs and activity. Those include any career in the military, any career in government above the level of a postal clerk, any managerial career in any major corporation—the list goes on and on.

More here. 

Eric Flint on changes in science fiction

Eric Flint at Marcon

I didn't even know who science fiction writer Eric Flint was until a few weeks ago, but he turned out to be one of the most interesting writers at Marcon. An academic historian by training, he was a left wing labor union activist and factory worker until he turned to full time writing.

Commenting on the running kerfuffle over the Hugo nominations, Sad Pupplies, etc., Flint made a several points when he spoke at Marcon: (1) The emphasis on short fiction in the Hugo Awards is hopelessly outdated, as it dates from the time when magazines dominated the field; today, most of the action is in novels, particularly novels that are part of a series; (2) the relatively small number of people who hand out awards have little connection to what is actually popular these days in the science fiction field and (3) science fiction has grown so vast that it's inevitable that many really fine writers will be overlooked for awards.

For more on this, I strongly suggest reading the essays posted recently on his website, in chronological order: "Some Comments on Hugos and Other SF Awards," "More on the Hugos from a Dark, Dark Place," "And Again on the Hugo Awards," and "What the Hell, Let's Do it Again — Still More on the Hugo Awards." The essays do become a little less interesting as he goes along — the main points are in the first essay. 

Incidentally, as I'd never read Flint, I asked him what someone who wants to sample his work should start with. He suggested 1632, which is available free as a Kindle ebook. (In fact, it was Flint who originally created the Baen Free Library.)