Dan Brown's lawyer: No RAW defense in plagiarism trial

Dan Brown, author of the mega-bestselling The Da Vinci Code, was sued for plagiarism by two of  the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the conspiracy theory book which claims that the Merovingian dynasty in France was descended from Jesus Christ. The judge ruled that as Holy Blood claimed to be history, Brown had the right to base a historical novel on it, just as any  novelist might use history as part of his material.

I have wondered for awhile now whether Brown's lawyers cited The Widow's Son by Robert Anton Wilson as part of their defense. After all, The Widow's Son also bases much of its plot on Holy Blood, Holy Grail and Wilson cited the book in the novel's footnotes. 

If the authors of Holy Blood believed that basing a novel's plot on their book was "plagiarism," then why didn't they object to The Widow's Son? Could it be, perhaps, that their objection to The Da Vinci Code was not based on principle, but on a desire to seize some of Brown's profits?

Via the Internet I tracked down John Baldwin, a British lawyer who is an expert on intellectual property and who represented Brown in the plagiarism lawsuit. I explained my interest in the case and asked Baldwin if The Widow's Son had come up during the trial.

Baldwin kindly took the time to email a reply to me. "As far as I can recall, Mr Wilson’s book was not brought up during the Da Vinci Code trial," he wrote.

Two images

Via the Rev. Dr. Narot on Twitter, a photo of a "secret UFO Illuminati painting," taken at a Starbucks at 11331 Camarillo St. in North Hollywood, Calif. (Hat tip, @narot23)

Jesse Walker, also via Twitter, has a daily feature called "Your morning image," and here is an image he shared on Dec. 29 on the structure of freemasonry. Click for larger image. (He's @notjessewalker).

'I post probabilities, not certainties'

Belatedly, I have discovered the blog Dedroidify, heavily influenced by RAW and devoted to exploring consciousness and conspiracy research. Lots of postings, and lots of links to other blogs I had not heard of before. There's also a video cache. I am sure I'll be exploring this blog as time permits. The guy who does it says he lives in Belgium. His list of blogs that he follows omits mine. Perhaps I am too prosaic, but I am surprised he does not follow The Oz Mix.

RAW on death

I've been reading a series of posts at The Oz Mix, based on Oz Fritz's belief that "Some part of us can survive death. We call that part a bardo voyager." Elsewhere, he refers to "the radical idea that some part of us can be educated to survive the death of the body." Oz is a sound engineer, and he had to pause the posts so he could go to Milan, Italy, to work with a band that includes Bernie Worrell and Bill Laswell, but he has promised to resume the series at some point.

There is a section in the "Sirius Rising" chapter of Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati, which Oz Fritz probably understands better than I do,  in which Wilson describes taking a "programmed trip," with interesting results:

"The Yogi entered Samadhi and believed, at last, that the wisdom of the adept is truly beyond the floating body-rapture of mere Hatha Yoga. Based on understand of and participation in a planet-wide Consciousness, Samadhi opens the neuro-atomic memory which is in all living beings, and in that dancing quantum energy mistaken called 'dead matter'."

A few graphs later:

"The Shaman lost all fear of death, knowing it to be literally impossible. He understood the wit of Yeats' fine line, 'Man has created death'."

New 'Historical Illuminatus' art

Artist Bobby Campbell has posted his new cover art for upcoming New Falcon editions of Robert Anton Wilson's three "Historical Illuminatus" books, The Earth Will Shake, The Widow's Son and Nature's God.


He says they are "coming soon from New Falcon and Amazon.com."

I asked if that meant there will be Kindle editions. He answered, "I'm not sure. I've made the case for why they should and even hooked em up w/ a service that'll convert everything. Here's hoping!"

Steven Pinker on ideology

I've been reading RAW's Natural Law recently, and that has focused me on the uses (and abuses) of ideology. In relation to that, here's a quotation from Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined:

Individual people have no shortage of selfish motives for violence. But the really big body counts in history pile up when a large number of people carry out a motive that transcends any one of them: an ideology. Like predatory or instrumental violence, ideological violence is a means to an end. But with an ideology, the end is idealistic: a conception of the greater good.


Yet for all that idealism, it’s ideology that drove many of the worst things that people have ever done to each other. They include the Crusades, the European Wars of Religion, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Russian and Chinese civil wars, the Vietnam War, the Holocaust, and the genocides of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. An ideology can be dangerous for several reasons. The infinite good it promises prevents its true believers from cutting a deal. It allows any number of eggs to be broken to make the utopian omelet. And it renders opponents of the ideology infinitely evil and hence deserving of infinite punishment.

Via Supergee, an important part of my daily info-diet.

Be sure you watch this video

RAW archive on YouTube

A Mr. K.K. Padmanabhan has pointed me to a RAW Archive on YouTube. The Croaker seems to have found a lot of material. His alchemical archives blog is worth a look, too. He currently has 23 postings there tagged to Robert Anton Wilson.

NOTE:  In the original version of this posting I erred and credited Padmanabhan for the archive and the blog, when I should have credited The Croaker.

RAW on album cover

This is the album cover for a music artist named Mickey Moonlight; album is listed here.

Another musician, Leno Lovecraft, Tweeted, "Haha Just realised Robert Anton Wilson is on the @mickeymoonlight Album cover.. GENIUS."

The guy in the middle certainly looks like Wilson. Anybody else know any more about this?

Robert Anton Wilson in the Christian Science Monitor

The Christian Science Monitor offers a feature "Are you a true Ron Paul Supporter? Take our quiz!"

The third question is, "Now that "Atlas Shrugged" has been made into a film, what should be the next political book to be adapted to the big screen?"

The answer I chose was the last one in the multiple choice quiz, "Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's 'The Illuminatus! Trilogy,' starring Penn Jillette as Hagbard Celine."

A couple of quotations

"He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive ... he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest."

 ILLUMINATUS!, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

"While Shaye, 35, had long been known as a brave, independent-minded journalist in Yemen, his collision course with the US government appears to have been set in December 2009. [Abdulelah Halder Shaye is currently being held in prison on Barack Obama's request -- Ed.] On December 17, the Yemeni government announced that it had conducted a series of strikes against an Al Qaeda training camp in the village of al Majala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province, killing a number of Al Qaeda militants. As the story spread across the world, Shaye traveled to al Majala. What he discovered were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs, neither of which are in the Yemeni military’s arsenal. He photographed the missile parts, some of them bearing the label “Made in the USA,” and distributed the photos to international media outlets. He revealed that among the victims of the strike were women, children and the elderly. To be exact, fourteen women and twenty-one children were killed. Whether anyone actually active in Al Qaeda was killed remains hotly contested. After conducting his own investigation, Shaye determined that it was a US strike. The Pentagon would not comment on the strike and the Yemeni government repeatedly denied US involvement. But Shaye was later vindicated when Wikileaks released a US diplomatic cable that featured Yemeni officials joking about how they lied to their own parliament about the US role, while President Saleh assured Gen. David Petraeus that his government would continue to lie and say “the bombs are ours, not yours.”

"Why Is President Obama Keeping a Journalist in Prison in Yemen?" Jeremy Scahill, The Nation. (Full article here.)

El Neil still loves RAW

I'm reading the new L. Neil Smith novel, a vampire fantasy called Sweeter Than Wine, as part of my Prometheus Award judging duties.

Smith, if you don't know him, is a libertarian science fiction writer. He's a rather strict libertarian, and also a huge fan of the ILLUMINATUS! trilogy who often slips in references to it or to RAW in his books.

His new book is no exception. The book is largely set in Colorado (where Smith lives) and on page 44 there's a reference to Fort Collins: "Nice place. I had business there from time to time. Younger natives call it 'Fort Funky.' Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea readers call it 'Fnord Collins'." (Smith lives in Fort Collins.)

I should mention that  he's won the Prometheus Award three times: for The Forge of the Elders (my favorite of his, among the El Neil books I've read), for Pallas (which I didn't particularly like) and for The Probability Broach (which I haven't read yet, and which for some reason lacks a Kindle edition.)

Ken Campbell and ILLUMINATUS!

Liverpool Confidential runs a loving tribute to the theater impresario Ken Campbell. The piece devotes a great deal of space to the staging of ILLUMINATUS! and features some eye-opening illustrations.