-from David Icke and the Politics of Madness:
Where the New Age Meets the Third Reich
Will Offley, 29 February 2000

As you may have guessed from my enthusiasm in the last post, I did catch David Icke on Coast to Coast AM tonight -- or more accurately, this morning, as Icke didn't come on until midnight. But before I go into my reactions to hearing him speak for the first time, I feel duty-bound to publish a long overdue disclaimer. Though I have done a very good job (if I say so myself) of cloaking my true identity, the fact is that I am an Illuminati/Chitauri lectroid reptile from Planet X by way of the 8th Dimension. There. I feel better already, now that I'm out.

Despite my ungracious words in previous posts here, Icke did not come across as an escapee from the laughing academy. In fact, he seemed a rather more intelligent fellow than your average run-of-the-mill nutcase. As long as you discount his views on reptilian overlords, logging in to some metaphorical-cum-metaphysical mental "internet" (yes, he said this), and "absolutely blissful" Banisteriopsis Caapi vision "downloads" in Brazil (he said that too, that way), he appears to be a reasonably sharp cookie.

I did get the impression, however, that he would have, let us say, peculiarly skewed notions about Jews. And I was right, as this page on his own site amply testifies. Don't ask me how I knew this -- it just seems to go with a certain species of conspiracy theorizing. There's a long tradition. One favored trick of this tradition is to suggest that, while The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is clearly a forgery, the forgery was a super-underhanded meta-trick perpetrated by those damned Jews to to throw us off the scent of... well, those damned Jews. Uh-huh. And the beat goes on.

Dr. Emilio Lizardo would be proud. Hmmm... the more I think about it, it seems as if many of Icke's stranger ideas could well have been lifted from ol' Buckaroo. I'm not talking about outright plagiarism, mind you, but rather, of unconscious influence. Let's face it, many of us who watched the movie in various altered states in the 1980s were operating under a similar... influence. Many of us lost licenses, wives, all sorts of things. In this respect (if not in others), David Icke may be no exception.

Protocols of the Elders Of Zion: a fraudulent document that reported the alleged proceedings of a conference of Jews in the late 19th century, at which they discussed plans to overthrow Christianity through subversion and sabotage and to control the world. The Protocols first appeared in their entirety in Russia in 1905. They were widely disseminated in the 1920s and became a classic defense for anti-Semitism. First published in the United States in 1920, the Protocols were championed by Henry Ford in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, and cited throughout the 1930s by some anti-Roosevelt and fascist groups. As early as 1921, the English journalist Philip Graves exposed the similarity between the Protocols and a political satire by Maurice Joly, Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (1864). Subsequent investigation showed the original document to be a forgery written by members of the Russian secret police.

Bibliography: See H. Bernstein, The Truth about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1935, repr. 1972 [out of print]); N. Cohn, Warrant for Genocide (1967, repr. 1970).

from: Protocols of the Elders of Zion
source: The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2005.
via: HighBeam™ Research

But what David Icke had to say last night about Jung's theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious totally blew my mind. Imagine much belly laughter. Follow along closely here, as this bit is highly counterintuitive and needs more than a casual scan. OK, so Jung proposed a number of archetypes -- the shadow, the divine child, the (male) anima, the (female) animus, and so on. So far so good. But Icke surmises that because the number of these is limited, and because the hyper-super-real (and mondo-mojo-surreal) reality he was describing is unlimited -- his constantly repeated phrase was "infinite possibilities" -- the existence of Jungian archetypes (which is more than I'm willing to swallow, personally; never mind the reptiles) proves that our "bio-computers" have been programmed by evil Illuminati bigwigs so far up the kosmik food-chain we can't even perceive them. That is, we can't. It appears he can.

This is such a stunning display of inside-out imagination, I had to give the guy points for sheer intellectual bravado. I mean, shapeshifting saurians are so passé, and c'mon, "bio-computers"? I'm sorry, that just doesn't count as an insight. Has Icke never heard of John Lilly? What self-respecting freak didn't read all about that silly drug-addled crap decades ago? But the Jung thing is genius. Credit where due. Sure, he's got some (not-so) funny ideas about Jews, and yeah, he's warped as a 2x4 left out in the rain too long, but would that some of these tarted-up, faux-compos-mentis spiritual types were even half as amusing.

I suppose I must bid a half-fond adieu -- or, as the British say, a half-fondue -- to our charming Mr. Icke. It's been fun, but enough is enough. Well, almost...

Beyond our worries about what we consume and the unbalancing of 'nature', the report, GM Nation, signals something far more worrying for Blair himself.

How come this man who, it was once said, sought only ever to be popular, now regularly aligns himself with deeply unpopular causes? Iraq, top-up fees and now GM foods are but three.

He has been given a vision of what the future holds and the rest of us must simply cheer his resolve.

He has come over all David Icke. While Icke now believes the world is controlled by giant alien lizards, Blair knows it is controlled by Republican reptiles and will make human sacrifices to stay in with them.

He is so far gone that there is little room for rational argument. His defence of the war now boils down to little more than he believed it was right, so even if it wasn't, he did what he believed and is therefore invincible.

from: Dr. Tony, a genetically modified David Icke by Suzanne Moore
source: The Mail on Sunday (London), 28 September 2003
via: HighBeam™ Research

rompiendo
la monotonia
del tiempo

On most days, the Santa Clara Convention Center, adjacent to the Santa Clara Westin Hotel and the Technology Mart, is abuzz with the schmoozing of high-tech millionaires, former millionaires, and wannabe-millionaires. But for two days of the Memorial Day weekend, it served as the world headquarters to a little-known resistance movement: the forces (such as they were) that had assembled to oppose the machinations of the Illuminati, the New World Order, MK Ultra, and numerous other shadowy organizations, some of which may even exist. Paranoia was the mantra, and the late-night radio talk show maven Art Bell the high priest. The world in which these people live is a truly frightening place. Mind control assaults us, and chemtrails poison us from above. Supposedly health-giving vaccines are deliberately poisoned, the energy crisis is a sinister fraud, and even microwave ovens are dangerous. Worst of all, some shadowy, sinister group is doing everything for its own selfish gain.... The British conspiracist David Icke (pronounced "Ike"), perhaps the best known of all the speakers, swaggered out onto the stage, then proceeded to tell a lot of jokes. Eventually moving onto the serious matters, he explained how all hunger and poverty in the world is caused by the conspirators who keep people miserable to promote dependency on them.... Icke's most amazing claim is that the bloodlines of Europe's royal families, which some claim to trace back to a secret union of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, are in fact derived from extraterrestrial lizards. As proof of this, you need only look at the prevalence of gargoyles and dragons on all kinds of royal coats of arms. These people can be recognized by their ability to "shape shift" into reptilian form, then back again. lizard grafik courtesy of The Reptilian Agenda >>>

from: Conspire This! by Robert Sheaffer
source: Skeptical Inquirer, 1 November 2001
via: HighBeam™ Research
Copyright © 2001 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal

We've been away from the hyper-weird too long. Time to get down in it once again. Oh yes. The proximate cause of this post is the earth-shaking news that David Icke will be a guest tonight on Coast to Coast AM radio, of Art Bell fame, now hosted by George Noory -- locate your local affiliate <<< here. (btw, I wonder if Julie Bell -- Hard Curves: The Fantasy Art of Julie Bell; see lightning-mountain-babe grafik -- is related to Art?) I tune the show in late some nights on 630-KHOW in Denver. Their webpage explains: "A media phenomenon, Coast to Coast AM deals with UFO's, strange occurrences, life after death, and other unexplained (an often unexplicable [sic]) phenomena." I ask you: what could be more exciting than that?! And I'll tell you what: David Icke!!!

Surely you remember David. I previously wrote about him in the magic of thinking big ("one of the planet's foremost nutjobs") and in turning japanese ("Looney Tunes Whackjob Supreme, David Icke"). On the page where he's flogging his new DVD, The Illuminati, we learn that...

The entire political system of the United States and Britain is being controlled by a small group of elite occultists who have all sworn allegiance to the All Seeing Eye of Lucifer. For more than two centuries, the aristocracy of Britain and America have been involved in Satanic Secret Societies which have seeded all the major positions of power in Politics, the Media and the Military.

Not hard to believe at all. But if I recall correctly -- and as you may remember if you've been reading CBO for a while -- this "small group of elite occultists" either is, or is being controlled by, the Anunnaki lizard people. Yes, you read that right: lizard people. I'm telling you, folks, you do not want to miss this little chat with David Icke on Coast to Coast AM tonight!

There are a lot of hidden-in-plain-sight hyperlinks in this post. In looking for something to partially unpack (or possibly further obscure) the second, I found this bit from Dead Man Blues: "The woman who raised Jelly Roll, was a voodoo witch... Jelly always knew she'd sold him to Satan..." Then, today's mail brought The Insider/Outsider Problem, which I wrote about last Tuesday in this time it's personal. I opened the book at random and read: "To understand what the Kuranko mean when they say a witch is not a person, it is necessary to clarify the indigenous concept of morgoye ('personhood')." Back in Synchronicity City. Oh yes. Papa Legba, come and open the gate...

And last night before listening to the final chapters of State of Fear (see yesterday), I was reading about the trial of Deborah Lipstadt resulting from the lawsuit that holocaust denier and all-around groovy guy David Irving brought against her in a UK court -- and about Kevin MacDonald, America's foremost major-mojo antisemitism rationalizer, "evolutionary psychologist" and California State University prof, who gave "evidence" in that trial. Though it's unrelated -- except via quantum-akasha trans-PSI hysperspatial co-occurrence -- I couldn't resist tossing this bit into the mix. In Shilling for Hitler (Salon subscription or site pass required), the author drops the following juicy morsel en passant: "The strangest point of that day came when Irving inadvertently referred to the judge -- usually called 'His Lordship' -- as 'Mein Führer.'"

And so: there you have it.

"an easily digestible introduction to the world of high strangeness"  -Amazon

* "put your hand on the radio" ...

"Gradually, he warmed up, until it started to pour out of him. You have to understand how I came up, he said, how hard I had to work, how I learned to sell ads on radio, and then to sell myself. How I learned to become as large as the artist whose record I was playing. 'Burn, baby! Burn!,' he said, 'meant that when I'm playing the record and I am snapping my fingers and I'm talking my talk, I have reached the epitome, the height -- there is no more you can do!' His words came faster. 'Everything is up, up, up! And that's when' -- he momentarily softened his voice for drama -- 'you burn, baby -- burn. It is like the high-five. You know you've hit your home run. There's no more to say. You look at the ball go, like Reggie Jackson. And when I hit that record and I say, 'Darling, I love you,' or 'Put your hand on the radio and touch my heart,' bop-bop-bop BURN, Baby! Burn -- there was no more to say! That was the epitome! That was it!'"

from An author backstory: Burn, baby! Burn!

Michael Crichton has a headful of very odd notions -- thus the title slug. And how do I know this? Oh ma-a-a-an! Where to begin? I recently decided to take a break from the thorny issues and undecidable conundrums of the book I'm working on -- or at least thinking about more than trivially in the background -- and relax with a morally simplistic techno-thriller by master-of-the-form Michael Crichton. The book is his latest, State of Fear. I picked up the unabridged audio edition on 16 CDs so I wouldn't even have to move my eyes -- or lips. A little needed respite, I thought, from my sometimes too-heady explorations into the dark interior of HighBeam Research, Amazon and the tiresome political posturings of the wool-dyed web. But far from the refreshing escapist vacation I thought I'd purchased, I discovered (too late to return it) that the book was in fact an endless neocon harangue on the dangers of believing anything you've ever heard about the dangers of global warming.

As Publishers Weekly notes (paraphrasing broadly here), if Crichton's right -- and he offers all sorts of purported evidence -- then all bets are off with respect to predictions of beachfront property values in Ohio and Nevada. But environmentalists aren't rolling over quite so easily. The Audobon-bon Society ran a review of the book titled Pulp Fiction that credibly debates the credibility of State of Fear while still giving the author his due. It quotes him, for instance, as saying "Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists" -- a line I'd be more than proud to claim as my own, had I but been smart enough to dream it up.

A scientific site called realclimate.org published a piece titled Michael Crichton's State of Confusion, the focus of which speaks for itself. As to the substance of the article, if you were planning an attempt to sort out its arguments, you might want to first consider completing that Ph.D. in geophysics you've been putting off. And that's the real problem with real climate -- and many other similar debates that depend for any hope of resolution on hugely abstruse technical data, on "the meaning" of which there is, naturally (or even unnaturally), no prefab consensus.

But who knows? Maybe that's just me. The realclimate article appends plenty of pushback and corroborative commentary by the usual cast of both brilliant and knee-jerker autodidact net-heads.

Unsurprisingly, National Review pipes up in Crichton's behalf, opening its review by gleefully offering: "If you want to see what an apoplectic fit looks like in print, check out Michiko Kakutani's review/denunciation in the New York Times of State of Fear, the latest book from Michael Crichton." Also unsurprising is the title of the Times review: Beware! Tree-Huggers Plot Evil to Save World.

from: Global warning
State of Fear book review by Andrew Stuttaford
source: National Review, 28 February 2005
via: HighBeam™ Research

[after describing the savaging Crichton's book took at the hands of Ms. Kakutani...]

At this point, wiser, calmer readers will suspect that a book that attracts that sort of condemnation in the pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times (reassuringly, The New Yorker didn't like it either) must be really, really good. The wiser, calmer readers will be right. It is.

btw, the Times review appeared on December 13, less than two weeks before the most devastating tsunami in memory. Could Crichton have had an eco-terrorist or two working in the background to maximize the effectiveness of his book tour? Or is God just on his side? These tastelessly tongue-in-cheek questions are begged by the specifics of this subject matter. If you haven't read the book yet, you'll have to take my word for it. Meanwhile, let's hear what "the Left" (it is to laugh; or cry) had to say:

from: A review of Michael Crichton's new book "State of Fear"
by Melissa Block
source: All Things Considered (NPR), 7 December 2004
via: HighBeam™ Research

Throwing out the conventional wisdom about global warming, Michael Crichton gives us a 600-page page-burner. It dramatizes the plight of post-Cold War globalized society in which we're all lied to and manipulated by something one of the characters dubs the PLM, the politico-legal-media complex....

[it is from the condition resulting from this seriously right-on concept of social control that the name of the book derives.]

The novel itself even survives near-death from the footnotes and charts that are copiously sprinkled throughout the story to corroborate the science spouted by some of the characters. Despite all of Crichton's scholarship, the novel never reads like a tract. Tracts exposing global falsehood don't usually keep you reading for 600 lightning-filled pages or give you scenes in which muddle-headed liberal matinee idols are eaten by Pacific island cannibals.

Was that really NPR talking about muddle-headed liberals? Wait a sec. I better recheck the URL... No, that's right. Oh well. As for the cannibals, that scene puts King Kong and Fay Wray to shame for sheer pulse-pounding bodice-ripping racism. Oooga booga!

But forget all that. That's just the entertainment portion of the program, folks. The Audobon article mentioned above concludes, as will I, with the following pithy quote:

"Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance. Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost."

To find out who said this, you gotta read the piece. It'd be a spoiler if I revealed the exciting ending.

Just a brief note to say I'm back online. With a little quiz this time, just to see if you've been paying attention. Shoko Asahara (founder of the Aum Shinrikyo sect most famous for its sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway station), Timothy McVeigh, Osama Bin Laden, Chief Blogging Officer -- guess which name does not belong in this set. Entries must be postmarked no later than midnight tonight. BIG HINT: pictures of the first three are taken from the cover of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. Look for official quiz results in our next post!

More hints here...

Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence book review by Rhys H. Williams
source: Sociology of Religion, 22 September 2002
via: HighBeam™ Research

Early drafts of history (books about the Sep 11, 2001 terrorist attacks) by Jay Tolson
source: U.S. News & World Report, 14 January 2002
via: HighBeam™ Research

Religion - Does Faith Matter? by Patricia Rice Stories
source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 31 December 1999
via: HighBeam™ Research