This Earth Day Is Conspiracy Day (UFOs, al Qaeda, a real CIA director in a gorilla suit on a motorcycle, etc.)

•On Earth Day, J.P. Freire posts a reminder that the host of the first Earth Day (in 1970), Ira Einhorn, went on to murder -- and compost! -- his girlfriend (but fled to Europe after getting out on bail with the help of then-lawyer Arlen Specter). 

•Twenty years later, a Brown University college communist told me he was delighted that Earth Day 1990 seemed to be making environmentalism mainstream (he was right) and that thus, so soon after the seeming implosion of communism, “capitalism would end not to the sound of marching Soviet boots but to the sound of falling trees.” 

(Can you blame me being inclined to believe the worst when it was thought by many people for a few hours last week that a missing Brown student might be the culprit in the Boston bombings?) 

•This year’s Earth Day brings, among other things, the premiere (in L.A.) of that documentary Sirius that alleges the government possesses UFO technology that could save the environment (the film also shows a surprisingly convincing-looking six-inch humanoid corpse that purportedly has non-human DNA -- my bet would still be deformed human-fetus mummy, since mummies are common in the part of Latin America where it was found, but who the hell knows). 

Sirius will be followed next week by a week-long National Press Club conference on UFOs headed by six former Congress members -- and the film itself will be shown again in Charlottesville in early May.  I think Reason’s Ron Bailey should attend and tell us how it goes.  He likes energy issues and biotech.

•What with next week also bringing the Toronto premiere of the much-touted, evidence-or-bust, we-mean-it-this-time, we’ll-shut-our-websites-down-if-it-ain’t-real documentary Shooting Bigfoot...

•and with reckless conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones pushing the idea that Craft International mercenaries were not merely running a drill but were in fact the real perps in Boston (those fellows in tan pants who were in a front-page photo on the Times this Sunday with no explanatory caption at all and were formerly run by recently-murdered sniper Chris Kyle)...

•not to mention Vice President Biden (like George H.W. Bush before him) using the phrase “New World Order” in a speech without seeming to notice that’s like waving a red cape in front of conspiracy theorists...

...April has been an incredibly bountiful month for people who allege cover-ups.  I am less paranoid, prone to see a world of screw-ups and disasters rather than conspiracies and extraterrestrials. 

However, reality has a tendency to get almost as weird as the conspiracy theories if you look at it closely enough, and it is with that in mind, post-Boston, that I find myself marveling again at one nice, cleanly-written paragraph from the 1996 memoir From the Shadows (p. 349) by CIA man turned Defense Secretary Robert Gates, which I blogged about last month.  The book was written five years before 9/11/01, and I think it’s safe to say that this is the haunting paragraph where al Qaeda happens, with all the same ambiguity about the degree of U.S. negligence in its formation that people still bicker about a decade after 9/11:

Farewell to Two Cold Warriors

Kudos to Johnny Rotten for denouncing the people exulting about Thatcher’s death last week.

Similarly, the Saturday Live Sketch about a punk who alienated his bandmates by liking Thatcher touched on one of my favorite topics: the tragic (and ultimately unnecessary) divide between people who love freedom for essentially left-anarchist reasons and people who love free markets.  Not that their differences aren’t real or important, but consider, for example, that the most notorious anti-Thatcher riots back in the day were still (long story short) riots against taxes.  (By the way, a free-marketeer must respect SNL’s right to ban troublemaking performers, but an anti-authoritarian might still find some amusement in how prestigious the list is.)

I wrote in the anthology Proud to Be Right about bridging the punk/conservative gap in my own youthful, Reagan-era mind.  But I haven’t harped on that specific theme too much since then, mainly because I increasingly think that if I take the idea to its logical (and in some ways far less fun) conclusion, I need to go far beyond stitching together a few ironically-compatible elements of the culture – and far beyond the tradition-plus-markets “fusionism” those on the right often laud. 

I need to tackle the much more daunting task of figuring out how to “reconcile” the whole culture to itself, so to speak, patiently and diplomatically finding ways to draw upon the best elements of every major political tradition without simply denigrating them or combating them. 

(By contrast, Proud to Be Right may well end up being remembered most for combat, namely the C-SPAN2 panel on which I condemned fellow PBR contributor Helen Rittelmeyer for being a closet nihilist – but she’s settled down, moved to Australia while still blogging wittily for First Things, and gotten engaged, and I wish them both well.  I honestly don’t like to fight.)

So much of human life is about performative ruts: People’s brains aren’t just making arguments, they’re constantly asking, “Should I be in aggrieved-party mode now?” and “Is this a right/left argument...is this turning into a city/rural argument...do I need to defend my favorite sports team now?” etc.  As Jonathan Haidt’s psychology-of-conflict book Righteous Mind suggests, needlessly escalating clashes may be more than just a troubling footnote to politics, it might be the main story, and not one we should be proud of endlessly retelling.

And that story probably won’t change much as long as politics resembles Crossfire and, perhaps worse, the short sniping of Twitter, Facebook, and online comments threads (which so quickly seem to turn everything into cycles of abuse that sound very much like two-party politics).  Now, I could try just mastering the quick-insult art form – I think you know I could – but I basically vowed back when the troubling show Politically Incorrect first became popular that I didn’t really want to go that route.  I have tried not to, but conflict is pervasive...and instinctually satisfying.  But no matter how risky it is to abandon that familiar game, I have to say no to it. 

Coincidentally, the same week various punks, anarchists, and even comic book creators in the UK were playing their assigned roles by celebrating Thatcher’s death (probably feeling a bit nasty about themselves, not just her, in the process), a study reportedly suggested that social media is tending to make us still nastier – and more shallow. 

I’ll soon try other approaches, then, reflected in the near future in a few projects that’ll take me away from Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger most of the time (really – reach me via e-mail if you need me).  I know I recently tried to exit a few times before, but the timing wasn’t quite right for both exiting and explaining myself.  The near future, though, should bring, among other things, (A) essays about reconciling political factions, (B) a site for libertarian pop culture (more decisively entertaining rather than argumentative), (C) an article about gold, (D) the moderating of ever-civil Dionysium debates, (E) possibly the moderating of much larger debates, and (F) various bits of ghostwriting (for you too, if you like).  More about all that as warranted.

The combat model of politics was well-suited to the Cold War era and is perhaps well-suited to a two-party system, but it’s healthy to take a step back and ask whether it’d look ridiculous in, say, a healthy system of twenty parties in a world with minimal threat of violence.  If it’d seem jarring in that world, wouldn’t it be nice, and probably quite productive, to behave right now more like a citizen of that imagined world than like one forged by the tragic conflicts of the twentieth century that molded minds from mine to Thatcher’s?  (Even punk has by now been tamed, after all – and I’m definitely going to see that museum exhibit, without shame or griping about lost “authenticity.”)

Of course, different mindsets are appropriate to different eras:

Moynihan on Murderers in Academia

How could I not love academia and the left?  Well, Michael C. Moynihan reminds us that academia is full of convicted left-wing murderers.  Don’t tell yourself this says nothing about how the Establishment thinks (or fails to, despite the PhDs).

Gay Marriage Debate Tonight (in a World Without Thatcher)

It is probably for the best that Cy Curnin of the Fixx did not know when I saw the band perform last night that Margaret Thatcher would die today. 

Like all too many of my favorite British creative folk of recent decades, he’s very left-leaning and probably thinks of Thatcher as almost a Satan-figure (though I have no reason to believe he will say anything inappropriate today).  She and Reagan tend to be the implied sources of madness in the West balancing the madness among the Soviets in New Wave-era songs like “Stand or Fall,” though I love all that music anyway.

And the juxtaposition of last night’s New Wave concert and tonight’s Dionysium debate on gay marriage (Dorian Davis vs. Mike Woods, moderated by me, 8pm at Muchmore’s, 2 Havemeyer St. near the Bedford Ave. L stop in Williamsburg) has me thinking that the Iron Lady will surely be remembered as doing more to alter perceptions of women in the British Isles than all those fey rockers, much as I admire both.  There was really never reason for them to quarrel. 

At the very least, no matter how fey the audience turns out to be – gay, hipster, nerd, what have you – tonight, let there be at least a toast to Thatcher’s memory.  I vow to lead one.  During the audience discussion, thoughts on Thatcher will be as welcome as thoughts on the gay marriage debate. 

But tonight’s proceedings need not be funereal.  Here are a few funny items to keep you in good spirits until this evening:

•Brian the dog on Family Guy manages to be endearing even when being homophobic (here reacting to Stewie’s gay-seeming documentary narration).

•Apparently, Brown University soon may literally be stealing our dreams, with their crazy brain-science-machines.

•Here’s a funny yet rational retort to all-too-common online conspiracy-theory videos (yet this video, last I checked, has more “dislikes” than “likes,” whereas almost any pro-conspiracy-theory nut seems to be rewarded with likes, a disturbing imbalance).  This one specifically mocks people who think an earlier video reveals an alien shapeshifter in Obama’s entourage, part of a larger “reptilian” or extraterrestrial invasion.

•Here’s one mocking equally-common videos purporting to spot life-on-Mars evidence in real NASA footage.

The real world is more than fascinating (and confusing) enough without deluding ourselves.  And, though certainly no politician is all good, that world is likely a bit freer for Margaret Thatcher having lived in it.

DIONYSIUM 4/8: Should There Be Gay Marriage?

Before the Supreme Court decides, the organization from which the Court traditionally takes its cues shall do so: 

"Should There Be Gay Marriage?"

A DIONYSIUM debate, with ample discussion, hosted by TODD SEAVEY 

Mon., April 8 at 8pm 

YES: DORIAN DAVIS, libertarian writer and adjunct journalism professor at Marymount Manhattan College

NO: MIKE WOODS, derivatives trader, libertarian, and Catholic

At the MUCHMORE'S performance space

(free admission, cash/credit bar -- at 2 Havemeyer St. on the corner of N. 9th St., a mere three blocks east of the very first L subway stop into Brooklyn from Manhattan, the Bedford Ave. stop)

Going Mostly-Offline for Real (plus the Fixx, Bigfoot, and superheroes)

April Fool’s Day or not, I’m really going to kick the Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and e-mail addictions – in part to give me more time for things like editing the comics section of the soon-to-launch LibertyIslandMag.com, writing a series of more serious political essays, ghostwriting, and more (including stuff for you, perhaps, if you want me to add your project in these areas or TV production or radio commentary or such to the schedule). 

My friend Kyle Smith here summarizes some great reasons to spend less time online.  Read it if you still have a sufficient attention span (h/t fellow crypto-semi-Luddite Kevin Walsh).  By contrast, ignore Kyle’s kind words about G.I. Joe Retaliation.

But there are entertaining moments coming up in April to keep you occupied while I’m mostly-silent (really, despite me posting this on April Fool’s Day):

•April 7: If you know me and want to join me for the Fixx, let me know before someone else claims the second ticket I have – and here’s a fan’s video for their song “Saved by Zero” using footage from Tron Legacy (I think this marks exactly 40 times I’ve mentioned that band online, by the way – fitting for one of the coolest acts ever to grace the Top 40).

•April 8: I think our Dionysium topic on Monday the 8th (8pm at Muchmore’s) may be the timely one of gay marriage – but contact me one week prior if you want to volunteer to debate that or a different topic.  

Announcing (not to mention planning) the Dionysium events farther in advance is one of the few things I’ll keep using Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail for – but I’ll provide links here to other big impending projects as well. 

•April 13: The conspiracy theorists I’ve so often mocked despite their vigilant, paranoid resistance to the powers that be (including in my “Conspiracy Week” of entries just ended) might want to note that the 13th will mark exactly 6 decades, 6 months, and 6 days since the barcode was patented.  Plan accordingly.  Then pay your taxes.

•April 24: The best-organized group of purported UFO witnesses, the ones behind the so-called Disclosure Project that has held attention-getting press conferences of ex-military people and the like at the National Press Club, will take their best shot at convincing the world we are not alone – and that the government possesses alien technology – when they release the new documentary Sirius. 

If that doesn’t contain proof, I never want to hear from the extraterrestrial-believers again.

•April 30: Coincidentally, one of the most-hyped Bigfoot documentaries, Shooting Bigfoot, will be released six days after the UFO one, at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto.  The site Facebook.com/FindBigfoot has vowed to shut down if this documentary doesn’t contain persuasive footage of a Bigfoot eating and then being shot and preserved (in Las Vegas) for study (by a guy who admits he’s previously faked a dead Bigfoot). 

If that doesn’t contain proof, I never want to hear from the Bigfoot-believers again.

[NOTE: That report of an Avengers/X-Men movie crossover was an April Fool’s story.]

Time of Renewal

I attended a very nice, non-threatening, quasi-Easter, Unitarian service with a very lovely Unitarian (the symbol behind the altar is almost a cross; the detailed sermon tale about literally-underground Jews in Ukraine hiding from the Nazis was almost a Passover story; and the tale of the empty tomb – much like Jesus Christ Superstar – almost ended with a resurrection).

I feel almost like I'm back in my native mellow New England (birthplace of transcendentalism, whatever exactly that is) instead of here on the Upper East Side.

But now, at this traditional time of renewal, I very rapidly do the apartment's long-overdue spring cleaning to prepare for the arrival of one of the multiple(?!) converts to Catholicism I know. And tomorrow, the day that to many trolls really best symbolizes changed perspectives and the embrace of new truths, April Fool's Day, I swear I kick the Blogger/Facebook/Twitter/e-mail addiction and get a bunch of other long-overdue work done, hoping you forgive my delays as I forgive yours.

P.S. Also, two nights ago I saw an Upper East Side yuppie couple taking a photograph of their dog's poop on the sidewalk. Yea, and so we are reminded that there is beauty in even the lowest parts of our universe, due to the bounty provided by Nature or whatever or Whoever or the dog or such or what have you.

Conspiracy Week: SPECTOR, LANNISTER, RAPE, JOE

TRIGGER WARNING, but I mean literally in this case: Phil Spector killed a woman with a gun, and this past Sunday there was an HBO movie about it written by (notoriously manly) David Mamet, with Al Pacino, Helen Mirren, and Jeffrey Tambor in it.  The case was sufficiently disturbing that we should not allow Spector’s historic musical achievements to cause us to forget (he waved a gun around the Ramones as well, apparently, and even punk has its limits). 

While it’s true that we should not imagine that everyone who commits violence against women will be as eccentric and easy to spot as Spector, I think (as an individualist might) that there’s also a real danger in the suddenly-popular approach of condemning most of society as “rape culture” – not because the issue is unimportant (and certainly not because any decent person condones rape) but because, much as it pains egalitarians to do this, you have to make clear distinctions between those who commit violence and those who do not (this goes for the recent guns debate as well). 

When you tell every male who likes high heels or whistles at strippers that he’s part of “rape culture,” you’re also telling the handful of actual rapists: Hey, you’re just like everybody else (except a handful of feminists, of course). 

That’s dangerous in much the same way as those creepy instances of (no doubt warmhearted) folk saying, Both the assailant and the person he shot were victims here.  Well, sort of, maybe, in some complicated Hegelian sense, but in a far more important way: no, not if you’re trying to maintain some semblance of a moral order and legal system.  With that in mind, maybe we can safely indulge in a...

SEXIST SIDENOTE: Twenty years ago, I was privileged to be present (until I quietly drifted away because I’m polite and unobtrusive like that) at a somewhat flirty conversation between writer David Lodge and the aforementioned Helen Mirren, who I contend is still hot, was even hotter then, and was a freaking curvaceous bombshell back when she was **walking around completely naked at age twenty-seven in the 1972 film Savage Messiah.**

...if perchance that sounds like something you might want to rent.  Y’know, I mean, like, for Easter.  I mean because it has “Messiah” in the title and all.  (She played Ayn Rand once, too, you know, allowing her to vent about as passionately as the real Ayn does here.  And the recent RED movies are based on comic books.  And she uses machine guns in them.)

BUT ADMITTEDLY BOOBIES AND RELIGION/CULTURE OFTEN CLASH, as in the case of threats against Tunisian activist Amina Tyler.

On the bright side, though, back here in the benighted U.S., National Victimization Survey stats suggest that just in the past three decades alone rape rates in the U.S. have fallen by 85%(!) – even as crude jokes on TV and porn everywhere have increased (with high-profile spats over such forms of crudeness causing people like vlogger AmazingAtheist to spring to their defense). 

Yet rage at purportedly omnipresent, conspiracy-like “rape culture” seems to be growing exponentially, to the extent that one isn’t quite sure any of us, no matter how innocent, can hope to escape the boiling fury now.  We are all still guilty, guilty, guilty participants in patriarchy no matter how peaceful things get and how spotless our own criminal records are. 

(And, in a comparatively trivial footnote, I suspect all that mounting rage, no pun intended, is somehow going to be channeled, in a massive non sequitur, into zealous support for a 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign – just you watch.  Several of the angriest feminist bloggers are of course also ardent socialist Democrats, a few right here in NYC.  They are always fighting what they perceive as the “War Against Women” on two fronts, hating Wall Street as much as they hate rapists – and somehow seeing the two as related.  And at some point in 2016 they may find themselves compelled to revisit the night of Rand Paul’s infamous “Aqua Buddha” college prank.  Don’t think it can’t happen... I’m warning you... People should listen to me...)

BUT WHAT DID LOUIS C.K. DO in between Lucky Louie on HBO and Louie on FX, you ask?  Apparently, he got his own lesson in how economic and sexual exploitation can intermingle.

AND CONTINUING THE HBO AND NUDITY THEMES: Game of Thrones season 3 starts on HBO this coming Sunday (though I’ll be watching it one week from tonight) and should be nicely Machiavellian.  (In addition to breasts and political intrigue, the show sometimes depicts the promise and peril of mixed-faith marriages, as does Naomi Schaefer Riley’s new book at an apt time.)

Breasts and violence notwithstanding, though, I think the two things the series does right that set it apart from other fantasy and sci-fi are using the supernatural elements vary sparingly at first and using morality almost not at all.  I’m not knocking morality, of course, but the usual practice in fantasy of having clans of aristocrats line up neatly into good and evil camps is, well, not convincing given actual human history. 

BUT FIRST, I'll be seeing G.I. Joe: Retaliation, no doubt far more morally-dualistic.  And I know it'll be goofy.  And I have no intention of seeing the first film.  But (to return to this blog’s “Conspiracy Week” and “Month of Geopolitics” themes), those people who fear reptilian shape-shifters have secretly taken over the government will surely rush to see a film about a Cobra operative disguising himself as the President in order to conquer America.  It’s like this movie was made for them.  They probably think it’s part of the conspiracy. 

IF ONLY real-world politics were that simple.  Instead, it involves subtler evils, like the quiet death of contrarianism over at once-eclectic, sometimes-hawkish New Republic and its replacement by a new, authoritarian, Progressive sycophancy from the likes of young Ezra Klein. 

(My only tiny complaint about that great Matt Welch piece is that the second-to-last paragraph notes liberals bringing the charge of “epistemic closure” against closed-minded conservatives three years ago – but Matt might’ve mentioned that, for good or ill, it was Reason’s own Julian Sanchez who started that lament.  And so the snake consumes its tail, and the ritual is completed.)

ON THAT NOTE, we conclude this “Month of Geopolitics” – and after Easter/April Fool’s, I'll really, truly take that break from cyberspace I’ve threatened for ages...at least on this site.

Conspiracy Week: THE IMMIGRANT MENACE

I’m not only seeing Nick Cave in concert tonight, yesterday at 11am I saw the performance art piece involving fake horses that he’s got going a couple times a day at Grand Central.

The crowd loved it.  They probably would have been much more sad if the fake horses re-enacted the song “The Carny” (“And the dwarves were given the task of digging the ditch and laying the nag’s carcass in the ground... we can’t afford to carry dead weight,” etc.).  They might have been somewhat happier, though, if the horses were “prancing in the field” as in “Till the End of the World” – without the bomb that blows up the narrator’s ex-girlfriend at the beginning of the song.  That’s no way to cope with relationship issues.  (Ah: two different Nick Caves.)

Speaking of relationship issues, there’s a gay couple out there (probably watching this week’s Supreme Court news with great interest) who are married and whose child was facilitated by an egg donation from the woman with whom I’m seeing Cave tonight.  But it’s not the gays or the fetuses or the alternative rock fans I’m worried about today – it’s the immigrants. 

While Australian Nick Cave seems to be able to make it in and out of the U.S. without too much hassle, the same is not true for hapless Australian video artist Pogo, as he politely explains here, suffering like many people the world over whose plans have been wrecked by the U.S.’s byzantine travel and immigration rules (h/t proud comso-tarian Tom Palmer).  But we have met the enemy, and, no, they are not the Australians.  We wish the Australians well.

Not only is libertarian-ish Rand Paul lately realizing how crazy the rules resulting from our visitor-phobia are, he seems to have persuaded the often-bullheaded Sean Hannity on the issue, enough to get the latter calling Ann Coulter “annoying” for her intransigence on the topic.  This is important progress.

In the meantime, though, even as I typed this blog entry, I received a mass-e-mail from La MaMa theatre and the Irish Arts Center apologizing to their customers because “visa issues” have forced the cancelation of an intended performance called ponydance (perhaps involving fake ponies much like Cave #2’s fake horses, but certainly involving real Irish people).

If you tend either (A) to dislike big government or (B) to like the free blending of cultures (and I bet you agree with at least one of those things), imagine the possibilities of a world literally without borders.  I’m confident humanity would find an infinitude of things to do with the opportunity besides plotting terrorism and going on welfare.  If territorial governments as we know them dissolved in the process, so be it.

P.S. Meanwhile, the American Spectator tells us what Tom Lehrer’s been up to for fifty years (h/t Rick Sincere).

Conspiracy Week: MONSANTO AND BIOTECH

Congrats to Monsanto on the legislation signed today preventing them being barred from engaging in productive trade every time some yahoo files another lawsuit calling for further regulatory review of (vital, harmless) biotech. The foes are Luddites, the endless lawsuits and calls for unscientific guilty-until-proven-innocent reviews nonsense.

The fact that some libertarians have jumped on the anti-Monsanto bandwagon is a sad reminder that some libertarians more closely resemble the "paranoid" stereotype than the "rationalist" stereotype. I'll happily take the latter caricature if I must pick one.

And it is troubling indeed that some libertarians, in behavior that would be unbecoming even in an enviro-lefty, will pick and choose which industries' libertarian impurity to freak out about on grounds having nothing to do with their degree of deviation from market ideals – selectively complaining about biotech being subsidized or engaging in lobbying, as if the same couldn't be said about everything from sofa manufacturing to vacuum cleaners.

There'd be no need for socialists to destroy capitalism if free-marketeers eliminated every industry currently entangled with government. We'd have destroyed industrial civilization all by ourselves.

By all means get rid of government, but stop quaking in fear of science...you wretched hippie.

Conspiracy Week: CIA (per Robert Gates) plus: guns and gold!

That bastard Richard Nixon did many, many things wrong -- including simultaneously taking the U.S. off the gold standard, freezing wages and prices, and increasing tariffs 10% to boot. 

On the bright side, in a world full of unintended consequences, big government reaped a few immediate punishments for these actions, including (A) the creation of the Libertarian Party in part by disgusted anti-Nixon Republicans and (B) a new wave of “gold bug” metal-buying enthusiasts as fervent as the survivalists who were rapidly multiplying in the years after Viet Nam.  Ron Paul first rose to political prominence in that milieu.

Forty-two years later, (A) there’s talk of Paul’s son Sen. Rand Paul being the new thought leader of the Republican Party and (B) today at 10am a young libertarian (from a family of libertarians) with the Ayn Rand-inspired name Anthem Blanchard launched his company Anthem Vault, the first U.S. storage space specifically for privately-traded gold.  The company is fairly conservative/mainstream – financial/investment-minded rather than apocalyptic – in its thinking.  But still: when the whole damn system collapses and you have nothing but your gold and your Bitcoin, you may be grateful for their existence. 

But not everything Nixon did was a disaster.  Oh, sure, he made the economy worse, expanded government bureaucracy in several rather left-wing-seeming ways (including environmental and affirmative-action enforcement), and even appears to have secretly sabotaged Viet Nam peace talks before he became president in order to ensure his initial election.  He was a monster.  However, some of his foreign policy maneuvering against the Soviet Union was actually quite savvy. 

•••

Or so contends former CIA, NSA, and DoD (but not S.H.I.E.L.D.) man Robert Gates in his revealing 1996 book From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War.  Now, I know what certain of you are already thinking, which is roughly: “Why on Earth would I believe anything the former CIA director and former Secretary of Defense has to say – you realize CIA’s about to drag us deeper into Syria and was obviously co-running those embassies in Libya, don’t you?”  Fair enough.  And, yes, I was given this book by the smoking-hot granddaughter of an OSS operative (true story). 

And then some of you are more specifically thinking, “I wouldn’t believe anything a Bush defense secretary says,” followed by, “Wait – he was also Obama’s defense secretary?” and then you’re all like, “Oh my God, now he’s on the board of Starbucks?  Wait, does that mean he’s in favor of gay marriage?  Does he believe in ‘fair trade’?”  Look, hippie, it’s a complex world and I don’t have time to answer all of your questions, so let’s just get back to the Cold War for now. 

Long before the so-called Star Wars anti-missile defense system (a technologically nigh-impossible project Reagan announced thirty years ago this past Saturday, in 1983) and even before the culture-altering 1977 film that gave that project its name (in a year which may also have seen the Dodgers invent the high five, according to Gersh Kuntzman), Nixon subtly changed the world in August 1969 (perhaps in retrospect one of the most pivotal months in history) by shifting U.S. resources toward early anti-missile research – and thereby convincing the panicked Soviets to devote the next two decades to pouring their dwindling funds into efforts to counter our largely-imaginary potential technology. 

Not bad (sadly, we’re now in the process of undoing what Gates considers Nixon’s greatest accomplishment, though, which was driving a wedge between Russia and China).

Gates doesn’t just heap the expected praise on later-Cold War, Republican presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush, though.  He makes a fairly convincing case that Jimmy Carter – dubbed “history’s greatest monster” by one Simpsons character – was

Conspiracy Week: BIGFOOT

Speaking of conspiracies and such: I see that the creators of the page Facebook.com/FindBigfoot very publicly vowed to take the page down and exit Bigfoot research if the dead Bigfoot that one Rick Dyer claims to have stored in Las Vegas turns out to be fake. 

Well, already, the related camping/Bigfoot video he claims to have shot in September turns out to use images he’d already used in another video months earlier.  Oh, yeah, and regardless of that he admits to being the same guy who already faked a dead Bigfoot in a freezer a few years before that.  So will the FindBigfoot guys give up soon and all of humanity move on to saner quests? 

The full-length Dyer documentary about it all will be shown the night of April 30 at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto.  One way or another, history may record that it was the night Bigfoot died.

There’s also been zero action over at Spike TV’s $10 Million Bigfoot Bounty blog since it was launched last year, incidentally.  Again: TEN MILLION DOLLARS but no Bigfoot yet.  Makes you think, doesn’t it?  (Then again, Westerners, unlike Africans, only found solid evidence of gorillas circa 1860.  And I’m pretty sure gorillas are real.)

BONUS ITEM: Here is a real photo, though, of a twenty-five year-old Martha Stewart, who did not look like a monster.

 

AND IN OTHER FOOT-ORIENTED SUPERHUMAN NEWS: It's looking like the geopolitical scorecard for next year's Capt. America sequel will be: one American superbeing (Cap) and two American/Russian superbeings (Black Widow and Winter Soldier) vs. one neo-Nazi (Crossbones) and – yes – a Frenchman doing kickboxing and (I have long predicted!) parkour: oui, Batroc the Leaper will be played by a UFC fighter, Georges St-Pierre.

So much has changed in the realm of international relations since WWII (and tomorrow: the CIA!). 

Conspiracy Week: MOON LANDING

I admit that as I age, I find the dividing line between the crazies and the sane more ambiguous than I did in my youth.  And (as Robert Anton Wilson tried to teach us) the imaginary conspiracies sometimes overlap with the real ones in odd ways.

For instance, there is a moment (49 min. 25 sec. in) in the documentary Apollo Zero by Bart Sibrel – who thinks the moon landings never happened – when astronaut Edgar Mitchell muses aloud about shooting the documentarian and Mitchell’s son Adam is heard (not realizing he’s miked) to ask (perhaps jokingly), “Y’wanna call the CIA, have ’em whacked?”  I swear.  (More about the CIA later in this “Conspiracy Week” of blog entries, within my larger “Month of Geopolitics.”)

On top of that, there’s a certain justice in Mitchell suffering this annoying conspiracy theorist, since Mitchell himself believes in a government cover-up of extraterrestrials.

Mitchell kicked Sibrel during the confrontation seen in the documentary, and Buzz Aldrin once famously punched Sibrel in the face (another astronaut confronted by Sibrel refused to swear on a Bible that he’d been to the moon and offered the oddly-weak explanation that he doubted it was a real Bible – and of course I don’t think there’s a real God, just to add another odd layer to the conflict). 

You can’t blame astronauts for wanting to beat Sibrel, really.  But it’s interesting one of them should also have a son who reflexively thinks of the CIA as hitmen.  Does he get it from Hollywood?  A crazy dad?  Experience?

Astronauts don’t normally inspire conspiracy-theory documentaries, though – they inspire things like this, and rightly so.

And the layers of weirdness don’t end there (don’t blame me, I’m just a messenger): There are also conspiracy theorists who think Sibrel was in league with Aldrin all along and – irony of ironies! – think the video of Aldrin punching Sibrel was faked (that their brief conversation in the video was hastily dubbed and the punch a mere “stage” punch).

So to summarize (to take the most-mainstream view of these events, mind you), we have conspiracy theorists…distrusting a conspiracy theorist…who himself confronted astronauts who include a conspiracy theorist…whose son invokes CIA assassins. 

So we don’t even need any actual aliens or conspiracies to achieve weirdness, not in America.

Left Denounces Other Leftists as White Male “Bro-gressives”

Our world is an increasingly complex and stupid one: Salon and some other pro-Obama operations have decided to smear those among their fellow leftists who support Rand Paul's anti-drones position by falsely implying that the supporters do so because they are white and male.

They've even coined the term "bro-gressives" to describe those Paul supporters (which I guess is supposed to work a bit like "Oreo" -- authentic progressives presumably knowing enough to avoid being male). Who would have foreseen (say, thirty years ago) that the day would come when being a leftist who is opposed to an aspect of militarism gets you marginalized for being a white male?

Freddie DeBoer points out a blog that retorts by compiling comments from many non-white and/or non-male supporters of the Rand Paul filibuster (including Rachel Maddow, who is still terrible in my book but for reasons having nothing to do with her being white and male).