Electromagnetics & VDU News
Subtitled ‘a News Report on Non-ionising Radiation’, this is now up to volume 6, and is now extremely impressive – and pretty alarming. Vol. 6 nos 1-2, for example, includes:
Dramatic cuts in EMF exposure demanded by US draft report; biggest EMF lawsuit launched by top attorney – then dropped; breast cancer-EMF link strengthened; incubators emit significant EMFs; low-level microwaves break rat brain DNA; EC report calls for more research on mobile phone safety; mobile phone companies fund EMC research centre; Motorola funds mobile phone centre (yes, they’re damaging your brain); and so forth.
The two issues from volume six I have seen are jumping with information, ongoing research and studies – all the signs of a new field developing at full tilt.
In a note the editor, Simon Best, added that there is now a cheap, UK-manufactured shielding material that cuts EM frequencies between 1Khz and 10GHz by 99%. For information on that, or to obtain the magazine, contact him at PO Box 25 Liphook, Hants GU30 7SE or tel/phone fax 01428 751430.
The magazine is quarterly, £26 a year for individuals in the UK; outside the UK add Europe £1.50, USA £3.00, Australasia £5.00.
Green Apocalypse
Luther Blissett (sic) and Stewart Home, £3.50 from Unpopular Books, Box 15 138 Kingsland High St London E8 2NS 50 A4 pages
Storming teacups! An attack on Green Anarchist magazine and Larry O’Hara by the Neoist Alliance. What this latter is and what it believes (if anything) I don’t know. The cover claims that ‘the main text is supplemented by an exposure of how Green Anarchist sets about smearing anyone who dares to criticise its reactionary politics’. Very strange indeed but essential reading, I guess, for O’Hara buffs. It includes reproductions of a vast array of leaflets that have been produced in this strange fracas.
Here and Now
Some of this feud is included in issue 16 of Here and Now. This is a really good issue, including a 28-page supplement on Situationist Guy DeBord. In the magazine itself there is much (mostly critical) material on the Larry O’Hara thesis on the state and the far right, an account by Martin Walker on his conflict with Duncan Campbell; pieces on Yugoslavia, Chechenia, roads protests, and the various feuds rattling around the UK political fringe; as well as some sharp satire on post-modernism, cyberdrivel, and so forth. Sixty pages (plus the supplement), really impressive – and really cheap at £2.50 from Here and Now, PO Box 109, Leeds, LS5 3AA.
Probe
describes itself as the ‘Newsletter of Citizens for Truth about the Kennedy Assassination’, which doesn’t do it any favours. Actually it is a professionally produced, 32-page quarterly magazine whose primary focus is the Kennedy assassination but whose ambit is actually the entire period from JFK’s assassination through to Watergate – and beyond. Vol. 2 no. 3, for example is a special edition on Watergate. But it includes a piece on Alger Hiss – who launched Nixon’s career. (The fact that I didn’t catch up with Probe until vol. 3 no. 2 tells you have far I am from being a serious JFK buff.)
The problem with the JFK thing is that it has now ramified so far – and as the material in this issue, the Scott extract and Frewin’s literature survey, shows, is ramifying further and further – it is very hard to keep track of. For example: the leading (ten page) article in Probe vol. 3, no. 3, 1996, is titled ‘David Attlee Phillips, Clay Shaw and Freeport Sulphur’. Freeport Sulphur?
Probe is very good indeed and is edited by Jim Di Eugenio, author of the recent book about the Garrison inquiry (reviewed in Lobster 24 by Scott Newton); and the magazine does reflect his interest in the Garrison/Shaw end of things.
A subscription to vol 3 (six issues) is $39 (US) outside the States, $30 inside to: CTKA, PO Box 5489, Sherman Oaks, CA 91413, USA. Telephone 310 838 9496.
CE Chronicles:
The Journal of Suppressed Information and the Unexplained. (bi-monthly, 24 pages, desk-topped) $40 US per annum outside US, ($30 in US) from 10878 Westheimer number 283, Houston, TX 77042, USA.
CE means Close Encounter, and, as its subtitle suggests, this partly overlaps the territory covered by Nexus, New Dawn and the Fortean Times, but done in a more rational, critical and sober way than the first two. No. 13, for example, carries a reprint of Armen Victorian’s piece on US psychic research from Lobster 30, with a statement from Major Edward Dames, one of the program’s participants; an extract from a book on the H.A.A.R.P project (reprinted from Nexus); and a number of shorter pieces on Area 51 and various natural phenomena.
In number 11 the essay of note is ‘The Revolution in Military Affairs and Conflict Short of War’ by Lt. Col James Kievitt and Steven Metx PhD, which, despite the disclaimer at the beginning that the piece does not reflect the views of the DoD, Dept of the Army, or the US Government, appears to be a semi-official statement of US military doctrine in the post Cold War era.
Portland Free Press
continues to produce pieces of note. The issues of Sept/October and November/December 95 carry a very striking piece in two parts (though the beef is in the second part) by L. Fletcher Prouty on the role of the US insurance business in the US Missing In Action (MIA) story. Prouty points out that National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia was incorporated in 1970 by a lawyer who worked for the Reinsurance Association of America! (As long as they’re still classified as missing, they’re legally alive and the insurance policies on their lives need not be paid.) Prouty knows this as he was the League’s first financial advisor….. PFP, PO Box 1327, Tualatin, OR 97062, USA
Daniel Brandt continues to produce some of the best writing in the fields Lobster covers in NameBase Newsline. Issue 12 has a long essay by Brandt, ‘Mind Control and the Secret State’, about as good a short survey of the subject as exists. Back issues of Newsline in printed form are $3.00 each; a two year subscription (8 issues) is $24 to PO Box 680635, San Antonio, TX 78268.
The back issues are:
- Clinton, Quigley and Conspiracy: What’s going on here?
- Cyberspace Wars: Microprocessing vs Big Brother
- Multiculturalism and the Ruling Elite
- Thirty Years after: JFK Researchers Gather in Dallas
- Cults, Anti-cultists and the Cult of Intelligence
- Cold Warriors Woo Generation X
- The ‘Information Superhighway’ and its discontents
- Organised Crime Threatens the New World Order
- The Decline of American Journalism
- The 1960s and COINTELPRO: In Defense of Paranoia
- Infowar and Disinformation: From the Pentagon to the Net
- Mind Control and the Secret State
- Class Warfare: Wall Street vs Main Street.
Highly recommended. Brandt is about as interesting an essayist as exists in the USA.
Prevailing Winds
In its 90 page, third issue, Prevailing Winds has the text of a lecture by Peter Dale Scott on the global drug traffic and US intelligence; a long piece by Ralph Schoenman (there’s a blast from the past!) on the murder of Robert Kennedy, inter alia taking issue with Dan Moldea’s recent exculpation of Thane Cesar, everybody else’s candidate for the role of the actual assassin (see Frewin’s JFK books survey for details); a piece by Michael Parenti on the role of the ‘drug menace’ in America; various other essays, and the usual catalogue/mail order section. Prevailing Winds ($32 for four issues outside the US) at PO Box 23511, Santa Barbara, CA 93121, USA.
Steamshovel Press
returned in November after a hiatus while editor/ publisher Kenn Thomas was writing a book or two. No 14 is the usual mixture of (mostly) fascinating bits and pieces and occasional complete dross. On the plus side is a piece by Martin Cannon on the alleged Dulce, New Mexico, secret underground base for extra-terrestrials. Anyone who found his piece in Lobster 23 of interest will want this extension of that work into the very fuzzy area where UFO-nuts and government disinformation projects merge.(1) On the dross side is a long review of a book on socialism by John Coleman, he of the ‘Committee of 300’ fantasies. It’s that ‘Fabian Society as prototype World Controllers’ thing some of the US Right are attracted to. (And if they get this so wrong, how accurate are their other perceptions?) At PO Pox 23715, St Louis, MO 63121 $28 for four issues outside the US.
1 Cannon’s piece in Lobster 23 was half of a longer m/s The Controllers. This is now being expanded into a full-length book of the same title, to be published by Feral House in the USA.
By-pass
is a UK version of the US ‘zine’ survey Fact Sheet 5. Issue 6 is 36 pages of short pieces on 500 or so ‘zines’, from the serious anarchist/ libertarian end, through to the simply wacky. While Fact Sheet 5 is much bigger, Bypass devotes more space to its little reviews and conveys a more accurate picture of their contents. 3 issues for £4.00 in the UK, $10 (US) rest of the world. PO Box 148, Hove, BN3 3DQ.
The Baffler
By-pass mentioned The Baffler, a new-ish US journal. I acquired #7, titled ‘Twentieth Century Lite: the City in the Age of Information’. This is the opening pararaph from the editorial:
‘Oh, that cyber-revolution! It’s turning out to be the long-awaited deliverer of American business from all the dreadful forces, riotus impulses, and malign social movements that have prevented its happy hegemony all these years. The “Third Wave”, philosopher-king Newt Gingrich and his stable of third-rate thinkers proclaim, has finally liberated the wise entrepreneur not only from the grasp of Washington bureaucrats, with all their meddling demands about workplace safety and miimum wages, but from every other social institution that once threatened him. Labor unions for example, the nightmarish Second-Wave organizations par excellence, are openly gloated to be a thing of the past, ruined by the near-total freedom of capital to move around the globe at will, wherever poverty severe enough to induce people to scab can be found.’
The Baffler is 120 pages, bound, mostly non-fiction essays, with one or two little bits of fiction in it, beautifully laid-out. The Toronto Star described The Baffler as ‘the smartest and most exciting magazine in America’. I haven’t seen enough of its competition to know, but these are certainly seriously clever and literate people in a bad temper.
One issue is $5.00 but add $3.50 for airmail postage to Europe; in Europe a sub. is $29.00 for four issues ($16.00 in the USA). PO Box 378293, Chicago Il 60637.
Fortress Europe?
is a newsletter, produced in Sweden. Its subject is matter similar to that of Statewatch, with a European-wide brief. It is it the ‘organ of the Platform “Fortress Europe?” and of the Geneva Group…. an informal international network concerned with European harmonisation in the fields of international security, policing, justice, data protection, immigration and asylum and its effects on fundamental rights and liberties’. The February 1996 issue, no. 41, for example, contains material on an Austrian organised crime bill authorising widespread bugging, reports France’s recent anti-terrorism measures; the Schengen agreement, the treatment of Irish prisoners in the UK etc.
Nicely desk-topped, sober and comprehensively documented, Fortress Europe is edited by Nicholas Busch at Blomstervagen 7, S-791, 33 Falun, Sweden, tel/fax 46 23 26777; email .
Subs in the UK are £20 for ten issues, in the USA $33 dollars. Send cash.
The Runnymede Bulletin
is the six-times-a-year newsletter of the Runnymede Trust. It is 12 pages, nicely produced, with contents similar to that of Statewatch; i.e. the state and its powers, with a focus chiefly on race relations and immigration issues. £13 for six issues (individuals); unwaged £7, from Runnymede Trust, 11 Princelet Street, London E1 6QH.
The Scottish Separatist
is the new ‘Organ of the Scottish Separatist Group’. Number one, which appeared in March 1996, is twelve pages, containing some interesting material on disinformation in Mcleay and Scott’s dreadful Britain’s Secret War/Tartan Terrorism and the Anglo-American State,a long piece ‘What they don’t want you to know’ about the Scottish National Liberation Army (SNLA) and its recent activities, and other bits and pieces The earlier press release the group distributed alleging links between the state and Red Action is also included.
The group proclaims on the front cover that it ‘stands uncompromisingly for the legitimate, democratic and unconditional right of the Scottish people to total national self-determination, and for their right to achieve it by any means necessary!’ (The exclamation mark is theirs. They mean they support the use of violence.)
The group claims to be independent of any other group but Special Branch and MI5 will see it as the mouthpiece of the SNLA and will be monitoring its post office box. In other words, if you subscribe you will end up in the state’s files. (If you aren’t there already.)
The Separatist is quarterly, subs are £5.00 in the European Union, Elsewhere £10 by air. Individual copies are £1.50 worldwide. PO Box 4960, Dublin 1, Eire.
Internetting
In addition to Jane Affleck’s net survey, three other sites worth noting are:
- the Liberty Tree run by Profesor Jerry Landay of the University of Illinois at http://www.prairienet.org/libertytree, which contains news and commentary on the mass media;
- The Consortium, an on-line magazine covering stories the American media won’t touch. This is run by the journalist/writer Robert Parry who did much to break the Iran-contra story. This is at http://www.delve.com/consort.html.
- Also worth checking the Web site of FAIR, publishers of Extra! at http://www.fair.org./fair/
Lobster is not on the net. Not due to any prejudice or technophobia, simple lack of money.
MI6: The Inside Story
2 hour VHS video from First Direct, 1995, no price stated.
Four, half-hour interviews – monologues, really – by two former FO wallahs, Robert Cecil and Frank Roberts, the historian D.C.Watt, and Oleg Gordiefsky. It would have made a very dull Radio 3 series. None of the four interviewees tell us anything new – and there is little of interest about MI6. The point of this escapes me, unless it is Gordiefsky’s spiel at the end of his interview, praising MI6, and British schools, British churches, British culture – and then calling for British defence and intelligence budgets to be increased. I suppose it might just be a useful teaching aid for A-level history students doing the Cold War.
Net sources
- Tom Davis Books, one of the many excellent mail order sources in the US, is now on the net and has a web site at http//www.cruzio.com/~tdbooks
- Flatland, another excellent catalogue, is at http://www.mcn.org/cbc/Bussect/Flatland/ flatland.html