Two pieces here by Tim Pendry. The major piece is followed by an addendum, which began as the text of a letter from Pendry to Dr Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance in response to an article of Gabb’s. Pendry copied me his letter and I saw that it would go nicely with the longer … Read more
Lord Stevenson Media coverage of four senior bankers arraigned before the Treasury Select Committee in February centred on whether the representatives of the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS would utter the word ‘sorry’ about behaviour that has landed the British taxpayer in the soup. In what appeared to be a well-rehearsed effort, all duly … Read more
US deception operation blowback The e-newsletter stuff (1) ran this fascinating piece around 15 March. ‘At the Princeton conference last Saturday, Raymond Garthoff, a distinguished historian now with the Brookings Institute and a former CIA analyst, mentioned that we had recently learned of an FBI-Army double agent operation that may have spurred the Soviets to … Read more
In an article in the Journal of Popular Culture, (1) one of the editors of the Jonestown Report considers the role that conspiracy theories have played in the unfolding narrative of ‘Jonestown’. It is a worthwhile endeavour to which few scholars could bring better credentials. Rebecca Moore is a professor of religious studies at the … Read more
Obituaries Ace Hayes (1940-1998) by Daniel Brandt Ace R. Hayes, 58, an activist and political researcher who was well-known in the Portland, Oregon area, died on February 13, 1998 from an aneurism in the brain. Corruption and conspiracy in high places is the name of the game, but Ace was on the case. His broad … Read more
Paul Todd, Jonathan Bloch, and Patrick Fitzgerald London: Zedbooks, 2009, £14.99, p/b, £39.95 h/b This book is published as the debate rages in America about whether or not the activities of the Bush regime, specifically the torture of various combat detainees and suspects rendered from various parts of the world, should be subject to … Read more
Gore Vidal London: Abacus, 2002, £10.99, p/b Once upon a time collections of essays by Gore Vidal would appear every few years or so in this country in those neat little Panther paperbacks: On Our Own Now (1976), Matters of Fact and of Fiction (1978), Pink Triangle and Yellow Star (1982) for example. The … Read more
A stranger harvest The best single volume on the alien abduction connundrum I have come across is C.D. B. Bryan’s Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1995). In it Linda Moulton Howe, the American film-maker who made A Strange Harvest about the ‘cattle mutilation’ phenomenon in the United States, describes to … Read more
The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein, (Penguin 2007) X Films: true confessions of a radical filmmaker Alex Cox, London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008 Managing Britannia: Culture and Management in Modern Britain Robert Protherough and John Pick, imprint-academic.com, ISBN 978-097645539 Guns for Hire Tony Geraghty, Piatkus, 2008 A Peoples History of American Empire: a … Read more
This arrived from David Guyatt, prefaced by the following message: ‘Robin: This is being published on a couple of Internet sites shortly. I’ve given up trying to sell it or get any responsible journo/editor to carry my work forward. They all have chickened out, mostly without an explanation or even a courtesy call/reply. Fuck ’em … Read more
