William Blum New York: Soft Skull Press, 2002, $15 www.softskull.com The working lives of writers, especially writers of non-fiction like Blum – or me – are rather dull. To produce Lobster and my other bits and pieces I have to stay in one place, read e-mails every day, books, newspapers, visit libraries, go to … Read more
Will the Illuminati arrive in black helicopters or Nazi-designed UFO’s? We are currently awash in dotty conspiracy theories. This is an interesting phenomenon even if the content of most of them is almost totally unreliable – at best. Some of this is the spin-off from the Oklahoma bombing and the media’s discovery of the militias. … Read more
There is an unmistakable thread running through America’s move eastward since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Using their vast economic clout – in the form of loans, grants and sanctions – and backed by threatening military supremacy (to say nothing of the devious use of ‘unattributable’ mercenary groups such as the MPRI), … Read more
The view from the bridge Bilderberg and the EU The Diaries of former Liberal-Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown, (volume one 1988-1997, London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 2000) is a pretty uninteresting read with a couple of striking sections. Pages 42-46 contain his account of attending a Bilderberg meeting – by far the longest and most detailed account … Read more
Why do they do this? In the previous issue I referred to the fictitious comments attributed by Tony Blair to a doctor in Africa. They’ve done it again. In February Blair’s spin doctor in chief, Alastair Campbell, claimed to have saved a man from being beaten by muggers, The Mail on Sunday (23 February) traced … Read more
Given a WTO-driven free trade regime in a world without enforceable international law and with large accumulations of capital emerging from the supply of consumer wants (including guns, sex, labour, drugs, untaxed goods and unregulated financial services), the lifting of capital controls by the Reagan-Thatcher generation also meant the globalisation of criminality in all its … Read more
Assassination or ‘targeted killings’? Joshua Raines of the University of Iowa College of Law argues that although assassination, ‘narrowly defined’ [sic], is illegal, ‘targeted killings’ could well be permissible under ‘just war’ criteria. The US should therefore pass legislation that allows for ‘…targeted killings under a very narrow range of circumstances with adequate checks built … Read more
Dominic Streatfeild London: Hodder and Stoughton 2006, £20, h/b One of the gaps in the parapolitical library has been a great pull-together of the material on ‘mind control’. And Streatfield has done it, and done it rather well. He is a documentary film-maker and some of the chapters here read rather like scripts. All … Read more
Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre Nashville (US):Nelson, 2005, Distributed in the UK by New Holland Publishers, London, at £14.99, h/b RFIDs are acoming. RFIDs are radio frequency identification or identifiers, little chips which can be fixed to, implanted in, built into almost anything from paper money to human beings; and which can then be … Read more
Jeffrey M. Bale In this essay, and the notes and sources that accompany it, there are many words from languages – French, Spanish, Portugese etc – which should have various accents on them. These accents have been omitted to simplify type-setting. This essay was first published in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology and is reprinted … Read more
