not sensible exactly

I got to ask a co-worker at lunch today if round planes made any sense in the pre-Stealth era.

I'm not in a habit of doing this, but the co-worker is actually a pilot and is good enough at physics to point out (sometimes gently) when I'm way off on my physical intuition.

Dave Emory has been on a "Nazi flying saucer" kick lately; he claims that among the awful things that are about to happen is an "invasion" by very human "space men" in very earthly flying saucers followed by a mass hysteria accompanied by mass exterminations etc. that are common in Dave Emory scare stories.

He figures that the Nazis perfected flying saucer technology toward the end of World War II, after which the technology went mostly underground, and in the meantime it's only gotten more sophisticated, etc. His theory is that the Nazis figured out how to power a spinning disc using a jet engine in the center. The problem here, as far as I can tell, is the same one that flying wings (precursors to stealth aircraft) suffered: before fly-by-wire they were unstable.

I have no idea whether an industrial grade flying saucer would be possible now (in the stealth era), but that's not the point. Not Dave's point, anyway; in Dave's world everything evil leads back to the Nazis, and while modern flying saucers might well be full of splendid blond beasts, or whatever, if they couldn't be built until the 1970s it's hard to blame the Nazis exactly.

On the other hand, underground Nazi connections to illegal drugs made this week's 10 Things; Dame Helen Mirren apparently stopped using cocaine when she discovered its connections to, among other people, Klaus Barbie.

And while I probably shouldn't bring this up again, this behavior of associating one's own behavior with its distant effects is at the heart of what Misha Glenny goes on about in McMafia. Good on ya Dame Emma, whoever you are.

There's a new Dave Emory/WFMU episode up; I'm hoping to get to it this weekend. I'm still digging out from under the pile of 1973 Jean Shepherd that accumulated while I was away. Soon oh soon.

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why I link to Scott Williams

Within modern evangelical Christianity there are three broad classes of people: ordinary sinners, professional Christians, and celebrity Christians. The last two categories typically overlap with each other, but rarely do you find someone who is in the first and also in either of the others.

Scott Williams may be one of those people. I'm not entirely sure, since I think he considers himself post-evangelical. Regardless, his month-old posts train wrecks (about his drug use) and grind (about his days as a church planter) certainly secure his position in the first category with hints of the second.

I'm grateful for his example, not as a former church planter, nor as a former drug user, but as somebody who has the humility and the honesty to own up to being both. One of the cliches of contemporary Christianity is to pat ones self on the back, saying "yes but I'm not one of those Christians (I'm one of the good/safe/reasonable ones)." People like Scott, who apparently have emerged from a terrible life experience broken but not ruined make it more difficult to resort to that cliche; so I'm doubly grateful.

recent and upcoming

Here are a few things that didn't merit posts by themselves, but that I wanted to mention before they slipped away altogether:

• My recent post regarding Fishbrick got mentioned without a namecheck on the most recent episode of Jawbone Radio; honest, Neil, I didn't mean anything by it: just because I haven't seen many weblogs that mention both The Drudge Report and Metafilter doesn't mean that nobody does it. Maybe I should just get out more, etc.
  
• Friend and friend of a friend Sarah Musick is working on a novel, and posting about it at her personal (as opposed to public) weblog. We haven't seen any of it and don't expect to right away. You go girl.
  
• I picked up a copy of James Tabor's book The Jesus Dynasty at the bookseller inside the Liverpool Street Tube Station. I'm tempted to dismiss it as an "archaeologist starts to believe his own press releases, doesn't know when to stop" book, but it's deeper than that. Also, as far as I can tell England has broken up with Christianity, but doesn't know when to stop calling. This really merits a post of its own, but I doubt I can do the topic justice.
• I also picked up copies of Misha Glenny's book McMafia and William Young's novel The Shack at a bookseller inside Heathrow down near the British Airways lounge. I'm not quite halfway through McMafia, but frankly it scares me to death. I'm reading the section about how Dubai overhauled its public image and is becoming a world financial hub. The book definitely merits a post or two on its own, but I'm so busy right now I can't see when it will happen. Let's just say organized crime is bad.
• Randall Balmer is talking about Charles Grassley over at Religion Dispatches. Unfortunately Balmer has decended into use labels (in this case, Religious Right) to scare his audience instead of trusting them with complicated facts, but he's noted that Grassley is having to pay for his ongoing investigation into people who might otherwise be considered his political allies. At least I think that's what Balmer is trying to say, but because he'd rather talk about a convenient boogeyman he's making a mess of the story. I'm only mentioning it because I think the whole Grassley investigation is fascinating.
• The Olympics start in four days. I won't be watching, and I don't care about anything that happens there. Except maybe whether Ryan Hall does well in the marathon. And what sort of trouble various Tibetan groups can cause. I might be interested if there were a potential Jesse Owens story in the offing, but I don't think there is. I don't think the Olympics matter, and I'd be perfectly happy if this were the last one. That goes double for the Winter Olympics.
  

Whew.

Marcus Conant at the Commonwealth Club of California

Today's episode of the Commonwealth Club of California podcast featured Marcus Conant discussing the state and future of HIV/AIDS; a video feed is available here; right now there's no link to the audio podcast. Here are somethings we learned today:

• The average American male will have twenty-five sexual partners in a lifetime
• The average African male will have twenty-five sexual partners in a year
• Homosexuals comprise roughly four percent of the population in the States
• Twenty percent of black men in New York City are HIV-positive
  
• A heterosexual HIV epidemic requires a substantial pool of low-risk HIV-positive people

This last point was news to me: Conant discusses the fact that HIV in Africa spread around truck routes, mostly due to the fact that truck drivers, who were the primary vector for the disease, passed it on to prostitutes, bar girls, etc. who lived near the truck route, who then passed it on to their domestic partners, who passed it on to women in the area who had nothing to do with truck drivers. In this case the low-risk people are the second group of local women, who by comparison to the truckers, prostitutes, bar girls, etc. lead low-risk lifestyles.

What a depressing story.

Conant goes on to suggest that a similar low-risk HIV-positive group is forming in the States among black and Hispanic groups and in regions where crystal meth is popular, but he didn't speculate on when the long-awaited heterosexual HIV epidemic will arrive in the States.

Have I mentioned recently that And The Band Played On is one of my favorite books? It's a shame Randy Shilts died and nobody picked up the mantle. Edward Hooper's book The River takes a speculative look backward from about 1976 toward the origins of HIV in Africa, but so far as I know nobody has taken a wide-angle look at HIV/AIDS from the end of Shilts's book forward.

Shilts's book is an excellent mix of small stories and big ones, and the resulting HBO movie is worth watching even if you don't have time for the book. As I recall, though, the book chooses a somewhat artificial end point: the identification and classification of the virus. And as I recall Shilts took the position that somehow Ronald Reagan prevented the discovery of an AIDS vaccine; that position hasn't aged especially well. I wonder what changes Shilts would make if he were alive today and could revise and expand his book.

Here's an update: the World Health Organization says the threat of a global HIV pandemic outside high-risk groups is over.

Dave Emory on Peak Oil

Our dear Dave has been holding forth about Nazi oil for the last couple of weeks. I think he spent two episodes reading from a novel about Nazi technology for converting coal into liquid fuel, and then last week he spent the whole hour talking about how the whole Peak Oil story is, you guessed it, Nazi propaganda.

Dave Emory

This week's Dave Emory is a continuation of last week's: he's still talking about environmentalism and Nazis, what he calls envirofascism. In this case he's talking about the roots of environmentalism in pre-Nazi Germany and how it stems from the notion that Germans in a sense grew up out of their land (the concept of "blood and soil") and how it developed a spiritual component in the minds of some German thinkers and led them to think that they should rid their homeland of any ethnic group that didn't grow up out of that same soil in the same sense.

Like I said before, Dave's a fascinating storyteller, and it takes a while to tune in to what he's saying. I'm starting to believe that when he says "fascist" he almost always means "Nazi," which makes for difficult listening for me because I naturally think of Benito Mussolini when I hear the word "fascist," complete with visions of castor oil and so forth.

I'm starting to reconsider the idea that every ethnic group should have a homeland, mostly on the basis of what I'm hearing from Our Dear Dave. I guess I ascribe to the notion that political systems can be organized from inferior to superior depending on how many people are effectively in power, from family to tribe to nation, from monarchy to democracy, but with allowance for the fact that in a democracy the minority is always persecuted to the extent that the will of the people is directly examined and executed. Unfortunately democracies tend to be full of people who dislike and mistrust each other for not entirely rational reasons, and people who look beyond their own interests in favor of the greater good are rare. So I guess what I'm saying is that I consider democracies superior to monarchies (as a first cut) but suspect that tribes hate each other, and are less likely to behave badly if each has its own homeland.

It's a tough problem, and Emory highlights an interesting idea: that one ethnic group would play off a minority group in an enemy country against the minority for its own benefit.

Unfortunately Dave rarely quantifies, so it's hard to say from week to week whether what he's saying is sensible or not.

The Religion Report

I love ABC Radio National's The Religion Report, presented by Stephen Crittenden. I'd love to find a similarly well-informed show in the States.

This week's episode focuses on Scientology, but he usually focuses on the religious issues that are prominent in Australia: Anglicans, the Uniting Church, the Exclusive Brethren, Hillsong Church, and of course the ongoing issues surrounding Australia's relationship to its Muslim minority.

I picked up on The Religion Report after visiting Australia in 2005; it's one of two (the other being The Night Air) ABC Radio National podcasts I listen to on a regular basis.

Dave Emory

Today was a busy day, and it's late, but I'd like to spend a little time on Dave Emory.

I find him fascinating because he's telling a large involved story in which the world is a bad magical place but is still explicable. And most of the time he's consistent: when he starts delving into Proper Nouns it's usually easy to guess whether they're going to be Good Guys or Bad Guys. And it's a story that I find interesting but can't get motivated about. I can't imagine what I'd do (personally) to stop the underground Reich, even if I was totally convinced that it existed and is the prime mover in world history as we know it.

In understanding Emory it's helpful to know what his jargon means. Tonight I'd like to briefly touch on a couple of terms he uses.

Going Native. This is his term particularly for Germans in particular using ethnic groups in large countries to thwart the aims of those countries. The most recent episode of For The Record (527?) refers to Germans using the Kosovars to break up the now-former Yugoslavia. 

Emory talks a lot about connections between the underground Reich and modern Islamic groups. When he refers to Islamofascism he means something different from most people who use the term, because he believes the underground Reich has financial if not familial ties to modern Islamic terrorist groups.

Splendid Blond Beast. Evidently this term goes back to Friedrich Nietzche, but Emory just loves it. Right now I honestly have no idea what he means by it, much less whether his usage is in reference to the book by Christopher Simpson.

Dave Emory

I've added a link for Dave Emory; it's the one for the archive at WFMU, which carries his show and offers a limited archive; I listen to his WFMU podcast. Dave's wikipedia page refers to him as an "anti-fascist," which is sort of an anti-description, since it says what he's against but doesn't say what he's for. I'm not sure what would be a positive description might be; an unflattering description might be "conspiracy theorist," although unlike your garden variety conspiracy theorist he doesn't apparently do any original research.

I like Emory's podcast because he generally isn't pushing a product and because he has a consistent narrative style with long and fairly-consistently told stories. I dislike the fact that it generally has ten minutes of a show devoted to old music (either 78rpm records or Edison cylinders) tacked onto the end, which makes for uncomfortable listening on a stand-alone digital media device with poor fast forward capabilities. I also dislike the fact that he evidently produces two half-hour segments as separate shows, and pads each of them with repeated information about his various resources, websites, and services, all recommended with outsized modifiers.

Like most true believers he has a private vocabulary with terms that may shift slightly from usage to usage; the most important of these is milieu, which as far as I can tell (this after thirty or so shows) means "financial support network," encompassing organizations that are structurally linked, linked by sharing personnel (possibly in the past), or by sharing money (also, possibly in the past). It may also mean "conspiracy." I'm not sure. Also like most true believers his arguments often rest on crucial but unstated premises, and finding these makes for an interesting game.

He is most interested in what he calls the "underground Reich," meaning whoever was left of the Nazis (mainly Martin Bormann) at the end of World War II plus their money. At different times Emory has linked these people to modern Germany, various neo-Nazi groups, Islamic groups, the Bush family, the Republican Party generally, the Dalai Lama, various Green Parties, Harvard University, and (I may have misunderstood) Pacifica Radio. He also occasionally spends time on Japanese nationalist groups, or the Kennedy assassination, or what have you, but the underground Reich is his bread and butter.

His premise (more or less) is that the Allies left Germany's (and Japan's) infrastructure more or less intact after World War II not to preserve stability and avoid hyperinflation and economic collapse, but rather because they were conspiring with German industrial interests and/or the Nazis themselves. Much else of what he has to say follows from this premise.

In the most recent episode, for example, he suggested that the underground Reich was behind the breakup of Yugoslavia, and was also involved in the formation of the Eighties-era German Green Party. He suggests that various German interests are involved in homeland movements for various ethnic groups (I think the Bosnians, in this case) because they want to cripple the countries where these groups live. In another episode he suggested that these same people are behind the Tibetan freedom movement, the Mongolian nationalist movement, and possibly the Hawaiian secessionist movement.

All told he makes for interesting listening; he's smug but not overly strident, offended but not entitled. Like most self-proclaimed authorities he often gloats unnecessarily over bad news and he tends to believe his own opinions. But his is primarily an exercise in storytelling and it's more interesting than most.