The Invisible Library

Slate:

THE SKY, Dec. 20—We’re hovering 1,500 feet above Baltimore in a 200-foot blimp with Ron Paul’s name on it, and I’ve lost feeling in my hands. Elijah Lynn, vice president of the Ron Paul Blimp, passes around heat packets, the kind made for skiers. “Shake it,” he says. Over the past week, temperatures in the blimp have dropped to as low as 28 degrees. As the crew has learned, it’s hard out here for a blimp.

The Ron Paul Blimp launched last week in Elizabeth City, N.C,. and has since moved through Columbia, S.C., Richmond, Va., and now Baltimore, taking days off for bad weather. (You can track the blimp’s path via GPS here.) Anyone craning their neck blimpward sees one of two messages: “Who Is Ron Paul?” (an homage to Ayn Rand’s ” Who is John Galt?”) or “Ron Paul Revolution,” with the “evol” highlighted as a backwards “love.”

[…] There’s something perfectly Paulian about the blimp. It’s a stunt, in the best sense of the term—big, memorable, and utterly silly—a lot like Ron Paul’s candidacy itself, at least in the eyes of outsiders.

I have to quibble over this last assertion. Thanks to Ron Paul, scientists now have enough data to quantify nonsense, making the Ron Paul blimp objectively silly. No one in their right mind says,” Hay yeah, lets advertise our man for president with a blimp!” and then, not only puts forth enough effort to raise the money from like-minded idiots to put the damn thing in the air but then plasters it with allusions to Ayn Rand. The surviving members of Monty Python were preparing for a reunion, took one look at the Ron Paul Blimp and then Michael Palin turned to John Cleese and said, “Why bother?” Will Farrel, when contacted to play the part of Paul in an upcoming biopic said, “I’m sorry, I simply have too much dignity to act that ridiculous.” This is industrial strength silly, hardened in the hard heart of the most nonsensical blast furnace and constructed by mimes huffing ether.

It’s the perfect symbol for America in the 21st Century: a giant bag of hot air, drifting lazily overhead, threatening to fall on anyone and everyone for no good reason other than that it simply can. All that would make it better is if it were a nuclear powered blimp covered in depleted uranium spikes, built to substandard specs by a blimp design firm who outsourced the job to Bangalore and then had it constructed in China by eight year old sweatshop laborers, painted with toxic lead paint and imported by Wal-Mart.

Ben Franklin famously suggested that our national emblem should be, not the Bald Eagle, but the Wild Turkey. It only took 223 years but he finally got his wish.

Link via Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake.

China Mieville has a great article over at In These Times about Floating Utopias and the sinister, libertarian shadow, the tax-free micro-nation. It’s a fun read* but the best part is his summation of Libertarianism:

Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy.

Libertarians have always struck me as either extremely naive or excessively callous. They don’t want to be part of society if they have to share burdens and responsibilities or contribute (other than goods and services that they get cash money paid for). They want to drop out of society and be like hippies, only they still want to drive Hummers and have that leather couch they’ve always wanted.

(more…)

L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics was published in 1950:

Dianetics was first published May 9, 1950 by Hermitage House, a New York-based publisher of psychiatric textbooks whose head, Arthur Ceppos, was also on the Board of Directors of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation. Hubbard said that he wrote the book in only six weeks (though according to another Scientology source he wrote all 180,000 words in only three weeks).

The book became a nationwide bestseller, selling over 150,000 copies within a year. Due to the interest generated, a multitude of “Dianetics clubs” and similar organizations were formed for the purpose of applying Dianetics techniques. Hubbard himself established a nationwide network of Dianetic Research Foundations, offering Dianetics training and processing for a fee.Although it received a positive public response, Dianetics was strongly criticized by scientists and medical professionals for its scientific deficiencies. In response, Hubbard’s Dianetic Research Foundation issued a survey of “patients” to support his claims that Dianetics could achieve remarkable health benefits. See scientific evaluations of Dianetics for more on the scientific debate.

[…] According to Nielsen BookScan, Dianetics has sold 52,000 copies between 2001 and 2005. The book has been very aggressively marketed, for instance appearing as one of the twelve sponsors of the Goodwill Games under a $4 million agreement between Bridge Publications and Turner Broadcasting System. Bridge Publications also sponsors NASCAR racer and Scientologist Kenton Gray, who races as the “Dianetics Racing Team” and whose No. 27 Ford Taurus is decorated with Dianetics logos.Doubts have been expressed about whether the book’s continued sales have been manipulated by the Church of Scientology and its related organizations. According to a Los Angeles Times exposé published in 1990, “sales of Hubbard’s books apparently got an extra boost from Scientology followers and employees of the publishing firm [Bridge Publications]. Showing up at major book outlets like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, they purchased armloads of Hubbard’s works, according to former employees.”

He wrote 180,000 words in six weeks (or three weeks, depending on your source). If you ever wanted a technical definition of a hack, there it is. The Wikipedia link above for scientific evaluations of Dianetics is well worth the read. Even in the much touted “official neutral” tone, you can’t help but smell the stink of much deserved contempt. What really blows my mind is that people still believe this humbuggery, despite the naked, craven and unashamed marketing of the whole thing. Scientologists don’t even pretend they aren’t engaged in the most obvious pyramid scam ever, crassly advertising on NASCAR (imagine Jesus on the side of a car going 300 miles an hour. You can’t since everyone with one of those Christian fish seems to top out at about 25 mph) and fudging purchasing stats just for to garner the faintest pretext of credibility. “Dianetics is a number one bestseller, so it can’t all be bad!” Well, yeah, actually it can. The Da Vinci Code is a number one best seller and that was without its fans gobbling up armloads of books (on Dan brown’s dime) to artificially stack their ratings. And since when has the NYT bestseller list been the benchmark of credibility? All it measures is what crap is popular this week, and that it can be gamed so easily just proves it’s worthlessness.

And all of this is used as part of Scientology’s outreach method. Caveat Emptor is usually the preferred response to all this. Just chalk it up to the rubes being fleeced and sit back and smoke your cynical cigarette. But given how pliable people are to this sort of wish fulfillment Bullshit, it goes deeper than that. Even in the face of naked, sleazy marketing, enough people still want to be fooled that it validates these scumbags’ outlook. This mentality that it’s OK to take advantage of people just because they’re willing is deep rooted in our society. The Scientiologists, even more so than your garden verity Pope or Preacher are not motivated by a desire to help one another deal with the intrinsic absurdity and tragedy of life. A Scientologist’s faith grows out of a fetid pile of human fear of the unknown, fertilized by our exploitative economic structure and cultivated by a philosophy of capitalist greed and dressed up in the opulent rags of religion.

Who says you can’t get dangerous ideas from a book?

I’ve only heard of this Dinesh D’Souza fellow once before, when he was on the Colbert report, selling his shitty book about how progressives and free thinkers were responsible for 9/11 and the only way we’re going to defeat The Terrorists is by passing Sharia laws and becoming more like them. So, I wasn’t expecting clearheadedness from him when I read his little rant about the Virginia Tech shootings, in which he went off on a tangent, wondering aloud to his navel where all the atheists were about now and why wasn’t Richard Dawkins invited to speak at the memorial service.

That last little non sequiter there is the result of D’Souza not knowing the names of an other prominent atheists, ones who maybe live in the US rather than England. But apparently Mr. D’Souza thinks that Dr. Dawkins has nothing better to do than to fly half way around the world, calling press conferences to comment on tragedies that he has no personal connection with.

Setting aside the idiocy of this part of the argument, he goes on to make some ludicrous pronouncements about the character of people who do not share his belief in the grief counseling power of fairy tales:

Several atheists–who haven’t yet lost their fundamentalist habit of reading–took this sarcastic statement literally. “So what? The Pope hasn’t been invited either!” My point was that atheism has nothing to offer in the face of tragedy except C’est la vie. Deal with it. Get over it. This is why the ceremonies were suffused with religious rhetoric. Only the language of religion seems appropriate to the magnitude of tragedy. Only God seems to have the power to heal hearts in such circumstances. If someone started to read from Dawkins on why there is no good and no evil in the universe, people would start vomiting or leaving.One clever writer informs me that atheists don’t deny meaning, they simply insist that meaning is not inherent in the universe, it is created by us. Okay, pal, here’s the Virginia Tech situation. Go create some meaning and share it with the rest of us Give us that atheist sermon with you in the pulpit of the campus chapel. I’m not being facetious here. I really want to hear what the atheist would tell the grieving mothers.

First off, atheists don’t give sermons. We don’t tell other people what they should think and feel and then condescend to them when they have a different reaction than us. In the face of tragedy, some people cry, while others laugh or simply stare into space and wonder. We all react differently to grief but I have to wonder if telling the bereaved fairy tales about the dead playing volleyball in Cloud Cuckooland will really make anything better.

Secondly, as a number of people have pointed out, your God wasn’t exactly falling all over himself to stop the bullets or change the shooter’s mind. Just like Jesus didn’t use his super wood carving powers to build an unbreakable levy in New Orleans and Moses didn’t part the South Seas to stop the tsunami. But D’Souza has this one covered:

But perhaps God’s purpose in the world (I am only thinking aloud here) is to draw his creatures to him. And you have to admit that tragedies like this one at Virginia Tech help to do that!

Nice, huh? God lets bad things happen in order for us to become emotionally dependent on his stingy love and murderous whims. D’Souza thinks that not only is humanity suffering from a massive case of Battered Spouse Syndrome but that this is somehow a good thing.

Hat tip to PZ Myers.

Who is short, talks funny and is always huntin’ wabbits? Kim Jong-il, of course:

Karl Szmolinsky of  Eberswalde faces a grim Easter.

His gold medal pride,’ Robert der Grosse ‘, the largest rabbit in recorded Prussian history , is missing and believed dead in North Korea.

The 23 1/2 pound uberbunny was sent to Pyongyang last year along with 11 others “with the aim of setting up a breeding program to alleviate famine, “  only to end up on Dear Leader Kim Jong-il’s birthday banquet table on February 16th.

A commenter at Phyrangula pointed out that it was rather naive of Mr. Szmolinsky to think that his bunny’s would be put to good use. Philanthropy, good intentions and a kind heart will always put you in tyranny’s stew pot.

National Socialist Party nominates as it’s Presidential Candidate for 2008, John Taylor Bowles of South Carolina.

Not many Americans realise that there is an American Nazi party, or that they regularly field a candidate in elections. And while they are rather small and general considered to be extremist, even by other Fascist groups, the fact that they are still around in 2007 is a disturbing fact. Not so startling is that their candidate comes from South Carolina.

A few years ago, a South Carolina Baptist Church placed an add in the paper here (in Savannah, GA) advertising a Harry Potter book burning, so it’s no real surprise that American Nazis can find recruits there. Wherever you find book burnings, there’s probably a Nazi somewhere close by, washing the smell of kerosene off his fingers.

And sure, there are extremists all over— a friend of ours is moving to Portland, where they grow serial killers like cantaloupes. But still, it boggles the mind to think that more than sixty years after World War II, there would still be Nazis anywhere, let alone in the American South.

As always, if you really want to give yourself a case of the creeping squees, head on over to David Neiwert’s blog, Orcinus, where he keeps track of Minutemen, Nazis, Republicans and other hate groups.

Archy gives us a great review of Ken Ham’s Creationist Museum, focusing on the story of the Ark:

Ever since the book of Genesis became known to a broad audience, some twenty-four centuries ago, skeptics have questioned the possibility of fitting two of all species of land animals into a single boat. In the early days of the Church, apologists made a careful count of the number of species in the world (arriving at a laughably low number*), made the largest possible estimate of the size of the ark**, and carefully arranged the animals into that space along with enough food for a year and Noah’s family. These methods were sufficient to satisfy the faithful until the Renaissance, when sailors began bumping into entire continents with hundreds, even thousands, of new species. Then scientists began finding hundreds of very large, extinct species. How did they fit into the story?

The Ark story is one of my favorites, as it very concisely illustrates the one legitimate concern that Creationists have: that science will eventually undermine faith by pointing out how idiotic Biblical literalism really is. We simply know too many solid facts about history, biology, anthropology, archeology, history and physics to take these stories at face value. There is no way all the species of the world could fit in an ark that wouldn’t be the size of Cuba. Then their are the dinosaurs:

Dinosaurs, and other extinct animals known only by fossils, create a special problem. Not only do fossils multiply the number of animals that need to fit onto the ark; many of those fossil animals are very large. Some Biblical literalists chose simply to deny that they really existed. Others have suggested that fossils are the remains of a couple of practice creation that God did before making us. That idea has fallen out of favor, because it breaks the rules of taking the Bible at its word. No, the only real answer must be that dinosaurs were on the ark. This is the solution that Ken Ham embraces for his Creation Museum.

He wins point s for imagination, I’ll give him that. But Museums aren’t just  about imagination, and they most definitely aren’t about affirming outmoded beliefs just to quiet those pesky doubts caused by encountering facts.

Seems our old pal, Harun Yahya is back with another book. This one sounds like a winner:

PARIS (AFP) - Tens of thousands of French schools and universities have received copies of a Turkish book refuting Darwin’s theory of evolution and describing it as “the true source of terrorism.”

The education ministry said Friday that it had warned school and university directors that the textbook is not in line with the recognized curriculum and that they should disregard it.

Entitled “The Atlas of Creation,” the 770-page book by Turkish author Harun Yahya quotes several passages from the Koran and asserts that “human beings did not evolve (from another species) but were indeed created.”

[…] The book features a photograph of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center with the caption: “Those who perpetuate terror in the world are in fact Darwinists. Darwinism is the only philosophy that values and incites conflict.”

The theories of Charles Darwin are “the true source of terrorism,” it said.

Well, I’m convinced. I mean, the book is 770 pages long! Anything that long must be well researched. I bet it’s just bursting at the seems with well constructed and irrefutable truth.I wonder what other pieces of fine literature these schools have been gifted with?

The official said that the Church of Scientology had also embarked on a mass distribution of literature to schools a few years ago.

Via PZ Myers.

Note: due to the sudden uptick in comments for this post, I’ve bumped it up to the top of the page.

At the library yesterday we received a donation of DVDs from Bridge Publications Inc. the publishing arm of the Church of Scientology. We regularly receive unsolicited donations from publishers but as these DVDs were lectures by L. Ron Hubbard on Scientology, I was intrigued.

Now, Tom Cruise and his nutty ass aside, Scientology has got to be the single weirdest pyramid scheme mistaken for a cult, masquerading as a religion out there, and that’s taking into account the Church of Latter Day Saints and their Mormon Underwear.

What’s really fascinating is not just how blatant the Church of Scientology is about being so totally made up but how many people still join, thinking that they will somehow find joy and happiness and completion in the half baked proselytizing of some hack science fiction Author. I guess there are an awful lot of Star Fuckers out there who think that if they have a really good audit and become an Operating Thetan that they’ll get to meet Tom Cruise, his zombie wife and their soon-to-be super fucked up baby.

But that’s not the interesting part. What is fascinating is the hokey Space Opera that plays a large role in the basic scripture of Scientology. Wikipedia gives us a run down of the highlights. My favorite is this part:

The Marcab Confederacy is said to be one of the most powerful galactic civilizations still active. He describes it as:

various planets united into a very vast civilization which has come forward up through the last 200,000 years, formed out of the fragments of earlier civilizations. In the last 10,000 years they have gone on with a sort of decadent kicked-in-the-head civilization that contains automobiles, business suits, fedora hats, telephones, spaceships — a civilization which looks almost an exact duplicate but is worse off than the current US civilization.
(”Auditing Comm Cycles”)

The capital of the Confederacy is said to be “one of the tail stars of the Big Dipper“, probably Alkaid, a star 108 light years distant from Earth. The Marcabians used to rule Earth at some point in the past but lost control of it due to “losses in war and other things”.

The Marcabians had an oppressive political system: “if [a person] was considered to be in contempt of court or anything like that, [he was] simply fried since there was a curtain of radioactive material which went clear across the front of the bench anywhere that a witness or anybody would stand, and so on.” (”History and development of processes: question and answer period”) They invented income tax as a means of punishment, with the death penalty imposed for making even the slightest mistake in returns — “one comma wrong and it’s ‘dead forever’.” The Marcabians also appear to have been distinctly socialistic, having “had plan balanced economies” (presumably some form of planned economy). (”E-Meter Actions, Errors in Auditing”)

They were also keen on motor racing and every once in a while Scientologists undergoing auditing “will run into [memories of] race tracks and race-track drivers”. Hubbard described this in some detail in a 1960 lecture:

They had turbine-generated cars that went about 275 miles an hour (443 km/h). They ran with a high whine. I notice they’ve just now invented the motor again. And they had tracks that were booby-trapped with atom bombs, and they had side bypasses. The tracks were mined, and the grandstands were leaded-paned.
(”Create and Confront”)

The tracks were deliberately designed to be as dangerous as possible, with “a mountain that you went up to the top of and fell off”, and death was commonplace. This, however, was not a problem, as Marcabian medicine was so good that nobody ever died permanently. According to author Russell Miller, Hubbard liked to reminisce to his followers about “how he was a race-car driver in the Marcab civilization”. One of the people who accompanied him aboard his private fleet in the late 1960s described Hubbard’s stories of life with the Marcabians:

LRH said he was a race driver called the Green Dragon who set a speed record before he was killed in an accident. He came back in another lifetime as the Red Devil and beat his own record, then came back and did it again as the Blue Streak. Finally he realized all he was doing was breaking his own records and it was no game any more.
(Miller, p.280)

Hubbard describes exactly this in his lecture “Create and Confront”, telling how he went through multiple lives as a Marcabian racing driver with names like The Green Rocket, The Red Comet, The Silver Streak, The Gold Bomb, and so on.

Hubbard stated that the Marcab Confederacy was now using Earth as a “prison planet”. When a person dies or “drops the body”, as Scientologists put it, his thetan is pulled into a Marcab-established “implant station” or “report station”. The idea that Earth is a “prison planet”, maintained by “entheta beings” or Targs who dumped their enemies on Earth, was first put forward in a 1952 lecture, “Electropsychometric Scouting: Battle of the Universes”. A steady flow of flying saucers is said to be still dropping off more entheta beings.

The report area for most has been Mars. Some women report to stations elsewhere in the Solar System. There are occasional incidents about Earth report stations. The report stations are protected by screens. The last report station on Earth was established in the Pyrenees.
(Scientology: A History of Man)

The thetans are brainwashed and sent back to Earth, where they find a new body to inhabit. Only Scientologists who have reached the level of “Operating Thetan” are said to be able to avoid this fate.

[…] Hubbard mentions a number of other alien civilizations in his writings, though he does not go into any detail about them. These include the “Three-and-a-half Invaders, … the Psi Galaxy, Galaxy 82.” (”The Story of a Static”) According to the official Church of Scientology notes accompanying the lectures in which he alluded to them, these were “made up” (presumably for humorous effect), contrasting with the supposedly real invader forces and civilizations cited above.

I love that last part. He just made up some shit to throw people off. Ya think?

But there are some very telling details to this elaborate story. Most notable (beyond the ridiculous time scales—Xenu apparently ruled this quadrant of the Galaxy for 2 Trillion Years) is how this advanced civilization that had beat death, liked racing cars and setting off random nukes, was just like the US in the 1950’s, only they were all evil Socialists who killed the inherently good natured and capitalistic Thetans for sport and their technology was just like ours (down to even flying through space in Douglas DC-8s).

What’s telling about all this is that it emphasizes just what an unimaginative hack Hubbard was as a sci-fi author. He couldn’t conceive of a 200,000 year old space faring civilization that was any more advanced than the US at the height of the Cold War. Did they speak English and watch Leave it to Beaver as well? Take two hour long, four Martinni lunches? Chase their secretaries around the office making lascivious faces? Enjoy a tight crew cut?

Maybe back in the fifties and sixties when Hubbard made this stuff up it sounded sci-fi and futuristic but fifty years on, it creeks like a badly made B-movie, complete with rubber aliens, technobabble and cardboard flying saucers.

It would be amusing if it weren’t for the thousands of people all over the world who fall prey to this nonsense. Bellow the silly Space Opera and gibberish about Thetans is an organization that takes in millions of dollars from people who are just looking for answers in a weird and confusing world, exploiting them and encouraging cult-like behavior, just to make a buck.

Operation Clambake is an organization dedicated to exposing this fraud. Drop on by and let them know they aren’t alone, that Tom Cruise and the crazy science Fiction writer he worships aren’t going to win. A few trillion years form now, people will ask what was Scientology all about and will be able to snicker and laugh, they way w do now about other religions that have fallen out of fashion, like the cult of Mithra or Christianity.

Yesterday, I received this frankly baffling email:

Hi. My name is Eugene Gershin. Perhaps we have met online, but more probably you don’t know me from Adam. I monitor blogs for SamsonBlinded, and came across your post.

I’d like to welcome you to look at Obadiah Shoher’s blog. Obadiah - an anonymous Israeli politician - writes extremely controversial articles about Israel, the Middle East politics, and terrorism.

Shoher is equally critical of Jewish and Muslim myths, and advocates political rationalism instead of moralizing.

Google banned our site from the AdWords, Yahoo blocked most pages, and Amazon deleted all reviews of Obadiah’s book, Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict.

Nevertheless, 170,000 people from 78 countries read the book.

Various Internet providers ban us periodically, but you can look up the site on search engines. The mirror www.terrorism-in-israel.com/blog currently works.

Please help us spread Obadiah’s message, and mention the blog in one of your posts, or link to us from invisiblelibrary.blogspot.com. I would greatly appreciate your comments.

Best wishes,
Eugene Gershin

First off, Eugene is right, I don’t know him from Adam. I don’t recognize him form the comment threads on any of my regular reads and he’s never commented on this blog. And seeing as he wants a link form the old blogger version that I shut down over a year ago, I’m guessing he hasn’t read anything I’ve written here lately.

But more to the point: Who is Obadiah Shoher, and how exactly does one become an anonymous Israeli politician? Israel hasn’t been around that long and it’s not that big so as to have politicians that could be anonymous, if we can even grant that there ever could be such a beast as an anonymous politician to begin with. I suspect they sit at the same lunch table with tiny giants and compassionate conservatives.

Googling his name doesn’t really answer the question, as it’s apparently a pen name for someone who describes himself as having a Machiavellian perspective, which is refreshing in it’s honesty, if still a bit scary.

Shoher’s “political rationalism” advocates an Imperialist Israel that controls the entire Middle East. He also applauded the war between Israel and Hezbullah over the summer, and seems to advocate war (nuclear or just good old killing) with well, everyone within reach of Israel’s missiles. It’s a little hard to make out just what policies he’s advocating from his site’s entries as they ramble all over the map of Cloud Kuckooland without ever making a real point. But the general impression one gets is that he’s awfully fond of the idea of starting wars he’ll never have to personally fight. Which makes me wonder how he managed to avoid getting appointed to some high ranking post in the Bush Administration. I guess that’s one of the downsides to being an anonymous politician.

I don’t know what to make of Amazon deleting reviews of his silly book, unless they were simply so racist and militant that they constituted hate speech. Which is not out of the question. Right wingers like Shoher tend to bring out the worst in those with poor impulse control and childish world views.

Why they would think I might be interested in promoting such bloody and fantastical nonsense escapes me. I doubt that Eugene is really singling me out here. This is very likely just a rare bit of kook spam but I clearly got on someone’s list because if something I wrote here or on my old blog.

So, let me make something clear: I never have and never will espouse an ideology like Shoher’s. I’m morally opposed to Imperialism and war, no matter what the excuse. If my anti-religious stance has given someone the impression that I’m just another antimuslim or antisemite ranter, let me clear that up as well: I’m opposed to religious indoctrination, not religious people. You have every right to believe any damn fool thing you like. But I am neither obligated to play make believe with you or to suffer your ignorant jibber jabber, especially when that barely coherent rambling involves celebrating murder and advocating killing as if it were just part of the daily routine of politics.

I’m not in the habit of discouraging people from reading this site but Mr. Shoher and Eugene, you are not welcome here. Tolerance only goes so far but it does not mean that I will suffer idiots and fools.