by Richard Thieme

It is getting dark early, and although it’s almost spring, it feels like late autumn, less and less light each day, cold winds biting our faces as we turn instinctively from the wind … when we ought to be looking into the wind, looking for clues to how to trim our sails and adapt to a world that will never be quite the same again.

In Berlin recently (I was there to keynote a conference for security, military, intel, police, talking about creativity, thinking about the ways we think) I met a friend for coffee a few blocks from the Reichstag in the former East Berlin. The coffee shop was dark, with warm cozy nooks and the best coffee I had in Berlin. It was reputed, my friend said, to be a hang-out for bad guys during the Third Reich, but that may have been just a story. More tangible, however, was a metal plate on the outside wall of the coffee shop, pockmarked with Soviet bullets that had taken out a machine gun nest when they took the city in 1945.

My friend was 18 when the wall came down.

He said, we knew the flaws of the system, knew what we didn’t like, but it’s all we had. Until the wall came down, it never occurred to us that it would fall.

He was inside the system, in other words, and however apparent the economic stresses were to outside observers, it was all he knew, and we humans adapt to whatever is around us, we assume that what was there when we went to sleep will be there when we wake up, despite what we know – the impermanence of all things, the certainty that all systems have flaws, masked by momentary strengths, and that every structure, every civilization we humans have built, will inevitably fall.

I have faith we will survive, another said. I just don’t know how.

To which I replied, the dinosaurs adapted. They became birds.

But the finch, alas, outside my window doesn’t seem to remember the good old T-Rex days.

One can imagine that after sixty million years reclining in the tropical sun, dinosaurs never dreamed that a big snowball rock headed for the earth had something else in mind – a plan, if it was a plan, that wasn’t a plan, a happenstance, something that happened to happen.

In an art museum in Berlin, a guard, a Turk, walked up to me and asked, do you think America will go the way of the Soviet Union and break into pieces?

I asked if he had been reading the Russian economist who predicted that would happen in 2010.

No, he said, he was just thinking about what was happening.

The same question was implicit in my friend’s statement about the fall of the wall. Inside the system, one believes, it won’t happen. Outside, the system often looks ready to be transformed into something else.

A triceratops into a chicken.

Another question, too, has come up a couple of times. It was asked last night at the gym by a guy I had just met. Our conversation quickly went to real things, darkening skies and cold winds, and he said suddenly, I have gold at home. portable gold, like the chains the Vietnamese wore when they crossed borders with nothing else.

Where are you planning to go, he asked, if we have to leave?

A couple of years ago, another friend, a security expert, said with a conspiratorial whisper in the hallway of a hotel, hey, come here. We went off into a corner and he asked, where are you planning to go if we have to leave?

One preferred France, the other New Zealand. Of course, New Zealand and France might have something to say about that. Like Canada, which is intensifying scrutiny of the documents of Americans going there to work, because of the increased flow of people seeking medical care or jobs. Borders tend to become more porous when times get tough.

Those questions did not used to come up. Do you think the center will hold? Where will you go if things fall apart, if the streets ring with the wrong kinds of noise, noise that frightens not only children but parents … where will you go, where will you try to go, that is, when the going gets tough?

The cityscape of Berlin brims with haunting reminders of the Third Reich and the Soviet occupation – with the history, that is, of most of the twentieth century. Turn a corner near the S-bahn on Friedrichstrasse and there’s a statue of children, suitcases open and empty. faces despairing, about to be taken to their deaths. Or cross an immense plaza near the Opera House and find in the center a plastic window looking down at empty bookshelves, a reminder of 25,000 books being burned on the spot in 1933. Or look at the largest remnant of the wall, see excavated cellars under the headquarters of the SS, and punch a button to listen to Himmler’s voice reminding people not to be soft and object to the murder of their “good Jew,” that friend they think should be an exception.

Here in America we do not have reminders of the slaughter, for example, of native Americans, brutality to slaves, or sites of internment camps for Japanese. We have theme parks, we have movies. we have video games, fantasy worlds without end.

All I am saying, I guess, is that we do need to remember, remember what happens to happen, so we have a chance for resilience, dignity, heroism, even, when the lights go out. when we hope the noises in the night are work crews fixing the power lines, when we hope things aren’t as bad as they look. When we hope that our leaders can make a difference, somehow, as we trudge through the bad news toward tomorrow.

When we hope that we, too, can make a difference, by refusing to be anything but our best selves. By refusing to do nothing when part of us wants to hide.

How do you go bankrupt? someone asked Ernest Hemingway.

Two ways, he said. Gradually and suddenly.

That’s how the wall went down. That’s how the wolves of Wall Street stripped the skin from our bodies and from the body politic, too, with lots of allies along the way.

What they all had in common was the refusal to be aware of what they were doing. There were cracks, but the light didn’t get in. Now it is, a little.

This crisis will drive some to desperate measures. The center will be tested. We, too, here and now, will be tested.

But nothing is inevitable, as Marshal McLuhan said, if we contemplate what we are doing. Then we have options. That’s all I ask of our leaders, and myself, to have the courage to be aware, not to hide from consequences as certain as the seas rising when the ice melts, not to turn our backs on the one thing we humans have in bad times, the ability to respond to whatever life brings with courage, elasticity, and a willingness to see and then to act.

The Second Edition is a periodic reflection by author and speaker Richard Thieme. Subscribe (or unsubscribe) by using the Contact Form.

Richard Thieme speaks and writes about the issues of our times, with an emphasis on the impact of various technologies on the structures of our lives, on creativity in work and life, and how to reinvent ourselves in response to challenges. You might call his focus “practical spirituality.” If interested in having him speak to your organization, use the Contact Form.

by Richard Thieme

The cornerstone of capitalism, it has been said, is a handshake.

The legal embellishments that constitute the law books lining the shelves of lawyers, those laws are footnotes to the many ways people have betrayed trust, betrayed the letter of the law, the spirit of the contract, the meaning of the handshake.

Trust, not money, makes the world go around. Money is an emblem of the exchange of trust. It doesn’t exist except as an invention.

And trust has been broken.

Yes, it’s all smoke and mirrors, and everyone who looked already knew that. That isn’t news. The news, as Alan Greenspan said pathetically in front of Congress, was that the moguls and bankers and investment gurus did not act according to their own self interest. They did not just risky things but insanely stupid risky things and thought they could hide from their karma. They betrayed the trust of one another when they made deals, invented bogus instruments or used good ones unwisely, and they betrayed the trust of all of us. Nor will they pay the penalty they should. They never do. They never do.

Every structure built to ensure trust of those people and their institutions is now suspect. Every one.

We trusted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to keep good books and not take risks beyond their ability to manage risk or ours to understand what they were doing.

They betrayed that trust.

We trusted agencies like Standard and Poor’s to rate corporations accurately so we had a clue when we saw AAA on a bond or note.

They betrayed that trust.

We trusted the wise old men of the Fed, sitting on their dais like judges, looking down on plain people, to think about their actions, follow out the implications, and heed voices of caution and alarm.

They betrayed that trust.

We trusted the SEC to ensure that a failure to open the books by a man with a charming smile and ties to many Wall Street friends, so easy with his lies and deceit, we trusted that his lack of transparency would raise red flags, we trusted the SEC to do their job and not sell us out because they were complicit, equally criminal in their acts, or just plain dumb.

They betrayed that trust.

The astonishing thing about this country, at the present moment, is that our rage took the form of lowering the approval rating of our leaders and voting them out of office in the belief, apparently, that we might rebuild trust. Is that good will, a belief in democracy and its processes that distinguishes Americans for the moment from rioting Greeks in the streets of Athens? Or are we simply stunned for the moment, trying to understand the enormity of what just happened?

That trusting attitude, that faith in the process to turn the tide, would certainly be commendable. It is good when people are high and dry and even better when we’re wet. We are all wet, now, the showering spray of the waves hitting us all, but do we see that the sea is still coming in, higher and higher, not a tsunami but a rising tide going higher than anyone dared believe? Do we hear that glub glub glub as people try to make sane hopeful statements with their mouths already in the water?

Let’s return for a moment to those thrilling days of yesteryear when the streets were not so quiet and the view of the Viet Nam war was not, as lately, seen through a telescope wrong way around, little distant people far away and tiny puffs of smoke as they explode.

I remember it well. Toward the end of the seventies and its ravages – the war that tore us apart, the assassinations, the corruption in the government from the president to the FBI to the CIA – some of the people then in power realized the danger of a populace betrayed and enraged by betrayal. The cost of the war was a million lives and grief for the dead was a constant wail, the breakdown of constitutional guarantees was nearly absolute. Looking at the broken glass and burned-out buildings, some came to the conclusion that “the excesses of democracy” as one called the demonstrations and organized resistance to that chaos, that insanity, must not be allowed to repeat.

This is not a conspiracy theory. That’s a quote from one of the participants in the Bilderburg Conference at the end of that era. People of power from across the globe discussed with civility what must be done in a context of mutual self-interest. That’s not a conspiracy, just because the conversations take place behind closed doors and the press doesn’t cover them because the press are invited guests, embedded as it were, and sworn to be silent.

No, not a conspiracy at all. This is the essential nature of oligarchic structures at a new level of trans-global mutuality that converged into the foundation of the global financial networks we inhabit today.

“Trust us,” our leaders have recently said even as they threaded the machinery of surveillance and social control through our lives. To an outside observer, it might looks indeed like the apparatus of a police state. But that sounds like “conspiracy” as they use the word to denigrate an opposing position, and I am not talking about conspiracy.

I am talking about history. I am talking about reality.

And the fact that they betrayed our trust.

Because of S&P, we dare not buy bonds, because who knows what they might be worth? Because of the SEC, we dare not invest in stocks or mutual funds or funds of funds because who knows what they might be worth? Because of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the investment banks with whom they slept and partied, who knows what those arcane and opaque investments might be worth?

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Who will be the first to dare to believe the words of a leader or economist now? Who dares to pretend that the trauma that shocks us now is trivial or mild?

Fear and anxiety are thick in the air like cordite after a gunshot. That will not dissolve if we buy something shiny or big, go see a cartoon mouse or stay home and use the drugs that flood our lives, legitimate or not.

A “news anchor” said the other day, speaking of the sinking economy, it has gotten so bad that “people are only buying what they need.”

Let that sink in. It is so bad that people are only buying what they need.

The world that collapsed was built on people buying things they didn’t need. Then throwing them away and buying more.

That delusion is shredded into tatters and blows away in the wind … this is a moment of clarity, in which like any recovering addict we can see that such a world was insane.

Reality hurts, it is abrasive, but it restores sanity and inner order.

The tide is rising and the waves are shooting spray.

The restoration of trust is not what we need. We need to create trust in new structures appropriate for a global society. We need to come to them like weeds coming through the sidewalk from the ground up. We need to make our own word good and act as if the fractured bonds of civil society still exist. We need to bootstrap ourselves and learn again how it feels to have a handshake we can trust.

Trust, but verify, the cold warrior said. And remember LBJ as well: trust is when you’ve got him by the balls.

To trust those people and their words unless we have their cojones in our tight little fists is like Charlie Brown running to kick the football again.

Let’s not. Let us begin by affirming the vision we see when our heads are clear.

It is quiet in the streets right now. There is only the sound of newspapers blowing down dark alleys in the twilight. The excesses of democracy for the moment sleep in their coffins, waiting for the night. Like good patient vampires should.

We are not doomed. The resiliency and strength that makes us human beings are alive in our blood.

But boy oh boy, O masters of society on your high dais, don’t push your luck. You lied first to yourselves and then to us. You set up yourselves too to fall down. And the antidote, you say, is to set you up all over again?

Friends, as John McCain said to strangers, friends, the United States government owns banks, insurance companies, manufacturers of farm equipment, more, and will buy more. But conservatives still speak of “socialism” as if it’s part of a democratic platform.

The old way of framing things is broken. What anyone might have meant by “capitalism” is not what we have. Not here, not now, and not in the world.

We need new skins for new wine. New frames for new ways of seeing. New words for new real things.

Trust, but verify. Use words as if they mean what they mean. If a talk show host or pundit doesn’t, shut him off. Using words correctly is equal to a handshake now. We know how to do that. We have done it before. Humankind is built to self-transcend and turn transitions into triumphs. It is not a function of leadership, not alone, but a function of trust among people in the streets who are walking quietly now through canyons of broken glass, trying to get our minds around the extent of our peril, trying to understand what happened exactly while we played the game of life as if it were virtual reality, as if when cut we didn’t bleed, as if when shot we didn’t scream, as if when the screen went blank it would just reboot.

by Richard Thieme

December 17, 2008

Especially during hard times, it is easy for the little things in the foreground to be the biggest things we see. They loom large and even monstrous, scaring the bejeezus out of even stalwart hearts. Symptoms of anxiety – deep breathing, light heads, and irrational consuming fear – seem to be everywhere these days.

And thanks, as always, to media people for proving once again that “if it bleeds, it leads.” Shamelessly the pundits, while circulation numbers nevertheless plummet, continue to do what everyone knows no longer works, shouting down the rest of us.

But the rest of us abide. We may not be heard, right now. But… we abide. The Dude abides. So do we.

While the cycles of bust and boom continue to roll on in their metal tracks like trains that refuse to be derailed, larger things are afoot for the human race. Those bigger deals constitute a context that will alter forever these littler flies and gnats that buzz about our heads, things like job loss and big financial crimes that will, again, mostly go unpunished.

In my own strange world, a Fortean word of anomalies and misfits and the edges of normal things (a mainstream Milwaukee woman in this proudly provincial enclave interviewed me when my collection, “Islands in the Clickstream,” was published a few years ago, and I spoke of hackers and hacking, quantum weirdness, deep changes, making her write in her column, “he isn’t like the rest of us.” – but that’s Milwaukee for you, where epistemology and ontology fuse, and what is seen is taken for the real) … anyway, I was just sayin’ as Sarah Palin taught us to say that bigger things are going bump and bump again in the real night. In my own strange world, the stream of advances in neuroscience, nanotech, genetic engineering, and astronomy/cosmology compel an observation or two.

Soon we will be someone else. Not just me, but everyone else, too, will not be like the rest of us. The rest of us will be morphing too.

Identity is a set of points of reference, after all, by which we anchor a self-image or an image of our tribe. Tribes have been nation states lately, but that’s not true anymore. Or it’s true like all transitional states are true, both yes and no. We continue to operate as nations but the global structures have pulled us into something else. Because we don’t have good names for what that is, calling it say “the new world order,” it’s hard to talk about realities emerging from new combinations of people and events, events that seem to have lives of their own but never just happen to happen, no, they are planned and executed, most of the big ones seem to be. Changes like a global financial system, the concentration of media in a few hands, the management of perception so the sixties and seventies are less likely to happen again or happen in that way, a way that deeply interfered …

and while all that is happening, seldom discussed for what it is on shout shows or in twittering text, terse text as wee tiny messages must be these days, neuroscience and other biological breakthroughs are making it possible to take our essential attributes and magnify them or accelerate certain processes, making us incrementally smarter, stronger, quicker, more resistant to attacks, and the fusion of our brains with electromagnetic implants and processes, these are all changes of a huge degree that will alter the points of reference on the fly of who we think we are, who in fact we are, and one day we’ll wake up and reminisce about generations that were merely born, not made, whose qualities were throws of the dice instead of bought and paid for, and whose lives seem so short compared to the century plussers who will come to inhabit the world in larger and larger numbers.

And then, there’s the even bigger scene changer.

I love it when people refuse to look at the real history of why and how those things we still call UFOs came to inhabit our landscape. “You’re a loony!” said an Army officer recently when told that I thought the subject merited attention. “Look at the data,” was all I could say. “Look at the real history. Look at the documentation!”) (disclaimer: I am part of a group called The UFO History Project which is producing a book using not the words of loonies like ourselves i.e. everyone who finds the subject worthy of scientific study but government and military and other official sources during the late forties and early fifties when they had not yet learned that what concerned governments at the highest levels did not exist).

But all that dialogue does I’m afraid is make people look at us like we’re nuts. Like we’re round-earthers or people who believed in space travel before sputnik (and lasers)(and fiber optics)(and stealth and other cloaking devices)(and particle beam weapons i.e. ray guns)(and space stations)(and the Memex)(and the potential for life on Encelades or Europa or Mars or all over the galaxy or other galaxies as well).

So I won’t talk about those things. I’ll just say this:

where life can happen, it will happen. And where it does, when it does, it begins to evolve. And we hairless primates are just out of the darkness, just up from a swamp, we humans-come-lately who learned but a few decades ago that the Milky Way as we quaintly call it was not a skein of nearby stars or about black holes, dark energy, and other such silliness.

Others have been around for a good long while. So they know a few things that we don’t. We are the top of the food chain in our dreams, in our dreams.

But this is what I want to say: one of the immense events of the 21^st century will be the blossoming in the fullness of human consciousness of the deeply felt realization that we share this universe with myriads of species, some of them way more intelligent than us, smarter stronger or quicker long ago, whose doings look indeed like magic to our child eyes.

The realization – not the hunch, the hope, the fear, or the sci-fi dream, but the realization – based on knowing, knowing incontrovertibly, that here and there are relative, so we can indeed get there from here and here from there, that we are a wee small species and just getting up and going like toddlers walking around the block for the first time, that how we have thought of ourselves is not how we have been, how we thought we were made or created was a nice lovely story or myth but not exactly how it was, and the change in our context will make drops in consumer spending, interest rates, and employment seem like small concerns, we will even become fondly nostalgic for the good old days when we worried about ourselves and such trivial things, thinking we knew who we were because that was the point of reference we had been taught by school-masters every bit as ignorant as ourselves.

The challenge is to expand and not blow our minds, to know what we already know.

I once wrote, “The readiness is everything, and during those moments of exquisite timing ‑ tolled by a clock that ticks to a different rhythm ‑ we know that when everything can go right, it will, at the best possible moment. … The universe is gregarious and welcoming. We are built to live in space that is gateless, unbounded, free.”*

Fear not, little flock, someone else once wrote. The universe is welcoming. Or words to that effect. Despite the sometime evidence, despite the anxieties of the times, despite the alarms and sirens, keep your heads and wits about you. Touch base with the real, please. And even when it’s cold out there, climb a big hill and look around. Look around and keep yourself in perspective.

The universe is bigger, life is much shorter, and it’s later than we think.

by Richard Thieme

October 16, 2008

Boy, I sure don’t want to sound moralistic, surveying the current wreckage and feeling the chill winds of anxiety and fear every time I turn on the TV, but I do want to affirm some basic truths I think I know.

Let’s assume, first of all, that however protracted the struggle, we will come out of this mess on the other side. Our challenge is to get up every morning, which has long been my definition of faith.

Faith is getting out of bed in the morning in the belief that the day is worth living.

Let’s acknowledge, too, that global economic structures have long mandated global political structures. I know, I know, we still talk about countries as if they matter most. That illusion has been encouraged by politicians taking advantage of genuine patriotic sentiment and reinforcing the false beliefs of the people they manipulate and exploit. Telling the simple truth in the civic arena has not been common for a long time, regardless of the party in power.

But as I have long suggested, the forms and structures of economic, political and social realities follow the systems of information and communication which shape the flow of our interactions and therefore how we relate. Those emerging structures long ago undermined the boundaries around all sorts of identities from individuals (with rights grounded in prior technologies) to intellectual property (with rights) to nations.

Collaborative global structures, interpenetrating one another in multiple ways but separate from our primary political identities, have become the forums for determining how the world works. What we called euphemistically the global free market was a creature of those collaborative structures. The relatively small number of men and women who lead them were in effect the vanguard of a new world order, call it what you like. They still are.

The bottom line is, there is no going back to a time when America, for example, was a single country bounded by two oceans. That time is over. The flow of information, capital, products, everything, obeys different laws and comes to different conclusions than a sentimental preference for a national identity might suggest. We are bound, as ML King Junior said, in a single garment of destiny. We can not act as if we are not.

What is emerging now is a global structure with nationalized financial institutions—what Republicans, even as they bring it about, ironically blast as “socialism” on the campaign trail. We are being seized by the indelible realization that no country, much less a person, is or ever will be an island again.

In America, this is an incredible opportunity. At last we can act on what we say we believe.

We have long gobbled up the piggy portion of the resources of the world to fuel lifestyles of unanticipated and even unsought affluence. We have grown accustomed to lives of indulgence powered by excessive debt and unrealistic dreams. Our cars have been too big, our houses have grown too big, and the stuff we amass, we know in our hearts, is not only more than we need, it works against us having the lives we say we want—lives of fulfillment and enrichment, mutuality, generosity, genuine benevolence.

It’s really that basic. Regression to the mean means we may have to act in accordance with the more spiritual values we have always said we held. We may have to own a lot less and stop bolstering our egos with so much unnecessary stuff. We may have to live more simply.

We don’t need most of that stuff. We know that, like bored children playing with one more toy on Christmas morning. It doesn’t help. When we buy more, we want to buy still more the next day and the next. It doesn’t work. It does not satisfy the real self that craves authenticity, integrity, the riches of relationships, the delight in learning and exploring, the joy of participation in the sorrows and the triumphs of the world.

The upward call is to see and say clearly what is real. To see and say clearly on the basis of our experience what works and what does not. To affirm in action as well as word the deeper truths we all really know.

Woody Allen said in one of his wisest films, We all know the same truths. Our lives consist of how we distort them.

This transitional time is an opportunity to lessen that distortion, to align our lives more clearly with the ultimate truths we know. We will never close the angle of distortion entirely, but we can certainly tighten it up. The Golden Mean is what we see over our shoulders as we tack back and forth across it, coming always, we hope, closer to the wind.

That life-giving wind that invigorates the journey is the source and destination of our journeys. It blows where it will. Our task is to notice it, feel it, turn to it, and then use it with energy and gusto to true ourselves up.

By Richard Thieme

It is raining, leaves are falling, and the sky is dark, oh, dark.

A friend, despairing over the heart of corruption beating visibly through the skin inside the current financial meltdown, wrote:

“And things will only get worse, not better. I don’t even want to go on a rant regarding how Washington discourages me as a small businessperson while failures like AIG get huge tax breaks.”

As someone who set up a small business of sorts fifteen years ago as a wrapper for professional speaking, the shock was how many obstacles, penalties, and general “screw you’s” were embedded in the process. I asked an accountant if honest people had a chance. He said, not compared to his many clients whose evasive tactics stretched gray areas into black.

After my best year of income, he called on one fateful April 14th and told me to sit down. Every single penny of the surplus I had set aside on top of normal cash flow, he told me, was due in a single check for estimated state and federal tax, extra tax payments not calculated, and above all, both sides of social security which is a huge hit for entrepreneurs. I emptied my “extra” money market account and sent it to the state and federal governments. Every single penny.

I am so glad they have used it wisely.

The far right wing anti-foreigner anti-Arab and Jew (what’s up with hating both?) political parties in Europe have gained strength in Austria, Flanders, Switzerland, Italy, even Spain where Jew-hating is a bias of 50% of the population (although Arab-hating is higher). In Russia and most Slavic countries, you don’t even have to take that pulse; it is always visibly throbbing in the vein. Even Japan, with a dearth of real Jews, registers anti-Semitism. The simplistic hatred and scapegoating of “the other” is apparently a very contagious meme.

When people feel out of control, as so many now do, the projection of false patterns onto incomplete data intensifies. They think they see causes, evil doers, bogeymen, behind the REAL evil doers, causes, and bogeymen, who in turn encourage them to see the mirage and not themselves. Cheney hides in a bunker and Bush does what he has done for eight long years. Then their cronies slouch away to the spa for a government sponsored retreat from anxiety and fear.

The rest of us are advised by news anchors to breathe deeply, take walks, and eat and drink moderately. The same advice applies when we listen to pundits, eight heads in a row, shouting at each other, shouting down all and any voice that contends with their own.

In light of a recent “this is the first-step” exercise to use the United States Army to ensure domestic order, the posse comitatus law is becoming as obsolete in practice as guarantees against search and seizure in a panoptic state that justifies vacuuming up all communications, foreign and domestic, at the source. I am always chagrined when my predictions of how societal structures will follow the contours of enabling technologies do in fact come true. What were scary stories of a haunted house told around the fire on a dark night have become the headlines and all of the stories inside, too, the wrapper of our lives.

As a former clergyman who has listened to the heights and depths of human experience, I know that if people can do something, they will, someone will, and then those who think they are good will respond with similar actions. You can not stare long into the abyss before the abyss in turn stares deeply into you, as Nietzsche said.

He ought to know.

Now I am not a violent guy. I read a lot, think, talk, write, listen, love energetic interaction with people of all kinds. I have a generosity of spirit that is generally ready to forgive and connect. I relish life and the people I love. But the dangerous options that occur to me now will also occur to people less inclined to be law-abiding. Somewhere in America, someone is listening to his television, feeling helpless and growing enraged, and cleaning his gun.

We are through the looking-glass. Those of us who saw that we built a house of cards have scant consolation from its tumbling. Knowing we were living an illusion, I still preferred knowing it and employing irony to illuminate it to this dark time which signals the end of irony altogether. As Tina Fey is showing on Saturday Night Life when she impersonates Sarah Palin, there is little difference between the thing itself and the caricature. The ironic commentary collapses, and the level of deceit by our leaders, political, economic, other kinds, begins to creep out of the shadows.

This is when I return to things I wrote years ago, trying to bootstrap my optimism and faith. Things like Ferg’s Law. Ferg said, “When things can go right, they will, and at the best possible moment.” I reread that Islands in the Clickstream and hope that he was right.

As the sheriff said in Fargo, contemplating how many people died for stupid reasons, “… and it’s a beautiful day.” She looks at the bad guy who did much of the killing and adds, “And all for a little money. There’s more to life than money, you know.”

Now we get to find out what it is.

by Richard Thieme

October 6, 2008

A young man experienced an altered state and emailed to ask about its relationship to orthodox modes of spirituality and religious experience. I thought it might be of value to others who are asking the same question to share my response.

I replied:

I have used all sorts of modalities in my life to discover and ideally integrate various unconscious dimensions of my “Self.” What religions designate as “spiritual tools or techniques” have generally persisted for so many centuries because they work. The tools are woven into the narrative of each religion but the narratives are cultural media that validate them and enable them to be remembered from generation to generation. In short, religious systems, whatever else they may be, are mnemonic devices fused with interpretations of life that provide meaning or the illusion of meaning (choose one), community, and stabilizing fins in rough winds or training wheels for a tyke learning to ride a two-wheeler – pick your metaphor.

The community part is not extraneous. As I note below, wiser companions are well advised. We do this alone, but we cannot do it alone. We need to do it alone, together.

What you described is one attempt to enter a meditative or altered state, to take the train to the alpha wave central station. It sounds as if it sometimes works. The trick with dissociative states (like what I do when the dentist drills without Novocain but I feel little discomfort) is to be able to return to the center of your own psyche. Otherwise, it’s time for a therapist to get to work.

Over the years of my life, I have experienced – prayer, meditation in deeper and deeper states, guided meditations in group contexts (sometimes human potential movements and sometimes Buddhist and Christian communities), automatic writing, mediums, spiritualist trances, self-hypnosis, paranormal games (telepathy, clairvoyance, psychometry), even Ouija boards, in short, many orthodox and non-standard methodologies, and oh yes, the occasional “trip” on a hallucinogen (a recent study suggests that psilocybin delivers a religious experience which is subsequently designated by users as one of the most meaningful religious experience they ever had.. Before taking that trip, however, I suggest a major consult with the erowid web site.)

I don’t recommend fringe activities like automatic writing or Ouija boards. What seem to be discarnate spirits or, these days, space brothers in UFOs, are aspects of self that flick off like floaters in our eyes and lead to dissociated states with no controls. Sometimes the doors back home are blocked by falling debris. That can be frightening and dangerous. In addition, channeling of all kinds generally results in bogus testimonies and simplistic spiritualities, seldom specific but often sharing similar vague descriptions of another plane, another life, or another psychic domain. In Christian terms, the routes they suggest are generally around the cross, i.e. reality. In the spiritual domain, there are detours but no short cuts, and there are definitely no free lunches.

All religious traditions state that these practices must be guided by someone more experienced and for good reason – we are playing with powerful and dangerous fire here and like dynamite it can be used to build or to destroy. “Spiritual guides” – real flesh-and-blood people, I mean, not discarnate entities : – ) - or directors are needed for more than the shallowest waters – and that introduces the additional task of finding a good one. It’s like finding a good financial adviser – track record, maturity, word of mouth, due diligence all apply. Caveat emptor characterizes this marketplace too. Don’t just use the yellow pages. And remember, if you meet the Buddha on the road, shoot him.

The rewards of this journey include hierarchical restructuring of the psyche in ways that include and transcend prior states and deliver spiritual power, and the ability to live with self-mastery, dignity, and resiliency regardless of circumstances. That hard-wired experience is generally contextualized by religious narratives in a particular way – Buddhists experience “a nightmare in daylight,” Christians are “born again,” etc. – but the pluralism of interpretations relativizes them all and suggests an innate predisposition to transformation or conversion that is prior to any story.

The downsides include the trip being interrupted, which secular analysts unfortunately diagnose as mental illness instead of a detour, and of course, grandiosity and inflation of the ego. Think of Alice in Wonderland eating the wafer and growing real big. That’s ego inflation. Then think of Alice eating another and getting real small. That’s humility.

Humility is better.

In the end, one discovers that these practices all lead to diminishing self importance, a manageable and appropriately sized ego, and more surpassing joy in living life than one dares to dream.

It sounds to me like it’s worth it.

by Richard Thieme

April 10, 2008

I was recently at Purdue University to teach a graduate seminar at the CERIAS center for information assurance and security – http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/ – hosted by Gene Spafford and Victor Raskin, two lively and hospitable gents. Another professor had recently returned from a meeting at which researchers presented a paper about their company, a television, internet, and media ratings tracker, and she told me that the company monitors not only public web sites related to their work, the ones you would expect them to track, but also sixty million blogs in real time.

Sixty million blogs in real time. They mine the text of sixty million blogs … looking for trends … in real time …

The intelligence community mines text too, in fact, they do it faster, deeper, better. Their intention, we believe, is to protect the nation they serve. But this company mines text for trends to benefit clients. They notice blogs that threaten them, then identify the bloggers that matter, the influencers, the ones to which others link, and offer them a deal. If the blogger agrees to change the tone or alter the data to benefit their client, they will give them in exchange, for example, priority delivery of tidbits of gossip, the kind of new revelations bloggers need to enhance value. That increases revenue from ads and elevates an otherwise obscure portal to a privileged position in podcast nation.

And readers like you and me are swept downstream by the momentum. Do you actually remember the first time you heard of the Drudge Report? No, I didn’t think so. The facts that let us think about things like that disappear in time, as Roy the replicant said, like tears in rain. Like not knowing that Gene Pope worked at psychological ops for the CIA in 1952, the year before he started the National Inquirer, a purveyor of discrediting reportage that did not break even until 1960, but never mind, money continued to find him and fund it, flowing through the hands of friends like Frank Costello …

But I digress. I guess disinformation was simply on my mind.

It’s not news that the data-streams we are fed are manipulated to build pictures that aren’t true. Any interface that attracts numbers of people is fair game for distortion, alteration, manipulation, spin. We follow the bread crumbs of simulated data like children through the darkening woods, making images in our heads by linking them into patterns, we make patterns without even thinking about it and believe them long after they have been disproved.

There are billions and billions of bread crumbs in the digital forest, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, making up paths that seem real because they all lead somewhere. The serendipitous nature of life often convinces us that wherever we find ourselves is where we are meant to be. It’s the same with what we come to believe. We seldom stand back and evaluate the maps in our heads and how well they correlate with what’s real or how they got there in the first place; that requires time, energy, and lots of practice, and when the masters of distraction are always throwing flash-bang grenades into our living rooms, who has that?

Critical thinking is an acquired skill. So is the sophisticated management and manipulation of the digital mind space. It’s big business, the stuff of politics and consumerism, professional intelligence and counter-intelligence, a vast blue sea of propaganda in which we swim until we forget there’s anything else.

When Journalism Schools became Schools of Journalism and Public Relations, the jig was up. They didn’t even pretend anymore. Making up stuff and getting people to believe it was ranked right up there with finding and discerning the truth and disclosing it in a timely way.

The critical thinking skills required for an authentic humanity in the 21^st century include, but are not limited to, knowing how to find our way in this forest, knowing how to use skills I was taught long ago in courses on how to use bibliographies and libraries, do research, use index cards, mine text with our minds.

Based on years of teaching and speaking and preaching, I now offer speeches, workshops, and courses on Digital Critical Thinking, suggesting ways to practice that acquired skill, learn how to learn, move oneself from learning for love to a love of learning.

In this edition, I will scatter a few digital crumbs in the form of links to some recent adventures. They are audio and video instead of text.

(1) The first was a presentation on Researching UFOs as Practice for Researching Everything Else

What could be better practice for critical thinking than researching the wild world of UFOlogy? And who better to talk to about it than a couple of thousand hackers at Def Con?

“Hacking UFOlogy” was a tentative step toward speaking aloud about something I have explored for thirty years but seldom discussed in public. It took a push – from inside – because I have learned that saying the word “UFO” aloud invites ridicule and disdain. I was even refused entry onto a Board of Directors last year when a board member saw I had written an article about the subject. “They’ll think we’re all loonies,” he said, “if we’re associated with someone who takes the subject seriously.” I was told that if I removed that one article from the hundreds of fiction and non-fiction pieces on my web site, I would sail onto the Board.

It reminded me of the time I was asked about speaking for Aramco in Saudi Arabia. All I had to do, they said, was get a second passport and remove all references to Israel (I had just done keynotes for Microsoft’s Tech Ed in Eilat for two years) from my resume.

Needless to say, I am not on that Board and did not speak in Saudi Arabia.

Ridicule and disdain are powerful tools for dismembering someone’s pubic persona. A specialist in deception said, illusion, misdirection, and ridicule, these three – but the greatest of these is ridicule. And that’s how UFOlogy, a crazy quilt of real machines observed by real people and unreal stories about almost everything else, has been managed for fifty or sixty years. But serious investigation, the kind that filters as best it can all the cover stories, clever disinformation, ravings and howling at the moon, charlatans and con men and fraudsters scrambling for a living in the cottage industry, outright liars and nutcases – once that has all been filtered, as I say, as best one can, one is left with the solid research of a dozen or so researchers still doing real work in the field – and then you discover that there is as there always has been since the days of airships, foo fighters, and the events of 1947 … something to it. Something real. But some THING, indeed.

Because hackers insist on getting their hands on the engines of technology, refusing to accept the presentation that the machinery itself has been designed to make, seeing through the story that purports to define how the machine ought to be used, preferring to discover instead what the thing can be made to do with unconventional thinking and a little creative juice – Def Con in Las Vegas, the granddaddy of hacker cons, was a good place to suggest that we ought to look for ourselves … not at the cable programs or outlandish amazing tales but at the historical data, the record, the exchanges that have been documented to have taken place. (I offered the audience dozens of pages of notes and will send them to anyone who wants them).

That one hour talk – “Hacking UFOlogy: Thirty Years in the Wilderness of Mirrors” – is here, along with talks by Johnny Long (author of Google Hacking) and infosec gadfly Bruce Schneier:

http://hardflame.blogspot.com/2007/10/must-see-defcon-talks.html

(2)) Happy Birthday Albert Einstein!

I recently presented a keynote address for a Relativity Week conference in Philadelphia, sponsored by InterNetwork Defense, the dojo for Cyber Kung Fu. I was asked to use the concepts of relativity theory to illuminate emergent geopolitical structures. I don’t know if I did that, but here is the late-night presentation – which Larry Greenblatt, sensei of Cyber Kung Fu, titled “Relativity and the Art of War.”

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7974899741310825107

There are other good talks at the google link, too, and Larry is at www.internetworkdefense.com.

(3) Quiet American at http://www.quietamerican.org/ is a good place to take a break from all that mind-shifting. It’s a wonderful repository of sound art and found sound by Aaron Ximm, a technology entrepreneur from S P Controls, http://www.spcontrols.com/.

Quiet American hosts discography, field recordings, and one minute vacations. It wins lots of recognition and people from all over the world come to find magical, mysterious, immersive sites of sound, precisely layered in unexpected wondrous ways.

(Disclaimer: Sound artist and tech guru Aaron Ximm is an offspring.)

(4) Hexen is more than a game – it’s an exploration by London artist Suzanne Treister of military technologies for psychological warfare. In 1995 she created a fictional alter ego, Rosalind Brodsky, a delusional time traveler who believes herself to be working at the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality (IMATI) in the twenty-first century.

Now Treister is updating HEXEN2039 and charting more of Brodsky’s scientific research towards the development of new mind control technologies for the British Military. This work uncovers or constructs links between conspiracy theories, occult groups, Chernobyl, witchcraft, the US film industry, British Intelligence agencies, Soviet brainwashing, behavior control experiments of the US Army and recent practices of its Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (PSYOP), in light of alarming new research in contemporary neuroscience.

The Science Museum of London sent Treister and art critic Richard Grayson to Milwaukee to videotape interviews with me on those subjects. She thought my book review of Jonathan Moreno’s “Mind War” indicated a kindred spirit. And it did. She uses the interviews to anchor her project in the (more or less) present day.

See www.hexen2039.net and http://ensemble.va.com.au/tableau/suzy/TT_ResearchProjects/index.html)

for more about Hexen

see http://www.kunstverein-langenhagen.de/treister/index.html – to see a gallery opening of some of Treister’s work in Germany that includes a fourteen minute video loop from our interviews.

(5) The Room is an episodic novel I am writing. The first five episodes have been published at Combat, the Literary Expression of Battlefield Touchstones, an online labor of necessity and love by a man committed to exploring the psychological impact of warfare. (http://www.combat.ws/)

The names of the stories, found by a search of the Combat site, are:

Outside the Door – Cliché – BRB – A Second Opinion – The Big O

The chapters are now being logged onto this web site at “The Room.”  The sixth chapter is On the Fast Track to Sainthood.

They begin an exploration of the impact of torture on the people in a society that condones the practice. A single instance in “the room” in the war zone leads to other rooms until we arrive by a very circuitous route at “the room” where torture was authorized in the first place.

Fiction seems to be the right place to explore issues that once found their way into Islands in the Clickstream. I have published thirty stories in the past few years. Coming up next are: “The Man Who Hadn’t Disappeared” in Karamu, a literary magazine published at Eastern Illinois University (http://www.eiu.edu/~english/karamu/index.html), and “Silent Emergent, Doubly Dark,” in an anthology published in November 2008 in London, Subtle Edens: The Elastic Book of Slipstream. http://www.elasticpress.com/

Allen Ashley, the editor of Subtle Edens, wrote: “The story is gripping and fascinating. Your narrator’s three off-world trips raise questions of science, philosophy, religion, consciousness, reality and much more.”

And did that ever delight me! Why? Because he got it! He knew what I was doing! What more can any writer want?

and then it received this review:

“Silent Emergent, Doubly Dark” by *Richard Thieme* opens with a quote from *James Joyce*, a primogenitor of slipstream. Thieme, fortunately, doesn’t try to match Joyce for wordplay and instead gives us a calm, flat look into the psyche of alien beings. Thieme
explores various levels of reality through his protagonist, moving farther and farther away from the seen into unglimpsed realms. The story itself can be a bit hard, much like Joyce is hard, but Thieme’s beautiful descriptions and intriguing concepts keep things interesting. This piece truly deserves the slipstream label.

An edgy story about identity, levels of awareness in the universe, and a professional intelligence agent hollowed out over the years by his work called “Less Than the Sum of the Movable Parts” was just published at The Future Fire online at http://futurefire.net/.

And “Break, Memory” was republished by Bewildering Stories and chosen for a quarterly anthology of the best of. And “The Indian and the Fortune Teller,” a chapter in a second raucous novel-in-progress tentatively titled Multiple Connected Spaces, was just accepted by Zahir, my third story in that sci-fi magazine…. it will appear in June 2009.

Well … what else could a writer want? A writer might want to find a publisher interested in a collection of published short fiction called Mind Games (many of which can be found at www.thiemeworks.com), or a writer might want to find a publisher interested in looking at The Room. If you happen to be one, married to one, live next door to one, or know one, let me know … publishing in the digital age is a little tricky. We are all trying to figure out how best to get our writing, music, films, and other digital creations into the world. The old models are breaking down and the new ones are not yet clear. Maybe they’re slouching into outer space to be born. And more people seem to be writing these days than reading. The Indiana Review noted, “We receive more than 10,000 submissions a year, yet our subscriber list is less than 500.” Only subsidies keep them alive. The rest of us are heading to the Web.

So many bread crumbs! Nothing but bread crumbs, in fact, precious data that needs to be protected before it is distorted, re-linked, and presented as fact. Bread crumbs scattered in the darkening forest as the twilight deepens, leaves are woven into an opaque mass, and the urgency of the wind in the trees means hurry hurry. Get a move on. Find that one true light that will bring us home.

By Richard Thieme

When we wish to look deeply into a subject, it is essential to turn context into content, invisible assumptions into visible structures, background into foreground while illuminating the frame of the picture as well.

Security professional Matt Blaze said, the weakest link in the security chain is often the definition of the problem, and the real definition of the problem is often not the one that is advanced. So we need to know what to do to discover the real definitions, the essential ones, that will flood the problem space with light.

“What is the thing in itself?” asked Marcus Aurelius, an information expert in his own right. “What is its essence? Look beneath the surface; let not the several qualities of a thing nor their value escape your gaze.”

Software and hardware do not simply add tools or processes to our lives – they form habits, and once they become part of the infrastructure, part of the culture, those habits are stealthy. For information technology professionals, whether the ones who build or the ones who secure networks, to become aware that the structures they create shape the behaviors and thinking of people who interact with them is critical.
For counter-intelligence professionals, too, seeing the context is not an option. Context is content, plain and simple. If nested levels of appearance cloaked with deception are misunderstood, it is impossible to hit the real target. The old Cold War and the new one are replete with examples of elaborate ruses run by the KGB, among others, and the level of strategic thinking needed to see what is really happening.

Counter-intelligence is a skill that ought to be taught in schools as necessary for having a clue. Seeing the context and turning it into content is essential for anyone who just plain wants to know what is or might be real. It isn’t an option for outsiders like us either.

I hope to weave together these three domains – information security, counter-intelligence, and the basic human desire to understand what’s going on – in this piece.

Failures of intelligence often result from group think, the peer pressure of political necessity, corporate cultures that force creative thinking into habitual molds to make it acceptable. Then—after an unfortunate event – the tendency to cover one’s butt ensures that the transparency needed for subsequent accountability – which might prevent something similar from happening again – does not take place. Recent political history brims with examples.

I often cite the wisdom of Robert Galvin of Motorola, who said that when a group faced a problem and everyone quickly came to the “right solution,” it was always wrong. The reason, of course, is that a quick consensus is necessarily grounded in the past and past perceptions always fuzz the current data, making it fit prior models. Galvin added that real breakthrough ideas at Motorola during his tenure were always minority opinions at first and sounded crazy when first stated like the notion of a “chip in the head,” a then-radical idea that is now a mundane “medical implant.”

A few years ago I listened to the wisdom of a profiler for the CIA describe the habits of thought she had learned to apply in her work—work that resulted in commendations for helping to track down and prosecute a man who had killed two of her colleagues. I think her practice is worth reviewing. Although we mostly discussed network intrusions, her insights apply to hacking any system including the complex webs of mass media through which much of our working knowledge is spun.

When we looked at a network intrusion, she said, no matter who did it, it was best to look with a “beginner’s mind.” Do not bring preconceived notions to the task. The data when seen clearly always told us what we needed to know. This was true whether investigating serial killers, terrorists or criminal hackers.

A common assumption in the early days was that we faced “a young male hacker,” an assumption that had to be completely disregarded. We learned it worked best not to impose a template on the data. In the instance of the DC snipers, for example, every assumption about their identities was wrong. Yet … we can’t help but bring some preconceptions with us. So corrective mechanisms need to be built in. We need not “group think” but a “group that thinks.”

A former FBI profiler, William Tafoya, echoed this insight. When the Bureau was searching for the Unabomber, Tafoya’s counter-intuitive sketch of a suspect was right on, but contradicted the primary working assumption of the bureau. He calls his throwaway line a fluke, when asked who he thought they were seeking, that the Unabomber was “a monk on a mountaintop in Montana.” But his intuitive leap was a hit because it resulted from processing a great deal of data and then refusing to censor the hypotheses the data suggested.

My friend, the CIA profiler, said that the common belief that network patterns, constituting sets of known predictable behaviors, lead to specific criminal hackers is too narrow and unsophisticated when you observe good attackers. The latter are invisible, like ghosts, vague shapes moving stealthily at night. It is sophomoric, then, she said, to rely on templates because they exclude critical data and make the rest conform to expectations.

If I had a stereotype in mind, she confessed, I always blew it. Always.

So look at all of the data and focus on what is left behind. Focus on the evidence. Track back from “What were they after?” to “Who is likely to want that or do that or be that?” Covering one’s tracks completely is rare because a person entering a system always has a m.o., whether the system is physical or a computer network. Unconsciously or consciously, the patterns of their actions reveal their identities over time.

Such an approach is not trivial. It requires intense concentration and constant self-monitoring. The analyst is the real tool, and without the ability to step back and observe how that tool is used, how the analyst has been framed to approach problems, the tool will implement the assumptions built into it without thinking about them. Tools are extensions of the self, even when the tool IS the self. Tools are also extensions of organizational cultures and probe reality with all of their preconceptions built in.

And because there are a thousand puzzle pieces but no box with a picture to guide us, the degree of clarity required is exceptional.

So, she said, I learned not to form a pattern too quickly. I learned to interrupt my thinking when I reached for premature conclusions. A real profiler is the opposite of the popular conception of someone who leaps to conclusions as portrayed on television dramas. If you leap too quickly, you always have to unlearn what you thought you knew. You have to empty the cup, as the Zen story has it, to be teachable. You have to see the cup before it is filled so the shape that imparts form to whatever it contains can be discerned.

The way to do this is to observe yourself. But because no individual can factor in all of their unconscious assumptions, a team approach is needed. But the team must also observe itself or have specialists designated to question its assumptions. Someone must say: Wait! Stop! Interrupt! and help people distinguish what they think they see from what the data suggests.

Enterprises and individuals alike must build in an openness to heresy.

Ask, is this really true? Or does it seem true? Does it feel right because “everyone thinks so,” because it has been repeated so often, or because an authority says so and we had better go along with what they want?

Stop yourself from completing the loop too quickly. Ask at each step: how do I feel about thinking this? What am I missing? If my hypothesis is true, what other things must also be true, and how do they hold together? Did I conclude too quickly that “this particular kind of breach” must come from “that particular kind of person?” Especially with insiders, did I look for someone who does not fit the expected pattern? Always ask: who am I to know that, think that, be that, do that – without sufficient data?

Where do my conclusions and beliefs originate? How did they lead me to define the problem – and therefore the solution?

And if technologies shape social, psychological and cultural spaces, as I said, security and intelligence work in turn shape technologies. When the battle space is the hive mind of a global society, security and intelligence are thermostats that regulate the dynamic flow of information and data. Identities created at top level – the level of nation states, say – devolve into implicit commitments among practitioners to prevent the chaos which is always threatening to break out in the global system, forging new, more uncertain identities as a matter of course. Those identities do not have names, not yet. But in the trenches, deals get done on the basis of what one can do, what data one can deliver, not who one says or even thinks one is. Identities prior to action are always disguises. False flag operations are run not only on others but also on oneself, in good “Scanner Darkly” fashion.

So if others can not always be accepted at face value, neither can applications like hotmail or Google that filter information into our lives or the organizational identities behind them. Who built them, and to what multiplicity of ends? In all networks, electronic and human, boundaries blur and we occupy multiple nodes in multiple nets at the same time. Unless we connect all the dots, the pattern of the stars can be a bird or a bear and there is no point of reference for determining which.

So this profiler’s approach seems to apply to everyone seeking the truth in a world of disinformation, misinformation, and muddle. Depending on the scale or level of operations, the more difficult task is to understand the real identity of the organizational structures one confronts, whether a trans-national corporation, media or entertainment conglomerate, a university, a criminal enterprise, a state or non-state spin-off. All those terms are just names for public consumption. Only actions observed at depth and rendered in complex maps can reveal the real end of the enterprise.

Security professionals know that the apparent organizational structures in which attackers are embedded are veiled with deceptive claims, and false links to support those claims are distributed widely online and off in sophisticated ways. For example, if nodes from which sophisticated phishing attacks originate seem to be located in online China, are they sources of state-sponsored espionage, non-state freelance hacking, or organized criminal hacking? China, we know, is a “dark guest,” uninvited but present at many parties, the number one hacker enterprise in the world. But Israel is number two. Does that make Israel an enemy instead of a close friend? All those documents delivered by Jonathan Pollard to the Israelis – were they all used to map our intelligence efforts or were they bartered to whoever for whatever might be of value?

The deeper issues are generally reserved for specialists. People get uneasy when these contradictions and challenges are discussed. It gives us headaches.

But … if by “attacker” we also mean those who assault our desire to have a clue by making it difficult or impossible to see the bigger picture, then every entity that distorts the truth is the enemy of the body politic and the essential human enterprise which is to understand our world. When the “guardians of the interface” to our information about reality do the distorting, does the enemy become all of us, too, then? Are we denied access to information not only for security reasons but to prevent transparency and accountability as well? And does that turn an investigative reporter into the equivalent of a terrorist?

“What is the thing in itself?” asked Marcus Aurelius. This is still the question that must be asked if one seeks to know what is going on. Counter-intelligence – seeing the sources of the information we receive, playing the “great game” because we must – becomes a de facto requirement for being minimally informed.

Ask, is the organizational identity what it seems to be? Who is served by their actions? Who profits? Do we know who directs the enterprise, as opposed to who seems to direct it? Are there hidden links between the directors? Follow the money – to what relationships does it lead? Is any of this information available through media and research or must one be a specialist or have clearances to know?

This effort too is not trivial and requires constant attention and self-monitoring. Who has time for all this, much less the energy needed to contend with the dissonance of knowing that this approach is appropriate to the task? Even watching the “news” requires such an attitude these days, doesn’t it? In a recent celebration of sixty years on the air, the news interview program “Meet the Press” ran a montage of VIPs who had appeared on the program. What was striking was that with one exception every single one was lying. Every talking head down through the decades addressed issues with obfuscation, distortion, evasion, everything we have come to expect in a world of spin, PR, and propaganda. Before our eyes, “history” turned into sequences of spin. So when the current candidates for president subsequently appeared in clips, doing the same thing, bobbing and weaving, saying little, it was clear that we have been watching an ongoing charade presenting itself as a responsible news program for decades.

As the historian at the National Security Agency said when I asked what history we really shared … “Anything up until 1945.”

The speed of the leader is the speed of the team. The current administration does not believe that transparency or accountability through meaningful congressional oversight are good things. Only time will tell if a two-term limit on the presidency and a two-party system for checks and balances is sufficient to redress the consequences of obsessive secrecy and the view that constitutional law is an option or whether the kinds of scandals that resulted in the Church and Pike Committees in the seventies will be needed – if they are still possible, if they are not managed out of existence by sleight-of-hand and distraction.

It is not paranoia but common sense to recognize that designer scenarios make up the scenery of our lives. The more granular one gets in an examination of the cultural landscape, the more uncertain the visible evidence becomes. A coast line that looks long and smooth from orbit becomes a series of twists and turns, any one of which might look like a solid wall but can be in fact a door to another level or dimension of simulation or designer reality.

By advocating that profiler’s approach and level of discipline I am advocating something that unfortunately does not sell well in this society. Look at book racks in any of the big boxes and you’ll see what sells. Comfort, a feeling of security and simplistic thinking sell. Perplexity, complexity and sources of dissonance do not. Yet it is my experience that reality ultimately digests best and unreality causes constipation, or worse.

No one said it would be easy, did they? We may not be able to win this game of knowing what’s going on at an elemental level, but if we want to play, that profiler’s insights are as good a guide as any to how to do it. As the devil said in Woody Allen’s “Deconstructing Harry,” “Sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down. In the end, the house always wins. It doesn’t mean you didn’t have fun.”

The Second Edition is a periodic reflection by author and speaker Richard Thieme. Subscribe (or unsubscribe) by writing to rthieme@thiemeworks.com and stating subscribe (or unsubscribe).

Richard Thieme (www.thiemeworks.com) speaks and writes about the issues of our times, with an emphasis on technology, media, security, intelligence, and spirituality in all of their human and cultural dimensions.

by Richard Thieme

“When you think about it – I mean, really step back and think about it – the reaction, I mean, to Dennis Kucinich’s statement the other night during the Democratic debate, about seeing an aerial vehicle, a large dark triangle, something reported by many people in this and other countries and probably one of our own, one of our new stealthy inventions, but one he couldn’t identify – the fact that it was brought up as it was, to ridicule a man whose candidacy has already been made to seem silly, a waste of time and money – and then more ridicule and disdain, after the debate, the thigh-slapping laughter of a loud shouter like Chris Matthews who hooted and hollered and asked other candidates like Joe Biden did they “believe” in UFOs as if this alone of all domains is not a question of evidence, thinking about it all, but a belief like leprechauns or Santa Claus or God – and then, when Governor Richardson of New Mexico stated the obvious, that there is a documented record that our government has withheld information about the subject for decades – not months, not years, but decades – his quiet statement caused the already wildly raving Matthews to get even louder and wilder, demanding to know, my god man, do you think there was a cover-up? a cover-up? And all this said not simply with confidence, but with arrogance fused with ignorance, as if we do not live in a secrecy-shrouded world in which millions and millions of government documents, even when they have been declassified, will not emerge into the light of day for years – years! – a world in which statesmen like the late Senator Patrick Moynihan wrote an entire book about the negative impact of obsessive secrecy (and that was before the Cheney-Bush regime took it up another notch) and how unnecessary secrecy eroded the fabric of a once-open society – I mean, when you think about all that, while the rest of us live our lives downwind in the bluster of the loud shouters screaming their beliefs as if they were part of a civil discourse or a civilized debate – well, all a member of the hidden crowd can do is laugh or weep or perhaps wonder what in the name of God is going on?

I mean, think about it. Mention the silly distractions used to draw the scent into the bushes, nonsense like Britney Spears or the Hilton woman or the dead one, what was her name, now, Anna Nicole, just bring them up, I say, and you’ll get hours of silly discourse, pundits and news anchors and bloggers taking the silly nothings so seriously, playing hand-in-glove games with their publicists, as if such trivia has anything to do with anything real or anything that matters at all, making the silly film Idiocracy seem like a pretty good forecast of things to come, no, things already here.

You understand, it did not just happen. UFOs were not ridiculed when they were covered as news, years ago. As well they ought to have been. Anomalous vehicles having their way and will with our skies, showing up as Look Magazine documented over nuclear plants like Hanford and air force bases all over the country – that’s news, or ought to be. Vehicles behaving in ways that led Life Magazine to conclude, with an in-depth article using official quotes, that the vehicles which had been photographed and documented by official USAF cameras, were in all likelihood extraterrestrial.

Because, given what they did and how they did it, what else could they be?

But you wouldn’t know that, would you? You wouldn’t know that there exists a voluminous amount of data, an immense historical documentation going back into the nineteen thirties, long before the so-called “modern UFO era” had begun, filled with credible observers who were flying fighters or commercial planes or simply looking up or straight ahead, sometimes, at something landing, something alive coming out, then taking off again and disappearing so quickly it made their hair stand up. To observe that this history exists and is well-documented by serious researchers, that historical studies like Keith Chester’s Strange Company, a book that compiles reports mostly from Europe before the second world war and then, during and after the war, or historical articles by Michael Swords, a retired professor from the University of Western Michigan, documenting for example the Robertson Panel, a group that established CIA-supported debunking and ridicule of reports, keeping them out of the mainstream news, or the Condon Committee, a “scientific” panel intended to settle the matter once and for all, the conclusions of which however contradicted the data in its own report, as if the committee did not even read its own work, and indeed, the chair had declared his conclusion with a chuckle and a wink long before the committee had done its work – one could go on and on, there are many serious well-researched works that document the phenomena, and the obviously successful campaign by the US government to use ridicule above all to make the whole domain a matter of jokes and precisely the kind of silliness for which we can thank Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, and their pals, who have never seen much less read any of this serious work, or the other accounts that accurately describe the cottage industry of useful idiots, pathological liars, con artists and flimflam men (and women, of course), making multiple points about the real serious research, as well as the ways that psychological operations and propaganda have been carried out for many years, addressed to the people of this country of necessity in addition to “enemies,” the stated targets of deception, it now being impossible to distinguish one from the other in a world of ubiquitous information.

The subject, in short, is complex, vast, and worthy of study.

So I ask, once again – what is it about UFOs that makes them such a subject of ridicule when patently ridiculous subjects like Hilton and Spears are treated with respect and amplified by the loud shouters?

A friend who spent his life at the National Security Agency doing analysis said to me once, speaking of the practice of deception – “Illusion, misdirection, and ridicule, these three. But the greatest of these is ridicule.”

His echo of the Apostle Paul was deliberate. This was the Gospel according to the IC, the world of professional intelligence.

Ridicule. The greatest of these is ridicule.

Indeed, people fear ridicule more than death, it seems. The dismemberment of their reputations, careers, and self-images is a grave threat. The thought police know this, of course. The art and science of the intentional destruction of troublesome human beings is alive and well.

The blow-back, however, as our intel friends call the unintended consequences of a sanctioned campaign, is the destruction of civil discourse, the undermining of a public space in which serious subjects receive the attention they deserve. Because so many people do not believe the official truth but don’t know what the truth might be. They know they are lied to much of the time, but don’t know what’s so, so they fill the empty space with projections, confabulations, nightmares and dreams.

There is more to it than that, of course. There is also a threat to the unspoken compacts that keep society hanging together, the ones that get people out of bed in the morning to go to work, not money or other rewards, but how a society functions at its deepest levels. The threat is that a superior civilization exists not “out there” where SETI serenely searches for distant signals, officially sanctioned and signifying nothing, but right here, up close, where thousands of credible witnesses have testified to the presence of anomalous vehicles obviously directed remotely or on the spot by intelligent agents, right here on our very own planet, not the isolated little blue marble in space that we collectively imagine, but one of many inhabited planets, where our society has against all evidence been built on a cornerstone of key beliefs, say them how you will – for religious, that we are the apple of God’s eye, not one apple among many, but the most favored nation, and for non-religious, that our species is the top of the food chain, the obviously smartest and best of all species, kings of the kingdom and queens of the realm. The threat is to the threads that stitch together our particular ways of being a self-conscious collective entity into a cultural myth of priority, invincibility, being the favored children of God. Now, this is a serious threat, along with the other lesser threats, to our dominance of other countries, scientific prowess, and other key pieces of the way we perceive ourselves in this nation. … and so we come back to UFOs, which have been well-documented, as I said, noted all over the world, in most countries, not just here, for sixty, seventy years, or more, behaving in the same ways, doing similar things, all reported by diverse peoples of all cultures and tribes and ages noting the same small details – that’s not the stuff of insanity, is it? That is something serious, something real, something worthy of scientific study and discussion in the public domain, not only behind closed doors where the masters of deception do indeed practice their dark arts on behalf of multiple agendas which have neither been floated nor voted upon by we, the people, the impotent watchers in the wings, we who ought to know better when the shouters do their job, we who know we have listened for years to lies yet still, like children, believe them because we must, so when they ridicule their victims, pumping up the abuse to effective levels, we must jump on the wagon at once, lest we be ridiculed too by Official Truth. We choose to believe the illusions, to look away from the real, knowing what we are doing, but so afraid of what they’ll say and do if we don’t.

The greatest of these is ridicule. Ridicule is King. And we, good subjects and loyal, obey the King.

The Second Edition is a periodic reflection by author and speaker Richard Thieme. Subscribe (or unsubscribe) by writing to rthieme@thiemeworks.com and stating subscribe (or unsubscribe).

Richard Thieme (www.thiemeworks.com) speaks and writes about the issues of our times, with an emphasis on technology, media, security, intelligence, and spirituality in all of their human and cultural dimensions.

Dana Press (The Dana Foundation: New York and Washington DC) 2006
Richard Thieme

“What we don’t know is so much bigger than we are.” — A Haitian Proverb

Oh, how I wish that reviewing a book like this were simple and straightforward! That would mean we live in a world of transparency, government accountability to citizens, easy access to sources, primary sources willing to go on the record, and data trails that lead readers to those same sources so everyone can see for themselves.

But alas, we do not live in such a world. “Mind Wars” is a broad but necessarily incomplete overview of neuroscience, nanotechnology and related areas applied to the arts of war, with an examination of ethical issues raised by this work, all considered in a historical context by a scholar who has researched the field.

The key to decoding the book, however, is on page 4 of the introduction. “I am no loose cannon,” writes Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph. D., the Emilie Davie and Joseph S. Kornfeld Professor and Director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia. “I am deeply entrenched in the non-threatening, even boring, academic establishment. I’ve taught at major research universities, hold an endowed chair at an institution not known as a hotbed of radicalism …” and on the disclaimer goes, a plea to the reader to recognize that the author is no kook, no “conspiracy theorist,” but a respectable, conventional man.

Moreno sounds those notes again, on p. 107, for example, when he states that he has considerable “experience with government—on the staffs of presidential advisory committees, in [giving] congressional testimony, and so forth.”

Those qualifications define the subtext of this work and in many ways the subtext is the primary content. They also suggest one reason why the exploration of the frontiers of military research and development and the penetration of the military-industrial-academic-scientific-media complex is so difficult these days. Insiders know but can’t tell; outsiders can tell, but don’t often know, and when they do know, ridicule and other forms of disinformation can make what they know seem like fanciful speculation. So they err on the side of extreme caution.

Jonathan Moreno is qualified, without a doubt, to survey what is in the public domain about neuro-weapons and diverse applications of numerous branches of research that blur the distinctions between government, military, and medical, technological and scientific research, and he is also qualified to discuss the ethical implications of this research. So why does he need to insist that he is qualified? Because black budget (clandestinely funded) science and technology is so large a percentage of all scientific R&D and so hidden from public view that even to approach the subject is to enter a force field of distortion and paranoia. One might as well explore UFOs or time travel—domains of actual research, in fact, but which must be discussed with a wink or, as Moreno’s disclaimers indicate, the trumpeting of one’s credentials, above all credentials of character—respectability and conventionality—so that one is not marginalized by the mere fact that one has chosen to explore the domain.

Inevitably, researchers of exotic technologies experience a condition called “strangeness,” a kind of cognitive dissonance, and have to push against it to reestablish clear boundaries.

Why has this come about?

Because a national security state has evolved since World War 2 and is now the water in which we all swim. Moreno describes the history of that evolution and shows that a great deal of research, including research in the behavioral sciences, has been determined by a perception of military necessity. Access to the research is determined by the “need to know” and most readers of this book are “outsiders.” Moreno himself is an insider of sorts, having served as an expert for numerous government venues, but his credibility depends on continued access and access depends on behaving rightly. Saying the right things in the right way defines correct behavior; hence disclaimers that distance him from fringe thinkers without institutional support or structural authority, like this reviewer.

Steven H. Miles, M.D., the author of “Oath Betrayed/Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror,” states that he is often asked if he fears for his life because he discussed public documents, thirty five thousand pages of them, which reveal that medical complicity. That he is even asked such a question, Miles says, “is an epiphenomenon of being a torturing society. A torturing society is a society that is abraded by the process of dehumanization. In that process, we essentially create our own mirrored netherworlds.”

A mirrored netherworld is exactly what is signified by Moreno’s repeated insistence on credentials that ought to be obvious. His netherworld is a force field of distortion that attends any venture through the looking-glass of security clearances to explore areas that are exotic, dangerous, and mostly secret. That force field is an epiphenomenon of the national security state.

Moreno’s history of post-WW2 research begins with identifying the transformation of America into a “garrison state,” a nation that views the world as a dangerous place that requires the United States to project power everywhere in and increasingly out of the world to be secure. National Security Council document NSC-68, published in 1950, defined this strategy which is still pursued today. “It is mandatory that in building up our strength, we enlarge upon our technical superiority by an accelerated exploitation of the scientific potential of the United States and our allies,” the document states. Currently, academic research receives several billion dollars a year, with MIT receiving half a billion, the largest single share. Much of the research is dual use, with commercial as well as military applications, but would not have been funded were it not for the latter.

“Mind Wars” surveys current research that has come to light. I was not surprised by any of the details of this book, although someone with less of a fetish for the subject might well be.

Moreno asks what novel ethical questions are raised by the emergence of new applications for war which will alter human identity by modifying memory, cognition, and core physical, emotional and spiritual capabilities. The enhancement of cognitive processes such as memory, for example, raises questions about why we evolved as we have. We forget things for good reasons—it is not helpful to be tormented, and our brains would be overwhelmed if we remembered everything, including masses of irrelevant data. Near-total recall would pose new problems as would enhancement of affective processes related to religious experience—e.g., how many mystics do we need? Evolution of the species suggests that a few mystics per thousand are plenty. But if genetic, chemical, and technological enhancements can trigger mystical experiences, might too many people bliss out in ecstatic contemplation of the One? Would too many of us become mice pressing buttons connected to pleasure centers and die happily rather than eat? Would enhancements of memory and cognition give an unfair advantage to the children of the rich much as steroids give big-headed baseball players the ability to hit the long ball?

Moreno was hampered in his research because many scientists “clammed up” when asked about their work which means that we can only speculate about many of the projects. Their silence means that while we know we don’t know, we don’t know what we don’t know. Hence, cognitive dissonance.

That dissonance never left as I read this book. It’s what happens when I read the fiction of Philip K. Dick. Dick no longer reads like speculative science fiction smacking of paranoia because the landscape he describes is the world we now inhabit, a moebius-strip world in which distortions feed back into the perception of everyday life. The world we encounter in “Mind Wars” is like the world in Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly,” in which a policeman discovers that the subject he pursues is himself. In “Mind Wars,” Moreno is a participant in the world he describes as well as an objective observer; the edge of the glass curves and returns a distorted image.

His own emotions, for example, when he communicates the shock of certain discoveries, transform his feelings into subject matter the reader must consider. He communicates his surprise when he learned that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, participated in “a Harvard study aimed at psychic deconstruction by humiliating undergraduates and thereby causing them to experience severe stress.” (p. 69) Moreno does not simplistically attribute all of Kaczynski’s behaviors to this event, but he does speculate on the impact of “a psychological experiment that … involved psychological torment and humiliation that could have left deep scars” over a period of three years.

I had a similar reaction when I learned of a formative episode in the life of Donald Defreeze, a.k.a. Cinque, leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army. DeFreeze and other members of the SLA kidnapped Patty Hearst and subjected her to brainwashing using classical mind control techniques. It is seldom asked how DeFreeze learned to brainwash so effectively. Colin A. Ross, M.D. in “Bluebird,” a study of the deliberate creation of multiple personalities, notes that DeFreeze, while an inmate at Vacaville State Prison, was “a subject in an experimental behavior modification program run by Colston Westbrook, a CIA psychological warfare expert and advisor to the Korean CIA.” (Bluebird, p.212). Westbrook returned to the United States from working undercover in Viet Nam and “entered Vacaville State Prison under cover of the Black Cultural Association and there designed the seven-headed cobra logo of the SLA and gave DeFreeze his African name, Cinque.” (Bluebird, p. 212)

The accounts of both Kaczinski and DeFreeze suggest that their crimes might have been “blowback,” unintended consequences of covert intelligence operations that rebound on perpetrators.If those accounts were not public, however, and we speculated in that vein about DeFreeze and Kaczinski, it would be easy to dismiss our speculation as “conspiracy theories” or sloppy thinking. We know those two accounts are not the only experiments that might have backfired, but prudence suggests we not extrapolate from the known data, lest we be ridiculed. That’s what respectability in a world of strangeness requires. But in light of those accounts, it is not unreasonable to ask, what other rough beasts have slouched out of covert research to be born?

So there is often a disconnect between the history that we know and discussions of current research sanitized by willful innocence. This is crazy-making. I understand why Moreno does not want to be found on the wrong side of the looking glass. Yet Moreno wrote an excellent history of how “informed consent” evolved from the horrors of our own history. There is a parallax view of the stick of history which enters the water but seems to be discontinuous rather than a straight line. The distance of a historical account disinfects the moral dimension of events; we may be shocked when we read of the torturous experiments of Ewen Cameron and Sidney Gottleib, for example, doctors who participated in MKULTRA, a series of CIA experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric shock, and sensory deprivation, but because those experiments ended in the seventies, they read like scripts for a horror movie instead of a daily newspaper.

Moreno’s discussion of ethical issues is similarly sanitized and sane, appropriate to the seminar room on a college campus, with its warmth, light, and comfortable chairs, but far from the trenches in which experiments takes place. His calls for accountability sound eminently reasonable but are theoretical and abstract because the details we need in order to explore ethical implications in a real historical context, one with flesh-and-blood men and women feeling real emotions, are hidden in darkness.

As a result, readers remain outsiders because we do not “need to know.” We learn afterward some of what has taken place, when details filter into the light of ordinary day, but the ethical imperatives of a quickened public conscience can not be applied retroactively. The secret deeds are already done.

The technology of hypersonic sound (HSS) illustrates how the worlds of scientific researchers and outsiders bifurcate, creating an epistemological divide when we outsiders try to understand what is happening on a basic level.Hypersonic sound is “a column of sound that does not spread out like conventional sound but stays locked like a sonic laser.” (p. 147). If you enter the column, you hear it, but outside it, you do not. HSS can be used to target individuals while ensuring that those around them hear nothing.

It does not take a devious mind to imagine a variety of uses for hypersonic sound, nor to imagine its misuse, even as a trivial amusement. Some accounts of HSS describe pedestrians on sunny days walking into a column of sound in which they hear a waterfall. Seconds later, the sound is gone. The demonstrator laughed, watching the non-consenting public try to puzzle out experiences for which they had no prior frame. More pernicious uses of the technology suggest themselves. At the siege of Waco, David Koresh of the Branch Davidians reported hearing voices in his head. He was crazy, we are told. But without the key pieces to the puzzle … how do we know?Moreno states that he has spoken for years with people who claim to have been targeted by this or similar technologies which put voices into their heads or use them unknowingly to test beam, particle and electromagnetic weapons. I have spoken to such people, too. Yes, hearing voices that are not there is a symptom of illness. But hearing a voice that no one else hears does not mean, now that we know about HSS, that the voices do not exist.

Enter strangeness once again. Moreno concludes that the claims of these people are not credible. But Moreno had already reviewed by that point in the discussion the abuse of medical and psychological testing by intelligence professionals in the past. We know about those earlier experiments only because CIA Director Richard Helm’s order in 1973 to destroy all documents related to MKULTRA were carried out—except for financial documents stored in obscure places. Had they known those boxes existed, they too would have been destroyed, but because they were overlooked, researchers could connect some dots, at least, and describe a maze of funding sources, dummy companies fronting for intelligence agencies, and significant numbers of respectable medical establishments funded in whole or in part by the CIA.

The parallax view.So here’s the dilemma: Secret experiments were carried out by well-intentioned patriots working under the cover of security who tortured non-consenting adults, then covered up the events. There was no transparency or outside accountability for what they did. The same kinds of people today authorize experiments and weapons testing, and in the absence of accountability, they too report only to themselves. The light from inside bends back at the surface and we see only a black hole.

Had Moreno spoken to victims of MKULTRA and related projects in the fifties or sixties, before those documents were discovered, had he heard people subjected to electroshock therapy or drugs or isolation who told him in horrendous detail what had been done to them, don’t you think he would have made the same statement? That the sane conventional respectable response by a man of the establishment would be that they were deluded?

So why are such claims today unworthy of investigation?

Because to conduct such investigations in the absence of transparency, accountability, and meaningful legislative oversight is to subject oneself to ridicule and career suicide.

An aside about hypersonic sound … John Alexander, the author of “Future War,” told me that a major motivation for developing hypersonic sound was to communicate with covert agents in dangerous places. Someone about to be taken down can not answer a cell phone call but can attend to a voice in the head that tells them to “get out now.”

Moreno doesn’t mention that application—not a serious flaw, but an indicator that one depends on one’s sources for this sort of research and many of Moreno’s sources are unnamed. Moreno has confidence in them, as I often do in mine, but without an objective way to evaluate what they say … How do we know?

That question is left on the table when we finish this book. “Mind Wars” surveys much of what has become public about military applications of brain and mind science and reviews the historical context. Ethical issues are articulated at length. But in the end, what we don’t know is still much larger than what we do know.

The national security state, with millions of classified documents and billions of dollars in black research, freezes the average citizen out of the loop. Like enemies, real and imagined, we do not “need to know.” Classification, of course, covers mistakes and malfeasance and protects political bases in addition to ensuring security. So we ought to feel uneasy when we finish this book. “Mind Wars” is not an antidote to “strangeness.” We can’t blame Dr. Moreno, who wants doors to continue to open, calls to be returned. But our dissonance persists. We don’t know what we don’t know, only that those who do know ask us to trust.

Trust, yes, but verify, as the old Cold Warrior said. If it was good enough for him, it ought to be good enough for us.

Works cited:

Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense
by Jonathan D. Moreno
Dana Press (The Dana Foundation: New York and Washington DC) 2006

Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror
by Steven H. Miles, M. D.
Random House: New York. 2006.

Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists
by Colin A. Ross, M.D.
Manitou Communications: Richardson Texas. 2000

Future War: Non-Lethal Weapons in Twenty-First-Century Warfare
by John B. Alexander
St. Martin’s Griffin: 2000.

This review (edited) was published on June 22, 2007 by the National Catholic Reporter (http://www.natcath.com/). Copyright 2007 The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Comapny.