Howard Bloom joins Art Bell to dissect post-9/11 threats—anthrax’s 44 exposures, bin Laden’s potential suitcase nuke in the Washington Monument (1997–2000), and 6M U.S. Muslims under Fazler Raymond’s call for Dar el-Harb expansion—while framing them as a "war of mass psyche" against America’s fragmented cohesion. Bloom cites Columbia’s IVF prayer study, Darwinian societal conflict dating back 3.5B years, and Mandela’s civilized trial model to counter extremism, proposing satellite lasers and psychological tactics like leaflets mocking Islamic martyrdom myths. Callers debate unconventional strategies—naked women as distractions, HARP tech for cave strikes—but Bloom insists resilience lies in embracing American progress, from cell phones to Afghan women’s anti-Taliban groups, over blind retaliation. The core warning: complacency risks collapse, as seen in Mycenaean Greece and Indo-European conquests, demanding a unifying rhetoric to outmaneuver fundamentalist ideologies. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, or afternoon, as the case may be around the globe.
24 time zones in all.
This is Coast to Coast AM, and I am Art Bell.
Hi there, everybody.
Lots and lots to do tonight.
In the second hour, Howard Bloom will be here.
This hour, Richard C. Hoagland will be here because we've made orbits around Mars.
Let me give you a little quick news.
The CNN anthrax total now is 44 exposures, 12 infections, and three dead.
The nation's anthrax scare, of course, hit the White House today with a discovery of a small concentration of spores at an off-site mail processing center.
President Bush said we're working hard at finding out who's doing this.
Said the White House is safe, said he doesn't have anthrax.
Vice President Cheney said today that U.S. officials have disrupted some operations of bin Laden's terrorist network and prevented some potential attacks, but he cautions, quote, we have to assume there will be more attacks, end quote.
Bayer says it's near a deal on Cipro.
It's going to get cheaper.
In a moment, Richard will tell you all about Mars Odyssey and the current status of Mars Odyssey that slipped into orbit around Mars tonight.
The capital reopens, but the offices will remain closed.
Pentagon is saying the Taliban may be hiding in neighborhoods.
In other words, they may be suddenly taking up residence with civilians.
And we're talking about sending troops in on the ground pretty soon to find Osama bin Laden and company, and that's going to mean urban warfare, is what that's going to mean.
If that's the way they're going to do it, I know they've trained for that, but that's going to be one hell of a dangerous operation.
There's no question about it.
All right, in a moment, a little more on the Global Consciousness Experiment.
Whether it was officially that or not, Richard has some news on that, and we'll tell you all about that incredible, amazing, profound breath that we got at the end of last week as the result of our experiment.
If you will stay right where you are.
Advisor, Advisor Walter C. Cronkite at one point, science advisor, and then the Instrum Science Award winner, Richard C. Hoagland, on the night that we just begin to orbit Mars.
We'll get to all that in a moment.
Richard, I want to ask you about the incredible...
Well, that's what you get when you go to the mountains of New Mexico.
You get a hum on your phone.
All right.
Anyway, the most incredible night of my life, I think, was Friday when you sent me this graph, which you forwarded to me from Dean Raden, who is an associate, as I understand it, of the GCP, the Global Consciousness Program or Project?
He's at Mitchell's Noetic Sciences Institute in California.
But there are between 20 and 30 other scientists scattered institutions all over the world, and they're the institutions that host these eggs or these random number generators on various continents that feed their data back to Princeton to carry out these various measurements.
I had written this very complex article along with Mike Barra on the World Trade Center catastrophe and posted it on the web or was about to post it when someone emailed me, a guy, a friend of mine named David Haish in the UK, and asked me if I knew about this project at Princeton and that they had some pretty astonishing data on the September 11th event.
So I went to the website, the Princeton website, and lo and behold, there was the graph that you've seen showing this incredible spike, you know, beginning four or five hours before the first plane hit the first tower.
And I incorporated that in our piece and explained why we have a slightly different interpretation of their data than they do, but we're open to all interpretations and we wanted to discuss things.
Well, a couple, three days after we published it, I got a note to an email from Dean Rayton.
And he had a question, a hyper-dimensional question for me based on their four or five years of experience with this and other things.
And I, you know, he asked me to consider carefully the question.
So I sent an email back and I said, my friend Art Bell is going to carry out a consciousness experiment.
Would you be interested in analyzing, since these little 39 gadgets all over the world take data constantly, I said, Dean, would you be interested in analyzing the results?
What we said was they were monitoring, and they're monitoring 24-7, and that Dean Radin had offered to do the analysis, and he's part of their project.
I know, but Richard, if Dean Raden is part of GCP, even if this was a, I don't know, a wink of, hey, we'll take a look for you kind of deal, which I guess it was on the part of Dean Raden since he's part of the project, and they came up with this result, which you then sent me, which I then posted, then it seems to me it's kind of silly to just deny they had any part of it.
Now, I guess they weren't officially part of the experiment.
No, but no matter what the analysis, Richard, what I'm saying is, you know, since Dean is one of the founding people, and, you know, then to just deny they had any part of the experiment at all, yeah, officially they didn't.
You would think they would be anxious, if anything, to publicize the fact that they had picked something up.
I mean, when you look at the two analyses that he's done, one with a six-hour sliding window, which you have up on the site, and one that we haven't posted, which is with a one-hour sliding window, it all stays within the same timeframe of your show.
Now, here's one of the confusions.
Your show is broadcast live beginning a few minutes ago and running for four hours, right?
And on the Tuesday, Wednesday, when you announced you were going to do this the following night, with me as the guest in the following hour, you could, I mean, this whole consciousness business is a little bit fuzzy.
It kind of reminds me of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.
And neither Roger nor Dean know, they do now because I informed them, but they did not know that your, for your prior night show is rebroadcast before your live show.
Listen, Richard, I don't want to take up the whole night with it, but I just wanted to make that clear to my listeners where the graph came from, who the graph came from, and what it is that Princeton is saying about it.
It's political because it's Roger Nelson versus Dean Raden.
Dean Raden has been an absolutely super cool guy on this.
He wants to pursue quiet investigations, look into some other things, and we're going to do that.
And I have never talked to Dr. Nelson.
I'd love to.
I don't know why his nose is a little bent out of joint, but it does seem to me kind of typical of some of the academic things that have happened over the years on other projects.
Which they will refine down through a process called aerobraking in the next 76 days.
They'll literally dip the sucker into the upper atmosphere of Mars, and using the friction of the upper atmosphere will slow it down a little bit on each orbit, like kind of like dragging your toe in the water if you're in the middle of the middle.
And the problem there had to do with the solar panel, which was one of the kind of resistance objects on the spacecraft to slow it down.
It never properly deployed en route from Earth, so it was bending too far.
So they had to kind of call a hiatus until they understood the process better.
And that gave us the window in the spring of 98 to get those first pictures of Sidonia.
Remember, it was during that hiatus and the aerobraking that gave them the opportunity to take those pictures.
Well, hopefully we won't have hiatuses here.
We are told there will be no images until February of next year.
But I have a feeling that's not going to be a hard and fast rule because if you're in a 19-plus hour orbit, after you've dug your toe in the water at the low point, as you're going up to the high point, very long elliptical orbit, you can look down and take all kinds of neat spectacular pictures.
And this camera, unlike any camera we have ever sent to Mars before, Art, can take instantaneous color pictures.
It has a device called the GRS, for Gamma Ray Spectrometer, which will measure...
And of course, water is H2O.
So by looking at the map distribution of hydrogen, you're looking at the map distribution of water.
And our model, remember the tidal model we've talked about on the show a couple times, says They should find it in two big pools on both sides of the planet, which, if they do, will be a stunning discovery.
Or 20 years later, look at the little microbe data from the PR experiment that just got a new breath of life in the last few months that was basically overlooked for 20 years going back to biking, where the microbes in the soil were giving off gases with the rhythmic circadian rhythm of the Martian day.
So NASA's now put up a whole website with all kinds of cross-links and conversation and checks and balances.
And they're doing now what they should have done almost 30 years ago.
So yeah, it kind of go in and out of favor.
And with Dr. Golden leaving, with Golden leaving, it was kind of funny to see the live TV on NASA Select because he was high-fiving everybody in the control room after they announced they were in orbit, that he could get his arms around.
He even brought his, I think his grandson was there with him, kind of a cute kid that was asking questions of some of the staff people wandering around, a kid in a candy store.
Wonder if he's going to become a space scientist someday.
Anyway, we are on to something new.
We've got our success now.
We're in orbit.
They'll begin the arrow breaking tomorrow.
There'll be a press conference on NASA TV at about 1 p.m. Eastern at 10 a.m. Pacific for those who have NASA select.
And you can get it on the web.
We have a link on Enterprise, EnterpriseMission.com, to JPL.
So if you want to find the latest, just simply go to us and then you go over to JPL.
And the next things that are going to come out of this mission will be the Russian data.
The Russians have a neutron gadget measuring high-energy neutrons.
And that apparently is going to be activated tomorrow.
It doesn't have to wait until we're in the low mapping orbit.
And from that Russian data, we should get our first glimmer of whether there is anomalous radioactivity coming from the surface of Mars.
Well, as I've said, you know, if Mars has undergone this extraordinary life experience of being a satellite, a planet, the blah, blah, blah, Tom Van Flandern, then a lot of the radioactive debris from that process could have splattered into Mars.
And since not that long ago, 65 million years is when we're projecting this could have occurred, you might still have radioactive daughter products alive and well and radiating that this gadget will actually record.
And it's the Russians that have it on the spacecraft, and it'll be interesting to see their release policy versus NASA's release policy for cutting-edge science.
So if they find water under the surface in massive amounts and they find chlorophyll, doesn't that make the prospect of life almost, depending on how you believe, almost inevitable?
I mean, you don't get to chlorophyll without a lot of evolution going on around bushes, around trees, around, you know, solar-absorbing photopigmentation and stuff like that.
If they find chlorophyll, if they find water, do you think that sets the stage for the president to announce some sort of massive crash program to get a manned mission to Mars?
We have our own gadget from the University of Arizona called the GRS, gamma-ray spectrometer.
It can't be deployed on that long boom until they're in the mapping orbit, which will be in late January.
But we'll get interim data from the Russians on the radiation.
There's a gadget called Maria, by the way, which is from the Johnson Space Center that does not seem to be working.
That's the second radiation gadget.
And I don't know what's wrong with it, and they don't seem to either, but they'll try to tinker with it, you know, by remote control like they do with many of these things until they get to the mapping orbit.
But we're not going to see pictures unless they change style or change nuance or cadence, probably until late January or February.
But to make up for that, they are in multispectral color.
And remember what I said a few days ago?
If you take a picture of Sidonia and you get metal and you get anomalous composition of stuff down there from the multispectral that you can't explain by means of weird rock types.
You lose the human scale, and if you don't know the scale of what you're looking at down there, for those of us that look at satellite images and know what we're looking at, it's awesomely awful.
But if you don't understand that perspective, it probably loses a little.
The photograph that I've seen, and there are two of them in the article that I wrote on Enterprise, in the article that we have posted or linked.
I guess it may not be up tonight because I didn't call Keith and have him do anything.
But you can go to our site through ArtSight, and it's called Who's the Enemy, Really?
And down toward the bottom, there are two pictures.
One is of the shattered remains of one of the towers, just the facing steel, the almost gothic cathedral-like facade that had been put up by the architect when he designed these beautiful buildings.
And then at the very bottom, the last photograph, is a scene right out of the day after.
I mean, you see everything covered with this grayish, gritty, white, snow-like material, which is the gypsum and concrete and all the other stuff from the buildings.
And you see these structures at weird angles, looking as if they were the remnants of some ancient civilization on Mars.
I mean, this is, when I looked at some of these aerial pictures art, the only thing I could think of that was comparable is the shattered remains of what we're seeing in some of the photographs from Mars.
And of course, it then raises the question, what happened there to produce the same kind of destruction we're seeing comparable to New York?
And that, of course, raises the question, are the radiation instruments on the spacecraft that is now successfully orbiting Mars tonight going to tell us that as part of one of our scenarios, something in terms of a vast conflagration took place on this planet, and that's why the former Redland civilization was made extinct.
We live in extraordinary times.
I mean, I listened to your show and your guest last night, and I got this awful feeling of incredible depression like I've had for the last month, like a lot of people I have.
And then I'm watching on NASA TV and through the Internet and on the, you know, this place looked like a miniature version of Mission Control with all the screens lit up with all the Mars stuff.
And I look at this as the best and the brightest and the most hopeful side of the human condition and all the extraordinary things we can find out if they'll just let us know.
And it's like being hung between the abyss.
It's like being stretched over infinity where on the one hand you have the darkest side of human nature and on the other you have the brightest side of human inquisitiveness and curiosity and hopeful aspirations for another kind of future.
That the war we're in with these characters, since we have traced it back a thousand years, is an incredibly symbolic war about the foundations of the republic, the foundations of our very democracy.
And as I've been telling a lot of people who I know around the country who are concerned about this, you know, because they get mail and all that, I'm really telling them to calm down, that this is not what I see happening.
That's what I am projecting will be possibly another event sometime in the future.
And what we're working with now with some of the administration people that we're quietly talking to is a way of using this physics that I keep talking about and the alignments to try to predict, based on what we know they already did on September 11th, the windows in which they might try to carry out their next event.
You know what really bothers me about these damn suitcase nukes?
One of the things that I found out about them in recent discussions with guests, almost any nuclear weapon in the world can be tracked easily, fairly easily.
And we have a group that tracks and looks for nuclear devices and things that radiate and so forth and so on.
It's my understanding the suitcase nukes are so well shielded that absolutely nothing escapes from them, making them absolutely undetectable to these teams that would otherwise find nuclear devices.
Nuclear material, be it uranium or plutonium, which is the most fissionable two elements that we know, when you put them together and keep them far enough apart so they're not supercritical until the moment of detonation, they emit radiation.
Well, the portability is defeated if you have a lot of mass shielding to keep it from being detected by Geier counters and other things.
By its very nature, it has to be relatively unshielded because it takes several feet of concrete or steel or tungsten or something super dense to shield it so you could not detect it.
So, you know, where am I-My target of choice, if I was bin Laden and I had done what I had done, assuming, of course, he's the sole proprietor behind this, and we don't really know that yet.
We haven't seen the evidence.
the circumstantial evidence is in it it indicates that he's had a those those that have seen the evidence appear convinced and they don't know Tony Blair has seen the evidence nobody else anyway I believe the president of Pakistan and well I'm sure Isa also saw it and he went along yeah and he would be the least likely to go let's not get into that that canyon all right let's assume whoever did this who did it brilliantly even though it was dastardly it was also brilliant because it worked and it worked horribly well Yes.
So that level of planning is, we know it's two or three years in the making.
So if you're going after this incredible symbolic foundations of the Republic, which is what they did in New York, by hitting the trade towers, by hitting the Pentagon, doing it on the dates and the times and those windows and all that, if you read the article, it's incredibly symbolic and it goes back to the Templar Crusade assassin confrontation a thousand years ago in Jerusalem when this all began, actually 911 years ago.
All right, 911.
If they're following that modality, that's their logic, then the only place that it would make sense to strike would be Washington, D.C. It would be the only thing that you could do to follow up on your supreme success of 9-11.
You sick people, even if they're dying quietly in ones and twos, is not going to terrify the United States of America.
Blowing away Washington with a small nuclear device would.
It would completely change the structure of our society, our government, homeland security.
You know, we would be in a condition of martial law if that were to take place.
So the name of the game is to stop it.
So if you know it's Washington, you've narrowed it down now to that 10 square mile area.
But where in Washington?
Well, I told one of my sources tonight that I think that I have a basic clue.
If I were trying to do this, I would have hidden one of those nukes in the top of the Washington Monument when it was being renovated in the last couple, three years.
Under normal circumstances, even one of these things, most people don't run around with nuclear detectors.
Even Washington, you don't have nuclear sensors.
You don't have Geiger counters or scintillation counters or anything like that.
So if you were to transport it and then secrete it in a building, and the reason that the top of the 550-foot-tall Washington Monument is so diabolical is because a 1,000-ton tactical nuclear device, a tactical nuke, like a suitcase nuke, would take out the White House, the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the Smithsonian, NASA headquarters, all of the famous monuments in Washington would be gone.
And that would be Bin Laden's incredible triumph.
That's the bad news.
The good news is, because we know now from the numbers and the alignments and what he did on September 11th, we know he's game plan.
And we can outwit his game plan by predicting where he's going to be before he is there.
And that's what I communicated to the people who are talking to us tonight.
I mean, obviously, I can't expect you to believe me unless you read the documentation.
But the most interesting thing about what we did was a few days after what we did was put on the web, Saddam Hussein, you know, that other nasty guy, wrote a response to an email from someone who just sent him an email saying, why can't we all get along?
It's obviously propaganda.
It's obviously his chance to tout the Arab cause, right?
But he mentions in several places in his very long email, which is posted on several websites, the Crusades.
It's like they've suddenly all gotten on the same page.
They're taking this and they're saying it's a thousand-year-old thing between us and it won't be over until one of us is dead.
I mean, if you have people willing to die, looking forward to dying, to kill other people, then Armageddon probably sounds like the biggest firecracker of them all.
I'm going to bet you dollars to Navy Beans, 20 million people listening to me, that the next thing that happens is not going to be mass destruction biological.
That's the nuisance factor to keep the FBI and the bright guys all tied up.
Because, see, what makes it so horrible and such a boogeyman is that it's invisible.
It steals upon you in the night.
It comes innocently in your mail.
And they're being brilliant about it because they've got Washington going in circles, making counter-pronouncements, not doing simple common sense things like protecting postal workers until it's too late.
It was stupid not to be blowing these machines, you know, off with air hoses when you know you've got something in the system.
So finally now they're wising up, but it's tying up all the good manpower.
And Remember how magicians work?
They do their thing over with the left hand while the right hand is picking your pocket.
So I'm saying it's going to be symbolic.
Washington is it.
The signatures and fingerprints are all over this.
And I believe it's one of those suitcase gadgets.
Fortunately, once you understand that, finding it is easy because you cannot feel it unless you put it in a building.
And there are very few buildings that have been renovated or built from the ground up in Washington since 1998, 97.
And the Washington Monument itself was renovated and stood there with its scaffolding for three years, not even finished on the evening of the 2000 Millennium Celebration.
Well, Richard, I certainly understand watching the right hand and being wary of the left hand or the converse.
I understand that, and I understand how it's done, and we're out of time, and I'm glad we're going around Mars in an egg-shaped orbit, and I'm glad it was a success.
Well, I'll tell you, overhead photo of Ground Zero on my website now.
This is one that has not been seen.
I've certainly never seen anything like it.
It's incredible.
Absolutely incredible.
Howard Bloom is coming up in a moment.
Howard Bloom, a visiting scholar at New York University, is founder of the International Haleopsychology Project, a founding board member of the EPIC of Evolution Society, a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the International Society of Human Ecology, and the Academy of Political Science.
My, my, my.
Bloom has taken an unusual approach to the study of mass moods and cultural convolutions.
Well, this should be interesting.
I know he was on the program with one of our other hosts in the last few weeks, I believe.
But back for obvious reasons, he began out building his first Boolean algebra machine at the age of 12.
I know what kind of kid he was.
And co-designed a computer which won, listen to this, which won a Westinghouse Science Award before he left grade school.
At 16, he was a lab assistant at the world's largest cancer research center, the Roswell Park Memorial Research Cancer Institute, where he helped plumb the mysteries of the immune system.
After graduating magna cum laude at Phi Beta Kappa from New York City University, Bloom turned down four graduate fellowships and embarked on a 20-year-long urban anthropology expedition to penetrate what he calls society's myth-making machinery.
The inner sanctums of politics and the media.
Oh, that's got to be interesting.
During his foray into the dark underbelly of mass emotion, the dark underbelly of mass emotion, he edited a magazine, founded the leading avant-garde art studio on the East Coast, and was featured on the cover of Art Direction magazine, has done so much more.
I was the kind of kid who gets kicked around the block all the time.
Yeah.
Let's see, they had a name for me when I was 11.
I was called the Sickly Scientist.
Yes, you're not very popular.
You know, if you've got a medical quality microscope and are doing microbiology and you're involved with astrophysics, I mean, these are, you're not supposed to do this as a kid, but they don't allow you on baseball teams.
And what we create are basically mine tribes, new kinds of tribes that roam through cyber society and associate via electronics, via the movement of electrons.
And what we give to society, we do the Promethean task of going to the mountaintop, grabbing fire, and giving it to men.
You are aware, are you not, Howard, of the experiments that we conducted several years ago and then most recently conducted and got a chart from Dean Raden, which actually came from the Princeton equipment, of the results that just will knock your socks off at the mass concentration effort?
This was conducted under such strict circumstances that it baffles people like me in science.
And basically what happened is that the women who were being prayed for had twice the rate of reproductive success of the women who weren't being prayed for.
And yes, what the man, Dr. Rogerio Loba, the chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, was a lead author of the study.
And he made a very telling statement.
He says, we could have ignored the findings.
You know, us scientists tend to be a little orthodox and rigid.
He says we could have ignored the findings, but that would not help to advance the field.
And he wants to raise the question of how this thing can happen biologically.
Now, I run the International Paleopsychology Project, which is a group of 80 scientists and science writers all around the world.
And I raised the following very Art Bellian possibility, a very non-Howard Blumian possibility.
And I said, look, back around 1812 or so, a kid named Michael Faraday, who had no credentials in science, he had not gone to university at all.
Michael Faraday discovered something brand new.
He discovered the electromagnetic field.
Now, you and I as kids went through the same experiment that Faraday went through, putting a piece of paper on a magnet, putting droppings of iron shavings onto the piece of paper, then watching the iron shavings arrange themselves as if by magic into these concentric loops, and discovering that there's an invisible set of concentric loops in some field of a sort that we hadn't known before.
Now, if that new field could come as a total surprise to people in 1812, there may yet be other fields that we will be surprised by.
There are more things on heaven and earth, as Shakespeare said, than are dreamt of in our scientific philosophies.
Look, whenever we try to tap into mass human emotions, Whenever we try to tap into the mass human mood and mass perceptions, we have to watch out for something.
It's very possible, we're tapping the gods and other people.
I mean the passions and the deepest innate instincts in other human beings.
And we are synchronizing them.
And we have to watch out.
The easiest way to synchronize a group, the easiest way to create a synchronized mass mood is to find an enemy, to demonize it, and to organize everybody against that enemy.
That's what Osama bin Laden is attempting to do right now with the United States.
He's trying to galvanize all of the Islamic world, ummah, the ummah, the people, the overarching super.
The point is to, in one of the video pieces that I've done, there's a statement, and it says, and it's my statement, and it says, get rid of the God of war.
The first God you'll find within yourself, the easiest God to arouse, is the God of war.
That's the one that galvanizes people most easily.
That's the social synchronizer beyond all social synchronizers.
And that's the one to stomp out of existence.
Because there are so many positive gods of creativity that we can use.
So many positive gods of caring and of compassion that we can use, but they are harder to use.
The gods of war are raging, and we have to fight them, unfortunately, with the gods of war.
On rare occasion, it becomes necessary for human beings, in order to defend what they believe in, in order to defend a way of life, in order to defend the pluralism that makes this global brain, name one of the books, that makes this global brain work.
It works through throbbing competition, but peaceful competition primarily, between social groups that represent different alternatives in the mass mind.
Well, first they walk in parallel up against each other to see which one is the biggest, which has the most powerful muscles, and which, and this is the most important thing, which has the greatest determination.
And if one of those elk realizes, oh my God, I'm up against, you know, I'm up against it.
There's no way I'm going to win against this guy, they never get down to the horn-locking phase.
Yes, well, Osama has managed to pull off the kind of victory that we humans, with our deep animal instincts, call great.
Alexander the Great got to be great by demolishing a city, literally, and killing all of its inhabitants.
Osama bin Laden has just done something that has catapulted him to the level of a heroic level and that has made him a great man, a man who's fighting to restore an Islamic empire to the glory that it had in 1492, which is the year he refers to in the speech that he made after the World Trade Center attack.
Okay, well, the Islamic Empire, Muhammad came along in 622, and he was a warrior prophet.
He was a prophet who used the sword.
And many people in Islam, like the late Ayatollah Khomeini, who's a sort of spiritual grandfather to Osama bin Laden, have said those Christians, they've said lies about Christ.
They say he turned the other cheek.
He would never have turned the other cheek.
Prophets do not turn the other cheek.
Prophets are men who have swords in their hand.
Prophets are men who go into battle.
Prophets are men who kill.
This is one Islamic interpretation of their religion.
And what has happened is we've got a great warrior who wants to restore an empire That the Muslims, after 622 and roughly in 640, after Muhammad died, within 40 years had taken over almost all of the known world.
And the Islamic Empire eventually extended all the way from Nigeria and a third of Africa through parts of Europe, Spain, and a part of southern France.
They were attempting to take the rest of France and the rest of Europe in 712 when Charles Martel stopped them, fortunately for those of us who don't want to necessarily live under an Islamic imperium.
But their imperium spread all the way, roughly 12,000 miles, to Indonesia, to parts of the Philippines, and to Malaysia.
The largest Islamic country in the world is not Egypt.
It's not Saudi Arabia.
It's not any of the Arab countries.
It's Indonesia, which is so far away from the Middle East that it's astonishing.
Again, I acknowledge we propagandize our own people, and we hear about the coalition that we put together and Islamic countries that are part of that coalition and all the rest of it.
But there's a lot we don't hear, Howard.
And that is, for example, we don't really know what the Islamic world, the organism that is the Islamic world, if we think of them that way as we think of ourselves as one, what it really thinks about Osama bin Laden.
In Nigeria, which has only been a part of the Islamic Empire for 200 years, it was captured in a jihad, a holy war, 200 years ago.
The northern half of Nigeria is Islamic.
And in Nigeria, there are posters of Osama bin Laden in a pastiche, along with posters with pictures of the World Trade Center burning and then of Ground Zero.
The world of Islam reads the Quran as we read the Bible, and we are told constantly in our media that the Quran absolutely forbids the kind of thing that Osama bin Laden and company did.
So how could it be true, or why, I guess is a better question, would it be true, that the greater Islamic world does not necessarily think as we think or are told they think about all of this, but rather regards Osama bin Laden as a heroic figure, despite what officially the governments might be saying.
Well, you've characterized the situation very well.
And the fact, first we have to look at a basic fact.
The mind of a society generally operates by pitching or allowing subcultures to battle each other in rather peaceful ways, or not so peaceful ways sometimes.
In Islamic society, at least 60% of the Islamic community agrees with the interpretation of the Quran that absolutely rules out what Osama bin Laden has done.
But that 60% is a silent majority.
Any spokesman for that silent majority, anyone who, any writers who have attempted to write its positions and its points of view out have been literally killed all through the Islamic world.
This is from a friend who's been a very politically important figure in Malaysia, which is a very large Islamic country.
40% of Islamic society is favorably disposed toward the fundamentalists.
It could swing either way.
It could become extremely militant and go for Osama, or it could not go for Osama.
It could find him too fundamentalist even for them, too violent even for them.
5% of the Muslim community, he estimates, is the militant Islamic community, the community that's committed to violence, that just can't get enough of Osama.
Osama is the superhero beyond all superheroes.
He's the person who's finally going to deliver the Islamic imperium, the Islamic Empire, from its shackles and raise it to the glory that it had in 1350.
Can we, Howard, can we, for this group, can we cut the head of the snake off?
In other words, if some special forces trooper gets lucky and gets Osama in his sights and kills him and brings his head back to George Bush and the American media on a silver platter, what does that do?
Now, I've been raising the question ever since Princess Diana died within the context of the International Paleopsychology Project of why this is true.
And evolutionarily, none of us have really come up with a good explanation, but it is a simple fact of life.
You can galvanize a society by having a martyr.
On the other hand, Osama bin Laden and his right-hand man, who is an obstetrician from Egypt, are very clever people.
Look what they've done.
They have reinvented part of our infrastructure and turned it into a bomb.
They have turned our airplanes into bombs.
They have begun to saw away at the links that coordinate and bond our society.
You even more than I, far more than I, are a public voice.
We have to do what Winston Churchill and what Roosevelt did for America and England when Nazism first arose.
They didn't do it when Nazism first arose.
Nobody would listen to Winston Churchill when Nazism first arose.
It was Chamberlain, who wanted to give up everything in sight, who felt that you could buy peace with land.
That's where the peace with land phrase originally came up.
It didn't work.
It didn't work.
And when the Nazis in 1939 started a war in Poland, Britain was shocked.
And British were in the same position, Londoners were in the same position as New Yorkers have been recently.
New Yorkers have been calling each other up and saying, my wife says we need to go to the hills.
We need to hide somewhere.
Where is a good place to hide?
Well, if those people hide and New York dies, there are only five cities that create the civilization of this planet at this moment.
London, Tokyo, New York, Paris, and L.A., those are basically it.
So if that strange thing that is New York City, that gathering of strangers and mind tribes who are able to do things that are beyond the realm of normal human possibility, that's what New York is, if those people who are now associated in a kind of social ganglion that just catches fire periodically with inspiration and creates new things, if those people disperse, if the social bonds between them are cut, then we lose what makes our civilization thrive.
Yes, of course, by just the rudest, sloppiest, I mean, people who just didn't have a chance.
People who were written off as absolute yahoos.
It happened in 1800 B.C. when the Indo-Europeans came surging out of the territory just north of the Black Sea and took over all of Europe, took over Mycenaean Greece.
You know the Greece that's written about by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
They fell to the Aryan onslaught, the Indo-European onslaught.
And the Indo-Europeans threw Greece into a dark age.
Greece had written, had writing in 1200 BC.
It went through a period from 1200 BC until roughly 800 BC when writing disappeared, cities disappeared, the light of civilization was snuffed out in Greece by this invasion.
The same group not only invaded all of Europe and left its language traces all over the place, we all speak Indo-European languages, but it also took over India.
Now, those ants, when they attack a rival colony, spread a pheromone.
In other words, they spread a perfume that carries a message.
And that perfume carries a message that says, panic.
And if the ants in the hive that's being attacked panic, in other words, if they lose their social bonds, if they lose their social cohesion, they are dead.
They are gone.
Well, we are beginning to lose our bounds of social cohesion.
And the way to keep them together is through a strange social galvanizer called, are you ready for this?
We've been making the mistake of calling ourselves a consumerist society.
We've been making the mistake of calling ourselves a capitalist society.
We are not those things.
We are a society of new empowerments.
We are a society that presents new empowerments to us two or three times in our lifetime.
In my father's lifetime, they went from the horse-drawn carriage to the automobile.
In my father's lifetime, they went from magazines to, in 1922, to radio.
They went in his lifetime from radio to television.
These are new forms of empowerment that change the entire human condition and human possibilities.
Those changes are as great as the changes that would come from an evolutionary change in which we gain new forms of eyes, new forms of hands, new forms of legs.
But we don't have to do that.
Our society continually clothes us with new forms of virtual reality.
It's done it in our lifetime, yours and mine, with things like cyberspace.
We're looking at a much wider war, and it's going to be a war between determinations and passions.
We have to learn to be passionate about what we have.
What we have is beyond all belief.
What we have is wonder-making.
What we have is we empower people.
Everybody in this world now owns a radio, thanks to America's invention of the transistor and Japan's then commercialization of the transistor and projects.
Well, you could have been the king of Persia in 450 B.C., who seemed to own almost all the known world, and you still couldn't have had a radio.
You could have offered all of India with all of its elephants and all of its rubies and riches, and you still couldn't have bought these things.
So a society that produces these new possibilities constantly and constantly redefines human potential needs to recognize that that's what it does and needs to believe passionately, as passionately as Osama's followers believe in him and believe in the fact that Allah has given us, they say in Pakistan, Allah has given us the bomb.
Anything that Allah gives us must be used.
Allah gives it to us for a reason.
That's the Islamic bomb.
Now, whether Osama gets his hands on it or not depends on another struggle between subcultures.
Well, because he's bought, I forget the exact number of kilos of plutonium that he's managed to purchase, according to one story from a website that allegedly is a Mossad website.
Mossad tends to know a lot more than we do about a lot of things.
I'm sure you could get the material, and we all know it could be put in a bomb and simply scattered without exploding and poison and poison and poison.
It might not be Osama with the anthrax, absolutely.
Militant groups in the United States, we have, you know, we have our Christian militia groups, and people talked about them during the 90s a great deal.
People aren't talking about them very much these days.
So that means this is a war of pluralism, of modern secular pluralism, with all of its richness of invention and thought, against fundamentalism, which says, thou shalt not think.
Now, we're up against a bunch of fundamentalists in this country.
Only a small percentage of the Christian fundamentalists in this country are militant.
But those who are militant are armed to the teeth.
And those who are militant have wanted to create a civil war in this country for decades now, because if they create a civil war, they can destroy the Jews, they can destroy the blacks, they can destroy all the non-Aryans.
Now, the Aryans, according to their point of view, are the chosen tribes of God.
They are the chosen people spoken of in the Bible.
The Jews are lying when they say they're the chosen people of the Bible.
It's the Aryans who are the chosen people of the Bible.
And it's time for them to take back the new Canaan, to wipe America clean of all of its impurities, And to purify it with only Aryan blood again.
Then let me just bluntly ask you, I know this is a very sensitive question, but is this headed to ultimately the kind of thing where the fundamentalists in Islam convince the larger group or at least provoke enough that there becomes a war between Islam and the Christian world?
I asked the blunt question because President Bush, at every utterance, every opportunity for an utterance, goes out of his way, as I'm sure you've heard, to say, to emphasize, this is not a war against Islam.
He says it again and again.
This is not a war against Islam.
This is a war against the terrorists or the extremists, I guess.
And of course, Osama bin Laden has been making, every time he opens his mouth or gets an opportunity for any publicity, he's trying to make it a war of Islam against the West.
And so the question prior to the top of the hour was, will in fact our efforts fail, is another way of asking it.
And this will, in fact, turn into a war between Islam and Christianity.
But also, we're at a tipping point in history, Art.
And which direction we go depends right now on you and me and every single person who's listening to this program.
It depends on our exerting our will in every possible way we can, harnessing our passions to keep this society not just alive, but thriving more powerfully than ever before, even in the face of anthrax, even in the face of the destruction of the World Trade Center, and even in the face of the destructions yet to come.
All right, well, let us discuss then what has to change, because your current view, as reflected by your answer earlier, is that we're losing the war right now.
If you manage to, first of all, if you go down as a martyr, the basic definition of a martyr is somebody who goes down taking out five infidels.
And should you be fortunate enough to kill five infidels and then be killed, you go directly to paradise, you do not ask go, you get 70 virgins, and that's 70 virgins on the spot.
Well, you know that in these strict fundamentalist Islamic societies, men are segregated from women, and you know what happens to young men at the age of 13 when their home loans kick in.
They become horny as all hell, and it's one of the greatest tortures men ever go through.
If you offer a 16-year-old or a 26-year-old who's never had access to women, who can't even see their faces, 70 virgins on the spot in all of their glorious nakedness.
I am writing pieces that say things like the following.
New York is not just a city of concrete.
It is not just a city of glass.
It is not just a city with ribs of steel.
It is not a city of mourning.
It is a city of borning.
New York is a spirit, a flicker, a flame.
New York is a city whose brilliance is born in the strange.
It's a mega nest for those who were too bright, too adventurous, too pregnant with imaginings.
It's a giant hive for those who did not fit in Wilmington or Waterbury or Wasahatchee.
New York is a place for those who cannot squeeze themselves into the America of the everyday.
It is a gathering place for those who cannot just be normal, joke around, party, and play, those who cannot be content with a life of nothing but beer and football games.
New York is a city of those who find that something out of kilter with the ordinary, something odd, unnameable, teases and tickles their brain.
Those who had no one to understand them come here and find they suddenly have a home.
We New Yorkers are the oddballs, the misfits, the outcasts, the brilliant, the vision-ridden, the eerie, the nerdy, the incomprehensible, the bizarrely gifted, the ghosts of futures searching for a home, the restless souls who elsewhere have no grounding, who without New York are forced to roam.
Here, we strange ones, we two swift ones, we who open strange emotions, feelings haunting others, but which today's words won't yet let them say, we who see new passions, new astonishments, new forms of theater, new ways to dance, new cinematic vision, new prose, new jokes, new poetry, new fashion, new ways to work and play, we gather here and find each other.
And the point is that there are these ineffable strings that connect us human beings that are filled with flares of passion and emotion.
And it's up to those of us who are the spokesmen for society, those who try to speak those things others feel but can't quite put in words.
It's up to us to articulate what it is that America means.
Now, in World War I, you used a very valuable word a while ago.
You used two very valuable concepts.
One is the concept of propaganda, and the other is the concept of truth, seeing things from the other person's point of view, from your enemy's point of view.
Knowing your enemy's rhetoric, knowing what your enemy is saying about you.
Well, it's time for our press to get with it.
We are involved in a holy war that in Chechnya, we are not fighting freedom fighters.
Why is the second in command in Chechnya Jordanian if we are fighting local Chechen freedom fighters?
Because it's part of an international jihad.
In the Punjab, we do not have a local squabble.
What we've got is part of an international jihad.
In the Philippines, not only are there the Abu Sayyaf groups, but there are more established Muslim militant groups.
Those have been fighting until this last week.
They just made a peace agreement, fortunately.
But they have been fighting as part of an international jihad.
Several hundred Christians and Muslims have been killed in the last week in fighting between Christians and Muslims.
Those are part of an international jihad.
The people in Indonesia in the streets are carrying pictures of Osama bin Laden.
The people in Nigeria in the streets are carrying pictures of Osama bin Laden.
Those countries are roughly 10,000 to 12,000 miles apart.
We are fighting, first of all, there's a fight within Islam right now between the silent majority and the very, very vocal minority.
It is very similar to 1933, Hitler's Germany, when Hitler was only able to get 33% of the vote, meaning 67%.
The majority of Germans wanted nothing to do with Hitler at all.
If you were the president and you could issue an order, how would you dispose of Osama bin Laden?
Assuming we can get him, would you have him killed or would you have him, perhaps even worse yet, I'm wondering, it's some kind of choice, have him brought back And put on trial and then executed.
Yes, but if we put him in a jail, how many airliners would we be chasing about with people slitting throats and doing whatever it is the terrorists do to get him released?
You know, I understand exactly what you're saying, but I'm not sure that that solution, bringing him back, trying him, and then keeping him in jail for the rest of his life, I'm not sure that's a politically viable possibility.
Yes, bloodlust, you know, my books are not only talk about bloodlust and Taliban and Osama bin Laden and the history of Islam and what leads up to all of this crisis, but they talk a good deal about bloodlust.
But the trick is that the Rooseveltian and Churchillian trick in the Second World War was that they managed to articulate the passions of their societies in ways that galvanized their society and made them ready to fight, and even to give up a certain degree of their civil rights in order to retain their society.
But the remarkable thing was, not just that they galvanized their societies to fight successfully, but they galvanized them in such a way that when the fight was over, those societies could reconstitute themselves whole as pluralistic, democratic societies.
Well, one of the tricky things, this is also in global brain, one of the tricky things about a mass mind is that the actual brain, your brain and mind, consists of many different brains, many different brain segments, elements, or webs, whatever you want to call them, battling each other.
So we have feelings that contradict each other, struggling against each other all the time.
And society has the equivalent of that and subcultures struggling against each other.
We have to, again, know that we are fighting on behalf of pluralism and democracy and freedom and freedom for wonder, freedom for reinvention of human possibilities.
We are fighting for this against two forms of fundamentalism.
Christian fundamentalism, which could be behind, that is militant Christian fundamentalism, which could conceivably be behind the anthrax attack.
But we know who's behind the bombing of the World Trade Center.
Now, if you want to know more about what's being said in the Islamic world, first of all, I agree totally with you in the fact, or maybe I disagree, I feel that we must do what was done in World War I. Woodrow Wilson summoned the moguls of Hollywood,
and he summoned the moguls of the publishing industry, and he summoned all the superstars of his time, and he said to them, we need every avenue of expression available in our popular culture and in our high-class culture.
And we need it to resonate with a single message, that we are fighting for democracy, that we are fighting for the very life of democracy, and that we must fight with everything we've got.
The sigh in your voice is a very accurate evaluation of the situation.
Oh, my God, here comes war all over again.
Why are we involved in this after we've been struggling so hard all these years and all these centuries, in fact, all these millennia, to get rid of war?
Well, the evolution in this process comes from the fact, and this is an unfortunate fact, that our legacy, our heritage, our biological heritage is one of wars.
That 3.5 billion years ago, our initial ancestors, bacteria, lived in colonies of trillions.
Much more organized colonies socially than we are.
Every suit of armor ever made Has the king chainmills and with a missing link The End Now, I would never mean to suggest that my fast blasters are representative of, you know, the whole country or anything, but I do sit here with the computer in front of me reading what people send me as I do the program.
And not much has changed, in my opinion.
Greg here in Granada Hills, California says, Art, I don't want to see bin Laden dead.
I want his head on a stick.
Bruce in Fort Morris, Florida says, bin Laden needs to be drowned in swine soup of rotted pig body parts at a slaughterhouse.
Stephen in Victoria, BC says Osama must die by an act of Allah.
And that's the one that says, I want him killed by Allah.
If we could deal with him in a way that convinces the Islamic community that indeed Allah has turned his back on Osama bin Laden, that Allah does not approve of what Osama bin Laden is doing, we could pull off a minor miracle here.
The reason that George Bush is continually saying that this is not a war against Islam is that in fact, Osama bin Laden represents a threat not just to us, he represents an even more immediate threat to the government in Cairo, to Saddam Hussein, to the rulers of Saudi Arabia, to the king of Jordan, and to the leader, the president of Syria.
Well, see, we do have, we are trying to line up, and we have lined up, the cooperation of those governments that are scared to death of their own fundamentalist populations.
The prime minister of Pakistan is sitting on a powder keg.
The fundamentalists in his country have been almost ripe, have been almost ready to take over the country for quite a long time.
There are 10,000 madrasas, Religious schools in Pakistan.
Those madrasas are called factories, martyr factories, because they raise kids with an interpretation of the Quran that tells them the only thing you have to look forward to, and you can look forward to with enormous eagerness, is when you finally get old enough to hold a Kalishnikov in your hand and go into battle and go into martyrdom.
In other words, take out five of the enemy, and as a consequence, through your death, go directly to, you know what, 70 virgins, etc.
The number of these people is about to overwhelm the number of people in Pakistan who, again, are the silenced.
They shouldn't be called the silent majority.
They are the silenced majority.
They've had all of the vocal cords of their spokesman cut, literally sliced.
Again, when Richard Kidd was here, the expert on Afghanistan, I told him a story about Alexander the Great.
And the story goes basically like this.
This is a true story.
When Alexander the Great, in one of his first encounters with the Persians, saw that he was in a disadvantageous position.
He was going to have to cross a river and then climb the banks of the river to get at the Persians.
The Persians had erected palisades at the very top to stop him.
Now, the palisades, that is the technology that Darius, the head of the Persians, was using to shield his troops, gave a psychological signal to Alexander.
Alexander realized that it meant these guys were cowards, that it meant the people cowering behind those walls, if they were confronted with face-to-face conflict, would run like hell.
And he was right.
He got off of his horse, to emphasize the extent to which he was willing to risk his own life and limb, and he went ahead of his troops, rushed across the stream, rushed up the embankment, battled his way through the palisades, and fought like bloody hell.
And so did his troops following his example.
And sure enough, the Persians, who outnumbered him ferociously and who had every kind of technology you can imagine, they had elephants.
I mean, elephants were the super ribbons of the day.
I mean, yes, but despite all of that, not only did the troops run, Darius ran.
Now, Alexander, on the basis of those palisades, that sheer message given off by the equivalent of what George Bush wants to put up as our anti-ballistic missile capabilities, our new Maginot line, he's flashing our weakness as a people.
And when Darius then sent an emissary to Alexander saying, I will give you half my empire, Alexander should have been satisfied, right?
Look, once upon a time, I think I mentioned this the last time we got together, but when I see something like a mugging happening, I stop and I do everything in my power to stop it.
Now, how do I do that?
You know, I'm the little kid who was always beaten up, the scrawny little 99-pound weakling.
I come running up to them shouting things that are bizarre, that are utterly beyond belief, but shouting them with a conviction that with a passion that utterly confuses them.
Well, I'm hoping that some of these reports that we're getting, for example, that a bunch of our military guys were on the ground and went through the headquarters of the head of the Taliban.
I'm hoping that some of these reports are disinformation.
I'm hoping that some of these reports are reports that are focusing the attention of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden on geographic positions within Afghanistan that we're not actually attacking.
I'm hoping that those are feints.
I mean, one of the greatest feints of all time was the feint of D-Day.
I don't know how he did it, but Eisenhower was in charge of this.
Eisenhower was in charge of massing a troop strength so enormous that it could overwhelm the Germans.
He organized an enormous fleet to carry these guys simultaneously across the sea, and he did it in utter secrecy.
Well, these things are not only common to all of human history, I would suspect that some of this degree of cleverness, we know that some of this degree of cleverness, is involved in bacterial warfare.
It's involved in viral warfare.
Look at how viruses are overcoming us right now.
AIDS is our major virus.
Why is AIDS such a threat to us?
Because it can change hour by hour by hour and trick the automatic mechanisms, the defense of the cells within us.
I know that my friend Richard Kidd, who you're just talking about, the expert on Afghanistan, the graduate of West Point, his ideas are being seriously entertained and have made it all the way up to the Joint Sheesh's Staff Office.
That indicates that they're open to new thinking.
What I would recommend and what I would institute if I had the power to do so, I would take the major military, our major military thinkers, put them in a room, did what was invented in the 1950s when brainstorming was invented.
The basic idea of brainstorming was, once you get into this room, forget all of your inhibitions.
Don't try to say things that are normal and sane and that will impress each other.
Say anything crazy that comes to your mind.
Like, for example, airplanes can be turned into flying bombs.
And publicizing things is a very important part of organizing a society, recruiting a society, using those group synchronizers that we've been talking about.
Our whole conversation in one way or another has been about the mass mind, mass moods, and group synchronizers.
We have to use those group synchronizers that galvanize this society, and we have to really tap the creativity of our society.
And so even ideas as crazy as the one you outlined a little while ago, like giving him a quick out-of-country sex change operation, put him back in the country again, something as nutty as that could actually somehow turn the tide.
That might not be it, but that's the kind of kind of thinking that we're talking about here.
The ridiculous, let's make the ridiculous thinkable.
That's exactly what Osama's done.
He's made the absurd thinkable, the unthinkable thinkable.
Now, back to a point that you made a little while ago, your discouragement over the fact that we're still doing what we were doing three and a half billion years ago, making more.
Well, you brought up something, George, which I think is very important, and it's this feeling of enormous frustration and resignation over the fact that, or discouragement over the fact that we haven't gotten any further evolutionarily, and we're going back to the same old thing of making war and spilling blood.
And we have no choice about this because we're up against an enemy who absolutely insists on spilling blood.
But there's something That I researched and wrote for Global Brain that I want to share with you.
And it's basically the concept that we might not be able to do things instantly, we might not be able to do things in our lifetime, but if we work our asses off to make a contribution that moves us in the direction we want to go, that over the course of time, over the course of generations, many generations, we can make those dreams come true.
Now, 800 years ago, I mean, 800 BC, 2,800 years ago, Isaiah talked about turning swords into plowshares.
The dream of peace has been with us for at least 2,800 years, almost 3,000 years.
And almost as long, well, no, war we can trace back again, 3.5 billion years.
So we're stuck with that.
But the fact is that about the same time that we can trace a written record of the desire for peace and the desire for the elimination for war is another human dream that arose.
And it's the dream of flying.
It's in the myth of Daedalus, which is approximately the same time, came up at approximately the same time as Isaiah's pronouncements.
Well, we dreamed of flying, and we didn't seem to be able to do anything about it.
These fantasies of making wings out of wax and feathers were nonsense.
They simply couldn't work.
Then, in 200 A.D., a lot of people crashed trying to prove it could be done.
Well, here's the history.
About 200 AD, the Chinese invented this new stuff called paper.
Paper turned out to be remarkably helpful in flight.
In 1450 A.D., Leonardo da Vinci sat down and with pieces of paper drew all kinds of flying machines.
He still couldn't make them.
Nobody could fly, but it was a contribution.
In 1783, there were two sons of somebody who made products out of that paper.
They were called bags.
Paper bags.
Brand new thing.
1783.
The papermaker's son realized that if they turned a bag upside down, a paper bag, and put it over a candle so that it was filled with warm air, it would rise.
So they made a giant paper bag.
And they put two men in the little carriage that it carried underneath it, the basket it carried underneath it.
These guys were the Montgolfiers.
And they sent two friends drifting over Paris in the first manned long-distance flight.
Now we were beginning to get somewhere.
Benjamin Franklin, who made some very interesting contributions to science, Benjamin Franklin started speculating about putting some sort of propulsion engine on these flying devices the Montgolfiers had made.
Then there's a guy you've never heard of in 1799 called Sir George Cayley in England.
He spent 50 years of his life on a seemingly fruitless pursuit of making gliders.
And he came up with just a new technological twist, a tail assembly for horizontal and vertical stability.
50 years he stuck with this until finally, at the end of those 50 years, he had his first glider.
Then, Otto Lilienthal, from 1867 to 1891, made over 2,000 glider flights using the devices that Cayley had perfected.
And he recorded every single flight very carefully, the camber of the wings, the tilt of the tail, all kinds of aspects of the aerodynamics of this thing.
Fortunately, when he was about 2,000 flights into this, he wrote a book summarizing all of his results.
On roughly the 2,000 first flight, he crashed and died.
But he left behind a book.
The Wright brothers, and you know what they were, they were bicycle makers.
The Wright brothers picked up William Thal's book, applied what Willienthal had done, what the Montgolfiers had done, the stuff that Leonardo da Vinci had speculated about, and they built the first maneuverable flying machine.
They were not the first ones to build a heavier-than-air flying machine.
The point is that if you work on something diligently enough, generation after generation after generation, and you make contributions which even seem to you futile, like George Cayley's contribution of the vertical tail, you will contribute to something which will eventually allow our sons, our grandsons, our great-great-grandsons to achieve the goal of turning swords into plowshares.
All right, I will give you that right through the history of technological development, but I'm not sure that I will allow that to be a parallel for human evolution with respect to peace.
I mean, everybody wants peace.
Even bin Laden wants peace, but he wants peace with an entire Islamic world and nobody else left anymore.
And I'm not sure that there's been evolution that you could use.
Show me a parallel that works with the evolution of flight, for example.
I have spent 40 years of my life exploring the mass mind, taking it apart with a scalpel, anatomizing it, going in and exploring parts where scientists are absolutely not supposed to go.
Scientists are not supposed to be advisors to Michael Jackson.
You know I've done that.
Scientists are not supposed to engineer the careers of people like Prince, and you know I've done that.
But how in the world are you going to learn?
You know, the first people who took a body apart and looked to see how it was constructed were doing something sinful in the eyes of science and in the eyes of the religious community.
Well, you know, who cares about the idea of sin?
I've gone out and done it.
Now, if I can go out and do it for 40 years and come back with material that some people at least feel, fortunately, gives them their first real sense of how the mass mind works and how their own emotions work within it.
But even with those successes, they're only at best anecdotal and don't necessarily apply to an observable trend in that area from the point of view of all of society.
He just, a little soliloquy where he talked about how when he was a child, grandparents would call him down when they were visiting and they'd hit the snooze button or tell him not to come down and they'd say it's time to wake up.
And he said basically in his speech that this generation is waking up and we are the greatest generation.
Well, we're up against one of the grandest challenges in the history of this planet.
We're up against one of the grandest challenges in the history of our species, the human species.
This is a war between civilizations, and it's a challenge.
Do we rise to it or do we not?
That's the choice before us.
And if we rise to it, and I choose to rise to it, and I hope everybody that is listening chooses to rise to it, if we choose to rise to it and are willing to give our lives for what we believe in, for this life of pluralism, democracy, freedom, technological development, for all ideas of all kinds to flourish and live alongside each other peacefully, if we're willing to give our lives for this and to fight with all we've got for it, and I'm willing to do that, and I hope you're willing to do that, we will be one of the great generations.
We will be the people of whom it is said, and there were giants in their time, in another 25, 30, or 40 years.
In 25, 30, or 40 years, the Tom Brokaws of our grandchildren's generation will write about us as if we were great saviors of civilization.
But it's up to us to come up to the challenge.
If we continue to wallow in the complacency that art has characterized, we will fail that test.
He said that it would be his view that it would be best to capture bin Laden, put him on trial as a civilized nation would, and then put him away for the rest of his natural life.
That's what he said.
unidentified
But Art, I think we're facing anger in America that you can't quell.
You're talking to an atheist, but there's a spiritual component to things like automobiles and cell phones that we continually overlook.
And it's the process of personal empowerment.
I have a friend who comes over here periodically.
He visits me in Brooklyn from California.
It's Richard Brody, who's the author of Virus of the Mind and created Microsoft Word.
And while he's sitting here in the chair, he gets next to me.
He periodically gets phone calls from his girlfriend in California on his cell phone.
And you hear him go into an entirely different mode of speech, intimacy.
And he's talking to his honeybear on the phone.
Now, Richard has been empowered to be simultaneously in touch with his girlfriend in California and in a room with me.
This is a miracle.
We have a society filled with miracles.
unidentified
But isn't it wonderful how we have learned not to envy the other guy.
We are getting someplace that mankind hasn't gotten in years.
In those countries, they're so primitive that if one guy puts shutters on his house, the guy next door goes around saying, Who the hell does he think he is?
There's nothing but the jealousy.
Thank God for our toys.
Yeah, sometimes we overdo it.
But you know, we work individually, we live individually, and we mostly leave each other alone.
What other country has done that?
And if you want to teach them that, yeah, I'm serious, could have been Catholic.
But that primitive idea where they have nothing has a lot to do with them.
You know, I agree that we can get too much money and not enough religion.
We've got to stay honest.
But they've got too much religion to the point of using that as a tool to kill is insanity.
We're not like that, and we do have to do our best to give a voice to and empower the 60% of Muslims who believe that Islam should be a religion and should not be a law system, should not be a governmental system, and that those in Islam have the right to modernity, they have the right to modern technology, that women should have the right to uncover their faces in public.
There's a vast Muslim majority that we have to work with.
They already know everything that you're saying.
They already agree with you on everything that you're saying.
And we have to pull the drama off in a way that creates, you know, when you're a playwright or a director, you make every move very carefully to create the emotion that you want to generate in your audience.
Now, our trick is to generate an emotion of discouragement in the militant Islamic community to make them feel as if they're losing, to make them feel as if God has abandoned them, to make them feel as if Allah is on the side of those silent confreres of theirs, those silent Muslims who believe in pluralism just as much as you and I do.
Now the trick is, how do we do that?
Now on Friday night, Well, or we drop leaflets claiming to be written by somebody who has actually been to paradise and has channeled himself back in some form through a Mahdi and who says, oh my God, there weren't 70 virgins here.
Do you think that you're being a godless person, An atheist gives you some advantage, some subjectivity in looking at all of this and deciding how this war can be won?
So when we represent a heaven and a hell, we're trying to represent an eternal experience.
But back to what Sharon was saying, yes, we need a powerful sense of the goals toward which we are reaching because without a sense of those goals, we do not have the inspiration.
By the way, close to topic here, I had a detailed, serious message from a woman the other day who said, and talk about out of the box, Howard, she said, what you do is you recruit thousands or hundreds of thousands, if necessary, of PMS women.
Oh, yeah.
Who then you then equip with the proper weapons, which she claimed they barely needed anyway with their attitudes.
Right.
They would just clean up over there and parachute them in.
One of the tricky things, there have been articles in the last two weeks in the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle in which finally we're doing what you implicitly recommended earlier.
We are trying to understand the minds of our enemies instead of slathering ourselves with comforting propaganda.
Sharon, intensive research, extremely intensive research, curiosity that won't quit.
I mean, it's terrible sometimes.
At 3 in the morning when I know I should be eating dinner and getting ready for bed.
You know, 3 o'clock is relatively late.
There are a zillion little questions that I love to pursue.
So I pursue these things through vast volumes of books, through vast volumes of magazines, and through an internet system that I've worked out that provides me with a virtual library that is almost beyond belief.
But it's the intensity of the concentration.
You could do it too.
unidentified
Oh, you have some fabulous things that you have come up with just listening to you tonight.
It's just been amazing listening.
Yeah, I know.
I probably could do it too if I had the things to do it and the willpower to get off my butt and do it.
But yeah, it would be wonderful to dig into some of this stuff.
And all the information you had on the airplanes just fascinated me.
Well, you can, I don't know if I'm allowed to mention my website, but my website is HowardBloom.net.
And if you go to HowardBloom.net, Howard Bloom is all one word, you'll see about 30 different pages that lead you to literally thousands of different sites on the web that are just filled with all kinds of amazements.
So one of the major points that's made by those who really know the Afghani society is that you buy your armies, you buy your allies in Afghanistan.
Well, there's 50% of the population that people are not thinking of buying.
Well, they're thinking of buying various Pashtun subgroups.
They're not thinking of buying the women of Afghanistan.
And by buying the women of Afghanistan, I mean giving the insurgent organizations that want women's liberation in Afghanistan, and these are organizations run by Afghani women, giving them enough money to have an extremely powerful outreach because there's got to be a significant portion of the women in Afghanistan who were used to the Western freedoms when they were living under the Russian regime.
There are groups of women in Europe who are Afghani refugee women who just hate the system over there and would do anything in their power to topple it and have already organized very successfully.
I would give them sufficient money to go further.
I would brainstorm with them about how to go further.
If we concentrate the human mind, you guys said something about the human mind is made up of several components.
It's made up of the reptilian mind, the new mammalian mind, and the old mammalian mind.
And if we concentrate as mass concentration like we did with on these other experiments on the amyglia switch and switch this forward to the new mammalian mind, to the higher level of thinking, we could change their whole process of thinking and turn evil into good.
And the power of the mind is just an amazing thing.
And the one that's in the box is we have the technology through HARP, through other these things that can find caves and tunnels and stuff.
And they say, you know, we don't, but we do.
And we know where these caves are and these places here at.
We have to resurrect an old concept called courage.
And courage means the willingness to uphold our lifestyle and continue doing what we're doing and do it even better in the face of the risk of death, in the face of the risk of anthrax, in the face of the risk of bomb attacks coming from we know not what mechanism.
I mean, we certainly had no anticipation of the fact that our airliners would turn into flying bombs.
We don't know what's next.
But it doesn't matter.
We've got to live this life richly.
We can't abandon our posts.
And if our posts are at a radio show for you, Art, at my computer for me, for the people who are calling us, at various jobs that support us and without which we couldn't live, every one of us has to stick to our posts and work at it like crazy and know that if we go down to anthrax or if we go down at a bombing attack, that's the price we're willing to pay in order to preserve this way of life.
It is a fascinating thing, I suppose, for somebody like you, Howard, to contemplate that this really all might be true, that the powers of the mind and of many minds, millions even, might be the biggest power we have.
Alfred Kroeber, who was an extraordinary anthropologist back in the 20s, 30s, and 40s.
Alfred Kroeber did a bunch of research into things that were synchronous in societies that were utterly and completely separated from each other and could not possibly, to the best of our knowledge today, have had any intercultural transmission.
They couldn't have had any communication.
Those are the societies of the Americas, the Toltec, the Olmec, the Aztec, which had no way of making contact with the societies of Japan, China, India, or the United States, not the United States, sorry, or of Europe.
Okay, and yet they developed agriculture about the time we did.
They developed writing.
They developed metallurgy.
All these things that we developed over, or that let's say the Europeans developed and Asians developed, were developed across the seas in lands that had no contact with the original lands.
Is it the fact that humans with a common DNA, chromosomal components, when confronted with similar circumstances, came up with similar solutions to things?
Or was there what Rupert Sheldrake claims, a morphic resonance, a change in some field beyond anything we know?
Well, I have to opt for the secular explanations of these things.
For the fact that you put people with a common DNA heritage against an environment that has common paradoxes and common possibilities, and you get common solutions.