Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Howard Bloom - Paleopsychological Mass Behavior
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🎵 From the high desert, in 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 and 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 orbit around Mars.
Let me give you a little quick news.
The CNN anthrax total now is 44 exposures, 12 infections, and 3 dead.
The nation's anthrax scare, of course, hit the White House today with the discovery of a small concentration of spores at an off-site mail processing center.
President Bush said, uh, 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 Capitol 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, producing to find Osama Bin Laden and company, and that's going to mean... That's going to mean... 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.
Alright, 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 will 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 Enstrom Science Award winner, Richard C. Hoagland, on the night that we just begin to orbit Mars.
And we'll get to all that in a moment.
Richard, I want to ask you about the incredible... By the way, Richard, do you know you have home on your phone?
I shouldn't.
It's a hardwire phone.
That's what you get when you go to the mountains in New Mexico.
You get a home on your phone.
All right, anyway.
the most incredible night of my life i think uh... was friday friday when you
sent me this graph which had uh... which you forwarded uh... to me from uh...
dean rayton who is an associate as i understand it of the
uh... g cd the global consciousness uh...
programmer project project one of the founders is one of the founders of at
uh... at mitchell's noetic sciences institute in california but they're between twenty and thirty other scientists
scattered institutions all over the world and they're the
institutions that host these eggs or these you know random number generators
on various continents the feeder data back to princeton to
carry out these various measurements All right, so as I understand this, you knew he was... Dean was involved, so you contacted Dean... No, no, no, no, no.
No?
No?
No, I had written this very complex article along with Mike Barra on the World Trade Center You know, 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, in, uh, 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.
Yes.
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 in an email from Dean Radin.
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.
You know, he asked me to consider carefully the question.
So he opened the hailing frequencies with us.
Right, okay, gotcha.
And then it was... This was, I think, the night before you were going to do the thing for Rush.
Yes.
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?
And he said, sure.
Okay.
So, what we went on the air with was that Princeton didn't start it.
The Global Consciousness Project did not start it.
This was your idea as part of your seven previous experiments, but they, in the form of Dean Radin, offered to monitor, to do the analysis, and to give us the analysis when it was done, which is what we did.
Okay, but, you know, today I received a couple of emails, people who checked with Princeton, Roger Nelson sent a response to one of my listeners that said, I'm sorry, we cannot help you.
The information on the Arabelle Show was an error.
The GCP did not do an experiment as claimed on the show, and there is no software available for people to do their own REG experiments.
Roger Nelson, Director, GCP.
I don't think we, you or I, claim that Princeton did this.
No.
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.
This is kind of like academic... I know, but Richard, if Dean Radin is part of GCP, even if this was a, I don't know, a wink and a nod, hey, we'll take a look for you kind of deal, which I guess it was on the part of Dean Radin, 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.
They did not exchange formal letters or ambassadors.
So what?
I mean, so what?
Now, let me tell you what I think the problem here is.
It has to do with the interpretation of the data.
Um, in the analysis that I sent you, in the graph that appears, there are two spikes separated by about half an hour, I guess.
No matter what the analysis, Richard, what I'm saying is, um, you know, since, since Dean is one of the founding people, and, you know, then to just deny they had any part of the experiment at all, you know, officially, they didn't.
You would think they would be anxious, uh, if anything, to, um, to publicize the fact that they had picked something up.
Well, I think that is the question.
They do not, uh, let me say, let me back up here.
Roger Nelson doesn't think they picked anything up.
Dean Wrayton, in his communications to me, which I passed on to you, says that it is mildly interesting that there needs to be more data gathered.
You know, more experiments.
More experiments.
But he's interested.
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 time frame 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?
Correct.
But the previous night's show... Uh, is three hours.
Is three hours.
That's right.
Beginning earlier, running into your live show.
That's correct.
And on the Tuesday, Wednesday, when you announced you were gonna do this the following night, With me as the guest in the following hour.
That's correct.
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.
Yes.
And neither Roger nor Dean know, they do now because I informed them, but they did not know that your prior night show is rebroadcast before your live show.
I see.
So in terms of the spikes and in terms of the data, Those spikes fall within your show.
We don't know when people start focusing and thinking, and I know from my own experience, Art, that a lot of radios, like wallpaper, people have it on in the background.
No, it was all within the show.
All right, 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.
And I don't know why they're saying that.
It's a political thing to me.
It's political because it's Roger Nelson versus Dean Radin.
Dean Radin 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.
Oh, well.
All right, listen.
Something really big has happened on Mars.
Yes.
We have... Well, actually, above Mars.
Above Mars.
Right.
Although, I hate to even suggest it, but after all, Richard, there's been a lot of bad luck with Mars probes over the years.
Tell me about it.
So, it would appear as though, what has happened and when did it happen?
Well, remember the old cliche, third time's a charm?
Yes.
Tonight, at about 7.26 Pacific Time, the engines fired on Mars Odyssey, which had been trundling along toward Mars since being launched on April 7th.
They fired for roughly 19 and a half minutes.
Keep that number in mind, guys and girls.
Of course they do.
19 and a half.
And they went into an orbit which is roughly 19 and a half hours long.
Of course it is.
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 Your toe in the water?
Isn't this where we got into trouble with another spacecraft when we started dragging our toes?
Well, that was the Mars Global Surveyor, and the problem there had to do with the solar panel, which was one of the kind of resistance objects on the spacecraft to go 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 Cydonia.
Remember it was during that hiatus and the error breaking 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.
And we're going to find out if there is water below the surface.
It has two other instruments.
It has a device called the GRS, or Gamma Ray Spectrometer, which will measure It's a little complicated, but ultimately it's going to measure the hydrogen underneath the soil.
And, of course, water is H2O.
Right.
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 of 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.
If they discover big time water on Mars, Richard, what are the implications?
What does it mean?
Well, it means manned missions are much more Feasible, you can live off the land, you can send people there for a lot cheaper because rocket fuel is made of water.
Remember you split it apart with a nuclear reactor or with solar energy and you get hydrogen and oxygen, you put that back together in an engine and you're on your way.
Okay.
It also means that life is far more likely if they find available resources of water pretty close to the surface.
And then of course there's the possibility of the camera, the Themis camera, We'll pick up the chlorophyll of Arthur Clarke's bushes.
That's going to really turn the world upside down.
Which will turn the world not only upside down, but we'll spin it over several times.
Will they actually believe the data, Richard, or will they... You know, in so many other missions, there has been data received.
That was interpreted at the time to mean something very unexciting and then 10 years later it means something else.
Or 20 years later.
Or 20, yeah.
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 Viking.
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 20, almost 30 years ago.
So, yeah, it did 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, you know, 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, 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 aerobraking 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 You know, on the web we have a link on Enterprise, EnterpriseMission.com to JPL.
So if you want to find the latest, you 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 Or whether there is anomalous radioactivity coming from the surface of Mars.
What would that mean?
Well, as I've said, you know, if Mars has undergone this extraordinary life experience of being a satellite to a planet that blew up, a la Tom Van Flandern, then a lot of the radioactive debris from that process could have splattered into Mars, and there, 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?
Well, the water would make it possible, or maybe probable, but chlorophyll would make it a reality.
Well, it would make one type of life a reality, but I mean, if there's chlorophyll, then likely there's other life, wouldn't you think?
Well, yeah, because you have a food chain.
Yeah.
I mean, you don't get to chlorophyll without a lot of evolution going on.
Exactly.
Around bushes, around trees, around, you know, solar-absorbing photo-pigmentation and stuff like that.
Alright, political question, Richard.
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.
Is that enough to do it?
I think the fact that we have a successful spacecraft in orbit tonight called 2001 Mars Odyssey... Right.
...means we are on that curve.
Stay tuned.
Really?
Yes.
So, the answer to my question is a yes?
It's a yes.
All right.
And then it measures, you say it's going to measure radioactivity with the help of the Russian whatever?
That measures neutrons.
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.
How good are the photographs going to be?
Well, they're going to be better than Viking, and a little bit worse than Global Surveyor.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah, in terms of resolution.
They're somewhat better than biking.
They're about 30, 20 meters, something like that.
And Global Surveyor is 1.5.
But to make up for that, they are in multi-spectral color.
Remember what I said a few days ago, if you take a picture of Sedonia and you get metal, Can you get anomalous composition of stuff down there from the multispectral?
Yeah.
That you can't explain by means of weird rock types?
All right.
Well, you probably... We're gonna be... I'd love to see real color shots of Cydonia to see what's down there.
You don't really think they'd announce that, do you, Richard?
Do not know.
With Golden gone, it could be a new day, as I said a while ago.
Maybe.
And I'm optimistic.
All right.
Stay right there.
Remain optimistic through the break.
And we will continue.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
I think it's time to get ready To realize just what I have been
I have been only half of what I am It's all clear to me now
Can you hear me?
So when you hear me darling Can you hear me inside?
The love you gave me Nothing is the same
It's so clear When you're gone
How can I even try to go on?
When you're gone Though I try
How can I carry on?
To reach Artvel in the Kingdom of Nigh, from west of the Rockies, dial 1.
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dial 800-893-0903.
Good morning, Richard C. Hopewind is here at this hour.
Listen to me now.
We have got, you know, in every war, in every situation, there are certain pictures that
come in future years to represent that situation.
Bye.
Bye.
There were such pictures at the end of World War II.
You remember the kissing picture and the Marines on Iwo Jima.
You know, I don't know that I'm really comparing this photograph to any of those, but it's somewhere up in that class.
Keith had it sent to him from an unknown source.
But it doesn't matter.
It's obviously high-resolution and absolutely accurate.
You've never seen many photographs of Ground Zero from the air.
We have one.
This photograph was obviously taken directly above Ground Zero in New York.
A recent photograph.
And it's... It's...
It's the darndest thing you've ever seen in your whole life.
It just... It's an amazing photograph.
It shows a good part of Manhattan, or even most of it.
And it shows grounds, or it shows a hole.
I mean, that's the only way you can describe it as looking at it from the air.
This giant...
This hole, this scar in New York's skyline, it's an amazing photograph.
I had Richard look at it just before airtime.
Maybe he'll give you a comment in a moment.
It's on my website now.
And I wonder who got permission, maybe FEMA, I think Richard believes, to fly over like this.
But my God, what a photograph.
What a photograph.
And we've got it.
Under what's new?
Just no.
Yes, under what's new.
The first item.
It says overhead photo of Ground Zero.
Just click on that and uh... It's a high-res photo and it's... I've never... I have never seen anything like this in my life.
Really amazing photograph.
On my website now at artbell.com.
In a moment, Richard C. Hoagland will be right back.
Well, you know, as I look at this photograph again, maybe it does not have the power of those other photographs I mentioned.
Maybe not in that category.
I think because the human equation is not there, there's not a picture of a person in this.
And that's what it probably takes to have the emotional feel of one of those photographs of that sort of class.
Nevertheless, this will profoundly affect you to see.
And ever since 9-1-1, I have not seen a photograph Ever.
Like this.
Ever.
And I've seen a lot of photographs of the 9-1-1 disaster.
So I wonder what's new at my website, artbell.com.
Uh, that's some picture, huh, Richard?
It is certainly some picture, but you're right.
You lose the human scale, and if you don't know the scale of what you're looking at down there, it, it, it, you know, for those of us who 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 picture that I really... The scar on New York, though, it's like a wound, a giant scar on New York.
Oh, true, true.
It's incredible.
It will be there for at least another year.
Yeah.
You know, they've got, what, almost 300,000 tons of debris now removed, and they're talking about another year of this, day and night, 24-7?
That's right.
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 ArtSite, and it's called, uh, 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.
Yes.
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.
Sure.
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 bar 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.
I guess we can do both at once.
While we're on the subject, Richard, Anthrax, uh, today's news, you know the White House mail room?
Uh, I guess the military annex opens mail for the White House and they found, uh, anthrax.
And, you know, the numbers are rising now, uh, fairly quickly of those infected, dying, uh, uh, exposed and so forth and so on.
So, we've got a big anthrax thing going on.
I wondered what your take on this is.
I think it's a distraction.
I really do.
I listened carefully to your guest last night, and I know he knew what he was talking about.
He's done his homework.
You know, the numbers are there.
But I just have this feeling, and I think it has to do with the intensive research we did on the article that I've talked about.
Yes.
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.
Alright, but you said it's a distraction.
I see it as a distraction.
Yeah, you must see then it being a distraction for something else.
I see it.
You know, I'm listening to the Vice President, Dick Cheney, who is no fool.
Why do you think they have him sequestered far away from the President?
So he's not killed at the same time as the President?
Exactly.
And what do you think they're afraid of that would kill both of those men if they were relatively close to each other?
Either a nuclear weapon or a biological, I suppose?
I would go with the former.
The suitcase nuke.
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.
Right.
It's my understanding the suitcase nukes...
nukes are so well shielded that absolutely nothing escapes from them, making them absolutely
undetectable to these teams that would otherwise find nuclear devices.
Okay, now you said that last night and I was going to actually call you up and say I don't
quite agree. What is your source of data on this?
There are several people that I've had on and I'm not going to be able to pluck a name
Okay, well, the people that I'm talking to are saying just the opposite.
I mean, think, think logically, Art, okay?
I am thinking logically.
If you could design one that would not leak radiation, if you were designing something that would fit in a suitcase and be portable... But you can't, and here's why.
Why?
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.
They emit neutrons, they emit gamma rays, profusely.
Just standing near uranium or plutonium without shielding will give you a bad hearing.
The concept of a suitcase nuke was that it would be portable, that you could carry it someplace and then hide it.
Well, the portability is defeated if you have a lot of mass shielding to keep it from being detected by Geiger 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 then, uh... Your sources, I believe, are in error.
Well, maybe so, but if you're right, then they ought to be able to find this weapon before anything could ever happen.
Provided they know enough to look.
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, but the circumstantial evidence is It indicates that he's... Those that have seen the evidence appear convinced, and they'd be... Well, Tony Blair has seen the evidence.
Nobody else.
Well, I believe the President of Pakistan saw it.
Well, Yalma Sharif also saw it, and he went along.
Yeah, and he would be the least likely to... Let's not get into that canyon, alright?
Let's assume whoever did this, who did it brilliantly, even though it was dastardly, it was also brilliant, because it worked.
It worked horribly well.
Yes.
So that level of planning is...
We know it's two or three years in the making.
We know this wasn't cooked up last Thursday.
Right.
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 of 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.
Alright, 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.
Yeah, they probably concluded that themselves.
You have got to top yourself.
Hence the reason... And a few 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.
Yes.
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.
Remember?
Yes.
there with a scaffolding around it, up to and including the ceremonies on the so-called
millennium on 99-2000, and you could conceal it behind a concrete panel, keep it in place,
remember, we know now that this had been planned for several years, and it would be the irony
of ironies that it's the last place that the FBI and the CIA and other guys would think
And you're saying the radiation would not be detectable?
Oh no, not unless you go up specifically looking for it.
In other words, you have to be within a few feet, because it's behind concrete.
What about while a nuclear bomb were being transported?
Well, you wouldn't... Under normal circumstances, even one of these things, most people don't run around with nuclear detectors.
Even in Washington, you don't have nuclear sensors.
You don't have Geiger counters or, you know, 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, you know, 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 his game plan.
And we can outwit his game plan by predicting where he's gonna be before he is there, and that's what I communicated to the people who are talking to us tonight.
Well...
Maybe that's right.
That's one scenario, Richard.
It is one scenario.
They could also go to Chicago or Los Angeles and do it.
It would not have the symbolic value.
Maybe not, but it would.
This is a symbolic war.
It is totally symbolic and, you know, you gotta read the piece.
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.
Yes, the message from Osama, delivered by one of his henchmen, Jarel Jazeera, was, used that exact phrase, as a matter of fact.
Yes, Al-Zawahiri.
Crusades.
Is the more dangerous of the two, Art.
He is the guy who really wants a holy jihad for the end of Armageddon.
He wants to bring on Armageddon.
And he has said that?
Well, that's no surprise.
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, right?
The other thing we have to worry about is we have to be concerned that we're being maneuvered down a cattle chute.
If Washington were to take an enormous hit like we've just described, Our response would probably be equivalent to what the Israelis is.
I am hoping that we have quietly told these various governments who harbor these guys that if this happens, you're toast.
All right?
We're not going to go and... Or what about a big biological hit?
Same thing, Richard.
But it doesn't have the symbolic value.
It doesn't take out the monuments, and you don't wind up looking at a crater on global television.
Yeah, but it still produces lots of terror, and that's the business they're in.
I am going to bet you dollars to Navy Beans.
20 million people listening to me.
But 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.
Well, it is.
As a matter of fact, CNN had a call today saying almost all the resources of the FBI were now looking into the anthrax thing.
Distraction, big time.
All of them.
All of them.
Big time.
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.
You know, these two guys did not have to die.
Yeah, it was crazy.
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 why?
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 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.
We will stay tuned.
I would be.
It would be cool for all of us to stay tuned.
Good, Richard.
Thank you.
Good night, Art.
Good night.
Richard C. Hoagland from the mountains of New Mexico, where they have humming bones.
Coming up after the break is Howard Bloom from the high desert.
I'm Art Bell and this is Coast to Coast AM.
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Throw a rope down in a spin.
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Talk Radio 710 KCMO Without a reason why, you've blown it all sky high.
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Again, that is some photograph.
Boy, 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, as founder of the International Paleopsychology 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 outbuilding his first Boolean algebra machine at the age of 12.
Uh-huh.
I know what kind of kid he was.
And co-designed a computer 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 in the media.
Oh, that's got to be interesting.
During his foray into the dark underbelly of mass emotion, I like that, the dark underbelly of mass emotion.
He edited a magazine, founded the leading avant-garde art studio on the East Coast, and featured, uh, was featured on the cover of Art Direction magazine, has done so much more.
You get the idea of Howard Bloom, right?
In a moment, uh, he'll be here.
Stay right where you are.
Alright, here is Howard Bloom.
Howard, welcome to the program.
Art, thanks very much.
It's great to be with you again.
It's good to have you.
Howard, you must have been some kid, huh?
Well, you know, Art, 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.
The sickly... Yes, you're not very popular, you know, if you've got a medical quality microscope but are doing microbiology and you're involved with astrophysics.
I mean, you're not supposed to do this as a kid.
But they don't allow you on baseball teams.
They don't allow you on football teams.
You can't catch a ball.
I know.
You just happen to know something about the ballistics.
I know.
You know, when I was a kid, it was the same.
When everybody else got into girls and cars, I was into radios full time.
I mean, electronics all around me.
And it puts you in a different social category.
Yes, exactly.
As I read this, I knew what kind of kid you were.
But that makes people like us... There's a book that I've got in preparation.
And it's called Freaks, Geeks, and Oddballs.
The evolutionary power of the odd.
And it basically says that people like you and me are like explorer bees.
The evolutionary power of the odd.
I'm writing that down.
Well, yes, because there are kids like you and me, Art, who are obsessed, and we don't belong in a normal culture.
We tend to congregate.
You and I do it on the telephone.
We've done it once before, and it's a fortunate congregation.
We empower each other.
We eventually find each other, and what we create are basically mind tribes.
uh... 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
so anyway there is evolution for the odd right Yes, well, we're the instigators of evolution.
We're the catalysts for new change.
You have gone out exploring.
And you've explored your territory with enormous concentration and enormous depth.
And you bring back from those explorations things that galvanized tens of millions of people.
And possibly great risk.
Yes, possibly great risk.
Look at Prometheus.
You are aware, are you not, Howard, of the experiments that we conducted several years ago and then most recently?
Uh, conducted, uh, and got a chart from Dean Radin, which actually came from the Princeton equipment, uh, of, of the results that just will knock your socks off, the mass concentration effort.
I've been, I've been watching this stuff, Art, and you know me, I'm, I'm a scientist.
And as a scientist, I'm a skeptic.
But what I've been doing is collecting things that would support you.
Very strangely.
That's interesting.
For example, you probably know about this.
This is a study that was just released.
Let me go up my computer notes so I can give you the exact information.
this was a study that was released in the september uh... issue
of a uh... major medical uh... it was a study performed by the head of the columbia
university college of physicians and surgeons you can't get much higher than
that and and it it was a study in which
a hundred ninety nine women in seoul korea were prayed for
by people in the united states and australia the women have no idea of which of them were being prayed
for and which were not These were women who were undergoing in vitro fertilization.
They were attempting to have babies and they'd never been able to have babies before.
Half the group of 199 women was prayed for.
And then there was a backup group of people who prayed for the people who were praying.
but no one in the hospital new which people were being prayed for which were not with
a more big critical of the other was a control group that there was a
control group this was conducted under such strict circumstances
that it baffles people like me and fire
and uh... what happened 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.
Wow!
Really?
Yes.
Dr. Rogerio Lobo, the chairman of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, was the lead author of the study.
He made a very telling statement.
He said, we could have ignored the findings, You know, us scientists tend to be a little orthodox and rigid.
We know.
So we rule out a bunch of stuff.
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 Ardellian 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, You bet.
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.
Yeah, it would appear as though I have stumbled into something along with other people.
I'm sure, you know, it is happening concurrently, I guess, elsewhere, but, uh, Maybe you can, in fact, Howard, maybe you can even advise on this.
The results in the early experiments we did in years past were astounding.
I mean, weather changing stuff and healing and all the rest of it, and now this.
It's obviously, at least in my opinion, absolutely real.
The study you just quoted bolsters it even further.
The question is, What is it?
How is it working?
And is it potentially dangerous?
These are all questions that I've got to answer personally before I proceed with it.
I don't think it's dangerous.
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.
By the gods, I, an atheist, mean the passions.
You are an atheist?
Yes.
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, the ummah, the people, the overarching group.
But Howard, I'm going to pick a hole in your theory right now, and that is that you mention Osama, I would mention Hitler.
The power that we're talking about tonight uh... you know fits into what they have done as well as one
on and others have done exactly uh... so it's just a power and it can be used
for good or evil exactly the point don't you think absolutely the point is
uh... one of uh... the video pieces but i've done there's a statement and it says that 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.
God of hatred is the easiest god.
Fine, fine, fine.
But they just blew up two buildings, killed thousands of Americans, may be poisoning us with anthrax, and God knows what's to come yet.
They've done all this, so, you know, the gods of war are really fired up right now.
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, the name alone in 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.
Alright, well then, aren't governments, then, like our government, and make no mistake, Howard, we are propagandized to death by our own government.
Every single government on Earth does it.
Are they not manipulating this mass consciousness themselves?
They're manipulating to the best of their ability, but right now we're up against a life and death situation.
We're up against a struggle for the very existence of our super-organism.
There are two massive super-organisms about to arise and...
Go into a contest that is very much like the contest of two male elk.
Have you ever seen the nature shots of what happens when two of these magnificent elk or moose go up against each other?
Yeah, they beat the hell out of each other.
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.
Yeah, Harry over there has big ones.
Well, that small elk walks, the smaller elk walks away.
We're in a war of determination.
Against Osama Bin Laden.
We're in a war of the mass psyche.
We're in a war of mass emotion.
I was sitting with a military strategist a week ago, who's an expert in Afghanistan.
He spent the last 10 years in Afghanistan as the second in command of the demining operation that the UN runs in Afghanistan.
And he basically has been taught to think.
He's been taught at West Point.
He's a West Point graduate.
And he has an extraordinary mind.
His name is Richard Kidd.
Uh, and Richard, you could feel, had been trained in thinking about things in terms of terrain and thinking about things in terms of territory.
Well, the territory we're fighting for is the territory of mind spaces, the territory of attention spaces.
Can I ask a really hard question?
Just go ahead.
Who's winning?
Right now, we're losing.
I thought you would say that.
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, to 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.
I believe you.
He said we cannot repeat the defeat of Andalusia.
Now, what does the defeat of Mont Lucia mean?
Yes.
Have you got an idea?
No, I'm asking... No, I'm re-asking you, uh, what does it mean?
Okay, well, the Islamic Empire, uh, with... 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, uh, those Christians, They've said lies about Christ.
They say he turned the other cheek.
He could 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.
It's 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.
I mean, it's way off the coast of China.
Well, here's what I guess I would like to ask.
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 even think of them that way, as we think of ourselves as one, what it really thinks about Osama Bin Laden.
Well, yes, we do know.
Oh, we do know.
Because, for one thing, there are many Islamic websites.
Is he a hero?
He's an absolute hero.
Here's what happens.
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.
I knew it.
Hold on, we're at the bottom of the hour.
We'll be right back with Howard Bloom.
I'm Art Bell.
I knew it. Hold on. We're at the bottom of the hour. We'll be right back with Howard Bloom
I'm Art Bell. This is Coast to Coast AM Music playing...
Falling in love was the last thing I had on my mind Holding you was a warmth that I thought I could never find
I'm just trying to decide I'll stay by your side
I know I could...
The world of Islam reads the Quran as we read the Bible and we are told constantly in our media that the Quran...
It 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.
Howard?
Well, you've characterized the situation very well.
First we have to look at the 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 Um, agrees with the interpretation of the Koran 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.
And I'm not kidding.
This is not a metaphor.
Well, that leaves 40%.
And I suppose that 40% is generally thought to be to the right of center in the Islamic world.
In other words, rather a fundamentalist, extremely fundamentalist.
Well, here's how it seems to break down.
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 Uh, 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.
Five percent of the Muslim community, he estimates, is the militant Islamic community.
The community that's committed to violence.
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 Well, you know exactly what it will do.
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? Does that stop everything?
You know exactly what it will do. It will make Osama a murderer. And Islam is driven,
and all humans, for reasons we don't know, all of us are driven by murders.
All of us focus on those who give blood, on those who spill blood on our behalf.
It's true.
And we are galvanized 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 was 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.
Right now, our Postal Service is in disarray.
Our Congress is in disarray.
It's been evicted from its own building.
The nation is shocked.
The economy is shocked and weakening.
Look, all of these things are true.
But we have a task.
We have a real heavy-duty task.
You do, and I do.
Why?
Because we're both public voices.
You hear more than I. Far more than I.
That's right.
or 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, um, 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.
Howard, the average American, despite the tragedy in New York, thinks of America like they thought of the Titanic.
Right.
It cannot sink.
It is the idea, the freedom, the entire concept that makes up what we are, economics, it's too big, too right, too moral.
It could not collapse.
It could not be beaten.
You're talking about something so extremely important that it's amazing.
Do you agree with that?
Here's the history of complacency.
Here's the history, briefly, of societies that have been toppled by unshaven barbarians.
Oh no, you mean it's happened in the past?
Yes, of course, by just the rudest, sloppiest, people who just didn't have a chance.
People who were written off as absolute Yahoo's.
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?
Yes.
In the Iliad and the Odyssey.
That's Mycenaean Greece.
You'd think that that society was impregnable.
And I'm sure they did think that at the time, didn't they?
Yes, but impregnable they were not.
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 B.C.
It went through a period from 1200 B.C.
until roughly 800 B.C.
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 other European languages, but it also took over India.
Well, I was actually trying to be comically facetious.
So I know many, many great societies have fallen, obviously.
However, let's think about it.
We are a modern nuclear power.
I'll throw that in.
Nuclear power.
And our industry is still strong, as perhaps not compared to after the Second World War, but very strong.
Our infrastructure is very strong.
We have generally great roads, great buildings, all sorts of great things in America.
How would they go about, Howard, winning this war, beating us, taking us down?
How would you take us down?
Um, actually, it would be fairly easy, and they're doing it right now.
First of all, when... And you know that ant societies make war.
Yes.
And some ant societies are slave makers.
That is, they want to keep their victims alive.
Yes.
But they want to enslave them.
Yes.
Now, those ants, when they attack a rival colony, spread a pheromone.
They spread a... 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?
I don't know.
Rhetoric.
Rhetoric.
What in the world did Winston Churchill do that's so incredible that through British society, through a virtual phase transition.
It's true.
Through a paradigm shift, he said, We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.
We shall fight on the beaches.
We shall fight on the landing grounds.
We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.
We shall fight in the hills.
We shall never surrender.
Would that sell here?
It has to.
No, I said, would it?
Um, yes.
I think that the society can be sold.
It has to reinvent its 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.
Alright, alright, alright.
Let me try this on you.
This message may be needed.
Let's find out where you think we're going now.
The attack on New York, the Pentagon, subsequently the whole anthrax stuff going on right now, and who knows what directly ahead.
Now, how much of a wider... Do you think we'll just go after terrorists for two or three years and either kill or jail a bunch of people and it could be over?
Or are we looking at a much wider war?
We're looking at a much wider war.
We're looking at a much... I hope my wife isn't listening.
Well, I want the straight stuff from you.
In other words, where are we going?
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 in Japan, then commercialization.
Yes.
Yes.
That's right.
project as well you could have been the king of persia
uh... in in four fifty bc i think i'll almost all the world
and you still couldn't have had a radio that's right bill couldn't have had antibiotics right you
could have paid any price you could have offered all of india
with all of its uh... 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.
There are those who believe he may already have it.
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.
Well, that certainly wouldn't surprise me.
I'm sure he 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.
Yes, so there are all kinds of possibilities, and this is a very clever man we're up against.
But we have to realize now, every citizen of this country is a soldier.
You are a soldier.
I am a soldier.
The Postmen are soldiers.
So are the people at the White House and the Pentagon and the Capitol Hill.
Every one of us is a soldier.
Now, this week, we've lost two soldiers and they should be buried with national honors and given Purple Hearts.
Those are the two Postmen.
Well, they're victims of war.
They're victims of war.
And every day that you go to work, I'm trying to tell people who are panicking right now.
You know, before we move on, we say they're victims of war, but we don't know for sure yet who actually is doing this, and there are those who suggest it might not be Al-Qaeda or something like.
It may even be domestic, some suggest.
I don't buy into that.
Uh, how do we know... In your studies, do you deem it possible that it might not be Osama with the anthrax?
Um, it might not be Osama with the anthrax, absolutely.
Um, 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.
That's right.
But let's rephrase what this war is all about.
They are still there, though.
They're still there.
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.
That's their point of view.
The extremists always want purification.
Right. And they feel they can do it through a civil war.
Now, meanwhile, over in Afghan... in Pakistan, there is a leader, a very pro-Osama leader,
of the fundamentalists.
These are the people who you see rioting on the streets every time you see news clips.
Right.
Well, according to him, his name is Fosler Raymond.
Fosler Raymond made a statement the other day that was not very well publicized in the West, unfortunately.
What did he say?
He said, in America, we have six million Muslims now.
In England, we are the second biggest religion and about to become the biggest religion.
We have another five to six million Muslims in France.
It is time for those Muslims to arise.
It is time for them to arise in a civil war.
It is time for them to oppose the unjust and tyrannical governments currently in power.
Now, do you know what unjust and tyrannical means in fundamentalist Islam terms?
Well, I know what it means to me.
Um, what do you think it means to them?
Okay, I'll give you, I'll tell you.
Um, to them, unjust and untyrannical means any government that is not ruling according to the strict laws given directly by God to Mohammed.
Alright, 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.
There it is.
Blunt.
That's exactly what Osama is aiming for.
Alright, hold it right there.
We're at the top of the hour and that should be enough to give a lot of people a lot to think about right now.
I'm Art Bell.
Good morning.
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For so long.
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Talk Radio 710 KCMO.
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Howard Bloom is my guest.
Good morning, I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
He'll be right back.
We've got a hot one going.
Howard Bloom, and I mean, here we are.
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, you know, 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, is in fact, 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.
And your answer was really, yes, it's going to.
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.
So what has to change?
We have to... You implied it before, when you talked about complacency.
There's an old Japanese saying, and I'm going to paraphrase it, the strength is not in the metal of a soldier's blade, it is in the metal of the man himself.
And we have to steal our society.
We have to gird it with, we have to gird its loins, to use the old biblical expression.
We have to give it passion.
We have to let it know what is worth dying for in this society.
There are innumerable things which we do not total up day by day.
Here's the problem I see though, Howard.
They said it the other day, and I'm paraphrasing, but I'm close.
They said, we in Islam, Look forward to dying as you Americans look forward to living.
That's right.
You know, they have the vision of paradise.
They do.
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 animals and then be killed, you go directly to paradise.
You do not pass go.
You get 70 virgins and that's... You get 70 virgins?
You get 70 virgins on the spot.
Now this is the first time I've had any understanding at all for their attitude.
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 hormones 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.
That's a big offer.
Yes, it's a very big offer.
70 virgins.
And if normal life is nothing, I mean... You have just taught me something.
I had no idea.
I mean, I had no idea.
I thought it was just paradise.
Now, I didn't exactly know what paradise was.
Our paradise doesn't sound like that at all.
No, their paradise is a good deal more lusty.
We have angels, and we're more cerebral, and we're not physical at all, but in their paradise they get 70 virgins.
It's instant.
And it's quite amazing.
At any rate, this is a major motivator.
What we're talking about is, again, ineffable things.
We're talking about things you can't hold in your fingers, you can't see, but are all around us.
And these are the powers of beliefs, the powers of Belt and Shrunk, the powers of worldviews, the powers of memes, whatever you want to call them.
This is a war of memes.
It's a war of ideas.
It's a war of It's a war of... But I read your bio, Howard.
How were you brought up?
Look, you were a nerd kid.
You were a scientist.
You did your brain.
You've lived in society's sheltered world of communications and electronics and science all your life.
Now, how would somebody like you be developing an attitude like the one you're describing is going to be necessary to win this war?
I'm writing anthems.
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 mourning.
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 are too bright, too adventurous, too pregnant with imaginings.
It's a giant hive for those who did not fit Wilmington or Waterbury or Waxahachie.
New York is a place for those who cannot squeeze themselves into the America of the everyday.
There's 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 brains.
Those who have 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 too 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 visions, new prose, new jokes, new poetry, new fashion, new ways to work and play, we gather here and find each other.
Well then, hail the evolutionary power of the odd!
Yes, exactly.
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 spokesman for society.
Those who try to speak those things out of their field but can't quite put in words.
It's up to us to articulate what it is that America means.
Now World War I 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.
Yes.
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.
Yeah, I agree.
In Chechnya, we are not fighting freedom fighters.
Why is the second-in-command in Chechnya a 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 obvious SAAF 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 of Nigeria in the streets are carrying pictures of Osama Bin Laden.
Those countries are roughly ten to twelve thousand 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, being 67%.
The majority of Germans wanted nothing to do with Hitler at all.
But it didn't matter.
It didn't matter because Hitler was willing to slit throats.
And it's very difficult for people who only articulate their ideas in words to go against somebody who's willing to slit throats.
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.
What would you do?
I wouldn't execute him.
I would have him brought back if it were at all possible.
Alive?
I would have him brought back alive and have him tried in a civilized way.
And I would not execute him.
I would not make him a murder.
You know, there's this joke suggestion.
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 that terrorists do to get them released?
Well, quite a few, but one thing we have to do is every time Osama gets a victory, there are forces of social magnetism.
and one of those forces of social magnetism is victory.
Sure.
The more victories you have, the more people you attract to your cause.
You see this when we're moving toward World Series season.
Sure.
The team that's winning is the team that has the greatest adherence.
Of course, yes.
And social psychologists study sports fans.
And they study the vocabulary of sports fans.
Now, when your team wins, you say, we won.
Number one!
Number one!
That's how you do it.
When you say, when your team loses, you say, they lost.
I usually think they threw the point spread.
I see, but at any rate, the point is that winning It's a socially magnetic force.
It's what we call an attraction cue.
Because bacteria have all these things too.
These are things that go back three and a half billion years in our evolution.
But we won't go back three and a half billion years.
The point is that victories are attraction cues and defeats are repulsion cues.
The trick is to keep a defeat from becoming a martyrdom because there's some subtle difference between a defeat And a martyrdom.
A martyrdom is another social attraction cue.
We are playing a game of psychology.
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, you know, the rest of his life, I'm not sure that's a politically viable possibility.
What do you think?
Why is that, Art?
Um, because of bloodlust.
Yes, bloodlust.
You know, my books... I want to be honest.
...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.
Yeah, I'm trying to be blunt with you.
I feel it.
Bloodlust.
I want this guy dead as a doornail.
I would like him dead as a doornail too, but the trick is that they hit 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.
So, uh, keeping, putting him on trial in front of the world, then keeping him in jail until the day he dies of old age would be regarded As a victory, he would not be looked at, or at least it would be regarded as something of a defeat for him.
He would not be a martyr and it would be the wisest thing truly for us to do.
Yes, in my opinion it would be the best thing for us to do.
Because anyway you look at it, he can become what Nelson Mandela became when he was put on Robben Island.
Nelson Mandela then became a symbol.
and he became a symbol who was a rallying point.
He didn't quite become a martyr.
You know, a martyr rouses bloodlust and need for vengeance.
Yes.
The absolute passion for vengeance that you're feeling right now.
And we have, because we have four to 6,000 martyrs.
But if we deal with things in a slightly more civilized way,
we can calm things down.
The trick is to come out as an intact society when this is all over,
with everything that's of value to us.
Intact.
It's really interesting to listen to you.
I know you are absolutely correct about what you're saying.
And that really is having a fight with my, you know, hot steel between the eyes idea.
Oh, yeah.
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 mine, 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.
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
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.
Well you can imagine that as you can the actual militia groups or any extreme group.
Could conceivably be behind this, yes.
Right, exactly.
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.
It's the Churchillian message.
And it's going to be a fight to the death.
I wonder how many people really, really, really actually understand that.
Too few.
Nobody.
Almost nobody understands that.
But see, on the other side, they have a high percentage who understand that.
They've been inculcated with this kind of belief.
If not, live for it.
Well, this is, you know, this is something, this attitude.
I mean, I will die as a warrior and go to heaven.
My God, 70 virgins!
Well, there's a phrase that goes way, way back.
Two phrases that go way, way back in Islamic history.
They go back almost 1400 years.
And they are Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb.
Now, Dar al-Islam means the world of Islam.
Or, the world of peace.
They're synonymous.
Dar al-Harb means... But that implies when there is nothing but Islam, there will be peace, right?
Yes, exactly.
That's what I thought.
Exactly.
And Dar al-Harb means the land of war, or the land of the unbeliever.
The two terms are interchangeable.
They are synonymous.
Now what does that imply to you, Art, about a long-term Islamic attitude?
The obvious.
Making war and having a holy war is a perpetual goal of Islam until at last all the world has peace.
Oh, well then, Howard, what's changed?
Nothing has changed.
I mean, here we are going to be at war again and it's really going to be, it's going to be about religion again.
More beliefs.
More belief systems.
However you want to look at it, it doesn't seem any different than all of history.
No, and you're right.
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.
Do you know what happened?
Where is the evolution in this process if we have not evolved?
Well, the evolution in this process comes from the fact, and this is an unfortunate fact, that our legacy, our heritage, our biological heritage, Yes.
They absolutely did.
Hold on, hold on, Howard.
We're at the bottom of this hour.
point five billion years ago our initial ancestors bacteria lived in colonies of
trillions much more organized colony socially than we are yes much larger
colonies but what do those colonies do those colonies made war with each other
they absolutely did hold on hold on hard we're at the bottom of this hour he's
absolutely right I mean we are doing and I am too we are doing right
What we've always done in all the world's histories.
From the tribes, to the cities, to the nation states, to the approaching the one worldness or whatever it is that's coming.
It's still the same.
It hasn't changed.
Same reasons, too.
70 virgins.
I can't get over that.
That really does paint a very different picture.
A 70!
You see, not much has changed at all.
We're still the same.
Swords.
Crusades.
Right?
crusades. Now, I would never mean to suggest that you should be afraid of the dark side.
I'm not afraid of the dark side. I'm afraid of the light side. I'm afraid of the dark
side. I'm afraid of the dark side. I'm afraid of the dark side. I'm afraid of the dark side.
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 programming.
Um...
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 Myers, Florida says, Bin Laden needs to be drowned in swine soup of rotted pig body parts at a slaughterhouse.
Steven in Victoria, B.C.
says, Osama must die by an act Well, one of the thinkers has a good idea.
Which one?
let's see uh... somebody else says they were would like to see him crucified as
in the tradition of jesus christ actually crucified uh... in other words uh...
there's a little snapshot uh...
uh... for you harry dot you know some of the thinking out there right now
well one of the papers have a good idea which which one and that's the one that says uh... i want
to kill by allah we could uh... deal with him in a way that convinces the islamic
community that indeed allah has turned his back
i don't know what they want all that all of those not approved
of what i saw a lot of the story we can 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.
And I've got an idea then.
I've got an idea.
Yeah.
We need something really dramatic, right?
In other words, how about an apparent bolt of lightning from the clear Osama on the head and frying him as if from the very hand of Allah.
Now, it's my understanding that we have some satellites.
Yeah.
You know, that could damn near do that.
With lasers.
Exactly.
It would be very neat, especially, 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, murder factories.
Because they raise kids with an interpretation of the Koran 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 Kalashnikov 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 silent, 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 spokesmen cut, literally sliced.
See, we just don't have that kind of will.
No, but we have to get it.
I'd seem like the half-full, half-empty, rather, glass, but I don't know where that's going to come from.
It's got to come from you and me.
Who else is going to do it?
Don't lay this on us.
I don't think that you can... We are what we are, and frankly, we're really, compared to the people over there living in poverty and the harsh conditions they're in, We're soft.
I mean, compared to them, we're soft, soft.
Right.
Now, let's redefine the situation.
Let's define the resource that we measure wealth by as conviction.
We are poor and they are rich.
They are rich in conviction.
And we have to become rich in conviction as well.
How about being rich in nuclear weapons?
That won't help.
When Richard Kidd was here, the expert on Afghanistan, I told him a story about Alexander the Great.
The story goes basically like this.
This is a true story.
when alexander the great one of his first encounters with the persians
thought that he he was a bit of a contagious position he was going to have
to cross the 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
the palisades that is the technology that darius the head of the persians was using to shield
his troops gave a psychological signal
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 could imagine.
They had elephants.
I mean, elephants were the Superweapons of the day.
They're still pretty good, 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?
That's a huge amount to get.
But Alexander said, oh no, I realize this guy is a coward and he'll fold.
I can get the whole thing.
And Alexander went and got the whole thing.
Now, who was Alexander?
He was a barbarian.
He was a barbarian from Macedonia.
He was a barbarian from a territory so Out of it.
So primitive, that not even a Greek would take it seriously.
So the barbarians are at our gates.
Absolutely.
And in order to resist barbarians, you have to have superior will.
And superior will and confidence.
Generating that in our society.
Superior passion for our society.
Uh, is what we have to generate.
Uh, you, I don't know if you want to take that job on.
Can we win with our technology?
Well, it would be very nice.
It would be wonderful if we could win with our technology.
One of the tricks of war is to totally redefine the script of war.
So that you totally bamboozle your enemy.
Right.
Any script that he has prepared for, you just step around.
Right.
Now that's what Osama has done in turning our infrastructure Against us, yes indeed.
He's been quite brilliant at it.
Now, the Bush people are very good at coalition building.
They are very good at taking these Islamic governments that fear Osama.
Because they are not Islamic enough for Osama.
They are unjust and tyrannical in Osama's view too.
He is very good at lining up these governments on our side.
I shouldn't say George Bush because George's committee.
It's his father's committee.
Right.
That's running things these days.
The question is, do we have some out-of-the-box tactical thinkers who can come up with some real surprises?
Now, let me give you a real surprise.
I know you've read this.
I know everybody in your audience has read this.
This did the rounds on the internet.
And it said, let us capture Osama bin Laden.
Let us fly him to the best hospital we can find in the western world.
I know what that means.
Let us give him a sex change operation.
That's right.
And let us send him back to Afghanistan as a woman.
You know, just let's go with that for a second.
Right.
What if that was actually done?
What do you think would happen?
I think that the feelings in the Islamic society would be so confused.
I mean, is this man a martyr?
Is this man a man?
Well, he's certainly out of order for his 70 quotient.
Right.
I mean, it's confusing people.
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.
How do we do that?
You know, I'm the little kid who was always beaten up.
The scrawny little 99-pound weakling, right?
I still am.
You have a gun, right?
No, I don't have a gun.
I don't carry any weapons at all.
I see.
And I've never been able to win a fistfight in my life.
I was just thinking of unequal fights and how they're usually settled, but what is it?
Well, I go out of the box.
I know what these guys have in mind as a script.
It's a script of confrontation.
I don't confront them.
I come running up to them as if I'm a lunatic.
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.
What in the hell is this guy doing?
Is this actually out of character for you?
Right, it must not be out of character because it comes to me spontaneously when I'm stuck with these situations.
I've stopped one beating, one mugging, one car break, and one purse snatching.
With this technique.
I like it.
And it so totally confuses them.
So you sort of, you yell at them, you act crazy, you... I act like a madman.
They absolutely cannot interpret what is going on.
All I know is this madman is coming at them with a frenzy that they cannot believe.
And they have no way of interpreting it.
And they have no automatic response.
Now, our military is a group that's been trained in automatic responses.
And what Bin Laden has done is he's bypassed our automatic responses.
Now the question is, do we have some brains in the Bush cabinet and the Bush think tank who can think crazy?
Who can think maniacal?
Oh, I think we have those people.
Well, if we do, we're in a good position because we're going to have to take some maniacal approaches.
Some non-standard approaches.
To win this war.
If we manage to do it with technology, fine.
Well, there is what we're doing publicly, right?
And we see that on CNN with the news conferences every day of the smart bombs hitting the targets.
And then there's what they're doing, really doing whatever that is.
And we don't have the slightest idea because nobody's reporting that because it's all secret.
We're hoping that nobody's reporting it because the element of surprise is one of the most powerful things you have in
a military.
Yeah, so what do you think it is we're doing that could be perhaps so effective right now?
Let's hope for the best.
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 times 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.
He sure did.
And the Germans never had a clue.
Meanwhile, he set up a feint.
He gave them an idea that an attack was going to be coming from a different direction.
That's correct.
So they concentrated their troops elsewhere.
Yep.
We're talking, Art, we are talking about warfare on two terrains simultaneously.
Well, it's just not one bit different, in my opinion, than the way every army has tried to fight throughout all of history.
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 mechanism is the defense of the cells within us.
That's right.
You know a lot about the immune system.
Right.
And we have to be as clever as a retrovirus.
The time has come for cleverness.
Well, I'm hopeful about how clever we are, but what is it you really think?
Are we that clever?
Have we so modified our method of warfare that we have a chance for success, or are we so far So conventional that we don't.
Which do you believe to be true?
I know that my friend Richard Kidd, who we were 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 Chiefs of 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.
That's a nutty idea.
But it's an idea that worked.
It's time for us to start entertaining nutty ideas.
It's time for creativity.
We've got to think the same way.
Yeah, and creativity and passion.
Passion on the... In other words, we need to... As I said before, we need to propagandize the public in order to rouse its spirit.
Because this is a war to the death between societies.
And people have to realize that.
It is worth sacrificing my life for my son.
You know what, on Fridays I have open lines.
Right.
Usually.
Now, I was thinking, you just gave me a great topic.
This coming Friday, why don't I turn to the audience and I tell them exactly that.
Think out of the box.
Come up with crazy ideas.
And they're really good at that.
I think it's a great idea.
Yeah, and call me up and tell me how we win this war.
That would make a dynamite topic, wouldn't it?
I think it's terrific.
But the stuff you would hear, oh, it'd be so far out of the box, but it would be interesting.
It really would, I think.
It not only would be interesting, but it would be extremely important to publicize the heck out of it.
Because you need to get the attention in the same way that Richard Kidd did a memorandum.
That he only wrote to his fellow West Point graduates.
But it was so compelling, and it was so out of the box, that it made it all the way to the President's office, the Joint Chiefs of Staff's office.
Ideas are powerful.
Yes, exactly.
And publicizing things is a very important part of organizing a society, recruiting a society, using those group synchronizers.
Um, that we've been talking about.
The whole, 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 you have created a subcultural bunch.
Really does think out of the box.
We are a subculture, it's true.
That's right.
Alright, so then this Friday, it shall be, think out of the box, question is, how do we win this war?
How do we win the war?
That's what I'll do Friday, and you're not gonna believe what's gonna happen.
Nobody will.
Alright, done deal.
Friday.
I've got it down.
Uh, so... Yep, I think you're right, 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, I'm just taking it seriously.
Something as nutty as that could actually somehow turn the tide.
That might not be it, but that's the kind of thinking that we're talking about here.
Exactly.
The ridiculous, let's make the ridiculous thinkable.
That's exactly what Osama's done.
You've 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, and we haven't evolved past that.
I tell you what, it's already at the top of the hour, so hold that thought.
We'll cover that as soon as we get back, and then, if you wouldn't mind, there are a lot of people that would like to speak to you.
Good.
Is that good?
That's always a pleasure.
Alright, good, because I want to take some calls, so hold it right there.
Howard Bloom is my guest.
I see the bad moon rising.
I see trouble on the way.
I see earthquakes and lightning.
I see bad times today.
Don't go around tonight, but if I'm to take your die, there's a bad moon on the rise.
I hear hurricanes a-flowing.
I know the end is coming soon.
I hear rivers overflowing.
I hear the bad moon rising.
I'm not a bad man.
I'm just a bad man.
What will you do when you get low?
No one waiting by your side.
You've been hurt.
I know where she's gone.
You know it's just your imagination.
You've been hurt, I've been hurt too much You know it's just your foolishness
Well, the cold has got me on my knees, yeah And I'm begging, darling, please, yeah
Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033 First time callers may reach Art at 1-775-727-1222
And the wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295 To recharge on the toll-free international line, call your AT&T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nye.
Howard Bloom is a great guest, so we've got to get down in the trenches and think outside of the box.
Well, all right, then that seals it.
Friday night, Saturday morning, the topic on the program shall be, for all of you, think out of the box.
How do we win this war?
It's a good question, and I'm telling you, it's going to get some wild answers.
Now, I'm thinking of it myself.
Now, they're offering 70 virgins.
Suppose we were to offer 85 virgins.
Like, up the virginity.
Right?
How about that?
That's far enough out of the... probably too far out of the box, right?
In other words, the Christian world couldn't offer 85 virgins.
Well, I suppose we could offer them, but we couldn't deliver.
I wonder if we could so change Christianity that we would offer 85 virgins on the other side.
I don't think so.
so I'm not so sure we can get that far out of the box.
Once again, here is Howard Bloom.
Hi, Howard.
Hi, Eric.
That's pretty far out of the box, 85 virgins, and we really couldn't do that.
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 or going back to the same old thing of making war and spilling blood.
Yeah, a little bit.
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 B.C., 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.
Almost as long as war.
Almost as long, well, no, war we can trace back again three and a half billion years.
Yeah, it's even older.
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, 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 A.D., 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 paper maker'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 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 2001st flight, he crashed and died.
But he left behind a book.
The Wright Brothers, and you know who they were, they were bicycle makers.
The Wright Brothers picked up Lowenthal's book, applied what Lowenthal 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.
And there we have at least a pretty good partial history of flight, and the point is?
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.
Alright, 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 uh... even bin laden wants peace but he wants peace with an
entire islamic world and nobody else left uh... anymore and i you know i'm not
sure that there's been evolution that you could use a bit that that it show me a
parallel that works with the uh... the evolution of flight for example i'm not
sure i see it well i'm trying to do what george k leader
i have i have spent forty 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.
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 a point of view of all of society.
Well, they're a contribution.
Anyway, listen, this is interesting, but look, I've got callers who are waiting to talk to you, so here they come.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Howard Bloom.
Hi.
Hi, this is Tom in Tipton, Ohio.
Hello, Tom.
Hi, um, one thing I wanted to point out was, uh, I don't know if you've ever heard of Glenn Beck.
He's a morning talk show host on Clear Channel.
I think he's on Premiere, too.
Oh, well, uh, we are one and the same.
Clear Channel owns Premiere.
Oh, okay.
Um, yeah, he's been, uh, 9 a.m.
to, uh, what is it?
11 p.m.?
Yeah, in the morning, anyway.
Yeah.
Well, he had a really good speech, uh, the other day.
He just, uh, 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 has waken up and we are the greatest generation and we will...
Oh, that we are the greatest generation, and not our grandfathers, not our parents, but we are the greatest generation?
Right.
Okay, uh, what about that as an idea, uh, Howard?
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 to this to rise to it if we choose to rise to order 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 and i'm willing to do that i hope
you're willing to do that one of the great generations
we will be uh... the the people of whom it is said and there were
giants in their time another twenty five thirty or forty 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.
We will fail that challenge.
Alright.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Howard Bloom.
Hi.
Hi.
Um, I think that I might be misunderstanding, but an overview of what you're saying is the same as what the left is saying.
Let Bin Laden go.
And I think you... No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Well, in a way, he's saying... No, no, no.
He didn't say that, ma'am.
Okay, what did he say, then?
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.
But, Art, I think we're facing anger in America that you can't quell.
You're not gonna... Well, I said that.
I said bloodlust.
You know, there's a lot of bloodlust.
Because it's really no different than lining up 6,000 New Yorkers and shooting them in the middle.
Yes, ma'am. I'm with you all the way, ma'am.
I'm with you all the way, but...
I know what he's saying.
Actually, if we consider what'll happen if we make this man into a martyr, you know, Howard's got a point you've got to think about.
If he's a martyr, he's dead.
He can't give orders to kill 6,000 people.
I don't think we care.
Alright, fine.
Let's ask Howard.
What about that?
If he's dead, he can't give out any more orders.
He can't run a war from jail.
Whatever.
It's amazing.
The power of the dead is quite amazing, and it all depends on how they die.
Achilles died a hero and was made immortal by his death.
Alexander the Great followed the path of Achilles and tried to be the next Achilles.
He, in turn, in his death, set a pattern that a guy named Julius Caesar followed.
He tried to become the next Alexander the Great.
But we're not equal intellectually, what you're asking us to do.
We know where you're coming from, but we've had this for 30 years and it hasn't stopped anything.
They still think what they think, so for them, you're talking to the wrong audience.
To teach them what you know, we all know that too, but they're still coming after us to kill us.
It's just a primitive thing, but you have to teach them, not us.
Right, but what would you recommend we do?
I would recommend that we do exactly what Bush is doing.
I think we're all glad that he's in charge.
We have to not be afraid.
We beat Germany, we beat all of that faction.
We're getting to be friends with Russia, I hope.
We're uniting.
But that small area of the world, if they're still that primitive, and they still do that to their women, you're not going to change them.
You're not going to change them.
We don't have to be afraid of them.
And we're not.
As Americans, we're just too darn angry.
We're not going to settle for anything less than getting rid of them.
I think we need the mix of the emotional cocktail of the anger and the confidence that you're talking about.
No, no, give them some luxury cars.
We've got so many toys, we don't go around looking for importance about who's the most righteous or who's got the most beautiful wife to cover them all up.
I think we need to realize something extremely important, and I think you need to realize it too.
It's a horrible thing to say, but you need to realize it too.
There is a spiritual component.
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 is 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 honey bear 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.
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 do you 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, I'm 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.
And 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 their women should have the right to uncover their faces in public, Intellectually, Howard, I know that you are correct.
Muslim majority that we have to work with. They already know everything that
you're saying. They already agree with you and everything that you're saying.
They just don't have a voice right now. Intellectually Howard, I know that you
are correct. However, emotionally, believe me, I'd put a bullet between his eyes so
fast. You know, I cut his head off, serve it up in Washington, but I realized that
would do exactly what you're suggesting.
It certainly would immediately create a martyr.
Well, it's a war of theater.
You implied this earlier.
It's a war of theatricals.
It is.
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?
On Friday night... Maybe we drop leaflets saying, uh, all the virgins are gone.
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 Ahmadi and says, oh my god, there weren't 70 virgins here, this is a perched wasteland.
That's really good.
I like that a lot.
In fact, there were no women at all.
The whole Vail thing ruined it for you and they're somewhere else.
That's right.
And I'm stuck in this place forever.
Don't get me out!
Hold on, Howard.
I don't know about cell phones.
I'm not attached to my cell phone at all.
But I do have an emotional attachment to my car.
That lady could be right.
I know it's just metal and leather.
It's just a car.
I think I love it.
I'm missing.
Over the cool direction.
That I'm taking.
Falling in love with you.
I remind everybody, do not send me post office mail.
We are not accepting it.
We are not going through it for obvious reasons Send me email and you can do that by Sending it to Art Bell.
That's me ARTBLL at mindspring.com Good morning.
Hi.
Hi.
I'm thrilled to be here with you guys.
We're thrilled to have you.
What is your name and where are you?
My name is Sharon and I'm in Los Angeles.
Alright.
right here, the way to get to him is on the phone.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Howard Bloom, good morning.
Good morning.
Hi.
Hi, I'm thrilled to be here with you guys.
We're thrilled to have you.
What is your name and where are you?
My name is Sharon and I'm in Los Angeles.
All right.
I feel so strongly that we need to use our consciousness to make a difference in this world.
And, you know, I was listening last night when people were calling in about the test that you had done the other day.
Yes, yes.
And wanting to do crop circles and whatever.
Right.
And I feel that each of us can do this on our own and hold the intention of what we want this world to be.
And I honestly believe that it will make a difference.
I know it'll make a difference.
All right, Howard, so the whole consciousness thing is the path, she is saying, this consciousness amazing thing that we're doing.
I think that to hold the vision of what you want this world to be in your mind is one of the most important things that you can do right now.
We're in a war between worldviews, Belt and and a successful world view or review to see which is the
most successful uh... which can penetrate with the greatest passion
a world view generally have a picture of utopia of gold court which were reaching
and america is complacent to the extent that it feels it's already achieved all
of its goals and it's coasting
sorry guys but there's a long way to go
before we achieve goals like for example peace do you think that you're being uh...
a godless person and atheists
gives you some advantage some subjectivity in looking at all of this
and deciding how this war can be won on.
It helps.
It helps a lot.
I thought you'd say that.
It helps because I see the gods inside of us.
I see religious systems as ways of trying to express what's deep inside of us.
The heavens and hells are in us.
They're in our passions.
They're in our daily emotions.
Daily, a normal human being.
That is an adult, goes through a new massive mood swing every two hours.
That means to me that during the 14 hours of the day we cycle through heaven and hell roughly seven times.
Some females even more frequently.
Yes.
And teenagers go through massive mood swings approximately every 20 minutes.
Yes they do.
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.
We just don't have the psychic fire that it takes.
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, no.
Right.
Oh yeah, who then you then equip with the proper weapons, which she claimed they barely
needed anyway with their attitudes.
They would just clean up over there, parachute them in.
This was a serious suggestion.
She wasn't kidding.
It wasn't a joke.
She really meant it.
Well, it certainly qualifies as an out of the box solution.
Way out.
Yeah, way out.
One of the tricky things is that 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.
Well, her point was, with their attitude the way it is, you know, about women.
Right.
I mean, the veil and the whole thing.
They couldn't even begin to handle that.
They couldn't begin to handle it, and one of the reasons is that the posh tunes despise anybody who uses a woman in combat.
Now, the point made in several of these articles that explore the Pashtun psychology, you know, the Pashtun is a major tribe in Afghanistan.
It's a tribe that's ruling right now.
It's the Taliban's tribe.
It is also almost a majority tribe in Pakistan.
So, getting the Pashtun on our side would be a very good thing.
Um, however, if we send women into combat, we will not be able to get the Pashtun on our side.
Uh, the Pashtun are turning against us right now, but we're still at a choice point where we could win the Pashtun over.
Yeah, I know, but they're... With an onslaught like that, their entire society could crumble.
I mean, one out of the box, that's out of the box.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Howard Bloom.
Hello.
Yes, hi, Art.
Hi.
How are you doing?
Um, first off, Um, I would like to say, um, you know, I hate to change the subject, um, that, that song with Crystal Gayle, excuse me, is beautiful.
Yes, it is.
And it's very mystical and very beautiful.
I'm Cherokee myself, so.
Very appropriate.
Yes.
And you're so lucky to have known her, to know her.
Um, yes, I have a question for, for Mr. Bloom.
Um, you know, we were, uh, I was listening to when you were doing that mind concentration last week.
Yes.
And I did participate.
Yes.
It was something very awesome.
I've never experimented, you know, participating in such an experiment either.
And I believe in what you keep saying, that there are powers out there that we can't comprehend yet.
And it's almost frightening, in a way, what our minds can do.
Or perhaps that we're just beginning to get hints of, with this kind of experiment.
We're just starting to get hints of its presence.
Yes.
Yes.
And anyway, you have a question, right?
Yes.
And, you know, it's kind of funny when you were talking earlier about sending a lightning bolt and things like that.
I mean... Oh, that was me.
Well, it's something to consider.
It is indeed.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for the call and take care.
Yeah, if we could do that, and it actually was seen to come from Allah, that could work.
Something dumb like that could work.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Howard Bloom.
Hello.
Hello.
Hi.
How are you tonight?
I'm Sharon, also, from Oakdale, Nebraska.
All right.
And I was really enjoying listening to Howard.
I agree with a lot of things you've been saying tonight, especially the element of surprise.
Sometimes that will just totally wipe them off the map.
Yeah.
When he mentioned about the sex change operation, I had gotten an email about that.
Yeah, it's going around the net.
Yeah.
I'd also gotten one that pertained to women standing united going outside at a certain time of night naked.
Maybe we could just send all those women over there.
That would really surprise them.
It would, and can you imagine the coverage on CNN?
Yeah.
I can do.
Would you do that, I mean, for your country, for freedom, for the American way?
Would you get naked and parachute in?
You betcha.
That's what I'd ask.
whack. It would just throw them guys into hibernation forever and we'd never see the Taliban again.
Don't tell me more than I want to know. All right. Do you actually have a question for Howard?
Yes, Howard. I was wondering where you come up with all of your information?
Good question.
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.
Oh, you have some fabulous things that you've 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 I don't know if I'm allowed to mention my website, but my website is howardbloom.net.
Yeah, it would be wonderful to dig into some of the stuff and all the information you have
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, howardbloom 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.
It's a place to start.
Oh, you know, we ought to have a link up to that.
Didn't you give us a link?
Yeah, you have a link.
You have a link.
Oh yeah, there it is.
Herdbloom.net.
Alright everybody, just up to program, my website, program, tonight's guest info, and all the links are there actually.
And Sharon, there's another thing that you've brought up that's very relevant.
There are active revolutionary women's groups in Afghanistan.
There are active groups that are attempting to educate women.
I know, I was just watching it tonight on MSNBC.
MSNBC?
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 are used to the Western freedoms.
When they were living under the Russian regime.
So then how about parachuting in some women's livers?
That might be a two-front victory anyway.
It would absolutely destroy them.
I would go with the indigenous groups.
There are groups of women in North America.
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.
Women power.
Yeah, I think within the country you should stay.
What's that?
Use the women that are there.
Yes, exactly.
Use the women that are there and the Afghani women from the outside who are continually conversing with the women inside.
But they would at least need advisors, and we have those, right?
Oh, they're pretty smart.
Some of them have been out of the country and have gotten educated and have gone back.
And they are the ones that are trying to liberate the other ones.
Right.
Maybe they need, for the next government installed there, a female leader.
Yeah.
Abdullah Abdullah had mentioned that he was looking at the next government regime going in to have women included in the government society.
Wow.
That'll be a fight.
All right, thank you very much for the call.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Howard Bloom.
Hello.
How you doing, Art?
Okay, sir.
Where are you?
I don't know.
My wife might divorce me.
I'm in the next bedroom laying with you.
Listen to the radio.
Actually, I'm in Northern California.
A little humor there.
A couple things.
One out of the box, maybe one out of the box.
I studied the power of the mind for 27 years.
I actually know quite a bit about it, the conscious mind.
We can do this two different ways.
And you know the power of the conscious mind.
I mean, I was one of the participants that identified... No, go ahead.
I understand.
Proceed, though, with your idea.
Okay.
If we concentrate the human mind, you guessed it, 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.
Right.
And if we concentrate as mass concentration like we did with... Yes.
...all these other experiments on the amygdala switch, and switch this forward to the um new mammalian mind to the
higher level of thinking.
Neil Slade's.
We could change their whole process of thinking and turn evil into.
Into good.
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 uh harp through other these things that can find caves and tunnels
And they say, you know, we don't, but we do.
And we know where these caves are and these places here at, we ought to just bomb these caves.
Listen, I agree with you, but, and that was a question I asked earlier, can we win, you know, with our technology?
And certainly we can use it, but I'm not sure that would constitute A high enough percentage of what's needed to be a victory, Howard?
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 in a bombing attack, that's the price we're willing to pay in order to preserve this way of life.
All right, first time caller on the line, you're on the air with Howard Bloom.
Hi.
Hi, John, St.
Louis, Missouri.
Hey, John.
Thank you so much, Howard.
Howard, I love your anthem, and I honor your commitment to your research.
In spiritual disciplines, they say that a master is someone who refuses to change his mind, and I just want to say that to you.
I believe the spike on the Princeton computers before the attack on September 11th was a prayer of the followers of Ben Lyon.
Well, that's right.
It could as easily be believed as an anticipatory spike that came from us.
There's just not enough research into all of this yet to understand any of it, which is what causes me pause.
We have to proceed.
We have to full speed ahead, figure out what it is.
Yeah, I do agree with that.
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.
At least, Howard, it's a possibility.
It's a possibility, and I've made an entire list tonight for you.
Of things that support your position, even though you know I'm a skeptic about it.
You know about Carl Jung's concept of synchronicity?
Yes.
There's something you probably don't know.
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, Right.
have had any intercultural transmission but not have any communication right
uh... those of the societies of the americas they've got all tech the all black the aztec
uh... which had no way of making contact with the slides are trapped japan china
india or the united state of and not the united states or or or
europe We've got about one minute.
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 Lansing.
Weaving.
Clothing.
Cities.
Irrigation.
Nets.
Ropes.
Boats.
Synchronicity or common mind?
That's the question.
Is this the zeitgeist?
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?
Listen, buddy, we're out of time.
Thank you.
we know well i have to opt for uh... explanations of these things
uh... for the fact that you put a comp people with a common d n a heritage against
an environment that has common
uh...
paradoxes and common possibilities and you get common solution listen buddy
we're out of time thank you you've been uh... a real joy to have on the air
well argue stimulate me tremendously and i enjoy it tremendously
Good.
We'll do it again.
Howard, later.
Hey, thanks, Art.
Good night.
Intellectually, I certainly understand his argument, but emotionally, boots.