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May 21, 2005 - Art Bell

02:54:34

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Howard Bloom - Militant Islam Avian Flu & Energy

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54:15

howard bloom

01:14:13

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art bell ▲ ● ▼		What's up to you all?
		Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's time zones.
		I'm Mark Bell, and this is a program called Post to Coast AM, which covers every one of those time zones like a great warm blanket.
		It's great to be here.
		My honor and privilege to be escorting you through the weekend is my Howard Bloom, a brilliant guy, and the next hour.
		This hour open lines.
		You know, we haven't been doing enough open lines, so next couple weeks sometime I will schedule those to happen.
		Let's look around the world.
		Dilapidating as that is to do, a British tabloid published yet more surreptitiously taken prison pictures of Saddam Hussein on Saturday.
		And Iraq's once dominant Sunni Muslim minority sought to break out of its deepening isolation by forming an alliance of tribal, political, and religious groups.
		But the new Sunnis group, new Sunni group first act, a demand the Interior Minister resigned, threatened to fuel sectarian tensions following the recent killing of several Sunni clerics that they have blamed on Shiite-dominated security forces.
		What's going on is whoever is behind all of this violence in Iraq is trying to promote a civil war, and they're getting pretty close to being successful at it.
		And I wonder how the U.S. is going to handle it if a full civil war does break out.
		It's close.
		A fire broke out at a crowded house in Cleveland, Ohio during a children's sleepover of all things early Saturday, and it killed seven children and two adults.
		The fire department said it was so hot that it scorched the frame of the home jet black and forced back neighbors who rushed in to try to help.
		11 people were in the house when the blaze started at about 3 in the morning.
		The assistant fire chief said the victims were from 4 years of age to 34, and at least one of those children was at the house for a sleepover.
		Hours before flying to Washington, for talks with President Bush, the Afghan leader demanded greater control of Saturday over American military operations in his country, and he called for vigorous punishment of any U.S. troops who mistreat prisoners.
		He also said he wants the U.S. to hand over Afghan prisoners still in U.S. custody.
		A leading stem cell researcher, I think this is maybe the big news of the week that I've seen, a leading stem cell researcher has said it could be decades before scientific breakthroughs by his team will benefit humans, but he expressed hopes that they will eventually aid people with incurable illnesses.
		The South Korean scientist who cloned a human embryo last year announced this week that he had created the first embryonic stem cells that genetically match injured or sick patients.
		Now, as you know in this country, we have quite a number of restrictions placed on embryonic stem cell research.
		And the Koreans are blazing forward with no such restrictions.
		We're quite a ways behind them at the moment, and I am very concerned about it.
		There may be many cures for many very debilitating diseases like Alzheimer's, and the list goes on and on and on, and the answer may well be in stem cells.
		And the U.S. is acting in a very conservative, religious kind of manner, and we're very much behind.
		I wonder if developments are made overseas, and this will be an interesting question, won't it?
		Let us suppose, for example, that the Koreans or the Japanese or Chinese develop a cure for Alzheimer's or for spinal disease and injury, some of the awful things that occur to people through stem cell research.
		Would we then embrace those cures or would we make them against the law as the very research that would bring them is now?
		An awfully interesting question.
		My wife, I don't know about yours, but my wife loves those machines.
		You know, the claw machines, right?
		Where you can get a toy and you manipulate the claw, and she's very, very good at it.
		I mean, I have watched my wife with 10 or 12 little children around her watching as she would get animal after animal after animal.
		She is incredibly good.
		I mean, we have a room full of claw caught animals, little stuffed animals.
		Anyway, in Elkhart, Indiana, it seems, a crane vending machine can be frustrating enough when you're trying to snatch a little stuffed toy from its steely clutches.
		Imagine if the prize that it's denying you is your own three-year-old son.
		It seems James Magnes II managed to climb, get this, climb up the chute and inside one of the machines Thursday, refusing to come out, swinging around for about an hour amid the plush toys that he coveted before firefighters finally got to him and removed him from his little heaven, I suppose.
		It would be heaven for a child, wouldn't it?
		So he actually went up the little chute, got in there, and started playing with all the toys.
unidentified		Can you imagine?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This story is something I've been watching like a hawk.
		And here it is yet again this week.
		The headline is, WHO report charts disturbing changes in avian flu virus.
		Urges preparations.
		Great headline, huh?
		Toronto, the World Health Organization urged countries to make full haste with pandemic influenza preparation Wednesday as it released a report outlining disturbing changes to the H5N1 virus circulating in now in Asia.
		The report raises concerns that molecular and disease pattern evidence may indicate that that virus is becoming more adept at infecting people.
		It also reveals some strains rather of the H5N1 virus may be developing resistance to the drug that wealthy nations are now flocking to stockpile as fears of a pandemic mount.
		An influenza expert who helped draft the report said it's meant to convey the message that the level of anxiety regarding the virus has now risen yet again.
		I think it's fair to say that the report signifies a definite step up in concern, according to the doctor Fujida, I believe it is, a flu specialist from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, who is being seconded to WHO's Global Influenza Program.
		The report concedes the authors had limited scientific evidence on which to determine whether H5N1 is becoming an even graver risk to mankind, but basically we're worried that that is what's happening.
		We're also saying that there's not quite enough information available, not quite enough data and cases and patterns to really solidly say that that is the case.
		Fuida was part of a recent three-person WHO mission to Vietnam where the alarming changes are being observed in the northern part of that country.
		His team reported last week to a meeting of international experts in Manila.
		The report was drawn up from their deliberations.
		A leading U.S. doctor said the report contains no single smoking gun to suggest that H5N1 is becoming a pandemic strain, but the combined evidence does paint a compelling picture that cannot be ignored.
		I think it tells us that everything about H5N1 is headed in the direction that none of us would like to see it go, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
		Quote, do I say that's going to mean there's an impending pandemic?
		I don't know that.
		Does it tell me that there's a growing concern about it?
		Absolutely.
		So I've been sort of registering a growing concern about this situation.
		It's a very, very serious flu with a terrible mortality rate.
		And the suggestion would seem to be that it's becoming more accustomed to infecting humans.
		Here's a headline for you.
		You may have heard this last week.
		I don't know, but it sure hit me between the eyes.
		Lake disappears, baffling villagers.
		A Russian village was left baffled Thursday after its lake just up and disappeared overnight.
		A whole lake gone!
		NTV television showed pictures of a giant, muddy hole bathed in summer sun while fishermen from the village nearby looked on discolently.
		It's very dangerous.
		If a person had been in this disaster, he would have had almost zero chance of survival.
		The trees flew downwards under the ground.
		I just can't picture it, can you?
		Officials in the region on the Volga River, east of Moscow, said water in the lake, well, it might have been sucked down into an underground water course or cave system.
		But some villagers had more sinister explanations, said one old woman as she sat on the ground outside her house looking into the now muddy, sun-lit, water-bereft hole.
		Quote, I'm thinking, well, America has finally gotten to us.
		America has finally gotten to us.
		It's almost impossible to imagine an entire lake, a big lake, just gone overnight.
		I suppose it could be down in some sort of cave or something, but that one's really weird.
		A scientist group on Thursday warned the U.S. against weaponizing space, saying the move would be prohibitively expensive and could set off a new arms race altogether.
		The Union of Concerned Scientists, a watchdog group that opposes weapons in space, said the U.S. should consider drafting a treaty that would prohibit interfering with unarmed satellites, taking away any justification for putting weapons in space to protect them.
		The U.S. has a huge lead in the space field.
		It can afford to try the multilateral approach, said the former U.S. ambassador and an advisor on global security issues.
		But, you know, our military doesn't feel that way at all, as you might imagine.
		We've got a lot of very valuable satellites up there, and there are other nations beginning to reach out into space.
		And they just might reach out and zap our satellites.
		And you see, we need to have, from the military point of view, a way to prevent that, at the very least.
		If not a way to destroy whatever might be trying to reach out and zap our satellites.
		Now, I'll tell you what I really think.
		And what I really think is that we already have weapons in space.
		How many of you, and I've thought this over the years, how many of you don't think that we have secret weapons in space?
		Raise your hands.
		You see, I don't see any out there.
		Just about everybody agrees that they're probably already out there circling the Earth, waiting for an order from the ground that would cause untold destruction.
		If not, weapons capable of destroying other space-based communication satellites.
		After all, what better way to remove almost immediately the infrastructure of any advanced nation that's got orbiting satellites for communication and direction from space?
		So you just know it.
		They're already there.
		I imagine the very worst sort of things are there.
		Now, I'm a talk show host, so I can imagine these things, but I would imagine there are nuclear devices in space.
		I would imagine there are chemical and biological devices in space.
		I imagine all sorts of things.
	I could be dead wrong, but I'll bet we've already got them there.
	And I bet the other side, whoever the other side is, remember the Chinese have things in orbit.
	The Russians have things in orbit.
	A number of countries do.
	Even the Japanese.
	So I think they're already there.
	And what's up there?
	Well, we probably don't want to know.
	Let's take some calls, shall we?
	Is to the Rockies.
	You're on the air.
	Good evening.
unidentified		Hi, Eric.
		This is Dan.
		I'm calling from Cleveland, Ohio.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Yeah, I have a question for you.
		It was about 2001, I think.
		You had a guest on about Bigfoot, and he was saying, you know, how he killed him, I guess, and buried him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ah, yes.
unidentified		And it was like the best show I think I've heard from you, too.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It was a good show because the man was completely believable.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And in the end, he didn't do it because his wife wouldn't let him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And, you know, the issue was really a very serious issue, sir.
unidentified		I was wondering, did he ever wind up showing you the map or anything by chance?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Oh, okay.
unidentified		Well, then I believe him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I believe him.
		Yes, he shared with me where they are, and I promptly burned it.
		You know, look, look, his issues were serious.
		The guy could be conceivably charged with murder or something like that.
		And so, in the end, the decision to go forward or not had to be his.
		And I frankly did understand why he didn't go forward.
		Thank you very much.
		We had people calling us, attorneys and others, who did suggest the man could conceivably be in a very, very great deal of trouble and charged with something.
		He didn't know exactly what he had killed.
		He was pretty darn certain they weren't human.
		But on the other hand, you never know.
		There could be feral humans out there.
		There could be all kinds of things.
		And I guess in the end, I had to honor his wishes on the subject.
		West of the Rockies, you're on here.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi, Art.
		This is Ed in Los Angeles.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Welcome.
unidentified		Yeah, I want to mention about Tesla.
		I'm still waiting for our great Tesla movie to show up.
		Do you think there will be one?
		Or does anybody have a script?
		Or do you know anything about the Tesla movie?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know a thing about it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there supposed to be one?
unidentified		About 20 years ago, I think the man who produced the Kennedy assassination movie, Yeah.
		Yeah.
		And I think the actor Jeff Goldblum was going to play Tesla.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No kidding.
unidentified		Yeah.
unidentified		But I also want to mention that in 1942, my father, my late father, was an air raid ward in Los Angeles when they had that great so-called air raid.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you talking about the sightings over Los Angeles or the actual when the Japanese supposedly I'm talking about when the anti-aircraft guns went out of February 26, I believe it was, or about early morning.
unidentified		Anyway, the next day, he was an auto supply dealer, and during the war, of course, auto supplies were very scarce.
		So he was going around to these little stores they had then, and in Hollywood, near Vermont Avenue in Hollywood, there was a vacant lot, and he was roped off by the police, and that was supposed to be some of the crashed parts of whatever this was.
		And so he knew the officer and people around him.
		So he traded him a carburetor or some band belts or something.
		He got a piece of this, and somebody told me it might be a UFO part.
		And what do I do now?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You have a UFO part?
unidentified		I have it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What does it look like?
unidentified		To me, it just looks like a flattened piece of aluminum that's charred in one end, about 11, 12 inches long.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have you done any testing?
unidentified		No, actually, I always just thought it was from an aircraft that got shot down.
		They were trying to cover it up or something.
		And it was put in an old magazine, a Time magazine from 1943, I think it was.
		So my sister had it, and I finally got her to send it to me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so you've got it.
		All right.
		Well, the only thing you can do with that sort of thing is get it tested and find out if it's metal not common to the earth.
		About the only way you're going to prove or at least take the first giant step toward proving that what you have is extraterrestrial in origin one way or the other is to have it tested.
		And they can determine if the metal or material that you have has the same quantity of everything it would have if it came from Earth.
		If it doesn't, it's very easily detectable.
		And they can proceed.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning, Arthur.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Turn your radio off, please.
unidentified		Yes.
unidentified		I discussed socialized automation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Socialized automation?
unidentified		And the necessity for this thing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Socialized automation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you mean by that?
unidentified		Well, the chapter towards a healthy society in the book Warp Speed A Plus explains why libertarianism is doomed to failure since industrial robots will further concentrate the wealth by a factor of a hundredfold.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think you're probably right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ultimately, libertarianism probably is doomed, but it won't go easily into that gentle knight, sir, I can assure you.
unidentified		Do we really want Grandma Baron Don with anything going to automation?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're thinking we should have socialized automation, is that right?
		That is correct.
		Give me an example of socialized automation.
unidentified		We assign the industrial robots a hypothetical hourly wage and then tax those hypothetical hourly wages.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We assign a hypothetical world for everybody in the world, whether it's robots, industrial robots, or just robots.
unidentified		Industrial robots.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why should industrial robots make anything?
unidentified		Anything that creates wealth could and should be taxed.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And then I suppose we would have robot unions.
unidentified		No, the robots are slaves.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Slaves?
		Oh, slaves.
		Well, then why pay a slave?
unidentified		To raise taxes for our government.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
		All right.
		Well, that might be your future, sir, but it's certainly not the one that I'm looking forward to.
		Yeah, I think the robots actually would eventually get smart and form a union, don't you?
		All right, we're going to be in open lines from now until the top of the hour.
		So if you have something startling, interesting, compelling, pick up that phone and dial the number that we're going to provide for you shortly from the hydrated in the middle of the darkness with the moon creeping through.
		And actually quite beautiful up there in the desert night.
		I'm Art Bell, and this is Post to Post AM.
		Don't touch that dial.
unidentified		Once upon a time, once when you were dying, I remember those times when we were dead.
		The End Be it silent, sound, smell, or touch, the something inside that we need so much.
		The sight of the touch or the scent of the sand, or the strength of an oak roots deep in the ground.
		The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
		Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing.
		To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing.
		To have all these things in our memory's heart.
		And the user to help us to find.
		Yeah!
		One day.
		take a ride?
		To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
		The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
		To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free 800-825-5033.
		From west to the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach ART by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ah, indeed, you fly to the sun without burning a wing.
		Due to increased solar activity and the thinning of the ozone layer, the deadly skin cancer melanoma is being seen more frequently in children now despite the availability of sunscreens.
		Skin cancer, in general, is now on the rise.
		A group of chemists have made a discovery.
		They've discovered that adding a mixture of antioxidants to sunscreen enhances its protection from UV radiation.
		In animal studies, they found that a mixture of various topical antioxidants was more effective than any single antioxidant.
		What are some of these?
		They're the same things we've been told that we should ingest regularly in order to prevent the free radicals inside our bodies from causing cancer.
		Black and green tea, grapeseed ointment, grape juice, like all colors, fruits and vegetables, a powerful antioxidant, cranberry extracts.
		These all help prevent sunburn when applied to the skin.
		a little hints in this new world we live in Charles in Phoenix, Arizona agrees.
		He says, hey, Art, I'm a libertarian, and I agree with your last caller.
		Let's tax the robots and leave me the hell alone.
		Right on, Charles.
		First time caller line, you're on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi.
		You were just talking about the stem cells and the antioxidants, and you were exactly right.
		The stem cells are also in the cord blood.
		You don't have to use embryo.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's not entirely true.
unidentified		I mean, your parents are having it saving it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A lot of the lines from embryonic stem cells are very promising.
		And, you know, the argument right now, ma'am, boils Down to, oh, for example, fertility clinics.
		Now, they're just going to throw these things away.
		I mean, literally, throw them in the garbage.
		Now, if that's the choice, to go to the garbage or to go to research that could save lives, to me, that's duh.
unidentified		Well, you've got to think about what God would want.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, do you think God would want them thrown in the garbage?
unidentified		No, I don't.
unidentified		I don't think he wants you to take life either to help.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I certainly agree with you, but what is it when you toss them in the garbage?
unidentified		That's pretty bad.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Pretty bad, yeah.
unidentified		And the antioxidant, selenium is the most powerful antioxidant there is.
		And the grape and the cherry are your most powerful.
		And selenium actually kills cancer.
		It breaks the cells up where they can't replicate.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, we're in one world.
		Our children are going to come up in another.
		And as UV radiation becomes more of a problem, believe me, ma'am, these younger people are going to have to learn to protect their skin.
unidentified		Exactly.
		Exactly.
		And matter of fact, it would help you to get Dr. Williams from the Wellness Clinic and they're in L.A. Yes.
		And get him on your program because he can tell you all about this.
		And these sunscreens cause cancer because they block what your skin needs to protect it from, but the axis will help.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, apparently so.
		And that's why I read that.
		As I said, to fly to the sun without burning a wing.
		These days, you burn your wing.
		You definitely get a wing burned.
		And when I was young, my parents would frequently take us down to Florida, where we would go out unaided and just burn the you-know-what out of ourselves every year on a regularly scheduled basis.
		And then we didn't know a thing about it.
		We didn't know the sun caused cancer.
		We didn't know, as a matter of fact, my own father passed of melanoma.
		And I can recall his, I was kind of a, you know, when I was younger, I spent a lot of days in radio rooms when other kids were out getting sunburned.
		So I avoided a lot of that.
		But my dad, as a youngster, was out just virtually every day and did end up with melanoma.
		So all of you pay attention to this kind of story.
		And they're saying put antioxidants together with some sun shield and you'll have a great deal more protection.
		Something everybody should bear in mind.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hi.
		Art?
		Yes.
		Hey, this is Curtis from Wisconsin.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, Curtis.
unidentified		And I had a question about a theory I had, and hopefully you can help me out with it.
		Perhaps.
		Well, I was thinking, like, if a comet was possibly inbound towards Earth, and scientists, like, all agreed on it, and they all sucked, like, astronomers, you know, like the people who could see it, if they hit it, but yet, like, promised to give us a week ahead of time or something, like, could that happen?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't think that if something was headed toward us, that we would be told about it.
unidentified		like ever, until it actually hits?
		Or do you think, like, they'd...
		I had a couple astronomer teachers, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I suppose some astronomers, if they were to see it and do the calculations, might indeed tell us about it.
		But if there really was something on the way, there's a certain chain of command that even the amateur astronomers follow to get what they see verified.
		And it's my opinion that along the line of being verified somewhere, it would get stopped.
		And whether the general public would be told of an impending collision or not, I have serious doubts.
		You think we'd be told, huh?
unidentified		Or, like, maybe that's already happening right now.
unidentified		It's like a lot of, like, small meteorites have been hitting around, you know?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's certainly possible.
		I have wondered about this for a very long time.
		It's kind of the same thing as when we talk about SETI with Seth Shostak and so forth.
		Seth maintains that, oh, the word would get around very quickly, and we would know instantly if we had contact from another civilization.
		I'm not so sure.
		As I'm not so sure that if something were headed toward us and there was virtually nothing that could be done, well, I just don't think we would be told because the ensuing panic.
		I don't know.
		I'll have to think about that one.
		There might be certain conditions under which we would be told.
		If it was something that was the size that smacked the dinosaurs, then I'm not so sure.
		And I'm not so sure that there would be all that much use in telling us.
		Would you want to know?
		If something were coming at Earth and it was big enough so that it was going to extinguish all life down to including microbial life, would you really want to know?
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, this is Jason here in Dallas.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		I was wondering when, if ever, we will hear the second half of the Spiracom tape.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ah, the SpiritCom tapes.
unidentified		Don't you consider that scientific proof of life after death?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I consider it the strongest proof that I've ever heard.
unidentified		I mean, seriously.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, seriously.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I consider it the strongest proof that I've ever heard.
unidentified		It's irrefutable.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That makes sense.
unidentified		Okay, unless these guys are just bold-faced liars.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's exactly right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, and they're not.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I agree.
		They're not.
		So I consider it the next thing to the smoking gun of life after death.
		Yes?
unidentified		I'm thirsting for the second half of this.
unidentified		Carrots and cabbages are the last words you hear about it, and then that's it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I will consider the prospect of doing it.
unidentified		I'll get an online petition.
unidentified		I am not alone in my thirst for this knowledge.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, my friend.
		Thank you.
		Well, the Spiracom tapes, I did something nobody in broadcasting has ever done.
		And I played about, I think it was about a 40-minute segment of the Spiracom tapes, George Meek's lifelong research, and they had an active, ongoing conversation with the person on the other side.
		They created a series of tone generators and electronic equipment that actually allowed an ongoing conversation with the other side.
		I mean, so ongoing That the spirit on the other side, who was somewhat technical, actually helped out in the development of the equipment that made the voice even more legible coming from the other side.
		It was absolutely amazing.
		Once to the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hello?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, Martin.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Yeah.
		Yeah, I just want to tell you about a story that happened, something that happened to me.
		I'm a truck driver, and I was coming from Northern California from Redding, and I was going to a little town called Marysfield.
		Now, right before I got into that little town, about three lights got on the top of my truck.
		I say it was about 100 feet up, and all I could see was the lights, and they was about 100 feet across in diameter, and they were going around.
		And just as I got into the town, they disappeared.
		Now, I guess the place I'm going to is kind of out in the boonies, and it was on the other side of the town.
		And when I got out there, I saw the light on the road, and on the side of me again, I looked up, and there it was again.
		And by then, my heart is just thumping, thumping real hard.
		So I'm pulling into the place.
		There's nothing out there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Were you by yourself, or did you have a partner?
unidentified		By myself.
unidentified		It's three in the morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my God.
unidentified		And it's nothing out there but the place I was going to, which is a door company and a FedEx-like little depot there where they ship packages in and out.
		And nobody around.
		So I get out of my truck and the lights are, and I'm supposed to drop one trailer, pick up another one.
		The lights were right as I pulled in front of that trailer, and the lights came back over top of me again.
		By that time, I mean, I was so nervous and shaky.
		I listened to your show all the time, and I'm always thinking about these abduction type of things.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You thought you were going to get abducted.
unidentified		Well, you know, I wasn't taking no chances.
		Let me tell you what happened.
		I got so scared, I jumped back up in my truck, I pulled my 45 out, jumped back out, restuffed in the sky, and popped off four rounds.
		Pow, pow, pow!
		And the thing just disappeared automatically.
		Never saw it again.
		Now, check this out.
		I was so scared, I hurry up and hooked the trailer up.
		And I shot down to pull out of the parking lot, shot down the street, and I saw a guy.
		The FedEx gates was closed, but I saw a guy backing in a truck up to the dock.
		So I jumps out of the truck, and I go over there.
		I say, hey, guy, did you see that?
		Did you see that?
		He said, no, I didn't see nothing.
		I said, did you hear anything?
		He said, I didn't hear a thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		He didn't hear the gunshots.
unidentified		He didn't hear the gunshot or nothing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let me advise all against shooting at UFOs.
		Shooting at UFOs is probably not a good thing to do.
		One must reasonably make the assumption that if they have crossed light years, impossibly crossed untold light years, to get here, that they have a technology sufficiently advanced that we would consider it to be magic.
		Now, pulling out a 45 and firing at such objects is probably a poorly considered idea, not only for yourself, but for the rest of humanity, since it could be viewed as a hostile action by somebody with a bigger gun.
		You're on air coast to coast AM with Art Bell.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Hello, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, my name is Justin.
unidentified		I'm calling from St. Petersburg, Florida.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, Justin.
unidentified		And I have a story for you about near-death experiences.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		Or actually, a lack of near-death experiences, I should say.
		About three years ago, I was involved in a fatal car accident on the freeway, and I was declared clinically dead for three and a half minutes, and I saw absolutely nothing for the time I was dead.
		So I'm very, very skeptical of near-death experiences because the time that I was actually clinically dead, I saw absolutely nothing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		More people do not have them than have them.
		We, of course, hear about the people that have them, not the people that don't.
		Oh, wow.
		So I'm not sure what it proves either way, but you had absolutely nothing.
		You just had blank, huh?
unidentified		Yeah, I was blank for those three and a half minutes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, maybe there was never any consideration of your actually dying and moving on.
		Maybe you were always meant to come back.
		Maybe the only people that actually have these NDEs are people who have, well, more or less had it.
		What do you think?
unidentified		Well, yeah, definitely.
		I've seen things in my life that make me think that there is an afterlife.
		The experience that I experienced, I just saw nothing, but maybe for that time, maybe I was just unconscious and I wasn't dead.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe.
unidentified		Maybe.
		And also, I have a ghost story for you, actually.
		Okay.
		Actually, this was about four years ago, and this experience has really frightened me for my whole life.
		Me and three other people were on the bike trail, and the attempt was about 3 a.m. in the morning, and all three of us decided to get out of our tent and walk down the bike trail.
		And all of us walked down there, and it was the most frightening experience of my life.
		All of us looked up at the same time, and we saw, it was almost like an older lady, and she was almost hovering right in front of us.
		And the reason that we looked up because it was so dark is that we heard footsteps coming towards us, and all of us seen this spirit form all at the same time.
		So I know I wasn't just seeing things myself.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In that case, then, you should have a revival in your belief of life after death.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Because what was she?
unidentified		Wow, what was that, Art?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I said, what was she?
unidentified		Yeah, I don't know if she's someone trying to contact me or who she was, but I am 100% sure of what I saw, and two other people were there with me.
unidentified		I'm 100% on that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there you are, then.
		You should be 100% in that case with regard to life after death.
		The fact that you didn't have an NDE is one thing that I could see would be on the side of some doubt.
		However, having seen something that is in fact dead should bolster your belief in it without question.
		First time caller line?
		You're on air.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hello?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		This is Alan from Las Vegas.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello, Alan.
unidentified		Hi.
		I was calling to verify this or confirm this deal Bob Lazar was talking about.
		One night I was driving south from Ponopa.
		I know we know it's out 95 towards Las Vegas.
		I was coming down a hill, and I spotted those lights that Bob Lazar was talking about.
		This was six or seven years ago, but they were there.
		I saw them, and I wish I could say I had a witness there with me or someone.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There's absolutely no question about it, sir.
		We've seen all kinds of lights like that out here out in this area.
		And if you're in Las Vegas, then you know it is so.
		There was a piece on the local news the other night about Bob Lazard.
		Did you happen to see it?
unidentified		Yeah, I saw it.
unidentified		He's in Arizona or New Mexico, I guess.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is it Arizona or New Mexico?
unidentified		I can't remember.
unidentified		I'm not sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Anyway, he's sort of retired away from Nevada and away from all of this.
		But yes, he staunchly maintains his story, what he saw, what he did.
		He doesn't enlarge on it.
		He hasn't magnified the story over the years.
		It's still the same story.
		And you either believe him, I guess, or not.
unidentified		Yeah, well, I believe him.
		I thought.
		I wish I had more people that saw it.
		I wish my wife was with me or someone.
		The only other thing I'd like to talk about is this fellow from the Rolling Stone magazine he had on the other day.
		He talked about gasoline and the future of energy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The long emergency.
unidentified		Yeah, the long emergency.
		You know, I was looking at nuclear power and everything.
		And we look at Europe and 80% of France's power is developed by nuclear and Germany.
		And the Euro dollar is doing really well compared to us.
		And I'm just wondering if we're in the wrong, if the people in the government that are opposed to nuclear energy aren't the people that are for oil.
		Maybe they're the same bunch.
		Maybe we can be afraid of nuclear power.
		But then when we look at the benefits of it, like where's France putting their nuclear waste?
		And where's Germany?
		And where's the European Union depositing their nuclear waste in an ocean, I mean the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of France?
		They drilled a big pit out there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think, sir, that we have to look to nuclear power because there is very little else right now on the horizon.
		There are promises and wishes and talk of zero-point and free energy devices of all sorts and descriptions, none of which have yet panned out as a source of energy that we can use that'll even have a hint.
		And this even goes to biodiesel, by the way.
		Biodiesel, as wonderful as it is, at the very best is going to offset just a very tiny percentage of the totality of the needs of America and the world for energy.
		So if we are running out of oil reserves in the world, and there's every indication we are, every indication the world is not the soft, centered nugget of endless oil that some believe it is, I've read these stories and do discount them, and I do think that our oil is a finite finite material, and we are going to eventually run out of all the easy-to-get oil.
		In fact, we've just about done that right now.
		And that means the second half of the oil that remains out there, and that's still a whole lot of oil, is not going to be cheap nor easy to get.
		And as the prices go up, so will go the prices of virtually everything.
		Everything we have is oil or petroleum-based.
		So the only viable alternative energy source that I even see right now is indeed nuclear.
		It comes with its own set of problems.
		If instead of trying to dig in the mountains and then be shepherds of something for 100,000 years, we could figure out some way to efficiently recycle nuclear waste and use it for energy until it's all used up.
		If we could just do that, we might have more of a future than we seem to have right now.
unidentified		If we could just do that, we might have more of a future than we seem to have.
		If we could just do that, we might have more of a future than we seem to have.
		Above the boom, Can you hear my heart bleeding before?
		Do you know I'm not behind for the source.
		Like the titi sayadamelé.
		Nekumon me forda itame.
		I'm not just to be all I can do.
		Bye.
		To talk with Arc Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
		The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
		To talk with Arc Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
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		International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free, 800-893-0903.
		From coast to coast, and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is Kendrick of Bell Canyon, California.
		Thanks tonight's show's a repeat because he said you were talking about not shooting at UFOs.
		Um, Kendrick, I always dispense advice about not shooting at UFOs.
		No, this is not a repeat.
		And it remains excellent advice.
		Do not shoot at UFOs.
		Coming up in a moment, Howard Bloom.
		Howard Bloom has almost single-handedly carved out two new fields.
		Heliopsychology and mass behavior.
		His next goal is to establish a field he calls omnology.
		Bloom's cross-disciplinary theories trace crowd patterns from the precipitation of the first protons in the Big Bang to future trends in the life of humankind, testing his theories of mass emotion in the brutal lab reality.
		Bloom helped shape the careers of Prince John Cougar-Mellenkamp, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, and many others.
		Howard is a visiting scholar graduate in the psychology department at New York University and a core faculty member at the Graduate Institute.
		He is also founder of the International Paleopsychology Project in the Big Bang Tango Media Lab, and in addition, is a founding board member of the EPIC of Evolution Society and the Darwin Project.
		He is also a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior, and Evolution Society, and the International Society for Human Pathology.
		so uh...
		very very well credentialed in a moment howard bloom so uh...
		Howard Bloom, welcome back to the program.
		It's great to have you.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		It's good to hear you again.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Just great to have you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You were saying something that I put off just before you got on the air when I established the telephone call here about ZZ Top.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, you have a big fan in Billy Gibbons.
		Billy Gibbons is the mastermind of ZZ Top.
		He's one of the most colorful and artistic people I know.
		And after the last time he heard the two of us together, he got all excited.
		He called me in a fury, a storm of energy, said wonderful things about you, bragged about being one of your friends.
		I mean, it was a Billy Gibbons creativity explosion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, man, he's a wonderful guy.
		He knows that I love phased music.
		And I had a friend who was phasing music for me, and Billy and ZZ Top sent me a machine that actually phases music.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Now, what is phasing music?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's kind of like what is phasing music?
		It's a difficult thing to describe.
		You're familiar, of course, with old, for example, Moody Blues, right?
unidentified		Yes, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And you know, I frequently play Ride My Seesaw, right?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If you listen very carefully to the version of Ride My Seesaw that I play, it's a phased version.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Listen carefully.
unidentified		Take a long, through my eyes.
		A blessing is for free.
		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can you hear the phasing of it?
		A kind of a three-dimensional effect.
		And they sent me a machine that actually phases music.
		Billy sent that to me.
		So really a good guy.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he's terrific.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Have you ever heard, I know we're going way off a tangent here, but have you ever heard Hugo Zugarelli's hologonic sound?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I have not.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		This is a guy who plays around with mathematical formulae all the time, and you know music is based on mathematical formulae.
unidentified		Of course.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And he's come up with some formula that allow you to put on a pair of headphones or even just listen through normal stereo speakers.
		In one of his demonstrations tapes, he has a box of matches being shaked around your head, and you hear exactly where it is next to your head, behind your head, above your head, below your head.
		It's astonishing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		Yes.
		All right.
		We're going to enter some pretty dangerous territory, it looks like, to me tonight.
		Do you want to read this statement, this first statement about conspiracy?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Oh, oh, oh, okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hang on.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Let me find it for you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's not.
		I'm sorry.
		I can read it.
		I can read it.
		The problem with conspiracy.
		Think.
		We are picking at each other and fighting over which one of us caused 9-11.
		Our enemies within may threaten our freedom of speech, but the enemies without threaten our very life.
		Never argue with a shoplifter over what's in his pocket when there's a killer right behind you who's about to skewer you with his knife.
		Now, that's an interesting statement.
		The whole 9-11 thing, in fact, let us begin there.
		I'm having and have had for months now a big go-around, Howard, with the 9-11 conspiracy crowd.
		What do you think of them?
		Not a whole lot.
		I think that they are blustery, they are threatening, they are impolite, they call me a traitor, and I think they're full of energy and a lot of other things, Howard.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Have you watched, did you watch the first two months of the evolution of this community, the 9-11 conspirator community?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I most surely did.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		It was quite amazing because they were looking for someone to blame.
		And they were looking so hard for someone to blame.
		It was ridiculous, but they were looking in all the wrong places.
		They absolutely refused to believe that any culture outside of our own has any power greater than that of a saporific pygmy, a pygmy fast asleep.
		And as a consequence, they had to somehow find a way to blame it on the CIA.
		They had to find a way to blame it on us.
		And if it wasn't us, then it was going to have to be the Jews, for God's sake.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They quite literally think that George Bush ordered 9-11.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and it's an astonishing, first of all, they do, you know this better than I do, The footnoting that they do on their websites defies belief.
		It is very hard to refute their arguments because they've really taken them down to the nth degree of detail.
		But the fact is, they don't recognize that there are other civilizations on this planet.
		They are as stupid as the Byzantines were when they thought the only people that they should be fighting with were, well, you know, the Byzantines had the blues and the greens, and they started as two different sports teams.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And then they ended up dividing as thoroughly as Democrats and Republicans and ended up fighting each other in the streets.
		So when they were being threatened by utter annihilation by the Muslims, they were too busy blaming each other to pay attention to the fact that they were about to be destroyed as a civilization utterly.
		And of course, today they're gone.
		They are gone.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, of course.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And I wonder if we're headed down the same path.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, we seem to be in certain ways.
		I mean, I hate to say this.
		I don't know what your politics are, and we usually avoid talking about them on the show.
		But I'm a lifelong Democrat, and it's very hard for me to give credit to George Bush for anything.
		And we both know that there is a long history of the Bush family and his mother's side of the family, a long history of their involvement in everything from armaments to huge amounts of money and international trade.
		But the fact remains, that's the Walker's side of the family, but the fact remains that George Bush is at least willing to look at the fact that there's an enemy outside there.
		And if you read the rhetoric of that enemy, which I've been reading for the last 20 or 30 years, it is blood-curdling.
		I mean, some people, we believe that we should be, we hate the fact that we may have taken Korans and flushed them down toilets.
		We hate the fact that those awful, awful photos were taken in which Islamic prisoners were humiliated in every conceivable way.
		We loathe that, and we're investigating that.
		But you can read rhetoric in militant Islamic society that revels in that, that loves the fact that people cry and beg and whimper for mercy before you cut, you saw their heads off with a knife.
		Think of the way that our prisoners have been treated.
		It's a very different kind of society.
		And for those of us who really want a civilized society in which you and I have what we glory in most, freedom of speech, and I mean you and I, we glory in it more than most other people, for us not to recognize that somebody was right when he said that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, for us to be ignorant of that is to be suicidal.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are we going to end up, Howard, and I know the president has gone out of his way, and I'm no great Bush fan myself, but are we going to end up at war with Islam, in a wide war with Islam?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		You know, the events of the last few days, especially the riots over the possible abuse of the Koran, which should never have happened.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That was a false news week story, right?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		It was a false, possibly false newsweek story.
		The CRC, you know, the International Red Cross says that it had hints that possibly something like that was happening.
		But the fact is that over the last two weeks, there has been a heavy-duty struggle going on in the world of Islam.
		And it has surprised the heck out of me, Art, because there has been the beginning of a velvet revolution in the Arab world.
		I never thought I would see such a thing in my life.
		People have been taking to the streets in demonstrations calling for democracy in Lebanon, in Syria.
		In Syria, it is a death sentence to take to the streets in demonstrations.
		But the mothers and women whose brothers, whose fathers, whose sons have disappeared over the course of the last 30 years and never been heard from again, those mothers have taken to the streets and taken their lives in their hands to protest.
		It's happened in Kuwait.
		In Kuwait, there was a very heavy-duty struggle over the last couple of weeks over women's right to vote.
		In Saudi Arabia, you know that the headlines several years ago were all about the fact that women could not drive.
		We were not allowed to have driver's licenses.
unidentified		That's right.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, in the last two weeks, because of street protests, women were given driver's licenses, the right to drive, in Saudi Arabia.
		In Egypt, there have been two different street movements calling for democracy.
		One of them is called the Kafiya movement, which means enough, meaning we've had enough of this guy, Posni Mubarak, already retired of him.
		He can't get another German office.
		But these have been small demonstrations, several hundred people.
		The remarkable thing is that these small demonstrations have made the headlines all over the Middle Eastern world.
		I watch Middle Eastern news every night, and they have made headlines, which is remarkable in itself, but there's something even more remarkable.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, what's propelling all this?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, what's propelling all of this, apparently, every single article that I've read that appears in an Islamic paper says that George Bush's speeches have nothing to do with this.
		And George Bush did give a rather surprising speech around February in which he said, really, we didn't go into Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction.
		We went in to set off a domino effect in Middle Eastern society in which everyone would call for democracy.
		And I thought, this is the most foolish man I have ever seen in my life.
		That's a noble ambition if he really is small-brained enough to believe in it.
		But the fact is, I'm an expert on Islamic society.
		I have been for a long time.
		There is no way in hell that will ever happen in Middle Eastern society.
		And guess who was right and guess who was wrong?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, once there were found to be no weapons of mass destruction, then we had to have another motive and we had to have it pretty quickly.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, but the fact is that this extraordinary thing that Bush was saying that seemed so pinheaded, that seemed so stupid, he was right.
		And I'm supposed to have a brain.
		I was wrong.
		I was absolutely wrong, Art, because people did take to the streets in Lebanon.
		It started with the assassination of Hariri, and then the street protests were huge in the streets of Lebanon.
		The Syrians tried to organize street protests of equal size, and they had all the resources.
		They were bussing in people from all over the place, paying people's expenses and all that kind of thing.
		And even then, their protests could not equal the protests of those who wanted democracy in Lebanon.
		And that's what started it all.
		Then came the masses of demonstrators by the tens of thousands in Egypt, because the Islamic Brotherhood, which killed Anmar Sadat and has been outlawed in Egypt for decades, all of a sudden decided to go democratic and took to the streets in peaceful protest.
		This was astonishing.
		This whole kind of thing was astonishing, but there's been a battle in the Islamic community in the last seven days over who would own the Islamic heart.
		Would it be the militants or Would it be the Democrats?
		And the militants have seized on this excuse of a false Newsweek story.
		It may have some truth to it, but if it does, we're horrified by it.
		They have seized on this to use it as a propaganda tool because humans at heart are just like bacteria or any other living things.
		We will crowd together, we bond together around battles with outsiders, with adversaries.
		And demagogues use that simple, instinctual animal pattern within us.
		And they've used it very successfully because they've driven all of the pro-democracy demonstrations out of the headlines in the Islamic press over the course of the last six days.
		So this is a report from the front.
		You can see I watch this every night, and it's been changing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Apparently so, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And you believe this is going to turn into something really gigantic?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, here are two different ways we can go.
		This democratic movement can continue to take off, although, as I said, it's been driven out of the headlines for the last six to seven days.
		Or there's another alternative.
		You and I haven't talked about this, but I have talked about it on the show, and that's the fact that Islam now has two superstealth submarines with a range of 11,000 miles each, each of which carries 16 cruise missiles, and each of those cruise missiles is tipped with a nuclear warhead.
		Now, the country that owns these is Pakistan.
		And if you look at an October 2004 story that is a story from just a few months ago in the Atlantic, an expert who's worked with both the Reagan administration and the Clinton administration is telling you something that I've been saying on this show for a long, long time, which is that Pakistan is the country most likely to fall into the hands of the Osamaites, people who believe as Osama believes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you telling me that these submarines are under control of Islam?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Radical Islam?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		No, no.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		They're under control right now of Khirvez Musharraf.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Of Pakistan.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How close to gaining control of them would any militant be?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Very, because most of the militants in Islam do a great deal of practicing for what they're going to do later.
		And a lot of that practice has taken place in the city of Karachi, where they've done things like blown up bridges that are used almost exclusively by generals in the Pakistani Army and Navy.
		And the fact is that those two submarines I've spoken of are headquartered in Karachi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I've got to back up a little bit because I wasn't even aware that the Pakistanis had nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And nobody is, apparently, even though the information comes from public access sources.
		It took me two years to put together this story art.
		But it comes from things like newspaper stories in Pakistan and, well, primarily Pakistan, because the captain of the two crews that tested out both of these submarines wrote a very proud story about this in one of the Pakistani dailies.
		Yet when you try to get publicity for this in the United States, nobody will touch it.
		Nobody will touch it.
		And that's foolishness, too.
		That's the very foolishness we were talking about when we talked about our attitudes turning us suicidal.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, well, how unambiguously can you show us that that really is true?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I can show you the pictures of the submarines.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I can give you a file of approximately 120 pages of information on the submarines.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, the submarines exist.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		not probably believe the nuclear chipped missiles on our assuring it was easy And I predicted that Islam would have nuclear weapons.
		Everybody said that was foolish and ridiculous.
		Well, in 1998, Pakistan tested its first nuclear bomb.
		And guess what?
		It didn't have to test an old bomb the size of the bombs that America used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
		Those bombs were so big you literally needed a freight plane to deliver them.
		They were the size of your bedroom chest.
		But the bombs that the Pakistanis were testing right from the beginning were little 36-inch round nuclear warheads.
		So as of a year and a half ago, the Pakistanis had built a minimum of 40 nuclear devices.
		Every single one of them was a warhead.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you know what megatonage or kilotonnage?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		No, unfortunately, I don't, but certainly enough to destroy a concentrated city like New York City or Washington, D.C. And remember, there are two of these, and the French in 1994, when the world was still denying that Islam would ever have an Islamic bomb.
		And by the way, that phrase Islamic bomb does not come from propagandists on our side.
		It comes from the man who commissioned the bomb, the head of Pakistan at the time, meaning that this is a bomb for all of the Islamic community, not just for one country.
		But those submarines were sold by DCN.
		DCN is the company that has made all of France's military or naval equipment, all of their major naval vessels, since the days of Louis XIV.
		It was spun off as a private company, allegedly private company, it's not its government-owned, in 1990.
		DCN has these, you know that the French will love to come up with weapons far more sophisticated than ours.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And weapons that can foil ours.
		Well, this is a superstealth subma.
		It is beyond belief.
		It can stay underwater for 60 days, which is something that no submarine except nuclear subs were formerly capable of doing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And this is not nuclear-powered?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		No, it's not nuclear-powered.
		It's powered by something called by diesel.
		And it has another propulsion system, a mesma propulsion system, that it uses when it's underwater.
		And that's a very, it's a hydrogen peroxide, I believe, system.
		But it will power that vessel for 60 days.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And it sounds like relatively silently as well.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		It's very silent.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		It's a double-holt sub to keep the vibrations from inside and to keep, it's to minimize the electromagnetic signature, to minimize the thermal signature, and to minimize the auditory signature.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good God.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And the engines are mounted on the equivalent of the cushiest sort of shock absorbers you've ever seen in your life.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, hold it right there.
		Two submarines, each with 16 nuclear-tipped missiles.
		Submarines that at any time, virtually, could come under the influence and control of Islamic terrorists.
		Now that's something to think about, isn't it?
		From the high desert in the middle of the night with Howard Bloom, where scary stories like this are told.
		I'm Art Bell.
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art bell ▲ ● ▼		Idiots.
		Good morning, everybody.
		Howard Bloom is a student of human nature and what nations do and why.
		I wonder if one of those two nuclear submarines were to let loose some of those nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and we lost a couple of densely packed American cities.
		I wonder what he thinks would happen in America, what Americans would do, what the American government would do, what would happen to the whole world?
unidentified		will ask you Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's say the very worst happened, Howard, and a couple of cities, American cities, two or three cities, were lost in an attack of the type you just talked about.
		How would America react as a nation?
		What would happen?
		I mean, look what occurred with 9-11.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I was thinking of that art because I stood on my roof and I watched those buildings burn, the World Trade Center.
		And what I felt over the next month was a sense that we would lose the habits that make us America.
		That there's a set of underlying habits of civility or whatever you want to call it that bring us together and keep us working together on a daily basis.
		And those habits are so deeply ingrained in us that we utterly take them for granted.
		And they were bare for a few days after 9-11 and it became very clear, I had friends calling me, national magazine editors, saying, my wife wants to move to the hills of Kentucky, where can we go?
		Well, if those people, if people who are national magazine editors and who represent the brains of America, were to flee into the countryside, if all Americans were to respond that way, America as a civilization, as we know it, would cease to be, and you, think of Osama, think from the point of view of Osama for a minute, Art.
		There's a third submarine being completed.
		It will be ready probably sometime in the next year, was actually scheduled to be commissioned a year ago.
		Guess where it's being built?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Karachi.
		In other words, it's being built in Pakistan by the Pakistanis because DCM, the French company, not only sold one of these submarines, they sold the entire technology and they helped the Pakistanis rebuild the Karachi Naval Shipyard and retrain all of its personnel so that the Pakistanis henceforth can turn out their own Augusta-90B supersteal submarines carrying 18 cruise missiles with nuclear tips each.
		So you now have the option of three submarines.
		Would you, as Osama, wait until the third submarine is launched, wait a year before you take over a country that, as I said, according to an expert who works with Reagan and with Clinton, could fall into Osama's hands at any moment or into the hands of those who think like him and admire him?
		Would you wait until there's a third submarine?
		You're the guy who sent four planes, possibly as many as 20 planes, against America to accomplish 9-11.
		You believe in redundancy.
		So would you be patient and wait?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and I would too, if I were Osama.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Now, if you take three of those vessels and you send them off, and as I said, they superstar the American Navy, our Navy, has material up on the line in which it tells you that it cannot detect these submarines using our current sonar.
unidentified		Right.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And because it's lobbying us to give it something called long-wave frequency sonar, which it does not yet have, because that stuff could kill whales.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		So we can't detect it according to our own admission.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, the big question here is not whether the hardware is there, because I guess it is, but whether they can actually get to control it.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think they can probably very easily get to control it because it's been known for a very, very long time among Pakistan experts that there are large factions in the Pakistan military who feel far more loyal to Osama and to his ideals than they feel to Vervez Usharaf.
		And as I say, taking over Karachi, that's something they've been practicing for for a long time.
		Now, I have a friend in the State Department who's a West Point graduate.
		He knows Pakistan very well.
		He says there's no way this could happen.
		But we come from a long line of humans who said, for example, the great aerodynamic expert in the 1890s who said, no one will ever be able to get a heavy-than-air flying machine off the ground.
		Sometimes even experts are dead wrong.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So it's your view that America, as we know it, would not survive.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And there's a reason, because it is widely said in the Islamic, the militant Islamic community, because again, there is a democratic Islamic community emerging.
		But in the Islamic militant community, it is widely said that God promised us two things.
		He promised us Constantinople, and he promised us Rome.
		He made us wait 700 years before he gave us Constantinople.
		And now he's made us wait again.
		That now if we are patient, he will give us Rome.
		Now Constantinople means all of Eastern Europe and all of Asia Minor.
		All of that which was part of the Eastern Roman Empire controlled from Constantinople.
		And that's Byzantium.
		That's Constantinople.
		They got that in 1453 when they finally toppled Byzantium.
		That's 700 years after Islam had begun its conquests.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, Howard, despite the small examples of demonstration for democracy, Saul in Chico, California says, Yup, the democracy spreading your guest is talking about is working just great in Iraq and Afghanistan.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Your guest is here 100% unadulterated, you know what?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Well, my hopes, I gave a public talk last week, and I was very hopeful about Islamic democracy, because I would love to see it, Art.
		I would absolutely love to see it.
		I don't want this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would love to see it, too, but it does sound like a pipe dream.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		It may be a bit of a pipe dream.
		The one thing we know for certain is that Islamic militancy is not a pipe dream.
		And we know for certain that the desire of the Islamic militants to take all of Europe, which is what they mean by Rome, is not a pipe dream either.
		And as Sheikh Yusuf al-Qadawi, who's one of the most influential Sunni clerics around, he's got television shows all over the Islamic world, says, Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and a victor.
		Does that sound like peaceful infiltration?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, Howard, the one thing that I'm not sure about, and I think the average American is unsure of as well, is we're told constantly of this division between Islamic militancy and mainstream Islam.
		How much of a.
		Is there really that line?
		Is there a line there, or is it beginning to blur?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're right.
		Islamic militancy, according to some of my Islamic friends, is mainstream Islam.
		And according to some of my Islamic friends, Islamic democratic movements are the fringes.
		But we have to root for the fringes.
		And we also have to be realistic.
		When I said to one of my Islamic friends, if even 5% or 10% of the world's population, the world's Muslim population, were militant, that would be more than all of the people in Germany, Britain, and France combined in the days of World War II, in the days of the Nazis.
		And he said, 10%, are you kidding me?
		And I wondered, had I gotten the figure too high?
		Should it be down to 5%?
unidentified		He said, it's 70% at least.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is what I'm unsure about.
		Do you really believe that?
		70%?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I art.
		There are many things on which I Study deeply and think I understand.
		I do not understand what the exact proportion is.
		However, my tendency is to feel that he's right, that it's more than 50%, and that militant Islam is more mainstream than we are generally led to believe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you think our intelligence agencies assess it as?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, CNN probably got a better handle on it than our intelligence agencies.
		They went into the streets and interviewed a bunch of Islamic kids who had been born in England.
		And these are some of the most articulate English-speaking kids you will ever meet in your life, but I shouldn't call them kids.
		These were young men in their 30s, in their early 30s.
		And they said, your freedom, your democracy, your entire system is a lie.
		It is a lie.
		You have deceived yourselves and you have deceived us.
		Until Islam rules the world, this world will not know justice.
		I'm paraphrasing them, and I have the exact quotes in this file I've been putting together for you for the last few days, but this file is 18 pages long, very densely packed.
		But in essence, that is the attitude in the streets of London among people, kids whose fathers came to England in order to give their kids a chance to be well-educated Westerners.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Howard, we're now downstream of the Iraq war some bit.
		And there have been all kinds of investigations and charges and all the rest of it.
		What have you been able to cobble together in terms of why we actually went into Iraq, what we knew before we initiated the war with Iraq?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		There's only one story that makes any sense to me.
		It's a story that appeared in one of the British papers and then disappeared as rapidly as the information I'm giving you about Augusta 90 Bees, which has never been in Western papers at all.
		And it said very simply this, that for eight years, Iran fought Iraq.
		For eight years, Iran sought to topple Saddam Hussein.
		It cost them a million lives, and they didn't succeed in doing it.
		And then the Iranians, who are very intelligent, one of the longest-lasting civilizations on this planet, the Iranians came up with a cheaper way to do it.
		They were working with Chalabi, who was our main contact to Iraq at the time, and they fed him a bunch of documents that proved that there were weapons of mass destruction all over Iraq and showed exactly where those weapons were.
		They showed diagrams of the trailers that you've read about in which the Iraqis were able to make mobile gas factories, mobile chemical and biological gas factories.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think the Iranians fed the information back door to our government, to the CIA, before the lobby?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		It's the only story that makes sense because even if you are as skeptical as I am about George Bush and think that the man has very little credibility, there is a guy in London named Tony Blair and Tony Blair impresses me as a man of great integrity.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Indeed.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And Tony Blair went in front of the Parliament and you probably saw it.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And he said, I have information that demonstrates within 24 to 48 hours, weapons and mass destruction could be mobilized in Iraq against us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Why would he say that if he didn't have the exact documents in his hands right down to the blueprints?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think he did.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And who would have been feeding him those blueprints?
		Just think for a minute.
		In Saddam's, under Saddam Hussein, every single organization down to a women's knitting circle that could have produced opposition to Saddam Hussein was crushed ruthlessly.
		There was only one organization that Saddam dared not touch.
		And it was the Shiite mosque.
		It was the mosque system all over the country.
		And guess who runs that mosque system to this very day?
		The Iranians.
		In other words, the Iranians had control over the only political party that would continue to exist if Saddam were toppled.
unidentified		God.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now that's one I hadn't heard before.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you think the Iranians virtually orchestrated the whole thing?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		It's the only credible story.
		I kept asking the question, why Iraq?
		Why Iraq?
		Why Iraq?
		And then this story popped up and disappeared as rapidly as it come up.
		And did you ever see any American journalist follow up the story of why Chalabi was discredited?
		Why he disappeared?
		Why was there so little follow-up on that art?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's a very good point.
		Well, I wondered about it at the time.
		Suddenly, his currency was all gone.
		Just overnight.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Now, there are many conceivable explanations.
		The one conceivable explanation is we didn't want to be embarrassed.
		We did not want to be embarrassed by the fact that we had been taking a bunch, we had been fed a bunch of farfala mushrooms by the Iranians, and we had swallowed it all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, now that we're there and we're on the ground, and what we have done is now history and looking at the current situation in Iraq, where do we go from here?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		That's a good question.
		I think that the democratic movement, which is trying to, as I said, disavow any connection with George Bush whatsoever, but it's doing it through running through intellectual hoops, is our best hope.
		But we certainly have to be aware of the militant threat, and we certainly should not be deceiving ourselves.
		We should not be telling ourselves that everybody in the world of Islam wants peace.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, Howard, I said this in the first hour.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It looks very much as though the militants, with their continuing taking of life and bombs in Iraq, have got the country right now on the edge of civil war.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely, and that's what they're working for.
		The more chaos, the better, because who wins in chaos?
		People who have practiced violence.
		And what do you know from every document that's ever been dug out of the Afghani safe houses that we used to bomb, where we used to find manuals?
		In fact, what do you know from the manuals that are printed by Islamic militant groups on the web?
		That the practice for war has been going on for at least eight to nine years.
		And those who practice war intend to make it very often.
		And when they make it, they make it far better than those who are not practiced.
		One thing that Julius Caesar knew is never go into battle with unseasoned troops.
		Do not go into battle with men who haven't actually been making war over the course of the last two years.
		Now, who is in a continuous, low-level warfare with the West?
		It's the militants of Islam.
		They keep themselves fresh every day with new, to use the word that's used in the Islamic press, operations.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, it's true.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		But they do it in the Philippines, they do it in Indonesia, they do it in Malaysia.
		And we don't chronicle these things.
		They even do it in southern Thailand.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there any way that you see that we can get control of the situation in Iraq now?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I think we have to be resigned to the fact that war is a bloody mess and that it's going to stay a bungle and that we have to demonstrate something that makes the difference between greatness and nothingness, and that's called persistence.
		We have to have the same kind of multi-generational perspective that Islam has.
		Islam has been around as the world's biggest empire now since roughly 620 AD.
		That is 1,400 years.
		So when the Islamic militants look at things, they don't look at them in terms of the short term, and they don't look at them in terms of bailout strategies.
		They look at them in terms of the long run.
		We have to become a society that stops thinking bottom, that stops thinking quarterly profits, that stops thinking bailout strategies.
		Even the word exit strategy should be utterly expunged from our vocabulary in both business and war.
		We have to learn to be a people of persistence.
		Winston Churchill would have told you that.
		Never give up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Short of the fact that there were not weapons of mass destruction, is there a goal large enough worth pursuing now that we're in the ground in Iraq?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, apparently there is.
		And it wasn't our press that told us about this.
		It was the Islamic press that told us about this.
		And it told us about this over the course of the last three weeks.
		And it is that there is a desire for democracy.
		There is that the military sources have been claiming for a long time that our press has been exaggerating the amount of resistance and hatred of us.
		And that in reality, there are a lot of Iraqis and a lot of others in the Middle East who welcome our presence.
		Well, that has sounded, frankly, like horsepunky to me.
		Absolutely like horsepunky.
		But after the street demonstrations of the last two weeks, I now believe and after the huge turnout of a people who were told that their throats would be split if they voted in Iraq, after that enormous turnout, there's obviously something positive going on that's beyond my normally pessimistic ken.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're basing it still on a relatively small number, though, Howard, and a small happenstance.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		So we're stuck there one way or the other.
		And if we don't hang in there, we will only do what we did in Somali when we pulled out because one of our bodies was dragged through the streets.
		That became a part of Islamic, militant Islam's propaganda for years, that we would turn tail and run, that we were cowards, because men are judged in militant Islamic society on their courage.
		And we showed a lack of it.
		And we cannot afford to show a lack of it.
		We cannot afford to show a lack of it.
		If we really want freedom, if we really want democracy, if we really want freedom of speech, if we really want pluralism, if we really want civil rights, if we really want human rights, if we really want all the things that we claim to want and that I want badly and I know you want badly, we are going to have to persist with all the energy that's in us and possibly persist for many generations, just as Islam has persisted for many generations.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm not sure we're up to that.
		I mean, I hear America every night on the nightly news, you hear American commanders talking about when we can begin pulling troops out.
		The way it's going right now, you'd think they'd be putting more in.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Exactly, because you have influence.
		You're one of the most influential people that I know, frankly.
		The people I know who listen to your show are like Billy Gibbons.
		They listen to you religiously.
		And these are intelligent people.
		These are very intelligent people.
		And people like you and me, and I have several books in print, and I have my articles in physics journals and all that kind of thing.
		And I do a reasonable amount of radio and television.
		People like us have to speak up for all we are worth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, perhaps you're right about that, Howard.
		Hold on, we're the half of the hour.
		But as far as my having influence is concerned, I don't want to have influence.
		I'm a talk show host.
		I shouldn't have influence.
		Nobody in Hollywood should have influence, from my point of view.
		I'm not in this job for influence.
		And it's wrong for me to have it.
		Anyway, that's the way I view it.
		In the middle of the night, where we do our best work, and that is talk.
		With this night, Howard Bloom, I'm Art Bell.
unidentified		No, no.
		It's a powerful window.
		Nothing hides the color of the lights that shine Electricity so far
		For the night is my world City lights, painted good In the day, something like that.
		It's a night.
		Something like that.
		In the night, no control, through the wall, something like me, wearing white, as you're walking, down the street, of my soul.
		You take yourself, you take myself control, you got me living only for the night, before the morning comes, the story's told.
		You take yourself, you take myself control, another night, another day goes by, I never stop myself to wonder why.
		You take yourself, you take yourself, you take myself control, you hide, I live among the creatures of the night.
		To talk with Art Bell.
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art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is this night with Howard Bloom, and I have a feeling it's going to be quite a night when we get to the callers.
		Very, very interesting program from so many points of view.
		I certainly was unaware of the nuclear-tipped missiles on what could easily be Islamic submarines.
		That one's a new on-me.
		New one on me.
		The rest of it, and particularly now, this question of influence.
		I want to talk a little bit about that with Howard, and we will in a moment.
		The End Once again, Howard Bloom, I think we were talking about influence, Howard.
		You were talking about influence.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		It's a very important subject.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it is, and it's such a twisted maze.
		I'm somebody who has gained some measure of fame over many years talking about things that other people don't talk about for the most part.
		And what right does that give me to have influence in the world of war, for example?
		I've always worried about that.
		I think that people in Hollywood think they have influence, and perhaps they do, but they shouldn't, nor should I. And I don't welcome it.
		don't want to have influence and yet it I suppose.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		If people don't, there's an old saying, and you probably know it much better than I do, but it goes something like this.
		If the good do not speak up, then the bad will surely sweep them away.
		And we are the men of good conscience of our time, and it is insignificant as we feel.
		I mean, Winston Churchill once upon a time did something astonishing.
		He literally saved Western civilization from one of the most determined masters of influence who had ever existed on the planet Earth.
		And that master of influence was Adolf Hitler.
		And Adolf Hitler had the conviction and drive to stick to what he was doing for most of his life.
		Nobody would stand against him because nobody would go out on the line.
		Well, Winston Churchill was a pudgy little kid who had been beaten up all the time that he was going through the British private school system.
		He had gone out in military service.
		He was the most shameless self-publicist in the world.
		Every time he got into a military adventure, he wrote it up and sent it back to the papers in England.
		So he could be regarded as nothing but this person making a spectacle of himself.
		In the 1930s, everyone deserted him.
		He felt that there was a danger coming from Germany, and everybody shunned him.
		Those were his wilderness years.
		He had a drinking problem.
		He had a smoking problem.
		He had a weight problem.
		But he had courage, and he was willing to persist even in the most dismal depression that you can possibly imagine.
		That man was cast out into the desert, and your own body and emotions eat you away when you were in that state.
		And he wouldn't give up.
		And there must have been many days and many hours when he wanted to.
		And if he hadn't spoken off on behalf of you and me, we wouldn't be here.
		We wouldn't be having this conversation today.
		I would be dead because I'm Jewish.
		I would be turned to the equivalent of pork rinds.
		And you certainly wouldn't have the freedom of speech.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely not.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		So if it came down to a very, very fragile human being, because Winston Churchill was a very fragile human being.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And if he hadn't dared speak from the midst of his fragility, what would you and I have left today?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Indeed.
		Not much.
		Not much at all.
		Certainly we wouldn't be doing this right now, would we?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		No.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And as a consequence, if you and I are the only ones who see what we see, then it's our responsibility to speak up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But still in all, a talk show host ought not have influence.
		A movie star ought not have influence.
		If the power of an idea said alone is enough to cause influence, fine.
		But anyway.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, it was a newspaper publisher who helped start the American Revolution.
		He helped start it for the most crass and venal of reasons.
		He helped start it because the British decided to impose a tax on paper that was going to cut into his profits.
		And he wasn't even a decent newspaper man.
		He was a yellow journalist.
		There was a man in New England who had come up with a solution to something that was killing people by the tens of thousands, yellow fever.
		And he had come up with a technique which we would later call inoculation.
		And this yellow journalist shot this man down in every conceivable way, and in the process, ended up killing a lot of people, keeping people from inoculation.
		And do you know what this guy's name was?
		Benjamin Franklin.
		And without him, without all of his horrible sins, and he was filled with them, without his still taking a position on things, where would you and I be?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're, I know you've, speaking of Mother Nature disasters, I'm looking at current headlines, and I'm looking at, for example, the avian flu.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And I'm beginning to read stories now of scientists suggesting we're facing the strong possibility, stronger each time I read the story of a pandemic.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Yes, and that's been a real heavy-duty fear for a long, long time.
		And it basically comes down to this.
		There are two Massive communities of life on this planet.
		There's the multicellular family of life, and we're a part of that.
		Mice are a part of that.
		Cockroaches are a part of that.
		And there's the unicellular family of life, which is far more numerous than we are.
		The number of different species, we counted 11 million species and then realized about six months ago that we'd undercounted dramatically.
		And these bacterial, our bacterial brothers, because they are our brothers.
		We all came from bacterial foremothers 3.5 billion years ago.
		But these bacterial relatives of ours do research and development so much faster than we do that it is ridiculous.
		It's absolutely ridiculous.
		They invented antibiotics because they make war with each other, and they use weapons of mass destruction.
		They use chemical weapons.
		Those are weapons we've stolen.
		We call them antibiotics.
		Well, guess what?
		Because these things do research and development so fast and we come up with a new antibiotic within 10 to 15 years they've got a way around it.
		So now the fact is we also work in tremendous companionship with them.
		You and I consist of 100 trillion cells each.
		50 trillion of the cells that make up you and 50 trillion of the cells that make up me, half of our cells, don't even claim to be part of us.
		They are bacterial colonies living in our gut, living in our skin, living in our throat.
		They garrison us.
		They are our protective troops.
		They also take the food that you and I think we can eat but we can't, like a chocolate eclair, and they turn it into stuff we can eat.
		They digest it.
		They turn out our vitamins, many of our vitamin Bs.
		They turn out our vitamin T, they turn out our vitamin K. We can't exist without these microbial companions.
		But the fact is that some of them prefer eating us, to feeding us.
		And yes, we have a serious problem.
		The greatest experts on pandemics and on the avian flu, especially, I forget his name, he's down at St. Jude in Memphis, I think it is.
		But these people have been predicting a pandemic that could wipe out as many as 2 billion human beings.
unidentified		That's right.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And it's a serious danger.
		But nature is sending us a lesson.
		And this is something that I've been trying to preach.
		You know that I've done a whole bunch of speeches recently and have done, as I said, a couple of articles in physics publications.
		And what I've been trying to tell people is that nature has a very simple message.
		And her message is that we're part of a planetary project.
		It's a project put together by the team of cells in DNA.
		It's called Biomass.
		Its goal is to take every atom on this planet and recruit it into the biomass team.
		And that those who succeed, those who survive, have to be adaptive.
		They have to network big time.
		They have to turn everything they find into a part of their experiment, and they have to constantly invent.
		So we humans, when we think that Mother Nature is telling us to be still and to leave nature alone so she can be the wonderful green paradise, which she was once upon a time ago, don't know anything about nature at all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're very harsh on the environmental movement, aren't you?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I'm very harsh on the environmental movement because it misunderstands nature completely.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Do you know how many mass extinctions there have been?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, many.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		We can count.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Many.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Yes, 148.
		That's just the ones we can count, Art.
		And our science is very incomplete.
		There are probably far, far more.
		Of those 148 mass extinctions, six have wiped out up to 95% of the species on this planet.
		And have they been man-made or have they been made by nature?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's never been an opportunity until now for a man-made one.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And even the man-made one that we're talking about, which will raise our temperature by 2 to 5 degrees, is nothing compared to the fact that we have had 20 temperature-raising periods.
		20 in the time that we've been human, the last 100,000 years, every 5,500 years or so, we have had a period where the temperature has gone up as much as 18 degrees in only 10 years.
		That makes the kind of greenhouse warming catastrophe that we're talking about look absolutely insignificant.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, perhaps.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But if we come to one of these natural periods you're talking about, and then you lump on another five degrees or so from mankind, well, who knows?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		But, you know, what I've been preaching, and it sounds really grotesque, it sounds really absurd, it sounds like science fiction, is that we count too much on nature's stability.
		And 10,000 years of relative stability with the weather is more than the normal share.
		That's far more than nature normally gives.
		And unless we take our cities and unless we take our agriculture and unless we make them portable, then we're in big trouble because nature's basic way of doing things is change.
		And she only favors those of her creatures who learn to deal with change in a major, major way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it would seem as though we're in the midst of a change right now, a weather change.
		I think there's very little question about it.
		And some of the ocean currents, I don't know if you've been keeping current attendant on what's going on, but some of the currents are beginning to slow and forecast to stop, which would do small little things like freezing Europe and affecting much of the rest of the world.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And if you look at the track record, if you look at the track record of the current that goes past North America and up to Greenland and Iceland.
		It's the main thing that controls our weather.
		That has changed course roughly every 5,500 years.
		So whether we do it or whether we don't do it, the currents are going to change.
		And when I started, I thought I was a madman when I was going to have to go in front of groups of intelligent human beings and tell them that cities had to become mobile.
		But the fact is that the Mongols had a mobile city 500 years ago.
		It was a city in which all of their yurks were built on wagons.
		And it was a city.
		I mean, this was 10,000 or more people.
		Then I started looking into things further.
		There's a guy who's probably half a lunatic, but he is an engineer, and he has come up with a plan for something called Freedom City.
		And it is a giant cruise.
		Well, it's beyond any cruise ship.
		But it's big enough for 50,000 people.
		And it's in connection with the rest of the world by cell phone and by satellite phone and via the Internet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think this thing floats on the ocean, right?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Yes, and it's supposed to be for super wealthy people.
		Well, super wealthy people are the people who wheel And deal every day of the week, and they can do it by cell phone and by the Internet.
		Then there is an architect named Eugene Swee, and this is a man who's been taken seriously by NASA, and he has plans for a city in which 100,000 people go drifting and floating along.
		So if the weather changes, so be it.
		We move the city.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that's realistic?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, because, frankly, that's how bacteria do it.
		Bacteria live in cities that make ours look cuny.
		I mean, our biggest city, I believe, at this point is Mexico City with 27 million in population.
		One bacterial colony, the size of the palm of your hand, has 7 trillion citizens, all in constant communication.
		That is more than all the human beings who have ever lived.
		And bacteria, is there any way in which nature is telling us that bacteria have learned something that we haven't?
		There sure is.
		We've been around something like 138,000th as long as bacteria.
		They've been around since the beginning of life 3.5 billion years ago.
		They have shown that they are the ultimate masters of every form of catastrophe.
		That they can turn every form of catastrophe and turn it into an opportunity.
		And we've been around for a mere sliver of time.
		So if we don't learn from them, we're in big trouble.
		They've been around for a quarter of the life of this galaxy.
		That's pretty amazing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That is pretty amazing, isn't it?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		They float, drift.
		They're working right now, two miles beneath your feet and mine.
		They are eating granite.
		They are turning granite into biomass.
		They are turning granite into fuel.
		Three miles below the ocean, and you know that the ocean trenches go down four or five miles.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Three miles below those trenches, they are eating granite right now.
		They are basically saying to us, hey, you know, we have one sextillion cubic meters of raw stuff on this planet.
		So if you silly earthlings, if you silly humans, think that you have tapped out this planet, that you have used the resources of this planet up, what foolish, foolish creatures you are.
		Because there is one quintillion cubic meters of stuff just waiting to be transformed in one way or another.
		And if you don't do it, we're already doing it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you mean when you say the age of the tornado tamers?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, one of our great skills has been to take catastrophes and turn them into opportunities.
		The entire Egyptian civilization was built on the basis of a catastrophe.
		It was the annual flood of the Nile River that just wiped everything on either banks away.
		But guess what?
		In the process of wiping everything on either banks away, it deposited this incredibly rich silk.
		It wasn't the people who saw the disasters who made Egyptian civilization.
		It was the people who saw the opportunity in the catastrophe.
		And whirlwinds and tornadoes and hurricanes.
		You've seen the photos of hurricanes from satellite views.
		Those are some of the biggest systems of solar energy you have ever, ever seen at work in your life.
		Try turning one of those into a turbine.
		May seem impossible to us now, but turning Niagara Falls into a source of energy seemed impossible 150 years ago.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think we're working on that now?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think we're working on taming or at least using the force of nature at that level for a turbine?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I don't think we're doing it to the extent we should be.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Two years ago, the military published a position paper, which just simply means a think piece, on taking the weather and taming it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Owning the weather, huh?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, owning the weather.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		But it was only a think piece, Art, and I haven't seen any follow-up to it.
		Now, of course, you know me, I'm in so many different fields simultaneously, if there's no way I can keep track of all of them.
		There may have been further material, but I seriously doubt it, because if you look at the combined energies that are going right now into environmentalism versus the combined energies that are going into taming the weather and using it for our own purposes, you'll find that one is insignificant and one is enormous.
		But it's the wrong one that's enormous.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is it not possible, though, that things are being done that we don't know the first thing about?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		It would be possible, but that wouldn't be the wise way to do things.
		The most successful agency at really creating change and creating new technologies for war is DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
		And they are as successful as they are because they don't try to keep their work secret.
		They try to engage as many minds like yours and mine in their work that they're doing as is humanly possible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's certainly a public side of DARPA, but I sort of wonder when they actually fall upon something that's real, certainly they're reaching out and tapping resources, but when they really get something hot, I wonder if we hear about follow-up.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, it's hard to know.
		If it's really secret, neither of us would know about it.
		If they're doing a good job of keeping it secret, but think of one of the biggest things that they pulled off.
		They pulled off in the 1960s and 1970s by wiring as many intelligent people, college professors, as they possibly could into one gigantic computer system.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And you know what that system turned out to be.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Power Internet.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		And the World Wide Web.
		They're doing that again with the contest.
		They're about to rerun their contest for autonomous vehicles, vehicles that can drive themselves in the desert.
		Well, you know how silly the contest was last year.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		The vehicle that got the furthest got 1,400 feet or something like that.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it was crazy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		But the fact is that by turning it into a public contest, they've engaged some of the best minds of our time.
		And you know darn well that what starts in failure ends up in success if people keep working at it.
		Look at the XPRIZE.
		And look at the kind of creativity that yanked out of us.
		Now it took 10 or 15 years, but it produced Paul McCready, not Paul McCready, it was Burger Tan's Spaceship One.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		It's now going to be the version Galactic.
		And the same thing happened with NASA's support of Paul McCready's huge flying solar wing, Helios, that has something like 86,000 solar cells on it.
		The latest version broke up over the Pacific about a year ago, but they're planning to build lots more, and they've got lots of money coming in from the Japanese who are planning to use these things as transponders for satellite and cell phones because they'll be much less expensive than satellites, to say the least.
		And these are solar-powered vehicles with a wingspan that defies belief that can ride at heights of up to 87,000 feet, which is higher than the XPRIZE Vehicle went, I believe.
		And these are things that are being done on the basis of public contests.
		And Dompo's behind a lot of these contests.
		So you get a lot further when you network a lot of brains than you do when you try to keep things hidden and silent.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I'll hold it right there.
		When we get back, I want to talk to you about the long emergency.
		I interviewed a guest recently, wrote an article in Rolling Stone based on his book, The Long Emergency, which basically says, we have extracted all of the cheap oil that we're going to get from the ground.
		Basically, we have already extracted that.
		We're at the top of the curve.
		Everything from here onward is downhill and price-wise, uphill.
		We'll talk about that in a moment.
unidentified		We'll talk about that in a moment.
		I can feel it coming in the air tonight
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art bell ▲ ● ▼		And this night, Howard Bloom.
		Good morning, everybody.
		moments will find out what howard thinks about where we're headed with all of that and
		Actually, I've done interviews with quite a number of people recently who suggest that the world's oil is just about half gone.
		That is to say, we have taken from the Earth about half of the oil that would be available to be taken.
		Now, the second half of the oil to be taken, and granted, that still means a lot of oil is left, is going to be very expensive, very difficult to get, and with increasing demand for what is left, is going to be damned expensive.
		And Howard, I wonder how you come out on all of this.
		You know, this whole oil curve and where we're headed with energy, all the rest of that.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think it's the key issue.
		It really is the major issue of our time.
		And this is one area in which George Bush has got it upside down backwards and all wrong because he is so beholden to his friends in the oil patch that he and before him Ronald Reagan took the money out of alternative energy programs.
		But here's a quote, what's going on with alternative energy.
		First of all, there's a guy named Ted Sargent who has just invented a spray-on-plastic nanotech solar material.
		And he says, this is a quote, the sun that reaches the Earth's surface delivers 10,000 times more energy than we consume.
		Now, if he's right, there's a lot of power waiting to be tapped.
		When Enron went down about four years ago, you know what turned out to be the only profitable division in the company?
		It was the wind power division.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that so?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it was profitable as could be.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And wind power is now the form of energy harnessing that is getting the largest amount of annual investment of any energy form in the world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I am aware per kilowatt dollar that wind power is perhaps the best bet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		However, wind power, solar power, all these other alternative, even the biofuels that we're beginning to get into now, all of that is just a tiny, tiny fraction of the totality of the power that we need and will continue to need.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely true, but you made me think of something.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is the oil a finite resource or are you listening to?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		I mean, no, I can't say absolutely because there is an expert.
		I believe his name is Thomas Gold.
		Lynn Margulis is probably one of the greatest living biologists alive today, thinks that he has a point.
		And Gold thinks that the whole dinosaur theory of oil is wrong, and that oil is not made of the compressed sinking carcasses of previous creatures and old plants.
		That, in fact, in the same way that carbon-based molecules show up in interstellar clouds, hot interstellar clouds, cold interstellar clouds, on asteroids and comets and almost everywhere we look, in the same way that the Earth is generating carbon-based compounds and is basically oozing oil.
		But one way or the other, I wouldn't count on that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't think so.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've talked to a number of people, and really, it does not seem as though oil fields are refilling.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		No, and it doesn't seem that way to me either.
		And I really think these alternative energies, once upon a time, there was a hapless president who everything seemed to go wrong on his watch.
		He's largely forgotten.
		But he declared the moral equivalent to war, and it was a war for energy independence.
		And he said we were going to get in a lot of trouble.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And it's the one thing he was really right about.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		He was so right, it was ridiculous.
		And guess under whom, well, I shouldn't be asking all these questions.
		I'm supposed to be the guest.
		But the fact is that under his watch, these enormous wind turbines were developed, wind turbine technology.
		Now, guess where we get all of our wind turbines these days for wind farms?
		We get them from Denmark.
		We get them from Scandinavia.
		Why?
		Because Ronald Reagan pulled the money out of these alternative energy explorations.
		If this guy who's just invented a spray-on solar stuff is for real, and he does come from a legitimate scientific source, then we've had a problem because our solar cells up till now, including the one that powered Helios, that giant airship that I was talking about, only operated about 6% efficiency.
		They only squeeze about 6% of the sun's light into energy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, according to the guy who's got the spray-on solar cells, which are based on nanotechnology, so that you've got nano units instead of big panels, these things can get up to 30% efficiency.
		Now, a lot of people are wrong when they make predictions about something new they've invented.
		But there's a very good chance he's right.
		I have a friend at something called NSF, the National Science Foundation.
		NSF is the Vatican of science.
		If you want the highest prestige grants in the world, you go to NSF for your grants.
		And my friend happens to decide who gets granted money and who doesn't.
		He is a tremendous proponent of space-based solar energy.
		Now, I thought, that's ridiculous.
		Space-based solar energy.
		I mean, think of every bird that's trying to fly is going to be fried as it tries to get through whatever sort of solar energy beam there is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's not necessarily true.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're apparently right, and I was apparently wrong, because there's a new plan, and it has been financed by NASA, by NSF, and by the Electric Power Research Institute for a half-mile-long space solar power system that's self-assembled with satellite parts and could be much, much, much bigger than half a mile in size because it's truly clever in the way that it just grabs units and puts them into giant sheets.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It would be so incredibly dispersed that anything in its path would not get instantly fried out.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		So the fact is that we have all of these alternatives around, including simple.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's a company called Changing World Technologies.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What bothers me is that we have suppressed them now for so long and walked away from them for so long in favor of oil that when we do finally get oil that's so expensive we can't afford it, these other things are not developed and are not ready for prime time.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know that Changing World Technologies has got one pilot plant in the Philadelphia's naval yard turning, how do we put this, the stuff we defecate.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Is that polite enough?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		It's turning sewage into energy.
		It's got another pilot plant out in Carthage, Missouri at a butterball turkey factory.
		And it's taking all this horrible industrial refuse or biological refuse that would just pollute the river if it were tossed into the river.
		And it's turning it into natural gas.
		It's turning it into petroleum.
		It's turning it into cyclohexane, the stuff used to make nylon, benzene, the stuff used to produce rubber.
		Is there as much money going into this as there should be?
		Not by a long shot.
		Not by a long shot.
		But the stuff is there.
		And here's another, I hate to be cheerful, Art, because pessimism is my specialty.
		But to go to the cheerful side for a minute, there was a massive change of this sort that took place approximately 1905 to 1925.
		Everybody was heavily invested in one form of energy harnessing called the horse.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And you would think that with all the investment in carriages, with all the investment in carriage houses, with all the investment in horses and hay and all the other things that you had in the cities like New York, there's no way that this country could have turned around and made a massive investment in a new form of energy production, especially mobility production.
		And yet, without any government subsidy whatsoever, in those 20 years, this country completely turned around in its form of mobility creation and went from the horse to the internal combustion engine.
		That kind of thing can happen again.
		Would I like to see the government get into it big time?
		You're not kidding.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Perhaps.
		But right now, I'm not seeing any new refineries being built.
		I'm not seeing any new oil tanker.
		Well, you know why they're not building new refineries?
		Also, no new oil tankers.
		In fact, they're retiring oil tankers and just not replacing them.
		And there's a reason for that.
		It's because we are beginning to run out of oil.
		What I don't see is what's going, you know, other than the things you have discussed, and they all hold some promise, some possibility, but they don't get close to providing the kind of energy we require, not even close.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that the thermal conversion process, which is basically just cooking sewage and cooking industrial wastes, I think it's very promising.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Because look at the amount of stuff that we excrete a day.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Look at the number of barrels of oil that we use.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, but we also are very big excreters and we've got a very big base of biomass to work with here.
		And again, if right now, if bacteria can be turning granite into fuel, which they are doing, they're doing it this very moment.
		They're called litho-autotrophs.
		Then there are all kinds of possibilities ahead of us.
		It's just a matter of getting sufficiently committed to put in not just government money, but also to put in the private capital.
		Now, I don't know.
		One of the things that I've had a hard time scoping out, and you can see that I try to scope these things out to the best of my ability, when you're into mass behavior, you want to see it in all of its manifestations.
		Sure.
		But one thing that I haven't been able to scope out is what the oil companies are doing about alternative forms of energy and whether they are hiding developments or whether they are actually exploiting potential developments.
		But I would like to see what's going on in the solar programs at British Petroleum and a number of other major companies.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're the one who told me that we don't think past the next quarter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So why are you at all optimistic?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		You have a very good point because these are things that are going to be healthy for these companies 7, 10, and 15 years from now.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And every company president in America is afraid for his very tochas if he doesn't show a quarterly profit, a big quarterly profit.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		So this is a problem.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		This short-term thinking is really something we've got to turn around.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, since we're either at peak oil or very close to peak oil and demand is going through the roof, I mean, I don't know how carefully you've been watching China lately.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Oh, God, it's absorbing amounts of oil that are enormous, but that's an opportunity for us, Art.
		That means that we have, once again, the kind of window of opportunity we had in Jimmy Carter's day when we were the ones inventing all the latest solar cell technologies, when we were the ones inventing all of the wind turbines, when we could have been making all that money that the Danes and the Scandinavians are making right now by selling wind turbines to the world.
		We are in that position today because we could be selling things like this spray-on solar stuff to the Chinese.
		We could be ahead of them.
		We could be getting ahead of them right now.
		If we wait three to four years, you know they are very rapid at catching up on technologies and exceeding our abilities.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, let's talk a little more about technology.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In the news right now, this stem cell research going on, for example, in Korea.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The stem cell research that we're prohibiting here in the United States.
		In fact, there's even a sort of a Republican rebellion going on about all of this right now.
		Where do you stand on that?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I think that we're being stupid as all hell.
		I think that the message that nature gives us, the nature that God gives us, the nature that any manifestation of this cosmos that you want to turn to gives us is things are constantly changing and that this is a cosmos of invention.
		And anybody who tries to throw invention away doesn't get the cosmic message at all.
		Just doesn't get it at all.
		Basically, what nature is telling us is, invent your ass off because in the processes of inventing your tokas off, you are going to create new capabilities for me, Mother Nature.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I sort of wondered out loud in the first hour.
		We've outlawed many forms of stem cell research that involve fetuses.
		We toss away fetuses into the trash can that come from these clinics instead of using them.
		If there is a remedy discovered in, for example, Korea or China, where no such prohibit exist and Alzheimer's is cured, are we going to outlaw its importation into the U.S.?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		We may outlaw it, but right now we're a country on the verge of bankruptcy.
		We owe so much money that it absolutely defies belief.
		It's somewhere in the neighborhood of $7 trillion.
		Seven times our GDP or something of the sort.
		It's outrageous.
		And unless we turn things around, and unless we start coming up with things that other people want to buy instead of simply buying from other people, we are going to go down the tubes.
		Plus, there's another major change that's about to happen.
		And that is a change up until now, other countries have wanted to sell to America.
		This was the ultimate market because Germany only had 40 to 60 million people.
		France only had 40 to 60 million people.
		But the United States had 265 million people.
		So if you sold into the United States, you could make a profit.
		Selling locally wasn't a big deal.
		The fact is that our supersized market is about to be made to look silly by mega-sized markets.
		There are two of them in development right now.
		Instead of having merely 265 million people, there are two nations with 1.2 billion people approximately each.
		One of them is China and the other one is India.
		The middle class of India, a friend of mine who has contacts way, way up there in Indian society, called over 10 years ago and said, do you know what the middle class, the size of the middle class is in India?
		And it was 100 million people.
		Now it's over 300 million.
		In other words, there are more middle class people in India than the entire population of the United States, and India has just barely gotten started.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's really something to think about.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		So now here's another thing to think about.
		America has been able to weather storms because America has had the largest internal market.
		If we couldn't sell anything to Germany, it didn't matter.
		We could sell to each other.
		China showed itself to be absolutely weatherproof to the downturns in the economy that occurred in Southeast Asia a few years ago.
		Why?
		Because it had a huge internal market and it really didn't matter what was going on in Thailand.
		It really didn't matter what was going on in Taiwan or Japan.
		China was so big it could handle things on its own.
		That's what I mean by the age of the mega markets.
		We are about to hit the age of the mega markets and it's going to be unlike anything we've ever experienced before.
		And if we don't see it coming and if we don't get so far technologically ahead of everybody else that it's absolutely absurd, we are going to be the lost country, the once-upon-a-time great United States of America.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And how are we doing right now in that regard?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Not well.
		Unfortunately, we have a president who may have been right about Democratic impulse in the Middle East, but when it comes to all of his energy policies and when it comes to his financial policies, I mean, what are his financial policies?
		They're designed to, in essence, create a one-party state to get rid of the Democrats utterly.
		If you have hundreds of millions of dollars in income a year, and I am George Bush, then this is my promise to you.
		For every dollar that you give me in campaign contributions, I will make sure you get six.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		By the way, you asked earlier, I'm a libertarian.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've been a libertarian now for a long time.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And I have strong leanings in that direction, but I still continue to be God knows what.
		It's very hard to be a Democrat because the Democrats have no platform and nothing to offer.
		I certainly wouldn't want to be a Republican.
		And I'm one of those people who are left hanging somewhere way up there in the middle with no way to define ourselves.
		And I suspect there are probably a lot of us right now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is the Democrat Party going to find a way to define itself clearly to the American people before the next major election comes in?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I don't see any signs of it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't either.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And as for the Republicans, we've just talked about the fact.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		All they want to do is make their contributors rich and satisfy the folks on the religious right, which is not the kind of thinking we need to do to get it.
unidentified		Yes, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And the religious right may even be getting control.
		But the fact of the matter is, they're defined, they have a path, they're well on it.
		And their opposition, as you just pointed out, is confused, fragmented, and doesn't have a message.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And has one-third the funding.
		But I'll tell you something positive about the environmental movement.
		And the Democratic Party is very strongly aligned with the environmental movement.
		Environmentalism is turning a corner.
		Environmentalism is becoming what I call eco-techno-pioneering.
		And by that I mean it's got techno-lust.
		And techno lust is really what drives human advancement.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Technolust.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Techno-lust.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I have techno-lust.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And me too.
		I have it all over the place.
		Well, the fact is, there's something called the Apollo Project.
		And the Apollo Project is a project of 23 labor unions, the last people in the world you would expect to espouse new technology.
unidentified		Indeed.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		23 labor unions, the AFL-CIO, again, another traditional enemy of technology, and of the majority of the environmental organizations in the United States.
		And what have they suddenly put all of their weight behind?
		The advancement of technological solutions.
		Everything from hydrogen-powered cars to Maglev trains.
		And to see that happening in the environmental community is a blessing.
		That is a blessing.
		So if they continue to do this, if they're able to turn that into a platform in the next election, that would be superb.
		You get my vote.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		When we get back, we're about to take a break here at the top of the hour.
		When we get back, I want to open up the phone lines.
		And I have this feeling it's going to be a very interesting ride over the next hour.
		All right?
		So gear up, grab a cup of coffee, because you're going to need it.
		Stay right there, Howard.
unidentified		I'm Art Bell.
		Everything I banned is going fixing.
		Double fall time.
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		You're always talking about your crazy nights.
		One of the days is your beginning night.
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		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is, and my guest is Howard Bloom.
		A number of you out there, some number of you anyway, disagree with Howard Bloom, and it's been just blasting across my computer screen.
		The Fast Blast stuff, all right, fine.
		Let's see you convert that into a one-on-one confrontation.
		Let's see if you all have Cahonies to pick up some phone and convert that into the spoken word because here he is, for all of you, for the next one hour.
		let's hear from you Certainly, we have covered a great deal of ground with Howard Bloom this evening.
		It'll be very interesting to see what the audience has to say.
		Howard, are you ready for them?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I'm absolutely prepared.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I've got my bulletproof vest on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You may need it.
		First Tom Caller Line, you're on the air with Howard Bloom.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hi, Howard.
		This is Joe from Michigan.
		Hi, Joe.
		I was just wondering about, should we be more worried about the North Koreans developing weapons of mass destruction?
		Or could that be an orchestrated thing by the Chinese?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I'm a little disturbed about it because our negotiation process doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
		And it does seem, just for information that's emerged in the last 24 hours, as if the Chinese are using the North Koreans as a way to mount an additional threat against us.
		Because the North Koreans know very, very, very well that if they turn their nuclear weapons on the Chinese, they will be eradicated faster than a fly on an electric grid.
		They will be zapped.
		I mean, I don't know if you follow China's nuclear program, but they have had intercontinental ballistic missiles and a rather large nuclear arsenal since the 1960s.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, would they be eradicated any less quickly if they came after us?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		They might not be eradicated as quickly because we might have a lot more qualms about it.
		Plus, we would be afraid of destroying South Korea.
		South Korea, after all, it's a hop, skip, and a jump.
		It's a flea's hop from North Korea.
		And any sort of annihilation of North Korea would unfortunately destroy South Korea.
		And South Korea is quite a very, it's a fascinating, amazing, fantastic society.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're right.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Howard Bloom.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Yes, Mr. Bloom.
		Hello.
		Yes.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Hi, I'm here.
unidentified		This is Carl from Washington, D.C. Yes.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Hey, Carl, how are you?
unidentified		Yay.
		There's a growing number of people out there.
		I don't know if you heard this yourself, that say that the only way to have peace in the world is to get rid of all religion.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, my wife is one of those people, and I come up against those people all the time.
		But remember, back in the days of Leninism and Stalinism, Lenin was trying to eradicate every Marxist who was a social democrat around.
		And the social democratic Marxists were as atheistic as he is.
		So even though that is, they were as atheistic as Lenin.
		So humans are going to find a way of squabbling whether we have religion or not.
unidentified		But I think it's coming down to that with the stem cell research and all the terrorism we have that religion is being blamed as the root of the problem.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Religion's not the root of the problem.
		It's just another way of distinguishing between the way I wear my clothing and you wear your clothing, because we could get into a spat about that.
		When Gulliver's Travels was being written, the big disagreement that separated the two islands of the Lilliputians in Gulliver's Travels was a difference over whether you should take your boiled egg and have the pointy end up in the cup or you should have the more shallow end up in the cup.
		And I think that the book accurately characterized human nature.
		We will fight about just about anything.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, but I don't know if that's a good analogy to, for example, the threat we face right now from radical Islam.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, they either want us converted or dead.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		And I think you're absolutely right because there are two different ways to handle disputes of this kind.
		One is violently, and the other is with words.
		And the democratic systems prize wrestling matches that rely on words and ideas.
		Non-democratic systems prize wrestling matches that depend on annihilation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Howard Bloom.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi, I can barely hear you, hon. You're going to have to yell at us.
unidentified		Oh, I'm sorry.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's all right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead.
unidentified		What it is, is I live in Pensacola, Florida.
unidentified		Pardon me?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yep, you said okay.
unidentified		Okay.
		And we've already been told to prepare for another hurricane.
		Now, we're just getting over Hurricane Ivan, and they've already told us to prepare.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so they're saying it's going to be another bad year.
unidentified		Yes.
		And the shrimpers have noticed the stream in the Gulf has actually turned toward us, toward the land and everything.
		And the shrimpers are even worried about it.
		So how does that affect global warming and things?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think it's the other way around.
		The question is, is this coming from global warming?
		And the answer would be these kinds of things are inevitable.
		They're going to keep happening over and over again.
		They happened long before humans ever existed on the face of this planet.
		And we need, this is not a short-term solution by any stretch of the imagination.
		My heart goes out to you because I would not want to see my home threatened or destroyed by any stretch of the imagination, nor would I want to see your home threatened or destroyed.
		But the fact is that we humans have to get used to the idea that 65% of us are now living right on the verge of seas, and those seas will someday swell up around us and drown us utterly.
		It's happened before.
		It'll happen again and again and again.
		And we have to abandon our old system of being rooted in one spot and learn how to become more nomadic.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or at least have an understanding of the consequences of rooting in one spot and wanting to live near the oceans.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Well, I would still rather have the option of being able to take my home and float it someplace else.
		You know, there are simple technologies that we've got today.
		They're not really simple.
		But the oil, those great big oil things way out there in the middle of the platforms, in the middle of the ocean, those are immune to storms.
		They're built to be immune to storms.
		At this point, they only hold 250 to 300 people.
		But those are a form of floating technology that we could use to get around problems like this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Welcome to the Rockies.
		You're on the air with Howard Bloom.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Yes, good morning.
		Art, thank you for taking my call.
		Sure.
		Mr. Bloom, I'd like to go back a little earlier from your beginning of your conversation on Iraq, because I've often wondered about this.
		There's so much talk, rightfully so, about democracy and freedom in Iraq.
		But what I wonder is capitalism usually goes along with that, and how will they deal with capitalism and the money system too, as far as that goes?
		And Art, if I could stay on the line to hear this, because you're either got a carrier on you here for the last hour or aliens are interrupting your signal.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Howard?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't think capitalism is a problem because one of the things that was going on under Saddam Hussein was small-scale capitalism.
		There were women who owned beauty parlors.
		There were men who owned shops of all kinds.
		Remember, capitalism as we know it as a system of free exchange in the marketplace is one of the hallmarks of Islam.
		Muhammad himself was basically in the version of his time of the truck business.
unidentified		So you don't think they'll kill each other in competition.
unidentified		They'll abide by a rule of law.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, in order to operate in a capitalistic way, you have to operate by exchange rather than by severing another person's throat.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		So capitalism is automatically an improvement over the sever your enemy's throat approach to things.
unidentified		Got you.
		Thank you, gentlemen.
		Have a good evening.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You too, sir.
		You're on the air, Coast to Coast AM with Howard Bloom.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Yes, sir.
		It's a pleasure talking to you finally, and you too, Howard.
		I wanted to talk about, Howard, you said earlier you were talking about the liberal and The environmentalists not having a clue as to, you know, we can end our civilization as we know it, but we're not going to end the world's civilization no matter what we do.
		And the young lady talking about global warming kind of adheres to that.
		But then later you said that as far as the Democratic Party, you know, if there was a platform for more alternative energy, but I don't see that platform there, and I'm much like you in that I am a long-time Democrat who is really in the wilderness right now.
		And I wonder if you could expound on your topic about the environmentalist, which is right.
		I mean, what should we do about what they're saying?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, maybe it's time for me and you to do something that I know I haven't done in many, many decades, and that is get back involved with the Democratic Party.
		Because if the environmental movement is now embracing eco-techno-pioneering to the extent that I've just outlined with the Apollo project, and you know that the Democratic Party's base comes primarily from labor unions, and if the AFL-CIO and 23 labor unions are now involved with the ideas of promoting hydrogen cars,
		high-performance buildings, solar power, biomass power, wind-produced power, and magnetic levitation trains, then maybe it's time for us to help these people along, get their message through to the heart of the party that at least I still am a car-curing member of.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it actually was a puzzle to me, Howard, that it was so it was almost not even a part of the last presidential race.
		I mean, it wasn't even a part of the debate.
		It was a total puzzle to me.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		But I think what you're proving, Eric, with this show and with the kind of response that we're getting, even though we've just barely started in taking calls, is that everybody, every single one of us knows how important the energy issue is and that it is the core issue of the day.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And if that's what the Democratic Party addresses in an optimistic way with techno-loss, because we all stop dead in our tracks when we see a window full of the latest techno-booties.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, please.
unidentified		Can I ask one more quick question?
		What I've heard, and I don't know much about this.
		Maybe Howard can expound on it, and I'll let you go.
		I hear a lot of the more conservative, more Republicans talking about this new technology of horizontal drilling.
		If Howard could expound on that.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, I must confess I don't know a thing about it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		It's basically, and I don't know a whole lot about it either, but I guess some new horizontal drilling technique that's supposed to hit more oil.
		I don't know.
		So I'm with you, Howard.
		I can't really comment.
		First time caller line, you're on the air with Howard Bloom.
		Good morning.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Can I just say one thing about that, Arnold?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You may.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		If it's another oil technology, then screw it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		First time caller line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello?
		Hello.
		Yes.
		Oh, great.
		I certainly acknowledge you for finding some good guests.
		Every time I heard that Howard's going to be on the line, it's exciting to hear.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		I've got perhaps a couple of items.
		One is in terms of our foreign policy, the way we conduct our foreign policy and the degree to which it actually supports the country in the long term.
		And I'm talking about both Democratic and Republican foreign policy, and especially our policy toward Israel.
		And the fact that one of the published reasons why the terrorists, most of whom were educated Saudis, were willing to end their lives bringing down the Twin Towers in New York based on our treatment of our policy toward the Palestinians,
		which was essentially a policy of supporting if there's somebody trying to handle the Palestinian hotheads, it's Israel.
		And if Israel has hotheads, some people believe Sharon is one.
		There's nobody controlling Sharon if he's a hothead, and he's not doing too good a job controlling the really radical settlement hotheads.
		How is our foreign policy going to do anything, whether it's Democratic or Republican, to really handle Israeli hotheads to bring about the changes that need to happen in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to resolve that thing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Howard?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, a friend of mine who's Israeli criticized me last week for not adequately criticizing Jewish extremists.
		And my answer to him, which I actually haven't sent him yet, is this, that Israel has one quarter the population of just one Islamic city, Cairo.
		The number of people killed in the Palestinian versus Israeli conflicts is roughly a twentieth of the number of people killed in Algeria every year in Islam versus Islam conflicts, or roughly a seventh of the number of people killed every year in the Kashmiri conflicts in India between Muslims and non-Muslims.
		And I think that a country that has a population less than the size of most major American cities, and that's Israel, is a distraction.
		It's a radical, radical distraction.
		Now, I have a friend who is the head of the Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism.
		And he feels that if we solve the Israeli versus Palestinian problem, that all of the problems between the West and Islam will go away.
		But hey, there was no problem of the sort.
		There was no Israel until 1948.
		And guess what we had non-stop?
		From 630 A.D. until 1948.
		Massive, massive global wars between Islam and the West, including some of the biggest naval battles you have ever, ever seen in your life.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you're saying the Israeli-Palestinian problem is just a distraction that wouldn't change anything even if it was solved tomorrow.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		It's like the magician waving the handkerchief over in one hand so you won't see him palming something in the other.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Howard Bloom.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		How are you, Howard?
		Hi.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Fine, sir.
unidentified		Calling from South Florida, actually Southeast Florida.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		We're all prepared for the hurricane season already.
		And my question is basically, I've got a few of them.
		One, you mentioned that there have been over 100 extinctions, yet I'm teaching, I happen to be a college professor of environmental science, that there have been five mass extinctions, and we're in the middle of the sixth.
		And that one, of course, is caused by man.
		Can you kind of expound on the other hundred or so mass extinctions?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, if you do what I do, and I'm sure you do, and we both probably read Science Magazine every single week, and if you go back through their series of articles on this subject, you'll find that they outline 148 mass extinctions and the figure of only six, that six is the figure for the really huge mass extinctions, the humongous mass extinctions.
		Five is not a figure that I would have seen anywhere.
		I'm sorry.
		Six is the canonical figure.
		But there are 148, and if you're not aware of that and you're a college professor and you're in a field where you should be aware that something is horribly wrong, just, as I say, do a search in the pages of Science Magazine, which, as you know, is the definitive, that's Science and Nature are the two definitive magazines in our field.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		I have done that, and I don't really kind of agree with them, but I do agree that there have been minor extinctions.
		But be that as it may, my other question is, living in what's called the sun sign state, and with the cost of PVC dropping as the photovoltaic cells, I still don't see the use of them as much as they should be.
		I see them as being available to use the solar power to break down through electrolysis seawater to hydrogen and oxygen so that we can use them for fuel cell technology.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		That's a waste idea.
unidentified		And the waste product that we get back is water.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I think it's a very good idea.
		I was very skeptical about hydrogen power because in my experience, it takes burning coal, burning oil, and burning traditional fuels, and it takes nuclear power in order to make hydrogen.
		So it's just a matter of moving the mess someplace else.
		But in the work that I've been reviewing over the last two weeks, it's become obvious that there are more and more alternative energy forms or ways of using alternative energy to produce hydrogen.
		And that's one of the things that you're pointing at, and I am behind you 100% on that.
unidentified		And my question is also, my feeling is that the hybrid vehicles that we're currently seeing now are at best a stopgap measure and at worst just a hoodwinking of us by the auto companies and the oil companies.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, I tend to agree with you on that, too, because it's going back to oil.
		And I would much rather see something that's produced by alternative energy and your idea of using alternative energy to produce hydrogen and then using hydrogen to power cars.
		Well, actually, the cells that we're using these days are not terribly efficient, as you know.
		But nonetheless, using fuel cells or using any other form of power that depends on, for example, solar or that depends on biomass, I'm all for it.
		I'm behind you 100%.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you've certainly changed your opinion on hydrogen since we last did a show, Howard.
		Yep.
		Very good.
		All right.
		Howard Bloom is my guest.
		In the nighttime, which is where we do our very best work.
		This is Coast to Coast AM.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I'm Art Bell.
unidentified		We'll be right back.
		I'm going to do that.
		You don't have to shout or leave the vows, you can even play them easy.
		You don't have to shout or leave the vows, you can even play them easy.
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		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is, and my guest is Howard Bloom, and he's all yours for this next segment.
		By the way, if you want to get hold of me, it's artbell at AOL.com or Art Bell.
		That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L at mindspring.com.
		Either one of those will get directly to me, and a lot of the material that you send, I use on the air.
		That's ArtBell at AOL.com or ArtBell at MindSpring.com.
		Music Incidentally, tomorrow night, one of the most dynamic speakers on the kind of subjects we generally cover here on Coast to Coast AM, Dr. Roger Lear, is going to be my guest.
		That's one you don't want to miss, Dr. Roger Lear, tomorrow night.
		Now, Howard Bloom has a couple of books, The Lucifer Principle and The Global Brain, or Global Brain, actually, the evolution of the mass mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century.
		And The Lucifer Principle, a scientific expedition into the forces of history.
		How are your books doing, Howard?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, they're doing very well, Art.
		I designed them to last for 15 years, and apparently they're doing, though they're younger than that, something like that.
		And I've been asked to do another edition for the Lucifer Principle soon, but frankly, and this is a very unhumble opinion, but the book is more topical today than it was when it was originally written.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, good deal.
		Here we go.
		Somebody, I think, in opposition, you're on the Air Coast to Coast AM with Howard Bloom.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Yeah, is this me?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's you.
unidentified		Hey, just a little dispute with you, Howard.
		I agree with everything you're saying there.
		But the submarines that Pakistan has, they're diesel-electric.
		They're only 1,700 tons.
		It wouldn't even, cruise missiles maybe, could attack a carrier or something, but I don't think our cities would be in danger of that.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, are we talking about the same submarines?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Are we talking about the Augusta 90Bs?
unidentified		Yes, yes.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		You know that the Pakistani commander, and I don't have his name, but the one who piloted the crew that took the first submarine from Cherbourg Harbor over to Karachi, and then whose crew was involved in building the second one in Karachi, said in no uncertain terms that those submarines were built for second-strike nuclear capability.
unidentified		Well, I mean, I have a book right here, and I'm not, you know, what big deal are you?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		You might have a book that I don't have.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Which book, sir?
unidentified		This is Submarines of the World, Illustrated Directory of by David Miller.
		I mean, it's not a big deal.
		Not a big deal.
		I mean, the cruise missiles, they don't have the range, you know.
		I mean, if you're talking intercontinental.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		No, they only have a range of 135 miles, but when you've got 65% of the world's population living that distance away from the shoreline.
unidentified		Right, but it's going to have to come up.
		It can't go very far on the ocean without nuclear power.
		It's going to have to surface.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, have you looked at the range?
unidentified		Yeah, it actually says right here, the performance and the range here.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		The range underwater is only 250 miles.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		280 miles.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		It's a 10,000 nautical mile, which is 11,000 mile range.
unidentified		Not for the missiles.
		That's what I disagree on.
		It's the cruise missiles.
		Even the tomahawk can only go.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		The cruise missiles only have a range of 135 miles.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		But the ship, what have you got in terms of the range of the submarine itself?
unidentified		Oh, well, that's what I'm saying.
		Itself, it's going to be diesel-electric, so it's going to have to go on diesel power.
		It's not going to be able to go around the world.
		No diesel submarine really can.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Actually, I think he was talking something about a newer proxy.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's the mesmeric.
unidentified		Yeah, that's the area of the mesmerizing point.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Instead of looking at a book, which is outdated, go up to the DCN site where DCN itself, the company that makes these, advertises its characteristics.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And you'll see that the range is advertised as 10,000 nautical miles, which, as I said, is 11,000 miles.
unidentified		Okay.
		No problem.
		I mean, you got your facts, and I say it's way too small.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, the reason it's better, you know, now that we've got online, the reason it's better to go online is especially with rapidly evolving technologies like this.
unidentified		We got the summaries in it says 79 and 80.
		So, I mean, they got the one you're building, it hasn't even come out yet.
		It says 2006.
		They're building that one.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		It's constantly being updated.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do as he said.
		Do as he said, and check the DCN site and see what they say there.
		Okay.
		All right.
		Thank you very much.
		First time caller line.
		You're on the air with Howard Bloom.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, Charlie in Connecticut.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, Charlie.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Charlie.
unidentified		I was wondering, Howard, how we could increase our military personnel.
		I had an idea of maybe possibly giving full citizenship to mercenaries and give them all the benefits that our boys have.
		And you don't need quite so many people up on the line.
		You need a lot more people up behind the lines anyway.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Howard, we are having a problem right now with recruitment.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it's a big one right now, especially this week.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And the idea of giving mercenaries full citizenship disturbs me terribly because it reminds me of the days of the Roman Empire when the Romans got too lazy to do their own fighting and hired the Celts.
		They hired the Gauls and not just the Gauls, the Goths in particular.
		And when they became dependent on Gothic troops, those Goths in turn turned in on them and plundered them, destroyed them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not a good idea.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you have any ideas on increasing recruitment?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I have a friend who's in charge of that for the military, and he's one of the most brilliant people that I know.
		And if he doesn't have ideas for it, I don't, except that I do think, again, one very important thing here that we sort of glossed over, and that is that the guy who wrote Founding Brothers, the book on the Founding Fathers of the United States, said something in passing that should never have been said in passing,
		and it was that when we created a form of government that made public opinion one of the major mainstays of our policy, or the major director of our policy, we gave an enormous power to an unnamed branch of government called the press.
		And I think the press has got to do a lot more to demonstrate to us that we do have to have eternal vigilance to have freedom, that if we do believe in these things that I marched for in the 60s and the 1970s, and that most of my friends on college campuses say that they believe in, we're sometimes going to have to fight for these things.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wildcardline, you're on the air with Howard Bloom.
unidentified		Hi, yes, Mr. Bloom.
		Hi.
		Yes, I would like to talk about exactly what the point you brought up is that the press, the damage that they do to our own country, like with the report that we were flushing in the Quran, that was a total false report, and they admitted that, and how that has called deaths and riots as a direct influence over, you know, they're like our enemy.
		They're like, and they don't realize that we protect them.
		And if they, the press keep on, they're going to actually find themselves one day causing our country to go right down the tubes because of their hate for, you know, blame America and their laziness.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I mean, after all, what is the primary responsibility of both the press and a scientist?
		It's the truth at any price, including the price of your life.
		It means going diligently, using all the energy you possibly can use in order to find out truths and bring them to people's attention.
		And the people that I've worked with in the press over The course of the last 30 years do not have that kind of diligence at all.
unidentified		You're right.
unidentified		Thank you very much for making that point.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're very welcome.
		Thank you, Caller.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Howard Bloom.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
unidentified		Thank you for taking my call.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		You're very welcome.
unidentified		I just wanted to say to Howard, I am truly saddened by his remarks regarding global warming and species extinction.
		it is an established scientific consensus that global warming is occurring.
		And my question on that subject would be, do you suggest that we wait until our coastal cities are flooded and tropical diseases have spread beyond our historic regions and there's just a general devastation occurring to the population?
		And secondly, regarding...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm going to respond.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Howard?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I agree with you.
		There is a vast scientific consensus on global warming.
		However, no matter what we do, no matter how many Kyoto treaties we sign, the fact is that the carbon dioxide level on this planet has sometimes been 200 times what it is today.
		By one estimate, 10,000 times what it is today.
		And no matter how many Kyoto treaties we sign and no matter how good we are about not pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, one of these days, one way or the other, these seacoasts of ours are going to change and they are going to change dramatically.
		And that's where we should be focusing our attention.
unidentified		I agree.
unidentified		But I think we can also take steps to mitigate the amount of fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere so we don't trigger something like an abrupt climate change.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is it your position, Howard, that it doesn't matter how much we put in because, as you mentioned in the past, it's been so prolific?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's not my position.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		But again, if you go back to how we both feel about oil and the fact that we have to get away from oil, the fact is that every technology that I favor gets us away from the hydrocarbon emissions that we're talking about.
unidentified		Caller?
		Regarding the species extinction issue, whether there have been six or 143 periods of species extinction, it is an irrefutable fact that over the last 50 years, 300,000 species of plant and animal have become extinct, and it's estimated 3,000 to 30,000 species become extinct every year as a consequence of mankind.
		And my goodness, do we want to live in a biological wasteland?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		No, I don't hate a biological wasteland.
unidentified		My point is that we need to wake up and take decisive action now to mitigate our damage to the environment or we're going to be leaving future generations of people with a planet that's devoid of everything that we love about it now.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's possible.
		And I certainly don't want to leave a wasteland to the generations that come beyond us.
		It's just that we have to recognize the fact that one way or the other, with this or without us, wasteland will come.
		And that's what we really have to be prepared for.
unidentified		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		You're very welcome.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Howard Bloom.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hello?
		Hello.
		Yes.
		Hi.
		There's one Japanese car manufacturer that I know of.
		It has a battery gas combination car.
		And I'm wondering why the American automakers haven't jumped on that, not only gone full ahead with it here in the United States, but also around the world.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's the hybrid car, right?
		Yep.
		And American automakers have been far more slow than the Japanese, to say the least.
		The Japanese have the priest out there, and it's selling like crazy.
		And the hybrid cars that we're working on haven't even hit the streets yet.
		So you're right.
		We're being very sluggish.
		However, a caller who called in a few minutes ago and said the hybrid car was just a stopgap was also right.
		We've got to go beyond that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're still turning out SUVs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		First time caller line, you're on the air with Howard Bloom.
unidentified		Hi.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		Hello.
		Yeah, I've never called one of these stations before, but I listen to you every once in a while.
		I drive a truck.
		I'd like to ask a question.
		Have you guys ever heard of anything like a solar-powered vehicle backed up by maybe a wind generator type deal?
		And I'll get off the phone and have you heard of any such thing.
		No, I'm not a rocket scientist or anything like that.
		It's just I got these ideas floating in my head, and it's like, well, why can't we come up with an idea like that?
		And that would solve the problem of the battery issue.
		I mean, when you start a car, we all know that the alternator is basically what runs your car along with the gas.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		That the battery is just used for starting the vehicle.
		So I don't know why they don't come up with that.
		I mean, to me, that would solve the solution of the hydrogen deal and the battery issue.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I think you're moving in the right direction.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		That kind of creativity and innovation is what's going to get us somewhere.
unidentified		Yeah, and hopefully nobody won't steal my idea, but.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Caller.
		Thank you very much.
		Well, he's got ideas rattling around in his head.
		That's a good thing.
		Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Howard Bloom.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hi, Arth, Howard.
unidentified		This is Peter calling from Northern Arizona.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Peter.
unidentified		I heard you mention briefly about stem cell embryos and fertility clinics, which I take issue to.
		I believe personally that throwing away embryos is wrong for the embryo and for the people that are doing that.
		Do you believe that the U.S. should or should try to lead a forum discussing this issue?
		It's my personal belief that an individual human life has ultimate value simply because it's human.
		What do you think of that?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's very hard to determine when it becomes human.
		And I think that killing a single human life is absolutely unacceptable, if that helps.
		But it is very difficult to determine at what point an embryo becomes human.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That it is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		East of the Rockies, you're on there with Howard Bloom.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hello.
		My name is Chris.
		I'm presently down in Texas right now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Chris.
unidentified		Three points I wanted to point out that, you know, years ago they developed methane gas converters.
		They have one down here in Sweetwater, Texas, where they take the desiccation from animals and they comprise it into gas conversion.
		And a friend of mine was at John Hopkins University and developed a methane gas converter for a family of four to sustain itself with gas, although there would be a substantial little time bomb under every house, but it seems that a methane gas converter could greatly reduce the use of gas.
		The other point was hydrogen being used as it is today.
		In the submarines that we currently use desalinators to develop oxygen inside the submarines, they also excrete the hydrogen out into the water.
		Why couldn't we get something smaller, like that desalinator, and install it in a car and utilize the greatest resource we have in this world, which is water?
		Put water in a tank and have the hydrogen and oxygen separated out and burn the car on hydrogen.
		Although you would still need oil to lubricate the engine and you'd still need a power source.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, if you use your power source for the separation of hydrogen and the oxygen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's go back to methane, though.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Methane certainly is a powerful energy source, pretty much unexplored, isn't it?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's been explored a lot in Europe.
		And, you know, it's not that it's underexplored.
		It's undertapped.
		I think that your caller's making a good point.
		You're making a good point.
		Methane is just almost there for the taking.
		And it only takes throwing a couple of bacteria into the mix to turn out an awful lot of methane.
		So it's very underexplored.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		West of the Rockies.
		You're on the air with Howard Bloom.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hello?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Hey, how you doing?
unidentified		Derek from San Pedro on 640.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Derek.
unidentified		Hey, how you doing?
unidentified		My question is, do you think the SeaWolf or the improved Los Angeles class has a chance against the Augusta?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		You know, all I know is what the Navy tells me via its website.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		And the Navy tells me that it's going to have a very, very, very, very, very hard time detecting these Augusta 90Bs.
unidentified		One other question real quick, please.
unidentified		What do you think the Sea Wolf will do against the Augusta 90B?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Excuse me?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		You can't fight one submarine with another unless you can detect the submarine you're going up against, right?
unidentified		One other question real quick, please.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very quickly, yes.
unidentified		With the new base closure, Bill, if you looked it over, did you notice that there's nine attacked submarines being relocated to Guam?
unidentified		Do you think this has anything to do with response to what's going on in the world right now?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that it's a response to the situation developing in Korea.
		There's a very great deal being relocated to Guam right now.
		Are you on top of that, Howard?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, what I've been watching is the Chinese threat to Taiwan.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I think that those are two things that we're concerned about right now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's a gigantic buildup on Guam.
		We're moving F-15s.
		We're moving stealth aircraft all to Guam.
		And, of course, it could, I suppose, serve either purpose, but it's obvious that we know something's coming.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		Well, something does seem to be coming, but one of the things that's concerned me is the sunburn missiles that the Chinese have been making.
		And those sunburned missiles can take out aircraft carriers, and we've only got 11 aircraft carriers.
		They carry nuclear warheads, too, and they skim at a few feet above the water surface in zigzag patterns, so they're very hard to stop.
		So what I'm looking at, in addition to the North Korean problem, is the problem of losing our entire force projection capability in attempting to defend Taiwan.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that we would attempt to defend Taiwan?
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		I think we'd have a very serious crisis of decision on our hands.
		and uh...
		because if uh...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		if taiwan goes that japan knows that it's going to go and we I think the Chinese regard Taiwan as theirs and not Japan necessarily, though I could be wrong.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Howard, we're out of time.
howard bloom ▲ ● ▼		It's been a pleasure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It has been a pleasure, my friend, and we'll do it again soon.
		Okay, thanks, Aaron.
		Have a great night.
unidentified		Have a good night, too.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Take care.
		Tomorrow night, everybody, Dr. Roger Lear is here from the high desert.
		This night, though, that's it.
		I'm Mark Bell.
		Have a great night.
		Later.
unidentified		Good night in the desert, shooting stars across the sky.
		This magical journey will take the sun arise.
		Filled with belonging, searching for the truth.

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