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Beyond the Fringe: A review of Them: Adventures With Extremists

By Jon Ronson:

Ronson, a writer and documentary filmmaker in Britain, insinuated himself into the homes and graces of a variety of conspiracy theorists and ”extremists,” whom he defines as those who ”have been called extremists by others.” The project began with Omar Bakri Mohammed, who is said to be Osama bin Laden’s ”man in London.” Ronson went on to ingratiate himself with American Klansmen, neo-Nazis and the New World Order conspiracy theorists, some of whom he joins in the quest for the one ”secret room” where a conclave of rulers supposedly plots the conspiracies that control the world.

There is a lively account of Ronson’s attempts to penetrate the meeting of the Bilderberg Group, a publicity-averse conclave of globalists — and recent focus of ”secret room” theorists. Then there is his more successful attempt to sneak into the annual Bohemian Grove encampment in Northern California, where the rich and powerful cavort, cross-dress and enact rituals like the ”cremation of care,” in which an allegorical figure representing the tedium of everyday life is set ablaze. A conspiracy theorist radio host who accompanies Ronson insists this is proof the Bohemians practice human sacrifice. NY Times

The Right to Think: An Interview with Howard Bloom

From 2100 to the End of Time by Frank J. Tipler:

(Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University, Tipler is the co-author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press, 1986), about the significance of intelligent life in the universe, and the author of The Physics of Immortality (Doubleday, 1994) about the ultimate limits of computers, and the role computers will play in the universe. Professor Tipler was the post-doc of a post-doc of John von Neumann, the mathematician who made the first American digital computer. Tipler was also the post-doc of a post-doc of a post-doc of Albert Einstein. Finally, Tipler was the post-doc of John Wheeler, the man who named the black hole, and Wheeler was in turn the post-doc of Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Not surprisingly, Tipler’s research is on discovering the mutual implications of computer theory, relativity, and quantum mechanics.)

The year is 2100. AI’s and human downloads have begun to explore and colonize interstellar space. The spaceships carrying the AI’s and human downloads are tiny, massing no more than a kilogram. Quantum computers, which can code more bytes of information in 400 atoms than there are atoms in the entire visible universe, do not require much mass. An entire simulated city with thousands of humans and AI’s can be coded in a few grams. And a tiny spaceship has a huge advantage over the ponderous rockets of today. Powered by matter- antimatter annihilation, such tiny spaceships can reach 90% of lightspeed with only a few kilograms of fuel. At such a speed, the nearest star, some four and one-half light years away, will be reached in only five years. Acceleration to 90% of lightspeed will be very fast, because the downloads and AI’s will be impervious to acceleration. Humans not living in computers can take only a few gravities of acceleration, and can take that small acceleration only for a short time. Simulated humans will experience only the usual one gravity acceleration in their simulated environment. Human downloads have such a natural advantage over present-day humans in the environment of space, that it is exceedingly unlikely non-downloaded humans will ever engage in interstellar travel. The stars are to be the inheritance of our downloaded descendants, of the children of our minds rather than our bodies.

Alan Wolfe reviews Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline by Richard Posner, which includes a ranking of the top one hundred public intellectuals in America based on media recognition. The New Republic

New York Times review: The Reckless Mind: When Smart People Get Dumb Ideas

The essays that make up Mark Lilla’s book — essays on the Nazi tastes of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, on Walter Benjamin’s mystical Marxism, on Alexandre Kojeve’s weakness for Stalin and on the antiliberal fusillades of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida — are driven by his sense of disappointment, a lover’s kind of disappointment, that such profound and influential minds should have been so politically insouciant when confronted by the hectic barbarity of the 20th century.