Re: psychoceramics: (fwd) Grateful Dead--Covert Social Engineering for Gaia? (fwd)

[Cosma Shalizi <shalizi @ phys-next9.physics.wisc.edu>]

I've actually had some correspondence with the author of that piece, Mark
Stahlman (n--@p--.mci.newscorp.com); he was attracted by a Web
page I wrote on some of Alvin Toffler's statistical idiocies.  It soon
became obvious that he had a good five or six screws loose at least, and in
fact some of what he said was pure Lyndon LaRouche.  This prompted me to go to
the library and read a rather frightening and depressing book, Dennis
King's _Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism_ (Doubleday, 1989),
in which I learned that Mr. Stahlman had been part of the Security of the
National Caucaus of Labor Committees, i.e., LaRouche's internal police,
and vice-president of Computron, a computer company which was a LaRouche
fund-raising exercise.  (When I asked Stahlman what his connection was to
LaRouche, he said he'd just read him, ``along with nearly everybody
else,'' which is disingenous at the least.)  A significant chunk of the
LaRouchies at Computron left the movement when that company had to file for
Chapter 11, but I don't know whether Stahlman was one of them.  If not, New
Media Associates may be the on-line tentacle of the LaRouchies, who go in
for that sort of thing (cf. the Schiller Institute, the Fusion Energy
Foundation, etc., etc.)  

The general conspiratorial scheme here, incidentally, is that all these
things are part of a global conspiracy to restore the British Empire (!),
eliminating national sovereignty in favor of a rule of ``oligarchs,'' who
will keep the masses stupid and contened with drugs and rock and roll and
empiricism (LaRouche once called Bertrand Russell the most evil man of the
20th century), as detailed, among other places, in the _Protocols of the
Elders of Zion_.  Meanwhile, the oligarchs will be dismantling
industrialism and destroying technology and killing lots of people,
though why they want to do this is never made clear.  The alternative is to
follow LaRouche and set up total war economies where everyone is made to
read Schiller, listen to Beethoven, and the government is a totalitarian
dictatorship along the lines laid down by Plato, who is the One True
Philosopher.  (Back when there was a Soviet Union, LaRouche advocated
instant, pre-emptive nuclear war with it, cheerfully admitting that U.S.
casualties would run to at least 200 million.  Later he tried to push Star
Wars very hard, even to the point of saying that Edward Teller wasn't one of
Them, after all.)  All of this, of course, goes back to Babylon, if not indeed
to Atlantis.  (Gory details in King's book.) 

In a word: yuck.
I regret to add that Mr. Stahlman is a graduate of this university, where his
father was a professor of the history of science (and quite pukka and sane,
by all accounts).