America: all science, no fiction

"We are living in a science-fiction world where Disney and Disney's
science-fiction have won. This is the real world. Science-fiction has
become the real world, whether we realize it or not ... if a writer has
something to say, he must absolutely do so." - Bob Dylan, July 23, 2001

It's getting strange out there. But since you're here, you probably already knew that.

We may be on what's popularly called the "fringe," but that's only because we anticipated the curve. Sooner or later, sad to say, the fringe is where everyone is going to wind up, though when they do they'll call it conventional wisdom. And it will be too late.

Consider a pair of stories this week from our science fiction world:

Raytheon 'heat beam' weapon ready for Iraq

Raytheon, the world's largest missile maker, delivered a prototype to the U.S. military last month. The product is expected to be evaluated from February through June to determine whether to equip U.S. forces with it, Colonel David Karcher, director of the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, told Bloomberg Business News.

With U.S. casualties in Iraq rising, expectations are growing that Raytheon's weapon, called the Active Denial System, could be sent to Iraq in the next year, according to Charles "Sid'' Heal, commander of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. A former Marine, Heal headed nonlethal-weapons training for the U.S. military in Somalia in 1995 and advised Raytheon on the beam's development.

"It's there, it's ready,'' said Heal, who has felt the weapon's beam and compares it to having a hot iron placed on the skin. "It will likely be in Iraq in the next 12 months. They are very, very close.''

The weapon, mounted on a Humvee vehicle, projects a "focused, speed-of-light millimeter wave energy beam to induce an intolerable heating sensation,'' according to a U.S. Air Force fact sheet. The energy penetrates less than 1/64 of an inch into the skin and the sensation ceases when the target moves out of the beam.

From the Office of Public Affairs of the Air Force Research Laboratory, here is a prototype "Active Denial" vehicle:



Ironically, wearing tinfoil (shiny side out, naturally), should afford some protection against such microwave weapons. But don't kid yourself. We'll still be called crazy.

More Robot Grunts Ready for Duty

Hunting for guerillas, handling roadside bombs, crawling across the caves and crumbling towns of Afghanistan and Iraq -- all of that was just a start. Now, the Army is prepping its squad of robotic vehicles for a new set of assignments. And this time, they'll be carrying guns.

As early as March or April, 18 units of the Talon -- a model armed with automatic weapons -- are scheduled to report for duty in Iraq. Around the same time, the first prototypes of a new, unmanned ambulance should be ready for the Army to start testing. In a warren of hangar-sized hotel ballrooms in Orlando, military engineers this week showed off their next generation of robots, as they got the machines ready for the war zone.

Putting something like this into the field, we're about to start something that's never been done before," said Staff Sgt. Santiago Tordillos, waving to the black, 2-foot-six-inch robot rolling around the carpeted floor on twin treads, an M249 machine gun cradled in its mechanical grip.

For years, the Pentagon and defense contractors have been toying with the idea of sending armed, unmanned ground vehicles, or UGVs, into battle. Actually putting together the robots was a remarkably straightforward job, said Tordillos, who works in the Army's Armaments Engineering and Technology Center.

The 2'6" "Talon" robotic weapons platform is shown here, with mounted rocket launcher, grenade launcher and machine gun:



Heat beam and robot armour, and this glimpse of high weirdness from the psychic battlefield, as reported mid-November in The Scotsman:

JON RONSON AND I ARE WALKING DOWN a grimy Soho street, deep in conversation about mind-control. It’s a subject that lends itself to nuttiness, but the author of Them: Adventures with Extremists, who gatecrashed the sacred owl-burning ceremony at the exclusive American club, Bohemian Grove, challenged the Bildenberg Group and befriended the Ku Klux Klan, has an uncanny ability to discern the method within other people’s madness. In his latest book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, which accompanies the Channel 4 series (Sunday, 8pm), his target is the American military.

Ronson began his journey into the US army’s heart of cerebral darkness in London, where he got a tip from Uri Geller - the psychic famed for bending spoons on TV in the 1970s. "Under Clinton, the nuttiness was at the fringes but the dynamic changed when the Bushes got into power and it felt like the nuttiness was now at the core of things," Ronson tells me at his Soho club. "So I started asking around and then I heard about remote viewers and psychic spies and, right here on the roof terrace in this building, Uri Geller told me that he’d been ‘re-activated’."

I ask why the US military might have brought Geller back in from the cold. The simple answer is that Geller once belonged to an unofficial unit of psychic spies, formed in the 1970s to read the future and conduct experiments into the supernatural for the US military. Geller’s tip led Ronson to Glenn Wheaton, a retired sergeant and former Special Forces psychic spy who confirmed that the military funded this unofficial unit. There was more to the psychics, however, than trying to "remotely access" Soviet weapons plans or predict China’s next move. They were looking at new forms of warfare, including walking through walls, adopting a cloak of invisibility, even stopping an animal’s heartbeat by staring at it.

Wheaton told Ronson about a "goat lab" where the staring took place and this led him to General Stubblebine III, the army’s chief of intelligence in the 1980s. The General is a big fan of Geller and in Ronson’s documentary lays out a whole trayful of twisted cutlery as evidence of his faith. Stubblebine, says Ronson, was so convinced about these ideas that he spent several weeks trying to conjure up a mental state that would enable him to walk through walls. He never succeeded, but became a powerful advocate of New Age thought.

Okay: Uri Geller "re-activated," walking through walls, killing with a stare. It's not just a science fiction world; it's also gothic horror. And so long as we don't deny that this, too, is America, we ought to begin talking meaningfully about the military-occult complex, and ask ourselves at just which altar the US military worships.

Americans have become the Martians of the world, and Iraq its Grovers Mill. (Or, for you HG Wells enthusiasts, its Horsell Common.) But there is a ray of hope, when we recall the Martians were defeated by a common cold virus. Such a virus, potentially just as deadly to the as-good-as-alien globalists, may arise from the "world defense network" of progressive thinkers called for by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the commencement of the "In Defense of Humanity" World Conference.

It's a start. Perhaps enough of one to make Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things smile. As Tommy Douglas - socialist, father of Canada's public healthcare and recently voted "Greatest Canadian" - put it in his parable Mouseland, "My friends, watch out for the little fellow with an idea."

Rudyard Kipling, of all people, says much the same in A Pict Song:

Mistletoe killing an oak
Rats gnawing cables in two
Moths making holes in a cloak
How they must love what they do!
Yes, and we Little Folk too
We are busy as they
Working our works out of view
Watch, and you’ll see it some day!