Category Archives: Non-fiction

I happened on this book in an unusual way. I was visiting my wife at her office in Harper Collins, and while waiting for her to complete this or that task, I looked around for items of interest. My eyes alit on this one. “Looks like weird fun,” said I. Many of the books I review are selected by my esteemed wife dashing in the door and exclaiming, “you’ve gotta read this!” Or one or the other of us catches an interesting TV interview with an author and picks the book up at Barnes and Noble (no, not Amazon, NEVER Amazon, which seeks to devour publishers like the one that employs my wife, not to mention most available book-reviewer sites). But this was more of a found object. And so, over a period of a couple weeks, I read this thing, bits at a time. When I had finally finished Our Occulted History I felt like I had just gotten off a roller coaster designed by a person with no inner ear. I have had diverse reactions to this thing, and it should come as no surprise that the first line that popped into my head while reading the book was: “It’s one thing to maintain an open mind, but maybe not so good to have one so porous it retains nothing of value. Jim Marrs’ brain is so filled with empty space it is unlikely that even a virus could find enough substance to which to attach itself. He puts the pseudo in pseudo-science.” Which may be the tiniest bit harsh. But I do think there is something going on here that bears some looking into.

Ok, how many of you have ever been exposed to marijuana? Let’s have a show of hands. You know what I mean by exposed. Don’t get cute. And puh-leez, don’t pretend you never inhaled. Looking out over the group, I can see that almost every hand is raised, which means we have some liars out there. Yeah, my hand is up as well. From the tender age of fifteen. And yet here we stand sit, not a heroine addict, not a crack addict, not an alcoholic, and I have never been any of those, although I was addicted to cigarettes for many years. While I do not see much menace in it, I do not smoke pot any more. No moral high ground here. The stuff, while admittedly a nifty enhancement to Hendrix, Santana and a host of other musical artists, particularly when one ingests music via headphones, puts me to sleep. For me, pot, hash and some other things I will not go into, proclaimed unacceptable by the forces of righteousness, whether or not those proclaimers were peddling cigarettes, alcohol or equally addictive food products, were, for me, gateways to bedtime. I freely admit that I have not partaken since the 80s, and even then it was a rare event. But I do concede that there are situations within which the use of pot, once normalized, might make it easier for one to consider other products that are less benign.

So, let’s steer this vehicle back onto the actual roadway. What has this got to do with Jim Marrs? I’ll tell you. There are all sorts of gateway drugs in the world. Not all will have a pharmacological impact, and not all, as with weed, will necessarily pave a pathway to perdition. Our next example is one of those. And again, it is one I have sampled, probably even more than pot. Alien visitation. No, no anal probes, abductions or anything of an extreme sort. Never met, saw or conversed with an alien. (My personal eX-files have to do with a very Earth-based failed marriage) But I have tasted the out-of-this-world product and I like it. I have read my share of UFO books over the years. Although I am not a regular viewer, I have seen more than one or two episodes of the pseudo-scientific eye-roller Ancient Aliens. I mention this not to say that I buy their particular line of BS, but to note my starting position re alien visitation, namely that the subject matter still draws me. I have seen some freaky petroglyphs, in Hawaii, in Chichen Itza, the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, in the American southwest. And despite Don Henley’s claim that They’re not here and they’re not coming, I am inclined to believe that they have at least stopped by for a look-see and were spotted by the locals, actually a lot of locals, all across the planet, so maybe it was less of a look-see than a “whoa-ho, what have we here? Let’s check this place out” sort of thing. This requires no more suspension of disbelief than some of our more popular religions. And sustaining such notions does not lead to a suspension of intellectual processing. But the potential exists for this benign belief, given the proper (on in this case improper) influence, to be inflated into something alarming.

Just as a druggie friend can push one beyond a little weed into a much darker place, so people like Jim Marrs can take an interesting notion and, through their powers of story-telling, lead the gullible to a vulnerable place. I suspect that Jim Marrs is a lunatic. I fear that he may be a con-man. I can see that he applies the fuzziest of logic in looking for support for his theses. It is obvious that he lives in an echo chamber inhabited by other paranoids and conspiracy theorists and that they reinforce and embolden each other to the point where, as in the right-wing bubble, opposing opinions are routinely disregarded, and whatever theories are being floated by the elect are accepted as revealed truth. This is where the primary problem lies. Step inside the bubble and, like a spacecraft air-lock, eliminate from one’s intake any competing notions. I also know that Jim Marrs is a gifted story-teller. However, you might need a pair of these

and one of these

to get through the entire book safely.

It is an amazing story he has to tell. Marrs claims that a close look at ancient literature from across our world, particularly from Sumer, reveals not only that aliens have visited our lovely planet, but that, in order to more effectively mine gold, they modified the genetic makeup of the local hominid population to make the homo sap we are today to create a usable labor force. It gets weirder, really. He also posits a magical, and I do mean magical, form of gold that has unnatural properties, like an anti-gravity capacity and maybe even a multi-dimensional one. Guess what was inside the Arc of the Covenant?

Funny powder, and not the sort they serve at after-parties on Oscars night. Ok, people. Time to break out your tinfoil hats. But let’s make sure they are tinfoil tri-corner hats. (Sorry, I was unable to come up with a corresponding image) Marrs has a political agenda as well. On his web-site, Jimmarrs.com, I found the following:

Seeing how Paul and Palin are now candidates for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, the corporatists would love to weaken, if not stop, the so-called Libertarian Tea Party influence on the future direction of the Republican Party. [I guess Paul and Palin are not right-wing enough for Marrs] Live and learn and don’t fall prey to revisionism, usurpation and political/media manipulation.

He makes statements that have the sound of reason, but lack the substance. Here is an example.

In his 2010 book, Babylon’s Banksters, Joseph P. Farrell, as a doctoral graduate of Pembroke College Oxford, who had unparalleled access to old books and manuscripts in Oxford University’s library, said his thesis was both simple to state but difficult to understand. “Since ancient times and with more or less uninterrupted constancy, there has existed an international money power which seeks by a variety of means including fraud, deception, assassination and war to usurp the money- and credit-creating power of various states it has sought to dominate” (implying, of course, that if you find Farrell’s case unconvincing it is because you just don’t understand it. Yeah, I’ve heard that argument before).

What does unparalleled access mean? Is there a double-secret code that Dean Wormer gave Farrell that allowed him access to materials mere mortals were not permitted to see? Who says his access was unparalleled? Any fact-checking done on this? If there was, Marrs isn’t telling. Are we to presume (yes, we are) that having this unparalleled access means that the researcher in question therefore has superior interpretive powers, and was thus able to spot, and interpret this secret info, and incorporate the gained knowledge into his thesis? But what that information might have been we are not told. It goes on. Marrs does not mention that among this great scholar’s publications are Roswell and the Reich and Genes, Giants, Monsters and Men: The Surviving Elites of the Cosmic War and Their Hidden Agenda. Be sure to secure the hatch to the bubble after you step inside.

I could make a list of the outlandish claims that this guy makes, but it would make my usual, wordy reviews seem like headlines. There is a debating technique favored on the right known as Gish Gallop. It entails spewing so much bullshit in a small amount of time that one’s opponent winds up spending all his or her time refuting the bullshit and does not get to make their own case. Marrs’ work has that feel. Replay Romney in the first debate for a taste, if you like. And Marrs seems like such a down-home folksy sort that one might be tempted to indulge in a few puffs. After all, even in his political attire, there are positions he holds that are pretty reasonable. But if you toke down, or snort up too much, you drift past the amber fields of reasonableness, and ascend until you are off in la-la-land and the world is suddenly really out to get you; 9/11 was an Israeli plot; remote viewing psychics in the US Army watched as aliens shot down Russian probes nearing Mars; The Rothschilds (translation: Jews) control the world’s economic apparatus. It was JFKs driver who killed him. And so on. So make sure you load up on personal weapons, and for sure bring along that special hat, because you never know when they might be listening in. I’ll give you an example of Marrs Gish-Galloping later.

Back to the book. So, next step. If they came here, why did they come? Was it to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before? Columbus did not sail the ocean blue to check out the Caribbean beaches. He had a concrete, business purpose in mind. Marrs would have us believe that they, a race he calls the Anunnaki, from Sumer legends, came to earth, or at least stuck around on Earth, for the gold. I picture alien spouses asking star-traveler hubby, “So, Gorp, what did you bring me this time? Not another carnivorous flower, Geez!” To which Gorp smiles and hands over vast quantities of the shiny stuff. Lady Gorp blushes, throws her several arms around her main guy and exclaims, “This place is a keeper, Sweetie. When are you going back?”

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. For instance, in anthropology, just because we do not have rock (or in this case bone) solid examples of each and every step along a path of natural selection, that does not mean that those steps did not take place. Scientists are constantly finding previously undiscovered bones, unthought of species. Here is one that came to my attention just in the time since I began with Marrs’ book. Mr Marrs prefers to fill our knowledge gaps with notions of alien interference. And he is not above the odd lie to bolster his case.

Although Darwin never explicitly stated that man descended from the ape, his devotees advocated that conclusion.

Actually they did not. Apes and humans are evolved from prior species, not from each other and it was only the opponents of Darwinism who characterized his work as claiming humans descended from apes. Erect straw man. Light match. And he continues,

Even after a hundred years of effort, no one has been able to fully substantiate Darwin’s theories through documented fossil exhibits.

Um, well, actually yes they have. It is frequently the case that in any large chunk of science there will be specific steps from, say, point D to point F in a full alphabetic range, for which there is not 100% complete fossil evidence. It is the nature of science to extrapolate from available information. The absence of specific elements in the range of every possible piece of fossil evidence is not evidence that the missing bits do not exist. For a guy who is positing that humans were designed by an alien race, he seems unusually tetchy about insisting that every possible link be found in the theory that scientists across the planet accept as sound. But if Marrs can believe what he wants, why not the rest of us? I am not completely convinced that Jim Marrs is not the product of an alien huckster having bred with a cactus to produce him, I am still waiting for him to disprove that rumor, and he has never denied his questionable, and possibly prickly parentage.

They wanted our gold, so they fiddled with our (homo neanderthal, or maybe homo erectus) DNA to produce a work force trainable enough to to work the mines. It gets better. You may have heard the word Nefilim, basically angel-human hybrids. In the hands of Jim Marrs, it looks like our eight-foot-tall visitors liked a little, very little, relatively, something on the side. I will leave aside all the obvious penis jokes here, although it does pain me to do so. Tall, blue and handsome + human female = the Jim Marrs special, alien/human hybrid children, the Nefillim. Also, the inspiration for a classic film, well maybe not exactly a classic.

If you have not yet summoned men in white suits with large nets, here is where the bat really meets the shit. Marrs goes on and feeds into other wing nut paranoid fantasies about a core of thirty-three families (guess what sort of DNA they are protecting) who rule the planet, while, of course, suppressing the discovery of the proof of our alien ancestry. (We wouldn’t want the baby to know who gran really is, would we, not until he is old enough to be able to handle the shock, and then, naturally, dominate his personal section of the planet) Of course what he counts as evidence has not convinced real scientists, and is unlikely to do so.

So what Jim Marrs has done, and has been doing for some time, is to take the nifty notion that they were here at some point in human history and lace it with his own rich blend of opiated Tea Party paranoid delusion, fusing the two. Smoking at this pipe keeps ya coming back, if, that is, you buy in. And here is one final item, before a bit of a detour. He talks a fair bit in his book about a magical substance referred to as powdered gold. Well, it turns out that there are entities more than willing to sell this stuff to the gullible. I have no specific knowledge that Marrs has a financial stake in any of these companies, but let’s just say I have my suspicions.

Not only is he proselytizing stealth political messages in his book, but it becomes much more overt when he lectures. I am separating this out from the already lengthy body of this review, tucking it under a spoiler label. There is enough detail involved that only those who are interested would want to spend the time to read it. It consists of a series of political claims Marrs makes in a lecture and how his claims are lacking in foundation.

MARRS ATTACKS

Here is a quote from Jim Marrs: Hidden History Part 1, a lecture you can find on Youtube. This lecture was posted on February 7, 2012.

…global warming, which is turning out largely to be a hoax, because they fudged all the documents…they simply…but there is environmental change and there is a warming. Go outside. You can figure that one out. But, it’s not us. It is solar system wide. Something is happening solar-system wide. The outer planets are becoming more luminescent. The ice, the polar caps on Mars are melting. The ice on the moons of Jupiter, they seem to be melting. So, whatever’s happening, it’s not your SUV, no matter what Al Gore says. By the way Al Gore happens to have been one of the creators of the carbon tax credit company, corporation, out of Chicago, which is gonna handle all the carbon taxes that we’re all gonna have to pay, and manage the sale and trade and exchange of these carbon tax credits, which means that they’ll rake in billions and billions of dollars. So, gee, Al, maybe you had an ulterior motive in pushing this global warming idea.

So we will play Gish Gallop with Marrs here, as time is not much of a factor, but the methodology he uses should be illustrative of the tactic. Throw out enough lies and your opposition will have to spend all their time refuting them, while you move on to more lies. So, here goes.

global warming, which is turning out largely to be a hoax
In 1989, Republican president George H.W Bush proposed and Congress approved a twenty year study of global change. Participants included NOAA, NASA, the Pentagon the National Science foundation, the Departments of Transportation, Interior, Commerce, EPA and a host of others. You can look at a summary of their findings here. This brief summary says it all:

Trends observed in recent decades include rising temperatures, increasing heavy downpours, rising sea level, longer growing seasons, reductions in snow and ice, and changes in the amounts and timing of river flows. These trends are projected to continue, with larger changes resulting from higher amounts of heat-trapping gas emissions, and smaller changes from lower amounts of these emissions. The observed changes in climate are already causing a wide range of impacts, and these impacts are expected to grow.

Really, does anyone outside the bubble take this warming-denial malarky seriously?

it’s not us. It is solar system wide
Claims that the solar system is warming are complete nonsense The sun’s output has declined. This is another case of Marrs spewing politicized nonsense and claiming it to be fact. The supposed warming-induced increase in luminescence in outer planets is nothing more than seasonal change for entities that have a year that is far different in scale from ours. It is as if one were to observe New Hampshire from August through December and conclude that the planet was beginning an ice age.

the carbon tax credit company, corporation, out of Chicago, which is gonna handle all the carbon taxes that we’re all gonna have to pay, and manage the sale and trade and exchange of these carbon tax credits, which means that they’ll rake in billions and billions of dollars
Marrs appears to be making rather definitive presumptions about how the USA will deal with our emissions problem. Cap and trade, and Carbon taxes are both market-based attempts to reduce our emissions. Studies in 1967 and 1970 showed them to be the least costly way to reduce emissions. The 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act introduced the first cap-and-trade control mechanism into national law. This was proposed under and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush. These days, with Republicans in the majority in the House there is no chance that any carbon tax or cap and trade legislation will reach the president any time soon.

As for Al Gore’s sinister machinations to profit from theoretical exchanges, none ever existed. Gore’s company was one investor in the Chicago Climate Exchange, a company which was intended to function like the New York Stock Exchange, acting as a market in which corporations could trade carbon allotments in the same way that investors trade stock. It never happened. CCX ceased to exist in 2010, which is too bad. It is called putting his money where his mouth is. Capitalism, ya know? He took a loss. Nothing sinister there at all. No plots required.

If you are ok with just reading this as an entertainment, Our Occulted History delivers the goods. It offers a wild, entertaining, and occasionally thought-provoking tale. But if it strikes deeper in you than that, all I can say is “step away from the hookah.”

Posted 3/30/13

I am hardly a monogamous sort. I find that I am regularly attracted to different types. Sometimes I like them with big bowls. I am definitely fond of zaftig with strokable, curvy edges, sometimes I prefer something a bit more conservative, upright, familiar. And rarely, slender even, maybe with sharp edges. Occasionally I go for something way out there, maybe with spikes or exploding bits. Ok, you can put your filthy mind back where it belongs now. We are talking about font types, but you knew that, right?

One of the great joys to be had in reading is to learn something new about some aspect of life that has been before your eyes all along. Walking down a street with no fonts on display might lead one to suspect involuntary transport to an unintended time and location, say Soviet era Moscow, or worse, Siberia. (and yes, there is a font called Siberian, a unicase, sans-serif). But for almost all of us, we are surrounded by fonts. Simon Garfield has certainly touched many, particularly in the GR community, with his work. We all do love to read and are probably more susceptible to the attraction of beauty, utility and charm in fonts than most. Yeah, we bad. But not only are fonts significant in the books, magazines, newspapers, and web-sites we read, they demand our attention as we walk down the street, step into an elevator, check the time, unwrap our breakfast, decide what faucet to twist when washing our hands, and they call to us from the labels on our clothing, whether obnoxiously plastered on the outside or applied more decently in clothing interiors. They are on traffic lights, highway signs, airport directives, the sides of police, fire and emergency vehicles. And they have, of course, been around in different times. Fonts do seem to capture elements of the zeitgeist.

A favorite haunt of mine back in the day

Thank goodness we have not heard of anyone with an allergy or aversion to fonts. Such an unfortunate would, under the onslaught of type in which we live, soon be reduced to a quivering mound of jelly. Fonts are everywhere and someone not only decided what font needed to be attached to each and every word, someone had to design each and every one. And I am not referring solely to you law-averse sorts (you know who you are) who communicate your needs with literal cut-and-paste design. Really, someone else designed each and every letter.

For particularly lazy criminals this Ransom Note Vector font might come in handy

Garfield offers us a laudable overview not just of what is out there in the world of fonting, (See, I didn’t say he was a font of wisdom on the subject) but how each and every bit of it (OK, OK, not each and every bit, but a whole lot of it) came to be, with notice given to many of those who did the hard work of designing and literally casting the dies which have defined printing for hundreds of years.

For those who might only know of Gutenberg from the project that is named after him, it was illuminating to learn that he had been a blacksmith before inventing the printing press. Working with molten metal definitely relates. Garfield offers us a considerable cast of characters (one might say they were all type cast. I wouldn’t. Or that they comprised a cast to die for. No, not me. That would be too low. But some might.) responsible for how words look. Gill Sans, for example was created by, no shock, Eric Gill. (Mister Sans is unaccounted for) Matthew Carter, the founder of Bitstream, designed Verdana among many others. John Baskerville designed the font that was named for him, but there was no mention of his dog. There really is a guy named Bodoni out there, first name, Giambattista. And on it goes. Some of these type-designers’ stories are more interesting than others. But if you find the one you are reading beginning to induce yawns, hang on for a few pages. There will be another that might catch your interest. There is attention given to the development of fonts in various countries, most notably Switzerland, Germany, France and England. Perhaps the most delicious name in the book belongs to a printer from the 1500s. Wynkun de Worde, the first Fleet Street printer, used an expanding range of typefaces, a big innovation at the time.

(Brothers Blynkun and Nodde de Worde did not get any ink here.)

My absolute favorite item in the book has to do with a spoof published in The Guardian on April Fool’s Day in 1977, to mark the 10th anniversary of the Indian Ocean nationhood of San Serriffe. And no, it was not leaked by a twenty-something intelligence worker.

Some readers, we are told, tried to book holidays there

There is much information of other sorts as well in Just My Type. Garfield looks at research that says that our brains demand evenness in a font. He looks at the gold rush of printing that followed Gutenberg, at whether a font can be German or Jewish, and at tools for helping identify individual fonts, both books and software. And he offers some intel on how this or that locality selected the font to be used across their cities, for things like airport or street signage. In addition there are some bits on characters (the type type, not the human sort) most of us have never heard of. Doctor Seuss would be thrilled.

Letters from Seuss’s On Beyond Zebra

There are certainly many bad fonts out there. Garfield offers a list of the ten worst fonts in the world. With the explosive growth in the number of such creatures, I imagine this is a list that will be a challenge to maintain.

Ok, so this can be a fun book for us reader-sorts. But I confess it was not a total love fest for me. I found that the illustrations offered for many of the fonts were not sufficient, or even sometimes available. Also, as someone with a memory that is not nearly so well formed as the metal dies in question here, I found that much of the information seemed to slip past, in one eye and out the other. It was a lot to take in. So, that’s my mandatory gripe. If I could give the book four and a half stars I would, for the occasional glazing over I experienced. But there is such a wealth of interesting information that my kinder parts persuaded me to go ahead and submit a fiver.

One can only pray that the new fonts that continue to fill our world and our sensibilities will do at least as well, and hopefully even better than those that have come before. And it seems that we should take no chances with this, so I offer here the beginning of a celestial wish for visibility, clarity and readability

Helvetica, full of grace, the font is with thee…

you know, just in case.

Posted 6/14/13