WORST "GONZO JOURNALISM" EVER

A Review of The Men Who Stare At Goats by Jon Ronson

Hey Folks,

The Men Who Stare At Goats should be a great book, but it’s not.

It’s about a fascinating subject, it’s full of fascinating characters, and it describes a fascinating episode of U.S. history. Yet somehow it manages to be dull, unsatisfying, aggravating, and even offensive.

As you’ve probably guessed, I’m not easily offended. But a merry romp through the wacky world of psychological torture? Yeah, that’ll do it.

I came across a copy of The Men Who Stare At Goats at the Value Village near my mom’s house in Ottawa. I just wanted a light summer read. I saw the Coen Brothers movie The Men Who Stare At Goats many years ago, and I vaguely remember liking it.

I enjoyed the book a lot less. I paid 99 cents for it, and part of the reason that I’m writing this is that I feel ripped off. As a huge fan of Hunter S. Thompson, I’m pissed off that this trash apparently qualifies as gonzo journalism.

The Men Who Stare At Goats is about a division of the U.S. military which focused on psychic warfare. The title comes from their efforts to hone their psychic abilities to the point of being able to kill animals simply through mind-power. (It didn’t work).

The whole story is wacky and ridiculous, proving that the old joke about military intelligence being an oxymoron isn’t far from the truth. Military men did a lot of silly things investigating psychic warfare. But there’s a ton of essential context that the book leaves out, which leads me to conclude that the book is very much a limited hangout.

Why do I think that? Well, because the book doesn’t explain WHY military intelligence started investigating psychic warfare. The author would have you believe it emerged for no other reason than to help demoralized American soldiers overcome their Vietnam Syndrome.

The real reason was that the scientific evidence for psychic phenomena had become unignorable, and the U.S. army accepted its truth.

As Daniel Pinchbeck explains in 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl:

The data was combed through by U.S. government panels of scientific experts, including professional skeptics, in the 1980s and 1990s. The Congressional Research Service, in 1981, concluded: “Recent experiments in remote viewing and other studies in parapsychology suggest that there exists an ‘interconnectiveness’ of the human mind with other minds and with matter. This interconnectiveness would appear to be functional in nature and amplified by intent and emotion.” According to the Army Research Institute (1985): “The bottom line is that the data reviewed in [this] report constitute genuine scientific anomalies for which no one has an adequate explanation or set of explanations ...their theoretical (and eventually, their practical) implications are enormous.” The weight of evidence impelled the American Institutes for Research, reviewing declassified studies in psi research performed by the CIA, to recommend to the U.S. Congress, in 1995, that “future experiments focus on understanding how this phenomenon works, and on how to make it as useful as possible. There is little benefit to continuing experiments designed to offer proof.”

That’s right, folks. The science was settled by 1995. Magic is real.

Naturally, high-ranking members of the U.S. power structure wanted to learn how to weaponize this new knowledge, as well as be able to to defend against enemies who might employ magical tactics.

The U.S. Army would have been grossly negligent if they didn’t research psychic warfare. Yet Jon Ronson somehow didn’t think any of this was important enough to mention.

Speaking of the author, let’s take a minute to talk about him.

Jon Ronson is an author and filmmaker who seems the fit the profile of an establishment propagandist to a tee.

According to Wikipedia:

His second book, Them: Adventures with Extremists (2001), chronicles his experiences with people labelled as extremists. Subjects featured in the book include David Icke, Randy Weaver, Omar Bakri Muhammad, Ian Paisley, Alex Jones, and Thomas Robb. Ronson also follows independent investigators of secretive groups such as the Bilderberg Group.^[5] The narrative tells of Ronson's attempts to infiltrate the "shadowy cabal" fabled, by these conspiracy theorists, to rule the world.^[6]

Ah. That makes sense. So he’s one of those dipshits like Michael Shermer who explains to normies why everyone who doesn’t believe what they’re supposed to believe is a credulous, easily-duped simpleton with pudding for brains. Unlike the people who believe mainstream media and establishment-approved scientists like Peter Hotez. They know best, of course.

Anyway, the book’s too lousy to be worth cataloguing its many failings, but I will quickly mention a few. For one, I don’t think that this qualifies as gonzo journalism because the writing is too wooden. It’s written in the first person, but it contains little of the spirit or perspective of the author, who evokes about as much pathos as a landscape painting in the lobby of a Day’s Inn.

The fun of gonzo journalism is that the subject becomes part of the story. This is written in the first person, but that didn’t automatically make a piece of writing qualify as gonzo journalism, if you ask me.

The book tells the story of Jim Channon, who is credited as being the genius behind the “Be All You Can Be” ad campaign, which includes what is apparently the most successful jingle of all time.

Jim Channon is one of many interesting characters that Ronson fails to vivify with his stilted, vapid prose.

Jim Channon

Also Jim Channon

Even though I just finished reading a book about him, I still don’t know what to make of this guy, other than that he’s quite the character.

According to Wikipedia:

James B. Channon (September 20, 1939^[1]- September 10, 2017)^[2] was a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, New Age futurologist, and business consultant. He was primarily known for authoring the First Earth Battalion Operations Manual (1979, and later editions),^[3] a popular book pointing the way toward a New Age transformation in the U.S. military. The graphic-heavy publication was inspired by Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog.

And on the page for the First Earth Battalion, you’ll find this:

Channon imagined a new battlefield uniform that would include pouches for ginseng regulators, divining tools, foodstuffs to enhance night vision, and a loudspeaker that would automatically emit "indigenous music and words of peace."^[1][2]

Like many New Age types, it’s hard to know how seriously to take this guy. Did he really believe the U.S. Army could be converted into a force for good? Was this an elaborate put-on? A weird sublimation of the suppressed desire of career military men to escape the rigid forms of thinking necessitated by their profession?

Well, if you want real answers to such questions, you won’t find them in The Men Who Stare At Goats. But if you listen to Jim Channon speak, it sure seems like he believed in his own schtick.

Jim Channon advocated for the positive use of psychological warfare, such as playing soothing music to calm down potential insurgents in countries under U.S. military occupation.

He also promoted the use of non-lethal weapons such as militarized Sticky Foam, which was intended to immobilize rioters without doing physical damage. It was used in Somalia once. It didn’t work.

The Men Who Stare At Goats teems with flamboyant eccentrics just as colourful as Jim Channon, but Jon Ronson manages to make them all boring except one, whose story is too depressing to get into here. If Ronson ever wises up and realizes he’s not cut out to be a gonzo journalist, he should consider a second career as a demotivational speaker.

But the real reason this book pissed me off so much is because of the way it makes light of psychological torture.

Perversely, Jim Channon’s ideas about using Tibetan chants were used in the U.S. government’s assault on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. We’re talking about innocent people who were psychologically tortured before being murdered. Not really that funny.

Years later, it was widely reported that the U.S. army experimented with using music as a form a psychological torture in Iraq.

Remember that? They had detainees in shipping containers, and they were blasting them with the Barney the Dinosaur “I love you” song on loop for hours or maybe even days on end.

Listen to the song and tell me that’s not some psychopathic shit.

Here’s an excerpt from the book:

Personally, I don’t find this funny.

You’ll have to excuse me. You see, I cut my teeth on anti-Iraq War activism, so I happen to care quite a bit about this chapter on U.S. history, which most Americans are happy to (mostly) forget.

Here, let me refresh your memory.

The woman in that picture, by the way, says she has “no regrets” about torturing her victims.

A 2012 article quotes her as saying:

“They weren’t innocent. They were trying to kill us and you want me to apologize to them? It’s like saying sorry to the enemy.”

They were civilians.

The Men Who Stare At Goats contains a passage that will make you question how benevolent Jim Channon’s intentions ever really were.

Jim!" I said, "would you say that blasting Iraqi prisoners with the theme tune to Barney is a legacy of the First Earth Battalion?"

"I'm sorry?" said Jim.

"They're rounding people up in Iraq, taking them to a shipping container, and blasting them repeatedly with children's music while repeatedly flashing a bright light at them," I said. "Is that one of your legacies?"

"Yes!" Jim said. He sounded thrilled. "I'm so pleased to hear that!"

"Why?" I asked.

"They're obviously trying to lighten the environment," he said, "and give these people some comfort, instead of beating them to death!" He sighed. "Children’s music! That will make the prisoners more ready to divulge where their forces are and shorten the war! Damn good!"

I think Jim was imagining something more like a crèche than a steel container at the back of a disused railway station.

"I guess if they play them Barney and Sesame Street once or twice," I said, "that's lightening and comforting, but if they play it, say, fifty thousand times into a steel box in the desert heat, that's more... uh... torturous?"

"I'm no psychologist," said Jim, a little sharply.

Speaking of Sesame Street, this story gained a new sickening layer when the author pays a visit to one of the guys that writes songs for that famous show.

Christopher Cerf has been composing songs for Sesame Street for twenty-five years. His large Manhattan townhouse is full of Sesame Street memorabilia—photographs of Christopher with his arm around Big Bird, etc.

"Well, it's certainly not what I expected when I wrote them," Christopher said. "I have to admit, my first reaction was, 'Oh my gosh, is my music really that terrible?'"

I laughed.

"I once wrote a song for Bert and Ernie called 'Put Down The Ducky'," he said, "which might be useful for interrogating members of the Ba'ath Party."

"That's very good," I said.

"This interview," Christopher said, "has been brought to you by the letters W, M, and D."

"That's very good," I said.

We both laughed.

I paused.

"And do you think that the Iraqi prisoners, as well as giving away vital information, are learning new letters and numbers?" I said.

"Well, wouldn't that be an incredible double win?" said Christopher.

Christopher took me upstairs to his studio to play me one of his Sesame Street compositions, called 'Ya! Ya! Das Is a Mountain!'

"The way we do Sesame Street," he explained, "is that we have educational researchers who test whether these songs are working, whether the kids are learning. And one year they asked me to write a song to explain what a mountain is, and I wrote a silly yodeling song about what a mountain was."

Christopher sang me a little of the song:

Oompah-pah!
Oompah-pah!
Ya! Ya! Das is a mountain!
Part of the ground that sticks way up high!

"Anyway," he said, "forty percent of the kids had known what a mountain was before they heard the song, and after they heard the song, only about twenty-six percent knew what a mountain was. That's all they needed. You don't know what a mountain is now, right? It's gone! So I figure if I have the power to suck information out of people's brains by writing these songs, maybe that's something that could be useful to the CIA for brainwashing techniques."

Just then, Christopher's phone rang. It was a lawyer from his music publishers, BMI. I listened into Christopher's side of the conversation:

"Oh really?" he said. "I see... Well, theoretically they have to log that and I should be getting a few cents for every prisoner, right? Okay. Bye, bye."

"What was that about?" I asked Christopher.

"Whether I'm due some money for the performance royalties," he explained. "Why not? It's an American thing to do. If I have the knack of writing songs that can drive people crazy sooner and more effectively than others, why shouldn't I profit from that?"

This is why, later that day, Christopher asked Danny Epstein—who has been the music supervisor of Sesame Street since the very first program was broadcast in July 1969—to come to his house. It would be Danny’s responsibility to collect the royalties from the military if they proved negligent in filing a music-cue sheet.

For an hour or so, Danny and Christopher attempted to calculate exactly how much money Christopher might be due if—as he estimated—his songs were being played on a continuous loop in a shipping container for up to three days at a time.

"That's fourteen thousand times or more over three days," said Christopher. "If it was radio play I'd get three or four cents every time that loop went through, right?"

"It would be a money machine," concurred Danny.

"That's what I'm thinking," said Christopher. "We could be helping our country and cleaning up at the same time."

"I don’t think there’s enough money in the pool to pay for that rate," said Danny. "If I'm to be negotiating for ASCAP [American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers], I’d say it would come in the category of a theme or jingle rate, some kind of knock-down."

"Which is an appropriate term because there’s evidence that the prisoners are being knocked down as they listen to the music," said Christopher.

We all laughed.

The conversation seemed to be shifting uneasily between satire and a genuine desire to make some money. "And that's just in one interrogation room," said Danny. "If there’s a dozen rooms, you’re talking money. This is non-sponsored?"

"That's a good question," said Christopher. "It’s state-sponsored, I think. Would I get more money if it is or it isn’t?"

"Now, would we have a special rate for Mossad?" said Danny.

We laughed.

I don’t know about you, but I find every part of that passage disgusting, disturbing and infuriating.

I think I need a musical interlude. How about you?

Ah, here we go: A Call For Blood. This one goes out to every unrepentant U.S. soldier who participated in the War on Terror, as well as all the bureaucrats who enabled it, the reporters who sold it to the public, and the corporations who profited from it.

Keep in mind that I read The Men Who Stare At Goats because I wanted a nice, light summer read. You see why I’m so pissed?

And hacks like Jon Ronson can get rich whitewashing U.S. torture, whereas actually talented writers toil in obscurity because any genuine commitment telling the truth is practically guaranteed to get you shut out of the mainstream media these days.

Speaking of Ronson, Wikipedia also mentions that:

Ronson is Jewish^[38] and is a "distinguished supporter" of Humanists UK.^[39][40]

A quick perusal of that group’s Wikipedia page reveals that it is thinly-disguised anti-Christian group of meddling busybodies trying to foist their secularist pseudo-science on British schoolchildren.

Humanists UK also support humanist volunteers on the local Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education which currently determine the Religious Education syllabus for each local authority. Educational issues have always featured prominently in Humanists UK campaigns activities, including efforts to abolish compulsory daily collective worship in schools and to reform Religious Education so that it is "Objective, Fair and Balanced" (the title of an influential 1975 booklet) and includes learning about humanism as an alternative life stance.

The organisation opposes the teaching of creationism in schools. In September 2011, Humanists UK launched their "Teach evolution, not creationism" campaign,^[25] which aimed to establish statutory opposition to creationism in the UK education system.^[26] The Department for Education amended the funding agreement for free schools to allow the withdrawal of funding if they teach creationism as established scientific fact.^[27] […]

Humanists UK has long campaigned in opposition to collective worship laws in the UK which require all schools to hold school assemblies "of a broadly Christian character". In 2019, the charity backed two parents to take a human rights challenge to those laws, arguing that the state had a duty to treat non-religious pupils equally and by effectively isolating those who withdraw from compulsory worship, discrimination occurs.^[29]

So… Does this mean that the British people should be prevented from celebrating Christmas because their traditional culture might offend “humanists”?

It should be pointed out that Christmas and Easter are undeniably “of a broadly Christian character”. Is this another example of secularists forcing their beliefs on people in the name of inclusion and tolerance?

I’m going with yes. It’s kind of a dead giveaway when you’ve got a picture of Richard Dawkins on your Wikipedia page.

Suspecting that Humanists UK is a front for the Fabian Society, I asked Chat GPT about its history.

Its answer was telling.

Some of the early supporters and members of the Union of Ethical Societies (later Humanists UK) were also associated with the Fabian Society, a socialist organization advocating for gradual social reforms rather than revolutionary changes. The Fabians were influential in British intellectual and political circles around the time of the Union's founding. The overlap in membership and shared intellectual climate likely influenced some of the ethical stances and activities of the organization.

All you have to do is read through the Humanists UK Wikipedia to see the similarities to Fabian socialism. I’m calling it: the two groups share a common mission.

But I digress. Back to why The Men Who Stare At Goats sucks so much.

The book fails to offer any context as to why high-ranking members of the U.S. army, never previously noted for their propensity for woo-woo New Age meditation techniques and airy-fairy philosophies, would invest significant resources into investigating psychic phenomena.

The truth is far more interesting than Jon Ronson would have you believe, and so I have chosen to share a relevant excerpt from Daniel Pinchbeck’s masterpiece 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, a book that has had a profound influence on my life.

The fact is that there has been scientific evidence supporting psychic phenomena for ages. Fake skeptics like Richard Dawkins and Jon Ronson remain wedded to their materialist worldview in spite of the evidence, not because of it.

The cosmology supported by the scientific evidence suggests either panpsychism, animism, or pantheism. It does not support the materialist, mechanistic worldview that neo-Darwinists continue to cling to.

This has been known to shamans and mystics since the beginning of time, and I’ve really gotten sick of fake skeptics strutting around with their fake cosmology like coked-up roosters.

As the great Juggalo Prophets from the Insane Clown Posse so aptly put it:

“Y’all motherfuckaz lyin’, and gettin’ me pissed.”

These people are NEVER going to concede defeat. They are NEVER going to change their minds. They are far too attached to their delusions. I’m not even sure they know they’re lying. Either way, they are ideologues impervious to reason, much the same as religious fanatics in the inflexibility of their minds.

The best way to deal with them is to give them a taste of their own medicine: We should mock and ridicule them and their asinine belief system.

Fuck atheism, fuck “scientific materialism”, fuck Fabian socialism and the humanism it rode in on.

Y’all just a bunch of lying fucking evildoers, and I’m calling your bluff.

Yours Truly,

Crow Qu’appelle

P.S. An Audiobook version of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl is now available on Audible!

P.P.S. Don’t be put off by the “2012” part of the title… I assure you it has aged extremely well!

THERE IS HARD SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE FOR PSYCHIC PHENOMENA

by Daniel Pinchbeck, excerpted from 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl.

The modern perspective rejects the legitimacy of psychic phenomena. We base our certainty on the materialist paradigm that insists consciousness is a manifestation, or epiphenomenon, of the physical brain. Materialism institutes a strict separation between minds, and between mind and matter. But our curt rejection of such phenomena as telepathy, telekinesis, and clairvoyance is called into question by the long history of psychical research. Although the fact is little known, psychic effects of various kinds have been demonstrated in controlled scientific experiments. The influence of directed thought causes significant statistical deviations from random variation in many areas, including casino games and experiments where images or feelings are transferred between subjects who are not in contact with each other. Dean Radin, director of the Consciousness Research Laboratory at the University of Nevada, has compiled and analyzed the statistical evidence for “psi” phenomena, presenting the data in his 1997 book, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. According to his meticulous study, thousands of experiments in telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance have fulfilled the scientific requirements of verifiability and repeatability, indicating that these phenomena do, in fact, exist, and can be measured.

It is not just a small coterie of cranks who approve these results. The data was combed through by U.S. government panels of scientific experts, including professional skeptics, in the 1980s and 1990s. The Congressional Research Service, in 1981, concluded: “Recent experiments in remote viewing and other studies in parapsychology suggest that there exists an ‘interconnectiveness’ of the human mind with other minds and with matter. This interconnectiveness would appear to be functional in nature and amplified by intent and emotion.” According to the Army Research Institute (1985): “The bottom line is that the data reviewed in [this] report constitute genuine scientific anomalies for which no one has an adequate explanation or set of explanations ...their theoretical (and eventually, their practical) implications are enormous.” The weight of evidence impelled the American Institutes for Research, reviewing declassified studies in psi research performed by the CIA, to recommend to the U.S. Congress, in 1995, that “future experiments focus on understanding how this phenomenon works, and on how to make it as useful as possible. There is little benefit to continuing experiments designed to offer proof.”

In The Conscious Universe, Radin examines the underlying biases, ingrained prejudices, and multiple mechanisms that cause the evidence for psychic phenomena to be ignored and suppressed. Some of these mechanisms are psychological and some are professional—scientists, like those in other fields, contend for research grants and academic positions, and those who take on unusual or heretical causes are often rejected by the system. On the most fundamental level, psychic phenomena may not be dismissed for rational reasons, but for irrational ones. The acceptance of an interconnectivity between minds, or between mind and matter, would shatter fundamental postulates of the materialist worldview, forcing a paradigm shift. If, as successful scientists and academic philosophers such as John Searle insist, “the brain causes consciousness,” and consciousness is limited to the brain, what mechanism would allow for telepathy, precognition, remote viewing, and the host of other effects that have been documented? By shielding their subjects or separating them by large distances, experiments in psychic phenomena have demonstrated that these phenomena cannot be caused by any type of physical “waves,” whether consisting of electromagnetism or any other form of energy.

Faced with such paradoxes, most of us choose to accept the default setting that makes life easiest, while reducing our exposure to ridicule. The contemporary world besieges us with worries and work that seem immediately important to our success and survival. Few of us have time to make our own investigation of such abstruse realms as psychic research—and why would we bother, when our “experts” assure us they have the situation wrapped up? Without giving the subject our careful attention, we accept the materialist view that does not allow for psychic capabilities—even if we have experienced psychic events, in some form or other, in our own lives (how many men have explored the ability to stare at a woman’s back until, sixth-sensing this pressure, she abruptly turns around? How many of us are tickled by the occasional synchronicity that seems to defy even the most extravagant dice rolls of probability?). This is not usually a considered decision, but a subliminal response designed to reduce our exposure to “cognitive dissonance.”

The materialist view is supported not just by the mainstream media, which tends toward knee-jerk dismissal of psychic phenomena, but by a hard core of skeptical scientists who continue to assert that any evidence for psi is the result of “bad science”—even when those results are published in peer-reviewed science journals that support the same science they consider to be “good.” Another response from skeptics, when faced with the statistical evidence, is to argue that, while something unusual seems to be happening in these experiments, it is not important enough to merit our attention. Radin disagrees, noting, “effects that are originally observed as weak may be turned into extremely strong effects after they are better understood. Consider, for example, what was known about harnessing the weak, erratic trickles of electricity 150 years ago, and compare that to the trillion-watt networks that run today’s power-hungry world.” Once we accept the reality of psychic effects, Radin suggests, we may experience a rapid evolution. Our ability to utilize these capacities—for healing, telepathy, telekinesis, and other purposes—could develop rapidly.