Joseph Banks Rhine by Revilo P. Oliver The Pip-Squeak Effect IN America’s Decline I quoted, from a journal that I kept in my youth, an entry made in 1934, when I tried to analyse the probable shape of the coming World War at a time when our “intellectuals” were blabbering about “world peace” and similar…

by Revilo P. Oliver THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is an old and highly respected periodical. It tries to report discoveries and significant developments in all of the major sciences, and although its pages are occasionally adulterated with “sociological” buncombe, its articles deal chiefly with physics,…

Jewish magician and “psychic” con man Uri Geller by Revilo P. Oliver Our Spooners WHEN I WAS in college (long ago, when it was still possible to get an education in some of them) I knew a number of men of considerable accomplishment in the genuine sciences. They would no more have wasted three…

Arthur Conan Doyle by Revilo P. Oliver Scientific Suckers IT IS TRUE that quite a few men who attained competence, and some who attained distinction, in some one of the sciences have evinced remarkable gullibility, but that was almost always a susceptibility to some superstition about the supernatural…

by Revilo P. Oliver EARLY IN 1983, fifty-five years after it was perpetrated, Margaret Mead’s great anthropological hoax was at last definitively exposed by the publication of Professor Derek Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa. See Ray Hill’s review of that book in the May issue of The Liberty Bell…

by Revilo P. Oliver IN THE FIRST CENTURY B.C. and the following century, Egypt, Palestine, and adjacent parts of the Near East swarmed with goetae, itinerant mountebanks who practiced thaumaturgy, performing tricks of magic to make the yokels gawk and part with their money. These fakirs were also…

Noam Chomsky by Revilo P. Oliver THE Scientific American, May 1990, contains (pp. 40 ff.) an eulogy of Noam Chomsky, the Jewish linguist who is perhaps the best known figure in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although newspapers delight in reporting such statements as his charge that the…

by Revilo P. Oliver (1989) DR. HERMANN Oberth, a German born in Romania, was one of the first men to use his scientific knowledge to invent a technology that he finally saw fully realized when he witnessed the launching of the rocket that first carried men to the moon. It is possible, indeed, that if his…

by An Instaurationist This sky throughout the day
Made thunderstorms in play,
Piling them up until
The East was hill on hill
Of gleaming gold and quartz
And crags and granite forts.
Now like a tired, small child,
With closed eye dream-beguiled,
It sleeps athwart the land,
But clenching in trailing hand…

by Revilo P. Oliver I AM SOMETIMES reproached with ignoring spiritual values. I certainly do not intend to do so, although I may not always mention them where they are to be taken for granted. By ‘spirit,’ however, I understand, not the ghosts and spooks so dear to the religious imagination, but the psyche,…