Robert Oppenheimer by Revilo P. Oliver The Fly in the Ointment IT IS HIGH TIME we returned from our excursus to Mr. Catran and took notice of one nugget of wisdom he offers us, an injunction that we must never study history. History, you see, would tell us what human beings are by nature, and prophets of a…

by Revilo P. Oliver A Question of Taxonomy THE READER WILL have noticed what was illogical and literally untrue in the foregoing section, and will have made allowance for the vagaries of our language, but the point deserves comment. On the basis of the report in Mr. Dieckmann’s book, I made a statement…

by Revilo P. Oliver The Anatomy of Revolution NEW WORLDS have always been the shining bait dangled before simpletons by revolutionaries, who can never deliver what they promise. The famous Jesus is reported in the various gospels to have made all sorts of glowing promises, but Christianity nevertheless…

by Revilo P. Oliver Is There Any Hope? IN THE Eighteenth Century, as Voltaire tells us, two extraterrestrials, Micromégas, a native of Sirius, and his friend, a Saturnian academician, stopped by the earth and discovered, somewhat to their astonishment, that there was life on it. Their scientific…

H.G. Wells by Revilo P. Oliver Metaphysics IT IS EASY TO account for the sudden vogue of “science fiction” in the later 1920s. As we have already remarked, it was a novel form of fantasy, refreshing to palates weary of the traditional forms, which had been cultivated almost to exhaustion. But it was really…

Triumph of Daedalus Over Fate and Futility (2017) by Bryan Larsen (bryanlarsen.com) by Revilo P. Oliver Superstition Springs Eternal PLUS ça change, plus c’est la même chose. “New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.” It is human nature that is meant in the familiar Horatian tag, naturam expelles…

Jeremy Rifkin by Revilo P. Oliver Ain’t Science Wonderful? UNFORTUNATELY, for our race (I am not interested in others) common sense is not enough. Despite, our race’s characteristic recognition of the supreme authority of ascertained facts, it has a psychic need to escape now and then from the trammels…

“Spiritual” hoaxer Carlos Castaneda by Revilo P. Oliver Through the Looking Glass EARLY IN 1969, while looking over the ordure on a newsstand, I noticed a paperback, The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda, and I squandered $1.25 on it. It purported to record…

by Revilo P. Oliver Jewish scientific fraudster Immanuel Velikovsky Anything Goes! THE Skeptical Inquirer, a quarterly published in Buffalo, New York, and now completing its seventh year, is a praiseworthy periodical. I have read it with interest since its first issue. I admire the men who write…

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…