The prophecies of Nostradamus, today popularly believed to be the work of a charlatan, are given new life in Morten St. George's Incantation of the Law Against Inept Critics: A Guide to Cryptic Thinking. St. George discovered that some of the famous stanzas masked their message by means of a unique type of cryptography involving the deployment of a wide array of deception devices. Nonetheless, a rigorous and systematic unraveling of these devices does not always wind up with the prophecies confirming recorded history. Unperturbed, St. George allows his decoding techniques to take the prophecies to where they lead:

• Napoleon Bonaparte was murdered on his island of captivity by poison in the wine, instigated by a woman enraged over the defeat of his army in 1813.

• President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a group of conspirators led by his vice-president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Officially accused by the Warren Commission, Lee Harvey Oswald was completely innocent since the bullets that killed Kennedy were fired from a rooftop, not from an open window.

• The JFK conspirators were also behind the assassination of Kennedy's brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, several years later.

• Martin Luther King was assassinated because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, not because of racism.

• Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was assassinated because of his support for the anti-Islamic Shah of Iran, not because of his efforts to make peace with Israel.

• The Russians paid the Bulgarians with a suitcase containing gold and more than a hundred thousand rubles to attempt the assassination of Pope John Paul II.

• American satellites over the Falkland Islands guided a British submarine to an Argentine cruiser, which was torpedoed resulting in the death of hundreds of Argentine sailors.

St. George claims that this information, as well as a clear allusion to all the major events of world history from Hiroshima to September 11, are conveyed by a mere forty-two stanzas that interconnect in intricate ways to supply the needed details. According to St. George, these forty-stanzas were originally part of a group of one hundred stanzas written in the sixth century, a thousand years before the time of Nostradamus. St. George, however, does not view this as a strategic problem for the prophecies: "If the prophecies foresaw historical secrets, it is safe to assume that they also foresaw their translation into French; consequently, what we see in Nostradamus' book are the intended prophecies. Even the destruction of the remaining fifty-eight prophecies can be deemed as foreseen and thus intended."

As for the other nine hundred stanzas (Nostradamus published a total of 942 stanzas), St. George says they are largely re-writes, re-combinations, or thematic derivatives of elements of the original one hundred stanzas, with lots of new place names thrown in for good measure. Indeed, meticulous analysis of the 942 stanzas reveals a large number of repeating terms and concepts. Consequently, according to St. George, the other nine hundred stanzas have no prophetic merit at all; their purpose was only to mask or conceal the forty-two stanzas of the sixth century, and they were very successful at doing just that.

When asked if the forty-two prophecies were the product of extraordinary psychic powers, St. George asserted: "The future cannot be foreseen by means of psychic powers, nor by means of astrological calculations, tarot cards, black magic, crystal balls, or any other such thing." Then pressured to explain the prophecies, St. George replied: "Super-civilization technology. Very simple, really. You gain access to the time stream by orbiting our planet at the speed of light."

The final question was: What was the motive for writing one hundred prophecies in the sixth century? To this, St. George responded: "The gloom of the Dark Ages was already upon the scene, and ignorance became perpetually self-generating. It's a common misconception that technological progress is an inherent characteristic of humankind. Without intervention, western civilization today would be exactly like it was back then, embroiled in an endless cycle of famine, plague, and petty warfare. It took the prophecies fourteen hundred years to achieve their objective, which seems like a long time by the standard of a human lifetime, but might not be such a long time by other standards."