How Will Things Change Going Forward?

The virus continues to wreak its havoc in the US and all over the world, and as it does the governing paradigms stress and shift. We're entering a new era, a "brave new world" of sorts, and the outlines of it are beginning to be revealed.

The US imperial juggernaut is shuddering to a halt. "The World" cannot rely on the US for leadership or guidance but only for whining, complaints and chaos. "The World" has to go it alone without the US. This is a monumental strategic collapse, something eagerly longed for by the widespread nihilist contingent online, but like so much that passes for erudite opinion these days, the consequences are not thought through. Instead, the collapse of the Empire -- however you describe it -- is a Good Thing in and of itself, bugger the consequences.

This collapse, such as it is, may ultimately be attributed to the internal chaos of the Trump regime, but most observers and participants probably recognize the seeds were planted long before the advent of the Orange Shitgibbon, and symptoms of systems instability leading to eventual collapse were inbuilt long prior to Trump's election and installation.

I've maintained that our rulers have prepared for just this set of circumstances, and they're not too frightened of it. They knew it was coming. Some not only anticipated, they actively helped precipitate it. Crisis is opportunity after all.

The virus arose and spread, and here we are.

About half The World seems to have a handle on dealing with the virus positively; the other half does not. The US is in the latter category, but our rulers seem to think everything is going well enough. They, after all, are protected (for the most part) and do not witness nor do they suffer the losses of everyone else. They see a partial sketch of what's happening and think it's pretty good, all in all.

1) The stock market is doing OK thanks to enormous injections of "free money" for the rich and well-connected to play with.

2) Illness and death due to the virus is largely being confined to the Lower Orders where it belongs, reducing the population of useless eaters -- the old, the disabled, those with pre-existing conditions, the homeless, the mentally defective, the poor, the brown... yadda, yadda... with almost surgical precision. What's not to like if you're rich and well connected?

3) Government is now overtly authoritarian almost everywhere, and look, The People by and large are OK with it. There are periodic staged "revolts" -- the yowling moblets at state capitols, for example -- but it's mostly kayfabe, show business. The rightist mobs are helping to keep the Vox Populi from being heard at all. We can see that the efforts at mitigating the effects of the virus are limited, very limited, and to the extent they are working, they are merely slowing the impact of the virus and the chaos, not stopping or diverting it.

4) Illness and death rates are flattening or slowing in some places, rising and accelerating in others, and overall, the US is on course to witness a hundred million or more infections, a million or more deaths by the end of the year. And modeling predictions now suggest this rate of infection and death could continue for two or three years, even with a vaccine. Details of the virus aren't well known yet, but it doesn't matter. It's been established that the virus is "vicious" and "virulent" and does much damage among about 20% of the population. It hardly affects the other 80%. Even if 20% of the population dies (they won't) would it be a bad thing? Especially if the illness and death can be concentrated among the classes of useless eaters already identified? Sure enough, it looks like it can be, so what, exactly, is there to worry about? This is how our rulers are thinking about this thing. It's time we came to grips with it.

5) Main Street is being wiped clean yet again. As if the collapse of 2008 didn't do a good enough job. It took more than ten years to partially recover from that collapse. It appears that there won't be a recovery from this one. The Economy as we knew it isn't coming back. What will take its place is barely recognized as yet, but we have some clues.

• The death of Main Street (again) tells us that a handful of giant ("essential") corporations will dominate The Economy going forward. Independent enterpreneurship will all but vanish.
• A handful of banking giants will determine the economic status of everyone, and once determined that's where you'll stay for the rest of your (shortened) life. 
• New Deal social programs will go away. 
• Great Society social programs will go away.
• Public education will probably go away.
• Charity will take the place of some programs for some people. Otherwise, too bad so sad.
• Religion will become the universal opiate of the people, along with plenty of opiates.
• Typical lifespan will decline further.
• Typical income will decline further.
• Status will determine reward. Those who can't make it on their own won't make it at all unless they are of high enough status -- thus constantly winnowing the herd.
• Work will be transformed into something akin to "patriotic slavery." Once assigned to a status and function, that's where you'll stay until... well, the end.
• Accustomed accouterments of "civilization" such as electricity, running water, transportation, internet access, etc. will be gradually restricted only to those of high enough status to "deserve" them. As for the rest, oh well!
• A sham democracy may endure, but ultimately the uselessness of the practice will be clear. 
• Borders will be strictly controlled as the ruling interest is to reduce population, not increase it. 
• What used to be isn't coming back. There will be no 'better future' for most Americans. 

The End.

It didn't have to be this way.

Closing Down (in an abundance of caution...)

Our governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, had announcements to make yesterday. I've never been fond of her elementary school principal presentation, but I guess she thinks it's effective. The point was to drive home the importance of shutting down much of the state's economic and transportation activity in order to contain the spread of the Outbreak. There was an apparent case of community transmission yesterday. That triggered a raft of new restrictions.

Thus, while not being confined to their homes -- unless they have the virus -- New Mexicans are urged not to travel (especially not out of state), not to gather in groups of 10 or more, and not to work outside the home unless necessary. Many businesses and activities were ordered closed including most that would have more than 10 people on premises at a time. Restaurants can no longer serve patrons inside, they can only provide take out and delivery. Bars must close. Casinos must close. Social distancing is encouraged. Wash, wash, wash. Retailers are directed to put limits on purchases of paper products, soap, sanitizing supplies, and so forth (3 per at one time), and they are encouraged to provide special shopping hours for the old, the halt and the lame.

Schools have been closed for some time. Hand sanitizer has not been available for weeks, so distilleries are making it themselves -- since they have stocks of alcohol, after all, and apparently can get quantities of aloe vera gel -- and distributing it for free to first responders and police. Doctors' offices and hospitals are limiting contact with routine patients in order to prepare for possible corona virus patients. Dentists are cancelling routine appointments. I got a call from my pulmonologist yesterday asking me to postpone my appointment -- if I was feeling OK -- until this situation calmed down, as she would likely not be able to provide more than observational service. The pulmonary function test equipment was being reserved for those in immediate distress.

Yes, I am feeling OK, so I agreed to postpone, and then went ahead and postponed oncologist and rheumatologist appointments until September, when I hope things settle down somewhat, but who knows. I have not yet scheduled semi-annual rituxan infusions that would ordinarily be done in June and December. June will probably be impossible, but we'll see when the time comes.

Ms. Ché went to visit with friends in Albuquerque yesterday and they had a video call with their friend in Delaware. She's self-isolating for two weeks because she believes she's been exposed, though she has no symptoms, then she is thinking of heading to North Carolina to stay with a friend there. Delaware doesn't have a lot of cases, but our friend has been exposed to half of them, and there are many more in New Jersey and Maryland. So far, North Carolina has some dozens of cases, but the number isn't growing fast. Of course knowing the number requires testing, and in many places it is still not available or being done.

A neighbor came over to check on us yesterday while Ms Ché was gone. We keep an eye on one another. It's what you do. We're all in the elders with chronic conditions demographic. One of our neighbors is a long distance trucker who's usually gone five days a week or more. Younger than us, but probably at more risk, we give him a call now and then just to be sure he's ok. Ms Ché's relations in California and Nevada are hunkering down, too, either because of official policy or out of an abundance of caution.

And so it goes.

Stay home to the extent you can, wash and wash, check on neighbors and relations, and be safe.

I've referred to what's going on as a paradigm shift as consequential as those following 9/11 and the financial crash of 2008. I have no idea how we'll come out on the other side, but the signs don't bode well. And yet, there's always the potential for something better in the end, no?

Anticipating the Cull

Now that the US death toll from the Outbreak has passed 100 and all 50 states have reported infection (announced totals close to 6000, but actual totals may be 10-20 times higher) it's time to consider both the immediate future and the mid-term as well as a post COVID-19 future.

As I researched my ancestors, I was struck by how many of them and their relations died between 1918 and 1920. Some were old but most weren't. Hm. Spanish flu victims, probably. As was the case with many families, this loss wasn't discussed much while I was growing up. It must have had an effect, but nobody talked about it, and if I asked questions about it, I don't remember any answers if there were any.

I suspect it will be like that with regard to the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. There was a huge cull of Americans and many, many others around the world on top of the devastation of WWI due to the Spanish Flu, but it seemed to fade from memory fairly quickly. There is every sign there will be a significant cull due to the current pandemic -- how big is yet unknown. The incomplete statistics suggest an overall death rate of about 3%, but estimates of the real death rate vary between 1% or less to 5% or 6%. This is much higher than seasonal flu, and could mean as many as 2-3 million deaths in the US alone before the epidemic burns out (assuming it does). Deaths will be concentrated among the sicker of the old.

"Boomer Doomer" they call it.

This is only partially a joke, and the fact is, the loss of so many oldsters is not an unpleasant thought to some of the younger survivors. Indeed, surviving members of the ruling class might well appreciate the passing of a large percentage of the Boomer generation.

A major cull of humanity has long been seen by nihilists as necessary for the good of themselves or the earth, after all, and if the Outbreak can accomplish it, so much the better. If it's primarily a cull of the olds, how much more beneficial for the younger survivors would that be?

The immediate future is one of isolated anxiety for many millions of Americans. Out here in the wilderness, we've been under semi-lockdown, but most services are still operational, and while Ms. Ché and I stay in most of the time, we aren't limited to home confinement by any means. We go out for groceries, cat food, and supplies in our little town or in the next one, not that there's much on the shelves. We go into town for medical appointments or to socialize with friends. We could go to local and in town restaurants (most are still open) if we wanted. UPDATE: This afternoon, the governor ordered the closure of all bars, restaurants, casinos and so forth due to the enumeration of the first case without an identified source. Community transmission is assumed to have begun.

But we're very conscious of the risks, and we try not to push our luck. Ms. Ché and I are prime targets, not just Boomers, but Boomers with chronic underlying conditions.

In a telephone town hall with our congressmember yesterday, we learned that there is no community spread in New Mexico -- yet. The 23 28 currently identified cases are all in isolation and they are all due to travel-exposure and/or exposure within the household of someone infected. See update above. So far, no one has died, though I seem to recall at least one is hospitalized in critical condition.

Just north in Colorado, it seems the virus is raging, so I'm not at all sanguine about the likelihood of New Mexico escaping eventual widespread infection. It's not just Colorado. Texas and Arizona have cases and because of political ideology I strongly suspect they are underreporting cases and refusing to implement various mitigations. Sadly, we've seen this pattern throughout Trump-country, following the lead of the rightist media and Trump himself until recently. Ah but because there has still been very little testing, no one has any idea what the real infection rate is.

The immediate future is likely to include a good deal more "lockdown" procedures, but how strict it will become is hard to say. In fact, it seems as if Our Rulers, like Boris Johnson in Britain, are toying with the "herd immunity" fantasy by letting the virus infect a substantial percentage of the population and let nature take its course, along with triaging the ill and letting the young and strong survive.  The old and frail? Not so much.

Boris was apparently shamed off that approach as it would be overwhelming to the health care system, and it would mean literally millions dead in Britain alone. Ultimately there may be no choice, as the spread of the disease appears to be out of control in several locations, and so far there's been no real effort to end travel between these locations and the rest of the country.

China's experience, however, indicates that closing off travel between hot locations and elsewhere in the country seems to work, though it takes a while. The Chinese brought their infection rate and death rate down substantially by strictly limiting travel within China, indeed within cities and even apartment blocks. They also put up numerous temporary hospitals to treat those who became infected. It wasn't perfect, it still isn't. But it's been effective.

The Korean experience has been different, but it has also worked to lower the infection rate and death rate.

So far, though, the English-speaking countries and Western Europe have largely been failing, no matter what they try. There are mitigations, but they seem to be too little, too late. How that will translate into infection and death rates remains to be seen. But given the sense of calamity out there, we can expect rates to increase in every area, and substantially increase in some areas. For example, the Seattle area, the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, and a few other areas are having a very hard time right now and the expectation is they will get much worse before they get better. Many other places may not see a high infection/death rate, or even much of an effect at all. People may get sick but most or all will recover.

There will be a cull, no doubt, and most of the dead will be the old and unwell. How many? Who knows? And what will the world be like afterwards? That's the question.

"For the Love of God!" -- What Comes After Trump?

For all intents and purposes, Trump's power and authority was neutered toward the end of February (or March, depending on your point of view). He's simply not in charge of the government, which is in an anarchic -- but not yet chaotic-- state.

The interesting thing to me is that he has not (yet) been removed from office by subtle or overt means. So clearly he is serving a purpose on the Throne, even if he can't exercise any power from it other than having his personal Gestapo terrorize brown people in the Heartland. Why that's allowed while almost nothing else is, I'm not entirely sure. Entertainment for the crackers? I dunno.

Having this empty mechanical Thing sitting on the Throne may be entertaining enough for the rubes but it gives everybody else the willies. It's Grand Guignol at best. Walking Dead most of the time. Things are happening quite apart from anything Trump says or does, but what he says and does -- no matter how stupid or irrelevant -- dominates every news cycle, and that's probably why he's being kept on the Throne. So we don't see or recognize what's going on behind the scenes and who is directing the pageant.

Precedents are being set.

The world has been turned upside down and things will never be the same again.

This could be a good thing. Just as Trump or Congress or the SCOTUS might -- for once in their worthless lives -- do the right thing. It could happen. It won't. But it could.

What comes After Trump? How will the White House and the world be changed by his advent and demise?

I've said many times that his advent represents the apotheosis of the neoLibCon paradigm. Many observers -- and voters for that matter -- on the other hand, bethought themselves that Trump would smash and destroy neoLibCon - ism once and for all when that was never his idea or intent. It was a desire projected onto him. (Much the same happened with Obama, and look what it brought us: Trump and the accelerated implementation of the Program).

Many observers now claim that neoLibCon-ism will crash and burn on its own as the rise of the nationalist white right sweeps the global North and West. Somehow, nationalism and white supremacy are deemed the death knell for neoLibCon-ism and Globalism, though I can't for the life of me fathom why. It's simply a rearrangement of winners and losers, it has no effect on the paradigm at all.

The Forever Wars, the exploitation of the Rabble, the looting, the indecency of it all will continue at an accelerated pace. That's all. In other words, nothing changes -- except that scapegoating of selected minorities will become the distraction of the moment.

That's an important addition to the neoLibCon kit bag, but it ultimately changes nothing.

After Trump will we see a succession of clowns and rakes and buffoons on the Throne? Come to think of it, isn't that what we've been seeing since Reagan with few (no?) exceptions?

On the other hand, as mentally incompetent as Reagan was (we knew about it when he was governor of California, but nobody listened to us) he had a crew of wreckers come in with him who were clever and executed a program that essentially changed the nature of the federal government that was accepted by both political parties. It's a legacy that continues.

I've said that Reagan was responsible for uprooting the Progressive operating system (or paradigm of governmental operations) first in California then in the federal government, and I doubt we'll ever get it back, though strangely that's what a lot of the so-called populists are pining for.

We're actually devolving government into something closer to neoFeudalism.

I have many, many reservations about Progressivism, but most of the time it seemed to be better aligned with the public interest than its replacements.

No, a government that serves only the interests of the Highest of the Mighty, slavishly, is not in the public interest and cannot be.

Trump -- for all his lack of power and authority -- is tilting the government so far over to favor the rich and well-connected that what will emerge After Trump would be unrecognizable as a government at all.

It would be little more than a service to the rich and a disaster to everyone else.

By design, not accident.

That would truly be the apotheosis of neoLibCon rule, and it could easily become a permanent (well, long lasting) state.

The Future looks bleaker every day.

What Happens When The Market Moves On?

Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) in Santa Fe.

I'm still processing some of the material from the exhausting day-long seminar at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art in Santa Fe that Ms Ché and I attended yesterday. Oh, and I rallied and went marching at lunchtime with the People's Climate rallyers and marchers. It was a full day.

The main issue alluded to but never entirely clarified was that The Market (for Art) has moved on and those who don't move with it and don't move quickly enough are shit out of luck.

There was only one working artist on the panel who I could be sure was making a living from his art, Tony Abeyta, all the rest were reliant on academic or institutional positions for their day to day wherewithal and succor.

Now that's sad. Or perhaps not.

There were a number of artists on exhibit at the Museum, none of which were acknowledged during the seminar, this despite the fact that the work of one, Ric Gendron, surrounded the symposites who were so deeply discussing the matter of Art and specifically "Indian Art" inside an institution dedicated to the notion that Contemporary Native Art is... a thing. That is to say, artists of the Native persuasion have a vital contemporary perception and voice and they use them in ways that don't necessarily fit the standards and expectations of The Market or the dominant-culture institutions such as the New Mexico Museum of Art on the other side of the Plaza.

The fact that none of the artists on exhibit at MoCNA was mentioned, nor were any of the exhibits acknowledged in any way by the panelists -- or even by the Museum's own curator-hostess -- was the first clue to me that the seminar lacked grounding. It was instead at best an abstract and academic exercise.That's what made it exhausting and ultimately empty in my view.

Without grounding in The Art and the Artists Themselves, everything else is suspect.

And so it went.

This was not unlike the series of lectures we attended at the New Mexico Museum of Art last year and into the spring, in which the history of Art in New Mexico was highlighted -- well, the Legend was -- but without really connecting with the huge quantity of Art possessed by the Museum, some of which surrounded the attendees but went unmentioned unless someone attending (me?) asked about it.

The problem, as I saw it, is that The Market has moved on, and although Santa Fe is still one of the chief art markets in the United States, it ain't what it used to be, the level of competition among artists for attention, let alone making a living is insane, and the Market for Southwest Art isn't sufficient to support so many artists on the one hand, and Santa Fe's galleries and other art market outlets are concentrating their efforts and interests on art and artists from elsewhere, whether Europe or Africa or wherever.

The New Mexico Museum of Art has -- or had -- a vast collection of Southwest Art dating from the era of the First New Mexico Artists Blumenschein and Phillips (ahem) to very recently. They've sold off a good deal of what they had in order to acquire more contemporary works, expand their collections into more diverse styles and to acquire works by artists from other eras, genres and locations.

The Museum of Contemporary Native Arts also has a vast collection, most of which stays unseen like that of the New Mexico Museum of Art and practically every other museum I know of. The museum Market demands it be so, unfortunately -- or perhaps fortunately depending on your point of view. If the entire collections were available to view by the public, after all, it would be overwhelming on the one hand, and it would prevent the Museums from fostering/highlighting/promoting certain artists and elements in their collections while diminishing or ignoring others. But that's how the Market works, and every museum that wishes to be taken seriously must play the game by the rules of the Museum Marketplace or be ignored and defunded by the People Who Matter.

It's a terrible game they must play, but play it they do, or eventually they perish.

As I mentioned, Tony Abeyta was the only artist on the panels I was sure was not dependent on the Institution or the Academy in order to make a living. He makes a handsome living from his art. Not many artists in any field of any ethnicity can do that anymore -- if they ever could. He is a business, an enterprise, a factory. In other words, he knows how to work The Market to his advantage.

Most artists, at least in my experience, don't have the temperament or skill to do what Tony does, and he mentioned during his talk that when he came up to Santa Fe in the '80s to do his time at IAIA, the place was jam-packed with some of the most highly regarded and financially successful Native artists ever, and he mentioned some of them: Allan Houser, Harry Fonseca, RC Gorman, and so on, and he said that all of these artists were mentors to him and to other Native artists, and they provided the kind of richness of experience that he feels obligated to share with the artists he mentors, but it's not the same anymore.

It's not the same any more because the ferment driven by financial success isn't there any more. Only a few are able to make ends meet and have a little extra from the sale of their art, everyone else has to do something else to get by. Art for them, essentially by definition, is a 'hobby' not a career. Because they can't possibly make a living at it.

It doesn't matter whether they are skilled and creative as all get out; the fact is, The Market rules, and The Market has no interest in them, no room for their work, and most of all, The Market doesn't care a whit whether they succeed or fail. At various times, in the '80s when Tony Abeyta was coming up for example, The Market in Santa Fe and elsewhere was in love with Indian Artists and some were financially successful in ways not seen since.

As I process what came through the seminar yesterday, I recall with some clarity what The Market was like back then, and how that era has passed. It isn't like that any more. Not only are the (Indian) artists who were so prominent back then mostly passed to the other side, the interests and demands of The Market are quite different now.

So. What are Indian artists to do? And it's an important question. One for which there was no answer yesterday, one for which there may be no answer in the end.

Part of the thrust of the discussion -- to the extent there was a thrust -- had to do with whether one was an artist or an Indian first. If there was a resolution, and I'm not sure there was, one is both -- if one is an Indian artist. It's self-evident, but the question must be asked, over and over again, in part because "Indian Art" isn't the same thing as standard and expected Western (ie: Market) Art, and Indians are thought to be always torn between their ancient traditions and their contemporary reality. An "Indian Artist" may work in "traditional" or "contemporary" styles, may combine them or utilize both of them in different contexts, the possibilities are endless. But ultimately, according to those who know and those who matter, the individual must decide whether to be an Artist (outside ethnicity and tradition?) or to be an Indian (outside of Art in the Western and Market sense?)

As Tony Abeyta put it (probably a bad paraphrase): "I'm an artist and I can't not be an Indian."

There isn't an either/or, there's a constant Both.

There was talk of the Boarding School Era and the suppression of Indian culture that went with it, and there's a constant background fear that something like that or worse could happen again. Indians are free-er now than they have ever been under the United States, but there is still the lingering fear that the dominant culture will perpetrate something awful simply because they can, and that Indians will suffer for it. Most white people never experience and can't imagine living under that kind of deeply seated fear, but I will say this: more and more are learning to.

Consequently, some Indian artists (how many, I don't know) would rather not be identified as "Indian" but would rather go to Market as Artists, devoid of ethnic baggage. Some can do that, I suppose, but why should they?

Some writers, too.

The issue isn't that they are Indians, though they are that. It is that they are Artists most of all.

If there is a Market niche for such people, good enough. But so far as I can tell, there really isn't. A freemartin Art Market is not a reality.

There was talk of Globalizing Indigenous Art and Artists, becoming a global movement somehow. And I thought, "Really?" There was fierce talk of collaborating with and coming to know and understand the breadth and depth of Indigenous Art world wide, and I thought, "For whom?" Talk of Bienniales filled the room, particularly the Venice Bienniale, where Indians and other Indigenous apparently have quite a presence among People Who Matter, and there was resistance.

Oh good, I thought. "Why should we go to these so-called 'Bienniales?' Why don't we have our own? Why don't they come here?"

Yes, well... can't do that. You see, that's not how The Market works. We don't tell it where to go or what to do, we follow it wherever it leads. If that means Venice or Rio or Sydney, that's where we go. It doesn't come here. Pshaw.

Except that's not entirely... true.

The Bienniale system is a way for People Who Matter to have some control and say over the Art Market, and to force artists to submit as supplicants to the demands and dictates of that segment of People Who Matter. It is perhaps the very definition of "colonization." One becomes the creature of the other, the servant, the handmaiden, the worshipful outsider seeking and perhaps by chance finding the smile and nod from one's Betters. If one is accepted at one of these Bienniales, one achieves a certain cachet and stature, but one is always subservient to Those Who Matter.

For one of the supplicants to declare independence and to suggest that the Bienniale system should hie itself hitherwards is near-heresy. That's not how it works. The supplicants do not declare a Bienniale, only the People Who Matter can do that, and they will declare a Bienniale where and when they want, without regard to the interests or wishes of Those Who Don't Matter. Got it? Good.

The issue of an Indian Artists Manifesto was briefly touched on. Not well or comprehensively, I must say. It was more of a gloss. "Is it time and should there be a manifesto?" Some of the panelists said yes, some said no. But what an artists' manifesto is and why they come about seemed too deep a consideration for the experts on the panel.

But in Santa Fe, you can't really sidestep or escape the question. Manifestos and art movements have been fundamental from the Beginning, whether you date that Beginning to Blumenschein and Phillips and their Broken Wagon Wheel above Taos in 1898 or to Carlos Vierra's purchase of a photo studio on the Santa Fe Plaza in 1904 or 05 or to the Cinco Pintores or what have you.

The point of these many manifestos and movements is the development and marketing of distinctive styles of art. In other words, the manifesto and movement in the art world is almost always a factor of being excluded from and forcing penetration of The Market.

Sometimes they work. Often they don't.

But without the unity provided by the manifesto and the movement, exclusion from The Market is almost guaranteed to be permanent.

Of course, Indian artists are not excluded from The Market, in fact, in Santa Fe, there are a number of specifically Indian Art Markets that are immense and highly regarded nationally and globally. The ones we have attended are literally overwhelming. Exclusion is not the issue. The problem is that The Market -- which determines "success" through sales -- is over-saturated, too many artists, too much stuff. The Market cannot support the numbers of artists involved.

A manifesto and movement (or their plurals) could separate out a certain segment of the now over-saturated Indian Art Market to make it distinctive. The SWAIA Indian Market in Santa Fe, for example, recently underwent a split, partly because it had grown too large and many of the artists involved felt they were being neglected and there was too little chance for new artists to emerge. The other factor, of course, is that the SWAIA Market could not support the number of artists involved.

The discussion yesterday almost completely avoided any of that consideration however, and the queston of a Manifesto was pretty much sidestepped.

At the end of the morning session, however, the issue of Native/Indigenous Art as it relates to social, economic and environmental conscience and justice was brought up, and for the first time, I felt that the symposium was actually connecting with reality and with the future.

Yesterday, there was a rally and march in Santa Fe in concert with the People's Climate Movement that is holding a series of demonstrations in New York in concert with the UN's climate conference to be held next week. There is also a Indigenous People's World Conference at the UN beginning this weekend.

It's a confluence of interests and activism, and some of those at the seminar recognized that the "movement" that some were advocating for Indian artists was already underway: it is the climate/environmental/indigenous peoples movement which for the moment is represented by events like the Peoples Climate events all over the country and the world.

At the Climate Rally in Santa Fe.

As the seminar broke for lunch, I went out to the Plaza to join the rally and march. There were speeches and exhortations and a New Orleans marching band and maybe a thousand people -- mostly white and a lot of them middle aged it seemed to me -- gathered together to share one another's presence and march to the Cathedral where someone was having a wedding the way they do on weekends in Santa Fe. Then they marched down San Francisco Street, and it was tremendously festive.

Hardly anyone on the street or at the seminar had any clue to what was going on.

Their focus has been so narrowed, they could barely imagine something of this sort taking place, nor could they imagine the linkages.

A man from out of town was trying to parallel park in front of the Cathedral; he smashed his car into another vehicle with New Jersey plates while the other driver watched from the sidewalk. Many witnesses including me saw what happened. The man who caused the wreck got out to check the damage. The other driver stood there in a kind of shock while she inspected the parking ticket she'd pulled off her windshield. The man checked the damage, mostly to his car, while the woman read her parking ticket. She looked at the man: "Would you mind moving your car so I can see what happened to my car?" The man looked at her: "Is this your car?" "Yes, I saw it all." "Oh." The man, who was from Missouri, moved his car a few inches forward, and the woman took a look at the damage to her car. It wasn't more than a couple of short scrapes. The man was standing beside her ready to give her his insurance and personal information, and she said: "Oh forget it. The car's a 2006 and those scrapes hardly show. There's more damage to your car. Just let it go." His car had a good-sized dimple in the rear bumper. "Just let it go," she said, "it isn't worth the bother." The man said thanks, got in his car and drove away.

Oddly enough, no one jockeyed to get into the parking place he left open. Parking places on the street are like gold during the height of tourist season, even if you get a ticket. The woman whose car had been hit went off toward the Palace of the Governors. I think she'd been at the seminar earlier.

Later, I spoke to the woman who'd presented the climate/environmental/social justice segment, and I told her how much I appreciated the fact that she brought it up, because I didn't think anyone that day was going to mention it. She nodded agreement. I told her that I thought it was important for people to make and understand the connections, but I doubted very many in attendance did. Nevertheless, it was important to make the point.

She sighed. "It's another step..."

There's much more I could say about what happened yesterday, but at the moment, today Amy Goodman is covering the march in New York, and lots of celebrities are turning up among the indigenous marchers.

As we know, nothing is more important than celebrity gets...

Edward "Robot" Goldstein Speaketh

Interesting. I picked this up over at FDL, and several things struck me about it:

A) Surprisingly, Snowden is able to speak quite clearly and the video of him is quite stable in this "robot" presentation as opposed to the herky-jerky, unwatchable and barely understandable presentation ("through seven proxies!!!") at SXSW.




B) He strikes me as someone making a sales-pitch for a product which he cannot quite show or describe. He talks in endless loops about something we're supposed to just "know," I guess, and ultimately it doesn't amount to anything concrete at all.

C) 'Taking back the Internet'? What is this supposed to be? A "Magna Carta?" Would this be some sort of agreement between the Internet Barons and a diminished government such as was concluded at Runnymede? An agreement, by the way, that only protected the Barons from the Crown, not the villeins from their overlords. And which was not anything remotely resembling "democracy."

All in all, I was quite taken with the technology -- my the set up in Moscow must have been dandy, and who did it? But the content? As with so many TED talks, not so much.

Corporate Defenders: Are They Necessary? And What -- Ultimately -- Do They Want Anyway?

In the recently released second segment of Glenn Greenwald's interview with Edward Snowden, recorded in Hong Kong in June, Snowden used a couple of locutions that I found instructive as to his motivations.

Quoting from the interview, Snowden says:

(3:03)…they [the government] are applying it [surveillance authority] to the whole society by basically subverting the corporate partnership…

(3:57) …US Government co-opts corporate power to its own ends…

[My emphasis]

I alerted on this kind of talk immediately because it's the kind of thing you hear from Libertarians and their fellow travelers all the time, and this particular way of speaking about the relationship between corporations and government -- that is, "subverted" and "co-opted corporate power" -- may as well be from the Koch Cookbook for Corporate Liberation. 

When I posted about this here and elsewhere, I made the point that he's got it completely backward, essentially inverting reality. The government -- Our So-Called Government -- serves corporate interests and is the creature of its corporate partners, not the other way around. The Government of the United States has long been effectively a wholly owned subsidiary of extremely powerful transnational corporations, and none of us are ever allowed to forget it.

"Step out of line, the man come and take you away..."

Make no mistake, Our Government was serving corporate interests then (in 1968), nearly as much as it is now, as anyone who was aware of the profits being made on the meatgrinder of the Vietnam War knew.

And yet here we see that in SnowdenWorld, it's just the opposite, The All-Powerful Government makes the corporations its bitches and slaves by "subverting" them and "co-opting" their power. That view, in my view, is seriously warped, but it gives us an insight into what's motivating Snowden and what his objectives may be. Snowden's views are aligned with those of Greenwald, who showed himself to be a Corporate Libertarian quite some time ago with his awkward and ham-handed defense of Citizens United and corporate personhood, and -- I would come to learn -- Snowden is aligned with quite a few other Corporate Defenders on the internet and in the digital data industry who apparently really do see themselves and their companies as "subverted" and "co-opted" by government, rather like kidnap or rape victims forced to engage in icky behaviors they otherwise wouldn't do if not for the coercion and imposition of authority upon them by nasty, evil government.

I see.

No. Wait.

This notion of government-evil/corporation-good is bullshit. Complete, utter bullshit. Corporate interests run governments at every level, top to bottom, practically everywhere around the world. There hasn't been an era of greater consolidated corporate control of government in history. Nothing even close to it has been encountered in this country since the Gilded Age, yet here's Snowden and other Corporate Defenders claiming against plain evidence to the contrary that corporate partners don't have enough independence and power, and that they are forced, somehow, to abide by icky government command and control, indeed that they are subverted and co-opted to the will of this Alien Government Thing, and here's proof!

Dude needs to get a grip.

He appears to be caught up in a Corporate Libertarian mindset -- and fantasy -- that I'm surprised to find is shared by so many otherwise rational and even progressive individuals who apparently see government as a kind of Ultimate Evil and corporations -- to the extent they "exist" at all -- as Benign Entities who would Rule Over Us with Loving Grace -- if only they were allowed to do so without the interference of ... (ewww!) government. [And that's only a little bit of hyperbole.]

In arguing these points at FDL yesterday, the Corporate Libertarian separation from reality became quite clear to me, as did the underlying authoritarianism of those who hold this viewpoint.

As I frequently ask of Libertarians: "Liberty for whom? To do what?" They never have an answer, because if they start answering it, the real repugnance and ugliness of their ideals would be revealed. Based on my own experience with Libertarians and their fellow travelers over many years, it has always been part of the Libertarian program to obfuscate and deny their real intentions and to propagandize the ignorant masses into believing in and acting on ideals of "liberty" and policies contrary to their own best interests.

My version of the Libertarian Motto: "I demand the liberty to impose my authority on you."

But this post is not about that. I have written many others that are. This post is about what I see as the end game of Corporate Libertarians, and what is driving Snowden in particular. This post is about the objectives of Corporate Defenders and whether their ideal world is really the world we want to live in now or in  the future.

Greenwald and Snowden said all they wanted was a debate about the kind of world we want to live in; their partisans have ordered the rest of us to confine that debate to the issue of the NSA's surveillance, which has -- not surprisingly -- almost nothing to do with the real debate we need to have.  Which is not to defend NSA's domestic surveillance activities in any way. It is merely to point out that NSA's surveillance activities are hardly the most important matter in the debate over the kind of world we want to live in.

I would say unfettered corporate control of that world is a far more important matter in the debate we should be having, and that is the debate that Corporate Defenders and Corporate Libertarians are anxious to avoid or prevent.

Instead, they aver that there is too much government control of corporations, and that NSA's domestic surveillance activity is the case in point.

In fact, for all intents and purposes, the US Government particularly, and governments throughout the world generally, are the creatures and the servants of corporate interests -- to the exclusion of the public interest at almost all times, almost everywhere.  This is a main reason why so many people are so enraged and rebellious in so many places so much of the time. Hello?

There is not too much government control of corporations, if anything there is far too little. Corporate interest runs roughshod over the public. Corporate interest is the principal business of most governments most of the time. Corporate interest comes first and foremost, and we are near the point where corporate interest is the only interest of government.

But, but, but, but Secret FISA COURT ORDERS!!!! Ayiee! Snowden proved it, did he not?

As I and others have pointed out, FISA court orders to companies providing data to the Surveillance System are functionally eyewash and ass covers for those companies to immunize them from lawsuits by the public for ongoing privacy violations and violations of terms of service.

And here it's important to realize that the Surveillance System is a joint partnership operation by an essentially fused corporate-government. It is not something that has been imposed on an innocent corporate sector by an evil government despite the arguments of Corporate Defenders to the contrary.

So with the Corporate Defenders' premise (of too much government control of corporations) undermined, what is the point of all this hoohah, anyway?

It is, in my view, to so diminish the power and authority of "government" that it literally ceases to exist as an independent entity and becomes entirely -- not substantially, but entirely -- the creature of a global, implacable, and unassailable Corporate-State.

In other words, the end-game, as I see it, is the full privatization of government everywhere around the world, in perpetuity, without let or hindrance, forever and ever, world without end, amen.

And the contest, such as it is, is over which corporate interests will have control of this ideal privatized government, and to some extent how soon it can and will be implemented, with the digital companies demanding primacy and the liberty to extend their reach and power immediately and indefinitely.

That's what this is all about. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Is the coming Corporate World, masterminded and controlled by a handful of digital Super-Corps the kind of world we want to live in?

Let's have that debate.

"All watched over by machines of loving grace."

Mars (Still) Awaits

Mars! Bitches!

Getting to Mars Edition -- Saturday was PBS Science Cafe Day at Los Poblanos in Albuquerque. We've been signing up for this event pretty much since we've been in New Mexico. It's a rather easy-going opportunity to get together with some like-minded coots and other space and science junkies (of which there are many in NM) and hear some talk about what's happening in the field.

Saturday, the field was "Mars and how to get there." Sending humans to Mars, it was confidently asserted, has been a Dream of Mankind for Centuries. Has it? Being the skeptic I am, I questioned the premise right off. Has Mars been a long-sought destination for Mankind for... centuries?  I think not. The Destination factor of Mars has only been around since the age of rockets that made probing the Solar System and beyond a possibility -- if not always a probability. But the issue wasn't really how long Mankind has set its sights on the Angry Red Planet.

The issue was "Why Anyone Would Want To Go To Mars?" And once anyone decided to go, how would they do it?

These issues are being intensely wrangled at various sites in New Mexico as well as around the world. One of the visual aids brought by the speaker was the April 30, 1954 issue of Collier's Magazine featuring articles on Mars by Wernher von Braun, Cornelius Ryan and Fred Whipple, but mostly featuring the striking cover art by Chesley Bonestell seen above.

Well, yes. Without the cover art on popular magazines, and without the enormous number of science fiction movies produced in the 1950's, I sincerely doubt many of us would give Mars more than a passing thought. If that.

Because there was so much popular media focus on Mars when we were children, however, the planet has become a kind of ingrained Place In Space for a lot of people of my generation. But I've got to wonder: do younger people, especially much younger people, give a good gott-damb?

Plenty of spacecraft have visited Mars during my lifetime. The statistic we were given yesterday -- if memory serves -- was "Earth 15, Mars 24" (as in fifteen successful Mars-destination spacecraft, twenty four unsuccessful.)  There have been many discoveries. But oddly there have been none that either confirm or refute many of the various theories about Mars and its potential to harbor biology that have cropped up over the years.

Especially, there has never been a direct effort to confirm (or refute, for that matter) the rather baroque theories of super-oxides in the soils which were offered to account for the failure of the Viking missions to discover life or even organics on the surface of the planet way back in 1976. Nor has there been any direct effort since 1976 to confirm or refute the supposed sterility of the Martian surface.

This has long struck me as very odd behavior by the planetary sciences. The Viking biology results were enigmatic and contradictory to say the least; however, the scientific consensus at the time was that the surface was sterile, and the theory offered was that a combination of soil super-oxides and ultraviolet light destroyed carbon compounds as they formed or arrived on the surface so that there were none to found. A priori, that meant there was and could be no biology on the surface. Case closed. Move on.

While this consensus may be correct, it has never been tested. No trace of super-oxides have ever been sought or found at the surface of Mars, and no measurement of ultraviolet flux has ever been made at the surface. The presence of liquid water -- or some liquid at any rate -- long confidently asserted to be impossible at the surface, has been rather dramatically confirmed in a little known series of Phoenix lander images that show droplets of something on the landing struts of the spacecraft.

Personally, I'm quite leery of asserting that it is "water" in the sense that most of us would recognize it. Due to the fact that the Phoenix landed on a patch of ice which appears to have sublimated and condensed in response to the heat of the landing rockets, the proposition that it is water seen on the landing struts makes sense; yet the behavior of the droplets -- appearing to remain on the strut and remain liquid throughout the mission -- is not the behavior expected of water at the surface of Mars. Any water that was released by the heat of the rockets striking the ice below the lander should have either sublimated immediately or if recondensed, it should have refrozen within minutes; there should have been no detectable liquid phase at all.

And yet, there those droplets are, and there they persisted. How could that be?

I proposed that it's not water. It is instead a brine or an acid that remains liquid at typical Martian temperatures and pressures, and that furthermore, many of the apparently water carved surface features on Mars were actually the result of flowing brines or even a strong solution of sulfuric acid. There may never have been much water -- as such -- on Mars throughout its entire history and there may be very little there now, and what there is may all be frozen as ice.

I could go on at great length about these matters, and have done so in other fora, but yesterday it was the turn of New Mexico Space History Museum Director Chris Orwoll to hold forth on the topic of how to get to Mars and why bother -- oh, and his own journey from submarining in the Navy to his current perch at the museum outside of Alamogordo.

Getting there is being worked out as we speak, the major difficulties being the hazards of cosmic rays and meteoroids, both of which have damaged near-Earth orbiting space satellites and laboratories, and the sheer amount of stuff that has to be carried on the voyage and will be necessary to pre-position on the surface of Mars to supply the needs of landing crews. It's much simpler just to send a robot, as of course has been done many times in the past and will continue to be done for the foreseeable future. Getting people to Mars -- even though it is quite feasible right now -- may be a long time in coming, in part because it is very expensive, there is little current impetus for additional manned exploration of the solar system, and public sector budgeting for space exploration looks rather dismal indefinitely. The private sector is not picking up the slack.

While it wasn't mentioned yesterday, there's a rather good two part teevee movie out of Canada that dramatizes some of the issues involved in manned expeditions to Mars called "Race to Mars" which I recommend as a primer. While I enjoy the many Mars movies made in the past, they tend to be locked in their own time period or to foster highly dramatic but not necessarily apropos story-lines.

Documentaries as opposed to dramatizations often leave out human nature and how people respond to crisis, focusing more on hardware than the people taking the risks and making the voyage. "Race to Mars" strikes an interesting balance and features relatively recent (well, up to 2007) discoveries and understanding of the Martian surface and conditions.

Getting there is almost the easy part. What to do once there is the hard part. The final scene in "Race to Mars" shows the establishment of a little colony in Dao Vallis, where the fictional pioneering Olympus expedition had struck water -- and lost a crew member when the water gushed out as a snow and ice geyser destroying the drilling apparatus.

Water, of course, is the prime necessity for any human colonization of Mars, but whether there is any currently available -- even deep underground -- in Dao Vallis is something of a mystery. Dao is an ancient outflow channel in the Southern Highlands, arising near the Hadriaca Patera volcano and debouching into the Hellas Basin, the deepest hole on the planet. There likely has been substantial water and ice in this region, but whether they are there now -- at least near the surface -- is doubtful primarily because these features are very, very old, dating back nearly to the origin of the planet.

There are much more recent "watery" features, and as noted above, the Phoenix craft actually landed in 2008 on near-surface ice and released something ("") that stayed liquid at the surface for quite some time. If there is water to be found on Mars today, it is likely within meters if not centimeters of such surfaces -- high in latitude, low in elevation.

On the other hand, the Hellas Basin, Dao Vallis, and the surrounding terrain are relatively low latitude (ie: in places much nearer the equator than the pole) and low elevation (the lowest on the is planet found in the Hellas Basin) and are more likely to sustain liquid water near the surface than any other location in the Southern Highlands.

It was patiently explained to me by a planetary scientist some years ago that the Hellas Basin is unlikely to contain any liquid water today (though it may have done so in the past) because of an ongoing process of freeze-drying, similar to what happens in a frost-free refrigerator freezer. Evaporation and sublimation such as is likely to take place on Mars can maintain a frost and fluid free environment indefinitely even at relatively high temperatures and and atmospheric pressures.

The basic question remains, "why go to Mars?" And the answer is always the same: "It is human nature to explore and go where no one has gone before." Once the urge to explore fades, the progress of civilization is reputed to end.

Here's the problem, though. Too many times, those who are most intent on exploration of new frontiers are the very ones who threaten -- and often cause -- the extinction of the civilizations they encounter and/or the ruin of the pristine environment they claim.

I suspect Mars is such an inhospitable place -- whether or not it hosts native biology -- that any effort to colonize the planet from the Earth will be fraught with peril and failure to no apparent object. No one expects to find gold or jewels or a functioning civilization on Mars -- all of which were impetuses for exploration and conquest on Earth. There is no one to exploit. There are few or no resources to control. There is almost nothing that could sustain a modern expedition let alone a comfortable lifestyle on Mars. Whatever is found there in the by and bye, it won't be sufficient to sustain a viable human society. At least not as we know it.

The closest analogues on Earth to potential Mars colonies are the science outposts on Antarctica and the telescopes high on the Atacama Plateau in Chile. Neither is even remotely self-sustaining, nor could they ever be in the future. Such is almost certain to be the case on Mars should a colony ever be established there. The question is not so much one of getting there, it is more about maintaining a presence once there.

At one time, after all, it was widely believed -- or at least said -- that conditions at the surface of Mars were almost certainly almost instantly lethal to any and all carbon-based biology; even the slightest contact with the surface dust could be and probably would be a death sentence to terrestrial visitors. Surely the ultra violet flux and lack of protection from solar radiation and cosmic rays would take care of any survivors of Mars dust exposure.

The lethality of the Martian surface is yet to be proved, but it is still not a hospitable place no matter what.

Almost 60 years ago in the Collier's article linked above, Wernher von Braun, the father of (Nazi)German rocketry and the American space program predicted that it would take a century for Americans to prepare sufficiently to undertake a manned expedition to Mars.  That was pre-Sputnik, when there was no American or international space program to speak of.

The space program has once again fallen on (relatively) hard times. NASA lacks focus and budgeting for major space exploration programs is not likely to be abundant for many years to come -- if ever again.

Sixty years ago there was no lack of imagination, however, and it seems to me that we've lost the ability to envision the future. Without that imagination and vision, progress as we have known it ceases.


So just what in tarnation is this thing on Mars, anyway?

Shiny Thing On Mars -- Dubbed The Faucet Handle

Looking Backward -- 2012

Jebus, what a year.

It's been full of change for us, some of it really positive, but for millions of Americans 2012 was yet another year of misery and disaster as the now Perpetual Recession became institutionalized, the New Normal as it were, the Way Forward universally accepted by Our Rulers. We re-elected Mr. Obama for another term as Our Redeemer, but as before, he has no intention of redeeming anything but an option.

This has been the strangest thing about the constant immiseration of the American People by Their Betters. There is literally no one among the Better Class who is willing or able to stand up for the People and for doing the right thing.

No one.

I can't recall any previous period when that was so, when no one among the High and Mighty would stand up for the People or insist on fostering the Better Angels among the Upper Classes. But that's where we are now, and it's bewildering.

The signs that we'd get to this point were clear enough when institutional failure and collapse became obvious, starting with the failure of institutions to oppose the Supreme Court's lawless interference in the election of 2000 and the institutional acquiescence to the Bushevik usurpation, followed not surprisingly by the institutional acquiescence to the New Normal of Constant War.

Institutional opposition simply evaporated, and it was up to the People as individuals and in temporary groups to mount whatever opposition they could to the predation and horror they witnessed all around them.

Over the last decade and more, the People have taken upon themselves a gigantic burden as one after another of the institutions they created and/or relied on for sustenance and succor collapsed followed in turn by the collapse of whatever was passing for the economy putting many millions out of work and eventually out of their homes.

This was all happening due to strict policies adopted at the top -- policies which protected and enhanced the position of those in charge, advancing their wealth and power, and diminished the position of those not so lucky. It was all very obviously going on, but because of the nature of our argumentative and rationalizing and highly atomized society acknowledging and acting on the important and the obvious is often the last thing on anyone's mind.

Yet in 2011, a Movement got going that started to deal with some of what's been going on by pointing out the root of the problem in the grifter-financial sector. Occupy Wall Street stunned the Powers That Be with its strategies and tactics of "occupation" and its persistent calls to action against the depredations of the grifter-sector. Soon enough it was being subjected to some of the most violent suppression by Authority that we've seen in more than a generation; the contrast between the official suppression of Occupy and the official accommodation to the Tea Party could not have been more acute.

But it did help clarify the situation for many.

In 2012 the official suppression of resistance continued, even expanded, while at the same time a handful of bones were thrown to the masses in the hope that they would distract or tame the ravening hordes outside the gates. Efforts to further plunder what little remained of the assets of the working and middle classes were put on temporary hold, and every now and then there would be a bump in the employment figures -- so that there were fewer idle workers or indigents who might be inclined to raise a ruckus.

And of course there was the "election." To my mind the entire election process has become a cruel joke when it isn't a complete farce, and the re-election of Barack Obama and a compliant congress merely means that the plunder and immiseration will continue unabated.

Nothing will change.

For the People, this is a downward spiral from which there appears to be no escape. For the Masters and those on top, nothing could be better.

How much longer this situation will endure is anybody's guess; as we know, things can change in an instant, and the Counter Revolution put in place by the Busheviks and continuing under the Obamanauts could be overturned in an instant. I see no sign of it, though.

What I see is a continuing effort by the People to find and build alternatives to the status quo while maintaining as much as they can of a familiar way of life. Sometimes it all seems like teetering on the point of a pin. Massive change is being imposed rather quickly from the top; the People, on the other hand, are working on their own alternatives and in the process becoming the change they've sought for generations. We're in uncharted territory in many ways.

The Earth itself is going through a change as Climate Change accelerates. None of us can really know what the upshot will be, but we can be certain that nothing substantive will -- or now can -- be done to forestall or reverse the global climate catastrophe (if that's what it will be) that's been predicted for decades. Our Rulers simply have had no intention of fixing things for our benefit, though they may do some tweaks here and there on their own behalf. Modeling has been done to describe what the Future will be like, and Our Betters are well aware of where the Safe Places are expected to be and how they may live well and profit under whatever physical regime there may be.

 The rest of us? Oh well! Poor devils!

It is my sense that the institutional failures of the last decade and more, along with the critical failure of conscience among the most privileged people is due at least in part to the fact that they believe there is no longer a Future in the classic sense to look forward to. The dynamic changes under way in the natural world are too vast, and the Future as it used to be is simply not part of the picture that is emerging.

Without a sense of a Future, there is no longer anything binding people and generations to one another. The lifeboat has sunk. We're on our own.

That's the image I get based on the behavior of the Ruling Class toward everyone beneath them. Cruelty to the point of sadism is now assumed and accepted by Authority. Plunder is fundamental. Living standards for the masses are declining, wealth continues to evaporate, poverty is increasing, and all the markers that we once regarded as Progress are vanishing. Without a Future, why should there be progress?

I've been reading a book written by the Works Progress Administration in 1940 about California's Central Valley Project, a huge undertaking that was just then beginning, one that literally transformed California's Central Valley's water regime and provided a Future where one was previously seen to be absent. It's almost impossible to imagine that point of view, the "Yes, we can!" faith and belief in gigantic projects to ensure a Future, these days. There is obviously so much that needs to be done and can be done but won't be done on behalf of the Future well being of the People of the United States. Nothing like the vast projects of yore -- whether the Central Valley Project, or the Interstate Highway Project, or the Space Program, or some of the more ill advised programs like Urban Renewal -- can even be imagined these days.

Not because we can't do them. They can't be imagined because there's no Future any more. Why bother, then?

I'm an optimist by nature, so I see the little efforts underway to transform our vision and way of life as the answer to the absence of any kind of Big Picture Future. All this small scale activity -- characterized most clearly by the Permaculture Movement, but not solely by that -- has a spontaneity and cumulative effect that produces the Future all by itself.

It's not at all what was done before, it's something else again.

Some Additional Thoughts To Throw In The Mix

America's Favorite

Some additional matters of interest have been swirling around this end game the political class seems to be playing. While they and their owners and sponsors continue to wrangle over how quickly and thoroughly the tattered remnants of the Republic (we have been unable to keep) shall be unraveled, we the People wrestle with a whole other set of circumstances Our Betters have neither the time nor the patience for:

• Joblessness


• Debt


• Hunger


• Homelessness


• Stolen Future


• Endless Sacrifice

And that's just for starters, to get the ball rolling as it were. The situation for many households in America is dire. A report just came out (can't find the link at the moment, but will add it once I do) that points out that California's median household income fell by 11% between 2007 and 2010, a spectacular drop compared to the oft reported increases in median (or sometimes "average") income during this Endless Recession.

I've long been suspicious of any statistical report that claims rising income for Americans in general because it just isn't so. I've witnessed too many cases of household incomes remaining perfectly flat at best during the course of the Endless Recession, and too many cases, way too many cases, of household employment income falling by anywhere from 10% to 50% (and sometimes more) in the course of a few years.

The statistics have clearly been skewed by the fact that those at the top continue to amass gigantic fortunes from which they derive enormous income, though statisticians deny it.

Millions have been forced out of their jobs, and millions have been forced out of the job market altogether; labor force participation is at the lowest point in generations and it continues to shrink. Poverty is at the highest level in generations and it continues to grow. The two are related it seems to me, factors, you might say of one another. Duh.

But in his acceptance speech -- which I have still not seen any of -- the Would-be King Emperor, Shahanshah, declared that when $21.00 an hour jobs with benefits "went away," Americans rolled up their sleeves and took two jobs that paid $9.00 an hour without benefits and they forged onward, uncomplaining, happy indeed to be able to continue the March of Progress -- at least that's a paraphrase of a report I saw. "Only in America," right?

Americans are falling backwards rapidly, and this is due, as I have repeatedly pointed out, to the deliberate policie at the top of the Government which in turn are determined -- if not dictated outright -- by the desires of the Masters of the Universe who crashed the economy to begin with. Those few people still control the United States and they largely control the rest of humanity as well.

Should the RomneyBot and His Familiar succeed in their Pinky and the Brain plan to take over the world -- their plan after all is directly out of the Reaganite-Gingrichite playbook. I've long assumed that the models for the cartoon characters were Ronnie and Newty -- things for the average sod will only get worse, far worse, far more pervasively and far faster than anyone thought possible.

The so-called political "opposition" isn't even playing a rearguard action any more, it's now a rout. The Future -- at least anything resembling a Future as we once understood it -- is gone.

"There's nothing left."

Well, not exactly "nothing." What Our Rulers are attempting to engineer, and the ACA is a perfect example of it, is the subjugation of the American People, through a form of taxation, to corporate interests in perpetuity; it's a form of debt slavery. Whether it is precedented or not I can't say, but in the end it hardly matters whether it's been done before, what matters is that it proceed with as few impediments to those on the top who will benefit from these extractions as possible.

So far, so good.

The New Future of Universal Debt Slavery -- through what amounts to automatic extractions from the 99% on behalf of corporate interests via innovative forms of taxation -- will shortly become the New Normal in part because there is almost no conscious opposition to it. There is opposition but not so much at the root of the problem, the real issue as it were.

Somewhat tangentially, there is a remarkable review by Mike Beggs of David Graeber's "Debt" over at Jacobin that is quite a wonder in its own right, for it does seem to go on forever. These are the kinds of exercises I have long had a love-hate relationship with, for they often add to the consideration, even though ultimately they are as light as froth floating in the air. It's appreciable in its own evanescent right, though what it actually has to say about "Debt" -- apart from the nostrum that "anecdotes aren't enough" -- is lacking... clarity. In fact, Beggs seems to be quite taken with Graeber's anthropological and indeed anarchist approach to his topic, one that makes mincemeat out of economists (who deserve it of course), and provides a comprehensive and comprehensible framework for the woefully uninformed public to understand what is really going on.

But it's not enough for him, he wants something both grander and more granular, and cites a number of works that provide what he is looking for. Ergo, what? Yes, there are other works out there, and isn't it great? Anyway, I didn't mean this to devolve into another criticism of the critic -- one of my favorite pastimes when time was -- but Beggs' contribution to the discussion is something else again. Check it out if you have a few hours to spend on... froth.

Meanwhile, Mark Ames has put out a piece dealing with the nature of the shoot-to-kill kultur that pervades American Authoritarian Society these days and how it relates to both the propaganda culture and the "twerps" who so often are placed in positions to defend the indefensible. It's a rollicking ride than can make for substantial dot-connection. Ames is very good at that.

As is his former colleague at the Moscow headquarters of the late-lamented Exile, Matt Taibbi, who works his gonzo mangler into a perfect storm of revelations regarding RomneyBot and his devotion to loading companies with debt from which many never recover, while he collects fabulous amounts of free money. Automatically. That's what it's all about in our financialized supposed capitalist casino, getting to the point where "I win, you lose" is institutionalized and made permanent.

There's your trouble -- and there's your Future.

Let the Dixie Chicks make it all better:


Finally, from May, a piece from the Occupied Chicago Tribune regarding the Dreaded Black Bloc. Much virtual ink has been spilled on the topic (lord knows, I've done my share), but this is one of the better examinations of the phenom of the Black Bloc and just what it does and doesn't do. Recommended.

"Dance for that Anarchy" -- Po-Po Troopers getting out of the rain in Tampa on August 27 prior to the RNC, while the folks dance for that anarchy in the downpour.



Another Po-Po Troopers in Tampa video. This is actually pretty sad... it's from Indybay.org:

Annual Green Day Post

[This is crunch month for me, so posting is liable to be infrequent at least until September ends. Here's Green Day to lighten the mood... er...]



Ah, I can't just leave it at that, so here's Walter Huston's definitive version of Kurt Weill's and Maxwell Anderson's "September Song."

In Defense of Percival Lowell

I've spent some time looking at Mars in a telescope and looking at other people's pictures of Mars taken with their telescopes, and I've spent some time looking at Percival Lowell's drawings of Mars from which he derived his famous (or infamous) interpretations about canals and civilizations. I've also been to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ and heard the stories they tell there of his observational acumen.

No one claims there are canals on Mars now, but for some time it has been customary to denounce Lowell's observations as "optical illusions," and to declare that there is "nothing really there" where he said he saw canals. Carl Sagan was among those famous for doing it.

And I never felt it was entirely fair. Lowell was said to have been one of the finest planetary observers of his era, though he lacked academic training in the field. His observatory was located in one of the finest observing locations in the country, and Lowell Observatory is still one of the nation's premiere observatories and research centers.

In an earlier post, I juxtaposed an illustration of Lowell's freehand drawing of what he saw in the Solis Lacus region of Mars in 1896 with three telescopic views taken with a CCD camera in 2006, 110 years later in the UK. The similarities are striking.

There are differences to be sure. Especially the size of the "pupil" of the Solis "eye." Lowell's is small and discreet, the "pupil" in the CCD image is large and extended. But many of the other features correspond almost exactly. Those features we now know include dark-floored craters, "fossae," dark and light terrains, volcanoes, and clouds among other things. I was able to toggle easily between the images, so it was startling to see the correspondences and to spot more of them each time I toggled.

Among the most striking correspondences is the appearance of lines on the CCD images, several of them in remarkably similar positions to those delineated by Lowell.

Side by side comparison; features seen on the CCD image are marked with arrows on the Lowell drawing [Note: South is at the top of the images.]

Side by side comparison of Mars Solis Lacus quadrant
left drawing by Percival Lowell, c. 1896
  CCD telescopic image by D. Peach, 2005
Correspondences noted on Lowell drawing

If you are able to relax your eyes a bit, you will see many -- many! -- linear markings on the CCD image, both light-toned and dark, some of which correspond to Lowell's markings, some of which don't. The correspondence of spots between the drawing and the CCD image taken more than 100 years later is remarkable, especially given the differences inherent in the, telescopes, the techniques and the tendency of the eye and hand to diverge when attempting to record visual impressions. (Think of courtroom drawings.)

The faint linear markings on the CCD image are NOT "optical illusions." They are on all the CCD images from that sequence so they are real in the sense that the CCD camera was able to record them. But there are many other CCD images taken by others around the same time that do not show linear markings as this one does.

What gives?

The "optical illusion" argument tends to fail when CCD images show linear markings similar to those Lowell recorded 100 years before. So other arguments have been put forth proposing that the linear markings are actually a telescopic artifact. Something in the optics of the telescope makes them "appear." This argument was offered in part because other astronomers also reported seeing linear marking corresponding to Lowell's canals, and Lowell for his part reported linear markings on the surface of Venus and Mercury when he trained the telescope on them.

I'm more inclined to accept the optics argument than I am the illusion argument, but even so, it seems to me there's something about the surface of Mars itself that allows and requires the appearance of linear markings in some telescopes but not in others. Given the fact that Lowell's telescope was a huge 24" refractor, and most of the modern amateur CCD images are made through a much smaller reflector or Schmidt/Maksutov Cassegrain telescopes, the "optics" argument becomes difficult to fathom.

[Note (as of 9:30pm Friday, August 10, 2012): a huge limb just broke off a eucalyptus tree down the street, blocking the road, exploding street lamps and power transformers, and causing much to do in the neighborhood. Power went out briefly, but there are wires crossed all over, and the exploded transformer is a big problem. Will probably lose power again as repairs are made. That tree has been there since God was a boy, and it periodically drops fair sized limbs, but this time the branch that snapped was enormous. Good thing nobody (that we know of) was under it at the time. Another big tree on the same property fell a few years ago in a storm, destroying the garage and badly damaging a neighbor's house. A neighbor said he witnessed the whole thing tonight, and he thought it was the end of the world...]

The point I'm making is that Lowell was a very accurate observer who honestly recorded what he saw when he observed Mars. Many of his contemporaries saw similar features. And similar features can still be seen and recorded on the surface of Mars with much different telescopes. I have seen some of them myself. It has never looked to me like the surface is crisscrossed with canals, but it is quite possible to resolve straight lines -- both dark and light colored -- that appear to connect various dark and light spots.

It's not an illusion.

There is something which produces the appearance of these lines, and given the absolute abundance of linear features of all kinds on the surface of Mars -- some of which have never been adequately explained, especially the "searchlight" and other linear features that Mariner 9 revealed, many of which are no longer seen in orbiter images -- it seems worth investigating how the surface features, the Martian atmosphere, the terrestrial atmosphere and telescopic optics all interact to produce the appearance of "canali" as described by Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877.

Cerberus Fossae, set of deep troughs with dark interiors, about 1600 km long

The image above is from Google Mars and shows some of the most prominent linear features on the surface, the Cerberus Fossae, a paired set of dark-floored trenches, some 1600 km from one end to another, that are still something of a mystery. I did a brief survey of "fossae" using Google Mars, and there are literally thousands of examples, dozens of them 1000km long or more.

The conventional wisdom is that relief on the surface of Mars cannot be detected with Earth-based telescopes even today, and that the various and numerous fossae on the surface are so narrow -- at most, a few kilometers wide, in the case of the Cerberus Fossae above, only about half a kilometer -- they cannot be resolved by Earth-based telescopes. While volcanoes and craters have long been seen on the surface of Mars, including the vast Valles Marineris canyons, they weren't recognized for what they were because it was impossible to detect surface relief. In fact, prior to spacecraft explorations, it was assumed that Mars had very little surface relief because none could be detected.

This is an unlabeled US Air Force map of Mars from 1962, which will give you an idea of how widely  the linear features of Mars were accepted prior to the arrival of spacecraft:

USAF map of Mars, c. 1962. Clickage will embiggen.

I got the map from this site where the development of Mars mapping is explored. Lowell's maps of Mars are not nearly as sophisticated but they are not dissimilar.

Lowell's map of Mars, c. 1894 for comparison:

Map of Mars drawn by Percival Lowell, c. 1894

Some observers have seen surface features very much like those recorded by Lowell throughout the history of telescopic observations, and some of them can be detected by modern CCD cameras. The appearance of linear markings on the surface of Mars is quite real. They are well and truly there, and they are there at many different scales.

In another post, I may get into the scale issue, for in some ways it may be a key to understanding what is going on.

[Today and tomorrow are travel days....]

The Future of Nuclear Power -- Too Cheap To Meter Returns

Boy, this takes me back: Thorium

If you were a boy in the 1950's -- or in some cases a girl -- dreaming of the Future, a Future of Abundance and Peace and Technological Marvels, then nuclear power was where it was at, and according to all the news, nukes would eventually be powerful and small and common enough to power airplanes and refrigerators and maybe even bicycles, who knows.

Thorium in the '50's was marketed as the nuclear fuel of the Future, and the small scale, efficient reactors that would run on thorium were considered The Latest Thing. At the time, the notion that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter" was still in vogue, and the idea of truly inexpensive and universally available electricity was still considered both exotic and desirable.

We've come a long way since then.

Nuclear power turned out to be neither cheap nor easy to obtain; the reactors themselves are simple enough to be sure. The complexity is in their safe operation which has proved to be elusive no matter what safeguards are installed. (To say that every reactor that has melted down or exploded was designed and built wrong is a tautology. Of course they were. That's not the issue. The issue is that these kinds of design and construction errors are, for some reason, endemic to the field.) And of course there's the storage and disposal of nuclear waste issue, something that wasn't even on the radar 50 or 60 years ago when Our Nuclear Future was being planned for us.

For whatever reason, the nuclear power industry has been plagued with an inability to think through the basics of what it is they are trying to do and what the consequences of doing it on the one hand and failure to do it safely and responsibly on the other are likely to be. This problem is not unique to the nuclear power industry, but the consequences of fault and failure in the nuclear field are much greater for all of us than is the case in most other major industries.

The nuclear industry (both for war and peace) is a product of World War II, and that, I believe, is where the intrinsic problem lies. There was a certain way of doing things during wartime back then that is frankly appalling in a contemporary context. It was not an era where safety was emphasized. It was, after all, war. And there are casualties in war, many casualties, whole peoples and nations turned into casualties, and that's just the way it was. Producing for war was a matter of scale and speed, not worker safety -- or warfighter safety for that matter. "Git 'er done," was not invented in the Bushevik era. It was the way that wartime economies and societies were organized.

Both of my parents were in the military during WWII, and both regarded it as a natural thing. "Git 'er done." They had their jobs to do and they did them rather unthinkingly. I've apparently misplaced it, but I've read a copy of my father's military record, much of which consists of reports he wrote for his superiors, and I'm struck by a number of things: he was apparently fully into his assignments, so much so that he wrote detailed, specific narratives of his findings that are filled with objectivity and extraordinary energy. He was looking into everything he was assigned and more and reporting to the War Reconversion Board his recommendations for proceeding with contract termination and so forth, pretty cut and dried you would think. But it was clearly an adventure for him given what wrote.

That sense of adventure fills practically everything I've come across about WWII that was produced during the war. And adventure as well as stealth was very much a part of the nuclear weapons saga of World War II.

There's an address in Santa Fe just down the street from the Governor's Palace. It's old and has gone from decrepitude to renovation and back again several times. It was the site of J. Robert Oppenheimer's Santa Fe office and served as the staff entrance for the engineers and physicists assembling to take part in the Manhattan Project some distance away in Los Alamos.

It was an adventure which Oppenheimer and others have written about with great eloquence and not a little dread.

I've been by the site and have of course been to the Trinity Site to pay my respects... but those aspects were just the beginning of the Nuclear Future as determined by Victory in World War II.

Transformation of nuclear energy from use as a weapon of war and annihilation to use as a power source for the benefit of mankind was the Futurist marketing plan, but just what happened is still somewhat mystifying.

There was an arms race, for example, between the United States and the Soviet Union to produce an abundance of nuclear weapons so as to be able to assure one another of mutual annihilation. This was the threat Americans and Soviet children lived under practically every day of their lives from the end of WWII until... when? Has that existential threat ever gone away?

At the same time, the nuclear sword was being beaten into plowshares in both the United States and the Soviet Union, with the advent of nuclear power generation in the mid-fifties. There were nuclear reactors popping up everywhere, from nearby riverbanks to submarines and ships at sea. The N. S. Savannah was the first commercial nuclear powered ship, started in 1959, launched in 1961 as a showcase. But there are dozens of nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers plying the seas today. The technology is well understood. It's simply too expensive for civilian use.

It was assumed, however, that nuclear energy generation would be far cheaper than traditional coal or oil or natural gas fired plants, and that it would be 'clean energy' having practically no negative environmental consequences.

Well, that didn't work out so well, either.

Comes now Thorium.

Or Here It Comes Again.

Thorium has always been more abundant and easier to work with than uranium as a nuclear fuel; that's never been the issue. The issue is the same no matter what the nuclear fuel is: what will you do with the waste, and what if something goes wrong?  And if something goes wrong, what are the consequences? Be honest now.

Things go wrong; the problems of nuclear power have never been thought through, and no matter how much we hear "we can figure it out," the inherent problems haven't been figured out in more than 60 years of trying. Oh, maybe it's not quite as bad as it once was, but that's not saying much.

Nuclear energy has become almost a cargo cult, a realm of dreamers and enthusiasts. Maybe it was always like that, I don't know. But I know I was happy as could be when the local nuclear power plant, which was draining the public utility of resources and money, was finally decommissioned. Of course the fuel rods and waste are still stored at the site in pools; and they say that it will have to stay there until a permanent waste disposal site is found. Which is not likely to happen. Ever. Because there is no place to store this shit that is actually, permanently, safe. That's just the way it is.