119

July 5, 2020 was my father's 119th birthday. I sometimes ponder how far back in time my parents and grandparents go. My father was born in 1901, my mother in 1911. My (half) sister was born in 1933. My (half) brother in 1935.

My mother's father was born in 1878. Her mother was born in 1889. My father's father was born in 1869 and his mother was born in 1875. Their parents were born in the 1830s, their grandparents right around 1800.

My ancestry is Irish, German, French (they say), and English with the addition of a supposed Indian Princess back in the 1700s. Well, some of her descendants dispute that she was Native American at all, as the stories of her being who it was said she was (the daughter of King Nummi of the Lenappe of New Jersey) only emerged in the 1850s, long after she died, and the competing story was that she was actually a mulatto slave of the man she eventually married, a British soldier who changed sides and fought for the Americans in the Revolution. Of course, that might not be true, either. Americans, made up stories of their ancestors and tended to glamorize them when truth might be better left unsaid.

That was certainly what my father told me about his ancestors. There was a standard story that apparently was passed down through the generations that "we" were descended from a prominent Irish Catholic colonial family from Maryland. The story was surprisingly detailed -- and utterly false. Made up. In researching the Irish side of my ancestry, I found that they weren't related to the Maryland family at all -- at least not after the late 1600s, if they were related to them even then. My ancestors were not descendants of the Maryland family at any rate, since they emigrated from Ireland in 1849, the height of the Famine, and the Maryland family was settled by 1710 or so, and had cut off ties with Ireland. The story of how my ancestors got to Iowa was mostly false. The only true thing was that they sojourned in Ohio until about 1855 when they moved permanently to Iowa. The rest of it, traveling by rail and wagon from Maryland, through Virginia to Ohio was false. In fact, it seems the Irish ancestors arrived in New Orleans in 1849, went up the Mississippi to the Ohio, then traveled by riverboat to around Springfield where they tried to settle in 1850. Didn't work. As Irish and Catholics they were harried and harassed and ultimately driven out. None of that was ever mentioned in the stories I heard.

Some of my father's German ancestors were already in Iowa when his Irish ancestors arrived. His German grandfather, though, didn't arrive until 1863. But he had left Germany -- the principality of Baden -- in 1854, when he was (apparently) 14. He arrived in New York the next year, and he stayed in Brooklyn as a bookbinder's apprentice until the Civil War broke out when he hightailed it to Iowa and hooked up with the German Catholic community there. He became a carpenter on the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, a job he held until he died two weeks after my father was born.

My father told me almost nothing about the German side of his family. He didn't tell me, for example, that his mother was deaf or that her mother didn't speak English. I learned these things from a cousin I didn't know I had (the daughter of one of my father's sisters).

I've tried, but I haven't been able to nail down when my father's Irish grandfather arrived in the US. Most of his family -- parents and several siblings -- arrived together in 1849, but he doesn't show up in any records until 1856 in Iowa. He doesn't seem to have any records in Ireland after his birth in 1835. My father knew him (he died in 1913) but seemed to know little or nothing about him, or rather what he did know, he kept to himself.

My cousin, for example, didn't know that her Irish great grandfather was married to an Irish woman who died shortly after our grandfather's birth in 1869. He married another Irish woman in 1873, and it was she who my cousin had been told about and who she thought was our grandfather's mother. But no, she was the mother of the youngest brother only.

My father knew these things, but apparently those stories weren't shared with his sisters.

And I begin to think all this was so very long ago. Does any of it matter now?

Electoral Myths

Now that things are heating up once again on the electoral front -- partly because of the inherent chaos in the process of electing presidents and such -- we're likely to be treated to another few months of... erm.... entertainment over who actually won the presidential election and possibly others.

Entertainment and lies.

The myths abound. For example, that the popular vote doesn't matter in presidential elections. If that were so, why do we bother with elections for the presidency? Of course we know from bitter experience that if the popular vote in particular "battleground" states goes the "wrong" way, the vote can be  -- indeed will be -- canceled, adjusted or revised until it produces the "correct" result. Because of the arcane, anachronistic Electoral College, only the popular votes in the individual states matter in presidential elections, not the overall popular vote nationally. A minority vote getter nationally can be elected to the presidency by the Electoral College -- as it looks like it will be the case with Mr. Trump, as it was the case with Mr. Bush2 and as has been the case previously (too lazy to research it right now) -- if enough voters in enough states vote for him or her, regardless of the total popular vote in all states.

That can happen, but it doesn't have to happen. The Electoral College is actually free to elect anyone they want -- or no one. The Electoral College could deadlock. It could refuse all the candidates before it. It could select someone the People did not have the opportunity to choose themselves. At least in theory, it doesn't even have to take a vote.

Hillary's national popular vote lead continues to grow. Right now it's edging up on 3 million and could conceivably better that. It's actually quite stunning. Despite all the yabbering and narrative creation about the election and the irrelevance of the popular vote, Mrs. Clinton is bidding fair to achieve one of the highest popular vote margins in recent history. That ain't nothin'. Far from it.

Thus there is a myth that once she conceded, the "election was over." Not so fast, Sparky. A concession is a courtesy, it's not a legally binding capitulation. On the other hand, there is every sign that Mrs. Clinton intended her concession as a capitulation, and that until recent events intervened, she had no intention of contesting the election outcome.

Those recent events include Dr. Stein's efforts to fund and undertake recounts in three  "battleground" states where the results are... questionable.We know that our elections are ridiculously opaque and arcane, and that the results can be jiggered pretty much any way by forces inside or outside of the electoral process. Even a recount -- when they are possible at all -- can't necessarily clarify and verify what happened. This is, I'm convinced, a deliberate design flaw to thwart the People's will, the People being so mercurial and untrustworthy and all.

What Emma Goldman said so long ago still obtains:

If elections changed anything, they'd be illegal.

Indeed.

But they are entertaining, so there is that.

Dr. Stein threw a spanner in the works  by funding and calling for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania where the popular vote margin for Trump was slight and there are... anomalies in the vote and the result.

The fact that she could raise millions of dollars in a few days to undertake these recounts shocked the complacent political class who were all in for Trumpian Things To Come, settling in to their "peaceful transition of power," and normalizing Trumpism as if it were just the coolest thing in school.

Back in my day, monkeywrenching on this scale -- the scale that Stein did it -- was not uncommon at all, and many of those in the political class as well as among the resistant public engaged in it routinely. Every president since Kennedy has been monkeywrenched when you get down to it.

The issue here is that without a recount, the public can't be sure that the outcome in these three states reflects the actual will of the voters in these three states. The margins are so close, and any number of questionable acts and omissions have already come to light. Better to be sure, no?

Well for some in the political class, the answer is clearly NO!!!!! They've been running around with their hair on fire demanding that this effort not take place, and insisting without evidence that Dr. Stein is scamming the public and somehow will not go through with the recounts.

The "scam" accusation became ingrained in the mythos of this election's monkeywrenching first on the Democratic side and then picked up yesterday and blared forth by Trump hisownself.

Ah yes. Dems in high office and low said "Just accept it," and appeared to do nothing whatever to interfere with the "peaceful transition of power" to Trump and his cronies. Obama himself has been extremely accommodating and determined to "help (Trump) succeed." He has validated the election results in his own mind and has repeatedly said that he supports the announced outcome. Hillary has said much the same thing.  And essentially all of the Democratic establishment concurs. The media as a whole is fully on board with the Trump Transition, as if nothing at all were questionable about it.

As I've said many times, the winning side in our elections doesn't care how they achieve that victory, just that they win. In this case, the "winning side" appears to be the political class in general; ie: Dems and Reps together. Clinton, Obama and Trump as a unified voice against the People.

Interesting.

Not surprising, though.

It took an outsider -- with Standing -- to make the Political Class as a whole pay at least some attention to the People this time. The recounts -- so far -- are going forward, and who knows what will be found?

The Clinton campaign belatedly entered the Wisconsin recount effort when Dr. Stein filed for and was granted a recount on Friday. They said they did so "in the interests of fairness for 'all sides.'" Interesting indeed. One would expect the Trump campaign to do likewise in the by and bye. 'All sides" indeed. After all, who knows what they might find? Eek.

No, I'd say it's an obvious attempt by the Clinton campaign -- joined soon by the Trump campaign? -- to thwart the recount in every way possible. Why? Well, why not? The Clintons have already pledged their fealty and been given provisional absolution from criminal complaints against them. Key word, "provisional." What they had to agree to do in exchange is anyone's guess, but I'll bet it included such things as denouncing and/or thwarting the recount efforts.

And so it has been.

When Trump came out with his statement about it on Saturday, it strangely echoed the statements of certain Clintonite element on TV and in the media generally that insisted that Dr. Stein was "scamming" people, and that there was no merit in doing a recount at all because... "the election is over."

The myth that the election was "over" the minute the media called Mr. Trump the "winner" on November 9 is one of the more pernicious ones that has been retailed to the public. That's not how our (s)elections work as anyone who has even a casual familiarity with the process understands.

All the results are subject to review and adjustment following the election night scramble to get the tallies to the media. It doesn't take a recount, though that can happen too. As we've seen, the totals are constantly being supplemented and adjusted even now. This is how Mrs. Clinton has been gaining a substantial lead in the popular vote. More votes are being counted and tallied each and every day.

The numbers change, day by day, hour by hour. And in the battleground states, Mr. Trump's lead has shrunk as more votes are counted, more adjustments made. In Wisconsin there were incidents that appeared to be "vote padding" wherein thousands more votes for Mr. Trump were recorded than were cast. And so it goes. The (s)election is not "over" when a news network "calls" the election, nor when a candidate concedes.

The Electoral College doesn't meet until December 19, and their vote -- if they ultimately have one -- isn't official until certified by Congress in January.

Ah, the Majesty of it All!

A whole lot can happen between now and then, but the fact is that the media have no legal standing or authority to declare a winner, and a concession is not a legally binding contract.

In this case, the entire process of choosing a candidate for the presidency has been chaos. Deliberately induced and maintained chaos in my view, but there you are.

So let the Chaos continue and let it settle out in its own way in its own time.

I'm no fan of Mrs. Clinton, let me tell you, and if I had my druthers, there's no way she would be allowed to run things from the White House, but I'm not in a position to do anything about that. I voted for Bernie and Stein, but my vote didn't matter in the end.

I would not, however, under ANY circumstances, vote for or support Mr. Trump and his band of thieves and mountebanks. Never. Much as I don't want Mrs. Clinton in the White House  (again), I don't want him anywhere near it.

What I've seen is that the Democratic nomenklatura has almost all lined up in support of Trump's ascendancy. They have made their peace with what is to come and appear to be looking forward to another four years of bashing away at their political rivals. It's what they do. It's essentially all they do: hold the Rs up to ridicule and promote fear. They have shown that they have little or no interest in serving the People. They are instead the Peanut Gallery, booing the Bad Guys. That's where they want to be. That's where they are comfortable.

At the present time, they seem to have no interest in winning elections, either.

If I had my druthers, I'd RICO both major parties into oblivion. But that's not my choice to have, and we live with what we've got.

That's a mess.

One of the clarifying factors to emerge from the chaos so far is that all the hooey from both Trump and Clinton about "rigged elections" and "foreign interference" prior to Nov 8 has suddenly become "inoperative." They now both deny there is any evidence of rigging or foreign interference, despite their absolute certainty of it prior to Election Day. For a good long time after Election Day, there was no mention of it at all. As if, with a wave of the hand, all these accusations of electoral fraud and foreign interference made by both candidates could be made to go away as if by magic.

Well no. What they did was open a Pandora's Box which cannot be shut again -- though they are trying like mad to do so. What they did was expose how screwed up and vulnerable our electoral process is. People can't unhear or unsee it. And what Dr. Stein has done is open it to view by anyone who cares to look... Ooops. Maybe the candidates should have been a little more careful in what they said, but it's too late now, isn't it? I've said that Trump sowed the wind and will reap the whirlwind, but I think that goes for Mrs. Clinton as well. Indeed, we could witness something much more profound than the routine delegitimization of the Other Party's rule.

Huh.











Overturning Myths and Expectations

If nothing else, this election has kicked the complacent in the butt. The complacent have had a number of these kicks lately, but it's not entirely clear the lesson has been learned. This is quite a different country, it seems to me, than conventional wisdom would have us believe, and as all the hue and cry and schadenfreude and what have you over the outcome continue unabated -- no, no, they're redoubling! -- it doesn't appear that many observers or opinion leaders have the least clue to what is really going on. It's all about confirming bias and believing falsehood, in other words being willingly conned. And that goes for pretty much all "sides" in the "national conversation" about what happened and where we go from here. I'm as guilty of that as anyone, though of course I see myself as a font of wisdom and objective reasoning. Of course. Don't we all?

I've been through these kinds of elections many times -- going back to Ronald Reagan's California gubernatorial victory over Pat Brown in 1966. The shock then couldn't have been any greater than the shock is now,  I didn't notice at the time, but I've heard that there was a similar shock nationally when JFK defeated Richard Nixon in 1960. The whole Nixon impeachment/resignation drama was certainly shocking at the time, but previously the shocks of the assassination of President Kennedy, and the undermining of LBJ's administration by anti-war fury among other things, followed by the multiple assassinations of 1968 acted as one shock after another. Nothing has been the same since.

Perhaps the most appalling shock of a presidential (s)elecction was the elevation of G W B thanks to the lawless intervention of the Supreme Court in 2000. Nothing like that had ever happened before. A naked power grab, quite simply, with the open connivance and participation of a faction of the sitting government. It was a coup, right before our eyes, and nothing was done about it.

The popular rebellion that tried to get going several times from the beginning of the Bush2 Regime fizzled out, partly because the media ignored it, being as it was fully in the tank with the usurpers. And the media was in the tank until the whole appalling mess unraveled when the economy collapsed.

The Obama elections and administration haven't been particularly shocking -- except to the white supremacists who never accommodated the notion of Negroes in the White House as anything but doormen and butlers and such -- it's been mostly a pause, a breathing space, before the next set of outrages and shocks, and here they come!

Oh yeah baby. Reversion time it will be. Reversion to America's Greatness, with White Men in charge the way they're supposed to be. You betcha. Hillary wouldn't have been a White Man (damn her all to hell!) and she wouldn't have undone the diversity progress that's been made in the government for a generation, but I have to agree with some observers that her administration, the permanent US government, and US society as a whole would still be dominated by White Men, and that white supremacy, while more or less subdued, would still be the dominant belief of many, perhaps most Americans.

Trump merely makes it explicit. Oh boy, does he.

Assuming he takes office -- and there is still some marginal doubt that will happen -- he will govern as a White Supremacist without a doubt in my mind. However, so would Hillary. And to a great extent, so has Obama.

They pretty much have to because it's baked into America's "Greatness." The US wouldn't be what it is and what it wants to be without White Supremacy.

A reversion to White Supremacy as it was as recently as the 1950s looks to be in the cards, and that's not a good thing in my mind. To many white people, the way White Supremacy operated outside the South in the 1950s was very benign and benevolent, and even in the South, as long as the colored didn't get uppity, it was tol'able.

As long as the colored and other inferiors didn't cause trouble, so the story went, they didn't get trouble.

Of course it wasn't true, but that's the myth of the era.

That's the era that Trump came up in. He's a little older than me, so he got a headstart. Of course he was born into wealth and raised in privilege (white privilege supplemented by the privilege of wealth) and was educated in private boarding schools at a time when the people who went to them were considered the offspring of the cream of the crop. He got in trouble, though, for misbehaving at one school and was then placed in a military boarding school connected with West Point to learn discipline and correct behavior. As far as anyone knows, the lessons didn't take, in part because the New York Military Academy saw his misbehavior -- particularly his bullying and "persuasion" -- as an asset rather than something to be trained out of him, and he was pretty much allowed his head.

I didn't have anything like that background. No. Not much. I was raised by a single working mother in California (who at one point said she wanted to send me to military school to train the rebellion out of me), and until I was ten years old, we always lived in lower or working class mixed race neighborhoods. When I was ten, I encountered middle class and upper middle class and then upper class "all white" society for the first time, and I recoiled -- still do, really.

It was crazy, and the beliefs that insulated white people had of their inferiors (and make no mistake, in all white society, the colored are most definitely considered inferior) were ridiculous and wrong. But since they only knew them as servants and field hands, how were insulated white folks to know that? They couldn't, right? And they didn't. And they had no better beliefs about lower and working class white folks, either. This was in the late 1950s, so I experienced it at its apogee before its fall. Or rather, its retreat. It never fell.

This is not to say that some of the white supremacists I encountered and knew weren't in many ways "good people." They were. some of them. They had no open animosity toward their inferiors -- but they didn't mix with them, either. Some employed Asians, Blacks, or Hispanics as servants, without any sort of conscious prejudice toward them, but many who had servants at the time only employed white people. Again, there was likely no conscious prejudice involved, it was just the way things were. They were following the precedent set by their parents and grandparents and the expectations of their class. That's all.

For the most part, these white-rightist-supremacists were ideological Progressives. I've tried to clarify the nature of Progressivism in other posts, but I don't think I've quite hit the spot. California was, until Reagan's terms as governor, as fully a Progressive state as there has ever been in the United States, and it still echoes some of that past, despite Reagan's successful efforts to dismantle Progressivism as California's governmental operating system.

Progressivism was a Republican innovation to counter the spreading threat of Populism that the Democratic Party was utilizing for political purposes. The basic Progressive theory was "rule by managerial elites" with the "consent" of the ruled. Experts in many fields would be called in, they would study problems and make expert recommendations regarding solutions, the public or their representatives would be given a chance to say yay or nay -- always under the assumption that they would say yay, which is what they usually did when allowed to opine -- and the expert cadres would be set to work. Previously intractable problems were indeed addressed and many were solved to the benefit of all. On the other hand, democratic principles were subverted, the "consent of the governed" part was often skipped in practice, and in operation, Progressivism was deeply intertwined with white supremacism. It was taken for granted without question. "Everyone knew" whites, particularly Anglo-Saxons and so called Nordics, were superior. Not only were they superior to the colored races, they were inherently superior to other whites, and they were meant to rule.

The reason for the withdrawal of consent for the continuation of Progressive Rule in California was simple enough to understand. By 1966, there had been numerous student rebellions in public colleges and universities (there was even a walk out in my high school) and there had been spectacular uprisings of the disincluded in urban environments, just then becoming known as "ghettos." And of course, the hated Hippies were arising.

Pat Brown, who had been a very successful Democratic and Progressive governor for two terms, was unable -- and perhaps unwilling -- to bring various rebellions under control. He was seen as feckless and ineffective against the urban blacks and rebellious white students. Both groups were seen by many Californians as "undeserving" of the privileges and benefits they had been granted by their Progressive overlords.

So the voters rebelled and installed a nonentity in the Corner Office, a nonentity who proceeded to crack down on the rebels as harshly as he and his cohorts felt necessary, to the cheers of many. Meanwhile he was instituting policies and programs to cripple public education, starting at the top and moving downwards, and insofar as possible eliminating the state hospital system for the mentally ill and insane. In the process his administration began the dismantlement of the Progressive operating system of government, substituting an advance on a prior form of government which was typical before the Progressive Revolution (essentially re-opening government to rule by corporate interests for their pecuniary benefit.)

Democrats, to their undying shame, largely went along with it. It was all based on a theory that government existed primarily to punish the lower orders and to reward the rich and powerful.

That set the pattern for what was to come nationally under Reagan when he became president, but under Democrats, too.  And here we are.

Trump in some ways is the natural culmination of that theory of governance.

But Hillary, had she been able to capture the prize, wouldn't have been so much different. She wouldn't have the trappings and the glitter that Trump brings with him, but essentially their politics and policies are very similar, they just have different targets for their "wrath" as it were.

The key difference between them, I think, is that he was always sheltered and showered with the privileges of his wealth and whiteness, and she was not. He started out on third base, as they say, and succeed as a conman and gangster to reach the top of his field -- and then (apparently) become president. She worked her way up from next to nothing -- she wasn't poor, but she was brought up in a very abusive household -- and she made many indelicate compromises along the way.

What I've said about the two of them is that he is a crude and rude representative of his class, and she is the model of those who work for them.

Sigh.

I don't expect him to be any less destructive of the public good than his predecessors, but I wouldn't have expected much good to come from Hillary's reign had she succeeded. As I say, they had different targets, but in the end they both favor the already rich and powerful.

It's a complete myth that she would start WWIII; just as it's a myth that he will prevent it. It's one of the more pernicious myths of the election season, and it's unshakable among believers.

But there are many others. There's been a great deal of projection onto both candidates, most of which has nothing to do with them and everything to do with the unmet needs of the hoi-polloi. Neither candidate would actually meet those needs, however. Both would try to bamboozle their way along.

I believe the plug was pulled on Hillary primarily because she showed she was not much of a bamboozler when it came to the end when she might have turned Comey thing around. She didn't, she blew it.

Trump, on the other hand, showed himself to be 1) a master entertainer; 2) a master conman. Those are two absolute necessities in the Post-modern Presidency. Hillary just didn't come up to snuff.

Well, enough of that. We'll get through this one way or another.

Lost Civilization

Percival Lowell's view of the Solis Lacus region of Mars, c. 1896

Telescopic view of the same region from 2005 by D. Peach, Bucks, UK
Note: At just about the limit of visibility, many people will see straight lines
on the surface of the telescopic images that strongly evoke the Lowellian canals.
It's not an optical illusion, as these lines are visible in all three telescopic images.
What they actually are and what causes them to appear is a mystery.

Like many youths, I was something of a science fiction fan during those awkward pre-teen and early-teen years, but I particularly enjoyed science fiction movies and television shows from the 1950s and early 60s both for their utter cheesiness and for their often very strong message of civilization's self-destruction. Who can forget "Science Fiction Theater," "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet," (on ViewMaster no less!) and the early "Twilight Zone?" There was much more than that.

Science fiction at the time could almost always be relied on to be a bracing counterpoint to the kind of hyper-American patriotism young people were being indoctrinated into every day of their lives.

I've mentioned Disneyland a few times in reference to my youth and the more recent events in Anaheim. I was a pretty frequent visitor from soon after the park opened until we left Southern California in 1959. Two of my favorite attractions were the Rocket to the Moon and the House of the Future both in Tomorrowland. The notion of a Future of Unlimited Possibilities was the American cultural counterpoint to the constant drumbeat of nuclear holocaust -- a holocaust that would destroy any hope of "civilization" forever.

Mars figured heavily in the science fiction of the era, as it had for generations, at least since the advent of the Martian Canals that later observers would insist were nothing but illusions -- as they pointed to spacecraft images of the surface of the planet that showed.... something like canals. Forbidden Planet -- a take-off on Shakespeare's The Tempest -- was set on a planet that resembled Mars, Angry Red Planet, Flight to Mars, Red Planet Mars, were just some of the pictures released in the 1950's that dealt with the Mars of imagination, sometimes touching on the fundamental Lowellian notion of a "Dying Civilization."

Of course Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury, among many other authors, would pick up on and elaborate the themes of rough going civilizations facing extinction, many of which were set on Mars or on a planet like Mars, but perhaps the most influential take on the Dying Civilization of Mars trope was that of H. G. Wells' brilliant "War of the Worlds," from 1898. 

Of course I saw the 1953 movie. In the theater. I was too young to understand it, but still it made a tremendous impression on me, especially the scenes of the destruction of Los Angeles. Given the constantly whipped up fear of Soviet attack during the era, such scenes were terrifying and too true to life.

Many years would pass before I read the novel and comprehended what Wells was getting at by positing the invasion of London by Martians and their essentially casual destruction of everything the British held dear. It was an allegory of the British Imperial behavior toward Natives everywhere, but at the time particularly in Africa. They arrived, they destroyed. It was quite the counterpoint -- and in some ways a complement -- to Kipling.

Be that as it may, the notion that Mars either has hosted or currently hosts an alien civilization -- whether dying or not -- is strong among the Planetary Anomalist community. It remained strong even after the the iconic Face on Mars was rather cruelly debunked. I say "cruelly" because there are so many claimed artifacts on Mars and supposed evidence of Civilization, some of which is faked, but there are so many real anomalies as well. The Face, while perhaps not being carved into the landscape by Martian artisans, is most definitely worth further study -- as is the case with the rest of the mesas and buttes in the Cydonia region -- because how it formed is not understood at all, and how the rest of the formations in Cydonia came to be the way they are is a mystery.

Planetary scientists do not know very much about how Mars "works" -- or if they do, they're not saying.

Interestingly, after 36 years of rigorous official denials that Viking Landers found evidence of biology at the surface in 1976, there have been some recent studies that suggest the early denials were in error. Yes, well, that would be typical of Mars study. Error is the rule in Mars study, no matter who is doing it, nor how rigorously they deny their own error! (Lowell comes to mind as setting the standard for that behavior.)

Given the way Mars has been studied, especially since the early space craft exploration era, it would be almost impossible to recognize the presence of a Lost Civilization on Mars if it ever existed. After decades of exploration and investigation, after all, there still no definitive conclusion regarding the presence -- or absence -- of biology on Mars. Many of the investigations that might support or refute hypotheses about biology on Mars are not done. It's as if, perhaps, the planetary science community doesn't want to know one way or another but only wants to extend the study indefinitely.

Some of the Anomalists -- and a few planetary scientists such as Gil Levin -- claim cover-up and worse, but I suspect it's not that. Science, especially the planetary sciences, often works on the Big Man principle, and progress in understanding is often a matter of the prominence and position of those who hypothesize and theorize, not necessarily a matter of skilled and insightful observation and coherent presentation. It's human nature, especially in institutional settings. Politics, in other words, always plays an important role in "what we know." Who is making a claim and in what venue matters.

It's Civilized!

The fact that the study continues, now in Gale Crater with Curiosity, but it cannot be conclusive about Martian biology -- if there is or was any -- or anything else for that matter, is no doubt deliberate, but not necessarily conscious. Gale is thought to have been a lake at one time,  just as Gusev was (the site of the Spirit Rover landing not far away). At the present time, however, Gale is dessicated and dry -- just as Gusev is -- and there is unlikely to be any evidence of recent water or other fluid on the surface; there is unlikely to be any evidence of biology either, at least none that could be recognized without endless dispute. The Opportunity Lander possibly imaged fossils at its landing site in Meridiani, but those images have never been accepted as definitive nor could they be because of the nature of the study itself.

Landing at a site known to be dessicated and dry -- such as anywhere near the Mars equator -- will be unlikely to show any evidence of recent fluid flow or biological activity. On the other hand, a few years ago, a lander plopped down at the margin of the northern polar region, landing on a patch of ice no less, and it appears that fluid droplets were promptly imaged on the landing struts. They remained for many days, but in most of the images released by the Phoenix Mission, the presence of those droplets was either ignored or consciously cut out.

Mars Water -- droplets deposited on Phoenix lander strut, 2008

It became something of a running gag among lay observers that the evidence of water at the surface of Mars that for so long had been sought so eagerly was right there in front of the investigators but it was being ignored. The problem was actually more complex. The droplets were on a landing strut that there was no way to get to for experimental purposes, just as the ice upon which the Phoenix landed could not be directly probed because there was no equipment that could reach it.

A problem with the drops on the Phoenix lander also theoretical. For decades, it has been conventional wisdom that there cannot be liquid water on the surface of Mars, period. Any liquid water at the surface would almost immediately freeze or sublimate/evaporate, because temperatures and atmospheric pressures are too low to sustain liquid water at the surface. This conventional wisdom has been challenged for years, but it has been treated as Iron Law in the planetary science community because -- as Carl Sagan was often wont to say -- "calculations show" that liquid water can't exist at the surface of Mars for more than a few minutes, which was extended to mean that it can't exist at all.

The droplets which you see in the pictures above are not only obviously there, they lasted for many days, and from those three images, it's clear that they are growing, moving and changing over the course of several days. This is, according to the Iron Law of Conventional Wisdom "unpossible." It can't be happening. (At the same time, of course, NASA and JPL and Malin Space Science Systems have routinely announced evidence of current surface water flows when presenting images of recent gullies.)

The article that's linked, however, describes means and mechanisms that make such an "unpossible" thing not only possible but likely, indeed certain to have occurred.

IMNSHO, biology is possible on Mars, and evidence for its active presence was likely found by the Viking Landers in 1976. That evidence was misinterpreted, I suspect to some extent maliciously. There has never been any follow up to the hypotheses that were presented to explain the conflicting results from the Vikings -- which is one of the reasons why I suspect that those involved in the furor actually understood the data to indicate biology rather than "exotic chemistry."

There is most certainly fluid at the surface of Mars, and there is much fluid underground, but how much of it is "water" in the sense we would understand it is an open question. I suspect there is very little pure liquid water anywhere on Mars.  More than likely, almost all liquid water on Mars is in the form of very salty brines, or -- as I came to realize Opportunity Mission in Meridiani -- actually dilute (in some cases concentrated) sulfuric acid. I suspect there has never been an actual "water regime" on Mars, and the images of an Ancient Watery Mars we sometimes see are as much fantasy as any Lost Civilization idea from science fiction literature.

It is highly unlikely that there has ever been any kind of civilization on Mars, not so much because it is "unpossible" as it is because the emerging understanding of the history of Mars will demonstrate there's never been an opportunity for a civilization to develop or become established, in part because of the continuing chaos of the Martian environment.

Despite terrestrial tribulations nowadays, the Earth has been a calm refuge by comparison.

If I continue with this Mars series, I may get into some of that "emerging understanding of the history of Mars.

History for Beginners -- Militant Nonviolence vs Polite Protest

Video of first day of Occupy Wall Street, September 17, 2011

One of the constant themes of the current Occupy Crisis Over Nonviolence is the insistent belief that Occupy Wall Street was originally an entirely peaceful, nonviolent, welcoming protest against the Wall Street bankers and predatory capitalism, and that it was full of music and strollers and families out on balmy fall days, and it was wildly popular.

According to myth, OWS was not meant to be some militant, confrontational, violent marauding Black Bloc Anarchist Thing. It was not supposed to be an uprising. Certainly not a Revolution. It was supposed to be a peaceful assembly for the redress of grievances against the banks and Wall Street. NOT what it is becoming. And what it is becoming is terrifying.

I've been sifting through the hundreds of emails that have come to me on the topic, and many of them are filled with real anguish at the violent, confrontational, and altogether non-peaceful tactics that have been adopted by OWS/Black Bloc/Anarchists in their determination to just make trouble for everyone and ruin what was once so beautiful and wonderful.

Dear me. WTF? No, I mean really. WTF?

This is not just revisionism, it's fantasy. A nice fantasy, sure, but were these people ever paying attention? Or were they somehow lulled by a propaganda campaign I wasn't aware of? Because I don't recall OWS ever promoting itself as anything but a nonviolent militant resistance campaign, initially to take and hold public space in defiance of authority, wherein the interests of the People, the 99%, could be and would be discussed, debated, and advocated. From its first moment of existence, OWS engaged in militant nonviolent civil disobedience. The encampment at Liberty Square/Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan was an act of militant defiance, not a nice, polite family-friendly protest that precisely followed the rules of the MLK and Gandhian civil rights and independence movements.

Liberty Square for a time became a family-friendly, festive affair, but only after it was established in defiance of authority and held against eviction by highly motivated and militant activists.

The mythology continues on this pleasant revisionist fantasy that somehow OWS has been taken over by Black Bloc anarchists and that anarchists had little or nothing to do with the origination (as I call it, founding) of OWS, which is simply absurd.

They were there at the beginning and they're there now. The entire structure of OWS and most of the Occupys that spontaneously arose subsequently, utilize concepts and processes and ideals that have been part of anarchist practice for decades; autonomy, respect for people's rights over property rights, General Assemblies, direct democracy, consensus decision making, working groups, affinity groups, even the later spokes council all came directly out of anarchic thought and practice. Black Bloc wasn't utilized as a tactic, but people who had been part of Black Blocs were very much involved in the OWS process. Anarchists were founders of NYCGA and Occupy Wall Street, they provided the intellectual space for there to BE an Occupy Wall Street, they provided much of the original energy of the movement, and they provided most of the horizontal leaderless structure and process used by OWS to this day. Anarchists are not some alien intrusion into OWS; they've always been there, as have the Dreaded Boogie Men, the all-powerful "Black Bloc anarchists."

Revisionists like to conflate OWS (Occupy Wall Street) with "Occupy," as if OWS defines the whole, OWS is one Occupy among several autonomous Occupys in New York City and one of hundreds around the United States and the world. It is not the headquarters; it is not run by the Occupy Central Committee, and it doesn't have any operational control or authority over any other Occupy. Since the raid in November that evicted the camp and destroyed the encampment, OWS has had a relatively low profile in Occupy affairs (though it is still an important element in the whole).

Another revisionist notion is that the concept of Occupying public space began in the United States with OWS last September, and that nothing like it had happened in this country before. It's a particularly beguiling pious fiction in that OWS quite consciously pretended to come from nothing, appearing suddenly fully formed and without precedent to press its case for social and economic justice. Of course, that's not quite the case, either. Something in, I believe, Wisconsin happened earlier in the year. In February and March, the Wisconsin State Capitol was occupied continuously sometimes by thousands of demonstrators protesting various rightist economic and labor policies enacted or about to be enacted by the Wisconsin legislature. Protests continued outside the Capitol, sometimes involving a hundred thousand marchers, into July. The Wisconsin occupation and demonstrations were inspired by the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings in January. Spanish protesters occupied the Plaza del Sol in Madrid from May through June to protest the lack of peoples' representation in the government and a growingly dire economic situation for millions of Spaniards. The occupation of Plaza del Sol was evicted by police in June. The Plaza del Sol occupation was used as a model by OWS. There was a student occupation of campus buildings at UC Berkeley in October, 2009, that was violently attacked by campus and area police forces, setting the pattern for the violent and brutal crack downs on the US Occupys in many locations, including the campus of UC Berkeley, in November of 2011. In other words, OWS was preceded by a plethora of similar occupations that served to set the stage for the occupation of Liberty Square/Zuccotti Park.

Perhaps the most pernicious myth being circulated now is that somehow the OWS and the Occupy Movement have been taken over by Black Bloc and anarchists who are forcing the Movement to become violent. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

There has been very little violence initiated by Occupy activists, none of it involving weapons or firearms. There have been a few autonomous Black Blocs during Occupy demonstrations (Black Blocs are autonomous actions), the most notorious being the Black Bloc that paralleled part of the November 2, 2012 march in Oakland as part of the General Strike during which a dozen or so windows of banks, a few businesses and the City Hall were broken and a number of buildings were sprayed with graffiti.

In fact, Occupy has been subject to relentless police violence and destruction of property, mass arrests, and torturous conditions of custody virtually since the beginning of the Occupations. None of it has been in retaliation for isolated incidents of vandalism or object-throwing. Hundreds of demonstrators have been wounded by police fire and thousands have been arrested. Encampments have been wantonly destroyed and the property of Occupiers has been routinely confiscated and destroyed. In one of the most notorious incidents of that sort, the People's Library of the OWS encampment was trashed and its contents thrown into garbage trucks during the eviction from Zuccotti Park, even as occupiers pleaded with authorities to allow them to remove the books safely.

The idea that Occupy has become violent or that Occupy endorses or approves violence is absurd; there has been minor and incidental violence during a few Occupy events, that's it. Meantime, Occupy has been subjected to ever increasing levels of police violence in city after city. And that police violence is not due to any violent incidents that have occurred during Occupy events. Police violence against demonstrators doesn't need an excuse. Violent suppression of Occupy encampments and demonstrations is a matter of policy and command. No matter how much Occupy attempts to suppress violence at its events (as has been done), the police are still violent toward the demonstrators on command.

Occupy practices a variety of nonviolent tactics including militant and confrontational nonviolent resistance. Occupy does not engage in violent or armed resistance, but some of the militant tactics, such as confrontation with police and public officials, or, as happened at UC Davis and UC Berkeley, linking arms and sitting in acts of non-violent civil disobedience, have been declared "violent" or "not-nonviolent" by some observers and officials. They are in fact classic forms of nonviolent resistance.

There have been many examples of "polite" resistance during Occupy actions, and there have been many examples of "militant" resistance as well; there are very few examples of violence initiated by Occupy demonstrators, but hundreds of demonstrators have been wounded by police fire against unarmed and nonviolent demonstrators.

Being loud is not violence. Defying authority is not violence. Impolite does not mean violent.

Last November, Jaime Omar Yassin, a participant in Occupy Oakland, wrote a blog post titled "What Violence Isn't." It's worth a read to get some perspective on the issues that are still roiling Occupy.

It's as if the discussion hasn't moved an inch since then -- except to become more hysterical.


The militant nonviolent Occupy Oakland OccuBus cruising San Francisco's Financial District, January 20, 2012


Sector of parking lot at Democratic National Convention wherein polite protest was allowed, Denver, 2004


Cage within which polite protest was allowed to those who were admitted during the Republican National Convention, St. Paul, 2008