Disturbing

James Steele, Operator

Well, not in the sense that one didn't know that these things -- and much worse -- were going on during our continuing warriorism in the wastelands of the former Turkish Empire, but in the sense that another name and face have now been put to a throughline of atrocity that characterizes so much of the American Imperial Ambition. From the get go.

Many Americans, of course, will claim not to have known about any of it, and not to believe it now, for the simple reason that America is Good and Doesn't Do These Things -- unless necessary. You understand.

Therefore, the Wogs (Must) Deserve It.

What I saw, though, in this BBC/Guardian co-production (apart from the use of so much unrelated and uninformative video) was something I doubt many Americans are even remotely conscious of:

Steele and his ilk are operatives throughout the American corporate-government realm. So far as I can tell, they don't actually run things themselves; they carry out the directives of and report back to their Betters -- who are actually in charge. It was very obvious who was who during the Bushevik Reign, but it's not so much so now.

The exception to this rule is in the American prison industry and their gulag offshoots -- where the ilk does run things, and in many cases, they are free to do whatever sadistic shit they want. And they'll lie about it, too.

While it doesn't touch on America's domestic imprisonment industry, focusing instead on the development of Iraqi interrogation centers and death squads modeled on previous counter-insurgency wet work done in the fields of Vietnam and Central America under the guidance of Steele and people like him, Americans should long ago have come to the realization that this sort of thing comes from domestic American experience with prisons and prisoners. It has never been confined to "over there" somewhere in wartime.

Brutal interrogation -- torture -- has long been routine in America's domestic law enforcement practices. False confessions. Summary execution. Round ups of the innocent. Intrusive and constant surveillance. Property seizures. For all I know, "disappearances" as well. This is going on domestically and has been going on for many years. There has long been a synergy between what goes on domestically and how these things are done overseas by client states. None of it is happening in isolation or in a vacuum.

It's all linked together.

What's revealed in the BBC/Guardian production is actually not that much, and strangely a name that is strangely never mentioned in it is John Negroponte, perhaps the pre-eminent American Lord of Darkness, of torture and death squads. Once he was assigned to Iraq, the wet work commenced in earnest. Everyone knew it, too. Many cheered.

But putting other names and faces to what was happening Over There is useful. The bloody business of the day wasn't some aberration, it was intentional. Considered necessary. Effective. For a time at any rate.

The scale and the style may be somewhat different domestically. There are far more domestic prisoners, after all, most of whom are simply warehoused and rarely used for interrogation purposes since few of them have any information the government needs or wants. There have been exceptions, however. Round ups and street justice ("") are typically confined to particular jurisdictions and wards therein, generally neither witnessed nor even recognized by most people. Out of sight, out of mind.

Unless of course the Authorities want their cruelties and brutalities and their occasional street executions to be seen and appreciated by the rest of the herd -- in which case very public displays are made. This happens all the time, but many people don't seem to understand the deliberate nature of these displays. They are intended to induce fear leading to submission and cooperation. They generally do it well.

The problem is that eventually people become so inured on the one hand and fed up on the other that they revolt. Revolts that can lead to revolution. Ultimately, for example, even the client officials in Iraq revolted against the American intrusion, just as the Afghan clients are doing. Empire done so bloodily and brutally cannot last. The British should have learned this back in the day, but apparently they still believe they can impose their rule by main force forever, particularly if it is done through their far more brutal and bloodthirsty American proxies.

It doesn't work.

Compare and Contrast -- Hugo vs Hugo

The outpouring of grief over the death of Hugo Chavez is matched by the contempt of a certain class of want-it-alls who rule us and seek to rule Venezuela once again.

But the contrast isn't just between grief and contempt. It's between celebration and lies, between accomplishment and fabrication, between admiration and insult.

This is the Class War limned in bright tropical colors, the global war between the haves-who-want-it-all and everyone else.

The day after Hugo's death, two sectors of what passes for 'lefty' media in the United States -- the Diane Rehm Show on NPR and Democracy Now! on Pacifica -- demonstrated just how deep those divisions run, even on the so-called Left.

Rehm had three panelists, one of whom was a stone liar rightist from Venezuela now on wingnut welfare at the Carnegie Institute. His lies were nonstop, pure propaganda, and they went essentially unchallenged by the other panelists, let alone the hostess (who tolerates no challenge to her perspective and authority on her show). The other panelists were Tom Gjelten of NPR and Geoff Thale of something called The Washington Office of Latin America. Gjelten presented the US government line on the matter of Chavez and Venezuela and Thale presented a somewhat softer version of the Government Line.

Rehm was at sea, vaguely drifting around, but knowing that Chavez was indubitably A Bad Man. Socialist dictator that he was. And all the rest of it.

Transcript

Listen

Interestingly, many of her callers, emailers and commenters seemed to be fed up with the, shall we say, anti-Chavez bias of the program and said so more or less politely. Diane feigned perplexity and badly mischaracterized the comments she was receiving apparently throughout the show. 

Read the commentary

I don't ordinarily listen to Rehm. I did because of the topic. I was disgusted and offended.

Later, Democracy Now! presented what I thought was a much fairer and more people centered, rather than government-institution centered, remembrance of Chavez, for good and ill. What was striking to me was that several of those speaking about Chavez and Venezuela had personal knowledge of him and Venezuela. Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez had interviewed him (albeit in New York) and Eva Golinger had been one of his friends and advisers in Caracas. I don't recall offhand, but it could be that other panelists had known him personally. At any rate, even when they didn't necessarily approve of some action or policy of Chavez and his government, even when they acknowledged that he and his government got some things wrong, they certainly saw him as a worthy figure with profound influence in Latin America and beyond.

Quite the contrast with the Diane Rehm Show.

Democracy Now! Video and transcript.

Now of course I should not consider Diane Rehm and NPR to be the "left"  -- and ordinarily I wouldn't do so. But in the United States, the mainstream media, like government, is divided between rightists and fascists. There is no "left" at all. Consequently, various outlets within the rightist-fascist mainstream are designated "left" -- NPR, PBS, MSNBC, the "Communist News Network," so as to have demons to thrash, even though all of the mainstream outlets are pretty much on the same page, and it is a page that's written by Ailes and Murdoch.

Meanwhile, Pacifica has ventured pretty far from its radical/revolutionary -- and yes, leftist -- roots, having been captured in a sense by Puritans and Propertarians. I won't go into the Take-Over sturm und drang here, but it was dramatic to say the least. While there is a leftist gloss to the place still, it shows (to me at least) far more signs of straightlaced libertarianism than Leftism in much of its programming, including the flagship Democracy Now!

The American media and what's fundamentally wrong with it, however, are topics for another day.

Let it just be noted in this instance that NPR and Diane Rehm performed the role of FOX "News" to in contrast to Democracy Now! doing a creditable version of an MSNBC "moderate" take.

That is all...

Cheer Up -- There's Always YouTube!

As I've pointed out in the past, I'm not into Doom Blogging. There's a whole genre of it, however, and it's very popular. A subgenre is Survivalism. And its antithesis. Thus the video up top. Ain't YouTube grand?

Out in the country, though, I'll admit you do think about these things, sort of a constant drone in the background of daily tasks and routines. Storms have periodically shut the interstate, after all, sometimes for days at a time, and the local roads can be difficult to travel even if they are open. There were two groceries in town, now there's one. What would happen if it closed or couldn't be supplied regularly?

But we stockpile food because we're lazy and don't want to have to go to the market every day. We have a lot of materials and supplies for all kinds of eventualities, simply because it is easier to keep them on hand than to have to go out and hunt them down in the event they're needed. If we were like some of the locals, we'd stockpile a lot more than we do.

We are advised to have guns because -- "You never know."

There's a clinic in town, but it would be one the first things shut were The Ultimate Collapse to come. We've been using a clinic in Albuquerque anyway (and I'd bet you it would stay open!) We keep a larger supply of medications on hand than we might otherwise, though, so as to be sure it's here if we can't get refills quickly.

All kinds of little adjustments.

The video is one of a series. Oh my.

Hugo

Viva

After a long struggle with an unspecified cancer, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has died.

He was a man of extraordinary zeal, strength and courage who set out to change The Way Things Are in Venezuela, to shine a light in the darker corners of his country and the global plutocracy in general, and to build up his people, to develop the human potential of Venezuela and Latin America in general and to serve as an inspiration for struggling peoples everywhere. "Si, se puede."

He became a monumental figure to me and many other Americans as well as struggling peoples around the world when he did this at the United Nations in 2006:

 

""The devil came here yesterday, and it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of. Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the President of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world." [President Bush] ...came [to the General Assembly] to share his nostrums to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world."

This made him the implacable enemy of the United States' government, which, through various nefarious means, set out to destabilize and destroy him and his quest for social and economic justice.

In this strange war of many unkind words and some bizarre deeds, Hugo always seemed to wind up on top -- at least until he took ill with an initially entirely mysterious malady, eventually acknowledged as cancer which was being treated in Cuba. There are claims, naturally enough, that his malady was induced by some means or secret method of the CIA or one of the other "agencies" Our Government unleashes on its enemies. Cuba is the laboratory.

Castro's Cuba, the other implacable enemy of the United States' government. Forever condemned to perdition, the both of them, Cuba and Venezuela, at least for so long as their "strong-man dictators" hold sway over the unfreedom of the people.

In these cases it is abundantly clear that those who clamor loudest for "liberty" and "freedom" devoutly wish the freedom from responsibility to others, the liberty to exploit and enslave whomever they choose. They wish the "liberty" and "freedom" of the olden days in which a handful of hyper-wealthy owners-plunderers took from the masses without let or hindrance, what they wanted and when they wanted, as if by right, with no obligation toward the masses, or indeed any interest in them beyond how they could be made to serve Their Betters more fully, efficiently and profitably.

Ah Liberty!

Ah Freedom!

Anything and anyone who interferes must be isolated, crushed, destroyed. Viz: Honduras and the coup against democratically elected Manuel Zelaya in 2009, a coup backed by the United States government, operating strictly on the pattern established during the Red Scare 1950's during which any Latin American popular uprising or election to office of People's candidates were ruthlessly subverted, stamped out or overthrown.

Or take the Reagan Era, when the bloodiest reign of terror in hundreds of years was imposed from Washington's nether reaches (the various agencies and their private sector offshoots) through their proxies in Central America as a warning and a lesson to the uppity natives throughout Latin America that their impertinence would not be tolerated. The question was not "submission or death," it was merely a matter of when Death would come and in what hideous manner. Even the Church felt the wrath of Washington.

All of this was prelude.

500 Years of Prelude you might say.

Hugo Chavez was at first dismissed by the Better People of Venezuela (interestingly, Venezuela was  conquered and initially settled from Europe by Germans not Spaniards) as a zambo upstart, worthless and meaningless, and simply impossible to consider seriously. His popularity among the People soared.

Latin America has a myth of racial tolerance and indifference to matters of racial superiority or inferiority. It is a comforting myth but hardly accurate. Throughout Latin America, and through its long, tortuous history as colonies and dependencies of Spain, Portugal and the United States, Latin America has been marinating in racial discrimination, much of it derived directly from the patterns and policies instituted during the Reconquest of Iberia -- Andaluz as it were -- from the Moors.

Everyone was classified according to skin color, ethnic heritage, race, and religion, and the darker the skin, the more African and/or Indian the ethnicity, the lower down the social ladder one was. The purer the sangre (the blood) or the race -- ie: the whiter -- the higher one was. Not to be Catholic, of course, was not to be considered at all.

My introduction to Venezuela was through the telenovela Pura Sangre which didn't beat around the bush about these things...

Hugo was considered to be a zambo -- something like a mule in the eyes of los ricos blancos. A cross between an African and an Indian, therefore barely recognizable as human. So they (los ricos) thought they could get away with anything they wanted by insulting and denouncing him, perpetrating coups against him, attempting to assassinate him, subverting elections, and so on. All of this, of course, and much more was backed wholeheartedly by certain high-placed private interests, and not unexpectedly, many of the attempts at subversion and overthrow of Chavez were covertly -- and on occasion overtly -- backed by the United States Government.

The idea -- the very idea -- of using the wealth of the nation to uplift the People, as Hugo set out to do in Venezuela, was and widely is considered daft, crazy, insane, appalling, unjust, and worse. Hugo was hammered for it relentlessly by the press and media in his own country.

The very idea!

We Americans are not far from the very same situation as our own press and media giddily anticipates the next round of granny-starving budget cuts for the masses and tax cuts for the rich. They can't help themselves. They are beside themselves with glee

I've noticed that most of the objections to Chavez have to do with his supposed authoritarianism, but for the most part, these objections are not coming from anti-authoritarians. Oh no. They are coming from other authoritarians who simply don't like the fact that their authority was not the ruling authority -- or even acknowledged -- in Caracas.

In fact, for all the accusations of suppression of opposition in Venezuela under Chavez, the opposition seemed to be quite healthy and openly defiant (and wildly rich to boot) throughout his presidency. Interesting, eh?

Will Hugo's reforms and social reconceptions survive?  At this point, it's hard to say. Much the same question is being asked about Cuba after the Castros. Will it revert to the criminal hell-hole it was before the Revolution?

My own view? Yes, probably. Take the Russian example after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Reversion is almost certain.

People will put up with a lot of misery -- far more than they think they can or would -- before they will take control of their fate from their Betters. They will happily let go of their own control if someone stronger and seemingly smarter comes along. Hugo's fundamental reform was to teach the People to hold on and not give up, not give over, not retreat. In other words, his goal was to ensure that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela endures long after his passing.

Whether it will or not remains to be seen.

So long, Hugo. Thanks for the memories, thanks for the laughs. Heaven smiles on you.
------------------------------------

"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", a documentary about the 2002 coup in Caracas (enthusiastically supported by the New York Times, do not forget...)

"Tribute"

Money for nothing 
And chicks for free...

--Dire Straits 1985


1990 Performance

The goal for capitalists and their fellow travelers is no different than that of the fictive MTV Star made infamous in Dire Straits megahit "Money for Nothing"  -- an anthem of sorts for the dispossessed and disenchanted in the Thatcher/Reagan era. We might call it The Era of Greed.

The goal is always to get "money for nothing" and your chicks for free.

While the rest of the poor sods work themselves to death making sure the fancy people get the tribute and freedom they want and demand -- on the wan hope some of that tribute will fall into their own gnarled hands before they die.

"That's the way you do it
Lemme tell ya
Them guys ain't dumb

Maybe get a blister
on your little finger

Maybe get a blister
on your thumb."

Permanent Deficit Hysteria --> Permanent Recession

That's the way it is.

I'm not one to accept the notion that Deficits are somehow Apocalyptic Now when they Didn't Matter At All a decade ago during the Bushevik Gung Ho Period. Government spending deficits are now what they have always been, useful and necessary for the conduct of private and government business. In fact, the United States Government has nearly always run a deficit, and when state governments are forced to run deficits contrary to their charters (more and more common thanks to the lootage they've experienced at the tender mercies of the financiers and plutocrats) somehow the sky doesn't fall.

Deficit hysteria is a crock, but it has become a permanent fixture of our Ruling Class, and the permanence of deficit hysteria ensures that Americans will endure a permanent recession.

It's the strangest recession, though, isn't it? Corporate profits and the remuneration of the High and the Mighty have never been better, ever, in the entire history of greed and capitalism -- so they say. Yet the puny salaries and benefits of the workers whose toil ensures the privileges of their masters continue to fall. Tens of millions of Americans are forced into poverty. Homelessness and hunger stalk the land.

Hm. Maybe there is a connection of some sort? Ya think?

From appearances -- and from hearing the rhetoric of doom all the time -- Americans are coming to recognize that there will probably never be a return to a growth economy. The Powers That Be are intent on asset and wealth stripping from what remains of the middle class -- the working class and the poor having already long ago been looted of anything of value they once may have been able to accumulate.

The major mass media (and much of the new media) is practically giddy at the imposition of the latest kabuki, the so-called sequester, and they look forward to the re-allocation of the sequester cuts from the defense ledger to the social spending side. This makes them so happy, they can hardly stand it.

The high-stepping and baton twirling has only just begun.

THIS is what they have been waiting for.

The Graphology of Inequality

This video/graphology of wealth inequality in America has been getting a lot of play lately. It speaks for itself.



 Hell in a handcar propelled by the greedy and crazed end-timers. They've got all the wealth. What more could they possibly want???

Republicans All The Way Down

Shipoopi-Kabuki

The Dreaded Sequester is now upon us. Apparently. Well, given the Kabuki that is Washington Theater, we never really know whether anything is ever an actual yay or nay -- or even whether it matters -- in that otherworldly realm. They will do what they want and when they want to screw the rest of us, and if that screwage is most effectively accomplished through Sequestration, then so be it.

Now of course in Washington Theater, everything is always the result of Republicans doing something nasty to the Democrats -- who are always, of course, being entirely reasonable and completely powerless.

This has been going on for decades now. The actors and the victors are always the diminishing handful of Republicans -- such as Dame Mitch McConnell, or everyone's least favorite Munster-cousin Paul Ryan. The hapless Dems just take it, whatever "it" may be at the moment, and then when they are not being hapless, they're totally feckless. When their fecklessness fails, they are simply craven.

It is now Iron Law. It was not ever thus, nor need it be thus, but it is thus, and for whatever reason,  the plot cannot be changed. Republicans are the actors in our play. Dems react. If they aren't simply cowering in the corner.

The notion of cutting the federal budget during a now essentially permanent recession seems slightly, somewhat, just a teense counter intuitive, especially given that it is relatively obvious -- even to Republicans and the media who serve them -- that continuing reductions in government workforces are a major drag on economic recovery. Republicans make clear they understand this full well when they scream and fuss about all the military budget cuts and all the military contractors who will be forced to cut back their work-forces because of the Dreaded Sequester. They know full well that their rhetoric about the Government Never Creating A Job is bullshit, but they figure that the Dems are too feckless and craven to counter these lies effectively, and they're too hapless to point out the glaring hypocrisy of paying for endless military spending (on top of the bloated Imperial Domestic Security State)  on the basis of "jobs, jobs, jobs!"

Yeah, well.

This performance on the Washington Stage is being brought to us by a unified company. It includes both parties in Congress and the White House, acting in concert to accomplish certain mutually agreeable ends. Those ends include the fleecing and screwage of the rest of us.

The concept that it is all the Republicans' fault -- or all the Democrats', or Nino Scalia's -- fault is kind of essential myth making and propaganda, intended to maintain division among the Lower Orders. That division is essential for continuing control of said Orders, and that control is necessary for the continued unmolested fleecing and screwage -- which is all Our Betters think the rest of us deserve anyway.

The Dreaded Sequester does little in the context of the overall budget -- because it is such a tiny percentage of overall spending. But because of its focus on bang for the buck, so to speak, the harm caused to ordinary people will be significant -- intentionally. The harm to the poorest among us will be especially harsh, and few will pay much attention because that's the way budget cuts have been implemented for many years now.  But intentional harm to the collapsing middle class will be significant as well.

Obviously, Republicans don't have to worry about what happens to ordinary people in any case because they don't have "constituents" as the term is ordinarily understood. They have client who they serve -- as long as the price is right. Dems may have the same or different clients, but they lack "constituents" as well. The People matter not a whit to the Rulers.

It is so because even when the People become restive, they are still reluctant to do anything that Rulers believe they need pay any attention to. Nobody expects the Paris Commune, but it's well past time to demand something better out of the Washington image machine -- something beyond "it's Republicans all the way down!" (And oh how the "Left" loves to play that game!)

Interestingly, there is some nascent ferment on the Constitutional front, even going so far as to suggest replacing the antiquated, indeed fossilized and ignored, establishing document we have with something appropriate and new. The Voting Rights issue seems to be a trigger to the realization that the establishing document itself is deeply, terminally flawed (because there is no People's right to vote in the Constitution). Regardless of what you believe about the ideology of the Supreme Court majority, if they are going to rule based on what they believe the framers of the Constitution meant, and they will not allow any deviation, then perhaps -- just maybe -- it is time to abolish the whole rickety mess and start over.

Will wonders never cease.

Imperial Police State Marches On

Itself

The Sacred Second Absolutists continue to be in complete denial about the extinction of the Republic as it used to be. Those who claim to be ready and able to defend to the death the rights of Americans as enshrined in the Constitution are completely oblivious to the fact that those "rights" are mere figments these days, and soon enough they will be little more than historical relics, whether or not the gunners are allowed to keep their arsenals.

By now, it should be perfectly clear to Americans -- as it is around the world -- that private arsenals do not and cannot prevent the "imposition of tyranny." In fact, they enable that imposition.

Perhaps the most glaring example in recent times is Iraq under the Ba'athists and that Old Devil Saddam. It wasn't all that long ago, you know. Everyone was ordered to be armed to the teeth under Saddam, and all those armaments in civilian hands did nothing -- nothing -- to prevent the imposition of Saddamite tyranny, in fact, civilian arms helped maintain it. Duh. It was only through massive intervention from outside that the Ba'athists were at first contained and then driven out of power.

Far from being the fantasized "protectors of Liberty" they imagine themselves to be, heavily armed civilian populations typically function as tools of tyranny. After all, the origin of the Sacred Second is found in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the purpose of which was the arming of Protestants and the disarming of Catholics so as to ensure the perpetuation of Protestant authority and rule over the Realm. That's what the English Civil Wars were about, and that's what the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 was about. It was nothing less than a fight over which religious faction would have authority -- tyrannical authority -- over the whole.

There was no thought of "liberty" for the common people at all, and there was certainly no thought of universal "liberty." The idea was absurd.

The American experience was not that much different. From the beginning of British settlement right up to today, the notion of universal "liberty" somehow preserved, protected and defended by a heavily armed civilian population is patently absurd. Civilian arsenals enable no "liberty" for the masses whatsoever; instead, they enable endless individual gun deaths and periodic mass murder that keep the People in a state of fear and near panic, which enables... tyrannical rule. Surprise, surprise.

That's the point.

And one of the principles of Sacred Second Absolutists is no different than that of the English version of 1689: while some civilians are allowed essentially unlimited access to weaponry, other segments will be disarmed by law and custom.

This enables those with armaments to more effectively rule over those who are disarmed. For example, in the early days of the Republic, armed white militias were utilized against disarmed slaves and Indians -- and from time to time, domestic rebels. Later, they would be utilized against supposedly free blacks and workers who dared to question the authority of and exploitation by their bosses and the corporations they served.  The definition of the "liberty" being protected was the freedom to exploit an underclass without hindrance.

It's not all that different today, though the gun rights issue is once again leading straight to a civil war.

Absolutists, for example, insist on their right to defend themselves against marauding Negroes and other swarthy-brown-black Criminals. The occasional innocent slaughtered in the struggle is just "the price you have to pay" they say, for the "liberty" to assert your dominance over the marauders. Or anyone who looks like them. Or might be one. Or has an attitude. Or who makes you scared. Or...

In the meantime, an Imperial Police State is imposed from Above while the gunners and absolutists are oblivious -- when they are not actively encouraging it. After all, so long as the Police State ostensibly only applies to Designated Out Groups and Swarthy Others, why should the gunners and absolutists care?

In my view, the only way to solve this untenable situation on behalf of the People is through Civil Disarmament -- in other words, essentially eliminating civilian arsenals, and strictly limiting civilian access to guns and ammunition. By "civilian arsenals" I mean those of the police too.

As many Americans know all too well, the police have become part of the problem of gun violence in this country. Reducing their access to and utilization of armaments will go a long way toward reducing the overall level of gun violence in these United States.

Gunner Absolutists have long been in the business of supplying weapons to factions within impoverished American communities, on the premise that armed competitors (gangs as it were) will wipe each other out in the by and bye. While they are engaged in their continuous armed struggle, non-combatants will live in perpetual fear -- which will make them much easier to control than they otherwise might be.

What works so well in impoverished communities has its application to better off communities through the periodic means of apparently random mass shootings at sites otherwise considered "safe": schools, malls, movies, churches and so on. Each time there is another of these mass shootings, people panic and tremble in fear. It's a good thing in the eyes of those who wish control over the masses.

On the other hand, calls for even modest gun control get nowhere, in part because the weapons industry is so profitable and so generous to officials, and in part because the gruesome level of gun violence and mass murder in this country is useful to those in power. So long as they are not the targets -- and they only rarely are -- what's to worry?

If gunners and absolutists really had any interest in thwarting tyranny they would have long ago applied their arguments (ahem) against the abrogation of the other provisions of the Bill of Rights, but this they -- tellingly -- do not do, not on a bet and not on a prayer. In fact, they feign utter obliviousness to any imposition by the Imperial Police State so long as there is no interference with the domestic (let alone international) weapons trade.

It's Just Business, see?

Certain Libertarian factions like to "stand up to tyranny" by video recording their resistance to and encounters with TSA and Border Control. Occasionally, they'll take on the day to day harassment and abuse of the public by local police forces. Some media figures have made entire careers out of it. The problem is that the tyrannies they are so manfully standing up to are usually the smallest ones, the relatively minor irritations and harassments that come with the territory. We face a situation in this country which is the result of collapsed and imploded institutions -- including much of government -- being replaced by ever-more authoritarian, draconian, and even totalitarian policies and procedures, often -- as in the case of the DHS -- imposed by entirely new departments and agencies acting with apparently impunity.

Don't blame it on '9/11'; essentially all of what is being imposed was pre-programmed well prior to those attacks.

It is always in the nature of government to seek means to expand its authority, something that is in-built into the institution itself.

None of the tyrannical incidents cited in this post -- and there are many hundreds more available -- require or utilize civilian weapons arsenals to counter or thwart the imposition of tyranny, nor would the employment of these arsenals be of any use in thwarting these tyrannies. In other words, the purported reason for maintaining civilian arsenals -- the thwarting of tyranny -- is bogus. In fact, in the incidents cited, deft argument on the scene or in court following the incident generally suffices to... erm... thwart the immediate imposition of tyranny.

Much the same could be said about out of control, violent, and too frequently deadly policing.

Ergo, time to engage in civil disarmament.

Expanding the Voting Rights Act

Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act... still considered too much too soon by some

Given the nature of "law" and "justice" in this country, it's likely that the Supreme Court will find a way to strike down the Voting Rights Act and will leave it up to a dysfunctional Congress to rectify the consequences... or not as the case may be. Neo-Jim Crow, here we come.

For generations states have been trying to get out from under the onerous burden of holding free and fair elections in which voting is not "unduly" restricted, and given the successful efforts of many of them to interfere with the voting rights and opportunities of their citizens these last few years, it's clear they are champing at the bit to be liberated from oversight and get on with the business of limiting the franchise to the right sort of people once again -- free at last! Thank gawdal mighty, we free at last!

Though there have been no overt efforts to "unduly" restrict the franchise in New Mexico, there have been a number of ham-handed actions by county clerks and elections officials to gum up the works, most notoriously in Sandoval County in the last general election when far too few voting machines were provided for large-population precincts leading to unprecedentedly long lines and hours long waits to vote. It was so bad that the governor herself came down from Santa Fe and handed out bottles of water and snacks to those in line.

For the most part, elections in New Mexico are handled smoothly and relatively well given the vast empty expanses of the state and the heavy concentration of population in the Abq Metro area as well as the relatively primitive procedures employed -- such as (eek) hand-counting ballots.

If the Voting Rights Act is struck down, it's widely assumed that many states will revert to pre-VRA policies and procedures, which essentially means reverting to Jim Crow exclusionary laws and policies. What most Americans seem not to understand is that Jim Crow-style laws and policies were not limited to the South, they were practically universal throughout the country, and in many cases, the first order of business was disenfranchisement of large segments of the population. This was unfortunately considered a 'progressive' means of 'curbing corruption.'

So it is likely to be again if Congress doesn't intervene, and there is no sign whatever that this Congress will do any such thing.

Millions of course are already disenfranchised by the fact that they are on some list somewhere of convicted felons or other miscreants. Of course, non-citizens are unable to vote in any case. So part of the process of disenfranchisement includes restrictions on citizenship. In effect, those disenfrancised become a separate class of non-citizens who can be subjected to all kinds of mistreatment with impunity -- as they were when time was.

Those who advocated for the Voting Rights Act knew full well what these consequences were, and that was part of the motivation for the Act in the first place. It's not solely a matter of being able to vote, it is a matter of citizenship itself, and the dignity that is supposed go with it.

Apparently, the issue before the Court is whether things have reformed enough in the subject states that there is no longer any need for the oversight and conditions imposed on them by the Voting Rights Act. Practically everyone seems to think that the conservative majority of the Court will agree that the time has come to lift these provisions and overturn the Act, but not because things are necessarily permanently better. No, the issue now is that voting restrictions are being emplaced outside the designated states and jurisdictions, and therefore, the Act no longer works the way it was intended. By the authority vested in the Court, the time has come to overturn the Act and do something else.

There is no federal constitutional right to vote (despite references to it in some of the amendments.)  Perhaps the ideal "something else" would be an amendment that specifically grants the right to vote to all Americans in all elections with few restrictions -- as is customary in almost every other democracy on earth. The second choice might be to expand the provisions of the Voting Rights Act to all states without restricting its provisions to only those jurisdictions with a history of voter suppression. One of the interesting objections I've heard to that idea is that the DoJ would be "overwhelmed" with voting rights cases and issues and would be essentially paralyzed due to the sheer volume of voting rights violations. That may be. Would it necessarily be such a bad thing?

It would be in the sense that the issue would likely be litigated forever, which would more than likely mean that there would be endless delays in lifting "undue" voting restrictions, all the while endless creative attempts at enhancing voting restrictions would be undertaken. We know how these things play out.

On the other hand, I've said many times that voting as such is not the most effective means of making desirable policy changes, as the Voting Rights Act itself demonstrates. The Act was never subject to a vote of the People, of course, nor would it have been in any case. Nor, in fact, were those who voted for it in Congress elected on the understanding that the provisions of the Act would be their objective. That's not to say that the Act was somehow a mistake. It is to say that "voting" as such had little or nothing to do with the creation, passage and implementation of the Act. And so it is with most public policies especially at the Federal level. You don't get a vote on policy. You get to vote for personalities.

Policy changes generally happen through pressure from outside the electoral system, by effective and well placed advocates and activists. Which may mean high-priced lobbyists and their running dogs, or it may mean massive demonstrations in the streets, or it may mean populist uprisings of one sort or another. Strikes. Shutdowns. Resistance.

Voting by itself is generally not an effective means of accomplishing desirable change, nor is it meant to be.

But then, who really wants change, anyway?

The Living Theatre Is Dead...?

Save the Living Theatre! from Lucky Ant on Vimeo.


The Clinton Street home of the Living Theatre in Manhattan for the last five years or so has become too expensive for Judith Malina and the remnants and disciples of the theatre company she founded with Julian Beck in 1947 to maintain.

Of course, there have been many closings for the Living Theatre in the past. Their cutting edge work, which was -- and still is -- well beyond any American Establishment notion of "what the theatre should be and is supposed to be", never made them many of the Right Kind of Friends in the perfected power structures of the 1950's and 1960's and that kept them homeless and on the run more often than not.

That was OK back in the day, as the vitality of The Living Theatre didn't depend on having a permanent performance site. But New York being New York, they were subject to constant official harassment and eviction even from some of their temporary sites. They didn't -- couldn't -- fit the format of The Theatre as it was supposed to be.

It's hard for me to express just how much influence The Living Theatre had on my formative notions of what kind of theater I wanted to do if I ever had a chance to do it as I wanted to. I never saw a live performance by The Living Theatre in all my years in the field, though there were some films of their performances circulating back in the day. It was primarily a book that inspired me, however.

PARADISE NOW.

It would be wrong to claim that nothing like that had been done before; after all there was an enormous amount of creative ferment on the fringes of the theatre throughout the 1950's and 1960's, much of it done by The Living Theatre itself, and I would see as I learned and did more, that this ferment stretched all the way back to the turn of the century and work done in Europe and Russia to free the theatre from the shackles of convention. While all kinds of experimentation in the theater had been going on for generations, there had never been, to my highly imperfect knowledge, so much confrontational involvement with an audience in America as there was in "Paradise Now," nor had there been so much nudity on stage, so much open pot use, and so much integration between the "stage" and the "audience." It was a revelation to me that these sorts of things could even be contemplated let alone done.

Freeing the theater from the shackles of convention seemed to be complete with the Living Theatre's production of "Paradise Now" -- and yet looking backward, it seems that the conventions and shackles of today are much stronger than they were then, and the idea of doing something like "Paradise Now" as a political statement, inveterate social criticism, performance art, and integrative theatre today would be even more difficult than it was then. It's not that it couldn't be done at all... it could be (I suppose), but only in such a rarefied atmosphere and location that it couldn't/wouldn't be seen by more than a handful.

The first Living Theatre production I recall seeing (on film) was "The Brig" which must have been in 1966 or 1967 at the Midnight Movies down the street from my home at the time. By the standards of the day, I suppose it was a fairly radical production, though it would be considered rather tame and conventional now. The topic, however, of violence and inhumanity in the military and particularly in Marine Corps brigs, is quite contemporary given the Bradley Manning Thing and the vague, dawning realization that the United States has become a prison society operating gulags domestically and all over the world, in which millions upon millions of human beings are incarcerated, tormented, to live if they can, and in too many cases to die.

The Living Theatre has been very influential over the decades, but even so, its European and Russian progenitors like Artaud and Meyerhold have a much higher profile in the American theater than do Julian Beck and Judith Malina. Why that is could be the subject of another essay, but maybe not.

After all, we closed our theater almost 20 years ago now (gee, has it really been that long?)  What we managed to accomplish has inspired more than a few people and organizations to carry on the work we pioneered. While we took many risks and opened eyes and minds to what could be, we were never in a position to entirely break through the conventions which then and now hidebind the theater.

That was and is for something like The Living Theatre.

So, all hail. And what will come after? Something tells me The Living Theatre will live on...
The Beautiful Nonviolent Anarchist Revolution from Earl Dax on Vimeo.

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A Continuation of Sorts: I've been reading an issue of Tulane Drama Review (available to read online, free with signup to JSTOR -- I know, I know. Don't know whether the link will work...) from 1964 about the 1963 bankruptcy and closure of the Living Theatre in New York. It was something I vaguely recalled hearing about back in the day, but it was well after the event when I heard about it, and all the details brought out in this issue of TDR escaped my notice at the time. I am made physically ill by some of the commentary by various theatre leading lights of the time -- such as Peter Zeisler as one contemptible example. I came to know him sometime later in connection with another theater in crisis and I found him to be singularly unhelpful (to say the least), and yes, the theater in question did close as a result of his and his colleagues' ministrations. But his attitude then was little different from his attitude toward the financial difficulties of the Living Theatre years before. It was simply that if the theater couldn't or didn't attract a substantial audience consistently, it didn't "deserve" to survive, period, end of discussion. Bye. Bye. No matter what "creative" (ptooie) leaps were undertaken.

I encountered this attitude widely, consistently -- and disturbingly -- in the nonprofit theater field, and I see now where it came from. It was built in to the fabric of what became the non-profit regional theater from a time long before it became well-established nationwide. That "establishment" took place in large part thanks to the role of government funding through the NEA and the extensive network of Arts Commissions and Arts Councils that resulted from it.

The idea of any kind of "creativity" which wasn't necessarily immediately popular was simply anathema in the field. If one wanted to take risks, one did what everyone else was doing. In fact, when one did what the Moscow Art Theatre had done sixty years before, that was considered about as "creative" as anyone ever needed to be -- and radical, too.

Many of us struggled against that attitude through various subversive means and methods, but few of us were ever successful at it simply because funding the theaters relied on was largely dependent on toeing a rather narrow line.

In my view, the theater -- which once showed such promise and relevance thanks to such creative souls as the Becks and others in the 1950's and 1960's -- has ossified once again. There are still plenty of enthusiasts to be sure, but there isn't a whole lot of spirit anymore, in large part because of the necessity of toeing that line "in order to survive."

Yet another institutional failure...

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

Liberty For Whom? To Do What?

Over the years, I've asked that question of libertarians and constitutionalists and gun rights purists and other types of gung-ho Freedom Lovers many times. I've never received an answer of any kind, from anyone.

Given history, however, I proposed the following motto for those self-same Freedom Lovers: "I demand the Liberty to impose my Authority on you."

Yes, well. That's basically what it is all about, which we can see quite clearly in the whole gun rights debate these days.

To many of these rightists, the Second Amendment is not only sacred, it is the only part of the Bill of Rights, and almost the only part of the Constitution itself that matters. The rest being dross in their eyes, the long-winded scribblings of dead white men...

After all, wasn't it Mao who said, "power grows out of the barrel of a gun"? Thus the primacy of the Sacred Second: it is the ability to impose one's authority on others ("power") that is the chief rationale behind the fervent desire of gun rightists to maintain their nearly unfettered access to firearms.

We see it a lot in New Mexico, though I'm sure it's worse in neighboring Texas and Arizona.

Just the other day, there was announced another Coyote Shooting Contest by yet another New Mexico firearms dealer. The Grand Prize for the most coyote heads brought in by the deadline (so to speak) being one of those AR-15s that are so popular for mass murder these days. I have no illusions that these "hunts" are anything more than modern-day posse/vigilante excursions. They used to be focused on Indians and Negroes and various designated Outlaws, but now, of course, the hunters include plenty of the formerly hunted castes, so it's (once again) the turn of the various wild animals to be slaughtered for prizes -- or just because.

Why did Americans slaughter the buffalo in such gargantuan numbers in the 19th Century? Because they could. It felt good to have such power over Nature. I can't find it now, but I saw a magazine article from about 1915, in which "sportsmen" in California showed off their one day's bag of geese shot along the Pacific Flyway. There were hundreds and hundreds of dead geese piled up around them as they posed with their dogs and their guns in the marshes of the San Joaquin Delta, and this one team of hunters said they averaged some 300-500 kills a day. Even then, conservationists and others were questioning such immense slaughter, and the excuse was the same as you hear now: the animals were feeding on or spoiling crops, and we can't have that! Civilization! What's so obviously idiotic about these claims is that there are far more people living in the area today, and there is far more intense farming going on -- and there are far more birds roosting along the flyway because after being mindlessly slaughtered to near extinction, they are now protected in most places and are thriving. And hardly anybody objects to them, not even farmers and ranchers.

Coyote kills (and wolf kills and mountain lion kills and buffalo hunts and so on) these days are said to be justified because of all the damage these animals cause to livestock and crops. "Everyone knows..." Except they don't. And the farmers and ranchers often wildly exaggerate their losses. The real point of these killings is not to protect livestock and crops, it is to assert life and death power over the Other, in this case, the Natural World.

Gun rightists don't care a whit about preventing "tyranny" in any rational sense. By and large they were either silent or actively cheering on the gutting of the rest of the Bill of Rights by Congress and the Executive during recent times, most being "patriots" and all who don't believe in such luxuries as "rights" when it comes to other citizens and terrorists -- who are often one and the same in their view. While a modern form of tyranny was being imposed and consolidated even before the advent of the Glorious Global (and Forever) War on Terror. In other words, throughout the abrogation of what remained of the Bill of Rights, Sacred Second believers either paid no attention (as long as no one tried to grab their guns!) or they were in the vanguard of the cheerleaders, where most of them still are.

They don't want to prevent tyranny, oh no. They just want to be sure they're the ones to impose it.

"I demand the Liberty to impose my Authority on you."

That is the whole of the Law and the Prophets.

In gun rightist cant and rhetoric, it doesn't matter how many people are killed every year by firearms -- never mind all the animals. According to statistics, most of the firearms deaths are suicides  anyway, and who are we to stand in the way of such Liberty? As for the rest, well, too bad for them; most of them probably "needed killing" or just had bad luck, and who are we to stand in the way of such Liberty?

As for all those other abrogated "rights" Americans once had, or thought they had, so?

Most of them were interferences with the public or private and personal imposition of tyranny in any case, annoying restrictions on what could be done to impose public or private authority on others at will.

I've repeatedly pointed out that the Sacred Second is ultimately derived from the gun rights provision of the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the point of which was to ensure that one British faction was armed while another was disarmed (in the case of the Glorious Revolution, the objective was the disarmament and political neutering of British Catholics). So it has been throughout the history of gun rights advocacy. In America, of course, the objective of the Sacred Second was the private arming of the (white, male) militias, and the disarming of Negroes, Indians, and whatever designated Outlaws were being persecuted at the moment.

It is ever thus.

Liberty for whom? To do what?

As it is, the American firearms casualty numbers are close to those one would expect from an ongoing civil war, and in some sense, that is what has been taking place in this country for many a long year, with periodic spikes and lulls to be sure, but more or less constant over the long term. Arms merchants profit from it, of course, and they are eager to keep it going by any means necessary. It is the nature of their business. They need and want the public fear and suffering, the drama of the many gun incidents, the clamor both for control and unfettered access to firearms. All of it leads to more sales, more profits, more death and destruction. It's a vicious cycle.

Government is right on board with it, too.

Bringing an end to the ongoing civil war Americans are immersed in will be the key to curbing or ending the gun culture. But in order to do that, power will have to be re-distributed from a tiny minority of killers and exploiters to the rest of us. That can be done once the rest of us refuse to be cowed by the handful of killers and exploiters who rule.

So far, there is no common understanding of how to do it, and it may be generations before anyone figures out how. But history shows it can be done.

Liberty for whom? To do what?

Change of Pace: Memory Jogging At The Movies. "Kronos" (1957)

Kronos, ready to stomp Los Angeles to smithereens while sucking up all the energy in creation

While tooling around the YouTubes over the weekend, I stumbled on this little SciFi effort from 1957, and after some Other Important Matters were tended to, I was able to watch it, mostly without interruption.

It was quite a trip. Deja vu all over again. I'd seen the picture before, and I was pretty sure I knew where and when: At the Saturday kiddie matinee at the Covina Theater in the summer of 1957. I went every Saturday from about 1954 to 1959, and that's where I saw most of the SciFi pictures released during the era. Also lots of Warner Brothers and Walter Lantz cartoons.

I was pretty sure I had not seen "Kronos: Ravager of Planets" since then, either. It's a very, very strange sensation to watch a movie that you haven't seen for more than 50 years and to recognize the scenes, and to even be able to anticipate the dialogue and what would come next.

It's hard to describe the effect this movie had on my young self, but I seem to carry a body-memory of it. It was frightening and energizing and intriguing all at the same time. Many of the sensations I must have felt while watching the movie all those years ago, the feeling of being in the theater, even the smells of the place (let alone the noise of the children who were there every Saturday like I was) all came back, almost as if no time had passed. It was very strange.

The theater was in downtown Covina, California, out in the far eastern part of the San Gabriel Valley; it was in an old building, but the theater had been fairly recently remodeled and brought up to MidCentury Modern Movie House standards. I paid a quarter at the box office to get in, bought a popcorn, a small Coke, and a box of Jujubes at the counter (maybe another 35 cents) and went in to what seemed to me to be a very large auditorium, but I doubt it was really that large. It had a stage, though, and a balcony. And I think it had a red velvet or possibly damask curtain. I should remember, but I can't be sure. I went to movies at many different theaters all my young life, and I can't recall for certain the details of the decor of any of them.

Science fiction was by far my favorite genre after I got over my cowboy phase -- which was at about the age of four or five.

I saw many turgid melodramas and thrillers at the movies when I went with my mother to see the regular programs in the evenings, but on Saturday afternoons, I was on my own. I would be dropped off at the theater a few minutes before the start of the kiddie matinee and would be picked up a few minutes after the program ended. Typically there would be several cartoons, an episode of a serial, a game or contest or prize promotion from the stage, then the feature presentation, and sometimes there would be another cartoon after the feature. Usually my head would be reeling from so much stimulation. Now and then, I won a prize offered by one of the sponsors of the matinee. I looked forward to the science fiction pictures. "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" was a favorite.

"Kronos" wasn't far behind, and because I was older when I saw it, I understood it better and identified with the characters somewhat more. I could enjoy "Invasion" for the scare. It was very much a character piece, but "Kronos" was an accessible story for young people and a feast of visuals that I really got into.

I noticed right off when the YouTube version began that I had seen it before -- when I was a child -- because I recognized the very distinctive and unique flying saucer that would be seen repeatedly in the early sequences. "Labcentral" was a familiar destination, too:

Labcentral, whereat SUSIE computated

Of course the special effects were primitive even by the standards of the time, but that didn't matter so much. The story was gripping, especially after the appearance of the Kronos Machine on the beach in Mexico.

The Machine I saw on YouTube was very familiar, and I recalled how intrigued and horrified I was with it when I saw it stomping its way up the coast toward Los Angeles and the area of my home at the time. Science fiction set in or near Los Angeles naturally had an immediate appeal that stories set far away did not. And the more plausible the story was -- at least to a kid-mind -- the better the picture. And this story, for whatever reason was highly plausible to my kid mind, so much so that this movie became the basis for a fantasy-game that my friends and I played in the schoolyard at recess and after school.

We were playing with notions of "what could be" if the aliens landed one day and took over one of our bodies (this was a popular theme in the SciFi genre of the time.) And we were trying to imagine what the Future -- or what advanced alien civilizations -- would look like. The helicopter and B-47 seen in the picture were the latest things. The B-47 is, to my way of looking at it, the most elegant bomber ever built. The Kronos Machine, too, was extraordinarily spare and sleek, and it was visually striking because it completely eschewed both streamlining and the "googie" look of the era.  We knew from "googie." It was everywhere anything new was, and out in the far eastern suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1950's most things were new, and a lot of it was quite fanciful.

The idea of aliens coming to Earth to extract energy -- including the energy of the hydrogen bomb -- was really an interesting notion in that it carried an underlying assumption that Earthlings were producing and using a shit-ton of energy via electric power and nuclear weapons that some other civilization "out there" noted -- and wanted. We didn't have much of a conception in those days of how very tiny the Earth is compared to almost anything else in space, and how practically unnoticeable (and probably uninteresting) the Earth would be to actual aliens searching for energy resources. No, we saw the Earth as large and important and central to our lives -- and therefore of primary and central interest to the aliens, too.

"War of the Worlds" was perhaps the most thematically similar movie of the genre, but it was a blockbuster compared to the modesty of "Kronos" -- and frightening as hell to my young self (I wouldn't have been much more than five or six when I first saw it). Of course watching a model of Los Angeles get destroyed in the movie was deeply disturbing to me. The scenes of destruction of Los Angeles in "Kronos" were not so scary -- because they didn't look anything like Los Angeles. As far as I could tell from the YouTube version, they looked like they were from the 1935 movie of "The Last Days of Pompeii." But maybe it was some other movie that featured the destruction of Pompeii. There were a lot of them.

In order to save what was left of Los Angeles and the lives of those who survived, the science team at Labcentral has to figure out how to reverse the insight that brought forth the atom and hydrogen bombs. It's pointed out that while "we" know how to make energy from matter, the aliens use energy to make matter. By reversing the polarity of the Machine, they will be able to turn it into energy and thus destroy it. It will "eat itself alive." This is perhaps the most intriguing notion in the film.

What would happen if E=MC² were reversed thus: M=E/C²? Would matter spontaneously appear from the background energy if the velocity of energy were somehow reduced?

In the film, "omega particles" -- whatever they are -- are sprinkled (by a bomb, of course) between the electrodes of the Machine, and behold, the polarity is reversed and the thing commences to consume itself until there is nothing left but a heap of smouldering rubble. Yay! Close call, but we survived.

There's much to like and to ponder in this somewhat silly low-budget SciFi picture, and I was delighted to see it again after so many years. I wonder what else I'll stumble across I haven't seen in all these many years.

Why Do They Call The Police?

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Seems like every day there's another story of someone getting executed by police who've been called to handle a mental health crisis/emergency that family, friends and caregivers apparently can't.

Why. Do they call. The. Police?

This is what I don't get. Hundreds of people are killed by the police every year in extremis as it were. These killings -- executions -- take place with heartbreaking regularity, and most of them get plenty of coverage on the news. By now, everyone should know, without question, that once Emergency Services is called for help dealing with someone having a mental health crisis, the police will be dispatched, and in far, far too many cases, the person in crisis will be terminated.

And yet seemingly every day the calls get made, the police are dispatched, and some poor sod -- who is probably not a threat to anyone -- winds up dead.

Rule 1: When they get these calls, Emergency Services dispatches the police, not mental health caregivers or even EMTs.

Rule 2: The prime directive of the police is force protection. Everything and everyone is evaluated first and foremost in terms of threat to the officers. Any perceived threat must be neutralized by any and all means at the officer's disposal.

Thus:

Rule 3: Someone having a mental health issue is almost by definition a threat to themselves, those around them and/or responding officers -- or Emergency Services would not have been called.

And:

Rule 4: That threat must be -- and will be -- neutralized before any other service is rendered. The only means of neutralization the police know any more is through violence, including on the spot execution.

The officers are not there to "help." They are there to neutralize a perceived threat by any means necessary. In their world, those means are violent, bloody and deadly.

And they will get away with it in almost every case.

Practically every homicide committed by police is ruled "justified." Any and all threats the cops perceive are justification for use of deadly force in practically every conceivable circumstance.

So my question is: why do people keep calling the police (or Emergency Services, knowing the police will be the first responders) when all they want is some help in calming a friend or relative in crisis?

Why do they keep calling when they know -- or should know -- that the police don't do calming interventions, they do deadly ones? Do they actually want the deadly interventions that take place hundreds of times every year?

Perhaps it's an automatic and unconscious thing, as we've all been conditioned to "Call 911!" whenever we need assistance for a life threatening emergency. And perhaps we believe that if we explain the situation carefully enough, the right sort of assistance will be sent.

What do we want? Help with something beyond our control.


Who shows up? Police. And what do they do? They kill.

For the most part, there is no mental health care assistance available to the public when they call 911, only police. And the police are not concerned with offering "assistance" to the public in a mental health crisis emergency; they are interested in protecting themselves from any threat of harm from the subject of the call. They are trained and expected to use deadly force whenever they perceive a serious threat, or literally in many cases, any threat at all.

Someone in the throes of a psychotic break is about as serious a threat as police encounter, for there is no way for them to anticipate the actions/reactions of the subject. So they shoot.

What's needed is health care intervention as opposed to force protection. But that means relearning how to do it -- a skill that has been largely lost over the past few decades -- and dedicating resources to ensure that those who can do it are made available as widely as possible.

Police are the wrong responders in these situations -- that is, if those calling for help actually want help rather than deadly force. EMTs won't go to these incidents until their safety is assured, and that can't be done until the threat is neutralized, and that too often means the death of the one in crisis.

Explosive

I made a tour of some of the now incredible number of videos of the Russian Meteor Thing yesterday, and I was struck by how phlegmatic the Ruskies were when the apparition appeared in their skies. Mostly, it looked like they were uninterested as they continued to go about their business as if there were nothing unusual happening at all. "We see this shit all the time." (When I looked in some of the video archives, indeed, it seems that it's not all that uncommon to see something streaking across the skies in daylight in parts of Mother Russia.) The brilliant flash of the meteor exploding high in the atmosphere -- far outshining the sun for a brief moment -- seemed not to phase the people on the streets at all. That, all by itself, would be enough to make Americans shit their pants.

The sound of the explosion(s) seemed to get the attention of the multitudes however. How many of the after-noises -- noises that sounded like bombardment/gunfire -- were due to echoes and how many were due to smaller pieces of the object exploding, I don't know, but the noise as recorded in the video above and in many others was terrifying and very destructive. They said something like 30,000 buildings were damaged, a million windows were broken, and more than a thousand people were injured  -- mostly from flying glass. The physical injury, damage and destruction from the Thing seems to be greater than the larger Tunguska Comet-or-Asteroid of so long ago, wherein there seemed to be very little damage/destruction to anything but the forest.

I saw some postings suggesting or implying that Chelyabinsk is some sort of remote village in the taiga. Yes, well. Turns out the city has a population of well over 1 million, and I thought it was kind of special that the main boulevard is still named Lenina Prospekt, the main square is called Revolution Square, and the statue of Lenin therein still looms tall and proud. This video is from Revolution Square in Chelyabinsk:



That is the statue of Lenin at the center. And it is obvious the flash is much brighter than the sun.

The videos of the contrail all show a double trail of condensation which suggests to me that there were two objects side by side crashing into the atmosphere, perhaps due to one object splitting apart as it encountered the upper atmosphere or perhaps from gravitational effects. After the big explosion, there is still a double contrail, though it is much smaller. Finally, it looks like it becomes a very small single contrail before there is a little puff and it's gone. I've read that there are many, many pieces of the Thing scattered on the ground, and one pretty good sized one seems to have punched a large hole in the ice.

Ice Hole after Meteor Event in Russia

Many of us have carried an image in our minds of what a giant meteor or asteroid strike on the earth might do, no due to the many illustrations and animations of the asteroid strike that is proposed as the cause of the dinosaur extinction.

This image by Don Davis is one of the many he's done of what an asteroid impact on the earth might look like from space:

And supposedly the dinosaurs saw something like this just before the impact itself:

But for the multiplicity of impactors, the illustration above tracks the sight in Russia the other day pretty closely.

Of course for generations, it was widely assumed in space and earth sciences that nothing like this could -- or rather would -- take place in "modern times," that is, within the last many millions, even billions of years. Certainly not within the space of human history. Perhaps there were incidents of meteor and asteroid impact long, long ago at the very beginning of the Earth's existence, and maybe once or twice since then there have been significant impacts, but the general belief was that there were none "recently."

All the reports that things like this may have happened in human history were discounted as figments of primitive imaginations run wild. Everyone knew the earth and sky were stable, the continents didn't move, and that all change was gradual, imperceptible, incremental over vast periods of time. Uniformitarianism was the standard understanding of just about everything.

Then there was the atomic bomb, and the very foundations of the Uniformitarian paradigm began to shatter. Nothing quite as apocalyptic had ever existed in human history. Or had it?

Many students began to reconsider the old stories and legends and myths of catastrophic events in times gone by, events that were said to have destroyed entire cities and wiped out whole peoples back in the day. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb himself, began to think about what may have happened in the past.

Soon enough, many of the discredited theories of Catastrophism were being given a rehearing, spurred on by the popularity of Immanuel Velikovsky's "Worlds in Collison" published in 1950. Velikovsky was a Russian Jewish psychiatrist who used Biblical and other ancient scholarship and insight into the human psyche to establish in his own mind that something awful and wonderful had happened not so very long ago, and that the people who experienced it had recorded it in myth and story that is still preserved today.

He saw in those Biblical records and others that not so very long ago the Earth had experienced near collisions with the planets Mars and Venus; that Venus itself had been ejected or erupted from Jupiter as a comet shortly before these encounters, and that the Earth and Moon had been bombarded with debris from both planets causing untold destruction and misery... All of which was in the Bible. The implication was that as bad as atomic weapons might be, it had been bad -- no, worse -- in ancient times.

The physics, cosmology, geology and astronomy communities had a collective nervous breakdown, because what Velikovsky was proposing had the potential to undermine the foundations of all of them. For his part, Velikovsky seemed to relish the possibilities.

He followed up with a number of other popular books that explained and expanded on his position, and he eagerly engaged in debate and argument with "establishment" scientists for the rest of his life. Debunking Velikovsky became a cottage industry among "estsablishment" scientists, but at the same time, a great deal of work was undertaken to modify or dispense with the Uniformitarian paradigm in order to accommodate an abundance of evidence of past catastrophes on immense scales, some of them fairly recent in a geological sense.

Velikovsky was not to be admitted into the laboratories and halls of science, but the fundamental idea he proposed: that catastrophe and Catastrophism were more common and intrinsic to the history of the Earth, the Solar System, and the Universe than standard Uniformitarianism allowed was accepted and developed widely.

For a time, cosmic collisions and catastrophe were said to be behind just about everything. It was silly.

It's still a matter of debate whether the dinosaurs were wiped out by a cosmic collision 65 million years go. But there is no doubt now that such collisions can happen and have happened with some regularity over the course of Earth's history, and the consequences for living things on Earth can be dire.

Later in the day of the Russian Meteor Thing, a small asteroid zipped by the Earth at very close range, less than 20,000 miles, and people's thoughts turned to "what if?"

We know these explosive things can happen; they can come out of the blue, unanticipated, at any time. There is no real protection against them. There was no warning that something like the Chelyabinsk Meteor would appear on the morning of February 15, but thankfully, Science was quick to reassure us that it only happens once ever 100 years or so (and only in Siberia? :->)  Not to worry!

Of course nobody ever thought they would ever see a train of comets impact Jupiter or any other planet, either.

Ya never know.

But as the late, great Jack Horkheimer would say, "Keep looking up!"