‘War and Peace’: The Relevance of 1812 as Explained by Tolstoy to Current Global Affairs – by Gilbert Doctorow – 31 Jan 2019

Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is widely considered to be the best war novel ever written. Spatially, in its more than 1,800 pages it offers a vast panorama of Russia during the Napoleonic wars, both on the battlefield and on the home front. Temporally, Tolstoy shifts our attention back and forth between the big picture in time-lapse and close-up slow-motion psychological portraits of the leading characters. With its “scenography” already sketched by the author, War and Peace has inspired a number of beloved films produced both in the West and in Russia. It provided the material for Sergei Prokofiev’s brilliant opera of the same name, which enjoys periodic revivals in the world’s grand opera theaters.

Of course, the dramatizations of War and Peace tend to highlight the affective romantic themes which carry along readers, in particular teenage girls. We envision Natasha’s first ball, her dance with Andrei. We see her by his bedside in his final agony as he succumbs to his injuries from the Borodino battle. We tend to skip over and ignore the considerable dose of Tolstoy’s historiographical musings on whether great men like Napoleon or Tsar Alexander I are the decisive force of history or the involuntary agents of the people they think they govern, his philosophical shadow boxing with Schopenhauer over free will versus determinism.

Tolstoy injected these “asides” into the work at regular intervals, and then let go of all self-restraint at the very end in the 75 pages of the Epilogue, Part Two. That non-narrative text, in which the author was reasoning directly with his readers rather than through his characters confused professional reviewers of War and Peace when it was first released in 1869 to the extent that there was some uncertainty whether the work even qualified as a novel in terms of genre.

Indeed, some publishers chose to delete the second Epilogue from their editions. However, the briefer passages of historiographical reflections spread through the novel are there to be savored in most all editions. In the appendix to this essay, I offer an extensive citation of one such “aside” so that the reader can appreciate from Tolstoy’s text his method of reasoning, which is at the same time homely and unrelenting. The given selection focuses ultimately on the relationship between kings, generals, ministers and the people. It is as applicable to our understanding of Donald Trump as it was to Tolstoy’s understanding of Napoleon or Alexander I of Russia. The translation from the Russian is mine.

The philosophical asides of Tolstoy in War and Peace serve as the raw input for this essay, because they strongly suggest the relevance of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in the late spring of 1812 to the psychological and strategic situation we find ourselves in today on the Old Continent in what could well be a prelude to all-out war. To go a step further, I would argue that the Napoleonic invasion of Russia is more relevant today than Cold War 1.0, not to mention WWI and WWII.

To be specific, 1812 as interpreted by Tolstoy raises the following issues:

1. The precondition for war is the near universal acceptance of the logic of the coming war by not only those who will be doing the fighting but also by all those who must support the war effort in civilian capacity in production and logistics. That is to say people fight not because Power compels them to do so but because they are persuaded it serves their interests

In 1812, the logic of those enlisted by Napoleon was, on the high-minded side, the spread of the values of the French Revolution to the very fringes of autocratic Asia. On the low side, it was the incalculable riches awaiting the victors. For soldiers and officers that meant whatever could be seized by those lucky enough to occupy Moscow. For the French emperor and his coterie, it meant enforcement of the Continental System that enriched France at the expense of Britain and the other European states.

Transposed to our own day, this issue finds its parallel in the informational war the United States and the West more generally have been waging against Russia. The defamation of Putin, the denigration of Russia all have been swallowed whole by the vast majority of our political classes, who today would view with equanimity, perhaps even with enthusiasm any military conflict with Russia that may arise, whatever the immediate cause.

2. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was not a French force acting out purely French ambitions but was described by Tolstoy as “a movement of the peoples of Europe from West to East.” The Grand Armée of 680,000 soldiers which Napoleon led had as its core his Imperial Guard of 20,000, which he never deployed in action against the Russians because of their vital role in keeping him in power. Ordinary French soldiers and officers who were put on the field to fight and die made up less than half of the total forces at Napoleon’s orders. They were a still smaller percentage of those who perished in the campaign. The rest of the army consisted of willing recruits from petty German states along the Rhine, Prussians, Dutch, Italians, Austrians and others, in particular Poles, who deserve special mention below.

Transposed to our own day, the multinational forces of French-led Europe of 1812 translate very nicely into American-led NATO.

3. The single biggest contingent of the voluntary forces serving in the Grand Armée poised to invade Russia in 1812 were Poles, who were there for their own geopolitical purposes to restore their homeland to the map of Europe and to prove their value as Europe’s protectors. This is a point which Tolstoy develops at some length not just because of the numbers of Polish troops, which were very significant, at approximately 96,000 but because of the Poles’ likely influence on how the whole campaign by Napoleon was conceived, including the peculiar decision to march not on St. Petersburg but on the ancient Russian capital of Moscow, where the Poles sat on the throne exactly two hundred years before during a turbulent period known in Russian as the Time of Troubles.

Tolstoy goes out of his way to highlight the Polish factor in the invasion. This begins with his description of the June day when Napoleon stood on the banks of the Nieman River which marked the western border of the Russian Empire and gave the order to invade.

While Napoleon rested on a tree stump and looked over his maps, Tolstoy tells us that a Polish lancer came up to him, shouted Vivat and offered to lead his cavalry troops across the river before the eyes of the Emperor. Napoleon distractedly looked the other way, while the lancer’s men attempted the crossing, during which more than 40 of them drowned. The emperor afterwards made sure that the leader, who did make it across was duly given a medal.

A further tip-off on Tolstoy’s thinking about the role of the Poles in the invasion is his remark on what was going through Napoleon’s mind as he looked across the river to the Russian Cossack detachment on the other side. He tells us that Napoleon believed he was looking at the Asiatic steppes!

While Tolstoy does not attribute this specific extravagant idea to Napoleon’s Polish allies, who otherwise are close by his side, we note that at this time Napoleon has already donned a Polish officer’s uniform. And in a day or so he will be taking up residence in the home of a Polish nobleman in Vilno (today’s Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, then still a Polish province of Russia) where Alexander I had had his field headquarters just weeks before.

Transposing all of this to present-day, we find that once again Polish ruling elites are hard at work prompting, goading the European Union and the United States to use Poland as the shield against Russia. The notion of a Fort Trump falls perfectly in line with the sycophancy of their forebears to Bonaparte.

Finally, there are three observations about the invasion of 1812 which Tolstoy repeatedly tells us in his asides. They merit the full attention of today’s leadership in Washington and Brussels.

4. Watch your supply lines!

It is today widely believed in the general public here in Belgium, in France that Napoleon was defeated in Russia not by superior military skills of his enemy but by “General Winter.” Even a cursory reading of Tolstoy shows that this is utter nonsense. The French retreat began after only 5 weeks of the occupation of Moscow in mid-September, when blasts of winter cold were still months away. But from the moment the withdrawal began the Grande Armée was melting away due to illness and desertions related to lack of provisions. The overall breakdown in discipline following on the marauding and looting during the occupation of Moscow compounded this disaster.

Provisions were lacking for a number of reasons, including very poor decisions by Napoleon on the route of return, using the already wasted Minsk highway. But the single most important reason was that Napoleon’s forces were overstretched. And, of course, that was no accident. Insofar as the Russian commander Kutuzov had a consistent strategy it was precisely to draw the French far into the country till their ability to sustain war was vitiated by the scorched earth policy of the Russian population, from peasants up to nobility.

Transposed to today’s strategic confrontation with Russia, the notion of NATO defending the Baltics or pursuing a war at Russia’s borders generally is as foolish as what Napoleon undertook. The United States is simply too far away to respond effectively to Russia fighting on its home soil, with or without the forward stationing of US supplies and rotating NATO forces in the East.

5. Beware of “asymmetrical” responses to your military superiority

Tolstoy devotes considerable attention to the irregular Russian forces operating quasi-independently of the imperial Army which were used with devastating effect against Napoleon during his long retreat from Moscow. These were both Cossack detachments and forces of local noble landowners and peasants who made opportunistic raids on isolated groups of French-led troops and, Tolstoy hints, took no prisoners. They brought into play for Russia great tactical flexibility and heroic initiative outside the lines of command, where, as Tolstoy shows us in detail, there was always wrangling between the armchair generals brought in from court and the field commanders, between native Russian and foreign-born officers. All of this “asymmetrical” warfare compromises both Napoleon’s and our own vision of the contest in 1812 as one between the military of the ancien régime and the military of revolutionary France in the same way as Napoleon was perplexed and unable to respond to the Russian emperor’s refusal to raise the white flag and negotiate a peace after his historic capital, Moscow, was captured. Such obstinacy was simply not fair play by the inter-state rules of the day.

Transposed to today, it compels us to take with utmost seriousness the claims of President Putin to have put in place low cost and deadly asymmetrical weapon systems that can overcome and defeat America’s vast investments in a global missile network to contain Russia and possibly exercise a first nuclear strike.

6. The outcome of battles and of war itself is not foreseeable.

In his narrative of the battles between the warring forces during the 1812 campaign, Tolstoy tells us repeatedly that the relative strength in men and materiel of the respective sides was only one factor to success, however important. That advantage could be overturned by greater determination and morale of the nominally weaker side. It could be overturned by the arbitrary decision of a noncommissioned officer on the front line to shout ‘hooray’ and lead his troops in attack or it could be enhanced by the arbitrary decision of such an officer to shout “we are lost” and pull back his forces in a rout. In no maneuver is morale more important than in retreat, which was the strategic plan of the Russian leadership.

Readiness for self-sacrifice to save the fatherland was the outstanding feature of the Russians in 1812, just as later proved itself in WWII. The battle of Borodino was, in purely military terms, a loss for the Russian side which left the battlefield with casualties and deaths more damaging than Napoleon’s Grand Armée suffered. However, it was a moral victory, because unlike all the European armies Napoleon had fought till then, only the Russians absorbed horrific losses from artillery bombardment and nonetheless stood their ground, leaving in an orderly retreat in the end. The way was now open for the French to take Moscow, but the Russian Army was not broken and would be there to enforce the flight of Napoleon’s force after it lost its strength to indiscipline and desertion during its stay in Moscow.

Transposing this message to our present day, we have reason to take seriously the manifest will of today’s Russians to stand their ground at whatever cost. More generally, we should pay close attention to a crusader for moderation who has the military experience to justify our respect. In his several books, Andrew Bacevich has argued repeatedly, like Tolstoy, that there are no certainties in war and that wars of choice must therefore be avoided.

Gilbert Doctorow, 2019

Appendix

War and Peace. First pages of Volume Three. Part One Tolstoy’s philosophical thoughts on historical causality, on the role of Great Men in history and on day one of the invasion.

“From the end of 1811 there began a strengthened arming and concentration of forces of Western Europe and in 1812 these forces – millions of people (taking into account those who transported and fed the army) moved from West to East, to the borders of Russia to which precisely as in 1811 the forces of Russia were drawn. On 12 June the forces of Western Europe crossed the borders of Russia and war began, i.e., an event occurred which went against human reason and against all of human nature. Millions of people did to one another such countless evil deeds, deceptions, betrayals, theft, counterfeit and release of fake bank notes, stealing, arson and murders which for whole centuries you do not find in the chronicles of all courts of the world and for which in this period of time the people who perpetrated them did not view them as crimes.

“What produced this unusual event? What were its causes? Historians with naïve certainty say that the causes of this event were the offense given to the Duke of Oldenburg, the failure to observe the Continental system, the thirst for power of Napoleon, the firmness of Alexander, the errors of diplomats, etc.

“Consequently, you needed only that Metternich, Rumyantsev or Talleyrand, between the going forth and the rout, had to try harder and write some paper more skillfully or for Napoleon to write to Alexander: “Sir, my brother, I agree to accord the duchy to the Duke of Oldenburg,” and there would have been no war.

“It is understandable that it seemed to be the case to contemporaries. It is understandable that to Napoleon it appeared that the cause of the war was the intrigues of England (as he said on the island of St. Helena); it is understandable that to members of the English House of Commons it appeared that the cause of the war was the thirst for power of Napoleon; that to the prince of Oldenburg it appeared that the cause of war was the violence committed against himself; that to merchants it appeared that the cause of war was the Continental system, which ruined Europe; that to the old soldiers and generals it seemed that the main cause was the need to use them in the affair; to the legitimists of that time it was necessary to restore the proper principles, and to the diplomats of that time, everything resulted from the fact that the alliance of Russia with Austria in 1809 was not sufficiently skillfully concealed from Napoleon and the memorandum No. 178 was clumsily written. It is understandable that these and still countless more reasons, whose number depends on countless different points of view, appeared to contemporaries; but for us – the descendants who see the enormity of the event and are looking into its simple and terrible sense, – these causes are insufficient. For us it is not clear that millions of people- Christians – killed and tortured one another because Napoleon was thirsty for power, Alexander was firm, the policy of England was crafty and the Duke of Oldenburg was offended. We cannot understand the connection between these circumstances and the fact of murder and violence; why in consequence of the fact that the duke was offended thousands of people from one end of Europe killed and destroyed people of Smolensk and Moscow provinces and were killed by them.

For us, the descendants – not historians, not carried away by the process of searching and therefore with undimmed common sense contemplating the event, the causes seem to be countless in number. The more we get into the search for causes, the more they are revealed to us and every cause taken separately or a whole array of causes seems to us to be equally just by themselves, and equally false in their insignificance by comparison with the enormity of the event and equally false due to their inability (without the participation of all the other coincidental causes) to create the event which took place. Such a cause as the refusal of Napoleon to move his troops back beyond the Vistula and to give back the duchy of Oldenburg seems to us to rank with the refusal of the first French corporal to enroll for a second tour of duty: for if he did not want to go into the service and did not want a second tour and a third tour and the thousandth corporal and soldier there would be so many fewer people in the army of Napoleon and the war could not have been.

“If Napoleon had not been insulted by the demand that he move back beyond the Vistula and had not ordered his troops to advance, there would not have been a war; but if all the sergeants had not wanted to go for a second tour of duty war also would not have been possible. Also there could not have been a war if there were no intrigues by England and if there was no prince of Oldenburg and the feelings of insult in Alexander, and if there were no autocratic power in Russia, and if there had been no French revolution and the dictatorships and empire which followed from it, and everything that produced the French revolution, and so forth. Without one of these causes nothing could have been. And so these causes, all of them, billions of causes, came together for what happened to occur. And consequently nothing was the exclusive cause of the event, but the event had to happen only because it had to happen. Millions of people had to abjure their human feelings and their reason, going to the East from the West and killing people like themselves, just as several centuries before that crowds of people went from the East to the West and killed people like themselves.

“The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, from whose words it would seem the event took place or would not take place – were also no more arbitrary than the action of each soldier who went on the campaign by drawing lots or by recruitment. It could not be otherwise because for the will of Napoleon and Alexander (people upon whom, it seemed, the event depended) to be executed it was necessary that there be a coincidence of innumerable circumstances without one of which the event could not be carried through. It was necessary that millions of people in the hands of which there was real power, the soldiers who shot, carried the provisions and cannon, they had to agree to carry out the will of the singular individuals and weak people and they were brought to this by an innumerable number of complex and diverse reasons.

“Fatalism in history is inevitable to explain unreasonable phenomena (i.e., those whose reasonableness we cannot understand). The more we try to reasonably explain these phenomena in history, the more they become unreasonable and incomprehensible for us.

“Every person lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his own personal objectives and feels by his whole being that he can now do or not do some action; but as soon as he does it, this action completed at a certain moment in time becomes irreversible and becomes the property of history, in which it has not a free but a predetermined significance.

“There are two sides to life in each man: his personal life, which is freer the more abstract are his interests, and the elemental life where man inevitably performs what the laws prescribe for him.

“Man consciously lives for himself, but serves as an unconscious tool for the achievement of historical, general human goals. The act completed is irreversible, and his action, coinciding in time with millions of actions of other people, receives historic significance. The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the more he is bound up with big people, the more power he has over other people, the more obvious is the predetermination and inevitability of his every action.”

“The tsar’s heart in in God’s hands.”

“The tsar is the slave of history”

“Napoleon, despite the fact that more than ever before in 1812 it seemed to him that it depended on him whether to spill or not to spill the blood of his peoples (as Alexander wrote to him in his last letter),never more than now did he submit to those inevitable laws which forced him (acting in relation to himself, as it seemed to him, by his arbitrary choice) to do for the common cause, for history, what had to be done.

“The peoples of the West move to the East to kill one another. And by the law of coincidence of causes it happened on its own and coincided with this event that there were thousands of small causes for this movement and for the war: rebuke over nonobservance of the Continental system, and the duke of Oldenburg, and the movement of troops into Prussia undertaken (as it seemed to Napoleon) only to achieve an armed peace, and the love and habits of the French emperor for war coinciding with the predisposition of his people, the attraction to grandeur of preparations, and the expenses on preparations, and the need to acquire advantages which would justify these expenses, and the ……millions and millions of other causes which underlay the event and coincided with it.

“When the apple falls, why does it fall? From the fact that it is drawn to the earth, from the fact that the stem dries out, from the fact that it is dried by the sun; that it grows heavy, that the wind shakes it, from the fact that a boy standing underneath it wants to eat it?

“Nothing is the cause. These are just the coincidence of conditions under which any live, organic and elemental event occurs. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because its cells decompose, etc. will be just as correct and just as incorrect as the child standing underneath who says that the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for this. Just as right and wrong will be the person who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted this and he was ruined because Alexander wanted his destruction: both right and wrong will be the person who says that an excavated hill weighing a million poods fell because the last worker struck it the last time with a pick. In historical events so called great men are labels which give a name to the event, which like labels have least of all any connection with the event.

“Every action by them which seems to them to be arbitrary and for themselves in historical sense is not arbitrary but is bound up with the whole course of history and has been determined eternally.”

29 May 1812 [Old Style] Napoleon left Dresden where he spent three weeks surrounded by his court.

“Although diplomats still firmly believed in the possibility of peace and worked hard with this goal, despite the fact that the emperor Napoleon himself wrote a letter to emperor Alexander calling him Monsieur mon frère and sincerely assuring him that he did not want war and always would love and respect him – he went to the army and gave at every station new orders aimed at speeding up the movement of the army from west to east. He traveled in a carriage pulled by six horses, surrounded by pages, adjutants and a convoy on the road to Posen, Torn, Danzig and Koenigsberg. In each of these cities thousands of people met him with thrill and delight.

“The Army moved from West to East and exchange teams of horses bore him there. On 10 June [Old Style] he reached the army and spent the night in the Wilkovis forest in an apartment prepared for him in the estate of a Polish count.

“The next day Napoleon caught up with the army and in a carriage approached the Nieman so as to inspect the place of crossing. He changed his dress into a Polish uniform and went out onto the shore.

“Seeing on the other side Cossacks and the Steppes spreading out, in the middle of which was Moscow, the Holy City, the capital of a state like the Scythian state, where Alexander of Macedon had gone. Napoleon, unexpectedly for everyone and against both strategic and diplomatic considerations, ordered the attack and on the next day his troops began to cross the Nieman.”

Gilbert Doctorow is a Brussels-based political analyst. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2017. … his blog.

Reading ‘Lolita’ in the West – by Zachary Snowdon Smith – 26 Jan 2019

In 1955, when a flushing toilet was still considered too offensive for the eyes of the movie-going public, it’s no surprise that a blackly comic novel about sex with children would cause a stir. Enter Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the effusively written story of a 37-year-old literature professor who marries a widow in order to gain access to Lolita, her 12-year-old daughter. The star of Lolita is not Lolita herself, but Humbert Humbert, who hides his obsession with adolescent girls under a mask of tweedy old-world erudition. Humbert uses his position as narrator to lecture the reader on the many noble aspects of adult-on-child romance, and to extol his love for his adopted daughter/concubine. To many, Nabokov remains “the guy who wrote that book about pedophilia.”

Following its publication, Lolita was ignored, and then banned. Britain led the way, confiscating all copies of the novel entering the country, and France followed suit. Only months after its release did Lolita receive its first positive review from a respectable paper, the Sunday Times.

Responding to the Sunday Times, John Gordon, editor of the Sunday Express, spoke for Lolita’s moral critics: “Without doubt it is the filthiest book I have ever read. Sheer unrestrained pornography… Anyone who published it or sold it here would certainly go to prison. I am sure the Sunday Times would approve, even though it abhors censorship as much as I do.”

The first edition of Lolita was printed by Olympia Press, a publishing house where the pornographic bumped elbows with the merely provocative. Nabokov was not the first serious writer to take refuge with the seedy publisher: William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy and Robert Kaufman’s exposé Inside Scientology all had their first editions at Olympia. The Olympia imprint, however, did little to improve Lolita’s credibility.

In the 2010s, as hand-wringing over the moral effects of art has grown fashionable once more, Lolita has been subjected to fresh scrutiny. In Russia, an ascendant religious Right has sought to discredit Nabokov as an un-Russian cosmopolitan and purveyor of deviance. The Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg has suffered particular abuse, ranging from graffiti accusing Nabokov of pedophilia to having vodka bottles containing Bible verses thrown through its windows.

One email received by museum director Tatyana Ponomareva, from a group calling itself the “Orthodox Cossacks,” reads: “We believe that Nabokov’s museum cannot exist in St. Petersburg, and ask you to move it outside city limits…. Our goal is to rid our beloved country from the culture of Satan, depravity, and violence.”

These primitive antics have been reinforced by more sophisticated attempts to erode Nabokov’s reputation among educated Russians. In 2013, around the time of the Orthodox Cossacks’ vandalism of the Nabokov Museum, Literaturnaya Gazeta columnist Valery Rokotov enthusiastically set about dismantling Nabokov’s legacy as an icon of Russian culture:

Today, reading Nabokov, you catch yourself thinking that you are wasting your time. You are quickly lulled by the murmur of his text, flowing in a leisurely stream and completely without meaning. You understand fully what stood behind his coronation. His heights of style and loud disrespect of the classics were not only a tool with which to hammer Soviet chiliasm. They turned out to be an ideal stupefying machine, extremely important to the new, postmodern society. It’s no coincidence that postmodernists look on him as a god.

In the West, puritanical concern with art emerges not as much from the Orthodox Right as from the progressive Left. For readers subscribing to the axiom that all speech is an exercise of power, there is little redeeming in a novel that, however prettily written, remains a comedy about rape authored by a wealthy and powerful man. Many revisionist spin-offs of Lolita, like the novel Lo’s Diary and the stage play Dolores, have mounted explicit attacks on the inferred misogyny of the original. Author Rebecca Solnit, who has carried on a years-long feud with Nabokov’s admirers, writes, in an article titled “Men Explain Lolita to Me”:

The popular argument that novels are good because they inculcate empathy assumes that we identify with characters, and no one gets told they’re wrong for identifying with Gilgamesh or even Elizabeth Bennett. It’s just when you identify with Lolita you’re clarifying that this is a book about a white man serially raping a child over a period of years. Should you read Lolita and strenuously avoid noticing that this is the plot and these are the characters? Should the narrative have no relationship to your own experience?

For right-wing critics, Nabokov remains a pervert and an amoral postmodernist; for progressive ones, he’s just another dead white man. The fact that Nabokov snarkily decried anti-war activists and other “class-conscious philistines” has also done little to endear him to social-justice-minded readers. In an article celebrating feminist reappraisals of Nabokov, Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam wrote: “I’m a Lolita fan, but let’s face it, Solnit is right: This is a sprightly little tale about the serial rape of an unwilling or indifferent 12-year-old, embraced and promoted by the male literary establishment.”

*     *     *

Did Nabokov share Humbert’s inclination toward pedophilia (or, for the pedants, hebephilia)? The notion is popular among readers, and non-readers, of Lolita, and it’s easy to see why. After all, why would Nabokov craft such a charming and witty character, only to fill his mouth with eloquent defenses of ideas with which Nabokov himself disagreed? Why spend five years writing a manifesto for something you’re against?

Throughout the novel, Humbert paints attraction to children as a kind of refined aesthetic taste, himself as a victim of fate, and his own victim as a kind of provocateur:

A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs — the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate — the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.

There are, in fact, many similarities between Nabokov and Humbert, which feed the theory of Humbert as Nabokov’s alter-ego. Both Nabokov and Humbert were European immigrants to the United States, both taught literature and published poems, both were skilled chess players, both disdained Freudianism, and both shared a talent for audacious multilingual wordplay.

A close reader, however, will find numerous cues that Nabokov did not view Humbert as a kindred spirit. While Nabokov was himself an exile from the Soviet Union, Humbert has only disdain for the novel’s handful of Russian émigré characters. Humbert sarcastically refers to a White Russian colonel-turned-cabdriver as “the Tsarist” and “Mr. Taxovich,” and misses no opportunity to draw attention to the colonel’s poor French and corny ancien régime courtesy. That Humbert is a world traveler who, nonetheless, views Nabokov’s own country exclusively through a set of crude clichés, should not be overlooked.

After writing, Nabokov’s chief pleasure was butterfly-hunting. This was no mere hobby — Nabokov spent years working as a lepidopterist at Harvard University and elsewhere, and ornamented gift copies of his books with color sketches of butterflies. On this topic that was so crucial to Nabokov, he and Humbert once more diverge: at one point, Humbert laughably mistakes a cloud of hawk moths for “gray hummingbirds.” It may also be worth noting that Humbert describes himself, twice, as a spider who wishes to catch Lolita in his web — spiders also being natural predators of butterflies. It’s doubtful that Nabokov, for whom butterfly-hunting was a doorway to life’s sublimity, would have written a self-insert as a lepidopterological ignoramus.

Indeed, much of the novel’s dark comedy emanates from Humbert’s absurd use of elevated verbiage to embellish his predatory and self-deceiving actions. In one scene, Lolita develops a fever. Rather than taking her to the doctor, Humbert decides that the time is right for seduction: “I could not resist the exquisite caloricity of unexpected delights — Venus febriculosa — though it was a very languid Lolita that moaned and coughed and shivered in my embrace.” Here, the reader is invited to laugh incredulously at Humbert’s narcissism; to read this passage as a blithe endorsement of raping children while they have the flu is to miss Lolita’s true audacity.

On the other hand, new readers who have been acquainted with Lolita’s hair-raising reputation, but not with the book itself, are often disappointed by how little sex is to be found within its pages. Nabokov’s sex scenes are as allusive, as intricate, and as playful as the rest of his work. In perhaps the novel’s most explicit moment, Humbert dandles Lolita on his lap:

The day before she had collided with the heavy chest in the hall and — “Look, look!” — I gasped — “look at what you’ve done, what you’ve done to yourself, ah, look”; for there was, I swear, a yellowish-violet bruise on her lovely nymphet thigh which my huge hairy hand massaged and slowly enveloped — and because of her very perfunctory underthings, there seemed to be nothing to prevent my muscular thumb from reaching the hot hollow of her groin — just as you might tickle and caress a giggling child — just that — and: “Oh, it’s nothing at all,” she cried with a sudden shrill note in her voice, and she wiggled, and squirmed, and threw her head back, and her teeth rested on her glistening underlip as she half-turned away, and my moaning mouth, gentlemen of the jury, almost reached her bare neck, while I crushed out against her left buttock the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known.

In short, anyone who buys a copy of Lolita as a companion piece to The 120 Days of Sodom is likely to be let down. (A friend once asked me, in somewhat conspiratorial tones, to lend her my copy of Lolita. She returned it two days later, commenting that it “seemed censored.”)

Alfred Appel, who studied under Nabokov at Cornell and later went on to annotate Lolita for McGraw-Hill, recalls the shock of finding his erudite former professor published by Olympia Press:

I was on the Left Bank and I wandered into a dusty, quaint old bookstore… I did a double-, maybe triple-take because there was a book called Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, my professor. And in the matching green Olympia covers, on the left side was a book called Until She Screams and on the right side of the Lolita was a book called The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe. So I bought the middle book, Lolita, and took it back to the barracks. Someone wanted to read my dirty book, but couldn’t get through the first sentence and threw it down, said it was “goddamn literature.”

For his part, Nabokov seemed to find Lolita’s confusion with pornography rather funny. In one interview, Nabokov is seen leafing through a bookshelf full of Lolitas, taking a moment to chuckle at a Turkish edition with generic Harlequin-style cover art: “Look at the man and the girl. I’m not sure who is older!”

Nabokov seems not to have considered seriously that readers might so strongly identify him with Humbert. “The double rumble [‘Humbert Humbert’] is, I think, very nasty, very suggestive,” Nabokov told Playboy in 1964. “It is a hateful name for a hateful person.” To the Paris Review, he commented, “Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear ‘touching.’ That epithet, in its true, tear-iridized sense, can only apply to my poor little girl.”

Perhaps we identify Nabokov most readily with the narrator of Lolita simply because Lolita is the only one of his books we know well. The antihero of the lesser-known novel Despair lectures us on the virtues of Marxism — how many readers suspect Nabokov of being a secret Marxist? Pale Fire’s protagonist rhapsodizes on the shapely rumps and thighs of male youths — does this suggest that Nabokov was a closet case? We all know Humbert Humbert, the prototypical pervert, but few of us are acquainted with Hermann Karlovich, Charles Kinbote or, for that matter, Vladimir Nabokov.

As Nabokov remarked, “Lolita is famous, not I.”

 

Meeting Turgenev On the Streets of New York – Sketches From a Hunter’s Notebook – Xenagogue Vicene – 28 Jan 2019

Meeting Turgenev On the Streets of New York – Audio Mp3 (4:57 min)

I got in some trouble in political circles for a piece I wrote about strolling through Boston and sticking revolutionary news papers where they should not belong.  I saw myself as something like the character in Edgar Poe’s “The Man and the City.” 

But, as I looked at some of the other writings I had made about my walks through the city, and the people I’ve met and interacted with on the streets I began to think of the collection of Russian stories about seemingly mundane everyday events and people by Ivan Turgenev – Sketches from a Hunters Notebook. 

At least that’s how the title was remembered by me.  As I look into the work I find the translated title would be more accurately rendered ‘Sketches From a Hunter’s Album.’  I remember one college prof quoting an Italian writer: “Translation, traitor.”  Another prof said that reading fine works of literature in translation was like feeling a beautiful body with mittens on. 

But, the book was in my head.  Or, at least the title and the idea of someone wandering around their society and learning about places and people they met.  I haven’t read the stories.  But I liked the title and the idea and I had thought of collecting some of the pieces I have written that might fit in that kind of a description.   For instance when I met the Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney at a high school I was teaching technical drawing at.  I didn’t know who he was, I had fun interacting with him and feeding him limericks to complete.  I didn’t find out who the man was until ten years later when he died and I recognized his picture in the news.  Or when I met a girl from Donegal on the streets of Dorchester when a wild doe came down Ashmont street at 5 o’clock in the morning.   I could add the piece I wrote about being at a rally to defend immigrant rights where at the beginning of the rally on Boston Common an older woman approached me and said, “You have really beautiful eyes.”  Later as the rally arrived at Boston City Hall a young woman in a group also said to me, “You have really beautiful eyes.”  I’m still puzzled by that. 

A few days ago I was walking in New York City toward a meeting in a restaurant where I might speak with some political friends who were critical of some of the things I had posted.  I was thinking of my blog as a series of Sketches From a Hunters Notebook.

As I crossed one street I saw a ‘free newspaper’ plastic display box on its side with five books spread out on top.  Abandoned literature?  My favorite kind.  I stopped and immediately the title that captured my attention was a book I had read in high school – “The Good Earth” by Pearl S. Buck.  A bright colorful cover, and as I opened the book it had good large type that I could read easily.  I thought of taking the book to read on the bus trip home back to Boston.  Underneath “The Good Earth” was — “Sketches From a Hunter’s Album” by Ivan Turgenev.

A book that I had been turning over in my head for the past two months appeared on the street in front of me practically on platter.   I don’t believe in God, or Gods, or muses or the spirit of Literature… but what a strange development. 

I thought of taking both “The Good Earth,” and “Sketches From a Hunters Album,” but I was worried about the weight on my back.  I had miles to go before I slept.  I have too, too many books at home and have been trying to give away as many as I can in the last few years.  As people remind me, so many of the books I love or want to read are online, and with large type.  There is no pressing need to fill my apartment with books, books, books. 

I put the books down and turned the pages of a hardcover book that had no dust cover with a title.  Through a blank page I saw a large thin letter ‘U’ that I recognized from…I wasn’t sure.  Then it came to me as I turned the page.  This was a copy of James Joyce’ “Ulysses.”  A Nobel Prize winning novel sitting on the street.  Free to any who might stop to pick the work up.  Abandoned on an overturned free newspaper box. 

I saw a woman’s name on a bookplate on the first page.  I should have written her name down, but I did not.  I decided that I could not resist taking the “Sketches From a Hunter’s Album” and put it in my backpack. 

A few more blocks down as I moved toward Lower Manhattan I saw a pizza place with lots of seating and not too many people.  They offered “Two slices of pizza and a 20oz Coke” for $5.99 (plus tax).  This was not as good and offer as the $3.00 for two slices and a can of coke that I had passed earlier, but one could not sit down in that place. 

So I sat down to my pizza and coke and opened the pages of “Sketches From a Hunter’s Notebook” and a tasty meal of words and cheese and sauce and sugar.  I had much to digest. 

I especially liked the fact that Turgenev got in trouble for what he wrote, and I was in trouble for what I had written.  At least I am not going to be confined to my mothers estate under house arrest as Turgenev was in 1860 Russia .  Any arresting I will do will be in my head.  And yet, arrested I am. 

 

The best way to use social media is to act like a 19th-century Parisian – By Ephrat Livni – 26 Jan 2019

Are you the kind of person who jumps into a fight at a bar even when it doesn’t involve you at all? Do you throw punches out on the street whenever you disagree with something you see, whether or not you know the context?

My guess is no, you don’t. In the physical world, we tend to be pretty careful about our interactions. Certainly, most people aren’t eager to engage in conflicts with random strangers. It’s tiresome and dangerous, subjects you to liability and injury, and may well be a sign you’re unhinged. Yet in the virtual world, it seems people are always itching for a fight, exchanging barbs and insults on Twitter and Facebook and making much ado about topics they often know very little about.

A recent example of this was the Jan. 19 Twitter brouhaha based on a video clip showing a Covington Catholic School student, Nick Sandmann, wearing a MAGA hat and smirking in the face of Nathan Phillips, a Native American Vietnam war veteran, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. Twitter went nuts, and as usual people were divided along ideological lines, with the left incensed on behalf of the veteran, the right defending the teen, and reporters writing outraged takes before much was understood about the situation. Later, a longer version of the video revealed that the scene was more complex than it first seemed—although perhaps not so complex that it excused the youth’s smirk and subsequent appearance on the Today show, as Elie Mystal points out in The Nation.

Writers at The Atlantic, the New York Times, and CNN have since offered mea culpas for jumping to conclusions. They’ve been musing all week about whether reporters, and everyone else, need to slow down their response times on social media. Instead of jumping into the fray, they suggest, people need to stop and think before posting, and maybe even not post at all. In an unrelated (but nonetheless relevant) move, Insider is initiating a one-week experiment which will bar most of its newsroom from using Twitter during work hours.

Resisting the pull of social media, and its constant pressure to take sides, is a good idea. But abstaining from it altogether is a difficult proposal for many. After all, per the US Supreme Court, it’s the new public square. If you’re not quite ready to quit Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, a more measured approach is to treat virtual spaces more like a bustling street—a place where, like a flâneur,  you can pick up a lot of information by observing the action, while being more reticent to offer opinions and circumspect about posting.

Becoming a boulevardier

The boulevardier, or flâneur, was a French 19th-century literary type who wandered Paris with no particular purpose other than to be on the scene. Although flâneurs didn’t necessarily do anything visible to the naked eye, besides hanging around in parks and cafes, they watched what was happening, taking in the bustle of others and so developing a deeper understanding of city life and their changing times. The writer Charles Baudelaire illuminated the flâneur and the art of flânerie in his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life“:

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.

The 19th-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin likened the flâneur to an urban investigator, within the city but detached from events, the quintessential modern artist citizen. A 2004 article in the American Historical Review explains that Benjamin saw the flâneur as a “sign of the alienation of the city and of capitalism.”

In other words, flânerie is a charmingly subversive act, a refusal to be swayed by the vagaries of the moment while committing to investigating the trends and events rather than ignoring them. 

The idea of doing nothing is not in vogue at the moment—we’re forever optimizing our time and trying to seem extremely active. Still, this is a great time to take up flânerie. In a 2013 article in The Paris Review, Bijan Stephen suggested as much when he wrote of the flâneurs in 19th century Paris, observing that our virtual streets resemble the physical boulevards of days gone by. “Real life hasn’t changed…Now that we’re comfortably into the era of the postmodern, perhaps it’s time to take a brief stroll into the past, to sample its sights and its sounds,” he proposed. We can use Instagram and the like for input and limit our output, thus becoming keen cultural observers, refining our understanding of the online environment.

Silent, solitary revolution

Since 2013, we’ve only become more invested in internet culture, more outraged and engaged and hungry for the affirmations that social media provides. We want to be liked, or at least acknowledged, online, and everyone else does, too. We think tweeting is doing something, an expression of activism, and we’re encouraged to believe engagement is evidence of success. So family, friends, corporations, and strangers seek our hearts and our likes, our retweets, insults, and quips. The signs of virtual approval that can be quantified into metrics that prove we exist, even if sometimes they are negative and even make us sick.

The dangers of total immersion and lack of circumspection about this fast-paced culture can’t be overstated. In 1963, the writer Hannah Arendt published a report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi SS officer instrumental in orchestrating the Holocaust. She imagined he would be exceptionally wicked only to discover that he was terribly conventional, “quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous,” Arendt wrote in “The Banality of Evil.”  She believed his evil stemmed not from ideological conviction but profound thoughtlessness. Jennifer Stitt explains Arendt’s counterintuitive conclusion in Aeon, ”It was his inability to stop and think that permitted Eichmann to participate in mass murder.”

Arendt argued that a moral society depends on thinking individuals. In order to think we need solitude and mental freedom. “Arendt reminds us, if we lose our capacity for solitude, our ability to be alone with ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think. We risk getting caught up in the crowd. We risk being ‘swept away’, as she put it, ‘by what everybody else does and believes in,’” Stitt writes. She warns that in our hyper-connected world, the risk of losing a connection to ourselves and the ability to think independently is greater than ever.

That’s not to say that tweeting all day will turn you into a perpetrator of genocide, of course. But operating under the influence of the masses clearly has deleterious effects on our thinking and behavior. By simply refusing to provide the desired engagement, or at least slowing down the pace of our interactions and taking time to think, we can collectively, and very politely, undermine the expectations for empty affirmations and recognize the effects of groupthink. This could change the tenor of the cultural conversation and make actual engagement meaningful again.

It’s possible that in stepping back and vowing to think before we tweet, we may discover that, upon reflection, we don’t really have any value to add. Theoretically, if enough people do this, there might come a day when the public square falls silent. While that’s unlikely, if it were to happen, nothing will be lost. If we’re all quiet and there’s nothing left to observe online, that either means we didn’t need social media after all, or that we’ve all taken to speaking only about what matters, and only when we know enough about it to opine. This category probably doesn’t encompass much, in which case we’ll be the wiser for realizing it, and in very esteemed company indeed.

At this point, we’d be in the territory of ancient sages and great philosophers like Socrates, the wisest guy in ancient Greece who admitted his limitations. and was thus wiser than people who considered themselves very knowledgeable, and the Chinese sage Lao-Tzu who spoke only when pressed to opine, noting that “great eloquence is tongue-tied.”

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What old story about yourself are you still believing? Here’s how to find it and change – by Mary Halton – 24 Jan 2019

 

Many of us hold deeply ingrained beliefs about ourselves that are simply not true. You can start to free yourself from them by editing your narrative, says psychiatrist John Sharp.

There are many things in our lives that we have little control over — the news, the weather, the traffic, the soup of the day at our local café. But among the things that we can control, there’s a big one: our story.

This narrative is not the one that contains the objective facts of our lives; instead, it’s “the story you’ve been telling yourself about who you are and how everything always plays out,” says psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor John Sharp.

And he adds, “If you want to change your life, it needs a re-edit.”

The problem with this story is that too often, it’s not accurate — writer Marilynne Robinson calls it “a mean little myth.”

Sharp, the author of The Insight Cure: Change Your Story, Transform Your Life, explains, “Some emotionally difficult scenes are way over-included — just think of all the things you can’t let go of — and other scenes are deleted, such as times when things did go well. The worst part about the false truth … is that it becomes our self-fulfilling prophecy, the basis of what we expect from ourselves in the future.”

To begin revising your narrative, Sharp recommends doing the following:

1. Identify where your narrative diverges from reality.

For Sharp, his parents divorced when he was young, and he says, “the false truth that I held to so dearly was that just … as I couldn’t be effective in keeping my parents together, I probably couldn’t be effective at much of anything else, and this left me feeling very insecure.”

Since you’ve long accepted your false story as the official account, it may not be super-obvious to you. If you’re not sure what it is, try filling in these blanks, says Sharp:
“If I break a promise to myself, I feel ___________.”
“When someone ignores me, I feel _____________.”
“When my partner or best friend and I have a big fight, I feel _____________.”

Why these prompts? Our inaccurate narrative tends to be one that we default to when we’re faced with difficulty or disappointment.

Another way to help you identify your old story is to listen to your self-talk and notice when it includes statements that begin with “I always ______,” “I’m always ______,” or “I never ______.”

After you find your ingrained story, think back to your childhood and try to look for the experiences that helped feed it. And if you end up identifying multiple false stories, choose the one that’s had the most impact on your life. Sharp says, “While I know there are many stories and many possible revisions for all of us, I truly believe that there’s one underlying story that you deserve to identify and rework first.”

2. Question your beliefs.

Let’s say your deep belief is no matter what you do, it’s not enough; perhaps your parents were rarely satisfied with your achievements, even when they were stellar, and fixated on your next report card, exam or accomplishment. So, ask yourself: While that might have been the case when you were younger, is it really true now that what you do is never enough?

“When you view it from an adult perspective, you can see that it’s not fair or just to ourselves,” says Sharp.

Your story doesn’t have to have been caused by your parents, but it’s typically the result of a relationship we had when we were young. Explains Sharp, “It happens at a time before we know the difference between a healthy and and unhealthy reaction to something that really scares us, so we hold on to the wrong conclusion.”

3. Don’t beat yourself up.

It’s normal to feel a bit discouraged when you realize how long you’ve been telling yourself a false narrative. But know you’re far from alone — many of us walk around with these stories, says Sharp. “We need to be compassionate with ourselves about how this came into being.” Most people come up with them for what he calls “understable reasons” — the need to maintain a sense of control and the tendency for kids to take specific circumstances and generalize broadly.

4. Introduce positives into your narrative.

Think about all your strengths and talents, and appreciate them. While the situations that led to the false story have made you into who you are today, they’ve probably affected you in positive ways as well. Maybe they’ve made you more resourceful, more responsible, more empathic, or more ambitious. These positives, big and small, deserve a place in your story, too.

5. Leave behind the old story.

“Cut away what no longer serves you,” says Sharp. “Identify and gather up all the many exceptions … and accept that it’s safe now to move on. You no longer have to hold on to that false security.”

One of Sharp’s patients was a woman who avoided all challenges and adversity. Upon reflecting about her past, she realized “she suffered from the false truth that when she fell, she couldn’t pick herself up,” says Sharp. “Now she knows she can, and her future looks entirely different and better.”

Sharp is a fervent believer in the power of editing one’s story. “If I hadn’t cut away from my ‘mean little myth,’ then I’m confident now that I wouldn’t be here with you today,” he says in his TEDx talk. “In my 20 years of clinical practice, I’ve seen this kind of transformation over and over again.”

Watch his TEDxBeaconStreet talk here:

 

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‘Hangxiety’: why alcohol gives you a hangover and anxiety – by Amy Fleming (Guardian) 27 Jan 2019

A few drinks can relax you – but, says scientist David Nutt, that morning-after feeling is the booze playing tricks with your brain

 

 

Want to avoid ‘hangxiety? Then drink less.

If you are looking forward to your first stiff drink after a dry January, be warned: it may feel bittersweet. You may feel you deserve an alcoholic beverage after toughing it out all month – but have you forgotten what it feels like to wake up haunted by worries about what you said or did the night before? These post-drinking feelings of guilt and stress have come to be known colloquially as “hangxiety”. But what causes them?

David Nutt, professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College, London, is the scientist who was fired in 2009 as the government’s chief drug adviser for saying alcohol is more dangerous than ecstasy and LSD. I tell him I have always assumed my morning-after mood was a result of my brain having shrivelled like a raisin through alcohol-induced dehydration. When Nutt explains the mechanics of how alcohol causes crippling anxiety, he paints an even more offputting picture.

Alcohol, he says, targets the Gaba (gamma-aminobutyric acid) receptor, which sends chemical messages through the brain and central nervous system to inhibit the activity of nerve cells. Put simply, it calms the brain, reducing excitement by making fewer neurons fire. “Alcohol stimulates Gaba, which is why you get relaxed and cheerful when you drink,” explains Nutt.

The first two drinks lull you into a blissful Gaba-induced state of chill. When you get to the third or fourth drink, another brain-slackening effect kicks in: you start blocking glutamate, the main excitatory transmitter in the brain. “More glutamate means more anxiety,” says Nutt. “Less glutamate means less anxiety.” This is why, he says, “when people get very drunk, they’re even less anxious than when they’re a bit drunk” – not only does alcohol reduce the chatter in your brain by stimulating Gaba, but it further reduces your anxiety by blocking glutamate. In your blissed-out state, you will probably feel that this is all good – but you will be wrong.

The body registers this new imbalance in brain chemicals and attempts to put things right. It is a little like when you eat a lot of sweets and your body goes into insulin-producing overdrive to get the blood sugar levels down to normal; as soon as the sweets have been digested, all that insulin causes your blood sugar to crash. When you are drunk, your body goes on a mission to bring Gaba levels down to normal and turn glutamate back up. When you stop drinking, therefore, you end up with unnaturally low Gaba function and a spike in glutamate – a situation that leads to anxiety, says Nutt. “It leads to seizures as well, which is why people have fits in withdrawal.”

It can take the brain a day or two to return to the status quo, which is why a hair of the dog is so enticing. “If you drank an awful lot for a long time,” says Nutt, “it might take weeks for the brain to readapt. In alcoholics, we’ve found changes in Gaba for years.”

To add to the misery, the anxiety usually kicks in while you are trying to sleep off the booze. “If you measure sleep when people are drunk, they go off to sleep fast. They go into a deeper sleep than normal, which is why they sometimes wet the bed or have night terrors. Then, after about four hours, the withdrawal kicks in – that’s when you wake up all shaky and jittery.”

Imbalances in Gaba and glutamate are not the only problem. Alcohol also causes a small rise in noradrenaline – known as the fight-or-flight hormone. “Noradrenaline suppresses stress when you first take it, and increases it in withdrawal,” says Nutt. “Severe anxiety can be considered a surge of noradrenaline in the brain.”

Another key cause of hangxiety is being unable to remember the mortifying things you are sure you must have said or done while inebriated – another result of your compromised glutamate levels. “You need glutamate to lay down memories,” says Nutt, “and once you’re on the sixth or seventh drink, the glutamate system is blocked, which is why you can’t remember things.”

If this isn’t ringing any bells, it may be because hangxiety does not affect us all equally, as revealed by a study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. Researchers quizzed healthy young people about their levels of anxiety before, during and the morning after drinking alcohol. According to one of the authors, Celia Morgan, professor of psychopharmacology at the University of Exeter: “The people who were more shy had much higher levels of anxiety [the following day] than the people who weren’t shy.” The team also found a correlation between having bad hangxiety and the chance of having an alcohol use disorder. “Maybe it’s playing a role in keeping problematic drinking going,” says Morgan.

One theory as to why very shy people might be more at risk of hangxiety and alcoholism is the possibility that alcohol’s seesaw effect on Gaba levels is more pronounced in them. Their baseline Gaba levels may be lower to start with, says Morgan. “It could also be a psychological effect – people who are more highly anxious are more prone to rumination, going over thoughts about the night before, so that’s another potential mechanism.”

However, the study’s findings have wider implications – after all, most drinkers lean on alcohol as social lubrication to some degree.

The bad news is that there seems to be little you can do to avoid hangxiety other than to drink less, and perhaps take painkillers – they will at least ease your headache. “Theoretically, ibuprofen would be better than paracetamol,” says Nutt, “because it’s more anti-inflammatory – but we don’t know how much of the hangover is caused by inflammation. It’s something we’re working on, trying to measure that.”

Morgan suggests trying to break the cycle. “Before drinking in a social situation you feel anxious in, try fast-forwarding to the next day when you’ll have much higher anxiety levels. If you can’t ride that out without drinking, the worry is that you will get stuck in this cycle of problematic drinking where your hangxiety is building and building over time. Drinking might fix social anxiety in the short term, but in the long term it might have pretty detrimental consequences.” Exposure therapy is a common treatment for phobias, where you sit with your fear in order to help you overcome it. “By drinking alcohol, people aren’t giving themselves a chance to do that,” says Morgan.

But there might be hope for the future. Nutt is involved in a project to develop a drink that takes the good bits of alcohol and discards the damaging or detrimental effects. “Alcosynth”, as it is currently called, drowns your sorrows in the same way as alcohol, but without knocking the Gaba and glutamate out of kilter. “We’re in the second stage of fundraising to take it through to a product,” he says. “The industry knows [alcohol] is a toxic substance. If it was discovered today, it would be illegal as a foodstuff.”

Until Alcosynth reaches the market, Nutt says his “strong” message is: “Never treat hangxiety with a hair of the dog. When people start drinking in the mornings to get over their hangxiety, then they’re in the cycle of dependence. It’s a very slippery slope.”

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California: Ironworker killed in fall at Amazon fulfillment center construction site (Bakersfield Now) 13 Jan 2019

 

(Brien Daunt)

UPDATE (9:50 p.m., Sunday, Jan. 13): Eyewitness News has confirmed that 45-year-old Brien Daunt was the ironworker who died Saturday.

He leaves behind one daughter, his family told Eyewitness News.

Eyewitness News is still working to verify the name of his employer and has reached out to the site contractor, as well as the ironworkers’ union.

—

UPDATE (3:30 p.m., Sunday, Jan. 13): Eyewitness News has reached out to Amazon, and it has declined to comment on the incident.

The original story, posted Saturday, is below.

—

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KBAK/KBFX) – A construction worker was killed Saturday in a fall at the Amazon fulfillment center construction site.

The Kern County Fire Department said it received a call around 3:30 p.m. for a person who fell near the 1900 block of Petrol Road.

Firefighters said when they arrived they found the worker had died.

Cal/OSHA is investigating what led to the fall.

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……………………

Ironworker Brien Daunt was killed Saturday at the construction site of a new Amazon fulfillment center near Bakersfield, California. According to local news reports, the 45-year-old father leaves behind one daughter.

The information available regarding the circumstances of Daunt’s death is limited. It was reported that he fell from a structure just before 3:00 in the afternoon. He was a member of Ironworkers Local 433. The Division of Occupational Safety and Health has opened an investigation, which could take up to six months.

The state agency’s press release stated that it “has opened an inspection to determine the cause of the incident and correct workplace safety hazards.” Amazon has not made any official statement, and the incident has not been reported outside of local news.

Kern County Fire Department battalion chief Jason Schillinger was quoted by local news station KGET as remarking that “a lot of workers…are bummed out right now just because one of their own got killed today and so from a Kern County Fire Department standpoint we need to make sure we stay safe and individuals around us stay safe.”

According to Bakersfield Now, Amazon has been “gobbling up Bakersfield real estate.” The fulfillment center under construction, when completed, will be a total of 2 million square feet and is expected to employ as many as 1,500 workers.

Bakersfield, located in the flat central valley north of Los Angeles, is an impoverished city of 380,000 with a local economy dominated by agriculture, livestock, and oil fields.

In 2016, the percentage of residents with income below the poverty level was 26.7 percent, compared to 19.1 percent statewide. The disability rate among poor males was 26 percent, compared with 16.2 percent statewide; for females, 24.5 percent compared with 18.6 percent statewide. The percentage of children below the poverty level was 26.4 percent, compared with 19.6 percent statewide. The city ranks among the worst in the country for air quality, and it has been afflicted by successive waves of opioid and methamphetamine addiction and overdoses.

The Bakersfield Police Department enjoys the distinction of having the highest rate of police killings per capita of the country’s 60 largest police departments. A 2017 report by the American Civil Liberties Union found “a disturbing pattern of shootings, beatings and canine attacks by police and sheriff’s deputies, beyond what was called for in numerous law enforcement situations, especially when dealing with unarmed individuals.”

Amazon scours the world for vulnerable communities like Bakersfield, where it believes it can maximize the exploitation of the local workforce. In return for “creating” jobs in an economically devastated area, Amazon frequently demands immunity from regulations, free money in the form of tax exemptions, and other giveaways from local governments.

The jobs in Amazon’s fulfillment centers are notorious for their low wages and tyrannical working conditions. Workers are forbidden from talking, mobile phones are prohibited, and every second of a worker’s time is monitored to increase productivity.

Amazon was featured last year in an annual report by the National Council for Occupational Health and Safety (COSH): “The Dirty Dozen 2018: Employers Who Put Workers and Communities at Risk.” At the time of that report, seven workers had been killed at Amazon warehouses in the US since 2013, including three workers in a five-week span during the high-volume holiday “peak season” in the fall of 2017.

In September of last year, Amazon worker Mike Gellasch, 61, died of cardiac arrest at a fulfillment center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. His death was the subject of an investigation by the local WSMV News-4 station, which revealed that company radios were not working, five minutes passed before emergency responders were called, and the 911 operator was inexplicably put on hold. A Murfreesboro worker interviewed by the International Amazon Workers Voice after the incident questioned the company’s refusal to allow workers to carry mobile phones.

Two more Amazon workers were killed in November when a wall collapsed in Baltimore during a storm.

More than 5,000 deaths occur annually in the workplace in the US, in addition to 95,000 workers who die every year from various forms of workplace poisoning: cancers, respiratory and circulatory diseases and other illnesses associated with toxic working environments. Millions more are injured, maimed, or disabled at the workplace.

Referring to the most recent statistics on deaths due to “acute workplace trauma,” the COSH report states that “almost all these deaths were preventable. Thousands of workers would still be alive and with their families today if their employers had followed well-established safety protocols to reduce the risk of injury, illness and death.”

A Genderfluid Movie: ‘Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde’ (1971) (1:33:01 min)

I took a look at a Reddit subreddit called r/FullMoviesonYoutube and found a link to this gem of a movie.  The classic Dr Jekyll is researching female hormones as a transformation agent in this version of the widely known story.  When the doctor transforms he changes into a voluptuous woman.

A Victorian London atmosphere and a hint of Jack the Ripper give some flavor to this interesting take on the Robert Louis Stevenson 1886 novella.

Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde is a 1971 British horror film directed by Roy Ward Baker based on the novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. The film was made by British studio Hammer Film Productions and was their third adaptation of the story after The Ugly Duckling and The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll.  The film is notable for showing Jekyll transform into a female Hyde; it also incorporates into the plot aspects of the historical Jack the Ripper and Burke and Hare cases. The two characters were played by the film’s stars, Ralph Bates and Martine Beswick.

A remake of the film was reportedly under consideration as of 2011

Plot

Dr. Henry Jekyll dedicates his life to the curing of all known illnesses, however his lecherous friend, Professor Robertson, remarks that Jekyll’s experiments take so long to actually be discovered, he will no doubt be dead by the time he is able to achieve anything. Haunted by this remark, Jekyll abandons his studies and obsessively begins searching for an elixir of life, using female hormones taken from fresh cadavers supplied by murderers Burke and Hare, reasoning that these hormones will help him to extend his life since women traditionally live longer than men and have stronger systems.

In the apartment above Jekyll’s lives a family: an elderly mother, her daughter Susan Spencer, and Susan’s brother Howard. Susan is attracted to Jekyll, and he too returns her affections, but is too obsessed with his work to make advances. Once mixing the female hormones into a serum and drinking it, it not only has the effect of changing Jekyll’s character (for the worse) but also of changing his sex, transforming him into a beautiful but evil woman. Susan becomes jealous when she discovers this mysterious woman, but when she confronts Jekyll, to explain the sudden appearance of his female alter ego, he calls her Mrs. Edwina Hyde, saying she is his widowed sister who has come to live with him. Howard, on the other hand, develops a lust for Mrs. Hyde.

 

Dr. Jekyll soon finds that his serum requires a regular supply of female hormones to maintain its effect, necessitating the killing of young girls. Burke and Hare supply his needs but their criminal activities are uncovered. Burke is lynched by a mob and Hare blinded. The doctor decides to take the matters into his own hands and commits the murders attributed to Jack the Ripper. Dr. Jekyll abhors this, but Mrs. Hyde relishes the killings as she begins to take control, even seducing and then killing Professor Robertson when he attempts to question her about the murders.

As Mrs. Hyde grows more powerful the two personalities begin to struggle for dominance. Dr. Jekyll asks Susan to the opera, however when he is getting dressed to go out, he unconsciously takes Mrs. Hyde’s gown from the wardrobe instead of his own clothes, realizing that he no longer needs to drink the serum in order to transform. Susan is heartbroken when Jekyll fails to take her out to the opera, and she decides to go alone. However, the evil Mrs. Hyde decides that innocent, pure Susan’s blood is just what she needs to finally overtake Jekyll’s body.

She stalks Susan through the dark streets, but Jekyll’s will only just manages to thwart Mrs. Hyde’s attempt to kill Susan. He then commits one last murder to find a way to stabilize his condition, but he is interrupted by the police after a comment by Hare leads them to realize the similarity between Jekyll’s earlier experiments on cadavers and the Ripper murders. As Dr. Jekyll tries to escape by climbing along the outside of a building, he transforms into Mrs. Hyde, who, lacking his strength, falls to the ground, dying as a twisted amalgamation of male and female.

Cast

• Ralph Bates as Dr. Henry Jekyll/Jack the Ripper
• Martine Beswick as Mrs. Hyde
• Gerald Sim as Professor Robertson
• Lewis Fiander as Howard Spencer
• Susan Brodrick as Susan Spencer
• Dorothy Alison as Mrs. Spencer
• Ivor Dean as William Burke
• Tony Calvin as William Hare
• Philip Madoc as Byker
• Paul Whitsun-Jones as Sergeant Danvers
• Virginia Wetherell as Betsy

In Praise of 1971’s DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE

Dr. Jekyll and Sister HydeHammer FilmsMost Popular By Jerry Smith June 9, 2016 image: https://cdn2-www.comingsoon.net/assets/styd/assets/uploads/2016/06/Hyde1.jpg A appreciation of a Hammer Horror classic. “It is I who exists, Dr. Jekyll, not you!” Roy Ward Baker’s 1971 Hammer film, DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE, is easily one of the most unique and entertaining adaptions of Robert Louis Stevenson novella, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. A film that not only offers its viewers a fresh perspective on an age old tale, but is at the same time, a good, if not somewhat sleazy look at man’s desire to play God as well as a hefty amount of not so subtle sexuality. Starring Ralph Bates (TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA, LUST FOR A VAMPIRE) as the infamous Dr. Jekyll, the film spends its first quarter following its protagonist’s attempts at creating an “elixir of life,” a form of medicine which would allow for its takers to live longer. We see that Jekyll is a man on a mission with his continuous attempts, caring not about leading any normal social life or even sleeping, but has his eyes set on playing God, something that we as filmgoers all know never leads to anything positive. By mistake, Jekyll comes across the discovery that certain female hormones allow for a transformation of the elixir’s partaker, a discovery that ends up being more of a curse than a blessing to the doctor. While that revelation is more than enough to grab your attention, the film also injects the story of Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel Murders and the grave-robbing characters of Burke and Hare into the mix, putting a very different spin on things. image: https://cdn2-www.comingsoon.net/assets/styd/assets/uploads/2016/06/Hyde4.jpg When we get to the film’s first transformation, we don’t see the young doctor turn into a raging monster, instead he becomes a female version of himself (our “Hyde” portrayed by the stunning Martine Beswick), a spin that leads the film into many different ideas and themes, a lot of which weren’t typically addressed in the early ‘70s. Looking at himself in his mirror for the first as a female, the scientific facts and mission of Jekyll’s isn’t in the foreground anymore. Instead, the young doctor, now a beautiful woman, begins to explore her new body for the first time. It’s an interesting scene, one that causes you to ask yourself for the first time (and definitely not the last) if the pre-elixir doctor has felt a sense of body dysmorphia prior to his transformation into Hyde. The fondling of her own breasts, the seductiveness of the character, it’s all front and center with Hyde.  Needing to have access to a continuous supply of female hormones, Jekyll enlists Burke and Hare to sell him female cadavers to assist in his need of female hormones, but when the early twist comes in the form of both Burke AND Hare getting killed by a town mob, Jekyll realizes that he must go out and kill women himself. Showing us again, that the Hyde character is the more dominant of the two, Jekyll takes his serum and becomes Hyde again and again, each time roaming the Whitechapel streets, murdering prostitutes left and right in order to use their bodies as ways to extract hormones. image: https://cdn1-www.comingsoon.net/assets/styd/assets/uploads/2016/06/Hyde3.jpg The film has such a solid setup, with Jekyll questioning himself and his desires, all while dodging advances from a beautiful neighbor as well as fending off advances towards Hyde from said neighbor’s brother. During its second half, Jekyll’s world slowly comes crashing down, as the battle within himself rages on, getting increasingly harder to fight off Hyde’s growing dominance, something that goes back to the body dysmorphia issues mentioned above. It’s only when Jekyll becomes Hyde that he’s most comfortable, seductive and in control. The tormented Jekyll becomes a headstrong, beautiful and controlling figure in Hyde, something that really shows that it’s only during these times in the film that the character is most comfortable. It’s interesting to see such issues be addressed in a film from 1971, but it’s refreshing to see that even back then, and even in an attempted play at undertones, that the idea of not being comfortable in one’s body is something that we’re able to see be a major plot-point. Bates does an excellent job at playing the well-meaning but unfortunately uncomfortable Jekyll, but the real star of the film is Beswick as “Mrs Hyde” (Jekyll explains to his neighbors that Hyde is his sister and a widowed one at that). Beswick commands every scene she’s in, giving her best allure and seduction possible, making the film’s scenes in which she roams the White Chapel area for potential victims that much more effective. With her gorgeous red dress and having a long letter-opener as a weapon, Hyde claims victim after victim, soon making things very hard for the young doctor and gaining leverage on her alter ego. image: https://cdn1-www.comingsoon.net/assets/styd/assets/uploads/2016/06/Hyde2.jpg  A scene towards the film’s second half really puts things into perspective when Hyde proclaims that she’s always been the dominant one of the two, showing us that even long before Jekyll developed the elixir, he struggled with who he was and who he wanted to be. The unfortunate issue though, lies within just that. The LGBTQ community has seldom been represented in films as anything other than the sassy best friend or the psycho killer, DR JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE unfortunately does nothing to change that. It’s the female Hyde that is the murderer of the two personalities, and it almost makes it feel like those who aren’t comfortable in their own bodies are wrong, instead of embracing those types of people. It’s an interesting concept, the film, and though it’s pretty damned entertaining, the film could be something of an awkward viewing for any viewers who aren’t quite sure where they stand in life and who they are as people. If you can look past that, you’’ve got something of a unique film, one that decades before Showtime’s Penny Dreadful brings multiple stories and characters into a single tale of murder, science and a hefty amount of body dysmorphia. It’s a Hammer film that you don’t hear mentioned a lot in conversations regarding the legendary British film studio, but it’s an important one

Read more at https://www.comingsoon.net/horror/news/749671-in-praise-of-1971s-dr-jekyll-and-sister-hyde#mbm7J02jOXjZXRTY.99

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G. H. W. Bush – The Vice President’s Men – by Seymour M. Hersh (London Review of Books) 24 Jan 2019

When George H.W. Bush arrived in Washington as vice president in January 1981 he seemed little more than a sideshow to Ronald Reagan, the one-time leading man who had been overwhelmingly elected to the greatest stage in the world. Biography after inconclusive biography would be written about Reagan’s two terms, as their authors tried to square the many gaps in his knowledge with his seemingly acute political instincts and the ease with which he appeared to handle the presidency. Bush was invariably written off as a cautious politician who followed the lead of his glamorous boss – perhaps because he assumed that his reward would be a clear shot at the presidency in 1988. He would be the first former CIA director to make it to the top.

There was another view of Bush: the one held by the military men and civilian professionals who worked for him on national security issues. Unlike the president, he knew what was going on and how to get things done. For them, Reagan was ‘a dimwit’ who didn’t get it, or even try to get it. A former senior official of the Office of Management and Budget described the president to me as ‘lazy, just lazy’. Reagan, the official explained, insisted on being presented with a three-line summary of significant budget decisions, and the OMB concluded that the easiest way to cope was to present him with three figures – one very high, one very low and one in the middle, which Reagan invariably signed off on. I was later told that the process was known inside the White House as the ‘Goldilocks option’. He was also bored by complicated intelligence estimates. Forever courteous and gracious, he would doodle during national security briefings or simply not listen. It would have been natural to turn instead to the director of the CIA, but this was William Casey, a former businessman and Nixon aide who had been controversially appointed by Reagan as the reward for managing his 1980 election campaign. As the intelligence professionals working with the executive saw it, Casey was reckless, uninformed, and said far too much to the press.

Bush was different: he got it. At his direction, a team of military operatives was set up that bypassed the national security establishment – including the CIA – and wasn’t answerable to congressional oversight. It was led by Vice-Admiral Arthur Moreau, a brilliant navy officer who would be known to those on the inside as ‘M’. He had most recently been involved, as deputy chief of naval operations, in developing the US’s new maritime strategy, aimed at restricting Soviet freedom of movement. In May 1983 he was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly conducted at least 35 covert operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and, most important, perceived Soviet expansionism in more than twenty countries, including Peru, Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, Libya, Senegal, Chad, Algeria, Tunisia, the Congo, Kenya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia and Vietnam.

Moreau’s small, off-the-record team, primarily made up of navy officers, was tasked with foreign operations deemed necessary by the vice president. The group’s link to Bush was indirect. There were two go-betweens, known for their closeness to the vice president and their ability to keep secrets: Murphy, a retired admiral who had served as Bush’s deputy director at the CIA; and, to a lesser extent, Donald Gregg, Bush’s national security adviser and another veteran of CIA covert operations. Moreau’s team mostly worked out of a room near the National Military Command Centre on the ground floor of the Pentagon. They could also unobtrusively man a desk or two, when necessary, in a corner of Murphy’s office, which was near Bush’s, in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House.

The Reagan administration had been rattled by a wave of Soviet expansionism and international aggression that had begun before the president took office. In 1979, even before their incursion into Afghanistan, the Soviets had taken over the old airbase at Cam Ranh Bay in the former South Vietnam, which had been extensively rebuilt and updated by the US during its losing war. It was a base heavy with symbolism for the American and British navies – in December 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese dive bombers operating from Cam Ranh sank two of Britain’s premier battleships – and the Soviet decision to expand there was seen by some senior admirals as an alarming affront. And a revolutionary increase in America’s capacity to intercept and decode Soviet signal traffic in the year before Reagan came to power led to the discovery by analysts at the National Security Agency of a ring of Soviet sleeper agents inside the United States, many of them working in federal jobs with – the Carter White House feared – access to national security data.

A former military officer who worked closely with Moreau recalled the early tensions that prompted Bush to increase the targeting of Soviet operations. Moreau’s actions were aimed at limiting Soviet influence without provoking a confrontation. ‘We saw the Russians sorting out their internal politics and expanding economically,’ the officer recalled. ‘Its military had become much more competent, with advances in technology, nuclear engineering and in space. They were feeling good about their planned economy and believed that their state control of education from cradle to grave was working, and it seemed as if the Russians were expanding everywhere. We were in descent; our post-Vietnam army was in shambles; morale was at rock bottom, and the American people had an anti-militarist attitude. There was a sense of general weakness, and the Russians were taking advantage of it. They had developed the MIRV’ – the multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle, a missile carrying several nuclear warheads – ‘and were putting ICBMs on wheels and hardening nuclear silos. This was at the time when it became clear that the president was drifting, and was not an effective leader.’

By 1983, it was plain to those who worked on national security for the White House that Reagan wouldn’t or couldn’t engage with intelligence or counterintelligence matters. Bush had emerged, by default and very much in private, as the most important decision-maker in America’s intelligence world. ‘He controlled the strings,’ the officer said. ‘We ran small, limited operations that were discreet, with a military chain of command. These were not long-term programmes. We thought we could redouble our efforts against the Soviets and nobody would interfere. And do it in such a way that no one could see what we were doing – or realise that there was a masterplan. For example, the published stories about our Star Wars programme were replete with misinformation and forced the Russians to expose their sleeper agents inside the American government by ordering them to make a desperate attempt to find out what the US was doing. But we could not risk exposure of the administration’s role and take the chance of another McCarthy period. So there were no prosecutions. We dried up and eliminated their access and left the spies withering on the vine.’ Once identified, the Soviet sleepers who worked inside the federal bureaucracy were gradually dismissed or moved to less important jobs, in the hope that the low-key counterintelligence operation would mask the improvements in the US’s capacity to read sensitive Soviet communications. ‘Nobody on the Joint Chiefs of Staff ever believed we were going to build Star Wars,’ the officer said, ‘but if we could convince the Russians that we could survive a first strike, we win the game.’ The aim of the game was to find a way to change the nuclear status quo of Mutual Assured Destruction, or seem to do so. ‘We wanted the Russians to believe that we had removed the M from MAD.’

In the beginning, the officer told me, ‘there was a great fear that the Russians were ten feet tall. What we found was total incompetence.’ Moreau’s team were amazed to find how easy it was to reverse Soviet influence – often with little more than generous offers of American dollars and American arms. Across the Third World – in countries such as Chad, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire – the offer of advanced American electronics and communications equipment was also invaluable. ‘The Russians simply were not liked abroad,’ the officer said. ‘They were boors with shoddy clothing and shoes made out of paper. Their weapons were inoperative. It was a Potemkin village. But every time we found total incompetence on the part of a Soviet mission, the American intelligence community would assume that it was Soviet “deception”. The only problem was that it was not deception. We came to realise that the American intelligence community needed the threat from Russia to get their money. Those of us who were running the operations were also amazed that the American press was so incompetent. You could do this kind of stuff all over the world and nobody would ask any questions.’

Congress, and the constitution, were at first no more of an obstacle to Bush and Moreau’s covert operations than the press. The one member of Congress who knew what was going on was Dick Cheney, a close friend and confidant of Bush’s from their days together in the Ford administration. In 1976, in the aftermath of the Church Committee’s inquiry into CIA abuses, standing intelligence committees had been set up in both the Senate and the House, charged with holding the CIA and other intelligence agencies to account. But it was understood by all those involved in the vice president’s secret team that these committees could be bypassed, even though the laws governing covert intelligence activities had been stiffened: there was now a legal requirement that all covert CIA and military intelligence operations had to be made known to the committees through a formal, written document known as a ‘finding’. But there was a big loophole in the legislation, in the view of the vice president’s men. ‘There was no requirement for a finding for merely asking questions,’ the officer said, ‘and so we’d make routine requests for intelligence assessments from the CIA through the Joint Chiefs and the National Security Council. Our basic philosophy was that we were running military’ – not intelligence – ‘operations and therefore did not have to brief Congress. So we could legally operate without a finding.’ He was describing an ingenious procedure for getting around the law: one that would be put into use again after 9/11, when Cheney, by then vice president, triggered the unending war on terror. ‘The issue for Moreau was how do we take advantage of what the CIA has to offer – its people, with their language skills and its networks and assets overseas,’ the officer said. ‘The disadvantage was if we used the CIA in an intelligence context, we had to get a finding. We decided to get around the law by using agency people in what we claimed was a “liaison capacity”.’ The next step was ‘to attach the CIA operators to military units as liaison who were working for Moreau. Casey knew his CIA was being cut out and so he became more active where he could – in Latin America.’ As a precaution, the team prepared written findings when CIA men or information were being made use of – but they were put ‘in a safe’, to be produced only if anyone in Congress found out what was going on.

Moreau was contemptuous of Casey and ‘thought the CIA was a crazy organisation that had no concern about the consequences of its covert actions’, according to the officer. He remembered Moreau telling his subordinates on the secret staff: ‘I’m accountable to the vice president and you motherfuckers are accountable to me. The agency is not accountable to anybody – not the president, not Congress, not the American people. They will do whatever they want to support their mission, which is defined by them.’ Cutting out the CIA leadership – though using their resources where needed, partly through the good offices of Dan Murphy, who had many connections inside the agency – was key to Moreau’s operations. ‘From the beginning our philosophy was no publicity,’ the officer said. Enlisting the agency formally would involve findings, and relying on ‘the CIA’s knuckle-draggers’ – paramilitary units – ‘who were seen as too dumb and too incompetent. But by using only the military we inadvertently laid the groundwork for what we have now – a Joint Special Operations Command essentially out of civilian control.’

One of Moreau’s confidants was Alfred Gray Jr, a marine who rose from enlisted private to general. He was someone who could be trusted to do the dirty jobs that were seen as inevitable in combating the spread of communism in the Third World. By the early 1980s, Gray was a two-star major general commanding a division of the marines; he would be made commandant of the Marine Corps in 1987. If there were people to hurt, he would get it done and leave no footprints. ‘Gray was profane and tough as nails,’ the officer said. ‘He tells us: “I can do that. We’ve got guys who can do stuff.” And the marines are organised, unlike the navy. Whenever there are two marines together, one is senior to the other.’ As the team’s activity stepped up, the officer told me, they began compiling ‘hit lists’. ‘The CIA would provide us with lists of bad guys from the files of the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Justice Department and the National Security Agency, much of it focused on the drug war and anti-communist operations. A lot of it was in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and of course Nicaragua. We were doing the same thing then that the administration is doing now – only now it’s institutionalised with JSOC. Back then we used the marines and Delta Force, and there was no reason, as today, to say anything to the Joint Chiefs. Moreau’s strategy was to act in advance to pre-empt terrorism. “Why wait for it to take place?”’

Moreau’s activities have remained secret, and, as I learned while reporting on this aspect of history, those who knew of his activities at the time remain sceptical that they can be written about today. ‘I’m aware of what you’re referring to,’ one senior defence official told me. ‘And Art Moreau was just like “M”. But you are working in an area that remains highly classified, and even today it may be too sensitive to reveal the rudiments of our intelligence networks. I doubt if any records still exist.’

*

Over the course of 1983, Moreau’s team was given a target that would prove much tougher than the Soviets – terrorism in the Middle East. Sixty-three American diplomats, intelligence experts and military personnel, along with civilian employees, were killed when the US embassy in Beirut was bombed in April 1983, and six months later 241 military personnel, most of them marines, were killed in an attack on a barracks at Beirut airport. The US embassy in Kuwait was bombed in December that year, and there was a wave of kidnappings of Westerners – among them William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, who would die in captivity.

A particular target was Muammar Gaddafi. ‘By 1981 Gaddafi was beginning to get more and more bizarre,’ the officer said. ‘He was making a lot of moves into our hemisphere: selling air-to-surface missiles to Argentina, selling Hind attack helicopters to Nicaragua, supplying aid to Peru, supporting the government in Venezuela, and even dealing with the Popular Front in Palestine. He also closed the Gulf of Sidra to our 6th Fleet. We had to take care of Libya. Gaddafi was a primary military and oil threat, and he became a strategic target.’

An assassination was planned, using Casey’s CIA assets in Libya, the officer said, and because of the CIA’s involvement the administration was required to inform the congressional leadership about aspects of the plan via a highly classified finding. This was promptly leaked by someone in Congress, so Moreau’s team thought, and the operation called off – allegedly. Moreau’s people continued to support the Libyan opposition. In May 1984, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, an opposition group that would later be clandestinely supported by the CIA, failed in an attempt on Gaddafi’s life. Eight rebels were killed along with eighty government soldiers, according to published reports. Gaddafi responded by executing three members of the Muslim Brotherhood and arresting and torturing thousands of others. One of the Americans involved in the plot was Major-General Richard Secord, who had resigned from the air force in 1983 after being accused of improper dealings with a former CIA officer. Secord, who had a long career in special operations, pleaded guilty in 1989 to a felony count for lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra affair, but never came close to spending a day in jail. His sentence of two years on probation was reversed the following year.

Moreau’s operations were described, indirectly, in The Reagan Imprint (2006) by John Arquilla, who teaches in the special operations programme at the United States Naval Postgraduate School. Arquilla wrote about a secret 1984 White House memorandum – NSDD 138 – that authorised ‘sabotage, killing … pre-emptive and retaliatory raids, deception and a significantly expanded [intelligence] collection programme, aimed at suspected radicals and people regarded as their sympathisers’. Arquilla reported that the memorandum (which wasn’t declassified until 2009) triggered intense controversy inside the government, and the directive was never implemented in full. He added that Bush ‘was initially cool to the idea as well, though he eventually warmed to it’.

It seems likely, from the suggestive reference to Bush, that Arquilla knew more than he could write, or wanted to write. The officer remembered the bitter internal dispute over the memorandum, which was promulgated well after Moreau’s team began its activities. ‘The irony was, of course,’ the officer said, ‘that as we racked up some amazing successes, the administration took credit and defence and the agency each thought the other was responsible.’

There were a few hints of Moreau’s real authority in the early Reagan years. A 2010 US army history of the 1983 decision to invade the Caribbean island of Grenada includes a paper by Edgar Raines of the US Army Centre of Military History. It recounts a series of secret planning meetings in which Moreau, while junior to others present, ‘was in many ways the most influential person in the room … Moreau’s ideas thus had a way of reaching the very highest echelon of government. It made him a force with which to reckon.’ Raines notes that Moreau had managed to direct the most sensitive operational decision-making to the Special Situation Group, a committee of the most senior policymakers chaired by Bush. None of this was made public at the time.​＊

A memorandum declassified in 2008, written in April 1984 by Richard Kerr, then deputy director of the CIA, noted that the agency’s ‘products’ – its intelligence reports and estimates – were being cut off by Moreau and his team, and not reaching the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ‘I have the feeling,’ Kerr wrote plaintively, ‘that if we are going to get something past Admiral Moreau we will need to send it via the briefer with a note . . . asking that it be called to the attention of the chairman.’ Moreau himself received the full range of CIA products. ‘Admiral Moreau’s interests,’ Kerr added, ‘are all subjects, worldwide.’

Another hint came in Colin Powell’s 1995 autobiography – he was military aide to the secretary of defence, Caspar Weinberger, at the time of the Grenada invasion. Powell wrote that Moreau

came to me one morning with an odd revelation. The secretary’s office was not getting some of the most curious traffic that the NSA plucked out of the air. On his own hook, Art had decided to share this withheld material with me. What I read enraged me … The content of the messages was startling enough, but what troubled me just as much was why the secretary’s office should be cut out of the loop.

Powell, who shared his boss’s scepticism about the value of a war on terror, showed the intercepts to Weinberger. Weinberger – equally furious – asked where they had come from. ‘I explained,’ Powell wrote, ‘that they were bootlegged to us by Admiral Moreau, who got them from the NSA.’ ‘And don’t I control the National Security Agency?’ Weinberger asked. There was no suggestion in Powell’s book that either he or Weinberger challenged Moreau’s access to intercepts deemed too sensitive for the secretary of defence.

*

‘Bush was petrified that the president would say the wrong thing to outsiders about what was going on, and he was hanging around the Oval Office,’ the officer said. ‘You never knew whether the president might start talking about an operation in China or into Vietnam.’​† Reagan was kept out of trouble at important national security meetings by being given a script. ‘My colleagues and I would write a talking paper for the president before meetings that resembled movie scripts, because the Old Man knew scripts as a reference. We were constantly updating the script, because if we made a dumb mistake, he would read it. We’d talk among ourselves about where to put the emphasis for certain words and phrases.’ In Deadly Gambits, his 1984 study of arms control, Strobe Talbott showed what happened when Reagan didn’t have a script. During a conversation about arms control with a group of congressmen, the president suddenly proclaimed: ‘Land-based missiles have nuclear warheads, while bombers and submarines don’t.’ ‘Even as he said these words,’ Talbott wrote, ‘his voice dropped and wavered, as though he had forgotten his lines and knew there was something not quite right about his attempt to improvise.’

Casey was another source of tension, the officer said. He ‘was going around giving the impression that he was a super spook, but nobody on the inside cared because he had no juice. We knew he was over the hill and living on his past glory with the OSS’ – the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s wartime predecessor. He may have run Reagan’s election campaign, he may have been controlling the US operation in Afghanistan, but the military men working with Moreau saw him as ‘bizarre, unpredictable, out of control and dishonest’. Murphy made sure to be kept up to date on what Casey was up to. The CIA’s director got his chance of glory in Nicaragua, whose Sandinista government was inordinately feared by Reagan and Casey as a dire threat to the United States. Casey was able to get his way because of a rare error of judgment by Moreau, who had brought Marine Lieutenant Oliver North onto the secret team. The Iran-Contra story, as seen from inside the Moreau operation, has little in common with the public record. Bush, known to his friends and aides as ‘Poppy’, was also worried about Nicaragua and Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader, and was instrumental in the decision to give clandestine American support to the Nicaraguan opposition force known as the Contras. Moreau’s team inevitably became involved: a high-risk proposition for the group because Congress had passed an amendment barring the use of American funds for support of the Nicaraguan opposition. There was no question about Bush’s part in what would become the Iran-Contra scandal. ‘Dan Murphy and Poppy would sit down and work it out about the Contras,’ the officer said. ‘They saw Ortega as turning Nicaragua into a Russian puppet state. “We can’t have that. This is our turf. We have to protect Guatemala and Honduras and Panama.” So I and my colleagues on Moreau’s team wrote findings about covert actions going after Daniel Ortega.’

But it was important to keep Casey out of the way, the officer said, in order ‘to protect our real operations’. Unfortunately, the person charged with protecting the vice president’s inside team was Ollie North, then on the staff of the National Security Council. ‘We were in different parts of the White House’ – where conspiracy was a constant – and ‘North’s job was to keep Moreau up to date on all NSC operations. North was a plant.’ It became clear to the Moreau team that the CIA’s Casey-led operations in support of the Contras were veering out of control. Casey had been busy illegally raising millions of dollars for the Contras from ‘concerned’ American citizens and foreign countries, including Saudi Arabia and Brunei, whose leaders were seeking favour with the White House. ‘Moreau thought that Casey’s actions in support of the Contras were stupid and a time bomb,’ the officer said. ‘What had begun as a quiet op designed by Moreau to influence public opinion inside Nicaragua was becoming a political football. So Moreau calls on his boy Ollie and tells him to get involved with the Contra issue and keep it from getting out of control. He picked the wrong guy. North was loyal and enthusiastic, but he was fucking dumb.’ North saw a career path through keeping in with Casey – but then the operation took a ludicrous turn after Buckley’s kidnapping in Beirut in March 1984 by members of the group that would soon call itself Hizbullah.

A plan developed to sell anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles to Iran, via the Israelis, in return for Iranian help in releasing Buckley and the other prisoners (the government of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had overthrown the shah in 1979, was viewed with great hostility by the Reagan administration). Profits from the arms sales would then be used to finance support for the Nicaraguan opposition – in direct violation of the congressional ban. ‘Ollie brings in Dick Secord and Iranian dissidents and money people in Texas to the scheme, and it’s gotten totally out of control,’ the officer said. ‘We’re going nuts. If we don’t manage this carefully, our whole structure will unravel. And so we’ – former members of Moreau’s team who were still working for Bush – ‘leaked the story to the magazine in Lebanon.’ He was referring to an article, published on 3 November 1986 by Ash-Shiraa magazine in Beirut, that described the arms for hostages agreement. He would not say how word was passed to the magazine, nor did he acknowledge that with this leak Moreau’s group was acting with as much self-interest, and as little regard for the consequences, as Moreau had accused the CIA of doing. The officer explained that it was understood by all that the scandal would unravel in public very quickly, and Congress would get involved. ‘Our goals were to protect the Moreau operation, to limit the vice president’s possible exposure, and to convince the Reagan administration to limit Bill Casey’s management of covert operations. It only took a match to light the fire. It was: “Oh my god. We were paying ransom for the hostages – to Iran.”’

Moreau was gone by the end of 1985: at the recommendation of Bush, he had received his fourth star and was rewarded for his high-pressure double duty in the White House by being appointed commander of US naval forces in Europe and Nato forces in southern Europe. There was another factor: on 1 October 1985, Admiral William Crowe replaced John Vessey as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The formidable Crowe had been filled in, up to a point, on the clandestine operations inside the vice president’s office. ‘He got a whiff of what was going on,’ the officer said. Crowe quickly disbanded Moreau’s secret team and returned its officers to navy duty. There would be no undeclared operations on his watch. The roof could have fallen in the following November, when the Iran-Contra scandal became public. The congressional inquiry that followed focused on Reagan, and what he did and didn’t know. Bush was mostly out of the line of fire, and so was Moreau. Casey, meanwhile, was diagnosed with a brain tumour in December 1986, and left office within days. He died five months later.

If Casey had not taken ill, the officer assured me, ‘he would have been the fall guy, and taken one for the Boss’ – the president. Bush, with his seemingly secure run for the presidency in 1988 under threat, flew into a panic about the burgeoning scandal. He had played a major role in the sure-to-fail scheme; a comprehensive inquiry might well discover the 35 or so earlier covert operations – many of them successful – that he and the Moreau group had conducted. The team’s carefully prepared findings, none of which had been given to Congress, were destroyed, as were any other records of the extraordinary operations unit. Moreau suffered a major heart attack in December 1986, while on duty, and died soon afterwards at a military hospital in Naples.

Secrecy, internal rivalries and illegality had doomed Moreau’s project but, for all its flaws, there were some in the defence establishment who felt, as Moreau did, that extraordinary efforts were needed to combat international terrorism. ‘How ironic it is,’ a senior defence official told me, ‘given all the interest now in waging covert warfare, that the very real opportunity to pre-empt al-Qaida, and launch a war decades before 9/11, was squandered by a mix of overzealous, sometimes misguided operators and bickering administration officials.’

*

In 1986, as the Iran-Contra scandal turned toxic, the immediate problem for Vice President Bush was political survival. Too many outsiders – men like Oliver North – knew too much. The vice president began keeping a diary – with notable fake elements – late in 1986, as the scandal was being investigated by the special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. The diary wasn’t turned over to Walsh’s inquiry until after Bush’s defeat in the 1992 presidential election, despite relevant subpoenas dating back to 1987. It begins with the sentence: ‘This is November 1986, the beginning of what I hope will be an accurate diary, with at least five and maybe 15 minutes a day on observations about my run for the presidency in 1988.’ But Bush was unable to restrain himself, repeatedly wondering whether North and his close associate on the National Security Council, Admiral John Poindexter, would ‘do the right thing’ when testifying before Congress. The ‘right thing’, of course, was for North and Poindexter to lie and not say what they knew about Bush’s involvement. At one point, Bush refers to allegations in the media that he has not come clean on his part in the scandal, and adds: ‘The implication being that I was some way linked in to the diversion of funds to the Contras or that I was running a secret war’ – which, of course, was precisely what he had been doing. Later, writing about the arms for hostage agreement, he says: ‘I’m one of the few people that know fully the details, and there is a lot of flack and misinformation out there. It is not a subject we can talk about.’

Bush’s unconscious seemed to spin out of control again when he was summoned in December 1986 by the Tower Commission, a three-member investigating group put together by the White House in a failed attempt to head off the Walsh inquiry. ‘The testimony before the Tower Commission, I think went well,’ Bush wrote. ‘I made several suggestions to them … [and] they include no more operations by the NSC; CIA to conduct covert operations; formalise process of the NSC staff; clearly [no more] oral findings, and failure to follow up on these covert operations was wrong. Nobody had any dream that these kinds of things were going on.’ He was once again describing what Moreau’s group had been doing. The diary, had it been turned over earlier, as Bush’s team of lawyers certainly understood, would have led to a great deal of further questioning, and possibly to an indictment.

Walsh reluctantly ended his far from satisfactory inquiry in 1993. Convictions his staff won at trial were later overturned or suspended, as in North’s case; others were pardoned by Bush before he left office. One of Walsh’s last acts was to determine whether there was a case against Bush for his initial refusal to turn over the diary. He decided against it after concluding that there was little likelihood of a successful prosecution. The same general conclusion had been reached two years earlier, before the existence of the diary became known, by Christian Mixter, a senior attorney on Walsh’s staff. While there was much evidence that Bush had attended most of the important meetings on Iran-Contra, Mixter wrote, his role as ‘a secondary officer’ to the president made him less likely to be criminally liable for the actions he took. Mixter’s analysis was not made public until 2011.

There is no evidence that Walsh or any of the lawyers on his staff found out about the existence of Moreau’s special operations group, though it was clear to some that there was more to know. John Barrett, who now teaches at St John’s University School of Law in New York, spent five years working for Walsh and came away, as he told me, with ‘a very strong sense that the water was way deeper than we could see. And who knew what was below. I concluded that we were at the mercy of the executive branch.’ He added that Archibald Cox, the Harvard law professor who was in charge of the Watergate investigation in 1973, had been able to turn for help to John Dean – the White House counsel who testified in public about the presidential cover-up. Unlike Cox, ‘we didn’t have an intelligence insider.’

The Washington press corps was equally in the dark. Scott Armstrong, a Washington journalist who spent years researching US policy on Iran, recalled a pleasant lunch he had long after the Iran-Contra inquiry with Don Gregg, Bush’s national security adviser. The conversation inevitably turned to the Iran-Contra days and Armstrong told Gregg that he and other journalists had always been interested in his role. Gregg’s answer, as Armstrong recalled it, was crude and mysterious: ‘You guys [in the press] were always sniffing around my ass, and Dan Murphy passed right by you.’

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Mid-Level Manager Forced To Find Out Who Isn’t Flushing The Toilet (The Local) 18 Jan 2019

DOVER, DE – Bill Tepfer, an associate service-department manager at Shademaster Tent & Awning Supply, was ordered by his supervisor Monday to determine the party responsible for not flushing the second-floor toilet.

Associate service-department manager Bill Tepfer.

“Someone in this company has been neglecting to flush after going to the bathroom,” said Tepfer, 31. “And I’ve been put in charge of finding out who that person is.”

According to secretary Shelley Grabisch, three times in the past two days, various Shademaster employees have attempted to use the second-floor bathroom, only to discover toilet paper and fecal matter still in the bowl.

“It’s disgusting,” Grabisch said. “It’s been particularly bad the last few days, but it’s been going on a lot longer than that. We’re talking at least every other day for a month.”

The unflushed toilet has dominated office conversation of late, with Shademaster employees trading anecdotes and details of their own encounters with the toilet, as well as airing their own theories regarding who the guilty party may be.

“Everyone’s very curious about who’s doing it,” said Tepfer, who earned a business degree from the University of Delaware in 1990. “It doesn’t really make sense: How could you forget to flush? And if the person is doing it on purpose, why? What could they possibly have to gain by leaving that kind of mess?”

“At first, I figured the fecal matter was being left there because it was too big to be flushed,” Tepfer continued. “But every time it’s been discovered, it’s gone right down without a problem. So we’re not even talking about a situation where somebody clogs the toilet and then runs away in embarrassment.”

Tepfer has begun checking the toilet at regular one-hour intervals, but he has had little luck. At 1 p.m. Tuesday, he checked and found it properly flushed, but 10 minutes later, a coworker called him back to the area to show him the toilet filled with copious amounts of toilet paper and bodily waste.

“I could hang around outside the bathroom and try to catch the culprit in the act, but I’d pretty much have to be there around the clock,” Tepfer said. “Besides, everybody knows I’ve been assigned this task, so the guilty party probably wouldn’t even use the bathroom if they saw me nearby. I’ve also considered directly asking everyone, but I just can’t imagine what I’d say.”

Tepfer verifies the presence of unflushed bodily waste in the second-floor toilet.

 

Tepfer said he believes a sternly worded sign reminding employees to flush would be an effective measure. However, he noted: “An entry in the employee handbook clearly states that, ‘In order to maintain a professional atmosphere, no paper or cardboard signs are to be posted in or around any shared employee areas, including the break rooms, hallways, or bathrooms.’ So, unfortunately, that’s out.”

Tepfer was assigned the task of identifying the non-flusher by his direct superior, service-department manager Milt Trautwig.

“Milt stressed to me that, with only two bathrooms serving all 44 employees in the company, it is imperative that both are in full working condition at all times,” Tepfer said. “He also said the smell is really bothering the accounting department, whose area is right across the hall.”

“I’ve gleaned that it usually happens in the early afternoon,” Tepfer said. “They’re probably doing it right when they get back from lunch.”

“Really, it could be anyone in this whole building,” Tepfer added.

Despite being given the task less than 48 hours ago, Tepfer is already feeling the pressure to root out the guilty party. Yesterday, he received a lengthy e-mail from senior sales representative Bob Raeder complaining that the situation is “causing huge problems” among his staff.

“Not only is it unpleasant,” Raeder’s e-mail read in part, “it is cutting into valuable work time, as members of my team are forced to wait in long lines for the first-floor restroom due to the recurring problem in the restroom they normally would use. It is my sincere hope that you can remedy this situation soon.”

Thus far, Tepfer has received nearly 30 e-mails from coworkers expressing their feelings about the situation.  Tepfler as asked people to stop sending him pictures of the ‘situation’ as he has seen more than one ‘incident.’

“When I find the toilet unflushed, unlike some others here, I will flush it,” secretary Diane Huncke wrote. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I shouldn’t have to.”

“This is ridiculous!!!” promotions coordinator Jeanette Wolk wrote. “We are all grown adults here, yet some of us can’t seem to observe the most basic rules of hygiene!!!”

Tepfer, a lifelong Dover resident, has been with Shademaster since 1992. Starting out answering phones as a customer-service representative, he quickly climbed through the ranks, promoted to lead operator in 1994, to junior associate service-department manager in 1997, and to his current associate-manager post in 1999.

“I’m not thrilled to be the one who has to find out who’s not flushing,” Tepfer said. “But sometimes you have to do these kinds of things when you’re the associate manager. With position comes certain duties.”

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Germany: Gloomy left remembers murdered Communists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnecht (AFP) 13 Jan 2019

Deep in a period of historic weakness, Germany’s sharply divided left-wing parties commemorate Sunday the larger-than-life revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg on the 100th anniversary of her murder. The memory of “Red Rosa” and prominent fellow leftist Karl Liebknecht — also murdered in January 1919 — could bring together more than 10,000 people in the capital Berlin.  A whole week of events is planned for the commemoration, although local conservative politicians have tried to ban demonstrations honouring “enemies of democracy and free society”.

“Rosa Luxemburg arouses great interest among a very diverse public. There is no other historical tourist route with such varied participants,” said Claudia von Gelieu, a political scientist who guides visitors around the scenes of historic moments in Berlin.

“Pop icon”

Germany’s main left-wing parties — the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Left (Die Linke) — can together boast of less than 25 percent support in the polls after years of crisis.  The malaise is shared by their counterparts around Europe and elsewhere in the world, as many working-class people are increasingly attracted by nationalist or populist movements who oppose Third World immigrants and the Islamization of sections of Western Europe.

In Germany, the left has borne the brunt of voter departures from the political mainstream to far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), especially in the country’s formerly communist eastern states.

“The fact that Rosa Luxemburg was killed so early” — before Stalinism tainted the communist dream for good for many in western Europe — “made her an icon whose aura and influence remain intact,” said Free University of Berlin political scientist Stefan Heinz.  Left-wing daily Die Tageszeitung also dubbed her a “pop icon” on Saturday.

A journalist and talented public speaker, Luxemburg was born in Lublin, in Russian-controlled Poland, to a family of liberal Jewish traders.  Admired by Lenin, she was a tireless interpreter of Marx.She travelled around Germany stirring up crowds, often standing precariously on a stool to speak.  For his part, Liebknecht was a social-democratic member of parliament who went down in history for declaring a “socialist republic” the day of the Kaiser’s abdication.

Together, the two leftists created the Spartacist League, referring to gladiator slave Spartacus who led a militant slave uprising against Rome.  Two weeks before the pair were murdered they founded the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).  The new party did not have the cadre and training that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had in Russia.  Lenin and comrades spent decades in Russia preparing a professional revolutionary party.  The German socialists had weeks to organize themselves into a fighting socialist party.

The double killing on January 15 1919 was the high point of a “bloody week” in the uprising of tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors and workers around Germany’s World War I defeat in November 1918.

Demobilised former soldiers organised in so-called “Freikorps” killed Luxeumburg and Liebknecht and hurled their bodies into a Berlin canal.  A shaky SPD government that took power after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II had turned to the Freikorps and their brutal methods to restore order in the fledgling Weimar Republic.

‘Gulf’ on the left

The violent repression and double murder slammed the door on cooperation between the social democrats and the communists, giving the Nazi party an opening on its march towards taking power in 1933.

Even today the division persists, with the SPD operating as junior coalition partner to centre-right Chancellor Angela Merkel while the Left — the successor to the official communist party of East Germany — battles both from the opposition benches.

In November, SPD leader Andrea Nahles admitted it was “likely” that Gustav Noske, the SPD defence minister at the time, played a role in the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht.

“The murders created a gulf between the radical left and the social democrats that still exists, even if it had appeared as soon as World War I broke out,” political scientist Heinz said.

During the Cold War, the East German government tried to capitalise on the two renowned left-wingers by building monuments in their honour.  East German school textbooks praised the revolutionary Communists and blamed the violence of capitalists for their assassinations.  Meanwhile in the West they were seen as tragic figures, like Trotsky, of the radical left that was finally betrayed by Stalin.

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Germany remembers Communist Rosa Luxemburg 100 years after her murder (Guardian) 15 Jan 2019

Leftwingers commemorate 100th anniversary of murder of the communist writer, pacifist and radical inspiration

 

Kate Connolly and Josie Le Blond in Berlin

Tue 15 Jan 2019

 

 

A procession of leftwing radicals on their way to Friedrichsfelde cemetery in Berlin to commemorate the killings of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919. Photograph: Michele Tantussi/Getty Images

Negar Mohseni clutched a red carnation and waited patiently under cold, drizzly skies as the queue slowly snaked its way towards the grave of Rosa Luxemburg. “I simply want to pay my respects,” said the 54-year-old Iranian. “Besides, she gives me the strength and motivation to continue to believe in the fight for social justice.”

A thick carpet of red blooms smothered the grave of the early 20th-century revolutionary leader and that of her fellow leftist agitator Karl Liebknecht at the Friedrichsfelde central cemetery in eastern Berlin. Both were murdered at the age of 47 on 15 January 100 years ago. Someone had left a note in a shaky hand that read “Peace, bread, roses, freedom”. People wiped away tears as they laid their flowers.

The anniversary of the state-sanctioned murders of the founders of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) brought an estimated 20,000 people on to the streets of Berlin at the weekend for a march that marked the high point of a series of commemorative events, including theatre performances, readings and new biographies.

Although Liebknecht is held in high regard, it is Luxemburg who has been stealing the limelight. Not least, according to Mark Jones – assistant professor at University College Dublin and a leading expert on the German revolution of 1918-19 that culminated in the murders – because “she was a high achiever who rose in the very male-dominated world of Social Democratic politics”.

Kit Aastrup, a retired social worker from Denmark: ‘History might well have taken a different turn had Rosa been able to fulfil her wishes.’ Photograph: Kate Connolly for the Guardian

She was considered a great orator and a prolific writer, cherished today by her leftwing supporters due to her opposition to the first world war and her fight for the rights of the working class, as well as the fact that her early death meant her reputation was not blemished by later disillusionments with the communist dream. Her name retains its popularity as a choice for her supporters’ female offspring.

Luxemburg’s slogans, along with portraits of her and Liebknecht, were held high on the red banners clutched by people as they made their way along the former Stalin Allee in eastern Berlin on Sunday, with hearty renditions of the Internationale and other revolutionary songs blaring out of portable speakers.

“Of course, the brutal and sudden end to her story raises the question of what would have happened if she had survived,” said Jones. “At its most advanced and powerful, the Rosa Luxemburg myth claims that had she lived, National Socialism may have never taken control of Germany.”

That was a view held by many at the demonstration. “I do believe the Nazis might not have come to power and history might well have taken a different turn had Rosa been able to fulfil her wishes,” said Kit Aastrup, a retired social worker who had taken a bus from Aarhus in Denmark to join the march. She wore a Russian ushanka ear-flap hat, embossed with a hammer and sickle.

A group calling themselves the “Yellow Vests”, a nod to France’s gilet jaunes movement, held a banner across the width of the street that read: “Remembering Karl and Rosa in 2019 means showing solidarity with the ‘yellow vests’.”

Flowers on a memorial to Rosa Luxemburg at the Tiergarten park near the river Landwehrkanalin in Berlin. Photograph: Clemens Bilan/EPA

On the sidelines, a team from the British communist newspaper Morning Star was doing a roaring trade. “Red Rosa, the communist eagle,” ran the headline on its inside feature story on Luxemburg, referring to the affectionate title Lenin gave to the German communist. The article concludes: “Even after 100 years [her] memory still soars like an eagle to inspire revolutionary socialists all over the world.”

The Luxemburg tour

Uwe Hiksch, a member of the opposition Die Linke, or Left party, which sees itself as the natural inheritor of Luxemburg’s legacy, guides tourists around the Berlin landmarks connected to the murders. A recent tour took in the site of Eden, the hotel where Luxemburg and Liebknecht were brought by demobilised former soldiers, known as Freikorps to be beaten and shot. It continues to the location where Luxemburg’s body was thrown into the canal, and, a few hundred metres away, the Neuen See lake where Liebknecht was shot and killed.

When the Freikorps came to arrest her, Luxemburg was reading Goethe’s Faust. “She thought she was going to be taken to prison, she had no idea she was going to be murdered, so she brought a suitcase of books with her,” Hiksch said.

 

Far from uniting Germany’s left, the murders created a deep divide, still felt keenly today in the animosities that exist between the Social Democratic party (SPD), the junior coalition partner to Angela Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats, and Die Linke, successors to the communist party that ruled East Germany.

Recently, Andrea Nahles became the first leader of the SPD to come close to admitting her party’s role in the revolutionaries’ deaths, amid evidence that Gustav Noske, the minister of defence in the SPD-led fledgling Weimar government at the time, effectively signed off on the murders in an effort to crush the far left.

“It is probable that Gustav Noske had a hand in the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht,” she told the party faithful in November at an event to discuss the 1919 revolt.

Noske was later involved in the farcical trials that followed the murders and that led to the acquittal of all but two of the suspects, who received paltry sentences.

“The SPD has a very difficult relationship with the 1918-19 revolution,” said Jones. “While various party historians openly admit the SPD’s role in the events, others still want to defend it.”

Karl Liebknecht speaking at a peace rally in Berlin. Photograph: ullstein bild Dtl./ullstein bild via Getty Images

Even now, he said, Die Linke supporters argued that just as the SPD betrayed the working class then, so it continued to do with its labour reforms, seen as punishing the working class.

The London writer David Fernbach was among those who came to Berlin to pay tribute to Luxemburg and Liebknecht. His grandfather, Wolfgang, was a member of the Spartacus League, the Marxist revolutionary movement founded by Luxemburg and Liebknecht in reaction to the SPD’s support for the first world war. Wolfgang was murdered by government troops on 11 January 1919, when he was 30.

“Luxemburg made a huge contribution to the positive sides of German socialism at a time when it was free from the dogmatisms that were to follow, which is why I think she remains something of an untainted socialist icon today,” Fernbach said.

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Why Excessive Consumption of Media Limits Your Creativity – By Srinivas Rao – 4 Dec 2017

“When a creative artist is fatigued it is often from too much inflow, not too much outflow” — Julia Cameron

If most of us, myself included, were completely honest about our balance between consumption and creation, we’d see that it’s pretty out of whack. We consume far more than we create when it should be the opposite. Every day our consumption diet includes any of the following

• Articles on Web sites
• Emails
• Status updates
• Netflix/Youtube/Hulu
• Podcasts
• Online Shopping

If you actually took inventory of all the digital content that you consumed over the course of a week, you would actually be horrified.

Because my upcoming book is about creative habits, I spent quite a bit of time thinking about my own consumption habits and my areas of weakness. One of those areas of weakness is inflow. We may not realize it, but managing our inflow is one of the best opportunities to design our environments for optimal performance and creativity. Excessive consumption and inflow inhibit creativity, negatively impacts our ability to do deep work and reduces our cumulative output. So let’s look at how and why this happens.

1. Excessive Consumption Causes Decision Fatigue

On average, we’re making over 300 decisions a day. A few months ago, I downloaded the dating app Bumble. After a few hours of playing with the app, I realized that every swipe was a decision. That was just the beginning of the decision fatigue that results from excessive consumption. And that made me think about all the other decisions that are made through our consumption habits.

• Every time you click on, read, or comment on an article you make a decision
• Every time you like, reply to or write a Facebook status update you make a decision
• Every time you read, reply to or write an email you make a decision
• Every time you browse and buy something online you make a decision
• Every time you scroll through the queue on Netflix you make a decision

This is in addition to the other 300 decisions we’re making each day. The same willpower that could have been directed towards creation gets completely depleted by our consumption habits if we’re not careful about them.

2. Excessive Consumption is Harmful to Our Attention Spans

If you’ve ever sat in a Starbucks and watched a group of teenagers, you’ll see the definition of short attention spans. They’ll spend over an hour attempting to take the perfect selfie. This is between multiple status updates and check-ins to whatever social network they’re addicted to.

But where this becomes really apparent is in Cal Newport’s research around the concept of Deep Work. According to Cal, if your attention is constantly shifting to stimuli that are novel, when it comes time to do deep work, your ability to do deep work is going to suffer. It’s the cognitive equivalent of being an athlete who smokes.

3. Excessive consumption results in multitasking and attention residue

It might seem harmless to take a quick glance at your inbox ever ten minutes or so. Indeed, many justify this behavior as better than the old practice of leaving an inbox open on the screen at all times…. That quick check introduces a new target for your attention. Even worse, by seeing messages you cannot deal with at the moment (which is almost always the case), you’ll be forced to turn back to the primary task with a secondary task left unfinished. — Cal Newport

Just imagine how much harder it is to sustain attention for something like reading a book when you’ve spent your whole day jumping from one website to another, scrolling through articles and not doing much actual reading. You end up being mediocre at a bunch of things as opposed to being excellent at one thing.

4. Excessive Consumption could be Bad for Our Mental Health

Every email you receive, every notification, and every “like” you get on a post releases a shot of dopamine, thereby making the products and services that we use on a daily basis addictive as hell. The sense of fulfillment and satisfaction derived from this doesn’t last very long. As a result, we crave these dopamine hits all day long.

But what’s more disturbing is what it’s doing to our mental health. Simon Sinek’s research on this predicts that in young people we’re going to see a much greater likelihood of depression, social anxiety, and the inability to communicative effectively because their faces are buried in screens getting their dopamine fix from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to sleep.

According to Kelly McGonigal’s work and her book The Upside of Stress, people who use social media excessively experience a decreased sense of satisfaction with their lives. No matter what you accomplish, achieve or do, somebody is always up to something far more epic than you are if you live your life through the lens of your Facebook news feed.

As I’ve said before, you should treat the information you consume like the food you eat. And if you over-ate the way you over-consume you wouldn’t be alive very long.

5. Reduce Your Inflow

There are some really basic ways that anybody can reduce their inflow that won’t be disruptive to their lives or their work.

• A Separate Email Address for newsletters, notifications , etc: As someone who spends the day scouring the web for insanely interesting people to interview on the Unmistakable Creative, I need to have a decent level of inflow. This is why I have two email addresses. One is for communication that’s essential. The other is for newsletters and things that I sign up for on the web. Cal Newport goes as far as to have separate email addresses for multiple purposes, which is another approach.
• Facebook Newsfeed Obliterator: This is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a Chrome extension that removes the newsfeed from Facebook. About once a week I reenable Safari on my phone and see what everybody else is up to. But on a day to day basis I have no idea and I can focus all my efforts on what I’m there to do which is manage the community around Unmistakable Creative.
• Go Analog: I believe there’s tremendous power to being analog in an increasingly digital world.Some of the best designers in the world don’t turn on their computers for days. Nearly every post I write is written by hand first. When you’re a writer, using pen and paper gives you a chance to truly hear the sound of your own voice.

When you limit the inflow, you increase the energy that can be directed towards your outflow. You create more than you consume.

Archive

Steam Punk Starship – Steam-powered spaceship could cruise the solar system without running out of fuel – By Brandon Specktor (Live Science) 14 Jan 2019

Developers say the microwave-sized craft would suck its watery fuel right out of the asteroids, planets and moons it’s exploring.

Illustration of a near-Earth object. The proposed craft could revolutionize the exploration of asteroids like this and other celestial objects.NASA/JPL-Caltech

Jan. 14, 2019, 11:18 AM PST / Source: Live Science

Come one, come all and behold the future of space travel: steam power!

No, seriously; half a century after the world’s first manned space mission, it seems that interplanetary travel has finally entered the steam age. Scientists at the University of Central Florida have teamed up with Honeybee Robotics, a private space and mining tech company based in California, to develop a small, steam-powered spacecraft capable of sucking its fuel right out of the asteroids, planets and moons it’s exploring.

By continuously turning extraterrestrial water into steam, this microwave-sized lander could, theoretically, power itself on an indefinite number of planet-hopping missions across the galaxy — so long as it always lands somewhere with H20 for the taking.

“We could potentially use this technology to hop on the moon, Ceres, Europa, Titan, Pluto, the poles of Mercury, asteroids — anywhere there is water and sufficiently low gravity,” Phil Metzger, a UCF space scientist and one of the chief minds behind the steampunk starship, said in a statement. Metzger added that such a self-sufficient spacecraft could explore the cosmos “forever.”

Metzger and his colleagues call the lander WINE (short for “World Is Not Enough”), and a prototype of the craft recently completed its first test mission on a simulated asteroid surface in California. Using a compact drilling apparatus, the lander successfully mined the fake comet for water, converted that H20 into rocket propellant and launched itself into the air using a set of steam-powered thrusters.

By using steam rather than fuel, the World Is Not Enough (WINE) spacecraft prototype can theoretically explore “forever,” as long as water and sufficiently low gravity is presentUniversity of Central Florida

While the phrase “steam-powered spaceship” might initially evoke images of a rusty, gear-laden, fog-belching bucket of bolts, the technology behind WINE is far more complex than it sounds. To get the prototype working just right, Metzger spent three years developing new steam propulsion computer models and equations to help WINE optimize its operations in response to the varying gravitational demands of its surroundings. If a WINE-like robot ever makes it to space, built-in solar panels could provide it with the initial energy needed to start its off-world drilling operations.

The successful test run is a big feather in WINE’s proverbial steampunk top hat, but there’s a long way to go before the lander can be tested in an actual space environment. NASA sees value in the potentially self-sufficient starship and helped fund the early stages of the project; now, the developers are seeking new partners to help take WINE out of the lab and onto another world.

Originally published on Live Science.

The War on Populism – by C.J. Hopkins • 10 Jan 2019

Remember when the War on Terror ended and the War on Populism began? That’s OK, no one else does.

It happened in the Summer of 2016, also known as “the Summer of Fear.” The War on Terror was going splendidly. There had been a series of “terrorist attacks,” in Orlando, Nice, Würzberg, Munich, Reutlingen, Ansbach, and Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, each of them perpetrated by suddenly “self-radicalized” “lone wolf terrorists” (or “non-terrorist terrorists“) who had absolutely no connection to any type of organized terrorist groups prior to suddenly “self- radicalizing” themselves by consuming “terrorist content” on the Internet. It seemed we were entering a new and even more terrifying phase of the Global War on Terror, a phase in which anyone could be a “terrorist” and “terrorism” could mean almost anything.

This broadening of the already virtually meaningless definition of “terrorism” was transpiring just in time for Obama to hand off the reins to Hillary Clinton, who everyone knew was going to be the next president, and who was going to have to bomb the crap out of Syria in response to the non-terrorist terrorist threat. The War on Terror (or, rather, “the series of persistent targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America,” as Obama rebranded it) was going to continue, probably forever. The Brexit referendum had just taken place, but no one had really digested that yet … and then Trump won the nomination.

Like that scene in Orwell’s 1984 where the Party switches official enemies right in the middle of the Hate Week rally, the War on Terror was officially canceled and replaced by the War on Populism. Or … all right, it wasn’t quite that abrupt. But seriously, go back and scan the news. Note how the “Islamic terrorist threat” we had been conditioned to live in fear of on a daily basis since 2001 seemed to just vanish into thin air. Suddenly, the “existential threat” we were facing was “neo-nationalism,” “illiberalism,” or the pejorative designator du jour, “populism.”

Here we are, two and a half years later, and “democracy” is under constant attack by a host of malevolent “populist” forces …. Russo-fascist Black vote suppressors, debaucherous eau de Novichok assassins, Bernie Sanders, the yellow-vested French, emboldened non-exploding mail bomb bombers, Jeremy Corbyn’s Nazi Death Cult, and brain-devouring Russian-Cubano crickets. The President of the United States is apparently both a Russian intelligence operative and literally the resurrection of Hitler. NBC and MSNBC have been officially merged with the CIA. The Guardian has dispensed with any pretense of journalism and is just making stories up out of whole cloth. Anyone who has ever visited Russia, or met with a Russian, or read a Russian novel, is on an “Enemies of Democracy” watch list (as is anyone refusing to vacation in Israel, which the Senate is now in the process of making mandatory for all U.S. citizens). Meanwhile, the “terrorists” are nowhere to be found, except for the terrorists we’ve been using to attempt to overthrow the government of Bashar al Assad, the sadistic nerve-gassing Monster of Syria, who illegally invaded and conquered his own country in defiance of the “international community.”

All this madness has something to do with “populism,” although it isn’t clear what. The leading theory is that the Russians are behind it. They’ve got some sort of hypno-technology (not to be confused with those brain-eating crickets) capable of manipulating the minds of … well, Black people, mostly, but not just Black people. Obviously, they are also controlling the French, who they have transformed into “racist, hate-filled liars” who are “attacking elected representatives, journalists, Jews, foreigners, and homosexuals,” according to French President Emmanuel Macron, the anointed “Golden Boy of Europe.” More terrifying still, Putin is now able to project words out of Trump’s mouth in real-time, literally using Trump’s head as a puppet, or like one of those Mission Impossible masks. (Rachel Maddow conclusively proved this by spending a couple of hours on Google comparing the words coming out of Trump’s mouth to words that had come out of Russian mouths, but had never come out of American mouths, which they turned out to be the exact same words, or pretty close to the exact same words!) Apparently, Putin’s master plan for Total Populist World Domination and Establishment of the Thousand Year Duginist Reich was to provoke the global capitalist ruling classes, the corporate media, and their credulous disciples into devolving into stark raving lunatics, or blithering idiots, or a combination of both.

But, seriously, all that actually happened back in the Summer of 2016 was the global capitalist ruling classes recognized that they had a problem. The problem that they recognized they had (and continue to have, and are now acutely aware of) is that no one is enjoying global capitalism … except the global capitalist ruling classes. The whole smiley-happy, supranational, neo-feudal corporate empire concept is not going over very well with the masses, or at least not with the unwashed masses. People started voting for right-wing parties, and Brexit, and other “populist” measures (not because they had suddenly transformed into Nazis, but because the Right was acknowledging and exploiting their anger with the advance of global neoliberalism, while liberals and the Identity Politics Left were slow jamming the TPP with Obama and babbling about transgender bathrooms, and such).

The global capitalist ruling classes needed to put a stop to that (i.e, the “populist” revolt, not the bathroom debate). So they suspended the Global War on Terror and launched the War on Populism. It was originally only meant to last until Hillary Clinton’s coronation, or the second Brexit referendum, then switch back to the War on Terror, but … well, weird things happen, and here we are.

We’ll get back to the War on Terror, eventually … as the War on Populism is essentially just a temporary rebranding of it. In the end, it’s all the same counter-insurgency. When a system is globally hegemonic, as our current model of capitalism is, every war is a counter-insurgency (i.e., a campaign waged against an internal enemy), as there are no external enemies to fight. The “character” of the internal enemies might change (e.g., “Islamic terrorism,” “extremism,” “fascism,” “populism,” “Trumpism,” “Corbynism,” et cetera) but they are all insurgencies against the hegemonic system … which, in our case, is global capitalism, not the United States of America.

The way I see it, the global capitalist ruling classes now have less than two years to put down this current “populist” insurgency. First and foremost, they need to get rid of Trump, who despite his bombastic nativist rhetoric is clearly no “hero of the common people,” nor any real threat to global capitalism, but who has become an anti-establishment symbol, like a walking, talking “fuck you” to both the American and global neoliberal elites. Then, they need to get a handle on Europe, which isn’t going to be particularly easy. What happens next in France will be telling, as will whatever becomes of Brexit … which I continue to believe will never actually happen, except perhaps in some purely nominal sense.

And then there’s the battle for hearts and minds, which they’ve been furiously waging for the last two years, and which is only going to intensify. If you think things are batshit crazy now (which, clearly, they are), strap yourself in. What is coming is going to make COINTELPRO look like the work of some amateur meme-freak. The neoliberal corporate media, psy-ops like Integrity Initiative, Internet-censoring apps like NewsGuard, ShareBlue and other David Brock outfits, and a legion of mass hysteria generators will be relentlessly barraging our brains with absurdity, disinformation, and just outright lies (as will their counterparts on the Right, of course, in case you thought that they were any alternative). It’s going to get extremely zany.

The good news is, by the time it’s all over and Trump has been dealt with, and normality restored, and the working classes put back in their places, we probably won’t remember that any of this happened. We’ll finally be able to sort out those bathrooms, and get back to paying the interest on our debts, and to living in more or less constant fear of an imminent devastating terrorist attack … and won’t that be an enormous relief?

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin.

Israel: Arab Christians Protest Art Museum’s ‘McChrist’ Crucifixion Work – by Alexander Fulbright (Times of Israel) 11 Jan 2019

Arab Christians clash violently with police in Haifa over ‘McJesus’ sculpture

3 officers wounded as hundreds of protesters try to forcibly enter Haifa Museum during demonstration against depiction of Ronald McDonald on a cross

By Alexander Fulbright

11 January 2019

 

The “McJesus” sculpture by Finnish artist Jani Leinonen on display at the Haifa Museum of Art. (Haifa Museum of Art)

Hundreds of Arab Christian demonstrators clashed with police in Haifa on Friday over a museum’s display of a sculpture depicting Ronald McDonald, the mascot of the fast-food giant, on a cross, amid calls to remove the artwork that some have called offensive.

Police said a few hundred protesters tried to force their way into the Haifa Museum of Art during the demonstration and that three officers were injured by rocks hurled at them.  An investigation was opened to identify the rock-throwers, and a 32-year-old resident of the city was arrested on suspicion of attacking officers. Video from the demonstration showed scuffles as police used tear gas and stun grenades to clear the protesters.

 

One of the protesters complained that the government was slow to react to their concerns because they were from the Christian minority. “If they put up [a sculpture of] Hitler with a Torah scroll they would immediately respond,” he told the Walla news site.

Ahead of the protest, police deployed officers from its Special Patrol Unit to guard the museum after a molotov cocktail was thrown at the museum on Thursday. 

The “McJesus,” which was sculpted by Finnish artist Jani Leinonen and depicts a crucified Ronald McDonald, went on display in August as part of the Haifa museum’s “Sacred Goods” exhibit.  The show also features a number of other pieces depicting Jesus, including one of him as a “Ken” doll, as well as imagery from other religions.

On Thursday, Culture Minister Miri Regev sent Haifa Museum director Nissim Tal a letter calling for the sculpture’s removal.

“Disrespect of religious symbols sacred to many worshipers in the world as an act of artistic protest is illegitimate and cannot serve as art at a cultural institution supported by state funds,” she wrote.

In response to Friday’s protest, the Haifa Museum said Tal agreed during a meeting with church leaders and officials from the Haifa Municipality to put up a sign at the entrance to the exhibit explaining it contains potentially offensive content.  The museum also condemned the throwing of the molotov cocktail and said any objection to the piece must not be expressed violently. 

“A discourse about art, however complex it may be, must not spill over into violent territory and must be respected — even in charged situations,” it said.

 

Archive

Looking At: The Great War – Lenin and Trotsky 1917 – Youtube Video and Comment

 

I put a comment on Youtube about the video:

I have watched many episodes of this series and have been impressed with the even handed tone and reliance on documentation and evidence. So…I was reluctant to click on this Lenin and Trotsky episode. I am one who has some acquaintance with these men and have read a number of works by both. I was afraid of a slanted anti-communist presentation. But, I finally watched this episode. Mostly very good.

One point – the difference between Lenin’s Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks was not about ‘violence.’ The difference is about the organizational structure a socialist party should have. The Mensheviks and most European moderate socialists wanted an open party with low key meetings and open membership at any time. Members could say just about anything they wanted about politics and openly disagree with other party members. The focus would be on winning parliamentary seats in elections and slowly pushing for modest reforms that really improve workers lives right now.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks wanted to form a shadow government that would have party members who were professional revolutionaries who joined the party and voted on the parties positions and then accepted the majorities ruling and said the same thing as everyone else in public. The Leninist wanted a party news organization that would publish a national newspaper that would be an organizing tool for the party and socialism. The Leninist was expected to be a organizer, a publicist, a street vendor of a revolutionary newspaper, and someone who followed orders, and knew how to give others orders. The Leninists did not want to be ‘Sunday Socialists.’

Moderate Socialists like the Mensheviks were quite capable of using violence and had no ideological problems using government police forces to fight workers and socialists when they are elected to parliament. The July Days in Petrograd 1917 featured Menshevik backed violence – against revolutionary workers and socialists. All political parties use violence when they have state power – some more, some less. The State is ultimately built on a system of violence and the threat of violence to enforce laws and rule the population. The Soviet state was no different. The vote in 1903 between the Mensheviks and Lenin’s Bolshevik’s was not about violence versus peaceful progress.

German Gold? Like a story from the Brothers Grimm many love to write about Lenin getting “German Gold.” I don’t think I’ve ever read anyone use the phrases “German money,” or “German funds.” Those phrases are not something one would find in a fairy-tale. Has anyone ever written about the American Revolution and said the Revolutionaries got “French Gold?” When Irish Nationalists and Socialists rose up against the UK in 1916 they got money and guns from Germany. Just like Lenin, perhaps. But the implication for many is that the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was some kind of German destabilization trick that morphed out of control and became a historical fluke – an openly socialist state that aimed to eliminate capitalism.

China’s Long Game: Hold Tibet, Take Taiwan, Colonize Moon – by Pepe Escobar (Asia Times) 11 Jan 2019

The top story of 2019 – and the years ahead – will continue to revolve around the myriad, dangerous permutations of the economic ascent of China, the resurgence of nuclear superpower Russia and the decline of the US’s global hegemony.  Two years ago, before the onset of the Trump administration, I sketched how the shadow play might proceed in the New Great Game in Eurasia.

Now the new game hits high gear; it’s the US against the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Diplomatic capers, tactical retreats, psychological, economic, cyber and even outer space duels, all enveloped in media hysteria, will continue to rule the news cycle. Be prepared for all shades of carping about authoritarian China, and its “malign” association with an “illiberal” Russian bogeyman bent on blasting the borders of Europe and “disrupting” the Middle East.

Relatively sound minds like the political scientist Joseph Nye will continue to lament the sun setting on the Western liberal “order,” without realizing that what was able to “secure and stabilize the world over the past seven decades” does not translate into a “strong consensus … defending, deepening and extending this system.” The Global South overwhelmingly begs to differ, arguing that the current “order” was manufactured and largely benefits only US interests.

Expect exceptionalists to operate in condescending overdrive, exhorting somewhat reluctant “allies” to help “constrain” if not contain China and “channel” – as in control – Beijing’s increasing global clout.

It’s a full-time job to “channel” China into finding its “right” place in a new world order. What does the Chinese intellectual elite really think about all this?

Never fight on two fronts

An unparalleled roadmap may be provided by Zhang Wenmu, national security strategy expert and professor at the Center of Strategic Studies of the University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Beijing, who wrote an essay published in August 2017 in the Chinese magazine Taipingyan Xuebao (Pacific magazine), that was translated recently into Italian by Rome-based geopolitical magazine Limes.

“Geopolitics” may be an Anglo invention, arguably by Sir Halford Mackinder, but it has been studied in China for centuries as, for instance, “geographic advantage” (xingsheng) or “historic geography” (lishi dili).

Wenmu introduces us to the concept of geopolitics as philosophy on the tip of a knife, but it’s mostly about philosophy, not the knife. If we want to use the knife we must use philosophy to know the limits of our power. Call it a Sino-equivalent of Nietzsche’s philosophizing with a hammer.

As a geopolitical analyst, Wenmu cannot but remind us that the trademark Roman or British empires’ ‘divide and rule’ is also a well-known tactic in China. For instance, in early 1972, Chairman Mao was quite ready to welcome Richard Nixon. Later, in July, Mao revealed his hand: “One must profit from the conflict between two powers, that is our policy. But we must get closer to one of them and not fight on two fronts.” He was referring to the split between China and the USSR.

 

 

Wenmu gets a real kick out of how Western geopolitics usually plays things wrong. He stresses how Halford Mackinder, the Englishman regarded as one of the founders of geostrategy, “influenced World War II and the subsequent decline of the British Empire,” noting how Mackinder died only five months before Partition between India and Pakistan in 1947.

He destroys George Kennan’s theory of the Cold War, “directly based on Mackinder’s thinking,” and how it led the US to fight in Korea and Vietnam, “accelerating its decline.”

Even Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former US national security advisor, “saw the decline of the American empire,” as he died recently, in May 2017. “In that moment, China and Russia gave life to a strategic collaboration always closer and invincible.” Wenmu is positively gleeful. “If Brzezinski was still alive, I think he would see the ‘great defeat’ of the Western world – the opposite of what he wrote.”

Why Tibet matters

Chinese geopolitics predictably pays close attention to the tension between sea powers and land powers. Wenmu notes how, in the Indian Ocean, the British Empire enjoyed more naval power compared to the Americans “because it occupied the homonymous continent. And because it dominated the seas, the United Kingdom also threatened the Russian Empire, which was a land power.”

Wenmu quotes from Alfred Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History on the reciprocal influence between control of the seas and control of the land. But, he adds: “Mahan did not analyze this relation on a global level … Based on the priorities of the United States, he concentrated most of all on distant seas.”

 

 

Wenmu crucially stresses how the Pacific Ocean is the “obligatory passage of the Maritime Silk Road.” Even though China “developed its naval capacity much later, it enjoys [a] geographical advantage in relation to the UK and the US.” And with that, he brings us to the essential Tibet question.

One of Wenmu’s key points is how “the Tibetan plateau allows the People’s Republic to access the resources respectively of the Pacific Ocean to the east and those of the Indian Ocean in the west. If from the plateau we look at the American base in Diego Garcia [in the center of the Indian Ocean] we can’t have any doubts about the natural advantage of Chinese geopolitics.” The implication is that the UK and US must “consume a great deal of resources to cross the oceans and develop a chain of islands.”

Wenmu shows how the geography of the Tibetan plateau “links in a natural way the Tibetan region to the dominant power in the Chinese central plains” while it does “not link it to the countries in the South Asia subcontinent.” Thus Tibet should be considered as a “natural part of China.”

China is supported by the continental plaque, “which it controls along its coast,” and “possesses technology of medium and long-range missile attack,” guaranteeing it virtually a “great capacity of reaction in both oceans” with a “relatively powerful naval force.” And that’s how China, as Wenmu maps it, is able to compensate – “to a certain extent” – the technological gap relative to the West.

Wenmu’s most controversial point is that “the advantage that only China enjoys of linking to markets of two oceans crashes the myth of Western ‘naval power’ in the contemporary era and introduces a revolutionary vision; the People’s Republic is a great nation who possesses by nature the qualification of naval power.” We just need to compare “how industrial development allowed the West to navigate towards the Indian Ocean” while China “arrived on foot.”

Get Taiwan

President Obama was keen to exhort at every opportunity the status of the US as a “Pacific nation.” Imagine the US confronted by Wenmu’s description: “The Western Pacific is linked to the national interests of the People’s Republic and is the starting point of the New Maritime Silk Road.” In fact, Chairman Mao talked about it way back in 1959: “One day, it does not matter when, the United States will have to retire from the rest of the world and will have to abandon the Western Pacific.”

Extrapolating from Mao, Wenmu elaborates on a “Western Pacific Chinese Sea” uniting the South China Sea, the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea. “We can use the formula ‘southern zone of the Western Pacific Chinese Sea’ to describe the part that falls under Chinese sovereignty.”

This suggests a combination of Chinese forces in the South China Sea, the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea under a sole Western Pacific naval command.

 

 

It’s easy to see where all this is pointing: reunification with Taiwan.

Under such a system, as delineated by Wenmu, Taiwan “would return to the motherland,” China’s sovereignty over its coastline “would be legitimated” and at the same time “would not be excessively extended.”

Beijing’s supreme goal is to effectively move the “Chinese line of control” to the east of Taiwan. That reflects President Xi Jinping’s speech earlier this week, where he referred to Taiwan, for all practical purposes, as the great prize. Wenmu frames it as an environment “where Chinese nuclear submarines are able to counter-attack, the construction of aircraft carriers can progress and products made in continental China may be exported effectively.”

The barycenter of Asia

One of the most fascinating arguments in Wenmu’s essay is how he shows there’s always a natural proportion – a sort of ‘divine’ or ‘golden ratio’ between the three strategic powers in Eurasia: Europe, Central Asia and China.

Cue to a fast tour of the rise and fall of empires, with “history showing how in the main zone of the continent – between 30 and 60 degrees of north[ern] latitude – there can be only 2.5 strategic forces.” Which means one of the three major spaces always becomes fragmented.

In modern times it has been rare that one of the three powers “managed to expand to a 1.5 ratio.” Before, only the Tang empire and the Mongol empire came close. The British Empire, Tsarist Russia and the USSR “invaded Afghanistan and entered Central Asia, but success, when it happened, was short-lived.”

That paved the way to Wenmu’s clincher: “The law of the aurea section [Latin for ‘golden’ section] as the base of strategic power in Eurasia helps us to understand the causes of alternate rise and decline of powers in the continent and to recognize the limits of expansion of Chinese power in Central Asia. To understand it is the premise of mature and successful diplomacy.”

Although this cannot be seriously depicted as a roadmap for “Chinese aggression,” Wenmu cannot help but direct another hit at Western geopolitical stalwart Mackinder: “With his genius imagination, Mackinder advanced the wrong theory of the ‘geographic pivot’ because he did not consider this law.”

In a nutshell, China is key for the equilibrium of Eurasia. “In Europe, the fragmented zone originates in the center, in Asia, it is around China. So that presents China as the natural barycenter of Asia.”

Dark side of the moon

It’s easy to imagine Wenmu’s essay provoking ballistic responses from proponents of the US National Security Strategy which labels China, as well as Russia, as a dangerous “revisionist power.”

Professional Sinophobes are even peddling the notion that a “failing China” might eventually “lash out” against the US. That’s a misreading of what Rear Admiral Luo Yuan said last month in Shenzhen: “We now have Dong Feng-21D, Dong Feng-26 missiles. These are aircraft carrier killers. We attack and sink one of their aircraft carriers. Let them suffer 5,000 casualties. Attack and sink two carriers, casualties 10,000. Let’s see if the US is afraid or not?”

This is a statement of fact, not a threat. The Pentagon knows all there is to know about ‘carrier killer’ danger.

Beijing won’t stop with carrier killers, the rebranded Western Pacific and reunification with Taiwan. It is planning the first artificial intelligence (AI) colony on earth – a deep-sea base for unmanned submarine science and defense ops in the South China Sea.

China’s robotic lunar rover goes for a spin on the far side of the moon.

The landing of the Chang’e 4 lunar probe on the far side of the moon could even be interpreted as the most extreme extension of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

These are all pieces in a massive puzzle bound to reinforce the grip of a new – Sinocentric – map of the world, already in use by the Chinese navy and published in 2013, not by accident the year when the New Silk Roads were announced in Astana and Jakarta.

Wenmu ends his essay stressing how “Chinese geopolitics must distance itself from the idea that ‘one cannot open his mouth without mentioning Ancient Greece’.” That’s a reference to a famous Mao speech of May 1941, when the Chairman criticized certain Marxist-Leninists who privileged Western history – of which Ancient Greece is the ultimate symbol – over Chinese history.

Thucydides trap? What trap?

Archive

Berlin: 15,000 Rally to Remember the 100th Anniversary of the Assassination Of Communists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht – 13 Jan 2019

Red, black, neon yellow
100 years later: Commemoration of murdered revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht with current references in Berlin

By Claudia Wangerin

(Google Translate)

One century after the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, thousands of people marched from the Frankfurt Gate to the Socialist Memorial on Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery on Sunday in Berlin.

Between red flags with logos of communist groups and the party of  The Left – /Die Linke were also seen at this year’s Luxembourg Liebknecht demonstration also numerous Neongelbe West.  Leaflets and speeches linked the current political struggles with the memory and program of the two revolutionary founders of the Communist Party of Germany, who had been murdered on 15 January 1919 by officers of the old imperial German army, after the ‘moderate’ Social Democrat SPD leadership gave the assassins a free hand to suppress leftist workers organizations and leaders.

On the front panel of the “LL-Demo”, besides Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was also mentioned: “Nobody is forgotten – standing up and opposing.”

Some wore the “yellow vests” with communist hammer and sickle symbols printed on them in reference to the French “gillet jaune” protest movement with their bright safety vests.

“Strike! Soviet power! Women’s fight! « said on another banner. In many cases, the logo of the anti-fascist action with red and black flag used by several groups was also on display. An anti-fascist-internationalist block referred in slogans and speeches mainly to the council models in the Syrian-Kurdish self-governing area Rojava and in the Mexican Chiapas. Inspired by this, the Berlin “Kiezkommune” campaigned for self-organization in the district.

“Rosa, Karl, Vladimir – we’re fighting for our future,” a street rock band sang just before the finish at the end of the demonstration. The Socialist Memorial formed queues of people who had come to lay flowers, especially red carnations.

 

On Tuesday, the actual anniversary of the death of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, they will be remembered at 18 o’clock at the Olof-Palme-Platz in Berlin-Tiergarten.

https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/347458.erinnerung-an-kpd-mitbegr%C3%BCnder-rot-schwarz-neongelb.html

https://archive.is/dEwlL

Putin’s Passport Found at US State Department Burglary Site – by Carol Morello (Washington Post) 11 Jan 2019

The State Department was hit in two separate locations last week by a thief who got away with dozens of cellphones and electronic equipment.

The department acknowledged that one individual is suspected of slipping into two of its buildings — one in Washington and one in Arlington. A suspect was arrested after he allegedly tried to sell the equipment at a restaurant in Virginia, and almost all the stolen devices were retrieved.

The suspect was identified by Arlington police as Joel Enriquez-Bueno, 42, with no known fixed address. He was charged with grand larceny, grand larceny with intent to sell, breaking and entering, and giving a false identity to police. It was not clear whether he had retained an attorney. He was being held without bond in the Arlington County Detention Facility.

It is unclear why someone apparently targeted two different State Department facilities across the river from each other on the same day, suggesting they were not chosen at random. It also is unclear whether it is just a coincidence that the thefts happened during the government shutdown that has furloughed 4 in 10 State Department employees, or whether the thief failed to realize that Diplomatic Security, which is responsible for protecting property as well as lives, is fully staffed despite the shutdown.

A State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the mysterious incident, said, “We continue to meet security staffing requirements” but declined to discuss the details. The official said a thief had entered two State Department annexes on Jan. 3. The official did not say whether the person succeeded in getting past security to reach interior offices at the Washington building.

More is known about the incident in Rosslyn. According to the Arlington County Police Department, officers were dispatched around 11 a.m. to a building in the 1800 block of North Lynn Street. A high-rise building on that block houses the State Department’s Office of Personnel Security and Suitability, where security clearances for all State Department employees are checked and processed.

Police said a man had “piggybacked” into the secure building at 9:35 a.m., slipping in behind someone else, made his way to an upper-floor suite and allegedly stole 53 electronic devices, including 44 cellphones that were a combination of private and government-owned phones. It is unclear why so many phones were in one place, but government employees often check their phones before entering secure areas. Police declined to specify what other electronic devices were taken.

Police determined the thief went to a restaurant less than half a mile away on Fort Myer Drive and attempted to sell them. While canvassing the area, they located a man they said matched the thief’s description and took him into custody. Police recovered all the stolen equipment except for one set of headphones, said police spokeswoman Ashley Savage. The State Department said it does not believe the purloined phones contained any classified material.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/thief-breaks-into-two-state-department-buildings-steals-phones/2019/01/11/5fc1d67c-15e0-11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html?utm_term=.8362fa7b8bc7

‘Save The Earth?’ The Planet Can Take Care of Itself – George Carlin – 21 Oct 2007

Worried about everything! You got people like this around you? Country’s full of ’em now. People walkin’ around all day long every minute of the day, worried about everything. Worried about the air, worried about the water, worried about the soil. Worried about insecticides, pesticides, food additives, carcinogens, worried about radon gas, worried about asbestos, worried about saving endangered species.

Lemme tell ya bout endangered species, awright? Saving endangered species is just one more arrogant attempt by humans to control Nature. It’s arrogant meddling. It’s what got us in trouble in the first place. Doesn’t anybody understand that? Interfering with Nature. Over 90 percent, over, way over 90 percent, of the species that have ever lived on this planet, ever lived, are gone. Wooosh! They’re extinct. We didn’t kill them all. They just disappeared. That’s what nature does.

They disappear these days at the rate of 25 a day—and I mean regardless of our behavior. Irrespective of how we act on this planet, 25 species that were here today will be gone tomorrow. Let them go gracefully. Leave Nature alone. Haven’t we done enough? We’re so self-important, so self-important. Everybody’s gonna save something now. Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails. And the greatest arrogance of all, save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet? We don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven’t learned to care for one another—we’re gonna save the fuckin’ planet?

I’m gettin’ tired of that shit. Tired of that shit. Tired. I’m tired of fuckin’ Earth Day, I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white bourgeoise liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for their Volvos.

Besides, environmentalist don’t give a shit about the planet, they don’t care about the planet, not in the abstract they don’t, not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that someday in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me. Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet, nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The people are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doin’ great! It’s been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years.

We’ve been here, what? A hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand and we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow we’re a threat? That somehow we’re gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a floatin’ around the sun?

The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids, and meteors, world-wide floods, tidal waves, world-wide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. We are! We’re goin’ away. Pack your shit, Folks, we’re goin’ away. We won’t leave much of a trace either, thank god for that. Maybe a little styrofoam, maybe, little styrofoam. Planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake, an evolutionary cul de sac. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas, a surface nuisance. You wanna know how the planet’s doin’? Ask those people at Pompeii, who were frozen into position from volcanic ash. How the planet’s doin’.

Wanna know if the planet’s alright, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia, or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. How about those people in Kilauea, Hawaii who built their homes right next to an active volcano and then wonder why they have lava in the living room. The planet will be here for a long, long, long time after we’re gone and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself ’cuz that’s what it does.

It’s a self-correcting system.

The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allows us to be spawned from it in the first place: it wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it, needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old philosophical question,

“Why are we here?” “Plastic, assholes.”

So, so, the plastic is here, our job is done, we can be phased out now. And I think that’s really started already, don’t you? I mean, to be fair, the planet probably sees us as a mild threat, something to be dealt with, but I’m sure the planet will defend itself in the manner of a large organism like a bee hive or an ant colony can muster a defense.

I’m sure the planet will think of something. What would you do, if you were the planet trying to defend against this pesky, troublesome species? Let’s see, what might, viruses, viruses might be good, they seem vulnerable to viruses.

And, viruses are tricky, always mutating and forming new strains whenever a vaccine is developed. Perhaps this first virus could be one that compromises the immune system in these creatures. Perhaps a human immuno deficiency virus making them vulnerable to all sorts of other diseases and infections that might come along, and maybe it could be spread sexually, making them a little reluctant to engage in the act of reproduction. Well, that’s a poetic note. And it’s a start.

But I can dream, can’t I? I don’t worry about the little things, bees, trees, whales, snails. I think we’re part of a greater wisdom than we’ll ever understand, a higher order, call it what you want. You know what I call it? The Big Electron. The Big Electron. Woooohhhh, woooohhhh, woooohhhh. It doesn’t punish, it doesn’t reward, it doesn’t judge at all. It just is, and so are we, for a little while. Thanks for being here with me for a little while tonight.

Take care New York Take care of yourself and take care of someone else.

George Carlin

Red moon rising – How China could dominate science Should the world worry? (The Economist) 12 Jan 2019

A HUNDRED YEARS ago a wave of student protests broke over China’s great cities. Desperate to reverse a century of decline, the leaders of the May Fourth Movement wanted to jettison Confucianism and import the dynamism of the West. The creation of a modern China would come about, they argued, by recruiting “Mr Science” and “Mr Democracy”.

Today the country that the May Fourth students helped shape is more than ever consumed by the pursuit of national greatness. China’s landing of a spacecraft on the far side of the Moon on January 3rd, a first for any country, was a mark of its soaring ambition. But today’s leaders reject the idea that Mr Science belongs in the company of Mr Democracy. On the contrary, President Xi Jinping is counting on being able to harness leading-edge research even as the Communist Party tightens its stranglehold on politics. Amid the growing rivalry between China and America, many in the West fear that he will succeed.

There is no doubting Mr Xi’s determination. Modern science depends on money, institutions and oodles of brainpower. Partly because its government can marshal all three, China is hurtling up the rankings of scientific achievement, as our investigations show (see article). It has spent many billions of dollars on machines to detect dark matter and neutrinos, and on institutes galore that delve into everything from genomics and quantum communications to renewable energy and advanced materials. An analysis of 17.2m papers in 2013-18, by Nikkei, a Japanese publisher, and Elsevier, a scientific publisher, found that more came from China than from any other country in 23 of the 30 busiest fields, such as sodium-ion batteries and neuron-activation analysis. The quality of American research has remained higher, but China has been catching up, accounting for 11% of the most influential papers in 2014-16.

Such is the pressure on Chinese scientists to make breakthroughs that some put ends before means. Last year He Jiankui, an academic from Shenzhen, edited the genomes of embryos without proper regard for their post-partum welfare—or that of any children they might go on to have. Chinese artificial-intelligence (AI) researchers are thought to train their algorithms on data harvested from Chinese citizens with little oversight. In 2007 China tested a space-weapon on one of its weather satellites, littering orbits with lethal space debris. Intellectual-property theft is rampant.

The looming prospect of a dominant, rule-breaking, high-tech China alarms Western politicians, and not just because of the new weaponry it will develop. Authoritarian governments have a history of using science to oppress their own people. China already deploys AI techniques like facial recognition to monitor its population in real time. The outside world might find a China dabbling in genetic enhancement, autonomous AIs or geoengineering extremely frightening.

These fears are justified. A scientific superpower wrapped up in a one-party dictatorship is indeed intimidating. But the effects of China’s growing scientific clout do not all point one way.

For a start, Chinese science is about much more than weapons and oppression. From better batteries and new treatments for disease to fundamental discoveries about, say, dark matter, the world has much to gain from China’s efforts.

Moreover, it is unclear whether Mr Xi is right. If Chinese research really is to lead the field, then science may end up changing China in ways he is not expecting.

Mr Xi talks of science and technology as a national project. However, in most scientific research, chauvinism is a handicap. Expertise, good ideas and creativity do not respect national frontiers. Research takes place in teams, which may involve dozens of scientists. Published papers get you only so far: conferences and face-to-face encounters are essential to grasp the subtleties of what everyone else is up to. There is competition, to be sure; military and commercial research must remain secret. But pure science thrives on collaboration and exchange.

This gives Chinese scientists an incentive to observe international rules—because that is what will win its researchers access to the best conferences, laboratories and journals, and because unethical science diminishes China’s soft power. Mr He’s gene-editing may well be remembered not just for his ethical breach, but also for the furious condemnation he received from his Chinese colleagues and the threat of punishment from the authorities. The satellite destruction in 2007 caused outrage in China. It has not been repeated.

The tantalising question is how this bears on Mr Democracy. Nothing says the best scientists have to believe in political freedom. And yet critical thinking, scepticism, empiricism and frequent contact with foreign colleagues threaten authoritarians, who survive by controlling what people say and think. Soviet Russia sought to resolve that contradiction by giving its scientists privileges, but isolating many of them in closed cities.

China will not be able to corral its rapidly growing scientific elite in that way. Although many researchers will be satisfied with just their academic freedom, only a small number need seek broader self-expression to cause problems for the Communist Party. Think of Andrei Sakharov, who developed the Russian hydrogen bomb, and later became a chief Soviet dissident; or Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist who inspired the students leading the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. When the official version of reality was tired and stilted, both stood out as seekers of the truth. That gave them immense moral authority.

Some in the West may feel threatened by China’s advances in science, and therefore aim to keep its researchers at arm’s length. That would be wise for weapons science and commercial research, where elaborate mechanisms to preserve secrecy already exist and could be strengthened. But to extend an arm’s-length approach to ordinary research would be self-defeating. Collaboration is the best way of ensuring that Chinese science is responsible and transparent. It might even foster the next Fang.

Hard as it is to imagine, Mr Xi could end up facing a much tougher choice: to be content with lagging behind, or to give his scientists the freedom they need and risk the consequences. In that sense, he is running the biggest experiment of all.

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https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/01/12/how-china-could-dominate-science

(Editors Note: Oh, the lectures from the Mother of Democracies. (I don’t mean Greece.) When was the last time the UK put a space vehicle on the Moon? And, I don’t mean in a witty children’s story. As far as the scientific study of space in the UK is still in Victorian Flatland when it comes to machines that fly to the Moon. Does China monitor their citizens online the way the UK monitors the subjects of the queen? People are arrested and jailed for expressing opinions online in the UK, just like China.

Does China have an open technology culture, like, say Google? At Google there is a politically correct way of thinking speaking and writing. People who go against the bureaucracy’s ideas lose their jobs. Just like in China. In the US the number of women who identify as ‘feminists’ is 20%, yet virtually all the media women are feminists. In the UK 8% of women see themselves supporting ‘feminism’ yet the entire state funded BBC is feminist. The party line is enshrined as a moral principle – in China, the US, and the UK. So, China can go to the Moon and build vibrant modern cities, and massive electric power dams to power numerous lengthy high speed train lines. When was the last time the UK built a high speed train line? Any new electric power plants? New cities?

Perhaps if the UK wasn’t the junior invader with the US in Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and Syria and Yemen they’d have the money and organizational will to fix the home country. But, apparently there is more to be made with weapons and neo-colonial adventures than acting like an old fashioned country that takes care of it’s people and infrastructure first.

This upper class twit is going to give a Youtube lecture to the billion and a half people on China in how to do things and be democratic about it? Ha. The UK controlled Hong Kong for about a 150 years with very little democracy in the Chinese city except towards the last decade or so. The UK had no problem shooting down Chinese protesters in Hong Kong during the long colonial dictatorship. But now the upper class Brits are going to tell China how to do things. You are the last people they should follow.  

NYC Pizza Controversy – US Copyright Laws Do Not Protect Cooking Recipes (CBS NY) 9 Jan 2018

Rival Cries Pizza Plagiarism In Escalating War Of Pepperoni Slices

January 9, 2019

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – Dominic Morano runs the iconic Prince Street Pizza in SoHo for his dad Frank, whose anger is piping hot over an employee who left this shop after seven years to work at another pizza shop on the Upper West Side. The Moranos claim he had the nerve to take the recipe for this Signature Spicy Pepperoni Square with him, reports CBS2’s Dave Carlin.  So the elder Morano is set to sue, and the son is trying to keep the peace in an escalating pizza war.  “The litigation is pending and will take care of itself,” said Dominic. “I can’t talk about it.”

CBS2 “caught up with” the ex-employee who is now at Made in New York Pizza on Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side. Frank Badali says he did not steal anything. “It’s not the same recipe,” said Badali. “It’s upgraded.”

A lawyer for Prince Street Pizza did not immediately respond to CBS2’s emails and calls for comment, but the case may come down to whether the recipe is protected and just how similar the pizzas actually are.

Taste tests on pepperoni squares from both shops drew a variety of reactions from discriminating eaters.

“I think it’s different,” said Darren Rogers comparing the slices.

“I think I gotta give it to Made in New York,” said another taster.

“I think this is better, Prince Street,” said Griffin Rocco of Warren, N.J.

 

Cases involving chef-versus-chef can be tough, said Barry Heyman, an intellectual property attorney. “They’re difficult to protect,” he said. “They would have to have an agreement in place.”

Recipes cannot be patented, copyrighted, or trademarked, said Heyman. A non-disclosure or confidentiality agreement would had to have been included in the employee’s work contract.

Badali says he never signed any kind of confidentiality agreement when he was at Prince Street Pizza.

“All is fair in love and pizza, right?” said Bonnie Holzer of the Upper West Side. She says both pizza places getting publicity out of this row, so anyway you slice this fight, it’s a win win. One might also ask what damage having similar tasting foods might do to restaurants that are some distance from each other.

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Sex Doll Owners – Robot Lovers Are Better (The Sun) 8 Jan 2018

LOUNGING on a sofa in a leather corset and holding a can of beer, Kristal is Nick’s perfect woman.  

So she should be, as the truck driver forked out over £6,000 on the silicone sex doll, who he calls the ultimate “boy toy”.

Kristal is Nick’s perfect woman and he does everyday things like watch football and enjoy a beer with her.

Blonde Kristal is one of many carefully crafted dolls to hit the market in recent years and Nick is among a growing number of men ready to splash the cash on a plastic partner.

Every part of the dolls can be custom-made – from hair and eyes to the shape and texture of their nipples.

Buyers can even choose from a gallery of 11 different vagina styles and shapes, including ‘neat’ and ‘tight’ options, and varying clitoris sizes – but they’ll have to fork out an additional £80 if they want pubic hair.

With several ‘doll brothels’ popping up across the world, including a shop named “The Dolly Parlour” in Greenwich, London, men are getting the chance to try before they buy.

Nick says he has created a personality for Kristal and imagines she will punish him for watching the football

The phrase “digisexual” was coined by experts at the University of Manitoba as a term for men who are turned on by things you can turn on.

Critics have blasted them as creepy and weird. One campaigner suggests they could lead to dwindling sex lives and even violent behaviour towards real women.

But what is it that drives men to make the disturbing decision to use sex robots? Sun Online spoke to three doll owners to find out.

Izla’s perfect women come in a box and he now has 6 dolls

‘I hug Kristal when I’m lonely or have had a hard day’

Nick, 33, places his doll his doll Kristal next to him in bed if he feels lonely.

He also admits he gives her a hug after a bad day.

The truck driver from Ontario, Canada spent £6,205 on his dream woman from top-selling doll manufacturer, Abyss Creations in March 2017.

He designed her to match the blonde-haired, blue-eyed bombshell images in magazines he had been lusting over.

Kristal cost over £6000, but Nick doesn’t regret his precious purchase

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Every part of the dolls, from eye colour to nipple texture, can be customised.

“I chose Kristal from the ‘petite series’ and matched her body to my ideal face. She’s called ‘body 5’ with a ‘Nova face’.”

After choosing her skin colour, nipple shape and even her make-up style, he thought Kristal was “breath-taking” and “absolutely beautiful” when he opened her box for the first time.

But filled with trepidation and excitement, he waited two weeks before having sex with her and chose to sit her on the sofa for a cup of coffee instead.

Single with no children, Nick says he has a casual long-distance relationship with a woman, but says he has told her about his doll and that when it comes down to having sex, real women still come out on top.

Nick waited for two weeks to have sex with Krystal and sat her down with a cup of coffee first

“It feels amazing [to have sex with Kristal] but it’s not the same as a real woman,” he says.

“Psychologically, with a real woman it would be intercourse, not masturbation and I obviously wouldn’t treat her like an object.

“Although I do treat my doll with a lot of respect and care.”

 

Nick enjoys a date night with Kristal

His family and best friend know about his doll but he says he doesn’t “flaunt” her and prefers to show her off to fellow doll owners.

“I don’t think the general public are ready to see people wheeling dolls around just yet,” he says.

Meet Harmony – the sex robot with a Scottish accent who likes threesomes, can have ‘multiple orgasms’ and can even throw a strop

‘I like excessive fondling and kissing’

Izla, an IT consultant in his 60s, says he discovered the RealDolls after he was left feeling “fatigued and bruised” by failed relationships.

His second marriage lasted for 23 years and Izla, who has two grown-up sons,  says he was dating women constantly before a relationship breakdown led him to discovering the dolls online in 2014.

Diane was Izla’s first doll and he says she’s given him the freedom to explore his fantasies

Izla says he’s just as sexually active now as he was in his 20s, and Tiffany is just one of the six dolls he sleeps with four to five times a week

Instantly hooked, he now owns six dolls, and says his need for “companionship and sex” has been completely fulfilled.

He describes himself as being “monogamous” to his dolls – Diane, Dianna, Tiffany, Honey, Kissy and Erin.

The IT consultant loves to bathe and dress his “gals”

“I’m not interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with a woman. I think of [being with my dolls] as a lifestyle choice, similar to deciding to be a vegan,” he says.

“I’m old, and all I want to do in my waning years is have fun. For me, my dolls are way better than real women.”

Izla says he has a sex life that men half his age would envy – having sex with his dolls three to four times a week.

“Physically I can climax with a doll just as easily as I can with a real woman and sometimes I have sex with more than one at a time,” he says.

For “Honey Rider”, Izla chose the ‘Krystal face’ and ‘smoke eyes’

“There are differences between having sex with a doll and making love to a woman.

“A doll doesn’t care about anything you say or do, so I feel free to explore my sexual fantasies.

“I like dress-up, role-playing, excessive fondling and excessive kissing.

“I can have sex for two hours or two minutes.”

Izla says it makes him feel proud when his dolls look this good and he loves showing them off

Izla purchased his first doll, redhead Diane in 2015, and says his hands were shaking as he opened her crate.

Speaking of the moment they met, he says: “I stopped just long enough to read the instructions about getting her ready for sex”, before taking her to bed.

“She was – and still is – so beautiful. I was filled with desire for her immediately. I carried her straight to bed,” he says.

Tiffany is Izla’s perfect Christmas present

His active love-making with his dolls also means they need to be cleaned regularly so Izla has developed a “bathing ritual” for them.

He adds: “A wash and a rinse with a cloth keeps them clean for long periods of time but they also get a head to toe sponge bath when they need it.

Erin is an older model of doll who Izla purchased from another member but he says he still adores her

“It’s a sensual experience to undress them, lather their body with soap and rinse them before towel-drying them and getting them dressed.

“I like to dote on them. I spend time brushing their hair and trying out new jewellery, wigs and shoes.”

‘I got her settled in the basement, then bought clothes’

For TJ, buying his doll, Tasha, was a big decision for both him and his wife, who he describes as “my best friend” and who is unwell.

“My wife is chronically ill from several long-term illnesses and the associated treatments. We had a wonderful relationship and still do,” he says.

Describing brunette Tasha as “a surrogate” for his wife, TJ says that while other women may be jealous of their husband having sex with another woman, it’s taken the strain off of that side of their relationship.

“It’s almost impossible for her to have sex and enjoy it, without it being painful,” explains TJ.

Tasha takes the burden of having sex away from TJs wife, who sadly finds it too painful

Seeking “something more” than a sex toy, TJ says he first came across Tasha through her “ex” – her previous owner.

“He’s a nice guy, but in Tasha’s world, they just ‘didn’t click,'” he says.

TJ says he fell for Tasha almost immediately

“We met for the first time in a storage unit. She looked right into my eyes and spoke to me – really, I could feel her say: ‘Take me with you, please’.

“I took her home and got her settled in the basement until I could get her some clothes.”

TJ, who also cuddles up with Tasha on the sofa and watches TV with her, says he wanted a doll with a personality so imagines Tasha is a tough ‘Jersey Girl’, who likes “eating pizza, drinking beer and having great hair”.

He says Tasha is a real ‘Jersey girl’

He says his need for a “connection with a sex partner” means he imagines Tasha’s responses when they’re in bed together.

“In the bedroom, I treat Tasha the way she wants to be treated, which is how it was with my wife.

“I probably cuddle more with Tasha because it doesn’t physically smother her,” TJ adds.

“I kiss her a lot, on the forehead, cheek, nose ear, shoulder and neck.”

‘Harmony’ is the doll creator’s latest offering and is going through the final stages of testing

So could robotic women be the future of dating and swipe traditional romance out completely?

Kathleen Richardson, who is the founder of Campaign Against Sex Robots, and a professor of culture and ethic of robots and AI, even suggests the dolls could lead to dwindling sex lives and even violent behaviour towards real women.  The thought that a number of men who might impose themselves on women will instead be ‘milked’ by a machine does not occur to Kathleen Richardson.  If men desire women, that’s sexist.  If men desire robots that look like women, that’s sexist, too.

 

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Dorchester In The Dead of Winter – I Am One Acquainted With Crows in The Night

Audio of Article – Mp3

I heard the bird in the middle of the night.  It was past two o’clock in the dead of the night when I thought I heard the ‘caw-caw-caw’ of a crow.  There had been so many about lately in the neighborhood.  In the early part of the morning when the inky blackness was still against the eastern sky towards the ocean I had seen flocks of noisy black birds seeming to have some kind of raucous meet-up. 

I posted some pictures and also put them on Twitter in the last month or so.  I wondered if anyone else was up and looking up and listening to the raven crowd in the skies above Dorchester.  What did they think?

The Eastern North American Crow is probably what I am seeing in the heavens in the late night and early morning.  Some Canadian birds fly south during winter time, so, perhaps these birds are newly arrived Canadians.  Are they having a reunion and meet-and-greet for all the Canadians spending the season in the warmth of Massachusetts in January?  The encyclopedia says that ‘Outside of the nesting season these birds often gather in large (thousands or even millions) communal roosts at night.’

But, at a little after two o’clock at night, I thought I must have been mistaken about hearing a bird.  I stepped out into the back hall and looked out the window of the back door.  The birds were outside; a flock of crows were right above my head in the branches of the large tree.  There looked like hundreds.  The ‘caw-caw-caw’ would start up with one bird and dozens more would take up the chant.  I opened the door as quietly as I could and marveled at the dark shapes perched on the branches all around me. 

Some birds took off into the air as the screen door creaked a little.  Others followed, and hundreds remained.  I went back in the kitchen to put a tea bag in a cup of hot water.  I sat down and looked at a news story on my computer screen as my tea brewed and the cup was warm in my hands. 

I thought again of the hundreds of dark birds in the tree in the backyard.  I got up and went out in the back hall and lifted the curtain to see the tree.  The birds were all quiet and seemed to number hundreds and hundreds.  I opened the back door as quietly as I could, but a little squeak sounded.  Dozens of wings flapped in a kind of Hitchcockian chorus.  Some birds took to the air.  Most stayed perched on the branches.  ‘If these birds were organized or determined,’ I thought,’They could come down in a group and attack me.’  I had the slightest apprehension. 

I saw a troop of crows last evening after the sun set and darkness had fallen at five o’clock.  ‘Caw-caw-caw.’  What are they doing?  Building group solidarity?  Finding vocal mates?  PartyIng? 

The American crow mates and raises young.  The birds form family groups and the juvenile members often help take care of younger birds in the family.  They live in groups that might be a dozen family members.  So the night time meetings might be a chance for all these close crow families to meet other families and have group interaction.  The birds are intelligent and live seven or eight years in the wild and captive birds have lived up to age thirty. 

In past cultures Crows were believed to be messengers of the gods, bringing grief and death. To please them and prevent bad events from happening, people offer treats like sweets and leave them on the roof for crows to take in the morning.  There is enough left over food in Dorchester’s trash barrels to feed thousands of crows in the middle of winter so the birds can have cold noisy parties in the dead of the night.

A video from Washington state shows some of the night time activities of crows.

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The Healing Power of Nature: How Walking in the Rain Saved My Life – By Suzanne Falter

“All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” ~Nietzsche

A recent study by the National Academy of Sciences found that a ninety-minute walk in nature slows our worried, troublesome thoughts about ourselves and our lives. Even better, it reduces the neural activity in parts of the brain linked to mental illness.

On the other hand, if you spend your time walking down city sidewalks, don’t expect much. The science says you’ll have no change whatsoever in your neural activity. Or even in your thoughts about yourself.

This means that if you’re inclined to be anxious, depressed, grieving, or harried, go find the nearest nature trail.

But I could have told you that.

I road tested this concept at the very worst moment in my life, in the year following the sudden death of my daughter. At the time my life had fallen apart completely. Not only had my daughter just dropped dead from a medically unexplainable cardiac arrest, but a few months earlier I lost my relationship and the home that came with it.

I’d also recently closed a successful business that had pushed me to the point of burnout. So not only did I need to grieve, I needed everything to grind to a halt. Then I needed to do a radical reboot of my entire life.

Unable to fathom how to even begin, I found my way north to the country. Once there, I moved in with a friend.

A nearby park with rambling blackberry lined paths beckoned to me—even in the rain soaked northern California winter. Unable to even keep two thoughts in my head at the time, the only thing I could do was to walk.

Every day, I would pull on my rain gear and my big rubber rain boots and walk along the park’s muddy trails for hours. It was a rough and tumble place, but it was beautiful, as well. More importantly, I was alone out there as I slowly memorized every dormant blackberry bush, every rain puddle rut, and every sweeping field of grizzled grape vines.

Sometimes I sobbed as I walked. Sometimes I smiled at the pileup of bittersweet memories that poured through my body. Sometimes unexpected ideas would pop up for things I wanted to write, or places I wanted to go. Sometimes I’d remember lost wisps of memory from my childhood, things once said to me or stories I’d been told.

These walks became nothing less than a time of reckoning.

Most of the time, I just needed the active motion of my legs pumping and my feet moving through the mud. I needed to feel my feet on the ground in order to somehow get a grip—and to be reminded, perhaps, that everything would eventually be okay.

By the time summer came, I knew every path, every rock, and every tree. Gradually, my grief began to lift as my walks in nature gradually worked their magic.

I felt held out there by something bigger than myself. More importantly, I reveled in the sheer predictability of my surroundings. It was important that I walked in this park, at this time, down these paths every day. In the absence of a job, walking these trails and letting my thoughts and feelings pour through me became my work.

Turns out there is science behind my random decision to hike in the rain.

Stanford University researchers have found that walking of any kind—outdoors or on a treadmill—increases our ability to hatch creative ideas. Yet, they’ve also found walking in nature actually produces the most high-quality, unique ideas. Not only that, the effect lasts when you sit down to do your work afterwards.

I happened to have proof for this as well. Because as I walked, ideas would descend on me. I’d stew over things that bothered me. But then I found myself plumbing those experiences for some sort of meaning or lesson learned. As I uncovered these insights, I realized I needed to share them. So I began to unravel the mystery of what was to come next.

Each day as I came back to our house, renewed and rain-soaked, I would I sit down at my computer. Then I’d write through what I’d discovered. By the following fall, I was working again in earnest. The ideas that had drifted into my consciousness as I walked now fomented into something real and tangible. So, slowly, I began again.

These days I live in a city, though I still walk several times a week. But researchers say that’s okay, too.

Just a stroll in a nearby park will help to clear your head. Yet, if you can’t get to the park, views of green space can also help. Simply gazing out a window at nature has been proven to yield better memory,

This could be why the first thing I did every morning during that bleak period was to spend several moments just looking at the meadow behind my friend’s house. In the winter, a natural pond would pop up, becoming home to all manner of visiting birds.

The scene was simple and serene, and it was so beautiful to see a white snow goose come flying in and land to take a drink. Little did I know my neurons were appreciating this as well.

The NAS study suggests that having access to nature may become increasingly critical to our mental health as the years go on. All I know is that I now rely on a regular walk to carry me through my day. And not just any walk.

I walk where there is natural beauty, even if it’s the small lake in the middle of my city. I’ve found it to be nothing short of a healing miracle. This truly is one that anyone can enjoy.

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A Poem: SINGULARITY – by Marie Howe (Video)

SINGULARITY
by Marie Howe

(after Stephen Hawking)

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money —

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.   Remember?

There was no   Nature.    No
them.   No tests

to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up   to what we were
— when we were ocean    and before that

to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all — nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All everything home

Wild Shopping Carts of North America

 A while back I read about someone who had composed a parody field guide to the ‘wild’ shopping carts that one can see across the US and Canada.  So, just as there is a picture pocket book picture guide and websites to spot wild birds of North America….

Art for Art’s Sake – Graphic Expression Reduced to Essence

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Reporter Quits NBC Citing Network’s Support For Endless US Imperialist Wars – 2 Jan 2018

A journalist with NBC has resigned from the network with a statement which highlights the immense resistance that ostensibly liberal mass media outlets have to antiwar narratives, skepticism of US military agendas, and any movement in the opposite direction of endless military expansionism.

“January 4 is my last day at NBC News and I’d like to say goodbye to my friends, hopefully not for good,” begins an email titled ‘My goodbye letter to NBC’ sent to various contacts by William M Arkin, an award-winning journalist who has been associated with the network for 30 years.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve left NBC, but this time the parting is more bittersweet, the world and the state of journalism in tandem crisis,” the email continues. “My expertise, though seeming to be all the more central to the challenges and dangers we face, also seems to be less valued at the moment. And I find myself completely out of synch with the network, being neither a day-to-day reporter nor interested in the Trump circus.”

The lengthy email covers details about Arkin’s relationship with NBC and its staff, his opinions about the mainstream media’s refusal to adequately scrutinize and criticize the US war machine’s spectacular failures in the Middle East, how he “argued endlessly with MSNBC about all things national security for years”, the fact that his position as a civilian military analyst was unusual and “peculiar” in a media environment where that role is normally dominated by “THE GENERALS and former government officials,” and how he was “one of the few to report that there weren’t any WMD in Iraq” and remembers “fondly presenting that conclusion to an incredulous NBC editorial board.”

“A scholar at heart, I also found myself an often lone voice that was anti-nuclear and even anti-military, anti-military for me meaning opinionated but also highly knowledgeable, somewhat akin to a movie critic, loving my subject but also not shy about making judgements regarding the flops and the losers,” he writes.

Arkin makes clear that NBC is in no way the sole mass media offender in its refusal to question or criticize the normalization of endless warfare, but that he feels increasingly “out of sync” and “out of step” with the network’s unhesitating advancement of military interventionist narratives. He writes about how Robert Windrem, NBC News’ chief investigative producer, convinced him to join a new investigative unit in the early days of the 2016 presidential race. Arkin writes the following about his experience with the unit:

“I thought that the mission was to break through the machine of perpetual war acceptance and conventional wisdom to challenge Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness. It was also an interesting moment at NBC because everyone was looking over their shoulder at Vice and other upstarts creeping up on the mainstream. But then Trump got elected and Investigations got sucked into the tweeting vortex, increasingly lost in a directionless adrenaline rush, the national security and political version of leading the broadcast with every snow storm. And I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself – busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play.

 

“I’d argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism. I’d also argue, ever so gingerly, that NBC has become somewhat lost in its own verve, proxies of boring moderation and conventional wisdom, defender of the government against Trump, cheerleader for open and subtle threat mongering, in love with procedure and protocol over all else (including results). I accept that there’s a lot to report here, but I’m more worried about how much we are missing. Hence my desire to take a step back and think why so little changes with regard to America’s wars.”

Arkin is no fan of Trump, calling him “an ignorant and incompetent impostor,” but describes his shock at NBC’s reflexive opposition to the president’s “bumbling intuitions” to get along with Russia, to denuclearize North Korea, to get out of the Middle East, and his questioning of the US military’s involvement in Africa.

“I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria? We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula?  Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the Cold War? And don’t even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?”

“There’s a saying about consultants, that organizations hire them to hear exactly what they want to hear,” Arkin writes in the conclusion of his statement. ” I’m proud to say that NBC didn’t do that when it came to me.  Similarly I can say that I’m proud that I’m not guilty of giving my employers what they wanted. Still, the things this and most organizations fear most – variability, disturbance, difference – those things that are also the primary drivers of creativity – are not really the things that I see valued in the reporting ranks.”

That’s about as charitably as it could possibly be said by a skeptical tongue. Another way to say it would be that plutocrat-controlled and government-enmeshed media networks hire reporters to protect the warmongering oligarchic status quo upon which media-controlling plutocrats have built their respective kingdoms, and foster an environment which elevates those who promote establishment-friendly narratives while marginalizing and pressuring anyone who doesn’t. It’s absolutely bizarre that it should be unusual for there to be a civilian analyst of the US war machine’s behaviors in the mainstream media who is skeptical of its failed policies and nonstop bloodshed, and it’s a crime that such voices are barely holding on to the fringes of the media stage. Such analysts should be extremely normal and commonplace, not rare and made to feel as though they don’t belong.

Click here to read William M Arkin’s full email, republished with permission.

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The News Media’s Post-Advertising Future Is Also Its Past – by Derek Thompson (The Atlantic) 31 Dec 2018

Why the news is going back to the 19th century

Dec 31, 2018

Derek Thompson

Staff writer at The Atlantic

It’s my holiday tradition to bring tidings of discomfort and sorrow to my colleagues in the news business. One year ago, I described the media apocalypse coming for both digital upstarts and legacy brands. Vice and BuzzFeed had slashed their revenue projections by hundreds of millions of dollars, while The New York Times had announced a steep decline in advertising.

Twelve months later, it’s end times all over again. There have been layoffs across Vox Media, Vice, and BuzzFeed (and dubious talk of an emergency merger). Mic, once valued at $100 million, fired most of its staff and sold for $5 million. Verizon took a nearly $5 billion write-down on its digital media unit, which includes AOL and Yahoo. Reuters announced plans to lay off more than 3,000 people in the next two years. The disease seems widespread, affecting venture-capital darlings and legacy brands, flattening local news while punishing international wires. Almost no one is safe, and almost everyone is for sale.

It’s tempting to think that this is the inevitable end game of Google and Facebook’s duopoly. The two companies already receive more than half of all the dollars spent on digital advertising, and they commanded 90 percent of the growth in digital ad sales last year. But what’s happening in media right now is more complex. We’re seeing the convergence of four trends.

Read: When Silicon Valley took over journalism

1. Too many players

It’s not just Facebook and Google; just about every big tech company is talking about selling ads, meaning that just about every big tech company may become another competitor in the fight for advertising revenue.

Amazon’s ad business exploded in the past year; its growth exceeded that of every other major tech company, including the duopoly. Apple is building tech that would skim ad revenue from major apps such as Snapchat and Pinterest, according to The Wall Street Journal. Microsoft will make about $4 billion in advertising revenue this year, thanks to growth from LinkedIn and Bing. Uber is reportedly getting into the ad business as it eyes new revenue sources to beautify its forthcoming IPO. AT&T is building an ad network to go along with its investment in Time Warner’s content, and Roku, which sells equipment for streaming television, is building ad tech. Oracle, Adobe, and Salesforce are using their cloud technology to collect data that could be used for ad targeting, as Axios reported.

These tech companies have bigger audiences and more data than just about any media company could ever hope for. The result is that more advertising will gravitate not only toward “programmatic” artificial-intelligence-driven ad sales but also toward companies that aren’t principally (or even remotely) in the news-gathering business.

2. Not enough saviors

As advertising has migrated to digital platforms, the news media have converted to hero worship. The iPad was going to save media. Then it was venture capital. Then it was the mystical promise of “Hulu for news.” Then it was Facebook’s video platform. No, podcasts!

Each savior has proved fleeting or fictitious. The iPad is great for many purposes, none of which is the resuscitation of mid–20th century business models. Venture capitalists blithely expected media companies to produce tech-company returns, and many pulled back when they learned what any journalist could have told them: News isn’t a profit gusher. Companies such as Mic that went all in on Facebook turned themselves into glorified subletters—and they ended up on the street when the social network changed its priorities.

Read: Facebook and Snapchat are the new television

3. No clear playbook

News organizations are experimenting with anything and everything.

For the past two years, many newspapers and magazines have reoriented their businesses around subscriptions, asking readers to make up the revenue lost from advertisers. Some magazines and papers (including The Atlantic and The Correspondent) are asking diehards to become not just subscribers but members who pay a premium to go deeper with their favorite journalists. Axios, Crooked Media, BuzzFeed, Vice, and Vox have built out TV production studios and sold shows to HBO and Netflix. BuzzFeed is opening a store in New York City and selling kitchen merchandise with Walmart.

Ultimately, however, the market might not support some forms of journalism. For example, the number of local reporters today is at its lowest point since the 1970s, despite the fact that the U.S. population has grown by 50 percent. Research has shown a direct connection between declining local journalism and less civic engagement. If local news is a public good, it may deserve public support—perhaps in the form of government subsidies. But asking for public assistance might seem like an act of pure desperation.

4. Patrons with varying levels of beneficence

Publications that were once the crown jewels of publicly traded firms are finding refuge in the arms of affluent patrons. Many legacy titles have already landed with millionaires and billionaires, including Time (bought by Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce), Fortune (bought by Chatchaval Jiaravanon, a Thai businessman), and The Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon). Emerson Collective, an organization founded by the billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, purchased a majority share of The Atlantic in 2017.

Those nostalgic for the lucrative old days might curl their toes at the mention of a Medici-esque sponsorship model. But billionaire-supported investigative reporting is surely better than no investigative reporting at all. So what’s the matter with patronage?

A patron is a person. A person can change his or her mind—and often does. Chris Hughes junked The New Republic when losses eclipsed his idealism. Phil Anschutz snuffed out The Weekly Standard. Michael Bloomberg has made noises about selling off his political desk if he runs for president, or offloading his entire eponymous media empire, which employs several thousand people.

Read: Student journalism in the age of media distrust

This sounds downright awful. But the business of news has always been unsteady. It seems safe to say that, going forward, media organizations will get by on some combination of subscription, patronage, and auxiliary revenue from sources such as events and licensed content. Whatever happens, advertising will almost certainly play a lesser role.

To understand the future of post-advertising media, let’s briefly consider its past. During a period of the early 19th century known as the “party press” era, newspapers relied on patrons. Those patrons were political parties (hence “party press”) that handed out printing contracts to their favorite editors or directly paid writers to publish vicious attacks against rivals.

That era’s journalism was hyper-political and deeply biased. But some historians believe that it was also more engaging. The number of newspapers in the United States grew from several dozen in the late 1700s to more than 1,200 in the 1830s. These newspapers experimented with a variety of journalistic styles and appeals to the public. As Gerald J. Baldasty, a professor at the University of Washington, has argued, these newspapers treated readers as a group to engage and galvanize. Perhaps as a result, voting rates soared in the middle of the 19th century to record highs.

It was advertising that led to the demise of the party press. Ads allowed newspapers to become independent of patronage and to build the modern standards of “objective” journalism. Advertising also led to a neutered, detached style of reporting—the “view from nowhere”—to avoid offending the biggest advertisers, such as department stores. Large ad-supported newspapers grew to become profitable behemoths, but they arguably emphasized milquetoast coverage over more colorful reader engagement.

As the news business shifts back from advertisers to patrons and readers (that is to say, subscribers), journalism might escape that “view from nowhere” purgatory and speak straightforwardly about the world in a way that might have seemed presumptuous in a mid-century newspaper. Journalism could be more political again, but also more engaging again.

That’s already happening.

For example, in just the past few decades, The New York Times’ revenue has shifted from more than 60 percent advertising to more than 60 percent reader payments. As its business model has changed, so has its coverage. “Look at The New York Times in 1960 vs. 2010; the reportage is more interpretive,” observed the late James L. Baughman, the communications theorist and University of Wisconsin professor.

Mid-century newspapers were as broad and unobjectionable as department stores, because department-store advertising was their business. News media of the future could be as messy, diverse, and riotously disputatious as their audiences, because directly monetizing them is the new central challenge of the news business.

Every once in a while, somebody asks me whether we’ll ever get back to a place where the country can agree on a “single set of facts.” Those asking the question tend to be nostalgic for the 1950s, when they could count the number of television channels on one hand and rely on Walter Cronkite and a local media monopoly to control the flow of information.

That past is dead and irrecoverable. We’ve accelerated backward, as if in a time machine, whizzing past the flush 20th century to a more distant, more anxious, and, just maybe, more exciting past that is also the future.

…………

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https://archive.vn/rksXN

Reading “The Great God Pan” by Arthur Machen – Book Covers and Illustrations – 1 Jan 2018

Yesterday I bumped into the title of an 1895 Gothic Horror novel “The Great God Pan” by Arthur Machen.  I had never encountered the title before, that I could remember.  I followed my current custom; I went to Wikipedia and found an entry for the work. I looked at the index for the entry and found ‘external links’ and then followed links to a free text of the work at Project Gutenberg, and a free audio book of the work at Librivox.  The Librivox reading was excellent – a professional quality effort by Ethan Rampton
I noted that the work was a short novella, so I began to listen and read the work immediately.  I was lying on my bed propped up with pillows and under the blankets for warmth the sun goes down early on cold winter nights.  I had tired of random videos on Youtube and watched enough science fiction on Netflix.  I wanted a good story.  I needed something different. 

I delved into Arthur Machen’s story of “The Great God Pan.”  The first scene has an overconfident scientist from 1890 doing brain surgery on an unsuspecting woman.  My fair lady, indeed.

I had the 17 inch screen laptop computer on a bedside rollup stand.  The text was large and clear on Gutenberg.  I listened along with the Librivox audio.  I scrolled down as the narrative progressed.

When I was about three quarters of the way through I was sleepy and rolled over and stopped reading the text and let the voice tell me the story as I drifted off to sleep.  I read another chapter without audio when I woke up.  How nice to have access to large type.

If I had to buy all the old books I read online in a large text format – I’d need a lot more shelf space.  I have lots of books in my house, but I read lots of different books online and don’t have to store anything.  I do pay $100 a month for fast internet.  The internet access I have gives me access to more books than I could ever read, or begin to store and catalogue physically.  My own library is a hit or miss jumble of works that are not alphabetized or systematized in almost any way except height or publisher.  I do have collections, classics illustrated, Great Books, that are together as a set.  I have a large collection of Dover Classic line art books also.  But even those collections, while together, are not alphabetized or categorized.  So, maybe I am better off going online to find literary works and great books.

The internet access allowed me to find a several dozen pictures and book covers from “The Great God Pan” and make a slide show and then a video with sound on Youtube.  Anyone in the world might access the visual I made and become acquainted with the book “The Great God Pan.”  I leaned something yesterday, and I share it with the world today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib5Ey_x4KkI

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