If China Does It, It’s Spying. If the US Does It, It’s Research – by Larry Romanoff • 10 Aug 2020

In the late 1950s and early 1960s there was an American TV series called “The Naked City”, set in NYC. The opening for each episode began with the intoned words, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This is one of them.” Well, there are probably 8 million American spy stories that have taken place in China during the past few decades. Here are two of them.

Introduction

Several years ago it was reported that the Pentagon was building an international spy network that might become even larger than that of the CIA, planning to have at least 1,600 “collectors of information” spread around the world. In addition to military attaches and others who do not work undercover, more clandestine operatives would be trained by the CIA and deployed overseas to undertake tasks the CIA was unwilling to pursue. It was duly confirmed that China was among the Pentagon’s top intelligence priorities, reflecting the American affinity for espionage and covert action, evidence of which we no longer need. Americans are frequently conscripted by the CIA or the US military into espionage service in China, operating with the assistance of the US State Department.

Foreign individuals in China, ostensibly acting independently, are regularly apprehended by Chinese authorities for carrying out illegal surveys and mapping, marking the location of key military and other facilities. Almost 40 illegal surveying and mapping cases were detected in China in the past several years alone, mostly surrounding some of China’s military bases and installations, and in sensitive border areas such as Xinjiang and Tibet, the data almost certainly used in planning the foreign-sponsored unrest that occurred in those provinces.

In one recent case, an American citizen was found using two professional surveying and mapping GPS receivers on which he had recorded more than 90,000 coordinates, 50,000 of those near military installations. He travelled to XinJiang on a pretext of registering a travel agency to offer outdoor tours to foreigners in Urumqi, and clearly was there on assignment from the US government when he was caught. This is the reason Google’s mapping service was killed in China. Google was busy collecting high-resolution intelligence for the CIA, again images of sensitive military areas.

It is widely-known in China that literally thousands of the staff of the US Embassy in Beijing and its various Consulates are engaged in activities which are clearly espionage. This was the reason the Chinese government selected the closure of the US Consulate in Chengdu. Chinese authorities had repeatedly objected to the US Embassy and the US Government that the staff in Chengdu were engaged in activities “not commensurate with their diplomatic designations”. That’s Chinese understatement.

The American media are fond of accusing the Chinese of “seeing a conspiracy around every corner”, but these events are sufficient in number to justify China’s concern, these same media neglecting to note that anyone collecting hundreds of thousands of GPS coordinates near American military bases, would have a very short future.

Coca-Cola

The Coca-Cola Company has always been involved in espionage for the US military and the State Department.[1] Oddly, neither the Coca-Cola company website nor Google have any knowledge of this, and the State Department had no one available to discuss this with me. Since at least the 1940s, when the company established bottling plants in a new country, OSS or CIA spies were automatically sent in as part of the staff. It wasn’t even much of a secret: when the US Senate held their famous Iran-Contra hearings in 1987, the link between the CIA and Coca-Cola was fully exposed.

And it isn’t only Coca-Cola, but let’s look at this company first. In March of 2013, Laurie Burkitt of the WSJ wrote a pleasantly uninformed article[2] about Coca-Cola having been charged with espionage in Western China, her curious but typically American media spin being that this highlighted “the perils of doing business in China”. Let’s look at the facts.

On 21 separate occasions, 21 different Coca-Cola trucks were apprehended while conducting what the Western media called ‘surveying’ or ‘mapping’ of some of China’s more politically-sensitive areas that included borders and military bases. The first question coming to mind is why drivers of Coca-Cola delivery trucks would be conducting “mapping operations” or “surveying” anywhere in the world, much less in Yunnan and other politically-sensitive areas of China, and especially of border areas and those surrounding military bases. Even more to the point, why would Coca-Cola drivers doing this ‘mapping’ be as much as 600 kilometers off their normal delivery routes?

Coca-Cola said the GPS units its employees used were “digital map and customer logistic systems commercially available in China”, a claim that was an outright lie. It is true that many truck fleets around the world install GPS devices in their vehicles to help track locations and improve their logistics efficiency, but these GPS units are permanently mounted and are generally ‘dumb’ units able to do no more than record and transmit their location to a central source, and indeed that is their only use. But in the case of the Coca-Cola trucks, the GPS devices were not mounted but were hand-held units of military grade and were so sophisticated in their programming that Chinese military officials at first had considerable difficulty in precisely determining all their functions. Many of those units contained nearly 90,000 coordinates of military bases and other sensitive areas. In her article, Burkitt ignored all of this with the foolish claim that the GPS units were “only being used to improve fuel efficiency and customer service”, her claim immediately picked up by the US media to paint Coca-Cola as the victim and portray China as sensitive to the point of paranoia.[3]

An official government statement was as follows:

“What we can say for now is that many subsidiaries of Coca-Cola are involved and this happens in many provinces. Due to the sheer scale of the case, the complexity of the technology involved and the implication to our national security, we are working with the Ministry of State Security on this.”

If the Ministry of State Security is involved, you can be sure this is a damned serious matter, and it was due to the use of what were called “devices with ultra high sensitivity” and GPS units containing “mapping technology with military-level algorithms” that got them involved.[4] The reason of course is that such geographical data is primarily used by cruise missiles directed against sensitive military facilities. These data must be obtained on the ground because, while observation satellites can provide very high resolution, their photos have no frame of reference and cannot provide sufficiently accurate location targeting data – no matter what the New York Times tells you. At the time, Han Qixiang, director of the administration’s law enforcement department, claimed that Coca-Cola was doing more than just improving its supply chain, and was using mapping technology so sophisticated that the administration had difficulty adequately analysing the company’s system. And, while it wasn’t widely reported at the time, these same “Coca-Cola drivers” were simultaneously conducting aerial photography of military bases with drones.

No further information was released, but it was clear from government statements that this Coca-Cola espionage event was much more serious than portrayed in the Western media. And, with due apologies to Laurie Burkitt, none of this was about “the perils of doing business in China”.

Another item may provide some insight into Coca-Cola’s involvement. One is that the Chinese media published stories at around the same time that appeared unconnected but that were almost certainly part of this same process. The stories involved Coca-Cola employees who had been arrested for accepting bribes. One such individual surnamed Zhu who worked in Coca-Cola’s Shenmei marketing department had apparently accepted more than 10 million RMB, about US$1.5 million, with several others having been accused and detained for the same offense.[5][6] It is true that employees of Coca-Cola and other American firms in China often demand bribes, but these are usually small-scale extortion attempts from company suppliers where the individual has authority to grant business contracts, and the police are generally uninterested in these matters unless the company itself requests a police investigation. But these payments were two orders of magnitude above the commercial extortion level, leaving the more logical conclusion that these additional Coca-Cola employees had received their payments from the same source as the truck drivers performing the GPS ‘mapping’, in other words, from some agency of the US government, with the money dispensed in cash through the Coca-Cola company from the US Embassy, but were caught before they could execute their espionage duties.

This is a good place to note that in a typical year (at least until recently) the American consulates in China were receiving about 800,000 visa applications per year from Chinese citizens, mostly for studying or tourism. The US Embassy and consulates charged a fee of 1,000 RMB for each application, with a stipulation that the fee be paid only in cash. To save you the math, that’s about 800 million RMB per year, or about US$130 million that by-passed the banking system and was available for black ops. A more recent but undated website page claims application fees can be paid by Visa or Master Card, American Express, Discover and Diners Club, of course every Chinese citizen carrying these American credit cards to the same extent that every American carries Bank of China credit cards.

The Interesting Case of Xue Feng

In 2010, a Chinese Court charged Chinese-American geologist Xue Feng with attempting to obtain and traffic in state secrets and sentenced him to eight years in prison with a 200,000 RMB fine, for his attempts at purchasing data on the Chinese oil industry. Naturally, the US government reacted with “dismay and puzzlement” at the prison sentence imposed and, just as naturally, the American media presented a distorted description of the surrounding events while withholding most of the crucial information. Let’s look at the facts.

From various sources, Feng had collected documents and proprietary data on the geological conditions of China’s on-shore oil wells, as well as a database providing the GPS co-ordinates of more than 30,000 oil and gas wells belonging to CNOOC and PetroChina. The information was then sold (or about to be sold) to US-based IHS Energy for US$350,000.

The primary issue is that without oil, a country has no military capability. Without a consistent supply of oil, ships cannot sail, aircraft cannot fly, tanks cannot move, and troops cannot be transported. The US, being one of only two nations in the world always looking for yet another war, is the only country that amasses data on the petroleum supply capability of all other nations. It does so because, in the event of an armed conflict, it wants to know the enemy’s military fuel capacity. This includes not only tanker supply routes but the production capability of all producing wells, the duration of maximum production and, perhaps most importantly, the precise GPS coordinates for launching missiles to destroy this capability. This is why information on China’s oil wells is of great interest to the US military, and of course why the information is considered by the Chinese government to be sensitive and confidential. It could be crucial to China’s survival.

Let’s look at Feng’s supposed employer, the mysterious IHS Energy, identified in the US media as an “information-services company” providing data on worldwide petroleum production to customers around the world. Not quite true. IHS is a secretive company primarily engaged full-time in espionage for the US military, and in fact IHS was born in the US military although neither Google nor Bing seem aware of this. This company was originally created to serve the US aerospace weapons manufacturing industry and to coordinate purchases from weapons contractors. The company publishes many books and military trade magazines that are used by Western governments as a prime source of military intelligence and information on defense and warfare. One company owned by IHS is Jane’s Information Group[7][8], perhaps the prime source of global aerospace and defense industry information and intelligence to all Western government agencies. IHS also owns a company named Cambridge Energy Research Associates[9], which is a military intelligence-gathering firm that advises the US and other Western governments on military strategy and what we might call ‘geopolitics’, related to the energy availability of foreign militaries, certainly including China.

More to the point is that one of IHS’s most critical assets is a massive database that contains all the production and technical information on the vast majority of oil and gas wells in the entire world[10], an asset collected exclusively for use by the US military, the CIA and the State Department. This information is a critical part of American war-planning since a prime objective in an armed conflict would be to neutralise or destroy an opponent’s energy supplies. And, since the US has for years been planning war scenarios involving China, this is why IHS was so interested in obtaining all that information.

From this, you can understand why IHS had Feng collecting information on such an enormous and detailed scale. For its war planning, the US military needs to know the precise production capacity of all China’s oil wells and whether their yields are increasing or declining, in order to estimate the ability of China’s military to function during a conflict if the US navy cuts off imported supplies of tanker petroleum to China through the South China Sea. IHS was tasked with obtaining this information, including the precise GPS coordinates of all producing wells of any consequence so the US military could target and destroy them with cruise missiles. And that’s why the information was worth $350,000 to IHS; they would have re-worked and resold it for millions to various departments of the US military and other government agencies.

Feng was not an employee of IHS. He was a freelancer who had been hired and trained by the CIA in espionage and data collection in China, then turned over to IHS under contract to collect the necessary information. The WSJ made a coy statement that Feng “had switched jobs shortly before he was detained for his work for IHS.” This was the reason.[11] Feng was not doing ‘research’ in any sense in which we use that word, nor was he collecting information that was already in the public domain as the Western media tried to portray him. Instead, he was engaged in an important program of espionage for the US military in an area crucial to China’s defense, and should have been executed for his actions. I cannot understand why he was not.

The information Feng attempted to collect was neither commercially available nor in ‘the public domain’ as the Western media suggested. Other media reports stated this information is publicly available in the US, a claim that may be true, but irrelevant. The US is not in danger of military attack and nobody is collecting GPS coordinates on American oil wells so as to direct cruise missiles in their direction. In any case, I could hardly escape arrest or imprisonment in the US by claiming that my ‘market research’ on their military assets was legal in some other country and therefore the US had no right to detain me, though Feng attempted this defense in the Chinese courts.

In one of its articles on this issue, the WSJ made this observation: “Mr. Xue was born in China, a reminder that ethnic Chinese may be more vulnerable to pitfalls of the country’s legal system than other foreigners. Like IHS, many multinationals have come to rely on people like Xue to run their China operations.” IHS had no “China operations” nor any presence in China, but the above comment is true in the sense that in such circumstances the Chinese authorities have tended to be more lenient with foreigners than with ethnic Chinese whom they deem traitors to their homeland.

The US invests considerable effort to locate and indoctrinate Chinese-born Americans who can be sufficiently “turned” to betray their own country. Feng was undoubtedly one of these, his attraction to the CIA based on the assumption that, being ethnic Chinese, he would attract less attention than other foreigners and might better understand how to fit into the cultural environment without drawing attention to himself.

The US government took a very strong interest in Feng’s case, and mounted a prolonged diplomatic campaign to have him released on “humanitarian” grounds. Former US ambassador Jon Huntsman visited Feng in prison, and even President Obama met with China’s President to beg for Feng’s release, while many other US government officials raised the issue privately. Just so you know, when the US government exhibits such keen interest in the fate of one such individual, it is only because those same officials were actively involved in placing the person in that situation, and feel some responsibility to save their “asset”. It was interesting that this case must have involved more than merely oil well production and location data because anyone from the US government was barred from the hearing[12], which would indicate there were additional and serious classified matters involved.

For your reading entertainment, here are some of the Western distortions:

The UK Independent carried a headline screaming, “US geologist jailed for eight years in China for oil research”[13], in a case that “highlights the government’s use of vague secrets laws to restrict business information”. The Wall Street Journal told us that “Mr. Xue’s case is the latest to highlight stark questions about the legality in China of conducting market research”, claiming “Mr. Xue’s case stems purely from his attempt to purchase commercially available data on the oil industry”. Notice the choice of words. Feng was imprisoned for conducting ‘market research’, in which capacity he attempted to purchase ‘commercially available data’, leaving an impression that was quite different from the facts. The UK Guardian[14] and the Telegraph[15] chimed in as well, and Fox News told us that “Chinese officials have wide authority to classify information as state secrets.” Unlike the Americans.[16] The US government played its part in the media circus, claiming Feng simply “received” information that “should be in the public domain”, and “was just doing his job”.

More amusingly, the WSJ claimed that China’s court announcing its verdict during an American holiday weekend, “appeared to be a calculated act of defiance” against the US[17], meaning that China should conduct its internal affairs with one eye on a calendar of US holidays to ensure Americans are properly informed. A Jewish-American law professor in New York, Jerome A. Cohen, who purports to be “an authority on China’s legal system”, claimed that this was a case of China’s “thumbing its nose at the US government” – apparently an unforgivable act of defiance against the Imperial Master. And the act of sending Feng to conduct espionage in China would be the US government’s ‘thumbing their nose’ at whom?

Notes

[1] https://cocacolaunited.com/blog/2012/11/12/supporting-u-s-military-and-veterans-since-1941/

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323826704578357131413767460

[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-accuses-coca-cola-of-misusing-gps-equipment/

[4] http://www.3snews.net/startup/246000023519.html

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/business/global/14coke.html

[6] http://www.china.org.cn/china/news/2009-09/17/content_18543520.htm

[7] https://janes.ihs.com/

[8] https://www.janes.com/defence-equipment-intelligence/

[9] https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/376925Z:US

[10] https://ihsmarkit.com/products/international-well-data.html

[11] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704594804575649722313164714

[12] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/asia/01beijing.html

[13] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/us-geologist-jailed-for-eight-years-in-china-for-oil-research-2019192.html

[14] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/05/us-geologist-china-prison

[15] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7871740/American-geologist-Xue-Feng-jailed-in-China-for-eight-years.html

[16] https://www.foxnews.com/world/chinese-court-sentences-us-geologist-abused-by-state-security-agents-to-8-years-in-jail

[17] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704738404575347901204454976

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Islamic Republic of Iran: Metal Band Condemned To 15 Years In Prison – Escapes (Loudwire) 12 Aug 2020

The Islamic Republic of Iran has a history of suppressing creative freedom, famously sentencing Confess to over 14 years in prison and 74 lashes.  Islam prohibits singing and music in general. Metal is viewed as a Satanic form of music in Iran, which violates the country’s strict Islamic blasphemy laws and could result in execution.

In a statement to Loudwire, Arsames wrote that they’re not a Satanic band. “Our music is about our past culture, history… that they think when we growl and play fast music we are into Satanism! The skulls on our t-shirts means the same for them as satanic musicians.”

Arsames continue, “We [were] arrested in 2017 when we were in our studio during rehearsal. They moved us to jail that day and [did] not [tell] our family about where we [were] for a week. Finally after nearly a month later we paid bail to come out of prison and they told us you should not work, release [or sell] your merch until your final court … and do not talk with media! Our Instagram page, official website … banned and they shot down all for a year, but we built a new Instagram again and [started] to be active until few weeks ago [when] the court called us again and they gave us 15 years [in] prison. So we had to escape from Iran.”

The metal band recently posted a video to their official YouTube channel explaining their sentence, which was handed down by the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Mashhad, in further detail.

“Is it a crime that we are playing metal music!?” they begin. “Is it [a] crime that we are talking about Persian history?! Is it a crime that you think we are into Satanism when we have songs about Cyrus the Great and monotheism!? Is it a crime that we love music and our country?!”
Arsames’ current location is not yet public knowledge. Throughout the band’s 18-year history, Arsames have played alongside acts like Amon Amarth, Kreator, Napalm Death, Arch Enemy and Sepultura.

To support Arsames, you can visit their Facebook and Instagram pages and check out their music via Bandcamp.

Read More: Arsames Escape Iran After Being Sentenced to 15 Years in Prison | https://loudwire.com/arsames-escape-iran-sentenced-15-years-prison/?fireglass_rsn=true&utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral

Invasion of the New Normals – by C.J. Hopkins • 9 Aug 2020

They’re here! No, not the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We’re not being colonized by giant alien fruit. I’m afraid it is a little more serious than that. People’s minds are being taken over by a much more destructive and less otherworldly force … a force that transforms them overnight into aggressively paranoid, order-following, propaganda-parroting totalitarians.

You know the people I’m talking about. Some of them are probably your friends and family, people you have known for years, and who had always seemed completely rational, but who are now convinced that we need to radically alter the fabric of human society to protect ourselves from a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms (or absolutely no symptoms at all) in over 95% of those infected, and that over 99.6% survive, which, it goes without saying, is totally insane.

I’ve been calling them “corona-totalitarians,” but I’m going to call them the “New Normals” from now on, as that more accurately evokes the pathologized-totalitarian ideology they are systematically spreading. At this point, I think it is important to do that, because, clearly, their ideological program has nothing to do with any actual virus, or any other actual public health threat. As is glaringly obvious to anyone whose mind has not been taken over yet, the “apocalyptic coronavirus pandemic” was always just a Trojan horse, a means of introducing the “New Normal,” which they’ve been doing since the very beginning.

The official propaganda started in March, and it reached full intensity in early April. Suddenly, references to the “New Normal” were everywhere, not only in the leading corporate media (e.g., CNN, NPR, CNBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Forbes, et al.), the IMF and the World Bank Group, the WEF, UN, WHO, CDC (and the list goes on), but also on the blogs of athletic organizations, global management consulting firms, charter school websites, and random YouTube videos.

The slogan has been relentlessly repeated (in a textbook totalitarian “big lie” fashion) for going on the past six months. We have heard it repeated so many times that many of us have forgotten how insane it is, the idea that the fundamental structure of society needs to be drastically and irrevocably altered on account of a virus that poses no threat to the vast majority of the human species.

And, make no mistake, that is exactly what the “New Normal” movement intends to do. “New Normalism” is a classic totalitarian movement (albeit with a pathological twist), and it is the goal of every totalitarian movement to radically, utterly transform society, to remake the world in its monstrous image.

That is what totalitarianism is, this desire to establish complete control over everything and everyone, every thought, emotion, and human interaction. The character of its ideology changes (i.e., Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc.), but this desire for complete control over people, over society, and ultimately life itself, is the essence of totalitarianism … and what has taken over the minds of the New Normals.

In the New Normal society they want to establish, as in every totalitarian society, fear and conformity will be pervasive. Their ideology is a pathologized ideology (as opposed to, say, the racialized ideology of the Nazis), so its symbology will be pathological. Fear of disease, infection, and death, and obsessive attention to matters of health will dominate every aspect of life. Paranoid propaganda and ideological conditioning will be ubiquitous and constant.

Everyone will be forced to wear medical masks to maintain a constant level of fear and an omnipresent atmosphere of sickness and death, as if the world were one big infectious disease ward. Everyone will wear these masks at all times, at work, at home, in their cars, everywhere. Anyone who fails or refuses to do so will be deemed “a threat to public health,” and beaten and arrested by the police or the military, or swarmed by mobs of New Normal vigilantes.

Cities, regions, and entire countries will be subjected to random police-state lockdowns, which will be justified by the threat of “infection.” People will be confined to their homes for up to 23-hours a day, and allowed out only for “essential reasons.” Police and soldiers will patrol the streets, stopping people, checking their papers, and beating and arresting anyone out in public without the proper documents, or walking or standing too close to other people, like they are doing in Melbourne, Australia, currently.

The threat of “infection” will be used to justify increasingly insane and authoritarian edicts, compulsory demonstration-of-fealty rituals, and eventually the elimination of all forms of dissent. Just as the Nazis believed they were waging a war against the “subhuman races,” the New Normals will be waging a war on “disease,” and on anyone who “endangers the public health” by challenging their ideological narrative. Like every other totalitarian movement, in the end, they will do whatever is necessary to purify society of “degenerate influences” (i.e., anyone who questions or disagrees with them, or who refuses to obey their every command). They are already aggressively censoring the Internet and banning their opponents’ political protests, and political leaders and the corporate media are systematically stigmatizing those of us who dare to challenge their official narrative as “extremists,” “Nazis,” “conspiracy theorists,” “covidiots,” “coronavirus deniers,” “anti-vaxxers,” and “esoteric” freaks. One German official even went so far as to demand that dissidents be deported … presumably on trains to somewhere in the East.

Despite this increasing totalitarianization and pathologization of virtually everything, the New Normals will carry on with their lives as if everything were … well, completely normal. They will go out to restaurants and the movies in their masks. They will work, eat, and sleep in their masks. Families will go on holiday in their masks, or in their “Personal Protective Upper-Body Bubble-Wear.” They will arrive at the airport eight hours early, stand in their little color-coded boxes, and then follow the arrows on the floor to the “health officials” in the hazmat suits, who will take their temperature through their foreheads and shove ten-inch swabs into their sinus cavities. Parents who wish to forego this experience will have the option to preventatively vaccinate themselves and their children with the latest experimental vaccine (after signing a liability waiver, of course) within a week or so before their flights, and then present the officials with proof of vaccination (and of their compliance with various other “health guidelines”) on their digital Identity and Public Health Passports, or subdermal biometric chips.

Children, as always, will suffer the worst of it. They will be terrorized and confused from the moment they are born, by their parents, their teachers, and by the society at large. They will be subjected to ideological conditioning and paranoid behavioral modification at every stage of their socialization … with fanciful reusable corporate plague masks branded with loveable cartoon characters, paranoia-inducing picture books for toddlers, and paranoid “social distancing” rituals, among other forms of psychological torture. This conditioning (or torture) will take place at home, as there will be no more schools, or rather, no public schools. The children of the wealthy will attend private schools, where they can be cost-effectively “socially-distanced.” Working class children will sit at home, alone, staring into screens, wearing their masks, their hyperactivity and anxiety disorders stabilized with anti-depressant medications.

And so on … I think you get the picture. I hope so, because I don’t have the heart to go on.

I pray this glimpse into the New Normal future has terrified and angered you enough to rise up against it before it is too late. This isn’t a joke, folks. The New Normals are serious. If you cannot see where their movement is headed, you do not understand totalitarianism. Once it starts, and reaches this stage, it does not stop, not without a fight. It continues to its logical conclusion. The way that usually happens is, people tell themselves it isn’t happening, it can’t be happening, not to us. They tell themselves this as the totalitarian program is implemented, step by step, one seemingly harmless step at a time. They conform, because, at first, the stakes aren’t so high, and their conformity leads to more conformity, and the next thing they know they’re telling their grandchildren that they had no idea where the trains were going.

If you have made it through to the end of this essay, your mind hasn’t been taken over yet … the New Normals clicked off around paragraph 2. What that means is that it is your responsibility to speak up, and to do whatever else you can, to stop the New Normal future from becoming a reality. You will not be rewarded for it. You will be ridiculed and castigated for it. Your New Normal friends will hate you for it. Your New Normal family will forsake you for it. The New Normal police might arrest you for it. It is your responsibility to do it anyway … as, of course, it is also mine.#

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volume I of his Consent Factory Essays is published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.

 

Bolerium Books – The San Francisco Bookstore Where the Revolution Ends up – By Lucy Schiller (The New Yorker) 20 Sept 2018

There is great benefit, these days, in having a name unlike any other: you float to the top of Google searches. Bolerium Books, in San Francisco, knows this well, although it wasn’t a consideration when it first opened, in 1981. Bolerium’s co-owner, John Durham, runs through any number of explanations for the name, depending on whose leg he wants to pull and how hard. “It was an ancient road in Roman times,” he intoned recently, “large, funny, and sluggish,” while another co-owner, Alexander Akin, roundly mouthed, “Not true.” (The word is a Roman one for Land’s End, in Cornwall, England. The bookstore was once a bit closer to the ocean.) Fittingly, there is no other place like Bolerium, not on the Internet nor in the province of the real. Similes come steadily, none of which really seem to fit. Perhaps Durham’s is best. “We’re like a platypus,” he told me recently, “ugly as fuck and all sorts of parts.”

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This moment of serious American protest against Trump has led to one of Bolerium Books’ best sales years ever.Photograph by Thor Swift / NYT / Redux

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At last count, the store contained 67,385 single titles in stock. Estimates of the time that has elapsed since the last deep cleaning ranged from a jokey “twenty years ago” to a hemming “define ‘clean.’ ” “Nature abhors a vacuum,” Durham quickly noted. A store map gestures at the sheer amount of stuff, with sections labelled as “Reef of Flotsam” or “Onset of Confusion” (right by the entrance), or, in one cramped corner, “Hell.”

The semi-barbed humor protects something serious and deeply essential. Few people walk in (“the door is locked to keep out the unworthy,” Durham wrote in response to a negative Yelp review, though he made sure to mention the password, “swordfish”). Those who do manage to enter find, three floors above one of the Mission District’s busiest intersections, a vast and quiet space populated by seven staff members, thousands of books about and from social movements, densely packed rows of pamphlets and ephemera, and, in the adjacent storage room, great snowbanks of paper. These snowbanks, or “midden heaps,” as Durham calls them, are from attics, basements, personal archives, and libraries across the country. They have all been sold or donated to Bolerium. In them, evidence of the past is to be found, possibly reckoned with, and then, hopefully, sold.

From Bolerium’s snowbanks have come copies of On Our Backs (a lesbian erotic magazine put out in response to the anti-pornography publication Off Our Backs), century-old postcards of pacifist Doukhobors protesting in the nude, intricate Black Panther posters and handbills, an issue of Lumberjack (“with appendix on musical saw”), and the famous inter-commune Kaliflower newsletters from early-nineteen-seventies San Francisco. But with a staff so expert that they can translate a Mongolian treatise on traditional Oirat law using a handmade cheat sheet, classifications like “famous” and “obscure” begin to blur. So do “past” and “present.” Rather than a platypus, maybe the store is more like an estuary: the disparate holdings mingle, rolling in and out according to murky tides. (If you visit the Web site and browse the digital catalog by date, the tides begin to feel more explicable; one week, for example, carries a huge wave of Alan Watts-related material. The next week brings a crush of gay romance novels.) At Bolerium, for better and worse, you can wade around in what Durham calls “the primary source material for history.”

Here is an 1838 publication by the American Anti-Slavery Society and a brochure arguing for the Equal Rights Amendment. A pamphlet from a 1928 speech by Marcus Garvey sits not far from a publication on “incidents in the Life of Eugene V. Debs” written by his brother, Theodore (once, before an important speech, a piece of barbed wire tore “a great rent in [Debs’s] trousers . . . the flap of which hung down like the ear of a Missouri houn’ pup”). Among many other small, sheeny pins is a button from the 1990 AIDS Walk in San Francisco. Here are fliers that passed from hand to hand at protests, meant to convince, assuage, and inflame, and here’s a lump of coal from a miners’ strike in Alabama with tiny chicken-scratch wording: “never forget.” Notably, this year of serious American protest has been the store’s best sales year ever.

Not marked on the map is that other part of American history that has, this year and every other, raged—a section that Durham loosely calls “the White Problem” and keeps behind the locked door of a different room altogether. Accessible to scholars and those who know to ask, the spindly bookcases contain titles like “Gun Control Means People Control” and “Fluoridation & Truth Decay,” as well as several publications by the John Birch Society. “You can’t understand American history without understanding the far right,” Durham told me. “What it’s done, its justifications, its tropes and idiocies.”

It was to the deepest corner of the storeroom that the archivist Lisbet Tellefsen was drawn one afternoon. (Tellefsen visits Bolerium as a “treasure hunter,” and has amassed the largest collection of Angela Davis-related material in the world.) One time, she idly tugged out an issue of The Bayviewer, a magazine that once served the historic black neighborhood that James Baldwin characterized as “the San Francisco America pretends does not exist.”

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The magazine fell open to a page bearing the face of Tellefsen’s father, whom she had not seen since she was two, in an advertisement for his Oldsmobile dealership. That led to an ongoing saga of tracking down half-siblings and cousins found on Ancestry.com. “There is so much history there,” Tellefsen told me. She visits Bolerium once a month, wary of buying back her own consigned material. “It’s so rich with connections. We have an understanding of history, but places like that hold so much.” Bolerium’s official motto, “Fighting Commodity Fetishism with Commodity Fetishism since 1981,” does not quite distill the feeling of holding some of these discoveries between your fingers, or explain the way that ephemera can work to vivify history, very often through its ordinariness. A bit of light browsing recently unearthed a flier from a class reunion of Florida’s first accredited African-American high school, as well as an Electrolux manual from 1933 listing Pope Pius XI as a famous customer.

But history is ongoing, and the present moment needs its collectors. During the Occupy Movement, the store paid a dollar for each flyer or poster that people brought in, then put together a sweeping collection for the British Library. Holdings from contemporary social movements are fairly small, since so much planning, discussing, and arguing takes place on Facebook and Twitter. “Occupy was the last one to have lots of leaflets,” Akin told me, somewhat sadly. Currently, he is collecting material from what he calls the “shock-and-disbelief period” following the 2016 Presidential election. Only from “marinating in the sauce of time” do these things begin to accrue both value and interest.

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Recently, in one snowbank, Akin found a sketch done in creamy pastel of a basalt mountain and drifting clouds. Tiny guard towers dotted the background. It was a drawing of the view from Tule Lake Segregation Center, the largest of the incarceration camps that held Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, and the one which held those people deemed by the government to be “disloyal.” The artist was a man named Tomokazu, surname unknown, who resided for over thirty-five years in Plumas County, California, before being imprisoned at Tule Lake. The piece of paper sat among countless others all bearing dispatches of one kind or another from the past, which is not a foreign country, really, but a place hovering just under our present, and made of paper and ink, buttons, and voices.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-san-francisco-bookstore-where-the-revolution-ends-up

Lucy Schiller is a writer based in Iowa City, Iowa.

 

 

 

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Bolerium Books – Bright Young Booksellers: Alexander Akin

By Nate Pedersen on March 16, 2017

 

 

Our Bright Young Booksellers series continues today with Alexander Akin of Bolerium Books in San Francisco:

How did you get started in rare books?

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My mom has a yellowed newspaper clipping that shows me in a baby carrier on her back as she and my dad peruse books at the UC Riverside library book sale. I guess my parents got me hooked early. My dad was a steelworker, and my mom a union organizer, and as a kid I thought every working-class family had a huge library at home. I remember my first purchase of a rare (though not expensive) book when I was ten, when I found a hardcover tract published by missionaries in China about a hundred years ago, using a phonetic transcription to represent the local dialect of a coastal town.

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I paid something like four weeks’ allowance for it, and still have it. The first item I ever got signed was a campaign brochure from when Angela Davis was running for vice president. (It wasn’t exactly a huge coup to get her autograph, since my mom worked with her). Through high school and college I worked summers for a coin dealer who specialized in medieval Islamic and Indian coins, and I collected books relevant to these fields for a working library. While collecting books, though, I never thought of selling them until I was in graduate school, when I started scouting for the (late, lamented) firm of McIntyre and Moore in Cambridge, MA.

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I kept finding books I didn’t need for myself, but that I recognized as worthwhile, and it occurred to me that I could try selling them or trading them for store credit. I was working on a dissertation in late imperial Chinese cartography, and I traded stacks of unrelated tomes from nearby thrift shops, estate sales, and even piles of academic books left on the sidewalk before recycling pickup, in exchange for many a title in Chinese history from M&M. I then started selling on Amazon to keep a larger proportion of the proceeds. We moved to San Francisco to follow a job opportunity for my wife, while I was in the writing-up stage of my dissertation and taking care of my daughter during the day. I carried her around in a Baby Bjorn while visiting various bookstores to keep from going stir-crazy. One day I walked into Bolerium and I realized I had found paradise on earth.

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What is your role at Bolerium?

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It started from the fact that I was spending more money there than my dissertation completion grant could really allow. I started bugging John Durham about doing some sort of work at the shop for store credit. Eventually, he set me loose on the towering piles of boxes in storage, sorting stuff out by category, completing runs of serials, etc, while I set aside things that I wanted for myself in payment. One day I found a box of Chinese-language gay travel guides to Taiwan, going back to the first one that was published. He had no idea how they had found their way into Bolerium’s storage.

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(There were – and still are – boxes on our second floor that haven’t been touched in 20 years). Mike Pincus, his business partner at the time, picked up the phone and sold the lot to an east coast library in a flash. That might have been the incident that led John to take me more seriously as a potential asset to the shop. My dissertation completion grant had concluded and I was eligible to work for pay, so he hired me as a packer (which was great training for what sells and to whom), working on cataloging after the shipping was done for the day. I had finished my dissertation, however, and with a PhD from Harvard I went on the job market, fully expecting to become a professor of Chinese history. I found a short-term position in Boston as the Smith Fellow at Roxbury Latin School (a wonderful experience), while also filling in at Brandeis in the afternoons for a faculty member who was on leave for the year. The fiscal crisis at that time (2010) had really decimated the market for my field of late imperial Chinese history. Budgets were slashed and many university jobs that had been advertised were quietly canceled.

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Worst of all, in many cases teaching at colleges on an adjunct basis actually paid less than Bolerium. Since my wife had found a lucrative niche in San Francisco, I realized that it didn’t make sense for me to drag the family around the country scrambling from post to post until I found something with tenure. I came back to Bolerium, this time for good, and after a couple of years we incorporated. I became the junior partner, with John the majority owner. I’ve expanded the shop’s specialties to include more Asian and Asian-American material, and I also buy and catalog stock related to radical politics, Judaica and African American history. When we do book fairs I usually travel with John, though in some cases I represent the shop alone, such as at last year’s Boston ABAA show.

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What do you love about the book trade?

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As an historian I love discovering new things. You can have all the Hemingway first editions you want; I’ll take the trove of mimeographed newsletters published in the 1940s by underground activists in Chinatown. Our trade is quite diverse, with room for all sorts of specialties and variant approaches. At an ABAA fair I can see things that I fantasize about collecting if I won the lottery, like illuminated French manuscripts from the 15th century. The stuff I really like to handle, though, is what I envision as the raw material for researchers working on relatively understudied fields.

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Our shop has been cited in the acknowledgements of many books on political history and LGBT studies, and I tremendously enjoy finding librarians who “click” with us and helping them to build their research collections. Some time back we sold a book about a gay religious utopian commune near San Diego, a work of truly awe-inspiring strangeness, to a famous theological seminary – and last year out of the blue we received a letter from a grad student thanking us for having sourced that work, which became a centerpiece of his research. This job combines my academic background with the romance of the treasure hunt, offering endless opportunities for sleuthing.

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Describe a typical day for you:

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Get up at 6:30 to get the kids ready for school. By the time I head for the shop, sometimes stopping at one of our storage units to pick up or drop off material, most of the orders that came in overnight have been processed by our hardworking early birds, but I may pitch in to find items in foreign languages or to search for recalcitrant titles that nobody else has been able to put their finger on yet (a frequent problem in a large shop where some stock was cataloged years ago). I have stacks of papers, pamphlets and books arrayed around my workspace that crave cataloging, but the amount of this work that gets done depends on all sorts of other factors.

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Calls come in all the time from people trying to unburden themselves of books or ephemera, and sometimes it’s worth throwing out the day’s plans to make an emergency trip to someone’s garage in the East Bay in pursuit of some trove or other. One respect in which we differ from most shops is that our specialties in radical politics and LGBT history bring us lots of leads from retired activists or their heirs. I like doing these book calls with my partner John, because we have different priorities and different ideas of what things are worth to us, and it can be valuable to bounce these ideas back and forth. The leads often come to us because of John’s own activism in various groups going back to the 1970s. In any case, whatever interruptions the day has brought to my cataloging, by the afternoon I head out to pick up the kids, and it’s family time until they go to bed, after which I often work on cataloging stuff I’ve brought home with me, or I put together thematic pricelists. Sometimes I can get more cataloging done in a couple of uninterrupted hours at night than I can all day in the shop.

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Favorite rare book (or ephemera) that you’ve handled?

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The most amazing thing in the past year was a handwritten prompt book for a “paper son,” someone immigrating from China to the US in the 1930s under a false identity. A racist law from 1882 had banned general Chinese immigration, but there was a loophole if you were the child of a previously naturalized citizen who had gone back to China and married there. (Since Chinese women could not usually immigrate, and it was illegal in many places to marry someone of another ethnicity, going back to China was the easiest way to have a family – often the kids would live there for years before being brought over).

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In the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, the local records burned up, which opened a window of opportunity because there was no easy way to verify claims about who had been born in the city. Thus a small industry of “paper sons” sprang up, in which people in China would pay for a false identity as the grown child of a Chinese-American citizen. Immigration officials (correctly) assumed that a significant proportion of such claims were false, so they interrogated would-be immigrants about the most minute details of their family connections, the arrangement of rooms in the house they lived in, what businesses were in their neighborhood in the ancestral village in China, and so on.

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People who claimed to be related would be interrogated in separate rooms to see if their answers corresponded. In order to prepare for these interviews, handwritten booklets would be produced that listed every conceivable question, paired with an answer for the “paper son” to memorize. The booklet we had included a sketch map of the neighborhood around the alleged clan compound. It is very unusual for these prompt books to survive, because of course discovery would mean serious trouble, including expulsion from the US. The example we handled is now in the collections of the Chinese Historical Society here in San Francisco.

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What do you personally collect?

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Books on Asian and Islamic numismatics, Chinese propaganda publications intended for foreign audiences, ephemera related to the World Festival of Youth and Students, lots of other series that have personal or academic significance for me. The one arena where I spend serious money is my collection of pro-Khmer Rouge propaganda. When I was in grad school I encountered a book in the library stacks that had been published by a sectarian communist group based in Chicago that had a friendship visit to Cambodia, during which they met Pol Pot and other senior leaders, toured communal farms, and so on. The book was lavishly illustrated with photographs of cheerful peasants in labor camps, children smiling with guns, and so on.

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Given what was known even then about the Killing Fields and mass starvation, the naiveté of these American visitors seems astonishing. For some radical political groups that are committed to excavating hidden injustices in their own countries, there is a desire to perceive a more just society in some foreign utopia. To see this in Cambodia under Pol Pot struck me as just about the furthest one could push this “grass is greener” complex.

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I have known a number of Cambodian immigrants who grew up in this period, all of whom have physical scars as well as emotional ones, and somehow it became a passion of mine to seek out everything I could that was published by foreign enablers, endorsers, or supporters of the Khmer Rouge. China was of course their main diplomatic sponsor, and as I can read Chinese I search for relevant material on the Chinese market, including children’s comic books from the 1970s that feature Khmer Rouge guerrillas as heroes, doing things like throwing grenades into boatloads of Lon Nol government soldiers. I have material from all over the world, and my plan is to write a book about this phenomenon – but I still find material that surprises me and adds new dimensions to the picture, so I’m not yet ready.

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What do you like to do outside of work?

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I have two kids, 3 and 10, and I spend a lot of time with them. That’s an advantage to this business, the freedom of scheduling, especially for a shop like ours that has several employees. I used to be a big hiker, going on multi-day treks, but it’s harder with kids of this age. I still have some tenuous connections to the coin business and I sometimes travel to do translation at auctions of Chinese coins; last year I went to a show in Hong Kong to represent the firm I used to work for. I still do research in the field of Chinese historical cartography, presenting papers at conferences of the Association for Asian Studies and the American Association of Geographers, and publishing articles. I also spend more time than I should on Facebook, to be honest!

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Thoughts on the present and future state of the rare book trade?

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Every urban bookstore faces the problem of rising rent, unless the proprietor is also the landlord, and I see many cities becoming culturally desertified. A few years back I went to an academic conference in San Diego and I printed out a list someone had posted online a year or two previously, naming his ten favorite best bookstores downtown. After finishing my other business, I started tracking them down, and found that every single shop on this particular list had closed – one of them just a week earlier.

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Of course the books are still out there, but the market is atomized, with countless individuals dealing online from their basements or garages, and many collectors, even serious collectors, have little to do with ABAA-level shops. One thing I’ve been happy to see in my area is that even as some shops have been driven out of San Francisco by rising rent and the sterilization of the city’s cultural legacy, relatively young people are opening shops across the bay in places like Oakland. When I read the laments of long-time booksellers about what the internet has done to business, I feel glad that I only came onto the scene long after the process was already underway. This allows me to focus on the opportunities this brings (like selling to buyers all over the world, or being able to scout online for under-described or unappreciated items), rather than the way of life it has undermined. The greatest fear I have, for a business like ours with its orientation to libraries, is the seemingly ever-increasing turn to digital repositories. Many younger librarians seem to be under the impression that everything they need is already digitized somewhere, and their focus is on purchasing access rights rather than seeking out physical material that is unknown (but would cost money to process and store).

https://www.finebooksmagazine.com/blog/bright-young-booksellers-alexander-akin

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On a sleepy Monday afternoon, Bolerium Books owner John Durham receives a call from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, informing him that his store has made it into the annual “Best of the Bay” issue for the second time.

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While giving him the good news, they gently try to sell him advertising space.

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“Local people tend to come in and wander around without buying a f***ing thing,” Durham replies, having just canceled his ad in the Yellow Pages.

He continues to explain what his store is about: “There’s nothing normal here. If you want that, f*** you and stay away.”

This is the bold spirit of Bolerium on Mission Street, which specializes in archival collections of rare used books and political ephemera like pamphlets, buttons and posters. The store is organized by social movement, with sections on gay liberation, African American equality, feminism and more.

Boasting over 60,000 titles, the shop displays rows and rows of shelves brimming with books and full boxes that sit haphazardly in the aisles. While it looks disorderly, there’s a sense of controlled chaos at Bolerium; everything has its place, even if it’s hidden at the bottom of a box. The room is silent except for a heater that hums all day, lending a cozy feeling to the large loft-like space.

The shop is located on the third floor of the building, and you have to be buzzed in to visit. Once inside, Bolerium is like your grandmother’s attic, if your grandmother was a radical with a salty tongue. It’s full of trinkets and artifacts from the past: vintage pins that read “Viva Che” and “End the War in Vietnam”; the “Sacred Text” bookshelf featuring titles by Marx, Engels and Lenin only; a tattered gay flag; a windup Nunzilla doll.

The store first opened in a house on Judah Street and 14th Avenue in the Sunset District in June of 1981. After four years it became too big for the space and moved to the current location, where it’s been ever since. Durham runs the shop with help from five employees and his partner of over 30 years, Sue Englander.

Durham and Englander are longtime San Francisco activists who were involved in many of the movements featured in the store. Durham is a former member of the Socialist Workers Party and fought for gay rights and against the Vietnam War. Englander was active in the women’s and civil rights movements, and currently teaches history at San Francisco State University.

“I’m the snarky one,” Durham says early on, just so everything is clear. “I don’t think it’s possible to be snarkier than me.” Throughout the day he shuffles around the store in his socks, pulling books and paying bills. His eyes are scrunched tight behind wire-rim frames, making his constant sarcasm hard to read.

“John is just snarky because he hasn’t had his morning coffee,” Englander says with a smile.

Englander is wearing a heavy black sweater with a big red stripe across it and a matching black newsboy cap. She sits comfortably by the door, behind a large desk that’s covered with papers, surrounded by treasures like the lamp on her right, which has a collection of trolls hanging from it. On the couch adjacent to her is a large framed poster from the “committee to bring back the nude Olympics.” It depicts a naked man throwing a javelin. He is visibly aroused. She’s quick to clarify that this one’s not for sale because it “perks me up every morning.”

Englander spends the day archiving and cataloging materials. She enters new stock into the database, describes its condition and content, and puts it into archival mylar before shelving. Nestled among the store’s many tchotchkes, she thumbs through the myriad goods around her to find a pamphlet that reads “Nuclear War in Vermont.”

This one makes the Facebook cut, Englander explains, because it’s “incredibly perverse or weird.” She uses the Facebook page to spread what she calls “our bad reputation.” The store has gained notoriety among booksellers, partly because of its diverse retail — it has a popular gay pulp section, and mind control and mysticism titles. It is also is known for a wide price range, from free books to $10,000 collections.

The store does most of its business online and over the phone, with walk-ins making up less than 10 percent of total sales. Most of its profits come from sales to universities and libraries that are interested in the historical value of the merchandise, which documents both the details and the essence of various social movements. They get their material from other bookstores as well as individuals; their motto is, “You’re old, you’re dying, sell us your books!” says Englander. It’s because of this specialized niche that they may not be struggling as much as many other bookstores.

Foot traffic is low, and today employees Jay Kinney, “Captain Cranky” David Park and “Professional Packer” Bill Taylor are the main people in the shop. Jared Marchildon, who works at Latin American book purveyor Libros Latinos down the hall, stops by multiple times to partake in the communal free snack box filled with treats from Rainbow Grocery. The floor is also home to Myer Boswell, which specializes in rare law books, and downstairs is Valhalla, which sells modern first editions.

Marchildon has green eyes that stand out above his dark beard. The epitome of a bohemian, his hair is in a messy bun beneath a straw fedora, and he wears a colorful scarf. He launches into a story about his friend, who wants him to appear in his movie dressed in a suit while praying to a vagina.

“If you’re in a movie like that, be sure to tell me so I don’t see it,” Durham says as they quip back and forth.

It’s common for the bookstore employees to frequent each other’s shops for coffee and to share the gripe of the day.

“We tolerate and even have a gentle affection for each other,” says Marchildon, adding that he goes to Valhalla to talk to owner Joe Marchione about everything from his love affairs to philosophy.

“Considering the weirdness of many communities, we’re as much of a book community as there is,” Englander says.

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A “Wanted by the FBI” poster hangs on a pillar toward the front of the store. It depicts former employee Claude Daniel Marks, who was wanted for offenses that included destruction of government property and receipt and transportation of explosives. Marks pleaded guilty to a plot to help a leader of the group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional escape from prison. Although he is no longer working at Bolerium, the flyer has been marked “Employee of the Month” for the past five years, and is a source of pride for Durham and Englander.

Job applicants at Bolerium need to not just know, but be expert in, the history of social movements. To weed out the unqualified, a staff member drafted a test for all prospective employees that explains, “it takes some pretty arcane interests and a certain degree of tastelessness to feel at home [at Bolerium].” In addition to asking the test-taker to identify and explain the significance of various historical figures, it also has some more open-ended questions, like:

– Explain why you got fed up with whichever revolutionary movement you formerly belonged to.

– If a book dealt with Afro-Venezuelan transgender poetry, translated into Yiddish, in which of our sections would it most appropriately be filed? Would your answer change if it were profusely illustrated with nude photos?

The test is so difficult that even Englander didn’t get a perfect score the first time.

“I only missed one!” she protests as Durham teases her. He starts to walk away.

“Oh John…” she says slyly to get his attention.

“What?” he replies.

She squeezes her “New Age Bob” doll that she calls her “mascot” and keeps handy on her desk. Made in the 1970s in response to feminism, the male doll says touchy-feely things.

“Let’s cuddle tonight,” Bob says in a cheesy voice as Durham walks back to his desk, unamused.

Sitting next to Durham is Kinney, a quiet man with a serious face framed by circular glasses and a gray beard. An author and prominent comic artist from the 1970s, he has worked at Bolerium for four years, processing one to two dozen online orders a day, cataloging new material and shelving books. His favorite part of the job is “all the different material we get to handle and reliving history by going through [the shop’s] artifacts.”

Kinney doesn’t have to deal with too many customers — only one or two people stop by each day, a minor nuisance that interrupts his tasks.

“Do you have a section on boating?” he says, imitating an imaginary customer. “It’d be gay boating or African American boating,” he responds.

Durham, trying to fix the broken printer, interjects that one of the reasons the shop is on the third floor is that they aren’t set up for walk-ins.

Surprisingly, three young men walk into the store. They’re MFA students in town to visit photographer Jim Goldberg’s studio, down the street.

“Are you alphabetical?” one asks. “I’m looking for anything by photographer Susan Lipper.”

Durham attempts to explain the store’s setup. “Here we have antisocial art,” he says, pointing to one section. “And here is gay art — that’s mostly naked guys.”

It seems that Durham does this for the joy it brings him, not because it will actually help them find what they are looking for. Nonetheless, the customers seemed amused.

“We have 65,000 titles,” says Durham.

“Hard to remember them all?”

“Yup, despite having read them all,” Durham replies coyly, and the men chuckle.

Bolerium doesn’t have the book and the three men leave empty-handed. Durham returns to his desk to get cracking on the bookkeeping, which has been looming all day. He has a lot to get done before he leaves on a scouting trip to Boston the next day. While there, he is attending the International Antiquarian Book Fair and hopes to pick up some collections from a bookstore owner who is “changing the direction of his business.”

Despite having two full storage spaces in the building and three off-site, there’s always more history to acquire, more ephemera to capture.

“We’re doing OK,” Durham says. “But we have to hustle.”

https://www.bolerium.com/

 

Evidence of puberty, store of fatty goodness or construct of the patriarchy? Scientists probe why men are SO obsessed with breasts – by Peter Andrews – 21 January 2020

Male preference for women’s permanently swollen globular breasts is somewhat anomalous, but to date, no widely accepted evolutionary explanation has been offered. What is the latest in this titillating area of research?

Science has always been concerned with the big questions. How did we get here? How did the universe begin? What is the nature of reality? And now, the scientific method has turned its dispassionate gaze towards that eternal and pressing question: Why do men like women’s breasts?

‘’Because they do’’ or ‘’because they’re nice’’ are not acceptable answers here. Neither, for that matter, is ‘’because media portrayals brainwash them into liking breasts’’ (if you believe this, have a conversation with any straight man). In science we must seek always to be disinterested and unbiased, and to apply the principles of discovery as rigorously as we can. That is how a recent column in Psychology Today by Robert D. Martin, a distinguished anthropologist, treated this topic. So let us examine the evidence, and please, let us have no giggling or smart comments from the back of the room.

Breastology

Although the reason for breasts’ existence is obviously breast-feeding, women’s capacity for milk production is not associated with breast size (at least not before pregnancy). Furthermore, there has been no clear association between hormone levels and breast size. So why have men evolved to like them?

An early hypothesis was that breasts are an honest signal of fat reserves, which would come in handy during lean times for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. If that were true, however, men should find breasts no more erotic than fat elsewhere on the body. Chalk that one off.

One of the most popular theories has to do with pair-bonding. Neurology studies have proven that women are flooded with oxytocin, the bonding hormone, when their nipples are stimulated by a nursing baby, or indeed by a sexual partner. So, men who pay extra attention to this will impress their mate, and make it more likely that she will have his babies. Make of this theory what you will – it seems to suggest an unlikely degree of unselfishness in men – but there may be something to the bonding aspect.

Switching positions

One person who thinks bonding plays a part is British anthropologist Edward Dutton; he has suggested that breasts evolved to resemble buttocks. Seeing as our distant ancestors mated from behind, like our primate cousins, at some point they must have switched to face-to-face. This moment in evolutionary history was hugely important, because with front-facing intercourse came sustained and intense eye-contact theretofore absent from the act of procreation.

Much has been speculated about the profound anthropological changes face-to-face sex may have brought on the human species, not least the new depths of pair-bonding it must have triggered. Dutton thinks that one of the byproducts of the change may have been that female breasts expanded so as to create a cleavage reminiscent of the previously all-important backside.

How old are you?

Possibly the most intriguing argument is that of evolutionary psychologist Frank Marlowe. His ‘nubility hypothesis’ proposes that full, pert breasts are an honest signal of youth, and therefore fertility. In the ancestral environment, humans often went without clothing on their torsos, meaning the females’ breasts would have been more on show. Before birth records and possibly even before the advent of language, there was no way to know the age of other adult humans, except by visual physiological signals.

As women age their breasts begin to sag due to the pull of gravity. Therefore, fleshy lumps on females’ chests became one fool-proof way for males to know the rough age of females, even if it was subconscious. Over aeons of time and thousands of generations, those men with an internal urge to mate with women with younger breasts would on average have had greater reproductive success, seeing as they were mating with younger (but adult) women.

Once a preference for a certain kind of breast kicked in, sexual selection may have also entered the picture. Women having the types of breasts men prefer also had the most reproductive success, leading to a feedback loop of selection for the permanently swollen breasts we see in Homo sapiens, somewhat unlike any other mammal species.

Fast forward millions of years, and attraction to breasts is a near ubiquitous trait among heterosexual men (and homosexual women).

 

It’s a good story, but does that make it true? And do the cultural elements have any role to play at all or is it all just cold hard evolutionary biology? And if natural selection is still at work, what kind of breasts will the man of the future find attractive – if any at all?

Peter Andrews is an Irish science journalist and writer, based in London. He has a background in the life sciences, and graduated from the University of Glasgow with a degree in Genetics

 

https://redd.it/i5ybp3

‘The Gadfly,’ an Irishwoman’s novel of revolutionaries: Remembering Ethel Voynich – by Jenny Farrell (People’s World) 24 July 2020

Image from the cover of an edition of ‘The Gadfly.’ | via Mariinsky Theatre

Liam Mellows read this novel awaiting his execution, along with the other condemned and his comrades, imprisoned by the Irish Free State in the civil war (1922-23), for opposing the Treaty which gave Ireland Dominion Status within the British Empire, rather than establish an independent Irish Republic. Fellow prisoner Peadar O’Donnell writes: “It is a curious fact, which many of the Mountjoy prisoners must be easily able to recall, that it was around the days that the Gadfly was being widely read in ‘C’ wing; it is a tale of Italian revolution with a ghastly execution scene.… MacKelvey…picking up the Gadfly…saying once more: ‘God, I hope they don’t mess up any of our lads this way.’ MacKelvey was to remember the Gadfly next morning.”

What was this book, so widely read by Republicans in Ireland and the Labour movement in Britain in its own day?

This novel of revolution was published in New York in 1897 and a few months later in London, two years after its completion. It achieved cult status in the USSR and China, selling millions of copies. Two film versions were made in the USSR, one silent (1928), the other (1955) with a score by Dmitri Shostakovich. Its author, Irish-born Ethel Voynich, was closely associated with revolutionary circles in London, Berlin, and Russia.

By National Book League – Frontispiece of Book News, Public Domain. Wikimedia Commons.

Ethel Lilian Boole was born May 11, 1864, in County Cork, the youngest of five daughters of the renowned mathematician professor George Boole and Mary Boole, psychologist and philosopher. Ethel’s father died shortly after her birth, and her mother took the family to London, returning to Ireland regularly during her childhood. It was on one of these visits to Ireland that she first read about Giuseppe Mazzini, leader of the Italian Risorgimento movement.

At the age of 18, she went to study music in Berlin for three years (1882–85). There she met Russian revolutionaries, and when she returned to London, she learned Russian from the exiled revolutionary Stepniak (Sergei Kravchinski), who had fled Russia after assassinating the chief of the Czarist secret police. Later, she traveled in Russia, staying with Stepniak’s sister-in-law Preskovia Karauloff in St Petersburg for two years (1887–89). Preskovia was a doctor, whose husband was a political prisoner. Ethel helped Preskovia treat impoverished peasants. She also gave music lessons and associated with families of political prisoners whom she met through Preskovia.

Back in London, Ethel met a Polish political exile, recently escaped from Siberia (Poland was part of the Russian Empire at that time), who Anglicized his name to Wilfred Michael Voynich. Transported to Siberia for participation in the Polish liberation movement against the Czarist regime, he escaped to England in 1890. Ethel and Wilfred worked together with Stepniak printing revolutionary literature and banned books and smuggling them into Russia, including translations of Marx’s and Engels’s writings. Along with other revolutionaries, they founded the Russian Free Press Fund. Ethel herself undertook a clandestine journey to Lvov in Ukraine to organize the smuggling of illegal publications into Russia. Involved in these Russian émigré circles was another Russian exile and agent, Sigmund Rosenblum, alias Sidney Reilly, executed in 1925 for his role in a coup d’état against Lenin and the USSR. Legend is attached to Ethel and “Sidney” having an affair in Italy.

From these experiences and circle of comrades, Voynich drew the stuff from which the novel is made. It is set in 1840s Italy at the time of its popular rebellion against Austrian domination, the Risorgimento.

The novel’s main characters belong to Mazzini’s underground party, Young Italy, active in the national liberation movement. A thrilling plot roots the readers’ sympathy with the author’s. It is understandable how this book captured the imagination of readers who sympathized with movements against oppression and domination. “Several of them belonged to the Mazzinian party and would have been satisfied with nothing less than a democratic Republic and a United Italy.” It is obvious why the Anti-Treaty prisoners, captured during the civil war in Ireland, identified with the characters in the book.

This domination was not merely exercised by a foreign power. Reflecting historical fact, the novel sharply criticizes the Catholic Church’s active opposition to the movement for a united Italy, expressed in a father and son conflict that deepens the import: an Italian reluctantly willing to sacrifice his son and the cause of freedom, and Italy’s future, for the sake of religion. The author leaves no doubt regarding her own stance. In fact, the novel’s declared atheism must have contributed to its being banned by the Irish State in 1947.

The spirit of revolution is not limited to members of the Young Italy movement. It has covert support throughout the population, evidenced in many scenes in the novel. Ordinary people help the movement smuggle arms across borders, come to their personal aid, even prison wardens back them. In fact, in the scene referred to by MacKelvey, the firing squad tries to protect their secret hero. So, at the end of the 19th century, we see a new type evolving within the English novel, one whose hero and heroine are revolutionaries and part of a revolutionary liberation movement.

Written at a time of international suffrage movements, the central female character, Gemma Warren, is a woman the movement respects highly. She is inspired not only by Voynich’s own experience but also by other women revolutionaries around the author. Gemma is not merely an emancipated woman; she is also a revolutionary woman, at the center of the movement. In this way, she goes beyond the literary heroines of the late 19th century and anticipates the proletarian women Gorky would write about. “Those who saw her only at her political work regarded her as a trained and disciplined conspirator, trustworthy, courageous, in every way a valuable member of the party, but somehow lacking in life and individuality. ‘She’s a born conspirator, worth any dozen of us; and she is nothing more,’ Galli had said of her.” Voynich brings not only the revolutionary group as central to the novel plot but, as a necessary part of this group, a new type of woman.

Given Voynich’s internationalism and experience, it is bewildering to find racist sentiments toward South Americans and Black people expressed in this book. This racism also affects the portrayal of women of color, as readers will discover. It seems that Voynich’s novel did not find much resonance in Cuba and other Latin American countries, nor in Africa, all waging heroic liberation struggles. Surprisingly, critics have not drawn attention to this aspect. Instead, if they dislike it, it is due to its unashamed atheism, so unusual for its time, or for its partisanship for a revolutionary movement.

Before the outbreak of the First World War, Wilfred Voynich became involved in the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom. He ran a rare bookshop in Soho, which he also used for money laundering and smuggling revolutionary Marxist literature into Russia. Again, Ethel frequently worked as a courier for the organization.

Wilfred’s greatest fame is linked to a Renaissance manuscript he discovered in 1912. Later, he brought this with him to New York, where he moved in 1915 and continued in the book business. The document that became known as the “Voynich Manuscript,” was written in a code that to this day has not been deciphered. Much mystery surrounds this script; one possibility is that it is an elaborate hoax, manufactured by Voynich, who held a degree in chemistry.

Ethel began writing full time, authoring three more novels: Jack Raymond (1901), Olive Latham (1904), and An Interrupted Friendship (1910). She also translated some poetry by Shevchenko and Lermontov into English, published in 1911.

She worked with the Quakers as a social worker in London’s East End during World War I and left Britain for good around 1920 when she joined Wilfred in New York. There is no further information about active political work. Wilfred died in 1930. Ethel returned to music, composed musical works including the “Epitaph in Ballad Form,” dedicated to the Irish revolutionary Roger Casement, who was hanged in Pentonville Prison, London, on August 3, 1916. She also translated composer Frederic Chopin’s letters into English. None of her later novels achieved the quality or the fame of The Gadfly.

Soviet literati in 1955 discovered that Ethel was still alive in New York, aged 91. This caused an enormous sensation in the USSR and resulted in the payment of royalties. Ethel continued to live quietly with her companion, Anne Nill, who had once managed Wilfred’s New York book business. They lived together for thirty years in the heart of Manhattan, in an apartment at London Terrace on West 24th Street. Ethel Voynich died 60 years ago, on July 27, 1960, at the age of 96.

‘The Gadfly,’ an Irishwoman’s novel of revolutionaries: Remembering Ethel Voynich

Police and Their “Unions” Have No Place As Members Of The Labor Union Movement (Boson Workers) 2 Aug 2020

Audio of Article – Mp3

Amidst nationwide protests ignited by the racist police murder of George Floyd, union members everywhere are asking: how can labor throw its weight into the fight to uproot racist repression?

Using our collective power as workers is key. The multiracial working class makes the country’s wheels turn, and can bring them to a halt just as quickly. We have the power to shut down factories and docks, farms and urban transport, food plants and phone service. And now is the time to use it.

But it’s also high time the labor movement cleans its own house. In fact, it’s long overdue. As mass anger at police killings shines the spotlight on police forces’ role as enforcers of racist repression, the time is now to carry through the demand long raised by class-struggle unionists, summed up in the slogan: “Cops out of the unions.”

As the list keeps growing, we in labor’s ranks join millions searching for an answer to how and when police killings and brutality will end. Workers like me want police “unions” ousted from the labor movement and want cops of all kinds removed from unions and union bodies now: this will be a crucial part of unchaining labor’s power in the fight against racial oppression.

The fact is, we face a glaring contradiction with the inclusion of police in the labor movement. The struggle against racist oppression is crucial to lab

or’s cause, but the professionals of repression are included in one labor body after another. Freeing labor from any and all affiliation with the cops is crucial to the revitalization of unions, which is a matter of life or death for the labor movement. Yet despite recent efforts by the Writers Guild of America, East and others to rightly call for the expulsion of the International Union of Police Associations from the AFL-CIO, the push has been met with resistance – the AFL-CIO rejected WGAE’s call earlier this month. When members of the labor officialdom try to stop or divert this vital fight, they are wielding the very outlook and policies that have drastically undercut and weakened our movement for years.

We must resolve this contradiction now if labor is genuinely going to unite with the aspirations of a new generation of workers who want to uproot racism – and if the labor movement is going to

transform itself into an instrument for the emancipa

tion of the working class and the oppressed.

Labor playing the role it must in the fight against racist repression is flatly counterposed to harboring organizations whose purpose is to push the claims, and shield the crimes, of the police. And that is precisely what cops’ so-called “unions” are all about. When Minneapolis banned “warrior training” for cops last year, the police “union” even announced that it would provide such training for free.

While labor bodies like WGAE push for disaffiliation with the International Union of Police Associations, the effort is just one drop in one very large bucket. IUPA is just one of the entities representing the demands and interests of the

repressors in blue. “We have a dozen affiliate unions that represent law enforcement in some form,” the AFL-CIO Executive Council noted in its June 10 statement opposing WGEA’s demand. Instead, it’s calling for police groups to adopt a “code of excellence.” This would be the equivalent of cops taking a knee before they go out yet again to bust heads and round up anti-racist protesters.

While police associations are not workers unions, many actual unions (AFSCME, the CWA, SEIU, Teamsters and others) have brought “law enforcement” and repression-industry sectors into their ranks. Having professional strikebreakers in the unions — when unionists face repression from cops and guards in every strike — is a recipe for defeat.

The AFL-CIO leadership’s position would only discredit unions in the eyes of a new generation that must be won over to the cause and struggle of labor. And it delivers a slap in the face to countless unionists subjected to police violence, teargas and sonic weapons for protesting racism or standing on a picket line. The officialdom claims that maintaining the affiliation of police is a question of – wait for it – “unity.” Cops’ billy clubs may “unite” with our heads, but real unity of workers, against racist repression, means uncuffing labor from “unity” with those swinging the batons.

The shopworn claim that it’s just a “few bad apples” involved in police brutality across the U.S. is starkly exposed by current events. When police terrorize black communities, target protesters and break up union pickets, they are literally doing their job — a role integral to the profit system, in which racial oppression has always been key to capitalists’ wealth and power. There is no reform or code, no set of rules or oversight that can change the basic role of the police, and they don’t belong in our unions in any form.

Just digging into the history of the police in America, which began as slave patrols, reveals how central it has always been to racial oppression.

After the Civil War, the promise of black freedom through Reconstruction was betrayed. As industry grew, labor — both black and white — faced bloody police intervention. As black workers took the lead in bringing the 1877 labor upheaval into the South, the cops were there to bloodily break up interracial workers’ struggles. When Democratic Party “Redeemers” imposed Jim Crow, the cops were there to enforce “law and order.” Up North, police joined post-WWI pogroms against black communities, while police frame-ups and vigilante lynchers took the lives of immigrant workers like Sacco and Vanzetti, IWW bard Joe Hill, his Native American comrade Frank Little and innumerable other heroes of labor.

Down the decades, from police massacres of striking dock workers in San Francisco and “Little Steel” strikers in Chicago, to the police murder of black teenager Larry Payne in the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike to today, strike-breaking and racist repression are central to the history of labor struggle, and of the police.

When police aren’t enough, companies rely on assistance from security guards like the Pinkertons (currently known as Securitas Security Services), infamous for strike-breaking as “just part of the job” of protecting capitalist property and making sure that bosses can keep unions in check.

On June 2, Minneapolis Public Schools voted to cut ties with the police department. This important step should spread to other cities. And it means opposing any attempts to replace them with private security guards or some other police department, which would mean more of the same.

Today, all labor faces the old question: Which side are you on?

https://bosonmassachusetts.blogspot.com/2020/08/police-and-their-unions-have-no-place.html