Who Killed Gary Webb?

The other day, when I wrote about the Crimes of Ronald Reagan, Constant Reader Yellow Fringe asked if I had seen the movie or read the book Kill the Messenger. I hadn't done either one, so I went to Netflix and put it into my "want" list -- it won't be released on DVD until Feb 10 -- and then I scouted my local library and was able to get a copy of the book.

It is, to give it its full title, Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb, by Nick Shou. It tells the story of investigative reporter Gary Webb and how he was destroyed by the very media he worked for, print journalism.

Webb was in the investigative reporter game for many years, with several different papers. Along the way he picked up a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on a California earthquake, but that "shaker" wasn't the biggest one to hit Gary Webb. It was his three-part series "Dark Alliance" in the San Jose Mercury-News in 1996, about the CIA-Contra-crack cocaine connection, that blew up in his face.

Even though Webb never said that the CIA was behind the sudden crack cocaine epidemic that hit the US, and especially Los Angeles, in the early 1980s, the mainstream papers climbed all over him. Leading the charge was the LA Times -- smarting over the "scoop" Webb got on them, no doubt -- which vilified Webb and fed into the other papers "discrediting" Webb, for claiming something that he did not claim.

All Webb did was ask a few pointed questions about some curious connections between the CIA, the Nicaraguan "contras" and the drug shipments that were coming into the US from Latin America. The CIA of course denied any participation in, or knowledge of, any thing of the sort, and their lackeys at the LA Times and the Washington Post bought the whole story. Back in those days, even after Watergate(!), big media were still in bed with government, and, according to Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, especially the CIA. It likely still goes on.

It wasn't until several years later that a CIA internal investigation established that, yes indeed, whoops!, there were some connections, the same ones that Webb had `questioned. The report was "coincidentally" released the first weekend that our old friend Monica Lewinsky made the news, and even then the neo-yellow-journalism papers were slavering over reports of a sex scandal involving the president of the United States, and not so eager to follow up on some boringly tedious report from an "uninvolved" government agency.

Reading this book, I was constantly reminded of the whole "Rathergate" incident from 2004 -- never mind the content of the story; instead make the story about the reporter covering it. Dan Rather vanished into oblivion, and we never did manage to settle the whole question of G.W. "Baby Doc" Bush's alleged military service.

I've heard it described as "censorship by noise". If one person is telling the truth, let him, but drown him out with a thousand people calling him a liar. Kill the messenger.

And that's what happened to Gary Webb. His life was ruined and he spiraled into depression and unemployment (no one was willing to hire a "disgraced" journalist, even if he did have a Pulitzer), and finally in 2004 he was found dead from two shots to the head. It was ruled a suicide.

So who killed Gary Webb? It is possible that it was a legitimate suicide; he may have pulled the trigger himself but it was his fellow journalists in the media, along with the shadowy government world of the CIA, and the contras, the amoral "founding fathers" of Nicaraguan death squads, who loaded the gun.

Highly recommended for its insight into a very ugly slice of our history.

2016 Dream Ticket

I just watched Jon Stewart interview Mike Huckabee on The Daily Show from last night. Jeez, that fucker has packed on some pounds -- he's gotten fat!

He's flogging his new book, God, Guns, Grits and Gravy, and it's a safe bet that he's overdosed himself on at least two of those things.

Watch Stewart tear him a new one over his hypocrisy and his "reverse elitism", and especially on why, in Huckabee's world, Beyoncé is bad and Ted Nugent is good:

So, even though the Blunt-Boehner ticket has the bumpersticker for a great campaign, I'm now considering supporting the Fatboy Ticket: Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie. Even though the structural engineers will have to get busy now to construct a platform that will hold up the two of them at the inauguration.

Kent Hovind: The Flintstones Was a Documentary

I really like having the Internet. For an information junkie like me it is heaven-sent. All of the information you reasonably need on pretty much any topic you want -- and some you don't want -- is just a click or two away.

Unfortunately there is a down side. People whose only influence before the World Wide Web would have been limited to the few-mile reception range of a low-watt AM station in South Knucklesville suddenly can have a voice that spans the world. All you need is a clever shtick, a low opinion of the intellectual abilities of your followers, and a craven willingness to fleece your sheep in the name of The Lord.

My related researches over the last week into the intricacies of The Turner Diaries led me to an examination of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and that led me to the fantastical world of one Kent Hovind.

You may not recognize his name, but Hovind was the founder and creator of something called "Dinosaur Adventure Land", an ultra-cheesy low-rent fact-free Creationist theme park, apparently based on the idea that The Flintstones was a documentary, that he built behind his house in Pensacola, Florida. He is of course a Young Earth Creationist.

He is also, as you might expect, 100% wackjob nutso crazy.

What the Protocols have to do with Young Earth Creationism is a connection that exists only in Hovind's mind, but he is also an adherent to any number of insane rightwing fringenut ideas and a proponent of the "sovereign citizen" movement (aka the "I don't got to pay you no stinkin' taxes!" movement -- which I have bloviated about before), a belief for which he was ultimately sent to federal prison for tax evasion. Evading taxes on the many thousands of dollars of income that stupid people sent him to continue doing The Lord's work. And his defense was that it was never his money -- it was The Lord's money.

Mmmmmm-kay...

People like Hovind, like I said, would likely not be well-known outside Escambia County FL back in the good old days. But give a man free access to the most democratic of media (the Internet) and he'll pull in the sheeple like a wool suit pulls in cat hair.

Hovind is also notorious for positing this challenge on his website: "Show me irrefutable proof of evolution and I'll give you $250,000".

Of course he is the sole judge of this "contest" and all rulings by the "judges" are final.

It got to the point that even the rest of his fellow Young Earth Creationists have backed away from him. That's got to hurt, when even your fellow wackjobs think you are too far "out there"...

Martin Luther King: It Was More Than a Dream

Today is Martin Luther King Day, and it has been 50 years since he gave the "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. That speech and maybe a couple of marches are pretty much all he is remembered for any more by the majority of Americans, but that's not all that he did.

Over at The Daily Kos there's an excellent and thought-provoking piece called Most of You Have No Idea What Martin Luther King Actually Did that is well worth reading.

Excerpt:

...Because at this point in our amnesiac national existence, my question pretty much reflects the national civic religion view of what Dr. King accomplished. He gave this great speech. Or some people say, "he marched." I was so angry at Mrs. Clinton during the primaries when she said that Dr. King marched, but it was LBJ who delivered the Civil Rights Act.
At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn't that he "marched" or gave a great speech.
My father told me with a sort of cold fury, "Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south."

Go ahead and read it all. It will likely change the way you think about Martin Luther King.

Go Seahawks!

Last week and today I got a reminder as to why I don't watch regular season football: It's too much work and it's too hard on me.

I spent four hours today yelling and screaming at the television, throwing anything loose across the living room and generally making an excitable ass of myself as my team managed to get itself down by a score of 19-0 in a game they were supposed to win handily. My voice is scratchy and it's leaving me rapidly.

After much weeping and wailing and sending She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed diving for cover, the Hawks finally, late in the 2nd half, turned it around and scored on a Special Teams fake-kick stunt, and then immediately recovered their own onside kick -- something which never happens -- to go on and ultimately win the game in overtime in what was I think the greatest comeback in a playoff game that I have ever seen.

At the end I was a steaming mass of sweat, covered by a damp Seahawk #12 jersey, shaking off onto the rug the shattered bits of fried pork rinds, and sitting in a puddle of spilled beer on the couch, while I was kicking aside the dropped empties.

Not a pretty sight.

I had a real mess to clean up, and don't think that She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed was about to help me with it, either. Better not to ask...

I get really into it during regular season games, too. And that's why I had to stop watching them. But I am willing to put up with it for three championship games a year, which are always the best football games.

Now there's just one more Game Sunday to go through, when they play in the Superbowl on Sunday Feb 1. THEN I can relax back into my regular other 49 weeks of the year.

Do Mormons Still Believe in Polygamy?

A casual scan of the public face of Mormonism, as shown on their websites and through their many apologists, would indicate that they do not still believe in polygamy. Any more, they are very careful to try to cover up and hide the history of their polygamous past. That's understandable. It was polygamy that prevented Utah from becoming a state in the late 1880s, and the Federal Government had worked hard to disband the church by taking its assets and arresting many polygamous church leaders.

The issue of polygamy, understandably, was a Very Big Deal to the other Christians in the country -- it was seen as immoral, base, evil, irreligious, and generally just a nasty business all around. They said this even as they exhibited a morbid fascination with it. Because, you know, human nature...

Finally it came down to this: The church was going to have to stop the practice or face extinction and have its leaders spend years in prison. Plus Utah was not going to become a state -- and therefore it would miss out on the many monetary opportunities that statehood would provide.

So in 1890,  the "Prophet, Seer and Revelator of the Church", Wilford Woodruff, issued a manifesto that advised church members not to enter into any marriage "prohibited by the law of the land". That essentially ended all polygamous marriages -- but only the ones that had been planned. Existing church polygamists could still keep their wives intact, and most of them did. Several families stole away in the night to settle in Alberta, Canada, and across the Mexican border where they set up many Mormon colonies, including something called "Colonia Juárez" in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, in the totally mistaken belief that neither Mexico nor Canada had laws against polygamy. Mitt Romney's grandparents were in the group that went to Juarez, where his father, George, was born. In 1968 the question came up as to whether he was a Constitutionally-required "natural-born" citizen of the United States when he was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president.

The Mormon Fundamentalist movement said that Woodruff got no such revelation and was therefore a "false prophet" -- anathema to Mormons -- and they split off from the One True Church, and eventually splintered into several offshoots, the most noteworthy of them being the one headed by the notorious Warren Jeffs.

Later on, though, the pre-manifesto marriages to multiple wives had to stop as well. The church members, who always choose to follow the "Prophet", had divested themselves of the supernumerary wives, mostly by attrition, by the end of the first decade of the 20th Century, and the church joined the rest of society on the "one woman one man" bandwagon. To the point that it became Holy Writ  by the time they were campaigning for the passage of Proposition 8 outlawing gay marriage in Califormia -- "It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!"

But, since the Prophet did not issue this as a "divine revelation" but rather as a "manifesto", the question remains as to whether The Lord commanded it, or did he just make it as a suggestion. None of the passages in the Doctrine and Covenants, LDS scripture authored by Joseph Smith himself, were altered to remove the whole "plural marriage" revelations by The Prophet in the 1830s. But True Believers naturally think that their Prophet is more infallible than the Pope, and many took the manifesto as though it were a new commandment.

But polygamy still exists in the church in a weird kind of way. In order to get into the top tier of Heaven (the "Celestial Kingdom") a person has to be married. And not just married -- they have to be "sealed" together in a Mormon Temple so that they will be husband and wife not only here on earth but also for "time and all eternity". Those who do not receive this "sealing" will not get to go. Sorry.

But there is a loophole. A man who is already on his way there (i.e., a good Mormon who obeys the commandments, upholds The Prophet and the General Authorities, exalts Joseph Smith, and has already been sealed to one wife) can, out of the goodness of his heart (or for a monetary consideration), take on many more women to be sealed to him. By the time he gets to the Celestial Kingdom, he can have a virtual harem of women who are his "wives". Of course those women also have to be good Mormons -- not just any Jane Doe/Street Ho will do. Usually these are women who didn't manage to snag a husband while they were trying to get their MRS degree at BYU, or women who married shiftless "Gentile" (i.e., not Mormon) louts outside the church, etc. Weirdly, woman can also get themselves "sealed" to a man who is already dead (well, the Mormons baptize for the dead anyway; why not get them married off as well? It's not like they are going to complain about it...).

And that still sounds a lot like polygamy to me. It just happens on a different plane.

I am not making this up. And I wonder if I am on that Mormon blacklist yet.

BTW, if you are a Mormon who is questioning your continued belief in the church, you don't have to suffer your spiritual crisis alone. There are people over at PostMormon.org who can help you.  Drop by and see what they have to offer.

165 "Lyrically Questionable" Songs

Quick, what do all of these songs have in common?

New York, New York by Frank Sinatra
Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap by AC/DC
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da by The Beatles
Wonderful World by Sam Cooke
Johnny Angel by Shelley Fabares
I Feel the Earth Move by Carole King
Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin

There doesn't seem to be any common thread tying these songs together, does there? Yet they are all on a list of 165 songs dubbed "lyrically questionable" in a memo that Clear Channel Communications sent to the radio stations it owned.

The date? Shortly after September 11, 2001. Talk about overreacting.

To be fair, Clear Channel didn't come out and say that the stations couldn't play any of these songs -- it was just a "suggestion".

But Jesus, Frank Sinatra, Carole King and Shelley Fabares? Really?

The Crimes of Ronald Reagan

You could probably guess that I was never a fan of Ronald Reagan, not even when he was a "B" movie actor lamenting his missing leg in King's Row or playing straight man to a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo.

When he ran for president the first time, in 1976, challenging and losing the nomination to the incumbent, Jerry Ford, I thought it was some kind of sick joke. Sure he had been governor of California, but everyone I knew in California thought he was a joke even then, what with the inane comments like his "if you've seen one redwood you've seen them all", his "trees cause pollution" and his answer to student protests, "let the bloodbath begin".

Then in 1980 when he swept out of near-oblivion and not only won the nomination but also the fucking presidency, it was like I woke up in a bad dystopian science-fiction movie. But "the Amurrican peeple" apparently disagreed with me. They LOVED them some Ronald Reagan, and even then he was being deified as a living god.

Even in the latter years of his presidency, when he looked to me like someone's doddering and senile grandfather, rambling on about nothing, pissing his pants and drooling food out of the corners of his mouth at the dinner table, everyone pretended not to notice and still just LOVED him. Not everyone, of course, but there were enough St. Ronald idolators around to quash any criticism of him, and even today there are people will mutter a sotto voce "bless-ed be his nay-um" whenever he is mentioned.

It didn't really come as a surprise to me when it was announced, several years after he left office, that he had Alzheimer's. Suddenly a lot of his distracted behavior, his lack of memory about certain aspects of, say, Iran-Contra, made sense. It really was a case, to paraphrase Senator Howard Baker about Richard Nixon, "What did the president know and when did he stop knowing it?"

Reagan enablers/apologists insisted that he did not have it while president, but his own son disagrees.

Recently I rewatched the terrific 1985 movie, Salvador, which I still think is Oliver Stone's best film. If you haven't seen it, make sure that you correct that oversight. You can get it from Netflix if you can't find it elsewhere. Be sure to watch the documentary "making of" feature on the DVD as well.

Anyway, that movie does a number on American foreign policy in El Salvador and touches on how the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 signaled to the corrupt leaders of that country that they could wantonly kill as many of their "rebels" as they wanted to, with no repercussions from the United States. Major Bob, unleash the Death Squads.

And you already saw my "pallin' around with terrorists" photo of Reagan and the Taliban yesterday. Coincidentally, a writer for Listverse, a site which I read daily, came up with a list of 10 Reprehensible Crimes of Ronald Reagan. It's quite a spread, from the casting of mental patients out of hospitals into the streets to tacitly approving South African apartheid to openly supporting Latin American genocidal terrorists. It's all there and it's a healthy antidote to the fawning lickspittles who still cross themselves when He is mentioned.

Also be sure to glance through the comments. There are people even now who are just frothing at the mouth to spew a stream of invective against anyone who dares to profane The Name of The Prophet Saint Ronald...

Today is Religious Freedom Day

Read all about it here, and be sure to check out the main page of that site, Americans United for Separation of Church and State for ideas about what you can do to get involved.

Sarah Palin: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Sarah Palin just can't stand being out of the spotlight. Today I learned that she publicly called President Barack Obama "chicken" for not labeling all terrorists "Islamic terrorists", and also for not going to Paris for a photo-op at The March, where he would have met with world leaders that she despises, e.g., Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, the socialist president of France François Hollande, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

Instead she calls the President "chicken". So the caliber of political discourse has dropped to the level of schoolyard taunts? Really?

But if he had gone, I am also 100% dead certain that she would use that against him, saying he was "pallin' around with terrorists". The President just can't win against the brain-dead nattering nabobs of negativism at Faux News.

In other news, Palin is bringing back her television show on some channel that is so far up the line that most remote controls can't handle the large number of punches it takes to get to it. I don't know what kind of knuckle-dragging mouth-breathing moron-American audience she gets, but they can't exceed about 75 on the IQ scale. And the total viewership surely can't make a nudge, or even a burp, in the Nielsens.

I hope she does stay in the spotlight as much as she can. It's like shooting fish in a barrel making snarky comments about her. They practically write themselves -- hell, she actually writes them for us.

It's probably too much to hope for that she'll make a run for the presidency next year.

Oh, and speaking of pallin' around with terrorists:

My Review of The Turner Diaries

I finally took my own advice (I'm good at dishing it out, not so good at taking it myself) and read The Turner Diaries. I was fully prepared to hate it -- I was looking forward to talking about a constipated writing style, cardboard cutout characters, a stumbling plot and wooden prose descriptions. I was actually more than a little disappointed when I got none of that stuff. It is, very surprisingly and for the most part, well-written.

The very first chapter, in which the narrator describes four "Negroes" from the "political police" kicking down his door to search for guns (which are of course outlawed), is a Wayne LaPierre wet dream. Soon our "hero" and the members of his group, The Organization (as "the resistance" is called), organized like a series of communist-like "cells", blows up the FBI building with a truck bomb containing ... ammonium nitrate. It's not a coincidence that Timothy McVeigh had two pages from this book in his getaway car after the Oklahoma City bombing. They were the very two pages that describe the preparations for blowing up the FBI; I won't provide it here --it's a workable blueprint for bomb making.

Ultimately, I think that it's really an inversion of, and a through-the-looking-glass take, on the Weather Underground's journey in the early 70s. Take away all the White Supremacy stuff and you have a ripping good tale, a dystopian alternate history/sci-fi take on the future as imagined in 1978. All of the wackjob stuff you would expect is in here: Confiscation of guns, requirement to have an electronic ID to buy stuff, the need to go "underground" and fight against The System, the stockpiling of weapons and bomb-making materials.

I'm generally a big fan of the dystopian fiction genre (e.g. The Iron Heel by Jack London, 1984 by George Orwell, It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis). But this is really beyond the pale -- I've never read anything that is so matter-of-fact about the necessity to elevate the White Race by killing off all "subhuman mongrels", e.g. the blacks, the Jews, the Chicanos/Hispanics, the Asians, the mixed-race whites, etc. The list of intended victims runs into the billions.

While in the main the book is a gripping narrative of the actions of one Earl Turner, in the last quarter of the book or so it veers off into racist and anti-Semitic polemic that is hard to take. Besides (spoiler alert), all non-whites die in the end. And I do mean all. It's not a pretty prediction, but it's one that the Neo-Nazis and others of their ilk salivate over. This book really does enact the "Final Solution", on everyone that isn't white. Not surprising, since William Pierce, the author, was a Big Shot in the Neo-Nazi movement in this country and founded the National Alliance white-separatist, white nationalist, anti-Semitic organization. That fact was the only thing that kept me from believing that it was intended as a overblown, over-the-top satire on Nazis. You remember Poe's Law. The notorious fascist group, The Order, took its name and behavior directly from the book, which had an organization with the same name and the same designs.

This book is definitely worth reading. if only to get a chilling insight into the thinking of these people.

NOTE: As a sidebar, while I was reading it, I could not help but notice some eerie parallels between this book (1978) and The Talking Heads' song,  "Life During Wartime" (1979) -- was the song inspired by this book and not, despite what David Byrne claimed, the Weather Underground? I can see why he'd try to keep that part to himself.

It's an interesting question. The descriptions of life on the run in the song can be equally -- and is some cases, better --  applied to the events in this book.

Check out the lyrics, especially this line: "Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit? Heard about Pittsburgh, PA?" That line has always been somewhat of a mystery to me. Until I read this book. The first bomb set off by The Organization (as "the resistance" is called) was set off in Houston. (On September 11, wrong year. Make of that what you will...) Later on, a bomb takes out Detroit, and there is also a surprise and deadly race riot in Pittsburgh by the non-whites who are not willing to kowtow to their new overlords.

It's in the book. I tried to find anything on the Internet that makes this correlation, and I couldn't find it. Maybe I am one of a very few people who have both heard the song enough to remember the lyrics and read this book. It doesn't seem to me that there would be a lot of crossover audience...

You can download The Turner Diaries free in a variety of formats, if you want to read it for yourself. I'm not recommending it as proper reading, but we must know our enemy!

My God's Better Than Your God

Naturally after the massacre in Paris it's been all over the media again that Islam is a religion of hate, that Allah commands the murder of infidels, that the enemies of Islam must be put to death, etc. etc. etc.

But I think that Allah is a piker when it comes to this stuff. He's like a junior high basketball player trying out for the NBA. The God of the Old Testament (i.e., "our" God) is, to paraphrase General William Boykin, way more badass than any other god.

For example:

Anyone arrogant enough to reject the verdict of the judge or of the priest who represents the LORD your God must be put to death.  Such evil must be purged from Israel.  (Deuteronomy 17:12)
If a man lies with a male as with a women, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives.  (Leviticus 20:13)
If a man commits adultery with another man's wife, both the man and the woman must be put to death.  (Leviticus 20:10)
But any prophet who claims to give a message from another god or who falsely claims to speak for me must die.'  You may wonder, 'How will we know whether the prophecy is from the LORD or not?'  If the prophet predicts something in the LORD's name and it does not happen, the LORD did not give the message.  That prophet has spoken on his own and need not be feared.  (Deuteronomy 18:20-22)
Anyone who is captured will be run through with a sword.  Their little children will be dashed to death right before their eyes.  Their homes will be sacked and their wives raped by the attacking hordes.  For I will stir up the Medes against Babylon, and no amount of silver or gold will buy them off.  The attacking armies will shoot down the young people with arrows.  They will have no mercy on helpless babies and will show no compassion for the children.  (Isaiah 13:15-18)

This is just a small sampling of the many, many times "our" god has acted like a murderous sociopath. Read more about this in Murder in the Bible on the Evil Bible website.

And don't get me started on the Book of Job. You remember Job. God, in one of the biggest dick moves of all time, tortures him for years and kills all of his children, just to win a fucking bet with Satan!

So Christians, before you start telling me about how evil Islam is, take a look at your own house. As your Great Prophet, Yeshua bar Yosef said, don't worry about a mote in your neighbor's eye when there is a two-by-four in your own.

That's good advice. Too bad more "Christians" don't follow it.

The Whole Story on Bowe Bergdahl?

In this 15-minutes-of-fame world, where we want it all and get it now and instant gratification takes too long, the story of Bowe Bergdahl is so yesterday that a lot of people won't even recognize his name.

Bergdahl was the US soldier in Afghanistan who somehow wandered off from his remote outpost and was taken prisoner by the Taliban. Five years later he became the subject of intense scrutiny when his release was engineered at the exchange rate of five-to one for Talibani prisoners of war detainees held in Guantánamo.

It's an extremely interesting story, and Robert Young Pelton has written a lengthy but incredibly detailed article on it, "Finding Private Bergdahl", over at Vice.

Because the details of Bergdahl's leave-taking and the five years he was held captive are still not clear, and because his name and his face bear a more-than-passing resemblance to those of the traitor/Islam-convert/terrorist Nicholas Brody, the former US prisoner of war held in Iraq, in the HBO series Homeland, it was easy for the nonthinking wingnut media to conflate Brody with Bergdahl and paint him as a traitor as well.

They are still at it. A Google search for the words "Bowe Bergdahl traitor" yields nearly 80,000 hits, the vast majority of them from wingnut sites. You know, the usual suspects: World Net Daily, Breitbart, Western Journalism Review, et al.

Will we ever know all of the details? Probably not, but Pelton's article likely comes the closest to describing the circumstances surrounding Bergdahl's disappearance and the Byzantine governmental -- and non-governmental -- machinations behind his ultimate release.

How to Tie a "Necktie"

As I was searching through my book case the other day I caught another book I hadn't looked at in years. It was called "The Handbook for Boys", the 1957 edition. It was actually the Boy Scout Manual. and aside from the crap about being brave, clean and reverent, it has a ton of practical information on building campfires, field cooking, setting up animal traps, keeping warm, etc. for the teenage outdoorsman.

Yes, I was in the Boy Scouts for about a year when I was 12, and there is even a photo of me in my Junior High yearbook wearing a dumb scout uniform and looking stupid. I didn't last long in Scouts, what with all the marching and crap and the quasi-Nazi-Hitler-Youth aspects to it, but I did manage to hold on to the book on the chance that it would stand me in good stead some day.

There's a great section on how tie various knots, such as a bowline and a bowline on a bight, a clove hitch, a half-hitch, etc., but one thing it did not show you how to tie was the one thing you wanted:  A hangman's noose. My friends and I tried it, with varying degrees of success, but as you can see here (from a different source, of course), it's quite simple:

The only thing you had to remember was not to put 13 loops in it -- that was against the law (or so we believed). But once we wrapped it up with 12 or 14 loops, we were ready to mete out some well-placed amateur justice, should the occasion present itself, even with our slipshod tied-in-ignorance granny knots pretending to be a noose.

As you might have guessed, the situation never came up. There was only one black guy in my class, and he would not have taken kindly to being the honoree at a necktie party. Plus he was way bigger than the rest of us...

The Islamophobic Wingnut Media

Over at Media Matters, one of the few Internet sites that keeps an eagle eye on Fox News and other wingnut media, there's an extensive list of Right-Wing Media's Worst Islamophobic Rhetoric, and it contains some lulus:

• Fox's Eric Bolling: "Every Terrorist On American Soil Has Been A Muslim." On the June 6, 2012, edition of Fox News' The Five, host Eric Bolling advocated for police surveillance of Muslims and falsely claimed that "every terrorist on American soil has been a Muslim."
• Fox's Brian Kilmeade: "Not Every Muslim Is An Extremist, A Terrorist, But Every Terrorist Is A Muslim." On the October 15, 2010, edition of Fox News Radio's Kilmeade & Friends, host Kilmeade defended his Fox colleague Bill O'Reilly's statement that "all terrorists are Muslim," asserting that "Not every Muslim is an extremist, a terrorist, but every terrorist is a Muslim. You can't avoid that fact." 
  [Note: These are of course "mistakes", i.e., flat-out lies; see When is a Terrorist Not a Terrorist?, my post from the other day about rightwing terrorists.]
• Fox's Sean Hannity Likened Use Of Quran In Congressional Swearing-In Ceremony To Using Mein Kampf. On the November 30, 2006 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, co-host Sean Hannity likened Rep. Keith Ellison's (D-MN) intention to use a copy of the Quran during his congressional swearing-in ceremony to the use of the "Nazi-bible," Mein Kampf.

There's more, all of it equally stomach-churning. Be sure to check it out.

Robertson Family Values

They may have exhausted their 15 minutes of fame a while back, but since I had this picture just kind of laying around, I had to use it.

Thanks to Cracked.com for the image.

The Sovereign Citizen Movement, the Turner Diaries, and How They Destroy America

I was looking through that list from The Southern Poverty Law Center that I linked to in yesterday's post, and something kind of jumped out at me.

There is something called The Sovereign Citizen Movement, taken up by a pack of lawless morons on the right with the belief that they are not citizens of any states, but are "sovereign" unto themselves.

They refuse to pay taxes, refuse to license their vehicles, refuse to get Social Security numbers or drivers' licenses, or pretty much any of that avalanche of normal personal identity papers that come tumbling out of your wallet when a cop asks for them.

The are, indeed a bunch of wackos. And they are a large bunch -- over 100,000 hard core members and another 300,000 around the periphery. Many of them have already been sentenced to long prison terms for tax evasion, but that fact has only served to make them martyrs in the movement.

They are also known for stockpiling weapons and ammunition, plus the chemicals and other necessities to build various types of bombs.

So what we have is a large crowd of unhinged Rambo-wannabes who seem to think they can successfully overthrow the government of the United States by armed insurrection.

The fact that they are out there, that they believe in this shit, and that they seem willing to put their plans into effect, that some of them are willing to die for their belief in this pile of porcine excrement is scary. It is so scary, in fact, that something called National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, an academic study group out of the University of Maryland, has cited a survey of law-enforcement officials and agencies across the United States and concluded that the movement was the single greatest threat to their communities, ranking above Islamic terrorists and jihadists.

One of the "Holy Writs" of the movement in a 1978 novel called The Turner Diaries, written by William Luther Pierce (former leader of the white nationalist organization. National Alliance) under the pseudonym "Andrew Macdonald".

It has somehow slipped out of copyright, so you can get a copy of it for FREE at The Internet Archives at this location, in a variety of formats.

When you see the format you like, e.g., "epub", just put your mouse on it, right-click and choose "Save Link As..." You will be able to place a copy on your computer in a location of your choice and then open it with any standard e-reader.

It's definitely worth reading, just a much as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is worth reading -- it is another one of their "source documents", also available free from the same site in the same formats.

May you live in interesting times, indeed.

When Is a Terrorist Not a Terrorist?

The answer, according to Faux News coverage anyway, is when he is not a Muslim. The recent events in Paris brought the foaming froth to the mouths of the talking assheads on Faux News, who are insisting that Obama is a fascist-communist-Nazi-America-hating-Islam-enabling atheist traitor for not calling it "Islamist terrorism".

Leave it to those fuckers to politicize any tragedy and blame it on Obama.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has compiled a list of the rightwing terrorist plots against the United States and its people in the 20 years since the 1995 terrorist bombing of Oklahoma City, and it's a fucking long one!

All of them have a couple of things in common, though. There are no "Islamists" on that list, but it is way top-heavy with "Christianists".

And the second thing?

As far as I can tell, Faux News did not describe a single one of these as "terrorist".

I guess it depends not just on what is getting blown up or how, but more on who is doing it.

What again was that thing about Christianity being the "religion of peace"?

Book of the Month: Auschwitz: A New History

It's time to bring back the One Pissed Off Veteran Book of the Month, and to start off the New Year, may I present Auschwitz: A New History by Laurence Rees.

At this point in our history, 70 years after the end of World War II, you'd think we already knew everything about the Holocaust and its ultimate symbol of man's inhumanity, the death camps at Auschwitz-Berkenau. But you'd be wrong.

This book is based on years of interviews with not only survivors of the camps but also former guards and Russian "liberators". Rees also spent a lot of time in the archives of the former Soviet Union after its fall and managed to dig out some fascinating previously-unknown facts.

For example, when the Russian soldiers liberated the camps, the inmates were, in many respects, little better off -- sure, they were not going to be gassed, but they were going to die of starvation, exposure and physical abuse at the hands of their Russian "liberators". Many of the inmates, Jewish and Russian, were taken to Russia and immediately sent into the gulag. Those Jews who were not sent to Siberia ultimately tried to go home, only to find that there was no home to go to. Their village neighbors in Poland, Hungary, Austria, Germany, etc., had moved into their houses and taken over their businesses. Even former "friends" gave them the cold shoulder -- No Jews Wanted Here. The deep strain of Anti-Semitism that had enveloped Europe for centuries was still alive, even after the Nazis were defeated.

There are a lot more surprising and little-known details surrounding Auschwitz, including the shockingly eye-opening interviews with former guards, many of whom still felt no remorse at what they had done. They truly believed that they were helping to rid the world of a pestilent scourge that was, at best, only half-human.

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An Open Letter to Obama Haters: You Just Wasted Ten Years of Your Life

Thanks to bernardpliers over at The Daily Kos, here is Dear Obama Hater - You Just Wasted A Decade Of Your Life:

Lots of you  continue to get unhinged emails from people on Facebook, your drunk uncle, and various Tea Party relatives. Here's a gentle response to them....
Pretty soon Obama will be gone and you will have to face up to the fact that you will have lost a whole decade of your life passing around conspiracy theories and whipping yourself into a frenzy of hatred.  All of you lost friends, severed relationships with family members, and some of you even lost your job or your marriage due to your unhinged behavior.
You lost that decade wailing about Obama the gay Communist Muslim narcissist dictator who was going to let the UN invade America and various hoaxes like "death panels," birth certificates, and the "Ground Zero Mosque" (remember how you wasted two years of your life over that?).  Just think of what you could have accomplished if you hadn't wasted all that time.  You could have gotten a college degree, you could have written a book, you could have run your first marathon, you could have built a boat and sailed it around the world. You could learned to speak another language - oh wait, you never would have done that.
You kept waiting for Obama to be impeached or for the GOP candidates to "take off the gloves." But they never did because your favorite stories were hoaxes, and the GOP can't impeach or win the White House based on hoaxes. No doubt you were waiting for someone, anyone,  in the White House to be indicted or arrested, like all those people under Nixon and Reagan and Bush, but no dice.  
Many of you will never recover from this experience.  Physically, your health is no doubt worse for having lost a decade watching television and whipping yourself into a frenzy of hatred. Your ability to reason is probably permanently damaged, and nobody really wants to listen to your opinions anyway. Yes, you can successfully annoy the waitress at the diner, because she can't run away from a customer, but that doesn't mean she agrees with you. Some of you will be going into nursing homes because people gave up on you a long time ago and nobody can stand to listen to one more day of you babbling about Saul Alinsky (who died in 1972, by the way).
Some of you have no doubt suffered financially from all the time you wasted hating Obama.  But some of you have actually done very very well under his "anticapitalist," "communist," "dictatorship." You do know that the economy usually does much better under Democrats, right? And that the best four years of job creation in the last 50 years was under Jimmy Carter, right?
The next two years would be a good chance to start making amends to your families and trying to rebuild relations with people in your life.  Yes we know there's another election in 2016 and you'll be falling down the next rabbit hole of insanity, but try to leave your families with a few memories of you acting like a normal human being.
And the next time there is a GOP president, just remember that there will be fatal embassy attacks under the GOP president, just like the dozens of fatal embassy attacks that occurred under previous Republican presidents.  Except Democrats won't be working themselves into a frenzy of conspiracy theories when it happens, they won't be cheerleading for the terrorists, and they won't be trying to overthrow the US government every time something happens.

I'm taking the unusual step of quoting it in its entirety. I think it's that important.

A Solution for Botched Executions in Capital Cases

Let me say up front that I, like most liberals, am against the death penalty. I think it's clear that all of the customary justifications for using it are bogus. If the leading death penalty state, Texas, who has executed 474 persons since 1976, still has a homicide rate of nearly 1200 murders a year, it doesn't appear that the death penalty is really any kind of deterrent.

The families of victims who have watched the executions of those who murdered a member of their family, with the hope of getting some kind of closure -- or revenge -- out of the experience mostly come away dissatisfied, without that feeling of closure. Many of them agree after witnessing it that, despite the crime that took away the life of their loved one, two wrongs don't make a right.

I am also not of that peculiar Orwellian mindset characterized by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Mormon), who once stated that "the death penalty is how we demonstrate our respect for human life."

Just last year, in Oklahoma and in New Mexico, executions by lethal injection (that's the "in" way to do it now -- even Utah did away with its firing squad) were botched so badly that it took hours for one of the condemned to die.

Now drug companies are running the other way because they don't want it known that they supplied lethal drugs for executions. I'm sure that wouldn't be good for the bottom line or for their stock valuations.

There is an easy solution to this. If we really are hell-bent on executing "the bad guys", there's a simple way to take care of it. Every police department of any size confiscates pound upon pound of heroin every year. After it is no longer used for evidence, that heroin is destroyed. By burning, mostly.

Everybody knows that the human body can take just so much heroin shot into it before it will shuffle off this mortal coil. Take some of that seized heroin and inject it into the body of the condemned man (or woman). Any street junkie can tell you what would be a normally fatal dose. Just double that amount -- or triple it, to be safe. It still won't be a tremendous amount. No drug companies are involved, no lawsuits by the families of the condemned man because of the botched execution, no "cruel and unusual" punishment. Just a long slow slide into a blissful oblivion.

If we are still going to insist on this barbaric 19th Century holdover, let's try to be a little smarter about it.

Member of Congress and State Legislators: You can have this idea for free. I won't even expect a shout-out when it is adopted.

You're welcome.

"Sire, the Peasants Are Revolting"

Movie buffs will recognize that as a line from the French Revolution scene in Mel Brooks' History of the World Part 1. To which the king replies, "Phew, you're telling me! They stink on ice!"

Today the conservatives are revolting ("phew, you're telling me"...). But Boner kept his pecker up and fended off challenges from the Teabagger Morons (is that a tautology?) who were trying to oust him as Speaker of the House for being too "liberal".

Too bad it went down in such a civil manner. I was looking forward to that cage match. I'd pay good money for a pay-per-view broadcast of that.

Still, it has all the potential of being a very good year for snarky sideline commentators, like me.

Time for a Boogie-Woogie Break!

Here are famous world champion French Boogie-Woogie dancers, William Mauvais and Maéva Truntzer, dancing to the music of the equally-famous Swiss piano player, Silvan Zingg, with Nuno Alexandre on bass and Simon Shuffle Boyer on drums.

Wow!

A Return to the “Good Old Days”? No Thanks.

The Republicans have made no secret of the fact that they want to destroy the progressive accomplishments of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Mitch McConnell is on record – and on YouTube – with the flat-out statement that “we need to elect more Republicans in order to roll back the New Deal”. You can’t get much more blatant than that.

Well, The Turtle got his wish and now there are Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. Now will they make good on their threat to roll back the New Deal?

And if they did, what would that really mean?

Well, for those who slept through history class, or those who are younger than about 90, there was this little thing called The Great Depression. It started in 1929 when an overinflated stock market crashed, wiping out millions of dollars in savings and investments, rippling through the economy causing banks to fail and creating an unemployment rate of 25% by 1933. (A little perspective: The highest rate of unemployment since the end of the Great Depression was just a little over 10%.)

There was no unemployment insurance, no Social Security, pretty much no “safety net” at all. Families were evicted from homes they could no longer afford, people lined up for blocks in all kinds of weather just for a loaf of bread or a bowl of soup, and churches and other charitable organizations were swamped with requests they could never afford to fulfill.

The affected people coped in as many ways as they could, even going so far as to cobble together housing from cast off materials –  piano crates, old canvas, scrap wood – which they erected on vacant land in the cities. In dubious honor of Herbert Hoover, whom many blamed for the depression, these impromptu communities were called “Hoovervilles”.

Seattle Hooverville circa 1932

Unemployed men – and women, and children – became hobos who crisscrossed the country by freight train seeking work, a dry place to sleep, or a handout of food.

The New Deal changed all of that. It established, among other things, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, Social Security, and the FDIC and hired the unemployed into government jobs. It also promoted labor unions, aided farmers and regulated banks. Many books have been written on all of the good that the New Deal created in American society.

So why do the Republicans want to get rid of it? Because the very people it helped were – and still are – the very people who did not deserve it.

Calvinist theology has played a big part in the thinking of Republicans, indeed of most conservative types, from the very beginning of the settlement of this continent. It’s a thread that has run though American culture almost from the very first – the so-called Pilgrim Fathers themselves were Calvinists.

Briefly, Calvinism proposes that God is a personal god who takes care of his “children”, and those who are blessed with wealth must have been pleasing to God, who has given them earthly rewards for their faith and piety. Sadly, the corollary of this is that the poor have obviously not pleased God and are therefore cursed with the scourge of poverty. This sentiment has been expressed in several variations by many Republican politicians, but it all boils down to erstwhile presidential candidate Herman Cain’s infamous “blame yourself”: If you are poor it’s your own fault. Scratch a Republican and you’ll find that sentiment. No wonder they want to roll back the New Deal – it helps the very people who are least worthy of that help.

One Republican talking point for many years has been that if taxes are lowered, charitable giving will rise, so that all those poor people who are now living on the government dole will be taken care of by charitable organizations. Yeah, sounds good, but how does that really work out? Studies have consistently shown that people in the bottom 20% give to charity, as a percentage of their income, at about twice the rate of people in the top 20%. All those tax breaks we’ve seen over the years, starting with Ronald Reagan, have enabled the rich to pocket their windfall rather than give to charity.

And, as we saw in the Great Depression, charitable organizations are unable to keep up with the demand for their services. Moreover, many people who lived through that depression have said that they didn’t want to take “charity”, in a tone of voice that made it sound like a dirty word.

Why was that? Well, I have my own grandmother’s testimony on that: The charity she went to for help in 1931 did dribble out some to her, but in her words, “They made me crawl for it.”

Most charitable organizations were associated with a church and so they were shackled by the Calvinist mindset. The people who actually needed their assistance were those who were deemed least worthy of receiving it. But if you were willing to swallow your pride, jettison your dignity and get down on your knees in supplication, you might get some help. No wonder people didn’t want to take “charity”. No wonder it became a dirty word.

Do we really want to go back to those Good Old Days? I don’t think so, but our Republican friends do. It’s up to us to not allow that to happen. The only thing that is saving us at the moment is that we have a Democratic president who will veto any all bills that come before him that would roll back the progressive reforms of the New Deal.

Can you imagine what would happen if Mitt Romney had won the presidency? We'd be so fucked.

Gomer to Boner: Down, Boy

Looks like John Boehner is too liberal(!) for his Republican pals. Today brought the news that the equally-unfortunately-named Louie Gomer Gohmert (R-Nutcase) is going to challenge Boehner and run for Speaker of the House.

Not to be outdone, there's a yahoo named Yoho from Florida who is also throwing his pinhead-sized hat into the ring. One Ted Yoho, in fact (R-Wackjob).

The wingnut media, of course, is all over it supporting anybody who is going to challenge that [expletive deleted] Liberal, Johnny Boner.

Boner? Gomer? Yahoo? Cage match! Cage match!

I swear, you can't make this shit up.

This year is gonna be fun.

Spam: Corpse in a Can?

Right up front, I have to admit it: I LOVE Spam (the real Spam, not the email spam, so don't get any ideas about selling me out to the marketeers). I was raised on Spam. I love it, every way you can fix it, from fried Spam-n-eggs to "raw" eaten right out of the can with a fork. I've even created some of my own recipes using Spam.

I am not alone in this -- there are millions of others who eat Spam regularly, even those who claim that they hate it. If everyone hates it so much, then who is buying all that Spam that keeps Hormel Meats and Austin MN flush with cash? It's not just Hawaii.

Everyone knows that Hawaii leads the nation in per-capita consumption of Spam. Anyone who has been there will remember the ready-to-eat Spam sushi for sale in every 7-11-type convenience store. There are millions of web-pages explaining why Hawaiians love Spam. Not surprisingly, there's even an official "Spam Hawaii" website (from Hormel, of course).

But what most people don't know is that Spam is extremely popular throughout the South Pacific. From New Guinea to Melanesia, from Micronesia to Polynesia, the indigenous people (aka "the natives") just can't get enough of it. Why is that?

Well, you can take the usual and customary explanation and believe that Spam came right along with the Americans in WWII, and wherever we went we left behind a legacy of canned luncheon meat that didn't need refrigeration. Even the Cargo Cultists waiting for the return of John Frum likely expect him to bring Spam with him when He returns.

But there is an alternate theory. One of my very favorite writers, Paul Theroux, wrote about Spam in one of his travel books, 1992's The Happy Isles of Oceania. It seemed that everywhere Theroux paddled his kayak amongst the native people of the islands of Oceania, he found that they LOVED Spam.

That was not just a coincidence, it seemed to Theroux. These same natives were, at most, just a couple or three generations removed from cannibalism. In short, the canned meat product we know as Spam was the closest taste they could find to ... human flesh. Canned corpse meat.

Well... Gross.

But actually, that's not going to stop me from eating it, any more than the knowledge that pickled pig's feet are, in fact, actual PIG'S FEET! But I think that now, every time I bite into a delicious chunk of Spam, I'll remember that I am eating the next-best-thing to the Long Pig.

Your Cat Is Plotting To Kill You

As a followup to my post the other day, here is a humorous form of Apophenia. If you have cats, as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed and I do, you'll lnow right away what's going on here. Hope you can sleep well tonight, knowing this...

Some New Years Eve Ramblings

Quick, what do you see here?

If you say "three circles and a line" then you are technically correct. You are also in a very small minority. Most people, even if they consciously try not to, will see a face. Go ahead. Try not to see a face there.

We are a pattern-recognition species, and that stood us in good stead as we were evolving. Those who saw some seemingly random lines but did not see the sabre-tooth tiger behind those lines were likely to have their lives end rather abruptly and would not pass on their genes. Those who saw some random lines and thought, "OMG that's a sabre-tooth tiger!" and ran away, got to live. Even if those random lines were not really a sabre-tooth tiger, they made a clean getaway anyway. "Better safe than sorry" is not just a glib cliché -- it was a way to live (and keep on living).

Apophenia is the experience of finding patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. More specifically, a subset of apophenia is called Pareidolia and deals with seeing or hearing things that aren't really there, such as the "face" above, or the so-called Face on Mars.

Because we have evolved to see patterns, apophenia is something that we all have to guard against, and as the old saying has it, there is a fine line between sanity and madness. Most of us take great pains to ignore that line. Probably because we see it as the first step on the stairway to crazytown.

I have a close family member who has taken that stairway. He is a diagnosed shizophrenic and he sees patterns in everything. And I mean everything, including an (to him) infinitely higher than average number of white Honda cars. It's an easy step from there for to believing that all of the white Hondas are part of a larger -- but hidden -- plan, that they are following him around and spying on him. To what end is never a question that enters the equation. It's enough that they are there, all around him, everywhere, all the time. And, because he refuses to take his meds ("I don't like the way they make me feel"), it is an untreated mental disorder and his long-term prognosis is not good. He has crossed that line from apophenia to paranoia.

The main function of propaganda, and its non-political arm, advertising, is to subtly and not-so-subtly encourage us to see the patterns where they don't exist. Nobody knows this better than Faux News. They are the hands-down experts at placing a semi-transparent grid over reality, where everything they want you to think is pre-patterned out for you. Who else could make a connection between the constitutionally-mandated legal representation of an indigent client accused of a crime and the supposed "socialist" views of someone who is now being considered a presidential candidate? (Hint: It's Hillary Clinton, who was raked over the coals for once acting as a court-appointed defense attorney in a rape case.)

And it's not just Faux News. Pretty much the entire right wing is guilty of it. How else to explain shit like the Obama-was-born-in-Kenya meme, or the Loontown Express that was Benghazi?

An admission: For a while there, many years ago, I was fascinated/obsessed with the concept of "subliminal messaging" in advertising (which is apparently a real thing), having read a couple of books by the notorious Wilson Bryan Key, and started seeing the letters S-E-X in every print ad that I saw. After a while pareidolia took over and I was able to see the letters in randomly textured things like pebble-grain leather, "popcorn" ceilings and towels. Finally I'd had enough and stopped looking for them. But amazingly enough, every so often I still "see" letters in those kinds of surfaces. They are not the infamous S-E-X these days (may be something to do with my age...), more like a random scattering of letters, but my mind can still project them. Weird.

The movie Conspiracy Theory starring Mel Gibson back before he became the living embodiment of Jerry Fletcher, his character in the film, is an example of apophenia. But in this movie, there actually were patterns but only he could see them. Maybe that's a bad example...

So I don't know. Maybe the patterns are there all the time and we are socially conditioned to NOT see them. Or not talk about them if we do see them. Or something...

Or maybe I need another drink. Or two. It is New Years Eve Day after all...

See you all in the new year and thanks for reading.

Further Reading: Programming the Nation?, Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, Confirmation Bias, Cherry Picking, Denialism.

Who the Hell Is Eatoin Shrdlu?

No that is not a Gaelic dancer or Lithuanian farmer. EATOIN SHRDLU -- those are, in order of frequency, the 12 most common letters of the alphabet in written English. This is why I never lose playing the Hangman game on my Nook. Once you go through those letters, you rarely find a Hangman word where you can't fill in the missing letters.

Unsurprisingly, it has its own Wikipedia page, which gives its history, going back to the linotype printing days. It even gives the updated frequency based on modern computer studies: ETAONI RSHDLC or ETAOIN SRHLDCU (13 letters!) -- take your pick; naturally there would be two competing schools of thought on this. But neither of those sounds very "name-y", unlike the original. Those two sound more like secret CIA cryptonymic code designations for Agency operations, as in ZRRIFLE (the Castro Assassination Plot) or JMWAVE (the Miami CIA station) rather than foreign names of people.

Naturally, the Oxford Dictionary also something to say on the whole topic.

So how does it end up? Predictably, again depending on the source, CMFWYGP BVKQJXZ. (That first group actually looks Welsh to me.)

So why does anyone even study this kind of thing? Well, based on my 40-year-old-experience in academia, the less something matters in the "real world", the more likely people are to heatedly argue over it. During the Clinton years, professors actually came to blows over the definition of "is" -- as in "That depends on what your definition of 'is' is"...

The Invention of the Police

I discovered a new-to-me blog, Works in Theory, where I just read an interesting think-piece entitled Origins of the Police:

In England and the United States, the police were invented within the space of just a few decades—roughly from 1825 to 1855.
The new institution was not a response to an increase in crime, and it really didn’t lead to new methods for dealing with crime. The most common way for authorities to solve a crime, before and since the invention of police, has been for someone to tell them who did it.
Besides, crime has to do with the acts of individuals, and the ruling elites who invented the police were responding to challenges posed by collective action. To put it in a nutshell: The authorities created the police in response to large, defiant crowds. That’s
— strikes in England,
— riots in the Northern US,
— and the threat of slave insurrections in the South.
So the police are a response to crowds, not to crime.

The author, David Whitehouse, takes the long view from a Socialist perspective of the rise of capitalism and the corollary invention and evolution of the police, especially in three US cities, New York, Charleston SC and Philadelphia. He comes to the inescapable conclusion that the police are doing today what they have always done, what they were set up to do: Control by intimidation certain large segments of the population to force them into "obeying the law".

It's a long article but it is well worth the time it will take to read it.

Hoover's Masters of Deceit: A Surprising Do-It-Yourself Guide to Going Underground

A ratty paperback copy of J. Edgar Hoover's "magnum opus" and blatant propaganda tool, Masters of Deceit, subtitled "The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It", has been nestled in my bookcase for about fifty years now, ever since the prof of a freshman political science class assigned it as a "valuable textbook on the communist influence in the United States". It kind of surprised me that he would assign it, since, according to Hoover and those of his ilk, all college professors were, at a minimum, "pinkos" if not out-and-out Reds.

Anyway, I happened to run across it last night while I was looking for something else and chanced to pick it up and glance through it. Along with the expected "exposés" of the usual suspects, William Z. Foster, Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, et al., there was a chapter on how the communists target minorities, especially "the Negroes".

It seems that if anyone went out amongst the black population in the United States and did anything to point out what the blacks themselves already knew, e.g., that they were kept down economically and kept ignorant Intellectually by such things as infringement on their right to vote, or work at decent pay, or the establishment of "separate but equal" deteriorating schools and substandard textbooks, then they were "communist agitators" who should be run out of (Ni**er)town on a rail. Apparently anyone who told "the Negroes" anything, except how satisfied they should be in their menial low-pay jobs and their rat-infested firetrap shacks and their antiquated and poorly maintained schools with their outdated and torn textbooks and how happy they ought to be with massa's boot kept firmly on their necks, was nothing more than a Soviet Agent taking orders directly from The Kremlin.

But the most interesting, if not to say illuminating, chapter was one called "How the Underground Works", in which detailed descriptions appear of how the communists go underground, how they evade surveillance, how they lose suspicious cars which may be tailing them, how they change their identities and their appearance, how they use "safe houses" etc. The book devotes nearly 20 pages to this.

It's actually a do-it-yourself guide to dropping out of sight. If you did need to "go underground" (like members of the Weather Underground in the early 70s, an act made musically famous by the Talking Heads' 1989 song, Life During Wartime), Hoover's book would be a valuable detailed textbook on how to do it.

I wonder if anyone actually used it for that. I wouldn't doubt it -- the book was in print starting in 1955 and was, allegedly, a huge best-seller. Bookstores had to be full of used copies by the time 1970 rolled around. I can picture Bill Ayres or Bernadine Dorhn picking up a copy as a lark, for a chuckle at the expense of the "enemy" and for a  window into how the enemy thinks, and then being surprised and elated by the step-by-step instructions on how to go underground, avoid suspicion, shake off your surveillance and disappear.

I hope it happened. That would be the ultimate strike of bitter irony against J. Edgar Hoover.

Dick of the Year

Every year the News Corpse website of media criticism (which I read regularly) chooses whom it wishes to bestow upon the coveted title of "Dick of the Year".

The waiting is over. The hands-down winner of this year's award -- no surprises here --  is the appropriately-named Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney. He proudly joins the Dick Hall of Fame (there may be an actual, genuine "Dick Hall of Fame", but a Google search for that phrase brings up some very odd results).

Speaking of Dicks, whatever happened to the Dickipedia? It was a Wiki dedicated to Dicks everywhere, and it was an equal-opportunity insulter. People like Tucker Carlson and Michele Bachmann shared the designation with people like Michael Moore and Barack Obama.

So what happened to it? Well, according to this guy:

It seems like the corporate overlords at AOL didn't take kindly to the Huffington Post offshoot. What a bunch of dicks. But if you want to take a look at the Way Back Machine... Dickipedia as it was.

And here is that link to the Internet Archives Wayback Machine's capture of The Dickipedia.

Enjoy.

Idris Elba a Black James Bond? Great! -- Not So Fast, Says Rushbo

A little background: Idris Elba is one of my all-time favorite actors. Who can forget him as Russell "Stringer" Bell, the crimelord/aspiring businessman in that great HBO series, The Wire? Or as the angst-ridden police Detective John Luther in the terrific BBC series, Luther? He's been suggested as a possible future movie version of James Bond

With his versatility and range, along with being able to project a sense of smoldering danger, he would be great at playing that role. James Bond may have been originally conceived as a blue-eyed half-Scots half-Swiss white guy by his "daddy" Ian Fleming back in 1953 (over 60 years ago!), but there is nothing in his character or behavior or job description that would preclude the role being taken by a black man. I'm not aware of anyone having a fit over Bond's CIA pal, Felix Leiter, turning black in 2006 for Casino Royale.

But wait! I forgot to include the wheezy rants of America's foremost neo-19th-Century wingnut, that drug-addled ass-pimpled flailing gas-bag draft dodger, Rush Limbaugh:

"James Bond is a total concept put together by Ian Fleming. He was white and Scottish. Period. That is who James Bond is," Limbaugh said.
"But now [they are] suggesting that the next James Bond should be Idris Elba, a black Briton, rather than a white from Scotland. But that's not who James Bond is."
And as if that wasn't bad enough…Limbaugh finished up his rant with an alarmingly self-aware thought.
"I know it's racist to probably point this out."

Gee, ya think?

As the E! Online story pointed out, that statement is, in fact, "alarmingly self-aware" of him. Could Rush Limbaugh finally get so self-aware that he sees that he's become totally irrelevant?

No, I'm not counting on it either.

Killer on the Road, Part II -- Charles Starkweather

After my first post on this topic the other day, I did a little more thinking about the whole "killer on the road" phenomenon. Billy Cook was certainly not the first embodiment of the Killer on the Road, and he certainly wasn't the last, but he sank into obscurity faster than the musical career of The Hollywood Argyles.

So why did his crime spree fall into oblivion while that of Charles Starkweather, almost exactly seven years later and similar in a lot of ways, become world famous and develop such a lasting endurance that he would be the topic of eight movies over the next 30 years -- including the Martin Sheen-Cissy Spacek vehicle Badlands from 1974 and the "eighth most controversial film of all time", Oliver Stone's neo-noir Natural Born Killers from 1991, not to mention the 1982 moody Bruce Springsteen hit, "Nebraska"?

Aside from Starkweather's first killing, on Nov 30, 1957 (which no one even connected with Starkweather until he confessed after his arrest), his killing spree lasted only eight days, from January 21 to January 29, 1958. His body count was higher, but not all that much higher -- only eleven people as compared to Cook's five. That's kind of paltry when it's compared to later killers such as Ted Bundy (at least 30 victims)  or the now forgotten "I-5 Killer", Roger Kibbe (also known as "Roger Who?"), whose suspected number of victims also runs into the 30s.

So how did Charles Starkweather pull off that notoriety when Billy Cook couldn't? What happened during that seven year interim to make Starkweather's story develop the"legs" to be such a long-lasting part of our culture, our psyche?

Part of it goes to the breathlessly-reported sordid detail that Starkweather had his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, with him the whole time, after first murdering her entire family (shades of Mickey and Mallory Knox!), and the fact that they had terrorized and then murdered a wealthy local industrialist along with his wife and their maid, in their own home!. To the media, a wealthy person's violent death, especially in a home invasion, is worth far more than that of the "Poor White Trash" represented by Caril Ann's family, and consequently that crime gets way more air play and more column inches in the reporting. But that's only part of the story.

What happened in just seven short years comes down to two things: The advent of universal access to television by "the masses", and rise of the Juvenile Delinquent.

In 1951, when Billy Cook made his run, television was something that only the well-to-do had. TVs were expensive, there were relatively few broadcasters, and the general feeling in the entertainment world was that after the novelty wore off, no one would really watch television -- in the words of movie mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, people would soon get tired of staring at a plywood box in their living rooms. By 1957, however, everyone except a few Luddite curmudgeons and cousin-marryin' moonshinin' backwoods-livin' peckerheads had a television set, and it was rapidly becoming THE source for the news of the world. Including news of a violence-prone Juvenile Delinquent serial killer roaming the highways in search of victims.

Anyone who lived through the 50s remembers the archetypal Juvenile Delinquent: Black leather jacket, Levi's, engineer boots, ducktail haircut, long sideburns, bad attitude, lack of respect for authority, cigarette dangling from snarly lips, etc. No, not the emasculated sitcom version epitomized in the pseudo-cool of Henry Winkler's "The Fonz" on the Happy Days TV series. The real JD was dangerous, unpredictable, bristling with switchblade knives and and bubbling over with barely-contained violence. According to the media's stereotypical portrayal of him, anyway.

It was also the media's frantic obsession with "Troubled Youth" (and coincidentally the market share it represented). Starting in the early 1950s, analyzing and explaining the Troubled Youth of the nation became a kind of cottage industry, and television coverage of youth crimes only served to exacerbate that trend.

First comic books were blamed -- they were solely responsible for the increase in teenage delinquency, an accusation that came from the questionable "science" of one Dr. Fredric Wertham and his crusade to have all comic books banned.

Then it was movies. Then it was television itself. Every print media outlet, from The New York Times to Life Magazine to Reader's Digest was wringing its collective editorial hands over the sudden juvenile "crime wave" that had swept up American Youth in its ugly paws. Even the newspaper comics' Dick Tracy got into the act in 1956, in a story arc concerning a punk named "Joe Period" who fit the classic mold -- ducktail haircut, black leather jacket, etc. -- which immediately morphed into a story concerning the murderously violent teenage genius offspring of one of Tracy's most classic villains, 1944's Flattop, one Flattop Jr. by name.

The 1955 release of Nicholas Ray's homage to rebellious youth, Rebel Without a Cause, starring the very symbol of teenage angst, James Dean (despite the fact that he was 24), hit the youth culture like a tidal wave combined with an earthquake  combined with a meteor strike. Charles Starkweather even started modeling himself after the rebellious Dean.

The media were, naturally, quick to pick up on this trend and a ton of Teen Rebellion movies were produced, from the middle-of-the-road Blackboard Jungle to quickie crime-car-culture exploitation films like Hotrod Gang and its cult-classic sequel, The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, all of them cashing in on the perceived personal danger inherent in just being around a teenager in 1950s America.

So in 1958 it all came together, and a nation was glued to the little screen for over a week in late January, following the "exploits" of America's new favorite Juvenile Delinquent/spree killer, Charles Starkweather.

Sorry, Billy Cook. Timing is everything.

Oh, and that sudden increase in crime by "Juvenile Delinquents" in the 1950s? It never happened.

A Christmas Song

Feel-Good Christmas Story

Here's your feel-good story for Christmas: Prankster Gives Homeless Man $100, Secretly Follows Him And Learns He Buys Food For Others.

There. Go enjoy your holiday. I'll see you on the other side.