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.

"A White and Delightsome People"

It used to be that the Mormons believed and taught that all Native Americans were descended from a group of emigrants from the Middle East to the West Coast of the Americas about 600 BCE(!) who were eventually called "Lamanites", followers of a guy named Laman in the big civil war that happened circa 400 AD, wherein all of the Lamanites slaughtered to the last man their rival tribe, the Nephites. This was a Very Big Deal, with mounted cavalry, chariots pulled by horses, steel swords, the whole works. Never mind the total absence of historical/sociological/biological/archeological evidence of all this, seeing as how, for example, the remains of horses, chariots, steel swords, etc., have not been found anywhere in the Pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere and there is absolutely zero Middle Eastern DNA in the genetics of the "Indians".

However, long before this big battle, as punishment for their apparently innate rebelliousness, God cursed those Lamanites with a "skin of blackness" so that they would "not be enticing" to the Nephites. Who remained "white", of course.

Despite that curse, the Lamanites embarked on some serious ass-kicking, stomped the Nephites literally out of existence, and wasted no time in populating the North and South American continents with up to 50 million people or more by the time Columbus showed up late to the party. And that population explosion all happened in just a little over 1000 years. I'll leave it to you to do the math on that, but me, I don't think it really adds up.

The Mormon Church had for years an "Indian Placement Program", wherein it identified the best and the brightest among the children of the various tribes that inhabited Mormon Country and yanked them off the rez to be raised the homes of middle-class white Mormon foster parents, all in the interest of the betterment of the race by erasing their Native culture and grinding "civilization" into them. Not to mention the salvation of their very souls by infecting them at an early age with the basic tenets of Mormonism.

This all started in 1947, and, coincidentally I'm sure, the Navajo Nation, primary recipient of this cultural hijacking and ideological brainwashing, had become suddenly wealthy in strategic minerals, specifically uranium, which was needed to fuel the nuclear armaments industry. Many of the Indian Placement Program alumni went on to positions of power and authority in theor tribes and have become individually quite successful economically. It was initially limited just to the Navajo Nation but later it expanded out to include the Hopi and other "strategically-important" tribes. Hardscrabble poverty-ridden tribes like the Paiute had to "suck hind tit" -- they apparently had no place in "God's Plan" for the betterment of the Savages.

Sadly, I have to report that none of these "Lamanite Brethren" have turned into a "white and delightsome people" yet, despite the promise of God that if they kept the commandments, served the faith, exalted Joseph Smith, stayed away from the booze, etc., then He would lift that horrible curse and turn them into that white and delightsome people. Now of course, the newer versions of the Book of Mormon (the so-called-by-Mormons "the world's most perfect book" -- which has undergone several thousand editorial revisions over the 170+ years it's been in print...) calls it a "pure and delightsome people".

Jeez, though. It's not like the Mormons didn't try really really hard, and wish-oh-wish with all their might.

Here's no less an authority than Mormon "Apostle" and later Prophet, Seer and Revelator of the Church, (aka the "head honcho") Spencer W. Kimball, speaking at a Mormon General Conference in 1960:

I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today... The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos, five were darker but equally delightsome. The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter we represent, the little member girl—sixteen—sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents—on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather... These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated.

This was just 13 years after the program had started. Jeez, you'd think that the whole Navajo Nation would have achieved that elusive "white and delightsome" status by now.

But now that I think of it, isn't one of the symptoms of radiation poisoning through lengthy exposure to uranium a bleaching out of the skin to a deathly pallor?

Or maybe that's just death itself. It's called a "deathly pallor" for a reason, I guess...