The Pope Smokes Rope

The Persistent Sound Of Memory

After the advent of Stereophonic sound for 33 1/3 LP recordings, 'Quadrophonic' sound, albums engineered for four-track playback, appeared in the early 1970's. They were a relatively short-lived phenomenon, and not that many Quadrophonic records were available relative to all the two-channel Stereo albums being marketed (It was that decade's version of Beta and VHS).

I bought Sonic Seasons, the electronic music of (then) Walter Carlos; "The Engulfed Cathedral", Isao Tomita's interpretation of Debussy piano works; and several in the Environments - A Totally New Concept In Sound series.

They were essentially field recordings -- several technicians with multiple microphones and (then studio- or motion-picture sound quality) reel-to-reel tape recorders simply went to a location, and let the tapes roll. The concept was originally created by Syntonic Research, with albums released through Atlantic Records. Syntonic / Atlantic eventually released eleven different environmental recordings, in two-channel and Quad stereo versions.

I liked the concept of putting on 'ordinary' sounds as background White Noise (Also, getting toasted while listening to them was pleasant). I bought Disc 1 ('The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore' and 'Optimum Aviary'); Disc 5 ('The Psychologically Ultimate Thunderstorm' and 'Gentle Rain In A Pine Forest'), and Disc 3 -- "Dawn In New Hope, Pennsylvania", and "Be-In In Central Park", described by a reviewer as

The sounds of a spontaneous gathering in Central Park, April 6, 1969 with strolling musicians, dancers, anti-war protesters, and fragments of conversations. This recording presents the unmistakable ambiance of a place and time in culture now gone. Though many of the Environments recordings have been imitated, this one stands alone as a totally unique recording.

The Be-In was held in what is now Strawberry Fields in New York's Central Park, on Easter weekend, April 6, 1969.

On that day, the number-one ASCAP hit song in America was Let The Sunshine In, performed by the Fifth Dimension from the musical, "Hair". The Grateful Dead and 'AUM' were playing that night at the Avalon Ballroom on Van Ness in San Francisco. British explorer Wally Herbert reached the North Pole on foot that day, having started to walk across the entire frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean -- 3,720 miles -- sixteen months before.

And in New York City's Central Park, the roving sound engineers of Syntronics Research, Inc. eventually picked up the sounds of a pro-marijuana rally as part of the Be-In. One of the performers was David Peel, a 'personality' on the Lower East Side, who urged the unseen crowd to chant, "I Like Mar-i-juan-a!", and to smoke dope. He was a fixture in the Hippie, and later the more political Yippie, counterculture scenes, and was friendly with John Lennon after his move to New York (so much so that the FBI once mistakenly distributed a picture of Peel, assuming that he was Lennon). Peel was also well-known at the time for a (non-Quadrophonic, one would assume) album entitled The Pope Smokes Dope.

David Peel: Singing “until the day I drop dead and go to rock ’n’ roll heaven.”

So it was with a small amount of surprise that I came across this article in the New York Times: Peel, aged 68, still kicking out the jams as a Character in The Big Apple. The photo above is exactly the Peel I remembered hearing, and hearing about.

Peel is a part of the cultural soundscape of my past. I admit that I haven't thought about him in over thirty years; but remembering the album briefly touched my memories of "a place and time in culture now gone" -- and to honor all of that, more than any other reason, is what moved me to put this up.

I do not, of course, know whether the Pope smokes dope or not. But it's an alliterative turn of phrase, que no?

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I Got Nothin' Sunday

The Usual, And A Small Furry Puppy

A Sampler of stories appearing on the Intertubes this fine morning:

• Lehman's Top 50 employees Paid nearly $700M Just Before It Collapsed

  Walter Hamilton, Andrew Tangel and Stuart Pfeifer, Los Angeles Times Exclusive: Less than a year before the 2008 collapse of Lehman Bros. plunged the global economy into a terrifying free fall, the Wall Street firm awarded nearly $700 million to 50 of its highest-paid employees, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.
  
  ..."The numbers are shocking but consistent with the fact that in some ways Wall Street has been run as a casino for extracting money from the real economy and using it to pay extraordinary high levels of compensation — one might say obscenely high — to a small number of people," said Lisa Donner, executive director of the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform.

• Spain In "Crisis Of Huge Proportions" After S&P Downgrade

  (REUTERS) - Spain's sickly economy faces a "crisis of huge proportions", a minister said on Friday, as unemployment hit its highest level in almost two decades and Standard and Poor's downgraded the government's debt by two notches.
  
  Unemployment shot up to 24 percent in the first quarter, one of the worst jobless figures in the developed world. Retail sales slumped for the twenty-first consecutive month as a recession cuts into consumer spending.
  
  "The figures are terrible for everyone and terrible for the government ... Spain is in a crisis of huge proportions," Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said in a radio interview.

• Data Harvesting At Google Not A Rogue Act

  David Streitfeld, New York Times: SAN FRANCISCO — Google’s harvesting of e-mails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households in the United States and around the world was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained, but a program that supervisors knew about, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report.
  
  ...The so-called payload data was secretly collected between 2007 and 2010 as part of Street View, a project to photograph streetscapes over much of the civilized world...
  
  ...Google says the data collection was legal. But when regulators asked to see what had been collected, Google refused, the report says, saying it might break privacy and wiretapping laws if it shared the material.
  
  A Google spokeswoman said Saturday that the company had much stricter privacy controls than it used to, in part because of the Street View controversy. She expressed the hope that with the release of the full report, “we can now put this matter behind us.”

• White House Correspondent's Dinner 'Shameful Display Of Whoredom'

  (Hamilton Nolan, Gawker:) ...Do you know who knows that the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner is a shameful display of whoredom that makes the "average American" ... continue to disregard the findings of any ostensibly neutral journalistic outlet in favor of their own ideology of choice, because they have a fully solidified belief that the "mainstream media" is little more than a bunch of ball-lapping lapdogs to whoever's in power?
  
  Everyone. Everyone knows this. Even the members of the media who attend the White House Whores Despondence Dinner know this, deep down, whether they admit it openly or lie defensively ... and no, it does not matter, because they are professionals who would never be compromised by the fact that they just spent their favorite evening of the year joshing playfully with the powerful officials they are supposed to be afflicting and reveling in their close proximity to the celebrities that they wish they were.

• 4-Week-Old Puppy Rescued After Being Stuck In Drain Pipe

  (Daily Mail UK) Wrapped up in a towel, this four-week-old puppy was saved after more than 12 hours stuck underground in a drain pipe. Rescue workers had to dig a 16-foot hole in the ground to free the puppy, which became trapped in Detroit, Michigan.
  
  

  

  Obligatory Cute Small Animal Photo At Conclusion Of Blog Rant (Photo: Daily Mail)
  
  The owner said that the Puggle-Daschund mix became stuck after crawling into the basement drain pipe and venturing more than 15 [feet]...When the puppy had not emerged from the pipe the next morning, the worried owner called in the Michigan Humane Society, plumbers and a local excavation company.
  
  A rescue party used their hands, shovels and a digger to free the little dog.

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It Cannot Be Repeated Enough

Little Rupert, 5 Years Old, Testifies (Again) In Merrie Olde Anguland

I've said it before: If you want to bite into what Little Rupert has to sell, fine.

Just don't blame anyone but yourself if it tastes like you're sucking Joseph Goebbels' underwear.

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Und: I've said before:

Rupert pumps sewage on his customers because he doesn't have a high regard for human beings, generally -- I've always assumed that you lie to or steal from people you don't respect. Little Rupert must hold humanity in utter contempt, since all his media provides is a formulaic, lowest-common-denominator style of entertainment. No truth at all; no accuracy, and no information that isn't right-wing propaganda.

And when you hold your customers (i.e., other people) in contempt, Rupert, you scumbag -- like you, the people who pump that sewage believe they can do whatever they want in pursuit of your goals. You set the example for them to follow. They did what they did because you rewarded them for doing so then and continue to do so, now.

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Roll Up For The Magical Misery Tour

You Say Yes; We Say No

Hey - Tirez Sur Mon Doigt; D'accord? (Photo: EPA, via UK Telegraph)

The path of Austerity™ in Europe -- baling out Banksters and Eurozone Zombie Governments on the one hand; slashing those government's budgets on the other -- has had two principal champions: Conservative politicians Angela Merkel in Germany, and Nicolas Sarkozy in France.
Economists (principally Keynesians) have predicted for over three years that Austerity™ would do nothing but drag 'spendthrift, profligate' European nations like Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland (and to some degree, Britain) into a spiral of increased unemployment and reduced consumer demand. They would, in turn, drag the rest of Europe into even deeper recession. Which would eventually torpedo the very, very modest 'recovery' here in the United States.

There's a great deal of current evidence that the Keynesians were, uh, right on the money.
France had a national elections today, pitting Center-Right Nicolas Sarkozy against the Socialist party candidate Francois Hollande. This election would have been between Sarkozy and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund, but for an unanticipated event. Strauss-Kahn wasn't exactly a fan of Austerity; as reported by The American Prospect in the week after his arrest on rape charges in New York City:

As recently as [April, 2011], in a talk at the Brookings Institution pointedly titled "The Global Jobs Crisis," Strauss-Kahn... [said] that

We need financial-sector reform and repair, to put the banks back in the service of the real economy, and direct credit to small and medium-term enterprises -- key drivers of employment and indeed of growth... But fiscal tightening can lower growth in the short term, and this can even increase long-term unemployment, turning a cyclical into a structural problem. The bottom line is that fiscal adjustment must be done with an eye kept keenly on growth.

When he was arrested at JFK airport, Strauss-Kahn was on his way to meet with Angela Merkel in Berlin to talk about resolving what was the Greek sovereign debt crisis. His abrupt departure as head of the IMF meant that the Greek situation was 'solved' by others -- among them Christine Legarde, the Fund's new head and someone much more sympathetic with Merkel and Sarkozy's New Austerian fiscal policies. And, being charged with rape also meant that Strauss-Kahn was neutralized as a political threat to Sarkozy as the Socialist Party's candidate for the French Presidency.

At the time of Strauss-Kahn's arrest, Greece was heading for its fourth (of a total of five, so far) financial crisis. A principal issue was whether holders of Greek bonds could be persuaded to accept a reduction in the interest they'd receive when the bonds were redeemed: A 'haircut', something that would affect a number of European major banks and brokerage houses.
This was negotiated, finally, in the winter of 2011-2012; by then the Greek parliament had no choice. Without the deal (which included more public-sector job cuts and selling off major state-owned industries to Oligarchs private interests), Greece would otherwise have had to default on all its obligations, pull out of the Eurozone, which would send the Euro plummeting on the currency markets and threaten the very existence of the European Union. 

But in May of 2011, when Strauss-Kahn was being arrested, the "haircut" hadn't yet been accepted. I don't know what his position was regarding it. This isn't an argument that his removal from any position of influence in European economic or political affairs was the result of a conspiracy -- just a recognition that there are a lot of interconnected interests at play. 

For New Austerians like Sarkozy, like Merkel, the stakes are very high. For them, the EU's financial crisis is about nothing less than maintaining a coherent European economic and political union in the face of a rising China, the U.S., Russia, and the Middle East, all of whom are in competition with EU nations for the Earth's shrinking natural resources.
 
The turnout in France's election yesterday was high -- eighty per cent of France's 44.5 million eligible voters turned out for what everyone in and outside the country understood was in part a referendum on Sarkozy's embrace of Austerity.

Both candidates qualified for the second round on May 6, with Mr Hollande taking 28 to 29 per cent of the vote and Mr Sarkozy 25 to 26, according to unofficial estimates from multiple sources.
Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen came third with between 17 and 20 per cent, beating far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon, who scored between 10.5 and 13 per cent, according to the estimates...
The two finalists will face off in round two on May 6, when Mr Hollande is expected to easily romp home...

In America, however, the focus of our news agencies is on other, more important things.
That the French are willing to vote for Hollande, a person who appears lackluster at best against the more energetic and charismatic Sarkozy, is an indication that the election isn't about personalities, but the policies.
It might seem that Sarkozy's departure could be the beginning of the end of Austerity -- but not yet, and not in any positive way. The European Central Bank, the majority of the EU's finance ministers and the IMF are committed to Merkel's Castor Oil and Carrots plan of strict budget targets and bank bailouts; lower standards of living for many Europeans and relief for corrupt financial institutions. Hollande may be a socialist, but he can't hold back the tide.

Austerity as a policy will simply have to play out and fail, spectacularly. Unfortunately a lot of people will be affected -- some more, others less; but unless you're one of the 1%, the cost of the New Austerian's lack of vision will be paid by you, and me. And for many French, that future is already here.

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MEHR: And, from the Monday morning Reuter's wire:

NEW YORK / FRAKFURT , April 23 (Reuters) - U.S. stock index futures pointed to a sharply lower open on Monday on weak European data and renewed anxiety over how the region would tackle its debt crisis...
The euro zone's business slump deepened at a far faster pace than expected in April as European factories had their worst month since June 2009. Investors worried that fears of recession would undermine the political will to tackle the debt crisis...
France's presidential election was thrown wide open by the surprisingly high score of a far-right candidate in the first round vote while the Dutch government was set to resign in a crisis over budget cuts.

I suppose the only response to the continuing fiscal deterioration Europe is experiencing as a result of Austerity is (as The Great Curmudgeon would say) -- more Austerity.

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Und Noch Einmal, Mit Schwein: Bondad weighs in as well: Austerity is a failure. Empirically.
Any Questions?

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Und Nun Auch Diesen Auflage, "Was Ist Denn Mit Dir Los, Lumpenhunde?":

(NYT Wednesday, April 25) LONDON — Britain slid back into recession in the first quarter of the year, according to official figures released Wednesday, undercutting the government’s argument that its austerity program was working.
The British economy shrank 0.2 percent in the first quarter after contracting 0.3 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, the Office for National Statistics said Wednesday. The first double-dip recession in the country since the 1970s was mainly the result of a slump in the construction industry at the beginning of this year.
Some economists had predicted a small increase in first-quarter gross domestic product after recent surveys had indicated that the British economy was recovering, albeit very slowly. Prime Minister David Cameron’s government had pointed to the recovery as a sign that the austerity measures it implemented were working.
“The economy slipping back into recession comes as a blow” said Azad Zangana, an economist at Schroders. “It’s too early to call for a reversal of government policy, though these latest results do highlight that the economy will not withstand any further acceleration in cuts.”

Any Questions?

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Random Barking

So... What?

Whether this observation bounded by the strictures of religious belief, or as open as any question in quantum mechanics -- it can't be denied that we live on a single planet, its atmosphere captured by gravity, orbiting a single star in a universe so vast that we can't conceive just how large that vastness is.

So.. what? What is all this for? Religion will insist on one answer, science another -- though unlike religious leaders, scientists (not ones paid by the Koch Brothers™, or some other bored billionaire, anyway) will tell you their answers aren't absolute. But though you can debate about the purpose, the facts of where and how big can't be argued. So, what's it for? What are we for?

And from that perspective, President Boner's toupee, Obama's support for Banksters™ or 'National Security', or "Bucky The Beaver" Brooks' rat-toothed giggle doesn't mean much.

Obligatory Toupee Photo In Middle Of Existential Rant: President Obama Graciously Ignores The Incident Of President Boner's Hairpiece (Photo: People/Newsroom; TPM; Inset Detail By Mongo)

In the face of the unanswered Big Questions, many of the things we consider so important, aren't. There are obvious things which are important, but much of what captures our attention in this place we inhabit -- as Ellen Ripley reminds us, "all this, all this bullshit you think is so important" -- isn't.

We should be asking The Big Questions. But, I'm only a Dog, and no one listens to me.

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Hubble 22

Years Of Deeper Vision


Area Of 30 Doradus, In The Large Magellanic Cloud

NASA recently celebrated the 22nd anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Deep Space Telescope by releasing the image above of a large (as in, tens of light-years across) star-forming area in a satellite galaxy to our own.

You can see the official slide show, created for the twentieth anniversary of the orbiting telescope, of the best of the images from Hubble, at NASA's website.

We live in a big place. We also make it difficult for ourselves to remember that.

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...Am Grünen Strand Der Spree

A River Runs Through It


Bodemusee At North End Of The Museums Insel; Monbijou Bridge
At Left, The Pergammon Museum And Neue Galerie Further On;
Fernsehturm At Alexanderplatz In The Background (per.ch)

If you know much about Berlin, you probably remember that the river Spree curves up through the city from the south, tracing a lazy S[pree]-shaped path back down before turning north again; eventually, it makes its way to the Baltic. It was the main reason Berlin came to be; the city began as two trading posts on either side of the river, southwest of what is today the Alexanderplatz.


Tour Barges Navigate Locks On The Spree At The Friederich
Bridge; Berlin Cathedral In The Background (per.ch)

For hundreds of years, rivers in Europe like the Spree were the principal means of getting trade into the city -- everything from fish to timber, beer, hides, cloth and vegetables -- before the advent of the train and the automobile. Today, the Spree is a highway for tourists and some private traffic -- and the Wasserpolizei, of course.


UBahn Station At Wittenbergplatz; KaDaWe On Tauentzienstrasse
In The Background. (per.ch)

...And aside from a river running through it, another kind of river travels through the city -- but that's for another post.

(Incidentally, these pictures of Berlin were taken by a vacationing Czech (or Slovak) in July of 2010. You can see their full photo collection of their journey around Berlin here.)

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Japan Will Burn Fukishima's Radioactive Debris

What Is Past Is Prologue: We Regretfully Express Regret

(I originally saw this on Barry Ritzholz's The Big Picture and was more appalled by the criminal stupidity he was reporting than I can express. Much of this post is based on his article and the links in it; go and read Barry's post.)

In May, Japan will begin burning approximately 25,000 tons of highly radioactive debris created by the March 2011 tsunami, then irradiated by the disaster at the four Fukushima nuclear reactors.

Members of the international scientific and regulatory community said while the Fukushima catastrophe was taking place that the management of Tepco, the company which owns and operated the reactors, and the Japanese government, was intentionally downplaying and covering up the extent of the crisis.

They're still doing it. The Japanese government has artificially lowered their own public standards for what is considered 'permissible' in exposing human beings to radioactivity. Their standards are no longer those used by the international scientific community.

If you want to eliminate an embarrassment, the expense and responsibility of dealing with it, then simply deny the reality. Drive in private cars to large, expensive private homes and sit in a peaceful garden. There; no more bad things -- at least, not for you.

As reported in the Japanese press, the debris contains up to 100,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram.

FUKUSHIMA (Kyodo) -- The state will start building storage facilities for debris generated by the March 2011 tsunami as early as May at two locations in a coastal area of Naraha town, Fukushima Prefecture...

Debris created by the tsunami largely remains untouched within a 20-kilometer radius of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant from which residents have been forced to evacuate in the aftermath of the earthquake-triggered disaster.

About 2.5 hectares of land have already been secured at the two locations, a large portion of which lies within the exclusion zone, and about 25,000 tons of debris are expected to be brought into the facilities beginning in the summer, according to the officials...

If more than 100,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium are found per kilogram of debris, the debris will be transferred to a medium-term storage facility to be built by the state.

But if burnable debris contains 100,000 becquerels of radioactive Cesium or less, it may be disposed of at a temporary incinerator to be built within the prefecture, according to the officials.

The American NRC and international nuclear experts have said that debris with even lower levels of radioactive Cesium, twenty times lower than what the Japanese will allow to be burned at Fukushima, would need to be buried underground for thousands of years.

Burning radioactive debris only spreads it. Particles from the burning will end up not only in other parts of Japan, but will travel with prevailing winds across the Pacific to fall in Hawaii, Canada, Oregon; Washington and California.

Effectively, it recreates the Fukushima disaster by releasing a huge amount of radioactivity on the ground back into the air. Again, from The Big Picture:

It is bad enough that radiation from Fukushima is spreading across the Pacific to the United States through air and water, that the Japanese are underplaying the enormous threat posed by the spent fuel pools, and that the Japanese have engaged in a massive cover-up of the severity of the Fukushima crisis.

But intentionally burning radioactive debris to try to cover up the problem – and spreading radiation worldwide in the process – is an entirely separate affront.

Postscript: In addition to burning radioactive debris, Japan intends to build tents over the leaking Fukushima reactors. While this sounds like a way to contain the radiation, it would actually funnel it straight up and spread it globally:

But nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen said that the tents – while helping to protect workers at Fukushima – will actually increase the dispersion of radioactive gases. Specifically, Tepco will pump radiation out through stacks, which will push radiation up to a higher elevation, dispersing it even further around the world.

A commenter to Ritholtz's article noted (paragraphing added for clarity):

I have Hashimoto’s. Basically my thyroid died and went to heaven and I was lucky I didn’t. The interesting thing is that my specific manifestation of the disease is endemic to left handed midwestern males born in the mid 50′s. One could directly correlate it to open air nuclear testing if one wanted to, but Eisenhower’s favorite complex might take offense.

We already have excellent data on worldwide particulate transmission as a result of Krakatoa and Pinatubo.

Now we will have excellent data on various aggressive radiation induced cancers.

I find it interesting that this slow motion train wreck has been going on for quite a while and only now are we disturbed? There were plans to evacuate TOKYO. This is a tragedy of the commons of the first order and there is nothing we can do about it. Fait accompli.

Even so, we know there has been a cover-up of the disaster so far; there's nothing we can do about that but shun those responsible and publicly shame them, if you're into that sort of thing. But, unlike the disaster that followed the earthquake and tsunami, we know in advance what will happen. This is a completely avoidable catastrophe.

But the United States government won't do much. Why not? Another commenter to the same article at Ritholtz's site said, "Yeah right , threaten *permanent sanctions* with one of the few allies we have" to counter a rising China, beginning to flex its armed muscle. No; our leaders won't do more than "express concern" to the Japanese.

And when it's all done, and in years to come when the damage is obvious and public; those Japanese scientists, government officials and all the fun boys and girls at Tepco will just bow a few times for the cameras. They'll say, "We express regret". Everyone will just have to understand, and that will just have to be enough.

Again: This is avoidable. It does not have to happen. Is anyone doing anything to stop it?

Didn't think so.

As a species, it's a wonder that humans can remember how to breathe.

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Dog Dog Dog Dog

Friday The 13th

All kinds of stuff out there give me the sense that all is not well.

However, I recommend going and looking at this courtesy of "Sad And Useless", a site whose owner uses a photo of David McCollum (in his appearance on the second season of The Outer Limits in the mid-60's) as his little avatar.

And you thought we wouldn't notice. We are a smarter species than you realize. Anyway, given the pervading sense of doom I'm feeling, I needed the laugh.

MEHR: My friend at the Place Of Witless Labor™, El Rog The Magnificent, walked up to me with a grim expression. "Heard the news?" I allowed that I had not, but it didn't look good. "Two fully-loaded 747's just collided over Warsaw."

"Oh, my God; that's -- how could that have happened?" I said.

"Dunno." El Rog shook his head. "One 747 carries about six hundred people -- want to hear the ironic thing? They both crashed into a cemetery."

"Oh, Criminey."

"Yeah." El Rog nodded, then looked at me. "So far, the Poles have recovered over fourteen thousand bodies," he said, and smiled a little as he walked away, leaving me with the understanding that I'd just been Had.

"It's still Friday the 13th, you know," I said to him.

"All day. You're expecting something bad to happen," El Rog said. "It will -- just not today."

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Kulturschande *

John Derbyshire's Public, Total, And Irreversible Loss
Of Bowel And Bladder Control

John Derbyshire, a conservative pundit and gadfly at the National Review (originally founded by William F. Buckley, and later run by unindicted war criminals), author of several books, including We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, provided us with a spectacle last week: Virtually dousing himself with gasoline and lighting a fantasy match, via this post at the Takimag website: "The Talk: Nonblack Version".

Apparently, John-Boy had read several articles that referenced a "talk" which at least some Black parents purportedly have with their children about living in a society dominated by non-African Americans (I've preserved some of the links to them from Derbyshire's original below):

[Derbyshire quotes:]“Sean O’Reilly was 16 when his mother gave him the talk that most black parents give their teenage sons,” Denisa R. Superville of the Hackensack (NJ) Record tells us. Meanwhile, down in Atlanta: “Her sons were 12 and 8 when Marlyn Tillman realized it was time for her to have the talk,” Gracie Bonds Staples writes in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Leonard Greene talks about the talk in the New York Post. Someone bylined as KJ Dell’Antonia talks about the talk in The New York Times. Darryl Owens talks about the talk in the Orlando Sentinel.

Yes, talk about the talk is all over.

There is a talk that nonblack Americans have with their kids, too. My own kids, now 19 and 16, have had it in bits and pieces as subtopics have arisen. If I were to assemble it into a single talk, it would look something like the following...

Herr Derbyshire said, to paraphrase, Blacks are generally less intelligent than Caucasians or Asians, whom Blacks simply lump together as "white"; are more likely to be undeservedly promoted into management positions in the workplace; and are prone to violent behavior against "whites", if only on the basis of statistics. All this, and more like it, is what he tells his own children.

He tells this to his children. And where, pray, do people like him believe that racism comes from? Not only in the images and attitudes children unconsciously absorb from the world around them -- but because someone teaches them.

It's What They Do

Some pundits with a large soapbox to stand on, or their own site -- precisely because they publish lies and drivel, and use the Net to sling their own feces beyond their cages -- deserve to be ignored, vilified; to have their IP addresses blocked and sent to dwell in the land of Little Rupert, East of Podhoretz, with the crying, and the wailing, and the gnashing of mandibles (and the hey hey hey, as Professor Frink might tell us).

A few obvious examples of public masturbation are Drudge, Malkin; Goldberg, Erikson; and Breitbart (a Grand Public Masterdebater); but it's a long list. Thinking human beings recoil from the junk that spills out of their addled minds and into the rinse-cycle whirl of the Intertubes (Or, we laugh our asses off. Or both). They deserve our contempt, and receive it -- but they won't leave. They won't perform a swan song -- a GBCW! post: Good-Bye, Cruel World!.

However, the GBCW doesn't tend to happen in Right Blogostan, where the operative principle is to lie, and outrageously. As (for example) Breitbart and O'Keefe have shown us, don't just strain credulity, piss on it. And, Right bloggers have automatic support among a large community, willing to swallow every wingnut, asshat, echo-chamber fantasy of the moment.

Because, you see, the Right must stand in solidarity. They see a hostile world, dominated by elite Liberals and their Media; Jews; non-white people; and the undeserving poor and undocumented aliens, all supported by the taxes of honest working Americans (Also, there are giant radioactive scorpions being trained by the UN to bring about a one-world government headed by George Soros).

So You Wanna Be One Of The Kool Kidz

Sometimes, the GBCW is purely voluntary. At some level, the Blogosphere -- Left or Right -- mimics high school. Bloggers and regular commentors tend to affiliate, and like any other association of humans can be exclusionary. On occasion someone appears whose style in posting comments is grating, awkward. They insist on being right, on dominating a thread; they just don't express ideas well. They may be off-topic, and are thin-skinned when teased -- as they will be (humans are humans, and anonymous ones even more so).

Usually, these people have a blog of their own. They want to be one of the Kool Kidz, too, and have lots of site traffic -- to be popular. To "be someone". The problem is, they already are someone, and that they've confused the raison d'etre of their blog, or commenting on someone else's post, with wanting to appear on something like the old Gong Show.

So, when no one reads their amazingly important, detailed, lengthy blog posts; and they're ignored when adding to threads on other sites... finally, they may write that GBCW post, clomping off the Internet stage with a final, long soliloquy explaining ad nauseum why they are right and the rest of the world is wrong, wrong, wrong; and also, bad. If they are religious, they may hint darkly that god (somebody's god, anyway) will punish everyone for not eagerly lapping up their vomit.

(For some reason, I'm reminded of R. Crumb's Everyman character, Flakey Foont, constantly looking to Mister Natural for enlightenment, befuddled; angry at his mistreatment in life. In one final panel, Foont weeps as, in a thought bubble, he imagines his tombstone's epitaph: Here Lies Flakey Foont / A Beautiful Soul / Crushed By An Uncaring World..)

Wingnut Self-Immolation

Then, there's the other category of GBCW, almost unique to the Right, where a Rightist pundit's mask slips and the true reptilian horror is shown for all to see and wonder at. This sort of thing happens all the time -- you can't get through a week without a Rightist politician, or self-proclaimed pundit like Lard Boy, saying something insulting or incendiary.

So, when a wingnut pundit like Derbyshire can't maintain the Right's cherished fiction of bipartisan cooperation, or that they believe non-white persons are their equals, for anyone on the Right to take notice their outburst has to cross a line that is damaging for conservatism in general -- particularly in an election year.

A recent example: Lard Boy's public ridicule of a young woman as a slut and a prostitute, over her appearance before Congress on the subject of contraception. After enough heavy-hitters on the Right strongly hinted he'd stepped over a line, El Fathead reluctantly made a self-justifying half-apology -- as good as you'll get from a pathetic bully like Rush.

Trent Lott Flies The Bonny Blue Flag

But an example more to the point is then-Senator Trent Lott's fulsome praise of Strom Thurmond at his 100th birthday party in 2002: "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him," Said Trent. "We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either".

Thurmond had run for president in 1948 as a 'Dixiecrat', expousing what Wikipedia notes as "an explicit States' Rights platform that challenged the Civil Rights Movement and later, the Civil Rights Act as illegally overturning the Separation of powers under the United States Constitution." In other words, Antebellum 'Southern values'.

In the appropriate storm of criticism that followed, Lott was forced to resign as Majority Leader of the Senate in 2003, and blamed the evil nasty Intertubes bloggers for keeping the story alive (Lott resigned from the Senate in 2007, and opened a lobbying firm a block from the Senate offices).

Missy Laura Talks To The Nation

On August 10, 2010, Laura Schlessenger, right-wing radio commentator "Doctor Laura", had an exchange with a Black woman who had called in to her syndicated program to speak about a personal issue: Occasional racial slurs her husband (who is Caucasian) and his friends would make in front of her.

CALLER: I'm having an issue with my husband where I'm starting to grow very resentful of him. I'm black, and he's white. We've been around some of his friends and family members who start making racist comments as if I'm not there or if I'm not black. And my husband ignores those comments, and it hurts my feelings. And he acts like --

SCHLESSINGER: Well, can you give me an example of a racist comment? 'Cause sometimes people are hypersensitive. So tell me what's -- give me two good examples of racist comments.

CALLER: OK. Last night -- good example -- we had a neighbor come over, and this neighbor -- when every time he comes over, it's always a black comment. It's, "Oh, well, how do you black people like doing this?" And, "Do black people really like doing that?" And for a long time, I would ignore it. But last night, I got to the point where it --

SCHLESSINGER: I don't think that's racist.

CALLER: Well, the stereotype --

SCHLESSINGER: I don't think that's racist. No, I think that --

CALLER: [unintelligible]

SCHLESSINGER: No, no, no. I think that's -- well, listen, without giving much thought, a lot of blacks voted for Obama simply 'cause he was half-black. Didn't matter what he was gonna do in office, it was a black thing. You gotta know that. That's not a surprise. Not everything that somebody says -- we had friends over the other day; we got about 35 people here -- the guys who were gonna start playing basketball. I was going to go out and play basketball. My bodyguard and my dear friend is a black man. And I said, "White men can't jump; I want you on my team." That was racist? That was funny.

CALLER: How about the N-word? So, the N-word's been thrown around --

SCHLESSINGER: Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is n----r, n----r, n----r.

CALLER: That isn't --

SCHLESSINGER: I don't get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it's a horrible thing; but when black people say it, it's affectionate. It's very confusing. Don't hang up, I want to talk to you some more. Don't go away.

I'm Dr. Laura Schlessinger. I'll be right back.

It continued in the same vein after "Doctor Laura" returned. "Yeah," Frau Schlessenger said; "We've got a black man as president, and we have more complaining about racism than ever. I mean, I think that's hilarious". When the caller disagreed, the good doctor responded, "[You've] got a chip on your shoulder. Can't do much about that."

Frau Schlessenger spent much of the next week trying to defend herself on air, and on August 17, announced on Larry King Live that she was leaving commercial AM radio, moving to subscription-only Sirrus to continue her special brand of joy without "some special interest group deciding this is a time to silence a voice of dissent."

Old School Dog-Whistle

Derbyshire is originally British, a naturalized American citizen; well-educated; his wife is Asian, and his sons are mixed-race Amerasians. You'd think he knew exactlywhat was about to happen as he clicked "Send" to upload his article to 'Takimag', and it did: The National Review terminated Derbyshire; the NROnline's editor, Rich Lowry, posted:

[Derbyshire's] latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways.

(I so like Lowry's use of the nickname, "Derb"; it smacks of Groton or Andover, of lacrosse or crew at Yale. Just kind of tone the NR likes to have amongst its own; so "Our Crowd".)

I don't agree with Lowry that Derbyshire's views are such that the NR "would never associate ourselves otherwise". I believe the Right perpetuates racist perspectives, the common assumptions that Derbyshire is so willing to teach his children -- but assumptions only admitted to quietly, between the "right sort" of people.

One Cardinal rule of the wingnut tribe is not to embarrass the Right by admitting to its true shared values, particularly about how icky Blacks and The Poor are (they're so -- well, so Black, and so poor). Derbyshire's irretrievable sin was to say so, openly and in public.

But in calling him 'Derb' (both affectionate and dismissive at once), Lowry showed he didn't repudiate an old friend and member of his class; only that he was uncomfortable with Derb's statements. Lowry will meet Ol' Derb, buy him a drink and say, "What were you thinking, Derb? I mean, we all know about 'Those People'; but you had to go and say it. I had to cut you from the NR; you didn't really give me a choice, old man."

(Think this is a stretch? Possibly. But I doubt it.)

The Right is eager to play the race card with a sitting Black President, but they have to do it through innuendo, metaphors, verbal allusions. I understand that I'm offering no examples, but I believe Lowry and people like him on the Right tacitly support Derbyshire's "views" concerning the comparative intelligence, aggression and "otherness" of Blacks in America. And, so they can't be accused of overt racism, they'll just make oblique references. They'll use the dog whistle.

Race is an issue in America. There's been a tremendous amount of racist garbage, blog posts and comments, crudely-drawn cartoons, aimed not at Obama's policies but at his race (One of the first comments I heard after the 2008 election from someone at work was, "Guess we can't call it the 'White House' anymore!").

And Right blogostan has never stopped baying about the 'conspiracy' around the legitimacy of his birth certificate. Breitbart's last super-secret, stop-the-presses video was about Obama giving someone a hug -- proof of his radicalism, that he is (hint, hint) a Black man first and an American second.

You can barely hear the National Anthem any longer for all the dog-whistling on the Right that's been going on since 2008. And none of the Good Ole Boys repudiates it; I see Sessions, Haley Barbour, and Saxby Chambliss (who crawled into office by calling a triple-amputee Vietnam veteran a traitor) whining on television and want to puke. People like this are a shame on my country.

We're a badly polarized society -- possibly more so than at any time since The Great Depression, certainly since 1965 -- and at a time when we can least afford to be so divided. Asshats like Derbyshire (aber natürlich, only for the purest of reasons) have pushed and escalated our society's divisions and put us at each others' throats. They'd like to keep us there.

Race is an issue in America. Electing Barack Obama as president didn't solve it. I'm not happy with Obama as a president, or a Democrat -- but it would never cross my mind to believe his public policies or decision-making are the product of his being Black.

The Right, on the other hand, seems to think that is the case -- and while Derbyshire will be publicly repudiated by conservatives for his remarks, many of those same people on the Right will attempt to perform a quiet, virtual lynching as they attempt to 'save' America from ... the Justice in Equality, I guess.

Auf Nicht Wiedersehen, Derbyshire, you Lumpenhund nutter.

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( * "Kulturschande" Is more than just bringing shame upon one's culture, because the concept in German of Kultur encompasses much more than that. But, trust me; it's pejorative.)

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