Mitt Romney And Paul Ryan

Be Very Very F'ing Afraid


The Candidates In Tampa: Mitzy (L) Getting SuperPAC Donations;
Little Paul Ryan (R) Looks For Austerity From The American People

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This Is Your Universe

Try Not To Screw It Up


(All photos © NASA/ESA)

NASA and the European Space Agency recently released some of the all-time greatest hits of the Hubble Space Telescope. TPM has posted a slideshow of many of these images (see it here). They're breathtaking; amazing. Stunning.





We live inside of all this -- but our perspectives aren't normally wide enough to take it all in. And the universe is, you know -- a lot to take in. As we stumble on into what I fear will be a Little Mitt presidency, and as the majority of Americans are forced to "feel the pain" of Little Paul Ryan's Austerity plans so that Our Lords and Masters can have a wonderful, comfortable life with vacations, servants and treats. They are, as they believe, 'Masters Of The Universe'.

But, not. So we should try for the larger perspective, and keep images like these in mind -- because I'm greatly afraid that the fix is in, Boyz 'n Girls. Herr Obama had his opportunity -- and in his desire to play fair and become the Great Conciliator, was knocked down and curb-stomped by the Rethugs because that's all they understand or know how to do -- that, and buying or fixing elections. And my sense is they're about to do just that.

But even if that's not what comes to pass, and Obama manages to hold on by his fingerprints -- the perspective is the same. The Universe doesn't recognize election cycles or nationalism or religious bigotry and violence. It simply exists, and it's very beautiful.





All the swirls and blobs of light in the exposure above are individual galaxies. Whole galaxies. Hopefully on at least one of them, there are life forms who have determined how to live without doing as relatively poor a job as we've done in the past 50,000 years, and particularly in the past 5,000.

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MEHR: Saturday, August 25th; It was just announced on The New York Times online edition half an hour ago that Neil Armstrong, first human being to set foot on the surface of Earth's moon, passed away at age 92.

As The Great Curmudgeon says, I'm so old that I can remember watching Armstrong do it, on a black-and-white television in the long-ago, Tricky-Dick, Vietnam war, rock-and-roll summer of 1969.

Now he knows what we do not. Sail on, Neil.

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Hulk Decide

Or, Those Things Which Herr Hulk Does Not Care For



We inaugurate yet another DogBlog category for the three people and the superintelligent parakeet who read them: Hulk Not Like; or, a category of Things found wanting by the second cousin to the Jolly Green Giant, deserving of opprobrium and HULK SMASH!!!

More later this weekend on what or whom Monsieur Le Hulk is displeased with.

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MEHR: A friend has observed that they like the "idea behind" Hulk Not Like, but wish I wouldn't use images that contain profanity.



Well, okay then. Let it not be said we don't provide a fair and balanced offering of Hulk images.

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Cha-Cha-Cha-Cha In Amerika

You No Like? Then You Go Someplace Else.

Offered without Comment, except to say if it was a possibility to emigrate back to the land my grandfathers left just 92 years ago, I'd be sorely tempted.

What holds me back is that it's the same Rich Man's Mambo over there, too.


(Screenshot: New York Times, August 16, 2012)
Click On Image To Enlarge. Fun For The Kids!


(Screenshot: Reuters "Counterparties", August 16, 2012)
Click On Image To Enlarge. Good And Good For You!

Good Thursday, and Good Luck.

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MEHR: Then, there's this recent image from the Curiosity Rover:

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Zombie-Eyed Granny-Starver For President

Little Paul Ryan, Five Years Old

Mitzy chooses someone to save him. And The Krug Man weighs in on Little Paul's Austerity Plan, insofar as the DizneyChannel News will allow him.

Because as America has its version of the Taliban, so we have our versions of Europe's Die Eisenkanzellerin Angela and "We Must Have More Austerity" Osborne. And, at the head of that pack of fools is Paul Ryan.

[Ryan said to John Huntsman during the GOP prmaries] “This is, by all accounts, an age of austerity for this country. A jobs crisis. Also a pending crisis in Washington. I wonder what specifically you would do to say to Americans, "These are cuts I'm going to make in federal spending that cause pain, that will require sacrifice?"

Later he asked [Huntsman]:

“Governor Huntsman, name three areas where Americans will feel real pain in order to balance the budget?”

He asked a third time:

“Three programs that will make Americans feel pain, sir?”

Later he asked Rick Santorum:

“Senator Santorum, same question: [Name] Three programs that would have to be cut to make Americans feel pain, to sacrifice, if we're going to balance the budget.”

If America elects Mitzy and The Prince Of Pain (or, if the Rethugs pull another Fat Karl's Ohio and steal the election), we deserve everything about the Feudalistic, grey and Oligarch-ridden future we will get.

The only problem is, I don't see the Democratic party as being any less Bought by The Masters Of The Universe™. They're just more willing to maintain the polite fiction that everyone else on the planet is every bit as good as the ten thousand or so persons whose wealth and influence rules the Earth.

The Rethugs want to take your money and give much of it to the 1%; curb-stomp you because they enjoy it; then rub your face in the mud and bellow out a cry of 'victory' because Life is for Teh Strong, don'cha know.

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Election Year

Same As It Ever Was


Goldman-Sachs Mascot Celebrates In Typical Style

The New York Times this morning:

Federal authorities ended two investigations into the actions of Goldman Sachs during the financial crisis, handing a quiet victory to the bank after years of public scrutiny.

In a rare statement late Thursday, the Justice Department said there was “not a viable basis to bring a criminal prosecution” against Goldman or its employees after a Congressional committee asked prosecutors to investigate several mortgage deals at the bank...

The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had examined troubled mortgage securities that Goldman sold to investors... (and the Subcommittee) also suggested prosecutors investigate whether the chief executive of the bank, Lloyd Blankfein, had misled lawmakers during public testimony.

Separately, Goldman Sachs announced early Thursday that the Securities and Exchange Commission had ended an investigation into a $1.3 billion subprime mortgage deal, taking no action. The move was an about-face for the commission, which notified the bank in February that it planned to pursue a civil action.

“We are pleased that this matter is behind us,” a bank spokesman said Thursday.

And what kind of example does this set for the kids?

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MEHR: Of course, we don't waste time attempting to bring the Masters Of The Universe © to justice; those who destabilized not only a national but a global economy and impoverished hundreds of millions of people around the world -- those who lied, cheated, stole, and explain away their continuing behavior as routine and acceptable for Winners in Life's Great Lottery.

Here in downtown America, it's more important to provide the Kids with examples in their own neighborhoods of what justice is truly about -- that the perpetrators shall suffer the full weight of Jurisprudence to extract payment for their crime and sin, in the American tradition:

Police in Bucks County say two teens have been cited for doodling
on the street with chalk.

The Doylestown Intelligencer reports Friday that 18-year-old Connor
Logan and a 17-year-old friend drew a whale and sea turtles in a local
parking lot.

(Via The Great Curmudgeon)

Any Questions?

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Two Minutes To Midnight

Ruh-Roh

Yahoo News reports that

The White House refused to comment Thursday on a bombshell Israeli media report that President Barack Obama recently received an updated intelligence assessment that Iran has made surprising strides towards being able to build a nuclear weapon.

The Haaretz newspaper reported that Obama had received a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)—the consensus assessment of the American intelligence community—that "Iran has made surprising, notable progress in the research and development of key components of its military nuclear program." The daily cited unnamed "Western diplomats and Israeli officials."

..."We are leading an international effort to impose upon Iran what even the Iranian president has identified as the most stringent sanctions ever imposed on any country," [Press Secretary Jay] Carney said. "And that effort is designed of what we believe remains to be a window of opportunity to persuade Iran through these sanctions and through diplomatic efforts to forgo its nuclear weapons ambitions and live to its international obligations." He added that "hardly a week goes by" without the economic vise tightening further.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israeli Radio that there was "apparently a report by American intelligence agencies" that was "making the rounds of high offices" and has heightened American worries about Iran's nuclear program.

"As far as we know, it comes very close to our own estimate, I would say, as opposed to earlier American estimates. It transforms the Iranian situation to an even more urgent one, and it is even less likely that we will know every development in time on the Iranian nuclear program," Barak said, according to a CBS report on the interview.

Israel, widely thought to be an undeclared nuclear power, has warned it cannot tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran and reserves the right to use military force to prevent that outcome.

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Denied

New York State Votes 'No'

London-based Financial Times website reported that New York state's Department Of Financial Services has revoked the ability of the British bank, Standard Chartered, to do business in the state.

The order said that between 2001 and 2010 Standard Chartered concealed from US authorities about 60,000 transactions for Iranian clients, amounting to about $250bn and generating “hundreds of millions of dollars” in fees for the bank.

Among the Iranian clients were the Central Bank of Iran and two state-owned institutions, Bank Saderat and Bank Melli.

The department, led by Benjamin Lawsky, superintendent of financial services, alleged that Standard Chartered had falsified records and evaded US sanctions. One Standard and Chartered director allegedly told a colleague: “You f---ing Americans. Who are you to tell us, the rest of the world, that we’re not going to deal with Iranians?”

In addition to the bank’s “systematic misconduct” with Iran, the Department said it had evidence that Standard Chartered appeared to have conducted “similar schemes” with Libya, Myanmar and Sudan.

...and in all the scandals and error reported in just the past six months (Peregrine; MF Global; JP Morgan; HSBC; the LIBOR rate-fixing; Knight Financial), no one is really demanding more accountability from the financial and banking sector.

And why is that?

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Mars

Curiosity Lands


Curiosity Parachuting Toward Martian Surface, Seen By Orbiting
Satellite (Photo: NASA; Talking Points Memo)


One Of The First Images Sent Back By Curiosity After Landing
(Photo: New York Times; NASA TV, Via Reuters)

I grew up as a child of the Space Age, not far from one of the major launch sites that could conjure up names out of a mythic past: Mercury; Gemini; Apollo; Thor, Atlas, Saturn. The deep rumble of a rocket engine tearing through the sky was a regular experience; everyone stopped what they were doing to look up and watch a point of fire at the top of a long, white contrail arching out over the ocean.

It was also normal to see some of them explode, destroyed by a signal from ground controllers as they veered off course. Early one winter evening in the early 1960's, I stood looking out my bedroom window at a launched missile that had clearly gone off course. Its contrail pinwheeled around behind it; what I didn't know at the time was that I could only have seen this spinning effect if the rocket was corkscrewing through the air, nose-on, right in my direction. Suddenly it disappeared in a flash and grey-black cloud, the report of the explosion arriving a moment later and black specks of debris falling to the ground. I went back to reading a comic book.


Missile Contrail At Sunset; This One Was A Success

I collected everything I could get my hands on in magazines about space, the solar system, rocketry and NASA; I had a collection of every Mission Patch ever made. I met John Glenn (who genuinely seemed uncomfortable with being famous) for two minutes in 1963 and was -- well, on the Moon for the rest of the day.

The notion of space exploration has always seemed a particularly American enterprise -- second into space itself but first to the Moon (probes, then the landing in July of 1969), first to send probes and then rovers to Mars; the leader in aerospace engineering and development.

The past quarter-century, however, has sen the rise of the ESA (European Space Agency), and in particular China, which seems poised to use some of its 'new wealth' in an attempt to create a permanent Moon base. I like the idea of humankind leaving the planet -- believing the old Robert Heinlein quote that "Earth is simply too small a basket for humanity to put all its eggs in" -- but there's a part of me that bridles (unrealistically) when thinking they may not be Americans. Clearly, they did their jobs well in the schools of my youth.

While the American Empire is in decline, we managed to divert enough money -- less than $10 Billion, actually -- to develop and build the Curiosity rover and launch it to spend the next two years testing aspects of Martian soil, atmosphere and rocks in an attempt to answer some fundamental questions around how both Mars, and the Earth, were formed. One question they may answer, or not, is whether in the distant past Mars ever supported any forms of life.

If the answer to that question is an unambiguous Yes, then it will be proof that life can develop independently, anywhere, given the correct conditions. That Drake's equation was correct, and that out in the vastness of space are other life forms.

(This reminds me of two things: One, a childhood memory, and the other a joke. I had a coloring book in the mid-1950's which showed the history of rocket development -- I have a dim recollection of coloring a glum-looking Robert Goddard and one of his rockets, and a happier-looking Werner von Braun.

(One of the last line drawings were two astronauts [You knew they had to be American, of course], having climbed down from a lander that looked like something out of Rocketship XM [a 1950 sci-fi film about a journey to Mars].


Rocketship-XM Takes Off For Mars, With A Soundtrack
By Ferde Grofe, No Less (Photo: MST3K Fansite)

(The astronauts had landed on another planet; in the background were tall, alien buildings; one of the astronauts was shaking hands with a bald alien in a robe, whose face appeared a bit like Max von Sydow as Ming The Merciless [Yeah; Ming of Mongo; I know] in Flash Gordon. It was a friendly image, and nothing like the hostile experiences of crews in films like Ridley Scott's Alien or Prometheus.

(The joke [Which Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman put into the mouth of a character in Stardust Memories] is, If there's life on other planets, I can prove it has a Marxist economy.)

Yesterday, at about 10:20 PM, PDST, the Curiosity probe shot into the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 miles an hour, slowed through atmospheric entry and eventually deployed a carrier with thrusters that allowed it to 'float' over the Martian surface long enough to lower the Curiosity rover at its designated landing site -- just south of the Martian equator, at the southeast edge of Gale Crater.

Touchdown was confirmed at 10:32 PM and roughly two minutes later, Curiosity began transmitting grainy black-and-white test images back to NASA mission control.

The rover, called Curiosity, ushers in a new era of exploration that could turn up evidence that the Red Planet once had the necessary ingredients for life — or might even still harbor life today. NASA and administration officials were also quick to point to the success to counter criticism that the space agency had turned into a creaky bureaucracy incapable of matching its past glory.

“If anybody has been harboring doubts about the status of U.S. leadership in space,” John P. Holdren, the president’s science adviser, said at a news conference following the landing, “well, there’s a one-ton, automobile-size piece of American ingenuity, and it’s sitting on the surface of Mars right now.”

At present, the idea of a manned mission to Mars is being discussed for the mid 2030's (god willing and the creek, or ocean levels, don't rise). If I live that long, I will be a very old man when it happens -- but some of me is still the boy who watched rockets thunder up into the sky, and wanted to see us take the next step in a larger evolution. The boy still wants them to be American; the man wants them to be human beings.

Mars!

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Reprint Heaven: Im Abendrot

A Distant Drummer

(Something from last December. I'd been thinking then, as I am now -- and with no obvious reason -- about how things change, generally through periods of intense uncertainty and suffering; and how the past is often swept out with little ceremony. We end up relying on the artist, the composer, to have preserved something of the best of those times, and of the human spirit.)



Richard Strauss; Photographed At Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, 1930 (BBC)

I'm listening to music from a vanished world, just now: Kiri Te Kanawa's 1979 rendition of Four Last Songs and Orchestral Songs by Richard Strauss (1864 - 1949) (London Symphony Orchestra; Andrew Davis, Cond.; CBS Masterworks [CD] MK35140).

All of it is music from a world, twice-vanished, if you consider it. Strauss' Orchestral Songs were all written in the world of fin-de-siecle Vienna at the turn of the last century -- Strauss' personification of a composer both prophetic and (for a time) avant-garde; the measured movements and manners of the Hapsburg empire. Riding in the morning and walking on the Ring; pastries from Demel's; where women of the upper classes changed their clothing with their moods; and servants could be dismissed, without reference, their lives irreparably changed, over a trifle.



I've been reading Bill Bryson's At Home recently, and the one thing which stands out in contrast through the book is how hard and constricted the world was when you had no money, or legal protections. Considering only three hundred years of the 17th through the early 20th centuries (relatively more 'modern' and accessible to us than life in the Middle Ages or Renaissance), the "laboring and servant classes" worked far harder than you'd like to imagine.

I've had shitty jobs and bad circumstances in my time, but always had options. The working-class men and women of Strauss' day did not. Our 21st Century state of consciousness would perceive the lot of those without much money or power as unfair, exploited; wage slavery, and worse. And Strauss was among the upper ten per cent of European society by income, at least, if not the '1 per centers'.

That pre-August 1914 world, as Scott Fitzgerald pointed out, could not have existed without the sharp distinctions of class and wealth; still, it rested on the timbers of a thousand years of European culture -- and most of it was blown sky-high by the Great War. It's hard to reconcile the beauty of a Klimt, or Strauss' Mutterändelei, with four years of witless slaughter on the Western and Eastern fronts.

The guns stopped. The map of Europe was altered; the Hapsburg empire was gone. The cultural framework of Europe had been shaken on its foundations -- yet most of it was intact. There was still some continuity between the lost certainties of that Old World, and whatever lay ahead.

Tod, Und Verklärung

The nazis lionized Strauss after their rise to power in 1933, and in that same year appointed him head of the New Germany's Reichsmusikkammer (State Bureau of Music), which tacitly gave Strauss some control over state-sponsored presentation of music -- concerts, and opera.

The nazis did so because Hitler liked (some of) Strauss' music, and Little Joey Goebbels, the Rupert Murdoch of his times, flattered and manipulated Hitler whenever he could. He would use Strauss as a revered figurehead; but privately, Joey referred to Strauss as "a pipsqueak ... Unfortunately we still need him, but one day we shall have our own music and then ... no further need of this decadent neurotic". Outside Germany, reaction to Strauss' appointment was viewed by some as approval of the nazis; conductor Arturo Toscanini said publicly, "To Strauss the composer, I take off my hat. To Strauss the man I put it back on again."

Strauss continued to promote classical works by Jewish composers in concert, and continually faced pressure from nazi functionaries to stop. Then, in 1935, Strauss composed a comic opera with a friend, the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, who wrote the libretto. It opened in Dresden and was shut down by local nazi authorities because Zweig was Jewish; Strauss tried but could not force reopening the production.

"Do you believe I am ... guided by the thought that I am 'German'?" Strauss bitterly complained to Zweig, who had left Germany for England a year earlier, in a letter. "Do you suppose Mozart was consciously 'Aryan' when he composed? I recognize only two types of people: those who have talent and those who have none." The letter was intercepted by the Gestapo; subsequently, Strauss was dismissed as head of the Reichsmusikkammer. Zweig was able to leave Europe to the Americas, only to commit suicide with his wife in Brazil, in 1942 -- a not-uncommon occurrence among escapees from the nazi empire.

Strauss' son Franz was married; his wife, Alice, was Jewish. In 1938, she and her two children were placed under house arrest in Garmisch-Partenkirchen (where Strauss himself had moved in the 1920's). Strauss asked acquaintances in Berlin with nazi contacts to intervene and ensure they were not formally arrested (in 1938, incarceration as a means of extorting German or Austrian Jews of their money or property was common, particularly after the Anschluss). For the next six years, Strauss repeatedly had to ask, plead and beg the nazis for the lives of members of his family.

(An observation: Any person humbling themselves before ignorant bullies is saddening, distasteful. The more gifted and nuanced the individual, the more painful it must be. Given Strauss' revulsion over the nazis, I can only imagine what dealing with them on any level -- let alone begging them for mercy, based on nothing but the strength of his international reputation -- must have felt like.)

He drove to Theresienstadt concentration camp to ask for the release of Alice's mother, Marie von Grab (which was refused) and wrote letters to the SS pleading for the release of her children, his daughter-in law's brothers and sisters (the letters were ignored).

In 1942, he moved himself and his family from Garmisch back to Vienna. In the ten years after his brush with and dismissal by the nazis, Strauss suddenly became focused, more alive, composing some of his most nuanced and challenging work when he was in his seventies and eighties -- especially Metamorphosen (Metamorphosis), A Study For 23 Solo Strings, based on a soul-searching poem by Goethe concerning the causes of man's darker nature, particularly as it is expressed in war. He also produced The Rosenkavalier Suite in 1944, a reworking of the main themes in one of his most successful operas.

Also in 1944, while Strauss was out of Vienna, Franz and Alice and their children were arrested by the Gestapo and briefly imprisoned; only Strauss's asking the Gauleiter of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach (who liked Strauss' music), to intervene saved them from 'deportation'. Strauss took them back to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where they survived for roughly another year under house arrest.

Zueignung

The European conflict in the Second World War ended with Germany's unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945.

Strauss wrote in his journal:

The most terrible period of human history is at an end, the twelve year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany's 2000 years of cultural evolution met its doom.

Strauss' Four Last Songs -- Spring, September; Before Sleeping and At Sunset -- were his Abscheid, a farewell, to the world he had been born into, erased by totalitarianism and allied bombing and aggressive war, by the ovens of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

But the Songs aren't a raging against the approach of night in the midst of destruction, the aftermath of depravity; they aren't a complaint. They're filled with Strauss' recognition of ending, but with the sense that his personal end is due, fitting: It's time. If anything, they're filled with tenderness, a compassion that sounds sorrowful, but echoes the recognition that ultimately life is in no way fair -- not for the laborer, nor the genius who feels the world through music.

The Last Songs were first performed by Kirsten Flagstad in May of 1950, eight months after Strauss' death. The Norwegian soprano was in her mid-fifties when premiering the works, and while she acquitted herself in performance there were questions beforehand whether she had enough tonal range left in her voice -- and, there were questions whether Flagstad herself (who had remained in Norway, never quite a collaborator but never really a resistor, during the nazi occupation) was the appropriate choice to sing Strauss' final Lieder.


Twelve Years From The London Recordings: Faster, Not Better

I've heard a number of renditions of the Last Songs by sopranos over the past thirty-plus years; my personal favorite is Te Kanawa's 1979 recordings, because she simply puts more of what I believe Strauss was feeling into her interpretation.

I first heard her, doing Beim Schlafengehen (Before Sleeping), one of the most soulful of the four, in the 1981 Australian film, "The Year Of Living Dangerously": Billy Kwan (Linda Hunt) puts on a record for Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) as operatic background to a scene of Gibson's romantic longing for British Embassy (and MI-6) officer, Sigourney Weaver (My girlfriend at the time loved the music, which gave me the opportunity to introduce her to Strauss, generally; sadly, that interest didn't develop. Neither did the romance).

Te Kanawa returned to do the Last Songs twelve years later, in a Decca recording with the Weiner Philharmoniker conducted by Georg Solti, and some of the same Orchestral Songs -- but this time, with only a piano accompaniment.

Scott Joplin once said, "It is never right to play Ragtime fast"... Solti's 1991 interpretation of these Lieder with Te Kanawa is definitely up tempo. It sounds and feels too hurried, for me -- particularly when I compare it with Kanawa's earlier rendition, where Davis let her communicate Strauss' bittersweet longing for life, even at its close, in every passage without reaching for low-hanging fruit.

It would be easy to play Joplin as if it were background music for a grainy, sepia-toned silent film, just as it's simpler to present Strauss and things Viennese as a confectioner's treat in saccharine, Art Noveau swirls, a surface appreciation of place and anguished sorrow at a lost world. It's a caricature.

But that wasn't the reality for Strauss in these compositions; he knew what he was about to lose, personally, and what the world had lost in the real events of his times. And Te Kanawa is an artist. Her work with Davis was a reaching for something in herself to connect with one man's expression of the terrible beauty of living. She succeeded.

Four Last Songs seems appropriate music, for me, these days. The sense that "Neroism is in the air", that we seem to be approaching... something, never feels very far away. Far I hear a steady drummer, drumming like a noise in dreams.

And when we get to the other side of whatever that approaching something is, will everything still seem familiar? Or, like Strauss, will we try our best to be true to -- not crumbling social forms... but to describing the truth of our own lives, expressing our experience as human beings, in whatever way is uniquely our own; even as it transfigures us?

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