text:
tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2015-11-28:/News From A Parallel WorldMokoFeed2015-11-28T13:59:49+01:00tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2015-05-04:/2015/05/04/sad-news-20267281/Sad newsRAZFX2015-05-04T06:22:25+02:002015-05-04T06:22:25+02:00
Richard Alan Raznikov, attorney, novelist, musician, and political activist, passed away peacefully on April 28 at his Sonoma home after a long illness. He was 68 years old.

He will be dearly missed by the many people whose lives were touched by his fierce passion for social justice and concern for the human condition.

Richard came of age in the 1960's in the tide of social and political revolution.Impressed by the prose of John Kennedy and the poetry of Bob Dylan, he began to find his voice as an activist.

After graduating from San Rafael High School, where he served as SB President, Richard matriculated to U.C. Berkeley in 1964, where much to the consternation of his parents, he became actively involved in the Free Speech Movement. While at Cal, he became deeply suspicious of government explanations of the JFK Assassination. He began to do meticulous research, spoke publically, and published several articles
 on the matter. By 1967, against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, Richard authored a position paper outlining a strategy of how Robert Kennedy could unseat President Johnson in the coming election. Six months later, he moved to New York to work full time for Senator Kennedy and became the youngest delegate to the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.

Shortly thereafter, Richard entered Boalt School of Law at the University of California.
 He worked his way through school by teaching political science classes in the Marin Community Colleges and writing for several bay area publications.
 Upon graduation, he began a 35 year career as a plaintiff's attorney, often representing the most marginalized citizens. Although never driven by material success, Richard considered himself quite wealthy. He valued family and friends and understood how truly fortunate he was to be born in a time and place of unfettered opportunity. He took great satisfaction in simplest of pleasures: a good book,
 a round of golf, a Giants game, or an old movie.

As a longtime Marin County resident, Richard became immersed in several progressive political causes. He ran for state office and served on several high profile commissions, most notably as President of the first Marin Nuclear Free Commission. After being elected to the Tamalpais School Board,Richard encouraged students to develop their own political voices and he worked tirelessly to deemphasize the importance of standardized testing in measuring academic achievement.

In his later years, Richard fulfilled a lifelong ambition by penning his first novel, the critically acclaimed, News From a Parallel World, which has been described as a "page turning thriller and a crash course in the US History of the 1960's". Concurrently, he began writing a political blog of the same name. Within a short period of time he had hundreds of subscribers who looked forward to his insightful, humorous and often angry treatises on the current state of political affairs.

In addition, despite the advise of his music teacher who once lamented at the sad state of his singing voice, Richard taught himself to play guitar, wrote dozens of songs, and with the help of several musician friends, published 3 CDs with a distinct personal and political tone.

Richard is survived by his daughter, Jessica Raznikov, his sibblings Constance Raznikov Roth and Charles Raznikov, and his grandsons Phaedrus Raznikov and Jacob Clein. His voice is silent now, but his spirit lives on in the hearts of those he touched. Rest well, Richard.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2015-01-26:/2015/01/26/a-mild-winter-so-far-20011737/A Mild Winter, So FarRAZFX2015-01-26T08:36:31+01:002015-01-26T08:36:31+01:00
It's been a mild Winter so far.

The article in the local press was not cloaked in euphemism. "Temporary shutdown aimed at moving homeless from Boyd Memorial Park," read the headline, temporary meaning until we get rid of the vermin who make important people uncomfortable. Where the homeless were expected to move to was not specified but 'elsewhere' is the general idea.

Until I managed to close up shop, I ran my law practice out of the top floor in an old building at the corner of 4th and A downtown, right across the street from where a grand old courthouse had stood for about seventy years until a couple of local fixers decided to arson it out of existence so they could put up a couple of bank buildings.

A few years before I quit, the tenants got notices, the public bathrooms on all three upper floors were to be locked, and each of us was issued a key. That was to keep the riff-raff out. Apparently, homeless people had been using the facilities instead of peeing on the side of the building or in their pants, which is what we'd evidently prefer they do, and that was not okay. We owned businesses and were important people, not to be troubled by having to share with losers.

My protests were ignored. Fortunately, someone more enterprising than I managed to break the lock and then break it again until management gave up on the idea.

Poor people in America are supposed to be ashamed of their situation. They are supposed to hide from the rest of us, not shove their condition in our faces.

Indeed, San Rafael Mayor Gary Phillips invoked this power because "City Council members have received an influx of emails and phone calls recently from residents and business owners complaining about homeless people drinking, doing drugs and littering in the park."

According to Phillips, families are afraid to bring their children to the 4.2 acre patch which rests in the northern part of town, a bare three blocks from the Falkirk Estate and a block and a half from a couple of banks. The homeless people, he says, "make them feel uncomfortable."

Well, I guess we could shoot them.

The Mayor, writes a local reporter, says that there was a difference between "many homeless people who are trying to improve their lot… people who hang out in the park are not interested in changing their ways."

"Reportedly this group is not of this nature," Phillips told her. "They sit here, have their amphetamines and go get a meal at St. Vincent de Paul."

See, if you're among the least important, least worthwhile people in San Rafael, you have an obligation to improve your attitude, to 'improve (your) lot,' to supplicate.

I've encountered drunk, obnoxious people at Peacock Gap, San Rafael's golf course. Probably, we should shut it down for a month or until the bad people leave.

But the people Phillips has targeted at the behest of more deserving people don't agree with his assessment of themselves or their behavior.

Richard Davis has been homeless periodically over the last ten years, including the last six during the Obama economic recovery. He grew up in Marin. Somehow, he never figured out the money situation. He told the reporter:

"There are people that bring their kids here. We put out our cigarettes and put our drinks away while they are here. Nobody bothers them."

Another says: "When one person messes up, the (cops) blame it on everyone." Well, certainly. Everyone knows that as a group these people are dangerous.

A third says: "They wait for catastrophe to happen, then they go after the people they recognize," as though she expected police to differentiate. So naive, the homeless. Fairness? Decent treatment as human beings? Justice? What country do they think they're living in?

The city had earlier placed a lock on the public bathrooms over night to discourage, well, to discourage… uh… what, exactly? But someone did to it what someone did to the one in my old building: broke it. Presumably, some of these less-valued people think they ought to be able to shit indoors.

While the park is closed, the city plans to trim vegetation, i.e. eliminate foliage because the wrong people might want privacy behind it, and get rid of the portable outhouse it had placed there. The director of the city's Community Services Department, Carlene McCart, who actually ordered the closure, will be "leading the renovation effort."

A homeless man commented, "If they want to clean it up, why don't they give us some brooms?"

Good thing the Christmas season is over and the people who run my old home town won't have to pretend they give a rat's ass about the words or deeds of Jesus for another nine months or so, a perfect time to purify the downtown areas on behalf of the business owners and realtors who pay the tab.

It's been a mild Winter so far. Not too much rain or bitter cold in the Bay Area, except of course in the hearts of important people and the politicians who do as they're told.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2015-01-20:/2015/01/20/eastwood-and-the-empire-19992755/Eastwood And The EmpireRAZFX2015-01-20T09:27:35+01:002015-01-20T09:27:35+01:00
There was praise in the Bay Area's Chronicle for the Eastwood film, critic Mick LaSalle arguing that 'American Sniper' was nuanced and multi-layered and carried much deeper messages than bloodlust and hatred, but LaSalle is wrong, dangerously wrong.

Early returns from the Tweeting community call for killing 'Arabs,' many using the terminology of fascism, describing them as "vermin." "Now I really want to kill some fucking ragheads," crowed one happy theater-goer. The web is filled with such now, an ugly presage of what we have in store after a record-breaking, ninety-million-dollar opening weekend for the Hollywood version of the killing career of Chris Kyle.

Eastwood celebrates a man who bragged of a blood lust, proud of his 'verified kills,' four tours with the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and gilds his pathology with the Hitler-loved-dogs treatment. Depicted as a warm-hearted man with doubts, a cold-hearted man devoid of any real human connection is now a hero to much of impressionable, stupid America. Kyle's fans on Twitter are mostly young, white, and apparently lost to sensibilities of any kind.

The Kyle story and Eastwood's sick encomium fit comfortably into a society which has a growing erotic fascination with violence and destruction. All of this was quite predictable.

If a nation embarks on the road to empire, it must increasingly control its domestic population. In America, that control is visibly manifest in police actions against demonstrators, in prosecutions of troublemakers, in rules requiring government employees to inform on fellow workers, in army facilities converted into FEMA camps with double-directed barb wire, in surveillance cameras mounted at intersections, in massive security complexes and wire tapping of everyone, but a critical component is mind control, without which the physical interposition of police state indicia would invite unwelcome rebellion.

Glorification of violence has never been so ubiquitous in this society, and every government policy is unthinkingly conflated with patriotic necessity. I never watch television's 'news' shows because I respect my mind and want to keep it available to reality, yes, but also because from the leavings shared on Facebook it appears that 'news anchors' and 'commentators' are selected and employed principally as airheads, and it's painful to contemplate emotionally-stunted script-readers with sub-normal intelligence speaking in sing-song.

But no one except those who have fled the system can detach well enough to avoid all exposure, and I confess a lifelong devotion to what Whitman called our greatest national sport, which is of course baseball. In the off-season, devotees can pick up scraps on a channel built for this sort of thing, and so, even with my left thumb poised over the mute button, it is clear there is a military drumbeat to everyday life.

For one thing, television advertisements for the military and its various outfits are everywhere and relentless. The networks afford the highly-paid ad boys and girls all the free airtime they wish to spin fantasies, and they must desperately need them these days. According to estimates from Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, extrapolating from a 2012 Veterans Administration report, 22 veterans committed suicide every day in 2009 and 2010, and we are now losing them at the rate of more than 8,000 per year, easily exceeding the number killed in combat. http://www.businessinsider.com/veterans-suicide-2014-3.

Military service in America is now more dangerous psychologically than physically. Think about that.

Unsurprisingly, the nation's politicians have ignored the numbers. But now that the numbers are common currency, they ignore their implications.

Senator John Walsh (D-Mont.), first Iraqi war veteran to be elected to the upper chamber, has introduced legislation to increase mental health professionals at the VA, enhance collaboration with the Pentagon, and reconsider cases of some veterans discharged wrongly due to "invisible wounds."

But the question no one dares ask is this: if America really needs to go to war, how come the conditions are such that more than half of those we dispatch to fight –– now more than 2.6 million –– return with crippling mental problems?

The television advertisements for the Army, at least those which accompany sports programs, include this astonishing scene: men are gathered in some sort of tunnel, applying eye black, wearing helmets, but the shot is hazy, smokey, and while the voice over describes a team apparently preparing for opening kickoff the players begin to move together until they break into the sunlight, heavily armed men on their way to deliver medical supplies or meet with friendly local forces.

The Navy's main shot depicts a family, including the requisite cute little blond girl, surrounded by military personnel in an enormous circle of protection.

Many of the ads feature Red Cross symbols or American flags with 'AID' stamped on boxes and crates, the friendly Western soldiers bringing comfort and protection to the unlettered foreigners who would be easy prey for jihadist crazies were it not for the generosity of America and its idealistic young.

It is now automatic that every single sports broadcaster –– except, thus far, thank God, Krukow and Kuiper –– wear an American flag lapel pin, most of them no doubt manufactured in Hong Kong or Korea.

Eastwood's propaganda is no less horrific, humanizing the inhuman, feeding the worst impulses of the American spirit, inviting us to glorify horror, to sign up for it, to drape it in superficial patriotic language and wheel it out for parades and perhaps even Oscars.

James Garner as Charlie Madison in the great, great subversive film, Americanization of Emily:

I don't trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham. It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a Hell it is. And it's always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades . . . we shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It's the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers; the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widows' weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices....

My brother died at Anzio -- an everyday soldier's death, no special heroism involved. They buried what pieces they found of him. But my mother insists he died a brave death and pretends to be very proud. . . . [N]ow my other brother can't wait to reach enlistment age. That'll be in September. May be ministers and generals who blunder us into wars, but the least the rest of us can do is to resist honoring the institution. What has my mother got for pretending bravery was admirable? She's under constant sedation and terrified she may wake up one morning and find her last son has run off to be brave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reUstMn4bM8.

What it means about my country that the Eastwood film is breaking box office records, what it means about who we are and what it promotes, is very dark indeed.

The commentary I like best was provided by playwright John Steppling, who recently wrote this:

"An added note on Clint Eastwood's new film American Sniper. It may be the most psychotic piece of American filmmaking ever. I think that in years to come when looking back at Eastwood's career, this is going to seem the logical conclusion to his madness. All the lurking sadism, the misogyny, the jingoism has reached completion. All the personal issues that were always half hidden, the abuse of wives and girlfriends that was hinted at, the strange perverse relationship to animals and children, all of it is now unveiled, unmediated, stark naked insanity. Its an ugly experience. It is soul deadening and I had a hard time washing it out of my head. From the almost murder of a dog to the murder of a child, and a mother, and later an an almost second child murder. To the curious and total lack of context for the story.

"…There is no moral complexity, there is only a shocking hatred for Muslims, a cartoon U.S. military machine, and even that cartoon lacks depth. It is a truly depraved film. It has all the value of a snuff film. It's really the zenith of white supremacism and disregard for the lives of all others. The end of the film, after 120 some minutes of this shit, the end of Chris Kyle arrives. But Eastwood shows it off screen. Why? Presumably because it is, for him, a sacred moment. Too hard to film. How can we do justice to such a horror. Sniper head shots of children …well, thats OK. Showing the 'War God Kyle' meeting his banal but rather karmic end at the hand of another psycho vet is sacrosanct. As a footnote of sorts, the real Chris Kyle was a racist sadistic killer who enjoyed death. He was a not very smart and very unpleasant man, exactly the sort of figure Eastwood lusts for…"

[from The Occupied Mind. http://john-steppling.com/the-occupied-mind/].

I am old enough to remember well a quite different America. There is no need to invent or gloss over the details. Always a nation struggling to find its better destiny and often falling short, my country began in oppression and built its industrial base on exploitation and slavery. It has always been a racist country. Even the most optimistic of foundational documents, the Constitution, has been regarded as inconvenient to many administrations. Yet, there was always something better, something hopeful, in John Hiatt's words, hanging around the observatory.

In my life, we could always fight to make things better, and there were times when it seemed reasonable to believe we were going to actually succeed. If we had to tell ourselves lies in order to hang onto a more benevolent vision, well, we could manage it. Now, though, it looks as though the curtain at the back of the theater has been pulled, as Zappa predicted, revealing only the brick wall.

We are not only a vicious society, a bloodthirsty society, we are apparently now reveling in it.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2015-01-18:/2015/01/18/in-a-room-she-never-slept-in-the-murder-of-dorothy-kilgallen-19986140/A Room She Never Slept In: The Murder Of Dorothy KilgallenRAZFX2015-01-18T11:21:27+01:002015-01-18T21:38:58+01:00
She was found sitting up in bed, the master bedroom on the third floor of the New York City townhouse on East 68th Street, by her friend and hairdresser, Marc Sinclaire, who'd let himself into the home with his own key.

"I knew she was dead right away," Sinclaire said. "The bed was spotless. She was dressed very peculiarly like I'd never seen her before. She always (would have been) in pajamas and old socks, and her makeup off and her hair off…" But now she was "completely dressed like she was going out, the hair was in place, the make-up was on, the false eyelashes were on." She was instead in blue, a "matching peignoir and robe." It was, Sinclaire says, something "she would never wear to go to bed."

A book by Robert Roarke, "The Honey Badger," was near her, open and turned upside down. Sinclaire says that she had finished reading it months earlier, and spoken to him about it.

Her reading glasses were not in her hand or perched on her nose; they were not on the bed nor on her nightstand. They were not found in the room. She could not read without them.

There were other things Sinclaire thought strange:

"(There was) a drink on the table, the light was on, the air conditioning was on, though you didn't need an air conditioner. You would've had the heat on. She was always cold, and why she had the air conditioner on I don't know…"

A single glass on the bedside table, somewhat out of her reach since she was positioned in the center, held traces of nembutal, the drug she'd been using as a sleeping aid. An autopsy showed three other drugs in her system: secobarbital, amobarbital, and pentobarbital, a drug cocktail of powerful barbiturates. The New York City medical examiner called it "acute ethanol and barbiturate intoxication, circumstances undetermined," but the police closed their brief, perfunctory investigation without bothering most witnesses.

Dorothy Kilgallen was found dead in the center of a king-sized bed in the third floor master bedroom, a bed in a room she never slept in. The scene was clearly staged. But, although she was a major, respected, important public figure, officialdom managed to grab hold of the case and invent its own narrative.

Kilgallen, 52, was then a popular, nationally-known figure, who appeared as a regular, along with Bennett Cerf of Random House, Steve Allen, Jayne Meadows, and other luminaries on "What's My Line?" She had for many years been a crime reporter, whose stories on major murder trials had set the standard for journalists.

Among sensational stories Kilgallen had delivered to more than twenty million readers was, on July 15, 1959, the first exposé of CIA-mobster operations, a story which pissed off you-know-who.

On August 3, 1962, she broke the story of President Kennedy's relationship with Marilyn Monroe. Two days later, Monroe was found dead of a drug overdose. Kilgallen began asking tough questions, questions the authorities never answered:

"Why was Marilyn's door locked that night, when she didn't usually lock it? If she was just trying to get some sleep, and took the overdose of pills accidentally, why was the light on? Usually, people sleep better in the dark. Why did the first doctor have to call a second doctor before calling the police? The real story hasn't been told, not by a long shot."

The November 22, 1963, murder of President Kennedy stunned Kilgallen. Like the crime reporter she had long been, she was on the story, with sources inside the Dallas Police Department who gave her a copy of the police logs which chronicled the minute-by-minute activities of the department that day. This gave her proof that Chief Jesse Curry was lying when he told reporters that he'd immediately thought the shots came from the Depository, since his first order after the shooting was to "get a man on top of the overpass and see what happened up there."

Kilgallen's interest in the case continued, and on September 25, 1964, she ran a story of her interview with Acquilla Clemons, a witness to the shooting of officer J.D. Tippit never questioned by the Warren Commission. Two men had run from the scene, Clemons said, and neither of them looked like Oswald.

Then Kilgallen's sources furnished her with a copy of the secret 102-page transcript of the Commission's interrogation of Jack Ruby. She was shocked at Earl Warren's "inept" questioning of Oswald and at his failure to follow up on the leads Ruby was handing him. And as the FBI sent agents to question her –– and accelerated its surveillance of her –– she reacted by writing, on September 30, 1964, that the FBI "might have been more profitably employed in probing the facts of the case rather than how I got them."  She then approached one of Ruby's lawyers, Joe Tonahill, and succeeded in gaining what no other journalist had: a private interview with Oswald's killer.

As Tonahill later described it, "This interview with her was a very significant point in his life. (Ruby) cooperated with her in every way that he could, and told her the truth as he understood it."

The substance of that interview formed what Kilgallen expected to be the centerpiece of her next book for Random House and Bennett Cerf, whose working title was 'Murder One.' A close friend, Ron Pataky, says, "It would have been on JFK, the entire assassination. That's what she was working on, of course. When she got into the JFK thing, as we all know, the whole world went crazy. But given her background, given the people she spoke with, don't you think the obvious thing would be that that would be the book?"

Kilgallen represented a special problem for two reasons. First, she had inside sources in government agencies, including the police and the Warren Commission investigation. Second, she was a very powerful personage and carried great credibility among the movers-and-shakers in New York and Washington.

What Ruby told her and what she'd unearthed in sudden flights around the country and midnight meetings with witnesses, we will probably never know. Her voluminous file on the Dallas murder simply disappeared the night she died, along with every other bit of associated data, such as the contact numbers of sources.

Her last trip had been to New Orleans, a nexus of planning for the field operatives in the assassination. She flown down with her friend, Sinclaire, but she'd insisted on separate flights. They met, had dinner. The following morning, Sinclaire got this phone call from Kilgallen: "She said, I want you to go immediately back to New York and never tell anyone you came to New Orleans with me."

Her other hairdresser, Charles Simpson, recalls her telling him, "I used to share things with you… but after I found out now what I know, if the wrong people knew what I know, it would cost me my life."

On the last weekend of her life, and exhausted Kilgallen told Sinclaire her life had been threatened. On the night she died, Kilgallen had a post-midnight meeting with someone in a corner of the Regency bar, someone who has never been identified.

As Cerf described her on the air the following Sunday, "(She) was a very tough newspaper woman. When she went after a story, nothing could get in her way. But we got to know her as a human being, and a more lovable, softer, loyal person never lived…"

"I'm going to break this case wide open," Kilgallen had told more than one close friend, "if it's the last thing I do."

[Thank you Sara Jordan, writing in Midwest Today, for much of the foregoing material. http://www.midtod.com/new/articles/7_14_07_Dorothy.html.]

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2015-01-18:/2015/01/18/we-have-no-choice-19985992/"We Have No Choice..."RAZFX2015-01-18T10:41:07+01:002015-01-18T10:41:07+01:00
Anytime you find yourself thinking that the United States is the craziest country on Earth –– and I think this quite often –– it can be useful to consider the levels of public policy madness elsewhere. For instance, England.

According to a dispatch by David Edwards of Raw Story, reprinted in Alternet, the British Home Office has proposed a new policy which will require nursery staff to report to the government any children who "might be at risk of sympathizing with terrorists."

The Counter-Terrorism and Security bill now before Parliament contains this provision: "Senior management and governors are expected to assess the risk of pupils being drawn into terrorism, including support for extremist ideas that are a part of terrorist ideology."

Whenever I write about these sorts of things I'm at a loss whether I need to explain why and how they cross the border into madness when it's hard to believe anyone would not grasp immediately its wholesale, alarming wacko-ness.

The British government wants teachers to inform on children. The Home Office, hearing some criticism of this policy, responded with alacrity. A statement released a few days later tried to clarify what was intended:

"We are not expecting teachers and nursery workers to carry out unnecessary intrusion into family life, but we do expect them to take action when they observe behavior of concern. It is important that children are taught fundamental British values… We would expect staff to have the training they need to identify children at risk of radicalisation and know where and how to refer them for further help if necessary." (Emphasis added).

Translation: everyone knows we care about "at risk children," and that means children at risk of adopting unapproved ideas. The intrusions will be only when necessary, and any child identified will win a free scholarship to re-education programs run by the government.

In America, we've got all sorts of programs which require government employees to rat on their fellow workers, c.f. Obama's "Insider Threat" program rolled out a couple of years ago to virtually no notice. http://lookingglass.blog.co.uk/2013/06/22/hammer-this-fact-home-16154325/.

Total surveillance inevitably leads to total control. That is its purpose.

In the United States, as in England, the government, while paying lip-service to basic guaranteed, codified civil liberties protections, is working diligently every day at destroying them. The six-year record of the Obama-Holder Justice Department in classifying record numbers of documents 'secret,' –– in the millions –– and fighting against disclosure in the appellate courts, is arguably the worst civil liberties record of any administration since Jackson decided to kill off native Americans.

Yet, the image is still superior to the facts, and when Obama reassures us that the government is not listening to our every conversation and recording every keystroke on the web, most people choose to believe him, even though there has been constructed in Utah a repository for the data being collected, with a capacity to store everything you say and do, every day, along with everyone else in the country.

Saw a wonderful video this evening, part of the discipline I'm engaged in these days when recovery requires more down time and less attention to the facts of that other life in the web. Crosby, Stills, Nash, still true after all these years. 'appears to be a long… appears to be a long… appears to be a long… time before the dawn,' written by Crosby in 1968 in response to the murder of Senator Robert Francis Kennedy by our own government. 'Speak out, you've got to speak out against the madness…'

And this:

'Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice but to carry on…'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LTXGCutvLo.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-12-21:/2014/12/21/khalid-shaikh-mohammed-and-the-uses-of-torture-19872058/Khalid Shaikh Mohammed And The Uses Of TortureRAZFX2014-12-21T07:30:26+01:002014-12-21T07:34:03+01:00
There were plenty of problems with the cover story about those passenger planes striking the towers and the Pentagon thirteen years and three months ago. A lot of technical details couldn't be matched-up, and the laws of physics and thermodynamics kept getting in the way.

There also had to be someone to pin it on, someone reliable, someone who fit the part and was in no condition to refute whatever we might say about him. Someone, maybe, in failing health, in need of dialysis, hiding out, whose organization had been grafted on a CIA operation and some of whose personnel would be still be subject to CIA influence.

It is rarely commented on but nonetheless noteworthy that the FBI steadfastly refused to list Osama bin Laden as a suspect in the September attacks. And yet the rest of us were so sure.

The reason this comes up right now is its connection with the release of the Senate report on CIA practices, a report which itself is a necessarily watered-down account in 520 pages of what was found in 600,000. The things that were done, on orders from the Vice President and with the enthusiastic assent of Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld.

The government has, essentially, a single witness still alive who has given inculpatory statements as to bin Laden's role and al-Qaeda's central operational function on 9-11. He is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and his name has again surfaced as a tortured prisoner, one of twenty listed whose consequent revelations the CIA falsely claimed to have produced important or useful intelligence.

The Senate report details why in each of these cases the claimed benefits were either completely falsified or obtained in other ways. The CIA, it seems, pretended that information otherwise obtained in Khalid's case came from Kahlid while under torture, part of a design to generate political support.

Khalid, it is established, was physically beaten, deprived of sleep, forced to undergo simulated drowning 183 times, and had fluids forced up his rectum. His captors also threatened to kill his children.

As numerous law enforcement and military experts have testified over the years, the reason why torture is not a preferred method of inquiry, quite irrespective of any moral considerations, is that it produces unreliable results. And although news stories critical of the program expose the fakery of the CIA's claims of torture's benefits, they have thus far apparently failed to notice one of its more alarming aspects.

That the CIA has systematically invented tales of success for torture –– quite often, as in Khalid's case, where good intelligence work and not brutality brought success –– is not surprising; virtually all bureaucracies lie about the efficacy of their operations in order to sustain political support and to generate higher budgets.

Nor is it surprising that the use of torture by the CIA is a strategy which is really designed to punish and intimidate the opposition. As others have pointed out, this is a characteristic of many doomed totalitarian regimes –– whose secret police and death squads are trained in the United States at what was formerly called the School of the Americas –– where the state's control is beginning to slip away.

What is not noticed, apparently, is the intentionality behind the extraction of false confessions. Sometimes, the CIA and the American government have a very large stake not in discovering truth but in inventing useful cover stories.

If Khalid had indeed been bin Laden's 'mastermind' of 9-11, as the U.S. government and the corporate media never fail to describe him, anything produced by his marathon tortures would have been factually useless. It may be that U.S. policymakers and the secret police army which carries out assignments never really worried whether they could prove anything. Merely asserting something as true is the arrogant way things are done now. People in positions which oversee power and its uses are confident that, as Orwell predicted and Goebbels implemented, the Big Lie is enough.

There is a spate of new articles regarding the use of psychiatrists and psychologists in Guantanamo and elsewhere, giving material assistance to torturers. That's nothing new, disturbing though it certainly is. Shrinks have been helping governments in many countries learn the art of brainwashing, both collectively and individually, and its employment as a critical tool in the handling of prisoners –– and others under state control –– has been going on in the United States for at least seventy-five years.

Sometimes what I write earns the 'conspiracy theorist' label, fired by a reader blissfully unaware that the term itself was actually created by the CIA to use against critics, researchers, and journalists beginning with the Dallas murder of a President.

The truth is that we don't know who Khalid is or was, what his role may have been, if any, in a recent horrific day in American history. What matters to the government is that we cause as little trouble as possible and not ask too many questions.

Couple of days ago, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was brought into a Boston courtroom for a final pretrial conference. The trial in the Boston Marathon bombing case is to begin January 5th, eighteen months after Tsarnaev's original arraignment.

We don't know who Tsarnaev is, either, or what his role may have been, if any, in the bombing which killed three and injured hundreds and which was used to rationalize a police occupation of the entire city, suspension of the Constitution, and a series of events whose purpose and meaning remain murky to this day.

There is substantial evidentiary reason to question yet another official government story. I've written extensively about the gaping holes in that story and the alarming indications of factual manipulations indicative of internal –– or extra-governmental –– operations. http://lookingglass.blog.co.uk/2013/07/26/boston-the-case-is-not-closed-part-1-16266652/.

In Part 10 of the Boston series, written in July, 2013:

"10. A Very Strange Interrogation.

"Until federal judge Marianne B. Bowler came to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's hospital room to put a stop to it, he was subject to questioning for sixteen hours, not by Boston police or even local FBI agents, but by a special team of interrogators, the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group flown to Boston from Guantanamo Bay Prison by order of the President  (emphasis added).
 Obama said at the time that agents could question the suspect without the presence of an attorney under an exception to the Miranda Rule. This little used exception, however, as the President certainly knew, permits at most a handful of questions and is narrowly applied only to circumstances in which lives may be in immediate danger.
 Why, then, did Obama do it? What did he expect to gain? The violation of Miranda would jeopardize any statement Tsarnaev might make under interrogation and be inadmissible in court. In fact, this quite literally endangered any trial and prospective conviction, even if the Supreme Court is inclined to fry the defendant.
 But that is not the only disturbing aspect of this chain of events. For the President to order in this particular interrogation unit from Guantanamo should set off alarm bells for anyone familiar with their special talents.
 The federal government, as I have documented several times, knows full well that most of the prisoners at Guantanamo are factually innocent of any crimes; the Pentagon's own study says this, as does the Red Cross. Yet, these people have been held for more than a decade and there are scant prospects for their release. Their conditions are so terrible that the vast majority recently spent months in a hunger strike to try to gain the attention of the outside world. Sadly, most Americans don't give a shit.
 Still, what is the principal task of the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group? It's not as though the FBI has a dearth of qualified agents, and it's not as though Boston Police can't field skilled questioners. The Guantanamo team specializes in one thing and you know what that is: extracting false confessions from innocent people.
 As journalist Andy Worthington has exposed (see his book, The Guantanamo Files), and has been confirmed by federal judges in habeas corpus petitions, the U.S. government has obtained false confessions from Guantanamo prisoners under torture. This is the specialty of the HVDIG. As I'm sure you know, there are forms of torture which are psychological, so it may have been unnecessary, as well as impractical, for these spooks to waterboard Dzhokhar in his hospital room.
 It has since emerged that Tsarnaev repeatedly asked for an attorney and his request was ignored. These agents must have known, just as Obama knew, that refusing to provide a lawyer to a suspect who requests one, as was the case here, can not only contaminate any statement they might get but actually get any later conviction thrown out.
 The questioners were senior people, fully aware that what they were doing was risky. But they proceeded. Then they leaked to a helpful mass media that the accused had confessed to them that he and his brother had planned and carried out the bombings due to their anger at U.S. policies in Afghanistan and Iraq. The leak was insupportable. Under these circumstances, and with the putative defendant without counsel, there could be only one purpose: to poison the public mind about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and short-circuit any further or parallel investigation.
 Why would they do this? If the government had the airtight case it claims to have, it would not want to take chances with it. It would not need to further prejudice a public already willing to chow down on any official story it was told. Moreover, this supposed 'confession' could never be used in evidence, so what good was it?
 That's when former FBI agent and network shill John Miller came to the rescue, telling his CBS audience that, amazingly, there was a Tsarnaev confession that was admissible after all because one had been discovered, written on the inside of the boat where he'd hidden. He'd left a rambling explanation, Miller said, which informed the world that an attack on one Muslim was an attack on all.
 The hospital 'confession' had done it's work, further magnifying the public's certainty that the brothers were guilty although direct evidence was rather paltry. What was needed was another 'confession,' one which could be used in evidence.
 Hence, the fortuitous, rambling tell-all written by a bullet-riddled suspect, inside a boat, in the dark, on fiberglass, with a Sharpie that he had either been saving for just such a purpose or had found conveniently lying around."

It is important to keep in mind that the perverted activities of the nation's intelligence services, as augmented by professional psychiatrists and psychologists, has been well-documented. http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2014/12/16/cia-health-professionals-role-in-systematic-torture-including-human-subjects-research/.

The most advanced research in the manipulation of the human mind has been going on for at least seventy years in government facilities. Human subjects have been 'experimented on' by the CIA, the FBI, and other spooks, with psychomimetic drugs and a vast array of medical procedures. http://www.amazon.com/Acid-Dreams-Complete-History-Sixties/dp/0802130623/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419133626&sr=1-1&keywords=acid+dreams+the+complete+social+history+of+lsd+the+cia+the+sixties+and+beyond.

It's not hard to understand that by this time, anyone chosen by the government to play a role in one of its manufactured or inflated crises, if 'questioned' by experts without the protection of counsel, has a fairly good chance of producing whatever 'confession' the government prefers.

Consider:

Five weeks after the Marathon bombing and apprehension of the surviving Tsarnaev brother –– the official account of the killing of Tamerlan Tsarnaev is itself full of discrepancies –– Ibragim Todashev, a friend of the elder Tsarnaev, was shot to death by an FBI agent while being questioned in his Florida apartment. The agent, unnamed, fired six bullets into his chest and one to the top of the head.

Todashev had told his father that Tsarnaev had been "set up," and was innocent of the Boston bombing.

The FBI story of Todashev's death stunk to high heaven. The victim, the feds claimed, had been about to write a confession when he suddenly snapped and attacked the armed agent with, variously, a knife, a saber, a metal pole, and a gun, depending on which day of the week the FBI was being asked. There had been at least five other police officials and FBI agents present during Todashev's interrogation but, says the government, all but one had left the room just before the killing, presumably to crowd into the bathroom where they took turns at the toilet. http://lookingglass.blog.co.uk/2013/08/02/boston-the-case-is-not-closed-parts-12-and-16282986/.

For more than a year, both the Todashev murder and the case against the Tsarnaev brothers had disappeared into the great black hole of corporate news control. Now, however, with the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev about to begin, both crimes could surface together. At Tsarnaev's appearance on Thursday last, proceedings were briefly interrupted by the mother-in-law of Ibragim Todashev, who called out in Russian, "We pray for you. Be strong, my son. We know you are innocent!"

We may be well-advised to view the most recent revelations about the CIA's use of both physical and psychological torture as the bare surface of things. We know that more than one major event used to scare the American people –– and massage our expectations to accept increased forms and manifestations of a police state –– has been described to us in government narratives riddled with lies.

The case against Dzhokhar, if based on facts, in the hands of competent defense counsel, would likely disintegrate. But what the court will hear, and what the defendant has been made to understand it will hear, is a case at least substantially invented for the purpose of putting him to death.

I won't be surprised if Tsarnaev pleads guilty. He will have been told that only that can save him from the death penalty. There have been a few other prominent cases involving agencies of the federal government where innocent defendants pretended to their own guilt in order to save their lives, including James Earl Ray and Sirhan Bishara Sirhan.

The owners of the United States and their business agents in the government always have cover stories for their crimes. Why in the world would any sentient being think otherwise?

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-12-17:/2014/12/17/the-lies-and-the-laws-on-torture-19854199/The Lies And The Laws On TortureRAZFX2014-12-17T08:53:08+01:002014-12-17T08:53:08+01:00
"I still believe that a nation's intelligence services are the truest measure of its character." John LeCarre.

After almost a year of lies, redaction, threats, and diversion, an Executive Summary, a bare 520 pages of the full Report of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Torture, 6,000 pages in length, itself a bare synopsis of the entire record, which is estimated at more than 6,000,000 pages, was released to the general public last week.

Now we know what kind of people we are.

It would be logical to retain skepticism about the Summary, since Washington has managed before to collect massive amounts of material, only to get rid of anything too scary or which might conflict with official stories or imperil officials themselves, c.f. the blighted Warren Commission.

One might be forgiven suspicion, also, since the investigative process was itself infiltrated by the CIA, which tapped the telephones and otherwise spied on the staffers who were assigned to review the files, and since the President repeatedly evaded calls for its release until the pressure from some Democrats, notably Wyden (D-Or) and Udall (D-Colo) who threatened to go public with what they already knew.

I'm reading commentary on the web which argues that the Report exposed 'nothing new' and therefore ought to be ignored, that it was impossible to prosecute the perpetrators anyhow, that we ought to shut up since the Report gave ammunition and comfort to our 'enemies,' and that what the CIA did was in any case a renegade operation, the hideous details of which were unknown to two successive administrations.

Now Dick Cheney is on the talk show circuit claiming that torture 'saved lives' and that he'd "do it again in a minute."

The vast bulk of television attention to the Report and its subject has been designed to popularize torture under the unusual circumstances which required its use in order to defend America from its enemies all over the world. And the first comprehensive opinion survey, taken December 11-14 by Pew Research, confirms that propaganda is working. The survey found 51% of Americans approving of the CIA's methods and agreeing that they were 'justified.' A bare 29% said no. 56% believe that torture produced intelligence that 'prevented terror attacks,' while 28% did not agree. And 43% of Americans questioned, a plurality of those asked, said that the Senate committee's decision to release the Report in the first place was wrong. http://www.alternet.org/shock-poll-americans-are-ok-cia-torture-methods?akid=12581.113440.PbJAFd&rd=1&src=newsletter1028782&t=3.

We know what kind of people we are and we apparently don't care.

The tidal wage of nauseating apologia was kicked off in grand fashion by Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU, in a New York Times opinion piece on December 8th. It was titled "Pardon Bush and Those Who Tortured."

Romero wrote that Obama ought to issue pardons "because it may be the only way to establish, once and for all, that torture is illegal."

With that kind of logic, it's no surprise that the Times ran his piece. This is the newspaper which learned in 2003 of the government's massive wiretapping out of an unmarked room in the phone company's operations in San Francisco –– and sat on the story until after November, 2004, because it 'didn't want to influence the election.'

Romero also wrote this: "But neither (Obama) nor the Justice Department has shown any appetite for holding anyone accountable. When the department did conduct an investigation, it appeared not to have interviewed any of the prisoners who were tortured. And it repeatedly abused the "state secrets" privilege to derail cases brought by prisoners — including Americans who were tortured as "enemy combatants."

The argument, I guess, is that since the President and Attorney General are complicit in the crimes, they're not going to prosecute anybody, anyhow No reason to waste a lot of energy. Romero says that the present state of moral corruption is granting de facto pardons to the perpetrators and that therefore formal pardons wouldn't be any worse. Not only that, the tacit pardons we're seeing now "leave open the very real possibility that officials will resurrect the torture policies in the future. Indeed, many former C.I.A. and other government officials continue to insist that waterboarding and other forms of torture were lawful."

But by Romero's interesting logic, issuing actual pardons makes it clear that the acts these people have been caught engaging in were illegal. That, he thinks, will deter future tortures. I don't know how it's possible to become the executive director of the ACLU while retaining such childlike faith in the system.

"The spectacle of the president's granting pardons to torturers still makes my stomach turn. But doing so may be the only way to ensure that the American government never tortures again. Pardons would make clear that crimes were committed; that the individuals who authorized and committed torture were indeed criminals; and that future architects and perpetrators of torture should beware. Prosecutions would be preferable, but pardons may be the only viable and lasting way to close the Pandora's box of torture once and for all."

Good gravy, "once and for all"?

Pardons, of course, would teach future practitioners that they have nothing to worry about. Should they enjoy a proclivity for inflicting anal torture, they'll be confident of escaping responsibility because they'll have precedent on their side. They won't even have to lie. They can appear on the talk shows with Dick Cheney and brag about it.

The practice of issuing pardons before trial or other adjudication is not new, Romero writes. It was used by Gerald Ford to pardon Richard Nixon. We all know how well that turned out.

One of the more revealing documentary trails exposed by the Senate investigation is the exchange between the CIA and Bush on the subject of torture. The President had made several public statements denying it and proclaiming that Americans don't torture. The CIA messages inquired whether this meant a change in policy. No doubt winks were also exchanged. The agency knew there had been no change, that Bush was only posturing for the gullible public and to make a record, however flimsy, for himself. But it wasn't going to let him untie himself from the agency and its practices. Those memos were part of the CIA's life insurance policy.

Obama, too, said that Americans don't torture. But, of course, we do. And under Obama the only thing which has actually changed is the cover story. This President is better at deniability; black flights continue to black sites, where foreign intelligence officers, often trained and always supervised by the CIA, enjoy a little recreational enhanced interrogation.

Abu Ghraib was but a small fragment of the larger picture, the broad application of physical and psychological abuses engaged in as policy, and everyone in the chain of command knew what was going on. A couple of low-level military personnel were scapegoated and the government concentrated on finding and closing the source of the leaks.

Romero writes that as far as most of the government crimes are concerned, the applicable statutes of limitations have run and, therefore, it is too late to prosecute. He is wrong. In fact, he describes the basis on which a successful criminal case may yet be brought against numerous high-ranking officials:

"That officials at the highest levels of government authorized and ordered torture is not in dispute. Mr. Bush issued a secret order authorizing the C.I.A. to build secret prisons overseas. The C.I.A. requested authority to torture prisoners in those "black sites." The National Security Council approved the request. And the Justice Department drafted memos providing the brutal program with a veneer of legality."

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and a great many others who initiated, aided, abetted, wrote legal justification for, and carried out a systematic program, which is most certainly was, may be charged with murder, under 18 U.S.C. § 1111c4, et seq., referencing 18 U.S.C. § 2340, et seq. There is no statute of limitation for murder.

Likewise, they may be charged under § 2340(a) Torture, and under 42 U.S.C. § 2000dd, Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment, which is defined in this way:

In general. No individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. (b) Construction. Nothing in this section shall be construed to impose any geographical limitation on the applicability of the prohibition against cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment under this section. (c) Limitation on supersedure. The provisions of this section shall not be superseded, except by a provision of law enacted after December 30, 2005, which specifically repeals, modifies, or supersedes the provisions of this section. (d) Cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment defined. In this section, the term "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment" means the cruel, unusual, and inhumane treatment or punishment prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, as defined in the United States Reservations, Declarations and Understandings to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment done at New York, December 10, 1984 (Emphasis added).

There is no applicable statute of limitation for crimes under the Declarations and Understandings, and it is not superseded by national provisions to the contrary.

The defendants may also of course be charged with criminal conspiracy.

Yes, I realize this is not going to happen. America tortured everybody under the instructions of the President and his associates and the directions of the CIA and its supervisory personnel. Everyone knew it was morally wrong, unlikely to lead to any useful intelligence, and certainly illegal. They did it anyway because, as President Obama likes to say, we are "exceptional."

International laws don't apply to the United States, we believe, even when we are a signatory nation and our own laws specify their application, and we refuse to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court –– one of only a handful of such refusers –– because we don't plan to let any international body judge our war criminals.

Indeed, The Obama administration has made this clear from the start, with the President saying we had to "turn the page" on the worst crimes political leaders may commit, and his Justice Department fighting in court against any trials or even evidentiary hearings concerning war crimes, 'extraordinary rendition,' torture, and even murder.

There was a brief moment when exposure to some of the more lurid photographs from Abu Ghraib and the accompanying CIA reports had so alarmed Obama and Holder that they believed they couldn't sweep everything under the carpet. In August, 2009, Holder announced a criminal investigation in more than one hundred cases of prisoner abuses, including threats of harm to family, threats using guns and power drills, and sexual abuse, but in June, 2011, Holder dropped every one except two.

These would be tossed a year later, an action described by the New York Times as "eliminat(ing) the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the CIA."  The two cases Obama wanted dropped were: one that resulted in the 2002 death of an Afghan detainee at a secret CIA prison near Kabul, and the other the 2003 death of an Iraqi citizen while in CIA custody at Abu Ghraib. Murder investigations.

In fact, Obama believes he's successfully papered-over America's crimes by declaring that Bush, et al., had immunity from prosecution, a legal judgment equivalent to the one Richard Nixon made –– unsuccessfully –– concerning a small matter of partisan surveillance.

But international agreements such as the Geneva Convention are by general federal adoption the law of the land in the U.S., and the refusal of the President and his Attorney General to prosecute criminals under its provisions does not change the fact that Cheney, Bush, and the rest are by law required to stand before the court and suffer the consequences of their horrific acts.

In her article in the Nation in March, 2013, former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman demanded that people be prosecuted, noting the expiration of some statutory time limitations, but also making it clear that some crimes could not be expunged by time and technicality:

"Nothing would corrode Americans' respect for the rule of law more than enshrining a perception of impunity for top government officials. Nothing would encourage future criminality by presidents more than a belief that they are above the law. That is why it is incumbent upon the attorney general to appoint a well-regarded, independent prosecutor promptly, so that appropriate investigations can be completed in the time remaining.

"President Bush and Vice President Cheney may also be criminally culpable for waterboarding and other forms of torture. This should also be investigated now, even though there is no statute of limitations for waterboarding and other life-threatening forms of torture—those responsible may be prosecuted as long as they live. Both President Bush and Vice President Cheney have publicly admitted their involvement in waterboarding detainees abroad. The federal anti-torture statute makes it an apparent crime to have done so. Attorney General Holder's previous exoneration of CIA agents relying on the Justice Department memos regarding torture should not apply to President Bush and Vice President Cheney, because of their role in producing the memos." http://www.thenation.com/article/173435/statutes-limitations-are-expiring-some-bush-crimes.

As Holtzman observed in an earlier article, Bush's Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez, had, when he was White House counsel, "expressed deep concern about possible prosecutions under the War Crimes Act of 1996 for American mistreatment of Afghanistan war detainees."  http://www.thenation.com/article/torture-and-accountability.

John Ashcroft, Gonzalez' predecessor, advised Bush to 'opt out' of the Geneva Convention because, among other things, the 1996 Act defined actionable offenses broadly under that Convention, to include "outrages against personal dignity," and "inhuman treatment." Bush had to take this action –– of questionable legality –– in order to give military officers, intelligence officials, and law enforcement personnel the "highest assurance" that they would not be prosecuted.

The Gonzalez and Ashcroft memos leave large, bloody footprints across the Bush presidency and across any criminal defense the former President might wish to employ. They all knew, and they were going to do it anyway, looking around for quasi-legal hiding places, just in case.

It is also a cognizable possibility that Barack Obama and Eric Holder, among many others, have by their systematic burial of evidence and their intentional delays, brought themselves under the law as well, as accomplices after the fact for engaging in what amounts to a criminal conspiracy to protect war criminals from the consequences of their acts.

They all knew, and that includes not only the Bush and Obama regimes, their lawyers and fixers, their military appointees and field commanders, and the CIA functionaries who spent their days and nights at the sport of inflicting human misery.

Americans probably knew, too, regardless of the alacrity with which not only Fox but CNN, MSNBC, and even NPR pretended it was not really all that bad. Many of the specific tortures widely used have worked their way into acceptance among Americans. The application of techniques to simulate drowning, unquestionably a violation of every agreement America ever signed on military behavior, has become known as 'waterboarding,' a practice which sounds almost playful, as it is intended to sound.

That's why half of the American people don't think the Senate report should have been released. That's why that half –– and no doubt most of the rest –– will not read it. Bush need have no worry on that score. The American people will never prosecute him for crimes the details of which they would rather not know.

LeCarre was right. The collected works of the CIA, and our response to their exposure, constitute the truest measure of the American character.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-12-09:/2014/12/09/doomed-19822386/DoomedRAZFX2014-12-09T08:42:13+01:002014-12-09T08:42:13+01:00
We are doomed. I don't think I've said it quite that way before, but until a few days ago I'd never heard of the sex doll revolution.

I should warn you: this column is not for the squeamish. Usually I write about politics. This includes what humans do to other humans, not a very encouraging exploration if we're discussing nation-states, America's wars, police practices, failing educational systems, banking felons, and the rest of the criminal class running the country. But we can take it. We're learning disgusting things but we're learning.

And then there was the $51,000.00 sex doll. As the Dude said, I'll be back, I'm just going to the ATM…

Matt McMullen, a sculptor, says he was getting requests for anatomically-correct mannequins. He now runs a company, Abyss Creation, which sells such dolls at prices starting at $6,000.00 and running to more than $51,000.00. If the absence of actual flesh doesn't trouble you, it might even be a cost-effective move, depending on what hookers are charging. One of these suckers would've been a great help to Governor Spitzer.

McMullen's 'Real Dolls' come with more options than a BMW. Customers can choose among 20 different nipple textures, 16 different faces, 14 different hair styles, 13 different areola colors, 10 eye colors, 9 hair colors, 7 lip colors, 6 body types, 5 skin tones, and 4 different types of public hair. You can also add freckles to face (and body) and get real human hair for the eyebrows.

Did I warn you about the subject matter of this piece?

Abyss Creation tosses in some extras: hair wig, lingerie, lotion, powder, hair brush, a repair kit and an instructional handbook.

There's more. Buyers choose between a 'removable vagina' and a 'realistic vagina,' the former easier to clean, the latter requiring a bucket of Astroglide.

Tell you what. Let's take a break. Get yourself a drink or a joint, breathe the slightly polluted air outside, come on back. It's true that the better we understand ourselves as a culture the better off we are in general, but sometimes it gets as sleazy as a Republican Senator in an airport mens room stall.

Turns out there is not only a market for Real Dolls, it is growing like crazy. And people like to talk about their sex dolls. There are Facebook pages, Twitter pages, and apparently thousands of amateur sex videos on the web involving these dolls. One website has 41,000 registered users, which alone, even at the bottom-line price of six grand, means more than $240,000,000,00. With that kind of cash you can get invited to play in the Crosby, sign Max Scherzer, or even pick up a presidential medal of freedom.

Okay, now we climb out of the Abyss and head to Japan, where Orient Industry says it has "reached the next level" in realistic dolls. It's latest version, called 'Dutch Wives,' is made from a proprietary form of silicone and offers real-looking and -feeling skin and moveable parts. The company's flack told journalists from the Daily Mail that they had identified two areas in manufacture that needed improvement, the skin and the eyes:

"We feel we have finally got something which is arguably not distinguishable from the real thing."

Manufacturers are struggling to overcome something called the 'Uncanny Valley' syndrome, the impediment to complete satisfaction consisting of a frantic disconnect among neural pathways. Orient's spokesman Osami Seto said, "alarm bells go off in the brain when there is a perceptual conflict between the human-like features of the robot and its inhuman movement."  No kidding.

Apparently, active or merely prospective sex with a doll, even a life-like, expensive, silky-skinned, perfect nippled doll, detachable vagina or not, just feels creepy to some people. Can't imagine why.

And speaking of creepy…

The Orient Industry doll is marketed as "a young lady like you've never experienced before: pure, gentle and in need of your love."

And from press reports, the word 'young' is the operative one because the dolls are not only like-like, they're childlike, maybe 10 to 12 years old, and they come with a variety of child's clothing, and with stuffed animals, including a bunny rabbit and a giant teddy bear.

There are more coming. Creator Hiroshi Ishiguro, at Tokyo Designers' Week, introduced several quite 'naturalistic' she-droids, which can change facial expressions, blink their eyes, and even speak.

One writer at the First International Conference on Human-Robot Personal Relationships, described the phenomenon this way:

"Being loved by a robot. It sounds a bit weird, but someday, for many, many people, being in love with a robot will be just as good as love with a human."

Not distinguishable from the real thing... Just as good as love with a human... As I said, doomed.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-12-09:/2014/12/09/doomed-19822362/DoomedRAZFX2014-12-09T08:33:59+01:002014-12-09T08:33:59+01:00
  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-12-08:/2014/12/08/five-and-five-a-movement-to-save-america-19821444/Five And Five: A Movement To Save AmericaRAZFX2014-12-08T22:04:26+01:002014-12-08T22:04:26+01:00
There are 435 members of the House of Representatives, America's largest national governing body. Four days ago, the members voted on a resolution, one which grants Barack Obama the authority –– though Obama had previously claimed that he already had it and didn't need Congress' opinion. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/15/white-house-war-powers-resolution-iraq.

Resolution 758 was aimed not at Iraq but at Russia. It essentially represents Congress' interest in having Obama take us to war and also take the heat for it if things go wrong and we end up with, say, a nuclear exchange. They're saying, go ahead, Barack, your last term is gonna be up pretty soon, anyhow, and Obama says, 'you may rise.'

411 members of the House voted yes, green-lighting the road to hell. 14 did not vote or were not present. 10 dissented. Here they are:

George Miller (D-Ca). Knew him many years ago, a smart, tough, left-leaner with about fifteen or twenty terms on his resumé.

Dana Rohrabacher (R-Ca). Reputed to be very right-wing.

Alan Grayson (D-Fla). The man who had to sue Obama to force his way into the secret room where they keep drafts of the TPP deal, had to agree to take no notes and say nothing about what he saw. Afterwards, Grayson said the documents were a disaster for America and it was against the law for him to tell us what was in them.

Alcee Hastings (D-Fla). If I'm not mistaken, I met this guy in law school. Later became a controversial judge. Don't know his politics.

Thomas Massie (R-Ky). Very conservative.

Justin Amash (R-Mich). Amash's name was on the sensational, almost successful congressional revolt against the NSA and its flagrantly illegal surveillance operations, where more than two hundred voted to de-fund the NSA. It was a temporary coalition between the two elements of the two major parties often found at the right and left fringes. I wrote about this and discussed the prospects for a more permanent coalition, sort of a coalition on the present Bill of Rights emergency. http://lookingglass.blog.co.uk/2013/07/29/guess-f-ing-what-16273375/.

Walter Jones (R-N.Car). Very conservative.

John Duncan (R-Tenn). Very conservative.

Beto O'Rourke (D-Tex). From Texas, probably suicidal.

Jim McDermott (D-Wash). An anti-war politician, rare these days.

Five Republicans from the far side of Goldwater. Five Democrats probably more comfortable having a chat with Fidel Castro than lunch with Diane Feinstein (as I would be).

Five and five. The seeds of a movement, perhaps, to save the nation.

http://youtu.be/e0q7zIfjOB8.

Small facebook debate yesterday over, of all things, something Ron Paul said. That's the father, not the son, for those of you keeping score.

Paul Sr. continues to write and speak against the extension of America's empire. In this, he's been consistent and consistently right. He says these things at Republican forums and gets plenty of applause. Here's a sample from a 2012 presidential debate in Nevada:

How does it help us to keep troops in Korea? All these years. We're broke, we have to borrow this money. Why are we in Japan? Why do we subsidize Germany

We would be safer if we weren't in so many places, We have an empire, we can't afford it, empires always bring great nations down, it's what's happened throughout history, and we're doing it to ourselves.

900 bases, 150 different countries, we have enough weapons to blow up the world twenty, twenty-five times, we have more weapons than all the other countries together, essentially, and we want to spend more and more and you can't cut a penny?

Oh, they're going to invade this country? They can't even shoot a missile at it.

Foreign aid, that's the easiest thing to cut… foreign aid is taking money from poor people in a rich country and giving it to rich people in poor countries. It becomes weapons of war.

Yesterday, he called House Resolution 758 "16 pages of war propaganda that should have made even neocons blush," saying it was intentionally crafted to justify military aggression against Russia.

"If we accept that Russia is posing a 'threat' to international peace, how can such a thing be ignored? These are the slippery slopes that lead to war," Paul said.

On September 5th of this year, an agreement was reached in Belarus between Ukraine and Russia suspending hostilities. Resolution 758 calls on Obama to re-start that war, to "provide the government of Ukraine with lethal and non-lethal defense articles, services, and training to effectively defend its territory and sovereignty."

Paul slammed the Resolution as being hypocritical, saying that the House ignores the role the U.S. played in overthrowing a democratically-elected government last February and installing a right-wing regime.

"We have all heard the tapes of State Department officials plotting with the US Ambassador in Ukraine to overthrow the government. We heard US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland bragging that the US spent $5 billion on regime change in Ukraine. Why is that OK?"

Referring to elections held in the east of Ukraine which the U.S. called 'illegal' and 'fraudulent,' Paul asked, "Aren't the people of eastern Ukraine allowed self-determination? Isn't that a basic human right?"

http://rt.com/usa/211799-paul-congress-russia-war/.

Obama's war against Ukraine and Russia, like his wars against much of Africa, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iran, is based entirely on the lies of empire. That's what empires do because they have to, expand always and lie to the people about the reasons. If you are clinging to the fiction that the country is a democracy and that Washington cares about you, explaining that America is causing wholesale destruction, death, and misery around the world to advance the profits of Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil, General Electric and Boeing is not going to be well-received.

The great historian Chalmers Johnson, whose commentary survives his death via YouTube and his books, pointed out a simple truth: you can have an empire or you can have a democracy at home, but you can't have both. Ron Paul seems to know this, in stark contrast with the leadership of both major parties. On matters of money, business, and the profits of war, Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid are on the same page.

The only hope I see on the horizon is by way of a new coalition. Both existing major parties will never allow anyone with a contrary foreign policy to reach the presidency. Too much money is at stake. Hell, Jack Kennedy was killed for less.

But when I propose this coalition –– I'm still pushing the name, 'American Birthday Party,' but it's not catching on –– I get a torrent of criticism from people who are otherwise my political friends, essentially excoriating the Pauls (they don't generally draw any distinction, although there obviously are some) for being racists and name-calling on an Olympic level. Why is that?

What I think: my country is in crisis right now, pushed almost to collapse by corporate greed, corrupt politicians, and the glorification of violence when used in the service of the rich.

People who care about this situation can find plenty of particular issues of great importance. To me, without diminishing the significance of other things, we've got three situations which are extremely dangerous and we'll do something about them if we wish to survive. And it's on these three issues that I find allies on both fringes.

One is civil liberties. Attacks on freedom are not new, that's what governments do, as we were warned repeatedly by Thomas Jefferson and the original American street gang. That's where the Bill of Rights came from and the separation of powers. But after the events of September 11, 2001, whatever their origin, those who wanted to curtail freedom were now, conveniently able to impose new laws on a people who had been scared out of their wits.

We got the Patriot Act and several iterations of the National Defense Authorization Act. We got an entirely new federal police apparatus, Homeland Security, which is vast, secretive, and which infiltrates political organizations and shares in the universal surveillance we are now subject to.

Under the law, the 4th Amendment has been illogically but effectively repealed. Most courts are allowing the government to search our persons and homes without warrants or probable cause. There are official lists kept by the government which label eight million Americans –– that's the last number which was conceded by Washington –– as potentially troublesome, the formerly unAmerican practice of preventive detention is now legal, and Halliburton got just under a billion dollars to construct a series of 'relocation camps' inside military bases, to be used for holding an influx of "illegal aliens" or, the budget language explains, "for some other purpose."

In fact, under what Bush and Obama claimed to be the law, and in the face of a mostly-useless and staggeringly corrupt Congress, much of the Bill of Rights has been wiped out.

The extreme danger of that, alone, cannot be overemphasized. We get it back or we're goners.

In that fight, I don't have a lot of allies in what still considers itself to be the 'liberal' wing of the Democratic Party. I don't get any help from Dick Durbin or Barbara Boxer, from Schumer, even from Franken. The only three Senators in my party to speak out against the incipient police state have been Ron Wyden and the two Udalls, one of whom just got defeated for re-election.

Among Republicans, it's much the same, of course. At least they offer some specimens of spectacular stupidity for the limited amusement that provides. The Democrats mostly just want to explain why they can't get anything done and how their campaign coffers, bulging from the weight of gold from the banks, the drug companies, insurance thieves, and the arms industry, have nothing to do with it.

I will make common cause with anyone who will join this fight. I don't care if they also believe the dollar should be replaced by the cherry pit and that the sun travels around the Earth. We have a little time to get to the cherry pit issue if we can first save the damned country.

I will make common cause also in the second matter, that of reversing the excesses of empire. I realize this is probably hopeless but that doesn't make it not worthy of trying. Here, America is spilling its resources, blowing things up, bringing terrible pain and misery to, literally, millions. The cost is already terrible. When the blowback arrives, it will be worse.

Again, Ron Paul lines up with me. If you haven't seen it, check out this stunning, radical anti-war video Paul released in the last election: http://youtu.be/XKfuS6gfxPY.

While the Democrats in the Congress fall over one another in the rush to show how warlike they are, how belligerent, how trigger-happy, the dissent comes from unexpected sources. I will take all the help I can get. I don't care if some of my allies want to abolish the department of education –– we'll get into that later.

The third critical issue, to me, is race.

This is going to surprise and annoy some people who, having seen a few internet items woven into a narrative that seems obvious to them, fervently believe that Ron Paul is a racist.

Some base that conclusion on articles printed under his name decades ago when a fundraising 'newsletter' went out without his active supervision. Others point to his associations, the support he has gotten from some pretty disgusting people. Of course, in the political arena, disgusting people are everywhere. One can find them on the roster for every major politician, from Hillary Clinton to John Boehner.

I would've assumed about him what so many others seem to, taking the words of his enemies and not bothering to dig into the question, had it not been for seeing a couple of his debates in 2012 and getting my mind blown.

The debate I'm referring to was in South Carolina, and Paul was telling the audience that he could no longer support the death penalty because it was inflicted against poor people and minorities in a blatantly discriminatory way.

This was not some politician paying lip service to 'good guy' legislation, something to look good for constituents. This was a guy looking for Republican votes in the middle of the South and talking about inequality.

Then he started talking about legalizing drugs. All drugs. One of the panelists, obviously shaken, protested that it would lead to an explosion in drug use, but Paul asked him whether, were it legal, he would run right out and buy some heroin. Then he talked about how the drug laws, especially the federal drug laws, were being used against blacks, that given their percentage use blacks were prosecuted at a much higher rate, convicted at a still higher rate, and sentenced to longer terms. He was saying this to a white audience in South Carolina.

So I checked him out a little bit, started catching the sound bites.

Then came Ferguson.

Ron Paul, saying we have to demilitarize our police forces. http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/ron-paul-ferguson-militarization-police-110112.html.

"Too many bureaucrats with guns, too many regulations, too many prisons, all designed to protect the state… Protesters to the police killing an unarmed teenager have been met with tear gas, a substance banned in warfare. Police0initiated violence should surprise no one. NSA spies on everyone without warrants. Drug busts with SWAT teams making mistakes are common. The excessive use of police power should be an expected consequence of big government, which is authoritarian by nature. The people's liberties are forgotten."

http://reason.com/blog/2014/08/15/on-ferguson-ron-paul-says-a-culture-of-v.

And then, there's this:

America's attention recently turned away from the violence in Iraq and Gaza toward the violence in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of Michael Brown. While all the facts surrounding the shooting have yet to come to light, the shock of seeing police using tear gas (a substance banned in warfare), and other military-style weapons against American citizens including journalists exercising their First Amendment rights, has started a much-needed debate on police militarization.

The increasing use of military equipment by local police is a symptom of growing authoritarianism, not the cause. The cause is policies that encourage police to see Americans as enemies to subjugate, rather than as citizens to "protect and serve." This attitude is on display not only in Ferguson, but in the police lockdown following the Boston Marathon bombing and in the Americans killed and injured in "no-knock" raids conducted by militarized SWAT teams.

One particularly tragic victim of police militarization and the war on drugs is "baby Bounkham." This infant was severely burned and put in a coma by a flash-burn grenade thrown into his crib by a SWAT team member who burst into the infant's room looking for methamphetamine.

As shocking as the case of baby Bounkham is, no one should be surprised that empowering police to stop consensual (though perhaps harmful and immoral) activities has led to a growth of authoritarian attitudes and behaviors among government officials and politicians. Those wondering why the local police increasingly look and act like an occupying military force should consider that the drug war was the justification for the Defense Department's "1033 program," which last year gave local police departments almost $450 million worth of "surplus" military equipment. This included armored vehicles and grenades like those that were used to maim baby Bounkham.

Today, the war on drugs has been eclipsed by the war on terror as an all-purpose excuse for expanding the police state. We are all familiar with how the federal government increased police power after September 11 via the PATRIOT Act, TSA, and other Homeland Security programs. Not as widely known is how the war on terror has been used to justify the increased militarization of local police departments to the detriment of our liberty. Since 2002, the Department of Homeland Security has provided over $35 billion in grants to local governments for the purchase of tactical gear, military-style armor, and mine-resistant vehicles.

The threat of terrorism is used to justify these grants. However, the small towns that receive tanks and other military weapons do not just put them into storage until a real terrorist threat emerges. Instead, the military equipment is used for routine law enforcement.

Politicians love this program because it allows them to brag to their local media about how they are keeping their constituents safe. Of course, the military-industrial complex's new kid brother, the law enforcement-industrial complex, wields tremendous influence on Capitol Hill. Even many so-called progressives support police militarization to curry favor with police unions.

Reversing the dangerous trend of the militarization of local police can start with ending all federal involvement in local law enforcement. Fortunately, all that requires is for Congress to begin following the Constitution, which forbids the federal government from controlling or funding local law enforcement. There is also no justification for federal drug laws or for using the threat of terrorism as an excuse to treat all people as potential criminals. However, Congress will not restore constitutional government on its own; the American people must demand that Congress stop facilitating the growth of an authoritarian police state that threatens their liberty.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-08-25/ron-paul-ferguson-war-comes-home.

And meanwhile there is Ron Paul's son, the right-wing Senator from Kentucky. I see him shifting his foreign policy views closer to those of the empire builders, in a rather sorry spectacle of a candidate hoping to appeal to an evil but popular policy impulse. But on Ferguson and on militarized cops, he produced a stunning critique, thoughtful and radical.

In an Op-Ed for Time Magazine, Rand Paul called for 'Demilitarizing the Police.'

"The shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown is an awful tragedy that continues to send shockwaves through the community of Ferguson, Missouri and across the nation.

If I had been told to get out of the street as a teenager, there would have been a distinct possibility that I might have smarted off. But, I wouldn't have expected to be shot.

The outrage in Ferguson is understandable—though there is never an excuse for rioting or looting. There is a legitimate role for the police to keep the peace, but there should be a difference between a police response and a military response.

The images and scenes we continue to see in Ferguson resemble war more than traditional police action.

Glenn Reynolds, in Popular Mechanics, recognized the increasing militarization of the police five years ago. In 2009 he wrote:

Soldiers and police are supposed to be different. … Police look inward. They're supposed to protect their fellow citizens from criminals, and to maintain order with a minimum of force.

It's the difference between Audie Murphy and Andy Griffith. But nowadays, police are looking, and acting, more like soldiers than cops, with bad consequences. And those who suffer the consequences are usually innocent civilians.

The Cato Institute's Walter Olson observed this week how the rising militarization of law enforcement is currently playing out in Ferguson:
 Why armored vehicles in a Midwestern inner suburb? Why would cops wear camouflage gear against a terrain patterned by convenience stores and beauty parlors? Why are the authorities in Ferguson, Mo. so given to quasi-martial crowd control methods (such as bans on walking on the street) and, per the reporting of Riverfront Times, the firing of tear gas at people in their own yards? ("'This my property!' he shouted, prompting police to fire a tear gas canister directly at his face.") Why would someone identifying himself as an 82nd Airborne Army veteran, observing the Ferguson police scene, comment that "We rolled lighter than that in an actual war zone"?

Olson added, "the dominant visual aspect of the story, however, has been the sight of overpowering police forces confronting unarmed protesters who are seen waving signs or just their hands."

How did this happen?

Most police officers are good cops and good people. It is an unquestionably difficult job, especially in the current circumstances.

There is a systemic problem with today's law enforcement.

Not surprisingly, big government has been at the heart of the problem. Washington has incentivized the militarization of local police precincts by using federal dollars to help municipal governments build what are essentially small armies—where police departments compete to acquire military gear that goes far beyond what most of Americans think of as law enforcement.

This is usually done in the name of fighting the war on drugs or terrorism. The Heritage Foundation's Evan Bernick wrote in 2013 that, "the Department of Homeland Security has handed out anti-terrorism grants to cities and towns across the country, enabling them to buy armored vehicles, guns, armor, aircraft, and other equipment."

Bernick continued, "federal agencies of all stripes, as well as local police departments in towns with populations less than 14,000, come equipped with SWAT teams and heavy artillery."

Bernick noted the cartoonish imbalance between the equipment some police departments possess and the constituents they serve, "today, Bossier Parish, Louisiana, has a .50 caliber gun mounted on an armored vehicle. The Pentagon gives away millions of pieces of military equipment to police departments across the country—tanks included."

When you couple this militarization of law enforcement with an erosion of civil liberties and due process that allows the police to become judge and jury—national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, pre-conviction forfeiture—we begin to have a very serious problem on our hands.

Given these developments, it is almost impossible for many Americans not to feel like their government is targeting them. Given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them.

This is part of the anguish we are seeing in the tragic events outside of St. Louis, Missouri. It is what the citizens of Ferguson feel when there is an unfortunate and heartbreaking shooting like the incident with Michael Brown.

Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention. Our prisons are full of black and brown men and women who are serving inappropriately long and harsh sentences for non-violent mistakes in their youth.

The militarization of our law enforcement is due to an unprecedented expansion of government power in this realm. It is one thing for federal officials to work in conjunction with local authorities to reduce or solve crime. It is quite another for them to subsidize it.

Americans must never sacrifice their liberty for an illusive and dangerous, or false, security. This has been a cause I have championed for years, and one that is at a near-crisis point in our country.

Let us continue to pray for Michael Brown's family, the people of Ferguson, police, and citizens alike.

Let me try to get this as clear as possible: I'm not writing this to praise Ron Paul (or Rand). I'd have a few difficulties with his policies were he the President. But he's not going to be President, and this isn't even about Ron Paul. It's about the battle we're in for the soul of the country.

If the Bill of Rights doesn't survive –– and it's in mortal danger right now –– America won't survive. We'll become a monster to our own people, cheating them, stealing from them, brutalizing them. The cops are just delivering the mail. What we had better do is get at the people behind the cops.

I make reference to Ron Paul because although he's routinely slandered and ridiculed, he turns up on the right side of the battle on the issues that cut to the heart of our political survival. Even his kid does, surprisingly, perhaps.

We need a new movement, a new path, a new party, a new something which galvanizes those on the right and left who can see what's being done by America's owners and are alarmed enough to want to stop it. Ron Paul is just an indication of what might be out there. To the true libertarian voices on the right (I exclude the corporate thieves who fake their libertarianism as a cover for financial rape), we have to come together now. We can fight about other matters later, and we certainly will, but we can fight about other matters later only if we've got a country where that is permissible.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-12-07:/2014/12/07/please-tell-me-i-m-wrong-19817471/Please Tell Me I'm WrongRAZFX2014-12-07T23:43:05+01:002014-12-07T23:43:05+01:00
Guilt and fear, the white American double header. Nothing's going to get any better until we face up to it.

Most of these daily shootings, white cop, black victim, feature a similar narrative: there's a black guy who looks suspicious, looks menacing, looks different than white people look, and he's in the wrong place, walking, standing still, looking hard at me, not looking at me at all. If I need to, I can say he was reaching for something, charging at me, struggling, going for my gun.

But even in a country which adores violence, most of these killings are so damned obvious that the badge-wearing perp would be going to prison except for one thing: a very large number of white people are scared of black people.

There's one principal reason for this fear. White people share a collective guilt at the horrors and misery other white people inflicted on blacks in America ever since those other white people and their forebears dragged Africans over in chains to work the cotton fields and provide a little sport and sex for the owners. In other forms, it's still going on, the plantations exported from cotton fields to big cities like Chicago, Cleveland, New York, L.A. The cops patrol these plantations with one aim in mind: keeping down the trouble.

My personal observation as a white man who's lived his life in the United States, although largely in white-dominated enclaves like Marin County, is that blacks are astoundingly peaceful and patient, considering. That, of course, is not a common view among whites, especially among white cops.

If you have a deep fear of blacks, especially of young black men, and you have a badge and weaponry and carry them into black communities or, worse, encounter a black man in a white community, somewhere he looks dangerously out of place, what are the chances you're going to use that gun?

Many of these death scenes involve more than one cop. In New York, it was five men, weighing collectively well over a thousand pounds, pinning the victim while a confederate applied the choke hold which killed him. Last Spring in Orange County, California, six cops, including two Highway Patrol officers, beat a man to death on a public street, while onlookers yelled for them to stop and one actually called 911 for help. Several witnesses captured the killing on their cell phones, and each got a visit in the early morning hours from a cop who confiscated the camera.

Combine a propensity for violence with a deep fear of 'the other,' it's a recipe for murder.

Long time ago, 1978, I was running in the Democratic primary in Marin County and asked a white friend to accompany me on campaign stops in Marin City, a mostly-black community just north of the bridge. He declined. "They want to kill me," he said. My friend at the time –– haven't seen him since he decided Reagan was a good choice for President –– had been born in the aforementioned Orange County. He was afraid of blacks.

In my admittedly limited experience, I think blacks are onto whites and that makes whites exceedingly nervous. My friend was a racist, a blond haired, blue eyed white boy with an often sweet disposition who was aware that black people knew about the racism. And, of course, they sure did.

It's close to axiomatic that oppressed people are acutely aware of their oppressors. They must be because for them it's a survival skill. Blacks know that white people will lynch them and set the perpetrators free –– they've been experiencing this for, well, pretty much forever. They can smell white people.

It doesn't help matters when they can smell your fear.

My friend Judy told me a story about a guy she knows, black guy from Chicago, a guy with a story, beating the odds, tours in Afghanistan, back to school, success in the world. He's one of those remarkable people the right-wing likes to point to when prattling about how anyone can make it in America if they just quit whining.

He wrote of his feelings in the wake of the most recent executions. I've excised his name.

"Man oh man. Days like today make it hard to believe in America.

 I'll say it because I know a lot of my friends can't say it that succinctly. But I've fought wars (plural) for this country, so whatever if you have a problem with me saying it.

 This country is supposed to be about working hard, and living the dream. Except where it's seemingly perfectly all right to murder people in the streets. On camera, and we won't even put you through the pretense of having to defend yourself against that.

 I mean, thank god I don't have children. What would I tell them? Work hard, do the right thing and maybe, if you're lucky you'll be able to make it through the day and reap the benefit from that work?

 This isn't some intellectual exercise. I'd had guns pulled on me by cops during routine traffic stops. I've been handcuffed to the curb for walking through the wrong neighborhood. Recently. So has EVERY SINGLE OTHER black person I've ever met.

 Because its common knowledge that black people are dangerous, and we can just assume they're up to no good?

 I mean, let's recap. At 17, I enlisted in the United States Army to try escape the cycle of poverty that had defined the life of my granny (born in the deep south on sharecropping farms) and my father (who spent the first 17 years of his life living under pre civil rights legislation).

 Since this was a peace time Army I had to graduate from HS first. So I went and took classes at three different high schools in the city to graduate as quickly as possible. At the time CPS only allowed you to take classes from one. I was banking on the fact that no one would actually not count the extra classes I took. I was right about that. So 10 days after I graduated from HS, I shipped out to basic training

 After about 30 days I shattered my wrist. The cause was unknown, so I was told it was most likely from malnourishment. Alrighty then. I spent 4 extra months in basic training rehabbing the injury. When one of my drill sergeant met my grandfather (a WWII vet), he went out of his way to tell him how much he respected what I did and that he didn't think he could have handled what I went through. If you've ever had a drill sergeant, you know they don't do that shit.

 BTW, my wrist never healed fully, but it healed enough for me to go back to training. I just gutted it out and 6 months later I had to have a surgery to remove the chunks of bone fragments still floating in my wrist.

 That "peace time Army" thing lasted about 26 days. 9/11. Boom. I never wanted to end up like my dad (100% disabled Vietnam Vet), so I started taking college classes on my own time. Note: You don't have a lot of your own time when you're a scout. Even still, I did so well in them that I got accepted into a program that would take me off active duty and send me through ROTC. Except my papers got "lost" in the shuffle, and I went to Iraq for a year instead.

 I'd see the heaviest fighting this country had seen since Vietnam. That's cool. I still keep cranking out college courses. Waiting on the green to hit the target? Great. Let me crack open my introduction to computer information systems textbook. Hey, sorry man. I'm gonna miss midnight chow tonight because I gotta crank out this 15 page paper for international politics when the internet hootch isn't crowded. I did 7 courses this way, nearly a full year of courses.

 I get to college, work full time to help pay for it and continue on in the Army Reserves. I win a shit ton of academic awards in the process. No big deal. Just doing what I do. I then somehow luck my way into the State Department and work my ass off. Despite graduating college at 25, I'm a GS-13 at 26. If you work in the government, you know that doesn't usually happen.

 After a few years, I realize I've missed almost every significant moment for my family. So, I apply to get my MBA while in Afghanistan. That's more of waking up on 3 hours of sleep to study the GMAT during the only open window you have. MBA admissions are funny, so I have to schedule my application period during the 2 weeks I'm home for a buddies wedding.

 I go Kandahar>Myrtle Beach>Bachelor Party> Take GMAT>Submit Application>Fly to Chicago>See family for first time in year and a half>Talk my way into Interview>Interview>Fly back to Kandahar.

 Zero margin for error. I get a full ride. I get to come home and I do what anyone who has spent 10 years fighting wars does. I party a lot.

 People are surprised when I graduate early, because they don't understand that no matter what, I wake up every day as early as possible and do shit. It's what I've always had to do.

 That's a long road. Hell. I bet that's just exhausting to read. But that's the American dream right?

 You work hard, you earn it.

 Then again. I know for a fact that if some cop killed me in the streets tomorrow, that it wouldn't be all that above that people would look at. They'd say I looked intimidating, because obviously. They'd find pictures of my tattoos and talk about how some of them reference known gang members and about how that just proves I was some thug on the streets.

 They'd show pictures of my holding drinks or bottles of liquor and how I was living some baller lifestyle carbon copied out of some gangster rapper's video.

 Am I being dramatic? Nah. What picture of mine do you think gets posted on Fox news?

 They'd show all this to some grand jury, and say how much the officer feared for his life. I mean, wouldn't you? If you had some tatted up, mean looking, 6'5, 215 lb black dude bearing down on you, wouldn't you be afraid? Obviously.

 All of that above? Never mind that.

 It's a split second reaction when you're on the streets, and it's not the cop's fault that Black Men are something to be feared. Maybe I should have known better than to give him a reason. I shouldn't have been walking down the street in a neighborhood I didn't belong in. Or walking down the middle of the street, or standing on the corner.

 Or Maybe I shouldn't have mouthed back, or stood up for myself or just you know, failed to fully acknowledge what was happening in 1.5 seconds.

 Man, that's some bullshit. I can't believe this is America. Please tell me I'm wrong.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-12-06:/2014/12/06/the-wall-at-the-back-of-the-theater-19810435/The Wall At The Back Of The TheaterRAZFX2014-12-06T05:29:08+01:002014-12-08T18:30:52+01:00
I liked it better when the lies showed more intelligence and care. So long as most Americans could be tricked into buying a well-disguised corporate agenda, it was somehow comforting. It meant that the uglier characteristics of America were restrained, maybe only for cosmetic or public relations reasons, but anything which stood between me and overt totalitarianism was welcome.

I could even be one of the fools who signed on, even after all the years of knowing things I'd have preferred not knowing, for one last ride with Barack Obama in 2008. Hell, I wrote about it at the time. http://lookingglass.blog.co.uk/2008/02/29/the-bonehead-baseline-and-thoughts-about-3795915/.

What is most troubling these days is not only the frightening number and savagery of police homicides but the carelessness of the official whitewash afterward.

American cops do not quite bring a clean history to the modern day. Urban blacks have known for about two hundred fifty years that white cops could beat, rob, rape, and even shoot them without suffering any consequences. But it was not a daily ritual, and the white-owned newspapers gave the brutality no column inches and radio and television no airwaves.

Cops in some American cities were notorious. Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Kansas City, along with many Southern venues, waged an ongoing war against the poor and against non-whites, and there was no fallout and little blowback. Until Watts.

In 1965, the Watts section of Los Angeles became a combat zone.

From my novel, News From A Parallel World:

Is Paris Burning? was near the top of the best-seller lists, but it was Watts that burned. The television news reports: L.A. in flames, the sounds of glass breaking, sirens, enraged partisans. The commentators, all white, incoherent and in shock. I sat in the family room and watched the images flicker, hand-held cameras on an urban battlefield, sniper fire in an American city, and they had to shut down upscale hotels and reroute planes at the airport. It could've been Beirut.

Five days before L.A. blew, the President had signed the Voting Rights Act, and now Chet Huntley and Eric Sevareid were confused, and white liberals felt betrayed, and all over America sales in prescription drugs and firearms went right through the roof. The air smelled like fear.

The media covered it, which is to say they wrote about it or showed film clips, but they generally hadn't a clue…

On television and in the magazines, the photos were of looters, national guard soldiers, cornered teenagers getting the shit kicked out of them, and things burning. There were bodies in the streets.

A month earlier, Martin Luther King, Jr. had told Sunday parishioners in Atlanta, I'm more convinced than ever before that nonviolence is the way... We need not hate; we need not use violence... But for people who felt broken every day by the legacies of slavery, King's vision was not always enough, and Robert Kennedy, speaking at a convention in New York, said ...it is one thing to assure a man the legal right to eat in a restaurant; it is another thing to assure that he can earn the money to eat there...

But King's words, no more than Kennedy's, were finding increasingly unreceptive ears, and by the Summer of 1967, when Newark and Detroit exploded in insurrection, the unresolved racism and systemic prejudice had gotten worse, and by the Summer of 1968, King and Kennedy were both killed by assassins' bullets.

Fifty years after Watts, we are experiencing a wave of homicides in America initiated and carried out by police officers. According to the FBI's own admittedly minimized data –– they count only those killings self-reported by police agencies –– there were more than 400 of these horrors in 2013, alone. It is not only black men. Others are killed in mistaken home assaults by SWAT teams at the wrong address, by cops called to domestic disputes and to assist when a family is concerned about a mother or father or sibling or child who is showing signs of mental confusion. Some are killed simply because they didn't obey orders quickly enough, including two who were deaf and didn't understand the cop.

All of this is quite alarming, no less so because police agencies and other government authority reliably cover-up evidence, silence witnesses with threats and worse, and manage to skate almost every time.

When the pretense becomes so thin as to represent arrogance, it is a sign that the government no longer cares whether we believe it or not. That is dangerous.

Frank Zappa, predicting all of this:

The President selected a cop with a long history of racist behavior and thoughts to his new commission on Ferguson and the militarization of police. It's as though they don't care whether we believe them or not anymore. They go through the motions. They say the right things.

Obama is replacing outgoing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel with someone straight from the Pentagon and a career officer hungry for conflict. He is preparing, assuming the latest funding slipped into a last-minute bill before Congress will pass –– despite objections from both the left and right, including Rand Paul, to go after the government of Syria using arms for 'moderates' actually affiliated with Al-Qaeda, and to reintroduce ground troops into Iraq.

He speaks eloquently of peace while operating the most lethal killing machine in world history.

The Obama betrayal of everything he promised has not occurred in a vacuum. Gifted with a large victory in 2008, he and his party managed to excuse their way out of doing anything of value on domestic or worldwide environmental matters. Fracking became commonplace despite considerable evidence that it is poisoning people.

We got a continuation of torture and a President who is preventing the American people from seeing the report done on CIA practices. We got death lists and missile attacks against wedding parties, and 'double-tap' strikes which violate international laws.

It's a very long list. Thing is, at least for a while, we got excuses. True, most of them were kind of flimsy –– the claim that they needed 60 Senate votes to pass anything was a blatant lie, not to mention the majority party could have amended the filibuster rule by majority vote but didn't want to.

What worries me especially is that it's starting to look as though they, the owners, are taking down the scenery and pulling back the curtains. And that must mean they believe they have the country under sufficient control, that the people, being ignorant to a toxic degree –– http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/americans-are-dangerously-politically-ignorant-numbers-are-shocking?paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark –– no longer pose any threat to power.

The country's owners are not black, they're not poor, they don't live in desperate, depressed areas of America. They are also not cops. They use cops. And when increasing resort to weaponry wracks my country, these people will hide behind professional protection, behind the walls of their villas, behind their vast wealth.

I hope very much that America's cops and soldiers figure out who the real danger is, who is using them as hostages, human shields between the people and the mechanisms of ownership, and decide they're not going to be used that way anymore.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-12-05:/2014/12/05/cops-19805485/CopsRAZFX2014-12-05T10:18:32+01:002014-12-05T10:27:11+01:00
So now there's a father of six, a black man in New York City, choked to death by five police while being 'subdued' on suspicion of a misdemeanor –– since refuted –– selling individual cigarettes. It took five cops to hold Eric Garner to the pavement while one, Daniel Pantaleo, applied a hold to his throat which stopped his breathing.

The grand jury, as in Ferguson, Missouri, declined to indict, despite the availability of a videotape which is quite graphic. The President ignores all of the deep and tragic issues wrenching the nation apart and plans to 'solve' these serial killings by more extensive use of cameras by cops. But if New York City is any indication, cameras won't be enough.

Some people in America, some who wear guns and badges, some who serve on grand juries, some who are prosecutors, and some in the mass media think that black people are dangerous, especially black kids, and that if a (usually white) cop shoots, or strangles, or beats to death one of them he was probably justified.

In case after case, the winning defense is that the well-trained and otherwise innocent cop was threatened, assaulted, or maybe stared at in a manner which caused the shooter to reasonably fear for (usually) his life. That the dead kid was unarmed is dismissed as a random detail.

America is inflicting death on mostly black and poor people on a daily basis, by people wearing guns and other instruments of force and control. Sometimes the victims are inside the United States.

The dead, the stories run, whether foreign or domestic, "asked for it" by being "uncooperative," or being different, or maybe just by walking in the street, or selling tobacco cigarettes.

The mass media, the corporate criminals who share responsibility for this and other carnage, line up behind the muscle and excoriate the victims.

Cable news networks feature 'experts' who prop up overseas adventures, regardless of how bloody, crazy, or preposterous. ABC paid the Ferguson killer, Darren Wilson, $500,000.00 for an exclusive interview with George Stephanopolous, the former Clinton hack, after Wilson met with and, apparently, auditioned ABC's Stephanopolous, Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon of CNN, Scott Pelley of CBS, and Matt Lauer of NBC News.

The networks conducted a bidding war for the right to put Wilson on the air. Wilson made sure to give the deal to someone who would play ball.

Added to the cash raised for his comfort and support by a private group –– with which the Ferguson district attorney is affiliated –– Wilson has pocketed a tidy one million dollars. He then announced that he was quitting the force in order to protect his former fellow officers from reprisals.

The police in America play the same role assigned to them in just about every nation on Earth: they are the enforcers for those who own and run the place. That's why they have guns. In America, that could hardly be plainer, with major crime indexes showing steadily declining numbers while police forces are armed to the teeth and stocking up weaponry suitable for an occupying army.

The President speaks of peace while escalating conflicts around the world, selling ever more weaponry to nations and guerrilla groups, rattling sabers at Russia. Everywhere, there are 'coalitions' for war, never for peace. More guns to Egypt, where the rulers have smashed the popular revolt, and 'smart bombs' to Israel, whose leaders commit ongoing and universally-condemned (except by the United States) war crimes against the Palestinians.

Then he admonishes Americans against violence, regardless of provocation, although everyone knows he's talking to blacks and the poor, not to those who command armies.

The cops are, after all, civil servants. They are also placed in a unique category, above the law –– their price for protecting the politicians and the owners –– and beyond control. They are exploited and lied to by the owners, fed propaganda about blacks and about those who seem 'different,' and they rally behind one another as they feel the anger rising around them.

It's the owners who are looting the country, starving the poor, stealing people's pensions and savings, indenturing the students, sending jobs overseas. The job of the cops, obviously, is to keep the lid on.

But if the cops ever figure out who their real enemy is, the owners of this country will be running for cover.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-12-03:/2014/12/03/oswald-19790918/OswaldRAZFX2014-12-03T08:17:49+01:002014-12-03T08:17:49+01:00
Lee Harvey Oswald got the book depository job through Ruth Paine. Ruth and her husband Michael, who were friends with the owner of the building, had been introduced to Oswald by Guy deMohrenschildt, a prominent member of the White Russian community in Dallas, a member of the Petroleum Club, and a world-traveling geologist who spoke five languages.

The tax returns and numerous other government documents concerning the Paines remain classified secret for more than fifty years for reasons of 'national security.'

Shortly after being introduced to the couple by deMohrenschildt in late Summer, 1963, the Paines effected a separation. Marina Oswald then moved into the Paine residence and Lee Oswald moved to a rooming house.

After the assassination, two photographs were found in the Paine garage which showed the accused killer posing with a rifle and two communist newspapers. Oswald denied that they were real. He'd had considerable experience in photography –– prior to the depository job, he'd worked for a defense contractor doing photographic work for the military –– and said he could prove it.

As a future lone assassin, Oswald never seemed to be alone. In New Orleans, he was surrounded by intelligence personnel –– at the Reilly Coffee Company (more on this bizarre happenstance in a minute), handing out pro-Castro leaflets in a public display designed to get him arrested (more on this, also), and running his 'leftist' operation out of an office at 544 Camp Street, the same building which housed the offices of CIA operatives and the anti-Castro groups the agency funded. In Dallas, he had deMohrenschildt.

544 Camp was located at Lafayette Square, right in the middle of the offices of national security and military operations, including the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI, the Secret Service, and the FBI. The person Oswald reported to was Guy Banister, former head of the Chicago office of the FBI.

As Oliver Stone mentions in his great film, JFK, nobody mourns Oswald. But we ought to. We do not know precisely what role he played in the Dallas assassination, other than as a patsy, but that is our fault because there was quite a bit of information to be found; we just didn't look for it, happy to buy the official story which was released to the public only hours after the Parkland doctors told us the President had died.

According to documents which survived an FBI effort to destroy them, a Telex report went to FBI field offices on November 17, 1963, warning that a militant 'revolutionary' group would try to assassinate the President in Dallas on the 22nd. The source of that warning has never been identified, but Jim Garrison believed it may have been Oswald.

Oswald was, after all, an FBI informant. This fact was relayed to the Warren Commission by Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr. Evidently, his association with the Bureau went back at least to his time in New Orleans, when he met with agent John Quigley, who later destroyed his notes of that interview, much as Dallas FBI agent James Hosty, whose name and phone number were in Oswald's address book before being removed posthumously by the government, destroyed his notes of a meeting with Oswald shortly before the murder of the President.

The New Orleans 'incident' took place when Oswald, who had arranged to meet with anti-Castro Cuban leader Carlos Bringuier several days earlier, distributed his pro-Castro leaflets under the nose of the city's intelligence groups. Bringuier showed up and yelled at Oswald, at which Oswald invited him to take a swing. The police officer who arrested Oswald later said the whole thing had the appearance of a 'staged incident.' In custody, Oswald asked to speak with agent Quigley, and later showed up to debate Bringuier on local radio.

The Reilly Company period, in the Summer of '63, before he moved or was moved to Dallas, is one of the strangest aspects of a life filled with unexplained occurrences. The only visible benefit to Oswald working at Reilly was its geographic location in New Orleans, being right next door to a car repair shop which serviced only the vehicles of intelligence personnel. Oswald, on his breaks from Reilly, was often seen there.

When Oswald left Reilly, at least six people with whom he had worked suddenly got jobs in the aerospace business, with NASA, Lockheed, and Chrysler Aerospace. The person who had hired him at Reilly, the people he had worked with, his supervisor –– all turned out to have excellent credentials for jobs in a distinctly different, specialized industry. In the terminology of intelligence, Reilly was being sanitized.

It was not an exaggeration to write that this was a man of remarkable experiences. Oswald, who was quite intelligent according to tests he'd taken, enlisted in the Marine Corps at 17 and was eventually stationed at the U2 spy plane tracking facility at Atsugi, Japan, where he demonstrated awful marksmanship but a facility for learning Russian, read Pravda, and had an elevated 'crypto' security clearance.

How fortunate for Oswald when, subsequently, he applied for a hardship discharge based on the flimsy claim that his mother had suffered a foot injury. Upon returning to New Orleans for only a few days, he bought a steamship ticket to Europe for around $1,500.00 on a bank balance of slightly more than $200.00, then turned up in the Soviet Union. It has never been established how he got there, but once he arrived he publicly renounced his American citizenship and declared that he would give the Soviets everything he knew about U.S. military operations in the Pacific.

The Soviets debriefed Oswald and gave him a job in a radio factory in Minsk, a nice allowance, and an apartment with a balcony. In Minsk, Oswald met and married the niece of a KGB colonel. Shortly after he told the Russians the details, including codes, for tracking the U2, the spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers, was shot down over the Soviet air space, scuttling a summit meeting between Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev.

After living in the Soviet Union for some time, suddenly everything changed. Oswald decided he'd had enough of defection and wanted to return to the United States.

Okay, ask yourself some logical questions here. What would be the attitude of the U.S. government to this request? How would the Soviets like it? How would Oswald manage his return? Would he not be prosecuted for espionage, having handed secrets to an 'enemy' government?

He returned to the U.S. and was not prosecuted. He was met by and spoke with only one person, a representative of a CIA outfit, the Travelers Aid Society. The U.S. State Department actually advanced him the cost of his return.

Shortly thereafter, he went to work on military mapping projects with Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall. He applied for and was immediately granted –– before anyone else who applied that day –– a new passport.

In the months, and even years, before the assassination, Oswald showed a remarkable ability to be in two places at once. While still in Russia, someone using his name sought to purchase military supplies in the U.S. for an anti-Castro Cuban brigade. Other Oswalds cropped up around Dallas in the fall of 1963. One test-drove a new car, then made memorable anti-American remarks to the dealer –– Oswald did not know how to drive. One shot at another man's target at a rifle range, then apologized saying he thought he was shooting at Kennedy. Still another showed up in the company of a pair of exiles on a visit to refugee Silvia Odio's house, and the visit was followed by a phone call to Odio from one of the exiles saying that 'Oswald' had said they were cowards for not shooting Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs and that it would be easy to do.

The evidence is indisputable that someone was impersonating Oswald in the months before the assassination in situations where he was likely to be remembered.

The Testimony and Exhibits of the Warren Commission, of which I have a copy, all 26 unindexed volumes, depicts a man said to be Oswald photographed outside the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, who is quite obviously not Oswald.

Numerous credible witnesses saw Oswald in the company of Clay Shaw, David W. Ferrie, and Jack Ruby.

While in custody, police, Secret Service, and other intelligence agents questioned Oswald for a total of twelve hours. During the entire time, no lawyer was provided, though several came to the jail asking to see the prisoner and Oswald himself had pleaded for legal help. During that time, also, there was no stenographic record or tape recoding made of a single minute of this interrogation.

Everything in his history, from the Atsugi posting to his 'defection' to the Soviets, to his return without prosecution, to his receipt of a new passport without a problem, to his New Orleans pro-Castro cover from an anti-Castro office, to his CIA associations in both New Orleans and Dallas, to his periodic meetings with FBI agents, who then destroyed their notes –– everything puts Oswald in the middle of an intelligence profile.

Who was Oswald? Well, for one thing, he was anything but a loner. As Garrison remarked, he was never alone until Jack Ruby shot him in the middle of 70 Dallas cops assigned to protect him. He was almost certainly a government counterintelligence agent. In any event, he was certainly what he claimed to be on November 23, 1963: a patsy.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-12-01:/2014/12/01/violence-race-and-class-in-america-19781137/Violence, Race And Class In AmericaRAZFX2014-12-01T08:34:20+01:002014-12-01T09:06:01+01:00
The line was familiar in a sick kind of way, something twisted out of the past and laid on by the President as he lectured Americans: "There is never an excuse for violence."

You can't fault him for lack of chutzpah. A man who spends part of every Tuesday night compiling a death list, then tries to make murder more acceptable by renaming it a 'disposition matrix,' who is ordering air strikes against seven countries that I know of today, and who recently bragged that under his administration America had sold more weaponry to the rest of the world than ever before, lecturing desperate people who've been abandoned by their government except when it's time to shoot one of them.

I don't know how much of the Ferguson-related violence was due to agents provocateur. We do know from even a cursory review of common FBI and military intelligence operations that seeding dissenters and dissident organizations is automatic. At the same time, of course, a lot of people are so enraged that consideration of strategy or tactics is not first on the list.

America is a violent country. For much of its history, that violence has been standard practice for the government and ancillary authority, for use against foreign peoples who had something we wanted and against native peoples and, increasingly, at home against those who either don't fit the profile or won't buy the products.

While Obama condemned violence, he authorized establishment of a 'no-fly zone' over Ferguson, Missouri. It was not enemy warplanes he was afraid of, it was news helicopters who might accidentally film something the government does not want the rest of us to see.

Lyndon Johnson didn't have public support for banning news helicopters, but the skies over Detroit and Newark were not the safest places to be in the Summer of 1967. The nation's cities were exploding, largely, said the subsequent Kerner Commission, due to white racism. So LBJ sent in the National Guard and there were days of street fighting and snipers on rooftops.

Johnson lectured Americans in almost identical words, words thrown back at him in black political rallies. Stokely Carmichael, to overflow crowds, spoke of the tonnage of American bombs dropped in Viet Nam, the carnage, then, his voice dripping with sarcasm, inhabiting LBJ's Texas drawl lecturing black America, violence never solved anything, mah fellow 'mericans…"

It's not exactly new, the policies which invariably support the use of force against those the state deems less than worthy or potentially troublesome, nor is it modern happenstance that violence is acceptable as a means for the wealthy and powerful to enforce their ownership of whatever they get a hankering for, regardless of whose pocket it may be in.

It is significant that Barack Obama can issue such a hollow statement and evidently not realize how naked that leaves him.

While it isn't new, the unexamined yet clear distinction in America between races and classes over violence and its uses as a mechanism of power has over the last four decades become a matter of deep cognitive dissonance. Its message and meaning is clear, yet it remains stubbornly disallowed in public discourse. Those on the receiving end of this violence must on some level understand whose boot is on their necks but, except for occasional, desperate outbursts, such as in the wake of Ferguson, they are not making the connection.

We as a people are glued to the glittering façade, the show-biz cover story of America, even though the vast majority are experiencing persistent economic and cultural pain. Income in real dollars has actually declined over the past forty years, public services have been gutted, and public programs have been privatized, the latter a model of how hopes and fears are now commodified, as college education, once nearly free, puts the young into indentured servitude, which is exactly where the country's owners want them.

In the first part of the twentieth century, wealthy whites in the South diverted any simmering populism by reminding poor whites, in one form or another, how much better they had it than did blacks. Now, this has spread nationwide.

In the aftermath of Ferguson, the web is filled with venom toward the victim, toward Michael Brown, people of his race and, unspokenly, of his class. This venom is rising out of the white population, but it is also, when rhetorically cleaned-up, national policy. Obama, who is ostensibly part-black, on the matter of violence and who gets to use it against whom, is as white as Jesse Helms.

One common expression is "he asked for it."

Asked for what? To be shot to death on a public street? The unspoken assumptions behind this remark include the idea that some people, in disputing or arguing with authority, qualify for whatever savage reaction authority may wish to manifest, up to and including violent death.

Lenny Bruce argued that we should not be angry at the cops. They're just the mail men, he said, meaning that they are only civil servants doing what their masters tell them to do. I don't entirely buy that, since there seem to be plenty of insane, violent people wearing badges these days, but I get the point. Cops would not be murdering people, many but not all of them black or young, were it not for the worship of violence in this culture, encouraged by the state.

America is run by and on behalf of an astonishingly small number of people and interests. The popular expression now is that these comprise the "one percent," although the truth is closer to one one hundredth of that. I stopped counting after 300 million, but however many of us there are in this grand experiment run aground, the joint is being run by fewer than a thousand, and if you can name a dozen of these you're doing well.

The interests of the owners are protected by every rule, every structure, every program coming out the White House and the Congress, in one form or another, and have been for quite a long time. Presidents who don't buy into this reality get killed, like Kennedy, or simply neutered, like Carter.

Both major parties overwhelmingly vote for war, for war appropriations, for sanctions against any country whose leaders resist the demands of corporate empires and banks. Our government, led by either party, attacks people who have never harmed or threatened us, in country after country, waving the flimsiest excuses imaginable, and we the people acquiesce.

We have internalized much of the propaganda of the owners, even when we hazard mild dissent to what is now routine thuggery. The President, the Senate leaders, the State Department, the NSA and CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security, all have reasons for what they do; they don't have to be true, in fact they virtually never are.

Currently, the United States is supplying arms and materiel to what we term the 'moderate' faction in the Syrian civil war. We do this because one insurrectionist army, ISIS, is gaining territory too quickly and, although our aim has always been to kick out or kill its president, we don't want Assad supplanted before we can get our hands on the reins. Thing is, the 'moderate' faction we're arming includes a large segment of al-Qaeda, which a couple of months back and ever since 9-11 has been the worst evil on the planet.

America will do anything to achieve its goals, and its goals are those of its owners.

Lyndon Johnson thought he could instruct black Americans to behave themselves while ordering bombing attacks on hospitals. Barack Obama thinks he can condemn the violence of ordinary people while striking wedding parties with missiles.

Unless that kind of staggering hypocrisy generates the popular firestorm it deserves, it will be impossible to keep this country from sliding into history.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-11-25:/2014/11/25/four-sorrows-19760488/Four SorrowsRAZFX2014-11-25T02:59:41+01:002014-11-25T02:59:41+01:00
"Four sorrows, it seems to me, are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism. . . Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress. . . Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens." -- Historian Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, 2003.

What is it that "keeps us free" in America?

Freedom is of course an illusive concept, more honored in its absence and taken for granted in whatever measure it exists, at least in the United States.

Whatever it is, the relentless propaganda splashed across our minds by corporate media and in daily life has decided that it is the military which is principally responsible. We are ordered at athletic events and every other mass gathering to "honor our troops" by engaging in ritualistic 'patriotic' behavior, e.g. saluting the flag or singing the national anthem, hats removed, hands over our hearts.

We are supposed to thank anyone who's armed or in uniform. But people in windowless rooms launching remote-control missile attacks on people thousands of miles away, whom they have never met and who have never harmed us, are not patriots, protecting our freedom. They are cowards.

We must really be frightened.

In America, we behave as though we are a nation besieged by enemies, although acts against the United States are extremely rare. True, U.S. troops are attacked, but they are in someone else's country when that happens. Current estimates put American soldiers in more than 150 countries around the world. Does anyone wonder why that is deemed necessary, and for whose benefit?

To the extent Americans have tasted freedom it is due to the foundational documents which are designed to protect us from our government, the willingness of courts to uphold them, and the sacrifices of individuals and groups who have struggled to make America live up to its promises.

Americans are in a state of permanent warfare now, and what we're told about the reasons is flagrantly untrue. In such a situation, it becomes imperative for the government to escalate its civilian powers and military presence among the population in order to keep the lid on. The militarization of police is not an accident.

One of the central, inevitable disasters which arise in the case of empires is the looting of their own people. Empires must be maintained and expanded, to the increasing neglect of their own internal well-being. Traditionally, rather than address genuine domestic needs, they impose draconian, repressive laws and beef-up the cops.

In the American empire, there is electronica of exponentially-greater sophistication than ever before seen, and it is being used by the state to imprison its own population. That is the point of the total surveillance of the American people done by secret police in the name of security.

If the cops are any good, they have the skills and experience to ferret out any real threats to the nation without making suspects out of 300 million people. They do not need to wiretap my phone and read my mail, but they do. They use computer programs to suck up everything, such as via the FBI's aptly-named 'Carnivore.'

There is a no-fly list in America. If your name shows up on this list, you are deprived of your right to travel in a fundamental way. No one is permitted to see the list or know how many names are on it. No one is permitted to know the procedure used in selecting names for the list. All of these things are secret, and their continued secrecy has been protected by court rulings. This and other, similar programs are characteristic of totalitarianism, not of democracy.

Americans can be searched at random now, although the 4th Amendment to the Constitution clearly forbids the practice.

That's the situation. Whatever freedom might still be found in America is increasingly residual, ever-more narrowly defined.

The reason America attacked Iraq, invaded Afghanistan, overthrew Libya, and is trying to occupy the African continent, is simple: control over the resources of other people, from their villages to their national governments. It's banking, commerce, arms, oil, minerals. It has nothing to do with the actual safety or well-being of Americans. It has nothing to do with freedom.

The reach of empires is always, at some point, contested. The U.S. operations in Africa, through AFRICOM, drone bases, special ops units, bombings, and attempts to purchase the loyalty of the cops and politicians, is being challenged externally by the Chinese, who have determined that making economic deals is smarter than sending troops. They are doing the same thing in Latin America, with some success.

Inside the empire's own borders, the excessive promotion of 'patriotic' symbols, including heavily-armed soldiers dressed in 'camo' for no apparent reason, has accelerated as real freedom has diminished.

The inextricable relationship between empire and domestic repression has been discussed extensively, including by the late Chalmers Johnson, a professor and former CIA advisor, whose commentaries are on YouTube. You can choose empire or freedom, Johnson explained, but you can't have both.

It is hard to believe this empire will recede voluntarily. It behaves organically, as though its human directors are mere actors in some classic Shakespearean tragicomedy.

It may be beyond fixing. It may well be that our best bet is just to survive its collapse.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-11-21:/2014/11/21/newsweek-s-phony-story-on-jfk-s-murder-19744105/Newsweek's Phony Story On JFK's MurderRAZFX2014-11-21T23:57:41+01:002014-12-19T21:26:02+01:00
51 years later and still there are serious vested interests in propounding the colossal lie about Dallas, John Kennedy, and Lee Harvey Oswald.

The cover of Newsweek, THREE BULLETS EXPLODING JFK MURDER MYTHS. by one Max Holland is clever and cleverly-constructed. It is entirely false and built on dishonest premises, but it does not have to be true, just superficially convincing.

For readers who havent studied this case, who are largely unfamiliar with known, established facts, the Holland treatise might work. But it can be dismantled, point-by-point, and it needs to be. We've got enough official criminality these days.

This is a long post. I'm sorry. The Holland piece needs excavation.

Here is what Holland wrote, italicized. Interlineated, paragraph by paragraph, are my observations and references disproving what he says. It's my job.

"On November 29, 1963, President Lyndon Johnson directed the Warren Commission to 'evaluate all the facts' in the brutal November 22 murder of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, on a downtown Dallas street in broad daylight. Reduced to its bare essentials, the investigation sought answers to three fundamental questions: Who, why, and how?"

Johnson appointed the commission in order to head-off other inquiries which had already begun, including one by the State of Texas, which had jurisdiction, and a second by the Congress. The commission was comprised of a handful of carefully-selected individuals, including Allen Dulles, whom Kennedy had fired from his position as director of the CIA, and John J. McCloy, banker and central power at the World Bank.

Earl Warren was Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court at the time and a widely-respected personage. He did not want to do it and refused Johnson's request. That is when the President confided in him this terrible secret: the assassination had probably been done by either the Soviets or the Cubans, and that if it became known there would be overwhelming public pressure to launch attacks against them. World War III was a possibility. America needed the commission to squelch the rumors already flying in the country. Warren would have to do it as a patriotic duty. And he assented.

The investigation was therefore compromised at the start.

"Why was entirely contingent on 'who,' and that depended on 'how.' Thus, the linchpin of the Warren Report –– and every subsequent investigation –– has always been precisely how Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza. That is the finding from which all important answers flow; mishandle that question and the credibility of the entire report is undermined. The Warren Commission's bungling of 'how' is a primary reason why there have been so many residual doubts and conspiracy theories over the past 50 years."

See what I mean by 'clever'? In fact, there is considerable evidence amassed over the years, and plenty at the time, as well, which related to each of those questions, and each question is inextricably bound to the others.

The significance of the Dealey Plaza specifics is that it should separate the plausible from the implausible. It is one thing to see what did not happen but more difficult to establish what did. In other words, it's possible to show, and indeed a cinch to prove, that more than three shots were fired at Kennedy's motorcade, but to know precisely how many is more difficult. We'll get to a few of these details later.

The 'credibility of the entire report' has been not merely 'undermined' but blown to bits by irrefutable evidence. And it is a lie to ascribe 'so many residual doubts and conspiracy theories' to the Warren Commission's 'bungling of how.' In fact, it's a sleazy rhetorical device to refer to 'residual doubts,' because we've got more than doubts here, and they're not residual.

"In the 1964 Warren Report, just seven pages (of 888) reconstruct the shooting sequence. Three spent cartridges were found in the sniper's nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, corroborating the testimony of most ear- and eyewitnesses that three shots were fired. But after 10 months of investigation, the report did not present a compelling explanation of the sequence; instead, it offered up three slightly different scenarios. In each, one of the bullets fired by Lee Harvey Oswald fatally hit Kennedy in the head; another struck and passed through the president before hitting Texas Governor John Connally; and the third shot fired by Oswald… well, the commission could not say where that bullet went or even if it was fired. Depending on which of the three scenarios one favored, the total time span of the assassination ranged from as little as 4.8 seconds to 'in excess of 7 seconds.'"

Most ear- and eyewitnesses told police and the FBI that at least two shots came not from the direction of the Depository but from behind a picket fence which ringed a small parking lot behind thick foliage at the top of a grassy knoll. Photographs show numerous bystanders running up the incline toward the place from which these shots were fired. Among these people was a motorcycle police officer who had been riding to the left rear of Kennedy's car and had been spattered by blood and brain tissue from the final shot. In the parking lot, the officer and others encountered two men who displayed Secret Service credentials and wore the special lapel pin being used for this trip.

Although it did not become common knowledge for many months, the commission was quite early aware of the fact that a spectator, James Tague, who had been standing near the triple underpass ahead of Kennedy's car, had been wounded in the cheek from either a bullet fragment or a piece of curbing chipped off by an errant shot.

The commission had these items to consider: a bolt-action 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with a faulty scope said to have belonged to Oswald and which at one time had fired a bullet which the government had recovered; a home movie shot by businessman Abraham Zapruder, a short Bell & Howell 16mm film which showed the President and Governor Connally being shot; three shell casings found on the 6th floor under the 'sniper's window.'

"The story of how the Warren Commission fumbled this pivotal question is long and convoluted, and only the barest outline can be presented here. The saga involved not just the lawyer-dominated commission and staff but also the FBI, the Secret Service, and the media, primarily the then-mighty Time Inc. empire. The crucial element, of course, was the most famous movie ever taken by a cameraman, the 26-second-long Zapruder film."

The Zapruder film ran at 18.3 frames per second, giving investigators a workable clock in examining the shooting frame by frame.

They quickly realized that the window in which Kennedy and Connally are visibly struck was limited as to time. All of the damages depicted in those frames was caused within 5.6 seconds.

The Mannlicher-Carcano, even with the scope realigned, and even in the hands of Olympic medal winners, could fire no more than three shots within that period. The difficulty was plain. Kennedy and Connally has sustained seven wounds besides the fatal shot to the President's head. There was a wound in Kennedy's back, several inches below the neck and slightly to the right of the spine. There was a wound in Kennedy's throat, seen by numerous doctors at Parkland Hospital, who agreed that it was a wound of entry. There was a wound in Connally's back, a bullet which exited his chest after breaking ribs. There was a wound in Connally's right wrist, where a bullet shattered the radius. There was also, finally, a wound in his left thigh.

They knew about Tague. It was too many wounds for just a couple of bullets, especially since one of those bullets had struck Kennedy in the right temple and blown out much of the back of his skull.

The Commission assigned a young, ambitious counsel to come up with a solution. Thus, the career of Arlen Specter, got its start.

Specter theorized that a single bullet had hit Kennedy in the back, exited his throat, entered Connally's back, broke ribs, exited his chest below the right nipple, gone through his right radius and wound up in his left thigh. Of necessity, since one bullet had missed and one bullet had killed Kennedy, all of the other wounds had been inflicted by what would become known as Commission Exhibit 399. The Magic Bullet. Despite all that ascribed to it, it remains pristine, as though it had been fired into cotton wadding.

But Holland will not touch this except tangentially. He concentrates on what I imagine he thinks is a great discovery, the fact that Zapruder shot his film in two parts. The first runs 132 frames and shows only police motorcyclists. He stopped filming for a few moments, not wanting to run out of film. He began filming again when Kennedy's car turned the corner from Houston onto Elm and, as Holland describes it, the President was 'acknowledging the crowd.'

"The FBI and the Secret Service swiftly got copies of Zapruder's footage, which seemed destined to be a key exhibit in the upcoming trial of Oswald, arrested 75 minutes after Kennedy was shot for killing a policeman while fleeing downtown Dallas. But the film's role changed on November 24, when a self-appointed vigilante, Jack Ruby, murdered Oswald as the accused assassin was being transferred to the Dallas County jail."

The capture of Oswald required a precipitating event. There was no evidence in Dealey Plaza, not at that time –– the rifle and bullet evidence came much later –– to connect him with the shooting, yet slightly more than an hour after the assassination, a veritable fleet of patrol cars converged on the Texas Theater on reports that someone had entered without buying a ticket.

The Tippitt killing, blamed on Oswald and used as the logical bridge for the cops to grab him, was almost certainly done by someone else. The first cop on the scene found spent shell casings and followed proper procedure by scratching his initials in them; the casings later produced did not contain those chain-of-custody markings. Several eyewitnesses saw Tippitt go down and none identified Oswald as the shooter. One later changed his mind after someone creased his forehead with a bullet as he closed up his business garage for the night. Another, cited by the Warren Commission said only that when she looked at Oswald in the police lineup, she felt "chills running up my spine."

The Zapruder film's existence only accelerated someone's need to prevent a trial from ever taking place, since any competent defense counsel, on the evidence of the film alone, could get an acquittal on a murder charge. And no one seemed very concerned that a trial would be necessary, hence the astonishing failure of the authorities, Dallas cops, and FBI agents, to tape record their lengthy interrogations or arrange for a court stenographer. Anything he may have said while in custody would be useless because the best evidence available had been averted by the state.

Oswald, as he was paraded past reporters, several times shouted his request that "someone come forward to give me legal representation," but when ACLU lawyers showed up at the jail, they were not permitted to see the prisoner.

Holland, in order to present his broad thesis, had to logically sever the Life Magazine account, which featured frames from the Zapruder film and claimed to identify when each bullet struck, within the 6.8 seconds presumptively allowed by the film, although 5.6 seconds is a more likely time frame, from the Warren Commission's findings.

"The magazine asserted that the film provided 'a frame-by-frame chronology of events (making it) possible to reconstruct the precise timing… of the shots.' The article even specified the frames in which bullets could be seen hitting President Kennedy in the upper back, Governor Connally in the back, and the president in the head, all within the span of 6.8 seconds, and in that order…

"This interpretation of the evidence proved almost indelible." Holland then waxes rhapsodic over the power and influence of Life Magazine in 1963, America's biggest weekly, it was "60 minutes and the Today show and the evening news all rolled into one." It was so powerful, Holland says, that its parent, Time, Inc. sold out 3 million copies of a special memorial edition.

"The Warren Commission staff, to its credit, did not rubber-stamp Life's analysis. It came to realize that the president and the governor had been wounded in such a brief time span that Oswald could not have worked the bolt action on his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle to fire shots so quickly and accurately."

To its chagrin, it realized that the time differential between shots striking Kennedy and Connally couldn't be stretched beyond 1.3 seconds, whereas no rifleman in the world could operate that rifle's bolt any faster than 2.3 second, never mind aiming and hitting anything.

Here's where Holland leaves the rails entirely.

"Consequently, the staff theorized that there were either two shooters, or one of the bullets hit both men. The latter seemed more plausible, in part because Oswald had used military ammunition designed to pass through people. Besides, there was another insurmountable problem with the FBI-Life scenario: If a bullet, traveling at an entrance velocity of 1,900 feet per second, penetrated the president's upper back, where did it go after exiting his throat at a velocity of 1,800 feet per second? Only one other person or object in the limousine was struck by a bullet, and that was Connally, his 6-foot-plus frame shoehorned into a jump seat just inches in front of JFK. Of course the same bullet hit the governor; it had to. Critics deride the 'single-bullet theory,' calling it a 'magic bullet.' But the truly magic bullet would have been one that disappeared after exiting the president's throat –– which is what one has to believe if one believes it didn't hit the governor."

Get this. The whole paragraph is a fabrication because it insults the evidence at every turn. Forget for the moment the bland assumption throughout that Oswald, of course, was the assassin, while claiming an even-handed review of the facts. Doesn't matter. Kennedy was shot in the throat. That hole was never an exit wound for any shot in the back and every doctor at Parkland who saw it, before the opening was used for a tracheotomy, described it as small and round, an entry wound. And what's with this Connally being "shoehorned.. just inches (from) JFK." Look at the photos. The governor has plenty of room and is at least a couple of feet away from Kennedy, not inches.

Holland is also a little to facile with details. It is almost certainly a fact that something other than Kennedy and Connally was hit in that vehicle, as photographs of the limousine at Parkland show an indentation in the metal above the dash which more than one forensic scientist has called bullet damage. Where did the bullet go which struck the President in the back? Holland either doesn't know or doesn't want to trouble readers with the information, but nobody knows the path of the bullet in Kennedy's back because the autopsy doctors were instructed not to probe that wound. Reassuring, isn't it?

"On May 24, 1964, when the commission restaged the assassination in Dealey Plaza, the main thrust was to show that the 'single-bullet' hypothesis was correct. The theory has since been endorsed by every reputable investigation, to the point where it should be called the 'single-bullet conclusion.' Yet its corollary –– if one shot hit two men, then one of the three shots missed –– was mostly ignored. That unaccounted-for bullet was a pesky problem but one the commission could not explain."

Yes, it's true, the Commission reached its conclusions before the restaging, thus turning an investigative procedure into an artificially-built, preconceived frame. Thing is, the single-bullet theory has not been "endorsed by every reputable investigation." There is a very long line of forensic experts not hired by a government agency who think precisely the opposite, that it is not only wrong but impossible on the known, established facts. "…every reputable investigation," indeed. That's like saying the CIA has cleared itself of drug running allegations.

Here's what the whole case depends on, a single bullet fired from the Book Depository entering Kennedy's back, changing direction upward to exit his throat, then seeing the governor sitting over to the right, waiting about a full second, then slamming into his back, breaking ribs and the radial bone in his right wrist.

Bullets do not stop for a second in the air. They do not change direction unless impacted. In the Zapruder film –– which itself is subject to some complicated controversy we're not going to deal with here –– one can clearly see when Kennedy is first hit. He raises his hands to his throat, his elbows to the side. One can also see when Connally is hit: the air is blasted out of his chest and he crumples into his wife's arms. Some government contortionists have 'explained' this one-second gap by saying that the governor was suffering a delayed reaction. Seriously.

Also not mentioned by Holland: when Kennedy is struck, Connally heard the shot. As he later explained, he recognized it for what it was and tried to turn in his seat to see about Kennedy. In the film, he is seen turning, his stetson clutched in his undamaged right hand.

But Holland is now off and running toward the target he's had in mind all along, pausing only to blow kisses at two writers, Gerald Posner and Vincent Bugliosi, and their equally meritless accounts of the assassination "that have been regarded as nearly definitive."

All of those "pesky problems" could be made to disappear if one posited this: that Oswald's first shot never showed up on the Zapruder film because it was fired during the lull in filming, fired as Kennedy's limousine had reached what Holland calls 'Point A,' and giving Oswald "a leisurely eight seconds in which to get off three shots."

For support, Holland hauls out a photograph taken during the filming of Oliver Stone's masterpiece, JFK, which he claims shows the position of Kennedy's limousine as it approaches the corner of Houston and Elm. He hauls it out but he doesn't show it to us. The reason could be that nobody could or would have taken a shot at Kennedy at that point from that window because there was a very prominent Texas Live Oak blocking a sniper's view. In fact, from that window, the limousine would not have emerged from behind the oak until approximately the Zapruder frame where Kennedy first registers that something has happened.

It is also a touch overstated to call eight seconds a 'leisurely' amount of time in which to fire, eject, reload and get off three shots at anything, let alone a moving target.

Holland's theory is that Oswald, from the sixth floor window, fired a first shot as Kennedy was approaching the turn onto Elm, essentially facing the Oswald window, that the bullet was deflected by a tree branch, ricocheted off a traffic mast arm, and veered far to the right, where it struck the street and then took a snip out of Tague's cheek.

Here's a sample:

"…calculations based on the bullet-deflection measurements revealed that a glancing bullet strike on the mast arm in the right circumferential location could deflect a bullet downstream to the turf adjacent to the concrete skirt on the south side of Elm Street."

Holland's methodology is hilariously similar to the contortions the Commission lawyers, mainly Specter, had to engage in to arrive at the lone nut conclusion. He and an expert on this sort of thing spent years studying the mast arm, including firing bullets at an equivalent object to try to produce the extraordinary angle of ricochet he was looking for, and with the gun being discharged about thirty inches away instead of 75 feet, and after numerous attempts were able to get something arguably close –– 'the turf adjacent to the concrete skirt' –– concluding that although extensive tests of the actual mast arm failed to show any evidence whatever, the other tests showed that a bullet could conceivably ricochet wildly after striking it. Therefore, the mystery is solved.

Newsweek paid this guy for this stuff.

We are handed a long, meticulous corrupted examination of a prospective theory, whose larger premise is that it satisfactorily 'solves' the dispute over the meaning of the forensic evidence. From this, we are to docilely accept the entire package of long-discredited government claims, everything from the magic bullet theory to Oswald's life and associations.

We are told that it has no significance that there were fake Secret Service men diverting police and spectators from the parking area behind the knoll, that FBI agents, on several occasions, destroyed their notes after talking with Oswald, that James Humes, the pathologist who was used at Bethesda, had never before performed any autopsy, then burned his notes in his fireplace late that night. It doesn't matter that a police patrol car stopped in front of Oswald's rooming house shortly after the assassination and the driver tapped his horn several times before driving off. It doesn't matter that Oswald was taught to speak Russian while in the Navy, that his discharge was for a transparently false reason, that he took a ship to Europe on his way to defecting to the Soviet Union, and the cost of the ticket exceeded his bank balance.

Never mind that Connally told investigators that he had heard the shot which struck Kennedy and had turned in his seat –– confirmed on film –– before being himself shot. Never mind about the stetson in the right hand. Never mind that Oswald was denied a lawyer, then questioned for twelve hours without a stenographic record, and that one witness to these proceedings, deputy Roger Craig, later reported that Oswald claimed to "outrank everyone in this room." Never mind that Craig was later shot in the spine because he wouldn't shut up about it.

Newsweek wants us to forget a mountain of evidence accumulated by patient, serious researchers and investigators over the years.

Forget what the witnesses said. Forget that there was no plausible reason to look for or arrest Oswald. Forget that at the time of the assassination, Oswald was in the second floor lunch room and that he was seen there by Roy Truly, the building superintendent, and by a Dallas cop, a bare ninety seconds after the shooting, calmly drinking a Coke.

Forget that a paraffin test for nitrate deposits on Oswald's cheek was negative, which acquits him of having fired a rifle that day. Forget that the rifle was defective. Forget that the first weapon produced from the Depository was a 7.65 German Mauser, identified by deputy Seymour Weitzman, who had long-owned a sporting goods store and knew guns. Forget the fact that the fatal shot came from the right-front, not the right-rear.

Forget also the riveting footage, available on You Tube, which shows the protective guards who were to ride on the rear corners of the limousine being waved off as the motorcade begins, and which shows one of the Secret Service agent raising his hands, palms up, out to his sides, in a gesture of disbelief.

Forget that E. Howard Hunt, on his deathbed, told his son –– and recorded it –– of his involvement, in a peripheral way, in the murder of the President. It was called 'the Big Event,' Hunt said, and involved major CIA figures, who he named.

Forget that two Mafia legends, Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli, were each murdered shortly before their scheduled testimony before the House committee investigating the John Kennedy assassination. Roselli turned up in pieces, in oil drums off the Florida coast. Giancana was shot to death in the basement kitchen of his Chicago home as police surveillance didn't hear or see a thing.

Forget that there were thousands of pages of documents pertaining to Lee Harvey Oswald which the Warren Commission never saw and which remain classified secret today.

Forget that Lee Oswald had his 'Fair Play for Cuba Committee' office in the same building as several CIA front groups, 544 Camp, and that while he was supposed to be a pro-Castro dissident he was actually working with American intelligence. Forget that Oswald's status as an FBI informant was relayed to the Commission by Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr.

Forget that the famous Life Magazine cover photo of Oswald holding a rifle has long since been exposed as a composite –– and not a very good one.

Forget that the Commission published a bare 6,000 copies of the its real files, a twenty-six volume set of 'Testimony and Exhibits,' and that it was reading this mass of material which convinced New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison to go after the real killers of JFK. Garrison had been urged to do it by Congressman Hale Boggs, who had served on the Commission but didn't think it's findings were true.

Most of all, what Newsweek really wants you to forget is who John Fitzgerald Kennedy really was, and the reasons for his murder. So long as it's possible to toss Kennedy in with everybody else, just another past President who sadly ran into a couple of bullets, no reason for it except random happenstance, a crazy loner who'd been to Russia, then the big lie is safe.

It's when one takes a good, long, hard look at the Kennedys and what those times were about, that it becomes apparent what was done to him and by whom.

If a lone nut ever shoots the President, there will not be thousands of pages of information hidden from the public for more than 50 years. There will not be a huge volume of premature deaths among key witnesses. There will not be a fixed, fraudulent autopsy. A captured suspect will have a lawyer. He will not be shot to death while surrounded by fifty cops.

Are you kidding me?

When John Kennedy was killed, he had provoked extreme fear and hatred in America's military and intelligence circles. Not only had he fired the top CIA officials and a couple of generals, he'd initiated a war designed to, in his own words, "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds."

Kennedy knew the position he was in. Just weeks before Dallas, the President confided in a family friend, New York Times' reporter and columnist Arthur Krock, that it was possible that a coup d'etat could occur in America, and that if it did, it would come from the CIA. Krock wrote about it.

His last executive order was for the withdrawal of troops from Viet Nam. It was announced not from the White House but by Robert McNamara from the steps of the Pentagon. He'd told Oregon Senator Wayne Morse that "by 1965, I'll be damned everywhere as a communist appeaser, but I don't care."

Kennedy signaled his aggressive plan for peace in a June 10, 1963, commencement address at American University, pledged to unilaterally stop nuclear tests in the atmosphere, and announced initiation of talks leading to the test ban treaty, which he described as just a first step toward actual disarmament. It is his greatest speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fkKnfk4k40.

"What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do I seek? Not a Pax Americana, imposed on the rest of the world by American weapons… I'm talking about a real peace, the kind that makes life on earth worth living. Not the peace of the slave…"

There is a wonderful book which documents Kennedy's transformation from Cold Warrior to a near-radical peace-maker, JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglass.

Not only did Kennedy's war on the CIA and his seeking deals with the Soviets trouble the military, there is also substantial evidence that Kennedy's phones were tapped and his residence bugged and that Kennedy, at least toward the end, knew of it.

"This generation of Americans has had enough, more than enough, of war and hatred and oppression."

Yeah, I get it, 51 years ago, the guy'd be dead by now anyhow, along with his brothers.

But the murders of the 1960s, in which the country's best leaders were systematically removed, profoundly changed the country. Today, much of our dark nightmare grew inevitably from our failure to address the truths about who we had become.

Maybe it's a good sign, that a corporate institution such as Newsweek finds it necessary to print and push such a lengthy, pseudo-sophisticated lie. Even with the CIA's planting agents throughout the mass media, for some reason the American people remain suspicious. We may not all know the details, but in what Shakespeare called a murder most foul, the awful smell will not go away.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-11-20:/2014/11/21/slip-of-the-tongue-19738120/Slip Of The TongueRAZFX2014-11-21T00:29:46+01:002014-11-21T00:29:46+01:00
Maybe you saw the piece on the web, a September incident in which a Kentucky fire chief for Southeast Bullitt County, Julius Hatfield, added his wisdom to the evolving national conversation about race.

Hatfield, who is white, responding to a traffic accident, offered assistance to the white motorist, offering to change his tire, drove him from the hospital to his car. The white driver, Loren Dicken, at first declined the offer. "You got a jack, ain't you?" Hatfield said.  "It'll save you a bill."

The Ohio family of four in the other vehicle were not quite handled the same way. A Bullitt County deputy captured this exchange on his body recorder. The deputy tells Hatfield, "We've got a family of four from Cincinnati, I've got to do something with." Hatfield responds, laughing: "We ain't taking no niggers here."

Then there was the town meeting at which WDRB reporter Valerie Chinn tried to ask Hatfield about the financial management of the department.

"Do you understand English, darling? Do you understand English?

"Turn that camera off! I've asked you that in a nice way. Buddy, call the cops and get them here.

"I asked you once tonight if you understand English…"

Later, by telephone, Hatfield told Chinn that he didn't remember the remarks he's made at the September accident scene, but he was "sure it was a slip of the tongue."

http://www.wdrb.com/story/27419237/newly-obtained-video-of-southeast-bullitt-fire-department-chief-raises-questions-of-racism.

There's a theory that God put white people on earth as a punishment.

I'd like to cut through the bullshit, if that's possible.

It is a fact that young blacks in America, especially young, black males, wonder whether, if they're on the street, or just unlucky, they'll be shot by a white cop. It is a permanent state of fear engendered by all those young black mean losing their lives to trigger-happy, mentally unsound white men wearing badges.

Ferguson is just one more killing of a black kid by a cop where nothing is going to be done, either to bring justice for the victim or change the sick, militaristic cop culture which nurtures, encourages, and defends sociopathy.

There is an undeniable escalation in harsh, racist policies inside America, but the policies actually lag behind the snarling popular meanness. Hatfield's tongue didn't slip. He was expressing a rather popular view among whites, especially in the South and Midwest.

I realize a lot of this is simply a continuation of the history of race relations in America, a not very admirable chronology of abuse, mass murder, and a kind of cruelty which doesn't mind a little torture. A lot of white people, far more in surveys than blacks and other minorities, think that Guantanamo should stay open, torture is justified, Muslims are trying to take over the world. This isn't a very educated view.

Hatfield, having insulted a news reporter, demands that the cameras be stopped and that the cops be called. This is how authority today responds to challenges. People who interrupt a powerful politician's speech are often beaten and arrested. It is about force, the use of force, often in a context not far removed from colonial occupation.

That's why Ferguson, you dumb peckerheads.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-11-20:/2014/11/20/respect-19734598/RespectRAZFX2014-11-20T07:55:32+01:002014-11-20T07:55:32+01:00
In 2010, the San Francisco Giants finally eclipsed fifty-six years of frustration by capturing the World Series.

One of the key players in that championship was a sometime utility player who'd stepped up his game to fill the third base vacancy when Pablo Sandoval's production went bye-bye. The fans loved Juan Uribe, chanted his name.

Shortly after the champagne had been sopped up and the locker room cleaned out, the team offered a three-year deal to Uribe, who was a free agent and eligible to sign with anyone who would want him. For three years, they would pay him $20 million.

Uribe turned them down, agreeing instead to a three-year, $21 million deal with the Dodgers. He said it was a matter of 'respect.'

Now, following the third championship in five years –– an accomplishment quite extraordinary in modern team sports –– it is Sandoval who is a free agent.

Couple of days ago, he flew into Boston, accompanied by his agents, one of whom is his brother, Michael, where they were wined and dined by officials and players from the Red Sox. According to the usual reliable sources, an offer will follow shortly and it will be for a very good sum of cash over a five- or six-year period. Brother Michael told a Boston radio station that Pablo is looking for 'respect.'

While in Boston, he ate a nice dinner at a fancy restaurant with Red Sox star, David Ortiz. They polished off two huge steaks, two lobsters, shrimp cocktails, and assorted extras. The tab for the steaks and lobsters, alone, came to about $600.00.

Those who enjoy the statistical end of the game have established that for most players their most productive years are between the ages of 28 and 32. Sandoval is 28. Over the last three years, he has averaged fourteen home runs and much fewer than 100 runs batted in, numbers which are not impressive. Sandoval is a third baseman, a position which is ordinarily filled by power hitters.

Last Spring, the Giants tried to sign him to a contract extension, offering $40 million over three years. He was insulted. Apparently, they are prepared to more than double the money, but the team is not happy with a six-year deal, especially with a player whose substantial weight raises concerns about his productive longevity.

They'd like to keep him. As a friend pointed out to me, the Giants payroll is sixth among the thirty major league clubs and the perpetual full houses at Mays Park and the sale of team-associated products guarantees the owners a pretty fat dividend. In other words, on the face of it, they can probably afford to pay the Panda whatever he wants.

But what does Sandoval want? According to brother Michael, 'respect' means money. He wants as much as he can get.

Well, hell, it's hard to blame him. Wouldn't we all, in his shoes, take the highest bid?

Well, no. Not if we valued happiness in terms not strictly monetary.

San Francisco is the perfect place for this guy to play, a great manager, stable front office, good weather, a superior park, enormous crowds cheering for you, and a team loaded with players as selfless as you'll find anywhere. He is loved here.

Quite possibly, Sandoval will tell the Giants to match the Boston offer or he's leaving. The team may not do it.

Recently, another free agent, a pitcher named A.J. Burnett, turned down an offer from the Philadelphia Phillies to sign with the Pittsburgh club for five million dollars less. It could be that Burnett is not insane.

I get it that these athletes are among the very best in the world at what they do, and I get it that their careers are limited by physical demands and age. But since the end of the Reserve Clause and the birth of free agency, it's become possible for players to take in very large amounts of cash. Even players without the major league tenure to force arbitration are inked to nice six-figure, sometimes seven-figure, contracts.

I have no idea how many people Sandoval feels called on to support, but surely seventy or eighty million dollars would cover it. He will be demanding more and may leave a place where he clearly loves to play, where he is valued by his teammates and adored by fans, for the extra bucks three thousand miles away.

The question is a disturbing one, not limited to baseball players, certainly. As a culture, America seems unable to answer it. How much money is enough?

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-11-19:/2014/11/19/and-for-other-purposes-19729772/"...And For Other Purposes"RAZFX2014-11-19T08:05:19+01:002014-11-19T08:05:19+01:00
On October 30, 2014, several representatives –– Mr. Chabot, Mr. Smith of New Jersey, and Ms. McCollum –– introduced HR 3398. It is to be voted on this week in the House of Representatives. http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20141117/h3398_sus_xml%20-%20Girls%20Count%20Act.pdf.

I've seen nothing about this is the mainstream media, although admittedly I don't watch television 'news.' It appears at first glance to be an innocuous piece of legislation, the sort of thing Congress passes without much thought. It begins:

'A BILL To authorize the Secretary of State and the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development to provide assistance to support the rights of women and girls in developing countries, and for other purposes." red flags here. One, the Agency for International Development is and has for forty years been an arm of the CIA, and two, whenever they say 'and for other purposes,' it's a good idea to read the fine print.

It's titled, "Girls Count Act of 2014." Its authors mean that literally.

SEC. 2. FINDINGS. … ing to the United States Census Bureau's 2013 international figures, 1 person in 12 –– or close to 900,000,000 people –– is a girl or young woman age 10 through 24.

The data also asserts (sic) that young people are the fastest growing segment of the population in developing countries.
 Even though most countries do have birth registration laws, nearly one-third of all children under the age of 5 worldwide have never had their births registered. Moreover, an estimated 45 percent of children under the age of 5 worldwide (about 290 million children) do not possess a birth certificate.

A nationally recognized proof of birth is the key to determining a child's citizenship, nationality, place of birth, parentage and age, without which a passport, drivers license, or national identification card are impossible to obtain. Those who lack such documentation are often prevented from officially participating in and benefitting from the formal economic, legal, and political sectors of their countries.

The lack of birth registration among girls worldwide is particularly concerning (sic) as it exacerbates their disproportionate vulnerability to trafficking, child marriage, and lack of access to health and education services.

A lack of birth registration among women and girls can also aggravate what in many places amounts to an already reduced ability to seek employment, participate in civil society or purchase or inherit land and other assets.

Girls undertake much of the domestic labor needs for poor families to survive: carrying water, harvesting crops, tending livestock, caring for younger children and doing chores.

Accurate assessments of access to education, poverty levels, and overall census activities are hampered by the lack of official information on women and girls. Without this rudimentary information, assessments of foreign assistance and domestic social welfare programs cannot be accurately gauged.

To ensure that women and girls are fully integrated into United States foreign assistance policies and programs, that the specific needs of girls are, to the maximum extent possible, addressed in the design, implementation, and evaluation of development assistance programs, and that women and girls have the power to affect the decisions that affect their lives, all girls should be counted and have access to birth certificates and other official documentation…

In Section 4, there is this:

(b) The Secretary shall coordinate with the World Bank, relevant United Nations agencies and programs, and other relevant organizations to urge and work with countries to enact, implement, and enforce laws that specifically collect data on girls and establish registration and identification laws…

The World Bank?

If one leans on the 'findings' and doesn't ask too many questions, this Resolution seems innocuous enough, maybe even praiseworthy. After all, it's true that woman are disempowered throughout the world –– including, of course, the United States which, as in most things, is in deep denial –– and anything we can do to change that sounds good.

On the other hand, what's this really about? Ostensibly, getting everybody registered or carrying a national ID card, improves the accuracy of population numbers for the grand purpose of delivering an accurate amount of assistance. But 'assistance' rendered by such as the Agency for International Development and the World Bank generally means they are going to assist people right out of their natural resources.

"…and for other purposes." I don't doubt it. What the American state wants is an international system of identification. Several years ago, the idea was floated in the Congress for Americans, a requirement that citizens be forced to carry identification. It was shot down by a coalition of left and right, alarmed at the police state implications of such a plan.

Congressman Ron Paul said at the time, "…over the decades now in this country, there have been some who have wanted this national ID card. They're looking for every opportunity to do it… To me, it violates the principle of privacy, the principles of the Constitution, the principles of the Republic. … It's part of an authoritarian society. Dictatorships have this…"

http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/congress-alert/2014/november/18/us-house-to-vote-on-imposing-national-id-cards-worldwide-for-the-children/.

For most of my life, I was a classic knee-jerk liberal. I'm not apologizing for that. There are worse things. But in my assumptions about the interactions of philosophy with policy, I often adopted an ideological straightjacket which has not served me especially well.

I believe absolutely that there is a place for government in assisting those who need it, and the programs in place in America are both shamefully inadequate and poorly-run. But it's also true that central government has grown into a monster which can be controlled only by the largest corporations, the secret police, and the fantastically wealthy. It imposes ever-greater controls over our lives, even over our thoughts.

If the true left in America is going to get anything done, it had better hook up with the true right, because there are such people. The most fundamental fight of all is for our liberty, our Constitution, our Bill of Rights. If we lose them, the country will die.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-11-19:/2014/11/19/the-waiver-19728508/The WaiverRAZFX2014-11-19T02:29:56+01:002014-11-19T02:29:56+01:00
People have mentioned this before but it's worth repeating. The United States, by being a signatory to a number of international and United Nations agreements, is legally constrained from acts considered to be war crimes. This is also a matter of United States laws, since federal statutes require adherence to international treaties.

Naturally, the United States has treated the rest of the world much as it historically treated indigenous peoples in North America, including breaking every treaty it ever agreed to.

Fortunately, despite evidence to the contrary, not every American politician is an unindicted conspirator at the great gang bang. One such was Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt) who, in 1997 authored legislation which bars the federal government from funding military units suspected of "gross human rights violations," including murder, torture, and extrajudicial imprisonment.

That the U.S. government, throughout the world, really, where it has deployed military bases in 150 other countries, violates international law every day of the week seems to have escaped the notice of the public, the media, and the Congress. Any related challenges are struck down by reliable courts. Guantanamo, where about 150 people, most of them demonstrably innocent of any crime against America, remains open six years after Obama promised to shut it down.

But the Leahy Act remains troublesome for the Obama administration, which wants to send arms and money to some of the worst fuckers on the planet.

A week ago, the President sent to Congress a request for $1.6 billion to 'train' Iraqi and Kurdish forces to fight the Islamic State, America's flavor-of-the-month enemy. This was part of a larger, $5.6 billion request to expand America's occupational control over Iraq. Meanwhile, Iraq's last prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, was famous for brutality and human rights abuses.

Along with the budget numbers, and a part of the bill itself, is a White House request for a blanket exemption from the Leahy Act. Obama wants a waiver so he can send billions in cash and equipment to war criminals. There really is no other explanation.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-11-18:/2014/11/18/a-matter-of-gender-19722893/A Matter Of GenderRAZFX2014-11-18T07:21:41+01:002014-11-18T19:47:50+01:00
Prior to the 2006 mid-term elections, San Francisco congresswoman Nancy Pelosi urged audiences to make a Democratic House majority a reality. Pelosi was in charge of national fundraising, a task for which she was eminently qualified. With a House majority, she would become Speaker.

Many times in that campaign, Pelosi told Democrats that they could stop the war against Iraq by giving her a majority.

In 2006, Democrats carried the national elections, elevating Pelosi to the speakership. She did not use her office to defund Bush's wars. In 2008, she got a companion majority in the Senate, as well as a Democratic president. The wars continued, indeed expanded.

Eschewing any true leadership function, Obama abandoned virtually all of his promises, and Pelosi lined up with the President. To the unhappy surprise of many, the Democrats backed down on everything, saying that they needed a 'supermajority' in the Senate (they didn't) or that the changes they swore to bring about would just take more time.

From her swearing-in, January, 2007, until now, Pelosi was Speaker of the House. Under her leadership, House Democrats managed an insurance industry-written health care package but little else. Meanwhile, some of the worst, most treacherous legislation in American history was adopted with little dissent, including re-enactment of the Patriot Act and passage of the National Defense Authorization Act, which purports to wipe out the 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution.

In the wake of the 2014 election, the 74-year-old Pelosi was asked by Washington reporters whether, having lost the speakership, it might be time for her to step aside and let newer, presumably younger, leaders arise.

She lost her cookies.

"It just is interesting as a woman to see how many times that question is asked of a woman and how many times that question is never asked of Mitch McConnell (long-time Republican Senate leader), she said. She was just warming up:

"When we won the House, and that was largely an initiative that I started around 2000, to take us to a place where we would win the House, that was a big thing. (But) I was never on the cover of Time magazine, even though I was the first woman to be (elected speaker), wasn't that a curiosity?"

Wow, stiffed by Time magazine. Let's carry that around for eight years.

Certainly, from a personal standpoint, Pelosi is going to feel disappointment. Since 2002, she has been a principal party fundraiser. This year alone, she pulled in over 100 million dollars. Since becoming a Democratic House leader, she's raised $428.8 million. That's a lot of elections subsidized and a lot of gratitude fairly earned.

But Pelosi has also helped drive her party into the ground.

Due either to her political personality or the way she regards the requirements of her job, she's failed to lead even a single progressive initiative in those eight years, the longest tenure of any House Democratic leader since the legendary Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson's mentor and fellow conspirator.

In some respects, Nancy Pelosi exemplifies what's wrong, fatally wrong, with this party: her actions are at stark contradiction to her rhetoric. I realize, of course, that party leaders quite often say one thing and do another. Every newly-elected president in memory has taken office with a pledge to end or get out of war, and the wars roll on.

The people in general know how they are being gamed. We may not know the extent of our hosing, but we feel some of it and we don't much like it.

In recent years, the main difference between Democratic and Republican parties has been that the former has no principles and stands for nothing while the latter is home to some of the most birdbrained officials of all time. Recognition of this state of affairs recently showed itself in a discernible mass of younger voters staying home.

I don't mean to demonize Pelosi, since she is just one part of a larger problem, but her interesting response to the question of her continuing in a leadership position raises further questions and other issues.

It is actually typical for Democratic leaders to resign from hierarchical positions when they suffer electoral defeats. It's not about Pelosi personally, nor about her gender. I'm sorry about Time magazine. It must be interesting to have the kind of self-image that the cover of Time would belong to you as a matter of right.

The gender comment is disturbingly similar to the commentary about Obama, and how his low public approval rate (38%) is a matter of race. Yes, there are a lot of racists around, and sexists, too. They are people in urgent need of further education. But opposition to Obama is not solely due to race; it is to some significant degree comprised of people who are angry about his abandoning his promises. This criticism is coming from the left.

In Pelosi's remarks, I think I can hear words we will all be hearing, at ever greater volume as the campaign evolves, in the 2016 presidential circus. We will be hearing this around the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

That there is considerable ignorance and fear stirred whenever a woman acts to get hold of some political power is undeniable. But that cannot be the basis of a reactionary support, either. Clinton is no more entitled to support because of her gender than she merits opposition. Whenever a campaign trades on this as an issue, it subverts the sort of conversations that need to take place.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-11-17:/2014/11/17/operation-dirtbox-19717876/Operation DirtboxRAZFX2014-11-17T08:45:11+01:002014-11-17T08:45:11+01:00
It's really a simple premise. If you can access everything there is to know about someone, his or her thoughts, dreams, ideas, moods, insecurities, ethical blunders, and sexual acts, you can assert control. J. Edgar Hoover knew that and used the FBI and its surveillance network to advance his power and to blackmail potential opposition.

Those who proved resistant to blackmail were served notice in other ways, sometimes involving bullets.

A small portion of Hoover's crimes were made public in America's brief flirtation with truth, post-Watergate, when Senatorial hearings under the direction of Senator Frank Church and a temporarily functioning media exposed some of the evil deeds of the country's intelligence network. That was forty years ago.

As we all know by now, there really were no reforms. The CIA, FBI, and other secret police agencies continued to expand their powers and the national political arena was shortly beyond the reach of troublemakers such as Church.

While some of the Snowden revelations were small bombshells to a normally somnolent public, the central point, that we are all under constant surveillance, was not terribly surprising. Put the technology together with operations organized and conducted by secretive, violent sociopaths, and all of this is inevitable.

The public reaction to Snowden and its political reflection were interesting for what they mean about America and what it portends.

Much of the public political conversation was immediately negative, with commentators, news readers, and professional politicians of both major parties attacking him as a traitor. Democratic members of congress were no better than their Republican counterparts. Liberal luminaries such as Al Franken tried to pacify dissenters by saying that the NSA was only acting to protect us, and Hillary Clinton lectured the fugitive about 'coming back to face the music.'

President Obama was on television, uncharacteristically awkward in reassuring the country that the NSA "isn't listening to your phone calls," which he knew to be false.

Politicians are in some ways just like everyone else: they are uncomfortable with anything which might inconvenience them or even cost them their jobs. So when it turns out that somebody who wants to direct your behavior knows all about that weekend you spent with that intern and the bag of coke, it can matter.

Multiply that by any number you want.

On Friday, the Denver Post and other papers ran the story that the Justice Department is directing a massive spy operation which can suck up close to every cell phone communication in America. They've done this by installing fake communications towers on a fleet of Cessnas, beginning in 2007.

Devices known as 'dirtboxes,' from the initials DRT of the Boeing unit which produces them, mimic cell towers of large telecom firms and trick cellphones into reporting their unique registration information. Investigators can harvest data from tens of thousands of calls in a single flight. The planes are said to cover most of the country. According to the Post article by Devlin Barrett, "people with knowledge of the program wouldn't discuss the frequency or duration of such flights, but said they take place on a regular basis."

The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, said that the flights come out of at least five major airports, that the fake towers can briefly disconnect calls, including, presumably inadvertently, emergency calls on 911. The Journal source said that there were software changes being made to avoid interrupting such calls.

The Justice Department refuses to confirm or deny any of this. A spokesman actually said that talking about this would allow criminal suspects or foreign powers to determine U.S. surveillance capabilities.

Barrett explains how the spy operation works:

"Cellphones are programmed to connect automatically to the strongest cell tower signal. The device being used by the U.S. Marshals Service identifies itself as having the closest, strongest signal, even though it doesn't, and forces all the phones that can detect its signal to send in their unique registration information. Even having encryption on one's phone, such as Apple Co.'s iPhone 6 now includes, doesn't prevent this process."

Basically, this program allows the government to escape scrutiny and evade constitutional problems. They can wiretap anybody and no longer have to rely on the phone companies to do so. Unnamed persons have told the media that the government does obtain court orders to run the program, but the court orders, if any really exist, are sealed.

One convenience for the secret police is that, unlike information taken through a phone company, they are using a procedure which skirts a variety of recently-enacted state laws which require them to obtain probable cause search warrants.

There has apparently been some discomfort among cellphone manufacturers, but apparently there's nothing they can do about it. The fake tower signals work even on phones with encryption, such as the iPhone 6.

The technology has been in use in foreign military operations and is a part of the surveillance used to locate targets for assassination. It is no longer out of the question that such a use will be made of it here.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-11-15:/2014/11/15/the-lynching-in-ferguson-19711033/The Lynching In FergusonRAZFX2014-11-15T09:23:12+01:002014-11-15T19:14:31+01:00
On August 9th, an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was murdered by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.

It's not that the Brown killing was especially unusual: in 2013, more than four hundred people, a wildly-disproportionate number of whom were young, black males, had been shot to death by American cops.

The Ferguson authorities began their defense of the officer by selectively withholding information from the press and public, including the cop's name, while they put together a story,

On August 10th, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar, said "the genesis of this shooting incident was a physical confrontation" in which Brown "physically assaulted the police officer."

The classic "unnamed sources" told Fox and ABC that the cop had suffered a fractured eye socket and been beaten nearly unconscious. This turned out to be untrue.

Six days after the shooting, Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson named the shooter, Darrin Wilson, a five-year veteran with a clean record.

According to the cops, Wilson had shot Brown after an altercation which began with the dead man reaching into the cop's Chevrolet Tahoe SUV and striking him. Brown, they said, had tried to get hold of Wilson's gun, a struggle which resulted in the weapon being discharged and Brown being grazed with a bullet.

Brown, the authorities said, then tried to flee, along with a companion, Dorian Johnson. The latter hid behind a nearby vehicle while Brown began running. Then, the cops said, after Wilson had fired in his direction, Brown reversed his course and charged at the officer. That's when Wilson shot him to death.

Practically self-defense, was the official story, much of it leaked to the media while actual documentation was being withheld.

On the 10th, demonstrations began at the site of the shooting, largely peaceful. Ferguson reacted by mobilizing 150 officers in riot gear, carrying military-grade weaponry. While protestors confronted police with their hands raised, chanting "Don't shoot," the cops closed off avenues to escape and fired tear gas into the crowd.

The demonstrations got bigger and angrier and, on the 12th, President Obama extended condolences to the Brown family and promised an investigation. On the same day, the FAA imposed a no-fly zone for a 37-mile radius over Ferguson.

You've met no-fly zones before. They're a common tool used by the U.S. government and Obama when they want to overthrow a foreign government. In Libya, the reason given was the 'protection of civilians,' a lie so obvious no one believed it except most Americans. In Ferguson, the FAA described "safety precautions" after the St. Louis cops claimed shots had been fired at one of their helicopters, but no one remembered to file an incident report on the shooting and the police copters were undamaged.

The 'shots fired' story proved to be a lie. What the government feared was not locals with guns but reporters with cameras. The ban on traffic was expressed this way: "Only relief aircraft operations under direction of St. Louis County Police Department are authorized in the airspace. Aircraft landing and departing St. Louis Lambert Airport are exempt."

Then, following an Associated Press Freedom of Information Act request, it turned out that an FAA supervisor was recorded saying that the cops "did not care if you ran commercial traffic through this TFR (temporary flight restriction) all day long. They didn't want media in there."

The FAA, of course, denied that it was acting to censor press coverage. One administrator, Michael Huerta, issued this statement:

"FAA cannot and will never exclusively ban media from covering an event of national significance, and media was never banned from covering the ongoing events in Ferguson in this case."

Nope, we didn't exclusively ban the media; we banned the media and a few others. There's no ban, we just won't let you cover the police attacking demonstrators.

Meanwhile, Ferguson on the ground had turned into a war zone, in the words of Republican Congressman Justin Amash and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren. Reporters were sometimes assaulted by the police. At least one was arrested. Police tried to herd demonstrators into enclosed spaces and some demonstrators fought back.

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, on the 14th, directed the state's Highway Patrol to direct security.

In an op-ed in Time Magazine, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky called for demilitarizing of the nation's police forces, writing that "anyone who thinks race does not skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention."

On the 16th, Lacy Clay, Ferguson's congressman, declared that he had "absolutely no confidence in the Ferguson police, the county prosecutor" to conduct a fair investigation into Brown's death.

On the 19th, the governor demanded that Wilson be prosecuted, which touched off a predictable firestorm from politicians anxious to appease the cops.

There have been three autopsies, one by the local authorities, one by a pathologist hired by the family, the third under federal appointment. Each found that Brown had been shot six times, twice in the head. One bullet entered his right eye on a downward trajectory and another entered the top of his skull; consistent with eyewitness accounts, these two fatal shots were the last fired.

There are numerous named witnesses to the shooting, and a compilation of their statements can be found on Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Michael_Brown.

There is at least one audio recording of the gun shots. A witness who had been recording a video-text message at the time inadvertently captured ten shots, according to CNN's audio expert Paul Ginsberg, who describes six shots followed by a pause, then four more. "I was very concerned about that pause," Ginsberg says, "because it's not just the number of gunshots, it's how they're fired."

As I write this column, we are said to be on the verge of a grand jury decision whether to charge Darrin Wilson with a criminal offense. The police are mobilizing to handle what civil authorities anticipate may be a public reaction, perhaps an indication which way the grand jury will go.

Here's what I believe happened. Brown and his friend were walking in the street when Wilson drove up to them in the Tahoe SUV and, according to Johnson, told them to "get the fuck on the sidewalk." He then drove past but stopped and backed up, swinging his car directly into their path and extremely close to the pair.

I believe Johnson's account: "We were so close, almost inches away, that when he tried to open his door aggressively, the door ricocheted both off me and Big Mike's body and closed back on the officer."

What happened next was that Wilson reached out his window and grabbed Brown's neck, trying to pull him against the cab, Brown resisted, and Wilson drew his gun. Forensic evidence indicates that Brown then jammed his finger between the hammer and the firing pin and the first shot failed for that reason. As Wilson pulled the gun back, he fired again, wounding Brown, who began running.

Wilson exited the cab and went after Brown, firing six shots, wounding him in the right arm. Brown stopped and turned around. Witnesses are divided on whether he raised his hands. Several thought he was partly doubled-over, protecting his wounds. In either case, he was obviously starting to fall when Wilson shot him through the eye and the top of the head.

For quite some time, I've been sparring a bit with people on Facebook on the issue of police violence. A couple of these guys are or were cops. There defense is predictable: the facts aren't yet known and won't be until the police investigate it; the victim was attacking the officer; the officer feared for his (invariably, it's a 'he') life. The facts, as they emerge, belie these excuses. Yes, once in a while the cop had little choice, but those times are rare.

It's useful to note that on so many occasions the victim is shot numerous times, often fatally when he is already down or falling, sometimes when he's got his hands in the air.

I think the most noteworthy comment I've seen from any politician was from Rand Paul: "anyone who thinks race does not skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention."

Why are all these dead guys young blacks?

From commentary on the web, echoed, eerily, by a white civilian who recently shot a black kid to death at a gas station, the white shooters think their victims did not treat them with adequate 'respect.' The civilian shooter said these people think they can get away with anything.

In 1955, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago named Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi over the Summer. Inside a local grocery store, Till whistled at a white woman, a sign of appreciating beauty in his young mind. The woman told her husband who, with a few friends, subsequently kidnapped, tortured, and murdered the boy.

The Emmett Till story was for many years emblematic of the American South and the experience of blacks. Local politics was dominated by White Citizens Councils and the KKK. It was not unusual for law enforcement officers to brutalize blacks who were perceived as "getting out of line."

For most of the history of the United States, white people have lynched blacks.

I suppose over the past forty years lynching has fallen out of favor. We like to congratulate ourselves on our more advanced racial attitudes. Blacks are more visible in corporate structures, and the President is black. Of course, much of the Republican centrist animosity toward Obama is not over his policies but his race. They just know how to be more polite or clever about it.

Lynching, however, most often by the police but once in a while by an idiot peckerhead like George Zimmerman, is still going on. The majority of those 400-plus blacks shot to death by cops are just hanged from a nearby tree by cover of official bullets, instead of rope, that's all. But they're lynched, whatever the storyline.

Once we get past the euphemisms and convenient justifications, thin but usable, we can see what's going on here. It's who we are, it's who our cops are. We've sowed this ignorance and hatred, we've nurtured it, tolerated it, pretended it was an aberration. With Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown, and hundreds of other cases, it's becoming functionally impossible for many people to pretend.

The only thing saving these executioners now is the perpetuation of massive willful ignorance. But given the propaganda of the media, the militarization of the country and its police forces, the ludicrous praise heaped on anyone associated with uniforms, arms, and killings, it's hard to bet against it.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-11-14:/2014/11/14/on-bud-selig-buck-weaver-and-the-selling-out-of-baseball-19706926/On Bud Selig, Buck Weaver, And The Selling Out Of BaseballRAZFX2014-11-14T09:12:03+01:002014-11-14T09:12:03+01:00
I'm gonna sound like an old guy today. Can't help it. It's one of those "look what a mess they've made over the past fifty years" sort of columns, and I know what that makes me, one of those people I used to make fun of.

I began playing baseball when I was maybe five years old, soon as I could catch and throw. I played in Little League and in a bunch of other leagues through the years, even managed and coached it.

Until age 12, my childhood was in Madison, Wisconsin, and each year we'd begin our own spring training as soon as the snow started to melt. I was a shortstop, and I'd practice for hours every day, slamming tennis balls against the garage door –– and sometimes hardballs against concrete walls. Made a terrible racket. Astonishing that my mom put up with it.

My hometown team was, of course, the Milwaukee Braves, with Aaron, Mathews, Spahn, Lew Burdette. The shortstop was Johnny Logan, who wore number 23 and batted second on the 1957 world championship team. Dad got tickets to one of the Series games and I saw our boys beat the Yankees.

In the 'fifties and into the 'sixties, the Majors consisted of two leagues, eight teams in each. They played 154 games in the regular season. At the end, the winner of the races in the National and American Leagues met –– for the first time –– in a seven game World Series.

The games were played on real grass. And although most major league clubs by this time had installed lighting, most games were still fought in daylight, including all the Series games. As kids, we'd play hooky or carry transistor radios, when they became available, listening between classes and sometimes while class was in session.

My family moved to the Bay Area in 1958-9, and we adopted a new team, the Giants. My old home town was soon to lose the Braves, anyway, who decamped to Atlanta and started to wear hideous blue jerseys, and this eventually opened the door to a new club, the Milwaukee Brewers and its owner, Allan "Bud" Selig.

Baseball, as Walt Whitman said, is our grandest game. It is a game so grand, so perfect in its symmetry, that it has somehow withstood a relentless assault on it by its own 'protectors' over the past forty-five years, an assault greatly accelerated since Bud Selig became its commissioner in 1992.

Selig was baseball's ninth commissioner, a position which was created to help bring the game back into public favor after the Black Sox scandal in 1919.

For those unfamiliar with the details, there is a wonderful film by John Sayles, "Eight Men Out," with a brilliant cast, available on Netflix and elsewhere. Hell, it's probably on YouTube in its entirety by now. Here's a trailer: http://youtu.be/NZYltpZT0KI.

Baseball in 1919 was the exclusive playground of the wealthy team owners, many of whom were first-class pricks. Charlie Comiskey, the owner of the White Sox, squeezed and cheated his players to the point where, as American League champions and prohibitive favorites against the National League winner, the Cincinnati Reds, six of the players agreed to fix the Series at the invitation of Arnold Rothstein, a New York mobster.

Two great players were among the eight indicted, though they were clearly innocent, and third baseman Buck Weaver (John Cusack in the film) and left fielder "Shoeless" Joe Jackson were banned from baseball for life.

From the days of the first Commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a nasty piece of work who demanded control over many aspects of the game, to Selig, baseball's evolution has followed the national money sickness. Through breaking the color barrier to breaking the Reserve Clause (and disallowing a team's right to keep a player exclusively), baseball has much to recommend it, but as players began achieving rights and powers the ownership has manipulated the game purely for profit. There are consequences.

The Commissioner is supposed to protect the integrity of the game. A few actually tried to do that, c.f. Bart Giamatti, but the owners decided they would never let that happen again. Selig, former used car dealer and owner of the Brewers, took over on an interim basis which lasted longer than FDR's presidency.

It wasn't entirely Selig's fault, what's happened to our grandest game, but he's played a big role, monetizing every aspect of baseball to the point where the games are effectively scheduled to please the broadcast networks and corporate sponsors, adding layers of lucrative playoffs, ending day games in the World Series.

Everything now has a corporate sponsor. The seventh-inning-stretch is sponsored, as are various in-game events. The broadcast booth is sponsored. The updated scores of other games are sponsored.

The glorious names of the stadiums are now mostly gone, and we get names of criminal enterprises (Houston's park was called Enron Field) instead of something beautiful. A few of historic claim have resisted the cash, probably because the fans of the Red Sox would lynch anybody who wanted to get rid of Fenway Park.

Inter-league play has generated revenue but eliminated the magic of a World Series between opponents who hadn't played one another at least since spring training. Extra rounds of playoffs involving wild card teams has fed the money machine but diminished the importance of the long season. This year, my team won the Series but had no business being there. Neither did their opponent, Kansas City's Royals.

It was a lot of fun, the World Series, and the playoffs were a rich dessert after six months of struggle, but neither San Francisco nor Kansas City won even their own divisions. The best teams in the two leagues this year were the Washington Nationals and the Los Angeles Angels, each clipped in the first round.

Granted, there are more teams than there once were, not a bad thing at all, but where once two teams emerged from two eight-team leagues, ten now qualify from six divisions. One-third of the major league teams make it to the playoffs.

The money people argue that it just makes the races more exciting, gives more fans something to hope for down the stretch. Superficially, that sounds logical. But it's not exactly true. If you pulled the existing divisions into two in each league (this would require adding two more expansion teams, which would mollify the bean counters), there would have been four very closely-fought races. And the integrity of the game would be protected because whichever two teams emerged for the Series would have earned it by a full season of play.

The integrity of the game is further damaged by the tail-wagging-the-dog domination by the networks and their corporate sponsors. The World Series should be contested under optimum conditions. This used to mean October, mostly in the sunshine. Now, thanks to an extended season and several rounds of playoffs, we get November, at night, generally chilly, and sometimes close to freezing. That is not respecting the game.

Neither is the bizarre fact that the games can no longer be played in their own natural rhythms. Innings may not start until the network notifies the umpires that the commercials are over.

I have plenty of other gripes, but most of them are familiar enough not to require much explanation. The DH is an abomination. The home-field advantage in the Series ought to be alternated each year as it once was, not determined by the result of a mid-season exhibition, which itself is now ruined by attaching that significance to it. I'm tired of the enormous American flags covering the fields before games or during quasi-patriotic renditions of the Star Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful. And the habit of baseball turning every occasion into an "honor our troops" celebration is both nauseating and frightening.

Despite these things, the game is so wonderful that, at least for me, the relentless monetizing of everything connected with it can't ruin it. But, now, it appears these people are determined to begin tearing at its basic perfection:

This Fall, in the Arizona Instructional League, baseball is trying out a brand-new rule designed, the owners say, to speed things up. Games shouldn't last so long, we're told. The time between commercials has to be shortened. Thus, they're imposing a time clock on pitchers and a rule forbidding batters to step out of the box except under limited conditions.

One of the great graces of baseball is and always has been its timelessness. There are no clocks, no time constraints. Each game, each inning, each clash has its own character. Pitchers and batters try to disrupt each other's timing. But now the lords of baseball would destroy this fundamental characteristic.

Baseball is not football, ice hockey, basketball. I want to know where the outrage is, where are the baseball writers who ought to see what's happening and raise the alarm.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-11-13:/2014/11/13/the-hayden-question-19702408/The Hayden QuestionRAZFX2014-11-13T07:03:16+01:002014-11-14T08:07:35+01:00
Tom Hayden began political life as a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society, one of the drafters of the sensational Port Huron Statement, and a radical anti-war leader. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Huron_Statement

He had the stones to travel to North Viet Nam, with Yale professor Staughton Lynd, while America was bombing its people, returning to write passionately about the war.

In the Summer of 1967, he worked as a community organizer in the midst of riot conditions in Newark. In 1968, he helped organize the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention, for which he was later prosecuted.

In 1976, he was an insurgent candidate taking on incumbent Senator John Tunney in the Democratic primary and picking up 40% of the vote.

He's just published an open letter to Barack Obama, in Thorne Dreyer's excellent web magazine, the Rag Blog. It is one of the most depressing political pieces I've ever seen. Here it is: http://www.theragblog.com/tom-hayden-message-to-the-president/#comment-19752.

For several years, I've been puzzled as well as alarmed by a widespread psychological blindness among some segments of what used to be considered the Democratic left. No matter what the President does, they broadcast their support, excuse his policies, ignore his manifold crimes.

Hayden and I both worked for Obama in 2008. Hayden repeated the mistake in 2012.

I've several times specified rather lengthy lists of Obama's criminal, or just shameful, acts. It's hard to find a single significant promise he issued in the 2008 campaign which he has not flatly reversed once in office. There are too many to gloss over, too many to 'explain.'

The facts of this presidency, and of the Democratic Party leadership, which ratifies his wars, his prosecutions, the activities of his secret police, his cozy relationship with bankers and CEOs, and his overtures to Republicans on prospective cuts in Social Security, are fatally inculpatory.

Wall Street stocks are at an all-time high, and it's touted as evidence of 'recovery,' and meanwhile the food stamp budget has been cut and people around the country are being arrested for trying to feed the homeless.

And still there is Hayden's letter, and other columns like it, penned by people on the left, people who at least once upon a time had credentials.

I don't know Hayden. Met him in the old days, politics and campaigns, he seemed legitimate. And the Hayden question now, the same question one may ask of some other 'left' icons who try to overcome six years of stark betrayal by either ignoring the facts or blaming the Republicans, is a very important one.

In the aftermath of the latest election, there is a renewed clamor to drag the Democratic Party farther to the right, the idea being that it is too far left for the public. Possibly, some people actually believe it. It is charitable to see this campaign as simply ignorant, the sort of strategic lunacy sometimes seen from doomed military leaders. Maybe these guys are just morons.

Maybe not, though. Maybe they know damned well what they're doing, taking the last remnants of a once-great political party and wringing the life out of it.

The Democrats lost for two reasons. One, it was a midterm election, which always produces an electorate more conservative, older, and better-off financially. Two, the party manifestly stands for nothing and thus cant mobilize its forces as it once could. You cannot inspire people to work for you when you offer them nothing to care for or believe in.

I don't really feel confident enough to predict what will happen with this party, but none of the scenarios I can envision is an optimistic one.

I have suggested before that people need a serious alternative to the two major parties, since both parties have whored themselves out completely to the worst elements in the country, but I'm aware of the profound structural barriers erected to prevent such an alternative from surviving. Even if it could solve the money deficit –– essentially impossible –– it could not get past the heavily restricted ballot requirements in the states.

We need people to start thinking about this. The sort of 'bluebird of happiness' ideas, such as the various constitutional amendments being floated about getting money out of politics, are a colossal waste of time; I shouldn't have to explain why that is. No, we need a better path, one based on reality, one which acknowledges the grotesquerie our national politics has become, and we'd better get on it soon.

Tom Hayden represents a curious but greatly harmful perspective, one which buries the facts of Obama and the Democratic Party and thus impedes the work which urgently needs doing.

We need a new Port Huron Statement, a rallying document which speaks to the real feelings real people have, which addresses real lives in a still-depressed economy. We need radical alternatives that nobody seems to have yet come up with.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-11-11:/2014/11/11/coda-19697442/CODARAZFX2014-11-11T21:09:19+01:002014-11-11T21:10:39+01:00
"I think he's waking up."

I opened my eyes. Bev Galley, several months short of 21, was smiling at me. "You're okay," she said.

I tried to say something but no words came. Another voice, John Pecora's:

"Lucky you're so short. Six inches taller you wouldn't be here."

Bev leaned over so I could whisper it, my question.

"You've been shot but you're going to be fine. Bobby's all right."

I was awake, in a hospital, and then I remembered, the last few seconds, slow motion, running in quicksand, the shots. It was real, not a dream. It was true. Bobby's all right!

Bev put a straw between my lips and I drew in water, sweet. My throat cleared a little.

"What happened," I said, aloud this time. My eyes could take in the room, John standing at the foot of the bed, looking tired and jubilant, Brian Wells in a plastic chair against the wall, looking serene. There was someone I didn't recognize, a nurse, and she diplomatically left the room.

They told me.

Bob and Brian, talking it over, had decided to drive down to L.A. without troubling the rest of us with details. Rich Standard, booted out of the Navy for reasons which were never explained to him and certain he was being followed, had spent a month dragging brush over his trail before applying for work as a cook's apprentice at the Ambassador. And Brad Davis, barred from the Embassy Ballroom due to my blundering, had located a clothes hamper on the west side of the building and found inside it several soiled white cook's uniforms, one of which fit him nicely, and had come through the kitchen about ten seconds before Sirhan stepped into the Senator's path and started pulling the trigger. As for Bob, he'd been stopped at the door to the ballroom and had then found his way to the fifth floor and come down in the elevator with several campaign staffers and waited there, at the other end of the kitchen corridor. Between them, Brad and Bob had flattened two people on Kennedy's right, just to be sure, and John and Rich had separated Sirhan's shoulder and broken his collarbone with a couple of flying tackles. Brian, meanwhile, had abandoned his post with the getaway car and positioned himself in the ballroom at the Serrano staircase, figuring to block the girl in the polka dot dress and her accomplice from escape; it hadn't worked because this time they'd run through the kitchen and taken a different exit. He still blames me for giving him faulty information, but concedes that, in a free will universe, things can change.

I missed meeting Ethel Kennedy, who'd visited the shooting victims at Good Samaritan, because I'd been out cold at the time, but at Christmas I got in the mail a great black-and-white photograph of the next President of the United States, with a nice inscription and a note of thanks.

Chicago was a different scene this time. The general level of anger and frustration was much lower, perhaps because there was still a mood of optimism in the country, perhaps because Mayor Daley knew how to gravitate to power. There were a few incidents, but no riots. I was there, of course, mostly recovered from my shoulder wound, and had a pretty good time, hanging out at Grant Park with Bob and dropping acid on the convention floor two hours before I cast the best vote of my life.

Bobby won on the second ballot. McCarthy clung to his vanishing hopes right to the end, but after Humphrey was stopped the defections in Wisconsin and New Hampshire, and Daley's delivery of Illinois wrapped it up. Kennedy, because he liked and respected him, and because it was a terrific life insurance policy, picked George McGovern as his running mate.

Nixon, for his part, was deprived at least for the time being of his chance to burglarize the Democratic National Committee's offices at the Watergate because, although the '72 elections are still a long way off, his electoral defeat, not to mention his erratic behavior in the fall campaign, evidently finished him in politics. In the bitter aftermath, Tricky Dick held another of his "last press conferences" and swore he really meant it this time.
 Meanwhile, Spiro Agnew's got a job working for the Greek generals, but when word gets out about his soliciting bribes while Governor of Maryland – as it no doubt will; I still own a typewriter – his lobbying days will be pretty much done.

As we'd worried, there was a second attempt on Kennedy's life, this time in Detroit, in October, a lone gunman, who unfortunately tumbled from a rooftop afterwards and thus could never be questioned. The F.B.I. claims that its investigation is continuing, which is entirely possible now that Hoover's been booted into a long-overdue retirement.

It was a bad year for lone nuts in general. James Earl Ray was shot to death at London's Heathrow Airport while "trying to escape," according to the authorities, but there are signs that Congress is less than satisfied with this story, so it's not over yet. Sirhan Sirhan awaits trial in Los Angeles for attempted murder. Besides me, two other bystanders were wounded, neither seriously, and I've been notified that I might have to testify at his trial and, no, I'm not planning on making any speeches from the witness box.

The war in Viet Nam officially ended on February 14, 1969, with a mutual cease-fire, but it was already over the moment Robert Francis Kennedy took the oath of office on a bright but chilly day in January. At least thirty thousand American lives were saved, and many more Vietnamese. I was invited to the inaugural but settled for watching on television, warm and stoned, in the same cottage on Ellsworth for which, after some tough negotiations with Mrs. Ross, I'd signed another lease. I invited the boys but only John and Rich could make it. Bob was up in Davis, opening a health food store; Brad was with Donna; Brian was, as usual, nowhere to be found.

In March of this year, a New Orleans jury deliberated four days before finding Clay Shaw guilty of conspiracy in the murder of John F. Kennedy. It's still on appeal, but the cover-up's probably blown to hell, with the appointment by Kennedy's Attorney General Burke Marshall of an Independent Prosecutor to lead a federal investigation. It seems possible that we will finally get the guys who did it, but that's no certainty. The press has already noted the suicide of Guy de Mohrenschildt in Dallas, and a hunting accident took the life of E. Howard Hunt in the Virginia woods. I guess we'll see.

In April, Kennedy restored diplomatic relations with Cuba, touching off a storm of domestic protest, largely in Miami, and it's still controversial four months later. Last month, he sent to Congress the most sweeping, ambitious urban renewal proposal in American history. With the war ended, there's money available, and he's got a majority, so it might even pass.

As for me, I'm headed back to Boalt Hall for another year and you can keep your remarks to yourself. I still have the same attitude about the legal business, that hasn't changed, but with Kennedy in the White House I might want a job at the Justice Department by the summer of '71, assuming we're done with presidential assassinations for the time being. Anyway, I'm also taking guitar lessons and following the progress of the New York Mets; among the boys, we came up with slightly more than seventeen thousand bucks and got odds of 80-1 in Las Vegas, and with a little over a month to go in the season I've got my eyes on a house in Forest Knolls, almost an acre, with a sauna right off the master bedroom and a separate studio big enough to record music in.

John Pecora sold his water bed store but kept the name for his new enterprise, a hot tub and spa emporium on Miller Avenue. He's seeing a nice girl but I suspect he still dreams about Donna.

Donna, meanwhile, gave birth to another son, and she and Brad are working on things. Brad's future will be interesting. He's quit the phone company and gone back to graduate school in English lit, which is where he always belonged anyway, and with the future invention of spell-check he stands a pretty good chance.

Rich Standard's back in school, on the GI bill, incredibly, and painting. He was able to pitch nearly two thousand dollars into the Mets fund, so he may not have to worry much about paying for brushes and canvas. He's met a girl, too, who's almost tough enough to handle his bullshit, but I suspect there'll be another one down the road, name of Jean. I haven't told him.

Bob, as I mentioned, has a co-op health food store in Davis, where he's living with Claudia and getting ready to run for city council. His chances are even better than the Mets, in my opinion, but I haven't told him, either.

Brian is still resisting the urge to invent all sorts of computer thingies, although I talked to him at length about Silicon Valley, Microsoft, and the World Wide Web. He and Kitty are already homeowners, got a place near downtown Larkspur, and a new daughter, Jennifer. Brian's one of those guys who could make a million dollars if he felt like it, but he always seems to have something more interesting to do.

Drew made it home from the war, in one piece, and has wrangled his way back into Berkeley, where Fred Stripp thinks he's got himself one half of a national championship team. All he needs now is someone who can put up with the Legendary Mendelson.

Mom and Dad are in therapy again, and Mom was optimistic the last time we talked, so that's another thing that's up for grabs.

As for Beverly Galley, she didn't marry Larry Schwartz, evidently due to her inference from the bullet in my shoulder that I might be telling the truth after all. She starts grad school in a week or so, at Stanford, in psychology, of all things, and is appearing in a Little Theater production of Ibsen, a bit high-brow for my taste but I saw the show and she's got the chops. She's not marrying me, either, at least not yet. Like everybody else these days, I guess she's just waiting to see what happens next.

(That's it, the final chapter. News From A Parallel World. Physical copies can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/News-From-A-Parallel-World/dp/1478194448/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top.

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-11-11:/2014/11/11/chapter-thirty-three-city-of-angels-19695286/Chapter Thirty-Three: City Of AngelsRAZFX2014-11-11T06:00:38+01:002014-11-11T06:00:38+01:00
Driving, you can make L.A. in about six hours, if your car doesn't mind a lead foot on its accelerator, and I seemed to recall covering it in slightly more than five when I was first young and immortal, but since I wanted to arrive rested and in one piece, and since this was a Volkswagen and not a Buick Skylark with an all-aluminum engine, I elected to take it in leisurely stages. Anyway, that's my story. A simpler truth was that there was enough hard-wired adrenaline in my central nervous system to run all of your household appliances, and I couldn't just pace around the cottage any more.

I packed the VW on Monday morning: a change of clothes; magazines; a Nero Wolfe novel, The Final Deduction; a small ice chest containing a six-pack of Coke and a couple of Dos Equis; toothbrush, toothpaste, comb, and shaving materials; a half-loaf of San Francisco sourdough, two cans of Chicken-of-the-Sea tuna, with opener, two apples, three tangerines, and a bag of Oreos; a windbreaker; an extra pair of shoe laces; a flashlight with new batteries; sunglasses; and a partridge in a pear tree. In the trunk was a fully-inflated spare and a jack with a handle. On my person was a checkbook, two hundred fifty dollars cash, two packs of Chesterfields, and matches. I also stuck four joints under the floor carpet on the passenger side, a technical violation of my own rules but they were well-concealed and it wasn't Tuesday yet.

I walked up to Telegraph and down toward the campus, in no hurry. I passed Discount Records and Cafe Mediterraneum, Cody's, Moe's, The Forum, and the head shops. There were political posters, and concert posters, and someone had spray-painted anti-war slogans in blue on the earth-tone facing of the Bank of America. I snagged the latest issue of The Berkeley Barb. The people on the streets, in a good mood, summer coming on, and I was envious, a wasted emotion, but there it was.

I walked onto campus at Bancroft and Telegraph, where an iron plaque set into the concrete informed me that the University owned the property and permission to use it could be revoked at any time.

No rallies in Sproul Plaza today. I passed under the intricate scrolled verdigris archway at Sather Gate and stood in an empty space, Dwinelle Hall down to my left, where Fred Stripp was probably this minute dealing out "A"s to all draft-eligible males. It's where I'd seen Legendary for the first time again, stepping through the doorway, that mop of curly hair, dark eyes under bushy eyebrows, assessing the situation, not that long ago. Up to the right, on the way to the Campanile, was Wheeler, with classrooms I'd managed to visit and the Auditorium where I'd seen Gene McCarthy, gray, cool, and not yet twisted by bitterness and insecurity, testing the waters for a presidential run. The bells began to toll. Noon.

I circled up past the Campanile to the Greek Theater, where Clark Kerr's superficial rhetoric and the dragging of Mario Savio from the stage had destroyed the opposition to the Free Speech Movement, and where Robert Francis Kennedy had called us to recognize how privileged we were and to fight for those less fortunate. Today it was silent, a vast, uncluttered sweep of white and gray, but there were echoes, I thought, of everything gone before.

I ate lunch at Larry Blake's, reading about McCarthy's latest rejection of an alliance with RFK in The Chronicle and wondering what the fuck happened to some people when they got a taste for adulation.

Back at the cottage, I listened to music and played solitaire and, breaking security, made a couple of phone calls, too early to leave unless I wanted to make L.A. by nightfall, which I didn't. I called John at his store, a circumspect conversation. He sounded calm and subdued. Brian was out, Kitty said, running errands. Nobody answered at Bob's place.

I filled the tank at the Shell station on Ashby, checked the tires, picked up a map, and hit the freeway early enough to make it through the City before rush hour. It was still sparkling bright, the sun high, no fog over San Francisco and Coit Tower, Johnny Kan's, Tommy's Joynt, auto row, the Fillmore, Haight-Ashbury, Fisherman's Wharf, the Curran Theater, and the Bridge. All the clock-watchers in their offices fiddling with paper clips, many of them bored to tears and it was only Monday. Dad was down there, too, Drumm Street, just off Montgomery, reminded of his secondary status by a couple of rapacious bosses and the skyscrapers which allowed light to filter through only on sufferance.

I rolled by Candlestick Park and was on the Bayshore Freeway about five minutes ahead of the commute traffic, cruised through South San Francisco, past the produce terminal, the racetrack, the airport, with the window down and the radio off and the rumble of big rigs and low whine of sports cars, and the wind in high register, and I rolled by Millbrae and past Burlingame, the Bay smooth as glass, and then the rows of old, rusted industrial buildings, warehouses with broken windows, storage sheds, marshy swamps. A freight train whistled southbound, Southern Pacific box cars in orange and rust.

I was thinking all sorts of things, running a steady fifty-five in the slow lane, smoking, finally on the road, disjointed shit inside my skull, disconnected people and places, memories of the past and future. This was flat land skidding by me, but the earth was curved and kept turning. By tomorrow, I'd have to suffocate my doubts. Anybody going into combat with doubts was going to get shot; worse, was going to fail. As an intellectual exercise, it was a lot of fun to wonder about free will, cause-and-effect, cognition, quantum physics, the phases of the moon, and the problems of Mercury in retrograde, but when Kennedy came off the platform and through the curtain at the Ambassador Hotel there wasn't going to be room for any of that.

After Burlingame came San Mateo and Redwood City, and the signs promised Palo Alto next, the Stanford turnoff, and there was time, of course, a short detour, maybe Bev would be at home and I could feel her arms around me again, maybe even stay for a while, wrapped in love and recognition and forgiveness for all things, but I kept going.

I finally pulled over at a truck stop at the northern edge of San Jose, too early for dinner but I needed to use the lavatory and stretch my legs a little. I got out the map and ate a tangerine, spilling juice on my shirt. I was looking at a long stretch now, farmlands and vineyards in all directions, probably not much traffic, an easy drive. Inside the café, I picked up some coffee in a styrofoam cup and the napkins I'd forgotten to pack, and then I extracted a joint from under the floor mat and hit the road.

Morgan Hill. Gilroy. Watsonville. Salinas. Agricultural outposts with broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, strawberries, great dusty fields plowed in rows, fruit stands by the side of the road, a farmer on a yellow tractor, big wheels slowly churning. I sailed by, on automatic, making good time now. It was 6:00 exactly passing the turnoff for Soledad Prison, 6:23 at King City. I stopped at a likely-looking roadside diner in Paso Robles, refilled the gas tank, and put away a chili size with onions and a raft of fries; I was working up a good case of indigestion anyhow, reading the Fresno Bee. McCarthy sniping at Kennedy, said to be "optimistic," and Kennedy, trying to stem the bleeding, saying nice things about Gene. I took the rest of the paper with me, anxious now to cover more miles. The sun was beginning to drop and if the map was good I'd reach San Luis Obispo before night came. 101 was nearly deserted. You could say a lot of things about Pat Brown, and after Reagan beat him in '66 people had, but he'd delivered a first-class highway system. I finished the joint breezing by Atascadero.

Local radio was a wash-out. I found "Mrs. Robinson," which seemed hopeful, but that was followed with a couple of dreadful numbers, including one by the Ohio Express called "Yummy Yummy Yummy," and I gave it up. AM radio was a year beyond its expiration date. You could still hear the Beatles, and James Brown, but otherwise it was bubblegum all the way, music for people who couldn't hear.

I caught the sunset at Avila Beach, a state park where the highway reaches the Pacific, pulling off to the right among coastal oaks and down through scrub grasses into a small parking lot and walking a short path to the edge of the continent. I sat for a long time on an outcropping of rock, as the sand darkened and the waters turned purple, listening to the soft breath of the tide, thinking about endings.

I stayed over at a Motel 6 in Santa Maria, with two skimpy guest towels jammed against the bottom of the door to keep the scent of pot from leaking out. I watched part of an old Mickey Rooney film on television, switched to The Final Deduction, broke open the Oreos, and then started on the beer. I must have been insensate by the time sleep came because when I awakened around ten in the morning the lights were still on and there were crumbs all over the sheets.

I reached Santa Barbara a few minutes after twelve, a straight shot south to the channel and then due east through Naples and Goleta. I tried the radio again, off and on, "Lady Madonna," and Blue Cheer's "Summertime Blues," and picked up snatches of news. Andy Warhol had been shot and was in critical condition in New York. Students were again rioting in Italy. An errant U.S. rocket had killed six high-ranking South Vietnamese military and police officials on the outskirts of Saigon.

A strong early voter turnout in Mexican-American and black precincts in L.A.

The Channel was a bright, clean blue, that twinkling picture postcard seduction which lured the unsuspecting from their cozy nests in Michigan and New Jersey with golden promises no less terrifying for being sometimes true. I saw lines of surfers paddling out from El Capitan Beach, and ranks of white gulls diving in loose formation, and tourist families spilling out of station wagons alongside the road, Beach Boy heaven a bare hundred miles west of Los Angeles, and I didn't stop.

John and Brad were on the road. Kennedy was in Malibu at the home of filmmaker John Frankenheimer. Legendary was halfway around the world. Rich Standard was missing. The past seemed to be gathered up behind me now, galleries in a brilliant light, faces and voices, scenes I'd moved through, everyone, everything in confluence on a single moment in time. I heard Kennedy's voice inside my head.  ...Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle... too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others... I run because I am convinced our country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done that I am obliged to do all that I can...

I pulled off the freeway once more, at Carpinteria along the coast, to get some lunch and use the facilities, but I skipped coffee and didn't light a cigarette until I was back in the VW and rolling, and in a couple of hours, still in one piece and more sentient than I'd expected to be, I pitched down along the southern edge of Sepulveda Dam and into the City of Angels.

I took an off-ramp in North Hollywood, parked against the first convenient curb, and spread the map across the passenger seat, already lost.

An index and a magnifying glass could get you to Wilshire Boulevard, and the address of the Ambassador wasn't hard to come by, but even with a map people could get sucked into the maze, the sprawling puzzle pieces, the endless, tortured linkages around film studios, reservoirs, parks, country clubs, schools and cemeteries, and lose their bearings and wind up in Brentwood or Baldwin Hills and be unable to get back out. I wasn't hearing Kennedy's voice any longer, but Brad's, and he was saying Where the fuck am I?

Wilshire ran from the ocean in Santa Monica northeast through Westwood, past UCLA, then bit off a chunk of Beverly Hills, crossed Olympic Boulevard, and rolled east into downtown. It covered about seventeen miles. The part that interested me, though, was confined to a couple of square blocks bordered by Catalina and 8th Streets, due south of Griffith Park, and I got back on the Hollywood Freeway. It was three o'clock.

I passed Universal City and the Hollywood Reservoir, and took the Vermont Street exit. There was a strange yellowy atmosphere in L.A., a special kind of pollution different from what I'd seen in other cities, as though a vast atomizer was bathing everything in a poisonous spray of fairy dust. I pulled over near the corner of Vermont and 6th, maybe four blocks from the hotel, finished off the last of the tangerines, had a Chesterfield, and considered my options. It would be good to check things out early and then go somewhere nearby, occupy my mind. Nearly five hours until the polls closed. I had a few wild notions: rent some clubs and play a little golf; go to the movies; window shop the fashions on Rodeo Drive. Instead, I walked over to Catalina Street and down to the Ambassador. It looked about the same as it had in December, a bit dryer and just as intimidating. There were cars parked in the long drive, several late-model Mercedes and a black limo with tinted windows. The palms swayed high over everything.

Inside, I took a quick peek around the first floor – the Ambassador Room being prepped for something, I couldn't tell what – and hopped up to the second. The Embassy Ballroom was considerably different from the last time I'd been there, no dining tables, just an empty space about as deep as a football field. A couple of bars had been set up against the far walls, and red-white-and-blue bunting had been strung along the perimeter. A podium had been set on the low platform to my right, and a gold curtain had been hung behind it. Several large television sets were in view and a couple of technicians were fiddling with one of them. A middle-aged man with short hair and a military-style moustache noticed me near the doors and came over.

"It'll be a couple of hours," he said. I identified myself as a member of Kennedy's delegate slate but he seemed unimpressed. The doors leading backstage were standing open. I left the same way I'd entered.

I wandered the hallways for a while, smoking, trying to calm down. There was a campaign command center on the fifth floor and I considered dropping in but vetoed it; nothing I could do there except get in the way and after my brief encounter in the ballroom I didn't know whether I could manage my own voice.

I spent the next three hours driving, down Wilshire, up through Beverly Hills, back over to Griffith Park to see the Planetarium, which was closed, nibbling time in two- and three-minute increments. My palms were sticky, my legs felt cold, and my jaw hurt from grinding my teeth. Getting into the pantry, I'd manage it, through the doors, if open, or the curtain, or right through the wall if I had to, but when Sirhan moved my job was to be in front of Kennedy, turn around and knock him flat.

I ate dinner at a small, funky hamburger palace about a mile from the hotel, where a couple of families were making matter-of-fact messes on the yellow formica tables and conversing in a happy disjointed jumble of voices. I couldn't taste anything, even fries with salt and mustard, and I washed everything down with so much water the waitress refilling my glass every five minutes must've wondered about my economy-sized kidneys.

I watched the kids eat and play without being seen to stare, my eyes otherwise glazing over the back sections of the LA Times. I read the baseball news. The Dodgers were on their way to another pennant, apparently, and nobody could score off Drysdale. It would be nice to see another ballgame, even at Candlestick. One little girl, maybe five years old, with copper curls and dimples when she smiled, was shamelessly flirting with a boy of about the same age at another table. She kept twisting and craning her neck for a view, then yanking it back with a startled grin on her face. The boy affected nonchalance, but he wasn't fooling me.

I drove back to the hotel along Wilshire, the palms bending overhead and the darkening sky turning blue to gray. I wondered what L.A. sunsets were like, whether the colors blurred in the smog, diffused, muddied. I wondered what L.A. life was like, whether the days blurred in the Spanish stucco and Mediterranean bronze, if you had that kind of life, Caucasian semi-famous, skimming cash from the glittering surface of the California dream machine. Other people lived here, too, but they were roped-off, in Watts and South Central, so far removed from the Coconut Grove and the Brown Derby they might as well have been on the moon. I shoehorned the VW into a half-space on Catalina. Lights had been turned on and with approaching night they cast shadows everywhere. My feet were on the pavement but I wasn't too sure they were connected to the rest of me. It was eight o'clock.

At the Ambassador, lights blazed from upstairs windows and cars were rolling down the drive. There were three parties tonight, the other two being for that right-wing nut Max Rafferty who was about to wrest the Senate nomination away from Tom Kuchel, and for Alan Cranston, who would make Rafferty's nomination worthless. I walked the perimeter at first, trying to get my bearings. No sign of Brad or John but no reason to worry yet, either. I toured the grounds a little, crossing lawns and traversing a service entrance, and cutting between a couple of official-looking Lincolns pulled right up close, and then hung out around the front entrance for a while longer, putting it off, letting the day go down one last time.

I stood up, stretched, and walked through the entrance into the ornate, richly-carpeted lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, stuck my burning cigarette into the sand receptacle, and took the wide stairs to the second floor.

Ornate crystal chandeliers depending from high arched grayish-white egg carton ceilings, sending flashes of light through an almost supernatural brightness. There were tables toward the back where you could get a straw boater with a Kennedy bumper sticker pasted around its crown, or buttons if you had none or wanted more, and the room was filling up. Toward the front, a chalkboard had been set up to record the numbers as they changed. There were the television monitors, too, where you could follow the Huntley-Brinkley guys or the Cronkite guys or the Frank Reynolds guys, who were all guessing madly and trying to be first with the goods. McCarthy led in the raw vote, but it was early, not much past eight-thirty, and network exit polls had given Kennedy the edge. At a refreshment table I picked up a ginger ale, although what I really wanted was about nine bottles of beer.

No Brad and no John. By nine o'clock I was beginning to worry, which was ridiculous since even the networks hadn't called it and Bobby wouldn't be down until midnight. On CBS, David Schoumacher was interviewing McCarthy at the Beverly Hilton. "We made our real test in Oregon," he was saying. "We neglected California to go into Oregon." Schoumacher could barely suppress a smile.

The music was too loud, although that could've been my nerves, and I didn't want to risk having to hear any more from McCarthy for a while, and I went down to the lobby and wandered around. I walked outside for another half hour, still didn't see John or Brad, and fled back inside where the numbers had gotten better, but still the networks held off; a computer breakdown stalling the vote count in Los Angeles.

If what Brian and Bob had told me was right, it was a very short distance between the guys who'd questioned them in Memphis and me. If they'd covered that distance there was no telling what that might mean, and Rich had been missing for two months. I was stalked by questions, of course, such as whether I hadn't seen Brad or John because they hadn't made it, because something had happened; whether I was being covered by someone I hadn't noticed; whether someone's plan had changed and the next President of the United States would this time be shot in the corridor outside his rooms on the fifth floor. None of those questions was doing me any good. Again I left, to a men's room on the first floor where the marble-swirled walls made my eyes swim, then outside, where it was dark and not very loud and I could breathe.

The drive was lit and there were lights in front and some scattered around the sides of the Ambassador, but I just wanted to be invisible for a while, try to quiet my mind. I had to go in, obviously: I had to get used to the lights, first, and the noise, and I had to get close to the platform, but it was only 9:48, give or take, and Kennedy was upstairs and safe for the moment and unless history spun a curveball he wouldn't be down until close to midnight.

I can tell you it was 9:48, give or take, because I was staring in disbelief at the dial when about eight feet away from me, nearly a ghost in the shadows cast by a giant tree, there was movement, and I saw the flame of a match and then the soft glow of a lit cigarette. The voice sounded casual.

"Hey, hippie."

I walked over. "Glad you could make it."

"Wouldn't miss it for the world." Brad was wearing a sports coat and looked fairly good considering the shape he was in. I don't care how much Zen shit you've got going, there are moments when the blood just races.

"You been inside?"

He shook his head. "Not yet. How's it look?"

"Crowded and loud." A small herd of well-dressed revelers came around the side of the building, talking excitedly about Rafferty's impending upset win, and we watched them pass. "As you go in, the platform's to the right. It'll hold about thirty people. Last I saw, maybe an hour ago, one of those doors was open, next to the stage."

"You seen John?"

"No," I said, "have you?"

"No. I just got here."

"We've got a couple of hours. What do you want to do?"

"See a movie?"

"Yeah, I know. I'm too wired to stay up there. I don't know what to do with myself."

"Okay," Brad said, "let's walk a little."

We crossed the main entrance and skirted the east side of the hotel. I pointed out the Serrano stairway, the steps which led up to the ballroom, and Brad nodded. There was nobody on it, nobody hanging around. We talked things over, voices low.

"Your guy, the shooter. I think the gun'll be in his right hand. He might have his left on Bobby's arm, steering him. Anyhow, he'll be the guy to Bobby's right, maybe just a step back of him. Can you picture it?"

Brad said he could. "One thing," he said. "The girl with Sirhan, the one in the polka dot dress."

"Yeah?"

"Might be a good idea, if either of us can do it, keep her from getting away."

"Yeah, either way."

"Either way."

We stopped at the edge of the cul-de-sac under a pool of light. I checked my watch again. 9:56. "Wish we had another couple of guys."

"Good time to think of it."

The back parking lot was crammed, half of them Cadillacs with Rafferty bumper stickers. "A lot of nuts out tonight," Brad said. We wandered, smoking, eating up time, working our way through to the southwest corner.

"You remember how he ends his speech?"

"Sort of," I said. "I think he talks about ten minutes. Thanks everybody, makes a joke about Sam Yorty." I tried bringing it up in my mind, but I'd blanked it out, blanked out everything, and felt a shiver of panic. This was no time to be useless. I lit another cigarette. Brad waited, then let it pass.

"Never mind," he said. "I'll be there."

It came to me just then, how the speech ended. I told Brad what to listen for. We are a great country and an unselfish country and a compassionate country, and I intend to make that the basis of this campaign...

We were silent for a while. I smoked the Chesterfield until it started to burn my fingers.

"I'll get the guy," Brad said.

"You've got to pin his arms –"

"I know."

"– so he can't fire –"

"I plan to. Calm down."

"Try not to nail the wrong guy."

He laughed. "That's not funny."

It could happen, though. What the fuck did I know? The guy had to be behind him, right behind him and to his right. That's where the shots came from, the one through his jacket, the one under his right arm, the one behind the ear that fragmented so badly that nothing could've saved him, but for some reason his heart had kept beating more than a day anyway, long enough for bumper stickers to show up on cars from L.A. to New York that read, simply, Pray for Bobby.

We finished the circle, around almost to the front.

"Well," Brad said, "I'm going inside. I hear there's a party." In about three seconds he was beyond the hedge which bordered the hotel and was gone.
 It was a quarter past ten. There was a vacant bench across the walk and I sat down for a while, feeling better. Still no sight of John, but I believed he was here, probably arrived while we were circumnavigating. I was worried he'd get shot, but not that he wouldn't make it. Of us all, it was John who was most reliable. If he said he'd be somewhere or do something you could count on it. Sirhan might manage one shot but after that he'd be bouncing off the ice machine.

I figured it was time. My breathing was pretty regular and my knees weren't wobbly, and I was thirsty and could use a Coke. I was halfway up from the bench when I saw a figure coming around the corner and heard Brad's voice, cold as ice.

"We've got a problem." I sat back down.

"What kind of problem?"

"I can't get in."

"What are you talking about?"

"The room's packed. They've got fire marshals at the door. They're not letting anybody else in. They're sending people down to some other room, on the first floor." He stood facing me, his eyes in shadow. "Got any ideas?"

"I don't fucking believe it."

"Believe it."

"Sit down," I said, "we've got time." But we didn't have much, and every fear I'd harbored, all the doubts I'd carried for years, pricked by Memphis, by unsettled questions of free will, by Brian's cautious words, came rushing in and there was no room for ideas, and almost no room to breathe.

"This can't be happening."

"There is some good news," Brad said. "I saw John and he's inside."

"Thank God. Did he see you?"

"I don't think so. Maybe. I attracted some attention arguing with the guys at the door, but it's loud in there and he was across the room."

I stared at my watch. 10:28. I might be able to get in anyhow, I was on the delegate slate, that had to count for something. If John got Sirhan and I got the other guy, we could still pull it off.

"Look, I've got I.D., I'm on a list somewhere, I'm sure I can get in. I can go up to Kennedy's suite, on the fifth floor, somebody up there will give me credentials." Then I thought about the outside staircase on the east side. "Wait, those stairs, remember? It's a fire escape, but I think that's how Sirhan or the girl, or both of them, I think that's how they got in. Somebody saw them do it, so that door's open. You can try it."

"That's a thin reed, brother."

"No, I think it'll work."

"Sure," Brad said, "I'll just wait around 'til I see Sirhan and go in with him."

We were already moving, across a strip of lawn, over the drive and around the other side. The palm trees shone silver. The staircase began at the end of a concrete walk, half hidden by foliage. We took it two steps at a time, hands grasping the cold iron railing. Brad shoved against a horizontal bar, then tugged.

"Locked," he said. I hammered the door with the side of my fist, then again, louder. Nothing. We could hear sounds from the other side, but they were indistinct.

"What are we gonna do?"

"All right," I said. "I should've thought of this before. I'll get in the other way and open it from the inside. Wait here."

I glanced again at my watch, taking the inside stairs at a run. The doorway was crowded with marshals now and I didn't bother arguing.

"How do I get to the Colonial Room?" One of them pointed, and I was moving. There were people hanging out, reporters I guessed, at a long table, a couple of them working electric typewriters, another couple scanning a printout from a clattering teletype machine. I explained to one guy that I was a delegate and couldn't get into the ballroom.

"Can I get a press badge or something?" He looked at me doubtfully and I pulled out my wallet.

"Look, here's my I.D. I'm on the slate. Have you got a copy of it anywhere?"

He shook his head, then shouted to another guy who was hunting-and-pecking a Selectric.

"Hey, Jack, you got the delegate list anywhere?" Jack shook his head, not looking up. It was eighteen minutes to eleven. "Won't they just let you in?"
 I explained about the fire marshals. For a long moment he looked me over.

"Ah, fuck it," he said, unpinning a rectangular green badge from his jacket and handing it to me. It said Kennedy for President – Press. "I don't need this. They know who I am."

"Yeah," Jack said, to general laughter, "everybody knows who you are," and I thanked him, bolting out the door.

The Embassy Room was packed but the badge got me in without incident and I worked my way toward the far left corner. The band was pumping out plastic folk-rock. On the large TV screens, big numbers showed Kennedy ahead now, and there were red check marks next to his name, calling him the winner. I reached the fire door.

"Hey, leave it closed!" A man in shirt-sleeves, a gold badge pinned to his chest. "That door stays closed," he said, moving to block me.

"I just want to get some air," I said. "It's hot in here."

"Then you can go out the front," he said. "This is an emergency exit." He was middle-aged, crew-cut, and serious.

"I'll just be a minute."

He was unmoved. "Front door," he said, pointing.

I reversed direction. It made no sense; how the fuck had Sirhan and the girl in the polka dot dress gotten in that way? I was out the main door and down the stairs. Around to the side, I called out Brad's name and there was no answer. I can give him the press badge, I thought, and I can talk my way in. I could go up to Kennedy's suite and tag along with them. I was at the bottom of the Serrano staircase, staring up into blackness.

"Brad! Where the fuck are you?"

Hurrying now, I went over the grounds. Nothing. On the west side again, my knees gave out and I sat on the bottom steps of a stairway, shaking with fear and frustration. My face felt hot and my hands were slippery with sweat. Maybe Brad was inside, maybe he'd figured something out for himself. The worst thing I could do was panic. We still had an hour. I glanced up behind me to where the stairs ended at a second floor doorway. No help. Wherever it led, it wasn't to the Embassy Ballroom.

I went over it: logically, we might be okay even without Brad. I thought about angles of attack, where I'd have to be when Sirhan moved. John would handle Sirhan. I'd hit the other guy straight on, pin his arms to his body and prevent him from firing.

I felt exhausted. I was resting my face in my hands when I heard a door open, above me, and I glanced up. Someone in a white uniform, stepping outside for a smoke. I turned back, reflexively fished a Chesterfield from my jacket pocket. Then the sound of footsteps coming down, and I jerked myself up and turned, flooded with fear.

"Hey, take it easy, Raz. I thought that might be you."

He came down out of the darkness a step at a time, and I didn't see him right away, but I knew that voice.

"Christ! What are you doing here?"

Rich Standard, in a cook's outfit, no hat.

"I'm working. Man's gotta eat."

"You asshole! Jesus, you scared the piss out us! Where the fuck have you been? You're working here?"

"Yup. It's a long story. Some other time, okay? I assume Bob and Brian told you what happened."

"Yeah, their version. There was more than one guy in Memphis. We didn't know what happened to you."

He smiled. "I'll tell you about it sometime. I'm on a break and I've got to get back. Anyway, it's after 11:00. Who's here?"

"John's inside. Brad's around somewhere, I don't know. I've lost him. He can't get in. The room's over capacity and they've got fire marshals at the door." Rich nodded. He stubbed out his cigarette against the iron railing.

"I can get in," I said. "Got a press pass. But I don't know what Brad's gonna do."

"We'd both better get back," he said. "I remember your description of Sirhan pretty well and I can pick him out of a crowd. Little guy, curly hair. Arab. He comes through the kitchen, right? From the press room? Brad can come in the same way." He went up a couple of steps and turned. "Take it easy, Raz. We'll get him."

"Wait! Which one are you gonna take?"

"Sirhan, of course. I know where he'll be. The other guy's yours."

I walked around back, came down the cul-de-sac, checked the Serrano staircase, no sign of Brad. And meanwhile, Rich Standard, working in the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel, well, it was typical. He could've got word to us somehow but no, a surprise would be more fun. That's how his brain worked, and I thought I'd be happy to lengthen his neck for him when I got the chance, and I thought, Thank God.

There must've been close to two thousand people in the Embassy Ballroom, including John Pecora, but he hadn't seen Brad. There was no place for a private conversation, but at least the band had stopped playing. John's press badge was blue and white and said Kennedy Election Night Press. I pointed to it.

"I guess yours is one night only," I said.

"All I'm gonna need," he said. We were standing toward the back, near the refreshment table. It didn't look as though anybody was paying us special attention.

"Rich is here," I said. "Working in the kitchen." John's eyebrows lifted.

"No shit."

"Like he says, it's a long story."

"Probably A.W.O.L.," John said. "Some people have no sense of responsibility."

On the monitors, Roger Mudd of CBS was interviewing Kennedy.

"Perhaps we could unite now that the primaries are finished," Bobby said, "to accomplish what we all started out to accomplish, which was for a cause, for a purpose, not for an individual." Someone next to us said, "Lotsa luck."

"Well," said Mudd, "it appears, though, doesn't it, that you're not going to be able to shake Eugene McCarthy?"

Kennedy, a trace of tension in his voice: "He's going to have to make that decision by himself."

Mudd, switching subjects: "You have no way now, between California and Chicago, to draw the Vice President into a fight?" Kennedy's toothy grin, he couldn't help it: "No, I... do I have to put it that way?" The policies Humphrey supported had been defeated everywhere in the country, he said, and they would not be successful with the party. And Mudd, hugely enjoying himself: "Well, are you saying, Senator, that if the Democratic Party nominates the Vice President, it will be cutting its own throat in November?" And Kennedy, desperately trying to keep a straight face: "Well, again, you use those expressions... I think the party would be making a very bad mistake to ignore the wishes of the people and ignore these primaries."

There was a sense now in the crowd around us, you could feel it, a not-quite-crazy joy, the numbers piling up, a simultaneous landslide in South Dakota, and Bobby Kennedy, bantering with a newsman he clearly liked, relaxed, having fun. Stan Tetrick had been right that first wild day in Kansas, he was going all the way.

Mudd was saying, "Are some of the delegates that are listed as leaning or even committed to the Vice President, are they squeezable?"

Kennedy, finally losing it: "Roger! Your language!"

Mudd, laughing too: "Well, that...you...isn't that the way you talk about it?"

"No, I don't go that far, I don't, I don't."

"Well, I –"

"Probably somebody else does."

The interview over, some of the crowd around us broke up. John's Nikon hung from a strap around his neck, leaving his hands free for lighting a cigarette or choking a would-be assassin. He was smiling, like everyone else.

"He's gonna be a great President," he said, reflexively looking around. Then, close, almost a whisper, "Who's Rich going for?"

"Your guy. Try not to step on each other."

John just smiled. "It's 11:30," he said.

A very pretty girl wearing a Kennedy straw hat was angling for John's attention.

"I don't know what they see in you," I said.

We walked toward the platform, no hurry.

"If Brad doesn't make it," John said, "you want to change the plan?"

"Think I can't take the guy?"

"Okay, just asking."

"You gonna try the platform?"

"Yeah. You?"

"I like the door, if it's open. We'll see."

We parted company and I worked my way over to the other side of the stage. The band was at it again, right in my ears. A small crowd was gathered around another TV monitor watching Kennedy talking with an ABC reporter.

Both doors were open at the side of the platform, but standing right there were a couple of guys in suits, hotel security, and they weren't smiling. Still, I thought I could get through once Kennedy's speech was over. I wandered, got a Canada Dry Ginger Ale, drained it, picked up another.

No sign of Brad, but I couldn't be positive in this crowd. I was only five-seven, five-eight if I stood on my toes, and I couldn't see over anybody. The chandeliers were on fire now, and the ceiling was a mile up, and the room seemed to be swaying, and I wanted some air badly, but at least my legs were steady, that was the main thing, and I finally got a decent idea.

The doors next to the platform were still open, and still guarded, but I had a press badge. You can get in almost anywhere if you act as though you belong. I nodded at one of the suits.

"I'm doing a piece on the Chicano vote," I said, "and I forgot to ask the kitchen staff whether they voted." I shook my head, amazed at my forgetfulness. "Just take a second." And I walked through.

The passageway was brighter than I'd expected, and shorter than I'd recalled. The back of the stage was to my left, up a small ramp, and immediately to my right were the swinging doors to the pantry. I hesitated. There was no place to hide here. Through the doorway I'd just exited came the opening verse of "This Land Is Your Land." Any second, one of the security men would glance around and see me standing there. Might as well hang a sign on me. I moved.

The pantry was as I'd remembered, long and narrow, its sides framed by a large ice machine on the right and by assorted serving tables to the left. Halfway down, to the left, was the alcove opening into the kitchen itself. It would be right about there, I thought, maybe thirty feet to cover. Just inside, there was a small area to the right, short of the ice machine, which was blocked from view by a wall. Anyone coming in through the swinging doors would see me, but I was screened from the rest of the pantry. It was as good a place as any, and I leaned against the side, trying to look casual. I had a small notebook in my jacket pocket and I took it out and pretended to be checking something. I waited, trying to keep my breathing steady, my pulse under control, but where was Kennedy? My watch read 11:50. Where was he? He'd been shot at midnight, give or take a minute, and his speech had run at least ten. Was something wrong? From the ballroom, the singing had been replaced by a chant, picking up volume, We want Kennedy! We want Kennedy! 11:52. Maybe my watch was off. And Brian's gentle warnings, that night three years back, dinner at Gonzalez Hacienda, and again at the planning meeting at the cottage, this was a different world, we didn't know for sure, things could change, and I had a rush of paranoid fantasy: they'd got him upstairs in the hallway, he was already dead, face down on the carpet outside Sorenson's room. Some things are written. My body was running sweat now and I could smell my own fear. Through the walls the chant was We want Chavez! We want Chavez! 11:54. 11:55. 11:56. I poked my head around the edge of the wall. A couple of guys pushing serving carts against the side. Someone calling out in Spanish.

Then came sounds of a commotion, a mild explosion of noise and movement from the other end of the kitchen area and I knew Kennedy was on his way. Okay, okay, okay. Here we go.

I stood just inside the double doors, against the wall, and nobody paid any attention. I saw Frank Mankiewicz, Bobby's press secretary, and Unruh, and a couple of other locals, and then Bobby and his wife. I saw him smile as he passed, someone saying something to him and he was nodding. He was wearing that dark blue suit and the blue tie with the diagonal white stripes, and his hair was too long.

In a moment they were all by me and through one of the swinging doors, and the sound of the crowd through the opening growing and growing and then deafening as he emerged onto the platform, stood in front of the ubiquitous red-white-and-blue bunting, stood under the hot lights and they could see on his face what you didn't see on the faces of politicians in public, which was hope and belief, and love. He began to speak. It was muffled from where I stood, just inside the pantry, and I wanted to get closer, I wanted to hear him, and so I went back through one of the doors into the backstage area, close to the curtain.

Kennedy was thanking people, Cesar Chavez and John Lewis, and the people of color who'd supported him in incredible numbers. He thanked Rafer Johnson and Rosey Grier, "who promised to get anyone who didn't vote for me." Laughter. He thanked his dog, Freckles, who'd been the butt of McCarthy's sardonic wit in Oregon. More laughter. Soon now, any minute. I backed away from the platform and positioned myself just outside one of the pantry doors. I'd be right there when they came, go through in front of him, drop a little to the side.

Mayor Yorty has just sent a message that we've been here too long already...

John would be on the platform, no question. Maybe even Brad. Rich was in the kitchen. It was happening now.

...we are a great country, an unselfish country, a compassionate country...

The curtain was pulled back and Kennedy was almost the first one through, led by someone I didn't recognize. And then came the crowd. People talking and jostling for position, a lot of people suddenly filling the corridor, and I saw John, ahead of everyone, walking backward and snapping photos, and I began to move. The pantry doors were in front of me and close. I reached for the swinging door on the right and slammed against it. Locked! Oh, my God, no! I shoved left, to the other door, knocking somebody sideways. There were angry shouts, but I got through, Bobby a couple of steps ahead but I could catch him, and then someone stepped on my ankle, and I was bumped sideways and pinned against the wall, and fought free and I was trying to run now, God, please help me, and the lights were shimmering, and I saw him just ahead, just ahead and there was still time, and then something was happening, a chaotic instant, and the sounds, harsh, crashing, no, oh God, please, no, no, no, no.

I didn't feel the pain right away, just a kind of shock, and I was burning up, and everything suddenly so bright, flashes, and I must have fallen, gone down backwards, and now my body was cold, so very cold, and I thought why am I so cold?

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-11-08:/2014/11/08/chapter-thirty-two-on-the-shattered-dreams-of-others-19685984/Chapter Thirty-Two: On The Shattered Dreams Of OthersRAZFX2014-11-08T22:07:13+01:002014-11-08T22:07:13+01:00
It wasn't dark when we hit the toll plaza but the lights were on, scarlet tracks arcing into a faint blur ahead, beyond Treasure Island to the City, where Kennedy and McCarthy were already having at each other at the KGO studios on Golden Gate Avenue. The sun, too, looked red, heading for Viet Nam out past the horizon, and the western sky was streaked with purple. Three days left.

Molly drove. The debate was being tape-delayed for television and we'd see it in the hall later on, but it was live on radio, and I'd reached for the dial as we pulled out of Berkeley but Molly wanted to wait and I didn't argue. The Airplane's new single rang through the speakers. You and me, we keep walking around and we see – all the bullshit around us...

Across the country, supporters of the two men had developed coalitions to prevent Humphrey from salting away a convention majority, and meanwhile a loose-hinged McCarthy was blowing bridges every chance he got. A reporter had asked Kennedy about the impact of a possible loss in California, and the candidate had answered that it would realistically end his pursuit of the nomination, whereupon McCarthy said that sounded like "the threats of a child holding his breath unless you do something for him." Then there were the full-page ads, which blamed RFK for pretty much every ill-fated American foreign policy adventure from the Bay of Pigs invasion to Viet Nam. If there was a theory behind this sort of nastiness I couldn't guess what it might be.

We parked on the street around the corner from City Hall, a soft, filmy light gracing the gold dome and the facing the color of Lebanese hash. The broad avenues were alive, streams of people, mostly middle-aged, converging on an ash-gray mausoleum across the way, the Civic Auditorium, whose architectural style might be fairly described as modern totalitarian. There was a sense of excitement, a crackle of electricity in the crowd funneling through the tall doors and it wasn't the anticipation at seeing Angie Dickinson and Eddie Fisher. At 9:30, everything would stop for an hour and the only debate among presidential contenders in nearly eight years would be projected onto a mammoth screen, and it was generally believed that this clash could turn the election.

We located our seats, down toward the front on the left, naturally enough, and looked around. Maybe two-thirds of our fellow attendees appeared to have just come from dinner at The Blue Fox or Trader Vic's. Molly whispered into my ear.

"I think we might've over-dressed."

She was wearing a long floral skirt and peasant blouse. I was in my usual crypto-proletarian outfit with a black-on-orange Citizens for Kennedy/Fulbright button on the pocket of my denim jacket.

The orchestra section was filling up fast, and the tangle of conversation was building to a steady roar, and the lights were dimmed a little, and Bill Cosby strolled onto the stage, and all of the nervous energy burst into waves of sustained applause.

It was a weird show. Kim Novak, in lavender, reading from Tennyson's Ulysses, and Bobby Darin, who was pretty cool, and Jerry Lewis, either on speed or mainlining Hostess Twinkies, and the aforementioned Fisher, and Don Ho, I'm not making this up, who babbled about solving the racial divide by turning everybody beige. Molly, listening to this, raised her eyebrows.

"Tell me it's all a bad dream," she said.

"I've got a joint in my pocket," I said. "I don't think anyone would mind." She elbowed me in the ribs.

The debate, of course, stank, with the candidates, sitting at a table with ABC reporters Frank Reynolds, Bill Lawrence, and Bob Clark, spending much of the hour waltzing each other around. Each tried to appear friendly, alert, and dignified, but Bobby seemed uncomfortable, and McCarthy's occasional smile never started any deeper than his teeth.

Challenged on his newspaper ads, McCarthy backed down and claimed he'd stopped running them. Kennedy talked about his experience as Attorney General and on the National Security Council. McCarthy said he'd fire Dean Rusk. Each talked about getting out of Viet Nam but argued over terminology. Near the end, Reynolds, seated between them, perhaps to avert fisticuffs, asked about the ghettos.

The new jobs, McCarthy pointed out, were in the suburbs; therefore, we ought to move people there from the inner cities. Kennedy, fresh from his midnight meeting with the Panthers, and probably imagining a McCarthy government notifying Huey P. Newton that he was being shipped to Beverly Hills, responded, "He's talking about taking 10,000 black people from the ghetto and moving them into Orange County, where they can't afford the housing and their children can't keep up in the schools..."

In the hall, naturally, there was a strongly partisan flavor and plenty of applause for our boy, but the press would call it a draw and I guess it was. No knock-out punches, no gaffes, no spitting. Nevertheless, when the lights came back on and Cosby introduced the junior Senator from New York, the room exploded in cheers. Kennedy, obviously weary after another long day, took the stage briefly to thank everyone, then promised, if elected, to move the White House to San Francisco.

Afterwards, lighting a cigarette in the lobby and forming an answer to Molly's question, "What did he mean by that crack about Orange County," I felt someone tugging at my shoulder and calling my name and found myself staring at Bob Foster, clean and substantial in a suit and tie, and then at the beautiful blond girl with a hand in the crook of his arm. Laurie Cooper, in red, not her best color, and the hand flashed a diamond engagement ring.

"You're a delegate," Laurie said, and I said there was the formality of Tuesday's election. They mentioned their engagement and invited us to join them, go for coffee somewhere, but the whole idea was much too nuts for me and I said I had to be up early tomorrow but we'd all get together sometime, which I hoped was a lie, and I congratulated Bob, really meaning it, and we got out of there.

"What was that all about," Molly said. We were crossing the plaza toward McAllister, and I thought maybe she'd misunderstood.

"It's nothing." A row of yellow cabs was parked against the curb and Kennedy celebrants were piling into them. It wasn't what she thought, but it wasn't nothing, either, it was far from nothing, so far from nothing that I couldn't ever explain.

"Poor Rick," she said, laying her hand against the side of my face. "Your women are always leaving."

"Not always," I said. I had to stand on tip-toes to kiss her forehead. She just smiled.

"You know I'm going back to College Park for the summer."

"I figured you were."

We headed up the sidewalk on McAllister, past City Hall, past the Art Museum. I asked if she wanted to spend the night.

"Thought you had to get up early," she said.

"Not that early."

"Okay," she said as we reached the car, "but you still have to tell me what the hell was all that about Orange County."

I awakened earlier than I'd wanted to, my eyes tired and sore and my skin sticking to the sheets, for a moment not knowing where I was. Beside me, Molly rolled over and mumbled something, then sank again.

I'd had a strange dream. In it, there was a barn-like house, flat-sided, two-story, standing not far away on an open patch. I was floating there, without a body, watching as the house moved through time, took a coat of new paint, weathered, changed color again, added trim, and the dirt path which led to it gained, then lost, gravel, got filled with red brick, was paved over. The foliage grew and melted, advanced and retreated, and was periodically graced with flowers.

We'd gone to sleep pretty late the night before, watching the last half of Night of the Hunter on channel 5, then making love until we were used up. I tried to go back to dreaming but my senses were on alert, my brain racing. A lot to do today, places I needed to be, and there were way too many loose ends. One way or another, I'd reached the finish of things.

I extricated myself from the covers and pulled on my jeans, early enough to retrieve the morning paper. On Sundays, the thing was too bulky for the kid with the route to fire it down my driveway, and dropped near the sidewalk it was an easy temptation for someone who might be passing by and feeling a hankering for the news.

I put on water for instant coffee and lit a cigarette. Sundays the Chronicle became a part of the Examiner, and there on page one was William Randolph Hearst, Jr., and his grudging praise for de Gaulle's hard-lined response to the would-be revolutionaries trying to overthrow the French government. I read his screeds occasionally, for their amusement value, and speculated about his family life. Today, though, I was quickly bored, and I skimmed the international news, the Italian government falling, the Viet Cong within a mile of the presidential palace in downtown Saigon. Molly came into the kitchen, wearing my bathrobe and rubbing her hair dry.

"What do they say about last night?" She stopped rubbing and rested her chin on my shoulder.

"Well, let's see. The big story seems to be that all three of the panelists were white."

"Undeniably," Molly said. "I suppose one of them should've been an octaroon."

"Bill Lawrence, maybe. He looked a little dark to me."

Molly bit me on the neck.

We ate cereal with blueberries, and drank coffee, going through the Examiner/Chronicle, and I took a shower. I asked Molly whether she was coming back out when summer was over, and she smiled and shrugged. "That seems like a long way off," she said.

"Well, in the meantime, Bobby's gonna need help in Pennsylvania. How about organizing some pressure on those delegates?"

I was out the door but she stayed for a while. She was working the crossword puzzle when I left. I never saw her again.

At Peacock Gap, Dad was pacing the driveway, the trunk up on the Riviera, and Chuck was doing stretching exercises. Connie wasn't back home yet; Mom was in the house. We were playing Indian Valley, my request. Everything felt as though it might be the last time.

"Come on," he said, "we're late." In the car, he said, "How was last night?" Chuck had picked up his learner's permit and was driving, and I was in the backseat, and Dad's conversation was intermittent, having to keep an eye on Chuck, so his head kept swiveling back and forth.

I said the seats had been great, and he didn't ask about the show, which was just as well. We talked about the debate. He thought Kennedy had mopped the floor with McCarthy, which was wishful thinking and loyal, so I didn't argue.

It was a warm day in Novato. The course was packed, and we had to wait on nearly every tee, but I had a fine time. I smoked half of a joint riding the elevated car to the fourteenth hole while Dad and Chuck pulled their carts around the dusty track and up the side of a hill.

"You tired, or just getting old?" Dad said. He'd seen the articles, of course, you couldn't miss them. The Chronicle had run a piece titled, "How To Tell If Your Child Is On Marijuana," which warned parents to watch for a lack of ambition, an increased appetite and "excessive laughter." But stoned as I was, I was graduating from Berkeley, accepted to law school, and one of the 172 names on the presidential primary slate of Robert F. Kennedy, so even if my eyes resembled barbequed oysters, it hadn't slowed me down any, regardless of what the experts were saying. And as for excessive laughter, well, as Wavy Gravy says, if you can't laugh, it's just not funny.

Back at the house, Mom had the TV going, Kennedy on Issues and Answers, fielding questions about the importance of California, saying that after Tuesday either he or McCarthy would have to drop from the race or else Humphrey would win. "It's always been clear we both believe in a new direction. Perhaps after the primary we can somehow join together." It didn't look good. The issue had already been put to McCarthy, and his answer had been not if Hell freezes over.

Mom asked me to stay for dinner, saying she might make fudge later on, but I was meeting John and Brad at Gonzalez. Chuck had gone out to the pool for a swim and Dad was taking a shower. I asked how things were going. We hadn't talked much in a couple of weeks.

"He stopped going to the counselor," she said.

"Oh shit. Why?"

"Says it's a waste of time." She picked a grain of tobacco off her tongue and stubbed out the Lucky. Her eyes were a soft, deep brown, clear and resigned.

"It's starting to work, that's all. What did the shrink say?"

She laughed, probably excessively. "He said your dad was afraid it was starting to work."

I said she should keep going anyway, by herself if she had to, and she nodded.

"I think he just needs some time," she said.

I hung around for a hour or so, and left when they sat down to dinner, around 6:15, still early but I didn't want to watch them eat and, anyhow, I was having trouble holding carbon dioxide in my lungs. I remembered Brian's words, the implications of quantum mechanics, we manifest what we imagine, but it was inside my head that I might take a bullet in a couple of days. I didn't want to say goodbye.

I rolled west on San Pedro Road, window down, radio up loud. Well hello Mr. Soul, I dropped by to pick up a reason... I passed yacht harbors on the left, a few cars in the lots, boats on the canal, people stretching out their weekends. I slowed at the high school but didn't stop, crossed right on Irwin and headed uptown. At the Book & News, I bought Chesterfields and a copy of the latest Time. On the cover was a bearded kid from U.C.L.A., wearing cap and gown, a peace symbol around his neck, "The Graduate 1968," it said. "Can You Trust Anyone Under 30?"

The courthouse steps were empty and I took a seat about halfway up, had a smoke, read Time's usual campaign blather, the letters-to-the-editor, evenly divided between pro- and anti-Kennedy partisans, and the feature story about me and the other 600,000-plus graduating seniors called "The Cynical Idealists of '68," which I guess meant we were smart enough to know better.

I went back to the car and retrieved a manila folder, then walked up Fourth and took a left on B. Halfway down the block I saw Brad and John, waiting for the light at 2nd Street. John waved and we met at the entrance.

"How're you feeling?" Brad said, smiling. His eyes looked a little mad, but maybe it was the indirect lights from the restaurant catching them just right.

"Okay, considering."

"Let's eat," John said.

Gonzalez Hacienda was half-empty and we picked the booth at the far end, settled in, scanned menus. A middle-aged waitress in a mostly-red dress, hair tied back, brought chips and hot sauce, and three red plastic glasses filled with water. She took our orders. Brad lit a cigarette, not a Players. He gestured at the folder in my hands.

"What you got there?"

I opened it up to show them, then closed it.

"After we order, okay?"

It was commercial hot sauce but it was good, and the chips were salty and crisp.

"So," I said, "how're you guys getting there?"

"Driving," Brad said. "Separate cars. I think it's safer."

"I do, too. When're you leaving?"

"Tuesday morning, early," Brad said.

"Me, too," John said. "What about you?"

"Tomorrow." I'd just decided that instant.

"You sure that's a good idea?"

"Why not?"

"What're you gonna do all day Tuesday? Hang around the hotel?"

"I don't know," I said, "take my time, check out the La Brea Tar pits. You sound a little nervous."

Brad knocked the ash off his cigarette and missed the tray. He looked at John. "Maybe we ought to wrap him up, stash him somewhere until Tuesday." At me: "You're damned right I'm nervous, and I plan to stay that way." He crunched a chip. "Now, what's in the folder?"

I'd come up with new drawings, working from what they'd seen before, the platform, the backstage area, the pantry. I placed them onto the grey, speckled formica one at a time, pushing the chips and sauce to the side. John and Brad, across from me, looked them over.

"The pantry's very narrow. There'll be a seventy-five people or so trying to wedge into it at the same time, it'll be chaotic. It happens fast, so we've got to be through those doors and in position."

"These doors back here," Brad gestured, "the ones from the ballroom going to the passage behind the stage. You say this happens at midnight?"

"More or less. Kennedy talks for a while. The last thing he says is something like 'so it's on to Chicago and let's win there.' Then it takes a few seconds for them to get it sorted out, where they're taking him."

"Okay. We check these doors while he's speaking. If they're unlocked, that's where we go."

"Yes, I think so, too, but if they're locked we'll have to get onto the platform, and that's a problem. It'll be crowded up there, and if we don't get through those doors we'll have to take the stairs on the other side, and we might not be able to reach him. We don't want to create a disturbance or draw attention to ourselves. I think we need to check the doors much earlier, and keep checking them. If we have any doubt, we'd better find another way."

"What about the kitchen?" John said. "Didn't you say there's an elevator that stops there?"

"Yes."

"Okay, I check out the elevators a few hours ahead of time. If it's easy, then that's the best way. I could come down a few minutes before 12:00. We all could."

"Too conspicuous," Brad said. "Not all of us."

"But we're friends," John said. "We would be together."

"If something goes wrong," Brad said, "we'd better be sure that at least one of us gets through."

"Let's go at this a different way for a minute," I said. "Who's taking Sirhan and who's taking the other guy?"

"I've got the other guy," Brad said. "We decided already."

"Okay, but if we want to change it, now's the time." I lit a Chesterfield, drank a third of my water. "I know you can get him. But you're in a very dangerous position there. Sirhan will probably get off a shot or two, and you're right in the line of fire."

"Sirhan will be lucky if he has time to swallow his tongue," John said.

"Just make sure he moves before you hit him," I said.

"Take it easy," John said.

"You think Sirhan's any safer?" Brad said.

"Hell, yes. We can take him from the side. The guys who jumped him last time, none of them got hit."

"They were late."

John scooped up the drawings and slid them back inside the folder. A moment later, our Cokes arrived. "Plates coming," our waitress said.

"All right," I said. "Next question. One or two? I mean, how many on Sirhan and how many on the other shooter."

"I'll get Sirhan," John said. "I promise."

"I know you will," I said. "You remember what he looks like?"

"Yeah, a little guy, an Arab, curly hair, gun."

Brad laughed. "Looks like we don't need you, brother," meaning me. "John and I got it covered."

"Then I'll take out Bobby," I said. "Bob's idea, remember? I'll try to get in front of him, a little to his right. I'll turn around and knock him flat as soon as Sirhan moves."

"Okay," Brad said, "but as I said, what if only one of us gets through?"

"Then the lucky winner gets the guy behind Bobby, and we hope to Christ that Sirhan misses again."

Our dinners arrived, steaming hot, and we ate in silence for a while. The booth behind us got filled by a family, mom and dad and a couple of teenaged girls. They were talking about a boy one of the girls was dating, to her immense discomfort and to the amusement of her sister, and if I could hear them, they could hear us. The tacos were sensational.

It had grown dark outside, just a faint trace of the day to the west, and south behind Mt. Tam, looming black, but it was still fairly warm. I suggested we walk down to Albert Park, finish our conversation.

"That's a good idea," Brad said. "We're down there anyhow."

The park was deserted, not like it would be in another twenty years when homeless people tried it for shelter, just a short distance from St. Vincent's dining hall where the lines got longer during the time of Reagan's great trickle-down prosperity. With the Kennedys and King dead, we'd fought on for a while, but the war to save America had been lost.

Brad popped the trunk of the Opel and lifted out two items, an athletic bag, the kind you keep your gym clothes in, and a reel-to-reel Sony tape recorder. He handed me the bag.

"Got something I want you to hear."

Behind the grandstand was a covered electrical outlet and Brad pulled a very long extension cord from the bag and plugged in one end. John offered to carry the Sony, which looked as though it weighed at least fifty pounds. An old fashioned machine, boxy, black and metallic silver.

"You always did have a taste for the bizarre," I said. "What is it?"

"My dad got it. He trades tapes with people."

"Someone'll hear," John said.

"No, we'll keep it low. Besides, look around: nobody within two hundred yards." A hundred was more like it, but I didn't quibble. The cord was stretched as far as it would go, and we were huddled down the third base side of the grandstand, shielded from view in the only direction that might matter. Still, to be on the safe side, I lit the joint I'd been carrying around in my pocket.

"Might as well. If someone comes, at least there won't be any contraband on me. How about you fellas?"

"You're both crazy," John said, but he took a hit. "This is good shit."

Brad was meanwhile threading a reel of tape through the Sony.

"How can you do that in the dark?" I said.

"This is from April 5th," Brad said. "The day after King was shot." There was the faint ticking of tape, and we waited.

"This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity to speak briefly to you about this menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives. It is not the concern of any one race. The victims are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed...
 The chill spread through me. That voice.

...whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded... yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization... We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment... Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others...
 John and I looked at each other. His eyes were shining with tears.

...Some Americans who preach nonviolence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them... this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul. For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books, and homes without heat in the winter. This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men...

The tape quality wasn't great, and we could hear the tick tick tick tick, the slow turning, and I thought it might be too loud.

"Turn it up," I said.

...We know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs... when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered. ...We know what we must do – it is to achieve true justice. The question is whether we can find in our hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence. We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all.

Recently I'd told Brad that he couldn't imagine how much Kennedy's survival meant. I'd been wrong. Maybe I'd thought, from my own special viewpoint, the extra years, the historical perspective, I knew something that other people didn't, but I was a fool. Brad knew. So did millions of people all over the world, in the barrios, in the ghettos, in the coal mines and in the auto plants, on the family farms and on Indian reservations, and in Bogota, Mexico City, Santo Domingo, Berlin, Caracas, Athens, Johannesburg, Capetown...

...We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled nor enriched by hatred or revenge. Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. ... We can perhaps remember – even if only for a time – that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek, as we do, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can. Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at last, to look at those around us as fellow men and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

Then there was silence, only the tape spooling onto the takeup reel.

(This is the next-to-last chapter. You can buy your own copy of New From A Parallel World on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/News-From-A-Parallel-World/dp/1478194448/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top.)

  Comments
 tag:lookingglass.blog.co.uk,2014-11-06:/2014/11/06/rot-behind-the-walls-19671518/Rot Behind The WallsRAZFX2014-11-06T07:46:54+01:002014-11-08T21:42:08+01:00
Yesterday, we re-elected morons and newly elected a batch of unbelievably, demonstrably stupid people. One of the few decent Senators, Mark Udall, was beaten in Colorado. There are articles in the New York Times and other repositories of establishment bullshit proclaiming that the Democrats, if they wish to succeed, will have to crush their 'left' fringe just as the Republicans crushed their Tea Partiers. Moving to the middle, that's the ticket.

Can you hear the trumpets? Hillary Clinton's prospective ascendency is in the air, supported by such ideology.

I've been saving material on Clinton, figure to begin writing about her pretty soon. She is one spectacular piece of work.

Most of what I'm seeing and hearing by way of analysis and prescription is shithouse rat crazy, which should not really be surprising, considering the shithouse is where the country's political leaders, of both parties, have been dragging us for forty years.

The Democrats were going to lose yesterday regardless of money or what passed as 'issues.' It's a mid-term election, notoriously lower turnout favoring the GOP, the party out of power ordinarily gains some seats. Among the Senate contests, nearly all were Democratic seats at risk; in 2016, it will be mostly Republican seats on the ballot.

But the Democratic loss was to some of the most pathetic candidates in American history. In Iowa, a state with a long history of farmer-labor politics and prairie populism, voters replaced retiring Senator Tom Harkin with Joni Ernst, who pushed a platform of extending legal rights to the unborn and privatizing Social Security.

There was actually a time in America when most Senators were intelligent. The occasional fool, c.f. Roman Hruska, provided comic relief. Now, however, the fools have taken over.

The Democrats lost because they no longer stand for anything. They have abandoned working people and further damaged the poor. They fight for nothing except getting elected. They have no discernible principles. Republicans are bone-head idiots but they are seen as sincere.

This state of affairs has been coming for a long time. The mass media, without exception, promotes a political 'spectrum' which plants crypto-fascism in the middle and consigns serious dissent from corporate hegemony to the fringes.

The secret police are reading this column and can easily discover who else is reading it. They wiretap everyone, storing the retrieved data in the largest building complex in the country. Leaders of both parties say nothing. Obama's lawyers defend it in court. Only the far right and the far left are troubled by this.

We in the United States do not live in a democracy. It's a faux-democracy, a palace with gilded doors and a golden dome, and rot behind the walls.

Political discourse is acceptable so long as the subject matter is safe. America's owners do not care whether gay marriage is legal or abortion is restricted. They care about completing the greatest transfer of wealth in world history, building it through the distraction of permanent war and protecting it with military, paramilitary, and police operations which are barely questioned.

It is perfectly okay for the parties and candidates to quarrel over anything which does not threaten their power and the power of their sponsors. The Obama administration is crammed full of corporate lobbyists and its policies reflect what they want. Neither party cares about 'the people' they're always talking about. Republicans appeal to fear and ignorance, the Democrats to pretension and ignorance.

Doesn't it strike anyone else as strange that a presidential campaign finds both parties and their leaders incapable of debating wars, bailouts, torture, drone attacks, death lists, GMOs, police violence, Fukushima, the NSA and CIA, massive surveillance of the citizenry, and the barbed wire surrounding FEMA camps?

Each major party uses the other as a fund-raising tool. The blue team shows its partisans photos of Rush Limbaugh eating small children, the red team waves pictures of Hillary Clinton and predicts that she will kill helpless diplomats. Each blames the other for ISIS and Ebola.

Over the past forty years, both parties have neglected or dismantled the rudimentary, basic safety net woven by Roosevelt and, later, Johnson. Forty years ago, it was possible for people to survive if they lost their jobs, not anymore. The poor are simply an embarrassment.

Over forty years, I've seen the cost of higher education obscenely escalated, as university officials collect enormous salaries and build new football stadiums. The allotments for food stamps and other welfare, never very generous, have been cut still further while there is more and more money for destruction.

Each party has played a major role in the present catastrophe. Clinton was no cleaner than Reagan. Obama is no better than Cheney.

The media prattle about the new Senate Majority Leader, when the fact is that Harry Reid was and is useless or untrustworthy on anything of significance.

The Democrats' House leader, Nancy Pelosi, campaigned in 2006 for a House majority, saying that if the voters delivered they could stop the war. She got her majority. Two years later, she was lobbying, alongside Obama, for the bank bailout, phoning party leaders to save the banks after a massive popular e-mail had flooded congressional offices with the demand that it be defeated.

Some early data from exit polls –– which apparently now avoid direct 'who did you vote for' questions so as not to expose whatever electronic theft may be going on –– shows that the Democrats got a much higher than expected turnout. But still they got creamed.

What happened?

What I think: there's been a growing chasm between political leaders and the rest of the country for a long time. It's finally widened so much that the manufactured fear campaigns aren't enough to bridge it. Opinion surveys show majority disgust at the Democrats, the Republicans, the President, and pretty much every institution of government.

You can't ride the Koch boogeyman when it becomes obvious you never keep your promises and you lie about everything. That's why Obama's at 39%. That's why nobody cares that Harry Reid lost his job.

Republicans are crazier than ever but the Democrats have no credibility. As for the President, he has betrayed every promise he made six years ago and much of what comprised his critical, grassroots base, has been compelled to face it.

The owners of this plantation will peddle another series of stories designed to explain the latest electoral embarrassment. We will be told that the Democrats are just too far left to appeal to the nation. Just as the Republican leaders went after the Tea Partiers and radicals in their midst, the Democrats will purge whatever remains of its left flank.

Time is ripe for a third party or an alternate force, a real one, angry, populist, telling the truth about America. The people, contrary to the fantasy of New York Times writers, are ready, and it's not a moment too soon.

  Comments