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gnosticgnoob · 5 years

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Variations on a Theme: "The Weird vs The Quantifiable" -- Aggregated Commentary from within the Gutenberg Galaxy

The pursuit of examining the world through philosophy, mathematics, and science tends to be seen as expanding the borders of what is known and quantified, conquering the territory of what is not yet known. In this pursuit, the investigator encounters wonder or the "weird", and what ideologically separates some philosophers and scientists from others is whether the investigator sets aside the weird as a misunderstood quirk of what is not yet known but still knowable, or the investigator takes into account the weird as a fundamental, permanent attribute of the landscape of inquiry that may perhaps always represent factors which intrinsically and inescapably evade knowledge and literary explanation, not as a bug of our understanding but as a feature of the true ontological state of affairs. The former mindset supposes that with more time and rigor, our inquiry will finally arrive at a sort of epistemological/ontological "bedrock" that dispels any sense of the bizarre, the latter treats scientific inquiry itself as necessitating the injection of a sort of subjective poetry or play to adequately do justice to the full reality of what is observed and described for our purposes, without ever expecting that we will hit such bedrock. Materialism/scientism perhaps would posit that any inclusion of the mystical or poetic in the language we use to describe the world is inappropriate, pseudo-scientific, pseudo-intellectual, or maladaptive; the mystic posits conversely that to exclude the poetic and not make room for the weird is maladaptive.

I have here a collection of excerpts from other thinkers that I think work together to allude to the mystical as a permanent fixture of our endeavors for clarification through experimentation and language, or at least suggest that a more "mystical" mindset will always be more useful than one that is conversely more in the vein of materialism/scientism trying to arrive at a "final technical vocabulary":

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“We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. […] Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.” --Gregory Bateson, English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. His writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979). In Palo Alto, California, Bateson and colleagues developed the double-bind theory of schizophrenia. Bateson's interest in systems theory forms a thread running through his work. He was one of the original members of the core group of the Macy conferences in Cybernetics (1941- 1960), and the later set on Group Processes (1954 - 1960), where he represented the social and behavioral sciences; he was interested in the relationship of these fields to epistemology.

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“The mind is somehow a co-creator in the process of reality through acts of language. Language is very, very mysterious. It is true magic. People run all over the place looking for paranormal abilities, but notice that when I speak if your internal dictionary matches my internal dictionary, that my thoughts cross through the air as an acoustical pressure wave and are reconstructed inside your cerebral cortex as your thought. Your understanding of my words. Telepathy exists; it is just that the carrier wave is small mouth noises.” --Terence McKenna, "Eros And The Eschaton". McKenna was called the "Timothy Leary of the '90s", an American ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, and an advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. -------------------------------------

“If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet. Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” --Niels Bohr, Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, in which he proposed that energy levels of electrons are discrete and that the electrons revolve in stable orbits around the atomic nucleus but can jump from one energy level (or orbit) to another. Although the Bohr model has been supplanted by other models, its underlying principles remain valid. He conceived the principle of complementarity: that items could be separately analysed in terms of contradictory properties, like behaving as a wave or a stream of particles. -------------------------------------

“We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” --Werner Heisenberg, German theoretical physicist known for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which he published in 1927. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for the creation of quantum mechanics. He also made important contributions to the theories of the hydrodynamics of turbulent flows, the atomic nucleus, ferromagnetism, cosmic rays, and subatomic particles, and he was instrumental in planning the first West German nuclear reactor at Karlsruhe. -------------------------------------

“We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.” --Max Planck, German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame as a physicist rests primarily on his role as the originator of quantum theory; the discovery of Planck's constant enabled him to define a new universal set of physical units (such as the Planck length and the Planck mass), all based on fundamental physical constants upon which much of quantum theory is based. -------------------------------------

“There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.” --Daniel Dennett, American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. A member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, he is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism", along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens. -------------------------------------

“Things themselves become so burdened with attributes, signs, allusions that they finally lose their own form. Meaning is no longer read in an immediate perception, the figure no longer speaks for itself; between the knowledge which animates it and the form into which it is transposed, a gap widens. It is free for the dream.” --Michel Foucault, French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, and critical theory. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. -------------------------------------

“When the mind projects names and concepts on what is seen through direct perception, confusion and delusion result.” --Patanjali, sage in Hinduism, thought to be the author of a number of Sanskrit works. The greatest of these are the Yoga Sutras, a classical yoga text. -------------------------------------

“The man who says that he has no illusions has at least that one.” --Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911). Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. Conrad wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of what he saw as an impassive, inscrutable universe. Heart of Darkness is among is most famous works. Conrad is considered an early modernist, though his works contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced numerous authors, and many films have been adapted from, or inspired by, his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that Conrad's fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events. -------------------------------------

“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” --Richard P. Feynman, American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to a wide public as a member of the commission that investigated the Challenger shuttle disaster. Along with his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. -------------------------------------

“The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.” --Michel Foucault -------------------------------------

“In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as ‘dazzling obscurity,’ 'whispering silence,’ 'teeming desert,’ are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth. Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions. “He who would hear the voice of Nada, 'the Soundless Sound,’ and comprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dharana…. When to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams, when he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE—the inner sound which kills the outer…. For then the soul will hear, and will remember. And then to the inner ear will speak THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE…. And now thy SELF is lost in SELF, THYSELF unto THYSELF, merged in that SELF from which thou first didst radiate.… Behold! thou hast become the Light, thou hast become the Sound, thou art thy Master and thy God. Thou art THYSELF the object of thy search: the VOICE unbroken, that resounds throughout eternities, exempt from change, from sin exempt, the seven sounds in one, the VOICE OF THE SILENCE. Om tat Sat.” (H.P. Blavatsky, The Voice of the Silence). These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you receive them, probably stir chords within you which music and language touch in common. Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them. There is a verge of the mind which these things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.” --William James, Varieties of Religious Experience. American philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James was a leading thinker of the late nineteenth century, one of the most influential U.S. philosophers, and has been labeled the "Father of American psychology". Along with Charles Sanders Peirce, James established the philosophical school known as pragmatism. James also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James' work has influenced intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty, as well as former US President Jimmy Carter. -------------------------------------

“Metaphysical assertions, however, are statements of the psyche, and are therefore psychological. … Whenever the Westerner hears the word ‘psychological’, it always sounds to him like ‘only psychological.’” --Carl Jung, “Psyche and Symbol”. Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work was influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies. Jung worked as a research scientist at the famous Burghölzli hospital, during which time he came to the attention of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology. Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation—the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual's conscious and unconscious elements, a process which Jung considered to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex, and extraversion and introversion. -------------------------------------

“God is a psychic fact of immediate experience, otherwise there would never have been any talk of God. The fact is valid in itself, requiring no non-psychological proof and inaccessible to any form of non-psychological criticism. It can be the most immediate and hence the most real of experiences, which can be neither ridiculed nor disproved.” --Carl Jung -------------------------------------

“Daniel C. Dennett defines religions at the beginning of his Breaking the Spell as ‘social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought,’ which as far as Christianity goes is rather like beginning a history of the potato by defining it as a rare species of rattlesnake…. He also commits the blunder of believing that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world, which is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.” --Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution. British literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual, Eagleton has published over forty books, but remains best known for Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983). The work elucidated the emerging literary theory of the period, as well as arguing that all literary theory is necessarily political.

#occult #scientism #mysticism #esoterica #philosophy

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jedboudreaux427-blog · 5 years

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Jazz And Classical—Musical, Cultural, Listening Differences

Portmanteau class holding classes that represent kinds or classifications of music, useful in figuring out and organizing comparable musical artists or recordings. Freakbeat isn't something you hearken to over Halloween 9 Spooky Spotify Playlists Good for Any Halloween Get together 9 Spooky Spotify Playlists Perfect for Any Halloween Social gathering Finding the proper music for this 12 months's Halloween social gathering shouldn't be a problem. As a result of Spotify has a seemingly unlimited supply of Halloween playlists to select from. Read More , it is the genre that hyperlinks a few of the early-Sixties UK R&B music with the psychedelic rock songs that had been produced later within the decade. A type of American roots music with its personal roots within the English, Irish and Scottish traditional music of immigrants from the British Isles (notably the Scots-Irish immigrants of Appalachia), in addition to the music of rural African-People, jazz, and blues. Like jazz, bluegrass is performed with each melody instrument switching off, taking part in the melody in turn while the others revert to backing; this is in distinction to previous-time music, in which all instruments play the melody collectively or one instrument carried the lead all through whereas the others present accompaniment.

Since musicians will be very artistic, not all songs have a selected and defined genre. Some are a combination of many, others current a new sample with no related style in any respect (for instance, in our fast-sluggish music instance, what do we do with songs that don't have any evident tempo, or songs with variable velocity, or a song that can be described at more than one velocity like 80 and 160 bpms?). In distinction, there are songs that share well-outlined patterns (by custom, convention, influence, whatever) and are simpler to catalog. Named by McDonald himself, fallen angel is the place calamitously overwrought feminine-led symphonic rock meets fantastically melodramatic, shred-happy energy metal. If that sounds a bit like Bonnie Tyler on each ice and drugs with the whole lot turned up to eleventy-seven then, damn it all, you are kind of proper. Anticipate twinkly pianos, blankly private lyrics and window-bending, hair-shaking riff-bombs. Maybe even a violin right here and there. Fallen angel is, actually, the uncoolest music of all time. Which makes it awesomely cool. Since chances are you'll be operating on a small funds in school, music of this kind is incessantly worth getting from web sites with free online streams. For example, presents common online radio streams like Drone Zone, Groove Salad, and Secret Agent. And Digitally Imported presents online radio channels in virtually every digital style, together with cool channels for stress-free study music like Area Desires. And should you're a Spotify consumer, you have got access to a huge number of songs and playlists.

The music that composers make will be heard by means of a number of media; essentially the most conventional way is to listen to it live, within the presence of the musicians (or gennieclunie0878.mobie.in as one of the musicians), in an outside or indoor house reminiscent of an amphitheatre, live performance corridor , cabaret room or theatre Since the twentieth century, reside music can be broadcast over the radio, television or the Web, or recorded and listened to on a CD player or Mp3 participant. Some musical styles give attention to producing a sound for a efficiency, while others give attention to producing a recording that mixes together sounds that had been never played "stay." Recording, even of primarily reside types akin to rock, often makes use of the power to edit and splice to supply recordings which may be thought-about "better" than the actual efficiency. Today, you could be a Juggalo in a Garth Brooks tribute act and somebody will nonetheless accuse you of being a hipster. Actually, maybe the only genre of music you may be into without somebody, somewhere, accusing you of being a hipster is metalcore, and even that's iffy. It is because the term "hipster" denotes an id that is laborious to nail down, but might be damaging and positively disingenuous one way or the other(i.e., two dudes can be sporting the same Unhealthy Brains T-shirt, however the one you want and assume is "for actual" is a punk, and the one you think is a filthy hobbyist is a hipster). Unhealthy religion and pattern-hopping is the default assumption in music, as a result of god forbid anybody like something ever.

Word that for basically every style, you may add the phrase for music to the top, i.e. 古典音乐 (classical music), 摇滚音乐 (rock music), or 世界音乐 (world music). This is not all the time essential, however. The word 民乐 (people music) already has the character for music in the identify, 说唱 (rap) is completely tremendous by itself, as is 歌剧 (opera). If the conversation is clearly centered on music, you will be understood whether or not or not you add the phrase 音乐 onto the style. Just don't be surprised if Chinese language individuals have no idea what you are talking about when you point out something like bluegrass or world music - these genres merely aren't quite common. Dubstep is an EDM genre that started in South London within the late materialized as an evolution of related kinds music genres like the damaged beat, techno, dub, reggae, drum, and base. Within the UK the origins of this music may be traced back to party scenes growth of Jamaican sound methods. Within the early Eighties, the music featured percussion patterns, syncopated drums, sparse among others. First releases of this music date back to 1998 the place the only release of B-sides of two-step garage was featured. The underside-up technique begins from the decided amount of music genres and locations them in a two-dimensional house. Their coordinates are based on the style-defining characteristics and www.audio-Transcoder.com thus comparable genres are positioned shut to one another. As soon as again, parametrically primarily based programming to create this chart is nigh impossible because the traits (parameters) are too broad, not solely measurable, and even variable in importance (weight). The profit from this methodology is that tremendous-genres will finally emerge as amorphous zones, overlapping and connecting other tremendous-genres at numerous points. This is a extra lifelike visualization of the musical genre network, although still restricted by two-dimensional constraints.

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dweemeister · 6 years

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The Journey of Natty Gann (1985)

Almost a hundred years after the United States started settling its West, most of the land west of the Mississippi River remained “untamed” by humans. Today, much of the American West still has humans at the mercy of nature. Jeremy Kagan’s The Journey of Natty Gann sees a young, tomboyish girl that endures some of nature’s harshness in her long westward adventure – eventually finding peace with it and surviving. This one of the strongest films from one of the worst decades for Walt Disney Studios; yet the film is all but forgotten. In the years after Walt Disney’s death, the studio that bears his name attempted to make live-action films within the family-friendly confines that Disney himself established, yet making these newer films appeal to contemporary audiences. That tricky balancing act has continued into the present day, yet few have ever succeeded to the extent Natty Gann does.

It is 1935 in Chicago. Sol Gann (Ray Wise) lives in an aging apartment complex with his fifteen-year-old daughter Natalie Sue/“Natty” (Meredith Salenger). It seems as if he has been unemployed for some time, but soon finds a job in Washington state as a lumberjack thanks to the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The catch: he must leave on a bus for the Pacific Northwest immediately. Once he arrives home, Sol is unable to find his child anywhere. Considering his financial desperation, he leaves a note for Natty and arranges for the landlord, Connie (Lainie Kazan), to be a temporary guardian. Connie disapproves of Natty, and circumstances will force Natty to leave Chicago on her own. While traveling west on foot, by train, and automobiles, she will save and befriend a wolfdog from a dogfighting organization and meet a young man named Harry (John Cusack).

The Journey of Natty Gann marks the final on-screen appearance of dancer/singer/actor Scatman Crothers (the voice of Hong Kong Phooey, 1970′s The Aristocats, 1980′s The Shining), who appears in a brief role.

There is no denying that Natty Gann is as sentimental a movie as it sounds. It presents itself as a family film but does not see the need to sugarcoat everything: the dogfighting scene is more violent than expected, we are shown a few instances of a worried Sol calling a prevaricating Connie about his missing daughter, and Natty must fend off someone heavily implied to be a pedophile. Screenwriter Jeanne Rosenberg (1979′s The Black Stallion, 1991′s White Fang… yes, she specializes in animal movies) turns the film into part animal movie, part coming-of-age - when the film concentrates on the latter, it is at its best. This is because Natty is a street-smart Chicagoan who knows how to navigate life in a big city. But when tossed into wilderness without anyone to fall back upon, she retools her sense of resourcefulness and inner courage to suit her passing surroundings. Never despairing, a quiet go-getter by nature, always retaining some shred of optimism within but – unlike many Disney female characters – in touch with her anger, Natty is wonderfully portrayed by Salenger as one of the least Disney-esque female protagonists. It helps to have the Disney label, but The Journey of Natty Gann is an excellent film for youngsters who can take some of the film’s violence.

A sorta-first romance occurs with John Cusack’s character of Harry, but so little is made of this and so underdeveloped is their emotional connection that it seems like just another throwaway subplot in the film’s final third. Cusack, whose career was just beginning and had starred in Sixteen Candles (1984) and Better Off Dead (1985), is like a teenage Humphrey Bogart mixed with a teenage James Cagney (in his non-gangster roles) in this film – even though he does not appear in Natty Gann long, it should be of great interest to his fans.

One cannot ignore the other half of the film, as it is also a decent animal movie. Walt Disney Pictures has a long history of making live-action animal films from Old Yeller (1957) to various incarnations of The Incredible Journey (1963) and others, the studio has produced plenty in that subgenre – even if they might not be the most artistic movies ever made, there is no denying their enjoyability or emotional hold on audiences. To its credit, Natty Gann leaves its wolfdog protagonist as more of an open question, an unpredictable and fickle (like nature itself) aspect of the story that takes his time to warm up to Natty. Trust and understanding is not developed instantaneously, and the relationship between Natty and the wolfdog progresses as she comes closer to reuniting with her father. The film concentrates on Natty, not the wolfdog who never receives a proper name other than “Wolf”.

The canine actor here is a wolf-malamute named Jed. Born in 1977, Jed appeared in four films: a cameo in 1982′s The Thing, The Journey of Natty Gann, and White Fang and its 1994 sequel. His owner-trainer was Clint Rowe, who has trained animals for movies and television for more than thirty years. Ferocious though he might be at first, he wins over Natty’s and the audience’s affections as the film concludes.

From the film’s beginning in Chicago until its closing minutes, this is one of the prettiest films ever photographed with Disney. Cinematographer Dick Bush outdoes himself (1979′s Yanks, 1982′s Victor Victoria) in a setting – because of his British background – he has little experience with. The North American outdoors, as I have already waxed upon earlier, are unlike anything else in the world and often becomes a character of its own when Hollywood movies warrant it. Shot in various places along the route of the BC Rail (westward from Prince George to Vancouver) in Canada, Bush – when the action slows down – captures enormous panoramas of the forests, mountains, and waterways to trumpet the immense scope of Natty’s journey. During more intimate moments (like to emphasize the lack of space in the Chicago apartment complex Natty and Sol live out of), Bush’s camera lingers on conversations without gimmicks – and assisted by a lack of unnecessary editing by David Holden (1979′s The Warriors, 1980′s The Long Riders). And in moments of peril, the camera keeps the action within the entirety of the frame, rather than fragmenting it as it happens too often in contemporary films.

There is nothing more traumatic for a film score composer than when one has composed an entire score for an upcoming project, only to have it entirely tossed out and be replaced with another composer’s work. This trend increased in major Hollywood studios once the old Studio System disintegrated. For Natty Gann, Elmer Bernstein (1956′s The Ten Commandments, 1960′s The Magnificent Seven) submitted a score, rewrote it once, edited some of the cues after the second rejection, but ultimately was dismissed from the film. The already-established, but young, James Horner (1982′s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, 1989′s Glory) came in. Horner’s score recalls the works of Aaron Copland in its musical expanse – Americana music replete with optimistic woodwinds and free-flowing strings. Later in his career, Horner’s compositions for Americana would incorporate tragic motifs like in Legends of the Fall (1994), so Natty Gann represents Horner at his most adventurous and clear-eyed for a film sent in the West. Influences from Copland’s Rodeo appear in cues like “Into Town” (and would be replicated for Horner’s work in 1991′s An American Tail: Fievel Goes West). The final minutes of the film are blessed with two cues – “Farewell” and “Reunion/End Title” – which encapsulate all the emotion building to the only ending that this movie could entertain. It is excellent work from a young James Horner.

To appreciate The Journey of Natty Gann in all its scenic beauty, do not purchase the 2004 DVD/VHS release. That home media edition employs pan-and-scan – a bastardized method of video presentation meant for square televisions, but chops off chunks of the film’s imagery. For a proper letterboxed experience, all editions of Natty Gann legally streaming are presented in the correct format. This review, based on the March 29 airing on Turner Classic Movies’ (TCM) Treasures from the Disney Vault bloc, has been written on the letterboxed version.

Today, Disney is approaching a time where a majority of its live-action/hybrid films are remakes or reimaginings of its animated classics. Longtime readers will notice, thanks to TCM’s periodic bloc, has featured many live-action Disney titles from yesteryear not based on any pre-existing Disney property. Where have lower-mid and mid-budget original films like The Journey of Natty Gann gone? 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) this is not, nor is it trying to be. In that wonderful modesty, set amidst beautiful landscapes, verdant forests, and shimmering rivers, The Journey of Natty Gann – along with another film with wolves, Never Cry Wolf (1983) – is one of the best Disney films of the 1980s, and ranks comfortably in the studio’s top tier of live-action films.

My rating: 7.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

#The Journey of Natty Gann #Jeremy Kagan #Meredith Salenger #John Cusack #Ray Wise #Lainie Kazan #Scatman Crothers #Jeanne Rosenberg #Dick Bush #David Holden #James Horner #TCM #My Movie Odyssey

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meditationadvise · 5 years

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A Shamanic Odyssey – Journey Into Ayahuasca Spirituality

Every now as well as then a great book goes along that not only wows its target market yet sparks movement. Which is just what Aya: A Shamanic Odyssey is.

Here is a passage from guide thanks to the writer as well as author. Enjoy.

Introduction: Candidates of the Mystery

Lima Airport, Peru Wednesday, June 28th, 2006

THE CLEAN WHITE WALLS OF THE WORK AREA ARE TAGGED WITH grafiti: "We that resolve mystery, come to be secret," alchemical knowledge bied far via the ages and also currently in the clean and sterile men's bathrooms at the Lima airport terminal departure lounge. Scrawled, no question, by among the travelers suffering in the food court.

Outside, milling under the common stare of safety and security video cameras are brilliant sprinkles of vivid spirits wearing crystals, grains as well as indigenous American Indian paraphernalia, middle-aged academics with "Erowid" medicine internet site t-shirts, and passengers that provide you that weird conspiratorial smile that claims: yes, we are right here for the conference. And here we are chowing down on McDonalds and also Donut King, getting our last hits of human being before hitting the jungle city of Iquitos and also shamanic boot camp.

It seems like some whacked out truth TV program, a generational photo of a new psychedelic wave just prior to it damages. Bright-eyed Westerners about to die as well as be reborn in the damp jungles of Peru, consuming alcohol the hallucinogenic mixture ayahuasca ...

Ayahuasca is a plant medication that has been used by the aboriginal individuals of South The U.S.A. for centuries to heal physical disorders and, they claim, to cleanse and cleanse the spirit. It was discovered by the West in 1851 when the epic British botanist Richard Spruce checked out the Rio Basin and was presented to the creeping plant by the Tokanoan Indians. Spruce gave the creeping plant its taxonomic name Banisteriopsis caapi, in different locations of South America it is also called yagè or hoasca. For a while in the mid-20th century drug stores that isolated the active residential or commercial properties of the vine called their compound "telepathine."

Research revealed it consisted of different harmala alkaloids which are after that boiled up in a mixture (likewise called ayahuasca) with a plethora of other plants, one being the leafy Psychotria viridis, which consists of the effective hallucinogenic chemical Dimethyltryptamine, also known as DMT. On its own the vine is not orally energetic but it does consist of powerful MAO (mono-amine oxidase) inhibitors that subdue the body's very own enzymes as well as allow the DMT to potentiate.

Science has made mindful ventures into the forest to study the vine in its native setting or, as with the "Hoasca Job" in the 1990s, to study church members of groups like União do Vegetal (UDV) who consume ayahuasca as part of their syncretic Christian-jungle religious beliefs. Exactly what they located was that routine ayahuasca usage purged the mind clean as well as enhanced receptor sites, recommending the vine might be a medical goldmine.

But what science can not explain is the psychic result of this "mother of all plants", the feeling of the numinous and also the spiritual globe it supposedly opens. Those that consume alcohol state that each ayahuasca trip is distinct. They say that the spirit of the vine comes active, it overviews as well as shows as well as on the other side absolutely nothing is ever before the exact same. Approximately they say.

The indigenous males and females that guard the knowledge of the creeping plant and also of the spirits it is stated to reveal are the curanderos and curanderas-- or as the West would call them-- shamans. Their duty has been that of therapist, priest and tourist in between globes, acting as intermediaries between the spiritual dimension as well as this globe in behalf of their patients.

Yet the needs of the work and the surge of Western materialism throughout South America have seen a loss in status-- and also clients-- for the curanderos. The career, generally genetic, was in danger of termination before an unmatched wave of Western gringos began being available in search of ayahuasca and the recovery it could provide.

Over the last twenty years or so a new gringo path-- this a trip of the soul-- has been blossoming in the jungles of South America. Hunters and also thrillseekers alike have actually been coming from the West for a reconnection to the much deeper fact shamanism connects one to-- and restoring amazing tales of hallucinogenic journeys, healing as well as enlightenment.

Indigenous shamanism has quickly come to be the most successful organisation in town and various forest lodges as well as hideaways have emerged across South America to accommodate the influx of abundant visitors. This has actually spilled over into the net as hundreds of ayahuasca internet sites, conversation spaces and also forums have actually arised to crystallize a global subculture engaging with a native spiritual method and also seeding it back into the Western world.

As well as being utilized by hundreds of thousands, maybe countless indigenous individuals throughout South The U.S.A., ayahuasca has also ended up being one of the globe's fastest expanding religions, with branches of Brazilian churches like Santo Daime as well as União do Vegetal emerging in Europe, Britain, Australasia, The U.S.A., Japan as well as elsewhere. In January 2006 the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of a New Mexico branch of the UDV, saying they had a constitutional right to be permitted to lawfully practise their ayahuasca ceremonies under the liberty of religion law. The US government promptly appealed, however the genie ran out the bottle.

The secret of ayahuasca had left the jungle and also entered the cities, by means of religious beliefs, media and the web. And here I was, a thirty-six-year-old freelance reporter, a gonzo reporter in the classic Hunter S. Thomson as well as Tom Wolfe style, freelancing for Australian Penthouse on an academic-style seminar with a pronounced spin: it was everything about Amazonian shamanism, with a hands-on component.

Strange, to believe that in the first years of the 21st century I would certainly be going to the Peruvian jungles in search of a link to the primitive consciousness that aboriginal knowledge exposed. Yet in a globe of global warming and also environmental collapse it seemed even more urgent to reconnect with the earth in a visceral means. And also in this age of fact television, blog writing as well as city monitoring, being an embedded journalist was par for the program. Nowadays we're all part of the story-- and getting down-and-dirty in the far abyss of awareness was a possibility I was relishing.

Despite cultural diffidence back in the standard world of battle, home mortgages as well as climate adjustment, Australian Penthouse was willing to have a peek under the covers of reality as well as welcome the tale I was going after-- to comprehend the mythic pull of shamanism-- one of the last worldwide archetypes that connects to a numinous "Various other." At the very same time it's also one of the most appropriated, glorified and also repackaged brand names embedded in the worldwide consciousness. So a lot so that it now attracts thousands of Westerners yearly back to the going away forests as well as the plant medications they provide.

But what was the company of spirituality doing to all these backpacking ayahuasca tourists that dared to trip into the enigmas of creation? And what did it say regarding the expanding Western demand for a genuine reconnection to the planet?

' Margaret ... Shane?' I detect a number of acquainted faces sitting at a table in the McDonalds food court, surrounded by their travel luggage and that homogenized glaze that global vacationers give off when they've remained in flight terminal separation lounges for also long and their inner body clocks have actually gone crazy. Margaret's furiously filling electronic images from their video camera into an iBook while Shane stops briefly over the keyboard and also searches for with a smile. With his stocky broad shoulders and also close-shaven head he resembles a cop, but nothing might be additionally from the truth.

' Dr Razam, I presume,' Shane jokes, trembling my hand as well as grinning extensively. 'I'm grateful you might make it.' 'Consuming hallucinogenic brews with the medicine men of the Amazon? I wouldn't miss this for the globe.' 'Rak? Just how are you beloved?' Margaret cries, standing up as well as offering me a hug filled with unconditional love.

#healing #how to meditate #meditation #meditation music #religious beliefs #spiritual

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camploah · 7 years

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In the wake of its February release, writer-director Jordan Peele’s debut film, Get Out, has done what few others in recent memory have — it’s a genre film that became a surprising box office success and cultural lightening rod, while centering on an exploration of racism and black identity. By its very nature, it shouldn’t be surprising that Get Out has inspired fraught conversations that have real-world implications. But there is one topic that has proved to be the most intense when discussing the film.

In a Hot97 interview last month, Samuel L. Jackson reflected on how different Get Out would be had the lead role been played by an American actor. Daniel Kaluuya, a black actor from London of Ugandan descent, stars as Chris, a photographer who travels with his white girlfriend to meet her liberal-minded parents in upstate New York*. Horror quickly ensues. In his interview, Jackson said, “I tend to wonder what that movie would have been with an American brother who really feels that. Daniel grew up in a country where they’ve been interracial dating for 100 years. What would a brother from America have made of that role?” Jackson acknowledged that Hollywood provides black actors more opportunities than the British film and television industry does. “It’s all good. Everybody needs work,” he added. Even when he later softened his criticism, it didn’t matter. The damage was done. Soon enough, Jackson’s comments spurned impassioned responses from casting directors and British actors like John Boyega, David Harewood, and Kaluuya himself, as well as kickstarting a round of wars among the members of black Twitter. The criticism against Jackson’s comments were united in arguing that what he said was ultimately divisive, given the racism black actors throughout the diaspora experience in crafting their careers.

Jackson’s critique touched a nerve, reigniting an old argument about the need for authenticity within black stories, and the value of black American actors in the face of the widespread, misguided belief that their British colleagues are more well-trained. The conversation around the merit of British actors over American ones is not novel, and it typically transcends racial distinctions. This tense dynamic has existed for decades, a classic example being the chatter around Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe during the 1957 film A Prince and a Showgirl. He was a British acting titan revered for his stage and screen work. She was a blonde bombshell who at the time had only recently become enamored of method acting, an American discipline that many mid-century homegrown actors like Paul Newman and Gena Rowlands trained in and is usually curiously absent in conversations of this sort. In recent memory, this conversation was sparked in 2015 around the release of Ava DuVernay’s Martin Luther King Jr. biopic, Selma, whose leads were British, with pieces like this one from BuzzFeed News, declaring “the rise of the black British actor in America.” I think it would be impossible to ask that all distinctly black American roles be played by black American actors. It’s also arguably a limiting way to think of art, always equating it to identity to such an extreme degree. But the rebuttals to Jackson’s comments haven’t actually engaged with what Jackson was saying. Take, for example, Kaluuya’s response in an interview with GQ: “That’s my whole life, being seen as ‘other.’ Not fitting in in Uganda, not Britain, not America. They just highlight whatever feature they want. […] I really respect African-American people. I just want to tell black stories.” He concluded by saying, “I resent that I have to prove that I’m black.” While Jackson frames the matter rather inelegantly, to put it mildly, nowhere in the interview does he question Kaluuya’s blackness. What Jackson was doing was pointing out that the black experience throughout the diaspora isn’t an interchangeable one like some filmmakers may like to believe.

As the black-American experience is proving to be seen as creatively and financially fertile territory in film and TV, you have to wonder why, if these stories are seen as vital, actual black American actors aren’t necessarily viewed as their ideal storytellers?

Generally, the answer to this question, and to arguments against comments like Jackson’s, fall into two camps: 1) That acting by its very nature is the art of evoking the lives of others, so black-American actors aren’t essential to these roles; and 2) British actors get these opportunities due to being better trained in a rigorous theater tradition that leaves them more artistically capable, whether it’s Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave, Idris Elba in The Wire, or the leads of Selma. On the latter point, a 2015 Entertainment Weekly piece argued, “[P]erhaps the biggest factor leading to the perception that American actors are falling behind is that the path to Hollywood fame in this country doesn’t necessarily go through the Actors Studio or Juilliard or the Yale School of Drama. Though Hollywood has its share of Jessica Chastains and Mark Ruffalos, well-trained professionals who studied at revered dramatic institutions, the difference might lie in the other cases, in which actors get a break in Hollywood with limited training or acting background.” The most damning statement about this ongoing feud comes at the very end of the essay, “the British are coming … because Hollywood needs them.”

That filmmakers repeat this argument is more troubling. During the promotion for Selma in 2015, writer-director Ava DuVernay, who is considered one of the most talented and politically aware directors working, explained to BuzzFeed News why she likes working with black Britishactors: “I think there’s something about the stage, because they have that stage preparation. Their work is really steeped in theater. Our system of creating actors is a lot more commercial … there’s a depth in the character building that’s really wonderful.” That same year, Spike Lee told Slate, “Their training is very proper, whereas some of these other brothers and sisters, you know, they come in here, and they don’t got that training. The training and craft, it’s the same thing and I see it when people come in to audition and stuff, they don’t got it together.” Lee and DuVernay’s beliefs suggest that there is something inherently missing when it comes to the American talent pool. That their quotes are somewhat insulting to actors stateside is one thing, but they’re also simply untrue. If you take a look at established and fledgling black American actors working today, you’ll find that many are highly trained: Denzel Washington went to Fordham and the American Conservatory Theater. Viola Davis, Tracie Thoms, Nelsan Ellis, Rutina Wesley (who stars in DuVernay’s Queen Sugar), and Anthony Mackie all went to Julliard. Mahershala Ali, who won Best Supporting Actor for his marvelous turn in Moonlight, earned a masters degree from New York University’s acting program. (He joked after his win to reporters on Oscar night, “I’m just so fortunate that Idris [Elba] and David Oyelowo left me a job. It was very, very kind of them.”) Ali’s Moonlight co-star Ashton Sanders was studying acting at DePaul University before dropping out to pursue his career full-time. This is a small sampling, but you get the idea.

André Holland, who’s had mesmerizing turns in Moonlight and The Knick and received his masters in acting at NYU, spoke about the bias against black American actors in a 2015 discussion with Interview magazine. “There are so many brilliant, trained actors of color in America. If you just think about it, every year in the spring Julliard and NYU and Yale and hundreds of schools across the country graduate classes of trained actors, and in those classes are actors of color. So to say that there aren’t enough actors of color is factually inaccurate. But more than it being inaccurate, it’s also really divisive and damaging and frankly disrespectful to the actors who are out here working. […] It really sometimes feels like a slap in the face to hear these British actors say that,” Holland said.

When I spoke to Prema Cruz, a black American actress who most recently had a brilliant guest spot on The Good Fight and went to Yale University for acting, she echoed Holland’s view. “There are people graduating from my program — black men and women — and they’re killing it. They aren’t Hollywood stars. If we’re talking about stars that’s a whole different thing,” Cruz said. What Cruz is alluding to is that there isn’t so much a dearth in black American actors who go through rigorous training so as much they aren’t given the opportunity to lead films and series with enough regularity that filmmakers and audiences would notice them. She also spoke of the “fetishized obsession” that is attached to British actors regardless of race, which itself has an undercurrent of classism. “There’s this misconception that [British, theater-trained actors] are more elite or more sophisticated than American actors,” she continued. This is something British actress Kate Winslet touched on in a 2015 interview: “When you are an English actor and you go into another country. They automatically assume you are fully trained … Which I’ve played on, believe me.”

The language that directors like Spike Lee use insinuates that stage preparation is both essential to great acting and that American actors demonstrate a lack of this. And while there are plenty of classically trained American actors, this obsession with theatrical training is in and of itself misguided. To make that argument ignores the differences between film and stage acting as well as the lineage of actors who haven’t had such training, but have given amazing performances that in turn shaped the medium itself — from classic Hollywood stars like Joan Crawford, who in many ways wrote the playbook on what it means to be a screen actor, to modern powerhouses like Elisabeth Moss. One of my favorite performances last year was Trevante Rhodes as the eldest version of Chiron in Barry Jenkins’s Academy Award–winning film Moonlight. His turn was brimming with sincerity and intensity. It is also the work of an actor not trained on the stage. Film history is richer for such performances.

One crucial aspect missing from this conversation are the inherent class politics of who has the resources and access to make such training possible. Many black actors in the early days of Hollywood had to find training elsewhere due to the deeply entrenched, racist attitudes that barred black performers from gaining access to it. As Cruz said toward the end of our interview, “Black actors have had to carve their own path.” Her statement can be applied to everything from black American actors who had to work the Chitlin’ Circuit from the 19th century onward to classic Hollywood denizens like Canada Lee to modern icons like Gina Torres. In their own way, each of these references reflects a truth all black artists must learn: to see yourself in places the rest of the industry could never imagine you being.

While the first issue Jackson raised relates to opportunity, the second comes down to craft: How might being a black American actor inform a black American role? This conversation keeps popping up in part because there has been a much-needed rise within the last few years in stories detailing the intricate history of the black American experience — some of which are explicitly about America’s own turbulent racial history — including Selma, 12 Years a Slave, Hidden Figures, Black-ish, and Queen Sugar. It’s important to note that while the leads in Selma and 12 Years a Slave are British, many of these examples employed black American actors in leading and supporting roles. That includes Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Shots Fired, a new TV series that subverts the expectations that come with police brutality stories by making the police officer black and the victim who dies a young white man. It forces us to confront some nasty questions about how racism flourishes in America and the black community’s relationship with the police, particularly within a southern milieu. That the executive producer, Prince-Bythewood, many of its directors like Millicent Shelton and Kasi Lemmons, and its star, Sanaa Lathan, are black Americans doesn’t mean the show is necessarily any better than if British artists were involved. But in showing the particulars of an experience that is not universal, there is a perspective they undoubtedly bring to the table. Black people throughout the diaspora, whether you’re from South Side Chicago or London or Nigeria, experience racism. But to say that this racism exists at the same tenor and manifests in the same ways flattens the diversity within the black experience itself. As Jackson said in his Hot97 interview, “Some things are universal but everything ain’t.”

There are a few things that underlie the belief that, because acting requires imagination and transformation, direct experience isn’t a necessity. And that thanks to some shared history and the common experience of racism, black actors no matter their origin are interchangeable (of course, American actors like Will Smith have been criticized for taking on African roles, like his work in Concussion, which had him adopt a shoddy Nigerian accent). As Richard Brody curiously expressed in The New Yorker, “In the case of Kaluuya, the gap between the experience of being a black person in Great Britain and the United States is perhaps not as wide as Jackson assumes.”

Some British actors take it even further, arguing that they have just the right amount of commonalities and distance to bring to life American stories in ways American actors may be too mired in direct experiences to do as poignantly. Carmen Ejogo, who played Coretta Scott King in Selma, told BuzzFeed News, “I’ve been trying to convince myself that being British has had no bearing on any of this, but actually I think that’s where it served me well. I’m not as entrenched in the history so immediately. […] I didn’t know who Coretta was until I played her the first time. And I think I have permission — that’s the definition of the artist, in my opinion — to be a little deviant. It wasn’t as daunting as it might have been for an American actress. An African-American actress … that might have been a bit more of a challenge.” In a BBC America interview, Oyelowo argued that having British actors spearhead Selma may have been a wise decision since they don’t have the so-called baggage American actors have when it comes to such a towering historical figure like Dr. Martin Luther Jr. “There’s something to be said for the fact that we are able to come at these films clean,” Oyelowo noted. And actor David Harewood, who played Martin Luther King Jr. onstage in The Mountaintop, argued in a piece for The Guardian, responding to Jackson’s criticism, that “[British actors are able] to unshackle ourselves from the burden of racial realities – and simply play what’s on the page.” Oyelowo, Harewood, and Ejogo’s comments are troubling in how they frame black Americans’ abilities to speak to their own history, as if we all have the same perspective on the civil-rights leaders whose stories were drilled into us in school, in church, in the living rooms of our homes. The relationship to this history doesn’t mean black Americans lack nuance or an understanding of the jagged edges these people had in their lifetime. Furthermore, the black experience, even in America, is not a universal one, although it is bound together by a bloody historical lineage. As Cruz said in our interview, “Being American is a very specific thing. Being a black American is even more specific. What’s even more specific than that is being a Southern black American. It isn’t a matter of just shifting your vowels and consonants and now I have a Southern accent. […] It’s a culture you come from, the mentality, the food you eat, the racial tension you’re constantly faced with. It’s slavery. What it does to your spirit and mentality. That seeps into your DNA, into your bones, into the way you see the world.”

Growing up as a black woman of Dominican heritage between Miami and New Orleans, I grew up learning very early the weight of slavery because I could see its aftermath on the faces of my own family. When you grow up passing by plantations in which it is safe to assume that someone from your own family line was brutalized, it undoubtedly shapes how you conceive of your blackness, racism, and the legacy of America itself. It’s this history that informs my work as a writer and my life as a woman today. To pretend the presence or absence of such experiences couldn’t enrich an actor’s work is to believe the fallacy that the black experience is a monolith.

I don’t fault black British actors for coming to America for work. It’s simple pragmatism. Many have spoken about why British actors move Stateside in order to find artistic fulfillment. As K. Austin Collins wrote in an essay for the Ringer, “Hollywood being the center of the West’s film industry, there are simply more opportunities for black actors of every stripe. That explains why black Brits come here. It doesn’t explain the perceived advantage they seem to have when going up for American parts.” I’m also happy to see more black talent doing well in Hollywood. That this argument rears its head so often demonstrates the paltry opportunities for all black actors, forcing them to look at their peers with wary cynicism. But criticizing black American actors and treating the black experience as if it is universal is not a way to combat this. If anything, this tactic reaffirms class biases and mistruths that deprive black American talent from having a voice in the way their history is refracted in film.

*An earlier version of the piece noted that Get Out takes place in the South. In fact, it takes place in upstate New York.

#Black Films

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kristablogs · 4 years

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How a 19-year-old lion fathered 35 cubs in 18 months

Lion tamer at work. Though no evidence is available, the mustachioed man is unlikely to have survived this scene. (Library of Congress, 1873/)

Popular Science’s WILD LIVES is a monthly video series that dives like an Emperor penguin into the life and times of history’s noteworthy animals. With every episode debut on Youtube, we’ll be publishing a story about the featured beasts, plus a lot more fascinating facts about the natural world. Click here to subscribe.

Feature Creature: Frasier the Sensuous Lion

Have you ever wondered about the number of lions at your zoo? You probably don’t think about lion reproduction too much. Well, consider this:

If one female lion in captivity has a litter of cubs and they all survive and breed—for reference: zoo lions can start breeding before their third birthday—and then those offspring all survive and breed, and then the next generation the same, and so on, it would take about 37 years until that one family tree of descendants from that one lioness needed to eat the entire population of Los Angeles every day just to survive.

Dr. Craig Packer, Professor and Head of the Lion Center at the University of Minnesota, originally came up with this thought experiment. He used it as a way to answer a question on if lions have any difficulty breeding in captivity or the wild. Clearly, no panda bear-type pornos are needed to stimulate mating here. This lion factoid came up during a conversation about a lion that actually did take over L.A. That prolific Panthera leo was named Frasier. In the video above, we tell his story.

Let us now praise other famous animals

Below, a collection of fast facts about famous critters.

Question: why does this Peruvian military helicopter emblem have a tiger on it—its tail around a missile—when there are no tigers anywhere in South America? (Tom McNamara/)

Magicians Siegfried and <a href="https://ift.tt/2yKi50i" target=_blank>Roy</a> got their start in 1957 in Germany when Roy, who apparently took care of a cheetah at a local zoo, borrowed the animal and used it as part of the duo’s show. Nearly half a century later, their act came to an end when Roy was attacked by a tiger named Montecore onstage at the Mirage hotel and casino in Las Vegas.

In 2015, Cecil the Lion was killed by American dentist Walter Palmer. The <a href="https://ift.tt/2YVVIPJ" target=_blank>13-year-old lion</a> was a popular attraction at Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, known for his striking black mane and comfort with tourist vehicles. His fate drew intense news coverage, a flurry of celebrity tweets, and an impassioned monologue from Jimmy Kimmel. <a href="https://ift.tt/2YVVIPJ" target=_blank>Read more. >></a>

In a recent book, <a href="https://amzn.to/2E4SQ8P" target=_blank>No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal in History</a>, author Dane Hucklebridge details the surprisingly methodical and incredibly blood machinations of a single Bengal tigress. Between 1900 to 1907, the Champawat man-eater stalked humans living in the villages of southern Nepal and, because tigers know no borders, eventually northern India. Along her route, she killed 435 people, making her perhaps the most murderous non-human animal in recorded history. <a href="https://ift.tt/2D4Kuk7" target=_blank>Read more. >></a>

El Jefe the Jaguar is the last known of his species to be seen in the United States. The Panthera onca was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTC8XdViC5s" target=_blank>spotted in the Santa Rita Mountains near Tucson, Arizona</a>, between 2011 and 2017.

In 2014, I accompanied a scientific expedition to a previously unexplored part of the Peruvian Amazon. When I boarded a military helicopter to get there, I noticed the design on the door pictured above. Why a tiger? There are no tigers anywhere in Amazonia. Well, first, there are no tigers or lions in Detroit, but that doesn’t stop the city from having those animals as their mascots. A member of the expedition clued me in, though, saying that across South America the Amazon Jaguar is often called “tigre” or tiger. And, let’s be honest, the tail around the missile is a nice touch.

Popular Science’s Encyclopedia of Big Cat Facts

The math of tiger stripes:

How’d the tiger get its stripes? MATH! (Pond5/)

Math might be able to predict the tiger’s stripes. Or, more accurately, mathematical rules likely work with biological processes to determine patterns on animals—the leopard’s spots, the horse’s dapples, and, yes, those beautiful black stripes that contour and bend around the tiger’s orange fur.

Famed World War Two codebreaker and British mathematician Alan Turing first theorized in the 1950s that spontaneous patterns emerge when “chemicals [react] together and [defuse] through tissue,” writes Ian Stewart in his 2017 book, The Beauty of Numbers in Nature. These chemicals are also known by another name: morphogens, a term Turning coined. We should think of them as shape creators.

Over half a century later, scientists found support for these theoretical models in the real world. A 2015 study published in Cell Systems used them to take Turing’s theories a step further to explain pattern orientation. Think about it, if math can predict an animal’s spots and stripes, why couldn’t it also tell us why a tiger’s stripes are vertical and an okapi’s stripes are horizontal? The most abstract level of mathematics can play out in the day-to-day lives of the biological world. Read more about the study, this way. >>

The Saber-toothed cat

Los Angeles looked a lot different 10,000 years ago. Teratornis birds, saber-toothed cats, and an extinct species of horse all roamed around the La Brea Tar Pools. Fall in and you’ll be preserved forever! (Field Museum/Charles R. Knight, 1921./)

How long did it take for Smilodon fatalis—the saber-toothed cat—to grow their 7-inch long mouth swords? Well, the extinct feline’s fearsome canine teeth grew at an incredibly quick 6 mm per month, almost twice as fast as human fingernails.

(Oh, and that picture is by way of famed early 20th Century natural history painter Charles R. Knight, who was legally blind. Some of his paintings are hidden like Easter eggs on random walls at The Field Museum in Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History in New York.)

How climate is changing animals

Snow Leopard, Panthera unica. (Joel Sartore/Getty Images/)

This spotted and thick-coated Snow Leopard thrives in a Goldilocks zone between 9,800 to 17,800 feet in altitude across the Tibetan Plateau, a frigid, rocky region that offers wild goats and sheep as prey. But rising temperatures are pushing the zone higher, forcing leopards and their quarry up the slopes, fragmenting their habitats into isolated summits. Rising temps also pull in competing predators like common leopards, which previously avoided the chilly heights in favor of forested hunting grounds at lower elevations. Humans are moving in as well to graze their domesticated goats and sheep, which sometimes requires killing cats who get too curious about the flocks. Read more about animals reacting to climate change, this way. >>

Calls of the Wild

East African Cheetah, Acinonyx jubatus jubatus. Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. (Tom McNamara/)

If you had to guess, what sound does a cheetah make? Lions roar. Tigers bellow and growl. And cheetahs…chirp? Yup. They also purr, hiss, bark, and even meow. It turns out, their chirp can mean a lot of things. Females, who are more solitary compared to males, chirp to attract mates. Yet both sexes also chirp when they’re distressed. Males do it if they get split up from their pack—and they chirp in celebration when the crew gets back together again. Same goes for mothers and their cubs. According to the National Zoo, “cheetahs may even be able to identify each other by the sound of their chirps.”

Denzil Mackrory · Cheetah Chirp

And, finally, rabbit holes I went down while researching this video

What’s the lion equivalent of a rabbit hole? “Daniel in the Lions' Den” is a 1614–1616 painting by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. (National Gallery of Art/)

Did you know in the 1970s. actor Tippi Hedren (probably most famous for her role in the Hitchcock classic, The Birds), her husband Noel Marshall, and their whole family lived with 150 untrained wild animals? And filmed it? Roar, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi3fz5Dbn6k" target=_blank>released in 1981</a>, became known as “the most dangerous movie ever made”—mostly because 70 members of the cast and crew were injured in its creation. Someone even got their scalp sliced clean off. New Yorker <a href="https://ift.tt/2RW2X6o" target=_blank>remembers the film</a> here. The movie is somehow worse than you’re imagining.

This headline from <a href="https://ift.tt/2hV7IhF" target=_blank>The Washington Post in 2017</a> says it all: “The strange and deadly saga of 15 circus cats’ final week in America.” Also, this <a href="https://ift.tt/2FZXjx3" target=_blank>history of the Indian circus from Quartz India</a> is fascinating.

Ever wonder what it’d be like to be a lion tamer? OK. Probably not. But one-third of Errol Morris’ 1997 documentary <a href="https://ift.tt/3lqtu9l" target=_blank>Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control</a> will make you glad you found out about lion tamer Dave Hoover. The other two-thirds of the movie are pretty weird in a good way, too.

After watching the PopSci <a href="https://youtu.be/eK_zmYWHxxo" target=_blank>video short about Frasier the Sensuous Lion</a>, you might start having questions about if it’s ethical to keep wild animals in captivity or not. This <a href="https://ift.tt/3gymgfQ" target=_blank>2007 Radiolab episode</a> about zoos is a must-listen, especially the first segment.

PopSci found out if <a href="https://ift.tt/2EBUq54" target=_blank>a lion could live on veggie burgers</a>. Also, did you know that <a href="https://ift.tt/31AkExU" target=_blank>mountain lions are so scared of humans that the sound of talk radio sends them running</a>?

And, if you can stomach it, you can meet the deadliest cat in the world via <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl8o9PsJPAQ" target=_blank>a PBS Nature clip</a>. It’s intense. Seriously. Turn back now. OK, you’ve been warned.

Subscribe to WILD LIVES on YouTube for more wild stories about animals like Frasier the Sensuous Lion.

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scootoaster · 4 years

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How a 19-year-old lion fathered 35 cubs in 18 months

Lion tamer at work. Though no evidence is available, the mustachioed man is unlikely to have survived this scene. (Library of Congress, 1873/)

Feature Creature: Frasier the Sensuous Lion

Have you ever wondered about the number of lions at your zoo? You probably don’t think about lion reproduction too much. Well, consider this:

Let us now praise other famous animals

Below, a collection of fast facts about famous critters.

Question: why does this Peruvian military helicopter emblem have a tiger on it—its tail around a missile—when there are no tigers anywhere in South America? (Tom McNamara/)

Popular Science’s Encyclopedia of Big Cat Facts

The math of tiger stripes:

How’d the tiger get its stripes? MATH! (Pond5/)

The Saber-toothed cat

How climate is changing animals

Snow Leopard, Panthera unica. (Joel Sartore/Getty Images/)

Calls of the Wild

East African Cheetah, Acinonyx jubatus jubatus. Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. (Tom McNamara/)

Denzil Mackrory · Cheetah Chirp

And, finally, rabbit holes I went down while researching this video

Subscribe to WILD LIVES on YouTube for more wild stories about animals like Frasier the Sensuous Lion.

0 notes

newshoeser-blog · 5 years

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Golden Goose Sneakers Sale want

Converse is one of those classic brands that has managed to maintain relevancy across generations and regions. They're also about individuality and personalization, which is why this Toronto project is an interesting addition to the bustle and color of Queen West.

Kate Bellman, the fashion director of footwear at Nordstrom gives us a theory on why we are gravitating toward the sleek silhouette. "A resounding trend of the season is tailoring, and the same holds true for footwear.

Their eco-friendly Cotton Corn collection launched last year, then received a more elevated revisal in 2019 when it was made vegan. A pair of the lime green sandals languished in my cart for a few days, until an e-mail arrived in in my inbox with the subject line: 'Why To Buy Labucq Shoes.' The note outlined the small, family-owned Italian factory the shoes are made in and the brand's lack of overhead.

At Hermes, there was no shoe collection proper. There were some styles that went from one season to another, but no specific creative statement. Martens 1461 shoe as part of his F/W19 collection. It was a particularly momentous moment given that it was his first show since leaving the American brand.

Fun note: The upside down heart actually means five in the Persian alphabet (AyoubZadeh was born in Iran), and five is also her lucky number. Prada's chunky oxfords and Bottega Veneta's heavy Chelsea boots are trending on Instagram, but you can go straight to the punk rock source with Underground, a British shoe brand that's been making authentic creepers since the eighties.

I know what you're thinking-yes, I am a poser. Sure, I dabbled with teenage mosh pits and cried to The Cure in my bedroom like any healthy adolescent, but I have never been part of a subculture. New shoes on budget day is a longstanding Canadian tradition though it's roots are hard to trace. The act of putting on new shoes (or wearing old ones for that matter) is laden with meaning and cultural significance.

The CBC's Nil Koksil, the Toronto Star's Shinan Govani and Soho House's Markus Anderson, who is part of Meghan and Harry's inner circle, cheered on the steamy performance, before the dance floor was filled again with non-stop action. Actually I wasn't bad, I was lazy and didn't Golden Goose Sneakers Sale want to pay attention, so I didn't do architecture.

In the future, I'll probably just combine all https://www.goldengoosebigdeals.com/ three methods the next time I have to wear painful heels for a long period of time. Our customers can choose any silhouette, pick any artwork and really do anything they'd like with the shoes.

#Golden Goose

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topworldhistory · 5 years

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#blog

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clubofinfo · 7 years

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Expert: When I was a young boy completing catechism in preparation for my first communion, I had to learn the proper procedure for auricular confession, a primary ritual of Roman Catholicism. At that age I did not really understand what I was supposed to do or really why. In fact, catechism, save for the fact that it offered about two hours leave from regular school instruction on Thursdays, would have been a torture except that I liked my teacher. I was just never good at memorising things and learning long texts like the Apostles’ (Nicene) Creed posed an insurmountable challenge. However, a first confession must be performed if I was to get my first communion—a sort of graduation ceremony in which we got to wear something like priestly or academic vestments (and I always liked getting dressed up). In preparation for the confession we had to learn things like what “sin” is and why our sins have to be forgiven before we can take the host (a wafer that tastes like plastic, perhaps calculated to avoid cultivating carnivorous appreciation of the deity). The concept of sin is at best abstract for an eight-year-old. Although there was a kind of primitive devotion in our family—my grandmother was very faithful to the church calendar—I cannot recall sin or morality playing much of a role in our home. Things were handled very pragmatically. A few rules and some decorum were stated and if you violated these there was summary judgment: confinement to quarters or a few lashes with father’s belt. Back then men at home still wore proper trousers instead of athletic attire from some high-end sweatshop magnate. So the morality at home was very secular and utterly lacking in celestial allusions. This made confession into a ritual of inventing things to tell the priest which somehow conformed to the language of the catechetic catalogue of proscribed acts or thoughts. In essence this was an exam to be passed to get the white robes for the first grand ceremonial wafer feast at high mass (still Tridentine rite). After passing the exam in the first part I struggled to remember the lines of the Ave Maria and Pater Noster we had to repeat to ourselves for penance. I found myself grateful that I was never told to recite the Credo or I would never have left the pew. Following the first grand communion, when one feels almost like an acolyte, if not a priest, the whole ceremony gets boring. The flavours never change. One had to avoid breakfast before Sunday mass and wearing an ordinary suit and tie just did not make one feel “part of it all”. Later it was explained to me that we really didn’t have any sins to confess when we were eight. I had not killed any classmates with my father’s shotgun while medicated for not paying attention in class. I grew up with sisters, so girls were just normal company and the term “Carnal Knowledge” (a risqué film of that era) meant nothing at all to me. I also learned, but maybe that was dubious or disputed theology, that the Eucharist was itself a sacrament of higher rank than the act of contrition so I only had to be truly contrite to take the host without any conversation with an unnamed source of grace in a little wooden cubicle.1 But there was a valuable social lesson in all this early psychological training. Namely, confession is a tool for manipulation of the parishioner. It is a complex tool. On the one hand the parishioner learns in childhood that a proper confession is one which tells the priest what he wants to hear. Already as a child one is told what to confess and how to say it. On the presumption that one must have sinned—whatever that means—the verification that a sin was, in fact, committed came when the priest said, yep, yep, followed by some inscrutable Latin words, concluding with “go my son, and sin no more”. Then one heard the screen slide closed in the little box and off it was to the pew to repeat some lines five or ten times, after which one could finally go back home and play. I would say I was as honest and sincere as any child my age in such an environment. Nonetheless I learned another lesson. What one did in the confessional to get the absolution was just as effective outside. Lying outright is simply too much work. You just have to know your confessor and what he (or she) wants to hear. This was my first lesson in the power of euphemism and circumlocution. So when I knew that I was coming home too late and that my mother would be quite cross with me (my father had died too young to enjoy this phase), I began to consider along the way home what my mother would find to be ameliorating circumstances or a valid excuse. In order that I would not lie outright I reviewed all the events of the day, all the people I had met, what could be checked and what was impeachable. When I arrived home I knew the first question would be “where have you been?” This was just another way to say, “you are late and you are in trouble!” So I would choose the least incriminating or least objectionable answer that would either excuse my tardiness or result in a misdemeanour rather than a “felony”. Years later as a teacher I would tell my pupils this too. First, I wanted to discourage outright and stupid lies, and, second, I wanted my pupils to grasp that not every factually correct statement is a true answer to the question being asked. In fact, the sensible critique—back when there was a critique—of formal education argued the same point for all exams. Blacks did disproportionately badly on exams in white run schools because they did not know what the real questions were—not because they were incapable of giving correct answers. Hence the much-praised (mainly by white folks) return to standardised testing was really a return to the same psychological manipulation I was taught as a young catechist. It was a ruse to separate the rulers from the ruled. Passing the tests—whether an IQ test or an SAT—was a ritual to keep those not deemed adequate from those who were best susceptible to indoctrination. Like the SCUM say when they explain that Parris Island is intended to assure that they get just “a few good men”—to kill on command. Robert Gibb, The Thin Red Line (1881) displayed in Scottish National War Museum Now before getting into the meat of this argument, let me make a historical note. The term “thin red line”, a bit of British military sentiment, is supposed to have originated during the Crimean War. On 25 October 1854, the 93rd Highland (Sutherland) Regiment faced a Russian cavalry charge in the Battle of Balaclava. There some five hundred foot soldiers stood in two lines to face the charge. It is important to understand infantry tactics and weaponry of the day to grasp the significance of this. (If any one wants to see this today then I recommend watching the Trooping of the Colour at Horse Guards Parade held every year on the official birthday of the British monarch—it can be found in the Internet.) Since the machine gun had not yet been invented four lines of massed infantry produced “rapid fire”. The first line fires, drops to its knees and reloads while the second line fires and so forth. By this method (graphically demonstrated in the film Zulu), single shot rifles can be brought to a very deadly rate of fire—very effective against men with spears and swords. A further elaboration of this tactic is the square. The line can be turned outward or inward—should the enemy breach the line—and fire directed at any side without interruption and with relatively little risk of troops shooting each other (assuming the inward square is not too tight). The Sutherlands did not have enough soldiers for a classic four-line infantry barrage so they stood their ground with two lines. They managed—at least this is the report—to deter the Russians and protect the unprepared troops in the rear. The battle is deemed heroic because of the meagre contingent facing a full cavalry assault. However, it has been written that the Russians withdrew because they believed that such a small force had been deployed as a diversion. Not wishing to waste their strength against the Sutherlands they went in search of the main force. Hence the heroism of the individual soldiers actually meant an unintended feint—using a small force to create the impression of more might than was actually available and fooling the enemy. Of course, even unintentional deceit is often just as useful as that which is planned. Moreover deceit does not necessarily rely on a falsehood but upon knowing, or being grateful as if one knew, how to create an impression in the mind of the target to which he or she is already susceptible. And that brings me to today’s homily. An article has been posted throughout the alternative media that has led to a serious dispute. Ironically the piece is called “Trump’s Red Line.” The apparent reference is to what under a previous POTUS was called “the red line”. The implicit meaning of this term “red line” is that of the “line in the sand”—the kind of schoolboy-bully dare usually leading to a serious fight. I think this is the wrong way to understand the term in the current situation. Not that bullies—with a schoolboy mentality—are not involved but also, that the historical use I describe above is not only more appropriate to describe the principals but that the ruse is analogous. First publication of the article is attributed to Die Welt am Sonntag, a newspaper in the German Axel Springer publishing group, which posted it on 25 June 2017 in English. On the same day Die Welt posted another item from the author in German titled “So einen Scheiß kann ich mir nicht mal ausdenken” (roughly “I could not even dream this shit up.”). It is described as the protocol of a “chat” between a former US “Sicherheitsberater” (presumably one of those “national security advisers” described in Trump’s Red Line or the senior adviser from whom the reader will read a lot below) and a US American soldier (of unspecified rank or grade). The subject is events in Khan Shaikhoun, Syria. Die Welt editors advise the readers that the places where the parties to the exchange are assigned are known to them but that personal statements that could provide information about military operations have been abridged so as not to endanger sources. As a result of the dispute arising from the publication of the article “Trump’s Red Line”, another article was posted defending the author of the first.2 The defence lodged, however, is not a counter to the criticism but underscores the problem—extending the “thin red line” so to speak. In what follows I will describe the “Battle of Khan Sheikhoun” as it is recounted by the regimental scribes whose task it is to present the battle in the most favourable light—for the regiment that is and those who deployed it. In Trump’s Red Line, posted here on 4 July 2017, the author begins by stating that: On April 6, United Stated President Donald Trump authorized an early morning Tomahawk missile strike on Shayrat Air Base in central Syria in retaliation for what he said was a deadly nerve agent attack carried out by the Syrian government two days earlier in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun. Trump issued the order despite having been warned by the US intelligence community that it has found no evidence that the Syrians had used a chemical weapon. The available intelligence made clear that the Syrians had targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided bomb equipped with conventional explosives. Details of the attack, including information on its so-called high-value targets, had been provided by the Russians days in advance to American and allied military officials in Doha, whose mission is to coordinate all US, allied, Syrian and Russian Air force operations in the region. Some American military and intelligence officials were especially distressed by the president’s determination to ignore the evidence. “None of this makes any sense,” one officer told colleagues upon learning of the decision to bomb. “We KNOW that there was no chemical attack… the Russians are furious. Claiming we have the real intel and know the truth… I guess it didn’t matter whether we elected Clinton or Trump.” Within hours of the April 4 bombing, the world’s media was saturated with photographs and videos from Khan Sheikhoun. Pictures of dead and dying victims, allegedly suffering from the symptoms of nerve gas poisoning, were uploaded to social media by local activists, including the White Helmets, a first responder group known for its close association with the Syrian opposition. I take the liberty of citing this article’s first paragraphs in full because it is necessary to examine the way this story is told from the very beginning. For what follows I will refrain from lengthy citation where possible and refer the reader to the piece itself. As to the scene-setting first paragraphs some questions arise which are by no means trivial. * While it is a matter of record that the attack occurred one must ask: How does the author know or how should we know that the order issued by Trump was actually based on the stated grounds—alleged use of a chemical weapon? The US is at war with Syria and has been for a long time. Bombing countries is the weapon of choice for the US. Ask any Korean, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Iraqi, Afghani, et al. When the US is at war it bombs. It has given all sorts of excuses—Tonkin Gulf comes to mind. It even bombs its own citizens when they are deemed belligerents as anyone in Philadelphia or Waco can attest. So what difference does it make whether the alibi was a chemical weapon or a fantasy attack against a US destroyer violating territorial waters of a sovereign country? * Who is the US intelligence community? The police red squad in Washington, the FBI, Naval Intelligence, a Homeland Security fusion centre, the CIA, et al., their wives, retired officers? * What is “available intelligence”? From whom? Of what nature and for what purpose? * Who are jihadists? * What is a “high-value target” in a sovereign country where the US has no authority under any colour of law to aim? * Which American military and intelligence officials? Those assigned to Fiji or in Venezuela? * Why is the outcome of the last presidential election of relevance to this story? * If the world’s media was saturated with photographs and videos, who verified that they are of or from Khan Sheikhoun? * If the depicted injured and dead—unverified—are allegedly suffering from the symptoms of nerve gas poisoning, who alleges this and what credibility do these allegations have without substantiated image documents? * Who are “local activists”, the rebels? “Including the White Helmets…” The White Helmets is not known “for its close association with the Syrian opposition. It is known that they were organised by a British defence contractor for the so-called Syrian opposition. The principal funders of the organisation are the same as those who finance the mercenaries themselves. They are, in fact, a part of that so-called opposition. That opposition is also known to comprise bands of mercenaries funded by the US, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the rest of the countries allied with US-Israeli efforts to topple the Assad government or Balkanise it (here the comparison is appropriate since the CEO of the company that created the White Helmets cut his teeth—and who knows what else—in Bosnia).3 In the following paragraph we find the sentence: “The provenance (jargon) of the photos was not clear and no international observers have yet inspected the site, but the immediate popular assumption worldwide was that this was a deliberate use of the nerve gas agent sarin, authorised by President Bashar Assad of Syria.” * Perhaps I am not on the same planet but I did not wake up one day in April and assume that Mr Assad used nerve gas. So where does this popular assumption originate? * The sudden use of Mr Assad’s full name is purely rhetorical. It is clearly intended to reinforce the impression that such an act would be a highly personal order issued from the US archenemy. It is certainly not intended to educate the reader as to the correct name of a head of state against which the US happens to be at war. Or is this equal time because the article begins with “United States President Donald Trump” thereinafter just “Trump”? * Why would Trump refer to “Syria’s past use of chemical weapons”—apparently referring to a time prior to his presidency? A reasonable person would be excused for concluding that Trump merely followed an assumption that his predecessor propagated based on precisely the same “available intelligence”. Then come the handkerchiefs again: “To the dismay of many senior members of his national security team, Trump could not be swayed over the next 48 hours of intense briefing and decision-making. In a series of interviews, I learned of the total disconnect (jargon) between the president and many of his military advisers and intelligence officials, as well as officers on the ground in the region who had an entirely different understanding of the nature of Syria’s attack on Khan Scheikhoun. I was provided with evidence of that disconnect (again jargon) in the form of transcripts of real-time communications, immediately following the Syrian attack on April 4.” * Who were the senior members in dismay? * What was the nature of the briefing and decision-making? Did it have anything to do with the public statements rationalising the attack? How do we know that the alleged intelligence had anything to do with the briefings or decisions to be made? * With whom were the interviews conducted? * What is “disconnect”? Is Trump on a dialysis or heart-lung machine? * What is “an understanding of the nature of Syria’s attacks”? Is it an opinion? Is it a report of observations of the scene? Or is it perhaps just a word because maybe the people concerned have no understanding of the case? * Who provided “real-time communications”? Why should these be considered reliable testimony of the facts—if there are any? The article follows with a quaint press release explanation of what the US regime has said it is doing to avoid outright war with Russia. I think it is fair to say that it can be treated with all the credulity applied to any government press release. Or are we to believe that the US war establishment is more honest now than it ever was in the past? Then Michael the Archangel enters the scene in the form of “a senior adviser to the American intelligence community, who has served in senior positions in the Defence Department and Central Intelligence Agency. Does the author mean someone of the rank of Richard Helms or William Colby—with the same established credibility?4 Michael the Archangel then proceeds to tell the author minutiae about the supposed target of Syria’s bombing raid. We get some more jargon; e.g., POL. This shows that the author is versed in the terms of the trade, as if he were one of them, and can translate daily war operations like an Edward Murrow—naturally without even the pretence of being at the front (a point to which I will return).5 Then comes the real fun: “One reason for the Russian message to Washington about the intended target was to ensure that any CIA asset or informant who had managed to work his way into the jihadist leadership (again who are they?) was forewarned not to attend the meeting.” This is third rate Ian Fleming. It has been established and even acknowledged that the CIA funds, directly and indirectly, these mercenaries and has done so since the dean of Carter’s covert wars, Zbigniew Bzrezinski, helped create them in Afghanistan. Bzrezinski never ceased to brag about this—because he felt it promoted his war against Russia (then called the Soviet Union).6 It is more likely that the Russian message to Washington—assuming there was one and that it had anything like the character the author’s St. Michael alleges—was intended to enforce the ostensible agreement to combat these mercenaries by forcing coherence between public statements and actual conduct. To date Russia has been rather unsuccessful in achieving that goal. We only have the senior adviser’s word for it that the Russians have anything to say to the US regime, which it feels obliged to respect. The recent destruction of a Syrian Air Force combat aircraft by US Forces ought to be sufficient proof of that—without input from St. Michael—who then gets quite folksy by telling the author about the Russians: “They were playing the game right.” The language is offensive on its face. Since 1945, the Russians and most of the rest of the world has “played the game right.” It is the US regime that does not. Of course, that is the fact that cannot be stated openly. Only the Russians can be suspected of perhaps “not playing the game right.” That is what is meant too, so the author lets this remark stand as if it were a sign of “fair play” on the part of the US regime—for whom the senior adviser still works. Then the author throws in some other meaningless words: “a time of acute pressure on the insurgents” and people “presumably desperately seeking a path forward in the new political climate”. This is just State Department boilerplate. What is “acute pressure” from what or whom? What is “a path forward” in what direction, where and with what aim? Then we get some names finally—but not of people in the “intelligence community”. Trump and “two of his key national security aides… Rex Tillerson and Nikki Haley”. First of all, since when is the Secretary of State “an aide”? The Secretary of State is a member of the cabinet and heads the entire US diplomatic corps and Foreign Service, and even in the line of presidential succession, hardly an “aide”. Even if UN Ambassadors, with the notable exception of former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, Vernon Walters, are not usually identified as members of the “intelligence community” (if that term has any meaning under statute), Nikki Haley also has cabinet rank.7 She is not listed in the Foreign Service List with the rank of an “aide” to the president. The author’s only reason for this blatant inaccuracy is to suggest that Trump and his senior cabinet members are not fully competent or qualified to participate in the serious business the author wishes to explain to the readers. Then we get another jargon-laced description of martial skill and military superiority. The story that follows purports to be an analysis of the situation at the scene (in Syria, where our author is conspicuously absent). To spare the reader the details, which can be read in the article itself, I just list the questions I had. Others could be asked: * If the gas in question is or can be made undetectable how are the “locals” to identify the weapon with anything even approximating certainty? * Who provided the Bomb Damage Assessment and why should it be believed? Body counts in Southeast Asia come to mind. * If there is no confirmed account of deaths what deaths are at issue here? Whose “intelligence estimates” does the author use and what good are they? * Who are the “opposition activists” reporting? Why is CNN an authority? * What significance can the observations or reports by MSF (Médicins Sans Frontières) have from a clinic 60 miles north of the target? Recently we have heard how fire brigades and other emergency personnel in London were unable to provide reliable information in the immediate vicinity of the Grenfell Tower. Sixty miles in Syria where inland transport and communication are interrupted by war can scarcely be called on site. * If all of the indicators cited to imply the use of some kind of chemical weapons are taken as a whole, then it is entirely possible to infer that the mercenary forces in the course of their operations caused such injuries. So why is it even necessary to consider the Syrian government forces as potential perpetrators? Of course, one purpose of detailed description of a weapon that may not even have been used is to implant in the readers’ minds the expectation that it could be used—to support in other words what the author initially calls “the immediate popular assumption”. Then the perpetuum mobile upon which this entire story relies—the Internet—“swings into action” all by itself, of course, like divine providence. This is another ruse because the target readers have been trained for years now to see the Internet as a truth machine instead of the largest weapons system in the US arsenal—after atomic bombs, which it was designed to complement. That US intelligence is at it again—“tasked with establishing what had happened.” Isn’t this curious? We still do not know who this is. Despite the fact that the past decade has been full of apparent exposures of how large, differentiated and competitive the bureaucracies are that are formally constituted (we don’t know how much is off the books) to perform what are euphemistically called intelligence functions, we are supposed to attach meaning to this statement. Then we find that “those in the American intelligence community understood, and many of the inexperienced aides and family members close to Trump may not have…” Translation: St. Michael’s employers versus the Secretary of State, UN Ambassador and people holding positions of trust in the Trump administration who are members of his family (as if the US regime, like the medieval papacy, only now was rife with nepotism). St. Michael, the “senior adviser”—whom an attentive reader will sooner or later notice is the ONLY source for this story—wants the author to say—and he does throughout—that the “intelligence community” should be making the decisions not the president or his cabinet. The only reason for this slight of hand is to distract the reader from the fact that the “intelligence community” is nothing of the sort and it already does make the decisions—including what Trump is to say or not to say. Then follows some more sobbing. Thereafter we learn that Trump is a “constant watcher of television news”. The author is not describing a unique Trump attribute but something all presidents have done. So what is the point—to compare him with St. Ronald or LBJ or the last Bush in the White House? Or put another way, was the author watching television with Trump and the king of Jordan? Or was this an episode of reality TV and everyone could see the two of them sitting in front of the screen? The purpose of this is to soothe the consciences of the McNeill – Lehrer News Hour (later The News Hour with John Lehrer) fans and other PBS addicts. Then the senior adviser tells us about the national defence apparatus instructed by Trump. Now who or what is this? The National Security Act of 1947 created what was called The National Defence Establishment. This was later renamed the Department of Defence. Has Congress created a new instrument and no one bothered to announce it? Then we read that “planners” asked the CIA and DIA for some evidence that Syria had sarin. Who are the planners? Again the question ought to be why is this important? If the US is at war and it is going to bomb—which is what it always does, both for doctrinal and business reasons—then the only point of this question could be “can we use sarin as an alibi?” The psychological profile of Assad given in brief by unnamed persons is a “throwaway”. It is already part of the official language that all US enemies are willing to use atomic, biological and chemical weapons (ABC in the house jargon). It is part of the strategy of deniability. By planting in the public consciousness the presupposition that all US enemies are willing to use such weapons—even if they do not have them—the actual deployment of those weapons by the US regime can be plausibly denied by attribution to the enemy. This strategy is as old as the US regime’s annihilation of Native Americans. It has done little or no good to show for over a century now that it was white settlers and militias under US control that introduced scalping—not the Native Americans. This is school bully tactics at its finest. The reader should be more than irritated that the author insists on writing “provenance” when he means “source”. I leave it to the sensitive reader to consider why. The late George Carlin in his wonderful routine on “euphemisms” explained how “shell shock” in WWI became PTSD after Vietnam. “More syllables less meaning” was his conclusion. I would even recommend listening to Carlin’s complaints before reading the rest of my argument. Then Michael, aka the senior advisor, tells a true fairy tale of bureaucratic life. “Intelligence analysts do not argue with the president. They’re not going to tell the president, ‘if you interpret the data this way, I quit.’” This may be true of certain retired intelligence professionals who loyally briefed Ronald Reagan and now complain about the service. However, there are numerous people who quit the service because they saw what it does and what the president does together with the service. Of course, they have names and have made their cases in public, even in print, but they are not sources for the author of “Trump’s Red Line.” After that come unnamed national security advisers (presumably not the national security adviser since he has a name).8: “Trump wanted to respond to the affront to humanity committed by Syria and he did not want to be dissuaded…” This is the smoking gun so to speak. The author complains through the voices of the unnamed advisers that Trump was not to be dissuaded from a response. However, the author leaves the reader to agree that Syria committed an unproven or unnamed “affront to humanity”. The author tells the readers that the “popular assumption” really is correct and should still be held dearly. Then Trump meets with unnamed people again, this time in Florida. And now he gets the options. St. Michael phrases the options carefully to fit the readers’ well-cultivated prejudices: an affront to humanity that is ignored. That is impossible. “The available intelligence was not relevant.” We still do not know what that was and what, if any, bearing it had on the discussion. That must mean that none of Trump’s staff was able to recommend action. So who did? The CIA director was absent. Hmm. Getting a tan at the beach or was this for plausible deniability? Tillerson is again described in terms fitting with his previous designation as an “aide”. Option two is “a slap on the wrist”. Since when is the head of one sovereign state entitled to “slap the wrist” of another? Oh, let’s just bomb a pharmaceutical factory or a peasant village or an airfield in a foreign country. The senior adviser said the Russians should be alerted first—“to avoid too many casualties.” Given the fact that no reliable body counts have ever been alleged or proven—who is to say how many is too many? Then we are told about the impressive sounding “strike package” presented to Obama in 2013 and that it was rejected. This option was, in jargon again, “decapitation”. This is actually prohibited by national and international law. But the author sees no more scruple here than his provenance the “senior adviser”. Finally Trump is quoted as having said, “You’re the military and I want military action.” The rest of the alleged discussion is too obscene to repeat. But clearly the quote is intended to portray Trump as a simpleton. Whether he is or not is unimportant. However, the author needs this redundancy because it is part of his and St. Michael’s story. St. Michael, true to the trade whose patron saint he is, tells the author “The lesson here was: Thank God for the military men at the meeting. They did the best they could when confronted with a decision that had already been made.” That may be true. What we do not know is who actually made the decision. We are left—without any substantiation—to believe that it was Trump. However, to anyone familiar with the history of the US regime this is simply nonsense. Here I have to ask a silly question? Why were only fifty-nine missiles fired? Why not sixty? Why not ninety-nine? One answer is statistics. An odd number appears more realistic as detail than an even number. It is also like going to the hypermarket and buying something for 1.99 instead of 2.00. Gives you the feeling you saved something. So maybe the author thought 59 missiles sounds more restrained than 60 or 100. St. Michael continues: “It was a totally Trump show from beginning to end. A few of the president’s national security advisers viewed the mission as a minimized bad presidential decision and one that they had an obligation to carry out. But I don’t think our national security people are going to allow themselves to be hustled into a bad decision again. If Trump had gone for option three there might have been some immediate resignations.” Here we see the other real message of the author’s article. Does St. Michael ask the reader to believe that some of his fellow knights would fall on their swords if Trump authorised what those same people recommended to Obama? Which national security people does he mean? If they are employees under the authority of the president, then they have no business even talking about being “hustled”—they have orders and they are to be executed. The president is the supreme executive authority in the US—at least that is what the country’s Constitution says. Or does he mean that there are national security people (now are they in the “intelligence community” or the “national security apparatus” or the “US intelligence community” or where in hell) who are not subject to presidential authority? Now we are getting to the point. As Fletcher Prouty already wrote years ago, there most certainly are “national security people” for whom the office of the president is a legal fiction.9 However, if this is what St. Michael really means—then the attempt to make all of this supposed error “a totally Trump show” must be deception. Then the author finally appears to be writing on his own account and continues by placing the Trump show in the long line of presidential testosterone secretions by pointing to Trump’s poll results after the attack. This follows with an utterly revisionist platitude, which is the stock-in-trade of the US war propaganda apparatus (the national security establishment + 99% of the mass media + 99% of academia): “America rallied around its commander in chief, as it always does in times of war.” This is simply false. Throughout most of US history only the white elite and its acolytes have rallied around the US war machine. Wars have cost nearly every US President votes and popularity—to the point of election defeat or impeachment. Only the enormous power of the propaganda machine, to which the author of the article under review belongs as a highly decorated veteran and reserve combatant, has been able to make the US population support the wars US presidents nominally lead. I have covered that history elsewhere.10 Suffice it to say that almost exactly 100 years ago this machine was inaugurated as the Committee on Public Information aka as the Creel Commission.11 Five days later we are told, there was a background briefing given by the Trump administration on the Syrian operation. Now it is no longer a bombing. We do not know who issued the invitation (what office?). Instead we learn that a senior White House official “who was not to be identified” gave everyone the official talking points. He points out that none of the reporters present challenged or disputed the background briefing. He does not say a) was he in attendance? b) did he challenge or dispute the official assertion? Finally—yes, we are almost done with the author’s story—three criticisms are mentioned that arise from this unofficial official event. They are inconsequential. The author praises “the briefer” for his careful use of words like “think”, “suggest”, and “believe” during the 30 minutes of the event. The briefer refers to “declassified data” from “our colleagues in the intelligence community”. Then comes the clincher which is made just for all those who believe that they do not follow the mainstream press: “The mainstream press responded the way the White House had hoped it would: stories attacking Russia and ignoring the briefer’s caveats. We read that the author senses a “renewed Cold War”. Then there is some obfuscation about the putative importance of calling something “declassified information” or “a declassified intelligence report” and “formal intelligence” and a “summary based on declassified information”. Of course, one can detail semantic differences but it is more important how and in what context and for whom the words are used—but our author says nothing of this because that is a trade secret. “Trump’s Red Line” ends with some boilerplate from official policy talking points. Then ends with a deceptive disclaimer. Since by now it should be apparent that this is a very crafted and crafty propaganda piece addressed to precisely those who pride themselves on not believing the journals of record (at least not in public), it is once more necessary to show that the author is a sincere investigator who, like a few other professionals in the political warfare field, is sometimes frustrated in his search for truth, we learn that the author sent specific questions to the White House via e-mail on 15 June and received no answer. We do not know what questions and to which office in the White House or even what answers he expected. This should all be superfluous if St. Michael the Senior Adviser was a reliable source, one would think… In the by-line, the author of “Trump’s Red Line”, is identified “as an investigative journalist and political writer who first gained wide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War”. Presuming that there were any of the statements made in open source references like Wikipedia false or unsubstantiated the author would have directly or indirectly effected their correction and because this is a common source of information today, I would like to call attention to some points that at best qualify the acclaim implied by the 1969 reporting. I have written elsewhere on the mythical status of Vietnam War reporting and the reader is directed to those articles for further background.12 In the English language Wikipedia entry about the author there is a passage about My Lai 4. The story is attributed to a tip (since he was not in Vietnam at the time) from Village Voice columnist Geoffrey Cowan. Now when one reads Cowan’s biography one finds that after leaving the Voice his jobs were at VOA and USIA. My Lai Massacre According to Wikipedia: On November 12, 1969, Hersh reported the story of the My Lai Massacre, in which hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians were murdered by US soldiers in March 1968. The report prompted widespread condemnation around the world and reduced public support for the Vietnam War in the United States. The explosive news of the massacre fueled the outrage of the US peace movement, which demanded the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam. Hersh wrote about the massacre and its cover-up in My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (1970) and Cover-up: The Army’s Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4 (1972). For My Lai 4, Hersh traveled across the United States and interviewed nearly 50 members of the Charlie Company. A movie was also produced, based on this book, by Italian director Paolo Bertola in 2009. Hersh had been directed to the Calley court-martial by Geoffrey Cowan of The Village Voice and later remarked, “Yeah, part of me said, ‘Fame! Fortune! Glory!’ The other part was very pragmatic [in thinking] about, ‘How are you going to prove this?'” A critical attitude to Hersh perceives him as the mere instrument by which the My Lai massacre became public knowledge and a part of the machine with which the army built its case against a scape-goat. According to this view, Hersh served in this way to shape the memory the military wanted—an exceptional atrocity, an anomaly, that was dealt with. So let us imagine that the author was introduced to a St. Michael or some other “senior adviser”, someone who needed to get a story into the public domain. The author is still relatively new in the business or at least he has not hit it big. He is offered a story based on a tip by Cowan. It had been decided (by the “intelligence community”) that a leak must be arranged to again tar the Army with atrocities and distract from the actual command element (CIA) and this was done through Cowan, who then gets Hersh to do the writing. The Hersh Wiki page (in German but not in English) says Cowan had published an article on the Phoenix program in the Voice and that Cowan had given him (Hersh) the tips.13 Yet apparently neither Cowan nor Hersh see (or are supposed to see) a connection between Phoenix and My Lai 4. The German version of the Wiki entry says: Ebenfalls im Jahr 1969 erlebte Hersh seinen Durchbruch auf internationaler Ebene. Durch den Journalisten Geoffrey Cowan, der seinerzeit in einem Artikel über die Operation Phoenix Details berichtete, unter anderem, dass die CIA vietnamesische Zivilisten ermordete, die im Verdacht standen, dem Viet Cong zu helfen, bekam Hersh einen Tipp. Cowan hatte einen Informanten im Pentagon, der ihn und somit Hersh in Kenntnis setzte, dass ein US-Offizier wegen Mordes an Zivilisten in Vietnam angeklagt war und dieser Fall vertuscht werden sollte. Note that in the German Wiki entry it is the CIA that is killing Vietnamese civilians, while in the English entry it is the US Army. In the German Wiki entry, Cowan had an informant in the Pentagon that gave him and hence the author the information that a US officer was charged with murder of civilians in Vietnam. In other words, the German version points to our St. Michael—while there is no mention of a Pentagon informant in the English version. So if one were to give Hersh the benefit of a doubt that before his article on My Lai he may have been doing legitimate investigative journalism (I find that hard to believe since that is no way to make a career) then Cowan was essentially the conduit (cut out) for a bribe (a chance to become famous and advance one’s career) and a distraction. (If Cowan were genuine why wouldn’t he have done the story in the Village Voice, which at least in those days had a certain impact beyond maintaining New York’s pretensions to cultural radicalism?) Hersh goes after the Army (not the CIA) and gets famous. One reason why Cowan might not have pursued the story himself– even as an agent or collaborator– was to protect his position in the Village Voice. Another reason could have been that someone else needed to place the story in the NYT and the key establishment media– to which at that time the Voice still did not belong. The fact that Cowan spent the rest of his career in government service at the Voice of America (VOA) and United States Information Agency (USIA/ and USIS abroad) does not prove but does lend plausibility to a strong undisclosed relationship to the other government agencies that worked with VOA and USIA in political warfare.14 Here it ought to be recalled that Die Welt am Sonntag, as a publication of the Axel Springer Verlag, has always had close relationships with the secret services, especially those of the US. This is not to rule out domestic German political motives for presenting the war in particular ways or Trump in an unfavourable light. Germany is the most powerful country in Western Europe and the support of its electorate is important to US policy aims in Europe. The German mass media in the past years has supported almost without qualification US anti-Russian policy although much of Germany—albeit for various reasons, is far from anti-Russian. Hence psychological warfare in Germany is a very important part of NATO strategy. The encouragement of the strong pro-American factions is needed to counter those who see—logically and historically—Russia as the preferred trading partner. But the significance of first publication in Germany ought to be clear to those who are familiar with Operation Mockingbird. The CIA and other propaganda activities in the US government would release through various channels stories to the foreign press in the certainty that they would be picked up by US media and reprinted, quoted or rebroadcast. The point is that normal means would make it very difficult to trace the provenance back to the US government and the story would appear as if it were independently produced and therefore merely borrowed from abroad—giving the colour of objectivity if not the substance. The author enjoys respect, especially on the Left, bordering on canonisation. He stands for loyal opposition. The Left imagines that he is in opposition and the rest know he is loyal. Moreover celebrity in the US is a kind of wealth and it endows people who enjoy it with power that others do not have. The condescending compatible Left has its Ellsberg and Hersh from the “good old days” when the white middle class imagined they toppled the government and ended the war in Vietnam. It needs these celebrities because they distract from the necessity to think for oneself. There are a few international saints and some who have only reached the rank of venerable or blessed. The differences can be seen in the lecture fees and the book receipts or how often they appear on TV—mainstream or otherwise. Like with my grandmother, there is a kind of primitive devotion that has to be served and so it is almost irrelevant who does it, but it has to be done. But some of these venerated are not just ordinary celebrities; they are knights of the church militant. They wield their celebrity as a weapon to elevate or suborn others who might threaten the realm of which they are a part. These “knights Templar” who wield the pen as a sword on behalf of the Establishment are both martial and priestly. They have learned the creed and know all the sacraments, especially the pseudo-sacrament of confession. The journalist of this type has his/her code of honour but it is a military code and as such strictly hierarchical. They have learned professionally what I only learned by accident of catechism: confession is a transaction between a willing deceiver and a willingly deceived. This consent is maintained by highly structured ritualistic language and jargon, which allows the deceiver to conceal his desires and motives and the deceived to ignore or so distort them that they satisfy expectations. The Central Intelligence Agency subjects its personnel, especially those officers who work outside headquarters, to regular polygraph tests. Like all military-type organisations (including the Catholic Church) the hierarchy exercises an absolute authority which, given the highly selective nature of recruitment, assures almost absolute control throughout the ranks. Just like in the Church every officer has his “confessor”. So the executive management knows in detail what information is moving in and out through its public interfaces. There must be a presumption—willingly denied on the Left—that “leaks” are authorised if they have not been punished. Conspicuously the two most important insider stories of how the CIA works, Philip Agee’s CIA Diary and John Stockwell’s In Search of Enemies, are almost entirely ignored by the Left and absolutely ignored by Sy Newhouse’s star investigative reporter. The CIA harassed Agee until the end of his life. All the proceeds of Stockwell’s book were attached and awarded to the CIA as damages. We have yet to hear the name of someone punished by the Agency for breach of his or her secrecy oath in revealing something to the star investigative reporter. “Trump’s Red Line” was written by a thin red line comprising a small regiment of propagandists who by deliberately positioning themselves visibly but in apparent weakness deceive their targets into believing they are greater and truer than they actually are. They serve as a front for the massed but often poorly managed viciousness of the ruling class. Their job is to make the rest of us think that we are basically on the “right side” on “the side of good and the brave”. They provide the intellectual pageantry, which flatters and induces people to want to join, “for king and country” as it was a century ago. They do this by means of the confessional, for Catholics a cubicle, for white Protestant America, the Oprah Winfrey show or for the highbrow, The New Yorker. The “exposure” or “disclosure” or “whistleblowing” are all forms of eroticism, often oral, which titillate and relieve the pressures of daily self-deception. The narrative is one of sin and guilt. The compatible Left is deeply implicated in the maintenance of white supremacy and imperialism in the US (and throughout the NATO member-states). They need occasional absolution for this complicity and that is what the confessors deliver. It is a dialogue that has little to do with truth or accuracy or change—and nothing in common with democracy. Quite the contrary it is a dialogue between the State and its loyal subjects aimed at purifying consciences while maintaining the system itself, even reinforcing it. The compatible Left is bound to its confessors—and the confessors know that. It is a dance of mutual deception by which the rest of the world’s population can continue to be starved, robbed and bombed. This reporting has no other function but to distract people from what the US regime is actually doing, to maintain the illusion that stated policy is actual policy and thereby maintain the criminal enterprise of which the CIA—in the widest sense of that term– remains one of the core elements. As I have argued above, it is not necessary to lie to be a propagandist for liars—it is only necessary to do exactly what Robert McNamara did when he said “I never answered the questions others asked. I made it a rule only to answer the questions I think they should have asked.”15 The task of the “thin red line” is to control the range of questions and assure that everyone learns the right answers. The regiment of journalists is like the 93rd Highlanders at Balaclava, they are there to pose like truth before the hordes, but unlike the Sutherlands, they do it with other people’s blood. * Henry Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences (1896) This book by the US historian who documented the real reasons for the Catholic Inquisition, demonstrates that the theology of confession was in fact a dubious justification for church espionage and just good business for the Church—and often clearly seen as such. * Jonathan Cook, “Useful Idiots Who Undermine Dissent on Syria” posted here also on 4 July, 2017. * We must start from the fact that ISIS and all the groups in the US-Israel-Saudi Arabia-managed terrorist coalition against Syria are a creation of the CIA. The beginning of the ISIS “regimental history” was when the CIA created the Mujahdeen in Afghanistan and that has never been denied. Therefore it is ludicrous to say there are “embedded terrorists” in the “White Helmets”. The accurate formulation is that the White Helmets is a part of the terrorist organization. The technical term for this is “armed propaganda”. When US Special Forces are deployed in pacification they have people who perform what are technically called “civil affairs” operations: starting and running schools, clinics, SAR teams etc. Civil affairs operations are still subordinate to military/paramilitary control, the people involved may just happen not to be carrying weapons or killing at that particular time. Since there has been no serious discussion even in the alternative media about the actual organisation and structure of “civil affairs” and “armed propaganda” (Phoenix-type) operations, a lot of time and ink or bytes describing things out of context. Hersh and others exploit this ignorance or incomprehension. Civil affairs operations are designed to conceal military operations and as the reporting on them shows — very successfully. * For those too young or ill-informed to know, former CIA director Richard Helms was convicted of perjury because he lied to the Congress in testimony under oath during investigations into CIA activity. He made it clear to those in power that he was not going to jail for implementing government policy and indeed he did not. William E. Colby, while CIA director, gave testimony to the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, also “Church Committee” after its chair, which if followed carefully, indicates the function of information and the role of “intelligence” in the US “intelligence community”. Helms lived to a ripe old age. Colby drowned while fishing. A parallel investigation by the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (Pike Committee) has been virtually ignored. Its final report was suppressed. The final report eventually became available in the UK, but not in an official version. * Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965) was a broadcast journalist for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). He became famous for his radio broadcasts during WWII. He was treated as a mentor and/or icon of broadcast journalism well into the TV era. * “What was more important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of central Europe and the end of the Cold war?” * Vernon A. Walters (1917-2002) served not only as US ambassador to the UN and Germany and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (1972-76), he was military advisor for many (if not all) of the military coups d’état (overthrow of the government by the armed forces) and other covert actions now popularly called “regime change”, instigated and supported by the US during his professional career. It is very likely that his appointment as ambassador to Bonn in 1989 was for the purpose of coordinating the collapse of the democratic GDR government to facilitate its absorption FRG, including what became known as the “donation scandal” (Spendenaffäre) by which massive illegal funds were delivered to Helmut Kohl’s CDU, just around the time of the GDR elections. Kohl, who died this year, will have taken many of those secrets with him. * First there was Michael T. Flynn. He was encouraged to resign and Lt Gen H R McMaster USA was appointed in his place. * L. Fletcher Prouty (1917-2001) served as Chief of Special Operations for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy. He published his book The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World in 1973. * See my Viet Nam series: here; here; here; and here. * George Creel (1876-1953) also among other things an investigative journalist and writer was chairman of the Committee on Public Information (hence Creel Commission). He detailed the commission’s propaganda functions and operations, many of which were covert, in his 1920 book How We Advertised America. The committee was constituted in July 1918 and its activities (including foreign operations) ended officially in August 1919. * See Footnote 15. * The definitive work on the CIA’s Phoenix Program was written by Douglas Valentine (also reviewed in DV). In it he documents and explains how Lt. Calley’s unit was part of Phoenix—that is a CIA operation. The intimate connection between war crimes committed by regular US soldiers in Vietnam and the CIA’s overall initiative and guidance of the wars in Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia were not disclosed in any of the work for which Hersh is credited in respect to Vietnam. * See description of USIA/ USIS and one of its officers during the war against Vietnam. After graduating from America University he went to the CIA-sponsored East-West Centre which Scotton said “… was a cover for a training program in which Southeast Asians were brought to Hawaii and trained to go back to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to create agent nets.” (This is also where Obama’s parents met.) When he had finished his training and passed the Foreign Service exam he was advised by his patron/ confessor to join the USIS, “which dealt with people”… see Valentine (2000, 2014) p. 49. In Frank Scotton’s memoir Uphill Battle (2014) it is clear that he was a close friend of Daniel Ellsberg. He writes in his memoir that he had cognisance of Ellsberg’s private possession of documents from the report on which Ellsberg had worked to produce an internal history of the war in Vietnam which he would later supply to the New York Times. (page 247) Ellsberg’s leak became the famous Pentagon Papers. However the documents leaked and those chosen for publication in the New York Times omitted any mention of the CIA role in the war or that the CIA was the principal agency driving the war from the 1950s when they were advising the French in Indochina. Both Prouty, in his 1973 book, and Valentine, in numerous articles, shed considerable doubt as to the real motives and actions behind the ostensible leak. * Errol Morris, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003). McNamara gave this explanation for how he performed in public; e.g., at press conferences. http://clubof.info/

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bluewatsons · 7 years

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G. Thomas Couser, Body Language: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing, 13 Life Writing 3 (2016)

As much as we may like to evade or minimise them, illness and disability inescapably attend human embodiment; we are all vulnerable subjects. So it might seem natural and inevitable that the most universal, most democratic form of literature, autobiography, should address these common features of human experience. And yet self-life writing has reckoned with embodiment only relatively recently. In the Western tradition, we can date first-person life writing about illness and disability (which I have named autosomatography) from classic texts like John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and Several Steps in My Sickness (1624) and the essays of Michel de Montaigne. But such texts are rare—few and chronologically far between—until well after the birth of the clinic in the eighteenth century.

Granted, in the United States, the post-Civil War period saw a flurry of narratives of institutionalisation by former mental patients, a subgenre that adapted older American life writing genres, the captivity narrative and the slave narrative, to protest the injustice of the confinement of those deemed insane. But for the most part, autobiographical writing expressive of illness and disability remained quite uncommon until the second half of the twentieth century, when it flourished concurrently with successive civil rights movements. Women's liberation, with its signature manifesto Our Bodies Ourselves, supported the breast cancer narrative; the gay rights movement encouraged AIDS narrative in response to a deadly epidemic; and the disability rights movement stimulated a surge in narratives of various disabilities. Conversely, the narratives helped to advance the respective rights movements. Such writing, then, has been representative in two senses of the term: aesthetic (mimetic) and political (acting on behalf of). It has done, and continues to do, important cultural work.

Academics began to pay attention to these subgenres of autosomatography only around 1990. Although I was hardly aware of it at the time, I realise in retrospect that my interest in illness narrative had autobiographical stimuli. My mother survived breast cancer in her fifties only to succumb to ovarian cancer at the age of 64, in 1974, when I was a graduate student; a cousin my age died of breast cancer several years later. So I was intimately acquainted with stories I thought deserving of inscription and publication. For that and other reasons, as memoirs of illness and disability proliferated in the 1980s, I became convinced they were a significant new form of life writing, worthy of scholarly scrutiny.

Though not a scholar of British literature, nor a devotee of Virginia Woolf, when I stumbled on Woolf's marvellous essay ‘On Being Ill', I was struck by its recognition of ‘how tremendous [is] the spiritual change that [illness] brings, how astonishing when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed’ (9) and by its related claim that, ‘considering how common illness is … it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place … among the prime themes of literature’ (9). As Susannah Mintz's recent Hurt and Pain: Literature and the Suffering Body has demonstrated, Woolf was not entirely correct even about what she considered ‘literature’ (imaginative genres like poetry, drama, and fiction); as Mintz shows, canonical texts in those genres have been more amenable to the expression of illness and disability than recent critics (following Elaine Scarry) have claimed. Still, this was not as true of imaginative literature when Woolf made her claim, and, since her time, autobiographical writing has come to the fore as a medium in which to make sense of suffering, illness, and disability—and, more broadly, to express the experience of anomalous (but not necessarily painful) embodiment.

In 1990, I proposed and edited a special issue on illness, disability, and life writing for a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, a young journal open to new ideas (the issue ‘Illness, Disability, and Life-Writing,’ was published in 1991). In my own contribution, ‘Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Lifewriting,’ I wrote,

Though Woolf's remarks are concerned with imaginative literature, they are certainly relevant to life writing. Especially to the predicament of the female autobiographer, for [Woolf's] account of the suppression of illness in literature has as its subtext the domination of discourse by masculinist assumptions … the Western privileging of mind over body, the tendency to deny the body's intervention in intellectual and spiritual life. (68)

In the 1990s, other critics mapped this new territory. Adapting the clinical term to refer to non-clinical narratives, Ann Hunsaker Hawkins's Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography (1993) was the first monograph to pay sustained attention to this sort of life writing, beginning with Donne. Not long after her pioneering book appeared, Arthur Frank published the Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, Ethics (1995). A sociologist, Frank had survived a heart attack and cancer in early middle age; indeed, he had written an illness memoir of his own, At the Will of the Body (1991). His scholarly book, then, reflected the point of view of someone with personal experience of mortal illness, on the one hand, and, on the other, a social scientist's perspective on the roles assumed and assigned in medicalisation. He supplemented Hunsaker Hawkins's mythic approach with a tripartite division of illness narratives into ‘restitution', ‘quest', and ‘chaos’ stories—a distinction that has continued to be useful to students in the field.

In Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability and Life Writing (1997), I examined life writing generated by four conditions—breast cancer, HIV/AIDS, paralysis, and deafness. At the time, there was still not much in the way of secondary source material; my method was to read all the book-length narratives of each condition that I could find, including some that were self-published. Given the context of the various rights movements, I was particularly interested in whether, and how, these narratives (mostly, but not all, first-person in point of view) responded to the dominant discourses (sexist, homophobic, and ableist) of the bodies in question. In addition, I exposed a more general rhetorical imperative that I termed ‘the tyranny of the comic plot’—the strong preference in the literary marketplace for a positive ‘narrative arc', i.e., a happy ending. Obviously, that demand militated against first-person narratives of HIV/AIDS, which was not survivable in the early days of the epidemic; it was similarly repressive of narratives of worst-case scenarios of cancer, chronic illness, and some impairments (what Frank labeled ‘chaos narratives’).

While this special issue addresses narratives of illness and disability, the two are not the same, and we should be wary of confusing or conflating them. Illness is properly addressed by the ‘medical model', which interpellates subjects as ‘patients', assigning them the ‘sick role’ and, ideally, bringing medical intervention to bear in a beneficial way. But disability often does not require or respond to biomedical treatment. Central to Disability Studies is a distinction pertinent here, between impairment (a dysfunction in the body, which may be amenable to cure, rehabilitation, or prosthetic modification) and disability (environmental features that exclude or impede those with impairments; these require altering the context—legal, social, and architectural—in which the impaired body functions). Hence the ‘social model', which defines ‘disability’ as culturally and socially constructed.

And yet, though distinct in concept, illness and impairment often coexist in the same individuals. Indeed, in practice illness and impairment have a reciprocal relation: each may cause the other. Moreover, like disability, some illnesses—especially chronic or terminal ones—carry powerful stigmas. Illnesses, too, are susceptible to damaging social and cultural construction. For that and other reasons, recent work in Disability Studies questions the sharp distinction between illness and disability and indeed the utility of the social model. Having initially advanced the argument that disability is a harmful social construction, like race and gender, then, Disability Studies scholars are now reckoning with the limitations and flaws of that analogy. For instance, unlike other minority conditions manifest in the body, like race and gender, impairment involves disadvantages that are intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, and thus not amenable to discursive or institutional reform. Disability Studies is increasingly acknowledging that impairment may entail traumatic effects: chronic pain, progressive degeneration, and early death. Disability studies is coming around to a somewhat more favourable view of the biomedical model—at least, an acknowledgment that it is indispensable.

Given the ubiquity of illness and disability, it is notable that the distribution of narratives of anomalous physical conditions does not track their currency in the general population. A very few conditions still account for very large numbers of narratives: to the four I examined in Recovering Bodies, we could add depression (among mental illnesses), eating disorders, and, recently, autism spectrum disorders and dementia. Of course, parents continue to write narratives of severely disabled children, and most dementia narratives are written by carers, usually daughters or wives of male subjects. But with conditions that might seem to preclude first-person narration—like autism, other developmental disabilities, and dementia—the mere existence of autobiography and memoir itself challenges harmful preconceptions. Such texts are performative utterances; their composition enacts their message: there's a person here, capable of self-understanding and self-expression.

At the same time, a large number of conditions have prompted small numbers of narratives. Over the years, my informal tally of these conditions has grown steadily longer; it now includes (in alphabetical order) amputation, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), anorexia, anxiety, asthma, bipolar illness, borderline personality disorder, cerebral palsy, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic pain, Crohn's disease, cystic fibrosis, deformity, diabetes, Down syndrome, epilepsy, insomnia, irritable bowel syndrome, locked-in syndrome, multiple sclerosis, Munchausen syndrome by proxy, obesity, obsessive-compulsive disorder, pancreatic cancer, Parkinson's, prosopagnosia (face-blindness), prostate cancer, schizophrenia, stroke, stuttering, Tourette syndrome, and vitiligo. Some of these conditions are very rare, or mysterious one-offs, like those impelling Susannah Calahan's Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness (an unusual autoimmune disorder that defied initial diagnosis) and Head Case: My Brain and Other Wonders, by Cole Cohen (a hole in her brain the size of a lemon, which accounted for her difficulty with spatial and temporal relationships). Other conditions, like large-breastedness or having undergone a lobotomy, don't qualify as illnesses or disabilities, but they involve unusual bodily configurations or experience. Collectively they constitute what I have dubbed ‘some body [two words] memoirs’ or ‘odd body memoirs’: they register the experience of living in, with, or as a particular kind of anomalous body. The appeal of such narratives is not so much to others with the condition in question (as with the narratives of more common, or more symbolically loaded, conditions) or even to those who may fear experiencing it themselves, but rather to a broader audience (which includes me) curious about what it's like to live in a body functionally or formally different from their own.

This list is not comprehensive; nor could it be: it seems that every time I browse a biography/memoir section in a large bookstore, I come across a new example. And if I think of a condition I am not aware of having been narrated, Google often proves me wrong. During the so-called memoir boom in North America, an unusual impairment or illness was considered a valid basis for a full-length memoir. Indeed, some popular examples, like Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, have been adapted into film, and reached even wider audiences. Like Kaysen, the writers of these memoirs are often young women; like Cole Cohen and Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face, some have earned MFA degrees from prestigious programs. Thus, professional writers have begun to flaunt bodily conditions they might once have hidden, or camouflaged in fiction. Illness and disability memoirs have achieved great popularity, critical esteem, and currency in contemporary media. Along with gay, queer, and transgendered people, ill and disabled people are coming out in life writing.

In the Internet age, the ease, decreased cost, and increasing respectability of self-publishing further facilitate such testimony. As a result, autosomatography proliferated dramatically around the turn of the millennium. Life writing about illness and disability has expanded—one might say exploded—into new modes and media as well. Beyond the realm of print stretches the vast expanse of cyberspace, which hosts blogs, online support groups, and other forms of self-representation. In addition, social media like Facebook and Twitter offer venues in which people with various medical conditions can issue running accounts of their welfare in real time, giving new simultaneity and immediacy to illness and disability narrative.

These phenomena should not be dismissed as facile or narcissistic. Whether a particular condition is heavily stigmatised or not, illness and disability can be isolating, and such isolation is inherently toxic. In this case, ‘virtual’ does not mean attenuated or artificial; virtual communities can provide vital resources, emotional support, encouragement, and stimulation in ways that actual communities sometimes fail to do. Indeed, in the case of rare conditions, face-to-face community may be simply unavailable. So the Internet provides a new kind of accessibility, especially important for those with mobility impairments. Social media can provide a sense of community that is itself therapeutic and healing.

In the United States, even mainstream media have participated in this dissemination of autosomatography. Susan Gubar, a feminist scholar best known as co-author (with Sandra Gilbert) of The Madwoman in the Attic, has followed up her 2013 Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Surviving Ovarian Cancer with occasional blog posts in the New York Times. Similarly, diagnosed with terminal cancer at the end of a literary career spent writing about others’ neurological impairments, Oliver Sacks narrated his dying in several essays published in the Times. More democratically, and more significantly, its online edition has hosted multiple sets of brief oral accounts of nearly 50 conditions under the rubric ‘Patient Voices'. Readers can hear several ordinary people of different genders, races, and backgrounds discuss their experience of each condition. Clearly, autosomatography has come of age. I welcome this phenomenon, as it expands our sense of the range of bodily experiences humans may have. It begins to address, and redress, the Cartesian privileging of mind over body.

An additional aspect of illness narrative worthy of mention here is the advent and spread of Narrative Medicine—an approach to clinical care conceived and articulated by Dr. Rita Charon and institutionalised in the Program in Narrative Medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at the Columbia University Medical Center (Narrative Medicine). This approach involves training medical professionals (not solely physicians) in narrative competence (both as readers and as writers) in order to make them more empathetic and attentive to the way in which patients experience and understand their conditions. Thus, it builds on the distinction between ‘disease’ and ‘illness', where ‘disease’ refers to a disorder in the abstract, viewed through a biomedical lens, and ‘illness’ refers to a patient's particular experience of a disorder: the way it affects their life narrative, family dynamics, and so on. It approaches the patient's condition in a broad perspective comprehending its spiritual and emotional, as well as physical, dimensions. To borrow a coinage I only recently came across, we might call the goal ‘empathography', rather than pathography (Lammer). The method imagines narrative not as the bald recapitulation of a series of events—ideally, from symptoms to examination, diagnosis, treatment, and recovery—but as the construction of meaning out of the distressing, disorienting, experience of bodily disorder. In Arthur Frank's terms, the former approach yields a ‘restitution narrative', whose protagonist is the physician, rather than the patient; the latter approach, a ‘quest narrative', whose protagonist is the patient as a person.

On the face of it, this approach is consistent with what I see as the deep subtext or, to put it differently, the ‘work’ of autosomatography—not the mere expression of experiences of illness and disability but the active reclaiming of them from medicalisation (this was the implication of the title of Recovering Bodies: that illness narrators can regain authority over their bodily lives). But as Charon has herself acknowledged, Narrative Medicine entails the risk of enhancing physicians’ narrative competence at patients’ expense: it may unintentionally augment biomedical authority over the illness narrative (‘Listening’). Moreover, giving practitioners greater access to patients’ private lives can invite, and may even encourage, ethical abuses, violations of the privacy of very vulnerable subjects. In any case, while it aspires to treat the whole person, Narrative Medicine is still and only a variant of the medical model; unlike the social model, it has no designs on the world.

Ultimately, illness and disability narrative are too important to be left to physicians; as much as possible, such narrative should be authored by those with the conditions in question. And perhaps more useful to clinicians than narratives they may co-construct as practitioners of Narrative Medicine would be the careful study of illness and disability narratives, beginning in medical school. I have long been a believer in, and advocate for, the clinical value of non-clinical narratives of illness and disability. In this context I refer to autosomatography as ‘quality of life writing'—combining the sometimes problematic term ‘quality of life’ with the generic term ‘life writing’—because this body of work has great potential to demystify and destigmatise the conditions it recounts from the inside.

The essays in this issue sample, rather than survey, this rich, ever-expanding field. Because they discuss diverse kinds of materials from a variety of perspectives, they indicate numerous areas for future work. The first contribution, Ann Jurecic's ‘The illness essay', looks at once backward and forward. Glancing backward, its opening line informs us that ‘the essay was born out of suffering, injury, and recovery'. She is referring here to the inventor of the personal essay, Michel de Montaigne. I regard Montaigne's ‘On a Monster-Child’ as marking the moment in Western culture when it became possible to view a highly anomalous body not as a ‘wonder'—an omen—but rather as a mere freak of nature, so I am glad to lead off the issue with this acknowledgment of him. Jurecic's essay is forward-looking as well, however, in its focus on an emerging genre, the lyrical essay, which can address illness and disability in ways that sidestep the need for a narrative arc. As the term ‘lyrical’ suggests, her exemplary texts—Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams, Eula Biss's On Immunity: An Inoculation, and Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby—draw on the resources of poetry to express aspects of embodiment in original and challenging ways.

Given the importance of Virginia Woolf's essay ‘On Being Ill', it seems apropos that the issue should include Janine Utell's ‘View from the sickroom: Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Wordsworth, and writing women's lives of illness'. In it, Utell explores Woolf's literary connections with Dorothy Wordsworth, and also Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as expressed in various genres, including diaries and biography. Her focus is on how women may use writing to create ‘a transgressive space’ outside ‘normal’ life in which to negotiate complex relations with their minds and bodies.

The following article, Susannah Mintz's ‘Mindful skin: disability and the ethics of touch in life ‘riting’ represents a foray into relatively unfamiliar territory (for me, at least). It focuses on the body in a very particular way—on a very fundamental, but too often ignored, sense (`the body's most primitive’ one), that of touch—but it is also attentive to the mind. The point is of course that the body and mind are not merely in touch with each other, so to speak, but inextricable elements of one entity, aspects of a single existential and ontological being. Mintz brings together seemingly disparate phenomena—Buddhist mindfulness, disability activism, and the ethics of care—in an innovative and fruitful way. She concludes with a discussion of Mark O'Brien's memoir How I Became a Human Being (the basis for the motion picture The Sessions) and Sharon Cameron's Beautiful Work: A Meditation on Pain.

One of the liveliest new venues for autosomatography has been graphic narrative, so I am grateful for Krista Quesenberry's and Susan Merrill Squier's ‘Life writing and graphic narratives'. They trace the origins of graphic memoir and speculate about its potential for the representation of illness and disability. (One significant aspect of autosomatography in graphic form is that it renders the affected body visible to readers in a way that print does not). Their collaborative contribution is innovative in form, as well: it comprises an exchange of emails between the two as they develop ideas and insights about the new genre. Graphic narrative is already being employed in medical education, and it bids to become much more common, so their analysis is particularly timely.

As my former colleague James Berger has pointed out, Disability Studies has been slow to reckon with the traumatic nature of disability—for family and friends as well as for the disabled themselves (‘Trauma’). Similarly, Trauma Studies has largely ignored disability as an arena of trauma. Margaret Torrell's contribution, ‘Interactions: disability, trauma, and the autobiography', helps to address and repair these oversights. After a discussion of the methodology of the two fields, she uses Kenny Fries's memoir Body, Remember to demonstrate how the two approaches may complement each other.

Earlier, I touched upon the critical role that illness and disability narratives can play in medical education, beyond their appeal to lay readers. And I noted that Narrative Medicine, though collaborative, tends to situate authorship and authority in the physician. Richard Freadman's and Paula Bain's ‘Life writing and dementia care: a project to assist those “with dementia” to tell their stories’ demonstrates the possibility, and profit, of having patients author their own stories, albeit with some coaching and assistance. There are ethical dangers here, of course, but it seems clear that under the best of conditions, patients—even (or especially) those who may be losing their self-narrative competence—can benefit in multiple ways from engaging in this process. The Freadman-Bain project of leading a therapeutic writing group for dementia patients illustrates the utility of self-narrative in addressing deficits in memory and cognition. These narratives serve their authors, first, by activating and exercising their memories in the process of composition; later, as records the authors can consult for reference and value as personal creations; and still later, as memorials available to posterity.

One of the features of Life Writing that I have always valued and enjoyed is its Reflection section. This issue contains two contributions under this rubric.

Hugh Kiernan's ‘“Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now”: cancer and a virtual relationship’ is in itself a kind of double feature. It arises from Kiernan's virtual acquaintance with another cancer patient, forged in an on-line writing forum. Kiernan has published his own narrative of living with multiple myeloma. He keeps his own illness experience in the background here, though, to showcase and respond to the poetry of his much younger female friend, who has a very different kind of cancer. In addition to introducing her voice, and enriching the issue's range by including autosomatography in poetic form, this piece testifies to the value of the Internet as a site for vital connection among those with illnesses and disabilities.

The issue concludes with Joanne Limburg's ‘“But that's just what you can't do”: personal reflections on the construction and management of identity following a late diagnosis of Asperger syndrome'. Sometimes forgotten in the study of illness and disability is the subject's obligation to enact a certain role: to play disabled, to assume the sick role, to present as ill or disabled. In this case the irony is that Limburg, who was diagnosed with Asperger's as an adult, needs to perform her disability in order to ensure that she qualifies for legal benefits and accommodation. Disability rights laws are invaluable enactments of the social model, but their application may impose peculiar burdens on those they purport to benefit. In this case, writing back (and humorously) may be the best revenge.

I want to thank Maureen Perkins for inviting me to guest-edit this special issue in the first place and for ably performing all the invisible work of organising the issue and submitting the text to the publisher. And of course, I am hugely grateful to all the contributors for their provocative articles and essays.

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#narrative #illness #disability #embodiment #essay #personal essay #trauma #coping

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