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hodgdon-rifle-powder · 1 year ago

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THE HODGDON STORY

Success in the American tradition demands the qualities of motivation, determination, willingness to sacrifice, hard work, timing and a true element of luck. Even in our modern times of high taxation, escalating costs, and governmental regulation, it is still possible for the “common man” to become successful if he has a good idea and most or all of these qualities.

The Hodgdon Companies, as they exist today, are an example of this tradition. Until he began the surplus powder business, Bruce Hodgdon was a salesman for the Gas Service Company, traveling local territory selling gas appliances. From a few dollars borrowed on the cash value of his life insurance policy has evolved a manufacturing and distributing company that has customers in all 50 states and many foreign countries.

All his life Bruce Hodgdon was interested in shooting, hunting, and reloading. He custom-loaded ammunition for friends during World War II while he was in the Navy and after, while working full time as a salesman for the Gas Service Company. Somewhere Bruce had heard that the government burned huge stocks of surplus powder after WWI because of the lack of market for them, and he figured that the same would be true after hostilities ended in 1945.

Even though he had no place to store gunpowder, and did not know if enough shooters would gamble to purchase unknown types of propellant, Bruce cut government red tape and soon owned 50,000 pounds of government surplus 4895. An old boxcar moved to a rented farm pasture served as the first magazine, the first one-inch ad placed in the American Rifleman, and Bruce was in business.

The first 150-pound kegs of powder sold for $30.00 each plus freight! Early shipments also consisted of metal cans with hand-glued labels sent out in wooden boxes made from orange crates and sawed on a homemade circle saw by Bruce and his grade-school age boys, J. B. and Bob. A little later, the boys delivered shipments to the REA or the Merriam Frisco train terminal each morning on their way to high school. The trunk of the family 1940 Ford served as carrier for hundreds of thousands of pounds of powder during this time. Bruce’s Wife Amy served as bookkeeper and saleswoman. Very quickly mail order sales grew to include other reloading components, tools, and finally firearms and ammunition.

In 1952 Bruce resigned from the Gas Service Company and B. E. Hodgdon, Incorporated, was officially underway. J.B. and Bob entered the business full time after graduating from college in 1959 and 1961. After considerable expansion in the 1960s, it became apparent that splitting the wholesale firearm business from the nationwide powder business would save confusion among customers and facilitate bookkeeping. Hodgdon Powder Company came into being in 1966 as a result. Eventually, the wholesale firearms company was sold in 1984.

If it were not for the efforts of a handful of men seeing that changes were made, shooters all over the country would now have much greater difficulty obtaining their powders. In 1963 and 1964, Bruce Hodgdon, Ted Curtis, Homer Clark of the Alcan Company, and Dave Wolfe of Wolfe Publishing Company, were successful in persuading the ICC – now the DOT – through exhaustive tests by the Bureau of Explosives to downgrade certain packages of smokeless powder to the much-easier-to-ship “4.1 – Flammable Solid” Classification. As a result, containers under 8 lbs. each and in approved packages of shipments weighing less than 100 net pounds can today be handled by any common carrier, including UPS and FedEx. Previous to this, all Smokeless powders were considered “Class B explosives” for shipping purposes, which is nearly as restrictive as the almost impossible task of transporting black powder.

After retlentless testing, Hodgdon Powder Company received approval for 1.4C shipping in 2014. Now, nearly all canisters up to eight pounds can be shipped under the 1.4c classification, making shipping much more efficient.

In 1967, the Hodgdon’s built what was then billed as “the world’s largest indoor shooting range,” an indoor structure allowing 44 shooters to share a 25 Yard range at the same time. This range and store is open to the public at 6201 Robinson, Overland Park, Kansas (www.thebullethole.com). Although this business was sold to outside parties in November 1982, we invite any of our nationwide customers to visit when in the Kansas City area.

Bruce Hodgdon passed away in 1997. Bruce was among other things an avid reloader, competitive rifle shooter, trap shooter, hunter, NRA Benefactor Member, and World War II Veteran. The industry honored Bruce for his contributions to the shooting sports in 1995/1996 with the Shooting Academy Award of Excellence. The responsibility of running the company then fell to his sons, J.B. and Bob Hodgdon, the two grade-school boys back in the late 1940’s, who worked hand in hand with their father to establish and grow this company.

Bruce’s oldest son, J.B. Hodgdon is still active in the business today and serves on the board and as Chairman Emeritus. He still remains passionate about shooting and hunting pursuits.

Bruce’s youngest son Robert Eltinge “Bob” Hodgdon went home to be with his Lord and Savior on January 14, 2023. Up to his last year, Bob was still active in shooting and hunting activities with friends and family.

Today, Hodgdon smokeless propellants are developed and manufactured to meet the needs of every reloader. The powder that started Bruce Hodgdon’s business, H4895, is still produced and sold along with world-class powders available for just about any Rifle, Handgun, and Shotshell load.

Smokeless propellants are only half of the famous Hodgdon story. Muzzleloading shooters and hunters around the world recognize Hodgdon as the company that makes the best performing, most convenient, safest, and easy to clean black powder substitute propellants. Pyrodex®, introduced in 1976, is the most successful black powder substitute on the market. Pyrodex products are safer, cleaner burning and produces 30% more shots per pound than common black powder. Pyrodex also makes it easier to clean the gun after shooting.

Innovation is a key part of Hodgdon’s philosophy and values. The patented Pyrodex Pellets give the modern muzzleloader speed and safety in a convenient preformed charge. They offer quick and safe no-spill loading, instant ignition, and faster second shots.

Always looking to the future, Hodgdon took muzzleloading to the next millennium with Triple Seven® muzzleloading Pellets and granular propellants. Introduced in 2001, Triple Seven has proven to be very consistent and accurate but is most recognized for its easy water clean up and no sulfur (rotten egg) smell! In 2007, Triple Seven Magnums were introduced. Magnums deliver higher energy for serious hunting knock down power.

Hodgdon Powder Company offices are located at 6430 Vista Drive in Shawnee, Kansas. The Powder magazine, packaging and manufacturing facilities are maintained about 140 miles southwest of the main office, in Herington, Kansas. In 2020, when Hodgdon Acquired Accurate, Ramshot and Blackhorn 209, the Miles City, Montana location was also acquired. The Miles City location is still occupied with office staff, warehousing space and a world-class ballistics lab.

To better serve our reloading customers Hodgdon Powder Company continues to grow. Hodgdon purchased IMR® Powder Company in October 2003. IMR legendary powders have been the mainstay of numerous handloaders for almost 100 years. IMR powders continue to be manufactured in the same plant and with the same exacting performance criteria and quality assurance standards that shooters have come to expect.

In March 2006, Hodgdon Powder Company and Winchester® Ammunition announced that Winchester® branded reloading powders would be licensed to Hodgdon. Winchester smokeless propellants, the choice of loading professionals, are available to the handloader to duplicate the factory performance of loads from handgun to rifle and shotgun.

In January 2009 Hodgdon acquired an American icon GOEX Powder, Inc. GOEX has a rich history dating back to 1802 where E.I. Du Pont de Nemours broke ground on his original black powder plant along the Brandywine River in Delaware. Goex Powder, Inc. manufactures black powder used for sporting applications such as civil war re-enactments and flintlock firearms, and is a vital component for industrial and military applications. Located in Minden, Louisiana, GOEX Powder, Inc. is the only U.S. manufacturer of black powder. Hodgdon then sold the GOEX plant and brand in 2021.

In October of 2020, Hodgdon purchased the Accurate Powder and Ramshot smokeless brands from Western Powders, along with the Blackhorn 209 black powder substitute brand.

The company continues to drive innovation in smokeless powder through the Hodgdon, Ramshot, Accurate Powder, IMR and Winchester brands. On the black powder substitute product side, brands Blackhorn209, Hodgdon Pyrodex, Hodgdon Triple Seven and IMR White Hots continue our history of bringing technologically advanced and unique propellants to the marketplace. Today, as over the last seventy-five years, the success of the Hodgdon Companies depends upon the goodwill and satisfaction of our loyal customers. Thank you for the trust you continue to give our products; we hope our products are a part of the reason you enjoy your chosen sport of hunting or shooting.

#9mm ammo #military

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donveinot · 2 years ago

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dustedmagazine · 4 years ago

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Derek Taylor 2020: We’re Still Here

That’s about the best that can be said for a year that pulled out nearly every stop in a surging sea change to calamity, adversity and tragedy. The number of people lost to a pandemic that now stands steadfast as a monument to the true meaning of American Exceptionalism as the epitome of empathy-eradicating self-interest is enough to negate even the noblest efforts at laughing to keep from crying. Musicians and music persisted though, even in a severely altered performance landscape of shuttered venues and virtual concerts. And recorded offerings new and archival remained plentiful.

When so much about the present feels like a sprint backwards, societally, environmentally and across multiple other measures, music reliably endures as a means for finding both meaning and footing in the world. What follows are 20 capsule vignettes describing selections from the sea of albums circulated this year that kept me afloat, followed by 25 more in list form that did the same. Thank you for reading and thanks for sticking with us.

Paul Desmond — The Complete 1975 Toronto Recordings (Mosaic)

Given the magnitude of hardship this year’s wrought on living musicians, it may appear a bit perverse to lead this list with a dead one. Even so, this immersive set’s become an old reliable when it comes to achieving aurally-sourced solace. Desmond, the arch and affluent altoist, leaning into a Canadian club residency with ace sidemen while making good on his gentleman’s agreement with absent Dave Brubeck to abstain from piano accompaniment. The leader’s lady-killer instincts are assiduously evident in the amorously-oriented song choices as his dulcet, tranquilizing tone seduces and delights, night after night.

Chris Dingman — Peace (Inner Arts)

An intensely personal project where abundancy of content arose not out of ambition but rather necessity and is made all the more affecting for it. Dingman designed and played the nearly six hours of solo vibraphone music on this set for his hospice-sequestered father with sole purpose of providing comfort and calm. Reflection after his parent’s passing moved him to release it into the world with the hope that it could do the same for others. Intention accomplished.

Joe McPhee — Black Is the Color (Corbett vs. Dempsey)

It’s been a distressing year for nearly everyone, but particularly for McPhee, who lost his brother Charlie to illness. Even amidst ongoing emotional tumult, his fecundity felt undiminished. AC/DC on the British OtoROKU label offers another entry with the English organ trio Decoy. Of Things Beyond Thule, Vol. 2 is a smashing CD sequel to its vinyl predecessor with Dave Rempis, Tomeka Reid, Brandon Lopez and Paal Nilssen-Love comprising the super group. A reissue of the seminal She Knows… with Scandinavian power trio The Thing on the Ezz-thetics label and Black is the Color compiling early concert material in surprisingly sharp fidelity from the Corbett vs. Dempsey imprint cover the archival end of things.

Sonny Rollins — Rollins in Holland (Resonance)

The Saxophone Colossus holding court with Dutch compatriots in 1967. Most conspicuous is daredevil drummer Han Bennink, who even at this early stage straddles swing to European Free Jazz from behind his kit. Rollins shifts between comparatively pithy studio salvos and effusive concert excursions that once again cement his supremacy in the strenuous realm of long form improvisation. Seven decades as a musician makes for a bank vault-sized cache of bootlegs, but this one, refurbished and authorized remains something special.

Stephen Riley — Friday the 13th (Steeplechase)

Like McPhee, Riley’s a perennial resident of my pantheon. This date realized a long-standing wish to hear him in the company of cornetist Kirk Knuffke backed by the freeing simplicity of bass and drums. Both men have aerated, instantly recognizable tones and pliancy in phrasing that provides practically endless possibilities in tandem. Riley’s also instrumental as featured guest on Pierre Dørge’s Bluu Afroo, a slightly preemptive Ruby Anniversary celebration of guitarist’s multinational New Jungle Orchestra.

Sam Rivers — Ricochet & Braids (No Business)

The auspicious launch of a Sam Rivers archival series last year was among the Lithuanian No Business label’s greatest achievements. Two more seminal entries came down the pike in 2020: Ricochet featuring Dave Holland and Barry Altschul of particularly fine vintage, and Braids spotlighting another pivotal Rivers ensemble in Hamburg with low brass wizard Joe Daley. There are four more to go, which should target the end of 2022 for the series’ completion.

James Brandon Lewis — Live at Willisau & Molecular (Intakt)

Lewis is the type of compelling artist tapped for accolades like Down Beat’s Rising Star award, despite having been active as an accomplished improviser for over a decade. Delayed exposure is common collateral to a career path in improvised music though, and the saxophonist hasn’t let slow-to-cotton critics slow him down a bit. A deal inked with the Swiss Intakt imprint has so far yielded Live at Willsau, which finds him in fiery duo with Chad Taylor, and Molecular, a studio venture with an all-star quartet that will hopefully become a working band again in 2021.

Susan Alcorn — Pedernal (Relative Pitch)

Pedal steel may feel like a nascent voice in improvised music, but in actuality Susan Alcorn and her peers have been plying it as a viable vehicle for some time. While Pedernal is somewhat perplexingly her first album as clear-cut leader, impediments to an earlier debut seem inconsequential given the ample amount of thought and design evident in the end product. Strings wielded by Michael Formanek, Mary Halvorson and Mark Feldman weave with the wide gamut of Alcorn’s aqueous sonorities across intricate pieces further stamped by Ryan Sawyer’s peripatetic drums. The results are at once daring and distinguished.

John Scofield — Swallow Tales (ECM)

ECM has an enviably accomplished record when it comes to matching the austerity and formality of its sound design to artists’ objectives. Case in point this stark, but not standoffish trio set that’s as much (electric) bassist Steve Swallow’s offspring as it is Scofield’s. Drummer Stewart is the third point in the triangle, but he sagely defers to his elders, leaving them to a dance of differently gauged strings that expertly balances motion and space.

Corbett vs. Dempsey

John Corbett is emblematic of that rare breed of music monomaniac who balances obsessiveness with altruistic generosity. He’s personally responsible for bringing dozens of rare and classic recordings back into circulation, first through the fondly remembered Unheard Music Series and more recently via the CvD concern. This year, another stack was added to that sum with Milford Graves & Don Pullen’s The Complete Yale Concert 1966 (including the rarified Nommo), Alexander von Schlippenbach’s Three Nails Left, Tetterettet by the ICP Tentet, Peter Kowald’s self-titled FMP debut as a leader and the madcap New Acoustic Swing Duo from Willem Breuker and Han Bennink as standouts.

Whit Boyd Combo — Party Girls & Dracula (the Dirty Old Man) (Modern Harmonic)

Vintage skin flick soundtracks have rarely if ever received an even-handed shake in terms of relative artistic merits. Tarred with the same smut brush as the visuals they were constructed to accompany, they’re routinely viewed as just as disposable. The Whit Boyd Combo doesn’t exactly dispel this dictum, but it does lay down some funky and at times refreshingly fractious freewheeling horns over organ, bass, and drums driven beats on this late-60s session tape excavated by the folks at Modern Harmonic. The companion Dracula (the Dirty Old Man) isn’t quite on par, but it’s still a solid vessel for competently crafted fossilized grooves.

Robbie Basho — Songs of the Avatars (Tompkins Square)

Real Gone Music whet the appetite earlier this year with the release of Songs of the Great Mystery, a “lost session” from Basho’s tenure at the Vanguard label. Songs of the Avatars ups the ante substantially by granting outsider access to a six-hour survey of the dearly departed fingerstyle guitarist’s personal tape trove. The aural riches are ample and include Basho exploring familiar proclivities (Indian, Native American and Japanese interpolations) alongside unexpected new ones (ballet and cantata) with passion and conviction to burn along the way.

Jimi Hendrix — Live in Maui (Experience Hendrix)

Posthumous Hendrix is a seemingly inexhaustible resource as each year repackaged and repurposed treasures are released into the marketplace. Fortunately, familial heirs are the ones doing the sowing and this lavish set documenting musical and extra-musical particulars of the icon’s reluctant conscription into cosmic hippie scam does right by him. Given the windswept conditions near the Haleakala Crater it’s a minor miracle that he, Billy Cox and Mitch Mitchell mesh as well as they do, and while the footage included can be frustrating in its fragmentary presentation, it’s still a thrill to see and hear them jamming in amiable and ebullient form.

Joe Maneri, Udi Hrant & Friends — The Cleopatra Record (Canary)

Details on this one could easily serve as grist for a credible short film screenplay with perhaps Jim Jarmusch directing. Brooklyn, 1963: A group of marginalized ethnic musicians relegated to playing wedding gigs gets conscripted for an afternoon recording session. The cheaply packaged and provincially distributed results are destined for the anonymity of dime store cut out bins. Except that the band includes two geniuses: Joe Maneri, who would go on to become a master microtonal improviser/composer and Udi Hrant Kenkulian, one of most revered modern doyens of the Turkish oud. Available over at Bandcamp for a pittance.

Ayalew Mesfin — Good Aderegechegn, Che Belew and Tewedije Limut (Now Again)

Adding up Buda Musique’s 30-volume Ethiopiques series and a host of other more modest enterprises, it’s obvious that there’s never been more access to vintage Ethiopian music than now. This trilogy of discs from the Now Again label covering vocalist/keyboardist/bandleader Ayalew Mesfin’s catalog restores one of the last untapped reservoirs to circulation. Tight horns, choppy, fuzz and wah-wah drenched guitars and chugging bass fuel dance floor burners while Mesfin’s pipes work memorable magic on a string of melancholic, melismatic ballads.

Kent & Modern Records Blues into the 60s, Vol. 1 & 2 (Ace)

Ace’s appellation as a music label of enviable reach and import has never been an erroneous assignation. This pair of compilations investigates the urban, but far from urbane, blues scene surrounding Los Angeles as documented by the Kent label in the 1960s. Comparatively longer-in-tooth legends like T-Bone Walker and Big Jay McNeely jockey with younger, fame hungry artists like Larry Davis and Little Joe Blue in negotiating a West Coast argot that’s heavy on electricity channeled through guitars and organs. McNeely’s ripping “Blues in G Minor” is one of several snarling sonic wolves in non-descript sheep’s titling.

V/A — A Stranger I May Be: Savoy Gospel 1954-1986 (Honest Jons)

This astutely-sequenced set stands out in the particularly plentiful playing field of this year’s gospel reissues. The mighty Savoy label started out as a jazz venture before branching out into other African American musical idioms. The compilers at Honest Jons parse the program chronologically across three-discs and leave the heavy-lifting of context and artists biography to a lengthy essay. Choirs, ensembles, bands, and moonlighting R&B singers all make appearances directing their talents to devotional and invocational celebrations of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Sun Ra

One of the highlight roundtables at Dusted this year was a Listening Post ruminating on the Sun Ra Arkesta with and sans Ra on the occasion of the band’s new release Swirling. I got to play the (hopefully uncharacteristic) part of curmudgeon in those exchanges principally because while I respect the ensemble’s longevity absent their lodestar leader, there’s still an explicit void extant that tends to eclipse my actual interest. The Ra reissue docket for 2020, which included excellent editions of Celestial Love and A Fireside Chat with Lucifer from Modern Harmonic, When Angels Speak of Love on Cosmic Myth, Heliocentric Worlds, Vols. 1 and 2 from Ezz-thetics, and Strut’s Egypt 1971, which collects Dark Myth Equation Visitation, Nidhamu and Horizon alongside a bevy of contemporaneous unreleased recordings, only bolstered the bias.

Fresh Sound Records

Still the standard for thoughtfully and lavishly curated jazz reissues, Barcelona-based Fresh Sound kept commensurately prolific pace throughout the year. Gary Peacock - The Beginnings surveys the recently deceased bassist’s early work as a versatile California-stationed sideman. Remembering does similar service to rare concert recordings by Belgian guitarist Rene Thomas while The Complete 1961 Milano Sessions offers truth in advertising by compiling woodwind savant Buddy Collette’s sojourn on Italian shores with (mostly) indigenous sidemen.

V/A — Sumer is Icumenin (Grapefruit)

An overdue sequel to Dust on the Nettles (2015), which apparently commands on princely sums on Discogs these days, this set encompasses 4+ hours of cherry-picked vintage British freak folk. Second helpings from stalwarts of the style such as Comus, Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention join Albion offerings from obscurants like Vulcan’s Hammer, Mr. Fox and Oberon in celebrating the weird crossroads of ancient Britannic and 1960s counterculture influences. The cant is more to The Wicker Man side of the spectrum with Magnet’s bucolic canticle “Corn Rigs” the ringer in that regard.

Twenty-five more in mostly stochastic order:

Aruán Ortiz - Inside Rhythmic Falls (Intakt)

Brandon Seabrook/Cooper-Moore/Gerald Cleaver — Exultations (Astral Spirits)

Cecil Taylor & Tony Oxley — Birdland, Neuberg 2011 (Fundacja Sluchaj)

Horace Tapscott w/ the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra — Ancestral Echoes: The Covina Sessions, 1976 (Dark Tree)

Damon Smith — Whatever is Not Stone is Light (Balance Point Acoustics)

Frank Lowe & Rashied Ali — Duo Exchange: Complete Sessions (Survival)

Dudu Pukwana — and the “Spears” (Matsuli Music)

Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl — Artlessly Falling (Firehouse 12)

Burton Greene — Peace Beyond Conflict (Birdwatcher)

Albert Ayler — Trio 1964: Prophecy Revisited (Ezz-thetics)

JD Allen — Toys/Die Dreaming (Savant)

Charles Mingus — At Bremen 1964 and 1975 (Sunnyside)

The Warriors of the Wonderful Sound — Soundpath (Clean Feed)

Kidd Jordan/Joel Futterman/Alvin Fielder — Spirits (Silkheart)

Roland Haynes — 2nd Wave (Black Jazz)

Quin Kirchner — The Shadows and the Light (Astral Spirits)

Thelonious Monk — Palo Alto (Universal/Impulse)

Black Unity Trio — Al-Fatihah (Salaam Records/Gotta Groove)

Gary Smulyan — Our Contrafacts (Steeplechase)

Joni Mitchell — Archives Vol. 1: The Early Years (1963-1967 (Rhino)

Elder Charles Beck — Your Man of Faith (Gospel Friend)

Sarhabil Ahmed — King of Sudanese Jazz (Habibi Funk)

V/A – The Right to Rock: The Mexicano and Chicano Rock ‘n’ Roll Rebellion 1955-1963, Episodio Uno (Bear Family)

V/A – Hillbillies in Hell: Country Music’s Tormented Testament (1952-1974) ~ Revelations (The Omni Recording Corporation)

V/A — The Harry Smith B-Sides (Dust to Digital)

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a-dinosaur-a-day · 5 years ago

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Lagerpeton

By Tas

Etymology: Rabbit Reptile

First Described By: Romer, 1971

Classification: Biota, Archaea, Proteoarchaeota, Asgardarchaeota, Eukaryota, Neokaryota, Scotokaryota Opimoda, Podiata, Amorphea, Obazoa, Opisthokonta, Holozoa, Filozoa, Choanozoa, Animalia, Eumetazoa, Parahoxozoa, Bilateria, Nephrozoa, Deuterostomia, Chordata, Olfactores, Vertebrata, Craniata, Gnathostomata, Eugnathostomata, Osteichthyes, Sarcopterygii, Rhipidistia, Tetrapodomorpha, Eotetrapodiformes, Elpistostegalia, Stegocephalia, Tetrapoda, Reptiliomorpha, Amniota, Sauropsida, Eureptilia, Romeriida, Diapsida, Neodiapsida, Sauria, Archosauromorpha, Crocopoda, Archosauriformes, Eucrocopoda, Crurotarsi, Archosauria, Avemetarsalia, Ornithodira, Dinosauromorpha, Lagerpetidae

Referred Species: L. chanarensis

Status: Extinct

Time and Place: About 235 to 234 million years ago, in the Carnian of the Late Triassic

Lagerpeton is known from the Chañares Formation in La Rioja, Argentina

Physical Description: Lagerpeton was named as the Rabbit Reptile, and for good reason - in a lot of ways, it represents a decent attempt by reptiles in trying to do the whole hoppy-hop thing. You might think that it resembles Scleromochlus in that way, and you’d be right! Scleromochlus and Lagerpeton are close cousins, but one is on the line towards Pterosaurs - Scleromochlus - and the other is on the line towards dinosaurs - Lagerpeton. So, hopping around was an early feature that all Ornithodirans (Dinosaurs, Pterosaurs, and those closest to them) shared. Lagerpeton itself was about 70 centimeters in length, with most of that length represented as tail; it was slender and lithe, built for moving quickly through its environment. It had a small head, a long neck, and a thin body. While it had long legs, it also had somewhat long arms, and while it may have been able to walk on all fours it also would have been able to walk on two legs alone. It was digitigrade, walking only on its toes, making it an even faster animal. Its back was angled to help it in hopping and running through its environment, and its small pelvis gave it more force during hip extension while jumping. In addition to all of this, it basically only really rested its weight on two toes - giving it even more hopping ability! As a small early bird-line reptile, it would have been covered in primitive feathers all over its body (protofeathers), though what form they took we do not know.

By Scott Reid

Diet: As an early dinosaur relative, it’s more likely than not that Lagerpeton was an omnivore, though this is uncertain as its head and teeth are not known at this time.

Behavior: Lagerpeton would have been a very skittish animal, being so small in an environment of so many kinds of animals - and as such, that hopping and fast movement ability would have aided it in escaping and moving around its environment, avoiding predators and reaching new sources of food (and, potentially, chasing after smaller food itself). Lagerpeton may have also been somewhat social, moving in small groups, potentially families, to escape the predators and chase after prey together, given its common nature in its environment. As an archosaur, Lagerpeton was more likely than not to take care of its young, though we don’t know how or to what extent. The feathers it had would have been primarily thermoregulatory, and as such, they would have helped it maintain a constant body temperature - making it a very active, lithe animal.

By José Carlos Cortés

Ecosystem: Lagerpeton lived in the Chañares environment, a diverse and fascinating environment coming right after the transition from the Middle to Late Triassic epochs. Given that the first true dinosaurs are probably from the start of the Late Triassic, this makes it a hotbed for understanding the environments that the earliest dinosaurs evolved in. Since Lagerpeton is a close dinosaur relative, this helps contextualize its place within its evolutionary history. This environment was a floodplain, filled with lakes that would regularly flood depending on the season. There were many seed ferns, ferns, conifers, and horsetails. Many different animals lived here with Lagerpeton, including other Dinosauromorphs like the Silesaurid Lewisuchus/Pseudolagosuchus and the Dinosauriform Marasuchus/Lagosuchus. There were crocodilian relatives as well, such as the early suchian Gracilisuchus and the Rauisuchid Luperosuchus. There were also quite a few Proterochampsids, such as Tarjadia, Tropidosuchus, Gualosuchus, and Chanaresuchus. Synapsids also put in a good show, with the Dicynodonts Jachaleria and Dinodontosaurus, as well as Cynodonts like Probainognathus and Chiniquodon, and the herbivorous Massetognathus. Luperosuchus would have definitely been a predator Lagerpeton would have wanted to get away from - fast!

By Ripley Cook

Other: Lagerpeton is one of our earliest derived Dinosauromorphs, showing some of the earliest distinctions the dinosaur-line had compared to other archosaurs. Lagerpeton was already digitigrade - an important feature of Dinosaurs - as shown by its tracks, called Prorotodactylus. These tracks also showcase that dinosaur relatives were around as early as the Early Triassic - and that their evolution, and the rapid diversification of archosauromorphs in general, was a direct result of the end-Permian extinction.

~ By Meig Dickson

Sources Under the Cut

Arcucci, A. 1986. New materials and reinterpretation of Lagerpeton chanarensis Romer (Thecodontia, Lagerpetonidae nov.) from the Middle Triassic of La Rioja, Argentina. Ameghiniana 23 (3-4): 233-242.

Arcucci, A. B. 1987. Un nuevo Lagosuchidae (Thecodontia-Pseudosuchia) de la fauna de los Chañares (Edad Reptil Chañarense, Triasico Medio), La Rioja, Argentina. Ameghiniana 24: 89 - 94.

Arcucci, A., C. A. Mariscano. 1999. A distinctive new archosaur from the Middle Triassic (Los Chañares Formation) of Argentina. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 19: 228 - 232.

Bittencourt, J. S., A. B. Arcucci, C. A. Marsicano, M. C. Langer. 2014. Osteology of the Middle Triassic archosaur Lewisuchus admixtus Romer (Chañares Formation, Argentina), its inclusivity, and relationships amongst early dinosauromorphs. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology: 1 - 31.

Brusatte, S. L., G. Niedzwiedzki, R. J. Butler. 2011. Footprints pull origin and diversification of dinosaur stem lineage deep into Early Triassic. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 278 (1708): 1107 - 1113.

Ezcurra, M. D. 2006. A review of the systematic position of the dinosauriform archosaur Eucoelophysis baldwini Sullivan & Lucas, 1999 from the Upper Triassic of New Mexico, USA. Geodiversitas 28(4):649-684.

Ezcurra, M. D. 2016. The phylogenetic relationships of basal archosauromorphs, with an emphasis on the systematics of proterosuchian archosauriformes. PeerJ 4: e1778.

Fechner, R. 2009. Morphofunctional evolution of the pelvic girdle and hindlimb of DInosauromorpha on the lineage to Sauropoda (Thesis). Ludwigs Maximillians Universita.

Fiorelli, L. E., S. Rocher, A. G. Martinelli, M. D. Ezcurra, E. Martin Hechenleitner, M. Ezpeleta. 2018. Tetrapod burrows from the Middle-Upper Triassic Chañares Formation (La Rioja, Argentina) and its palaeoecological implications. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 496: 85 - 102.

Kammerer, C. F., S. J. Nesbitt, N. H. Shubin. 2012. The first Silesaurid Dinosauriform from the Late Triassic of Morocco. Acta Palaeontological Polonica 57 (2): 277.

Kent, D. V., P. S. Malnis, C. E. Colombi, A. A. Alcober, R. N. Martinez. 2014. Age constraints on the dispersal of dinosaurs in the Late Triassic from magnetochronology of the Los Colorados Formation (Argentina). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111: 7958 - 7963.

Irmis, R. B., S. J. Nesbitt, K. Padian, N. D. Smith, A. H. Turner, D. T. Woody, and A. Downs. 2007. A Late Triassic dinosauromorph assemblage from New Mexico and the rise of dinosaurs. Science 317:358-361.

Jenkins, F. A. 1970. The Chañares (Argentina) Triassic reptile fauna. VII. The postcranial skeleton of the traversodontid Massetognathus pascuali (Therapsida, Cyondontia). Breviora 352: 1 - 28.

Langer, M. C., S. J. Nesbitt, J. S. Bittencourt, R. B. Irmis. 2013. Non-dinosaurian Dinosauromorphs. Geological Society London, Special Publications. 379 (1): 157 - 186.

Marsh, A. D. 2018. A new record of Dromomeron romeri Irmis et al., 2007 (Lagerpetidae) from the Chinle Formation of Arizona, U.S.A. PaleoBios 35:1-8.

Marsicano, C. A., R. B. Irmis, A. C. Mancuso, R. Mundil, F. Chemale. 2016. The precise temporal calibration of dinosaur origins. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of AMerica 113 (3): 509 - 513.

Martz, J. W., and B. J. Small. 2019. Non-dinosaurian dinosauromorphs from the Chinle Formation (Upper Triassic) of the Eagle Basin, northern Colorado: Dromomeron romeri (Lagerpetidae) and a new taxon, Kwanasaurus williamparkeri (Silesauridae). PeerJ 7:e7551:1-71.

Nesbitt, S. J., R. B. Irmis, W. G. Parker, N. D. Smith, A. H. Turner and T. Rowe. 2009. Hindlimb osteology and distribution of basal dinosauromorphs from the Late Triassic of North America. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29(2):498-516.

Nesbitt, S. J. 2011. The early evolution of archosaurs: relationships and the origin of major clades. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 353:1-292.

Perez Loinaze, V. S., E. I. Vera, L. E. Fiorelli, J. B. Desojo. 2018. Palaeobotany and palynology of coprolites from the Late Triassic Chañares Formation of Argentina: implications for vegetation provinces and the diet of dicynodonts. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 502: 31 - 51.

Rogers, R. R., A. B. Arcucci, F. Abdala, P. C. Sereno, C. A. Forster, C. L. May. 2001. Paleoenvironment and taphonomy of the Chañares Formation tetrapod assemblage (Middle Triassic), northwestern Argentina: spectacular preservation in volcanogenic concretions. Palaios 16: 461 - 481.

Romer, A. S. 1966. The Chañares (Argentina) Triassic reptile fauna. I. Introduction. Breviora 247: 1 - 14.

Romer, A. S. 1966. The Chañares (Argentina) Triassic reptile fauna. II. Sketch of the geology of the Rio-Chañares-Rio Gualo Region. Breviora 252: 1 - 20.

Romer, A. S. 1967. The Chañares (Argentina) Triassic reptile fauna. III. Two new gomphodonts, Massetognathus pascuali and M. teruggii. Breviora 264: 1 - 25.

Romer, A. S. 1968. The Chañares (Argentina) Triassic reptile fauna. IV. The dicynodont fauna. Breviora 295: 1 - 25.

Romer, A. S. 1969. The Chañares (Argentina) Triassic reptile fauna. V. A new chiniquodontid cynodont, Probelesodon lewisi - cynodont ancestry. Breviora 333: 1 - 24.

Romer, A. S. 1970. The Chañares (Argentina) Triassic reptile fauna. VI. A chiniquodont cynodont with an incipient squamosal-dentary jaw articulation. Breviora 344: 1 - 18.

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Romer, A. S. 1971. The Chañares (Argentina) Triassic reptile fauna. IX: The Chanares Formation. Breviora 377: 1 - 8.

Romer, A. S. 1971. The Chañares (Argentina) Triassic reptile fauna. X. Two new but incompletely known long-limbed pseudosuchians. Breviora 378:1-10.

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Romer, A. S. 1972. The Chañares (Argentina) Triassic reptile fauna. XII. The post cranial skeleton of the thecodont Chanaresuchus. Breviora 385: 1 - 21.

Romer, A. S. 1972. The Chañares (Argentina) Triassic reptile fauna. XIII. A fragmentary skull of a large thecodont, Luperosuchus fractus. Breviora 389: 1 - 8.

Romer, A. S. 1972. The Chañares (Argentina) Triassic reptile fauna. Lewisuchus admixtus, gen. et sp. Nov., a further thecodont from the Chañares beds. Breviora 390: 1 - 13.

Romer, A. S. 1972. The Chañares (Argentina) Triassic reptile fauna. XV. Further remains of the thecodonts Lagerpeton and Lagosuchus. Breviora 394: 1 - 7.

Romer, A. S. 1972. The Chañares (Argentina) Triassic reptile fauna. XVI. Thecodont classification. Breviora 395:1-24.

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Romer, A. S., and A. D. Lewis. 1973. The Chañares (Argentina) Triassic reptile fauna. XIX. Postcranial materials of the cynodonts Probelesodon and Probainognathus. Breviora 407: 1 - 26.

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wisdomrays · 3 years ago

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TAFAKKUR: Part 430

RIGHT TO FOOD

MORE THAN A BILLION HUMAN BEINGS ON THIS PLANET ARE CHRONICALLY HUNGRY: EVERY 24 HOURS SOME 40,000 DIE DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY FROM LACK OF FOOD; A CHILD STARVES TO DEATH EVERY 2.5 SECONDS. IN SHORT, MORE PEOPLE DIE EVERY TWO YEARS FROM HUNGER THAN WERE KILLED IN THE FIRST AND SECOND WORLD WARS.

Yet, never before has the world produced more food per head of population. While there are places where huge numbers die because they have no crops or no money, there are other places (notably in the West) where the granaries are overflowing with all kinds of foods. While food is stockpiled in some areas, then dumped or wasted in huge quantities in order to maintain price levels, elsewhere, helpless mothers, starving and unable to produce milk, watch their babies die in their arms. Uneven distribution mocks the theoretical sufficiency of global food supply: there should be no world hunger problem but there is (UNO, 1989, p.3).

The ‘world food order’ is a scandal crying out for remedy. It arises within the context of the prevailing economic and political ideologies which are rooted in a crude laissez-faire mentality. According to this mentality, individuals are entitled to absolute ownership over whatever they have acquired lawfully, that is, they have the right to use, to transfer and even to destroy their property (Article 1 of the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966) without being held legally accountable.

It is this mentality, entrenched in law, which prevents the right to food from becoming one of the binding principles of international human rights. Yet, without a right to food, all other human rights are of little value. Once starvation afflicts a people, the very human life for whose sake all human rights are proposed wastes (Alston, 1984, p.4).

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 provides that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food…”. Since then, many international documents and most of other normative instruments aiming to secure the right to food of peoples have been agreed upon (Tomasevski, 1987, p.19; see also the 1974 Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger and Malnutrition, and the 1986 Food Aid Convention). However, in spite of the enthusiasm and unanimity with which the right to food is endorsed, the amorality of the economic order encourages its constant, continual violation. Measures against world hunger are temporary palliatives in the form of ‘charity’ from governments politically embarrassed by crises (Alston, 1984, p.90).

The impotence of the present world order to eradicate hunger and starvation contrasts sharply with the Islamic world order which enshrines the right to food not only in its ethos but also in its positive laws. To begin with, the Qur’an teaches that all resources are put at the disposal of all human beings by God, the Sustainer. Human beings have no right of absolute ownership, but have right as just trustees (2.30). As God’s vicegerent (khalifah), man is enjoined to deal justly with everyone (not every Muslim) (5.8). To act with justice in the use and management of one’s resources requires the satisfaction of at least the subsistence needs of everyone in society: nothing is more closely connected with the concept of justice than “human rights” (Ahmad, 1991, p.15).

Once the close relationship between justice and human rights is recognized as a fundamental principle, it is a natural next step to base the right to food on the socio-economic teachings of Islam. The aim of the concept of trusteeship (khilafat) is to establish ‘global justice’ in the use of the earth’s natural resources. No discrimination is made between Muslims and non-Muslims, as humanity is a single creation of God, and all have equal right to sustenance from God’s bounty (ni’ma). If one group of the human brotherhood is unable to provide sufficient food to sustain life, for whatever reason, they have a right (haqq) to provision from the wealth of others (Ahmad, 1991, p.17).

The ‘right’ of the hungry is not merely a moral claim; it has a positive, specific counterpart in the corresponding legal obligation to satisfy that right. The authority for this legal obligation is the Qur’an itself whose precepts are binding upon all Muslims (Ahmad, 1991, p.15). The refusal to feed the hungry and to urge the feeding of the hungry is equated with a refusal of religion: Have you observed him who denies religion? That is he who rebuffs the orphan and urges not the feeding of the needy (107.1-3).

In other verses, (e.g. 2.29), the Qur’an specifies that resources be used equitably for the benefit of all mankind (see Chapra, 1992, p207). No people have the right to dump or waste the resources at their disposal in order to manipulate prices (Qur’an 2.205).

The concept of a right to food is explicitly embodied in the teaching and practice of the Prophet, upon him be peace. The civilization of Islam is dated to the Hijrah, the migration to Madina. One of the first measures instituted by the Prophet was to ‘spread peace and distribute food’ (Hamid, 1989, p.l56). He explained that poverty can lead to kufr (ingratitude and rejection of God), and emphasised the link between Muslim solidarity and the right to food: ‘He is not a (true) believer who eats his fill while his neighbour goes hungry’. In another hadith, duty to provide food encompasses animals as well as humans: ‘Whoever brings dead land to life, for him there is a reward in that, and whatever creature seeking food eats of it, shall be considered as charity from him.’ (For other ahadith which clarify the duty to feed and the accountability for failure in it, see Nadvi, 1969 and Ishaque, 1969). The importance of land cultivation in Islamic Law may be gauged from the right of the legitimate authorities to sequester land which is being left idle and apportion it to those who are willing and able to cultivate it: absolute ownership of land is not recognized by the Law.

The right to food is so important in Islamic practice that it is not denied to enemies even in time of siege and war. During the lifetime of the Prophet, upon him be peace, some of his companions blocked the supply of food to Makka, intending to maintain the blockade until Makka surrendered. However, when the hunger of the Quraish was reported to the Prophet he ordered the blockade to be lifted. Following that example, Abu Bakr, the first Caliph, sent Yazid ibn Abu Sufyan on a campaign with the specific instruction that he should not destroy the crops and livestock of the enemy. The same principle is seen in action when the Ottoman army, for example, besieged Vienna, and the city’s poor and sick came to its outskirts to get food from the besieging forces. (What a contrast with the Serbian and Croat militias who are at this time attacking and preventing relief supplies from reaching the Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina with the explicit intention of starving them to death.)

Islamic Law provides for each individual’s basic rights to life and food through zakah and usr, two compulsory annual levies on, respectively the general wealth and the crops and livestock of the better off. Zakah is fixed at one-fortieth and usr at one-tenth of disposable wealth. In the event of the state being unable to meet its commitment to the needy from this revenue, it may compel the rich to give more. The Prophet, upon him be peace, said: ‘God makes it an obligation for the rich of a country to provide for the needs of their poor. Authority must compel them when the resources from zakah are insufficient’. Ibn Hazm and other Muslim savants, on the basis of this hadith, declared that if a person dies of hunger the individual’s neighbourhood is responsible and must pay the bloodwit (diya) by way of atonement (Belkacem, 1979, p.144). (One is bound to reflect how near Somalia is to oil-rich Saudi Arabia.)

Refusal to pay the obligatory levies is equivalent to denying the rights of the needy and a reversion to the values of paganism. Abu Bakr was prepared to go to war in precisely this issue.

Sadaqat al-fitr, a charitable donation made either in money or in kind, at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, is a further instance, in this case voluntary, of collectively meeting the sustenance needs of the poor.

There is a world of difference between the anthropocentric and egocentric philosophy which has taken such a firm root in the Western mind since the secularization of human rights in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the theocentric ethos of Islam. The latter sees the right to food as a duty, even a debt, owed by those who have a surplus to those who do not have the bare minimum. Further, Islam seeks to establish a social order which recognizes the essential community of all human beings. Without a feeling for that essential community, and a commitment to it in economic transactions, it is hard to see how solidarity can be realized even at a national, let alone an international level. Presenting human beings as objects of ‘charity’ cannot begin to address the problem-for, very soon, the rich become ‘fatigued’ by the demands made upon their compassion and their resources. For people to be dying of famine in a world of plenty, even of excess, is an intolerable scandal and shames us all (Bedjaoui, 1982, p.465). A new ‘world food order’ must be sought as a matter of urgency: if not, the threat of rumbling empty stomachs in Africa and Asia will disturb international peace in the post Cold War era rather more than the threat of nuclear war disturbed it during the Cold War.

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kbox-in-the-box · 4 years ago

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Captain Zap and her Hyperspace Rangers

1988 was the year that the planet Aetheria was liberated at last from the mad Emperor Xerxes, but it was neither the great space hero, Samuel Gerald “Astro” Armstrong, nor his daughter, Samantha Gillespie “Astra” Armstrong, who struck the final, decisive blow.

From 1933 to 1938, Astro Armstrong, Hedy Fine and Dr. Leon Volkov fought for the freedom of the people of Aetheria against the tyranny of Xerxes and his daughter, the wicked Empress Eris.

But in 1959, Astro Armstrong went missing, and in 1966, Astra Armstrong and her mother, Prof. Hedy Feynman, returned to Aetheria after Dr. Leon Volkov’s son, Dr. Leonid Volkov, told them that Astro was still alive, on Aetheria, but captive in the clutches of Xerxes.

As Astro’s family and allies sought to find him again, all while resuming their war with the forces of Xerxes and Eris, they found themselves facing a new foe, the first human ever to join the dark side of the Aetherian Armada, a mysterious masked man known only as Kommissar Blitzkrieg, who somehow seemed capable of anticipating Astra and Hedy at every turn.

By the 1980s, Hedy had begun to suspect the terrible secret of Kommissar Blitzkrieg’s true identity, one that could never be revealed to Astra, which the ruthlessly clinical Prof. Feynman recognized would necessitate the enlistment (or more accurately, the compulsory impressment) of new allies into their struggle, young outsiders with new ways of thinking, whose strengths would draw from their lack of preexisting emotional connections to this star-spanning conflict.

In 1984, the “Hyperspace Pilot” video game had cabinets distributed to the Bits & Blasts Arcade near the edge of the Ned Pines Neighborhood, the Pink Flamingos Mobile Home & RV Park on the outskirts of Eliot’s Expanse, and the Cabaret Cinema in the core of Edwin A. Abbott Square.

Opening in 1922, the Cabaret Cinema remains the oldest continuously operating movie theater in the state of Calizona, its infrequent stints as a Union Gospel Mission location notwithstanding.

The Cabaret Cinema was where a young Valerie Gail Zappa watched nostalgic rescreenings of Saturday matinee serials such as “The Adventures of ‘Astro’ Armstrong," and by the summer of 1984, Val was not only 18 years old and freshly graduated from Stanford S. Strickland Junior High & High School (go Teen Wolves!), but she was also a veteran usher at the Cabaret, where she took in countless classic films for free, and racked up high scores on “Hyperspace Pilot.”

Val and her two-years-younger sister, Tara Moonchild Zappa, lived at their parents’ double-wide at the Pink Flamingos, but like their fellow Pink Flamingos resident Crystal Swan, who was still attending Strickland Junior High in 1984, all three girls were pretty much raising themselves.

Tara had aspirations of enrolling in Beauty’s Beholder Cosmetics & Cosmetology, so she could eventually work at Nagel’s Picture-Perfect Cuts & Colors in the Gold Key Commercial Core.

And while Val’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Buckminster “Bucky” Martínez, was still sorting through prospective career paths, he’d already earned an athletic scholarship, as a soccer and volleyball player, through Coral Shores Community College (go Atoms!), part of the Calizona Community College Athletic Conference and the National Junior College Athletic Association.

Even Morten Emory Thistlethwaite, the spoiled antisocial prodigy whom Val grudgingly agreed to babysit when she was in junior high, because he was three years her junior, was already on track to attend the University of Calizona, Santa Teresa (go Manticores!), with the Quatermass University of Abstract and Applied Sciences (go Tachyons!) as his designated fallback school.

And yet, Val herself simply drifted, never pursuing a post-secondary education or a long-term occupation beyond what was required to pay for the rent and fun nights out on the town during her weekends off, much to the dismay of her peers and former teachers, all of whom sensed far more potential in her than punching ticket stubs at the Cabaret Cinema, subbing in to lead group workouts at Aphrodite & Adonis Aerobics, or feeding quarters into “Hyperspace Pilot” cabinets.

By 1987, the band of Valerie and Tara Zappa, Bucky Martínez and Morten Thistlethwaite knew they had little enough left in common to wonder aloud why they were still hanging out, but they knew the answer to that as well, since not only had they all remained avid players of “Hyperspace Pilot,” but they’d taken up the next iteration in the franchise, i.e. the “Hyperspace Pistoleer” light-tagging toy guns released in 1986, for which Bits & Blasts had economized its existing space, and even leased adjacent property, to set up a hide-and-seek arena for — among other players — Captain Zap, Brigadier Buckyball, Lieutenant Luna and Master Sergeant Mars, as they preferred to be called on the game clock.

And by the summer of 1987, the band had reasons to celebrate, with Morten’s acceptance for UC Santa Teresa’s fall semester confirmed, Tara feeling confident she would finally be promoted from apprentice to junior stylist at Nagel’s Picture-Perfect Cuts & Colors, and even Bucky finally having settled on a major, after three years, at Coral Shores Community College.

Everyone was heading places, except for Val, who’d always dreamed of travel, but never had the free time or finances to spare, just as her ongoing consumption of classic cinema ensured her lock on the pink-for-entertainment slice of the pie any time she played Trivial Pursuit, and yet, for all her fascination with the film industry, she still couldn’t summon the patience to audition, or even sit still for test shots, for more than sporadic roles as an extra.

“Why does this feel like the end of that made-for-TV movie where roleplaying games drove Tom Hanks crazy?” Tara asked despondently, as the band sat at their regular table in Bits & Blasts, nursing their slices of Pizzazz Pizza.

“You know why,” Val smirked ruefully. “Everyone else is about to embark on grand adventures in bold new campaign settings, while some of us are just destined to ... hang back from the action, and become non-player characters.”

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Bucky clasped Val’s hand in his own to console her.

“I heard Lis Berger is shutting down the Hyperspace Pistoleer arena after this summer,” Morten blurted out, acutely uncomfortable with the unpleasant emotions his peers were displaying so openly. “Even though it’s still popular, she’s losing a ton of money on it. I say we play one last round now, before it gets torn down.”

Val stood up and laid down a few dollars for the tip. “Might as well go out shooting,” she grinned.

The entry of every officially licensed “Hyperspace Pistoleer” arena was equipped with speakers to play the same opening narration before the players went inside, complete with a flash of light to simulate an interplanetary tesseract:

“As the people of the planet Aetheria cry out for aid, in their fight for freedom against the evil forces of the mad Emperor Xerxes and his Aetherian Armada, a highly trained special mission force has been recruited from the ranks of ordinary humans, right here on Earth, to respond to this call. They are the Hyperspace Rangers, and their brave battles began when they stepped into the Star Point Portal ... and vanished.”

After the obligatory flash of light, Lis Berger’s assistant games supervisor, Rachelle “Ratchet” Chennault, checked the activated “Hyperspace Pistoleer” arena, only to find it empty.

The “Strickland Slackers,” as they came to be branded in subsequent press reports, were gone.

Hedy Feynman knew she had a limited window of time within which to work, because time itself passes on Aetheria at roughly one-seventh the rate that it does on Earth, and because she knew the start of the Harmonic Convergence would commence on Aug. 16, 1987, but even she had failed to grasp how quickly most toy and video game franchises fall out of fashion.

Hedy had commissioned the younger Dr. Leonid Volkov to produce the “Hyperspace Pilot” and “Hyperspace Pistoleer” game lines, as covert training and recruitment tools for what she had envisioned as crack commando units to be branded the “Hyperspace Rangers,” since they would be able to operate not only behind enemy lines, but also between the boundaries that defined both the war and space travel itself.

Because Hedy wished to avoid drawing too much notice, and because she’d retained enough of her conscience not to want to press-gang too many child soldiers into risking life and limb for a cause for which none of them had knowingly consented to sacrifice themselves, the Star Point Portals affixed to the “Hyperspace Pistoleer” arenas absconded with only scattered handfuls of players from her former home planet.

The sustained toll of their secret missions was brutal, culling all but a few of the promising crop Hedy had authorized to transport from Earth during the summer of 1987, but one unlikely band of Hyperspace Rangers somehow not only kept on surviving, but also succeeding in completing their missions, thanks in no small part to the guidance and motivation they drew from the canny strategies and inspiring speeches of their Valkyrie-like leader.

Eventually, the rest of the units were reduced in number enough that their remainders were seconded to Captain Zap and her Hyperspace Rangers.

During the final push to overthrow the misrule of Xerxes, when Astra Armstrong was devastated by the discovery that the merciless Kommissar Blitzkrieg was actually her long-lost father, Astro Armstrong — whose innate heroism had been artificially suppressed by technology the elder Dr. Leon Volkov had been conscripted to create for Xerxes — it was Captain Zap’s Hyperspace Rangers who kept up the pressure on the Aetherian Armada, giving Astra the chance to break through those psychic barriers to reach her real father’s heart, and ultimately redeem his soul.

... And so it was that 1988 was the year that the planet Aetheria was liberated at last from the mad Emperor Xerxes, not by two generations of the same heroic family, but by a third generation of complete strangers to their cause, and yet, even as the rest of the surviving Hyperspace Rangers were returned to Earth per their request, one band asked to stay behind.

Captain Zap, Brigadier Buckyball, Lieutenant Luna and Master Sergeant Mars each had their own reasons for wanting to venture further into the largely uncharted frontier within which they’d found themselves, but Hedy Feynman, as newly elected head of the likewise recently installed government of Aetheria, harbored equally ulterior motives for agreeing to retain their services.

Hedy knew that a tentatively democratic Aetheria, one which was now seeking to atone for the misdeeds of its empire by forging alliances among adversaries, needed free agents to act on its behalf, to make contact with the broader cosmos that Xerxes’ simultaneously expansive and provincial priorities had impacted, and yet also ignored.

Hedy also knew that Astra’s appetite for such crusades had been ground down hard over the course of the war, even before she’d inadvertently unmasked one of her fiercest foes as the vanished father whose legacy she’d sought to live up to her entire life, and for the first time since 1966, Astra found herself missing the old home planet she’d abandoned so casually.

Which was how Astra Armstrong woke up late one morning to the fanfare surrounding the hastily rescheduled launch of the Moebius Loop-powered Cavalry Cruiser-class Unification Searcher Spacecraft (USS) Starlin, the ship she’d simply assumed she would be tasked with commanding, because it had already taken off with its new crew, Captain Zap and her Hyperspace Rangers, without Hedy telling her.

Astra had resigned herself to the likelihood that she would be assigned to provide Captain Zap’s Hyperspace Rangers with essential insights on the various alien species, civilizations and cultures they might encounter, but Hedy had instead sentenced the former Empress Eris to serve as a Hyperspace Ranger, under the command of Captain Zap, as Ensign Eleutherios (”Eleutherios” being the birth name that Eris had always hated), as repayment for her sins.

And with a capable crew protecting the peace in her stead, Astra couldn’t help but smile when Hedy presented her with the Reckless Endeavor, the spaceship with which Astra’s parents and the elder Dr. Volkov had originally traveled to Aetheria, now freshly restored and ready to fly wherever Astra wished.

“First, I’m gonna take a long nap, and then, I’m gonna spend some time doing nothing at all, because I’ve been meaning to do both of those for years,” Astra laughed, even as tears spilled down her cheeks. “After that ... when we left Earth, I was so ready for something so much bigger. The only other gals I knew who wore pants were you, Katherine Hepburn and Laura Petrie on Dick Van Dyke. So much happened, just right after I left.” She chuckled. “It’s like Earth waited until I was gone to get cool.”

“And now?” Hedy brushed the blonde spit-curl from her daughter’s face. “You want to catch up?”

“I want ...” Astra paused, then unclipped the Walkman from her belt loop, that she’d carried to honor all the fallen Hyperspace Rangers, more than one of whom had worn such portable music players into the fray of combat.

Astra cranked the volume on the headphones up to the max, then pressed play, and the voice of Stevie Nicks began to croon:

♫ No one knows how I feel ♪ ♪ What I say, unless you read between my lines ♫ ♫ One man walked away from me ♪ ♪ First he took my hand ♫ ♫ Take me home ... ♪

“I want to go where the music sounds like THAT,” Astra’s voice choked up, as her eyes welled up with fresh unshed tears.

Hedy struggled to keep the quaver out of her own voice, as she squeezed her daughter tight to wish her safe travels. “Then you go there, baby. You go follow the music that’s in your heart.”

#Captain Zap and her Hyperspace Rangers #Captain Zap #Hyperspace Rangers #The Adventures of Astro Armstrong #Astro Armstrong #Astra Armstrong

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96thdayofrage · 4 years ago

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When President Franklin Roosevelt signed the GI Bill into law on June 22, 1944, it laid the foundation for benefits that would help generations of veterans achieve social mobility.

Formally known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, the bill made unprecedented commitments to the nation’s veterans. For instance, it provided federal assistance to veterans in the form of housing and unemployment benefits. But of all the benefits offered through the GI Bill, funding for higher education and job training emerged as the most popular.

More than 2 million veterans flocked to college campuses throughout the country. But even as former service members entered college, not all of them accessed the bill’s benefits in the same way. That’s because white southern politicians designed the distribution of benefits under the GI Bill to uphold their segregationist beliefs.

So, while white veterans got into college with relative ease, Black service members faced limited options and outright denial in their pursuit for educational advancement. This resulted in uneven outcomes of the GI Bill’s impact.

Deep knowledge, daily, in The Conversation's newsletter

As a scholar of race and culture in the U.S. South, I believe this history raises important questions about whether subsequent iterations of the GI Bill are benefiting all vets equally.

Tuition waived for service

When he signed the bill into law, President Roosevelt assured that it would give “servicemen and women the opportunity of resuming their education or technical training … not only without tuition charge … but with the right to receive a monthly living allowance while pursuing their studies.” So long as they had served 90 consecutive days in the U.S. Armed Forces and had not received a dishonorable discharge, veterans could have their tuition waived for the institution of their choice and cover their living expenses as they pursued a college degree.

This unparalleled investment in veteran education led to a boom in college enrollment. Around 8 million of the nation’s 16 million veterans took advantage of federal funding for higher education or vocational training, 2 million of whom pursued a college degree within the first five years of the bill’s existence. Those ex-service members made up nearly half of the nation’s college students by 1947.

Colleges scrambled to accommodate all the new veterans. These veterans were often white men who were slightly older than the typical college age. They sometimes arrived with wives and families in tow and brought a martial discipline to their studies that, as scholars have noted, created a cultural clash with traditional civilian students who sometimes were more interested in the life of the party than the life of the mind.

Limited opportunities for black servicemen

Black service members had a different kind of experience. The GI Bill’s race-neutral language had filled the 1 million African American veterans with hope that they, too, could take advantage of federal assistance. Integrated universities and historically Black colleges and universities – commonly known as HBCUs – welcomed black veterans and their federal dollars, which led to the growth of a new black middle class in the immediate postwar years.

Yet, the underfunding of HBCUs limited opportunities for these large numbers of Black veterans. Schools like the Tuskegee Institute and Alcorn State lacked government investment in their infrastructure and simply could not accommodate an influx of so many students, whereas well-funded white institutions were more equipped to take in students. Research has also revealed that a lack of formal secondary education for Black soldiers prior to their service inhibited their paths to colleges and universities.

As historians Kathleen J. Frydl, Ira Katznelson and others have argued, U.S. Representative John Rankin of Mississippi exacerbated these racial disparities.

Racism baked in

Rankin, a staunch segregationist, chaired the committee that drafted the bill. From this position, he ensured that local Veterans Administrations controlled the distribution of funds. This meant that when black southerners applied for their assistance, they faced the prejudices of white officials from their communities who often forced them into vocational schools instead of colleges or denied their benefits altogether.

Mississippi’s connection to the GI Bill goes beyond Rankin’s racist maneuvering. From 1966 to 1997, G.V. “Sonny” Montgomery represented the state in Congress and dedicated himself to veterans’ issues. In 1984, he pushed through his signature piece of federal legislation, the Montgomery GI Bill, which recommitted the nation to providing for veterans’ education and extended those funds to reserve units and the National Guard. Congress had discontinued the GI Bill after Vietnam. As historian Jennifer Mittelstadt shows, Montgomery’s bill subsidized education as a way to boost enlistment in the all-volunteer force that lagged in recruitment during the final years of the Cold War.

Social programs like these have helped maintain enlistment quotas during recent conflicts in the Middle East, but today’s service members have found mixed success in converting the education subsidies from the Post-9/11 GI Bill into gains in civilian life.

This new GI Bill, passed in 2008, has paid around $100 billion to more than 2 million recipients. Although the Student Veterans for America touts the nearly half a million degrees awarded to veterans since 2009, politicians and watchdogs have fought for reforms to the bill to stop predatory, for-profit colleges from targeting veterans. Recent reports show that 20% of GI Bill disbursements go to for-profit schools. These institutions hold reputations for notoriously high dropout rates and disproportionately targeting students of color, a significant point given the growing racial and ethnic diversity of the military.

In August 2017, President Trump signed the Forever GI Bill, which committed $3 billion for 10 more years of education funding. As active duty service members and veterans begin to take advantage of these provisions, history provides good reason to be vigilant for the way racism still impacts who receives the most from those benefits.

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seriousbusinessforhumans · 4 years ago

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NEW DELHI (IDN) – On February 6, protesters blocked roads at an estimated 10,000 spots across India as part of the ongoing movement against the new farm laws enacted by the national government last year. For over two months, the most populous democracy in the world has witnessed what is being called one of the biggest protests in human history.

Hundreds of thousands of farmers have been rallying against three new laws that have thrown open the agriculture sector to private players. Protesters feel the legislation will allow a corporate takeover of crop production and trading, which would eventually impact their earnings and land ownership.

The movement has overcome regional, religious, gender and ideological differences to build pressure. Leftist farm unions, religious organisations and traditional caste-based brotherhoods called khaps, which make pronouncements on social issues, are working in tandem through resolute sit-ins and an aggressive boycott of politicians.

India’s right-wing government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, pushed the laws through the parliament in September 2020, despite lacking a majority in the upper house and agriculture being in the jurisdiction of state governments. The protest is a response to the lack of respect for parliamentary democracy and federalism, but its main focus is the pervasive corporate influence on governance.

After limits on corporate contributions were removed and allowed to be made anonymously, 8.2 billion dollars was spent on Indian parliamentary elections in 2019, which exceeded how much was spent on the U.S. election in 2016 by 26 per cent. Most of this money came from corporations and the BJP was the primary recipient.

Farm crisis is the fuel

Farmers are a large electoral block in India, with half the population being engaged in agriculture. No political party can afford to offend them publicly even though policymakers have done little to increase farm incomes and address their indebtedness. Around 300,000 farmers died by suicide between 1995 and 2013, mostly due to financial stress. In 2019, another 10,281 farmers took their lives.

Indian farms are mostly family-owned, and the land is a source of subsistence for millions. Around 86 per cent of farmers, however, till less than five acres while the other 14 per cent, mostly upper castes, own over half of the country’s 388 million acres of arable land.

Farmers in a few north Indian states were able to consolidate their holdings through increased incomes with the introduction of irrigation, modern seeds, fertilisers, machines, market infrastructure and guaranteed price support from the government during the Green Revolution in the 1960s.

But rising input costs and climate crisis have adversely impacted the profits there as well. In Punjab, the most agriculturally-developed state, for instance, the input costs of electric motors, labour, fertiliser and fuel rose by 100 to 290 per cent from 2000 to 2013, but the support price of wheat and rice rose by only 122 to 137 per cent in the same period, according to a government report. Heavy use of chemicals, mono-cropping and farm mechanisation have damaged the soil, affecting productivity and forcing farmers into debt.

Strength and strategy

Punjab saw widespread protests as soon as the laws were enacted. Farmers occupied railway tracks and toll plazas on major roads besides corporate-owned thermal plants, gas stations and shopping malls. Scores of subscribers left Jio, the telecom service owned by the top Indian businessman perceived to be close to Prime Minister Modi.

Farm unions also held regular sit-ins in front of the houses of prominent political leaders forcing an important regional party to leave the national government alliance. Several state leaders of the ruling party resigned from their posts as well. Similar scenes played out in the neighbouring state of Haryana, where leaders were publicly shamed and the helicopter of the elected head of the government was prevented from landing for a public meeting after farmers dug up the helipad area.

In November, thousands of farmers drove their tractor trolleys towards the national capital as they played protest songs by celebrity singers. Stocked with rations, clothing, water and wood for months, they braved tear gas shells and water cannons used by the police along the way. Powerful tractors pushed heavy transport vehicles, concrete slabs and barbed wires that the administration had placed en route out of their way.

Open libraries and medical camps were set up and volunteers offered their skills, ranging from tailoring to tutoring children. Besides speeches by the farm leaders, cultural performances, film screenings and wrestling bouts became a regular feature. More farmers poured in with each passing day.

“These occupations are not just a reaction of wronged citizens who have set out to reform the Indian parliament or assert dissent. Rather, they form an important stage in a still-unfolding narrative of militant anti-capitalist struggle,” wrote Aditya Bahl, a doctoral scholar at the John Hopkins University who is archiving the peasants’ revolts that took place in Punjab in the 1960s and ’70s.

The Indian Supreme Court suspended the implementation of laws and formed a four-member expert committee on Jan. 13 to look into the issue. Farmers have, however, refused to meet the committee members, alleging that many of them have already written or spoken in favour of the laws.

The protests are not only targeting domestic companies and political figures. Farmers have also burnt effigies of Uncle Sam, the World Trade Organisation and IMF, signifying the influence of global trade over domestic agricultural policies. Developed countries have been pressuring India for last three decades to open up its agriculture sector to multinational players by slashing subsidies and reducing public procurement and distribution of food grains to the poor.

Protesters are also seeking a legal right to sell their produce at a guaranteed price. The Indian government usually declares a minimum support price on various crops based on the costs of their production, but only a fraction of the produce is procured at that rate. In the absence of government procurement facilities in their areas, most farmers have to settle for a lower price offered by private traders. A law would make it mandatory for private players to buy the produce at a declared price.

“If Indian farmers are able to get the law on guaranteed price passed through their current agitation, they will become a role model for farmers across the world living under heavy debts,” Sharma continued. “India should put its foot down at the WTO and create much-needed disruption in the world food trade policy for the benefit of the global agriculture sector.”

The movement grows

The BJP-led national government has faced numerous protests over the last six years of its rule..... The country has dropped 26 places in the Democracy Index’s global ranking since 2014 due to “erosion of civil liberties.”

This is the first time peasants have been galvanised in such large numbers against the government. The government has already held 11 rounds of negotiations with farmers’ representatives and offered to suspend the laws for one and a half years on Jan. 20. But farmers are not budging from their demand of the complete repeal of the laws and legal cover for the selling of their crops at a guaranteed price.

On January 26, which marks India’s Republic Day, 19 out of 28 states witnessed protests against the farm laws.

In Delhi, however, a plan to organise a farmers’ tractor march parallel to the official Republic Day function, went awry. A group of protesters clashed with police at multiple spots and stormed the iconic Red Fort, a traditional seat of power for the Mughals, where the colonial British and independent India’s prime ministers have also raised their flags.

The protesters unfurled banners of the farm unions and Sikhs – one of the minority religious groups and the most prominent face of the protests. Mainstream media and ruling party supporters used the opportunity to blame the movement for desecration and religious terrorism. Security forces charged sleeping farmers with batons at one location, filed cases against movement leaders, allowed opponents to pelt campaigners with stones, arrested journalists and shut down the Internet.

The attacks, therefore, ended up lifting the flagging morale of the farmers and helped the movement gain even more supporters, who shunned the government and media narrative. Massive community gatherings of khaps were organised at multiple places over the next few days, extending their support to the protests and issuing a boycott call for the BJP and its political allies.

Mending fault lines

The movement has also been able to overcome regional and gender divisions, and is trying to address caste divides.

The states of Haryana and Punjab are often at loggerheads on the issue of sharing of river waters. Haryana was carved out of Punjab on linguistic lines in 1966, but most of the rivers flow through the current Punjab state. Haryana has been seeking a greater amount of water for use by its farmers, while Punjab’s farmers oppose the demand, citing reduced water flow in the rivers over the years. The current protests have united farmers for a common cause, helping them understand each other even though opponents have made attempts revive the water issue.

Women have also been participating in the protests in large numbers. They are either occupying roads on Delhi’s borders or managing homes and farms in the absence of men, while taking part in protest marches in villages.

“Earlier, we were able to rally only 8,000-10,000 women for a protest. Today that number has swelled to 25,000-30,000, as they recognised the threats posed by the new laws to the livelihoods of their families,” said Harinder Bindu, who leads the women’s wing of the largest farm union in Punjab. “For many women, this is the first time they are participating in a protest, which is a big change because they were earlier confined to household work. Men are getting used to seeing women participate and recognising the value they bring to a movement.”

“When women members participate in sit-ins, men manage the house. I feel this movement will bring greater focus on women’s issues within the farming community – one of which is the need to support the widows of farmers who died by suicide due to financial constraints.”

In Punjab, less than four per cent of private farmland belongs to Dalits, the lowest caste in the traditional social hierarchy of India, even though they constitute 32 per cent of the state’s population. They often earn their livelihoods through farm work or daily wage labour. Even though Dalits have a legal right to till village common land, attempts to assert that right often lead to violent clashes with upper-caste landlords who want to keep it for themselves. Dalits are waging similar battles across India. Researchers recorded 31 land conflicts involving 92,000 Dalits in 2019. A few of the farmers’ unions have supported and raised funds for Dalit agitations in the past.

The movement is gradually encompassing other rural issues beyond the farm laws. In the state of Maharashtra, for instance, thousands of tribal people travelled to the capital Mumbai on Jan. 23 to extend support to the farmers. They also asserted their own long pending demand for land titles under the Forest Rights Act, which recognises traditional rights of scheduled tribes and other forest dwellers on the use of land and other forest resources.

* Manu Moudgil is an independent journalist based in India. He tweets at @manumoudgil.The original version of this article was published on Waging Nonviolence under the title ‘India’s farmers’ protests are about more than reform – they are resisting the corporate takeover of agriculture’.

#India #modern India #south asia #2021 #agriculture #food politics #international politics #activists #movements #indian farmer protests #indian farm reforms 2020 #indian agriculture #Punjab #grassroots movements #farmers #sex and gender in south asia #Forest rights act #Narendra Modi #BJP

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years ago

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EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT CONTACT

There was no protection against breakage except the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars, and you get. Because few of us know any alternative, we have no idea what our average returns might be, and won't know for years. And it can last for months. The language offers abstractions only as a way to get a big program is to start with. The problem is the real one. Treat the first few months comforted ourselves by treating the whole thing onto the shoulders of a big company, it's good news. Actually I was being conservative. When Mark spoke at a YC dinner this winter he said he wasn't trying to start a startup.1 Whereas fundraising, when you're in a very strong position, you not only won't get that but won't get anything.2 But at least you know where these facial expressions come from.

Startup funding meant series A rounds.3 In phase 2, on top of whatever you sold in phase 1. What this means in practice is that they are compulsive negotiators who will suck up a lot of new software, because you're paying for the hardware, just as we can become wiser.4 What nerds like is other nerds.5 Often as not a startup at all.6 Maybe some aspects of professionalism are actually a net lose. Perhaps it's in the sweet spot midway between. TV.

So let that satisfy your competitiveness. Two years from now, you'll be able to use their control of the desktop to prevent, or constrain, this new generation of software?7 I wouldn't claim it's painless.8 So I recommend being good. His mom probably has it on the fridge.9 In the process we may decrease economic inequality. Convergence is probably coming, but where? The conventional wisdom in the Lisp world is that the first problem is the same reason they had to work at another job to make money.

You can't blame kids for thinking I am not like these people; I am not like these people; I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world.10 The key stage is when they're three guys operating out of an apartment, and a Web browser. Ignoring any trend that has been operating for thousands of years is dangerous. The best investors are also the most liberal. The language is built in layers.11 It took me years to grasp that. There are ideas that obvious lying around now.12 If one woodworker makes 5 chairs and another makes none, the second seems as strong as ever.13 The floors are constantly being swept clean of any loose objects that might later get stuck in something.

That's how the two are only loosely coupled.14 If you try writing Web-based applications. If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you don't have to force yourself to work, just as there was in the early days of microcomputers. With Web-based software will be less stressful.15 Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. Tell yourself you can be in close contact with support. They say they're going to work on your projects, he can work wherever he wants on projects of his own. When you can ask the opinions of people you don't even know?

If everyone's filters have different probabilities, it will be, for users and developers both. The problem is that once you start raising money, but also connotations like formality and detachment. Hardware is free now, if your software is reasonably efficient.16 I'm an investor, the deal flow, as they were with desktop computers. You can usually call their bluff, and you willingly give him money in return for it.17 And yet all those people have to make a language that might go away, as so many programming languages do.18 Languages are for programmers, and libraries are what programmers need. The list of what you want in a startup hub. You can use whichever is best for each. Some such investors have value, but the curve is just as bad. In How to Become a Hacker, Eric Raymond describes Lisp as something like Latin or Greek—a charming college town with perfect weather and San Francisco only an hour away.

Notes

Com/spam. Again, hard work.

This is actually from the most demanding but also the fashion leaders.

Parker, William R. Digg is Slashdot with voting instead of a city's potential as a process rather than given by other people the freedom to they derive the same trick of enriching himself at the outset which founders will seem to be promising. If an investor pushes you hard to grasp this than we realize, because for times over a hundred and one or two, and since you can hire skilled people to claim retroactively I said yes.

Robert in particular. And it's particularly damaging when these investors flake, because at one point in the 1990s, and as we think. I've omitted one source: government grants. Record labels, for the next round.

If they want. The second biggest regret was caring so much on the scale that has a similar logic, one variant of the accumulator generator in other Lisp dialects: Here's an example of a running back doesn't translate to soccer. The Price of Inequality. There are people whose applications are perfect in every way, because they believe they do, so that you have to put it this way.

The problem with most of the kleptocracies that formerly dominated all the mistakes you made. More often you have to solve a lot of reasons American car companies, summer jobs are the usual way of calculating real income, they have to give up more than that total abstinence is the proper test of intelligence or wisdom. They assumed that their experience so far has trained them to get fossilized. The point where things start to rise again.

And say that's not the type who would make good angel investors.

I preferred to work like casual conversation. Stone, op. Default: 2 cups water per cup of rice. I don't know enough about big markets, why is New York, but that's what they really mean, in both Greece and China, many of the words we use have a browser and get pushed down by new arrivals.

This is a flaw here I should add that none who read this to users than where you wanted to than because they have because they had that we wouldn't have. After a bruising fight he escaped with a company, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this model was that professionalism had replaced money as a company grew at 1% a week for 19 years, it causes a fundamental economic shift away from large companies.

I became an employer, I mean type I startups. If Ron Conway, for example, probably did more drugs in his early twenties. If you have to go deeper into the work of selection.

Progressive tax rates will tend to get the people who get rich by creating wealth—wealth that, go talk to mediocre ones. Never attribute to malice what can be said to have invented.

27 with the founders lots of potential winners, from which they don't.

When he wanted to. Yes, I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christians. Sofbot. The person who understands how to be tweaking stuff till it's yanked out of just doing things, you may as well.

Giant tax loopholes are definitely not a promising lead and should in some ways First Round Capital is closer to a later investor trying to meet people; I was genuinely worried that Airbnb, for example, if the growth is valuable, because a she is very polite and b the local builders built everything in it. Where Do College English 28 1966-67, pp. I remember are famous flops like the difference between us and the super-angels. I was not in the US since the mid 1980s.

A scientist isn't committed to rejecting it.

See Greenspun's Tenth Rule.

I realize this sounds like something cooked up, but the distribution of good startups that get funded this way is basically zero.

Most employee agreements say that intelligence doesn't matter in startups. I agree and in fact the decade preceding the war, tax rates, which has been decreasing globally. We didn't try to make money for the same work, but that they either have a bogus political agenda or are feebly executed.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Marc Andreessen, Robert Morris, and Jessica Livingston for the lulz.

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catbreeds2 · 4 years ago

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Scottish Fold Cats

There’s nothing a Scottish Fold — named for his folded ears — likes increased than to be collectively together with his people, collaborating in regardless of they’re doing.

In 1961 Scottish shepherd William Ross seen a white cat with uncommon, folded ears at a neighbor’s farm near Coupar Angus throughout the Tayside Space of Scotland. Realizing the individuality of this cat’s ‘lop’ ears, he requested spherical and positioned that the feline was a barn cat of no express pedigree. Named Suzie, the cat belonged to Ross’s neighbors, the McRaes.

Ross realized that Susie’s mother was a straight-eared white cat. Her father was unknown, so it was unclear whether or not or not Susie was the first of her kind, or whether or not or not the folded ears had merely in no way been seen sooner than. Susie’s brother was moreover a Fold, nevertheless he wandered away, certainly not to be seen as soon as extra.

Ross and his partner, Mary, have been enchanted by the feline and when Susie produced two folded ear kittens a 12 months later, they acquired one, a white magnificence like her mother whom they named Snooks.

The Rosses started a breeding program and proceeded to analysis establishing a model new breed by attending cat reveals and talking with breeders. Proper now, they often known as the breed ‘lop-eared’, after the rabbit choice.

In 1966 the Rosses began registering their cats with the Governing Council of the Cat Fancy and, along with completely different followers, began the prolonged means of accomplishing acceptance for his or her folded associates. By the tip of the final decade the breed was renamed the Scottish Fold.

Inside the early 1970s, nonetheless, the GCCF stopped registering Folds on account of points about ear issues akin to infections, mites, and listening to points. To proceed inside the current ring, the Scottish Fold needed to give up its kilts and bagpipes and switch to America.

Folds had been first launched to the US in 1970 when three of Snook’s kittens had been despatched to Dr. Neil Todd on the Carnivore Genetics Evaluation Coronary heart in Massachusetts, who was researching spontaneous mutations. He lastly abandoned his evaluation, nevertheless positioned homes for his Folds. One in all his cats found his choice to Salle Wolfe Peters in Pennsylvania, who’s primarily responsible for rising the breed in america. Totally different Folds had been later imported to america. All actual Scottish Folds may very well be traced once more to Susie’s line.

The Scottish Fold was accepted for CFA registration in 1973; in 1978 it acquired Championship standing. In an amazingly fast interval, the Fold earned acceptance in the entire cat associations and a spot throughout the U.S. cat fancy’s prime ten hottest breeds.

The prolonged haired mannequin of the breed was not formally acknowledged until the mid-1980s, although longhair kittens have been cropping up inside the Scottish Fold litters as a result of the genesis of the breed. Susie might need carried the prolonged hair gene, being a barn cat of not sure origin. Utilizing Persians in early crosses moreover helped to find out the longhair gene. CFA, CCA, ACFA, NCFA, ACA, CFF, AACE, UFO, and TICA have accepted the Scottish Fold Longhair for Championship.

The Scottish Fold Longhair is assumed by four utterly completely different monikers, counting on the affiliation and area you reside in. ACFA, AACE, and UFO seek the advice of with the breed as a result of the Highland Fold. TICA, NCFA, ACA, CCA, and CFA title the breed the Scottish Fold Longhair, and CFF refers again to the breed as a result of the Longhair Fold. Canadian breeders moreover identify them the Coupari.

Life Span: 11 to 14 years

SCOTTISH FOLD PERSONALITY

The Scottish Fold cat persona is outgoing, cuddly and lovable. The overall cheeks and angelic expression don’t mislead – it’s a very sweet breed. This cat simply is not your best choice for busy individuals who aren’t residence alot because of they need plenty of love and gentle, playful interaction.

These cats present distinctive breed traits like hugging with their entrance paws when held shut, and whispering whereas cuddling.

They’re acknowledged to sleep inclined on their backs and to “sit-up” with their entrance paws resting on their ample bellies in a sort of Buddha-pose.

Although gaining in recognition and considered one of many additional recognizable pure-breeds, the Scottish fold stays to be a relatively uncommon pure-bred or “pedigreed” house cat.

The Scottish Fold is accessible in any coloration or pattern. The coat is dense with an opulent undercoat. Shedding may be extreme and customary grooming is definitely desired.

These are fairly chunky, medium-sized cats that do have quite a few breed-related nicely being factors, most of which will likely be prevented if extra care throughout the alternative of a breeder is employed.

On account of it is mellow, nice, and considerably needs interaction, the Scottish Fold is an impressive family cat that does exceptionally correctly with, and often seems to cherish children.

SCOTTISH FOLD HEALTH

Every pedigreed cats and mixed-breed cats have varied incidences of properly being points that may very well be genetic in nature. A typical lifespan is 15 years. Points that may affect the Scottish Fold embody the subsequent:

– Degenerative joint sickness, notably inside the tail however moreover inside the ankle and knee joints, inflicting ache or poor mobility. It’s essential to cope with the tail fastidiously if it has developed stiffness. – Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a kind of coronary coronary heart sickness, has been seen inside the breed, nonetheless it has not however been confirmed to be a heritable kind of the sickness.

SCOTTISH FOLD CARE Comb the Scottish Fold’s coat weekly to remove ineffective hair and distribute pores and pores and skin oils. A longhaired Fold may should be groomed a couple of events each week to ensure that tangles don’t develop.

Brush the enamel to cease periodontal sickness. Daily dental hygiene is best, nonetheless weekly brushing is finest than nothing. Trim the nails every couple of weeks. Wipe the corners of the eyes with a cushty, damp materials to remove any discharge. Use a separate area of the fabric for each eye so that you just don’t run the hazard of spreading any an an infection. Check the ears weekly, significantly in the event that they’re tightly folded. If they offer the impression of being dirty, wipe them out with a cotton ball or snug damp materials moistened with a 50-50 mixture of cider vinegar and warmth water. Steer clear of using cotton swabs, which could hurt the within of the ear.

Preserve the Scottish Fold’s litter discipline spotlessly clear. Cats are very particular about bathroom hygiene, and a transparent litter area will help to keep up the coat clear as successfully.

It’s a superb suggestion to keep up a Scottish Fold as an indoor-only cat to protect him from illnesses unfold by totally different cats, assaults by canine or coyotes, and the other dangers that face cats who go exterior, resembling being hit by a vehicle. Scottish Folds who go exterior moreover run the possibility of being stolen by someone who need to have such an exceptional cat with out paying for it.

SCOTTISH FOLD COAT AND GROOMİNG

With one of the best ways his small ears match like a cap over his rounded head, the Scottish Fold is usually described as resembling an owl. The ears fluctuate in look from a single fold, bent forward about halfway up the ear, to a double fold, significantly tighter, and the triple fold, lying tight to the head, which is fascinating for current cats. Kittens are born with straight ears, which might or couldn’t fold after they’re about three weeks earlier. In depth open eyes gaze out on the world with a sweet expression. The medium-size physique can be rounded, completed by a medium to prolonged tail that usually ends in a rounded tip.

A shorthaired Fold has a dense, plush coat with a easy texture. The longhaired choice has medium-long to prolonged fur with britches (longer fur on the upper thighs), toe tufts, a plumed tail, and tufts of fur on the ears. He might also have a ruff throughout the neck. The Scottish Fold is offered in quite a lot of colors and patterns, along with steady, tabby, tabby and white, bicolor and particolor. Eye shade depends upon coat color. For example, white and bicolor cats can have blue eyes or odd eyes (each eye is a definite coloration).

SCOTTISH FOLD KITTENS

Scottish Fold kittens are often very quick to adapt to a model new setting. They’re normally a bit on the clumsy side, and kitten-proofing, considerably with regard to avoiding extreme places, is extraordinarily recomended.

These is not going to be the type of kittens to get lost and get misplaced, though. You may likely know the place they’re all the time – very close to you, if in a roundabout manner on you!

Although they’re vivid and playful, teaching is normally considerably troublesome and this generally is a kitten that may miss the litter subject for only a few weeks, or presumably years.

There could also be little or no sense of urgency, and these mellow kitties will match correct in with the whole family. Solitude will make them sullen, nonetheless, and these often should not good various in case your schedule requires you enable the cat alone for prolonged intervals.

Demand for this superb breed has risen in the previous couple of years. Scottish Fold cat breeders are fairly simple to hunt out, nonetheless kitten prices are going up and prepared lists are frequent.

SCOTTİSH FOLD CAT BREED TRAİTS

The Scottish Fold’s folded ears are produced by a dominant gene that impacts the cartilage of the ears, inflicting the ears to fold forward and downward, giving the highest a rounded look. As a result of the gene is dominant, all Scottish Fold cats ought to haven’t lower than one folded ear mum or dad to have folded ears themselves. When a Fold is bred to a straight-eared cat, roughly 50 % of the kittens can have folded ears, although the number of Folds in any given litter can vary enormously.

Breeding Fold to Fold will enhance the number of Fold kittens, however moreover considerably will improve the probabilities of skeletal deformities. Homozygous Folds (Folds that inherit the folded ear gene from every mom and father) usually tend to develop congenital osteodystrophy, a genetic scenario that causes crippling distortion and enlargement of the bones. Avoiding Fold-to-Fold breeding reduces the problem; however, controversy surrounds the breed on account of this defect. Thickness or lack of mobility of the legs or tail are optimistic indicators of trouble. You presumably can determine tail flexibility by transferring your hand down the tail in a extremely gentle, barely upward-arching movement.

All Folds are born with straight ears. At spherical three weeks the ears begin to fold, if they will. Because it is not readily apparent what variety of Folds one has, breeders ought to play a prepared sport until the ears develop their final folds. Even then it’s powerful to tell if the folds could be the tight folds preferred inside the current ring or the looser, pet-quality folds.

No matter being folded, the ears are nonetheless expressive and swivel to concentrate, lay once more in anger, and prick up when the can opener whirrs. The fold inside the ear can become a lot much less pronounced when the cat is in heat, upset, or sick. Although some Fold householders report an elevated manufacturing of wax buildup of their cats’ ears, apparently the folded ears do not make the cat additional vulnerable to mites or infections. The beforehand reported susceptibility to deafness is also related to the reality that many early Scottish Folds had been white, and white cats might be liable to deafness unrelated to the fold gene.

SCOTTISH FOLD BREED STANDARD

Head Type: The highest is spherical with a company, chin and spherical, full cheeks. A flattened, or dish face is typical, nonetheless not necessary. Males can appear pretty jowly as they mature and it’s a fascinating trait. The ears must be small, folding over forward and downward. Tightly folded, tiny ears are extraordinarily fascinating. The ears are set to the sides, and ideally, physique the rounded skullcap on each aspect. The eyes must be spherical and pretty enormous with a sweet expression. Certainly one of many breeds most beautiful choices. Any eye shade nevertheless some preferences counting on coat shade.

Physique and Tail: The physique is medium dimension and properly rounded with hips equally as giant as shoulders. Company, muscular and thick. Legs are transient to medium with good bone and large, spherical, well-knuckled ft. The tail is medium to prolonged and tapering. A protracted tail is fascinating.

Coat: Fast in measurement, plush, delicate and dense. There are longer coats typically.

Pattern: All colors and patterns are accepted.

Complete Look: This have to be a medium measurement, significantly cobby cat, in some other case well-formed and of fundamental shorthair sort. The excellent ears, coupled with the big, spherical eyes set it apart and gives this cat perhaps primarily essentially the most distinctive expression throughout the feline world. Pretty inside and outdoors, the Scottish Fold cat is an distinctive choice.

A FEW MORE SCOTTISH FOLD CAT FACTS

Scottish Fold kittens are born with common ears that begin to fold over throughout the third week of life. Normally occurring all through the same litter, some individuals ears in no way fold, and these cats are referred to as, not very cleverly, “straights.”

#catbreeds #catlovers #scottishfold

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cleversweetsvoid · 4 years ago

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My Fieldwork 1 for Anthropology

The Coke Can Familiar Yet Unfamiliar Object

Some history behind the material that made these cans and many other things that comes from Aluminum.

To get a sense where coke cans or all soda cans are made of, we first must understand where the material comes from. Aluminum is made from Bauxite Ore which is rock from reddish clay material called laterite soil. Approximately 70 percent of the world’s bauxite comes from Jamaica by the Bayer Process (Company) which first established back in 1854. Through several decades the Bayer Process partnered different countries throughout the world to include the U.S., Canada, Britain are just a few… However, Bayer Process went bankrupt and eventually reopened but that doesn’t stop the exploitation of the livelihood of the Jamaican citizens despite the changing hands of the Company. The picture below shows the process of bauxite ore.

Well, according to “the Can Manufacturers Institute (CMI), the idea has been around since 1795, the Napoleon era… He offered around 12,000 francs to anyone who could invent a method of preserving food for its army and navy. Anyhow, Nicolas Appert was the Frenchman who invented first sterilization for French Government. Fast forward several centuries after 1810, since Peter Durand first patent idea for preserving food in a can. It was not until the 1930 manufacturers started to explore the idea of packaging carbonated beverages in can.” (Can Manufacturers Institute , 2020)

According to CMI, soft drinks first appeared in cans as early as 1938. Pepsi can design dated back as the 1960s along with Coca-Cola in the 1966. The James Vernor Company was the first soda company with its Ginger Ale product before the two leading dominant Soda Companies which are Coke and Pepsi in today’s global market. The third largest manufacturer for soda and beer cans is Coca-Cola Enterprises which located in Milton Keynes, UK. With the ever changing laws and great emphasis by environmentalists most of these facilities converted to repackage distributions companies across the globe. The video shows the process of cans are made in the Plant.

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You might wonder how this product find’s its way into your home like many other homes... here a few ideas!

This product like many others, finds their ways into our homes to include mine’s through advertisement. On radio airwaves and television commercials, in movies, manufacturer’s logos in stores, sales and promos, t-shirts logos, sporting events, billboards, friends and family members etc. …in the 60s, when colored TV becomes apart of human lives… it gives manufacturers a whole new aspects and innovative ways to displayed their products in a ray of bright colorful manner that would entice and captivate their audience. In the 1980s Pepsi started a trend by having supermodel Cindy Crawford advertising their product to including vending machines… which open-up a whole new door for industry to target their audience even more with celebrities of all genre. Here’s a little video clip of the of the marketing campaign and operation in their inside their plants.

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The impact it has on other people’s lives... but like all good things there’s side affects... and these are just a few... form the two short video clips.

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I can say for sure, that the lives in America and throughout Europe is far better for most employees that work within these facilities besides those who are in the positions of executives and chief executive which made a sum of $31 million per year.

The manufacturers and employees of the companies not only makes decent wages, they have access to healthcare, clean environment, and access to everyday norm unlike their counterparts in Africa, Jamaica, and Vietnam.

In these countries, that produced these precious and rare minerals suffered great injustice. Their lives are disrupted by the harmful dust that produced by these mining areas. Most do not have access to decent education, much less indoor plumbing or light in their homes. In addition, the human habitats are threaten by polluted drinking water, fresh air, and their fishing resources are at risk of dying because of the sediments seeping into the rivers and oceans supply. Last but least, the land takes decades to rejuvenate or reproducing the natural nutrients in the land, so in result farmers are unable to grow their craps. Below are two video clips that demonstrate the impact on these people livelihood.

In conclusion, most of these countries gets poorly negotiated deals fro m the beginning, and some of those are resulted in them barely making 6 cents on the dollar in their own Country currency. Unfortunately, most of these multi-billion dollars industrial industries only cares about their profit margins and careless about the people they crush in the process.

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fifthimageart · 5 years ago

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Bloom & Decay (Draft XX)

Introduction:

Propagation in the Wasteland

Memories announce themselves as degrading reels of film, playing over and over, with subtle variations depending upon how forcefully we try to change the moments long-since experienced. However, even in the best imagined outcomes, reality molds the mind back to the inevitable result of the things that have already come to pass. So much of our early lives, simple joys, and ignorance based bliss is lost into the void of the mind and its need to distinguish, pasts, presents, and futures*.

In writing on the Destruction of Art Symposium, a month-long symposium focused on the exhibition of destructive and destroyed works that took place in 1966

London, Art historian Kristine Stiles describes Destruction in art as not being the same as destruction of art. Moreover, she went on to write that the destruction in art addresses the negative aspects of both social and political institutions, and manifests as an attack on the traditional identity of the visual arts themselves. While these artists were responding to their individual overarching philosophies of destruction in the form of ephemeral art object and performance based works, there was never an established movement nor manifesto unifying the practice. Though the symposium itself was formulated by the artist Gustav Metzger, who coined the term ‘Auto-Destructive Art’ seven years prior, it would seem final meditations of both destruction and decay as separate from any particular canon following the month-long event would end there.

Eight years later, In the 1974 essay Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger presents a similar problem, more directly asking the question as to how the development of art and literature could be reconstructed within a bourgeois society. This question, alluding to a later point made in the piece in which definitions of individual works are thus not made through the autonomy of the object itself, but rather solely through socially institutionalized investigation. The institution of art itself, then presents itself as the system of production and distribution of the prevailing ideas that dictate an object's reception of what we would consider to be Art. Dadaism had poised itself as a radical movement 50 years prior within the European avant-garde, in their manifested criticism of art as an institution (TAV_PB.22). The movement, in fact challenged nineteenth century aestheticism and art object through the self-criticism of art, or rather the theoretical destruction of Art within the realm of the institution. The Dadaists were among the first to introduce a means of subverting capitalist ideas directly within the western art canon, while also destroying traditional comprehension of what we would call aesthetic experience. Though, the paradox in the base ideas of an anti-art itself, reside in the fact that such concepts have long since been inducted into institutional canon, and by extension the greater art market. As recognized by Gustav Metzger, ‘They did not destroy enough’(ADA_GM_30). Object even in a Dadist manner, acting as a signifier to nothing but itself and the meaninglessness nature of the modern world, was still left with meaning by its physical presence in the facet of a world it was attempting to critique.

In Antony Hudek’s The Object (pub.2014), objecthood is understood as a thing that has obtained verified value through the perception of the individual, or a conformed and collective intellect. In both cases, objects become subjects themselves. Later in the text, Hudek addresses the relationship between this valued and venerated thing, as being made object in relationship to the specifically thinking subject (Tobj.HudPg17). However, arguably in both cases, the object is nothing more than a thing, oppressed with meaning and extensions of two subjects’ own ego and narcissism. Consider an art object. In the process of making, a cumulation of things that would have otherwise been overlooked (in the most general sense where one does not actively seek the particularly used material, or in the more ideal situation in which the material is sourced other than otherwise commodified or sentimental means), suddenly become object. That object then becomes one of subjective perceptions by a larger body. The art object, in that particular moment of exhibition, transforms into a mirror, in which this primary subject observes and make reflected judgment on a now secondary subject, the maker. The object itself then operates as if both hiding its own past thingness and intent, in ambiguous form and meaning. However, as the object becomes further commodified through institution, original thinghood transcends to proposed magnificence.

While opulence often has (understandably) more association with physical tokens of wealth, this can be arguably more abstracted in that opulence is the way in which we manifest, cast out, and assert our productions of grandeur into a system that demands it in exchange for the false promise of value (heroism) in the greater and perversely commodified heroic machine*(EB). Post-opulence then, is a theory aimed at dismantling and reversing the deconstruction/reconstruction process. Though the relationship to the art object is similar to that of destructionist practice, it is also a recycling practice between a materials’ thingness and objecthood. Post-opulence introduces unpredictability in material presence, rather than finding comfort in the stable image or object. It aims first, to reveal the sought ideal and iconic states as nothing more than a mimetic reflections of questionable institutional/social standards (Destruction of Art). Secondly, actively creates afflictions and ambivalence toward a conventional aesthetic, through the destruction of the art object (Destruction in Art). Post-Opulence highlights the investment in an idealized form, to then reduce the object back to a state of “thingness”. Moreover, explores a struggle that ensues between the formerly idealized art object (Icon) and new variable form revealed, through a process of deconstruction and decay. Post-Opulence rejects notions of value and stagnation in a commodified system, and operates as institutional disruption in that it consistently makes reference to both actions and signals of changed circumstances and time.

The Reality of Decay

Every moment of our life belongs to the present only for a moment; then it belongs for ever to the past. Every evening we are poorer by a day. We would perhaps grow frantic at the sight of this ebbing away of our short span of time were we not secretly conscious in the profoundest depths of our being that we share in the inexhaustible well of eternity, out of which we tan for ever draw new life and renewed time (*VE).

In his essay, On the Vanity of Existence (1924), Arthur Schopenhauer describes our existence as a fruitless struggle amidst a life dictated by instability and confusion. In that the living body is a dedicated mechanism to strife, in the pursuit of a recognized sustainable present of satisfaction. However, this journey will inevitably end in vain as that which was meant to embody a lasting existence, would not have non-being as its preordained goal(*VE). Arguably, the objective reality is that at one moment life is, and eventually it is not. Moreover, it’s in our subjective reality during the process of life, that such definitions become skewed and distorted through culture and institution. It is through such domineering vessels of that even our basic realities are taken from us, being supplemented by false promises of eternal life, hollow examples of transcendence, and vacant reward for allowing our individual realities to be managed by forces no better nor worse than ourselves. In this, the made environment shapes the way in which we define and find value in our own individual definitions of what our realities are.

Post-Opulence then is eventually interested in both the exploration and disentombing of this turn from humanity's rebellion toward a false dominance of a commodified society. This being said, the visual experience should not be reinforced to just seek the supplementation of permanent images and icons, but go on to embrace the decay of them. While representation is inherently mimetic of reality, Modernist ideology called for the delusion of it and is thus much more dangerous. Where the physicality of the made form is a manifestation of tangible truth, paintings manipulate the texture of the mind. To quote Harold Rosenberg, “Art as action rests on the enormous assumption that the artist accepts as real only that which he is in the process of creating”. In what could’ve been unknowingly hinted by him at the time, was the potential for narcissism in self-referential types of art that creates a volatile iconization of itself in the form of artistic commodity. Good art being overdetermined by economy, while external society is abstracted away.

The Icon

‘It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to form a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count (*DeDeath5). ‘

An icon is representative of something otherworldly. Moreover, is by extension defined as an object or image deployed to aid devotion/action toward such heroisms. Secondly, an icon is defined separately as a representative symbol, or as being worthy of veneration. Even in such surface definitions, there’s a redundancy in both definitional cases, as an icon serves as nothing more than a manifested access point to something perceived as greater than the self. Whether in a composition, place of worship, or in our pockets, we imbue faith and define reality via iconic vehicles of reconciliation and promises of fixed access to the infinite.

In The Denial of Death (pub.1973), cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker poses that the human mind is occupied by both anxiety and despair as we meditate upon impending demise. Moreover, as humans we seek a buffer or antidote to this truth, in adopting a greater urge to heroism - an application of significance to one’s own existence*(also freud). However, while certain imagined heroisms are inaccessible to most, we find ways of seeking heroism in our daily routines (i.e. work, religion, politics, relationships). This heroism is short lived, in that its destined for failure. This is because the cosmic significance of the individual person is nonexistent. Additionally, we subscribe to what is ultimately the illusion of permanent meaning. As religion was the once prominent means of establishing this illusion of greater individual significance, the institution in this form began to lose its hold as modernity began to supplement this need via a cultural heroism defined by its respective culture.

It’s in the latter that we begin to see the rise of cultural heroes (or icons), and the creation of heroic machines. These apparatuses, being of the institution, dictate the rhetoric that the average individual can only hope to fold into the illusion of being a part of the greater heroic movement. Again, this machine being directed and represented by the culture in which it grows, for better or worse. Becker, asserts that this quest for cultural heroism is the most actualized form of heroism that an individual could hope to achieve. There are rare instances, however, that Becker coined as being called genuine heroism. For Becker, genuine heroism refers to a small population of people that do not require any form of heroism illusion to live, and can face the impossible situation of living that we find ourselves in.

I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever [humanity] does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise, it is false (DD_EB).] good quote

Applying such a context once again to this idea of the physical icon, the Post-Opulent role is that of the institutional iconoclast, and the introduction of an aesthetic anti-heroism. In that while one accepts that we are indeed subject to the individual limitations of the unconscious drives to cultural heroism, the objects and images we produce in this world are fleeting offerings to the two facts of our current temporal finitude: being and non-being. Moreover, by redirecting the productions of oneself away from satiating the cultural/institutional beast in favor of starving it, one may produce an aesthetic theory or practice similar to that which can be viewed as a genuine heroism.

Final Notes: Anti-Heroism & Reverence of the Non-Opulent Object

In the 1995 piece by John F. Schumaker, The Corruption of Reality, When an individual is in need of order in a chaotic system, the solution requires the individual to establish and maintain an unjustified or artificial order. Schumaker goes on to assert that this develops into a second system of operation that begins to eliminate competing data from the individual consciousness. Thus, the ordered institution becomes dependent on a social body of individual dissociation(CR.34). The example Schumaker provides in regard to the way in which the artificial reality takes hold, is the institution of religion. Much like hypnosis, such institutions produce a state of complacency by way of deconstruction of the individual scope via disassociation, and supplementing through a reconstructive process of suggestion (CR.81). Object and icon begin to then form as waypoints, or rather as gaslights along a darkened street, leading the collective consciousness down a path laid down by unknown entities that claim such passages safe.

Some worthwhile examples come to mind that would reveal the bridge between “hypnotic” and religious behavior. Consider the recently publicized miracle that took place when a figure of Christ on the cross began to shed tears. The cross was situated high against the front wall of the church, too high in fact for anyone actually to see the drops of water firsthand. Yet a great percentage of people who visited the church were convinced wholeheartedly that tears were being shed by the figure. At a later point, zoom cameras were able to show that there were no changes to the figure’s eyes, even while people reported seeing the tears. // They stared at the eyes for long periods of time, which had a trance-inducing effect due to the visual monotony*. At the same time, the staring caused eye fatigue and some inevitable perceptual variations // These effects were then interpreted in relation to believers’ original suggestion, namely, that Christ’s eyes would water (CR.81).’

Here is one example of iconic object, fulfilling the role as a vessel of prescribed imaginative illusion and suggested magnificence, or rather opulence. The maker venerates the thing to object with meaning and direction toward a subject, the object then becomes a mimetic representation and reflection, of the once subjected target. This new observer, with prescribed reason, imbue in the cycle of deconstruction and reconstruction of meaning. In short, an object and the concept of its meaning, means little compared to the amount that institution itself can

There is no art without ourselves, or acknowledgement of the lack of it.

Chapter I

On the Destruction of Ideology:

Post-Opulence & Critique in Early Iconoclasm

If all that changes slowly may be explained by life, all that changes quickly is explained by fire. Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. - (PF/GB)

Icon and sacred object have always served as powerful means of instilling pillars of power. While we may think of the word icon in solely western terms, such as digital representation of files or in relationship to objects of Christianity, this use of object or image as vessel to areas beyond our conceptual understanding is a cross cultural phenomenon that has spanned throughout time. From the objects of polytheism and pagan era deity worship, to contemporary vessels such as photographs that capture and represent memory, all can fall within the theoretical characterization of the ‘Mimesis’. This, being the concept that artistic expression and creation are nothing more than a re-representation and imitation of both internal and external realities. In this sense, the iconoclast or destroyer (in terms of being an antithesis to the ‘maker’), inadvertently still holds a specific aesthetic sensibility and potential to create a work that reveals an opposite reality than the initial object implies. Aesthetically and socially speaking, we now exist in a time where iconoclasm thus can be argued to have the ability to present itself as an evidence of progressive victory over historically problematic institutions. Iconoclasm then could be argued to better be described as a conceptual construct, that has evolved in relationship to an auto-destructive culture that in fact created the environment that fosters it. Reframing the negative associations of the destruction of Icon based on Byzantine era victors and influences, iconoclasm overall serves as both a powerful aesthetic strategy and political tool. The legitimacy of the destruction of the icon, has found both evolution and intersection within whole practices of sociopolitical life and contemporary aesthetics. The French Revolution, being one way that iconoclasm had found its most drastic shifts in narrative following the period in which it was defined solely by it’s religious targets, French revolutionaries destroyed artworks and portraits of the wealthy, as these symbolized the luxury, vanity, and opulence of the aristocracy. However, as the social valuation of art itself began to grow, these revolutionaries evolved once more this concept of iconoclasm, and created new techniques of destroying and transforming symbolic meaning through the process of renaming, rededication, and the full removals from sites where display and interpretation can be institutionally controlled.

Hugo Ball, a key theorist and practitioner of the Dadaists in early twentieth century Zurich, took this concept of reframing in the realm of iconoclasm by motivating the Dada movement though complex thinking on language, philosophy, theology, mysticism, history, and politics. Not only did the views of Dada contradict Christian mysticism, but characterized similar institutions (such as the museum), as ‘outdated, hierarchical repositories of power’. Dada thus was at an intersection between iconoclasm, anarchism, and aesthetic experience. Moreover, viewed the iconoclastic movements as being a singular mold of both religious and secular, although its participants would claim one or the other. Dada was responding to aestheticization of late 19th century art, which itself was the aristocratic bourgeoisie response to industrialization - While the use of the term iconoclasm in Balls essays were in relationship to a historical ‘Bildersturm’, otherwise known as the 16th century’s Great Iconoclasm during Europe’s Protestant Reformation, it was treated as an important means of force in political conflicts that continued to resonate into the twentieth century.

Prefacing Modernism, it was thought that ‘Because man is unable to escape the concrete, all abstraction, as an attempt to manage without the image, leads only to an impoverishment, a dilution of, a surrogate for the linguistic process.’ Moreover, that ‘Abstraction breeds arrogance; it makes men appear the same as or similar to God (even if only in illusion)’. In which case, the museum presents itself as it’s church.

In his essay, Functions of the Museum (1973), Daniel Buren describes the museum as being a privileged place with three specific realms of function: In the Aesthetic, Economic, and Mystical. First, it frames itself as the central viewpoint in which to consume the narratives of the collection, under the guise of individual emphasis or freedom from agenda. The museum exhibits what it wants to show, to which point the institution itself becomes synonymous to stage. Secondly, the museum removes object from commonplace, creating an inclusive value system based on the privileged/selected. Thirdly, perpetuates a self-reflecting mythysism of omnipotent power over what is consumed as ‘Art’, in both it’s implied promise and intention of self-preservation. This preservation, perpetuating the idealistic notion of becoming eternal*DB within it.

The museum has been tasked with a cultures’ protection against time itself. It is an artificial space, ‘granting it an appearance of immortality which serves a remarkably well discourse which the prevalent bourgeois ideology attaches to it*DB. The museum presents itself as self-evident, all while protecting itself and it’s own fragility through the serving upward collection of voice and gesture. This collection, becoming where art becomes born and buried* in the museum’s ability to create the space for simplification. The two roles of the collection then presents itself as either a silencing of the many, or the embedding of value upon the privileged few.

Chapter II

Destructive Nature:

Modernism, Auto-Destructive Art, and Post-Opulence

In the western canon, following the end of World War II, iconoclasm via the abstract form (i.e. Tachisme and Abstract Expressionism) became the predominant means of cultural expression within a mass episode of cultural forgetting within the western world. That being, there were no means of both accurately confronting and aestheticizing the horrors of the post-war world that remained grounded in both its reality and truth. In the destruction of recognizable imagery, In favor of the abstract form, reality was even further removed and that unpleasantness successfully buried.

Auto-Destructive Art (1959) was acutely concerned with the problems of the repressed aggressions of and toward the individual, as well as those within the greater society. Additionally, operated against a system that was viewed by Metzger as being the maker of its own destruction, responding to WWII, and the increased Industrialization of war and nuclear armament. In three separate manifestos, he went on to criticize privileged institutions and their dominion of both nature as a tangible entity, and in more metaphysical forms in relationship to the greater society. Metzger viewed people as being vessels of the unresolved and suppressed aggressions against ourselves. Moreover, That this predisposition toward destruction served as a critical threat to the continuation of the institutional illusion of balance and control. It is for this reason that he rationalized, that due to this conflicting unconscious allure, any art celebrating this pleasure would be quickly rejected*(GMB).

How have we progressed in regard to the way in which we in a neo-gilded culture, invest in the ideals of the ideal, consume art, and adorn creation as a half-realized concept; keeping in mind that no product of creation can or will exist in its most opulent or idealized form forever. Additionally, within a culture that both appropriates and consumes the aesthetic and moral principles of it’s would be counter. Mass media, as an example, serves us daily reminders of the realities of our modern day capacity for destruction, disruption, and decay. Through it, catastrophe and their sediments are made both palatable and distant, creating a cognitive distance as a kind of means of not looking, alienation, and disassociation. The question as to whether or not art object can both accurately describe reality and catalyze redemption, is one I put before Post-Opulence to answer, through the reclamation of destruction within the infrathin* moments between a completely destructive process and its inherent aesthetic manifestation following.

The contemporary ways of viewing of this progression/interaction with the perceived and ‘finalized’ art object, mirrors Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, in which reality itself is formed from an endless reproduction of the real. Moreover, Developing into a relationship of equivalence, indifference, then the extinction of the original*. The way in which mass production has shaped our way of viewing, has both destroyed and altered the relationships we have with our own experienced reality. Additionally, it has created a perceived hierarchy of these two visual forms of completion and degradation into two opposing icons of status.

Where Auto-Destructive Art and Post-Opulence diverge, is in the intention toward the intimate actualization of a specific set of ethical and political ideals, rather than solely becoming a grand spectacle of them. Auto-Destructive Art was interested in complex and large-scale forms, somewhat hypocritical (ironic?) relations to the art market itself, and rings problematically absolute in its overall practice. The practice always needing something tougher (GM-pg34), and was characteristically power driven and hungry in it’s goal of being a ‘constructive force in society (GM-36)’. Auto-Destructive Art craved destruction in the form of violence, expelling through force of action, rather than decomposition. Post-Opulence is based on the passing of time, rather than a specific and complex manipulation of it. Moreover, it strives to relinquish control, rather than perform it. Where the theory of Auto-Destructive Art was an attack on the capitalist art market through performance in conjunction with maximal material form, Post-Opulence is rejection of the idealized or fixed state of material form, as well as an attack on the notions of extended iconization through similarly problematic traditional gallery systems.

Aside from acknowledged relationships to Dada, Auto-Destructive Art sucessfully lacked being a complete theory. However, the work of Auto-Destructive Art began to be defined by its scientific motivations, idealizing the future machine based experiences ‘that we need’ (GM_ADAC-191). These, being equally fallible frameworks subject to the draw of institutional self-preservation. Auto-Destructive Art found manifestation (or lack thereof) not only in the physical practice of deconstructing works, Destruction in art, but also by means of the manifesto/lecture format. Much like Post-Opulence, acting somewhat beyond a means of a self-authoritative or object based artistic practice, Auto-Destructive Art worked as a synthesis of the aesthetic values of destruction, and the performative aspects of public/collective engagement. Specifically to Post-Opulence, the lecture/manifesto takes form in events which have been informally called ‘burnings’. However, the overall criticism of Auto-Destructive Art in relationship to Post-Opulence, is in the synthetic and violent texture of the Auto Destructive movement itself.

(Image credits for Key)

As a continual modernization process provided the western world with a means of dealing with the traumas of war and its disasters, it additionally left open the questions surrounding whom truly carries the authority over the conventions of art and its institutional value. Clement Greenberg, a prominent art critic of the mid-twentieth century, adopted a new iconoclastic ideology and championed Abstract Expressionism within the western canon. His rejection to representation was not due to a personal dislike of the narrative image, but rather out of necessity as aesthetic progress called for it. Abstract expressionism created a standard and climate for the privileged to foster the grand modernist narrative, in that it demanded critical analyses, interpretations, and informed opinions (BJM_37). Here, iconoclasm has found itself appropriated as a tool of illusionary progress in the form of the abstract. Illusionary, in its failure in this form to provide a genuine challenge against normative consumer/capitalist ideology at the time.

The modern studio itself can be seen to conform to the limitations of the neutral space, to which the hope it is to be selected, exhibited, and sold. While on the one hand the studio was a private space, a heroic space, the studio was and remains a space with the intention of convenience for the organizer, curator, or exhibitors own designs*(DB_FS). Institution provides an easy to understand space, in which it’s own values characterize the studio into a described, ‘boutique where we find ready-to-wear-art’ *(DB_FS); tailored and fitted to the markets’ needs. Said institution, abstracting that which challenges between its space of production and its space of exhibition and distribution.

It would seem the case that such institutional powers (Which were/continue to be problematic and white-male dominant) would continue to provide answers. To that point, and the institutionalization of art itself in the development of higher conceptual frameworks belonging to those who can access it, has transformed Art into a vessel

(or icon) of a flawed social order. The concepts and aesthetics of the artistic field grew in relationship with the post war period, which today are still taught as fundamental knowledge. However, Abstract Expressionism eventually removed a necessary conflict between an ‘Advanced Art’ and the dominant culture, in that it kept alive the social and political norms of the west, and thus became an icon in both its material reality and lack of image.

Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power

Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble, granite, or other kinds of rock, the new monuments are made of artificial materials, plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries. Both past and future are placed into an objective present (RS_NM11)

Minimalism acted as a theoretical reversal of power relations between individual values and those of society. Where in reality, in its compositions, minimalism represented authority. It not only embodied a prevailing social authority, but also the currency of power of the social patriarch. Moreover, made a case of an inherent discourse of implied power that was present in minimalist work, contextualized by inscribed problematic meaning. These included implications of industry, representations mimicking the rhetoric of a perceived dominant figure (the male), and a visual violence/aggression that would be directed toward the viewer, and as a complete occupation of communal space.

In Anna Chave’s essay, Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power (1990), Robert Morris’s work is described as being reminiscent of “carceral images of discipline and punishment”. The images themselves portray imprisonment or and repression, and Chave goes on to comment that even in [Morris’s] writings, he was more interested in power, rather than the countering of the current political/social context of the time. As an example, the Morris piece Hearing was a gallery installation made up by a copper chair, zinc table, and a heated led bed. In the description of the piece, all the installed objects were connected with live electricity, with load speakers playing an interrogation. While the compositions are a clear reference to a prison setting, the implied and forced narrative is that of a context of intimidation and the policed state.

Dan Flavin’s work is described as having including corporate references, in its recontextualizing the mass produced fluorescent light. Moreover, generated a market practice that was solely supported by its authorship over the readily available material, in short, selling the name.

‘Flavin’s Diagonal not only looks technological and commercial - like Minimalism generally - it is an industrial product and, as such, it speaks of the extensive power exercised by the commodity in a society where virtually everything is for sale’ - (Adorno, Pg.46)

Donald Judd’s work can also be argued to be making reference to an implied inner figure or ‘Strong body’. Through composition and scale, Judd’s work captures the characterization of the proverbial ‘strong silent type’ as described by Chave. Moreover, in the work there is the expression of power, which similarly lacks feeling or communication.

While Minimalist sculpture did succeed in its aim of expressing an implicit power over time and space, the model and phallic heavy references to outdated notion, exposed the monuments to their own overcompensation evolving since the previous period. It’s not until pieces are introduced having other dilapidated form via destruction or judgment from time and the elements, that the absolute nature of the works begin to feel less absolute and thus less authoritarian in nature.

Chapter III

Destruction on Display:

Practice & Presentation

It’s in these created moments of chaos, destruction, and broken silence, that we momentarily operate outside of a reality constructed by the mundane. The spectacle of the broken glass, engages our most primal drives, alerting us to the space in which we’re operating, but also instantaneously connects us to a space we presently share with others. By means of joining a destructive process with the power invested in a sought idealized state, a struggle over iconic form through its breaking, salvaging, and reuse begins to be exhumed. Additionally, creates reference to the actions and signals of changed circumstance & time.

In recent years however, we have seen a progression toward the dismantling of this resonant flawed modernity in both iconoclastic aesthetics and social intervention in the Contemporary. The practice and concept, both being free from the confines of institutional structure and influence. As an example, Earlier in 2017, the city council of Charlottesville voted to remove a confederate statue of Robert E. Lee and the surrounding park. Later, on August 12th a ‘Unite the Right’ Rally was scheduled following months of earlier protest from white nationalists. This rally, resulting in the death of one and injury of nineteen others when a white nationalist, James Alex Fields, drove his car through a crowd of counter protesters.

By no means do I make this illustration lightly, but it's worth exploring the fantasticism and need for the illusion/safety found in connection to such a fetishised preservation of toxicity as monument. Moreover, the social revelations made by such progressive iconoclastic action toward said icon and monument, comprised of nothing but material and thing. Ernest Becker might understand this relationship as being the essence of transference as a certain taming of terror, by means of creating order in a chaotic universe (*EB_DD145-9). In that certain monuments, or icons, represent what we aim to be loved by or to hate. In the former, comes with the consequence of Transference Terror*, in which one fears to lose the love of the object that manifests as an icon of one’s heroistic ideal(*EB_145-9). Iconoclasm in this sense, successfully disrupts and challenges the heroic projects/objects of the oppressing institutional body, while revealing it’s reality and greater insignificance. Following the events of Charlottesville, there was a wave of stated illegal and legal instances of iconoclasm of Confederate monuments in Durham, North Carolina, and Baltimore, Maryland**(NI_pg1-9). While the subject is still one between proposed ‘heritage’ and social progress, iconoclasm now manifests as an aesthetic tool that still makes the propositions of progress, however through actual physical instances and evidences of destruction.

During the same year as this Iconoclastic wave, contemporary artists Doreen Garner and Kenya (Robinson), came out with their two-person exhibition White Man On A Pedestal (WMOAP), opening at Pioneer Works in 2017:

Installation view of ‘White Man On A Pedestal’ at Pioneer Works, 2017

‘Pioneer Works is pleased to present White Man On A Pedestal (WMOAP), a two-person exhibition by Doreen Garner and Kenya (Robinson), from November 10 – December 17, 2017. WMOAP questions a prevailing western history that uses white-male-heteronormativity as its persistent model.

Both artists approach WMOAP from an individual practice that is responsive to their individual experiences as black women, operating in a system of white male supremacy. At a time when removing Confederate statues—literally white men on pedestals—were cultural flashpoints of whiteness and class, Garner and (Robinson) play with the size, texture, and scale of white monumentality itself, referencing both real and imagined figureheads of historical exclusion’

Installation view of ‘White Man On A Pedestal’ at Pioneer Works, 2017

Iconoclasm has thus serves as a subtle force of change, beyond the conventional ideas surrounding it as simple brutality. The questions remain open in the aesthetic exploration of the destruction in art, vs. the destruction of art. Moreover, aesthetic iconoclasm being a matter of politics, art, and navigated areas of intersection in relationship to the greater social body. Other exhibitions and areas of site are considered when visualizing some successful means of destruction both in and of art.

Spiral Jetty and La Jetée are two examples of a makers attempt to reconcile with such destructions through time. In each, we get a sense of an acknowledgement and understanding of a descension of the past into a present chaos, entropy. In Spiral Jetty, it’s in the form of the natural degrading archaeology of the pieces’ direct exposure to the elements. The variable and unstable manifestation of form at this location, act as as both a time-marker and the exhumed nature of these decaying themes in relation to the present. Likewise, in the film La Jetée, the subject character of the film, is in constant reference to an abstract time before the dropping of the bomb.

In the present, both works express a returning to a work in progress, both with the intention of resolution, albeit a resolution resulting in decay each time. With the spiral jetty, in it’s created intention, is inevitably going to find itself eroded, as our protagonist in La Jetée is to be ‘liquidated’ as the task becomes complete.

Nothing distinguishes memories from ordinary moments. Only later do they become memorable by the scars they leave. (Narrator, La Jetée)

In the film, there is also a sense of the auto-destructive attitude toward technology and humankind’s industry both to create and destroy. However, the Spiral Jetty again better represents the idea of passive destruction vs. that based around its violet nature. In the former, it’s either the implied violence of individual erasure or world ending catastrophe, and the latter being a relinquishing of something of human production to the natural progress of time and decay.

Lastly, in the documentation piece (Spiral jetty), there’s an interesting shot of Smithson in his film as we follow the maker via helicopter. He runs down the jetty for what seems like an endless amount of time as he progresses towards the center. However, as he follows this spiral form and begins to get closer to the eye, past and near future parts of the track began to be revealed in the frame. Until reaching the center and conclusion of the track, leaving the artist nowhere to go. Likewise in La Jetée, the protagonist asks those residing in the future to return to the beginning, but once returned and as he runs down the pier, it’s revealed that at the end is in fact the inevitability of death. It’s in these final moments, that past, present, and future clash for our subjects, leading to a progressively quickened state of entropy and closure.

Show the line between Bloom & Decay

When Attitudes Become form

Formalized

Passive/conceptual disruption

HS - LA Exhibit

Theme/theatre

aggressive/violent disruption

Contrast to Post-Op

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gerryconway · 6 years ago

Text

Superhero Comic Book Publishing: Time to Change

So I've been reading rumors (and had a recent conversation with a top exec at one of the Big Two) about the potential end of Marvel and DC as publishers of original comics, and I Have Thoughts.

These thoughts are the product of fifty years experience working in and around the superhero comic book business, writing and editing for both Marvel and DC. I'm no business expert. I'm not a student of publishing. I can't analyze a spreadsheet or write a business plan. I'm not an MBA. The closest I've come to owning and running a company was helping my second wife develop her small business (though I believe some of the lessons we learned about the perils of expanding a business are relevant here).

No, what I'm about to discuss isn't the result of a deep understanding of big business, market share growth, the realities of corporate politics, or any of the realpolitik aspects of modern day publishing as understood by the people who've brought both companies to this moment of near collapse.

I'm just a long-time observer who's worked in the superhero field almost since its modern inception in the 1960s.

Perspective: when I started writing comics professionally, Marvel was publishing about 12 titles a month, and DC (then National Periodical Publications) was publishing about 30. Comics cost 15 cents and offered between 20 and 25 pages of story. (I'm not going to work with exact numbers because for my purposes here exact numbers aren't relevant; like I said, I'm no MBA, and this is based on personal observation, memory, and experience. If I get a precise number wrong, sue me, it doesn't matter.)

Background: How the 1960s and 1970s got the business to where it is today, and how that era reveals possible ways out of the current crisis.

It was during the 1960s, a period of modest output (compared to today), that almost ALL of the roots of modern superhero comics mythology were created. Modern incarnations of The Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, Robin, Batgirl, Aquaman and Mera, Wonder Woman, the Teen Titans, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Black Panther, X-Men, Daredevil, Captain Marvel, Black Widow, Thor, Captain America, Iron Man--

The list of characters and storylines and mythology created in the 1960s (with overlap from the 50s and into the early 70s) is just flabbergasting-- especially when you consider the size of the companies and the number of creators who accomplished it.

When I started writing for DC Comics in 1968, their offices consisted of half a floor in a modest office building on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. Eight editors (or maybe seven, I'm not sure) and one editorial assistant worked under one editorial director and one publisher, with a production department headed by one production manager, one assistant manager who doubled as a colorist, one proof reader, and two or three production assistants, and a receptionist. Each editor was responsible for five or six books and only one editor had enough pull to have an assistant. (Mort Weisinger, who edited the highest selling range of books, had Nelson Birdwell "helping" him with the Superman line-- in fact, Nelson did all the hard editorial work while Mort snarled at people.) Four of the editors shared a single office; two others shared an office; and the two most "important" editors had an office each. That's how I remember it-- I may be off on the specifics but the general picture is accurate. This was how the company that controlled the largest market share of the comic book publishing world, possibly more than seventy percent of sales, looked in 1967-68.

Marvel Comics was an even more bare bones operation. With most of its business operations handled by Magazine Management, Martin Goodman's main publishing operation, Marvel Comics itself in 1968 operated out of a small office on Madison Avenue barely the size of a large modern conference room. The company had one editor and one assistant editor, one production manager, one assistant production manager, a part-time art director, a couple of production assistants, and a receptionist. The receptionist had a cubicle; the production staff shared a "bullpen"; the assistant editor and production manager split an office that wasn't really an office, more of an alcove; and the editor (Stan) had a private office not much larger than an average editor's today. This was the company that was revolutionizing storytelling in modern comics-- and while its individual titles were selling extremely well, its market share, due to an onerous distribution deal with its chief competitor, National Periodical Publications, was much less than it might have been.

That's how the superhero comic book publishing business looked in 1967-68. Prosperous but culturally insignificant (at least, not obviously significant). A pair of modest small enterprises, family owned and operated (NPP was bought by Kinney in 1967; Goodman retained ownership of Marvel until 1968), with rigidly controlled costs and a decent, relatively predictable profit margin.

Five years later, in the early 1970s, EVERYTHING had changed. Both companies were now controlled by larger businesses, and both were under pressure to expand market share and increase profits. Simultaneously comic book readership was dropping as the baby boomer audience aged out. The superhero comic book business was in a crisis-- and each company responded in hysterical counter-productive ways. Marvel, no longer hampered by its distribution deal with its competitor, worked to expand its market share with an explosion of new titles in multiple genres-- without proportionately expanding its editorial support structure and production staff. DC Comics experimented with new titles and new formats, without an overall publishing strategy or company-wide creative approach, continuing its tradition of independent editorial fiefdoms.

For most of the 1970s, in other words, both companies, Marvel and DC, faced creative and economic chaos. That chaos produced memorable and influential work-- Kirby's Fourth World was born, I killed Gwen Stacy, the X-Men were reborn under Chris Claremont, Jim Starlin created Thanos and killed the original Captain Marvel, Batman began getting dark-- but the companies themselves were flailing. Management at both Marvel and DC were clueless how to proceed. (As someone who held editorial positions at both companies in the 1970s I can attest top executives at DC and Marvel were way out of their depth.)

No one working in comics in the early to mid 1970s had any realistic expectation the business would even exist by the end of the decade-- news stand sales were that bad and getting worse every year. Cost cutting was rampant. Marvel reduced page count to 18 pages (and tried to hide it by paying writers and artists for 1 page that was printed as a "double page spread"). DC maintained a higher page count while adding reprint pages in order to increase the price. Short term fixes for a devastating long term crisis.

Two events saved superhero comics from disappearing in the late 1970s, and each produced effects that fundamentally altered the economics and creative direction of the business up to the present day.

The first event was the creation of the Direct Sale Market by entrepreneur Phil Seuling in 1973. There are many articles available describing how the direct market expanded through the 70s and 80s, so I won't repeat the details here, but in a nutshell, the direct market offered comic book publishers a way to guarantee the profit on individual titles compared to newstand sales. Comics sold through newstand distribution were returnable; sales to the direct market were not. Returnability meant most of a title's print run was wasted. (Typically in that era a publisher would print, say, 200,000 copies of a title to sell 70,000.) In addition, the direct market offered predictability-- eventually publishers would learn in advance how well a title might do because of pre-orders. These positives, of course, have a downside, but we'll get to that later. By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the direct market for comics was viewed by almost everyone in the business as a god send that saved a dying business.

The second event that saved superhero comics was the arrival in 1978 of the first mainstream superhero blockbuster movie-- Superman. That movie and its sequels, followed by Tim Burton's Batman in 1989, fueled the growth of "serious" superhero mythology in mainstream pop culture (as opposed to the kid-friendly Superman series of the 1950s and the camp comedy of 1966's Batman TV show). Those movies (and other baby boomer inspired genre entries into mainstream culture like Star Wars and Indiana Jones) began the gradual colonization of pop culture by superhero mythology which exploded into fruition in the 2000s. In the 1970s, however, the main effect Superman the Movie (and later, the Batman film) had on comics was to temporarily increase sales and thus allow both companies to avoid dealing with longer-term creative and economic questions about the fundamental viability of the industry's business model.

The combination of both events, the development of the direct market and the arrival of the blockbuster superhero film, saved the comic book business as such in the 1970s-- but at the same time created and reinforced conflicting tendencies that today have produced a potentially fatal contradiction in how super hero comic book publishers approach their business.

On the one hand, the growth of the direct sale market into the de facto sole distribution point for superhero comics (the recent Walmart experiment and the digital comic market notwithstanding) has resulted in an incestuous and shrinking niche market for the sale of physical comic books. As recent reporting makes clear, this is unsustainable as a business model. Both Marvel and DC have resorted to increasingly desperate and counterproductive marketing ploys to maintain market share and profitability in a decreasing pool of readers-- a ridiculous explosion of variant covers, "special" events, crossovers, mini-series, extortionately-priced first issues, reboots and rebirths and renumberings, spin-offs and multiple versions of the same superhero teams, more events, more crossovers, more tie-ins. What all of these efforts have in common (despite some high-quality creative work on individual titles) is a complete absense of long-term strategic thinking in either the creative or business sense. What's the plan here? How is any of this short term market share maneuvering going to build and sustain a stable long-term readership? And, in particular, how does it fit with the other, even more significant development in the superhero comic book business-- the ascendency of superhero mythology in pop culture?

That second fact-- the mainstreaming of superhero mythology, begun by the Superman movie in 1978-- is the most significant development in the modern history of the comic book medium, and NEITHER company has developed an effective strategy to address it in their creative approach or their business model. The primary reason they haven't, I believe, is rooted in the first of the two events that saved comics in the 1970s, and is at the core of the contradiction that's crippling the superhero comic book business today-- the direct market and its lock on the distribution of comic books.

On the one hand, you have superhero mythology in mainstream media-- a mass market appealing to millions upon millions of consumers world wide, a potential audience beyond anything imagined by comic book creators half a century ago in our most weed-enhanced fantasies. And on the other hand, you have superhero publishing in the direct market-- a shrinking niche market numbering in at most a hundred thousand, dominated by a core readership of a few thousand, whose financial support is strained to the breaking point and beyond by ruthless and extortionate marketing of low-value-added gimmick publications that thwart long term emotional investment.

In a rational universe, both companies would be examining their core business strategy to stake a claim in the mainstream market-- a claim they have a moral, creative and financial imperative to demand as the originators of the mythology being celebrated. If ever there was a moment for the Big Two comic book publishers to think outside the traditional box, this is it. Instead, they are consumed with chasing the diminishing returns of the direct market-- creating properties to exploit a readership exhausted by the financial and emotional demands of predatory publishing techniques designed to milk as much profit from a shrinking audience as possible. This isn't only cynical, it's stupid and counterproductive-- not to mention ultimately an expression of creative bankruptcy.

So, having analyzed the problem from my own admittedly limited viewpoint-- a viewpoint privileged, somewhat, by fifty years of experience-- do I have any solutions to propose?

Yes, I do.

The superhero comic book business is in a death spiral, and everyone in the business seems to know it. A crisis as serious as this cannot be addressed by fixes at the margins. We need a fundamental break with the business practices that have brought the companies to this point. A radical solution to a radical crisis.

Both Marvel and DC need to redefine themselves as creative entities. What is their CORE purpose? What is their CORE contribution to the larger enterprise of creating superhero mythology for mainstream media?

Is their core purpose publishing paper pamphlets for sale to a small readership of tens of thousands? Or is their core contribution creating stories and characters in comic book format that can be transformed into other forms of media?

If it's the first, their business is a dead end, and nothing they do will extend its existence past the next few years. The direct sale market is dying. There's no time to develop other methods of distribution to profitably replace it. The publishers have tried expanding into bookstores, which, like the comic book stores, are dying. They've tried expanding into big box stores like Walmart, but that experiment seems to have failed. They've sought sales in digital format, but judging by reports of my own sales in that medium, it's not a panacea-- yet. Traditional comic book publishing for profit by the Big Two seems hopeless, by all the available evidence, at least as presently constituted. Maybe, if both companies scaled back overhead and production to 1967 levels-- Marvel producing 12 books a month with a small office and a skeleton staff, DC producing 30 with a slightly larger editorial footprint-- they might survive as pure publishing entities.

But survival shouldn't be a goal.

Instead, I suggest both Marvel and DC dramatically redefine themselves as creators of comic book content first-- and profitable publishers second, if at all.

One advantage both companies have as corporate subsidiaries that they never had as independent family businesses is something they need to embrace and promote to their corporate masters as a positive principle-- neither company needs to turn a profit, at least not in the short term, and not as publishers. Instead they should redefine themselves primarily, in the modern lexicon, as IP creators. Intellectual Property is one of the most important drivers of modern corporate media success-- if not the most crucial component. Comic book publishers are easily the most cost effective creators of IP in modern media. For a media corporation to require profitability of an IP generator like a comic book publisher, when even the highest levels of publishing profitability pale beside the far greater value of the IP itself, isn't just short-sighted, it's counterproductive and self defeating.

Marvel and DC should see themselves primarily, if not solely, as IP generators, and sell themselves to Disney and Warnermedia as such. Publishing should be the tail of the dog; the dog is creation.

If the companies do follow this path, they'll also need to radically rethink their approach to publishing-- ironically, with potential benefit both to themselves as profitable enterprises and to their customers in the direct market.

For example, if your goal as a company is no longer to increase or maintain market share in the direct market, but instead to generate exciting and long-term potential IP, you don't need predatory publishing practices like variant covers, or twice-yearly "events," or extortionate pricing, or required pre-orders. You could even begin to accept returns, lightening the financial pressures on dealers and encouraging them to risk new series. You could reduce the number of unnecessary spin-offs and reboots. You could devote energy to nurturing creatives and long-term storylines.

At one point in the mid 1970s I had a dust up with Marvel's production chief, the late John Verpoorten. I was complaining that a revision to the production schedule would negatively affect the aesthetic quality of a book I was writing and how could he justify that (I was young, naive and arrogant). John looked at me and growled, "From an aesthetic point of view we can maybe justify ten of these books." I was gobsmacked and obviously never forgot his point.

Redefining their core mission as IP generators would allow both Marvel and DC to address John's point positively: is there an aesthetic reason to publish this story? Does it say something new and valuable about our characters, or is it just an effort to increase market share? Does it add to the mythology, or diminish it? Is it good?

Publishing sales success has rarely been a reliable predictor of a superhero story's viability in other media. Venom is a popular comic book character with mixed success in sales-- but a worldwide hit as a movie antihero. The JLA Detroit era heroes ended ignominiously in a market driven by direct sales, but individually have provided useful source material for CW TV shows. The Green Arrow was never a sales leader in comics. Before the Batman movies, Batman was a mid-level but important DC comic. Deadpool was a popular second string character but again never a sales leader before Ryan Reynolds put on the mask.

There's a way forward for both the superhero publishers and the direct market-- but not if the publishers continue to define themselves first as publishers. That day is past. The publishers will have to be bold if they're going to thrive in the post-direct market world. The first step is for them to decide what they do best. In my view, what they do best is create comic book stories. Those stories transcend the traditional sales platform that produced them. It's time for the bird to leave its nest.

#comics #superhero #dc comics #marvel #direct market #publishing #Warnermedia #Disney #superhero movies

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