Some more good news

So much is going on in the world, I hardly know where to begin. Alternative medicine suppliers have had an unexpected nationwide-run on all types of iodine, in anticipation of radiation poisoning. The failure of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuke took us totally by surprise and has freaked everyone out. This has been the unexpected catalyst of the sudden requests; we never expected it and didn't plan for it. For my part, I've been reminding everyone of how right I was in opposing nuclear power back in the wayward 70s, and loading up on nori. I figure it can't hurt.

And I've been talking to my customers, as always.

I guess you all know that the Left Behinders are out in force, what with wars and revolutions and rebellions all over the Mideast, as well as probable-meltdowns and the infamous year 2012 approaching. It's the end of the world as we know it.

Along these lines, I thought yall might like to see the First of the Four Horsemen, spotted in Egypt (on European television), whilst bored newsreaders jabbered on. I guess they didn't see it? (One wonders how anyone could miss video of the imminent apocalypse.)

Go to 1:25; they helpfully rerun it in slow-mo a few times, for your edification.



Now, see, if it hadn't been a WHITE horse, nobody would have noticed.

There are many explanations of this video, with copious details about glare and lens-reflection, etc... but of course, many people have their own explanations. And I get to hear all about it. But you know what?

I feel fine. :)

Freedom from Fear excerpts

This week, Dead Air Library features excerpts from the Pulitzer-Prize winning Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, by David M. Kennedy:



But if the United States could do little for the Jews inside Germany [in 1933], could it not open its doors to those trying to leave? After the announcement of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, New York governor Herbert Lehman, a prominent Jewish leader and usually a close political ally of Roosevelt's, proposed doubling the number of German Jews annually admitted to the United States, from twenty-five hundred to five-thousand--"almost a negligible number," Lehman noted. Roosevelt responded sympathetically that consular officials had been instructed to offer "the most considerate attention and the most generous and favorable treatment possible under the laws of the country." The numbers of German-Jewish immigrants grew modestly but nevertheless stayed "negligible." Immigrants of whatever faith from Germany totaled some six thousand in 1936 and eleven thousand in 1937.

Why did the potential refugee flood remain such a trickle? The explanation lay partly in the intersection of Nazi policy with those "laws of the country" about which Roosevelt reminded Lehman. Nazi regulations severely restricted the sum of money that a departing Jew could take out of Germany. As early as 1934 the amount had been reduced to the equivalent of four dollars, essentially pauperizing any Jew who tried to leave the country. In the United States, immigration statutes forbade issuing visas to persons "likely to become a public charge." Herbert Hoover in 1930 had ordered consular officials to apply that clause strictly, as the American unemployment crisis worsened. Under the circumstances, few systematically impoverished German Jews could qualify for visas.

~*~

Before long frontline Japanese troops [on Guadalcanal] were on one-sixth rations. Rear-echelon personnel made do with one-tenth. Of six thousand men in one Japanese division, only 250 were judged fit for combat by mid-December [1942]. One Japanese officer calculated a grim formula for predicting the mortality of his troops:

Those who can stand - 30 days
Those who can sit up - 3 weeks
Those who can not sit up - 1 week
Those who urinate lying down - 3 days
Those who have stopped speaking - 2 days
Those who have stopped blinking - tomorrow

~*~

In Roosevelt's mind, China would serve as a counterweight to Britain and the other European powers in postwar Asia, thus helping to secure permanent decolonization. A strong China would also help protect against a resurgent Japan and would check Soviet ambitions in the region as well. Churchill considered Roosevelt's concept of China as an eventual great power nothing less than ludicrous. "To the President, China means four hundred million people who are going to count in the world of tomorrow," Churchill's physician noted in his diary, "But Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin; it is when he talks of India or China that you remember he is a Victorian."

~*~

The [Sicilian] campaign [in 1943] proved personally costly for [General George] Patton, too. In two separate incidents, soldiers under his command massacred seventy-three Italian and three German prisoners of war near the airfield at Biscari. Patton tried to cover the matter up--"it would make a stink in the press and also would make the civilians mad," he told a subordinate--but the facts came out, and a sergeant and a captain were charged with murder. Both pleaded that they believed themselves to be following Patton's orders in an inflammatory preinvasion speech, when he admonished his men to beware of enemy troops who might be feigning surrender in order to bait a trap. In case of doubt, Patton had said, "Kill the SOB's." The captain was acquitted, but the sergeant was sentenced to life imprisonment, later commuted.

In two further incidents, Patton verbally abused and physically struck two soldiers recovering from "battle fatigue" in field hospitals. Patton thought the men were malingerers. "You yellow son of a bitch," he yelled at one of them, brandishing one of his twin pearl-handled revolvers. "I won't have these brave men here who have been shot seeing a yellow bastard sitting here crying... You ought to be lined up against a wall and shot. In fact, I ought to shoot you myself right now, God damn you!" Patton then slapped the man repeatedly. For these actions, Eisenhower ordered Patton to apologize publicly to his troops and temporarily removed Patton from command.

~*~

As spring began to unroll its green carpet across the south of England in 1944, American GIs drilled on the softly undulating fields, staged mock attacks on the shingle beaches and in the leafing copses, rumbled in trucks and tanks along stone-hedged roads, snickered at the quaint ways of the tea-and-warm-beer-drinking British, and oiled and sighted their gleaming new weapons. Occasionally they relieved their boredom by setting fire to haystacks with tracer bullets. The teeming Yanks, arriving at a rate of 150,000 per month since late 1943, were "overpaid, oversexed and over here," the British quipped. (To which the Yanks replied that their British-comrades-in-arms were underpaid, undersexed and under Eisenhower.)

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Listening to: Jimi Hendrix Experience - Third Stone from the Sun
via FoxyTunes

Ballardian quotes

Left: James Graham Ballard, year unknown, from Ballardian.



My favorite writer, JG Ballard, is very ill. I am wishing him the very best.

Some random quotes from a recent BBC interview by James Naughtie:

[The post-war British] behaved like a defeated population. I wrote in The Kindness of Women that the English talked as if they had won the war, but acted as if they had lost it. They were clearly exhausted by the war and expected little of the future. Everything was rationed — food, clothing, petrol — or simply unobtainable. People moved in a herd-like way, queuing for everything. Ration books and clothing coupons were all-important, endlessly counted and fussed over, even though there was almost nothing in the shops to buy. Tracking down a few lightbulbs could take all day. Everything was poorly designed — my grandparents’ three-storey house was heated by one or two single-bar electric fires and an open coal fire. Most of the house was icy, and we slept under huge eiderdowns like marooned Arctic travellers in their survival gear, a frozen air numbing our faces, the plumes of our breath visible in the darkness.

...

I’d been to the United States and I’d seen that already, by the early 60s, we were getting the first supermarkets, motorways, we were getting, you know, consumer society, television and the like, we were turning into a kind of — media landscape — and I thought; this is interesting, because we’re all going to be Americanised, sooner or later, whether we like it or not, and science-fiction was above all, it was American, it described an Americanised future.

JN: To that extent it was right.

JGB: Yes it was right. It was right.

...

I’ve always been drawn to consumerism and Americanisation of daily life but I’ve always been aware, you know, there’s a sort of — dark side to the sun, and in the case of Kingdom Come — which describes, really, a sort of high-point reached by consumerism in this country, a year or two ago — I suggest that, you know, consumerism, could evolve into something very close to fascism.

...

[War brings] the sense that reality is a stage set that can be cleared at any moment; that came over very strongly, because children are very reliant on stability and convention, they take for granted that their parents are maintaining this friendly place called home. I think the experience of war is to undermine all that. I’ve always been a little sceptical about what I’m told — there’s nothing new about that nowadays — nobody trusts a politician. And I think I’m sceptical about consumerism because it’s really all we’ve got left — the main pillars of British society have always been: the monarchy, the Church of England, the class system, you know, respect for the Armed Forces, and so on. And they’ve all, these pillars have all been knocked down: politicians are distrusted, we think of them really as a collection of — many of them anyway — as a collection of rogues, the Church of England has lost a lot of its authority, so has the monarchy. So what we have: consumerism. I’m not sort of suspicious of consumerism, but the problem arises is when it’s all there is left. I mean, if you go out in the London suburbs, away from our great museums and Houses of Parliament and art galleries, theatres and the like, into a world where all you have are retail outlets, you suddenly, think my god, how can you live here? In fact I do live here. It’s that sense that there’s nothing other than a new range of digital cameras, or what have you, to sustain one’s dreams…

In a 1996 interview with Scottish journalist Damien Love for The List magazine, he discusses his novel Cocaine Nights, which he describes as "Kafka with unlimited Chicken Kiev":

Well, I the author am not suggesting that we all go out and… burgle our neighbour’s houses, or take up drug trafficking, and the very next day we’ll all be practising our violins and forming chess clubs. But I’m saying that it’s possible that we’re too obsessed with security. Although, anyone who has just been burgled is going to think me an idiot. Quite rightly. But, it’s a matter of realising that, you know, certain things have to be bought at a price, and maybe the price is too high. Maybe, to make a pearl, you need a bit of grit in the oyster shell. I think, probably, that the proposition I’ve put forward in the novel is probably correct.

...

As living standards continue to rise, as they have done since the war — and, I’m sure living standards will, on the whole, continue to rise — people have got more to lose. You know, they’ve packed their homes with high-tech electronic gear. It’s worth burgling the average suburban house, now. Many of them are equipped like TV studios, not to mention things like jewellery. So, one gets this strangely interiorised style of living, where you switch off the outside world, rather like it was some threatening television programme. You do this by treble locking your front door and switching on the alarm system, and then you retreat and watch videos of the World Cup. And that’s not a good recipe for healthy society. Looked at objectively, one could say that cinema, the visual arts, the ‘entertainment’ culture generally, are in a worse state than they have ever been this century. The cinema is a shadow of what it was in the forties. There’s scarcely a novelist worth reading. There’s scarcely a painter or sculptor worth looking at. I’m too old to know if the music scene has the vitality that it had back in the 60s, but I don’t imagine that it has. And, you know, we’re in a culture of substitutes — Elizabeth Hurley. They had Marilyn Monroe, we’ve got Elizabeth Hurley. Something’s gone wrong. Is it that we’re engineering a new kind of life for ourselves that has echoes of those that I describe in this book?

...

I mean, it’s silly to say this, because I’m not inviting anyone to come and steal my car or burgle my house; but one always assumes that totalitarian states will be imposed from the outside on the average citizen, that they’ll be sort of horrific and threatening. But in a way, I’ve often thought that the totalitarian systems of the future will be actually rather kind of subservient and ingratiating, and will be imposed from within. We’ll define the terms of the TV mono-culture which we now inhabit, and it’s a pretty empty place. I can imagine, 50 to 100 years from now, social-historians looking back at the closing years of the 20th century and saying, ‘My God, it opened with the flight of the Wright Brothers; halfway through they went to the moon; they discovered scientific miracle upon miracle. And then they ended with people sitting in their little fortified bungalows while the tele-surveillance cameras sweep the streets outside, and they watch reruns of The Rockford Files.’

It’s a nightmare vision.

Thanks to Ballardian for these interviews.

Madeleine McCann's disappearance

If you've been following the news surrounding the abduction of young Madeleine McCann, you know that the McCanns have been unusually aggressive in searching for their missing child. They have tirelessly looked for their daughter all over Europe; going to seek the Pope's blessing, appearing on German television, giving regular press conferences, etc.

And now, it appears that they may be culpable. The London Telegraph reports that the couple is now headed back to the UK, after having been questioned by Portuguese authorities and named suspects in Madeleine's 'abduction':

It is just two days since they were questioned and named as "arguidos" by detectives investigating the disappearance of Madeleine from Praia da Luz on May 3.

The McCanns, both 39, left Portugal with the full knowledge and agreement of the police, despite their status as suspects, their spokeswoman said.

They are returning to the UK to "consider their response" to the allegations against them, and to reintroduce their twins to ordinary life, the spokeswoman added.

"Despite there being so much that they wish to say, they are unable to do so, except to say this: they played no part in the disappearance of their beloved daughter," she said.

No bail conditions have been imposed or charges brought but the couple can be called back to the Algarve at any point to be re-interviewed.

There was speculation that the couple may return as early as later this week to face questions from the local public prosecutor in Portimao.

Just after 7am the McCanns left their villa in Praia da Luz, relying on two police cars to clear a path through the waiting camera crews. They were followed at speed along the motorway all the way to the airport by Portuguese media.

Mr McCann drove his wife and two children in a silver Renault Scenic, the hire car at the centre of controversial forensic results.

Portuguese police believe traces of Madeleine’s blood were found in the vehicle, while other sources claim the DNA sample was too badly contaminated to get a proper match.

The McCanns plan to approach David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, asking him to intervene in the case of their missing daughter Madeleine amid growing fears that they might become the victims of a "shocking injustice".

The couple are "angry and horrified" that the search for the missing four-year-old has been halted as, they believe, police seek to blame them for killing her and disposing of her body.

Some forensic scientists have begun to question some of the evidence against the couple - supposedly samples of Madeline's blood found in the boot of the car they hired 25 days after the disappearance, and the "death smell" allegedly found on Mrs McCann's belongings by a police sniffer dog.

(Shades of Jon-Benet Ramsey. I have a headache already.)

The aggressive demeanor of the parents had me fooled; truly, this possibility never occurred to me. There are links and photos of Maddy all over the web--they have made looking for her a full-time job.

I'm still skeptical; then again, I have found the story somewhat strange since the beginning:

The McCanns, both 39-year-old doctors, are said to be "deeply alarmed" by the turn of events after they were interrogated separately by Portuguese police for a total of 24 hours on Thursday and Friday.

Portuguese sources said police were using a "war of nerves" in an effort to make Mrs McCann "crack" and confess to killing her daughter.

Her two interrogations last week - the second lasting 11 hours - were described as "aggressive", with officers said to be "exploring her weaknesses".

Media reports said the couple used their right to remain silent and refused to answer "more than 40 questions". Friends insisted they answered all questions put to them.

The couple, who spoke with Mr Miliband last month, will urge him this week to step in "with any help he can," said a friend of the couple.

"There is a danger of a shocking injustice here," the friend said. "Kate and Gerry are appalled that anybody could think Kate would harm any of her children."

Mrs McCann's mother, Susan Healy, defended her, saying: "She fought her corner in her interview with the police and I felt quite proud that she was able to do that knowing how distraught she was by Madeleine's disappearance."

Philomena McCann, Mr McCann's sister, said of her brother: "He is a bit distressed and very tired. But he is adamant that he has done nothing wrong."

Portuguese police believe that Mrs McCann killed Madeleine accidentally with a sedative overdose, and then hid the body. They think Mr McCann helped cover up her crime.

I'm especially interested in hearing from British folks who may be reading and are more familiar with the case. What do you think?