"Farewell, Frankenstein!" in FREEDOM OF SCREECH

I'm proud beyond words to be a part of Craig Spector's latest anthology, FREEDOM OF SCREECH (a collection of freedom of speech-themed short fiction), the focus of which couldn't be more relevant in this bright, shiny future in which we all find ourselves. I'm particularly proud to be sharing a Table of Contents page with the likes of Norman Spinrad and Richard Christian Matheson, both of whom I've been reading since I was a teenager. Matheson's first book, SCARS AND OTHER DISTINGUISHING MARKS, has long been one of my favorite short story collections and Spinrad's THE IRON DREAM is—needless to say—one of the most audacious and challenging science fiction novels published during the past fifty years. 

My contribution to this anthology ("Farewell, Frankenstein!") celebrates the perennial significance of Mary Shelley's most famous literary creation while also addressing pressing issues of academic freedom in the twenty-first century. It's a strange but true tale about a darkly absurd attempt to ban Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN from a Southern California college campus. The story begins with the following disclaimer: "The following events are, to borrow a phrase coined by the late James W. Moseley, 'shockingly close to the truth.' Names and places have been changed to protect the guilty and innocent alike."

FREEDOM OF SCREECH is available on Amazon by clicking right HERE! Buy it now… while you’re still allowed to buy books!

THE NOX MENTE PODCAST

Last night I appeared on the extraordinary NOX MENTE podcast (hosted by Jerry Ablan and Niish) and discussed the subject of dreams for over two hours. Of the many interviews I've done during the past few years, this was definitely one of my favorites. In case you're curious, here is NOX MENTE's unique mission statement:

Nox Mente is a show dedicated to exploring consciousness through dreams, dreaming, and dream theory using a wide angle lens. We have opened up this conversation to a diverse world of dreamers. Our goal is to help in the process of bringing conscious intent to the state of dreaming — light to the shadowy corners of this experience we all have access to, each time we drift off to sleep. We strive to maintain an open and neutral environment as hosts. There are many theories on the process of dreaming and altered states, and we want to hear them all. No information is irrelevant when it comes to dreams. It is in the overlap of individual experiences that we find pathways into the thinking and journeys of the collective.  

To listen to my 7-10-19 appearance on NOX MENTE, simply click on the window below.... 

DARK GODS

Recommended: A fair and useful review of Anthony Roberts and Geoff Gilbertson's underappreciated 1980 nonfiction book DARK GODS, courtesy of David Halpin's The Occult Book Review....

Orchestrated Destabilization or Random Insanity?

“Street clashes do not distress the ruling elites. These clashes divide the underclass. They divert activists from threatening the actual structures of power. They give the corporate state the ammunition to impose harsher forms of control and expand the powers of internal security.”

--Chris Hedges, truthdig, 8-27-17

Without basic knowledge regarding COINTELPRO's well-documented tactics to destabilize "subversive" organizations and foment general chaos on the domestic front, the below news item cannot be fully understood. When read in isolation, events like these merely appear to be examples of random, anomalous outbursts of social madness in the 21st century. When seen in a broader context, however, that view inevitably shifts. Further information about COINTELPRO (and the related OPERATION CHAOS) can be attained HERE and HERE.

What follows is an excerpt from Quillette's 6-30-19 article entitled "Antifa's Brutal Assault on Andy Ngo Is a Wake-Up Call--for Authorities and Journalists Alike":

All revolutionary movements seek to sanctify their lawless behaviour as a spontaneous eruption of righteous fury. In some cases, such as the Euromaidan movement in Ukraine, this conceit is justified. But usually their violence is a pre-meditated tactic to intimidate adversaries. Or as Bolshevik theorist Nikolai Bukharin put it, “In revolution, he will be victorious who cracks the other’s skull.”

To read the entire post, click HERE.

"CONTROL IS CONTROLLED BY ITS NEED TO CONTROL."

--WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

1) From Jordan Crucchiola's 6-23-19 Vulture post entitled "Christian Group Petitions Netflix to Cancel Amazon's Good Omens, Netflix 'Agrees'":

A Christian group called Return to Order is very upset with the Amazon series Good Omens, which features the forces of heaven and hell teaming up to stop the Antichrist. So upset, in fact, that they have amassed more than 20,000 signatures demanding it be canceled (all episodes are already streaming on Amazon Prime) by … Netflix. While the petition appears to have been taken down from the Order’s website, it is reported to have been titled “Tell Netflix: Cancel Blasphemous ‘Good Omens’ Series,” and called [Good Omens] “another step to make Satanism appear normal, light and acceptable.” The group is also angry that God is voiced by a woman, that an angel and a demon are friends, and that it “mocks God’s wisdom,” according to quotes gathered by The Guardian. 

To read the entire post, click HERE. 

To see the Return to Order's "updated" petition, click HERE. 


2) From Crooks and Liars' 6-29-19 post entitled "Canadian Cartoonist Fired After His Trump Cartoon Goes Viral":

[Political cartoonist Michael] de Adder [has] had his contract terminated with the Brunswick News, a privately-held publishing company that operates in New Brunswick, Canada. The sole owner, James K. Irving, is one of the wealthiest people in Canada and he and his family have a vast array of interests and holdings, many of them dependent on access to the United States. So, when their little newspapers published a political cartoon that went viral completely excoriating the vile and hateful border practices of Trump something had to give....

 
To see the entire Crooks and Liars post, click HERE. 


3) From Robby Soave's 6-20-19 Reason article entitled "Activists Want a Problematic Mural of George Washington Destroyed. It Will Cost a High School $600,000.":

A high school in San Francisco is considering three options for censoring a mural of George Washington deemed problematic by the local activist community: putting up a curtain (price tag: $300,000), painting over it ($600,000), or hiding it behind panels ($875,000).

No doubt San Francisco United School District could hire quite a few teachers in lieu of executing even the cheapest of those plans, but a 13-member working group asserts the mural must go. It "glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, white supremacy, oppression," and "doesn't represent SFUSD values of social justice, diversity, united, student-centered." It's also responsible for traumatizing students, according to the activists.

The truth is that George Washington High School's mural is provocative by design. It was painted in 1936 by a Russian-American artist named Victor Arnautoff, who held leftist sympathies. Arnautoff did not wish to blindly celebrate Washington while ignoring the less savory aspects of the American founding, and thus he depicted the first president working his slaves and sending men to confiscate Native American lands. It was an attempt to remind students that history is a lot messier than what they read in class.

"He put those ghastly gray pioneers literally walking over the dead body of an Indian to demonstrate that the settlement of the west was an act of conquest that involved the slaughter of Native Americans," Robert Cherny, a San Francisco State University professor, told the school district's board of education in 2018. "That was a very bold effort on his part to counter the kinds of textbooks that students were seeing."

Modern activist culture, however, is preoccupied with an ever-expanding definition of safety, which now includes emotional safety. To walk past a mural that depicts violence against Native Americans and people of color—even if that's what actually happened—is considered trauma-inducing, and the purpose of education is to mitigate discomfort. (This is a major theme of my new book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, which was released this week and is available in book stores and online.)

"Why do we have to explain the pain caused by the visual offense that we see in that building that is supposed to be an institution for learning?" asked one woman at a public meeting about the issue on Tuesday.

"It's not in a museum, it's inside a school," lamented another speaker, who apparently did not understand the point of a school. "Our students, all of them, deserve better."

Other speakers, several of them Native American, expressed no objection to the mural, correctly pointing out that it was depicting "what actually happened."

According to National Review's James Sutton, most of the students want to keep the mural, or don't really care one way or another. The controversy is the work of "outside busybodies." Naturally, it looks like they are going to get their way. The school board is currently deciding between three different plans, all of which involve destroying the mural, or covering it up....

To see the original article, click HERE.

4) From Ray Kelly's 6-19-19 MassLive post entitled "Film Community Decries 'Politically Correct' Decision to Remove Lillian Gish Name From University Theater":

More than 50 prominent artists, writers, and film scholars are calling for the restoration of actresses Lillian and Dorothy Gish’s names to a theater established in their honor 43 years ago at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

The university decided last month to remove the Gish name — but retain the Ohio native’s endowment and personal memorabilia — because of Lillian Gish’s role in D. W. Griffith’s controversial 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation,” a racist silent film which glorified the Ku Klux Klan. It was one of more than 100 screen appearances by the American Film Institute and Kennedy Center honoree, who died in 1993 at the age of 99.

“For a university to dishonor her by singling out just one film, however offensive it is, is unfortunate and unjust. Doing so makes her a scapegoat in a broader political debate. A university should be a bastion of free speech. This is a supreme ‘teachable moment’ if it can be handled with a more nuanced sense of history,” the letter states in part.

Among those signing the letter calling for the restoration of the Gish Theater name are James Earl Jones, Helen Mirren, Martin Scorsese, George Stevens Jr., Peter Bogdanovich, Joseph McBride, Malcolm McDowell, Lauren Hutton, Larry Jackson and Joe Dante.

In removing the Gish name, Bowling Green State University officials said in a 12-page report that " in no way is our intent to minimize her accomplishments or contributions to film culture and history. However, as an educational institution, BGSU has a primary responsibility to its students and an overriding obligation to create an inclusive learning environment."

McBride, who wrote the “AFI Life Achievement Award: A Tribute to Lillian Gish” television special in 1984, decried that conclusion.

“In this age of rampant ‘political correctness,’ scattershot attacks are claiming a lot of unfortunate collateral damage. Two of the recent victims are Lillian and Dorothy Gish. Lillian acted in more than 120 films and television shows, and is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest actresses is film history, but her supporting role in D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film ‘The Birth of a Nation’ has landed her on the list of people to be shunned," McBride said. “It is shameful that Bowling Green State University shows such little regard for film history or cultural perspective in taking this rash overreaction to a film that, while deplorable in its racism, does not represent her entire career. Dorothy Gish, who did not appear in ‘Birth,’ is merely collateral damage in this controversy.”

McBride, a professor at San Francisco State University, added, “A university should encourage open debate instead of cultural shunning and attempts to rewrite history.”

To see Kelly's original post, click HERE.

Robo-Insects

Recommended reading: Knvul Sheikh's 6-26-19 New York Times article entitled "Unleashed, Robo-Insect Takes Flight":

For years now, scientists have sought to build aerial robots inspired by bees and other flying insects. But they have always run into a fundamental problem: Flying takes a lot of energy.

Insects flap their wings, generating the thrust needed to move through the air by utilizing the energy stored in strong muscles. Their robot doppelgängers must rely on batteries, which are less efficient and tend to be heavy, or must be hooked up externally.

Now researchers at Harvard University have built a new type of robot that is capable of true, untethered flight. The unit, called the RoboBee X-Wing, is equipped with four tiny wings made of carbon fiber and polyester, and even tinier photovoltaic cells. 

In bright light, its solar cells generate about five volts of electricity, which a minuscule transformer then boosts to the 200 volts necessary for liftoff. When the high voltage is applied to two components called piezoelectric actuators, they bend and contract, much as an insect’s muscles would. This drives the flapping motion of the RoboBee’s wings.

Clever engineering keeps the device small and light — about one-quarter the weight of a paper clip. This allows the RoboBee to flit about freely, whereas previous iterations of the robot could only take off, land, or perch mid-flight while leashed to a power supply.

“We wanted to keep pushing the limit on how much power we could squeeze out of the artificial muscles in the robot, and how efficient we could make the whole system,” said Noah Jafferis, a postdoctoral engineer at Harvard and one of the leaders of the research.

On Wednesday, Dr. Jafferis and his colleagues reported in Nature that the RoboBee is now able to match the thrust efficiency of similarly sized insects, such as bees.

The first time the robot took off in the lab, it lifted off with such force and speed that some of the researchers yelped in surprise. “We weren’t expecting it to take off like that at all,” said Farrell Helbling, a postdoctoral roboticist who also led research on the seminal flight.

So far, each of the RoboBee’s test flights have only lasted a couple seconds. One of the robot’s shortcomings is that it still can’t store energy. As soon as it flies out of a small, well-lit area, it slows down and falls to the ground.

But Dr. Helbling and Dr. Jafferis are confident that the robot could stay aloft for several minutes if its solar cells and circuits were given the proper tweaks.

Further advances in engineering could make microrobots even more autonomous, said F. Zeynep Temel, who works on ant-sized jumping robots at Carnegie Mellon University. And once these tiny robots are able to zip up, down and sideways outdoors, they could be used to take air quality measurements, help search collapsed buildings for survivors, or even be deployed in swarms.

“Having onboard power is the first big step to getting microrobots out of the lab and into the real world,” Dr. Temel said.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

I suggest comparing the above article with p. 116 of my book CHAMELEO: A STRANGE BUT TRUE STORY OF INVISIBLE SPIES, HEROIN ADDICTION, AND HOMELAND SECURITY. It's also worth noting (as political researcher Dave Emory is fond of pointing out) that the military is generally fifteen to twenty years ahead of the civilian world when it comes to technological developments.

A Return to Oligarchy

What follows is a relevant excerpt from Lynn Parramore's 5-30-18 article entitled "Meet the Economist Behind the One Percent's Stealth Takeover of America" about the continuing influence of Nobel laureate James McGill Buchanan and billionaire industrialist Charles Koch: 

Most Americans haven’t seen what’s coming.

[Nancy] MacLean notes that when the Kochs’ control of the GOP kicked into high gear after the financial crisis of 2007-08, many were so stunned by the “shock-and-awe” tactics of shutting down government, destroying labor unions, and rolling back services that meet citizens’ basic necessities that few realized that many leading the charge had been trained in economics at Virginia institutions, especially George Mason University. Wasn’t it just a new, particularly vicious wave of partisan politics?

It wasn’t. MacLean convincingly illustrates that it was something far more disturbing.

MacLean is not the only scholar to sound the alarm that the country is experiencing a hostile takeover that is well on its way to radically, and perhaps permanently, altering the society. Peter Temin, former head of the MIT economics department, INET grantee, and author of The Vanishing Middle Class, as well as economist Gordon Lafer of the University of Oregon and author of The One Percent Solution, have provided eye-opening analyses of where America is headed and why. MacLean adds another dimension to this dystopian big picture, acquainting us with what has been overlooked in the capitalist right wing’s playbook.

She observes, for example, that many liberals have missed the point of strategies like privatization. Efforts to “reform” public education and Social Security are not just about a preference for the private sector over the public sector, she argues. You can wrap your head around those, even if you don’t agree. Instead, MacLean contends, the goal of these strategies is to radically alter power relations, weakening pro-public forces and enhancing the lobbying power and commitment of the corporations that take over public services and resources, thus advancing the plans to dismantle democracy and make way for a return to oligarchy. The majority will be held captive so that the wealthy can finally be free to do as they please, no matter how destructive.

MacLean argues that despite the rhetoric of Virginia school acolytes, shrinking big government is not really the point. The oligarchs require a government with tremendous new powers so that they can bypass the will of the people. This, as MacLean points out, requires greatly expanding police powers “to control the resultant popular anger.”  The spreading use of pre-emption by GOP-controlled state legislatures to suppress local progressive victories such as living wage ordinances is another example of the right’s aggressive use of state power.

Could these right-wing capitalists allow private companies to fill prisons with helpless citizens—or, more profitable still, right-less undocumented immigrants? They could, and have. Might they engineer a retirement crisis by moving Americans to inadequate 401(k)s? Done. Take away the rights of consumers and workers to bring grievances to court by making them sign forced arbitration agreements? Check. Gut public education to the point where ordinary people have such bleak prospects that they have no energy to fight back? Getting it done.

Would they even refuse children clean water? Actually, yes.

MacLean notes that in Flint, Michigan, Americans got a taste of what the emerging oligarchy will look like — it tastes like poisoned water. There, the Koch-funded Mackinac Center pushed for legislation that would allow the governor to take control of communities facing emergency and put unelected managers in charge. In Flint, one such manager switched the city’s water supply to a polluted river, but the Mackinac Center’s lobbyists ensured that the law was fortified by protections against lawsuits that poisoned inhabitants might bring. Tens of thousands of children were exposed to lead, a substance known to cause serious health problems including brain damage.

Tyler Cowen has provided an economic justification for this kind of brutality, stating that where it is difficult to get clean water, private companies should take over and make people pay for it. “This includes giving them the right to cut off people who don’t—or can’t—pay their bills,” the economist explains.

To many this sounds grotesquely inhumane, but it is a way of thinking that has deep roots in America.

To read the entire article, click HERE.