LAND OF DOUBTS

The Edward Snowden story has grown several different sets of legs; news stories in the USA tend to do this.


Call it a growing distrust, or conspiracy theorising, call it critical thinking, call it general whacko-nuttery, but it happens.

A couple of front-runners (other than the always-out-there Alex Jones) in the "story has different legs" category are Naomi Wolf and Jon Rappoport.

Ms Wolf has the feeling that all is not exactly as presented to the public, and that Snowden's history and attitudes do not pass the smell test of an astute/intuitive looker-on. My own initial feelings were along those lines too (I wrote that I "felt uncomfortable" about it all, without knowing exactly why). However, Dave Lindorff, whose writings I've long respected (his website is among my links - see This Can't Be Happening) isn't convinced by the points Ms Wolf raises. Her opinion swings towards the idea that the whole thing is a staged "reveal" - her whole piece is HERE, it ends with:

"But do consider that in Eastern Germany, for instance, it was the fear of a machine of surveillance that people believed watched them at all times – rather than the machine itself – that drove compliance and passivity. From the standpoint of the police state and its interests – why have a giant Big Brother apparatus spying on us at all times – unless we know about it?"

Jon Rappaport's views were featured at Cannonfire a few days ago (Friday 14 June), by another respected blogger from my links. (Update: See also the post for Tuesday 18 June there). Snip from Mr Rappoport's piece (for all of it, see HERE) :

"Scandals, and how they’re presented to the public through the press, are rarely what they seem.
The players are different, their motives are different, and they’re trading blows in a different arena.
They’re accessing the Matrix and manipulating it at levels invisible to the general public, who are trained by mass media to look in the wrong direction."

It's a bit like looking at the situation through a set of those magic mirrors often found in fairgrounds: different, possibly distorted, possibly accurate views of the same thing. It's the way some of us see the President too (see my own post Obama x 3).

Suspicious minds, like that old song Elvis sang : "We're caught in a trap....We can't go on together with suspicious minds". Nobody trusts anybody any more, often for valid reasons. At the core: the government doesn't trust any of us, we don't trust the government, some speak out, some of us distrust even their motives. Where does it end?

A commenter online, sadly I failed to keep a reference to the source, pointed out a danger in this mushrooming climate of distrust:

If you read most peoples' writings from the most totalitarian states, or the most competent and cogent figures in political fiction, and the motif remains the same: The worst part of totalitarianism is the public distrust sown between neighbours, when you believe that each other member of the state is a potential part of the apparatus that monitors you. Resisting a monolithic authority is possible when you can combine. Resisting the rest of your citizens is impossible, because you are alone.

What's the remedy? Is there one? Keeping an open mind is the only way, I guess.

Prisms

PRISM. I wish the geeks of NSA hadn't called their spying program by that name, however appropriate it might appear to be. Prism is a lovely word, or was before we had to add to it the dark spectre of being spied upon.

In centuries past prisms were used on old sailing vessels to let sunlight into gloomy areas: deck prisms. (See photograph HERE). I suppose those at NSA, who hit upon this name for their spy-baby, thought they'd be letting light into areas formerly thought to be, while not dark, certainly out of bounds to the wandering eye.

As poet e.e. cummings wrote:
“The Symbol of all Art is the Prism. The goal is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism into the secret glories it contains.” Destructive- yes, in this case destructive of privacy.

Artist Jonathan Saiz, while spending time on the island of Mykonos in 2011/12, painted a series of gorgeous large oil paintings he titled Alkahest; he defines that word as "the hypothetical universal solvent sought by the alchemist".

"In this crystalline form everything is made of the multitude - the splendors of Versailles, the rearing stallion and other distractions or ambitions. A curious history restlessly shifting, its charged particles and reflections dissolving into a universal something. Its mystical alignment ordered by instinct or impulse where themes emerge through incoherent leaps and th vague impressions of something more about to appear or having just faded."

See the whole set of Alkahest in large format at the painter's website here

- I've borrowed a couple as samples:

What else.....

Well, Charles Dickens, in his novel Little Dorrit, has a character, Mrs General, who is prim in the extreme and a snob. She tells the Dorrit girls, after they and their family have been released from debtors' prison, and she attempts to give the girls some "polish" that:
“Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips.”

As well as being (I guess) a kind of exercise to keep the lips of a young woman plump, and desirable, the inclusion of "prism" could be seen as indicating that, in polite society of the 19th century, to be "proper" a woman was not the source of her own light, but merely ornamental, reflecting the opinions of others rather than advancing her own.

Dickens' use of prunes and prisms was later picked up by other, female, writers: Louisa May Alcott refers to "prunes and prisms" in Little Women and other novels. Lucy Maud Montgomery uses "prunes and prisms" in the Anne of Green Gables books. The term became emblamatic of snootiness.

Finally, considering prisms, mustn't forget this: the illustration on the cover of Pink Floyd's famous album of the 1970s.

The Future Seen from the Past: Visions of Orwell, Huxley & Zamyatin

Writers are throwing the name Orwell around more than usual just now. There's an example at HuffPo this week: Orwell 2013 by Jeff Danziger. I've mentioned and featured George Orwell in posts a few times over the years myself - best example, with some astrology and several interesting comments is from April 2011, titled simply George Orwell.

(Illustration, titled Visions Of The Future Seen From The Past was
Posted by Wastedpapiers at scrapiteria.)




I don't feel like re-reading 1984, only to depress myself further, but did pick up my copy the other day and re-read Erich Fromm's "Afterword", written in 1961. There's a full transcript of it online HERE.

Mr. Fromm remarked on the marked difference in tone between post-medieval writings, when optimism reigned: "With the breakup of the medieval world, man's sense of strength, and his hope, not only for individual but for social perfection", and writings after World War I when what's now categorised as "speculative fiction" took a turn into the decidedly negative, now known as dystopian. Fromm mentions, as examples of post-medieval writings Thomas Moore's Utopia, Campanella's City of the Sun, the German humanist Andreae's Christianopolis, and the latest of these Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, published in 1888. There are differences in approach but all have positive, utopian, flavours (a utopia: is a community or society possessing highly desirable or perfect qualities).

The visions of dytopia, arising post 1918 are best seen in three books mentioned by Fromm: Orwell's 1984, the Russian author Zamyatin's We, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Snip

This new trilogy of what may be called the "negative utopias" of the middle of the twentieth century is the counterpoint to the trilogy of the positive utopias mentioned before, written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The negative utopias express the mood of powerlessness and hopelessness of modern man just as the early utopias expressed the mood of self-confidence and hope of post-medieval man. There could be nothing more paradoxical in historical terms than this change: man, at the beginning of the industrial age, when in reality he did not possess the means for a world in which the table was set for all who wanted to eat, when he lived in a world in which there were economic reasons for slavery, war, and exploitation, in which man only sensed the possibilities of his new science and of its application to technique and to production -- nevertheless man at the beginning of modern development was full of hope. Four hundred years later, when all these hopes are realizable, when man can produce enough for everybody, when war has become unnecessary because technical progress can give any country more wealth than can territorial conquest, when this globe is in the process of becoming as unified as a continent was four hundred years ago, at the very moment when man is on the verge of realizing his hope, he begins to lose it. It is the essential point of all the three negative utopias not only to describe the future toward which we are moving, but also to explain the historical paradox.

The three negative utopias differ from each other in detail and emphasis. Zamyatin's We, written in the twenties, has more features in common with 1984 than with Huxley's Brave New World. We and 1984 both depict the completely bureaucratized society, in which man is a number and loses all sense of individuality. This is brought about by a mixture of unlimited terror (in Zamyatin's book a brain operation is added eventually which changes man even physically) combined with ideological and psychological manipulation. In Huxley's work the main tool for turning man into an automaton is the application of hypnoid mass suggestion, which allows dispensing with terror. One can say that Zamyatin's and Orwell's examples resemble more the Stalinist and Nazi dictatorships, while Huxley's Brave New World is a picture of the development of the Western industrial world, provided it continues to follow the present trend without fundamental change..........................................


In spite of this difference there is one basic question common to the three negative utopias, The question is a philosophical, anthropological and psychological one, and perhaps also a religious one. It is: can human nature be changed in such a way that man will forget his longing for freedom, for dignity, for integrity, for love -- that is to say, can man forget that he is human? Or does human nature have a dynamism which will react to the violation of these basic human needs by attempting to change an inhuman society into a human one? It must be noted that the three authors do not take the simple position of psychological relativism which is common to so many social scientists today; they do not start out with the assumption that there is no such thing as human nature; that there is no such thing as qualities essential to man; and that man is born as nothing but a blank sheet of paper on which any given society writes its text. They do assume that man has an intense striving for love, for justice, for truth, for solidarity, and in this respect they are quite different from the relativists. In fact, they affirm the strength and intensity of these human strivings by the description of the very means they present as being necessary to destroy them. In Zamyatin's We a brain operation similar to lobotomy is necessary to get rid of the human demands of human nature. In Huxley's Brave New World artificial biological selection and drugs are necessary, and in Orwell's 1984 it is the completely unlimited use of torture and brainwashing. None of the three authors can be accused of the thought that the destruction of the humanity within man is easy. Yet all three arrive at the same conclusion: that it is possible, with means and techniques which are common knowledge today.

Whereas it's easy to see how, from where we are now in 2013, a dystopia similar to those envisioned by the authors above could quite easily emerge, in light of the last paragraph quoted, there may be hope still that the better parts of our human nature might prevail. These could be obliterated only by deliberate and concerted effort. Equally, though, it'd be only through determined and concerted effort, and constant watchfulness on a level we have not yet attained, that certainty of retaining the better parts of our humanity would prevail.

Silly Seasonal Snips

From the China Daily(!)
h/t Dependable Renegade

Silly flippin' season indeed.....a federal appeals court said Tuesday that an Oklahoma pastor can sue the state over its Indian "rain god" license plate, ruling that the depiction of a noted sculpture on 3 million license plates could be interpreted as a state endorsement of a religion. Oklahoma pastor sued a number of state officials in 2011, arguing that Oklahoma's standard license plate depicted Native American religious beliefs that run contrary to his Christianity. U.S. District Judge Joe Heaton dismissed the lawsuit in May 2012 but the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it Tuesday. (Associated Press).

The sculpture represented on the car license plate is Sacred Rain Arrow by Allan Houser (1914-94):
"This monumental piece depicts a young Apache warrior shooting his arrow towards heaven with the hope of carrying a prayer for rain to the Spirit World. Houser represents the strength, dignity, beauty and spirituality of his people."
(HERE).

"How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it." --Edward Abbey

h/t DIVINE BREEZES

USA's Roller-coaster: Over-reaction -- Apathy

I've stumbled across a couple of articles this week where the writer compares, unfavourably, the attitudes of most people in the USA immediately after 9/11 events, to the attitudes of the British during attacks on their country during World War 2. Y'all cannot possibly compare events and reactions to World War 2 with reactions to the event of 9/11 2001 for goodness sake!!

Now....while the idea has often occurred to me that the people of the USA, in general, over-react - tend towards a communal paranoia on several fronts, and display a definite tendency to hyperbole on all fronts, I'd never categorised this as anything resembling cowardice, as implied in the articles I read. Take Stephen Pizzo's piece at Smirking Chimp, for instance. In referring to The Patriot Act:
Be Ashamed, Americans

Snip:

Who gave them the right to do that? Well, we did. Yes we did.

In the flash, 9/11 turned cocky, self-satisfied Americans into a mob of scared school girls. We went screaming to "Daddy" demanding to be kept safe from "terrorists." Spare us the details, we said, and just get-et done, we demanded.

Stop for a moment and compare that response to how the Brits responded to years of terror weapons raining down on their cities during WW II.

"Starting on 7 September 1940, London was bombed by the Luftwaffe for 57 consecutive nights. More than one million London houses were destroyed or damaged, and more than 40,000 civilians were killed, almost half of them in London. Ports and industrial centres outside London were also heavily attacked; the major Atlantic sea port of Liverpool was the most heavily bombed city outside London, suffering nearly 4,000 dead."

Americans had never felt such a blow. But, unlike the Brits who, rather than panic, stood up, strapped on a pair, and just kept on keeping on, we freaked out after 9/11. Three jets, a two buildings and 3000 dead, and we went to pieces.

Be ashamed, Americans. Be very ashamed. One attack, tiny by comparison, and our first response is to offer up our freedoms in return for protection.

And so came the Patriot Act; likely the most un-American piece of legislation ever passed by Congress and signed into law by an American president. It was slapped together by panicked government employees, passed by politicians who were far more terrified of their terrified constituents than they were of actual terrorists, and signed into law by the dumbest man ever to serve in the Oval Office.

We did that. Because we let them do that.

An English commenter (L. Harrison) agreed, and adds information about the devastation of the city of Plymouth during WW 2. I'm eligible to add my own views on this. I was born in Hull, a busy east coast port which also came in for blitzing by the Luftwaffe. We never knew from one morning to the next whether we'd still be around, or whether the house next door might be a pile of rubble, especially as we lived near a park with a large boating lake, which was often mistaken by German pilots for the docks, and they sometimes dropped their bombs not far from our doorstep. I was a very young child -just a baby at the start of it all, so have only fragmented memories, but do remember seeing the devastation downtown in the city centre, later on.

Reactions during a World War are something quite different from those following a single event coming out of the blue in peacetime (or what passes for peacetime). During wartime citizens become hardened to the possibility that death is just around the next corner, or will come during the next night. They learn to live with that, little by little. They have to - what else is there? People of the USA would be the same, I believe. 9/11 came out of the blue, a shock to the system, immediate reactions were understandable. What isn't understandable is that people have not demanded during ensuing years, that The Patriot Act be reviewed, rather than renewed. Apathy descended, complacency reigned and there lay the danger. The People can never, ever, afford to become complacent. Apathy isn't cowardice, but apathy of the masses has led to the situation in the USA - on several fronts.

It's as though initial hyperbolic over-reaction and paranoia moves on to dip to the other, more dangerous extreme: apathy.

Why Should We Care? & Edward Snowden's Natal Chart

By the time I click on the publish button the current surveillance saga will probably have moved on to yet another chapter. I'm still not as invested in the whole public outcry as most, mainly because we should have realised it was going on, and had been ever since 2001 - maybe even before that to the extent that technology then available could cope. A trawl through the nets to see whether I'm missing something crucial that'd kick my reactions up a notch or two followed.

Thinks: terrorism, though it poses a clear threat, doesn't pose such a huge threat to the USA as to warrant the allocation of billions of dollars to surveillance programs said to be the best way to circumvent such threats, when such programs involve wholesale invasion of telephone and internet communications of hundreds of millions of individuals - a mind-boggling volume, daily. In effect, though, chances of anyone's e-mail or phone call to friends and family being intercepted has to be tiny indeed, or even chances of defining the patterns of any individual's habits of communication, come to that - or so I assume. But the expense of all this to the country, when not in the most robust of financial health - there's that!

The item I found with a possibility of getting me engaged more in this issue was a comment at a blog called Lawyers Guns and Money, where a post by Erik Loomis asking why people were getting so much up in arms about this issue and not about several other important matters facing us. A commenter "Yankee Frank", responded well, I thought, and I trust he would not object to my spreading his words here:

The only reason people don’t care much is that they don’t really understand the import of this. Once the government can examine everything (pretty much) about someone’s past, that person is no longer free. If the government wants to, they can doctor up anything about you they want — to prove you are “evil”, or mentally ill, or a liar… and once they can do that to anyone they have total control over us. They can retroactively examine anyone’s life and find whatever “evidence” they want of anything they want to charge you with.

Why do you think criminal lawyers tell their clients never to speak to the police without their lawyer present? Even if you tell 100% truth and are innocent they can turn your words against you. All they need is a “witness” who saw you somewhere you (or your decades of internet history) claim you weren’t and they have you as a liar, and if you’re lying about an alibi, well then you are very likely guilty. They don’t even have to fabricate the witness. People want to help the police, and they “see” things they didn’t see all the time. This scenario plays out regularly in this and other ways. Hence lawyers tell you to say nothing to the police. These records mean you’ve been talking to the police since 2006, and they can catch you in any number of “lies” to weaken your credibility. People get life sentences for things they didn’t do based on evidence just like this.

Once you are a suspect, that is the beginning of the end of your freedom. The fact that we are all under threat of becoming suspects based on something we said or wrote 15 years ago, or whenever, because the NSA has all our history, means we are all constantly under threat of suspicion. This is what totalitarianism looks like.

The reason this is more important than income inequality and unemployment, and I think those things are hugely important, almost as important as this… is because this freedom underlies all the others. WIthout the freedom to speak out without the government being able to silence you and/or destroy your life, forget protest. Forget fighting for the unemployed, and forget arguing against any government activity period. We will live in a world where 99% of us are too terrified to even raise our voices, let alone dissent.

These things are only abstract because most of us just don’t understand how the state works when it goes after you. Hopefully I have shed some light on this.

I don't think we're quite at that stage of a totalitarian-like state quite yet, but an atmosphere where such things could become a daily worry may not be that far over the horizon.

Something upon which to chew, indigestible as it may be!

There's a good run-down of the situation in this video interview : Jake Tapper and Glenn Greenwald on CNN (around 14 mins)




For any passing astrology buffs, here's a natal chart (12 noon version) for Edward Snowden constructed using birth data given by Wikipedia - "The army did confirm Snowden's date of birth: June 21, 1983." Place of birth stated is Elizabeth City, but that's not an option on my software so I've used the nearest place available.

Snowden has lots of Air in his chart, unlike Greenwald : 3 Gemini planets and 2 in Libra. 3 in Sagittarius (Fire), with Uranus conjunct Jupiter - I'd bet on that conjunction as his "daring" trade mark. Natal Moon will be in Scorpio whatever his time of birth - between around 10 and 23 degrees. Whichever, transiting Saturn is heading that way, indicating some kind of restriction or limitation in his future. It's actually already happening, so his time of birth was likely to be earlier in the day rather than later, I think.

Pluto conjunct Saturn in Libra form an harmonious trine to his Sun and Mars in Gemini, blending a passionate, almost obsessive draw to legal matters (in this case Constitutionality?)with his naturally energetic and communicative core personality.

"Star" and key element of his chart, in the circumstances, for me has to be Uranus conjunct Jupiter.