Occupy’s public discussions on “diversity of tactics” have often lacked historical perspective; discussions, at least online, have tended to degenerate to “Ghandi!” “No, ANC!” Now, however, Erica Chenoweth has developed a dataset and analyzed the historical record. Below are the results of her study of 323
 non-violent and violent campaigns 
from
 1900‐2006. I’m sure, readers, that like any study, Chenoweth’s work is open to challenge on any number of grounds. That said, surely looking to the historical record to see what’s worked isn’t such a bad thing?

Abby and Robbie discuss the reality of war: the pre-propaganda that has manufactured consent for the illegal occupations, video game warfare and cognitive dissonance in combat, the Marine urination scandal; Martin Luther King Jr. and historical revisionism minimizing how anti-imperialism was the main pillar of his philosophical platform; the CIA and the US covert war in Iran; SOPA, PIPA breakdown, the difference between copyright and fair use, the threat to net neutrality and websites like Media Roots under this overarching legislation.

* Conversion of the U.S. dollar to silver and gold was suspended during the Civil War and discontinued entirely by 1972.  Covers the years for which full data are available (i.e., 1820 through 2009).

This analysis excludes, for what I hope are obvious reasons, the years covering America’s wars of existential crisis, i.e., the Civil War, World War I, World War II, when military spending as a % of GDP reached anamolous heights, ranging from over 3% and up to nearly 37% in 1942.  See details of calculations and source citations at the linked workbook.

This piece dutifully distributed by the Dystopia Diaries.

Victorian Hair Wreath

During the 19th century it was fashionable to incorporate human hair into brooches, watch chains, wreaths, and other objects that could be worn or displayed. Victorian Gothic explores the lost art of sentimental hairwork:

Mrs. Hamlin of Omaha, Nebraska left a rather curious heirloom to her descendants—an intricately woven bouquet composed entirely of human hair. Buried deep inside, each of its flowers is numbered with a tiny label corresponding one of fifteen names written on a separate index card; those of herself and her loved ones. More than a century ago, each of these people offered up their locks of brown or gray—literally, pieces of themselves—to provide the material for what would become a lasting symbol family unity.

The weaver need not have been the eccentric that one might suppose. On the contrary, she was likely to have been a conventional middle class lady going about her fancywork. She may have included a lock of her own in the wreath, but quite possibly she did not, preferring instead to be present as the sum of its parts; the invisible weaver of family ties. As a good 19th century woman, the domestic harmony she fostered was an expression of herself; her self-portrait in sacrifice.

As Helen Sheumaker describes in Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America, hairwork in its myriad forms had not only established itself as longstanding tradition by the later half of the 19th century, but had become an active fashion. Husbands went to work wearing watch fobs fashioned of their wives hair. Locks from the dearly departed were mounted into rings and brooches. Ladies filled their autograph books with snippets from their friends. At a time of rising commercialism, sentimental hairwork became a way both to signal one’s sincerity and, paradoxically, to stay in style.

[Full Article and More Pictures at Victorian Gothic]

Today, it is so highly prized by collectors that a complete set can go for more than 100 times the original price. The set came with four types of uranium ore, a beta-alpha source (Pb-210), a pure beta source (Ru-106), a gamma source (Zn-65?), a spinthariscope, a cloud chamber with its own alpha source, an electroscope, a geiger counter, and a comic book (Dagwood Splits the Atom).

George Washington may have been America’s first president, but was he nearly America’s first zombie-in-chief? If William Thornton, physician and designer of the US Capitol, had had his way, Washington’s body would have been subjected a scientific experiment designed to bring the deceased former president back to life.

Washington’s body was not buried immediately after his death. The president may not have feared death, but he did fear being buried alive. Before he died, he commanded his secretary, Tobias Lear, to make sure that he would not be entombed less than three days after he died. In accordance with Washington’s wishes, his body was put on ice until it could be moved to the family vault.

That’s where the story gets a little strange. The morning after Washington died, his step-granddaughter Elizabeth Law arrived with a family friend, William Thornton. History best remembers Thornton as the architect who created the original design for the Capitol building, but he was also a trained physician, having studied at the University of Edinburgh. Although he did not practice medicine for much of his life, Thornton always had a keen interest in the workings of the human body, and he suggested a novel method for resurrecting the fallen warrior …

Read More from Lauren Davis on io9

Religion is one of those big taboo topics that many people are terrified to touch: too afraid that others will question their religious loyalties and just as afraid to step on the minefield that is the overhyped sensitivity of some believers.

And this is precisely why it is so much fun to talk about it.

People, after all, live and die in the names of religious values, so the stakes of what we are playing with couldn’t be any higher. And yet, few fields can make many human beings as unwilling to face the evidence as religion. It is exactly because these ideas are so central to their lives that they don’t want anyone to plant doubts in their minds.

If this is you—if you are afraid of tackling contradictions, if you believe that without blind faith you would be prey to senselessness and desperation, if dealing with complexity sends you running for the reassuring arms of dogma—then do not read any further. What I am about to say will confuse you, anger you and ruin your digestion.

But if you feel like taking a weird, dangerous journey through world religions and running into some of the very odd characters populating them—if you have a taste for paradox and think that questioning authority should be an Olympic sport—then hop on board.

I had a hell of a lot of fun writing 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know: Religion and conveying fifty of the most bizarre and unexpected stories about religion outside of my classroom. So below you’ll find seven of them that best relate the experience of my book (in a Reader’s Digest format).

You will discover that:

1. The institutions, we as a civilization, have considered “sacred” for thousands of years often are not considered that same way in organized religion, when powerful political forces or massive carnal desire enter the picture

2. Universal rights have been a sticky point for a number of religions because of what particular groups would benefit from them

3. Established religions, throughout history, have been a magnet for would-be messiahs, and an opportunity for those clever iconoclasts and tricksters to create their own new “religion” to challenge the old ones; and finally,

4. Any group calling for “Heavenly Peace on Earth” often has ended up killing millions of people in their fervor, and even stranger, the greatest conqueror in human history actually allowed religious tolerance in an truly unprecedented manner that, even today, we have not seen over most of our planet.

Religion is not an easy topic to discuss: it’s one of those things in life that is truly more complicated than it looks, and often, is a very personal matter for a hell of a lot of people. So my goal here is, at a minimum, to try to make thinking about religion enjoyable, and something you would discuss with others, even if you expect a difference of opinion.

[Read "Believe It Or Not: 7 Facts You're Not Supposed To Know About Religion" over at the Huffington Post]

Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.

Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?

While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit…

[continues at the Washington Post]

Betsy Bell

An alternate reading of M.V. Ingram’s history of the infamous Bell Witch haunting suggests a sinister secret at the heart of the mystery. This from Victorian Gothic:

The visitations began with sightings of strange animals about the Bell homestead, and of a unknown girl in green swinging to the limb of a tall oak. Soon there came an unaccountable knocking about the door and exterior walls of the house, followed by scratching and gnawing sounds that searched from room to room. It assaulted the boys in the night, ripping the sheets from their beds and pulling their hair as they tried to sleep. Whenever candles were lit to investigate, they would soon hear screams coming from their sister’s room.

Betsy Bell was 12 years old in 1818 when she became the thrall of an unseen tormentor who, for some three years, relentlessly beat her, mangled her hair, pinched and pricked her skin, and once caused her to vomit pins and needles. Her family, early, well-respected settlers of Robertson County, TN, at first tried removing her from the home, but to no avail—the disturbances followed her wherever she went. It was intelligent and, moreover, able to communicate.

At first the communication was mediated through conventional spirit rapping techniques, but soon it achieved a faltering whisper that grew into a disembodied voice, able to be heard distinctly by everyone in the room. The so-called Bell Witch—or “Kate,” as she came to be known—went on to grant many interviews, over the course of which she sang, gossiped, played tricks, and aped the sermons of local ministers, all the while heaping violent torments on Betsy, her family, and visiting skeptics.

Above all, “Kate” hated Betsy’s father—John Bell, or “Old Jack,” as she addressed him—and swore that she would torture him to death. Coincident with her arrival, he had begun suffering from facial seizures that limited his ability to speak and consume food, and when he ultimately died in 1820, the witch pointed out a vial of poison that she had used to do him in. It was only after John Bell was thus dead that the witch began to release her grip on Betsy, the manifestations more or less coming to an end by 1821.

This is the narrative laid out in Martin Van Buren Ingram’s 1894 book An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch; the only 19th century study of the haunting to have surfaced…

[More at Victorian Gothic]

There is an “unhealthy correlation” between the building of skyscrapers and subsequent financial crashes, according to Barclays Capital.

Examples include the Empire State building, built as the Great Depression was under way, and the current world’s tallest, the Burj Khalifa, built just before Dubai almost went bust. China is currently the biggest builder of skyscrapers, the bank said. India also has 14 skyscrapers under construction.

“Often the world’s tallest buildings are simply the edifice of a broader skyscraper building boom, reflecting a widespread misallocation of capital and an impending economic correction,” Barclays Capital analysts said.

The bank noted that the world’s first skyscraper, the Equitable Life building in New York, was completed in 1873 and coincided with a five-year recession. It was demolished in 1912.

Other examples include Chicago’s Willis Tower (which was formerly known as the Sears Tower) in 1974, just as there was an oil shock and the US dollar’s peg to gold was abandoned. And Malaysia’s Petronas Towers in 1997, which coincided with the Asian financial crisis. The findings might be a concern for Londoners, who are currently seeing the construction of what will be Western Europe’s tallest building, the Shard.

Investors should be most concerned about China, which is currently building 53% of all the tall buildings in the world, the bank said.

A lending boom following the global financial crisis in 2008 pushed prices higher in the world’s second largest economy.

In a separate report, JPMorgan Chase said that the Chinese property market could drop by as much as 20% in value in the country’s major cities within the next 12 to 18 months.

In India, billionaire Mukesh Ambani built his own skyscraper in Mumbai – a 27-storey residence believed to be the world’s most expensive home.

As the 1960s came to an end, the rapid development of the American postwar decades had begun to take a noticeable toll on the environment, and the public began calling for action. In November 1971, the newly created Environmental Protection Agency announced a massive photo documentary project to record these changes. More than 100 photographers not only documented environmental issues, but captured images of everyday life and the way parts of America looked at that moment in history. The National Archives has made 15,000 of these images available.

The Temple of the Rose Cross, 1618.

[Site editor's note: This article below by Graham Hancock was first published in the newly available Disinformation title The Georgia Guidestones: America’s Most Mysterious Monument.]

Not all ancient monuments are mysterious and not all mysterious monuments are ancient.

The Georgia Guidestones are decidedly not ancient—until 1980 there was nothing on top of that bare hill outside of Elberton, Georgia—yet there is much that is extremely mysterious about them.

Raymond Wiley and KT Prime do a first-class job in this little book of telling what is known about the stones, and what is not, revealing and exploring their mysteries one by one. They always keeps their feet on the ground and avoid extravagant or fanciful explanations when a simpler one will do. This only makes it all the more mysterious, after the ground has been so thoroughly raked over, that we still to this day do not know the true identity of the man calling himself R. C. Christian who commissioned and paid for the monument!

What is unmissable, is the strong whiff of seventeenth century Rosicrucianism running through the whole story; indeed the Guidestones bear many of the hallmarks of a “Rosicrucian stunt” in the classic mold designed to shake things up, challenge old and entrenched positions, get people thinking along new lines.

One night in 1623, for example, dramatic placards were positioned on the walls of many public buildings in Paris and distributed along all the main streets of the city. They contained pronouncements from the “deputies of the principal College of the Brothers of the Rose Cross who show and teach without books or marks how to speak all languages of the countries where we wish to be and to draw men from error and death.” The placards also stated that the deputies were “making a visible and invisible stay in the city.” In other words they would be seen only by those who they wished to see them, while to others they would be invisible.

The placards caused a “hurricane” of rumor about the mysterious Rose Cross fraternity and its eponymous founder Christian Rosenkreutz. Various Rosicrucian documents, espousing radical and far-reaching ideas, had already begun to circulate and hundreds more were to appear, going on to play a key role in the Enlightenment. Bizarrely, however, it was always also understood that Rosicrucianism—and certainly its core notion of a secret brotherhood of sages and savants waiting in the wings to take over the guidance of society—was something of a hoax and that the so-called Rosicrucian Manifestoes were allegorical in nature.

All this seems to me to fit perfectly with the strange story of the Guidestones, starting of course with the elusive funder “R. C. Christian” (i.e., Christian Rosenkreutz), who claims to represent a group of Americans who believe in God (like the original members of the Rosy Cross Brotherhood), who is visible to some in the Elberton community but not to others, and who creates a monument inscribed in multiple languages “to convey certain ideas across time [and to] hasten in small ways the dawning of an age of reason.”

I suggest, however, that the ideas expressed in the stones’ inscriptions, like the ideas in the original Rosicrucian Manifestoes, are there first and foremost to get people worked up emotionally and engaged intellectually with issues they might otherwise pass over. Thus, for example, the statement on the Guidestones that we should “Maintain Humanity Under 500,000,000” does not have to be in any way “true,” or rooted in any great wisdom, or even something that “R. C. Christian” himself necessarily believed in, to fulfill the function of shaking up our thinking about global population and alerting us to the moral, ethical and other issues involved in enforced population control. Likewise the notion of a “world court” that appears on the Guidestones may be a piece of advocacy for such an institution, or it may again simply be intended to make us think.

To this extent the extreme reactions the monument has provoked, including the 2008 spray paint and polyepoxide attack, could be exactly what “R. C. Christian” and his shadowy group hoped for and intended when they conceived of and commissioned the Guidestones. To attack something in the realm of ideas one must first get to grips with it and try to understand it. As we do this, though it may be subtle at first, it can begin to shape and change us.

What better form of initiation is there than the one that leads us to initiate ourselves?

Graham Hancock is the author of Fingerprints of the Gods and Supernatural, and co-author, with Robert Bauval, of The Master Game.

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 44,000 year old Neanderthal building that was constructed using the bones from mammoths. The circular building, which was up to 26 feet across at its widest point, is believed to be earliest example of domestic dwelling built from bone. Neanderthals, which died out around 30,000 years ago, were initially thought to have been relatively primitive nomads that lived in natural caves for shelter.

The new findings, however, suggest these ancient human ancestors had settled in areas to the degree that they built structures where they lived for extended periods of time. Analysis by researchers from the Muséum National d’Histories Naturelle in Paris also found that many of the bones had been decorated with carvings and ochre pigments…

[Continues at The Telegraph]

The story of his life is richer and weirder than any fiction. Among his close friends were visionary poets such as William Blake as well as political icons like Benjamin Franklin. Napoleon slept with his books by his pillow, and told him statues of gold should be erected to him in every city in the universe (but the admiration was not reciprocated). Thomas Edison believed him to be one of the most brilliant minds in human history. Some of his writings rank among the greatest bestsellers of the 18th century. He participated in the two revolutions (the American and the French) that changed the political face of the modern world.

During the American Revolution, George Washington used his writings to inspire his troops to remember what they were fighting for, and even suggested that no other individual had done more for the cause of American independence. John Adams stated that without his pen, Washington’s military victories would have been in vain. In France, the revolutionaries invited him to join the National Convention in charge of drafting a new constitution. His unconditional love for freedom, however, made him allergic to “revolutionary” totalitarianism just as much as he was opposed to monarchic totalitarianism. So, Robespierre and his proto-fascist cronies had him arrested and sentenced to death. But the blade of the guillotine missed the date with his neck thanks to a mistake by the jailer in delivering condemned prisoners. Before the mistake was fixed, a future American president, James Monroe, intervened on his behalf and had him rescued. And another president, Thomas Jefferson, personally offered him political asylum.

The man we are speaking of is Thomas Paine.

Even though his name is relatively well known, it is not nearly as celebrated as one may imagine given such a wild, intense existence, and such a deep impact on history. Paine was after all the man who came up with the terms “United States of America,” and is credited by many to be the ideological father of modern democracy. So why is his face not on the dollar bills? Why is he not hanging out with Jefferson & co. on Mt. Rushmore? Why is he not given his due among the greatest American heroes?

Paine’s problem is that he didn’t die in 1792. Had he done that, his place among the pantheon of beloved founding fathers would have been assured. But instead he lived, and wrote another book entitled The Age of Reason. The result? By the time he actually died in 1809, only six people attended his funeral. The most repeated of his obituaries by the newspapers read, “he had lived long, did some good and much harm.” His supporters found themselves under relentless attacks. Thomas Jefferson’s political opponents had a field day using over and over his friendship with Paine against him. Abraham Lincoln’s friends burned a booklet he had written, in which he defended Paine’s ideas, for fear that this would irreparably ruin his reputation. Over a hundred years after Paine’s death, Theodore Roosevelt still referred to him as a “filthy little atheist.”

What exactly was it about The Age of Reason that transformed Paine into a ghost among the founding fathers? Why did he turn overnight from popular hero into a hated villain? It’s because the man took on organized religion with a furor, in an age when doing so was neither fashionable nor conducive to good health.

As he wrote, “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches … appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

When he had composed passionate defenses of freedom against political tyranny, the masses had loved him. But now that he had composed a passionate defense of freedom against religious tyranny, they hated him. Paine hadn’t changed. It’s simply that his audience was much readier to attack political rather than religious institutions. But for Paine tyranny was tyranny regardless which adjective was attached to it. To him, sworn enemies like the king of England and Robespierre, the pope and Martin Luther were but different faces of the same evil. Whether they called themselves monarchists or revolutionaries, Catholics or Protestants, whether they indulged in inquisitions or guillotines, didn’t matter much since they were all equally addicted to totalitarianism. The Age of Reason was Paine’s declaration of war against the religious dogmatism that had squashed individual liberties over the centuries.

The fame of being a godless atheist followed Paine like a shadow forever afterwards. But the punch line in all of this is that Paine was anything but an atheist. It was precisely because he believed in God that he despised organized religions since—in his view—these turned the divine mystery into bad mythology, and projected onto God their own psychotic hopes and fears. In Paine’s brand of freedom-loving spirituality, God was something greater than any religion. And this was the belief that cost Paine his place of honor among the founding fathers.

The above is an excerpt from the new Disinformation title 50 Things You’re Not Supposed To Know: Religion, authored by Daniele Bolelli.

While the preservation of hunting trophies may be the best-known use of the taxidermist’s art, fans of Walter Potter’s anthropomorphic tableaux can attest to the fact that it has its other, more silly uses. Potter (1835-1918) was a self-taught taxidermist who grew up in the rural community of Bramber, Sussex, at a time when stuffing dead animals was considered to be a suitable hobby for young boys. For technical assistance, he would have had any number of popular manuals at his disposal. For inspiration, he had his younger sister’s illustrated nursery rhyme books and the Great Exhibition of 1851, where anthropomorphic taxidermy was first displayed to the British public.

His first major contribution was an elaborate diorama depicting the death and burial of Cock Robin, which he began at age 19 and took seven years to complete. Each of the animals from the English nursery rhyme are represented, behaving in character; a rook with a book is parson, a mourning dove leads the funeral procession, an owl digs the grave.

Potter was encouraged in his hobby, which brought customers to his father’s inn. By 1880 his collection had grown into an important attraction for the tiny village of Bramber, and came to be housed in a separate museum building on land next to the inn. Here he welcomed visitors, received donations of small game from local farmers, and steadily improved his displays. The museum became so packed, and its tableaux so rich in detail, that returning patrons were never at a loss to find some new and interesting feature that they had overlooked before.

[Full Article and Images at Victorian Gothic]

Most Westerners who become fascinated with Zen Buddhism are intrigued with its reputation as an anti-authoritarian, freedom-loving, individualistic tradition. Books by excellent writers like Alan Watts popularized an image of Zen as a very relaxed, go-with-the-flow type of religion. But even a brief visit to a typical Zen temple is enough to make us painfully aware of the difference between hype and reality. Life in real Zen temples, in fact, is often so structured, regimented and heavily regulated as to quickly dispel the romanticism created by much of the literature about it. Far from being a hippie rendition of Buddhism, Zen discipleship can be demanding and severe.

But sometimes even misguided stereotypes are born from seeds of truth. Enter 15th century Japanese monk Ikkyu Sojun, who was truly as free, wild and allergic to authorities as advertised.

For Ikkyu, Zen was not a spontaneous calling. Rather, he stumbled upon it as an alternative to being murdered in infancy. Given that choice, Zen training didn’t seem so bad after all. Ikkyu, in fact, was the illegitimate son of the emperor of Japan, and the object of several conspiracies aimed at thinning out the ranks of potential candidates to the throne. In an effort to have his life spared, his mother entrusted him to a Zen monastery when he was only 5 years old: not the most fun-filled scenario for a little boy, but clearly more appealing than having angry assassins slicing you to pieces.

His early life was extremely tough since the training he received from the Zen monks was brutally stern. Despite some serious bouts of depression in this joyless environment, it became quickly clear to his teachers that Ikkyu possessed an amazing intellect, and that his grasp of Zen was unparalleled. But the fact that he excelled in this setting didn’t mean he felt at home in it. Despite genuinely loving Zen (or perhaps because of it), he was less than thrilled with the spiritual bureaucracy of the temples. Also, many of the priests bugged him: too many political games and too much time spent courting the favor of rich patrons. And so when the day came when his master presented him with a certificate of enlightenment—which was both a great honor and the necessary document to begin climbing the Zen hierarchy—Ikkyu promptly decided to wave goodbye to a monastic career and burned it.

This doesn’t mean he had given up on Zen. Far from it. In his thinking, it was the entire Zen establishment that had abandoned real Zen by turning it into a dogmatic parody of what it was supposed to be. Life in the temples was stifled by too many rules and not enough fresh air. The so-called professionals of Zen were in Ikkyu’s eyes a bunch of posers—too busy acting “spiritual” to be able to really taste spirituality in its rawest forms. Some people believed Zen enlightenment could only be found among clouds of incense in silent meditation. Ikkyu, on the other hand, found sake-drinking and wild sex more to his liking. As he put it in his poems, “The autumn breeze of a single night of love is better than a hundred thousand years of sterile sitting meditation.” Or, even more bluntly, “Don’t hesitate: get laid—that’s wisdom. Sitting around chanting sutras: that’s crap.” Driven by an uncompromising thirst for life, Ikkyu became a wandering monk, testing his Zen insights far away from the seclusion of the monasteries, and earning the nickname of “Crazy Cloud.”

The point of his erotic escapades and wild adventures was to suggest that the “sacred” is nothing other than regular life experienced with 100 percent awareness. Or perhaps, sake-drinking and inordinate amounts of sex didn’t need any justification at all other than the fact that they were a hell of a lot of fun. Ikkyu didn’t give a rat’s ass about what the religious authorities of his day thought of him anyway. But in the course of his travels, Ikkyu managed to influence great numbers of artists, poets, calligraphers, musicians, and actors in such a way that his ideas left a deep mark on the development of several Japanese art forms for centuries to come. Even his love life came to be celebrated through the ages, since his relationship with Lady Mori ended up being among the most famous romances in Japanese history.

But since good old Ikkyu was a man who loved paradoxes, when a civil war had destroyed most Zen temples in the country, he came to the rescue of the very institutions he had ferociously criticized. Just when the future of Zen seemed in peril, he was able to enlist the help of the many acquaintances he had met during a lifetime of travels and mobilized them into rebuilding some of the key temples throughout the country. So, oddly enough, much of modern Zen owes a huge debt for its existence to a man who preferred the company of hookers to that of monks.

In 2003 we went into Iraq under scandalously false pretexts, guns blazing—bragging about our ability to deliver “shock and awe” with impunity (the mark of the bully) and with one goal in mind: to rob and rape that country blind of its riches. The official excuse was that Iraq and Saddam were mortal threats that had to be neutralized.

Within a matter of weeks if not days, the official line—adopted without missing a beat by the entire punditocracy—was that we had gone in “to save Iraq”, “make it a democracy,” and all the rest of the self-serving claptrap we use over and over again to justify our uber-criminal behavior.  With a straight face the official voices declared that those who had the audacity to resist our criminal violence were ingrates. Don’t believe it? You may be forgiven: it is rather unbelievable.

Not too long after that, another somersault in logic and truth took place. This time the contortion was of Olympian quality, as we saw the same filthy pundits—a great many of them liberals—talking with a straight face (as did the man in the White House and other administration flacks) that if the Iraqis continued to “misbehave”, continued attacking our troops, imagine that, “we’d leave”—yeah, that’s right, their punishment would be that we, the self-annointed saviors, would leave!

Buwahahahahahahah….! Isn’t that a threat to shit in your pants? They didn’t receive us as liberators!

Reality quiz:

What would you do if you were the victim of a brutal home invasion; if they raped your wife and daughter, killed your animals, beat the shit out of you, and robbed you blind, to boot—oh, and reduced your house to rubble—and then they declared with a straight face that if you were not grateful for all that, if you didn’t beg them to stay … they’d leave? How’s that for the mother of all Orwellian nonsense?

Only with a totally confused public can the revolting media creatures who pass for journalists and commentators in the US foist such a huge con on the public mind … with nary an audible  protest.

Yeah, it’s pathetic alright. And if we don’t watch it, it will happen again.

PATRICE GREANVILLE is editor of the Greanville Post, a site dedicated to political, cultural and historical analyses.

Since the dawn of time, God’s faithful followers have been locked in a war without mercy against the forces of evil. Christian theology (and Muslim too, for that matter) is clear on this matter. This is a fight that can’t stop until the final showdown at the end of times, when God’s partisans will drown their enemies once and for all in rivers of blood. Until then, the battle rages on, and the entire earth is divided in opposing armies. Neutrality is just not an option. Much like rust, Evil never sleeps, and its agents are constantly busy trying to hurt the followers of the one true faith. Given this outlook, it then logically follows that it is wise for God’s people to strike down the devil’s minions wherever they are found: heretics, witches, pagans and other fans of the devil simply have to be stopped.

It would be easy for Christians to despair when they are always surrounded by such scary opponents, but in the Spain of the 1400s, a man rose to their defense. His name?

Fighting out of the red corner, wearing the robes of inquisitor general, he is “The hammer of heretics, the light of Spain, the savior of his country.” Ladies and Gentlemen, representing the Holy Inquisition, and sporting a record of hundreds of heretics killed, I introduce to you, the one and only reigning heavyweight champion of the Catholic faith, Tooooomaaaaaaasss de Torrrrrqueeeeemaaaadaaaaaaaaaa!

A Dominican friar and Queen Isabella’s personal confessor, Tomás de Torquemada had become Spain’s first inquisitor general, which is to say God’s right hand man in His fight against heresy. In his zealous quest, he set up a system that burned to death over 2,000 people (and many, many thousands more when imitators followed his lead in other parts of Europe). Some of his main victims were former Jews and Muslims posing as faithful Catholics but secretly holding on to their old beliefs. But even more broadly, Torquemada’s mission was to bring down anybody holding ideas that differed from Catholicism.

His methods were not exactly the embodiment of Christian compassion, but in the fight against the Evil One, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. Whips, hot irons, thumbscrews, stakes and other pearls of creative sadism were holy weapons to be used in defense of the Catholic faith. By the time Torquemada knocked on your door, you were pretty much screwed. It meant that someone had managed to convince him that you were an enemy of the faith who had to be stopped. The good, old rule “innocent until proven guilty” was not yet old and was certainly not considered good. The legal theory of the Inquisition was more along the lines of “guilty until proven innocent.” Actually, even that was too much to ask, since you really couldn’t prove yourself innocent. If you confessed, then obviously you were guilty. But if you didn’t, then it meant you were truly a lying, sneaky servant of the devil who should be tortured. If you confessed under torture, then it was a done deal. If not, again this only proved your guiltiness since clearly the devil was giving you supernatural power to resist pain: quite literally damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

Incidentally, along the way the Inquisition was also a profitable business since all the wealth of those convicted would be seized and split between king and church. But whether inquisitors burned you at the stake because they were greedy, or because they truly believed they were doing God’s work, it didn’t exactly make a huge practical difference.

Clearly, the devil had many fans since Torquemada’s holy mission didn’t find universal support. He was so fearful of assassination that he traveled with more than 250 bodyguards (hell … even Mafia bosses are satisfied with less than that…).

But God’s hit man also had many admirers. Not only most Catholic inquisitors looked up to him as a model to be followed, but even Protestants ended up following his same recipe. Both Martin Luther and John Calvin, the giants of Protestant theology, were as insistent as Torquemada about the necessity of barbecuing witches and other soldiers of the devil. It was only after the worst of the devil’s inventions became popular—that pesky Enlightenment with its emphasis on reason, science and individual rights—that the hands of Torquemada’s spiritual descendants were no longer free to strike down heretics. So, these must truly be dark times, now that heroes of the faith like Torquemada are no longer able to carry out their holy mission. If you can’t even burn them on the public square, how can society defend itself against the servants of the devil?

Many in the Occupy Wall Street Movement are patting their efforts on the back, and even claiming credit for what looks like a shift by President Obama towards a more engaged campaign discussing economic fairness.

The President’s speech in Kansas was modeled on remarks made by the Republican Bull Moose Teddy Roosevelt in 1910. There’s nothing like quoting a Republican for credible centrist positioning. (Note: he quotes TR, not FDR.)

Will he embrace GOP Pres Eisenhower’s warning about the Military Industrial Complex next?

Unlikely.

Richard Eskow was quick to salute the new Obama:

“Barack Obama channeled one of American history’s truly transformative figures by visiting the tiny Kansas town where Teddy Roosevelt gave his ‘New Nationalism’ speech over a century ago. It was refreshing to see the President invoke his predecessor, who was a powerful and fearless agent of change both inside and outside the White House.

“For the first time the President directly confronted the injustice of our growing economic divide, which were caused by the ongoing rapacity of the already-wealthy. He promised to take real action against the bankers who accepted our help after ruining the economy, then went on hoarding the nation’s wealth for themselves at everyone else’s expense. Teddy would have been proud.” (He was also proud of his role in the bloody Spanish-American War that turned into the Vietnam before Vietnam.)

Clearly it’s more heartening to hear the president’s new-found embrace of the needs of the millions being hurt by Wall Street’s crime spree — rather than watch his more devious collusion with it.

His speech seemed more radical because of the way the right attacked it. A columnist for the Wall Street Journal compared him to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, but also saw the speech for what it was — a campaign posture, a technique for rallying a disenchanted base, not a promise of tough action by the White House.

Writes Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal, “Some will say hearing crude Chavista populism in the Obama speech is an overreaction. That once it’s understood the Kansas speech was the work of the party leader, not the president of the United States, it becomes easier to think about it without overreacting to its intense and vivid rhetoric…”

President Roosevelt was sincerely battling the monopolists of his time, not opportunistically playing politics. “One of the fundamental necessities in a representative government such as ours,” Roosevelt said, “is to make certain that the men to whom the people delegate their power shall serve the people by whom they are elected, and not the special interests.

“No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered — not gambling in stocks, but service rendered.”

Amen.

Just recycling TR isn’t the same as applying his policies. Even Eskow admits that, admitting, “the Obama Justice Department sits idly by as the SEC continues to let major corporations pay slap-on-the-wrist fines for executive criminality- fines that are often paid by the same shareholders they deceived — while “neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing.”

Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalism blog goes further: “Wow, I have to hand it to Obama’s spinmeisters. They’ve managed to find a way to resurrect his old hopium branding by calling it something completely different that still has many of the old associations.

“And we have a twofer in Obama’s launch of his new branding as True Son of Teddy Roosevelt. …The second element of this finesse is that Obama is using the Rooseveltian imagery to claim he will pass legislation to get tough on Big Finance miscreants. That posture, is of course meant to underscore the idea that you just can’t get the perps with the present, weak set of laws.”

The Financial Times reported him saying” “financial institutions whose business model is built on breaking the law, cheating consumers or making risky bets that could damage the entire economy. I’ll be calling for legislation that makes [anti-fraud] penalties count — so that firms don’t see punishment for breaking the law as just the price of doing business.”

Sounds good, except there are laws and rules on the books right now that could be deployed!

Trying to get new “anti-business” legislation through the Republican Congress is sure to be a non-starter and only intended to give him a new club to attack his adversaries with, rather crack down on Wall Street fraud.

Writes Smith, “No, it has plenty of tools, starting with Sarbanes Oxley. As we’ve discussed at length in earlier posts, Sarbox was designed to eliminate the CEO and top brass ‘know nothing’ excuse. And the language for civil and criminal charges is parallel, so a prosecutor could file criminal charges, and if successful, could then open up a related criminal case. Sarbox required that top executives (which means at least the CEO and CFO) certify the adequacy of internal controls, and for a big financial firm, that has to include risk controls and position valuation. The fact that the Administration didn’t attempt to go after, for instance, AIG on Sarbox is inexcusable …”

We can go on and on detailing the many ways the President, reborn as Teddy Roosevelt, was anything but a rough rider charging up Wall Street hill.

Writing on Huff Post, Jim Sleeper, a former journalist turned Yale professor, compared Obama’s speech to suggestions in an earlier article in the NY Times by Drew Westen, a critic telling him what he should be saying: “Here are some of the lines that Westen suggested in his essay last summer. Following them are the ones Obama delivered this week….”

Westen last summer on what Obama should say: “Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness…”

Obama last week: “Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there’s been a certain crowd in Washington for the last few decades who respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. ‘The market will take care of everything,’ they tell us. If only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes – especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger … It’s a simple theory — one that speaks to our rugged individualism and healthy skepticism of too much government. … Here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It’s never worked…”

Well, at least Obama is open to suggestions but is it for a turn around in the way he’s governing, or is it to find new applause lines?

Writes financial analyst Ellen Brown, “The continued dominance of the Wall Street money machine depends on … collective amnesia. The fact that this memory is surfacing again may be the machine’s greatest threat — and our greatest hope as a nation. order his Attorney General to enforce the laws right now.”

Network other outlets and his News Dissector blog. He made the film Plunder the Crime Of Our Time. Please email comments to dissector@mediachannel.org.

First published in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was destined to become the universally-acknowledged masterwork of vampire fiction, but it was not, by any means, the first of its kind. Stokers genius consisted not in having invented the modern vampire monster, but in the imaginative way he synthesized and expanded upon the ideas that prior authors had already been exploring.

One of these was J. Sheridan Le Fanu, whose 1872 tale Carmilla provided a template for many of Dracula’s best-remembered characters and motifs, including the occult doctor (Dr. Hesselius), and the lonely Gothic castle set in a barbarous region of Europe. Many of the proper names in Dracula, in fact, are direct allusions to Carmilla’s characters and settings: “Karnstein” became “Carfax,” “Reinfeldt” became “Renfield,” and so on. Le Fanu’s protagonist, Laura, corresponds roughly to Stoker’s Mina; both are afflicted young women whose souls come depend upon their families’ efforts to unravel the vampire mystery.

Carmilla is told in the first person, from Laura’s point of view. She is a lonely Englishwoman who lives with her father and governesses in an ancient scholss in Styria (southeast Austria). After receiving word of the sudden death of a would-be guest, Bertha Reinfeldt, Laura and company gather on the castle drawbridge to admire a calm, full-moon night when an out-of-control carriage crashes in upon the scene. A weak, unconscious Carmilla is thrown from the compartment in the accident that ensues. Her “mother,” a mysterious noblewomen, professes to be on an urgent, secret mission, but reluctantly consents to leave Carmilla to recover in the family’s care.

Laura quickly recognizes Carmilla from a dream she had as a child; a dream of being visited in bed at night, and bitten on the shoulder. Carmilla, too, professes to remember Laura from a corresponding dream, wherein she awoke to find herself in an unfamiliar bed chamber, and Laura there. Quickly, they develop an intimate friendship, characterized pressings of hands, kissing of cheeks, and plenty of blushing.

[More at Victorian Gothic]

Or, more appropriately, “Where Does the Occupy Movement Go From Here?” I began writing an article on precisely this topic, working myself to the bone and pausing only to get dead stinking drunk for a couple weeks. Upon sobering up I started researching again and realized, to my embarrassment, that I had been beaten to the punch by practically every writer in the US (and some abroad) that follows the movement.

No, really! Type that question into a search engine and you’ll see this.

Well, it is an important question — this isn’t Tunisia or Egypt, one cannot count on the amount of popular support combined with near-suicidal rage necessary for a protest to topple a government. The US is a different animal and this is a different struggle. So what to do?

Miles Mogulescu, over at the Huffington Post, asks some pertinent questions. “It’s time,” he writes, “to ask whether the organizational forms and tactics which birthed the #Occupy mass protests are adequate to building a long-term movement which can change the country and the world.”

That’s something of a dangerous question. Leadership rarely transfers smoothly. He’s correct when he writes that the “open source, participatory, horizontal structure may be one key to its early success, and the ease with which it has been replicated in city after city around the country and the world”, but what will the reaction be when someone suggests changing that? It has become a hallmark of the Occupy movement, something looked upon with pride, something that says “we’ve done something amazing here”.

One may ask “well, why would we want to change that?” In a word: politics.Mogulescu suggests that while the protests are all well and good, it may be that the best way to accomplish something substantial is to engage in the rough and tumble world of politics. And the horizontal leadership that he praised earlier may not be the best tool with which to enter that world.

Michael Moore, well-known author/filmmaker and fan of trans-fats, has gone a step further. He has submitted a “vision statement” to the Occupy Wall Street general assembly, something that reads suspiciously like a wish-list. More useful, to my mind, is the comprehensive list of goals and demands (examples include “Eradicate the Bush tax cuts for the rich and institute new taxes on the wealthiest Americans and on corporations, including a tax on all trading on Wall Street where they currently pay 0%” and “Join the rest of the free world and create a single-payer, free and universal health care system that covers all Americans all of the time”. I encourage everyone to check them out).

Whether you agree or disagree with the items on the list, one has to admit they are significantly better goals and demands than those expressed by some of the protest signs that have been seen in various cities (“Jobs Are A Right” read one I saw, which reveals a frankly staggering ignorance about either the nature of employment or the nature of rights. “End Corporate Greed”, a slogan I heard at an Occupy Chicago event, is almost as bad. Greed is the foundation of the economic system in this country, which in turn drives the world economy. Curtail it? Sure. Maybe make it less short-sighted? Absolutely. Spread around the profits resulting from that lust for money? Great. End it? That statement is, for all intents and purposes, meaningless in this country). More importantly, it seems to suggest something similar to what Mogulescu was saying. After all, to accomplish any of these goals, the movement will have to start messing around in politics.

William Pfaff at TruthDig claims that the Occupy Movement is fighting “the system”, a phrase that always makes me nervous. Look around at the people near you, how good are they at recognizing, manipulating or even consciously and willfully interacting with systems? How can the masses fight a system? The author gives several examples, and you may or may not be surprised to discover that many of them are covered in Moore’s list of goals and demands. Pfaff also notes, though, that none of these goals will be possible unless there is severe campaign finance reform. Until the candidates no longer have to go on their knees to the money-men, the list of goals will only ever be a wish-list.

This, I think, separates the Occupy movement from other successful movements in the U.S.’s history. The Civil Rights movement did indeed combine home-grown protests with political aspirations, and did so successfully. But that struggle was different — they were combating hate and ignorance, which while powerful nevertheless takes a back seat to greed. An example of this principal is the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott of 1955. The protest campaign managed to prove that treating a certain portion of society as second class citizens is not a smart business plan, especially when that particular portion of society accounts for 80% of your annual income. Like the Civil Rights movement, the Occupy movement is battling an entrenched power structure committing injustices — but the injustices the Occupy movement are fighting are not, if you’ll forgive the pun, as black-and-white. Hate and ignorance are ugly, and that ugliness was seen by the entire nation in the responses to the Civil Rights movement, in the terrible attacks on the brave people involved in that struggle. Arson and murder will not rally the masses to your cause. Dead children being pulled out of a burnt-down church will not win the hearts and minds of the people. It will, in fact, do the opposite of that.

The short-sighted greed that runs through the reigning power structures cannot be seen as easily, though, and even when examples of it are brought to the public’s attention — the Wall Street crimes, the Super PAC legislation — it can (and has) been written off as business as usual, nothing to see here, move along folks.

So everyone is asking “Where Does The Occupy Movement Go From Here”, and the responses are all pretty similar: Get Political. I’m not seeing too many ideas on how to do that in terms of process, but hell it’s a start. While I’m here, let me add that now is the time to start getting the police on our side. Because what worries me the most is something I predicted a while back, something of which I am a little terrified but at the same time am anxiously awaiting: if and when the Occupy movement gets some real leverage, the shit will start hitting the fan in a much bigger way. When that happens, let’s hope the police are at least a little less willing to crack skulls and squirt pepper-spray down someone’s throat, because someone with a lot to lose will be telling them to do exactly that.