Lament

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I'd have an easier time believing in an all-loving God if my back yard were infested with yellow-fin tunas instead of squirrels.

Saturday matinee

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Come on, you fool! Do you want to get trampled?!?



In my view, Lois Lane is the real star of most of these 1940s Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons. She definitely wears the pants in her little menage with Kent and Superman.

First, she's always chiseling in on Kent's assignment, or stealing it outright, and ends up being the main reporter. (Not sure how Kent even keeps his job at the Daily Planet, considering his apparent lack of enterprise as compared with Lois.)

Second, she's the genuinely fearless member of the cast even if she does end up being humiliated on the dastardly villain's "sawmill" every time (in this episode, put into bondage over a cauldron of scalding, molten steel that the bad guy evidently keeps on the front burner, just in case). Superman needs no courage since he knows that he is inherently invincible.

Third, Lois must be stronger than hell judging by how she keeps her lunch hooks embedded in the robot's steel trapdoor at 3,000 feet while Superman helplessly bumbles off into a web of high-voltage power lines despite his supernatural physical endowment.

For purposes of brevity, I'll leave aside the discussion of intelligence since even a 6-year-old can discern that Superman is a dimwit. Lois is always doing dumb things in these animations, but Kent/Superman is just a dope, plain and simple.

Finally, I'd bet that Lois is a lot of fun behind closed doors. One can imagine her hollered warning to Kent (top of this post) to, in another context, double as an invitation to a night of fun in her own little BDSM dungeon.

Enjoy the animation and the industrial deco settings. I love how the robots slouch when they're deactivated instead of just locking down at attention---much more work to do things the Fleischer way, but the result was superior.

The Mechanical Monsters (1941, "Superman" cartoon by Fleischer Studios for Paramount Pictures; Steve Muffatti and George Germanetti, animators; Dave Fleischer, director), via YouTube, a work in the public domain embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Your right to peacefully assemble

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I am perversely thankful to the Bush/Cheney administration for pulling the friendly mask off the authoritarian homunculus living at the core of Movement Conservatism. I assume they dropped the pretense of neighborly Reaganism because they felt they were dealing from a position of unassailable strength---strength that can be reinforced when ordinary people "dummy up" due to a gnawing fear of government reprisals. Still, the illusion of certain democratic customs such as the freedom to peacefully assemble must be maintained in order to support the traditional story line that America is the greatest nation in the 6,000-year history of Earth, because at least we know we're free.

From my vantage point it seems that we are now seeing historic new limitations on the right to peacefully assemble. It appears that those limitations are triggered when nonviolent protests start to seriously interfere with The Spectacle that is the establishment media narrative about political economy. So as a result, we wake up to an image of "The World's Policeman" (so to speak) waging chemical warfare on University of California - Davis students sitting peacefully as part of an Occupy protest. Even when the state has a legitimate law enforcement interest in removing nonviolent protestors from a site, no manner of intentional (i.e., premeditated) brutality is justifiable. The world may note that the victims don't appear to be rowdy, body-painted, bongo-playing dopers, not that such an appearance would justify brutality anyway. My point is that the people being sprayed are probably pretty much like you and your neighbors (or their kids).

The risk that establishment interests take when deploying this kind of force is that ordinary Americans---the Silent Majority of the 21st century---may actually both note and remember with revulsion images like the one above (shot by one Louise Macabitas and found in an online photostream). With that thought in mind, watch this YouTube clip:



I suggest that you watch the whole thing, but especially around 6:15 in the video. These brave kids, as well behaved as anyone could possibly expect under the circumstances, pull off something amazing with nothing but words and The People's Microphone. And, to the establishment, it is much more threatening than bongos, throwing bricks, or setting fires.

In coming weeks I'm afraid we'll see more incidents involving movement infiltrators and provocateurs for the purpose of marginalizing the protestors. Even worse, I also feel that the despicable SOPA legislation now before Congress is aimed not at "online pirates," but online protestors. This legislation, which I've intended to write about and will try to get to, will give both government and industry powerful tools for suppressing online political dissent under cover of "protecting creator's rights." YouTube is dead in the SOPA crosshairs. And, finally, look for a huge push to formally outlaw the recording or photographing of police activity occurring in the public domain.

Also, look for Officer Pepper Spray to become America's next Joe The Plumber.

I should note that I found the media embedded above at Balloon Juice.

And I quote:

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Rudy, holding forth on the topic of squirrels:

They eat anything.
They're like rats!
They are rats. With tails!

Europe tries government/industry "partnership"

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It's a fact that Europe has a long history of experience in government/industry "partnership," dating back to Renaissance-era royally chartered corporations up through its 20th century experiments with centrally controlled fascist and socialist economies. But now we have the governments of Greece and Italy, the very cradles of democracy, diving head-first into partnerships that must be the envy of American corporatists:

The question now, in both Italy and Greece, is whether the technocrats can succeed where elected leaders failed — whether pressure from the European Union backed by the whip of the financial markets will be enough to dislodge the entrenched cultures of political patronage that experts largely blame for the slow growth and financial crises that plague both countries.

Some said there was cause for optimism. “First, the mere fact that they have been asked in such difficult circumstances means that they have a mandate,” said Iain Begg, an expert on the European monetary union at the London School of Economics. “Granted, it’s not a democratic one, but it flows from disaffection with the bickering political class.”

To understand the government/industry partnership aspect, you need to know that the new "technocrat" Greek Prime Minster, Lucas Papademos, is an MIT-educated economist who has worked for the Boston Federal Reserve Bank and the European Central Bank. Italy's new PM is likely to be "technocrat" Mario Monti: economist and politician, a two-term member of the European Commission, European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, and international adviser to that most ancient of US democratic institutions, Goldman-Sachs.

Atrios translates this trendy new European "technocrat" phenomenon for regular people:

Well the consensus seems to be we need to just install bankers as the leaders of all the countries, and the only way any of us can survive is if all the richest countries of the world are turned into 3rd world hellholes after the middle class gives all of their money to rich people.

I believe this concept is what is really behind the sentiment expressed by certain celebrity pundits that what American really needs is a billionaire philosopher-king like NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg at the helm because, after all, he's so rich that he has no reason to seek personal gain from the presidency. Mitt Romney is the poor man's Michael Bloomberg.

When government "partners" with industry

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The US Constitution assigns to Congress the authority to regulate commerce. The idea that the Commerce Clause is widely understood to mean that the federal government should encourage or promote the development of commerce doesn't seem outlandish to most of us. However, the idea that the government should be a "partner" of industry is fairly new, at least in America. What that means, practically speaking since the Reagan Revolution, is that Industry (with a capital I) considers it the duty of the federal government to remove barriers to corporate profit-making irrespective of the justice of social usefulness of doing so. That expectation has come to include the even more dicey concept that government operations should be conveyed into the hands of Business (capital B) for purposes of "efficiency," which is a euphemism for wealth transfer from the US taxpayer into corporate bank accounts.

This idea was expressed most elegantly by Robert Kennedy Jr. in a speech I heard broadcast on my local pubic radio station a coupla months ago. Asked by an audience member to explain his understanding of the controlling legal ideology of the Roberts Supreme Court (the current one), Kennedy quoted his law partner: "corporations always win."

When it's person versus the corporation, the corporation wins.

When it's government versus the corporation, the corporation wins.

And when it's the person versus government, government wins. This happens because government is the "partner" of industry, whose job it is to look after the legal interests of the corporation. In general terms, their interests have largely merged over the past few decades. Industry is the CEO and Chairman of the Board of America; the federal government is the Executive Vice President for Human Capital.

Republicans are at least candid about this; Democrats are not. That, in my opinion, makes the Democratic Party the more detestable of the two.

I offer the above as a spirochete's-eye view of some mental synthesis I've been working through in order to reboot my thinking process. I think all of us could benefit by trying to refresh our perspectives on who are the bad guys and who are the good guys. Today, for reasons of news topicality, I'm thinking that the typical Democrat plays Joe Paterno to the Republican Jerry Sandusky. The Democrat goes through the motions of doing the right thing in the eyes of his "base." But everything he does is for the aggrandizement of The Corporation. Any way you look at it, humanity is considered only an incidental feature of the environment, and one that The Corporation won't miss when it's gone.