The Collapse of European Unity

Britain's decision to leave the EU signals the end of over 50 years of social and political order, a time of historical peace and economic growth, begs the question of what order will replace it? 

For now, a powerful rising return of nationalism is seeking control - not to say wiser and perhaps better policies may arise - but since this anti-unity effort has grown from nationalism, then ....

An excellent essay at Washington Monthly comparing the most narrow of world views with the often demeaned policies of liberalism led by President Obama reveals stark contrasts. As he spoke in his Nobel Speech (quoted in the essay):

"I do not believe that we will have the will, the determination, the staying power, to complete this work without something more — and that’s the continued expansion of our moral imagination; an insistence that there’s something irreducible that we all share.

"We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place…For if we lose that faith — if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace — then we lose what’s best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass."

Confederates Fail Again in Greene County.

The previous post has a follow-up, and it's actually good news.

20 of 21 Greene County Commissioners rejected completely a proposal from one commissioner, Jame Randolph, to install a Confederate flag on the county's courthouse. Just like the way residents rejected secession during the Civil War 150 years ago.

Previously, as I said, this is idiotic on many levels, especially Randolph's ludicrous claim he was motivated by some fealty to history. But we all know what history that flag represents.

Randolph says he knew the resolution would fail and that he won't try to introduce it again - so the question remains: What was the point of his effort? Was it merely to attract and agitate a specific part of the population, to organize them and alert them to .... what?

The Greene County press should ask that question but they won't.

Confederate Ignorance in Greene County

It's pretty clear the Greene County Commissioners who think flying a Confederate flag is historically vital have zero knowledge of the history of their own county and of East Tennessee.

Here's a report on what Greene County elected officials want --

Here's the facts, from an 1899 account, of how the vast majority of Tennessee and Greene County residents utterly rejected the Confederates and embraced instead the American flag and the American government.

Since History proves these officials utterly wrong - then what is the real reason behind their desire to fly a flag of the county's enemies?

UPDATE: The outcome was a Big Fat NO.

Heading Into A Digital Dark Age

One of the million or so pieces of cuneiform writing awaiting someone to decipher it.

Google V.P. Vint Cerf - often tagged as one of the Internet's founders - warned of a coming lost century since digitized information fades fast as technology and software change.

"Ancient civilizations suffered no such problems, because histories written in cuneiform on baked clay tablets, or rolled papyrus scrolls, needed only eyes to read them. To study today’s culture, future scholars would be faced with PDFs, Word documents, and hundreds of other file types that can only be interpreted with dedicated software and sometimes hardware too.

"The problem is already here. In the 1980s, it was routine to save documents on floppy disks, upload Jet Set Willy from cassette to the ZX spectrum, slaughter aliens with a Quickfire II joystick, and have Atari games cartridges in the attic. Even if the disks and cassettes are in good condition, the equipment needed to run them is mostly found only in museums.

"The rise of gaming has its own place in the story of digital culture, but Cerf warns that important political and historical documents will also be lost to bit rot. In 2005, American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, describing how Lincoln hired those who ran against him for presidency. She went to libraries around the US, found the physical letters of the people involved, and reconstructed their conversations. “In today’s world those letters would be emails and the chances of finding them will be vanishingly small 100 years from now,” said Cerf."

Full article is here.

Meanwhile, some folks are thinking and working on the structure of a 10,000 year memory structure. Meet the Long Now Foundation.

History no longer belongs to those who write of it - it belongs to those who know how to archive and access it across thousands of years.

A Prime Selection of Long Reads

The "long read" nature of my writing style and my general slow, sometimes oh-so-slow, process could - to some readers- appear contrary to the popular binary wave patterns digital lifestyle blurring past us and around us. But hang in there kiddo, it's worth it.

So while I apologize for making you wait for a new post, I bring gifts, a prime selection of long reads - first up is an artist using photography and digital tech to create powerful images. Via Medium, their profile of Adam Maygur begins:

"Adam Maygar is a computer geek, a college dropout, a self-taught photographer, a high-tech Rube Goldberg, a world traveler, and a conceptual artist of growing global acclaim. But nobody had ever suggested that he might also be a terrorist until the morning that he descended into the Union Square subway station in New York.

At the time, Magyar was immersed in a long-running techno-art project called Stainless, creating high-resolution images of speeding subway trains and their passengers, using sophisticated software he created and hardware that he retrofitted himself. The scanning technique he developed—combining thousands of pixel-wide slices into a single image—allows him to catch passengers unawares as they hurtle through dark subway tunnels, fixing them in haunting images filled with detail no ordinary camera can capture."

Please oh reader, explore his images on Medium, as my humble but lovable blog cannot convey how fantastic Maygur's work is:

Maygur says at one point: These moments I capture are meaningless, there is no story in them, and if you can catch the core, the essence of being, you capture probably everything." A constant element in the my own writing/pondering about writing is about the nature of Art itself. By which I mean, what prompts the creation and execution? That leads us to an interview with Phillip Roth, the now-retired Phillip Roth, whose the hands down winner of, if not the long read, the long answer to press questions. And his mastery of language is impeccable. Below, Roth gives an assessment of America:

"Very little truthfulness anywhere, antagonism everywhere, so much calculated to disgust, the gigantic hypocrisies, no holding fierce passions at bay, the ordinary viciousness you can see just by pressing the remote, explosive weapons in the hands of creeps, the gloomy tabulation of unspeakable violent events, the unceasing despoliation of the biosphere for profit, surveillance overkill that will come back to haunt us, great concentrations of wealth financing the most undemocratic malevolence around, science illiterates still fighting the Scopes trial 89 years on, economic inequities the size of the Ritz, indebtedness on everyone’s tail, families not knowing how bad things can get, money being squeezed out of every last thing — that frenzy — and (by no means new) government hardly by the people through representative democracy but rather by the great financial interests, the old American plutocracy worse than ever. You have 300 million people on a continent 3,000 miles wide doing the best they can with their inexhaustible troubles. We are witnessing a new and benign admixture of races on a scale unknown since the malignancy of slavery. I could go on and on. It’s hard not to feel close to existence here. This is not some quiet little corner of the world."

I was deeply grateful to discover a 1999 essay om Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" by Tim Kreider - grateful because it was a brilliant piece about why EWS is great and critics of the day so very wrong. Ignoring all of Kubrick's previous work is idiotic as he was likely the most thoughtful composer of film images ever to wield  a movie camera. I  too read the movie as a scathing critique of greed and corrupt depravity at the cusp of the 21st century, especially among the mega wealthy, and a critique of those who see themselves as above such lowdown behavior. At heart, their is a murder mystery in the movie and the resolution so typically Kubrickian - intriguing spaces for audiences to ponder on meanings and conclusions:

"The open-ended narrative forces us to ask ourselves what we’re really seeing; is Eyes Wide Shut a movie about marriage, sex, and jealousy, or about money, whores, and murder? Before you make up your own mind, consider this: has there ever been even one Stanley Kubrick film in which someone didn't get killed?"

Let's follow the questions about creating home to Tennessee, or at least the South. Located on the Tennessee River, the music recorded in the wee studios of Muscle Shoals are the very foundations of rock and roll and soul music. The 2013 documentary "Muscle Shoals" has been airing on PBS recently and its a solid 2 hours of artistic collaborations that made history,

Yes, I know, a movie is not a read. How about reading movies? Would that work? Actors in Hollywood have been staging live readings of movies, most recently the notorious script for Quentin Tarantino's western The Hateful Eight" - notorious because it got leaked online, which pissed him off so much he decided to not make the movie and sued Gawker for linking to the script. But actors are doing more scripts with all new casts:


"We started with The Breakfast Club," says Elvis Mitchell, the former New York Times critic who now curates film at LACMA. ... Imagine The Graduate without Dustin Hoffman or Anne Bancroft. Now imagine those roles being filled by Jay Baruchel and Sharon Stone (that was April's other live read),  all in a stripped-down environment with the actors sitting in a row at a table facing the crowd, with their character names on a card in front of them, like the US supreme court in session. The approach has produced some happy moments of inspired casting, such as Paul Rudd and Mindy Kaling in The Princess Bride, Seth Rogen as The Big Lebowski, The Usual Suspects with Dexter's Michael C Hall, and the pilot episode of Breaking Bad, which was vigorously rejigged with Rainn Wilson as Walter White and Mae Whitman an absolute riot as Jesse Pinkman (Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul were among those cheering from the stalls). Other productions have included Ghostbusters, with Rogen, Jack Black and more Rainn Wilson, and a Boogie Nights do-over that was especially well received, with Taylor Lautner as Dirk Diggler and Don Johnson in Burt Reynolds' porn-impresario role."

Your History Is Being Rewritten

A chaotic event or even a mundane event might be recorded, then rewritten, then disappear, be rediscovered and rewritten many times. The furious speed at which information goes through these changes is mind boggling. These days, history is not written by winners of conflicts, it is endlessly revised by whim.

Writer William Gibson spoke about this in an interview with the Paris Review:

"Of course, all fiction is speculative, and all history, too—endlessly subject to revision. Particularly given all of the emerging technology today, in a hundred years the long span of human history will look fabulously different from the version we have now. If things go on the way they’re going, and technology keeps emerging, we’ll eventually have a near-total sorting of humanity’s attic.

In my lifetime I’ve been able to watch completely different narratives of history emerge. The history now of what World War II was about and how it actually took place is radically different from the history I was taught in elementary school. If you read the Victorians writing about themselves, they’re describing something that never existed. The Victorians didn’t think of themselves as sexually repressed, and they didn’t think of themselves as racist. They didn’t think of themselves as colonialists. They thought of themselves as the crown of creation.

We’ve gotten so used to emergent technologies that we get anxious if we haven’t had one in a while."

Whether the event is the recent chaos in Benghazi or the hysteria over "Duck Dynasty", our society seeks out revision over resolution.

You Can Help Finish the Documentary on The Farm Commune in Tennessee

Two filmmakers are hoping the last few days of fundraising via their Kickstarter page will bring success so their documentary on the largest commune ever in the U.S., known as The Farm and located in Summertown, Tennessee.

The film "American Commune" was made by two sisters who were born on The Farm, then their family relocated to California, and they decided to document their return to their origins:

"When we left The Farm as kids and moved to Los Angeles, we were catapulted into another world.  We had never smelled perfume, eaten meat, seen women with makeup or men without beards, and we’d hardly watched TV. We were taunted for being “hippie kids” and did everything we could to blend in.

"The impetus for making AMERICAN COMMUNE was born out of our simple desire to understand where we came from.  As luck would have it, working in the heart of commercialism in New York City compelled us back to our roots. Suddenly, we needed to learn about what our parents were doing in the backwoods of Tennessee and how they, along with hundreds of others, managed to create a massive alternative society out of no more than passion and an empty spot of land. As we interviewed The Farm’s founders, our parents, and our childhood friends, we developed a greater respect for how hard everyone worked to realize their dream."

Learn more about The Farm at their website:

"The 150 present-day residents of The Farm have not rested on their laurels, but continue to create and demonstrate low-consumption, high-fulfillment lifestyles within a caring, socially active community; to conceive, finance and launch daring business enterprises that revolutionize the fields they compete in; to reduce the burden of external government; to mitigate the negative environmental, health and economic impacts of unsustainable global patterns; to demonstrate and export a variety of integrated social development strategies which can encourage diverse cultures worldwide to bypass unhealthy transitions; and to become a living example of the healthy and fulfilling interdependence of human and natural communities."

Martian Memories With Ray Bradbury

One of the best aspects of people is the way we make writers and artists part of our lives. This week, we lost a great friend and a member of our human family, a person who helped make imagination into reality, who urged us all to make dreams possible.

Writer Ray Bradbury, who died this week at age 91, told tales in such a unique voice and with such simple grace. As I was reading about his life and works this week, I learned that a digital copy of his book, "The Martian Chronicles". was sent to Mars in 2007 aboard the Phoenix spacecraft which landed near the Martian North Pole. And in August of this year, a robotic mission to Mars by a craft named Curiosity will land and many have already suggested the landing site should be called the Ray Bradbury Memorial Station.

His awards and achievements are many. President Obama expressed what many of us thought this week about Ray Bradbury:

"For many Americans, the news of Ray Bradbury's death immediately brought to mind images from his work, imprinted in our minds, often from a young age. His gift for storytelling reshaped our culture and expanded our world. But Ray also understood that our imaginations could be used as a tool for better understanding, a vehicle for change, and an expression of our most cherished values. There is no doubt that Ray will continue to inspire many more generations with his writing, and our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends."

Back in 2005 when I first began writing this blog, I wrote about my own thoughts about Mars as images of dust devils were filmed by a robotic platform sitting on the planet. I've always liked that post, and in many ways it was my attempt to create something Ray Bradbury would like to read. So, what follows below is a reprint of that post -- and thank you Ray for making our world and our endless sea of stars feel like home.

----

Aug. 23, 2005

MARTIAN

I sit at my computer and I can watch Martian movies, real ones, filmed on location by the first robotic astronauts, mechanical twins roving the desolate reddish landscape for the last year and a half. NASA revealed these images in a short film of just a few seconds, in black and white, robotic cinema verite. I'm pecking at this keyboard on this computer and some 45 million miles away -- Mars will be getting a bit closer these next few months -- and many will mark how this other planet, smaller than the one I call home, takes a slow circular dance around the Sun.

There are no people to see in the short movie, no mulit-limbed invasion squads. The camera filmed in some 12 minutes this passing of "dust devils" across the rocky expanse of Mars which I have sat and watched for maybe a half an hour. It is odd, really, here at this far technological beginning point, this moment and place where I can see what a camera on a remote control cart sees. How long, I wonder, will we Earth-folk take to build and then send other robots to Mars or beyond? In a hundred years, will some other inhabitant of this valley in eastern Tennessee watch robots taking clunky steps to build some empty metal shells that might house fuel or food or other robots? Will it take fifty years or maybe two hundred and fifty?

There have been recent discussions here on this planet about Science and Space and what Science is or should be. Some theories put forth that millions of years ticked past here on this world -- hundreds of millions -- and lifeforms bubbled and swam and clumped together, thanks to the water and the dirt and the air and the fire, and caught hold and started growing. Some theories put forth that a Creator, a Prime Force, made all there is on this planet in six days and rested on the seventh day from that labor. And not only what is on this planet, but everything out in this solar system and beyond it, millions and millions of other galaxies made of planets with fire and ice and gas and shattered meteor bits, and all in six days. It has taken a very very short span of some forty years, 1965 to 2005, for the inhabitants here to begin accept the ideas that inhabitants of other colors or gender might all have the same basic freedoms, another beginning point that is still revolutionary in terms of how we live with each other.

And here I sit, staring at the 17 second movie of dusty twists of wind, ragged white whips that lash back and forth across a desolate world.

Some even more primitive robots have, in less than 30 years, been shot out into the inky blackness which surrounds us, and other planets are photographed -- planets that are thick with heat and pressure, enormous swirling clouds of gas and storms that bring acids and liquid metals in a hazy sheet across a surface whose contents I can barely imagine or conceive. The robot cameras explode or dissolve into nothingness long before they can attain anything even remotely considered a "landing"..

I ponder the Martian landscapes and wonder about it's design -- why create such a place? What purpose does it hold? Were the robotic twins on the scene too soon or too late to catch a sight of intelligent, conscious creatures?

Why make a world of dust? Of ice? 

Perhaps those winds are scattering particles of sand as part of a ten billion year planet renovation plan, and if so I doubt anything left in this valley on my home planet will know about it, even if I wish or hope that someone will be here to see a transformed world.

The Martian world today has little robots staring intently at rocks and dust devils, and people here, too, see it -- observing the location. I seem to understand so little of stars and atoms, I don't understand why the inhabitants here are so contentious and vile, or loving and compassionate in the face of such an enormous collection of galaxies filled with random winds and rotations. I am surprised we have not all stayed hidden in caves, full of fear from moment to moment, like we see it in the beginning of Stanley Kubrick's movie of space travel, "2001: A Space Odyssey". 

But what always excited me watching that movie was that slow, rhythmic rolling dance of men and machines and planets all moving to the Blue Danube Waltz, and how thrilled I was just to see it, to observe this quiet emptiness of space and stars and galaxies whose movements I cannot comprehend. And at the end of "2001" (a title whose name once resonated with an implausible future and now is just part of our past), at the end of the movie the astronaut has been moved from the caves to the stars and Kubrick leaves me to make up my own mind about what I have seen, what it all might mean.

My niece told me some years ago she fell asleep when she watched the movie it was so boring to her. I could hardly believe it. How could anyone watch those images and not feel some kind of un-nameable connection. some sense of endless wonder, some urge to search among the stars?

Filming geologic time will not bring box office dollars.

Mars has been in our books and our imaginations for thousands of years. Once on a Halloween night it escaped from the radio and terrified thousands of radio listeners, and Mars landed on top of actor Tom Cruise this summer. TV gave us "My Favorite Martian", and in ancient days it was the home of Gods and myths barely remembered, and today I sit and watch the dust devils filmed on location, on Mars, with no laugh tracks, no panic in the streets.

Maybe the best way to think of it is as development property -- a slow development, true. But I can almost see it all as part of the view of Our backyard. I have to use my imagination, to consider time and distance and what Life requires or how Life must adapt. I have to be willing to consider so many theories, and if I dismiss the possibilities, then I limit my view and I might as well stay in the caves.

Unwired: A Non-Liveblog of Life Outside Cyberspace

I decided to do an experiment and shut off the internet for a while, eventually going 12 days with no email, texting, no connection with The Web. I was curious what the changes would be since I've been connected to The Web for about 20 years. And I didn't tell anyone, just wasn't there .. there being here, on The Web. What were the results of the experiment?

I'm awake, up writing on and off The Web daily and early, a longtime habit. So I decided that instead of surfing and reading online, I would keep sort of a non-published Twiter feed to document the effects of being so disconnected. And then publish the results on The Web.

So here is Part One of a Three Part series of the non-liveblog:

DAY ONE

11:30 a.m.
Have marked the first 24 hours with no online usage.

What if I were to decide to never return to explore the world via online access? What if this non-connected landscape becomes preferable? Will I become an oddity of creation? Not being part of online discussions, comments, image sharing and info sharing, will I become a person unwelcome should I prefer to engage the world in the flesh, face to face? Will I be perceived as a danger, a threat even?

12:20 p.m.
Should I have told people I was going to do this? As those who undertake some solo journey to an isolated location, like that guy in that movie “127 Hours” who did not let people know he was taking on a risky task, he got stuck in some rocks and had to saw his arm off, so should I have alerted someone?
Or have I already chopped off an appendage by abandoning my internet post?

I hope I don’t start calling people on the phone for no real reason or decide to become a phone texter. Texting seems alien to me now – maybe I should decide now not to fill in the internet absence with pervasive texts … I am getting a little nervous.

2:18 p.m.
No one here in the house has started a meme today.

There have been, however, several snarky and witty comments made, but no one wrote them down or shared them with anyone outside of the house.

My neighbors have not come by to show me any photos of funny cats or cute kids.

4:30 p.m.
It occurs to me that this document is sort of like live-blogging an event which is not really live, nor is it really taking place. It’s a running commentary on what is not happening. Or, it’s a commentary on something which is really just happening to me. I am going to continue, though, since I have encountered much which is utterly useless and self-serving on the internet, so this project seems worthy of coverage and reporting. To me. For now.

 ....

DAY TWO

5:30 p.m.
This day has not been too bad. One glaring difference is the ability to obtain news and information, as mentioned before. Cable local and national news are offering an astonishingly narrow selection of stories. So much of what I am seeing reminds me of the old Punch and Judy puppet shows of hundreds of years ago – laughable figures beating each other up in an endless loop. (Note: While I know the old P and J shows began many years ago, I cannot provide the actual date they began to take place and spread since I don’t have access to vast archives of research offered by the internet to verify or correct my claims.)
---

DAY THREE

8:24 a.m.
I had thought initially that I might try this experiment for a month, now I’m thinking a week will be my limit.        

1:20 p.m.
Daylight is really bright.


 DAY FOUR

3:05 pm
I miss being able to look at funny pictures of whatever I want. So, here’s a picture from my hard drive – Charles Napier in “Star Trek”

DAY FIVE
7:48 a.m.
Oh man, this tiny dribble of information coming into the house via radio and television is ridiculously inadequate. It’s barely a notch above using the Pony Express to share news and information.

I can measure this weak and puny stream of information not by the bytes arriving by second, it is words per hour. And I know too there are some in the wide world who may just be pining for my perspectives which have been absent.

I have resisted urges to go to a friend’s house or library to sneak online for just a minute to check email messages. But my resolve is fading … I imagine it will take at least one week to kill such urges.


8:48 a.m.
A few weeks ago when web site operators wanted to make a global protest against internet piracy legislation, the web sites shut down for only 24 hours to make their point and kill the legislation. 24 hours. What would the response have been if, like me, they shut down for 5 times as long (120 hours and counting)?

9:15 a.m.
Have I been released from a digital cage or have I been caged in an analog world?

9:42 a.m.
This was a terrible idea.
....

That's the end of Part One, and when the other parts are published in the next few days, they will be linked here and here.

And a question for you, dear readers: How long would you be willing to go without The Web?

50th Anniversary of Friendship 7

Celebrations - but no ticker tape parades this time - are marking the 50th anniversary of John Glenn's flight into space as he became the first American to orbit our planet.

""He is a man of boundless courage, limitless optimism and unswerving honor."

 More pictures here.

Push To Rewrite History: Comedy or Tragedy?

I look forward to the day when news about politics in Tennessee is not simply easy material  for comedy shows. But that day is not today.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Some background on how the state 'tea party' wants to improve/re-write history.

Camera Obscura: A Real 'Artist" of Silent Film Era

Just as Hollywood is lining up to celebrate the movie romanticizing the silent film era, "The Artist", one of the era's very talented and outspoken screenwriters, Frederica Sagor Mass, passed away in early January at the age of 111.

Fortunately, she crafted a most memorable memoir of her days as a screenwriter published in 1999, "The Shocking Miss Pilgrim", where she revealed the greed, lechery and brutal nature of the early days of filmmaking. Her memoir reminded readers that Hollywood has always been first and foremost about one thing - business, not artists. Here she is from a 1999 interview:

"I know I’ve been hard on the motion picture industry [in the book],” she remarks. “The facts and the stories I tell — about the plagiarism and the way I was handled and the way other writers were handled — are true. If anybody wants to take offense at the fact that I tell the truth and I’m writing this book …” She pauses a moment, collects her thoughts, then — Whammo! “I can get my payback now. I’m alive and thriving and, well, you SOBs are all below, because I’ve lived to 99. And I quit the business at 50.”

---

"Maas doesn’t think much of current films. “There’s no lack of material, there’s just lack of incentive to make anything else but what they consider box office. And, hell, who can dispute them? Pictures are making money. And people are getting stupider and stupider. They’ll pay seven and a half dollars to see a motion picture and it’s all in the same vein: sex, sex, sex, sex, sex and violence, violence, violence, violence. You know what they’ve done? They’ve taken the vulgar, low part of old-fashioned vaudeville — all those terrible little acts — and they’ve put it on TV.”

And from her obit in the LA Times:

"Both she and her husband, Ernest Maas, saw their ideas stolen and plagiarized, and they were blackballed by the industry after being wrongly accused of being communists, she wrote.

"Her book is perhaps the best muckraking memoir about early Hollywood," film historian Alan K. Rode said Friday. "She was one of the last living connections to silent film, and her autobiography is an irreplaceable record written from the rare perspective of a woman who lived through those times."

Her life and works deserve to be celebrated as much as or more than any box office hit of the moment. Here's to you, Frederica.

Miracle Berries, or The Food That Sugar Companies Hate

A stray comment on a Knoxville message board I frequent brought up something called "food tripping" which led me to be educated about "miracle berries", food trends, history, corporate and government conspiracy, and other oddities of one of life's necessities - eating.

I rather like to eat. I have to do it fairly often. So I was intrigued by the mention of "food tripping" parties which became popular in larger U.S. cities a few years back. Participants gather to eat/sample a range of food and drinks after they chew on some "miracle berries", which magically block sour and bitter receptors on the tongue and boost sweet receptors. Folks say it makes sour things like pickles and limes taste rich and fruity, beer tastes like a milkshake and the effects of the berry on taste buds last for about an hour.

These events of idle folks who seek rare, hipster-ish fads of the moment were featured in a story and video from the NYTimes. And the ingredient in these West African berries which causes (for reasons no one has, at this point, scientifically explicated) the tastebud change is called "miraculin", a name seemingly suited to snake-oil promotionalists. Let the YouTube videos parade past your eyes.

So I plundered into the Google machine for more information. And the ragged historical mystery of the berry soon became linked to corporate warfare dating back to the early 20th century. While African locals had eaten the berry for who knows how long to improve the taste of foods in their diet, it was a French explorer, Chevalier des Marchais, who found them in 1752 and brought them to Western tongues.

But it was an American named Robert Harvey who synthesized the protein in the berry to provide a new sweetener to the U.S. and fell prey to foul deeds:

"In the ’60s and the ’70s, an entrepreneur named Robert Harvey managed to raise tens of millions of dollars to create an all-natural alternative to sugar using the miracle fruit, and he managed to synthesize the active ingredient in this berry, which is a protein called “miraculin.”

"And companies, other corporations started getting interested. And Harvey was turning down offers in the billions for control — billions of dollars were being offered to him for this, because it looked like it was poised to become an all-natural alternative to sugar. And even the artificial sweetening industry was very concerned about this threat of this small red berry.

"But what happened was, that just as it was about to launch, Harvey’s company, his office was raided by industrial spies. His files were stolen. He got into high-speed car chases in the middle of the night. People were following him."

"And then it got banned just as it was about to launch. And he got a letter in 1974 from the FDA saying the miracle berry — miracle berry products are not allowed into the market in any form whatsoever. And so, he had to shut down the entire operation.

"I called the FDA several dozen times and had a very hard time getting anybody to be able to speak about it. But what I did learn was that it is considered a food additive, and it is not allowed to be used as a food additive. Now, the fresh berry itself is different. So they said the berry can be used, and that’s the USDA’s department. But the USDA doesn’t even know it exists. So it is in a kind of regulatory limbo."

But one could, if one desired, order up some of these pills via sites like ThinkGeek and Amazon.

Or you can order the berries themselves from the only supplier in the country, in Florida, at miraclefruitman.com. The are running a Christmas special.

Aside from benefits in replacing sugar, the berries have been found to be most helpful to diabetics and to folks undergoing chemotherapy, as it returns the tastebuds to working order.

Boatlift: American Resilience On 9-11

A short documentary tells a little known story of the rescue of 500,000 people in the aftermath of the attacks in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001.

"It was the largest boatlift ever to have happened – greater than the one at Dunkirk during World War II. Yet somehow a story of such large scale became lost in all the rubble. But a new 10-minute documentary called Boatlift by Eddie Rosenstein captures the boat evacuations that happened on 9/11. The film is part of four new short documentaries that were created for the 9/11 Tenth Anniversary Summit in Washington, D.C."

Veterans Day: Past and Present

The cruel horrors of warfare are too many to list. The grueling conditions that marked the first World War are memorialized on this day - a day which now is held in remembrance for all veterans of war. Reading some history of Armistice Day in 1918, I discovered some words and images to share.

"An Act (52 Stat. 351; 5 U. S. Code, Sec. 87a) approved May 13, 1938, made the 11th of November in each year a legal holiday—a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as "Armistice Day." Armistice Day was primarily a day set aside to honor veterans of World War I, but in 1954, after World War II had required the greatest mobilization of soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen in the Nation’s history; after American forces had fought aggression in Korea, the 83rd Congress, at the urging of the veterans service organizations, amended the Act of 1938 by striking out the word "Armistice" and inserting in its place the word "Veterans." With the approval of this legislation (Public Law 380) on June 1, 1954, November 11th became a day to honor American veterans of all wars." (via)

A Canadian physician, Lt. Colonel John McCrae, wrote a most memorable poem following the battle in Ypres in the Spring of 1915, titled "In Flanders Field". He writes of the enormous amount of red poppies visible across the landscape. Oddly, wild poppies will flower only when other plants in the area are dead, and on the day McRae composed his poem, the war had churned the earth so violently, that the deep red poppies were everywhere.

The poem almost never made it into public. He was unhappy with it, crumpled and tossed it away, but Lt. Colonel Edward Morrison retrieved it and sent it to the press. It was finally published in December of 1915. (More information about McCrae and his letters home to his mother, and much more history are here.and a variation on how it was kept and published is here.)

In Flanders Field

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing,fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Below, a photo of Canadian stretcher bearers in Flanders Field, 1915

Today U.S. soldiers and soldiers from around the world remain in harm's way, fighting fiercely in Iraq and Afghanistan. From the website Boston.com, they have a series of powerful images of the war in Afghanistan taken during the month of October. In the image below, U.S. Air Force pararescuemen ride in the back of their medevac helicopter with the American flag-draped bodies of U.S. soldiers who were killed in a roadside bomb attack in Afghanistan's Kandahar province on October 10th, 2010. The pararescuemen and pilots from the 46th and 26th Expeditionary Rescue Squadrons had responded to the attack which killed two American soldiers and wounded three others. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder) (click image to enlarge)

The Constant Demonizing

Ir's pretty disgusting to witness the constant demonization of some "Other", which masquerades as social and political debate. The world seldom gets down to the Either/Or state of life, and when a person's world (or a group's) perspective is down to just two options, then one is surely in a battle royale.

The demonizations now seem to be the sole purpose of so-called cable news and talk radio, and yes, giant chunks of the Internet too have been swallowed up on the road to nowhere.

Like you, dear reader, I have been most recently bombarded with righteous and furious anger over the building of a religious center in Manhattan.

Truth is, religious buildings govern much in America -- one can't build an establishment where alcohol is sold unless a certain distance from religious buildings is maintained, a distance which in Tennessee which varies from town to town. 300 feet is too close, 301 feet is fine.

Truth is, some 80 feet away from where a crazed, radical group of terrorists slammed a fully loaded passenger plane into the Pentagon, Islamic services are held daily and have been since just after the horror of the Sept. 11th attacks. And those attacks were made possible by deeply deranged people who demonized all of America for ... well, for everything wrong in the world, I suppose.

And there are two mosques already quite near the site of the fallen twin towers - just blocks away. The one being planned now is meant to house the spillover of members, there isn't enough room for those who wish to attend. More hysteria is taking place here in Tennessee, in Murfreesboro, for a proposed expansion of a mosque and religious center, even though the group has been in Murfreesboro for decades.

Truth is, it is far easier to terrify and frighten people than it is to educate and illuminate them. Mark me down as someone who refuses to give power to those who want to terrify.

Today, I read about many celebrations marking the adoption of the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which allowed women the right to vote. A Tennessee fellow named Harry T. Burn cast the vote leading to victory for the movement, in part because his mother (Mrs. J. L. Burn (Phoebe "Febb" Ensminger) of Niota, Tennessee) admonished him to "be a good boy".

The state's archives notes:

"The nineteenth century witnessed the birth of two monumental movements in American history: abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. While the two movements appeared to be distinct, both sought to secure the American promise of Liberty and equality for all people. Abolition was the mother of the suffrage movement and growing numbers of people actively supported both reforms.

A large number of women supported abolition and most men believed it was because of women’s high moral standards and their tender hearts. Frederick Douglass himself noted that women were key players in abolition. He believed that the true history of the antislavery cause would one day be written and when it was, women would take up the largest amount of space in that great tome because, “the cause of the slave has been peculiarly woman’s cause.”

During a time when social standing, race, and gender defined a person’s place in society, courageous women were involved in a common cause and dared to take a stand for freedom and equality."

The world is seldom simple. Yes, there are Rights and Wrongs. Knowing which is which, dear reader, demands we all be vigilant and resilient. Constant, bitter, hateful demonization only fuels ignorance and despair.

See Also:
Don't Follow The Terrorists' Script

UT Project Turns TN Newspapers Digital

Expected to take 2 years to bring the newspapers online, the project will transfer state archived microfilm to digital files, focusing first on the years 1836-1922.

The Tennessean incorrectly notes that Knoxville was home to the 'first newspaper' in TN, The Knoxville Gazette founded in 1791 (though really it began in Rogersville and did not arrive in Knox-vegas until 1792). (And come on, Tennessean - I found that info in 0.32 seconds via Google.)

On the state's huge library of holdings statewide I discovered there have been at least 19 newspapers in Morristown I had not known about, including The Daily Pilot, also known as The Tennessee Pilot, which described itself as "The Republican Organ of the First Congressional District". Later years brought out The Christian Democrat. Good to know there was never ANY media bias until now.

UT's press release on the project.

National list of newspaper holdings on microfilm.

Every Twitter Ever Made Is Now In The Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has announced that they have acquired every Twitter archive, every single Twitter post anyone has made or will make - an announcement they made via Twitter, naturally.

The NYTimes reports:

"Academic researchers seem pleased as well. For hundreds of years, they say, the historical record has tended to be somewhat elitist because of its selectivity. In books, magazines and newspapers, they say, it is the prominent and the infamous who are written about most frequently."

Take that, you darn elitist books which apparently only some East coast genius can comprehend.

The Library has been actively gathering an immense amount of digital information in recent years, according to their own blog:

"... if you think the Library of Congress is “just books,” think of this: The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress.

We also operate the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program www.digitalpreservation.gov, which is pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations."

If the idea seems irrational, just consider the most minuscule scraps we already spend countless days and years collecting - time-frozen footprints, shards of pottery, crude marks on cave walls, ancient accounting logs, and practically any bit of human history. Now we're adding a moment-by-moment historical record of just plain folk, along with more notable twitterings such as those which emerged online during the upheaval in Iran during their last so-called "election".

If you're a Tweeter or Twitterer or whatever you chose to identify yourself, and you think "hey, my privacy is being violated", then you're forgetting the basic nature of writing and posting online. You already abdicated your desire for privacy.

Here in the modern age your Tweet of "OMG! I just ate some bacon ice!" will now reside along the writings of Thomas Jefferson or Mark Twain. Forget Andy Warhol's claim that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes - your fame could last centuries (assuming someone bothers to keep the technological machinery needed to peruse your random commentaries).

All this brings to mind a few lines from the movie "The Incredibles", when the mother tells her son "Everyone is special", and her son replies "Which is another way of saying no one is."

Not much is excluded, really, or ever has been when it comes to historical analysis. Perhaps it's all just taking place faster and faster.

And speaking of that, here's a way for you to view every single painting on display at the Museum of Modern Art ... in two minutes. And it's set to music, and naturally, it's on YouTube.

A History of Pretty Much Everything

Courtesy of The Examiner in Jackson, TN

The Simpsons - Television That Embiggens Us All

A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man

Where do you beginulate praise for such a cromulent moment in American television history?

I had barely begun my career as an entertainment writer when a new TV network called FOX hit the television airwaves of America. Today, I still have a collection of posters the fledgling network sent out to promo their line-up of programs in 1987, featuring such shows as "Married With Children", "21 Jump Street" and "The Tracey Ullman Show". Airing only a few night a week to begin, the network added and trashed shows faster than most viewers could follow.

One element of Ullman's underrated show were these little animated segments of an oddball family created by cartoonist Matt Groening. In 1989, "The Simpsons" got their own half-hour show and the show marks it's 20th anniversary tonight -- a special show, "The Simspson's 20th Anniversary Special In 3D on Ice" airs tonight, and you can take a sneak peek at what's ahead in this special right here and learn how the show has saved at least one life.

20 years of broadcast history, 20 years of success that began with a family that looks yellow and whose only son, Bart, told the world to "Eat my shorts".

Think about it - without Bart Simpson, we would not have Glenn Beck, as the ever-growing Fox Network soon begat FOX News. In truth, Beck surely seems a twisted creation from the weird world of Springfield as he writes his bizarre theories on a blackboard, just as young Bart found fame by writing on a blackboard in the opening sequences of every episode.

I'm a white male, age 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are. -- Homer Simpson

In the early days of the show, Conservative politicians and religious leaders degraded the show, howled of the abysmal influence of the rude Bart, the drunken Homer and the very idea that America could even be satirized. It was not only a battle such figures lost, it was a war they lost. Just last month, the Pope hailed "The Simpsons" for promoting religion in an article titled "Aristotle's Virtues and Homer's Doughnuts".

That title alone is something to celebrate, commingling Aristotle, the Catholic church and Homer Simpson's love for doughnuts.

"Without Homer Simpson and the other yellow-skinned characters "many today wouldn't know how to laugh .....

"Religion, from the snore-evoking sermons of the Rev. Lovejoy to Homer's face-to-face talks with God, appears so frequently on the show that it could be possible to come up with a "Simpsonian theology," it said.

"Homer's religious confusion and ignorance are "a mirror of the indifference and the need that modern man feels toward faith," the paper said.

"It commented on several religion-themed episodes, including one in which Homer calls for divine intervention by crying: "I'm not normally a religious man, but if you're up there, save me, Superman!"

"Homer finds in God his last refuge, even though he sometimes gets His name sensationally wrong," L'Osservatore said. "But these are just minor mistakes, after all, the two know each other well."

Astonishing, really, that authority figures might see such a view ... but since authority figures cannot beat them, then ...

The Simpson family too has changed the way America talks --

"According to Mark Liberman, of the University of Pennsylvania Linguistic Data Consortium: “ The Simpsons has apparently taken over from Shakespeare and the Bible as our culture’s greatest source of idioms, catchphrases and sundry other textual allusions.”

How many among us, on those occasions when we have made a mistake, of judgment or communication or thinking, how many of us have learned to say the word "D'oh!" as Homer might, in order to earn some indulgence, some forgiveness.

Serious Simpson's fanatics debate which season is the best, which the worst, if the show has far-outlived it's genius, but, as Homer himself has said, there is really one thing we should all remember:

"You can't depend on me all your life. You have to learn that there's a little Homer Simpson in all of us."

SEE ALSO:
Bart's Blackboard
Make Your Own Blackboard
A Simpson's Dictionary
A Simpson's Database