The administration’s newly announced Space policy, looking mostly to undo Bush-Cheney unilateral militarism and return to the norms of Reagan, Bush pere and Clinton, modest as it seems, echoes a bit ominously.
To begin, it seems intended to put NASA out of the spaceship business.
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NASA in 1963 was a deeply Cowboy institution. And when the president that year signed National Security Action Memo No 271 — headed “Cooperation with the Soviet Union on Outer Space Matters” — the reaction from the national security apparat was pale.
The same day Kennedy signed a less well known memo headed “Classification review of all UFO intelligence files affecting National Security” which referenced NSAM 271 and directed the CIA, which had recently taken over the UFO beat from the Air Force, to begin declassifying UFO files with an eye toward partnered investigation with the Soviet Union.
Jim Marrs, author of worthwhile books on both JFK and UFOs, reports:
In this memo Kennedy stated, “I have initiated [blacked out] and have instructed [then NASA Administrator] James Webb to develop a program with the Soviet Union in joint space and lunar exploration. It would be very helpful if you would have the high threat cases reviewed with the purpose of identification of bona fide as opposed to classified CIA and USAF sources. It is important that we make a clear distinction between the knowns and unknowns in the event the Soviets try to mistake our extended cooperation as a cover for intelligence gathering of their defense and space programs.”
Kennedy then asked for all files on “Unknowns” to be turned over to the NASA authorities and an interim report be forwarded to the White House no later than February 1, 1964.
Kennedy signed the two memos on November 12 and ten days later was dead.
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Werner von Braun and his President
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After running in 1960 as a Colder Warrior than Nixon, then nearly getting sunk by conniving brass and spooks at the Bay of Pigs some 70 days after taking office, after being embarrassed and outfoxed by Khruschev in Vienna then outlasting him at the psy ops battle of West Berlin, and after defusing the Cuban missile crisis by outfoxing his own warmongering brass while brokering a back-channel compromise with the Reds …
After all that, Kennedy during his last summer confirmed his fundamental turn with a commencement address at American University. For a few months it was rather in the news:
“Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique, among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other.
“And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least twenty million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including nearly two-thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland — a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.
“Today, should total war ever break out again — no matter how — our two countries would become the primary targets. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first twenty-four hours.
Kennedy then voiced clear comprehension of what Eisenhower had been struggling with since making his truce in Korea with Peking and then had spoken of with quiet thunder in his farewell address days before Kennedy took office.
“And even in the cold war [Kennedy said in '63], which brings burdens and dangers to so many countries, including this nation’s closest allies — our two countries bear the heaviest burdens.
“For we are both devoting to weapons massive sums of money that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.
“In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. …
“So, let us not be blind to our differences — but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
The speech, written by young brain-truster Ted Sorenson, had opened more abstractly, contesting the notion that war was the inevitable condition of modern states, taking clear cue here from FDR’s speech at Chicago in 1937.
Kennedy then broke some surprising news, announcing that the US would henceforth refrain, unilaterally, from testing nukes in the atmosphere, and that talks had been set in Moscow “looking toward early agreement on a comprehensive test ban treaty.”
He then concluded:
“Finally, my fellow Americans, let us examine our attitude toward peace and freedom here at home. The quality and spirit of our own society must justify and support our efforts abroad. … ‘When a man’s ways please the Lord,” the Scriptures tell us, “he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.’
“And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights — the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation — the right to breathe air as nature provided it — the right of future generations to a healthy existence?
“The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war ….”
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It’s only against JFK in June 1963, and Eisenhower in 1961, and FDR in 1937, that one can fully appreciate the depths to which we’ve been pulled by the Bush-Cheney doctrine and practice of preemptive war. Indeed, the contrasting lines of argument are so strong that Vladimir Putin at Munich in 2007 reminded the world of FDR at Chicago, in long, loyal paraphrases, while trying to organize the international community in opposition to the American warmongering.
It bears repeating that the Baby Bush Doctrine was promulgated for the most part by the American Likud Lobbyists gathered under the umbrella of The Project for the New American Century in DC.
And lo. Unilateral and exclusive military exploitation of space is high on the agenda of the manifesto published by the group in 2000, two months before the failed election. Half a dozen leading PNAC “Vulcans” were then advising baby Bush’s campaign and months later two dozen would take command of his War Room.
And so it’s only natural to wonder what today’s Apparat thinks of Obama’s announcement about peacefully sharing the last frontier.
As poet, publisher & old friend David Abel, long gone from New York, breezes thru this weekend with a reading on Sunday the 27th at the Zinc Bar, I find myself reading TUNC by Lawrence Durrell from 1958 …
A pheasant stuffed with nominal chestnuts, a fatty wine disbursed among fake barrels in a London cellar — Poggio’s, where people go to watch each other watch each other. I had been trying to explain the workings of Abel — no, you cannot have a computer with balls; but the illusion of a proximate intuition is startling. Like a buggerish astrology only more real, more concrete; better than crystal ball or divining rod.
“Here we have lying about us in our infancy” (they clear their throats loudly) “a whole culture tied to a stake, whipped blind, torn apart by mastiffs. Grrrr! And here we are, three men in black overcoats, ravens of ill omen in an oak tree.” I gave a couple of tremendous growls. Heads turned toward us in meek but startled fashion.
“You are still drunk, Felix.” This is Nash.
“No, but people as destinies are by now almost mathematically predictable. Ask Abel.”
“Almost.”
“Almost.”
“You interest me strangely,” said Vibart dozing off for a second. Emboldened Charlock continued.
“I call it pogonometry. It is deduction based on the pogon [then in Greek], a word which does not exist. It is the smallest conceivable unit of meaning in speech; a million pogons make up the millioneth part of a phoneme. Give Abel a sigh or the birth cry of a baby and he can tell you everything.”
Posted for files: An old story most people never heard about.
Don Wiley was the bigshot DNA sequencer at Harvard whose disappearance made people start to wonder if somebody hadn’t made a list, and in the chaos post 9/11 begun to work thru it.
The great WWA has just posted his letters from the Civil War years, gathered with responses.
It’s a wonder to appreciate his prosaic mind and voice.
And the colloquies with poetry editors are hilarious, to wit:
Jan. 20, ’60.
Dear Sir,
Mr. House inform’d me that you accepted, and would publish, my “Bardic Symbols.” If so, would you, as soon as convenient, have it put in type, and send me the proof?
About the two lines:
(See from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last!
See the prismatic colors glistening and rolling!)
I have in view, from them, an effect in the piece which I clearly feel, but cannot as clearly define. Though I should prefer them in, still, as I told Mr. House, I agree that you may omit them, if you decidedly wish to.
Friend and poet Michael Gushue reports this alleged lost scene from the Citizen Kane script:
Kane stands with his butler/factotum, Raymond in the family tomb. His only son, Charles Foster Kane II, is dead at the age of 31. The year is 1938, and workmen are setting a slab on the grave.
After they leave, Kane looks at the simple inscriptions on the crypts of his father, mother and son.
Above the blank space reserved for him, is an inscription on an ornate, ancient wall imported from Persia.
Kane translates for Raymond (bored and couldn’t care less):
The drunkenness of youth
Has passed like a fever
And yet I saw many things
Seeing my glory in the days of my glory
I thought my power eternal
And the days of my life
Fixed surely in the years
But a whisper came to me
From Him who dies not
I called my tributary kings together
And those who were proud rulers under me
I opened the boxes of my treasure to them, saying
“Take hills of gold, mountains of silver
And give me one more day upon the earth”
But they stood silent
Looking upon the ground
So that I died
And Death came to sit upon my throne
O sons of men
You see a stranger upon the road
You call to him and he does not stop
He is your life
Walking towards time
Hurrying to meet the kings of India and China
O sons of men
You are caught in the web of the world
And the spider
Nothing waits behind it
Where are the men with towering hopes?
They have changed places with owls
Owls who lived in tombs
And now inhabit a palace
We live in affluence
And are blind to where we are
This sad concession signals the death of the movement for health care reform in D.C that began during the Long Campaign and then crested — Who knew? — with Obama’s inauguration.
Poor Dennis looks dead on his feet.
This comes against news stories in the past two weeks reporting that Obama made explicit promises to the insurance companies last summer to reject a bill with a public plan.
The other shoe will drop with the hopeless wars, leaving Obama toast. Romney seems a shoe-in as successor.
I was talking to someone in Dennis K’s office Thursday, suggesting that he might be more effective in Ohio, as a governor, working the angle he repeatedly holds hope out for in the interview here.
If he thought the same, his argument for voting Yes here would falter. He could go out with a significant NO, like Eliot Richardson and Wm Ruckelshaus in 1973, and use it as a rallying cry back home.
But I guess Dennis still thinks there is a reason to be in Washington. He chairs an important subcommittee. Although that comes and goes with the Donkey majority, and the latter is hardly a clinch in November.
It’s March 2010. Do you know where your future is?
This is actually a conversion of a screenplay, the antepenultimate, my fifth, from 2005, into a novel. Thought about doing it before. Now it seems to have gone and …
Oh brother.
The opening paragraph seems to be:
In June 2004, after five Medecins Sans Frontieres were found murdered in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan, Aaron called, for the first time since coming to New York with Maya. Long out of touch had been the pattern of a friendship born and first aborted in Texas, then again at Duke, before settling down to disjointed maturity during years of criss-crossing work overseas. Since the rebirth of History the routine had been that to meet for coffee one went to Baghdad or Bosnia or Berlin.
That, or perhaps:
He would miss his turn.
And so on to the end.
If we shall suppose that writing lengthy bits that no one shall ever read is one of those offenses which, in the providence of Dog, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both Yea and Ney this terrible task as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living Dog always ascribe to Him?
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of lore may speedily pass away.
Yet, if Dog wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the pen man’s sore head and hands and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the quill shall be paid by another drawn by the horde, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “The judgments of the lord are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as Dog gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
President Sarkozy of France proposes to move the body from Lourmain, the little town where Camus tried to live and work in peace during his last decade, in the south, to the Pantheon in Paris. The notion seems to have caused a nasty stir.
1. German magazine publishes a general blast at the official story: “We Do Not Believe You!”
Recall that the German Defense Minister, Andreas von Bulow, stated loudly soon after the attacks that they were in some fashion an inside job, thinking it seems of Mossadist influence working within the western agencies to nurture and clear the way for the misison (a guess that I continue to think is worth keeping in mind, against, some day distant, the appearance of evidence).
2. Cass Sunstein, Obama’s appointee to run the Ministry of Truth, advocates (in 2008) infiltration of Conspiracy groups as a means of turning off the message.
And yet the city was still standing in its glory, and the temple still held its head high, higher than any structure in the world.
And Christ Himself says, “If thou hadst known in this thy day the things which are for thy good!” But to this he adds, “Now they are hid from thine eyes.” In God’s eternal counsel its destruction is determined, and salvation is hid from the eyes of its inhabitants.
Was the generation then living more wicked than the foregoing generations to which it owed its life?
Was the whole nation corrupt, was there none righteous in Jerusalem, not a single one who could check God’s wrath?
No, its destruction was determined. In vain the besieged city looked in anguish for a way out, the army of the enemy crushed it in its mighty embrace, and no one escaped, and heaven remained shut and sent forth no angel except the angel of death which brandished its sword over the city.
Is this the jealousy of God, that He visits the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, in such a way that He does not punish the fathers but the children?
What answer should we make? Should we say:
“There have elapsed now nearly two thousand years since those days. Such a horror the world never saw before and never again will see. We thank God that we live in peace and security, that the scream of anguish from those days reaches us only very faintly. We will hope and believe that our days and those of our children may pass in quietness, unaffected by the storms of existence. We do not feel strong enough to reflect upon such things, but we are ready to thank God that we are not subject to such trials.”
Can anything be imagined more cowardly and more disconsolate than such talk?
Is then the inexplicable explained by saying that it has occurred only once in the world?
Or is not this the inexplicable, that it did occur?
And has not this fact, the fact that it did occur, the power to make everything inexplicable, even the most explicable events?
If once it occurred in the world that man’s lot was essentially different from what it ordinarily is, what assurance is there that this will not recur?
What assurance that this is not the true thing, and what ordinarily occurs is the untrue?
Or is the true proved to be such by the fact that it most often occurs?
And does not that really often occur which those ages witnessed?
Is it not what we all of us in so many ways have experienced, that what occurs on a great scale is experienced also in a minor degree?
“Think ye,” said Christ, “that those Galileans whose blood Pilate commanded to be shed were sinners above all the Galileans because they suffered these things?” It was a providential dispensation, you will say, not a punishment.
But the destruction of Jerusalem was a punishment, and it fell with equal severity upon the innocent and the guilty …
Since Pearl Harbor Day, everybody — everybody — in the money world has setting up for a dollar rally in early 2010, to correct the Buck’s big fall in 2009. The rally — or at least a snap of the dollar’s downtrend — began in December.
But recent US economic news has been mixed, with housing optimism again failing. And yesterday’s unexpected drop in the monthly Jobs report — when the whisper numbers, reported by Todd H at Minyanville, were as sunny as 100,000 jobs created, not the 85,000 lost in fact reported — has people scratching.
And has a lot of fat set-ups suddenly looking pale. If the dollar were to turn down here with any authority, it would touch off a panic sell. And gold would soar.
Here’s the past year for the DXY index, which measures the Dollar against the Euro, Yen, Pound, Swiss Franc, Swedish Kroner and … Aussie dollar, if memory serves.
You can see the year’s tumble, the upturn in December, and the flatline since, as people puzzled and waited for yesterday’s US job number — which sent the dollar down.
Also this past week, bad employment news in Europe and an unusual public disagreement in Tokyo enriched the currency picture.
The new Japanese Finance Minister on his first day loudly renounced his predecessor’s Strong Yen bias — but the next day the Prime Minister rebuked the new Finance guy.
Nevertheless, people seem to think the Japanese bank may begin to publicly intervene — buying dollars — to weaken the Yen, trying to recover the balance that was broken this past year as the Dollar tumbled. (A relatively weak Yen helps Toyota and Sony sell stuff to the corpulent American consumer.)
So. New employment weakness in Europe will promote a weaker Euro.
Tokyo wants a weaker Yen.
But the (mixed) weakness in USA economic numbers across the past month will also blunt the momentum that had been building at the Fed to raise its bank rates sooner than later, blunting the Dollar’s heavily anticipated rise.
So. The three big currencies seem ready to race each other to the bottom.
Makes it very difficult to guess or bet on the currency pairs (ie, to trade dollar versus euro, euro vs yen, dollar vs yen, etc).
But if all the central bankers are intent on keeping their currencies weak, it seems gold — despite the recent trend in thinking re the Dollar rebound — will benefit again this year.
So I got back into some gold yesterday in my retirement account (having sold out early December, on the report of the November employment numbers).
And may prove a bit early getting back into gold now, if indeed the Dollar bid of December holds a while longer. As always we shall see. The dollar was down yesterday, on the bad US employment news.
I also got into a Japan fund this week, inspired by the new Finance Minister. The chart here is inviting — for Japanese stocks have suffered of late, not like American, worse than Chinese. Thus obvious room for upside if the Strong Yen is truly dead. And Japan would serve as something of a hedge on my new gold bet if the dollar were to rock a bit skyward against the yen.
Am still 40% cash in the retirement account. Would like to get back in technology if the stock markets provide an opening (ie, go down) sometime. They’ve been up, generally speaking, since March last year — perhaps (another story this week) with direct help from Tsy and Fed, who may have been buying S&P Mini Futures on the sly (again).
(They began doing so in March 2003 to support the Iraq war. Fiendish. A great sickness. Free market capitalism? Don’t be silly.)
Werner von Braun and his President
