Film as Time Machine

What is the psychological impact of being able to see high resolution images of ourselves taken through the various stages of our aging process?

It Will be Even Harder to be a Whistle Blower...

after they finish burying all of the whistles.

The subject of this post is censorship.  Actually, it should be about the LLC designation that, for some time now, readers may have noticed as having supplanted the more familiar, "Inc.".  Of course, given the character of the nation of which I am a citizen, I immediately concluded that we were being subjected to yet another of the machinations employed by corporate America to plunder and steal.  Yet I have long resolved to eventually get to the bottom of this latest assault.  Quarantined by force of the Corona virus, I now found myself with the time to finally do a little basic research and determine what this "LLC" was all about.  As one does nowadays, I began my search with Google.  I entered, "Why does LLC seem to have replaced Inc. as a corporate designation," (or something close to that), and found little if any useful information.  I kept at it however (having long ago learned that Google, though an invaluable acquaintance, is not a friend; its loyalty is more to its corporate backers and will not always give up its fruits without a struggle).  When, finally, I looked down one page at the list of references, I found a provocatively titled article that seemed to be just what I was looking for, "The Dark Side of Limited Liability Companies," written by one Lee A. Sheppard.  To my frustration, attempts to find a copy of "The Dark Side" were in vain.  There were "hits" on the title, but going to the actual sites containing the title had little else, certainly not the text of the article.  The online book vendors were similarly of no use.  I decided to attempt to contact Lee A. Sheppard, who it turns out is a woman who specializes in tax law and appears in a few Youtube videos discoursing on her subject.  I am now reasonably sure that I will eventually be able to read "The Dark Side of Limited Liability Companies," but my quest so far has already provided adequate confirmation of the fact that one obvious aspect of that dark side is the care that is taken to keep the true nature of LLCs hidden.  Corporate entities seem long ago to have learned that the best way to hide one's secrets is camouflage.  The anagram, LLC, is now ubiquitous; its meaning, though, is buried in the web of corporate tax laws.  One item uncovered while rummaging through the literature inspired me to carry on.  It turns out that landlords and slumlords have found in the LLC a means of hiding their identities.  Should you be so unfortunate as to live in one of their properties and have problems with heat, leaks, rodents, etc., you will find it impossible to determine, should the building's owner wish to conceal it, her identity.   And I thought this was just about tax evasion.

        While preoccupied with LLCs, I recalled some years ago coming upon a book about the Rockefellers' involvement in the Amazon, more particularly, the Rockefellers' role in the conquest of the Amazon and its native peoples for exploitation by the oil companies.  The book was titled, Thy Will be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil.*  I had meandered into a Barnes & Noble bookstore and found myself facing, located on a round table close to the entrance, a pyramid of the volumes on the occasion of the title's just having been released.  I browsed through it, absorbed by both the text and the pictures, and then put it down, deciding that, much as I would have liked to put everything else in my life aside and spend what time it took reading the book, I was too busy working on my dissertation.  I put the book back into the pyramid with a bit of a twinge and resolved that, as soon as time allowed, I would purchase and read it.

       I never did finish the dissertation, but freedom from its demands eventually led me to return to the book.  About a year had passed, but I thought I might still find it at Barnes & Noble.  It turned out they didn't have a single copy.  Nor was the book available on the B&N website or on Amazon.  In fact, I couldn't find it anywhere until I resorted to Alibris, an online book vendor that specializes in rare and out-of-print works.  The satisfaction in finding a source was only slightly diminished by having to lay out $40 for the pleasure.

       Amazon now carries Thy Will be Done, in an edition revised in 2017, and made part of a series appropriately called "The Forbidden Bookshelf," that up to now consists of 27 volumes, some well-known, others which were apparently suppressed in the manner similar to that I had long ago concluded was utilized by the Rockefeller family and/or its associates to protect the family brand.  For a while, at least, they had "disappeared" the book, probably using the time-worn strategy of buying up every volume in print and burying (or burning) them.

       Stay tuned as I continue my quest to find Ms. Lee A. Sheppard, her article and the story behind yet another chapter in corporate America's victory over the nuisance of democratic institutions.

     


__________________________
*The book was originally published in 1996, (Thy Will be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, Colby, G. and Dennett, C., New York: Harper Collins, May 1, 1996, 1008 pp.).  Amazon books is now selling a revised edition, done in 2017, with an additional chapter that one reviewer on the web site asserts, "accelerates the reader to the intensity of the moment, reflecting on the death of David Rockefeller, the strains of globalism, and the current oligarchic Titanomarchy on display in Washington."

China vs. U.S.: Two Societies Respond to a Crisis

Wu Han, China:  How a Society that Cares about its People Responds to a
Crisis.
A helicopter shot of a field covered with construction equipment building a
hospital to care for possible victims of the coronavirus.

                  
                                     New Orleans, Louisiana: An "Exceptional" Society's 
                                                   Response to a Devastating Flood

Nothing to Watch. Nothing to Read...

     I'm not going to argue with you about this nor will I bother to defend myself.  Maybe this just happens to certain individuals when they get old--like the characters in The Last Angry Man or Network.  I'm giving up my subscription to the Times, stopping all contributions to stuff like WBAI or PBS.  If I can use a cheap antenna, I will drop my subscription to Spectrum Cable, (which took over from Time Warner), a legally licensed crime syndicate that collects $184 a month for terrible service.  Spectrum used to provide access to RT, the Russian outlet from which one could occasionally get access to world events unfiltered by the NSA, but after the Mueller investigation began, Spectrum must have gotten the call and dropped RT.  (Oddly, for a while they also dropped access to NHK, the Japanese outlet, but then either had second thoughts or were told by the manufacturers of consent that, though like most foreign news organizations NHK had news and human interest stories far superior to the junk on U.S. outlets, since it rarely displayed any taste for battle with the USIA, it could resume showing us how to make paper cranes and appreciate the finer points of Noh theater.)
       The net result of all this is that, as I have feared for some time would eventually occur, there really isn't anywhere one can access information about what is actually happening either here in the U.S. or around the world.  Of course, some who are reading this are probably asking themselves, "Does this guy really expect to learn anything from electronic media?"  Well, yeah, that would be nice.  I love television. I love its potential for immediacy--CNN putting its viewers virtually in the streets of Moscow as tanks clanked along toward the Congress in 1993 or RT's RAW allowing you to feel part of the Yellow Jacket demonstrations in the streets of Paris just a short time ago.  Or you could hear at least a handful of individuals with the courage to speak truth to power.  Once, even PBS gave opportunities for expression to a wide spectrum of political opinion. but, of course, that's no longer allowed.  (As Mitt Romney was heard to mutter during his 2012 presidential campaign, "We may have to get rid of Big Bird."  PBS in its original configuration was just too dangerous for post-Reagan America.)  And even if one gives up all hope for televised news, what about reading for a change?  Right.  Like all those left wing journals--Monthly Review or the World Socialist Web Site.  Have you looked at those recently?  Great stuff if you want to read the ongoing debate between followers of Trotsky and Stalin.
      So...I'm not sure where I will turn now.  Maybe it's for the best.  I'll be forced to get a bit more inventive in my quest for truth.  Kicking my way through food channels, "tutti a tavola a mangiare!", transgender superheros taking on injustice, the drugged hordes, wires emanating from their ears, eyes glazed over as they scale pencil skyscrapers, reaching for the stars.

Enemy of the People

 When my brother sold his condo in Jersey and headed south to Florida, I never thought I would come to envy him.  My three brothers and I are all in our seventies now, though, and men of our age begin to feel a chill.  When the temperature in our apartments falls below 75 degrees or so, we begin looking through our closets for a cardigan sweater, typically a grey or beige affair that buttons up the front and will help keep our cold, brittle bones from rattling.  New York dwellings had a reputation for being overheated during cold winter months, so much so that steamed over windows have long been icons of our fair city.  With rising fuel costs, however, building managers began to adhere to strict legal guidelines.  If the outside temperature goes below 55 degrees, the heat will click on; otherwise, you're on your own, Nanook afloat on an urban iceberg.  The truth of the matter is indoor temperatures from 56 to the low 70s  leave most New Yorkers, (to borrow their word) "freezing."

And this past winter, though far from the coldest we, (especially us old codgers), have ever experienced, seemed grim, grey and endless.  We seemed stuck in a zone of cold just maddeningly around that 55 degree mark.  It was never quite cold enough for janitors to turn on the boilers, but it was never warm enough to be comfortable in one's home, and it never ended.

What could account for this strange weather phenomenon?  Most of us New Yorkers knew that climate change, often called global
warming by the careless, could actually give us colder weather under certain conditions.  After all, we had seen The Day After Tomorrow the movie which shows New Yorkers forced to take refuge in the library on 42nd Street and burn books to keep from freezing to death.  We knew that climate change could freeze us before it grilled us to death.  But why weren't our local weather forecasters talking about this?  Why particularly wasn't Lonnie Quinn, CBS' matinee idol forecaster, admired as much for his sterling character and devoted work ethic as for his good looks, coming clean, giving us the low down?

I decided to do my own research.  I just knew they weren't telling us the truth in the media.  What else was new?  Lots of corporate types don't like to acknowledge climate change in the first place--whether the gods are responsible or irresponsible human beings.  Weather forecasters have been lying about the weather forever.  It's bad for business so their bosses instruct them to lie.  Henrik Ibsen laid it all out for us over a hundred years ago in his gripping play on the subject, An Enemy of the People.  I began by turning to Google Maps.  The result was truly shocking.  Where one expected to find a large island of ice at the geographic pole, there was nothing but a large expanse of blue ocean.  I began clicking on the zoom slider, trying to get a closer view, but no matter, the screen stayed blue.  I had heard predictions that the Arctic ice would soon melt entirely, but the map indicated that it was already gone.  No ice.  No barber pole.  No Santa.  No reindeer harnessed to a sleigh.  Nothing but blue water.  The unthinkable had already occurred and no one had bothered to tell us.  (Closer reading reveals that the amount of ice at the North Pole is a matter of some debate.  I will leave it to the reader to do further research on this.)

Well, I thought as winter was drawing to a close, with the onset of spring I will be warm; I will open the windows and enjoy the balmy and sweet-scented breezes of spring, the joy of living in a temperate zone.  It is now May 10th as I put down these thoughts, and, though the thermometer is no longer stuck in the 55 degree range, plus or minus a few points, it is now stuck in the 60 degree range plus or minus a few points.  It must be those calving glaciers.  You can't keep dropping chunks of ice the size of Rhode Island into the sea and not expect it to have consequences, I muttered to myself.  I thought back to years in New York City's public school classrooms lacking air conditioning when temperatures in early May might be in excess of 90 degrees and teachers and students alike studied their calendars, counting the days until summer recess. 55 degrees or 65 degrees seemed to make little difference to my old bones.  I was still cold, and, beyond cold, anxious for a whole series of days in which the sun would show itself as it once did in the old times before the climate had changed. 

Ghost Busters?

Has the weather seemed a bit strange lately?  Does the long series of gray days make you begin to suspect that you live in Scandinavia, a grim land where people are perennially glum and depressed and contemplate suicide?  If you haven't already given up watching your televised local news, (or are just too frightened to watch), has the frequency and nature of macabre crimes, that is, the violent attacks on children, the elderly, the most vulnerable begun to freak you out?  Have you begun to suspect that the Devil really does exist and that he or she is frantically, spasmodically moving from one attack to another on our lives?  Has political correctness inexorably progressed to the point where gender and race, basically all human relations have evolved into eerie parodies of what they once meant?  Have the arts ceased to have a calming effect, to be able to please or comfort you when you most need a little pleasure or comfort?  Are you worried about your health or paying the medical bills required to give relief from your ailments?  Are you worried about money in general?  Do even the most petty financial transactions seem fraught with danger?  Is it not just banks and large corporations that are out to get you, circling you like so many sharks waiting to take bites out of your flesh, but the vendor of bread or chewing gum?  When that eerie blue glow suffused the skies of our fair city a little while ago, did the fear with which you reacted startle you?  Does the prospect of a nuclear attack seem real in ways it hasn't since good Sister Carmencita directed you to take shelter under your wooden desk until the all clear sounded?  Is it possible that the relief that many American voters felt when it was clear that Hillary would not occupy the Oval Office and lay out war plans on her desk with John Bol...  Oooh.  Wait.  Wait just one little minute here.  Oh.

RT as an Agent of a Foreign Government

It was only a matter of time.  I cannot count the number of times that I have watched RT and uttered aloud to an empty room, "I can't believe it!  How long will it be before they shut this down?"  It has been too good to be true.  A media outlet that tells the truth.
     

Now, it has happened.  Though not entirely shut down, RT has been labelled an agent of a foreign government. It is in keeping with the outrage expressed in the media about Russia influencing our elections.  This from a country that sent in helicopter gunships to murder Salvador Allende in Chile, a duly elected national leader.  The list of foreign leaders we have assassinated is a long one; the list of foreign leaders we have deposed through "covert" operations even longer.  RT's real crime--and this is obvious to anyone who follows world events--is that it gives a platform to those who have not drunk the American Kool-Aid.  There can be only one narrative of events--that coming out of Washington and a mainstream media that is controlled by Washington and the corporations that control the mass media in this country.  It is sad; it is outrageous; but it is also alarming because this is probably only the beginning of efforts to shut down any voices who do not subscribe to the official version of events.  Such behavior is associated with fascism and with the behavior of our erstwhile enemies in the former USSR.  Noam Chomsky, though a fierce critic of American policy, when asked by young people what they can do to turn the country around, has typically responded, "Act.  Speak out.  You have no excuse for not doing so.  This is the free-est country in the world."  That has now changed.  So nervous is the establishment now that the American people themselves are wildly scrambling for alternative leaders and ideas, that they have resorted to firing the first shot in a campaign to silence opposition voices. Unless this policy is reversed, we will see it applied to other media outlets.