"Carryin Fire"

At the end of No Country For Old Men, Sheriff Bell remembers two dreams he had after his father died.  This is the second:

 . . . it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night.  Goin through this pass in the mountains.  It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin.  Never said nothin.  He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside it.  About the color of the moon.  And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.  And then I woke up.

In What Is To Come, Sheriff Bell reflects on the changes in the world, changes that have led him to retire after 36 years because he feels overmatched.  His description of the dream as the novel ends can be interpreted in two ways.  First, as an acknowledgement that however hopeless the fight for right appears, there is always some hope (as symbolized by the fire made by his father) that should motivate us to continue.  Whether we succeed is not material.  The second is that the while the dream conveys this, Bell's final words "And then I woke up", means he woke up from the dream's delusion that there is some hope, some light and comfort ahead, from the violence and randomness that exists in the world.  I prefer the first interpretation.

Tommy Lee Jones performance in the movie, and in particular, the sound and cadence of his voice, played in my head as I read the parts of the novel concerning Sheriff Bell.  Although Llewelyn Moss and Anton Chigurh have the flashier roles in the book and movie, it is Sheriff Bell who is the main character, the only one who reflects and changes in the course of both.  After all, the title is No Country For Old Men.

There are two phrases we hear frequently these days:

"The right side of history"

"The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice"

Let me mash up the two and give a version which, I believe, is more accurate:

"The arc of history bends towards violence" 

Any examination of history leads to that conclusion.  History does not have a right or wrong side.  But what we must treasure are those brief periods of respite from that arc.  We must appreciate what it takes to disrupt that arc.  It is not an easy task.  We often fail, but it is worth trying.  Too often, we take for granted those periods of relative peace, stability, and security, and underestimate their value and the achievement of those who helped bring about those times.  And, most of all, to value and love our families and friends, who despite the turmoil and troubles of the world, are the refuges where we can provide support to each other.

In No Country For Old Men, Sheriff Bell comes to question the world around him and the assumptions he has based his life upon, but the one thing that never falters from start to finish is his love, faith, and reliance on his wife Loretta, a much larger character in the book than in the movie.

What Is To Come

I think we are all of us ill prepared for what is to come and I don't care what shape it takes.  And whatever comes my guess is that it will have small power to sustain us.  These old people I talk to, if you could of told em that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses speakin a language they couldn't even understand, well, they just flat out wouldn't of believed you.  But what if you'd told em it was their own grandchildren?

Well, all of that is signs and wonders but it dont tell you how it got that way.  And it dont tell you nothin about how it's fixin to get, neither.  Part of it was I always thought I could at least someway put things right and I guess I just dont feel that way no more.  I don't know what I do feel like.  I feel like them old people I was talkin about.  Which aint goin to get better neither.  I'm being asked to stand for something that I dont have the same belief in I once did.  Asked to believe in somethin that I dont have the same belief in I once did.  That's the problem.  I failed at it even when I did.  Now I've seen it held to the light.

Seen any number of believers fall away.  I've been forced to look at it again and I've been forced to look at myself.  For better or worse I do not know.  I dont know that I would even advise you to throw in with me, and I never had them sorts of doubts before.  If I'm wiser in the ways of the world it come at a price.

County Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in Cormac McCarthy's, No Country For Old Men.  The prophetic novel was written in 2005, set in 1980, and descriptive of today's world.

Stars Fell On Alabama

 It's been a while since we've heard from Frank Sinatra.  This is from his peak in the 50s, Stars Fell On Alabama, music composed by Frank Perkins, lyrics by Mitchell Parish, and featuring a Nelson Riddle arrangement.  The song was apparently inspired by a November 12, 1833 meteor shower in Alabama though what the connection was with Perkins, born in Salem, Massachusetts, and Parish, real name Michael Hyman Pashelinsky and born in Lithuania, I don't know.

This was the THC Daughter's favorite song when she was little so it brings back wonderful memories anytime I listen to it.

The Robust Alliance

Amazing headline and story from NBC News:

How the GOP muzzled the quiet coalition that fought foreign propaganda 

Below are some excerpts with my annotations:

The lead paragraph:

A once-robust alliance of federal agencies, tech companies, election officials and researchers that worked together to thwart foreign propaganda and disinformation has fragmented after years of sustained Republican attacks.

My Comment:  The entire article is carefully written to give the impression that this is all about foreign propaganda.  It's not.  The revelations, from the Twitter files released by Elon Musk, testimony from Zuckerberg and others at Facebook, investigations by House and Senate committees, and information uncovered through the use of FOIA and litigation, is that what was going on was far beyond thwarting foreign misinformation.  It involved monitoring social media by American citizens and included attempts, many successful, by social media and tech companies to censor legal speech, including factually accurate information.  

The better title would be "How Concerned Americans Exposed The 'Quiet Coalition' Seeking To Suppress Speech".

That this article comes from another major media outlet is telling.  NBC and its media compatriots are all about censoring information from its fellow Americans that does not comport with the desired narrative.

One of the authors, Ken Dilanian, is known to have submitted articles in the past to the CIA for its approval prior to publication and he promoted every false story during the heyday of the Russia Collusion Hoax.  NBC is acting here simply as a pass through of the desired narrative promoted by the Intelligence Community (IC) and the federal bureaucracy.

“This is the worst possible outcome in terms of the injunction,” said one U.S. official familiar with the matter. “The symbiotic relationship between the government and the social media companies has definitely been fractured.”

My Comment: Good!  The reference to an injunction is explained below.  Suffice to say the injunction was prompted by a Federal Court finding that the administration was interfering with the free speech rights of American citizens!  It had nothing to do with foreign propaganda.

Beyond the FBI briefings, other coordination efforts have folded after facing pressure from conservatives. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which oversees federal election cybersecurity and has become a favorite target of Republicans, has halted its outreach to Silicon Valley, and the Department of Homeland Security has shuttered a board designed to coordinate its anti-disinformation programs. 

Some politicians are sounding the alarm. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said efforts to stop foreign manipulation of U.S. politics are well within the government’s remit. 

“I understand we don’t want to interdict constitutionally protected speech, but what is constitutionally protected speech?” he said. “Certainly foreign agents don’t have constitutionally protected speech because they’re not subject to our Constitution. I presume bots don’t have constitutionally protected speech. American citizens do.”

My Comment:  Once again, Romney allows himself to be used by his enemies.  The lawsuits and investigations have to do with American citizens, not foreign propaganda.  Let's take a look at how suppression of free speech actually worked.  The Alliance for Securing Democracy, a progressive foreign policy shop, started an initiative called Hamilton 68 after the election in 2016.  Under the direction of former IC personnel, and with the support of elements still within the IC. Hamilton 68 tried to persuade Twitter to censor what it characterized as Russian bot accounts.  With the release of the Twitter files, we now know that Twitter itself found that only 36 of 644 claimed bots were Russian, with most of the rest legitimate accounts by American citizens - and this at a time when Twitter was very active censoring non-Democrat accounts!  Nonetheless, Hamilton 68's "findings" garnered a lot of publicity from a media eager to support the Russia Collusion narrative (Rachel Maddow being one of the most frequent citers of Hamilton 68).

These partnerships between government, corporations and legal and academic researchers were praised after 2020 as a crucial part of ensuring a secure election. 

My Comment: Yes, by the very institutions determined to suppress any information unfavorable to Democrats and the federal bureaucracy.  It's a self-reinforcing circle designed to create and sustain narratives.

Many of them focused on Twitter and Facebook’s decision to temporarily limit the reach of a New York Post story about Biden’s son, Hunter. Published a few weeks before the election, to the tech platforms it had echoes of when Russia leaked Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016. While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg said FBI statements about certain threats fit the pattern of the Hunter Biden story, both later said the agency didn’t specifically say the Biden emails were a foreign intelligence campaign. Digital forensics experts have verified that at least some of those emails were authentic but much remains unknown about the origins of the files.

My Comment:  Talk about "ensuring a secure election"!  This paragraph is written in the most convoluted possible way to minimize what happened.  This is all about the IC gaming the system along with a press favorably disposed towards it.  Notice the "FBI statements about certain threats" phrase.  That's a reference to the fact the FBI knew the Hunter Biden story was about to break and sent an agent from its Silicon Valley office to meet with FB and other companies beforehand to give them enough hints to trigger the ban and make sure the story was suppressed once it became public.  As soon as the New York Post reported on the laptop, 51 former intelligence officials issued a statement saying the story had "all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation", a statement coordinated by Anthony Blinken on behalf of the Biden campaign. That was enough for most of the press to ignore the story and for many social media outlets to ban reference to it.  Only well after Biden had been elected did it become permissible to acknowledge the authenticity of the laptop and its contents, which raised questions not only about Hunter Biden, but what his father knew of, or possibly derived financial benefit from, his son's Russian, Ukrainian, and Chinese connections.  Once the authenticity of the laptop became evident, 50 of the 51 officials initially declined to comment.  The one who did respond told the press that their statement merely said the story had "hallmarks of Russian disinformation", not that the story actually was Russian disinformation, and it wasn't his fault if people can't read.  That's okay since it served its purpose, signaling to a press predisposed to favor Biden that it was okay to suppress the story. Since then, James Clapper, the former DNI who also signed the letter, stated that he objected to the way the press covered it.  But Clapper, at the time a CNN analyst, never said anything publicly at the time.  He's just messing with us.  They knew all along and yet were willing to do anything to kill the story.

Last year, the attorneys general offices of Missouri and Louisiana filed a joint lawsuit against the Biden administration, alleging that federal government outreach to tech companies about content on their platform — including law enforcement tips about election integrity and Covid-19 — constituted intimidation and a violation of First Amendment protections to free speech.

My Comment: This is the lawsuit which prompted the injunction mentioned earlier.  Along with the two state plaintiffs, three healthcare professionals are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit.  The three are represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, an organization founded by Columbia Law Professor Philip Hamburger with the mission of taking on the unconstitutional administrative state which has become a 4th branch of the Federal government, an organization to which I am a donor.  Notice the NBC wording here. When they want to denigrate the basis of the lawsuit they use the word "outreach".  Sounds innocent, doesn't it?  But at the top of the article when they want to emphasize the importance of what the government is doing they refer to the "robust alliance" and "quiet coalition" working together "to thwart", and then later to the "symbiotic relationship between the government and social media".  In fact, the basis for the injunction was the Court finding that discovery had revealed there was a coordinated effort involving the government to suppress speech, including, by the way, factually accurate statements about Covid-19.  The case is all about domestic suppression of free speech, not foreign propaganda.

The NBC story is simply propaganda and misinformation designed to mislead the public and influence elections.  Perhaps we should complain to the Intelligence Community or Special Counsel Smith!

Two related points.

As more information has come out about the collaboration between the IC and social media, some supporters of that coordination have pointed out that it began in the Trump Administration.  Yes, it did which highlights one of the fundamental problems with the federal bureaucracy has it has grown over the decades.  An opposition party, and make no mistake, the bureaucracy sees the GOP as the opposition, will have great difficulty controlling the administrative state.  In other words, the people's elected representatives will be undermined by the bureaucracy if it does not approve of a proposed policy.  In the case of the Trump administration this problem was exacerbated by a Chief Executive ignorant of government operations and not interested in learning, compounded by his short attention span and being easily distractable, along with a overwhelming disinterest in details.  He also thought that tweeting about something was the same as doing something.  While Trump may be an extreme example, any future GOP president will face resistance.

The biggest issue is the lack of trust in institutions - both in government and throughout American society.  In their hysterical reaction to the election of Trump in 2016, institutions, in and out of government, have gone so far overboard as to completely wreck their credibility, finishing the job started in recent decades.(1)  Yes, Trump has no credibility, but who's left standing that does?  Do I think that the federal government could have a proper role in identifying and limiting the impact of foreign propaganda?  Yes, I do.  But why would I trust an Intelligence Community which helped create the Russia Collusion hoax to do so?  Why would I trust an Intelligence Community which acted to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story and speech by American citizens of which it disapproved.  Why would I trust a media to blow the whistle on any governmental overstepping of its proper bounds, when the media worked with the government to create the narratives I've just described?

Nor is this merely a partisan story.  If you examine the media, whether left or right (and all media now is left or right), who would you trust today?  I certainly trust very little at this point.  I don't watch any network or cable news of any political persuasion but for society to function there have to be some institutions we have confidence in.  I'm fortunate, being retired and having time to look at original documents and evaluate the credibility of sources, and I had a lot of experience in my career doing investigations.  By being willing to follow the evidence where it leads I've apparently ended up in a small group that knows both that Trump's "Stop The Steal" was lunacy, and the Russia Collusion story the biggest political scandal in our lifetimes.  But even I don't have the time to dive into everything.  What can people who have jobs and are raising families do?  I've also got time to evaluate people and new outlets on Twitter, Substack and elsewhere, seeking those in whom I might place some trust.  Most people don't have the time to do what I've been doing.  For most people, what is there on the right or left that can trusted to not just be generating narratives in support of their beliefs?  I don't know the answer and that is very troubling for our future.

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(1)  I observed in 2016 that Trump was Silvio Berlusconi, not Adolf Hitler.  I was right.  The Resistance went down a rabbit hole, while the real anti-democratic forces gathered on the left and seized control of the commanding heights.

Hotel Lobby

By Edward Hopper (1943).  I find the empty spaces in Hopper paintings more interesting than the people.

Final Orbit

(Photo taken from Apollo 8, December 24, 1968)

Earlier this week, Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman died at the age of 95.  Borman had flown on Gemini 7 before being selected to command Apollo 8, the first manned flight to circumnavigate the moon, in December 1968.  The Apollo 8 crew were the first humans to see the Earth as pictured above.

Borman is best known for his reading from Genesis, broadcast to Earth on Christmas Eve, of which I wrote previously:

Christmas Eve 1968.  Apollo 8 is on its mission carrying the first humans to escape low Earth orbit and the first to circle the Moon - Frank Borman, Jim Lovell (later commander of Apollo 13), Bill Anders.

Several weeks before lift-off the crew had been told that NASA had arranged for them to do a live Christmas Eve broadcast to the world.  When Borman asked what they should say, all they were advised was that it be "something appropriate".  With the help of the wife of a correspondent friend who had been raised in a French convent, they decided to read the opening chapters of the Bible, from Genesis (as explained in the video below).  No one on the ground at NASA was aware of what they would say, until they started reading.  For many reasons, this would not happen today, both from a process and substance perspective.

After reading the opening verses of Genesis, the crew closed with its own benediction:

And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on this Good Earth.

Hearing those words, in those circumstances, had a huge emotional impact on those who heard it, and it still affects me when I listen to it more than 50 years later.

The video below tells the story, followed by what listeners heard on December 24, 1968.  All of the Apollo 8 astronauts are still alive, Borman and Lovell at age 92, and Anders at 87.

 

(Text read by crew of Apollo 8)

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called the Seas: and God saw that it was good.

Jim Lovell, who flew with Borman on Apollo 8, and is best-known as the commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13, is now the oldest surviving Apollo astronaut, a week younger than Borman.  Marilyn, Lovell's wife of 71 years, passed away two months ago.  Borman was also married for 71 years before his wife passed in 2021. The third Apollo 8 crewman, Bill Anders, just turned 90.  Anders has been married to his wife, Valerie, for 68 years.

Along with Lovell and Anders there are five other surviving crew from the 24 astronauts who flew on the nine Apollo missions which orbited and/or landed on the moon:

Apollo 10 - Thomas Stafford (93)

Apollo 11 - Buzz Aldrin (93)

Apollo 15 - David Scott (91)

Apollo 16 - Charles Duke (88)

Apollo 17 - Harrison Schmitt (88)

 

Ken Mattingly, scrubbed at the last minute from Apollo 13, and Command Module Pilot on Apollo 16, passed ten days ago.