Tuesday, January 01, 2019

The Answer My Friend Id Blowing (No Clipped “G”) In The Wind-The Influence Of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” On The “Generation of’68”-The Best Part Of That Cohort

The Answer My Friend Id Blowing (No Clipped “G”) In The Wind-The Influence Of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” On The “Generation of’68”-The Best Part Of That Cohort



Link to NPR Morning Edition 'The Times They Are A-Changin" Still Speaks To Our Changing Times  https://www.npr.org/2018/09/24/650548856/american-anthem-the-times-they-are-a-changin

By Seth Garth
No question this publication both in its former hard copy editions and now more so in the on-line editions as the, ouch, 50th anniversary of many signature events for the “Generation of ‘68” have come and gone that the whole period of the 1950s and 1960s had gotten a full airing. Has been dissected, deflected, inspected, reflected and even rejected beyond compare. That is not to say that this trend won’t continue if for no other reason that the demographics and actual readership response indicate that people still have a desire to not forget their pasts, their youth.
(Under the new site manager Greg Green, despite what I consider all good sense having worked under taskmaster Allan Jackson, we are encouraged to give this blessed readership some inside dope, no, no that kind, about how things are run these days in an on-line publication. With that okay in mind there was a huge controversy that put the last sentence in the above paragraph in some perspective recently when Greg for whatever ill-begotten reason thought that he would try to draw in younger audiences by catering to their predilections-for comic book character movies, video games, graphic novels and trendy music and got nothing but serious blow-back from those who have supported this publication financially and otherwise both in hard copy times and now on-line. What that means as the target demographic fades is another question and maybe one for a future generation who might take over the operation. Or perhaps like many operations this one will not outlast its creators- and their purposes.)    
Today’s 1960s question, a question that I have asked over the years and so I drew the assignment to address the issue-who was the voice of the 1960s. Who or what. Was it the lunchroom sit-inners and Freedom Riders, what it the hippies, was it SDS, the various Weather configurations, acid, rock, folk rock, folk, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Abbie Hoffman, Grace Slick, hell the Three Js-Joplin, Jimi, Jim as in Morrison and the like. Or maybe it was a mood, a mood of disenchantment about a world that seemed out of our control, which seemed to be running without any input from us, without us even being asked. My candidate, and not my only candidate but a recent NPR Morning Edition segment brought the question to mind (see above link), is a song, a song created by Bob Dylan in the early 1960s which was really a clarion call to action on our part, or the best part of our generation-The Times They Are A-Changin’.    
I am not sure if Bob Dylan started out with some oversized desire to be the “voice” of his generation. He certainly blew the whole thing off later after his motorcycle accident and still later when he became a recluse even if he did 200 shows a year, maybe sullen introvert is better, actually maybe his own press agent giving out dribbles is even better but that song, that “anthem” sticks in memory as a decisive summing up of what I was feeling at the time. (And apparently has found resonance with a new generation of activists via the March for Our Lives movement and other youth-driven movements.) As a kid I was antsy to do something, especially once I saw graphic footage on commercial television of young black kids being water-hosed, beaten and bitten by dogs down in the South simply for looking for some rough justice in this wicked old world. Those images, and those of the brave lunch-room sitters and Freedom bus riders were stark and compelling. They and my disquiet over nuclear bombs which were a lot scarier then when there were serious confrontations which put them in play and concern that what bothered me about having no say, about things not being addressed galvanized me.
The song “spoke to me” as it might not have earlier or later. It had the hopeful ring of a promise of a newer world. That didn’t happen or happen in ways that would have helped the mass of humanity but for that moment I flipped out every time I heard it played on the radio or on my old vinyl records record-player. Other songs, events, moods, later would overtake this song’s sentiment but I was there at the creation. Remember that, please.   


Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance

Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance 




By Josh Breslin 

My yearly comment on behalf of the Holiday Appeal

I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) and more recently the courageous anti-fascist fighters who have been rounded up for protesting the alt-right, Nazi, KKK, white supremacist bastards.      

Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like the late Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, the Anti-fa anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Of course a couple of years ago  we lost Hugo Pinell, George Jackson’s comrade-in-arms from the San Quentin Six to a murderous vendetta. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. One year though, and it now bears repeating each year, after I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson’s present class-war prisoner the late Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven,  as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and the late wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. 

The class-war prisoners must not stand alone. 
                                                                                                
PDC    
Box 99 Canal Street Station                        
New York, N.Y. 10013

Google Partisan Defense Committee for more information and updates 




On The 100th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-From The Archives Of Marxism-Honor Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht-Karl Liebknecht's Statement In Opposition To The German War Budget In 1914

On The Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-From The Archives Of Marxism-Honor Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht-Karl Liebknecht's Statement In Opposition To The German War Budget In 1914






On The 100th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-


By Frank Jackman

History in the conditional, what might have happened if this or that thing, event, person had swerved this much or that, is always a tricky proposition. Tricky as reflected in this piece’s commemorative headline. Rosa Luxemburg the acknowledged theoretical wizard of the German Social-Democratic Party, the numero uno party of the Second, Socialist International, which was the logical organization to initiate the socialist revolution before World War II and Karl Liebknecht, the hellfire and brimstone propagandist and public speaker of that same party were assassinated in separate locale on the orders of the then ruling self-same Social-Democratic Party. The chasm between the Social-Democratic leaders trying to save Germany for “Western Civilization” in the wake of the “uncivilized” socialist revolution in Russia in 1917 had grown that wide that it was as if they were on two different planets, and maybe they were.

(By the way I am almost embarrassed to mention the term “socialist revolution” these days when people, especially young people, would be clueless as to what I was talking about or would think that this concept was so hopelessly old-fashioned that it would meet the same blank stares. Let me assure you that back in the day, yes, that back in the day, many a youth had that very term on the tips of their tongues. Could palpably feel it in the air. Hell, just ask your parents, or grandparents.)

Okay here is the conditional and maybe think about it before you dismiss the idea out of hand if only because the whole scheme is very much in the conditional. Rosa and Karl, among others made almost every mistake in the book before and during the Spartacist uprising in some of the main German cities in late 1918 after the German defeat in the war. Their biggest mistake before the uprising was sticking with the Social Democrats, as a left wing, when that party had turned at best reformist and eminently not a vehicle for the socialist revolution, or even a half-assed democratic “revolution” which is what they got with the overthrow of the Kaiser. They broke too late, and subsequently too late from a slightly more left-wing Independent Socialist Party which had split from the S-D when that party became the leading war party in Germany for all intents and purposes and the working class was raising its collective head and asking why. 

The big mistake during the uprising was not taking enough protective cover, not keeping the leadership safe, keeping out of sight like Lenin had in Finland when things were dicey in 1917 Russia and fell easy prey to the Freikorps assassins. Here is the conditional, and as always it can be expanded to some nth degree if you let things get out of hand. What if, as in Russia, Rosa and Karl had broken from that rotten (for socialism) S-D organization and had a more firmly entrenched cadre with some experience in independent existence. What if the Spartacists had protected their acknowledged leaders better. There might have been a different trajectory for the aborted and failed German left-wing revolutionary opportunities over the next several years, there certainly would have been better leadership and perhaps, just perhaps the Nazi onslaught might have been stillborn, might have left Munich 1923 as their “heroic” and last moment.  

Instead we have a still sad 100th anniversary of the assassination of two great international socialist fighters who headed to the danger not away always worthy of a nod and me left having to face those blank stares who are looking for way forward but might as well be on a different planet-from me. 


Markin comment:

The name Karl Liebknecht stands on its own and needs no additional comment from me. Except this. Every time some bourgeois congressman decides to get up the nerve to vote against one of the various parts of the American war budget just remember he or she, at worst, at least at worst for now, might not get reelected. Karl Liebknecht's stand led to charges of treason and jail. Yes, Karl Liebknecht's  name stands on its own and needs no additional comment from me.

Workers Vanguard No. 972
21 January 2010

Honor Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht

(From the Archives of Marxism)


In the tradition of the early Communist International, each January we commemorate the “Three Ls”: Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, who died on 21 January 1924, and revolutionary Marxists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were assassinated in Berlin on 15 January 1919 by the reactionary Freikorps as part of the German Social Democratic government’s suppression of the Spartakist uprising.

Although not well known today, Karl Liebknecht’s name is synonymous with intransigent opposition to one’s “own” bourgeoisie in the crucible of imperialist war. Despite his individual opposition to German imperialism from the outset of World War I, on 4 August 1914 Liebknecht submitted to the discipline of the Social Democratic Party and voted for war credits along with the rest of the party fraction in the Reichstag (parliament). But Liebknecht became increasingly vocal in his opposition to the party’s betrayal of the proletariat. When the party fraction resolved to support a new vote for the Kaiser’s military budget at the Reichstag session of 2 December 1914, Liebknecht broke ranks and cast the sole vote opposing war credits.

Liebknecht was prohibited from delivering a statement motivating his vote on the floor of the Reichstag or having it printed in the body’s official record. Barred from the German press, the statement was published in a Dutch socialist newspaper and translated into English in the Socialist New York Call. Below we reprint the statement as it appeared in the February 1915 issue of the U.S. leftist journal The Masses. Liebknecht’s stand inspired proletarian militants in Germany and internationally, not least in Russia, where the working class under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party would seize power in the October Revolution of 1917.

In a May 1915 leaflet, Liebknecht declared, “The main enemy is at home,” which for generations afterward became the watchword for revolutionaries at a time of war between imperialist powers. As he denounced the slaughter of World War I at a May Day rally in 1916, Liebknecht was dragged from the platform and thrown into prison on charges of treason. Released in October 1918, Liebknecht along with Luxemburg founded the German Communist Party at the end of the year. They were assassinated two weeks later.

In honoring the Three Ls, we fight to carry on their revolutionary tradition. As Liebknecht declared the day before his murder: “Whether or not we are alive when it arrives, our program will live, and it will reign in a world of redeemed humanity. Despite everything!”

* * *

My vote against the war credit is based upon the following considerations:

This war, which none of the peoples engaged therein has wished, is not caused in the interest of the prosperity of the German or any other nation. This is an imperialistic war, a war for the domination of the world market, for the political domination over important fields of operation for industrial and bank capital. On the part of the competition in armaments this is a war mutually fostered by German and Austrian war parties in the darkness of half absolutism and secret diplomacy in order to steal a march on the adversary.

At the same time this war is a Bonapartistic effort to blot out the growing labor movement. This has been demonstrated with ever-increasing plainness in the past few months, in spite of a deliberate purpose to confuse the heads.

The German motto, “Against Czarism,” as well as the present English and French cries, “Against Militarism,” have the deliberate purpose of bringing into play in behalf of race hatred the noblest inclinations and the revolutionary feelings and ideals of the people. To Germany, the accomplice of Czarism, an example of political backwardness down to the present day, does not belong the calling of the liberator of nations. The liberation of the Russian as well as the German people should be their own task.

This war is not a German defense war. Its historical character and its development thus far make it impossible to trust the assertion of a capitalistic government that the purpose for which credits are asked is the defense of the fatherland.

The credits for succor have my approval, with the understanding that the asked amount seems far from being sufficient. Not less eagerly do I vote for everything that will alleviate the hard lot of our brothers in the field, as well as that of the wounded and the sick, for whom I have the deepest sympathy. But I do vote against the demanded war credits, under protest against the war and against those who are responsible for it and have caused it, against the capitalistic purposes for which it is being used, against the annexation plans, against the violation of the Belgian and Luxemburg neutrality, against the unlimited authority of rulers of war and against the neglect of the social and political duties of which the government and the ruling classes stand convicted.

On The 70th Anniversary- Magical Realism One-On-One- With Humphrey Bogart And Lauren Bacall’s “Dark Passage” (1947)

On The 70th Anniversary- Magical Realism One-On-One- With Humphrey Bogart And Lauren Bacall’s “Dark Passage” (1947)





By Seth Garth

[At this point I am not involved in the so-called controversy between the younger and older writers of which I am one since I have moved on, have been actually trying to put stories together not let my bile jump up at me. Yes, I voted to retain my old friend Allan Jackson, but what of it-S.G]

It is a funny thing about breaks, about how things twist and turn in this crazy old world. Hey I should know, I, Pat Lynch, who has been in the private detection business for the past thirty-five years ever since I got out of the Army back at the end of World War II. (By the way private detection, detective is the way I like to hear it said not shamus, gumshoe, key-hole peeper like they say on television or in those silly crime detection novels as much as I liked reading guys like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler back before I got into the real profession and found they were mostly blowing smoke.) Take the Humphrey Bogart case, or what turned out to be the name of the case, a name I was told he did not use among his various names, his aliases, his akas as we say in the business, since he hated it from childhood when the kids thought he was humpty-dumpty and later when dope, marijuana was exotic and illegal hipsters would say “don’t bogart that joint.”

This Bogart case I worked off and on for the better part of twenty years in the days when the coppers, the public coppers, were offering five thou, big money then for the whereabouts dead or alive of the guy. Big money especially to a guy starting out a few years after the war in order to bring this guy to justice, or back to justice since he had escaped San Quentin, the Q and while on the lam he killed his best friend, some frail, some ex-girlfriend and some two-bit small time crook, con man really. They laid the whole mess on it in any case so it was the same thing.  Never did find him and I went to South America and Europe to try to collar him so he could be dead or alive some place. All I know is the case had plenty of twists and turns and Bogart got his share of bumps and breaks along the way so what I just said is true about breaks. And a little idea that maybe Bogart didn’t commit all those murders and was framed. Like I said breaks.            

Maybe you don’t remember the Bogart case? Back in the late 1940s it was all the rage in the papers for about six months in the days when they would run with a news story like that forever not like today when even murder cases get a day or two and then go with the breeze. This Bogart was supposed to have killed his wife in a rage with an iron from the fireplace. He did admit to having a quarrel with that wife before he left but he never hit her that day (neighbor testimony told a story that he was on other occasions abusive, had hit her at least one and she had had a black-eye to show for it). At trial which like I say was “page one” for weeks in Frisco though he was done in by that ex-girlfriend he later allegedly killed during his escape. She claimed she saw him hit that wife from the window outside the Bogart residence and the defense could never shake her story. So that and Bogarts’ being the only fingerprints on the iron doomed him. On defense Bogart claimed that this frail, this ex-girlfriend, Agnes, had never been his girlfriend, that she was jealous of the wife and despite their marital troubles he never had plans to leave that wife. The jury didn’t buy the story-life, life without parole.                

Which who knows should have been the end of the story and the only place Bogart should next have been seen anyway outside the Q was at his potter’s field funeral. But this Bogart was not only lucky in some ways which you have to be to escape any serious secured prison but he had planned it for years staying mostly to himself working out plans in his head (he had been an engineer before he fell down, before he took the big fall). Easy as pie from what I gathered as long as you don’t care about placing yourself in a garage barrel when they come to get rid of the trash on the outside. And Bogart didn’t. The next parts are a little murky since it was mostly pieced together from a lot of information that seemed contradictory-seemed to tempt the fates too much.     

He got out okay and along the road he jiggles the barrel enough to have it flip off the road down an embankment the clueless driver not noticing anything fall off the truck. In any case the coppers, once the warden declared an escape, were on the trail fast-caught up with that truck driver who knowing nothing noticed one barrel missing. So the cops started heading back up the road they had just come from.  Here is where luck plays a small role, part one, Bogart after discarding his shirt grabbed a ride from a passing car, from that two-bit small time con man. That funny little con man asked too many questions though and he bonked him one leaving him off to the side of the road. While he was doing that a stray car, a station wagon since she had to carry her art supplies around, pulled up and told him to get in, told him by name. This Lauren, Lauren Bacall, known in the Bay Area as something of an artist but also with dough left by a step-father who killed her mother and got the big sent-off, step-off really at Q for it had been following his case for years, had been at the trial (shades of her father’s case where she thought he too was innocent) and hearing the police reports over the radio decided to help Bogart along. Yeah, I know.

That’s the story anyway, once I heard the story from Bob, the dame’s boyfriend at the time who got wise once things didn’t add up about why she was giving him the deep freeze, the heave-ho really and she told him flat out she had another man after he found men’s clothing in her bedroom. But this was well after the whereabouts of Bogart, and Lauren, reached a dead end and I was looking for anything to get back on track.            

The way it figures from there is that she brought him to her place over on Russian Hill to keep him under wraps for a while. But a guy who every copper in California was looking for needed to hide out somewhere else. Needed that hideaway since he was going to get some plastic surgery done to change his looks enough to blow town, head to South America where they don’t ask questions, especially from gringos with a little dough to stop the questions. That is where his good friend, a stand-up guy, George was supposed to help keep him undercover after the surgery. No play. After the surgery Bogart went back to George’s place but he had been murdered by a party or parties unknown, and so back to Lauren’s place and some better plan because six, two and even he was going to take the fall for that George one too which if you at the frozen dead-ass cold files today you will see the Frisco coppers did.


So the surgery took after a week under the bandages. It was during this period that boyfriend Bob started getting the cold shoulder and later that is where his speculation started. Problem at this point is that nobody including Lauren would have known it was Bogart (Lauren would know once the bandages came off before all she had seen was a guy like a million other guys turned in another guy like a million other guys.) I had heard a rumor that a cabdriver was bragging to his buddies at the Irish Grille over off Fisherman’s Wharf that he would have the last laugh since he was probably the only guy alive who knew what Bogart looked after he tied him onto a disbarred plastic surgeon. Young and raw as I was at the time I still had some waterfront, skid row dive contacts who would have known who that surgeon was, or if there was more than one, it would be small work to locate him.

Bingo Doc Jamison who had been on the back alley work for several years after he botched a big-time starlet’s face so that not even her parents would recognize her. Doc was very upfront that he had done the job and what of it. The beauty for him is that after putting on the bandages he was as clueless as anybody about Bogart’s appearance, so he said. I could never shake anything out of him even after offering money. All we knew was he was five foot-ten, brown hair, brown eyes.           

Once Bogart was up and around, going out, with or without Lauren, was when he started going by the name of Parry, Victor Parry, which is ironic since that was the name of another guy in the Q who had murdered his wife. They got that bit of information from the real Victor Parry, a couple of months later after the trail was dead-ass cold, when he bargained for a reduction of sentence. So we had a name although a name which petered out after a place called Benson, Arizona. Benson is important to the story because that has been a jump-off point for people on the run since the old Wild West days. Once in Mexico, as I subsequently found out, the trail got even colder, colder than a witch’s tit as we used to say as kids, maybe they still do.           

So you know Bogart got away, you know Lauren blew town shortly after so it figured they had a meet-up place who knows where. End of five thou dreams. That is when I started working on the case from a different angle purely for professional reasons. Started to work an angle that he might have been framed, been the fall guy. When you think about it why would a guy who was on the lam bump off his best friend, a guy he had drinks with, a guy who just wanted according to Jimmy Lee at the Kit Kat Club to blow high white notes out to the China seas. That brings you up to who else had a motive to bump off Bogart’s wife. After talking to Bob, that ex-boyfriend of Lauren’s given the colds by her brought up that Agnes, that so-called ex of Bogart’s. According to Bob she was venomous like a snake enough to take advantage of what she saw looking into the Bogart apartment. Hated that wife with a passion the way she told it later after she put the big frame around Bogart. Problem, big problem which you might not remember from when I started. Agnes fell out a window under mysterious circumstances and shortly after a tenant saw a guy who’s over-all characteristics fit Bogart to a tee. So the coppers tagged him for it and let it sleep. What the hell he was going to hang for the other raps anyway so let him have every unsolved crime that needed cold storage.              

So you see where I was blocked even trying to work that other angle. Nothing, nothing except that added murder rap of that small time hood who may have had some information because when you put two and two together he might have been a guy who knew both ends of the Bogart face. He had after all picked Bogart upon that escape route before being tossed. Being, by all accounts, a guy who was always looking for the silver lining, he told one of his confederates that he was going to make a big score, a very big score , although cagey enough not be give details. So what if he figured the Bogart-Bacall connection. We’ll never know because he fell down on the rocks under the Golden Gate Bridge. See what I mean by breaks-both ways.   




The Legend-Slayer Cometh-In Defense Of A Theory Of Real Legends And Dismissal Of “Fake News” Heroes-The Case Of The Red Sparrow-A Film Review-Of Sorts


The Legend-Slayer Cometh-In Defense Of A Theory Of Real Legends And Dismissal Of “Fake News” Heroes-The Case Of The Red Sparrow-A Film Review-Of Sorts



By Will Bradley


The Red Sparrow, starring Jennifer Lawrence, 2018  
      

I “knew” that I would  get some serious blow-back when I decided to defend the real legend of our times the Green Lantern, both the legendary fighter pilot Hal Jordan and the universal Green Lantern Corp of which he is a member and which as I write is protecting us against all kinds of dangers especially the dreaded” fear” which has man sources and none of them good many. I did not expect the blow-back to come from so many different “legend” factions, including those who are being protected as we write by the Green Lantern Corp.  
Let’s start with those growing numbers who have been starting to believe that the whole legend game for the most part is the stuff of press agents, highly paid press agents at that who will write anything, think up any outlandish lie or fake news about their client to keep public interest up, and the paychecks coming in. They took me to task for defending heroic Hal and the brethren, especially Hal because they believed, fervently believed in some cases, that he had joined just to impress his girlfriend, that foxy frill as one reader called her Carol Ferris (and admitting he might have joined up too if he had a foxy frill like that to impress. 

Others have had the audacity to tell me that I have “sold out” the legend-slaying struggle by going down in the mud for these “frogs” as one reader called them. A reader who had sworn off believing in legends once Joseph Campbell gave her the scoop on the meaning of legends and myths in social life so far (she also mentioned that my destruction of Larry Lawrence (aka Sherlock Holmes put the frosting on the cake for her) That  was the general tenor of the comments from my advocates making me wonder if I have friends like this who needs enemies. I will try to staunch the bleeding a little, explain the difference between over-blown, undeserved and frankly fake legends and those which advance humankind below when I finally get a chance to explain my theory of legends in the review of The Red Sparrow, Dominika the world-historic post-Soviet sexpionage agent who has saved our bacon from those boorish Russians in the process, maybe more than Robert Mueller.  

As usual there are those who apparently have taken their cue from some of the writers in this publication and had cast a jaundiced eye at my attempts to bring a little rational discussion into the burgeoning legend marketplace with a little real time debunking of the bum-of-the-month legends. There will always be skeptics about any forward endeavor, any push forward for humankind always has blowback, and I have made my peace with myself on that score. I would also note that some of those same in-house skeptics have backed off a bit since that important UCal survey (supported by the prestigious Harrison Foundation) had shown a dip in belief in some of the legends I have been battering away at. That has led to an important vote of confidence in me by site manager Greg Green and a leg up on the food chain which is all important in this no holds barred, take no prisoners cutthroat business.

The most venom, and I mean that almost literally, have been displayed by what I call the “trolls” who have harassed me ever since I started debunking the American aviator pioneer Johnny Cielo legend, the undeserved legend of a guy who claimed many things, including being present at the creation of human flight with the Wright Brothers. That despite the fact that he was not born until 1910. The gist of their rude remarks had centered on making sport of the fact that Hal Jordan, once he signed on to the Green Lantern Corps could fly without an aircraft, could fly into space on his own green propulsion. Have contemptuously called him Icarus and other nasty names implying he had taken on more than he could handle. The only positive thing they have said already mentioned in another context is that Hal had a foxy looking girlfriend.      

I thought I would not go into the fake Johnny Cielo legend yet again but a few points should be made beyond that obviously fake present at the creation stuff. Especially in light of the fact that his UCal survey ratings have spiked probably because of the increased scrutiny by me and which has put his previously not well reputation in the spotlight. I would point out his claims to have been Howard Hughes right-hand man way back when TWA was getting off the ground were made of pure cloth. That he had squired drop-dead beautiful movie icon Rita Hayworth down to Barranca with him when he was running the air post service down there after having fled the states with people looking for him, looking for their dough was a case of mistaken identity fraud of the highest order since he was passing off some street-walker met in Hoboken as the real deal. And that he was entitled to some kind of left-wing hall of fame admiration for flying in guns and supplies to Fidel and the guys down in Cuba when it counted. Not one Fidelista had ever heard of him, and certainly not for bringing in guns and supplies when they desperately needed in that last push against Batista. All bullshit.

That press agent fakery by John Kerr formerly of the New York Times before he became nothing but a flak against the very real contribution Hal (and the brethren) have made in holding the line against the machinations of the universal fear machine that has gotten most of universe-kind down in the mouth for a long time. I have given up on trying to have reasonable conversations with the Johnny Cielo trolls based mainly in Florida, Key West but seem to be expanding their base since I got a comment, nasty of course, from Ohio in this latest slugfest. For others I will try to show, once again that I am not anti-legend just anti-bogus ones when I deal with another positive one in the Red Sparrow.

Okay, this Dominika previously mentioned was a ballerina moving up the Bolshoi food chain until she fell down, had been purposefully allowed to fall. The worse part beyond ending her career was that she could no longer care for her desperately ill mother (already you see a golden child ready to what was necessary before you). Through her lustful incestuous uncle, a guy named Ivan, like half the Russians guys are especially the bureaucrats, she got led down the garden path to become part of the state espionage apparatus via her training as a sexpionage agent. Some seriously weird stuff by run some ex-S&M madame from what I know of the operation. The idea by Ivan and those up the intelligence chain was that this semi-pro whore could find out who the “mole” was who was feeding Western intelligence, feeding the CIA tons of Russian state secrets. This remember is post-Soviet stuff although whoever dreamed up the idea claimed that Nikita Khrushchev, back in the 1960s, that dirty old man and previously Stalinist sycophant dreamed it up in the hot Cold War days. I would check that if I were you.

Dominika struts her stuff, made some contact with an on the shelf semi-disgraces CIA field agent who ran the Russian mole operation on the ground. By and by they fall in love and she decides to not only play footsie with that field agent but to play ball with the CIA to get that incestuous uncle off her back. She went through hell beforehand though taking merciless beatings to get her to spill whatever she knew. When the Russian agents grabbed Mr. CIA she had to make a decision-in or out. In the meantime, the freaking mole came in from the cold to her, told her to drop the dime on him as the mole. Instead she set up that pesky uncle and took the place of that disgruntled mole in the international intelligence games. That is the stuff of dreams and the stuff of real legends. I have heard from some reliable sources that she has given Western intelligence, NATO, a ton of good stuff about Putin’s moves, and about the relationship between him and his “poodle,” a guy named Donald Trump, POSTUS. Nice going little Red Sparrow, nice going.     


Start The New Year Right- President Trump Pardon Whistleblower And Veteran Reality Leigh Winner-We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind

Courage to Resist<refuse@couragetoresist.org>
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Pardon Whistleblower Reality Winner
Hi Alfred.
On June 3, 2017, NSA contractor Reality Leigh Winner was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act for providing a media organization with a single five-page top-secret document that analyzed information about alleged Russian online intrusions into U.S. election systems.
Reality, who has been jailed without bail since her arrest, has now been sentenced to five years in prison. This is by far the longest sentence ever given in federal court for leaking information to the media. Today, she is being transferred from a small Georgia jail to a yet-unknown federal prison.
Several months before her arrest, the FBI’s then-Director James Comey told President Trump that he was (in the words of a subsequent Comey memo) “eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message.” Meanwhile, politically connected and high-level government officials continue to leak without consequence, or selectively declassify material to advance their own interests.
Join Courage to Resist and a dozen other organizations in calling on President Trump, who has acknowledged Winner’s treatment as “so unfair,” to pardon Reality Winner or to commute her sentence to time served.

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