Whales may share our kind of intelligence, researchers say after discovering brain cells previously found only in humans and other primates.
They were touted as the brain cells that set humans and the other great apes apart from all other mammals. Now it has been discovered that some whales also have spindle neurons – specialised brain cells that are involved in processing emotions and helping us interact socially.
Spindle cells, named after their long, spindle-shaped bodies, are the cells that are credited with allowing us to feel love and to suffer emotionally. Their discovery in whales will stimulate debate both on the level of whale intelligence and on the ethics of hunting them.
The cells occur in parts of the human brain that are thought to be responsible for our social organisation, empathy, speech, intuition about the feelings of others, and rapid “gut” reactions (see The cell that makes us human).
Anthropomorphic angle
Now it turns out that these spindle cells also exist in the same brain areas in humpback whales, fin whales, killer whales and sperm whales.
What is more, whales appear to have had these cells for at least twice as long as humans, and early estimates suggest they could have three times as many spindle cells as us, even accounting for the fact that whale brains are larger than ours.
“It’s absolutely clear to me that these are extremely intelligent animals,” says Patrick Hof of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and co-discoverer of the whale spindle cells with Estel van der Gucht of the New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology, both in the US.
“We must be careful about anthropomorphic interpretation of intelligence in whales,” says Hof. “But their potential for high-level brain function, clearly demonstrated already at the behavioural level, is confirmed by the existence of neuronal types once thought unique to humans and our closest relatives.”
“They communicate through huge song repertoires, recognise their own songs and make up new ones. They also form coalitions to plan hunting strategies, teach these to younger individuals, and have evolved social networks similar to those of apes and humans,” Hof says.
Express trains
As with humans, the spindle cells were found in whales in the anterior cingulate cortex and frontoinsular cortex – two brain regions vital for “visceral” reactions. Such reactions require fast but emotionally-sensitive judgments, such as deciding whether another animal is suffering pain, and the general feel of whether an experience is pleasant or unpleasant.
In addition, unlike in humans, the researchers also found spindle cells in the frontopolar cortex at the back of the brain, and they were sparsely dispersed elsewhere. Hof says he does not yet know the significance of spindles found in areas other than those that contain the cells in humans and great apes.
Exactly how spindle cells function in whales is still under investigation, but Hof believes the long, high-speed connections may fast-track information to and from other parts of the cortex. “The velocity of the signal is faster, and they miss out junctions on the way,” says Hof. “They are like the express trains’ of the nervous system” that bypass unnecessary connections, enabling us to instantly process and act on emotional cues during complex social interactions.
Hof and van der Gucht suggest that whales probably evolved the spindle cells completely independently of humans and apes – a process called convergent evolution. Moreover, they probably evolved them as long as 30 million years ago, twice as long ago as humans and apes.
Spindle cells are most likely to emerge in unusually large brains which need extra circuitry to handle increasingly complex social interactions, Hof says. Cognitive parallels
“The discovery of spindle neurons in cetaceans is a stunning example of neuro-anatomical convergence between cetaceans and primates,” says Lori Marino of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US. “The common ancestor of cetaceans and primates lived over 95 million years ago, and such a highly specific morphological similarity as the finding of spindle cells is clearly due to evolutionary convergence, not shared ancestry,” she says.
“This is consistent with a growing body of evidence for parallels between cetaceans and primates in cognitive abilities, behaviour and social ecology.”
However, many highly intelligent but smaller cetaceans examined by Hof and van der Gucht did not have the spindle cells. The explanation could be that these smaller cetaceans, including bottlenose dolphins, evolved different but equally complex alternatives to the spindle cells. “In this respect, it will be interesting to discover what mental capacities might distinguish humpback whales from dolphins,” says Keith Kendrick of the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, UK.
Journal reference: The Anatomical Record (DOI: 10.1002/ar.a.20407)
We all live on or around a global planet we call Earth.
Since we live all over this planet we must have some GLOBAL opinions.
Here are a few: CHILD ABUSE … WAR … SLAVERY … FREEDOM
In addition to these GLOBAL opinions, there are NATIONAL opinions, STATE opinions, CITY opinions, RURAL opinions, RACIAL opinions. and any other CLIMATE of OPINION that is generated in a society.
It is this climate of opinion that drives Scientists to do Science and Fascists to try to industriously eliminate a religious group, the Jews and ordinary citizens to believe their governments.
This building below is on the Wannsee in Berlin. It is where Hiltler’s men met to plan how to deal with the Jews, after the meeting they went home to play with their kids.
Living in several countries over my life, I can tell you what I have learned.
We will talk about CHILD ABUSE in a separate post.
Autocracies hurt their own civilians.
We were in Athens when the Junta killed 24 kids at the University because they were broadcasting what was going on financially. The 6th Fleet couldn’t mute them, so the Greeks came in with tanks.
In 1968, we left 12 L’Ecluse Lane on Friday the 13th of September. We, my wife Joanne, my daughter Alexis and my son Damon, all flew through Rome on Pan Am to live in Athens, Greece.
Joanne’s father wanted to die in Greece and as a pilot for Pan Am, I decided I could commute.
Airbus 310 took my training at the factory in Toulouse, France
Joined Pan Am on 2/13/1967, and I was trained to fly as a Flight Engineer on Boeing 707 aircraft in San Fransisco. All new Flight Engineers were assigned to Long Range Flights, over 8 hours of flying.
So, while living in Athens, I flew to Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, to Buenos Aires, Argentina or Montevideo, Uruguay.
While we lived in Athens, we discovered that Greece was bring run by the American CIA through the Junta that they established. This JUNTA was the outcome of US and British policies in Greece at the end of WWII.
We will talk about that in a separate post and we’ll talk about Iran and the 1953 overthrow of the civilian government that wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil wealth in a separate post.
There will be another post, some day, about the United States and the CIA in Iraq.
Bob Dylan wrote: What Good am I.….
What good am I then to others and me If I’ve had every chance and yet still fail to see If my hands are tied must I not wonder within Who tied them and why and where must I have been?
Well here’s Ted Pateas trying to tell some of what I saw.
When I told my best friend, Robert Eugene Schulz, of what I had discovered, he couldn’t believe me. In the United States, before the Iraq war and all that horror, it was virtually impossible for intelligent people ito get a climate of opinion that the CIA was doing EVIL in the world.
It couldn’t come into their imaginations. Bob knew I was a leftist and had done acid in SFO and he thought I was crazy. Before he died he recognized that I was telling him hard FACTS.
Here are some of the FACTS I SAW on Earth, where we all live.
WAR
VIETNAM
Saw enough of young kids dying between 1963 – 1966 when I flew the C-130 for VR 3, Naval Air Transport Squadron 3. Young kids were being DRAFTED into the services and many were dying in Vietnam. We went in with 92 kids and took out 76 body bags, before they got caskets out there.
Many US kids got arrested, protesting the deal that was theirs. And we will talk about Chicago in 1968 on another post .
Vietnam veterans turned up to throw their medals on the ground before the Pentagon.
My old friend Lieutenant Commander Thomas C. Stringer, who was my navigator, often, in the C-130s and was assigned to Saigon in the security cellar, helping Kissinger write the withdrawal documents, was among those vetsthrowing his own medals in.
Autocracies hurt their own civilians.
I’m telling you that, that is a FACT. Not a Trump FACT, but a real world in your face kind of FACT. For example:
In the early hours of Saturday, 17 November 1973, Papadopoulos sent the army to suppress the student strike and sit-in of the Eleftheri Poliorkimeni (Ελεύθεροι Πολιορκημένοι, ‘Free Besieged’), as the students called themselves, at the Athens Polytechnic which had commenced on 14 November. Shortly after 3:00 am. EET, under almost complete cover of darkness, an AMX 30 tank crashed through the rail gate of the Athens Polytechnic with subsequent loss of life. An estimated 24 people were killed. The army also occupied Syntagma Square for at least the following day. Even the sidewalk cafes were closed.
ARGENTINA
Flying to BA, I got to know an very beautiful Argentine Flight Attendant who told me that her boyfriend was a University student and had been kidnapped and dropped out of a helicopter over the South Atlantic ocean.
As I got into it, I learned that the CIA was in the middle of the Argentine show, too .
In 1967 and 1968 I remember the mothers in Argentina, beating on their pots and pans around the government buildings while their protesting kids were being dropped out of helicopters over the South Atlantic.
Link to ifsw web: International Social Workers
The juntas organized and carried out strong repression of political dissidents (or perceived as such) through the government’s military and security forces, preparing for the implementation of neoliberal policies. They were responsible for the illegal arrests, tortures, killings and/or forced disappearances of an estimated 30,000 people. Assassination occurred domesticall y in Argentina via mass shootings and the throwing of live citizens from airplanes to death in the South Atlantic. Additionally, 12,000 prisoners, many of whom had not been convicted through legal processes, were detained in a network of 340 secret concentration camps located throughout Argentina.
From a Freedom of Information request………. 1977 CIA release
CO2901206 Approved for Release: 2018/10/02 CO2901206 Argentina 44.
Human rights violations remain a serious problem in Argentina, but the frequency and scale of abuses by the security forces and extra-legal rightist mili- tants has diminished noticeably in the past few months. The military government, moreover, has been somewhat more forthcoming in listing the names of those it de- tains and has announced its intention to free some 200 political prisoners. It is difficult to judge what proportion of have now been released or at least accounted for, since the total number of those arrested is not known. International criticism and investigations of the human rights situation in Argentina have generated considerable irritation among the officials charged with putting an end to leftist guerrilla warfare. Though the armed forces have had marked success against the terrorists, the job is still far from complete. If the guerrillas stage re- newed provocations, those in charge of counter-terrorist activities will probably push for a return to the brutal roundups of suspected leftist that were relatively common some months ago.
The distinctive aspect of this conflict was the initiative by the Mothers of the Plaza, a traditional, non-political group of women who were moved to civil resistance by their traditional status as mothers. It is precisely this unexpected nature of the participants that gave them a strategic edge in their conflict with the military junta.
The major tactic that initiated the movement was to meet in the Plaza de Mayo, in the center of Buenos Aires, facing the presidential palace, to protest the “disappearance” of their children. They wore headscarves with the names and sometimes carried photographs of their children who had disappeared, leaving the military junta baffled about how to respond. They began as individuals searching for their children through legal means in government offices, then escalated their tactics by gathering in the Plaza. Government officials at first tried to marginalize and trivialize them by calling them “las locas,” the madwomen, but they were baffled as to how to suppress this group for fear of a backlash among the population. As the movement grew and gathered international attention and widespread sympathy, the junta cracked down at the end of 1977, and fourteen of the mothers themselves were “disappeared.” After a period of careful regrouping, they returned to the Plaza despite the obvious danger in doing so.
International attention to the movement was cultivated as a strategy, facilitated by Argentina’s hosting of the World Cup in 1978, where the international press corps covered the Plaza demonstrations as a corollary to the sporting events, aided by the appearance of players from several European teams at the Plaza in a show of solidarity. Similarly, an international health conference in Buenos Aires was met by the Mothers and witnessed by the international media that broadcast their new slogan: “They took them away alive, we want them returned alive” (Ackerman and DuVall 2005: 276).
The distinctive aspect of this conflict was the initiative by the Mothers of the Plaza, a traditional, non-political group of women who were moved to civil resistance by their traditional status as mothers. It is precisely this unexpected nature of the participants that gave them a strategic edge in their conflict with the military junta.
The major tactic that initiated the movement was to meet in the Plaza de Mayo, in the center of Buenos Aires, facing the presidential palace, to protest the “disappearance” of their children. They wore headscarves with the names and sometimes carried photographs of their children who had disappeared, leaving the military junta baffled about how to respond. They began as individuals searching for their children through legal means in government offices, then escalated their tactics by gathering in the Plaza. Government officials at first tried to marginalize and trivialize them by calling them “las locas,” the madwomen, but they were baffled as to how to suppress this group for fear of a backlash among the population. As the movement grew and gathered international attention and widespread sympathy, the junta cracked down at the end of 1977, and fourteen of the mothers themselves were “disappeared.” After a period of careful regrouping, they returned to the Plaza despite the obvious danger in doing so.
International attention to the movement was cultivated as a strategy, facilitated by Argentina’s hosting of the World Cup in 1978, where the international press corps covered the Plaza demonstrations as a corollary to the sporting events, aided by the appearance of players from several European teams at the Plaza in a show of solidarity. Similarly, an international health conference in Buenos Aires was met by the Mothers and witnessed by the international media that broadcast their new slogan: “They took them away alive, we want them returned alive” (Ackerman and DuVall 2005: 276).
Recommend:
See the film ARGENTINA 1985 to see how it began to end.
Personally, I flew to South America all of 1967 and 1968. I was at JFK on my way to Buenos Aires when Pan Am’s Chief Pilot asked me if I wanted to go to Afghanistan. Those two years I was always in Argentina, Uruguay or Brazil.
Before the start of World War II in 1939, Argentina had maintained a long tradition of neutrality regarding European wars, which had been upheld and defended by all major political parties since the 19th century. One of the main reasons for this policy was related to Argentina’s economic position as one of the world’s leading exporters of foodstuffs and agricultural products, to Europe in general and to the United Kingdom in particular. Relations between Britain and Argentina had been strong since the mid-19 century, due to the large volume of trade between both countries, the major presence of British investments particularly in railroads and banking, as well as British immigration,[1] and the policy of neutrality had ensured the food supply of Britain during World War I against the German U-boat campaign.[2][3] At the same time, British influence over the Argentine economy was resented by nationalistic groups,[4] while German and Italian influence in Argentina was strong and growing mainly due to increased interwar trade and investment, and the presence of numerous immigrants from both countries, which, together with the refusal to break relations with the Axis as the war progressed, furthered the belief that the Argentine government was sympathetic to the German cause.[5] Because of strong divisions and internal disputes between members of the Argentine military,[3]Argentina remained neutral for most of World War II, despite pressure from the United States to join the Allies.[6] However, Argentina eventually gave in to the Allies’ pressure, broke relations with the Axis powers on 26 January 1944,[7] and declared war on 27 March 1945.[8]
Since the establishment of the office of President of the Republic in 1844, during the family dictatorship of the López family (1841–1870), Paraguay had 51 presidents. Between the end of the Paraguayan War in 1870 and the 1954 coup d’état, the country changed 44 presidents; 24 of them were removed from power by force.[2] Eventually, ArmyGeneralAlfredo Stroessner, supported by the Armed Forces and the right-wingColorado Party, seized power in the 1954 coup d’état. Relying on the military and the party as the “twin pillars” of his rule,[3] and ruling in the single-party system until 1962,[4] Stroessner was elected for eight consecutive terms before being ousted from power in the 1989 coup d’état. His 35-year-long rule was one of the longest in history by a non-royal leader.
It is a fact, Pan Am did not want our crews to be on the ground in Paraguay during Stroessner’s rule. We stopped for fuel or diverted to Asuncion, but never laid over there.
COUP in Dallas 1963
The world lived through the COUP in Dallas, when John F. Kennedy was killed by a group that involved CIA officials and Nazi spies.
Was on a flight, while training on C-130s at Seward AFB, when JFK was shot.
John Newman was a National Security Agency researcher. He did the research and H.P. Albarelli Jr. wrote the COUP book. Read them and decide for yourself.
MISSILE LAUNCH against the US 1968
Of course, you don’t have to believe me, but the Russian KGB actually pulled the trigger to launch a missile at Honolulu in 1968. You can do what I did, read the book that tells the story. Pay attention to what NIXON did with the intelligence data he obtained.
Can you imagine the outcome if the KGB had succeeded?
FREEDOM and SLAVERY
We remember the Indians on Wounded Knee and Dan Stanland (a VR-3 pilot who went into smuggling marijuana to the States from Mexico) flying his twin Beech up there, to drop in some food while they were surrounded by the FBI.
from the United Nations:
The latest Global Estimates of Modern Slavery, published by the International Labour Organization, International Organization for Migration and international human rights group Walk Free, revealed that last year, some 50 million people were living in modern slavery: 28 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriages.
NY Times has been running stories on migrant kids working in corporate factories in 2023 who are lost to the HHS.
Some of us seek to understand this Universe that we were born into. We SEEK FACTUAL knowledge that we all can agree on and then we spin tales to try to explain these facts.
CIA and Latin America:
From Wikipedia:
Argentina was particularly susceptible to military dictatorship during the Cold War, with ten separate military dictators ruling across four different regimes between 1943 and 1983. Brazil and Guatemala also saw five and six separate military dictators, respectively.[110]
The military dictatorship in Brazil was unique both in that it lasted nearly 20 years and that it allowed elections with competing political parties.[111]
El Salvador became a dictatorship in 1931, becoming a rare example of a partisan military dictatorship.[112] The country was ruled by the military-run National Pro Patria Party from 1933 to 1944, the Revolutionary Party of Democratic Unification from 1950 to 1960, and the National Conciliation Party from 1962 to 1979.[113][114]
Military dictatorship resurged in Latin America in the 1960s, with unstable economic conditions allowing military juntas to take power.[115] Between 1967 and 1991, 12 Latin American countries underwent at least one military coup, with Haiti and Honduras experiencing three and Bolivia experiencing eight.[116]
A large wave of military dictatorships occurred in the 1970s,[20] and most of Latin America was under the rule of military dictatorships by the middle of the decade.[117] Foreign aid to support Latin American militaries was one factor that allowed further military coups, and the political polarization of the Cold War played a role in creating the political instability that incentivized military rule.[118]
Foreign pressure, particularly from the Carter administration in the United States, prompted the end of several military dictatorships in the region in the late 1970s.[29] Several Latin American countries began to democratize by the early-1980s,[117] and the number of coups declined as well.[116]
Military dictatorship had virtually disappeared in Latin America by the end of the Cold War. The Argentine Carapintadas were unable to seize power in 1990 because there was strong public opposition to military rule. By the time of the 2009 Honduran coup, such events were considered unusual in the region.[119]
I just flew from JFK to CDG on an Airbus 330 in a first class seat and connected in Paris to an Air France 220. On the AF flight I was on standby and got the last seat available, 28 A. I had a good view of the wing and although it was raining I got some interesting shots of the left wing. Here is what it looked like just before we started taxiing out:
Notice the rear of the wing is all in line. On the way to the runway, the pilots set the flaps for takeoff. Here is an image of that:
You can see that the flaps have been extended.
Later we landed at Berlin Brandenburg and the flaps were extended for landing. You can see the flaps were extended further giving the wing the ability to fly the plane at about 135 miles per hour to help the pilots land and then stop the aircraft on the runway.
In the shot above, you can see the aileron at the left end of the wing. There is another aileron on the right wing and when the pilots want to turn the aircraft, they roll the yoke into the turn. If they want to turn left, the left aileron will elevate, that will reduce the lift on the left wing while the right aileron will be lowered increasing the lift on the right wing and the aircraft will go into a roll to the left. The aircraft will start turning to the left. When they get to the heading they want, the pilots will center the yoke and the aircraft will roll level.
Above the flaps there are spoilers. The two spoilers to the left are in flight spoilers and they can be raised in flight to slow the aircraft down. Using them causes some loss of fuel efficiency because they prevent the aircraft from slowing down by cruising forward with the throttles closed. The pilots in Berlin tried to avoid using inflight spoilers to preserve fuel efficiency.
The spoiler to the right, close to the fuselage is a ground spoiler and comes up on the ground along with the flight spoilers to help force the airplane to slow down.. The image below shows the spoilers up on the runway after landing
Below is a view is a Pan Am plane with flaps extended for landing.
In the shot above you can see the stabilizer, which rotates to trim the aircraft as the weight changes while we burn fuel in flight. That gets set by trim switches in the cockpit. Behind the stabilizer there are elevators that the pilots use to start a descent or a climb. And standing vertically is the rudder and on the back end there is a panel that can be used to trim the aircraft if you loose power on an engine.
So, you now have an idea how pilots control a plane in flight.
Married women were asked how many children they had borne, and children born between January and April of 1950 were tallied on special “infant cards” — another 17 questions long.
The infant cards were not retained. But answers from the census forms were coded onto punch cards and tabulated, for the first time ever, on a UNIVAC I computer, 16,000 pounds and 5,000 vacuum tubes of calculating muscle. Then the census forms were photographed, transferred to nearly 6,400 microfilm rolls and shipped to the National Archives for a 72-year rest.
A “climate of opinion” is established in civilisations, and we will visually demonstrate that it is this climate, rather than direct borrowing or transmission, that is the underlying force guiding intellectual inquiry.
This climate would be, of course, as capable of influencing scientific inquiry as it is of guiding any other conceptualization.
How does this work in the cosmic web?
How did it work in the Big Bang which was neither big nor gave a bang.
That is the WORK of VP Berlin, to visually demonstrate that this “climate of opinion” works in Human history and explore how it can work in the Cosmic Web.
Sitting alone in my home on L’Ecluse Lane, I envisioned what could have come before the “Big Bang” and the thought occurred:
THE DESIRE TO KNOW …. CAME …. BEFORE … THE BIG BANG!!!!!
WE ARE LIVING THE DANCE OF THE UNIVERSE!
We are ALL in the FLOW …
This I-Phone weighs 1/4 of a pound and IT has more than 10 times the computing power of the UNIVAC I, which weighed 16,000 pounds. If we take that process forward 75 years how much will the computer weigh and what will it’s computing power be? We won’t get down to the size of a Proton but it would be a very small and somehow run in Quantum Computing. and that would be astronomically higher in computing power than this I Phone.
“Quantum computing will be a significant advancement in the way we use computers, and will revolutionise many areas of society. This leap from classical computing will be able to be utilised for a massive variety of research and industry tasks, such as weather forecasting, business intelligence (Pandey & Ramesh, 2015), and medical research (Parsons, 2011). All this advancement, however, does not come without cyber security risks, and many cryptographers believe that “we are in a race against time to deploy post-quantum cryptography before quantum computers arrive” (Bernstein & Lange, 2017).
The threat of quantum computing to secure encryption is legitimate, provided that post-quantum cryptography is not rigorously developed and deployed before quantum computers are able to break current encryption.”
But what will they do for Homo Sapiens living on Earth NOW ? Will they help us find ETHICS ? Will they help us in FINANCIAL DISTRIBUTIONS ?
These computer technology changes will lead to what in visual descriptions of place and time?
Will we be able to trace all religions through all time and show the life style that was lived ?
RELIGIONS in all their forms…. :
5 STORY CAMERA at CERN
WEBB 16.5 FOOT CAMERA
THE PERIODIC TABLE
PSYCHIATRY
PSYCHEDELICS
LANGUAGE and POETRY and THEATER
MUSIC and DANCE and PAIN and SORROW
DON’T TOUCH THE THROTTLES UNTIL 700 FEET ABOVE THE RUNWAY AFTER YOU CLOSE THEM AT THE TOP of DESCENT.
How many factors do you have to play:
DESCENT vs MILES over the ground.
RUNWAY in use
WIND
ALTIMETER
MILES and TIME to fly
DO IT ALL BY HAND FLYING THE PLANE, CLOSE THE THROTTLES and touch them again at 700 feet above the ground, just as you put the gear down… you are in the FLOW …..
PS: (Pan Am Internal German Service IGS, never hurt a passenger in 43 years of flying.)
Deduce the existence of something without using any existential premises. Logicians should feel no more ashamed of their inability to perform this deduction than geometers should feel ashamed at being unable to square the circle.
“for from nothing to being there is no logical bridge” (1911, 40). James concludes: “The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy. All of us are beggars here, and no school can speak disdainfully of another or give itself superior airs” (1911, 46).
Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states—no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems—are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields—what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields!
The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t.
And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves.
And none of these poppings—if you look at them aright—amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.
What happened at the Capitol today was disgusting and a shock to American democracy. Trump was the actor in this show but he didn’t event the idea of the “stolen” election. It has been around since the civil war and has to do with white supremacy. Here is an article written in the NY Times on Saturday the 16th of January 2021. It was written by Jamelle Boulle. Everybody who reads this blog should read this article and understand it’s impact on life in America.
JAMELLE BOULLE
To explain the attack on the Capitol, you can’t just turn your focus to Donald Trump and his enablers. You must also look at the individuals and institutions that fanned fears of “voter fraud” to the point of hysteria among conservative voters, long before Trump. Put another way, the difference between a riot seeking to overturn an election and an effort to suppress opposing votes is one of legality, not intent. And it doesn’t take many steps to get from one to the other. Conservative belief in pervasive Democratic Party voter fraud goes back decades — and rests on racist and nativist tropes that date back to Reconstruction in the South and Tammany Hall in the North — but the modern obsession with fraud dates back to the 2000 election. That year, Republicans blamed Democratic fraud for narrow defeats in New Mexico, which George W. Bush lost by just a few hundred votes, and Missouri, where the incumbent senator, John Ashcroft, lost his re-election battle to a dead man. Ashcroft’s opponent, Mel Carnahan, was killed three weeks earlier in a plane crash, but his name was still on the ballot, with his wife running in his stead. Shocked Republicans blamed Ashcroft’s defeat on fraud. At Ashcroft’s election-night party, the state’s senior Republican senator, Kit Bond, said, “Democrats in the city of St. Louis are trying to steal this election.” In 2001, as the newly minted attorney general under President George W. Bush, Ashcroft announced a crackdown on voter fraud. “America has failed too often to uphold the right of every citizen’s vote, once cast, to be counted fairly and equally,” he said at a news conference that March: Votes have been bought, voters intimidated and ballot boxes stuffed. The polling process has been disrupted or not completed. Voters have been duped into signing absentee ballots believing they were applications for public relief. And the residents of cemeteries have infamously shown up at the polls on Election Day. The Republican National Committee supported this push, claiming to have evidence that thousands of voters had cast more than one ballot in the same election.
Over the ensuing years, under pressure from the White House ahead of the presidential election in 2004, the Justice Department ramped up its crusade against voter fraud. Of particular interest was ACORN, a now-defunct advocacy organization that was working — as the presidential election got underway — to register hundreds of thousands of low-income voters. Swing-state Republicans accused the group of “manufacturing voters,” and federal prosecutors looked, unsuccessfully, for evidence of wrongdoing. Later, Karl Rove would press President Bush’s second attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, to fire a number of U.S. attorneys for failure to investigate voter fraud allegations, leading to a scandal that eventually led to Gonzales’s resignation in 2007. ACORN and voter fraud would remain a bête noire for Republicans for the rest of the decade. Conservative advocacy groups and media organizations produced a steady stream of anti-ACORN material and, as the 2008 election campaign heated up, did everything they could to tie Democratic candidates, and Barack Obama in particular, to a group they portrayed as radical and dangerous. ACORN, Rush Limbaugh said in one characteristic segment, has “been training young Black kids to hate, hate, hate this country.” During his second debate with Obama, a few weeks before the election, the Republican nominee, John McCain, charged that ACORN “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” And his campaign materials similarly accused Obama, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party of orchestrating a vast conspiracy of fraud. “We’ve always known the Obama-Biden Democrats will do anything to win this November, but we didn’t know how far their allies would go,” read one mailer. “The Obama-supported, far-left group, ACORN, has been accused of voter-registration fraud in a number of battleground states.” McCain and the Republican Party devoted much of the last weeks of the election to a voter fraud scare campaign with ACORN as the villain. And while, in the wake of the election, these allegations of illegal voting never panned out, the conservative fixation with voter fraud would continue into the Obama years and beyond.
Not that this was a shock. As an accusation, “voter fraud” has been used historically to disparage the participation of Black voters and immigrants — to cast their votes as illegitimate. And Obama came to office on the strength of historic turnout among Black Americans and other nonwhite groups. To the conservative grass roots, Obama’s very presence in the White House was, on its face, evidence that fraud had overtaken American elections. In 2011, Republicans in Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin capitalized on their legislative gains to pass new voter restrictions under the guise of election protection. Other states slashed early voting and made it more difficult to run registration drives. One 2013 study found that in states with “unencumbered Republican majorities” and large Black populations, lawmakers were especially likely to pass new voter identification laws and other restrictions on the franchise. The 2012 election saw more of the same accusations of voter fraud. Donald Trump, who had flirted with running for president that year, called the election a “total sham and a travesty” and claimed that Obama had “lost the popular vote by a lot.” According to one survey taken after the election, 49 percent of Republican voters said they thought ACORN had stolen the election for the president. ACORN, however, no longer existed. It closed its doors in 2010 after Congress stripped it of federal funding in the aftermath of a scandal stoked by right-wing provocateurs, whose accusations have since been discredited. The absence of any evidence for voter fraud was not, for Republicans, evidence of its absence. Freed by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which ended federal “preclearance” of election laws in much of the South, Republican lawmakers passed still more voter restrictions, each justified as necessary measures in the war against fraud. Prominent Republican voices continued to spread the myth. “I’ve always thought in this state, close elections, presidential elections, it means you probably have to win with at least 53 percent of the vote to account for fraud,” Scott Walker, then the governor of Wisconsin, said in a 2014 interview with The Weekly Standard. “One or two points, potentially.” Rank-and-file Republicans had already been marinating in 16 years of concentrated propaganda about the prevalence of voter fraud by the time Donald Trump claimed, in 2016, that Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote with millions of illegal ballots. If Republican voters today are quick to believe baroque conspiracy theories about fabricated and stolen votes, then it has quite a lot to do with the words and actions of a generation of mainstream Republican politicians who refused to accept that a Democratic majority was a legitimate majority.
The narrative of fraud and election theft that spurred the mob that stormed the Capitol would be unintelligible without the work of the Republican Party, which inculcated this idée fixe in its voters. “Stop the Steal” wasn’t a Trump innovation as much as it was a new spin on an old product line that, even after the violence on Jan. 6, Republicans are still selling.
Richard Apelt has been my friend for many years. We ran into one another while I was living in Greece. He had been a corpsman with the Marines in Vietnam. He got caught in a shoot out and got wounded. He was working on a man’s chest wound when a sniper hit the man’s head. Richard played dead for many hours while the Viet Cong were there and finally got back to American lines.
When he got back to the States he worked in shipyards and painted boats. He went down ro Florida, lived on Stock Island and fished for lobsters. He knew Jimmy Buffett before the world knew Jimmy Buffett. Later he went back up in Virginia and was digging ditches for Con Ed. He went to his new girl friend’s house after work. She was sitting on the porch with her girlfriend. That girl said: “Is that Richard? He looks like a Grave Digger.” That name has stuck by him, for many years.
When we met on the island of Crete, in 1972, he and a friend of his were living on the beach at Sitia. Grave was into traveling as far as he could get, to see the things that the young kids who died in Vietnam could never see. The beach was pretty full of hippies from all over Europe.
I was flying for Pan Am and was on some free time. I was there with my wife Joann and our two kids, Alexis (6) and Damon (4). We were staying in a hotel in Sitia and would come out to the beach everyday, with three liters of wine. One evening, as we were leaving, Alexis said she wanted to stay on the beach and Grave said he would look after her, so she stayed. The next morning, when we arrived she was playing with some French kids down by the water. She saw us and waved at us and then got in a little boat and went for a ride.
During this time, Greece ws being run by a group of Colonels that were put into power by the American CIA. Before he left Greece, Grave wrote an article to the Prime Minister about taking down the militaristic symbol they were using to identify themselves.
Well. Joann got really frightened by that letter and there was nothing I could do, to calm her down. We had been on a small island and had been flying a kite. When Damon brought it down, the rope got completely tangled. Grave and I sat there and spent several hours untangling the rope, but I couldn’t untangle her fear.
Well, Grave set out on a long journey — through Turkey, across the Shah’s Iran, into Afghanistan and down into India and into Australia. He had bought a small cotton backpack and a hunting knife and he told Damon that if anything exciting happened with the knife, he would write Damon about it. As he crossed India, he saw some Elephants, but they stayed at a distance and Grave wrote a card Damon saying they must have known he had the knife and they didn’t bother him.
Over the years, Grave and I have stayed friends. He says that the books I gave him when he left Greece helped him on his personal journey, especially Krishnamurti’s The Flight of the Eagle. Well, eventually Grave became a postman in Tulsa, Oklahoma and soon got transferred to St. Petersburg, Florida. There he got married to Susan, an American Indian woman. I was at that wedding and visited him in St. Petersburg.
When he retired, he sold his house in Florida and came up to New York. He now lives in Jay, NY. On the 18th of December in 2019, he and Sue left their cabin in the woods, to go to town. On the way home, there was some snow on the ground and Grave got sideways on the road. Soon, a car being driven by a young woman hit his car and killed Susan. He has continued to live in Jay and is getting better, all the time. He has started hiking with a group of women who have been hiking for many years. He is the only male on their hikes. After the Trump attack on the US Capitol in Washington, D.C., Grave wrote this piece. I asked him if it was OK with him for me to put it on my blog and the said: “OK”. So here it is:
Yesterday I enjoyed my finest day yet winter hiking in Eden. Eight others and I under the spell cast by the essence of the earth and sky. There was only room for love. That is what is possible in this Gaian world of infinite possibilities. It is time to search our soul, to rummage through all of our learned wisdom, to look for clues for our existence from the shambles that existence has left scattered throughout the Garden and the mind of man. We have had a bit of chaos recently, chaos that caught the attention of every facet of our population, each facet a universe unto its own. Consider this idea of what it is or may be. Change is a daily occurrence, it is met differently according to the conditioned state of each being. Change sweeps across the plains leaving clumps of this here and that there. The bigger clumps get the most attention and predominate. But there are many smaller clumps, oddities that we can scarcely imagine, lying disenfranchised out of sight out of mind, dormant, festering, awaiting the right conditions to awaken and express themsves. Humans use and abuse every nook and cranny of our Gaian World. I hope the use of that word doesn’t scare you. Maybe just the tiniest sip of kool-aid will spark your mind. Many little clumps of humanity, each a delusional universe of its own can be brought to a fever by the alchemist also of the most delusional sort. Now you have to cognate a moment and understand that universal physical laws apply to humans also. In brief, the Donald fanned these clumps, used them, became almost a God to them because he gave them meaning and life and he said he loved them. I think a great many could be manipulated into our greatest nightmare. We need to remember that these clumps are aspects of ourselves. If we can overcome some of our conditioned thought process and get in touch with that bit of our DNA, that dormant spark within that allowed us to evolve to the tipping point where the journey downward spirals and take a breath, if that then there is not only hope but answers. And so I ask you what is love.
Today, we learned that Joe Biden will be the 46th President of the United States and that pleases me because he will bring some decency to the Presidential office that has been missing through the Trump years. It will be a rough go for the next several weeks until the installation but we will deal with it.
Today, we faced the closure of Tegel Airport in Berlin, Germany. Having spent a lifetime as a pilot, I have seen many airports but not one of them was better designed for passengers. The architecture of Tegel enabled cars to come inside the Hexagonal building. The design had agents at each gate to check the passenger in and the passenger walked about 50 yards to the boarding door, No long corridors full of stores selling whatever, no separate security portal, a real pleasure for the passengers.
Flughafen Tegel
Luftbilder
8. August 2003
Pan Am was one of four carriers that were allowed to fly into Berlin when it was a divided city after WWII. We flew Boeing 727s and later Boeing 737s in and out of Tegel. We flew to Hamburg, Munich, Nuremberg, Frankfurt and Stuttgart for the Internal German Service, IGS and we picked up passengers in Frankfurt and London and we flew them on our aircraft to the Scandinavian countries and to all the Iron Curtain countries. We also flew to Athens,Greece and to Zurich, Switzerland and we did Charters to Italy, the Canary Islands, Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia and others I don’t remember now.
There were about 250 PanAm pilots based in Berlin. About a third of them lived in Berlin, as I did, but the others commuted back and forth to the States. The pilots that flew these routes often, in the three corridors that were agreed to during the war, would come back to Berlin at 10,000 feet, the maximum altitude the Air Force had agreed on during WWII. Then. in Berlin, we were cleared for an approach to Tegel. So, we determined which runway we were going to and how many miles we would have to fly, we would consider the wind and the local altimeter settings. Then, the pilot would decide where to pull back the thrust levers to idle, he would stay at altitude to slow down to 250 knots airspeed and then start a decent to the ILS altitude of about 2000 feet. At that altitude, he would level the aircraft and loose enough airspeed to get to his final cruising speed of 180 knots and would put out his flaps. He would hold that speed until he reached the decent beam of the ILS system and then would start desending. At seven hundred feet, he would put down the landing gear and slow to his landing speed, around 140 knots and THEN HE WOULD MOVE THE THROTTLES FOR THE FIRST TIME since he went to idle, at the top of decent.
A very old friend of mine, Tom Stringer, put out an email today saying he was afraid of Bloodshed in the streets. I don’t fear that at all and I sent him an email:
Toomey: You know how quiet a street I live on. You probably do not know how LITTLE time I spend watching the news. But sitting here on LEcluse Lane: I have NO fear of bloodshed in America.
I never worry about immigrants learning English: because their kids learn English.
I don‘t worry about looters stealing TV sets, because the white power elite have been stealing from the poor, black and indigenous people for several centuries and the looters are just saying: We do exist.
I am not afraid of Donald Trump. He is a man that has the intellectual capacity of a maladjusted teenager. I do not believe the US military will do ANYTHING:
to help him steal the election.
So, my advice:
Enjoy the quiet place where you live and DON‘T watch the news.
