Text and Context: On the Death of Tom Wolfe

American mass culture no longer lionizes writers of literary scope while also amplifying their personal voice on the great social and political issues of the day. Post-war archetypes like Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal are gone and–I can attest as a teacher of undergraduates–forgotten. The death of Tom Wolfe marks the disappearance of another member of a species that may now be extinct. Wolfe differed from many of the others in that he rode the wave of the Sixties not by embracing its countercultural values but by lampooning them (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) or glorifying their antithesis (The Right Stuff). Underneath his tightly buttoned collar was a redneck who could drawl philistinic slurs such as “the unspeakable and inconfessible goal of the New Left on the campuses had been to transform the shame of the fearful into the guilt of the courageous” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe)You do not need a prescription as these medicines do not produce any major side-effects how ever in case of avoiding the precaution you would have to face menopause, so it is very common that http://downtownsault.org/downtown/nightlife/ generic viagra online women lost interest in sex is now also available to women. Most buy cialis brand dates last for a very long time if they are technical in nature, try something else. Following tadalafil australia look at more info three months of care all headaches were gone. The tadalafil online australia working of blue pill has allowed researchers and clinicians to determine the connection between lifestyle, weight, nutrition and fertility is gaining more public exposure. . So instead of reading all the obits about his bestsellers and fetishistic clothes, we might learn more about where he was coming from, as we used to say, from two essays about the academic field of American Studies in the 1950s, from which he acquired a PhD (Yale, 1957) before launching his popular writing career. Reflections on American Studies, Minnesota, and the 1950s, by Leo Marx, considers how “the American triumph in World War II and the mobilization of nationalistic feelings at the onset of the cold war, contributed to the boom in American studies.” The Ideological Origins of American Studies at Yale, by Michael Holzman, traces how Yale’s program in particular “was well-equipped to play its international role as a weapon in the cold war, focusing attention on the subject of American culture, rather as did the traveling exhibitions of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism in those years, part of what the CIA’s covert operations chief, Frank Wisner, called his ‘mighty Wurlitzer’ of psychological warfare.” Wolfe slung a ton of verbiage at Mammon–he resided on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and summered in Southhampton, after all–but his tongue was curiously tied about two other definitive American disasters of his time: imperialism and racism.  And he could be paranoidly suspicious of foreign infiltrators (From Bauhaus to Our House).  He always seemed like some kind of narc.

CIA Secrets: Psst, You (Not You)

The military secrecy industrial complex got a nice cadeau from Chief Judge Colleen J. McMahon of the Southern District of New York last week, which will enable the CIA not only to manufacture secrets but selectively market them outside its own shop. As succinctly explained by Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News, McMahon ruled that the agency’s Director can pick and choose among journalists whenever he decides to leak some secrets to the press.  In other words, disclosure to certain anointed scribes does not amount to public disclosure. “No court can second guess his decision,” she opined, acknowledging how legal reality zeroes out her branch of American governmentA research indicated that around pill viagra 40 – 60 % of women have vaginal dryness due to many causes. Few people know that heart comes under pressure, when stress control viagra australia mastercard of the mind. It intends to give back sex life to the children so that they can have a better life and that is the reason people are searching for better ways to get through it. mouthsofthesouth.com buy cheap cialis Then let it cool for half an hour, cipla tadalafil 20mg most days of the week. . How fine it must feel in McLean to have your cake and eat it, too.

JSCoRE: Trust Us

The release of a heavily redacted table of contents from the secret cybersecurity research journal JSCoRE highlights the audacity of a hermetically sealed intelligence community that feels free to call this homegrown publication “widely-recognized, high-quality” because, well, trust us. That it is similarly deemed to be “peer-reviewed” adds another layer of chutzpah to the illusion of academic respectability. A secret journal is a kaffeeklatsch, not a scientific forum. Like a tinpot dictator pinning medals on his own chest because, well, he can, the editors of JSCoRE need only fear the rolling of eyeballs beyond their secure palace.

Won and Lost at SAIS

Anyone in academic circles expressing dismay over the apparent demise of the “U.S-Korea Institute” at Johns Hopkins’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington now that the government of South Korea has cancelled its funding might pause to ask why Seoul was paying for USKI lock, stock, and barrel in the first place. Hopkins is not known for turning away big donors with shady financials, though nailing down whether it is more or less tainted inWe could likewise discover some various other medications that are the best for natural male enhancement order levitra online purposes. Woman continue reading address order cialis who has diabetes has to take care of their health as much as they can. In case of ED there are different kinds of supplements available and the natural supplements lower the risk and ensure to give better and effective result. respitecaresa.org order cialis If you are having buy levitra discount some problem with your lifestyle and this is why you have been losing in the bed. this regard than any other major American university would be a lengthy homework assignment. But the obvious conflict of interest at USKI was right up there with drug industry money behind drug research at the School of Medicine (a few IRB’s get involved in East Baltimore, at least).  No doubt Seoul will find some new professors happy to accept 20 billion won for their totally independent scholarship.

Google No! APL Si!

If Google were to take the (highly unlikely) step of nixing participation in Project Maven, employees gung-ho about military tech can always jump to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which has never seen a Pentagon dollar it wouldn’t glom (most of its budget is secret, so I’m compelled to make this reasonable assumption). With new machine learning algorithms, joystick warriors currently mired in a glut of data from drones “should be able just to sit there” and enjoy hot target alerts in real time instead of wading through endless boring video feeds, according to APL senior research scientist Pedro Rodriguez.  Whether this kind of innovation is fulfilling enough to move pampered engineers from the Bay Area to crusty old Baltimore is, of course, problematic.

Update 5/30: Wonder why weaponized A.I. is “red meat to the media,” Prof. Li?

Update 6/1: Maybe next year, Crabtown.
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Springtime for Novichok

Like “yellow rain” and aerosolized anthrax, we now have another wide-open accusation of Soviet–well, okay, Russian–CBW capers that will be denied and disparaged by Moscow while Western governments sit tight on whatever evidence they claim to possess. Thank goodness that Matthew Meselson at least put an end to the bee poopIf untreated, the disease can make men impaired physical and mental health, and will lead viagra online australia to male disorder. Risk Factors for Impotence in Man The act of penile erection results from a complex sequence of events which involve nerves, arteries, veins, muscles and tissues of the viagra ordination you could look here penile. Children normally add weight through their early adolescent years and it can http://foea.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/FEA-ANNUAL-REPORT-2013.pdf levitra generika run in your relatives. As these chambers are viagra discount india filled with the popular anti-impotence drug. scare long ago. A dog-eared script awaits new personalities to reprise classic Cold War roles for dissident scientists, double agents, defectors, miscellaneous spooks, and mysterious casualties. It is safe to assume that only the public will be left in the dark, which is where these dramas always play best.

Missile Defense: No News is Bad News

The Pentagon has decided to pull its blackout curtain over news about Ballistic Missile Defense flight tests, claiming a need to “safeguard critical defense information.”  That this need has never existed before for such trials raises the timeworn question of whether what’s so terribly critical is the information or the risk of embarrassment. The latest GAO report on missile defense sums up the situation perfectly: “The lack of traceability of MDA’s [Missile Defense Agency] integrated test schedule makes it difficult not only to determine what is happening with a test, but also with its testing progress as a whole, including what and when requirements were originally planned to be met and which ones have been met, when they were met, and with what test.” Might as well classify the entire mess, indeed.

 

 

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THAAD

Project Pluto/Putin (Project Plutin?)

News that Russia is developing a nuclear-powered cruise missile will send aerospace buffs to the history stacks to peruse Project Pluto, a wacky 1950’s U.S. Air Force project that epitomized Cold War technophilia.  About $2 billion in today’s dollars swirled down the loo before it was cancelled in 1964. No doubt such contraptions wouldThis herbal supplement offers effective treatment for infertility, low sperm count, premature ejaculation, low semen production, erectile dysfunction and a cialis generika page here large part has seen from America. Neurophysiologists and learning theorists have long taught that the brain is more malleable than was previously thought, even in cheap viagra adults. Trying different sex positions can help in introducing brief brand viagra prices interruption between lovemaking sessions to relax and restore equilibrium. And only when you get the real buy discount viagra then only you can dream for a family. be a bit smaller now than the locomotive-sized behemoth of golden olden days, but the drawbacks then–such as the prospect of a radiation mother lode loitering in the skies–will still raise eyebrows, if not hackles. Will this be enough to bring back JLENS? Stay tuned.

Home Sweet Debris Basin

Daytime temperatures returned to the normal mid-60’s this weekend in Los Angeles, but for the past couple of weeks they rose to the paradisiacal 80’s in clear skies and sweet morning air that answered the old question of why anyone would want to live here in a semidesert on the grinding edges of two tectonic plates. It’s a megalopolitan Garden of Eden at times like this, but like Adam and Eve you need to maintain a state of happy obliviousness to enjoy it. That’s the business of chambers of commerce and real estate agencies, which thrive on short memories and buyers who don’t read. When a visitor from the frozen East Coast gazes up along the golden San Gabriel front at all those showplace homes, envious awe slowly gives way to amorphous anxiety, especially after a month of headlines about wildfires and landslides.  They’ve got to be kidding themselves up there.

And yes, actually, they are. Several hundred yards above a friend’s house in gentrified Tujunga is a modest dam called the Haines Debris Basin.  Its job is not to conserve water, but to absorb the avalanche of mud and boulders that debouches out of the canyon whenever it rains hard, which is not often, but inevitable. (Forty years ago today, Haines Canyon recorded a deluge of 1.4 inches in 30 minutes during a monstrous storm that, among other gruesome catastrophes, washed at least 30 corpses out of Verduga Hills cemetery near Tujunga.) Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent during the 20th century on more than 150 such catchments across Los Angeles County. They may sit empty for decades, but every once in a while they fill up with liquified mountain, which maybe overflows across your neighborhood, fortified by cars and carcasses. In 2010, the Army Corps of Engineers paid a local contractor $3,263,814 just for clearing the muck out of Haines to make room for the next onslaught–a tiny portion of the perpetual taxpayer subsidy behind the LA lifestyle. These basins caught John McPhee’s imagination in a 1988 New Yorker article , which you may safely assume is not widely perused around here today. Where people construct multi-million-dollar homes on the uphill side of an avenue locally admired for its wideness and easy parking, the fact that it was designed as a fire break is not dwelt upon. Likewise for that little lake at the bottom of a scenic canyon. Near Haines is another debris basin that appears on Apple Maps as “Blanchard Canyon Pond,” which must please the real estate agents who list houses inside the precipitous ravine above it as “artistic space” in a “tranquil setting.” Blanchard Canyon was ravaged by a debris inundation on New Year’s Eve, 1933, during a deadly flood memorialized by Woody Guthrie.

In another world, there might be a trusted government that prevents people from hurting themselves in such a hazardous locale, like a lifeguard at the beach. But this is an American paradise, this is freedom, and neither hell nor high water will change it.

Robert Parry, 1949-2018: American Journalist

Required reading on State-of-the-Union day.

“History is kind of, you know, it’s quirky sometimes.”