Cerebral Flatulence

2008 was a tough, tough year for me personally and for my community. Major fires, a flurry of deaths, evacuations, and financial disruptions piled on to the stack of mundane concerns that are part of every life. The hardships produced a response often experienced, yet curiously hard to remember during the blues — a creative eruption of energy, ideas and action.

Here in Big Sur the locals dove in to recovery mode even as government agencies dithered and blithered. The Coast Property Owners’ Association rapidly organized a relief effort that led to real money and processed paperwork for dozens and dozens of residents. My landlord Jali Morgenrath and his son Tevye went to town on the property; before they were through they and their crew built reinforced concrete bunkers, hung steel shutters, piled earth berms and stacked 40-foot containers like so many Legos, on their own time and nickel, to prepare for potentially catastrophic landslides. (I live literally on Ground Zero; my apartment sits next to flood-prone Pheneger Creek, on the site of a building blown away by a post-fire slide in the late 1970’s.)

Fact: I’ve yet to receive a dime from the governments I pay for, for two weeks evacuation and loss of business and income. The Bush Administration never declared California’s worst-ever fire season a federal disaster, and the nincompoops in Sacramento have no money or interest for the rest of us anyway. NOTE: The government scientists and surveyors have been on the ball and full-throated in their response, including advanced slide and flood prediction from the USGS and a portable Doppler unit from NOAA, to help us through the winter without our forests and shrubs.

In my own affairs, I responded to the discomfort and disruption of last year by returning to some pleasures of childhood with a man’s spirit and focus. I rediscovered the stimulation of tactile crafts, of sanding and filling and carving and painting scale models; and I reconnected with a world of popular culture, of pulp magazines from the 30’s and 40’s, of sci-fi paperbacks from the 60’s and 70’s, of classic American films from the past century. And I did all this through the Medium of our time, the Internet. In our era we, the aficionados of whatever, can find each other across the developed world and convene in online communities to rub our enthusiasms together and foster growth in our chosen passions. Who knew, for example, that so many other people besides me are enthralled by Clark Ashton Smith? Or stop-motion animation? Or retro tales about Mars? Or highly-detailed model kits of fossil spacecraft?

In the process of feeding my head I reconnected with my own Muse, and transfused an old project with fresh life and spirit. Look for a five-minute trailer at ComicCon 2009 in San Diego this July.

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, photographed by Annie Liebovitz (who somehow managed to capture Vermeer’s light on film — mysterious wonder!) in the autumn of her long, remarkable reign.

Many great authors have flowered or continued to illuminate this Second Elizabethan Age. Coward, Maugham, Greene, Fleming, Pinter, Shaffer, Burgess, Brunner, Moorcock, Rice & Lloyd Webber, Merchant & Ivory, and, of course, Rowling have graced her nation, and the world, with British storytelling and notions for nearly as long as Dickens, Tennyson, Stevenson, Kipling and Conan Doyle graced Victoria’s.

Elizabeth II has had to reign over a painful and vexing era in British history, that of the dismantling of the British Empire and the rise of the Commonwealth. The Empire required a Sovereign; The Commonwealth and the monarchy are awkwardly exploring the role of Nobility in our times. On the whole the British footprint had as much cushioned sole as hobnails. Colonialism’s blighted legacy is nowhere good, and the Boer War, Amritsar, the Mau Mau, and Malaya were only the worst imperial terrors, but in general (in my opinion) the British sought to do well for their subjects after the shouting.

They still do a great deal to of good, as Oxfam and many other British humanitarian organizations demonstrate in their ongoing efforts. In a poetic way, rather as Gondor preserved of the best of Numenor, so the modern UK preserves the best of the Empire’s impulses.

Her Majesty’s style was recently remarked upon by Simon Doonan; he recounted an exchange with The Queen’s wardrobe designer. The gentleman sharply brushed aside suggestions for making Her Majesty’s style more chic, replying that Her Majesty must always appear kind and welcoming. Chic was unkind, he said, implying (I think) that high fashion emphasizes the competitive in women.

There is, in Liebovitz’s portrait, a sense of the Queen of the Hobbits in the picture; of the Matriarch, quietly determined to preserve all that is homely and good and nourishing about the Shire. The man who in times to come may be remembered as the greatest author of her reign, J.R.R. Tolkien, distilled so much that he loved about his country into that literary creation, which is why it still resonates so deeply in the public’s consciousness. I mean no disrespect to Her Majesty when I league her with Frodo and Bilbo, for Tolkien’s epic is truly about the virtue and value of those very British characters.

The New York Times’ Scott Shane analyzes AG nominee Eric Holder’s statements yesterday at his Senate confirmation hearing. Mr. Holder emphatically stated that waterboarding is torture, which is obvious, and opened a big ol’ can of worms for (soon-to-be) former Bush Administration officials, and possibly career civil servants.

Yet his statement, amounting to an admission that the United States may have committed war crimes, opens the door to an unpredictable train of legal and political consequences. It could potentially require a full-scale legal investigation, complicate prosecutions of individuals suspected of committing terrorism and mire the new administration in just the kind of backward look that Mr. Obama has said he would like to avoid.

[…]

In recent weeks, Mr. Bush, Vice President Cheney and other officials have strongly defended their counterterrorism methods and credited them with preventing attacks on the United States since 2001. Their implicit argument — that the Obama administration should not question policies that protected Americans — was made more explicit and personal by Michael V. Hayden, the departing C.I.A. director, in a session with reporters on Thursday.

“If I’m going to go to an officer and say, ‘I’ve got a truth commission, or I want to post all your e-mails, or, well, we’ve got this guy from the bureau who wants to talk to you,’ ” Mr. Hayden said, it would discourage such a C.I.A. officer from taking risks on behalf of the new president’s policies.

“We have no right to ask this guy to bet his kid’s college education on who’s going to win the off-year election,” Mr. Hayden said, alluding to legal fees that such a C.I.A. officer might face.

Excuse me?

We, The People, elected by popular vote, and the Electoral College confirmed, the incoming Commander-in-Chief, and we expect his principles to be followed by his subordinates.

We, The People, would like some real, public proof that the secret policemen have in fact protected us from the Bad Guys.

We, The People, would like to stop having our phones tapped, our persons searched, our travel interfered with, and our lives endangered by overaged cowboys.

We, The People, expect that when a person takes the CIA’s oath and pay that (s)he knows what they’re getting into, which especially includes “taking risks on behalf of the new president’s policies.”

We, The People, are paying for that CIA officer’s kid’s college education, often to the detriment of our own kids’ needs.

We, The People, are not holding a gun to this CIA officer’s head and forcing him to remain in our service. As so many stiffs have brayed over that last few years, personal choices entail personal accountability. If you choose to follow an order to commit criminal acts, you can choose to say No. The 20th Century taught us that much.

Dave Davies of the Philadelphia Inquirer asks, “When a shady pol squeezes, where do you turn?”

“It’s a big step, but I think we’d have less mischief if now and then one of those who gets a shady proposal from a pol called back and said, ‘You know, I’m going to take this down to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and if they say this is cool, we’ll talk about it.’ “

Yes, politicians are fellow citizens doing their jobs, so hey, I should lighten up, huh?

No.

These fellow citizens use other peoples’ money to get jobs that give them power tell the rest of us how to run our lives. The folks who pay the piper call the tune, and despite much effort, the power brokers who fund our politicians will not permit the rest of us to meddle in their deliberations. We, the hoi polloi, must buy back our governments from the perennnial few. And politicians should remember that they are temp workers, hired for the moment to manage our collective affairs.

Maybe we should have citizen “minders” to act as revolving Jiminy Crickets for our hard-pressed legislators and executives. Joe and Jane Bleaux’s who’d keep an eye on things for a week at a time, like jury duty.

If politicians don’t like the new order, why, then, they can find other work. You know, just like the rest of us.

Paul Newman, 1925-2008.

Better men and women than I are writing encomia and obituaries for him now, who passed away over the weekend. Real movie stars have been rare throughout the medium’s history; few performers possess the magic mix of bankability, looks, talent, skill, focus, chutzpah and willingness to stay public. Newman chose roles with texture and sharp edges and created a vision of humane, adult American masculinity. He was most definitely a Have who paid a lot of attention to Have Nots; born to some means, he graduated from Yale without the need for a skull or bone, and his charitable works share the man’s effective celebrity. Everyone knows (and eats) Newman’s Own products and may know about the Hole-In-The-Wall Gang camps, but perhaps you don’t know about the Westport Country Playhouse, where generations of American actors walked the boards and honed their skills. Or his support for the 1st Amendment. Or gay rights.

Paul Newman was a great actor, though he personally didn’t rank acting highest amongst his accomplishments. However, the man informed every role with his character, and his corpus models a a strong, trustworthy, compassionate male authority figure. You know, the Dad we all want to have and who some of us were lucky enough to grow up with.

…

[Compare Paul Newman to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. When these men and their retinue took over the American government it was snidely said, “Now the grown-ups are in charge.” My. Some grown-ups. There are terms for adults who bully, lie, kill, steal and avoid accountability. We call them sociopaths and criminals. Not grown-ups.]

I popped off about this astounding item noted on DANGER ROOM, WIRED Magazine’s fine blog on matters defensive. Russia is expanding its range of classic spacecraft available to the general (well-heeled) public! Joining the world-famous Soyuz, originally engineered for the Soviet Moon missions, is the first Soviet space station — Almaz!

Whoo-hoo!!! Un-fnorging believable.

Darn, but us and the Rooskies designed well back in the day, didn’t we? We really, really should have built the Manned Orbiting Lab and all that extra Apollo stuff — call it Classic Space and sell surplus hardware on eBay! Use the Skylab rescue layout to send 3 paying doofusses around the Moon! A Lunar Rover ought be worth at least as much as a 1971 Hemi ‘Cuda convertible, huh?

Back to our regularly-scheduled serious commentary.

– cross-posted [with later edits] from DANGER ROOM

DANGER ROOM’S “Five for Fighting” cliptage feature links to Bill Sweetman’s fine blog entry at Ares, about Russia’s drone-launching rocket.

Now that Russian 9M534 rocket and 9M61 drone is dark cool — proven delivery system, tough little plane with A PULSEJET (famously used in the V-1 “buzz-bomb” - simplest, highest power-to-weight powerplant known), and it swarms. You can lay down a barrage with its own spotter squadron — and catch Bill Sweetman’s last paragraph:

“Operational status of the 9M534 round is uncertain, although most of the Smerch rockets identified by manufacturer Splav - including sensor-fused explosively formed projectile (EFP) submunitions and a fuel-air explosive (FAE) rocket - are believed to be operational. The UAV system has been criticised on the grounds that a reconnaissance shot gives away the location of the firing battery; however, a more logical use might be for strike damage assessment, particularly in support of a sensor-fused weapon attack. In that case, the “spotter” round could be launched with the first ripple of rockets, refining the targeting of the next salvo.”

Now, given the reportedly poor performance of Russian air support in the Georgian War, were these used at all? Or is their operational status “uncertain?”

– cross-posted from DANGER ROOM

Frabularity:

Larry Niven was asked in an interview about why Hollywood hadn’t adapted more quality sci-fi written in the last 80 years. He snorted and couldn’t explain, and gave out his agent’s address to anyone interested in adapting his works! Supposedly, the music producer Quincy Jones owns the rights to “Ringworld“, but we’ll see.

Forget the Marvel comics adaptations — Alfred Bester wrote comics as well as sci-fi, and “The Stars My Destination” is a most grown-up yet dazzling comics opera (the plot inspired by ‘The Count of Monte Cristo”, no less).

Heinlein’s works would, I think, benefit from a “retro” treatment; his 40’s and 50’s writing is as good as Howard Hawks’ movies, and as ‘American.’

“The City and the Stars” is a wonderful choice; “Childhood’s End” has the terrible majesty of “2001″ but TCATS has a calm grandeur suited, I think, to a European director and style of filmmaking.

David Brin deserves more and better than “The Postman” — “Startide Rising” was FUN…

C.J. Cherryh’s work cries out for adaptation. Gritty, realistic backgrounds, believable characters, grown-up relationships and big ideas.

– cross-posted in the London Times, on an article about the “Greatest Sci-Fi Films Never Made”

Drones are big. Big news, big ups, and getting bigger.

How big can drones get? Well, if by drone one means “uncrewed remotely-piloted aerospace craft”, they can get reeeeally big. During the U.S. atmospheric nuclear tests in the Pacific, B-29’s were converted into giant drones and flown through the mushroom clouds on sampling and blast-effect missions:

“I’ll never forget seeing those B-29 bombers move up to the end of the runway by the Rawinsonde shack and go through warm-up of their four engines, without a soul inside of them! As you well know, these were drone aircraft that had a ground controller that taxied them out for takeoff, began their ground roll and lift off, and then a sister ship flew over and controlled the drone, steering it over the test site to collect samples of air to measure radiation. One time they used a B-36 as a drone. Talk about an awesome spectacle!”

– John A. Sapp, meteorological technician, USAF (ret.), quoted from The Wetokian

The biggest drone ever? How to top the crowning achievement of the Soviet space program, The Energia/Buran spaceplane system? Although outwardly resembling the American spacecraft enough to get tagged the “Shuttleski”, and borrowing its expensively-researched hypersonic form, the Buran was in some ways a more advanced vehicle:

“The completely automatic launch, orbital manoeuvre, deorbit, and precision landing of an airliner-sized spaceplane on its very first flight was an unprecedented accomplishment of which the Soviets were justifiably proud. It completely vindicated the years of exhaustive ground and flight test that had debugged the systems before they flew.”

– Mark Wade, Encyclopaedia Astronautica

Mark’s complete article on the Buran and its launch vehicle is in his rich and amazing reference work on spaceflight history.

When I grew up in Los Angeles, it always seemed both astonishing and mundane to me that my home town was one of the world’s greatest oil-producing regions. Adding Texas-type mineral riches on top of gold, agriculture, housing, movies and aerospace seemed like gratuitous good fortune, like a Hollywood star’s preposterous new contract. Yet petroleum production is the grimiest of industrial enterprises and glamorous only in Gothic terms; native industries were called upon to hide the “Big Oil” shoot on the back lot using marvelous, kitschy sets.

Current crude oil prices are driving old fields back into production, and the L.A. Basin still holds an estimated 2/3 of its reserves. If those reserves are opened up (gently) some funds would become available for expanding production under California environmental standards. (”Whaaa!” I hear neocons say, “strict eco-standards are costly and meddlesome!” Why, then, have Cailfornia’s auto and air standards been adopted worldwide? Answer: most people want the same air quality that rich folks do.) Perhaps we could find a way to artificially create contained underground reactions, or build big fuel-cell power stations powered by crude oil right out of the well next door. Now consider the new economic and political landscape created by America’s second largest city and biggest industrial region becoming a net energy exporter.