NYTimes | One morning in
the 1950s, Jon H. Else’s father pointed toward Nevada from their home in
Sacramento. “There was this orange glow that suddenly rose up in the
sky, and then shrank back down,” Else recalled.
It
was, hundreds of miles away, an atomic weapon test: a symbol of the
world that was created when a team of Americans led by the physicist J.
Robert Oppenheimer exploded the first nuclear bomb a decade earlier on
July 16, 1945.
Growing up in the nuclear age left an impression on Else, now 78.
He
was later a series producer of the award-winning “Eyes on the Prize,” a
program on the civil rights movement, and directed documentaries about
the Great Depression and Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. But before all that, in
1981, he made a documentary about Oppenheimer, the scientist whose bony
visage graced the covers of midcentury magazines, and the bomb. It was
called “The Day After Trinity,” a reference to that inaugural
detonation.
Decades later, viewers are
flocking to Else’s film, a nominee for the Academy Award for best
documentary feature, as a companion to Christopher Nolan’s biopic
“Oppenheimer,” which grossed more than $100 million domestically in its
opening week this month.
In a phone interview from California last
week, Else, a professor emeritus at the University of California,
Berkeley, praised Nolan’s film, which he saw last weekend in San
Francisco. (A spokeswoman for Nolan said he was not available to
comment.)
“These stories have to be retold every generation,” Else said, “and they have to be told by new storytellers.”
Nolan’s
three-hour opus, a Universal release shot on IMAX film with a lavish
cast of brand-name Hollywood actors, shares much with “The Day After
Trinity,” an 88-minute documentary financed by the public television
station in San Jose, Calif., and various grants.
responsiblestatecraft | On July 16, 1945, the world ended. Or at least it seemed that way to residents of the Tularosa Basin in New Mexico.
Unbeknownst to local civilians, J. Robert Oppenheimer had chosen
their backyard as the proving ground for the world’s first nuclear
weapon. The explosion, which U.S. officials publicly claimed to be an
accident at a local ammunition depot, tore through the morning sky,
leaving a 40,000-foot-tall cloud of radioactive debris that would cake
the surrounding area with dust for days on end.
Tina Cordova, whose hometown of Tularosa lies just 45 miles from
ground zero, remembers her grandmother’s stories about wiping that
infernal dust off every nook and cranny of her childhood home. No one
knew what had happened quite yet, but they figured it must have been
something special. After all, a local paper reported that the explosion was so bright that a blind woman had actually seen it.
When the initial shock wore off, the 40,000 locals who lived within
50 miles of ground zero returned to their daily lives. They drank from
cisterns full of radioactive debris, ate beef from cattle that had
grazed on the dust for weeks on end, and breathed air full of tiny
plutonium particles. Only later would the real impact become clear.
Bernice Gutierrez, born just eight days before Oppenheimer’s “Trinity
Test,” moved from a small town near the blast site to Albuquerque when
she was 2 years old. Cancer followed her like a specter. Her great
grandfather died of stomach cancer in the early 1950s. She lost cousins
to leukemia and pancreatic cancer. Her oldest son died in 2020 after a
bout with a “pre-leukemia” blood disorder. In total, 21 members of
Gutierrez’s family have had cancer, and seven have died from it.
“We don’t ask ourselves if we’re gonna get cancer,” Gutierrez told RS. “We ask ourselves when, because it just never ends.”
“Oppenheimer” — the latest film from famed director Christopher Nolan
— is a three-hour-long exploration of the “dilettante, womanizer,
Communist sympathizer,” and world-historic genius behind the ultimate
weapon. The movie, based on the book “American Prometheus,” delves
deeply into Oppenheimer’s psyche, from his struggles as a young student
at Cambridge to his profound melancholy over the world he helped create.
Yet nowhere in the film will viewers find an acknowledgement of the
first victims of the nuclear era. Indeed, the movie repeats the myth
that the bomb site was in a desolate area with “nothing for 40 miles in
either direction.” This was not for lack of effort, according to
Cordova, who leads an activist group called the Tularosa Basin
Downwinders Consortium. (“Downwinders” refers to those who live in the
fallout zone of nuclear tests.)
When Nolan’s team got to New Mexico to film, Cordova and her team published an op-ed
in the local newspaper that called on the Oppenheimer crew to “grapple
with the consequences of confronting the truth of our stories, of our
history.” When that didn’t work, she reached out to the production
through Kai Bird, the journalist who co-wrote American Prometheus, in an
attempt to get a meeting. She received a flat “no.”
jacobin | his isn’t
the only major revelation that has come out of President Joe Biden’s
December declassification. One is a secret 1977 memo unearthed
by Morley and other researchers that was written by an employee of the
foreign intelligence branch of the CIA’s Miami station, showing that far
from assuming that Oswald acted alone or that the KGB was involved,
officers there considered anti-communist Cuban exiles prime suspects.
According to the memo,
when Kennedy was still alive, station chief Theodore G. Shackley
ordered scrutiny of the movements and plans of “known dangerous Cuban
exile activists” while the president was traveling the country, to get
wind of and halt any “conspiracies” in that community to “exploit or
interfere with the president’s movement.” After Kennedy’s death, the
memo states, Shackley and other top station officials ordered agents to
gather information about Cuban exiles who may have been involved in the
assassination.
Sure enough, the decades that followed have seen serious
circumstantial evidence of anti-Castro exile involvement come to light.
One anti-Castro militant, Antonio Veciana, admitted that he had been
introduced to Oswald in Dallas by his CIA handler, a man whom he later identified
as David Atlee Phillips, head of the agency’s anti-Cuban operations. In
late 2021, the son of anti-Castro fighter and CIA contractor Ricardo
“Monkey” Morales revealed
that his father had told him that he had trained Oswald as a sniper at a
secret CIA training camp for an invasion of Cuba, and that he had been
ordered by his CIA handler to go to Dallas for a “clean-up” mission two
days before Kennedy was shot.
Another document from the December tranche found by researchers is a 1976 CIA memo
attesting to the agency’s heavy involvement in the Warren Commission’s
investigation. According to the memo, thirty-nine CIA personnel were
involved, including “nine of whom were involved daily.” As Morley pointed out
at the time, several of those listed in the memo are known to have
misled the Warren Commission about the CIA’s interest in and knowledge
of Oswald.
It’s further evidence of what even the agency’s own in-house historian in 2013 charitably called
a “benign cover-up” by the CIA in its dealings with the commission,
aimed at pushing it in the direction of what it considered the “best
truth” — that Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy, for his own,
inexplicable motives.
It builds on previous disclosures that show
that the CIA had a keen and extensive interest in Oswald before the
assassination that went right up to the agency’s senior officials.
popularmechanics | President Joe Biden has announced that he has completed his “final certification” of files to be released regarding John F. Kennedy’s assassination, even though 4,684 documents are still kept secret in whole or in part.
The
National Archives has already released thousands of confidential
documents related to the November 1963 assassination of then-president
Kennedy. The documents include information from the CIA, FBI,
State Department, and other agencies on topics such as assassin Lee
Harvey Oswald’s contacts with Soviet and Cuban officials, anonymous tips
and threats, and investigations into the shooting itself.
One of the newly released documents revealed the name of the CIA
official who intercepted Oswald’s mail in the months before JFK’s
killing: Reuben Efron. It turns out Efron had a UFO encounter in 1955
when he was on a train journey through the Soviet Union with Senator
Richard Russell, Democrat of Georgia, and an Army colonel. They all saw what a CIA report
called two “flying saucers,” though skeptics later argued that they
were Soviet aircraft. Russell was among the Warren Commission members
who interviewed Marina Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife, in 1964.
Some conspiracy theorists see a connection
between Efron and the Kennedy assassination and wonder if he knew more
than he let on. They also hope that a bipartisan bill to declassify UFO records will reveal more about the government’s knowledge and involvement in unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs).
“People say there’s nothing significant in these files?” Jefferson Morley, the editor of the blog JFK Facts, told The New York Times.
“Bingo! Here’s the guy who was reading Oswald’s mail, a detail they
failed to share until now. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to
think it’s suspicious.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is backing a bipartisan bill that would unveil government records on so-called UFOs
and unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs). The bill would amend the
National Defense Authorization Act and require the federal government to
compile all records on UAPs and share them with the public, unless a
review board justifies keeping them secret.
HuffPost | A retired Air Force official in charge of one of its most famous UFO
research efforts said before his death last year that the effort may
have been scuttled not because it was fruitless, but just the opposite.
In a clip from the new documentary “The Phenomenon,” Lt. Col. Robert Friend pointed to the sudden closure of Project Blue Book in 1969.
“Which would suggest what?” he asked before answering his own question: “That they knew what it was.”
James Fox, the film’s director added: “Or didn’t know what it was.”
But Friend, who led Project Blue Book from 1958-1963, persisted.
“Also the other way,” Friend replied with a telling grin. “That they did know what it was.”
Officially, the project was shuttered despite some 700 open cases because it “no longer can be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science.”
Friend, who was one of the
Tuskegee Airmen during WWII and the only Black leader of Project Blue
Book, heading it during the civil rights movement, was originally
skeptical of claims that aliens had ever made the long trip to Earth.
“Do I believe that we have been visited? No, I don’t believe that,” he told HuffPost in 2012.
“And the reason I don’t believe it is because I can’t conceive of any
of the ways in which we could overcome some of these things: How much
food would you have to take with you on a trip for 22 years through
space? How much fuel would you need? How much oxygen or other things to
sustain life do you have to have?”
However, Friend also called for more study and said he believes there could be life elsewhere.
“I
think that anytime there’s a possibility of scientific pay dirt from
studying these phenomena, that yes, it would be much better if the
government or some other agency was to take on these things and to
pursue the scientific aspects of it,” he said.
FAS | An extraordinary 95 percent of all Americans have at least heard or
read something about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), and 57 percent
believe they are real. (1)
Former US Presidents Carter and Reagan claim to have seen a UFO.
UFOlogists--a neologism for UFO buffs--and private UFO organizations are
found throughout the United States. Many are convinced that the US
Government, and particularly CIA, are engaged in a massive conspiracy
and coverup of the issue. The idea that CIA has secretly concealed its
research into UFOs has been a major theme of UFO buffs since the modern
UFO phenomena emerged in the late 1940s. (2)
In late 1993, after being pressured by UFOlogists for the release of additional CIA information on UFOs, (3)
DCI R. James Woolsey ordered another review of all Agency files on
UFOs. Using CIA records compiled from that review, this study traces
CIA interest and involvement in the UFO controversy from the late 1940s
to 1990. It chronologically examines the Agency's efforts to solve the
mystery of UFOs, its programs that had an impact on UFO sightings, and
its attempts to conceal CIA involvement in the entire UFO issue. What
emerges from this examination is that, while Agency concern over UFOs
was substantial until the early 1950s, CIA has since paid only limited
and peripheral attention to the phenomena.
Background
The emergence in 1947 of the Cold War confrontation between
the United States and the Soviet Union also saw the first wave of UFO
sightings. The first report of a "flying saucer" over the United
States came on 24 June 1947, when Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot and
reputable businessman, while looking for a downed plane sighted nine
disk-shaped objects near Mt. Rainier, Washington, traveling at an
estimated speed of over 1,000 mph. Arnold's report was followed by a
flood of additional sightings, including reports from military and
civilian pilots and air traffic controllers all over the United States. (4)
In 1948, Air Force Gen. Nathan Twining, head of the Air Technical
Service Command, established Project SIGN (initially named Project
SAUCER) to collect, collate, evaluate, and distribute within the
government all information relating to such sightings, on the premise
that UFOs might be real and of national security concern. (5)
The Technical Intelligence Division of the Air Material Command
(AMC) at Wright Field (later Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) in Dayton,
Ohio, assumed control of Project SIGN and began its work on 23 January
1948. Although at first fearful that the objects might be Soviet secret
weapons, the Air Force soon concluded that UFOs were real but easily
explained and not extraordinary. The Air Force report found that almost
all sightings stemmed from one or more of three causes: mass hysteria
and hallucination, hoax, or misinterpretation of known objects.
Nevertheless, the report recommended continued military intelligence
control over the investigation of all sightings and did not rule out the
possibility of extraterrestrial phenomena. (6)
Amid mounting UFO sightings, the Air Force continued to collect
and evaluate UFO data in the late 1940s under a new project, GRUDGE,
which tried to alleviate public anxiety over UFOs via a public relations
campaign designed to persuade the public that UFOs constituted nothing
unusual or extraordinary. UFO sightings were explained as balloons,
conventional aircraft, planets, meteors, optical illusions, solar
reflections, or even "large hailstones." GRUDGE officials found no
evidence in UFO sightings of advanced foreign weapons design or
development, and they concluded that UFOs did not threaten US security.
They recommended that the project be reduced in scope because the very
existence of Air Force official interest encouraged people to believe in
UFOs and contributed to a "war hysteria" atmosphere. On 27 December
1949, the Air Force announced the project's termination. (7)
With increased Cold War tensions, the Korean war, and continued
UFO sightings, USAF Director of Intelligence Maj. Gen. Charles P. Cabell
ordered a new UFO project in 1952. Project BLUE BOOK became the major
Air Force effort to study the UFO phenomenon throughout the 1950s and
1960s. (8)
The task of identifying and explaining UFOs continued to fall on the
Air Material Command at Wright-Patterson. With a small staff, the Air
Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) tried to persuade the public that
UFOs were not extraordinary. (9)
Projects SIGN, GRUDGE, and BLUE BOOK set the tone for the official US
Government position regarding UFOs for the next 30 years.
Early CIA Concerns, 1947-52
CIA closely monitored the Air Force effort, aware of the
mounting number of sightings and increasingly concerned that UFOs might
pose a potential security threat. (10) Given the distribution of the sightings, CIA officials in 1952 questioned whether they might reflect "midsummer madness.'' (11)
Agency officials accepted the Air Force's conclusions about UFO
reports, although they concluded that "since there is a remote
possibility that they may be interplanetary aircraft, it is necessary to
investigate each sighting." (12)
A massive buildup of sightings over the United States in 1952,
especially in July, alarmed the Truman administration. On 19 and 20
July, radar scopes at Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force
Base tracked mysterious blips. On 27 July, the blips reappeared. The
Air Force scrambled interceptor aircraft to investigate, but they found
nothing. The incidents, however, caused headlines across the country.
The White House wanted to know what was happening, and the Air Force
quickly offered the explanation that the radar blips might be the result
of "temperature inversions." Later, a Civil Aeronautics Administration
investigation confirmed that such radar blips were quite common and were
caused by temperature inversions. (13)
Although it had monitored UFO reports for at least three years,
CIA reacted to the new rash of sightings by forming a special study
group within the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) and the Office
of Current Intelligence (OCI) to review the situation. (14)
Edward Tauss, acting chief of OSI's Weapons and Equipment Division,
reported for the group that most UFO sightings could be easily
explained. Nevertheless, he recommended that the Agency continue
monitoring the problem, in coordination with ATIC. He also urged that
CIA conceal its interest from the media and the public, "in view of
their probable alarmist tendencies" to accept such interest as
confirming the existence of UFOs. (15)
Upon receiving the report, Deputy Director for Intelligence (DDI)
Robert Amory, Jr. assigned responsibility for the UFO investigations to
OSI's Physics and Electronics Division, with A. Ray Gordon as the
officer in charge. (16)
Each branch in the division was to contribute to the investigation,
and Gordon was to coordinate closely with ATIC. Amory, who asked the
group to focus on the national security implications of UFOs, was
relaying DCI Walter Bedell Smith's concerns. (17)
Smith wanted to know whether or not the Air Force investigation of
flying saucers was sufficiently objective and how much more money and
manpower would be necessary to determine the cause of the small
percentage of unexplained flying saucers. Smith believed "there was
only one chance in 10,000 that the phenomenon posed a threat to the
security of the country, but even that chance could not be taken."
According to Smith, it was CIA's responsibility by statute to coordinate
the intelligence effort required to solve the problem. Smith also
wanted to know what use could be made of the UFO phenomenon in
connection with US psychological warfare efforts. (18)
Led by Gordon, the CIA Study Group met with Air Force officials
at Wright-Patterson and reviewed their data and findings. The Air Force
claimed that 90 percent of the reported sightings were easily accounted
for. The other 10 percent were characterized as "a number of
incredible reports from credible observers." The Air Force rejected the
theories that the sightings involved US or Soviet secret weapons
development or that they involved "men from Mars"; there was no evidence
to support these concepts. The Air Force briefers sought to explain
these UFO reports as the misinterpretation of known objects or little
understood natural phenomena. (19) Air Force and CIA officials agreed that outside knowledge of Agency interest in UFOs would make the problem more serious. (20) This concealment of CIA interest contributed greatly to later charges of a CIA conspiracy and coverup.
The CIA Study Group also searched the Soviet press for UFO
reports, but found none, causing the group to conclude that the absence
of reports had to have been the result of deliberate Soviet Government
policy. The group also envisioned the USSR's possible use of UFOs as a
psychological warfare tool. In addition, they worried that, if the US
air warning system should be deliberately overloaded by UFO sightings,
the Soviets might gain a surprise advantage in any nuclear attack. (21)
Because of the tense Cold War situation and increased Soviet
capabilities, the CIA Study Group saw serious national security concerns
in the flying saucer situation. The group believed that the Soviets
could use UFO reports to touch off mass hysteria and panic in the United
States. The group also believed that the Soviets might use UFO
sightings to overload the US air warning system so that it could not
distinguish real targets from phantom UFOs. H. Marshall Chadwell,
Assistant Director of OSI, added that he considered the problem of such
importance "that it should be brought to the attention of the National
Security Council, in order that a communitywide coordinated effort
towards it solution may be initiated." (22)
Chadwell briefed DCI Smith on the subject of UFOs in December
1952. He urged action because he was convinced that "something was
going on that must have immediate attention" and that "sightings of
unexplained objects at great altitudes and traveling at high speeds in
the vicinity of major US defense installations are of such nature that
they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial
vehicles." He drafted a memorandum from the DCI to the National
Security Council (NSC) and a proposed NSC Directive establishing the
investigation of UFOs as a priority project throughout the intelligence
and the defense research and development community. (23) Chadwell also urged Smith to establish an external research project of top-level scientists to study the problem of UFOs. (24)
After this briefing, Smith directed DDI Amory to prepare a NSC
Intelligence Directive (NSCID) for submission to the NSC on the need to
continue the investigation of UFOs and to coordinate such investigations
with the Air Force. (25)
post-gazette | But, as D.W. Pasulka’s new book, “American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion,
Technology,” demonstrates, the fascination with alien life has found a
home among the successful, educated and powerful here in the United
States, and their interest is not without cause.
For the book, Pasulka, professor of religious studies and chair of
the department of philosophy and religion at the University of North
Carolina, Wilmington, interviewed a number of well-to-do, erudite people
who are convinced that UFO sightings and encounters with
extraterrestrial beings are the real deal, even if they happen in ways
most of us find difficult to envision.
Pasulka identifies several”psychic cosmonauts” from her own field of
study, including 18th-century theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, widely
regarded as one of the most intelligent people to have ever lived.
Swedenborg claimed that an angel visited him and allowed him to visit
with beings on Mercury, Mars, Venus and beyond. He detailed the
encounters in the 1756 book “Life on Other Planets.”
So begins Pasulka’s effort to re-calibrate the conversation around
alien life. For many, talk of extraterrestrial encounters conjures
images of little green men or the Greys. But, as Pasulka is told by a
succession of interviewees, narrow-minded views of alien intelligence
limits the ability of researchers and philosophers to consider what
might be behind the repeated claims of visitations from ships and
mysterious beings, as well as alien-ordained predestination.
One of the book’s most prominent characters, a biomedical
technologist and jet-setter named “Tyler” (real names are rarely used in
this book), has high-level security clearances and dozens of patents in
his field. He also believes his success is being driven by
other-worldly intelligence, which has informed his work and pushed him
toward certain events and places to advance their cause.
If Pasulka were not staking her academic reputation on this book’s
validity, it might be hard to believe that a character like Tyler is a
real person. Actually, it is still hard to believe he is real. He is
flown around the world, receiving special treatment wherever he goes.
When Pasulka runs into heavy security at the Vatican late in the book,
Tyler tells the guards who he is, and suddenly they are through. It is
almost too good to be true.
But it all lends itself to a readable and thought-provoking
narrative. Pasulka and her cast of curious characters offer a compelling
case for the study of extraterrestrial life. Contemplating the book’s
enormous, mind-bending questions, the sort of questions that get at the
fabric of who we are and why we are here, is not only a great deal of
fun, but also it may be the only way we get answers to many of these
questions.
There are some wild, sci-fi novel-style happenings in “American
Cosmic,” including a mysterious artifact that shuts down an airport
scanner. But on the whole, the book is more interested in getting
readers to consider that there may be elements in our universe with
abilities or influence beyond our comprehension.
Like the religions Pasulka has been studying for most of her career,
the study of extraterrestrial intelligence will require an open mind and
a little bit of faith. This comparison is sure to annoy some people who
may see their religion as worthy of more serious consideration than
studying aliens. I suppose it isn’t hard to blame them.
But when one considers how burgeoning religions have often been
viewed throughout history — skepticism, dismissal and anger — the link
Pasulka is drawing between ufology and religion no longer seems so
ridiculous.
Still, it may be some time before the study of extraterrestrial life
becomes a part of mainstream academic discourse. In the meantime,
however, those who find their curiosity piqued by “American Cosmic” can
seek refuge in that cozy corner of Rickert & Beagle, where the
supposedly fringe is given fair treatment.
richardhanania |Ron: That’s very interesting, Marius. But I’d
like to go back to the strangeness of this group and their complaints.
When you’re talking about crime and the destruction of our great cities,
aren’t you really talking about, well, since you like the euphemism of
“Foundational American,” I’ll call them “1619 Americans”…
Brahmin:
In a way, yes, but preserving the Foundational American stock is
important. Whenever there is diversity, you see division, chaos,
bloodshed. That’s the rule here, that’s the rule everywhere. Have you
ever read Precambrian Pederast? He taught us about all that is wrong
with this disgusting era. Ethnic homogeneity must be preserved, above
all else.
Ron: That certainly
doesn’t seem to be the rule here. Today, I live in the Bay Area.
California is a majority-minority state. And yet we see very little of
the violence you fear. In 1970, California was 76% white. It’s now 35%
white. You know what’s happened to the murder rate in that time? It’s
been cut by two-thirds! As far as racial strife, you may have seen
recent news stories about the California reparations commission and San
Francisco wanting to offer blacks ungodly amounts of money to compensate
them for past and present racism. The Bay Area is like 8% black,
they’re the smallest population of the major American “races.” Yet if
you follow racial issues in the state, if you went into a coma in the
late 1960s and woke up in 2020, you would be amazed at how little had
changed. Well, pronouns and that stuff would be new. But on race, you
have income and test score disparities, crime that we can’t be honest
about, so-called “police brutality.” Only if anything, California is a
lot more peaceful due to the demographic change you all decry so much…
Allison: But they vote, Ron! Who gave us these crazy policies?
Ron: I
won’t dispute that Hispanic and Asian immigrants tend to vote Democrat.
But look at it another way. Republicans in 2016 nominated the guy whose
main message was “Mexicans are rapists.” In 2020, he still won 40% of
them. Can you imagine if Republicans could actually pretend to like
these people? Italians ended up pretty evenly divided between the two
parties, and even Jews are headed in the conservative direction thanks
to differential birth rates. I see no reason why there’s some impossible
barrier to overcome between Mestizos and white Americans. I mean look
at this room…
[In addition to the clearly swarthy Romero
and Brahmin, at least a third of the room looks to be of either Hispanic
or South Asian descent.]
Ron: You doubt
that you can have a multiracial country? You all have built a
multiracial movement based on the idea of maintaining racial purity.
Don’t check your phones, you might see another alert of a Neo-Nazi
Mexican mass shooter, there have been a few of those lately, and a
right-wing Indian just tried to kill Biden I believe. Remember not that
long ago when there was a mass shooting, and everyone would either hope
it was a right-wing white male or a Muslim, depending on their politics?
Well, now we have the brown white supremacist, which right-wingers on
Twitter tell me can’t possibly exist, even though it’s like half their
movement now.
When was the last time you even heard of
Muslim terrorism? Is a brown mass shooter these days more likely to be a
Muslim extremist or someone whose brain has been melted by the online
right? This question would’ve been laughable a few years ago, and I
guess it’s still laughable now, but for a different reason.
And
the funniest part is that I suspect that all of this results from a fear
of talking about what is arguably the main issue at the heart of the
American experiment. That’s right, it’s the weird, sadomasochistic
relationship between whites and blacks that was so well dramatized by
Tom Wolfe when he was alive. Oh sure, you guys talk about race and
crime. But it seems like you need your “racism” to be more inclusive.
You need to pretend to exclude everyone, because it seems more
consistent with universalist principles. “We just want to preserve the
demographic majority, the same right that anyone else has. Oh, it’s not
any particular group that’s the problem, it’s the principle of
diversity. Can’t we just have a world where every nation is homogenous
to the greatest extent possible and then we can all get along?”
[At this point I burst out laughing]
Me: Ron, so wait, what you’re saying
is that when we see a Klansman walking around in a hood and screaming
about defending the white race, we should pity him for how much his mind
has been captured by political correctness? That’s quite a funny image,
in fact, it alone has made my night here worthwhile.
Ron:
Indeed, Richard, that is what I’m saying. And these poor kids worried
about the future of the American right, are digging their own grave,
because, guess what? The die has been cast, and we’re headed to a
non-white majority. And so conservatism is shaping up to be a movement
that represents a coalition of overweight rural whites from left behind
areas of the country and short Mestizos, all crying about the passing of
whiteness and also about how much the country sucks because everyone is
so fat. This probably isn’t a winning message. Of course, there’s
overwhelming public support for clamping down on crime and making
institutions color-blind, or, as you would put it, going after civil
rights law. This is what turned whites towards the Republican Party in
the first place, or the disgusting ways in which white elites have let
our cities be destroyed and gone to war with every American principle —
merit, freedom of speech, rule of law, you name it — in the name of
anti-racism.
But instead of focusing on those things and
fixing the country, the American right has decided to get distracted by
doubling down on becoming a movement of brown white nationalists, in a
country where the majority of children born are already non-white.
[At
this point, I can feel the energy go out of the room. A few of the
attendees pick at one or another of Ron’s points, but they’re clearly
deflated and realize that he has given them a lot to think about. An
hour and a half later, he is driving me home.]
Me: Wow,
Ron, that was something else. I really wish you would’ve elaborated on
the vaccine thing a little bit more. Their desire to “own the libs” has
really swallowed every other part of their brain, even though they like
to think they’re more sophisticated than regular conservatives, and I
appreciated you recently taking apart some of the most ridiculous claims
of the anti-vaxxers.
Ron: Thank you, Richard. We’ll have to do this again some time.
Me: Oh yeah, I had a lot of fun. What do you think you should try to convince people of next time?
Ron: I believe that covid-19 has a non-zoonotic origin.
Me:
So lab leak? That’s it? That’s very mainstream at this point, it’s
impossible to find a right-winger who doesn’t believe that this was all
the fault of the Chinese.
Ron: Who said anything about the Chinese?
Me: Wait,
is this another one of your anti-American conspiracy theories? You’re
now going to tell me that the US government accidentally inflicted covid
on the world?
Ron: Who said anything about it being an accident?
Me:
Please stop Ron, there are only so many mind-blowing ideas I can digest
in one night. Let’s talk about the pleasant California weather for the
rest of our trip, and how nice it is to live in a state with such
natural beauty and low levels of violent crime.
responsiblestatecraft | There might be a massive new Ukraine aid budget debate on the
horizon, as Uncle Sam is depleting the last one at a record pace and
Pentagon stockpiles are, by all accounts, running low.
According to a new report by Defense One,
some $36.4 billion of the $48.9 billion allocated for Ukraine-related
military aid since February 2022 has been delivered, contracted, or
“otherwise committed.” There is only $11.3 billion left, and it will
“run out in four months.”
The most recent allocation ($1.2 billion last week)
came under the U.S. Security Assistance Initiative, which means the
additional air defense systems, artillery rounds, and ammunition that
have been promised will be farmed out to U.S. defense contractors and
won’t be ready for shipment right away. Alternatively, aid has come via
the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which sends Ukraine weapons
directly from the Pentagon’s stockpiles. According to the Department of Defense,
there have been 37 such drawdowns totaling over $21 billion in weapons
and supplies since August 2021 when the U.S. first responded to Russian
forces massing along the border with Ukraine.
But now reports indicate that American stockpiles of HIMARS, Javelins, Stinger missiles, and 155 mm artillery rounds have been shrinking since late last year, and arms manufacturers are now scrambling to keep up.
This has led the U.S. to go out on an ammo-raising spree, gathering
pledges from allies and partners. Some, like South Korea, have resisted
but found a way to comply. According to the Wall Street Journal,
Washington has sent Ukraine more than one million rounds of 155 mm
caliber ammunition, and allies and partners have contributed more on top
of that. Moreover, NATO and European partners are being pressed to send
whatever they have from their own stockpiles for Ukraine’s anticipated
counteroffensive.
So where does this leave us? It would seem that defense contractors
need additional money and capacity to backfill the stores. Without more,
Ukraine with be under-supplied for both its counteroffensive and
whatever follows it. Meanwhile, American stockpiles are waning, which
hurts readiness.
One congressional aide “who closely tracks the issue” told POLITICO this week
that the money to draw down existing U.S. stockpiles will expire in
July. According to the report, which speculated when and how big the
next aid package will be, “that would mean the flow of equipment could
be disrupted if Kyiv has to wait an extended period for a new tranche of
funding.” Would it be included in the appropriations process, or a
supplemental? “I expect there will need to be a supplemental at some
point,” Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) told POLITICO. “It’s also clear
that it’s taken far too long to get munitions and tanks delivered to the
Ukrainians.”
But as Sam Skove points out in his Defense One report, there is the nagging issue of Republican members of Congress who have said they would not support another “blank check” to Ukraine and
would expect not only greater oversight but also an articulation of a
diplomatic strategy for ending the war before they would support another
multi-billion-dollar package. Their position not only reflects a need
for a full accounting for where the money is going, but also concern
that the American economy right now cannot afford what has become the
most expensive U.S.-war-that-is-not-a-U.S.-war in history.
thelastamericanvagabond | For those who have not closed their eyes to the integration of
leading unreconstructed Nazis, Italian Fascist, and Japanese fascists
into the Anglo-American intelligence complex after World War Two this
celebration is bitter sweet to say the least.
As Cynthia Chung demonstrated in her book The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,
between 1958-1973, every single head of NATO’s central European command
were former Nazi SS officers. And as Swiss historian Daniele Ganser
demonstrated in his NATO’s Secret Armies,
the Cold War served as the excuse to build a vast paramilitary complex
using fascists from Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, and Germany in order
to carry out a multi-faceted war on the people of Europe through the
organization of terrorist organizations like The Red Brigade and the
targeting assassinations of nationalist leaders unwilling to adapt to a
new depopulation-oriented world order.
Sadly, this devil’s pact
was not something that simply occurred in the wild days of the Cold War,
but continues virulently to this day on a number of levels.
Modern Nazi Revivalist Movements
For example, modern expressions of fascism can be seen in the renewal of swastika-tattooed, black sun of the occult loving, wolfsangel-wearing Azov,
C14, Svoboda and Aidar neo-Nazis in Ukraine today, on top of a whole
re-writing of WWII history which has taken an accelerated dive into
unreality during the 30 years since the Soviet Union collapsed.
Across the spectrum of post Warsaw Pact members absorbed into NATO,
such as Lithuania, Estonia, Albania, Slovakia, and Latvia, Nazi
collaborators of WWII have been glorified with statues, public plaques,
monuments, and even schools, parks, and streets named after Nazis.
Celebrating Nazi collaborators while tearing down pro-Soviet monuments
has nearly become a pre-condition for any nation wishing to join NATO.
In
Estonia, which joined NATO in 2004, the defense ministry-funded Erna
Society has celebrated the Nazi Erna Saboteur group that worked with the
Waffen SS in WWII with the Erna advance Guard being raised to official national heroes. In Albania, Prime Minister Edi Rama rehabilitated Nazi collaborator Midhat Frasheri, who deported thousands of Kosovo Jews to death camps.
In
Lithuania, the pro-Nazi Lithuanian Activist Front leader Juozas Lukša
who carried out atrocities in Kaunas was honored as a national hero by
an act of Parliament which passed a resolution dubbing “the year 2021 as the year of Juozas Luksa-Daumantas”. In Slovakia,
the ‘Our Slovakia Peoples Party’ led by neo-Nazi Marián Kotleba moved
from the fringe to mainstream wining 10% of parliamentary seats in 2019.
Finland
has become a new member of NATO which will possibly be joined by
Sweden, both of whom share deep unresolved pro-Nazi traditions which are
slowly coming to the surface once more as I outlined in Nazi Skeletons in Finland and Sweden’s Closets.
Eugenics
has become once more a governing pseudo science of a fascist elite
class of social engineers seeking to breed out undesired traits in the
population while reducing the overall population levels to manageable
numbers — using the same formulas adopted by Hitler and his
collaborators in the 1930s -1940s.
The fact is that a certain
something wasn’t resolved on the 9th of May, 1945 which has a lot to do
with the slow re-emergence of a new form of fascism during the second
half of the 20th century and the renewed danger of a global dictatorship
which the world faces again today.
unherd | In short, America is bankrupt. Our governments from the federal level
down, our big corporations and a very large number of our well-off
citizens have run up gargantuan debts, which can only be serviced given
direct or indirect access to the flows of unearned wealth the US
extracted from the rest of the planet. Those debts cannot be paid off,
and many of them can’t even be serviced for much longer. The only
options are defaulting on them or inflating them out of existence, and
in either case, arrangements based on familiar levels of expenditure
will no longer be possible. Since the arrangements in question include
most of what counts as an ordinary lifestyle in today’s US, the impact
of their dissolution will be severe.
In effect, the 5% of us in this country are going to have to go back
to living the way we did before 1945. If we still had the factories, the
trained workforce, the abundant natural resources and the thrifty
habits we had back then, that would have been a wrenching transition but
not a debacle. The difficulty, of course, is that we don’t have those
things anymore. The factories were shut down in the offshoring craze of
the Seventies and Eighties, when the imperial economy slammed into
overdrive, and the trained workforce was handed over to malign neglect.
We’ve still got some of the natural resources, but nothing like what
we once had. The thrifty habits? Those went whistling down the wind a
long time ago. In the late stages of an empire, exploiting flows of
unearned wealth from abroad is far more profitable than trying to
produce wealth at home, and most people direct their efforts
accordingly. That’s how you end up with the typical late-imperial
economy, with a governing class that flaunts fantastic levels of paper
wealth, a parasite class of hangers-on that thrive by catering to the
very rich or staffing the baroque bureaucratic systems that permeate
public and private life, and the vast majority of the population
impoverished, sullen, and unwilling to lift a finger to save their soi-disant betters from the consequences of their own actions.
The good news is that there’s a solution to all this. The bad news is
that it’s going to take a couple of decades of serious turmoil to get
there. The solution is that the US economy will retool itself to produce
earned wealth in the form of real goods and non-financial services.
That’ll happen inevitably as the flows of unearned wealth falter,
foreign goods become unaffordable to most Americans, and it becomes
profitable to produce things here in the US again. The difficulty, of
course, is that most of a century of economic and political choices
meant to support our former imperial project are going to have to be
undone.
The most obvious example? The metastatic bloat of government,
corporate and non-profit managerial jobs in American life. That’s a
sensible move in an age of empire, as it funnels money into the consumer
economy, which provides what jobs exist for the impoverished classes.
Public and private offices alike teem with legions of office workers
whose labour contributes nothing to national prosperity but whose pay
cheques prop up the consumer sector. That bubble is already losing air.
It’s indicative that Elon Musk, after his takeover of Twitter, fired
some 80% of that company’s staff; other huge internet combines are
pruning their workforce in the same way, though not yet to the same
degree.
The recent hullaballoo about artificial intelligence is helping to
amplify the same trend. Behind the chatbots are programs called large
language models (LLMs), which are very good at imitating the more
predictable uses of human language. A very large number of office jobs
these days spend most of their time producing texts that fall into that
category: contracts, legal briefs, press releases, media stories and so
on. Those jobs are going away. Computer coding is even more amenable to
LLM production, so you can kiss a great many software jobs goodbye as
well. Any other form of economic activity that involves assembling
predictable sequences of symbols is facing the same crunch. A recent
paper by Goldman Sachs estimates that something like 300 million jobs across the industrial world will be wholly or partly replaced by LLMs in the years immediately ahead.
Another technology with similar results is CGI image creation. Levi’s
announced not long ago that all its future catalogues and advertising
will use CGI images instead of highly-paid models and photographers.
Expect the same thing to spread generally. Oh, and Hollywood’s next.
We’re not too far from the point at which a program can harvest all the
footage of Marilyn Monroe from her films, and use that to generate new
Marilyn Monroe movies for a tiny fraction of what it costs to hire
living actors, camera crews and the rest. The result will be a drastic
decrease in high-paying jobs across a broad swathe of the economy.
The outcome of all this? Well, one lot of pundits will insist at the
top of their lungs that nothing will change in any way that matters, and
another lot will start shrieking that the apocalypse is upon us. Those
are the only two options our collective imagination can process these
days. Of course, neither of those things will actually happen.
What will happen instead is that the middle and upper-middle classes
in the US, and in many other countries, will face the same kind of slow
demolition that swept over the working classes of those same countries
in the late 20th century. Layoffs, corporate bankruptcies, declining
salaries and benefits, and the latest high-tech version of NO HELP
WANTED signs will follow one another at irregular intervals. All the
businesses that make money catering to these same classes will lose
their incomes as well, a piece at a time. Communities will hollow out
the way the factory towns of America’s Rust Belt and the English
Midlands did half a century ago, but this time it will be the turn of
upscale suburbs and fashionable urban neighbourhoods to collapse as the
income streams that supported them disappear.
nps.gov | The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), established by Congress on March 31, 1933, provided jobs for young, unemployed men during the Great Depression. Over its 9-year lifespan, the CCC employed about 3 million men nationwide. The CCC made valuable contributions to forest management, flood control, conservation projects, and the development of state and national parks, forests, and historic sites. In return, the men received the benefits of education and training, a small paycheck, and the dignity of honest work. Three CCC companies operated in the North Dakota badlands between 1934 and 1941, contributing to projects that today’s visitors can still appreciate.
Companies and Camps The North Dakota State Historical Society sponsored the three CCC companies that worked in the badlands from 1934 to 1941. All three CCC companies in the badlands arrived in 1934. About 200 men were assigned to each company.
When CCC Companies 2767, 2771, and 2772 arrived, the men lived in tents until buildings could be erected at their camps. When completed, each camp included a full complement of buildings: barracks, mess hall, recreational hall, bath house, latrine, supply, garage, and headquarters. The camp complex also included its own classrooms, hospital, barber shop, post office, canteen, and sometimes a theater. The buildings were frame structures heated by wood and coal burning pot-belly stoves.
Company 2767’s camp was located on the west bank of the Little Missouri River in what is now the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park from July, 1934 to 1937. Companies 2771 and 2772 established camps adjacent to one another in 1934 on the north bank of the Little Missouri River near what is now the entrance to the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Company 2771 moved out in 1935, but Company 2772 remained until the fall of 1939. In 1939, Company 2771 moved to a site on the east bank of the Little Missouri River just south of Jones Creek, which they occupied until November, 1941.
The Work The CCC sought to provide the maximum opportunity for labor at a minimum cost for materials and equipment. With little more than strong backs, shovels, and picks, the CCC built roads, trails, culverts, and structures. When building structures, the CCC utilized native materials, such as the local sandstone, which they quarried themselves with star drills, sledge hammers, muscle, and sweat.
In the badlands, the CCC, along with the Emergency Relief Administration (ERA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), worked on numerous projects. Even as the men were working on these construction projects, it was unclear who would ultimately be responsible for managing these recreation areas; Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park was not established until 1947.
In the North Unit of the park, the CCC built the two picnic shelters in the Juniper campground area and the River Bend Overlook shelter. In the South Unit, the CCC built the now-abandoned East Entrance Station, the entrance pylons, and portions of the park's roads and trails. The CCC also built structures at the nearby Chateau de Mores State Historic Site.
CCC Work Crew A CCC veteran who worked in the badlands reflected on the 50th anniversary of the CCC, "You learned how to live with other men, you learned self esteem ... you learned about yourself."
The People The CCC was open to unemployed men ages 17 to 23.5 who were U.S. citizens. Enrollees served 6-month terms, and were allowed to re-enroll at the end of each term up to a maximum of two years. A CCC worker’s salary was $30 a month, most of which the men sent home to their families. Meals, lodging, clothing, medical, and dental care were all free for enrollees. The men generally spent $5 to $8 of their monthly salary on toiletries, postage, haircuts, and occasional entertainment. The few enrollees promoted to Assistant Leader and Leader positions earned a bit more, $36 and $45 per month, respectively.
While the CCC men lived and worked on a regimented schedule, there was time for continuing their education through evening classes and for leisure activities on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. Living and working together, the men learned to get along. Some formed life-long friendships.
As the generation who participated in the CCC passes, the legacy of their work lives on. When you visit Theodore Roosevelt National Park and drive the roads, stop at the River Bend Overlook, or hike out to the old East Entrance Station. Take a few moments to reflect on the CCC, the men who labored on these projects, and the investment America made during its most desperate economic period. The Civilian Conservation Corps' hard work all those years ago still continues to pay off today.
livingnewdeal | The CWA was created on November 9, 1933 by Executive Order No. 6420B,
under the power granted to President Roosevelt by Title II of the
National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 [1]. Harry Hopkins was made
head of the CWA.
Like other New Deal emergency employment programs, the CWA was
designed to put jobless Americans back to work and to use them on
beneficial public projects. More specifically, the CWA was designed to
be a short-lived program to help jobless Americans get through the dire
winter of 1933-34 [2]. It did just that: Two months after its start, the
CWA had 4,263,644 formerly unemployed workers on its payroll [3].
The CWA received funding from the Public Works Administration ($400
million), the Federal Emergency Relief Administration ($89 million), and
an appropriation from Congress ($345 million) [4]. At its launch, two
million workers came over from FERA and “Nine million people swarmed to
the [United States Employment Service] offices to apply for the other
two million slots” [5].
The accomplishments of the CWA included 44,000 miles of new roads,
2,000 miles of levees, 1,000 miles of new water mains, 4,000 new or
improved schools, and 1,000 new or improved airports [6].
Remarking on the program a few years after its termination, Harry
Hopkins wrote: “Long after the workers of CWA are dead and gone and
these hard times forgotten, their effort will be remembered by permanent
useful works in every county of every state. People will ride over
bridges they made, travel on their highways, attend schools they built,
navigate waterways they improved, do their public business in
courthouses and state capitols which workers from CWA rescued from
disrepair. Constantly expanded and diversified to offer use for the
special skills and training of different types of workers, the CWA
program finally extended its scope to almost every kind of community
activity. We had two hundred thousand CWA projects” [7].
The CWA ended in July of 1934 (although most employment ended by
March 31, 1934) [8], but its success was so remarkable and its closure
so clearly felt that it was recreated in the form of the Works Progress
Administration (WPA) in 1935; and the WPA was led by some of the same
administrative workers from FERA and CWA.
Sources: (1) The American Presidency Project, Franklin D. Roosevelt:
167 – Executive Order No. 6420B, November 9, 1933, University of
California Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=14548,
accessed February 9, 2015. (2) Harry L. Hopkins, Spending to Save: The
Complete Story of Relief, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1936,
p. 116. (3) Robert D. Leighninger, Jr., Long-Range Public Investment:
The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal, Columbia, SC: University of South
Carolina Press, 2007, p. 47. (4) See note 2 at p. 117. (5) See note 3 at
p. 46. (6) Ibid. at 51. (7) See note 2 at p. 120. (8) Works Progress
Administration, Analysis of Civil Works Program Statistics, Washington,
DC, 1939, p. 6.
Slate | In
the 1960s, after realizing his spatial limitations in Anaheim,
California, Disney began to develop plans for another empire, this time
in central Florida. (Disney was said to have hated some of the
development that surrounded his California park.) At the time, Florida
hadn’t yet exploded, population-wise, into the state we know today. The
greater Los Angeles area had more people than every Florida county
combined.
As
a result, Disney was able to make big upfront demands of the state—and
reasonably expected the eager local government to give in. His grand
plan wasn’t just about sprawling resorts. He wanted to build an
experimental planned city, a utopian company town that would serve as a “blueprint for the future,”
where residents would test out new products, no one would be
unemployed, and the city’s climate-controlled center would cater to
pedestrians who could be ferried about by monorail. Disney called this
plan the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. To ensure he
could enact his vision without a lot of red tape, he stipulated all
kinds of rights to the land without knowing if he’d ever need them,
aware that he would never again have greater negotiating power.
This
Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—EPCOT for short—is not the
Epcot park we know today, though the amusement park shares the
idealized planned city’s (now nostalgic) futurism. The EPCOT that was
never built was meant to be a real town—and for that to become realized,
the Walt Disney Company needed the authority to develop and run a
town. So, Florida granted Disney the right to do everything it needed
to make that happen, including controlling zoning and regulations and
offering public services. Walt Disney’s death is cited as the reason the
city never came to be, but the Disney Company’s hold on zoning,
regulations, and public services remained.
Disney’s
self-governing district, with all its associated resorts and water
parks and sports fields and shopping centers, eventually grew to an
enormous size. And though it never developed any cities of the future,
the area held on to its self-governing privileges.
While
Foglesong was reporting his 2001 book, which traces Disney’s use of its
government immunities and relationship with the surrounding area, he
dug into Disney’s archives, poring over company documents and memos.
Instead of evidence of serious plans for the development of an idealized
city, he found a warning from a lawyer that such a development could
threaten Disney’s control of the land. If there were real residents,
they would be able to elect a local government and establish the
external control that Disney feared.
medium |Amidst the Cold
War, the United States of America continued to thrive off industrial
capitalism and consumerism as a way of embodying what America
represented — freedom, power, pride and identity. It was during this era
that universal exhibitions in the U.S. were used to showcase such
themes and continue showing the world how dominate they were, and how
much they had achieved thus far in the twentieth century. Corporate
companies were the main powerhouses at the world’s fairs and none other
shined than WED Enterprises, formed by Walt Disney during the 1964 New
York World’s Fair. Influenced by the ideals and values of world’s fairs,
Walt visualized a concept ahead of its time — EPCOT.
World’s fairs have always been a site designed to showcase the
achievements and technological advancements of nations. The 1964 World’s
Fair held at Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, New York focused on
showcasing mid-twentieth century American culture and technology, to
promote “Peace through Understanding” during the Cold War and Space Age.
With the help of over forty-five companies to create exhibitions and
attractions, the fair acted as a grand consumer show featuring numerous
of products produced in America for uses of transportation, living and
consumer electronic needs that would never be repeated at future world’s
fairs in America. Among these products and inventions included
videoconferencing, the Ford Mustang, push-button telephones and most
importantly Disney audio-animatronics — a brand-new state of the art
technology that was tested by Walt and later incorporated into his theme
parks. Walt’s involvement with the fair began when city planner and
fair organizer Robert Moses enlisted him, architect Philip Johnson,
artist Donald De Lue and engineers from around the world to mastermind
the world’s fair — resulting in a museum-theme-park-carnival monstrosity
that rivaled any attraction on the planet. Shortly before the opening
of the fair, Walt analyzed the history of fairs through animated
depictions. He believed that the fairs originated as “sites of trade and
commerce” and would later develop as stages of “talent and art”, before
ultimately becoming a “cultured and industrialized monolith of growth
and progress.”
“Disney had a huge footprint at the world’s fair, which sprawled over
the same square mile in Flushing Meadows as its 1939–1940 predecessor,
which also tried to predict the future,” says journalist Lou Lumenick in
hisNew York Post article Tomorrowland’, Disney and their links to the 1964–65 World’s Fair. At the 1939 New York World’s Fair, General Motors sponsored an exhibition entitled Futurama,
in which guests would ride a vehicle on a conveyour system to view a
scale model of what roadways and cities would look like twenty years
into the future. Inspired by the attraction, Walt created two pavilions
at the 1965 fair — Progresslandand the Ford
Pavilion. Sponsored by the General Electric Company, the Progressland
Pavilion housed the exhibition The Carousel of Progress in a rotating
theater with four stages that showed the lifestyle of an American family
household during the 1890s, 1920s, 1950s and sometime in the distant
future. The Ford Motors Pavilion housed the exhibition Ford’s Magic
Skyway in which guests rode fifty actual Ford vehicles, including the
brand-new Ford Mustang, that would pass slowly along an upper level
track. The ride moved the audience through scenes featuring life-sized
audio-animatronic dinosaurs, before passing through a futuristic city
and finally arriving back in the present.
While his role was mainly to create exhibitions and attractions through
corporation sponsorships, Walt took matters into his own hands to
utilize the fair as an experiment to test new technology for the already
existing Disneyland in Anaheim, California, as well as drawing up a
prototype of his vision for the city of tomorrow — EPCOT (Experimental
Prototype Community of Tomorrow). Walt intended to create a utopian city
of the future based upon the ideals and values of technology,
transportation and community. In a twenty-five minute film shot shortly
before his death, he described EPCOT as a city “taking its cues from the
new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative
centers of American industry.” Walt hoped that EPCOT would become a
“community of tomorrow that will never be completed but will always be
introducing and testing, and demonstrating new materials and new
systems.” He concluded by saying, “EPCOT will always be a showcase to
the world of the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.”
His original vision for EPCOT included a model community that would be
home to twenty thousand residents and would be shaped in the form of a
circle, with different businesses and commercial areas in the center.
Around it would be community buildings, schools and recreational
complexes, while residential neighborhoods would be on the outskirts of
the perimeter. At the time, Walt was fueled by his fascination for
transportation and spent countless of time and energy figuring out how
to move people from place to place. After unveiling the first monorail
on the Western Hemisphere at Disneyland in 1959, Walt utilized the
technology from Fords Magic Skyway for the future PeopleMover that
opened at Disneyland in 1967. But why was Disney so keen on bringing the
concept of EPCOT to life and why did the world’s fair have such an
impact?
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
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My birthday
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...
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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