Josh Powell's unforgivable crime

I've written a few times about the case of missing mother, Susan Powell. This post was written shortly after she disappeared.

As the case progressed I updated it. This is the last post I wrote, about Susan's father-in-law, Steve Powell.

After his father was arrested for taking pictures of young girls without their knowledge and having child pornography on his computer, Susan's husband, Josh Powell, then living with his father and his two young sons, lost his boys temporarily to his in-laws in a custody case.

On Sunday, February 5, 2012, the boys showed up at Powell's residence for a supervised visit. Powell locked the door on the social worker escorting the children, who then made a frantic 9-1-1 call that was met with some detached indifference by the dispatcher. In the next few minutes Powell committed a crime so heinous it's taken me two weeks just to be able to write about it. He hacked his sons with a hatchet, then blew up the house. He'd poured five gallons of gasoline on the floor, and turned on the pilot light. The house was destroyed, and what was recovered were three bodies, Powell and his two sons, ages 7 and 5.

I'm not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but a person who turns to that sort of desperation is probably thinking of his children as possessions, not human beings. If he can't have them no one can. Narcissism? I don't know if Josh Powell ever spoke with a professional. He's been under suspicion for the disappearance of his wife, but has never been arrested. Because of computer generated images of incest found on his personal computer the judge in the custody case said Powell would have to undergo a "psychosexual evaluation," and a lie detector test.

There are stories, which I consider truthful-sounding, that his older boy, Charlie, had begun to talk of his mother. "Mommy was in the trunk of the car." When the car stopped his mother and father went out into the desert, and she was never seen again. The speculation is that perhaps Powell was worried about the lie detector. He'd managed to deflect any kind of exam because he'd refused to speak to police. After his wife's disappearance he moved back to Washington from Utah, making it difficult for local West Valley City, Utah, police. They eventually coordinated their investigation with local police in the Puyallup, Washington area. Police had kept the pressure on Powell, and losing his boys to his in-laws may have been the final straw for him.

The picture of Powell, the day before his final crime, taking money out of his bank account, is of a man who looks committed. He has a definite plan, and this is one step in implementing it.

Since the explosion it's been discovered that the house where the boys were taken for their visits was rented for that purpose. He didn't live there. His neighbors did not know him. That shows that the crime had been planned well in advance, since that appears to have been step one in his plot.

Powell left some text messages saying "I'm sorry," but no suicide note, nor any reference to Susan, what happened to her or where to find her body. So investigators have lost that ability to question the main person of interest. The case is still active, and they are still working on it.

Utah is mostly desert, and can be desolate. Bodies can disappear forever in thousands of different places. Where to even begin the search? The police grasp at anything. Their investigation in Nevada came from an observation that Powell was excited about some rocks at a geology fair, which came from the area where police later searched. If that isn't desperation on the part of police I don't know what is. It's no wonder they can't zero in on her remains if they're using such vague clues.

A few days after the murder-suicide my wife, Sally, met her friends for their monthly coffee klatsch. Two of the women are social workers, who have done supervised visits with non-custodial parents for over 25 years. In Utah those visits are never held in that parent's home, but in a neutral place, like the social worker's office. I imagine Washington will have to look at the situation and change its protocols for supervised visits. But would it have stopped Josh Powell from killing his own children and then himself? I believe if he'd met the children at a neutral location he could have taken a gun and killed everyone, including the social worker. As my wife observed, he could have also gone to his in-law's house and killed everyone there, including himself. A person as desperate as Joshua Powell isn't stopped by a change of locale.

POSTSCRIPT:

There was a big flap for a few days about Josh Powell being buried next to his two sons. A group bought up the grave plots on either side of the boys to prevent it. Today Powell's family announced he would be interred in another cemetery.

Coffee—the wonder drug!

I've been telling people for decades that my coffee consumption (which is a lot) isn't hurting me. Now I find it's actually helping me.

"I love the java jive and it loves me!"

According to a recent article by Marni Jameson from The Orlando Sentinel, coffee has been shown to help prevent Alzheimer's. This is especially good news to me, because my mother died four years ago in a local Alzheimer's care center.

More good news for me is that only 1% of people with Alzheimer's in their family get the disease; it's caused by a gene, but there are other factors that contribute: lifestyle, obesity, high cholesterol. (These are things I've read before, but it's always good to get them reinforced with more current references.)

According to the article:

“For years, scientists thought that Alzheimer's was primarily genetic," said Gary Wenk, professor of Neuroscience at Ohio State University. "We now believe that, while there's a genetic component, Alzheimer's is primarily a lifestyle disease."

Further, activating the Alzheimer's genes "depends heavily on their lifestyles," said Stuart Lipton, professor at Sanford-Burnham Research Institute.

Obesity is a risk factor for Alzheimer's, according to the article, because it is a risk factor for diabetes, and "diabetics have a two to three times greater risk of developing Alzheimer's," said Ira Goodman, a neurologist at Orlando Health.”

All well and good, but where does coffee come in? Glad you asked. In a sidebar, "Ways to ward off Alzheimer's," it says:

“Coffee drinkers and those who partake in a little wine each day also enjoy some protective benefits," said Gary Wenk. Long-term global studies have shown that those who consume five cups of coffee a day reduce their incidence of diabetes by 50 percent, and their protection increases as coffee consumption goes up.

Other brain healthy behaviors include keeping cholesterol, blood pressure and inflammation under control. So to coffee and wine, add statin drugs, and keeping blood pressure and inflammation under control.”

Whaddaya know! I do all those things. I drink coffee by the gallon, take a statin drug for cholesterol, take a low dose b.p. med, and over-the-counter anti-inflammatory meds for the arthritis which came on me in my early fifties. "Those who developed arthritis early and take non-steroidal anti-inflammatories have a lower risk of developing Alzheimer's."

That news "perks" me up. I turn on my coffee maker early in the morning and keep it going all day. Here is a picture of an early '60s GE percolator I picked up before Christmas at an antiques mall.

Through this spout flows my cure for Alzheimer's disease.

I don't drink any fancy blends, no flavored coffee, just whatever is on sale at the grocery store. My caffeine/coffee habit costs less for me to feed than if I were patronizing expensive shops like Starbucks. I drink my coffee black. I'm hoisting my cup to the bearers of glad tidings, those doctors and scientists, and the author of this article, who definitely made my day.

Tank up. Have another cup, and here's to a healthy brain! Cheers!

.

Be my Valentine

Happy Valentine's Day, 2012.

Return Of the Living Walking Dead

The Walking Dead has its season opener tonight on AMC. Last season ended with something of a turkey shoot. Our intrepid crew of living survivors of the zombie holocaust mowed down a group of walkers kept in a barn by a kindly evangelical. Among them were his wife and stepson. He refused to believe they weren’t still human beings. Guess he found out what everyone who watches this show knows...if it's dead, it gets shot in the head.

I'm on record as saying zombie movies with hordes of living dead having their heads blown apart by gunshots have become cliché and repetitive. But I admit to getting caught up in the storyline of The Walking Dead.

The series is taken from the comic book/graphic novel. The first issue appeared in 2003.

The zombie movie phenom began in 1968, with the release of the low budget shocker, Night Of the Living Dead, aka Night of the Flesh Eaters.

Because of an error, NOTLD was never copyright. The distribution company made money, the creators didn't. The co-writers, George Romero and John Russo, both continued with zombies. Romero made movies with the words "the Dead" in the title: Dawn Of the Dead, Day Of the Dead, et al. Russo wrote a novelization of the original.

He also wrote a sequel, Return of the Living Dead.

When the time came to film the sequel, writer-director Dan O'Bannon decided Russo's treatment was too serious, and Romero had already filmed a sequel to Night, called Dawn Of the Dead. O'Bannon rewrote Return as a comedy.

In an interesting twist, Russo then wrote a novelization of the movie.

Frank, played by character actor James Karen, is training a new employee at a medical supply company. He tells him there are U.S. Army canisters containing dead bodies in the cellar, misdelivered 14 years before.

His boss, Burt, won't call the number on the canister for fear of problems with the government. In the meantime, the government has been looking for the canisters since they went missing.

Frank opens the top to show trainee Freddy the corpse in the can.

They inadvertently cause a rupture, which spews the chemical the body is immersed in. That's where all the problems begin. It later goes into the atmosphere, comes back to earth as rain, permeates a cemetery next door to the medical supply house where some punks are hanging out...

Punk chick, Trash, does a nude dance on a tomb. (The unwritten rule for this type of B-movie: "B" means Beast, Blood and Breasts.)

According to an article I read about the filming, scream queen Linnea Quigley, who played Trash, was shown full-frontal but her pubic hair caused the producers second thoughts. She shaved, which they deemed worse. They made a cast of her pelvic area, and a flesh-colored appliance is worn. You can see it if you look close. I have no idea why a pair of flesh-colored panties or tights wouldn't have done the same thing, but I wasn't there, was I? I'm sure the guy who got to make the mold of her had quite an experience.

The punks are beset by corpses rising out of their graves, attacking them. Survivors of the attack head for the medical supply house.

Meanwhile, in the medical supply house the beast is loose. The living corpse, called "Tarman," who was in the canister, does his gruesome thing. Lurching toward his victims, Tarman yells "Braaaiiiiins!" before biting into their heads.



A baseball bat is good for taking care of Tarman.

The whole movie moves along briskly, with many funny bits alternating with the horror. For a low-budget movie of this type I score it high. It's a successful movie filmed with Clu Gulager as the lead, a couple of familiar character actors (James Karen and Don Calfa) and a cast of unknowns. Dan O'Bannon (now sadly deceased) gets a lot of credit for his script and direction.

Production design of this movie is excellent. The creature makeup is fantastic; corpses erupting from their graves in the cemetery owe a lot to Michael Jackson's Thriller video, with that video's corpses by Rick Baker, but both owe EC Comics from 30 years prior. The original horror comic books had a lot of walking dead, corpses come back from their graves. William Stout, who did the designs and storyboards, is an illustrator who has done some horror comics in the classic tradition. He was a wise choice to use for this production, and what he designed for this production was horrifying, creepy, and yet, even funny.

Production drawings by Stout are shown in a separate feature with the DVD.






Return of the Living Dead spawned several sequels. I'm sure I've seen at least one of them, but I'm damned if I can remember it. It's one of those cases where they could have just stopped after the first and I wouldn't have noticed.

I posted pictures of John Russo in 2008 without knowing it. This posting, "The forty-year night", features Russo as a zombie in a sequence from the movie. He also gets the "honor" of being the first movie zombie killed by having his brain destroyed. In this case it's from a crowbar wielded by the movie's leading man, Ben.

.

Happy birthday, Honest Abe

Happy 203rd birthday, Abe Lincoln! Born February 12, 1809.

You can watch a 90-minute documentary of the 16th President of the United States on Bio, here.

You can read a really well illustrated chapter, with the Lincoln assassination, from a graphic novel bio here.

.

The Last Zombie

Do the living dead deserve the bad rap given to them by movies and popular culture?

FICTION

Copyright © 2012 Postino

Feelings were strong after the story came out on the local news in February, 1976, and Tom Arthur's neighbors were incensed that for ten years he had been keeping his late brother, Roy, in a room in his basement. Someone who knew Roy had died years before called the police after he spotted him pushing a lawnmower in Tom’s front yard. Tom was arrested and Roy, being dead and yet not dead, was taken into custody. A SWAT team was dispatched to the Arthur home, where Tom was handcuffed and Roy was taken down in a show of force completely out of proportion to the situation. At least Tom thought so. Roy, who gave no resistance, was thrown to the floor and cuffed, and a spit mask put over his head lest he bite someone. The police hadn't had a zombie call in ten years. All of the living dead had been taken care of, or so it was thought. But old prejudices die hard. The SWAT team responded to Roy as they would with a raging, flesh-eating, dead-alive ghoul, a creature of the movies but not reality.

Tom called the lawyer who had handled his parents' estate. He and Tom, now free on his own recognizance, sat at a table in the prosecutor's office. Assistant DA Timpkins was reading aloud a law about the handling of a dead body.

Tom's lawyer, Sweeney, said, "Mr. Arthur—Roy—is not strictly a corpse. He can walk. The law is specific about the condition a person is in when he is dead. In that legal framework corpses don't walk."

The truth was, since the zombie episode of 1966 no one in the Pennsylvania legislature had thought to draft any special laws about zombies, because there was no problem. The incident of reanimated dead bodies was over very quickly, never to be repeated. All of the walking dead (less than half a dozen in all of Butler County, where the satellite fell to Earth, and where the radiation bringing back the recently deceased was localized) were rounded up, and the incident put away as an anomaly. Then that movie came out in ‘68, heavily fictionalizing the incident, making the undead look like a surging horde of cannibal ghouls. In 1976 when Tom Arthur was arrested the other so-called zombies were assumed to be back in their graves, but the impressions from the movie were left.

Sweeney said, "No corpse means Tom can’t be held for desecration of a corpse."

Sweeney and Timpkins argued—actually more of a debate, really—about the strict definition of what Roy was. Sweeney, giving in to the drama inherent in the situation, made a statement, as impassioned as if he were speaking to a jury. "Roy Arthur is not a person, as such. He is a human being, deceased, prepared for burial, who, despite being embalmed, walked home from the undertaking parlor under his own power the night before his funeral. The reason for him being alive in such a form is beyond our understanding. We can’t assume his animation is not the will of God! Roy has some free will to move around, but Roy’s caretaker, his brother, Tom, must tell him everything he wants him to do. Despite Roy’s reappearance going against everything we understand about death, Tom was happy to have seen him again. He loves his brother and was grief stricken when Roy died. Their parents are deceased. Tom has never married. He wants the companionship his brother provides. He takes care of him, loves him, even though Roy cannot speak or interact except at the most basic level. They live in the rundown farmhouse where they grew up. Sometimes Roy does simple tasks. He mows the lawn, for instance, and with Tom getting up there in age he appreciates his brother’s help."

The discussion went back and forth, but in the end charges against Tom Arthur were dropped, and the undead Roy Arthur, walking under his own power, got into in the cab of Tom's pickup truck to be driven home. Roy had fallen into one of those cracks in the legal system: He was legally dead but still walking like a living person. As close as the law could come, Roy was like someone in a persistent vegetative state, being kept alive by machines. Except in this case he wasn't being kept alive by machines, because he didn't need to breathe. All such human functions had ceased at the time of his death in 1966. It was enough to give the DA and all of local law enforcement a massive joint headache, and to be honest, they were glad when Roy Arthur was released. They breathed a collective sigh of relief when Tom's taillights disappeared down the road, away from the Butler County Courthouse.

.

Holy day for America's football religious

Copyright © 2011 The New Yorker

Football in America is akin to a religion, and might have more members than any individual religious group. Super Bowl Sunday is the high holy day of this American religion, and we were all sitting in our pews at the Church of the NFL this past weekend. It was the highest rated event ever on American television. Can I get a hallelujah?

No? Well, I was being cynical. Sally and I watch football. We like the Pittsburgh Steelers (our son lives near Pittsburgh, and it is almost mandatory to be a Steelers fan). I also like the San Francisco 49ers. But we don't act like a win or loss is the apocalypse. We aren't the devout, or the zealots. Even after a bad loss by one of my teams, I've forgotten it after a few minutes and am ready to move on with my life. Not so True Believers, who, according to an article in the February 5, 2012 issue of Parade, are martyred, and actually have lower levels of testosterone after a loss by their football gods.

According to an article in the magazine by by Will Leitch, "'. . .[During the season] NFL teams play only 16 games—every one is a major event.'

"'Each game becomes the centerpiece of the week,' says Ed Hirt, a professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University. With so few games, 'every one can be critical to the teams potential for a playoff run, so fans have a lot of emotional investment in the outcome,'" says Adam Earnhardt . . . an expert on fan behavior.

"That investment can even cause chemical changes. 'Researchers from Georgia State University studied soccer players and extreme soccer fans and found that both groups exhibited the same increase in testosterone levels after a victory, and decrease . . . after a loss,' says Robert Cialdini, a professor of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University."

So now you know. If you can't get it up on Sunday night, it's probably because your team lost that day.

Not only do football fans worship their players and teams, but being Americans, they sing hosannas for the television commercials trotted out for the game. On Monday morning there was as much talk about what commercials scored with the viewers, as what teams scored touchdowns. Personally, I think all of this is lame. I saw some of the commercials, and my opinion was so what? The ones that scored highest with viewers I thought were stupid, and the one I liked best, the Jerry Seinfeld Acura commercial, hardly registered. That's because my tastes run counter to most people. It's something I've lived with all my life.

(No one commented on what my testosterone levels might have looked like after the game. I rooted for the losing team.)

Here's the commercial, and if you're looking at this and seeing a black screen it's because YouTube or Acura has pulled the commercial out of circulation. Sorry.




.

Dumb jokes you can tell at a party

The Italian Bride

In the 1930s a newly married Italian couple is spending their honeymoon in the bride's mother's country cottage.The bride’s father died long ago, and they don't have much money. This is the best they can do. The new bride, a lovely young woman, has never left her village and never been with a man. Her new husband sits alone upstairs while she tells her mother how nervous and scared she is.

"You don't-a worry," her mother tells her. "I stay here and make-a the spaghetti, you go upstairs and have-a some fun." The young woman goes upstairs and readies herself to consummate her marriage. Her husband, sitting on the bed smiling, removes his shirt. Having never seen a hairy chest before, the young bride gets frightened and runs downstairs.

"Momma! It's-a so scary! He has-a the hair on his-a chest-a."

"Calm-a down, little one," her mother says, stirring the sauce. "Everything-a gonna be-a all right. I stay here and make-a the spaghetti, you go upstairs-a and have-a some fun." So the young bride goes back upstairs.

Her new husband takes off his shoes, and pulls down his pants. Having never seen hairy legs before, she gets scared and runs back downstairs.

"Oh-a momma!" she cries. "It's-a so scary! He has-a the hair on his legs-a."

"It's-a OK," her mother says in a calming voice. "I stay here and make-a the spaghetti. You-a go upstairs and have-a some fun."

So the bride goes back upstairs. Her new husband is now wearing only his underwear and socks. She stands in the doorway, gathers herself and smiles at her groom. He sits on the bed and removes his socks. However, the man had fought in the Great War and was injured by a land mine. It blew off all his toes and part of his left foot. The new bride, knowing this is not normal, cries out in fear and runs back downstairs.

"Momma! Momma!" she screams. "It's-a so scary! Oh my god-a momma, I never seen-a anything like it before-a. You won’t believe it momma, but-a he has a foot and a half-a!"

The mother stops stirring her sauce and looks up at her daughter in disbelief. After a short pause she says, "OK, dear, don't-a worry. You stay here and make-a the spaghetti.....I go upstairs and have-a some fun."

Allie the Alligator

The bartender says, "You can't have that thing in here! Get out!"

The guy says, "It's okay, this alligator is highly trained. Just give me a few seconds and I'll show you." The bartender, intrigued, gives him the go-ahead. The man gingerly lifts the alligator up onto a table. By this point, everybody in the bar is gawking at this strange man and his pet. The man grins, looks around the room. Having a new audience, he clears his throat and says, "This is Allie the amazing alligator, and he is so well-trained that I can do this," He balls up his fist and gives the alligator a swift crack on the head.

"OPEN!" He says. The alligator opens his mouth. Before the bartender can do anything, the man unzips his fly and whips it out. He gingerly places his penis in the front of the alligator's gaping maw. He wallops the alligator once more and says "CLOSE!" And the alligator ever-so-gently closes his terrifying jaws comfortably around his cock. One last time, he raps the alligator's head and says "OPEN!" He removes his unharmed manhood, and tucks it safely back into his pants.

The crowd applauds, and he takes a bow. With all eyes still focused on him, he says, "Now, any of you guys have the balls to do that, I'll buy you a drink and give you fifty dollars." Silence falls over the bar, and everyone looks around for someone who might be willing to take the bet.

After a few endless, uncomfortable seconds, a little man in the back slowly raises his hand and says, "I'll do it, but you have to promise not to hit me so hard."

Are my testicles black?

A male patient is lying in bed in the hospital, wearing an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. A young student nurse comes in his room to give him a partial sponge bath.

"Nurse,"' he mumbles from behind the mask, "are my testicles black?"

Embarrassed, the young nurse replies, "I don't know, sir. I'm only here to wash your upper body and feet."

He struggles to ask again, "Nurse, please check for me. Are my testicles black?" Concerned that he might elevate his blood pressure and heart rate from worrying about his testicles, she overcomes her embarrassment and pulls back the covers. She raises his gown, holds his manhood in one hand and his testicles in the other. She looks very closely and says, "There's nothing wrong with them, sir. They're fine."

The man slowly pulls off his oxygen mask, and says very slowly, "Thank you very much. That was wonderful. Now listen very closely: Are-my-test-results-back?"

.

Happy birthday, Axl and Rick!

Axl Rose is 50 today.



Rick Astley is 46.



Happy birthday!

Happy birthday, Alice Cooper

Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier, February 4, 1948) is 64 today.







Happy birthday, Alice!

"I killed him with my voodoo!"

Yesterday I spoke with my friend and former work colleague, Brian. We talked about how our boss, Phil, died this past Labor Day of a massive heart attack. Phil was at a national park with his granddaughters, felt ill, went to a trash barrel and vomited, then sat on a bench and died.

I told Brian, "You know, I tried to kill Phil once with a voodoo kit that Sherry (another coworker) gave me one year for my birthday." I told the story here.

Brian said, "Well, your voodoo might have worked. That was about the time he started having problems." Phil had health issues and went in for a heart operation in January, 2010.

Well! That news made me feel kind of...weird. Not guilty, because officially I don't believe in voodoo. When I did my voodoo ceremony to bring about the very heart attack that later felled him, I'm sure I never for a moment really believed it would work.

But, my natural skepticism aside, what if it did? What if I sent a voodoo curse to Phil? Rather than dropping him that moment like a falling tree, it took its time, worked its way through his system, until, by god, in a couple of years the curse killed him!

The cops can't prove it, and the voodoo kit is long gone. I've disposed of that evidence. Besides, is murder by curse the same as up-close-and-personal murder? I don't believe there's a law against placing a curse. So, even though I'm confessing, I won't spend a minute in jail.

Be careful around me. Don't piss me off. Those voodoo kits are available in fine novelty stores everywhere, and you will ever know if the cause of your sudden pain or even death is because I'm sticking pins into a doll and chanting your name.

Happy birthday Graham Nash and Tommy Smothers

Tommy Smothers is 75 today.



Graham Nash is 70 today.



Happy birthday to both of you!

.

"Your money belt's too tight."

So Mitt Romney finally scored a victory. This time in Florida, a state so unique it has two time zones and a diverse and ethnically mixed population. I really don't know what Romney's win tells us, but it's a checkmark in the W column for the rich guy.

The New Yorker has some funny cartoons about rich people, which seem pertinent to the conversation. These three are from 1954, but rich is rich in any era. The cartoonists are masters Chas Addams, Peter Arno and Whitney Darrow. My feeling is that cartooning is not only a lonely life—working alone in a studio drawing funny pictures is a deadly serious business—and cartoonists have to work so hard at their craft, they like poking fun at the privileged 1%.



Lately I've been going through the New Yorker archives, specifically 1954 (a year chosen at random), and downloading cartoons I like. I am a New Yorker subscriber, so I'm allowed to go back through every issue ever published. The pages are scanned so low rez that producing anything worth showing is a chore. I blow them up and tweak them with my editing software. I've even had to re-set the captions. The New Yorker font is Caslon A, which they have used for the whole history of the magazine. That font costs money, so I use a font that is similar, the close-but-not-quite Century Schoolbook.

I have the book, The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker, with every cartoon published up until the book was published, but have the same problem with the cartoons on DVD. I believe many of the cartoons are genuine works of art, and the low resolution scanning diminishes them.

On the other hand, I believe the magazine is doing us all a favor by scanning all their back issues, even with the low resolution. It gave me a chance to read "The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty" in its first printing from the March 18, 1939 issue, for instance.

All cartoons Copyright © 2011, 1954 The New Yorker

.

Three by three

Sally and I went antiquing last Friday. She found some great old children's valentines, and then we went through a couple of boxes of old snapshots.

I find other people's photos to be like tiny time machines, taking us into the past. They seal that exact time, person and place on a piece of paper. Pretty neat. In another way it's sad. So many pictures of children, and you wonder how they got away from their rightful owners. While I'm looking at a picture of a baby without a name, that baby was very important to someone else. The people to whom these pictures meant something are gone. Their earthly goods made it to an estate sale, and then into the hands of strangers.

For some reason, and she probably didn't realize it, Sally picked out pictures of threes. Three little girls (date on the back says 1923), three women in beautiful hats (no date, but probably sometime in the late teens or early '20s), and a toddler, with a mother and new baby (dated 1916).

Are these girls sisters?

These three are related; they have the same nose.

Is this child a boy, dressed Buster Brown fashion?

.

Bad blood

In 1972 news of a long-term medical experiment, conducted by the Public Health Service since the early 1930s on black sharecroppers from Alabama, became public. The Tuskegee Experiment, as it's called, gave medical "treatment" to African-American men with syphilis. The true meaning of the study was kept from the men. Its goal was to conduct autopsies on them after they died, to see the results of damages caused by this sexually transmitted disease. They were given free treatment for something called "bad blood." Doctors in the experiment did not try to cure the syphilis, even after penicillin was discovered.

You can read more about it here.

Ten years before that I read an article about a propaganda movie from the Soviet Union, which had something of the same idea. At the time It was derided as an outrageously untrue portrait of American society and science. The 1954 article about the movie, Silvery Dust, in LIfe, was in a stack of old magazines I found about 1961 in the library of my junior high school. At the time, like Life, I thought a plot involving black men for a medical experiment (in this case, being falsely accused of rape, and then used as guinea pigs for a killer radioactive dust), could not possibly happen in America. We were a lot more patriotic in those days—jingoistic. really—and more trusting of our government and its motives.




Life treats the Soviet movie strictly as hate-filled anti-American propaganda. On the other hand, unknown at the time to Life or the film's Russian producers, some of its ideas were being carried out in the U.S. by a government department.

The USSR had a history of murdering its citizens for various reasons, mostly political, but the U.S. was supposed to be above that. At least we were taught that in school. Something they didn't tell us at the time was what the effects of open air testing of nuclear devices was doing to citizens downwind. The Atomic Energy Commission is quoted, "Fallout does not constitute a serious hazard outside the test site." The AEC was well aware of the results from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and knew that statement was a lie. Sometimes what is done in the name of national security causes some folks much less security. In this case it was the people of Southern Utah, who were exposed. The bombs weren't set off until the prevailing winds blew in the right direction, over a "low yield" segment of the population, Nevada and Utah.

These are the sorts of things that make citizens fear and mistrust their government, the basis for conspiracy theories. There are plenty of conspiracy theories to go around. The U.S. government figures into most of them. While I'm a skeptic on grand, far-reaching conspiracies, it chills me to think what if? What if conspiracy theorists of the past had screamed that the government was conducting inhumane medical experiments on African-American males, or that open air testing was done to make Southern Utah residents guinea pigs for radiation testing? Would anyone have believed them?

.

Mulling over Mitt's millions

"I'm the 1%!"

Mitt Romney released his tax return and there were no surprises. He pays about 13.9% in taxes, whereas the working poor in our country pay more like 30%. Republicans are hanging on to these tax breaks until their fingertips are bloody. What I can't believe is that many poor and middle class people still support Republicans and their billionaire buddies. They have fallen for the canard that rich people who get even richer = more jobs for poorer people. It wasn't true when Reagan said it, and still isn't true thirty years later.

Mitt doesn't work in the sense you and I work. He collects money. Mitt made a point to say that he didn't inherit his wealth. But his dad was the CEO of a major corporation in the 1960s, American Motors, and Mitt grew up with money. He learned early on how to exploit, how to make himself wealthier. A commentator said that Mitt's income works out to $47,000 a day, more than the great majority of working people earn in a year.

"Of course I don't know how much money I have. It comes in faster than I can count."

When Mitt tries to sound like a man of the people he can't, because every time he talks that silver spoon he was born with gets in the way of his tongue. He has no common touch because he hasn't associated with common people. He sounds like a rich person trying to convince us lesser mortals he's less than he is, the top 1% of the 1%-ers.

After writing a couple of early drafts of this post I watched an NBA basketball game to get my mind off politics. It didn’t work. I was watching a bunch of really tall millionaires running up and down a court throwing a ball at a hoop. Even the NBA minimum salary is about ten years of a working person's earnings. These financial realities are true across professional sports in America. Athletes who have been given the double gifts of good genes and skill can earn staggering amounts of money. Ball players will justify this by saying their careers are short, and that's true. But our careers are long and they still don't even out. I'd like to see someone like LeBron James or Kobe Bryant play for $50,000 a year, minus endorsements. Would they still excel, or just gripe about their wages while worrying how they're going to pay their mortgage and still buy food or shoes for the kids, and god help them if anyone in the family gets sick.

Bryant earned $24.8M in the 2010-11 season; James lagged behind him with a paltry $14.5M.

But in sports big money comes with close scrutiny. In a pro ballplayer's career everything he does is recorded. If I were doing my job with thousands of people watching every move I made, and had other people on the sidelines keeping track of my statistics I'd be very nervous. In that way I was lucky in my job. I got to be responsible for myself for thirty years. Only occasionally did I have to answer for anything I did. And Mitt probably didn't have to answer for much, either. As long as everyone was making money who would want to ask where the money was coming from? The only questions would be is this all? and where can I get more?

"Stop asking me questions I don't want to answer!"

Romney finds his feet being held to a very hot fire. When he wouldn't release his taxes he was criticized for hiding something. When he did release his taxes he was criticized for how much money he has, and how he holds on to it at the expense of other American taxpayers. Sorry 'bout that, Mitt! It's the way of politics, but not the way of CEO's. They have to answer only to shareholders. They feel privileged, and don't like anyone asking intrusive questions of them. Mitt is especially brittle when asked these types of questions. He wants to say it’s nobody’s business but his, but of course it’s our business to examine closely the people who want to be President.

The Republican candidates bicker amongst themselves as to who is more conservative. It's all just eyewash. What they are really doing is trying to hold onto a status quo where the rich keep taking out of the system while others pay into it. There isn’t the thickness of a dollar bill between their philosophies. Why their supporters and members of the Republican Party—most of whom are decidedly not rich—go along with this is beyond me. Maybe they're just hoping if they get close enough to a candidate like Mitt some of his skills with money will rub off.

.