Kid Celephais - background briefing - Guernica, 1937

Guernica is not about Picasso, his tragedy porn and ego or his view of the homicidal massacre that took place there.

It is an opening stanza in a decade of blood, the hecatomb encore of The Great War that cemented for all modern history that the Twentieth Century, The Century of the Sun, would usher in an Aeon in a tidal wave of blood for the first time in 26,000 years.

***

http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/pfguernica.htm

The Bombing of Guernica, 1937

The German bombers appeared in the skies over Guernica in the late afternoon of April 26, 1937 and immediately transformed the sleepy Spanish market town into an everlasting symbol of the atrocity of war. Unbeknownst to the residents of Guernica, they had been slated by their attackers to become guinea pigs in an experiment designed to determine just what it would take to bomb a city into oblivion. Spain was embroiled in a convulsive civil war that had begun in July 1936 when the right-wing Nationalists led by General Francisco Franco sought to overthrow Spain's left-wing Republican government. It did not take long before this bloody internal Spanish quarrel attracted the participation of forces beyond its borders - creating a lineup of opponents that foreshadowed the partnerships that would battle each other in World War II. Fascist Germany and Italy supported Franco while the Soviet Union backed the Republicans. A number of volunteers made their way to Spain to fight and die under the Republican banner including the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the United States. Hitler's support of Franco consisted of the Condor Legion, an adjunct of the Luftwaffe. The Condor Legion provided the Luftwaffe the opportunity to develop and perfect tactics of aerial warfare that would fuel Germany's blitzkrieg through Europe during 1939 and 1940. As German air chief Hermann Goering testified at his trial after World War II: "The Spanish Civil War gave me an opportunity to put my young air force to the test, and a means for my men to gain experience." Some of these experimental tactics were tested on that bright Spring day with devastating results - the town of Guernica was entirely destroyed with a loss of life estimated at 1,650. The world was shocked and the tragedy immortalized by Pablo Picasso in his painting Guernica. Rehearsal for War Noel Monks was a correspondent covering the civil war in Spain for the "London Daily Express." He was the first reporter to arrive on the scene after the bombing. We join his story as he and other reporters drive along a dusty Spanish road: "We were about eighteen miles east of Guernica when Anton pulled to the side of the road jammed on the brakes and started shouting. He pointed wildly ahead, and my heart shot into my mouth, when I looked. Over the top of some small hills appeared a flock of planes. A dozen or so bombers were flying high. But down much lower, seeming just to skim the treetops were six Heinkel 52 fighters. The bombers flew on towards Guernica but the Heinkels, out for random plunder, spotted our car, and, wheeling like a flock of homing pigeons, they lined up the road - and our car. Anton and I flung ourselves into a bomb hole, twenty yards to the side of the road. It was half filed with water, and we sprawled in the mud. We half knelt, half stood, with our heads buried in the muddy side of the carter. After one good look at the Heinkels, I didn't look up again until they had gone. That seemed hours later, but it was probably less than twenty minutes. The planes made several runs along the road. Machine-gun bullets plopped into the mud ahead, behind, all around us. I began to shiver from sheer fright. Only the day before Steer, an old hand now, had 'briefed' me about being strafed. 'Lie still and as flat as you can. But don't get up and start running, or you'll be bowled over for certain.' When the Heinkels departed, out of ammunition I presumed, Anton and I ran back to our car. Nearby a military car was burning fiercely. All we could do was drag two riddled bodies to the side of the road. I was trembling all over now, in the grip of the first real fear I'd ever experienced." "... I saw the reflection of Guernica's flames in the sky." Monk and his fellow reporters drive on, traveling near Guernica where they can hear what they think may be the sounds of bombs. They continue to the city of Balboa, where after filling his report to London, Monk joins his colleagues for dinner. His story continues as his dinner is interrupted by the news from Guernica: "...a Government official, tears streaming down his face, burst into the dismal dining-room crying: 'Guernica is destroyed. The Germans bombed and bombed and bombed.' The time was about 9.30 p.m. Captain Roberts banged a huge fist on the table and said: 'Bloody swine.' Five minutes later I was in one of Mendiguren's limousines speeding towards Guernica. We were still a good ten miles away when I saw the reflection of Guernica's flames in the sky. As we drew nearer, on both sides of the road, men, women and children were sitting, dazed. I saw a priest in one group. I stopped the car and went up to him. 'What I happened, Father?' I asked. His face was blackened, his clothes in tatters. He couldn't talk. He just pointed to the flames, still about four miles away, then whispered: 'Aviones. . . bombas'. . . mucho, mucho.' ...I was the first correspondent to reach Guernica, and was immediately pressed into service by some Basque soldiers collecting charred bodies that the flames had passed over. Some of the soldiers were sobbing like children. There were flames and-smoke and grit, and the smell of burning human flesh was nauseating. Houses were collapsing into the inferno. In the Plaza, surrounded almost by a wall of fire, were about a hundred refugees. They were wailing and weeping and rocking to and fro. One middle-aged man spoke English. He told me: 'At four, before the-market closed, many aeroplanes came. They dropped bombs. Some came low and shot bullets into the streets. Father Aroriategui was wonderful. He prayed with the people in the Plaza while the bombs fell.'.. ...The only things left standing were a church, a sacred Tree, symbol of the Basque people, and, just outside the town, a small munitions factory. There hadn't been a single anti-aircraft gun in the town. It had been mainly a fire raid. ...A sight that haunted me for weeks was the charred bodies of several women and children huddled together in what had been the cellar of a house. It had been a refugio." References:    Noel Monks' account appears in: Monks, Noel, Eyewitness (1955); Thomas, Hugh, The Spanish Civil War (1977).

"The Bombing of Guernica, 1937," EyeWitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (2005) *** To not forget the Condor Legion and Guernica, requires us first of all to know about it. To learn. In an age where a seld-espoused reference site like the ghastly wikipedia devotes the energy of the 60 or 70 mental cases who write 99% of its pages to getting minutiae of cartoons correct but doesn't even contain pages on some significant tragedies, let alone factual views of historical events, the first revolutionary act is to learn. Only then can memory play its role. The larger point is learning HOW to think, not WHAT to think. But the pavlovian generations have real hard time with that...

2012 aka 13.0.0.0.0 in the Mayan Calendar.

The Maya calendar is a cultural artifact from the general category of the World Ages. Computing the long-term cycles of cosmic order was a concern in all ancient cultures from China to Peru. The introduction of calendars to regulate civic life and agricultural planning was a long and complex process. In devising these systems, the calendar-makers did not limit themselves to time in the human scale, but extended their computations to countless thousands of years. Doing so, they sometimes came up with remarkable figures. 

In Hindu chronology, the number 4,320,000,000 is associated with the cosmological motif of the "Days and Nights of Brahma." This number caught the attention of Joseph Campbell, who observed that 4,320,000,000 years, or 4.32 billion years, is intriguingly close to the current estimate for the geological age of the earth, 4.5 billion years. 4320 is the base number that generates the four Yugas of Hindu cosmology. It also shows up in the chronology of prediluvian kings compiled by the Babylonian priest, Berossus, and elsewhere. It is an artificial norm (a sacred canonical unit, if you prefer) that also factors into various geological, sidereal, solar, lunar, and planetary time cycles.

Like the Hindu timescale, Maya calendrics runs into the range of remote, unimaginable numbers. The mathematician-priests who devised the Maya calendar recorded exact dates of events, down to the day, but they also liked to extrapolate far backward and forward in time. The precision of their planetary, solar, and lunar tables is impressive. They calculated the cycles of Venus and the Earth as accurately as we do today, down to four decimal points. This mastery of verifiable time-cycles commands respect, and obliges us to look closely at their long-term extrapolations. For the Maya and all other ancient peoples, verifiable and non-verifiable calculations were integral to a single system of sacred calendrics. I see nothing woolly-minded in granting some respect to their long-term timeframe, especially if something can be learned from doing so.

According to most experts, the Long Count dates from early in the Classical Maya era, 200 - 900 CE, although it may be much older in conception, possibly originating among the Olmecs in the 7th C. BCE. The engravings that record the earliest dates are Chiapas de Corzo, Stela 2, 32 BCE, and Tikal Stela 2, 292 CE. The last date recorded was January 909 CE. The calendar uses a string of five units factored on a 20-base: k´ín (1 day), winal (20 days), tun (360 days of 18 winals), katun (7200 days or 20 tuns) and baktun (144,000 days or 20 katuns).

The stele or engraved stones with calendric glyphs record dates by hieroglyphs and dot and bar notations, showing the units by position. Scholars notate the dates in five placements, from baktun to k'in, like this: 9.16.0.2.0, equivalent to June 18, 751 AD. December 21, 2012 is written 13.0.0.0.0. There are three standards of correlation and, you bet, a lot of quibbles and fine tuning in Maya chronology.

Obama, The Postmodern Coup -- Making of a Manchurian Candidate, by Webster Griffin Tarpley, at The Ralph Nader Library

Obama, The Postmodern Coup -- Making of a Manchurian Candidate, by Webster Griffin Tarpley, at The Ralph Nader Library

"Where did you get a public opinion that we should fully disarm and then, according to some theoreticians, such as Brzezinski, divide our territory into three or four states? If there is such a public opinion, I would disagree with it." -- Russian President Vladimir Putin, June 4, 2007.

This book exposes Obama, but it does so from a standpoint that is fundamentally different from almost all other critical studies seen so far. This book exposes and refutes Obama from the left. In this book, the vague and vapid messianic and utopian platitudes, the lemming legions, the personality cult, the narcissism, the megalomania, the fake polling, the media and intelligence agency manipulation which are the essence of Obama and his campaign of mass manipulation are criticized thoroughly, but always from a standpoint which reaches back to the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal, in many ways the best government that America has ever known. The basic thesis shared by the authors of this book is that Obama is a right-winger, an elitist, a creature of Wall Street, and a deeply troubled personality, running far to the right of his main opponent, Sen. Clinton, on all major issues, including the two critical areas of economics and foreign policy. Obama's ultra-left components, concentrated in social and energy policy, are an ideological camouflage which only accentuates, and does not alter, his overall pro-Wall Street profile. Obama is a right-winger, and this book criticizes him from the left. This, it turns out, is by far his most vulnerable flank in today's crisis of simultaneous wars and economic depression.

Other studies of Obama can be divided into three main groups. First are those which approach their subject with transparent adulation and hero worship. This is the majority of the treatments of Obama coming out of the liberal and left liberal community, and these studies are so biased as to be basically worthless. The authors are often the limousine liberals and wealthy elitists and their publicists, and these persons tend to make up Obama's most devoted base. 

The rightists speculate that Obama will surrender to the supposed global jihad, whereas his true goal is to launch his own apocalyptic global hyper-jihad against Pakistan, China, and Russia, in conformity with the prescriptions of his guru and svengali, the marplot Zbigniew Brzezinski. Obama is the darling of the failed and bankrupt elites: Brzezinski, Jay Rockefeller, George Soros, Paul Adolph Volcker, General Merrill "Bomb Now, Die Later" McPeak, Joseph Nye of the Trilateral-Bilderberger complex, and the notorious ruling class cover-up artist Lee Hamilton are all in Obama's amen corner. The right-wingers then try to portray Obama as a Moslem, whereas he obviously worships at the Ford Foundation Church of the Counterinsurgency, where the racist provocateur Jeremiah Wright purveys a Gnostic synthetic religion totally distinct from both Christianity and Islam. They try to portray Obama as a left liberal, whereas he exhibits in fact many of the features of what is being increasingly recognized as postmodern fascism. All of these right wing and neocon attempts to understand the Obama phenomenon are thus crippled by an attempt to make this candidate and his supporters fit into ideological schemes left over from the Cold War, or else from the post-9/11 era. But the Cold War is long gone, and the post-9/11 era is rapidly fading into yesterday's headlines, even as the Brzezinski faction gears up for the global showdown with Moscow, Beijing, and the other capitals of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

The net result of all the right-wing and neocon studies of Obama is to vastly underestimate the danger that he poses, both in terms of world-wide thermonuclear confrontation (the likely outcome of Brzezinski's endgame), as well as in terms of the transformation of the U.S. society and economy towards postmodern fascism. The postmodern fascist danger is not confined to Obama: the radical environmental charlatan Al Gore has just announced his intention to spend $300 million to create a private army of 10 million: Malthusian fanatics who will coerce politicians and society in general into implementing global warming countermeasures. These will obviously include reductions in the standard of living, and speculative bonanzas for Gore and his clique of elitists. Gore's Green Army will be available for strikebreaking. It might also undertake a March on Washington in the spirit of Benito Mussolini's October 1922 March on Rome. Will Gore's environmental storm troopers wear green shirts? If they do, they will join the tradition of the green-shirted Romanian Iron Guards of Codreanu, an imitator of Il Duce. Not surprisingly, Obama has announced that Gore will be prominent and influential in the future regime of the Illinois messiah.

World Simulators and Crowdsourcing Solutions to Save the Ape // Brainsturbator

World Simulators and Crowdsourcing Solutions to Save the Ape // Brainsturbator

Bucky Fuller & his World Game: Intro to Saving Planets

Rebooted for 2008. A curated collection of documents, open questions, and new material for R. Buckminster Fuller’s original “World Game.”
This was one of the very first Brainsturbator articles I wrote: I’ve totalled it today and built something better. I think now is a good time to be talking about Bucky’s vision of a World Game. We have the technology to do this and a new administration could easily provide the funding. I don’t think any of this material is Utopian or far out, but if you do, let me know why.

From the introduction to a World Game activity book:

“Now, for the first time in the history of man, all the political theories and all the concepts of political functions are completely obsolete. All of them were developed on the you-or-me basis. This whole realization that mankind can and may be comprehensively successful is startling.”

By comprehensively successful, R. Buckminster Fuller meant that every human being could live in abundance. This idea gets dismissed even today as Utopian bullshit, but I’d like to frame this with a few short, simple questions:

1. Can the quality of life on Earth be improved?
2. Will everyone benefit from those improvements?
3. Is that worth spending time on?

To me, it’s self-evident that the quality of life, for many billions of human beings, needs serious improvement, here on Earth. I also believe that all humans will benefit from ending hunger, poverty and oppression. When everyone has a place at the table there’s no need for resource wars, violent revolutions, or terrorist acts. When we all generate our own power and grow our own food, that will be the strongest and most stable domestic security possible.
Like you, though, I don’t have a printed copy of my detailed plans for How To Fix The World. Yet. I do have an idea, though: we should make Bucky Fuller’s World Game a reality today, and put it online for everyone to play with. This is basically a call for a government-funded world simulator game to “crowdsource” solutions for ongoing global problems.
We’ve proven that this model works, and we have the technology to make it happen—world simulators, as you’ll soon see, are already running, and being sold to corporations and militaries.

Version 1.0

The first World Game was all on paper. It was 1961 when Fuller announced the concept, noting modestly that he’d been doing it since 1927. Although the dense “Fact Books” that got handed out to students were indeed generated by a computer database, for the most part Bucky’s version of the World Game was something students did on paper, using the figures and facts provided.
This is the first element I’d like to update: What facts do you trust? Who are the real authorities? Any thinking human would be suspicious of being handed a document that literally claims to tell you everything that is true about the Earth, whether that document is titled “An Objective Report by a Supercomputer” or “The Holy Bible.” Teaching people the basic source-synthesis methods behind doing their own research should be a logical opening lesson for any World Game. Give kids the tools to build their own picture of the world. Perhaps rather than handing out “world factbooks,” we could hand out blank templates where kids could research and fill in their own data and conclusions.
This is the question Bucky posed to students: “how can we make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone?”

Open Questions:

1. Does the technology exist to build a computer based 1:1 simulation of Earth? Yes, and it’s being sold to corporations and the US military. Check out Simulex, the brainchild of Purdue big-processor genius Alok Chaturvedi. The best article on this system, and the horizons for world simulation tech in a Post-911 World™ check out Mark Baard’s excellent Register article, Sentient World: War Games on the Grandest Scale.
2. Does computer software have a role in education? I’d argue it should—automated computer instruction, done right, is more efficient and effective than a bored teacher. However, there’s obvious obstacles here: although the world sim software exists, it’s not going to run on the classroom desktop, and you definitely can’t fit the databases involved here onto an elementary school system. The immediate future will look more like, for instance, SimVermont: a 1:1 scale simulation of a much smaller sample population, just over 600,000 in the case of Vermont. In a classroom setting, a local context would probably be a lot more captivating than the global approach, too.
3. Is Will Wright Already Working on This? Seriously, is he? Send me an email.
4. How Accurate is Ecosystem Modeling? Considering how much we don’t know about the soil-food web and other ecosystem exchanges, how useful could this simulator be? Personally, I take it for granted that solutions will involve ecosystem design, living machines and permaculture—to be useful, the simulator would need to provide detailed ecosystem modeling. Aside from fire simulators and large-scale crop management software, how much research is being on done on the math behind nature?

Running the Numbers

Once we begin to define our problem with numbers, we can begin to make models and perform calculations. Because of the outstanding and almost total ignorance of issues at this global level of scale, examining the evidence leads to radical conclusions. For instance, paying people to stay home from work sounds insane, but when you examine the numbers, especially in light of our coming energy crisis today, it makes more sense:

The majority of Americans reach their jobs by automobile, probably averaging four gallons a day—thereby, each is spending four million real cosmic-physical-Universe dollars a day without producing any physical Universe life-support wealth accredited in the energy-time—metabolic—accounting system eternally governing regenerative Universe. Humans are designed to learn how to survive only through trial-and-error-won knowledge. Long-known errors are, however, no longer cosmically tolerated. The 350 trillion cosmic dollars a day wasted by the 60 percent of no-wealth-producing human job-holders in the U.S.A., together with the $19 quadrillion a day wasted by the no-wealth-producing human job-holders in all other automobiles-to-work countries, also can no longer be cosmically tolerated.
Today we have computers that enable us to answer some very big questions if all the relevant data is fed into the computer and all the questions are properly asked. As for instance, “Which would cost society the least: to carry on as at present, trying politically to create more no-wealth-producing jobs, or paying everybody handsome fellowships to stay at home and save all those million-dollar-each gallons of petroleum?’’ Stated evermore succinctly, the big question will be: “Which costs more—paying all present job-holders a billionaire’s lifelong $400,000-a-day fellowship to stay at home, or having them each spend $4 million a day to commute to work?’’ Every computer will declare it to be much less expensive to pay people not to go to work. The same computers will also quickly reveal that there is no way in which each and every human could each day spend $400,000 staying at the most expensive hotels and doing equally expensive things; they could rarely spend 4000 of the 1980-deflated dollars a day, which is only 1 percent of a billionaire’s daily income.’’

When you look at the entire planet as a corporation, and consider every human on Earth to be an equal shareholder, then “service sector” jobs, like working the counter at Starbucks or greeting people at Wal-Mart is completely useless. It creates nothing of value for humans except money.
For less than the cost of managing the Starbucks corporation, we could just organize a Coffee Union, where for a membership fee, people can stop in at locations all over the city and get good fresh coffee. This kind of operation would scale up very quickly to the point you’d no longer even pretend to verify memberships, you just let anyone who comes in have free coffee. This would put most existing coffee shops out of business, unless they’re community hubs, but this should also be viewed as freeing up human labor. Coffee is no longer a service we need provided to us by over-qualified wage slaves, and now they can focus on other things, right?
Unfortunately, it’s not that logical, rational or simple.
Until we’re applying the Coffee Union model to the world as a whole, we’re going to keep building towards increasing failure. We’re reducing the need for human labor with technological innovation, and we’re increasing our population around the world. This is forcing an increasing number of people to compete for a decreasing number of resources, and none of it is necessary.


Discordian Pope Robert Anton Wilson addressed this in his classic paper on The RICH Economy:

What I am proposing, in brief, is that the Work Ethic (find a Master to employ you for wages, or live in squalid poverty) is obsolete.
Delivered from the role of things and robots, people will learn to become fully developed persons, in the sense of the Human Potential movement. They will not seek work out of economic necessity, but out of psychological necessity—as an outlet for their creative potential.
As Bucky Fuller says, the first thought of people, once they are delivered from wage slavery, will be, “What was it that I was so interested in as a youth, before I was told I had to earn a living?”
The answer to that question, coming from millions and then billions of persons liberated from mechanical toil, will make the Renaissance look like a high school science fair or a Greenwich Village art show.

That’s all for now...

This whole tangent was inspired by the Superstruct review I did at Skilluminati, so thanks to IFTF for lighting the fire. There’s a lot more to come, as always.
Also highly recommended: Klintron’s positive and pragmatic presentation Left Behind: The Singularity and the Third World. He gives a much needed reality check that still provides good news—the best kind of balancing act, these days. (Technoccult is also home to my running TAZ History which has covered Mound Bayou and Kowloon Walled City and my roundup on Afrigadget: the Low-Tech Goldmine.)
I’m working on a small-scale version of this project over at Vermontistan.


Note: World Game is not the property of o.s.Earth, a corporation from New Haven that claims the “rights” to the World Game concept—a claim they will be happy to explain, starting at $5500. Obviously, anyone who puts the work into researching and compiling accurate data and making that accessible through a computer simulator with a “playable” user interface has built a World Game. Obviously that World Game is better than the o.s.Earth process, which is a generic brainstorming conference that evokes the Bucky™ brand.

Unterzaubernungs

Hitler is the modern myth's God of Rage. Awesome in its way I guess.

I found this one funny, but maybe that German clip's run its course.

In other news, people are still reading Simpsons comics, which have locally produced versions and are available where non-comics people go every day such as the supermarket and local corner stores.

Plus ca change.