The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh

The Pisces were coached by Sacramento's top investigative TV reporter, Jeffrey Trout.

Update:  Nicholas Pryor apparently and coincidentally died this week.  I'll also remember him as a passenger in "Airplane!" and from a couple of "Murder She Wrote" episodes.

The Security Apparatus Loves Genocide

The Department of Interior, led by Secretary Deb Haaland, has acknowledged that at least a thousand children died as part of the US government's decades-long program to systematically eradicate indigenous culture through its system of boarding schools, often administered by religious institutions.

"This report further proves what Indigenous peoples across the country have known for generations: That federal policies were set out to break us, obtain our territories, and destroy our cultures and our lifeways," Newland, a member of the Bay Mills Indian Community, said in a statement.

Of course, as a child I was forced to listen to geriatric bigots celebrate a similar program in which native youth were taken from their homes and placed with LDS white suburban families as part of a program of cultural and religious assimilation.  The most egregious proponent of such cultural imperialism was Spencer Kimball, LDS church president from 1973 to 1985, who never encountered anyone with indigenous American (or even Polynesian) ancestry who he wouldn't proclaim to be a "Lamanite."  

It's truly astounding how he openly made profoundly racist statements in the guise of a sustained prophet, seer, and revelation in LDS General Conference -

“The work is unfolding, and blinded eyes begin to see, and scattered people begin to gather. I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today as against that of only fifteen years ago. Truly the scales of darkness are falling from their eyes, and they are fast becoming a white and delightsome people.

The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos; five were darker but equally delightsome. The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation.

At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl — sixteen — sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents — on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather. There was the doctor in a Utah city who for two years had had an Indian boy in his home who stated that he was some shades lighter than the younger brother just coming into the program from the reservation. These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated.“

The Security Apparatus Loves Brain Damage

Berkeleyside has an interesting article about an exhibit about the history of movies in Berkeley.  The security apparatus bizarrely loves promoting brain damage on high school and college campuses, but the best amenity on the Berkeley campus was the university art museum's Pacific Film Archive.  It alone had better film programming than anything available in the DC area, but that's not surprising given that this area is still kind of a cultural wasteland.  Their film programs were academic and exhaustive so they would show literally every movie ever made by a director (I don't know how people keep all of those Ozu "Late Spring," "Early Summer," "End of Summer" movies straight).  One time they had a Terrance Davies series (which at the time was only four or five feature films and a movie made up of short films).  Before a screening in front of about ten grungy grad students on a random Wednesday night in Berkeley, Davies popped out unannounced and proceeded to deliver a rambling anecdote about how his earliest memory was of his alcoholic, psychotic father throwing one of his older siblings out of a second story window.  He then said, "As for the movie you're about to see ("The Neon Bible" bizarrely starring Dennis Leary), to be honest I wasn't really able to carry it off, but I learned enough that I could do a much better job with "The House of Mirth."  Enjoy!"  And with that he left and probably proceeded to get drunk somewhere.  Then there was the screening in a Chaplin series that the extremely old son of Chaplin's longtime cameraman Rollie Totheroh attended along with a grandson and some great-grandchildren.  They raucously cheered every time Rollie's name appeared in the credits.

Oh, but UVa has football players like Adrian Burnim and Anthony Poindexter assaulting people on and off the field, so that makes the security apparatus happy.

The Security Apparatus Loves Anti-Intellectualism and White Supremacy

When we were in high school, I and my siblings had to go to our local LDS church for religious indoctrination at 6 am every single school day (in addition, of course, to the required 3 hours of church on Sundays plus various activities and "firesides" we had to go to throughout the week).  Not even fundamentalist Christians or even Mennonites did such a thing.  And what did we learn?  Well, it was ostensibly instruction on the LDS "standard works" - Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price - but according to the church the real purpose was to help impressionable young people "feel the spirit," i.e. have emotional experiences that would tie them to the church and cause them to go to church schools such as BYU, go on missions, get married in exclusionary LDS temples, and pay 10% of their income to the church in tithes for life.

The actual content was incredibly impoverished and often offensive.  In my freshman year, we were supposed to study the Old Testament in the poorly-translated King James Version as a means of supporting the validity of the LDS church's truth claims.  Even active LDS members acknowledge that this kind of proof-texting is incredibly anachronistic and misleading.  It didn't help that we also read Joseph Smith's risible and self-promoting "translation" and "correction" of ancient texts that he could not read.  Of course, such ignorance also did not stop him from hilariously mistranslating Egyptian hieroglyphics (on papyri that he bought from a traveling mummy salesman) that were ordinary funerary inscriptions and claiming that the writings came directly from the hand of the patriarch Abraham.

Of course, the security apparatus was always terrified of my desire to learn so they pulled some bizarre stunt where they claimed that our teacher died.  I thought the guy was fine, unlike my senior year Book of Mormon teacher who literally told us every single day that he was incredibly special because he had served a mission in Ecuador and LDS president Spencer Kimball had said that the indigenous people of the region were supposedly the purest descendants of the mythical savage and wicked dark-skinned Lamanites who had exterminated their white, righteous, and civilized kinsmen at the conclusion of the Book of Mormon.  Of course, Kimball also claimed that Native children who were sent to live with suburban Mormon families literally had their skin turned whiter as divine reward for their righteousness in becoming culturally assimilated into white Mormon society.

Oh, and this guy was getting some kind of degree in education and told me that people at UVa were antichrists.

UVa Is Such a Joke

I went to UVa because it was cheap and I could pay for it myself, but as they say you get what you pay for.  When I was a freshman, I was forced to take an idiotic First-Year Seminar on "Community in America."  The professor was a stolid, non-intellectual type who specialized in colonial US history but almost in an antiquarian sense.  He was actually really impressed by the stereotypical overachieving UVa undergrad types - you know, dumb stuff like U Guides and living on the Lawn.

The seminar was an obvious setup designed to promote small-minded anti-intellectual boosterism and Babbitry in retaliation for my reasonable disdain for my parents' thoroughgoing bigotry and racism.  I had already read Faulkner, not to mention Sinclair Lewis, so I was reasonably unimpressed.  The only thing we read that was useful was Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," which had a similar pessimistic view of such environs.  We actually had to read and write an essay on Garrison Keillor's middlebrow fave Lake Wobegon Days.  My essay was characterized by Innes as an "evisceration," but he had to give me an A because it was completely accurate.  

The main thing I learned from the experience was to never get advice on course selection from a UVa professor.

Oh, and Innes's annoying daughter apparently has a high-level administrative position at UVa AND rides the horse at UVa football games.  What an incredibly stupid school!

The Security Apparatus Is Unbelievably Bigoted and Stupid

Because of anti-intellectual bigots like my mother, so much of this country doesn't have access to decent public education or public transportation or public health.

But we have the most overfunded military-intelligence complex in the world!  That's so much better than having the life expectancy or infant mortality or maternal mortality of a developed country.

The Security Apparatus Is Unbelievably Stupid and Bigoted

The state of Utah is notorious for shirking its ethical responsibility to provide a social safety net, instead directing people who should be eligible for assistance to the bigoted LDS church.  As ProPublica's Eli Hagar explained to NPR, people are forced to affirm that a thoroughly racist text that defames indigenous Americans as wicked and cursed is divine truth or face being homeless or going hungry.  He even explains the role of "bishop roulette" in this unprofessional and thoroughly patriarchal system.

HAGER: So in my ProPublica story, I highlighted the story of Danielle Bellamy. She's somebody who is not Mormon herself. And she's going through some serious health problems that have left her in the hospital for weeks at a time, and she's worried about being able to still afford her rent where she and her two daughters live. She tried applying for cash assistance from the state, but they denied her. And she was explicitly instructed by state caseworkers, she says, to go to the church instead. And she went to her local bishop for help. And that's when she was asked to read out loud from the Book of Mormon, watch Mormon videos and set a date to get baptized all in order to get help that she desperately needed to avoid becoming homeless.

KELLY: And, again, she's being asked to do all this. She's not Mormon, you said. Did she get any help?

HAGER: She did get some help from the church, but in her most recent attempt to get help, she was denied because she refused to get baptized as part of a faith that she is not part of.

KELLY: One big issue this raises is that, unlike the government, churches are often allowed to discriminate based on religion. Did your reporting indicate that that is happening in Utah?

HAGER: Correct. They are allowed to constitutionally. To be clear, the LDS church provides a tremendous amount of help to poor people and homeless people across Utah, across the country and really across the world. But there's a term in Utah called bishop roulette, which essentially means depending on the bishop where you happen to live, he might - it's always a man. He might be very generous with aid. Many are. But others might discriminate against, say, single mothers, you know, for having had sex out of wedlock or against LGBTQ people or simply against non-members of the church.