The Weight of Evil

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Portal of the Last Judgement, center (2^nd) door of the Notre Dame de Paris façade.

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When I first saw the central Portal of the Last Judgement on the face of Notre Dame in Paris, I was looking up from the portal threshold and perceived the ‘scale’ to be the globe with a life-size devil and his minion manipulating the ‘world’ balance. From a higher visual perspective, he is handling the balance of good-and-evil .  Notice the devil’s right hand is over the top crosspiece of the scale in front of its right shoulder.  From the ground, the demon looks straight down at you as you enter the cathedral.

*Not shown in this picture is the line of pious ‘scholars’ dressed similarly and reading books, coming into the center from the left. The lofty uncommon human figures of the portal all move in one direction—to the right, as you face it.

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A profoundly haunting challenge appears to me in the interpretation of the façade. Built over the course of a hundred years, Notre Dame, like other gothic cathedrals of the era, occupied a central place of power in the emerging civilization of Europe. The Holy Roman Empire under the Church, which established itself as the dominant organizing factor of the Carolingian monarchy begun by Charlemagne,  vaunted its victory over the minds of men,  and was perhaps at its peak in ‘mid-evil’ times as crusades and inquisitions spread across the civilized landscape.  The Portal of the Last Judgement, I take it, is commentary in stone from the builder/designers invoking the inherent evil of institutions of power and ‘knowledge’ –a cautionary tale about human nature ‘set above’ the ordinary and invested with professional rank.

In his book,  1992’s Dumbing Us Down,  John Taylor Gatto might call the portal image the wages of mass schooling and institutional networks.  The ‘devil’s bargain’ in the network is the apparent lightening of the burden of ‘good.’

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Several times over a Teacher of the Year, Mr. Gatto:

“In the growth of human society, families came first, communities second, and only much later came the institutions set up by the community to serve it… Particularly [now] in the United States, spokesmen for institutional life have demanded a role above and beyond service to family and communities. They have sought to command and prescribe as kings used to do…  Institutions, say their political philosophers, are better at creating marching orders for the human race than families are, therefore they should no longer be expected to follow but should lead. Institutional leaders have come to regard themselves as great synthetic fathers to millions of synthetic children, by which I mean to all of us. This theory sees us bound together in some abstract family relationship in which the state is the true mother and father; hence it insists on our first and best loyalty… I want to examine the destructive effects the false claim of institutional prerogative has on both individual and family life… If we return to our original discussion of networks, it will be clear that every one of our national institutions is a place where men, women, and children are isolated according to some limited aspect of their total humanity… [pp60-61]

“If the loss of true community entailed by masquerading in networks is not noticed in time, a condition arises in the victim’s spirit very much like the ‘trout starvation’ that used to strike wilderness explorers whose diet…gradually suffers for want of sufficient nutrients. Networks like schools are not communities, just as school training is not education. By preempting [a majority] percent of the total time of the young, by locking young people up with other young people exactly their own age, by ringing bells to start and stop wprk, by asking people to think about the same thing at the same time in the same way, by grading people the way we grade vegetables—and in a dozen other vile and stupid ways—network schools steal the vitality of communities and replace it with an ugly mechanism. No one survives these places with their humanity intact… [p56]

“It is a fact generally ignored when considering the communal nature of institutional families like schools, large corporations, colleges, armies, hospitals, and government agencies that they are not real communities at all, but networks. Unlike communities, networks…have a very narrow way of allowing people to associate, and that way is always across a short spectrum of one, or at most a few, specific uniformities…  [and] in spite of any genuine emotional attractions that might be there, human behavior in network situations often resemble a dramatic act—matching a script produced to meet the demands of a story. And as such, the intimate moments in the networks lack the sustaining value of their counterparts in community. [pp54-55]   …A community is a place in which people face each other over time in all their human variety, good parts, bad parts, and all the rest. Such places promote the highest quality of life possible, lives of engagement and participation. This happens in unexpected ways, but it never happens when you’ve spent more than a decade listening to other people talk and trying to do what they tell you to do, trying to please them after the fashion of schools. It makes a real lifelong difference whether you avoid that training or it traps you… People interact on thousands of invisible pathways in a community, and the emotional payoff is correspondingly rich and complex. But networks can only manage a cartoon simulation of community and provide a very limited payoff. [pp56-57]

“You must understand that first and foremost the business [of teaching] I am in is a jobs project and an agency for letting contracts. We [schoolers] cannot afford to save money by reducing the scope of our operation or by diversifying the product we offer, even to help children grow up right. That is the iron law of institutional schooling—it is a business, subject neither to normal accounting procedures nor to the rational scalpel of competition…  After an adult lifetime spent teaching school, I believe the method of mass-schooling is its only real content. Don’t be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son’s or daughter’s education. All the pathologies we’ve considered [in the book] come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love—and lessons in service to others, too, which are among the key lessons of home and community life… These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is… a jail sentence… [pp19-21]

“In fact the name ‘community’ hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. School is a major actor in this tragedy, as it is a major actor in the widening gulf among social classes… [and] schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders… and…[despite] thousands of humane, caring people [who] work in schools…the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions… [The] institution is psychopathic; it has no conscience…  Schools were designed…to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population…[and] to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled… It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to…confinement…[and] effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present…that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its ‘homework’ [pp24-27]

“I want to tell you what the effect on our children is of taking all their time from them…and forcing them to spend it on abstractions…  (1)The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world… nobody wants children to grow up these days, least of all the children…  (2) The children I teach have almost no curiosity and what little they do have is transitory. They cannot concentrate for very long… (3) The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they live in a continuous present, the exact moment they are in is the boundary of their consciousness. (4) The children I teach are ahistorical; they have no sense of how the past has predestinated their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives. (5) The children I teach are cruel to each other; they lack compassion…laugh at weakness…[and] have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly. (6) The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor…because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of [borrowed] behavior… [The] disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy, so intimate relationships have to be avoided. (7) The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically ‘grade everything’…  (8) The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges… frequently masked by surface bravado or by anger or aggressiveness, but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude…. Either schools have caused these pathologies, or television has, or both…  There simply isn’t enough other time in the experience of our kids for there to be other significant causes. [pp30-32]

“Genuine reform is possible but it shouldn’t cost anything. More money and more people pumped into this sick institution will only make it sicker. We need to rethink the fundamental premises of schooling and decide what it is we want all children to learn and why. For…[generations] this nation has tried to impose objectives downward from a lofty command center made up of ‘experts,’ a central elite of social engineers. It hasn’t worked. It won’t work. And it is a gross betrayal of the democratic promise that once made [our country] a noble experiment. The Russian attempt to create Plato’s republic in Eastern Europe has exploded before our eyes; our own attempt to impose the same sort of central orthodoxy using the schools as an instrument is also coming apart at the seams, albeit more slowly and painfully. It doesn’t work because its fundamental premises are mechanical, anti-human, and hostile to family life. Lives can be controlled by machine education but they will always fight back with weapons of social pathology; drugs, violence, self-destruction, indifference, and the symptoms I see in the children I teach. [p33]

….”We’ve got to give kids independent time right away because that is the key to self-knowledge, and we must reinvolve them with the real world as fast as possible so that the…time  can be spent on something other than abstraction. This is an emergency…  Experts in education have never been right; their ‘solutions’ are expensive, self-serving, and always involve further centralization. We’ve seen the results. It’s time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family.” [p38] …I disagree so strongly with the fundamental premise that networks are workable substitutes for families… [that] we shouldn’t be thinking of more school but of less. People who admire our school institution usually admire networking in general…and overlook its negative aspect—that networks, even good ones, drain the vitality from communities…[and] provide mechanical (‘by the numbers’) solutions to human problems, when a slow, organic process of self-awareness, self-discovery, and cooperation is what is required… Aristotle saw, a long time ago, that fully participating in a complex range of human affairs was the only way to become fully human… [p52]

“Networks, however, don’t require the whole person, but only a narrow piece. If you function in a network it asks you to suppress all the parts of yourself except the network-interest part—a highly unnatural act although one you can get used to. In exchange, the network will deliver efficiency in the pursuit of some limited aim. This is in fact a devil’s bargain, since on the promise of some future gain one must surrender the wholeness of one’s present humanity. If you enter into too many of these bargains you will split yourself into many specialized pieces, none of them completely human. And no time is available to reintegrate them. This, ironically, is the destiny of many successful networkers…  The fragmentation caused by excessive networking creates diminished humanity, a sense our lives are out of [our own] control because they are.” [p53]. Dumbing Us Down, by John Taylor Gatto, 1992.

WTC Since ’73: Nuclear Destruction

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The images above date from May 1953 at the first test of an artillery shell nuke fired from a gun at the Nevada Test Site https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/1090226/view

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Roughly fifty years ago, in 1973, a little book about nuclear proliferation was published that soon became a cornerstone in the debate against the industry’s expansion. Entitled The Curve of Binding Energy, author John McPhee introduced his public to the work and ideas of visionary physicist Ted Taylor, the man who miniaturized warheads into ‘tactical’ nuclear bombs small enough for an individual to carry around like a band instrument.

   “Musing once over a little sliver of metallic U-235 about the size of a stick of chewing gum, Ted Taylor remarked, ‘If ten percent of this were fissioned, it would be enough to knock down the World Trade Center.’ The United States Atomic Energy Commission has set five kilograms of U-235 as the amount at and above which the material is ‘significant’…Five kilograms is an arbitrarily chosen figure… In the frankly bellicose days of the somewhat forgotten past, the term used was not ‘significant’ but ‘strategic’. Unofficially—around the halls and over the water coolers—five kilos is known as ‘the trigger quantity.’ “ –p10, The Curve of Binding Energy

By the early 1970s, knocking down the World Trade Center with unimaginably small quantities of nuclear weapons-grade fuel became the persistent muse of Ted Taylor. ‘The Curve’ begins with Taylor’s WTC statement on page 10 and follows it through at the end of McPhee’s book, where author and subject together went for a ride into downtown Manhattan and ended up making their assessment in person:     “Driving down from Peekskill…we found ourselves on Manhattan’s West Side Highway just at sunset and…seeming to rise right out of the road were the two towers of the World Trade Center, windows blazing… We had been heading for midtown but impulsively kept going, drawn irresistibly toward two of the tallest buildings in the world. We went down the Chambers Street ramp and parked… We looked up the west wall of the nearer tower. From so close, so narrow an angle, there was nothing at the top to arrest the eye, and the building seemed to be some sort of probe touching the earth from the darkness of space. ‘What an artifact that is!’ Taylor said, and he walked to the base and paced it off. We went inside, into a wide, uncolumned lobby. The building was standing on its glass-and-steel walls and on its elevator core. Neither of us had been there before. We got into an elevator…pressed at random…[and] rode upward in silence broken only by…Taylor’s describing where the most effective place for a nuclear bomb would be… ‘The rule of thumb for a nuclear explosion is that it can vaporize its yield in mass,’ he said. ‘This building is about thirteen hundred feet by two hundred by two hundred. That’s about fifty million cubic feet. It’s average density is probably two pounds per cubic foot. That’s a hundred million pounds, or fifty kilotons—give or take a factor of two. Any explosion inside with a yield of, let’s say, a kiloton would vaporize everything for a few tens of feet… Thermal radiation tends to flow in directions where it is unimpeded,’ Taylor was saying. ‘It actually flows. It goes around corners. It could go the length of the building before being converted into shock… I can’t think in detail about this subject, considering what would happen to people, without getting very upset and not wanting to consider it at all,’ Taylor said. ‘And there is a level of simplicity that we have not talked about because it goes over my threshold to do so. A way to make a bomb…so simple that I just don’t want to describe it. I will tell you this: Just to make a crude bomb with an unpredictable yield –but with a better than even chance of knocking this building down—all that is needed is about a dozen kilos of plutonium-oxide powder, high explosives (I don’t want to say how much), and a few things that anyone could buy in a hardware store. An explosion in this building would not be completely effective unless it were placed in the core. Something exploded out here in the [open] office area would be just like a giant shrapnel bomb. You’d get a real sheet of radiation pouring out the windows. You’d have half a fireball, and it would crater down…’   Walking to a window of the eastern wall, he looked across a space of about six hundred feet, past the other Trade Center tower, to a neighboring building at 1 Liberty Plaza. ‘Through free air, a kiloton bomb will send a lethal dose of immediate radiation up to half a mile,’ he went on. ‘Or up to a thousand feet, you’d be killed by projectiles…People in that building over there would get…Gamma rays… Next the neutrons. Then the air shock. Then missiles. Unvaporized concrete would go out of here at the speed of a rifle shot. A steel-and-concrete missile flux would go out…and…include in all maybe a tenth the weight of the building, about five thousand tons.’  He pressed up against the glass and looked far down to the plaza… ‘There’s no question at all that…a half-kiloton bomb on the front steps where we came in [would cause] the building [to] fall into the river.’ We went back to the elevator…” pp163-165, ibid.

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Freight elevator # 50

“There were 2.1 and 2.3 Richter scale seismic events 14 seconds prior to the collapse of each tower.  There were documented nuclide isotopes following the event.  A nuclear bomb with an “absorbing tamper” can reduce gamma rays and amount of isotopes.  Freight Elevator #50 was the only basement to roof continuous vertical shaft in the building.  Placing a 0.4 kiloton nuke in the floor of this shaft would direct the gamma flash, then shock, then heat wave up the core of the building.  Firewalls around the elevators and stairwells would contain the energy as material was vaporized.  As the core collapsed into the basement crucible, it would pull the exterior wall inside the building footprint.  Seismic data and radioactive isotopes exclude the remote directed energy hypothesis.  The WTC basement remained molten until Dec 2001, excluding thermite or directed energy causes of vaporization.” –Joseph A. Olson, PE

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/07/30/joe-olseon-on-9-11-nuclear-unequivocal/

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“The Curve of Binding Energy is dense and yet topical; its subject…[in] plan…begins with two parallel story lines, one describing special nuclear materials and the other depicting Ted Taylor’s growth as a physicist and bomb designer. Those lines finally converge when McPhee and Taylor retreat to a Maryland cabin and there pursue, ‘in its many possible forms, the unclassified atomic bomb’,” wrote William L. Howarth, editor of The John McPhee Reader, in 1976. Though a major departure in subject matter from McPhee’s previous writing, The Curve demonstrates a street-smart point of view on the unbridled production and trade in deadly technology.  In addition to heading the government’s effort to build a nuclear-propulsion “starship” called Orion (1957 to 1963) under contract with General Atomic in La Jolla, CA, a division of General Dynamics, Taylor worked on the TRIGA ‘research’ reactors that were dispersed around the world and spent seven years working at Los Alamos.

Taylor’s friend Freeman Dyson said of him, “He was the first man in the world to understand what you can do with three or four kilograms of plutonium, that making bombs is an easy thing to do…”  Taylor mastered the making of lightweight artillery-shell nukes that were later called ‘Bluebirds’ and found among the alleged munitions ‘heist’ weaponry seized by the FBI outside New Orleans in the summer of 1963—on a tip, perhaps, from Lee H. Oswald. At least one of these ‘bluebird’ shells was found in David Ferrie’s apartment at the time of his death in 1967. Nuclear munitions, World Trade centers, and a colorful cast of characters have a long history together. More of that story when Atomic Agent Oswald returns.

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For his part, Ted Taylor deeply regretted his role in weapons-making.  Removing the genocidal threat of megaton nukes, in favor of small tactical weapons, seemed like a supportable moral and patriotic choice.  “He said his belief in deterrent postures had eroded to zero. ‘I thought I was doing my part for my country. I thought I was contributing to a permanent state of peace. I no longer feel that way. I wish I hadn’t done it. The whole thing was wrong. Rationalize how you will, the bombs were designed to kill many, many people… If it were possible to wave a wand and make fission impossible –fission of any kind—I would quickly wave the wand. I have a total conviction –now—that nuclear weapons should not be used under any circumstances.  At any time.  Anywhere.  Period.  If I were king…” p332, The John McPhee Reader, by John McPhee and editor W.L. Howarth, 1976

Atomic Agent Oswald Will Return

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Like Elvis, he left the building. But if you’re a fan, his imminent presence haunts the premises, maybe now more than ever, and I’ll tell you why. It isn’t easy and it certainly isn’t fast. I’ve been struggling with the Atomic Oswald story for over a decade, wondering if it would take the rest of my natural life –and if it does, I’m willing, if only to make a readable narrative out of plausible theory. Few ‘characters’ who live, breathe, and walk the earth ingratiate themselves into the darkest recesses of history’s matrices so that we would ever hear of them. In this sense, we’re lucky. The signal contribution of Oswald is in becoming known and forever associated to the JFK assassination, a fate he didn’t choose as his defenders maintain.  His fate, however, shines a light on the Big Science of nuclear energy and uncovers a few more characters who had the power to choose his fate when the timing favored it.

What matters is that the persistent secrecy of JFK assassination events, and Oswald’s role in them,  continues to oppressively hold down the vital public discourse on the consequences of Big Science technology. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, the death-dealing spread of nuclear energy was sold as a ‘peaceful’ enterprise, the Free Energy of its time, in support of which a vast medical military industrial complex began to flourish. Nuclear technology, which borrowed language from biology, is transitioning into the Big Science of biotech which is now endeavoring to ‘enhance us’ by displacement and usurpation. For a while, it is ourselves and our cells becoming the new Free Energy of tomorrow. Go to sleep now and wake up in the Hell Scenario of futurists past. The Enlightened Technocracy economy, which promises to pay its citizens not to work, doesn’t need us. Like all Free Energy thus far, it’s going to be very expensive and you will have to earn your right to live and participate with ‘good behavior.’ COVID aims to engineer out all the bugs.

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