The_jackalope
The_jackalope's Journal
Paris, May 10, 1968
These are my first serious pictures, taken almost 50 years ago.
In May, 1968 I was 17 years old, living in Paris for a year with my parents. I'd just begun my love-affair with photography, and was fascinated by the work I saw in Life magazine - especially the photos of Vietnam War photographers like Larry Burrows and Eddie Adams. When the student unrest began in early May, I saw my own opportunity to play photojournalist. With my parents' Canonet in hand, I headed down to the Latin Quarter to document the events.
I started shooting a couple of days before things got really serious. The main events happened during the afternoon of May 10 and the morning of May 11. These times bracketed the peak of the violence, which happened during the evening and night of May 10.
Things began pretty innocuously. The Sorbonne had been occupied by students, and the main courtyard became a free-speech forum.
Police evicted the Sorbonne occupiers and set up cordons to block the surrounding streets. The main police force was the CRS - a special French riot force noted for their willingness to use violence. Sporadic clashes began.
Graffiti has always been popular during demonstrations. This one reads "In opposition to police violence, violence in the streets." The classic Citroen 2CV places the photo unmistakably in Paris.
After the students were blocked from the Sorbonne the marches grew in size. I followed this one down Boulevard St. Michel on the afternoon of May 10.
When the march encountered a CRS cordon, it stopped. A couple of meters separated the two sides. I thought the space between them looked like a good photographic position, so I walked all the way down that opening to the far side of the street, with both sides staring at me in disbelief. Perhaps not one of my safer decisions...
A second after I snapped the previous picture, the street filled with tear gas and flying police batons. The CRS also used the steel butt-plates of their carbines to make their point.
Events escalated throughout the night, but I was at home with my parents nursing tear gassed eyes and a couple of police bruises. The next morning the streets were littered with the remnants of cobblestone barricades. These had provided both refuge and ammunition during the previous night's adventures. In the background are two of the dozens of burned-out cars that had illuminated the proceedings.
I picked up a couple of cobblestones from this barricade, and carried them back to Canada as souvenirs of history. I still have them on my bookshelves. These streets have all been paved.
The adventure convinced me that I probably didn't want to walk in the footsteps of Adams and Burrows after all. Looking back from 50 years on, that was a very sensible decision.
Taylor: Mueller's investigation is proceeding on three fronts
I've condensed the Twitter thread for easier reading:
"Source with knowledge of investigation. Mueller is proceeding along 3 broad fronts. Investigating Trump for ties to Russian Organized Crime, especially money laundering and other illegalities tied to his business career. The second front is Trump Campaigns and their collusion and coordination with Putin/Russian Govt in fixing the 2016 election. The third front is Trump's crimes as president especially obstruction of justice. My source says Mueller's team feels confident that Trump has committed impeachable offenses on all 3 fronts."
https://twitter.com/TrueFactsStated/status/877845049731448833
The roadmap to today's America
The current state of America has been developing for a long time. A rough timeline of significant events would include:
1961: Eisenhower warned of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex
1963: JFK assassinated
1971: Powell Memo published
1986: Fairness Doctrine repealed
1996: Telecommunications Act passed
2010: Citizens United ruling
2016: Russian-Republican subversion of the American electoral process.
At each step, the power of big-money interests to implement and defend their preferred social order was increased. The majority of those interests appear to have thrown their weight behind the "New, Improved Republican Party". At the same time, they have invited huge amounts of dark foreign money into the American socio-political process. Those interests are now thoroughly entrenched, and have commandeered all the levers of true power.
The state of America today is the culmination of an ongoing social monetization process in which cash is king and the poor are Kleenex. Consequently, it's hard for me to see how political action is going to succeed in undoing the last 65 years of unidirectional development. The Golden Rule applies more now than ever: "Those with the gold make the rules."
Absent a social catastrophe, I don't think the situation can be adequately or permanently addressed by standard party politics. The problem is now far bigger than mere politics, especially given the damage that has been done to the street-level political process. In the short term, a resolute intelligence community including the FBI may be able to temporarily stem the tide. But the big money interests aren't going anywhere, and their objectives will not change. Also, as Comey said in his Senate testimony, the Russians will be back - and they play a very long game, for keeps.
On the other hand, party politics is the only lever left to the average person. We have to work with the tools available, even they doesn't work all that well and seem inadequate to the task at hand. That's what human beings do. If you are a political person - like virtually everyone on this board - the only reasonable response is to resist in any and every way possible, even if that resistance seems at times to be a forlorn hope.
Was the data exposure really accidental?
Here's an interesting tidbit regarding the exposure of personal information on almost 200 million Americans from a Republican-funded data analytics repository.
According to the security company Upguard that found the breach, the data was stored in an Amazon S3 bucket, which is a cloud-based data warehouse.
The interesting tidbit is that S3 buckets are *****secure by default***** when they are created.
This means that the owner had to deliberately open them up for public access. Accidental exposure? Maybe, maybe not...
This issue isn't mentioned in the story by the company who discovered the exposed files:
https://www.upguard.com/breaches/the-rnc-files
For Father's Day
My father Bill, looking out over the farm where he lived for the last 57 years.
Happy Father's Day to all fathers.
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