We reached Leo Abbe this afternoon at the private equity firm Iroquois Capital, and asked him about an application he and Richard Abbe, Iroquois’s managing partner, made on January 20 to secure the trademark “Trump News Network.”

We asked him if he and Richard were actually connected to the former president, or [...]]]>

We reached Leo Abbe this afternoon at the private equity firm Iroquois Capital, and asked him about an application he and Richard Abbe, Iroquois’s managing partner, made on January 20 to secure the trademark “Trump News Network.”

We asked him if he and Richard were actually connected to the former president, or if they had merely snagged the name before Trump could.

“No comment,” he said, and told us Richard would be similarly uninterested in talking about it.

One of our readers, Eivol Ekdal, noticed the new listing at the US Patent and Trademark Office. Dated last Wednesday, when Trump left office, it has a pretty generic look as far as trademarks go…

 
Here’s that description of the Trump News Network, but less shouty: “Providing news in the nature of current event reporting; providing current event news via a global computer network; news reporter services in the nature of news analysis and news commentary; providing an Internet news portal featuring links to news stories and articles in the field of current events.”

The Abbes also, on the same day, registered “Patriot News Network.”

Hey, that’s clever.

Here’s how Richard describes himself at his website:

“Having been on Wall Street for over two decades, Richard traces his love for investing back to his teen years. This passion, which was birthed out of conversations with his father, would eventually lead him to receive his undergraduate degree from Hobart University, where he currently serves on the Investment Committee for Hobart & William Smith Colleges Endowment. Prior to co-founding Iroquois Capital, Richard co-founded Vertical Ventures, LLC. Other positions include working in Equity Middle Market Institutional Sales at Lehman Brothers, Senior Managing Director at Gruntal & Company, and Founding Partner at Hampshire Securities. Richard Abbe is drawn to investing for a few reasons, one of them being his love of helping promising businesses in the early stage of their life grow. Excited by new beginnings, Richard likes being a part of a prospective new business to help supply the funds needed to seed a great idea.”

Certainly, growing something called the Trump News Network could be a great beginning, now that the former president has made it plain that he will continue to be a force in American politics.

Abbe was in the news about a year ago when a lawsuit against him filed by the founders of the airport spa company, XpresSpa, was dismissed by a federal district judge. The XpresSpa founders had claimed that Abbe was among a group of investors who had made false statement in order to take over the business in a merger, but the judge decided the lawsuit lacked merit and ended it.

According to the Federal Election Commission, Richard Abbe made a $250 contribution to the Biden for President campaign in August, and Leo Abbe made three contributions last year to Act Blue totaling $150.00.

We’ll be interested to see whether the new network actually takes off.

 
————-

THE LOWDOWN is our blog for news, the QAnon phenomenon, and other subjects not related to our coverage of the Church of Scientology. If it’s our Scientology coverage you’re looking for, please use this bookmark for our latest stories.

Posted by Tony Ortega on January 26, 2021 at 15:40

In April, the Daily Mail described Paul Barresi as a “notorious private investigator” who had been hired by Amber Heard to dig up dirt on her ex-husband Johnny Depp. According to that story, Heard’s request backfired when Barresi not only couldn’t find anyone with a bad word to say about the Pirates of the [...]]]>

In April, the Daily Mail described Paul Barresi as a “notorious private investigator” who had been hired by Amber Heard to dig up dirt on her ex-husband Johnny Depp. According to that story, Heard’s request backfired when Barresi not only couldn’t find anyone with a bad word to say about the Pirates of the Caribbean actor, but then he also went public with it.

Hollywood ‘fixer’ Paul Barresi says he was hired by Heard’s legal team last summer to find people who had been verbally or physically abused by Depp and be star witnesses in the upcoming defamation cases in the UK and US.

Barresi, who has worked for the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Eddie Murphy, explained he was hired to look into Depp’s ‘follies and vices’ dating as far back as the actor’s Viper Room days, which he co-owned in the 1990s.

But Barresi said he couldn’t find anyone who had a bad word to say against Depp, 56, even after interviewing over 100 people across the US and Europe who had worked with Depp on films dating back 30 years.

Over the years, Barresi has been involved in a number of high-profile Hollywood kerfuffles, and we’ve mentioned him here at the Underground Bunker in the past: We credited him with bringing us one of our all-time strangest stories, about Michael Jackson and his close personal friend, porn director Marc Schaffel. Currently, the 71-year-old US Air Force veteran is assisting the Ventura Police Department with its investigation into the mysterious disappearance of Johnny Depp’s former business partner, Anthony Fox.

And now Barresi has surprised us again, but this time with something that’s just flat-out bizarre. He’s filed a lawsuit against Trader Joe’s.

According to the lawsuit filed in San Bernardino County Superior Court, in December Barresi was shopping at a Trader Joe’s store in Rancho Cucamonga, where he lives, when he and another customer, an elderly woman, accidentally bumped into each other.

After making sure the woman was OK, the two of them wished each other happy holidays and were about to continue shopping. But that’s when something really strange happened.

According to the lawsuit, a Trader Joe’s employee approached Barresi and said to him, “Faggot, I bet you would not talk to a real man that way.” He then ordered Barresi out of the store.

When Barresi refused to leave, the employee then allegedly grabbed Barresi’s arms and shoved him, saying, “You need to leave now, old man.” The employee then turned to the store’s assistant manager, Luke Saito, and said, “Hey Luke, come help me throw this old faggot out of here.”

Barresi is apparently so upset about how he was treated, he’s suing with the help of attorney Ritchie M. Lewis.

“We know that the employee was terminated right after this incident,” says Lewis, who tells us that he and Barresi are waiting for a legal response to the lawsuit from Trader Joe’s attorneys.

We put in a request for comment with the grocery company, and we’ll let you know if they get back to us.

 
————-

THE LOWDOWN is our blog for news, politics, and other subjects not related to our coverage of the Church of Scientology. If it’s our Scientology coverage you’re looking for, please use this bookmark for our latest stories.

Posted by Tony Ortega on August 6, 2020 at 10:00

 On Tuesday March 10 the Ishaqbini-Hirola Community Conservancy of Garissa county in eastern Kenya posted the sad news that two of their three white giraffes had been found dead.

The bodies were in a largely skeletal state but it was possible to determine that the animals had been shot by poachers, rather than dying from natural [...]]]>

 
On Tuesday March 10 the Ishaqbini-Hirola Community Conservancy of Garissa county in eastern Kenya posted the sad news that two of their three white giraffes had been found dead.

The bodies were in a largely skeletal state but it was possible to determine that the animals had been shot by poachers, rather than dying from natural causes or predators. They had been dead for three or four months.

The mother was first discovered in 2017 and bore a male calf that year, also white but with ghostly outlines of the usual mottled spots. In summer 2019 she had a female calf and for a brief time the family of three white giraffes stuck together, delighting tourists. Only the baby calf was found dead with the mother.

Large scale floods in November and December, after a couple years of drought conditions, made it difficult for the conservancy’s rangers to patrol, and caused most of the distinctive game (the conservancy was founded to protect the hirola, a unique species of antelope) to move well away from their usual ranges. In January and February patrols were interrupted by an infiltration of militias from Somalia believed to be affiliated with al-Shabaab, a group which has carried out some savage terrorist attacks in Garissa, and it was not wished to expose the rangers to attack or hostage-taking. Because of these delays it is unlikely that the exact circumstances of the poaching can be determined.

Biologists distinguish genetic traits causing pale white skin as albinisms (from Latin for white) if the body’s melanin production completely fails, or leucisms (from Greek for white) if melanin is selectively suppressed. The giraffes were a case of leucism, since their eyes were dark. In human albinos the eyes can be green (a tint not dependent on melanin) but not brown: commonly they are pink (from hemoglobin in the blood as the only colored substance) and the vision is subject to damage in bright light. The nearest thing to a leucism in humans is a poorly-understood condition called vitiligo, in which melanin production shuts down in irregular patches later in life; occasionally pigmentation fades all over the skin, most famously in the cases of Andrew Warhol and Michael Jackson. But while there is a genetic predisposition to vitiligo, the onset is some kind of autoimmune disorder of unknown trigger.

Leucisms are found in many species of ungulate (hoofed mammal), but typically the white is part of a disruptive camouflaging pattern. The old conundrum “Is a zebra a black horse with white stripes or a white horse with black stripes?” does have an answer: it is a black horse with white stripes, as seen most clearly in the subspecies called quagga, mostly dark brown with white stripes only on the forequarters. The quagga went extinct in 1883 but has been revived through selective breeding.

The striped pattern of the zebra confuses not only large cats but even flies, which have difficulty landing on a zebra.

Many breeds of cow, such as the Holstein, are largely white but with mottled patches of color in a less dramatic version of the zebra’s camouflage. Piebald moose are sometimes seen in Sweden and Canada, and in extreme cases nearly the entire body is white with only tiny flecks of brown.

These are called “spirit moose” by the Cree and considered a very lucky omen. Among the Lakota and other Plains tribes, the birth of a white buffalo was believed to signal the start of a new cycle. According to legend, the White Buffalo Calf Woman brought many sacred teachings and dances, and transformed into a buffalo calf which turned black, yellow, brown and finally white before disappearing. In 1833 Josiah Gregg recorded a solemn sacrificial ritual when the Cheyenne killed a white buffalo during the Leonid meteor shower in order to dedicate its hide to writing in white man’s letters and pictograms a treaty of trade and friendship.

In 1994 a white buffalo calf was born for the first time since 1933 and named Miracle: she went through multiple colorations as she grew, reminiscent of the legend, and appeared to receive social deference from other members of the herd. Unfortunately Miracle died at the age of ten, but others have been born among Miracle’s relatives and a herd of white buffalo, now 17 in number, is being bred by the Sacred World Peace Alliance. It was at one point suspected that they might be “beefalo” who acquired leucism genes through some interbreeding with domestic cattle, but DNA testing has confirmed that their genome is purely from the American bison species.

Unfortunately African beliefs about such things have taken an uglier turn. Human albinos are called zeru zeru from a word for “ghost” out of a belief that they can contact spirits of the dead. In past times they were both valued and feared. But in recent decades a superstition has taken root that body parts from albinos confer magic powers, and there have been a disturbing number of ritual murders and dismemberments of albinos in Tanzania and neighboring countries.

A white giraffe was discovered in 2015 in Tanzania’s Tarangire National Park and named Omo after a local brand of detergent (the Kenyan white giraffes were not given names). But after January 2016, Omo has apparently not been seen again, and it was feared that Omo had been especially targeted by poachers who could sell the meat and the hide at high prices, taking advantage of superstitious beliefs in talismanic powers.

Did something similar happen to the Kenyan white giraffes? That is possible, but there are other theories. Perhaps the armed Somalis entered Kenya earlier than was thought, and simply killed them because they were easily spotted and a good source of food: an area of Somalia east of Garissa county, Kenya, is classed by USAID as in an “Emergency” state of food insufficiency on account of the locust swarms this year.

But aside from simple desperation, a common motive has been trophy-seeking, whether or not connected with supernatural beliefs, and some angry posters to the Conservancy’s Facebook page suggested that the rangers must have been bribed by the hunters, or else why would such special animals not have been under constant surveillance? The rangers, stung and hurt by such accusations, have patiently explained the difficulties which hampered their work in the past few months.

The male white calf, we are told, is still alive. The Conservancy of course is giving no hint as to his whereabouts.

 
Robert Eckert is a longtime member of the Underground Bunker community and author of the historical novel The Year of Five Emperors.

On February 25, Kacper Wierzchos of the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona tweeted that since February 15 his team had been observing a small object, now catalogued as 2020 CD3, to ascertain whether it was a natural satellite of the Earth. There is a lot of [...]]]>

On February 25, Kacper Wierzchos of the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona tweeted that since February 15 his team had been observing a small object, now catalogued as 2020 CD3, to ascertain whether it was a natural satellite of the Earth. There is a lot of “space junk” orbiting the Earth by now, but almost all in low orbits which will spiral down, not up, with time; only rocket stages or other shed parts from interplanetary launches are going to be in high orbits.

The period of 2020 CD3 would be 47 days, corresponding to an average distance from the Earth about 4/3 that of the Moon, if it were a stable orbit. But the orbit is highly elliptical, sometimes dipping considerably closer than the Moon, and the perturbing effects of the Moon mean that its path does not exactly repeat from one time to the next.

The best reconstruction of 2020 CD3’s trajectory indicates that it was captured by the Earth about three years ago and probably will not stay in Earth orbit more than a few months longer. Catalina Sky Survey saw a similar object 14 years ago, 2006 RH120, but it drifted away from Earth in 2007. This sparked curiosity about how often such things might happen: a supercomputer simulation in 2012 by Mikael Gravnik of the University of Helsinki and others, studying a hypothetical population of millions of small asteroids in orbits closer to the Sun than Mars,
matching what we believe to be the real population, found that at any given time about 1,000 should be in temporary orbits around the Earth. These TCOs (transiently captured objects) should range in size from one meter in diameter down to a few centimeters, but with an average orbital distance four to five times the distance to the Moon. The average TCO will only orbit three times over the course of about nine months, before perturbations drive them away.

So 2020 CD3 is in a tighter and somewhat more lasting orbit than usual, and it is also somewhat larger than what should usually be the maximum mini-moon, about 2 meters across by3.5 meters long. It is about the size of a car rather than the beach ball size that is usually the largest. It was not noticed for three years because it was only a 20th magnitude object (1st magnitude means one of the brightest stars and 6th magnitude at the limit of naked-eye vision; every 5 magnitudes is a step-down in brightness by a factor of 100), and the thousand tinier TCOs we suspect are out there would be even harder to see. But Gravnik suggests that it would be worthwhile to capture and retrieve one: at present what we know about asteroidal material principally comes from meteorites, which have been heat-blasted and contaminated with terrestrial material as they fall through the atmosphere. Efforts to retrieve pristine asteroidal material have been fraught.

JAXA (the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency) launched the Hayabusa probe to asteroid 25143 Itokawa in 2003, but the November 2005 landing did not go well. The pellet gun which was supposed to loosen samples for collection did not fire, and after the craft took off for return to Earth its guidance system failed.

The craft had previously suffered damage to solar panels during a large solar flare while it was outbound, and fuel leakage during the initial landing attempts, and was thought to be cursed. But eventually it was nudged into a trajectory that let it return its sample capsule, into which a little dust (kicked up during the landing) had blown, in 2010. Japan recovered 1500 grains, each about .01 millimeters in diameter. The Hayabusa-2 probe, launched at the end of 2014 to asteroid 162173 Ryugu, contained more sophisticated equipment incorporating lessons from the first try, and from February through June of last year successfully fired a gun to dredge up subsurface material as well as collecting surface samples.

The sample capsule is expected to return later this year. Ryugu is a C-type (“carbonaceous”) asteroid, interesting for studying the question of how common organic materials are in space. But it is not typical of the S-type (“stony”) or M-type (“metallic”) which fall to Earth as meteorites more often. NASA’s Osiris-Rex probe, launched in 2016, has been orbiting C-type asteroid 101955 Bennu since December 2018. After two years of mapping and remotely analyzing Bennu it will land and gather about 60 grams of sample in a brief “TAG” (touch and go) maneuver sometime this year, perhaps July, for return to Earth by 2023, if all goes well.

Plans have had to be rethought in view of some surprising features of Bennu, which turns out to have jagged terrain and unexpected “ejection events” in which plumes of particles are thrown up from the surface. Understanding Bennu is considered important because it is one of the asteroids whose orbit crosses Earth: it will have a series of close encounters most years around September 24 from 2175 to 2199, but as far as we can calculate there is only a 1/2500 chance it will hit us.

Bennu is 490 meters in diameter and an impact would be devastating, though nothing like the Chicxulub (dinosaur killer) asteroid which is estimated to have been 10-80 kilometers. The dynamic studies however indicate that a more typical fate for a near-Earth asteroid is to have its orbit gradually assimilated to Earth’s by successive close encounters. Some will become TCOs drifting in and out of wide orbits like our current friend 2020 CD3. Another stage is illustrated by 2016 HO3, whose distance from the Earth varies from 38 to about 100 times the distance to the Moon: really it is orbiting the Sun, with a period of one year the same as the Earth, wobbling above and below the orbital plane of the Earth, not really circling the Earth.

This loose association is more stable than a closer orbit: it is believed that it started almost a century ago and will continue centuries more. This “quasi-satellite” also has the asteroid designation 469219 Kamo’oalewa. From 1996 to 2006, 2003 YN107 was in a quasi-satellite relationship but now has an orbital period a little under 364 days, and a few other bodies also are believed to slip into and out of quasi-satellite relationships with Earth.

The effect of gradually “domesticating” near-Earth asteroids like this is that their relative velocity with respect to the Earth is much less, and they are less likely to slam into the planet dramatically. Rather they may shed pieces which enter the atmosphere in gentle near-horizontal trajectories, producing fireballs with long visible paths. The Great Meteor Procession of February 9, 1913 which stretched 7,000 miles from northwest Canada across the United States into the Atlantic, was probably the death of one of these mini-moons.

 
Robert Eckert is a longtime member of the Underground Bunker community and author of the historical novel The Year of Five Emperors.

 “Mad” Mike Hughes, aged 64, died February 22 when his home-made steam-powered rocket crashed into the desert near Barstow, California. A video shot for an intended television show “Homemade Astronauts” to be aired on Discovery, Inc.’s Science Channel shows that the parachute which was supposed to brake the descent deployed prematurely and was torn off [...]]]>

 
“Mad” Mike Hughes, aged 64, died February 22 when his home-made steam-powered rocket crashed into the desert near Barstow, California. A video shot for an intended television show “Homemade Astronauts” to be aired on Discovery, Inc.’s Science Channel shows that the parachute which was supposed to brake the descent deployed prematurely and was torn off during the launch.

Hughes was experienced in daredevil stunts before he began specializing in homemade rocketry. His 2002 Guinness World Record for longest limousine jump, 103 feet in a Lincoln Town Car, still stands. His initial interest was in completing a stunt like Evel Knievel’s 1974 attempt to jump Snake River Canyon. Knievel usually jumped with motorcycles, but this was not an adequate vehicle for jumping a canyon (Knievel originally had the Grand Canyon in mind, but the National Park Service vetoed the idea). A steam-powered rocket was designed, built, and tested repeatedly at an estimated cost of $600,000 but during the stunt, the parachute deployed during the launch.

As a result of the extra drag, the rocket barely touched the far end of the canyon before the wind pushed it back into the gorge. However, unlike in the accident that killed Hughes last Saturday, the parachute remained attached to the rocket, although it was designed to pull the cockpit with the pilot loose in case of emergency. Knievel survived the plunge to the bottom with little injury. For the rest of his life he wanted to try it again, but the promoters, including such figures as Vincent McMahon of World Wrestling Entertainment, had not made their expenses back. After his death in 2007 many daredevils wanted to do a canyon jump in his honor. Evel’s son Robbie Knievel in 1999 had jumped 228 feet over a minor branch of the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle, but the real challenge was a wide canyon needing a rocket like Evel’s. Stuntman Eddie Braun succeeded in jumping the Snake River in September 2016, in a rocket built with cooperation from Robbie and the son of the designer of Evel’s rocket.

Mike Hughes was among those who failed. His May 2016 attempt was at the Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle where he charged only $10 a head to watch, and had to refund it all when he failed to achieve enough steam pressure to launch. He was mocked on social media and pleaded that, as a mere limo driver, he did not have the kind of funds the Knievels had been able to raise.

He said he had only given the rocket a full-fledged test once, in 2014 near Winkleman, Arizona. On that occasion, according to him, the parachute proved inadequate, and although he had a second backup parachute, the rocket landed hard, with enough damage that it took a long time to rebuild. As for himself, he needed to use a walker for two weeks to recover. But the video his friend took of the 1374-foot flight did not show Hughes climbing in or getting out, and some accused him of not actually having flown in the rocket at all. His cantankerous responses to trolling only served to encourage more hecklers to bait him.

His attempt to raise $7,500 for another record launch raised only $310 and a lot of questions about why he was bothering, after Braun had beaten him to the canyon jump.
So he disclosed another motive for his rocketry. He had become interested in 9/11 “truther” videos, and the YouTube algorithms led him to Flat Earth videos. He thought skepticism about whether the Earth is round was well-founded, since he had been to Kansas, where he could see a long way and it looks perfectly flat. Some claim to be able to perceive the curvature of the Earth looking down from an airplane, but the cruising altitude of a commercial plane is less than 1/600 the radius of the Earth, so that the effect would be very subtle and almost impossible to discern without a wider field of view than an airplane window affords, and those who think they are seeing the curve are mostly influenced by the fish-eye-lens effect the thick glass can have. From space, of course the curvature is unmistakable, but at this point the conspiracy theorists’ natural distrust of government kicks in, and all pictures coming from NASA are dismissed as forgeries. But what if, Hughes proposed, someone unconnected to government could build a rocket and get to space?

Flat Earthers were enthusiastic and quickly raised the money he was asking for. The Bureau of Land Management was much less excited: they would rather have known of his 2014 launch in advance, and wanted to coordinate with the FAA, and check whether he might hit ecologically sensitive areas. Hughes postponed scheduled launch attempts in November and December 2017 to try to get permission, then made an arrangement with the owner of a ghost town, Amboy, California, restructuring his ramp to be more vertical so that he would come back down within the private land. He live-streamed an attempted launch February 3, 2018 and had to scrub, due to insufficient steam pressure as at the canyon jump. This drew more mockery, with accusations that he had chickened out. Finally on March 24 he had a successful launch and only banged himself up a little on the landing: “I’ll feel it in the morning. I won’t be able to get out of bed. At least I can go home and have dinner and see my cats tonight.”

The maximum height of 1875 feet was only a small fraction of an airplane’s cruising altitude, and everyone agreed airplane height is too little to determine whether curvature is really visible. Online hecklers chided him that this was no way to prove the Earth is flat. He insisted that he was open-minded about the question, and truly wanted to gather evidence: “Do I believe the Earth is shaped like a Frisbee? I believe it is. Do I know for sure? No. That’s why I want to go up in space.” His plan was to build a “Rockoon” as he called it, a rocket lightweight enough to be carried up to the stratosphere in a balloon and powerful enough to launch upward from there. Now that he finally had proof of concept, more or less, he could raise funds to build an improved design and get closer to a rocket that would fulfill the needs of the Rockoon project.

The new improved model is what he tried on Saturday. As he put it in 2018, “This thing wants to kill you 10 different ways. This thing will kill you in a heartbeat.”

 
Robert Eckert is a longtime member of the Underground Bunker community and author of the historical novel The Year of Five Emperors.

Coffeyville, in the southeast corner of Kansas, is best known for a botched double bank robbery in 1892 which cost most of the Dalton Gang their lives.

After the cattle-drive days it had some minor prosperity as a center of light industry until the 1929 crash, but has been slowly shedding businesses and people [...]]]>

Coffeyville, in the southeast corner of Kansas, is best known for a botched double bank robbery in 1892 which cost most of the Dalton Gang their lives.

After the cattle-drive days it had some minor prosperity as a center of light industry until the 1929 crash, but has been slowly shedding businesses and people ever since, and is now ranked as the fastest-shrinking and most economically distressed city in the state.

Last October Lizzie Presser of ProPublica wrote an exposé on how Coffeyville treats those who are faring worst. An attorney for the creditors, usually Michael Hassenplug, summons the debtors before Magistrate Judge David Casement not just once but repeatedly, in what Kansas law called “debtor’s examination” (the law specifies only “from time to time”; every three months has become typical in Coffeyville) to delve into their financial circumstances and determine what is the maximum feasible payment plan or wage garnishment. The magistrate can cites no-shows for contempt, and if they miss the contempt hearing issue a bench warrant: Casement makes some effort to check whether the debtor was actually notified of the court date, but Presser found multiple instances of people who had no idea they’d been summoned at all, until they learned of the warrant.

Most unusually, Casement leaves it up to the creditors’ attorney whether to issue a warrant. “I’m not ordering a bench warrant. My decision is to give them that option,” Casement told Presser. “Whether they exercise it is up to them, but they have my blessing if that’s what they want to do.”

The most relentless creditors are the Coffeyville Regional Medical Center (the only hospital within 40 miles) and its affiliated doctors and ambulance service. Presser went in depth into the case of Tres Biggs, who learned in 2007 that his 5-year-old son Lane had leukemia, while his wife began suffering symptoms of Lyme disease. This made it impossible for him to obtain health insurance for his family under the “pre-existing conditions” rule. When the Affordable Care Act changed this, then-Governor Sam Brownback refused to let Kansas participate in federal subsidies for Medicaid, and insurance premiums have gone up well beyond the reach of the working poor.

Biggs eventually got a job with Blue Cross benefits, but only with a $5,000 yearly deductible. His medical debts, subjected to a 12 percent interest rate, have ballooned to $70,000. Since cases larger than $10,000 are beyond of the magistrate, the litigation is broken into separate cases for each bill to keep the matter in Casement’s court. The Biggs family has been through every stage of these procedures including jail. Lane is better now, but Heather sometimes has seizures, and when she regains consciousness begs, “Please don’t take me to the hospital.” (On its side, the hospital says it has to write off about $1.5 million in uncollectable medical bills every year, forcing it to raise charges on those who do pay, or go out of business.)

The sheriff’s deputies make sure that anyone jailed under a bench warrant is subjected to the full humiliations: stripped, hosed down with delousing solution, and put in jumpsuits. Bail is set at $500 which is not returned, but given to the creditors. Hassenplug takes a one-third contingency fee, and after expressing annoyance that debtors have to miss court twice, once for the debtor’s exam and then for the contempt citation, before a warrant issued, obtained a ruling from Casement that anyone who missed an
examination twice would have to pay $50 “plaintiff attorney fee” before posting bail, and would have to serve at least two days before bailing out. The ACLU questions the constitutionality of not returning bail after its usual purpose (ensuring appearance in court) is served, and of sentencing debtors to prison without a finding that they are able to pay (which few are).

Casement says he has “not seen enough pushback from defendants” to be persuaded he is doing anything unlawful: Casement, a former rancher, has no legal education or license, and was only required under Kansas law (K.S.A. 20-337) to complete a certification test from the state supreme court to get and keep his magistrate’s job, and this test only covers basic procedures and rules of conduct. When the ACLU involvement attracted the attention of the CBS affiliate 13-WIBW, they found 60 defendants at a debtor’s exam day, only one of whom had a lawyer. They were denied cameras in the courtroom, but interviewed the Biggs family for a piece that aired February 10.

Candidate Bernie Sanders used Twitter to call attention to the story.

A lifelong resident of Coffeyville, who prefers to remain unnamed, has a very low opinion of Hassenplug from a contentious run-in with him 20 years ago about a 13-cent discrepancy. This correspondent says that scuttlebutt in town attributes Casement’s increasingly extravagant assertions of power to envy of the other judges, who have been to law school, have the rank to hear more important cases beyond a magistrate’s jurisdiction, and are more highly respected in the community. Among the legal “loopholes” that have let Casement and Hassenplug get away with their behavior, she cites not only the use of “contempt of court / failure to appear” as an excuse to jail people, when everybody knows failure to pay is the real reason, but also a lack of legal protection for those who cannot miss work, without losing their jobs, or miss medical appointments to come to court (the Biggs family missed court at least once because it clashed with Lane’s leukemia treatment in Tulsa).

The debtor’s exam sessions give Hassenplug the opportunity to learn all about work and treatment schedules, so that further court dates can be set for maximal inconvenience. Her husband, who is already under wage garnishment, and her daughter’s fiancé, who was briefly pronounced dead during a seizure episode last summer, have medical bills they will never be able to pay in full, which “absolutely terrifies” her.

 
Robert Eckert is a longtime member of the Underground Bunker community and author of the historical novel The Year of Five Emperors.

 “Revolution is not nakedness!” is not the kind of slogan one would hear most places. But political protests in Iraq have taken an odd turn this week.

Political turmoil in some form or another has been a near constant in Iraq since its artificial creation a century ago. Since October 1, 2019 it has principally taken [...]]]>

 
“Revolution is not nakedness!” is not the kind of slogan one would hear most places. But political protests in Iraq have taken an odd turn this week.

Political turmoil in some form or another has been a near constant in Iraq since its artificial creation a century ago. Since October 1, 2019 it has principally taken the form of mass demonstrations in downtown Baghdad, commonly centered around Tahrir (“Liberation”) Square, across the Tigris River from the “Green Zone” where the US and other countries have their embassies, along with some government buildings. Americans are likely to hear of these demonstrations only when they target the US, as on December 31 when protests against American bombing of the Ketaeb Hezbollah militia penetrated the Green Zone and vandalized parts of the US Embassy compound, January 24 when influential cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called for “a million” (estimates are that 200,000 showed) to march in support of the Iraqi Parliament’s call for American troops to be expelled from the country, or January 26 when despite al-Sadr’s call to avoid attacking the Green Zone again, three missiles were fired at the US Embassy, slightly wounding one person.

But anti-Americanism is not what the protests are mostly about. While only 22 percent approve of the American presence in Iraq, only 16 percent approve of Iranian presence, and the January 5 march while the Parliament was voting on American withdrawal featured the slogan “No to America, no to Iran!” demanding that both leave. Before the confrontation between the US and Iran heated up, the main focus of protest was the fecklessness and corruption of the Iraqi government. Elections in May 2018 were contested by hundreds of parties of which three dozen won seats in Parliament; al-Sadr’s Forward party with 54 seats out of 329 was the largest but with nowhere near enough allies to cobble together a majority. It took a month to settle recounts, three more just to choose a Speaker to chair the meetings, and another to choose Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi, who accomplished little. Oil revenues are at their highest levels ever, and the government promised to spend the money on fixing the nation’s hospitals, but this has not been seen. After a year, people felt he had had enough of a chance.

Violent repression (al-Jazeera counts 536 deaths among protesters, 38 among security forces since October) became a further cause of protest. Abdul-Mahdi resigned December 1 and of course it was two months before a successor was chosen. New Prime Minister Allawi spoke on February 1 pledging to fight corruption, organize new elections, and end brutality against protesters. On Wednesday February 12, it was the 40th day since America killed Iranian general Soleymani, a traditional time for memorial services; and al-Sadr’s followers, who had been instructed to support Allawi, had gotten into fights the previous week with former allies still wanting to protest against the government; but security forces designated protest areas, to keep Soleymani mourners, al-Sadr supporters, and anti-government demonstrators separated, and generally got cooperation from all sides. Authorities even managed to open Sinak Bridge, a major crossing in the city that had been closed for months, to regular traffic (though they had to fire rubber bullets to make plain that protesters could not cross).

But tensions were growing over an odd statement by al-Sadr on Sunday, lamenting that men and women were not keeping separated during the demonstrations. He told his followers “not to follow their animal instincts and immoral lust” and that he “will not allow Iraq to become a Kandahar of religious extremists, nor a Chicago of immorality and homosexuality.” This was a reference to a chant by secularists in demonstrations years ago “We don’t want Baghdad to be Kandahar, we want to be Chicago”: Kandahar is a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan, and Chicago was chosen as Obama’s home. Oddly, Republicans were also comparing Chicago to Iraq back then, as a dig against Obama. The portmanteau “Chiraq” became slang for the more violent neighborhoods, and was adopted as a title of a Spike Lee movie…

…and a now-shelved Kanye West album. Ayatollah Seistani, who has higher respect and more moderate positions within the Shi’ite community of Iraq than al-Sadr, responded obliquely on Monday that Muhammad’s daughter Fatima was always one of the Prophet’s greatest supporters. Pictures of Muqtada’s second cousin Saba al-Sadr, whose grandfather founded the influential Amal movement in Lebanon and was murdered in Qadhafi’s Libya in 1978, circulated on social media to show that she protests together with men and does not even wear a scarf let alone a veil. People were largely kept home Tuesday by an unusual snowfall (first in Baghdad since 2008). Wednesday was the careful separation of demonstrations by security. But on Thursday, tens of thousands of women and men marched together for gender equality: “We came out today against those who accuse Iraqi female demonstrators in Tahrir Square.”

Calls have gone out for a million to demonstrate for women’s rights on Saturday. Such calls often do bring out hundreds of thousands: we will see. Remarks at Friday prayers will be influential among some: as Seistani has shown, not all the Muslim clergy will be on the side of gender segregation.

 
Robert Eckert is a longtime member of the Underground Bunker community and author of the historical novel The Year of Five Emperors.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California (the institution founded by L. Ron Hubbard’s onetime colleague in magick, Jack Parsons) completed assembly of the newest Mars rover, provisionally designated “Mars 2020,” on Wednesday.

They transported it on a C-12 cargo plane to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, aiming for a tentative launch date of July 17 (but the [...]]]>

Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California (the institution founded by L. Ron Hubbard’s onetime colleague in magick, Jack Parsons) completed assembly of the newest Mars rover, provisionally designated “Mars 2020,” on Wednesday.

They transported it on a C-12 cargo plane to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, aiming for a tentative launch date of July 17 (but the launch window does not close until August 5). If it launches on time it will land on the red planet in January 2021 (each one-day delay in launch would delay the landing by more than a day, but even late in the launch window the arrival would be by March 2021).

Much of the equipment is based on prior rovers like Spirit and Curiosity. Like them, it will be given an inspirational name, but NASA has taken precautions to ensure that the naming contest does not end in a “Boaty McBoatFace” debacle. NASA did experience such an incident a decade ago when “Colbert” got more votes than “Xenu” for a space-station module, prompting Stephen Colbert to explain who Xenu allegedly was, and claim the title of Galactic Overlord.

A panel of judges vetted 28,000 proposed names, with short essays in support, gathered from K-12 students, selected 155 semi-finalists, and now have it narrowed down to 9 finalists: Endurance, Tenacity, Promise, Perseverance, Vision, Clarity, Ingenuity, Fortitude, Courage.

Over 770,000 votes were received (alas, voting closed January 27) and the winner will be announced sometime in March.

Surely the coolest piece of new equipment is an experimental helicopter on top. Generating enough lift, in an atmosphere only about 1 percent as thick as Earth’s, to hoist the whole rover, over a metric ton in mass (though that translates to only 38 percent as much weight, that is gravitational force, on Mars as it would on Earth), would be too difficult. This trial version will detach and fly with no payload, but if it works, on future missions copters may be used to deliver small instrument packages to hard-to-reach places.

The rover itself has a plutonium power source (energy from the radioactivity only, not a fission reactor) but the copter is intended to draw its power just from solar panels (sunlight on Mars is only 40 percent as much energy per area per time as on Earth). But the scientific instruments are designed to get a better handle on some of the most exciting questions about Mars. The landing site is at the mouth of an ancient river delta on the west end of Jezero Crater in a corner of the Isidia Basin region…

 
Jezero is named, in keeping with a NASA practice of using the names of small towns for particularly interesting sites, for a Bosnian village which means “lake” in Serbo-Croatian (the initial J should be pronounced “y” but a lot of NASA and JPL spokespeople have fallen into the habit of pronouncing it with the English “j” sound). The crater must, indeed, have been a lake when the river still flowed, although that stopped billions of years ago (“how many billions?” is one of the questions still unanswered). The rover will drill deep to take core samples and measure how much water ice remains in various layers, and whether there is any liquid water or fossil life anywhere.

Could there be any surviving life on Mars? Hopes for this have faded. Early in the 20th century, Schiaparelli’s observation of “canali” (Italian for “channels”) on Mars got mistranslated into English as “canals”; this excited the eccentric American astronomer Percival Lowell into theorizing about Martian civilization desperately trying to conserve dwindling water supplies. Lowell’s maps showed not only the genuine, long fracture lines which are found on the planet, like the Nili Fossae near Jezero Crater, but numerous lines which his imagination posited. By 1952 it was clear that Mars was much less hospitable than Lowell and sci-fi writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. G. Wells expected it to be, but because of seasonal changes in the visual appearance of the hemispheres, popular science writer Willy Ley wrote, “Most astronomers agree that there is primitive plant life, like algae and lichens, on Mars.” Sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov responded, “Algae? Lichens? We were promised princesses!”

The 1965 Mariner orbiter made it clear that the seasonal changes were only windstorms moving the dust back and forth. The 1976 Viking landers carried the “Labelled Release” experiment which was supposed to test Martian soil for signs of bacterial life: the results were not what was expected whether there was life or not, and most think it detected weird soil chemistry (peroxides and perchlorates that can release oxygen). But Gilbert Levin, who designed the experiment, still persists in the position that he found evidence for life.

In 1984 a meteorite (Allan Hills 84001) was identified as having been knocked off of Mars. Examination found microscopic chains of bubbles which could be interpreted as small bacterial cells, although there are other explanations, associated with magnetite crystals such as some bacteria form, but again skeptics doubt the biological explanation.

What we really need is for a sample of the Martian soil to be brought back. And the new rover will prepare for this, putting some of its core drills into a capsule for a future mission to retrieve. The basic problem is that a round trip does not double the fuel requirement, like a long drive to a place where you can stop at a gas station to refill, but squares it. Consider driving across a continent with no gas stations: carrying enough fuel for the trip adds weight which requires more fuel in turn, so perhaps only a tanker truck would do; but then, if you need to deliver a full tanker tank to the other end, so you can come back, then you need a fleet of tanker trucks to set out. If a rocket must have ten times the payload mass to make the trip, then it would have to have a hundred times the payload mass to deliver ten times the
payload mass at the other end. But NASA is collaborating with ESA (European Space Agency) on a mission some years down the road to deliver an orbiter to Mars, with enough fuel to get back, which will drop a small rocket down, with enough fuel to get back up to the orbiter and a little “fetch rover” to go grab the capsule the Mars 2020 rover will gather.

The “fetch rover” has to be part of the plan because, although previous rovers have outlived their nominal lifespan to an amazing extent, that can’t be relied on. The Mars 2020 rover is designed to last a Martian year (almost 2 Earth years). One more thing it will try to do is break carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen to see if this is a feasible way to make air for a human habitat: of course, this costs as much energy as burning carbon produces, so it will not do too much of this. But we are finally taking baby steps towards sending people to Mars and bringing them back, and towards sending people to Mars who can live there long-term. The geeky joke is that “Mars is the only planet which, so far as we know, is inhabited only by robots.” Perhaps this will change, either because we learn that there is life on Mars, or because we are finally able to send life there.

 
Robert Eckert is a longtime member of the Underground Bunker community and author of the historical novel The Year of Five Emperors.

 It is difficult to obtain reliable biographic info on Chen Qiushi. From the videos he posts he looks even younger than his 34 years. He has a law degree, if we can go by a troll who posted multiple times on his videos (denounced as a government hack in replies), saying that Chen is only [...]]]>

 
It is difficult to obtain reliable biographic info on Chen Qiushi. From the videos he posts he looks even younger than his 34 years. He has a law degree, if we can go by a troll who posted multiple times on his videos (denounced as a government hack in replies), saying that Chen is only doing what he is doing now because no clients would hire him as a lawyer anymore. Chen calls himself a “citizen journalist” and reported from Hong Kong last fall about the protests, and then from Wuhan last month about the coronavirus outbreak. Since the evening of February 6 none of his family and friends have heard anything from him.

His case represents an intersection of two internal challenges which have been growing within China: the weiquan “rights protectors” who use China’s attempts to portray itself as a “rule of law” state to confront abuses through legal arguments within the system; and the jokers and hackers on the Chinese Internet who try to circumvent the pervasive censorship, either by finding ways to speak evasively on the approved social media sites such as Weibo and WeChat, or by working around the “Great Firewall of
China” to access forbidden foreign sites such as Twitter and YouTube, or since April even Wikipedia.

The two phenomena often intersect, since the regime’s response to any incident that reflects badly on any official is typically to suppress all discussion of it, while rights protectors need to stir up public awareness to generate pressure. The government gives in, if public outrage becomes loud enough, more often than outsiders might think.

To give one example which involved Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital, during the SARS outbreak, the last time a novel virus from China caused hundreds of deaths: Sun Zhigang (1976-2003) was from outside the city of Huanggang in Hubei, and attended university in Wuhan but could not find a job. At celebrations of the Lunar New Year in 2003 he told family and friends he intended to go to the Shenzhen Economic Zone in Guangdong province. Supposedly, only those with government-issued residency permits are allowed to work in these boom areas, but in practice companies are as reliant on illegal migrants as, say, produce farms in California. He was arrested in Guangzhou on March 17, and called friends in Hubei to ask them to bring his ID card. He had not bothered to bring it since it was marked rural residence only, and would not have been helpful, but having no ID at all on him made the charges worse. The police beat him severely, and he died that March 20.

The family did not believe it when the police told them he had died of natural causes, given the appearance of the body. Lawyers in Guangzhou would not help, but a rights protector in Wuhan, Wang Xiangbin, raised funds for an autopsy and pursued the case with authorities relentlessly. Reporters at Nanfang City News, a Guangzhou newspaper with one of the largest circulations in the world, broke the story on April 25. Crucially, the Internet was swamped at the time with criticisms of the government’s handling of the SARS outbreak so the censors had their hands full, and the Sun Zhigang story spread under their radar. Phoenix TV, headquartered in Hong Kong and more difficult for Beijing to control, did a piece interviewing the tearful family. When Southern Metropolis Daily, a tabloid affiliate of Nanfeng Media, also picked it up, the government belatedly responded, arresting the chief editor Cheng Yizhong for “corruption” alleging that he had been paid to cover the story. Outraged social-media posts from all over the country alerted the government that it was too late to cover up the affair, so officials changed to their other typical response, designating scapegoats. One was executed, another given a suspended death sentence, and a dozen more given prison terms from six months to three years, while the Sun family was given a $53,000 settlement (a lot of money in rural China).

But the rights protectors pressed on, appealing to the National People’s Congress that the Custody & Repatriation Act, which gave police broad powers to sweep up people working in urban areas without the residency permit, was unconstitutional since it had only been passed by the State Council and laws restricting personal freedom must, in theory, be passed by the Congress. Like many dictatorships, China has a constitution (latest version enacted 1982, with multiple amendments especially in 2004 and 2018) promising many rights that usually mean little. It is a particularly Kafkaesque irony that hashtags citing Article 35, with its guarantee of free speech, are censored immediately. There is no constitutional court with the authority to strike down a law for violating the constitution. In this case, though, Premier Wen Jiabao accepted the argument and declared in June 2003 that the law would be replaced with a Measure To Assist Vagrants With No Means Of Support. In practice the system is little changed except that police are now reluctant to beat “vagrants” to death. But Wuhan has become one of the places where rights protectors feel most emboldened.

The level of thought control which China would prefer to impose would practically require hiring half the population to censor the other half one on one. Artificial intelligence flagging suspicious phrasings for attention by a more feasible number of censors (Amnesty International estimates that the Ministry of Public Security employs between 30,000 and 50,000 in this capacity; Public Security is the Ministry whose budget has grown most rapidly in recent years) can only go so far. The problem is that the Chinese language is especially well adapted for speaking evasively. Words are formed from one-syllable roots with a tone (rising, falling, steady, or wavering) as well as consonant and vowel. Puns which substitute roots of unrelated meaning distinguished only by tone, or sometimes roots which are the same down to the tone and distinguished only by written character (in speech, only by context), are pervasive. Thus 8 is an unlucky number because it sounds like “death” and 748 is an insulting Internet reply sounding like “Die right away!” while 23 is Chinese for LOL since the characters for 2 and 3 put together look a little like the “Ha!” that is used for laughter (2333 is like LOLOLOL).

Words meaning “censored” are of course censored, so people would say “harmonized” in reference to a government statement that the Internet should contribute to a “harmonious society.” When héxié “harmonized” with two rising tones also became censored, people would say their posts were eaten by the héxiè “river crab” (falling tone on second syllable, and different character on the first). A daring animator “Crazy Crab” released a series of videos Hexie Farm in which animals on the farm sang their stories, to a sappy tune allegedly inspired by Disney’s It’s a Small World. The most popular animal was Cao Nima the “Mud Grass Horse” (depicted as an alpaca). Authorities were astonishingly slow to recognize that this name was, up to tones, “fuck your mother” and that the cheery song was full of double entendres both sexual and political: the March 2009 ban on YouTube was the response. Crazy Crab was never caught, but of course any reference to “river crab” is now censored. So people say they had problems with “what water yields” (the savvy of course realize this means river crab, which means harmonized, which means censored).

Wang Xiaofeng usually does light-hearted satire, but earned a lot of street-cred in 2006 when he appeared in a video wearing three wristwatches. Deng Xiaoping, who dominated China (though not holding the highest official titles) from Mao’s death in 1976 until his own in 1997, was purged in the 1960s as a “capitalist roader” for his economic approaches, and forcefully swept away socialist dogmatism when he came to power. He also rejected the antipathy to old Chinese culture of the “Cultural Revolution” period, insisting that China needed to embrace its heritage if modernization was not to turn it into a satellite of the West. Hopes that this was leading toward a more open democratic society were crushed in the June 4, 1989 crackdown on the protesters at Tienanmen Square: any oblique reference to this event will bring down the censors’ full fury. But it left a crisis of legitimacy: what did the Communist Party stand for anymore? Deng’s handpicked successor Jiang Zemin came up with the “Important Thought” of the “Three Represents” which was promoted throughout his presidency, and written into the Party platform when Jiang began retiring from his various posts in 2002. The Party represents 1. economic development, 2. cultural heritage, and 3. political unity. Wang popularized the pun “wearing three watches” (sounds like “Three Represents”) to refer to someone plugged into this system of state-sponsored crony capitalism justified by nationalistic cultural exhibitions.

Chen Qiushi is a brassy embodiment of a new generation of Chinese, brought up in this atmosphere of snarky resistance that constantly tests the edges of what they can get away with. From Hong Kong in August 2019 he repeatedly posted his views that the protesters were neither violent, except in response to police violence, nor lawbreakers, since they were only demanding what Chinese law nominally guaranteed them. The government takes a very different view, of course, and demanded in September that he return to Beijing to explain himself, under threat of having his Weibo and WeChat accounts (which had 740,000 followers) terminated. He complied, but his explanations did not satisfy the authorities, who shut down his accounts deleting all content. At the beginning of October he started posting to a YouTube account, and in a sign that knowledge of how to “climb” the Great Firewall is increasingly widespread, video of his reappearance was quickly mirrored on Weibo (though, of course, taken down quickly).

In January Chen, his close ally Xu Xiaodong (an MMA fighter nicknamed “Mad Dog”), and a half-dozen others infiltrated Wuhan, locked down since the end of 2019 in a belated effort to contain the coronavirus, but with no shortage of activists willing to provide safe houses. Chen and Xu appeared wearing wristwatches with their hands tied together (this author is not able to find out whether tying the hands together was just a gesture of unity or has some punny meaning) to launch a series of videos about the
shortage of supplies, confusion about what to do, and more damningly, the warnings which the government ignored from the doctors who first identified the disease.

The case of Dr. Li Wenliang, who was forced by Wuhan police to write an apology for “fear mongering” after correctly warning on December 30 that the new disease was likely to spread, and then contracted coronavirus himself, sparked an unprecedented outpouring of grief and fury on Thursday February 6 after premature reports of his death. The government denied he was dead, then the next day had to announce that he had died overnight.

The censors seemed unable to cope with the sheer number of posts about Dr. Li, but the authorities at least made sure to shut down Chen and his friends. On Thursday evening shortly after posting a disturbing video from Wuhan morgue, Fang Bin posted live as police battered down his door and took him into custody. On Friday there were numerous posts demanding Fang’s release, and he did reappear that evening, but Chen was not with him and he had no idea what had become of Chen. The government still seemed to be taken flat-footed by the outpouring, at first responding not by trying to censor all the protesting posts, but pushing back with posts purportedly from ordinary citizens asking for trust that authorities would properly investigate the questions raised by Dr. Li’s case. These were mocked as coming from the “Five Mao Party”: this phrase can be explained to police as meaning the five top officials who hold titles once held by Mao Zedong, but there is a small coin called a “Mao” in slang and it is widely believed that five of these per post is the going rate for pro-government propaganda.

Over the weekend postings took a more dangerous turn demanding “Where is Xi?” (the President, who has not made any kind of public statement) so the censors finally started mass deletions. On Saturday “Mad Dog” Xu posted that Chen’s mother had been informed that Chen was taken in “for reasons of quarantine” but questions about where he was being held went unanswered.

 
Robert Eckert is a longtime member of the Underground Bunker community and author of the historical novel The Year of Five Emperors.

Brian Wilson is the best-known member of the Beach Boys, the 60s hit group with which he has had a contentious off-and-on relationship for years. Recently a petition was forwarded to him asking people to boycott the Beach Boys, and not even buy their old recordings any more. Wilson signed it, [...]]]>

Brian Wilson is the best-known member of the Beach Boys, the 60s hit group with which he has had a contentious off-and-on relationship for years. Recently a petition was forwarded to him asking people to boycott the Beach Boys, and not even buy their old recordings any more. Wilson signed it, and passed it on to his social media followers urging them to sign as well.

He was angered that “The Beach Boys touring group licensed by Mike Love” (as Wilson phrased it in his tweet) would be performing at the February 5-8 convention of the Safari Club International in Reno, Nevada. The Safari Club International with 50,000 members and $15 million in assets is the largest organization in the world lobbying for trophy hunters.

Wilson is 77 now, and his cousin Michael Love is 78. It was back in 1958 that Brian pressed his brothers Carl and Dennis into singing harmony with him. The boy-band formed by the Wilson brothers with cousin Love and high school friend Al Jardine was called the Pendletones in a pun on Pendleton plaid shirts, a fad at the time. But in 1961 when their demo tape of two songs Brian had written, Surfin’ and Surfing USA, impressed Columbia Record execs, they were told to lose the brand-name reference (and change out of the plaids into stripes), and were redubbed the Beach Boys. None of them knew how to surf at the time, and while some tried it later they confessedly never became very good.

Despite scoring a lot of hits writing “bubble-gum pop” songs about hanging out on the beach, driving fast cars, and picking up girls, Brian aspired to break out of this stereotype and show that he could be a serious innovative musician. Brian suffered the first of the mental breakdowns that would keep him involved with therapists for decades at the end of 1964 and stayed in the studio for the next few years. The 1966 Pet Sounds album was a departure, and Paul McCartney later acknowledged that he “nicked a few ideas” from it for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (also influenced by many other musicians). Brian wanted their next album Smile to respond in turn and keep the Beach Boys up in the top tier with the Beatles and Rolling Stones, while Love urged that they return to the kind of music they had started with.

Love denies the quote “don’t f*ck with the formula” that has often been attributed to him but acknowledges “To those who think that Brian walks on water, I will always be the Antichrist.” The band moved on to other projects while some tracks from Smile leaked; Uncut magazine called it “the greatest bootleg of all time” (a form of the album was finally released in 2004). Like many bands of the time, the Beach Boys were sucked into litigation with their record company, political controversies, heavy drug use, and involvement with fringe religious movements. They broke with Capitol to start their own label Brother Records. Carl Wilson defied the draft and was in legal trouble for years. The band skipped the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, where they were originally slated to headline, out of fear that Carl would be arrested onstage (or fear that better musicians would show them up, less charitable critics opined). Mike Love made the pilgrimage to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh, and brought the yogi to tour with them, until Maharishi ditched them after five shows to pursue film opportunities.

Then Dennis Wilson had a brush with a much worse group when he picked up Manson Family member Patricia Krenwinkel (now the longest-serving female inmate in California, in prison since 1971) hitchhiking, and was introduced to Charlie Manson himself. At first he liked Manson’s music, let him use their recording studio, and wrote some lyrics to a tune of his. He became disturbed after a visit to Manson’s Spahn Ranch property (rumors that he actually saw Manson commit a murder on the ranch have never been confirmed), rewrote the tune somewhat and deleted Manson’s name from the credits. Manson sent him a bullet with the message “Every time you look at this feel grateful that your kids are safe” and sent his Family to the former house of the Beach Boys’ producer, Terry Melcher, who had delivered the news of the snub. It was now the house of director Roman Polanski, who was lucky not to be at home, but his 8-months-pregnant wife actress Sharon Tate was not so fortunate. She was murdered along with four others in the house. Learning that Melcher was not among the dead, the next night Manson delivered the Family to a wrong address in Los Feliz, next door to a house where he had partied with Terry and Dennis and hoped to find them, and there Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were murdered despite having nothing to do with Manson’s grudges.

Dennis went into a mental tailspin and there were fears he would end up like Brian, who was having such delusions as thinking that his obsessive retakes of the track “Fire” had caused a nearby building to burn down. Glen Campbell, the famously cheerful musician who was one of the substitutes for Brian on tour, could not take it and left to pursue a solo career and TV variety show. But Bruce Johnston, who also filled in sometimes during the early years, is still with the Mike Love faction of the Beach Boys to this day. In 1973 the use of their music in the movie American Graffiti to evoke a more innocent time, and an agreement with Capitol Records to release greatest-hits albums, allegedly led Brian to wonder “Have we become an oldies band, already?”

The Beach Boys, or subsets or solo members of the group, have occasionally returned to the charts over the decades but are more famous for the controversies. In 1982, after Brian ballooned to over 300 pounds, was arrested for vagrancy sleeping in a park, and overdosed on cocaine plus alcohol and other drugs, Love refused to let him have any more of his share of the money unless he returned to Dr. Eugene Landy, a therapist Brian thought was manipulating him. Dr. Landy kept Brian in strict isolation until he was restored to health. In 1983, Interior Secretary James Watt said he would ban the Beach Boys from their now-traditional 4th of July concert on the Mall because they “attract the wrong element”: Mike Love sought the personal intervention of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, who he had heard were fans. He was accused of going over to the conservatives but insisted he was still a “progressive” and started contributing to environmentalist groups.

Meanwhile tensions were growing with Dennis over his escalating drug addiction, leading to a similar ultimatum that Dennis go into rehab or be expelled. Dennis and Love even took out restraining orders against each other. Then in December 1983, Dennis in a state of drunken remorse dived into a marina to recover items belonging to his ex-wife, which he had thrown into the water during their divorce three years earlier, and drowned. Subsequent litigation included Brian suing his own father for making him sign away his royalties, when he was not mentally competent to do so; Brian suing Dr. Landy for taking financial advantage of him; Love suing Brian for not giving him co-credits on many songs, going all the way back to Surfing USA; Love and Al Jardine and some Wilson family members suing Brian for defamation over things he said in
his memoirs; and the rival bands around Love and Jardine suing each other over who had the right to use the “Beach Boys” name on tour. It was not until Carl Wilson, never as much of a drug user as the others but a heavy cigarette smoker from the age of 13, died of cancer in 1998 that the group started burying the tomahawk, somewhat. The survivors appeared together in 2006 at a celebration of the 40th anniversary of Pet Sounds, recorded a charity single in 2011 for victims of the Fukushima earthquake, and in 2012 went on a “50th anniversary” tour with a new album That’s Why God Made the Radio which made it to #3, giving them a world record for hitting the Billboard charts over a span of 49 years. Predictably, Brian and Love had a falling out and went their separate ways before the reunion was supposed to be over, and disagree about how to characterize this breakup.

Love’s Beach Boys were among the many musicians who declined to perform at Trump’s inaugural but they did consider it before accepting a gig instead at the Texas State Society’s Black Tie & Boots Inaugural Ball which happens every four years regardless of which party wins, though the attendees tend to be more enthusiastic about Republican Presidents.

Still, this willingness to get along with conservatives did not prepare some long-time fans for Love’s willingness to appear at the Safari Club convention, where the keynote speaker was Donald J. Trump Jr. It did not seem consistent with Love’s prior devotion to green causes. The petition in protest originally read…

Dear Beach Boys Manager Elliott Lott,

We the undersigned pledge to stop buying or downloading all Beach Boys music, going to Beach Boys concerts, and purchasing any Beach Boys merchandise until the Beach Boys withdraw from the SCI Convention and publicly state their opposition to this sick ‘sport’ of killing animals for ‘fun’. We will call on the Beach Boys’ record label, agent and publicists to disown the Beach Boys, and on members of the public to protest at forthcoming Beach Boys concerts, unless they do so.

However, the band was undeterred. “We look forward to a night of great music in Reno, and, as always, support freedom of thought and expression as a fundamental tenet of our rights as Americans,” Love said in a statement, and the band performed as scheduled.

The petition has now been repurposed to ask the UK to adopt a proposed ban on hunting trophies.

 
Robert Eckert is a longtime member of the Underground Bunker community and author of the historical novel The Year of Five Emperors.