Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 206

So Much for Arms Control

On this day in 1949, the U.S. announced--it made the top of the NYT--that it had detected the first Soviet atomic explosion several weeks earlier, see photo at left, which the Soviets thought they'd kept secret.    (Here's how we did it.)  So now the arms race was really.   Truman's refusal to compete with the Soviets rather than cooperate on control of the atom--as the scientists and others suggested--did not keep them from their own weapon, and then the H-bombs (their agents in the U.S. helped that along).   Meanwhile, as I explore in my Atomic Cover-up book,  the U.S. kept the American public largely in the dark on the key aspects of the effects of the bomb, and longterm dangers...

Ray Left His Stamp

New Postal Service "forever" stamp for Brother Ray goes on sale today.

Next: The Thin Red Lion?

Kitty ventures outside for first time, as filmed by Terrence Meowlick in his inimitable style.  (h/t Andy Mitchell)


Terrence Meowlick from Knock Bang Boom on Vimeo.

WikiLeaks Reviews WikiLeaks Film

The Fifth Estate is finally about to open, after debut at Toronto film fest, and no surprise, WikiLeaks folks, as far as we know, not happy with it.  They've obtained various scripts including what they say was the  near-final one and claim friends saw it in Toronto and noted a late change or two--so in any case they are, they say, basing their critique on the finished film, more or less.  Read the script and the critique details here.   Besides claiming inaccuracies about DDB and his role and deeds, there's this:

Julian Assange was never in a cult, but THE FIFTH ESTATE claims that he was.
Julian Assange does not dye or bleach his hair white, as claimed in the film.
While these interpolations may serve to enhance the dramatic narrative of the film, or to build an enigmatic or interesting central character, they have the effect of further falsely mythologizing a living person as sinister and duplicitous.

Trailer below:

Naturally Hicks Is There

UPDATE:   NYT with Q & A with Hicks on how he did it.  Was at framing shop next door when it went down.  Wife brought helmet and added camera equipment from home pronto.  Amazing.

Earlier: Tyler Hicks, who always somehow seems to be at the hottest of hot spots and war zones when things explode, did it again today, improbably being just outside the mall in Nairobi when the bomb went off.  NYT has gallery of his shots here.   Includes up-close photos of dead bodies and police with guns drawn.

Garland of Poses

I knew songwriter/singer Garland Jeffreys a little back in the mid-1970s in the West Village, just after his heralded debut solo album (which had some reggae-influenced stuff)  came out and we raved in Crawdaddy.  You might know his song "Ghost Writer" from his acclaimed 2nd disc.   Fun guy, good guy.  Now he's written an op-ed just posted at NYT on his songwriting process forty years later.   Here's one of best songs from that debut, which was supposed to be a hit single:

First Song of the Autumn

And it simply has to be the Kinks' wacky 1967 "Autumn Almanac." And then a tune for every season, the gender-bending "Lola" from 1970.

Uppie No Downer

So let's mark the birth on this date, in 1878,  of Upton Sinclair, famed socialist muckraking novelist (and one of the best-known Americans around the world during his heyday), author of The Jungle and--leftwing candidate in what I called "The Campaign of the Century" in my Random House book of that title, when he led grassroots crusade for governor or California in 1934.  He won the Democratic primary in a landslide--and to defeat him, big business, Hollywood and conservative Dems and GOPers went out and invented the modern political campaign, turning their dirty tricks over to a new breed of "spin doctors" and "political consultants."  And Irving Thalberg created the first "attack ads" for the screen.  To see them, and much more, go here. 

We Almost Lost The East Coast

UPDATE:  I mentioned the Schlosser book (below) and covered in a longer piece at The Nation, but now comes a bombshell, so to speak: Schlosser, perhaps to add publicity for book, gave The Guardian the FOIA document he obtained that outlines the single worst (near) nuclear accident here in the U.S.  Their story just now by Ed Pilkington opens:  "A secret document, published in declassified form for the first time by the Guardian today, reveals that the US Air Force came dramatically close to detonating an atom bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima.

The document, obtained by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gives the first conclusive evidence that the US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961. The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.

Fallout might have killed millions along the East Coast right up to NYC.  Of course, the U.S. lied about all this for decades.  The great cover-up after Hiroshima helped lead to this, as chronicled in my Atomic Cover-up book.

Earlier:   Eric Schlosser's much-awaited book on nuclear accidents in U.S. (from losing that H-bomb in 1961that might have detonated--we were lied to about that--to the 1980 silo catastrophe) published today.   See good summary here and first chapter.   And you wonder why I've written so much on nuclear danger--maybe more than anyone--since early 1980s.

Why Smart Phones Are Toxic...

For kids and sad adults, like Louis CK, as he explains (with some help from Springsteen).