midge at the mic

Earlier this week marked the anniversary of the identification and arrest of broadcast personality “Axis Sally” employed by Nazi Germany in order to spread propaganda and engineer public opinion and reception of the Allied war effort in 1949. Mildred Elizabeth Gillars, originally from Portland, Maine, was one of those Lost Generation types that came of age between the wars and was quite disaffected by the failure of her aspirations to become an actress. Not able to sustain a career in New York City, Gillars moved to Paris and then to Algiers before finding stable employment in Dresden in 1934 first as an English teacher and then with the Reichs-Rundfunk state media outlet.

The pursuit of fame often is expressed as infamy and Gillars’ case is perfect example. Though protesting that she signed an oath of allegiance under great duress after the attack on Pearl Harbor which pulled the US into the war and that she had no truck with Nazi ideology, under the influence of various Svengalis, Gillars’ prolific programmes turned pointedly vile, broadcasting under several pseudonyms and conflated with other parallel campaigns of disinformation and demotivation, with arcs of narrative aimed to engender homesickness for troops stationed overseas and suggest that prolonged absence did not make the heart grow fonder with sensational stories of infidelity while husbands were away at the front. For Midge at the Mic, Gillars would DJ a music hour with American songs with interstitials attacking the US government. Here is a link to an audio recording hosted on YouTube. Gillars was apprehended in Berlin running a second-hand furniture operation and was tried and convicted on a single count of treason (despite a litany of charges brought against her) for a broadcast that preceded the storming of the beach at Normandy by just a few days designed to make families question the worth of their sacrifice. Once discharged after serving a sentence of eleven years, Gillars confined herself to a convent and taught German, French and drama classes in an attached academy.

alpha predator

Via the always brilliant Nag on the Lake, we learn of the successful trial run of a robotic monster to mitigate human and wildlife competition for resources that’s a sort of next generation of scarecrow. Orchard-keepers and rice farmers in Japan can now summon the juggernaut Super Monster Wolf as a means of keeping wild boars out of their chestnut groves and rice paddies without resorting to more lethal countermeasures.
Its prowling and howls are adaptive so its quarry does not grow inured to its presence and the terrifying turns into the laughable. Having had a close-call with one of these hulking beasts (not pictured—this one was relatively tame and confined to a wild park), we wonder if Super Monster Wolf could be persuaded to patrol different beats besides safeguarding crops in order to keep animals away from busy roads and out of harm’s way. Be sure to visit the links up top to learn more and see a video demonstration of Super Wolf in action.

railroaded or letter of the law

The legal fiction of natural and corporate personhood—apparently with all benefits and responsibilities appertaining to, including the right to unimpeded free speech and no abridgement of religious liberties (though it is difficult to envision what that looks like for a corporation) has probably the basest and most twisted phoney, flimsy precedence that I’ve encountered since perhaps the selling of papal indulgences—and given the kleptocracy, kraterocracy that we’ve inherited, that speaks volumes.
About a decade after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution that provided that no person can be denied the citizenship and civil rights afforded to anyone without due legislative process that applies to every individual equally in the summer of 1868, a train magnate and Civil War Reconstructionist Robber Baron and a corruptible justice who fabricated accounts of deliberations of the constitutional amendment that ensured formerly enslaved people would be less systematically marginalized be testifying that the original version of the draft used the term “citizen” instead of person and by a patently sophistical argument by extrapolation if it was unconstitutional to discriminate on the basis of identified or attributed racial background, it stood to reason that it was equally a protected category when it came to natural versus agglomerated personhood—otherwise corporate citizenship. Though many landmark and recognisable cases appeal to the standard set by the Fourteenth Amendment: Plessy v Ferguson, Brown v Board of Education, Dred Scott v Sandford (the impetuous for the amendment that it overturned, an earlier finding that proffered Americans descended from enslaved people could not participate fully in civil society) and even latter day decisions like Gore v Bush in the disputed outcome of the 2000 presidential election or the bevvy of cases pertaining to marriage equality, the celebrity is overshadowed by the rather dull realm of the infringement by state or private institutions on corporate mission and vision whose litigations (despite the speciousness of the argument) make up the bulk of its legal exercise.

umzugstag