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(If a Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, the DNR and PCA Will Have no Rational Choice Other Than

Denying PolyMet’s Permit to Build an Experimental Tailings Lagoon in Water-Rich Northern Minnesota That Will Have 250 foot High, Soluble Earthen Dam Walls)

By Gary G. Kohls, MD - March 12, 2018

For Part I, go to: http://duluthreader.com/articles/2018/03/08/12656_what_entities_are_behind_the_reckless_endangerment

How ironic that Orpheus and Eurydice, an opera about hell, has one of the most exquisite expressions of paradise ever to grace the stage. According to The Victor Book of Operas by Louis Biancolli and Robert Bagar, O&E has “the classic, serene beauty that one associates with Grecian art.” That’s largely because composer Christoph Willibald von Gluck and librettist Pierre-Louis Moline derived the storyline for their 1774 opera from the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus’ (Russian tenor Maxim Mironov) descent into the Underworld to rescue his deceased beloved, Eurydice (Louisianan soprano Lisette Oropesa) and attempt to bring her back to life. Orpheus, but of course, was the son of Apollo and Calliope, the gods of music and poetry, and a chip off the ol’ Olympian block, he was antiquity’s peerless musician.

On March 1, 2018, I was very privileged to take part in a discussion of issues of racism, freedom of speech, patriotism, and war at Saint Mary’s Hall, a private high school in San Antonio “Military City USA” Texas.

Daniel Ellsberg has a message that managers of the warfare state don’t want people to hear.

“If you have information that bears on deception or illegality in pursuing wrongful policies or an aggressive war,” he said in a statement released last week, “don't wait to put that out and think about it, consider acting in a timely way at whatever cost to yourself…. Do what Katharine Gun did.”

If you don’t know what Katharine Gun did, chalk that up to the media power of the war system.

HELP WANTED: White House Aide(s)

The most accomplished administration in presidential history (especially one that’s done more in just one year than any other president) seeks bright, articulate aides offering varied opinions and perspectives that will most likely fall on deaf ears. No political experience necessary (in fact, the more unqualified you look on paper the better).

Applicants must be willing to be subjugated by a petty, belittling, mean-spirited, abusive boss and be stripped of their self-worth, dignity and pride (did we mention the merciless bullying yet?). Ideal candidates will be highly insecure with low self-esteem and and even lower expectations. Loyalty is a must. Irrational, blind, self-destructive loyalty.

The United States of America spends something like $80 billion annually on intelligence gathering and analysis. When the CIA was founded by the National Security Act in 1947 the intention was to create a mechanism that would warn about an imminent threat. The memory of Pearl Harbor in 1941, when Japan attacked the U.S. naval base was still fresh, and the legislation was popularized by the slogan “no more Pearl Harbors.”

In spite of the dedication of considerable resources and manpower, there have been some major intelligence failures in the past seventy years, starting with the inability to anticipate the breakout of the Korean War and including the embrace of false intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. But the most recent failure is perhaps more consequential than either Korea or Iraq.

When I found out Sacred Fools was mounting a play about Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin I immediately set out to review The Art Couple. Not only had I read about those Post-Impressionist painters and their cohabitation together in the so-called “Studio of the South”, I’d seen this depicted in films such as Vicente Minnelli’s 1956 Lust for Life starring Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh and Anthony Quinn as Gauguin. In 2017 AFI Fest screened Robert Altman’s 1990 Vincent & Theo, with Tim Roth as Vincent and Wladimir Yordanoff playing Gauguin. (BTW, Quinn won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for portraying Gauguin - up to that point it was the briefest onscreen appearance to strike Oscar gold.)

Here is an incomplete list of some of the culprits:

      A) Foreign Mining Corporations (PolyMet, Glencore, Twin Metals, Antofagasta, etc);

Anyone reading the scientific literature (or the progressive news outlets that truthfully report this literature) knows that homo sapiens sapiens is on the fast track to extinction, most likely some time between 2025 and 2040.

For a taste of the evidence in this regard focusing on the climate, see ‘Climate Collapse and Near Term Human Extinction’, ‘What They Won’t Tell You About Climate Catastrophe’, ‘Release of Arctic Methane “May Be Apocalyptic,” Study Warns’ and ‘7,000 underground [methane] gas bubbles poised to “explode” in Arctic’.

The week before British playwright Terry Johnson’s stage version of Charles Webb’s 1963 novella The Graduate and Buck Henry and Calder Willingham’s 1967 screenplay premiered at Laguna Playhouse, I happened to re-watch the classic movie on the IFC or Sundance Channel. I was struck by a number of things and wondered how could one translate its cinematic language to the medium of theatre, with real life movie star Melanie Griffith stepping into the role Anne Bancroft immortalized, that lecherous lush Mrs. Robinson?

After all, its helmer, Mike Nichols - who actually had previously been a theatre director whose movie debut was the 1966 adaptation of Edward Albee's Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - won the Best Director Oscar for The Graduate, which was only his second movie. And it was lensed by legendary director of photography Robert Surtees, who won three Best Cinematography Oscars, including for 1959’s Ben-Hur, and was Oscar-nommed another dozen times, including for The Graduate.