But, how is it that we were hipped to this particular action, as the Beatniks of the time might say?

One man, the coolest of the cool, really deserves most of the credit.

His name was Forrest J Ackerman. He was the editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.

We Monster Kids would haunt the magazine racks of drugstores and convenience stores, hoping to run into a copy of this publication, which had anti-status in the adult world of the time. Teachers would confiscate (and often summarily destroy) copies found in a student’s possession.

Today I’m sure most teachers would be gratified to find kids actually reading anything.

But in those times, what educational philosophy there was abroad in the land centered on cutting down jungles, rather than irrigating deserts, to use pedagogical terms created by C.S. Lewis.

The idea was that children could go wrong by reading the wrong things. Pop Culture and comic books were heavily discouraged, thought to inculcate Juvenile Delinquency, whose black-leather jacketed spectre haunted the guardians of Right and Order.

Anyway, Forrest Ackerman put out Famous Monsters. Its pages were a love letter to the fantasy cinema. The layout was avant-garde and striking. The covers were often magnificent oil paintings by Basil Gogos, the Rembrandt of Monsterdom.

All in all, a heady package. Ackerman wrote using a playful, pun-filled style, but with real love for the subject matter.

He lived, as every Monster kid knew, in Hollywood– as he called it, “Horror-wood, Karloff-ornia.” His house, stuffed with a lifetime collection of Science Fiction and Horror movie memorabilia, was known as the Ackermansion. For Monster Kids it was a Lourdes, a Mecca– a place to make a pilgrimage to, if one was blessed with extraordinary good fortune.

I always wanted to go, but, alas! I lived in far-off Illinois.

However, far later in my own life, after I landed in California, a girlfriend of mine who lived in Los Angeles did me the incomparable favor of taking me to the Ackermansion itself.

I realized that childhood dream.

I followed “Uncle Forry” as he toured the fans through his delicious labyrinth for the umpteenth time, something he devoted a sizeable part of his life to doing.

There my eyes beheld such wonders as the dinosaurs from King Kong, the model lighthouse destroyed by the Rhedosaurus in The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (American precursor to Godzilla) and the model of the U.S. Capitol destroyed by the titular vessels in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. I saw the head of the Metaluna Mutant from This Island Earth (1955).

After all those years, I was in Monster Heaven at last.

And there was more in this place. Acting as private guards, adoring, troll-like monster fans deliberately blocked wandering pilgrims from the doors to some of the “Mansion’s” rooms. But looking over the shoulder of the hulking form of one of them, I scoped out a shrine of another sort, where flickering votive candles and flowers surrounded an altar to Greta Garbo, decorated with many photographs and movie stills.

Oh, Ackerman was passionately devoted to the cinema in all forms. He, a worshipper in the movie-house dark, was the High Priest of an enthusiastic following, an army of acolytes.

An Esperanto-speaking futurist and would-be language reformer, Forrest J helped create our contemprorary cultural landscape. The term “sci-fi,” for example, was his, extrapolated from “hi-fi,” the most au courant music reproducing technology of the day. Also an agent for some working science fiction writers, he had on the site the greatest, most comprehensive collection of Pulp and Science Fiction magazines in the world.

At the very end of his life, he lost it all, house and all, sold to pay medical costs.

But what he did for a generation makes him, in my opinion and that of countless others, one of the architects of today’s living culture.

What would he have made of the New Yorker’s All-Science-Fiction Issue, which came out just last week?

[Silhouette on unrecognizable guest in the doorway of the dark industrial interior, via Shutterstock.com.]

Friday and time for a Panda Party! Since it’s Pride month, I thought it would be fun to play nothing but GLBT artists and bands with GLBT members today, so hop on over and join the fun!

Panda Party!

During the hearing, Republican senators complimented Dimon and praised his financial empire.

“What is going on with this panel of senators,” Stewart wondered. “They’re sucking up to Dimon like they’re on JP Morgan’s payroll.”

It turns out, the biggest campaign donor to many of the senators was JP Morgan. Throughout the hearing, the senators asked for Dimon’s advise and berated their own legislative body.

Stewart ripped into Sen. Bob Corker in particular. The Senator had questioned the effectiveness of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill, even though he fought against key provisions of the law.

“Must be nice to be a Republican senator sometimes,” he joked. “Cus you get the fun of breaking shit and the joy of complaining the shit you just broke doesn’t work.”

Watch video, via Mediaite, below:

A series of documents and photographs released by the Pentagon this week show that the lawyers for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of plotting the worst attacks on US soil traded barbs with military officials over the co-defendants’ attire.

The lawyers are urging the chief military commissions judge to stop Guantanamo commander Rear Admiral David Woods from interfering with the court wardrobe of their clients, who face the death penalty if convicted.

Mohammed had sought to wear the camouflage items for his May 5 arraignment. But after examining the men’s planned attire, prison authorities rejected everything but the white robes and camp uniforms they eventually wore.

In the end, the only person whose wardrobe stood out in court was that of Pentagon-paid defense lawyer Cheryl Bormann, who wore a traditional black abaya — typically worn by some conservative Muslim women — along with a headscarf that only left her face exposed.

She showed up the next day wearing a low-cut dress for a press conference to protest what she deemed provocative attire worn by other women in the courtroom, making an appeal for the women to wear more “appropriate” clothing.

The defense’s motion condemned Woods’s “arbitrary and capricious” denial of the detainees’ rights to wear clothing of their choosing, saying it “furthered the CIA’s goal to psychologically dislocate detainees from their individual and social personalities.”

Mohammed had sought to wear a woodland-patterned jacket, hunting vest and fabric for a proposed turban, Woods said in an affidavit, explaining he denied the request because of “security and good order and discipline concerns, and because they were inappropriate courtroom attire.”

Two of his co-defendants, including Mohammed’s nephew Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali — also known as Ammar al-Baluchi — wanted to wear traditional Afghan caps and vests.

Woods also forbade those choices because “such vests are traditionally only worn during the winter or in colder climates,” the affidavit said.

Another one of the accused men, Mustapha al-Hawsawi of Saudi Arabia, wanted to wear one of Guantanamo’s infamous orange jumpsuits to court, but Woods rejected the request due to “institutional and security concerns.”

The uniform is usually reserved for disobedient detainees at the US naval base in southern Cuba and Hawsawi’s attorney, Commander Walter Ruiz, told AFP that his client wanted to wear it “as a silent reminder of Guantanamo’s legacy of torture and in peaceful defiance of a system that is built to kill.”

Woods also barred the men from wearing any vests or clothing with pockets, noting they were “a potential means of removing unauthorized items from the courtroom.”

But “in recognition of their cultural and religious significance,” the men were allowed to wear white robes and skullcaps to court, and bring prayer rugs to perform their daily rituals.

“The detainee’s attire should not transform this commission into a vehicle for propaganda and undermine the atmosphere that is conducive to calm and detached deliberation and determination of the issues presented,” prosecutors wrote in a motion.

The five men are due back in court on August 8-12 for a preliminary hearing on defense appeals.

“Romney has said repeatedly, he wants to cut taxes on the very wealthy,” he said on MSNBC’s The Last Word. “The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center here in Washington has done a computation of what Romney’s taxes would do, and they’ve concluded that the typical millionaire or someone earning over $1 million gets $950,000 over a ten year period… I mean, this is absurd. At a time when we have a budget deficit and so many people in need in America, this is reverse Robin Hood.”

Reich described so-called trickle down economics as “bunk.” The economic theory is closely associated with former President Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party. According to the theory, if the wealthy are taxed less, then they will invest more into businesses, creating jobs for middle-class Americans.

“Almost all the gains of productivity over the last five year, six years have gone to the very top. What that means is the vast middle-class doesn’t have purchasing power to keep the economy going. The President has proposed over and over again a variety of ways of dealing with this widening gap, this increasing inequality, and the Republicans on the Hill have simply said no.”

Watch video, courtesy of MSNBC, below:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Of course he is also admired as an outspoken atheist. His bestseller, The God Delusion, has outsold all of his other books and it is for his secularism that Dawkins has received his most recent award. At the weekend the British Humanist Association presented him with its Award for Distinguished Services to Humanism. Previous recipients have included Julian Huxley, Philip Pullman and Polly Toynbee.

Dawkins opened his acceptance speech by quoting from memory some of Bertrand Russell’s essay “Why I am not a Christian”.

“I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation.”

He went on to speak about man’s position in the tree of life – “God knows my subject of evolution is no stranger to controversy. We are closer cousins to amoebas than amoebas are to bacteria, we are very close cousins to amoebas and this puts us in our place” – and ended his speech by reciting Julian Huxley’s poem The Crystal Cabinet.

But sandwiched in between was his pitch, that “evolution will become the new classics”.

Dawkins will lecture on evolutionary biology and science literacy at the New College of the Humanities which he helped to found. He explained that whereas classicists have traditionally been assumed to be the scholars most able to branch into any area of research, today – with advances in evolutionary study – it will be those with scholarship in evolutionary science who will supersede classicists in depth, breadth and usefulness.

He predicted that those who took his new degree course would achieve a “polymathic status”. He said the course “places evolution at the centre but brings in lots and lots of other subjects such as economics, social science, philosophy, engineering, medicine, agriculture, linguistics, physics, cosmology and history of science.”

Dawkins went into some detail to justify this statement, explaining the relevance of the various disciplines, starting with behavioural economics: “Everything has to be paid for, there is no such thing as a free lunch. You have to pay for whatever you do now in the form of lost opportunities to do other things in the future.”

He claimed that in the areas of sexual selection, parent–offspring relationships and sex ratio theory, economic thinking was “rife” within evolutionary research.

“What are the evolutionary origins for empathy, for sympathy, for our tendency to feel sorrow when we feel distress? Our tendency to want to help other people – other sentient beings indeed.”

Dawkins argued that the same design-optimising principles that are “central to evolutionary theory”, are used by engineers and economists. He also explained that modern molecular genetics had become a branch of IT, “really it is digital information technology, something Darwin would gave rejoiced at as it helps to solve some of the major riddles Darwin was faced with.”

Reminding the audience that for centuries humans have artificially selected for highly productive animals and plants, he said this process will now be supplemented by genetic engineering, which he referred to as, “the manipulation of the mutation side of the Darwinian equation”.

Dawkins wants all doctors of medicine to be Darwinists, referring to the “wonderful book” Why We Get Sick by Randolph Nesse and George Williams, and recommending we all buy a copy for our GPs.

“If doctors had been wise to natural selection we wouldn’t have the problem we now have with antibiotic resistance evolving by natural selection by bacteria.”

He gave doctors some other evolutionary tips: “Is a temperature a Darwinian adaptation by the body to make life difficult for the pathogen? If so, giving someone a drug to bring the temperature down is the very last thing a doctor should be doing. Lower back pain is likely because we are ancestrally quadrapedal animals turned into bipeds and this is giving us problems.”

But he criticised cosmologists who talk about the “evolution” of the universe, stating that the universe’s development is analogous to embryology not evolution. However, “there is a connection, also a theological connection, in that cosmology and evolution are in the business of explaining origins, explaining where we come from, in the case of biology, where life comes from, in cosmology, where the universe comes from. I would think my course in evolution would include cosmological theories on the origins of everything.”

Dawkins reminded his audience that Patrick Matthew was theorising about natural selection more than quarter of a century before Darwin, in an attempt to address age-old questions. “Questions that children always ask – “Where do I come from?”, “What is the meaning of life?” – these questions have been given wrong answers by theology for centuries. The right answers to these questions now come from evolutionary science. That is my pitch, my educationist pitch, for evolution as the new classics.”

Dawkins received a standing ovation. It seemed everyone wanted their photo taken with him and I certainly wasn’t the only person with a bag full of copies of his various books for him to sign. It was with the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976 that he was pushed into the spotlight and over the subsequent decades he has had to adapt to the environmental pressure of fame. So he paced himself, graciously negotiating the endless requests with the seasoned experience of celebrity.

But in behavioural economic terms there is a trade-off between time spent publicising existing work against time spent getting new work done. I suspect Dawkins would far rather have the memes arising from his work do the publicity for him while he makes the best use of his time, alone in his study, writing his next book.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2012

Stephanie Harnett, a publicist working for Mercury Communications, which has been retained by Walmart to assist in its effort to open a new store in the Chinatown area of Los Angeles, claimed to be a student journalist called “Zoe Mitchell” when she turned up at the event on 6 June.

She then spoke to and recorded an interview with an activist from Warehouse Workers United, a group campaigning for worker improvements in the notoriously low wage industry where casual labor and poor health conditions are all too common.

The subterfuge only became apparent on Wednesday, when Harnett turned up at a different event and this time used her real name. She was spotted by members of WWU who recognised her and were stunned to see her handing out Mercury business cards with a completely different identity.

Walmart moved to distance itself from her actions on Thursday, and Mercury said neither it nor the retail giant had “approved, authorized or directed” her actions. It said she was no longer working for the firm.

WWU officials, who are backed by the Change to Win coalition of unions, are outraged at the stunt. They say Walmart – with its gigantic spending power – has a chance to improve things.

“Last week when Walmart had the chance to talk about real issues affecting Latino workers in Southern California it instead sent ‘Zoe’, a fake reporter. A spy. Our door is open. Walmart can change this industry and create thousands of good jobs and improve the quality of life in Southern California, but first it has to come out of hiding,” the WWU said in a statement.

The press conference was to highlight a report by the National Employment Law Project which accused big box retailers, like Walmart, of driving down wages and work place safety standards in a supply chain of sub-contracted warehouse operators. The report, called Chain of Greed, singled out Walmart as a major offender. “Walmart sets the parameters for the working conditions in (warehouses)… but when things go wrong, it’s the contractors that are blamed, while Walmart skirts responsibility for its actions and accountability for its influence over those engaged in its massive supply chain,” the report stated.

For its part Mercury said that neither it nor Walmart had known about Harnett’s plans to infiltrate the press conference as “Zoe” and gather information on participants. It also said that such an act would not happen again. “The action taken by Ms Harnett was in no way approved, authorized, or directed by Walmart or Mercury. Stephanie is a junior member of our team who made an immature decision. She showed very poor judgment and Mercury takes full responsibility. We are taking the necessary disciplinary actions. This is an isolated incident that has never happened before and will not happen again,” Mercury said in a statement.

Warehouse worker Santos Castaneda, 25, one of two members of WWU who were speaking at the first press conference, is upset that he was duped by someone working indirectly for the company that he is campaigning against. “I never thought she was going to be a spy. I feel mad and disappointed,” he said.

The “journalist” approached Castenada, 25, asked him to tell his story about low wages and tough conditions in his job.

The woman reporter introduced herself to Castaneda as a University of Southern California journalism student called Zoe Mitchell. “She said she was a story teller from the heart. She was very interested in warehouse workers and the working conditions,” Castaneda said.

The pair spoke for up to half an hour and Mitchell recorded the whole interview, taking down details of Castaneda’s biography and working history. “I explained how we are fighting for our rights,” Castaneda said.

Walmart spokesman Steven Restivo told Gawker: “These actions were unacceptable, misleading and wrong. Our culture of integrity is a constant at Walmart and by not properly identifying herself, this individual’s behavior was contrary to our values and the way we do business. We insist that all our vendors conduct themselves in a way that is transparent and honest and we will reinforce that expectation to help ensure this type of activity is not repeated.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2012