JUSTICE, Christine Keeler and the Commies

I have given up looking for “justice”. As proof of its nonexistence I offer you the “ostentatiously wealthy” British Labor politician John Lewis (above). Called an evil man and “vindictive” by one of his victims, his allies described the self made rubber millionaire as a "nasty piece of work" and “one of the lowest forms of human existence I've ever met...” and “loathsome in every sense”. His “lack of personal...honesty or integrity” made him an “embarrassment to his party”. In a “just” world John Lewis would have retreated after karma thoroughly kicked his ass in 1951. He did not.

That year Lewis' fashion model wife, Joy Fletcher (above, left), grew weary after four years of her husband's promiscuity and odd sexual proclivities, and left him for a lesbian Swedish beauty queen. She later moved on to another male millionaire.  Lewis' bruised ego was further offended when a traffic cop ordered him to stop at an intersection. Lewis ran his car into the officer, three times. His justification was that he was late for a floor vote. The public chastisement resulted in him losing his seat in Parliament. It was not a good year for John. But Lewis avoided the productive introspection such justice suggested, by inventing a villain to blame for his just deserts. Lewis decided that the Joy in his life had been seduced by the unlucky, undeserving and unrepentant Stephen Ward. Lewis swore, “I will get Ward whatever happens”.

The irony was that Stephen Ward (above) did not sleep with Joy Fletcher Lewis. In fact Dr. Ward ( he was an American trained osteopath) was not that interested in sex. We know this because that is the one thing Christine Keeler, one the most inventive, inveterate and inexhaustible liars in the 20^th century, never changed her story about. 

The 18 year old topless show girl always said that although she and Stephen Ward slept in the same bed, it was always “like brother and sister.” She never claimed to have had sex with Stephen Ward. And this is notable because charting the admitted sexual contacts of this beautiful hedonistic exhibitionist egomaniac would have exhausted a team of Public Health epidemiologists.

Christine Keeler (above) , in the words of her most famous victim, “seemed to like sexual intercourse”. She was uneducated, and uninterested in much beyond her own vagina. But in her chosen field she was an expert, the epiphany of common carnal knowledge  It seems at times that this high school drop out had sex with every male in mid-century London, including Soviet secret agents, American military officers, London policemen, bankers, drug dealers, musicians, doctors, lawyers, even members of the British Cabinet. And like a single woman Ponzi scheme, Christine's constantly crescive coitus circle eventually brought her into contact with the only male in London who wanted to hear this gorgeous uneducated woman speak. And he was the vile, despised and despicable John Lewis.

Their meeting occurred at a 1961 Christmas Eve party. Christine (above)  was, as usual, concerned only with her own problems, which were not insubstantial. Two weeks earlier, a former boyfriend, Lucky Gordon, had fired “several shots” at the front door of the tiny apartment Christine had once platonically shared with Stephen Ward. 

The publicity generated by that gunfire had killed her affair with British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo (above)...

...as well as scaring off  the other man she was concurrently  dating,  Yevgeny Ivanov (above), a Soviet naval attache  Christine recalled later that John Lewis “could not have been more helpful....” that Christmas Eve.   But the only five words John Lewis heard in Christine's hour long self absorbed diatribe was “Stephen Ward”, “John Profumo”, and “Soviet”.

Lewis had been trying to get the Fleet Street crowd interested in attacking Stephen Ward (above, left)  for a decade, but even the judge in Lewis' 1954 divorce case had dismissed his fantasies about Ward being a pimp. 

 But by adding the name of Profumo to his vendetta, Lewis acquired an ally, in the Conservative Party hatchet man, George Wigg (above). 

Wigg scurried off to repeat Christian’s rant to Conservative Party leader, Harold Wilson. And with his okay, Wigg then fed the “News Of The World” the story of a Liberal Party leader who was having an affair with a woman who was also having an affair with a Soviet Spy.

Christine Keeler (above)  met John Profumo while skinny dipping at a 1961 summer night pool party at  Lord Astor's country estate. She had been invited as a guest of Stephen Ward, who was Lord Astor's osteopath and who rented a summer house on Astor's property for one pound a year. Over that weekend, John Profumo got Christian Keeler's phone number, but the lady and the tramp went home with another party guest, Yevgeny Ivanov, who was in fact a Soviet secret agent.  Monday morning, Stephen Ward felt nervous enough to call his MI 5 contact to report the triangle that had formed in Lord Astor's swimming pool.

The three dominant sections of British Military Intelligence have always been MI 1, code making and breaking, MI 5, counterintelligence, and MI 6, intelligence gathering. In 1960 MI 5 thought they saw a chance to “flip” Yevgeny Ivanov, and they asked Stephen Ward, who knew Ivanov casually,  to befriend him. At their urging, Ward had invited Ivanov to the pool party at the Astor estate. But it was also Ward who warned the government that the Secretary of War might be dipping his wick into Christian Keeler, at the same time she was partying with the Soviet Agent.

Christine (above)  may or may not have slept with Ivanov.  She did sleep with Profumo, but in her own words she saw him merely as “a screw of convenience.”  Ward tried to penetrate her myopia to warn her how deep the water was by joking that she should ask Profumo when NATO was going to share nuclear weapons with the West German government.  Ward knew Christine well enough to doubt the stunning brunette knew what NATO was, or West Germany, or even nuclear bombs. However Ward's little joke would come back to bite his own ass, with teeth that belonged to John Lewis. 

During the summer of 1963 the London Press exploded with lurid details of Christine Keeler's sex life, her affair with John Profumo and a Soviet spy,  both of which had been arraigned, said the press, by Stephen Ward. Christine was having a ball, feeding the press dark and sexy stories depicting Stephen Ward as her pimp and tool for the Soviets. For an ego maniac, even one as dim as Christine, it was a joy ride. 

Not everyone was having as much fun. Yevgeny Ivanov was called back to the Soviet Union before the story exploded. John Profumo first denied the affair, and then resigned after admitting to it. Stephan Ward (above, left center)  insisted he had been working for British Intelligence, who, of course, denied everything. Eventually Stephen Ward was charged with “living off the earnings of an under aged female” - i.e. pimping children.

As Stephen's trial was starting, Christine was in another court room, testifying at Lucky Gordon's trial. Eventually an appeals court would decided her testimony there had been unreliable, and probably perjury. But because the Foreign Office had yet to determine if national security had been breached (it had not), the accusations against her integrity were sealed. This left Stephen Ward's jury to take her headline inspired testimony as valid. 

Samuel Herbert (above), the Chief Inspector running the investigation broke quite a few rules, threatening to destroy anyone who testified in support of Stephen Ward.  And then, in his closing, the prosecutor reminded the jury that no one had come forward to defend Stephen. 

The entire trial was a travesty,  which drove Stephen Ward to take an overdose of sleeping pills. Rushed to the hospital (above) he died two days later. But the jury was still allowed to convict a dead man. 

That conviction helped to bring down the Liberal government, and made Harold Wilson (above) Prime Minister. Three years later 48 year old Inspector Herbert died of a heart attack. His will left only 300 pounds to his family. But his bank account contained 30,000 pounds, well over half a million dollars today.

The night Stephen Ward died, John Lewis celebrated with champagne in a London restaurant. There's political justice for you.

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WRITING STORIES - The Lawless Early Days of Print

I doubt you could have missed the pair, seated in the Swan tavern on Fleet Street in London, that 28 March,  1716.  Last to arrive was the infamous publisher, pornographer and plagiarist Edmund Curll, a scarecrow of a man, very tall and thin, splayfooted, and with gray goggle eyes that threatened to burst from his pale face like a cartoon character.

 Waiting for him like a spider on his web was one the greatest poets in history, the oft quoted and revered deformed genius Alexander Pope (above), with a Roman nose and a spine so twisted he stood barely four feet six inches tall from his stylish shoes to the top of the hump on his back. 

Curll thought he had been invited to settle their disagreements. Pope intended upon doing just that, by poisoning his guest's beer.  Later Pope joyfully wrote a mocking obituary of his victim, “A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison on the Body of Mr. Edmund Curll, bookseller...To be published weekly”. Curll was not killed, but he did projectile vomit until he wished his was dead. It was like a scene from Animal House. Ah, good times among the 18^th century London literati.

Publishing was in its youth, as young as the internet is today, and just as chaotic, dishonest, unregulated, and unencumbered with a functional business model. In 1688 there were only 68 printing presses in London, all controlled by members of the Stationer's Company or guild.  But in 1695 Parliament refused to renew the company's monopoly, setting off a decade of pure anarchy. Daniel Defoe of "Robinson Crusoe" fame, noted, “One man studies seven year(s), to bring a finished piece into the world, and a pirate printer....sells it for a quarter of the price ... these things call for an Act of Parliament".  So in 1710 Parliament obliged with The Statue of Anne - she was queen at the time - which created a 14 year copyright for authors. Still, six years later one author felt required to strike at a pirate printer – by making him vomit for 24 straight hours, and then attacking him again in print with his obituary in rhyme .

“Next o'er his books his eyes begin to roll,

In pleasing memory of all he stole;
How here he sipp'd, how there he plunder'd snug,
And suck'd all o'er like an industrious bug.”

Alexander Pope (above)  The Dunciad (1728)

Pope's justification for the poisoning of  Edmund Curl was as revenge for embarrassing the smart and lovely Lady Mary Montagu. The morally pompous poet, so famous for his version of Shakespeare and translations of Homer that he was nicknamed “the Bard”, was smitten with the lady. They even maintained a correspondence.  Pope privately published one of her poems. Copies were discretely passed about the English court. But soon, Curll was selling copies on the streets. Cultured nobility were not supposed to engage in publication – it smacked of stooping to actually earning a living. So Pope saw himself as a knight protecting Lady Montagu's honor when he poisoned  Curll and attacked him (among others) in his poem, “Dunciad”.  Curll responded by pirating the poem about his own attempted murder, even publishing an annotated version, also called a “key”. Mocked Curll, “How easily two wits agree, one writes the poem, one writes the key”.

Edmund Curll was not quite the “shameless Curll” Pope portrayed – not quite. He was infamous for keeping a revolving stable of struggling quill drivers “three in a bed” in the “low-rent flophouses, brothels, and coffeehouses” jammed into Grub Street (above). Originally “grub” referred to the roots and insect larval uncovered when the street was originally scrapped out. Eventually it was adopted as a badge of honor by the poverty stricken occupants, like the eventual great biographer Samuel Johnson, or Ned Ward, who considered his profession as “scandalous...as whoring....”.

These grubs were hack writers, named after the ubiquitous horse drawn Hackney cabs that plied London's streets, going where ever their paying passengers demanded. 

Which usually meant, obscenity, which as today, always sold well, as did insults and attacks on the pompous and well to do - like Pope (above). The occasional advance paid to a hungry writer was a “grub stake”, and the pitiful meals they could afford were “grub”. Jonathan Swift, eventual creator of “Gulliver's Travels”, grandiosely referred to this literary sub-culture as "the Republica Grubstreet-aria. But like Johnson, Swift was clever enough and lucky enough to eventually escape the life as a mere grub.

In fact, Curll employed no more Grub Street warriors than any other Fleet Street baron. But he was particularly adept at supplying what the public wanted - licentious sex, and manufactured controversy. Curll paid grubs to engage in a “pamphlet war” - much like the Fox News war on Christmas - over the 1712 trial of Jane Wehham for witchcraft. (She was convicted).

Curll also printed cheap pirated books that sold for a mere shilling, thus undercutting the actual author's authorized editions. His growing empire made Edmund Curll one of the most successful barons on Fleet Street. Acknowledged one critic, “He had no scruples either in business or private life, but he published and sold many good books.”  All paid for by the dirty and stolen books he published illegally.

With Pope's urging, Curll was convicted of obscenity in 1716, and twice more in 1725. In 1726, Curll struck back by befriending the mistress of a Pope confident. She passed him several letters in which the arrogantly moral Pope admitting to lusting after the Blount Sisters, Terresa and Martha. “How gladly would I give all that I am worth,” Pope wrote in one purloined missive, “for one of their maidenheads.” Embarrassed, Pope helped engineer yet another Curll conviction in February of 1727. 

This time a frustrated and exasperated court fined Curll and ordered him pilloried for an hour. At the mercy of the mob, Curll was spared the usual assault of rotted food and manure when a pamphlet was read to the well armed crowd, claiming Curll was being punished for defending the departed Queen Anne. Thus misinformed, the mob carried him home on their shoulders. Pope was infuriated and determined to even the score.

One of Edmund Curll's most profitable ventures was what came to be called “Curlicisms”. When a well known figure died, Curll would advertise a forthcoming biography, and ask the public for any anecdotes about or letters from the deceased. Then, without validating the submissions Curll would hire a Grub street hack to string them together into an instant and usually inaccurate biography, creating what one potential subject described as “one of the new terrors of death.”

Curll had done this when the Duke of Buckingham died in 1721. But Buckingham was a peer, a member of the House of Lords, and that body summoned Curll for interrogation. Curll was unrepentant, since it was not a crime to publish writings of a peer without their permission. So the Lords made it illegal, and in this Pope saw a new opportunity to injure Curll.

In 1731 Curll announced a upcoming “Curlicism” of Alexander Pope, himself; “Nothing shall be wanting,” Curll assured his potential readers, “but his (universally desired) death.” Again Curll called for submissions and a mysterious figured identified only as “P.T.” offered letters written by Pope to the Lord of Oxford.  In 1734 Curll published the letters in a vicious biography of Pope. The next year Pope published his own “Literary Correspondence for Thirty Years”, including the same letters to Oxford.  But the details in Pope's version did not match those published by Curll, as Pope pointed out when he alleged Curll had violated the privilege of a member of the House of Lords and worse, slandered the Lord while doing it. The trap was sprung.

The only problem was, Curll again refused to repent. Called again before the Lords, Curll quipped, "Pope has a knack of versifying, but in prose I think myself a match for him.” And in fact as well. The Duke of Oxford still had the original letters in his files. So, asked Curll, where had P.T.'s inaccurate versions come from? Curll produced P.T.'s letters so the Lords could judge for themselves who was implicated by the handwriting. 

For a few days, the city of London, or that section that cared about such things, held its breath. And then an ad appeared in a small newspaper offering 20 guineas if P.T. would come forward to admit he had “acted by the direction of any other person.”  P.T., of course did not appear. And the ploy fooled no one – Pope had written the originals and the fakes and even the ad, and everybody knew it. The House found a political solution; since the published letters were fakes, the law had not been broken. Case closed, except Pope now had even more egg on his face.

Wrote Curll, “Crying came our bard into the world, but lying, it is to be feared, he will go out of it.”.

And so he did.  Pope died on 30 May, 1744, and Edmund Curll followed him in December of 1747.

Thus, Curll earned the last word. He described his relationship with Pope this way, “A fitter couple was never hatched, Some married are, indeed, but we are matched”.

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Normalization and Climate Change

I can't make up my mind about climate change. Will we adjust our behavior in time, or does the human species lack the intelligence to survive? I hope the answer is yes and no, I worry the answer is no and yes. It seems to come down to how you define “intelligence”, by the smartest of us or the most obstinate and greedy? There are over 7 billion human brains working at this moment, and too many it seems are convinced meteorologists can't accurately predict if it will rain tomorrow, so of course scientists can't predict the average temperature a hundred years from now. But the first is almost impossible to predict, while the second is just extremely difficult.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration says “The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time”, while the Climate Impacts Group offers a more pragmatic definition; "You pick your vacation destination based on the climate but you pack your suitcase based on the weather." And it all started with a Swedish triple threat – he was an arrogant, racist atheist. But he was a very smart chemist. In fact Svante Arrhenius was so far ahead of his instructors that they gave his PhD dissertation a “C”, and in 1903 that same work won him the Noble Prize in Chemistry.

Growing up with those long cold Swedish winter nights made the racist Svante (above) curious as to why we weren't still having ice ages.  Being a chemist he naturally thought chemistry might provide the answer.  His knew that the sun heated the ground during the day, and  at night reflected most of that energy back into the air as infrared radiation, otherwise known as heat.  He suspected that the more carbon dioxide and water vapor there was in the air, the less of that reflected infrared radiation could escape into space. What he came up with in 1896 was his greenhouse law; “If the quantity of (carbon dioxide) increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.”   He ran the numbers, and found, as he wrote a decade later, “...any doubling of the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air would raise the temperature of the earth's surface by 4 degrees Celsius; and if the carbon dioxide were increased fourfold, the temperature would rise by 8 degrees C.”   Svante had predicted global warming and climate change, four years before the 20th century had begun.

Poor old Svante. He had to do his calculations the old fashioned way – using unpaid graduate students who labored for hours with pencils and papers and slide rules.  And he made a couple of bad assumptions. He figured clouds were pretty much a wash, since they both reflected sunlight from their tops, and trapped heat under their shadows.  He was right about that, but he missed how sensitive the climate was to carbon dioxide by half.   In other words he saw that burning coal and oil and wood released carbon into the air, but he didn't realize how really bad that was.  In fact, being Swedish, he was looking forward to more beach weather.

It was the geologists who provided what I think is the most convincing piece of the puzzle, they just did not know it for a long time. You see, they were looking for gold and diamonds and copper and coal and oil and even water, which they did by first drilling a lot of holes all over the place. Now, each hole was an experiment, and these rock farmers recorded everything about the holes as they drilled them, including the temperature at various depths. Most of those numbers were kept secret by the companies that collected them. But eventually the more social geologists were able to collect a record of what they called the geothermal gradient world wide. They found that as a general rule at anything less than 200 feet the temperature was about 11 degrees Celsius – or 55 degrees Fahrenheit.  Below that you have to figure in ground water, rock type, how close you are to a volcano - but as a general rule the temperature goes up about 1 degree Celsius for every additional 1,000 feet down the hole you go.  And it wasn't until much later that other graduate students noticed that as a general rule, up close the general rules did not add up.

Plotting out the temperatures in great detail and very exactly, and allowing for volcanoes and such, still produced a steady rising temperature curve as you went down.  But on the other end, at the top of the holes, things were a little odd.  The line there seemed to be steeper than it ought to - not enough that it kept the rock hounds up at night, but it did nag at them.  And then somebody compared the carbon 14 dating of the rocks through which these holes had been bored, at the top.  And suddenly the ages and the temperatures of the upper rocks of the holes started to make sense. The closer you got to the surface, and the younger the rocks got, the higher the temperatures were above that general rule, beginning about 500 years ago, about the start of the industrial revolution, when a growing number of smoke stacks started spewing out all that carbon that Svante had measured.  And in 1998, a century after the chemist Svante started all of this,  three geologists , Henry Pollock, Shapeeng Huang and Po-Yu Shen provided geological confirmation of global warming. “The subsurface temperatures ...indicate that Earth's mean surface temperature has increased by about 1.0° (C) over the past five centuries.”

So two independent fields of science, chemistry and geology, had each independently produced a picture of a warming planet for the previous 500 years, and predicted it would continue to warm. Together they produced a coherent, unified story with an explanation. Glaciologist, the only scientists whose field of study melts if they don't work fast enough, had independently stumbled on a third proof. Snow falling on glaciers today has more carbon in it than water melted out glacier ice formed five hundred years ago, and far more than the snow that fell a thousand years ago. And the amount of carbon in the snow is increasing. And it wasn't until very recently that meteorologists got into this discussion, which was to be expected, since, their field of study is what every other scientist calls “background noise”.

Let me give you an example of that noise; from December 1^st , 1801 to January 31^st , 1802, only about an inch of snow fell in Albany, New York, a spot which on average gets closer to 32 inches during those two months. The temperature ranged between 4 and 10 degrees Celsius (40 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit), when it is normally around minus 3 Celsius (mid 20's Fahrenheit ). Along the Ohio River, in eastern Ohio, 3 inches of snow fell on November first in 1801, but after that they suffered not even another hard frosts for the rest of the entire winter. In January of 1802 tulips and violets bloomed in New Haven, Connecticut, and on the 28^th of that month Salem, Massachusetts saw the thermometer hit 15.5 degrees Celsius (60 Fahrenheit). No less a numbers freak than Thomas Jefferson became convinced that “The change which has taken place in our climate is one of those facts which all men...are sensible of...”  And this was before the industrial revolution!

Less than 20 years later came the other extreme, the summer of 1816. On June 6^th, snow fell in Albany, New York. Ice was observed on rivers and lakes in July and August as far south as Pennsylvania. Farmers in Massachusetts got a crop in that summer, but so little that oats were selling for 10 times what they had sold for the previous year. World wide probably 40,000 people died of starvation. It was referred to as “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death”, or “The Year Without a Summer”, and it was probably caused by the April 10^th , 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the largest volcanic eruption in the last ten thousand years. To my mind, that is the real difference between weather and climate – weather is a record of extremes, and climate is a record of the average between them.

Yes, the 700 volcanoes that erupt every year throw about half a million tons of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, and a super volcano like Tambora may double that amount once or twice a century. But ever day today, humans spew 88 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Can there really be any doubt about why old extremes are becoming our new normal, or what is responsible for it?

Every scientific method we use to look at the past 500 years, every experiment we come up with to test what has happened over the last five centuries, tells us that the new normal is climate change, and that our industrial revolution is the one new factor over the last five hundred years that is driving our new normal to new climate extremes.  From this point forward there really is only one question more we have to ask. Does the human species lack the intelligence to survive? And the answer is up to all those idiots who voted for Donald Trump.

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