EMILY, WE HARDLY KNEW YOU.

I am still pissed off. The violent death of Emily Sander in November of 2007 left the usual wreckage. Her family is devastated. Her friends are bereft. The Kansas towns where she grew up and went to college have been wounded. But within in a month or two few remembered  her name, and we will forget that once again we got a look behind the veneer and saw the true face of our news media; provocateurs who cater to the public’s prurient interests. 

Without the ennoblement of the Bill of Rights, they (we) would all have been arrested as pornographers long ago. And the truly ironic aspect is that the media sold their papers and commercials by billing Emily as an “internet porn star”, as if the pittance she made from selling her image and reputation had ever come anywhere near the treasure collected each day by CNN, NBC, FOX, and even the Associated Press, selling Emily’s image and reputation. 

Her life didn’t make her newsworthy to them. Marketing her self as the “barely legal, Zoey Zane” certainly did not distinguish her significantly from millions of others living a fantasy on the net. Even her brutal murder by itself did not earn her a dubious equation with “man bites dog”. But her life and death tied to the word “pornography” is what finally made Emily Sander “worthy” as news.

The word “pornography” was born from an odd root. The ancient Greek sources are “porneia”, meaning fornication, and “graphein” meaning to write. They refer to the advertising signs hung outside the prostitute’s place of business (above). For three thousand years a “pornographer” was anyone who wrote anything about the lives of prostitutes or their customers. And it was a legal and respected profession.

It wasn’t until the Victorian age (about 1850) and with the invention of photography, that the noun “pornographer” evolved into the more specific meaning of “…Someone who presents, shows or sells writing or pictures whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal”. But the last 150 years has failed to inspire a simple accurate definition of what is now considered to be pornographic. In 1964 Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart admitted that the best description he could provide was, “I know it when I see it.” And it is that hazy justification which allows the news media to sell Emily Sander as an “internet porn star” without calling themselves “pornographers”.

Emily was a lovely, vibrant 18 year old woman, discovering her sexuality at a time when the internet gave young women economic power over their bodies.  She wanted to make a profit from that power. And if that was a mistake it was her mistake to make.  Said Nikki Watson, a fellow student at Butler Community College, "She was a young teenage girl and she wanted to be in the movies and enjoyed movies. She needed the extra money. Nobody in El Dorado, Kansas knew besides her close friends." 

As a writer Rhonda K. Baughman pointed out in a piece which appeared on the Larry Flint web, "Emily Sander was neither royalty of adult entertainment, nor, truthfully, was her Internet site naughty enough to warrant star status."

But Kansas is infamous for its fear of shifting that power away from men who have traditionally held it. In battles reminiscent of the temperance movement, today in Kansas and dozens of other Republican controlled states, men are determined to punish women, doctors, nurses and even uber drivers who play some part in otherwise “legal” abortions.  But Emily Sander is and was proof that that cultural war has  always been a fraud. 

Emily did not murder herself. She is blameless for that crime.  The precipitous cause of Emily's murder appears to have been that over Thanksgiving she revealed her web site to her boyfriend, who immediately broke up with her. A week later, on 8 December, she met a 24 years old man at a local bar. He made her feel wanted and desired. She accompanied him to his hotel room, where he raped her and strangled her with a telephone cord.  The internet had nothing to do with it. So said the cops.   

Emily’s death is no more proof that internet sex sites are dangerous for women than the murder of Stacy Peterson, a Chicago cops fourth wife, is proof that being married to a cop is inherently deadly. These two women were not murdered as punishment for some moral shortcoming, no matter what the implied moral the media wants to tag on their lives. They were murdered by men. And 57% of all women who are murdered are killed by their husbands, ex-husbands or boyfriends. 

And that makes Emily a member of the unlucky majority of women, whose greatest enemy is men in their lives. She was a freshman at the local junior college. That should have made her death worthy of being a headline; but it didn’t. As the saying goes, sex sells – especially it sells newspapers and cable and internet news ads. The slaughter of another young woman by an enraged male ego was simply another “dog bites man” story and not “news worthy”; unless she could be described as an “internet porn star”.

Well, Emily wasn’t much of a “star” until she was murdered by the media. On what was once her web site (ZoeyZane.com) her business partners, RagingBucks,com posted the following; “Emily was a solo nude model whose site went live September 25, 2007…the media…sent more traffic to Emily’s adult site in two hours then the site has received in the two months since the site has gone live”. 

The “Fort Worth Star-Telegram” printed the absurd statistic that 30,000 customers paid $39.95 a month to look at Emily’s nude photos. In fact “RagingBucks” offered access to images of dozens of women at that price. Emily was merely one of the newest.  Five minutes of investigation by main stream media would have shown, as anyone who has ever been the victim of internet porn pop-ups and seen the prices listed could testify, that being a "solo nude model" hardly qualifies anyone as an "Internet Queen" or even defines their site as pornography in the opinion of the majority of the population. 

"RagingBucks set up a fund for Emily's family and seeded it with $3,000. The least the "Star-Telegram" could have done was to match that amount, so that Emily might at least be paid symbolically part of the money she made for them. But they never did. 

But what finally, ultimately pisses me off is that if you “Google” the name Emily Sander you get 1,920,000 references, and almost all of them refer to her at some point as an "internet porn star". But if you Google “Isreal Mireles” you get just 734 hits -  and he’s the SOB convicted of raping and murdering her and then dumping her body beside a highway before picking up his 16 year old pregnant girl friend.

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AN OLD STORY

 

I hate to tell you this, but America's midsection has a big tummy ache. It's probably not keeping you up nights, but maybe it should. The testimonials of our last intestinal uprising are striking. “The roar I thought would leave us deaf...It was the worst thing that I have ever witnessed.” It was an historic case of indigestion. And that was what you would expect, considering what we swallowed.

About a billion years ago the earth had cooled enough for surface rocks to be strong enough to support the first great mountain range. The worn down nubs of these ancient Himalayas (above, across the center of the landmass)  still stretch across Quebec and Northern New York State, now called the Laurentide mountains and giving their name to this particular toddler continent. 

But as the mountains were word down the ancient bedrock, the igneous granite and quartz of  was first broken and cracked, and then buried under a few billion tons of sedimentary sandstone and limestone washed down from the same Laurentide mountains.

For most of the next three quarters of a billion years, Laurentia slowly drifted, her west flank adding new terrains in more collisions, until she reached adulthood as the North American tectonic plate. And then, like a Mexican omelet that brings up last night's sweet and sour pork, about a million years ago a lump of ice brought back up that lump of broken rock in our belly.

It was the glacier melt that realigned North America's rivers from north to south. The Mississippi now carried the weight of the Rocky Mountains to America's abdomen, depositing billions of tons silt at low water right on top of the ancient undigested meal. The piling weight caused the broken bedrock to occasionally shift. We know it shifted 2,500 years ago, again 1,800 years ago, and again 600 years ago. And then, one more time, 200 years ago. That last time, it happened to people who wrote the experience down.

In 1777, on the outer bank of a great westward bend of the half mile wide river (above), 175 river miles south of St. Louis (and 70 air miles south of the mouth of the Ohio River) , the Spanish established a fort they named after their capital - New Madrid. One year later Azor Rees, a farmer from Pennsylvania arrived with his wife and 3 year old daughter Eliza. The Rees willing swore allegiance to the Charles III of Spain, and adopted Roman Catholicism. They were successful in the community, even after Azor died in 1796. Then in 1803, with the Louisiana Purchase, they became Americans again.

Seven years later, the town of New "MAD-rid" had 400 residents, including the now 31 year old Eliza Rees Bryan – married to a United States Army surgeon. Having a government job, Dr. Bryan received a regular paycheck, and Eliza's mother also operated a boarding house, making them a very important family in this small frontier town. So it was natural that Eliza, in a time and a place where an educated woman was still a rarity, would be asked by a visiting evangelist to record what she had experienced. This is what Eliza wrote.

“On the 16 of December, 1811, about two o'clock, A.M., we were visited by a violent shock of an earthquake, accompanied by a very awful noise resembling loud but distant thunder, but more hoarse and vibrating...The screams of the affrighted inhabitants running to and fro....the cries of the fowls and beasts of every species - the cracking of trees falling, and the roaring of the Mississippi - the current of which was retro-gade for a few minutes....formed a scene truly horrible.” The town's graveyard even disappeared into the river.

Fifteen miles to the south, and closer to the epicenter, stood the 27 houses of the river town of Little Prairie. Here 16 year old Ben Chartier and his mother were standing in the cabin doorway overlooking their orchards though the crisp 40 degree air. Abruptly, "The ground burst wide open and peach and apple trees were knocked down and then blowed up.” The leading citizen of Little Prairie was George Roddell. As swamps next to his property “rose up and became dry land”, he watched his home and grain mill swallowed by the collapsing earth. Within fifteen minutes the residents were waist deep in the cold roiling Mississippi. Stumbling in the dark water, without lights, Roddell led his 100 neighbors in search of dry land. They did not find any until the village of Hayti, eight miles to the northwest.

As the riverbed below the New Madrid Bend rose up, the river was sent rushing backward, swamping 30 flatboats tied up for the night. Their crews were heard calling in terror as the darkness and the mad river swallowed them. On one of those boats that survived, Scotchman John Bradbury was awakened by “a most tremendous noise. All nature seemed running into chaos, as wild fowl fled, trees snapped and river banks tumbled into the water.”

Below the Bend another earthen block was thrown up, creating a waterfall that continued for days. Eliza observed that small shocks continued , “...until about sunrise...(when) one still more violent than the first took place... The inhabitants fled in every direction to the country...In one person, a female, the alarm was so great that she fainted, and could not be recovered. In all four died in New Madrid.

In St. Louis, two hundred miles north of the epicenter, a reporter for the Louisiana Gazette noted he had been “roused from sleep by the clamor of windows, doors and furniture in tremulous motion, with a distant rumbling noise, resembling a number of carriages passing over pavement – in a few seconds the motion and subterranean thunder increased....The agitation...lasted about one and three fourth minutes....At forty seven minutes past two, another shock was felt...much less violent than the first...At thirty four minutes past three, a third shock...(lasted) about fifty seconds...About 8 o'clock, a fifth shock was felt; this was almost as violent as the first, accompanied with the usual noise, it lasted about half a minute...”.

In South Carolina wells went dry and people were awakened from their sleep. In Washington, D.C., chairs slid about wooden floors and chandeliers were sent vibrating. Church bells were sent swinging and rang in Philadelphia and as far north as Boston. Two hundred thirty miles from the epicenter, at the falls of the Ohio River, in Louisville, Kentucky, future president Zachary Taylor recorded, “The sight was truly awful: houses cracking, chimneys falling, men, women and children running in all directions in their shirts for safety, and a friend of mine was so much alarmed as to jump off a window and was very much hurt.”

By current scientific figuring it was at least a seven on the Mercalli scale, and maybe an eight. If the later, that meant at least two aftershocks in the seven range, four above six and at least eight above five. But superimposed over this was a pattern, On January 13, 1812, in St Louis, the Governor of Louisiana Territory, sent an urgent request to Washington, arguing “provisions ought to be made by law for or cashiered to the said inhabitants relief, either out of the public fund or in some other way”. But “the Supreme Being of the Universe” as Governor Clark called him, was not yet finished with the residents of New Madrid.

On 23 January, 1812, there was a second major quake measuring between a seven and an eight, this time centered even closer to New Madrid. Artist James Audubon, on a boat trip to paint the new country, wrote in his journal, “ I heard what I imagined to be the distant rumbling of a violent tornado…at that instant all the shrubs and trees began to move...The ground rose and fell in successive furrows like the ruffled waters of a lake.” Godfrey Lessieur saw the ground, “rolling in waves of a few feet in height... These swells burst, throwing up large volumes of water (and) sand...(Leaving) large, wide and long fissures...I have seen some four or five miles in length, four and one-half feet deep on an average about ten feet wide.” George Crist, a farmer in Kentucky, confided to his diary, “We lost our Amandy Jane in this one – a log fell on her...A lot of people thinks that the devil has come here. Some thinks that this is the beginning of the world coming to an end.”

Then, as Eliza Rees Bryan noted, on 7 February, “..about 4 o'clock A.M., a concussion took place so much more violent...At first the Mississippi seemed to recede...leaving for the moment many boats, ...on bare sand...It then rising fifteen to twenty feet....the banks were overflowed with the retro-gade current, rapid as a torrent - the boats....were now torn from their moorings, and suddenly driven up a little creek...nearly a quarter of a mile. The river falling immediately...with such violence, that...whole groves of young cotton-wood trees...were broken off....A great many fish were left on the banks...The river was literally covered with the wrecks of boats, and 'tis said that one was wrecked in which there was a lady and six children, all of whom were lost.” There was now not a house undamaged nor a chimney standing within 250 miles of New Madrid.

At the headwaters of the Tennessee River, in the village of Knoxville, “the river rose several feet, the trees on the shore shook...hundreds of old trees that had lain perhaps half a century at the bottom of the river, appeared...” Six hundred miles from the epicenter, in Charleston, South Carolina there was, “Another severe shock....Books and other articles were thrown from shelves, and chairs and other furniture standing against walls, made a rattling noise...”.

Back in New Madrid, membership in the Methodist Church went from 17 in 1811 to 165 in 1812. Eliza Rees Bryan noted, “The site of this town...(has) settled down at least fifteen feet, and not more than a half a mile below the town...numerous large ponds or lakes....are elevated...fifteen to twenty feet....And lately it has been discovered that a lake was formed on the opposite side of the Mississippi (above)...upwards of one hundred miles in length, and from one to six miles in width,.” This came to be called Reelfoot Lake, and it is now, inj the 21st century,  a Tennessee Recreation Area

Responding with typical government efficiency, in 1815 congress voted to offer the December 1811 survivors of New Madrid, 640 free acres each, anywhere else in Missouri they wanted. Land speculators beat the government communications to the riverfront town, and bought up most of the claims for $40 to $60 each. Like earthquakes, mountains and continents, human greed is a repetitive story.

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UNDER PRESSURE cutting diamonds

 

I bet the the man who actually uncovered the legendary jewel ,was not Frederick Wells (above). It seems unlikely that in South Africa in 1905 a white man would have been at the dig’s face, where the danger was greatest.

Still, the legend has it that Frederick spotted the rock embedded in the stone wall just above his head (above, reenactment), reached up and pried what he first thought was glass out of the stone with his pen knife. And if that seems as unlikely to you as it does to me, we should both remember that everything about this particular stone is unlikely.

The nursery where this carbon crystal grew was an odd place. First, the surface above it had to have been stable for 1 to 3 billion years – maybe three fourths of the age of our planet. And for all of that time 90 to 120 miles below this stable surface the temperature had to be a constant 1,000 degrees centigrade, and the pressure about 653,000 pounds per square inch. The longer a carbon crystal remains under that pressure and temperature, the larger the crystal grows. And this one grew to weigh one and a half pounds. 

There are only a few spots in the earth where the temperature and pressure has remained consistent for so long; beneath the Canadian Shield, beneath Russian Siberia, beneath the Baltic Shield, beneath the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent,  beneath the Brazilian Shield, beneath northwest Australia, Beneath West Africa and beneath South Africa.

The heat allows the molecular bonds of carbon atoms to become plastic, while the immense pressure squeezes them into an eight sided crystal. Over eons such carbon crystals grow slowly and they must be fairly common in regions of the mantle where the carbon bonds with water. But then something unlikely happens. The earth burps.

If one of these carbon crystals rises to the surface slowly, over decades the atoms binding its carbon molecules together return to their fail-safe state, which is graphite – pencil lead. 

For carbon to remain a crystal, it must reach the surface in a burst, over no more than a few minutes. To travel from the nursery to the surface, then, the stone must reach speeds of several hundred miles an hour. Supersonic.

Such a speed can only be reached if the capping pressure is suddenly punctured by a narrow fissure, at which point the temperature and pressure produces a powerful volcanic explosion at the surface. For that to happen is unlikely. But over four billion years unlikely becomes inevitable.

The first European who “owned” the surface above this particular jewel was a white immigrant farmer named Cornelis Minnaar.  His farm was in the southern part of Africa, north of the River Valaal, 25 miles east of the city of Pretoria (Tshwane).  The Boers, as these Dutch transplants called them selves, had made the trek to this region to avoid the British, who were intent on stealing their colony. 

In 1861 Cornelis sold a section of his land to his brother, Roelof , who in 1896, sold an even smaller part to Willem Prinsloo (above) who was just starting a family. The sale price was 570 English pounds, and it was William who owned the land when another Dutchman named Fabricus arrived looking for buried treasure.

Being experienced in this sort of thing, Fabricus first inquired as to where the Prinsloo households had dug their “sanitary pits”. This was a euphemism for the holes used to bury the products of your outhouse, politely known as “night soil”. Why dig a hole when a hole had already been dug? But since to date nothing unusual had been found in the sanitary pits, Fabricus assumed he would have to look elsewhere. 

Once he had located some “virgin dirt”, he scrapped away the thin red top soil, and then hacked his way through ten feet of yellow limestone gravel (above), the bi-product of primordial coral reefs...

...before reaching a blue slate gravel (above) peppered with tiny red garnets. This rock was called Kimberlite.  And when he saw it, Fabricus realized he had struck pay dirt

Fabricius was working for an Englishman named Henry Ward, who had paid for the option to search on Prisloo’s land.  But Ward didn’t have the money to make the buy, and besides William Prisloo (above) was not interested in selling to an Englishman, since it looked like war was about to break out between the Boers and the English. 

Which it did.  Two of them, in fact.  After the second war was finally settled in 1904 – The British won – Ward now sold out his options to Thomas Major Cullinan.  

By then Willem Prinsloo was dead. So Thomas Cullinan (above) made an offer to William’s widow, Maria Prisloo.  Broke and defeated, she sold the farm for 52,000 pounds. Not a bad profit.

Cullinan and partners named their new venture "The Premier Mine". Production started at the end of April 1903, and in a year 2,000 people, mostly local Africans were blasting, chopping, digging and hauling blue Kimberlite out of the open pit. They were looking for diamonds.

Most diamond mines start out as open pits. A Kimberlite Pipe is famously “carrot shaped”, wide at the top, narrow towards the bottom. And after less than a year of digging, on 25 January, 1905, this new mine is credited with producing the largest gem quality diamond ever found.  

Diamonds are not rare, but gem quality diamonds are. On average two hundred tons of ore must be culled for every 1 caret of gem diamond, (there are 141.7 carets in every once) and only one out of every five million diamonds weighs two carets or above. 

The one and one half pound diamond Mr. Wells claimed to have pulled out of the rock face that January afternoon, was rated at 3,106 carets. In the name of good publicity, it was named after Mr, Cullinan.

After a nondescript voyage to England via the royal mail in an unmarked plain brown box, The Cullinan, as it was now known, was presented to King Edward VII. He asked as many experts as he could find - geologists, gemologists and even the physicists Sir William Cookes (above) -  how to cut this hunk of rock.

Cookes noted that around a small black spot in the interior of the stone the colors were very vivid, changing and rotating round the black spot.  These observations indicated internal strain…there was a milky, opaque mass, of a brown color, with flakes of what looked like iron oxide trapped as the crystal formed around it.  There were four cleavage planes of great smoothness and regularity.” At issue was how to turn this indescribably rare nondescript lump into something indescribably rare and beautiful.

Diamonds had been known by Europeans since the tenth century, but it was not until the 17th century that they became popular amongst the aristocracy, not until the first “Brilliant Cut” by Italian jeweler Jules Mazarin, really showed the beauty that was hiding inside. His diamonds sparkled with 17 facets, or faces, each one reflecting light back out at the viewer. By 1900 the skill of the diamond cutter had increased the possible reflections to 57 facets.

The general consensuses was that the best cutter for this job was Joseph Asscher (above), ironically another Dutchman. He studied the Cullinan for six months in his shop in Amsterdam, surrounded by a small crowd of bankers, experts and royal representatives, laying out a plan of attack.

As the London Evening News reported in mid-January, of 1908, “…a special model of the diamond in clay was made…It was cut into pieces to give an idea of what would happen if the genuine stone were treated in the same way. After several experiments a definite plan was arrived at…”

Finally, on Monday, 10 February, 1908, at 2:45 pm, Joseph was ready. Surrounded by a small crowd of anxious interested third parties, Joseph poised his hammer over the chisel (above), the blade of which was lodged against the precise point which he had calculated the first strike had to be made. If he missed, or struck a glancing blow, the one-of-a-kind diamond worth a million pounds would be rendered damaged and might end up being worth a few thousand. Joseph drew a breath, and sharply struck the chisel….which cracked apart against the diamond.

Immediately Joseph ordered the room cleared, except for the notary republic for the bankers, who were financing this entire thing. Joseph checked the Cullinan and found it, thankfully, undamaged. He checked his tools (above), re-examined his plans and announced a week's delay while he fashioned a new, larger, chisel.

So it was that on 17 February, 1908, alone in the room with the diamond and the notary, Joseph lined his hammer up for a second time over The Cullinan. He struck the precise strong blow, directly above the dark inclusion...

...And the diamond fell apart into three perfectly clear pieces. Despite legends to the contrary, Joseph did not faint. He did, however, drink a glass of Champagne.  Eventually the Cullinan was cut into nine large stones (above)....

....and 96 smaller diamonds, so many that it took 8 months just to polish them all. 

And if you ever get to the Tower of London, you might make a note that the Crown Jewels of England on display there, (including the Queen Mother's broach, above)   might be literally billions of years old, but they have only been in the English royal families’ possession for a little over a hundred years. And they will always be a testament to the creation of timeless beauty under pressure.

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