Wednesday, August 30, 2017

SOME STUFF I NOTICED AND WANTED TO SHARE...


Well, well, well... would you look at that! Seems like the story that went viral a couple weeks ago--the one about a random dude being brutally knifed by a terrorist Antifa Negro over his "fashy" haircut--has been exposed by police as a self-inflicted fraud. Turns out Colorado twenty-something Joshua Witt cut himself in an accident at home, then figured he might as well try and parlay his pain into political points for his "side". Let's see if any of the right-wing newspapers, websites, blogs, vlogs, countless social media accounts and jailhouse latrine graffiti bother to run any followup corrections.

You know, if I had the mentality of the average right-winger--not to mention the complete lack of integrity, flagrant disregard for the truth, and willingness to conduct bad faith agenda-pushing of the average right-wing propagandist)--I would use this incident (along with the discovery of a forged "Antifa How To Manual" and the recent revelation that right-wingers are creating--then falling for--fake "Antifa" social media accounts--as proof that ALL so-called left-wing crimes and attacks are false flag bullshit created by right-wingers to make the left look bad.

But you know what? I would never say that. Because, unlike so many right-wingers, I'm not an idiot, and because, unlike so many right-wing media outlets, I'm not a liar.

Heck, as long as we're on the subject, why not say hello to the newest addition to the Friends of the Daily Dirt Diaspora blog roll, Anti-Fascist News!

SUGGESTED READING LIST

Jason Yungbluth's essay, See No Evil, Conservatism's Blind Spot for Fascism, is an excellent, educational primer for the historic connections between conservatism, right-wing extremism, fascism, and racism. It's particularly good at pointing out the intellectual dishonesty and essential vacuity of the arguments put forth in recent times by such bad faith propagandists as Dinesh D'Souza, and Jonah Goldberg, as evinced in this excerpt:
Escaping the yoke of “fascism”, understood by nearly everyone as a right wing phenomenon, has been a decades-long side project for American conservatives who would dearly love to lay the sins of not just Stalin and Mao but also Hitler and Mussolini at the feet of leftists. The idea has not gained much purchase outside the conservative echo chamber, but fresh attempts are always forthcoming. This summer, for instance, Dinesh D’Souza, conservatism’s shriveling Doogie Howser, debuted his own contribution to the project, a book titled The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, and from its first Trump-cheering chapter it promises to turn tables and blow from out the water the myth that liberals in America are anything but the spawn of Hitler’s demon seed. 
I would sooner beat off a bonobo then curl up with D’Souza’s latest cringy effort to stay relevant in the field of conservative thought, but it is also unnecessary. The definitive effort to re-brand the Left as the Right was already published in 2008 as Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, written by the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg. 
Half-baked but agonizingly footnoted, Liberal Fascism lays out in detail the case for fascism’s socialist parenthood and its legacy within the Democratic Party. Lifting “fascism” from its mere association with Blackshirts and gas chambers, Goldberg gives us a “working definition of fascism” that is a “religion of the state…totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good.” 
“Statism” will be the lynchpin of Goldberg’s argument for fascism as the soul of modern American liberalism, since all readers will understand that conservatives, if nothing else, stand for a small state (yes, they also crave a prison cell for every dope smoker and a military infrastructure to awe Darth Vader, but no one can foresee that ever leading to Big Brother!)
The dismantling to which Yungbluth subjects Goldberg in the following paragraphs is truly a sight to behold; information rich and entertaining as any bloodsport. I suggest you read it, and absorb the main points found within.

***
If, on the other hand, you have neither the time nor the will to do a half-hour's worth of reading (much less take notes!), then you should at least keep the following video bookmarked, so you can show it to that special someone in your life who likes to say "Hitler was a liberal" because "Nazi" is short for "National Socialist".



***
For a tiny glimmer of hope, why not listen to this recent, extended New York Times interview with the reformed scion of the biggest White Nationalist movement family in America, Derek Black, who was the subject of this amazing Washington Post profile in October of last year.

MINUTIA & INCONSEQUENTIA
  • Everything you think you know about Black Lives Matter is (probably) WRONG (or, more accurately, a lie you fell for).
  • In the next couple of days, women in the state of Arkansas as going to have to receive permission from whoever impregnated then before they can terminate that pregnancy, even if the man in question is, say, an incest rape monster.
  • It's beginning to look like LIBOR, the foundations upon which rest pretty much the entire edifice of modern banking, is a made-up,bullshit phantom fiction. And hundreds of trillions of dollars are at stake. Sneaking this one in as a tidbit, but it's probably the biggest story I've linked to in months. 

STUFF I NOTICED, A SLIGHT RETURN

When reading the article, linked to in the first item above, about how right-wingers are starting to fall for their own hoax "Antifa" social media accounts, I was immediately reminded of Reagan's dimwitted CIA chief William Casey arguing for the existence of a worldwide terror networked backed by the Soviet Union after he read a ridiculous book, written by the ridiculous Cold Warrior Claire Stirling, and promoted by the ridiculous neoconservative Michael Ledeen, which was based on false documents created years earlier... BY THE FUCKING CIA! As Adam Curtis explains in the first episode of his absolutely essential documentary trilogy The Power of Nightmares:
Casey was sympathetic to the neoconservative view, and when he read The Terror Network book, he was convinced. He called a meeting of the CIA’s Soviet analysts and told them to produce a report for the president that proved this hidden network exists. But the analysts told him this would be impossible, because much of the information in the book came from black propaganda the CIA themselves had invented to smear the Soviet Union. They knew that the terror network didn’t exist, because they themselves had made it up.
 To see the section from the documentary for yourself, in context, click this link to the Youtube version and start watching around the 52 minute mark.

Monday, August 28, 2017

MINUTIA & INCONSEQUENTIA ~ AUG 28, 2017


Before we delve into all the links and stuff that make up the bulk of this "Minutia and Inconsequentia" edition of the DDD, I'd like to point out a few things, just to give any future readers a sense of what the situation is on the ground here in late August 2017.

On Friday, as hurricane Harvey, a category 4 storm, was bearing down on the Texas gulf coast, pushing an insane volume of water ahead of it--thanks in large part, according to experts, to the effects of climate change--President* Donald Trump took time out of what should have been an incredibly busy schedule to do three things.

BUH-BYE!
First, he--or, more likely, John Kelly--finally kicked that ridiculously under-qualified, potato-headed Nazi-loving fraud Sebastian Gorka out of the White House... and if you believe he left willingly, then I've got some Alex Jones brand powdered bone supplement that I can give you an excellent deal on. With Gorka's exit following hot on the heels of his fellow Breitbart co-conspirator Steve Bannon's ouster, that leaves only one man standing in the White House's Triumvirate of Alt Right Twats: Stephen Miller. Watch for that H.P. Lovecraft look-alike's departure in the coming days or, at most, weeks.

"HAHA! FOOLED YA!"
Second, he followed through on his earlier promise to ban transgender troops from serving in the American military by issuing a memo ordering the secretaries of defense and homeland security to lay the groundwork for the implementation of this policy by February 2018 at the latest.

Finally, with ZERO Department of Justice involvement, he issue a historically unprecedented Presidential pardon to the second most unambiguously evil lawman in postwar American history after Alabama's Bull Connor: the former, long-serving sheriff of Arizona's Maricopa county, Joe Arpaio.

It seems obvious at this point that Trump pardoning one of America's most prominent racist folk heroes a mere two weeks after the Far Right's deadly show of force in Charlottesville, Virginia was no coincidence, nor was it evidence of him being oblivious to the symbolism of it all. He knew full well how this pardon would play with the Trumpnik Redcaps. And, even more important to a revenge-obsessed hate-monger like Trump, he knew full well how much it would enrage and disturb his "enemies". Pardoning his fellow racist/Birther buddy Arpaio was a total win/win, with no downside.

It also didn't hurt that the two men have so much in common. For instance, they're both self-pitying narcissists who can't stop complaining about how hard done by they are.


Go ahead and see how long you can watch Trump's pool-boy Sean Hannity tongue-scrubbing Arpaio's butthole clean on FOX News before you have to run off somewhere to puke. If you make it to the part where the scrotum-faced toad whines, ever so ironically: “If they can go after me, they can go after ANYONE in this country!”, then give yourself a Gold Star.

Let's see, what else do Trump and Arpaio share? Oh yes! Their fondness for “watersports” and scat, as evidenced by Trump's notorious Russian “kompromat” pee tape, and Arpaio's online prison shitter porn cam. And then there's the fact that they both have zero respect for the norms, standards, and institutions of good governance, constitutional guarantees, and the law, as evidenced by both of them frequently trying to intimidate judges and attack investigators who dare to look into whatever shenanigans it is they're trying to get away with on any given day. 

Speaking of criminally negligent and/or dangerously insane law enforcement officers, Trump spent much of the weekend angrily tweeting his usual measure of nonsense and vitriol, this time threatening to terminate NAFTA, trying to bully Mexico into paying for his stupid wall, obsessing over the 2016 election... and hawking deranged Milwaukee county sheriff David Clarke's new book.

Meanwhile, this was happening:


***

As long as we're still on the topic of Hurricane Harvey, it was while watching this disturbing and ridiculous Trump PSA about it that I came to a sudden realization about which world leader Trump most reminds me of. No, it isn't North Korea's boy king Kim Jong Un, as many have declared. To me, Trump acts like the former leader of Uganda: Idi Amin! There's a scene in a famous documentary about Amin, entitled Idi Amin Dada, where the former African dictator lectures a room full of doctors about how they should be doing their jobs. Absolutely full of himself, a clueless buffoon bloviating at length about a subject in which he has zero training or expertise... and yet he's being treated like the Buddha himself all the while. To me, Amin is a far better fit than Kim Jong Un.

And finally for today, here are a bunch of links to stories you may or may not find interesting.

  • For a number of reasons, some of which are just as scuzzy and gross as you might have imagined, Canada's own version of Breitbart, The Rebel Media, is in the process of collapsing! Good riddance to bad rubbish is all that we here at the Daily Dirt Diaspora media family have to say about that.
  • In case you were wondering about the image at the top of today's edition, that just happens to be an artist's recreation of a 540-million-year-old, anus-mouthed creature that is, quite possibly, mankind's most ancient shared ancestor! If this turns out to be confirmed, it sure will explain a lot about the past few decades, I'll tell you what.
  • And last, but not least, this Atlantic essay by Julie Beck hopes to prove to you that the incredible amount of personal anxiety you're feeling over the state of the world these days is absolutely and categorically useless, in every sense of the word. So you'd might as well try to develop a sense of humor about it. 

***
QUOTE OF THE DAY

“I'd like to address myself to those people ... who waited for hours in 105-degree heat so that they could have the G-spot of their irrationality properly stroked for them. You're all suckers. You're dim and you're ignorant and you can't even feel yourself sliding toward something that will surprise even you with its fundamental ugliness, something that everybody who can see past the veil of their emotions can see as plain as a church by daylight, to borrow a phrase from that Willie Shakespeare fella. The problem, of course, is that you, in your pathetic desire to be loved by a guy who wouldn't have 15 seconds for you on the street, are dragging the rest of us toward that end, too.”

- The always eloquent Charles P. Pierce, in his Esquire essay “I Have No More Patience for Trump Supporters”, waxes poetic.

Sunday, August 27, 2017

PHOENIX NEW TIMES JOE ARPAIO TWEET-STORM

What follows is an epic Tweet-Storm by the Phoenix New Times newspaper, which you should probably read in context, but if you don't have time, this ought to do the trick. - Jerky

We've been covering Joe Arpaio for more than 20 years. Here's a couple of things you should know about him...

He ran a jail that he described as a "concentration camp."

Prisoners there died at an alarming rate, often without explanation.

One of his jailers nearly broke the neck of a paraplegic guy who had the temerity to ask for a catheter.

One time, as a publicity stunt, he marched Latino prisoners into a segregated area with electric fencing.

Here's a couple of other examples of what went on in his jails:

"Arpaio's Jail Staff Cost Ambrett Spencer Her Baby, and She's Not the Only One"

"109 Degrees of Incarceration"

He ran an ongoing "mugshot of the day" contest on the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office website.

He arrested New Times reporters for covering him. We won a $3.75 million settlement for that one.

Under him, the MCSO failed to investigate hundreds of sex abuse cases, many of which involved children.

But he somehow found time and money to send a deputy to Hawaii to look for Barack Obama's birth certificate.

Oh, and one time he staged an assassination attempt against himself? That was weird.

In 2013, a federal judge confirmed what literally everyone in Phoenix knew: he'd been racially profiling Latinos.

So naturally, he hired a PI to investigate the judge and his wife.

He also kept on profiling people, which is why he got charged with contempt of court (and was found to be guilty AF)

He also tried to destroy some of the hard drives containing material that was supposed to be turned over the court.

By 2015, his fondness for racial profiling had cost the county more $44 million. On top of, you know, ruining lives.

He also paid millions to settle lawsuits like this one, where deputies stood by as an inmate was brutally beaten.

Because this is the Old West or something, he had a "Sheriff's Posse." One member got arrested on child porn charges.

His office was responsible for countless fiascos like this botched SWAT raid, where deputies set a puppy on fire.

So, yeah, that's who Trump just pardoned. You can read all our coverage of Arpaio over the years here.

Saturday, August 26, 2017

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ AUG 25, 2017


Over at that left-wing bastion of socialist propaganda known as The Business Insider, a question is asked: “How Did George Soros Become the Favorite Boogeyman of the Right?” The answer, which might surprise you, begins thusly:
The day after Donald Trump became president of the United States, thousands of people in pink hats marched the streets. They were protesting Trump's stance on women's rights, among other issues. 
But some looked at the sea of pink and saw something else: the invisible hand of a man they believe is not just funding liberal protest movements but controlling the world's wealth and pushing a global order. 
It's not true, but the man these conspiracy theorists target is George Soros, the prominent billionaire hedge fund manager. 
The 86-year-old has become a Rorschach test. To the left, he's a rich guy openly supporting causes many liberals believe in. But to some on the far right, he's more sinister and nefarious, despite a lack of evidence. For two decades, some have seen Soros as a kind of puppet master secretly controlling the global economy and politics. 
At times Soros has wielded great power. In the early 1990s, he bet against the British pound, which broke England's monetary system overnight and earned him more than a billion dollars. Later in the decade, he took similar steps during Asian Financial Crisis. 
Many saw it as capitalizing off of catastrophes and the Malaysian prime minister even accused Soros of purposefully bringing down the value of his country's currency by more than 15%. 
From there, he's become a singular target of unfounded right-wing conspiracy theories, in part because he has so few peers on the left.
Read the whole thing to learn all the Five W's related to the man who--thanks to a heavy dose of tragically ironic psychological projection--has become the enemy of choice for the rogue Deep State faction that yer old pal Jerky has taken to calling the New Fascist International.

***


If you've been even marginally invested in current events over the past 12 months, then you've probably seen or heard the name "Magnitsky" in one context or another. Sergei Magnitsky is (I mean was) a Russian lawyer who, after helping to expose the epic levels of corruption in contemporary Russian society, was detained on trumped up charges, chained to a prison bed, then tortured and beaten to death. The Magnitsky Act--a law targeting Russian human rights abusers by freezing their American assets and banning them from entering the US--was passed by US Congress in 2012, and was named in his honor. But even if you knew all that, trust me, there's a whole lot more that you don't know yet. And that's where this excellent and thorough NPR report comes in. It begins:
William Browder knows Vladimir Putin's Russia all too well. 
Browder made a fortune in Russia, in the process uncovering, he says, incredible amounts of fraud and corruption. When he tried to report it to authorities, the government kicked him out of the country and, he alleges, tortured and killed the lawyer he was working with. 
In what one senator called one of the Senate Judiciary Committee's "most important" hearings, Browder, a wealthy businessman-turned-activist-turned Putin-adversary shed a chilling new light on a Russian system of government that operates ruthlessly in the shadows — as Browder described it for lawmakers: a "kleptocracy" sustained by corruption, blackmail, torture and murder with Putin at its center. 
"Effectively the moment that you enter into their world," Browder told senators investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, "you become theirs."
Browder's story — how he ended up living in London, after almost a decade of vast success as a businessman in Moscow, is arguably a case study in how Putin's government works: a system of intermediary influential businessmen who aren't directly employed by the Russian government, but who benefit financially from Putin's regime. 
Browder founded and ran one of the largest investment firms in Russia, Hermitage Capital Management, from 1996-2005. When he and his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky discovered a massive corruption scheme, they went to the authorities. 
"And we waited for the good guys to get the bad guys," he told the Senate Judiciary Committee. "It turned out that in Putin's Russia, there are no good guys."


Folks, this is must read material. Whether you're leaning towards Russo-apologetics, or even if you just know some poor, deluded useless alt.right/alt.left goof (yes, the alt.left exists, but not the way Trump thinks) who might be falling for that shit, you need to arm yourself with information. This is a great place to start.

***

In this excellent Truthout interview with Nancy MacLean--author of the current book Democracy in Chains: A Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America--we are introduced to the intriguing character of James McGill Buchanan, an almost completely forgotten economist from the 1950's who nevertheless exerts tremendous influence over the contemporary libertarian wing of Movement Conservatism. In some ways, he's kind of like the their Leo Strauss (long time Daily Dirt readers will know what I mean). Here's how the interview kicks off:
Mark Karlin: Can you summarize the importance of James McGill Buchanan to the development of the modern extreme right wing in the United States? 
Nancy MacLean: The modern extreme right wing I'm talking about, just to be clear, is the libertarian movement that now sails under the Republican flag, particularly but not only the Freedom Caucus, yet goes back to the 1950's in both parties. President Eisenhower called them "stupid" and fashioned his approach--calling it modern Republicanism--as an antidote to them. Goldwater was their first presidential candidate. He bombed. Reagan, they believed, was going to enact their agenda. He didn't. But beginning in the early 2000s, they became a force to be reckoned with. What had changed? The discovery by their chief funder, Charles Koch, of the approach developed by James McGill Buchanan for how to take apart the liberal state. 
Buchanan studied economics at the University of Chicago and belonged to the same milieu as F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises, but he used his training to analyze public life. And he supplied what no one else had: an operational strategy to vanquish the model of government they had been criticizing for decades--and prevent it from being recreated. It was Buchanan who taught Koch that for capitalism to thrive, democracy must be enchained. 
Buchanan was a very smart man, the only winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics from the US South, in fact. But his life's work was forever shaped by the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision. He arrived in Virginia in 1956, just as the state's leaders were goading the white South to fight the court's ruling, a ruling he saw not through the lens of equal protection of the law for all citizens but rather as another wave in a rising tide of unwarranted and illegitimate federal interference in the affairs of the states that began with the New Deal. For him what was at stake was the sanctity of private property rights, with northern liberals telling southern owners how to spend their money and behave correctly. Given an institute to run on the campus of the University of Virginia, he promised to devote his academic career to understanding how the other side became so powerful and, ultimately, to figuring out an effective line of attack to break down what they had created and return to what he and the Virginia elite viewed as appropriate for America. In a nutshell, he studied the workings of the political process to figure out what was needed to deny ordinary people--white and Black--the ability to make claims on government at the expense of private property rights and the wishes of capitalists. And then he identified how to rejigger that political process not only to reverse the gains but also to prevent the system from ever reverting back. He sought, in his words, to "enchain Leviathan," which is why I titled the book Democracy in Chains. 
Why, until your book, has his importance to the right wing been largely overlooked?
There are a few reasons Buchanan has been overlooked. One is that the Koch cause does not advertise his work, preferring to tout the sunnier primers of Hayek, Friedman and even Ayn Rand when recruiting. Buchanan is the advanced course, as it were, for the already committed. Another is that Buchanan did not seek the limelight like Friedman, so few on the left have even heard of him. I myself learned of him only by serendipity, in a footnote about the Virginia schools fight. 
His importance to the right wing could only be identified by working through the archival sources that provide context for his published work. That's what I did after discovering that Buchanan had urged the full privatization of Virginia's public schooling in 1959, and then learning that he later advised the Pinochet regime on a capital-protecting constitution that could withstand the end of the dictatorship. Even with both of those data points, I don't think I could have gleaned the full import of his project had I not moved to North Carolina in 2010, where a strategy informed by his thought has been applied with a vengeance by the veto-proof Republican legislative majority that came to power in the midterms that fall. After Buchanan died in 2013, I was able to get access to his private papers at George Mason University, where the documentation is incontrovertible. 
You really should read this whole interview, particularly if you want to learn “what a society based on Buchanan's principles and goals would look like”, or to learn more about the intersection of his economics and White Supremacy. Yer old pal Jerky sincerely believes that, for a certain percentage of those reading it, the information contained in this interview is going to be an important, life-changing encounter that leads to the creation of one, or many, antidotes, so to speak. Then, if the spirit should move you, use this link to buy MacLean's book, so that yer old pal Jerky gets a few shekels dropped into his beggin' cup!

***
QUOTE OF THE DAY

“America has this back-ass-wards Calvinist streak where calling for the expulsion and genocide of non-white races is just a difference of opinion. But making a sex joke at a corporate mascot who paid money to advertise to you is cause for censure.”

- 30-year-old Alex Boivin provides us with the week's most incisive bit of political wisdom as he reacts to being suspended from Twitter for telling Tony the Tiger he'd "hit that". 

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

SUGGESTED READINGS FOR AUGUST 23, 2017


Patrick Radden Keefe's Reporter at Large column in the latest edition of the New Yorker, titled "Carl Icahn’s Failed Raid on Washington", asks the rhetorical question: "Was President Trump’s richest adviser focussed on helping the country—or his own bottom line?" Although it falls somewhat short of arriving at a definitive answer, it does a fantastic job of familiarizing the unacquainted with one of the most powerful men in America, whose wields so much power, with so few checks and balances to rein him in, it's enough to make you wonder why the USA even bothers to hold elections at all.

About 1/10th of the way down the article, after a brief review of the massive and obvious conflicts of interest involved in appointing Icahn to a governmental role vis-a-vis industrial deregulation, the following paragraphs, which bear repeating here, appear:
Several weeks after Trump’s victory, Icahn tweeted, “I’ve agreed to serve as a special advisor to the president on issues relating to regulatory reform.” In a press release, Trump said, “Carl was with me from the beginning and with his being one of the world’s great businessmen, that was something I truly appreciated. He is not only a brilliant negotiator, but also someone who is innately able to predict the future, especially having to do with finances and economies.” He added that Icahn would help him address regulations that were “strangling” American business. 
Icahn’s role was novel. He would be an adviser with a formal title, but he would not receive a salary, and he would not be required to divest himself of any of his holdings, or to make any disclosures about potential conflicts of interest. “Carl Icahn will be advising the President in his individual capacity,” Trump’s transition team asserted. 
In the months after the election, the stock price of CVR, Icahn’s refiner, nearly doubled—a surge that is difficult to explain without acknowledging the appointment of the company’s lead shareholder to a White House position. The rally meant a personal benefit for Icahn, at least on paper, of half a billion dollars. There was an expectation in the market—an expectation created, in part, by Icahn’s own remarks—that, with Trump in the White House and Icahn playing consigliere, the rules were about to change, and not just at the E.P.A. Icahn’s empire ranges across many economic sectors, from energy to pharmaceuticals to auto supplies to mining, and all of them are governed by the types of regulations about which he would now potentially be advising Trump. 
Janet McCabe, who left the E.P.A. in January, and now works at the Environmental Law and Policy Center, told me, “I’m not naïve. People in business try to influence the government. But the job of the government is to serve the American people, not the specific business interests of the President’s friends. To think that you have somebody with that kind of agenda bending the President’s ear is troubling.” 
Conflicts of interest have been a defining trait of the Trump Administration. The President has not only refused to release his tax returns; he has declined to divest from his companies, instead putting them in a trust managed by his children. Questions have emerged about the ongoing business ties of his daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who, since early 2016, have reaped as much as two hundred million dollars from the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C., and from other investments. Although Trump promised to “drain the swamp,” he has assembled a Cabinet of ultra-rich Americans, including two billionaires: Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, and Wilbur Ross, the Secretary of Commerce. 
But Icahn is worth more than the Trump family and all the members of the Cabinet combined—and, with no constraint on his license to counsel the President on regulations that might help his businesses, he was poised to become much richer. Robert Weissman, who runs the watchdog group Public Citizen, told me, “This kind of self-enrichment and influence over decision-making by an individual mogul who is simultaneously inside and outside the Administration is unprecedented. In terms of corruption, there’s nothing like it. Maybe ever.” In conversations with me, financiers who have worked with Icahn described his appointment as a kind of corporate raid on Washington. One said, “It’s the cheapest takeover Carl’s ever done.”
That's America they're talking about, just FYI. Anyway, it's depressing as Hell, but still necessary, to educate ourselves. Read this article, top to bottom, and consider it your lesson on civics for the day. Oh, and don't put too much stock in that "Icahn may have messed up royally by hitching his wagon to the Trump Train, with a possible end result that he's broken laws and will soon end up behind bars" jazz. That kind of shit just doesn't happen to people like Icahn. Not in this lifetime, not in this world.

***

Timothy Zaal wrote a think piece about Charlottesville for Politico, titled "I Used to be a Neo-Nazi. Charlottesville Terrifies Me". It begins:

When I was a skinhead, living in the Los Angeles area in the 1980s, I remember watching a favorite video with my fellow extremists. It was footage of the 1979 Greensboro massacre, when Ku Klux Klan members shot and killed five people at a workers’ demonstration in North Carolina. A group of cars pulled up. KKK members jumped out of the vehicles, killed a group of communists, then drove away. 
We laughed at it.
This past weekend, the news from Charlottesville brought back that memory—of being surrounded by fellow white supremacists in my old house, watching our odd choice of Friday-night entertainment. Today, of course, you can find clips like these online. In those days, extremist groups had mail-order services where you could purchase VHS tapes. That was where we bought it.
I gave up being a skinhead years ago. But now, I’m getting uncomfortable feelings of déjà vu as I watch footage of the bloody events in Charlottesville. The white supremacist organizations of my day were different, but after researching these “alt-right” groups, and seeing the violence this weekend, I realize they’re all too similar. They hate the same minorities we did. They spew the same conspiracy theories. They consume the same kinds of propaganda.
But there’s one huge difference: These newer offshoots have been far more successful than we could ever have dreamed.
The article continues, giving a brief history of the White Power movement(s) of the 80's and 90's, exploring the parallels between then and now, theorizing how the rabbit hole paradigm that first led the author towards his views is almost infinitely worse today, relating his personal story of emerging from the fog of hate, before ending on an ominous and disturbing note. Nevertheless, this is a highly recommended, must-read op/ed.

***

One of my favorite authors currently writing about such outre subjects as Secret Societies, strange historical synchronicities, ritual magick, and other such things is the wonderful Peter Levenda. I am sadly aware that these so-called crackpot subjects often attract crackpots as self-declared "experts", many of whom tilt Far Right... an issue exacerbated by the fact that the media ecosystem where these topics are most often discussed are the domain of Far Right gatekeepers, so when I saw that Mr Levenda had written an op/ed piece on the subject of Charlottesville, I have to admit I was just a little bit worried. Then I read what he wrote:
If anyone doubts where my feelings may be located concerning Charlottesville, you obviously haven’t read my previous work. I’ve written three books on Nazism alone, and even more volumes on the American political and cultural currents that have contributed to the present state of affairs, plus lengthy blog postings on my website. I am not a member of any political party, in case you’re wondering, but I don’t believe that this issue is a partisan one in the sense of Republican versus Democrat, or conservative versus liberal. It’s not my intention to carry water for a politician or a party but to raise awareness of the context of current events, to “connect the dots” as my work sometimes has been described. But there has never been any ambiguity where my feelings are concerned when it comes to fascism, racism, and Nazism. In fact I hesitated to post anything at all about this because … who needs it, really? You all have been inundated with pundits and jeremiads already. Who needs yet another old white guy’s point of view? 
But … if you insist … 
Most of you know I was detained by actual Nazis in South America in 1979, that I was threatened at gun point at midnight by a Klansman in Pennsylvania a little later, and debated neo-Nazis in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I’m no stranger to any of this, unfortunately, and that means I am not fooled by pretentious pseudo-intellectual arguments that attempt to form moral equivalencies between Nazis on one side and those who oppose them on the other. 
The recent Vice interview with the weeping white supremacist who said it was his intention to form an “ethno-state” underlines just how intellectually bankrupt this movement is. What is the ethnos to which he refers? Is “white” an ethnicity? A hundred years ago, the Irish were not considered “white” by American racists. The Slavs were not considered “white” by the Nazis. The Jews still aren’t. Where do we draw that particular line? Catholics were considered “papists” and therefore part of the problem, and I still hear white nationalists refer to Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards as “not quite white” (which is interesting considering Mussolini, Salazar and Franco, but who’s keeping score anyway?). We all know what that guy means, though. He means a state where there are no black people, no Jews, no other people of color. That, of course, would only be phase one of his “ethno state”. Phase two means going after the other shades of white on the Klan’s color card. These guys are so fixated on “white” it gives a whole new meaning to that offensive pejorative “snowflake.”
It only gets better from there. I urge you all to read and share it. Oh, and if you ever want to have your mind blown while simultaneously learning loads of hidden American history, look no further than Levenda's Sinister Forces trilogy (the first of which you will find at the other end of the provided link). Also, if you purchase them through the link provided, yer old pal Jerky hears a tinkle in his beggin' cup!



*** QUOTE OF THE DAY ***

“It’s amazing what I say, and what I do, and what I get away with. It’s amazing.”

- Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph "Joe" Arpaio--Preznit Trump's favorite law-breaking lawman--marvels at how none of the people he was elected to serve were bothered that his department failed to go after predatory pedophiles so that they could instead concentrate on finding and deporting undocumented immigrants. I guess that means the race is on... can Trump pardon Sheriff Joe before being removed from office? Keep watching this space to find out!

TWIN PEAKS AND THE BLUE ROSE a guest post by Rocko Van Buren

We here at the Daily Dirt Diaspora family of websites are proud to bring you this illuminating Guest Post about some of the more obscure elements of the magnificent Lynch/Frost creation Twin Peaks by our brilliant friend Rocko Van Buren. Enjoy! - YOPJ

“Through the dark of futures past
The magician longs to see
One chance out between two worlds
Fire walk with me”
- Bob
TWIN PEAKS, BLUE ROSE, AND THE UFO PHENOMENON

In the first few moments of Part 12 of the ongoing Showtime television event, Twin Peaks: The Return, the audience finally learns definitively what “Blue Rose” means in the context of Dale Cooper, Gordon Cole and the rest of the FBI. This exposition comes in a scene with FBI deputy director Gordon Cole, Albert Rosenfield and agent Tammy Preston sipping fine wine while seated in a private room at a hotel in Buckhorn, South Dakota, surrounded by red curtains (reminiscent of the mysterious Red Room itself), Albert explains Blue Rose is a secret extension of the now-closed, real-world Project Blue Book conducted by the U.S. Air Force to investigate UFO phenomena.


As the Air Force describes in it's own documentation, some of which is now publicly available through the Freedom of Information Act and quoted here from Wikipedia:
Project Blue Book was one of a series of systematic studies of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) conducted by the United States Air Force. It started in 1952, and it was the third study of its kind (the first two were projects Sign (1947) and Grudge (1949)). A termination order was given for the study in December 1969, and all activity under its auspices ceased in January 1970.
Project Blue Book had two goals:
1 To determine if UFOs were a threat to national security, and
2 To scientifically analyze UFO-related data.”
Prior to this revelation in Part 12 of The Return, fan-favorite character Maj. Garland Briggs from Twin Peaks original two seasons was the show's clearest connection to Project Blue Book and how the classified Air Force investigation connects to the White and Black Lodges of Twin Peaks lore.

Following a mysterious disappearance in Season 2 in the original run, upon which we will touch in greater detail later on, Briggs tells Cooper that even though Project Blue Book was disbanded, “There are those of us who continue in an unofficial capacity, examining the heavens as before, or in the case of Twin Peaks, the earth below. We are searching for a place called the White Lodge.”

Back in The Return, Albert explains to Agent Preston that Blue Book was shut down in 1970 as part of a “cover-up” that concluded the UFO phenomenon was not credible, and there was no resulting threat to national security.

“A few years later, the military and FBI formed a top secret task force to explore the troubling abstractions raised by cases Blue Book failed to resolve,” Albert explains. “We call it, 'The Blue Rose,' after a phrase uttered by a woman involved in one of these cases just before she died., which suggested these hazards could not be reached except by an alternate path we have been traveling ever since.”

Albert goes on to name the agents involved in this secret task force created by Cole – himself, lead agent Phillip Jeffries, Chet Desmond and the original show's main character, Dale Cooper. All of the special agents involved in Blue Rose, excepting Albert and Cole, have since disappeared. All this exposition is by way of recruiting The Return's newest FBI agent, Preston, into the fold of the Blue Rose task force. And thus we have the first explicit delineation from Project Blue Book straight to Blue Rose and the strange, occult aspects that surround the FBI's investigation into the murder of Laura Palmer in the Washington town of Twin Peaks (in the original TV series) and the murder of Teresa Banks in nearby Dear Meadow (in the film Fire Walk With Me).

While the original Twin Peaks run of 1990-921 owes much of its nostalgic love to its soap-opera-style story-lines, Cooper's frequent references to “damn fine coffee,” “the best cherry pie in the tri-counties,” and scenes like Audrey Horne engaged in a strange and seductive dance to music composed by Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, it is the lore and mystery of Twin Peaks that always attracted me most. And while this aspect of the story was certainly included in the original run of the series, it was never as prominent on ABC prime-time as it was later on in the show's darker, stranger cousin, Lynch's 1992 film Fire Walk With Me (which was my introduction to the world of Twin Peaks). Nothing in the Twin Peaks ecosphere compares to the dark strangeness of Fire Walk With Me (which was originally intended as a series of three films; however, part two and three were never filmed because of the poor critical and financial reception to its first installment). While the inability of Lynch to continue the story in the 1990s was certainly disappointing to hardcore fans, without that failure, we may not have ever been able to experience 2017's revival of Twin Peaks via The Return, in which Lynch and Frost have continued their legacy of breaking new ground in television entertainment.


OUTSIDE OF TIME AND SPACE

Monday, August 21, 2017

FHTAGN ROCK OPERA OF DOOOM!

Our old pal Fabian Rush has, at long last, fulfilled his lifelong dream of creating a rock opera based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft! And the generous bastard went and uploaded the whole thing--entitled Fhtagn! Rock Opera of Doom--on Youtube, where you can watch it for free!


I'm about 20 minutes in, myself, and I'm LOVING IT! The music is fantastic, particularly if you're an aficionado of dark ambient, or heavy metal with a Gothic and/or Industrial flavor. It's also got a sense of humor about itself, which helps the somewhat DIY special effects go down easy.

Help spread this around! It fully deserves to achieve cult status!

Sunday, August 20, 2017

NON POLITICAL SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ AUGUST 20, 2017


I was not prepared for how beautiful indie comics legend Seth's remembrance of Hurricane Hazel would turn out to be. Commissioned by the Toronto Globe & Mail newspaper as part of their year-long "Canada 150" anniversary celebration, the stark elegance of his lines and the almost musical rhythm of his storytelling are at their absolute apex, here. This is a shining gem of aesthetic and narrative perfection. I'm so glad I got a chance to thank Seth personally for creating this mini masterpiece.

***


Every year, one of the highlights of the Just For Laughs festival is Andy Kindler's "State of the Industry" address. In case you're wondering whether there's anyone in the universe who hates Ricky Gervais quite as much as you do, I think Mr Kindler has got the answer for you. Well worth a listen!

***

If this podcast promo doesn't get your heart pumping and make you want to listen ASAP, then I don't know what to say to you:
On the latest episode of the Talkhouse Podcast, two cinematic titans are in conversation as Darren Aronofsky sits down with the legendary Alejandro Jodorowsky, to coincide with the theatrical release of the 88-year-old cult director’s new film, Endless Poetry. The two have a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation that takes in the challenge of making art within the Hollywood system, the ability of films to heal, the vulgarity of Trump and life’s big questions – death, God, aliens, the universe – and Jodorowsky also fulfills a longheld dream of the Black Swan director’s by reading his tarot.

Jodorowsky! Aranofsky! Tarot! COME ON! YA GOTTA LISTEN!

Saturday, August 19, 2017

CHARLOTTESVILLE & THE EERIE CALM OF AFTERMATH, A GUEST POST BY GOOCH

We here at the Daily Dirt Diaspora are pleased to be able to bring you some first-hand reportage from Charlottesville by our old pal Gooch, who just happens to live there. He's a fine writer, and I hope to be sharing more of his work with y'all very soon. - Jerky 

I’ve lived in Charlottesville since last June, and I heard about the debate over the statue of Robert E. Lee in Emancipation–née Lee–Park, the first week I was here. My divided thoughts about why one statue of a man who fought to protect the interests of slave owners needs to be removed from a town that sports a large array of monuments paying tribute to the wealthy, slave-owning elite of America’s past–while the others get a pass–have kept me from getting involved. Also, I’m on parole until 2019, and I don’t want to spend the next two years back in prison for being a tourist at somebody else’s cause, so I wasn’t there last Saturday.

But, on Sunday, I went to the downtown mall, where most of the violence on the 12th took place. Not to get involved, or to gawk, but for Audrey Hepburn. I’ve never seen Roman Holiday, and Caroline and I were looking forward to the screening they had planned for last Sunday afternoon at The Paramount. However, because of the rally, the protest, the counter protest, the fights, the civil unrest, and the terrorism, it was cancelled. So, I ended up doing a little gawking.

Just getting to the downtown mall where the theatre is was a bit of a bitch. We wanted to use a different parking garage than usual, so we turned to Google for help getting there, but the GPS on my phone had little red lines all over the streets indicating where things were blocked off. We ended up going to the garage we normally use, but only because the little maze they had created by shutting down various streets led us to it. On the way, we saw a variety of police vehicles, a boxy van-truck with a satellite mounted to the top, and a warlike Humvee with “State Police” stenciled above the grill.

We wanted to park on the top level so we could see what was happening before heading down, but had to go one level lower because, according to a laminated printout on a traffic cone, the roof had been reserved for “police parking.” It didn’t say we couldn’t go up there though, so after we parked, we walked up to have a look. Outside the garage entrance, there was a big, white, windowless bus with no markings except the letters D.O.C. stenciled on the roof, and a light blue school bus with tinted windows. The white one was a Department of Corrections prison transport bus. They are used to move prisoners from one facility to another and It must have been on there in case there was an incident that required them to haul off a lot of people. I think the blue one was for the riot police.

When we got to the mall, the first thing I saw was a guy on top of a building with a tripod-mounted rifle that was pointed at the area in front of City Hall; and a lot of cops. State and city police were milling around in neon vests. There were also several of them leaned up against the wall of the building across the street from City Hall, the one the guy with the rifle was on top of. After a minute, I realized it was because it was one of the only spots around that had shade. It’s been hot as shit here all summer, and Kevlar probably doesn’t breathe very well.

We got past the crowd outside of City Hall and I saw a guy I know from school. He looked miserable. Apparently, Nick had nearly been hit by the car that James Fields drove through the crowd of protesters, he was upset and didn’t look well. I’ve never seen this guy not be in a good mood. I enrolled in the community college here a month after getting out of prison, and he was the first person there that I talked to for more than 2 minutes. We don’t hang out outside of classes, but he’s a good guy, with a good attitude and a nice beard, and even though he is smart enough to know how enormously fucked America’s political landscape is, he devotes a lot of time to trying to change things. Nick gives good hugs, he likes Stanley Kubrick, and is almost always working on something that is due in 6 or 7 minutes. It was weird seeing him in such rough shape.

We’d thought the people grouped in front of City Hall chanting “Shame!” were protesting the city’s fuckups from the day before, or maybe they were releasing some people from jail or transferring them elsewhere (which, in hindsight, makes no sense since City Hall isn’t a jail) but Nick said that Kessler and Spencer were giving a press conference. Spencer wasn’t there, but there was no way to tell that from where we were. Aside from him not being perched very high up, and not being able to hear anything he said over the shouting, there were a lot of cell phones being held up in the air. If it hadn’t been for Nick, we wouldn’t have even known somebody was up there talking until people uploaded the videos from those phones to Facebook. When Kessler left, so did the crowd and off went Nick.

There is a large pavilion at the end of the mall that is set up for live, outdoor events. It has a large roof covering the area in front of the stage, and since it was the only large area of shade around, that is where the riot police were hanging out. Maybe 50 cops in black gear with shields and masks were milling around while a few people sat on the grass just outside of it snapping pictures. On another patch of grass there was a guy in a police vest and shorts, with a big console that controlled a drone somewhere overhead.

Further down the mall, it was less tense. Roman Holiday had been cancelled, and The Paramount was closed because of the events of the day before. Not everything was closed. The ice cream and gelato shop were still open and doing business, though they didn’t look as busy as they usually are on a weekend afternoon. Several restaurants were open, and so was the CVS, but only from one side. The back doors were locked so you couldn’t go in one side and out the other. The printout on their door said it was “for security reasons.” A little further down, a street was blocked off and was being lined with flowers in memorial of Heather Heyer.

Once, a line of cops in those neon vests came walking by, and a minute later, we heard applause. I think they were clapping because now, the day after the tragedy, there was a strong police presence ready to stop violence. Of course, by Sunday, all of the guys that showed up with guns, tiki torches, and riot shields were gone, so it wasn’t likely that there would be a need for much intervention. Although I later found out that they probably kept Kessler from getting beat up as he left City Hall. Good job guys. In the classic style of authority everywhere, they had fucked up and let people get hurt, and after widespread criticism of their failure to act, they were overcompensating with a big, aggressive display, a show of force that made nobody feel any better about what had happened the day before, but made them appear responsible. That applause was probably ironic.

Our backup plan was to go to a different movie at another theatre in the mall that was still open, but our timing was bad, we’d spent too much time walking around and looking at the weirdness. So, while trying to make a plan for the rest of the afternoon, we sat down against a wall and people-watched. It’s a good place to do that. People come there to walk their dogs and eat outside at the restaurants. There are usually street performers playing music, and the panhandlers are much less aggressive than you see in a lot of places. There is good food, there are great drag shows, and during the summer there is free live music on Fridays at the pavilion. It doesn’t really strike one as a hotbed of racial tension–somewhere where ideologies are so opposed that violence is always about to spill over. There are people of all colors and orientations there at any given time, and aside from a fat, drunk, shirtless man that was trying to fight somebody by the cigar shop while Caroline and I were eavesdropping on a Ween show from the patio of the Himalayan restaurant, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone even get their feelings hurt at the mall.

So, don’t draw too many conclusions about Charlottesville. This isn’t some Mississippi Burning shit, this was a bunch of assholes that had to buy their torches at Lowes and travel to get here. And, now that it’s over, they're denying that it's them in the pictures, and crying, literally crying, about how scared they are, on social media. Everyone wants to strut around and act scary until they might get hurt or do some time.

For fuck’s sake...

PROOF THAT WE LIVE IN A POST-SATIRE WORLD


You couldn't make this shit up if you tried, and if you did... people would say you're trying too hard.

NOTES ON THE FASCIST RHETORICAL STYLE

I've recently noticed the proliferation of a specific and rather annoying rhetorical tic employed by those on the Far Right when they're being questioned or interviewed. Maybe you've noticed it, too. It happens whenever they're being interviewed or questioned by members of the non-Far Right media.

For example, in the recent Vice documentary, when Christopher Cantwell says the demonstrations went well because nobody on their side died or killed anybody unjustly, and the interviewer reminds him that the killing of Heather Heyer was unprovoked (which is correct), and Cantwell replies: "That's not true, and YOU KNOW that it's not true." 

Another example is Trump's disastrous, Presidency-ending press conference on Tuesday, where--between petulantly whining "Excuse me! Excuse me!" with his tiny finger jutting skyward--he ejaculated: "I do think there's blame on both sides, and I don't have any doubt about it, and YOU don't have any doubt about it, either!"

And the above examples are just the tiny, rancid tip of a giant, floating shitberg. All the right-wing shit-heads are getting in on the act. I've seen it from right wing performance artist (and, since divorcing his Jewish wife, newly liberated anti-Semite) Alex Jones, pedophile-protecting halfwit Milo Poppananalcyst, Nazi hipster "Proud Boy" Gavin McFriendless and others of that ilk constantly telling people "This is what I believe and YOU KNOW I'm right and YOU KNOW YOU BELIEVE IT TOO, YOU LIAR!!!"

Next time you see one of these cretins being interviewed, or spouting off on one of their solo, talking head Youtube videos (the preferred medium of the alt right douchebag), just watch. I bet you'll start noticing it, too.

Another increasingly popular Far Right pastime is lying about being assaulted, a particularly precious irony when you consider that this is the same cohort loudly proclaiming that pretty much every single hate crime is a false flag hoax designed to make the Far Right look bad.

Here's a beautiful example featuring mush-mouthed masochist Mike "Gorilla Mind" Cernovich, whose sense of reality is so twisted by his daily regimen of home-brewed psycho-ceuticals he actually believed his humiliating on-air vivisection by 60 Minutes' Scott Pelley went well. Enjoy!


See what I mean? Of course, Cernovich is far from alone in this practice. If you dig around Youtube, you can find similar videos of such Far Right twats as Baked Alaska, Christopher Cantwell (again!), Chuck Johnson, and others shrieking bloody murder over the slightest of taps, or the gentlest of brushings past. 

They're no great fans of turnabout, either. 

In Charlottesville, on Friday night, Steve Lemons of the Southern Poverty Law Center was surrounded by a gibbering pack of raving and drooling Fascist shit-stains. They insult, threaten, belittle and provoke him, ratcheting up the rhetoric until one of the pack knocks off Lemons' baseball cap. To his credit, he maintains his cool and meets this ceaseless barrage of vitriol and threats with a bit of fun, knocking off Tim "Baked Alaska" Gionet's hat. 

Judging by Gionet's reaction, you'd think Lemons had tried to partial-birth-abort the poor baby:


You can see the full video at this link, for context. But be warned: If the sight of the world's least aggrieved people brimming with self-pity and inexplicable, inchoate rage is as repellent to you as it is to yer old pal Jerky... be sure to have a puke bag at the ready, because this video is the fucking motherload of Far Right Grotesques.

Anyway, Steve Bannon was fired from the White House today (an utterly meaningless, empty gesture), so I'll probably have more incredibly depressing crap for you shortly. Keep watching this space.

Thursday, August 17, 2017

HOW BAD IS IT?


This is Congressman (and long time useful idiot for Putin's Kremlin) Dana Rohrabacher at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he met for three hours with Wikileaks founder (and now obvious intel/propaganda/subversion asset for Putin's Kremlin) Julian Assange... a meeting that was, incredibly, organized by notorious Holocaust denying White Supremacist alt-right provocateur (and notorious public defecator) Chuck Johnson. 

Folks, if you know anything about the despicable fecal golem that is Chuck Johnson--the ginger twat up there smirking as he flashes his favorite hand sign (WP for White Power), a human shit-stain so vile he can't even keep a Twitter account going because he can't help but blurt out ridiculously offensive and fact-free racist bullshit on the regular--the fact that this absolute sack of inhuman garbage is even allowed within shouting distance of the White House is an unprecedented national humiliation. His rise to the level of key political fixer for Trump should give nightmares to everyone who isn't already mentally and/or spiritually damaged beyond repair.

So now, Putin puppet Roharbacher apparently has a bunch of messages to pass along to Putin puppet Trump, from Putin puppet Assange. You'd think the Kremlin could have cut out the middle man! But no... something else is at work here. And you can probably suss out what that missing X-Factor is based on the presence of right-wing agent provocateur Chuck Johnson.

I mean, you really have to wonder--and someone in a position to do so needs to ask--who paid for all this? Who covered all the air fare, hotel rooms, etc? Is the US govt footing the bill? Or some Far Right NGOs? And if so, which NGOs? Follow the money, for Christ's sake. We need to get busy fully exposing the nature of this Rough Beast, it's hour seemingly come round.

***

By the way, to all the many people who, in the last week, during "discussions" about Charlottesville, I witnessed bringing up the fact that the (law-abiding, rules-following) Nazis "had permits" and their (lazy, chaotic, disorganized) opposition didn't... Guess what?

YOU GOT PLAYED.  Turns out, the Good Guys did have permits. 

Ain't that a bitch? You were fed a pack of lies, and you sucked it up like mother's milk laced with uncut cocaine. You were willing dupes, useful idiots, for pro-Nazi lies and liars. How does it feel to be such an easy mark for Fascists? Does this realization even give you pause? Are you even capable of feeling shame at this point?

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

SICK OF "WINNING" YET?

Don't worry. America has only just begun "winning" in the Trumpian sense of that word.

If you haven't seen it yet, and in the interest of accurate witness, here's that Vice Media video that's been making the rounds. Watch the whole thing, from beginning to end.


Watching the torchlit, moonlight march from Friday, I couldn't help but think of Doug Stanhope, the stand-up comic and latter-day Bill Hicks, whose suggested remedy for such events involves balloons filled with gasoline. One hopes one lives to see the day.

The real breakout star of the above video, however, is GG Allin look-and-cock-alike (not to mention convicted crack dealer and all around shame of Keene NH) Christopher Cantwell, he who appears to prowl like a gym-toned panther when surrounded by hundreds of like-minded enablers, but turns into a blubbering sissy-bitch when he hears tell that the authorities are looking to have a word...


And then came Trump.

You know what gang? After days of arguing on Twitter and Facebook with people who should fucking know better, but whose brains have apparently been booby-trapped beyond redemption, I don't feel like revisiting the bogus POTUS's absolute blazing failure right here and now. Suffice it to say that, thanks to this event, and Trump's reaction to it, we're destined to endure a lot more of its like in the coming months.

I hope to be proven wrong.