MINUTIA & INCONSEQUENTIA ~ SEPT. 27, 2017

C. Brian Smith of MEL Magazine has put together An Oral History of Rodney Dangerfield's Back To School, the 1986 cult comedy smash that most people probably don't realize outperformed both ALIENS and Ferris Bueller's Day Off at the box office that year. Smith was inspired to pull together all these anecdotes from the cast and crew (minus Robert Downey Jr, unfortunately) after attending a celebrity-studded live table read in the movie's honor, held at Los Angeles City College a couple weeks ago, with all proceeds going towards charity.

Personally, I've always had a soft spot for Back to School, a movie with tons of heart, in which even the "bad guys" aren't all that bad. And that's okay. Because for a goofy comedy chock-a-block with one-liners, Back to School is also about father and son relationships, the value of life experience over a textbook education (promoting the former without denigrating the latter), and even manages to sneak in a subversive exploration of plagiarism and other issues related to academic ethics.

Plus, it's got this scene:

All this, and the finale features the only time a Triple Lindy has ever been caught on film! What more could a movie fan ask for? Fair warning, however... only click through to the article in question if you're prepared to gaze upon an ornate vial half-filled with sweat collected from Rodney Dangerfield by his widow after his shows.  Just try not to think about taking a swig and you should be fine.

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So have you heard about Korea's own alt.right movement, called Ilbe?

Ilbe users are the kind of people who refer to Korean women as “kimchi bitches.” They call Chinese people “cockroaches” and homosexual men “gay bastards.” They’re the trolls who binge-ate pizza to taunt a father on a hunger strike after he lost his child in a ferry accident that killed 325 high school students and teachers — or the ones who defaced memorial posters for the victims. 

They’re known for a “deep-seated misogyny” and a hatred of immigrants and sexual minorities, and they’re waging an online war on the political left — a group they call, simply, “commies.” 

But this isn’t the white supremacist “alt-right” of the U.S. — it’s a loose group of mostly digitally savvy, ultra-right-wing South Korean men. They congregate in an anonymous, 4chan-esque web forum where they can rant without social repercussions. And like in the U.S., their influence has grown rapidly in just a few short years. 

Welcome to the site Ilbe Storehouse, better known as just Ilbe, the hub for South Korea’s new far-right movement. It has risen to prominence in the backdrop of South Korea’s turbulent recent history — deep political divides, a youth unemployment crisis and backlash against liberal social values. 

Sound familiar?

It seems as though the New Fascist International has become even more "international" than even yer old pal Jerky had assumed. Keep your eyes on this one, folks, especially if you're from that part of the world.

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You know that Black guy who shows up at Donald Trump rallies wearing t-shirts with block printing of obscure messages and website urls, holding up signs that say "BLACKS FOR TRUMP!", and who occasionally merits a shout-out from Boss Tweet himself, who once pointed the guy out and shouted "Look at my African American over there!" Well, that guy is Michael Symonette, and it turns out his personal life story is... bizarre, to say the least. In recent years, he's apparently even gotten too weird for the cult he used to belong to, and those guys promote murdering White people and think Oprah Winfrey is the Devil! But don't take my word (or the word of various news media) for it... check out Symonette's own, incredibly awesome website, where he identifies the real racists in the world today: the Cherokees!

But hey, it's not like Symonette is the first unconventional figure to be pulled towards the center of American power by the Trump administration. Check out this informative dossier assembled by the good people at Right Wing Watch, which lists some of the most dangerously unhinged Far Right lunatics who are either currently basking in the radioactive afterglow of their close association with Trump. Some of the names here will be familiar to you (Alex Jones), and some should be (Michael "Savage" Wiener), but a few will likely be new to you, as they were to me. 

Now, as you peruse this list, imagine what the reaction would be if Hillary Clinton had openly associated with individuals even half so vile, dangerous, or profoundly anti-American as the people on this list. Then come back and try to look me in the eye and tell me with a straight face that the mainstream media was "against Trump", much less "pro-Hillary".

And finally, speaking of evil, creepy fuckers, I will leave you with this thought: For seven months, Trump's Nazi-whisperer strategist/adviser Steve Bannon had Top Secret clearance, and access to America's most sensitive intelligence information. After being quit-fired, it appears that he's looking to go to work for billionaire Trump supporter Robert Mercer, who also happens to own a data mining firm with a dedicated focus on swinging elections, ostensibly to the highest bidder, but seeing as this is the New Fascist International we're talking about (in particular the Silicon Valley tentacle of that particular monstrosity), that isn't necessarily the case.

Anyway... sleep well.

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.

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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".

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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.

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:

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As #HurricaneHarvey intensifies - remember to #PlanAhead.
☑️https://t.co/FMdmvohypy
☑️https://t.co/YL56ldeqoW
☑️https://t.co/t1s4AL3B47 pic.twitter.com/tpXmOK70ug

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 24, 2017

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. 

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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.

MINUTIA AND INCONSEQUENTIA

Okay, so before I write a proper introduction to the Diaspora Blog, I figured I'd better clear away some of the back-log of stories to which I've wanted to call your attention over the last couple years. Some of these are just videos, some are interesting articles, others are just funny wastes of time. This is just the first of what will probably turn out to be a number of house-cleaning posts, so don't worry, I won't be dumping ALL that accumulated crap on your laps at once. Anyhoo, I hope everybody finds at least one or two links per link-alanche to be worth their while. Huzzah! - YOPJ

In 1979, the CBS news magazine program 60 Minutes aired a report about the Swine Flu Scare of 1976 and the massive vaccination program that followed. This episode was allegedly banned after first airing and didn't see the light of day again until 2009 when it was released on the Internet. The implications are chilling and the parallels between what happened 20 years ago and the growing panic over Bird Flu - although currently on the back-burner - are ominous. Forewarned is forearmed.

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If you thought the American government was doing something new when its agents started spraying pot crops with paraquat and other toxic chemicals in the 1970's... you'd be mistaken. The Powers That Be have been harshing our collective buzz for a very long time, as this article about certain toxic Prohibition tactics explains.

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Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb. It made yer old pal Jerky LOL quite a bit, and hopefully it'll do the same for you. After all, we could all use a larf in these dark and dismal days, couldn't we, guv?

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And speaking of larfs, finally, at long last, someone has crafted a sexually realistic R&B song... and they were kind enough to put together a hilarious video to go with it!

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This is, quite possibly, the best condom commercial ever conceived, produced and released, ever. Hands down. No contest. Also, aside from the fact that it's funny as hell, it managed to give me the chubbs! Not quite as pleasurable as a full-blown erection, but I'll take what I can get at this point.

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Doctors are people, too, as this video amply demonstrates. And you know what? It's fucking terrifying. After watching this, you may never shove another can of spray-on hair coloring up your asshole, again!

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This incredibly beautiful and transcendently moving video and the staggering implications it conjures moved me to my marrow and, honestly, it just about succeeded in squeezing tears from this cynical old misanthrope's usually bone-dry eyeballs. Let's find out if watching it has a similar effect on you.