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.

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ JULY 30, 2017

For as long as it's been around, yer old pal Jerky has been a devoted fan of The Baffler, a sporadically published, digest-sized clearing house for some of the highest quality cultural, political, and business analysis to ever grace the magazine racks. I love everything about it; the aesthetic, the politics, the fact that it doesn't have a fixed publishing schedule, so they only produce an issue when they have enough good material to fill one. Through thick and thin, in my life and theirs, the folks behind The Baffler have never let me down. And that's why I'm always happy when one of their contributors knocks one out of the park, like Sam Kriss does with his most recent 'Horrordome' offering, "Shrinking the President". True to The Baffler's contrarian form, Kriss offers us his mass analysis of those who would publicly analyze Trump. After the obligatory call to "stop stigmatizing the mentally ill you guys", Kriss gets down to business... and boy, does he get dirty with it, as one particularly pungent passage illustrates:

Baby Trump never learned when to shit and when not to, and it’s far too late for him now. Watch, in particular, the way he talks about the size of the crowds whenever he talks. They’ll say it wasn’t very big. But it is, it’s enormous, it’s huge. He isn’t talking about his dick; he’s talking about his turds: with the grinning pride of a child who’s just deposited one on the Persian rug—look what I made—and the woundedness of a child who’s learned far too late that other people aren’t as proud as he is. Trump talks through his anus and people come out, millions of them, chanting and cheering in fecal happiness, as proud of him as he is of them. Trump is the king of the turd-people. He is a pre-Oedipal god.

Come for the first rate academic analysis... and stay for the "Baby Trump Shits Himself" jokes! In any case, it's a short read that makes many worthy, salient points. The prurient joy you'll get from the insulting take-downs is simply the icing on an otherwise substantial cake. Enjoy!

***

If the American political blogosphere ever institutes a Hall of Fame, Talking Points Memo author Josh Marshall is guaranteed to be an inaugural, first round inductee.  And I sincerely hope that my saying so means Josh won't be too pissed that I've stolen his info-graphic charting the cruel and petty details surrounding Trump's firing of his White House Chief of Staff, RNC P.R. B.S.

I also hope that urging you to surf on over to TPM so you can read more of Josh's forensic breakdown of this cruel and petty firing -- and suggesting that you bookmark his excellent blog for future reference -- will help to further assuage his righteous indignation at my blatant sticky-fingerism.

***

If you're still looking for a reason as to why you're perfectly justified in summarily dismissing anyone -- be they post-truth alt-right shitlord, or alt-left Moonbat useful idiot -- who reflexively shrieks "THERE'S NO EVIDENCE!" whenever the subject of Putin and other Russian gangsters being at least partly responsible for the Trump Presidency comes up... look no further than this incredible, constantly updated, interactive dossier put together by The Washington Post. Entitled "Here's What We Know So Far About Team Trump's Ties to Russian Interests", it's a knock-out bit of old-school journalism; the kind of thing that makes you long for the days when going into the newspaper business was seen as not just a viable career option, but a noble calling.

See all those faces? If you hover your cursor over one of them, that individual or organization's connections light up, and you can explore them all, one by one, or en masse, in excruciating detail. There are so many poorly covered, potentially explosive stories included in this dossier -- so many connections just waiting to be identified and absorbed by the American electorate -- that it almost feels like the journalistic version of a ticking time bomb. Trust me, if you start rooting around in there, you'll see what I mean pretty quickly. So my sincere congratulations to Bonnie Berkowitz, Denise Lu and Julie Vitkovskaya on their indispensable work. Ya done good!

***

This recent Buzzfeed article -- which is sure to elicit snotty condescension and knowing snorts of derision from the usual know-it-all suspects, despite the fact that it is both entertaining and informative -- begins thusly:

To use the internet in 2017, you need to have some level of familiarity with the tropes and signposts of the type of trolling that comes from the alt-right movement and various flavors. But most normal humans, rightfully, run the fuck away as soon as they see a Pepe. This guide is for you (presumably, a normal human). 

Some of these terms are not totally specific to the alt-right, but come from the soupy mix of 4chan, Reddit, men’s rights activists, Gamergaters, pickup artists, and white supremacist and Nazi sites that eventually gave birth to the alt-right. Imagine all these things as different bubbles in a Venn diagram with the alt-right in the middle. 

This guide aims to help explain some of those weird images and words you may have seen popping up in comments sections or on social media.

The first entry is already somewhat infamous, and pretty well known:

(((Echo))) Parentheses

When used around someone's name, a means of indicating that they are Jewish. The "echoes" are a reference to some old gobbledygook about Jews "echoing through history," but the parentheses are a handy tool on Twitter for anti-Semites to signal to one another when someone they dislike is Jewish. Once the tactic was exposed, some Jews and non-Jews started adding them to their own Twitter usernames as a way to subvert the practice and make it less powerful.

The rest of the glossary is fairly comprehensive, and includes a few entries that were new to me -- such as the entry on the Bogandoff Brothers -- which I found somewhat surprising. Of course, that's just because I had yet to be "Bogpilled". Anyway, if figuring out what shit like that means is at all important to you, then you might want to clip and save this glossary. Otherwise, your mileage may vary. 

NEW TWEET STORM FROM ERIC GARLAND RE: CONSPIRACIES!

Twitter superstar Eric Garland is no stranger to sparking strong feelings with his penchant for rollicking, go-for-broke, hypercharged brainstorming sessions on Twitter. He was praised and scorned in equal measure for his now legendary (and quite excellent, in my view) Tweet Storm that kicked off with the infamous line: "It's time for some Game Theory!" Today's Storm is sure to spark more tone policing and concern trolling and furrowed brow pleas of "Come now dear boy" from the usual suspects. However, to anyone with even a passing familiarity with some of the lesser known movers, shakers, and goings-on of the past... oh, let's say 75 years, none of this will be all that surprising. It's just nice to see it laid out in such plainspoken language. - Jerky

<CONSPIRACY THREAD>

 This was a takeover by the global billionaire nutball class. It'll be exposed soon. And no, not the stupid ((())) SOROS!!! thing. For real.

A little background: I have a mentor, one of the world's most brilliant historian/philosophers. He's not well known. By his design.

He can quote Epictetus or Plato or Laozi as easy as SNL - all of them with their humor in tact. He sees 2000 years as "recent-ish."

I learned to talk about movements in the 50-250 year timeframe. A little more than a fad, a bit less than an era. A "moment in time."

At this macroscopic level, you begin to speak about flows of power, the effect of ideas taken all the way out to their conclusions.

This leads one to talk about conspiracies - the discussion of a few people manipulating big power under cover of others' ignorance.

If you think about Europe and the Church before printing, this doesn't seem so crazy - only so many people could read. It's like that.

Anyhow, one day 15 years ago, I asked, "Like, WHOA, is there, like a Cabal of Global Power Elite Conspirators who run everything?"

"No," he laughed, "the hilarious part is that there are maybe 15-30 of those things- and they all think they're in control by themselves."

"They have A Lot of Money by any standard, and can get a ton done - but it's the combination of everyone that makes the world move."

All these people with gold toilets who think they can change math and chemistry - but really they're not in control either. Funny.

BUT, around 10-15 years ago, I started hearing about this weird strain of rich weirdos. The tech thing was getting big - and a bit psycho.

Apparently, there were some of the Very Wealthy Class who were starting to talk about controlling ALL OF HUMANITY through tech and stuff.

A CUSTOM HUMANITY! BY DESIGN! AND THE GENIUS IQ TECH RICH PEOPLE would anyway, it sounded nuts. But it sorta metastasized. Kept going.

I kept hearing bits of it. The "Sealand" people, where Java/C# programmers can live on an oil rig, because...genius? Like, wha?

Never mind mass farming and global supply chains. RICH GENIUS GALT WE SECEDE FROM MEDIOCRITY! IT'LL BE GREAT that kinda nuts.

A while back, I started hearing about a strain of this that turned out to be Mercer. SEE WE HAVE ALGORITHMSES! WE CAN HACK HISTORY!

Nano-IT-bio-info-technocracy! We ran Pets.com once! We are humanity's overlords! Also, we ruined mortgages! We are Gawds!

Anyhow, the play here in 2016 was the big move for Seekrit Tech Type Boss Autocracy Billionairez to Take Over The Game. I guess.  

But it goes back to my teacher's lesson: Who's running The Conspiracy? A couple dozen groups. All with competing interests. Get it?

If you think you're in on The Conspiracy, then you missed the whole thing about A Bunch of Conspiracies, Most Actually Hidden. Funny, right?

So, in this weird adventure, the Mercers, deVos, the Nazis, Breitbart, Russia, five Saudis oh whoever, it's a big weird chart.

These guys thought they'd hack America, give it to Nazi Christians, have Mike Flynn defend it, and have hedge funders make all the monees.

So we have Sessions trying to institute 1877, Carson saying there's no poverty, and Mnuchin selling you mailbox to a Saudi bond fund. 

THEY ARE IDIOTS. Because they ain't the only Conspiracy in town. Jay-Z and the Chinese Communists ran the whole thing. 

Taking over the world is hard work. You're dumb to try it. Perhaps cherish the world instead. </CONSPIRACY THREAD>

SUGGESTED READING LIST FOR JUNE 19, 2017

Okay, so I'm going to start just blogging some of the best articles I come across without too much content, to get back into the daily swing of things. That incredible image up there comes from this Vanity Fair article entitled "Trump's Biggest Mistake Might Have Been Getting Elected". It's worth a look.

Pathetic ALT RIGHT PROPAGANDA VECTOR and Patreon panhandler Dave Rubin has threatened to sue Mother Jones for this completely accurate and important examination of the emerging Far Right misinformation ecosystem. Help spread it around, it deserves a wide readership.

Speaking of figuring out how the Far Right propaganda machine works, Project S.H.A.M.E. has conducted a magnificently thorough and damning case study in how the Koch brothers, long time masters of conservative Astroturf techniques, create covert Manchurian Candidates from scratch, then send them out like info-terrorist sleeper cells to do their foul bidding whenever and wherever they deem it necessary. Only read this one if you're fully stocked up on your blood pressure meds.

Okay, more soon. Keep watching this space.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT YESTERDAY'S SHOOTING

In the wake of Wednesday's shooting/wounding of the White Nationalist-courting, NRA-funded Congressman Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) and three others by a Trump and Hillary-hating Bernie Bro during a charity baseball game practice, a friend of mine took to Facebook and wrote:

I wouldn't have believed what I read about wingnuts blaming this morning's shooting on "the left" if I did not have wingnut friends who are actually blaming this morning's shooting on the left. There is no polite way to describe their fanaticism. 

Unfortunately, he was 100% correct.

And it wasn't just thoughtless partisans reflexively spilling their ahistorical nonsense across the seething digital wastes of social media, either. The Big Boys got in on the act, as well.

Across the entire vast right-wing propaganda machine--all the way from FOX News, down through the talk radio ecosystem that is now well over 90% Far Right reactionary, through all the various right-wing and alt-right fake news sites like Breitbart and InfoWars and WorldNetDaily and TheBlaze and Daily Caller and on and on, ad infinitum, to the growing cottage industry of profiteering Youtube alt-right Patreon panhandlers sucking up as much anti-SJW loot as they can from people willing to pay good money to be told exactly what they want to hear--the refrain rang loud and clear: "The Democrats and leftists have taken things TOO FAR!

I shouldn't have to do this, because for fuck's sake, I assume most of you reading this are thinking people with functioning brains and at least some semblance of a working memory and basic analytic skills... but for anyone out there who might actually be stupid enough to think that "the left" or "Democrats" are the ones playing with rhetorical fire and courting extremists in the USA... well, here's what the FBI has to say about that.

I still have yet to see a single, solitary instance of this alleged "extreme rhetoric" that the Democrats have allegedly been engaging in. No. The home of true, violent extremism in America is almost entirely on the right. But the usual suspects, never ones to let facts get in the way of a good bullet point or anecdotal proof, are all het up over this one little incident, in which nobody but the shooter even fucking died.

Listen up, buttercups... an average of ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE are gunned down in cold blood in the United States of America, each and every goddamn day. Shot DEAD. But now, because Republicans got targeted this one fucking time... OH MY GOD! The RHETORIC!!! 

The really galling part is that this is coming from a cohort that fancies themselves "free speech absolutists", the very same people who poo-poo anyone who mentions that maybe the Republicans--with their increasingly unhinged and violent fan base and their blatantly White Nationalist "senior advisors" and their fucking Nuremberg style rallies where they demonize the media (while simultaneously pointing them out in the crowd), encourage chants of "Lock her up!" and worse, shriek "Go ahead and sucker punch that black bitch... I'll cover your legal bill!"--might want to tone that shit down.

By the way, if I were Steve Scalise right now, the person I'd be most afraid of in the world isn't the next Democrat, liberal, or even Bernie fan that he meets... it's Donald J. Trump. Because a wounded man doesn't make for even half as good a propaganda prop as a dead man, and deep down, I'm sure Scalise knows a) that Trump understands this instinctively, and b) that Trump would gladly sacrifice his life for far, far less than his death would be worth to him at this point.

She made $4,000 in two hours selling these. 

NEW ADAM CURTIS DOCUMENTARY: HYPERNORMALISATION

The release of a new documentary by Adam Curtis is always cause for celebration in the world of paracultural analysis. Here is a trailer for his latest thought-provoking project, HyperNormalisation...

And here is a five minute preview segment that covers something strange that happened a little while ago with (or rather, to) none other than Donald Fucking Trump...

And here is a third party website where you can watch the nearly 3 hour doc in its entirety without having to live in the UK or download some weird, proprietary BBC video player to watch.

THE POWER PRINCIPLE DOCUMENTARY SERIES CONCORDANCE COLLECTION

One of the goals I have for Useless Eater Blog is that it serve as something like an ongoing undergraduate-level course in parapolitical science. Obviously, not every post or article is going to be in keeping with this lofty ambition - I'm only human after all, and am not above using my tiny platform to launch the occasional editorial cheap-shot, or pick on the odd easy target for a laugh - but my resolution for the New Year is to make sure the substance/bullshit ratio becomes a little less embarrassing to me.

In order to separate the wheat from the chaff, I will be creating a new Useless Eater Blog sub-section called ParaPolitical Science 101. In this section, I will be warehousing those posts and articles that I feel meet a certain standard and serve to increase my regular readers' knowledge and awareness about everything from forgotten chapters in ancient history, to in depth analysis of contemporary "conspiracy culture" developments... for better or worse.

Having said that, my study guides, or "concordances", for Scott Noble's excellent documentary series The Power Principle represent exactly the kind of work that I'm going to be doing more of in the coming years. In these three articles, I attempt to summarize - and, in certain respects, expand upon - the information presented in these insightful, thought-provoking documentary films, which Information Clearing House called "probably the best documentary ever made about American foreign policy."

I'll be using Metanoia Films' own summaries to describe the contents of each film in the series.

The Power Principle I: EMPIRE 

An Introduction to the Empire; Iran – Oil and Geopolitics; Guatemala – the “merger of state and corporate power”; The Congo – Neocolonialism; Grenada – “The Mafia Doctrine”; Chile – “libertarianism with a small l"; Globalization: Consequences. 1945: Grand Area Strategy; Fascism: a “rational system of the plutocracy”; Case Studies: the Greek Communists; The Italian Communists; the Spanish Anarchists; Fascism’s Western backers; Trading with the Enemy; Fascism as “preservation of civilization”; the Cold War and “A Century of Fear”.

The Power Principle II: PROPAGANDA 

The Soviet Menace?; Case Studies: El Salvador, Nicaragua; Propaganda: Self-Deception and blowback; The “International Communist Conspiracy”; Declassified Documents; NSC 68; The Pentagon as Keynsian Mechanism; The Military Industrial Complex; The War against the Third World; Shifting rationales; What is imperialism?; Case Study: Haiti; “War is a racket”. Fear-based conditioning - The War of the Worlds, The Triumph of the Will; World view Warfare; The Russians are coming; Television: The “perfect propaganda medium”; Soviet vs. American propaganda; Hollywood and the Pentagon; Psywarriors and the media; Operation Mockingbird; The Pentagon Pundits; Project Revere; The Bomber Gap; “scare the hell out of them”.

The Power Principle III: APOCALYPSE

Mutually Assured Destruction; MAD men - Curtis Lemay and the super hawks; MAD men - Hermann Kahn and the Rand Corporation; Over flights as provocation; Cuba: the “danger of a good example”; terrorism against Cuba; “Unconventional warfare”; the Cuban Missile Crisis and the “man who saved the world”. Why did the Soviet Union collapse?; Gorbachev: a “more violent, less stable world”; the Pentagon’s New Map; Did Ronald Reagan end the Cold War?; The Brink of Apocalypse: Able Archer; The betrayal of Russia; The expansion of NATO; Yugoslavia and Libya; the Yeltsin coup; Living standards in the former Soviet Union; A third way?

Ideally, I would urge you to watch each of these three films from beginning to end, in the proper order, with my study guides open in another browser should you require clarification or more information about all the various historical events, individuals, or contributors therein. However, for the parapolitical seeker who is short on time, my concordances can also serve as a handy summary of these three feature-length films, in a format that shouldn't take you much more than twenty minutes to read, total. Hence my suggestion that you "clip and save" them somewhere for future reference.

***

If you enjoyed my concordances for The Power Principle series, then you might also enjoy a similar piece I wrote a couple years ago for Lutz Dammbeck's 2003 documentary The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet. As with the above films, I guarantee that you will encounter a bunch of new, mind-blowing information that you've never come across before... all of it impeccably sourced and researched.