DDD EXECUTIVE SUMMARY JAN/07/2017

THE MAIN EVENT

• The Electoral College has now finally made it officially, officially, official: Donald Trump "won" the election. When a small number of Democratic House Members, in response to a scathing bipartisan investigation that found at least 50 Trump electors voted illegally, attempted to enter their objections into the public record, the Republicans cut off their microphones. Expect a lot more of this.
• You should also expect a lot more things like what happened after Trump's intel briefing on Friday about how Russia helped get him elected. After spending most of this week crowing that he knew something others didn't, now the only thing he wants to know is how come somebody at NBC might have known something he didn't know before he even got a chance to know it! It's all so confusing... only it's not. It's actually really fucking simple. And obvious. And potentially catastrophic. Also, see our Quote of the Day for more irresponsible speculation on my part.
• A US military veteran apparently opened fire at an airport in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, killing five and wounding eight before being shot, then taken alive, by police. Others were wounded in the ensuing chaos, which lasted for hours. Not to be dismissive or cynical or anything but to be perfectly honest? Big fuckin' whoop.
• Apparently Americans are going to have to pay for "that fucking wall" after all. 

A DEEPER DIVE

• We had a brief DDD update earlier today about how Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have revealed themselves to be utterly lacking in both credibility and honor when it comes to Trump and Putin.
• By the way, the Russia/WikiLeaks connection began long before the 2016 election,
• Conservatism as Serious Mental Illness, Exhibit #534,510: Dan Close, the Dewey, Oklahoma high school history teacher who has spent the last few years publicly calling for a genocide against Muslims, spouting and inciting hatred against LGBTQ people and damning them to Hell, alleging President Obama is a secret Muslim, and accusing First Lady Michelle Obama of secretly being a man in drag. Yeah, I know... "shaming culture" can have shitty unintended consequences. But surely everyone can agree that someone publicly professing beliefs like these should not be allowed to teach history to children? Click on the link and look in his eyes. This fucker is a danger to himself and others, PERIOD.

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A SINGLE CONTRAST CAN REVEAL A LOT ABOUT CHARACTER

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SUGGESTED READINGS

1. I won't even pretend to understand most of what Paul Schmelzing says about how bond market trends might indicate a looming fiscal disaster in his essay, Venetians, Volcker, and Value-At-Risk: 88 Years of Bond Market Reversals, but some very smart people tell me it's pretty great, and maybe important. So yer old pal Jerky is going to take their word for it, and pass the savi- I mean the wisdom, along to you!

2. In case you weren't sufficiently disgusted by all of the above, here's a heart-warming little piece of investigative journalism looking into the increasingly popular practice of locking up the children of parents who are financially incapable of paying fines levied against them in the juvenile court system. Yes, that's right... America now has debtor's prison. For kids. SMHFMLSPSMITGDF.

3. Our old pal Keith Olbermann has a calm, collected, measured message for any of his fellow American citizens who may have cast their vote for Trump for some reason, and it's about what it feels like to realize when you're wrong about someone, and what it takes to prepare for that eventuality. It's actually kind of thoughtful and nice.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

"While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democratic National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines."

- This part of Donald Trump's reaction to Friday's intel briefing feels like the part in the movie where everybody slowly looks at each other, their eyes growing wide, as someone says out loud what everyone is already thinking: "Hold on... WE never said anything about voting machines..." And Trump, realizing what he's just done, stands frozen with an invisible cock in his mouth--as he is oft wont to do--praying nobody starts looking too closely at recent financial transactions made by certain election supervisors working in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, and North Carolina this past November.

DDD EXTRAS

If you want to learn about some cool and/or weird things that happened on this day in history, whether it's on Friday the 6th, Saturday the 7th or Sunday the 8th of January, check out our sister-site, Useless Eater Blog. 

THE TAKEAWAY

The shit is flying fast and thick right now in this, the lead-up to what may ultimately prove to be the most disastrous work-week in modern American history. It's getting very tough to stay on top of everything.

PS - Send any messages, requests for advice, hate mail and other stuff to jerkyleboeuf@gmail.com. I'll be reinstating ASK JERKY and the FIRST AMENDMENT ZONE in the next few days.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"In order to believe that the official vote tallies are legitimate, you have to accept that all of the above legitimately happened: African-Americans in the south went from turning out in droves for Hillary Clinton in the primary to not caring if she won the general election. Donald Trump got sixty-something percent of the same-day voting in Florida. The polling averages were wrong for the first time in modern history. Trump beat his poll numbers despite having spent the primary season tending to fall below them. Clinton fell below her poll numbers despite having spent the primary season tending to beat them. In every state where Trump pulled off a shocking upset victory, he just happened to do it with one percent of the vote. And in an election that everyone cared particularly deeply about, no one really turned out to vote at all. I can accept any one of the above things happening as an isolated fluke. I cannot accept all the above happening. And so for once in my evidence-driven career, I’m left to believe that the conspiracy theorists are right: the vote tallies are rigged." 

- Bill Palmer, senior editor at the independent news outlet The Palmer Report, in an article entitled You're Not Imagining It, The Election Results DO Look Rigged. Bill goes into detail on a number of the above-mentioned discrepancies. The horrible thing is, his list barely scratches the surface. In any case, we will continue to post evidence of the 2016 Presidential elections being stolen here at the DDD, even if only for posterity's sake.

DAILY DIRT FLASHBACK! NOV 10, 2002

I created this info-graphic in the wake of the United States' 2002 midterm elections, the first since the five activist conservative members of the United States Supreme Court - aka the November Criminals - treasonously ended the recount in Florida, effectively handing the White House to the loser of both the popular AND true electoral college votes. 

The 2002 election, some of you will recall, featured two of the most devastating blows ever delivered to America's failing democracy.  

First, and most tragically, was the assassination of incumbent Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone, which itself was an eerie replay of the assassination of Democratic Governor of Missouri, Mel Carnahan, two years earlier. With Wellstone, however, The Powers That Be didn't make the mistake of letting a spouse survive, or leaving enough time to change the ballots, like they did with Carnahan. Having the man's widow step in and snatch away the Missouri governorship from Bush Crime Family consigliere John Ashcroft was a lesson the Bad Guys took to heart, so Wellstone's family was wiped out in the hit.

The second blow was the panicked disbanding of the Voter News Service consortium smack dab in the middle of election day. The VNS had, for decades, conducted exit polling nationwide. But in 2002, for some "unexplained" reason, there were massive discrepancies between exit polls and the "real" results... all in the Republicans' favor, of course. Statistics experts called it "Red Shift", and basically declared it impossible. But hey, if the last couple decades have taught us anything, it's that experts don't know shit. Am I right? Yeah, you know it. Fucking eggheads.

This pro-Republican "discrepancy" in exit polls, by the way, has held true for every election since touch screen electronic voting machines have gone into service. 

More on this subject soon. But for now, enjoy this trip down memory lane as, in his own flailing inconsequential time-wasting way, yer old pal Jerky helps to educate you about...

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ OCTOBER 18, 2016

1. Matt Taibbi is one of the only reasons to read Rolling Stone Magazine anymore, and you shouldn't hold it against him that said severely compromised organ is the one that chose to publish this particularly entertaining and insightful piece of journalistic opinioneering, titled The Fury and Failure of Donald Trump. After vividly portraying the Wisconsin Massacre - wherein House Speaker Paul Ryan's public, on stage meltdown will serve as a "Franz Ferdinand" bookmark moment in future history book articles on the death of the GOP - Taibi goes on to remark:

Trump's early rampage through the Republican field made literary sense. It was classic farce. He was the lewd, unwelcome guest who horrified priggish, decent society, a theme that has mesmerized audiences for centuries, from Vanity Fair to The Government Inspector to (closer to home) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. When you let a hands-y, drunken slob loose at an aristocrats' ball, the satirical power of the story comes from the aristocrats deserving what comes next. And nothing has ever deserved a comeuppance quite like the American presidential electoral process, which had become as exclusive and cut off from the people as a tsarist shooting party. 

The first symptom of a degraded aristocracy is a lack of capable candidates for the throne. After years of indulgence, ruling families become frail, inbred and isolated, with no one but mystics, impotents and children to put forward as kings. Think of Nikolai Romanov reading fortunes as his troops starved at the front. Weak princes lead to popular uprisings. Which brings us to this year's Republican field. 

There wasn't one capable or inspiring person in the infamous "Clown Car" lineup. All 16 of the non-Trump entrants were dunces, religious zealots, wimps or tyrants, all equally out of touch with voters. Scott Walker was a lipless sadist who in centuries past would have worn a leather jerkin and thrown dogs off the castle walls for recreation. Marco Rubio was the young rake with debts. Jeb Bush was the last offering in a fast-diminishing hereditary line. Ted Cruz was the Zodiac Killer. And so on. 

The party spent 50 years preaching rich people bromides like "trickle-down economics" and "picking yourself up by your bootstraps" as solutions to the growing alienation and financial privation of the ordinary voter. In place of jobs, exported overseas by the millions by their financial backers, Republicans glibly offered the flag, Jesus and Willie Horton. 

In recent years it all went stale. They started to run out of lines to sell the public. Things got so desperate that during the Tea Party phase, some GOP candidates began dabbling in the truth. They told voters that all Washington politicians, including their own leaders, had abandoned them and become whores for special interests. It was a slapstick routine: Throw us bums out! 

Republican voters ate it up and spent the whole of last primary season howling for blood as Trump shredded one party-approved hack after another. By the time the other 16 candidates finished their mass-suicide-squad routine, a tail-chasing, sewer-mouthed septuagenarian New Yorker was accepting the nomination of the Family Values Party.

Whether you love him or hate him, there's no denying this Matt Taibbi boy can write. His Twitter feed is pretty entertaining, too.

2.  Next up, I urge each and every one of you reading this to carve out 20 minutes of uninterrupted quiet time to read this astonishingly frank and compelling Washington Post account of the turmoil roiling America's unofficial First Family of White Nationalism. Entitled "The White Flight of Derek Black", Eli Saslo's riveting account begins, in part, by describing what appear to be glory days for the Far Right's most popular father/son team, with an emphasis on the younger man's status as a movement rising star:

He never used racial slurs. He didn’t advocate violence or lawbreaking. He had won a Republican committee seat in Palm Beach County, Fla., where Trump also had a home, without ever mentioning white nationalism, talking instead about the ravages of political correctness, affirmative action and unchecked Hispanic immigration. 

He was not only a leader of racial politics but also a product of them. His father, Don Black, had created Stormfront, the Internet’s first and largest white nationalist site, with 300,000 users and counting. His mother, Chloe, had once been married to David Duke, one of the country’s most infamous racial zealots, and Duke had become Derek’s godfather. They had raised Derek at the forefront of the movement, and some white nationalists had begun calling him “the heir.” 

Now Derek spoke in Memphis about the future of their ideology. “The Republican Party has to be either demolished or taken over,” he said. “I’m kind of banking on the Republicans staking their claim as the white party.” 

A few people in the audience started to clap, and then a few more began to whistle, and before long the whole group was applauding. “Our moment,” Derek said, because at least in this room there was consensus. They believed white nationalism was about to drive a political revolution. They believed, at least for the moment, that Derek would help lead it. 

“Years from now, we will look back on this,” he said. “The great intellectual move to save white people started today.”

Folks, this story goes places and exposes you to realities that you will NOT see coming, I can almost guarantee it. Read this story, absorb it fully, deal with it, grapple with it, then help spread it around. I don't get anything out of this except knowing that I have maybe helped to guide a few more eyeballs towards an important, Pulitzer Prize-worthy piece of journalism. And, yes, that IS Ron Paul up in that photo with Derek and Don.

3. Okay then... after all that heavy stuff, I think we could all use a little comic relief. And so I hereby present the one and only Peter Serafinowicz's latest amazing Sassy Trump video!

I particularly love this video because it highlights a great example of Trump indulging in his favorite pastime, psychological projection, in such a way that causes him to say something that he probably regrets the moment the words slip past his lips. Trump, about whom speculation of cocaine abuse has swirled since his fidgety, aggro, sniffles-plagued performance in the first two debates, accusing Hillary of drug abuse is a concept that is almost perfect in its symmetrical idiocy. James Fallowes over at The Atlantic has an interesting take on this incident, which is even more unintentionally revealing than the time Trump said: "She has tremendous hate in her heart, believe me!"

I'm not even kidding about this: Hillary should show up to the next debate with a urine sample jar, some drug test dip sticks, a doctor willing to witness the sampling, and see whether or not Trump still wants to go through with it. For added comic effect, Hillary could declare: "Don't worry, Donald! This doctor is willing to sign a non-disclosure form regarding the actual size of your penis!"  My best educated guess? Donald probably won't go for it.

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ JUNE 1, 2016

1. Just when you thought 2016 might finally be the year you screw up the courage to follow through with years of idle threats by actually pulling the lever for the Libertarian Party candidate in November's elections, they go and hold the most screwed up party nominating convention since the Whigs' convention in 1939, in which nominee Henry Clay, who'd achieved a plurality of votes during the first ballot, blamed his second ballot loss to William Henry Harrison on the first ballot's third place finisher, Winfield Scott, prompting Clay to brutally pummel Scott during a drunken game of cards, an incident which nearly led to pistols at dawn. If anything, Seth Stevenson's Slate article about last weekend's Libertarian Party Convention goes a long way towards explaining why relatively popular Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson's next, best move might just be to immediately disown the Libertarian Party and pretend the convention during which he was nominated never took place. I mean, consider these excerpts:

Among the leading candidates for the party’s nomination were men who, by nigh any external standard, qualify as total nutters. 

Consider: McAfee—who fled his own Central American residential compound while under suspicion by the Belizean government for the murder of his neighbor; who openly admits that said compound featured a harem of teenage Belizean sex workers; who likes to talk about the time a 16-year-old Belizean prostitute tried to shoot him in the head at point blank range; who bounced around the hotel halls wearing a three-piece suit and a pair of Nikes like some kind of Mad Hatter on meth—had regularly polled in third place for the nomination in the lead-up to the convention and even seemed to have a puncher’s chance to win. 

Further consider: He was barely the weirdest candidate on the scene. Polling second coming into the convention, just ahead of McAfee, was a guy named Austin Petersen. Petersen’s 35 and looks 14, but question if he’s seasoned enough and he’ll yelp, “Tell that to the Marquis de Lafayette.” His go-to applause line: “I want gay couples to defend their marijuana fields with fully automatic weapons.” 

Polling fourth, one slot behind McAfee, was a fellow named Darryl W. Perry, who accepts campaign donations only in the form of precious metals and cryptocurrency and who opted to have his nominating speech delivered by an “erotic services provider” who goes by the moniker “Starchild.” Perry’s most animated moment in the debate came when he slammed his fist against his lectern, forehead veins a-popping, as he insisted that 5-year-old children should have the legal right to inject heroin without adult supervision.

Oh, and did I mention some of these "champions of liberty" appear to espouse the so-called "philosophy" of the so-called "Free Men on the Land" we've been hearing about so much in recent years? Google that shit for the some of the best evidence ever that bad ideas can be as contagious as the common cold.

2. Recently, an old pal sent along a link to The Kavli HUMAN Project, and asked me what I thought of it. On their front page, the Project describe their mandate in the following introductory paragraph:

The Kavli HUMAN Project will be the first true study of all of the factors that make humans… human. For the first time ever we are now able to quantify the human condition using rigorous science and big data approaches to understand what makes us well and what makes us ill by measuring the feedback mechanisms between biology, behavior, and our environment in the bio-behavioral complex.

My prediction? I suspect this project will probably yield a few interesting discoveries, followed by a whole bunch of philosophically questionable and morally bankrupt erroneous conclusions that will, in turn, lead to incredibly damaging policy shifts for a generation or two before ultimately vanishing into obscurity, just like every other technocratic attempt to digitally replicate, cybernetically quantify, and consciously control the ineffable that has preceded it. But hey... that's just me.

3. If you have yet to learn about the heart-warming, inspiring way in which the latest edition of the Scripps National Spelling Bee went down, you owe it to yourself to check out this story. It did, however, leave me with one unanswered question: Why are so many people shocked and surprised when a couple of kids named Jairam Jagadeesh Hathwar and Nihar Saireddy Janga turn out to be better at spelling than kids named Jason Jones, Holly Willis and Joey Smith? I mean, come on!

WTF IS GOING ON IN SOUTH AMERICA?

Lula, Chavez and Kirchner in happier times

For anyone seeking to make sense of the once promising, now precarious political situation in South America, Nikolos Kozlof's uncharacteristically substantive Huffington Post essay serves as a more than adequate starting point. It begins:

From Venezuela to Brazil to Argentina, the political left is crumbling, raising real questions about the durability of South America’s so-called “Pink Tide.” In Caracas, the future of Chávez protégé Nicolás Maduro remains unclear amidst plunging world oil prices, rampant inflation, power shortages and scarcity of basic goods. Opposition politicians have collected almost two million signatures calling for a recall referendum which could oust the president from power. In Argentina meanwhile, voters recently rejected Kirchner protégé Daniel Scioli in favor of Mauricio Macri, thus shattering the Peronist party’s lock on power. Macri disdains the foreign policy maneuverings of his predecessors, that is to say power couple Néstor and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who lined up behind Venezuela and Cuba. By contrast, Macri is seen as much more partial to the United States. ... Though certainly significant, such developments pale beside tectonic change in Brazil, which up until recently was the largest ostensibly leftist country in the wider region. There, lawmakers ousted Workers’ Party President Dilma Rousseff so as to place her on trial for alleged financial wrongdoing. 

While the information presented at the above link is worth knowing in and of itself, Kozlof doesn't stop with just providing a pretty good debriefing on the situation and detailing some of the disturbing implications; he spends the latter half of his article lambasting the US/UK journalistic response (such as it is) by pointing out how "the establishment press is already pouncing on the left’s failures in order to push its own wider hemispheric agenda" and, perhaps more troubling still, how there's been almost no "wider debate" on the "left circuit" over South America. 

Of course, Kozlof is not one to indulge in parapolitical musing, so his commentary is free of the type of analysis that would take into account either the effects of, or the reasons for, the ongoing artificial deflation of global oil prices at the behest of The Powers That Be. 

Our old pal ACD, whom old-timey Daily Dirt readers are sure to remember, recently told me in an email back-and-forth about this topic: "Thus ends nearly 20 solid years of gains for the poorest of the poor in the affected countries. Now Hillary or Trump will preside over a worldwide dismantling of said gains. Maybe Belgium and Denmark's middle class will survive. Canada's won't." 

Let's hope our old pal, brainy as he's proven himself to be over the years, is wrong on this count.

DDD SUGGESTED READING ~ SEPT 6, 2015

1. I assume we're all Pink Floyd fans here, right? Well then, I'm going to have to assume that you guys are going to be as shocked, surprised and delighted as I was to discover that the boys created a multi-page comic book "program" to coincide with their Dark Side of the Moon tour in 1975. As Dangerous Minds explains:  "It has an appealing lack of polish that puts it somewhere halfway between 'professional promotional item' and 'schoolboy’s notebook scribbling.' ... The 'programme' is credited to Hipgnosis, Nick Mason, Gerald Scarfe, Paul Stubbs, Joe Petagno, Colin Elgie, Richard Evans, and Dave Gale." You can download the whole thing at the link, and find more vintage Pink Floyd ephemera at the Ultimate Pink Floyd Fan Site. Especially their Tour Book Project page.

2. I am currently working on a long essay about the Rise of the Conspiritards, in which I will be making use of some of the concepts first delineated by Richard Hofstadter in his ground-breaking essay for Harper's entitled The Paranoid Style in American Politics. It's a great history lesson, and a wonderfully argued bit of intellectual polemic. I urge you all to bone up on it so you'll be better able to grapple with the ideas that I plan to put forth in my own essay. If you're one of those particularly wooly sheeple who believes that nobody died at Sandy Hook, THIS MEANS YOU.

3. And finally for today's "curation" (see Saturday's Suggested Readings for why that's kinda funny), I bring you Italian pop/rock superstar Adriano Celentano's "Prisencolinensinainciusol", a song that topped the Italian pop charts in 1972. The lyrics consist of gibberish designed to sound like English. “Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did,” said Celentano during a 2012 interview with All Things Considered. “I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn’t mean anything.” Thanks to my writing partner Marc Roussel (and BoingBoing) for bringing this gem to my attention. Somebody needs to put this thing in a movie before Quentin Tarantino does.

THE POWER PRINCIPLE I - EMPIRE: A CONCORDANCE

CLIP AND SAVE FOR FUTURE REFERENCE

A CONCORDANCE 

or a series of notes and thoughts on 

THE POWER PRINCIPLE I - EMPIRE

a documentary by Scott Noble (2003) 

The following notes were taken by myself during viewings of the film. The text presented includes some direct references to statements made on camera (indicated by quotation marks), as well as a number of observations, side references and potential avenues for further inquiry that came to mind as I watched. I do this because I believe this film to be an important document in the field of parapolitics, and anything I can do to help get it seen by more people - and, in particular, the RIGHT people - I see as worth doing. Secondly, as I did with my relatively popular concordance for The Net, I wanted to create an easy-to-use text and image based "concordance" that both documents and compliments the information presented in the film. As always, I leave it for you readers to decide whether or not I have succeeded on that count. - YOPJ 15/12/2014

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE AND FOLLOW 

THE CONCORDANCE BELOW!

The Power Principle 1 - Empire from S DN on Vimeo.

CAVEATS AND SUCH (00:00)

“This film contains controversial subject matter. Interview subjects and creators of some source material may not agree with certain views presented. The Power Principle is a non-profit documentary and has been released online for free.”

PREAMBLE

In the years between the end of World War II and 1989, when it fell, 171 people were killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall. With the Cold War over, why didn't Eisenhower's prophesied Military Industrial Complex collapse? Why did Clinton’s promised "Peace Dividend" fail to appear in any truly significant way? Why did most of the meager cuts to the military budget simply migrate over to private enterprise, where tax-payers still ended up footing the bill?

Ah, but all those pressing questions became totally moot on September 11, 2001. The USA now spends over 1 TRILLION DOLLARS a year on the military. As much as the rest of the world combined. There are over 800 military bases in 150+ countries. More money is now spent on air conditioning for American military personnel than the entire budget of NASA. Cuts to war spending are now all but unthinkable.

This film sets out to examine the reasons why.

PART ONE – EMPIRE

CONTINUE READING AT USELESS EATER BLOG!

QUOTE OF THE DAY - MONDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2014

“If you put fresh cucumbers into a barrel of pickles, they will soon turn into pickles.”

- The new mayor of Kiev, Vitali Klitschko, uses a colorful metaphor to explain the gravity of the situation in post-revolutionary Ukraine.

I, PET GOAT II

This gorgeous animated short by a group of Montreal artists calling themselves Heliofant has inspired a ton of ridiculous, piss-poor analysis by the usual Xian, Illuminati-phobic suspects all over the Interwebs. This incredible piece of work (and I mean that on every level of the word) merits every second of the seven minutes of your undivided attention that it demands. You may watch it here, of course, but I recommend you download it from the source, at the creators' website.

PARAPOLITICAL CALENDAR FOR MAY 7

On this day in 1794, French Revolutionary Robespierre proposes that the new state religion of the French First Republic be the Illuminati-inspired "Cult of the Supreme Being". It fails to catch on.

On this day in the year 1824, composer Ludwig von Beethoven's magnificent 9th (and final) Symphony - one of the only world-historic pieces of music - is performed for first time in front of an audience. The vocal section uses Freidrich Schiller's poem Ode To Joy, which is jam-packed with esoteric allusions that are ripe for exploitation as an expression of the beauties and charms of collectivism, which makes its eventual use as the "national anthem" of the European Union both amusing and somewhat troubling. Stanley Kubrick proved that he understood the essential duality of this piece of music - as well as the double-edged nature of genius in general - by highlighting it in an incredibly ironic way in his satirical sf masterpiece Clockwork Orange. 

On this day in 1896, one of the first and most prolific and inventive serial killers of all time is put to death for only a handful of the crimes he committed over a lifetime of almost unbelievable wickedness. His name was Herman Webster Mudgett, alias Doctor Henry Howard Holmes, and he built his own private "Murder Castle" in Chicago during the 1893 World Columbian Exposition - itself an event rife with parapolitical and paracultural over-and-undertones.

On this day in 1952, the concept of the integrated circuit, also known as the "monolithic integrated circuit" and the "microchip" - the basis for all modern computing technology - is first presented to the public by Geoffrey W.A. Dummer. Culturally, economically and historically, it's a game-changer on pretty much every imaginable level.

On this day in 1999, the British Antarctic Survey reports that the sky fell by no less than five miles over the preceding forty year period, as the upper limit of the ionosphere - beyond which lies the vacuum of space - collapsed from 190 to 185 miles altitude. Researchers at the time pointed to this startling phenomenon as "an important environmental warning sign," but yer old pal Jerky hasn't heard any more about it since the report was released. What gives?!

On this day in 2004, in one of the most heinous of many heinous landmarks that we collectively had to endure in the 'naughties, the sadistic and brutal beheading of American businessman Nick Berg is recorded on videotape and released on the Internet for all the world to see. I present to you an editorial that I wrote on the subject of the Berg conspiracy theories, reprinted now at my Useless Eater blog for archival purposes. Also reprinted is one of my best editorials (if I do say so myself), titled The Paradox of Polar Bears. It also touches on Berg's murder, but for much different reasons. I'd suggest you "enjoy", but somehow that just doesn't seem right in this case.

PARAPOLITICAL CALENDAR - MAY 5

Napoleon in Egypt

On this day in 1260, the cunning Kublai Khan seizes control of the vast Mongol Empire, which extends from the Black Sea all the way to the Pacific coast, including most of China, half the Middle East and all of Central Asia. And yet he still made time to be a good host to explorer Marco Polo... for over seventeen years!

Two of the most influential philosophers of all time are born on this day. First, in 1813, Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard is born in Denmark. The father of communism, Karl Marx, is born in Germany, five years later in 1818.

On this day in 1821, Emperor Napoleon I dies in exile on the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic. To this day, he remains one of the most influential World Historic figures of all time, leaving behind a legal, social, military and cultural legacy that simply cannot be over-stated. To teach one's self about the life of Napoleon Bonaparte is to teach one's self the foundational history of the Modern world.

On this day in 1920, police arrest Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti for allegedly murdering two men during a botched bank robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. Their subsequent trials, appeals and executions are the focal-point of one of the biggest justice-related brou-ha-ha's in the history of the USA. I'm talking scores-of-people-dying-in-revenge-bombings big. It made the reaction to the Rodney King verdict look tame by comparison.

On this day in 1925, biology teacher John Scopes is arrested for teaching evolutionary theory to his students in Dayton, Tennessee. This leads to the Scopes Monkey Trial, widely considered one of the most controversial and impactful judicial exhibitions (if not decisions) of the 20th century. What few people know is that the whole thing was a set-up from the start.

On this day in 1981, Irish activist Bobby Sands dies in the Long Kesh prison hospital after a 66 day  hunger-strike. He was 27 years old.

The videogame Wolfenstein 3D, the first-ever "first-person shooter", is released on this day in 1992, leading inexorably to all kinds of craziness.

PARAPOLITICAL CALENDAR - MAY 3

On this day in 1469, Italian historian and political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli - author of The Prince and favorite philosopher of neoconservative Godfather Leo Strauss - is born.

On this day in 1616, prolifically productive wordsmith William Shakespeare is alleged to have died, although some people claim he passed away on April 23, while others claim he never even existed, at all.

On this day in 1802, America's capital city, Washington, D.C. is incorporated, featuring a distinctly diabolical layout, courtesy of Master Mason and civic planner Pierre Charles L'Enfante. Quite disturbing that the old esoteric saying "as above, so below" should apply to road maps as well as it does to... other things.

On this day in 1938, the Vatican officially recognizes Generalissimo Francisco Franco's government in Spain. In the forty years between his inauguration and the end of his murderous, fascist reign in the 1970's, it was never suggested that perhaps it might be a good idea to deny Franco the right to receive Holy Communion, as a symbolic show of disapproval for his brutal tactics. Come to think of it, they never said "peep" to Mussolini, either. American Democratic politicians, on the other hand...

 On this day in 1963, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior delivers his "I have a dream" speech. Meanwhile, in Birmingham, Alabama, the police force there decide to confront the Birmingham campaign protesters with fire-hoses, billy-clubs and vicious attack dogs. That night, newscasts around the world are filled with King's powerful oratory juxtaposed with scenes of brutal and violent police suppression.

ON THIS DAY IN PARAPOLITICAL HISTORY!

MAY 1

The first day in the month of May is celebrated as May Day – also known as International Workers’ Day – almost everywhere in the world, with the most glaring exception being the nation whose citizens’ blood fertilized the soil of its inception: the United States of America.

First suggested at the first congress of the world socialist Second International in 1889, May Day was meant to commemorate Chicago’s infamous Haymarket Massacre of three years prior, in which dozens of labour demonstrators were gunned down by police after one of them allegedly threw a dynamite bomb.

The holiday was formally recognized as an annual event at the International's second congress in 1891. Three years later, following a particularly nasty Wall Street panic, the May Day Riots took place in Cleveland, OH. Ten years later, in 1904, the International Socialist Conference meeting in Amsterdam called on "all Social Democratic Party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on May First for the legal establishment of the 8-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace."

Considering its origins and history, it shouldn't be too surprising that The Powers That Be have never had much love for May Day. Right-wing governments, invariably favoring Capital over Labour, have historically downplayed the holiday’s significance, often celebrating “Labour/Labor Day” on another day – for instance, as in the USA and Canada, on the first Monday of September.

Unfortunately, simply shifting the holiday to a different spot on the calendar left folks with nothing to celebrate on the first day of May. The solution? How about the one-two punch of Law Day and Loyalty Day? Yes, that’s right, in the late 50’s, Republican President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower and his Republican-led Congress created these two (count’em!) brand spanking new holidays to take people’s minds off the central role labor has played in human progress over the years!

Of course, the above covers the “Red Root” (Labour) version of May Day. There exists another, “Green Root” (Pagan) version of the holiday, related to the sex-heavy Celtic festival of Beltane and the somewhat less sexy Germanic festival of Walpurgis Night (which is named after a Saint, after all). Some of the more hard-core versions of this European celebration were done away with after Christianization, but surviving traditions usually involve dancing around a Maypole – representative of either a Sacred Tree or a giant phallus, depending on who you ask – and other fertility-related activities, such as presenting gifts of flowers to loved ones. Beltane, specifically, involves ritual purification through fire, and if you've seen the The Wicker Man (1973), you already know how much fun that can be.

ALSO ON THIS DAY

On this day in 1776, a Jesuit-trained Bavarian philosopher by the name of Adam Weishaupt adopts the name “Spartacus” and establishes a secret society which he dubs the “Order of Perfectibilists”, more popularly known as the Illuminati. Both Weishaupt and his long-defunct organization remain as poorly understood today as they were by their contemporaries, a point underscored by the fact that Thomas Jefferson counted himself an unabashed admirer.

On this day in 1863, the Confederate Congress passes a resolution declaring no Black Union soldiers may be taken prisoner. Instead, all Black soldiers are to be shot on sight. And yet, some people still try to make believe the Civil War was about "state's rights," and had nothing to do with the institution of slavery. Go figure!

On this day in 1915, the RMS Lusitania departs from New York City for her 222nd – and final – crossing of the Atlantic. Six days later, a torpedo launched from a German submarine would sink her off the coast of Ireland, killing twelve hundred. 128 of the dead were Americans, which caused an about-face in the US population’s doggedly non-interventionist stance vis-à-vis the Great War. Within months, Americans would be dying in their thousands in the hideous, Satanic meat-grinder of trench warfare, ostensibly to avenge the deaths of those unlucky dozens.

On this day in 1930, the Solar System’s ninth planet is saddled with the decidedly Hellish name Pluto, borrowed from the Greek Lord of the Underworld. Upon their discoveries, Pluto’s moons would be given the similarly Stygian monikers Charon, Nix and Hydra. Who makes these decisions?!

On this day in 1945 a German newsreader announces that Adolf Hitler has "fallen at his command post in the Reich Chancellery fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany.” And the crowd goes wild!

On this day in 1948, The Democratic People's Republic of Korea – a.k.a. North Korea – is established by “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung. Folks, you couldn't pack more irony into a single sentence if you tried. Today, nearly 75 years and two generations of despotism later, North Korea retains its title as quite possibly the single most fucked up nation on a planet that is known for being home to some incredibly fucked up nations.

On this day in 1956, the polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk is made available to the public. And we all lived happily ever after.

On this day in 1960, a Lockheed U-2 spy-plane being piloted by American Francis Gary Powers is shot down over the Soviet Union. Powers survives by ejecting, and his U-2 glides to a soft crash-landing that leaves it frustratingly intact, allowing the Soviets to learn everything about the plane's structure and abilities when they pick it apart. Powers is interrogated for months, then forced to confess to espionage. He was sentenced to 10 years hard labor at a Soviet work camp, but ended up serving less than 8 months before being sent back to the USA in a spy-swap. After a different kind of rough landing back home (he was interrogated by hostile officials from the CIA, Pentagon, a few Senate committees and even Lockheed!), Powers continued his aviation career until 1977, when he heroically ditched his helicopter rather than risk a crash-landing in a field where children were playing..

On this day, in 1986, Russia finally tells the rest of the world about the nuclear accident at Chernobyl… five days after what was at that time the worst meltdown in the history of nuclear power. Much to the delight of the Ukrainian Tourism Bureau, “Fukushima” is poised to replace “Chernobyl” as short-hand for “FUBAR Nuclear No-Go-Zone”.

And, finally, on this day in 2003, Americans celebrate "Mission Accomplished Day" when Preznit Dubya appears before a cheering crowd of soldiers on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in full padded-crotch regalia to declare that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” Sadly, nothing could have been further from the truth.

THE NET - A CONCORDANCE

CLIP AND SAVE FOR FUTURE REFERENCE

A CONCORDANCE 
or a series of notes and thoughts on 

THE NET, THE UNABOMBER, LSD AND THE INTERNET

a documentary by Lutz Dammbeck (2003) 

The following notes were taken by myself during two separate viewings of the film. The text presented includes all of the subtitles from the film (indicated by quotation marks), as well as a number of observations, side references and potential avenues for further inquiry that came to mind as I watched. The reasons for my engaging in this admittedly somewhat pedantic exercise are twofold. Firstly, I do it because I believe this film to be an important and insufficiently propagated document in the field of parapolitics, and anything I can do to help get it seen by more people - and, in particular, the RIGHT people - I see as worth doing. Secondly, I wanted to create an easy-to-use text and image based "concordance" that both documents and compliments the original film. I leave it for you readers to decide whether or not I have succeeded on that count. - YOPJ - 26/04/2012

PRELUDE 

"In 1930, Viennese mathematician Kurt Godel shakes the foundations of mathematics with his incompleteness theorems. He demonstrates that in every formal logical system there are problems that are not solvable or conclusively determinable. The truth is superior to provability."

Mathematician Kurt Godel

THE NET 

Continue Reading this Concordance at the Useless Eater Blog...

THE NET - THE UNABOMBER, LSD AND THE INTERNET

In 2003, German filmmaker Lutz Dammbeck released an independently produced documentary film entitled Das Netz, the English title being The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and The Internet. Since its debut, it has slowly been acquiring a reputation as a must-watch production among serious students of conspiracy, secret histories and parapolitics in general. 

In my opinion, this is a film that deserves much more attention that it has been given, and it needs to be seen by a lot more people, for a long list of reasons that will become obvious once you've watched it, which you can either do here, using the embedded video provided below, or on Youtube.com, where the subtitles will probably be a lot easier to read.

Unfortunately, the film's official website is a German language only. Unless you're one of those lucky Fritzes and Friedas who speak it, that's too bad, because the site seems to have a pretty active forum section.

I am bringing this film to your attention now because I have nearly completed a lengthy "study guide" for it, which I intend to post here sometime during the next 24 hours. In it, I flesh out some of the concepts Dammbeck touches on only briefly, tease out some potential implications and offer my own, alternate explanations to some of the information presented in the film. I also offer suggestions for further avenues of research to compliment and broaden your understanding of the rich bounty of information presented in this remarkable film.

And so, in closing, I urge you to watch this film, and keep watching this space for my upcoming study guide!

Cheers!

YOPJ

EVIDENCE OF REVISION, PART SIX OF SIX

EVIDENCE OF REVISION, PART FIVE OF SIX

ALBERT'S BLOG ON ALL THINGS PARAPOLITICAL

Check out Albert's Blog BDC192, the new blog by my old pal - and very interesting character in his own right - Albert Venczel. He's working on a media degree at a prestigious Toronto university, and he's undergoing a trial by fire right now as an adult student back in school at a later point in his life. He's a good man who's had some intriguing encounters, and his work on a variety of 9/11-truth-oriented projects (among other things) deserves some attention, so here's a link to his work. Wish I could do more for you, Albert! Sorry I lost all my audience! Seriously. It sucks for both of us.

EVIDENCE OF REVISION, PART FOUR OF SIX