JOHN STEWART HIJACKS COLBERT'S LATE SHOW AND... WOW.

Sit back, get comfortable, and prepare to enjoy a nice thick slice of muscular liberal satire. 

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ JULY 22, 2016

1. It's been over a week since an abortive coup attempt appeared to take place in the strategically pivotal nation of Turkey, and even though increasingly disturbing developments have been taking place on a seemingly hourly basis ever since, we still essentially don't know shit about what really happened.

Upon first learning of the coup, I took to Facebook to state my belief that not all democracies are equally democratic, and not all military coups are equally militaristic. I wrote that we might all soon be wishing that the Turkish coup had succeeded, and that all that was left to do was wait and see. 

Today, even some of the most mainstream journalistic sources are open to the possibility that President Erdogan and his increasingly tyrannical AK Party cronies launched this deadly, false flag coup themselves, in order to manufacture a pretext for a speeding up of their ongoing crackdown on any dissent or opposition, no matter how slight. 

Of course, the ever growing chorus of Vladimir Putin fanboys in the "alternative" news media are having none of it; for them, the failed coup was obviously launched by Americans terrified of the recent Russo-Turkish detente.

In any case, if you'd like to learn more about exiled Turkish billionaire cleric Fethullah Gulen - the man whom Erdogan and his cronies are accusing of being behind the coup - check out this mini-dossier I wrote on the subject over at our sister blog, Useless Eater, over five years ago. Tuns out it's still relevant!

2. Speaking of coups, counter-coups, and questionable parapolitical shenanigans, have you ever wondered what a humour-impaired Communist cultural critic might think of Star Wars? It starts off, as all good pseudo-intellectual takes on Star Wars must, with an explanation of Joseph Campbell's highly influential theory of the "monomyth", before proceeding thusly:

But all this assumes that Campbell’s story really is universal and absolute, something that precedes culture and ideology. Which it isn’t: it’s the product of an antisemite’s ecumenicalism, the kind of syncretic cultural milkshake that Umberto Eco describes as the first condition of fascism. 

Look at the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars, really look at them, and try to see anything like a radically democratic revolution against tyranny. What is the class composition of these rebels? Of the ones we know, there’s one member of a hereditary royal family, one petty criminal, one former ruler of a privately owned city, and one adopted child of rural landowners (and, possibly, slaveholders) who is also the scion to an ancient religious order of aristocratic knights. 

At the start of A New Hope, we hear that the Alliance has growing support within the Imperial Senate, and Imperial Senates aren’t usually very fond of proper revolutionaries. Consider the Alliance’s tactics. Every time we meet the rebels, they have built themselves a base on some deserted planet, where they’re stockpiling heavy arms. 

As any good student of Mao knows, a revolutionary movement can only succeed if it wins the trust of the people; holding territory is a game played by the State, not those trying to overthrow it. We never see the rebels being sheltered from Stormtroopers by grateful peasants (while they do ally with the Ewoks, it’s with a fully colonial sense of entitlement); we never see Alliance propaganda being passed around in secret by the oppressed; we never see any indication that this armed faction has any kind of popular mandate whatsoever. It’s not just infantile bourgeois ultraleftism — Blanquism in space. 

At the end of The Empire Strikes Back, we see for the first time a full Rebel Alliance fleet; vast blobby spaceships to rival the Empire’s. Aren’t warships expensive? Who’s funding these people? Consider that when we see that fleet, it’s positioned outside the Galaxy. There’s a name for groups like the Rebel Alliance. Not freedom fighters, but Contras, right-wing death squads.

Fun stuff, n'est ce pas? And if you thought the above was goofy, just wait until you get to the part where the author, Sam Kriss, declares his preference for the sequel trilogy!

3. And lastly for today, I am pleased to announce that the most brilliant satirical mind of the "fin de millennium" media milieu is, at long last, working on a new project: his second full-length film, after 2010's excellent and tragically under-appreciated Islamic terrorism satire, Four Lions. No word yet on the topic, but considering Morris' track record, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a work of genius.

AN UNLIKELY HYPOTHETICAL

If a hyper-advanced race of aliens came to earth and told us to assemble our species' greatest achievements so that they could use them to stand in judgement over us, I would be perfectly comfortable with including Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii in total, and "Saucerful of Secrets" in particular, among the prime exhibits in our favor.

If you have any suggestions for achievements and artifacts to include in this hypothetical collection in defense of humankind, please either e-mail them to me, or let us know in the comments section, below. I know it's annoying to sign up to YET ANOTHER online entity just to leave a lousy comment or two, but I'd like to include more polls and things making use of Blogspot's commenting function, so please take the time to sign up, okay? I know that there are scores - and sometimes hundreds - reading each post, and I'd like to see that reflected in comments activity.

MEDIAVORE // COMICS ~ DAN CLOWES' LATEST IS A MASTERPIECE

Alternative comics legend Daniel Clowes is nothing if not prolific, and his output generally falls into one of two categories: short form comedy and long form graphic novels that, while retaining some comedic elements, tend somewhat towards detached, ironic bathos. Patience, Clowes' latest long form narrative project, is by far the most impressive work he's produced in the latter category.

Without giving too many plot details away (I've seen many reviews of Patience that are chock full of ridiculously revealing spoilers), I can tell you that Clowes has crafted a deft blend of soft sci-fi time travel fantasy and idiosyncratic, multiple stream-of-consciousness character study. So if you've ever wondered what Back to the Future would be like if it had been directed by Todd Solondz, then this is the book for you.

For those of you without access to a quality neighborhood comics shop or alternative independent culture store, Patience may be purchased at a seriously discounted price from Amazon.com. Also, if you buy it via the provided link, yer old pal Jerky gets a few shekels tossed into his beggin' cup.

If you're looking for a book that highlights an entirely different aspect of Clowes' substantial talents, look no further than his formally innovative misanthropic gut-buster WILSON, which continues to be my favorite thing that Clowes has ever done, and one of my favorite graphic novels of all time. And yes, purchasing it from the above link helps to keep me blogging.

SUGGESTED READING (WATCHING) LIST ~ JULY 11

Sometimes, it's easier to watch than it is to read. Something about the information getting injected directly into your neocortex or something. Anyway, sit back, relax, and watch. - YOPJ

1. First off, here's a quite amazing little allegorical animation from German artist Emanuel Strixner. No words are necessary to convey its timeless message.

2. Here is the story of Alex Landau's 2009 traffic stop in Denver, which resulted in... well, just watch this animated version of his version of the events that took place. I have looked into this incident, myself, and have found Landau's credibility to be far greater than that of the officers involved in this disgusting case of cut-and-dried brutality.

3. And finally, thanks to Birth Movies Death for bringing Jon Lajoie's latest, A New Beginning - described as "the perfect love letter to slasher films" - to all our attentions. It is most definitely a thing of beauty, and perfectly captures a piece of my own childhood.

OUR OLD PAL MARC BELL GETS BEST AMERICAN COMICS 2016 COVER!

Buy it now from this link, so that I can earn a few shekels in my beggin' cup! In fact, make ALL your Amazon purchases via links from my page, to help keep me in Caesar Salad and licorice whips!

INTERESTING BALL, A SHORT FILM BY DANIELS

Interesting Ball from DANIELS on Vimeo.

WORDS OF WISDOM

"All great, genuine art resembles and continues the 

Revelation of St John."

- Boris Pasternak

I DREW A WIZARD! ENJOY!

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ JUNE 9, 2016

1. Well, our old pal David Cole Stein went and dun diddit. He wrote an article that I've been planning to write myself for the better part of a year now: a definitive take-down of the increasingly unhinged, and inexplicably widespread, pathetically idiotic "conspiritard" mindset. That's what an epic case of self-sabotaging procrastination gets you pretty much every time. On the bright side, however, he has saved me a bit of a task. Of course, David comes at it from a different angle than I would have - for instance, his nonsensical fretting about "leftist tyranny", which in the context of 2016 America is almost as goofy as the stuff the "false flaggots", as he colorfully anoints his targets, are spouting - but it's still a pretty excellent piece of writing. He writes, in part:

False flag mania has now reached the point where the producers of a massively popular, high-profile Israeli TV series think the term is hip and familiar enough to garner their show attention and success in the U.S. There was a small air of condescension among some of the people with whom I spoke, a sense of (and I’m paraphrasing here) “if the goyim want to believe every Muslim act of terror is a false flag, we might as well profit from it.” Truth be told, I share that condescension. I wrote disdainfully about false flag conspiracy theorizing over a year ago, and after my experience at the LAJFF after-party, I thought it might be edifying to revisit the topic. 

First off, it’s important to get an understanding of the definition of “false flag” among the conspiracy-minded. Initially, the term had a fairly simple meaning. It’s an operation designed to hide the true identity of the perpetrators of a crime while at the same time framing an innocent person or entity. Soldiers from country A dress in the uniforms of country B and carry out atrocities to make country B look bad. That has happened, no question. In fact, it’s an age-old war tactic, although so is claiming that something was a false flag when it wasn’t (country B actually does commit an atrocity and tries to weasel out of it by claiming, “No, it was people from country A wearing our uniforms! We wuz framed”). 

Thanks to a dynamic partnership between trolls and lunatics, “false flag” has transmogrified into something very different these days. Now it is used to refer to fake events, hoaxes that were completely staged. “Crimes” (mass shootings, bombings, etc.) that involve no actual crime and no real victims. The “perpetrators” are all conspirators and the victims are all “crisis actors.” 

Not only did Sandy Hook never happen, there is no Sandy Hook. Obama faked a town called Newtown and a school called Sandy Hook. Thousands of average people were hired to portray residents, neighbors, students, and administrators, and every member of the media was bribed to play along. There was no gunman, no victims. And of course, not one of the pretenders—not even the small children—has ever betrayed the secret (because we all know that 6-year-olds are the world’s best secret-keepers). Bataclan never happened. The Boston Marathon bombing and the Brussels airport attack? Never happened. The Santa Barbara mass shooting? Aurora? Roanoke? Charleston? San Bernardino? Fake, fake, fake. Crisis actors and stage blood.

Unfortunately, despite my own best efforts over the years, I know that a few "false flaggots" still lurk amongst my regular readership. I therefore urge each and every person who comes across today's Suggested Reading List to surf on over to Taki's - enemy territory though it may be - and read David's excellent article in its entirety. It just might do you some good.

2. Thanks again to David for covering bogus conspiracy theories, above. Now, let's delve into some conspiracies that have a pretty good chance of actually being true, via this AOL-curated list of the Top Eight Conspiracies in the Sporting World. Keeping things topical and timely, let's take a look at Number Five on their list, Ali-Liston II's infamous "Phantom Punch", about which they write:

The theory: Sonny Liston took a dive and was "knocked out" by a "phantom punch" from Ali midway through the first round in their 1965 rematch. 

Why it might be true: There were rumors that Liston had run up major gambling debts to the mafia, so he may have bet against himself in the fight and then lost on purpose to make back what he owed. Also, footage of the Ali jab that floored Liston shows that it barely connected. 

Why it might be false: It was a punch that barely connected. Yet it connected. And it was thrown by Muhammad Ali. If the average person took a glancing blow from 1965 Muhammad Ali, they would not only be knocked out, they would be decapitated.

Keep reading and learn about David Stern's frozen draft pick envelope, Michael Jordan's "secret suspension", and Janet Jones' (NOT Wayne Gretzky's, surely!) gambling problem.


3. [adult swim] keeps surprising with their output. This particular short film, a trio of strange tales collected under the title MULCHTOWN, doesn't exhibit the terrifying refracting insanity of recent masterpieces like This House Has People In It and Unedited Footage of a Bear, or the self-assured, gleaming satirical perfection of Smart Pipe or For Profit Online University, but it has a certain charm all its own. Enjoy!

BBC4 DOCUMENTARY ON THE HISTORY OF HORROR FILMS - Part One

Watch along with me, why don't you?

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.

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ MAY 31, 2016

1. For the most part, if I link to an article or an essay here in the DDD's semi-regular "Suggested Reading List" column, it means that I either endorse it or have otherwise enjoyed it. Greg Hatcher's essay for Comic Book Resources, entitled The Day Captain America Betrayed Me, ostensibly about last week's public outcry over the revelation that Steve "Captain America" Rogers has secretly been working for the Nazi-affiliated HYDRA organization all along, is a rare exception. 

Not that it's poorly written (with the possible exception of the lazy bait-and-switch title), or aggressively annoying, or anything like that. I even quite enjoyed the first part, where he describes his youthful trauma at a much earlier "shocking" comic book revelation. Mostly, my issue with this essay stems from Hatcher's somewhat condescending and superior tone, such as in when he informs his readers:  

Guys, this is how ongoing adventure serials WORK. They’re TRYING to shake you up and get you invested. It’s what you do when you have long-running serial adventure characters.

Agreed, Greg. But in your haste to belittle all those angry comic book readers who have taken to the Internets to vent spleen over this storyline, you seem to forget that public fanboy freakouts are just as big a part of "what makes ongoing adventure serials work"!  Why pooh-pooh people for reacting passionately when a passionate reaction is obviously what the creators were after? It's all part of the fun, isn't it?

Before moving on to our second and third entries, I would just like to say that, yes, I am aware that my argument could very easily be turned against my own lambasting of Greg's lambasting of those who are currently lambasting Marvel. I know that. Also, I would like to thank Greg for publicly responding to the comment I left at his site, which you can see at the above link.

2. Put on your Deep Thinking helmets, folks, because the Oxford University Press blog is asking us to contemplate the "Realism of Social and Cultural Origins". Before exploring the widespread but rarely acknowledged influence of commercial and engineering interests on the sciences, essay author Aitor Anduaga details the philosophical foundations of scientific realism:

Until now, the most known type of realism in science has been the operational one. The Stanford School philosophers, Ian Hacking and Nancy Cartwright, held that scientists are justified in believing in the existence of theoretical entities only when they’re able to use them to produce effects. They called this fact “operational realism.” Thus, the existence of an entity, such as an electron, can be established only through manipulation and experiment. What convinces scientists that they’re seeing electrons is no empirical adequacy of theory, but the fact that they can manipulate in a direct and tangible way to achieve certain results. In fact, Hacking’s most famous motto says: “if you can spray them, then they’re real” — that is, an entity is real if we can manipulate it; so, manipulability is evidence of existence.

The philosophical implications of this "operational realism", particularly in regards to psychiatry and political science (which in some ways is a form of mass psychiatry), are pretty astonishing, particularly when viewed through the lens of paracultural and parapolitical historical analysis. I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to stumble into your own epiphanies about how Hacking and Cartwright's fundamentalist positivism connects to historical technocratic/cybernetic efforts to quantify the ineffable, such as MKUltra and the like.

3. This is a very revealing and educational ten minute look at the ideological roots and the racial underpinning of the insidiously propaganda-manufactured "conservative" longing for a return to America's mythical, pre-Civil Rights "Golden Age". Watch and share, as 2000 hits is far too few for a video presentation of this quality and caliber.

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ MAY 28, 2016

1. In your recent online travels through the more political sections of the Internet - but most especially in journalistic comment sections shitted up by Matt Drudge's loyal army of Keyboard Kommandos, as well as other assorted subhuman garbage people* - you may have come across a newly minted taunt: "Cuckservative", often shortened to just plain old "cuck". This Baffler article by Amber A'Lee Frost is a good place to begin learning about both the origins of this insult, and the pretty obvious psychopathies pulsing through the mushy brains of the people who make up the online "movement" that has so enthusiastically adopted it as their go-to insult of choice. Frost explains:

Just as you’d assume, cuckservative combines conservative and cuckold, referring not literally to the husband of an unfaithful woman, but rather to the sort of insufficiently masculine RINO (Republican In Name Only) who is unable and/or unwilling to vanquish the corrosive forces of Marxism, feminization, and reverse racism that threaten to destroy the very fabric of our once-beautiful country. 

At Salon, Joan Walsh professed her shock and disgust at the coinage, thanking The Daily Caller’s “mild-mannered, clean-cut conservative writer” Matt Lewis for bringing its ugly genealogy to her attention. Lewis claimed the first half of the word comes from the “cuckold” genre of pornography, wherein a black man has sex with a white woman while the performer playing her white husband watches ashamed, titillated, or both. In this context, the slur implies a “race traitor.” Over at The New Republic, Jeet Heer corroborated this usage and expounded on the term’s disturbing undercurrents of psychosexual racism under the too-clever-by-half headline “Conservatives Are Holding a Conversation About Race.” ... 

Not long after the first wave of cuckservative commentary washed over the servers of the left-leaning Internet, the sheer spectacle of liberal agita over the expression attracted the attention of more respectable outlets of debate. The Columbia Journalism Review dove into an intensive etymology of the term. (Did you know that The Oxford English Dictionary informs us that “cuckold” likely came from “cuckoo,” a bird that lays her eggs in another bird’s nest?) Even the venerable Gray Lady, though reluctant to broach the topic of pornography, felt obligated to translate cuckservative to her readership, unfortunately covering it under “Politics” and not, as I had hoped, in the Style section. 

As cuckservative went more or less mainstream, most conservative pundits scrambled to distance themselves from it, which makes sense, since it wasn’t doing much to enhance their standing in a presidential election cycle (and since conservatives, as we know, are traditionally averse to both pornography and obscenity). Erick Erickson at RedState denounced the word, calling it “a slur against Christian voters coined by white supremacists”—a condemnation echoed by Matt Lewis, the aforementioned “mild-mannered, clean-cut” sociologist of porn. It’s a fantastic feat of mental gymnastics to twist the cuckservative affair into fodder for a Christian persecution complex, but it’s hardly an unprecedented move for white commentators on the right. After all, many talking heads initially treated the recent massacre of black church parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, by white supremacist Dylann Roof as a secular assault on a Christian house of worship. ... 

As far as I know, the only high-profile conservative who went to the mat for cuckservative was right-wing novelty act and gay Catholic Breitbart scribe Milo Yiannopoulos. He presumes that since he has “literally taken black dicks in the ass,” his careful analysis of the theoretical racial dynamics at play afford him a sort of Standpoint Theory expertise—the kind of intellectual authority granted only by personal experience. ... 

Yiannopoulos further argued that cuckold and cuckservative are not racist terms because they were popularized not on Stormfront or in some KKK chatroom, but in that bastion of postracial enlightenment, 4chan, which, as it turned out, played no small role in Roof’s radicalization.

Unfortunately, Frost misses some important stuff regarding cuck's coinage, which, stray outliers aside and notwithstanding Yannapowhatsis' mincing prevarications, apparently took place in the rabidly racist cesspit of TheRightStuff.biz, home to a cohort so deaf to the signature screech of cognitive dissonance that they can go from denying the Holocaust to celebrating the Holocaust in a single sentence without even pausing to add a dash or a comma. A breed apart, indeed. Anyway, read Frost's article, keep in mind what I have added to it here, do your own research if you feel it's necessary, but above all, remember... people who say "cuck" should be avoided, but you should also keep tabs on them. See the asterisk at the bottom of this post to find out why.

2. As if the above story (and all its various parantheticals) wasn't enough to fill your heart with hate this morning, why not read this Prospect Magazine story about Max Martin, the Swedish "Svengali" of the international music industry? This is a man who got his start with the execrable Ace of Bass, and who appears to have recently cracked the code for writing godawful saccharine pop music hits.

In a new book entitled The Song Machine, the New Yorker writer John Seabrook forensically tells the story of “All That She Wants,” and what it set in train: a new kind of industrialised popular music in which every last nuance is carefully considered, instant impact is all and songs are filled with enough sonic punch to monopolise people’s attention. 

The story moves from the watershed success of Ace Of Base, through such international boy-band sensations as the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, on through the rise and fall of Britney Spears and on to the modern pop aristocracy: Rihanna, Katy Perry and Taylor Swift. The speciality of the songwriters and producers who work with such artists, Seabrook says, is music “made for malls, stadiums, airports, casinos and gyms,” which is metaphorically “vodka-flavoured and laced with MDMA.” 

If you want a illustrative flavour, listen to Swift’s frantic 2014 masterpiece “Shake It Off”: as exciting a pop record as I have ever heard, and so addictive that having it buzzing around your head produces an anxious, unfulfilled feeling similar to needing a cigarette. The only cure is to listen to it again and again. 

Seabrook calls tracks like this “industrial-strength products.” And self-evidently, they are made in an industrial kind of way.

The music being discussed is, of course, absolute and utter shit. But the story itself is quite interesting, if a little bit creepy with some definite (but subtle) MKUltra undertones. Bad music, a conspiracy? Why the hell not!

3. And finally for today, we bring you the story of the weird-ass machine that succeeded in freaking out none other than Nikolai Tesla, himself: the Spirit Radio!

“My first observations positively terrified me as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night”

– Nikola Tesla, 1901 article Talking With The Planets

The first link, above, has a video featuring some audio recordings of the super-spooky, cosmic sounds made by this most unique device, and even links to a set of instructions so that you can make your very own Spirit Radio! How cool is that?! If I was more of a tinker, I might give it a go, just to have something to put next to my very own home-made Dream Machine!


*A list that includes Trump's True Believers, Social Security-collecting FOX News "libertarians", Red Pill-poppers, meme-spewing Alt-Right Mega-Trolls, Evangelical Hyper-Zionists, Conspiritarded "Info-Warriors" (actually the woolliest sheeple on the Animal Farm), "Race Realists", proponents of the "Dark Enlightenment", NeoReactionaries (NRx), and other such groups among whose ranks currently lurk the next David Koresh, Dylann Storm Roof, Tim McVeigh, Cliven Bundy, Anders Breivik, Anton Lundin-Pettersson, Frazier Glenn Miller, Wade Michael Page, etc, etc, etc...