Revolution

and its discontents

Boy howdy Taibbi does it again:

That Democrats needed Thomas Frank to tell them what conservatives fifteen miles outside the cities were thinking was damning in itself. Even worse was the basically unbroken string of insults emanating from pop culture (including from magazines like Rolling Stone: I was very guilty of this) describing life between the cities as a prole horror peopled by obese, Bible-thumping dolts who couldn’t navigate a Thai menu and polished gun lockers instead of reading.

It’s well worth reading The F*ck Kansas Article in whole before continuing on to Vice’s

Boogaloo Bois

They tend to view themselves as the younger, action-oriented generation of militiamen. But they’re hard to pin down ideologically. Their ranks include hard-line libertarians, anti-government types, some white supremacists, and many active-duty military. Experts say that diverse composition is part of what makes them dangerous, and hard to track.

And they’ve got a lot of guns.

Or the Atlantic’s

As decades of rising inequality produced successive generations who felt they were consigned to the fringes, 4chan became an outlet to express rolling waves of escapist memes and radical anger. Among the left, this uptick in radicals and the corresponding increase in funding for law-enforcement agencies have generated further support for protests aimed at defunding the police and diverting the funds to social programs. Among libertarians, they have produced phenomena such as the boogaloo boys.

I received a great deal of pushback when I said we should begin to listen to the tea party, not because their ideas are good but because they are the canary in the trash stratum coal mine. Or the social silencing of extremist groups rather than winning thru the war of words and ideals - Now we have the results of suppressing fringe movements - Sudden weeds blooming everywhere - We thought de-platforming was roundup but its more like compost. 2 examples of glitchy technocrat rule:

From Boing Boing: Very serious novel includes Nintendo fantasy ingredients in dye recipe

In one scene, a recipe for red dye is described:

"The dyes that I used in my dressmaking were composed from various ingredients ... almost all required nightshade, sapphire, keese wing, the leaves of the silence princess plant, Octorok eyeball... For the red I had used for Abrila's dress, I employed spicy pepper, the tail of the red lizalfos and four Hylian shrooms."

These are recipes from the Nintendo game Breath of the Wild, a sprawling open-world adventure featuring the company's house elf Link and a roster of fabulous fauna and fauna.

Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates - The Verge

There are tens of thousands of genes in the human genome: minuscule twists of DNA and RNA that combine to express all of the traits and characteristics that make each of us unique. Each gene is given a name and alphanumeric code, known as a symbol, which scientists use to coordinate research. But over the past year or so, some 27 human genes have been renamed, all because Microsoft Excel kept misreading their symbols as dates.

On the other side (fair and balanced, after all):

“It’s amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form. It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses so soon,” explained investigator Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, at the time of the 2016 discovery.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/08/mysterious-carvings-evidence-human-sacrifice-uncovered-ancient-city-china/

I’m assuming that everyone on this list supports BLM and the struggle POC are having in the US. If you don’t please unsubscribe;-) Also please, please sign up for the Black Agenda Report: https://www.blackagendareport.com/newsletter/signup

I was looking for an article by Glen Ford (where I believe he says of BLM “A revolutionary insurgency movement was underway in the US and when asked for their demands they replied with minor changes to the municipal budget) and instead came across one of the best political essays I’ve read in a long time:

Essays on The Cult of White Feminism: The “Cos”-play of Elizabeth Warren  | Black Agenda Report

Feed Me, Seymour

Cosby’s complicated psychology as analyzed by Coates, Huber and Ford is significant because he was more than a star.  Stardom can make a person’s friends, family and home town look good.  Superstardom can make the entire machine that produced it look good.  Cosby was more than that; Cosby was an icon.  

It should be required reading for anyone in the ‘Resistance.’ Her support of Bernie is a little overstated IMO, but her rhetorical moves are simply brilliant.

And it speaks to the point: We are all LARPing the apocalypse (revelation) in real-time, with or without costumes.

Hey Doc what about psychedelics? (well here’s a few entertaining ‘psychedelic’ influencers:

Alejandro Jodorowsky Will See Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune,’ but Says ‘It’s Impossible’ to Do It Right

Any director trying to adapt Frank Herbert’s “Dune” has a holy mountain to climb. Alejandro Jodrowsky and David Lynch were revered auteurs when they took it on, and both came up short. Now, it’s Denis Villeneuve’s turn, with the Warner Bros. sci-fi epic opening December 18. As the world awaits first footage, much about Villeneuve’s version remains shrouded in secrecy.

Therapy llama ‘Caesar the No Drama Llama’ calms tensions at protests

Caesar, better known as “Caesar the No Drama Llama,” is a retired 6-year-old Argentine grand champion show llama that now works as a therapy llama and “llamactivist.” One of his best talents is offering emotional-support hugs, which people line up to give him at protests and other places where Caesar shows up.

He’s somewhat of a celebrity llama

It combines the safety we need with the horror franchise we love.

Oh and an article about psychedelics:

DIMITRI MUGIANIS - JONATHAN DICKINSON

AUGUST 1, 2020 6:00PM (UTC)

In August, 2019, Michael Pollan spoke about the promise of psychedelic therapy to a receptive audience at the American Psychological Association Convention. Pollan was coming off of a very successful year: The New York Timescalled his book one of the best of 2018, and his lecture marked the culmination of a public discussion that has helped to bring psychedelic therapy to mainstream consciousness.

Then, just a few weeks later, Elijah McLain, a young black man, was killed by police after being involuntarily administered ketamine. A psychedelic substance with powerful dissociative effects, ketamine has been promoted as a template for psychedelic therapy and is also increasingly used as a tranquilizer by police departments that are attempting to avoid the liability of firearms and tasers.

Sigh and lastly 3 excellent articles on Fascism:

The horror is all around us. It proliferates our daily news. It dominates social media. The economy is in shambles. The COVID pandemic is spreading like wildfire while we face the strangest US election in modern history. If you want to make sense of it all, Hollow Resistance is required reading. In CounterPunch’s latest book, radical historian Paul Street recounts the Democrats’ culpability in the rise of Trump and explains how his neofascist horrors took root during the Obama years, and will live on even if Joe Biden is victorious in November.

Hannah Arendt on Loneliness as the Common Ground for Terror and How Tyrannical Regimes Use Isolation as a Weapon of Oppression

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

(Sounds a bit like our Social Media Noosphere doesn’t it?)

And for fans of “Gravity’s Rainbow” or how the Nazis won the war history:

How the Fascists Won World War II

For fifteen years, this had been headquarters of the giant German conglomerate IG Farben. The main slave labor camp at Auschwitz was designed, administered, and financed within the walls, and profits from the camp were remitted to these offices. Joseph Mengele submitted detailed reports on his hideous Auschwitz experiments directly to this building, where his directors dutifully authorized his payments and requisitioned whatever equipment and supplies he requested. Here was invented the Zyklon-B gas used to murder millions of Jews, Communists, Roma, and homosexuals. Even more important, in this building were the brains and other vital organs of the company that invented and produced the synthetic rubber, synthetic oil, and new lightweight alloys

Interesting times.