blue bits. red rocks.
What struck me as strange about Chomsky was this: In the 1960s and 1970s, he emerged as a mainstream critic of the American Empire — first and foremost by being against the Vietnam War and critiquing the intellectual bankruptcy of American intellectuals, technocrats, and academics (whom he frequently called “mandarins”) who were trying to give aggressive imperialism a progressive and positive spin. What was interesting was that he went after the early computer-crazy technocrats who wanted to use early computers to create political weapons: systems for the monitoring, predicting, and controlling of societies. These were the people who dreamed of creating the cybernetic, constantly surveilled and manipulated Vampire Valley world that we all live in today. And yet I also discovered that, at the same time, Chomsky was in his own small way helping to create Vampire Valley. His work was directly funded by the same imperial security apparatus that he was critiquing — an apparatus that wanted to put a digital layer over the entire world.
DOJ released Epstein files with dozens of nudes and victims' names, reports say
The DOJ missed a December 19 deadline set by the Epstein Files Transparency Act by more than a month, but still released the files without fully redacting nude photos and names of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. The New York Times reported yesterday that it found “nearly 40 unredacted images that appeared to be part of a personal photo collection, showing both nude bodies and the faces of the people portrayed.”
If the shift in the midterms is similar to what we just saw, the Republicans in the House would shrink from 218 seats to somewhere in the 80s. That level of political destruction won’t happen, but voters are extremely angry. And if Democrat picked up a lot of unexpected seats, it won’t just affect the GOP. Non-establishment people like Rehmet would flood into the Democratic caucus, and upend the traditional hierarchy.
The ripoff economy is baked into the American experience. It is the foundation of Trumpism. It is the financial basis for things like “Project 2025” – literally! The Heritage Foundation (who created Project 2025) was founded and funded by the founders of Amway, a destructive Ponzi scheme that was rescued from criminal prosecution when Gerald Ford (Congressman to Amway’s founders) became president and ordered the FTC to let them off the hook
Remember: the right is the movement that says that governments are inefficient and corrupt, so right wing elected leaders make their own case by being incompetent and corrupt. Someone like Trump has to convince people that they can’t rely on institutions or their neighbors.
The reality of the Trump administration: there’s Trump himself, a malignant narcissist, reputedly addicted to stimulants, his body giving way to congestive heart failure, who speaks of himself in the third person and measures his allies and enemies based on how they relate to “Brand Trump.” Witness his screed about Renee Good’s parents being “pro-Trump.” He’s not a smart guy—never has been—which goes to prove, contra his boosters, that America is a place where the worst of us can fail upward, especially in politics. He’s surrounded by a collection of fascists, crackpot ideologues, fellow grifters, loyal idiots, suckerfish, and women selected for abject loyalty and what they look like ← a bizarre and fetishistic aesthetic we discussed in an earlier post.
Trump and his goons want to intimidate all of us — not just journalists, but anyone who might consider criticizing or protesting or objecting. He wants to arrive at a point where he does what he wants and no one has the courage to object. This is the way of tyrants everywhere, who know they don’t have to murder or imprison everyone who might expose or criticize them. They only need to do it to enough high-profile exemplars for the rest to decide that stepping out isn’t worth the risk.
(Source: bsky.app)
Lenin was a poaster. The tsardom had imploded, the Provisional Government was ascendant—and manifestly failing to solve any of the empire’s problems. The war continued. The hunger continued. Lenin rode to power on a simple message: PEACE. BREAD. LAND. Because people believed in that message—because they believed he had a plan to solve the crises afflicting their nation—because socialism had become the language of resistance—they followed him. The pages that came off that typewriter of Stalin’s had more impact than bullets or rubles. The Bolsheviks did not build revolutionary cadres from scratch. Trotsky co-opted the existing security services of the state—the famous soldiers and sailors of the Petrograd Soviet—not through armed resistance, but through poasting. (And organizing.)
