Category: Flotsam-and-Jetsam

FBI Bankrolled Publisher of Occult Neo-Nazi Books, Feds Claim

Court documents claim that a confidential informant who helped bring down Atomwaffen Division is also a publisher of white supremacist literature.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has paid a man involved in a publishing house specializing in occult neo-Nazi books more than $100,000 since 2003, according to court filings.

The publishing house is Martinet Press, fine purveyors of Atomwaffen Division-approved books such as Iron Gates and Liber 333. The former is a book about a Satanic cult roaming a post-apocalyptic America, which opens with a scene of a child being murdered.The apparent informant is Joshua Caleb Sutter, a man with longstanding ties to white supremacist organizations. Sutter’s father was a Pentacostal preacher who ran racist memorabilia stores in the area around the South Carolina capital of Columbia; Sutter and his father would take turns running the counter.

The court documents implicating Sutter are from the federal government’s case against Kaleb Cole, whom prosecutors say was a leader of the neo-Nazi terror group Atomwaffen Division. Obtained by investigative journalist Ali Winston, the documents are a motion to suppress evidence related to a search warrant used to search Cole’s house.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE: https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyv9zk/fbi-bankrolled-publisher-of-occult-neo-nazi-books-feds-claim

 

So much ice is melting that Earth’s crust is moving

So much ice is melting that Earth’s crust is moving

As the continents’ frozen burden dissipates, the ground deforms — not only in the immediate area, but also in far-flung locations.

The loss of melting ice from land masses such as Greenland and Antarctica is causing the planet’s crust to warp slightly, even in spots more than 1,000 kilometres from the ice loss.

LINK: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02285-0?fbclid=IwAR1_d0xhB7frPvmD8AOizqgY8tNHtj1mZ9xJjvRJj4fPhtEmEJaHJYl5E8w

How David Foster Wallace Used Compromise Aesthetics to Sell Infinite Jest

How David Foster Wallace Used Compromise Aesthetics to Sell Infinite Jest

Rachel Greenwald Smith on the Treacherous Common Territories of Literary Culture and Capitalism

Ardor characterizes Anderson’s tone, but it also becomes a value in and of itself in her editorial work. “I loathe compromise, and yet I have been compromising in every issue by putting in things that were ‘almost good’ or ‘interesting enough’ or ‘important,’” she writes in this particular issue. “There will be no more of it.”

Against “good poems” she wants to publish capital-A Art, art that goes beyond simply being the best version of itself. Notably diverging from Poetry magazine’s Open Door policy, Anderson believed that truly great art was not a matter of individual quality; it was a matter of ferocity of commitment. She wanted art that could knock a person over, art that “uses up all the life it can get.” She invokes the modernist credo “art for art’s sake,” but in an avant-garde reversal insists that this means not a retreat from the world of politics and history but a commitment to it. “Revolution is Art,” she explains. “You want free people just as you want the Venus that was modelled by the sea.”

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE: https://lithub.com/how-david-foster-wallace-used-compromise-aesthetics-to-sell-infinite-jest

Climate Change and the Future of Cities | Eric Klinenberg

What qualities help assure that a community can survive the threat of disaster? The population density of cities leads to inherent vulnerabilities to mass climate disasters: such as single point of failure transit systems and utilities built prior to today’s environmental realities. At the same time the resources of cities offer tremendous potential for preparation and innovation.

As a sociologist, Klinenberg brings insights on how neighborhood dynamics (what he calls “social infrastructure”) can help individuals & communities prepare for extreme weather including flooding and heat waves. He discusses how cities can be wiser and think more long-term by planning traditional infrastructure projects which also enable such social infrastructure in their design.

“Climate Change and the Future of Cities” was given on March 07, 02017 as part of The Long Now Foundation’s “Conversations at The Interval” Salon Talks. These hour long talks are recorded live at The Interval, our bar, cafe, & museum in San Francisco. Since 02014 this series has presented artists, authors, entrepreneurs, scientists (and more) taking a long-term perspective on subjects like art, design, history, nature, technology, and time. To follow the talks, you can:

A Former College Professor Accused Of Serial Arson Is Denied Bail In California

Investigators say they’ve linked the Ranch Fire, pictured here shortly after its discovery, and other blazes to Gary Maynard, a former college professor. He is charged with starting only the Ranch Fire.
U.S. Forest Service

 

Firefighters battling the Dixie Fire have also been facing a second enemy: a serial arsonist who went on a spree of setting fires in July and August — and who sought to trap fire crews with his fires, according to agents from the U.S. Forest Service. They allege former college professor Gary Maynard is the culprit, citing their tracking of his movements and other evidence.

“Where Maynard went, fires started. Not just once, but over and over again,” the government said in a court memorandum arguing for Maynard to be denied bail.

LINK TO FULL ARTICLE: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/11/1026700103/former-college-professor-arson-charges-california-dixie-fire

The Body, Biopolitics and Covid, The Night Forest Journal Issue 4 – Call For Howls

A repost of https://nightforestpoetry.wordpress.com/2021/07/30/the-body-biopolitics-and-covid-the-night-forest-journal-issue-4-call-for-howls

A howl erupts from the body, out into the world. From the flesh of the animal howling, its musicality rides the air, unseen but undeniably there.

A cough or a sneeze releases tiny particles of a disease named Covid-19 from the body, a presence that can ride upon the air and infect those who cannot see it, or deny its presence. It is not a friend to those animals it makes its host – perhaps it has become a friend to authoritarian governments however? Or has it been a monkeywrench in the machine, undermining political-narratives and creating issues for the state? Perhaps neither? Perhaps both? We do not pretend to know, with any quality of definiteness.

We know that we encounter the body as beautiful. We feel a desire for the bodily presence of living beings. If eroticism is assenting to life up to the point of death, as Bataille defines eroticism, there is an erotic quality to our life-desire. What does desire, eroticism, or love mean amidst a pandemic? Is this space that we find ourselves in the best or the worst space for love poetry? Again, we do not pretend to know.

For the fourth issue of The Night Forest Journal, we are asking for submissions on the body, biopolitics and Covid-19. As with previous issues, we will accept poems, essays, short stories and visual art for this project. Suggested areas of focus are –

Health and wellbeing

Bio-medical authoritarianism

Love, sex and desire in the pandemic

Free-love during lockdowns

Conspiracy and the art of seduction

Medicine-person praxis

Vaccine passports and (micro-)nationalism

We will publish up to 3 submissions from each contributor, but will consider any submissions sent to us. There is no limit in length of poems or essays. Submissions can be sent to us via nightforestpoetry@gmail.com or via our social-media presences. The deadline for submissions is the winter solstice 2021.

The Heroes of This Novel Are Centuries Old and 300 Feet Tall

THE OVERSTORY
By Richard Powers
502 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $27.95.

Trees do most of the things you do, just more slowly. They compete for their livelihoods and take care of their families, sometimes making huge sacrifices for their children. They breathe, eat and have sex. They give gifts, communicate, learn, remember and record the important events of their lives. With relatives and non-kin alike they cooperate, forming neighborhood watch committees — to name one example — with rapid response networks to alert others to a threatening intruder. They manage their resources in bank accounts, using past market trends to predict future needs. They mine and farm the land, and sometimes move their families across great distances for better opportunities. Some of this might take centuries, but for a creature with a life span of hundreds or thousands of years, time must surely have a different feel about it.

And for all that, trees are things to us, good for tables, floors and ceiling beams: As much as we might admire them, we’re still happy to walk on their hearts. It may register as a shock, then, that trees have lives so much like our own. All the behaviors described above have been studied and documented by scientists who carefully avoid the word “behavior” and other anthropomorphic language, lest they be accused of having emotional attachments to their subjects.

LINK TO REST OF STORY: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/books/review/overstory-richard-powers.html

LIBGEN LINK: http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=F6AA2C30BD11C9BE06D379C41119B979

Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made

https://youtu.be/BhRYNJOtYC8

Why The Deadliest Film Ever Made Is Finally Being Released

Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made is a cursed film is supposedly responsible for nearly 60 deaths. It’s now getting released for anyone to see.

 

One of the Writer/Director’s of Antrum said about Xen: The Zen of the Other:

…wildly creative experiments with form…through a down-to-earth lens and with a sense of humor. … I felt spoken to many times as Ezra articulated his own frustrations with life and with his own expectations of the world. – DAVID AMITO, award-winning Actor. Writer, Producer, Director of Antrum

‘One of the worst jobs I ever had’: former Citizen employees on working for the crime app

Working for the app, which feeds users local crime information, ‘is very traumatic’ and the managers ‘don’t appear to care’

“There’s nothing that tells me that that wouldn’t happen again,” one employee said. “It’s a private security force controlled by a bunch of really rich white men who have no concept of the communities that they’re supposedly protecting because all they want is money. What could go wrong?”

Link to full story: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/02/citizen-app-employees-mental-health