Category: Flotsam-and-Jetsam

Alabama police department blames Satan for spike in homicides

 

Go, ‘merica!

A rural Alabama police department that used social media to scold community members for rejecting God is coming under fire from a group that opposes mixing government and religious faith.

A statement posted on Facebook by the Opp Police Department on Tuesday blames a spike in area homicides on the idea that young people have turned away from God and “embraced Satan.” The post followed two gunshot killings in as many days in Covington County, located on the Alabama-Florida line.

LINK: https://www.al.com/news/2018/12/alabama-police-department-blames-satan-for-spike-in-homicides.html

NYT Column Promotes “Human Extinction”

The anti-humanism is flowing hard and fast these days. I just reported on a piece published in Science decrying “human supremacism.” Now, the New York Times has published a piece arguing in favor of human extinction.

Professor of philosophy (of course!) Todd May believes that we should go the way of the dodo because we are “the source of devastation of the lives of conscious animals on a scale that is difficult to comprehend.” Never mind that animals cause each other suffering, which May recognizes. We cause by far the most, so away with us!

LINK: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/nyt-column-promotes-human-extinction/

Peter Sotos ‎– Buyer’s Market (AWB Recording, 1992) [Full Album]

https://youtu.be/prODovMDh4A

*All rights belong to AWB Recording https://www.discogs.com/Peter-Sotos-B… 1. Children 00:00 2. McMartin 17:47 3. Trash 26:46 4. Bundy 38:06 5. Victims 48:06 Just for promotion. Please write me a direct message if you have complains about this upload concerning copyright issues. In that case, i will delete the video immediately.

Beyond our Ken

‘Against the Light: A Nightside Narrative’ by Kenneth Grant (Starfire Publishing, 1997)

reviewed by Alan Moore

First published in KAOS 14, 2002

As fascinating and as ultimately mystifying as a giant squid in a cocktail dress, what shall we make of Kenneth Grant? I know few occultists without at least a passing interest in his work, and I know fewer still who would profess to have the first idea what he is on about. What he is on. To open any Grant text following his relatively lucid Magical Revival is to plunge into an information soup, an overwhelming and hallucinatory bouillon of arcane fact, mystic speculation and apparent outright fantasy, as appetising (and as structured) as a dish of Gumbo. The delicious esoteric fragments tumble past in an incessant boil of prose, each morsel having the authentic taste of magic, each entirely disconnected from the morsel which preceded it. Sometimes it seems as if inferior ingredients have been included, from an unreliable source: the occult data and the correspondences that simply fail to check out when investigated, knowledge that appears to have been channelled rather than researched. Doubtful transmissions from the Mauve Zone.

Spicing this delirious broth, characteristically we come across bewildering yet urgent outbursts in which Grant repeatedly protests that the eleventh degree ritual of the OTO involves no homosexual practices, or jaw-dropping accounts of magic workings that defy all credibility, with live baboons dragged screeching into nothingness by extra-human forces, this delivered casually, almost as after-dinner anecdote. The onslaught of compulsive weirdness in Grant’s work is unrelenting, filled with jumpy fast-cuts that remind one less of text than television: H P Lovecraft’s House Party. Each chapter an emetic gush of curdling chthonic biles and juices served up steaming, a hot shrapnel of ideas, intense and indiscriminate. A shotgun full of snails and amethysts discharged point blank into the reader’s face.

READ MORE: https://coronzon.com/beyond.htm

‘An Indication of What’s Coming’: Melting at North and South Poles Worse Than Previously Thought

While NOAA’s annual report shows the Arctic has lost 95 percent of its oldest, thickest ice, NASA researchers have observed ice retreat in East Antarctica—a region they’d believed was stable

 

New data shows that over the past three decades, the Arctic has lost 95 percent of its oldest, thickest ice. (Photo: Christopher Michel/Flickr/cc)

As the Trump administration tries to undermine the COP 24 climate talks in Poland, new U.S. government data shows that ice melt at both of the planet’s poles—driven by rising air and ocean temperatures resulting from human-caused global warming—is worse than previously thought.

LINK: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/12/11/indication-whats-coming-melting-north-and-south-poles-worse-previously-thought

‘I can’t breathe’: Transcript of audio recording from Jamal Khashoggi’s murder reportedly describes him gasping for air in his last moments

The transcript of an audio recording from Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal killing reportedly describes the Saudi journalist gasping for air in his final moments.

LINK: https://www.businessinsider.com/transcript-of-audio-from-jamal-khashoggi-murder-i-cant-breathe-saudi-crown-prince-2018-12

The Man Making Art From Government Surveillance

Trevor Paglen writes the kinds of books that get you into weird conversations with strangers. He takes the kinds of pictures that are slightly unnerving until you read the title card, and then it becomes a regular amount of unnerving.

LINK: https://www.npr.org/2018/12/09/673403822/the-man-making-art-from-government-surveillance

Five to One: Rethinking the Doors and the Sixties Counterculture

Abstract

While historians have examined the complexity and nuance of the 1960s counterculture, their analyses of the popular culture that was intimately connected to it continue to focus on “hippie” culture from San Francisco. The Doors represent a different side of the experience. They were influenced by ideas that were influential across the movements that coalesced into the popular resistance front of the late sixties, but the band articulated an unorthodox brand of countercultural resistance that affirmed or rejected different aspects of the culture as it was discussed at the time and as it would later be constructed in popular memory. They advocated “sex as a weapon,” while subtly eschewing “psychedelia” and rejecting the more overt elements of hippie culture, especially Woodstock, in favor of “darkness” and “constant revolution.” The band’s extreme popularity in the late sixties points to the wide appeal of their particular countercultural brand.

LINK: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mp/9460447.0008.103/–five-to-one-rethinking-the-doors-and-the-sixties?rgn=main;view=fulltext

Children of Ted Two decades after his last deadly act of ecoterrorism, the Unabomber has become an unlikely prophet to a new generation of acolytes.

People have moments like that under normal conditions, of course. Sigmund Freud wrote a famous essay about them way back in 1929, Civilization and Its Discontents. A few unsettled souls will always quit that bank job and sail to Tahiti, and the stoic middle will always suck it up. But Jacobi couldn’t accept those options. Staggered by the shock of his Kaczynski Moment but intent on rising to the challenge, he began corresponding with the great man himself, hitchhiked the 644 miles from Chapel Hill to Ann Arbor to read the Kaczynski archives, tracked down his followers all around the world, and collected an impressive (and potentially incriminating) cache of material on ITS along the way. He even published essays about them in an alarmingly terror-friendly print journal named Atassa. But his biggest influence was a mysterious Spanish radical theorist known only by the pseudonym he used to translate Kaczynski’s manifesto into Spanish, Último Reducto. Recommended by Kaczynski himself, who even supplied an email address, Reducto gave Jacobi a daunting reading list and some editorial advice on his early essays, which inspired another series of TV-movie twists in Jacobi’s turbulent life. Frustrated by the limits of his knowledge, he applied to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to study some more, received a full scholarship and a small stipend, and buckled down for two years of intense scholarship. Then he quit and hit the road again. “I think the homeless are a better model than ecologically minded university students,” he told me. “They’re already living outside of the structures of society.”

LINK: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/the-unabomber-ted-kaczynski-new-generation-of-acolytes.html

The mind-bendy weirdness of the number zero, explained

We explain nothing.

The computer you’re reading this article on right now runs on a binary — strings of zeros and ones. Without zero, modern electronics wouldn’t exist. Without zero, there’s no calculus, which means no modern engineering or automation. Without zero, much of our modern world literally falls apart.

LINK: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/7/5/17500782/zero-number-math-explained