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Former Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain’s strange obsession with ‘Twin Peaks’


A tweet from former presidential candidate Herman Cain’s official Twitter page from Monday, July 17th, 2017.
 
A friend of mine hipped me to the weird tweets coming from idiotic 2012 presidential candidate and Fox News “personality” Herman Cain. It appears that over the last five or so days Cain has been tweeting images from David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks along with short rants.

If you’ve successfully blocked memories of Mr. Cain out of your mind, let me help you with that. This is the same guy that once referred to strategic U.S. ally Uzbekistan as “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan” so it’s probably not all that surprising that his Twitter account would be a bit unhinged. However, this new stuff seems a bit nutty even for Cain. I mean, he even went so far as to post a photo of Morning Joe‘s Joe Scarborough next to a picture of John Nance in character from Eraserhead. What are you doing Herman Cain? I don’t know if I should get behind this or get to the bottom of it. Perhaps some of our more investigative-minded DM readers will be able to figure out the meaning of these strange dispatches. For now, I’ll leave you to check out screenshots of Cain’s Twin Peaks related tweets below and after the jump…
 

July 18th, 2017.
 

July 17th, 2017.
 

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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07.18.2017
07:03 pm
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‘Not a Wolf’ is DEFINITELY NOT the Twitter account of a wolf pretending to be a man, nope
12.13.2016
09:26 am
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I know mileage varies on this, but I find Twitter to be good almost exclusively for humor, otherwise I almost couldn’t care less about it. It’s not even just seeking comedians’ feeds, I also surpassingly love good one-joke Twitter accounts, the more narrow and absurd the better. From the almost zen-like “Coffee Dad” to the seasonal-affective “Santa Klaus Nomi,” run your one stupid idea into the ground and I’ll probably find it funny once it’s gone on way too long. And in a similar spirit of denial shown by “Not a Cop,” here’s “Not a Wolf.”
 

 

 

 
“Not a Wolf,” if you haven’t picked it up from the content (or this post’s headline) is the purported feed of a “Coffee lover. Graphic designer. Definitely not a wolf pretending to be a man.” This very, very silly and wonderful thing is the brainchild of Chicago comedian Dan Sheehan, known as the creator of “We Still Like You”—a traveling storytelling show and podcast 100% centered around first-person narratives of shame—and the once extremely popular blog “I Suck at Tinder,” another high-concept affair, which must have petered out, as he switched it to a more general theme a little over a year ago.
 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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12.13.2016
09:26 am
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Of Skittles and Skypes: Shocking codewords ‘Racist Trump Twitter’ uses to avoid account suspension
10.03.2016
09:01 am
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This fucking election. I’ve heard that exact phrase so much more this year than I ever have before. The rise of Trump’s racist, sexist, illiberal id within the Republican Party has been depressing to watch. We’re all holding our breath to see where all of that unruly anger goes after (please God) Trump loses the election on November 8. 

In the meantime, the mainstreaming of Trump (our own American Mussolini®) and his politics of racial resentment, the KKK’s David Duke (whose name I’ve heard more in the last week than in the previous 20 years combined), and Breitbart News executive Stephen Bannon has also meant an inevitable education in the loathsome habits of the overtly and proudly racist part of America that is normally kept under wraps. I don’t want to know this stuff, but have learned about it via a sort of toxic, brain-damaged cultural osmosis.

So here’s something I learned this year. In white supremacist quarters the number “88” has special significance, because “H” is the 8th letter of the alphabet and so it can be taken to mean “HH” = “Heil Hitler” (also “8” kind of looks like an “H” if you think about it). It took the political rise of Trump to bring that to my attention. Fun stuff!

If you see the number 88 being thrown around by people who probably hate blacks and Latinos, it’s not an accident, it’s a dog whistle to the people who (wink) think of themselves as understanding the “true America” in which immigrants and blacks always win and white people and Christians never get an even break.

You may have seen the triple parentheses, also called “echoes,” around people’s names, which look like this: (((Martin Schneider))). That’s white supremacist code for “Jewish.” (Fortunately, Twitter users are now adopting the practice voluntarily in order to defuse it of its meaning.)

And the innocuous word Skittles is a racist dog whistle because that’s what Trayvon Martin had on his person when George Zimmerman shot and killed him for no good reason.

Some of you might recall that Trump’s son Donald Jr. recently unveiled an ugly metaphor having to do with the number of poisonous Skittles could be in a bowl before you’d make a decision to stop eating them, the idea being to communicate the advisability of a zero-tolerance policy on Muslim immigration.

That metaphor has roots in Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher—in more recent years the concept has been used against Muslims and black people using M&Ms as the candy, but the switch to Skittles was surely done as a conscious shout-out to Zimmerman. It’s astonishing how few news reports noticed this aspect of the metaphor, but the governing logic of an effective dog whistle is that most people—non racist people—can’t hear it.

On Saturday Buzzfeed ran an item by Alex Kantrowitz alerting “normals” to some new codewords the white supremacists on Twitter are using to evade detection. I heard about it via this tweet from Alex Goldman, who describes the groups using the terms as “Racist Trump twitter.”
 

 
Here’s the ugly list of words and their “true” meanings among white supremacists. Notice the presence of that loaded word skittles to mean Muslims or Arabs:
 

nigger = google
Jew/Kike = skype
Spic/Mexican = yahoo
Gook/Chink = bing
Muslim/Arab = skittle
gay (men) = butterfly
lesbian = fishbucket
tranny = durdens
liberals/dems = carsalesman
conservatives = reagans
libertiarian = a leppo

 
Here’s Kantrowitz on the reasons for the subterfuge:
 

The code appears to have originated in response to Google’s Jigsaw program, a new AI-powered approach to combating harassment and abuse online. The program seems to have inspired members of the online message board 4chan to start “Operation Google,” using Google as a derogatory term for blacks in an attempt to get Google to filter out its own name. The code developed from there.

 
This is obviously an elaborate game of whack-a-mole, but just because it’s kind of futile in no way diminishes the importance of letting some daylight in on these creeps. If they have to go through a hundred iterations of inventing some whole new elaborate code to enjoy their twisted, simple-minded hate among themselves, then maybe eventually they’ll get the message that society is not going to put up with it.

Here’s an example of the code in use. It don’t get a whole lot clearer than this, does it?

 
Here are a couple of other examples:

 

 
Ugh! This fucking election? How about This fucking country???

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
10 sexting codes parents should know

Posted by Martin Schneider
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10.03.2016
09:01 am
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Today’s best country music songwriter is a Twitter bot
02.29.2016
11:18 am
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In 2016 the most interesting and prolific lyricist in the genre of American roots music is a twitter bot named horse_bluegrass.

Programmer Jared Wenerd fed the lyrics of 1,796 bluegrass songs into a text prediction algorithm. The algorithm creates sentences with a certain degree of randomness, but using predictions of words likely to follow the preceeding word, based on the input of the original songs fed into the program. The end result are lyrics that are at times nonsensical, but at other times quite poignant and profound.

The code takes text, parses it into individual words, to create a model where the algorithm knows the likeliness that one word will follow another or end a phrase. For instance starting with the word “in” it knows that a likely word to follow will be “the”, “a”, or 43 other different words. The algorithm decides to go with “the” due to the statistical likeliness and randomness. It then continues and chooses the next word after “the” using the same process… and so on until the algorithm decides the phrase should end. Once it has a complete phrase, it publishes the text to Twitter

.

The twitter account updates every couple of hours.

Here’s some of horse_bluegrass’ fine work. Certainly as good as, if not better than, anything coming out of Nashville in 2016. Check it out, no songs about pick-up trucks or beer:
 

 

 

 
More robotic country music lyrics after the jump…

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Posted by Christopher Bickel
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02.29.2016
11:18 am
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2015: The year the Internet decided it was over Banksy
08.25.2015
01:06 pm
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Anti-establishment artist Banksy has been taking a beating on the Interwebz this week after the launch of his latest installation, Dismaland.

Some of the most scathing (and hilarious) recent critiques of the artist have come from the Twitter account of writer Demi Adejuyigbe (@electrolemon). Previously responsible for what has been called “the best tweet of all time,” Adejuyigbe eviscerates Banksy’s M.O.

Banksy: Trite, predictable, obvious? This week the Internet seems to think so:



 

 

 
More Banksy critiques, after the jump…

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Posted by Christopher Bickel
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08.25.2015
01:06 pm
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‘Why don’t you love me?’ Teddy Ruxpin speaks your social media emotions
08.17.2015
12:14 pm
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Teddy Ruxpin
 
You know what I remember about the 80’s? Not a lot. And the things I do remember I generally dismiss as useless, with some exceptions. Like the time I decided to put an actual cassette tape (it was Blizzard of Ozz in case you were wondering) in the back of a Teddy Ruxpin that belonged to a kid I used to babysit. Those were good times.
 
TED interactive exhibit
 
Back in 2012, artist Sean Hathaway created an interactive installation called “T.E.D.” (Transformations, Emotional Deconstruction) that featured 80 Teddy Ruxpins hanging from a wall that seamlessly culled 24 different human emotions that were expressed through social media. According to Hathaway, the installation was kind of like “taking the collective emotional pulse of the Internet.” The speech that flows from the Teddy is accompanied by music composed by Portland-based musician, Carlos Severe Marcelin. The dreamy, sometimes creepy and often sad video from the installation that may ruin your childhood (in case someone hasn’t done that for you already), follows.
 

“T.E.D.” or Transformations, Emotional Deconstruction interactive exhibit

Posted by Cherrybomb
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08.17.2015
12:14 pm
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Random tweets reformatted as Western Union telegrams
03.23.2015
03:26 pm
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”@kiki_13056,” 2013
 
I stumbled across the work of Charles Gute when a friend sent me an image of this amusing, meta-commentary pin. That drove me to his website, and I was not disappointed.

This series is called “Random Tweets Reformatted as Telegrams.” It’s an easy trick, but putting these “virtual” messages usually consumed on smartphone screens on old-timey telegrams more redolent of the Wild West or the Hindenburg crash or something, it just works.

Gute notes that “there are notable similarities between formats, such as the economy of words and syntax imposed by a limited number of characters,” which is certainly true. Plus, the last Western Union telegram, a medium that had existed for more than a century, coincided almost exactly with the first Tweet—there was a gap of almost two months—so it’s like the one short-form method of communication passed the baton on to the other.
 

”@hanannanahh,” 2013
 

”@longliveallyson,” 2012
 

”@zackshack,” 2013
 
More old-timey tweets after the jump…....
 

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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03.23.2015
03:26 pm
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Nick Cave hates Twitter
09.10.2014
02:11 pm
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Photo by Derek Ridgers.
 
Last year on February 19, 2013, Nick Cave did a Q&A on Twitter for his 15th studio album Push the Sky Away. And as one would expect—c’mon it’s Nick Cave on Twitter of all things!!!—the Black Crow King hated every damned minute of it.

Some might find Cave’s answers appropriately cranky. I found them to be completely hilarious.

 

 

 

 

 
Aaannnd drumroll, please…


 
via Cherrybombed

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Trailer for Nick Cave in ‘20,000 Days on Earth’
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds live in Moscow, 1998
Revisiting Nick Cave’s classic ‘From Her to Eternity’
Nick Cave area rugs because… why not?
Nick Cave doesn’t want MTV Awards’ nomination for ‘Best Male Artist’ of 1996
Nick Cave doll

Posted by Tara McGinley
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09.10.2014
02:11 pm
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The Twitter feed of Gary Burghoff—‘Radar’ from ‘M*A*S*H’—is a scurrilous delight
01.22.2014
01:05 pm
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Gary Burghoff
 
It may have been the ever-alert Patton Oswalt who got the ball rolling when he tweeted his admiration for Gary Burghoff’s hilariously bilious Twitter feed (@Gary_Burghoff), in which the actor who played Radar in M*A*S*H (movie and TV show both) has been furnishing all kinds of insider dish about the show as well as Battle of the Network Stars. Now everybody on Twitter is falling over themselves to retweet his scandalous bon mots.
 

Apparently Burghoff has a particular distaste for Alan Alda (Hawkeye on M*A*S*H) and Robert Conrad (Black Sheep Squadron star, but more pertinently, captain of the NBC squad on Battle of the Network Stars in 1976), as seen here:

 

 

 

Note that @Gary_Burghoff has not been verified by Twitter, but the tales of (and petty resentment over) Alda and Conrad have the ring of authenticity to them. If you’re a defamation attorney in Florida (where Burghoff currently lives, according to the Twitter feed bio), there might be a client here for you.

Below we have a clip of one of the greatest moments in sports history, in which ABC (blue; Hal Linden, Gabe Kaplan, Penny Marshall, Robert Hegyes, Lynda Carter, Richard Hatch) defeats CBS (red; Telly Savalas, MacKenzie Phillips, Adrienne Barbeau, Kevin Dobson, Pat Harrington) in the climactic tug-of-war competition in the 1976 Battle of the Network Stars, preceded by Robert Conrad whining about losing a race to Gabe Kaplan or something.
 

 
via deathandtaxes
 
Thank you Lawrence Daniel Caswell!

Posted by Martin Schneider
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01.22.2014
01:05 pm
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America need a reboot?
10.01.2013
10:52 pm
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shutdownsignoffrestart.jpg
 
Sounds like a plan…
 

 
Via Chris Hall

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.01.2013
10:52 pm
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Facebook, Twitter and MySpace: Gateways to Heroin
02.25.2013
12:42 pm
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image
 
A perplexing 2010 anti-drug campaign from the Long Island Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.

I’m not entirely sure what you’re supposed to take away from this? First off, who still uses MySpace??? And secondly, she looks perfectly fine and healthy hooked on heroin! I don’t see a problem.

Here are some choice reddit comments about the poster:

StewieBanana: I have a Heroin account. It’s stupidly addictive and no where near as enjoyable as it used to be.

ToInfinity_MinusOne: It went downhill after my parents joined.

lllillll: Their sharing feature is really insecure and I’ve heard a lot of users end up with a virus.

Deathwave88: I went on Twitter, now I inject 5 marijuanas a day.

JammieDodgers: Jesus, this is some fucked up sensationalism. Sure heroin is bad but it’s not as bad as MySpace.

ChickenNoodle519: Yeah, it’s unthinkable that someone would go from Twitter immediately to MySpace.

Via reddit

Posted by Tara McGinley
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02.25.2013
12:42 pm
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SuBo’s ‘susanalbumparty’ - funniest hashtag ever?
11.21.2012
05:47 pm
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‘Susan Boyle and Pebbles the Cat Duet’ by Dan Lacey

Coming as it does from Susan Boyle, it gets my vote. Via the NME:

Susan Boyle became the victim of an unfortunate spot of social networking naivety last night (Nov 20) as her record label tried to promote her new album ‘Standing Ovation’ on Twitter. Boyle’s PR team encouraged fans of the singer to Tweet about the album using the hashtag #susanalbumparty which, as you can see, is easily mistaken for “anal bum party”, a topic unlikely to feature in Susan Boyle’s music, but one which soon sent the tag trending.

Ah, you gotta be grateful for those small, everyday acts of total hilarity.

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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11.21.2012
05:47 pm
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If Twitter was like Facebook
10.26.2012
12:55 pm
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image
 
Boing Boing’s managing editor, ginger geezer Rob Beschizza, puts Facebook’s new promoted posts policy into proper perspective…

Follow Rob Beschizza on Twitter.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.26.2012
12:55 pm
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Ricky Gervais: ‘Oh no, the atheists are fighting again’
09.17.2012
08:23 pm
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image
 
Ricky Gervais tweets:

I see Atheists are fighting and killing each other again, over who doesn’t believe in any God the most. Oh, no..wait..that never happens.

True, that.
 
Via Ricky Gervais
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.17.2012
08:23 pm
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Naomi Wolf Vagina is now on Twitter

image
 
In the week Naomi Wolf’s Vagina: A New Biography goes on sale, some wit, or more likely some journalist or PR person, has started a Twitter account for NaomiWolfVagina (sensitive flower). Only 3 tweets so far, but I suspect this will increase towards the date of publication.

Follow NaomiWolfVagina on twitter.

Read the Guardian‘s exclusive extract from Naomi Wolf’s Vagina: A New Biography here, plus interview here and the book is available here.
 
image
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.03.2012
09:23 am
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