The Lavender Mafia
A Tribute to Gay and Lesbian Characters from Children’s TV Shows and Movies. The Academy Awards montage that will never be.
Via our friends at the wonderfully wonderful World of Wonder blog
A Tribute to Gay and Lesbian Characters from Children’s TV Shows and Movies. The Academy Awards montage that will never be.
Via our friends at the wonderfully wonderful World of Wonder blog
It doesn’t matter so much that the prank and the reaction is obviously fake (maybe?), but that where it’s coming from is obviously not. And Rich Praytor is one of the best Christian celebrity names ever, like a prayer raptor !
via Milk & Cookies thx Chris Ward !
In the early 90s I wrote to every single one of the crazed loners and weirdo organizations listed in Rev. Ivan Stang’s wonderful book, High Weirdness by Mail
I also got stuff from various televangelists, the best being a ‘prayer mat’ from Peter Popoff that instructed the user to kneel within the dotted circle, take out their wallet, place that in the circle, too and pray for money. The reader was told that Popoff and his father would also pray for monetary bounty to rain on their new friend. It was so fucking blatant—almost a joke—that only an absolute moron would believe it in. That was the point obviously. Someone with even a tiny portion of a brain would take one look at something like that and toss it, instantly. That person in the .00009 lowest percentile of idiots in this country WAS the target. I’m not so sure that the people sending in their donations got much out of Popoff’s and pere’s prayers for the gelt, but the reverse is certainly not true, I’d wager.
Some were more professional and upscale than most. Like an organization called Share International, started in the 1950s by a Scot named Benjamin Creme, now 87, a guest from time to time on the George Noory radio show. Share International’s mission is to herald the arrival of the world messiah Maitreya, variously described as a reincarnation of Christ, the Messiah, the fifth Buddha, Krishna, or the Imam Mahdi.
At one point Creme said that Maitreya was the representative of a group of beings from Venus called the Space Brothers.
Their letters and books were fairly well-designed and printed. They’d send me short books and newsletters about Maitreya’s imminent arrival on the world stage. From what I could tell, that seems to have been the message for nearly 30 years: HE is coming. Eventually, I guess Creme thought he had to shit or get off the pot, because in 1988 Maitreya was spotted and was supposed to be this guy, a supposed miracle worker seen in Kenya, (see picture above) but his arrival on the, um, world stage fizzled out apparently.
Here’s where it gets good: British Raj Patel, well-known economist and author of The Value of Nothing
Patel’s response: “I’m not the messiah… I’m just an economics expert!” The Sun got it right: This is The Life of Brian redux:
The confusion began after Raj, from Golders Green, North London, appeared on TV in January to plug his book on the global financial crisis, The Value Of Nothing. Two days later, Share International founder Benjamin Creme, 87, announced the chosen one his cult calls “Maitreya” had arrived, telling followers: “Maitreya recently gave his first interview in America. “The master of all the masters for the first time in human history himself came on a well-known television programme on a major network. But undeclared as Maitreya, just as one of us.”
Raj was mis-identified soon after as he shares many of the prophesied characteristics of Maitreya.
Both are dark-skinned, were born in 1972 and grew up in London;
Maitreya took a flight from India to the UK in 1977, which matches the date Raj flew back from a holiday there;
Maitreya would appear on TV and speak with a slight stutter - which Raj did on The Colbert Report show;
Frustratingly for Raj, it also states the Maitreya will immediately DENY his identity.
Raj, who was raised a Hindu, said: “I started getting emails saying ‘Are you the world teacher?’ Then it wasn’t just random internet folk, but also friends saying, ‘Have you seen this?’ It’s absurd to be put in this position when I’m just some bloke.”
Although Raj swiftly rejected his holy credentials, two devotees from Detroit flew 2,400 miles to meet him at a book signing in his current US home town, San Francisco.
Raj said: “They were really nice, straightforward people. They said they thought I was the Maitreya. They also said I had appeared in their dreams.
“I said, ‘I’m really flattered you came all the way here, but it breaks my heart you spent all this money to meet someone who isn’t who you think he is.’”
The cult was founded by Scotsman Creme in the 1950s. It believes that the 18 million-year-old Maitreya - who combines elements of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism and Islam - has been hiding in the Himalayas for 2,000 years. His arrival will unite humanity and improve life for everyone on Earth. Share International has its HQ in Amsterdam with offices in London, the US, Japan, France and Germany. Creme has refused to confirm or deny whether he believes Raj is his saviour.
Meanwhile Raj has had to remove contact details from his website and refuses to talk further about the Maitreya.
He said: “It frustrates me it might disappoint those looking for Maitreya that, in fact, I’m just an ordinary bloke.”
Patel reappeared on The Colbert Report, but refused to play along as if he really was the Maitreya.
But that’s what the real Maitreya would say, as Colbert adroitly pointed out.
Via Letters of Note, this letter from 1957 reveals that “Burroughs has gone insane!”
Early 1957, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg travelled to Tangier to join William Burroughs; their mission to assemble and edit Burroughs’ many fragments of work to form a ‘readable’ Naked Lunch manuscript. Kerouac arrived early and, during a break from socialising with Burroughs, the ‘old familiar lunatic’, wrote to Lucien Carr and his wife Francesca in order to update them on the project’s progress.
The letter reads:
Dear Lucien & Cessa — Writing to you by candlelight from the mysterious Casbah — have a magnificent room overlooking the beach & the bay & the sea & can see Gibraltar — patio to sun on, room maid, $20 a month — feel great but Burroughs has gone insane e as, — he keeps saying he’s going to erupt into some unspeakable atrocity such as waving his dingdong at an Embassy part & such or slaughtering an Arab boy to see what his beautiful insides look like — Naturally I feel lonesome with this old familiar lunatic but lonesomer than ever with him as he’ll also mumble, or splurt, most of his conversation, in some kind of endless new British lord imitation, it all keeps pouring out of him in an absolutely brilliant horde of words & in fact his new book is best thing of its kind in the world (Genet, Celine, Miller, etc.) & we might call it WORD HOARD…he, Burroughs, (not “Lee” any more) unleashes his word hoard, or horde, on the world which has been awaiting the Only Prophet, Burroughs — His message is all scatalogical homosexual super-violent madness, — his manuscript is all that has been saved from the original vast number of written pages of WORD HOARD which he’d left in all the boy’s privies of the world — and so on, — I sit with him in elegant French restaurant & he spits out his bones like My. Hyde and keeps yelling obscene words to be heard by the continental clienteles — (like he done in Rome, yelling FART at a big palazzio party) — I’ll be glad when Allen gets here. — Meanwhile I explores the Casbah, high on opium or hasheesh or any drink or drug I want, & dig the Arabs. — The Slovenija was a delightful ship, I ate every day at one long white tablecloth with that one Yugoslavian woman spy. — We hit a horrendous tempest 2 days out, nothing like I ever seen, — that big steel ship was lost in mountains of hissing water, awful. — I cuddled up with TWO TICKETS TO TANGIER and got my laughs, I read every word, Cess, really a riot. — Also read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling which you should read, it’s down on your corner. — Right now I’m high on 3 Sympatinas, Spanish bennies of a sort, mild. — Happy pills galore. — The gal situation here is worse than the boy situation, nothing but male whores all over, & their supplementary queens. — Met an actual contraband sailing ship adventurer with a mustache. Etc. More anon. Miss you & hope you’re well. Jack.
Arundhati Roy talks with Democracy Now about spending time with Maoist rebels in India. As somebody who’s spent time getting chased and almost killed by Maoist rebels, I’m not exactly sure she’s on point here. While they are fighting for the rights of the poor, they are also, to a large extent, providing a back door for China—and now that they have essentially sold Nepal to China, the buffer zone between India and China—two gigantic nuclear powers—is getting erased. Not good for anybody. In the slightest.
Earlier this month, when Forbes published its annual list of the world’s billionaires, the Indian press reported with some delight that two of their countrymen had made it to the coveted list of the ten richest individuals in the world.
Meanwhile, thousands of Indian paramilitary troops and police are fighting a war against some of its poorest inhabitants living deep in the country’s so-called tribal belt. Indian officials say more than a third of the country, mostly mineral-rich forest land, is partially or completely under the control of Maoist rebels, also known as Naxalites. India’s prime minister has called the Maoists the country’s “gravest internal security threat.” According to official figures, nearly 6,000 people have died in the past seven years of fighting, more than half of them civilians. The government’s new paramilitary offensive against the Maoists has been dubbed Operation Green Hunt.
Well, earlier this month, the leader of the Maoist insurgency, Koteswar Rao, or Kishenji, invited the Booker Prize-winning novelist Arundhati Roy to mediate in peace talks with the government. Soon after, India’s Home Secretary, G.K. Pillai, criticized Roy and others who have publicly called state violence against Maoists, quote, “genocidal.”
(AlterNet: Arundhati Roy on the Occupation of Kashmir)
(Arundhati Roy: Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers)
The Guardian reports on Colonel Gaddafi’s bizarre literary output. I think he should form a writer’s circle with Lynne Cheney and crank out the world’s best S&M authority porn. Then they can both be gainfully employed in the San Fernando Valley working for somebody’s porn distribution outlet when Internet Sleaze finally proves to be the predominant ideology of the 21st century, leaving all fascist systems in the gulch.
If it feels as though Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has been around a long time, that’s because he has. Born in 1942, Gaddafi led the coup against the Libyan monarchy in 1969 – the same year Sesame Street debuted on US television. He’s as old as ineffably boring Sir Paul McCartney, his regime as venerable as Big Bird. And, like many dictators, he fancies himself as a writer.
Gaddafi’s most famous literary work is The Green Book, published in 1975. This treatise on “Islamic socialism” defined the concept of Jamahiriya, a state without parties that would be governed directly by its people. Which, in practice, translates as a military dictatorship, headed by – you guessed it – Gaddafi! His subsequent volume, Escape to Hell, is less well known. Marketed in the UK as a single collection of short stories and essays, it is in fact an amalgamation of two books: Escape to Hell (1993) and Illegal Publications (1995). Of course, while it’s safe to say that all works of dictator literature are to some extent fictional, few tyrants have tackled the art of Chekhov and Maupassant. I was quite excited to see how the colonel fared.
One of the first things I learned is that Gaddafi has little grasp of literary classifications. The texts in Escape to Hell are, alas, not short stories but rambling prose feuilletons. There are no characters, no twists, no subtle illuminations; indeed, there is precious little narrative. Instead, you get surreal rants and bizarre streams of consciousness obviously unmolested by the hand of any editor.
See more craptacular stuffed animals over at Crappy Taxidermy.
(via Cakehead)
Because of my former career at The Disinformation Company, Ltd., I am often asked—I was asked this yesterday, in fact—if I have ever investigated a conspiracy theory that I was skeptical of and then become a convert? Nope. Not once. And for the record, I am not a conspiracy theorist. I just played one on TV.
First of all, you have to parse the term. There are criminal conspiracies—events that can be proven in a court of law or that are a matter of historical record; and then there is the Montauk Project/David Icke side of things. Iran-Contra, the CIA shenanigans we’ve all heard about, Watergate, etc., these were real events. When you get into the territory of aliens, the 9-11 nonsense, and the “reptilian beings” like the Queen, the Royal Family and the Bushes, I just pretty much tune it out. Been there, done that. I went down that rabbit hole when I was a teenager and came back out again on the other side.
Conspiracy theorists tend to be people who have been a bit cut off, from, let’s just say, the power centers of the world. If you’ve never been to Washington, DC or Manhattan or been in a Beverly Hills country club, or know how the news gets produced, then the way the world runs must seem very mysterious. Like someone is in control. But that’s not true.
People who are in positions of power—industrial, political, financial, media power—went to high school like the rest of us did. The class president type who went on to become a congressman did so because he could. He got into that position of power because… people voted for him and not for the other guy. And don’t be surprised if rich guy A makes a deal with rich guy B because both of their kids are on the same soccer team. THAT is the way the world turns. There are lots of little conspiracy theories, sure, but there are probably more of them on a local level, than on a national level because on a national level criminal activity is too easily exposed. If a blowjob in the White House can’t be kept secret, do you really expect me to believe that 9-11 was an inside job? (For the record, I have no fixed opinion about the JFK assassination, but it was unlikely the job of Lee Harvey Oswald alone).
Once a conspiracy theory gets published in a book, it then gets quoted by other writers, discussed on George Noory’s show and these things just perpetuate themselves in that way. It’s an intellectual cluster fuck with diminishing returns.
And blah, blah, blah, this is a topic I could rant about for a long, long time. Forgive the rambling preamble, all I really wanted to say was, there is an interesting article in the Los Angeles Times Magazine this week about something that might seem to be in one category of conspiracy theory, i.e. the alien thing, but does, in fact, fall into the other camp of something which can be verified:
Area 51. It’s the most famous military institution in the world that doesn’t officially exist. If it did, it would be found about 100 miles outside Las Vegas in Nevada’s high desert, tucked between an Air Force base and an abandoned nuclear testing ground.
Then again, maybe not—the U.S. government refuses to say. You can’t drive anywhere close to it, and until recently, the airspace overhead was restricted—all the way to outer space. Any mention of Area 51 gets redacted from official documents, even those that have been declassified for decades.
It has become the holy grail for conspiracy theorists, with UFOlogists positing that the Pentagon reverse engineers flying saucers and keeps extraterrestrial beings stored in freezers. Urban legend has it that Area 51 is connected by underground tunnels and trains to other secret facilities around the country. In 2001, Katie Couric told Today Show audiences that 7 percent of Americans doubt the moon landing happened—that it was staged in the Nevada desert. Millions of X-Files fans believe the truth may be “out there,” but more likely it’s concealed inside Area 51’s Strangelove-esque hangars—buildings that, though confirmed by Google Earth, the government refuses to acknowledge.
The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened there. Well, now, for the first time, someone is ready to talk—in fact, five men are, and their stories rival the most outrageous of rumors. Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater, 87, was commander of the Area 51 base in the 1960s. Edward Lovick, 90, featured in “What Plane?” in LA’s March issue, spent three decades radar testing some of the world’s most famous aircraft (including the U-2, the A-12 OXCART and the F-117). Kenneth Collins, 80, a CIA experimental test pilot, was given the silver star. Thornton “T.D.” Barnes, 72, was an Area 51 special-projects engineer. And Harry Martin, 77, was one of the men in charge of the base’s half-million-gallon monthly supply of spy-plane fuels. Here are a few of their best stories—for the record…
Read more: The Road to Area 51: After Decades of denying the facility’s existence, five former insiders speak out. (Los Angeles Times Magazine)
When I read about the vocal protesters at the University of Ottawa who effectively scuttled conservative pundit Ann Coulter’s speech there Tuesday night, my first thought was that Coulter would find a way to capitalize on it, a media feeding-frenzy would follow and it would turn into a win-win for Coulter, who presumably was still paid her speaker’s fee.
The protests followed another incident on Monday night at the University of Western Ontario, when Coulter told a Muslim student to “take a camel” instead of using airplanes. Fatima Al-Dhaher, the student, asked about Coulter’s statement that Muslims should not be allowed to fly on airplanes and should take “flying carpets” instead. Al-Dhaher told Coulter that—unlike most Muslims—she did not, in fact, own a flying carpet and asked how she should travel. “Take a camel” came the retort. Ooh, snap.
News travels fast these days, and predictably the protesters were out in force—over 2,000 of them—to “greet” the conservative author. Not one to give credit where credit is due, Coulter apparently saw a warning e-mail she was sent by University of Ottawa Vice President and Provost Francois Houle on Friday, gently and professionally telling her to not to step over the line as the real problem.
Houle’s e-mail was obtained by the National Post newspaper. Here is an excerpt:
“I would, however, like to inform you, or perhaps remind you, that our domestic laws, both provincial and federal, delineate freedom of expression (or “free speech”) in a manner that is somewhat different than the approach taken in the United States. I therefore encourage you to educate yourself, if need be, as to what is acceptable in Canada and to do so before your planned visit here.
You will realize that Canadian law puts reasonable limits on the freedom of expression. For example, promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges. Outside of the criminal realm, Canadian defamation laws also limit freedom of expression and may differ somewhat from those to which you are accustomed. I therefore ask you, while you are a guest on our campus, to weigh your words with respect and civility in mind.”
Pretty hateful if you ask ... um ... Ann Coulter, I guess.
But it was the update to the matter Wednesday morning that was really head-twisting: The deliberately inflammatory right-wing pundit—yes, the same woman who told the Muslim student to “take a camel”—is actually planning to file a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission alleging hate speech in connection with the e-mail!
Ann Coulter a victim of hate speech? Let that sink in for a minute. A woman who has no qualms whatsoever about publicly insulting Jews, homosexuals, Muslims, African Americans, Democrats—and now Canadians—a victim of hate speech?
It’s just like these right-wingers to blame Canada, isn’t it? Coulter later told a television interviewer that the “camel” comment was just a joke.
Cross posting this from Brand X
Excuse me while I totally geek out. Oh dear. It’s so tiny! I need five of them to start a tiny band with immediately. Only 85 clams. The same circuitry as the classic MS series !, External signal in !! Hackable !!! August come soon, Arrrgh!
Thx Dave Madden via Create Digital Music
