Attention New Yorkers, don’t miss Return to the Pleasure Dome, a benefit concert event for Anthology Film Archives with a Life Achievement Honor for Kenneth Anger.
Featuring Technicolor Skull (Kenneth Anger and Brian Butler), Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, The Virgins, Moby & other special guests.
Wednesday, May 19, 8:30p.m at the Hiro Ballroom, New York City, $99 via Ticketweb
Video: Kenneth Anger’s 42-second long film, Death. Part of the OneDreamRush project.
Great new essay from Dangerous Minds pal Charles Hugh Smith on his Of Two Minds blog:
Knowing what lies ahead is a great emotional burden.
The knowledge that the present is unsustainable is, for many of us, a great emotional burden. It troubles our sleep, our minds, and our basic emotional well-being. Knowledge, like memory, cannot be erased at will, and thus it runs in the background of our lives, unseen by others but deeply troubling to the knower.
I am not alone in feeling this weight; correspondents and readers write me that they feel it, too.
Yet it is not just the knowledge that all this is based on cheap, abundant oil and a rapidly imploding financial system based on fraud and lies that burdens us; it is the mirror image of reality pressed upon us by the status quo: the Mainstream Media, the corrupt Savior State beholden to Power Elites and crony-capitalist, predatory monopoly-capital cartels and Global Corporate America (which conveniently enough owns the mainstream media).
One of the most chilling stories to emerge from China’s Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early 60s—in which peasants were instructed to “make steel” by melting down their metal farming and cooking tools, leaving them to starve in countless millions—involves the artifices presented to Mao to cover up the grotesque consequences of his policies.
Communist party officials fearful of Mao’s ire and losing their own perquisites arranged to have a specific route through the countryside planted thickly with rice. Five meters deep on each side of this road, rice was planted so closely that it appeared to be the very acme of abundance; the road was seemingly a thin ribbon of pavement cut through endless green abundance.
It was all artifice and lies. While the officials pointed out the phony bounty to Mao, tens of millions of peasants were starving to death. Behind the five meters of contrived abundance lay a barren landscape.
The American media and Savior State are busy planting their own five meters of apparent abundance and “growth” along every highway in the land. The vast majority of people—even people who should know better but who prefer not to know, and thus they studioudsly avoid peeking through the curtain of sham prosperity—accept that GDP growth means something positive is happening in their own lives, even as the visible evidence points to a mirror-image of this “growth” propaganda.
We know that all the contrivances of “modern life” are ultimately the result of one single condition: cheap, abundant oil. Everything—the plays on Broadway, the film industry, the iPods made in China for cheap, the endless Mcmansions in gated exurbs, the grain-fattened, fat-marbled beef, the “cheap” fast-food meals, the Savior State and its Global Empire—is all based on cheap, abundant oil. There is no substitute in the near term.
Every “solution” fails to hold up beyond the most cursory examination. Natural gas? Well, yes, but then all those “fracc’ed” wells the industry extols as the “solution” have a nasty habit of depleting rather quickly. There are an an estimated 254.4 million vehicles in the U.S.; would you care to guess the cost of converting them to natural gas?
Will “entrepreneurship” re-make the distribution system to enable fueling those tens of millions of vehicles with natural gas? At what cost, and to whom?
How about that “new discovery” of a 1 billion-barrel oil field in deep water? Does the MSM or Savior State propaganda ministry mention that 1 billion barrels is less than two months of U.S. consumption, or that it may take 5 years to extract the first drop, or that the costs of such deepwater drilling are so prohibitive that oil extracted will not be cheap?
How about that “endless” shale oil? How many MSM stories note that production tops out at 2 million barrels a day, a mere 10% of U.S. consumption—and the Canadians and Chinese have claims on much of that production?
Even a cursory read of this site, or others which peek through the thick green screen of State/corporate propaganda, reveals the multiple frauds at the very heart of American finance, governance, real estate and the stock market.
Yet most people don’t want to know. They adamantly accept the mirror-image of reality presented by the media and State: that the economy is “growing” and fundamentally sound, even though the reality is the opposite; that “reform” will fix the core problems, even though the reforms are simulacra designed to give the appearance of reform; and that sickcare “reform” will lower costs even as the sickcare cartels increase their take of the economy every year.
This heavily promoted and contrived mirror-image disconnect between what we are told is true and what is actually true threatens us with a very draining madness. Some readers donate money to this site because they say that it provides some sort of landing in a sea of lies, propaganda, misinformation and misprepresentation—that in reading it they know they are not alone and that they are not crazy.
The unease and insecurity is very real. None of us know the future; we only know that the present is vastly unsustainable, and that if we as a nation and species rely on simulacra, artifice, lies, fraud and propaganda instead of reality, then the status quo will end very badly. Any sane person who knows this finds it worrisome.
“A male cat amazed onlookers with his behaviour to a female cat after she was hit by a car and left dead on the street in Kızılsaray district of Antalya, southern Turkey. Having seen his darling lying on the ground, the male cat started making massage-like movements, to bring the beloved back to life. The scene was likened to a cardiac massage by onlookers. The female cat was taken to a veterinary polyclinic for treatment but died there.”
The LAPD are on the hunt for a man who fled down the fire escape from his penthouse in downtown Los Angeles ala ‘Jason Bourne’ leaving weapons, counterfeiting equipment, and passports in various names. From the Los Angeles Times:
It started 11 days ago when a resident at an upscale downtown L.A. high-rise tower smelled fumes coming from neighboring apartment. Firefighters knocked on the neighbor’s door, but he refused to let them in.
They called police, who broke down the door of the penthouse just as the man inside was escaping through a back window and down a fire escape with multiple duffel bags over his shoulder.
“He escaped like Jason Bourne,” LAPD Deputy Chief Mike Downing of the Counter-terrorism Bureau, referring to the movie spy character. What they found next has begun a week-long mystery.
The apartment contained sophisticated counterfeiting equipment as well as a cache of weapons, including an AK-47. They also found stacks of counterfeit $100 bills totaling $15,000 and a camera tripod.
But detectives’ interest was really heightened when they looked outside the window and saw that the penthouse balcony had a spot-on view of the U.S. Federal Reserve building on Grand Avenue. Detectives now are searching for the suspect, who leased the $3,400-a-month penthouse, paying in advance with stacks of cash.
Detectives aren’t sure what Brian Alexik, a 33-year-old New Jersey man, was up to, and what role, if any, the Federal Reserve might have played in his schemes.
The fake $100 dollar bills found in the penthouse are said to be extremely good forgeries by those who had seen them.
“There were many levels of criminality,” Detective Downing said. “He’s funding a criminal enterprise. He’s dabbling in narcotics, he’s manufacturing weapons parts. But what is it? Was there a bigger plan? What was his intent? We have a lot of questions for him when he is arrested.”
Weren’t you excited that they stopped making Humvees? Didn’t you breathe a sigh of relief that perhaps some sanity had slipped into the world sideways? Well, hm. Now they’re making a FLYING one.
Generals may be notorious for always wanting to fight the last war but if true, there will be no shortage of tomorrow’s weaponry they’ll be able to choose from. At least in the U.S.
Earlier today, the New York Times ran a big piece on a new class of weapons that can hurl conventional payloads with precision accuracy at a target from thousands of miles away. Or at least that is how it’s being billed at this point.
For obvious reasons, that could turn into a very big deal. But with all the attention lavished on Prompt Global Strike, another story got lost in the shuffle that has the capacity to have an equally transformational effect on the U.S. military.
The Defense Advanced Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Defense Department’s research arm, has decided to go ahead with what it calls the Transformer (TX) program. The idea is to enable soldiers to go into battle riding a four-person flying car that also function like an airplane. The vehicle, which will be able to drive 250 miles on a tank of fuel, will not need a runway to get airborne.
Anti-piracy public service announcement from a group of “all star” pornies, including “hedgehog” Ron Jeremy, a bunch of sluts I’ve never heard of and Sarah Palin porn-a-like, Lisa Ann (I’m no fan of Palin’s but this woman looks like Sarah Palin maybe after she’s been hit in the face with a shovel).
This PSA will have perhaps less of an effect even than anti-marijuana messages, which is to say next to none. How many horny guys dialing up LubeTube will have second thoughts about stealing their product after seeing this? I’d wager zero is the winning answer to that!
This girl, whose gamer boyfriend apparently cheated on her, HACKS HIS EMAIL and SHREDS HIS STARCRAFT 2 BETA PASSWORD. Holy FKK THAT’S COLD. And as if that wasn’t enough, she then goes to his house and BREAKS HIS WINDOW WITH A BRICK. GOOD DEAR GOD LORD. I’m not sure which one is worse!
To paraphrase Al Pacino in “Heat”: “You might break a man’s window with a brick but YOU DO NOT GET TO FK WITH HIS STARCRAFT 2 BETA CODES.”
I hope this wasn’t one of OUR Brads. I’m gonna go hide in a corner now!!!
F*king epic remake of “Telephone” by Lady Gaga and Beyoncé by a bunch of bored soldiers in a base in Afghanistan. Clearly they are as bored there as I am here. I’m glad I know that all the money I got reamed for this year out of my hard-earned pay for writing about Lady Gaga went to Lady Gaga YouTube remakes in the desert.
