Speaking of liars…

I can’t remember the last time I heard about Jacob Wohl, one of the nastiest pieces of shit to ever do stuff on behalf of the Republican party, but I now see that’s possibly because him and his mate Jack Burkman both got sued for one of those stunts—a robocall scheme targeting black voters to convince them not to vote—and got fined five million dollars for their efforts. Now someone else is fighting back for even more:

A Marine veteran and attorney claims his life fell apart after Wohl and Burkman falsely tarred him in a 2021 video as a child sex predator, according to an $11 million racketeering lawsuit obtained by The Daily Beast.
In the aftermath, the unidentified Maryland man was let go from his law firm, lost a paid internship at Johns Hopkins University, was thrown out by his landlord, and was forced into bankruptcy, the lawsuit states. “John Doe” contends in the suit that Wohl and his co-defendant, soon-to-be-disbarred lawyer Jack Burkman, caused “irreparable harm” by laying waste to his reputation, wrecking his ability to earn a living, and turning him into a “critical casualty” of their “ongoing, illegal scheme.” […]
The complaint in Doe’s case centers around “Predator D.C.,” a low-rent web series aping NBC’s venerable true crime show, To Catch a Predator.
“We are doing hard hitting investigative journalism to expose predators in the heart of our nation’s capital,” Predator D.C.’s show page told prospective viewers, who were charged a minimum of $10 a month to tune in. “Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman conduct hidden-camera sting operations to expose predators who work within the highest levels of the U.S. Government.”

We still don’t know who this guy is, and I’d kind of love to cos I wonder why Wohl & Burkman went after him specifically. Or maybe it was just his damnable luck, I don’t know. I did think this detail was interesting:

The video also improperly described Doe as a married man, which the suit says Wohl believed “after seeing a photo of [Doe] online, in which [Doe] was wearing his Marine Corps dress blues with his wife at that time, who was African American,” the suit says.

So if they did specifically target him, did they do so because his (ex-)wife was black? I find that sadly believable… Either way, he is apparently not only a lawyer but a former Marine, so he is evidently disinclined to put up with this bullshit; apparently he turned on them in the original video and they kind of crumbled and promised not to use the footage, agreeing that he hadn’t in fact done anything wrong… except that then they did, of course, which is what led to all the ensuing trouble. I have a feeling brother Doe is going to romp home with this one…

Quelle surprise

Far-right group Project Veritas admits it had ‘no evidence’ of voter fraud in Pennsylvania

The far-right political agitator James O’Keefe and the Project Veritas organization he once led have admitted that they had “no evidence” backing up widely spread claims of voter fraud at a Pennsylvania post office during the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden.
O’Keefe and Project Veritas made that admission on Monday after settling a lawsuit filed against them by Robert Weisenbach, the postmaster of Erie, Pennsylvania, in state court, concluding one of the more prominent legal battles spurred by Republican lies that Donald Trump was defrauded out of another term in the White House.
“Neither Mr Weisenbach nor any other [postal] employee in Erie, Pennsylvania, engaged in election fraud or any other wrongdoing related to mail-in ballots,” O’Keefe said in a statement published on Monday on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “I am aware of no evidence or other allegation that election fraud occurred in the Erie post office during the 2020 presidential election.”

So, what this article is saying is that a political organisation whose whole raison d’etre was basically lying… lied. I would NEVER have thought it possible.

Kancer for the King!

So Charlie Windsor has cancer of some sort.

King Charles has been diagnosed with cancer and is already receiving treatment that will prevent him from undertaking public duties for the immediate future, Buckingham Palace has announced.
Although no further details about what type of cancer he has are being released at this stage, Buckingham Palace said it was not prostate cancer. It was discovered when the 75-year-old monarch recently underwent treatment at the London Clinic for a benign enlarged prostate.
Buckingham Palace said the king “remains wholly positive about his treatment”.
He began regular outpatient treatments on Monday, and although he has been forced to postpone public-facing engagements, he will continue with his constitutional role as head of state, including paperwork, his red boxes and private meetings.

Cue a lot of agonising over what this means for the monarchy if the king can’t actually function, who’s going to do whatever it is the royals actually do… are some of the younger ones going to have to pull their weight and actually work for once? The least helpful comment so far has surely been one I’ve seen reported as coming from Chuck’s* former press secretary, according to whom the fact that the king has cancer shows that obviously anyone can get it. WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED? No wonder you’re his former press secretary if that’s the best you can come up with in this situation…

Anyway, I have no particular feelings on the matter other than as a somewhat remote spectacle. Whatever else happens, Charles will have the best specialists in the world and the best care that money can buy, and he will be supremely looked after. And while this whole business may well show that, hey, the obscenely rich can get cancer just as easily as you Poor People, this is also what separates him from those Poor People. He can afford to get cancer in a way lots of people can’t, cos maybe they don’t have insurance, they can’t afford not to work, they’ve got to worry about where this’ll leave the rest of the family financially, etc. To use my own mum as an example: when her cancer came back in 2012, the treatment she got involved this anti-nausea pill that, for reasons I forget now (possibly her being a pensioner), only cost here five dollars per round of three pills, but normally cost ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY DOLLARS for the same three pills for everyone else. So I obviously don’t celebrate Charles getting cancer, but it’s probably not going to be the disaster for him that it could be for others.

* At this point I initially mistyped “Chuck” as “Cuck”, for what it may be worth. I briefly debated with myself whether or not to correct it.

Occult Features of Anarchism

Book #6 for 2024. (Bit of a turnaround from Tarzan?) I’ve always been intrigued by the ways in which occult thought and politics have intertwined over the centuries, and this give a reasonably good if brief overview of how medieval millenarian and heretic movements developed through the Renaissance, eventually blossoming into Freemasonry, and the book looks at how Weishaupt’s Illuminati took that into a political and revolutionary direction and inspired umpteen other groups in the nineteenth century to follow the Masonic pattern and use Masonry to further themselves. Theosophy was apparently big among anarchists in the later 1800s. I was kind of amused to see the famous A in a circle logo actually first appeared as a compass and level in the shape of a letter A, and to see that such figure as Proudhon and Bakunin were actual Masons (the latter espousing a Spinoza-esque sort of pantheism).

This historical stuff is good although perhaps not ideal for people coming to the subject completely new, it probably helps to have some prior knowledge. Also, I’m not sure how it really all ties in with Lagalisse’s real subject, or at least the one I think she cares more about, i.e. that anarchism since the 20th century has basically tried to ignore its theological and occult underpinnings, and this is leading it down something of a dead end where they’re more interested in looking like they have what she calls “good politics” than, you know, doing actual good. Which leads to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t be so automatically dismissive of conspiracy theorists:

…purveyors of “conspiracy theories” are often from subaltern groups, so the educated activists who generally state a nominal concern to “take lead” from “those most affected” by oppression should nominally allow for the possibility that the “conspiracy theorist” may actually be offering positioned insight. Beyond “tolerating” the theorist of conspiracy for the sake of reeducating him, activists’ own ideology suggests that they might listen for subversive social commentary amid unfamiliar exposition.

They might, but that doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily gain anything useful from it. Lagalisse writes about a Zapatista who put her onto the whole conspiracy thing in the first place, and how she managed to convince him THE JOOOOOOOOOOS aren’t really running the world, but I think she got lucky with that one; I’m not sure how much seriousness she thinks we should approach these people with before we realise the exercise isn’t as edifying for them or us as she seems to think it will be.

So a mixed result, I suppose, interesting but I also don’t know how much I agree with her own arguments or how well they mesh with the historical stuff. Still, short enough that I finished it in one night, so I’ll definitely give it points for not being any longer than it was…

RIP Brother Wayne

The MC5: pioneers of wilful career suicide

Wayne Kramer from the MC5 has left the building, meaning drummer Dennis Thompson is the last man standing from that ensemble. I must confess my first thought on reading the news was an uncharitable one, in that I wondered if this meant A True Testimonial might finally get an actual release now he’s no longer there to stop it, though I do now find that court case he filed against the makers actually went against him, it just still hasn’t come out anyway… whatever. Let us watch the five in full flow back in 1970:

This was shot for a Detroit cable TV show, evidently not the full gig but damn they picked great excerpts for the program. It is probably miraculous that even these clips survive, and in very fair quality at that…

And this is them in France, late in the game (with new bassist Steve Moorhouse replacing Michael Davis’ smack habit), but still, fucking hell. The video and audio were evidently recorded on a potato, and the end result is frankly obnoxious, but at the same time it’s also a perfect artifact and presentation of this sort of rock’n’roll. It’s probably even more miraculous that this survives. I always thought the MC5’s studio records never quite matched up to the on-stage power evinced on Kick Out the Jams; they obviously needed a crowd in front of them to produce their full effect. At any rate, they outlived Hudson’s, and I’m sure that was satisfying…

And in Oolong news…

You remember Neuralink, don’t you? You remember the 1500 animals that died in the course of experimenting on them? Well, as you may see above, Oolong is now claiming to have taken the next step; I was wrong the last time I posted about this, cos I said he didn’t have FDA approval for human testing when he actually had got it a few months earlier, and he’s apparently acted on that at last.

I say “apparently” because, well, this tweet appears to be the only evidence of it happening at all. Neuralink’s own Twitter account is conspicuously free of any statement on the subject, the “recipient” hasn’t been identified, and I’m just perplexed by the absence of hype. This tweet has been, you know, it. Kind of weird that people are just accepting this story on the face of it without, you know, evidence, though I have seen a few people wondering what Elon might be trying to distract us from with this amazing news, and someone may have found out:

“Unacceptable migration of contaminated ground water is present” is quite a way of putting it. Tesla’s fuckup is, as far as I can see, getting rather less coverage than Musk’s putative neurosurgery success, but maybe it just needs more time to circulate. Either way, if this operation did happen, and I somehow feel it didn’t, I hope the proud owner of a new brain chip has a happier ending than Oolong’s monkeys…

Parenthetically, one of the responders to the Brian Tyler Cohen tweet I posted at the start of this made some snide remark about how at least Elon admits he wants to microchip you. Which is not an entirely bad point, but, really, if you’re going to be like that about it, one might further add the reason why Bill Gates doesn’t tell you about microchipping is that HE ISN’T DOING THAT TO YOU. Fucking paranoids, man…

Swift boating again

As I’ve said before, I’m not particularly a Taylor Swift fan, but I certainly am greatly enjoying the American right’s current meltdown over her:

This video’s particularly good, cos the commentator blasting the idiots losing their shit over Swift works for Fox, which has been obsessed with her in recent times. A sample:

As others have observed, Fox is so outraged by Tay Tay that they’ve been forced to admit CO2 emissions are a bad thing (and in any case she has apparently purchased carbon credits to offset hers). The real lunacy, though, has been the “speculation” about her being some sort of government asset; and I put that in quotes because I don’t think even the clowns at Fox seriously believe it themselves, but they’re desperate to make their idiot viewers do so:

Right-wing activists have indulged in baseless speculation that Swift’s romance with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce — a kind of ur-American couple of football star and wholesome pop icon — is a contrivance engineered by Democrats, or perhaps the NFL, to trick unsuspecting Americans into boosting Super Bowl ratings or voting for Biden in November.
A version of that theory aired on Fox News in mid-January, when host Jesse Watters floated the idea that Swift was a government asset engaged in psychological warfare. He suggested that the runaway success of her Eras concert tour was aided by the Defense Department. “Have you ever wondered why or how she blew up like this?” Watters asked viewers. (He allowed that he had no solid evidence: “If we did, we’d share it.”)

So what aided her success before all this? Her Wiki entry notes she’d sold 37 million records in the US by 2019, which is kind of well before her recent blowup on the right. And Time included her on their 100 most influential people list for the first time in 2010. She is indeed making truly preposterous sums of money off the Eras tour, but it’s not like she’s come out of nowhere to do it. Still, if this “speculation” is unserious (and Watters basically admitted as much), I think their terror at Swift’s potential influence is genuine; the idea that she might actually encourage people to vote for Biden, or indeed to vote at all. And I’m sure her being of the female persuasion only makes things worse for them. I’ll finish off with this image I spotted on Tumblr today that I think sums it all up:

So how is the reading plan going?

Remember I was experimenting with a reading plan I found on Bluesky? I suppose now we’re staring down the barrel of a new month, I should look at how I’m going so far.

So, in the fifth week of the year, I’ve just finished book number five. That’s pretty good. I’m keeping to the “one book a week” rule on average.

Non-fiction for the month: Monster She Wrote. This one’s quite easily done.

Classic of the month: Tarzan. “Classics” is such a vexed issue, and I’m contemplating a post on that subject, that I did consider either Black No More or the Cornell Woolrich collection could technically count as the classic for January, but Tarzan‘s in the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Lose Your Eyes book so I suppose that makes it “more classic”…

Short story per day: THIS, somewhat to my surprise, has been the bit where I’ve fallen down. I haven’t read one story every day, though when I’ve missed a day I’ve made up for it by reading two the next day, so it actually works out, I should have read 366 individual stories by the end of the year… but yeah, I’m finding this hard. Cos I’m not used to reading quite like this; I obviously can’t read most books in a single day so I need to pause at some point and resume it later, but I’m still used to reading multiple chapters in one sitting. I don’t usually approach collections of stories in this one-at-a-time way, I read one and then I want to read the next on straight away. You know, like a “normal” book.

Also, it means that I’m reading more than one book at a time, which is definitely something I don’t think I’ve ever done before. I have, in the past, put one book on hold then read another book before going back to the first one, but I wasn’t reading both of them simultaneously, I was focusing on one at a time. And I can’t really do that the same with this approach, my attention is being divided to some extent. I’ll certainly stick with it, cos the plan is otherwise having results; maybe it’ll get easier…