Friday, November 27, 2020
Sunday, November 22, 2020
John Judge Interviews L. Fletcher Prouty
In 1992, John Judge sat down with L. Fletcher Prouty (author of THE SECRET TEAM and JFK: THE CIA, VIETNAM, AND THE PLOT TO ASSASSINATE JOHN F. KENNEDY) to discuss the assassination of JFK, the Vietnam War, the secret machinations of General Edward Lansdale, the Bay of Pigs, "Murder, Inc.," Project Paperclip, and other cryptoscatological aspects of American history....
Saturday, November 21, 2020
Lou Reed's BERLIN
Julian Schnabel's film of Lou Reed's masterpiece, BERLIN, is streaming for free from November 20 to November 29. Reed's performance was recorded in 2007 at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn. If you've been looking for a beautifully depressing soundtrack for Thanksgiving, you've found it.
Click HERE to see Schnabel's film.
Previous Cryptoscatology posts about Lou Reed can be found HERE and HERE.
Friday, November 20, 2020
The Last Dangerous Visions
From Alison Flood's 11-16-20 GUARDIAN article entitled "Harlan Ellison's The Last Dangerous Visions May Finally Be Published, After Five-decade Wait":
It is the great white whale of science fiction: an anthology of stories by some of the genre’s greatest names, collected in the early 1970s by Harlan Ellison yet mysteriously never published. But almost 50 years after it was first announced, The Last Dangerous Visions is finally set to see the light of day.
The late Ellison changed the face of sci-fi with the publication of anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, in 1968 and 1972, which featured writing by the likes of Philip K Dick, JG Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut and Ursula K Le Guin. Ellison, who was known for his combative nature – JG Ballard called him “an aggressive and restless extrovert who conducts life at a shout and his fiction at a scream” – announced a third volume, The Last Dangerous Visions, would be published in 1974. Contributors were said to include major names such as Frank Herbert, Anne McCaffrey, Octavia Butler and Daniel Keyes.
But the work never appeared, and in the words of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, it “became legendary for its many postponements”. The encyclopedia notes that “a series of illnesses certainly impaired Ellison’s fitness for the huge task of annotating what had soon become an enormous project”; in their study of Ellison, The Edge of Forever, Ellen Weil and Gary K Wolfe say the anthology ran to over a million words.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
(Previous Cryptoscatology posts dealing with Harlan Ellison can be found HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.)
"Foreign Policy Chaos in Trump's Final Days"
From Julian Borger's 11-17-20 GUARDIAN article entitled "Fears of Foreign Policy Chaos in Trump's Final Days Fueled by Iran Bombing Report":
Fears that Donald Trump might try to wreak havoc on the world stage in his final, desperate, weeks in office appear to have been well-founded, after he reportedly asked for options on bombing Iran.
A report in the New York Times said Trump was advised against strikes on Iranian nuclear sites by senior officials warning of the risk of triggering a major conflict. But it added that the president may not have entirely given up on the idea of staging attacks on Iran or its allies and proxies in the region [...].
The turmoil in foreign and defence policy comes at a time when Trump is refusing to accept election defeat and is preventing Joe Biden’s incoming team from receiving intelligence or policy briefings.
Former officials have suggested that Trump is aware he will eventually have to leave office and is considering another run at the presidency in 2024. To that end, he is looking at last-minute options for fulfilling campaign promises he can point to, to build a narrative that he ran a successful administration that was removed by a rigged election.
“This will be his version of the Lost Cause,” a former official from the Trump White House said, referring to attempts after the civil war to romanticise the Confederacy. “He can go out in a blaze of glory, and the stab in the back theory gets strengthened because he can point to all the things that he did.”
The former official added there were also factions in the Trump administration who view the weeks until Biden’s inauguration as a last chance to achieve their objectives [...].
“What I’ve always worried about was that people around Trump would try to persuade him that he’s the last thing standing between the ‘weak Democrats’ who would take over after him, and Iran developing a bomb,” said Rob Malley, a former Obama administration official who was one of the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] negotiators, and is now head of the International Crisis Group.
On Tuesday’s report that Trump’s aides had persuaded him against carrying out strikes on Iran, Malley said: “I’m not sure this is the end of the story. There may be a covert operation that would be less risky than what the president might have been talking about … And unlike in the years past, he would not have to carry the consequences.”
Click HERE to read the entire article.
Saturday, November 14, 2020
Trump's Pre-emptive Pardons
From Evan Perez, Pamela Brown, Jamie Gangel and Jeremy Herb's 11-12-20 CNN article entitled "As Trump Wrestles With Defeat, Pardons Loom for Allies -- and Himself":
To read the entire article, click HERE.