Brian Keene: Back in the Day (Part 1)

Recommended Viewing: Earlier today, novelist Brian Keene interviewed four living legends in the horror field: David J. Schow, John Skipp, Chet Williamson, and Douglas E. Winter.

Back in the Day (Part 1) hosted by Brian Keene

Quote of the Day

“The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War.

"Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear.

"Ho ho ho. Let's not get carried away here. Freedom was yesterday in this country. Its value has been discounted. The only freedom we truly crave today is freedom from Dumbness. Nothing else matters."

--Hunter S. Thompson, KINGDOM OF FEAR, 2003 

Cormac McCarthy's Noir Masterpieces

From Nick Kolakowski's 6-23-23 CRIMEREADS article entitled "How Cormac McCarthy Used Crime Fiction's Tropes to Make Masterpieces":

Attempting to analyze McCarthy’s work through the lens of ‘crime fiction’ is an interesting exercise. His books were saturated with ‘crime’ in the most primal sense: murder, theft, baby-eating, massacre and genocide. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy told The New York Times in 1992. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”

Crime fiction also revolves on the axis of crime and punishment, law and outlaw—but even in his most grounded novels, McCarthy wasn’t interested in the niceties of societal justice. The marauders of “Blood Meridian” pillage with impunity until more savage forces tear them apart; the police in “Child of God” are little more than a cleanup crew once the full scope of the protagonist’s horror is revealed; the cops who scurry through “No Country for Old Men” are powerless before the ruthlessness of Anton Chigurh, a professional hitman and fixer who pontificates about fate before murdering people; and in “The Road,” set in a post-apocalyptic America coated with ash, the laws and tenets of the old world are a fading dream.

Much of crime fiction is obsessed with balance: the forces of law and order win, or at least the guilty get what’s coming to them. The arc of McCarthy’s literary universe bends not toward justice but something far darker. In “Blood Meridian,” man is described as the “ultimate practitioner” of war, the “ultimate trade.” War, in the book’s context, isn’t the orderly movement of troops around a field—it’s slaughter and pillage, much of it conducted on territory where burning down a village and killing its inhabitants for their scalps is considered just another Tuesday. Humanity perfected violence, and violence pushed humanity onto a merciless evolutionary path: Sheriff Bell, the old-fashioned lawman in “No Country for Old Men,” laments that a man he sent the death row “wasn’t nothin compared to what was comin down the pike.”

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency

Earlier today, the House of Representatives held a congressional hearing regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena (i.e., UFOs). You can see the entire hearing directly below....

Subcommittee Hearing: Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency

CHAMELEO ANNIVERSARY

Twenty years ago this month, my friend Dion Fuller was arrested by the San Diego Police Department (under the ostensible auspices of The Patriot Act) for conspiring with international terrorists to smuggle Top Secret military equipment out of Camp Pendleton. The fact that Dion had absolutely nothing to do with international terrorists, smuggling, Top Secret military equipment, or Camp Pendleton didn’t seem to bother the NCIS. Dion was released from jail after a six-day-long Abu-Ghraib-style interrogation during which he was never allowed to make a single phone call or speak to a lawyer. This led to a domino effect of High Strangeness that continues to this very day. If you want to know the full story, read my 2015 book CHAMELEO (available from OR Books right HERE).

 

KING KONG: THE STAGE PLAY!

If you find yourself anywhere near Southern California within the next three weeks, I recommend checking out the Maverick Theater's wildly fun and inventive stage adaptation of KING KONG (1933), which I had the pleasure of seeing this past Sunday night. The Maverick Theater is located in Fullerton where Brian Newell has spent almost the last twenty years producing such eccentric stage adaptations as PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE and SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS. (Obscure & Useless Factoid: Oddly enough, the theater is located within walking distance of the Santa Ana apartment building where Philip K. Dick wrote VALIS.) What better way to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's most legendary film? The next performance is Friday, July 21st. To order tickets for the show, click HERE!

In other KONG news, I recommend buying a copy of PS Publishing's recent hardcover release, Edgar Wallace's KONG: AN ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY (edited by Stephen Jones). Here's the publisher's description of this historically important book:

90 YEARS AGO, the classic Hollywood monster movie King Kong was released. What most people do not realise is that much of the film was the brainchild of best-selling British mystery writer Edgar Wallace (1875–1932). Known as the “King of Thrillers”, Wallace was an incredibly prolific and influential writer who moved to California in the early 1930s, where he was employed at RKO Radio Pictures. He was working on the initial drafts of Kong when he died unexpectedly, at the age of fifty-six, just two months into pre-production.

For decades, Wallace’s contribution to the film has been consistently down-played. Now, with the publication of Kong: An Original Screenplay, we can finally see how Wallace’s substantial draft script prefigures much of the narrative structure and more important themes found in the final film. It also depicts many of the production’s key scenes, while also including several epic sequences that were never used.

With an historical Introduction by multiple award-winning editor Stephen Jones, Wallace’s personal copy of his original draft script with his own corrections and interpolations, a boys’ story-paper adaptation of the film, preliminary production stills and art-work, and a colour portfolio of King Kong posters from around the world, Kong: An Original Screenplay finally gives Edgar Wallace the credit he deserves as the “Man Who Created Kong”!

“Corporate Awareness Monitoring”

From Gabriel Grill and Christian Sandvig's 6-22-23 WIRED article entitled "Military AI’s Next Frontier: Your Work Computer":

IT’S PROBABLY HARD to imagine that you are the target of spycraft, but spying on employees is the next frontier of military AI. Surveillance techniques familiar to authoritarian dictatorships have now been repurposed to target American workers.

Over the past decade, a few dozen companies have emerged to sell your employer subscriptions for services like “open source intelligence,” “reputation management,” and “insider threat assessment”—tools often originally developed by defense contractors for intelligence uses. As deep learning and new data sources have become available over the past few years, these tools have become dramatically more sophisticated. With them, your boss may be able to use advanced data analytics to identify labor organizing, internal leakers, and the company’s critics.

It’s no secret that unionization is already monitored by big companies like Amazon. But the expansion and normalization of tools to track workers has attracted little comment, despite their ominous origins. If they are as powerful as they claim to be—or even heading in that direction—we need a public conversation about the wisdom of transferring these informational munitions into private hands. Military-grade AI was intended to target our national enemies, nominally under the control of elected democratic governments, with safeguards in place to prevent its use against citizens. We should all be concerned by the idea that the same systems can now be widely deployable by anyone able to pay.

FiveCast, for example, began as an anti-terrorism startup selling to the military, but it has turned its tools over to corporations and law enforcement, which can use them to collect and analyze all kinds of publicly available data, including your social media posts. Rather than just counting keywords, FiveCast brags that its “commercial security” and other offerings can identify networks of people, read text inside images, and even detect objects, images, logos, emotions, and concepts inside multimedia content. Its “supply chain risk management” tool aims to forecast future disruptions, like strikes, for corporations.

Network analysis tools developed to identify terrorist cells can thus be used to identify key labor organizers so employers can illegally fire them before a union is formed. The standard use of these tools during recruitment may prompt employers to avoid hiring such organizers in the first place. And quantitative risk assessment strategies conceived to warn the nation against impending attacks can now inform investment decisions, like whether to divest from areas and suppliers who are estimated to have a high capacity for labor organizing [...].

The corporations purveying these services are thriving in a context of obscurity and regulatory neglect. Defenses of workplace surveillance are made of the thinnest tissue. Industry apologists proclaim that their software, sold to help employers “understand the labor union environment,” isn’t anti-union. Instead, they brand themselves as selling “corporate awareness monitoring” and prominently mention that “every American is protected by federal, state, and local laws to work in safe conditions.” It’s apparently not the manufacturer’s fault if a buyer uses this software to infringe on a legally protected right to organize or protest.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

"Targeted Individuals Under the Shadowy Control of the Influencing Machine"

From Sophia Goodfriend's 6-8-23 THE BAFFLER article entitled "Paranoid Posting: Psyops on TikTok":

Today, [Hailey] Lujan eagerly mines her ties to the covert sphere for all they are worth. She mostly portrays herself as a cute prophet capable of influencing entire populations, foremost her fans. In January, she partnered with Weapons Outfitters to release a calendar titled “The Fucking of Hearts and Minds: A Twelve-Step Operation.” The cover features Lujan in a black leather bra, holding a shotgun, and pointing suggestively toward the viewer. That same month she launched SikeOps, which markets limited-edition Lujan merchandise like Tic Tacs shaped like bullets and iron-on patches announcing, “You’ve just been fucked by psyops.”

While there are many breeds of military influencers—from National Guard recruiters to infantry lifestyle gurus—Lujan might be the only psychological operations soldier cashing in on a booming influencer market. Still, her content bears a striking similarity to prior recruitment strategies blasted by the U.S. military. In May 2022, the Special Operations Recruiting Battalion released a recruitment video titled “Ghosts in the Machine.” “Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings?” the film asks over a manicured reel of special ops forces gallivanting around the world with automatic weapons. More akin to an abbreviated psychological thriller, the film seems to promise that those who enlist will gain access to a trove of secret knowledge that will allow them to separate fact from fiction.

It may seem strange that the DoD is telling Americans to distrust all official narratives in a bid to bolster its popularity. Yet we’ve entered the age of “psyop realism,” as Günseli Yalcinkaya writes in Dazed, in which we are all “targeted individuals under the shadowy control of the Influencing Machine.” Rather than seeking alternative sources of media unmarred by government or corporate influence, more tech users seem resigned to the fact that everything they consume online is propaganda. A riff on Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, “the widespread acceptance that there is no alternative to capitalism,” psyop realism affirms its conditions of possibility by acceding to the ontological crisis of our post-truth era, a time where the terms of reality are interminably up for grabs. It is a condition that oozes, in the words of Jak Ritger, “a pervasive paranoia of all politics and deep distrust of authority.”

American culture has long been marked by hallmarks of psyop realism, namely rampant conspiratorialism and suspicion of political authority, with former military personnel at the vanguard of high-profile movements. Bill Kasings was a U.S. Navy Officer who worked as a technical writer for one of the rocket manufacturers for NASA’s Apollo Mission before he published the wide-reaching tract We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle in 1976. Bo Gritz, a Vietnam veteran co-founded a survivalist community and paramilitary training center, ran for vice president, and often claimed the United Nations was bringing about an apocalyptic New World Order. Korey Rowe was an infantryman in Afghanistan in the mid-2000s when he helped produce the 9/11 truther series Loose Change that went viral among veterans.

The real novelty of “psyop realism” is that the military is now proudly aggravating American conspiratorialism across social media. Perhaps this is in response to the heightened visibility of racist paranoia throughout the armed forces. FBI infiltrated far-right chat rooms and Facebook pages reveal QAnon and Great Replacement Theories swirling across bases named after Confederate generals—including Lujan’s Fort Bragg. Chronic Trumpism among the military’s ranks has some retired generals worried that the 2024 elections will yield a successful coup attempt. Sowing deep-state intrigue through official and unofficial channels, from recruiting videos to influencers, helps the military maintain its dominance over an American public.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Moms for Liberty

From Olivia Little's 7-7-23 MEDIA MATTERS article entitled "Inside Moms for Liberty’s Summit: Big Money and Even Bigger Conspiracy Theories":

I’ve been following Moms for Liberty for over two years, and it’s now the fastest-growing self-described “parental rights” organization in the United States, hiding behind the innocuous descriptor to covertly push a far-right agenda. Its meteoric rise has coincided with an alarming increase in harassment and threats directed at teachers, administrators, and school officials across the country — so much so that the Southern Poverty Law Center designated Moms for Liberty as an extremist group this year.

What always strikes me about Moms for Liberty is the leadership’s ability to provoke such intense and hateful reactions from members, like threatening gun violence against librarians and bringing a 10-year-old to tears. I was morbidly curious about what exactly they were telling them. Although I pieced together a decent enough picture by viewing recorded meetings, streamed events, documents, and interviews, I felt like I was missing something because I was behind a desk, not on the ground.

Until I attended this year’s summit.

The gathering lasted from Thursday night until Sunday morning, drawing over 700 attendees and a steady group of protesters positioned outside of the hotel. It was divided into two types of events: general sessions and breakout sessions. General sessions included big name speakers — Trump, DeSantis, Nikki Haley — catered meals, and a designated press area.

Both the breakout sessions and the main stage included speakers doubling down on a local Indiana chapter's uncritical use of an Adolf Hitler quote printed on the front of their newsletter. NBC News reported that a speaker at a breakout session told attendees to “never apologize.” At Saturday night's general session, co-founder Tiffany Justice said, “One of our moms in a newsletter quotes Hitler. I stand with that mom.” The crowd cheered.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

MASONIC ANNIVERSARY

Twenty years ago today....

James Shelby Downard's STALKING THE GREAT WHORE

Highly Recommended: James Shelby Downard's recently published book, STALKING THE GREAT WHORE, is a compelling read. Editor/publisher Adam Gorightly went to a great deal of trouble to preserve this neglected manuscript, most of which was no doubt written in the 1970s. If not for Gorightly's herculean efforts, these posthumously discovered writings would have remained lost forever. Whether seen as fictional or nonfictional, sane or insane, the fact is that Downard's reality tunnel had an incalculable effect on pop culture. In releasing these visionary musings for publication, Gorightly has uncovered the motherlode of almost every conspiratorial obsession that would eventually become de rigueur for all the conspiracy 'zines that popped up in the late 1980s/'90s, not to mention every subsequent website, blog, and chatroom that ever catered to High Strangeness. If you have an irresistible desire to know what it feels like to freebase 100% pure paranoia, take a chance on STALKING THE GREAT WHORE. 

Recommended Listening: Check out Adam Sayne and Serfeil Stevenson's 4-25-23 CONSPIRINORMAL interview with Adam Gorightly (editor/publisher of STALKING THE GREAT WHORE: THE LOST WRITINGS OF JAMES SHELBY DOWNARD). Here's Sayne and Stevenson's description of the episode:

"Adam Gorightly joins us to discuss a project that he has been working on over the last few years and has now finally published. That is the lost writings of James Shelby Downard published as 'Stalking the Great Whore.' We speak to Adam about his process collecting and going through the writings and organizing it. We then talk about some of the themes Downard writes about and more of the fantastical experiences Downard mentions in the book."

Conspirinormal 445- Adam Gorightly 6 (Stalking James Shelby Downard)

Further Recommended Listening: Check out Adam Sayne and Serfeil Stevenson's 6-1-23 CONSPIRINORMAL interview with Dr. Richard Spence, who wrote the afterword to STALKING THE GREAT WHORE: THE LOST WRITINGS OF JAMES SHELBY DOWNARD. Here's Sayne and Stevenson's description of the episode:

"We are joined by Richard B. Spence to talk about his research he did on the life of James Shelby Downard as laid out in his afterword to "Stalking the Great Whore". He delves into some of the circumstances of Downard's life and if anything he wrote might have some basis in fact."

Conspirinormal 448-

Dr. Richard Spence 4 (More Downard Secrets and Royal Imposters)