The Cult of Ziz

Here's a brief excerpt from Holly Ramer, Patrick Whittle, and Mark Scolforo's 2-15-25 AP NEWS article entitled "A Vermont Border Agent’s Death Was the Latest Violence Linked to the Cultlike Zizian Group":

In the wooded outskirts of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a perplexed landlord noticed odd sights at two of his rental properties.

Tenants wore long black coats and parked box trucks outside the duplexes. They ran an electrical cord from one box truck into one of the condos, and kept a stretcher inside another.

A neighbor remembers similarly dressed figures walking around at night holding hands. They never spoke a word.

By the time the FBI searched the property last week, one of the most recent tenants had been killed in a shootout with U.S. Border Patrol agents in Vermont, and a second was under arrest. A third, a shadowy figure known online as “Ziz,” remains missing after authorities linked their cultlike group to six deaths in three states.

Officials have offered few details of the cross-country investigation, which broke open after the Jan. 20 shooting death of a Border Patrol trooper in Vermont during a traffic stop. Associated Press interviews and a review of court records and online postings tell the story of how a group of young, highly intelligent computer scientists, most of them in their 20s and 30s, met online, shared anarchist beliefs, and became increasingly violent.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

To learn more about the Cult of Ziz, I recommend checking out the 2-3-25 episode of Steven Snider's THE FARM podcast. Click HERE to listen to "Thiel, Yudkowsky, Rationalists & the Cult of Ziz w/ David Z. Morris & Recluse."

CRAZY CLOWN TIME

What's that? Not interested in the Super Bowl? If so, perhaps you should listen to David Lynch's "Football Game" instead...

David Lynch - Football Game

Christopher O'Brien on WHERE DID THE ROAD GO?

Recommended Listening: In honor of the late Christopher O'Brien (1957-2024), Seriah Azkath recently reposted a pair of interviews he conducted with O'Brien back in 2014. Both interviews focus on O'Brien's magnum opus, STALKING THE HERD: UNRAVELING THE CATTLE MUTILATION MYSTERY. You can here both episodes of WHERE DID THE ROAD GO? directly below...

In Memory of Chris O'Brien:

A 21st-century Coup

From Paul Krugman's 2-3-25 article entitled "Trump Is Doing Exactly What He Said He Would. Who Could Have Predicted That?":

For as I said, the trade war, drastic as it is, isn’t the most important story right now. It takes second place to what looks like a quiet takeover of the machinery of government.

Here’s how it works: Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary — whose selection was, financial types assured me, an indication that Trump wouldn’t go wild — has given associates of Elon Musk, who as far as we know aren’t even government employees let alone officials with the right security clearance, access to the computers at the Treasury department that control the federal government’s financial plumbing — that make payments to contractors, workers, everything.

This situation gives Musk’s minions the ability to download millions of Americans’ private information. But people who understand the system better than I do say that it also effectively gives them control of public spending. Congress may have passed a law mandating that money be spent for some public purpose; but Musk and company may simply, in effect, tell the system not to cut the checks.

If this is really the case, and serious people say that it is, we may already have experienced what amounts to a 21st-century coup. There may not be tanks in the streets, but effective control of the government may already have slipped out of the hands of elected officials.

To read Krugman's entire article, click HERE.

HAPPY 143rd BIRTHDAY, JAMES JOYCE!

On what would have been James Joyce's 143rd birthday, I recommend listening to the following 1988 interview (conducted by Faustin Bray of Sound Photo Synthesis) in which Robert Anton Wilson discusses Joyce's 1939 masterpiece, FINNEGANS WAKE. You can find more of Wilson's thoughts regarding FINNEGANS WAKE in Wilson's 1988 nonfiction book, COINCIDANCE: A HEAD TEST.

Robert Anton Wilson △ On Finnegans Wake and Joseph Campbell

SALON on Trump's Hard Lesson for MAGA True Believers

From Rich Logis' 1-26-25 SALON article entitled "MAGA's True Believers Don't Understand Capitalism — Trump Will Teach Them a Hard Lesson":

There’s the mythology of capitalist meritocracy at work, which is still championed by many people who’ve been failed by both major political parties. Their concerns have been exploited and manipulated by Republicans who have traumatized them into believing that liberalism, rather than capitalism, is the source of their ills; that because of the evil policies of liberals, they keep working harder and harder but never seem to break even, much less get ahead.

Lest there be any confusion: I support capitalism. Entrepreneurship and innovation best advance in free markets.

But still: The rage I felt, even more acutely experienced today among the MAGA faithful, was perhaps warranted but rooted in ignorance. Trump was not wrong when he lamented the once-thriving communities ravaged and hollowed out by outsourcing. But his solution was no solution at all.

Now he has persuaded millions into believing that only he can successfully stymie the global and domestic capitalist forces that he did essentially nothing about during his first administration.

Why didn’t he do anything? Because Trump understands, in his own pedestrian way, that capitalism operates less on merit the higher one moves up in the hierarchy.

Trump is the most devoted “deep state” capitalist in American history, given the millions his businesses have earned in foreign payments. So much for thwarting the globalists. Want an argument for why the über-wealthy should pay more in taxes? If these money-hoarders could have gotten so rich in another country, they most certainly would have. Do we really believe this doesn’t apply to Trump?

Broadly speaking, the two core ideological dogmas within MAGA are: 1) liberalism is almost solely culpable for our national ills (second come the RINOs, or Republicans in Name Only, although it’s not close); and 2) Trump is the greatest fixer God ever created.

Most people who voted for Trump — especially the MAGA faithful — want and expect him, and by extension the federal government, to intervene in commerce. According to the classical definition, that would be socialism — or Marxism or communism, whichever epithet we are using today. The confusion is general, because it’s all mythological [...].

[T]he notion that a singular person can serve as an economic savior and, in messianic fashion, usher in utopia, is much closer to a socialist-communist notion than a capitalist one. That surely does not mean the government should play no role in our economy; as mentioned above, the Biden administration oversaw remarkable growth. Trump and the Republicans, however, didn't actually campaign on any policy ideas aimed to increase economic mobility and opportunity. They benefited instead from the profoundly human delusion known as nostalgia.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Trump's Personal Deep State Gives Hegseth a Free Ride

From Jackie Calmes' 1-16-25 LOS ANGELES TIMES article entitled "The Case of the Missing Hegseth Investigation":

For folks who have so harshly turned on the FBI for supposedly targeting Donald Trump over the years, Republicans sure are quick to turn to the bureau when they need a cover-up, er, background check to salvage a troubled Trump pick for high office.

In October 2018, the beneficiary was Brett M. Kavanaugh. Then-President Trump and a Senate Republican majority directed the FBI to investigate sexual assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee to placate Republican senators whose threatened opposition could sink his nomination.

But as I learned in researching a book at the time, the Trump White House told the FBI whom its agents could contact, ignoring willing witnesses with damning information, and gave them just days to finish. The bureau’s slapdash Kavanaugh report, merely summarizing agents’ interviews without drawing conclusions, was enough political cover for Trump and Senate Republicans to falsely claim he’d been exonerated. Democrats correctly insisted otherwise. Yet it was their word against the Republicans’ since the senators-only report remains secret to this day.

And Kavanaugh, comfortably settled into his lifetime seat on the nation’s highest court, voted last Thursday — fortunately on the losing side — in favor of blocking Trump’s sentencing for covering up hush-money payments to a porn star.

Trump isn’t even back in the White House and he’s already replayed the FBI card — call it the Trump card — and again apparently successfully, this time for his manifestly unfit choice for Defense secretary, former Fox News host and former National Guard officer Pete Hegseth. With another incomplete, half-baked and secret FBI background check related to alleged sexual assault and excessive drinking, Hegseth got through his Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday without a dissenting voice from the Armed Services Committee’s Republican majority.

To read the entire article, click HERE.