I'll alleviate some of the crypticness though. None of this spooky stuff is stuff you haven't heard before. What gets spooky is I have the *actual linkages* underlying this narrative.

Essentially, a private investigator, before *refusing* to dig any further, presented evidence of a multi-national (you can guess the ones) NGO/agency push to create credible evidence of a "White Nationalist" threat in the United States in order to launch Joe Biden's presidential bid.

See, the reason Biden's backers wanted him back in the ring is because they were balls deep in Ukrainian energy investments, and wanted to make sure the United States would enter any Russian/Ukrainian conflagration to protect their investments.

This of course does not play well with the 300k or so voters in Milwaukee and Western Pennsylvania who decide national elections, so the looming spectre of "White Nationalism" was the ticket.

The idea was to create a much larger violent incident, but at least two of the interlacing layers of the plan red-lighted on the day of the event, and they were only able to produce one (dubious) murder.

This of course, was enough, and Biden announced the next day. But if you have ever wondered why the UTR coverage seemed too wall-to-wall with respect to what actually happened, it is because the media apparatus was spun up with the understanding that a *much larger story* was going to be underpinning the hysteria. The SPLC enters this equation as a broker more than anything else-- as they were (we now know for certain) one of the only institutional actors with established channels for laundering NGO money into pay-for-play schemes with existing extremist groups.

One megathread from me today-- people often ask me about patronage networks, incubators, how to bootstrap "culture" from nothing. Here's what I know, and this is how I know it. The Grateful Dead didn’t just "play music." They built a cybernetic system of propagation and replication.

In 1969 they were just one of many of garage bands in Haight-Ashbury, yet have persisted and thrived to the point where they can somewhat easily be called the most successful American cultural project of the 20th century.

I don't remember Aug 28 as well. Mixed responses. Mother was freaking out, Dad was on the emergency crew at work and, in hindsight, trying to pretend it was going to be ok. A habit I've picked up from him in my adult years.

It was hot. Swirling colors mostly. Grey, green, blue grey green in dazzling tones. Hand wringing. Old people telling stories about Betsy and Camille at the gas stations. Sounds of hammers.

Confusion and anger already. 20 hours to evacuate? The fast food places were still open though.

Around noon, that eerie feeling set in. The storm was huge on the television. Bigger than anything I'd ever seen. The cloud bands started rolling in far ahead of even the rain.

It was the first time id ever seen "hurricane bands" as tightly formed irl as they were on the radar.

Hot..it was hot. Can't stress enough. The central trauma of my life was less than three days away and I kinda knew it was coming but didn't really.

It's no secret that I've spent all year pretty much soyfacing over the work of David Lynch, but I gotta say last night I got handed the fuel I needed to say "GOAT". Better than Kubrick etc, and that was learning that (look I'm kinda dumb) Mullholland Drive came *after* Lost Highway. Now the "triptych" works. Mullholland only really works as the "middle" of a triptych because it has no stability whatsoever. None. It begins in uncertainty and ends there, nothing happens. The only thing you can say about it is "A Woman Is In Trouble".

You can be forgiven for getting ass-blasted by Dostoyevsky, and maybe that's the best thing. Just get flattened by one of them and die right there, but I have been trying to figure out for the better part of two decades why Russian writers cut so deeply into the American soul. It's not a fetish or anything, I'm mostly ambivalent about Russia. I went there and wasn't impressed by much of anything. Granted I was there at a weird time, but I wasn't like stumbling around soyfacing.

I gave you some ecoystems in the South that have been totally wrecked by land privatization. Most of those happened a long time ago, though, before we knew better. I was saving this one, though, because it is happening right now. While you read this.

These are the Pine Rocklands


When Miami was still more marsh than metropolis, ≈185 000 acres of rockland blanketed the county. Sprawl, agriculture & a century of fire-suppression have whittled that to < 2 % outside Everglades NP isolated in postage-stamp fragments.

Worst Places in America (Sandbatch edition)

10) The Entire Vibe of Non-Chicago Midwest Sry
9) Jacksonville, FL
8) Central Coast, CA (the whole thing)
7) Oakland, CA
6) Syracuse, NY
5) Colombus, OH
4) Denver, CO
3) Charlotte, NC
2) Houston, TX
1) Atlanta, GA

Breakdown thread (1/11) Midwest Trading Card

Diagnosis: Suburban Protestantism, Central European sense of humor, weather as personality, and moral vacancy disguised as politeness.

Key Image: A Hy-Vee parking lot under grey skies, an unused basketball hoop, and someone saying “big if true” without irony.

I love the patronizing thing where we do things like pretend "free speech" has any real basis in "Europe". It is lifted wholesale from John Milton, and we imposed it on Europe in the surrender conditions after WW1. The ontological cuts are here.

This is *close* but not quite right. The WASP ethnicity was a synthesis of two groups of people that were formed by Reconstruction, not the civil war.

https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1786024053444157940

The first group-- the one that mostly matches his description, were a group of wealthy, aesthete, New Englanders who broke with the Radical Reconstruction faction over the nomination of James Blaine for President. They're called "Mugwumps".

Alright we do another Deep Dive with "The Waste Land" as our anchor.

We look at the lines:

"I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?"

We've stumbled, suddenly, without warning, on the Fisher King. Hard to find a more *basic* image in our mythology than the Fisher King. He is first attested eo ipso in a late 12th century Old French manuscript detailing the adventures of Perceval. But probably has antecedents in the *veritably* ancient Welsh tale about Branwen ferch Llŷr.

This doesn't work, there aren't enough hunters. They tried this in Arkansas and on just ONE highway last week I stopped counting at over 100 deer.

🧵

https://twitter.com/Murgoot/status/1772705067021267446

The ecosystems you see in the United States, especially the Continental United States, are all very engineered. We spent the 20th century building up a massive state apparatus for terra forming and then privatized it into oblivion in the Reagan years.

But some things to know.

Sherman is unironically, possibly, the greatest American military figure of the 19th century... possibly *ever*

A counter-thread.

https://twitter.com/scsimodem/status/1750932899421892956

What is referred to as a "vengeful tear across the south" that didn't cause any Confederate surrenders, is the work of a man whose mind was already in the 20th century.

I don't really get the banned books thing. Let's look at four books that *actually* are de facto banned.


All four produced by absolutely eminent scholars in their respective fields-- bringing any of them up in an institutional setting is smashing into the electrified third rail of American institutional life, leading to unperson-ing and Kafka tier confusion.

When Cyrus the Great entered Babylon in 539 BC, the world was old. More significant, the world knew its antiquity. Its scholars had compiled long dynastic lists, and simple addition appeared to prove that kings whose monuments were still visible had ruled more than four millennia before.

https://twitter.com/CWingUexkull/status/1699584330526347727

Yet earlier were other monarchs, sons
of gods and so themselves demigods, whose reigns covered several
generations of present-day short-lived men. Even these were preceded,
the Egyptians believed, by the gods themselves, who had held sway
through long aeons.