All is not lost, my bloggy pen pals that may or may not actually read these. I know I have lapsed in terms of subbing stacks in and out, and that my substack has been the same damn stack for weeks now with no additional item added to the stack. I have had, to put it relatively mildly, a hellish many weeks. I have no tale of woe to offer. All I’ll say is that (this space was intentionally left blank)
I want you to know I’ve been working on projects that I want to connect to this across a couple of forms of media, and I spent a ton of time cutting together clips from the Army-McCarthy hearings and a NYC cable access show from the 70s where Roy Cohn and Gore Vidal go at each other’s throats. I am still playing with that.
I’m also gonna start casting pods to the wind. You can do that easily thru substack. I want to make it a quick hit kinda thing where the goal is to keep it eclectic. Like sometimes I might just rant, sometimes I might talk to a friend about some issue, sometimes I might play you highlights from the insane number of podcasts I listen to, sometimes it might just be some tunes.
There is some dated content I have to share with you that I wrote as part of a draft a week or so ago and will be damned if I let it go to waste. But first, let’s talk…
PEDO 9/11 (trigger warning for the stuff in italics)
(to be clear: I do not believe 9/11 was an inside job. The title is meant to convey that the Epstein case has made me so paranoid I may as well think it was. Please just try to be cool about this, okay? I believe in you, we’re gonna make it through this section together.)
Folks. If Epstein committed suicide, someone helped him do it. That’s the furthest you should go in that direction. Period. Point blank. Full stop. The End. Finis. Goodbye. Have a nice day. Truly yours.
As I heard someone mention on a podcast somewhere (internet sourcing at its finest, friends), if a key figure in a global child sex trafficking ring involving a prominent prime minister and many politicians and celebrities “kills himself” in a very fishy way, and there are immediately 20 thinkpieces about why we shouldn’t assume he was murdered, you have to stop and go “wait what?” I’m not alleging that there’s a conspiracy that extends to all the journalists turning out said thinkpieces, but I do think it reflects a (well-earned) conspiracy fatigue at the minimum. Especially for journalists who fell for the Russia conspiracy thing when Trump was, and continues to, commit impeachable acts in plain sight — ESPECIALLY for them. They are too slow to discern the difference between conspiracy fiction and things that actually can be backed up by credible sources on the record. They just want their jobs to be fun reports on political horse races again. (see also: the NY Times’ recent “fucking mess” of a headline. I heard they had an unprecedented number of cancellations. Good. they have been pissing away their reputation since Iraq, and they didn’t deserve the rep in the first place. Do not get me started on their opinion page. Seriously. Please put down the opinion page topic slowly and carefully, put your hands behind your head, and back up from the opinion page topic to the squad car right behind you.)
Book ‘em, Dano!
This is also not my original material (at least I don’t think it is, maybe it is… Sorry guys, I know it’s supposedly my duty to show my work..) but there IS an actual conspiracy here, and for all its disgusting details, it’s at least nice to know that Republicans and Democrats CAN still come together, in these divided times, over one thing: having teenagers pimped out to them.
And if any candidate running for president right now has a lick of sense, they will run on getting to the bottom of this. The amount of outrage since Epstein died has been crazy to witness. I think it’s because this is a fusion of #MeToo and Occupy. Epstein offered nothing of value to society and simply preyed on those who were desperate enough to sell themselves just on the potential of getting a good job somewhere. Sound familiar? There could not be a better example of why capitalism is fundamentally immoral — well, specifically to the American political system, total free-market capitalism where people can become as wealthy as Epstein and his clients and others can be so desperate they’ll do anything for any small amount of money. I should be clear that when I talk about socialism I’m saying socialize sectors of the economy, not all of it, just the ones we need to not operate purely for profit motive like health care and social services etc.
I don’t think any of the candidates will do that because of how the media reacted to Trump’s retweeting something about Clinton being on the jet. (By the way, they basically just stressed what he’d said and how it was a conspiracy theory etc etc, not so much the fact that he has also taken a joyride on the Lolita Express.) And the thing is, this is definitely not a partisan conspiracy. He was probably right, and the story should have been “Trump calls out Clinton’s ties to Epstein but waves off his own” or something like that.
With Epstein dead we will maybe never know what actually has been going on and how far the reach of it is. That is just too convenient.
Oh, and if you’re putting your faith in William Barr, forget it. His dad, Donald, appointed Epstein to his first job teaching math at a prep school where Barr was headmaster, despite Jeff’s having dropped out of college twice and no real marketable skills, according to former assistant director of the FBI Frank Figliuzzi. It gets EVEN WEIRDER - during the time Barr was working with Epstein in the 70s, he published a sci-fi novel, “Space Relations,”
To be fair I will copy-paste a good review of the book before I paste PART of a review that actually says what it’s about.
Space Relations: Five Stars, from an Amazon Customer
The author has a finely tuned sense of comedy.
Plot twists and action galore.
Joe Bob says "check it out."
Sounds good right?
Maybe not:
I have a copy of this book. It is a really badly written book whose only excuse seems to be to refer to human trafficking and sex slavery either as an appeal to prurient interests - in which case it fails, or to relate reminiscences in fiction, or possibly as a payoff, because the dialogue and connecting thoughts are lacking, as well as any real plot even after half the book is read.
The writer seems to like putting everything in terms of girls, and boys, and children, even when the scenes do not necessarily (but often do) involve kids. So while for instance the 14 year old girl getting raped in the first few chapters is really supposed to be 14, the hero of the book in danger of being sodomized [heath note: here I have removed details that are just horrifying and I don’t want you to have to read, basically he becomes an adult and people still call him ‘kid’ and other things while the violent acts transpired]
It is pretty shocking a headmaster of a school would write this junk. It's not the only low grade sf story out there with this non-writing in it - but they are always bad reads. exploitation novel at best, says something about the writer regardless.
Uhhh…. yeah, I think you might be right about that.
The novel is genuinely just the story of mega wealthy space aliens who are so bored they begin kidnapping Earth children and using them as sex slaves for the power thrill of it. It’s by William Barr’s father, Donald, who was also an agent in the OSA (later CIA) - a whole other rabbit hole I haven’t even peeked down yet.
Barr himself also worked for the firm that represented Epstein in the case where the Miami DA, Acosta, who would ALSO wind up in Trump’s cabinet, worked out a sweetheart plea deal that caused a scandal not long ago.
Barr pledged to get to the bottom of this. It might have sounded convincing without knowing the above info, and he also conveniently left out he has the final say on everything in federal pens, so the fact that there was an unprecedentedly low level of security in such an extreme case was either a very ill-timed oversight on his part or he knew what the fuck was going down and I firmly believe it’s the latter.
I have resisted almost every conspiracy theory I’ve ever been told. But this one is the exception. There’s too much ‘there’ there (for MUCH more on the ‘there’ that is there, check out the TrueAnon podcast… which also advances the theory that QAnon has been an intentional ruse to dilute public opinion when this story hit… i dunno, seems possible to me, 4chan has been good to the mega-wealthy and it’s anonymous by default. But I think it’s probably just a fever dream thing where it’s impossible to know what is a random incident and what isn’t.) I just realized I hate the phrase “too much there there.”
OK, so definitely cutting the bit I wrote about the shootings, this has been far too heavy already. And look, I hope there’s not a conspiracy. I hope William Barr really meant what he said when he said it. I hope Donald was just a kindly old headmaster that wrote about alien sex trafficking because it was just a way of channeling all his feelings about his mother or whatever. I hope that the horrible trade that was taking place died with Epstein, and that he died entirely by suicide as a result of an oversight. But I’m pretty sure it didn’t, and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t. (Strange approach to take for a guy that was working on a project to code his DNA into the human genome by spreading his seed thruout the world for IVFs etc.)
Let’s just jump to another topic, something else that I wrote a while back.
Oh Fuck, I really want to be the damn president. Ass! Crap! (the New Art of Political Swearing)
When Beto O’Rourke lost his Senate race by a close margin, he yelled to his supporters on cable news: I am so fucking proud of you guys! It felt VERY poll-tested and shoehorned in. Now I realize he was actually testing to see what a politician could say to an outraged base and actually benefit from it rather than it hurting, as conventional wisdom would suggest.
But it felt very fake in that moment. And so when he lost it at a reporter about how the media both-sides the gun control argument (specifically, she asked if he was pleased with trump’s proposals to prevent future mass shootings) and said something like “What the fuck kind of question is that?”, I said man I hope people aren’t dumb enough to think this guy, who made his bones as a slumlord, actually gives a shit about the people. If he cared about Texas, he’d drop his go-nowhere presidential bid and run for Senate again. but i digress.
I’ll give him credit, it was pitch perfect. But he’s already revealed himself as a guy working within a new medium: poll-tested political swear words, another layer of shit added to our political discourse by the current President.
Remember how at the first debate, Beto spoke Spanish, it felt weird and shoehorned in, and the only weirder element was that Booker gave him hilarious side-eye that seemed fitting for how out of place his move looked — only to try to do the same, and with MUCH worse diction, when his turn came?
It would appear that Booker has committed to a “be like Beto” strategy on this one too, and with the same tin ear. Soon after Beto’s comments aired, an aide to Booker handed over a text (ostensibly to her) to a reporter where he said the immortal words: “Listening to the president speak. Such a bullshit soup of ineffective words.”
Let’s roll back the tape. Booker has the idea to send his staffer a text while the Demonspawn Trump is up there spewing his horseshit so he can own him in the news cycle at least alongside Beto, if not better than Beto. And his clapback is …. “such a bullshit soup of ineffective words.” Which pretty much sums up the majority of what this Democratic field has to say, Beto and Booker included.
Such a bullshit soup of ineffective words.
The more I type that, the more I actually love it. Such a bullshit soup of ineffective words. I think we’ve found the Paleostack’s new motto.
A Few Shaky Promises of Content to Come
Speaking of which, here are some things I have been working on that you will hopefully see soon. I’m talkin podcasts, I’m talkin youtube clips, I’m talkin actually having some sort of format or purpose or something (I’m the least sure about this one). Behold the report of my progress at attempts to mix media with other media.
have been working on my video-chopping skills because I would love to show you some of the very weird material I have been putting together:
portions of Roy Cohn at the Army-McCarthy hearings set against video of Cohn and Gore Vidal having it out on a NYC TV talk show in the late 70s. Cohn is an important figure to understand, he’s the direct throughline from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump. Cohn was also deeply closeted as a gay man for most of his life and his legacy with McCarthy (who also, reportedly, was seen at Milwaukee ‘bath houses’ regularly that were really pretty much places to have sex) included the Lavender Scare, which involved rooting gays out of government.**(see below)
William F. Buckley, also considered by some to have been in the closet, in conversation with Groucho Marx and Woody Allen, both of which are the silliest things I’ve ever seen. With Buckley’s absolutely awful version of conservativism having given way to Trump’s even worse version, it’s almost tempting to romanticize his impressive intellect, but the guy was also just totally insane. I get fascinated by this.
Also thinking it’d be fun to just get a week in review of a few of the weird things that were on tv news (at least what tv news makes accessible on youtube). Pointing out bias etc or just making em look foolish.
As mentioned above, podcasting. I got semi-decent mic set up, and have a few different ideas re what to do with it, but I think my main aim will be to curate moments from OTHER podcasts that I think people will enjoy with some interstitials. Because honestly folks I listen to hours of podcasts just for these amazingly perfect nuggets of content that only come up every 3rd hour or so, and I’d love to be doing that work on your behalf. I also had an idea for that as its own podcast a while back, and a month or so later, Gimlet comes out with the Sampler, which I don’t think anyone listens to. Fuckin’ Gimlet. Learn to curate, jagoffs.
Need folks to email me things I can respond to in these pages, no matter how stupid you might think it is, we will make it fun.
This is the least likely to see the light of day but I’ve been fucking around with midi instruments and making tracks using Reason, so maybe one of these days ill have a silly song for you all.
**(continuing above from Cohn) Ironically, the idea was that being gay was blackmail material, which compromised the allegiances of State Dept officials and the like, but here we are with a Roy Cohn creation, DJT, whose PUBLIC record is basically all blackmail material. Oh, and by the way, Roy Cohn apparently expressed his sexual energies by taking young, tall, Nordic-looking men under his wing and mentoring them and introducing to all his political and mob connections. So, we are basically dealing with a president who only is where he is because this Roy Cohn guy wanted to fuck him. Trump also uses Cohn’s cadence and exact phrases so when you see how very articulate and smart Cohn is, and how he manages to obfuscate every issue, you realize how much worse Trump could be if he wasn’t just a bimbo.
Please, we only came for the screenshots, enough is enough
Ok. I hear you. The problem is I can’t remember which ones I’ve already used at this point - in terms of one-offs, I mean. I’ve been finding rich veins of screenshottable ‘tent in Google Play Store reviews as well as a few exclusive sources I’m not prepared to reveal yet. (This may or may not be true). I am only gonna drop a few here because I haven’t sized them and don’t feel like it and they’ll be annoyingly large.
I love Google Play Store reviews that tell stories. Sometimes they tell us someone is in deep shit and literally had to resort to WRITING A REVIEW to prove how indignant they are at something the app made it LOOK like they were doing:
Even KIDS TODAY see this as a viable path to get out of trouble:
Sometimes they tell us someone is really enjoying their cocaine:
Sometimes their absolute lack of context makes them hilarious if you’re not familiar with the app, in this case a game called I Became A Dog 2:
And finally, folks, sometimes they’re just poetry. Sometimes they capture the wabi-sabi of existence, knowing that nothing is permanent, that every power up balloon we come across is precious in part because it, like the human body, is impermanent:
On that incredibly poignant note, folks, HZA out. Stay safe out there.