Russian teenagers in MySpace-crazed expropriation spree!
Well they’re not actually Russian, they’re from Florida, but they have Russian names, so near enough. And, more importantly:
Two Florida girls aged 13 and 14 have been charged with armed robbery after allegedly setting up a bogus profile of an attractive woman to snare lonely men. The pair are said to have invented the identity of an 18-year-old called Natalia, who they described as “just lookin’ for some fun”. They also posted provocative photographs to entice men into chatting online. One alleged victim told police he spent two weeks building up a relationship with “Natalia” before he was invited to meet her at an apartment in Jacksonville. But when he turned up, he claims, he was met by one of the girls, who said she was the woman’s friend then robbed him at gunpoint.
“This was not the girl whose picture was on MySpace,” said the man, who wanted to remain anonymous. “She took the gun and put it to my head and said, ‘Empty out your pockets’.”
Cornish Pie
150 g (6 oz) shortcrust pastry
1 lb (450 g) shoulder of mutton
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 lb (450 g) apples
1 lb (450 g) onions
1 teaspoon each of salt and sugar
- Cut the mutton into neat pieces, removing as much fat as possible. Stew for 45 minutes until tender.
- Slice the onions and scald them by dropping into a pan of boiling water. Drain and put aside.
- Peel, core and slice the apples.
- Place a layer of onion and apple in the bottom of a deep pie dish, sprinkle with salt, pepper and sugar.
- Add a layer of meat and season.
- Continue with alternating layers of apples, onion and mutton. Finish with a layer of apple.
- Roll out the pastry and cover the pie. Decorate and glaze.
- Bake at 200°C, 400°F, mark 6 for 15 minutes, then reduce the heat to 180°C, 350°F, mark 4 and bake for a further 30 minutes or until the pastry is golden brown.
Surly Cosmonauts: Vanguard of Revolution
I spent a lot of last week reading Deleuze, Lovecraft, and Alien conspiracy literature. This doesn’t justify, but may explain, why I was, erm, “inspired” by infinite thought’s post on space exploration to make:
If you could touch our lizard skin
Infinite Thought wrote a little while ago about Philip K Dick’s revelation that “the empire never ended.” Interestingly, this is a claim that Dick shares with right-wing American conspiracy theorists, although they differ over which empire they think hasn’t ended. For the American fash, it is the British Empire that continues to exist. In it’s most sensible form, this theory proposes that the British royal family continue to rule America through their ownership of the Federal Reserve. This is an instance of the hatred of fiat money which fascists and libertarians share (there’s a shop in Berkeley which specializes in varied memorobilia and anti-fiat-money literature. I’m sure the first time I saw it it had a big display of Nazi uniforms in its window, but when I returned to take a picture the Nazi stuff had disappeared; obviously they were on to me).
Anyway, this Federal Reserve nonsense shares a common trait of a lot of conspiracy theorising, which is an obsessive focus on formal patterns of ownership and legal contracts; as with the claim that all American courts are somehow “secretly” military courts, because they supposedly display the military, rather than the civilian, seal. Or, another version of the claim that the British Empire still rules America is the claim that the royal family still owns America in the form of the “Virginia Company”:
The book points out that in 1203, King John of England, in his capacity as Crown Corporation Sole, granted the Vatican Corporation Sole ownership of England and her dominions in perpetuity. In return, the Vatican Corporation Sole granted England’s Crown Corporation Sole administrative rights over England and her dominions, in perpetuity. This renders the United States of America, a private corporation and body politic formerly known as the Virginia Company, a satrapy of the Vatican. If readers care to study the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which absolves King George III of England of future indebtedness to the United States, e.g. picking up the tab for a standing army on American soil, they will observe that King George is presented as Arch Treasurer and Prince Elector of the Holy Roman Empire and the United States of America. By signing the treaty two years after the Revolutionary War ended, the American signatories (Ben Franklin and John Adams) were acknowledging that King George was still the ruler of America. Total Vatican control over America did not occurr until the 19th century when the treacherous Jesuits initiated passage of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which rendered the laws of the individual sovereign states subservient to those of the United States of America
This story takes one into more exciting realms of conpsiranology. The Virginia Company, it turns out is just the tip of an iceberg involving Nazis, Illuminati, Knights Templar, Freemasons, the NSA, aliens, and so on. I found somewhere on the internet a document which gave exhaustive detail about the legal arrangements by which aliens had taken ownership of the Earth (I can’t re-google it, must be the CIA). There’s something extra wierd about phrasing ones discussion of alien influence in this legalistic way. If aliens have taken over Earth, surely the question of whether they have done so legally or not is not really of utmost importance. Of course, this serves to naturalize property, as if ownership were something that made sense outside of a particular legal and political context, as if it were a galactic universal.
For the full-bore alien conspiracy madness, how about a comment posted on this site, detailing the different levels of conspiracy, from the top (God), to the bottom (inevitably, the Jews). This comment is hardly unusual in its reactionary bent; alien conspiracy theories usually overlap with older right-wing conspiracism, see for instance the “Gnostic Liberation Front,” who big up holocaust denier Ernst Zundel and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by that, particularly those of us who really are members of a world-wide Jewish communist conspiracy. But this form of conspiracism is deeply opposed to revolutionary politics: they begin with hostility to the Freemasons, who were, after all, a radical bourgeois-liberal organization.
Benjamin points out in the Arcades that secret societies were a significant feature of the bourgeois revolutions of the 19th century, and this form of organization was initially adopted by the workers’ movement, too (he quotes at length an article by Marx on working-class conspirators, and he discusses Blanqui in various sections). According to the conspiracy theorists, the Illuminati are servants of Lucifer, engaged in a struggle against God-given ignorance and for world communism. Very Paradise Lost; sounds good to me. If there is an anti-human extra-terrestrial conspiracy, communists should probably be part of it.
Bonus: The Sparts and Freemasonry (is the Bolshevik Tendency a plot by the Bavarian Illuminati? It probably is the most logical explanation); A conspiracy theory quiz (Featuring such gems as the occult messages in Super Mario. Although they’re probably right about Kissinger funding the New Age movement).
Perfection
Could anything possibly be added to or taken away from this product description?
Reptile investigator Dragon Eye Morrison has possessed high-voltage superpowers ever since a childhood accident at a power station. With megawatts of power coursing through his body, he discharges his surplus energy by playing high voltage rock ‘n’ roll with his electric guitar. He spends his days looking for lost lizards in the alleyways of Tokyo, and his nights fighting the reptilian part of his brain that is making him increasingly violent. A shadowy figure named Thunderbolt Buddha soon surfaces and begins following Dragon Eye about town. A former TV repairman turned super-villain, Thunderbolt Buddha uses his high-powered love of technological devices to aid in his evil plans. Powered-up to the max in his electrical body suit, the two finally come face to face in an all out electricfied rock ‘n’ roll battle for the supremacy of Tokyo!
Unexpected Sunderland accent
Paris Hilton’s genius has always been as an example of bourgeois excess – a kind of perfect pointlessness that isn’t even an aristocratic sovereignty or a Bataillean general economy (Paris Hilton as voyou désÅ“uvré? Sounds like a Thesis You Should Write). So she’s rather ruined things by releasing a fairly good pop reggae record![[MP3]](/res/MP3.png "Download MP3 file")
. What with this and the last Sugababes album, the Ace Of Bass comeback can’t be far away.
Even more unexpected, though, is that she’s also recorded a track that sounds a great deal like Kenickie (well, if there’d always been a disco element to their music, anyway). Admittedly, there’s no actual Sunderland accent, but her vocal stylings are remarkably reminiscent of a young Lauren Laverne.
“I was saying we’ll be just fine, if you just leave the thinking to me”
Things which aren’t exactly theses, but which nevertheless you should write. I don’t imagine my co-editors at Critical Sense are familiar with the works of Girls@Play, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to persuade them to title an issue “‘He watches TV, I read my books’: Why Academics Observe Pop Culture.” Although, we’ve just got a new computer and we can finally print háÄ?eks, so maybe we should do a Žižek special issue. We could accept one article and print it four times.
Meanwhile, in honor of Daphne and Celeste’s “Never Been to Memphis”, someone should write an attack on the Democrats’ turn to “values” called “Eww, we’re in Kansas,” while somebody else (possibly me) should write a history of the relationship between the DIY protest movement (Earth First!, Reclaim the Streets, etc) and the traditional left called “Marching in Line, What Are You, Sheep? Do You Need to be Told How to Move to the Beat?”
And “Star Club” is obviously one of the finest records ever recorded.
Landscapes
The valley watered by the Mississippi seems created for it alone; it dispenses good and evil like a local god.… The surface of the earth is covered with granitic sand and irregularly shaped stones through which a few plants just manage to force their way; it looks like a fertile field covered by the ruins of some vast structure.… [I]t is the most magnificent habitation prepared by God for man, and yet one may say that it is till only a vast wilderness.…
A stormy, foggy ocean washed its shores; it was girt round by granite rocks and wide tracts of sand; woods of somber and melancholy trees covered its shores; there was hardly anything but pine, larch, ilex, wild olive and laurel.… In the dark and gloomy depths of the forests the air was always damp from the thousands of streams flowing through them, as yet uncontrolled by man. There was nothing but some flowers, berries, or birds.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
These Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first man, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.
— H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
The primitive machine is not ignorant of exchange, commerce, and industry; it exorcises them, localizes them, cordons them off, encastes them, and maintains the merchant and blacksmith in a subordinate position, so that the flows of exchange and the flows of production do mot manage to break the codes in favor of their abstract or fictional qualities. And isn’t that also what Oedipus, the fear of incest, is about: the fear of a decoded flow? If capitalism is the universal truth, it is so in the sense that makes capitalism the negative of all social formations. It is the thing, the unnamable, the generalized decoding of flows that reveals a contrario the secret of all these formations, coding the flows, and even overcoding them, rather than letting anything escape coding. Primitive societies are not outside history; rather, it is capitalism that is at the end of history, it is capitalism that results from a long history of contingencies and accidents, and that brings on this end. It cannot be said that the previous formations did not see this Thing that only came from without by rising from within, and that at all costs had to be prevented from rising.
— Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
