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Michael Hudson extends his historical review from debt in antiquity the role of the Catholic Church in the rise of banking and war finance.
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It was hard to pick pull quotes from this because every paragraph is perfect.
I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response. Miyazaki said, "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself." Scam Altman said we can surround the solar system with a Dyson Sphere to hold data centers. Miyazaki is right, and Altman is wrong. Miyazaki tells stories that blend the ordinary and the fantastic in ways people find deeply meaningful. Altman tells lies for money. [...]
I do understand: you want permission. There's a machine in the corner wrapped in human skin that makes things out of shit and blood to look like whatever you want (as long as you don't look too closely). You gave one to your teacher and they didn't notice. Your boss told you to use it after they laid off half the team and it was fine. You fed one to your kids and they liked it. You want to know you can use it sometimes without me thinking less of you. You don't need me to believe it's useful, you just want me to be polite about it.
But I am a hater, and I will not be polite. The machine is disgusting and we should break it. The people who build it are vapid shit-eating cannibals glorifying ignorance. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.
I became a hater by doing precisely those things AI cannot do: reading and understanding human language; thinking and reasoning about ideas; considering the meaning of my words and their context; loving people, making art, living in my body with its flaws and feelings and life. AI cannot be a hater, because AI does not feel, or know, or care. Only humans can be haters. I celebrate my humanity.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Beelzebibi - by Mr. Fish
As Israel ticks off its list of Nazi-like atrocities against the Palestinians, including mass starvation, it prepares for yet another – the demolition of Gaza City, one of the oldest cities on Earth. Heavy engineering equipment and gigantic armored bulldozers are tearing down hundreds of heavily damaged buildings. Cement trucks are churning out concrete to fill tunnels. Israeli tanks and fighter jets pummel neighborhoods to drive Palestinians who remain in the ruins of the city to the south.
It will take months to turn Gaza City into a parking lot. I have no doubt Israel will replicate the efficiency of the Nazi SS Gen. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who oversaw the obliteration of Warsaw. He spent his final years in a prison cell. May history, at least in terms of this footnote, repeat itself.
As Israeli tanks advance, Palestinians are fleeing, with neighborhoods such as Sabra and Tuffah, cleansed of its inhabitants. There is little clean water and Israel plans to cut it off in northern Gaza. Food supplies are scarce or wildly overpriced. A bag of flour costs $22.00 a kilo, or your life. A report published Friday by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classifications (IPC) , the world's leading authority on food insecurity, for the first time has confirmed a famine in Gaza City. It says more than 500,000 people in Gaza are facing "starvation, destitution and death", with "catastrophic conditions" projected to expand to Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis next month. Nearly 300 people, including 112 children, have died from starvation.
European leaders, along with Joe Biden and Donald Trump, remind us of the real lesson of the Holocaust. It is not Never Again, but, We Do not Care. They are full partners in the genocide. Some wring their hands and say they are “appalled” or “saddened.” Some decry Israel’s orchestrated starvation. A few say they will declare a Palestinian state.
This is Kabuki theater — a way, when the genocide is over, for these Western leaders to insist they stood on the right side of history, even as they armed and funded the genocidal killers, while harassing, silencing or criminalizing those who decried the slaughter.
Israel speaks of occupying Gaza City. But this is a subterfuge. Gaza is not to be occupied. It is to be destroyed. Erased. Wiped off the face of the earth. There is to be nothing left but tons of debris that will be laboriously carted away. The moonscape, devoid of Palestinians of course, will provide the foundation for new Jewish colonies.
"Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to...the south to a humanitarian zone without Hamas or terrorism, and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries," Israel's Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich announced at a conference on increased Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
All that was familiar to me when I lived in Gaza no longer exists. My office in the center of Gaza City. The Marna boarding house on Ahmed Abd el Aziz Street, where after a day’s work I would drink tea with the elderly woman who owned it, a refugee from Safad in northern Galilee. The coffee shops I frequented. The small cafes on the beach. Friends and colleagues, with few exceptions, are in exile, dead or, in most cases, have vanished, no doubt buried under mountains of debris. On my last visit to Marna House, I forgot to return the room key. Number 12. It was attached to a large plastic oval with the words “Marna House Gaza” on it. The key sits on my desk.
The imposing Qasr al-Basha fortress in Gaza’s Old City — built by Mamluk Sultan Baibars in the 13th century and known for its relief sculpture of two lions facing each other — is gone. So too is the Barquq Castle, or Qalʿat Barqūqa, a Mamluk-era fortified mosque constructed in 1387-1388, according to an inscription above the entrance gateway. Its ornate Arabic calligraphy by the main gate once read:
“In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, Most Merciful. The mosques of God shall establish regular prayers, and practice regular charity, and fear none except God.”
The Great Omari Mosque in Gaza City, the ancient Roman cemetery and the Commonwealth War Cemetery — where more than 3,000 British and commonwealth soldiers from World War I and World War II are buried — have been bombed, and destroyed, along with universities, archives, hospitals, mosques, churches, homes and apartment blocks. Anthedon Harbor, which dates to 1100 B.C. and once provided anchorage for Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman ships, lies in ruins.
I used to leave my shoes on a rack by the front door of the Great Omari Mosque, the largest and oldest mosque in Gaza, in the Daraj Quarter of the Old City. I washed my hands, face and feet at the common water taps, carrying out the ritual purification before prayer, known as wudhu. Inside the hushed interior with its blue-carpeted floor, the cacophony, noise, dust, fumes and frenetic pace of Gaza melted away.
The razing of Gaza is not only a crime against the Palestinian people. It is a crime against our cultural and historical heritage — an assault on memory. We cannot understand the present, especially when reporting on Palestinians and Israelis, if we do not understand the past.
History is a mortal threat to Israel. It exposes the violent imposition of a European colony in the Arab world. It reveals the ruthless campaign to de-Arabize an Arab country. It underscores the inherent racism towards Arabs, their culture and their traditions. It challenges the myth that, as former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak said, Zionists created, “a villa in the middle of a jungle.” It mocks the lie that Palestine is exclusively a Jewish homeland. It recalls centuries of Palestinian presence. And it highlights the alien culture of Zionism, implanted on stolen land.
When I covered the genocide in Bosnia, the Serbs blew up mosques, carted away the remains and forbade anyone to speak of the structures they had razed. The goal in Gaza is the same, to wipe out the past and replace it with myth, to mask Israeli crimes, including genocide.
The campaign of erasure banishes intellectual inquiry and stymies the dispassionate examination of history. It celebrates magical thinking. It allows Israelis to pretend the inherent violence that lies at the heart of the Zionist project, going back to the dispossession of Palestinian land in the 1920s and the larger campaigns of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, does not exist.
The Israeli government bans public commemorations of the Nakba, or catastrophe, a day of mourning for Palestinians who seek to remember the massacres and expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians carried out by Jewish militias in 1948 for this reason. Palestinians are even prevented from carrying their flag.
This denial of historical truth and historical identity permits Israelis to wallow in eternal victimhood. It sustains a morally blind nostalgia for an invented past. If Israelis confront these lies it threatens an existential crisis. It forces them to rethink who they are. Most prefer the comfort of illusion. The desire to believe is more powerful than the desire to see.
Erasure calcifies a society. It shuts down investigations by academics, journalists, historians, artists and intellectuals who seek to explore and examine the past and the present. Calcified societies wage a constant war against truth. Lies and dissimulation must be constantly renewed. Truth is dangerous. Once it is established it is indestructible.
As long as truth is hidden, as long as those who seek truth are silenced, it is impossible for a society to regenerate and reform itself. The Trump administration is in lock step with Israel. It too seeks to prioritize myth over reality. It too silences those who challenge the lies of the past and the lies of the present.
Calcified societies cannot communicate with anyone outside their incestious circles. They deny verifiable fact, the foundation on which rational dialogue takes place. This understanding lay at the heart of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Those who carried out the atrocities of the apartheid regime confessed their crimes in exchange for immunity. By doing so they gave the victims and the victimizers a common language, one rooted in historical truth. Only then was healing possible.
Israel is not only destroying Gaza. It is destroying itself.
Crew of the USS Tom Clancy,
Thank you so much for reading.
Hearing the news lately, I went into my files and found the original copy and photos of a story I wrote for the New Republic in 2019 on Epstein’s New Mexico operation; you can read that story here after it went through editorial pasteurization for a major media outlet, or you can read the raw copy I turned in after speeding down the highway from Santa Fe and spending a week chatting people up in the oldest colonial capital in North America.
I think you’ll still find this piece relevant.
In the back of your mind, while you read this article, keep one question: Why call it “Zorro” (Spanish for Fox) and put fox hunting images on the roadside mailbox near the cattle guard? Then please sound off in the comments, because I’m wondering it myself.
Matt
If there's a secret, New Mexico will try to keep it. The Land of Enchantment has gotten a lot of practice over the years, well before Jeffrey Epstein purchased the Zorro Ranch south of Santa Fe. The world's first nuclear weapon, code name Gadget, was detonated in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Tourists can now visit the Trinity Site on the U.S. Army's White Sands Missile Range to view the epicenter of a highly secret government conspiracy involving top physicists called the Manhattan Project. Trinity is a 111-mile straight line from Zorro Ranch. Consider what lies within the Land of Enchantment this way: Find a map. Make the center the late Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico operation. Put the Trinity site at the edge of its radius. Then look: what else is secret and radioactive and inside that circle? Did New Mexico’s other secrets throw off enough chaff to keep Epstein off the radar?
In 2019, I went to New Mexico to see what I could find out about secrets within the circle. Santa Fe, 23 miles away from Zorro as the crow flies, is the oldest colonial capital city in North America, one with a twisted history. The historic center of this small city in the foothills of the Sangre De Cristo mountains is the Plaza, an open-air park with a Haagen-Daas shop at one corner. This was once a drug store, Zooks Pharmacy, that doubled as a base for Russian espionage; in between filling prescriptions and ringing up customers, deep cover Stalinist spies here plotted the death of Leon Trotsky and later coordinated efforts to steal the secrets of the atomic bomb from Los Alamos (distance from Zorro Ranch: 50 miles).
There are also the sites where the Catholic Church hid pedophile priests in local parishes, until a tsunami of lawsuits from victims forced New Mexico’s largest diocese to file for bankruptcy last June. One of those places is in Jemez Springs, an isolated resort town in the middle of a melange of federal jurisdictions, Pueblo Nations, and National Forests. (Distance from Zorro Ranch: 50 miles. Here, the Catholic Church still operates one of two treatment centers in the United States for pedophile priests. They are treated by fellow members of the cloth who belong to an order called the Servants of the Paraclete — the paraclete, of course, being the Holy Ghost. One wonders about the mental health care available for the victims, or whether they will ever really rely on the paraclete again.
We travel inside the circle, from one abusive church to another. A little over 80 miles to the northwest of Zorro Ranch is Trementina Base, a bunker/vault complex owned by the Church of Spiritual Technology — an elite order within Scientology — with hardened rooms storing L. Ron Hubbard's writings. Hubbard's thoughts on Thetans will survive anything, as they’re reportedly inscribed on etched steel plates in titanium containers filled with inert argon gas.
The location is hardly secret, since the CST’s logo, two interlocking circles with diamonds, can be seen in aerial photos, carved into the high desert scrub, ostensibly to help guide Hubbard's spirit back to its new body — whenever that happens.
"Once Hubbard adopts a new body, he’s expected to make his way to one of the CST bases,” a Trementina Base insider told the Village Voice in 2012. “That’s where he’s supposed to be raised and be taken care of.”
There are dozens of other strange things in that circle: there's the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West, a selective international boarding school in Montezuma founded by Armand Hammer and Prince Charles, originally a resort hotel built on a hot springs sacred to the Jicarilla Apache, the previous inhabitants of the Sangre De Cristos. Bill Richardson — who in recently unsealed court records was named by Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre as a participant in the illegal sexual abuse ring — claimed to be a lecturer at the United World College in 2001-2002, between his stints as Bill Clinton’s secretary of energy and New Mexico’s governor but only showed up once that the students were aware of. That was to hobnob with Queen Noor of Jordan and Prince Pavlos in front of the cameras in advance of his Gubernatorial run (Full disclosure, I was a student at AHUWC at the time. I recall that Richardson accurately called me a smartass).
Down the street from Zorro is the “Light Institute,” a “center for spiritual healing and multi-incarnational exploration is without equal. Individuals of all ages, from all walks of life, from around the world visit The Light Institute to heal the body, mind, and spirit.”
If you’re rich, powerful, and committed to doing something big, strange and keeping it unseen, New Mexico beckons.
***
On February 22, 1993, as Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" topped the domestic charts, the New Mexico State Land Office granted an agricultural land lease to Zorro Trust. The trust was a shell company for Jeffrey Epstein, whose address of record at that time was 457 Madison Avenue (today it is also the headquarters of Trunk Club). On that same day, the Zorro Trust completed a purchase of lands owned by members of the King family, a powerful New Mexico agricultural and political dynasty. Zorro’s deal included rights to the Kings’ leases on public lands, a total of 1,158.97 acres rented for $872.22 a year. The largest private landowners in New Mexico are either outside billionaires or family dynasties. “Very often we will just be a wealthy landowner’s way of consolidating their holdings,” Stephanie Garcia Richard, the New Mexico Land Commissioner, told me.
The Commissioner then produced a thick binder that looked like a briefing book; it was a record of every interaction Epstein had with the land commission which involved only a small portion of Epstein's New Mexico playground; the 50,000 square foot mansion was situated on private land. A few details stood out about the land. For all the care he took purchasing it through shell companies and lawyers, the little things were often neglected. That November, the state sent Epstein a letter for not paying his grazing fees, bringing his annual costs for leasing land from New Mexico to $889.50, plus a 2% interest fee.
The next year, Epstein sought approval to construct a "grass strip runway for a private plane" on New Mexico state land within his lease — but when the state wanted to send inspectors out to the site of the proposed runway, the request for a permit was withdrawn, and Epstein built another runway on land he owned outright. In 2004, a variance from the NM land commissioner allowed Epstein to build a section of raised railroad track where he wanted to put an antique Santa Fe Railroad caboose in sight of the Creston Petroglyphs, nearly 5000 catalogued pictograms left behind by the original inhabitants of the Galisteo Basin. (http://galisteo.nmarchaeology.org/sites/creston.html) (https://www.archaeologysouthwest.org/pdf/arch-sw-v19-no4.pdf)
Zorro wasn’t Epstein’s only New Mexico investment. While raping teenagers three times a day and trafficking them to blackmail powerful friends must have occupied a substantial portion of his time, he had other interests: eugenics, cryogenics, and theoretical physics among them. New Mexico filled those needs nicely: groundbreaking work in all three has been done in New Mexico since the Manhattan Project; after World War 2 the United States imported Nazi war criminals to help run the fledgling space program, where their prior skills in rocketry and ghastly human experiments could help the United States retain the edge over the communists. It seems Epstein, a canny investor, saw value in both the physical and human terrain of New Mexico.
He pumped more than a quarter of a million dollars into the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank for theoretical researchers, where he befriended co-founder and quark-theory pioneer Murray Gell-Mann. When I called a well-connected Santa Fe lawyer, they told me to look at the Institute, and asked what I knew of Gell-Mann's reputation around town. Not much, I admitted, and went to find out.
“When these men describe Epstein,” Vanity Fair wrote, “they talk about ‘energy’ and ‘curiosity,’ as well as a love for theoretical physics that they don’t ordinarily find in laymen. Gell-Mann rather sweetly mentions that ‘there are always pretty ladies around’ when he goes to dinner chez Epstein.”
When I drove out to the Institute to ask about its connections, no one bothered me as I wandered around. SFI is up in the hills above the rest of the city, with beautiful views and a campus that seems like a graduate school building at an expensive university; open spaces and industrial lighting, whiteboards and hardwood furniture. Eventually,a spokeswoman provided me a statement that, “Contrary to certain statements in Epstein’s bios, he was not actively involved at SFI other than as an infrequent donor,” and the Institute had rejected any funding from Epstein after 2010. Gell-Mann could not be reached for comment; he preceded Epstein in death last May, at the age of 89.
Driving out of the Santa Fe Insitute, nestled in the hills above the rest of the city, I stop to take a photo of the welcoming artwork, before the Parking lot; an old, but operable, Chevy truck with an erect rocketship as its unloaded cargo. The fin of the rocketship reads 9EX, but at first I think it reads SEX. “Cowboy artist” Bob Davis built it for SFI’s first Interplanetary Festival. “our facilities crew drives it back and forth on the Chevy truck (part of the exhibit) which has a hydraulic system under the hood for changing the rocket’s angle of inclination," Jenna Marshall, Santa Fe Institute's flack explains on email. Cormac McCarthy is one trustee of the Santa Fe Institute. Pierre Omidyar is another. Perhaps the hydraulic lift will lower the 9EX rocketship 45 degrees to half-mast.
Gene Peach, a Santa Fe photographer, has “had an eye on ‘Zorro’ since the late ’90s," he tells me. After the news of Epstein's arrest broke, Peach spoke with several Stanley area ranchers, none of whom ever saw Epstein or had any idea what went on at his ranch. Locals say that they know when "the Epstein crowd is at the ranch, because the mansion lights drown out the stars” Peach explains later in an email — no mean feat in that part of New Mexico. Some thought Epstein owned Victoria's Secret, because of the "caravans of glamorous women" who would show up at the Ranch's double gate off Highway 41. Peach reports that the locals always had mixed feelings about their furtive big-city neighbor — Epstein's property taxes were "a blessing to the community" and won't soon be replaced, he said: "There are many big ranches, but no other 50,000 square foot mansions." Well, there’s Tom Ford's nearby seven figure ranch, but that has yet to find a new buyer.
***
State Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard has been among the most proactive public servants in her response to the revelations about Epstein’s illegal activities; even before Epstein's arrest in New York, as soon as she heard about Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s accusations — complete with pictures of Giuffre posing in snow in front of Zorro Ranch — Richard instructed her staff to pull every relevant document, deed and scrap of Epstein correspondence from the files, assemble it into a briefing book, and deliver it to New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas, one of only a few New Mexico government officials to do something about the state’s reputation for graft other than embracing it.
A wide ranging talk that corrects the record about banking, such as the the Catholic Church, as opposed to Jews, being the prime mover
The most underrated MetroidVania ever?
By: Toxicka Shock | ToxickaShock@gmail.com
Platform: Game Boy
Developer: Nintendo R&D 1
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: MetroidVania
Release Date: Nov. 30, 1991
I’ve always thought the original Metroid was fairly overrated. Yes, it was innovative and well-designed, but it wasn’t exactly the funnest game to trudge through, either. In a pre-Internet world, getting lost in that fuckin’ game wasn’t just an issue, it was essentially the game itself. You pretty much HAD to buy a Nintendo Power guide to finish that thing and even then it wasn’t all that easy to make sense of the game’s convoluted level layout. And not even the incentive of seeing Samus in her underwear compensated for that — even now, it kinda’ makes me want to type in ENGAGE RIDLEY MOTHERFUCKER on the password screen and brick whatever system I’m playing the damn thing on.
Metroid II on the Game Boy, though, is a VAST improvement over its NES precursor — which isn’t exactly something you’d expect to be the case, considering the obvious downgrade in technology. But even as a shrunken down portable adventure, Return of Samus (or, as those commercials pronounced it, SAM-MOOSE) actually manages to outdo its home console inspiration in just about every facet. Like, even graphically. Don’t let the monochrome color scheme fool you, the sprites in Metroid II are absolutely gorgeous and it’s kinda’ amazing just how much depth and variety the designers harnessed using just two colors. It’s a tremendous looking title, easily one of the most visually striking and technologically impressive Game Boy games ever. And the music is pretty damn good, too, even when the background sound is mostly ambiance. In that, the way Metroid II builds up atmosphere and tension and good, old fashion fear is remarkable. Like, there were actually moments in the game that made me jump out of my seat, and I think you can count on one hand just how many GB games are actually capable of that feat — and have a couple of fingers left over.
Metroid II plays a lot more like Super Metroid than the NES game and you don’t need me to tell you that’s a positive thing. The sense of weight and gravity in the game is really neat, and at the time, mildly revolutionary — I mean, how many other GB games are out there that even attempt to have a little bit of inertia and physics as gameplay elements? Samus controls like a dream, and pretty much everything you do in the game — from doing cannonball leaps in the air to rolling around in “spider ball” sticky mode to the combat system — feels slick, smooth and intuitive. You never really have to wrestle with the controls and it doesn’t take long to figure out the mechanics of the more advanced power-ups. You can’t stack beams like in later Metroid games, but that’s not really an issue — the designers make it obvious which weapon you ought to have handy at which phase of the game, and they never really attempt to fool you into powering down your equipment (although, admittedly, finding that ice beam at the ass end of the game took me forever.)
Now, conceptually Metroid II is the same game as Metroid (you explore a massive labyrinth and pick up new tools and weapons to reach formerly inaccessible areas, etc.) but the execution is way different. This time around, you’re basically playing species eradicator ne plus ultra, with about three dozen different Metroids (some of whom don’t look like the traditional Metroids we’re used to) to locate, confront and neutralize in the name of science. Of course, the path to each mini-boss is littered with lesser enemies and tons of environmental hazards and a lot of tricky, quasi-puzzle sequences to navigate and overcome. It’s a MetroidVania game to the marrow, and it gives you everything you’d want out of the subgenre in buckets. And for a Game Boy title, it’s insanely long — like, on my first playthrough, it took me five hours to reach the end credits. Not bad, considering so many of its contemporaries on the handheld could be complete in less than an hour (and sometimes, less than half an hour.)
So you’re definitely getting a lot of content for the upfront investment. There’s not really much of an incentive to replay the game, outside of beating your own record time (which does include another fan service, bra-and-panties shot if you beat the game in under three hours, for whatever that’s worth.) But the entirety of the game is so gripping, so atmospheric, so distinct that you could probably give it a reverential playthrough every year or two. It’s unquestionably one of the best all-around Game Boy cartridges out there, and there’s a strong, strong argument to be made that it’s not just the most criminally underrated and underappreciated Metroid game ever, but perhaps the most woefully unsung and uncelebrated MetroidVania game from any brand or franchise.
The game has been remade twice so far (just, uh, once, if we’re being super official here) so I guess the lingering existential question here is whether or not revisiting this graphically and aurally inferior game is even necessary anymore. Like fuck you don’t already know my response: duh, of course it is! It’s one thing for Metroid II to turn out as well as it did, but for it to surmount so many structural limitations of the Game Boy system itself to get there makes it a must play experience by default. It’s a monumental achievement for a GB release, and it’s influence on every subsequent Metroid game is glaringly obvious.
Yes, not having an in-game map is a pain in the ass and if you dip in without a guide handy you WILL get lost in no time. And admittedly, some of the mechanics — like using the bomb function in spider ball mode — are a little iffy. But those are small problems in an otherwise excellent handheld offering.
Return of Samus was kinda’ overlooked when it first came out and even now way too many people keep sleeping on it. It’s not without a few frustrations here and there, but by and large, it’s a downright tremendous addition to one of the most beloved (and consistently excellent) video game franchises ever.
And on top of that, just try and find a better grand finale sequence in a Game Boy game. I dare you.
Rating: 9.5 out of 10.0
MY FIVE FAVORITE THINGS ABOUT THIS GAME:
— The kick-ass “surface world” musical theme.
— The SPAZER, mostly just because of its name.
— Getting the Screw Attack and literally somersaulting your way through the rest of the game while practically invincible.
— Those snazzy shoulder blades on the Varia suit upgrade.
— OMG, how adorable is the little baby Metroid at the end of the game?
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