ahead of the curve.

The curious & brilliant Gary Lachman was already familiar to me through his rather seminal 2014 biography on Aleister Crowley, the most extensive & revealing on the man I’ve read so far.

As a prolific & respected scholar on occultism, former bass player for Blondie, & a supposed practitioner of “the craft” himself, his knowledge & expertise carry even more weight on the subject.

So when I heard he had written a book on $ump – Dark Star Rising – relating to occultism & black magic, I was instantly allured & wanting to read it as soon as possible.

“In the half-decade following the end of World War II, both McCarthy and Cohn had taken advantage of growing anxieties over social transformations and an uncertain global political situation to secure positions of influence in the emergent national security state. They had portrayed themselves as founts of masculinity, able to undertake the urgent task of defending the United States from enemies foreign and domestic.”

its guaranteed to end in tears. Nuclear tears.

“There’s a reason why monocultures do not exist in nature.”

“How did we go from ‘grab ‘em by the’ – I don’t know if I can even say that word, but you know what I mean – to images of him being [almost another] Jesus. I don’t understand it.

“ – how could a cultured nation which had produced Goethe, Beethoven, Bach, Schiller, Einstein, Kant, Hegel and so many of the world’s greatest thinkers and artists allow itself to be led lemming-like to the precipice of self-destruction by a ragged collective of criminals, misfits, sadists and petty bureaucrats – the very dregs of society?”

chronically overdue, but better late than never I guess? This is an excellent & up-to-date documentary examining U.S. military veterans personnel in domestic extremist/terrorist groups within America, with a special focus on the insurrection/capital storming of Jan sixth.

“All I could think was… we’re in the middle of what a lot of people consider potentially a massive medical scandal we’re seeing detransitioners talk about how let down they’ve been, how irreversible the interventions are, how angry they are that nobody paid any attention to anything else that was going on in their lives.”

“Everybody saw what was happening, but nobody said ‘stop’. Concerns raised are dismissed, complaints attacked. There’s something powerful and disturbing at play” – Dr. Juliet Singer

“Radical indifference means that it doesn’t matter what is in the pipelines as long as they are full and flowing.”

“The Conservative’s claim over Britain goes even further than this. Beyond fronting their own purported achievements while in power, they seek to absorb the achievements of their political opponents as well – even, or especially, where these were achieved against the Torie’s opposition. The abolition of slavery, the enfranchisement of women and the working class, the dissolution of Empire, the welcoming of refugees from war zones (such as the Kinderstransport during the Second World War) and the creation of the NHS – all these important chapters in the nation’s past often happened in the face of fervent opposition from the Tories somewhere along the way, but they are now celebrated by the Tories as proof of Britain’s – and their – magnanimity and good sense.”