Category Archives: literature

>Ezra Pound

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“Nothing written for pay is worth printing.
Only what has been written against the market.

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) once said of poetry: ”It is the dance of intelligence among words”. He dismissed most of the poetry he read as ”rethorical din crippled by painted adjectives and emotional slither”. His friend Wyndham Lewis, novelist and painter, wrote that Pound was ”a pedagogic volcano whose molten matter was language that seared through a tragic fracture in his personality, a broken seam of sensibility, releasing an uncontainable energy or an anger that could persist for thirty years”. Once, in Lewis’ Rebel Art Centre, Pound caused a stir when waving a flag that proclaimed ”The End of the Christian Era!”. He could never be fully trusted in polite society.
But Ezra Pound was a major figure in the modernist movement. He was its inspiration and, according to some, its sole establisher. Undoubtly, he was one of the immortals of poetry.


The years before World War I were very vital for Pound. He was occupied with his poetry, with journalism, with his work as editor of the journal Poetry, and with new writers like T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. When WWI exploded everything was shattered. Pound, recieving frontline reports from his friends, felt the best part of his generation had been ravaged by an absurdly wasteful war. Having begun his career with the studies of love poetry, now venom, antagonism and invective were to become equally important motivations for his own work.
He began to loathe Western civilization because it had no room left for its artists, and ”because it seemed systematically bent on its own extinction through warfare”. He hated the liberal modern state, where there seemed to be no strong leaders and where responsibility had become corrupted by insane bureaucracy. He also hated the influence of organized religion, and took as his models the two grand masters of hatred: Dante and Villon. He began to incorporate his anger and criticism in The Cantos, a booklenght long epic poem of 120 sections which was to become his lifework.

Pound, an American by birth, moved to London in 1908, and in 1921, dissatisfied with England after the war, he moved to Paris, and four years later to Rapallo, Italy. Here he became very interested in economics and he campaigned viciously against the Western banking system. He began to fear the preparations of yet another great war, ”a second instance of organized madness”, and he imagined Jews to influence political systems, the banking business and the weapon industries. He thought they would begin the next war to create a huge debt and new profits.
He began writing letters to American senators and congress men: ”Every man in high office is a thief’s accomplice”. He also campaigned against the obscenity laws affecting great literary works like James Joyce’s Ulysses. Of course, this was not a popular thing to do amongst the men of power. Even his closest friends began to protest against him.

When World War II was a fact, Pound ventilated his feelings of anger in a series of broadcasts on Italian State Radio where he – besides speaking of cultural matters – defended fascism, savaged America and incorporated what most would call anti-Semitism in his denunciations of the war. His radio rage was monitored by the FBI, and in 1943 he was arrested for treason by the United States government. He was incarcerated and isolated for three weeks in a very small wire cage, subject to broiling sun and searchlights all night. He was interrogated in an U.S. Army detention center where they usually dealt with troops who had raped civilians or disobeyed their officers. No one was allowed to talk to him, not even the guards, and from his gorilla cage he witnessed several inmates being shot to death in escape attempts. Finally, after weeks of fear, he ”believed something snapped” in his head, and he ”suffered a nervous breakdown”.
In Washington he defended his action as a ”protest against a system which creates one war after another, in a series and in system”. He refused to admit he’d been wrong.
Treason is punishable by death, and the U.S. government now faced a dilemma: Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if one of the world’s leading democracies executed one of its leading writers? But why should an artist deserve special treatment, even if he had contributed more than most to the general cultural level of the times?
The solution was to declare him insane.

In 1946 he was sent to what he called the ”Hell-hole”, a ward for lunatics in St. Elizabeths in Washington, D.C., an insane asylum where he was to be kept for the next twelve years of his life, from age sixty to seventy-two. He spent twelve years in the company of screaming men in straitjackets. Despite his suffering he continued writing The Cantos, which he had been working on since 1915. Now the themes of economics, governance, and culture were integral to its content. He also translated the Confusian classics while being held prisoner in this lunatic asylum.

He was often visited by a Library of Congress researcher named Eustace Mullins. Pound commissioned Mullins to write a book about the history of the Federal Reserve, which resulted in Secrets of The Federal Reserve. Pound believed that the bankers in charge of the Federal Reserve and their associates in the Bank of England were responsible for getting the United States into both World Wars, in an effort to drive up government debt beyond sustainable levels. He claimed that bankers hide behind the screen of the central banks and pull political strings to drive countries into the war, creating immense profits for themselves as the principal beneficiaries of wartime debt. Pound advocated an abandonment of the current system of money being created by private bankers.

“Wars are made to make debt.”

Released in 1958 after pressure from T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost, writers he had helped as critic and editor, he returned to Italy where he gave in to despair and depression. For the last ten years of his life he almost stopped writing and speaking, the man who had spent all his life doing just that: raging against the system in the name of poetry. The releaser of words spent his last ten years wordless. He died in 1972, two days after his 87th birthday, in Venice where he is buried.

The Cantos was never finished, but is nevertheless published. Still, along with the 794 pages long A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound I don’t understand much at all… Even scholars claim that The Cantos is an extreme piece of work, and it is said that Pound himself got depressed when realizing he’d spent most of his life writing a poem few people would understand. What I understand, though, is that The Cantos is the work of a genius.


“I did not enter into silence, silence captured me.”

Besides being a poet, critic, author, journalist and editor, Pound was also a translator and composer. In Paris he composed two complete operas and several pieces for solo violin. Pound’s first radio opera, transmitted in October 1931 under the title The Testament of François Villon, was one of the first electronically enhanced operas to be broadcasted in Europe.
Personally, I have no understanding at all for this thing they call opera, but you may listen and judge for yourself at Amazon. More info at ezrapoundmusic.com.

Current selling prices for an original copy of Ezra Pound’s A Lume Spento (1908):
$45000-$90000 /£24000-£48000
More info at bookride.com.

>Zionism, Jews and conspiracy theories

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Ben Heine‘s take on The Lovers
(check the ABOUT PORN!!! post for the original painting by René Magritte)

This is where I stand today:

  • I oppose Zionism, not Jews.
  • The essence of Zionism is Jewish ethnic domination over Palestine.
  • Zionism is the real enemy of the Jews, since Zionism causes global anti-Semitism.
  • Some Israelis, Americans, Jews and Zionists are responsible for the situation I’m about to describe. Some are not.
  • Israel and Zionism have always been in the wrong throughout history. The wrongdoings of the Palestinians pale in comparison.
  • There are always grey areas, and I do not applaud Palestinian terrorism.
  • The modern Jewish State would not be in existence without the Holocaust having occurred.

Now that you know my point of view, let’s get on with the program…

Why is it that everytime Jews are criticized in discussions we get to hear that the ones with an opposing viewpoint are either conspiratorial or anti-Semitic? Even when Jews criticize Israel, the Israel lobby or the Holocaust industry (like Michael Neumann, Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein do) they are most often labelled ”self-hating Jews” by the Zionists. Instead of discussing the main point we get to hear that type of whining bullshit. It’s nothing but a cowardly low way to avoid touchy subjects.
To dismiss a serious discussion by shouting ”conspiracy theory” is plain, simple and effective, though. The debate loses its credibility and its seriousness and the judeo-supremacists have won again. Nowadays there’s even a term called ”the new anti-Semitism”… Jeez. Try to learn the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism once and for all, will you? Opposition to Israel is not anti-Semitic. And since not all Jews are Israelis or supporters of Israel, to be against all Israelis or Israel is not to be against all Jews.
You need to get that into your brain if we’re supposed to have an honest and open debate.

Now, let’s look at your so called conspiracy theory. You know, just because people are constantly bitching about conspiracy theories doesn’t necessarily make them conspiracy theories.

How shall we adapt to the fact that Jews are overrepresented in the American banking systems (the Federal Reserve Bank)? What about AIPAC:s great influence – established through hard facts – in American politics? America’s financial and military aid in favour of Israel (Israel still remains the top recipient of US foreign aid world wide, Bush requested an aid budget of $20 billion dedicated to Israel in February this year…)?
These are just a few examples of very large Jewish overrepresentation and influence in the economic and political area. The question is, does the fact that these people are Jewish matter at all? Of course it does. That’s beyond doubt.
But that the lobby is working ruthlessly to benefit its cause is in itself not odd at all. That’s what lobby groups do. It’s about realpolitik, economic interests, power and influence. So why label it ”conspiracy” then? Why bitch about conspiracy theories when presented with obvious facts? Is Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry a conspiracy theory? If you think so, explain to me how.

If people were sane they would laugh at this very strange urge the Zionists have to label everything that votes against them as conspiracy theories or anti-Semitic. Unfortunately, the majority of the people are insane, brainwashed and untaught and finds even the most tiny criticism towards Jews as racist and politically incorrect (I bet you feel a bit uncomfortable reading this article, right?), and in a society like that, being labelled anti-Semite is as bad as being labelled pedophile. Not good, so to speak. The Zionists know this and hence use the term anti-Semite all the time to easily silence the opposition.

Here’s what Noam Chomsky has to say about conspiracy theories, and you might as well apply this to the discussion about Israel, Zionism, the Jews, USA or whatever conspiracy you’re talking about:

Part of the structure of corporate capitalism is that the players in the game try to increase profits and market shares – if they don’t do that, they will no longer be players in the game. Any economist knows this: it’s not a conspiracy theory to point that out, it’s just taken for granted as an institutional fact. If someone were to say, ”Oh no, that’s a conspiracy theory”, people would laugh. Well, what we’ve been discussing are simply the institutional factors that set the boundaries for reporting and interpretation in the ideological institutions. That’s the opposite of conspiracy theory, it’s just normal institutional analysis, the kind of analysis you do automatically when you’re trying to understand how the world works. For people to call it ”conspiracy theory” is part of the effort to prevent an understanding of how the world works, in my view – ”conspiracy theory” has become the intellectual equivalent of a four-letter word: it’s something people say when they don’t want you to think about what’s really going on.
[…]
Every example of planning decisions in the society is a case where some people got together and tried to use whatever power they could draw upon to achieve a result – if you like, those are ”conspiracies”. That means that almost everything that happens in the world is a ”conspiracy”. […]
Every business decision, every editorial decision is a conspiracy. […] Okay, obviously that’s not interesting: all decisions involve people. So the real question is, are there groupings well outside the structures of the major institutions of the society which go around them, hijack them, undermine them, pursue other courses without an institutional base, and so on and so forth? And that’s a question of fact: do significant things happen because groups or subgroups are acting in secret outside the main structure of institutional power?
Well, as I look over history, I don’t find much of that.
[…]
This term ”conspiracy theory” is an interesting one. For example, if I was talking about Soviet planning and I said, ”Look, here’s what the Politburo decided, and then the Kremlin did this”, nobody would call that a ”conspiracy theory” – everyone would just assume I was talking about planning. But as soon as you start talking about anything that’s done by the power in the West, then everybody calls it a ”conspiracy theory”. […] The guys in power aren’t idiots, after all. They do planning. In fact, they do very careful and sophisticated planning. But anybody who talks about it, and uses government records or anything else to back it up, is into ”conspiracy theory”. […] In other words, as soon as you describe elementary reality and attribute minimal rationality to people with power – well, that’s fine as long as it’s an enemy, but if it’s part of domestic power, it’s a ”conspiracy theory” and you’re not supposed to talk about it.
[…]
There is just no doubt that a lot of very conscious planning goes on among intelligent people who are trying to maximize their power. They’d be insane if they didn’t do that. I mean, I’m not telling you anything new when I tell you that top editors, top government officials, and major businessmen have meetings together – of course. And not only do they have meetings, they belong to the same golf clubs, they go to the same parties, they went to the same schools, they flow up and back from one position to another in the government and private sector, and so on and so forth. In other words, they represent the same social class: they’d be crazy if they didn’t communicate and plan with each other.
[…]
Now, the only significant question to ask is, is it intelligent planning? Okay, that depends on what the goals are. If the goals are to maximize corporate profits for tomorrow, then it’s very intelligent planning. If the goals are to have a world where your children can survive, then it’s completely idiotic.
Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power

As for the connection USA-Israel-Zionism-Holocaust I recommend the following books, they are essential reading when trying to understand the importance of this gigantic problem.
The Case Against Israel by Michael Neumann
The Holocaust Industry – Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering by Norman Finkelstein
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

You might also want to read The Case For Israel by Alan Dershowitz and The Case For Peace by the same author – but then you’ll be forced to read Norman Finkelstein’s response as well: Beyond Chutzpah – On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History
If you are brave and have an open mind and do not back away from the politically incorrect you should also try Kevin MacDonald‘s The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements.
Also check the True Torah Jews Against Zionism site.
Interesting article: “Over 10,000 Orthodox Jews protesting the existence of the state of Israel”
More about U.S. Aid to Israel

Previous posts of relevance:

War is menstrual envy
War is menstrual envy II
Holocaust religion
Gilad Atzmon Taking Elder Peres Apart
You cannot question the Holocaust – Töben arrested again
Genocide awareness
American Radical – A documentary about Norman Finkelstein
Ahmadinejad and honesty
False media – we don’t need it, do we?
Nuclear war games – for real
Modern Apartheid
Propaganda for war
Obama – Hope or hopelessness
McCain or Obama? Does it really matter in the long run?
The war on/in Iraq
Religion and its influence on society
Political tests

>Theodore Kaczynski, The Unabomber – Part Eight

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Left: David Kaczynski — Right: Theodore Kaczynski

Had it not been for David Kaczynski’s wife, Linda Patrik, he probably wouldn’t have turned his brother in. She was the one insisting on David reading the manifesto, since David kind of lived in denial, obviously not wanting his brother to be the infamous serial killer the Unabomber.
In October 1995, when the Unabomber was very much in the news, David finally got to read the manifesto – almost one month after it had been published by the press.
“After I read the first few pages”, David recalled, “my jaw literally dropped”. He recognized the tone and feel, and remembered certain sentences from his brother’s letters. He went home immediately and dug out those old letters, dating fifteen years back, and found sentences identical to the ones in the manifesto, even with the same capitalization:
“The radical environmentalists ALREADY hold an ideology that exalts nature and opposes technology”.

When living in the wilderness Ted recieved money from his family. Suddenly it struck David and Linda that the Unabomber had performed several of his attacks shortly after the family had sent him money… Could it be that the family had funded murder?
David struggled with himself and finally came to the conclusion that the only way to find out if his brother was the Unabomber was to confront him. He wrote Ted a letter asking if he could visit him and recieved the following reply:
“I get just choked with frustration at my inability to get our stinking family off my back once and for all, and ‘stinking family’ emphatically includes you… I DON’T EVER WANT TO SEE YOU OR HEAR FROM YOU, OR ANY OTHER MEMBER OF OUR FAMILY, AGAIN.”

After letting a friend of Linda handing over some of Ted’s letters to the FBI – with names and adresses carefully removed, in case Ted wasn’t the Unabomber after all – they got the reply that there was a 60 to 80 percent chance of a match. The FBI somehow got to know David’s identity and soon realized it must be David’s brother who had written those letters and they quickly began surveillance in Lincoln, Montana, and on the morning of April 3, 1996, the SWAT team was in place ready to strike against the Unabomber cabin.

Ted said later of his brother that he was “another Judas Iscariot”, but ultimately Ted put most of the blame on Linda Patrik.

>Theodore Kaczynski – The Unabomber, Part Seven

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Left: Theodore Kaczynski, 9 — Right: David Kaczynski, 2

The Unabomb Taskforce of the FBI had – over 17 years – dealt with 3,600 volumes of information, 175 computer data bases, 82 million records, 12,000 event documents and 9,000 evidence photographs. And still they couldn’t catch the Unabomber, this one man living in a tiny cabin in Montana, terrorizing the country, killing innocent people.
It was with the help of David Kaczynski, Ted’s younger brother, that they managed to solve the case.

Ted and David were very much alike. David admired his older brother for his ideals and conviction, and Ted enjoyed having an equal partner when it came to discussing philosophy, amongst many other subjects the two brothers shared similar interests in. Ultimately, faced with a moral dilemma, David turned his brother in. Theodore Kaczynski, who loved his brother, could not bear David’s betrayal and to this day deeply hates his whole family.

Yet the two were very dissimilar as well. Ted had no time for abstract philosophy or ethics, while David was more romantic, humble and sought discussion and was willing to compromise. Ted was unrelentless in believing he was right, he believed only in what was scientifically verifiable and rejected everything else as pure emotion. He thought of David’s abstract thinking as weak, and claimed David lacked energy and persistence, and he became furious when David summoned up the courage to argue back. Over time, though, his feelings of guilt about his unjust treatment of his little brother grew.

Ted began building his cabin in 1970. In 1985 David, obviously inspired by his brother, quit his job as a teacher, writer and bus driver, and also went into the wild. He bought five acres of land in the Christmas Mountains of West Texas and literally lived in a hole he had dug in the ground. Later on he purchased thirty acres nearby and – exactly like Ted – built his own cabin, living there until 1989.
In those days he was even more outspoken than Ted. He worried a great deal about the destruction of mankind, the destructive use of technology and the extreme materialism in our society. He often spoke about a need to revolt against it all. ”If he had known about my experiments”, Ted said later on, ”he would’ve regarded me as a hero”.
However, David’s conviction didn’t last. In 1989 he abandoned his desert home and moved to New York to marry an old girlfriend, a philosophy professor at Union College. This made Ted furious. He wrote a long letter to David about his ”betrayal of their shared resolve not to capitulate to the system”. David had ”committed the ultimate sin: ideological disloyalty”.
Ted believed all truths were like mathematics: either true or false. There was no room for compromise. Thus David – in Ted’s mind perfectly aware of the evils of industrial society – was living a lie when rejoining the middle class, and thereby proved his dishonesty. There was no forgiveness for such weakness and Ted turned to hate and total alienation.

By the early 1990s David began to worry about Ted’s extreme alienation. His wife said, half jokingly, ”You’ve got a weird brother, maybe he’s the Unabomber?”.

>Theodore Kaczynski – The Unabomber, Part Six

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Previous posts about The Unabomber:

Theodore Kaczynski, the militant atheist who believed that violence was the only solution.
In an untitled essay in 1971 (pre-Manifesto) he wrote: ”The principal effect of technology is to increase the power of society collectively. This empowers social forces that are then able to use the machinery of society to impose their choice universally… The eventual result will be a world in which there are only one system of values”.

Kaczynski was a literary man. He was particularly fond of the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga, he liked his works so much he even translated at least two of them into English. He also enjoyed Joseph Conrad immensely (real name Józef Teodor Conrad Korzeniowski – they shared the same name, and Kazcynski often used the pseudonym “J. Konrad” when travelling to plant his bombs), The Secret Agent being one of his favourite novels. No wonder, since it’s about terrorist revolutionaries who declare war on science…
His acts of violence were supported by his reading of history, and he found his role models in literature.

When in the last week of June 1995, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Penthouse Magazine and Tom Tyler (social psychologist) recieved the 35,000 word document entitled Industrial Society and Its Future, soon dubbed The Unabomber Manifesto, they were given an ultimatum: ”If the enclosed manuscript is published reasonably soon and recieves public exposure, we will permanently desist from terrorism”. He gave all three publications three months to respond.

New York Times and Washington Post published the entire essay as a special supplement on the 19th of September. The reaction was incredible. No other essay in recent times had created such a stir in society. A criminologist specializing in serial killers observed that ”Numbers of people seem to identify in some way with him”. The Nation announced that the manifesto’s first sentence ”is absolutely crucial for the American public to understand and ought to be on the forefront of the nation’s agenda”.
The first sentence reads:

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Alston Chase writes in his book Harvard and The Unabomber: ”The manifesto was ignored, in sum, not because the ideas were so foreign, but because they were so familiar. Except for the call to violence, its message was ordinary and unoriginal. The concerns it evinced about the effects of technology on culture and nature, are widely shared, especially among the country’s most highly educated”.

The Unabomber, Chase writes, simply warned about what we all should be concerned about: ”genetic engineering, pollution, pesticides and herbicides; brainwashing of children by educators and consumers by advertising; mind control, cars, SUVs, power plants and power lines, radioactive waste; big government, big business; computer threats to privacy; materialism, television, cities, suburbs, cell phones, ozone depletion, global warming; and many other aspects of modern life”.
What he wrote appealed to the vast majority of the population, and of course it was entirely intentional. He borrowed ideas from Spengler, Nietzsche, Marx, Aristotele, Schopenhauer, Freud, Adorno, and many, many others, so that people could relate to his philosophy.

As for the ecological part, many claim that Kaczynski didn’t care at all about the environment: it was just a flirtation with ecological groups to gain their support. The manifesto, in sum, consists of two theories: the philosophical one (him being opposed to ”bigness” – big business, big government, big science – that destroy and limit human freedom) and the environmental one (which he, according to many, used for tactical reasons).
Alston Chase notices that these two theories are incompatible:

Of course, it is possible that Kaczynski put forward these two (chronological and cultural) theories not for tactical reasons but simply because he failed to note their incompatibility. But given his logical mind, this is unlikely. It is more probable that his proffering both theories was, indeed, tactical. And if so, then in having his manifesto published he had pulled off a colossal stunt. His previous deceptions… […] …the word games and package bomb adresses – may have momentarily confused the FBI. But now he had fooled the entire country, not just for a few weeks but for years! Everyone believed he was an environmentalist.

>Watchmen – Illuminating reality

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Yeah, you know, that old graphic novel (i.e. comic book) by Alan Moore (writer) and Dave Gibbons (illustrator) which is now being adapted to the screen. I love that comic. It’s kind of Ny Moral in a nutshell.

Because to me Watchmen is about the delusion and condemnation of humanity. It’s about what happens when we abuse power and responsibility, when ”soft-spoken” fascism dictates the rules of everyday life. When people who think they know what’s best for you tell you what to do. It’s about what needs to be done to save humanity. And it asks two questions:
Who watches the watchmen?
Does the end justify the means?
The solution to humanity is rather dystopic and misanthropic, I’d say.

When Alan Moore unleashed Watchmen in 1986/87 he created a whole new way of looking at comics. All of a sudden comics where of literary value. When TIME Magazine picked the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present, Watchmen was right up there alongside The Catcher in The Rye (J.D. Salinger), Catch-22 (Joseph Heller), 1984 (George Orwell), Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy), Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller), A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess), Lord of The Flies (William Golding), Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon), Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut), The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) – to name my personal favourites – and other novels by William Burroughs, Doris Lessing, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ernest Hemingway, Salman Rushdie, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene, Toni Morrison… The list goes on. Watchmen is also the only graphic novel to win a Hugo Award. All this elite stuff is almost hard to believe, but when reading Watchmen you’ll understand. Or else, in a fascist kind of way, they will make you understand, with the help of the written word, commercials, money, capitalism, corruption, chaos – a maximum overload of information. That’s how it works. But constantly being told what to do raises scepticism amongst individuals, and anti-authority works both ways; some like it, some don’t.

Watchmen thrives on the complexities of life, of being human, and adds to that the odd twist of what it would be like if superheroes – or rather masked ” heroes”, devoid of supernatural powers (Dr. Manhattan excluded), acting as vigilantes – really existed in our modern world. What if God all of a sudden walked the Earth? ”Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”, quoted from Genesis chapter 18, verse 25.
Obviously, it’s not that easy.
What Moore does is that he gives coherence to these complexities. In his own words: ”it is possible to think about politics, history, mythology, architecture, murder and the rest of it all at the same time to see how it connects”.


Catching up on Alan Moore, and watching The Mindscape of Alan Moore DVD (watch it here!), I find I really like this guy. Check out what he says about information in this great interview:

Information is funny stuff. In some of the science magazines I read, I’ve found it described as an actual substance that underlies the entirety of existence, as something that is more fundamental than the four fundamental physical forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. I think they’ve referred to it as a super-weird substance. Now, obviously, information shapes and determines our lives and the way we live them, yet it is completely invisible and undetectable. It has no actual form; you can only see its effects. Information is a kind of heat. I would suggest that as our society accumulates information, from its hunter-gatherer origins to the complexities of our present day, it raises the cultural temperature.
I feel that we may be approaching a cultural boiling point. I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing; I really don’t know because I can’t imagine it, quite frankly. But I think we may be approaching the point at which the amount of information we are taking becomes exponential, and I’m not entirely certain what kind of human culture will exist beyond that point. Except it will happen sooner than we expect, and the difference between us and the kind of people that will exist after such an event will be vastly different than the difference between us and the hunter-gatherer society we’ve evolved from.

You’re saying we might not be able to recognize human beings of the future that well.

Yeah, it could be a quantum leap, a sudden, massive and unprecedented leap. Boiling point is a good analogy, because what you have before that stage is water. What you have after it is something that does not behave at all like water; it’s a completely different substance altogether. And that’s what I see looming for society — and it’s probably necessary, probably inevitable, probably scary. That’s my prognosis. I suppose, as an artist, one of the obligations upon my work is to try and prepare people for the more complex world, to try and make it more palatable and accessible to them and not quite so frightening. That would seem to be a worthy goal, illuminating reality.

On another note: As for the nobel prize in literature I’d suggest we give it to Cormac McCarthy. Or Iain Sinclair. Or why not Alan Moore? But maybe it would do them and the fans more bad than good, so let’s not make it complicated.

PS. If you’re really interested in Watchmen, you should check out The Annotated Watchmen!
And here’s a Watchmen Wiki
And this blog post pretty much concludes that Rorschach is a Jew…
As you can see, we’re dealing with information overload here as well.

And as for the movies, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V For Vendetta and Watchmen, here’s Alan Moore talking about his disgust for Hollywood, stating clearly that the comics ”were written to be impossible to reproduce in terms of cinema”. He obviously hates them all.

>Theodore Kaczynski – The Unabomber, Part Five

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Homemade gun, homemade bomb and the manifesto. (Click to enlarge)
(For supersized version click here)

Kaczynski’s bomb found by FBI:s top bomb expert James C. Ronay on American Airlines Flight 444 (November 15, 1979) is described in Harvard and The Unabomber:

Inside the container, Ronay found fragments of a meticulously constructed homemade bomb that had been mailed from Chicago. What struck him was how elaborately and carefully crafted it was – though made entirely from ordinary materials found in any hardware store.
These included a cheap aneroid barometer altered to measure ambient pressure changes in the aircraft and altitude changes. The bomb was designed to explode when the plane reached over 2,000 feet in elevation. A second, redundant triggering system was fixed to ignite if the package was opened. A large juice can contained the main explosive charge of smokeless power and fireworks chemicals. The fusing system consisted of four ”C” batteries wired to a modified barometer switch, all housed in a homemade wooden box. The postage on the box comprised several $1 ”Eugene O’Neill” and ”America’s Light Fueled by Truth and Reason” stamps.

For each and every bomb being made, the genius mad man came closer and closer to perfection. Though each bomb was made of pipe plugs and the fusing systems were powered by C- or D-cell batteries, each triggering mechanism was different. Old Ted was an imaginative man.

The Hauser bomb revealed the continuing evolution to ever more gratiously painstaking construction. The pipe was not the ordinary galvanized kind found at any plumbing supply store, threaded at each end and capped with threaded plugs. Rather, it was made of super-hard stainless steel that could only be cut, Ronay suspected, with a power saw. And the plugs were custom-made of a similarly hard material, crafted with care. At each end of the pipe were precisely sized square holes that coincided exactly with similar-sized notches in the plugs. The plugs were kept in place by square dowels carved out of hard steel. It took an excellent craftsman with a strong power drill and grinder to do this kind of work.
More troubling, the bomber was learning how to seal the explosives more tightly, thereby amplifying potential damage. And he was concocting more potent explosives. With the Hauser bomb, he had for the first time used a mixture of aluminium powder and ammonium nitrate, producing a much bigger bang and signaling to Ronay that worse was to come.

Reading this, and then looking at that tiny cabin he worked in, one becomes absorbed with fascination for the human mind. Or for this human mind, I should say. What really makes me wonder is how the hell he did manage to build his bombs when there was no electricity in the cabin? Ronay suspected he’d used a power saw and a power drill etc, but as far as I know no such tools have been found.
I hope I can find answers to that later on.

As for the final bomb, found in the cabin in April 1996, bomb-disablement expert Chris Cherry got a phone call from the FBI asking him to haul his ass over to the cabin. He lived in Albuquerque, whilst the cabin was located in Montana. Wasting no time the FBI flew down a special plane that night and picked him up immediately. He and his team were at the cabin for a week, and it took them three days to totally render safe the bomb itself.
”Our objective was not just to defuse the bomb but to surgically defuse it so that we would have all the evidence captured. We couldn’t just blow apart the bomb. We had to go into it to ensure that all the evidence was preserved and we understood the working functions of it”, says Chris in an interview.
The team used Kaczynski’s extremely detailed notes about all his devices and how they were put together. There were loads of them, but they were written in Spanish, so first they had to be translated.
The bomb was a fragmentation device designed to kill people. It was all home-made and designed to be rough-handled through the mail. The switch mechanisms Kaczynski used were hand-made switches that he would spend weeks building. He even machined his own screws.
Chris: ”The device was complicated in that it was guaranteed to work. It was not your basic pipe bomb. It was much more sophisticated than that. Every one of his devices functioned as designed.”

Some stuff found in the cabin: