BANKER DEATH COUNT REACHES NINE

IntellihubNews.com brings word from John Vibes that the trail of dead bankers, which has now reached nine victims, has also reached the corruption-shackled state of Arizona:

SCOTTSDALE, AZ (INTELLIHUB) — Former National Bank of Commerce CEO James Stuart Jr. was found dead, the morning of Feb. 19. A family spokesman did not say what caused the death. This brings the total of banker deaths in recent weeks to 9, and like the other recent deaths, this one comes with no explanation.

POP OCCULTURE: CODEX SERAPHINIANUS REDUX

Dangerous Minds has a story about the re-release of one of the strangest books ever to be published for commercial distribution, Italian renegade artist Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus.

In October Rizzoli will be republishing what is regarded by many to be the strangest book in the world, the Codex Seraphinianus. The Codex is unlike other historically well-known strange books (such as the Voynich Manuscript), in that the author of the book is not only known (Luigi Serafini is his name), he’s still alive. But the book is just so damned strange that it has accumulated a veritable industry of speculation about its meaning, deeper origins, and whether the language in which it is written actually has any syntax or not. Serafini has said relatively little about it himself over the years, and denies that the script has any meaning, but no one really believes that, including me.

Original printings often sell for upwards of a thousand dollars on Ebay. I don't know what effect if any this re-release is going to have on the value of the original stock, but I do know one thing. If this fool has any cash in his pocket when je come across this re-release in book stores, he and it will soon be parted.

POP OCCULTURE: WHO'S WITH SGT PEPPER?

1. Sri Yukteswar Giri
2. Aleister Crowley
3. Mae West
4. Lenny Bruce
5. Karlheinz Stockhausen
6. W.C. Fields
7. Carl Gustav Jung
8. Edgar Allen Poe 
9. Fred Astaire
10. Richard Merkin
11. The Varga Girl
12. Leo Gorcey
13. Huntz Hall
14. Simon Rodia
15. Bob Dylan
16. Aubrey Beardsley
17. Sir Robert Peel
18. Aldous Huxley
19. Dylan Thomas
20. Terry Southern
21. Dion
22. Tony Curtis
23. Wallace Berman
24. Tommy Handley
25. Marilyn Monroe
26. William Burroughs
27. Sri Mahavatar Babaji
28. Stan Laurel
29. Richard Lindner
30. Oliver Hardy
31. Karl Marx
32. H.G. Wells
33. Sri Paramahansa Yogananda
34. Anonymous Dummy
35. Stuart Sutcliffe
36. Anonymous Dummy
37. Max Miller
38. "THE PETTY GIRL" painting of Lucille Ball), by George Petty
39. Marlon Brando
40. Tom Mix
41. Oscar Wilde
42. Tyrone Power
43. Larry Bell
44. Dr. David Livingstone
45. Johhny Weissmuller 
46. Stephen Crane
47. Issy Bonn
48. George Bernard Shaw
49. H.C. Westermann
50. Albert Stubbins
51. Sri Lahiri Mahasaya
52. Lewis Carroll
53. T.E. Lawrence
54. Sonny Liston
55. "THE PETTY GIRL 2"
56. George Harrison
57. John Lennon
58. Shirley Temple
59. Ringo Star
60. Paul McCartney
61. Albert Einstein
62. John Lennon
63. Ringo Starr
64. Paul McCartney
65. George Harrison
66. Bobby Breen
67. Marlene Dietrich
68. Mahatma Gandhi
69. Legionnaire from the Order of Buffalos
70. Diana Dors
71. Shirley Temple

POP OCCULTURE: DAVID LYNCH AND THE PROJECTIONISTS PLOT

Everybody loves to be in on a conspiracy, so I'm sure the nation's projectionists were totally stoked to receive this personal message from director David Lynch upon release of his 1996 masterpiece, Mulholland Drive.

PARADIGM SHIFT: HELL ON EARTH IN AUSTRALIA

The fire has been raging out of control, underground, since February 9th. Firefighters can't fight it because they get sick when they approach within a few hundred yards of it. Find out more at this link.

PARADIGM SHIFT: APOCALYPSE NJ

What does the future hold in store for America's major metropolitan centers? This Rolling Stone article gives you a pretty vivid portrayal of one possibility, using one of New Jersey's most dangerous hot-spots as a test market for the Apocalypse...

The first thing you notice about Camden, New Jersey, is that pretty much everyone you talk to has just gotten his or her ass kicked.
Instead of shaking hands, people here are always lifting hats, sleeves, pant legs and shirttails to show you wounds or scars, then pointing in the direction of where the bad thing just happened.
"I been shot six times," says Raymond, a self-described gangster I meet standing on a downtown corner. He pulls up his pant leg. "The last time I got shot was three years ago, twice in the femur." He gives an intellectual nod. "The femur, you know, that's the largest bone in the leg."
"First they hit me in the head," says Dwayne "The Wiz" Charbonneau, a junkie who had been robbed the night before. He lifts his wool cap to expose a still-oozing red strawberry and pulls his sweatpants down at the waist, drawing a few passing glances. "After that, they ripped my pockets out. You can see right here. . . ."
Even the cops have their stories: "You can see right here, that's where he bit me," says one police officer, lifting his pant leg. "And I'm thinking to myself, 'I'm going to have to shoot this dog.'"
"I've seen people shot and gotten blood on me," says Thomas Bayard Townsend III, a friendly convicted murderer with a tear tattoo under his eye. "If you turn around here, and your curiosity gets the best of you, it can cost you your life."

It only gets better/worse from there. Keep reading this depressing goddamn screed at Rolling Stone.

POP OCCULTURE: TRUE DETECTIVE'S LOVECRAFT FETISH

True Detective is currently the only must-watch show on commercial television for the paraculturally-inclined viewer, and this io9.com think piece by novelist Michael Hughes does a decent job of explaining why that is, exactly...

The King in Yellow is a fictional play within a collection of short stories - a metafictional dramatic work that brings despair, depravity, and insanity to anyone who reads it or sees it performed. Robert Chambers inserts only a few selected scenes from the play into his story collection, and all of them are from the first act. This act, we are told, is a bit of a honeypot, luring readers into the cursed text. If they read even the first few words of Act II they are driven insane by the revelation of horrible, decadent, incomprehensible truths about the universe. Anyone familiar with Lovecraft's "cosmic horrors" should see the thematic similarity. For his unfortunate protagonists, the ultimate truths of the universe are too much for their overloaded minds to handle. It should not be surprising that Lovecraft incorporated Chambers's The King in Yellow into his overarching Cthulhu mythos, embellishing the elements of the story and adding the fictitious play to his growing bookshelf of equally fictional mythos tomes.

Hughes' article was written after only two episodes of True Detective had aired. We are currently five episodes into the show's eight episode lifespan, and the Easter eggs for fans of dark fiction and apocalyptic nihilism just keep on coming. Everything from Se7en and Nine Inch Nails to Twin Peaks and Pink Floyd gets either name-checked or visually referenced, here, with yer old pal Jerky finding references to even more obscure cultural artifacts, such as dark fantasy author Thomas Ligotti's non-fiction philosophical treatise The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, and paracultural superstar Alan Moore's little-read black and white Lovecraftian police procedural comic The Courtyard, which features a detective not unlike True Detective's Cohle, played with remarkable morbidity by Matthew McConnaughey. And if the denouement of that particularly nasty piece of work has played any role in determining the ultimate outcome of events in True Detective... well, God help the American viewing public, because they ain't seen nothin' yet.

POP OCCULTURE: DAMIEN HIRST'S "VERITY"

Damien Hirst is one of the most successful artists alive and working today in England, if not the entire world. Since he emerged on the British arts scene in the 1990s as part of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement spearheaded by Charles Saatchi and his influential Saatchi Gallery, Hirst has moved from triumph to triumph, with ever-increasing paychecks dotting his progress.

Although much of Hirst's work is considered "dark" in the sense that it is obsessed with death and the process of decay, none of his work has struck me as being particularly "paracultural" in the way that, say, Matthew Barney's work most definitely is. By "paracultural", I mean work that involves certain factors, modalities of thought, and/or key players that fall outside the realm of so-called respectable, mainstream discourse, existing in a kind of witchy, pan-paradigmatic, Jungian Twilight Zone, where it’s okay if the concepts being explored are half-baked, the gestalt half-gelled.

Perhaps this is why I was so pleasantly surprised by Hirst's latest effort, Verity, a titanic (66') bronze-clad statue of a partially-skinned, pregnant female stabbing a great sword straight into the sky above. Aside from being an intriguing visual object - particularly impressive are the lush, almost chocolaty smoothness of the anatomical details - it also seems to reference both his own earlier work (particularly The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living) and the world-famous Body Worlds travelling exhibition of posthumously "plastinated" human beings in various poses. It also stands as a fine exemplar of the lower order of colossi.

From Hirst's own site:

Verity is an allegory for truth and justice. Her stance is taken from Edgar Degas’s ‘Little Dancer of Fourteen Years’ (c. 1881). An anatomical cross-section of her head and torso reveal her skull and the developing foetus inside her womb. Verity stands on a base of scattered legal books and holds the traditional symbols of Justice – a sword and scales. ... She was fabricated in bronze in over 40 individual sand castings at Pangolin Editions foundry, in Gloucestershire. Her phosphor-bronze surface is 20 millimetres thick and her internal support structure is a single piece of stainless steel. The sculpture is weather and lightning-proof and underwent extensive wind-tunnel-testing to ensure her capability of withstanding the force of high winds and sea spray. After two years of planning and production, Verity arrived in Ilfracombe in three parts in October 2012. After a week’s assembly on site, the sculpture was hoisted into final position using a 250 tonne crane.

For more images and details of the sculpture's fabrication, please click here.

MEMORY HOLE: USSR/RUSSIA SPENT $1 BILLION ON PSYCHOTRONICS IN 20TH CENTURY

Serge Kernbach, a scientist at the Research Centre of Advanced Robotics and Environmental Science in Stuttgart, Germany, claims that recently de-classified Soviet documents prove that, from 1917 to 2003, roughly 1 billion dollars was spent researching "mind-controlling weaponry to compete with similar programs being undertaken in the US." Particularly worthy of attention is the following excerpt:

The paper also outlines how the Soviets developed "cerpan", a device that could generate and store high-frequency electromagnetic radiation, and the usage of this energy to affect other objects. The paper said that if the generator was designed properly, it would be able to accumulate bioenergy from all living things - animals, plants, humans - and then release it outside.

Could this "cerpan" be the Soviet equivalent to - or represent a parallel discovery of - the much-maligned concept of orgone energy that was said to have been discovered by Wilhelm Reich in the USA during the same time period?

POP OCCULTURE: ESQUIRE INTERVIEWS KENNETH ANGER

While not quite a Mount Rushmore of Pop Occulture, in the above photograph you will find four of the most interesting figures in popular and experimental entertainment of the last half of the 20th century. First, we have director Donald Cammel, who gave us 1970's Performance, among other films. Next comes actor Denis Hopper. Then we have mystic/auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky of El Topo and Holy Mountain infamy. And finally, Crowleyite occultist and omnipresent creative muse Kenneth Anger, who gave us both the best-selling Hollywood Babylon series of "tell all" scandal tomes, as well as some of the most intriguing and influential experimental film of the post-war period (Lucifer Rising being a prime example). This interview with Esquire Magazine is well worth reading from beginning to end. It serves as both a primer for newcomers and a catch-up for those who've loved his work in the past and have wondered what he's been up to, lately. All Useless Eaters are hereby urged to devour it with relish.

PARADIGM SHIFT: THE END OF THE AGE OF ANTIBIOTICS

A rather sobering assessment of the situation in which we currently find ourselves...

A high-ranking official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared in an interview with PBS that the age of antibiotics has come to an end.
'For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about "The end of antibiotics, question mark?"' said Dr Arjun Srinivasan. 'Well, now I would say you can change the title to "The end of antibiotics, period.”'
The associate director of the CDC sat down with Frontline over the summer for a lengthy interview about the growing problem of antibacterial resistance.

Srinivasan, who is also featured in a Frontline report called 'Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria,' which aired Tuesday, said that both humans and livestock have been overmedicated to such a degree that bacteria are now resistant to antibiotics.

‘We're in the post-antibiotic era,' he said. 'There are patients for whom we have no therapy, and we are literally in a position of having a patient in a bed who has an infection, something that five years ago even we could have treated, but now we can’t.’.

Read the whole article.

THE WOO FILES: SATAN STATUES AND UK UFO INFO

When news first broke of an alleged plan by an New York-based Satanic Temple to erect a statue in honor of their main goat next to the Ten Commandments monument at Oklahoma's state capitol, all the usual right-wing finger-sniffers started quaking with outrage, which caused all the usual left-wing "cooler than thou" douchebags to start snorting through their latte foam. My own favorite headline relating to this story - which spread like syphilitic wildfire through the nation's newsrooms - was the following: SUPPORT GROWING FOR SATANIC MONUMENT AT OK CAPITOL.  Anyway, if you want to donate funds to help get this monument built, you can do so here.

***

If you're going to be holding super-secret, heavy-duty, occult-tinged Eyes Wide Shut "mansion orgies" - complete with extreme BDSM fetish kink and "art shows" that involve knife-play and bloodletting - you might want to try not telling Business Insider about it, afterwards. It kind of ruins the whole elitist mystique of the thing, knowing that it's going to spend weeks as a "recommended reading" sidebar selection on Slate.com where a bunch of fucking nobodies can "read all about it."

***

There was a bunch of UK UFO info dumped by the British government and featured in THE WEEK a few months ago, so I thought I'd share a link featuring the highlights with y'all. Of special interest are the tales of "Faceless Goons", UFOs appearing during the Falklands War, and copies of Top Secret minutes of the MoD's Flying Saucer Working Party of 1950-52, which were opened at the Public Record Office, now the National Archives. The file was annotated by one worried official who feared it might fuel cover-up conspiracies. They wrote: "Oh dear! This makes our line 'no interest' in [flying saucers] look suspect." THE WEEK also covered UFO story, this one of a more recent vintage. It details a pilot's revelations about how a rugby ball-shaped UFO flew "within feet" of his A320 Airbus at 34,000 feet, shortly after takeoff from Heathrow Airport in July 2013. 

POP OCCULTURE: THE RAP PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

If you have an interest in the intersection between para-culture and the world of hip-hop, then there's an article that you need to read top to bottom, right now. It's this VICE story detailing exactly how MTV-crowned "Hottest Rapper in the Game" Rick Ross - real name William Roberts - stole his identity whole cloth from a real-life crime figure who helped the CIA flood America's West Coast inner cities with crack cocaine back in the 1980's to incalculable effect. Far from being a crime boss before making it big in the rap game, Roberts was, of all things... a corrections officer. The above photo broke the story wide open and forced an eventual confession from the rotund pretender.

But hold up. Can it really be that the most sinister aspect of this rapper's background is the fact that he doesn't have a sinister background?! I mean, it's not as though most people take all these hip-hop beefs seriously... do they? I've always assumed it was more like, say... professional wrestling for black folk. And on those occasions when the shit does get real - as it also tends to do in the wrestling game, an industry with a mortality rate that rivals hip-hop's - it's usually because the play-acting gets out of hand and boils over into a temporary spasm of narcotic-fueled violence.

Boyz will be boyz, in other words.

But what if there's more to it than that? In fact, what if there's more to Roberts/Ross's correctional industry background than first meets the eye? What if way back in 1991, there was a secret meeting that changed rap music and destroyed a generation?! You can read the full text of an anonymous email that rap journalists and bloggers received in 2012 here.

In fact, I kind of have to insist you go read it. Go ahead, I'll still be waiting here when you're done.

Finished? Okay, let's proceed.

So... what does the real "Freeway" Rick Ross think about all this? He definitely believes something unsaid is at work...

...something far more grave and conspiratorial than taking a name and a rep.
“The police union gets a lot of laws passed in this country so they can build up the union. It's a strength in numbers gang. The more people that commit crime, the more police officers they get to hire and the bigger the union gets.[Roberts] would be the first one that you start to look at because he was part of the union. This goes to the heights of the music industry.”
It's impossible to validate an entirely anonymous tip-off such as this, just as it's impossible to disprove it. Still, people have been joining the dots and tracing cross-shareholdings ever since. Some have noted that BlackRock owns stakes in both Vivendi (the parent of Universal Music Group) and Corrections Corporation of America. That may be true but the $4trillion asset management giant also holds interests in Wal-Mart, Chevron and owns 5% of nearly half of all companies traded on America's various stock exchanges.
“I look at what makes sense,” says Freeway. “If something doesn't make sense to me then I question what’s really going on. When you look at the justice system here in America, is it working? We got 2.2 million people in prison. After you think about it you see that it's absolutely working the way the people who put it in place wanted it to work. They wanted to lock people up. They don't want it where people are not going to jail because then they make less money.”
Prison is big business in the US. America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with roughly one in every 107 adults imprisoned. The nation accounts for 5% of the world’s population, and yet 25% of its prisoners.

And maybe that should be our biggest take-away from this story after all... the fact that we're living in a vast gulag system, and most of us hardly ever notice.

PARADIGM SHIFT: SINLESS SPIRITS?

Respected psychopharacologist David Nutt wants to use cutting edge science to create safe, non-addictive, synthetic alcohol that gets you just as sauced as the real thing and comes with its very own sober-up pill.

He said: “I think this would be a serious revolution in health... just like the e-cigarette is going to revolutionise the smoking of tobacco. “I find it weird that we haven't been speaking about this before, as it's such a target for health improvement.”
The scientist said 10 per cent of drinkers become addicted, and that addicts account for most of the one and a half million people killed by alcohol every year. The Professor said that the drug would be taken in the form of a range of cocktails, and added: “I’ve done the prototype experiments myself many years ago, where I’ve been inebriated and then it’s been reversed by the antagonist. That’s what really gave us the idea. There’s no question that you can produce a whole range of effects like alcohol by manipulating the brain.”

So... a product with all the anxiolytic and euphoria-inducing qualities of alcohol that doesn't wreck your liver, rot your brain, and cause you to plow your SUV into a bridge abutment on the way home... sounds like a no-brainer, doesn't it? Who on Earth could possibly object to such a thing?

Well, how about the rather deep-pocketed and morally ambiguous alcohol industry, for starters?

Keep your eyes on this story, folks. If Nutt ever gets any serious backing for his endeavor - and a recent appearance on Dragon's Den suggests that he's looking - the corporate shenanigans it will invariably lead to will involve some serious popcorn-bait.

POP OCCULTURE; "GHOSTLY GAGA" EDITION

The ever-creepy Lady Gaga struck a decidedly otherworldly pose during a UK show last October. More photos and details about the performance (at a venue suggestively called G-A-Y) at the link.