Stanley Ho, flamboyant ‘godfather’ of Macau casinos, dies aged 98

Considered the father of modern gambling in China, Ho had a four-decade monopoly on Macau’s casinos

Read the full article on The Guardian here

The Copyright Battle that Gave Cinematic Life to Dracula

Nosfertau was an illegal adaptation, but the fight over it spawned a monstrous legacy.

Read the full article on Crime Reads here

Out-of-Sync ‘Loners’ May Secretly Protect Orderly Swarms

Studies of collective behavior usually focus on how crowds of organisms coordinate their actions. But what if the individuals that don’t participate have just as much to tell us?

Read the full article on Quanta Magazine here

THE ANT HILL KIDS: Break Your Legs With A Sledgehammer Or Go To Hell

Roch Thériault was a man with a mission: to save himself and his followers from the coming apocalypse. As a child, Thériault dropped out of school and started teaching himself the Old Testament. He was convinced that a war between good and evil was about to come, and that this would bring about the end of the world. Thus, he converted to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and lived by their rules: no tobacco, no unhealthy foods, no alcohol or drugs. Thériault was a charismatic man, good at persuading others to do his bidding. While organizing seminars for the Adventists, he convinced an entire group of people to quit their jobs and form his religious following called The Ant Hill Kids (named for their ant-like hard work). He was no longer Roch to the world, he was ‘Moses.’ It was 1977, and Thériault and his followers formed a commune that was free of sin and stood for equality and unity. Of course, just as with every other cult, the good times would quickly come to an end, which started when the Adventists kicked them out for their weird-ass behavior. Thériault forbid his followers to contact their families, and against Adventist rules, developed a drinking problem. Rules for followers became stricter and stricter, up until the point where the members were restricted from speaking to each other without Thériault present.

Read the full article on Cvlt Nation here

Lawrence Ferlinghetti With the Cellar Jazz Quintet - Junkman's Obbligato

Lawrence Ferlinghetti With the Cellar Jazz Quintet

Junkman's Obbligato

from the lp Poetry Reading In the Cellar

Book Review

Book Review

King Of the Conjurers: Memoirs of Robert-Houdin

by Robert-Houdin

     Harry Houdini has rightfully earned the reputation for being the most prestigious stage magician of the modern era. Not as many people know of his predecessor and inspiration, the man who lent him his name, Robert-Houdin. King Of the Conjurers: Memoirs of Robert-Houdin had a significant impact on the young Harry Houdini. It is an entertaining autobiography that gives us a nice glimpse into the mind of a man who could be considered the grandfather of modern conjuring.

     In simple prose, Robert-Houdin describes his childhood in Blois, France during the early 19^th century. The son of a watchmaker, he developed an early interest in mechanics. In one memorable passage, the young boy gets reprimanded at boarding school for trapping mice and rats which he hooks up to miniature farm tools he created for fun during his spare time. This fascination would later spark his interest in building automata (if you know nothing about this, look it up on Youtube since it is very interesting).

     Robert-Houdin also writes of how he develops his fascination for stage magic, also known in his day as prestidigitation, a word he claimed to have coined himself, though like many of the claims in this book, the authenticity is in dispute by historians. His early encounter with a street-performer and con-artist is one good story and another is how he met up with Torrini, a traveling conjurer who had a great influence on the young man and helped him get started in his career. The stories with the life story of Torrini and his assistant Antonio is one of the great parts of this narrative.

     As he goes on, Robert-Houdin gives details about how he developed his stage act, how he built on his previous performances and developed new tricks. His early encounters with strange people, sleazy businessmen, and unruly crowds were learning experiences for him. Along the way he learns the art of publicity and builds his reputation to a fine crescendo. Meanwhile he gives descriptions of his tricks and how the audience responds; this is a little disappointing at first because he explains how a lot of the illusions are created. Magic is a lot more fun when we agree to allow ourselves to be deceived since the secrets of the trade make the fascination of illusion disappear.

     As the life story goes on, Robert-Houdin reveals less and less of his secrets. Meanwhile his reputation grows to the point where King Louis XVIII of France and Queen Victoria of England demand private performances. The story climaxes when, after retirement in old age, the French colonial authority summons him to tour Algeria to perform for the Muslim tribal leaders. This is a very politically incorrect passage. The whole purpose of his tour is to prove that the supernatural powers of French magicians are superior to the performances give by the traditional Algerian magicians called Aissaoua. Without a trace of guilt in his conscience, Robert-Houdin sets out to assist in proving to the Arabs of North Africa that the French are superior to them in every way.

     Robert-Houdin’s writing style is sometimes good and sometimes lacking. The prose moves along in a consistently even-handed and gentle pace. However, there are times when these memoirs could benefit from more description. This is especially true when he describes his automata. He probably wrote this book without the knowledge that this art form would eventually fade into obscurity so that most readers of our time would not know enough about them to really get what he was describing. His descriptions of other people in his life could use some enhancement as well. In a strange way, the characters don’t come off as two-dimensional the way people in genre fiction do. Instead they seem like three-dimensional people whose third dimension is hidden; as a reader, you know it is there but you just can’t see it. Maybe it is like a painting by Edouard Manet who worked with the concept of fitting three spatial dimensions into the two-dimensional space of a canvas. The spatial surfaces and depths interplay in a way that forces you to shift your perceptions. But Manet did this intentionally and in terms of writing style it makes some characters seem flimsy and incomplete.

     A lot of what Robert-Houdin wrote in King Of the Conjurers may not be one hundred percent accurate. There is no doubt he took some literary license and gave himself credit for tricks he stole from other magicians. This should not stop you from reading it. It is an entertaining story nonetheless. Like a member of the audience at a theater, it is most rewarding if you agree to play along with the magician’s game and just accept the illusions as they are. 

Robert-Houdin. King Of the Conjurers: Memoirs of Robert-Houdin. Dover Publications Inc., New York: 1964.

The Church of QAnon: Will conspiracy theories form the basis of a new religious movement

Followers of the QAnon movement believe in wild and dangerous conspiracy theories about U.S. President Donald Trump. Now a faction within the movement has been interpreting the Bible through QAnon conspiracies.

Read the full article on The Conversation here

DEVO Is Now Selling COVID-19 Personal Protective Equipment: Energy Dome Face Shields

According to DEVO's co-principle songwriter and bassist Gerald Casale, the experimental art band turned early MTV pop-punk darlings were “pro-information, anti stupid conformity and knew that the struggle for freedom against tyranny is never-ending.”

Read the full article on Open Culture here

R.I.P. Michael McClure

R.I.P. Michael McClure

Beat Generation poet

1932 - 2020

The Day Police Bombed a City Street: Can Scars of 1985 Move Atrocity Be Healed?

Eleven people, including five children, died and a Philadelphia neighborhood burned down in the airstrike against a black liberation group. Now an effort at reconciliation is under way

Read the full article on The Guardian here

Book Review

Book Review

What Is Property?

by Pierre_Joseph Proudhon

     “Property is theft” is one of those literary sentences that gets stuck in your head as if someone permanently burned it into your gray matter with a branding iron. What Is Property? is Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s attempt at explaining what it means. Understanding his argument is certainly an intellectual challenge.

     First Proudhon explains how he defines “property”. This is not as easy as it may seem since he does not follow the common understanding of “property” in terms of possession and ownership of something, most often an object, money, real estate, or intellectual property. On one hand, he defines it as synonymous with a concept like “attribute” or “characteristic”. The properties of the human body include a head, a torso, limbs, organs and everything else an average human being is composed of. He extends this definition to include objects that a human owns, possesses, or uses. Humans are users of tools so ownership of tools is perfectly alright in Proudhon’s mind. These two kinds of property are acceptable to him. The property he objects to is a landlord’s or businessman’s appropriation of goods produced by laborers in exchange for money. The semantic root of “property” and “appropriation” are philologically linked so that “appropriate” would mean “to take property away from someone”. This type of business transaction is what Proudhon rants against when he says “property is theft”.

     The reasoning behind this notion can be tricky and confusing. This is probably because Proudhon had not followed his own chain of logic to its end. It goes something like this: one laborer extracts raw materials from the Earth, another laborer forges them into tools, and those tools get used to do farm work. Each laborer along the chain adds something of value to the crops that are the final product. If we were to calculate a value for each step in the process based on time and effort spent in work we could conclude that each vegetable or piece of fruit is worth x amount of money when the proprietor comes to collect his goods. He buys the food in bulk which means that he pays less per item than the sum of the cost of labor put into its production. Since “labor” is a property of a laborer, each laborer in the chain of production owns a portion of all the crops that are later sold. So when a tenant farmer receives payment for his produce, the property of each laborer is being appropriated by the proprietor against their will. Therefore, property is theft and the proprietor is a criminal. After following Proudhon’s reasoning, it makes sense. Well at least it does for about twenty or thirty seconds. The if you start to think about it in detail, the whole theory falls apart. This is as close as he comes to constructing a logically coherent argument.

     The following section is an explication of the concept “property is impossible”. Proudhon sets the bar higher here and some of his arguments in this part are smart, a little more clear and a littlre more clever. One of his strongest points is that a piece of farmland exists in time and space. The farm itself may be sentient but the land it is on exists eternally. Furthermore, space and time are physical dimensions, kind of like vessels that are filled with things like farms, farmers, and crops. The landlord holds a lease giving the time of purchase and the boundaries of the land tract he owns but the lease does not state that he owns the time and space in which the land tract exists. That is because it is impossible for any human to own the abstract dimensions of time and space just as it is impossible for a finite being to own something that exists infinitely like a section of Earth. Therefore, property is impossible. It is like saying a wagon is made out of wood and the wood is made out of molecules which are made out of atoms that are made out of subatomic particles. No one can actually own subatomic particles so that means the wagon can not be owned. Now try stealing a car and using that argument as a defense in court; you would probably not be found innocent but you might end up getting locked in a hospital for the criminally insane rather than the federal penitentiary. It is an interesting concept but too far from the real world to be of much value. It might make an interesting topic of discussion in a law class though.

     The third and final section is a rant. Proudhon derails his narrative fequently, starting with an etymological examination of the word “theft” which shifts into a summary of Hegel, followed by some religious sermonizing, a declaration of anarchism as the only logical form of governing, and it all ends with a rather bizarre and hysterical statement that the idea of property being theft will wipe out the older ways of life and usher in a new utopian paradise of freedom, justice, and equality for all. Despite Proudhon’s inability to stay on topic, this section contains some of the clearest and most well written thoughts in the book.

     What Is Property? is a strange book. Even the most fanatical anarchists would concede that the logic has a few shortcomings. One obvious flaw is that the statements “property is theft” and “property s impossible” are mutually exclusive concepts; you obviously can not steal something that doesn’t exist. At best Proudhon will be remembered as a minor footnote in history which is certainly more than I can say for myself or most of you who are reading this, by the way. Despite his rudimentary thinking, Proudhon was one of the first theorists of anarchism and his ideas had a strong influence on Karl Marx who lifted the ideas of collective ownership and the elimination of the bourgeoisie class directly from his thinking. Marx and Proudhon were actually friends until the two had a falling out and died as enemies.

     Even if Proudhon’s thinking is confused and underdeveloped, knowing something about his life puts it into a clearer perspective. Proudhon grew up in a family of tenant farmers. He saw first hand how the people he knew struggled with the hardest physical labor and lived in extreme poverty while the landlord paid them pennies so he could sell their crops and make a fortune doing little more than signing receipts and lending money at interest. Proudhon was good at reading, got accepted at a college and saw the French Revolution come and go, leaving the poor farmers poor and the aristocrats rich. He saw that the replacement with monarchy by parliament left the general populace just as oppressed as ever. He desperately wanted to transform society so the farm laborers would have their fair share in life. What Is Property? Can be seen as an attack on the economic and political injustice of the world. Despite its naivite and limited scope, it is a sincere fight in favor of the common people who deserve more than what they get. Proudhon had no chance of winning this battle but he was determined to keep up the attack until the end. There is something admirable and noble about his attitude.

     So is property theft? Proudhon does not make a convincing case but in failing to prove his point he raises a lot of questions about society and morality that are legitimate and worth contemplating. The statement “Property is theft” is like William S. Burroughs claim that “language is a virus”. It is one sentence that has become detached from its original context to fly freely through the ethers of abstract thought to this day, a power-chord riffing through the symphonies of intellectual debate. It is a mind-blowing thought that survives long past any other ideas put forth by Proudhon.

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. What Is Property? Cambridge University Press, New York: 1992. 

Anna Jarvis: The woman who regretted creating Mother's Day

The woman responsible for the creation of Mother's Day, marked in many countries on the second Sunday in May, would have approved of the modest celebrations likely to take place this year. The commercialisation of the day horrified her - to the extent that she even campaigned to have it rescinded.

Read the full article on BBC News here

R.I.P. Little Richard

R.I.P. Little Richard

rock & roll star

1932 - 1937

R.I.P. Florian Schneider

R.I.P. Florian Schneider

founding member of Kraftwerk

1947 - 2020

R.I.P. Dave Greenfield

R.I.P. Dave Greenfield

keyboard player for The Stranglers

1949 - 2020

Who Was The Man In The Iron Mask, The Anonymous 17th-Century French Prisoner?

Even after his death, the government took great care to hide the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask. His clothes were promptly burned at dawn and his cell was immediately scraped and whitewashed.

Read the full article on All That Is Interesting here

How 13 Seconds Changed Kent State University Forever

The institution took decades to come to grips with the trauma of the killing of four students 50 years ago

Read the full article on Smithsonian here

Book Review

Book Review

Brainwashing

by Edward Hunter

          In mid-century America, a publishing house called Pyramid Books mass produced lowbrow novels for mainstream public consumption. The subject matters of their pulp paperbacks usually revolved around action and adventure stories, westerns, thrillers, war stories, and detective fiction. One of their more unusual titles was a supposedly a journalistic account of communist P.O.W. camps during the Korean War called Brainwashing. Its author, Edward Hunter, claimed that communists had developed a powerful technique of mind control which they used to turn ordinary citizens into robots who were unquestioningly subservient to the state apparatus. But Brainwashing is not a work of scholarship nor is it a product of scientific inquiry. Its publication by a cheap book company churning out fluff literature for people of average intelligence and mediocre tastes should be a good indication of what it really is.

     An interesting man in his own right, Edward Hunter was no psychiatrist not was he a sociologist or even a political scientist. He was an OSS and CIA agent who worked for the for propaganda bureaus of those governmental branches. He oversaw an impressive archive of communist propaganda from the USSR and China. He was also in charge of creating and disseminating propaganda pushing America as the greatest and most truthful of all nations, a messianic titan ordained by God to save the world from anything un-American, a harbinger of truth that all nations must bow down and submit to or else be condemned to the hell of being on the wrong side of history. Hunter coined the term “brainwashing” and used it to explain why people, who otherwise would be good, would choose to take sides with those the American government hates. Some of these people were citizens of communist countries and some of them were American soldiers who gave up sensitive military secrets to communist officials and sometimes even renounced their American citizenship.

     Hunter starts off this book by presenting it as a scientific history of mind control. The great discovery of the neurological scientist Ivan Pavlov is described; you know the one where he rings a bell and gives the dog food and watches as it starts to drool; later ring the bell but in the absence of the food and the dog still drools. Transfer this practice to the human population and you have a powerful formula for controlling the masses of humanity, right? Hunter claims that Pavlov went on to secretly refine this technique and gave the results to Nikolai Lenin, a claim that has since been debunked by legitimate historians.

     The bulk of Brainwashing consists of anecdotal evidence or should we say “case studies”? Probably not because Edward Hunter was not enough of a scientist to be able to properly use the concept of case studies in the writing of a research paper. Each sleep-inducing account is written in a dull, dry prose of short declarative sentences that drone on and on. The soldiers all tell stories about life in Pak’s Palace, the military’s name for the P.O.W. camps located in North Korea. A perceptive reader might quickly notice that their descriptions of brainwashing techniques are not only minimal but also vague, muddled, and unclear. Most of what they say involves things they do to amuse themselves, often at their captors’ expense, descriptions of the miseries of their prison, self-criticism sessions, and torture.

     Using canned responses, the soldiers all answer questions about how they resisted brainwashing and survived the ordeal. Without variation, their explanations come down to two stock answers: religious faith and patriotism. Ring a bell and the dog starts to drool. Invoke the sacred ideals of God and country and any human will feel the strength and courage to survive any trial. Are the emotional responses to faith and patriotism conditioned reflexes? Pavlovian psychiatrists would say yes. Does America brainwash American citizens the way communists brainwash Soviet and Chinese citizens? The communists would say yes. But Hunter claims that communists always lie, are never capable of telling the truth; only Americans tell the truth so when communists condition their citizens it is mind control and when Americans do the same it is not. Black is black and white is white; there are no other colors and there are no shades of grey. Hunter claims the shades of grey are for weaklings and liberals who are no different from communists or anything else that does not fall into lockstep with the American way. You don’t want to be a weakling or a liberal, do you? Jump on the bandwagon, take your place in line, and conform to what the American authorities say you should be, schmuck.

     If you think the testimony from those G.I.’s is not enough, some clinical analysis is provided by the great Dr. Leo Freedom. Yeah right. And you might be surprised to learn that Dr. Freedom has a brother named Captain America. I mean, if you are just going to make stuff up at least try to make it believable. In the end, the doctor’s analysis is little more than a reiteration of everything the soldier’s supposedly said in their descriptions of the P.O.W. camps, albeit in slightly altered language. He does not cite any peer-reviewed research, he uses no technical jargon, refers to no statistics, and his dialogue is no more sophisticated than that of a junior high school biology teacher. Dr. Freedom was probably never even a real person. Of course, he ends his explication by explaining the importance of religion and patriotism when it comes to resisting brainwashing. One of the indoctrination techniques mentioned by Hunter is the repetition of ideas to the point where they become an unquestionable part of a man’s mind. It’s kind of like a catechism, praying before a meal, or recitations of the Lord’s Prayer which they teach to children. But religion is true and communism isn’t so when the church conditions the minds of its sheep (the Lord is my shepherd so believe what we tell you to believe, you little piece of mutton) it is for the common good but when the communists do the same it is brainwashing.

     One point that Hunter makes about communist rhetoric is that they never offer proof for any of their claims. Their method of argumentation involves stating a premise, making some brief comments on it, then restating the premise. But this is also how Dr. Freedom states his case in the chapter allotted to him. In fact, Hunter does the same when he makes his own commentaries on brainwashing techniques. For example, he says that religious faith is necessary for resisting mind control with the explanation that having a belief in a higher purpose makes torture bearable and that is why we should all be religious. He does say that prayer helps to focus the mind on something other than the pain but that is the most explanation he gives. In the end we should all be religious because that is the right thing to do. He uses the same circular logic that he accuses the communists of using. If you read carefully, you might notice that Hunter often uses the same conditioning and rhetorical strategies that he claims are brainwashing techniques. You can accuse him of being a hypocrite but he probably was something worse; he knew how to manipulate emotions and knew most readers will just swallow everything he says without skepticism. He would piss in your face and tell you it’s raining because he’d assume you are too gullible and submissive to challenge him on the matter.

     In fact, Brainwashing is not actually a book about emptying the contents of a person’s mind and replacing them with what the communists want them to think. The scenarios described by the soldiers are all scenes of torture. The prisoners are given insufficient food rations, denied medical treatments, subjected to violence and verbal abuse, put into solitary confinement, questioned endlessly, force to make false confessions, rewarded for good behavior and punished for disobedience. This book is really about interrogation methods used by intelligence agents to learn military secrets from their captives. Individuals subjected to cruelty will often say anything their interrogator wants to hear in order to make their suffering stop. Mind control has little or nothing to do with what Edward Hunter is writing about. The interrogation techniques he describes are the same ones used by American intelligence agents and law enforcement officials anyhow. But certainly if the people on our side do it, it is not a problem.

     To make matters worse, at the time this book was published the CIA had already initiated their MK-ULTRA program. Although Hunter’s concept of brainwashing was little more than a propaganda ruse, the intelligence agency was fascinated with the idea of mind manipulation. Therefore they began a two decades long program exploring the possibilities of brainwashing, not because they wanted to combat it but because they wanted to develop a powerful coercion system of their own. They experimented with control techniques involving hallucinogenic drugs, truth serums, electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, and violence. It is as if Hunter’s book was written to say, “Hey look at what those commies are doing over there. We are the good guys. We would never do anything like that, would we?” Edward Hunter was the type of old-time grifter would direct your attention to a crime being committed in the distance while he slides your wallet out of your pocket, empties it of its contents, and slides it back in without you ever noticing it. He was the kind of conman who would forcibly anally rape you and then convince you to see a therapist because he just proved you are gay.

Time has not been kind to theorists of brainwashing. Neuroscientists and psychiatrists have dismissed it. Hypnotism is possibly a pseudoscience. Mass hypnosis has been relegated to the realm of conspiracy theory kooks. Mind control is the content of science fiction and for anyone smarter than one of Pavlov’s drooling dogs it is not hard to see that it is an oversimplification, a term used to describe the practices and beliefs of people who differ radically from your own point of view. It is too complicated for some to grasp the idea that Asian or Russian people are different from Americans because we live in geographically distinct regions of the world. We grow up in different cultures, speak different languages, and are the products of different histories. When Chinese or Korean communists give evasive answers to questions, speak indirectly, drop hints, or use face-saving behavior, it is not because they are sneaky or dishonest; it is because those are ordinary communication styles for Asian people and other cultures that are defined as “high-context” by sociologists. This reality is too complex for many people to understand so it is easier to say they have been brainwashed and leave it at that. Then again, there are times when most humans do seem to be little more than trained animals.

     Edward Hunter’s Brainwashing is a work of propaganda. The Chinese communists are always ugly, vicious, and tricky but never smart enough to see that the morally upright Americans are always outwitting them. Stereotyping, demonizing, and vilifying the enemy is a common propaganda technique, one that is abundant in the pages of this book. At one point the author address the moral conflict some soldiers might feel about lying to their interrogators to protect American military information. He says it is morally acceptable because deceit is a necessary part of war. He deliberately neglects to mention that the authorities’ deceit of the people on their own side is a part of that equation. Do not make the mistake of thinking that the leaders of your own country are more righteous than the leaders of any other country because the are not. The style may be different but the result is the same. You can choose to be a dupe for communists or you can choose to be a dupe for capitalists but either way you are nothing more than a dupe in the end.

     Brainwashing is, however, an interesting sample of Cold War propaganda. It is also an interesting window into the mindset of the American government. You can use it to familiarize yourself with propaganda techniques and be all the wiser in the end. Poke holes in Hunter’s flimsy theories and watch this house of cards collapse.

Hunter, Edward. Brainwashing. Pyramid Books, New York: 1956.

The True Story of Brainwashing and How It Shaped America

Fears of Communism during the Cold War spurred psychological research, pop culture hits, and unethical experiments in the CIA

Read the full article on Smithsonian here

Biological Warfare in Korea: A Review of the Literature

In this article we will look at the arguments pro and con in regard to US biological warfare (BW) during the Korean War as they have been made in the subject literature. After the first decade of post-Korean War secrecy, including McCarthyism, prosecution, direct censorship, and programmed forgetting, an initial trickle of academic curiosity has increased into a steady flow of articles and new titles. The allegations that the US used germs and insects as combat weapons during the Korean War have grown into an historical controversy with its own library a small but recognizable sub-genre of Cold War history, stimulated by the heated and ongoing charges.

Read the full article on OpEd News here