[Eliot Curtis] found himself a little too close to 1960’s counterculture while restoring a vintage modular synthesizer — he began tripping out on acid. The instrument in question is a Buchla Model 100. The Buchla is a modular synth. Instead of a keyboard, it used capacitance-sensitive touch plates. This particular model 100 was purchased by California State University East Bay Campus. The synth was popular for a while, but eventually fell into disuse, and was stored in a classroom closet.
Modular synths are experiencing a renaissance, as can be seen right here on Hackaday. The Buchla was pulled out of storage and given a proper restoration. [Eliot Curtis] is the Broadcast Operations Manager at KPIX 5, the San Francisco CBS TV station. He also is the hacker who volunteered to restore the Buchla.
During the restoration, [Curtis] found residue and crystals stuck under one of the knobs of the Control Voltage Processing Module. Was it flux, conformal coating, or something else? [Eliot] hit the board with contact cleaner and wiped it down. Within 45 minutes, he was feeling a strange tingling. It was the beginning of a nine-hour LSD trip. Three independent tests on the module came back positive for LSD.
Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD for short) can be readily absorbed through the skin, which is exactly what happened to [Eliot]. Synth designer [Don Buchla] was friends with [Owsley Stanley], who worked for the Grateful Dead and allegedly cooked up some very potent LSD. Some of Buchla’s modules even found their way into Ken Keesey’s hands, where they wound up on his famous bus “furtherâ€. As it turns out there were rumors that modules had been dipped in LSD back in the ’60s. Why someone would do that to an electronic module, we’re not sure — they must have been on drugs. [Eliot] recovered from his brush with the ’60s and continued with the restoration with gloves on.
It was probably Owsley acid, too. The really good stuff! I remember it well.
Some of you have done NOTHING with your life and you’re mad. You have a college degree & a smart phone with access to virtually *anything* and you can barely get out of bed in the morning while you spit on people who built a whole world with nothing but a horse, map, & axe.
You’ve made nothing with access to everything. You’ve conquered nothing. Hell you can’t even conquer yourself. So go tear it all down. Scream into the void how unfair it all is. It’s not that you’ve wasted your short time here. Surely not.
Don’t bother with your own legacy you’re busy shitting on the long dead who aren’t here to care. Go burn down every Starbucks. That’ll show them. Torch the Target. Tear down every monument. Deface every memorial. But what have you built? What do you leave behind?
So take your benzos. Watch your porn. Get Uber to drop off your dinner. Buy an adult coloring book. Have sex with strangers to ease your crippling anxiety. It’s not you. It’s the system really. It isn’t fair. Go cancel someone. Dox someone. They deserve it. You’re the good guy.
Don’t write an epic novel worth building a statue to remember you. Go troll seven year old problematic tweets ever on the hunt for the boogeymen. See now you’ve accomplished something. Cancel everyone. You’re a warrior now. A real hero.
And lastly whatever you do never ever take even a moment to self reflect on your own failures. Never own them. Never take a hint of responsibility. Remember you’re just a helpless victim of circumstances beyond your control. This all means nothing. Its like you weren’t even here.
Derek Hunter suggests letting the lefties have their own People’s Republic on the Left Coast. Maybe more of them will flock there and leave the rest of us alone.
Be honest, if we let the mutant mob have Seattle, would you really miss it? We’ve already gotten all the good music out of it, coffee is everywhere, so what else do they bring to the table? If you feel as though you missed your chance to visit the Space Needle, they have a similar enough tower in Toronto. And you can catch scabies in any number of third world countries with much better climates. So I say, let them have it.
For that matter, give them the whole state. They inflicted Microsoft on the country, so think of leaving them to the wolves as revenge for whatever version of Windows last crashed on you, which is to say whatever the latest version of Windows there is. Toss in Oregon, too, because what good has ever come from Oregon?
That’s an honest question. I’m sure they’ve added something besides trees, I just have no idea what it is. Nor do I care. Whatever it is (beaver pelts, maybe?), I’ll happily forego to create whatever they end up calling a country that will undoubtedly be a magnet for like-minded leftists, thereby ridding this country of a significant percentage of those carcinogens known as progressives.
Let them create Utopia, or at least see how it goes.
Vanderleun links a little story from Raconteur Report set in the dystopian future about the very possible fate awaiting the rioting urban leftist mobs… some fine tomorrow.
“Sevenâ€.
The earpiece crackled in Jake’s ear from one of the handheld radios they were each tuned to. They’d picked up a couple of dozen surplused Motorola LE-only encrypted radios on eBay, and after a lot of work, Gene had programmed them all to use a normally unused simplex channel reserved for the authorities for tonight. All anyone else would hear was a brief bit of static with the factory encryption, but they still stuck to brevity codes.
Jake calmed himself. He knew the signs of buck fever, and he took a few moments to stretch his whole body, starting with his toes, and ending with his fingers. It wouldn’t be long now, and he didn’t want to be fighting adrenaline when the moment came.
The van he was in was non-descript. It was the twin of one belonging to a local business the next city over, and the plates on it would be back in the morning, with any luck at all. Inside was dark and quiet, but he could already hear the noise of the protesters as they moved down the main street, closing at the speed of a 6000-footed caterpillar, fueled by youthful exuberance, and a healthy amount of stupidity. Well, they were about to get a lot more education than what they’d gotten at U Cal, and he was happy to be a teaching assistant tonight.
He focused on the intersection, and checked over his gear one last time inside the darkened vehicle, as the sounds of yet another leftist temper tantrum grew louder by the moment.
“Six.â€
Jim, hunkered down behind a load of cardboard boxes in a van much like Jake’s, sat at right angles to the intersection.
His weapon too was identical to Jake’s: the ubiquitous Ruger 10/22, modified for tonight.
It had a frame optimized for grown-ups, with one of those evil pistol grips that gave the state legislature hissy fits, going back to the late 1980s. Also a high-cap magazine, which torqued them out even worse. In this case, picked up out of state on a visit to relatives, and driven back across state lines into what Jim referred generally to as “Occupied Territoryâ€. He had several more loaded and waiting next to the stock. Also present was a heavy barrel, making the thing a tack-driver out to the limits of the relatively weak cartridge. And under the heading of “in for a penny, in for a poundâ€, both rifles had custom home-made suppressors screwed on at the business end. They wouldn’t be truly silent, but inside a can, inside a van, a couple of hundred yards away from a herd of screaming protesters, would be as near as. Just to be on the safe side, Jim screwed an earplug into the other ear, the one without the earbud.
Jim hadn’t been in the military, and he wasn’t the shooter Jake, who’d been a designated marksman when he served, was. But a lot of patient practice and range time had made him plenty good enough. And using the little pop-guns tonight wouldn’t tax anyone’s abilities at all. He checked the bipod legs to make sure they were securely locked. If they had failed, he had a beanbag rest for backup.
And when they returned, the barrels used tonight would come off, replaced by factory barrels again, and the heavys would go on a fishing trip, after being reamed out with a hardened bit. No evidence, no traces.
Jean Raspail is best known in the United States for The Camp of the Saints (1973), a dystopian novel predicting Europe being overwhelmed by massive Third World immigration.
He was philosophically a Catholic traditionalist, whose novels were written in explicit opposition to both Liberalism and Communism.
Despite his literary stature, he was denied membership in the French Academy in 2000.
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Louis de Bourbon, Duc d’Anjou, Legitimate heir to the throne of France, writes:
Paris Review’s first issue, Spring 1953, cost 75¢.
The Paris Review was founded in 1953 by three literary-minded American graduates of elite schools (M.I.T., Yale, and Harvard).
William Styron wrote an editorial statement on the new quarterly’s intentions:
The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines. […] I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages: the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they’re good.
That was then; this is now.
The latest issue of the Paris Review, June 8, 2020, features an editorial titled, Let It Burn, by one Robert Jones, Jr.
The United States of America is, by its very nature, anti-Black.
It isn’t the only anti-Black nation and it isn’t only anti-Black (it also despises the Indigenous, the queer, the trans, the poor, the disabled, and many others). But anti-Blackness is, indeed, the American fact. The nation was constructed on the notion that white people are the only fully human beings on earth, and that humanity exists on a spectrum that moves from the “purity†of whiteness to the “impurity†of Blackness. This isn’t merely some abstract idea; it’s the foundation of every American institution and what animates every American person. It’s what allows, for example, the American media to uphold the pretense that pro-Blackness and anti-Blackness are equal moral propositions or that there can ever be “both sides to the story†when it comes to a state agent murdering a Black person. …
That is the beauty of these uprisings—which are happening in all fifty states; Washington, D.C.; Puerto Rico; and all around the world, joined, surprisingly, by non-Black people who I can only imagine could no longer suffer under the strain of the guilt that is their blood memory (but not only memory). They hint at the possibility of Black liberation. It will not be achieved, of course. The United States of America would unleash the full fury of its military might upon its own citizens before it would allow that to happen. An America without its proverbial knee on the necks of the Black populace is not America at all. And that is their greatest fear: the collapse of all they hold sacred, which is held together, really, by the fiction that Black people are not people.
We must resist even if defeat is imminent.
I don’t believe we will be liberated from the American regime through superficial and incremental reforms (do you reform a lynch mob by giving them a willow tree instead of a sycamore from which to condemn the hanged?). That is the sacred knowledge that Assata Shakur prophesied for the flock to receive. What is required is a reevaluation, a dismantling. And no nation will go down quietly—especially not one whose character is no different than that of a tick, sucking the blood of the warm body to which it has attached its mandibles until it’s engorged, leaving disease in its wake. When I was a child, I was told that one way to remove a tick was to light a match and hold it near.
So, the reader might suppose that the author is a poor, constantly persecuted minority, living in fear, forced to do hard labor, and surviving barely above starvation level in some hovel.
Not really. Robert Jones, Jr. is actually a comfortable haute bourgeois homosexual living in Brooklyn, writing for ethnic magazines and the New York Times, and travelling nationally and internationally.
He got a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. at Brooklyn College, and he has a literary agent and his first novel will be being published by Putnam’s next January 5th.
This particular “editorial” is, of course, one of countless pieces of current African-American political manifestos comprised of totally hyperbolic, utterly paranoid, self-indulgent, malicious, fantastical nonsense, peddling limitlessly inflated historical grievances and expressing the most pernicious, offensive and insolent sorts of racial animosity and group chauvinism.
Reading it the second time, in the light of my just-acquired familiarity with the author’s bio, I could not help but smile, as I recognized that all this hypertrophied ebullition of hysterical complaint and rabid racial hatred was nothing real at all.
All this essay is is a classic example of over-the-top homosexual self-indulgent emotional dramaturgy. The homosexual struggles with identity and views the world in terms of theatrical scenes and roles. Mr. Jones is not really oppressed. Black blood is not really flowing down his gentrified Brooklyn street. Mr. Jones does not really hate America or hate white people. He is just pouring all of his ever-too-available emotional energy into a role: the role of the Angry Black Man.
Take that, whitey! You were afraid that the Big Bad Black Man was going to start the Revolution, waving a machete, and coming after you with a big Kalashnikov. In reality, if you looked Robert Jones, Jr. in the eye, and cried: Boo! The fierce guerilla fighter would instantly wilt and melt into tears.
So, the question becomes: how naive, how stupid, how infantile has the elite American establishment become when the editor of Paris Review cannot distinguish a ridiculous piece of homosexual role-playing fantasy from a serious statement of supposed factual observation and political analysis and intent?
where are the police while these vandals destroy public property and tear down priceless works of art that have stood, in some cases, for a century or more? You almost have to remind yourself that the people tearing down the property actually do not have the legal right to do what they’re doing. You’d be excused for thinking otherwise – does the term “public property†mean that the public can do whatever it wants with it? – however, destruction of property worth more than $500 is a felony in most states. These statues are worth many thousands of dollars, making these mob-led “removals†felony crimes. They are also dangerous crimes, as the man who had his skull cracked open in Virginia convincingly discovered.
But this has been the theme in recent weeks. The police standby while leftist radicals do, quite literally, whatever they want.
In Seattle, a group of radicals have seized control of several city blocks and declared it a sovereign state. They have set up checkpoints and barricades, and uniformed police are barred entry. The police, in fact, were nice enough to abandon their precinct at the rioters’ behest. This is a repeat of what we witnessed in Minneapolis, except in that case the precinct was then ransacked and torched. Somehow, in a civilized country once ruled by law, this has all become a familiar sight. Mobs rampage through our cities, set buildings on fire, destroy police cars, destroy public property, destroy private property, throw bricks, invade government buildings, loot, assault, and murder. And very little effort is made to stop any of these crimes from occurring, or to punish those who commit them.
There is much discussion about “privilege†in our culture. Indeed, the concept of privilege is one of the things fueling these mobs. They would say that privilege is bestowed based on race and gender, and that I, as a white man, have the most privilege of all. Yet I’m fairly sure that if I drove into town right now and threw a brick in a window, or set a retail outlet on fire, or looted a convenience store, or invaded a police precinct, or tried to set up my own “autonomous zone,†or yanked down any statues or monuments I found personally displeasing, I would be arrested on the spot, with little fanfare. And if I resisted arrest and was beaten or killed by police in the process – even if my death was unjust and the result of excessive force – there would be no CNN headlines about it, no riots in my honor, no elaborate displays of performative grief from our elected officials in Washington. Whatever my white privilege gets me, it doesn’t get me that. And it doesn’t provide me a pass that allows me to tear through the city, stealing, destroying, looting, and burning, either.
Mainstream Christianity in today’s West has become a dead letter and a joke. But our elites are not irreligious. Their real clerisy is the rancid radical Left. And their religious observance consists of submission, self-abasement, and virtue-signalling in response to whatever the Left demands.
Portsmouth, Virginia police stood by and watched, making no attempt to interfere as a mixed race mob first defaced the Confederate Monument, erected 1876-1881 and on the National Register of Historic Places, then proceeded to decapitate and then topple the four statues of soldiers and a sailor standing guard around its base.
The monument honored 1,242 men from Portsmouth of whom 199 were killed or died; gave 1,018 from Norfolk county of whom 280 were killed or died; and 1,119 from the city of Norfolk of whom 176 were killed or died in defense of their native state.
Jim Hoft reports a denouement worthy of an M.R. James story.
A far left protester was critically injured on Wednesday when a leftist mob toppled a Confederate statue on top of him.
The young Democrats attempted to destroy a Confederate Monument in Portsmouth, Virginia.
When they knocked over one of the statues it landed on a fellow protester critically injuring the man.
A witness said the protester’s skull was showing and he as convulsing on the ground.
