Who was Marshall McLuhan and how did his famous aphorism–the medium is the message–frame the new technology of visual content consumed via television screens? For some basic info, here’s some biographical context from Wikipedia:
Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. Raised in Winnipeg, McLuhan studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is known as “the father of media studies”.
McLuhan coined the expression “the medium is the message” (in the first chapter of his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man), as well as the term global village. He predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. However, with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspectives.
In a Wired article from 1996, McLuhan’s influences and ideas are more closely examined in relation to the new “World Wide Web” technology emerging at the time, including the controversial Jesuit who developed the idea of the noosphere. From the first link:
McLuhan’s idea that media are extensions of man was influenced by the work of the Catholic philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who believed that the use of electricity extends the central nervous system. McLuhan’s mysticism sometimes led him to hope, as had Teilhard, that electronic civilization would prove a spiritual leap forward and put humankind in closer contact with God.
But McLuhan did not hold on to this brief hope, and he later decided that the electronic unification of humanity was only a facsimile of the mystical body. As an unholy imposter, the electronic universe was “a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ.” Satan, McLuhan remarked, “is a very great electric engineer.”
Why did McLuhan come to this conclusion about the “electric universe”? Was it simply his outdated Christian belief system reclaiming the cognitive territory he pioneered? Or, perhaps, McLuhan did see something forming on the future’s distant horizon, and he determined it wasn’t what we were being told.
Five years before Wired revisited Marshall McLuhan’s old stomping grounds, Scientific American published a special issue about how to work, play and thrive in Cyberspace. One of the contributors for this issue, as you can see on the cover, was then-Senator, Al Gore.
Like building railroads and highways, Al Gore made his case for letting the U.S. government build, with U.S. tax dollars, America’s new information superhighway so that our great and amazing technological future could arrive and make all our lives so much better. Let’s see how his words have aged 35 years later:
Why did Marshall McLuhan become so cynical by the end of his life? He was one of Canada’s most famous thinkers, pen pals with Pierre Trudeau and the widowed wife of Henry Luce (Time Life), and an accepted part of the academic conversation happening about new communication technology, as this 1968 press release from the University of Montana clearly indicates:
This post–and the answer, I believe, to McLuhan’s evolution in thinking–came from two letters I found in McLuhan’s collection of letters.
And, yes, considering modern communication technology has essentially eliminated the art and insights of letter-writing, the irony of discovering McLuhan bitching about Secret Societies to the poet, Ezra Pound, is not lost on me.
Nearly a half century after Marshall McLuhan’s death in 1980, the “art” of a director, like David Lynch, is getting some critical attention for reasons I think McLuhan would appreciate because it has everything to do with electricity.
The following excerpt about Lynch’s Twin Peaks comes from the book by Robert Guffey, Hollywood Haunts The World, which I mentioned briefly in part II of A Very Curious Montana Cold War Book. Here’s the excerpt:
The connection between electricity and interdimensional beings, hinted at in the original series as well as Fire Walk With Me, is made explicit in Twin Peaks: The Return, Lynch and Frost’s belated conclusion to the series. When Dale Cooper finally manages to escape from the otherworldly Black Lodge in which he has been trapped for twenty-five years, we see him emerge on Earth through an electrical socket. He spends many episodes unable to remember his Agent Cooper persona until, at last, he plunges a metal fork into another electrical socket, the resultant shock putting him into a coma, then restoring him to full consciousness.
When I rhymed the word “shock” with “pussy lock” yesterday in the poem that concluded my timely dismantling of Dick Manning’s writing agenda, it wasn’t just a crude reference to fucking. At risk of sounding like a New Ager, sex, like death, is all about energy, and it was at the moment of electrifying Chicago for the 1893 World’s Fair that I believe a major shift happened as electricity–and the infrastructure needed to transmit it–transformed the country.
When you adopt the esoteric lens that informs Hollywood’s mind-magick manipulation, then David Lynch, Montana, and the continued focus on this specific geography to help tell larger stories becomes very suspect. Here’s a few before I wrap this up.
Taylor Sheridan’s endless series, starting with Yellowstone, is the obvious one, but then there’s a bunch of little references, like Jake Gyllenhaal’s character in Roadhousecoming from Missoula, aliens in Arrival arriving in Montana, David Cross sporting a Missoula beanie, Anna Kendrick shouting out a recipe from a “Missoula Mom” in A Simple Favor, and the American Horror Story reference to Butte, Montana, in season 8.
What’s going on here?
My cop-out answer to what’s going on here is A LOT, but since this post is getting long, I’m going to go back to Al Gore’s words from 1991 after pointing out the historical relevance of the copper deposit that made Butte, Montana, “the richest hill on earth”.
Does this sound like the rationale to build DATA CENTERS? Yes, it does. And, if you’re one of those well-meaning people being led to oppose data centers, Wired has a warning for y’all:
In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.
Who is Richard Manning? And why is he throwing a tantrum over the independent candidacy of Seth Bodnar? Today’s post will contextualize Dick’s tears and MAYBE, if you’re lucky, I’ll share a song I’ve been working on, since Dick LOVES music so much!
Manning is the author of 11 books and has worked as a journalist, reporter and editor for more than 40 years, including four years at the Missoulian. In 1995 he was the recipient of a John S. Knight Fellowship from Stanford University. He is a three-time winner of the Seattle Times C.B. Blethen Award for Investigative Journalism, and also won the Audubon Society Journalism Award and the inaugural Richard J. Margolis Award in 1992.
He writes frequently about the environment, neuroscience and music. He was a senior research associate at the National Native Children’s Trauma Center based at the University of Montana, where he wrote about trauma and poverty. In addition to his eleven books, his articles have been published in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Audubon and The Bloomsbury Review.
To understand Richard Manning and the political tribe he represents, you have to understand how Democrats in Montana have slowly abandoned working class voters, especially white ones, as a parallel economic trend shifted economic influence from extractive industry, like timber and mining, to chasing tourist dollars.
Since first winning his Senate seat in 2006, Jon Tester has had to manage the uppity expectations of his environmentalist supporters, since they’ve been claiming for 20 years that Jon Tester only won in 2006 because the environmentalist’s candidate, John Morrison, bowed out and threw his support behind Tester (they aren’t wrong).
To STAY in power after getting elected in 2006, Jon Tester exploited the political cult of public lands by deploying anonymous dark money to support the Libertarian candidate, Dan Cox. And it worked!
Now Jim Messina’s friend, Seth Bodnar, is breaking poor Dick’s heart by NOT choosing a side like that political Kentucky song sings about, the same song dumb Dick references in his tantrum op-ed:
I have a song to sing to Seth Bodnar. It’s a time-tested tune steeped in a deep history of troubles much like the troubles of our own time. If Bodnar can’t hear it, this song still might prove useful to the voters of Montana. It frames a vitally important question specific to Bodnar’s candidacy..
The song itself arose in the heat of Harlan County, Kentucky’s long, bloody battles to unionize the coal mines, but from there it spread and endured, rang out as anthem for subsequent progressive battles for civil rights, against the Vietnam War, for universal education, decent wages, all those long Democratic fights for human dignity.
In its origins it arose at the apex of a generations-long struggle of common people against the greed of Gilded Age oligarchs, of billionaires, of plutocrats. They called them “plutes” then, but it was the same deal then as now.
This Dick Manning op-ed is one of the most amusingly hollow complaints I’ve ever read. Why? Because, just two years ago, Dick lent his name and Big Sky bonafides to the “Montana Independent”, an astro-turfed effort that hurt BOTH local politics AND local media by being neither. From the link:
A national progressive media organization with ties to a Democratic Party-aligned super PAC has launched a self-described news outlet in Montana ahead of the state’s slate of high-profile elections, most prominently the race for incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester’s seat in the U.S. Senate.
Veteran political journalist Joe Conason, who oversees editorial operations for the nonprofit American Independent Foundation, told Montana Free Press via email that the Montana Independent, one of four state-level affiliates of the American Independent, was launched earlier this year. News outlets in three other political battleground states, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, are also being published under the American Independent umbrella.
…
But Montana Independent writers are almost all out-of-state journalists well-established in the progressive media sphere. (One apparent exception is Montana’s Richard Manning, a former Missoulian reporter and book author married to current U.S. Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning.) Some of the officers of the foundation that funds the American Independent are also connected to American Bridge 21st Century, a Democrat-aligned political action committee that receives substantial contributions from a dark money nonprofit of the same name founded by national Democratic operative and media figure David Brock. Former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat, is co-chair of the American Bridge 21st Century PAC.
The Dick Manning connection to Steve Bullock, who ran for president in 2020, is very important for reasons that will hopefully be clear by the end of this post.
Before I expound on WHY that connection screams out at me, let’s first appreciate that Dick’s wife, Tracy Stone-Manning, was selected by Joe Biden to be the director of BLM, and I’m not talking about Black Lives Mattering. Quite the opposite, as you soon will see.
Tracy Stone-Manning’s legacy among hardcore environmentalists is her role as a snitch to the Feds back in the day. For conservatives, they argued in 2021 the other side–that Stone-Manning was a key instigator in planning “eco-terrorism”:
Today, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) issued the following statement in response to receiving a letter from the retired special agent who was in charge of investigating the spiking of trees that were part of the Post Office Timber Sale in the Clearwater National Forest in 1989.
In the letter, the retired special agent criminal investigator for the Forest Service provided the facts of the entire case. He made clear that Tracy Stone-Manning, President Biden’s nominee to be director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), was a target of the investigation, did not cooperate with investigators until she received immunity, and helped plan the 1989 tree spiking.
Barrasso is ranking member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources (ENR).
“I am grateful to the lead investigator for providing the committee with all of the facts of the case,” said Barrasso. “Not only did Tracy Stone-Manning collaborate with eco-terrorists, she also helped plan the tree spiking in Clearwater National Forest. She has been covering up these actions for decades, including on her sworn affidavit to the committee. This new information confirms that Tracy Stone-Manning lied to the committee that she was never a target of an investigation. The nominee has no business leading the Bureau of Land Management. President Biden must withdraw her nomination and if he does not, the Senate must vote it down.”
Before Biden got his turn at the presidential grift spigot, Richard Manning was helping position national Democrats at the start of Trump’s first turn. That’s why he wrote this long piece for Harper’s Magazine, titled “Political Climbers: Environmentalist momentum in the West“.
Here’s what an optimistic Manning wrote back then about Colorado’s Hickenlooper and other states around the west:
Conservation, support for the arts — these are key platforms for a politician in his position. In 2014, though Colorado voters chose the G.O.P. for the Senate, they delivered Hickenlooper, a Democrat, to a second term as governor. The state has historically leaned Republican, but in recent years its constituency has changed, and the same has been true across the West, as hiker-progressives have turned districts blue. Last November, Hillary Clinton lost Montana, my home state, to Donald Trump by 20.5 points, but in the governor’s race the nature-loving Democrat Steve Bullock beat a superrich archconservative by 4. The states along the Pacific Coast — California, Oregon, Washington — have long been dependably Democratic; now Nevada and New Mexico are trending that way, too. These states, along with Colorado, all went for Clinton last fall.
Directly after this quote Dick writes, almost casually, about a curious call Hicklenlooper received while they drove across town:
Hickenlooper and I left his office and shuttled off to an SUV for a ride across town. In the back seat, as he pored over a speech, he took a call concerning meetings he’d had a week before, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He talked for twenty minutes or so, a monologue of arcane details about computer chips on bank cards and surgical joint replacements in livestock — the minutiae of Colorado business. Then we pulled up to a suburban conference center, a bit late.
Yes, you are reading this correctly–a phone call about computer chips on bank cards from someone who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos got causally explained away by Dick Manning (along for the ride) as simply “the minutia of Colorado business”. Amazing.
Also, total horseshit.
For more horseshit, here’s Manning talking about some “hired gun” fresh from the failed Banjo-Op of Rob Quist. I really wish I was making this horseshit up.
From the far end of the table came the voice of a guy in a Patagonia vest. He was Aaron Browning, who had been working in Montana, first as a hired gun on Bullock’s gubernatorial race and then on the congressional campaign of Rob Quist, a banjo-playing Democrat from Glacier County. In the spring, Quist ran to fill the House vacancy left by Ryan Zinke, whom President Trump had chosen as his secretary of the interior; the G.O.P. had long held the seat. The Democrats appeared to have a decent shot, but Quist would ultimately lose to Greg Gianforte, a Republican multimillionaire, in a vote that was split sharply between progressive cities and the rest of the state. In the abbreviated race, public-lands politics became a factor, but so did unprecedented campaign spending, health care, and Gianforte’s body-slamming a reporter after at least two thirds of the votes had been cast. In the end, the margin was 6 points among the same voters Trump had carried by more than three times that. The possibility of such a shift, Browning believed, implied a clear strategy for conservationists: “Make our issues the signature issues in a particular election and defeat people who are outside the mainstream of the consensus.” Of politicians who fail to sign on to environmental protections, he added, “It’s our imperative to make sure they are punished for that.”
Punished, Dick? You mean, like what the clique of von Klaus did to Bernie supporters in Montana?
Steve’s righteous disgust and disavowal of Democrats is precisely the sentiment Seth Bodnar is trying to side-step in this election cycle. Will it work?
Here’s my hot-take: I don’t give a fuck if it will work because I have a different focus, and part of that focus stems from Steve Bullock’s role as the Montana Attorney General who looked the other way during the Coyote Club law enforcement scandal.
Have I asserted that the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office has essentially gotten away with murder in the case of Sean Stevenson? Yes, and this murder–which occurred on January 5th, 2020, at St. Pat’s hospital–occurred while Steve Bullock was running for president. Curious.
But it gets even MORE curious when you consider the role of Josh Manning, the guy who officially investigated Missoula’s Sheriff at the time, T.J. McDermott, for post-campaign work place retaliation. And yes, there a Manning family connection. Hmmm.
Again, I wish was making this all up, but these curated screenshots from behind the Missoulian paywall are pretty eye-opening for me, considering what I now know about this town:
Pattern recognition is an affliction, and I do repeatedly remind myself that correlation is NOT causation, but sometimes the thing you see quacking in front of you REALLY IS a duck, so, in that spirit, here’s Josh throwing his support behind a Smokejumper for Congress, followed by some suggested summer reading titles:
There’s more I could say, but my pattern-recognition abilities are pretty controversial these days, as are my poems, which Pete Talbot once encouraged me to publicly share with local online audiences at the blog we both contributed to, 4&20 Blackbirds. Pete’s Daddy, John Talbot, retired from the CIA in ’57 then, 30 years later, stepped away from his work for Lee Enterprises, which owns the Missoulian.
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Dick Manning worked at the Missoulian around the same time Talbot retired, ’85-’87 I believe (Pete will correct me if I’m wrong).
Yeah, I totally vibe with the sentiment of I GUESS IT’S UP TO ME. Too bad I broke the leash.
Ah, what fond memories of less complicated days, before I knew how devious, despicable, and truly dangerous some of the people I’ve been exposing truly are.
Now, how about a song for ALL the dicks and pussies out there! America’s 250th birthday is SO CLOSE, yet the founding principles of this Republic have never seemed so further away. Here’s how I cope (song link):
Benny Franklin what a shock penis key fits pussy lock ignore for now the skull, the bones kites fly high like planes and drones
honest, Abe, the highway sings unlike chink and clack of rail bifurcate then stitch back boldly Frankenstein your holy grail
let us think about Chicago back to eighteen ninety three Grover Cleveland pushed the button to make a chair of the lynching tree
Benny Franklin, bones get found because the dead can still make sounds but your dead dick cannot rape and I never trusted honest Abe
X-post angling for Greg Carlwood’s attention from The Higherside Chats
What does Laura Loomer know that we don’t? That’s what I immediately thought when I saw Montana join Michigan as the two places that Loomer thinks Ebola might already be spreading.
Huh?
Montana and Ebola have been paired together recently in local media–KPAX to be specific–and here’s the annoyingly vague reporting:
Two Montanans with deep ties to Africa are sharing what life looks like on the ground amid concerns over the Ebola outbreak — and what it could mean for their ability to return.
Conor Molloy, who works with a humanitarian group in Kenya, said the disease carries a significant psychological burden.
“Ebola has a lot of kind of fear associated with it and…a horrendous disease with a high mortality rate,” Molloy, who is from Helena, said.
Annette Leivestad spends six months out of the year living in Uganda, where she and her organization have helped people for 16 years.
“We are now full-time around the year helping the people in Rippon,” Leivestad, a Baker resident, said.
Leivestad said travelers are already taking the situation seriously.
The unspecified “humanitarian group” Conor Molloy works for is Trócaire, an Irish Catholic charity doing “God’s” work in places like Africa. Here’s Molloy addressing the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade a few days ago describing the kind of work his organization does:
Trócaire is the overseas humanitarian and development agency of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference. We are part of the Caritas Internationalis network globally and we work in about 20 countries. We work around four key goal areas: democracy and human rights; climate and environmental justice; women and girls’ protection, voice and leadership; and humanitarian preparedness and response.
Before I get to the wildly speculative part of this post, let’s quickly review what kind of actual incidents have recently occurred at the Rocky Mountain Lab in Hamilton, Montana:
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has confirmed two separate incidents where employees at Hamilton’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories were potentially exposed to Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.
…
A spokesperson for NIH told the Ravalli Republic on May 21, “Rocky Mountain Laboratories filed a required reporting form on Feb. 18, 2026, in response to a potential exposure to Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever Virus due to a hole in a glove that occurred while changing cages of laboratory mice. All reporting, emergency response, and safety protocols were followed. There was no release outside of the lab and at no time was there any risk to the public.” Occupational exposures, such as a torn glove, are considered a “release” for reporting purposes. The reporting process is designed to be abundantly and overly cautious, according to the NIH spokesperson.
This same article also references the rumors that Laura Loomer is amplifying, citing the same supposed whistleblower group:
Rumors have circulated online surrounding recent exposure events at the Hamilton lab after Montana U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy joined fellow congressional Republicans in calling for scrutiny of RML last week, citing an anonymous whistleblower report by the White Coat Waste Project (WCW).
What’s really going on here? Well, buckle-up, because now I’m going to throw in aliens, data centers, and Clavicular’s looksmaxxing Op. Are you ready?
First up is Clavicular, the “looks-maxxer” who has successfully monetized the male insecurity and loneliness epidemic by introducing and familiarizing for his audience the option of injecting shit into your body to “improve” it.
Peptides for the face? Inject that shit. Cock filler for your dick? Inject that shit. Then, let in some experts to help bolster this normalizing process with literal studies about injecting filler into your body. Or maybe I’m reading this wrong? (hint: I am)
Aliens enter our story because fuck the CIA and this stupid alien bullshit getting mainstream media play right now. I mean, Yahoo News? Really?
Apparently, the government isn’t disclosing everything it knows about UFOs. A whistleblower has accused the CIA of attempting to use sites like 23andMe and Ancestry.com to uncover people with extraterrestrial DNA in their makeup.
“The CIA wants to hunt them down,” said philosopher and novelist Jason Reza Jorjani, Ph.D., while discussing the so-called top secret government program in an episode of the podcast “American Alchemy.”
While the alien/CIA/DNA bullshit circulates, rehashing what conspiracy theorists have been kicking around for decades, I’m more interested in this Rand Paul X post about our CIA pals:
Maurice Hilleman was responsible for developing more than 40 vaccines, including measles, mumps, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, meningitis, pneumonia, Haemophilus influenzae bacteria, and rubella. His vaccines have been credited with saving millions of lives and with eradicating common childhood diseases. The measles vaccine alone has prevented approximately one million deaths. Among other accomplishments, he succeeded in characterising and isolating many viruses, including the hepatitis A vaccine in culture.
Despite Hilleman’s many breakthroughs in immunology and vaccinology, he has never been a household name. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Hilleman had “little use for self credit.” Dr Fauci told the BMJ that Hilleman’s contributions were “the best kept secret among the lay public. If you look at the whole field of vaccinology, nobody was more influential.”
This history is important when considering what’s brewing in Western Montana to help “solve” the Fentanyl “problem”, and who has invested in this “solution” through the public/private/Super-Hero nexus involving the University of Montana, the company Inimmune, and Batman, aka, Mike Goguen.
Inimmune, a Missoula-based biotech company founded by nationally recognized vaccine scientists that has been working on a vaccine for COVID-19, announced today that it has raised $22 million in Series A funding led by Two Bear Capital, a venture-capital firm founded by Whitefish philanthropist Mike Goguen.
The firm plans to use the Series A investment to advance at least two late-stage pre-clinical drug candidates in oncology and allergy through Phase I human clinical trials.
The $22 million is believed to be largest round of Series A funding in state history, according to Two Bear Capital Chief Marketing Officer Liz Marchi, who has been involved in equity capital in Montana for decades.
Does Mike Goguen have ties to the CIA? You betchya! Just ask retired FBI man, Mark Seyler, who wrote a whole book about Batman and the private security company he funded, Amyntor, titled Go Big Or Go Home. It’s quite a read!
When you combine the contents of Seyler’s book with the conversation between Steven Snyder and Morgan Lerette in this episode of Snyder’s podcast, The Farm, you will understand how easily COP-MAXXING can involve cops doing illegal drugs, like steroids, trafficked by people like Matt Marshall, as alleged by Morgan Lerette in her excellent analysis of the Private Security blackhole that emerged as more of America’s war capacity shifted to less accountable private operators, or mercenaries, to use a more honest term.
To wrap this up, narrative control continues to be one of the most important aspects of gaining larger control over people’s thinking and actions, so Clavicular unfortunately MUST be part of the conversation about what constitutes being “sick” and “healthy” in a world increasingly going totally and completely insane.
And data centers? I mean, DATA CENTERS!!!!!!! How about, for 47’s upcoming B-Day celebration, we have a DATA CENTER face off against Erin Brockovich, who recently tossed her hat in the ring to fight back against this fever’d focus of public angst.
To really get inside the data center narrative I strongly recommend watching Ari Aster’s movie, Eddington, several times. When my PsyOp Cinema conversation finally drops I’m sure I’ll have more to say about why Aster so explicitly linked the 2020 “pandemic” with the rise of the data center.
This collage piece was made the old fashion way–with magazines, a pair of scissors, some tape, and a human mind. My favorite collage artist, Jess Collins, set the standard (in my opinion) for this type of art because of talent, obviously, but ALSO because Jess was involved with the project of violently dismantling the old world in order to help reassemble the new, atomic one.
Jess was born Burgess Franklin Collins in Long Beach, California. He was drafted into the military and worked on the production of plutonium for the Manhattan Project. After his discharge in 1946, Jess worked at the Hanford Atomic Energy Project in Richland, Washington, and painted in his spare time, but his dismay at the threat of atomic weapons led him to abandon his scientific career and focus on his art.
In 1949, Jess enrolled in the California School of the Arts (subsequently the San Francisco Art Institute) where he studied under Clyfford Still, David Park, Hassel Smith, and Edward Corbett. He received a BFA degree in 1951. in 1949 he broke with his family, and thereafter referred to himself simply as “Jess.”
Jess’ piece, pictured above, is a nice illustration of how art/mind control functions. You, cowboy, are immediately drawn to the captivating eyes of the mountain lion…but who notices the eye of Horus near the mountain peak? And, even if noticed, who understands that the eye of Horus could be a symbolic reference to the pineal gland?
Now that we’ve entered the New Age of Digital WhoreUs, the prospects for artists has never been bleaker. Take the story of folk musician, Murphy Campbell, as a disturbing and cautionary example:
Folk musician Murphy Campbell just became the latest victim in AI’s Wild West. In January, she discovered songs on her Spotify profile that she never uploaded – AI-generated covers of her own performances, scraped from YouTube and uploaded under her name without permission. The incident exposes a growing crisis where independent artists face both AI voice cloning fraud and a copyright system too broken to protect them, raising urgent questions about platform accountability in the age of generative AI.
Accountability? With how much AI slop now “floods the zone”, accountability for folk artists might not rate high in navigating the hellscape of cognitive triage necessary to wade through all the garbage we are faced with on a daily, hourly basis.
If you follow any Boomers on Facebook you will see the resulting cognitive damage of what’s happening with online content, since they are easy targets for this online slop-rot. Here’s an example I got a tip about this morning while trying to figure out what to write about today:
Screenshot
The irony that Foruk, Abdur, and that third one is helping to slop humans in Missoula with DATA CENTER BAD outrage while I, the unpaid citizen blog-flogger, gets increasingly restrained from WHERE I CAN GO and WHO I AM ALLOWED TO WRITE ABOUT, isn’t lost on me.
It’s also ironic that the kind of Boomers outraged by DATA CENTERS are also using FB to write accurate, yet useless, commentary on local decision-making processes regarding the same tax mechanism I made myself a local target for years ago when I accurately called out the Missoula Redevelopment Agency in a documentary I self-financed and released to the Missoula public for free.
Well, John, you had me until AND VOTE FOR LEADERS…because you obviously don’t understand how much happens before “leaders” emerge on the scene as options. It’s kind of like expecting these people to be supporters of art that challenges institutional power:
Is there an alternative to becoming a retarded local with impotent outrage expressed on the digital platforms fueled by the infrastructure they think they are fighting? Sure, I’d say give money to a LESS RETARDED whistleblowing local Lego master with a deep historical perspective, but I’m not sure I’m legally allowed to solicit donations at this point, so instead I’ll just close by saying…
It’s ok to love bullshit, Missoula, so stop pretending you want anything else.
Is there a new beer to write about at The Pulp? There sure is. How about KGVO reporting on Montana’s favorite breakfast cereal? Yep! Obviously, this is the kind of information that we need to know in order to successfully navigate an increasingly confusing world.
Right?
Well, I’m not here to shovel more bullshit into your stupid ear holes because that’s what paid journalists get paid to do. I’m here to say, out loud, what you already know to be true: until the Epstein class is dealt with, everything we are being told right now about our world is TOTAL BULLSHIT!
Take one of the Democrats running for the U.S. Senate, Alani Bankhead. Who the fuck is this woman? And, is she really waging a genuine war against child sexual abuse, like she says she’s been doing for many years?
Is this bullshit?
It sure smells likes bullshit to me, but that’s because I know, and have written about, Democrat Sheriff of Missoula, T.J. McDermott, who was ALSO a part of the Internet Crimes Against Children task force around the same time he was in close proximity to the Epstein adjacent Deutsche Bank retiree, Klaus von Stutterheim.
When I see law enforcement angling to become politicians by promoting their careers fighting these types of crimes, I now lean towards interpreting this as examples of cynically using taxpayer-funded law enforcement jobs to obtain valuable kompromat, then leveraging this kompromat to operationalize and monetize a political grift.
The other option is politicians mean what they say, and Alani Bankhead really is “fighting for us, against the MAGA agenda”.
I don’t know who still needs to hear this, but we’re not voting our way out of this bullshit. Meaningful voting requires voters to know real shit, not bullshit, but my humble efforts to do that at the local level have been very effectively restrained. That’s why I’m legally forbidden from even attending the City Club media bullshit event, brought to you by ALL the regular corporate and non-profit bullshitters I’ve been calling out for years.
One of the speakers at the upcoming City Club Bullshit Summit (CCBS) next month, John Adams, had his outlet, the Montana Free Press, recently report on how retarded Montana voters are, and by retarded I mean that a vast majority of people asked apparently have no fucking clue who any of these jokers running for Montana’s Senate seat are.
A majority of voters couldn’t identify the race’s four Democrats either. Reilly Neill, a former state representative with the most name recognition of the Democrats, couldn’t be identified by 60% of voters. Meanwhile, roughly 70% of voters couldn’t place Democrats Alani Bankhead or Michael Hummert.
The 2026 race for Senate is just the third in 50 years without an incumbent. Republican U.S. Sen. Steve Daines withdrew his candidacy minutes before the filing period ended and shortly thereafter endorsed Alme, who also received President Donald Trump’s endorsement. Alme, a two-time Trump-nominated U.S. attorney for the state, raised close to $1 million in the first quarter of fundraising, according to Federal Election Commission financial filing. Roughly 16% of voters said they had a favorable impression of him, the same percentage that indicated no opinion of him, while 24% of voters said they viewed Alme unfavorably. Among Republicans, 29% said they viewed Alme unfavorably, 48% said they didn’t know him and 21% said they had no opinion.
Yeah, it’s all bullshit, and if the Massie Op didn’t convince you, nothing will.
To remind readers what calling out bullshit looks like, this post from May 17th offers LOTS of context on the Epstein class tentacles that have infiltrated Big Sky Country. Too bad this reporting has come at such a steep price.
