I had Grok collate my updated draft notes for a screenplay/novel hybrid that I’m creating called Disastrous Amateurism. And the Grok synthesis is really fascinating to me. It didn’t change the tone or direction of anything but helped to sharpen my conception of everything. I’ve shared it below, largely unedited save for the addition of…
LINKS: Vital Hatred; the Open Road; Primal Despotism
A Modest Defense of Hatred: “Where man is denied hatred, and he lacks any objective referent of meaning, he sinks into a lobotomized stupor. In such an age, the alternative to a vital hatred is the Last Man. It is in Nietzsche’s forecast of the logical consequences of nihilism where we see something remarkable—that the…
LINKS: Killing Those Who Would Convict Them of Their Sins; Deep Heuristics; the Values of God
Against Christian Civilization: Paul Kingsnorth critiques the idea of using Christianity as a tool to defend Western culture, arguing that Christianity at its core is uncivilized. Christianity is impractical. Impractical, intolerable, and awful, in the original sense of that word. It is terrifying, and it is designed to kill you. This is because the values of…
LINKS: Heat/Light/Deluge; Places of Peril; the Secular Ineradicability of Evil
Britain Must Go: “There is no justification for continuing to let this regime breathe. The United States has the means, and the duty, to end it, and a motive for doing so. The endpoint of the UK’s current trajectory is a nuclear-armed jihadi state in the heart of the American Atlantic lake. This outcome must…
Twin Peaks: Trapped in an Incomplete Cosmos
cross-posted at Void Wandering My first awareness of David Lynch came via Dune and The Elephant Man in the early 80s, followed by random exposure to Blue Velvet on a premium cable channel sometime in 1987, when I was 14. By then, Altered States and other phantasmagoria had me primed to receive Lynchworld without too much shock. My true Lynchian flashpoint was Twin Peaks, which blew the…
David Lynch: 1946-2025
There’s a treasure trove of David Lynch film reviews at Unz.com, most of which are written by Trevor Lynch (no relation to David that I’m aware of). Some excerpts below. Death My Bride: “Lynch ends [Lost Highway] as he begins it: rocketing down a nighttime highway to Bowie’s ‘I’m Deranged.’ But by ending and beginning…
Remembering Michael Murray
Before we get too deep into 2025, I’d like to take a moment to remember a dear friend of this blog, Michael Murray, the publisher of the literature and art website Galaxy Brain. Michael passed away in 2024, which shocked me — I had no idea he was ill. I only knew him through Twitter,…
2024 in Review
2024 IN REVIEW What a year — I bounced all around, from the base of the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming to a village in the Andes to Houston, Texas to consort with falconers, Trumpists, Ecuadorian farmers, pilots, poets, and cowboys. January set the tone. As I set off for Wyoming, I watched an arc flash…
LINKS: Safeguarding Oblivion; the Permission Structure Machine; Communion on the Moon
On the Grid — How Surveillance Became a Love Language: “…true privacy requires safeguarding oblivion, not secrets.” Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment: “The wizards of the permission structure machine had become captives of the machinery that they built. Bullying large numbers of people into faddish hyperconformity by controlling the machinery of social approval may require both…
LINKS: the Heart of a Collapsed Star; Hurricanes in Human Form; Friends Who Turn Their Backs on the World
American Return: “Americans said they want a nation. And not just any nation—the one we’ve always had. The metanoic model for transformation—embodied by Obama’s ‘fundamental transformation’—was unmistakably relegated to the dustbin of history.” Building Freedom Cities: “Some potential locations for a Freedom City might include Presidio National Park, Lowry Range in Colorado, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba….
LINKS: A New Avant-Garde; Cybernetic Meta-Organisms; Loneliness in Faith
AI, Crypto, and the Arms Race for Superintelligence: “We speak of an ‘arms race’ because there is some prospect of irreversible global lock-in. First, recursively self-improving machine intelligence introduces the possibility of rapid ‘takeoff’ scenarios, where the progress next year is not double but 3x the progress last year, then 4x the following year, and…
LINKS: Genuflection; Maps of Reality; Dionysian Vigor
Aeneas in Washington: “You can tell by the blood streaks on his face that he had yet to wipe any of it away. His hands are in penitent repose, palms slightly up. Out of context he appears to be in genuflection. It is at this moment, in all likelihood, that he first tasted the blood,…