MES_more notes 9 is on #SoundCloud on.soundcloud.com/cYZpxreokk…

The Legend of Hell House (1973)👻 One of the great classic haunted-house horrors... an underrated gem that deserves more love.

― James Baldwin

Pretty funny to see everyone blame this (rightly condemned, to be clear) on whatever their political bogeyman is: I've just seen people say that this is because of, take your pick, "communism," "Islamism," "third worldism," "Russia," and "China". As if France needed any outside help to riot... Maybe some people need to brush up on our history, or read Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables"... This isn't to romanticize the rioters in the least. A reminder that in Les Misérables there's the figure of Thénardier, a horrendous scoundrel who exploits the chaos around him, robbing corpses and fleecing anyone he can. Every chaotic moment in French history has its share of Thénardiers, and this one is no exception. It's just too easy, and actually useful to those in power, to blame this on outside forces. At the end of the day, this anger was made in France, is happening in France, and can only be solved in France. And, as painful as it is to hear, if one studies history, this is pretty much exactly what's expected at the stage France is at. People have studied this. Whether you take Ray Dalio’s six-stage cycle theory, Peter Turchin’s "elite overproduction" thesis or the Chinese dynastic cycle framework, they all come to the same conclusion: when debt piles up, public services crumble and those in power become incapable, the streets eventually explode. In fact it's almost eerie how France ticks almost every box of most cycle theories: - Fiscal distress (debt is 119% of GDP and we now pay more to borrow than Italy or Greece), - Crumbling public services: a reminder that these protests (now turning into riots) started with high school students protesting over the state of education - Political paralysis and a legitimacy crisis (Macron has an insane 82% disapproval rate, he's definitely lost the Mandate of Heaven...) - Popular immiseration with a record poverty rate at 15.4% and a median wage at only €2,190 net per month for a full-time private sector employee (you can't even afford to rent a decent flat in any major French city with this) "Third worldism" or "Islamism" isn't the cause of any of this: French governments didn't borrow like there's no tomorrow (the last balanced budget dates back to 1974!) because the "Muslim Brotherhood" told them to, and it wasn’t Putin or Xi who left French classrooms without teachers... Sadly the reactions - scapegoating - are ALSO typical of this stage of the cycle: Dalio lists among the classic markers of Stage 5 the emergence of "scapegoat classes who are commonly believed to be the source of the problems" (linkedin.com/pulse/delving-s…), alongside a "loss of truth in the public domain," with people more interested in hunting for culprits than looking for solutions. So what is the solution? Well, the way the Chinese dealt with it was basically a reset - regime-changing themselves with a new dynasty claiming the Mandate of Heaven, usually after decades of rebellion and war. Not exactly a hopeful prospect... There is also the exception where a dynasty managed what the Chinese call a 中兴 (zhōngxīng, "restoration"): profound reform from within before the whole house came down. It succeeded a few times (e.g. the Tongzhi restoration during the Qing dynasty) but usually could only buy a few more decades, rarely more. In 1945, the writer Huang Yanpei famously asked Mao how to break free of the cycle (cn.vlex.com/vid/constitution…), framing it in those terms: "People are careful and hard-working at first, for bold measures are the only possible ways to break through difficult conditions. But when things gradually get better, people begin slacking off: laziness may spread through a long history and is impossible to be corrected when it becomes a common practice. Gradually expanded territory requires corresponding increases in talent, but when the latter is insufficient, the central control will become weak. In a word, no one can escape the 'vicious cycle' of dynastic rise and collapse." Mao replied that democracy was the answer, because "as long as the people can supervise the government, the government dare not slacken." And Xi later added a "second answer" (chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/…): a system capable of "resolute self-reform". The jury is still out on whether China has broken the cycle, but if France has any hope of escaping it, it will need both answers at once: a government that truly answers to its people, and very resolute self-reform. One thing the answer definitely isn’t: turning on each other. In all these cycle theories, division and scapegoating appear on the way down, never on the way back up.

Not enough people remember when The Atlantic openly stated that killing Palestinian children is sometimes justifiable.

Jorge Lopez Ruiz - Bronca Buenos Aires (1971)

Obywatel prosi – obywatel dostaje. Tak to u nas na Kronikach jest. Skoro pytacie mnie, czym właściwie są te protesty we Francji, jeśli nie jakimiś rasowymi rozruchami imigranckich milicji pożerających cywilizację łacińską, to odpowiadam uprzejmie (wersja bardzo skondensowana). Otóż są przede wszystkim kolejnym etapem bardzo głębokiego kryzysu społecznego, ekonomicznego i politycznego Francji, rzec by się chciało – kryzysu systemowego. I doprawdy, nie trzeba do tego mieszać ani żadnego islamizmu, ani Rosji, ani Chin. Francuzi od dobrych 200 lat całkiem nieźle radzą sobie z robieniem potężnych zamieszek własnymi siłami. Przypomnijmy przede wszystkim, od czego ten konkretny ruch się zaczął. Nie od meczetu. Nie od imigracji. Nie od konfliktu na tle narodowościowym czy religijnym. Zaczął się od protestów licealistów przeciwko fatalnym warunkom w publicznej edukacji. Chodziło o to, żeby tynk nie leciał im na głowy podczas zajęć, żeby woda była w kiblach, żeby klimatyzację im zapewnić, gdy latem leje się z nieba żar, a zimą żeby nie było przeciągów wwiewających ziąb do budynków. Był to też protest przeciwko olbrzymim brakom kadrowym wśród nauczycieli, przepełnionym klasom, zaniedbanej infrastrukturze, przeciążonym planom zajęć i systemowi Parcoursup. Najpierw zastrajkowali w tej sprawie nauczyciele, potem dołączyli uczniowie. Protesty rozlały się następnie na cały kraj, zostały wsparte przez organizacje rodziców i związki zawodowe, a do katalogu masowych pretensji dołączyły kwestie kosztów życia, płace, emerytury i katastrofalny stan usług publicznych. Takie są fakty. Potem – jak wielokrotnie w historii Francji – masowy protest społeczny zaczął w części miejsc przechodzić w zamieszki, starcia z policją, bezmyślne demolowanie i szabrownictwo. To ostatnie można sobie spokojnie potępiać. Nie zmienia to jednak przyczyn i istoty procesu. Dług publiczny we Francji to obecnie 119% PKB. Państwo od dekad ma strukturalny problem z finansami publicznymi, a jednocześnie postępuje degradacja usług finansowanych przez państwo i abdykacja tegoż z kolejnych odpowiedzialności. I akurat w oświacie lont dopalił się najszybciej. Szkoły nie mają nauczycieli, szpitale lekarzy i pielęgniarek, mieszkania są tak horrendalnie drogie (zwłaszcza w aglomeracjach miejskich), że młodzież w najśmielszych marzeniach nie wyobraża sobie reżimu innego niż wynajem. Koszty życia rosną bardzo drastycznie. System polityczny jest sparaliżowany, a popularność Macrona osiągnęła rekordowo denny poziom 15%. I w takich okolicznościach ktoś jest autentycznie zaskoczony, że we Francji wybuchają protesty? Przecież to jest najbardziej logiczne następstwo, jakie można sobie wyobrazić. Ja bym nawet powiedział, że dziw, że tak późno. A Polacy w internecie mogą sobie oczywiście opowiadać radośnie, że Francję podpalił islam, imigranci, Moskwa, Pekin, komunizm albo Merkury w retrogradacji. Tylko proszę mi jeszcze wyjaśnić, dlaczego i w jaki sposób islam spowodował rzekomo brak nauczycieli w liceach, dlaczego Putin doprowadził francuskie finanse publiczne do długu na poziomie 119% PKB oraz dlaczego Xi Jinping uczynił wynajem (nie mówiąc o kupnie) mieszkania w Paryżu, Lyonie czy Marsylii nieosiągalnym. To jest klasyczny konflikt społeczno-ekonomiczny, tzw. konflikt klasowy. A że znajdują się prowokatorzy, podpalacze, szabrownicy, przestępcy, lumpenproletariat korzystający z chaosu i zwyczajni bandyci, to, jak mawiał mój kolega z Zimbabwe mieszkający w Polsce: „trudno, you know”. Przypomnę uprzejmie tak na koniec, że Victor Hugo już ponad 160 lat temu umieścił w swym wstrząsającym dziele „Nędznicy” niejakiego Thénardiera, który na barykadach nie walczył o sprawiedliwość, tylko okradał zwłoki. Każda francuska rewolta ma swoich Thénardierów. Mam nadzieję, że pomogłem. Pozdrawiam. @stanislavski_b

Nagisa Oshima, Koji Wakamatsu and Tatsuya Fuji during the shoot of IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES (1976).

"So, no, long story short: Mearsheimer hasn’t “discredited himself over Ukraine”. The ones who should worry about their credibility are those who led Ukraine down the very primrose path he warned about, and still haven’t had the decency to admit where it took the country." x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2…

I get asked this all the time, so I am reposting my famous thread of all the top strategic thinkers - from Kissinger to Chomsky - who warned for years that war was coming if we pursued NATO expansion, yet had their advice ignored (which begs the question: why?).

witamy w internetach. niektórzy wrzucali takie sadystyczne, zdegenerowane rzeczy pod swoim nazwiskiem.

Happy Birthday to The Heart of Saturday Night. Album released this day in 1974 by Tom Waits. His 2nd. The title song was written as a tribute to Jack Kerouac. The album marks the start of a decade long collaboration between Waits and Bones Howe #TomWaits 🎹

The Southwest Review music issue is stacked. I wrote about docs on Karen Dalton, IDAHO, & Garland Jeffreys. Check out that TOC! Coolest of all: I wound up on the contributors page under my hero, David Berman. Easily the best 6 bucks you’ll spend this year. southwestreview.com/volume-1…

On the short list of my favorite Ashbery poems. He must really have been riding some high when he got to those lines about the segments of the orange.

Rees-Mogg actually lied through his teeth in that part of the interview: he claims that, in a treaty, America "guaranteed" Ukraine's territorial integrity, making it "inviolable", as a "quid pro quo" for giving up its nuclear weapons. This is completely false. The treaty he refers to is the so-called "1994 Budapest Memorandum", whose full text you can read here: nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/defa… What the U.S. (alongside Russia and the UK, the other signatories) did commit to is "to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine," to refrain from the threat or use of force against it, and to refrain from economic coercion. These are promises about each signatory's own behavior: the US promised not to violate Ukraine's borders ITSELF, it did NOT guarantee their inviolability against anyone else - contrary to what Rees-Mogg is saying. Steven Pifer, one of the US negotiators, wrote about this in an article he titled "Budapest Memorandum Myths" for Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/news/…). He writes that the claim that "the United States and Britain violated their Budapest commitments by not going to war against Russia on Ukraine’s behalf" - what Rees-Mogg is essentially saying - is "a myth." In another article he wrote for CNN in 2014 (edition.cnn.com/2014/03/04/o…) the same Pifer explains that "U.S. negotiators — myself among them — discussed this point [i.e. the absence of security guarantees] in detail with Ukrainian counterparts so that there would be no misunderstanding." The only thing the U.S. (and the other signatories) committed to do if Ukraine was attacked was "to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine" - and even that only in case of an aggression "in which nuclear weapons are used." And the U.S. did go to the Security Council, but given that Russia is a permanent member of the same UN Security Council, it's of course completely useless. Rees-Mogg is also lying on the other half of the supposed "quid pro quo": the fact that Ukraine supposedly agreed to get rid of "its nuclear weapons," emphasis on the "its." The nuclear weapons on Ukrainian soil were never theirs to keep, and they never had operational control of the weapons: the launch authority was always in Moscow and, even if Ukraine had wanted to launch the weapons, they couldn't have because they didn't have the launch codes. As Ramesh Thakur, former Assistant Secretary-General of the UN, explained in a 2014 article titled "the myth of Ukraine’s nuclear deterrent" (opencanada.org/the-myth-of-u…), the bombs on Ukraine's soil "were always Russian bombs that happened to be based in Ukraine" and "were not in fact Ukrainian, any more than NATO nuclear weapons stored on West European soil or U.S. bombs that used to be kept in South Korea belonged to the countries on whose territory they were located." So there you have it, Rees-Mogg is your classic Eton-educated British politician: extremely posh and very well-spoken, supremely confident in everything he asserts, and... a shameless liar, peddling thoroughly debunked myths.

The great Yandex bot conspiracy currently circulating on Twitter is this week’s “Russian plague,” which was itself last week’s “Putin has been replaced by a body double” or “Russia has no toilets,” or whatever. The stories change, but the appetite for believing them remains remarkably consistent. This post does an excellent job of dismantling the latest nonsense.

Uwaga! Jeżeli chcesz usunąć "ruskie trolle" z twittera, opublikuj wpis z tym wykresem wraz z kodem o treści "5P13RD4L4J-5L3D21U", a następnie prześlij go na pw dziesięciu znajomym. Dostaniesz eurogąbki!!

RT @aparajito316: @mubi @Freelineorlando @ouicinema @Mesmerized2021 @CanetCinema @HauntedMovies @VishalBhardwaj @NFAIOfficial @janusfilms @…

New acquisitions

The diesel fuel deal exposes, once again, the chronic failure of the typical expertise on Russia: short-sighted, methodologically nationalist, and tunnel-visioned by liberal teleology. Having falsely predicted Russia’s economic collapse several times in a row, it is fundamentally incapable of analyzing Russia and the war in Ukraine as part of global processes rather than as the irrational idiosyncrasies of the Russian ruling clique. In that perception, Russia is miraculously saved again and again by a deus ex machina: the regular arrival of “white swans,” essentially Putin's “luck,” or conspiracy theories about Trump. The root of this intellectual crisis is the lack of any coherent, rational conceptual framework capable of connecting the war against Iran, Gaza, the escalating political squabbles in the EU and the US as interconnected parts of the global crisis.

Artem Kirpichenok is still in prison. No one can clearly explain what is happening. But the most frightening part is what is happening now. Some people have already begun to say: “What if there really was something we don’t know about him? Perhaps he did break some law after all? These days, you never know who might be spying on whom.” This is what is truly terrifying. It turns out that almost anything can be justified. People can be seized, put in shackles — literal shackles, no exaggeration — tortured and deprived of sleep. And then ordinary citizens will say: “We don’t mean anything bad. Maybe he accidentally called the ‘wrong’ person? Maybe he photographed something in Israel?” And no explanation seems to matter anymore. Not even the fact that he was not living in Israel at the time: he lived in St Petersburg, worked as a tour guide, and posted on Facebook almost every minute, so his life can be traced practically day by day. It is hard to imagine that, from the other side of the world, he also found time to spy on behalf of Israel’s enemies. But common-sense arguments are of little interest to anyone. Most people are interested only in finding a way to justify what is happening, in the hope that this terrible violence will somehow spare them. You want to shout: “But my friends, it will not spare you. The war is not merely at your doorstep; it has already crossed the threshold. These violent fanatics entrenched in power (your power) are threatening, first and foremost, your own safety.” But of course no one will hear it. It is useless.