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September 4, 2022

IN FASCIST LETTER, SALVADOR DALI CALLED FOR SLAVERY OF ‘ALL COLORED RACES:’

In the letter, which was written by Dalí in 1935, the artist proposed the enslavement of “all the coloured races” as part of a new world order that would be “anti-Christian and materialistic, based on the progress of science”.

“The domination or submission to slavery of all the coloured races” could be possible, Dalí wrote, “if all whites united fanatically”. He also insisted on the need for “human sacrifices”.

As Europe was threatened by the fascist regimes of Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy, Dalí‘s letter to André Breton, the French writer and co-founder of the surrealist movement, speaks of the need for “new hierarchies, more brutal and strict than ever before” to “annihilate” Christianity.

“I believe that we surrealists are finally turning into priests,” Dalí wrote.

Scornful of Christianity’s “altruism”, he added: “We don’t want happiness for ‘all’ men, rather the happiness of some to the detriment of others”.

The letter was recently discovered in the digitised personal archive of Sebastià Gasch, an art critic from Barcelona who died in 1982. It was published on Thursday by Spain’s El Pais newspaper.

But the artist’s fascination with Hitler and fascist sympathies were already well known. In other comments from the time, Dalí admitted that he found Hitler “exciting”. He thought Nazism was “hyper original”, seeing it as an example of surrealism in government, with the swastika as a surrealist symbol.

Philip Johnson. Walter Gropius. Mies van der Rohe. Le Corbusier. Ezra Pound. H.G. Wells. Why did so many pioneering modernists know all the lyrics to “Springtime for Hitler?”

CHILEANS DODGE BULLET: Breaking: Chileans overwhelmingly reject new socialist constitution.

CHANGE: ABC News Is Now Asking Uncomfortable Questions About Biden, Shady Dem Tactic of Boosting MAGA Candidates.

MARK JUDGE: Fantastic Four: Full Circle: A Throwback to the Age of American Optimism.

OPEN THREAD: Upon what are you laboring this weekend?

THE NEW SPACE RACE: UK releases military ‘space power’ doctrine.

COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Spoken Insults Stir Up More Brain Activity Than Compliments And Linger For Longer, Too.

Hence the custom of dueling.

NEWS FOR THE BIDEN ERA: Financial Lessons From the Great Depression We Can All Use Today.

THE HARSHEST TWITTER BURNS AGAINST THE SAN FRAN* TECH BROS AT BURNING MAN:

For every passionate Burning Man attendee, there are three equally passionate haters waiting in the wings to fire off a tweet about the people who choose to spend a week on the playa.

And this year, after COVID-19 rendered Burning Man a digital-only festival, the festival is back in full force — and so are the dunks against its attendees.

In recent years, a new level of ire has been unlocked — not against the hippies and trust-fund kids who have made Burning Man into the libertarian-leaning cultural phenomenon that it is. Instead, it’s the VCs and tech bros who fell in love with the fest in recent years that bear the brunt of criticism. After all, entry fees that climb as high as $2,500 are probably nothing to a startup founder who raised millions in seed-stage funding — or the VC throwing money at said startup founder.

Even as the tech industry deals with economic woes apace, it appears that it’s not stopping the 1% of Silicon Valley from going. San Francisco residents and tech industry watchers alike have noted how empty city streets are or how quiet Twitter is this week.

Flashback: Bill Maher: Liberals Are the Fun Suckers Now. “Look, here’s my libertarian side: I don’t really care about any of partying, drugs, and consenting adults doing whatever. Yet, Maher noticed something odd happening between the parties with this story. They’ve switched roles. The GOP is doing having fun, while the Democrats are acting like the Public Morals Bureau. As Maher noted, which is true, conservatives were the ones whose backsides were clenched so tight that you could grind diamonds to dust. Maher’s build-up rips the 1980s conservative establishment but it actually tees him up to go after the woke Left, who he says are millennials who embodied all the bad characteristics Southern Baptist. The Left is the ones for speech codes, blacklists, and cancel culture now. They’re the ‘fun-suckers.’”

And from the Kavanaugh hearings: Did Conservatives Win The Culture War?

* Sorry, I couldn’t help it.

BACKWARDS RAN THE PRONOUNS UNTIL REELED THE MIND. WHERE IT ALL ENDS KNOWS GOD: Say what? Time uses woke pronouns to describe controversial author of Gender Queer.

Time magazine published a glowing profile of a controversial LGBT author whose book, which features questionable illustrations of sexual activity, happens to be the No. 1 most banned book of 2021. The magazine’s tweeted description, however, is confusing social media users.

In describing the interview, the magazine used new, gender-neutral pronouns, calling the biologically female author by “eir” and “ey,” which operate the same as pronouns their and they.

“TIME spoke to ‘Gender Queer’ author and illustrator Maia Kobabe on about eir work, the efforts to restrict access to eir writing, and what ey make of the current cultural moment,” Time tweeted Wednesday night.

Flashback: We’ve Descended Into Some Sort of Bizarre Hell-World in Which Van Jones is a Voice of Sanity: ‘I’ve Never Met A LatinX:’ CNN’s Van Jones Tears Into Left-Wing Rhetoric.

He said the elites use strange rhetoric that does not appeal to working class voters.

“Those people talk funny,” he continued. “I’ve never met a LatinX, I’ve never met a BIPOC … There’s this weird stuff that all these highly educated people say. It’s bizarre, nobody talks that way at the barbershop, the nail salon, the grocery store, the community center. But that’s how we talk now, so that’s weird.”

It’s also a reminder of how radically Time has changed from moderate Republican Henry Luce’s original brief in the 1920s, in which he wrote, “Nothing will be too obvious. We assume nothing—e.g. that our readers know what 5-5-3 means, or who is John Masefield or Babe Ruth…. [It would] serve the illiterate upper classes, the busy business man, the tired debutante, to prepare them at least once a week for a table conversation.”

(Classical allusion in headline.)

TEN PEOPLE KILLED, 15 INJURED IN STABBING SPREE IN SASKATCHEWAN, SUSPECTS STILL AT LARGE.

THIS COULD BE A GAME CHANGER: Clinical Trials On Male Contraceptive With No Side Effects Prove To Be Successful.

ROGER KIMBALL: Biden Puts the ‘Total’ in Totalitarianism.

Joe Biden certainly set the punditocracy abuzz with his neo-totalitarian performance piece at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on Thursday. The significance of that speech can be broken down into three parts, two of which have already received abundant commentary.

The first has to do with the theater of the piece, its optics or stagecraft. As many commentators (myself included) noted, the feel of the event was distinctly, and distinctively, bombastic. The melodramatic red lighting, the presence of armed Marines flanking the president, and Biden’s hectoring, gesticulating delivery made the event seem eerily reminiscent of a speech by Stalin, Mao, or—the closest parallel—that diminutive former house painter who, for a few short years, mesmerized the world with his elaborately staged rallies before pushing ahead with more kinetic activities.

To those who object that I am flirting with Godwin’s Law by invoking old AH, I reply that the flirtation was not mine but the doing of Biden’s producers and puppeteers. The visual similarity between Joe Biden’s event and some nighttime events at Nuremberg are just too striking to be coincidental. Leni Riefenstahl, as someone noted, would have been proud. Those who point out that Biden’s speech took place on September 1, a fraught day on the Polish border anno domini 1939, may be too ingenious for this historically illiterate age, but who knows? Often these things are, as our Marxists friends like to say, no accident. There are wheels within wheels.

Read the whole thing.

Earlier: The Architecture of Doom.

HOW DID HE CROSS PUTIN? Bed, Bath & Beyond CFO Identified As Man Who Leapt To Death From Tribeca Skyscraper.

When Black Friday comes, I’m gonna stand out by the door. And catch the gray men when they dive from the 18th floor. It just got here earlier than I expected.

HOW WEED BECAME THE NEW OXYCONTIN:

[Dr. Libby Stuyt], a recently retired addiction psychiatrist in Pueblo, Colorado, treated patients with severe drug dependency. Typically, that meant alcohol, heroin, and methamphetamines. But about five years ago, she began to see something new.

“I started seeing people with the worst psychosis symptoms that I have ever seen,” she told me. “And the worst delusions I have ever seen.”

These cases were even more acute than what she’d seen from psychotic patients on meth. Some of the delusions were accompanied by “severe violence.” But these patients were coming up positive only for cannabis.

Stuyt wasn’t alone: Health care professionals throughout Colorado and all over the country were seeing similar episodes.

Ben Cort, who runs an addiction recovery center in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, watched a young man jump up on the table in the emergency department and strip naked, claiming he was the God of thunder and threatening to kill everyone in the room, including two police officers. A collegiate athlete Cort worked with also had a psychotic episode and was shot five times by the police with a beanbag gun before he was subdued. In Los Angeles County, Blue Stohr, a psychiatric social worker, had a patient who climbed a 700-foot crane and considered jumping off of it, not because he was suicidal but because he thought he was in a computer simulation, like The Matrix.

Those patients, too, were high only on cannabis.

In 2012, Colorado legalized marijuana. In the decade since, 18 other states have followed suit. As billions of dollars have flowed into the new above-ground industry of smokable, edible, and drinkable cannabis-based products, the drug has been transformed into something unrecognizable to anyone who grew up around marijuana pre-legalization. Addiction medicine doctors and relatives of addicts say it has become a hardcore drug, like cocaine or methamphetamines. Chronic use leads to the same outcomes commonly associated with those harder substances: overdose, psychosis, suicidality. And yet it’s been marketed as a kind of elixir and sold like candy for grown-ups.

* * * * * * * *

Prior to legalization, marijuana plants were bred to produce higher and higher concentrations of THC, a naturally occuring chemical compound in the plant that induces euphoria and alters users’ perceptions of reality. In the 1960s, the stuff the hippies were smoking was less than 2% THC. By the ’90s, it was closer to 5%. By 2015, it was over 20%. “It’s a freak plant that resembles nothing of what has existed in nature,” said Laura Stack, a public speaker who has advocated against the industry since her son, Johnny, killed himself three years ago at 19 years old after years of cannabis abuse drove him into psychosis.

Flashback: Second Thoughts on Pot: “‘Yeah, they all smoke.’ ‘Well . . . other things too, right?’ ‘Sometimes. But they all smoke.’”

GET WOKE GO BROKE – BIG RIG EDITION:

[US Xpress CEO Eric Fuller] offers contrition for being born a straight, white male, of course. But as a white savior, he is still not above using racist terms such as “Latinx,” a word that is well-documented as being a culturally offensive slur favored by affluent whites.

As a straight, white male, what I see as positive characteristics for opportunity within our industry is different than what a gay, Black or female person may see — or someone of Asian descent, someone who is trans or Latinx.

Unsurprisingly, this privileged white man who inherited his executive position from his daddy, accused truck drivers of being toxic people with white privilege.

Start talking to team members from minority communities within your organization and listen to them. Ask them to tell you how they view the openness and inclusion within our industry. Put yourself in their shoes. Think about the advantages that you have and how different their experiences are than yours.

CEO Fuller really, REALLY likes slandering his employees and his industry as being racist, doesn’t he?

In the previous year, I’ve interviewed multiple, highly skilled candidates for roles at U.S. Xpress. While each candidate has his or her own story, overwhelmingly I heard them talk about the lack of acceptance of diversity and perceived lack of opportunity within our industry.

While I admit that U.S. Xpress has a long way to go in developing a more inclusive culture…

Mr. Fuller made it very clear that the focus of his leadership had nothing to do with shipping goods, or making a profit, but instead on things such as creating “a safe space for open dialogue about important issues that impact women, the LGBTQ+ community…”

Exit quote: “You’ll never guess what happened next.”

IRISH TIMES: Rings of Power: The new hobbits are filthy, hungry simpletons with stage-Irish accents. That’s $1bn well spent. “After 20 minutes of this Lord of the Rings spinoff I’m having flashbacks to that EastEnders episode with the fightin’ villagers and donkeys walking the streets.”