It turns out that US military and intelligence agencies have a long history of using UFOs as a psychological instrument, having discovered their hyper-mimetic qualities in the 1950s. Decades before Doty’s variations on the theme, UFOs were a well-known self-replicating cultural trope capable of infecting individual and cultural consciousness and spreading like a virus.
— Read on www.e-flux.com/journal/147/623330/society-of-the-psyop-part-1-ufos-and-the-future-of-media/

Days after Abe’s assassination, the Japanese media lifted a longtime taboo about reporting on the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s deep links to the Unification Church, the anticommunist religious cult founded in 1954 (with assistance from the Korean CIA) by the self-proclaimed Korean messiah Sun Myung Moon. Soon, these shady relationships, and the politics behind them, became the number one issue in Japan, obscuring much of the positive coverage that usually follows a political assassination.

— Read on timshorrock.com/japan-is-americas-new-proxy-army-thanks-to-pm-abe/

It is as if Trump’s fascist propaganda here is less oriented toward creating anxiety and rage than alleviating it.

— Read on joelowndes.org/fascisms-soothing-affect/

Doug Enaa Greene gives an overview and critique of the political journey of Michael Harrington, founder of the Democratic Socialist of America, and his influence on reformist socialism to this day.
— Read on mronline.org/2019/05/29/michael-harrington-and-his-afterlives/

Ho Xuan Huong (胡春香; 1772–1822) was a Vietnamese poet born at the end of the Lê dynasty. The facts of her life are difficult to verify. It seems that …

Snail Trails – Brief poems by Ho Xuan Huong