Monday, October 27, 2025
Sunday, October 26, 2025
Saturday, October 25, 2025
Friday, October 24, 2025
Thursday, October 23, 2025
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Tuesday, October 21, 2025
Monday, October 20, 2025
Sunday, October 19, 2025
what do you do. - Tao Wells
what do you do
with people who
are killing your friends,
let’s call them x
x also wants you to kill them
so their friends will be
able to feel persecuted
threatened, feel bad,
be so bad that,
that a super good guy
who is currently missing
cancelled, me too# children
god will have to come
back to earth
and spank them
but then love them
proving that they
were right to kill
my friends
and that my killing them
made them happier.
Fulfilling a greater good
by forcing heaven on to earth
This is insanity
made normal
the same way
capitalism has
arranged theft
of works wealth
to be normal, class like
they both don’t make good sense
but the sense they make
is one that threatens
to exist anyway
regardless of how
I feel about it
So I am asked
what do you want to do
about it, this is here
it’s not going away
I don’t know, surly
we’ve been here before
how did the last lot address it
oh, of course that’s how we got here
just one abused poor person away
from a tyrannical capitalist, package
recycled, perfectly
trauma sewing trauma sewing
the rest of us standing around
watching them kill our
friends
Saturday, October 18, 2025
Tuesday, October 14, 2025
Monday, October 13, 2025
Sunday, October 12, 2025
Mark Lombardi
Mark Lombardi
Mark Lombardi | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 23, 1951 |
| Died | March 22, 2000 (aged 48) |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Syracuse University |
| Occupation | Artist |
Mark Lombardi (March 23, 1951 – March 22, 2000) was an American neo-conceptual artist who specialized in drawings that document alleged financial and political frauds by power brokers, and in general "the uses and abuses of power".[1][2][3]
Education and early career
Lombardi was born in the town of Manlius, New York, just outside Syracuse, New York. He majored in art history at Syracuse University, and graduated with a B.A in 1974. While still an undergraduate, Lombardi had a job as chief researcher for a 1973 art exhibit Teapot Dome to Watergate – a multimedia collage, all of whose elements focused on various US governmental scandals; it was motivated by the then-ongoing Watergate scandal. In 1975, James Harithas (the former director of the Syracusan Everson Museum) hired Lombardi to be an assistant curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas, where Harithas had become director. Lombardi worked there for approximately two years, until 1976. While in Houston, he also opened a small art gallery, "Square One".[2] Then, he became a general reference librarian for the Fine Arts department in the Houston Public Library, started a regional artist archive, and wrote two books, one on the drug wars and another on the neglected and forgotten art genre of panoramas. During this time, Lombardi was also an abstract painter of no particular note; he pursued painting as a hobby during his actual career as an archivist and reference librarian.[3]
Late career
Six years before his death, Lombardi switched to link analysis pencil diagrams of crime and conspiracy networks that he would become best known for. In the early 1990s, he began researching the many scandals of the time, including the BCCI scandal, the Harken Energy scandal, and the Savings and Loan scandal. The thousands (roughly 14500) of index cards that he accumulated in the course of this research began to overwhelm his ability to deal with them, and to cope, Mark began assembling them into physical outlines, and then into hand-written diagrams. These were intended to be a tool, to provide focus to his work, but he "...soon decided that this method of combining text and image in a single field (called a drawing, diagram or flow chart, whichever you prefer) really worked for me in other ways as well." This decision was spurred, according to Lombardi, while he was talking with a friend about one of the participants in the Iran–Contra scandal, Adnan Khashoggi. Regarding this conversation, Lombardi wrote "I began taking notes, then sketching out a simple tree chart, showing the breakdown of Khashoggi's American holdings. Within days, I began making more of these charts, depicting other corporate networks I had researched. I was writing several pieces at the time and found the charts a useful, quick reference to the material at hand."
Initially, as the subject of one of his manuscripts, the primary focus was on the drug wars, but because of Pete Brewton's January 1990 newspaper series about the Houston S&L scandal, in which Brewton alleged that the Bush family, CIA members, and Mafia members took part in a de facto conspiracy to steal vast sums of money, Lombardi shifted his emphasis to investigating the laundering of the stolen money.[4]
Lombardi divorced in October 1996, and moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn at the urging of his friend Fred Tomaselli. There, he participated in a group show at the Drawing Center, called Selections: Winter 1997, followed by two solo art shows: Silent Partners, shown in November 1998 at Pierogi 2000 in Brooklyn,[5] and Vicious Circles, a work drawing upon Jonathan Kwitny's book of the same name dealing with Mafia involvement in the legitimate commercial markets, shown in 1999 at the Devon Golden Gallery in Chelsea.[2][3] Mark was included in Versus IV - a Willoughby Sharp curated group effort juxtaposing five American artists (including John Drury, Neil Frankl, Alan Skarritt and Duff Schweninger in addition to Lombardi) with eight Europeans in Torino, Italy - also in 1998, where two of his drawings including "Neil Bush and Silverado #2" (1996) were printed in the accompanying catalogue. He also participated in another group show, Greater New York: New Art in New York Now in February 2000 at the P.S. 1 art gallery.[3]
In March 2000, on the day before his death, Lombardi moved all his work to Pierogi 2000. He then bolted his apartment from the inside and hanged himself, on the day before his birthday and three years after he had moved to Williamsburg.[2]
Works
Lombardi called his diagrams Narrative Structures.[4] They are structurally similar to sociograms – a type of graph drawing used in the field of social network analysis, and to a lesser degree by earlier artists like Hans Haacke. Other important influences on Lombardi were philosopher Herbert Marcuse,[2] and visualization expert Edward Tufte.[6]
"On October 17, 2001, five weeks after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center...an FBI agent contacted the Whitney Museum of American Art....to obtain a reproduction of Mark Lombardi's large drawing BCCI-ICIC & FAB, 1972-1991 (4th Version) or, if that were not possible, to see the actual work at the museum. At about the same time, Lombardi's gallery, Pierogi, also received a telephone inquiry from a 'lead investigator into the September 11th attacks.' Federal investigators wanted to obtain information pertaining to wealthy Saudi Arabian terrorist Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network by tracing his many financial connections...[to] BCCI," Robert Hobbs writes in his introduction to Global Networks.[4][7] Hobbes continues: "If government investigators had merely decided to include select members of the art world in their investigation in the 9/11 attacks, that fact alone would have been newsworthy. But when an F.B.I. agent consulted a work of art for clues pertaining to terrorist financing, she unwittingly made history."[4]
In Lombardi's historical diagrams, each node or connection was drawn from news stories from reputable media organizations, and his drawings document the purported financial and political frauds by power brokers.[3]
According to Hobbs, who faced the overwhelming task of fact-checking Lombardi:
"Certain things that are listed in the drawing are in red. These represent court judgments, actual dollar amounts. That is verifiable information. And I think that Lombardi himself realized that not everything could be verified. So I think what you have instead is names. We know about connections of names. Exactly what is that connection is hard to characterize. So that is a line with an arrow in one direction, or an arrow in two directions. So it's really the abstract component of the work of art. It's what can be represented, and – really – what cannot be represented."[7]
For instance, his 1999 drawing "George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens, ca 1979–90" shows alleged connections between James Bath, the Bush and bin Laden families, and business deals in Texas and around the world. Following Lombardi's suicide in 2000, the book Mark Lombardi: Global Networks was written in conjunction with a traveling exhibit.[4] The editors chose to incorporate into the cover artwork (see image at right) a detail from "George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens, ca 1979–90", showing George W. Bush (on the back cover of the book) and Osama bin Laden (in the upper left of the front cover) separated by one step from each other in the network, via Bath; the same connection between Bush and bin Laden was also highlighted in a 2003 Boston Globe article that described the FBI's interest in Lombardi's works immediately following the September 11 attacks of 2001.[8] Lombardi's diagrams map the illicit flow of capital, amounting to a creative form of story-telling or, arguably, financial true crime.[9]
Other subjects that interested Lombardi and were covered in his works include:
- Chicago Outfit
- Meyer Lansky
- The P2 conspiracy, Michele Sindona, Roberto Calvi
- World Finance Corporation
- Nugan Hand Ltd.[10]
- Gerald Bull, Project Babylon, Space Research Corporation
- Iran–Contra, Lake Resources of Panama and Oliver North
- Global International Airways and the Indian Springs State Bank
- The Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the arming of Saddam Hussein
- Charles Keating, Lincoln Savings (a subsidiary of American Continental Corporation)
- BCCI and ICIC
- Harken Energy Scandal, George W. Bush, James R. Bath, and Jackson T. Stephens
- Hans Kopp, Shakarchi Trading AG
- United Press International, and its attempted takeover by Pat Robertson with the aid of Beurt SerVaas.
- Jackson T. Stephens, the Lippo Group, and Bill Clinton; also, Clinton, the Lippo Group, and China Ocean Shipping Co.
Posthumous exhibits
A major exhibit of Lombardi's art, "Mark Lombardi: Global Networks," was organized by Independent Curators International and curated by Robert Hobbs. The exhibit traveled to nine museums over 2003–2005, and has been the subject of several reviews.[8][11][12] The exhibit catalog was published by Independent Curators in 2003.[4][13]
Several of Lombardi's works were included in a 2010 show, NineteenEightyFour, hosted by the Austrian Cultural Forum New York.[1] A re-exhibition of his work was held at the Pierogi Gallery in 2011 which, in addition to his drawings, included his bookshelf and a vitrine displaying some of his reference materials, as well as a 1996 video of Lombardi interviewed by Andy Mann.[14][15][16]
20 of Lombardi's drawings are in the permanent collection of MoMA.[17] Another 10 of his drawings are at the Whitney Museum of American Art,[18] and were the subject of an FBI investigation after the September 11 attacks in 2001.[8][19]
In 2012, German director Mareike Wegener released a documentary on Lombardi, entitled Mark Lombardi: Death-Defying Acts Of Art And Conspiracy. The movie premiered in May 2012 in Germany and the Brooklyn Film Festival,[20] and then opened in September at MoMA in New York.[21] Reviewers of the movie suggested that, unlike Lombardi's own work, it relies too much on innuendo and too little on factual information,[22] and that it focuses too much on testimonials from friends and does not adequately explain the impact of Lombardi's art.[21][23]
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Saturday, October 11, 2025
Friday, October 10, 2025
"If you're going to wrap yourself in the cloth of the first amendment and not talk about this the most immediate existential titanic threat to the First Amendment because you're afraid of the Zionist movement and you're afraid to critique Zionist power, then you're just irrelevant.": Max Blumenthal on Matt Taibbi's Gaza SILENCE
Solstice For Embodiment
For my life I held on tight
And you made it worth
me living it right
All those years we had
I wish they’d last but
You and I have gone somewhat quiet
Pushing innocence away
Now that’s something
I can never get back
As the time has changed
I’m lost, not gone.
I’m moving on
And I’m leaving but
I’ll see you again
You’re my old friend
you call
And I'd still take you to the end
Spilling secrets
for us
To hold to forever within
Catching distance is hard
but loving who we were way back then
Oh but it’s something I will never regrеt
As I’m older now
I notice how
I’ve sacrificеd myself in expense
Do you know something
I don’t
Cause you seem to spend forever, no end
And you can’t blame me
for what it’s worth
I can’t put myself first
And I’m leaving
but I’ll see you again
You’re my old friend
you call
And I would still take you to the end
Spilling secrets
for us
To hold onto forever within
Catching distance is tough
While loving who we were
way back then
I’ll run with you
I’ll watch the sun come through
I’ll watch our time
And all our memories too
To tell the truth
I’m holding onto you
That’s why I cried
And lost my sense of youth
And I’m leaving
but I’ll see you again
You’re my old friend
you call
And I would still take you to the end
Spilling secrets
for trust
And god the things I’d give to relive
Times of hope all
for love
It’s something I still carry within
Thursday, October 9, 2025
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
Tuesday, October 7, 2025
Monday, October 6, 2025
Sunday, October 5, 2025
Saturday, October 4, 2025
"How the Irish Became White Again"
Trisha McOrmond: (Métis Sociologist. Policy Punk. Coach. Writer. Speaker. Committed to building a world prepared for the future)
I’ve been reading How the Irish Became White again and reflecting on what it means in this moment …
This line “… the assimilation of the Irish into the white race made it possible to maintain slavery.”
Super revealing.
He continues “The need to gain the loyalty of the Irish explains why the Democratic Party rejected nativism. It also explains why not merely slaverybut the colour line became so important to it.”
The psychological benefits of being white are a mechanism of control “sure my boss pays me nothing and leaves me to die on the street, but at least I’m not Black.”
These outweigh the physiological pain of hunger by creating a sense of belonging.
And creating a sense of belonging with the “in” group is a part of safety, “I’m with them”
But when you can’t belong, you learn to fit in. And by fitting in, we give up ourselves. Just like the Irish abandoned themselves when they stopped fighting for the equality they’d long stood for.
In this moment it means: Part of professionalism in our current economy is fitting in, pretending everything is fine while science and our eyes tell us something very different.
The illusion of fitting in by denying what we know to be true is more comfortable in the moment, absolutely.
In the long run though, speaking from personal experience, deciding to stop pretending is the best decision I’ve ever made.
Find groups who embrace all of you, not just the pretty parts, so we can all do work that matters for our selves and our communities.
Give up the goal of being popular, which is really all whiteness is to paraphrase Ignatiev - a popularity contest among mostly incompetent people who rule by fear and violence (and no one really likes anyway) and require you to lie to yourself about what is real.
3 Factions and 1 Factor of USA political power, right now. - Max Blumenthal Oct. 2. 2025
Nima R. Alkhorshid:
"Who's the main, the mastermind of the administration? Is there anybody there, to be called mastermind? Or it’s a huge, some sort of division, within the administration, two forces, three forces, factions that are fighting each other, within the administration?"
Max Blumenthal:
Bush/Kissinger/Trump/Rubio/Miller/Graham/Neocon Faction:
“Yeah, I would say there are various factions, but the factions that are winning represent the neoconservative faction, that started this conquest, post 9/11 conquest under George W. Bush. So, I keep saying that Trump's second term feels like the third coming of George W. Bush's first term. Lindsey Graham is the big winner on Ukraine after Alaska. Trump has completely turned around and agreed to new weapons deals, freezing negotiations and so is General Keith Kellogg.
Donald Trump on the Western Hemisphere has ceded his agenda to Marco Rubio who has quietly become the most important or influential figure within the national security bureaucracy, along with Steven Miller, the sort of nativist fanatic, who is backing up Rubio's plan, to start to wage a war inside Venezuela. Rubio controls actually more cabinet level national security positions than anyone in the United States since Henry Kissinger, but he's certainly not as savvy an operator as Henry Kissinger, but he's getting his way.”
Colby/Vance/Anti China/Imperialists Faction:
“And so these three or four factions all have different agendas. The one faction that I think is losing out right now is the faction of Elbridge Colby who is in Trump's cabinet of national security advisers, who is an anti-China fanatic, who sees the ultimate objective of US empire to be neutralising or weakening the Chinese threat, as China supersedes the US, as a global economic power using not military force but, trade and infrastructure and the belt and road initiative and the expansion of BRICS.
So Elbridge Colby, would be terrified by the prospect of another conflict over Iran because it would further deplete US THAAD missile stocks, which he would like and I would think JD Vance, who's a figure from the Colby faction, you could call it the Vance faction would like to give those THAAD missiles to Taiwan, or to Japan and the Philippines, which have just signed a defence pact, an anti-China defence pact. They want to militarise the Pacific Rim and contain China. And they're not able to do it because Israel, we keep wasting or “we” the United States, keeps wasting bad missiles on this crazy little apartheid colony that can't stop attacking Iran. And at the same time, Ukraine has had to redeploy Patriot batteries even to defend Israel.
The faction that wants to take on China, ultimately would want a deal in Ukraine and has pushed for a deal in Ukraine that freezes lines around Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. And the lines are not frozen anymore, Russia continues to advance, Ukraine does not have manpower, no matter how much technical wherewithal they have, to wage these sophisticated drone attacks, or to use more advanced US weapons, including Tomahawks, to attack inside Russian frontier regions. They just don't have the manpower, which means as long as those lines are not frozen, the US will keep pouring more and more weapons in, as Russia advances towards Odessa.
So, the real imperialist, the real long-term imperialist planners inside the Trump administration are losing long-term as the Trump administration positions itself for conflicts that appease the factions that have a much more myopic vision. And I mean, it's three visions, as I said before. one, Rubio catering to the gusano industrial complex in South Florida, which is a major key for Trump's electoral strategy, is to always win Florida, but also Rubio has this ideological fervour, that they share, to destroy Venezuela. Then they think once Venezuela is destroyed, they will be able to topple the Government in Cuba, which depends on Venezuelan exports and help. And then Nicaragua will be next, and then the region will be completely free for the US to exploit. And then you have the Zionist Neocon faction, Lindsey Graham, is sort of fronting for them. They want to destroy Iran, for ideological reasons.”
Military Industrial Complex Faction:
“And then you have this third faction, which is focused on, they're like the traditional military leadership. They're focused on the revolving door. They're making loads of money through the trillion dollar defence budget, which is mostly going to contractors. Only 6%, actually goes to maintaining US troops, in the field. And they're just focused on profits and continuous war.”
Military Purge factor:
“And then I should say there's a sort of a fourth factor. I don't know if it's a faction, but a fourth factor. If you paid attention to Donald Trump's speech (to a rare meeting of U.S military leaders) at Quantico, which is being minimised, even by the people who hate Donald Trump the most in Washington, the liberals and so on, they're like, "Oh, he mocked... .”
Basically, for those who don't know, Pete Hegseth, who is one of the least qualified defence secretaries, just because of his rank and lack of experience and is there basically because he's an effective communicator, who is a former Fox News host, he convened 200 US generals and high-ranking officers at Quantico. Many of them had to come across, some of them had to come across 10 time zones. And then he delivered this speech lacerating them for being fat and gay. I mean, that's basically what he said. He's like, "We're not going to have any more dudes in skirts and too many of you are too fat and that's not who we are." And that was sort of treated as a joke by the media and even by liberals. But it's actually setting the stage for a politicised purge of the military, in which Trump loyalists will be elevated to new positions. and those who are perceived as Democrats will be ousted.
Then Donald Trump comes on stage and he tries to get the military audience to laugh at his jokes. I thought some of some of them are like classic Trump humour like comedy like he's opening up at a New Jersey nightclub or something, he's talking about how Obama “bops down the stairs on Air Force One”, and he thought that if there's laughter, it will show some kind of support for himself, from the Generals, like an organic support. But nobody laughed. So, he sort of failed there.
But if you parsed what Trump was saying, including his support and endorsement for Rubio's agenda against Venezuela, he called for using US cities as training grounds for the US military. To essentially wage war on and pacify parts of the American public that he described as animals, essentially urban minorities and the poor. They're sending troops to Memphis this coming week, and there are plans to deploy in Chicago as well. But he talks about American cities as training grounds for foreign conflicts. We haven't heard this kind of language before.
And as Trump does that, this is something Steven Miller, his top adviser wants and a large part of his base wants, it diffuses the drive to actually send US troops into a conflict theater, in the Pacific Rim or in Iran. So, you have all of these competing agendas and factions, and the faction that will lose here are the long-term, I think ultimately more dangerous Imperial planners, and they're losing to the ideologues and the avaricious grifters in the military.”
- Max Blumenthal, Oct. 2, 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMZ202d8Auc
