No April Fool

Hi Interweb!

How’s it going! I’ve been doing a bit of writing, although obviously not here. That does not mean that I’ve forgotten this blog nor its attendant website HIL-GLE dot com. No sirree, not at all. Quite the opposite.

As promised many moons ago, HIL-GLE is about to go through a major replate and expansion. We have about 300 pages completed and are now inching our way to launch. The majority of these pages are dedicated to the new Streamlined Edition of Weird Detective Mystery Adventures. We have expanded our listings well beyond those found in the previous edition and the text has been extensively rewritten and reformatted for greater clarity and ease of play. All of this is part of a long-term plan to relaunch the game in print.

At this point I am thinking that we will be live by August, but it could be sooner. We also are planning on a pair of web novels for posting on these pages. And I have a whole bin of subjects to blog about that I have compiled over the months. Life incidents not intruding otherwise, I am hoping to make a dent in the stack. We may also revisit some of our other continuing topics, such as the Flying Car (two more have been “invented”) and the Electric Car.

Certainly current events have provided more than enough fodder for the dedicated blogger to feel prompted by. As recounted earlier, HIL-GLE is now a registered, card-carrying member of the Resistance. The experience has been an eyelash or so less than satisfying, although control of the House is nothing to sneeze at. I’m not sure toting a protest sign and rubbing shoulders with anti-fascists pushing for the legalization of prostitution contributed much to the cause. I am ready to resume my protesting, weather and proximity of protests permitting.

It’s been easy to relax one’s focus during these past few months.  Many hopes have been pinned on the legal process doing what the political process seems incapable of—removing the Orange Thing from office. Barring a reversal of fortune predicated on an attorney named Barr’s lack of reading comprehension, it looks as if the big probe struck out. That’s not good news, no matter how you slice it. The groundhog sees two more years of Trump, unless he massively overplays his hand.

If I were the Republicans, I would just settle for giving each other hickeys and blowing wet kisses at the opposition and call it a day.  Gloating is well within the norms for this sort of victory, as is the loud postulation of superlative hypotheticals. Break out the Emerging Republican Majority and all the other blow up dolls and party favors. All good fun and possibly deserved. Unfortunately, it appears as if the euphoria has turned sinister, if this recent missive from Trumpland to my secret identity can be believed:

Dear HIL-GLE’s Secret Identity,

President Trump has been vindicated, but now justice must be served.

It’s time to go after the witch hunters who allowed this illegal attempt to overturn the 2016 election to happen.

Kellyanne Conway, Steve Scalise, and Jim Jordan are all calling for Adam Schiff -- the congressional Democrat who led this witch hunt -- to RESIGN.

The rule of law in America is at stake.

If unelected government agents can get away with colluding with the losing political party and the mainstream media to wage a two-year-long witch hunt against an innocent man based on no evidence, what will become of America?

This time it was President Trump -- the most powerful man in the world.

But next time, the Deep State could choose to go after you.

Justice must be served. Adam Schiff, the Pelosi lapdog who replaced Devin Nunes as Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, cannot serve one more day in Congress.

He must RESIGN -- and if he refuses, then he must be expelled from the people’s House.

This is either silly or a classic example of overreach. By “unelected government agents” the Trumpsters mean the FBI, Justice Department, IRS and other cop types. They could also mean the mailman, but the mailman has not been tossing Trump’s pals in the pokey.

If we can’t trust these FBI, Justice Department, IRS cop types, I’m not sure who Trumpland proposes we do trust.  Their demand to refashion the whole shooting match in their own image seems a tad self-serving, to say the least. If this DEEP STATE was so powerful, one wonders how MAGIC TRUMP was ever elected in the first place. I am sure that all of these things will be explained to me, in exhaustive detail, once the DEEP STATE finally gets around to COMING FOR ME. In the mean time I will continue to dress in non earth tones and eat sensibly.

As odd as Trumpland’s missives have been, they pale when compared to a 24 page letter I recently received in the mail.  Fraud In My Mailbox has been a theme in this blog, mostly consisting of run of the mill trolling for geezers using various color of law pretexts. My latest treasure uses the rare Secret Society of Supervillains tactic, posing to initiate me into the hidden wisdom of the ancients through membership in their clandestine cult. No human sacrifices, but it was pretty flamboyant otherwise. And at 24 pages it was fatty as far as long form lies are concerned, outside of the format of the investment prospectus. A quick check of the interweb showed that it was well debunked—which is what you get for being so long-winded. I may still post parts of it, since it did contain some interesting flourishes.

Speaking of cults, not one, but two of the mega cults here in the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago have recently imploded. Cults are more common than one might believe, and they all have a discernable life cycle. Since this life cycle has not been covered to any degree, I may make it a subject of a new post. The two cults in question, Harvest Bible Chapel and  Willow Creek Church shared a lot of demographics in common and both essentially failed at the same place in the life cycle.

Our In Box remains jammed, in any case.  A new posting on trends we are likely to outlive will be live here shortly.

Newsweek's Last News

(Reuters) - The FBI is investigating a hack into U.S. magazine Newsweek's Twitter account that resulted in posted threats against the Obama family, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Tuesday.

Poor Reuters.  They still insist on calling Newsweek a magazine. Factually, Newsweek is no longer a periodical in any conventional sense. It’s even stopped being a credible website, twice now. A more accurate headline might be: FBI investigates threats over Twitter handle cyber squatted by a religious cult.

OK, not quite pithy enough. My point here is that something oddball happening on a Twitter feed owned by a foreign religious cult shouldn’t be news.  It would be news if something normal appeared on Newsweek’s feed.

I thought I had written my last piece on Newsweek some time ago. Not to set fabled Reuters straight, but Newsweek is no longer owned in the U.S. It is today a subsidiary of a cult run out of Korea. Technically it shares offices with International Business Times. This aggregation website has strong ties to Olivet University. All of these various institutions are wholly backed by love offerings sent in the direction of minister David J. Jang.  For Wonderblog bonus points, Jang is an end of the world guru of the Herbert W. Armstrong stripe, although he’s actually a Moonie.

What a long, strange trip it’s been. Apparently Reuters missed it. Tellingly, almost no other news source picked up on Newsweek’s little hack. This could be because the rest of the world declared what was left of Newsweek’s reputation DOA RIP right after its last printed issue, a masterpiece of BIG LIE NEWSFICTION declaring that they had uncovered the mastermind behind Bitcoin. Since then, Newsweek has only appeared on newsstands in neo-pulp form, as a trademark used for stand alone publications on specific sensational topics.

And since Newsweek’s descent into the abyss, nearly one third of the newsstand space has come to be cluttered with these neo pulps, sensational fact paperbacks in magazine form.  It might be the hottest trend in publishing right now.* Hot or not, the trend has gone unnoticed in the media.

It should be noted that Reuters itself is in the business of selling subscriptions to news outlets for its various transmitted tidbits. Like the Associated Press, United Press International and Dow Jones, Reuters is a vestige of the time when most news outlets relied on the telegraph (or wire services) to provide broad content. Like their primary consumers, the newspapers, the internet has made them all somewhat obsolete.

Reuters and its kin still have some brand value. Your average edition of Huffington Post is much more likely to post a feature originating on Reuters than it is from the About Us feature of the Facebook page on Nell’s House of Pet Care. And that’s as it should be. Unfortunately there is a shadow business that each of the wire services has been in since the 1920s or so—promotions. They are not quite on a par with the Yahoo News, which often posts flat out advertising as news stories, but each wire service has been known to rent its space to Publicity Agents. **

There is also some back scratching known to occur. I think that’s what might be happening here. I’m guessing that Newsweek still has a Reuter’s subscription. Thus it makes good business sense for Reuters to report anything that happens to Newsweek as news, especially if it disparages Twitter. After all, it was Twitter which destroyed the wire services’ once very lucrative Publicity Agent pimping.

By the way: who the hell still has a Twitter subscription?

(*) We do intend to do a publisher by publisher breakdown of the newest crop of neo pulp producers in a future post. Hopefully the trend will outlast the race of retailers removing magazine racks altogether.

(**) There was a time in the not too distant past when certain news outlets would rip and read nearly anything that came across on the wire services.  It was the goal of every publicity agent to have one of their client’s promotions reported as actual news. That this happened often enough was what justified the wire services’ steep fees. It was the old school way of “Going Viral”. With the decline of  chain newspapers and rise of Twitter and other services selling the same access, this business largely evaporated.

Note: I am not the suspicious type. If I was I might suspect that Newsweek staged the incident to draw attention to itself.  I honestly don’t think David J. Jang is that smart. Moreover, having his house organ news magazine bleat threats to Obama is probably something that he would rather avoid. Sometimes rank incompetence is exactly what it seems. For a detailed look at the Jang organization’s general workmanship and influence, check out either the International Business News website or Jang’s own wiki entry. These people are not masterminds.

Note: Although Hil-Gle does appreciate Newsweek’s status as a rare two-fer—a subject which strays into several of our beats—we take no delight in its current fate. We are not at all rooting on the trend of former news magazines becoming pulp magazines nor pulp magazines becoming the possessions of end of the world cult gurus.  It makes us dizzy. 

The Religion of Fear Returns!

I hope to have something more uplifting to post before Christmas. The subject of impending doom has crossed my internet desk several times over the past week or so. So  I feel prompted to comment on it.

Those of you who have been alive for a certain period of time have no doubt gone through several waves 1960s nostalgia. It’s the X anniversary of the Summer of Love, March on Washington, Woodstock, blah, blah, blah. Much of this is tied in with the rise, decline and now retirement of a major demographic group. And some of it can be attributed to the genuinely historic nature of the events of the times. Why some events and times, such as two world wars, are not prone to cycles of fond remembrance whereas others are is a mystery.  Interest in the Civil War and the Gay 90s went on and on. The happier 1920s and 1980s went without reflection. There appears to be no real rhyme nor reason to it, no telling what is going to become the target of a wave of nostalgia nor when the next wave will come in.*

Or very little. What you can predict with some regularity are swings in general fashion—hemlines and necklines plunging, followed by the sudden concealment of flesh. (When times are good, the girls get naked. When life sucks, they mummy up.) When times are actually bleak, predictions of “green shoots” and “recovery around the corner” abound.  And when a recovery is actually in progress, the “snap back into the crap” predictions come out.

It seems as if we are indeed in the midst of an economic recovery, if the two following gems of misanthropy are any clue. This first one is from my Yahoo scroll. The headline was something along the lines of “Billionaire Predicts New Depression On Its Way.”

The United States could soon become a large-scale Spain or Greece, teetering on the edge of financial ruin.

That’s according to Donald Trump, who painted a very ugly picture of where this country is headed. Trump made the comments during a recent appearance on Fox News’ “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.”

According to Trump, the United States is no longer a rich country. “When you’re not rich, you have to go out and borrow money. We’re borrowing from the Chinese and others. We’re up to $16 trillion in debt.”

He goes on to point out that the downgrade of U.S. debt is inevitable.

“We are going up to $16 trillion [in debt] very soon, and it’s going to be a lot higher than that before he gets finished. When you have [debt] in the $21-$22 trillion, you are talking about a downgrade no matter how you cut it.”

Ballooning debt and a credit downgrade aren’t Trump’s only worries for this country. He says that the official unemployment rate of 8.2 percent “isn’t a real number” and that the real figure is closer to 15 percent to 16 percent. He even mentioned that some believe the unemployment rate to be as high as 21 percent.

“Right now, frankly, the country isn’t doing well,” Trump added, “Recession may be a nice word.”

While 15 percent to 16 percent unemployment, a looming credit downgrade, and ballooning debt are a bleak outlook for the United States, they are hardly as alarming as the scenario laid out by another economist.

Without earning celebrity status or having his own television show, Robert Wiedemer did something else that grabbed headlines across the country: He accurately predicted the economic collapse that almost sank the United States.

In 2006, Wiedemer and a team of economists foresaw the coming collapse of the U.S. housing market, equity markets, private debt, and consumer spending, and published their findings in the book America’s Bubble Economy.

But Wiedemer’s outlook for the U.S. economy today makes Trump’s observations seem almost optimistic.

Where Trump sees ballooning debt and a credit downgrade, Wiedemer sees much more widespread economic destruction.

In a recent interview for his newest book Aftershock, Wiedemer says, “The data is clear, 50% unemployment, a 90% stock market drop, and 100% annual inflation . . . starting in 2012.”

When the host questioned such wild claims, Wiedemer unapologetically displayed shocking charts backing up his allegations, and then ended his argument with, “You see, the medicine will become the poison.”

The interview has become a wake-up call for those unprepared (or unwilling) to acknowledge an ugly truth: The country’s financial “rescue” devised in Washington has failed miserably.

The blame lies squarely on those whose job it was to avoid the exact situation we find ourselves in, including current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Chairman Alan Greenspan, tasked with preventing financial meltdowns and keeping the nation’s economy strong through monetary and credit policies.

At one point, Wiedemer even calls out Bernanke, saying that his “money from heaven will be the path to hell.”

But it’s not just the grim predictions that are causing the sensation; rather, it’s the comprehensive blueprint for economic survival that’s really commanding global attention.

The interview offers realistic, step-by-step solutions that the average hard-working American can easily follow.

The overwhelming amount of feedback to publicize the interview, initially screened for a private audience, came with consequences as various online networks repeatedly shut it down and affiliates refused to house the content.

Bernanke and Greenspan were not about to support Wiedemer publicly, nor were the mainstream media.

“People were sitting up and taking notice, and they begged us to make the interview public so they could easily share it,” said Newsmax Financial Publisher Aaron DeHoog, “but unfortunately, it kept getting pulled.”

“Our real concern,” DeHoog added, “is what if only half of Wiedemer’s predictions come true?

“That’s a scary thought for sure. But we want the average American to be prepared, and that is why we will continue to push this video to as many outlets as we can. We want the word to spread.”

You will note the somewhat stilted syntax of the above. I have not so much edited it as I have removed the links which were seeded into various “boom points” within the story. The intention of this form of copy writing is for the reader to stop reading it and click away to whatever our presenter is hawking. Like all news scrolls offered by free portals, the Yahoo feed is loaded with a number of disguised ads.

This one has a bit of hair on it. When first run it probably mentioned Donald Trump prominently in the headline. Trump’s a curious bird amongst the rich boy set. He seems willing to endorse all sorts of dubious deals. He even plays a game show host on television.

The ad is, of course, for Aftershock, a seemingly new book by the prominently mentioned Robert Wiedemer. If you read the dated text closely, Wiedemer is already wrong. 2012 turned out to be a fine year, as did 2013 and 2014. So if none of the crap Wiedemer predicted as starting to happen in 2012 came true, what possible predictive value could Aftershock have? Trust me, a book explaining why Aftershock was wrong is not forthcoming. Once remaindered editions of Aftershock are sold, Wiedemer will simply write another book.

Or Newsmax will find another fraud to promote. Sadly Newsmax has been peddling a lot of these junk survivalist economic schemes of late. And the Motley Fool bunch isn’t much better. I would be tempted to cover them both as Frauds The News if their appeals weren’t so entirely repetitive. When it comes to claims like this, always keep in mind two things: (1) No one has supernatural powers. No one can predict the future of anything, much less markets and (2) If they could, the last thing they would do is publicize it. When it comes to Newsmax and others, beyond books, what they are out to sell are vastly overpriced (and under sourced) tip sheets. For the price of even one of these dubious publications, you can subscribe to all of the major business magazines.

By the way,  Robert Wiedemer did not predict anything sensational in his last book. Instead he threw spaghetti at the wall, claiming the entire world was coming to an end, largely during the time the crisis was actually going on. That’s not prediction. That’s not even good commentary.

(Aftershock is a take off on Future Shock, the title of the only predictive book on the near future ever written. That book was accurate, although more in describing the end game of trends which were already evident than it was in predicting the emergence of anything new. The whole racket was started by Thomas Malthus, who was also wrong on a rather spectacular level.)

Next up on our parade of the woefully fantastic is my pen pal Bruce Porteous. I got my start in blogging responding to Bruce’s love bombing of various newsgroups. The following is his latest missive:

  

THE COMING GLOBAL ECONOMIC COLLAPSE

The global economy survived the crisis of 2008 by governments printing and borrowing money to prevent the collapse of the global banking system.  While this has temporary saved the world from economic collapse at the time, nothing has been done to correct the problems that caused the crisis in the first place.  As a consequences the world is now about to experience a far worse economic disaster than what caused the 2008 crisis.

The causes of the previous crisis were:

1.       Governments operating on large deficits financed with borrowed money.

2.       Large consumer debts financed by a highly liquid banking system.

3.       A shift of capital from investment in goods and services into speculative activities.

4.       An insolvent banking system

5.       A growing welfare budget to support an ageing population

6.       Governments draining the productive sectors of the economy to support regulatory environment to support their socialistic agendas, subsidies and military adventurism.

WHAT IS THE CURRENT SITUATION

As a result of governments printing money since the last crisis to purchase government debt and prop up an insolvent banking system, the world is now awash with liquidity.  Yet this newly created money has not restored the global economy to health. Rather it created an economic time-bomb, waiting for the fuse to be lit. Many governments around the world are still suffering from:

1.       High unemployment

2.       Budget and current account deficits

3.       Low economic growth.

4.       Growing gulf between rich and poor.

5.       Unsustainable Government debt.

6.       Rising property prices

7.       Over investment into production, causing a collapse in commodity prices.

WHAT IS EXPECTED TO HAPPEN NEXT?

Sadly it will take another crisis to bring about the necessary changes.

Changes necessary will not be made unless governments are forced to give up their independence - they would rather resort to military conflict than give up their sovereignty to preserve the benefits of a privileged few in power than care for the welfare of their citizens.  

Many economies are now in deep trouble.  China has unsustainable local government and corporate debt.  Japan’s government debt threatens the survival of theirs and the world’s economy.  North America Government debt is now so large that the USA is technically bankrupt. The Russian economy is in danger of unravelling. Many EU countries are in a similar position.  The world is sitting on a political and economic powder-keg.

Already we are seeing the growing threat in Asia, especially between China and Japan. In Europe the conflict between Russia and the EU could quickly evolve into a much large war. Meanwhile the USA and its allies continue to engage in conflict in the Middle East.  These conflicts can only worsen.

The one nation that has opposed the print and borrow policies is Germany, but Germany cannot save the world alone. Chancellor Angelika Merkel acknowledges that the only solution of reviving the EU economy is by creating a Federal United States of Europe.  The fear that unless Europe can form a Federal European Government, it will be unavoidable to save the EU economy from unravelling. A new Federal EU Government would take over the debts of member states, managed by single Central Bank and with the power to tax similar to the USA today.  It is becoming clear that the UK will no longer be a part on this new EU Government.

This new Federal Europe would be dominated by Germany, the only nation with the economic power to bring about the changes, creating a new super-power that will have the economic muscle to bring out the reforms to restore a shattered global economy.  It will be this new Global Super-Power which will have the capacity to restore a new world order.

CHANGES THAT NEED TO BE MADE TO SAVE A COLLAPSE

Governments cannot continue printing money without inflation eventually causing loss of value in the currency.  No longer can economic growth be achieved with borrowed and printed money. Rather there needs to be drastic changes on how the global economy is managed.  We now live in an inter-connected world where national boundaries are circumnavigated by multi-national corporations and money speculators. There needs to be a world government to oversee the management of the global economy.

The economic and social changes that will need to be made are:

1.       A single global currency

2.       One global taxation system – a flat tax system.

3.       Removal of trade tariffs allowing global free trade.

4.       Reform of the world’s banking system, directing capital into productive enterprises rather than speculation. To be monitored by the IMF.

5.       Land reform – property ownership rights protected.

6.       A common global legal system.

7.       Reform of state welfare system – reduction in the role of the State in providing welfare to what nations can afford.

8.       Management of the planet’s environment to prevent a break-down of the world’s eco-system.

 To cut Bruce some slack, he’s not out to sell anything. Instead, he’s simply deeply disturbed. (Entirely my opinion. I am not a medical doctor.) Bruce has been narrowcasting versions of the above rap since 2001 or so. Twice bankrupt, Bruce is best known for a scheme to sell citizens of South Korea escape visas to a cannibal infested island. (Long story short. I am not making this up.)  Originally Bruce had another contention that he was out to promote and it’s somewhat distressing to see the current direction his philosophy has taken.

He used to be out to tell you that the world was coming to an end, that the intercession of divine justice was in the offing. Now, if I read this correctly, he is advocating global socialism. That is when he’s not slamming socialism as a vice. Frankly, it doesn’t make a lick of sense. If you compare it to the promotion for Robert Wiedemer you will see the same underlying appeal.

Bruce used to belong to a cult which specifically targeted the mentally ill. Like Newsmax, it peddled a number of survivalist schemes. Bruce is a victim of cult think, desperately attempting to salvage failed predictions by grafting on timely notions. Newsmax, by contrast, is just lying.

Both Newsmax and the cult are essentially out to fleece the mentally ill. It’s a sick and evil business, with several well used models. Essentially they take a timely cocktail of everything bad and then shove it in a direction. In the cult business, when a dour economy isn’t present, they literally talk about the weather.

I’ve never been sure of how to handle it here. Is it a branch of fiction or is it a defective consumer product? What the End of The World really is is a bad lie. It gets told. It gets exposed. It gets retold.  And the world moves on.

I am putting Newsmax on our Fraud Watchlist. Given that Robert Wiedemer seems to be beyond his use by date, nothing further need be detailed on his works. We will be covering Newsmax's further antics. As for Bruce, I hope he eventually recovers his sanity. (Again, it is only my opinion that he ever was sane and is now not so.) It’s been a long wait, but where there is life there is hope.

*There probably is a method for determining what may become nostalgia worthy, but I have not come across it.

Note:

The Pulp Today project ran into a bit of a snag. I am currently cataloging the number of genres and subgenres there were in pulp fiction. Once I am through, we will go forward. 

Newsweek Joins A Cult!

It’s odd when two of our little beats converge, but it’s not entirely unheard of. If the report in the recent issue of Mother Jones can be believed, America’s second favorite weekly news magazine has become the possession of a Korean Christian Evangelical Cult known as The Community.  Please pick up the latest Mother Jones (available at most bookstores) for the full monte. Since I don’t want to step all over their findings, my purpose here will be only to add a bit of perspective.

Newsweek’s History Thus Far: Newsweek was launched by a former Time Magazine editor as a money making venture designed to do exactly the same thing Time did, but without so many quirks. At the time, Time Magazine had become quite linguistically oddball and the people behind Newsweek felt that there was room in the 1933 market for a weekly news magazine written in actual English. By today’s light that might seem an odd cause for being, but Newsweek wasn’t the only publication plying these waters. Time Magazine had become both very influential (and weird) at this point and there were several efforts targeted at the “don’t need a translator to read the damn thing” portion of the market. Through various turns, Newsweek merged with its main rival Today Magazine and established itself as a distant Pepsi to Time’s Coke in the world of week old news.

The market for all of this started to shrink in the 1930s. As with all forms of magazines and newspapers, Time and Newsweek were impacted by the rise of radio as the dominant news medium. Mutations in the form of the news weekly were ongoing, with Time and Newsweek constantly making changes in presentation and emphasis. Time always had more traction. Moreover, Time was part of a publishing empire. When Time’s parent wanted to innovate, it launched new titles such as Life, Sports Illustrated and People. Newsweek, by contrast, was usually a sole publication show. Newsweek came to triangulate between all of the popular forms. At least since the 1960s, Time and Newsweek have been pretty much twins.

Whereas Time aggregated itself into full blown media mogul-dom (CNN, Warner Brothers, Time-Life), Newsweek has been a sideline of the Washington Post since the 1960s. And this is where the story takes a dark turn. It is the Washington Post Company that has changed most—migrating away from the news business and into the business of stapling lower class youth into non-dischargeable, government backed  education loans. At some point being a loan shark for the underprivileged became so much more an attractive pursuit that all pretense at making money legitimately had to be jettisoned. Thus Newsweek was flung to the four winds.

Other news magazines besides Newsweek have folded recently. And it doesn’t seem to matter how rich one’s backer is. There is no saving the form. If it wasn’t for its attributive value (and dominant position in its niche) Time Magazine itself would have long been cancelled. Life and all of its clones bit the dust in the 1960s. US News and World Report vanished without a trace a decade ago. We could list more. The writing has been on the wall for Newsweek for some time now.

It hasn’t been a pleasant death. First the Post hired a first class moron to stanch the bleeding. No one is sure what this guy’s plan was—other than he wanted to raise the ticket price and cut the circulation in half. How that was supposed to result in anything positive is a mystery deserving the attention of Sherlock Holmes. Then the magazine was sold for a dollar to a mad scientist. No sooner was the sale’s ink dry when the scientist died. His family, as it should turn out, wanted nothing to do with a magazine. So it somehow became Barry Diller’s. Diller hired Tina Brown, who did a wonderful job, but it seems the damage was already done. Diller finally pulled the plug on Newsweek as even a blog site, tossing it like fish parts overboard to something called International Business Times.

As it turns out, there is no such thing as International Business Times. This entity is one of about a thousand internet domains controlled by a splinter of the Moonies known as The Community. Its content is generally aggregated from wire services. The relative Google position the thing enjoys is powered by thousands of clicks from cult slaves. It shows up on the Google ranks the way that Scientology texts show up on the best seller lists—cult members force march it there. It’s all kind of a shame.

It also seems to have been kind of a secret. It was at least a secret to some of the very desperate hacks the cult hired to front the new Newsweek. After issuing non-denial, denials to Mother Jones, everyone with an iota of self respect up and split the new Newsweek ship.

Before we lament the opportunity our supposedly respectable journalists were shamed into giving up, may I remind you of the direction these paragons of the publishing world had charted for their venture.

Prior to this they published an actual issue claiming to have EXPOSED the inventor of Bitcoin. So it looks like all we’re missing out on is another version of the National Enquirer. Or another publisher of dead celebrity focused neo pulps. Sadly, it seems that the cult isn’t even this competent or this high brow.

In fact, it doesn't look like the cult will publish another issue. With the professional staff having taken a walk—and an expose about ownership floating in the ethers—they may have problems finding a distributor. And if you read between the lines, it looks like they are entirely out of money.

From what I can tell, The Community is a classic “Bubble Sect”—the type that focuses on recruitment because it essentially bankrupts its followers.  I am beyond attempting to parse the logic of these groups, but they do all seem to run the same playbook. If The Community isn’t simply bungled entirely, then its leadership is playing a very short game.

We study cults as a form of confidence racket, or game. The object of the short game is to funnel as much money to the operator as quickly as possible. From what Mother Jones reported, The Community first takes all of the member’s money and then has them hit up relatives for loans. Once the relations are tapped out (or burnt out), the member is effectively isolated and can be used for slave labor. As with Heaven’s Gate, The Community uses its slaves to build websites.  Or to pump up the reputations of websites it has constructed. It’s not very original nor clever--nor, in an ad depression, very lucrative.

Most cults are smarter than this.* The Community’s Pastor David is no Herbert W. Armstrong. (The two aren’t related in any way, historically or by theology.) Pastor David is a former Moonie cockroach who decided to elevate himself to king turd. In his zeal to attain Moonie Leader trappings, he’s fleecing for as much cash as he can  from any quarter he can reach. When all you have for income are your own poor members, your time in the cult business is not going to be long. Buying Newsweek seems to have been more of a hail Mary pass than a demonstration of his capacity.

The loss of Newsweek, again, is of minor import. Becoming part of a cult tragedy makes its ending downright maudlin.   

(*) In the end, fleecing the followers directly is what all cults have resort to. And financial over-reach on the part of leadership is more the norm than the exception to the rule. The Community’s Pastor Dave is just being more blatant about it than normal. 

Coda: 

If it wasn't a magazine, the demise of Newsweek reads like that of every stock that wound up trading in the pinks. We at Hil-Gle stand ready and able to assume the mantle of Newsweek, should it fall to us. We even have a dollar and an actual website. 

Moneycode25.com (Cult Marketing)

God’s Financial Horizontal Passing Game

The Christian Right is repellent. This is something the Republican Party knows in its core. For every Bible thumping wing nut you attract, you repel two  members of the general public. The only advantage catering to this moralist minority is that they are twice as likely to participate in the political process than the average citizen.

It’s a statistical chimera, with the true results buried within category definitions and population overlays. But the conclusion is obvious and close enough to the truth on the ground to be actionable.

Beyond the political calculus, the Christian Right is a distinct culture. It has literature in all genres. There is a look and an agreed standard of comportment. It has its own music. The group is less clinging to regions or defined by education level or even by race than most would suspect. Economically they shade no better or worse than the average Joe in average times.

They do constitute a market unto themselves, with specific channels of promotion. And it’s a somewhat mature defined market. There are any number of proven postures tailored to reaching them, a whole cascade of ‘the phrase that pays.’

Moneycode25.com is a financial advice vehicle which is being specifically pitched at the Christian Right. Its appeal is chock full of custom ordered tag lines. Advertisements have recently aired for Moneycode25 on news stations and talk radio.

Moneycode25.com’s pitch is that its operator has discovered a magic system for creating wealth plucked from the pages of the King James Bible.  Through following a simple system, supposedly secretly adhered to by many millionaire investors, you too can ethically build a substantial fortune.  The radio advertisement directs avid listeners to a website. This website itself is—SURPRISE! SURPRISE!—more marketing. The actual product isn’t what one might expect and it isn’t actually called Moneycode25. In fact, there is no moneycode, no magic system plucked from the Bible and any pretense towards ethics is add-on eyewash.

That’s what we in Ajax Telegraph Land call a TwoFer: both a potential scam and a potential cult.  The good news is that Moneycode25 is nowhere near as bad as I suspected it might be. It is neither a scam by any classical definition nor is it overtly the conduit to participation in a proprietary religion. End of endorsement.

Unfortunately, it’s not very good, either. It’s nice to see that the field of Christian Right Financial Planning has advanced beyond the selling of gold coins. The appearance of this appeal is a step in the right direction.  And it isn't so much that Moneycode25 is in any way unsound, but rather that there is no there there.

Moneycode25 is itself an advertising vehicle, a product pitch in website form. The “25” portion of the name is meaningless and was added on—probably to secure the domain rights at an affordable level.  What Moneycode25 promotes is Ultimate Wealth Report, itself a product of long time wing nut marketer Newsmax.

Newsmax itself is a shabby operator, often pretending to be the fair and balanced version of Time Warner. It’s the K-Mart knock off of Fox News. This time they are pretending to be financial gurus—or they’ve hired someone to play the role. That said, Ultimate Wealth Report is a step up from their usual shoddy offerings.

The front man for Ultimate Wealth Report is, at best, an enthusiastic hobbyist.  That’s actually his own claim, delivered aw shucks style. He’s just a good old boy, with none of them fancy Ivory tower credentials. He don’t hang out on no Wall Street. Prior to being called by the Lord to promote financial increase to the masses, he was called to preach in more conventional venues.

On top of not having any credentials, he also has no real track record. After months and months of publishing and numerous weekly podcasts, this guy can claim to have been right exactly twice. And that’s stretching it. His other claims are equally nebulous. He helped guide his father’s 401K out of a lull over an undisclosed period. He went from making $15,000 a year to giving away up to $50,000 a year. Product claims don’t get any more meaningless than this.

This is the best Newsmax can do. He does clean up nice. He hits his mark. He knows his lines. He seems sober—at least on television. I highly suspect that his appearances on financial television have been bought and paid for.  This would not be unusual in and of itself. Most financial touts are paying for the privilege of talking at the talking heads above the stock scroll.

What does make him somewhat unusual is his thorough lack of qualifications as an expert.  This man wouldn’t even be considered an expert witness on the subject of investing in civil court.

He’s also no genius. His mysterious Triple Pronged Approach is disclosed as being nothing more than an amalgamation of three very well known and widespread forms of analysis. None of these systems is perfect and none of them have been proven predictive. (Hint: no system works.) At best, they are predictive for forecasting what other  people using those systems may think.  How he triangulates between the three isn't explained. It doesn’t matter. It’s all unreliable bafflegab and poop to begin with.

On top of that, he’s not going to teach you how to work this system. None for you. Too complicated for your feeble mind to comprehend. Instead he’s offering you a subscription to his wonderful tip sheet. But wait! There’s more! You also get his video podcasts. Plus some books. All for the price of a full tank of gas.

Some of the groundwork information he provides is quite sound. On the other hand, if the maxims wonderboy is spewing are news to you, you do not belong in the market. He doesn't quite go with “buy low, sell high”, but it’s pretty basic stuff. Overall, he’s preaching what they call in football a horizontal passing game.  He keeps you from making mistakes and chasing phantoms. You will be invested in Blue Chips, period. None of this will keep you from being wiped out by the defense—in this case, negative economic forces. The down side is that he has mitigated your upside. You don’t throw bombs, you throw for first downs. The strategy is stupid, unless you’re already rich. If you are this risk averse, the stock market is not for you.*

I fear that the stock market is simply not for most of the people he is out to reach. He is also giving some exceptionally bad advice, including seemingly advocating buying stocks on margin. This is a bozo no no, except for the well to do.  Ditto options trading. Even sophisticates screw that up on a regular basis. Moreover, the stock market is simply out of reach for people with fixed incomes, credit card debt or those who have less than a quarter of their earnings left after food and shelter are accounted for. No one should be pulling a Jim Cramer and living in their car while shuttling off monies to brokers.

Bottom Line: Ultimate Wealth Report is a valueless product, a well packaged and well targeted ball of nothing. For the price of a full tank of gas you can subscribe to all of the mainstream financial magazines. You’ll then have as much of the advice as you care to read, provided by real experts.

*Owning individual stocks is probably not for you. Invest in an EFT. These are available through most brokers.

(Full disclosure: Ajax’s own self-traded IRA is doing swimmingly. I’m not at guru level… yet. For the mean time I’ll remain a hack.  Thank you.)

Cult Religions (Part Two)

Cult Religions (Part Two)

Anatomy of a Cult Leader

Most religions are not cults.

Most churches are not cults.

Most religions did not start off as cults.

Few established denominations are cults.

The difference between a cult and a legitimate religion is broad, distinct and definite.

Meet Dave.

Dave was born in 1948. Dave has been preaching the Gospel as he knows it since 1971. During that time, Dave has been employed by three different denominations—all with essentially the same theology. What has Dave spent every professional moment since the age of 23 preaching?

The End of the World is Immediately at Hand!

That’s 41 years and counting. Sadly, that’s not a record. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have been predicting the same since 1910. Dave’s old boss, “Doctor” Roderick C. Meredith has been at it since 1952, some 60 years. The person they learned this stuff from was at it for over 50 years also, starting in the mid 1930s.

It’s a proven schtick (piece of business). I mention Dave and his mentors and the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the same breath because they appeal to the same demographic, have largely the same cause for being and preach the same overall theology. This isn’t an accident.  The guy who ordained Dave and Roderick essentially ripped the Jehovah’s Witnesses off.  Not that the Jehovah’s Witnesses actually have much in the ways of original religious thought, either.

David C. Pack and his pals are the inspiration for this series. Although their theology has little appeal today, their methods of operation are illustrative of a type of cult leader. In the last posting I introduced you to Matt, a fictional new cult leader. Dave is something of the opposite of Matt—or at least a distinction in type. Whereas Matt the Music Minister has a good grasp of his target audience (the people from his last church), but is flailing around for a template, Dave already has a good idea of what the people he is looking for want. Matt’s going to go as far as the magnetism of his personality, and the overall imagination (and sweat engine) of whatever organization he can muster, will take him. Dave is standing on someone’s shoulders. Copycats like Dave are probably more typical—at least on the single church level. Thinking up an entire cosmology and séance for delivering such is pretty rare.

Which is to say that most cults are copycats. As with most cults, most cult leaders are copycats. I suppose you could say that of most businessmen and entrepreneurial types. Why go into an entirely new field when you can simply refine the methods used to service an already proven market? Many a business plan is founded on just this idea—and cults are no different. To take this a tad further, it is easier to start and operate a business that someone has heard of than it is to attempt to service the market of people who think that microscopic aliens are eating their brains. (More later.) In either case, a known brand name will help you, which is why so many people go in for franchising.  Oddly, the history of franchising dovetails into the history of modern American cults. And it pertains specifically to our pal Dave.

As convoluted as that transition was, every word of it is true. In our last posting we gave you the anatomy of the cult form. In this posting we will focus on the leader. As you will see, a fish rots from the head down. As we will also see, no one who starts a cult does so to increase the overall happiness of the world. To be sure, Cult leaders are a peculiar lot, but they do fit into identifiable categories.

Matt the Music Minister from our last entry would be an unusual cult leader, at least in one regard. Matt’s success in founding a cult would be highly unlikely unless the church he was spat out from was also a cult. Remember, cults have four necessary and sufficient properties: (1) they are Proprietary, owned by a single person or tight group; (2) there is No Accountability over how the leader spends money;  (3) there is a Double Standard amongst the members—clear ranks of more holy than thou or an actual double set of rules; and finally (4) concentration in one or more of three themes:  (A) The way is narrower than you think; (B) God wants to make you rich; and (C) I have magic powers. No one forms a cult by splitting off the youth ministry of Saint Paul of the Cross Lutheran Church. Splits in staid churches are along staid lines, usually about doctrinal issues (Lutherans from Catholics, Unitarians from Trinitarians). Splits in Carnival religions are about which clown gets to drive the clown car. Thus unless Matt is some sort of Rasputin, chances are what he’s offering in the basement of the local Stuckey’s is very similar to the services at the church he was unceremoniously spat out of.

Charismatic Evangelical Fundamentals

Christianity is a fairly simple religion: follow the teachings of Christ or at the least believe that Christ can salvage you from your moral failings. It’s user manual, the Bible, is not so simple. It is, by any cold reading, contradictory. For the past 2000 plus years or so various denominations have done their best to reconcile this problem. To many, the solutions and doctrines contrived as a result of this problem solving process constitute in and of themselves a distraction. Movements have been afoot since the time of the Iconoclasts to strip the doctrine of bloatware and get back to its binary (trinary, in this case) truth. It is from this Back To Basics wellspring that the entire flurry of American Cults have sprung.

(And a bunch of other religions, not all of them cults.)

It is my dismal heritage as an American that the majority of this nonsense has taken place in my country. Most cults are American. Most cults are Christian. Most cults are Charismatic, Evangelical and Fundamentalist. And they hate the Catholics. Together they are the black eyes of Christianity, the open spewing puss sores of spiritual sentiment. That the world would be a better place without the lot of them is an understatement.

Not all charismatic, evangelical, fundamentalist churches are cults—but that’s where all the June Bugs are. FINAL SNIFF TEST: if you are in a church that HATES Catholics but LOVES Jews, you are in a CULT. (I’m not saying that loving Jews is a bad thing. I am simply pointing out a key dichotomy.) How things got this way is not the purpose of this posting.  To understand the cult leader, you need only understand the basics of forming cult theology.

The basics amount to: the Catholics are wrong about everything. And are active agents of Satan. Hate them. Hate their trappings. Call all of their feasts Pagan or whathaveyou. Do the opposite of them to the extent that you can get away with. Then you can branch into an attack on Salvation By Grace. Salvation by the simple miraculous say so and death of Christ  doesn’t seem fair. Not manly enough for the fundies. Or you can grant Salvation By Grace and pitch some higher form of salvation. You can create several levels of heaven. (Why not? Dante did it for hell.) Conversely, you can pick on the book. It’s either all right or all wrong. If it’s all wrong (James Jones, People’s Temple), you have kind of left the religion business. Saying it’s all an analogy infringes on Calvin. Saying parts of it are historical truth and other parts are morality plays is to adopt the theology of the hated Pope. If the core story is true and the rest of it is an analogy, you may join Luther. As I said, it’s really pecked over—and doubly so as far as half steps are concerned. The real shelf space as far as creating distinction to your movement is in declaring the entire Bible absolute historical fact. It also sounds certain.

(That’s not the evolution of it, but rather just a quick explanation.)

Making the Bible a literal text is problematic. You can ignore the contradictions. (Weirdly, an untried approach.) You can explain the contradictions away. (Cult tactic one.) You can overwrite the Bible, either through revision or creating additive texts. (Cult tactic two.) To contrast your efforts with actual learned attempts to harmonize or understand  the Bible, please have no skills in linguistics, lack interest in any translation that isn’t authorized by English monarchs and have zero grounding in history. If you really don’t like something, blame Constantine.

Sans blaming Constantine, this is pretty much what the Jehovah’s Witnesses did. They weren’t the first and they weren’t the last. Entire libraries can be stocked with tomes explaining how one snippet of the Bible explains everything or some new thing or some other out of context snippet.

That’s it. Theology done. Add distinctive revelation (matter does not exist, the end is near), Rasputin- like figure, shake (in the case of the Shakers) and bake. You are in the cult business.

Wait! Oh giver of the anatomy lesson, you have just defined a cult leader as Rasputin-like figure. That is not very descriptive of any type. Rather, it is cartoon shorthand. Surely, there must be more!

Short answer: No. Wrong. Long Answer: You don’t want to be the Alpha Dog. It’s not a fun life. Ask Aimee McPherson. Aimee is about as close to Matt as an Alpha can be, inasmuch as she is mostly a showman. Aimee wasn’t much for theology and most of her”act” was playing off the novelty of a new invention called radio. Even as straightforward as her routine was, the constant toil caused her a breakdown. Her movement dwindled dramatically during her life. The money was good to the end, but she was hardly happy. That said, she was mostly sane, something your average Alpha Dog isn’t. If they aren’t a flunk out from another religion, they have a resume similar to that of Charles Manson. Think flunk out at life. Think drifter. You don’t want to be the guy who gets caught cheating on his wife with a maid and then goes into heated delusions about being called BY GOD to do such as opposed to just begging for forgiveness. Most of us aren’t that delusional—or that good at being delusional. Alpha Dog gets broken out of jail by people who want to shoot him. Alpha Dog dies in a hospital, screaming about how he’s going to hell. Alpha Dog wanders his house naked, attempting to control gravity with his feet or living in dread of microscopic aliens eating his brain. Alpha Dog gets high on his own supply. Don’t be Alpha Dog. Be Dave.

David C. Pack wakes up every day knowing exactly what he needs to do and say at work. There isn’t an original piece of thinking involved. No one expects him to be clever. (Though he is.) They expect him to be certain. (Check!) And severe. (Double Check!) After forty years, he has the act down. Thanks in equal parts to talent and good fortune, his enterprise is all his. He didn’t think of a word of it and he doesn’t have to pay a dime for it. It’s like Colonel Sanders died and left him all the herbs and spices. Now, thanks to advances in technology. Dave is ready to take fried chicken where it has never been before.

  

Since I have already covered their religion in some detail in my David Pack Internet Cult Guru post, I will not do so here. And if you don’t trust me, you can check out Dave’s extensive web trove at Restored Church of God. I will not link to it. If you wish to strike a blow for justice, Google it and hit Dave’s sponsored link. It’s at the top. Anything that costs Dave money is good with me.

Take Dave’s bio with a grain of salt. As opposed to hearing the call of Alpha Dog Herbert W. Armstrong on radio and suddenly converting, I have it on fair authority that his folks were members of the cult to start with. (This doesn’t have to be a contradiction. Dave might have converted the family.) The bits about being an All American and Ivy League material is fairly typical cult fluff.

Whatever Dave’s opportunities were, by the age of 19 he had decided to enroll in the cult’s unaccredited—and expensive--Bible school, Ambassador College in Pasadena, California. The first class graduated from this institution in the year of Dave’s birth. 19 years later it still didn’t have a filled out curriculum. In effect, the only real purpose of attending this school was to become a minister in the Radio Church of God, later called the Worldwide Church of God.

It’s a very pretty campus. The campus also did double duty as the church’s headquarters and broadcast production facilities.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s the purpose of the college was broadened somewhat. Not all of the students went into the clergy, but the more select of them were encouraged to. From what I have been told, some students were there for the draft deferment. (Although the church was anti-war, draft dodgers on campus were viewed with distain by the faculty.) For some students this was the only college they could get into, given that it didn’t have any academic standards. For the most part, however, sending kids to cult church was a good way of goosing the process of making sure your spawn married within the cult.

The linebacker sized Dave was selected for ministry and, after graduation, sent off to be a regional minister. In the Worldwide Church of God each minister was paid directly by the denomination, to the tune of about $40K in 1970s dollars. On top of this, ministers were provided with a house and a car, both owned by the church but provided to the pastor free of charge. If it wasn’t the best starting compensation package in all of American religion, it was close. But there was a downside that I will go into later.

Dave moved around a lot, as was common in this church. Herbert Armstrong didn’t like his ministers to become too familiar with their flocks. To hear Dave tell it, he was something of a roaming Enforcer, bringing stray flocks to heel. To hear others tell it, Pack was a bully and a jerk. That he was only doing what he was told excuses only part of this. Despite these constraints Pack eventually developed a distinct and highly effective style of oral presentation. It’s a mix of controlled rage and black humor. Coupled with a bombastic manner and physical size, it gives Pack quite a presence.

That said, Pack’s career was largely undistinguished. During the entirety of Pack’s slog for Worldwide, the core church was in a constant state of disorder. The church had to back off its constantly heralded date for the End of the World. This date came and went—first without explanation and then with the bald faced lie that no date had ever been set. Having at that point outlived his usefulness, cult leader Herbert Armstrong refused to step aside in favor of his own son. This despite the fact that he had been grooming his son for just this purpose for over ten years. Worse, he may have been behind a sex scandal which engulfed his son soon after. (This actually happened twice.) An association of former Ambassador students started a newsletter exposing the cult’s financial gamesmanship. Then the church was on 60 Minutes. (Never good.) Its assets were seized by the state of California. And then after having weathered those storms, Herbert Armstrong went on a spree of changing the church’s doctrines.

Pack stayed put during all of this, towing the line, cashing a check. Herbert Armstrong 180ed church teachings back and forth at whim. If there were reasons based on principle to leave the church, Armstrong was providing them in abundance at the time. Pack didn’t leave. Very few of the ministers left. Instead they stood by stupidly while their obviously demented leader played kangaroo court with the spiritual lives of 120 thousand brethren. And then Armstrong did a very fast fade. The old boy ran out of stupid and became the prisoner of strangers he thought were trusted henchmen. In the wake of Armstrong’s death, these henchmen seized control of the church’s assets, exposing Armstrong’s many misdeeds-mostly as camouflage for their own looting. It was only then that rats like Pack started to jump ship.

Pack didn’t jump immediately. He stood as the campaign of defaming Armstrong progressed to fruition. It was only after it became clear that the church’s financial losses (linked to a wholesale flight of membership) might lead to cutbacks in paid clergy, did David “Restored Church of God” Pack jump ship. And then, he didn’t go into his own ministry, but rather a rickety raft piloted by “Doctor” Roderick Merideth.  The rest of the story will have to wait until our next posting.

Dave is fairly typical of the type that pitches his own tent. It’s pretty much all they can do.  We will go into the variations of Cult Leaders using Dave and his pals as our examples in our next posting.

Coda:

If you are reading this, it means the Maya were wrong. Or the people who thought the end of the Mayan timeline meant anything were wrong. So it looks like we may have Christmas after all.

We may leave this topic for a post or two, as other ones have cropped up. But I am hoping to have the basics of Cults down for you in short order. We will be covering them as a part of our beat going forward.

I hope this Christmas finds you all well.

God Bless Us, Every One!