Behind the Bastards

I really like a blog and it's also a podcast every week, Border Chronicles, Todd Miller's Border Chronicles.

I also would recommend reading all of Todd Miller's books. He is an incredible investigative journalist that does a deep dive on how we got to this militarized state of the border.

So, I would recommend starting with Border Patrol Nation and just going straight through there.

One analyst asked how the price for copper would impact earnings in the next quarter. "What the hell difference will that make?" Welch shot back. "You should be asking me where I want to take the company."

Some people think it's cruel or brutal to remove the bottom 10% of our people. It isn't. It's just the opposite. What I think is brutal is false kindness. False kindness is keeping people around who aren't going to grow and prosper.

Within months of his departure, it became clear that GE was deeply troubled. And in a matter of years, the corporation was falling apart.

Had so much of the wealth created by corporations not been reverse distributed back to investors in the form of buybacks and dividends over the past 45 years and had pay kept pace with productivity, the average full-time American worker would be making about $102,000 annually, roughly double what he or she is today.

He's full of shit, Jack said. "He's a bullshitter." But Jack, I asked, "Didn't you choose Jeff?" "Yes," he conceded he had. "That's my burden and that I have to live with," he continued. "But people have been hurt. Employees, people's pensions, shareholders. It's bad." There were tears in his eyes. "I fucked up," he said again. "I fucked up."

An annual report from 1953 described how GE worked in the balanced best interests of all. The report trumpeted how much the company had paid in taxes, the virtues of paying its suppliers well and how critical it was to take care of its employees.

That year, GE proudly stated that it spent some 37 percent of its sales on pay and benefits for its workers, resulting in the biggest payroll in the company's history, with more people at work than ever before.

Next to the statistic was an illustration of a grinning factory worker walking away from the assembly line holding bags of money only after enumerating all the ways in which it was helping the government suppliers and employees.

layoff spread to other divisions as Welch amassed more responsibility. And as he toured GE's facilities around the country, he took the opportunity to remind the rank and file who was now in charge.

In Cleveland at the light bulb factory, he berated a manager for the relative high costs of GE's bulbs, screaming that competitors in communist Europe made similar products for half the price.

...murder yourself with it like Keanu Reeves fighting a giant in a library. It's the only way out for you.

This may seem a strange way to begin an autobiography, a confession I hate having to use the first person. Nearly everything I've done in my life has been accomplished with other people. Yet when you write a book like this, you're forced to use the narrative I when it's really the we that counts now.

Please remember that every time you see the word I in these pages, it refers to all those colleagues and friends and some I might have missed. Now we move on.

my mother poured her love into me as if I were a found treasure.

don't kid yourself. That's the way it is. If you don't study, you'll be nothing. Absolutely nothing. There are no shortcuts. Don't kid yourself.

she knew how to be tough with me, but also how to hug and kiss. She wanted to make sure I knew how wanted and loved I was.

So beam continued to write speeches newsletters and articles in various far-right journals of record culminating in his 1983 book essays of a clansman

He did start making other plans. Oh he continued. Oh, no Spoilers it ends with a federal building exploding actually

So beam continued to write speeches newsletters and articles in various far-right journals of record culminating in his 1983 book essays of a clansman in this book he encouraged his fellow fascist Vietnam veterans to bring the war on home to the United States

He noted that many former inmates not only insisted they'd had direct contact with Mengele, but, and this is really strange, they tended to remember him as being hot.

those who kept the machinery of murder going in Auschwitz were not devils. They were humans.

I recommend if you want to get an actual degree of personal physical context for what it was like there. Miklos Niesley's memoir, Auschwitz, a doctor's eyewitness account is short. You can finish it in an afternoon. It's not a long book and it's fucking harrowing.

The quarantine camp, C camp, D camp and the F section were terribly overcrowded, despite the quotas which were filled daily for shipment to more distant camps.

The Czech section of the Auschwitz concentration camp was liquidated. This date, due to a prevalence of typhus among the prisoners. Signed, Dr. Mengele, Hauptsturmfhrer.

his focus in this book was on what he called the engineering of consent a phrase is horrified as it is

He says is to provide leaders with the ability to quote control and regiment the masses according to our will without they're knowing about it

he says is to provide leaders with the ability to quote control and regiment the masses according to our will without they're knowing about it

look at the Catholics their priests have been molesting women and children for centuries and the governments have not been able to stop it if handled properly a church can protect us from vaccinations that we don't want from forced insurance and for many things that a government might want to use to oppress us

Look at the Catholics, their priests have been molesting women and children for centuries and the governments have not been able to stop it. If handled properly a church can protect us from vaccinations that we don't want, from forced insurance, and for many things that a government might want to use to oppress us.

But he he he talked about how like his pen name Malaclips the younger he like described it as like as like a spirit that like entered him.

And he was he was he was he's able to like channel writing through through the spirit, which is why he credited the work to this to to to this entity.

But he also says that like that the entity kind of left him once. Yeah. Once Principia was done writing, he kind of like it left.

Go steal the Principia Discordia from a bookstore that has the temerity to sell it.

when Adam Gorightly, who's who's written the book, The Prankster and the Conspiracy, which is the best book about Kerry.

Sterner wrote a book called the ego and his own

Under Ceauescu's stewardship in the 1970s, the trade in Jews became even more elaborate and far more lucrative.

Financing animal farms was no longer adequate. Ceauescu was prepared to throw caution to the wind and demand direct cash payments in exchange for Jewish exit visas.

The ransom money was to be calculated according to a sliding scale. At the lower end were unemployed Jews and children who were considered Category D and required a ransom fee of around $2,000.

More well-educated Jews were deemed Category A and could only be released from the country for a fee of $6,000.

In exceptional cases, that rose to $250,000.

It was around this time during the first couple of years of Dracula's rule that he organized a notorious feast for all the beggars of Targoviste.

The event appeared to be a great humanitarian gesture. The hall was hired and tables were filled with food and wine.

Invitations were put out around the city to the cripples the blind the diseased and the destitute.

They all congregated in a large wooden hall toasting Dracula's generosity. But towards the end of the meal someone noticed smoke coming from the walls.

They ran to the door only to find Dracula's troops had locked it from the outside and set the place ablaze. Many hundreds were trapped in a bonfire of souls was left burning into the dark Wallachian sky.

The bonfire of the beggars as it became known was a warning. Begging would not be tolerated. It was a drain on the finances of the most decent and generous in society said Dracula. A crime as evil as theft.

Wallachians were uneasy. It was one thing killing the rich but to massacre the poor in such violent circumstances?

On the other hand Dracula's tactics did seem to be working and crime fell. It was said that Dracula's guards would test the townsfolk by leaving a purse full of gold coins in a busy marketplace.

When the guards came to collect it in the evening the purse was always left untouched.

The admiration for authoritarian solutions would also resonate down the centuries.

They had a lackey in prison, a young hooligan who brought them food packages and ran messages.

His name was Nikolai Ceauescu, a 22 year old trainee cobbler who is regularly in trouble for fighting and delivering communist leaflets.

Some of his fellow inmates thought him weird and said that they avoided him because he was such a bore with absolutely no sense of humor.

In the presence of big men like George Uday, Ceauescu remained largely silent and deferential. He avoided speaking whenever possible because of a stutter so severe it made his legs shake.

But he also possessed a powerful memory and an instinctive intelligence and sat among the future leaders, listening to everything they said and slowly learning.

I think Warren Farrell wrote a book called The Boy Crisis told me yesterday when I was talking to them, every single high school shooter was fatherless.

This child was kidnapped by Israeli settlers, tortured, forced to drink gasoline, and burned alive.

I read a book for this episode two, The Second Coming of the KKK by Linda Gordon. I want to advocate reading both of the books for this podcast because they're both good but Linda Gordon's book is really special. It is almost unbelievably dense.

I rarely in my life encountered so much information from so many different sources and solidated into a single book of this size. I'm just kind of in awe of the amount of work she must have put into it and like how... It's really good.

We're only using fractions of it for this episode, but it is a fantastic book. So I really recommend giving it a read if you're interested in the history of American radical right-wing extremism.

One of the things that is pointed out in the fantastic Linda Gordon book, The Second Coming of the KKK is that this was not radical at the time.

The ideology of this group is not fringe in any way, shape or form. They are preaching to the choir. They are not radicalizing people and that's critical.

I read a book for this episode two, The Second Coming of the KKK by Linda Gordon. I want to advocate reading both of the books for this podcast because they're both good but Linda Gordon's book is really special. It is almost unbelievably dense.

I rarely in my life encountered so much information from so many different sources and solidated into a single book of this size. I'm just kind of in awe of the amount of work she must have put into it and like how... It's really good.

We're only using fractions of it for this episode, but it is a fantastic book. So I really recommend giving it a read if you're interested in the history of American radical right-wing extremism.

One of the things that is pointed out in the fantastic Linda Gordon book, The Second Coming of the KKK is that this was not radical at the time.

In the conclusion of the second coming to the KKK Linda Gordon makes this note some scholars and contemporary observers have seen the 1920s Northern clan as a failure because it was short-lived and because its campaigns against Catholics and Jews did not manage to confine them to second class citizenship, but transience is common to most social movements moreover the clan declined in part because it had triumphed in several respects state eugenics laws providing for forcible sterilization of those of defective stock spread to 30 states and those labeled defective were typically the poor and people of color the biggest clan victory was immigration restriction and imperial wizard Evans repeatedly claimed credit for its passage.

In 2008 Facebook hired Cheryl Sandberg, the author of Lean In and generally as slimy as a bucket of weed.

The Dark Side of Genius notes that it's impossible to confirm or deny Hitchcock's story about being locked in a cell for five minutes.

In the early afternoon between a lecture class and a quiet study time the boys were free to gather in the schoolyard near the church. Gould who was one of his classmates then nine was suddenly yanked away from his peers by Hitchcock and an accomplice and dragged off to another forbidden area, the basement boiler room of the school.

Before he could cry out or struggle not much use in any case against two bigger boys Gould was bound hand and foot once he was immobilized he was preyed to a carefully planned psychological torture that could have ended disastrously. His trousers were pulled down and Hitchcock quickly stepped behind him.

There was the sound of a scratching noise and the two bullies raced up the stairs. Young Gould must have thought he was attacked by a firing squad. At once the sound of gunfire exploded but it was a string of firecrackers that had been pinned to his underwear and ignited.

To make others feel childish and dependent, this seemed to be part of his goal.

In the early afternoon between a lecture class and a quiet study time the boys were free to gather in the schoolyard near the church. Gould who was one of his classmates then nine was suddenly yanked away from his peers by Hitchcock and an accomplice and dragged off to another forbidden area, the basement boiler room of the school.

To make others feel childish and dependent, this seemed to be part of his goal.

He was not only considered most people a threat, they were better looking, more intelligent, better educated, more socially acceptable than himself and by reducing them to a sudden discomfort perhaps he felt he was bringing them to the level on which he always lived by thus subjugating those he resented for whatever reason and on whatever level of consciousness by submitting them to varying degrees of humiliation and danger he was not only controlling them but also being able to make them dread.

You there, the Swede pointed to an astonished man waiting for his turn to be handed over to the executioner. Give me your Swedish passport and get in that line, he barked. And you, get behind him. I know I issued you a passport.

Wallenberg continued moving fast, talking loud, hoping the authority in his voice would somewhat rub off on these defeated people.

The Jews finally caught on. They started groping in pockets for bits of identification. A driver's license or birth certificate seemed to do the trick. The Swede was grabbing them so fast.

Faster, Wallenberg's eyes urged them. Faster, before the game is up.

In minutes he had several hundred people in his convoy. International Red Cross trucks there at Wallenberg's behest arrived and the Jews clambered on. Wallenberg jumped into his own car. He leaned out of the car window and whispered, I am sorry to the people he was leaving behind. I am trying to take the youngest ones first, he explained. I want to save a nation.

You there, the Swede pointed to an astonished man waiting for his turn to be handed over to the executioner. Give me your Swedish passport and get in that line, he barked. And you, get behind him. I know I issued you a passport.

Wallenberg continued moving fast, talking loud, hoping the authority in his voice would somewhat rub off on these defeated people.

The Jews finally caught on. They started groping in pockets for bits of identification. A driver's license or birth certificate seemed to do the trick. The Swede was grabbing them so fast.

Faster, Wallenberg's eyes urged them. Faster, before the game is up.

In minutes he had several hundred people in his convoy. International Red Cross trucks there at Wallenberg's behest arrived and the Jews clambered on. Wallenberg jumped into his own car. He leaned out of the car window and whispered, I am sorry to the people he was leaving behind. I am trying to take the youngest ones first, he explained. I want to save a nation.

The Last Island of the Savages

The Last Island of the Savages

published by Adam Goodheart in 2000, nearly 20 years before Chow's own journey.

anyone who's curious can get the book 100 Little Hitlers

anyone who's curious can get the book 100 Little Hitlers

Author of We Won't Be Here Tomorrow.

I have a book called We Won't Be Here Tomorrow.

Well, after that enjoyable...Yeah, I have a book that is probably out by the time you hear this called We Won't Be Here Tomorrow which includes such stories as people programming drones to murder people like we're discussing the show in a fictional setting.