Behind the Bastards

You've never read the book, A Drink with Shane McGowan.

You should absolutely. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

But also like read it, read the book, listen to the music at the same time. It's fucking tight.

Bailey produces and circulates a translation of Curie's groundbreaking 1910 two-volume book Treatise on Radioactivity, which is what she got her second Nobel Prize for.

The Purpose Driven Life.

The Death Squad Driven Life.

There's a somewhat famous book and movie called John Dies at the End, a movie you can find on streaming.

It is a New York Times bestselling book series and this book is one of them.

it is one of the John Dies at the End books.

A Curious History of Vegetables by Wolf D. Storl has numerous asparagus anecdotes to enjoy if you're into that sort of thing and also contains this quote by modern-day plant experts Fritz Martin Engel

Pharaohs, Emperors, Kings, generals, and great spiritual leaders, princely poets like Gota and gourmands like Berlant Severin, all of them ate and eat asparagus with great enthusiasm.

In the autumn, we captured and trained kestrels, red tails, and immature passage hawks on their first migration. I've caught upwards of 50 hawks a day squatting atop a ridge line on Shunemunk Mountain in the Hudson Valley in autumn. We flew wild red tails, falcons, and goshawks and pioneered many of the game hawking techniques still used by American falconers. We talked about hawks every spare moment.

I once read a book about the origins of the Illuminati as influencing the anarchist movement called the Occult Origins of Anarchism or something.

Now there's a great book about all this, Berlin 1933, written by French media critic Daniel Schneiderman.

Activist journalism, Schneiderman writes, journalism that subordinates the quest for truth to the quest for a truth that is useful to its cause is the only journalism that today doesn't have to feel ashamed about what it produced.

There's a book called I Alone Can Fix It, which a couple of journalists are coming out with and there's some interesting quotes from it from specifically General Mike Miley, who's like the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was appointed by Trump.

Yeah, this is a Reichstag moment.

Now, the very, very best investigation I have found into this period of German media is the book Modern Modernity by Jrgen Hohn.

Both denisovich and ishmael are misspelled, but that could be intentional.

He also doubts that Bremer was well read enough to make reference to Solzhenitsyn's Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or quip as he crossed the Great Lakes call me ishmael.

I drove to East London where I was joined by Charlene Craig, recalls Pittman. Accompanied by a relative of Cea Bongo, we went directly to Frary Hospital where we found the victim with a bullet wound running from his abdomen clear through his back.

A telling piece of evidence collected from the custody of the hospital was the clothing he had been wearing when he was shot, notably a synthetic fiber tracksuit. The tracksuit top had a gaping hole in front, with indications that the fiber had been burned in the vicinity of the hole, which would prove Cea Bongo's allegation that he had been shot at point blank range.

Armed with Cea Bongo's statement and his clothes in a plastic bag, we drove jauntily to the Fleet Street Police Station.

a massive dossier began to grow against the man whose callous exploits read like a scene from a Dirty Harry script.

He is if you've read Inders game He's doing what Inders brother does an Inders game where he's writing his little essays for the internet Trying to like overthrow the government using them and there's a certain certain kind of guy Who is just deeply attracted to that idea

Around 1838, clinging to a dream of racial exclusivity, but leaving behind their homes in the fields they had cultivated, the Afrikaners set out to escape the British by migrating northwards across the Drakensberg Mountains into Natal and over the Orange River into the Transvaal.

The Great Trek, some bloody 19th century battles with Zulu warriors and their defeat in the war with the British 70 years later helped create a fierce nationalism among the Afrikaners.

The concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer War, in which men, women and children perished at the hands of the British, left Afrikaners a profoundly defeated tribe with a defensive psyche that was to have disastrous repercussions in later years.

And the plot of this book, this is not the book we're covering this week. Okay. Okay. But you need to hear about it to get to that book.

And the plot of the book is that an unhinged Barack Obama stand in president. Many such cases?

It's like one of those right wing, this is what Obama's right about to do books because he publishes it right before he gets reelected. I'm like, I think we've seen this film before.

His not Barack Obama stand in is Tyrell Johnson and is also a black president.

My favorite detail about the book, which I got from a Texas monthly review of it, is that the fake president in the book, Tyrell Johnson was originally just named Barack Obama and they did a find and replace.