Category Archives: culture

FU@K FEAR! TRANSFORM IT INTO FUEL INSTEAD

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By Gary McGee

Source: Waking Times

“We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.” ~William James

Fuck fear! Fuck angst! Fuck existential dread! Turn it all into fuel for the fire of life instead. Life is less about getting what you want and more about making the best of what you get. It’s about playing a shitty hand of poker like a boss. So you got dealt fear, angst, ennui, dread, and a sense of meaninglessness? So what? Play the hand! Own it. Double down on it. Bluff the devil and take God for all he’s worth. Turn it all into gold by becoming unfuckwithable.

Unfuckwithable (adj.): When you are truly at peace and in touch with yourself, and nothing anyone says or does bothers you, and no negativity or drama can touch you. ~Urban Dictionary

Transform fear into fuel for fire:

“The difference between a good life and a bad life is how well you walk through the fire.” ~Carl Jung

Rule number one of being unfuckwithable: Fear is fuel for the fire of doing what you love.

Never forget that. It will get you through just about anything. And even if it doesn’t, at least you’ll have the ‘fuck-it bucket of your daring’ to toss all your fucks into.

At least you’ll have what you love. At least you’ll have your passion. Whatever that is. It will be unique to you. It might even be something that nobody else will ever need to know.

As long as what you love to do is valid and in alignment with the universal laws of health, you can’t go wrong. Be savage. Be fierce. Love dangerously. Love as you live—on the edge. Love on purpose, with purpose. Love like you’re not going to live forever. Because you aren’t.With a love this fierce, this bold, this full-frontal boss-mode, fear has no choice but to become fuel for its fire. For—have no illusions—love is fire. Fear is its kindling. Because of this, it is the hottest fire that ever burned. No moth can resist it. No moth can survive it. Only the Phoenix thrives there. Or fire itself.

Be fire itself! No fear, but for the fuel of it. No concern, all burn. This is what fearlessness truly is. Your love is a blaze of glory just waiting to flare up. Let it flare through the sieve of what you fear.

Be brave despite danger or hardship:

“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.” ~Thucydides

Rule number two of being unfuckwithable: Focus on what you can control, let go of what you can’t.

You can’t know the future. You can’t control how things will turn out. You can only control how you react to how things turn out. Even then, it’s not about control. It’s about being adaptable. It’s about being flexible and resilient. It’s about being prepared for the worst, even as you hope for the best. It’s about pulling your fragile past toward your antifragile future.

In that speck of hope is all the courage you’ll ever need. A dash of courage trumps an ocean of doubt. Use that courage like a sword. Or, even better, a scythe. Cut through the storm of the unknown. Shred the shroud of not knowing. Slice and dice the thickness of uncertainty. Not for the goal of invulnerability. No. For the transcendence of absolute vulnerability.

Cut with your soul. Meet the danger in the throes of adventure. Meet the glory in the field. Meet the albatross on the path. Meet the Minotaur in the labyrinth. Cut! To cut means to engage absolutely. To cut is to become the sword. Even if you have no sword. Cut. Cut the obstacle until it becomes the path. And if God Himself should stand in your way, cut that bastard down and become one with all things.

Nip fear in the bud through self-inflicted knowledge:

“Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads to violence. This is the equation.” ~Averroes

Rule number three of being unfuckwithable: Stay as close to the edge as you can without going over.

Death is a given. Use it to hone a proper perspective, to sharpen the sword of your courage. This soul-sharpening comes in the form of spiritual circumspection, or existential skepticism. Ignorance will lead to fear and fear will lead to hatred—with paranoia, nihilism, and ennui in between—if you’re not careful.

Stay ahead of the curve by questioning things to the nth degree. Be a razor-sharp question mark in the dark. Just don’t forget to also cut through the blinding light. For blinding light can be just as unhealthy as too much darkness. Be both: a beacon of light that cuts through the darkness and a beacon of darkness that cuts through the blinding light.

Allow uncertainty to become your guide. Just as fear can be transformed into fuel for fire, uncertainty can be transformed into fuel for curiosity. Curiosity is the cure for certainty. It will give you an edge. It will keep you ahead of the game. You’ll be playing James P. Carse’s Infinite Game while everyone else is toppling over themselves in the myopic one-upmanship of the Finite Game.

Most of all, even as it cures certainty, your curiosity will be your guiding light through uncertainty. It’s double-edged. It will help you become resilient despite discomfort. It will help you stretch your comfort zone despite comfort. It will help you become adaptable despite an inhospitable world. It will help you overcome yourself by not getting hung-up on your ego.

Why? Because curiosity is always on the edge. It is always the tip of the spear. It is always foremost. It is utmost, supreme, ahead of itself because it is always on the edge of its seat. It is always cutting, despite the world’s attempts at dulling its mettle.

Use it. Harness its trailblazer essence. Channel its catalyst synergy. Recalibrate the universe with it. Discover the cheat codes hidden in the storm. Do it despite the storm. Do it despite the slings and arrows of vicissitude. Do it despite the worst the tempest can dish out. Do it despite the fear. Do it because of the fear. Do it for the tribe. Then come back and share the magic elixir of being unfuckwithable.

Back to that shitty hand of poker… So you got dealt fear, angst, ennui, dread, and a sense of meaninglessness? Transform the fear into fuel, the angst into hunger, the ennui into curiosity, the dread into humor, and the sense of meaninglessness into meaning. Then go all in.

Freedom Rider: How the billionaires rule

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Predatory capitalism has driven down wages and created a dystopia for workers.

By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Intrepid Report

President Calvin Coolidge said, “The business of America is business.” The expression is memorable because it always rang true. But nearly 100 years later an old trite saying has taken on an ever more terrifying meaning.

The ruling class wield their power more blatantly than ever. There is little effort to conceal their determination to rule over the people and to control the politicians who are now little more than their personal minions.

When the people get a little help, as happened with additional stimulus funds for the unemployed, politicians across the country took up arms for the ruling class and turned down free money just to stay in the good graces of their bosses.

Currently 25 states out of 50 have rejected additional help for the unemployed. The money came from the federal government and didn’t impact state budgets, but politicians know who calls the shots. When called upon to help struggling people they chose to do just the opposite. They helped their exploiters and, in the process, made a mockery of what passes for democracy.

There is no labor shortage in this country. Instead, there is a shortage of jobs that pay a living wage and that is because of the power of capitalists. They have grown richer precisely because they have forced workers to live in a constant state of precarity, and now it is quite literally better to stay home than to work for a pittance.

Of course, the richest man in the world, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is a master at coming up with new ways to subjugate workers. Any reports of job growth should be viewed with a very jaundiced eye as predatory capitalism has driven down wages and created a dystopia for workers. Bezos has mastered squeezing the most and giving the least.

Amazon warehouse workers suffer from injuries at higher rates than other employees in similar jobs but the injuries are part of the cost of doing business. It is expected that the grueling working conditions will create high turnover which is exactly what Amazon wants. A revolving door of employees serves their needs quite nicely. Bezos made a big deal about a $15 per hour starting salary but he could certainly afford to pay a lot more, a real living wage. The tight-fisted billionaire who could potentially become a trillionaire got rich the old fashioned way. He cheats workers.

Bezos also comes up with new and ingenious ways to spread the suffering. Amazon Flex delivery drivers are hired by apps and fired by algorithms. They have no interaction with human resources or any humans at all and they must pay a $200 fee to contest terminations that are rarely decided in their favor.

Even when American workers lose their jobs they are still at the mercy of corporate giants. ID.me contracts with states to provide public access to web sites such as those used for unemployment claims. Their facial recognition software doesn’t verify everyone properly and desperate people wait days and weeks for their unemployment payments to arrive. As with Amazon there is no one to speak to for help. But state governments turn over millions of dollars to ID.me in order to cheat people out of benefits they have earned. Currently 30 states contract with ID.me to make sure that the most vulnerable are kicked while they are down.

The algorithm hirings and firings and the facial recognition technology problems are not bugs in the system. They are features. They are doing precisely what they are intended to do, keep workers poor, desperate, and at the mercy of capitalists. Cruelty is the point.

One might ask who speaks for the people. Workers in several states had their unemployment saved by court decisions but those are few and far between. Politicians are as blatant as their corporate bosses and openly side with them against their constituents.

There is no way to reform this system. Democrats and republicans are equally eager to act at the behest of corporate interests. The people either vote in hopes of change that never comes or are apathetic because they see that the odds are against them.

The workers who refuse low pay under dangerous conditions are moving in the right direction. Whether they know it or not they are potentially building a new movement. A general strike is what the country needs. Of course that is why the hammer fell in an attempt to nip any resistance in the bud and get the cogs back into the machine. But the direction we must move in is clear. There is no salvation from a Biden or a Harris or any other name being floated. The people will have to move in a different direction if they are to save themselves.

The Assange Case Isn’t About National Security, It’s About Narrative Control

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Julian Assange once said, “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”

As someone whose life’s work before his imprisonment was combing through documents of an often classified nature, he’d have been in a prime position to know. He’d have seen time and time again how a nation’s citizenry are not under the slightest threat from the secret information in the documents that had been leaked to him from around the world, but that it could damage the reputation of a politician or a government or its military.

As the persecution of the WikiLeaks founder continues to trudge on with the UK government’s granting the Biden administration permission to appeal a declined extradition request, claiming that it can safely imprison Assange without subjecting him to the draconian aspects of America’s prison system which caused the initial dismissal, it’s good to keep in mind that this is being done entirely for the purpose of controlling public access to information that is inconvenient for the powerful.

The prosecution of Julian Assange under the Espionage Act is being touted by the US government as a matter of national security; you can’t simply allow journalists to publish classified information about the things its military forces are doing in the nations they occupy, because that could endanger American lives.

Leaving aside the fact that the Pentagon already admitted years ago that it could not find a single instance of lives being lost due to the publications for which Assange is currently being prosecuted, this case is not and has never been about national security. This case has always been about narrative control.

The US government is not afraid that unauthorized publication of government secrets will lead to Americans being killed, it’s afraid it will lead to their knowing the truth. The powerful understand that narrative control is everything, and that an entire globe-spanning empire depends on keeping the masses from having a lucid perception of what’s really going on in the world. There is an unfathomable amount of power riding on their ability to continue doing this.

Assange isn’t in Belmarsh Prison for doing something wrong, but for doing something right. For trying to give the public information which will help them form a truth-based worldview so that they can make intelligent informed decisions about where they want to collectively steer society together. Because the oligarchic empire depends on the ability to manipulate the way people think, act and vote to benefit the powerful, this was like handing someone who’s being groomed by a sexual predator a guidebook of all of the psychological tactics that are being used.

This good deed could not go unpunished.

Nothing WikiLeaks published endangered the American people, it endangered a globe-spanning empire’s ability to control our understanding of what’s happening in the world. This was a most egregious offense as far as our rulers are concerned, and it could not be allowed to stand.

So an example is being made. In less polite times Assange would have been tortured and drawn and quartered in the town square while the king looked on sipping from a goblet of mead. In the days of polite liberal democracy our rulers must remain hidden, and they must publicly torture dissidents to death in the name of national security concerns.

Beneath all the spin and excuses, this is all being done to show everyone what happens to you if you reveal embarrassing truths about the most powerful people on earth. If you compromise their political security. It’s telling the world, “If you ever try to interfere in our control over the dominant narratives, this is what we will do to you.”

And, whether we fully understand what’s really happening or not, that’s the message that is being ingested here. Journalists who find themselves in a position to publish such things going forward will find themselves thinking thoughts about what happened to Julian Assange.

This is why it’s so important that they don’t win this case. We cannot allow ourselves to be cowed away from the truth in this way, or else we’re flying blind. We’re unable to obtain information which will help us steer society in a truth-based direction.

The Assange case receives so much attention not because of interest in one man’s fate, but because of interest in everyone’s fate. If humanity is ever to turn away from its self-destructive patterns and create a healthy world, it will necessarily need to do so guided by the light of truth and transparency. As long as the powerful are able to keep us confused and deluded using propaganda and government secrecy, such a world will never come into being.

The War on Reality

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By CJ Hopkins

Source: Consent Factory, Inc.

So, the War on Reality is going splendidly. Societies all across the world have been split into opposing, irreconcilable realities. Neighbors, friends, and even family members are bitterly divided into two hostile camps, each regarding the other as paranoid psychotics, delusional fanatics, dangerous idiots, and, in any event, as mortal enemies.

In the UK, Germany, and many other countries, and in numerous states throughout the US, a “state of emergency” remains in effect. An apocalyptic virus is on the loose. Mutant variants are spreading like wildfire. Most of society is still shut down or subject to emergency health restrictions. People are still walking around in public with plastic face shields and medical-looking masks. The police are showing up at people’s homes to arrest them for “illegally gathering outdoors.” Any deviation from official reality is being censored by the Internet corporations. Constitutional rights are still suspended. Entire populations are being coerced into being injected with experimental “vaccines.” Pseudo-medical segregation systems are being brought online. And so on … you’re familiar with the details.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, and a few other countries, and in various other states throughout the US, there is no apocalyptic pandemic. People are just going about their lives as normal. OK, sure, there is a nasty virus going around, so people are taking common sense precautions, as people typically do for any nasty virus, but there is no “state of emergency” in effect, and no reason to radically transform society into a paranoid, pathologized-totalitarian dystopia.

This state of affairs, in which two contradictory, mutually-exclusive realities exist, is … well, it’s impossible, and so it cannot continue. Either there exists a devastating global pandemic that justifies a global “state of emergency,” the suspension of constitutional rights, and the other totalitarian “emergency measures” we have been subjected to since March of 2020 or there doesn’t. It really is as simple as that.

Except that it isn’t as simple as that. It is easy to forget, given the last 16 months, that people have been bitterly divided, and inhabiting mutually-exclusive realities, and regarding people who don’t conform to their realities as enemies for the last five years. I’m not talking about political disagreements, or even socio-cultural differences. I’m talking about contradictory realities. Things that actually happened, or didn’t happen. Things that exist, or do not exist.

I’m not going rehash the whole War on Populism — I covered it extensively at the time — but that’s when the current global-capitalist War on Reality was officially launched. It wasn’t just the usual lies and propaganda. It was a full-scale ideological assault. By the end of it, people actually believed that (a) Donald Trump was a Russian agent, (b) that he was literally Hitler, and so was going to stage some sort of “coup,” declare himself American Führer, and launch the “Trumpian-White-Supremacist Fourth Reich,” and (c) that he had actually attempted this by sending a few hundred unarmed protesters — violent domestic extremist grandmothers, father-and-son kill squads, and bison hat loonies — to “storm the Capitol” and overthrow the government during the so-called “January 6 Insurrection.”

So, when GloboCap rolled out the “New Normal” reality, they weren’t exactly starting from scratch. Millions of people — not just Americans, because the War on Populism was a global campaign — were already living in a new reality in which facts no longer mattered at all, where things that never happened officially happened, and other things that obviously happened never happened, not officially, or were “far-right extremist conspiracy theories,” “fake news,” or “disinformation,” or whatever, despite the fact that people knew that they weren’t.

But the goal of GloboCap’s War on Reality isn’t simply to deceive the masses and divide them into opposing camps. Rulers have been deceiving the masses and dividing them into opposing camps since the dawn of human civilization. This time, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

OK, bear with me now, because this gets kind of heady.

The War on Reality is not an attempt to replace reality with a fake reality. Or it is that, but that is only one part of it. Its real goal is to render reality arbitrary, to strip it of its epistemological authority, to turn it into a “floating signifier,” a word that has no objective referent, which, of course, technically, it already is. You cannot take a picture of reality. It is a concept. It is not a physical object that exists somewhere in time and space.

But let’s leave that last point for a later discussion. This is not the time to get lost in semiotics. For most people, for most practical purposes, reality is … well, reality. It’s objective. Material. It actually exists. It exists independent of our beliefs. It isn’t just an arbitrary, empty signifier that doesn’t actually refer to anything, but which we use, strategically, to assert authority, or to impose ideology on society. If that were the case, there would be no reality. Nothing would be true, everything would be permitted … which is a bunch of postmodern Marxist nonsense.

But just imagine, for a moment, if that were the case … if what determined reality was actually just a question of power rather than facts. Imagine that reality was just a concept that we used to mark the current limits of our knowledge and ideological beliefs. Our doctors — oncologists and virologists, for example, but they could be any kind of doctors or scientists — would be not all that different from medieval alchemists, who totally believed in their reality at the time, as did the patients they were treating, but which we know now was not reality at all, because our reality is the real reality. I mean, it’s not as if people, five hundred years from now, are going to look back at our medical practices and scientific knowledge, and laugh, like we do at those medieval alchemists, right?

Sorry, I got a little off track there. I was trying to explain the ultimate purpose of this global-capitalist War on Reality, and I wandered off into an ontological swamp, which isn’t going to get us anywhere. So, let’s get back to imagining reality, not as what we all know it is (i.e., an actual, material thing that exists), but as a construct people use to validate certain officially-sanctioned beliefs and perceptions and invalidate other beliefs and perceptions, more or less like a system of morals, except instead of dividing things into to “good” and “evil,” it divides things into “real” and “fake.”

Now imagine that you were an immensely powerful, globally hegemonic ideological system, and you wanted to impose your ideology on as much of the entire world as possible, but you didn’t have an ideology per se, or any actual values at all, because exchange value was your only real value, and so your mission was to erase all ideologies, and values, and truths, and belief systems, and so on, and transform everything and everyone in existence into de facto commodities that you could manipulate any way you wanted, because they had no inherent value whatsoever, because their only real value was assigned by the market.

How would you go about doing that, erasing all existing values, religious, cultural, and social values, and rendering everything a valueless commodity?

Well, you wouldn’t want to destroy reality completely, because people wouldn’t stand for that. They would freak right out. Things would get ugly. So, instead, you might want to go the other way, and generate a lot of contradictory realities, not just contradictory ideologies, but actual mutually-exclusive realities, which could not possibly simultaneously exist … which would still freak people out pretty badly.

Naturally, there would be one official reality that you would force everyone to rigidly conform to at any given moment in time, but you would change the official reality frequently, and force everyone to conform to the new one (and pretend that they’d never conformed to the old one), and then, once they had settled into that one, you would change the official reality again, until people’s brains just shut down completely, and they gave up trying to make sense of anything, and just tried to figure out what you wanted them to believe on any given day.

If you repeated that process long enough, eventually, nothing would mean anything anymore, because everything could potentially mean anything … at which point, you could basically tell people anything you wanted and they would go along with it, because what the hell difference would it make? A narcissistic billionaire ass-clown could be a Russian agent and literally Hitler. A half-assed riot could be an “insurrection.” Children could be born “systemically racist.” Men could menstruate. But wait … it’s gets better.

You could stage an apocalyptic global pandemic that only happened in certain countries, or in certain parts of certain countries, and that more or less mirrored natural mortality, and that didn’t drastically increase historical death rates, but was nonetheless totally apocalyptic.

Perfectly healthy people could become “medical cases.” You could count anyone who died of anything as having died of your apocalyptic virus. You could tell people in no uncertain terms that medical-looking masks will not protect them from viruses, and then turn around and tell them that they will, and then, later, publicly admit you were lying in order to manipulate them, and then deny you ever said that, and tell them to wear masks.

You could experimentally “vaccinate” millions of people whose risk of becoming seriously ill or dying from your apocalyptic virus was minuscule or non-existent, and kill tens or hundreds of thousands in the process, and the people whose brains you had methodically broken would thank you for murdering their friends and neighbors, and then rush out to their local discount drugstore to experimentally “vaccinate” their own kids and post pictures of it on the Internet.

At that point, you wouldn’t really have to worry about “populist uprisings,” or “terrorism,” or any other type of insurgent activity, because the vast majority of the global population would be scramble-headed automatons who were totally incapable of independent thought, and who had no idea what was real and what wasn’t, so just repeated whatever new script you fed them like customer-service representatives on Haldol.

It doesn’t get much better than that for globally hegemonic ideological systems!

OK, sorry, I think I got lost there again. I’m not sure what I was trying to say. I’ve been a little foggy lately. I’m not sleeping so well. It’s probably Long Covid. Or maybe it’s just that time of month. Whatever. It’s not like it matters anyway. Still, I think I’ll go down to my former local bookshop and get myself tested.

Have a nice day in … you know, reality!

Overcoming the Hypnosis of Fear

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By Julian Rose

Source: Waking Times

You are a Universal Being. Your body is just a vehicle for the manifestation of this Universal Being here on Earth. As a Universal Being your ‘essence’ lives forever. Start identifying your Self as a Universal Being, merged with the source of all existence. The more you live in this Self – the Real You – during this lifetime – the more seamless is the passage onwards at the time of passing.

Say:

“I am a spiritual entity and nothing can harm me, because ‘I’ am not this physical body which carries me through this third density existence experienced here on Earth. ‘I’ am soul, ether, spirit, plasma – and I chose to come back to planet Earth and to be reborn into a human body in order to perform valuable tasks and help realign Earthly existence with Cosmic existence – and thereby create harmony and balance.”

Repeat this – and feel the fear fall away. Feel it dissolve like the sun-burned morning mist.

Fear is a state of mind. A cramped mind. Every part of it is alien to us save that useful bit that warns us not to do some crazy act – like jump over the edge of a cliff under the illusion that one will sprout wings and fly away into the blue horizon!

Yes, the ‘real you’ can fly. The ether/spirit you. But the physical you is a gravity respecting entity here on dear mother Earth. Respect this type of fear, for it is a God given preservation instinct.

So, you are not convinced? You hold onto your fear because it seems ‘real’, doesn’t it? You quite like it, a sort of drug. After all every TV, newspaper, radio and neighbour is telling you ‘to be afraid.’ It’s easier to give in than not to. There are so many things you need to fear, they say, so many that there is almost no room left for anything else to get you going in a positive direction.

We live in a culture of fear, imposed by those we elect and allow to manage our lives. Think about it – so determined are most of us to avoid taking true responsibility for our lives and the lives of other living beings that we allow our minds to say to us “OK, that’s fine, leave it to the politicians, bankers and corporate board members to run our affairs for us.” Then we turn around and curse them for introducing a despotic top-down police-state agenda that makes a misery out of our lives!

How foolish can one get?

All the while ‘the elected ones’ (by us) learn better and better how to manipulate those who elected them, so that they can hold onto the power. They are addicted to power – and use it to make us addicted to fear. So we shrink, while they expand.

How very foolish so much of mankind is. Both parties, the purveyors of fear and the fearful, bogged-down in a rail siding leading to nowhere. Both sides bogged-down in a rail siding completely terminating our natural evolutionary instinct and putting in its place a state of perpetual self-imprisonment.

“Fear not!” say I, for anyone reading this is not heading for the end of the line or the gallows; is not busy constructing a hangman’s noose to stick his/her neck in. Nobody reading this can suffer the delusion that to profit from worldly riches is superior to profiting from the flow of Divine uplift. An ecstatic state which comes from rejecting fear and ceasing to hide in the shadows of a frightened ‘little me’.

This ‘little me’ is a hypnotised being who has convinced himself/herself that one can never step forward and take responsibility for one’s destiny, or make a valuable contribution on the stage of life.

Out you go ’little me’ – and stay out. No place for you in the unfolding age of Truth. For as has been said, You are not a cipher, You are a Divine eminence – and is that a quality to hide away under a cloak of self impoverishment? Well, is it?

After what seems like an interminable pause, an answer emerges: ‘NO’

And immediately, as if shot from a cannon, the Real You bursts upon the scene – soul-burden immeasurably lightened! Yes, I can see this Real You, right now, and I can tell you – you are an outstanding being with enough potential to single-handedly transform both yourself and your community into manifestations of an age of instant enlightenment!

Yes, my friend, I’m not talking about someone else, it’s you who is transformed. ‘Little me’, who was that? Never mind, gone forever.

Now you stand single, strong, proud, all traces of fear banished forever. Maybe for the first time, you are free, out of jail, ready to be intoxicated by the sweet scent of the wild rose, the symphonic triumph of the dawn chorus, the illustrious beauty of awakened nature calls you forth – rejoice in her and act in her defence!

Proudly step forward to defend her precious wealth of vital diversity, so cruelly sterilised by vampires wearing carefully pressed city suits and a fixed smile on their faces. They and their clan scared you once, didn’t they? But no more, you now see the fake smile for exactly what it is.

You are metamorphosed and stand shining, a ray of the living sun. Use your new gifts well, my friend, millions need the support of your awakened powers to themselves be awakened and freed from the hypnosis of fear. These are the builders of the New Society which is our imperative to create – and no one else’s.

Saturday Matinee: Kingpin

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Why I love Kingpin – A crude comedy about horrible people

The Farrelly brothers’ reached their vulgar, freewheeling peak with this 1996 bowling comedy.

By James Oddy

Source: Single White Lies

Irecently bombed a job interview that seemed a sure thing. It was a job I wanted and, even worse, a job I needed. I got the rejection call, then I missed my bus and had to wait in the rain. Then I lost my wallet. I felt like a real Munson. A born loser. Give me a wide berth.

So I went home and (re)watched the Farrelly brothers’ 1996 film Kingpin. I know what you’re thinking, it’s not the most obvious candidate for a feel good film. Actually, it may be one of the scuzziest films ever produced by a major studio. For the uninitiated, it tells the story of former “man-child” bowling prodigy Roy Munson (Woody Harrelson). An alcoholic, and devoid of his bowling hand after an unfortunate incident involving nemesis Ernie “Big Ern” McCraken (Bill Murray), Munson believes he’s found his ticket out of poverty with Ishmael (Randy Quaid), an Amish man hailing from rural Pennsylvania.

Subtlety isn’t this film’s strong point – most of the jokes concern some bodily function or another, or slapstick violence involving someone’s testicles, sometimes at the same time. What really sets it apart from other ’90s gross out comedies is how genuinely nasty the characters are. At the time of its release many critics, even the ones that liked it, described it as tasteless, vulgar and crude. In one of his most underrated performances, Harrelson is simply hilarious as the stupid, lazy and self-serving Munson.

Meanwhile, Bill Murray ad-libs almost every time he is on screen, giving a masterclass in smart arse performance as the womanising sleaze ball Ernie. Farrelly bros’ regular Rob Moran somehow manages to be even more unpleasant as a domestically abusive “bowling enthusiast” and sometime gangster called Stanley. Vanessa Angel’s Claudia is a born grifter and a bowling groupie. Even Ishmael is all too eager to abandon his Amish ways to enjoy the earthly pleasures of coffee and cigarettes. Along with a colourful supporting cast, this is one of the most glorious collections of freaks and weirdoes you’re ever likely to see on screen.

Kingpin also has a refreshing, freewheeling approach to genre. It’s a romantic comedy, a clash of cultures played for laughs, a buddy movie, a road movie and a underdog sports story all rolled into one 113-minute caper. It should also be noted that this is very much a film for adults, with explicitly adult themes. Yet it’s undercut with the universal message that, just maybe, everything will be okay in the end.

Ultimately, this is a story of redemption. A film that says you can always turn things around, that it’s always worth persevering. The 1990s and early 2000s saw a rise in “adult genres”, allowing filmmakers to take greater risks on mid-sized studio films. Kingpin is one of the finest examples of that trend, a film in which nobody involved is particularly interested in focus groups or target markets. It is what it is, warts and all.

After Kingpin, the Farrelly brothers began to scale back the sleaze, retreating to the safer shores of more formulaic rom-coms like There’s Something About Mary and Shallow Hal. But we’ll always have Munson to remind us that you never know when an Amish bowling prodigy might walk into your life and change everything.