Wertheimer

Now more than ever.

Last Thursday, in the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, two students were giving an in-class presentation on the composer John Cage. His most famous piece is “4’33”,” which directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that period of time.

I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon, because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway, but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building. Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.”

I did some easy googling and it's likely that John Cage would have wanted students to listen that way: “The powers-that-be have become more and more repellent,” he said in 1966. "Look at us in Vietnam. It is indefensible.”

Back to McWhorter:

I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans, or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza War would view them that way, in fact. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?

And what if John McWhorter were not a professor of linguistics, but actually a professor of cannibalism? That'd be pretty fucked up. What if, instead of writing books about language, he wrote books about how to cook and eat babies?

Favorite part:

The other night I watched a dad coming from the protest with his little girl, giving a good hard few final snaps on the drum he was carrying, nodding at her in crisp salute, percussing his perspective into her little mind. This is not peaceful.

NEW YORK—Provided with a bullish catalyst as the world was cast into perpetual darkness, brimstone stocks rose Tuesday on news that the Antichrist had ushered in the Age of Eternal Misery. “Common shares of brimstone surged to all-time highs after the Antichrist announced a new era of pestilence and never-ending woe,” said hedge fund manager Wayne Rebhorn, who explained that brimstone futures had been climbing ever since the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse burst onto the scene, disrupting incumbent false prophets. “We expect infernal flames of despair and agony to be the prevalent theme for the next millennium at least, with brimstone being one of the largest beneficiaries of the macro trend. Given the rise in investor interest in objects of human torment, today’s brimstone prices certainly aren’t cheap, but there are still gains to be had when you factor in all the ungodly who will need to be cast into fiery lakes of burning sulfur.” At press time, forecasts had projected that brimstone could grow to be a $40 trillion industry by the End Times.

The New York Times Simulator is out now, free to play from any browser. It works decently on mobile too. It’s a meta news game about how corporate media manufacture consent for genocide, minimize police misconduct, and serve the ruling class.

The content of the game is literally “ripped from the headlines” in that it uses mostly real headlines (and even actual edits) from the NYT, the Wall Street Journal, and other “liberal” mainstream media. I originally wanted to make parody headlines but I just couldn’t come up with anything more shameless and contrived than what’s already out there.

Oh shit oh fuck

THE HEAVENS—In a statement addressed to individuals at risk of having their access to life on earth permanently revoked, God, the Almighty Creator, confirmed Monday that He would soon delete millions of humans due to inactivity. “To my dear creations, per My all-seeing eye, you have not been an active participant in the human race since Feb. 5, 2015,” a voice from on high bellowed to Justin Buller, 35, of Nashua, NH, one of an estimated 700 million people who received similar messages, which cited a service agreement for use of the planet under which the Lord God is said to retain the right to delete any and all of His creations who fail to do anything of value with their lives. “If you wish to continue living on your current plane of existence, please drop to your knees and pray to the heavens within the next 30 days; otherwise, your body, mind, and soul will be removed from the cosmos for all time. And since you haven’t done anything with your life, no evidence you once lived will remain behind when you’re gone. This is your final warning. You will not be able to recover your place on earth once the grace period has expired.” At press time, God had sent numerous blights, plagues, and floods to free up extra space in the universe.

Teenage angst has paid off well, now I'm bored and old.