Salt City Sinner

Humans tell stories constantly: to ourselves, about ourselves, and about the world. Collectively, the stories we tell and are told make up culture. It is thus worth noting which stories we choose to tell and, vitally, how closely those stories map the real, material world.

( This is part two of my review of Them: Adventures with Extremists, by Jon Ronson. You can read part one here .) Posted on 11/17/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Two decades are sprawled between our present moment and the time period captured by Jon Ronson’s Them: Adventures with Extremists . That represents a pretty substantial chunk of data that we can use to assess Ronson’s analytical prowess in profiling extremists. What did Ronson tell us about the Klan, about Alex Jones, and about Omar Bakri Mohammed? The edition of Them that I read contained a forward by Ronson, penned in June of 2002, that attempted to answer this question in the period just after 9/11, a time period in which billing one’s self as “bin Laden’s man in Great Britain” may not have been the wisest move (Omar was eventually arrested, released, deported… It’s a long saga, but it ends with him in a prison cell in Lebanon, where he languishes as of 2019). Ronson recalls a conversation he had with Mohammed...

Jon Ronson and Alex Jones, in happier times Posted on 11/13/2019 by the Salt City Sinner It’s telling that the debate over Bill Clinton’s conduct found the majority of both conservatives and liberals arguing not about consent, not about sexual harassment or workplace safety, but about libertinage. This allowed both tribes of elderly white men (with some younger white men and a few white women) to sidestep a number of thorny questions. Consent, workplace harassment, and the ever-hungry male gaze (a gaze not bounded on the left or the right, we discovered) – all of these issues were obscured by the prurient details of Bill Clinton’s sex life, the tawdriness of it all. Conservatives got to clutch their pearls, and liberals got to feel contempt for the prudes who did the pearl-clutching. That was always bullshit, of course, and both liberals and conservatives knew it. Conservatives never gave a toss for personal probity or morality in any real sense – only for the advanceme...

Illustration by Miguel Ángel posted on 12/16/2018 by the Salt City Sinner The Religious Education Series is has proved to be an interesting and welcome addition to life in Salt Lake City. Since 2017, Executive Director Megan Kennedy has presented a series of free public lectures on topics including religion, anthropology, and archaeology. On Saturday, RES (in conjunction with the Godless Rebelution Podcast , which sounds like a lot of fun based on the name) presented the seventh lecture in the series, “Delusions of the Gods: The Colonial Racism of Ancie1nt Aliens, Mormon Anthropology, & Other Pseudohistory.” Recordings of all of the RES lectures can be found here for free, which is mighty generous of them. Now, I was not in need of a debunking on this subject. I absolutely did not subscribe to the “ancient aliens” theory going in, and have long considered it to be both nonsense and not a particularly rich vein of nonsense at that (although I have a lingerin...

posted on 12/4/2013 by the Salt City Sinner Bored on a snowy day? Pestered by persistent political perfidy? Looking to limber up your worldview or sprout a proud rack of plenti-pointed paranoias? I have just the fun time activity for you! Think of this post as “interactive” in the sense of a Choose Your Own Adventure book or a dice-and-paper role playing game. Indeed, you will need dice to play this game, which we'll call “Could It Be Or Couldn't It.” CIBOCI will require two six-sided die (or 2d6), the type you can find in any Yahtzee box or dusty old Monopoly set. In a pinch, one could theoretically use the fuzzy dice from one's rear-view mirror, as long as they roll and have six sides. warning: there is a not inconsequential risk this may happen All righty, at this preliminary stage we must separate the goats from the lambs, so to speak, so CHOOSE YOUR OWN INTRODUCTORY SECTION. Those of you who are rational/material types, or purely in this for The Chuckles, g...

posted on 4/20/2013 by the Salt City Sinner A conspiracy theory without Glenn Beck kicking in his two cents is like a kiss without whiskers as the saying goes (or is it a soup without salt?). Joining the illustrious ranks of such deep thinkers as Alex Jones, Beck is now convinced that the official story on the Boston bombings is so much flim-flam and hocus-pocus. Like a newly hatched baby turtle’s irrepressible urge to seek the sea, or a flower’s instinctual strain for the light of the sun, Beck’s internet vanity press, The Blaze, is inevitably advancing the theory that all this Boston carnage has something to do with Benghazi. “Huh?” you say. Well, that’s not really a word, mister, but I’m willing to forgive it in this case because, seriously, huh? It’s not necessarily surprising that Beck’s first and most authentic reaction to the tragedy in Boston was to   use it  to   sell gold  . Glenndolf Beckler is, after all, a good capitalist, although his theory ...

posted on 4/19/2013 by the Salt City Sinner Bombings in Boston. A man with loaded weapons on the White House grounds. Poisoned letters. A massive explosion in Texas. It has been the kind of week that makes you feel like it’s quite possible you’ve simply gone insane; that some fantastic machinery cooked up in the architecture of your sleeping brain must have lumbered into your waking life. Surely none of it is real, right? A lot of Americans (and I’m including myself here) are incredibly poorly equipped to deal with the brutal and unpleasant nature of the world that we have, in part, helped to make the way it is. It’s worth noting that the entire country has apparently lost its collective mind over the attacks in Boston that killed three and horribly injured dozens, but that on that same day in Iraq, a string of bombs in Baghdad killed 55 people and injured countless more. Obviously any connection between the two – Boston and Baghdad – only exists (if at all) in a tenuous and...

posted on 4/17/2013 by the Salt City Sinner ( Editor's Note : It goes without saying that what happened in Boston on Monday is horrific. Three deaths, countless injuries -- what motivated the attacker or attackers is not important. What is important is that we keep the people of Boston in our thoughts.) As I'm fond of saying, "there is no bottom floor in hell." Loosely translated, what I mean by that is that there is no situation in which conditions can't get worse, no level of stupidity that can't get dumber, no plumbed depth that won't look like a dip in a puddle compared to some inevitable later excursion into the watery abyss of crazy. With that in mind, I'd like to say a few words tangentially related to Monday's bombings in Boston, with a massive caveat: there's not much to say, really, about the bombings themselves other than "that is awful" and "nobody knows yet what the h*ck is going on." So this is less about...

posted 1/25/2013 by the Salt City Sinner What is  it with Aaron Klein and the occult? I can easily explain my own fascination, but A.) I'm not a worshiper of YHWH, and B.) I'm not ensconced in a worldview where demonic entities are lurking around every corner, curdling milk and snacking on good Christian infants. In fact, summoning or communicating with "demonic" forces is like many facets of magick or occult practice-- tricky, difficult, and not for the lazy or inexperienced. Yesterday we were illuminated by Klein's theory that the Sandy Hook massacre was motivated by Satanism (a theory based on one statement by one sketchy source to a tabloid that Adam Lanza had a "web page with the word 'SATAN' on it" in Gothic font -- impeccable "journalism," Aaron!). Well kiss my grits and slap my hamhocks silly, because Investigator Klein is back with a bold new theorem, this time regarding the possible demonic possession and/or actua...

posted 10/23/2012  by the Salt City Sinner Greetings, wage slaves! If there are two things I love (there are a lot more than two things I love), they are breakfast and science fiction. In this very special edition of Salt City Sinner we will examine a few slightly more (or less) esoteric science fiction television programs in terms of what breakfast they represent. What were my criteria for picking this show instead of that? Don't ask any damned questions, just roll with it, and feel free to comment. First up! nice LaserDisc you have there Series: Any Star Trek Pros: Functioning positive example of Socialist government (oh wait, all of Europe before the Eurozone crisis also qualified/s) Cons: Ferengi ear-sex is mad creepy Breakfast: Two eggs fried over easy with bacon and white toast. Reliable, sensible, old-school. Series:  Any Star Wars Pros:  Seriously awesome set design and internal cohesion (pre-prequels) Cons: George Lucas Breakfast: ...

posted 10/5/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Greetings, sheeple, from my stronghold high atop the Wells Fargo Building in downtown Salt City, where I type this before a massive, glowing bank of monitors that display the ongoing progress of my 23-point plan for complete social control. Whether you want to demonize me as a "liberal," or prefer the Glenn Beck update "progressive," we all know the truth, and it's time to pull the curtain aside: like all left-leaning persons, I am actually a member of the Illuminati. How else to explain how much power my side of the aisle wields in U.S. American politics? According to conservatives, liberals/the Illuminati control the media * , science * , academia in general * , public schools * , public radio * , pretty much anything "public," the courts * , and Hollywood * . Hell, we pretty much control everything except for scrappy, underdog operations like WND and Fox News, or quiet, marginalized voices like...