The pipsqueak, by now, is an old, well-explored character in literature. Normally I’d avoid quoting Tao Lin, but he’s one of the few writers today who’s realized that the pipsqueak’s mind-disease has leaked out of literature and now roots in the populace at large—that is, we’re all of us, men and women, rich and poor, smart and dumb, we’re all of us becoming pipsqueaks. Never has this been more clear than at a party I attended last Friday night.

When people ask me what From Hell is about, I usually say that it's about Jack the Ripper, but not really. For me it's about architecture. Inspired by Douglas Adams' idea that crimes must be solved holistically, Alan Moore wrote his finest work across the span of seven years. During this time he attempted to solve the great mysteries of Victorian London, engaging in deep research that always seems to empty out into architecture and the deep structure of London as a (hole)y city.

“For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California . . . Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments.” -- Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism

At the end of March 2011, the Bloc Quebecois polled at 36.8% of the Quebec vote, which would give it about 45 seats in an election if it were held that day. Alas, the vote was held just over a month later: in the May 2011 election, the Bloc Quebecois won just four (4) of Quebec's 75 seats. It received 23.4% of the Quebec vote. With Bloc Quebecois fading from relevance, the future direction of the Quebec Sovereignty Movement is up for grabs.

Ever since reading that D.H. Lawrence was a reactionary monarchist, and having an Irish Lit. friend tell me that Yeats was an Irish Fascist, it's come to me that a significant number of Great Writers are reactionaries, far more than their percentage in the population at large probably justifies.

I have always been fascinated by games of war. I think its the ease in which my mind is able to sync with the way a war game works; in a war without the mucky mess of Clausewitz's political object, a war without worry of the consquences, the mind is free to zip along unadultered lines of strategy and tactics with a childish joy in its heart. The heart of the mind, I mean; the rest of it might still be freaking the fuck out. Which brings us to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup...

“Every country has the government it deserves.” Or, at least, they will eventually, for only the form of government suited to that nations specific circumstances will endure more than a few years. Anything else is an aberration. This all seems like common sense, of course, but becomes problematic when applied specifically, which is to say critically. For example, let us consider the “long counter-revolution” to borrow a phrase, of American social-politics: that is, the last 40 years.

This has been brought up before and undoubtedly a lot of you are familiar with the now infamous Wikipedia article about the Cultural Revolution that delves into a hilariously sickening level of anti-communist blood libel. However, what I find deeply interesting are the sources quoted in the article and academic articles written that treat such absolutely ludicrous accusations as fact without batting an eye.

First and foremost, I have come to the understanding that first-world feminism has almost nothing in common to the overwhelming majority of women of the world. The issues that I saw as important in my youth have never crossed the radar of these women and they are wary to concern themselves with issues such as abortion (hammered into every young USA feminist's head as the golden issue), sexuality, gender, dress, and public economic position.