March 21 Update: A New Great Game in the Baltic Sea; Tech 'Rationalism' and Serial Killers; French Prisons go American; It's Meir Kahane's Israel Now; LASD Challenges Civilian Oversight.

"No husband, No Fatherland, No Boss" - it's different 'over there' ©Ali Winston

Having fun living through a sped-up version of the 1930s? Or are we slowing wending our way through a redux of the workup to Archduke Franz Ferdinand's 1914 assassination in Belgrade? Either way you slice it, Israel's imperial expansion into Syria and Lebanon plus the Trump Administration's apparent abandonment of Ukraine and Europe to the whims of Vladimir Putin's own dreams of aping Tsar Peter the Great give new meaning to the old adage about decades when nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen. When France is mulling over whether to give Germany access to its nuclear arsenal, you know it's about to go down.

I've been outside the U.S. for a while now (ergo the recent radio silence) and aside from levels of entirely justified anti-American sentiment that I haven't seen since the post-2003 invasion of Iraq, it has been remarkable to watch the speed at which seemingly stolid institutions have cowered in the face of a president with the third-smallest margin of victory in American history. Forget that decade-long spike in extreme right wing domestic terrorism, now the Justice Department is locked in on Tesla vandalism, Habitat for Humanity and climate justice groups as equivalent threats. Not to mention detaining legitimate green card holders for their Palestinian solidarity work, or in some cases, no discernible reason at all.

On my end, I circled back on the universe of extortion and child pornography cults best exemplified by Com/764, this time exploring their evolution towards real-world violence. Assaults, stabbings, murder plots and attempted school shootings have all been connected to a splinter faction known as 'No Lives Matter,' with criminal cases cropping up in the United States, Sweden, Great Britain, and elsewhere. What stood out most during this reporting is the evolution of these young perpetrators towards 'hybrid' extremist motivation, whereby they cobble together elements from seemingly rival belief systems to justify acts of mass violence.

For paid subscribers, I published an item earlier this month that is a bit of inside baseball to the Terrorgram Collective story that surfaces allegations made by federal prosecutors in a now-sealed filing claiming the propaganda network's leaders Dallas Erin Humber and Matthew Robert Allison were in direct contact with two mass shooters in Slovakia and Brazil. In addition to the aforementioned evidence that appears to greatly bolster the government's material support for terrorism case against the pair, the filing also alleges Matt Allison had writings and text messages indicating his desire to murder and disembowl a pregnant woman, as well as find an underage boy to use as a "sex slave." Yes, it's shocking material, but the bigger picture here is the apparent influence of Order of Nine Angles/Tempel ov Blood ideology on the Terrorgram network. I'll have far more on this in a longer feature for WIRED later this spring. And if you're interested in the paywalled content here at Bleeding Edge, follow this prompt. Subscriber numbers are still climbing, and that server space don't come for free.

That's all for now. Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-As discussed above, there absolutely is a new Great Game afoot, and large chunks of it are playing out in Northern Europe's Baltic Sea, a key body of water where commerce, energy and military interests have reared their heads in a series of jarring and bizarre events. The sabotage by Ukrainian special forces of the Nordstream natural gas pipelines in 2022 was just the start: since then, Russian military maneuvers prompted Sweden to rearm and man positions they'd abandoned since the Cold War, and suspicious tankers have severed fiber-optic cables with conspicuously-timed anchor drops. The Financial Times took a shot at explaining this intricate dance with a detailed interactive piece last week that exemplifies how to use graphics and cartography as a storytelling mechanism. More of this, please.

-Since a January shootout near the Canadian border that resulted in the death of a Border Patrol agent, reams have been written about the Zizians, a cult that spun out of the Bay Area 'rationalist' (read 'completely fucking irrational) movement that is devoted to better living through eugenics, machine leaning and hyperconnected humanity. Think of it as the modern iteration of Ray Kurzweil's Singularity, except with a hefty dose of repackaged race science and financial fraud thrown in, as per some reporting I did for the Guardian with Jason Wilson last summer. There are many reasons to read about the Zizians' cross-country murder spree that ranged from California to Pennsylvania and back up to Vermont - including the hysterical tactic of rolling the eyes back to try and mar a criminal mugshot - but Evan Ratliff's detailed account of the movement down the years from a true understander of Silicon Valley's most insane depths is head and shoulders above the competition.

-The rightward shift on criminal justice is proceeding apace in Europe as well as the United States. France, home to the Old Continent's largest prison (Fleury-Mérogis) and wildly overcrowded facilities (81,000 inmates living in spaces designed for 62,000 inhabitants reminiscent of turn-of-the-Millenium California, approved the creation of supermax 'narcoprisons' to house high level drug traffickers. The initiative of President Emmanuel Macron's interior minister, Gerard Darmanin, was designed in response to the shocking escape of Mohammed "the Fly" Amra, who was broken out of custody last year while being transported to court in a brazen assault that left two prison guards dead. Though Amra was recaptured earlier this year, his case shed light on the French prison system's lawlessness and the ease at which criminal organizations are run from behind bars. The new prisons, which were approved by the legislature with the key support of the Neo-Fascist Rassemblement National, will place up to 800 sensitive inmates in solitary confinement, restrict them to no contact visits, and subject them to strip searches. It's notable that the conditions which France's left condemn as 'torture' and 'a sadistic vision' are...standard in American prisons. Via Mediapart [French].

-Want to understand the Jewish Supremacist mania and commitment to genocidal violence that forms the hard core of Israeli society? Look no further than Meir Kahane, an extremist American rabbi murdered 35 years ago in New York City by an Egyptian Islamist (like attracts like). Amongst his lovely beliefs were a conviction that Arabs must be expunged from Israel by whatever means necessary (yes, murder included) and that Israel must be a Jewish-only state. All that sounds eerily familiar because these creeds are now mainstream, thanks to Bibi Netanyahu's alliances with extremist sects and settlers in his current bid to avoid corruption charges and stay in power while perpetuating a genocide in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Joshua Leiffer's longread in the Guardian is an important reminder of this often-neglected history.

-Kafka's got nothing on the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. California's largest law enforcement agency, replete with its sordid history of deputy gangs, rampant jailhouse abuse, wanton shootings and even direct intimidation of the FBI, is at it again. This time, Los Angeles Sheriff Robert Luna is directly challenging the authority of the LA County Civilian Oversight Commission, tasked with keeping LASD in line, by refusing subpoenas for deputy personnel records. This cuts to the core of independent civilian oversight and flies not only in the face of California law but also recent LA voter referendums that explicitly granted such power to the oversight commission. 'No kings' is a mantra that sheriffs would do well to remember, but trampling on the Constitution is a time-honored cop tradition.

BOOK - I'm doing something a bit different here: an old friend of mine has been working on a fiction project for some time now that took on some...let's say, timely relevance this past December with the killing of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson. Far from the jury-tampering clickbait documentaries churned out in the wake of Luigi Mangione's arrest - which, ironically, could jeopardize the prosecution over chain of custody and jury tampering issues - JJ Stavros Schaffer's The Ash Swimmers is a novel-in-progress that tracks an eerily similar campaign of corporate assassination and score-settling. I've found the 16 chapters publish so far to be compelling and tightly written. Judge for yourselves.

FILM - Pepe le Moko (1937) is a cinematic gem for myriad reasons: peak Jean Gabin in arguably his greatest role alongside Renoir's La Grande Illusion (which came out the same year), unparalleled location filming in Algiers' pre-WWII Casbah, and the inspiration for Looney Tunes' Pepe Le Pew character, I shit thee not. You'll get a timeworn crook-on-the-lam caper with some sharp-edged dialogue, those iconic 1930s Citroens and Peugots rolling around shadowed North African streets, and some sharp plot twists. But more than anything, appreciate what a gorgeous city Algiers was before decades of war ripped it apart.

MUSIC - Like loud music? Hate nativist politicians? Wish bands still sounded raw while taking a stand? Then Los Angeles stalwarts Brujeria is the group for you, and 1995's Raza Odiada [hated race] should do the trick. It's an acquired taste for certain, but hey, you all bought the ticket so take the ride along with me. Pete Wilson's favorite!