Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Sept 17, 2001: George W. Bush - "This Crusade Is Gonna Take A While"




September 17th is Constitution Day.


On this day in 1787, delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia to sign the Constitution, shaping the future of the United States. All four pages of the U.S. Constitution are on permanent display in the Rotunda of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, alongside the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights.
America's Founding Documents


September 17, 1954: Classic novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding was published. It’s about a group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempt to govern themselves. I'm sure you've seen the original (1963) movie and the remake (1990) and maybe read it too.


The novel's title is a literal translation of Beelzebub, a biblical demon considered the god of pride and warfare. Golding, who was a philosophy teacher before becoming a Royal Navy lieutenant, experienced war firsthand, and commanded a landing craft in the Normandy landings during D-Day in 1944. After the war ended and Golding returned to England, the world was dominated by Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation, which led Golding to examine the nature of humanity and went on to inspire Lord of the Flies. TED-Ed video

In April 2023, the BBC announced that the British production company Eleven Film would produce the first ever television adaptation of the novel, written by screenwriter Jack Thorne.

A graphic novel based of the book, adapted and illustrated by Aimée de Jongh, was published on  September 12, 2024 in 35 countries. The Dutch version of the book was sold out in a day.

Iron Maiden wrote a song Lord Of The Flies inspired by the book, included in their 1995 album The X Factor.


Weird how this popped up on my search...


Donald Trump's classmates share their memories about his 'Lord of the Flies' days in military school





September 17, 1971: The first episode of The Persuaders was broadcast in some ITV regions. (Sept 18th in USA) It starred Tony Curtis as New York oil baron, Danny Wilde, and Roger Moore as Lord Brett Sinclair. There were 24 episodes until 25 February 1972.



The Persuaders Youtube playlist


Snowden and Gen. Michael Hayden at a gala in 2011 as he worked with the CIA’s account with Dell, Inc. before moving to Booz Allen under the NSA.


The former NSA & CIA director said of Snowden, "a troubled young man -- morally arrogant to a tremendous degree -- but a troubled young man." "I suspect he will end up like most of the rest of the defectors who went to the old Soviet Union: Isolated, bored, lonely, depressed -- and most of them ended up alcoholics." - Michael Hayden (Sept 17, 2013)
Former NSA chief


Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. born May 8, 1937 is a very mysterious man, said to have an extremely high IQ with deep knowledge on how the US gov/mil complex actually functions and notoriously reclusive from the media; few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s. Pynchon's most recent novel, BLEEDING EDGE, was published on Sept 17, 2013.


He also wrote a book titled "Mason & Dixon" (1997) of his interpretation about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon working with ley lines in laying out the boundary stones for the Mason-Dixon line between 1763 to 1768; after first Venus transit and before the second transit, prior to the American Revolution. A MacArthur Fellow, he is noted for his dense and very complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. His own family history was involved in the American Revolution War and one of his ancestors founded Springfield, MA.

Pynchon is a hard nut to crack. Biographical material is hard to come by, but here's a weird documentary about him.



"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
- Thomas Pynchon

“Chryskylodon Blues” 12-minute film by Laura Colella captures behind the scenes filming of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, shot in grainy Super-8 color. Its name comes from the place in the Thomas Pynchon novel called Chryskylodon Institute (“from an ancient Indian word meaning ‘serenity’), an upscale rehabilitation facility.

Time to get Pynchonized...

This is a story about the sixties: it's about me and some friends of mine, it's about Berkeley, and it's about Pynchon. It's about a decade in which we were all young together and thought we would stay young forever. Berkeley was our Vineland, a dream of a perfect new world. The time was ripe, America was ours, and we were going to change the world: Paradise Now or Apocalypse Now.

Neither one happened. As the decades pass, is anything left of that refuge, that Vineland, apart from memory and isolated dreams? Where are the sixties now? Where are we? And where is Thomas Pynchon?

    We are stardust, we are golden,
    We are billion-year-old carbon,
    And we've got to get ourselves
    Back to the garden.

        (Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock")

Ultimately, I suppose this story is all about me. Everything you write always is, disguise it as you may. I don't know what I can tell you about Thomas Pynchon, but I can tell you something about myself, about the impact that the sixties and Berkeley and Pynchon had on me. Vineland looks back on the late sixties, and I'm going to look back on 1964-67, from ages 19 to 22, when I was first going out into the world on my own and when my life became enmeshed with the fictions of Thomas Pynchon. I want to trace some of the parallels between life and fiction.

Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir by Andrew Gordon.

Some 62 years ago we had...


Oswald was conspicuously conspicuous in the months leading up to the assassination.  He played both for and against Cuban groups, and was interviewed on the radio. I think that’s the key: it’s not about being active politically, it’s about BEING SEEN to be active politically. For a couple of lone wolves, both Oswald and Routh seemed to be out in front of a camera, leafleting, protesting, being interviewed, right up to their respective ends.


They were hot in the in the 80's, but are explosive in the 21st century!



The beeperpalooza event should be a warning to any country that outsources its technology, manufacturing, and infrastructure to foreign companies when practically the whole world is at war. You simply cannot have national security when you outsource everything to foreign nations. Every component you outsource—whether it’s for communications or weapons or vehicles or food or medicine—is a potential ticking time bomb. Gives a whole new meaning to "my notifications are blowing up!"


Imagine electronic pulses in space that block signals and replace them with counterfeits. It's not science fiction, it’s science fact. Watch what could happen in our series on the space threats that inspired the creation of the U.S. Space Force. Funny how the US Space Force Space Systems Command put out this infomercial today. Then think about today's pager attack, your phone, any comms device.


Space Threats Episode 2 | ELECTRONIC WARFARE