#262: It's Epstein's World (And We're Just Dying In It)

I don't even particularly think Chomsky was involved in the, as Nick Mullen would say, molestacio – he could've been, I don't know, and he doesn't really deserve the benefit of the doubt – but for NOAM CHOMSKY, the public figure Noam Chomsky is supposed to be, it's almost worse if he spent years kissing the ass of the 87 IQ pedophile because he RESPECTED him so goddamn much

the biggest ho that Scotland's got, and by christ you are not prepared to her have throw it back

I love an understandably rare MSJ gigglesode! See y’all down at the Cocksucker’s Ball

There are mobjects, there are mitems, there are mideas, there are mypotheses, there are mubjects, and there are mudflaps, and woe betide what nations shall conflate them

I think it must be that somebody showed him a Fourier transform before he allegedly dropped acid with Deepak Chopra, and he spent 72 hours thinking he could see reality as vibrations. Which raises two primarily questions: #1, what kind of vibrations are we seeing for "child molester," and #2, can you imagine what it would be like to do some "spiritual retreat" bullshit and realize, too late to withdraw, that you're about to DROP ACID WITH JEFFREY EPSTEIN

Give em time, they may yet build it on top of Gaza

buddy, you bring the side of beef to the studio, you're not leaving till you throw some punches

https://www.discogs.com/release/10444338-The-Clovers-The-Orioles-Cocksuckers-Ball-Its-Too-Soon-To-Know

I don't know if Czechs hate Slovaks now, or vice versa, or if they're tight bros, or if nobody cares in either country, but on behalf of all musicians and listeners with discerning taste, I would like to issue an official DEATH/CORNER commendation and letter of gratitude to onetime Czechoslovaks and present-day Slovaks, specifically Jan Jurco and the town of Čadca, for maintaining and improving the production of vacuum tubes for musical purposes. This is in no way a joke. Since nearly every other industrial and mechanical sector stopped relying on vacuum tubes, especially when the Soviet Union collapsed and previously-embargoed devices like transistors started pouring into newly "post-Soviet" Eurasia, guitarists have had 3 real sources for tubes, though there's a lot of deceptive brand-name bullshit that makes the field seem much larger: • the Reflektor factory in Novosibirsk, Russia – which, I swear to god, was where Lee Harvey Oswald worked during his Russian vacation – which was bought by Electro-Harmonix founder and inveterate con man Mike Matthews, who changed its name to "New Sensor" to avoid genocidal American rage over anything "Russian," and who then made the evil but very smart move of buying the names and trademarks from the most presitigious tube manufacturers, who had no use for them; you'll see modern tubes branded Mullard, Tung Sol, Gold Lion, Genalex Electro-Harmonix, Sovtek (the exact same entity as Electro-Harmonix, just incorporated in Russia), and though their designs differ to some degree, they're all made in that one factory by that one company owned by that one guy • "China" in general, which used to mean the Shuguang factory and now means 2 separate facilities for Shuguang and PSVANE in Changsha, and Chinese tubes are also labeled as a dozen different "brands," but in this case it's the Western distributors making up brand names, and I don't think the Chinese producers have anything to do with the labeling – anything badged as Ruby, Groove Tubes, or Tube Amp Doctor is Chinese, and there are also tubes sold straight-up as Shuguang and PSVANE (that is a HORRIBLE-sounding piece of language), plus the occasional tube with no brand that just says "CHINA," • and then, arguably most importantly, there's JJ, which is essentially all the designs and machinery from Warsaw Pact-era Czechoslovakia, which a guitar player named Jan Jurco (hence "JJ") acquired for what I imagine was an *insanely* low price in the 1990s, because he realized that there would be a collapse in the guitar-amp world if all the Eastern Bloc tube manufacturers suddenly disappeared – the major Western brands were all defunct by then – AND that those Eastern-Bloc tubes were actually more rugged and better-designed than the legendary Western tubes like Mullard, Philips/Sylvania, Amperex, Siemens, etc., because embargoes forced the Soviet-aligned world to use vacuum tubes much longer than the West did, which meant they also got considerably better at building them, and while I will admit that Electro-Harmonix makes the best modern EL34 (rebuild of East German RFTs from the ’70s), and Shuguang makes by FAR the best modern 6L6 (rebuild of the old Philips/Sylvania STR415s), everything else is pretty much JJ down the line. The best 12AX7/ECC83 preamp tubes, no question, plus a couple cool variations; the best 6V6s by far, the smaller 6L6 cousin you'd find in a Princeton or Deluxe; the best EL84s by FAR by far by far, like all-timer shit. I've got an amp that's still mostly stocked with Soviet-era 6p14p Reflektors, their equivalent of an EL84, and the JJs are every bit their equal. And even when I prefer a particular tube to the JJ version(s), the JJs are ALWAYS eminently usable, always sound good, and often sound better-than-good. Their basic EL34 is wayyyy better than anything but the EHX, and they do some interesting variations like the E34L (much more aggressive tube, patterned after the Svetlana SED "Winged C") and EL34II (quite recently designed on spec for Marshall, designed around the Mullard XF4, very cool combination of EL34 and 6L6 traits). And whatever the audio equivalent of "sight unseen" is, I suppose "tone unheard," I trust the JJ 6L6 over anything that's not in the Philips/Sylvania STR 387 (made for Fender) to STR 415 (made for Mesa/Boogie) to STR 440 (made for Mesa/Boogie when Philips/Sylvania shut down and only Shuguang could copy the 415s right). I have realized, at several points during this exposition, that you may or may not play an instrument, and even if you're an electric guitarist, you may not give a shit about vacuum-tube history. But I really mean it when I thank the whole post-WW2 history of united or divided Czech and Slovak states, because if JJ didn't exist, it might not have been possible for tube amplifiers (include bass amps as well, and amps built into electric pianos and organs, and tube-based pedals, and tube-based studio rack gear) to persist beyond the end of the USSR. Meaning that all music would sound worse, and TONE is such a huge part of the songwriting and arranging imagination that music in general would also be worse written, worse recorded, worse mixed, worse mastered, and worse worse. (If you're a guitarist, and if you have an amp that runs on 6L6s, allow me to put you onto some game: Mesa/Boogie no longer sells the 6L6 GC STR 440s, those copies of the Philips 415s. There was a small fire at the Shuguang factory a few years ago, and then a mess of zoning and permit details, so Shuguang went dark for a couple years, and Mesa couldn't rely on their unsold stock. But those 440s are back in production now, billed as the Ruby 6L6GCM STR, exact same thing, and if you put those in an amp that's been running on Groove Tubes or Sovteks or whatever, you will not goddamn believe what you hear.)

It is fucking crazy that you have a direct connection to that story. I know it very well – it was the stock "secret evils of secular culture" reference in a place like Missouri and a time like the early and mid-1990s. And I just saw your edit; I was gonna say, I thought one guy died immediately and the other nonfatally blew off the lower half of his face, which is pretty high on my list of the worst fucking things that could plausibly happen to the average person. I don't mean it as any kind of joke or ridicule when I say (to everybody, because I imagine you know perfectly well) ***do not shoot yourself by putting a gun in your mouth or under your chin*** – ideally, don't shoot yourself at all, but especially not like that. It is INSANE how often that leaves people alive and brutally disabled, and nobody ever talks about it, because, as Americans, we have a belief system constructed around the central tenet that it is much worse to SAY the worst possible thing than to DO it, and that if we never ever talk about something, it will vanish from the world of its own accord. If you start looking for that, the frequency with which *mentioning* something is punished far more severely than the thing itself, it will drive you insane. Every time somebody starts bloviating about "our Puritan heritage," you know it's going to concern the public display and utilization of buttcheeks, but – à propos for the season, and relative to something you'll soon see – the Puritans weren't just standard-issue smug Protestants, they were freaks, and the name itself testifies to their core ethos, namely that all ungodly things shall cease, and all manner of thing shall be well, if human beings just do not think or speak of the unholy. They also believe that the "covenant of works," i.e. salvation in return for divine obedience, is impossible after original sin, so that no human being can "earn" or "deserve" salvation, AND they believe in predestination of both the saved and the damned, beyond all human knowledge or alteration. Now you might think that if everyone is already saved or damned, and your own behavior can never merit salvation on its own, then you would do whatever the fuck you wanted to – and indeed this was briefly the case with the Antinomians, who reacted to the early popularity of Martin Luther with the fairly straightforward idea that if the Vatican has no real spiritual authority, and all goodness or salvation are a matter between Christ and the individual, then fuck everybody else's rules, you should just do what you think is good, right? And Luther himself stepped in to tell the Vatican, "Please kill these people. They're getting my shit wrong and making me look stupid," and indeed the temporal powers allied with the Roman curia did kill, lo! did they kill, the Antinomians. So if every human afterlife is predetermined, and there is no ecclesiastical institution or ritual observance capable of granting anyone a special dispensation against the Will of the LORD, but you ALSO can't just do whatever you want and are obligated to practice the most soul-crushing artless literal-minded Anglo-Saxon version of a faith which, frankly, never really hung together great in the first place – if your religion needs the entire "history" of Judaism as a preface, and you aren't Jewish, your religion is what would now be called "fanfic" – well, then, clearly, you need to orient your existence around the outward display of "purity" and utter contempt for the "impure," to the point of very casually murdering them, because then other people will look at you and think "Now THAT guy is going to Heaven." ... Except that thought is, in itself, sinful, since it assumes a prerogative of human reason in matters of salvation. And trying to LOOK "saved" is the most grievous sin of all, because it not only renders salvation a matter of individual egotism, and therefore DESIRE, which is by its very nature a form of blasphemy, it ALSO misleads humanity into belief that they too can assure their salvation by looking like they're going to Heaven, and he who would "look saved" is thus the Archdevil and Father of Lies, who battens on the artifice of his own self-satisfaction in the place of GOD's will, and who, ill-content to live alone in monstrous sin, damns and dooms humanity in toto with the heretical fiction that mankind may do say make think practice believe ANYTHING that indicates, let alone BIASES, the fate of any single soul, which is the LORD's alone. And yet here we are. Because Protestantism, and especially Calvinism, and *especially* the American varities of Calvinism, don't make any fucking sense, and by their own internal logic, they are impossible to obey, since you're not allowed to do anything bad, and you have to do good things, but also you don't know what's bad or good, except that the baddest of the bad is to think you know what "good" is. Thence the "moral" tenor of our state. Now sic THAT on some white people and see what they do with 400 years.

Pwer. Legal. Political. Financail. Value. Wealth.

That's so rad man

The whole John Butler Train thing scares the hell out of me. Learning too much about how reality operates, in a time when you were barely allowed to SAY any of it, let alone find any receptive audience for it, and being so deranged by it that you start to believe you were somehow responsible, this is not an unfamiliar notion to me, nor does it appear to be especially new – there's a Walter Sickert painting called JACK THE RIPPER'S BEDROOM which, if you know it was painted by a man whose contact with the monstrous realities of East End poverty, and with elite immunity from consequences for unimaginable crimes, drove him to the obsessive delusion that he was either the Ripper's accomplice or the Ripper himself, is the most frightening thing ever painted

me, Limp Legg, and Money Waters all live in the same apartment and we only fusk with a Tight Lounch

Seconding this because I would really like a source for Yeltsin's happy recollections of his childhood recreations, specifically.

“Baby I need your tunch”

I am WAY more aware of numbers stations that I should be. There's a free archive of numbers-station recordings called The Conet Project, and when I had my first psychotic breakdown, I listened to those recordings for 48 straight hours while playing Stan Brakhage's autopsy movie on repeat

there is no chance that Jeffrey Epstein knew the word "prosody"

Weirdly happy that I picked up on that but also holy shit, what a retarded world we live in, thank you for continuing to consume and transmute the horrors for our listening pleasure (?)