For time beyond memory, the Nine Families watched from the shadows, believing themselves shepherds and manipulating whole societies as they saw fit. Nothing happened that they didnt observe or control. Outsiders knew naught of the Families, much less threatened them. Until now. A blend of The X-Files and Marvels A.I.M.! Featuring art by Pete Woods (Deadpool, Catwoman, Superman, Action Comics).
For time beyond memory, the Nine Families watched from the shadows, believing themselves shepherds and manipulating whole societies as they saw fit. Nothing happened that they didn't observe or control. Outsiders knew naught of the Families, much less threatened them. Until now. Van Jensen (Green Lantern Corps, The Flash) and Pete Woods (Action Comics, Deadpool) join forces for a high-octane sci-fi thriller. Delve into a conspiracy millennia in the making.
When nations decide to disown their troubled pasts, how does this strategic disavowal harden into social fact? In Negative Exposures, Margaret Hillenbrand investigates the erasure of key aspects of such momentous events as the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square protests from the Chinese historical consciousness, not due to amnesia or censorship but through the operations of public secrecy. Knowing what not to know, she argues, has many stakeholders, willing and otherwise, who keep quiet to protect themselves or their families out of shame, pragmatism, or the palliative effects of silence. Hillenbrand shows how secrecy works as a powerful structuring force in Chinese society, one hiding in plain sight, and identifies aesthetic artifacts that serve as modes of reckoning against this phenomenon. She analyses the proliferation of photo-forms—remediations of well-known photographs of troubling historical events rendered in such media as paint, celluloid, fabric, digital imagery, and tattoos—as imaginative spaces in which the shadows of secrecy are provocatively outlined.
Operation Mind Control - The CIA - The Making and Unmaking of a KILLER! This is the most terrifying true story ever to emerge from the united states. Walter Bowart has uncovered a huge government ""cryptocracy"" dedicated to controlling and manipulating human minds. Through hypnosis and drugs, ordinary citizens became CIA zombies, human computers, spies, trained assassins, with no control over their consciousness or consciousness of their actions. Only unexplained memory gaps, or a separate personality which emerged on a trigger cue, showed the victim that something else was amiss. Bowart's devastating account includes top secret documents cold-bloodedly outlining the cryptocracy's program, and startling new evidence to link Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, and Sirhan Sirhan with Operation Mind Control. In the Manchurian Candidate that was fiction - OPERATION MIND CONTROL IS CHILLING FACT!
From the acclaimed DC Comics writer and the artist of the #1 New York Times bestselling and National Book Award–winning illustrated trilogy March comes a stunning crime noir graphic novel exploring the intertwining threads of crime, conspiracy, racism, and insanity in the post-World War II Deep South. After World War II, tensions rise in a Southern city ruled by organized crime, touching countless residents as they struggle to make sense of the new world. A sudden act of violence sets off a series of bloody events between the police and mafia as they lash out against one another. As the violence worsens, desperation grows to stop it, by any means necessary. Told in multiple perspectives—from a seemingly untouchable mafia don, to a gun-happy seasoned detective succumbing to the depths of his schizophrenia, to a newly minted police lieutenant haunted by his recent service in the war, and two African-American brothers, one mired in corruption and the other leading a local militia in an effort to see that justice is served—Two Dead is at once a white-knuckled and unputdownable thriller, a roman à clef inspired by true events, and a book about post-traumatic stress disorder and the underlying social traumas of how war and segregation affect their survivors on all fronts.
“This shocking expose of the CIA operation aimed at destroying the Vietcong infrastructure thoroughly conveys the hideousness of the Vietnam War” (Publishers Weekly). In the darkest days of the Vietnam War, America’s Central Intelligence Agency secretly initiated a sweeping program of kidnap, torture, and assassination devised to destabilize the infrastructure of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam, commonly known as the “Viet Cong.” The victims of the Phoenix Program were Vietnamese civilians, male and female, suspected of harboring information about the enemy—though many on the blacklist were targeted by corrupt South Vietnamese security personnel looking to extort money or remove a rival. Between 1965 and 1972, more than eighty thousand noncombatants were “neutralized,” as men and women alike were subjected to extended imprisonment without trial, horrific torture, brutal rape, and in many cases execution, all under the watchful eyes of US government agencies. Based on extensive research and in-depth interviews with former participants and observers, Douglas Valentine’s startling exposé blows the lid off of what was possibly the bloodiest and most inhumane covert operation in the CIA’s history. The ebook edition includes “The Phoenix Has Landed,” a new introduction that addresses the “Phoenix-style network” that constitutes America’s internal security apparatus today. Residents on American soil are routinely targeted under the guise of protecting us from terrorism—which is why, more than ever, people need to understand what Phoenix is all about.
It's the first collection of the exciting new crypto-noir series, THE BLACK MONDAY MURDERS. All Hail God Mammon pulls the covers back on the secret world of magic lying behind the largest and oldest financial institutions in the world. Collects THE BLACK MONDAY MURDERS #1-4.
The Nine Prophecies foretell a great cataclysm and the end of the age of the Nine Families that secretly rule the world. The first has come true, and now the mysterious and deadly Hum aims to fulfill the others. Agent Grahame is desperate to prove that Hum is just a mana man who can be killed. Elsewhere, radio host Bela is drawn into the fight for the fate of the world as she learns some of the FamiliesÈ long-hidden secrets.
In the wake of tragedy, Grahame makes a desperate gamble for leadership of the Mars Family. But to do so, he must battle with his stepsister Temple for the Spear of Mars. Elsewhere, Bela's document leak has brought her fame and attention, but she begins to question the motives of her new ally, Hum. Also: The Lizard Men attack! A blend of The X-Files and Marvel's A.I.M., a fun and thrilling adventure melding conspiracy theories, alternate history, trippy sci-fi, political thrills, and intense action!
The rise of the platform economy into statelike dominance over the lives of entrepreneurs, users, and workers. The early Internet was a lawless place, populated by scam artists who made buying or selling anything online risky business. Then Amazon, eBay, Upwork, and Apple established secure digital platforms for selling physical goods, crowdsourcing labor, and downloading apps. These tech giants have gone on to rule the Internet like autocrats. How did this happen? How did users and workers become the hapless subjects of online economic empires? The Internet was supposed to liberate us from powerful institutions. In Cloud Empires, digital economy expert Vili Lehdonvirta explores the rise of the platform economy into statelike dominance over our lives and proposes a new way forward. Digital platforms create new marketplaces and prosperity on the Internet, Lehdonvirta explains, but they are ruled by Silicon Valley despots with little or no accountability. Neither workers nor users can “vote with their feet” and find another platform because in most cases there isn’t one. And yet using antitrust law and decentralization to rein in the big tech companies has proven difficult. Lehdonvirta tells the stories of pioneers who helped create—or resist—the new social order established by digital platform companies. The protagonists include the usual suspects—Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Travis Kalanick of Uber, and Bitcoin’s inventor Satoshi Nakamoto—as well as Kristy Milland, labor organizer of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and GoFundMe, a crowdfunding platform that has emerged as an ersatz stand-in for the welfare state. Only if we understand digital platforms for what they are—institutions as powerful as the state—can we begin the work of democratizing them.
