Latest Blog Posts

• The Cockroach Janta Party

  Today I learned that there is a Cockroach Janta Party in India. I first thought this was an Asmongold reference, since he is also known as the “Roach King” among his viewers.

  Abhijeet Dipke has barely slept in the last 72 hours, fielding waves of messages on social media after a casual joke took an unexpected turn. The 30-year-old, a recent graduate in public relations from Boston University in the United States, finds himself leading a sweeping satirical political movement — the so-called Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), where “janta” means people in Hindi — being joined online by thousands of people with each passing day.

  On Friday, the Supreme Court of India’s chief justice, Surya Kant, said during an open court hearing that “parasites” were attacking the system, and equated the youngsters “who don’t get any employment and don’t have any place in a profession” to cockroaches. “There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don’t get any employment or have any place in the profession. Some of them become media, some of them become social media, RTI activists and other activists, and they start attacking everyone,” he said.

  Kant later clarified his remarks, saying his comment related to some people acquiring fraudulent degrees and did not target India’s youth, whom he called “the pillars of a developed India”. Yet, his remarks drew considerable ire, mainly from Gen Z internet users, as they battle large-scale unemployment, inflation and bitter religious divides after 12 years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government. As outrage escalated across social media, Dipke posted on X on Saturday: “What if all cockroaches come together?”

  He followed up on his joke and the desperately frustrated emotions behind it by setting up a website and social media accounts for the Cockroach Janta Party — a play on Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — on Instagram and X.

  (This story is from May, I just now learned about this party, though.)

  ---

• Sergey Galanter: Artist & Scam Artist

  The other day I came across this — as far as I know untitled — painting by Russian artist Sergey Galanter on social media:

  Untitled painting by Sergey Vladimirovich Galanter, 2020

  Immediately intrigued by this work, I decided to look into the artist. He’s produced some other, similarly striking art. Sadly, I also discovered that he was recently sentenced to seven years in a penal colony by a court in the Tverskoy Disctrict of Moscow for, of all things, NFT fraud. According to the reporting on the court case in Izvestia, he ran a pyramid scheme, trying to sell his own NFT art. He is said to have raised $6 million from over 200 investors, reinvesting most of the money into the scheme, but allegedly also paying large sums to his wife, lifestyle blogger and finance influencer Maria Afonina, who is said to have used her online reputation to advertise his art and the NFT scheme.

  Apparently, in a very Hunter Biden move, Galanter left his laptop with his landlord as collateral, who then sold it to a second-hand store. Eventually, the laptop made its way to an Izvestia journalist and also, somehow, ended up with one of the victims of the NFT scam. Its contents were apparently used as evidence in the case. Galanter, who is originally from Krasnodar, was first arrested in December 2023.

  ---

• Replacing AI Images

  As I’ve mentioned when I went live with the new version of this site in June, I am in the process of adding older content back to the site. This is a continual process and you should see more and more older stuff popping up every once in a while.

  As part of this, I am also replacing AI-generated images on the site. Either by substituting them for photos that show similar scenes or, if I like them a lot, by redrawing the artwork manually by hand, as I’ve done with this piece that was originally generated by Midjourney:

  

  ---

→ See all blog posts or subscribe to the blog's RSS feed