The New Kremlinology

can I offer you any more Kool-Aid? oh, I see you're already topped up

2008-12-17T15:55:00.000-08:00

ECHO...
ECHO...
echo...
echo

you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself, i guess. the toll for reading this post is having to look at Madame Blavatsky here on the right.

i've been sitting on this one for a week now, because i couldn't be sure. but it finally came to me what the animation looked like. that seemed to be the key to me, stylistically. it didn't say "Russian" to me, and I threw out the live-action portions of the video as irrelevant to my point. whatever it was at the time. but i got it.

the animation is straight out of Fleischer Studios. you may remember them from the classic Superman cartoons.

that's what didn't sit right with me. it was supposed to be "Russian," but all the animated bits screamed "American." LS was the only one who got close to this, but i think you're basically all drinking the Kool-Aid. he said it was bullshit because it was bullshit the Russians wanted us to buy. he was nearly there. it's bullshit WE wanted US to buy.

stop and think about the provenance of this video for a second. EC says he got it at a garage sale in south Florida. if you look at that wikipedia link, you'll see that Fleischer Studios had their own animation outpost in Miami in the 1940s, at the same time this video was dated and that GFK confirmed in his post. now unless you're crazy enough to think that there was a secret Russian enclave working at Fleischer in Miami in the 1940s, this has definitely got to be ours.

the thing that makes me stop and doubt a little about WHO had this vid was EC saying that it had an old stamp on it that said "SA [something]." that could mean a lot of things. maybe it's "standard animatic" or something to do with animation. but it just as easily could mean School of the Americas.

the SOA (SA) was founded in 1946 in Georgia, so it would make sense that they'd use training or propaganda vids from a close source. Miami is a short train ride. plus, you've got all the Cuban population in Miami. we were training junior dictators and insurgents from south Florida before Castro. you better believe we were roping them in to work for SOA, just as training. after all, we liked Batista's thugs, and those thugs knew how to keep a population down.

so remember the spore thing I talked about? the quick explanation is that this is a biochem war training manual. we're showing the worst-case scenario to our latin Americans to show them how to get their gas masks on when we "cropdust" the commie latin Americans. why else all the fucking gas masks?

the other quick explanation is this was domestic propaganda and counter-information meant to scare the shit out of anti-war reps in congress. stop and think about the security the US felt in 1948 or whenever this video literally claims to be from. you've got the US riding high on being the only country with The Bomb. but at the same time, you have China falling apart to the communists. you've got people in State who don't like Chiang and think Mao is the answer. how do you take apart those people in State? HUAC and McCarthy are one answer. the other is, show them something that takes the a-bomb out of the question

you guys point to the Russian animation vids as propaganda from "them", and maybe they are. but saying this film is the same thing as that is just assuming too. what if we were inspired by their propaganda, like the reanimation of animals thing? "hey, that's scary. let's make it scarier. to LAUNCH the appropriations budget for the Military Industrial Complex into the STRATOSPHERE."

BOTH explanations come back to the same thing. maybe we were training SOA counterinsurgents with the vid. maybe we were scaring congressmen. both direct back at America to make us promote the M.I.C. we have to make it bigger. it needs to have its control.

LS talks about cloud seeding. who wanted to weaponize that? the M.I.C.! they took a thing that helps civilians and wanted to make floods and monsoons. THEY have been researching chemical seeding from the start. do you really think they stopped at RAIN? you really think it was just the Russians that tested shit in the sky, just because of a video? WE made that video. those jets are so fucking generic to begin with. it starts with cloud seeding, it ends with crowd control.

i love the Russian propaganda as much as you all, but you're so focused on seeing THEM behind the scariest options that you don't see US. behind the things we document. the things we proved we'd do. you don't assume that this video is just us making us bigger, for us, for no reason, again.

edit: if nobody's gonna comment, I'm just disabling it. also adding the "you guys are lazy shits" tag, because you guys are lazy shits.

hello? where the fuck is everyone?

2008-12-14T23:32:00.000-08:00

seriously? we found this film, went on with some amazing conjectures about it, and now- no one has talked about it again for a week? did we hit a dead end? i have an idea, why don't we hit up a site to translate cyrillic into english and put what words the film did have into babelfish or any plethora of free online translators...

no?

ok, i'll go first: споры is "Spores."

so maybe that balloon is filled with anthrax? eh?

Blogger Error (Again)

2008-12-10T10:44:00.000-08:00

Hi, guys. It looks like the Blogger code error that happened to LS before happened to me this time. What I posted yesterday was eaten up, and I know Max couldn't add any content anywhere. I don't know if I have the heart to rewrite my post, but I left a brief comment on LS's most recent post just so he'd have a reply after his apology. I've written to the Help Center, but their solution seems to be, "Delete whatever creates a problem." It's an easy fix, but that's like setting your house on fire because the roof leaks.

The Devil's Advocate

2008-12-08T13:36:00.000-08:00

No, for once I'm NOT talking about the FINEST movie Keanu Reeves ever made. I want to toy around a little bit with what you "gentlemen" have posted so far.

First up, thanks again for filming and uploading these, EC. Second, thanks again for writing up some smart speculation about what these films could mean, G.

Third, I think you're both wrong.

If there's any one thing we've FAILED to learn as a country from the Cold War, it's that an idea of a threat can be as powerful as the the threat itself.

If we'd had an ounce of sense on September 12, we'd have said, "Ok, a bunch of useless whackjobs did this, and whoopie for them, they just killed off a third of their own manpower. They're a sad and lonely bunch of crazies who have to hide from society because of how much everyone else in the world thinks they're fucking dogshit. They punched us. It hurt. Who gives a fuck? We're bigger and badder than that, and we're going to rebuild, and they can go fuck themselves."

Instead, we fueled the idea. We made them supermen. We made them a thousand times more powerful in our nightmares than they ever could be in reality. A handful of totally twisted broken people with a severe inability to fucking DEAL WITH IT ("it" being the rest of the fucking world) became a monster in every shadow. We closed our eyes and saw them there too. When they probably weren't enough people to storm and wipe out half the fans of a southern high school football game.

The thing is, we ALWAYS do this, and we're ALWAYS wrong. Think back on Kim Philby and Team B and HUAC and McCarthy. We've got the worst track record on this shit. Every time we figure out that we were wrong, we say, "Well, we're never going to overreact like THAT again!" And then the next crisis comes along, and we go all, "WAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGH FFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!" and freak the fuck out and act like a bunch of totally unforgivable pantswetting spazzes.

What's worse is, I think you guys are doing it again here. When, if anybody SHOULD know much better, it's you guys.

So what...?

Okay, first of all, let's accept that everything GFK said about the date of this video is true. Well, what's that tell you?

Look at the time period. The Soviets weren't stupid. They could see what was going on in America. Fuck, getting a subscription to the New York Times wasn't hard. They watched as we reported on our own paranoia. HUAC was a sitting committee starting in '45. Every time the communists made a gain in Europe, we flipped the fuck out. Meanwhile, look at it from their perspective:

1. They need nukes and don't have them.
2. They know even if they crack the nuclear code and start making nukes, we're way ahead of them.
3. But we'll believe anything we read, see, or hear, so...
4. What the fuck's it matter?

Instead of racing to close the distance between us on nukes, why not say, "Fuck it"?

I know what you're going to say: "Fuck it! Yes! That's your answer. That's your answer for everything! Tattoo it on your forehead! Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski! The bums lost!"

Seriously, though, follow me here. If we were so credulous we'd just buy ANYTHING, that meant they didn't have to sell anything real. Just invent something that would make us shit our pants. Sure, we had nukes, but all they had to do was claim they could seed the sky with something that would set the world on fire. Who needs nukes when they have that? BOOM, right there, it doesn't matter if there's a gap in nukes, because nukes are on equal footing with SKY FIRE.

It's not even that implausible when you consider 1946 is when cloud seeding was invented. We'd already just figured out that we could control the weather by dropping shit into clouds, so why couldn't the Soviets control the apocalypse by doing the same? Hell, WE tried to weaponize cloud seeding anyway, so we were already thinking perfectly along the lines they'd need to promote a propaganda weapon. WE started chemically altering the sky itself, so who could even say that they couldn't do it with the right compounds, ones we hadn't even found yet? Hell, just stop and think of the images in the film. Why are ALL their troops wearing gas masks? What is this stuff coming out of the plane? What could the Piemaker be making?

CHEMICALS. Or so we'd be totally willing to believe because we almost NEED to believe shit like this.

We set OURSELVES up. All they'd need was a punchline. One filmstrip leaked to the west later, and suddenly there's "proof" how they're going to fight American nuclear armament. A little push here with a cartoon and some Higgins motherfucker, and we'd shit our pants for them and create our own fears.

Stalemate.

Jigsaw Post #3

2008-12-07T01:08:00.000-08:00

EC, God help me, what you posted was disturbing and, to steal from Scotty's word vault, awesome as hell. I don't know whether to feel elated or unsettled. I know what my stomach feels like: it feels like about half a bottle of the Jamey. And it feels like the other half should be coming soon. I wish you'd gotten that video out before I'd got tossed out of my head, but I can't stop watching it. I really doubt I'll be able to contribute all that much, but it's just amazing to me. Where did you say you got this again? Promise me you'll remember better and tell us more.

Okay, okay, we should look at some of the frames of this, because the individual pictures reveal probably more than the video as a whole, insofar as the choices the director made are animated ones (at least partially) where he could pick out the themes of violence he wanted to evoke, irespective of consequence.

This is an amazingly menacing image, because you've got the rat behind bars. I can't tell if this is immediately a capitalist metaphor, the predatory animal that eats and steals from others. It would seem to be the well that any good Soviet video would go to. This thing creates nothing and yet prospers due to exploitation and theft from the creative and generative class. Better that he be locked up. What happens to him is anyone's guess. I can't tell what's killing him, but his stabbing/strangulation seems almost lusciously vindictive and bloodthirsty.

Given how much the "Higgins" (cf. Scotty's post) character is lecturing or directly narrating at the camera, this substance seems to be a critical element (but is it an element?—the notation suggests it is not) in the dramaturgy. But not knowing what it is obviously means that we can't really say anything informed without venturing into putting on airs or, if you like, Asshole Territory.

If you remember, our earlier inclination was to say this was an anti-nuclear film — as if to say, "Here are your horrors. You would not want them yourself. But what could they do to us?" Perhaps it was the USSR drafting a westerner ("Higgins") to warn us about the dangers of our overreaching militarily and damaging the balance of power or the planet itself. But given how threatening or frightening the rest of this clip becomes, I don't feel comfortable anymore with this being cautionary. It could be an aggressive warning. I don't know what the substance is, but my first guess is that it's highly radioactive particulate matter. Something that shows the west that their weapons have direct harm.

Can you weaponize exposed soils? If teh Soviets had access to low-density soils exposed to an atomic blast, maybe they might offer them up as condemnation (in this video) of western action, or maybe they might offer them up as a threat. Remember that balloon from the earlier clip? Perhaps they could be saying, "If you poison our soils, we will drop your poison on you."

I could not get a clear screenshot of any of this, but there is a sustained sequence involving burning bodies and fires within a city. My guess is that it shows the horrors of a deliberate strike and the breakdown in social order. But I don't know if this is a passive or active statement. Food for thought.

This is another complete puzzle. This plane flies, and after it we see stalled boats and driftwood, which seems to signify the arresting of conflict. I don't know if this is a propagandizing gesture or a descriptive one. Is what's within this plane a metaphor? Is it an actual, named weapon? Is the word an acronym or a representation of something else?

This shot is a very poor one, but I'm having trouble getting my fingers to hit the keys at the same time I'd like. What I was trying to get is the people going by in gas masks. Again, I don't know what that signifies. My quick guess would be "Fallout Protection." Going off my earlier guesses, if this animation sequence is immediately post-war, that means that the Soviet Union did not then possess nuclear capabilities. They didn't get those until the Cambridge Five brought them the necessary scientific shortcuts in the later 1940s. If my dating suppositions are accurate, then it would make this video the product of an era of total and extreme paranaoia. It would make sense that they'd broadcast to the world both nuclear horrors and how those horrors could be turned back on the aggressor: how the seeds he'd planted with his bombs could taint the soil and grow into death and malignance for himself as well, how ripe the death could be for everyone who tilled that murderous field. How crappy poetry he could write if he were drunk. Sorry for writing all dramatic like this. Gross.

Here's where the warning stops being implicit and starts getting explicit. But I don't think this amounts to any such thing as a declaration of war. Although, I'm not naive. It just as well could be. However, as I've said, the dating of the video seems to be from a very praranoid time, so you can see this violence as retributive. If there is an atomic age that the USSR isn't part of, you can see them conceptualizing nuclear violence as something that beats back and bloodies its user just as hard and just as well. I don't know. I feel like I'm almost arguing against myself and better judgment at this point.

And here's where I'm starting to freak the fuck out looking at it. Because you can see the spread of this "CNOPbl" element cast across the North American continent and rise up into this Death's Head. Obviously, it's easy to incorporate this in my earlier thesis: this is the Soviet fright manifesting as a cautionary tale for the Americans. "Use this," it says, "and the death you bring is death across your own territory too. It doesn't get localized. Nuclear terror is global. Even for the user." On the other hand, there's something not at all "friendly warning" about skulls skipping across a continent and getting huge until they blot out the screen.

I feel like I started out wanting to believe one thing about this film and now almost want to believe the exact opposite. My problem is that I still think the dating of the film is on-target. If that's the case, it just makes it more confusing and difficult to deal with. If this is a pre-nuclear Soviet film, the threats it makes are all threats WE created. If it's post-nuclear (and I don't think it is), then the threats are clear. And it's an aggressive and confident document from early in their nuclear career. If it's not nuclear and not passive, it's just a bizarre anomaly that's hard to reconcile.

I have to quit now because I'm just drunk enough to be starting to write really crappy prose-poetry, tilling that field of sounding really sappy. And I need the rest of that Jamey.

Thanks again, EC.

Also, Boston College sucks completely and couldn't even come close to the spread. Assholes.

(I'll add links in the morning.)

(Hell, who am I kidding? I'll add links in the afternoon.)

(Links added — 12/7 8:09 p.m.)

finally got more footage up

2008-12-06T22:08:00.000-08:00

(not just talking about the footage in my pants)

okay guys, i have had a HELL of a saturday...all according to the gf's evil plans to steal all my weekends from me forever...and i am uploading this thing and sprinting for a bar

i wish this sucker answered more questions than it makes me ask...but it sucks that it doesnt. that film is really looking bad. there are bits that seem like theyre gonna break off at any second, so i tried to film a bit that looked like it was going to be pretty good...there were a lot of false starts in there. i figured you didnt want to hear me yelling at shit breaking or watch clips that were 11 seconds long. this is the best stretch

theres a lot of that Higgins guy again

we open with the spruce moose, then a lake i think...

about 25 secs in theres a FUCKING COOL scene with a rat

CNOPBLI! its what plants crave...a ton of people on fire...BAPNN -- you get it from planes

some dude gets OWNED with a flagpole in the FACE after getting seriously fucked up by someone

get this though...its a SOVIET flag...and the flag dude has a GAS MASK

after that the CNOPBLI spreads across america like death...VERY creepy

i hope this is enough for you guys to sink your teeth into because getting any kind of long clips off this reel is going to be hard...its just falling apart depending on where we are on it, and i cant sit and refeed it forever to try to get it going again. tell me you guys can get stuff out of this much because im not sure how much more i can get out of the reel without fucking up something really cool that we might not get to see again...also, i do you think im off base not taking this in somewhere? do you have a guess if its valuable??

Jigsaw Post #2: I think it's teddible you are not taking me vetty seriously

2008-12-04T14:34:00.000-08:00

Now that we got the less critical analysis out of the way, it's time to look at this a little seriously. You know, use the brain device thing to do brainwork. I said I'd actually THINK about this stuff, and I will keep my word. Word is bond. Straight up. You feel me? Also, big ups to Biggie. Love you, dawg.

Something Max said in the comments on Post #1 got me thinking. He asked,

have you considered whether this could be anti-nuke propaganda? if the dates are as right as you think they are, then that would put the film in a period where the russians didn't have nukes, so this might be their attack on them to discourage other nations from using them or condoning them.

He raises some good points. Combined with G.'s comment that, "Something about him doesn't sit right with me at the moment," I spent a while thinking about this guy before I made my other post.

Here's what I think the problem is: he looks too bourgeois.

Look at that picture. Three-piece suit. Desk blotter. Pen set. Nicely wood-paneled room. Maybe some sort of exotic bird in a cage next to him.

The entire thing sets off alarm bells with me that this guy is not an engineer, and he's not a proletarian. He seems un-Soviet.

If you think about most of the videos we wind up looking at, you usually see some dude in a jumpsuit or a white coat. Something that really brings out the SCIENCE+WORKERS! element of the Soviet Union. Either that or you get some jowly commissar with a bad haircut and bags under his eyes. By comparison, this guy looks like he lives in some nice digs. He almost seems like a banker. Maybe even a British banker. Like any second he's going to get a teacup and saucer and say "oooh, lovely!" and then say

Oh, by the way, I can't believe I forgot about this; I really would lose my head if it weren't attached to my neck! I'm so bloody forgetful. But, the thing is, and this is really quite a tedious point to make, chaps, but the thing is there's this new bomb that can obliterate life on earth. Cheerio! Toodle pip!

THAT'S what makes me think Max might be onto something here. What better way to send a message to democratic governments than with someone FROM there? He can talk to us because he looks like us. If you think about it in those terms, he looks more like a professor than a banker, so maybe he can tell us about the GRAVE THREAT of nuclear weapons.

You know who he really reminds me of? The English guy from the reanimation of animals video that EC linked way back in this post. You know, this dude:

I'm too lazy to go back and read when they did that video, but I remember he was a British scientist who got discredited because people thought that the USSR was using him as a mouthpiece to front for propaganda. The thing was, a lot of the stuff he was talking about WAS real, but it just seemed a little fishy that here was this guy who was just perfectly willing to shill for Soviet science. Maybe it's a loose connection, but if years before or years later or whenever it happened the Soviets were willing to go looking for a westerner to talk to a western audience, maybe that's an idea they would have had before or gone back to after. Does that make sense?

I'm not saying I have any real reason to go with this idea, but this is just what I came up with. Like GFK, something about this guy was just bothering me in my gut, and I couldn't tell what it was. This explanation quiets my gut down, and it would make sense given the dates this is probably from.

EDIT:
Somethings's gone really wrong with blogger all of a sudden. Arrrrggghghghghghghg fuck blogger!

My first post from today - which was AWESOME - for some reason is totally fucking up our blog's main page and making it not load. I figured out it was that post, but I don't want to delete it because maybe someone at blogger can fix it.

We can get around it for now though by making every post its OWN PAGE. I know it's sort of a headache to have to click if you want to go back and read GFK's post or something, but it's better than not being able to see it at all.

Scrimshaw Post #1: Mutual ASSured Destruction, Prying Open the Truth and Cracking The Code

2008-12-04T11:43:00.000-08:00

NOTE: I rewrote this late last night when the kid woke me up. It's sort of like the post Blogger - FUCK BLOGGER - deleted. I had a shell of it in a Word doc but had to rewrite a bunch anyway. Whatever. If you guy's think it's dumb to have it follow the serious post I technically wrote after writing this, go ahead and backdate it. I don't care.
- LS, 12/6/08

GFK has done a wonderful job of breaking this film EC found wide open and probing inside, but anyone who thinks that's where all this ends is fooling himself. After plunging off an intellectual waterfall, skiing slopes of meandering thought and snaking dynamically through the subterranean text waiting to be mined, indeed, it's time to admit: we walk from here.

What my man G. cannot tell you is critical and vital to understanding this video, and what he can't tell you is very simple. Who the fuck is El Baldo of the Professor Institute of Knowing Things?

Thankfully, I can, b/c I hold advanced degrees in Awesomeness, a Bachelors in Being Rad and a minor in Doing It With Ladies. The man in the picture is none other than Galactic Rear Admiral Chester F. Buttocks, and he's not even a man at all b/c he is 10 million times older than the Earth itself, if you're one of those people who believes in the literal word of bible (which he wrote, to troll everybody).

Over five billion years ago, after losing an apocalyptic battle of fission thumb-war with Superman - who's actually a massive DICK - the Admiral was exiled as punishment. Superman dispatched him to the outer boundaries of the new galaxy that had come into existence after the Admiral had punched him so hard in the stomach that his anus dilated like it was trying to say "Whuh-oooooooooo-OOOOOOOwwwwww" and Superman literally sharted out the new creation - much of which never changed form at all and later became Texas.

After failing to wrest control of the oblong brown prisoner transport vessel he was locked in, the admiral instead fled via escape pod after overwhelming the security forces controlled by Aquaman - proving once again that Aquaman isn't worth a tenth shit-all of FUCK outside of the water. Also, the escape pod looked a lot like like a bomb being carried by a balloon. The bomb was later worshipped as a godhead in part of a cargo cult in the year Andre 3000.

Superman's forces opted not to fire on the escape pod even after it was jettisoned, b/c sensors indicated no life forms were aboard. This is because the Admiral had changed physical form to that of an ambient gas to evade detection - like one of the angry gods of a foreign world in Star Trek. Or a vampire. Later, some of Superman's stormtroopers examining the landing area on the ground would find clues that were inconclusive.

"Look, sir! Admirals!" said one to his supervisor, while holding up a navy cap with gold-thread "scrambled eggs" on the brim.

"You're a goddam idiot," said the other. "That's just a fucking hat."

Superman's forces combed the earth, trying to track down the escaped Admiral, flying crisscrossing search patterns in airplanes that looked remarkably like Spruce Gooses. Each craft was capable of carrying 200 passengers from New York's Idlewild Airport to the Belgian Congo in 17 minutes, but almost all of them crashed due to crewmen knocking over their own jars of urine on the instrument panels and causing the craft to plummet and then augur hundreds of feet into the ground - which, if you weren't dead, you could look to the left side of the aircraft and see out the window. But you were, so fuck you.

Special note: Wonder Woman coulda totally helped out with the search party, but she didn't. Why? Because Wonder Woman is a stone bitch. The other reason is because her plane's all invisible or whatever, you can look up in the sky when she's passing over and notice what a fat fucking ass she's got now that she's all old and shit. Girl's ass so big, they call the strap of her thong the International Ain't Gettin No Date Line. Seriously, Superman told her she had to stop flying in front of the sun b/c her assclipses were scaring the shit out of all the Maya. Bitch fat, that's all I'm sayin.

Anyway, Superman eventually gave up and fucked off b/c he wanted to investigate whether somewhere in the galaxy there was a Planet of Impressionable Gay Boys Who Looked Tense and Could Use a Massage. The Admiral was left to wander the entirety of the earth in solitude for billions of years. After one billion, he settled on a static visage of himself as some kind of grayhaired suit-wearing version of Higgins from "Magnum, P.I." Either that or one of those dads from the 80s tv shows about white dudes adopting young telegenic black kids. I don't know which one. I don't have a degree in Looking Up This Gay Bullshit. You know what I do have, though? I have a doctorate in Eat Me, Look It Up Your Damn Self.

For a while, he wrote a series of totally incredible romance novels and, ashamed that they weren't his best effort, buried them for millions of years in a ditch in England, where they were eventually found and published under the name Barbara Cartland. After people were invented, he'd randomly leap into their bodies and try to help them with the aid of an invisible cigar-smoking former child actor. But the Admiral could never leap home and died. He died 1,478 times actually, regenerating every single time. Why? Stick-to-it-iveness. Also, heart.

Sometimes he'd pretend to be a god just to see if he could get a couple million people to kill a couple other million people over invisible bullshit. He would never have done this if he could have gotten drunk while watching television. Once, he got so bored waiting for Philo Farnsworth to show up and invent TV that he just invented it anyway, but it turned out it was useless b/c nothing was on. He thought about inventing Lucille Ball to have something to watch, but he knew with a flash of incredible perception and prescience that Lucille Ball would be an annoying overrated harpy that no one born after 1970 would ever sincerely like but would profess was a genius anyway b/c that's what a bunch of assholes always said.

Then he decided to invent the hot ladies from "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeannie," and they spent ten straight years having totally hot unnatural sex. Why unnatural? Because one was a witch, the other a genie, and the other a billion-year-old goddammed immortal gas being vampire god who shart-punched superman. That's just how they do. They'll do whatever the fuck they want. I don't slap the dick out of your mouth and tell you how to do your job, so you just listen to the goddam story and stop being all snippy about why this and why that. Bitch.

Sometime in the 1940s, after spending years carving a mile-wide glacial frieze of a veiny and erect uncircumcised penis to impress Jodie Foster, the United States' atomic tests roused the Admiral from his languor. Fearing the vengeance and return of his SuperNemesis, the Admiral captured the world's leaders and imprisoned them in back braces intended to prevent scoliosis and made them watch a color broadcast of his warning to the globe.

In it, he showed off the totally badass desk he'd stolen from an old person who smelled like powder and death and on it displayed the special white mask he wore to protect himself from the haunted vapors that could be projected out of his ass. The mask rested on a canopic jar. It contained the brain, nose and ilium of Austrian empress Maria Theresa. For luck. The Admiral demanded the world cease all nuclear research and production or else be leveled by his stunning flatulence.

Undeterred, American general Carl "Tooey" Spazz ignored the threat and made more nukes. The Admiral made a face like Magnum had forgotten to let Robin Masters' dogs out. That was it. Fuck you if you thought he was just going to stick around and wait for that George-Lucas-hair-having twink bitch Superman to tie him to some half-cylinder justice dome and cram a fat man suppository up his little boy and blow him up forever. Fuck that.

Both sides in the Cold War thought they could dress everyone up in gas masks like a Wilfred Owen poem on acid and ride out the coming apocalypse in trenches, but they were wrong. the Admiral "called down the thunder" and "dropped the bomb."

It was over. The blast killed Superman. This is what happened to his face:

The Admiral was fine b/c he was dressed like a ghost. Only Americans survived b/c they led the world in being fatties and cutting ones. The rest of the world is just an illusion maintained by the Admiral to give them busy work.

Later the admiral returned to his self-imposed exile, fleeing to his White Castle of Fear in the Colorado mountains in a vintage WWII T-34 tank that he'd generated by re-arranging matter around him with the power of his mind. There he lives in seclusion and sleeps in a speedboat with a dog that can mix drinks and use a toilet.

Jigsaw Post #1

2008-12-02T21:37:00.000-08:00

I couldn't think of a good post title, so I just went with the name of the puzzles that annoyed the bejesus out of me as a child. Since we're basically trying to piece together just what the hell EC found, it seems appropriate.

First up, I don't have a Russian dictionary/Cyrillic type pack installed on this computer, so can anyone translate this? The same goes for the text that opens the film. I have a feeling both could be of enormous help.

I have an overall impression of the film, but I want to get there after making note of a few things.

DETAILS:
1. This looks to be fairly standard WWII-era tank; the profile looks pretty much like a T-34, so going off the other cues/clues from the film, let's just assume it's that.

2. This scene shows a soldier running down a trench. Also, all the soldiers seem to be wearing gas masks. While there was significant entrenchment in Stalingrad and the siege of Leningrad, these images really seem like throwbacks to WWI — especially since they're combined. On their own, they don't signify much, but together they seem like artistic choices deliberately meant to evoke a memory of Great War-style warfare.

3. That said, while the first two pictures ground us in WWI and the early years of WWII at the latest, this image establishes that this video can't pre-date 1945.

4. The presence of the balloon, though, makes me reluctant to date this much later. And this is a significant reach on my part, so feel free to call me on it. The thing looks like it's delivering a bomb payload, but why? Balloons are incredibly unreliable, and the bomb could wind up anywhere. No country is going to go to the balloon (pardon the totally inappropriate metaphor) well if they have access to supersonic jets; the value you get out of a balloon is so much less than a jet delivery of a bomb. So that makes me want to date this no earlier than 1945 but no later than 1948 — 1949 at the latest.

5. This actually looks like a souped-up B-29 or an end-of-war prototype for a super-fortress style bomber. Actually, what it really reminds me of is the Spruce Goose, only with four fewer engines. The important distinction here is that it's very reminiscent of American bomber designs. That's actually helpful, because it only helps further anchor this film in the immediate post-war period. If you'll recall, both Lend-Lease and our open allied partnership with the USSR from 1941-1945 saw American arms shipped to the Soviet Union en masse. There was no shortage of Douglas and Lockheed aircraft in the Soviet Air Force and Army support, so it would make sense for Russian artists to go with what they knew. What they knew was a lot of American designs. It would make sense to date this video in a period before the two Air Forces significantly diverged.

6. I literally have no idea what this guy is doing, but I've been watching a lot of Pushing Daisies lately, so every time I watched this video (which was about a round ten, trying to figure it out), I thought, "Meanwhile, The Piemaker...." So that's who this guy is: The Piemaker.

SUMMARY:
As I've said, I don't see any reason to date this later than 1949 at the very latest, and because of the balloon technology and absence of jets, I really want to date this film to 1945-6. Remember the old adage: generals always fight the last war. Consumed with the desire to correct the mistakes they made last time, they make mistakes by ignoring the new details of this time. Artists make the same mistakes. They always have difficulty envisioning the next conflict (the few who don't are the real geniuses), and because of that they tend to describe what they just saw. The presence of WWI-era gas masks and trenches and WWII-era tanks and propeller planes date this as the product of the Second World War or its immediate aftermath. The presence of an atomic mushroom cloud gives us a hard date of 1945 at the earliest.

SPECULATION:
I have no idea what this video is for, just yet. Anything I say would be wildly off-base and just what I want to hear. Right now, though, the only supposition I feel comfortable with is that this is either:

a. A recap of WWII, in instructional form, maybe meant for the civilian populace's education/entertainment.

b. An immediate post-war video meant to show the Soviet Union's continued mobilization for war and readiness for national defense.

Of course, a lot of that speculation hinges on what this guy is here for:

Right now, I don't know. Something about him doesn't sit right with me at the moment.

Either way, that's my speech. What do you guys think?

pink floyd goes to war all fucked up in russia

2008-12-01T23:23:00.001-08:00

ok, so heres the motherbitch...i cant believe it took me this long to get it up (all up in your blog).

i dont even know what to tell you about this. its like watching The Wall high as shit, only its not The Wall, and ive never seen it before, and its actually kind of fucking scary if youre in an empty office with the projector going clickclackclickclack over and over alone

i KNOW what you guys are going to bitch about though, so let me get this off my chest RIGHT NOW. i threaded the film in the projector and started going and realized id left my camera downstairs with the gf.

so i have NO idea how far into the strip we came in

i was running around downstairs trying to find her...i found her on the back porch, but she said shed left the camera in her bigass purse by the couch...so i had to find that. that was a HUGE help considering her purse is BIGGER THAN GOD...i spent another minute just throwing away wads of tampons and an old EXTRA CELL PHONE before i got the camera that i guess she managed to cram at the VERY BOTTOM OF THE BAG. i got it and went upstairs and fired it up and started recording

trouble is, this film is OLD. i got about a minute recorded before it broke...do NOT get on my case for this. i had no idea...i thought i had the camera with me at the time...and i really didnt sweat missing a few seconds because i thought theyd be all credits

fire away...its late and i need sleeeeeeeep

UPDATE: i added 2 stills i snapped with my point and shoot....the embedded video quality blows...

happy thanksgiving, this is fucked up

2008-12-01T13:50:00.000-08:00

not sure i had the best holiday, hope your guys' was better

its nice to see family and get together with them, but this one was a mother...kids, dogs, parents everywhere. i dont know all the little kids names, and i dont know all the dogs names, so i couldnt tell who was yelling at who. i think there might have been a dog and a kid with the same name, because otherwise there was a dog with shitty table manners or a kid who wouldnt get off a rug

i tried setting up the projector in an office and getting a quiet 5 minutes but FUCK THAT, that wasnt happening...the door kept flying open and whiting out the movie, and i had to chase 2 or 3 cousins out every time i turned around. plus you could hear these kids screaming and bashing shit over the sound of the PROJECTOR. andy was a trooper and tried to quiet everybody down for a quick 5...no luck

i tried conning andy into letting me have the projector and going home with it, but he said the fam that was staying with him wanted to watch old reels together and shit...so it had to stay with him. it meant i had to stick around until all the kids were put down for the night and everyone else left...which meant i was stuck hanging around during CLEAN UP, meaning i had to help scrub about a billion dishes and wipe up the kids table and sweep their area and all that bullshit. i mean, i didn't HAVE to...but if youre gonna be there and asking for a favor, you cant sit around just reading a magazine waiting for everyone else to stop working so you can goof off...unless youre my gf. tyvm for all the help, lazy broad

i FINALLY got to shoot the film upstairs waaay late, and believe me when i tell you this shit is FUCKED UP. i dont know if its some kind of goof or serious propaganda or what, but it looks cool as shit, really wanna upload it.......

except i left my firewire cable at work

i got home and realized i cant upload from my camera, so ive been sitting on this vid since thurs night just waiting to get to work and show you guys this shit. its AMAZING. i googled a bunch of stuff and jumped around youtube and couldnt find anything like it, so i hope this is something new

as a matter of fact, i got SO excited, i got to work and realized i left my camera AT HOME

fuck fuck shittity fuck shit fuck rihkerwghp98h3jgksdbnkdshgu34hdskjbsdkfbjlsoipwg

so this shit doesnt happen to me again only in reverse, i already crammed the firewire cable in my bag and took my bag out to my car, so even if i forget EVERYTHING ELSE, at least ill be going home with it. hopefully ill upload it tonight. you guys are going to love this

Polygon (Firing Range) Полигон

2008-11-08T00:54:00.000-08:00

i cant believe this was made in 1978, but it was...it reminds me of newer computer animation that is stylized to look like handdrawn animation....

a scientist bent on revenge makes an artificially intelligent tank that targets fear, and of course it turns on him in the end...great story barring the cheesy flashbacks, but just watch it for the animation...i cant even imagine how long it took them to airbrush each frame...

Russian Prez: 'Putin Could Serve 2 More Terms'; Me: 'We Don't Actually Hate Russians'

2008-11-07T09:19:00.000-08:00

Linkeydink

MOSCOW – Russia's constitution will be amended by year's end to extend the presidential term to six years, lawmakers promised Thursday — a move that could pave the way for Vladimir Putin's return to the Kremlin.

It would be the first change to the Russian constitution since its adoption in 1993. A six-year term could mean 12 more years as president for Putin — the current prime minister — who has not ruled out getting his old job back.

President Dmitry Medvedev, a Putin protege, had suggested raising the term from four years to six Wednesday in his first state of the nation address.

Pretty much everything GFK was worrying about in his post a couple months back is coming true. Medvedev basically just gave a speech a few days ago saying, "We're back. We're going to kick some ass. Fuck you if you can stop it." Now Putin may wind up back as president for 12 more years due to his handpicked errand boy changing the rules for him.

Gosh, you know, I LOVE Democracy. And I LOVE Authoritarianism! Both have such great tastes, but where can I get both of them together, like in some kind of fucked-up government version of a Snickers bar??? Oh, the president of Russia. Great! Wait, if democracy is the caramel, and authoritarianism gives you peanuts, what's the nougat? DUH - the secret intelligence services!

Putin will probably get away with it because of them. I can't imagine what it must be like to be an opposition leader right now. It's probably like having bowel control issues and going on a roller coaster called THE ELIMINATOR. You probably can't even stand up without your asshole closing to the size of a pinprick. How can you organize anything that might change the government when you could be infiltrated or subverted or hurt?

This probably all sounds mean. Looking back, it looks like we really hate China and Russia. Look, for anyone Chinese or Russian who might ever read this (HA!), we don't. Seriously. Chinese people, chinese food, chinese basketball players, chinese culture (except the music, sorry, I can't take it) rule. Every Russian I've met socially has been all class and really cool to meet. Russian music rules. Russian literature OWNS. And both your countries are so beautiful it's sick.

But here's the thing, obviously we aren't a gang who loves authoritarianism. It's bad. And frankly, your bosses scare the shit out of me. Probably the same way our boss for the last 8 years scared the shit out of you.

When you think back to you having watching a gang run our country without anyone holding them accountable, watching them rewrite the rules to suit themselves and ignoring all the ones they didn't want to bother with, heading out into the rest of the world and fucking with other people however they pleased to win the WARAWN TEAR, maybe you have an idea what it's like for us looking out now.

We've got nothing against the people in either place, and hope they don't feel like we do. Just bear in mind dealing with your bosses frightens the fuck out of us right now. The last couple years couldn't have been a cakewalk for you either, so please just be patient with us if we start running drills about hiding under desks again.

Wham, Bam, Hologram

2008-11-05T22:16:00.000-08:00

So the big news yesterday was something about america's first black president being covered for the first time ever by the first female hologram to ever appear on CNN.(way to try to upstage history with such a dumb and trivial stunt guys)

But if you are a crazy person, this would actually be like the millionth time a hologram has been seen on CNN... don't believe me? lets roll the tubes...

Exhibit 1- WTC destroyed by missile disguised as a plane using a holographic projection
i dont even know what to say about this one. these people are such assholes...this brilliant theorist posits that a gleam of light coming off the plane as it hits the building and explodes is a 'scalar flash...' ok. sure. what? i'm tempted to send this guy a video of someone lighting a fart and telling him that it's evidence of a 'positronic vector-based replasmatation..."

Exhibit 2- Shapeshifting journalists working for the reptilian conspiracy
ok before i go into this i just need to say, please don't annotate your vids with captions in comic sans and knock it off with the fucking techno...i can only imagine paul revere warning us that the british were coming while wearing tevas and waving one light stick by land and 2 if by sea...for fuck's sake, if the world is really in danger, try to make us take you seriously...
so, some people believe that a race of reptile humanoids from space or hell or the center of the earth are conspiring to eat us..and they even walk among us despite having slitted pupils and millions of razor sharp teeth and hideous scales. how? holograms, duh. bush? reptile. cheney? do you have to ask? the royal family, cindy mccain, fox news reporters, cnn, they're all in the tank for the conspiracy. but every now and then, one of the truth seekers out there gets a little too close to their tv while wearing a foil hat and fucks with their reception...you've seen digital artifacting before...a digital transmission lags for a minute and then you get pixels from multiple frames over time overlapping and the image starts to look really funky...i saw it used to pretty good effect in a Presets video once... but that explaination sounds a little too convoluted doesnt it? more likely is that these people on tv are experiencing a glitch in the holographic field that keeps them looking as lovable and mammilian as elizabeth hasselbeck.

Exhibit 3- Kate Moss as a hologram for Alexander McQueen
i dunno, she's in a pyramid, thats like freemasonry or ancient aliens right? pyramids. yeah.

Michael Chrichton Dead

2008-11-05T16:23:00.000-08:00

From here:

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Michael Crichton, who helped create the TV show "ER" and wrote the best-sellers "Jurassic Park," "The Andromeda Strain," "Sphere" and "Rising Sun," died in Los Angeles on Tuesday, his public relations firm said in a news release.

(snip)

Crichton also invited controversy with some of his scientific views. He was an avowed skeptic of global climate change, giving lectures warning against "consensus science." He later took on global warming and the theories surrounding it in his 2004 novel "State of Fear," which attracted attacks in its own right from scientists including NASA's James Hansen.

Look, just because all his doctors said that he had cancer didn't make it so. In fact, that probably made it LESS so.

Stop and think about this.

There's a lot of money in cancer.

*holds up back of hand, rubs fingers with thumb*

Laaaaaaaaatta money in it. So what do you think those doctors' diagnoses are going to be? That's right: cancer. See, what happens with this sort of consensus science is these guys don't like to be wrong, so they tend to back each other up with diagnoses and cause-and-effect, because they know doing so makes their jobs secure. They also like to make money. And if they can just keep agreeing with each other, they can keep the funding flowing.

Stop and ask yourself this question: How many years have the global cancer doctors been telling you the reason people die of cancer is "cancer," and how come there's no cure for it yet? They've been fighting it for decades, and cancer's still here. Maybe because... when we realize there's no such thing as cancer, the government checks stop showing up?

The fact is that cancer doesn't exist, and even if it did, it would only be caused by three things:

1. Cancer volcanoes.

2. Cancer spots on the sun.

3. An intergalactic overlord of the Canceroid League named Skip Geech who would come to earth and shoot cancer into people with mind lasers because he heard their bodies stored fresh muffins.

Follow the money.

Obama

2008-11-05T02:49:00.000-08:00

I'm so fucking drunk right now.

Nothing will ever be like 2004. When Foulke flipped it to Mientkiewicz, I was pretty sure I heard every person in my neighborhood and for three neighborhoods over totally explode in joy. But this was pretty fucking incredible. I think I heard at least ten surrounding buildings. It probably would have been louder but I bet each network called things at slightly different times.

Who cares? I just went on a parade with about ten other people over about half the city. It was like we were doing kick return coverage or something; we kept running into tons of people dancing and running around, but we kept this wedge formation going on. Maybe we were protecting the booze. Nobody's going to work tomorrow.

I have to go to bed, but a toast before I go. I shouldn't, but one more Jamey isn't going to kill me. No toast to HOPE — too vague. But as the scion of old ward heelers, as the great-nephew of a fixer and a crook and a man so twisted they're going to have to screw him into the ground at the funeral, fuck it: to no longer being scared shitless by my government.

Tomorrow, when I make a cell phone call, I'm just going to stop whoever I'm talking to at the moment so I can say, "Hey, you, crusted photophobic NSA golem listening to every fucking word of this. Start rewriting your resume, you crypto-fascist shitfuck."

OMFG, WTF USSR???

2008-10-31T19:31:00.000-07:00

OK...i just stumbled across the best soviet-made cartoon i've ever seen... apparently in 1985, the US managed to slip lsd into their water, that's all i can figure...

i'm pretty frustrated that this one has no subtitles, because i don't even know enough russian to make sure not to order elk balls at a restaurant. so, i'm going to try to give a synopsis of what i think is happening at the risk of getting it completely backwards....

First, the film is called Контракт....i'm going to guess that this means 'contract...' because thats sort of what the word looks like to me, and also this dude is waving a contract around in another dudes face halfway through....but i'll get back to that later...

so, this cosmonaut is shooting space demons on the surface of some mars-like planet...i'm guessing that he is a colonist, for a corporation or state called "Sezan" or "Sezam." It was a little hard to make out and neither word seems to mean anything on babelfish... so, this colonist is suddenly surrounded by more space-dinos than he can handle and out of nowhere comes a robot that looks suspiciously like a golden cash register (they really know how to beat you over the head with heavyhanded symbolism...). Magic cash register robot joins the colonist under a forcefield he has made around them to keep the dinos out...i think the robot is telling him they should go back outside, but the colonist is like no way, dude.

'trust me, i'm a metaphor!'

so then the robot shrinks the aliens and safely stows them inside his stomach. ok. sure. crisis averted. the colonist disengages the forcefield and starts walking. then i looked away for a second and when i looked back up, a rubiks cube was unfolding into like a chair and a home entertainment console...

on the tv is a guy with the word SEZAN or SEZAM behind him...he's the typical banker/fatcat oligarch type...even has a monocle (c'mon, wasnt that dated even in the 40s?)... the robot hands the colonist a bill...i don't read russian (still) but i think it's for 'dinosaur removal and storage.'

the colonist/spaceman seems pretty pissed about this...i'm guessing because he's a recon guy for the corporation and here they are charging him for the tools he needs to keep himself out of harms way and to do the job he was hired to do....sort of like when you get hired as a waiter at a restaurant and they make you buy the apron and shirt you're required to wear (dicks).... ok, maybe marx was onto something there.

moving on, the corporate fatcat holds up a contract and is like (in russian) "you should have read the fine space print in this space contract, spaceman!" and he's like no way dude! so they send the big head from Zardoz to blow up his robot...

from this point on, i don't know what the fuck is happening...he tears up the contract, he fixes the robot and it starts laughing maniacally and then sky literally falls in....capitalism is a madness that will lead us into nuclear winter? is that right??? did i get it?

but we arent done yet. i mean that's where i would have ended this thing, but they go and top that movie where bruce willis was dead the whole time.... the camera pulls wide, and then wider, and then holy crap, the planet was actually a flower the whole time.

happy halloween...

Anti-Booze Pill Sold with Viral Soviet Vid

2008-10-14T22:53:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine who knows I like old Soviet junk got really excited telling me all about this video a few weeks back. She was convinced it was some seriously cool real-deal stuff and started searching online for some way to buy it. (She drinks.)

(It's not like it's a huge problem or anything. She just goes out probably two or three times per week and usually has a pretty bad hangover the next day.)

(It's not like she's some raging wino, either. Although now that I think about it, I did once see her drink a bottle of scotch that had a pirate or sea captain on the label, but we've all had one of those nights. She's together. She's got a good job and a good relationship. She has a lot of good relationships. It's part of the reason why she goes out a couple times per week.)

(Ok, I just looked up the stats for what constitutes "binge drinking" if you're a woman, and I guess that means she binge drinks, which I guess makes her an alcoholic, but she's really obviously NOT an alcoholic, which I guess means that my point is that whoever comes up with the limits for bingeing and being an alcoholic seriously has no one to hang out with and must live in a place with no nightlife and winds up barfing like an SNL skit after half a glass of sherry.)

AS I WAS SAYING,

Because she was fired up about finding the pill in the video, she did her best to track it down online and figured out pretty quickly that the video was just part of a viral campaign. I wish I could tell you which one, but she hasn't answered my email, and googling the video's title isn't turning up a product name. I'm guessing the video's been rehosted since, which is why it's not pointing me at whatever they're selling.

Bottom line, though, the effort is pretty good. I like that they've distorted the film to make it look old. The uniform looks pretty authentic, and the scenery doesn't leap out at you as obviously being in Northern California or anything like that. Plus, it's interesting. I watched it all the way through, and if my friend hadn't told me about what her googling turned up, I probably would have googled myself (NO, NOT LIKE THAT, PERVERTS) and wound up finding the product too. By those standards, it's a good campaign. I get exposed to the product and have a decent time doing it. Plus, I did this all at work and got paid for it. Triple word score.

The video's got a few problems though.

First, I can't really tell if there's a cut scene or a wipe happening, but it seems like the soldier gets drunk INSTANTLY.

Second, the doctors had to be giving him PURE alcohol, which could always potentially just make him puke. If they wanted a control group, wouldn't they inject alcohol directly?

Third, they distorted the video pretty well, but the band on the right side is really regular. I think it's supposed to look like the ragged edge of an old film, but it seems like someone just slapped four photoshop filters onto the side of frames 1,2,3&4, repeat. It's cool, but kind of slick. Or maybe I'm talking out my ass.

Lastly (and this is the biggest one), they're running a test. A test where they get someone royally fucked up. A test where they get someone royally fucked up while he's standing behind a big wall. Then they hand him LIVE GRENADES. And ... stand there???

Maybe I'm not a good judge b/c I went into this one knowing it was fake, but even without knowing that, I think I would have still thought, "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TWO STANDING THERE FOR?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!" You've got a drunk who could pull the pin and drop the grenade, or pull the pin and pass out, or pull the pin and throw the grenade into the wall. The whole POINT of this exercise is that you've made this guy almost totally incapable of functioning AT ALL, and you've GIVEN HIM THINGS THAT BLOW UP.

If they'd just hopped back behind a blast barrier or something and watched through a slit where we could see them, it would have "sold" the video about 100x better.

As it is, though, it's still pretty cool.

The other two videos aren't nearly as good. The second one goes by in about 15 seconds, and the third one is about four minutes long and really boring. This one seems to be the one that really hit all its marks.

army units on american soil for "civil unrest"

2008-10-08T11:06:00.000-07:00

i really hate getting lumped in with the paranoid gun nut crowd, but this whole situation is pretty unbelievable

here are the quick & dirty bits:

An initial news report in the Army Times newspaper last month noted that in addition to emergency response the force “may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control.”

"Any military force has the inherent right to self-defense. And if the situation was inherently dangerous, then potentially the Secretary of Defense would allow them to carry their weapons, but it would only be for self- and unit-defense. This force has got no role in a civil disturbance or civil unrest, any of those kinds of things."

"Colonel Boatner talked about this unit, what it’s trained for. Well, let’s look at what it’s trained for. This is the 3rd Infantry, 1st Brigade Combat unit that has spent three of the last five years in Iraq in counterinsurgency."

"The whole question here about what the Pentagon is doing patrolling in the United States gets to the real heart of the matter, which is, do we have a democracy here? I mean, there is a law on the books called the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act that says that the president of the United States, as commander-in-chief, cannot put the military on our streets. And this is a violation of that, it seems to me.

"President Bush tried to get around this act a couple years ago in the Defense Authorization Act.... the President isn’t supposed to be using the military in this fashion, and though the President, true to form, appended a signing statement to that saying he’s not going to be governed by that.

"National Security Presidential Directive 51, that he signed on May 9th of 2007, Amy, this gives the President enormous powers to declare a catastrophic emergency and to bypass our regular system of laws, essentially, to impose a form of martial law.

"And if you look at that National Security Presidential Directive, what it says, that in any incident where there is extraordinary disruption of a whole range of things, including our economy, the President can declare a catastrophic emergency. Well, we’re having these huge disturbances in our economy. President Bush could today pick up that National Security Directive 51 and say, 'We’re in a catastrophic emergency. I’m going to declare martial law, and I’m going to use this combat brigade to enforce it.'

"...Now the Pentagon is doing sweeps of areas before, you know, a political convention? That used to be law enforcement’s job. That used to be domestic civil law enforcement job. It’s now being taken over by the Pentagon. That should concern us."

the domestic spying is bad enough. the president just signing whatever he wants to bills passed by congress, saying "thats nice but i dont care" -- THATS bad enough. but i dont know if i can take the idea of "the army is just here for your own good if things get out of hand. and they have tanks and tons of ammo." if its just for training exercises, do we need the ammo? the tanks? the force multipliers? the non-lethal suppression shit like tasers and who knows what else? (i cant believe im saying this, but -- microwaves? ELF? anything???)

if all its about is preparation and training for coordination with a bunch of different agencies, you can run sims for that. you can dry run over and over. its not like we dont have tons of airbases and national guard units all around the country that can respond and also be trained. why add a bunch of ARMED COUNTERINSURGENCY TRAINED active duty soldiers??? it doesnt make sense for preparation. you can prepare in sims. the air force does it all the time

i think i might ignore all this if it wasnt for one thing. in a month, the hardcore conservative candidate might get totally waxed by a democrat. a black democrat. a black democrat the conservatives keep trying to call a secret muslim. and i think a lot of black people and a lot of unarmed liberals are going to vote for that black democratic candidate. and i think if he loses by some funny means, theres going to be serious shit happening on the streets. serious shit that cant fight back against a fucking army counterinsurgency force

i know, i know, i sound so fucking paranoid

i dont even know where i heard this before, maybe it was this blog, but i want you to think of something:

think of a country, like a banana republic somewhere

the son of the countrys old intelligence chief runs for presidente. only it looks like hes losing. then his brother who runs a province on the outside of the country makes sure that a bunch of votes dont get counted for the other candidate for presidente. then a bunch of judges who got appointed by their father and their father's bosses sign off on not counting the ballots. so youve got the former secret agency chief and his judge buddies signing off on his one son throwing out some ballots so his other son can win the presidency

only that's not a banana republic. that's florida. and the bushes. in 2000.

jeb bush, the son of a former president and CIA chief, had his secretary of state katherine harris purge thousands of people from the voter rolls and prevented a recount of thousands of ballots. there were reportedly also lots of police in poor areas of miami stopping blacks and hispanics and putting them through security checks and keeping them from getting to the polls before they closed. (minorities vote democrat in much higher numers). then a supreme court that was stacked with republican appointees signed off on it. we lived through it, so it doesnt seem so weird. its america, right? we're not really crooked. but if that happened in even MEXICO, wed think that was the most corrupt fucked up shit wed ever heard

but we were okay with it. and maybe wed be okay again. maybe it would sound totally natural for the polls to get fucked up in LA and THE ARMY come in and reestablish order and OOPS the black guy lost in a last minute SHOCKER

i dont know anymore. i feel like fucking crying aabout being worried like this. we know how much those buzzwords from the bush admin meant. compassionate conservatism meant "FUCK YOU" to people who werent conservative and "FUNDING CUTS" to anyone who wasnt. "youre either with us or against us" stopped being about the rest of the world in about 10 seconds, and suddenly it was about anyone who didnt buy their shit 100% and dared to ask questions. "enhanced interrogation" is FUCKING TORTURE

so i guess when i hear "civil unrest and crowd control" you have to just give me a pass for a second for thinking "occupation force" because its not like they havent given me example after example after example to believe that theyd be that ballsy and cynical and fucking evil

cold war, hot air

2008-10-02T15:42:00.000-07:00

normally i call bullshit on 'swamp gas' and 'venus' type dismissals of ufo sightings...i mean i don't know the last time i saw venus change from green to orange and then bifurcate into a fleet of smaller orbs before speeding off at mach speeds in the afternoon... but anyway, i digress. my point is that in the classic gallery of culprits, the weather balloon may be plausible and probable more often than not. especially in the 50's.

see, if it wasn't greys and reptillians plotting our demise from atomic spaceballs, it was the us and the ussr doing it with balloons... not that we were trying to figure out how to rain death on each other with balloons or nuclear carrier pigeons exactly...but the us in particular was going nuts trying to understand what they were up against. the russians were, as churchill stated, "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."

and so, under the guise of 'scientific research' and being 'enthusiasts of cloud photography,' we started sending out balloons over the soviet union to take pictures. this went swimmingly until the soviets started catching them with their own planes using the same hooks that we put on the balloons so that we could easily retrieve them on returning...smooth move team america. anyway, check out the article...its a bit more interesting than i care to be this evening...

new weekend sort of a drag, new film found

2008-08-26T21:05:00.000-07:00

my friday night was dead dead dead because the gf had another "bargain hunt" planned. this time we were driving to sarasota...but i could sort of get behind it because supposedly afterwards we were going to go to this really nice beach and get some daquiris and just fun in the sun and shit...sort of like we did a few months back. if you tell me friday night is dead and cannot be BOOZED, im going to be an upset boy...and if you tell me its because we have to drive to another town to go to garage sales, im going to be pissed... but if you tell me theres going to be beaches, bitches, bikinis and BOOZE, i will put up with it

the gf had the trip-tik thing going on again. i swear she had 11 different places marked, and we had to get down there by 10 to cruise all of them. uuugggghhhh. still it wasnt so bad. sarasota used to be a place for wealthy people to retire, and over the years as one wealthy neighborhood kind of gets crapped up, a new one springs up, so you can basically hop from neighborhood to neighborhood every couple of years as the old people in each one start dying off in groups

this makes me seem kinda sick, and i swear im not THAT guy. its just that this town really DOES have a lot of cool stuff on the cheap. i remember going into a local goodwill and finding four crystal champagne saucers (like the ones you see in movies about the 20s) marked at $10. i dont think anyone knew they were crystal. so guess what i drink my cristal out of now? hell yeah

i feel bad about the families who let this stuff go on the cheap. they miss out on a lot of the money value. their moms and pops probably kept the stuff out of sentimentality, but unless youre going to keep the things for the same reason, getting rid of really awesome plates or knife sets for pennies just because "you already have a knife set or some plates" is really dumb. if youre going to sell off everything about your mom, get something for it, for fucks sakes

so anyway, i was picking around this one sale in a house that was probably amazing 25 years ago. neighborhood isnt much anymore, and i know the gf knew that, because thats where you get some really great deals, and she was seriously bloodhounding all over the place. i bitch, but i have the complete Who, Floyd, Beatles (american releases) and Zep on vinyl because of these things. so they arent all bad. but like i say, iwas picking around, and i found this HUGE film canister

i saw it and wanted to buy it because
a. it was about twice as big as the old reels ive mostly seen, not like some family cassette or something, it looked like it had some movie junk in its movie trunk
b. it was 5 dollars and
c. it had a cool label
i didnt even expect it to have shit in it. but it did, so i picked it up. what the hell

the label was sort of yellowy but it looked like someone had written it with a typewriter with big ROMAN letters all in caps. just this cool looking SA-149B. or 186B. or something. im not looking at it now. i just remember the SA. i dont remember typewriters stamping that big, but i guess i dont remember a bunch because apparently this dude remembered everything, there was a STACK of boxes about four wide, six longh and about six high and they were just newspapers. i coulda had them for a buck, but it would have cost me about ten bucks just to drive them to a recycle bin

the gf kept poking around for basically forever. i got bored and actually found two really nice picture frames. i don't know why they were selling them actually, because you don't get these anymore. they look carved and totally serious. but i got them for five bucks, and thankfully that takes care of birthday presents for mom and grandma this year

the moral of the story is: LS, dont let this happen to you...set boundaries...the kid is already setting them for you. have limits. and GFK, if you ever wind up not being a sexless dork extraordinaire, dont let this happen to you either. im not worried about max...hes too drunk to get a girl pregnant

ill let you know about the film whenever i get it worked out. for now remember to get daquiris if you can. daquiris on the beach with your girl in a bikini is the way to go if you have to go shopping

Russia & Georgia (Will They Ever Hook Up?)

2008-08-11T09:46:00.000-07:00

You asked, I felt like I should answer about Russia.

Also I'm going to preemptively head off any complaints about being eggheaded by saying you asked for this.

There are only two problems facing Russia, and they're Putin and indifference.

Let me tell you about the indifference. Right now, Russia is going through one of its biggest economic expansions ever. If not the biggest. (You don't even have to include the boost organized crime contributes to the economy, especially the pirating of western media.) And God help you if you don't report that condition favorably.

Since Putin took power, about 20 journalists have been killed in Russia. While that's not quite Columbia-level numbers, that's astronomical for a western European country. There's just no excuse for it. But a common thread running through the deaths and the spontaneous raids of radio and TV stations is that these people were following the money. The Putin regime has never really seemed to care if you report on their human rights abuses or their lack of transparency or the really boundless executive power. Once you get into the kleptocracy stuff — once you ask, "How many billions does Putin have in Swiss bank accounts due to just seizing energy companies?" — that's when you're going to get disappeared.

Because ultimately I don't think a lot of Russian citizens care too terribly much about a lack of transparency at the top. When America was doing all right economically, you probably couldn't find even 5 people in 10 who really gave much of a damn about unchecked executive power. Iraq or Katrina or tax cuts for the wealthy... sure, they might have cared about that. But the principle of balanced power and oversight of the executive is too abstract to care about.

Putin's a smart guy. It's the economy, stupid. He's kept people better off than they were under communism and under the panics of early democracy, and for that they repay him by not caring enough to ask the hard questions. "Who cares if he's a strongman? We have iPods."

It's also partially what happens, I think, when a people have almost zero experience with democracy and whose moments of freedom almost always couple with economic panics or social dislocation. Russian democracy was a messy business, and it hurt an awful lot of people because there were no built-in safety nets anymore. In the rush to tear down communism, they tore down the stuff that bailed out people in tough times, and the only people who knew how to build those safety nets only knew how to do it with a communist instruction manual.

So because freedom was so scary and uncertain, a lot of people treated it as "the time you steal everything not nailed down because you never knew when the next crisis would come and it would all disappear." But since that kind of cowboy capitalism creates crises and destabilizes the economy and social order, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. You want to get out of a crummy system, so you choose freedom; but freedom creates chaos and another kind of crummy system. So at some point you throw up your hands and say, "WE NEED ONE MAN TO SOLVE THIS, BECAUSE DEMOCRACY DOESN'T WORK!"

I think that's sort of what's happened in Russia. Historically they've always kind of see-sawed between flirting with more liberalism and then trusting in an iron-fisted figure to solve the problems facing them. To a certain extent, I think they looked at Putin and said, "You. Fix this." He did, and in response they turn a blind eye to many things.

One of those things is the sudden aggression toward neighbors. Georgia today. Ukraine and Belarus recently. To a certain extent, there are probably a lot of Russian citizens who enjoy this. After being down and out for the late 1980s and 1990s, it feels good to kick ass and be the big kid on the block again. (You know America loved Gulf War I for the same reasons: Vietnam was such a bummer. But now — we rule again!) But for the most part, this seems like Putin's thing.

You can take the KGB away from a man, but put him in charge of the country, and he'll just recreate it with a new name. Which he has. Putin's an unregenerate Chekist, and he's rebuilt the same spooky secret state apparatus he used to be a part of. And with that comes the aggression, because otherwise what's the point?

As to what that aggression means, I don't think it's part of a plan for global domination. As my namesake George Kennan pointed out in his famous Long Telegram, Soviet expansion post-WWII was really just a realization of all the 19th century land grabs the Russian Tsars pursued. It was this paranoid reach for security in the guise of a century-long national dream.

I don't think this aggression is as grand, but I think it indicates Putin and his band of Chekists are going back to the recent past. They want those satellite states that the USSR had. They want their old Socialist Republics back — Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus. They want to have the glory of the old Soviet dream back. Just without the communism and with the billions and billions of nakedly stolen petrochemical dollars and hijacking of private industries.

It's funny that we picked the name that we did for this place, because at the time, it couldn't have been more of a winking joke. The world wasn't really like that anymore. Now it seems prescient. The movement toward opacity, mendacity, ornate deceptions, arms increases, elective wars and wars-by-proxy — the sort of stuff we lived through in the Cold War — were all sort of coming back after 2001. But to take it seriously enough to call looking at it "Kremlinology" would have sounded like pretentious self-indulgence. Yet in just the last year, all those tendencies have ramped up to an absurd degree. It's not funny anymore. It's not even remotely funny.

And, at least in Russia's case, it looks like Putin and his joke of a picked successor will get away with it. In part because most of the people are too indifferent to really ask what's going on and challenge the responses they get. And in part because when people do do that, more of their bodies are dropping on St. Petersburg streets than Marlo Stanfield dropped on West Baltimore.

Из дневников Йона Тихого. Путешествие на интеропию.

2008-08-10T01:46:00.000-07:00

beats me. again, i wish one of us spoke russian...feel a bit lost without the subtitles even though the gist is always apparent (capitalism bad). i just like the art...no great insight here, move along...

Robbery, American Style (Ограбление по-американски)

2008-08-09T14:09:00.000-07:00

this cartoon is pretty amazing on a couple levels. first, just watch this thing and take in all the colors and lines (the music rules too)...its just a fucking stunning piece of work. second, its a piece of propaganda that could have just as easily been made by an american filmmaker in the 60s...the swaggering cowboy sheriff reminds me of William Klein's great but rarely seen flick Mr Freedom.

the action starts with a bank heist. the robber leads the cops on a wild chase, leaving dozens of bodies in his wake. a sheriff in classic western garb follows the whole pursuit from a safe distance, watching the thieves doublecross one another in a way that strangely reminds me of the first 5 minutes of the dark knight. eventually the money winds up in the hands of a femme fatale who soon meets her demise as well (after being trampled in a bizarre frenzy over a reverse striptease- just watch, it's odd-...probably has something to do with materialistic fetishism). the sheriff collects the loot and returns 'empty handed' to the bankers (looking a bit like mobsters of course) and tells them that the robbers got away.... apparently there are 2 other films in this trilogy, Robbery, French Style and Robbery, Italian Style...i'll see if they are on youtube too.

how do you explain the crisis in georgia? chatlogs, oh yeah i love chatlogs

2008-08-08T14:31:00.000-07:00

e.c: is there a particular reason russia wants all these little states so badly? is it just because they dont want nato setting up bases in them?
GFK: That's a possibility. It could also just be their 19th century territorial ambitions all over again. there's a patter in Russian history where land = security, and maybe it's not even NATO but just a perceptual thing. I don't know. I don't think Putin really has a check on his desires right now either.
GFK: Honestly, I've just given up. That's it. That's the explanation.
e.c: i feel like culturally the east loves to be bossed around ... they really dont like changing leaders
e.c: every former eastern block resident i know who is over 30 talks about how awesome soviet radio was and they start singing these crazy folk songs about farming. i mean not everyone, but enough that it seemed weird. didnt these guys murder and oppress you? why miss that?
GFK: It could be rose-colored glasses. It also could be just not knowing what the struggles of political/economic freedom are. Russia's kind of gone back and forth throughout history. If you look at the course of Russian history, there's this constant see-saw between evil strongmen and slightly more democratizing and benevolent strongmen. You'd have good Tsars and oppressive Tsars, then democracy, then communist dictatorship, then democracy, then Putin's iron fist in a velvet glove.
e.c: its weird theres not more outrage about him inside russia right now, and the only explanation i can come up with is the same reason there arent demonstrations in the streets right now here. as pissed as people are about the government getting more powerful and more secret, theyre comfy for right now and still buying stereos
GFK: Yeah.
e.c: but thats got to be risky too. arent they a little too intertwined with the western economy to do this kind of thing? do they really have any leverage beside something stupid like nukes?
GFK: We've bankrupted ourselves of all moral capital in the world that basically this is just their way of saying, "Fuck it, try something." What the fuck are we supposed to say back to them anyway? "Don't invade other countries on flimsy pretexts"? Pfffffffffffffff!
e.c: i dont understand why they didnt just let them take the 2 breakaway regions.... arent they almost entirely populated with russian nationalists anyway?
GFK: Me neither, but nationalism's emotional. Even if there are more Russian nationalists than Georgian nationalists, it doesn't mean the Georgians are going to stop feeling they have rights. Look at all the Hungarians in Romania. They haven't lived in Hungary since 1919, but it USED to be Hungary, so screw the fact that they're outnumbered.

e.c.: i think itd be cool if one small town went to war against another small town over rezoning, but that wont happen. i guess its because it doesnt matter as much if the place you live is pretty much just as good as the place your neighbor lives. you cant imagine ft. lauderdale going to war with miami, but i think thats because no one could tell them apart in the first place

how can you not be prepared for the olympics when you're a one-party government that can kill your citizens?

2008-07-30T08:55:00.000-07:00

no link because you can literally pick ANY online newspaper, and they have an article on this

what totally confuses me is something i said back here, that i cant imagine how you can have a 1-party government that is accountable to NOTHING (not even the international community; i mean, it's just a week until the olympics, and they're still locking their own people up left and right) and still fuck up this hard

think about it, the chinese govt doesnt seem to care too much about the health&welfare of their own people, and yet they didnt think about dropping a few bodies to get this shit done on time? build a dam, fuck a village...all in the game. but build an olympic village...and suddenly there are deadlines and work stoppages? what?

so now we're going to have an olympics where some facilities are sort of slapped together last-minute and of questionable safety...at the same time, youre going to get a cynical display of communist unity and perfection from a bunch of poor scared-shitless chinese people dressed up like drum majorettes and oompa-loompa-ing around, going, "Oh-wee-Oh, we're here at gunpoint"

meanwhile, the air is like breathing fucking coffee grounds...this is the other thing thats just totally nuts about china...youve got them fucking up central planning and fucking up this gilded age economics and environmentalism thing. its like theyve managed to fuck up both ends of the socio-political spectrum and crush their people to death in the middle. i feel so bad

J. Frank Parnell's Radiation-O-Rama

2008-07-20T08:27:00.000-07:00

J. Frank Parnell: Ever been to Utah? Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have 'em, too. When they canceled the project it almost did me in. One day my mind was full to bursting. The next day - nothing. Swept away. But I'll show them. I had a lobotomy in the end.
Otto: Lobotomy? Isn't that for loonies?
Parnell: Not. At. All. Friend of mine had one. Designer of the neutron bomb. You ever hear of the neutron bomb? Destroys people - leaves buildings standing. Fits in a suitcase. It's so small, no one knows it's there until - BLAMMO. Eyes melt, skin explodes, ev-ry-bo-dy dead! So immoral, working on the thing can drive you mad. That's what happened to this friend of mine. So he had a lobotomy. Now he's well again.

Thought I'd do this one b/c it looked like a fun one. No real surprises here. Just your basic, MY GOD RADIATION IS SO FREAKIN' GOOD FOR YOU WHY ARE YOU EVEN WORRYING ABOUT IT??? pap that got fed to our parents. Still, let's go to the highlights.

ASPECTS OF NUCLEAR RADIATION

0:57 - "Complete recovery is more probable!"
Oh cool. Lies. I love lies. Tell me more lies.

1:11 "...as potent and irresistible as the evil spirits of the Indians."
That isn't a lie, that's just crazy insensitive racism. Could you make up something that any asshole could disprove in about a year with a lab not funded by an arms company?

1:40 "The radium-treated dye of your watch, for instance, is harmless!"
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much. I hope you died of bone and dick cancer.

2:05 "Not even the atomic-bomb burst... is the DDT of humanity from which there is no escape."

If I can be serious for a second, this makes me suspect this isn't a 50's video as advertised. According to the Knowledge Lords of the Internet, DDT really didn't become a big scary thing nationwide until after 1962 and Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring." So the idea of never getting away from the evil of DDT wouldn't make sense in the 50's. Granted at the time there was a worldwide campaign to wipe out mosquitoes and malaria with it, but that was never 100% effective. Also it's just a REALLY weird metaphor to use. Was everyone in America at the time sitting there thinking things like, "Nobody covers center field like Mickey Mantle. He just blankets it like DDT!" "You can't see anything on that girl. That dress is on her like DDT." Or, "One day I'm gonna slam a guy's head into the mat by falling backward. My name is Jake Roberts. Here is my trouser snake."

2:38 - [Advice for surviving a nuclear blast] "Be somewhere else!"

I'm going back to the beginning of the video right now to see if this was made by the "1+1=2 Educational Film Company." Look for other classics like:

- How to Prevent Drowning: pull your head out of the goddam water

- Can Fires Kill? - YES!

- How to Prevent Dog Bites: kill all dogs

- POISON: DON'T EAT IT!!!

4:05 - [To prove the effectiveness of concrete bunkers, they show four guys in one, chainsmoking and wearing the same outfit and slick hair]

Oh, I get it. To survive the nuclear holocaust, I have to join The Jets.

4:20 - "It is safe to go into the area of a high airburst two minutes after it occurs."

That locomotive engine couldn't possibly be hot. In fact, stick a baby on it! Also, 4:20 smoke dank airburst every day.

5:00 - WORRY vs. DEATHS

This chart is totally fucking amazing.

Now see whatcha got here is your Worry AND your Death. Your WORRYDEATH. 85% of the time, you're gonna have Worry. But then the other percent of the time, BOOM! You're gonna have Death. That's why you've got to get protection in the middle.

Some people say you gotta combine your Worry and your Death. But I want you to look at this! I want you to look at this right here. You take out your Death pie, but it doesn't fit in your Worry! Dudnt make sense! BOOM! That's a nuke going off! You weren't protecting your quarterback! PAY ATTENTION!!!

7:05 - Radiation does not cause impotence! Or sterility! "The dose needed to bring about permanent sterility exceeds the fatal dose."

Just remember that while this agency was telling you this, another agency in the government was NUKING MEN'S BALLS in prisons against their will just to test this out. Guess what? This video is wrong!

8:58 - "These are the probabilities, and they aren't worth losing any sleep over!"
This is like waking up in the middle of the night b/c your wife is shaking you and saying "I heard glass shattering" and then you say, "Holy shit really???" and then she says "nevermind, it's probably nothing," and then you can't sleep for about three fucking hours, b/c if it isn't nothing, you're going to be found slashed to pieces and your kid cut open and boiled for soup. OH, DON'T WORRY! IT'S ONLY DEATH! AND YOU NEED SLEEP, RIGHT?????

9:02 - "Besides, a mutation can be a good variation, an improvement over the parent!"

10:1 the writer of this film was a mutation from a good human being.

fist pumping and totalitarianism?

2008-07-16T12:08:00.000-07:00

am i the only one who feels like the best soviet stuff just dropped off the radar in the last 11 months???

i was looking through our old myspace posts and some of the stuff on the old board, and all the links are just dead...its like someone got to whoever uploaded them (kidding!), but doesnt it seem weird? why would interest in this die out? why would cool stuff just not be there to load? you cant find anything anymore

best example...i keyword searched about a dozen different things, and the best i could come up with was the same result over and over for one of Stalins b-day celebrations...the video doesnt show anything new, but watch it and let me get back to you

ok, is there a relationship between how un-free your nation is and how free your leader's elbows are?

all the soviets, hitler, mussolini...they look like theyre conducting an orchestra when they talk

roosevelt was never like this, and he had more central authority as president than probably anyone...except bush II...and LBJ

chavez bangs the podium too, like hes angry

the only one who doesnt flip out and get angry and who still has really unquestioned power is bush

maybe thats why he leans on the podium...folksy...throws everyone else off their game

Terror Cells Kill Tony Snow

2008-07-12T16:05:00.000-07:00

CNN:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former White House press secretary Tony Snow -- who once told reporters "I'm a very lucky guy" -- died at the age of 53 early Saturday after a second battle with cancer.

Hate to see a guy meet a timetable like that.

The tragic/weird life of Wilhelm Reich

2008-07-03T15:32:00.000-07:00

it's been a month and I feel like posting again. apparently disabling comments did little to deter matt and les from e-mailing me their thoughts (soo funny guys, now i know what a lemon party is), so i give up. let 'er rip.

reich was a rejected student of freud. he fathered primal scream therapy and had some very astute observations on the origins of fascism. but then he went nuts and thought he had discovered the energy that all life was derived from.

and it's a shame because he had highly progressive ideas on sex education, abortion,contraception, feminism, etc. but this is overshadowed by his work that he pursued in the US after fleeing nazi germany because of persecution for the ideas that should have been his legacy (not that this would be the first time nazis ruined a good idea for everyone else).

so, Wilhelm Reich (it's an odd name, like being named Napoleon France) fled Germany, rejected by his mentors and his government, and set up shop in Oslo. It's a story too convoluted for a single blog post to explain how he went from being a commie sex therapist to a whacko theorist of space monads but it has something to do with him studying the galvanometric resistance of a vagina during orgasm and the belief that he saw a box of sand glow in the dark during an unrelated experiment about cancer cells..

so fast forward to the 1950s. wilhelm reich has been living in the US on a piece of land he named 'Organon,' in honor of the Orgone Energy, the force of life he had come to believe in. what is orgone exactly? have you ever rubbed your eyes and looked at a sunny sky and seen little lights or points moving? that's Orgone. it's not that crazy of an idea in many cultures. indians call it prana, the chinese call it chi. the soviets had a scientific hypothesis of life energy called 'bioplasma'.
laugh if you want, but even the US took it seriously for a time, though they denied it.

do i personally believe in orgone? no. i think there are far more plausible models of zero point energy to be investigated and pursued. but that said, i believe that his intentions were noble and that at certain times he may have been observing real effects even if he didnt know how to explain them. eventually, he wound up in a jail cell, his books burned by the FDA and his mind so gone (the US govt burned his books, can you blame him?) that he died believing his weather research was being sanctioned by aliens, and that everytime a plane passed over his cell, it was a message of goodwill from his secret ally president eisenhower.

Bill O'Reilly SUCKS at Battletoads

2008-07-02T15:45:00.000-07:00

Man gets decapitated on Greyhound Bus

2008-06-30T16:58:00.000-07:00

Police in Winnipeg said Thursday they do not know what triggered a vicious attack on a Greyhound bus the night before that led to the beheading of a passenger.

Some officials are saying this was planned, but I hope cooler heads prevail. Sounds like the guy just lost his head.

BUT ... it's almost quittin time here. Looks like I gotta head out.

found films friday is fucking frustrating

2008-06-23T10:19:00.001-07:00

i know its not friday. i just like fs

fffffffffffffffffffffor fucks sakes

didnt warn you guys about this upload since i got this a day before i knew i was going to be seeing my uncle andy to help him move some giant-ass rocks from home depot to his home backyard (its where his home his)...i figured i could kill two birds with one stone and get my hands on the projector and get this sucker uploaded ASAP while i was there

this is a pretty video. i love model planes, and one of my great uncles literally had a garage with a fucking squadron of them...so keeping that in mind, there isnt a lot here...not the way im used to

its grainy, so its hard to tell if theres a swoop from another plane going on before the cut...you see a bright slash of something, then a cut back to your protagonists plane. kind of uneventful, though maybe a dogfight specialist could get some aeranautical (sp?) juju out of it

i have to admit, i think im going to skip out on the film purchases from here on out. i know theyre cheap, but i dont think i can look at another shed or a t-bird getting waxed or (IM NOT KIDDING) a kids gums and teeth with and without braces...that was the worst thing ive seen ever. these things are cheap as shit, but the effort to find out how much they should be $2 takes a lot out of me...(they should be $2 when they shouldnt be $1, seriously)

if i had my uncles projectors in the apartment, it wouldnt be so bad. but driving to see family, play around with the kids, shoot shit with my uncle, maybe help him drill some holes in the garage and keep a level for the shelving...all those costs on top of the films are starting to make them less worth it

ill keep you posted if i see something cool, but most of the cool stuff ive seen has been about like all the stuff ive posted...not cool

Ekranoplan, Schauberger, and other funny words

2008-06-18T01:05:00.000-07:00

ok, I'm actually posting again. (and just so you know, i'm disabling the comments because I really don't want hear it- get fucked, guys)

anyways, as you know, if there is one thing I hate more than disinformation, it's misinformation. and crap that relies on cheesy music or clips to convey stuff that is no laughing matter.

one of these things near and dear to my heart is UFOs. i'm not sure if this is the best analogy, but if there are religious ufologists, then i am of the secular variety. do i believe? yes i do. but only in UFOs of the manmade variety. sorry, you aren't going to sell me on the idea that pleiadians or reptiles gifted us with transistors and stealth tech in the 40s. it's bullshit and insulting to human ingenuity. i also hate the ancient astronaut theories advanced by assholes with the racist idea that black people couldnt figure out how to build the pyramids without the help of alien benevolence...

so back to UFOs. had most people seen an airship in the 19th century? no. must be from mars. have most people today seen a craft using a vortex turbine based on the principals of the Coanda or 'implosion' effect? no. must be from alpha centauri.

modern sightings of UFOs started in the 40s, just around the time that the nazis and soviets were beefing up their aerospace tech. that's all there is to it. and who knows who in this brave new global economy has what now.

but its worth noting the following. the soviet ekranoplan. once you get over how hot that redhead anchorgirl is, pay attention to the video.

those suckers are able to get some altitude and look at how the more recent prototypes are saucer shaped...

but going back to the 40s, i'm certain that even more impressive concepts beyond ground effect vehicles were being tinkered with. have a look at this clip. that's just a toy. Shauberger started playing with these things in the late 30s....i can only imagine what we are doing since the end of classical physics and the dawning of quantum mechanics.

There Are No Other Words for This Other Than "This Sucks"

2008-06-13T22:32:00.000-07:00

Tim Russert dead at 58.

Finding out this happened to Big Russ's baby boy when people like O'Reilly and Hannity still walk the earth suddenly makes me understand how my parents must have felt when they found out that Mark David Chapman pumped a bunch of bullets into John Lennon while Yoko Ono was

standing.

right.

fucking.

there.

the cat's out of the bag: the soviet neurobiology gap appears to have been veterinary...

2008-06-02T18:18:00.000-07:00

Just. ew.

according to english russia

These guys penetrated the abandoned and sealed science lab of Russian Army which conducted sophisticated experiments studying human and animal brains. They got a lot photos of many test samples in an abandoned state but still excellent condition. You can see even the last Soviet leader Gorbachev that was left in rush - it was the time of his rule when the lab was closed and sealed from civilians.

yeah right, 'secret army lab...' it looks like an abandoned community college, honestly. all i see are cat and rat parts, maybe some monkey eyes in that jar. i doubt that this is really the good stuff.

it did remind of a great little failure that the cia once undertook: operation acoustic kitty. basically we thought it would be a good idea to embed radio transmitters into felines and then deploy them (using don adams dressed as a crazy cat lady i'm guessing) near kgb moles talking on park benches in washington. after 20 mil was dumped into this program, the cat's maiden voyage was almost immediately ended when it decided to run under a moving taxi...

if only we could have been better friends to the soviets perhaps today we would all own headless radio transmitting dogs or some other wonderful innovation that this kind of research leads to in peacetime.

this sort of crap isn't over either, in fact, we're just starting to roll out the 2.0 stuff with a frighteningly high degree of improvement over the suiciding radio cats of the 60s.

Why MKUltra?

2008-06-02T10:46:00.000-07:00

This is something I've been thinking about off and on since I wrote up my little breakdown on MKUltra: why that? Our government has done so much evil to us in the name of good and has crossed the lines of civil liberties more times than I can count. It's doing it right now in Guantanamo, arguably with Echelon, likely with other forms of wiretapping and data-mining. So if something this bad is still going on, why do fringe groups — especially right-wing ones — get so upset about things like MKUltra instead of something like Cointelpro?

Wikipedia actually has a pretty decent write-up about it, but here are the five things you need to know about Cointelpro:
1. It lasted for roughly the same period as MKUltra, from the mid fifties to early seventies, was conducted by the FBI, and it was meant to keep the existing socio-political order intact by pretty much any means necessary.
2. FBI agents were permitted to conduct raids and beatings, destroy property and act like Vikings in black suits.
3. FBI agents planted fake news stories and flyers, wrote up fake subversive literature, all to scare Mom and Pop to death. They used the media to demonize even peaceful groups.
4. Agents infiltrated protest groups. Sometimes they did so to push the groups over the edge into doing something wrong, so they could be prosecuted. Sometimes they were just there to obviously BE plants, so other members would get scared off, refuse to do anything or distrust everyone else.
5. Massive civil rights violations and perversions of the legal system were carried out to bankrupt, jail and terrorize protest groups.
But for the last 20 years or so, the big parts of anti-government fringe groups have been right-wing, and in that time people seem to have gotten lots more worried about MKUltra than Cointelpro, despite the second one having a ton more effect. It's been bugging me, but I think I know why.

Independent Instead of Collectivist
A lot of right-wing fringe puts a premium on individuality. It's why so many are libertarian. There's this attitude that you might want to do the same things, but mainly you go home to Fortress Your House. The biggest thing you worry about is Martial Law from the government, and you don't need to be best buddies with other people to fight back. But a lot of leftist organizations in the 60s, even if they weren't Marxist, were collectivist. Collective action, collective effort. It's a lot easier to poison a group than a bunch of individuals. You get members turning on each other. If you're all sharing together and sacrificing together, all it takes is one fake bank account slip showing that a guy in the group is sitting on tons of cash, and you've just torn the whole thing apart. So I think rightist groups don't care, because they don't think it's their problem. Even though it is.

Personal Subversion Instead of Violence and Intimidation
I think MKUltra spooks rightists more because it's about subverting the individual by using invisible forces. Ultra-Low-Frequency, LSD, something else in the water, hypnosis. If you're an individualist, you only have to rely on yourself. But what if the government can get to you and get YOU to betray YOU? MKUltra's the unseen enemy, making an enemy of you. Compare that to violence and intimidation. Those? Big deal. If the government comes for us, we'll shoot the bastards. The seen enemy you can arm against is less scary.

Cointelpro Targeted the Left
Mainly though, I think it's politics. Cointelpro spent over 80% of its effort on leftist organizations. Socialist, communist, pro-black, pro-hispanic, pro-women and pro-gay groups. Let's be honest, a lot of right-wing anti-government types hate socialism, communism, blacks, hispanics, homosexuals and women's liberation. It doesn't mean they're wrong about the government, but they're wrong about all that other stuff (except communism). Even if these groups had the same distrust they did, those on the right said, "Fuck 'em!" and were happy to see the feds do their work for them. It was against their self-interest, but on the surface it looked like it served their interests. They bought the FBI propaganda: these are all violent blacks and man-raping queers who want to be just like RUSSIA.

MKUlta must have just been scarier. It came for individuals, turned them against themselves. It came after anybody, not just the queers and the darkies and the commies. For an individual who needs a clear enemy, it must still be really spooky. And it is! It still is!

That's the thing I think that bugs me the most. Both of these programs were inexcusable. Horrible. Exactly the opposite of what I want my country to be. But elements of the right have demonized the left so much that they almost seem to compliment Cointelpro. In the meantime, their crazy conspiracies about continuing MKUltra and GOVERNMENT MIND CONTROL (which goes against the basic science) have made MKUltra kind of a joke. They also make you sound like a joke if you condemn it or even really talk about it. You also make people think you're like one of those righist groups.

Now that I think about it, I'm pissed off. I'm pissed off to get lumped in with that crowd just because I think history proves I should distrust my government. And I'm pissed off that these same people seem to just write off one of the most important reasons FOR that distrust.

I don't know where I was going with this. Sorry.

massive quake hits china

2008-05-13T09:10:00.000-07:00

didnt we just have one of these?

i feel horrible for the chinese people...while theres no way you can blame an earthquake on their completely fucked-up environmental policies, youve gotta think they cant be helping. you can just picture shocks like this creating mudslides due to their massive erosion, cracking deep mines, opening up crevasses that dump all kinds of shit into their groundwater

china sort of amazes me because it seems like they manage to have the fucking worst parts of statist government and gilded age style raping of everything...like, entire regions and local cultures getting wiped out for dams, hillsides washing away under erosion, then you've got everyone basically breathing the equivalent of tailpipe exhaust and working for 10 cents per day in some collapsible shithole

on the other hand, i guess i just want to make jokes like, "so this is what happens when Dragon Meets Phoenix...gotta be a lotta un-Happy Family goin around"

Okay, So Let's Talk MKUltra

2008-05-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

Since this has come up in a few of the most recent posts, let's talk about it. Created in the early 1950s and lasting (allegedly) up until about 1973, the CIA's MKUltra program sought to develop new technologies in mind control, hypnosis, behavioral modification, etc.

Some say the narrative begins with Operation Paperclip, the American intelligence community's program to harvest as many Nazi scientists, doctors and engineers as possible (and cynically capitalize on knowledge gleaned from their atrocities-disguised-as-experiments, while also keeping these men out of the hands of the Soviets). Others say it was inspired by POWs from the Korean Conflict, who'd been broken and distorted by the Chinese, Russians and North Koreans.

Here's all you really need to know:

1. It was real.
2. It was still bullshit anyway.

Yes, MKUltra probably killed people via accident or deliberate acts. Yes, it violated people's civil liberties. Yes, it may have poisoned their bodies and minds with chemicals administered without consent. Yes, it was part of a cover-up by Director Richard Helms (who destroyed almost all the files on it). It doesn't mean any of this shit works. It doesn't. Here's why:

1. It Relied on Agents for Science
A lot of time you had field men administering this junk, often doing it in the field, often without any control group, often within social settings where you've got a billion variables going on. Most of what we know about MKUltra was ultra-unscientific. You can put protons in a linear accelerator and fire them at each other, but if you've got the two dudes from Bartles & Jaymes watching the dials, they're going to thank you for your support and tell you something useless. MKUltra was morally and socially disgusting in a society of law and liberty, but it also managed to be an appalling demonstration of Bad Science.

2. It Relied on Belief in Hypnotism
Hynotism is bullshit. If it weren't, you'd see it all the time. Since you don't, what does that tell you? There'd by hypnosis rape cases, hypnosis burglaries, hypnosis-forced-suicides. It wouldn't just be a Vegas show or on the Sci-Fi channel. When a huge wing of your science boils down to "things from the carnival are real!" then you're not learning anything. The only way you can believe that hypnosis as it related to MKUltra meant anything is if you can believe there's a secret society of people who have this ability and who are kept out of public light by the government or hypnotize their way out of detection. Since almost every hypnotist you're ever going to meet is a grifter or a flake, you can either bury your head in conspiracy or wake up to this being another demonstration of BAD SCIENCE.

3. It Relied on Shoddy Psychology
At the time, what we knew about personality disorders and other forms of abnormal psych was about a tenth as much as we know today. Considering we know slightly more than jack about that now, again, NOT something to base all your science on. Unless you like (you guessed it) BAD SCIENCE.

4. It Relied on LSD and MDA for Behavioral Sabotage and Control
Have you ever tried controlling someone on acid? Seriously? Come on. MDA (related to MDMA) was used to make people feel euphoric and blab or lose inhibitions, but like booze and other drugs, it basically worked on people who were the type of people to talk and not on the type of people who didn't. Meaning that it did nothing significant. With acid, they could induce panic in some people, not in others. Again, it's an unpredictable and unproductive effect that usually depends on the person.

In summary, any time your big conspiracy against the American people is being run by guys without training, using Vegas act techniques for their science, going off pop-psych about MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES and powered by LSD, you're going to come up with a bunch of bullshit.

That video LS linked plays right into all this stuff. People believe it counts as science because they want to believe it does, just as much as the CIA did. And to prove it that guy who made the video has a bunch of popular movie clips and pop-psych explanations and then puts in some SPOOOOOOKY images, but it doesn't tell you anything you couldn't dream up after sticking a fork in half your brain.

MKUltra is significant because of what it says about our government — not because of what its results said at all.

CIA's secret weapon -- German director dead for 32 years

2008-05-06T13:43:00.000-07:00

i'm getting a little tired of all the jokes about me never posting, because it's just untrue. i post all the time. i am a master at posting. ask your wives and girlfriends.

lol, j/k. they wouldn't know what a good posting is anyway.

OW!!!!

seriously, though, i will never post again, except this one time when i need to hyperlink and post lots of images

if you know much classic silent film, that video LS posted is truly pathetic. in the middle of talking about mind control and bizarre experiments and MKULTRA, they show this:

it's from fucking METROPOLIS. the evil technology the CIA is on the brink of letting loose on the world is from the special effects from a silent film made 81 years ago.

if you don't believe me, check out this list of metropolis characters and scroll down to ROTWANG AND HIS ROBOT. rotwang, the classic mad scientist, builds a robot that he designs to look exactly like the lover who left him.

it's a really great movie, and everyone should see it at least once. it's good for us to remember that some of the people who cared the most about society and equality in the 20s and 30s were the GERMANS. it isn't fair their legacy got hijacked by a bunch of loonies. which is what pisses me the fuck off about seeing cool images from this great movie being used by another bunch of fucking loonies

-30-

Holy Fucking Rabbit Hole, Batman

2008-05-06T07:51:00.000-07:00

Holy shit! Did you guys click the links embedded on the video E.C. just posted? If you're on the youtube page and click on the video.google link underneath the profile of the user who uploaded it, you get this:

I don't even know where to begin with this. But I know where to end. After about five minutes.

First of all, these people act like microwave technologies are some sort of terrible secret, when that's not the case. I wish I could find it right now, but it's down (GFK, tell me you have it somewhere), but the New Yorker did a HUGE article last year or so on all kinds of alternate law enforcement methods. I remember reading a bunch of references to it after the DON'T TASE ME, BRO kid hit youtube. Basically it said what everyone else in the mainstream media and government has said: "Effective microwave technology? I WISH!" It followed a retired U.S. military officer who was also an LAPD consultant. The guy kept coming back to the same themes, like, "Alt. tech. is too costly" or "too cumbersome" or "too unreliable" or "not targeted enough" etc.

But you still get articles like this one and videos like the one linked above, saying it's all true. Usually based on eyewitness or "victim" statements. But the victim statements, especially for microwave weapons and sonic confusion devices and all that jazz all usually wind up saying the same thing:

1. I was in a crowd of protesters.
2. Something happened.
3. I got scared.
4. I got nauseous.

Well no shit. You were in a tense situation with lots of people yelling and pushing and maybe tear gas. No fucking shit you got nauseous. The thing is, if you're in an environment where reacting like that physically is TOTALLY NATURAL, turning around and blaming the FEDRAL GUMMYMINT for using mind bullets on you is fucking retarded. Maybe they should use Occam's Razor on you, at least because you'd think it was some weird new technology no one had seen before.

I could have put all this in a comment on E.C.'s piece, but blogger - Fuck Blogger - won't let me embed video code there, or post these AWESOME PICTURES.

The best thing about the video I posted is the pictures. Half of them seem like someone just posting whatever shows up on Google Image Search for "crazy," "rape," CIA" and "mind control." It's a constant rotisserie of trying too hard and not trying hard enough at all. Like someone flipped a coin between driving their point home and driving it into the ground accidentally. The other half is taken from video games and movies and public domain stuff. Just incredible.

Check it out:

I had the sound off, but I'm pretty sure this has something to do with Howard Hughes' preteen love-slave rape protocols.

What?

HAWKMAN FLY TO GET CHEWY DELIGHT FROM CHILD, MAKE FEAR BUT ALSO FRIEND. I LOVE NUTS, GRUBS, ANTS AND TREE BARK IN MY MOUTH.

WELCOME TO THE CIA. MY NAME IS HEIHACHI MISHIMA. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO HAVE YOUR GROIN AND THE GROINS OF YOUR FAMILY MICROWAVED BY BLACK HELICOPTERS, YOU MUST WIN THE KING OF IRONFIST TOURNAMENT.

I'm not kidding. That last picture is literally in the video. No, I don't have any fucking idea what it means

human radiation experiments

2008-05-05T10:19:00.000-07:00

totally disgusting video from a moral perspective...im just killing time and trying to make the clock move fast here today, so i started skipping around youtube...i think i started with "cat playing piano" and wound up here inside 10 steps

the video is pretty low budget, and i think someones just reading a chpater from a book over it (i dont know if its his own book though, or a valid textbook)...the reader also stumbles a couple times. and the slideshow is pretty amateurish...you could whip this up in iPhoto and garageband pretty easy at home, almost tempted to try my hand just because i could mix this so much better but nvm

most of the stuff looks legit...the first case they open up with is elmer allen, and you can find proof of his being involved in these tests on a US.gov website, so the info is solid

i already knew about domestic radiation testing on people; i wrote an article about it in high school -- all those prisoners who got tested and experimented on without consent (iirc just because they were prisoners), pictures of them holding up their penises and showing the black scars like burned hamburgers where their balls used to be

pretty sure you guys already know all about this stuff, but it hits home hard again when you put faces and bodies to the experiments. seeing elmer is pretty depressing...

also, these pictures are pretty amazing

the fact that the military didnt even give a shit about the health of its own soldiers pretty much tells you all you need to know about how they felt about civilians

Sox Batting Stances Through History

2008-04-30T15:04:00.000-07:00

This guy's a pretty great mimic. He exaggerates everything, so most of it comes off as mocking, which means you Sox HAAAATAHS ought to get a kick out of it. The Youkilis one is at the end and absolutely worth it. God, I hate having to root for that guy.

I'M CALLING FROM THE AIRPORT!!!!!!!!

2008-04-21T14:06:00.000-07:00

Blogging this one from the Delta Lounge, gang.

In about an hour, me and the now Mrs. Cindy are taking off for Italy. It's a sexy peninsula shaped like a long lady's boot. I am going to have lots of sex there.

Sorry I didn't comment on whatever the fuck you bozos just wrote: I was busy getting married. It's like a party where people like you and give you things and at the end you make them go away so you can have porno sex with awesome costumes. But mostly you get to throw a party all about getting to the point where you have The Sex. If you don't know what that's like for me, I'll get your mom to tell you all about that later. She knows, personally.

I'm going to eat so much pasta, I'll need to punch holes in my belt. But that's going to be fine, because I'm carbo-loading for fucking. In Venice, we're doing canal sex. In Pisa, we're setting the record straight. In Bologna we're just going to eat. Fuck you, I get a break. In Florence, a three-way. Oh yes, I will be in Florence too.

Also I'm going to see enough churches that I might convert before I get back. But not before we're done fucking.

PASTA. I NEED CARBS.

YOUR COMMIE!!! - More Different Than You Think

2008-04-16T08:57:00.000-07:00

First of all GFK, sorry for making this a new post. I'm not trying to WAR on you or anything. It's just that blogger - fuck blogger - doesn't let you embed pics and youtubes in comments.

Obviously I get what you're talking about. Look at that video. It's a joke. I wouldn't show that to someone trying to sell GM cars in the field. (Then again, maybe I would. More on this later.) Fuck being a field agent for the CIA. It's a joke as any kind of field-training primer. But you're getting caught up in MST3K'ing it instead of seeing what else it has.

Look:
0:53 - An agent acts in "intemperate fashion" by drinking booze. We lose the Cold War.

1:11 - An agent holds hands with a strange woman. We lose the Cold War.

1:28 - An agent sits in a huge plane cabin where there are no seatbelts (did they have them then?) but basically drinks too much and tells technological details to a stranger. We lose the Cold War.

4:23 - "The writing from her back home is no substitute for being home!" This is the explanation for a guy walking out on his wife to find another woman. Look how hard it is for him to walk out. He even wadded up the picture with the other girl's face on it. Infidelity=hard to succumb to! Succumbing to infidelity=We lose the Cold War!

Then we see the weird mental derail of this guy getting laid. Like his brain shuts off in Eastern Europe when someone shakes the goods.

Look at this guy's face when he's about to go get laid with someone who's not his wife. First he licks his lips like some lizard, then he stares like he saw Jesus.

That not bad enough? Then,

6:35 - [this is verbatim] "'No!,' he thought. 'It couldn't have happened to him. Not to him!'"

It's like the voice-over is talking about catching VD. He got caught by foreign spies but... chlamydia!!!

8:50 - "Walk the straight path abroad just as you would at home!"

The big mistake you're making is thinking this is either totally real or totally a joke. It's either one, for CIA agents. But why would anyone make a film this bad for them? This is schlock aimed at the American public. It's got a 1964 copyright on it, and it was probably written in 1964 and meant to be distributed in 1964.

You know the history of the CIA better than anyone here. You know them. They weren't liberal. They've always been New England Presbyterians with guns and the presidency and data. You think they'd leak this without a point? If this is real, it's not an intelligence training video. It's an America training video. Don't drink. Don't fuck. Don't tell that Ford rep on the plane what GM is up to.

Loose Lips Sink Myths!

First CGI by soviets?

2008-04-15T04:31:00.000-07:00

KNOW YOUR COMMIE!!!!

2008-04-14T10:23:00.000-07:00

So it says, and so I'm inclined to believe it. (Sorry that's not a video link; that's the credit page.) It's too much to think it's anything other than true. Even Hollywood doesn't make pictures this clunky.

The seduction from "evil foreign spies" is so obvious. Even the regular citizen at home in America could spy it from afar. The bribe, the woman suddenly touching the hand, the cabaret singer who wants to make love, the stranger on the plane who wants to know (in detail) results about the grain harvest in [insert state].

As a propaganda piece about the Soviets, it has no persuasion. As a propaganda piece from the Soviets, it has even less. As a spooky glimpse into the world of espionage for an average American audience, it's not even as interesting as popular film. As much as I might want to search for something else happening here, I'd be wrong. There isn't. There's just another bad idea from our government, working at cross-purposes to reality, effectiveness, being entertaining AT ALL, you name it.

Watch it for fun. Forget the rest.

Sark No Longer Feudal

2008-04-09T23:01:00.000-07:00

No, not the guy from Alias. The island. The one that's part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey. I am not making this up. I couldn't make this up.

Sark is a small island in the English channel that, until now, was rented from the English Crown by a "seigneur," who ruled the island as its feudal lord, dispensing rents to citizens, given permission to staff the island with a military force, and who was the only person on the island allowed to keep pigeons or an unspayed female dog.

I was going to post the article, but the Wikipedia entry about the whole island is amazing.

Apparently to make it in the EU, they had to give up being feudal, which is sort of disappointing.

Giant-Ass Ice Shelf Makes a Break for It

2008-03-25T23:51:00.000-07:00

Apparently something like a 414-square km ice shelf broke off the Wilkins Ice Shelf off antarctica.

I guess it's goal is to become mayor of Sunnydale until it can start the Ascension.

I don't know about you, but when chunks of ice smaller than Philly start breaking off continents, I know I'm thinking 1 thing and 1 thing only: global warming is such total bullshit.

found films monday - 1 person chutes, 0 dead, 0 fed

2008-03-24T10:01:00.000-07:00

turns out my found films seem like standard family fare. looks like an xmas spread and then a trip to a local slide park or something??? does anyone know what that is? ok lemme break this shit down, slide first

i dont understand this stuff. i grew up with HEAT, so when we went sliding, we went with water. this looks like an overgrown playground...someone pumped the local slide on steroids...only you have to go down on a protective mat and go you straight down and thats all that happens. wtf?

when was this cool? i bet you even have to WAIT IN LINE to go down a slide straight...on a protective mat...nowhere...jesus i hope nobody had to pay for this. going here instead of a local park sounds like going to the library and paying to check out the same book you were going to get anyway...only the book is 2 feet tall!!!

this ones even weirder to me. it starts off with this real eggheady guy who doesnt really look like hes in the christmas spirit of fun but instead real serious. like maybe hes trying really hard not to point out which box he wrapped for his brother...you know, the one with headgear in it. no dinosaur action figures or bb guns when love means orthodontistry. then again who knows. maybe this kid secretly collected daggers. that would be pretty badass. all i know is that hes the only thing happening, because next we pan to a table

thats it

forever

tables are neat and all, and i love a good set table when family is about to TEAR THE SHIT out of some roast beast, but we got nothing to work with here. i cant even make fun of cranberry sauce shaped like the can

finally at the end, we pan over to some hotness, but we get about two seconds of the hot lady. the hell???

i dont know whats going on here. in my family, you bring the camera out because everyone youre related to is an idiot. you have to show andy almost set himself on fire when he grills the salmon and puts some oil on it OVER THE FLAME. you have to show ariel hoppin around when shes wearing a tiara, because shes young enough that shell hop up and down if you tell her to, but then the tiara bops off and bonks her on the nose. you gotta show tim because hell blow smoke into the camera. and you gotta show dave because hell try to wave the camera off when hes taking the last of the coffee and TOTALLY isnt making any more because hes THAT guy and always will BE THAT GUY.

wheres that? i wanna see that, and im not even in the damn family

its a nice table, and that lady definitely BRINGS IT, and im pretty sure that kid has his heart in the right place, but finding these videos and just seeing things like tables, or someones shed (i found this one i didnt even bother uploading because it was literally three minutes of a guy crabwalking around his fucking SHED and filming it in pure grainy SURROUND) is really making me want to give this up. i know most of these buys at garage sales are a couple bucks a pop, but i could get a CASSINGLE by "Cutting Crew" for the same amount and still have something i could listen to in my truck

found some other stuff

2008-03-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

ill try to get it uploaded ASAP, but the basic story is that the gf and i went out on another barfgain mission this weekend, and while she racked up the values, i picked through whatever else was there. i got a couple filmstrips, but they werent labeled, so i cant tell you anything...except that im sick and tired of being tired on my weekend. i cant imagine what its going to be like when we arent renting anymore and have to go bargain hunting AND take care of the house. when do i get my beer and madden? that should happen at least one night EVERY weekend. period.

Commie horse in gasmask

2008-03-10T02:24:00.000-07:00

how cool is this? the horse in the gasmask i mean...the rest just terrifies me...people dancing around and making fanfare about creating the means of ending the world...not so cool

ZOMFG! KGB UFO!

2008-03-03T08:57:00.000-08:00

just kidding. check it out

tons of things wrong with this

first up, sounds like roger moore is narrating it...i cant prove it, and im not looking through a couple hundred fucktarded youtube comments to see if someone pointed this out...but it sounds like some british tv series on "MYSTERIES OF UFOS!" with shitty footage and spooky music and a bunch of scary shit about nothing

the proof this is a ufo is supposedly that it can dive into the clouds...so can jet fighters.

look at this photo

now go back and look at the video for the few seconds before this timestamp and a few seconds after

youll see the size of the "ufo" increases in terms of height. sort of like seeing a jet fighter way off in the distance from the side and watching it...ROLL OVER COUNTERCLOCKWISE DOWNWARD INTO A DIVE. the side of a jet fighter, thin. seeing the whole bottom of it as it rolls over, wider...

end of mystery

this is bullshit, and its the sort of bullshit that only gives skeptics about the current "line" on ufos a bad name.

Raul Castro elected president of Cuba

2008-02-26T23:20:00.000-08:00

That had to be a nailbiter for him.

Anything can happen. I remember when I was a kid and played FORTRESS with all my stuffed animals and I had an election for Fortress Commander. I just barely won that one. I guess I really didn't do enough to lock down the bear and rabbit vote.

"I play oboe."

2008-02-07T14:48:00.000-08:00

ARE YOU READY FOR SOME BRANDENBURG CONCERTO???

This is a pretty adorable ad from the Super Bowl.

I wish they'd do more ads like this, because there are a lot of people in football who aren't morons, but unless you're Brady or Manning, there's pretty much an inverse relationship between your IQ and your airtime.

Bush sends budget electronically

2008-02-05T14:12:00.000-08:00

I read it here, but it redirects to here:

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all for coming. I just met with my Cabinet, where we discussed a lot of issues. And one issue we discussed is the budget. I submitted the budget today to Congress -- it's on a laptop notebook, an e-budget. It saves paper, saves trees, saves money. I think it's the first budget submitted electronically.

Hello, my name is GFK. I have taken the liberty of mailing you this telegram.

Team B

2008-02-05T09:38:00.000-08:00

I needed something to take my mind off of the absolute gut-punching feeling I still have from the Patriots' Super Bowl loss, so I decided to write something. Anything. I get the feeling that hollow pit in my stomach isn't going away anytime before the start of the next NFL postseason, so the best I can do in the meantime is try to chase away the pain with good old-fashioned anger. LS's Philby post reminded me of this, which is one of the worst excesses in the history of American intelligence: Team B.

In 1974, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (sound familiar? Same guy. Don's pretty unique in American history in that he held the same job two decades apart and managed to be completely fucking wrong about the most important parts of his job both times) claimed that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the Soviet Union was building up massive armies, missiles and atomic stores in preparation for an apocalyptic war with the United States, advocated by borderline-mad hardline party members and generals. Meanwhile, peaceniks and nearsighted analysts in the U.S. couldn't even see that this was happening!

Another person, professor Albert Wohlstetter said the same thing. Some people consider Wohlstetter one of the founding members of the neocon movement, since he taught at the University of Chicago at the same time that a lot of members of the movement were also teaching or attending school. It's also important to remember that this guy (along with Kissinger) was partly the inspiration for the character Dr. Strangelove. In political terms, that's like saying, "This guy was the inspiration for Dr. Lecter."

Anyway, like a lot of neoconservatives in 2002 and 2003, they managed to scare the everloving fuck out of enough Americans that Team B was created by then Director of the CIA George H. W. Bush. The point behind it was to establish a different evaluation of Russia's military actions, to test if what Rumsfeld and company said was true.

Their conclusions were an entire fabrication, counter to every CIA estimate that preceded them and every conclusion wrought by the end of the Cold War. Declassified documents prove that their assurances were panics and terrors aimed at the American people. I hate to quote Wikipedia, but it simplifies things:

The CIA and other agencies who watched the Soviet Union strongly disagreed with Rumsfeld, calling Rumsfeld's position a "complete fiction" and claiming that the Soviet Union was disintegrating from within, could barely afford to feed its own people, and would collapse within a decade or two if simply left alone.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it's exactly what happened. If it sounds unfamiliar, it's because you're someone who grew up biting hard on the line that the people in Team B, Ronald Reagan and neoconservatives have been feeding you: that Ronnie won the Cold War. Why, without massive tax cuts to the rich and a pointless and wasteful mass increase in defense spending and a concomitant MASS increase in the national debt, the Russians might have conquered us instead! We had to outspend them! Nevermind the fact that most of the generals on the Russian equivalent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to say about the last two decades of the Soviet Union: that they were always terrified, because they were always one large riot or two days of panic or mass desertion away from total collapse.

But that's getting ahead of ourselves. What about Team B and what does this have to do with Philby?

The most important thing here is a concept called "Confirmation Bias." It's a psychological term that you probably suffer from. Hell, I know I do. You think, "Geez, that guy's kind of a dick." So every time you hang out with him and he does something dickish, you say, "Yep, total dick." Then, when he does something nice, you don't notice. Why? Because you're too busy looking for when he's next going to be a dick. Or you rationalize it. You say, "That guy's only being nice now because he knows we think he's a dick, so he's buttering us up for the moment he can act like a dick again." In simple terms: that guy's acting nice because he's a dick.

Think of it another way. You want to find out what the best burger restaurant in town is. You, almost everyone you know, the two food reviewers for the town newspapers, the food reviewer from the local rag that prints News of the Weird, and a bunch of online reviews say that Sal's Burgers is the best burger joint. But you know ten people who think that Mort's Burger Shack is better. You give those ten people $10 each to buy a burger at both places and tell you which one's better. They all tell you it's Mort's Burger Shack. Big motherfucking surprise right there.

Here's the rub: this is exactly what happened with Team B. The people appointed to Team B were all people who already believed what Team B was supposed to investigate. We needed to know, "Is the Soviet Union secretly MUCH more powerful than we think and planning to attack us?" and to prove that we asked a bunch of people who already had that opinion whether it was true. That's like asking OJ if he thinks someone else murdered Nicole and then handing him the keys to the LAPD crime lab to figure it out.

You can Wikipedia Team B and find out a bunch of this stuff pretty quickly. It's absolutely nuts. The best example probably comes from Star Wars/SDI. The CIA and other analysts said that the USSR had too many economic problems and was too disorganized to be able to produce an effective missile defense system like Star Wars/SDI. Team B said, "HAHAHAHAHA! THAT'S WHAT THEY WANTED YOU TO THINK! THEY ALREADY HAVE IT!!!!"

Sound familiar? The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In fact, it's proof of the opposite. If you want to go back to the OJ example, it'd be like saying, "Of course he killed Nicole! Because there's not a shred of evidence proving he did. Look how crafty he is. The best proof he did it is how perfectly he removed all proof he did it." Or pick any other example. If you read this post and disagree with it, that's just proof of how well you're hiding how true you think it is. The best proof that you're gay as hell is that you're married. The best proof you love Lifetime Original Movies is how you never seem to watch them. You must hate America because you go around not protesting it. What the fuck are you trying to hide???

This goes back to the Philby thing. Once he was outed as a double agent, people wanted (that's probably not the right word, but in some way they sort of needed) to believe there were tons of other double agents out there. The proof they were there was, in fact, all the proof that wasn't there. All the people who were squeaky clean — they must be the guilty ones. There's an old joke in intelligence history: "How can you tell someone's crooked? They've never done anything wrong." We tore our own intelligence networks apart and discredited dozens of loyal operatives because we wanted to find wrongdoing and were willing to believe the absence of it proved its existence. The absence of evidence is not....

Here's the rub again: we can do this with anything. Spies, Iraq, terrorists, Putin. Think about all those liberals you hear about who want to destroy and weaken America. What's the proof of that? That they devote their lives to being public servants by running for elected office in America. Ohmigod, that's so fucking spooky. They're like Manchurian candidates. Maybe you are.

And you.

Iran launches rocket into space

2008-02-04T16:45:00.000-08:00

linkety-link

TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- Iran fired a rocket from its newly inaugurated space center Monday, laying the groundwork for what it says will be the future launch of its first domestically produced satellite, the semi-official FARS news agency reported.

Congratulations to the New England Patriots

2008-02-04T09:10:00.000-08:00

18-1.

I almost didn't post this. I said to myself, "It's 4th down. You've got to kick it here. Take the three points."

But I said to myself, "No, go for the first down. Don't settle for any less than 7."

SCORE!

Kim Philby

2008-01-31T16:31:00.000-08:00

Cindy is really into British TV. I think I've seen more Britcoms in the last two years than American sitcoms. Come to think of it, maybe that's not so bad. Every time I see a new American sitcom these days, it either came from a Britcom or sucks. Except 30 Rock. That's amazing. Someone squeezed the finest juices out of their mind grapes to make that show.

The bad part is that she's started branching out into British drama series, usually movie miniseries, with names like, "Love in a Cold Climate" and "Acting Cross with Tea," and "Looking Like Wet Gray Asshole." B/C I'd never heard of John le Carre, I groaned when I opened up the Netflix and found out she'd gotten, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy."

I admit it. I'm an idiot.

If you guys haven't seen it, rent it. It's amazing. Alec Guinness stars as George Smiley. He's the anti-Bond and 10x more authentic. He's this rumpled older spy who's trying to figure out who the mole is in British Intelligence. His boss, Control, has died or left the service (you REALLY have to pay attention in this series, b/c important info can come quietly and out of nowhere, and they really don't repeat it. It's also about 6 hours long and builds slowly, but believe me it's worth it), but Control knew there was a mole. Now a key defector and an agent have been shot.

Smiley has to piece it together. No guns (except a little at the end), no car chases. Just walking, talking, reading, listening. It's the classic chess game.

What's amazing is, it's real. Most of the story of TTSP comes from the story of Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five.

Now I don't know if any brits will wind up reading this, so sorry if you're reading it and saying, "WELL, DUH," but it's not like they teach British Intelligence History in high school over here. If they find intelligence in high school, someone drives it out with great force. Using them brain bits is, like the british would say, just not done. Same goes for gum chewing.

From 1941 to 1963, Kim Philby was probably the most important counter-espionage agent in Britain's MI6. He was a big swinging dick in a field where they say, "Your dick, do not let it swing. It draws attention. Put that away for crissakes. I said- oh, god. CHECK, please. I don't even care if that's your big beef and you're makin the cheddar- you, sir, have disgraced Arby's for the last time."

He not only handled their double agents within Russia and tried to find Russian double agents within Britain and other NATO nations, he also trained most of the counter-espionage personnel in Britain. He even trained James Jesus Angleton (should have changed his name officially to "James - JESUS! - Angleton"), who went on to become the CIA's chief counter-espionage agent for something like three decades. Angleton wrote the book on CIA counterintelligence and is probably the most legendary CIA agent ever.

The trouble is, Kim Philby had been a Russian agent since 1933, a member of a group of 5 Cambridge students recruited by the Russians in the 1920s and 30s.

So stop and think about this for a second. The guy in charge of rooting out Russian spies in Britain was a Russian spy himself. Instead of working to root them out, he worked to cover them up. He also worked to cover them up within the United States. It was probably Philby who worked with his pals Burgess and Maclean to pass American nuclear secrets to Moscow. And not only that, but he was in charge of turning Russian agents into double-agents for the West. Only he probably pretended to do this, creating fake agents and then passing on useless information while sending USEFUL information about the west to Moscow. On top of ALL this, he trained America's best counterintelligence agent.

When he defected in 1963, it's putting it mildly to say the shit hit the fan. It's like someone took all the manure runoff from every Tyson chicken farm in Arkansas and dumped it onto the spinning blade of 20 Apache helicopters while someone inside them played the old Circle Jerks song and screamed, "I love the smell of WAAAUUUUUUGHGHHHHHHH."

Angleton basically turned into a paranoid nutball. His mentor betrayed him, America and Britain. Angleton saw spies everywhere, double agents in the shadows and meaning where there wasn't any. The Americans became convinced that everything in MI6 was rotten. Angleton acted like he was trying to cut a tumor out of himself. He hacked the careers of other CIA agents to bits and basically destroyed british intelligence for about a decade by making their bosses throw out agents AND intel. He destroyed people. Philby proved he didn't have ANY perspective on counterespionage, and it's like he went so far in the opposite direction that he lost all perspective that way too.

I can guess what you're gooing to say. "Where are you going with this?" Well, think about it. Philby told one lie, but one lie was enough for the CIA and MI6 to almost destroy themselves, with their own hands.

What's amazing about Philby is that he could have done almost nothing for Russia. He could have just BEEN there and talked to other people, and he still would have torn the CIA/MI6 apart. He could have been rating playmate of the month. B/C if you have a bunch of people who believe themselves and their own judgment, then make them totally question everything about it, they'll implode.

They'll tear themselves apart just out of fear and anger at being wrong even once. If they find other double agents, that just proves they were right to start worrying, and they keep looking. If they don't find any other double agents, they must not be looking hard enough. They're still out there. They could be everywhere. As a matter of fact, the guy in charge of finding double agents hasn't found any. Maybe he's just like Philby. Maybe he doesn't find any b/c he doesn't WANT to find any. Maybe it's HIM. Let's get him.

What's totally amazing about Philby is that it's like playing the Kevin Bacon game. He's connected to everything, b/c intelligence is connected to everything. Our countries make decisions based on it every day. They trust the intelligence they get, and they talk to the people in intelligence. So once you start doubting one part of it, the doubt never stops. It spreads to everything.

I don't want to seem insensitive or anything, but when you look at Philby and then look at Angleton's paranoia about it after the fact, the really mindblowing thing is that the paranoia ever stopped. There's no reason to stop questioning, except at some point you have to.

So Many Connections

2008-01-23T15:16:00.000-08:00

I that I would post this here on the off chance there was even one of you who'd never seen this. Even if you have, I'm sure you won't mind watching it again.

911 Eyewitness - Evidence of thermonuclear explosions

2008-01-14T19:15:00.000-08:00

I fucking hate this bullshit.

VOICEOVER: Could conventional conventional demolition explosives vaporize all the people, computers and office furniture in the towers, while pulverizing all the concrete in the floors into fine powder and have enough left over to fracture the welded steel framework of up to four-inch-thick steel beams?

Hmmm, good question. I'm going to guess the answer is "no." I'm going to guess YOUR reason is because you want to advance some jive-ass theory about nukes in the World Trade Center. I'm going to guess MY reason is because NONE OF THAT FUCKING HAPPENED.

People were sorting through rubble - not "powder" - and old office machine parts and cataloging body parts out at Fresh Kills for months. You think the government managed to break into its secret "rubble and broken xerox machines" cache out at Fort Make Believe and then got hundreds of people to stand around sorting through a bunch of prop destruction for prop bodies and had to keep yelling at them, "NO! Stop laughing. Take this big fakeout seriously you assholes!"

VOICEOVER: Our paper/powder theory has been recognized as evidence of a thermonuclear device being detonated in the basements of both towers and World Trade 7 in order to superheat all the steel and concrete and sufficiently weaken the structure to facilitate the observed progressive collapses.

That's great to hear man. That's just fucking super.

Look, while you're here, let me tell you about my Hybrid Dogzilla Urine Theory. See, the reason why global sea-levels and sea temperatures are rising while the ocean gets greener and smells more like piss is because there's a giant Half-Godzilla/Half-Dog - or Dogzilla, if you will.

*coughs*

*taps ash out of pipe, jams pipe into ear repeatedly*

This Dogzilla keeps urinating into the Pacific from one of those islands near Japan where the people from the Toho Movie Company and the U.S. Military carried out all those nuclear tests on beagles and that one Tyrannosaurus someone found living in Canada.

*puts on a third tweed coat*

The nuclear tests fused a beagle and the t-rex together and made a Dogzilla, and since it keeps drinking all the fresh water out of Asia and taking a giant ass dog whizz into the pacific, the world's ocean levels are getting higher. They're getting warmer because dog piss is warm. And they're getting greener because the ocean is blue, and pee is yellow, and YELLOW+BLUE=GREEN.

*sews elbow patches into forehead*

I think you'll find that, like your vaporized bodies and nukes theory is proved by the giant sugar loaf of powder left over from the WTC, my imaginary Dogzilla theory is completely proved by the evidence of the warm yellow pissy oceans, because it's REALLY EASY TO PROVE MADE-UP BULLSHIT WITH OTHER MADE-UP BULLSHIT.

ROSE ARCE, CNN PRODUCER: There was a schoolyard across the street, and I remember there were kids that were being evacuated from the schoolyard.

No shit, really? Must be because something was up. Like a fucking airplane flying into a building and making it explode. Sometimes when someone's punching himself in the head and his hair's on fire, sometimes the explanation isn't that he's being controlled by the Illuminati. Maybe he's punching his head because it's ON FIRE.

ROSE ARCE, CNN PRODUCER: And one of the girls looked up into the sky, and she said, to her father, "Daddy, look. They're doing it on purpose."

PRICELESS. The eyewitness they're talking about in the video title is a little girl. Of course! When I'm trying to figure out what complex series of events caused a tragedy, the first thing I try to do is find a joint panel of children to really break down the chain of evidence. Remember when we got those kids Tyler and Dakota to bring us the skinny on what happened with the levees during Katrina? Remember how relieved we all were when we found out that either God was really sad and cried too much rain or maybe a giant filled up his bathtub too high, only - get this - his bathtub was the GULF OF MEXICO???

You know, I get people who want to make sense out of scary stuff. I get that they want explanations. I DON'T get how they go to extra effort to hide the explanation by making up the dumbest shit in the world to hide even more truth and just confuse anyone they meet. Especially when they go to 20x the effort to convince themselves of something weird as shit instead of doing the 1x effort of checking the facts for themselves.

You think maybe some nukes went off in the WTC? BUY A FUCKING GEIGER COUNTER, you lazy mystery-loving assholes.

The trouble with people like these guys and the "Loose Change" people isn't that they're trying to find more knowledge. The trouble is they're making non-knowledge, antiknowledge, counterknowledge. They don't dig up sense, they hide all the sense we might find behind more nonsense. And the reason they do it is because they know fuckall to begin with.

Yeah, maybe it seems like perfect sense that the towers fell because of controlled demolition. Maybe the evidence points to that. Then again, I'm guessing it makes sense to you because you couldn't find your way out of your own asshole with a trail of breadcrumbs and a fucking Garmin, much less find your way out of chapter 1 of a book on structural engineering.

Get off the fucking internet and go take a class at the learning annex or just bang your head on your desk until you wander away from the fucking keyboard.

Interplanetary Revolution

2008-01-09T01:31:00.000-08:00

i love/hate this cartoon... this one makes very little sense and seems to meander off point alot...nazis fly a shoe to the moon, the moon's eyes turn into a kissing couple...what? ok... it's just awful...looks like a low budget emo vid made with a bootlegged copy of after effects by a kid on a cough syrup binge...oh well, enjoy it for its "historic value...."

Gas Prices Hit $100/Barrel

2008-01-02T22:01:00.000-08:00

Here.

It's the highest gas/barrel cost in history.

Obviously, this is going to change our lives in ways we can't anticipate, but right now I feel comfortable making predictions about how others will cope and how their lives will change.

EC
• Instead of chasing them, will let the black helicopters come to him.
• Saves money on gas mask filters because fewer planes in the sky mean fewer chemtrails.
• Buys another handgun just to be sure.
• Buys a shotgun to test theory of "shooting away high prices."

LS
• Stops doing everything to save money for his girlfriend's shopping excursions.
• ~~Stops having safe sex because petroleum is used in producing latex condoms, and every little bit helps.~~ Whoops, already took care of this.
• Will get back to you on other changes, waiting for what girlfriend says about them.

This Guy Really Doesn't Seem to Like Baltimore

2007-12-31T15:51:00.000-08:00

I'm tired of EC crowing about how much he's posting, so I'm throwing this sucker out here (it's NSFW, but if you're at work right now, quit your job, for God's sake):

All you suckers can leave a message with my assistant. I'm going to a party.

Immanuel Kant: We Just Can't Trust Him

2007-12-28T16:26:00.000-08:00

Worth clicking in about a hundred different ways...

Happyholiday, Motherf-----r

2007-12-25T12:34:00.000-08:00

Ho ho ho, now I have a machine gun.

Merry Christmas!!!

can someone get me this for xmas????

2007-12-22T13:05:00.000-08:00

im drooling right now; this looks so awesome

look, i know ive been bitching about posting and certain people (me) have been pissed about it but whatever...i dont have time to write now, so all youre getting is the old cut and paste. its still a post so im doing better than the rest of you guys this month

me two - you zero

Films by Jove in association with SoyuzmultFilm Studios presents
ANIMATED SOVIET PROPAGANDA
FROM THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION To PERESTROIKA

A landmark four disc Box Set

Unearthed from Moscow's legendary Soyuzmultfilm Studios (est. 1935), the 41 films in ANIMATED SOVIET PROPAGANDA span sixty years of Soviet history (1924 - 1984), and have never been available before in the U.S.

The set is divided thematically into four discs, all dealing with different subjects of the Soviet propaganda machine.

AMERICAN IMPERIALISTS (disc 1) contains seven films, almost all of which are drawn from the Cold War era. The recurring image is of the money hungry industrialist self-destructing because of his greed.

FASCIST BARBARIANS (disc 2) is a 17 film reaction to the Nazi invasion of 1941. While Americans were mocked relentlessly, at least they remained human. After breaking the non-aggression pact and declaring war, the Nazis became animals in the propaganda films, turning into snarling warthogs and depraved vultures.

CAPITALIST SHARKS (disc 3) contains six films that take on the bourgeoisie the world over - and sometimes beyond. In INTERPLANTERY REVOLUTION (1924), capitalists escaping to Mars discover the revolution has spread throughout the galaxy.

ONWARD TO THE SHINING FUTURE: COMMUNISM (disc 4) contains 11 works, most of which mythologize the state and envision the inevitable utopias of the future. Dziga Vertov's SOVIET TOYS (1924), however, offers criticism of the state. Generally agreed to be the first Russian animated film, it satirizes the communist members who cashed in on Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP), which introduced a limited form of capitalist enterprise.

hello?

2007-12-20T20:34:00.000-08:00

i dont want to play mommy...but what gives? it's nearly christmas, and in three months of this blog, weve only got maybe a dozen posts. im not going to single out anybody because we ALL have slacked on this, but i rushed out a review and a 'mission statement' when we started, and then

...

nothing.

we had all this STATEMENT OF PURPOSE stuff at the beginning...we defined the mission...then we didnt do anything about the mission. ive seen this too many times not to notice the symptoms. it happens all the time wiht programmers...you shoot the shit and complain about how Software X doesnt do Thing Y, and so you brainstorm Software Z...then you and whoever you were talking to write up a big roadmap, maybe budget it, divvy up assignments, nail down each feature you want and then...poof.

the only work you wind up doing is planning the work you were going to do but never get around to. id hate to see that happen here, because i like talking to you guys, and not talking is getting on my nerves. dont get me wrong, though. I AM JUST AS MUCH TO BLAME. i noticed the problem and havent gotten off my ass to do anything about it either.

but i realize there might be other problems i havent noticed. so let me throw this out there:

what gives?

How Russian Hearts Are Heaving

2007-11-26T12:39:00.000-08:00

"Moscow, 1947" gives an interesting glimpse of a Soviet culture that was probably already dead before its creators finished the animatic. Ostensibly celebrating the 800th anniversary of the city's founding, it is instead a propaganda film highlighting the city's recapture from Polish leadership in the Polish-Muscovite wars of the early 17th century and its withstanding Napoleon's siege of 1814. Then the video cuts off. I'd seen it years before on a bootleg VHS, but I can't remember if it went on to pay tribute to the WWII defense of Moscow, but even if it doesn't, the subtext of the rest of it clearly celebrates the recent WWII vitory.

You have to remember that prior to WWII, the internal structure of the Soviet Union was in turmoil. The Great Purge of 1937-1938 not only destroyed (probably) millions of lives, but also families, Soviet technological research and defense. Many able generals were sent to camps because, their devotion to bolshevism aside, their families had aristocratic lines pre-dating the regime.

The principle for which they were banished was Stalin's version of communism, which had become one-statist and self-interested. International communist struggles could go hang themselves so long as Russia survived. While initially this self-interest led to the necessary Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the foolhardy belief that it would spare Russia from war, it ultimately came to save Russia. Humiliated by literally millions of men encircled by (and surrendering to) German forces, Stalin was forced to re-build his military hierarchy on the fly. Old generals and colonels were rescued from the camps, told all was forgiven and asked to save the Motherland. Stalin's vision of "Communism in One Country" (i.e. "Russia First," for lack of a better term) immediately transformed into basic bourgeois patriotism. WWII was recast as "The Great Patriotic War." This film represents the last gasp of this liberalization of thought.

The video opens with soaring invocations of the city's name: MOSCOW! Quotes from Pushkin overlay images of patriotic medals, as animated WWII-era bombers fly out from behind them, taking flight over the Motherland. Bombers swoop and open their bay doors, dropping out thousands of love letters written to the city. But evidence of the erosion of the all-for-Russia spirit accompanying WWII can be seen in the video itself.

It's tough to argue that part of the motivation for Stalin's purges wasn't racial. There's a classic element in the Russian psyche, going back to Pushkin and Tolstoy at least, where almond-shaped eyes and yellow skin and the chaos of the east represents a kind of menace that, while not maliciously racist, nonetheless "others" easternness. But during the Great Patriotic War, much of that got set aside. Commissars — Russian political officers — even propagandized for racial diversity within units. E.g. "this commander is Tartar, and his adjutant is Russian, and these officers are Georgian, and this one's a Pole."

Yet, by 4:29 in the video, we already have the narrator invoking the "Tartar's yoke!" in talking about the periodic rule of parts of Russia by the mongol hordes. Worse, by 4:40 you have a kind of Punch and Judy Minstrel Show, with the white Russian puppet beating the crap out of the "BLACK FOREIGNER" Tartar. Already, that need to band together that WWII brought seems to be spooling apart.

Probably what's most interesting though is how by 1947 all this "Russia Only" Stalinism was being overcome by the ambition to push the Iron Curtain out to the fullest boundaries of Eastern Europe. While it might be all well and good to return to a racist mentality about Eastern peoples, Communism In One Country wasn't a doctrine that could bear up to scrutiny when more and more countries were coming under Soviet hegemony. By 1947, the Baltic States, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and Hungary were communist client states.

The Great Patriotic War attitude that this film celebrates was already over and done with probably by the time any average citizen saw it. Truman had already promulgated his Truman Doctrine, fighting to contain communism on every front. American and Soviet proxies faced off in Greece. The next year, Berlin would be cordoned off Czechoslovakia absorbed into the Iron Curtain. Already the message was transitioning to the harmony and prosperity of many nations, sharing in communism, outside the boundaries of any one state. And the propaganda for that would have to be very delicate indeed, because it sounded like the multinational war for communism that all the Trotskyists had been militating for in 1937 and 1938, before they were shot and shipped east to starve to death or die of exposure.

In the end, this film is interesting because of the rarity of what it has to say. Years later, watching it is like looking at a miraculously clear shapshot taken from a moving train: unless you time it just right — just blink — that tiny era of postwar Russian nationalism and brotherhood is gone. I wish I could say the same for the print quality though. Nighttime and forest scenes are almost totally dark. A bear and an owl are virtually invisible against a dark background. I get the sense this was improperly stored in an archive for four decades. I'd be really excited to see a cleaned-up copy, if one is out there.

Found a super8 film with a miniature steam train...

2007-11-13T20:27:00.000-08:00

remember back here i was bitching about bargain hunting with the gf?? anyway, i finally go around to uploading this film junk i got at a garage sale

pretty basic stuff like i usually find...family picnics, etc...but this one has the granfather (i guess) giving everyone rides on a miniature steam engine...there was a photo of the train in a box of photos i got with the films too... 3 bucks, not bad.

sorry for spacing on this one so long guys...you know how it goes, life and work get in the way...two tears in the bucket, motherfuckit

i got older family in the area though. around the holidays it sort of sucks...maybe you want to stay in with the gf on thanksgiving and have turkey sandwiches and just make love three or four times and watch football and get fucked up...but instead youve got to drive out to uncle andys place and deal with rugrats and stuffing and toasts and drama. and FUCK...you cant drink a bunch of wine and go out behind the shed and maybe do a little petting out there, because those rugrats will FIND you

me and the gf actually DID try that one REALLY boring birthday get together out there. we were groping around behind the shed a bit one time and heard someone chunk-chunk-chunking out on the gravel and managed to straighten ourselves out at the last second, and good thing because it was my little cousin who's maybe five. we had to bluff what we were doing, so the gf started dropping gardening science...we wound up showing him how to care for rosebushes and identify weeds and teaching him how to garden, and showing him the irrigation system andy put in. it actually worked out and was a lot of fun...we felt proud to be the cool relatives who give it to the kid straight, saying "this is a chore a lot of the time, but plants are cool, and i bet your dad will like it if you help him out sometime," but obviously on the other hand i wouldve been just as happy if the gf and i had just been making out the whole time

i dont dislike my family at all, and thank fuck the gf thinks theyre pretty cool, but going there can suck because of family drama and because you cant really unwind...someone will always blow up about something or needle someone else and make you grind some fucking teeth because you have to be more mature than they are and just not make a scene. going there for one night of your weekend can be pretty draining and unfun...sort of like your gf waking you up early on saturday to to hunt bargains...unsexy

not that that has anything to do with anything right now

i swung by andys place this weekend because i know he has a good video camera (and i dont) and also because hes sort of OCD and has all the old family film projector stuff going on. if youve got an old reel of your cousin naked in a playing pool and eating grass and want to embarrass her in front of her fiancee, andys usually got something to play it on

i raided his upstairs closet and got out the projector and this weird collapsable podium or whatever, and he let me use a super8 to film what we projected. good times. as OCD as he is, hes always been cool with me...i think he knows that i might be sloppy about me but will never be sloppy about someone else's stuff...especially not with a favor. i keep a favor, i pay it back

like i said, i promised this...here it is a little late...but its cute and sort of nice to watch. i made the effort so DIG IT

Democratic Party Killjoys End Colbert Campaign

2007-11-02T08:49:00.000-07:00

NudeYorkTimes:

GREENVILLE, S.C., Nov. 1 — Stephen Colbert’s nascent and satirical presidential campaign came to an abrupt end on Thursday when the Democratic Party in South Carolina decided he was not serious and turned down his application to get his name on the primary ballot.

I can see where they're coming from. Of course, every election is important, but this one has generational significance. As much as I'd love to see Colbert do a performance-art satire of campaigns while conducting one, I understand the worry the democrats would have. Now, if he could run as a republican somehow...

Congratulations to the Boston Red Sox

2007-10-28T08:52:00.000-07:00

for winning the World Series.

Also congrats to you, GFK.

You dick.

Here's a joke:

Q: What's the difference between Red Sox and Yankee fans?

A: Nothing. Everyone else in the world thinks you're both assholes.

Okay, that's not very funny. Here's another one.

Q: What's the difference between the Yankees and the Red Sox?

A: The Yankees spent $140,805.545 more on payroll than the Rockies, and the Red Sox only spent $89,102.214 more.

You might not laugh at that one either. Sorry. But at least you guys are a true baseball team, unlike those evil Yankees who just buy championships. You had a lot of home grown talent. You had Youkilis, Pedroia, Ellsbury and Lester. You only ran out and bought:

Manny Ramirez
David Ortiz
Jason Varitek
Coco Crisp
J.D. Drew
Julio Lugo
Mike Lowell
Curt Schilling
Josh Beckett

and

Daisuke Matsuzaka.

And you only had to spend $51,111,111.11 just to get the rights to offer him a contract! (That's more than the total payrolls of four different teams.) Then you only spent $52 million ON his contract. (That's also more than the total payrolls of four different teams.) Combined, that's more money on one pitcher than 24 other teams spend on their whole rosters in a year!

You guys are such lovable losers!

(Two WS in three years)

(Fuck you.)

so i got this film canister and a boring weekend

2007-10-22T11:24:00.000-07:00

the gf is stubborn. way more stubborn than me, if you can believe it. the weathers been pretty good lately, so she made me go out both days this weekend looking for "bargains"

i fucking hate every part of this

first things first: you cant get drunk if youre bargain hunting. theres no staying up late with her and hoping she gets a little drunk and slutty and willing to let you do it real nasty together. none of that...just straight to bed...uggggh

second things second: forget drinking alone and playing some video games. because she wants to get up early, that means YOU get up early...its like no weekend at all. you cant open a sixpack and just let er rip. yeah ok, im cool with doing something sunday morning, but at least leave me friday night to get fucked up and play some madden and maybe do some shots and call my friends a little too late and go "yaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" into the phone or something. no dice. MUST. BE. AWAKE. EARLY. BOTH. DAYS. like i said, not even a weekend at all

third things third: instead of driving around and going to a ballgame or going to look at something cool, we go look at where things arent. like HIGH PRICES!!!! fucking kill me

im not even making this up, she has a fucking MAP - like she GOOGLED OR MAPQUESTED ALL OF THIS - of all the different yard/garage/away/rummage/whatever sales everywhere...she wakes up at like 7 am and looks on craigslist and the newspaper and just finds all these things and puts together a trip-tik like AAA for how to get to all of them the fastest. we have to get to all of them before noon

i really hate doing this, not just because id rather drink UNTIL 7 am but because its creepy...i dont like looking through other peoples lives. the fuck they do to me? - nothing. i dont want to rummage through their happiness and take shit away...i dont want to be a part of it. i think it sucks that sometimes they have to sell it off, but leave me out of it...i dont need the connection. the gf doesnt worry about this. i think she just sees dollar signs, and thats weird because she doesnt care about money with me and has never complained about how we live

i just dont want to butt in on people...but between the economy sliding and property tax here and the senior citizens dying off naturally, there are a LOT of these kinds of sales. people either want to get out or they checked out, either way you get to flip through all this personal shit that someones family really should be taking instead...but clearly they dont really want it and want to make money off of it...so if you see some shit thats cool enough to make you kick some bucks back at them, i guess its ok

so like i said the gf dragged me to fucking a million of these this weekend, and i was at one of these sunday in a town called ruskin. it sounds like the outside of a weird vegetable...like, no you have to peel off the ruskin. thank god i have a dvr and there werent any football games on early in the day that i really gave a shit about, because i already wanted to kill someone. but it was ok for all that i guess

anyway i found a cool film canister labeled WH-TRAIN and there was this narrow drawer like an old card catalog filled with pictures, and there were a lot of train pictures in it. i think its just going to be family fun stuff, but ill post it and let you know as soon as i can transfer and upload this stuff

hope you guys had decent weekends

Cheney '94: Invading Baghdad Would Create Quagmire

2007-10-15T21:13:00.000-07:00

From EC:

now, 60 years later, we learned that we produced the same thing...as many lies as they sent to us, WE sent to US. we got a double dose of lies, and it turned out the one place we were looking for truth was double-dealing us too. now we have more than one enemy...there are enemies all over the globe...even maybe here...and they could be anyone or believe in anything. and how much can you trust what we hear about them? we used to have one enemy and got fed a batch of lies about it. how many more do we get from multiple enemies? multiply the doubt by hundreds, thousands...i dont know.

I read your "Why Kremlinology" post the other day, EC, and I guess I sort of felt like you were overloading the doubt at the end, like maybe you were playing up how much we don't know. Then someone sent me this link today:

I don't want to be one of those people still arguing LOL BUSH IS DUM, CHENEY EVILL!!!!!!!! for the next decade. I'm sick of it. It gets you nowhere. It doesn't make friends. It bores people. But compare his statements then to what he said on Meet The Press ("We will be greeted as liberators") and what Rumsfeld said about the duration of our commitment ("Six days, six weeks, six months"), and it's just unbelievable. Hell just look at this:

It's gotten to the point where there's almost no statement made by someone in our current government where you can't find them making the exact opposite statement on video. Then another statement contradicting both. Then another contradicting the contradiction. If you made it a math equation, it'd be something like

Untruth - [Untruth - (Untruth - Untruth)] = a steaming mound of pure bullshit.

At this point, there's no way to not go down the rabbit hole forever just searching for something basically decent, accurate and still-meant-later. It's like pulling the peel back on a banana to reveal an unpeeled banana underneath. Then peeling back that layer and finding another and another and another until you pull back that last layer of peels and there's nothing underneath.

Then try to take a step anywhere. You can't. Your government's littered the ground around you with so many untruths that there's no way you won't slip and fall and hurt and humiliate yourself. You look like a fucking clown.

Why 'Kremlinology'?

2007-10-13T22:06:00.000-07:00

i realized i meant to get this post out before i started reviewing things and making comments, but i guess i got distracted by "Soft Rains" and just started in without thinking. GFK originally asked me to write something explaining the blog name, since i picked it, and i said i'd follow through...soooo...why the name?

kremlinology is a really cool term invented during the cold war to describe anyone who specialized in analyzing the soviet union. you think you know photoshop on the internet? shit, you dont even know who invented it. the soviets were so obsessed with wiping out party members whod said the wrong thing that theyd photoshop them out of thousands of official pictures...all before photoshop even existed. the thing was, with a country that never told the truth about ANYTHING, getting a hold of doctored photos was sometimes the only way americans and other NATO countries could ever figure out what was going on

"oh, this guy disappeared from photos...which one was he?"

"he was the guy who talked peace and openness"

"i guess the peace party isnt coming to the negotiating table anymore."

the thing is, i didnt pick the name because of that. it just came to me because we all like cool soviet propaganda stuff. we dont like it because we love communism: honestly it just looks cool as shit most of the time. we were all in a chat at the time though, and after i typed the name out, i thought, "damn, that makes so much sense"

like GFK said in his earlier post, we got booted from another board for being "problem kids" or whatever, but i think a better word for it is "doubters." i dont like the term "skeptics" because that makes us sound eggheaded when we arent...im not like "hmmm...does the data correlate???" i think its a gut feel, like something is wrong here. like "i cant even be sure about this data in the first place."

maybe that comes from digging old soviet posters and writing and movies. you look at them, and theyre really beautiful and sometimes just really well made, and you appreciate them for that...but you also laugh at how many lies are in there. then...in that laughter somewhere...you remember, someone believed this with his heart. someone died believing this. someone cried to his kids telling them about this because he believed it so much...and it just breaks your heart

because then you think about your dads or uncles or friends of the family who died on the other side for the same bullshit. "russian communists have an interest in vietnam." fuck no they didnt. nobody gave a fuck about vietnam except the vietnamese who just wanted their own fucking country and everyone else to fuck off. my mom still gets tears in her eyes talking about kennedy sometimes, and he lied about a missile gap...there wasnt one! we had so many more fucking nukes than the russians it was SICK. my older brother gets more misty-eyed about fucking REAGAN than our own grandpa, and he lied too. contras, iran, russia, fucking pick one

thats where the name started to sink in with me. because look at the last five years. WMDs that never existed. yellowcake uranium that might as well of been fucking angelfood cake. Osama and Saddam are buddies...oops! they never talked at all. iraq did 9/11 --- ha! we send people out to die based on info, and the more i think about it, the more i wouldnt even go to the corner store based on it

so i immed everybody, "why not kremlinology?" and it turned out someone already had that blog. but LS said "new kremlinology isnt taken," and i said "take it." because honestly that makes even more sense. 60 years ago, all anyone knew was that the soviet union was our enemy. we had to read into it and figure it out and try to guess what to do next...because everything that came out of it was lies and misinformation.

now, 60 years later, we learned that we produced the same thing...as many lies as they sent to us, WE sent to US. we got a double dose of lies, and it turned out the one place we were looking for truth was double-dealing us too. now we have more than one enemy...there are enemies all over the globe...even maybe here...and they could be anyone or believe in anything. and how much can you trust what we hear about them? we used to have one enemy and got fed a batch of lies about it. how many more do we get from multiple enemies? multiply the doubt by hundreds, thousands...i dont know. i want to be like that poor russian guy who cried to his kids telling them a lie he believed so hard, instead of sitting here wanting to cry because i cant believe anything

we picked the blog as a place to shoot the shit and figure out life and have fun like anyone else. with a little help from your friends and with a little help from effort. it seems like it takes a lot more effort these days, or maybe a lot more friends to divide up the reading just to figure shit out. i didnt want this to be depressing. the name might be right, and its right to doubt, and maybe we find something true along the way. i just hope its fun.

There Will Come Soft Rains

2007-10-09T10:03:00.000-07:00

i dont handle the review thing as well as GFK does, but i saw this first, so i figured id be the one to write something up about it.

apologies ahead of time for the writing...ive been using all-lowercase and no apostrophes for so long in inter-office im and email for so long that i actually take twice as long to write if i stop to put in the right punctuation. my brain doesn't even understand it anymore. i sent out two pages to a buddy on my team the other day, and it took me about 20 minutes to write, but when i got home and started writing an email to my mom (which i always dress up like adult writing) i swear it took me something like an hour to write the same amount. i actually have to stop and think about every word, and then i wind up doing that thing you do when you overthink a word, like, "lamp? lamp? is that really how its spelled? god, that doesn't look right...it's got to be something else...no, wait, spellchecker thinks its ok."

ANYWAY, i ran across "There Will Come Soft Rains" the other day on youtube. the film is a soviet adaptation of a ray bradbury short story, whose title came from this classic anti-war poem by sara teasdale

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

the premise is pretty basic (spoilers ahead!). in the year 2026, automated robots tend to a family, making food, waking them, playing phonograph records and broadcasting beautiful images of the outdoors on telescreens. the gotcha! part is that the family is dead...annihilated by a nuclear war. by 1:54, you see the robots lifting sleep pods up to start the day, only to see the dark figures inside crumble and spill out on the floor...they are piles of ash.

the most chilling moments come after the 6:15 mark. a pure white dove (what could that represent???) appears at an open window. the robots that automate the dead victims' lives asks for a password. since a dove cant, like talk, the robot goes berserk trying to destroy the intruder...it converts its normal seeing/manipulating appendage (which sort of looks like a face) to a big stabby thing. it keeps trying to stab the bird, missing, destroying the inside of the house, stabbing a crucifix, creating more holes in the wall..and eventually blinding itself.

the imagery and atmosphere is very effective. the robot is conditioned to protect, but it does it without thinking or weighing threats it detects...it treats them all like crises and in the end destroys itself for lack of perspective. there is no mercy (stabbed christ), and the uberprotectiveness just weakens the whole more than a lowered guard (putting more holes in the wall). the worst thing is, if you're committed blindly to a program (like fearing everything from outside), youll eventually blind and destroy yourself following it.

the cartoon is really effective and pretty to watch, and sad. too bad it's a modern piece. "There Will Come Soft Rains" was made in 1984, so theres less of the sinister stuff that makes for good soviet propaganda films. its also probably not a rarity since its current enough that there are probably multiple clean copies out there. still, given the good story, it's probably a must-own for a good cold war buff

Why here?

2007-10-07T22:47:00.000-07:00

Those friends of ours who (we hope) will stop by might wonder, "Why here? Why blogger?" Other people probably just wonder, "Who are you dudes?" My response would be, "Who are you and why would you even care? We're all idiots."

The story is a pretty simple one. We're all guys who met in our 20s a couple years ago on a message board and discovered we shared a lot of interests. Sports, politics, history, activism, collecting. We eventually got banned for "causing trouble," which is shorthand for "being irritating to mods who didn't have a reasonable explanation for banning us."

The shorthand version for why we were irritating was "our politics."

The better explanation is: we don't fall easily into groups of liberal or conservative, anarchist or socialist. We distrust, but we're not paranoids (except for maybe one of us *wink*), and we love our country, but we're not patriots. At least not in the "owning a lot of guns kind of way." (Except for one of us. Don't kill me please, EC) For most people, this living outside labels is really really annoying. They don't want to listen to what you have to say: they want to listen until they find something juicy enough to sink teeth into and disagree with.

So when you act like you don't trust your government but also think socialism's not a bad idea, people don't know whether to write you off as a Milita Man Gun Nut or a social revolutionary. They just know they want to write you off. That creates a lot of flame wars and a lot of enemies. People like being able to dismiss you because it makes it easier to reinforce what they think of themselves if they can make you their yin while jerking their own yang.

Eventually, the mods at the board got rid of us. Banning a couple hundred other people who weren't adult enough to have a conversation without freaking out would have been a lot harder than banning the few of us, who were grown up enough to walk away.

Maybe you think that people like us would go apeshit about FREE SPEECH and be outraged at being banned, but those are the breaks. Websites are private things. People pay to put them up and run them; they don't have to pay attention to you. If I ran those websites, I might have banned us too, just because I already have enough headaches.

We thought about starting our own board, but that would have been gay. It's only a few of us, so we could just talk on IM or myspace blogs. That's what we did for a while, but then weird members of the old board tracked down our myspaces and were generally being assholes playing "internet sleuth." It got so we couldn't post a new blog for our friends and comment back and forth on it without seeing a mirror of it appear on the old site, with people tweaking the language and rewriting things to win a flame war we didn't care about anymore.

Because of this, we wanted to talk openly to our friends and allow strangers to read what we had to say (but it's any guess why they'd want to), but we also didn't want to do it with our own names attached anymore. Some people online are malicious, and we all started to worry about maybe losing a job opportunity down the road because somewhere someone was spamming a website with copy-and-paste jobs of our myspace discussions, tweaking the language, making up other stuff and attaching our names to it to make us sound like kooks.

Hence the blogspot. Here we can be anonymous to strangers but also show our friends whatever weird thing is on our minds. Here we can get our ideas out without the burdens of real names and worrying about any consequences. Here we can have fun. We don't expect anyone else to really care about this junk, but if you've stumbled across it, we hope you have fun too.

Thanks!