Kim Philby

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

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

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

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

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.