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

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.

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

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.

Obama

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."

YOUR COMMIE!!! - More Different Than You Think

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!

KNOW YOUR COMMIE!!!!

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.

Cheney '94: Invading Baghdad Would Create Quagmire

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.

There Will Come Soft Rains

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