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.

The Devil's Advocate

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.

Wham, Bam, Hologram

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.

cold war, hot air

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...

Russia & Georgia (Will They Ever Hook Up?)

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.

J. Frank Parnell's Radiation-O-Rama

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.

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

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?

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.

Okay, So Let's Talk MKUltra

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Why 'Kremlinology'?

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.