After storming New York theatre with Haitian Shakespeare versions of Julius Caesar and that War of the Worlds that shook up the US, 24 year old prodigy Orson Welles moved to Hollywood. There he portrayed media mogul William Randolph Hearst in his movie Citizen Kane but also included Hearst's girlfriend as an untalented drunk and made reference to a Rosebud which was Hearsts nickname for Marion Davie's vagina (see photo above).
He never made another film again.
This is one of the best documentaries on media, fame, genius, money and power I've ever watched. It's not perfect but I had no idea that Hearst was the kind of guy who urged the assassination of president McKinley in his newspapers and it actually happened.
I would bookmark this one. I had just watched the movie too, so it added a lot of depth to the documentary but I think you could do it the other way round without diminishing the enjoyment of either. Update: The original documentary was pulled so I've embedded another. It's either that one or this one below I'm referring to. Sorry.
Mr Van Allen discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts declared they were deadly. However since the Apollo missions that line has been retracted and NASA say it's safe for humans. I'm not too bothered either way, as my beef with the Apollo missions is the photography which uses a Hollywood technique of front screen projection. You might not be able to see the line between the stage and the backdrop below but once you do, you can't ignore them in any Apollo mission photography so here's a classic one for you. Once the brain groks the line you can't miss them ever again.
More importantly here is NASA describing the Van Allen belts as deadly. The original post is from here.
They were the subject of perhaps the first scientific discovery of the Space Age, and yet we still don't know much about them. The radiation belts that surround Earth are home to killer electrons, plasma waves, and intense electrical currents that can disrupt and destroy the electronics on satellites. But the behavior of the Van Allen Belts—named for James Van Allen, who led the team that discovered them in 1958—is wildly unpredictable.
This artist's conception shows the radiation belts (green), which are two doughnut-shaped (torus) regions full of high-energy particles that fill the near-space around Earth. The blue and red lines between and around the belts depict the north and south polarity of the planet’s magnetic field. The inner belt, a blend of protons and electrons, can reach down as low as 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) in altitude. The outer belt, comprised mainly of energetic electrons, can swell to as much as 60,000 kilometers (37,000 miles) above Earth’s surface. Both rings extend to roughly 65 degrees north and south latitude.
The radiation belts were discovered during the flight of the very first American satellite. Van Allen and colleagues had installed a Geiger-Müller tube on Explorer 1 to detect cosmic rays, and as the satellite made its eccentric orbit around the Earth, the readings periodically went off the top of the counter’s scale. It happened again during the flight of Explorer 3 several months later. Several followup missions proved that the space around Earth was not empty, but instead enriched with electrons, protons, and energy created by interactions between Earth's magnetic field (or magnetosphere), the solar wind, and (occasionally) cosmic rays arriving from beyond the solar system.
Fifty-four years later, NASA has embarked on a missions designed specifically to understand the space weather in the dynamic and erratic Van Allen Belts. At 4:05 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on August 30, 2012, the Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) were launched into orbit on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket that lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. (Watch video of the launch here.) The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) built and will operate the twin RBSP spacecraft for NASA’s Living With a Star program.
The identical twin spacecraft will fly in separate orbits across the inner and outer Van Allen radiation belts. The mission is starting near the height of the Sun’s 11-year cycle, or solar maximum. Activity on the sun influences the behavior of the radiation belts, though scientists are puzzled by that behavior. Sometimes a solar storm can swell the belts with particles and energy, creating havoc for Earth-orbiting satellites by accelerating electrons (aka, “killer electrons”) and creating electrical currents. Other times, the radiation belts grow very calm and depleted during Sun storms. Occasionally, no change is detected at all.
The RBSP satellites are designed to observe how and when killer electrons are energized, to sample the electrical and magnetic fields in Earth’s space, to count particles, and detect plasma waves of different frequencies. The ultimate goal is to improve the prediction of space weather; that is, how solar activity can cause geomagnetic storms that upset telecommunications and electronics.
This only takes a minute and is very funny. It makes the point that humans are genetically wired to see what they trust and trust what they see. My hope from an evolutionary perspective is that this is a good thing in the long term for our species, but in the short term can lead to massive abuses of trust as I believe is the case from the power elite.
Ted Gunderson ran the FBI in Los Angeles. Even with his credentials he couldn't jail the ring leaders of ritual child sex abuse with links to the CIA and all the way up to the Oval Office in the Whitehouse.
We now know Lee Harvey Oswald was on the FBI's books and likely spying on the CIA for Hoover. When the CIA found this out they set him up to be the patsy for JFK's murder. This means Hoover was playing a very ambiguous game in the JFK murder where he hoped to finger Alan Dulles who was running the CIA, and gain even more powers.
At the end of the day we still don't know for certain who initiated killing JFK but what should be apparent to the researcher of corruption is that our elites are rotten to the core.
Last week, Mark Kaigwa gave one of the most interesting presentations at the Media Evolution conference in Sweden. Naturally, I missed the session entirely because I was attending another one at the same time, but I’m very happy to say I caught up with him to hear him out.
Kaigwa is a Nairobi, Kenya-based digital marketing expert, consultant, startup founder and advisor, writer, short film maker and online media entrepreneur.
The man runs a few popular sites, including African tech and innovation blogAfrinnovator and online artist community AfricanDigitalArt.
He’s also a super nice guy.
We talked about mobile usage and penetration – there’s expected to be 735 million mobile phones in Africa alone by the end of this year – and a number of interesting technology services coming from and stats about Africa.
In my experience there are genocides and there are genocides. Everyone knows the typical ones from WWII and Rwanda or Cambodia even if they can't quote particular details like how Obama's foreign policy advisor (and founder of the Taliban) Zbigniew Brzezinski supported Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. So if you're going to quote a genocide the one documentary to watch is John Pilger's Death of a Nation - The Timor Conspiracy. It's the handiest one because nobody knew about it, the media didn't report it, journalists died reporting it and Australia, UK, US and Canada all had a hand in helping the Indonesians slaughter there way through Timor. It's just one of the more exotic genocides the imperial powers have assisted and turned a blind eye to. Nobody comes out of the East Timor episode looking good. It's like the Swiss Army knife of genocides at dinner parties or human rights discussions. You look good pulling it out and even more an expert as you extract the right tool for whatever country needs as a good clobbering.
On December 7, 1975 Indonesia secretly – but with the complicity of the Western powers including the US, the UK, and Australia – invaded the small nation of East Timor. Two Australian television crews attempting to document the invasion were murdered.
In 1993, with the Indonesian army still occupying the country, John Pilger and his crew including director David Munro, slipped into East Timor and made this film. In the intervening 18 years, an estimated 200,000 East Timorese – 1/3 of the population – had been slaughtered by the Indonesian military. The C.I.A. has described it as one of the worst mass-murders of the 20th century.
Pilger tells the story using clandestine footage of the countryside, internment camps and even Fretlin guerillas, as well as interviews with Timorese exiles, including Jose Ramos Horta and Jose Gusmao, and Australian, British, and Indonesian diplomats.
There's a ton of information about the Bush dynasty criminal activity on the internet but comparatively very little for the Clintons. The above is the usual right wing fare but most of it checks out and there are only a few names I'd not heard of about unusual deaths around the Clintons which were slipped in. Back in the day I used to write this off as conspiracy theory without even reviewing it but now I know how it works it's all so very obvious. The Clintons were much more prepared to use or turn a blind eye to murder than the Bushes if it meant their continued rise.
An excellent multi person presentation on the Blackbird which still looks ahead of its time today but was from another planet in the mid sixties. I'm not into tech-porn but the Blackbird is beautiful and yet for me the obvious thought is imagine if we could have channelled this much genius and design into making the world a better place rather than a CIA plane that relied on Soviet Titanium (thus negating its very existence) while we gave them Ford factories that built trucks to shoot US Marines in Vietnam.
Bottom line is a lot of money rides on the backs of the people who put down their lives for an elite who really don't care all that much but don't mind having a technological edge and are prepared to keep a technocracy handcuffed to very nice GovCorp pensions and non disclosure agreements for life.
The plane looks like a different beast from every angle.
All around the worldmilitary types are taking their kit off to show support for Prince Harry's nudity. We applaud this show of affection even if the IDF force used sub machines to cover their tackle (third pic down).
When are we going to toss out the cold hearted and stiff Windsor lizards and put a warm mammal blooded Stewart back at the head of the Royal Family?
Alex Bogusky put me on to this ad against Prop 37. Amazing when the world's leading adman is courageous enough to say that advertising tells lies about the most critical issues.
If you ever wondered what a creative Prussian looks and acts like Alex is quite close. He'd look fab in an Officer's uniform and one those shiny spiked nickel helmets they wore.
To understand Islam properly needs an understanding of Arabic so the Quran can be appreciated in its original transcribed language, which even when translated into English has parts that soar in terms of poetic language. Other than that I don't approve of Abrahamic religions at all and in principle I can pick holes in Buddhism and Hindusim too. I like to pick the good bits out of all of them but I reserve the most disapproval for the Abrahamic religions.
That's Islam, Christianity (the one with the largest body count around the planet) and Judaism. All space cults.
McKenna's talking career began around this time when friends encouraged him to do his thing while being recorded. This is one of the earliest from 1983 and it's also one of the best. Great topic and only sixty minutes for those who can't make time for his weekend long recordings.
Royal Thai Army snipers are now claiming they used fake bullets when called to answer in front of a civilian criminal investigation. General Prayuth Chan-ocha and the Prime Minister at the time Abhisit Vejjajiva should take responsibility but as you can tell from the malodorous lies (and the video above) there's no intention of being men about it. They shame the institutions they claim to serve.
They let down the people they didn't kill. It's just business.
There's no moral difference between the crooked Clinton and Bush administrations but it's worthwhile remembering the evidence for the lies and coverup is well documented on Youtube. The corporate media has amnesia over these issues. It's not profitable to tell the truth. There's no money in it.
One of the reasons I'm attached to the Annunaki and Archon mythologies is that I want the Abrahamic faiths to be space cults so I can wash my hands of them all. It makes a lot of sense that we're being manipulated by off world forces and both the Sumerian Cuneiform clay tablets and the Nag Hammadi codices are among our oldest writings confirming this. They both say we're being manipulated. The latter explicitly the former implicitly if you read them with your mind on red alert.
Anyway, dear God and baby Jesus. Let it be so. Bit depressing otherwise. Listen to Joseph Atwill anyway.
Jan Irving has written an excellent conspiracy theory piece on the connection between Terence McKenna and a trumped up eschatology 2012, Esalen-proselytized, new age spiritualism. I say theory because he pulls back at the last moment and suggests Terence may have just been a useful idiot. My own view is he took a few Esalen cheques to put food on the table as the man lived frugally and was too broke to pay for the laser knife surgery he needed to remove the brain tumour at the end of his life. God knows we've all worked a few agendas to pay the bills haven't we? I have. Read this example.
However Jan's piece is well researched, makes strong and repeated connections and raises important issues that I had never come across before including the influence on Terence of Jesuit priest and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who was also responsible for the Piltdown man hoax to sell Darwin's theory of evolution. The similarities between McKenna's Novelty and Complexity theory which links directly into his 2012 timewave zero work is too close to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point Theory. See for yourself.
In this theory, developed by Teilhard in The Future of Man (1950), the universe is constantly developing towards higher levels of material complexity and consciousness, a theory of evolution that Teilhard called the Law of Complexity/Consciousness. For Teilhard, the universe can only move in the direction of more complexity and consciousness if it is being drawn by a supreme point of complexity and consciousness.
Thus Teilhard postulates the Omega Point as this supreme point of complexity and consciousness, which in his view is the actual cause for the universe to grow in complexity and consciousness. In other words, the Omega Point exists as supremely complex and conscious, transcendent and independent of the evolving universe.
Teilhard argued that the Omega Point resembles the Christian Logos, namely Christ, who draws all things into himself, who in the words of the Nicene Creed, is "God from God", "Light from Light", "True God from true God," and "through him all things were made."
Recently I've taken to using art as a tool for the manifestation of the collective unconscious in a Jungian sense, and so as Moby Dick has been prodding me for over a year now since Hong Kong, for reasons I couldn't quite fathom, I set up an RSS feed and curated a mood stream of every new piece of original art being shared with the world on the topic, and supplemented that with bits of data plumbing Jedi Knightery, to see if I can compile an emerging narrative.
The learning so far is unsettling and an anomaly in expressionistic terms when looking back at history. It seems one of the key themes is not just the death of Captain Ahab and crew, but the death of Whales. Spooky whales levitating above the sea as if drawn in a state of mourning; lamenting the transit to a marine afterlife.
And then I awoke up from a nap just now, and for the umpteenth time was reminded of the book by The Guardian who week in and week out out are echoing the questionably tinnitus driven peals, ringing in my head and then out of nowhere, I realised the part of Moby Dick I had been so eager to share when reading this unusually off-topic novel for me that I find hard to follow. I overcame the age and relative formality of its language through the time tested clamour of Bangkok Go-Go bars. I find the neon, noise and nubility more soothing than when left a difficult text, alone in the distracting silence of home.
In any case, I meant to write how extraordinary it was learning of the whaling business in its heyday with respect to being the precursor for the entire edifice of imminent planetary industrialisation. That is to say, built upon the global scale of a wind powered floating business, in singular pursuit of yet another of natures exclusive and historically irreplaceable organic yields. If asked it is for this reason I argue leaving the oil in the ground instead of fuelling jet engines in the air for an economy levitating on the hologram of endless financial growth. What if say quantum entangled oil is the spice melange of a future interstellar life? To me, the what-ifs are a full nelson on the what-the-fucks line of reason.
I'll leave you with Melville's passage that left a slow burning mark upon me with a lesson on gateway drugs of the monkeys (homo consumericus) obsession with whale oil that was only displaced when the black stuff leaking from the ground, looked like it had something going for it.
Why did the Dutch in De Witt's time have admirals of their whaling fleets? Why did Louis XVI of France, at his own personal expense, fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of L1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000. How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling?
Lurking around Youtube on the subject of Moby Dick last night/this morning I came across Cyrus Patel - Professor of English Literature at NYU. Each of these lectures on Moby Dick has around 5000 views (Jan 2011) which is rock star status for a lecturer on a subject that ostensibly doesn't pay immediate bills.
He's amazing.
I'm working my way through them but his lectures are a tour de force in video learning. Any more self-learning of this calibre and I'm flat out booked up on attention bandwidth for the rest of my life (or cloning is on the table). I've written a post about the process I'm going through with video learning that is still lurking in draft but this is brain crack stuff so I need to get it out there before I pop.
I've posted interviews with Joe Atwill before over here. He asks a great question. In an area where Qumran, Jericho and Jerusalem are a stone's throw from each other in 'shoebox sized' Judea how did the Christian story emerge with two conflicting narratives? One from the Dead Sea Scrolls talks about killing the gentiles and the other talks about turning the other cheek and rendering unto Caesar that which is his.
There are so many conflicting accounts of Jesus that I just a pick a couple of lines here and there like, love thy neighbour, and hope they're the right ones to keep and are not elite manipulation of the kindness of humans. Religion has after all been their most powerful tool to get us killing each other. Their latest religious cult is called Government and a lot of people are hooked on it. Here's the details from Jan Irving's post:
This episode is an interview with Joe Atwill, author of Caesar’s Messiah, part 2, titled “On Caesar’s Messiah, John Allegro, and mind control” and is being released on Monday, August 06, 2012. My interview with Joe was recorded on June 09, 2012.
This is our first video episode, so if you’re getting this in audio only, please go to the Gnostic Media website if you’d like to see the video version.
We had Joe on back on April 1, and today he’s back.
Joseph Atwill spent his youth in Japan where he attended the only English-speaking school in the country, St. Mary’s Military Academy. The school was run by Jesuits so removed from the events of the modern world that they did not even consider shutting it down during World War II, and taught a curriculum that had not changed since the eighteenth century. Atwill describes that, “The majority of every one of my school days was spent studying Greek, Latin and the Bible, which for some reason I found fascinating.”
After studying computer science in college, Atwill began working with one of the most renowned programmers in the world, David Ferguson. David had been granted the first two patents ever issued in computer software. Over the next twenty years, between 1975 and 1995, David Ferguson and Atwill started a series of companies including Ferguson Tool Company and ASNA. “After selling my interests in our companies to investors in 1995, I returned to my earlier interest; the origins of Christianity,” Atwill says of this time period.
Atwill continues, “Though I had drifted away from the Catholic faith, my study of Christianity never stopped. Over the course of my life I had read perhaps six or seven hundred books relating to the historical Jesus and early Christianity, but none of them left me feeling like I really knew anything about how the religion began or its founder.” Atwill contends that the more he studied Christian origins the more he saw the question of how the religion began as an open one. Atwill held this position in spite of the fact that in the popular mind, and in the minds of most scholars, Christianity began as a movement of lower class followers of a radical Jewish teacher in the 1st century CE.
Says Atwill, “I did not share in this certainty.” What contributed most to his skepticism was that at the exact time the followers of Jesus were purportedly organizing themselves into a religion that urged its members to “turn the other cheek” and to “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s”, another Judean sect was waging a religious war against the Romans and seeking a Messiah who would lead them militarily. Atwill continues, “It seemed implausible to me that two diametrically opposite forms of messianic Judaism would have emerged from Judea at the same time. So the Dead Sea Scrolls became of such interest to me that I began what turned into a decade-long study of them.” Like others, Atwill was hoping to learn something of Christian origins in the 2,000 year old documents found at Qumran. To assist in his understanding of them, Atwill began studying the history of the era.
It was then that Joseph Atwill came across the key that led to his discoveries. “While reading Josephus’ War of the Jews, and his account of Titus’ destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE,” Atwill recounts, “I noticed some curious parallels. At first I could make no sense of the parallels between Titus’ campaign and Jesus’ ministry. So I tried to look at the Gospels with fresh eyes, as if I had never seen them before, giving up any preconceived notions about what they meant.” This perspective resulted in the discoveries Atwill presents in Caesar’s Messiah and his soon-to-be-published book, The Single Strand. A Roman imperial family, the Flavians, had created Christianity, and, even more incredibly, they had placed a literary satire within the Gospels and War of the Jews to inform posterity of this fact.
Understanding the symbolic framework for the Gospels opened up the hidden history of Western Civilization to Joseph Atwill. That framework enabled him to recognize the typology that underlies authors such as Marlowe and Shakespeare and see the incredible story their typology tells us, and is the basis for The Single Strand.
Joseph Atwill concludes, “I am an avid chess player and proud to state that I have more than 100 victories over Grandmasters and International Masters. I hold an ICC Masters rating of 2358.” It is this form of strategic thinking that enabled Atwill to uncover the strategy behind the Romans’ invention of the Gospels.
Books by Joseph Atwill include Caesar’s Messiah, Ulysses Press 2006, the best selling work of religious history in the US in 2007, and its German translation Das Messias Ratsel, Ulstein 2008, achieving #1 Best Seller status. Atwill’s upcoming book, The Single Strand is also slated to be published by Ulstein. The German Magazine Focus published a cover article of Atwill’s work: Issue #52 December 25, 2008.
There's a great quote about this movie on IMDB. It says just because it's interesting doesn't mean it should be enjoyable. It's fair to say that in parts and in different ways The Man Who Fell To Earth isn't very good or even deliberately not good in my view like hiring flat actors so that Bowie doesn't look too bad (I've seen him do much better roles in Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and The Prestige).
Right at the end the synching is so bad they have to be ripping off a Fellini movie and it doesn't quite work in colour so I would call this movie Fellini in New Mexico as it's filmed in Roswell UFO country. Bits of it are great including photography and costumes. Even the sex scenes are too ridiculous to be offensive.
It's an open secret that Prince Harry is the son of Major James Hewitt. Nobody will ever sue me for saying that as a blood test will prove me right. This means Harry is pure Spencer and has no Windsor/Reptilian bloodline in him. You can tell because he likes sex, likes fun, is a real human being with emotions and is a chip off his mum's block.
It's up to the British but if they really like all that pageantry and like the tourists coming over, I say get rid of the lizards running UK PLC and install a real human being.
There are much better reviews than I could write at IMDB on this film so I'll just add that it was a welcome piece of art after researching hundreds of hours on CIA organized crime and global drug dealing. There's no way a film could be made today that reintroduced a Nazi war criminal with a Jewish female victim for S&M scenes of relived sex and power. There's also a splendid homo-erotic ballet scene with Nazi officers standing around, silent but intensive. Like Leni Riefenstahl the Nazi politics are ugly but the Hugo Boss SS uniforms are evil sexy. Nazism is probably the best branded ideology of the 20th century in terms of aesthetic. Like corporate Western branded ideology it hides its savage destruction in the background but what's up front looks good if like advertising you like to wear black. For this reason we should interrogate all we have and all we do. Not just look at the surface.
Like Graham Green's The Third Man it is set in post war Vienna and if anyone knows any other movies from this time and location, particularly black and white I want to see more so do let me know please.
Here's a write up:
This is quite dark. If you are seeking material that can be described as "happy" or "light", you will not find it here. I didn't know anyone in this prior to viewing. This deals with Max, the night porter of the title, who has tried to put his past in the SS behind him. One night, he spots a woman, Lucia, and they both recognize each other... she was one of the concentration camp prisoners, and the two had a specific relationship with one another. The plot is captivating. This is deliberately paced, and those who have short attention spans, and/or wish for a lot of developments in a feature are not the intended audience for this. I found the behavior of all of the characters chillingly psychologically accurate, and this definitely takes a long, hard, unflinching and uncompromising look at human nature and the mind, and not everyone is going to like the observations. The acting is excellent. All of the leads disappear into their roles. They are all well-cast, too, talent as well as physical types. I don't know if anything similar to this has truly happened, but I can imagine it, and this does pay respect to the historical events. The editing mixes flashbacks and the present effectively. This has disturbing content, including violence, sexuality that is not graphic and explicit nudity. None of it is gratuitous. The DVD has credits and posters, and while the print starts out looking shabby, it turns out to be perfectly fine. I recommend this to anyone who believes they can handle it, and is mature enough, from reading this review. 7/10
