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The Power of Nightmares The Rise of the Politics of Fear Pt. 2

The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is a BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis. Its three one-hour parts consist mostly of a montage of archive footage with Curtis's narration. The series was first broadcast in the United Kingdom in late 2004 and has subsequently been broadcast in multiple countries and shown in several film festivals, including the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

The films compare the rise of the Neo-Conservative movement in the United States and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and claiming similarities between the two. More controversially, it argues that the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organised force of destruction, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, is a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American Neo-Conservatives—in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies.

The Power of Nightmares has been praised by film critics in both Britain and the United States. Its message and content have also been the subject of various critiques and criticisms from conservatives and progressives.

Part 3 next sunday

Part 1 Last sunday

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The Ho Ho Horror: Rudolph meets Apocalypse Now

from Dangerous Minds

 

I can vividly remember growing up and watching those Rankin/Bass holiday specials every year. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Year Without a Santa Claus, Rudolph’s Shiny New Year. The New Year’s one I recall best, because I had, shall we say, “prominent” ears as a child, so I felt the Baby New Year’s pain when everyone cried “Those EARS!!” It was still a great program. And who can forget the Heat Miser and the Snow Miser from The Year Without a Santa Claus?

In Silver Screen Fiend, his forthcoming follow-up to his 2011 memoir Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, comedian and actor Patton Oswalt discusses in great detail his twentysomething years as an addict of cinema, and part of the tale involves his stint as a writer on MADtv in the mid-1990s. Oswalt excoriates himself for being a terrible employee of Rupert Murdoch, pitching abstruse sketch ideas and then not bothering to try to execute them properly and sneering at anyone in his orbit who didn’t happen to be swooning over Sam Peckinpah that very minute. He’s very hard on himself, but I suspect he threw in more useful writing ideas and was easier to get along with than he remembers—there’s a reason he stayed there for roughly two years, after all, and a reason The King of Queens wanted him as a featured player even though his acting chops were still being honed.

 



 

In any case, one of his cinephile pitches was to do a version of Francis Ford Coppola’s fractured 1979 masterpiece Apocalypse Now in the form of a Rankin/Bass Christmas special. It turns out they did it, but only after Oswalt was no longer on staff. Here’s a brief excerpt from Silver Screen Fiend on the subject in which he spreads the credit around as widely as possible:

 

There I was … at MADtv, struggling to explain to a network suit what Apocalypse Now was, and how it could be funny if done through the prism of a Rankin Bass special.* 

* They eventually shot my idea—a year after I left the show. Well, I really didn’t leave. They didn’t have me back. And with good fucking reason. I was a judgmental, sour asshole of a writer. Quick with a criticism and never with a fix. A comedy and film snob who rolled his eyes half the time and turned in typo-filled scripts. But they shot it. And put my name in the credits. Misspelled. Revenge? They were entitled. The sketch was called “A Pack of Gifts Now,” and it was lovingly animated by a stop-motion genius named Corky Quakenbush. An elf [actually a reindeer—Editor] is sent by toy makers to the North Pole to terminate “the Kringle” and his cultlike operation of toy makers “with extreme prejudice.” And, ironically enough, one of the producers I clashed with, Fax Bahr—who codirected the documentary Hearts of Darkness, about the making of … Apocalypse Now—shepherded the sketch through, with all of my visual jokes and references intact, and plenty of his own, which made the sketch even better. Even got a mention in TV Guide. Thanks, Fax. Sorry I was such a dick. Part of being in your twenties is not knowing an ally when you see one.

 

Not too surprisingly, given Oswalt’s status as a passionate consumer of comic books, movies, and TV shows, the details of the sketch, also executed to perfection, are what make it work—the use of eggnog as a substitute for scotch, the substitution of “Saskatchewan” for “Saigon” and “the Kringle” for “the colonel.”

For more on those early Rankin/Bass TV specials as well as “A Pack of Lies Now,” check out The Enchanted World of Rankin/Bass by Rick Goldschmidt.

 

from Dangerous Minds

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The Power of Nightmares The Rise of the Politics of Fear Pt 1

The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is a BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis. Its three one-hour parts consist mostly of a montage of archive footage with Curtis's narration. The series was first broadcast in the United Kingdom in late 2004 and has subsequently been broadcast in multiple countries and shown in several film festivals, including the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

The films compare the rise of the Neo-Conservative movement in the United States and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and claiming similarities between the two. More controversially, it argues that the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organised force of destruction, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, is a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American Neo-Conservatives—in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies.

The Power of Nightmares has been praised by film critics in both Britain and the United States. Its message and content have also been the subject of various critiques and criticisms from conservatives and progressives.

Part 2 next sunday

Shit Express will send poop to your bitter enemies

from Dangerous Minds:

 

Sometimes, when someone—your boss, your neighbor—really pisses you off, only a box full of poop sent to their home or office will really satisfy your need to inflict revenge. But so far, at any rate, there isn’t a tutorial on sending your enemies poop in the mail on eHow or Instructables, and until there are, you’re either going to have to do it yourself—yuck—or rely on the good people at Shit Express.

 



 

Shit Express is an online company that specializes in, well, sending shit to your enemies (hearing the lamentation of their women is not included in the service fee). It turns out that there are a lot of complex variables to having someone send your enemies poop. The poop of what animal? What should the packaging be? Here’s the step-by-step process, according to Shit Express:

 

1. Choose an animal.

2. Give us an address.

3. Choose how to wrap your package.

4. Pay anonymously with Bitcoin.

 

About seventeen bucks will get you a box of horse poop sent to anyone of your choice. At press time, the only poop available was horse poop. Packaging comes in “plain,” “cute,” and “ceremonial.” Apparently one of them, probably “cute,” features smiley faces. Shit Express insists on cryptocurrency like Bitcoin to ensure your anonymity. It’s actually illegal to send certain substances in the mail in some nations, so Shit Express has to navigate the laws in the various countries they ship to (this appears to be unlimited).

 

 

via Death and Taxes

Friday Classic - The Evel Knievel Movie staring George Hamilton

Long live the Ramones: Incredible unseen early Ramones news story

from Dangerous Minds:

 

Just when you thought there was nothing left to see, that you’d watched every Ramones clip YouTube has to offer, up pops something like this. A veritable ten-minute rock and roll history lesson from the Ramones. The fact that they were put on TV this early in the midwest is shocking enough, but for an extended story that is quite unedited, where their message comes across loud and clear, a message that holds true to this day and forever, well, it’s just something else. It’s so exciting for me to revisit the open and endless possibilities of that time, to see the group embraced by small town weirdo hippies turning punk right before our eyes as the whole country got bored of so-called “rock music” and disco! And the local news (or maybe this was a local PBS newsmagazine, it’s hard to tell) totally getting it!

We see the band performing three numbers at the Red Lion in Champaign IL and signing autographs at the local Musicland store (‘mema them?). Johnny Ramone does most of the talking and he is already looking forward to retiring! Beyond great! Major thanks to whoever found this, it’s only been up on YouTube for a few weeks. And to think that I just received a gold record for the first Ramones’ LP (thank you Linda Ramone!) which took 38 years to happen. THIRTY EIGHT YEARS to sell 500,000 copies! I will never understand this. U2, who have a song about the Ramones on their new “download thing,”  had it put in 500 million iTunes subscribers pockets in one day. It’s not fair! But in the end it all came true as the Ramones become what they always knew they should be, one of the top most influential bands of all time… I just hope they can see it happening from whatever juvenile delinquent heaven they’re rehearsing in. Long live the Ramones!

 



 

Noam Chomsky: Reagan was an ‘extreme racist’ who re-enslaved African-Americans

from RAW Story

IIn an interview with GRITtv’s Laura Flanders, linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky discussed how the events in Ferguson, Missouri and the protests that followed demonstrate just how little race relations in the United States have advanced since the end of the Civil War.

“This is a very racist society,” Chomsky said, “it’s pretty shocking. What’s happened to African-Americans in the last 30 years is similar to what [Douglas Blackmon in Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II] describes happening in the late 19th Century.”

Blackmon’s book describes what he calls the “Age of Neoslavery,” in which newly freed slaves found themselves entangled in a legal system built upon involuntary servitude — which included the selling of black men convicted of crimes like vagrancy and changing employers without receiving permission.

“The constitutional amendments that were supposed to free African-American slaves did something for about 10 years, then there was a North-South compact that granted the former the slave-owning states the right to do whatever they wanted,” he explained. “And what they did was criminalize black life, and that created a kind of slave force. It threw mostly black males into jail, where they became a perfect labor force, much better than slaves.”

“If you’re a slave owner, you have to pay for — you have to keep your ‘capital’ alive. But if the state does it for you, that’s terrific. No strikes, no disobedience, the perfect labor force. A lot of the American Industrial Revolution in the late 19th, early 20th Century was based on that. It pretty must lasted until World War II.”

“After that,” Chomsky said, “African-Americans had about two decades in which they had a shot of entering [American] society. A black worker could get a job in an auto plant, as the unions were still functioning, and he could buy a small house and send his kid to college. But by the 1970s and 1980s it’s going back to the criminalization of black life.”

“It’s called the drug war, and it’s a racist war. Ronald Reagan was an extreme racist — though he denied it — but the whole drug war is designed, from policing to eventual release from prison, to make it impossible for black men and, increasingly, women to be part of [American] society.”

“In fact,” he continued, “if you look at American history, the first slaves came over in 1619, and that’s half a millennium. There have only been three or four decades in which African-Americans have had a limited degree of freedom — not entirely, but at least some.”

“They have been re-criminalized and turned into a slave labor force — that’s prison labor,” Chomsky concluded. “This is American history. To break out of that is no small trick.”

Watch the entire interview via GRITtv on YouTube below.

Reality Check: A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS REUNION

Let's get ready: A Charlie Brown Heavy Metal Christmas

The Century Of The Self Part 4

An incredible
BBC documentary about the use of Freud's theories in the use of propaganda to control the masses. Excellent! Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, and his "public relations" were instrumental in shaping the consumer mindset of the 20th century.

Part 1 HERE.

THE BOARD by Jeff Ho

Opening night of Jeff Ho's surfboard gallery show
at the C. Nichols Project in Los Angeles, California



Jeff's show runs November 29 - December 23, 2014

Bing Crosby Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer DEATH METAL VERSION

The Beatles Never Existed is the greatest, weirdest Beatles conspiracy theory of all time

from Dangerous Minds

 

You think you know the truth about The Beatles? I laugh at your ignorance! Perhaps you naively proclaim that “Paul is dead!” but you have no idea. Wake up, sheeple! Paul never even existed! The rest of ‘em, too! At least, this is the claim made by the batshit-crazy/amazing conspiracy website, The Beatles (as they were presented to us) Never Existed. This is truly the holy grail of music conspiracy sites; it appears it is an ongoing project—Alex Jones style—and the theory is premised entirely on the scrutiny of photographic “evidence.”

The premise?

This is a serious subject, not a joke, and this site is here to expose the actions of those who exploited these young men and defrauded us their fans. It is to defend the honor of everyone involved who did not take part in it willingly. It has become apparent to us in this extensive and painstaking research that there were never just four individual people known as “John”, “Paul”, “George”, and “Ringo” who comprised one Rock & Roll band known as “The Beatles”, and rose to fame as the world’s first supergroup. For all intents and purposes as far as we can tell, no one such group ever existed.

We are here to explore whether the original individuals themselves ever existed (and if so, what may have happened to them and by whom), but have not been able thus far to calculate how many of each persona were fraudulently presented to the world. Please join us at the forum if you care to and can be open-minded. This is a highly-emotional topic for many of us, and most of us have very strong feelings about it. We have started this work because we were once fans to varying degrees, and many of us still listen to and enjoy their music.

So yeah, The Beatles were a series of individuals imitating personas. It’s theorized that this is because four lone human beings couldn’t possibly produce the work of such a prolific band, much less meet all their social/media obligations. The blog concedes an uncanny resemblance between various Beatle bodies, but suggests that clones might have been used to keep up the charade (Clones! of course! Why didn’t I think of that?). Clones, the site argues, would only be “95-99%” identical to their source body, which accounts for the slight discrepancies in photographs.

 



 

So far, the three major factors in the site’s argument are height (they don’t seem to understand shoe heels,posture or the concepts of distance and perspective), eyebrows (maybe Paul plucked?!?), and ears, which the site maintains “fluctuated wildly with each Beatle, as to shape, size, placement on the head, and which type of earlobes they had (attached or unattached).”  We are talking about a looooong scroll of Glenn Beck-esque diagramming of Paul McCartney’s eyebrows, crowd-sourced from a community of people on message boards who suspect The Beatles are some kind of elaborate hoax.

 



 

On the list I compiled of what different people around the internet on Beatles forums have said were the features and attributes of the “real” JPM (it’s on 2 or 3 of our forum threads), one thing commonly agreed on was that he had a highly-swooped right eyebrow. They said this was for certain one way to identify him as the true Paul McCartney. I can understand that when someone sees that highly-swooped brow, it stays in their memory, so they would always expect to see it again and again when viewing videos or pictures of Paul. So I ask now, if he has a highly-swooped right eyebrow at any given time, age or era that cannot be proven to be doctored or tampered with, that means it’s really Paul McCartney, right? And if he has any other shape of eyebrows at any given time, age, or era, that means it isn’t Paul McCartney?

Intriguing! It’s advertised that the next feature to be examined is Beatle teeth—I cannot wait. I highly recommend immersing yourself in the Quixotic delusion—if you feel bad for laughing, you can donate to a mental health charity for penance… or maybe your eyes will be opened to a whole new reality! Either way, it’s a win-win, right?

 



 

Posted by Amber Frost