PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR APRIL 26

On this day in 1937, the Nazis test the bombing capabilities of their newly inaugurated Luftwaffe air force on the tiny Spanish town of Guernica, with Generalisimo Francisco Franco's consent. For three hours, German planes poured bombs on the town in what was history's first ever bombing of purely civilian targets, a tactic that would later be enthusiastically adopted by both sides of the conflict, at the ultimate cost of millions of innocent lives. The attack inspired Picasso to paint his great masterpiece, Guernica.

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On this day in 1962, roughly three days after being launched, NASA's Ranger 4 spacecraft - which was designed to transmit pictures of the lunar surface, to rough-land a seismometer capsule on the Moon, to collect gamma-ray data, and to study the potential radar reflectivity of the lunar surface - fails to do ANY of those things after a computer malfunction causes it to crash into the dark side of the Moon.

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On this day in 1986, a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant in the Soviet Union melts down, killing 31 and irradiating hundreds of thousands more. It was, and still remains, the single worst nuclear accident in history, with a legacy that is just... it's... it's beyond words, is what it is.

THE NET: THE UNABOMBER, LSD AND THE INTERNET - A STUDY GUIDE

CLIP AND SAVE FOR FUTURE REFERENCE

A CONCORDANCE 
or a series of notes and thoughts on 

THE NET, THE UNABOMBER, LSD AND THE INTERNET

a documentary by Lutz Dammbeck (2003) 

The following notes were taken by myself during two separate viewings of the film. The text presented includes all of the subtitles from the film (indicated by quotation marks), as well as a number of observations, side references and potential avenues for further inquiry that came to mind as I watched. The reasons for my engaging in this admittedly somewhat pedantic exercise are twofold. Firstly, I do it because I believe this film to be an important and insufficiently propagated document in the field of parapolitics, and anything I can do to help get it seen by more people - and, in particular, the RIGHT people - I see as worth doing. Secondly, I wanted to create an easy-to-use text and image based "concordance" that both documents and compliments the original film. I leave it for you readers to decide whether or not I have succeeded on that count. - YOPJ - 26/04/2012

PRELUDE 

"In 1930, Viennese mathematician Kurt Godel shakes the foundations of mathematics with his incompleteness theorems. He demonstrates that in every formal logical system there are problems that are not solvable or conclusively determinable. The truth is superior to provability."

Mathematician Kurt Godel

THE NET 

We begin on a commuter plane travelling from Frankfurt to New York. Director Lutz Dammbeck explains that he has some interviews lined up for a film he's been working on about the evolution of information technologies. But lately he's become distracted. He explains:

FAILURE TO LAUNCH

Okay, so, what the Hell is going on, here?

Two American-built, NASA-launched satellites, both designed by the same private company with the goal of surveying key factors in our global environment - 2009's "Orbiting Carbon Observatory" and 2011's "Glory", which was to study the impact of aerosols on the climate - have both ended up at the bottom of the Pacific instead of up in the sky where they belong. What are the frickin' odds?! And, more importantly, what are the implications?

Yer old pal Jerky couldn't help but be suspicious. So he he strapped on his brain-boosting electro-helmet, swallowed a fistful of Adderalls, and set about applying a heaping helping of rigorous intuition to this topic. I am now prepared to say that it seems to me as though there are two possible scenarios playing out, here.

1. The global environmental situation is so dire, the planet's outlook so grim, that The Powers That Be - or some rogue faction thereof - are purposely sabotaging the tools that could be used by the scientific community to discover the true magnitude of the problem. This, because if any of these eggheads' findings were to work their way down to us Useless Eaters, it might spark a planet-wide panic-fueled mega-riot.

2. There really is no scientific basis for the belief that the Earth is facing an unprecedented complex of man-made ecological and climate crises. And perhaps The Powers That Be - or some rogue faction thereof - are attempting to prevent the scientific community from being able to prove this, because without an imaginary "crisis" to deal with, they would have no plausible excuse to implement the genocidal de-population programs they've been itching to kick-start since Malthus first put pen to paper.

Of course there are other possible explanations - everything from hostile alien intervention to mere coincidence to spontaneously-sentient Artificial Intelligences taking over both satellites and plunging them into the ocean in a case of double-cyber-suicide - but we do ourselves no favors by ignoring the obvious, here: Barack Obama was NOT born in this country, God-damnit!!!

That last part was a joke, by the way.