1.It is always a cause for rejoicing when master documentarian Adam Curtis - the man who brought us such essential series as The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self, The Trap and All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace - takes to his blog in order to share his incredibly valuable insights into past and current events. In his most recent wide-ranging post, he discusses the influence of American Marxist thinker, Murray Bookchin, on the recently-updated Utopian ambitions of the Kurdish "terrorist" organization PKK.
Bookchin was born in New York in 1921. In the 1930s he joined the American Communist Party. But after the second world war he began to question the whole theory that underpinned revolutionary Marxism.
What changed everything for him was the experience of working in a factory. Bookchin had gone to work for General Motors - and he realized as he watched his fellow workers that Marx, Lenin and all the other theorists were wrong about the working class.
The Marxist theory said that once working men and women came together in factories the scales would fall from their eyes - and they would see clearly how they were being oppressed. They would also see how they could bond together to become a powerful force that would overthrow the capitalists.
Bookchin saw that the very opposite was happening. This was because the factory was organised as a hierarchy - a system of organisation and control that the workers lived with and experienced every second of the day. As they did so, that hierarchical system became firmly embedded in their minds - and made them more passive and more accepting of their oppression.
But Bookchin didn’t do what most disillusioned American Marxists in the 1950s did - either run away to academia, or become a cynical neo-conservative. Instead he remained an optimist and decided to completely rework revolutionary theory.
Curtis eventually segues into a discussion about the various "perfect societies" as imagined by some of America's leading post-war think tank technocrats - people like Herman Kahn and B.F. Skinner - including video footage of their chilling predictions (perscriptions?) that will sound chillingly familiar to Modern ears. I mean, just check this insanity out...
Anyhoo, if any of these vitally important issues is of interest to you, then I urge you to check out Curtis' blog post for yourself, and make sure to watch all the videos and follow all the links with which he stuffs his latest message. I also suggest you bookmark it and check back every once in a while.
1. Apocalyptic super-villain scenarios Yesterday they were science fiction. Today, they're (almost) science fact!
Apocalyptic weapons are currently the domain of world powers. But this is set to change. Within a few decades, small groups — and even single individuals — will be able to get their hands on any number of extinction-inducing technologies. As shocking as it sounds, the world could be destroyed by a small team or a person acting alone. Here's how.
Just one of many delightful scenarios.
2. In keeping with today's End of the World theme - and also from the intermittently excellent io9 blog - here's a handy-dandy, clip-and-save list of the Top Ten Horrifying Technologies That Should Not Be Allowed to Exist!My personal favorite comes in at Number Ten: Hell Engineering!
Some futurists make the case for paradise engineering — the use of advanced technologies, particularly consciousness uploading and virtual reality, to create a heaven on Earth. But if you can create heaven, you can create hell. It's a prospect that's particularly chilling when you consider lifespans of indefinite length, along with the nearly boundless possibilities for psychological and physical anguish. ... Why anyone would want to develop such a thing is beyond me. It's yet another reason for banning the development of artificial superintelligence — and the onset of the so-called Roko's Basilisk problem.
3. Tiz the season... for this intriguing look back at the real history of Christmas. There's a ton of intriguing historical trivia to be enjoyed in this document, just so long as you're not terribly attached to your presuppositions. For instance, did you know that Joseph A. Fitzmyer – Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at the Catholic University of America, member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, and former president of the Catholic Biblical Association – "guesses that Jesus birth occurred on September 11, 3 BCE"? I don't know about you, but that sets yer old pal Jerky's conspiratorial little brain to spinning at 33 and 1/3 rpm.
The following notes were taken by myself during viewings of the film. The text presented includes some direct references to statements made on camera (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. I do this because I believe this film to be an important 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, as I did with my relatively popular concordance for The Net, I wanted to create an easy-to-use text and image based "concordance" that both documents and compliments the information presented in the film. As always, I leave it for you readers to decide whether or not I have succeeded on that count. - YOPJ 15/12/2014
“This film contains controversial subject matter. Interview subjects and creators of some source material may not agree with certain views presented. The Power Principle is a non-profit documentary and has been released online for free.”
PREAMBLE
In the years between the end of World War II and 1989, when it fell, 171 people were killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall. With the Cold War over, why didn't Eisenhower's prophesied Military Industrial Complex collapse? Why did Clinton’s promised "Peace Dividend" fail to appear in any truly significant way? Why did most of the meager cuts to the military budget simply migrate to private enterprise, where taxpayers still ended up footing the bill?
Ah, but all those pressing questions became totally moot on September 11, 2001. The USA now spends over 1 TRILLION DOLLARS a year on the military. As much as the rest of the world combined. There are over 800 military bases in 150+ countries. More money is now spent on air conditioning for American military personnel than the entire budget of NASA. Cuts to war spending are now all but unthinkable.
This film sets out to examine the reasons why.
PART ONE – EMPIRE
Adam Smith and George Washington both believed America would one day become an Empire. Most historians agree that the project really got started with the Monroe Doctrine (1823). But it kicked into high gear after the Second World War, in the wake of which the world had only two Superpowers, or potential Empire builders: the USA and the USSR. There was, however, a significant power imbalance. The USA was far wealthier and 20 million Russians had just been slaughtered by the Germans.
It's true that the Red Army expanded into Europe in the years after WWII. Before the breakup of the Soviet bloc, people from Poland, Hungary, Checoslovakiaet al experienced real repression. But did this make American atrocities, ostensibly committed in the "fight against communism", legitimate? Was the idea of a Global Communist Conspiracy realistic? Or was it just propaganda?
National Security Document #68, which states: “US military superiority is a policy which the US would peruse whether or not there was a Soviet Union”, gives us cause to wonder. Let’s look at Five Interventions during the Cold War to put this theory to the test:
INTERVENTION ONE - IRAN (8:00)
- 1951. Mohammed Mossadegh wins landslide elections, but the Brits and Americans are disturbed. Dr. Mossadegh was elected on a policy of partially nationalizing that nation's oil. This would endanger Western control of oil supplies (Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. being the old name for none other than British Petroleum, aka BP).
- Nafeez Ahmed's book War on Freedom is an excellent resource. Here is his blog.
- Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of Teddy), along with MI6 and the CIA and a bunch of oil industry businessmen organized the coup that overthrew Mossadegh. Needless to say, this was illegal.
- Despite his claims to be able to transform into a puma at will, John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit-Man, offers some decent insights, here. Also, anybody interested in parapolitics should probably have a link to his website bookmarked, regardless of whether or not they agree with everything he says.
- The Shah of Iran was re-installed by the coup plotters. So the USA put an un-elected KING back into power in Iran, replacing a democratically elected secularist. This unfortunately fits in with the West's tradition of supporting anti-Democratic "strongmen" wherever it suits Big Business (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, etc, etc, etc).
- "In 1976, Amnesty International concluded that the Shah's CIA-trained security force, SAVAK, had the worst human rights record on the planet. ... It went on to claim that the torture techniques the CIA had taught SAVAK were 'beyond belief'." It was from this boiling well of resentment from which the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his Islamist Shi'a revolution rose.
- And yet, despite this, even Jimmy Carter wasn't above publicly supporting the Shah, calling his Iran "an island of civility" in the region. It should be noted that, despite occasionally violent covert operations undertaken against it by the USA and Israel, Iran has not initiated aggression against another country in over 200 years.
- As an "appendix" of sorts to this section on Iran - more of an expansion, really - be sure to watch this highly entertaining and highly illuminating History of Oil by British comedian/activist Robert Newman. It will help to round out your understanding of the issues and probably disabuse you of some long-cherished beliefs about history (sorry about that).
INTERVENTION TWO - GUATEMALA, 1954 (15:40)
- Whenever you hear politically savvy comedians making jokes implying that the Rockefeller-owned produce company United Fruit - global purveyors of everybody's favorite brown bag lunch fruit, Chiquita Bananas - is actually kind of sinister, it is the 1954 CIA coup d'etat in Guatemala to which they are making sly reference. So, now and forever more, you, too, are in on the joke. You're welcome. But really, it's not that funny.
- This section begins quite bluntly with CIA man Howard Hunt admitting, on camera, that the US waged Nazi-inspired terrorism against the democratically elected leader Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. His exact words are astonishing:
"What we wanted to do was have a terror campaign to terrify Arbenz, particularly - terrify his troops - much as the German Stuka bombers terrified the population of Holland, Belgium and Poland at the onset of World War II, and has rendered everybody paralyzed."
- Howard Hunt, Head of CIA Operation, Guatemala, 1954
- When Arbenz took office, 2% of the population owned 70% of the arable land. He initiated some progressive programs, including granting some unused land to landless peasants for agriculture, giving labor unions the right to exist, and other modest, moderate reforms. He was not a communist, and had no links to communists. But he also wasn't willing to play ball with United Fruit, who just so happened to "own" 43% the land in that country (with only 1/3 of that land cultivated, and several hundred thousand unemployed peasants who were happy to farm it). Therefore, by the logic of Empire, democratically elected or not, the man had to go.
- Of course CIA director Allen Dulles - one of the most evil characters in the parapolitical milieu; we're talking Project Paperclip, MK-Ultra, Bay of Pigs, the JFK assassination, the Warren Commission cover-up, etc, etc, ad nauseum - is up to his neck in this bloodbath.
- But how to legitimize a coup when Arbenz wasn't a communist, and Guatemala didn't even have diplomatic relations with the USSR? Enter Edward Bernays, "double nephew" of (and hardworking promoter of) Sigmund Freud, and one of the early pioneers of advertising, the "public relations" (PR) industry, as well as advanced, psychological propaganda techniques. Bernays also happened to be a firm believer that democracy simply didn't work, and that an "elite" or "vanguard" needed to be in control of society, with platoons of public relations experts on the payroll, helping to control the masses by engineering consent.
- One of documentarian Adam Curtis's best works is his multi-part documentary about propaganda, , The Century of the Self. This introduction gives a pretty good taste of what the series is about, which is mainly: "how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy." It is "must watch" material and I will be doing a group-watch, concordance of it eventually. Keep your eyes on this space!
- John Stauber of the Center for Media and Democracy links Bernays to Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels, and points to the fact that this "liberal Jewish intellectual" was "completely comfortable" with playing a part in the anti-democratic coup against Arbenz as proof of the man's moral culpability.
- How did Bernays help the coup? By doing what he did best and organizing a wide-ranging, well-funded propaganda campaign! His "media blitz" linked Arbenz to Guatemala's grass-roots communist organizations in all the most influential newspapers, magazines and media outlets of the day. This was a lot easier to do back then, with no Internet and far less suspicion of power elites among the working and middle classes.
- Binghampton University Professor Emeritus James Petras explains how Arbenz was removed to restore the right-wing regime of Carlos Castillo to power and how, between 1954 and 1990, somewhere close to a quarter million native people were massacred by government forces in what can only be described as an attempted genocide. Maria Esparza founded the Historical Memory Project to document this atrocity as well as other often poorly documented events in South and Central America.
INTERVENTION THREE - CONGO, 1961 (27:00)
"I wanted to mention one case in particular, the painful one of the Congo. Unique in modern history, this shows how one can flout, with total impunity and the most insolent cynicism, the rights of peoples. Under the United Nations flag, Patrice Lumumba was killed in the Congo. And it's the same United Nations which the Americans want to send to inspect our own territory!
- Che Guevara, UN speech, 1961
- The Post-World War II era gave birth to a number of revolutionary and anti-colonial movements around the world. The Powers That Be soon figured out that, instead of outright massacres and military suppression - neither of which were particularly good for business - better to give the restless natives a semblance of independence while retaining covert control behind the scenes. Thus did the era of colonialism give way to the era of neo-colonialism.
- Author and educator Peter Linebaugh (here's his blog)explains the main difference between colonialism and neo-colonialism thusly:
Colonialism is when one political economy dominates and conquers another. Neo-colonialism is when the imperial power takes down its flag and a local or national one puts up its flag. But the economic relations remain the same. That is, the imperial country still extracts value from the human beings in the colony, but now it's done in the name of trade. Neo-colonialism means so-called independence for states. But all that basically means is they have their own flags, sometimes their own airlines, their own stamps and sometimes their own coinage.
- In the Congo, between 8 and 10 MILLION people were KILLED in an incredible slew of atrocities perpetuated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the colonial forces of King Leopold II of Belgium. Therefore, there was a lot of hope when, after decades of struggle, Patrice Lumumba - an educated man of humble origins - was elected Prime Minister in the newly liberated country. It took all of 12 weeks for The Powers That Be to put the kaibosh on that nonsense.
- Here was the problem with Lumumba in a nutshell. Immediately upon being elected, he wanted Belgium to vacate its military. Belgium refused, so Lumumba went to the UN, who backed Belgium. He then approached the USA and asked for support, stating with almost heartbreaking sincerity: "It's with great pleasure that I find myself today in the United States, home of democracy and freedom!" But Eisenhower rejected him. So he approached the USSR for help. Even though Khrushchev offered only minor material support, Lumumba had signed his own death warrant.
- Another problem was the fact that Lumumba felt that some of the wealth generated by the Congo's vast mineral resources should stay in the Congo and be used to better the lot of its people. Obviously, another unforgivable sin.
In 2001, the minutes of a long buried meeting of the National Security Council were revealed to the public. During the gathering, President Eisenhower told CIA chief Allen Dulles that Lumumba had to be "eliminated".
- Once again, a public relations propaganda blitz painted Lumumba as a communist stooge of the USSR. The CIA readied an assassination-via-poisoning plot cooked up by CIA witch-doctor Sidney Gottlieb - head of the nefarious MK Ultra mind-control division and a truly despicable sack of sub-human filth - which was eventually abandoned in favor of a more brutal and direct option: a Belgian-sponsored military coup. Cameras rolled as a sad-eyed Lumumba was hanged by his captors. He was replaced by Joseph Mobutu, who looted the nation, and let Belgium continue to do the same.
INTERVENTION FOUR - GRENADA, 1983 (34:00)
The United States has been engaged in an effort to stop the advance of communism in Central America by doing what we do best: by supporting democracy. Grenada, that tiny little island... it isn't nutmeg that's at stake in the Caribbean and Central America. It is the United States' national security.
- Ronald Reagan, 1983
- In the 1970's, the teensy-tiny island nation of Grenada saw the rise of something called the New JEWEL Movement. Led by a young lawyer named Maurice Bishop, it's aim was a "Joint Endeavour for Welfare, Education and Liberation". After the NJM gained power in Grenada, literacy and disease rates dropped precipitously as the new government accepted labor and donations from anybody willing to help. They made the mistake of accepting free labor from Cuba in the building of an airport (which was actually funded mostly by the UK). Then, in early October of 1983, an internal power struggle led to Bishop being first detained, then executed, by former NJM partner, Bernard Coard. This combination of minor communist connections and political instability put Grenada square in the middle of the Pentagon's incredibly simplistic and oft-debunked Domino Theory of incipient communist take-over efforts... and the Reagan administration's cross-hairs.
One of the leading themes of the Cold War has been the Domino Theory; what critics call "the danger of a good example". ... You could call it the Mafia Doctrine. The Godfather does not tolerate disobedience. It's too dangerous. If some small storekeeper doesn't pay protection money, the Godfather may not care about the money, but he does care about the refusal. ... The Domino Theory is always ridiculed after the dominoes don't fall. ... There's nothing ridiculous about the theory. That's why it keeps being resurrected. The Mafia principle is correct.
- Noam Chomsky
- A 7,300-strong force of American Army Rangers, Airborne Paratroopers and Delta Force commandos, as well as Navy SEALS, were joined by a couple hundred Jamaican soldiers for Operation Urgent Fury. Their opponents? 1,500 troops from Granada, reinforced by 720 Cubans and a couple dozen North Koreans. It was, without a shadow of a doubt, the most ridiculously mis-matched war in the history of military combat.
- Something this otherwise excellent documentary fails to point out is that the American-led invasion of Grenada took place only two days after a terrorist drove a truck loaded with 2000 lbs of TNT and compressed gas into the lobby of Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, resulting in the deaths of over 300 American Marines and affiliated personnel. It was an unmitigated disaster, brought about as a direct result of the President's purely political choice to maintain a land-base rather than a more easy-to-defend flotilla, a decision that flew in the face of advice from military brass at the time. In context, it seems very likely that Grenada simply fell victim to an unfortunate coincidence of timing. It was the invasion of Grenada, by the way, which inspired the satirical film Wag the Dog.
INTERVENTION FIVE - CHILE, 1973 (45:00)
General Pinochet and bosom buddy Henry Kissinger
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people."
- Henry Kissinger
- "Nowhere was the danger of a good example more apparent than in Chile." Ah, yes. Now we reach the OTHER September 11th. September 11, 1973, which saw the American-orchestrated coup d'etat that ousted Chile's democratically-elected leader: Salvador Allende. Under Fascist military dictator August Pinochet, soccer stadiums became concentration camps, thousands began to disappear without a trace, women were kidnapped, impregnated, forced to give birth (the children were farmed out to Chilean elites), then dumped into the sea from military helicopters. Keep that in mind as you read about this regime's cozy relations with Henry Kissinger (America's own Merlin), the Bush Crime Family, revolutionary economist Milton Friedman, and various other Friends in High Places, listed below.
Poet and singer/songwriter Victor Jara
[Victor Jara] was taken to the stadium where he was a source of strength for his fellow prisoners, singing for them until soldiers beat him to the ground and smashed his hands. In his last poem, smuggled out of the stadium, he wrote: "What horror the face of Fascism creates / They carry out their plans with knife-like precision / For them, blood equals medals / How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror / In which silence and screams are the end of my song." After two days, they killed him.
- John Pilger, "The War on Democracy" (2007)
General Pinochet with high school sweetheart Maggie Thatcher
- The Fascist "Generalisimo" Pinochet found an unlikely confederate in self-declared "small-l libertarian" Milton Friedman, the "Free Marketeer" and "Laissez-Faire" theorist of the Chicago School who, as a European Jew who fled the Nazis, you would think might have some issues with a regime with a penchant for concentration camps, torture chambers, political reeducation prisons, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Rather, he went around telling anyone who would listen about how he and his chums, the Chicago Boys, had helped precipitate a Miracle in Chile!Jeepers Creepers! Gosh Golly Wow! Too bad it didn't last... and probably never actually ever happened, depending on how you measure such things. Oh, the excuses they made! But hey, you know, it's all water under the bridge now. Or rather, blood. Endless gushing rivers of blood.
"It's an honor for me to be here to pay tribute to a hero of freedom: Milton Friedman. He has used a brilliant mind to advance a moral vision. We have seen Milton Friedman's ideas at work in Chile, where a group of economists called the Chicago Boys brought inflation under control and laid the groundwork for economic success."
- George W. Bush
- Graeme McQueen, co-founder for Center for Peace Studies and author of The 2001 Anthrax Deception(forget about Building 7, guys, THIS is the "smoking gun" of Neoconservative involvement in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001), explains quite succinctly the difference between the two types of Market Fundamentalism. First, there is the sincere form that evinces a deep faith in the power of the market to solve economic and other kinds of problems. The second type of Market Fundamentalists are, in reality, "Bullet Fundamentalists". They believe in FORCE, and the market is just one among many things that they will use.
HERE COME THE GLOBALISTS! (57:00)
"Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
- Benito Mussolini
Over a very short period of time overlapping parts of the 80's and 90's, the so-called "economic miracles" of free market reforms led to huge increases in misery and precipitous declines in the standard of living for millions upon millions of people in Brazil, Mexico and elsewhere. In Argentina, in less than a decade, neo-liberal "austerity" reforms caused unemployment to rise from 3% to 20%, and saw the number of people living in "extreme poverty" swell from 500,000 to five MILLION. The "economic miracle" in Argentina ended in Apocalyptic food riots. Fucking FOOD RIOTS. Before free market measures were put in place, Argentina was, like, the Canada of South America. Then, all of a sudden, formerly middle-class people were reduced to foraging for food in garbage dumps. It was insanity.
- A good topic for further study is the concept of what is now referred to as "Grand Area" Strategy or Planning. Cooked up by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Working Group in the cauldron of World War II and the early days of the Cold War, it lays out a plan for a planet-straddling "command and control" apparatus evolving away from the British-style rule of Empire to a Pax Americana. Basically, the uncontested control of populations and resources around the world. Global Domination. Full Spectrum Dominance.
- Chomsky explains that Soviet imperialism after World War II did take place, but interventions took place in a narrow way, within Eastern Europe. "That was their domain." For the US, it was the rest of the world. "The history of the Cold War was wars against independent countries by the Superpowers."
THE MARSHALL PLAN, GREECE, AND ITALY (1:03:30)
- After World War II, with the Marshall Plan, the US pumped vast sums of cash to its European allies, ostensibly to help rebuild obliterated infrastructure, but also to help dissuade them from turning towards communism. And yet, even so, of the 50 BILLION dollars committed, only five billion went towards non-military purposes.
- The first real test to America's commitment to democracy was in Greece, where the peasant-led anti-Nazi resistance had evolved into a non-Stalinist form of grass-roots, bottom-up, semi-communist "self government" that caught fire and spread from village to village. The churches supported this new way of governing, simultaneously insisting upon a separation of church and state. Winston Churchill called it "anarchy" and insisted that Greece put King George back on his throne, with a Fascist puppet dictator by his side. This precipitated the Greek Civil War, which saw the UK, the USA and allies provide arms and support to the very Fascists and Nazis that they'd just spent the better part of a decade trying to remove from power! 150,000 dead Greeks later, nothing much was changed. Afterwards, when crushing the school teachers and farmers of highland Greece didn't prove to be sufficient to dampen their revolutionary spirit, the US supported the first direct revival of Fascism in Europe after WW II, which took place there and lasted until 1974.
"Adhereing strictly and faithfully to our agreement of October... During all the long weeks of fighting the Communists in the streets of Athens, not one word of reproach came from Pravda or Izvestia."
- Winston Churchill
Z by Costa-Gavras
- Chomsky: "Italy has been the target of more CIA action than anywhere else in the world up until at least the late 1970's, at which point the historical record runs dry."
- Few people understand what went on in Italy during and immediately following World War II. As Chomsky explains, the anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist resistance in Italy had been so successful in chasing out the Axis powers that the Americans and Allies were actually forced to re-install Fascist police, military, business leaders and even politicians in order to crush the increasingly pro-Communist resistance forces.
- Although this documentary doesn't go into this topic, during the post-war period, the Left in Italy was so popular and well organized that NATO and the CIA - under the leadership of former top Nazi "super-spy" Reinhard Gehlen, a prize Paperclip pig second only, perhaps, to Werner Von Braun - initiated a Strategy of Tension code-named GLADIO. Essentially, Fascist and Nazi agents either funded or outright committed savage acts of terrorism that were then blamed on left-wing and Communist agitators in order to terrify various European populations into the arms of "strong" conservative, anti-Communist political leaders. Thousands died and, perhaps more insidiously, the political life of Europe became something like a vast, Satanic chessboard. And the going price for pawns was dirt-fucking-cheap.
THE GREAT SPANISH TRAGEDY (1:18:00)
The embrace of Fascist leaders by the West is often explained as a product of Cold War necessity, yet the reality is more complex. From the very beginning of the Fascist movement, many Western business leaders not only praised Fascists, but offered significant intellectual, financial and moral support. The case of Spain provides one of the most striking examples. When peasants and workers took control of production, consumption and social life across much of the country, world leaders united in opposition against them. Their system of self-government threatened not only the Fascists and Communists, but also the liberal democracies in America and the rest of the world.
- The documentary that we are currently studying features some choice excerpts from the 1997 film Living Utopia, considered "a jewel" by historians, students of documentary film, and rebel hearts the world over. It features first-hand recollections of the rise of the anarchist Spanish Revolution in the mid-1930's. It is well worth your time and attention, so I link it here, as a reminder, in case you'd like to watch it later.
"Fascism is a very rational system. It is an instrument by the ruling plutocracy to distract the people with the accouterments of a false revolution. ... Much of politics is the rational use of irrational symbols. So when people study Italian Fascism or Nazism, especially, they focus on it as a kind of insane movement that just happened... In fact, what they tried to do is direct the real grievances of the German people towards irrelevant enemies. ... And when the Fascists came into power, they cut wages by 50%, they destroyed every labor union, they destroyed every opposition party and every newspaper, they abolished all inheritance taxes for the rich or cut them drastically, they abolished all cartel taxes for the corporations, pretty much what's being done here without having to go, politically, all that far. So Fascism is an instrument whereby the plutocracy can control and hopefully effect a Final Solution to the class struggle. ... What substantiates what I just said ... is the way in which the plutocracy reacted to the Fascists."
- Michael Parenti, historian and author
- Journalist Russ Baker points out that there were a great many "industrialists" and Wall Street types who had a great deal of sympathy for Hitler and Mussolini and who were very much in tune with their beliefs. This included those pesky Dulles Brothers, Allen and John Foster, not to mention Prescott Bush, father to George Herbert Walker "Poppy" Bush and grandfather to George W. Bush. As President of Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott was even charged under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
- Yes, that's right... as all you old time Daily Dirt readers were already aware, I don't call them the Bush Crime Family for nothing.
- The Power Principle 1 - Empire ends with a truly breathtaking montage of footage from World War II and a quote from maverick progressive politician Henry Wallace, who predicted that the Cold War would lead to "a century of fear."
- Closing to the strains of Richard Wagner's epic orchestral composition Siegfried's Death and Funeral March was an altogether fitting choice, in my opinion.
- Stay tuned for my concordance to The Power Principle II - Propaganda, coming soon.
1. Remember that robot uprising I was always freaking out over back when I was writing the Daily Dirt on a relatively daily basis? In the years since the Dirt went tits up, that "trope" or "meme" or "idiom" or what have you has become somewhat of a cliche', not to mention an increasingly probable possibility, if the people at DefenseZone.com are to be believed. In attempting to explain why A.I. are pretty much destined to wreak havoc on mankind, they write:
In the case of utility function, action and stimulus form a sort of feedback loop. Actions that produce stimuli consistent with fulfilling the program’s primary goal will result in more of that sort of behavior. That will include gaining more resources to do it.
For a sufficiently complex or empowered system, that decision-making would include not allowing itself to be turned off, take, for example, a robot with the primary goal of playing chess.
“When roboticists are asked by nervous onlookers about safety, a common answer is ‘We can always unplug it!’ But imagine this outcome from the chess robot’s point of view,” writes Omohundro. “A future in which it is unplugged is a future in which it cannot play or win any games of chess. This has very low utility and so expected utility maximisation will cause the creation of the instrumental subgoal of preventing itself from being unplugged. If the system believes the roboticist will persist in trying to unplug it, it will be motivated to develop the subgoal of permanently stopping the roboticist,” he writes.
In other words, the more logical the robot, the more likely it is to fight you to the death.
Anyhoo, if my efforts had anything to do with the increase in awareness of this looming catastrophe, then that would have to be my third proudest moment in terms of Jerky LeBoeuf leaving his greasy thumb-print on the global zeitgeist. The runner up in that category would be my coining of the term "mansap", which I came up with in my porn copywriting days as a new word for semen. But the one I'm most proud of is my crazy neo-expletive: "Jesus Fucking Nailholes!" I see it starting to creep into conversations, and it makes me damn proud, let me tell you.
2. Looks like some "boffins" (that's British-speak for "scientists") have figured out a way to freeze light for one whole minute. Not sure how, exactly, but I'm pretty sure this breakthrough is going to play a big role in the coming war with our Shiny Metal Overlords (see above). Also, be sure to read the entire linked page, because there are some awesome videos full of scientific goodness at the bottom of it. Videos like this one, about how to break the speed of light:
3. Ah! So light and frothy with the suggested readings today! Perhaps I should commit my own version of the Ice Bucket Challenge by plunging you headlong into an incredibly depressing dispatch from George Packer in the most recent New Yorker about exactly how and why the press is LESS free today than it's ever been before. It begins...
In the worldwide movement away from democracy, perhaps the most vulnerable institution is the free press, and the most disposable people are journalists. If they’re doing their job right, they can have few friends in powerful places. Journalists become reliably useful to governments, corporations, or armed groups only when they betray their calling. They seldom even have a base of support within the general public. In some places, it’s impossible to report the truth without making oneself an object of hatred and a target of violence for one sector of society or another.
And it only gets more grim from that point on, concluding, in part...
Despite its promise of liberation, democratization, and leveling, the digital revolution, in undermining traditional forms of media, has actually produced a greater concentration of power in fewer hands, with less organized counter-pressure. As a result, the silencing of the press, otherwise known as censorship -- whether by elected autocrats, armed extremists, old-fashioned dictators, or prosecutors stopping leaks with electronic evidence -- is actually easier and more prevalent today than it was twenty years ago.
Not that there's much we can do about it other than hanging on and doing our best to be honest in all things (a promise that I hereby make to anyone reading any of my blogs). But I do sincerely believe that it's important for all of us to be aware of exactly how dire the situation really is. It's easy for me, here in Toronto, Canada, but maybe not so much for our old journalistic pal J.J. in Istanbul. So keep him and others like him in your thoughts and prayers.
1. To those of you who found my previously published article about how Glenn Beck thinks the mostly-unread works of philosophy professor Eugene Thacker are part of a massive worldwide progressivist conspiracy, you might also enjoy the Comics Alliance article "Understanding True Detective", which goes into great detail about where that show's writers and producers really got all that nihilistic philosophy - not to mention huge chunks of plot and dialogue. Here's a hint: Alan Moore and his more esoteric works fit snugly in the center of this Satanic spiderweb of influence.
2. Have you heard about the far-right conservative movement filmmaker "Molotov" Mitchell and his new blended "Black Power" / "anti-abortion" propaganda flick Gates of Hell? Here's the trailer...
...and here's a synopsis:
Three years in the making, "Gates of Hell" is a documentary from the year 2016 that chronicles the crimes of a band of domestic terrorists known as the Zulu 9. Finnish filmmaker Ani Juva travels to the United States to better understand the mysterious black power assassins, the unexpected eugenics conspiracy theory that drove them to commit extreme acts of violence and how America's political landscape was transformed overnight. Blending real history and real public figures with a fictitious (yet plausible) future, it is safe to say that you have never seen a film like "Gates of Hell".
3. Wanna have your minds completely blown? Well then, check this out:
These are words. If you are reading this it is because you have been taught to recognize that letters, when strung into certain arrangements, form words which are understood to mean things. In this way we are able to share ideas, feelings, truths, lies and adventures both real and fictional. But words only have the power of the meanings we assign them. Break them back down into letters and see that they are merely symbols with an arbitrary link to sound, utterly meaningless on their own.
The written word itself is estimated to be only about 8,000 years old. In the last 1,000, English has changed so dramatically that we require full translations for most texts from that period: Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and Piers Plowman all bear little resemblance to our contemporary English. There are texts, such as those of the Indus Valley Civilization, which are already illegible after only 5,000 years. By comparison the half-life of a small percentage of radioactive wastes stored underground is estimated to be upwards of 10,000 years.
In the late 1980s the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico put together an incredible panel comprised of anthropologists, semiologists, designers, astronomers and a variety of experts from other fields tasked with “developing design guidelines for markers and messages to communicate with future societies about the location and danger of the buried wastes”. The idea was that the radioactive waste they had stored underground would outlast our current understanding of civilization. The words and symbols we would associate with danger and radiation may not be intelligible to future generations and any signs we may put up could be either meaningless to or misinterpreted with the likelihood of any message conveying its meaning in 200,000 years diminishing almost to nil.
...the truth is we're living in a slaughterhouse built on the twin pillars of mass genocide and slavery, and fueled by the ongoing enslavement, impoverishment and starvation of nearly half the fucking planet.
1. Are you ready for FOUR-dimensional printers? Yes, that's right... you read correctly. Not those new-fangled THREE-D printers you've been reading about in The Economist and the New York Times, but printers that actually... well... maybe I should let today's first Required Reading entry, this article from DVice.com, do the 'splaining...
2D printing makes things that are flat. 3D printing makes things that have volume. Add in the fourth D, time, and you make things that move. We're not talking about things that can be be moved, but rather, objects that come printed with the capacity to move all by themselves. ... The process is actually not that complicated, and the smart materials aren't even all that smart: all it takes is a material that acts like a sponge that can be layered inside of a joint during the 3D printing process. When the joint is submerged in water, the sponge material expands and the joint bends. Put a bunch of joints together, and you can get a fairly complex self-assembling object, like this cube:
Okay, so I know what you're thinking. Not so impressive. But considering the way DARPA spends your hard-earned tax dollars, I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually find out that they're working on "Four D" micro-bio-mechanical devices that "react" in certain ways when coming into contact with people with certain blood types, or "epidermal melanin levels", if you get where I'm going with this. Get ready for blood-borne microscopic racist death-bots, is basically what I'm saying. I mean, what the Hell else did you think they were going to do with the map of the human genome? They've been working on it since the Swingin' Sixties, so you'd better believe they've made impressive strides.
2. What with hugely popular file-sharing site Pirate Bay being shuttered by Scandinavian authorities last week, you might think The Powers That Be have copyright infringement perpetrators on the run. How then, to explain China's new, massive - and massively illegal - World of Warcraft theme park, which kicked off without a hitch - and without any input from, or payment to, the game's creators -early this year in Changzhou? I mean, just look at this monstrosity! And do you think they paid anyone involved with the Kung Fu Panda series before they chose to make Jack Black their on-site noodle hut's mascot? Seeing as we're talking about a country that "recreated" an entire Swiss mountain village from scratch - copying every building, every street and even giving their copy-village the same name, all without asking first - I fuckin' doubt it.
3. And finally, if you ever wanted to read about how a tantric "sex expert" managed to yoga-fuck her way into a "Tantric Kundalini Awakening" that was so incredibly, terrifyingly intense that it managed to turn her off sex, like, forever, then today is your lucky day! Former BDSM Janet Hardy's essay about stumbling into the horror of ecstasy begins:
My frequent co-author Dossie Easton and I were working on a book called “Radical Ecstasy,” charting what is known in S/M-land as “spirituality”: the transcendent, ecstatic, deeply connected state that may occur during and after a good scene. We were enacting intense S/M scenes with one another and our other partners, and the scenes were often chosen to illuminate some aspect of the manuscript: edgy role-plays designed to tap into both personal and cultural histories of trauma and abuse, as well as intense, prolonged experiences of bondage and pain. They were risky scenes both emotionally and physically, challenging every skill we’d acquired during our combined half-century-plus of experience. In the spirit of research, we added tantra and other quasi-religious practices into the mix and took classes in those, too.
And if that doesn't capture your interest and get you to read further, then why am I even doing these silly lists?!
It may have escaped your notice, but last September, there was a bit of a folderol in some social media circles after Glenn Beck - the weepy CNNFOXNEWS "self-facilitating media node" took to the airwaves his website to wax conspiratorial about a sinister plot involving nihilists, "progressives", eugenics, NPR, Global Warmers, the Nazis, the New School, the federal government, New Yorkers, the fashion industry, obscure philosophy professors, Jay-Z and Beyonce, True Detective, and Matthew McConnaughey. You can watch the embedded video above to see for yourself that I'm not exaggerating, and this excellent essay by Critical-Theory.com’s Eugene Wolters covers all the important factual points - and catalogs most of Beck's crimes against reason - very well, indeed.
Basically, Beck has less than nothing to say about the substance of what philosopher/author Eugene Thacker tries to communicate in his book, In The Dust of This Planet... which is kind of bizarre when you consider that's the ostensible topic of this entire video segment. I would frankly be shocked if Beck had even reached out to Thacker for comment.
Instead, what we're presented with is yet another example of Beck's trademark "pinball logic". He literally winds himself up, then goes skimming across the surface of things, making annoying noises every time he collides with a familiar name or concept. "Nihilism!" DING! "Progressives!" DING! "Eugenics!" DING! "Jay-Z thinks he's so cool!" DING-DING-DING!!!
Never mind that there are no conceivable connections between the facts that he's juggling, beyond their close proximity in Beck's tightly-packed frontal lobe. So long as he delivers his spiel with the kind of eerie foreboding and fake, wounded dignity we've come to expect from him, the message is going to resonate with a growing segment of the population that I'm calling New Wave Paranoids. You know, the kind of "independent thinkers" who instantly believe every major news story is either a "false flag event", or a "psy-op", or "predictive programming". They're the ones who go around telling everyone to "wake up", when the tragic fact of the matter is that they're the woolliest sheeple of them all.
Anyway, it should come as no surprise that Beck entirely misses Thacker's point. In The Dust of This Planet isn't describing some future dystopian nightmare world, but the world AS IT IS TODAY. Beck likes to sell the fantastic lie that you and I are living in some sort of comfy, cozy American Dream... when the truth is we're living in a slaughterhouse built on the twin pillars of mass genocide and slavery, and fueled by the ongoing enslavement, impoverishment and starvation of nearly half the fucking planet.
When considered in this light, the idea that Beck could level charges of nihilistic conspiracy against the likes of Thacker is among the blackest of ironies.
This roundup of most of the relevant findings in summary statement of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's use of (occasionally deadly) torture during so-called "enhanced interrogations" is required reading for every American, be they liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, or whatever other false dichotomies you can point a dead cat's tail at.
However, while reading this severely redacted, extremely curtailed summary of a severely redacted, extremely curtailed report, one should also keep in mind that it covers only a tiny sliver of the vile violence inflicted on often totally innocent people, saying nothing about crimes committed by other agencies, such as the various branches of the armed forces - not to mention their own, completely separate, military intelligence apparatuses - as well as the myriad "private security" firms like Blackwater that were operating in the regions without any kind of operational oversight whatsoever... with often disgusting results.
And so, the question is begged... at what point do we accept that some behavior goes beyond mere procedural overreach, beyond even the idea of profound psycho-sexual negativity manifesting itself via individual interrogators' twisted psyches, and strays perilously close to the same diabolical territory as, let's say, for instance... some kind of massive, federally sanctioned Satanic Black Mass super-ritual?
It's a question one should keep in mind as more and more of these revelations invade our collective consciousness over the next little while.
1.This article from Dangerous Minds might be the most frustrating thing I've come across today, because it's all about a "jaw-dropping" German documentary about the preeminent Luciferian/Thelemite experimental filmmaker/artist/writer of our age, Kenneth Anger. But the video that it sets up so beautifully - Kenneth Anger: Film as Magical Ritual - has been removed from Youtube, and I can't find it anywhere else, for the life of me. All I can find is this tiny excerpt:
Considering what the article has to say about this documentary, this inability to link to the film is proving frustrating in the extreme. So if any of you reading this know where I can see it, by all means contact me and let me know. I mean, if it serves as "as direct an explanation of Anger’s cinemagical modus operandi as I have ever heard him articulate anywhere", and is "a must see for anyone interested in his work and showcases the Magus of cinema at the very height of his artistic powers", then goddamnit, I wanna see it, and share it! Keep your eyes peeled for future updates.
2. While we're waiting for someone to dig up the Anger doc, why not spend some time learning about what Flavorwire considers to be the 50 Weirdest Movies Ever Made? Personally, I've seen 20, with most of the ones I've missed being from various Asian nations (Thailand, the Philippines), and some of them don't really deserve to be listed here. For instance, Zardoz, Crimewave and Boxing Helena are odd, no doubt... but among the weirdest films ever made? With such baffling offerings as Holy Motors, Amer, and Upstream Color not making the list, perhaps it is in need of a rethink. Anyway, if the films listed in Flavorwire's article aren't obscure enough for you, here's Games Radar's list of 50 Amazing Films You've Never Seen. I found a lot more strange pickings there, including a few I'd never even heard of before, much less seen. And I try to see a LOT. The lo-fi, super-hostile French anti-American 70's satire Mr. Freedom was a particularly odd revelation. You can watch the first part, below, and pick up the rest on Youtube.
3. And what better way to finish things off than by linking to an ass-load of Totally EVIL Paintings?! Many of the usual suspects - and a great many who were influenced by these usual suspects - are represented here, as there is a great focus on Lovecraftian, apocalyptic horrors. However, any such gallery that chooses to omit even a single piece by Thomas "Painter of Light" Kinkade is kind of missing the boat, if you ask me.
1. According to this eye-popping article from the Independent UK, using "magic mushrooms" can change one's personality... for the better! The article states:
The study, at Johns Hopkins University of Medicine in Baltimore, found that a single dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, was enough to cause positive effects for up to a year. "Psilocybin can facilitate experiences that change how people perceive themselves and their environment," said Roland Griffiths, a study author and professor of psychiatry and behavioural science at Johns Hopkins. "That's unprecedented."
Users who had a "mystical experience" while taking the drug showed increases in a personality trait dubbed "openness", one of the five major traits used in psychology to describe human personality. Openness is associated with imagination, artistic appreciation, feelings, abstract ideas and general broad-mindedness. None of the other four traits – extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness and conscientiousness – was altered.
The study further shows that those who did NOT receive a beneficial boost of openness from ingesting shrooms didn't show any negative responses, either. Not a single "bad trip", and not a single negative result throughout the study. That's a damn sight better than most pharmaceutical tests, I can assure you.
2. If you're the kind of reader who enjoys a giggle or a titter to go along with your shivers, then look no further than artist Patrick Dean's ongoing blog series featuring Underwhelming Lovecraft Monsters! The example below is just a sketch pad scan. Most of the posts involved somewhat involved, multi-paneled stories that are sure to give great delight to even the most glancing of Lovecraft fans. Enjoy! And, by all means, Bookmark it as a favorite! When I put together that Daily Dirt Diaspora Ultimate Online Comics Page (coming soon), Underwhelming Lovecraft is sure to be a member strip!
3. Read this detailed overview of the Cicada 3301 online mystery that baffled the net's best code-breakers for the better part of a year. Then read this detailed overview of one group's collective attempts at solving that mystery. Then read this gripping account of Joel Eriksson, who "solved" Cicada 3301... but not really. Although I do appreciate his guesstimate about who might be behind the now annual hacker's delight puzzle game:
"It is most likely an underground organization, not related to any government or intelligence agency," he says. "Based on the references in their challenges—the Agrippa poem by William Gibson, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake, The Book of The Law by Aleister Crowley — and their constant references to prime numbers and the like, they are likely intellectual, anti-establishment, ideologically driven and they seem to be valuing logical/analytical thinking highly. They seem to share a lot of ideology with the cryptoanarchy movement, and old-school hackers."
Personally, although I find the references kind of interesting - and in hindsight, I would have easily guessed the answer to the first clue right away - "a book dictated to a beast?" Nigga please - the whole enterprise strikes me as a huge waste of time. But then again, what isn't these days? Still worth a read, that's for sure.
In this rigorous, definitive and ongoing survey of the guests who have appeared on the overnight AM radio ratings juggernaut Coast to Coast AM conducted by parapolitical researcher Joël van der Reijden, a rather convincing argument is made that...
...the CIA, NSA and Pentagon, whose leaders are all part of a civilian establishment, have created a complete "alternative" community consisting of news websites, forums, skeptical groups, radical activists and authors, as well as a vast stream of trolls in the form of forum, website and Youtube video posters that target anyone in favor of a sensitive conspiracy with a blitzkrieg of skepticism or extreme irrationality. The nexus in the "believers" category is Coast to Coast AM, followed by the closely-allied Alex Jones.
The entire WikiSpooks site is well worth bookmarking. I think that anyone interested in seeing honest scholarship and civilized discourse return to our money and ratings-hungry world of parapolitical investigation should read this particular page in its entirety.
As the graphic reproduced bellow begins to illustrate, there exists a rather large nexus of well-connected power brokers who have a veritable army of "useful idiots", heartless shills, and willing dupes ready to help spread mis-and-disinformation in exchange for a purse full of silver... or, in some cases, nothing more than a paternalistic pat on the head. This alone is reason enough to be wary of anything you learn via the new so-called "counterestablishment" or "alternative" sources - what I call "conspiritainment" - which, their vociferous protests to the contrary notwithstanding, is where you'll find the woolliest "sheeple" of them all these days.
Gee willickers, you guys! Do you sometimes feel like you've basically seen it all? Well, for all you's guys in the "Been There, Done That" brigades, check out this new Satanic toddler toy from... um... from China, I'm guessing, as it's a dollar store toy Dayton, Ohio.
At first glance, the so-called Evil Stick doesn't seem to be too strange. Just your typical magic wand (of the variety used in virtually ever O.T.O. lodge during their rituals...
But when you peel away the foil on the toy, hidden beneath is...
AAWWGGHH!!! What the bloody shitty fuck?!? Is that a demon-faced girl slicing into her arm with a butcher knife? On a kid's toy? Hidden behind the foil where nobody can see it without destroying the toy's functionality?!?
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc, has a history of warning society about the potential dangers posed by research into artificial intelligence, once tweeting that AI could become "more dangerous than nuclear weapons." At today's Centennial Symposium at MIT, Musk expanded on his previous comments, stating:
If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.
These comments make me wonder whether Musk is just resorting to a popular metaphor - along the lines of calling AI a "Frankenstein's Monster" - or if he grasps the very real parallels between what today's cutting edge scientists are doing when they work towards creating AI, and what sorcerers, alchemists, and ceremonial magicians have always done when attempting to communicate with or conjure up the powerful dark and primal forces that have haunted our universe since before we were even a twinkle in God (or the Demiurge's) titanic, all-seeing eye.
Readers of sf master Alfred Bester's unjustly neglected novel Golem100 know what I'm talkin' 'bout. That's the cover art, above, btw.
The more I read from and/or about Dr Ronald Mallett, the University of Connecticut physics professor who wrote the 2006 memoir Time Traveler: A Scientist's Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality, the more that the man seems to me to emanate the kind of potentially world-historic, game-changing light that shines off so many other, ostensibly off-the-wall, world-historic, game-changing super-geniuses. People like Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Francis Crick, Buckminster Fuller , John C. Lilly, and Werner von Braun.
If anyone else out there has any thoughts on Mallett or his work, please post it in the comments section, below.
With 1998's Last Night, Canadian director Don McKellar created a work of transcendent beauty and almost unbearably intense emotional poignancy. The end of the world has never felt so intimate, so possible, so viscerally present as it does in this film.
If you consider yourself an aficionado of apocalyptic cinema and you have yet to see this film, be prepared to make room in your personal Top Ten list. It's incredible to me that McKellar was still in his 30's when he directed this.
The thing that he seems to get, and convey so eloquently, is that, in such a global endgame scenario, regret would loom just as large as dread, and that all our emotions - bad and good - will be heightened to an almost supernatural degree.
Anyway, I've said too much already. Watch, experience, share. This film deserves to be seen by everyone... starting with you.
According to this Washington Post article, a probe and court case stemming from an illegal "insider" deal relating to the manufacture and sale of hundreds of on-spec automatic rifle silencers to a tiny Pentagon planning office is leading investigators down some very dark and spooky hallways. Consider:
The mysterious workings of a Pentagon office that oversees clandestine operations are unraveling in federal court, where a criminal investigation has exposed a secret weapons program entwined with allegations of a sweetheart contract, fake badges and trails of destroyed evidence.
Capping an investigation that began almost two years ago, separate trials are scheduled this month in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., for a civilian Navy intelligence official and a hot-rod auto mechanic from California who prosecutors allege conspired to manufacture an untraceable batch of automatic-rifle silencers.
The exact purpose of the silencers remains hazy, but court filings and pretrial testimony suggest they were part of a top-secret operation that would help arm guerrillas or commandos overseas.
The silencers — 349 of them — were ordered by a little-known Navy intelligence office at the Pentagon known as the Directorate for Plans, Policy, Oversight and Integration, according to charging documents. The directorate is composed of fewer than 10 civilian employees, most of them retired military personnel.
To anyone with even a modicum of imagination, the potential implications of this accidentally uncovered secret weapons deal are staggering. A tiny Pentagon back-office (with upwards of ten employees) orders nearly half a thousand silencers for automatic rifles... why? For whom? The article implies, without much evidence, that these weapons might have been intended for use "overseas" by illegal (but American-supported) paramilitaries, or, as they're more commonly known by their victims, death squads. But why not consider the possibility that these "Made in America" munitions were meant for a far more... domestic purpose?
This story, of course, will require a great deal more research and thought. For instance, what's the deal with this Directorate for Plans, Policy, Oversight and Integration? What is its history? Who has been involved with it? I'll be keeping an eye on this story as it develops, as will the participants at the Rigorous Intuition message board (the thread about this particular case can be found here).
You can learn more at the topmost link, obviously.
